transcribed from the hodder and stoughton edition by les bowler. charlotte bronte and her circle by clement k. shorter london hodder and stoughton paternoster row [picture: charlotte bronte] preface it is claimed for the following book of some five hundred pages that the larger part of it is an addition of entirely new material to the romantic story of the brontes. for this result, but very small credit is due to me; and my very hearty acknowledgments must be made, in the first place, to the rev. arthur bell nicholls, for whose generous surrender of personal inclination i must ever be grateful. it has been with extreme unwillingness that mr. nicholls has broken the silence of forty years, and he would not even now have consented to the publication of certain letters concerning his marriage, had he not been aware that these letters were already privately printed and in the hands of not less than eight or ten people. to miss ellen nussey of gomersall, i have also to render thanks for having placed the many letters in her possession at my disposal, and for having furnished a great deal of interesting information. without the letters from charlotte bronte to mr. w. s. williams, which were kindly lent to me by his son and daughter, mr. and mrs. thornton williams, my book would have been the poorer. sir wemyss reid, mr. j. j. stead, of heckmondwike, mr. butler wood, of bradford, mr. w. w. yates, of dewsbury, mr. erskine stuart, mr. buxton forman, and mr. thomas j. wise are among the many bronte specialists who have helped me with advice or with the loan of material. mr. wise, in particular, has lent me many valuable manuscripts. finally, i have to thank my friend dr. robertson nicoll for the kindly pressure which has practically compelled me to prepare this little volume amid a multitude of journalistic duties. clement k. shorter. strand, london, _september_ _st_, . contents preliminary chapter i patrick bronte and maria his wife chapter ii childhood chapter iii school and governess life chapter iv pensionnat heger, brussels chapter v patrick branwell bronte chapter vi emily jane bronte chapter vii anne bronte chapter viii ellen nussey chapter ix mary taylor chapter x margaret wooler chapter xi the curates at haworth chapter xii charlotte bronte's lovers chapter xiii literary ambitions chapter xiv william smith williams chapter xv william makepeace thackeray chapter xvi literary friendships chapter xvii arthur bell nicholls list of illustrations charlotte bronte frontispiece patrick branwell bronte facing page facsimile of page of emily bronte's diary facing page facsimile of two pages of emily bronte's diary facing page anne bronte facing page miss ellen nussey as a schoolgirl ) miss ellen nussey to-day ) facing page the rev. arthur bell nicholls facing page a bronte chronology _patrick bronte born_ _march_ _maria bronte born_ _patrick leaves ireland for cambridge_ _degree of a.b._ _curacy at wetherfield_, _essex_ ,, _dewsbury yorks_ ,, _hartshead-cum-clifton_ _publishes_ '_cottage poems_' (_halifax_) _married to maria branwell_ _dec._ _first child_, _maria_, _born_ _publishes_ '_the rural minstrel_' _elizabeth born_ _publishes_ '_the cottage in the wood_' _curacy at thornton_ _charlotte bronte born at thornton_ _april_ _patrick branwell bronte born_ _emily jane bronte born_ '_the maid of killarney_' _published_ _anne bronte born_ _removal to incumbency of haworth_ _february_ _mrs. bronte died_ _september_ _maria and elizabeth bronte at cowan bridge_ _july_ _charlotte and emily_ ,, ,, _september_ _leave cowan bridge_ _maria bronte died_ _may_ _elizabeth bronte died_ _june_ _charlotte bronte at school_, _january_ _roe head_ _leaves roe head school_ _first visit to ellen nussey at the rydings_ _september_ _returns to roe head as governess_ _july_ _branwell visits london_ _emily spends three months at roe head_, _when anne takes her place and she returns home_ _ellen nussey visits haworth in holidays_ _july_ _miss wooler's school removed to dewsbury moor_ _emily at a school at halifax for six months_ (_miss patchet of law hill_) _first proposal of marriage_ (_henry nussey_) _march_ _anne bronte becomes governess at blake hall_, _april_ (_mrs. ingham's_) _charlotte governess at mrs. sidgwick's at stonegappe_, _and at swarcliffe_, _harrogate_ _second proposal of marriage_ (_mr. price_) _charlotte and emily at haworth_, _anne at blake hall_ _charlotte's second situation as governess with _march_ mrs. white_, _upperwood house_, _rawdon_ _charlotte and emily go to school at brussels_ _february_ _miss branwell died at haworth_ _oct._ _charlotte and emily return to haworth_ _nov._ _charlotte returns to brussels_ _jan._ _returns to haworth_ _jan._ _anne and branwell at thorp green_ _charlotte visits mary taylor at hounsden_ _visits miss nussey at brookroyd_ _publication of poems by currer_, _ellis and acton bell_ _charlotte bronte visits manchester with her father for _aug._ him to see an oculist_ '_jane eyre_' _published_ (_smith & elder_) _oct._ '_wuthering heights_' _and_ '_agnes grey_', (_newby_) _dec._ _charlotte and emily visit london_ _june_ '_tenant of wildfell hall_' _branwell died_ _sept._ _emily died_ _dec._ _anne bronte died at scarborough_ _may_ '_shirley_' _published_ _visit to london_, _first meeting with thackeray_ _nov._ _visit to london_, _sits for portrait to richmond_ _third offer of marriage_ (_james taylor_) _visit to london for exhibition_ '_villette_' _published_ _visit to london_ _visit to manchester to mrs. gaskell_ _marriage_ _june_ _death_ _march_ _patrick bronte died_ _june_ preliminary: mrs. gaskell in the whole of english biographical literature there is no book that can compare in widespread interest with the _life of charlotte bronte_ by mrs. gaskell. it has held a position of singular popularity for forty years; and while biography after biography has come and gone, it still commands a place side by side with boswell's _johnson_ and lockhart's _scott_. as far as mere readers are concerned, it may indeed claim its hundreds as against the tens of intrinsically more important rivals. there are obvious reasons for this success. mrs. gaskell was herself a popular novelist, who commanded a very wide audience, and _cranford_, at least, has taken a place among the classics of our literature. she brought to bear upon the biography of charlotte bronte all those literary gifts which had made the charm of her seven volumes of romance. and these gifts were employed upon a romance of real life, not less fascinating than anything which imagination could have furnished. charlotte bronte's success as an author turned the eyes of the world upon her. thackeray had sent her his _vanity fair_ before he knew her name or sex. the precious volume lies before me-- [picture: first thackeray inscription] and thackeray did not send many inscribed copies of his books even to successful authors. speculation concerning the author of _jane eyre_ was sufficiently rife during those seven sad years of literary renown to make a biography imperative when death came to charlotte bronte in . all the world had heard something of the three marvellous sisters, daughters of a poor parson in yorkshire, going one after another to their death with such melancholy swiftness, but leaving--two of them, at least--imperishable work behind them. the old blind father and the bereaved husband read the confused eulogy and criticism, sometimes with a sad pleasure at the praise, oftener with a sadder pain at the grotesque inaccuracy. small wonder that it became impressed upon mr. bronte's mind that an authoritative biography was desirable. his son-in-law, mr. arthur bell nicholls, who lived with him in the haworth parsonage during the six weary years which succeeded mrs. nicholls's death, was not so readily won to the unveiling of his wife's inner life; and although we, who read mrs. gaskell's _memoir_, have every reason to be thankful for mr. bronte's decision, peace of mind would undoubtedly have been more assured to charlotte bronte's surviving relatives had the most rigid silence been maintained. the book, when it appeared in , gave infinite pain to a number of people, including mr. bronte and mr. nicholls; and mrs. gaskell's subsequent experiences had the effect of persuading her that all biographical literature was intolerable and undesirable. she would seem to have given instructions that no biography of herself should be written; and now that thirty years have passed since her death we have no substantial record of one of the most fascinating women of her age. the loss to literature has been forcibly brought home to the present writer, who has in his possession a bundle of letters written by mrs. gaskell to numerous friends of charlotte bronte during the progress of the biography. they serve, all of them, to impress one with the singular charm of the woman, her humanity and breadth of sympathy. they make us think better of mrs. gaskell, as thackeray's letters to mrs. brookfield make us think better of the author of _vanity fair_. apart from these letters, a journey in the footsteps, as it were, of mrs. gaskell reveals to us the remarkable conscientiousness with which she set about her task. it would have been possible, with so much fame behind her, to have secured an equal success, and certainly an equal pecuniary reward, had she merely written a brief monograph with such material as was voluntarily placed in her hands. mrs. gaskell possessed a higher ideal of a biographer's duties. she spared no pains to find out the facts; she visited every spot associated with the name of charlotte bronte--thornton, haworth, cowan bridge, birstall, brussels--and she wrote countless letters to the friends of charlotte bronte's earlier days. but why, it may be asked, was mrs. gaskell selected as biographer? the choice was made by mr. bronte, and not, as has been suggested, by some outside influence. when mr. bronte had once decided that there should be an authoritative biography--and he alone was active in the matter--there could be but little doubt upon whom the task would fall. among all the friends whom fame had brought to charlotte, mrs. gaskell stood prominent for her literary gifts and her large-hearted sympathy. she had made the acquaintance of miss bronte when the latter was on a visit to sir james kay shuttleworth, in ; and a letter from charlotte to her father, and others to mr. w. s. williams, indicate the beginning of a friendship which was to leave so permanent a record in literary history:-- to w. s. williams ' _th_ _november_, . 'my dear sir,--you said that if i wished for any copies of _shirley_ to be sent to individuals i was to name the parties. i have thought of one person to whom i should much like a copy to be offered--harriet martineau. for her character--as revealed in her works--i have a lively admiration, a deep esteem. will you inclose with the volume the accompanying note? 'the letter you forwarded this morning was from mrs. gaskell, authoress of _mary barton_; she said i was not to answer it, but i cannot help doing so. the note brought the tears to my eyes. she is a good, she is a great woman. proud am i that i can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. in mrs. gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my sister emily. in miss martineau's mind i have always felt the same, though there are wide differences. both these ladies are above me--certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience. i think i could look up to them if i knew them.--i am, dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i inclose two notes for postage. the note you sent yesterday was from harriet martineau; its contents were more than gratifying. i ought to be thankful, and i trust i am, for such testimonies of sympathy from the first order of minds. when mrs. gaskell tells me she shall keep my works as a treasure for her daughters, and when harriet martineau testifies affectionate approbation, i feel the sting taken from the strictures of another class of critics. my resolution of seclusion withholds me from communicating further with these ladies at present, but i now know how they are inclined to me--i know how my writings have affected their wise and pure minds. the knowledge is present support and, perhaps, may be future armour. 'i trust mrs. williams's health and, consequently, your spirits are by this time quite restored. if all be well, perhaps i shall see you next week.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_january_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--may i beg that a copy of _wuthering heights_ may be sent to mrs. gaskell; her present address is sussex place, regent's park. she has just sent me the _moorland cottage_. i felt disappointed about the publication of that book, having hoped it would be offered to smith, elder & co.; but it seems she had no alternative, as it was mr. chapman himself who asked her to write a christmas book. on my return home yesterday i found two packets from cornhill directed in two well-known hands waiting for me. you are all very very good. 'i trust to have derived benefit from my visit to miss martineau. a visit more interesting i certainly never paid. if self-sustaining strength can be acquired from example, i ought to have got good. but my nature is not hers; i could not make it so though i were to submit it seventy times seven to the furnace of affliction, and discipline it for an age under the hammer and anvil of toil and self-sacrifice. perhaps if i was like her i should not admire her so much as i do. she is somewhat absolute, though quite unconsciously so; but she is likewise kind, with an affection at once abrupt and constant, whose sincerity you cannot doubt. it was delightful to sit near her in the evenings and hear her converse, myself mute. she speaks with what seems to me a wonderful fluency and eloquence. her animal spirits are as unflagging as her intellectual powers. i was glad to find her health excellent. i believe neither solitude nor loss of friends would break her down. i saw some faults in her, but somehow i liked them for the sake of her good points. it gave me no pain to feel insignificant, mentally and corporeally, in comparison with her. 'trusting that you and yours are well, and sincerely wishing you all a happy new year,--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte 'the briery, windermere, '_august_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i reached this place yesterday evening at eight o'clock, after a safe though rather tedious journey. i had to change carriages three times and to wait an hour and a half at lancaster. sir james came to meet me at the station; both he and lady shuttleworth gave me a very kind reception. this place is exquisitely beautiful, though the weather is cloudy, misty, and stormy; but the sun bursts out occasionally and shows the hills and the lake. mrs. gaskell is coming here this evening, and one or two other people. miss martineau, i am sorry to say, i shall not see, as she is already gone from home for the autumn. 'be kind enough to write by return of post and tell me how you are getting on and how you are. give my kind regards to tabby and martha, and--believe me, dear papa, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' and this is how she writes to a friend from haworth, on her return, after that first meeting:-- 'lady shuttleworth never got out, being confined to the house with a cold; but fortunately there was mrs. gaskell, the authoress of _mary barton_, who came to the briery the day after me. i was truly glad of her companionship. she is a woman of the most genuine talent, of cheerful, pleasing, and cordial manners, and, i believe, of a kind and good heart.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i herewith send you a very roughly written copy of what i have to say about my sisters. when you have read it you can better judge whether the word "notice" or "memoir" is the most appropriate. i think the former. memoir seems to me to express a more circumstantial and different sort of account. my aim is to give a just idea of their identity, not to write any narration of their simple, uneventful lives. i depend on you for faithfully pointing out whatever may strike you as faulty. i could not write it in the conventional form--_that_ i found impossible. 'it gives me real pleasure to hear of your son's success. i trust he may persevere and go on improving, and give his parents cause for satisfaction and honest pride. 'i am truly pleased, too, to learn that miss kavanagh has managed so well with mr. colburn. her position seems to me one deserving of all sympathy. i often think of her. will her novel soon be published? somehow i expect it to be interesting. 'i certainly did hope that mrs. gaskell would offer her next work to smith & elder. she and i had some conversation about publishers--a comparison of our literary experiences was made. she seemed much struck with the differences between hers and mine, though i did not enter into details or tell her all. unless i greatly mistake, she and you and mr. smith would get on well together; but one does not know what causes there may be to prevent her from doing as she would wish in such a case. i think mr. smith will not object to my occasionally sending her any of the cornhill books that she may like to see. i have already taken the liberty of lending her wordsworth's _prelude_, as she was saying how much she wished to have the opportunity of reading it. 'i do not tack remembrances to mrs. williams and your daughters and miss kavanagh to all my letters, because that makes an empty form of what should be a sincere wish, but i trust this mark of courtesy and regard, though rarely expressed, is always understood.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' miss bronte twice visited mrs. gaskell in her manchester home, first in and afterwards in , and concerning this latter visit we have the following letter:-- to mrs. gaskell, manchester 'haworth, _april_ _th_, . 'my dear mrs. gaskell,--would it suit you if i were to come next thursday, the st? 'if that day tallies with your convenience, and if my father continues as well as he is now, i know of no engagement on my part which need compel me longer to defer the pleasure of seeing you. 'i should arrive by the train which reaches manchester at o'clock p.m. that, i think, would be about your tea-time, and, of course, i should dine before leaving home. i always like evening for an arrival; it seems more cosy and pleasant than coming in about the busy middle of the day. i think if i stay a week that will be a very long visit; it will give you time to get well tired of me. 'remember me very kindly to mr. gaskell and marianna. as to mesdames flossy and julia, those venerable ladies are requested beforehand to make due allowance for the awe with which they will be sure to impress a diffident admirer. i am sorry i shall not see meta.--believe me, my dear mrs. gaskell, yours affectionately and sincerely, 'c. bronte.' in the autumn of mrs. gaskell returned charlotte bronte's visit at haworth. she was not, however, at charlotte's wedding in haworth church. { } to miss wooler 'haworth, _september_ _th_. 'my dear miss wooler,--your letter was truly kind, and made me warmly wish to join you. my prospects, however, of being able to leave home continue very unsettled. i am expecting mrs. gaskell next week or the week after, the day being yet undetermined. she was to have come in june, but then my severe attack of influenza rendered it impossible that i should receive or entertain her. since that time she has been absent on the continent with her husband and two eldest girls; and just before i received yours i had a letter from her volunteering a visit at a vague date, which i requested her to fix as soon as possible. my father has been much better during the last three or four days. 'when i know anything certain i will write to you again.--believe me, my dear miss wooler, yours respectfully and affectionately, 'c. bronte.' but the friendship, which commenced so late in charlotte bronte's life, never reached the stage of downright intimacy. of this there is abundant evidence in the biography; and mrs. gaskell was forced to rely upon the correspondence of older friends of charlotte's. mr. george smith, the head of the firm of smith and elder, furnished some twenty letters. mr. w. s. williams, to whom is due the credit of 'discovering' the author of _jane eyre_, lent others; and another member of messrs. smith and elder's staff, mr. james taylor, furnished half-a-dozen more; but the best help came from another quarter. of the two schoolfellows with whom charlotte bronte regularly corresponded from childhood till death, mary taylor and ellen nussey, the former had destroyed every letter; and thus it came about that by far the larger part of the correspondence in mrs. gaskell's biography was addressed to miss ellen nussey, now as 'my dearest nell,' now simply as 'e.' the unpublished correspondence in my hands, which refers to the biography, opens with a letter from mrs. gaskell to miss nussey, dated july th, . it relates how, in accordance with a request from mr. bronte, she had undertaken to write the work, and had been over to haworth. there she had made the acquaintance of mr. nicholls for the first time. she told mr. bronte how much she felt the difficulty of the task she had undertaken. nevertheless, she sincerely desired to make his daughter's character known to all who took deep interest in her writings. both mr. bronte and mr. nicholls agreed to help to the utmost, although mrs. gaskell was struck by the fact that it was mr. nicholls, and not mr. bronte, who was more intellectually alive to the attraction which such a book would have for the public. his feelings were opposed to any biography at all; but he had yielded to mr. bronte's 'impetuous wish,' and he brought down all the materials he could find, in the shape of about a dozen letters. mr. nicholls, moreover, told mrs. gaskell that miss nussey was the person of all others to apply to; that she had been the friend of his wife ever since charlotte was fifteen, and that he was writing to miss nussey to beg her to let mrs. gaskell see some of the correspondence. but here is mr. nicholls's actual letter, unearthed after forty years, as well as earlier letters from and to miss nussey, which would seem to indicate a suggestion upon the part of 'e' that some attempt should be made to furnish a biography of her friend--if only to set at rest, once and for all, the speculations of the gossiping community with whom charlotte bronte's personality was still shrouded in mystery; and indeed it is clear from these letters that it is to miss nussey that we really owe mrs. gaskell's participation in the matter:-- to rev. a. b. nicholls 'brookroyd, _june_ _th_, . 'dear mr. nicholls,--i have been much hurt and pained by the perusal of an article in _sharpe_ for this month, entitled "a few words about _jane eyre_." you will be certain to see the article, and i am sure both you and mr. bronte will feel acutely the misrepresentations and the malignant spirit which characterises it. will you suffer the article to pass current without any refutations? the writer merits the contempt of silence, but there will be readers and believers. shall such be left to imbibe a tissue of malignant falsehoods, or shall an attempt be made to do justice to one who so highly deserved justice, whose very name those who best knew her but speak with reverence and affection? should not her aged father be defended from the reproach the writer coarsely attempts to bring upon him? 'i wish mrs. gaskell, who is every way capable, would undertake a reply, and would give a sound castigation to the writer. her personal acquaintance with haworth, the parsonage, and its inmates, fits her for the task, and if on other subjects she lacked information i would gladly supply her with facts sufficient to set aside much that is asserted, if you yourself are not provided with all the information that is needed on the subjects produced. will you ask mrs. gaskell to undertake this just and honourable defence? i think she would do it gladly. she valued dear charlotte, and such an act of friendship, performed with her ability and power, could only add to the laurels she has already won. i hope you and mr. bronte are well. my kind regards to both.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'e. nussey.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _june_ _th_, . 'dear miss nussey,--we had not seen the article in _sharpe_, and very possibly should not, if you had not directed our attention to it. we ordered a copy, and have now read the "few words about _jane eyre_." the writer has certainly made many mistakes, but apparently not from any unkind motive, as he professes to be an admirer of charlotte's works, pays a just tribute to her genius, and in common with thousands deplores her untimely death. his design seems rather to be to gratify the curiosity of the multitude in reference to one who had made such a sensation in the literary world. but even if the article had been of a less harmless character, we should not have felt inclined to take any notice of it, as by doing so we should have given it an importance which it would not otherwise have obtained. charlotte herself would have acted thus; and her character stands too high to be injured by the statements in a magazine of small circulation and little influence--statements which the writer prefaces with the remark that he does not vouch for their accuracy. the many laudatory notices of charlotte and her works which appeared since her death may well make us indifferent to the detractions of a few envious or malignant persons, as there ever will be such. 'the remarks respecting mr. bronte excited in him only amusement--indeed, i have not seen him laugh as much for some months as he did while i was reading the article to him. we are both well in health, but lonely and desolate. 'mr. bronte unites with me in kind regards.--yours sincerely, 'a. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'dear miss nussey,--some other erroneous notices of charlotte having appeared, mr. bronte has deemed it advisable that some authentic statement should be put forth. he has therefore adopted your suggestion and applied to mrs. gaskell, who has undertaken to write a life of charlotte. mrs. gaskell came over yesterday and spent a few hours with us. the greatest difficulty seems to be in obtaining materials to show the development of charlotte's character. for this reason mrs. gaskell is anxious to see her letters, especially those of any early date. i think i understood you to say that you had some; if so, we should feel obliged by your letting us have any that you may think proper, not for publication, but merely to give the writer an insight into her mode of thought. of course they will be returned after a little time. 'i confess that the course most consonant with my own feelings would be to take no steps in the matter, but i do not think it right to offer any opposition to mr. bronte's wishes. 'we have the same object in view, but should differ in our mode of proceeding. mr. bronte has not been very well. excitement on sunday (our rush-bearing) and mrs. gaskell's visit yesterday have been rather much for him.--believe me, sincerely yours, 'a. b. nicholls.' mrs. gaskell, however, wanted to make miss nussey's acquaintance, and asked if she might visit her; and added that she would also like to see miss wooler, charlotte's schoolmistress, if that lady were still alive. to this letter miss nussey made the following reply:-- to mrs. gaskell, manchester 'ilkley, _july_ _th_, . 'my dear madam,--owing to my absence from home your letter has only just reached me. i had not heard of mr. bronte's request, but i am most heartily glad that he has made it. a letter from mr. nicholls was forwarded along with yours, which i opened first, and was thus prepared for your communication, the subject of which is of the deepest interest to me. i will do everything in my power to aid the righteous work you have undertaken, but i feel my powers very limited, and apprehend that you may experience some disappointment that i cannot contribute more largely the information which you desire. i possess a great many letters (for i have destroyed but a small portion of the correspondence), but i fear the early letters are not such as to unfold the character of the writer except in a few points. you perhaps may discover more than is apparent to me. you will read them with a purpose--i perused them only with interests of affection. i will immediately look over the correspondence, and i promise to let you see all that i can confide to your friendly custody. i regret that my absence from home should have made it impossible for me to have the pleasure of seeing you at brookroyd at the time you propose. i am engaged to stay here till monday week, and shall be happy to see you any day you name after that date, or, if more convenient to you to come friday or saturday in next week, i will gladly return in time to give you the meeting. i am staying with our schoolmistress, miss wooler, in this place. i wish her very much to give me leave to ask you here, but she does not yield to my wishes; it would have been pleasanter to me to talk with you among these hills than sitting in my home and thinking of one who had so often been present there.--i am, my dear madam, yours sincerely, 'ellen nussey.' mrs. gaskell and miss nussey met, and the friendship which ensued was closed only by death; and indeed one of the most beautiful letters in the collection in my hands is one signed 'meta gaskell,' and dated january , . it tells in detail, with infinite tenderness and pathos, of her mother's last moments. { } that, however, was ten years later than the period with which we are concerned. in mrs. gaskell was energetically engaged upon a biography of her friend which should lack nothing of thoroughness, as she hoped. she claimed to have visited the scenes of all the incidents in charlotte's life, 'the two little pieces of private governess-ship excepted.' she went one day with mr. smith to the chapter coffee house, where the sisters first stayed in london. another day she is in yorkshire, where she makes the acquaintance of miss wooler, which permitted, as she said, 'a more friendly manner of writing towards charlotte bronte's old schoolmistress.' again she is in brussels, where madame heger refused to see her, although m. heger was kind and communicative, 'and very much indeed i both like and respect him.' her countless questions were exceedingly interesting. they covered many pages of note-paper. did branwell bronte know of the publication of _jane eyre_,' she asks, 'and how did he receive the news?' mrs. gaskell was persuaded in her own mind that he had never known of its publication, and we shall presently see that she was right. charlotte had distinctly informed her, she said, that branwell was not in a fit condition at the time to be told. 'where did the girls get the books which they read so continually? did emily accompany charlotte as a pupil when the latter went as a teacher to roe head? why did not branwell go to the royal academy in london to learn painting? did emily ever go out as a governess? what were emily's religious opinions? did _she_ ever make friends?' such were the questions which came quick and fast to miss nussey, and miss nussey fortunately kept her replies. to mrs. gaskell, manchester 'brookroyd, _october_ _nd_, . 'my dear mrs. gaskell,--if you go to london pray try what may be done with regard to a portrait of dear charlotte. it would greatly enhance the value and interest of the memoir, and be such a satisfaction to people to see something that would settle their ideas of the personal appearance of the dear departed one. it has been a surprise to every stranger, i think, that she was so gentle and lady-like to look upon. 'emily bronte went to roe head as pupil when charlotte went as teacher; she stayed there but two months; she never settled, and was ill from nothing but home-sickness. anne took her place and remained about two years. emily was a teacher for one six months in a ladies' school in halifax or the neighbourhood. i do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that prevented branwell from going to the royal academy. probably there were impediments of both kinds. 'i am afraid if you give me my name i shall feel a prominence in the book that i altogether shrink from. my very last wish would be to appear in the book more than is absolutely necessary. if it were possible, i would choose not to be known at all. it is my friend only that i care to see and recognise, though your framing and setting of the picture will very greatly enhance its value.--i am, my dear mrs. gaskell, yours very sincerely, 'ellen nussey.' the book was published in two volumes, under the title of _the life of charlotte bronte_, in the spring of . at first all was well. mr. bronte's earliest acknowledgment of the book was one of approbation. sir james shuttleworth expressed the hope that mr. nicholls would 'rejoice that his wife would be known as a christian heroine who could bear her cross with the firmness of a martyr saint.' canon kingsley wrote a charming letter to mrs. gaskell, published in his _life_, and more than once reprinted since. 'let me renew our long interrupted acquaintance,' he writes from st. leonards, under date may th, , 'by complimenting you on poor miss bronte's _life_. you have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. be sure that the book will do good. it will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. i confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. _jane eyre_ i hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and thackeray's, are the only ones i care to open. _shirley_ disgusted me at the opening, and i gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. how i misjudged her! and how thankful i am that i never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. 'well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering. i shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written, especially those poems, which ought not to have fallen dead as they did, and which seem to be (from a review in the current _fraser_) of remarkable strength and purity.' it was a short-lived triumph, however, and mrs. gaskell soon found herself, as she expressed it, 'in a veritable hornet's nest.' mr. bronte, to begin with, did not care for the references to himself and the suggestion that he had treated his wife unkindly. mrs. gaskell had associated him with numerous eccentricities and ebullitions of temper, which during his later years he always asserted, and undoubtedly with perfect truth, were, at the best, the fabrications of a dismissed servant. mr. nicholls had also his grievance. there was just a suspicion implied that he had not been quite the most sympathetic of husbands. the suspicion was absolutely ill-founded, and arose from mr. nicholls's intense shyness. but neither mr. bronte nor mr. nicholls gave mrs. gaskell much trouble. they, at any rate, were silent. trouble, however, came from many quarters. yorkshire people resented the air of patronage with which, as it seemed to them, a good lancashire lady had taken their county in hand. they were not quite the backward savages, they retorted, which some of mrs. gaskell's descriptions in the beginning of her book would seem to suggest. between lancashire and yorkshire there is always a suspicion of jealousy. it was intensified for the moment by these sombre pictures of 'this lawless, yet not unkindly population.' { } a son-in-law of mr. redhead wrote to deny the account of that clergyman's association with haworth. 'he gives another as true, in which i don't see any great difference.' miss martineau wrote sheet after sheet explanatory of her relations with charlotte bronte. 'two separate householders in london _each_ declares that the first interview between miss bronte and miss martineau took place at _her_ house.' in one passage mrs. gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon mr. bronte for the following testimonial:-- 'haworth, _august_ _th_, . 'i beg leave to state to all whom it may concern, that nancy and sarah garrs, during the time they were in my service, were kind to my children, and honest, and not wasteful, but sufficiently careful in regard to food, and all other articles committed to their charge. p. bronte, a.b., '_incumbent of haworth_, _yorkshire_.' three whole pages were devoted to the dramatic recital of a scandal at haworth, and this entirely disappears from the third edition. a casual reference to a girl who had been seduced, and had found a friend in miss bronte, gave further trouble. 'i have altered the word "seduced" to "betrayed,"' writes mrs. gaskell to martha brown, 'and i hope that this will satisfy the unhappy girl's friends.' but all these were small matters compared with the cowan bridge controversy and the threatened legal proceedings over branwell bronte's suggested love affairs. mrs. gaskell defended the description in _jane eyre_ of cowan bridge with peculiar vigour. mr. carus wilson, the brocklehurst of _jane eyre_, and his friends were furious. they threatened an action. there were letters in the _times_ and letters in the _daily news_. mr. nicholls broke silence--the only time in the forty years that he has done so--with two admirable letters to the _halifax guardian_. the cowan bridge controversy was a drawn battle, in spite of numerous and glowing testimonials to the virtues of mr. carus wilson. most people who know anything of the average private schools of half a century ago are satisfied that charlotte bronte's description was substantially correct. 'i want to show you many letters,' writes mrs. gaskell, 'most of them praising the character of our dear friend as she deserves, and from people whose opinion she would have cared for, such as the duke of argyll, kingsley, greig, etc. many abusing me. i should think seven or eight of this kind from the carus wilson clique.' the branwell matter was more serious. here mrs. gaskell had, indeed, shown a singular recklessness. the lady referred to by branwell was mrs. robinson, the wife of the rev. edmund robinson of thorp green, and afterwards lady scott. anne bronte was governess in her family for two years, and branwell tutor to the son for a few months. branwell, under the influence of opium, made certain statements about his relations with mrs. robinson which have been effectually disproved, although they were implicitly believed by the bronte girls, who, womanlike, were naturally ready to regard a woman as the ruin of a beloved brother. the recklessness of mrs. gaskell in accepting such inadequate testimony can be explained only on the assumption that she had a novelist's satisfaction in the romance which the 'bad woman' theory supplied. she wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it. 'when the fatal attack came on,' she says, 'his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached. he died! she lives still--in may fair. i see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the christmas balls; and i hear of her in london drawing-rooms'--and so on. there were no love-letters found in branwell bronte's pockets. { } when mrs. gaskell's husband came post-haste to haworth to ask for proofs of mrs. robinson's complicity in branwell's downfall, none were obtainable. i am assured by mr. leslie stephen that his father, sir james stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations. the subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the brontes; but it is of moment, because charlotte bronte and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother's ruin; and this belief charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to her. her letters at the time of her brother's death are full of censure of the supposed wickedness of another. it was a cruel infamy that the word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief. here, at any rate, mrs. gaskell did not show the caution which a masculine biographer, less prone to take literally a man's accounts of his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed. yet, when all is said, mrs. gaskell had done her work thoroughly and well. lockhart's _scott_ and froude's _carlyle_ are examples of great biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet both these books will live as classics of their kind. to be interesting, it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and certainly the branwell incident--a matter of two or three pages--is the only part of mrs. gaskell's biography in which indiscretion becomes indefensible. and for this she suffered cruelly. 'i did so try to tell the truth,' she said to a friend, 'and i believe _now_ i hit as near to the truth as any one could do.' 'i weighed every line with my whole power and heart,' she said on another occasion, 'so that every line should go to its great purpose of making _her_ known and valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful heart.' and that clearly mrs. gaskell succeeded in doing. it is quite certain that charlotte bronte would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer. it has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by mrs. gaskell was far too sombre, that there are passages in charlotte's letters which show that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful. that there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely no one ever doubted. to few people, fortunately, is it given to have lives wholly without happiness. and yet, when this is acknowledged, how can one say that the picture was too gloomy? taken as a whole, the life of charlotte bronte was among the saddest in literature. at a miserable school, where she herself was unhappy, she saw her two elder sisters stricken down and carried home to die. in her home was the narrowest poverty. she had, in the years when that was most essential, no mother's care; and perhaps there was a somewhat too rigid disciplinarian in the aunt who took the mother's place. her second school brought her, indeed, two kind friends; but her shyness made that school-life in itself a prolonged tragedy. of the two experiences as a private governess i shall have more to say. they were periods of torture to her sensitive nature. the ambition of the three girls to start a school on their own account failed ignominiously. the suppressed vitality of childhood and early womanhood made charlotte unable to enter with sympathy and toleration into the life of a foreign city, and brussels was for her a further disaster. then within two years, just as literary fame was bringing its consolation for the trials of the past, she saw her two beloved sisters taken from her. and, finally, when at last a good man won her love, there were left to her only nine months of happy married life. 'i am not going to die. we have been so happy.' these words to her husband on her death-bed are not the least piteously sad in her tragic story. that her life was a tragedy, was the opinion of the woman friend with whom on the intellectual side she had most in common. miss mary taylor wrote to mrs. gaskell the following letter from new zealand upon receipt of the _life_:-- 'wellington, _th_ _july_ . 'my dear mrs. gaskell,--i am unaccountably in receipt by post of two vols. containing the life of c. bronte. i have pleasure in attributing this compliment to you; i beg, therefore, to thank you for them. the book is a perfect success, in giving a true picture of a melancholy life, and you have practically answered my puzzle as to how you would give an account of her, not being at liberty to give a true description of those around. though not so gloomy as the truth, it is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it. i have seen two reviews of it. one of them sums it up as "a life of poverty and self-suppression," the other has nothing to the purpose at all. neither of them seems to think it a strange or wrong state of things that a woman of first-rate talents, industry, and integrity should live all her life in a walking nightmare of "poverty and self-suppression." i doubt whether any of them will. 'it must upset most people's notions of beauty to be told that the portrait at the beginning is that of an ugly woman. { } i do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness. i had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose. 'i had the impression that cartwright's mill was burnt in not in . you give much too favourable an account of the black-coated and tory savages that kept the people down, and provoked excesses in those days. old robertson said he "would wade to the knees in blood rather than the then state of things should be altered,"--a state including corn law, test law, and a host of other oppressions. 'once more i thank you for the book--the first copy, i believe, that arrived in new zealand.--sincerely yours, 'mary taylor.' and in another letter, written a little later ( th january ), miss mary taylor writes to miss ellen nussey in similar strain:-- 'your account of mrs. gaskell's book was very interesting,' she says. 'she seems a hasty, impulsive person, and the needful drawing back after her warmth gives her an inconsistent look. yet i doubt not her book will be of great use. you must be aware that many strange notions as to the kind of person charlotte really was will be done away with by a knowledge of the true facts of her life. i have heard imperfectly of farther printing on the subject. as to the mutilated edition that is to come, i am sorry for it. libellous or not, the first edition was all true, and except the declamation all, in my opinion, useful to be published. of course i don't know how far necessity may make mrs. gaskell give them up. you know one dare not always say the world moves.' we who do know the whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to 'mutilate' the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it. but with these letters of mary taylor's before us, let us not hear again that the story of charlotte bronte's life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately told by her gifted biographer. why then, i am naturally asked, add one further book to the bronte biographical literature? the reply is, i hope, sufficient. forty years have gone by, and they have been years of growing interest in the subject. in the year ten thousand people visited the bronte museum at haworth. interesting books have been written, notably sir wemyss reid's _monograph_ and mr. leyland's _bronte family_, but they have gone out of print. many new facts have come to light, and many details, moreover, which were too trivial in are of sufficient importance to-day; and many facts which were rightly suppressed then may honestly and honourably be given to the public at an interval of nearly half a century. added to all this, fortune has been kind to me. some three or four years ago miss ellen nussey placed in my hands a printed volume of some pages, which bore no publisher's name, but contained upon its title-page the statement that it was _the story of charlotte bronte's life_, _as told through her letters_. these are the letters-- in number--which miss nussey had lent to mrs. gaskell and to sir wemyss reid. of these letters mrs. gaskell published about , and sir wemyss reid added as many more as he considered circumstances justified twenty years back. it was explained to me that the volume had been privately printed under a misconception, and that only some dozen copies were extant. miss nussey asked me if i would write something around what might remain of the unpublished letters, and if i saw my way to do anything which would add to the public appreciation of the friend who from early childhood until now has been the most absorbing interest of her life. a careful study of the volume made it perfectly clear that there were still some letters which might with advantage be added to the bronte story. at the same time arose the possibility of a veto being placed upon their publication. an examination of charlotte bronte's will, which was proved at york by her husband in , suggested an easy way out of the difficulty. i made up my mind to try and see mr. nicholls. i had heard of his disinclination to be in any way associated with the controversy which had gathered round his wife for all these years; but i wrote to him nevertheless, and received a cordial invitation to visit him in his irish home. it was exactly forty years to a day after charlotte died--march st, --when i alighted at the station in a quiet little town in the centre of ireland, to receive the cordial handclasp of the man into whose keeping charlotte bronte had given her life. it was one of many visits, and the beginning of an interesting correspondence. mr. nicholls placed all the papers in his possession in my hands. they were more varied and more abundant than i could possibly have anticipated. they included mss. of childhood, of which so much has been said, and stories of adult life, one fragment indeed being later than the _emma_ which appeared in the _cornhill magazine_ for , with a note by thackeray. here were the letters charlotte bronte had written to her brother and to her sisters during her second sojourn in brussels--to 'dear branwell' and 'dear e. j.,' as she calls emily--letters even to handle will give a thrill to the bronte enthusiast. here also were the love-letters of maria branwell to her lover patrick bronte, which are referred to in mrs. gaskell's biography, but have never hitherto been printed. 'the four small scraps of emily and anne's manuscript,' writes mr. nicholls, 'i found in the small box i send you; the others i found in the bottom of a cupboard tied up in a newspaper, where they had lain for nearly thirty years, and where, had it not been for your visit, they must have remained during my lifetime, and most likely afterwards have been destroyed.' some slight extracts from bronte letters in _macmillan's magazine_, signed 'e. balmer williams,' brought me into communication with a gifted daughter of mr. w. s. williams. mrs. williams and her husband generously placed the whole series of these letters of charlotte bronte to their father at my disposal. it was of some of these letters that mrs. gaskell wrote in enthusiastic terms when she had read them, and she was only permitted to see a few. then i have to thank mr. joshua taylor, the nephew of miss mary taylor, for permission to publish his aunt's letters. mr. james taylor, again, who wanted to marry charlotte bronte, and who died twenty years afterwards in bombay, left behind him a bundle of letters which i found in the possession of a relative in the north of london. { } i discovered through a letter addressed to miss nussey that the 'brussels friend' referred to by mrs. gaskell was a miss laetitia wheelwright, and i determined to write to all the wheelwrights in the london directory. my first effort succeeded, and _the_ miss wheelwright kindly lent me all the letters that she had preserved. it is scarcely possible that time will reveal many more unpublished letters from the author of _jane eyre_. several of those already in print are forgeries, and i have actually seen a letter addressed from paris, a city which miss bronte never visited. i have the assurance of dr. heger of brussels that miss bronte's correspondence with his father no longer exists. in any case one may safely send forth this little book with the certainty that it is a fairly complete collection of charlotte bronte's correspondence, and that it is altogether a valuable revelation of a singularly interesting personality. steps will be taken henceforth, it may be added, to vindicate mr. nicholls's rights in whatever may still remain of his wife's unpublished correspondence. chapter i: patrick bronte and maria his wife it would seem quite clear to any careful investigator that the reverend patrick bronte, incumbent of haworth, and the father of three famous daughters, was a much maligned man. we talk of the fierce light which beats upon a throne, but what is that compared to the fierce light which beats upon any man of some measure of individuality who is destined to live out his life in the quiet of a country village--in the very centre, as it were, of 'personal talk' and gossip not always kindly to the stranger within the gate? the view of mr. bronte, presented by mrs. gaskell in the early editions of her biography of charlotte bronte, is that of a severe, ill-tempered, and distinctly disagreeable character. it is the picture of a man who disliked the vanities of life so intensely, that the new shoes of his children and the silk dress of his wife were not spared by him in sudden gusts of passion. a stern old ruffian, one is inclined to consider him. his pistol-shooting rings picturesquely, but not agreeably, through mrs. gaskell's memoirs. it has been already explained in more than one quarter that this was not the real patrick bronte, and that much of the unfavourable gossip was due to the chatter of a dismissed servant, retailed to mrs. gaskell on one of her missions of inquiry in the neighbourhood. the stories of the burnt shoes and the mutilated dress have been relegated to the realm of myth, and the pistol-shooting may now be acknowledged as a harmless pastime not more iniquitous than the golfing or angling of a latter-day clergyman. it is certain, were the matter of much interest to-day, that mr. bronte was fond of the use of firearms. the present incumbent of haworth will point out to you, on the old tower of haworth church, the marks of pistol bullets, which he is assured were made by mr. bronte. i have myself handled both the gun and the pistol--this latter a very ornamental weapon, by the way, manufactured at bradford--which mr. bronte possessed during the later years of his life. from both he had obtained much innocent amusement; but his son-in-law, mr. nicholls, who, at the distance of forty years still cherishes a reverent and enthusiastic affection for old mr. bronte, informs me that the bullet marks upon haworth church were the irresponsible frolic of a rather juvenile curate--mr. smith. all this is trivial enough in any case, and one turns very readily to more important factors in the life of the father of the brontes. patrick bronte was born at ahaderg, county down, in ireland, on st. patrick's day, march , . he was one of the ten children of hugh brunty, farmer, and his nine brothers and sisters seem all of them to have spent their lives in their irish home, to have married and been given in marriage, and to have gone to their graves in peace. patrick alone had ambition, and, one must add, the opportune friend, without whom ambition counts for little in the great struggle of life. at sixteen he was a kind of village schoolmaster, or assistant schoolmaster, and at twenty-five, stirred thereto by the vicar of his parish, mr. tighe, he was on his way from ireland to st. john's college, cambridge. it was in that patrick bronte went to cambridge, and entered his name in the college books. there, indeed, we find the name, not of patrick bronte, but of patrick branty, { } and this brings us to an interesting point as to the origin of the name. in the register of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as 'brunty' and 'bruntee'; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as dr. douglas hyde has pointed out, the original name was o'prunty. { } the irish, at the beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as were the english of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see variations in the spelling of the bronte name--it being in the case of his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt 'brontee.' to me it is perfectly clear that for the change of name lord nelson was responsible, and that the dukedom of bronte, which was conferred upon the great sailor in , suggested the more ornamental surname. there were no irish brontes in existence before nelson became duke of bronte; but all patrick's brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname. for this theory there is, of course, not one scrap of evidence; we only know that the register of patrick's native parish gives us brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies is bronte. from cambridge, after taking orders in , mr. bronte moved to a curacy at weatherfield in essex; and mr. augustine birrell has told us, with that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking irish curate made successful love to a young parishioner--miss mary burder. mary burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and guardian. she was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers never met again. there are doubtful points in mr. birrell's story. mary burder, as the wife of a nonconformist minister, died in , in her seventy-seventh year. this lady, from whom doubtless either directly or indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated a very innocent flirtation. one would like further evidence for the statement that when mr. bronte lost his wife in he asked his old sweetheart, mary burder, to become the mother of his six children, and that she answered 'no'. in any case, mr. bronte left weatherfield in for a curacy at dewsbury, and dewsbury gossip also had much to say concerning the flirtations of its irish curate. his next curacy, however, which was obtained in , by a removal to hartshead, near huddersfield, brought flirtation for mr. bronte to a speedy end. in , when thirty-three years of age, he married miss maria branwell, of penzance. miss branwell had only a few months before left her cornish home for a visit to an uncle in yorkshire. this uncle was a mr. john fennell, a clergyman of the church of england, who had been a methodist minister. to methodism, indeed, the cornish branwells would seem to have been devoted at one time or another, for i have seen a copy of the _imitation_ inscribed 'm. branwell, july ,' with the following title-page:-- an extract of the christian's pattern: or, a treatise on the imitation of christ. written in latin by thomas a kempis. abridged and published in english by john wesley, m.a., london. printed at the conference office, north green, finsbury square. g. story, agent. sold by g. whitfield, city road. . price bound s. the book was evidently brought by mrs. bronte from penzance, and given by her to her husband or left among her effects. the poor little woman had been in her grave for five or six years when it came into the hands of one of her daughters, as we learn from charlotte's hand-writing on the fly-leaf:-- '_c. bronte's book_. _this book was given to me in july _. _it is not certainly known who is the author_, _but it is generally supposed that thomas a kempis is_. _i saw a reward of_ , pounds _offered in the leeds mercury to any one who could find out for a certainty who is the author_.' the conjunction of the names of john wesley, maria branwell, and charlotte bronte surely gives this little volume, 'price bound s.,' a singular interest! but here i must refer to the letters which maria branwell wrote to her lover during the brief courtship. mrs. gaskell, it will be remembered, makes but one extract from this correspondence, which was handed to her by mr. bronte as part of the material for her memoir. long years before, the little packet had been taken from mr. bronte's desk, for we find charlotte writing to a friend on february th, :-- 'a few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched me. papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, telling me that they were mamma's, and that i might read them. i did read them, in a frame of mind i cannot describe. the papers were yellow with time, all having been written before i was born. it was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. they were written to papa before they were married. there is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable. i wish she had lived, and that i had known her.' yet another forty years or so and the little packet is in my possession. handling, with a full sense of their sacredness, these letters, written more than eighty years ago by a good woman to her lover, one is tempted to hope that there is no breach of the privacy which should, even in our day, guide certain sides of life, in publishing the correspondence in its completeness. with the letters i find a little ms., which is also of pathetic interest. it is entitled 'the advantages of poverty in religious concerns,' and it is endorsed in the handwriting of mr. bronte, written, doubtless, many years afterwards:-- '_the above was written by my dear wife_, _and is for insertion in one of the periodical publications_. _keep it as a memorial of her_.' there is no reason to suppose that the ms. was ever published; there is no reason why any editor should have wished to publish it. it abounds in the obvious. at the same time, one notes that from both father and mother alike charlotte bronte and her sisters inherited some measure of the literary faculty. it is nothing to say that not one line of the father's or mother's would have been preserved had it not been for their gifted children. it is sufficient that the zest for writing was there, and that the intense passion for handling a pen, which seems to have been singularly strong in charlotte bronte, must have come to a great extent from a similar passion alike in father and mother. mr. bronte, indeed, may be counted a prolific author. he published, in all, four books, three pamphlets, and two sermons. of his books, two were in verse and two in prose. _cottage poems_ was published in ; _the rural minstrel_ in , the year of his marriage; _the cottage in the wood_ in ; and _the maid of killarney_ in . after his wife's death he published no more books. reading over these old-fashioned volumes now, one admits that they possess but little distinction. it has been pointed out, indeed, that one of the strongest lines in _jane eyre_--'to the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'--is culled from mr. bronte's verse. it is the one line of his that will live. like his daughter charlotte, mr. bronte is more interesting in his prose than in his poetry. _the cottage in the wood_; _or_, _the art of becoming rich and happy_, is a kind of religious novel--a spiritual _pamela_, in which the reprobate pursuer of an innocent girl ultimately becomes converted and marries her. _the maid of killarney_; _or_, _albion and flora_ is more interesting. under the guise of a story it has something to say on many questions of importance. we know now why charlotte never learnt to dance until she went to brussels, and why children's games were unknown to her, for here are many mild diatribes against dancing and card-playing. the british constitution and the british and foreign bible society receive a considerable amount of criticism. but in spite of this didactic weakness there are one or two pieces of really picturesque writing, notably a description of an irish wake, and a forcible account of the defence of a house against some whiteboys. it is true enough that the books are merely of interest to collectors and that they live only by virtue of patrick bronte's remarkable children. but many a prolific writer of the day passes muster as a genius among his contemporaries upon as small a talent; and mr. bronte does not seem to have given himself any airs as an author. thirty years were to elapse before there were to be any more books from this family of writers; but _jane eyre_ owes something, we may be sure, to _the maid of killarney_. mr. bronte, as i have said, married maria branwell in . she was in her twenty-ninth year, and was one of five children--one son and four daughters--the father of whom, mr. thomas branwell, had died in . by a curious coincidence, another sister, charlotte, was married in penzance on the same day--the th of december . { } before me are a bundle of samplers, worked by three of these branwell sisters. maria branwell 'ended her sampler' april the th, , and it is inscribed with the text, _flee from sin as from a serpent_, _for if thou comest too near to it_, _it will bite thee_. _the teeth thereof are as the teeth of a lion to slay the souls of men_. another sampler is by elizabeth branwell; another by margaret, and another by anne. these, some miniatures, and the book and papers to which i have referred, are all that remain to us as a memento of mrs. bronte, apart from the children that she bore to her husband. the miniatures, which are in the possession of miss branwell, of penzance, are of mr. and mrs. thomas branwell--charlotte bronte's maternal grandfather and grandmother--and of mrs. bronte and her sister elizabeth branwell as children. to return, however, to our bundle of love-letters. comment is needless, if indeed comment or elucidation were possible at this distance of time. to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _august_ _th_, . 'my dear friend,--this address is sufficient to convince you that i not only permit, but approve of yours to me--i do indeed consider you as my _friend_; yet, when i consider how short a time i have had the pleasure of knowing you, i start at my own rashness, my heart fails, and did i not think that you would be disappointed and grieved at it, i believe i should be ready to spare myself the task of writing. do not think that i am so wavering as to repent of what i have already said. no, believe me, this will never be the case, unless you give me cause for it. you need not fear that you have been mistaken in my character. if i know anything of myself, i am incapable of making an ungenerous return to the smallest degree of kindness, much less to you whose attentions and conduct have been so particularly obliging. i will frankly confess that your behaviour and what i have seen and heard of your character has excited my warmest esteem and regard, and be assured you shall never have cause to repent of any confidence you may think proper to place in me, and that it will always be my endeavour to deserve the good opinion which you have formed, although human weakness may in some instances cause me to fall short. in giving you these assurances i do not depend upon my own strength, but i look to him who has been my unerring guide through life, and in whose continued protection and assistance i confidently trust. 'i thought on you much on sunday, and feared you would not escape the rain. i hope you do not feel any bad effects from it? my cousin wrote you on monday and expects this afternoon to be favoured with an answer. your letter has caused me some foolish embarrassment, tho' in pity to my feelings they have been very sparing of their raillery. 'i will now candidly answer your questions. the _politeness of others_ can never make me forget your kind attentions, neither can i _walk our accustomed rounds_ without thinking on you, and, why should i be ashamed to add, wishing for your presence. if you knew what were my feelings whilst writing this you would pity me. i wish to write the truth and give you satisfaction, yet fear to go too far, and exceed the bounds of propriety. but whatever i may say or write i will _never deceive_ you, or _exceed the truth_. if you think i have not placed the _utmost confidence_ in you, consider my situation, and ask yourself if i have not confided in you sufficiently, perhaps too much. i am very sorry that you will not have this till after to-morrow, but it was out of my power to write sooner. i rely on your goodness to pardon everything in this which may appear either too free or too stiff; and beg that you will consider me as a warm and faithful friend. 'my uncle, aunt, and cousin unite in kind regards. 'i must now conclude with again declaring myself to be yours sincerely, 'maria branwell.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b, hartshead 'wood house grove, _september_ _th_, . my dearest friend,--i have just received your affectionate and very welcome letter, and although i shall not be able to send this until monday, yet i cannot deny myself the pleasure of writing a few lines this evening, no longer considering it a task, but a pleasure, next to that of reading yours. i had the pleasure of hearing from mr. fennell, who was at bradford on thursday afternoon, that you had rested there all night. had you proceeded, i am sure the walk would have been too much for you; such excessive fatigue, often repeated, must injure the strongest constitution. i am rejoiced to find that our forebodings were without cause. i had yesterday a letter from a very dear friend of mine, and had the satisfaction to learn by it that all at home are well. i feel with you the unspeakable obligations i am under to a merciful providence--my heart swells with gratitude, and i feel an earnest desire that i may be enabled to make some suitable return to the author of all my blessings. in general, i think i am enabled to cast my care upon him, and then i experience a calm and peaceful serenity of mind which few things can destroy. in all my addresses to the throne of grace i never ask a blessing for myself but i beg the same for you, and considering the important station which you are called to fill, my prayers are proportionately fervent that you may be favoured with all the gifts and graces requisite for such calling. o my dear friend, let us pray much that we may live lives holy and useful to each other and all around us! '_monday morn_.--my cousin and i were yesterday at coverley church, where we heard mr. watman preach a very excellent sermon from "learn of me, for i am meek and lowly of heart." he displayed the character of our saviour in a most affecting and amiable light. i scarcely ever felt more charmed with his excellencies, more grateful for his condescension, or more abased at my own unworthiness; but i lament that my heart is so little retentive of those pleasing and profitable impressions. 'i pitied you in your solitude, and felt sorry that it was not in my power to enliven it. have you not been too hasty in informing your friends of a certain event? why did you not leave them to guess a little longer? i shrink from the idea of its being known to every body. i do, indeed, _sometimes_ think of you, but i will not say how often, lest i raise your vanity; and we sometimes talk of you and the doctor. but i believe i should seldom mention your name myself were it not now and then introduced by my cousin. i have never mentioned a word of what is past to any body. had i thought this necessary i should have requested you to do it. but i think there is no need, as by some means or other they seem to have a pretty correct notion how matters stand betwixt us; and as their hints, etc., meet with no contradiction from me, my silence passes for confirmation. mr. fennell has not neglected to give me some serious and encouraging advice, and my aunt takes frequent opportunities of dropping little sentences which i may turn to some advantage. i have long had reason to know that the present state of things would give pleasure to all parties. your ludicrous account of the scene at the hermitage was highly diverting, we laughed heartily at it; but i fear it will not produce all that compassion in miss fennell's breast which you seem to wish. i will now tell you what i was thinking about and doing at the time you mention. i was then toiling up the hill with jane and mrs. clapham to take our tea at mr. tatham's, thinking on the evening when i first took the same walk with you, and on the change which had taken place in my circumstances and views since then--not wholly without a wish that i had your arm to assist me, and your conversation to shorten the walk. indeed, all our walks have now an insipidity in them which i never thought they would have possessed. when i work, if i wish to get _forward_ i may be glad that you are at a distance. jane begs me to assure you of her kind regards. mr. morgan is expected to be here this evening. i must assume a bold and steady countenance to meet his attacks! 'i have now written a pretty long letter without reserve or caution, and if all the sentiments of my heart are not laid open to you, believe me it is not because i wish them to be concealed, for i hope there is nothing there that would give you pain or displeasure. my most sincere and earnest wishes are for your happiness and welfare, for this includes my own. pray much for me that i may be made a blessing and not a hindrance to you. let me not interrupt your studies nor intrude on that time which ought to be dedicated to better purposes. forgive my freedom, my dearest friend, and rest assured that you are and ever will be dear to maria branwell. 'write very soon.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _september_ _th_, . 'my dearest friend,--having spent the day yesterday at miry shay, a place near bradford, i had not got your letter till my return in the evening, and consequently have only a short time this morning to write if i send it by this post. you surely do not think you _trouble_ me by writing? no, i think i may venture to say if such were your opinion you would _trouble_ me no more. be assured, your letters are and i hope always will be received with extreme pleasure and read with delight. may our gracious father mercifully grant the fulfilment of your prayers! whilst we depend entirely on him for happiness, and receive each other and all our blessings as from his hands, what can harm us or make us miserable? nothing temporal or spiritual. 'jane had a note from mr. morgan last evening, and she desires me to tell you that the methodists' service in church hours is to commence next sunday week. you may expect frowns and hard words from her when you make your appearance here again, for, if you recollect, she gave you a note to carry to the doctor, and he has never received it. what have you done with it? if you can give a good account of it you may come to see us as soon as you please and be sure of a hearty welcome from all parties. next wednesday we have some thoughts, if the weather be fine, of going to kirkstall abbey once more, and i suppose your presence will not make the walk less agreeable to any of us. 'the old man is come and waits for my letter. in expectation of seeing you on monday or tuesday next,--i remain, yours faithfully and affectionately, 'm. b.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _september_ _th_, . 'how readily do i comply with my dear mr. b's request! you see, you have only to express your wishes and as far as my power extends i hesitate not to fulfil them. my heart tells me that it will always be my pride and pleasure to contribute to your happiness, nor do i fear that this will ever be inconsistent with my duty as a christian. my esteem for you and my confidence in you is so great, that i firmly believe you will never exact anything from me which i could not conscientiously perform. i shall in future look to you for assistance and instruction whenever i may need them, and hope you will never withhold from me any advice or caution you may see necessary. ['for some years i have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no _control_ whatever--so far from it, that my sisters who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother, used to consult me in every case of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my opinions and actions. perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that i do not _boast_ of it, i have many times felt it a disadvantage; and although, i thank god, it never led me into error, yet in circumstances of perplexity and doubt, i have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor.] { } 'at such times i have seen and felt the necessity of supernatural aid, and by fervent applications to a throne of grace i have experienced that my heavenly father is able and willing to supply the place of every earthly friend. i shall now no longer feel this want, this sense of helpless weakness, for i believe a kind providence has intended that i shall find in you every earthly friend united; nor do i fear to trust myself under your protection, or shrink from your control. it is pleasant to be subject to those we love, especially when they never exert their authority but for the good of the subject. how few would write in this way! but i do not fear that _you_ will make a bad use of it. you tell me to write my thoughts, and thus as they occur i freely let my pen run away with them. '_sat. morn_.--i do not know whether you dare show your face here again or not after the blunder you have committed. when we got to the house on thursday evening, even before we were within the doors, we found that mr. and mrs. bedford had been there, and that they had requested you to mention their intention of coming--a single hint of which you never gave! poor i too came in for a share in the hard words which were bestowed upon you, for they all agreed that i was the cause of it. mr. fennell said you were certainly _mazed_, and talked of sending you to york, etc. and even i begin to think that _this_, together with the _note_, bears some marks of _insanity_! however, i shall suspend my judgment until i hear what excuse you can make for yourself, i suppose you will be quite ready to make one of some kind or another. 'yesterday i performed a difficult and yet a pleasing task in writing to my sisters. i thought i never should accomplish the end for which the letter was designed; but after a good deal of perambulation i gave them to understand the nature of my engagement with you, with the motives and inducements which led me to form such an engagement, and that in consequence of it i should not see them again so soon as i had intended. i concluded by expressing a hope that they would not be less pleased with the information than were my friends here. i think they will not suspect me to have made a wrong step, their partiality for me is so great. and their affection for me will lead them to rejoice in my welfare, even though it should diminish somewhat of their own. i shall think the time tedious till i hear from you, and must beg you will write as soon as possible. pardon me, my dear friend, if i again caution you against giving way to a weakness of which i have heard you complain. when you find your heart oppressed and your thoughts too much engrossed by one subject, let prayer be your refuge--this you no doubt know by experience to be a sure remedy, and a relief from every care and error. oh, that we had more of the spirit of prayer! i feel that i need it much. 'breakfast-time is near, i must bid you farewell for the time, but rest assured you will always share in the prayers and heart of your own maria. 'mr. fennell has crossed my letter to my sisters. with his usual goodness he has supplied my _deficiencies_, and spoken of me in terms of commendation of which i wish i were more worthy. your character he has likewise displayed in the most favourable light; and i am sure they will not fail to love and esteem you though unknown. 'all here unite in kind regards. adieu.' to rev. patrick bronte a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _september_ _rd_, . 'my dearest friend,--accept of my warmest thanks for your kind affectionate letter, in which you have rated mine so highly that i really blush to read my own praises. pray that god would enable me to deserve all the kindness you manifest towards me, and to act consistently with the good opinion you entertain of me--then i shall indeed be a helpmeet for you, and to be this shall at all times be the care and study of my future life. we have had to-day a large party of the bradford folks--the rands, fawcets, dobsons, etc. my thoughts often strayed from the company, and i would have gladly left them to follow my present employment. to write to and receive letters from my friends were always among my chief enjoyments, but none ever gave me so much pleasure as those which i receive from and write to my newly adopted friend. i am by no means sorry you have given up all thought of the house you mentioned. with my cousin's help i have made known your plans to my uncle and aunt. mr. fennell immediately coincided with that which respects your present abode, and observed that it had occurred to him before, but that he had not had an opportunity of mentioning it to you. my aunt did not fall in with it so readily, but her objections did not appear to me to be very weighty. for my own part, i feel all the force of your arguments in favour of it, and the objections are so trifling that they can scarcely be called objections. my cousin is of the same opinion. indeed, you have such a method of considering and digesting a plan before you make it known to your friends, that you run very little risque of incurring their disapprobations, or of having your schemes frustrated. i greatly admire your talents this way--may they never be perverted by being used in a bad cause! and whilst they are exerted for good purposes, may they prove irresistible! if i may judge from your letter, this middle scheme is what would please you best, so that if there should arise no new objection to it, perhaps it will prove the best you can adopt. however, there is yet sufficient time to consider it further. i trust in this and every other circumstance you will be guided by the wisdom that cometh from above--a portion of which i doubt not has guided you hitherto. a belief of this, added to the complete satisfaction with which i read your reasonings on the subject, made me a ready convert to your opinions. i hope nothing will occur to induce you to change your intention of spending the next week at bradford. depend on it you shall have letter for letter; but may we not hope to see you here during that time, surely you will not think the way more tedious than usual? i have not heard any particulars respecting the church since you were at bradford. mr. rawson is now there, but mr. hardy and his brother are absent, and i understand nothing decisive can be accomplished without them. jane expects to hear something more to-morrow. perhaps ere this reaches you, you will have received some intelligence respecting it from mr. morgan. if you have no other apology to make for your blunders than that which you have given me, you must not expect to be excused, for i have not mentioned it to any one, so that however it may clear your character in my opinion it is not likely to influence any other person. little, very little, will induce me to cover your faults with a veil of charity. i already feel a kind of participation in all that concerns you. all praises and censures bestowed on you must equally affect me. your joys and sorrows must be mine. thus shall the one be increased and the other diminished. while this is the case we shall, i hope, always find "life's cares" to be "comforts." and may we feel every trial and distress, for such must be our lot at times, bind us nearer to god and to each other! my heart earnestly joins in your comprehensive prayers. i trust they will unitedly ascend to a throne of grace, and through the redeemer's merits procure for us peace and happiness here and a life of eternal felicity hereafter. oh, what sacred pleasure there is in the idea of spending an eternity together in perfect and uninterrupted bliss! this should encourage us to the utmost exertion and fortitude. but whilst i write, my own words condemn me--i am ashamed of my own indolence and backwardness to duty. may i be more careful, watchful, and active than i have ever yet been! 'my uncle, aunt, and jane request me to send their kind regards, and they will be happy to see you any time next week whenever you can conveniently come down from bradford. let me hear from you soon--i shall expect a letter on monday. farewell, my dearest friend. that you may be happy in yourself and very useful to all around you is the daily earnest prayer of yours truly, 'maria branwell.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _october_ _rd_, . 'how could my dear friend so cruelly disappoint me? had he known how much i had set my heart on having a letter this afternoon, and how greatly i felt the disappointment when the bag arrived and i found there was nothing for me, i am sure he would not have permitted a little matter to hinder him. but whatever was the reason of your not writing, i cannot believe it to have been neglect or unkindness, therefore i do not in the least blame you, i only beg that in future you will judge of my feelings by your own, and if possible never let me expect a letter without receiving one. you know in my last which i sent you at bradford i said it would not be in my power to write the next day, but begged i might be favoured with hearing from you on saturday, and you will not wonder that i hoped you would have complied with this request. it has just occurred to my mind that it is possible this note was not received; if so, you have felt disappointed likewise; but i think this is not very probable, as the old man is particularly careful, and i never heard of his losing anything committed to his care. the note which i allude to was written on thursday morning, and you should have received it before you left bradford. i forget what its contents were, but i know it was written in haste and concluded abruptly. mr. fennell talks of visiting mr. morgan to-morrow. i cannot lose the opportunity of sending this to the office by him as you will then have it a day sooner, and if you have been daily expecting to hear from me, twenty-four hours are of some importance. i really am concerned to find that this, what many would deem trifling incident, has so much disturbed my mind. i fear i should not have slept in peace to-night if i had been deprived of this opportunity of relieving my mind by scribbling to you, and now i lament that you cannot possibly receive this till monday. may i hope that there is now some intelligence on the way to me? or must my patience be tried till i see you on wednesday? but what nonsense am i writing? surely after this you can have no doubt that you possess all my heart. two months ago i could not possibly have believed that you would ever engross so much of my thoughts and affections, and far less could i have thought that i should be so forward as to tell you so. i believe i must forbid you to come here again unless you can assure me that you will not steal any more of my regard. enough of this; i must bring my pen to order, for if i were to suffer myself to revise what i have written i should be tempted to throw it in the fire, but i have determined that you shall see my whole heart. i have not yet informed you that i received your serio-comic note on thursday afternoon, for which accept my thanks. 'my cousin desires me to say that she expects a long poem on her birthday, when she attains the important age of twenty-one. mr. fennell joins with us in requesting that you will not fail to be here on wednesday, as it is decided that on thursday we are to go to the abbey if the weather, etc., permits. '_sunday morning_.--i am not sure if i do right in adding a few lines to-day, but knowing that it will give you pleasure i wish to finish that you may have it to-morrow. i will just say that if my feeble prayers can aught avail, you will find your labours this day both pleasant and profitable, as they concern your own soul and the souls of those to whom you preach. i trust in your hours of retirement you will not forget to pray for me. i assure you i need every assistance to help me forward; i feel that my heart is more ready to attach itself to earth than heaven. i sometimes think there never was a mind so dull and inactive as mine is with regard to spiritual things. 'i must not forget to thank you for the pamphlets and tracts which you sent us from bradford. i hope we shall make good use of them. i must now take my leave. i believe i need scarcely assure you that i am yours truly and very affectionately, 'maria branwell.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _october_ _st_ . 'with the sincerest pleasure do i retire from company to converse with him whom i love beyond all others. could my beloved friend see my heart he would then be convinced that the affection i bear him is not at all inferior to that which he feels for me--indeed i sometimes think that in truth and constancy it excels. but do not think from this that i entertain any suspicions of your sincerity--no, i firmly believe you to be sincere and generous, and doubt not in the least that you feel all you express. in return, i entreat that you will do me the justice to believe that you have not only a _very large portion_ of my _affection_ and _esteem_, but _all_ that i am capable of feeling, and from henceforth measure my feelings by your own. unless my love for you were very great how could i so contentedly give up my home and all my friends--a home i loved so much that i have often thought nothing could bribe me to renounce it for any great length of time together, and friends with whom i have been so long accustomed to share all the vicissitudes of joy and sorrow? yet these have lost their weight, and though i cannot always think of them without a sigh, yet the anticipation of sharing with you all the pleasures and pains, the cares and anxieties of life, of contributing to your comfort and becoming the companion of your pilgrimage, is more delightful to me than any other prospect which this world can possibly present. i expected to have heard from you on saturday last, and can scarcely refrain from thinking you unkind to keep me in suspense two whole days longer than was necessary, but it is well that my patience should be sometimes tried, or i might entirely lose it, and this would be a loss indeed! lately i have experienced a considerable increase of hopes and fears, which tend to destroy the calm uniformity of my life. these are not unwelcome, as they enable me to discover more of the evils and errors of my heart, and discovering them i hope through grace to be enabled to correct and amend them. i am sorry to say that my cousin has had a very serious cold, but to-day i think she is better; her cough seems less, and i hope we shall be able to come to bradford on saturday afternoon, where we intend to stop till tuesday. you may be sure we shall not soon think of taking such another journey as the last. i look forward with pleasure to monday, when i hope to meet with you, for as we are no _longer twain_ separation is painful, and to meet must ever be attended with joy. '_thursday morning_.--i intended to have finished this before breakfast, but unfortunately slept an hour too long. i am every moment in expectation of the old man's arrival. i hope my cousin is still better to-day; she requests me to say that she is much obliged to you for your kind inquiries and the concern you express for her recovery. i take all possible care of her, but yesterday she was naughty enough to venture into the yard without her bonnet! as you do not say anything of going to leeds i conclude you have not been. we shall most probably hear from the dr. this afternoon. i am much pleased to hear of his success at bierly! o that you may both be zealous and successful in your efforts for the salvation of souls, and may your own lives be holy, and your hearts greatly blessed while you are engaged in administering to the good of others! i should have been very glad to have had it in my power to lessen your fatigue and cheer your spirits by my exertions on monday last. i will hope that this pleasure is still reserved for me. in general, i feel a calm confidence in the providential care and continued mercy of god, and when i consider his past deliverances and past favours i am led to wonder and adore. a sense of my small returns of love and gratitude to him often abases me and makes me think i am little better than those who profess no religion. pray for me, my dear friend, and rest assured that you possess a very very large portion of the prayers, thoughts, and heart of yours truly, 'm. branwell. 'mr. fennell requests mr. bedford to call on the man who has had orders to make blankets for the grove and desire him to send them as soon as possible. mr. fennell will be greatly obliged to mr. bedford if he will take this trouble.' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _november_ _th_, . 'my dear saucy pat,--now don't you think you deserve this epithet far more than i do that which you have given me? i really know not what to make of the beginning of your last; the winds, waves, and rocks almost stunned me. i thought you were giving me the account of some terrible dream, or that you had had a presentiment of the fate of my poor box, having no idea that your lively imagination could make so much of the slight reproof conveyed in my last. what will you say when you get a _real_, _downright scolding_? since you show such a readiness to atone for your offences after receiving a mild rebuke, i am inclined to hope you will seldom deserve a severe one. i accept with pleasure your atonement, and send you a free and full forgiveness. but i cannot allow that your affection is more deeply rooted than mine. however, we will dispute no more about this, but rather embrace every opportunity to prove its sincerity and strength by acting in every respect as friends and fellow-pilgrims travelling the same road, actuated by the same motives, and having in view the same end. i think if our lives are spared twenty years hence i shall then pray for you with the same, if not greater, fervour and delight that i do now. i am pleased that you are so fully convinced of my candour, for to know that you suspected me of a deficiency in this virtue would grieve and mortify me beyond expression. i do not derive any merit from the possession of it, for in me it is constitutional. yet i think where it is possessed it will rarely exist alone, and where it is wanted there is reason to doubt the existence of almost every other virtue. as to the other qualities which your partiality attributes to me, although i rejoice to know that i stand so high in your good opinion, yet i blush to think in how small a degree i possess them. but it shall be the pleasing study of my future life to gain such an increase of grace and wisdom as shall enable me to act up to your highest expectations and prove to you a helpmeet. i firmly believe the almighty has set us apart for each other; may we, by earnest, frequent prayer, and every possible exertion, endeavour to fulfil his will in all things! i do not, cannot, doubt your love, and here i freely declare i love you above all the world besides. i feel very, very grateful to the great author of all our mercies for his unspeakable love and condescension towards us, and desire "to show forth my gratitude not only with my lips, but by my life and conversation." i indulge a hope that our mutual prayers will be answered, and that our intimacy will tend much to promote our temporal and eternal interest. ['i suppose you never expected to be much the richer for me, but i am sorry to inform you that i am still poorer than i thought myself. i mentioned having sent for my books, clothes, etc. on saturday evening about the time you were writing the description of your imaginary shipwreck, i was reading and feeling the effects of a real one, having then received a letter from my sister giving me an account of the vessel in which she had sent my box being stranded on the coast of devonshire, in consequence of which the box was dashed to pieces with the violence of the sea, and all my little property, with the exception of a very few articles, swallowed up in the mighty deep. if this should not prove the prelude to something worse, i shall think little of it, as it is the first disastrous circumstance which has occurred since i left my home], { } and having been so highly favoured it would be highly ungrateful in me were i to suffer this to dwell much on my mind. 'mr. morgan was here yesterday, indeed he only left this morning. he mentioned having written to invite you to bierly on sunday next, and if you complied with his request it is likely that we shall see you both here on sunday evening. as we intend going to leeds next week, we should be happy if you would accompany us on monday or tuesday. i mention this by desire of miss fennell, who begs to be remembered affectionately to you. notwithstanding mr. fennell's complaints and threats, i doubt not but he will give you a cordial reception whenever you think fit to make your appearance at the grove. which you may likewise be assured of receiving from your ever truly affectionate, maria. 'both the doctor and his lady very much wish to know what kind of address we make use of in our letters to each other. i think they would scarcely hit on _this_!!' to rev. patrick bronte, a.b., hartshead 'wood house grove, _december_ _th_, . 'my dearest friend,--so you _thought_ that _perhaps_ i _might_ expect to hear from you. as the case was so doubtful, and you were in such great haste, you might as well have deferred writing a few days longer, for you seem to suppose it is a matter of perfect indifference to me whether i hear from you or not. i believe i once requested you to judge of my feelings by your own--am i to think that _you_ are thus indifferent? i feel very unwilling to entertain such an opinion, and am grieved that you should suspect me of such a cold, heartless, attachment. but i am too serious on the subject; i only meant to rally you a little on the beginning of your last, and to tell you that i fancied there was a coolness in it which none of your former letters had contained. if this fancy was groundless, forgive me for having indulged it, and let it serve to convince you of the sincerity and warmth of my affection. real love is ever apt to suspect that it meets not with an equal return; you must not wonder then that my fears are sometimes excited. my pride cannot bear the idea of a diminution of your attachment, or to think that it is stronger on my side than on yours. but i must not permit my pen so fully to disclose the feelings of my heart, nor will i tell you whether i am pleased or not at the thought of seeing you on the appointed day. 'miss fennell desires her kind regards, and, with her father, is extremely obliged to you for the trouble you have taken about the carpet, and has no doubt but it will give full satisfaction. they think there will be no occasion for the green cloth. 'we intend to set about making the cakes here next week, but as the fifteen or twenty persons whom you mention live probably somewhere in your neighbourhood, i think it will be most convenient for mrs. b. to make a small one for the purpose of distributing there, which will save us the difficulty of sending so far. 'you may depend on my learning my lessons as rapidly as they are given me. i am already tolerably perfect in the a b c, etc. i am much obliged to you for the pretty little hymn which i have already got by heart, but cannot promise to sing it scientifically, though i will endeavour to gain a little more assurance. 'since i began this jane put into my hands lord lyttelton's _advice to a lady_. when i read those lines, "be never cool reserve with passion joined, with caution choose, but then be fondly kind, etc." my heart smote me for having in some cases used too much reserve towards you. do you think you have any cause to complain of me? if you do, let me know it. for were it in my power to prevent it, i would in no instance occasion you the least pain or uneasiness. i am certain no one ever loved you with an affection more pure, constant, tender, and ardent than that which i feel. surely this is not saying too much; it is the truth, and i trust you are worthy to know it. i long to improve in every religious and moral quality, that i may be a help, and if possible an ornament to you. oh let us pray much for wisdom and grace to fill our appointed stations with propriety, that we may enjoy satisfaction in our own souls, edify others, and bring glory to the name of him who has so wonderfully preserved, blessed, and brought us together. 'if there is anything in the commencement of this which looks like pettishness, forgive it; my mind is now completely divested of every feeling of the kind, although i own i am sometimes too apt to be overcome by this disposition. 'let me have the pleasure of hearing from you again as soon as convenient. this writing is uncommonly bad, but i too am in haste. 'adieu, my dearest.--i am your affectionate and sincere 'maria.' mr. bronte was at hartshead, where he married, for five years, and there his two eldest children, maria and elizabeth, were born. he then moved to thornton, near bradford, where charlotte was born on the st of april , branwell in , emily in , and anne in . in the family removed to the parsonage of haworth, and in the poor mother was dead. a year or two later miss elizabeth branwell came from penzance to act as a mother to her orphaned nephew and nieces. there is no reason to accept the theory that miss branwell was quite as formidable or offensive a personage as the mrs. read in _jane eyre_. that she was a somewhat rigid and not over demonstrative woman, we may take for granted. the one letter to her of any importance that i have seen--it is printed in mrs. gaskell's life--was the attempt of charlotte to obtain her co-operation in the projected visit to a brussels school. miss branwell provided the money readily enough it would seem, and one cannot doubt that in her later years she was on the best of terms with her nieces. there may have been too much discipline in childhood, but discipline which would now be considered too severe was common enough at the beginning of the century. the children, we may be sure, were left abundantly alone. the writing they accomplished in their early years would sufficiently demonstrate that. miss branwell died in ; and from her will, which i give elsewhere, it will be seen that she behaved very justly to her three nieces. the reception by mr. bronte of his children's literary successes has been very pleasantly recorded by charlotte. he was proud of his daughters, and delighted with their fame. he seems to have had no small share of their affection. charlotte loved and esteemed him. there are hundreds of her letters, in many of which are severe and indeed unprintable things about this or that individual; but of her father these letters contain not one single harsh word. she wrote to him regularly when absent. not only did he secure the affection of his daughter, but the people most intimately associated with him next to his own children gave him a lifelong affection and regard. martha brown, the servant who lived with him until his death, always insisted that her old master had been grievously wronged, and that a kinder, more generous, and in every way more worthy man had never lived. nancy garrs, another servant, always spoke of mr. bronte as 'the kindest man who ever drew breath,' and as a good and affectionate father. forty years have gone by since charlotte bronte died; and thirty-six years have flown since mr. nicholls left the deathbed of his wife's father; but through all that period he has retained the most kindly memories of one with whom his life was intimately associated for sixteen years, with whom at one crisis of his life, as we shall see, he had a serious difference, but whom he ever believed to have been an entirely honourable and upright man. a lady visitor to haworth in december did not, it is true, carry away quite so friendly an impression. 'i have been to see old mr. bronte,' she writes, 'and have spent about an hour with him. he is completely confined to his bed, but talks hopefully of leaving it again when the summer comes round. i am afraid that it will not be leaving it as he plans, poor old man! he is touchingly softened by illness; but still talks in his pompous way, and mingles moral remarks and somewhat stale sentiments with his conversation on ordinary subjects.' this is severe, but after all it was a literary woman who wrote it. on the whole we may safely assume, with the evidence before us, that mr. bronte was a thoroughly upright and honourable man who came manfully through a somewhat severe life battle. that is how his daughters thought of him, and we cannot do better than think with them. { } mr. bronte died on june , , and his funeral in haworth church is described in the _bradford review_ of the following week:-- 'great numbers of people had collected in the churchyard, and a few minutes before noon the corpse was brought out through the eastern gate of the garden leading into the churchyard. the rev. dr. burnet, vicar of bradford, read the funeral service, and led the way into the church, and the following clergymen were the bearers of the coffin: the rev. dr. cartman of skipton; rev. mr. sowden of hebden bridge; the incumbents of cullingworth, oakworth, morton, oxenhope, and st. john's ingrow. the chief mourners were the rev. arthur bell nicholls, son-in-law of the deceased; martha brown, the housekeeper; and her sister; mrs. brown, and mrs. wainwright. there were several gentlemen followed the corpse whom we did not know. all the shops in haworth were closed, and the people filled every pew, and the aisles in the church, and many shed tears during the impressive reading of the service for the burial of the dead, by the vicar. the body of mr. bronte was laid within the altar rails, by the side of his daughter charlotte. he is the last that can be interred inside of haworth church. on the coffin was this inscription: "patrick bronte, died june th, , aged years."' his will, which was proved at wakefield, left the bulk of his property, as was natural, to the son-in-law who had faithfully served and tended him for the six years which succeeded charlotte bronte's death. extracted from the principal registry of the probate divorce and admiralty division of the high court of justice. _being of sound mind and judgment_, _in the name of god the father_, _son_, _and holy ghost_, _i_, patrick bronte, b.a., _incumbent of haworth_, _in the parish of bradford and county of york_, _make this my last will and testament_: _i leave forty pounds to be equally divided amongst all my brothers and sisters to whom i gave considerable sums in times past_; _and i direct the same sum of forty pounds to be sent for distribution to mr. hugh bronte_, _ballinasceaugh_, _near loughbrickland_, _ireland_; _i leave thirty pounds to my servant_, _martha brown_, _as a token of regard for long and faithful services to me and my children_; _to my beloved and esteemed son-in-law_, _the rev. arthur bell nicholls_, b.a., _i leave and bequeath the residue of my personal estate of every description which i shall be possessed of at my death for his own absolute benefit_; _and i make him my sole executor_; _and i revoke all former and other wills_, _in witness whereof i_, _the said_ patrick bronte, _have to this my last will_, _contained in this sheet of paper_, _set my hand this twentieth day of june_, _one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five_. patrick bronte.--_signed and acknowledged by the said_ patrick bronte _as his will in the presence of us present at the same time_, _and who in his presence and in the presence of each other have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses_: joseph redman, eliza brown. the irish relatives are not forgotten, and indeed this will gives the most direct evidence of the fact that for the sixty years that he had been absent from his native land he had always kept his own country, or at least his relatives in county down, sufficiently in mind. chapter ii: childhood eighty years have passed over thornton since that village had the honour of becoming the birthplace of charlotte bronte. the visitor of to-day will find the bell chapel, in which mr. bronte officiated, a mere ruin, and the font in which his children were baptized ruthlessly exposed to the winds of heaven. { a} the house in which patrick bronte resided is now a butcher's shop, and indeed little, one imagines, remains the same. but within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find, with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the bronte children. there, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries, { b} differing from their neighbours only by the fact that mr. morgan or mr. fennell came to the help of their relatives and officiated in place of mr. bronte. mr. bronte, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to haworth when anne was baptized. there were, it is well known, two elder children, maria and elizabeth, born at hartshead, and doomed to die speedily at haworth. a vague memory of maria lives in the helen burns of _jane eyre_, but the only tangible records of the pair, as far as i am able to ascertain, are a couple of samplers, of the kind which mrs. bronte and her sisters had worked at penzance a generation earlier. _maria bronte finished this sampler on the th of may at the age of eight years_ one of them tells us, and the other: _elizabeth bronte finished this sampler the th of july at the age of seven years_. maria died at the age of twelve in may , and elizabeth in june of the same year, at the age of eleven. it is, however, with their three sisters that we have most concern, although all the six children accompanied their parents to haworth in . haworth, we are told, has been over-described; and yet it may not be amiss to discover from the easily available directories what manner of place it was during the bronte residence there. pigot's yorkshire directory of gives the census during the first year of mr. bronte's incumbency thus:-- haworth, _a populous manufacturing village_, _in the honour of pontefract_, _morley wapentake_, _and in the parish of bradford_, _is four miles south of keighley_, _containing_, _by the census of_ , _inhabitants_. _gentry and clergy_: _bronte_, _rev. patrick_, _haworth_; _heaton_, _robert_, _gent._, _ponden hall_; _miles_, _rev. oddy_, _haworth_; _saunders_, _rev. moses_, _haworth_. from the same source twenty years later we obtain more explicit detail, which is not without interest to-day. haworth _is a chapelry_, _comprising the hamlets of haworth_, _stanbury_, _and near and far oxenhope_, _in the parish of bradford_, _and wapentake of morley_, _west riding_--_haworth being ten miles from bradford_, _about the same distance from halifax_, _colne_, _and skipton_, _three and a half miles s. from keighley_, _and eight from hebden bridge_, _at which latter place is a station on the leeds and manchester railway_. _haworth is situated on the side of a hill_, _and consists of one irregularly built street_--_the habitations in that part called oxenhope being yet more scattered_, _and stanbury still farther distant_; _the entire chapelry occupying a wide space_. _the spinning of worsted_, _and the manufacture of stuffs_, _are branches which here prevail extensively_. _the church or rather chapel_ (_subject to bradford_), _dedicated to st. michael_, _was rebuilt in_ : _the living is a perpetual curacy_, _in the presentation of the vicar of bradford and certain trustees_; _the present curate is the rev. patrick_ _bronte_. _the other places of worship are two chapels for baptists_, _one each for primitive and wesleyan methodists_, _and another at oxenhope for the latter denomination_. _there are two excellent free schools_--_one at stanbury_, _the other_, _called the free grammar school_, _near oxenhope_; _besides which there are several neat edifices erected for sunday teaching_. _there are three annual fairs_: _they are held on easter-monday_, _the second monday after st. peter's day_ (_old style_), _and the first monday after old michaelmas day_. _the chapelry of haworth_, _and its dependent hamlets_, _contained by the returns for_ , _inhabitants_; _and by the census taken in june_, , _the population amounted to_ . haworth needs even to-day no further description, but the house in which mr. bronte resided, from till his death in , has not been over-described, perhaps because mr. bronte's successor has not been too well disposed to receive the casual visitor to haworth under his roof. many changes have been made since mr. bronte died, but the house still retains its essentially interesting features. in the time of the brontes, it is true, the front outlook was as desolate as to-day it is attractive. then there was a little piece of barren ground running down to the walls of the churchyard, with here and there a currant-bush as the sole adornment. now we see an abundance of trees and a well-kept lawn. miss ellen nussey well remembers seeing emily and anne, on a fine summer afternoon, sitting on stools in this bit of garden plucking currants from the poor insignificant bushes. there was no premonition of the time, not so far distant, when the rough doorway separating the churchyard from the garden, which was opened for their mother when they were little children, should be opened again time after time in rapid succession for their own biers to be carried through. this gateway is now effectively bricked up. in the days of the brontes it was reserved for the passage of the dead--a grim arrangement, which, strange to say, finds no place in any one of the sisters' stories. we enter the house, and the door on the right leads into mr. bronte's study, always called the parlour; that on the left into the dining-room, where the children spent a great portion of their lives. from childhood to womanhood, indeed, the three girls regularly breakfasted with their father in his study. in the dining-room--a square and simple room of a kind common enough in the houses of the poorer middle-classes--they ate their mid-day dinner, their tea and supper. mr. bronte joined them at tea, although he always dined alone in his study. the children's dinner-table has been described to me by a visitor to the house. at one end sat miss branwell, at the other, charlotte, with emily and anne on either side. branwell was then absent. the living was of the simplest. a single joint, followed invariably by one kind or another of milk-pudding. pastry was unknown in the bronte household. milk-puddings, or food composed of milk and rice, would seem to have made the principal diet of emily and anne bronte, and to this they added a breakfast of scotch porridge, which they shared with their dogs. it is more interesting, perhaps, to think of all the daydreams in that room, of the mass of writing which was achieved there, of the conversations and speculation as to the future. miss nussey has given a pleasant picture of twilight when charlotte and she walked with arms encircling one another round and round the table, and emily and anne followed in similar fashion. there was no lack of cheerfulness and of hope at that period. behind mr. bronte's studio was the kitchen; and there we may easily picture the bronte children telling stories to tabby or martha, or to whatever servant reigned at the time, and learning, as all of them did, to become thoroughly domesticated--emily most of all. behind the dining-room was a peat-room, which, when charlotte was married in , was cleared out and converted into a little study for mr. nicholls. the staircase with its solid banister remains as it did half a century ago; and at its foot one is still shown the corner which tradition assigns as the scene of emily's conflict with her dog keeper. on the right, at the back, as you mount the staircase, was a small room allotted to branwell as a studio. on the other side of this staircase, also at the back, was the servants' room. in the front of the house, immediately over the dining-room, was miss branwell's room, afterwards the spare bedroom until charlotte bronte married. in that room she died. on the left, over mr. bronte's study, was mr. bronte's bedroom. it was the room which, for many years, he shared with branwell, and it was in that room that branwell and his father died at an interval of twenty years. on the staircase, half-way up, was a grandfather's clock, which mr. bronte used to wind up every night on his way to bed. he always went to bed at nine o'clock, and miss nussey well remembers his stentorian tones as he called out as he left his study and passed the dining-room door--'don't be up late, children'--which they usually were. between these two front rooms upstairs, and immediately over the passage, with a door facing the staircase, was a box room; but this was the children's nursery, where for many years the children slept, where the bulk of their little books were compiled, and where, it is more than probable, _the professor_ and _jane eyre_ were composed. of the work of the bronte children in these early years, a great deal might be written. mrs. gaskell gives a list of some eighteen booklets, but at least eighteen more from the pen of charlotte are in existence. branwell was equally prolific; and of him, also, there remains an immense mass of childish effort. that emily and anne were industrious in a like measure there is abundant reason to believe; but scarcely one of their juvenile efforts remains to us, nor even the unpublished fragments of later years, to which reference will be made a little later. whether emily and anne on the eve of their death deliberately destroyed all their treasures, or whether they were destroyed by charlotte in the days of her mourning, will never be known. meanwhile one turns with interest to the efforts of charlotte and branwell. charlotte's little stories commence in her thirteenth year, and go on until she is twenty-three. from thirteen to eighteen she would seem to have had one absorbing hero. it was the duke of wellington; and her hero-worship extended to the children of the duke, who, indeed, would seem even more than their father to have absorbed her childish affections. whether the stories are fairy tales or dramas of modern life, they all alike introduce the marquis of douro, who afterwards became the second duke of wellington, and lord charles wellesley, whose son is now the third duke of wellington. the length of some of these fragments is indeed incredible. they fill but a few sheets of notepaper in that tiny handwriting; but when copied by zealous admirers, it is seen that more than one of them is twenty thousand words in length. _the foundling_, by captain tree, written in , is a story of thirty-five thousand words, though the manuscript has only eighteen pages. _the green dwarf_, written in the same year, is even longer, and indeed after her return from roe head in , charlotte must have devoted herself to continuous writing. _the adventures of ernest alembert_ is a booklet of this date, and _arthuriana_, _or odds and ends_: _being a miscellaneous collection of pieces in prose and verse_, by lord charles wellesley, is yet another. the son of the iron duke is made to talk, in these little books, in a way which would have gladdened the heart of a modern interviewer: 'lord charles,' said mr. rundle to me one afternoon lately, 'i have an engagement to drink tea with an old college chum this evening, so i shall give you sixty lines of the _aeneid_ to get ready during my absence. if it is not ready by the time i come back you know the consequences.' 'very well, sir,' said i, bringing out the books with a prodigious bustle, and making a show as if i intended to learn a whole book instead of sixty lines of the _aeneid_. this appearance of industry, however, lasted no longer than until the old gentleman's back was turned. no sooner had he fairly quitted the room than i flung aside the musty tomes, took my cap, and speeding through chamber, hall, and gallery, was soon outside the gates of waterloo palace.' _the secret_, another story, of which mrs. gaskell gave a facsimile of the first page, was also written in , and indeed in this, her seventeenth year, charlotte bronte must have written as much as in any year of her life. when at roe head, - , she would seem to have worked at her studies, and particularly her drawing; but in the interval between cowan bridge and roe head she wrote a great deal. the earliest manuscripts in my possession bear date --that is to say, in charlotte's thirteenth year. they are her _tales of the islanders_, which extend to four little volumes in brown paper covers neatly inscribed 'first volume,' 'second volume,' and so on. the duke is of absorbing importance in these 'tales.' 'one evening the duke of wellington was writing in his room in downing street. he was reposing at his ease in a simple easy chair, smoking a homely tobacco-pipe, for he disdained all the modern frippery of cigars . . . ' and so on in an abundance of childish imaginings. _the search after happiness_ and _characters of great men of the present time_ were also written in . perhaps the only juvenile fragment which is worth anything is also the only one in which she escapes from the wellington enthusiasm. it has an interest also in indicating that charlotte in her girlhood heard something of her father's native land. it is called-- an adventure in ireland during my travels in the south of ireland the following adventure happened to me. one evening in the month of august, after a long walk, i was ascending the mountain which overlooks the village of cahill, when i suddenly came in sight of a fine old castle. it was built upon a rock, and behind it was a large wood and before it was a river. over the river there was a bridge, which formed the approach to the castle. when i arrived at the bridge i stood still awhile to enjoy the prospect around me: far below was the wide sheet of still water in which the reflection of the pale moon was not disturbed by the smallest wave; in the valley was the cluster of cabins which is known by the appellation of cahin, and beyond these were the mountains of killala. over all, the grey robe of twilight was now stealing with silent and scarcely perceptible advances. no sound except the hum of the distant village and the sweet song of the nightingale in the wood behind me broke upon the stillness of the scene. while i was contemplating this beautiful prospect, a gentleman, whom i had not before observed, accosted me with 'good evening, sir; are you a stranger in these parts?' i replied that i was. he then asked me where i was going to stop for the night; i answered that i intended to sleep somewhere in the village. 'i am afraid you will find very bad accommodation there,' said the gentleman; 'but if you will take up your quarters with me at the castle, you are welcome.' i thanked him for his kind offer, and accepted it. when we arrived at the castle i was shown into a large parlour, in which was an old lady sitting in an arm-chair by the fireside, knitting. on the rug lay a very pretty tortoise-shell cat. as soon as mentioned, the old lady rose; and when mr. o'callaghan (for that, i learned, was his name) told her who i was, she said in the most cordial tone that i was welcome, and asked me to sit down. in the course of conversation i learned that she was mr. o'callaghan's mother, and that his father had been dead about a year. we had sat about an hour, when supper was announced, and after supper mr. o'callaghan asked me if i should like to retire for the night. i answered in the affirmative, and a little boy was commissioned to show me to my apartment. it was a snug, clean, and comfortable little old-fashioned room at the top of the castle. as soon as we had entered, the boy, who appeared to be a shrewd, good-tempered little fellow, said with a shrug of the shoulder, 'if it was going to bed i was, it shouldn't be here that you'd catch me.' 'why?' said i. 'because,' replied the boy, 'they say that the ould masther's ghost has been seen sitting on that there chair.' 'and have you seen him?' 'no; but i've heard him washing his hands in that basin often and often.' 'what is your name, my little fellow?' 'dennis mulready, please your honour.' 'well, good-night to you.' 'good-night, masther; and may the saints keep you from all fairies and brownies,' said dennis as he left the room. as soon as i had laid down i began to think of what the boy had been telling me, and i confess i felt a strange kind of fear, and once or twice i even thought i could discern something white through the darkness which surrounded me. at length, by the help of reason, i succeeded in mastering these, what some would call idle fancies, and fell asleep. i had slept about an hour when a strange sound awoke me, and i saw looking through my curtains a skeleton wrapped in a white sheet. i was overcome with terror and tried to scream, but my tongue was paralysed and my whole frame shook with fear. in a deep hollow voice it said to me, 'arise, that i may show thee this world's wonders,' and in an instant i found myself encompassed with clouds and darkness. but soon the roar of mighty waters fell upon my ear, and i saw some clouds of spray arising from high falls that rolled in awful majesty down tremendous precipices, and then foamed and thundered in the gulf beneath as if they had taken up their unquiet abode in some giant's cauldron. but soon the scene changed, and i found myself in the mines of cracone. there were high pillars and stately arches, whose glittering splendour was never excelled by the brightest fairy palaces. there were not many lamps, only those of a few poor miners, whose rough visages formed a striking contrast to the dazzling figures and grandeur which surrounded them. but in the midst of all this magnificence i felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. and now the mossy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. when i heard the rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me i gave a loud shriek of terror. the scene vanished, and i found myself in a wide desert full of barren rocks and high mountains. as i was approaching one of the rocks, in which there was a large cave, my foot stumbled and i fell. just then i heard a deep growl, and saw by the unearthly light of his own fiery eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. his terrible eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang and the rocks echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang towards me. 'well, masther, it's been a windy night, though it's fine now,' said dennis, as he drew the window-curtain and let the bright rays of the morning sun into the little old-fashioned room at the top of o'callaghan castle. c. bronte. _april the_ _th_, . six numbers of _the young men's magazine_ were written in ; a very juvenile poem, _the evening walk_, by the marquis of douro, in ; and another, of greater literary value, _the violet_, in the same year. in we have an unfinished poem, _the trumpet hath sounded_; and in a very long poem called _the bridal_. some of them, as for example a poem called _richard coeur de lion and blondel_, are written in penny and twopenny notebooks of the kind used by laundresses. occasionally her father has purchased a sixpenny book and has written within the cover-- _all that is written in this book must be in a good_, _plain_, _and legible hand_.--p. b. while upon this topic, i may as well carry the record up to the date of publication of currer bell's poems. _a leaf from an unopened volume_ was written in , as were also _the death of darius_, and _corner dishes_. _saul_: _a poem_, was written in , and a number of other still unpublished verses. there is a story called _lord douro_, bearing date , and a manuscript book of verses of , but that pretty well exhausts the manuscripts before me previous to the days of serious literary activity. during the years as private governess ( - ) and the brussels experiences ( - ), charlotte would seem to have put all literary effort on one side. there is only one letter of charlotte bronte's childhood. it is indorsed by mr. bronte on the cover _charlotte's first letter_, possibly for the guidance of mrs. gaskell, who may perhaps have thought it of insufficient importance. that can scarcely be the opinion of any one to-day. charlotte, aged thirteen, is staying with the fennells, her mother's friends of those early love-letters. to the rev. p. bronte 'parsonage house, crosstone, _september_ _rd_, . 'my dear papa,--at aunt's request i write these lines to inform you that "if all be well" we shall be at home on friday by dinner-time, when we hope to find you in good health. on account of the bad weather we have not been out much, but notwithstanding we have spent our time very pleasantly, between reading, working, and learning our lessons, which uncle fennell has been so kind as to teach us every day. branwell has taken two sketches from nature, and emily, anne, and myself have likewise each of us drawn a piece from some views of the lakes which mr. fennell brought with him from westmoreland. the whole of these he intends keeping. mr. fennell is sorry he cannot accompany us to haworth on friday, for want of room, but hopes to have the pleasure of seeing you soon. all unite in sending their kind love with your affectionate daughter, 'charlotte bronte.' the following list includes the whole of the early bronte manuscripts known to me, or of which i can find any record:-- unpublished bronte literature. by charlotte bronte _the young men's magazines_. in six numbers [only four out of these six numbers appear to have been preserved.] _the search after happiness_: _a tale_. _by charlotte bronte_ _two romantic tales_; _viz. the twelve adventures_, _and an adventure in ireland_ _characters of great men of the present age_, _dec._ _th_ _tales of the islanders_. _by charlotte bronte_:-- vol. i. dated _june_ , vol. ii. dated _december_ , vol. iii. dated _may_ , vol. iv. dated _july_ , [accompanying these volumes is a one-page document detailing 'the origin of the _islanders_.' dated _march_ , .] _the evening walk_: _a poem_. _by the marquis douro_ _a translation into english verse of the first book of voltaire's henriade_. _by charlotte bronte_ _albion and marina_: _a tale_. _by lord wellesley_ _the adventures of ernest alembert_: _a fairy tale_. _by charlotte bronte_ _the violet: a poem_. _with several smaller pieces_. _by the marquess of douro_. _published by seargeant tree_. _glasstown_, _the bridal_. _by c. bronte_ _arthuriana_; _or_, _odds and ends_: _being a miscellaneous collection of pieces in prose and verse_. _by lord charles a. f. wellesley_ _something about arthur_. _written by charles albert florian wellesley_ _the vision_. _by charlotte bronte_ _the secret and lily hart_: _two tales_. _by lord charles wellesley_ [the first page of this book is given in facsimile in vol. i. of mrs. gaskell's _life of charlotte bronte_.] _visits in verdopolis_. _by the honourable charles albert florian wellesley_. _two vols._ _the green dwarf_: _a tale of the perfect tense_. _by lord charles albert florian wellesley_. _charlotte bronte_. _the foundling_: _a tale of our own times_. _by captain tree_ _richard coeur de lion and blondel_. _by charlotte bronte_, vo, pp. . signed in full _charlotte bronte_, and dated _haworth_, _near bradford_, dec. _th_, _my angria and the angrians_. _by lord charles albert florian wellesley_ _a leaf from an unopened volume_; _or_, _the manuscript of an unfortunate author_. _edited by lord charles albert florian wellesley_ _corner dishes_: _being a small collection of_ . . . _trifles in prose and verse_. _by lord charles albert florian wellesley_ _the spell_: _an extravaganza_. _by lord charles albert florian wellesley_. signed _charlotte bronte_, _june_ _st_, . the contents include: . preface, half page; . _the spell_, pages; . _high life in verdopolis_: _or the difficulties of annexing a suitable title to a work practically illustrated in six chapters_. _by lord c. a. f. wellesley_, _march_ , , pages; . _the scrap-book_: _a mingling of many things_. _compiled by lord c. a. f. wellesley_. _c. bronte_, _march_ _th_, , pages. [this volume is in the british museum.] _death of darius cadomanus_: _a poem_. _by charlotte bronte_. pp. . signed in full, and dated _saul and memory_: _two poems_. _by c. bronte_. pp. _passing events_ '_we wove a web in childhood_': a poem (pp. vi.), signed _c. bronte_, _haworth_, _dec'br_. _th_, _the wounded stag_, _and other poems_. _signed c. bronte_. _jan'y._ , . pp. _lord douro_: _a story_. _signed c. bronte_. _july_ _st_, _poems_. _by c. bronte_. pp. _lettre d'invitation a un ecclesiastique_. signed _charlotte bronte_. _le_ _juillet_, . large vo, pp. . a french exercise written at brussels _john henry_. _by charlotte bronte_, crown vo, pp. , _circa_ written in pencil _willie ellin_. _by charlotte bronte_. _may and june_ crown vo, pp. the following, included in charlotte's 'catalogue of my books' printed by mrs. gaskell, are not now forthcoming: _leisure hours_: _a tale_, _and two fragments_ _july_ _th_, _the adventures of edward de crak_: _a tale_ _feb._ _nd_, _an interesting incident in the lives of some _june_ _th_, of the most eminent persons of the age_: _a tale_ _the poetaster_: _a drama_. _in two volumes_, _july_ _th_, _a book of rhymes_, _finished_ _december_ _th_, _miscellaneous poems_, _finished_ _may_ _rd_, [these _miscellaneous poems_ are probably poems written upon separate sheets, and not forming a complete book--indeed, some half dozen such separate poems are still extant. the last item given in charlotte's list of these _miscellaneous poems_ is _the evening walk_, ; this is a separate book, and is included in the list above.] by emily bronte a volume of_ poems_, vo, pp. ; signed (at the top of the first page) _e. j. b_. _transcribed february_ . each poem is headed with the date of its composition. of the poems included in this book four are still unprinted, the remainder were published in the _poems_ of . the whole are written in microscopic characters a volume of _poems_, square vo, pp. . each poem is dated, - and the first is signed _e. j. bronte_, _august_ _th_, . written in an ordinary, and not a minute, handwriting. all unpublished a series of poems written in a minute hand upon both sides of - fourteen or fifteen small slips of paper of various sizes. all unpublished _lettre and reponse_. an exercise in french. large vo, pp. . signed _e. j. bronte_, and dated _juillet_ _l'amour filial_. an exercise in french. small quarto, pp. . signed in full _emily j. bronte_, and dated _aout_ by anne bronte. _verses by lady geralda_, and other poems. a crown vo volume - of pages. each poem is signed (or initialled) and dated, the dates extending from to . the poems are all unpublished _the north wind_, and other poems. a crown vo volume of - pages. each poem is signed (or initialled) and dated, some having in addition to her own name the nom-de-guerre _alexandrina zenobia_ or _olivia vernon_. the dates extend from to . the poems are all unpublished _to cowper_, and other poems. vo, pp. . of the nine - poems contained in this volume three are signed _anne bronte_, four are signed _a. bronte_, and two are initialled '_a. b._' all are dated. part of these poems are unpublished, the remainder appeared in the _poems_ of a thin vo volume of poems (mostly dated ), pp. , _circa_ each being signed _a. bronte_, or simply '_a. b._'--some having in addition to, or instead of, her own name the nom-de-guerre _zerona_. a few of these poems are unprinted; the remainder are a portion of anne's contribution to the _poems_ of _song_: '_should life's first feelings be forgot_' (one octavo leaf) [a fair copy ( pp. vo) of a poem by branwell bronte, in the hand-writing of anne bronte.] _the power of love_, and other poems. post octavo, pp. . - each poem is signed (or initialled) and dated _self communion_, a poem. vo, pp. . signed '_a. b_.' and dated _april_ _th_, by branwell bronte. _the battle of washington_. by _p. b. bronte_. with full-page coloured illustrations [an exceedingly childish production, and the earliest of all the bronte manuscripts.] _history of the rebellion in my army_ _the travels of rolando segur_: _comprising his adventures throughout the voyage_, _and in america_, _europe_, _the south pole_, _etc._ _by patrick branwell bronte_. _in two volumes_ _a collection of poems_. _by young soult the rhymer_. _illustrated with notes and commentaries by monsieur chateaubriand_. _in two volumes_ _the liar detected_. _by captain bud_ _caractacus_: _a dramatic poem_. _by young soult_ _the revenge_: _a tragedy_, _in three acts_. _by young soult_. _p. b. bronte_. _in two volumes_. _glasstown_ [although the title page reads 'in two volumes,' the book is complete in one volume only.] _the history of the young men_. _by john bud_ _letters from an englishman_. _by captain john flower_. _in - six volumes_ _the monthly intelligencer_. _no._ _march_ , [the only number produced of a projected manuscript newspaper, by branwell bronte. the ms. consists of pp. to, arranged in columns, precisely after the manner of an ordinary journal.] _real life in verdopolis_: _a tale_. _by captain john flower_, _m.p._ _in two volumes_. _p. b. bronte_ _the politics of verdopolis_: _a tale_. _by captain john flower_. _p. b. bronte_ _the pirate_: _a tale_. _by captain john flower_ [the most pretentious of branwell's prose stories.] _thermopylae_: _a poem_. _by p. b. bronte_. vo, pp. _and the weary are at rest_: _a tale_. _by p. b. bronte_ _the wool is rising_: _an angrian adventure_. _by the right honourable john baron flower_ _ode to the polar star, and other poems_. _by p. b. bronte_. quarto, pp. _the life of field marshal the right honourable alexander percy_, _earl of northangerland_. _in two volumes_. _by john bud_. _p. b. bronte_ _the rising of the angrians_: _a tale_. _by p. b. bronte_ _a narrative of the first war_. _by p. b. bronte_ _the angrian welcome_: _a tale_. _by p. b. bronte_ _percy_: _a story_. _by p. b. bronte_ a packet containing four small groups of _poems_, of about six or eight pages each, mostly without titles, but all either signed or initialled, and dated from to _love and warfare_: _a story_. _by p. b. bronte_ _lord nelson_, _and other poems_. _by p. b. bronte_. written in pencil. small vo, pp. [this book contains a full-page pencil portrait of branwell bronte, drawn by himself, as well as four carefully finished heads. these give an excellent idea of the extent of branwell's artistic skill.] chapter iii: school and governess life in seeking for fresh light upon the development of charlotte bronte, it is not necessary to discuss further her childhood's years at cowan bridge. she left the school at nine years of age, and what memories of it were carried into womanhood were, with more or less of picturesque colouring, embodied in jane eyre. { } from to charlotte was at home with her sisters, reading and writing as we have seen, but learning nothing very systematically. in - she was a boarder at miss wooler's school at roe head, some twenty miles from haworth. miss wooler lived to a green old age, dying in the year . she would seem to have been very proud of her famous pupil, and could not have been blind to her capacity in the earlier years. charlotte was with her as governess at roe head, and later at dewsbury moor. it is quite clear that miss bronte was head of the school in all intellectual pursuits, and she made two firm friends--ellen nussey and mary taylor. a very fair measure of french and some skill in drawing appear to have been the most striking accomplishments which charlotte carried back from roe head to haworth. there are some twenty drawings of about this date, and a translation into english verse of the first book of voltaire's _henriade_. with ellen nussey commenced a friendship which terminated only with the pencilled notes written from charlotte bronte's deathbed. the first suggestion of a regular correspondence is contained in the following letter. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _st_, . 'my dearest ellen,--your kind and interesting letter gave me the sincerest pleasure. i have been expecting to hear from you almost every day since my arrival at home, and i at length began to despair of receiving the wished-for letter. you ask me to give you a description of the manner in which i have passed every day since i left school. this is soon done, as an account of one day is an account of all. in the mornings, from nine o'clock to half-past twelve, i instruct my sisters and draw, then we walk till dinner; after dinner i sew till tea-time, and after tea i either read, write, do a little fancy-work, or draw, as i please. thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course, my life is passed. i have only been out to tea twice since i came home. we are expecting company this afternoon, and on tuesday next we shall have all the female teachers of the sunday school to tea. i do hope, my dearest ellen, that you will return to school again for your own sake, though for mine i would rather that you would remain at home, as we shall then have more frequent opportunities of correspondence with each other. should your friends decide against your returning to school, i know you have too much good-sense and right feeling not to strive earnestly for your own improvement. your natural abilities are excellent, and under the direction of a judicious and able friend (and i know you have many such), you might acquire a decided taste for elegant literature, and even poetry, which, indeed, is included under that general term. i was very much disappointed by your not sending the hair; you may be sure, my dearest ellen, that i would not grudge double postage to obtain it, but i must offer the same excuse for not sending you any. my aunt and sisters desire their love to you. remember me kindly to your mother and sisters, and accept all the fondest expressions of genuine attachment, from your real friend 'charlotte bronte. '_p.s._--remember the mutual promise we made of a regular correspondence with each other. excuse all faults in this wretched scrawl. give my love to the miss taylors when you see them. farewell, my _dear_, _dear_, _dear_ ellen.' reading, writing, and as thorough a domestic training as the little parsonage could afford, made up the next few years. then came the determination to be a governess--a not unnatural resolution when the size of the family and the modest stipend of its head are considered. far more prosperous parents are content in our day that their daughters should earn their living in this manner. in charlotte went back to roe head as governess, and she continued in that position when miss wooler removed her school to dewsbury moor in . to miss ellen nussey 'dewsbury moor, _august_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i have determined to write lest you should begin to think i have forgotten you, and in revenge resolve to forget me. as you will perceive by the date of this letter, i am again engaged in the old business--teach, teach, teach. miss and mrs. wooler are coming here next christmas. miss wooler will then relinquish the school in favour of her sister eliza, but i am happy to say worthy miss wooler will continue to reside in the house. i should be sorry indeed to part with her. when will you come _home_? make haste, you have been at bath long enough for all purposes. by this time you have acquired polish enough, i am sure. if the varnish is laid on much thicker, i am afraid the good wood underneath will be quite concealed, and your old yorkshire friends won't stand that. come, come, i am getting really tired of your absence. saturday after saturday comes round, and i can have no hope of hearing your knock at the door and then being told that "miss e. n. is come." oh dear! in this monotonous life of mine that was a pleasant event. i wish it would recur again, but it will take two or three interviews before the stiffness, the estrangement of this long separation will quite wear away. i have nothing at all to tell you now but that mary taylor is better, and that she and martha are gone to take a tour in wales. patty came on her pony about a fortnight since to inform me that this important event was in contemplation. she actually began to fret about your long absence, and to express the most eager wishes for your return. my own dear ellen, good-bye. if we are all spared i hope soon to see you again. god bless you. 'c. bronte.' things were not always going on quite so smoothly, as the following letter indicates. to miss ellen nussey 'dewsbury moor, _january_ _th_, . 'your letter, ellen, was a welcome surprise, though it contained something like a reprimand. i had not, however, forgotten our agreement. you were right in your conjectures respecting the cause of my sudden departure. anne continued wretchedly ill, neither the pain nor the difficulty of breathing left her, and how could i feel otherwise than very miserable. i looked on her case in a different light to what i could wish or expect any uninterested person to view it in. miss wooler thought me a fool, and by way of proving her opinion treated me with marked coldness. we came to a little eclaircissement one evening. i told her one or two rather plain truths, which set her a-crying; and the next day, unknown to me, she wrote papa, telling him that i had reproached her bitterly, taken her severely to task, etc. papa sent for us the day after he had received her letter. meantime i had formed a firm resolution to quit miss wooler and her concerns for ever; but just before i went away, she took me to her room, and giving way to her feelings, which in general she restrains far too rigidly, gave me to understand that in spite of her cold, repulsive manners, she had a considerable regard for me, and would be very sorry to part with me. if any body likes me, i cannot help liking them; and remembering that she had in general been very kind to me, i gave in and said i would come back if she wished me. so we are settled again for the present, but i am not satisfied. i should have respected her far more if she had turned me out of doors, instead of crying for two days and two nights together. i was in a regular passion; my "_warm_ temper" quite got the better of me, of which i don't boast, for it was a weakness; nor am i ashamed of it, for i had reason to be angry. 'anne is now much better, though she still requires a great deal of care. however, i am relieved from my worst fears respecting her. i approve highly of the plan you mention, except as it regards committing a verse of the psalms to memory. i do not see the direct advantage to be derived from that. we have entered on a new year. will it be stained as darkly as the last with all our sins, follies, secret vanities, and uncontrolled passions and propensities? i trust not; but i feel in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer. it will want three weeks next monday to the termination of the holidays. come to see me, my dear ellen, as soon as you can; however bitterly i sometimes feel towards other people, the recollection of your mild, steady friendship consoles and softens me. i am glad you are not such a passionate fool as myself. give my best love to your mother and sisters. excuse the most hideous scrawl that ever was penned, and--believe me always tenderly yours, 'c. bronte.' dewsbury moor, however, did not agree with charlotte. that was probably the core of the matter. she returned to haworth, but only to look around for another 'situation.' this time she accepted the position of private governess in the family of a mr. sidgwick, at stonegappe, in the same county. her letters from his house require no comment. a sentence from the first was quoted by mrs. gaskell. to miss emily j. bronte 'stonegappe, _june_ _th_, . 'dearest lavinia,--i am most exceedingly obliged to you for the trouble you have taken in seeking up my things and sending them all right. the box and its contents were most acceptable. i only wish i had asked you to send me some letter-paper. this is my last sheet but two. when you can send the other articles of raiment now manufacturing, i shall be right down glad of them. 'i have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. the country, the house, and the grounds are, as i have said, divine. but, alack-a-day! there is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you--pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky--and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. the children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. as for correcting them, i soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like. a complaint to mrs. sidgwick brings only black looks upon oneself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children. i have tried that plan once. it succeeded so notably that i shall try it no more. i said in my last letter that mrs. sidgwick did not know me. i now begin to find that she does not intend to know me, that she cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress. i do not think she likes me at all, because i can't help being shy in such an entirely novel scene, surrounded as i have hitherto been by strange and constantly changing faces. i see now more clearly than i have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil. while she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. if she steals a moment for herself she is a nuisance. nevertheless, mrs. sidgwick is universally considered an amiable woman. her manners are fussily affable. she talks a great deal, but as it seems to me not much to the purpose. perhaps i may like her better after a while. at present i have no call to her. mr. sidgwick is in my opinion a hundred times better--less profession, less bustling condescension, but a far kinder heart. it is very seldom that he speaks to me, but when he does i always feel happier and more settled for some minutes after. he never asks me to wipe the children's smutty noses or tie their shoes or fetch their pinafores or set them a chair. one of the pleasantest afternoons i have spent here--indeed, the only one at all pleasant--was when mr. sidgwick walked out with his children, and i had orders to follow a little behind. as he strolled on through his fields with his magnificent newfoundland dog at his side, he looked very like what a frank, wealthy, conservative gentleman ought to be. he spoke freely and unaffectedly to the people he met, and though he indulged his children and allowed them to tease himself far too much, he would not suffer them grossly to insult others. 'i am getting quite to have a regard for the carter family. at home i should not care for them, but here they are friends. mr. carter was at mirfield yesterday and saw anne. he says she was looking uncommonly well. poor girl, _she_ must indeed wish to be at home. as to mrs. collins' report that mrs. sidgwick intended to keep me permanently, i do not think that such was ever her design. moreover, i would not stay without some alterations. for instance, this burden of sewing would have to be removed. it is too bad for anything. i never in my whole life had my time so fully taken up. next week we are going to swarcliffe, mr. greenwood's place near harrogate, to stay three weeks or a month. after that time i hope miss hoby will return. don't show this letter to papa or aunt, only to branwell. they will think i am never satisfied wherever i am. i complain to you because it is a relief, and really i have had some unexpected mortifications to put up with. however, things may mend, but mrs. sidgwick expects me to do things that i cannot do--to love her children and be entirely devoted to them. i am really very well. i am so sleepy that i can write no more. i must leave off. love to all.--good-bye. 'direct your next dispatch--j. greenwood, esq., swarcliffe, near harrogate. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'swarcliffe, _june_ _th_, . 'my dearest ellen,--i am writing a letter to you with pencil because i cannot just now procure ink without going into the drawing-room, where i do not wish to go. i only received your letter yesterday, for we are not now residing at stonegappe but at swarcliffe, a summer residence of mr. greenwood's, mrs. sidgwick's father; it is near harrogate and ripon. i should have written to you long since, and told you every detail of the utterly new scene into which i have lately been cast, had i not been daily expecting a letter from yourself, and wondering and lamenting that you did not write, for you will remember it was your turn. i must not bother you too much with my sorrows, of which, i fear, you have heard an exaggerated account. if you were near me, perhaps i might be tempted to tell you all, to grow egotistical, and pour out the long history of a private governess's trials and crosses in her first situation. as it is, i will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me thrown at once into the midst of a large family, proud as peacocks and wealthy as jews, at a time when they were particularly gay, when the house was filled with company--all strangers: people whose faces i had never seen before. in this state i had a charge given of a set of horrid children, whom i was expected constantly to amuse, as well as instruct. i soon found that the constant demand on my stock of animal spirits reduced them to the lowest state of exhaustion; at times i felt--and, i suppose seemed--depressed. to my astonishment, i was taken to task on the subject by mrs. sidgwick, with a sternness of manner and a harshness of language scarcely credible. like a fool, i cried most bitterly. i could not help it; my spirits quite failed me at first. i thought i had done my best, strained every nerve to please her; and to be treated in that way, merely because i was shy and sometimes melancholy, was too bad. at first i was for giving all up and going home. but after a little reflection, i determined to summon what energy i had, and to weather the storm. i said to myself, "i had never yet quitted a place without gaining a friend; adversity is a good school; the poor are born to labour, and the dependent to endure." i resolved to be patient, to command my feelings, and to take what came; the ordeal, i reflected, would not last many weeks, and i trusted it would do me good. i recollected the fable of the willow and the oak; i bent quietly, and now i trust the storm is blowing over. mrs. sidgwick is generally considered an agreeable woman; so she is, i doubt not, in general society. her health is sound, her animal spirits good, consequently she is cheerful in company. but oh! does this compensate for the absence of every fine feeling, of every gentle and delicate sentiment? she behaves somewhat more civilly to me now than she did at first, and the children are a little more manageable; but she does not know my character, and she does not wish to know it. i have never had five minutes conversation with her since i came, except when she was scolding me. i have no wish to be pitied, except by yourself. if i were talking to you i could tell you much more. good-bye, dear, dear ellen. write to me again very soon, and tell me how you are. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i left swarcliffe a week since. i never was so glad to get out of a house in my life; but i'll trouble you with no complaints at present. write to me directly; explain your plans more fully. say when you go, and i shall be able in my answer to say decidedly whether i can accompany you or not. i must, i will, i'm set upon it--i'll be obstinate and bear down all opposition.--good-bye, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' that experience with the sidgwicks rankled for many a day, and we find charlotte bronte referring to it in her letters from brussels. at the same time it is not necessary to assume any very serious inhumanity on the part of the sidgwicks or their successors the whites, to whom charlotte was indebted for her second term as private governess. hers was hardly a temperament adapted for that docile part, and one thinks of the author of _villette_, and the possessor of one of the most vigorous prose styles in our language, condemned to a perpetual manufacture of night-caps, with something like a shudder. and at the same time it may be urged that charlotte bronte did not suffer in vain, and that through her the calling of a nursery governess may have received some added measure of dignity and consideration on the part of sister-women. a month or two later we find charlotte dealing with the subject in a letter to ellen nussey. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--you could never live in an unruly, violent family of modern children, such for instance as those at blake hall. anne is not to return. mrs. ingham is a placid, mild woman; but as for the children, it was one struggle of life-wearing exertion to keep them in anything like decent order. i am miserable when i allow myself to dwell on the necessity of spending my life as a governess. the chief requisite for that station seems to me to be the power of taking things easily as they come, and of making oneself comfortable and at home wherever we may chance to be--qualities in which all our family are singularly deficient. i know i cannot live with a person like mrs. sidgwick, but i hope all women are not like her, and my motto is "try again." mary taylor, i am sorry to hear, is ill--have you seen her or heard anything of her lately? sickness seems very general, and death too, at least in this neighbourhood.--ever yours, 'c. b.' she 'tried again' but with just as little success. in march she entered the family of a mr. white of upperwood house, rawdon. to miss ellen nussey 'upperwood house, _april_ _st_, . 'my dear nell,--it is twelve o'clock at night, but i must just write to you a word before i go to bed. if you think i am going to refuse your invitation, or if you sent it me with that idea, you're mistaken. as soon as i read your shabby little note, i gathered up my spirits directly, walked on the impulse of the moment into mrs. white's presence, popped the question, and for two minutes received no answer. will she refuse me when i work so hard for her? thought i. "ye-e-es" was said in a reluctant, cold tone. "thank you, m'am," said i, with extreme cordiality, and was marching from the room when she recalled me with: "you'd better go on saturday afternoon then, when the children have holiday, and if you return in time for them to have all their lessons on monday morning, i don't see that much will be lost." you _are_ a genuine turk, thought i, but again i assented. saturday after next, then, is the day appointed--_not next saturday_, _mind_. i do not quite know whether the offer about the gig is not entirely out of your own head or if george has given his consent to it--whether that consent has not been wrung from him by the most persevering and irresistible teasing on the part of a certain young person of my acquaintance. i make no manner of doubt that if he does send the conveyance (as miss wooler used to denominate all wheeled vehicles) it will be to his own extreme detriment and inconvenience, but for once in my life i'll not mind this, or bother my head about it. i'll come--god knows with a thankful and joyful heart--glad of a day's reprieve from labour. if you don't send the gig i'll walk. now mind, i am not coming to brookroyd with the idea of dissuading mary taylor from going to new zealand. i've said everything i mean to say on that subject, and she has a perfect right to decide for herself. i am coming to taste the pleasure of liberty, a bit of pleasant congenial talk, and a sight of two or three faces i like. god bless you. i want to see you again. huzza for saturday afternoon after next! good-night, my lass. 'c. bronte. 'have you lit your pipe with mr. weightman's valentine?' to miss ellen nussey 'upperwood house, _may_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i have been a long time without writing to you; but i think, knowing as you do how i am situated in the matter of time, you will not be angry with me. your brother george will have told you that he did not go into the house when we arrived at rawdon, for which omission of his mrs. white was very near blowing me up. she went quite red in the face with vexation when she heard that the gentleman had just driven within the gates and then back again, for she is very touchy in the matter of opinion. mr. white also seemed to regret the circumstance from more hospitable and kindly motives. i assure you, if you were to come and see me you would have quite a fuss made over you. during the last three weeks that hideous operation called "a thorough clean" has been going on in the house. it is now nearly completed, for which i thank my stars, as during its progress i have fulfilled the twofold character of nurse and governess, while the nurse has been transmuted into cook and housemaid. that nurse, by-the-bye, is the prettiest lass you ever saw, and when dressed has much more the air of a lady than her mistress. well can i believe that mrs. white has been an exciseman's daughter, and i am convinced also that mr. white's extraction is very low. yet mrs. white talks in an amusing strain of pomposity about his and her family and connections, and affects to look down with wondrous hauteur on the whole race of tradesfolk, as she terms men of business. i was beginning to think mrs. white a good sort of body in spite of all her bouncing and boasting, her bad grammar and worse orthography, but i have had experience of one little trait in her character which condemns her a long way with me. after treating a person in the most familiar terms of equality for a long time, if any little thing goes wrong she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner. i think passion is the true test of vulgarity or refinement. 'this place looks exquisitely beautiful just now. the grounds are certainly lovely, and all is as green as an emerald. i wish you would just come and look at it. mrs. white would be as proud as punch to show it you. mr. white has been writing an urgent invitation to papa, entreating him to come and spend a week here. i don't at all wish papa to come, it would be like incurring an obligation. somehow, i have managed to get a good deal more control over the children lately--this makes my life a good deal easier; also, by dint of nursing the fat baby, it has got to know me and be fond of me. i suspect myself of growing rather fond of it. exertion of any kind is always beneficial. come and see me if you can in any way get, i _want_ to see you. it seems martha taylor is fairly gone. good-bye, my lassie.--yours insufferably, 'c. bronte.' to rev. henry nussey, earnley rectory 'upperwood house, rawdon, '_may_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i am about to employ part of a sunday evening in answering your last letter. you will perhaps think this hardly right, and yet i do not feel that i am doing wrong. sunday evening is almost my only time of leisure. no one would blame me if i were to spend this spare hour in a pleasant chat with a friend--is it worse to spend it in a friendly letter? 'i have just seen my little noisy charges deposited snugly in their cribs, and i am sitting alone in the school-room with the quiet of a sunday evening pervading the grounds and gardens outside my window. i owe you a letter--can i choose a better time than the present for paying my debt? now, mr. nussey, you need not expect any gossip or news, i have none to tell you--even if i had i am not at present in the mood to communicate them. you will excuse an unconnected letter. if i had thought you critical or captious i would have declined the task of corresponding with you. when i reflect, indeed, it seems strange that i should sit down to write without a feeling of formality and restraint to an individual with whom i am personally so little acquainted as i am with yourself; but the fact is, i cannot be formal in a letter--if i write at all i must write as i think. it seems ellen has told you that i am become a governess again. as you say, it is indeed a hard thing for flesh and blood to leave home, especially a _good_ home--not a wealthy or splendid one. my home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what i shall find nowhere else in the world--the profound, the intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source--when they have clung to each other from childhood, and when disputes have never sprung up to divide them. 'we are all separated now, and winning our bread amongst strangers as we can--my sister anne is near york, my brother in a situation near halifax, i am here. emily is the only one left at home, where her usefulness and willingness make her indispensable. under these circumstances should we repine? i think not--our mutual affection ought to comfort us under all difficulties. if the god on whom we must all depend will but vouchsafe us health and the power to continue in the strict line of duty, so as never under any temptation to swerve from it an inch, we shall have ample reason to be grateful and contented. 'i do not pretend to say that i am always contented. a governess must often submit to have the heartache. my employers, mr. and mrs. white, are kind worthy people in their way, but the children are indulged. i have great difficulties to contend with sometimes. perseverance will perhaps conquer them. and it has gratified me much to find that the parents are well satisfied with their children's improvement in learning since i came. but i am dwelling too much upon my own concerns and feelings. it is true they are interesting to me, but it is wholly impossible they should be so to you, and, therefore, i hope you will skip the last page, for i repent having written it. 'a fortnight since i had a letter from ellen urging me to go to brookroyd for a single day. i felt such a longing to have a respite from labour, and to get once more amongst "old familiar faces," that i conquered diffidence and asked mrs. white to let me go. she complied, and i went accordingly, and had a most delightful holiday. i saw your mother, your sisters mercy, ellen, and poor sarah, and your brothers richard and george--all were well. ellen talked of endeavouring to get a situation somewhere. i did not encourage the idea much. i advised her rather to go to earnley for a while. i think she wants a change, and i dare say you would be glad to have her as a companion for a few months.--i remain, yours respectfully, 'c. bronte.' the above letter was written to miss nussey's brother, whose attachment to charlotte bronte has already more than once been mentioned in the current biographies. the following letter to miss nussey is peculiarly interesting because of the reference to ireland. it would have been strange if charlotte bronte had returned as a governess to her father's native land. speculation thereon is sufficiently foolish, and yet one is tempted to ask if ireland might not have gained some of that local literary colour--one of its greatest needs--which always makes scotland dear to the readers of _waverley_, and yorkshire classic ground to the admirers of _shirley_. to miss ellen nussey 'upperwood house, _june_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--if i don't scrawl you a line of some sort i know you will begin to fancy that i neglect you, in spite of all i said last time we met. you can hardly fancy it possible, i dare say, that i cannot find a quarter of an hour to scribble a note in; but when a note is written it is to be carried a mile to the post, and consumes nearly an hour, which is a large portion of the day. mr. and mrs. white have been gone a week. i heard from them this morning; they are now at hexham. no time is fixed for their return, but i hope it will not be delayed long, or i shall miss the chance of seeing anne this vacation. she came home, i understand, last wednesday, and is only to be allowed three weeks' holidays, because the family she is with are going to scarborough. i should like to see her to judge for myself of the state of her health. i cannot trust any other person's report, no one seems minute enough in their observations. i should also very much have liked you to see her. 'i have got on very well with the servants and children so far, yet it is dreary, solitary work. you can tell as well as me the lonely feeling of being without a companion. i offered the irish concern to mary taylor, but she is so circumstanced that she cannot accept it. her brothers have a feeling of pride that revolts at the thought of their sister "going out." i hardly knew that it was such a degradation till lately. 'your visit did me much good. i wish mary taylor would come, and yet i hardly know how to find time to be with her. good-bye. god bless you. 'c. bronte. 'i am very well, and i continue to get to bed before twelve o'clock p.m. i don't tell people that i am dissatisfied with my situation. i can drive on; there is no use in complaining. i have lost my chance of going to ireland.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _st_, . 'dear nell,--i was not at home when i got your letter, but i am at home now, and it feels like paradise. i came last night. when i asked for a vacation, mrs. white offered me a week or ten days, but i demanded three weeks, and stood to my tackle with a tenacity worthy of yourself, lassie. i gained the point, but i don't like such victories. i have gained another point. you are unanimously requested to come here next tuesday and stay as long as you can. aunt is in high good-humour. i need not write a long letter.--good-bye, dear nell. 'c. b. '_p.s._--i have lost the chance of seeing anne. she is gone back to "the land of egypt and the house of bondage." also, little black tom is dead. every cup, however sweet, has its drop of bitterness in it. probably you will be at a loss to ascertain the identity of black tom, but don't fret about it, i'll tell you when you come. keeper is as well, big, and grim as ever. i'm too happy to write. come, come, lassie.' it must have been during this holiday that the resolution concerning a school of their own assumed definite shape. miss wooler talked of giving up dewsbury moor--should charlotte and emily take it? charlotte's recollections of her illness there settled the question in the negative, and brussels was coming to the front. to miss ellen nussey 'upperwood house, _october_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--it is a cruel thing of you to be always upbraiding me when i am a trifle remiss or so in writing a letter. i see i can't make you comprehend that i have not quite as much time on my hands as miss harris or mrs. mills. i never neglect you on purpose. i could not _do_ it, you little teazing, faithless wretch. 'the humour i am in is worse than words can describe. i have had a hideous dinner of some abominable spiced-up indescribable mess and it has exasperated me against the world at large. so you are coming home, are you? then don't expect me to write a long letter. i am not going to dewsbury moor, as far as i can see at present. it was a decent friendly proposal on miss wooler's part, and cancels all or most of her little foibles, in my estimation; but dewsbury moor is a poisoned place to me; besides, i burn to go somewhere else. i think, nell, i see a chance of getting to brussels. mary taylor advises me to this step. my own mind and feelings urge me. i can't write a word more. 'c. b.' to miss emily j. bronte 'upperwood house, rawdon, '_nov_. _th_, . 'dear e. j.,--you are not to suppose that this note is written with a view of communicating any information on the subject we both have considerably at heart: i have written letters but i have received no letters in reply yet. belgium is a long way off, and people are everywhere hard to spur up to the proper speed. mary taylor says we can scarcely expect to get off before january. i have wished and intended to write to both anne and branwell, but really i have not had time. 'mr. jenkins i find was mistakenly termed the british consul at brussels; he is in fact the english episcopal clergyman. 'i think perhaps we shall find that the best plan will be for papa to write a letter to him by and bye, but not yet. i will give an intimation when this should be done, and also some idea of what had best be said. grieve not over dewsbury moor. you were cut out there to all intents and purposes, so in fact was anne, miss wooler would hear of neither for the first half year. 'anne seems omitted in the present plan, but if all goes right i trust she will derive her full share of benefit from it in the end. i exhort all to hope. i believe in my heart this is acting for the best, my only fear is lest others should doubt and be dismayed. before our half year in brussels is completed, you and i will have to seek employment abroad. it is not my intention to retrace my steps home till twelve months, if all continues well and we and those at home retain good health. 'i shall probably take my leave of upperwood about the th or th of december. when does anne talk of returning? how is she? what does w. w. { } say to these matters? how are papa and aunt, do they flag? how will anne get on with martha? has w. w. been seen or heard of lately? love to all. write quickly.--good-bye. 'c. bronte. 'i am well.' to miss ellen nussey 'rawdon, _december_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i hear from mary taylor that you are come home, and also that you have been ill. if you are able to write comfortably, let me know the feelings that preceded your illness, and also its effects. i wish to see you. mary taylor reports that your looks are much as usual. i expect to get back to haworth in the course of a fortnight or three weeks. i hope i shall then see you. i would rather you came to haworth than i went to brookroyd. my plans advance slowly and i am not yet certain where i shall go, or what i shall do when i leave upperwood house. brussels is still my promised land, but there is still the wilderness of time and space to cross before i reach it. i am not likely, i think, to go to the chateau de kockleberg. i have heard of a less expensive establishment. so far i had written when i received your letter. i was glad to get it. why don't you mention your illness. i had intended to have got this note off two or three days past, but i am more straitened for time than ever just now. we have gone to bed at twelve or one o'clock during the last three nights. i must get this scrawl off to-day or you will think me negligent. the new governess, that is to be, has been to see my plans, etc. my dear ellen, good-bye.--believe me, in heart and soul, your sincere friend, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i am yet uncertain when i shall leave upperwood, but of one thing i am very certain, when i do leave i must go straight home. it is absolutely necessary that some definite arrangement should be commenced for our future plans before i go visiting anywhere. that i wish to see you i know, that i intend and _hope_ to see you before long i also know, that you will at the first impulse accuse me of neglect, i fear, that upon consideration you will acquit me, i devoutly trust. dear ellen, come to haworth if you can, if you cannot i will endeavour to come for a day at least to brookroyd, but do not depend on this--come to haworth. i thank you for mr. jenkins' address. you always think of other people's convenience, however ill and affected you are yourself. how very much i wish to see you, you do not know; but if i were to go to brookroyd now, it would deeply disappoint those at home. i have some hopes of seeing branwell at xmas, and when i shall be able to see him afterwards i cannot tell. he has never been at home for the last five months.--good-night, dear ellen, 'c. b.' to miss mercy nussey 'rawdon, _december_ _th_. 'my dear miss mercy,--though i am very much engaged i must find time to thank you for the kind and polite contents of your note. i should act in the manner most consonant with my own feelings if i at once, and without qualification, accepted your invitation. i do not however consider it advisable to indulge myself so far at present. when i leave upperwood i must go straight home. whether i shall afterwards have time to pay a short visit to brookroyd i do not yet know--circumstances must determine that. i would fain see ellen at haworth instead; our visitations are not shared with any show of justice. it shocked me very much to hear of her illness--may it be the first and last time she ever experiences such an attack! ellen, i fear, has thought i neglected her, in not writing sufficiently long or frequent letters. it is a painful idea to me that she has had this feeling--it could not be more groundless. i know her value, and i would not lose her affection for any probable compensation i can imagine. remember me to your mother. i trust she will soon regain her health.--believe me, my dear miss mercy, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--will you write as soon as you get this and fix your own day for coming to haworth? i got home on christmas eve. the parting scene between me and my late employers was such as to efface the memory of much that annoyed me while i was there, but indeed, during the whole of the last six months they only made too much of me. anne has rendered herself so valuable in her difficult situation that they have entreated her to return to them, if it be but for a short time. i almost think she will go back, if we can get a good servant who will do all our work. we want one about forty or fifty years old, good-tempered, clean, and honest. you shall hear all about brussels, etc., when you come. mr. weightman is still here, just the same as ever. i have a curiosity to see a meeting between you and him. he will be again desperately in love, i am convinced. _come_. 'c. b.' { } chapter iv: the pensionnat heger, brussels had not the impulse come to charlotte bronte to add somewhat to her scholastic accomplishments by a sojourn in brussels, our literature would have lost that powerful novel _villette_, and the singularly charming _professor_. the impulse came from the persuasion that without 'languages' the school project was an entirely hopeless one. mary and martha taylor were at brussels, staying with friends, and thence they had sent kindly presents to charlotte, at this time raging under the yoke of governess at upperwood house. charlotte wrote the diplomatic letter to her aunt which ended so satisfactorily. { } the good lady--miss branwell was then about sixty years of age--behaved handsomely by her nieces, and it was agreed that charlotte and emily were to go to the continent, anne retaining her post of governess with mrs. robinson at thorp green. but brussels schools did not seem at the first blush to be very satisfactory. something better promised at lille. here is a letter written at this period of hesitation and doubt. a portion of it only was printed by mrs. gaskell. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i cannot quite enter into your friends' reasons for not permitting you to come to haworth; but as it is at present, and in all human probability will be for an indefinite time to come, impossible for me to get to brookroyd, the balance of accounts is not so unequal as it might otherwise be. we expect to leave england in less than three weeks, but we are not yet certain of the day, as it will depend upon the convenience of a french lady now in london, madame marzials, under whose escort we are to sail. our place of destination is changed. papa received an unfavourable account from mr. or rather mrs. jenkins of the french schools in brussels, and on further inquiry, an institution in lille, in the north of france, was recommended by baptist noel and other clergymen, and to that place it is decided that we are to go. the terms are fifty pounds for each pupil for board and french alone. 'i considered it kind in aunt to consent to an extra sum for a separate room. we shall find it a great privilege in many ways. i regret the change from brussels to lille on many accounts, chiefly that i shall not see martha taylor. mary has been indefatigably kind in providing me with information. she has grudged no labour, and scarcely any expense, to that end. mary's price is above rubies. i have, in fact, two friends--you and her--staunch and true, in whose faith and sincerity i have as strong a belief as i have in the bible. i have bothered you both, you especially; but you always get the tongs and heap coals of fire upon my head. i have had letters to write lately to brussels, to lille, and to london. i have lots of chemises, night-gowns, pocket-handkerchiefs, and pockets to make, besides clothes to repair. i have been, every week since i came home, expecting to see branwell, and he has never been able to get over yet. we fully expect him, however, next saturday. under these circumstances how can i go visiting? you tantalise me to death with talking of conversations by the fireside. depend upon it, we are not to have any such for many a long month to come. i get an interesting impression of old age upon my face, and when you see me next i shall certainly wear caps and spectacles.--yours affectionately, 'c. b.' this mr. jenkins was chaplain to the british embassy at brussels, and not consul, as charlotte at first supposed. the brother of his wife was a clergyman living in the neighbourhood of haworth. mr. jenkins, whose english episcopal chapel charlotte attended during her stay in brussels, finally recommended the pensionnat heger in the rue d'isabelle. madame heger wrote, accepting the two girls as pupils, and to brussels their father escorted them in february , staying one night at the house of mr. jenkins and then returning to haworth. the life of charlotte bronte at brussels has been mirrored for us with absolute accuracy in _villette_ and _the professor_. that, indeed, from the point of view of local colour, is made sufficiently plain to the casual visitor of to-day who calls in the rue d'isabelle. the house, it is true, is dismantled with a view to its incorporation into some city buildings in the background, but one may still eat pears from the 'old and huge fruit-trees' which flourished when charlotte and emily walked under them half a century ago; one may still wander through the school-rooms, the long dormitories, and into the 'vine-draped _berceau_'--little enough is changed within and without. here is the dormitory with its twenty beds, the two end ones being occupied by emily and charlotte, they alone securing the privilege of age or english eccentricity to curtain off their beds from the gaze of the eighteen girls who shared the room with them. the crucifix, indeed, has been removed from the niche in the _oratoire_ where the children offered up prayer every morning; but with a copy of _villette_ in hand it is possible to restore every feature of the place, not excluding the adjoining athenee with its small window overlooking the garden of the pensionnat and the _allee defendu_. it was from this window that mr. crimsworth of _the professor_ looked down upon the girls at play. it was here, indeed, at the royal athenee, that m. heger was professor of latin. externally, then, the pensionnat heger remains practically the same as it appeared to charlotte and emily bronte in february , when they made their first appearance in brussels. the rue fossette of _villette_, the rue d'isabelle of _the professor_, is the veritable rue d'isabelle of currer bell's experience. what, however, shall we say of the people who wandered through these rooms and gardens--the hundred or more children, the three or four governesses, the professor and his wife? here there has been much speculation and not a little misreading of the actual facts. charlotte and emily went to brussels to learn. they did learn with energy. it was their first experience of foreign travel, and it came too late in life for them to enter into it with that breadth of mind and tolerance of the customs of other lands, lacking which the englishman abroad is always an offence. charlotte and emily hated the land and people. they had been brought up ultra-protestants. their father was an ulster man, and his one venture into the polemics of his age was to attack the proposals for catholic emancipation. with this inheritance of intolerance, how could charlotte and emily face with kindliness the romanism which they saw around them? how heartily they disapproved of it many a picture in _villette_ has made plain to us. charlotte had been in brussels three months when she made the friendship to which i am indebted for anything that there may be to add to this episode in her life. miss laetitia wheelwright was one of five sisters, the daughters of a doctor in lower phillimore place, kensington. dr. wheelwright went to brussels for his health and for his children's education. the girls were day boarders at the pensionnat, but they lived in the house for a full month or more at a time when their father and mother were on a trip up the rhine. otherwise their abode was a flat in the hotel clusyenaar in the rue royale, and there during her later stay in brussels charlotte frequently paid them visits. in this earlier period charlotte and emily were too busy with their books to think of 'calls' and the like frivolities, and it must be confessed also that at this stage laetitia wheelwright would have thought it too high a price for a visit from charlotte to receive as a fellow-guest the apparently unamiable emily. miss wheelwright, who was herself fourteen years of age when she entered the pensionnat heger, recalls the two sisters, thin and sallow-looking, pacing up and down the garden, friendless and alone. it was the sight of laetitia standing up in the class-room and glancing round with a semi-contemptuous air at all these belgian girls which attracted charlotte bronte to her. 'it was so very english,' miss bronte laughingly remarked at a later period to her friend. there was one other english girl at this time of sufficient age to be companionable; but with miss maria miller, whom charlotte bronte has depicted under the guise of ginevra fanshawe, she had less in common. in later years miss miller became mrs. robertson, the wife of an author in one form or another. to miss wheelwright, and those of her sisters who are still living, the descriptions of the pensionnat heger which are given in _villette_ and _the professor_ are perfectly accurate. m. heger, with his heavy black moustache and his black hair, entering the class-room of an evening to read to his pupils was a sufficiently familiar object, and his keen intelligence amounting almost to genius had affected the wheelwright girls as forcibly as it had done the brontes. mme. heger, again, for ever peeping from behind doors and through the plate-glass partitions which separate the passages from the school-rooms, was a constant source of irritation to all the english pupils. this prying and spying is, it is possible, more of a fine art with the school-mistresses of the continent than with those of our own land. in any case, mme. heger was an accomplished spy, and in the midst of the most innocent work or recreation the pupils would suddenly see a pair of eyes pierce the dusk and disappear. this, and a hundred similar trifles, went to build up an antipathy on both sides, which had, however, scarcely begun when charlotte and emily were suddenly called home by their aunt's death in october. a letter to miss nussey on her return sufficiently explains the situation. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i was not yet returned to england when your letter arrived. we received the first news of aunt's illness, wednesday, nov. nd. we decided to come home directly. next morning a second letter informed us of her death. we sailed from antwerp on sunday; we travelled day and night and got home on tuesday morning--and of course the funeral and all was over. we shall see her no more. papa is pretty well. we found anne at home; she is pretty well also. you say you have had no letter from me for a long time. i wrote to you three weeks ago. when you answer this note, i will write to you more in detail. aunt, martha taylor, and mr. weightman are now all gone; how dreary and void everything seems. mr. weightman's illness was exactly what martha's was--he was ill the same length of time and died in the same manner. aunt's disease was internal obstruction; she also was ill a fortnight. 'good-bye, my dear ellen. 'c. bronte.' the aunt whose sudden death brought charlotte and emily bronte thus hastily from brussels to haworth must have been a very sensible woman in the main. she left her money to those of her nieces who most needed it. a perusal of her will is not without interest, and indeed it will be seen that it clears up one or two errors into which mrs. gaskell and subsequent biographers have rashly fallen through failing to expend the necessary half-guinea upon a copy. this is it:-- extracted from the district probate registry at york attached to her majesty's high court of justice. _depending on the father_, _son_, _and holy ghost for peace here_, _and glory and bliss forever hereafter_, _i leave this my last will and testament_: _should i die at haworth_, _i request that my remains may be deposited in the church in that place as near as convenient to the remains of my dear sister_; _i moreover will that all my just debts and funeral expenses be paid out of my property_, _and that my funeral shall be conducted in a moderate and decent manner_. _my indian workbox i leave to my niece_, _charlotte bronte_; _my workbox with a china top i leave to my niece_, _emily jane bronte_, _together with my ivory fan_; _my japan dressing-box i leave to my nephew_, _patrick branwell bronte_; _to my niece anne bronte_, _i leave my watch with all that belongs to it_; _as also my eye-glass and its chain_, _my rings_, _silver-spoons_, _books_, _clothes_, _etc._, _etc._, _i leave to be divided between my above-named three nieces_, _charlotte bronte_, _emily jane bronte_, _and anne bronte_, _according as their father shall think proper_. _and i will that all the money that shall remain_, _including twenty-five pounds sterling_, _being the part of the proceeds of the sale of my goods which belong to me in consequence of my having advanced to my sister kingston the sum of twenty-five pounds in lieu of her share of the proceeds of my goods aforesaid_, _and deposited in the bank of bolitho sons and co._, _esqrs._, _of chiandower_, _near penzance_, _after the aforesaid sums and articles shall have been paid and deducted_, _shall be put into some safe bank or lent on good landed security_, _and there left to accumulate for the sole benefit of my four nieces_, _charlotte bronte_, _emily jane bronte_, _anne bronte_, _and elizabeth jane kingston_; _and this sum or sums_, _and whatever other property i may have_, _shall be equally divided between them when the youngest of them then living shall have arrived at the age of twenty-one years_. _and should any one or more of these my four nieces die_, _her or their part or parts shall be equally divided amongst the survivors_; _and if but one is left_, _all shall go to that one_: _and should they all die before the age of twenty-one years_, _all their parts shall be given to my sister_, _anne kingston_; _and should she die before that time specified_, _i will that all that was to have been hers shall be equally divided between all the surviving children of my dear brother and sisters_. _i appoint my brother-in-law_, _the rev. p. bronte_, a.b., _now incumbent of haworth_, _yorkshire_; _the rev. john fennell_, _now incumbent of cross stone_, _near halifax_; _the rev. theodore dury_, _rector of keighley_, _yorkshire_; _and mr. george taylor of stanbury_, _in the chapelry of haworth aforesaid_, _my executors_. _written by me_, elizabeth branwell, _and signed_, _sealed_, _and delivered on the_ _th_ _of april_, _in the year of our lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-three_, elizabeth branwell. _witnesses present_, _william brown_, _john tootill_, _william brown_, _junr_. _the twenty-eighth day of december_, , _the will of_ elizabeth branwell, _late of haworth_, _in the parish of bradford_, _in the county of york_, _spinster (having bona notabilia within the province of york_). _deceased was proved in the prerogative court of york by the oaths of the reverend patrick bronte_, _clerk_, _brother-in-law_; _and george taylor_, _two of the executors to whom administration was granted_ (_the reverend theodore dury_, _another of the executors_, _having renounced_), _they having been first sworn duly to administer_. effects sworn under pounds. testatrix died th october . now hear mrs. gaskell:-- _the small property_, _which she had accumulated by dint of personal frugality and self-denial_, _was bequeathed to her nieces_. _branwell_, _her darling_, _was to have had his share_, _but his reckless expenditure had distressed the good old lady_, _and his name was omitted in her will_. a perusal of the will in question indicates that it was made in , before branwell had paid his first visit to london, and when, as all his family supposed, he was on the high road to fame and fortune as an artist. the old lady doubtless thought that the boy would be able to take good care of himself. she had, indeed, other nieces down in cornwall, but with the general sympathy of her friends and relatives in penzance, elizabeth jane kingston, who it was thought would want it most, was to have a share. had the kingston girl, her mother, and the bronte girls all died before him, the boy branwell, it will be seen, would have shared the property with his branwell cousins in penzance, of whom two are still alive. in any case, branwell's name was mentioned, and he received 'my japan dressing-box,' whatever that may have been worth. three or four letters, above and beyond these already published, were written by charlotte to her friend in the interval between miss branwell's death and her return to brussels; and she paid a visit to miss nussey at brookroyd, and it was returned. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i hope your brother is sufficiently recovered now to dispense with your constant attendance. papa desires his compliments to you, and says he should be very glad if you could give us your company at haworth a little while. can you come on friday next? i mention so early a day because anne leaves us to return to york on monday, and she wishes very much to see you before her departure. i think your brother is too good-natured to object to your coming. there is little enough pleasure in this world, and it would be truly unkind to deny to you and me that of meeting again after so long a separation. do not fear to find us melancholy or depressed. we are all much as usual. you will see no difference from our former demeanour. send an immediate answer. 'my love and best wishes to your sister and mother. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i hope that invitation of yours was given in real earnest, for i intend to accept it. i wish to see you, and as in a few weeks i shall probably again leave england, i will not be too delicate and ceremonious and so let the present opportunity pass. something says to me that it will not be too convenient to have a guest at brookroyd while there is an invalid there--however, i listen to no such suggestions. anne leaves haworth on tuesday at o'clock in the morning, and we should reach bradford at half-past eight. there are many reasons why i should have preferred your coming to haworth, but as it appears there are always obstacles which prevent that, i'll break through ceremony, or pride, or whatever it is, and, like mahomet, go to the mountain which won't or can't come to me. the coach stops at the bowling green inn, in bradford. give my love to your sister and mother. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--it is a singular state of things to be obliged to write and have nothing worth reading to say. i am glad you got home safe. you are an excellent good girl for writing to me two letters, especially as they were such long ones. branwell wants to know why you carefully exclude all mention of him when you particularly send your regards to every other member of the family. he desires to know whether and in what he has offended you, or whether it is considered improper for a young lady to mention the gentlemen of a house. we have been one walk on the moors since you left. we have been to keighley, where we met a person of our acquaintance, who uttered an interjection of astonishment on meeting us, and when he could get his breath, informed us that he had heard i was dead and buried. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i am much obliged to you for transferring the roll of muslin. last saturday i found the other gift, for which you deserve smothering. i will deliver branwell your message. you have left your bible--how can i send it? i cannot tell precisely what day i leave home, but it will be the last week in this month. are you going with me? i admire exceedingly the costume you have chosen to appear in at the birstall rout. i think you say pink petticoat, black jacket, and a wreath of roses--beautiful! for a change i would advise a black coat, velvet stock and waistcoat, white pantaloons, and smart boots. address rue d'isabelle. write to me again, that's a good girl, very soon. respectful remembrances to your mother and sister. 'c. bronte.' then she is in brussels again, as the following letter indicates. to miss ellen nussey 'brussels, _january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i left leeds for london last friday at nine o'clock; owing to delay we did not reach london till ten at night--two hours after time. i took a cab the moment i arrived at euston square, and went forthwith to london bridge wharf. the packet lay off that wharf, and i went on board the same night. next morning we sailed. we had a prosperous and speedy voyage, and landed at ostend at seven o'clock next morning. i took the train at twelve and reached rue d'isabelle at seven in the evening. madame heger received me with great kindness. i am still tired with the continued excitement of three days' travelling. i had no accident, but of course some anxiety. miss dixon called this afternoon. { } mary taylor had told her i should be in brussels the last week in january. i am going there on sunday, d.v. address--miss bronte, chez mme. heger, rue d'isabelle, bruxelles.--good-bye, dear. 'c. b.' this second visit of charlotte bronte to brussels has given rise to much speculation, some of it of not the pleasantest kind. it is well to face the point bluntly, for it has been more than once implied that charlotte bronte was in love with m. heger, as her prototype lucy snowe was in love with paul emanuel. the assumption, which is absolutely groundless, has had certain plausible points in its favour, not the least obvious, of course, being the inclination to read autobiography into every line of charlotte bronte's writings. then there is a passage in a printed letter to miss nussey which has been quoted as if to bear out this suggestion: 'i returned to brussels after aunt's death,' she writes, 'against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. i was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.' it is perfectly excusable for a man of the world, unacquainted with qualifying facts, to assume that for these two years charlotte bronte's heart was consumed with an unquenchable love for her professor--held in restraint, no doubt, as the most censorious admit, but sufficiently marked to secure the jealousy and ill-will of madame heger. madame heger and her family, it must be admitted, have kept this impression afloat. madame heger refused to see mrs. gaskell when she called upon her in the rue d'isabelle; and her daughters will tell you that their father broke off his correspondence with miss bronte because his favourite english pupil showed an undue extravagance of devotion. 'her attachment after her return to yorkshire,' to quote a recent essay on the subject, 'was expressed in her frequent letters in a tone that her brussels friends considered it not only prudent but kind to check. she was warned by them that the exaltation these letters betrayed needed to be toned down and replaced by what was reasonable. she was further advised to write only once in six months, and then to limit the subject of her letters to her own health and that of her family, and to a plain account of her circumstances and occupations.' { a} now to all this i do not hesitate to give an emphatic contradiction, a contradiction based upon the only independent authority available. miss laetitia wheelwright and her sisters saw much of charlotte bronte during this second sojourn in brussels, and they have a quite different tale to tell. that misgiving of charlotte, by the way, which weighed so heavily upon her mind afterwards, was due to the fact that she had left her father practically unprotected from the enticing company of a too festive curate. he gave himself up at this time to a very copious whisky drinking, from which charlotte's home-coming speedily rescued him. { b} madame heger did indeed hate charlotte bronte in her later years. this is not unnatural when we remember how that unfortunate woman has been gibbeted for all time in the characters of mlle. zoraide reuter and madame beck. but in justice to the creator of these scathing portraits, it may be mentioned that charlotte bronte took every precaution to prevent _villette_ from obtaining currency in the city which inspired it. she told miss wheelwright, with whom naturally, on her visits to london, she often discussed the brussels life, that she had received a promise that there should be no translation, and that the book would never appear in the french language. one cannot therefore fix upon charlotte bronte any responsibility for the circumstance that immediately after her death the novel appeared in the only tongue understood by madame heger. miss wheelwright informs me that charlotte bronte did certainly admire m. heger, as did all his pupils, very heartily. charlotte's first impression, indeed, was not flattering: 'he is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena; occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above degrees removed from mild and gentleman-like.' but he was particularly attentive to charlotte; and as he was the first really intelligent man she had met, the first man, that is to say, with intellectual interests--for we know how much she despised the curates of her neighbourhood--she rejoiced at every opportunity of doing verbal battle with him, for charlotte inherited, it may be said, the irish love of debate. some time after charlotte had returned to england, and when in the height of her fame, she met her brussels school-fellow in london. miss wheelwright asked her whether she still corresponded with m. heger. charlotte replied that she had discontinued to do so. m. heger had mentioned in one letter that his wife did not like the correspondence, and he asked her therefore to address her letters to the royal athenee, where, as i have mentioned, he gave lessons to the boys. 'i stopped writing at once,' charlotte told her friend. 'i would not have dreamt of writing to him when i found it was disagreeable to his wife; certainly i would not write unknown to her.' 'she said this,' miss wheelwright adds, 'with the sincerity of manner which characterised her every utterance, and i would sooner have doubted myself than her.' let, then, this silly and offensive imputation be now and for ever dismissed from the minds of charlotte bronte's admirers, if indeed it had ever lodged there. { } charlotte had not visited the wheelwrights in the rue royale during her first visit to brussels. she had found the companionship of emily all-sufficing, and emily was not sufficiently popular with the wheelwrights to have made her a welcome guest. they admitted her cleverness, but they considered her hard, unsympathetic, and abrupt in manner. we know that she was self-contained and homesick, pining for her native moors. this was not evident to a girl of ten, the youngest of the wheelwright children, who was compelled to receive daily a music lesson from emily in her play-hours. when, however, charlotte came back to brussels alone she was heartily welcomed into two or three english families, including those of mr. dixon, of the rev. mr. jenkins, and of dr. wheelwright. with the wheelwright children she sometimes spent the sunday, and with them she occasionally visited the english episcopal church which the wheelwrights attended, and of which the clergyman was a mr. drury. when dr. wheelwright took his wife for a rhine trip in may he left his four children--one little girl had died at brussels, aged seven, in the preceding november--in the care of madame heger at the pensionnat, and under the immediate supervision of charlotte. at this period there was plenty of cheerfulness in her life. she was learning german. she was giving english lessons to m. heger and to his brother-in-law, m. chappelle. she went to the carnival, and described it 'animating to see the immense crowds and the general gaiety.' 'whenever i turn back,' she writes, 'to compare what i am with what i was, my place here with my place at mrs. sidgwick's or mrs. white's, i am thankful.' in a letter to her brother, however, we find the darker side of the picture. it reveals many things apart from what is actually written down. in this, the only letter to branwell that i have been able to discover, apart from one written in childhood, it appears that the brother and sister are upon very confidential terms. up to this time, at any rate, branwell's conduct had not excited any apprehension as to his future, and the absence of any substantial place in his aunt's will was clearly not due to misconduct. branwell was now under the same roof as his sister anne, having obtained an appointment as tutor to young edmund robinson at thorp green, near york, where anne was governess. the letter is unsigned, concluding playfully with 'yourn; and the initials follow a closing message to anne on the same sheet of paper. to branwell bronte 'brussels, _may_ _st_, . 'dear branwell,--i hear you have written a letter to me. this letter, however, as usual, i have never received, which i am exceedingly sorry for, as i have wished very much to hear from you. are you sure that you put the right address and that you paid the english postage, s. d.? without that, letters are never forwarded. i heard from papa a day or two since. all appears to be going on reasonably well at home. i grieve only that emily is so solitary; but, however, you and anne will soon be returning for the holidays, which will cheer the house for a time. are you in better health and spirits, and does anne continue to be pretty well? i understand papa has been to see you. did he seem cheerful and well? mind when you write to me you answer these questions, as i wish to know. also give me a detailed account as to how you get on with your pupil and the rest of the family. i have received a general assurance that you do well and are in good odour, but i want to know particulars. 'as for me, i am very well and wag on as usual. i perceive, however, that i grow exceedingly misanthropic and sour. you will say that this is no news, and that you never knew me possessed of the contrary qualities--philanthropy and sugariness. _das ist wahr_ (which being translated means, that is true); but the fact is, the people here are no go whatsoever. amongst persons which compose the daily population of this house, i can discern only one or two who deserve anything like regard. this is not owing to foolish fastidiousness on my part, but to the absence of decent qualities on theirs. they have not intellect or politeness or good-nature or good-feeling. they are nothing. i don't hate them--hatred would be too warm a feeling. they have no sensations themselves and they excite none. but one wearies from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing, liking nothing, hating nothing, being nothing, doing nothing--yes, i teach and sometimes get red in the face with impatience at their stupidity. but don't think i ever scold or fly into a passion. if i spoke warmly, as warmly as i sometimes used to do at roe-head, they would think me mad. nobody ever gets into a passion here. such a thing is not known. the phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil. they are very false in their relations with each other, but they rarely quarrel, and friendship is a folly they are unacquainted with. the black swan, m. heger, is the only sole veritable exception to this rule (for madame, always cool and always reasoning, is not quite an exception). but i rarely speak to monsieur now, for not being a pupil i have little or nothing to do with him. from time to time he shows his kind-heartedness by loading me with books, so that i am still indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement i have. except for the total want of companionship i have nothing to complain of. i have not too much to do, sufficient liberty, and i am rarely interfered with. i lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which, when i think of mrs. sidgwick, i ought to be very thankful. be sure you write to me soon, and beg of anne to inclose a small billet in the same letter; it will be a real charity to do me this kindness. tell me everything you can think of. 'it is a curious metaphysical fact that always in the evening when i am in the great dormitory alone, having no other company than a number of beds with white curtains, i always recur as fanatically as ever to the old ideas, the old faces, and the old scenes in the world below. 'give my love to anne.--and believe me, yourn 'dear anne,--write to me.--your affectionate schwester, 'c. b. 'mr. heger has just been in and given me a little german testament as a present. i was surprised, for since a good many days he has hardly spoken to me.' a little later she writes to emily in similar strain. to miss emily j. bronte 'brussels, _may_ _th_, . 'dear e. j.,--the reason of the unconscionable demand for money is explained in my letter to papa. would you believe it, mdlle. muhl demands as much for one pupil as for two, namely, francs per month. this, with the francs per month to the blanchisseuse, makes havoc in pounds per annum. you will perceive i have begun again to take german lessons. things wag on much as usual here. only mdlle. blanche and mdlle. hausse are at present on a system of war without quarter. they hate each other like two cats. mdlle. blanche frightens mdlle. hausse by her white passions (for they quarrel venomously). mdlle. hausse complains that when mdlle. blanche is in fury, "_elle n'a pas de levres_." i find also that mdlle. sophie dislikes mdlle. blanche extremely. she says she is heartless, insincere, and vindictive, which epithets, i assure you, are richly deserved. also i find she is the regular spy of mme. heger, to whom she reports everything. also she invents--which i should not have thought. i have now the entire charge of the english lessons. i have given two lessons to the first class. hortense jannoy was a picture on these occasions, her face was black as a "blue-piled thunder-loft," and her two ears were red as raw beef. to all questions asked her reply was, "_je ne sais pas_." it is a pity but her friends could meet with a person qualified to cast out a devil. i am richly off for companionship in these parts. of late days, m. and mde. heger rarely speak to me, and i really don't pretend to care a fig for any body else in the establishment. you are not to suppose by that expression that i am under the influence of _warm_ affection for mde. heger. i am convinced she does not like me--why, i can't tell, nor do i think she herself has any definite reason for the aversion; but for one thing, she cannot comprehend why i do not make intimate friends of mesdames blanche, sophie, and hausse. m. heger is wonderously influenced by madame, and i should not wonder if he disapproves very much of my unamiable want of sociability. he has already given me a brief lecture on universal _bienveillance_, and, perceiving that i don't improve in consequence, i fancy he has taken to considering me as a person to be let alone--left to the error of her ways; and consequently he has in a great measure withdrawn the light of his countenance, and i get on from day to day in a robinson-crusoe-like condition--very lonely. that does not signify. in other respects i have nothing substantial to complain of, nor is even this a cause for complaint. except the loss of m. heger's goodwill (if i have lost it) i care for none of 'em. i hope you are well and hearty. walk out often on the moors. sorry am i to hear that hannah is gone, and that she has left you burdened with the charge of the little girl, her sister. i hope tabby will continue to stay with you--give my love to her. regards to the fighting gentry, and to old asthma.--your 'c. b. 'i have written to branwell, though i never got a letter from him.' in august she is still more dissatisfied, but 'i will continue to stay some months longer, till i have acquired german, and then i hope to see all your faces again.' to miss ellen nussey 'brussels, _august_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--you never answered my last letter; but, however, forgiveness is a part of the christian creed, and so having an opportunity to send a letter to england, i forgive you and write to you again. last sunday afternoon, being at the chapel royal, in brussels, i was surprised to hear a voice proceed from the pulpit which instantly brought all birstall and batley before my mind's eye. i could see nothing, but certainly thought that that unclerical little welsh pony, jenkins, was there. i buoyed up my mind with the expectation of receiving a letter from you, but as, however, i have got none, i suppose i must have been mistaken. 'c. b. 'mr. jenkins has called. he brought no letter from you, but said you were at harrogate, and that they could not find the letter you had intended to send. he informed me of the death of your sister. poor sarah, when i last bid her good-bye i little thought i should never see her more. certainly, however, she is happy where she is gone--far happier than she was here. when the first days of mourning are past, you will see that you have reason rather to rejoice at her removal than to grieve for it. your mother will have felt her death much--and you also. i fear from the circumstance of your being at harrogate that you are yourself ill. write to me soon.' it was in september that the incident occurred which has found so dramatic a setting in _villette_--the confession to a priest of the roman catholic church of a daughter of the most militant type of protestantism; and not the least valuable of my newly-discovered bronte treasures is the letter which charlotte wrote to emily giving an unembellished account of the incident. to miss emily j. bronte 'brussels, _september_ _nd_, . 'dear e. j.,--another opportunity of writing to you coming to pass, i shall improve it by scribbling a few lines. more than half the holidays are now past, and rather better than i expected. the weather has been exceedingly fine during the last fortnight, and yet not so asiatically hot as it was last year at this time. consequently i have tramped about a great deal and tried to get a clearer acquaintance with the streets of bruxelles. this week, as no teacher is here except mdlle. blanche, who is returned from paris, i am always alone except at meal-times, for mdlle. blanche's character is so false and so contemptible i can't force myself to associate with her. she perceives my utter dislike and never now speaks to me--a great relief. 'however, i should inevitably fall into the gulf of low spirits if i stayed always by myself here without a human being to speak to, so i go out and traverse the boulevards and streets of bruxelles sometimes for hours together. yesterday i went on a pilgrimage to the cemetery, and far beyond it on to a hill where there was nothing but fields as far as the horizon. when i came back it was evening; but i had such a repugnance to return to the house, which contained nothing that i cared for, i still kept threading the streets in the neighbourhood of the rue d'isabelle and avoiding it. i found myself opposite to ste. gudule, and the bell, whose voice you know, began to toll for evening salut. i went in, quite alone (which procedure you will say is not much like me), wandered about the aisles where a few old women were saying their prayers, till vespers begun. i stayed till they were over. still i could not leave the church or force myself to go home--to school i mean. an odd whim came into my head. in a solitary part of the cathedral six or seven people still remained kneeling by the confessionals. in two confessionals i saw a priest. i felt as if i did not care what i did, provided it was not absolutely wrong, and that it served to vary my life and yield a moment's interest. i took a fancy to change myself into a catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like. knowing me as you do, you will think this odd, but when people are by themselves they have singular fancies. a penitent was occupied in confessing. they do not go into the sort of pew or cloister which the priest occupies, but kneel down on the steps and confess through a grating. both the confessor and the penitent whisper very low, you can hardly hear their voices. after i had watched two or three penitents go and return i approached at last and knelt down in a niche which was just vacated. i had to kneel there ten minutes waiting, for on the other side was another penitent invisible to me. at last that went away and a little wooden door inside the grating opened, and i saw the priest leaning his ear towards me. i was obliged to begin, and yet i did not know a word of the formula with which they always commence their confessions. it was a funny position. i felt precisely as i did when alone on the thames at midnight. i commenced with saying i was a foreigner and had been brought up a protestant. the priest asked if i was a protestant then. i somehow could not tell a lie and said "yes." he replied that in that case i could not "_jouir du bonheur de la confesse_"; but i was determined to confess, and at last he said he would allow me because it might be the first step towards returning to the true church. i actually did confess--a real confession. when i had done he told me his address, and said that every morning i was to go to the rue du parc--to his house--and he would reason with me and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a protestant!!! i promised faithfully to go. of course, however, the adventure stops there, and i hope i shall never see the priest again. i think you had better not tell papa of this. he will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think i am going to turn catholic. trusting that you and papa are well, and also tabby and the holyes, and hoping you will write to me immediately,--i am, yours, 'c. b.' 'the holyes,' it is perhaps hardly necessary to add, is charlotte's irreverent appellation for the curates--mr. smith and mr. grant. to miss ellen nussey 'brussels, _october_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i was glad to receive your last letter; but when i read it, its contents gave me some pain. it was melancholy indeed that so soon after the death of a sister you should be called from a distant county by the news of the severe illness of a brother, and, after your return home, your sister ann should fall ill too. mary dixon informs me your brother is scarcely expected to recover--is this true? i hope not, for his sake and yours. his loss would indeed be a blow--a blow which i hope providence may avert. do not, my dear ellen, fail to write to me soon of affairs at brookroyd. i cannot fail to be anxious on the subject, your family being amongst the oldest and kindest friends i have. i trust this season of affliction will soon pass. it has been a long one. 'c. b.' to miss emily j. bronte 'brussels, _december_ _th_, . 'dear e. j.,--i have taken my determination. i hope to be at home the day after new year's day. i have told mme. heger. but in order to come home i shall be obliged to draw on my cash for another pounds. i have only pounds at present, and as there are several little things i should like to buy before i leave brussels--which you know cannot be got as well in england-- pounds would not suffice. low spirits have afflicted me much lately, but i hope all will be well when i get home--above all, if i find papa and you and b. and a. well. i am not ill in body. it is only the mind which is a trifle shaken--for want of comfort. 'i shall try to cheer up now.--good-bye. 'c. b.' chapter v: patrick branwell bronte the younger patrick bronte was always known by his mother's family name of branwell. the name derived from the patron saint of ireland, with which the enthusiastic celt, romanist and protestant alike, delights to disfigure his male child, was speedily banished from the yorkshire parsonage. branwell was a year younger than charlotte, and it is clear that she and her brother were 'chums,' in the same way as emily and anne were 'chums,' in the earlier years, before charlotte made other friends. even until two or three years from branwell's death, we find charlotte writing to him with genuine sisterly affection, and, indeed, the only two family letters addressed to branwell which are extant are from her. one of them, written from brussels, i have printed elsewhere. the other, written from roe head, when charlotte, aged sixteen, was at school there, was partly published by mrs. gaskell, but may as well be given here, copied direct from the original. [picture: patrick branwell bronte] to branwell bronte 'roe head, _may_ _th_, . 'dear branwell,--as usual i address my weekly letter to you, because to you i find the most to say. i feel exceedingly anxious to know how and in what state you arrived at home after your long and (i should think) very fatiguing journey. i could perceive when you arrived at roe head that you were very much tired, though you refused to acknowledge it. after you were gone, many questions and subjects of conversation recurred to me which i had intended to mention to you, but quite forgot them in the agitation which i felt at the totally unexpected pleasure of seeing you. lately i had begun to think that i had lost all the interest which i used formerly to take in politics, but the extreme pleasure i felt at the news of the reform bill's being thrown out by the house of lords, and of the expulsion or resignation of earl grey, etc., etc., convinced me that i have not as yet lost _all_ my penchant for politics. i am extremely glad that aunt has consented to take in _fraser's magazine_, for though i know from your description of its general contents it will be rather uninteresting when compared with _blackwood_, still it will be better than remaining the whole year without being able to obtain a sight of any periodical publication whatever; and such would assuredly be our case, as in the little wild, moorland village where we reside, there would be no possibility of borrowing or obtaining a work of that description from a circulating library. i hope with you that the present delightful weather may contribute to the perfect restoration of our dear papa's health, and that it may give aunt pleasant reminiscences of the salubrious climate of her native place. 'with love to all,--believe me, dear branwell, to remain your affectionate sister, charlotte.' 'as to you i find the most to say' is significant. and to branwell, charlotte refers again and again in most affectionate terms in many a later letter. it is to her enthusiasm, indeed that we largely owe the extravagant estimate of branwell's ability which has found so abundant expression in books on the brontes. branwell has himself been made the hero of at least three biographies. { } mr. francis grundy has no importance for our day other than that he prints certain letters from branwell in his autobiography. miss mary f. robinson, whatever distinction may pertain to her verse, should never have attempted a biography of emily bronte. her book is mainly of significance because, appearing in a series of _eminent women_, it served to emphasise the growing opinion that emily, as well as charlotte, had a place among the great writers of her day. miss robinson added nothing to our knowledge of emily bronte, and her book devoted inordinate space to the shortcomings of branwell, concerning which she had no new information. mr. leyland's book is professedly a biography of branwell, and is, indeed, a valuable storehouse of facts. it might have had more success had it been written with greater brightness and verve. as it stands, it is a dull book, readable only by the bronte enthusiast. mr. leyland has no literary perception, and in his eagerness to show that branwell was a genius, prints numerous letters and poems which sufficiently demonstrate that he was not. charlotte never hesitated in the earlier years to praise her brother as the genius of the family. we all know how eagerly the girls in any home circle are ready to acknowledge and accept as signs of original power the most impudent witticisms of a fairly clever brother. the bronte household was not exceptionally constituted in this respect. it is evident that the boy grew up with talent of a kind. he could certainly draw with more idea of perspective than his sisters, and one or two portraits by him are not wanting in merit. but there is no evidence of any special writing faculty, and the words 'genius' and 'brilliant' which have been freely applied to him are entirely misplaced. branwell was thirty-one years of age when he died, and it was only during the last year or two of his life that opium and alcohol had made him intellectually hopeless. yet, unless we accept the preposterous statement that he wrote _wuthering heights_, he would seem to have composed nothing which gives him the slightest claim to the most inconsiderable niche in the temple of literature. branwell appears to have worked side by side with his sisters in the early years, and innumerable volumes of the 'little writing' bearing his signature have come into my hands. verdopolis, the imaginary city of his sisters' early stories, plays a considerable part in branwell's. _real life in verdopolis_ bears date . _the battle of washington_ is evidently a still more childish effusion. _caractacus_ is dated , and the poems and tiny romances continue steadily on through the years until they finally stop short in --when branwell is twenty years old--with a story entitled _percy_. by the light of subsequent events it is interesting to note that a manuscript of bears the title of _the liar detected_. it would be unfair to take these crude productions of branwell bronte's boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister's are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss branwell bronte once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account of the bronte circle. branwell was born at thornton in . when the family removed to haworth he studied at the grammar school, although, doubtless, he owed most of his earlier tuition to his father. when school days were over it was decided that he should be an artist. to a certain william robinson, of leeds, he was indebted for his first lessons. mrs. gaskell describes a life-size drawing of charlotte, emily, and anne which branwell painted about this period. the huge canvas stood for many years at the top of the staircase at the parsonage. { } in branwell went up to london with a view to becoming a pupil at the royal academy art schools. the reason for his almost immediate reappearance at haworth has never been explained. probably he wasted his money and his father refused supplies. he had certainly been sufficiently in earnest at the start, judging from this letter, of which i find a draft among his papers. to the secretary, royal academy of arts 'sir,--having an earnest desire to enter as probationary student in the royal academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire, i presume to request from you, as secretary to the institution, an answer to the questions-- 'where am i to present my drawings? 'at what time? and especially, 'can i do it in august or september? --your obedient servant, branwell bronte.' in we find him as 'brother' of the 'lodge of the three graces' at haworth. in the following year he is practising as an artist in bradford, and painting a number of portraits of the townsfolk. at this same period he wrote to wordsworth, sending verses, which he was at the time producing with due regularity. in january branwell became tutor in the family of mr. postlethwaite at broughton-in-furness. it was from that place that he wrote the incoherent and silly letter which has been more than once printed, and which merely serves to show that then, as always, he had an ill-regulated mind. it was from broughton-in-furness also that he addresses hartley coleridge, and the letters are worth printing if only on account of the similar destiny of the two men. to hartley coleridge 'broughton-in-furness, 'lancashire, _april_ _th_, . 'sir,--it is with much reluctance that i venture to request, for the perusal of the following lines, a portion of the time of one upon whom i can have no claim, and should not dare to intrude, but i do not, personally, know a man on whom to rely for an answer to the questions i shall put, and i could not resist my longing to ask a man from whose judgment there would be little hope of appeal. 'since my childhood i have been wont to devote the hours i could spare from other and very different employments to efforts at literary composition, always keeping the results to myself, nor have they in more than two or three instances been seen by any other. but i am about to enter active life, and prudence tells me not to waste the time which must make my independence; yet, sir, i like writing too well to fling aside the practice of it without an effort to ascertain whether i could turn it to account, not in _wholly_ maintaining myself, but in aiding my maintenance, for i do not sigh after fame, and am not ignorant of the folly or the fate of those who, without ability, would depend for their lives upon their pens; but i seek to know, and venture, though with shame, to ask from one whose word i must respect: whether, by periodical or other writing, i could please myself with writing, and make it subservient to living. 'i would not, with this view, have troubled you with a composition in verse, but any piece i have in prose would too greatly trespass upon your patience, which, i fear, if you look over the verse, will be more than sufficiently tried. 'i feel the egotism of my language, but i have none, sir, in my heart, for i feel beyond all encouragement from myself, and i hope for none from you. 'should you give any opinion upon what i send, it will, however condemnatory, be most gratefully received by,--sir, your most humble servant, 'p. b. bronte. '_p.s._--the first piece is only the sequel of one striving to depict the fall from unguided passion into neglect, despair, and death. it ought to show an hour too near those of pleasure for repentance, and too near death for hope. the translations are two out of many made from horace, and given to assist an answer to the question--would it be possible to obtain remuneration for translations for such as those from that or any other classic author?' branwell would appear to have gone over to ambleside to see hartley coleridge, if we may judge by that next letter, written from haworth upon his return. to hartley coleridge 'haworth, _june_ _th_, . 'sir,--you will, perhaps, have forgotten me, but it will be long before i forget my first conversation with a man of real intellect, in my first visit to the classic lakes of westmoreland. 'during the delightful day which i had the honour of spending with you at ambleside, i received permission to transmit to you, as soon as finished, the first book of a translation of horace, in order that, after a glance over it, you might tell me whether it was worth further notice or better fit for the fire. 'i have--i fear most negligently, and amid other very different employments--striven to translate two books, the first of which i have presumed to send to you. and will you, sir, stretch your past kindness by telling me whether i should amend and pursue the work or let it rest in peace? 'great corrections i feel it wants, but till i feel that the work might benefit me, i have no heart to make them; yet if your judgment prove in any way favourable, i will re-write the whole, without sparing labour to reach perfection. 'i dared not have attempted horace but that i saw the utter worthlessness of all former translations, and thought that a better one, by whomsoever executed, might meet with some little encouragement. i long to clear up my doubts by the judgment of one whose opinion i should revere, and--but i suppose i am dreaming--one to whom i should be proud indeed to inscribe anything of mine which any publisher would look at, unless, as is likely enough, the work would disgrace the name as much as the name would honour the work. 'amount of remuneration i should not look to--as anything would be everything--and whatever it might be, let me say that my bones would have no rest unless by written agreement a division should be made of the profits (little or much) between myself and him through whom alone i could hope to obtain a hearing with that formidable personage, a london bookseller. 'excuse my unintelligibility, haste, and appearance of presumption, and--believe me to be, sir, your most humble and grateful servant, 'p. b. bronte. 'if anything in this note should displease you, lay it, sir, to the account of inexperience and _not_ impudence.' in october , we find branwell clerk-in-charge at the station of sowerby bridge on the leeds and manchester railway, and the following year at luddenden foot, where mr. grundy, the railway engineer, became acquainted with him, and commenced the correspondence contained in _pictures of the past_. i have in my possession a small memorandum book, evidently used by branwell when engaged as a railway clerk. there are notes in it upon the then existing railways, demonstrating that he was trying to prime himself with the requisite facts and statistics for a career of that kind. but side by side with these are verses upon 'lord nelson,' 'robert burns,' and kindred themes, with such estimable sentiments as this:-- 'then england's love and england's tongue and england's heart shall reverence long the wisdom deep, the courage strong, of english johnson's name.' altogether a literary atmosphere had been kindled for the boy had he had the slightest strength of character to go with it. the railway company, however, were soon tired of his vagaries, and in the beginning of he returns to the haworth parsonage. the following letter to his friend mr. grundy is of biographical interest. to francis h. grundy '_october_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--there is no misunderstanding. i have had a long attendance at the death-bed of the rev. mr. weightman, one of my dearest friends, and now i am attending at the deathbed of my aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. i expect her to die in a few hours. 'as my sisters are far from home, i have had much on my mind, and these things must serve as an apology for what was never intended as neglect of your friendship to us. 'i had meant not only to have written to you, but to the rev. james martineau, gratefully and sincerely acknowledging the receipt of his most kindly and truthful criticism--at least in advice, though too generous far in praise; but one sad ceremony must, i fear, be gone through first. give my most sincere respects to mr. stephenson, and excuse this scrawl--my eyes are too dim with sorrow to see well.--believe me, your not very happy but obliged friend and servant, 'p. b. bronte.' a week later he writes to the same friend:-- 'i am incoherent, i fear, but i have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as i would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and i have now lost the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood. i have suffered much sorrow since i last saw you at haworth.' charlotte and anne, it will be remembered, were at this time on their way home from brussels, and anne had to seek relief from her governess bonds at mrs. robinson's. branwell would seem to have returned with anne to thorp green, as tutor to mr. robinson's son. he commenced his duties in december . it would not be rash to assume--although it is only an assumption--that branwell took to opium soon after he entered upon his duties at thorp green. i have already said something of the trouble which befel mrs. gaskell in accepting the statements of charlotte bronte, and--after charlotte's death--of her friends, to the effect that branwell became the prey of a designing woman, who promised to marry him when her husband--a venerable clergyman--should be dead. the story has been told too often. branwell was dismissed, and returned to the parsonage to rave about his wrongs. if mr. robinson should die, the widow had promised to marry him, he assured his friends. mr. robinson did die (may , ), and then branwell insisted that by his will he had prohibited his wife from marrying, under penalties of forfeiting the estate. a copy of the document is in my possession: _the eleventh day of september_ _the will of the reverend edmund robinson_, _late of thorp green_, _in the parish of little ouseburn_, _in the county of york_, _clerk_, _deceased_, _was proved in the prerogative court of york by the oaths of lydia robinson_, _widow_, _his relict_; _the venerable charles thorp and henry newton_, _the executors_, _to whom administration was granted_. needless to say, the will, a lengthy document, put no restraint whatever upon the actions of mrs. robinson. upon the publication of mrs. gaskell's life she was eager to clear her character in the law-courts, but was dissuaded therefrom by friends, who pointed out that a withdrawal of the obnoxious paragraphs in succeeding editions of the memoir, and the publication of a letter in the _times_, would sufficiently meet the case. here is the letter from the advertisement pages of the times. ' bedford row, 'london, _may_ _th_, . 'dear sirs,--as solicitor for and on behalf of the rev. w. gaskell and of mrs. gaskell, his wife, the latter of whom is authoress of the _life of charlotte bronte_, i am instructed to retract every statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed lady, referred to, but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, or of her social duties, and more especially of the statement contained in chapter of the first volume, and in chapter of the second volume, which imputes to the lady in question a guilty intercourse with the late branwell bronte. all those statements were made upon information which at the time mrs. gaskell believed to be well founded, but which, upon investigation, with the additional evidence furnished to me by you, i have ascertained not to be trustworthy. i am therefore authorised not only to retract the statements in question, but to express the deep regret of mrs. gaskell that she should have been led to make them.--i am, dear sirs, yours truly, 'william shaen. 'messrs. newton & robinson, solicitors, york.' a certain 'note' in the _athenaeum_ a few days later is not without interest now. 'we are sorry to be called upon to return to mrs. gaskell's _life of charlotte bronte_, but we must do so, since the book has gone forth with our recommendation. praise, it is needless to point out, implied trust in the biographer as an accurate collector of facts. this, we regret to state, mrs. gaskell proves not to have been. to the gossip which for weeks past has been seething and circulating in the london _coteries_, we gave small heed; but the _times_ advertises a legal apology, made on behalf of mrs. gaskell, withdrawing the statements put forth in her book respecting the cause of mr. branwell bronte's wreck and ruin. these mrs. gaskell's lawyer is now fain to confess his client advanced on insufficient testimony. the telling of an episodical and gratuitous tale so dismal as concerns the dead, so damaging to the living, could only be excused by the story of sin being severely, strictly true; and every one will have cause to regret that due caution was not used to test representations not, it seems, to be justified. it is in the interest of letters that biographers should be deterred from rushing into print with mere impressions in place of proofs, however eager and sincere those impressions may be. they _may be_ slanders, and as such they may sting cruelly. meanwhile the _life of charlotte bronte_ must undergo modification ere it can be further circulated.' meanwhile let us return to branwell bronte's life as it is contained in his sister's correspondence. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _rd_, . 'dear ellen,--i must write to you to-day whether i have anything to say or not, or else you will begin to think that i have forgotten you; whereas, never a day passes, seldom an hour, that i do not think of you, _and the scene of trial_ in which you live, move, and have your being. mary taylor's letter was deeply interesting and strongly characteristic. i have no news whatever to communicate. no changes take place here. branwell offers no prospect of hope; he professes to be too ill to think of seeking for employment; he makes comfort scant at home. i hold to my intention of going to brookroyd as soon as i can--that is, provided you will have me. 'give my best love to your mother and sisters.--yours, dear nell, always faithful, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i have often said and thought that you have had many and heavy trials to bear in your still short life. you have always borne them with great firmness and calm so far--i hope fervently you will still be enabled to do so. yet there is something in your letter that makes me fear the present is the greatest trial of all, and the most severely felt by you. i hope it will soon pass over and leave no shadow behind it. i do earnestly desire to be with you, to talk to you, to give you what comfort i can. branwell and anne leave us on saturday. branwell has been quieter and less irritable on the whole this time than he was in summer. anne is as usual--always good, mild, and patient. i think she too is a little stronger than she was.--good-bye, dear ellen, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i don't know whether most to thank you for the very pretty slippers you have sent me or to scold you for occasioning yourself, in the slightest degree, trouble or expense on my account. i will have them made up and bring them with me, if all be well, when i come to brookroyd. 'never doubt that i shall come to brookroyd as soon as i can, nell. i dare say my wish to see you is equal to your wish to see me. 'i had a note on saturday from ellen taylor, informing me that letters have been received from mary in new zealand, and that she was well and in good spirits. i suppose you have not yet seen them, as you do not mention them; but you will probably have them in your possession before you get this note. 'you say well in speaking of branwell that no sufferings are so awful as those brought on by dissipation. alas! i see the truth of this observation daily proved. 'your friends must have a weary and burdensome life of it in waiting upon _their_ unhappy brother. it seems grievous, indeed, that those who have not sinned should suffer so largely. 'write to me a little oftener, ellen--i am very glad to get your notes. remember me kindly to your mother and sisters.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i have not yet paid my usual visit to brookroyd, but i frequently hear from ellen, and she did not fail to tell me that you were gone into worcestershire. she was unable, however, to give me your address; had i known it i should have written to you long since. 'i thought you would wonder how we were getting on when you heard of the railway panic, and you may be sure i am very glad to be able to answer your kind inquiries by an assurance that our small capital is as yet undiminished. the "york and midland" is, as you say, a very good line, yet i confess to you i should wish, for my part, to be wise in time. i cannot think that even the very best lines will continue for many years at their present premiums, and i have been most anxious for us to sell our shares ere it be too late, and to secure the proceeds in some safer, if, for the present, less profitable investment. i cannot, however, persuade my sisters to regard the affair precisely from my point of view, and i feel as if i would rather run the risk of loss than hurt emily's feelings by acting in direct opposition to her opinion. she managed in a most handsome and able manner for me when i was at brussels, and prevented by distance from looking after my own interests; therefore, i will let her manage still, and take the consequences. disinterested and energetic she certainly is, and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as i could wish, i must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity. and as long as we can regard those we love, and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and very unshaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by, what appear to us, unreasonable and headstrong notions. you, my dear miss wooler, know full as well as i do the value of sisters' affection to each other; there is nothing like it in this world, i believe, when they are nearly equal in age, and similar in education, tastes, and sentiments. 'you ask about branwell. he never thinks of seeking employment, and i begin to fear he has rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life; besides, if money were at his disposal he would use it only to his own injury; the faculty of self-government is, i fear, almost destroyed in him. you ask me if i do not think men are strange beings. i do, indeed--i have often thought so; and i think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptations. girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world as if they, of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray. 'i am glad you like bromsgrove. i always feel a peculiar satisfaction when i hear of your enjoying yourself, because it proves to me that there is really such a thing as retributive justice even in this life; now you are free, and that while you have still, i hope, many years of vigour and health in which you can enjoy freedom. besides, i have another and very egotistical motive for being pleased: it seems that even "a lone woman" can be happy, as well as cherished wives and proud mothers. i am glad of that--i speculate much on the existence of unmarried and never-to-be married woman now-a-days, and i have already got to the point of considering that there is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly, without support of husband or mother, and who, having attained the age of forty-five or upwards, retains in her possession a well-regulated mind, a disposition to enjoy simple pleasures, fortitude to support inevitable pains, sympathy with the sufferings of others, and willingness to relieve want as far as her means extend. i wish to send this letter off by to-day's post, i must therefore conclude in haste.--believe me, my dear miss wooler, yours, most affectionately, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--you do not reproach me in your last, but i fear you must have thought me unkind in being so long without answering you. the fact is, i had hoped to be able to ask you to come to haworth. branwell seemed to have a prospect of getting employment, and i waited to know the result of his efforts in order to say, "dear ellen, come and see us"; but the place (a secretaryship to a railroad committee) is given to another person. branwell still remains at home, and while he is here you shall not come. i am more confirmed in that resolution the more i know of him. i wish i could say one word to you in his favour, but i cannot, therefore i will hold my tongue. 'emily and anne wish me to tell you that they think it very unlikely for little flossy to be expected to rear so numerous a family; they think you are quite right in protesting against all the pups being preserved, for, if kept, they will pull their poor little mother to pieces.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i assure you i was very glad indeed to get your last note; for when three or four days elapsed after my second despatch to you and i got no answer, i scarcely doubted something was wrong. it relieved me much to find my apprehensions unfounded. i return you miss ringrose's notes with thanks. i always like to read them, they appear to me so true an index of an amiable mind, and one not too conscious of its own worth; beware of awakening in her this consciousness by undue praise. it is the privilege of simple-hearted, sensible, but not brilliant people, that they can _be_ and _do_ good without comparing their own thoughts and actions too closely with those of other people, and thence drawing strong food for self-appreciation. talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them. i wish i could say anything favourable, but how can we be more comfortable so long as branwell stays at home, and degenerates instead of improving? it has been lately intimated to him, that he would be received again on the railroad where he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily, but he refuses to make an effort; he will not work; and at home he is a drain on every resource--an impediment to all happiness. but there is no use in complaining. 'my love to all. write again soon. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i was glad to perceive, by the tone of your last letter, that you are beginning to be a little more settled. we, i am sorry to say, have been somewhat more harassed than usual lately. the death of mr. robinson, which took place about three weeks or a month ago, served branwell for a pretext to throw all about him into hubbub and confusion with his emotions, etc., etc. shortly after came news from all hands that mr. robinson had altered his will before he died, and effectually prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow and branwell, by stipulating that she should not have a shilling if she ever ventured to re-open any communication with him. of course he then became intolerable. to papa he allows rest neither day nor night, and he is continually screwing money out of him, sometimes threatening that he will kill himself if it is withheld from him. he says mrs. robinson is now insane; that her mind is a complete wreck owing to remorse for her conduct towards mr. robinson (whose end it appears was hastened by distress of mind) and grief for having lost him. i do not know how much to believe of what he says, but i fear she is very ill. branwell declares that he neither can nor will do anything for himself. good situations have been offered him more than once, for which, by a fortnight's work, he might have qualified himself, but he will do nothing, except drink and make us all wretched. i had a note from ellen taylor a week ago, in which she remarks that letters were received from new zealand a month since, and that all was well. i should like to hear from you again soon. i hope one day to see brookroyd again, though i think it will not be yet--these are not times of amusement. love to all. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _march_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--branwell has been conducting himself very badly lately. i expect from the extravagance of his behaviour, and from mysterious hints he drops (for he never will speak out plainly), that we shall be hearing news of fresh debts contracted by him soon. the misses robinson, who had entirely ceased their correspondence with anne for half a year after their father's death, have lately recommenced it. for a fortnight they sent her a letter almost every day, crammed with warm protestations of endless esteem and gratitude. they speak with great affection too of their mother, and never make any allusion intimating acquaintance with her errors. we take special care that branwell does not know of their writing to anne. my health is better: i lay the blame of its feebleness on the cold weather more than on an uneasy mind, for, after all, i have many things to be thankful for. write again soon. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--we shall all be glad to see you on the thursday or friday of next week, whichever day will suit you best. about what time will you be likely to get here, and how will you come? by coach to keighley, or by a gig all the way to haworth? there must be no impediments now? i cannot do with them, i want very much to see you. i hope you will be decently comfortable while you stay. 'branwell is quieter now, and for a good reason: he has got to the end of a considerable sum of money, and consequently is obliged to restrict himself in some degree. you must expect to find him weaker in mind, and a complete rake in appearance. i have no apprehension of his being at all uncivil to you; on the contrary, he will be as smooth as oil. i pray for fine weather that we may be able to get out while you stay. goodbye for the present. prepare for much dulness and monotony. give my love to all at brookroyd. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_july_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--branwell is the same in conduct as ever. his constitution seems much shattered. papa, and sometimes all of us, have sad nights with him: he sleeps most of the day, and consequently will lie awake at night. but has not every house its trial? 'write to me very soon, dear nell, and--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' branwell bronte died on sunday, september the th, , { } and the two following letters from charlotte to her friend mr. williams are peculiarly interesting. to w. s. williams '_october_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--"we have hurried our dead out of our sight." a lull begins to succeed the gloomy tumult of last week. it is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve for those they lose. the removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. branwell was his father's and his sisters' pride and hope in boyhood, but since manhood the case has been otherwise. it has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled; to experience despair at last--and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career. 'i do not weep from a sense of bereavement--there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost--but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. my brother was a year my junior. i had aspirations and ambitions for him once, long ago--they have perished mournfully. nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings. there is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as i cannot describe. i trust time will allay these feelings. 'my poor father naturally thought more of his _only_ son than of his daughters, and, much and long as he had suffered on his account, he cried out for his loss like david for that of absalom--my son my son!--and refused at first to be comforted. and then when i ought to have been able to collect my strength and be at hand to support him, i fell ill with an illness whose approaches i had felt for some time previously, and of which the crisis was hastened by the awe and trouble of the death-scene--the first i had ever witnessed. the past has seemed to me a strange week. thank god, for my father's sake, i am better now, though still feeble. i wish indeed i had more general physical strength--the want of it is sadly in my way. i cannot do what i would do for want of sustained animal spirits and efficient bodily vigour. 'my unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature--he was not aware that they had ever published a line. we could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time mis-spent, and talents misapplied. now he will _never_ know. i cannot dwell longer on the subject at present--it is too painful. 'i thank you for your kind sympathy, and pray earnestly that your sons may all do well, and that you may be spared the sufferings my father has gone through.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i thank you for your last truly friendly letter, and for the number of _blackwood_ which accompanied it. both arrived at a time when a relapse of illness had depressed me much. both did me good, especially the letter. i have only one fault to find with your expressions of friendship: they make me ashamed, because they seem to imply that you think better of me than i merit. i believe you are prone to think too highly of your fellow-creatures in general--to see too exclusively the good points of those for whom you have a regard. disappointment must be the inevitable result of this habit. believe all men, and women too, to be dust and ashes--a spark of the divinity now and then kindling in the dull heap--that is all. when i looked on the noble face and forehead of my dead brother (nature had favoured him with a fairer outside, as well as a finer constitution, than his sisters) and asked myself what had made him go ever wrong, tend ever downwards, when he had so many gifts to induce to, and aid in, an upward course, i seemed to receive an oppressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity--of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness if unaided by religion and principle. in the value, or even the reality, of these two things he would never believe till within a few days of his end; and then all at once he seemed to open his heart to a conviction of their existence and worth. the remembrance of this strange change now comforts my poor father greatly. i myself, with painful, mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying moments; and to the last prayer which my father offered up at his bedside he added, "amen." how unusual that word appeared from his lips, of course you, who did not know him, cannot conceive. akin to this alteration was that in his feelings towards his relations--all the bitterness seemed gone. 'when the struggle was over, and a marble calm began to succeed the last dread agony, i felt, as i had never felt before, that there was peace and forgiveness for him in heaven. all his errors--to speak plainly, all his vices--seemed nothing to me in that moment: every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was left. if man can thus experience total oblivion of his fellow's imperfections, how much more can the eternal being, who made man, forgive his creature? 'had his sins been scarlet in their dye, i believe now they are white as wool. he is at rest, and that comforts us all. long before he quitted this world, life had no happiness for him. '_blackwood's_ mention of _jane eyre_ gratified me much, and will gratify me more, i dare say, when the ferment of other feelings than that of literary ambition shall have a little subsided in my mind. 'the doctor has told me i must not expect too rapid a restoration to health; but to-day i certainly feel better. i am thankful to say my father has hitherto stood the storm well; and so have my _dear_ sisters, to whose untiring care and kindness i am chiefly indebted for my present state of convalescence.--believe me, my dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' the last letter in order of date that i have concerning branwell is addressed to ellen nussey's sister:-- to miss mercy nussey 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'my dear miss nussey,--accept my sincere thanks for your kind letter. the event to which you allude came upon us with startling suddenness, and was a severe shock to us all. my poor brother has long had a shaken constitution, and during the summer his appetite had been diminished, and he had seemed weaker, but neither we, nor himself, nor any medical man who was consulted on the case, thought it one of immediate danger. he was out of doors two days before death, and was only confined to bed one single day. 'i thank you for your kind sympathy. many, under the circumstances, would think our loss rather a relief than otherwise; in truth, we must acknowledge, in all humility and gratitude, that god has greatly tempered judgment with mercy. but yet, as you doubtless know from experience, the last earthly separation cannot take place between near relatives without the keenest pangs on the part of the survivors. every wrong and sin is forgotten then, pity and grief share the heart and the memory between them. yet we are not without comfort in our affliction. a most propitious change marked the few last days of poor branwell's life: his demeanour, his language, his sentiments were all singularly altered and softened. this change could not be owing to the fear of death, for till within half-an-hour of his decease he seemed unconscious of danger. in god's hands we leave him: he sees not as man sees. 'papa, i am thankful to say, has borne the event pretty well. his distress was great at first--to lose an only son is no ordinary trial, but his physical strength has not hitherto failed him, and he has now in a great measure recovered his mental composure; my dear sisters are pretty well also. unfortunately, illness attacked me at the crisis when strength was most needed. i bore up for a day or two, hoping to be better, but got worse. fever, sickness, total loss of appetite, and internal pain were the symptoms. the doctor pronounced it to be bilious fever, but i think it must have been in a mitigated form; it yielded to medicine and care in a few days. i was only confined to my bed a week, and am, i trust, nearly well now. i felt it a grievous thing to be incapacitated from action and effort at a time when action and effort were most called for. the past month seems an overclouded period in my life. 'give my best love to mrs. nussey and your sister, and--believe me, my dear miss nussey, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' _my unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature_--_he was not aware that they had ever published a line_. who that reads these words addressed to mr. williams can for a moment imagine that charlotte is speaking other than the truth? and yet we have mr. grundy writing: _patrick bronte declared to me that he wrote a great portion of_ '_wuthering heights_' _himself_. and mr. george searle phillips, { } with more vivid imagination, describes branwell holding forth to his friends in the parlour of the black bull at haworth, upon the genius of his sisters, and upon the respective merits of _jane eyre_ and other works. mr. leyland is even so foolish as to compare branwell's poetry with emily's, to the advantage of the former--which makes further comment impossible. 'my unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature'--these words of charlotte's may be taken as final for all who had any doubts concerning the authorship of _wuthering heights_. chapter vi: emily jane bronte emily bronte is the sphinx of our modern literature. she came into being in the family of an obscure clergyman, and she went out of it at twenty-nine years of age without leaving behind her one single significant record which was any key to her character or to her mode of thought, save only the one famous novel, _wuthering heights_, and a few poems--some three or four of which will live in our poetic anthologies for ever. and she made no single friend other than her sister anne. with anne she must have corresponded during the two or three periods of her life when she was separated from that much loved sister; and we may be sure that the correspondence was of a singularly affectionate character. charlotte, who never came very near to her in thought or sympathy, although she loved her younger sister so deeply, addressed her in one letter 'mine own bonnie love'; and it is certain that her own letters to her two sisters, and particularly to anne, must have been peculiarly tender and in no way lacking in abundant self-revelation. when emily and anne had both gone to the grave, charlotte, it is probable, carefully destroyed every scrap of their correspondence, and, indeed, of their literary effects; and thus it is that, apart from her books and literary fragments, we know emily only by two formal letters to her sister's friend. beyond these there is not one scrap of information as to emily's outlook upon life. in infancy she went with charlotte to cowan bridge, and was described by the governess as 'a pretty little thing.' in girlhood she went to miss wooler's school at roe head; but there, unlike charlotte, she made no friends. she and anne were inseparable when at home, but of what they said to one another there is no record. the sisters must have differed in many ways. anne, gentle and persuasive, grew up like charlotte, devoted to the christianity of her father and mother, and entirely in harmony with all the conditions of a parsonage. it is impossible to think that the author of 'the old stoic' and 'last lines' was equally attached to the creeds of the churches; but what emily thought on religious subjects the world will never know. mrs. gaskell put to miss nussey this very question: 'what was emily's religion?' but emily was the last person in the world to have spoken to the most friendly of visitors about so sacred a theme. for a short time, as we know, emily was in a school at law hill near halifax--a miss patchet's. { a} she was, for a still longer period, at the heger pensionnat at brussels. mrs. gaskell's business was to write the life of charlotte bronte and not of her sister emily; and as a result there is little enough of emily in mrs. gaskell's book--no record of the halifax and brussels life as seen through emily's eyes. time, however, has brought its revenge. the cult which started with mr. sydney dobell, and found poetic expression in mr. matthew arnold's fine lines on her, 'whose soul knew no fellow for might, passion, vehemence, grief, daring, since byron died,' { b} culminated in an enthusiastic eulogy by mr. swinburne, who placed her in the very forefront of english women of genius. we have said that emily bronte is a sphinx whose riddle no amount of research will enable us to read; and this chapter, it may be admitted, adds but little to the longed-for knowledge of an interesting personality. one scrap of emily's handwriting, of a personal character, has indeed come to me--overlooked, i doubt not, by charlotte when she burnt her sister's effects. i have before me a little tin box about two inches long, which one day last year mr. nicholls turned out from the bottom of a desk. it is of a kind in which one might keep pins or beads, certainly of no value whatever apart from its associations. within were four little pieces of paper neatly folded to the size of a sixpence. these papers were covered with handwriting, two of them by emily, and two by anne bronte. they revealed a pleasant if eccentric arrangement on the part of the sisters, which appears to have been settled upon even after they had passed their twentieth year. they had agreed to write a kind of reminiscence every four years, to be opened by emily on her birthday. the papers, however, tell their own story, and i give first the two which were written in . emily writes at haworth, and anne from her situation as governess to mr. robinson's children at thorp green. at this time, at any rate, emily was fairly happy and in excellent health; and although it is five years from the publication of the volume of poems, she is full of literary projects, as is also her sister anne. the _gondaland chronicles_, to which reference is made, must remain a mystery for us. they were doubtless destroyed, with abundant other memorials of emily, by the heart-broken sister who survived her. we have plentiful material in the way of childish effort by charlotte and by branwell, but there is hardly a scrap in the early handwriting of emily and anne. this chapter would have been more interesting if only one possessed _solala vernon's life_ by anne bronte, or the _gondaland chronicles_ by emily! [picture: facsimile of page of emily bronte's diary] _a paper to be opened_ _when anne is_ _years old_, _or my next birthday after_ _if_ _all be well_. _emily jane bronte_. _july the_ _th_, . _it is friday evening_, _near o'clock_--_wild rainy weather_. _i am seated in the dining-room_, _having just concluded tidying our desk boxes_, _writing this document_. _papa is in the parlour_--_aunt upstairs in her room_. _she has been reading blackwood's magazine to papa_. _victoria and adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house_. _keeper is in the kitchen_--_hero in his cage_. _we are all stout and hearty_, _as i hope is the case with charlotte_, _branwell_, _and anne_, _of whom the first is at john white_, _esq._, _upperwood house_, _rawdon_; _the second is at luddenden foot_; _and the third is_, _i believe_, _at scarborough_, _enditing perhaps a paper corresponding to this_. _a scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own_; _as yet nothing is determined_, _but i hope and trust it may go on and prosper and answer our highest expectations_. _this day four years i wonder whether we shall still be dragging on in our present condition or established to our hearts' content_. _time will show_. _i guess that at the time appointed for the opening of this paper we_, i.e. _charlotte_, _anne_, _and i_, _shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary_, _having just gathered in for the midsummer ladyday_. _our debts will be paid off_, _and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount_. _papa_, _aunt_, _and branwell will either_ _have been or be coming to visit us_. _it will be a fine warm_, _summer evening_, _very different from this bleak look-out_, _and anne and i will perchance slip out into the garden for a few minutes to peruse our papers_. _i hope either this or something better will be the case_. _the_ gondaliand _are at present in a threatening state_, _but there is no open rupture as yet_. _all the princes and princesses of the royalty are at the palace of instruction_. _i have a good many books on hand_, _but i am sorry to say that as usual i make small progress with any_. _however_, _i have just made a new regularity paper_! _and i must verb sap to do great things_. _and now i close_, _sending from far an exhortation of courage_, _boys_! _courage_, _to exiled and harassed anne_, _wishing she was here_. anne, as i have said, writes from thorp green. _july the_ _th_, a.d. . _this is emily's birthday_. _she has now completed her_ _rd_ _year_, _and is_, _i believe_, _at home_. _charlotte is a governess in the family of mr. white_. _branwell is a clerk in the railroad station at luddenden foot_, _and i am a governess in the family of mr. robinson_. _i dislike the situation and wish to change it for another_. _i am now at scarborough_. _my pupils are gone to bed and i am hastening to finish this before i follow them_. _we are thinking of setting up a school of our own_, _but nothing definite is settled about it yet_, _and we do not know whether we shall be able to or not_. _i hope we shall_. _and i wonder what will be our condition and how or where we shall all be on this day four years hence_; _at which time_, _all be well_, _i shall be_ _years and_ _months old_, _emily will be_ _years old_, _branwell_ _years and_ _month_, _and charlotte_ _years and a quarter_. _we are now all separate and not likely to meet again for many a weary week_, _but we are none of us ill_ _that i know of and all are doing something for our own livelihood except emily_, _who_, _however_, _is as busy as any of us_, _and in reality earns her food and raiment as much as we do_. _how little know we what we are_ _how less what we may be_! _four years ago i was at school_. _since then i have been a governess at blake hall_, _left it_, _come to thorp green_, _and seen the sea and york minster_. _emily has been a teacher at miss patchet's school_, _and left it_. _charlotte has left miss wooler's_, _been a governess at mrs. sidgwick's_, _left her_, _and gone to mrs. white's_. _branwell has given up painting_, _been a tutor in cumberland_, _left it_, _and become a clerk on the railroad_. _tabby has left us_, _martha brown has come in her place_. _we have got keeper_, _got a sweet little cat and lost it_, _and also got a hawk_. _got a wild goose which has flown away_, _and three tame ones_, _one of which has been killed_. _all these diversities_, _with many others_, _are things we did not expect or foresee in the july of_ . _what will the next four years bring forth_? _providence only knows_. _but we ourselves have sustained very little alteration since that time_. _i have the same faults that i had then_, _only i have more wisdom and experience_, _and a little more self-possession than i then enjoyed_. _how will it be when we open this paper and the one emily has written_? _i wonder whether the gondaliand will still be flourishing_, _and what will be their condition_. _i am now engaged in writing the fourth volume of solala vernon's life_. _for some time i have looked upon_ _as a sort of era in my existence_. _it may prove a true presentiment_, _or it may be only a superstitious fancy_; _the latter seems most likely_, _but time will show_. _anne bronte_. let us next take up the other two little scraps of paper. they are dated july the th, , or emily's twenty-seventh birthday. many things have happened, as she says. she has been to brussels, and she has settled definitely at home again. they are still keenly interested in literature, and we still hear of the gondals. there is wonderfully little difference in the tone or spirit of the journals. the concluding 'best wishes for this whole house till july the th, , and as much longer as may be,' contain no premonition of coming disaster. yet july was to find branwell bronte on the verge of the grave, and emily on her deathbed. she died on the th of december of that year. _haworth_, _thursday_, _july_ _th_, . _my birthday_--_showery_, _breezy_, _cool_. _i am twenty-seven years old to-day_. _this morning anne and i opened the papers we wrote four years since_, _on my twenty-third birthday_. _this paper we intend_, _if all be well_, _to open on my thirtieth_--_three years hence_, _in_ . _since the_ _paper the following events have taken place_. _our school scheme has been abandoned_, _and instead charlotte and i went to brussels on the_ _th_ _of february_ . _branwell left his place at luddenden foot_. _c. and i returned from brussels_, _november_ _th_ , _in consequence of aunt's death_. _branwell went to thorp green as a tutor_, _where anne still continued_, _january_ . _charlotte returned to brussels the same month_, _and_, _after staying a year_, _came back again on new year's day_ . _anne left her situation at thorp green of her own accord_, _june_ . _anne and i went our first long journey by ourselves together_, _leaving home on the_ _th_ _of june_, _monday_, _sleeping at york_, _returning to keighley tuesday evening_, _sleeping there and walking home on wednesday morning_. _though the weather was broken we enjoyed ourselves very much_, _except during a few hours at bradford_. _and during our_ _excursion we were_, _ronald macalgin_, _henry angora_, _juliet augusteena_, _rosabella esmaldan_, _ella and julian egremont_, _catharine navarre_, _and cordelia fitzaphnold_, _escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious republicans_. _the gondals still flourish bright as ever_. _i am at present writing a work on the first war_. _anne has been writing some articles on this_, _and a book by henry sophona_. _we intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us_, _which i am glad to say they do at present_. _i should have mentioned that last summer the school scheme was revived in full vigour_. _we had prospectuses printed_, _despatched letters to all acquaintances imparting our plans_, _and did our little all_; _but it was found no go_. _now i don't desire a school at all_, _and none of us have any great longing for it_. _we have cash enough for our present wants_, _with a prospect of accumulation_. _we are all in decent health_, _only that papa has a complaint in his eyes_, _and with the exception of b._, _who_, _i hope_, _will be better and do better hereafter_. _i am quite contented for myself_: _not as idle as formerly_, _altogether as hearty_, _and having learnt to make the most of the present and long for the future with the fidgetiness that i cannot do all i wish_; _seldom or ever troubled with nothing to do_, _and merely desiring that everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding_, _and then we should have a very tolerable world of it_. _by mistake i find we have opened the paper on the_ _st_ _instead of the_ _th_. _yesterday was much such a day as this_, _but the morning was divine_. _tabby_, _who was gone in our last paper_, _is come back_, _and has lived with us two years and a half_; _and is in good health_. _martha_, _who also departed_, _is here too_. _we have got flossy_; _got and lost tiger_; _lost the hawk hero_, _which_, _with the geese_, _was given away_, _and is doubtless dead_, _for when i came back from brussels i inquired on all hands and could_ _hear nothing of him_. _tiger died early last year_. _keeper and flossy are well_, _also the canary acquired four years since_. _we are now all at home_, _and likely to be there some time_. _branwell went to liverpool on tuesday to stay a week_. _tabby has just been teasing me to turn as formerly to_ '_pilloputate_.' _anne and i should have picked the black currants if it had been fine and sunshiny_. _i must hurry off now to my turning and ironing_. _i have plenty of work on hands_, _and writing_, _and am altogether full of business_. _with best wishes for the whole house till_ , _july_ _th_, _and as much longer as may be_,--_i conclude_. _emily bronte_. finally, i give anne's last fragment, concerning which silence is essential. interpretation of most of the references would be mere guess-work. _thursday_, _july the_ _st_, . _yesterday was emily's birthday_, _and the time when we should have opened our_ _paper_, _but by mistake we opened it to-day instead_. _how many things have happened since it was written_--_some pleasant_, _some far otherwise_. _yet i was then at thorp green_, _and now i am only just escaped from it_. _i was wishing to leave it then_, _and if i had known that i had four years longer to stay how wretched i should have been_; _but during my stay i have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature_. _others have seen more changes_. _charlotte has left mr. white's and been twice to brussels_, _where she stayed each time nearly a year_. _emily has been there too_, _and stayed nearly a year_. _branwell has left luddenden foot_, _and been a tutor at thorp green_, _and had much tribulation and ill health_. _he was very ill on thursday_, _but he went with john brown to liverpool_, _where he now is_, _i suppose_; _and we hope he will be better and do better in future_. _this is a dismal_, _cloudy_, _wet evening_. _we have had so far a very cold wet summer_. _charlotte has lately been to hathersage_, _in_ _derbyshire_, _on a visit of three weeks to ellen nussey_. _she is now sitting sewing in the dining-room_. _emily is ironing upstairs_. _i am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender_. _papa is in the parlour_. _tabby and martha are_, _i think_, _in the kitchen_. _keeper and flossy are_, _i do not know where_. _little dick is hopping in his cage_. _when the last paper was written we were thinking of setting up a school_. _the scheme has been dropt_, _and long after taken up again and dropt again because we could not get pupils_. _charlotte is thinking about getting another situation_. _she wishes to go to paris_. _will she go_? _she has let flossy in_, _by-the-by_, _and he is now lying on the sofa_. _emily is engaged in writing the emperor julius's life_. _she has read some of it_, _and i want very much to hear the rest_. _she is writing some poetry_, _too_. _i wonder what it is about_? _i have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an individual_. _i wish i had finished it_. _this afternoon i began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at keighley_. _what sort of a hand shall i make of it_? _e. and i have a great deal of work to do_. _when shall we sensibly diminish it_? _i want to get a habit of early rising_. _shall i succeed_? _we have not yet finished our gondal chronicles that we began three years and a half ago_. _when will they be done_? _the gondals are at present in a sad state_. _the republicans are uppermost_, _but the royalists are not quite overcome_. _the young sovereigns_, _with their brothers and sisters_, _are still at the palace of instruction_. _the unique society_, _above half a year ago_, _were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from gaul_. _they are still there_, _but we have not played at them much yet_. _the gondals in general are not in first-rate playing condition_. _will they improve_? _i wonder how we shall all be and where and how situated on the thirtieth of july_ , _when_, _if we are all alive_, _emily will be just_ . _i shall_ _be in my_ th _year_, _charlotte in her_ rd, _and branwell in his_ nd; _and what changes shall we have seen and known_; _and shall we be much changed ourselves_? _i hope not_, _for the worse at least_. _i for my part cannot well be flatter or older in mind than i am now_. _hoping for the best_, _i conclude_. _anne bronte_. exactly fifty years were to elapse before these pieces of writing saw the light. the interest which must always centre in emily bronte amply justifies my publishing a fragment in facsimile; and it has the greater moment on account of the rough drawing which emily has made of herself and of her dog keeper. emily's taste for drawing is a pathetic element in her always pathetic life. i have seen a number of her sketches. there is one in the possession of mr. nicholls of keeper and flossy, the former the bull-dog which followed her to the grave, the latter a little king charlie which one of the miss robinsons gave to anne. the sketch, however, like most of emily's drawings, is technically full of errors. she was not a born artist, and possibly she had not the best opportunities of becoming one by hard work. another drawing before me is of the hawk mentioned in the above fragment; and yet another is of the dog growler, a predecessor of keeper, which is not, however, mentioned in the correspondence. upon emily bronte, the poet, i do not propose to write here. she left behind her, and charlotte preserved, a manuscript volume containing the whole of the poems in the two collections of her verse, and there are other poems not yet published. here, for example, are some verses in which the gondals make a slight reappearance. [picture: facsimile of two pages of emily bronte's diary] '_may_ _st_, . gleneden's dream. 'tell me, whether is it winter? say how long my sleep has been. have the woods i left so lovely lost their robes of tender green? 'is the morning slow in coming? is the night time loth to go? tell me, are the dreary mountains drearier still with drifted snow? '"captive, since thou sawest the forest, all its leaves have died away, and another march has woven garlands for another may. '"ice has barred the arctic waters; soft southern winds have set it free; and once more to deep green valley golden flowers might welcome thee." 'watcher in this lonely prison, shut from joy and kindly air, heaven descending in a vision taught my soul to do and bear. 'it was night, a night of winter, i lay on the dungeon floor, and all other sounds were silent-- all, except the river's roar. 'over death and desolation, fireless hearths, and lifeless homes; over orphans' heartsick sorrows, patriot fathers' bloody tombs; 'over friends, that my arms never might embrace in love again; memory ponderous until madness struck its poniard in my brain. 'deepest slumbers followed raving, yet, methought, i brooded still; still i saw my country bleeding, dying for a tyrant's will. 'not because my bliss was blasted, burned within the avenging flame; not because my scattered kindred died in woe or lived in shame. 'god doth know i would have given every bosom dear to me, could that sacrifice have purchased tortured gondal's liberty! 'but that at ambition's bidding all her cherished hopes should wane, that her noblest sons should muster, strive and fight and fall in vain. 'hut and castle, hall and cottage, roofless, crumbling to the ground, mighty heaven, a glad avenger thy eternal justice found. 'yes, the arm that once would shudder even to grieve a wounded deer, i beheld it, unrelenting, clothe in blood its sovereign's prayer. 'glorious dream! i saw the city blazing in imperial shine, and among adoring thousands stood a man of form divine. 'none need point the princely victim-- now he smiles with royal pride! now his glance is bright as lightning, now the knife is in his side! 'ah! i saw how death could darken, darken that triumphant eye! his red heart's blood drenched my dagger; my ear drank his dying sigh! 'shadows come! what means this midnight? o my god, i know it all! know the fever dream is over, unavenged, the avengers fall!' there are, indeed, a few fragments, all written in that tiny handwriting which the girls affected, and bearing various dates from to . a new edition of emily's poems, will, by virtue of these verses, have a singular interest for her admirers. with all her gifts as a poet, however, it is by _wuthering heights_ that emily bronte is best known to the world; and the weirdness and force of that book suggest an inquiry concerning the influences which produced it. dr. wright, in his entertaining book, _the brontes in ireland_, recounts the story of patrick bronte's origin, and insists that it was in listening to her father's anecdotes of his own irish experiences that emily obtained the weird material of _wuthering heights_. it is not, of course, enough to point out that dr. wright's story of the irish brontes is full of contradictions. a number of tales picked up at random from an illiterate peasantry might very well abound in inconsistencies, and yet contain some measure of truth. but nothing in dr. wright's narrative is confirmed, save only the fact that patrick bronte continued throughout his life in some slight measure of correspondence with his brothers and sisters--a fact rendered sufficiently evident by a perusal of his will. dr. wright tells of many visits to ireland in order to trace the bronte traditions to their source; and yet he had not--in his first edition--marked the elementary fact that the registry of births in county down records the existence of innumerable bruntys and of not a single bronte. dr. wright probably made his inquiries with the stories of emily and charlotte well in mind. he sought for similar traditions, and the quick-witted irish peasantry gave him all that he wanted. they served up and embellished the current traditions of the neighbourhood for his benefit, as the peasantry do everywhere for folklore enthusiasts. charlotte bronte's uncle hugh, we are told, read the _quarterly review_ article upon _jane eyre_, and, armed with a shillelagh, came to england, in order to wreak vengeance upon the writer of the bitter attack. he landed at liverpool, walked from liverpool to haworth, saw his nieces, who 'gathered round him,' and listened to his account of his mission. he then went to london and made abundant inquiries--but why pursue this ludicrous story further? in the first place, the _quarterly review_ article was published in december --after emily was dead, and while anne was dying. very soon after the review appeared charlotte was informed of its authorship, and references to miss rigby and the _quarterly_ are found more than once in her correspondence with mr. williams. { } this is a lengthy digression from the story of emily's life, but it is of moment to discover whether there is any evidence of influences other than those which her yorkshire home afforded. i have discussed the matter with miss ellen nussey, and with mr. nicholls. miss nussey never, in all her visits to haworth, heard a single reference to the irish legends related by dr. wright, and firmly believes them to be mythical. mr. nicholls, during the six years that he lived alone at the parsonage with his father-in-law, never heard one single word from mr. bronte--who was by no means disposed to reticence--about these stories, and is also of opinion that they are purely legendary. it has been suggested that emily would have been guilty almost of a crime to have based the more sordid part of her narrative upon her brother's transgressions. this is sheer nonsense. she wrote _wuthering heights_ because she was impelled thereto, and the book, with all its morbid force and fire, will remain, for all time, as a monument of the most striking genius that nineteenth century womanhood has given us. it was partly her life in yorkshire--the local colour was mainly derived from her brief experience as a governess at halifax--but it was partly, also, the german fiction which she had devoured during the brussels period, that inspired _wuthering heights_. here, however, are glimpses of emily bronte on a more human side. to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i got home safely, and was not too much tired on arriving at haworth. i feel rather better to-day than i have been, and in time i hope to regain more strength. i found emily and papa well, and a letter from branwell intimating that he and anne are pretty well too. emily is much obliged to you for the flower seeds. she wishes to know if the sicilian pea and crimson corn-flower are hardy flowers, or if they are delicate, and should be sown in warm and sheltered situations? tell me also if you went to mrs. john swain's on friday, and if you enjoyed yourself; talk to me, in short, as you would do if we were together. good-morning, dear nell; i shall say no more to you at present. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--we were all very glad to get your letter this morning. _we_, i say, as both papa and emily were anxious to hear of the safe arrival of yourself and the little _varmint_. { } as you conjecture, emily and i set-to to shirt-making the very day after you left, and we have stuck to it pretty closely ever since. we miss your society at least as much as you miss ours, depend upon it; would that you were within calling distance. be sure you write to me. i shall expect another letter on thursday--don't disappoint me. best regards to your mother and sisters.--yours, somewhat irritated, 'c. bronte.' earlier than this emily had herself addressed a letter to miss nussey, and, indeed, the two letters from emily bronte to ellen nussey which i print here are, i imagine, the only letters of emily's in existence. mr. nicholls informs me that he has never seen a letter in emily's handwriting. the following letter is written during charlotte's second stay in brussels, and at a time when ellen nussey contemplated joining her there--a project never carried out. to miss ellen nussey '_may_ , . 'dear miss nussey,--i should be wanting in common civility if i did not thank you for your kindness in letting me know of an opportunity to send postage free. 'i have written as you directed, though if next tuesday means to-morrow i fear it will be too late. charlotte has never mentioned a word about coming home. if you would go over for half-a-year, perhaps you might be able to bring her back with you--otherwise, she might vegetate there till the age of methuselah for mere lack of courage to face the voyage. 'all here are in good health; so was anne according to her last account. the holidays will be here in a week or two, and then, if she be willing, i will get her to write you a proper letter, a feat that i have never performed.--with love and good wishes, 'emily j. bronte.' the next letter is written at the time that charlotte is staying with her friend at mr. henry nussey's house at hathersage in derbyshire. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _february_ _th_, . 'dear miss nussey,--i fancy this note will be too late to decide one way or other with respect to charlotte's stay. yours only came this morning (wednesday), and unless mine travels faster you will not receive it till friday. papa, of course, misses charlotte, and will be glad to have her back. anne and i ditto; but as she goes from home so seldom, you may keep her a day or two longer, if your eloquence is equal to the task of persuading her--that is, if she still be with you when you get this permission. love from anne.--yours truly, 'emily j. bronte.' _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_, 'by ellis and acton bell,' were published together in three volumes in . the former novel occupied two volumes, and the latter one. by a strange freak of publishing, the book was issued as _wuthering heights_, vol. i. and ii., and _agnes grey_, vol. iii., in deference, it must be supposed, to the passion for the three volume novel. charlotte refers to the publication in the next letter, which contained as inclosure the second preface to _jane eyre_--the preface actually published. { } an earlier preface, entitled 'a word to the _quarterly_,' was cancelled. to w. s. williams '_december_ _st_, . 'dear sir,--i am, for my own part, dissatisfied with the preface i sent--i fear it savours of flippancy. if you see no objection i should prefer substituting the inclosed. it is rather more lengthy, but it expresses something i have long wished to express. 'mr. smith is kind indeed to think of sending me _the jar of honey_. when i receive the book i will write to him. i cannot thank you sufficiently for your letters, and i can give you but a faint idea of the pleasure they afford me; they seem to introduce such light and life to the torpid retirement where we live like dormice. but, understand this distinctly, you must never write to me except when you have both leisure and inclination. i know your time is too fully occupied and too valuable to be often at the service of any one individual. 'you are not far wrong in your judgment respecting _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_. ellis has a strong, original mind, full of strange though sombre power. when he writes poetry that power speaks in language at once condensed, elaborated, and refined, but in prose it breaks forth in scenes which shock more than they attract. ellis will improve, however, because he knows his defects. _agnes grey_ is the mirror of the mind of the writer. the orthography and punctuation of the books are mortifying to a degree: almost all the errors that were corrected in the proof-sheets appear intact in what should have been the fair copies. if mr. newby always does business in this way, few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.--believe me, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell.' when _jane eyre_ was performed at a london theatre--and it has been more than once adapted for the stage, and performed many hundreds of times in england and america--charlotte bronte wrote to her friend mr. williams as follows:-- to w. s. williams '_february_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--a representation of _jane eyre_ at a minor theatre would no doubt be a rather afflicting spectacle to the author of that work. i suppose all would be wofully exaggerated and painfully vulgarised by the actors and actresses on such a stage. what, i cannot help asking myself, would they make of mr. rochester? and the picture my fancy conjures up by way of reply is a somewhat humiliating one. what would they make of jane eyre? i see something very pert and very affected as an answer to that query. 'still, were it in my power, i should certainly make a point of being myself a witness of the exhibition. could i go quietly and alone, i undoubtedly should go; i should endeavour to endure both rant and whine, strut and grimace, for the sake of the useful observations to be collected in such a scene. 'as to whether i wish _you_ to go, that is another question. i am afraid i have hardly fortitude enough really to wish it. one can endure being disgusted with one's own work, but that a friend should share the repugnance is unpleasant. still, i know it would interest me to hear both your account of the exhibition and any ideas which the effect of the various parts on the spectators might suggest to you. in short, i should like to know what you would think, and to hear what you would say on the subject. but you must not go merely to satisfy my curiosity; you must do as you think proper. whatever you decide on will content me: if you do not go, you will be spared a vulgarising impression of the book; if you _do_ go, i shall perhaps gain a little information--either alternative has its advantage. { } 'i am glad to hear that the second edition is selling, for the sake of messrs. smith & elder. i rather feared it would remain on hand, and occasion loss. _wuthering heights_ it appears is selling too, and consequently mr. newby is getting into marvellously good tune with his authors.--i remain, my dear sir, yours faithfully, 'currer bell.' i print the above letter here because of its sequel, which has something to say of ellis--of emily bronte. to w. s. williams '_february_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--your letter, as you may fancy, has given me something to think about. it has presented to my mind a curious picture, for the description you give is so vivid, i seem to realise it all. i wanted information and i have got it. you have raised the veil from a corner of your great world--your london--and have shown me a glimpse of what i might call loathsome, but which i prefer calling _strange_. such, then, is a sample of what amuses the metropolitan populace! such is a view of one of their haunts! 'did i not say that i would have gone to this theatre and witnessed this exhibition if it had been in my power? what absurdities people utter when they speak of they know not what! 'you must try now to forget entirely what you saw. 'as to my next book, i suppose it will grow to maturity in time, as grass grows or corn ripens; but i cannot force it. it makes slow progress thus far: it is not every day, nor even every week that i can write what is worth reading; but i shall (if not hindered by other matters) be industrious when the humour comes, and in due time i hope to see such a result as i shall not be ashamed to offer you, my publishers, and the public. 'have you not two classes of writers--the author and the bookmaker? and is not the latter more prolific than the former? is he not, indeed, wonderfully fertile; but does the public, or the publisher even, make much account of his productions? do not both tire of him in time? 'is it not because authors aim at a style of living better suited to merchants, professed gain-seekers, that they are often compelled to degenerate to mere bookmakers, and to find the great stimulus of their pen in the necessity of earning money? if they were not ashamed to be frugal, might they not be more independent? 'i should much--very much--like to take that quiet view of the "great world" you allude to, but i have as yet won no right to give myself such a treat: it must be for some future day--when, i don't know. ellis, i imagine, would soon turn aside from the spectacle in disgust. i do not think he admits it as his creed that "the proper study of mankind is man"--at least not the artificial man of cities. in some points i consider ellis somewhat of a theorist: now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of mine, but certainly it often travels a different road. i should say ellis will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist. 'i return to you the note inclosed under your cover, it is from the editor of the _berwick warder_; he wants a copy of _jane eyre_ to review. 'with renewed thanks for your continued goodness to me,--i remain, my dear sir, yours faithfully, 'currer bell.' a short time afterwards the illness came to emily from which she died the same year. branwell died in september , and a month later charlotte writes with a heart full of misgivings:-- to miss ellen nussey '_october_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i am sorry you should have been uneasy at my not writing to you ere this, but you must remember it is scarcely a week since i received your last, and my life is not so varied that in the interim much should have occurred worthy of mention. you insist that i should write about myself; this puts me in straits, for i really have nothing interesting to say about myself. i think i have now nearly got over the effects of my late illness, and am almost restored to my normal condition of health. i sometimes wish that it was a little higher, but we ought to be content with such blessings as we have, and not pine after those that are out of our reach. i feel much more uneasy about my sisters than myself just now. emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. i fear she has pain in the chest, and i sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing, when she has moved at all quickly. she looks very, very thin and pale. her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. it is useless to question her--you get no answers. it is still more useless to recommend remedies--they are never adopted. nor can i shut my eyes to the fact of anne's great delicacy of constitution. the late sad event has, i feel, made me more apprehensive than common. i cannot help feeling much depressed sometimes. i try to leave all in god's hands; to trust in his goodness; but faith and resignation are difficult to practise under some circumstances. the weather has been most unfavourable for invalids of late: sudden changes of temperature, and cold penetrating winds have been frequent here. should the atmosphere become settled, perhaps a favourable effect might be produced on the general health, and those harassing coughs and colds be removed. papa has not quite escaped, but he has, so far, stood it out better than any of us. you must not mention my going to brookroyd this winter. i could not, and would not, leave home on any account. i am truly sorry to hear of miss heald's serious illness, it seems to me she has been for some years out of health now. these things make one _feel_ as well as _know_, that this world is not our abiding-place. we should not knit human ties too close, or clasp human affections too fondly. they must leave us, or we must leave them, one day. good-bye for the present. god restore health and strength to you and to all who need it.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have received, since i last wrote to you, two papers, the _standard of freedom_ and the _morning herald_, both containing notices of the poems; which notices, i hope, will at least serve a useful purpose to mr. smith in attracting public attention to the volume. as critiques, i should have thought more of them had they more fully recognised ellis bell's merits; but the lovers of abstract poetry are few in number. 'your last letter was very welcome, it was written with so kind an intention: you made it so interesting in order to divert my mind. i should have thanked you for it before now, only that i kept waiting for a cheerful day and mood in which to address you, and i grieve to say the shadow which has fallen on our quiet home still lingers round it. i am better, but others are ill now. papa is not well, my sister emily has something like slow inflammation of the lungs, and even our old servant, who lived with us nearly a quarter of a century, is suffering under serious indisposition. 'i would fain hope that emily is a little better this evening, but it is difficult to ascertain this. she is a real stoic in illness: she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy. to put any questions, to offer any aid, is to annoy; she will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not one of her ordinary avocations will she voluntarily renounce. you must look on and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word--a painful necessity for those to whom her health and existence are as precious as the life in their veins. when she is ill there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me. the tie of sister is near and dear indeed, and i think a certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to her more. but this is all family egotism (so to speak)--excuse it, and, above all, never allude to it, or to the name emily, when you write to me. i do not always show your letters, but i never withhold them when they are inquired after. 'i am sorry i cannot claim for the name bronte the honour of being connected with the notice in the _bradford observer_. that paper is in the hands of dissenters, and i should think the best articles are usually written by one or two intelligent dissenting ministers in the town. alexander harris { a} is fortunate in your encouragement, as currer bell once was. he has not forgotten the first letter he received from you, declining indeed his ms. of _the professor_, but in terms so different from those in which the rejections of the other publishers had been expressed--with so much more sense and kind feeling, it took away the sting of disappointment and kindled new hope in his mind. 'currer bell might expostulate with you again about thinking too well of him, but he refrains; he prefers acknowledging that the expression of a fellow creature's regard--even if more than he deserves--does him good: it gives him a sense of content. whatever portion of the tribute is unmerited on his part, would, he is aware, if exposed to the test of daily acquaintance, disperse like a broken bubble, but he has confidence that a portion, however minute, of solid friendship would remain behind, and that portion he reckons amongst his treasures. 'i am glad, by-the-bye, to hear that _madeline_ is come out at last, and was happy to see a favourable notice of that work and of _the three paths_ in the _morning herald_. i wish miss kavanagh all success. { b} 'trusting that mrs. williams's health continues strong, and that your own and that of all your children is satisfactory, for without health there is little comfort,--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' the next letter gives perhaps the most interesting glimpse of emily that has been afforded us. to w. s. williams '_november_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--i put your most friendly letter into emily's hands as soon as i had myself perused it, taking care, however, not to say a word in favour of homoeopathy--that would not have answered. it is best usually to leave her to form her own judgment, and _especially_ not to advocate the side you wish her to favour; if you do, she is sure to lean in the opposite direction, and ten to one will argue herself into non-compliance. hitherto she has refused medicine, rejected medical advice; no reasoning, no entreaty, has availed to induce her to see a physician. after reading your letter she said, "mr. williams's intention was kind and good, but he was under a delusion: homoeopathy was only another form of quackery." yet she may reconsider this opinion and come to a different conclusion; her second thoughts are often the best. 'the _north american review_ is worth reading; there is no mincing the matter there. what a bad set the bells must be! what appalling books they write! to-day, as emily appeared a little easier, i thought the _review_ would amuse her, so i read it aloud to her and anne. as i sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melancholy fireside, i studied the two ferocious authors. ellis, the "man of uncommon talents, but dogged, brutal, and morose," sat leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted; it is not his wont to laugh, but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened. acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly portrayed. i wonder what the reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity could he have beheld the pair as i did. vainly, too, might he have looked round for the masculine partner in the firm of "bell & co." how i laugh in my sleeve when i read the solemn assertions that _jane eyre_ was written in partnership, and that it "bears the marks of more than one mind and one sex." 'the wise critics would certainly sink a degree in their own estimation if they knew that yours or mr. smith's was the first masculine hand that touched the ms. of _jane eyre_, and that till you or he read it no masculine eye had scanned a line of its contents, no masculine ear heard a phrase from its pages. however, the view they take of the matter rather pleases me than otherwise. if they like, i am not unwilling they should think a dozen ladies and gentlemen aided at the compilation of the book. strange patchwork it must seem to them--this chapter being penned by mr., and that by miss or mrs. bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband, that other by the wife! the gentleman, of course, doing the rough work, the lady getting up the finer parts. i admire the idea vastly. 'i have read _madeline_. it is a fine pearl in simple setting. julia kavanagh has my esteem; i would rather know her than many far more brilliant personages. somehow my heart leans more to her than to eliza lynn, for instance. not that i have read either _amymone_ or _azeth_, but i have seen extracts from them which i found it literally impossible to digest. they presented to my imagination lytton bulwer in petticoats--an overwhelming vision. by-the-bye, the american critic talks admirable sense about bulwer--candour obliges me to confess that. 'i must abruptly bid you good-bye for the present.--yours sincerely, 'currer bell.' to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i duly received dr. curie's work on homoeopathy, and ought to apologise for having forgotten to thank you for it. i will return it when i have given it a more attentive perusal than i have yet had leisure to do. my sister has read it, but as yet she remains unshaken in her former opinion: she will not admit there can be efficacy in such a system. were i in her place, it appears to me that i should be glad to give it a trial, confident that it can scarcely do harm and might do good. 'i can give no favourable report of emily's state. my father is very despondent about her. anne and i cherish hope as well as we can, but her appearance and her symptoms tend to crush that feeling. yet i argue that the present emaciation, cough, weakness, shortness of breath are the results of inflammation, now, i trust, subsided, and that with time these ailments will gradually leave her. but my father shakes his head and speaks of others of our family once similarly afflicted, for whom he likewise persisted in hoping against hope, and who are now removed where hope and fear fluctuate no more. there were, however, differences between their case and hers--important differences i think. i must cling to the expectation of her recovery, i cannot renounce it. 'much would i give to have the opinion of a skilful professional man. it is easy, my dear sir, to say there is nothing in medicine, and that physicians are useless, but we naturally wish to procure aid for those we love when we see them suffer; most painful is it to sit still, look on, and do nothing. would that my sister added to her many great qualities the humble one of tractability! i have again and again incurred her displeasure by urging the necessity of seeking advice, and i fear i must yet incur it again and again. let me leave the subject; i have no right thus to make you a sharer in our sorrow. 'i am indeed surprised that mr. newby should say that he is to publish another work by ellis and acton bell. acton has had quite enough of him. i think i _have_ before intimated that that author never more intends to have mr. newby for a publisher. not only does he seem to forget that engagements made should be fulfilled, but by a system of petty and contemptible manoeuvring he throws an air of charlatanry over the works of which he has the management. this does not suit the "bells": they have their own rude north-country ideas of what is delicate, honourable, and gentlemanlike. 'newby's conduct in no sort corresponds with these notions; they have found him--i will not say what they have found him. two words that would exactly suit him are at my pen point, but i shall not take the trouble to employ them. 'ellis bell is at present in no condition to trouble himself with thoughts either of writing or publishing. should it please heaven to restore his health and strength, he reserves to himself the right of deciding whether or not mr. newby has forfeited every claim to his second work. 'i have not yet read the second number of _pendennis_. the first i thought rich in indication of ease, resource, promise; but it is not thackeray's way to develop his full power all at once. _vanity fair_ began very quietly--it was quiet all through, but the stream as it rolled gathered a resistless volume and force. such, i doubt not, will be the case with _pendennis_. 'you must forget what i said about eliza lynn. she may be the best of human beings, and i am but a narrow-minded fool to express prejudice against a person i have never seen. 'believe me, my dear sir, in haste, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' the next four letters speak for themselves. to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--your letter seems to relieve me from a difficulty and to open my way. i know it would be useless to consult drs. elliotson or forbes: my sister would not see the most skilful physician in england if he were brought to her just now, nor would she follow his prescription. with regard to homoeopathy, she has at least admitted that it cannot do much harm; perhaps if i get the medicines she may consent to try them; at any rate, the experiment shall be made. 'not knowing dr. epps's address, i send the inclosed statement of her case through your hands. { } 'i deeply feel both your kindness and mr. smith's in thus interesting yourselves in what touches me so nearly.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i mentioned your coming here to emily as a mere suggestion, with the faint hope that the prospect might cheer her, as she really esteems you perhaps more than any other person out of this house. i found, however, it would not do; any, the slightest excitement or putting out of the way is not to be thought of, and indeed i do not think the journey in this unsettled weather, with the walk from keighley and walk back, at all advisable for yourself. yet i should have liked to see you, and so would anne. emily continues much the same; yesterday i thought her a little better, but to-day she is not so well. i hope still, for i _must_ hope--she is dear to me as life. if i let the faintness of despair reach my heart i shall become worthless. the attack was, i believe, in the first place, inflammation of the lungs; it ought to have been met promptly in time. she is too intractable. i _do_ wish i knew her state and feelings more clearly. the fever is not so high as it was, but the pain in the side, the cough, the emaciation are there still. 'remember me kindly to all at brookroyd, and believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _st_, . 'my dear ellen,--emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. she will never suffer more in this world. she is gone, after a hard, short conflict. she died on _tuesday_, the very day i wrote to you. i thought it very possible she might be with us still for weeks, and a few hours afterwards she was in eternity. yes, there is no emily in time or on earth now. yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the church pavement. we are very calm at present. why should we be otherwise? the anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. we feel she is at peace. no need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. emily does not feel them. she died in a time of promise. we saw her taken from life in its prime. but it is god's will, and the place where she is gone is better than she has left.' to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i will write to you more at length when my heart can find a little rest--now i can only thank you very briefly for your letter, which seemed to me eloquent in its sincerity. 'emily is nowhere here now, her wasted mortal remains are taken out of the house. we have laid her cherished head under the church aisle beside my mother's, my two sisters'--dead long ago--and my poor, hapless brother's. but a small remnant of the race is left--so my poor father thinks. 'well, the loss is ours, not hers, and some sad comfort i take, as i hear the wind blow and feel the cutting keenness of the frost, in knowing that the elements bring her no more suffering; their severity cannot reach her grave; her fever is quieted, her restlessness soothed, her deep, hollow cough is hushed for ever; we do not hear it in the night nor listen for it in the morning; we have not the conflict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame before us--relentless conflict--once seen, never to be forgotten. a dreary calm reigns round us, in the midst of which we seek resignation. 'my father and my sister anne are far from well. as for me, god has hitherto most graciously sustained me; so far i have felt adequate to bear my own burden and even to offer a little help to others. i am not ill; i can get through daily duties, and do something towards keeping hope and energy alive in our mourning household. my father says to me almost hourly, "charlotte, you must bear up, i shall sink if you fail me"; these words, you can conceive, are a stimulus to nature. the sight, too, of my sister anne's very still but deep sorrow wakens in me such fear for her that i dare not falter. somebody _must_ cheer the rest. 'so i will not now ask why emily was torn from us in the fulness of our attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers; why her existence now lies like a field of green corn trodden down, like a tree in full bearing struck at the root. i will only say, sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest, and repeat again and again that emily knows that now.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' and then there are these last pathetic references to the beloved sister. to w. s. williams '_january_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--untoward circumstances come to me, i think, less painfully than pleasant ones would just now. the lash of the _quarterly_, however severely applied, cannot sting--as its praise probably would not elate me. currer bell feels a sorrowful independence of reviews and reviewers; their approbation might indeed fall like an additional weight on his heart, but their censure has no bitterness for him. 'my sister anne sends the accompanying answer to the letter received through you the other day; will you be kind enough to post it? she is not well yet, nor is papa, both are suffering under severe influenza colds. my letters had better be brief at present--they cannot be cheerful. i am, however, still sustained. while looking with dismay on the desolation sickness and death have wrought in our home, i can combine with awe of god's judgments a sense of gratitude for his mercies. yet life has become very void, and hope has proved a strange traitor; when i shall again be able to put confidence in her suggestions, i know not: she kept whispering that emily would not, _could_ not die, and where is she now? out of my reach, out of my world--torn from me.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' '_march_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--hitherto, i have always forgotten to acknowledge the receipt of the parcel from cornhill. it came at a time when i could not open it nor think of it; its contents are still a mystery. i will not taste, till i can enjoy them. i looked at it the other day. it reminded me too sharply of the time when the first parcel arrived last october: emily was then beginning to be ill--the opening of the parcel and examination of the books cheered her; their perusal occupied her for many a weary day. the very evening before her last morning dawned i read to her one of emerson's essays. i read on, till i found she was not listening--i thought to recommence next day. next day, the first glance at her face told me what would happen before night-fall. 'c. bronte.' '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i am very sorry to hear that mr. taylor's illness has proved so much more serious than was anticipated, but i do hope he is now better. that he should be quite well cannot be as yet expected, for i believe rheumatic fever is a complaint slow to leave the system it has invaded. 'now that i have almost formed the resolution of coming to london, the thought begins to present itself to me under a pleasant aspect. at first it was sad; it recalled the last time i went and with whom, and to whom i came home, and in what dear companionship i again and again narrated all that had been seen, heard, and uttered in that visit. emily would never go into any sort of society herself, and whenever i went i could on my return communicate to her a pleasure that suited her, by giving the distinct faithful impression of each scene i had witnessed. when pressed to go, she would sometimes say, "what is the use? charlotte will bring it all home to me." and indeed i delighted to please her thus. my occupation is gone now. 'i shall come to be lectured. i perceive you are ready with animadversion; you are not at all well satisfied on some points, so i will open my ears to hear, nor will i close my heart against conviction; but i forewarn you, i have my own doctrines, not acquired, but innate, some that i fear cannot be rooted up without tearing away all the soil from which they spring, and leaving only unproductive rock for new seed. 'i have read the _caxtons_, i have looked at _fanny hervey_. i think i will not write what i think of either--should i see you i will speak it. 'take a hundred, take a thousand of such works and weigh them in the balance against a page of thackeray. i hope mr. thackeray is recovered. 'the _sun_, the _morning herald_, and the _critic_ came this morning. none of them express disappointment from _shirley_, or on the whole compare her disadvantageously with _jane_. it strikes me that those worthies--the _athenaeum_, _spectator_, _economist_, made haste to be first with their notices that they might give the tone; if so, their manoeuvre has not yet quite succeeded. 'the _critic_, our old friend, is a friend still. why does the pulse of pain beat in every pleasure? ellis and acton bell are referred to, and where are they? i will not repine. faith whispers they are not in those graves to which imagination turns--the feeling, thinking, the inspired natures are beyond earth, in a region more glorious. i believe them blessed. i think, i _will_ think, my loss has been _their_ gain. does it weary you that i refer to them? if so, forgive me.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte. 'before closing this i glanced over the letter inclosed under your cover. did you read it? it is from a lady, not quite an old maid, but nearly one, she says; no signature or date; a queer, but good-natured production, it made me half cry, half laugh. i am sure _shirley_ has been exciting enough for her, and too exciting. i cannot well reply to the letter since it bears no address, and i am glad--i should not know what to say. she is not sure whether i am a gentleman or not, but i fancy she thinks so. have you any idea who she is? if i were a gentleman and like my heroes, she suspects she should fall in love with me. she had better not. it would be a pity to cause such a waste of sensibility. you and mr. smith would not let me announce myself as a single gentleman of mature age in my preface, but if you had permitted it, a great many elderly spinsters would have been pleased.' the last words that i have to say concerning emily are contained in a letter to me from miss ellen nussey. 'so very little is known of emily bronte,' she writes, 'that every little detail awakens an interest. her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely lovable; she invited confidence in her moral power. few people have the gift of looking and smiling as she could look and smile. one of her rare expressive looks was something to remember through life, there was such a depth of soul and feeling, and yet a shyness of revealing herself--a strength of self-containment seen in no other. she was in the strictest sense a law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law. she and gentle anne were to be seen twined together as united statues of power and humility. they were to be seen with their arms lacing each other in their younger days whenever their occupations permitted their union. on the top of a moor or in a deep glen emily was a child in spirit for glee and enjoyment; or when thrown entirely on her own resources to do a kindness, she could be vivacious in conversation and enjoy giving pleasure. a spell of mischief also lurked in her on occasions when out on the moors. she enjoyed leading charlotte where she would not dare to go of her own free-will. charlotte had a mortal dread of unknown animals, and it was emily's pleasure to lead her into close vicinity, and then to tell her of how and of what she had done, laughing at her horror with great amusement. if emily wanted a book she might have left in the sitting-room she would dart in again without looking at any one, especially if any guest were present. among the curates, mr. weightman was her only exception for any conventional courtesy. the ability with which she took up music was amazing; the style, the touch, and the expression was that of a professor absorbed heart and soul in his theme. the two dogs, keeper and flossy, were always in quiet waiting by the side of emily and anne during their breakfast of scotch oatmeal and milk, and always had a share handed down to them at the close of the meal. poor old keeper, emily's faithful friend and worshipper, seemed to understand her like a human being. one evening, when the four friends were sitting closely round the fire in the sitting-room, keeper forced himself in between charlotte and emily and mounted himself on emily's lap; finding the space too limited for his comfort he pressed himself forward on to the guest's knees, making himself quite comfortable. emily's heart was won by the unresisting endurance of the visitor, little guessing that she herself, being in close contact, was the inspiring cause of submission to keeper's preference. sometimes emily would delight in showing off keeper--make him frantic in action, and roar with the voice of a lion. it was a terrifying exhibition within the walls of an ordinary sitting-room. keeper was a solemn mourner at emily's funeral and never recovered his cheerfulness.' chapter vii: anne bronte it can scarcely be doubted that anne bronte's two novels, _agnes grey_ and _the tenant of wildfell hall_, would have long since fallen into oblivion but for the inevitable association with the romances of her two greater sisters. while this may he taken for granted, it is impossible not to feel, even at the distance of half a century, a sense of anne's personal charm. gentleness is a word always associated with her by those who knew her. when mr. nicholls saw what professed to be a portrait of anne in a magazine article, he wrote: 'what an awful caricature of the dear, gentle anne bronte!' mr. nicholls has a portrait of anne in his possession, drawn by charlotte, which he pronounces to be an admirable likeness, and this does convey the impression of a sweet and gentle nature. anne, as we have seen, was taken in long clothes from thornton to haworth. her godmother was a miss outhwaite, a fact i learn from an inscription in anne's _book of common prayer_. '_miss outhwaite to her goddaughter_, _anne bronte_, _july _ _th_, .' miss outhwaite was not forgetful of her goddaughter, for by her will she left anne pounds. there is a sampler worked by anne, bearing date january rd, , and there is a later book than the prayer book, with anne's name in it, and, as might be expected, it is a good-conduct prize. _prize for good conduct presented to miss a. bronte with miss wooler's kind love_, _roe head_, _dec._ _th_, , is the inscription in a copy of watt _on the improvement of the mind_. apart from the correspondence we know little more than this--that anne was the least assertive of the three sisters, and that she was more distinctly a general favourite. we have charlotte's own word for it that even the curates ventured upon 'sheep's eyes' at anne. we know all too little of her two experiences as governess, first at blake hall with mrs. ingham, and later at thorp green with mrs. robinson. the painful episode of branwell's madness came to disturb her sojourn at the latter place, but long afterwards her old pupils, the misses robinson, called to see her at haworth; and one of them, who became a mrs. clapham of keighley, always retained the most kindly memories of her gentle governess. [picture: anne bronte] with the exception of these two uncomfortable episodes as governess, anne would seem to have had no experience of the larger world. even before anne's death, charlotte had visited brussels, london, and hathersage (in derbyshire). anne never, i think, set foot out of her native county, although she was the only one of her family to die away from home. of her correspondence i have only the two following letters:-- to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'my dear miss nussey,--many thanks to you for your unexpected and welcome epistle. charlotte is well, and meditates writing to you. happily for all parties the east wind no longer prevails. during its continuance she complained of its influence as usual. i too suffered from it in some degree, as i always do, more or less; but this time, it brought me no reinforcement of colds and coughs, which is what i dread the most. emily considers it a very uninteresting wind, but it does not affect her nervous system. charlotte agrees with me in thinking the --- { a} a very provoking affair. you are quite mistaken about her parasol; she affirms she brought it back, and i can bear witness to the fact, having seen it yesterday in her possession. as for my book, i have no wish to see it again till i see you along with it, and then it will be welcome enough for the sake of the bearer. we are all here much as you left us. i have no news to tell you, except that mr. nicholls begged a holiday and went to ireland three or four weeks ago, and is not expected back till saturday; but that, i dare say, is no news at all. we were all and severally pleased and gratified for your kind and judiciously selected presents, from papa down to tabby, or down to myself, perhaps i ought rather to say. the crab-cheese is excellent, and likely to be very useful, but i don't intend to need it. it is not choice but necessity has induced me to choose such a tiny sheet of paper for my letter, having none more suitable at hand; but perhaps it will contain as much as you need wish to read, and i to write, for i find i have nothing more to say, except that your little tabby must be a charming little creature. that is all, for as charlotte is writing, or about to write to you herself, i need not send any messages from her. therefore accept my best love. i must not omit the major's { b} compliments. and--believe me to be your affectionate friend, 'anne bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'my dear miss nussey,--i am not going to give you a "nice _long_ letter"--on the contrary, i mean to content myself with a shabby little note, to be ingulfed in a letter of charlotte's, which will, of course, be infinitely more acceptable to you than any production of mine, though i do not question your friendly regard for me, or the indulgent welcome you would accord to a missive of mine, even without a more agreeable companion to back it; but you must know there is a lamentable deficiency in my organ of language, which makes me almost as bad a hand at writing as talking, unless i have something particular to say. i have now, however, to thank you and your friend for your kind letter and her pretty watch-guards, which i am sure we shall all of us value the more for being the work of her own hands. you do not tell us how _you_ bear the present unfavourable weather. we are all cut up by this cruel east wind. most of us, i.e. charlotte, emily, and i have had the influenza, or a bad cold instead, twice over within the space of a few weeks. papa has had it once. tabby has escaped it altogether. i have no news to tell you, for we have been nowhere, seen no one, and done nothing (to speak of) since you were here--and yet we contrive to be busy from morning till night. flossy is fatter than ever, but still active enough to relish a sheep-hunt. i hope you and your circle have been more fortunate in the matter of colds than we have. 'with kind regards to all,--i remain, dear miss nussey, yours ever affectionately, 'anne bronte.' _agnes grey_, as we have noted, was published by newby, in one volume, in . _the tenant of wildfell hall_ was issued by the same publisher, in three volumes, in . it is not generally known that _the tenant of wildfell hall_ went into a second edition the same year; and i should have pronounced it incredible, were not a copy of the later issue in my possession, that anne bronte had actually written a preface to this edition. the fact is entirely ignored in the correspondence. the preface in question makes it quite clear, if any evidence of that were necessary, that anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'i could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions i have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as i trusted none would fail to perceive; but i knew that such characters do exist, and if i have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.' 'one word more and i have done,' she continues. 'respecting the author's identity, i would have it to be distinctly understood that acton bell is neither currer nor ellis bell, and, therefore, let not his faults be attributed to them. as to whether the name is real or fictitious, it cannot greatly signify to those who know him only by his works.' to w. s. williams '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--in sitting down to write to you i feel as if i were doing a wrong and a selfish thing. i believe i ought to discontinue my correspondence with you till times change, and the tide of calamity which of late days has set so strongly in against us takes a turn. but the fact is, sometimes i feel it absolutely necessary to unburden my mind. to papa i must only speak cheeringly, to anne only encouragingly--to you i may give some hint of the dreary truth. 'anne and i sit alone and in seclusion as you fancy us, but we do not study. anne cannot study now, she can scarcely read; she occupies emily's chair; she does not get well. a week ago we sent for a medical man of skill and experience from leeds to see her. he examined her with the stethoscope. his report i forbear to dwell on for the present--even skilful physicians have often been mistaken in their conjectures. 'my first impulse was to hasten her away to a warmer climate, but this was forbidden: she must not travel; she is not to stir from the house this winter; the temperature of her room is to be kept constantly equal. 'had leave been given to try change of air and scene, i should hardly have known how to act. i could not possibly leave papa; and when i mentioned his accompanying us, the bare thought distressed him too much to be dwelt upon. papa is now upwards of seventy years of age; his habits for nearly thirty years have been those of absolute retirement; any change in them is most repugnant to him, and probably could not, at this time especially when the hand of god is so heavy upon his old age, be ventured upon without danger. 'when we lost emily i thought we had drained the very dregs of our cup of trial, but now when i hear anne cough as emily coughed, i tremble lest there should be exquisite bitterness yet to taste. however, i must not look forwards, nor must i look backwards. too often i feel like one crossing an abyss on a narrow plank--a glance round might quite unnerve. 'so circumstanced, my dear sir, what claim have i on your friendship, what right to the comfort of your letters? my literary character is effaced for the time, and it is by that only you know me. care of papa and anne is necessarily my chief present object in life, to the exclusion of all that could give me interest with my publishers or their connections. should anne get better, i think i could rally and become currer bell once more, but if otherwise, i look no farther: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. 'anne is very patient in her illness, as patient as emily was unflinching. i recall one sister and look at the other with a sort of reverence as well as affection--under the test of suffering neither has faltered. 'all the days of this winter have gone by darkly and heavily like a funeral train. since september, sickness has not quitted the house. it is strange it did not use to be so, but i suspect now all this has been coming on for years. unused, any of us, to the possession of robust health, we have not noticed the gradual approaches of decay; we did not know its symptoms: the little cough, the small appetite, the tendency to take cold at every variation of atmosphere have been regarded as things of course. i see them in another light now. 'if you answer this, write to me as you would to a person in an average state of tranquillity and happiness. i want to keep myself as firm and calm as i can. while papa and anne want me, i hope, i pray, never to fail them. were i to see you i should endeavour to converse on ordinary topics, and i should wish to write on the same--besides, it will be less harassing to yourself to address me as usual. 'may god long preserve to you the domestic treasures you value; and when bereavement at last comes, may he give you strength to bear it.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_february_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--anne seems so tranquil this morning, so free from pain and fever, and looks and speaks so like herself in health, that i too feel relieved, and i take advantage of the respite to write to you, hoping that my letter may reflect something of the comparative peace i feel. 'whether my hopes are quite fallacious or not, i do not know; but sometimes i fancy that the remedies prescribed by mr. teale, and approved--as i was glad to learn--by dr. forbes, are working a good result. consumption, i am aware, is a flattering malady, but certainly anne's illness has of late assumed a less alarming character than it had in the beginning: the hectic is allayed; the cough gives a more frequent reprieve. could i but believe she would live two years--a year longer, i should be thankful: i dreaded the terrors of the swift messenger which snatched emily from us, as it seemed, in a few days. 'the parcel came yesterday. you and mr. smith do nothing by halves. neither of you care for being thanked, so i will keep my gratitude in my own mind. the choice of books is perfect. papa is at this moment reading macaulay's _history_, which he had wished to see. anne is engaged with one of frederika bremer's tales. 'i wish i could send a parcel in return; i had hoped to have had one by this time ready to despatch. when i saw you and mr. smith in london, i little thought of all that was to come between july and spring: how my thoughts were to be caught away from imagination, enlisted and absorbed in realities the most cruel. 'i will tell you what i want to do; it is to show you the first volume of my ms., which i have copied. in reading mary barton (a clever though painful tale) i was a little dismayed to find myself in some measure anticipated both in subject and incident. i should like to have your opinion on this point, and to know whether the resemblance appears as considerable to a stranger as it does to myself. i should wish also to have the benefit of such general strictures and advice as you choose to give. shall i therefore send the ms. when i return the first batch of books? 'but remember, if i show it to you it is on two conditions: the first, that you give me a faithful opinion--i do not promise to be swayed by it, but i should like to have it; the second, that you show it and speak of it to _none_ but mr. smith. i have always a great horror of premature announcements--they may do harm and can never do good. mr. smith must be so kind as not to mention it yet in his quarterly circulars. all human affairs are so uncertain, and my position especially is at present so peculiar, that i cannot count on the time, and would rather that no allusion should be made to a work of which great part is yet to create. 'there are two volumes in the first parcel which, having seen, i cannot bring myself to part with, and must beg mr. smith's permission to retain: mr. thackeray's _journey from cornhill_, _etc_. and _the testimony to the truth_. that last is indeed a book after my own heart. i _do_ like the mind it discloses--it is of a fine and high order. alexander harris may be a clown by birth, but he is a nobleman by nature. when i could read no other book, i read his and derived comfort from it. no matter whether or not i can agree in all his views, it is the principles, the feelings, the heart of the man i admire. 'write soon and tell me whether you think it advisable that i should send the ms.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _february_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i send the parcel up without delay, according to your request. the manuscript has all its errors upon it, not having been read through since copying. i have kept _madeline_, along with the two other books i mentioned; i shall consider it the gift of miss kavanagh, and shall value it both for its literary excellence and for the modest merit of the giver. we already possess tennyson's _poems_ and _our street_. emerson's _essays_ i read with much interest, and often with admiration, but they are of mixed gold and clay--deep and invigorating truth, dreary and depressing fallacy seem to me combined therein. in george borrow's works i found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity (so to speak), which give them a stamp of their own. after reading his _bible in spain_ i felt as if i had actually travelled at his side, and seen the "wild sil" rush from its mountain cradle; wandered in the hilly wilderness of the sierras; encountered and conversed with manehegan, castillian, andalusian, arragonese, and, above all, with the savage gitanos. 'your mention of mr. taylor suggests to me that possibly you and mr. smith might wish him to share the little secret of the ms.--that exclusion might seem invidious, that it might make your mutual evening chat less pleasant. if so, admit him to the confidence by all means. he is attached to the firm, and will no doubt keep its secrets. i shall be glad of another censor, and if a severe one, so much the better, provided he is also just. i court the keenest criticism. far rather would i never publish more, than publish anything inferior to my first effort. be honest, therefore, all three of you. if you think this book promises less favourably than _jane eyre_, say so; it is but trying again, _i.e._, if life and health be spared. 'anne continues a little better--the mild weather suits her. at times i hear the renewal of hope's whisper, but i dare not listen too fondly; she deceived me cruelly before. a sudden change to cold would be the test. i dread such change, but must not anticipate. spring lies before us, and then summer--surely we may hope a little! 'anne expresses a wish to see the notices of the poems. you had better, therefore, send them. we shall expect to find painful allusions to one now above blame and beyond praise; but these must be borne. for ourselves, we are almost indifferent to censure. i read the _quarterly_ without a pang, except that i thought there were some sentences disgraceful to the critic. he seems anxious to let it be understood that he is a person well acquainted with the habits of the upper classes. be this as it may, i am afraid he is no gentleman; and moreover, that no training could make him such. { } many a poor man, born and bred to labour, would disdain that reviewer's cast of feeling.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--my sister still continues better: she has less languor and weakness; her spirits are improved. this change gives cause, i think, both for gratitude and hope. 'i am glad that you and mr. smith like the commencement of my present work. i wish it were _more than a commencement_; for how it will be reunited after the long break, or how it can gather force of flow when the current has been checked or rather drawn off so long, i know not. 'i sincerely thank you both for the candid expression of your objections. what you say with reference to the first chapter shall be duly weighed. at present i feel reluctant to withdraw it, because, as i formerly said of the lowood part of _jane eyre_, _it is true_. the curates and their ongoings are merely photographed from the life. i should like you to explain to me more fully the ground of your objections. is it because you think this chapter will render the work liable to severe handling by the press? is it because knowing as you now do the identity of "currer bell," this scene strikes you as unfeminine? is it because it is intrinsically defective and inferior? i am afraid the two first reasons would not weigh with me--the last would. 'anne and i thought it very kind in you to preserve all the notices of the poems so carefully for us. some of them, as you said, were well worth reading. we were glad to find that our old friend the _critic_ has again a kind word for us. i was struck with one curious fact, viz., that four of the notices are fac-similes of each other. how does this happen? i suppose they copy.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--anne's state has apparently varied very little during the last fortnight or three weeks. i wish i could say she gains either flesh, strength, or appetite; but there is no progress on these points, nor i hope, as far as regards the two last at least, any falling off; she is piteously thin. her cough, and the pain in her side continue the same. 'i write these few lines that you may not think my continued silence strange; anything like frequent correspondence i cannot keep up, and you must excuse me. i trust you and all at brookroyd are happy and well. give my love to your mother and all the rest, and--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--my sister has been something worse since i wrote last. we have had nearly a week of frost, and the change has tried her, as i feared it would do, though not so severely as former experience had led me to apprehend. i am thankful to say she is now again a little better. her state of mind is usually placid, and her chief sufferings consist in the harassing cough and a sense of languor. 'i ought to have acknowledged the safe arrival of the parcel before now, but i put it off from day to day, fearing i should write a sorrowful letter. a similar apprehension induces me to abridge this note. 'believe me, whether in happiness or the contrary, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'dear laetitia,--i have not quite forgotten you through the winter, but i have remembered you only like some pleasant waking idea struggling through a dreadful dream. you say my last letter was dated september th. you ask how i have passed the time since. what has happened to me? why have i been silent? 'it is soon told. 'on the th of september my only brother, after being long in weak health, and latterly consumptive--though we were far from apprehending immediate danger--died, quite suddenly as it seemed to us. he had been out two days before. the shock was great. ere he could be interred i fell ill. a low nervous fever left me very weak. as i was slowly recovering, my sister emily, whom you knew, was seized with inflammation of the lungs; suppuration took place; two agonising months of hopes and fears followed, and on the th of december _she died_. 'she was scarcely cold in her grave when anne, my youngest and last sister, who has been delicate all her life, exhibited symptoms that struck us with acute alarm. we sent for the first advice that could be procured. she was examined with the stethoscope, and the dreadful fact was announced that her lungs too were affected, and that tubercular consumption had already made considerable progress. a system of treatment was prescribed, which has since been ratified by the opinion of dr. forbes, whom your papa will, i dare say, know. i hope it has somewhat delayed disease. she is now a patient invalid, and i am her nurse. god has hitherto supported me in some sort through all these bitter calamities, and my father, i am thankful to say, has been wonderfully sustained; but there have been hours, days, weeks of inexpressible anguish to undergo, and the cloud of impending distress still lowers dark and sullen above us. i cannot write much. i can only pray providence to preserve you and yours from such affliction as he has seen good to accumulate on me and mine. 'with best regards to your dear mamma and all your circle,--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i have delayed answering your letter in the faint hope that i might be able to reply favourably to your inquiries after my sister's health. this, however, is not permitted me to do. her decline is gradual and fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful. the symptoms of cough, pain in the side and chest, wasting of flesh, strength, and appetite, after the sad experience we have had, cannot but be regarded by us as equivocal. 'in spirit she is resigned; at heart she is, i believe, a true christian. she looks beyond this life, and regards her home and rest as elsewhere than on earth. may god support her and all of us through the trial of lingering sickness, and aid her in the last hour when the struggle which separates soul from body must be gone through! 'we saw emily torn from the midst of us when our hearts clung to her with intense attachment, and when, loving each other as we did--well, it seemed as if (might we but have been spared to each other) we could have found complete happiness in our mutual society and affection. she was scarcely buried when anne's health failed, and we were warned that consumption had found another victim in her, and that it would be vain to reckon on her life. 'these things would be too much if reason, unsupported by religion, were condemned to bear them alone. i have cause to be most thankful for the strength which has hitherto been vouchsafed both to my father and myself. god, i think, is specially merciful to old age; and for my own part, trials which in prospective would have seemed to me quite intolerable, when they actually came, i endured without prostration. yet, i must confess, that in the time which has elapsed since emily's death, there have been moments of solitary, deep, inert affliction, far harder to bear than those which immediately followed our loss. the crisis of bereavement has an acute pang which goads to exertion, the desolate after-feeling sometimes paralyses. 'i have learned that we are not to find solace in our own strength: we must seek it in god's omnipotence. fortitude is good, but fortitude itself must be shaken under us to teach us how weak we are. 'with best wishes to yourself and all dear to you, and sincere thanks for the interest you so kindly continue to take in me and my sister,--believe me, my dear miss wooler, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--your kind advice on the subject of homoeopathy deserves and has our best thanks. we find ourselves, however, urged from more than one quarter to try different systems and medicines, and i fear we have already given offence by not listening to all. the fact is, were we in every instance compliant, my dear sister would be harassed by continual changes. cod-liver oil and carbonate of iron were first strongly recommended. anne took them as long as she could, but at last she was obliged to give them up: the oil yielded her no nutriment, it did not arrest the progress of emaciation, and as it kept her always sick, she was prevented from taking food of any sort. hydropathy was then strongly advised. she is now trying gobold's vegetable balsam; she thinks it does her some good; and as it is the first medicine which has had that effect, she would wish to persevere with it for a time. she is also looking hopefully forward to deriving benefit from change of air. we have obtained mr. teale's permission to go to the seaside in the course of six or eight weeks. at first i felt torn between two duties--that of staying with papa and going with anne; but as it is papa's own most kindly expressed wish that i should adopt the latter plan, and as, besides, he is now, thank god! in tolerable health, i hope to be spared the pain of resigning the care of my sister to other hands, however friendly. we wish to keep together as long as we can. i hope, too, to derive from the change some renewal of physical strength and mental composure (in neither of which points am i what i ought or wish to be) to make me a better and more cheery nurse. 'i fear i must have seemed to you hard in my observations about _the emigrant family_. the fact was, i compared alexander harris with himself only. it is not equal to the _testimony to the truth_, but, tried by the standard of other and very popular books too, it is very clever and original. both subject and the manner of treating it are unhackneyed: he gives new views of new scenes and furnishes interesting information on interesting topics. considering the increasing necessity for and tendency to emigration, i should think it has a fair chance of securing the success it merits. 'i took up leigh hunt's book _the town_ with the impression that it would be interesting only to londoners, and i was surprised, ere i had read many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy style, varied knowledge, just views, and kindly spirit. there is something peculiarly anti-melancholic in leigh hunt's writings, and yet they are never boisterous. they resemble sunshine, being at once bright and tranquil. 'i like carlyle better and better. his style i do not like, nor do i always concur in his opinions, nor quite fall in with his hero worship; but there is a manly love of truth, an honest recognition and fearless vindication of intrinsic greatness, of intellectual and moral worth, considered apart from birth, rank, or wealth, which commands my sincere admiration. carlyle would never do for a contributor to the _quarterly_. i have not read his _french revolution_. 'i congratulate you on the approaching publication of mr. ruskin's new work. if the _seven lamps of architecture_ resemble their predecessor, _modern painters_, they will be no lamps at all, but a new constellation--seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world ought to be anxiously agaze. 'do not ask me to mention what books i should like to read. half the pleasure of receiving a parcel from cornhill consists in having its contents chosen for us. we like to discover, too, by the leaves cut here and there, that the ground has been travelled before us. i may however say, with reference to works of fiction, that i should much like to see one of godwin's works, never having hitherto had that pleasure--_caleb williams_ or _fleetwood_, or which you thought best worth reading. 'but it is yet much too soon to talk of sending more books; our present stock is scarcely half exhausted. you will perhaps think i am a slow reader, but remember, currer bell is a country housewife, and has sundry little matters connected with the needle and kitchen to attend to which take up half his day, especially now when, alas! there is but one pair of hands where once there were three. i did not mean to touch that chord, its sound is too sad. 'i try to write now and then. the effort was a hard one at first. it renewed the terrible loss of last december strangely. worse than useless did it seem to attempt to write what there no longer lived an "ellis bell" to read; the whole book, with every hope founded on it, faded to vanity and vexation of spirit. 'one inducement to persevere and do my best i still have, however, and i am thankful for it: i should like to please my kind friends at cornhill. to that end i wish my powers would come back; and if it would please providence to restore my remaining sister, i think they would. 'do not forget to tell me how you are when you write again. i trust your indisposition is quite gone by this time.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i returned mary taylor's letter to hunsworth as soon as i had read it. thank god she was safe up to that time, but i do not think the earthquake was then over. i shall long to hear tidings of her again. 'anne was worse during the warm weather we had about a week ago. she grew weaker, and both the pain in her side and her cough were worse; strange to say, since it is colder, she has appeared rather to revive than sink. i still hope that if she gets over may she may last a long time. 'we have engaged lodgings at scarbro'. we stipulated for a good-sized sitting-room and an airy double-bedded lodging room, with a sea view, and if not deceived, have obtained these desiderata at no. cliff. anne says it is one of the best situations in the place. it would not have done to have taken lodgings either in the town or on the bleak steep coast, where miss wooler's house is situated. if anne is to get any good she must have every advantage. miss outhwaite [her godmother] left her in her will a legacy of pounds, and she cannot employ her money better than in obtaining what may prolong existence, if it does not restore health. we hope to leave home on the rd, and i think it will be advisable to rest at york, and stay all night there. i hope this arrangement will suit you. we reckon on your society, dear ellen, as a real privilege and pleasure. we shall take little luggage, and shall have to buy bonnets and dresses and several other things either at york or scarbro'; which place do you think would be best? oh, if it would please god to strengthen and revive anne, how happy we might be together! his will, however, must be done, and if she is not to recover, it remains to pray for strength and patience. 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i hasten to acknowledge the two kind letters for which i am indebted to you. that fine spring weather of which you speak did not bring such happiness to us in its sunshine as i trust it did to you and thousands besides--the change proved trying to my sister. for a week or ten days i did not know what to think, she became so weak, and suffered so much from increased pain in the side, and aggravated cough. the last few days have been much colder, yet, strange to say, during their continuance she has appeared rather to revive than sink. she not unfrequently shows the very same symptoms which were apparent in emily only a few days before she died--fever in the evenings, sleepless nights, and a sort of lethargy in the morning hours; this creates acute anxiety--then comes an improvement, which reassures. in about three weeks, should the weather be genial and her strength continue at all equal to the journey, we hope to go to scarboro'. it is not without misgiving that i contemplate a departure from home under such circumstances; but since she herself earnestly wishes the experiment to be tried, i think it ought not to be neglected. we are in god's hands, and must trust the results to him. an old school-fellow of mine, a tried and faithful friend, has volunteered to accompany us. i shall have the satisfaction of leaving papa to the attentions of two servants equally tried and faithful. one of them is indeed now old and infirm, and unfit to stir much from her chair by the kitchen fireside; but the other is young and active, and even she has lived with us seven years. i have reason, therefore, you see, to be thankful amidst sorrow, especially as papa still possesses every faculty unimpaired, and though not robust, has good general health--a sort of chronic cough is his sole complaint. 'i hope mr. smith will not risk a cheap edition of _jane eyre_ yet, he had better wait awhile--the public will be sick of the name of that one book. i can make no promise as to when another will be ready--neither my time nor my efforts are my own. that absorption in my employment to which i gave myself up without fear of doing wrong when i wrote _jane eyre_, would now be alike impossible and blamable; but i do what i can, and have made some little progress. we must all be patient. 'meantime, i should say, let the public forget at their ease, and let us not be nervous about it. and as to the critics, if the bells possess real merit, i do not fear impartial justice being rendered them one day. i have a very short mental as well as physical sight in some matters, and am far less uneasy at the idea of public impatience, misconstruction, censure, etc., than i am at the thought of the anxiety of those two or three friends in cornhill to whom i owe much kindness, and whose expectations i would earnestly wish not to disappoint. if they can make up their minds to wait tranquilly, and put some confidence in my goodwill, if not my power, to get on as well as may be, i shall not repine; but i verily believe that the "nobler sex" find it more difficult to wait, to plod, to work out their destiny inch by inch, than their sisters do. they are always for walking so fast and taking such long steps, one cannot keep up with them. one should never tell a gentleman that one has commenced a task till it is nearly achieved. currer bell, even if he had no let or hindrance, and if his path were quite smooth, could never march with the tread of a scott, a bulwer, a thackeray, or a dickens. i want you and mr. smith clearly to understand this. i have always wished to guard you against exaggerated anticipations--calculate low when you calculate on me. an honest man--and woman too--would always rather rise above expectation than fall below it. 'have i lectured enough? and am i understood? 'give my sympathising respects to mrs. williams. i hope her little daughter is by this time restored to perfect health. it pleased me to see with what satisfaction you speak of your son. i was glad, too, to hear of the progress and welfare of miss kavanagh. the notices of mr. harris's works are encouraging and just--may they contribute to his success! 'should mr. thackeray again ask after currer bell, say the secret is and will be well kept because it is not worth disclosure. this fact his own sagacity will have already led him to divine. in the hope that it may not be long ere i hear from you again,--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _may_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i will lose no time in thanking you for your letter and kind offer of assistance. we have, however, already engaged lodgings. i am not myself acquainted with scarbro', but anne knows it well, having been there three or four times. she had a particular preference for the situation of some lodgings (no. cliff). we wrote about them, and finding them disengaged, took them. your information is, notwithstanding, valuable, should we find this place in any way ineligible. it is a satisfaction to be provided with directions for future use. 'next wednesday is the day fixed for our departure. ellen nussey accompanies us (by anne's expressed wish). i could not refuse her society, but i dared not urge her to go, for i have little hope that the excursion will be one of pleasure or benefit to those engaged in it. anne is extremely weak. she herself has a fixed impression that the sea air will give her a chance of regaining strength; that chance, therefore, we must have. having resolved to try the experiment, misgivings are useless; and yet, when i look at her, misgivings will rise. she is more emaciated than emily was at the very last; her breath scarcely serves her to mount the stairs, however slowly. she sleeps very little at night, and often passes most of the forenoon in a semi-lethargic state. still, she is up all day, and even goes out a little when it is fine. fresh air usually acts as a stimulus, but its reviving power diminishes. 'with best wishes for your own health and welfare,--believe me, my dear miss wooler, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams 'no. cliff, scarboro', _may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--the date above will inform you why i have not answered your last letter more promptly. i have been busy with preparations for departure and with the journey. i am thankful to say we reached our destination safely, having rested one night at york. we found assistance wherever we needed it; there was always an arm ready to do for my sister what i was not quite strong enough to do: lift her in and out of the carriages, carry her across the line, etc. 'it made her happy to see both york and its minster, and scarboro' and its bay once more. there is yet no revival of bodily strength--i fear indeed the slow ebb continues. people who see her tell me i must not expect her to last long--but it is something to cheer her mind. 'our lodgings are pleasant. as anne sits at the window she can look down on the sea, which this morning is calm as glass. she says if she could breathe more freely she would be comfortable at this moment--but she cannot breathe freely. 'my friend ellen is with us. i find her presence a solace. she is a calm, steady girl--not brilliant, but good and true. she suits and has always suited me well. i like her, with her phlegm, repose, sense, and sincerity, better than i should like the most talented without these qualifications. 'if ever i see you again i should have pleasure in talking over with you the topics you allude to in your last--or rather, in hearing _you_ talk them over. we see these things through a glass darkly--or at least i see them thus. so far from objecting to speculation on, or discussion of, the subject, i should wish to hear what others have to say. by _others_, i mean only the serious and reflective--levity in such matters shocks as much as hypocrisy. 'write to me. in this strange place your letters will come like the visits of a friend. fearing to lose the post, i will add no more at present.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--my poor sister is taken quietly home at last. she died on monday. with almost her last breath she said she was happy, and thanked god that death was come, and come so gently. i did not think it would be so soon. 'you will not expect me to add more at present.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_june_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i am now again at home, where i returned last thursday. i call it _home_ still--much as london would be called london if an earthquake should shake its streets to ruins. but let me not be ungrateful: haworth parsonage is still a home for me, and not quite a ruined or desolate home either. papa is there, and two most affectionate and faithful servants, and two old dogs, in their way as faithful and affectionate--emily's large house-dog which lay at the side of her dying bed, and followed her funeral to the vault, lying in the pew couched at our feet while the burial service was being read--and anne's little spaniel. the ecstasy of these poor animals when i came in was something singular. at former returns from brief absences they always welcomed me warmly--but not in that strange, heart-touching way. i am certain they thought that, as i was returned, my sisters were not far behind. but here my sisters will come no more. keeper may visit emily's little bed-room--as he still does day by day--and flossy may look wistfully round for anne, they will never see them again--nor shall i--at least the human part of me. i must not write so sadly, but how can i help thinking and feeling sadly? in the daytime effort and occupation aid me, but when evening darkens, something in my heart revolts against the burden of solitude--the sense of loss and want grows almost too much for me. i am not good or amiable in such moments, i am rebellious, and it is only the thought of my dear father in the next room, or of the kind servants in the kitchen, or some caress from the poor dogs, which restores me to softer sentiments and more rational views. as to the night--could i do without bed, i would never seek it. waking, i think, sleeping, i dream of them; and i cannot recall them as they were in health, still they appear to me in sickness and suffering. still, my nights were worse after the first shock of branwell's death--they were terrible then; and the impressions experienced on waking were at that time such as we do not put into language. worse seemed at hand than was yet endured--in truth, worse awaited us. 'all this bitterness must be tasted. perhaps the palate will grow used to the draught in time, and find its flavour less acrid. this pain must be undergone; its poignancy, i trust, will be blunted one day. ellen would have come back with me but i would not let her. i knew it would be better to face the desolation at once--later or sooner the sharp pang must be experienced. 'labour must be the cure, not sympathy. labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow. the society of a calm, serenely cheerful companion--such as ellen--soothes pain like a soft opiate, but i find it does not probe or heal the wound; sharper, more severe means, are necessary to make a remedy. total change might do much; where that cannot be obtained, work is the best substitute. 'i by no means ask miss kavanagh to write to me. why should she trouble herself to do it? what claim have i on her? she does not know me--she cannot care for me except vaguely and on hearsay. i have got used to your friendly sympathy, and it comforts me. i have tried and trust the fidelity of one or two other friends, and i lean upon it. the natural affection of my father and the attachment and solicitude of our two servants are precious and consolatory to me, but i do not look round for general pity; conventional condolence i do not want, either from man or woman. 'the letter you inclosed in your last bore the signature h. s. mayers--the address, sheepscombe, stroud, gloucestershire; can you give me any information respecting the writer? it is my intention to acknowledge it one day. i am truly glad to hear that your little invalid is restored to health, and that the rest of your family continue well. mrs. williams should spare herself for her husband's and children's sake. her life and health are too valuable to those round her to be lavished--she should be careful of them.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' it is not necessary to tell over again the story of anne's death. miss ellen nussey, who was an eye witness, has related it once for all in mrs. gaskell's memoir. the tomb at scarborough hears the following inscription:-- here lie the remains of anne bronte daughter of the rev. p. bronte incumbent of haworth, yorkshire _she died_, _aged_ , _may_ _th_, chapter viii: ellen nussey if to be known by one's friends is the index to character that it is frequently assumed to be, charlotte bronte comes well out of that ordeal. she was discriminating in friendship and leal to the heart's core. with what gratitude she thought of the publisher who gave her the 'first chance' we know by recognising that the manly dr. john of _villette_ was mr. george smith of smith & elder. mr. w. s. williams, again, would seem to have been a singularly gifted and amiable man. to her three girl friends, ellen nussey, mary taylor, and laetitia wheelwright, she was loyal to her dying day, and pencilled letters to the two of them who were in england were written in her last illness. of all her friends, ellen nussey must always have the foremost place in our esteem. like mary taylor, she made charlotte's acquaintance when, at fifteen years of age, she first went to roe head school. mrs. gaskell has sufficiently described the beginnings of that friendship which death was not to break. ellen nussey and charlotte bronte corresponded with a regularity which one imagines would be impossible had they both been born half a century later. the two girls loved one another profoundly. they wrote at times almost daily. they quarrelled occasionally over trifles, as friends will, but charlotte was always full of contrition when a few hours had passed. towards the end of her life she wrote to mr. williams a letter concerning miss nussey which may well be printed here. to w. s. williams '_january_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have to acknowledge the receipt of the _morning chronicle_ with a good review, and of the _church of england quarterly_ and the _westminster_ with bad ones. i have also to thank you for your letter, which would have been answered sooner had i been alone; but just now i am enjoying the treat of my friend ellen's society, and she makes me indolent and negligent--i am too busy talking to her all day to do anything else. you allude to the subject of female friendships, and express wonder at the infrequency of sincere attachments amongst women. as to married women, i can well understand that they should be absorbed in their husbands and children--but single women often like each other much, and derive great solace from their mutual regard. friendship, however, is a plant which cannot be forced. true friendship is no gourd, springing in a night and withering in a day. when i first saw ellen i did not care for her; we were school-fellows. in course of time we learnt each other's faults and good points. we were contrasts--still, we suited. affection was first a germ, then a sapling, then a strong tree--now, no new friend, however lofty or profound in intellect--not even miss martineau herself--could be to me what ellen is; yet she is no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred yorkshire girl. she is without romance. if she attempts to read poetry, or poetic prose, aloud, i am irritated and deprive her of the book--if she talks of it, i stop my ears; but she is good; she is true; she is faithful, and i love her. 'since i came home, miss martineau has written me a long and truly kindly letter. she invites me to visit her at ambleside. i like the idea. whether i can realise it or not, it is pleasant to have in prospect. 'you ask me to write to mrs. williams. i would rather she wrote to me first; and let her send any kind of letter she likes, without studying mood or manner.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' good, true, faithful--friendship has no sweeter words than these; and it was this loyalty in miss nussey which has marked her out in our day as a fine type of sweet womanliness, and will secure to her a lasting name as the friend of charlotte bronte. miss ellen nussey was one of a large family of children, all of whom she survives. her home during the years of her first friendship with charlotte bronte was at the rydings, at that time the property of an uncle, reuben walker, a distinguished court physician. the family in that generation and in this has given many of its members to high public service in various professions. two nusseys, indeed, and two walkers, were court physicians in their day. when earl fitzwilliam was canvassing for the county in , he was a guest at the rydings for two weeks, and on his election was chaired by the tenantry. reuben walker, this uncle of miss nussey's, was the only justice of the peace for the district which included leeds, bradford, huddersfield, and halifax, during the luddite riots--a significant reminder of the growth of population since that day. ellen nussey's home was at the rydings, then tenanted by her brother john, until , and she then removed to brookroyd, where she lived until long after charlotte bronte died. the first letter to ellen nussey is dated may , , charlotte having become her school-fellow in the previous january. it would seem to have been a mere play exercise across the school-room, as the girls were then together at roe head. [picture: ellen nussey as schoolgirl and adult] 'dear miss nussey,--i take advantage of the earliest opportunity to thank you for the letter you favoured me with last week, and to apologise for having so long neglected to write to you; indeed, i believe this will be the first letter or note i have ever addressed to you. i am extremely obliged to mary for her kind invitation, and i assure you that i should very much have liked to hear the lectures on galvanism, as they would doubtless have been amusing and instructive. but we are often compelled to bend our inclination to our duty (as miss wooler observed the other day), and since there are so many holidays this half-year, it would have appeared almost unreasonable to ask for an extra holiday; besides, we should perhaps have got behindhand with our lessons, so that, everything considered, it is perhaps as well that circumstances have deprived us of this pleasure.--believe me to remain, your affectionate friend, 'c. bronte.' but by the christmas holidays, 'dear miss nussey' has become 'dear ellen,' and the friendship has already well commenced. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--the receipt of your letter gave me an agreeable surprise, for notwithstanding your faithful promises, you must excuse me if i say that i had little confidence in their fulfilment, knowing that when school girls once get home they willingly abandon every recollection which tends to remind them of school, and indeed they find such an infinite variety of circumstances to engage their attention and employ their leisure hours, that they are easily persuaded that they have no time to fulfil promises made at school. it gave me great pleasure, however, to find that you and miss taylor are exceptions to the general rule. the cholera still seems slowly advancing, but let us yet hope, knowing that all things are under the guidance of a merciful providence. england has hitherto been highly favoured, for the disease has neither raged with the astounding violence, nor extended itself with the frightful rapidity which marked its progress in many of the continental countries.--from your affectionate friend, 'charlotte bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i believe we agreed to correspond once a month. that space of time has now elapsed since i received your last interesting letter, and i now therefore hasten to reply. accept my congratulations on the arrival of the new year, every succeeding day of which will, i trust, find you _wiser_ and _better_ in the true sense of those much-used words. the first day of january always presents to my mind a train of very solemn and important reflections, and a question more easily asked than answered frequently occurs, viz.--how have i improved the past year, and with what good intentions do i view the dawn of its successor? these, my dearest ellen, are weighty considerations which (young as we are) neither you nor i can too deeply or too seriously ponder. i am sorry your too great diffidence, arising, i think, from the want of sufficient confidence in your own capabilities, prevented you from writing to me in french, as i think the attempt would have materially contributed to your improvement in that language. you very kindly caution me against being tempted by the fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance, and then in a parenthesis you beg me not to be offended. o ellen, do you think i could be offended by any good advice you may give me? no, i thank you heartily, and love you, if possible, better for it. i am glad you like _kenilworth_. it is certainly a splendid production, more resembling a romance than a novel, and, in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great sir walter's pen. i was exceedingly amused at the characteristic and naive manner in which you expressed your detestation of varney's character--so much so, indeed, that i could not forbear laughing aloud when i perused that part of your letter. he is certainly the personification of consummate villainy; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly artful mind, scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge. excuse the want of news in this very barren epistle, for i really have none to communicate. emily and anne beg to be kindly remembered to you. give my best love to your mother and sisters, and as it is very late permit me to conclude with the assurance of my unchanged, unchanging, and unchangeable affection for you.--adieu, my sweetest ellen, i am ever yours, 'charlotte.' here is a pleasant testimony to miss nussey's attractions from emily and anne. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _september_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i have hitherto delayed answering your last letter because from what you said i imagined you might be from home. since you were here emily has been very ill. her ailment was erysipelas in the arm, accompanied by severe bilious attacks, and great general debility. her arm was obliged to be cut in order to relieve it. it is now, i am happy to say, nearly healed--her health is, in fact, almost perfectly re-established. the sickness still continues to recur at intervals. were i to tell you of the impression you have made on every one here you would accuse me of flattery. papa and aunt are continually adducing you as an example for me to shape my actions and behaviour by. emily and anne say "they never saw any one they liked so well as miss nussey," and tabby talks a great deal more nonsense about you than i choose to report. you must read this letter, dear ellen, without thinking of the writing, for i have indited it almost all in the twilight. it is now so dark that, notwithstanding the singular property of "seeing in the night-time" which the young ladies at roe head used to attribute to me, i can scribble no longer. all the family unite with me in wishes for your welfare. remember me respectfully to your mother and sisters, and supply all those expressions of warm and genuine regard which the increasing darkness will not permit me to insert. 'charlotte bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _february_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--my letters are scarcely worth the postage, and therefore i have, till now, delayed answering your last communication; but upwards of two months having elapsed since i received it, i have at length determined to take up my pen in reply lest your anger should be roused by my apparent negligence. it grieved me extremely to hear of your precarious state of health. i trust sincerely that your medical adviser is mistaken in supposing you have any tendency to a pulmonary affection. dear ellen, that would indeed be a calamity. i have seen enough of consumption to dread it as one of the most insidious and fatal diseases incident to humanity. but i repeat it, i _hope_, nay _pray_, that your alarm is groundless. if you remember, i used frequently to tell you at school that you were constitutionally nervous--guard against the gloomy impressions which such a state of mind naturally produces. take constant and regular exercise, and all, i doubt not, will yet be well. what a remarkable winter we have had! rain and wind continually, but an almost total absence of frost and snow. has _general_ ill health been the consequence of wet weather at birstall or not? with us an unusual number of deaths have lately taken place. according to custom i have no news to communicate, indeed i do not write either to retail gossip or to impart solid information; my motives for maintaining our mutual correspondence are, in the first place, to get intelligence from you, and in the second that we may remind each other of our separate existences; without some such medium of reciprocal converse, according to the nature of things, _you_, who are surrounded by society and friends, would soon forget that such an insignificant being as myself ever lived. _i_, however, in the solitude of our wild little hill village, think of my only unrelated friend, my dear ci-devant school companion daily--nay, almost hourly. now ellen, don't you think i have very cleverly contrived to make up a letter out of nothing? goodbye, dearest. that god may bless you is the earnest prayer of your ever faithful friend, 'charlotte bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i have been a long while, a very long while without writing to you. a letter i received from mary taylor this morning reminded me of my neglect, and made me instantly sit down to atone for it, if possible. she tells me your aunt, of brookroyd, is dead, and that sarah is very ill; for this i am truly sorry, but i hope her case is not yet without hope. you should however remember that death, should it happen, will undoubtedly be great gain to her. in your last, dear ellen, you ask my opinion respecting the amusement of dancing, and whether i thought it objectionable when indulged in for an hour or two in parties of boys and girls. i should hesitate to express a difference of opinion from mr. atkinson, but really the matter seems to me to stand thus: it is allowed on all hands that the sin of dancing consists not in the mere action of shaking the shanks (as the scotch say), but in the consequences that usually attend it--namely, frivolity and waste of time; when it is used only, as in the case you state, for the exercise and amusement of an hour among young people (who surely may without any breach of god's commandments be allowed a little light-heartedness), these consequences cannot follow. ergo (according to my manner of arguing), the amusement is at such times perfectly innocent. having nothing more to say, i will conclude with the expression of my sincere and earnest attachment for, ellen, your own dear self. 'charlotte bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dearest ellen,--i thought it better not to answer your kind letter too soon, lest i should (in the present fully occupied state of your time) appear intrusive. i am happy to inform you papa has given me permission to accept the invitation it conveyed, and ere long i hope once more to have the pleasure of seeing _almost_ the _only_ and certainly the _dearest_ friend i possess (out of our own family). i leave it to you to fix the time, only requesting you not to appoint too early a day; let it be a fortnight or three weeks at least from the date of the present letter. i am greatly obliged to you for your kind offer of meeting me at bradford, but papa thinks that such a plan would involve uncertainty, and be productive of trouble to you. he recommends that i should go direct in a gig from haworth at the time you shall determine, or, if that day should prove unfavourable, the first subsequent fine one. such an arrangement would leave us both free, and if it meets with your approbation would perhaps be the best we could finally resolve upon. excuse the brevity of this epistle, dear ellen, for i am in a great hurry, and we shall, i trust, soon see each other face to face, which will be better than a hundred letters. give my respectful love to your mother and sisters, accept the kind remembrances of all our family, and--believe me in particular to be, your firm and faithful friend, 'charlotte bronte. '_p.s._--you ask me to stay a month when i come, but as i do not wish to tire you with my company, and as, besides, papa and aunt both think a fortnight amply sufficient, i shall not exceed that period. farewell, _dearest_, _dearest_.' to miss ellen nussey 'roe head, _september_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--you are far too kind and frequent in your invitations. you puzzle me: i hardly know how to refuse, and it is still more embarrassing to accept. at any rate, i cannot come this week, for we are in the very thickest _melee_ of the repetitions; i was hearing the terrible fifth section when your note arrived. but miss wooler says i must go to gomersall next friday as she promised for me on whitsunday; and on sunday morning i will join you at church, if it be convenient, and stay at rydings till monday morning. there's a free and easy proposal! miss wooler has driven me to it--she says her character is implicated! i am very sorry to hear that your mother has been ill. i do hope she is better now, and that all the rest of the family are well. will you be so kind as to deliver the accompanying note to miss taylor when you see her at church on sunday? dear ellen, excuse the most horrid scrawl ever penned by mortal hands. remember me to your mother and sisters, and--believe me, e. nussey's friend, 'charlotte.' to miss ellen nussey '_february_ _th_, . 'i read your letter with dismay, ellen--what shall i do without you? why are we so to be denied each other's society? it is an inscrutable fatality. i long to be with you because it seems as if two or three days or weeks spent in your company would beyond measure strengthen me in the enjoyment of those feelings which i have so lately begun to cherish. you first pointed out to me that way in which i am so feebly endeavouring to travel, and now i cannot keep you by my side, i must proceed sorrowfully alone. 'why are we to be divided? surely, ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well--of losing sight of the _creator_ in idolatry of the _creature_. at first i could not say, "thy will be done." i felt rebellious; but i know it was wrong to feel so. being left a moment alone this morning i prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to _every_ decree of god's will--though it should be dealt forth with a far severer hand than the present disappointment. since then, i have felt calmer and humbler--and consequently happier. last sunday i took up my bible in a gloomy frame of mind; i began to read; a feeling stole over me such as i have not known for many long years--a sweet placid sensation like those that i remember used to visit me when i was a little child, and on sunday evenings in summer stood by the open window reading the life of a certain french nobleman who attained a purer and higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the early martyrs. i thought of my own ellen--i wished she had been near me that i might have told her how happy i was, how bright and glorious the pages of god's holy word seemed to me. but the "foretaste" passed away, and earth and sin returned. i must see you before you go, ellen; if you cannot come to roe head i will contrive to walk over to brookroyd, provided you will let me know the time of your departure. should you not be at home at easter i dare not promise to accept your mother's and sisters' invitation. i should be miserable at brookroyd without you, yet i would contrive to visit them for a few hours if i could not for a few days. i love them for your sake. i have written this note at a venture. when it will reach you i know not, but i was determined not to let slip an opportunity for want of being prepared to embrace it. farewell, may god bestow on you all his blessings. my darling--farewell. perhaps you may return before midsummer--do you think you possibly can? i wish your brother john knew how unhappy i am; he would almost pity me. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'my dearest ellen,--the inclosed, as you will perceive, was written before i received your last. i had intended to send it by this, but what you said altered my intention. i scarce dare build a hope on the foundation your letter lays--we have been disappointed so often, and i fear i shall not be able to prevail on them to part with you; but i will try my utmost, and at any rate there is a chance of our meeting soon; with that thought i will comfort myself. you do not know how selfishly _glad_ i am that you still continue to dislike london and the londoners--it seems to afford a sort of proof that your affections are not changed. shall we really stand once again together on the moors of haworth? i _dare_ not flatter myself with too sanguine an expectation. i see many doubts and difficulties. but with miss wooler's leave, which i have asked and in part obtained, i will go to-morrow and try to remove them.--believe me, my own ellen, yours always truly, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'my _dear kind_ ellen,--i can hardly help laughing when i reckon up the number of urgent invitations i have received from you during the last three months. had i accepted all or even half of them, the birstallians would certainly have concluded that i had come to make brookroyd my permanent residence. when you set your mind upon it, you have a peculiar way of edging one in with a circle of dilemmas, so that they hardly know how to refuse you; however, i shall take a running leap and clear them all. frankly, my dear ellen, i _cannot come_. reflect for yourself a moment. do you see nothing absurd in the idea of a person coming again into a neighbourhood within a month after they have taken a solemn and formal leave of all their acquaintance? however, i thank both you and your mother for the invitation, which was most kindly expressed. you give no answer to my proposal that you should come to haworth with the taylors. i still think it would be your best plan. i wish you and the taylors were safely here; there is no pleasure to be had without toiling for it. you must invite me no more, my dear ellen, until next midsummer at the nearest. all here desire to be remembered to you, aunt particularly. angry though you are, i will venture to sign myself as usual (no, not as usual, but as suits circumstances).--yours, under a cloud, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'my dearest ellen,--yesterday i heard that you were ill. mr. and miss heald were at dewsbury moor, and it was from them i obtained the information. this morning i set off to brookroyd to learn further particulars, from whence i am but just returned. your mother is in great distress about you, she can hardly mention your name without tears; and both she and mercy wish very much to see you at home again. poor girl, you have been a fortnight confined to your bed; and while i was blaming you in my own mind for not writing, you were suffering in sickness without one kind _female_ friend to watch over you. i should have heard all this before and have hastened to express my sympathy with you in this crisis had i been able to visit brookroyd in the easter holidays, but an unexpected summons back to dewsbury moor, in consequence of the illness and death of mr. wooler, prevented it. since that time i have been a fortnight and two days quite alone, miss wooler being detained in the interim at rouse mill. you will now see, ellen, that it was not neglect or failure of affection which has occasioned my silence, though i fear you will long ago have attributed it to those causes. if you are well enough, do write to me just two lines--just to assure me of your convalescence; not a word, however, if it would harm you--not a syllable. they value you at home. sickness and absence call forth expressions of attachment which might have remained long enough unspoken if their object had been present and well. i wish your _friends_ (i include myself in that word) may soon cease to have cause for so painful an excitement of their regard. as yet i have but an imperfect idea of the nature of your illness--of its extent--or of the degree in which it may now have subsided. when you can let me know all, no particular, however minute, will be uninteresting to me. how have your spirits been? i trust not much overclouded, for that is the most melancholy result of illness. you are not, i understand, going to bath at present; they seem to have arranged matters strangely. when i parted from you near white-lee bar, i had a more sorrowful feeling than ever i experienced before in our temporary separations. it is foolish to dwell too much on the idea of presentiments, but i certainly had a feeling that the time of our reunion had never been so indefinite or so distant as then. i doubt not, my dear ellen, that amidst your many trials, amidst the sufferings that you have of late felt in yourself, and seen in several of your relations, you have still been able to look up and find support in trial, consolation in affliction, and repose in tumult, where human interference can make no change. i think you know in the right spirit how to withdraw yourself from the vexation, the care, the meanness of life, and to derive comfort from purer sources than this world can afford. you know how to do it silently, unknown to others, and can avail yourself of that hallowed communion the bible gives us with god. i am charged to transmit your mother's and sister's love. receive mine in the same parcel, i think it will scarcely be the smallest share. farewell, my dear ellen. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i read your last letter with a great deal of interest. perhaps it is not always well to tell people when we approve of their actions, and yet it is very pleasant to do so; and as, if you had done wrongly, i hope i should have had honesty enough to tell you so, so now, as you have done rightly, i shall gratify myself by telling you what i think. 'if i made you my father confessor i could reveal weaknesses which you do not dream of. i do not mean to intimate that i attach a _high value_ to empty compliments, but a word of panegyric has often made me feel a sense of confused pleasure which it required my strongest effort to conceal--and on the other hand, a hasty expression which i could construe into neglect or disapprobation has tortured me till i have lost half a night's rest from its rankling pangs. 'c. bronte. '_p.s._--don't talk any more of sending for me--when i come i will _send_ myself. all send their love to you. i have no prospect of a situation any more than of going to the moon. write to me again as soon as you can.' here is the only glimpse that we find of her penzance relatives in these later years. they would seem to have visited haworth when charlotte was twenty-four years of age. the impression they left was not a kindly one. to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--as you only sent me a note, i shall only send you one, and that not out of revenge, but because like you i have but little to say. the freshest news in our house is that we had, a fortnight ago, a visit from some of our south of england relations, john branwell and his wife and daughter. they have been staying above a month with uncle fennell at crosstone. they reckon to be very grand folks indeed, and talk largely--i thought assumingly. i cannot say i much admired them. to my eyes there seemed to be an attempt to play the great mogul down in yorkshire. mr. branwell was much less assuming than the womenites; he seemed a frank, sagacious kind of man, very tall and vigorous, with a keen active look. the moment he saw me he exclaimed that i was the very image of my aunt charlotte. mrs. branwell sets up for being a woman of great talent, tact, and accomplishment. i thought there was much more noise than work. my cousin eliza is a young lady intended by nature to be a bouncing, good-looking girl--art has trained her to be a languishing, affected piece of goods. i would have been friendly with her, but i could get no talk except about the low church, evangelical clergy, the millennium, baptist noel, botany, and her own conversion. a mistaken education has utterly spoiled the lass. her face tells that she is naturally good-natured, though perhaps indolent. her affectations were so utterly out of keeping with her round rosy face and tall bouncing figure, i could hardly refrain from laughing as i watched her. write a long letter next time and i'll write you ditto. good-bye.' we have already read the letters which were written to miss nussey during the governess period, and from brussels. on her final return from brussels, charlotte implores a letter. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _february_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i cannot tell what occupies your thoughts and time. are you ill? is some one of your family ill? are you married? are you dead? if it be so, you may as well write a word and let me know--for my part, i am again in old england. i shall tell you nothing further till you write to me. 'c. bronte. 'write to me directly, that is a good girl; i feel really anxious, and have felt so for a long time to hear from you.' she visits miss nussey soon afterwards at brookroyd, and a little later writes as follows: to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i have received your note. it communicated a piece of good news which i certainly did not expect to hear. i want, however, further enlightenment on the subject. can you tell me what has caused the change in mary's plans, and brought her so suddenly back to england? is it on account of mary dixon? is it the wish of her brother, or is it her own determination? i hope, whatever the reason be, it is nothing which can give her uneasiness or do her harm. do you know how long she is likely to stay in england? or when she arrives at hunsworth? 'you ask how i am. i really have felt much better the last week--i think my visit to brookroyd did me good. what delightful weather we have had lately. i wish we had had such while i was with you. emily and i walk out a good deal on the moors, to the great damage of our shoes, but i hope to the benefit of our health. 'good-bye, dear ellen. send me another of your little notes soon. kindest regards to all, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--anne and branwell are now at home, and they and emily add their request to mine, that you will join us at the beginning of next week. write and let us know what day you will come, and how--if by coach, we will meet you at keighley. do not let your visit be later than the beginning of next week, or you will see little of anne and branwell as their holidays are very short. they will soon have to join the family at scarborough. remember me kindly to your mother and sisters. i hope they are all well. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--your letter came very apropos, as, indeed, your letters always do; but this morning i had something of a headache, and was consequently rather out of spirits, and the epistle (scarcely legible though it be--excuse a rub) cheered me. in order to evince my gratitude, as well as to please my own inclination, i sit down to answer it immediately. i am glad, in the first place, to hear that your brother is going to be married, and still more so to learn that his wife-elect has a handsome fortune--not that i advocate marrying for money in general, but i think in many cases (and this is one) money is a very desirable contingent of matrimony. 'i wonder when mary taylor is expected in england. i trust you will be at home while she is at hunsworth, and that you, she, and i, may meet again somewhere under the canopy of heaven. i cannot, dear ellen, make any promise about myself and anne going to brookroyd at christmas; her vacations are so short she would grudge spending any part of them from home. 'the catastrophe, which you related so calmly, about your book-muslin dress, lace bertha, etc., convulsed me with cold shudderings of horror. you have reason to curse the day when so fatal a present was offered you as that infamous little "varmint." the perfect serenity with which you endured the disaster proves most fully to me that you would make the best wife, mother, and mistress in the world. you and anne are a pair for marvellous philosophical powers of endurance; no spoilt dinners, scorched linen, dirtied carpets, torn sofa-covers, squealing brats, cross husbands, would ever discompose either of you. you ought never to marry a good-tempered man, it would be mingling honey with sugar, like sticking white roses upon a black-thorn cudgel. with this very picturesque metaphor i close my letter. good-bye, and write very soon. 'c. bronte.' much has been said concerning charlotte bronte's visit to hathersage in derbyshire, and it is interesting because of the fact that miss bronte obtained the name of 'eyre' from a family in that neighbourhood, and morton in _jane eyre_ may obviously be identified with hathersage. { } miss ellen nussey's brother henry became vicar of hathersage, and he married shortly afterwards. while he was on his honeymoon his sister went to hathersage to keep house for him, and she invited her friend charlotte bronte to stay with her. the visit lasted three weeks. this was the only occasion that charlotte visited hathersage. here are two or three short notes referring to that visit. to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--it is very vexatious for you to have had to go to sheffield in vain. i am glad to hear that there is an omnibus on thursday, and i have told emily and anne i will try to come on that day. the opening of the railroad is now postponed till july th. i should not like to put you off again, and for that and some other reasons they have decided to give up the idea of going to scarbro', and instead, to make a little excursion next monday and tuesday, to ilkley or elsewhere. i hope no other obstacle will arise to prevent my going to hathersage. i do long to be with you, and i feel nervously afraid of being prevented, or put off in some way. branwell only stayed a week with us, but he is to come home again when the family go to scarboro'. i will write to brookroyd directly. yesterday i had a little note from henry inviting me to go to see you. this is one of your contrivances, for which you deserve smothering. you have written to henry to tell him to write to me. do you think i stood on ceremony about the matter? 'the french papers have ceased to come. good-bye for the present. 'c. b.' to mrs. nussey '_july_ _rd_, . 'my dear mrs. nussey,--i lose no time after my return home in writing to you and offering you my sincere thanks for the kindness with which you have repeatedly invited me to go and stay a few days at brookroyd. it would have given me great pleasure to have gone, had it been only for a day, just to have seen you and miss mercy (miss nussey i suppose is not at home) and to have been introduced to mrs. henry, but i have stayed so long with ellen at hathersage that i could not possibly now go to brookroyd. i was expected at home; and after all _home_ should always have the first claim on our attention. when i reached home (at ten o'clock on saturday night) i found papa, i am thankful to say, pretty well, but he thought i had been a long time away. 'i left ellen well, and she had generally good health while i stayed with her, but she is very anxious about matters of business, and apprehensive lest things should not be comfortable against the arrival of mr. and mrs. henry--she is so desirous that the day of their arrival at hathersage should be a happy one to both. 'i hope, my dear mrs. nussey, you are well; and i should be very happy to receive a little note either from you or from miss mercy to assure me of this.--believe me, yours affectionately and sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_july_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--a series of toothaches, prolonged and severe, bothering me both day and night, have kept me very stupid of late, and prevented me from writing to you. more than once i have sat down and opened my desk, but have not been able to get up to par. to-day, after a night of fierce pain, i am better--much better, and i take advantage of the interval of ease to discharge my debt. i wish i had pounds to spare at present, and that you, emily, anne, and i were all at liberty to leave home without our absence being detrimental to any body. how pleasant to set off _en masse_ to the seaside, and stay there a few weeks, taking in a stock of health and strength.--we could all do with recreation. adversity agrees with you, ellen. your good qualities are never so obvious as when under the pressure of affliction. continued prosperity might develope too much a certain germ of ambition latent in your character. i saw this little germ putting out green shoots when i was staying with you at hathersage. it was not then obtrusive, and perhaps might never become so. your good sense, firm principle, and kind feeling might keep it down. holding down my head does not suit my toothache. give my love to your mother and sisters. write again as soon as may be.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i am writing to you, not because i have anything to tell you, but because i want you to write to me. i am glad to see that you were pleased with your new sister. when i was at hathersage you were talking of writing to mary taylor. i have lately written to her a brief, shabby epistle of which i am ashamed, but i found when i began to write i had really very little to say. i sent the letter to hunsworth, and i suppose it will go sometime. you must write to me soon, a long letter. remember me respectfully to mr. and mrs. henry nussey. give my love to miss r.--yours, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i was glad to get your last note, though it was so short and crusty. three weeks had elapsed without my having heard a word from you, and i began to fear some new misfortune had occurred. i was relieved to find such was not the case. anne is obliged by the kind regret you express at not being able to ask her to brookroyd. she wishes you could come to haworth. do you scold me out of habit, or are you really angry? in either case it is all nonsense. you know as well as i do that to go to brookroyd is always a pleasure to me, and that to one who has so little change, and so few friends as i have, it must be a _great pleasure_, but i am not at all times in the mood or circumstances to take my pleasure. i wish so much to see you, that i shall certainly sometime after new year's day, if all be well, be going over to birstall. now i could _not go_ if i _would_. if you think i stand upon ceremony in this matter, you miscalculate sadly. i have known you, and your mother and sisters, too long to be ceremonious with any of you. invite me no more now, till i invite myself--be too proud to trouble yourself; and if, when at last i mention coming (for i shall give you warning), it does not happen to suit you, tell me so, with quiet hauteur. i should like a long letter next time. no more lovers' quarrels. 'good-bye. best love to your mother and sisters. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--long may you look young and handsome enough to dress in white, dear, and long may you have a right to feel the consciousness that you look agreeable. i know you have too much judgment to let an overdose of vanity spoil the blessing and turn it into a misfortune. after all though, age will come on, and it is well you have something better than a nice face for friends to turn to when that is changed. i hope this excessively cold weather has not harmed you or yours much. it has nipped me severely, taken away my appetite for a while and given me toothache; in short, put me in the ailing condition, in which i have more than once had the honour of making myself such a nuisance both at brookroyd and hunsworth. the consequence is that at this present speaking i look almost old enough to be your mother--grey, sunk, and withered. to-day, however, it is milder, and i hope soon to feel better; indeed i am not _ill_ now, and my toothache is now subsided, but i experience a loss of strength and a deficiency of spirit which would make me a sorry companion to you or any one else. i would not be on a visit now for a large sum of money. 'write soon. give my best love to your mother and sisters.--good-bye, dear nell, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _st_, . 'dear nell,--i am very much obliged to you for your gift, which you must not undervalue, for i like the articles; they look extremely pretty and light. they are for wrist frills, are they not? will you condescend to accept a yard of lace made up into nothing? i thought i would not offer to spoil it by stitching it into any shape. your creative fingers will turn it to better account than my destructive ones. i hope, such as it is, they will not peck it out of the envelope at the bradford post-office, where they generally take the liberty of opening letters when they feel soft as if they contained articles. i had forgotten all about your birthday and mine, till your letter arrived to remind me of it. i wish you many happy returns of yours. of course your visit to haworth must be regulated by miss ringrose's movements. i was rather amused at your fearing i should be jealous. i never thought of it. she and i could not be rivals in your affections. you allot her, i know, a different set of feelings to what you allot me. she is amiable and estimable, i am not amiable, but still we shall stick to the last i don't doubt. in short, i should as soon think of being jealous of emily and anne in these days as of you. if miss ringrose does not come to brookroyd about whitsuntide, i should like you to come. i shall feel a good deal disappointed if the visit is put off--i would rather miss ringrose fixed her time in summer, and then i would come to see you (d.v.) in the autumn. i don't think it will be at all a good plan to go back with you. we see each other so seldom, that i would far rather divide the visits. remember me to all.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i have a small present for mercy. you must fetch it, for i repeat you shall _come to haworth before i go to brookroyd._ 'i do not say this from pique or anger--i am not angry now--but because my leaving home at present would from solid reasons be difficult to manage. if all be well i will visit you in the autumn, at present i _cannot_ come. be assured that if i could come i should, after your last letter, put scruples and pride away and "go over into macedonia" at once. i never could manage to help you yet. you have always found me something like a new servant, who requires to be told where everything is, and shown how everything is to be done. 'my sincere love to your mother and mercy.--yours, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--your letter and its contents were most welcome. you must direct your luggage to mr. bronte's, and we will tell the carrier to inquire for it. the railroad has been opened some time, but it only comes as far as keighley. if you arrive about o'clock in the afternoon, emily, anne, and i will all meet you at the station. we can take tea jovially together at the devonshire arms, and walk home in the cool of the evening. this arrangement will be much better than fagging through four miles in the heat of noon. write by return of post if you can, and say if this plan suits you.--yours, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--the old pang of fearing you should fancy i forget you drives me to write to you, though heaven knows i have precious little to say, and if it were not that i wish to hear from you, and hate to appear disregardful when i am not so, i might let another week or perhaps two slip away without writing. there is much in ruth's letter that i thought very melancholy. poor girls! theirs, i fear, must be a very unhappy home. yours and mine, with all disadvantages, all absences of luxury and wealth and style, are, i doubt not, happier. i wish to goodness you were rich, that you might give her a temporary asylum, and a relief from uneasiness, suffering, and gloom. what you say about the effects of ether on your sister rather startled me. i had always consoled myself with the idea of having some teeth extracted some day under its soothing influence, but now i should think twice before i consented to inhale it; one would not like to make a fool of one's self.--i am, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--there is a great deal of good-sense in your last letter. be thankful that god gave you sense, for what are beauty, wealth, or even health without it? i had a note from miss ringrose the other day. i do not think i shall write again, for the reasons i before mentioned to you; but the note moved me much, it was almost all about her dear ellen, a kind of gentle enthusiasm of affection, enough to make one smile and weep--her feelings are half truth, half illusion. no human being could be altogether what she supposes you to be, yet your kindness must have been very great. if one were only rich, how delightful it would be to travel and spend the winter in climates where there are no winters. give my love to your mother and sisters.--believe me, faithfully yours, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _nd_, . 'dear ellen,--i have just received your little parcel, and beg to thank you in all our names for its contents, and also for your letter, of the arrival of which i was, to speak truth, getting rather impatient. 'the housewife's travelling companion is a most commodious thing--just the sort of article which suits one to a t, and which yet i should never have the courage or industry to sit down and make for myself. i shall keep it for occasions of going from home, it will save me a world of trouble. it must have required some thought to arrange the various compartments and their contents so aptly. i had quite forgotten till your letter reminded me that it was the anniversary of your birthday and mine. i am now thirty-two. youth is gone--gone--and will never come back; can't help it. i wish you many returns of your birthday and increase of happiness with increase of years. it seems to me that sorrow must come sometime to every body, and those who scarcely taste it in their youth often have a more brimming and bitter cup to drain in after-life; whereas, those who exhaust the dregs early, who drink the lees before the wine, may reasonably expect a purer and more palatable draught to succeed. so, at least, one fain would hope. it touched me at first a little painfully to hear of your purposed governessing, but on second thoughts i discovered this to be quite a foolish feeling. you are doing right even though you should not gain much. the effort will do you good; no one ever does regret a step towards self-help; it is so much gained in independence. 'give my love to your mother and sisters.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i shall begin by telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time i have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering it, because you have often kept me waiting much longer; and having made this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, i will add that i think it a great shame when you receive a long and thoroughly interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure and not even have the manners to thank your correspondent, and express how much you enjoyed the narrative. i _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly; the exquisitely characteristic traits concerning the bakers were worth gold; just like not only them but all their class--respectable, well-meaning people enough, but with all that petty assumption of dignity, that small jealousy of senseless formalities, which to such people seems to form a second religion. your position amongst them was detestable. i admire the philosophy with which you bore it. their taking offence because you stayed all night at their aunt's is rich. it is right not to think much of casual attentions; it is quite justifiable also to derive from them temporary gratification, insomuch as they prove that their object has the power of pleasing. let them be as ephemera--to last an hour, and not be regretted when gone. 'write to me again soon and--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ , . 'dear ellen,--i have received the furs safely. i like the sables very much, and shall keep them; and 'to save them' shall keep the squirrel, as you prudently suggested. i hope it is not too much like the steel poker to save the brass one. i return mary's letter. it is another page from the volume of life, and at the bottom is written "finis"--mournful word. macaulay's _history_ was only _lent_ to myself--all the books i have from london i accept only as a loan, except in peculiar cases, where it is the author's wish i should possess his work. 'do you think in a few weeks it will be possible for you to come to see me? i am only waiting to get my labour off my hands to permit myself the pleasure of asking you. at our house you can read as much as you please. 'i have been much better, very free from oppression or irritation of the chest, during the last fortnight or ten days. love to all.--good-bye, dear nell. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _rd_, . 'dear ellen,--papa has not been well at all lately--he has had another attack of bronchitis. i felt very uneasy about him for some days, more wretched indeed than i care to tell you. after what has happened, one trembles at any appearance of sickness, and when anything ails papa i feel too keenly that he is the _last_, the _only_ near and dear relation i have in the world. yesterday and to-day he has seemed much better, for which i am truly thankful. 'for myself, i should be pretty well but for a continually recurring feeling of slight cold, slight soreness in the throat and chest, of which, do what i will, i cannot quite get rid. has your cough entirely left you? i wish the atmosphere would return to a salubrious condition, for i really think it is not healthy. english cholera has been very prevalent here. 'i _do_ wish to see you.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ , . 'dear nell,--i am going on monday (d.v.) a journey, whereof the prospect cheers me not at all, to windermere, in westmoreland, to spend a few days with sir j. k. s., who has taken a house there for the autumn and winter. i consented to go with reluctance, chiefly to please papa, whom a refusal on my part would have much annoyed; but i dislike to leave him. i trust he is not worse, but his complaint is still weakness. it is not right to anticipate evil, and to be always looking forward in an apprehensive spirit; but i think grief is a two-edged sword--it cuts both ways: the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another. take moderate exercise and be careful, dear nell, and--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--poor little flossy! i have not yet screwed up nerve to tell papa about her fate, it seems to me so piteous. however, she had a happy life with a kind mistress, whatever her death has been. little hapless plague! she had more goodness and patience shown her than she deserved, i fear. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i should not have written to you to-day by choice. lately i have again been harassed with headache--the heavy electric atmosphere oppresses me much, yet i am less miserable just now than i was a little while ago. a severe shock came upon me about papa. he was suddenly attacked with acute inflammation of the eye. mr. ruddock was sent for; and after he had examined him, he called me into another room, and said papa's pulse was bounding at per minute, that there was a strong pressure of blood upon the brain, that, in short, the symptoms were decidedly apoplectic. 'active measures were immediately taken. by the next day the pulse was reduced to ninety. thank god he is now better, though not well. the eye is a good deal inflamed. he does not know his state. to tell him he had been in danger of apoplexy would almost be to kill him at once--it would increase the rush to the brain and perhaps bring about rupture. he is kept very quiet. 'dear nell, you will excuse a short note. write again soon. tell me all concerning yourself that can relieve you.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _rd_, . 'dear ellen,--i write a line to say that papa is now considered out of danger. his progress to health is not without relapse, but i think he gains ground, if slowly, surely. mr. ruddock says the seizure was quite of an apoplectic character; there was a partial paralysis for two days, but the mind remained clear, in spite of a high degree of nervous irritation. one eye still remains inflamed, and papa is weak, but all muscular affection is gone, and the pulse is accurate. one cannot be too thankful that papa's sight is yet spared--it was the fear of losing that which chiefly distressed him. 'with best wishes for yourself, dear ellen,--i am, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. 'my headaches are better. i have needed no help, but i thank you sincerely for your kind offers.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _august_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--papa has varied occasionally since i wrote to you last. monday was a very bad day, his spirits sunk painfully. tuesday and yesterday, however, were much better, and to-day he seems wonderfully well. the prostration of spirits which accompanies anything like a relapse is almost the most difficult point to manage. dear nell, you are tenderly kind in offering your society; but rest very tranquil where you are; be fully assured that it is not now, nor under present circumstances, that i feel the lack either of society or occupation; my time is pretty well filled up, and my thoughts appropriated. 'mr. ruddock now seems quite satisfied there is no present danger whatever; he says papa has an excellent constitution and may live many years yet. the true balance is not yet restored to the circulation, but i believe that impetuous and dangerous termination to the head is quite obviated. i cannot permit myself to comment much on the chief contents of your last; advice is not necessary. as far as i can judge, you seem hitherto enabled to take these trials in a good and wise spirit. i can only pray that such combined strength and resignation may be continued to you. submission, courage, exertion, when practicable--these seem to be the weapons with which we must fight life's long battle.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss nussey we owe many other letters than those here printed--indeed, they must needs play an important part in charlotte bronte's biography. they do not deal with the intellectual interests which are so marked in the letters to w. s. williams, and which, doubtless, characterised the letters to miss mary taylor. 'i ought to have written this letter to mary,' charlotte says, when on one occasion she dropped into literature to her friend; but the friendship was as precious as most intellectual friendships, because it was based upon a common esteem and an unselfish devotion. ellen nussey, as we have seen, accompanied anne bronte to scarborough, and was at her death-bed. she attended charlotte's wedding, and lived to mourn over her tomb. for forty years she has been the untiring advocate and staunch champion, hating to hear a word in her great friend's dispraise, loving to note the glorious recognition, of which there has been so rich and so full a harvest. that she still lives to receive our reverent gratitude for preserving so many interesting traits of the brontes, is matter for full and cordial congratulation, wherever the names of the authors of _jane eyre_ and _wuthering heights_ are held in just and wise esteem. chapter ix: mary taylor mary taylor, the 'm---' of mrs. gaskell's biography, and the 'rose yorke' of _shirley_, will always have a peculiar interest to those who care for the brontes. she shrank from publicity, and her name has been less mentioned than that of any other member of the circle. and yet hers was a personality singularly strenuous and strong. she wrote two books 'with a purpose,' and, as we shall see, vigorously embodied her teaching in her life. it will be remembered that charlotte bronte, ellen nussey, and mary taylor first met at roe head school, when charlotte and mary were fifteen and her friend about fourteen years of age. here are miss nussey's impressions-- 'she was pretty, and very childish-looking, dressed in a red-coloured frock with short sleeves and low neck, as then worn by young girls. miss wooler in later years used to say that when mary went to her as a pupil she thought her too pretty to live. she was not talkative at school, but industrious, and always ready with lessons. she was always at the top in class lessons, with charlotte bronte and the writer; seldom a change was made, and then only with the three--one move. charlotte and she were great friends for a time, but there was no withdrawing from me on either side, and charlotte never quite knew how an estrangement arose with mary, but it lasted a long time. then a time came that both charlotte and mary were so proficient in schoolroom attainments there was no more for them to learn, and miss wooler set them blair's _belles lettres_ to commit to memory. we all laughed at their studies. charlotte persevered, but mary took her own line, flatly refused, and accepted the penalty of disobedience, going supper-less to bed for about a month before she left school. when it was moonlight, we always found her engaged in drawing on the chest of drawers, which stood in the bay window, quite happy and cheerful. her rebellion was never outspoken. she was always quiet in demeanour. her sister martha, on the contrary, spoke out vigorously, daring miss wooler so much, face to face, that she sometimes received a box on the ear, which hardly any saint could have withheld. then martha would expatiate on the danger of boxing ears, quoting a reverend brother of miss wooler's. among her school companions, martha was called "miss boisterous," but was always a favourite, so piquant and fascinating were her ways. she was not in the least pretty, but something much better, full of change and variety, rudely outspoken, lively, and original, producing laughter with her own good-humour and affection. she was her father's pet child. he delighted in hearing her sing, telling her to go to the piano, with his affectionate "patty lass." 'mary never had the impromptu vivacity of her sister, but was lively in games that engaged her mind. her music was very correct, but entirely cultivated by practice and perseverance. anything underhand was detestable to both mary and martha; they had no mean pride towards others, but accepted the incidents of life with imperturbable good-sense and insight. they were not dressed as well as other pupils, for economy at that time was the rule of their household. the girls had to stitch all over their new gloves before wearing them, by order of their mother, to make them wear longer. their dark blue cloth coats were worn when _too short_, and black beaver bonnets quite plainly trimmed, with the ease and contentment of a fashionable costume. mr. taylor was a banker as well as a monopolist of army cloth manufacture in the district. he lost money, and gave up banking. he set his mind on paying all creditors, and effected this during his lifetime as far as possible, willing that his sons were to do the remainder, which two of his sons carried out, as was understood, during their lifetime--mark and martin of _shirley_.' let us now read charlotte's description in _shirley_, and i think we have a tolerably fair estimate of the sisters. 'the two next are girls, rose and jessie; they are both now at their father's knee; they seldom go near their mother, except when obliged to do so. rose, the elder, is twelve years old; she is like her father--the most like him of the whole group--but it is a granite head copied in ivory; all is softened in colour and line. yorke himself has a harsh face; his daughter's is not harsh, neither is it quite pretty; it is simple--childlike in feature; the round cheeks bloom; as to the grey eyes, they are otherwise than childlike--a serious soul lights them--a young soul yet, but it will mature, if the body lives; and neither father nor mother has a spirit to compare with it. partaking of the essence of each, it will one day be better than either--stronger, much purer, more aspiring. rose is a still, and sometimes a stubborn girl now; her mother wants to make of her such a woman as she is herself--a woman of dark and dreary duties; and rose has a mind full-set, thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew. it is agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and repressed. she has never rebelled yet; but if hard driven, she will rebel one day, and then it will be once for all. rose loves her father; her father does not rule her with a rod of iron; he is good to her. he sometimes fears she will not live, so bright are the sparks of intelligence which, at moments, flash from her glance and gleam in her language. this idea makes him often sadly tender to her. 'he has no idea that little jessie will die young, she is so gay and chattering, arch--original even now; passionate when provoked, but most affectionate if caressed; by turns gentle and rattling; exacting yet generous; fearless--of her mother, for instance, whose irrationally hard and strict rule she has often defied--yet reliant on any who will help her. jessie, with her little piquant face, engaging prattle, and winning ways, is made to be a pet; and her father's pet she accordingly is.' mary taylor was called 'pag' by her friends, and the first important reference to her that i find is contained in a letter written by charlotte to ellen nussey, when she was seventeen years of age. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i know you will be very angry because i have not written sooner; my reason, or rather my motive for this apparent neglect was, that i had determined not to write until i could ask you to pay us your long-promised visit. aunt thought it would be better to defer it until about the middle of summer, as the winter and even the spring seasons are remarkably cold and bleak among our mountains. papa now desires me to present his respects to your mother, and say that he should feel greatly obliged if she would allow us the pleasure of your company for a few weeks at haworth. i will leave it to you to fix whatever day may be most convenient, but let it be an early one. i received a letter from pag taylor yesterday; she was in high dudgeon at my inattention in not promptly answering her last epistle. i however sat down immediately and wrote a very humble reply, candidly confessing my faults and soliciting forgiveness; i hope it has proved successful. have you suffered much from that troublesome though not (i am happy to hear) generally fatal disease, the influenza? we have so far steered clear of it, but i know not how long we may continue to escape. your last letter revealed a state of mind which seemed to promise much. as i read it i could not help wishing that my own feelings more resembled yours; but unhappily all the good thoughts that enter _my mind_ evaporate almost before i have had time to ascertain their existence; every right resolution which i form is so transient, so fragile, and so easily broken, that i sometimes fear i shall never be what i ought. earnestly hoping that this may not be your case, that you may continue steadfast till the end,--i remain, dearest ellen, your ever faithful friend, 'charlotte bronte.' the next letter refers to mr. taylor's death. mr. taylor, it is scarcely necessary to add, is the mr. yorke of briarmains, who figures so largely in _shirley_. i have visited the substantial red-brick house near the high-road at gomersall, but descriptions of the bronte country do not come within the scope of this volume. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _rd_, . 'my dear ellen,--i received the news in your last with no surprise, and with the feeling that this removal must be a relief to mr. taylor himself and even to his family. the bitterness of death was past a year ago, when it was first discovered that his illness must terminate fatally; all between has been lingering suspense. this is at an end now, and the present certainty, however sad, is better than the former doubt. what will be the consequence of his death is another question; for my own part, i look forward to a dissolution and dispersion of the family, perhaps not immediately, but in the course of a year or two. it is true, causes may arise to keep them together awhile longer, but they are restless, active spirits, and will not be restrained always. mary alone has more energy and power in her nature than any ten men you can pick out in the united parishes of birstall and haworth. it is vain to limit a character like hers within ordinary boundaries--she will overstep them. i am morally certain mary will establish her own landmarks, so will the rest of them. 'c. bronte.' soon after her father's death mary taylor turned her eyes towards new zealand, where she had friends, but two years were to go by before anything came of the idea. to miss emily j. bronte 'upperwood house, _april_ _nd_, . 'dear e. j.,--i received your last letter with delight as usual. i must write a line to thank you for it and the inclosure, which however is too bad--you ought not to have sent me those packets. i had a letter from anne yesterday; she says she is well. i hope she speaks absolute truth. i had written to her and branwell a few days before. i have not heard from branwell yet. it is to be hoped that his removal to another station will turn out for the best. as you say, it _looks_ like getting on at any rate. 'i have got up my courage so far as to ask mrs. white to grant me a day's holiday to go to birstall to see ellen nussey, who has offered to send a gig for me. my request was granted, but so coldly and slowly. however, i stuck to my point in a very exemplary and remarkable manner. i hope to go next saturday. matters are progressing very strangely at gomersall. mary taylor and waring have come to a singular determination, but i almost think under the peculiar circumstances a defensible one, though it sounds outrageously odd at first. they are going to emigrate--to quit the country altogether. their destination unless they change is port nicholson, in the northern island of new zealand!!! mary has made up her mind she can not and will not be a governess, a teacher, a milliner, a bonnet-maker nor housemaid. she sees no means of obtaining employment she would like in england, so she is leaving it. i counselled her to go to france likewise and stay there a year before she decided on this strange unlikely-sounding plan of going to new zealand, but she is quite resolved. i cannot sufficiently comprehend what her views and those of her brothers may be on the subject, or what is the extent of their information regarding port nicholson, to say whether this is rational enterprise or absolute madness. with love to papa, aunt, tabby, etc.--good-bye. 'c. b. '_p.s._--i am very well; i hope you are. write again soon.' soon after this mary went on a long visit to brussels, which, as we have seen, was the direct cause of charlotte and emily establishing themselves at the pensionnat heger. in brussels martha taylor found a grave. here is one of her letters. to miss ellen nussey. 'brussels, _sept_. _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i received your letter from mary, and you say i am to write though i have nothing to say. my sister will tell you all about me, for she has more time to write than i have. 'whilst mary and john have been with me, we have been to liege and spa, where we stayed eight days. i found my little knowledge of french very useful in our travels. i am going to begin working again very hard, now that john and mary are going away. i intend beginning german directly. i would write some more but this pen of mary's won't write; you must scold her for it, and tell her to write you a long account of my proceedings. you must write to me sometimes. george dixon is coming here the last week in september, and you must send a letter for me to mary to be forwarded by him. good-bye. may you be happy. 'martha taylor.' it was while charlotte was making her second stay in brussels that she heard of mary's determination to go with her brother waring to new zealand, with a view to earning her own living in any reasonable manner that might offer. to miss ellen nussey 'brussels, _april_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--that last letter of yours merits a good dose of panegyric--it was both long and interesting; send me quickly such another, longer still if possible. you will have heard of mary taylor's resolute and intrepid proceedings. her public letters will have put you in possession of all details--nothing is left for me to say except perhaps to express my opinion upon it. i have turned the matter over on all sides and really i cannot consider it otherwise than as very rational. mind, i did not jump to this opinion at once, but was several days before i formed it conclusively. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_sunday evening_, _june_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--you probably know that another letter has been received from mary taylor. it is, however, possible that your absence from home will have prevented your seeing it, so i will give you a sketch of its contents. it was written at about degrees n. of the equator. the first part of the letter contained an account of their landing at santiago. her health at that time was very good, and her spirits seemed excellent. they had had contrary winds at first setting out, but their voyage was then prosperous. in the latter portion of the letter she complains of the excessive heat, and says she lives chiefly on oranges; but still she was well, and freer from headache and other ailments than any other person on board. the receipt of this letter will have relieved all her friends from a weight of anxiety. i am uneasy about what you say respecting the french newspapers--do you mean to intimate that you have received none? i have despatched them regularly. emily and i keep them usually three days, sometimes only two, and then send them forward to you. i see by the cards you sent, and also by the newspaper, that henry is at last married. how did you like your office of bridesmaid? and how do you like your new sister and her family? you must write to me as soon as you can, and give me an _observant_ account of everything. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'manchester, _september_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--papa thinks his own progress rather slow, but the doctor affirms he is getting on very well. he complains of extreme weakness and soreness in the eye, but i suppose that is to be expected for some time to come. he is still kept in the dark, but now sits up the greater part of the day, and is allowed a little fire in the room, from the light of which he is carefully screened. 'by this time you will have got mary's letters; most interesting they are, and she is in her element because she is where she has a toilsome task to perform, an important improvement to effect, a weak vessel to strengthen. you ask if i had any enjoyment here; in truth, i can't say i have, and i long to get home, though, unhappily, home is not now a place of complete rest. it is sad to think how it is disquieted by a constant phantom, or rather two--sin and suffering; they seem to obscure the cheerfulness of day, and to disturb the comfort of evening. 'give my love to all at brookroyd, and believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i return you mary taylor's letter; it made me somewhat sad to read it, for i fear she is not quite content with her existence in new zealand. she finds it too barren. i believe she is more home-sick than she will confess. her gloomy ideas respecting you and me prove a state of mind far from gay. i have also received a letter; its tone is similar to your own, and its contents too. 'what brilliant weather we have had. oh! i do indeed regret you could not come to haworth at the time fixed, these warm sunny days would have suited us exactly; but it is not to be helped. give my best love to your mother and mercy.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i should have answered your last long ago if i had known your address, but you omitted to give it me, and i have been waiting in the hope that you would perhaps write again and repair the omission. finding myself deceived in this expectation however, i have at last hit on the plan of sending the letter to brookroyd to be directed; be sure to give me your address when you reply to this. 'i was glad to hear that you were well received at london, and that you got safe to the end of your journey. your _naivete_ in gravely inquiring my opinion of the "last new novel" amuses me. we do not subscribe to a circulating library at haworth, and consequently "new novels" rarely indeed come in our way, and consequently, again, we are not qualified to give opinions thereon. 'about three weeks ago, i received a brief note from hunsworth, to the effect that mr. joe taylor and his cousin henry would make some inquiries respecting mme. heger's school on account of ellen taylor, and that if i had no objection, they would ride over to haworth in a day or two. i said they might come if they would. they came, accompanied by miss mossman, of bradford, whom i had never seen, only heard of occasionally. it was a pouring wet and windy day; we had quite ceased to expect them. miss mossman was quite wet, and we had to make her change her things, and dress her out in ours as well as we could. i do not know if you are acquainted with her; i thought her unaffected and rather agreeable-looking, though she has very red hair. henry taylor does indeed resemble john most strongly. joe looked thin; he was in good spirits, and i think in tolerable good-humour. i would have given much for you to have been there. i had not been very well for some days before, and had some difficulty in keeping up the talk, but i managed on the whole better than i expected. i was glad miss mossman came, for she helped. nothing new was communicated respecting mary. nothing of importance in any way was said the whole time; it was all rattle, rattle, of which i should have great difficulty now in recalling the substance. they left almost immediately after tea. i have not heard a word respecting them since, but i suppose they got home all right. the visit strikes me as an odd whim. i consider it quite a caprice, prompted probably by curiosity. 'joe taylor mentioned that he had called at brookroyd, and that anne had told him you were ill, and going into the south for change of air. 'i hope you will soon write to me again and tell me particularly how your health is, and how you get on. give my regards to mary gorham, for really i have a sort of regard for her by hearsay, and--believe me, dear nell, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' the ellen taylor mentioned in the above letter did not go to brussels. she joined her cousin mary in new zealand instead. to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, _april_ _th_, . 'dear charlotte,--i've been delighted to receive a very interesting letter from you with an account of your visit to london, etc. i believe i have tacked this acknowledgment to the tail of my last letter to you, but since then it has dawned on my comprehension that you are becoming a very important personage in this little world, and therefore, d'ye see? i must write again to you. i wish you would give me some account of newby, and what the man said when confronted with the real ellis bell. by the way, having got your secret, will he keep it? and how do you contrive to get your letters under the address of mr. bell? the whole scheme must be particularly interesting to hear about, if i could only talk to you for half a day. when do you intend to tell the good people about you? 'i am now hard at work expecting ellen taylor. she may possibly be here in two months. i once thought of writing you some of the dozens of schemes i have for ellen taylor, but as the choice depends on her i may as well wait and tell you the one she chooses. the two most reasonable are keeping a school and keeping a shop. the last is evidently the most healthy, but the most difficult of accomplishment. i have written an account of the earthquakes for _chambers_, and intend (now don't remind me of this a year hence, because _la femme propose_) to write some more. what else i shall do i don't know. i find the writing faculty does not in the least depend on the leisure i have, but much more on the _active_ work i have to do. i write at my novel a little and think of my other book. what this will turn out, god only knows. it is not, and never can be forgotten. it is my child, my baby, and _i assure you_ such a wonder as never was. i intend him when full grown to revolutionise society and _faire epoque_ in history. 'in the meantime i'm doing a collar in crochet work. 'pag.' to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, new zealand, '_july_ _th_, . 'dear charlotte,--about a month since i received and read _jane eyre_. it seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book. such events did not happen while i was in england. i begin to believe in your existence much as i do in mr. rochester's. in a believing mood i don't doubt either of them. after i had read it i went on to the top of mount victoria and looked for a ship to carry a letter to you. there was a little thing with one mast, and also h.m.s. _fly_, and nothing else. if a cattle vessel came from sydney she would probably return in a few days, and would take a mail, but we have had east wind for a month and nothing can come in. '_aug_. .--the _harlequin_ has just come from otago, and is to sail for singapore _when the wind changes_, and by that route (which i hope to take myself sometime) i send you this. much good may it do you. your novel surprised me by being so perfect as a work of art. i expected something more changeable and unfinished. you have polished to some purpose. if i were to do so i should get tired, and weary every one else in about two pages. no sign of this weariness in your book--you must have had abundance, having kept it all to yourself! 'you are very different from me in having no doctrine to preach. it is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production. has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities? did you never sneer or declaim in your first sketches? i will scold you well when i see you. i do not believe in mr. rivers. there are no _good_ men of the brocklehurst species. a missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes from enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a quality for st. john. it's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such a man. you have done wisely in choosing to imagine a high class of readers. you never stop to explain or defend anything, and never seem bothered with the idea. if mrs. fairfax or any other well-intentioned fool gets hold of this what will she think? and yet, you know, the world is made up of such, and worse. once more, how have you written through three volumes without declaring war to the knife against a few dozen absurd doctrines, each of which is supported by "a large and respectable class of readers"? emily seems to have had such a class in her eye when she wrote that strange thing _wuthering heights_. anne, too, stops repeatedly to preach commonplace truths. she has had a still lower class in her mind's eye. emily seems to have followed the bookseller's advice. as to the price you got, it was certainly jewish. but what could the people do? if they had asked you to fix it, do you know yourself how many ciphers your sum would have had? and how should they know better? and if they did, that's the knowledge they get their living by. if i were in your place, the idea of being bound in the sale of two more would prevent me from ever writing again. yet you are probably now busy with another. it is curious for me to see among the old letters one from anne sending _a copy of a whole article_ on the currency question written by fonblanque! i exceedingly regret having burnt your letters in a fit of caution, and i've forgotten all the names. was the reader albert smith? what do they all think of you? 'i mention the book to no one and hear no opinions. i lend it a good deal because it's a novel, and _it's as good as another_! they say "it makes them cry." they are not literary enough to give an opinion. if ever i hear one i'll embalm it for you. as to my own affair, i have written pages, and lately more. it's no use writing faster. i get so disgusted, i can do nothing. 'if i could command sufficient money for a twelve-month, i would go home by way of india and write my travels, which would prepare the way for my novel. with the benefit of your experience i should perhaps make a better bargain than you. i am most afraid of my health. not that i should die, but perhaps sink into a state of betweenity, neither well nor ill, in which i should observe nothing, and be very miserable besides. my life here is not disagreeable. i have a great resource in the piano, and a little employment in teaching. 'it's a pity you don't live in this world, that i might entertain you about the price of meat. do you know, i bought six heifers the other day for pounds, and now it is turned so cold i expect to hear one-half of them are dead. one man bought twenty sheep for pounds, and they are all dead but one. another bought and has left. 'i have now told you everything i can think of except that the cat's on the table and that i'm going to borrow a new book to read--no less than an account of all the systems of philosophy of modern europe. i have lately met with a wonder, a man who thinks jane eyre would have done better to marry mr. rivers! he gives no reason--such people never do. 'mary taylor.' to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, new zealand. 'dear charlotte,--i have set up shop! i am delighted with it as a whole--that is, it is as pleasant or as little disagreeable as you can expect an employment to be that you earn your living by. the best of it is that your labour has some return, and you are not forced to work on hopelessly without result. _du reste_, it is very odd. i keep looking at myself with one eye while i'm using the other, and i sometimes find myself in very queer positions. yesterday i went along the shore past the wharfes and several warehouses on a street where i had never been before during all the five years i have been in wellington. i opened the door of a long place filled with packages, with passages up the middle, and a row of high windows on one side. at the far end of the room a man was writing at a desk beneath a window. i walked all the length of the room very slowly, for what i had come for had completely gone out of my head. fortunately the man never heard me until i had recollected it. then he got up, and i asked him for some stone-blue, saltpetre, tea, pickles, salt, etc. he was very civil. i bought some things and asked for a note of them. he went to his desk again; i looked at some newspapers lying near. on the top was a circular from smith & elder containing notices of the most important new works. the first and longest was given to _shirley_, a book i had seen mentioned in the _manchester examiner_ as written by currer bell. i blushed all over. the man got up, folding the note. i pulled it out of his hand and set off to the door, looking odder than ever, for a partner had come in and was watching. the clerk said something about sending them, and i said something too--i hope it was not very silly--and took my departure. 'i have seen some extracts from _shirley_ in which you talk of women working. and this first duty, this great necessity, you seem to think that some women may indulge in, if they give up marriage, and don't make themselves too disagreeable to the other sex. you are a coward and a traitor. a woman who works is by that alone better than one who does not; and a woman who does not happen to be rich and who _still_ earns no money and does not wish to do so, is guilty of a great fault, almost a crime--a dereliction of duty which leads rapidly and almost certainly to all manner of degradation. it is very wrong of you to _plead_ for toleration for workers on the ground of their being in peculiar circumstances, and few in number or singular in disposition. work or degradation is the lot of all except the very small number born to wealth. 'ellen is with me, or i with her. i cannot tell how our shop will turn out, but i am as sanguine as ever. meantime we certainly amuse ourselves better than if we had nothing to do. we _like_ it, and that's the truth. by the _cornelia_ we are going to send our sketches and fern leaves. you must look at them, and it will need all your eyes to understand them, for they are a mass of confusion. they are all within two miles of wellington, and some of them rather like--ellen's sketch of me especially. during the last six months i have seen more "society" than in all the last four years. ellen is half the reason of my being invited, and my improved circumstances besides. there is no one worth mentioning particularly. the women are all ignorant and narrow, and the men selfish. they are of a decent, honest kind, and some intelligent and able. a mr. woodward is the only _literary_ man we know, and he seems to have fair sense. this was the clerk i bought the stone-blue of. we have just got a mechanic's institute, and weekly lectures delivered there. it is amusing to see people trying to find out whether or not it is fashionable and proper to patronise it. somehow it seems it is. i think i have told you all this before, which shows i have got to the end of my news. your next letter to me ought to bring me good news, more cheerful than the last. you will somehow get drawn out of your hole and find interests among your fellow-creatures. do you know that living among people with whom you have not the slightest interest in common is just like living alone, or worse? ellen nussey is the only one you can talk to, that i know of at least. give my love to her and to miss wooler, if you have the opportunity. i am writing this on just such a night as you will likely read it--rain and storm, coming winter, and a glowing fire. ours is on the ground, wood, no fender or irons; no matter, we are very comfortable. 'pag.' to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, n. z., _april_ _rd_, . 'dear charlotte,--about a week since i received your last melancholy letter with the account of anne's death and your utter indifference to everything, even to the success of your last book. though you do not say this, it is pretty plain to be seen from the style of your letter. it seems to me hard indeed that you who would succeed, better than any one, in making friends and keeping them, should be condemned to solitude from your poverty. to no one would money bring more happiness, for no one would use it better than you would. for me, with my headlong self-indulgent habits, i am perhaps better without it, but i am convinced it would give you great and noble pleasures. look out then for success in writing; you ought to care as much for that as you do for going to heaven. though the advantages of being employed appear to you now the best part of the business, you will soon, please god, have other enjoyments from your success. railway shares will rise, your books will sell, and you will acquire influence and power; and then most certainly you will find something to use it in which will interest you and make you exert yourself. 'i have got into a heap of social trickery since ellen came, never having troubled my head before about the comparative numbers of young ladies and young gentlemen. to ellen it is quite new to be of such importance by the mere fact of her femininity. she thought she was coming wofully down in the world when she came out, and finds herself better received than ever she was in her life before. and the class are not _in education_ inferior, though they are in money. they are decent well-to-do people: six grocers, one draper, two parsons, two clerks, two lawyers, and three or four nondescripts. all these but one have families to "take tea with," and there are a lot more single men to flirt with. for the last three months we have been out every sunday sketching. we seldom succeed in making the slightest resemblance to the thing we sit down to, but it is wonderfully interesting. next year we hope to send a lot home. with all this my novel stands still; it might have done so if i had had nothing to do, for it is not want of time but want of freedom of mind that makes me unable to direct my attention to it. meantime it grows in my head, for i never give up the idea. i have written about a volume i suppose. read this letter to ellen nussey. 'mary taylor.' to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, _august_ _th_, . 'dear charlotte,--after waiting about six months we have just got _shirley_. it was landed from the _constantinople_ on monday afternoon, just in the thick of our preparations for a "small party" for the next day. we stopped spreading red blankets over everything (new zealand way of arranging the room) and opened the box and read all the letters. soyer's _housewife_ and _shirley_ were there all right, but miss martineau's book was not. in its place was a silly child's tale called _edward orland_. on tuesday we stayed up dancing till three or four o'clock, what for i can't imagine. however, it was a piece of business done. on wednesday i began _shirley_ and continued in a curious confusion of mind till now, principally at the handsome foreigner who was nursed in our house when i was a little girl. by the way, you've put him in the servant's bedroom. you make us all talk much as i think we should have done if we'd ventured to speak at all. what a little lump of perfection you've made me! there is a strange feeling in reading it of hearing us all talking. i have not seen the matted hall and painted parlour windows so plain these five years. but my father is not like. he hates well enough and perhaps loves too, but he is not honest enough. it was from my father i learnt not to marry for money nor to tolerate any one who did, and he never would advise any one to do so, or fail to speak with contempt of those who did. shirley is much more interesting than jane eyre, who never interests you at all until she has something to suffer. all through this last novel there is so much more life and stir that it leaves you far more to remember than the other. did you go to london about this too? what for? i see by a letter of yours to mr. dixon that you _have_ been. i wanted to contradict some of your opinions, now i can't. as to when i'm coming home, you may well ask. i have wished for fifteen years to begin to earn my own living; last april i began to try--it is too soon to say yet with what success. i am woefully ignorant, terribly wanting in tact, and obstinately lazy, and almost too old to mend. luckily there is no other dance for me, so i must work. ellen takes to it kindly, it gratifies a deep ardent _wish_ of hers as of mine, and she is habitually industrious. for _her_, ten years younger, our shop will be a blessing. she may possibly secure an independence, and skill to keep it and use it, before the prime of life is past. as to my writings, you may as well ask the fates about that too. i can give you no information. i write a page now and then. i never forget or get strange to what i have written. when i read it over it looks very interesting. 'mary taylor.' the ellen taylor referred to so frequently was, as i have said, a cousin of mary's. her early death in new zealand gives the single letter i have of hers a more pathetic interest. to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, n. z. 'my dear miss bronte,--i shall tell you everything i can think of, since you said in one of your letters to pag that you wished me to write to you. i have been here a year. it seems a much shorter time, and yet i have thought more and done more than i ever did in my life before. when we arrived, henry and i were in such a hurry to leave the ship that we didn't wait to be fetched, but got into the first boat that came alongside. when we landed we inquired where waring lived, but hadn't walked far before we met him. i had never seen him before, but he guessed we were the cousins he expected, so caught us and took us along with him. mary soon joined us, and we went home together. at first i thought mary was not the least altered, but when i had seen her for about a week i thought she looked rather older. the first night mary and i sat up till a.m. talking. mary and i settled we would do something together, and we talked for a fortnight before we decided whether we would have a school or shop; it ended in favour of the shop. waring thought we had better be quiet, and i believe he still thinks we are doing it for amusement; but he never refuses to help us. he is teaching us book-keeping, and he buys things for us now and then. mary gets as fierce as a dragon and goes to all the wholesale stores and looks at things, gets patterns, samples, etc., and asks prices, and then comes home, and we talk it over; and then she goes again and buys what we want. she says the people are always civil to her. our keeping shop astonishes every body here; i believe they think we do it for fun. some think we shall make nothing of it, or that we shall get tired; and all laugh at us. before i left home i used to be afraid of being laughed at, but now it has very little effect upon me. 'mary and i are settled together now: i can't do without mary and she couldn't get on by herself. i built the house we live in, and we made the plan ourselves, so it suits us. we take it in turns to serve in the shop, and keep the accounts, and do the housework--i mean, mary takes the shop for a week and i the kitchen, and then we change. i think we shall do very well if no more severe earthquakes come, and if we can prevent fire. when a wooden house takes fire it doesn't stop; and we have got an oil cask about as high as i am, that would help it. if some sparks go out at the chimney-top the shingles are in danger. the last earthquake but one about a fortnight ago threw down two medicine bottles that were standing on the table and made other things jingle, but did no damage. if we have nothing worse than that i don't care, but i don't want the chimney to come down--it would cost pounds to build it up again. mary is making me stop because it is nearly p.m. and we are going to waring's to supper. good-bye.--yours truly, 'ellen taylor.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'i get on as well as i can. home is not the home it used to be--that you may well conceive; but so far, i get on. 'i cannot boast of vast benefits derived from change of air yet; but unfortunately i brought back the seeds of a cold with me from that dismal easton, and i have not got rid of it yet. still i think i look better than i did before i went. how are you? you have never told me. 'mr. williams has written to me twice since my return, chiefly on the subject of his third daughter, who wishes to be a governess, and has some chances of a presentation to queen's college, an establishment connected with the governess institution; this will secure her four years of instruction. he says mr. george smith is kindly using his influence to obtain votes, but there are so many candidates he is not sanguine of success. 'i had a long letter from mary taylor--interesting but sad, because it contained many allusions to those who are in this world no more. she mentioned you, and seemed impressed with an idea of the lamentable nature of your unoccupied life. she spoke of her own health as being excellent. 'give my love to your mother and sisters, and,--believe me, yours, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _may_ _th_. 'dear ellen,--i inclose mary taylor's letter announcing ellen's death, and two last letters--sorrowful documents, all of them. i received them this morning from hunsworth without any note or directions where to send them, but i think, if i mistake not, amelia in a previous note told me to transmit them to you.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss charlotte bronte 'wellington, n. z. 'dear charlotte,--i began a letter to you one bitter cold evening last week, but it turned out such a sad one that i have left it and begun again. i am sitting all alone in my own house, or rather what is to be mine when i've paid for it. i bought it of henry when ellen died--shop and all, and carry on by myself. i have made up my mind not to get any assistance. i have not too much work, and the annoyance of having an unsuitable companion was too great to put up with without necessity. i find now that it was ellen that made me so busy, and without her to nurse i have plenty of time. i have begun to keep the house very tidy; it makes it less desolate. i take great interest in my trade--as much as i could do in anything that was not _all_ pleasure. but the best part of my life is the excitement of arrivals from england. reading all the news, written and printed, is like living another life quite separate from this one. the old letters are strange--very, when i begin to read them, but quite familiar notwithstanding. so are all the books and newspapers, though i never see a human being to whom it would ever occur to me to mention anything i read in them. i see your _nom de guerre_ in them sometimes. i saw a criticism on the preface to the second edition of _wuthering heights_. i saw it among the notables who attended thackeray's lectures. i have seen it somehow connected with sir j. k. shuttleworth. did he want to marry you, or only to lionise you? _or was it somebody else_? 'your life in london is a "new country" to me, which i cannot even picture to myself. you seem to like it--at least some things in it, and yet your late letters to mrs. j. taylor talk of low spirits and illness. "what's the matter with you now?" as my mother used to say, as if it were the twentieth time in a fortnight. it is really melancholy that now, in the prime of life, in the flush of your hard-earned prosperity, you can't be well. did not miss martineau improve you? if she did, why not try her and her plan again? but i suppose if you had hope and energy to try, you would be well. well, it's nearly dark and you will surely be well when you read this, so what's the use of writing? i should like well to have some details of your life, but how can i hope for it? i have often tried to give you a picture of mine, but i have not the skill. i get a heap of details, mostly paltry in themselves, and not enough to give you an idea of the whole. oh, for one hour's talk! you are getting too far off and beginning to look strange to me. do you look as you used to do, i wonder? what do you and ellen nussey talk about when you meet? there! it's dark. '_sunday night_.--i have let the vessel go that was to take this. as there were others going soon i did not much care. i am in the height of cogitation whether to send for some worsted stockings, etc. they will come next year at this time, and who can tell what i shall want then, or shall be doing? yet hitherto we have sent such orders, and have guessed or known pretty well what we should want. i have just been looking over a list of four pages long in ellen's handwriting. these things ought to come by the next vessel, or part of them at least. when tired of that i began to read some pages of "my book" intending to write some more, but went on reading for pleasure. i often do this, and find it very interesting indeed. it does not get on fast, though i have written about one volume and a half. it's full of music, poverty, disputing, politics, and original views of life. i can't for the life of me bring the lover into it, nor tell what he's to do when he comes. of the men generally i can never tell what they'll do next. the women i understand pretty well, and rare _tracasserie_ there is among them--they are perfectly _feminine_ in that respect at least. 'i am just now in a state of famine. no books and no news from england for this two months. i am thinking of visiting a circulating library from sheer dulness. if i had more time i should get melancholy. no one can prize activity more than i do. i never am long without it than a gloom comes over me. the cloud seems to be always there behind me, and never quite out of sight but when i keep on at a good rate. fortunately, the more i work the better i like it. i shall take to scrubbing the floor before it's dirty and polishing pans on the outside in my old age. it is the only thing that gives me an appetite for dinner. 'pag. 'give my love to ellen nussey.' to miss ellen nussey 'wellington, n. z., _th_ _jan_. . 'dear ellen,--a few days ago i got a letter from you, dated nd may , along with some patterns and fashion-book. they seem to have been lost somehow, as the box ought to have come by the _hastings_, and only now makes its appearance by the _philip lang_. it has come very _apropos_ for a new year's gift, and the patterns were not opened twenty-four hours before a silk cape was cut out by one of them. i think i made a very impertinent request when i asked you to give yourself so much trouble. the poor woman for whom i wanted them is now a first-rate dressmaker--her drunken husband, who was her main misfortune, having taken himself off and not been heard of lately. 'i am glad to hear that mrs. gaskell is progressing with the _life_. 'i wish i had kept charlotte's letters now, though i never felt it safe to do so until latterly that i have had a home of my own. they would have been much better evidence than my imperfect recollection, and infinitely more interesting. a settled opinion is very likely to look absurd unless you give the grounds for it, and even if i could remember them it might look as if there might be other facts which i have neglected which ought to have altered it. your news of the "neighbours" is very interesting, especially of miss wooler and my old schoolfellows. i wish i knew how to give you some account of my ways here and the effect of my position on me. first of all, it agrees with me. i am in better health than at any time since i left school. my life now is not overburdened with work, and what i do has interest and attraction in it. i think it is that part that i shall think most agreeable when i look back on my death-bed--a number of small pleasures scattered over my way, that, when seen from a distance, will seem to cover it thick. they don't cover it by any means, but i never had so many. 'i look after my shopwoman, make out bills, decide who shall have "trust" and who not. then i go a-buying, not near such an anxious piece of business now that i understand my trade, and have, moreover, a good "credit." i read a good deal, sometimes on the sofa, a vice i am much given to in hot weather. then i have some friends--not many, and no geniuses, which fact pray keep strictly to yourself, for how the doings and sayings of wellington people in england always come out again to new zealand! they are not very interesting any way. this is my fault in part, for i can't take interest in their concerns. a book is worth any of them, and a good book worth them all put together. '_our_ east winds are much the pleasantest and healthiest we have. the soft moist north-west brings headache and depression--it even blights the trees.--yours affectionately, 'mary taylor.' to miss ellen nussey 'wellington, _th_ _june_ . 'dear ellen,--i have lately heard that you are leaving brookroyd. i shall not even see brookroyd again, and one of the people who lived there; and _one_ whom i used to see there i shall never see more. keep yourself well, dear ellen, and gather round you as much happiness and interest as you can, and let me find you cheery and thriving when i come. when that will be i don't yet know; but one thing is sure, i have given over ordering goods from england, so that i must sometime give over for want of anything to sell. the last things ordered i expect to arrive about the beginning of the year . in the course of that year, therefore, i shall be left without anything to do or motive for staying. possibly this time twelve months i may be leaving wellington. 'we are here in the height of a political crisis. the election for the highest office in the province (superintendent) comes off in about a fortnight. there is altogether a small storm going on in our teacup, quite brisk enough to stir everything in it. my principal interest therein is the sale of election ribbons, though i am afraid, owing to the bad weather, there will be little display. besides the elections, there is nothing interesting. we all go on pretty well. i have got a pony about four feet high, that carries me about ten miles from wellington, which is much more than walking distance, to which i have been confined for the last ten years. i have given over most of the work to miss smith, who will finally take the business, and if we had fine weather i think i should enjoy myself. my main want here is for books enough to fill up my idle time. it seems to me that when i get home i will spend half my income on books, and sell them when i have read them to make it go further. i know this is absurd, but people with an unsatisfied appetite think they can eat enormously. 'remember me kindly to miss wooler, and tell me all about her in your next.--yours affectionately, 'mary taylor.' miss taylor wrote one or two useful letters to mrs. gaskell, while the latter was preparing her memoir of charlotte bronte, and her favourable estimate of the book we have already seen. about or she returned to england and lived out the remainder of her days in complete seclusion in a yorkshire home that she built for herself. the novel to which she refers in a letter to her friend never seems to have got itself written, or at least published, for it was not until that miss mary taylor produced a work of fiction--_miss miles_. { a} this novel strives to inculcate the advantages as well as the duty of women learning to make themselves independent of men. it is well, though not brilliantly written, and might, had the author possessed any of the latter-day gifts of self-advertisement, have attracted the public, if only by the mere fact that its author was a friend of currer bell's. but miss taylor, it is clear, hated advertisement, and severely refused to be lionised by bronte worshippers. twenty years earlier than _miss miles_, i may add, she had preached the same gospel in less attractive guise. a series of papers in the _victorian magazine_ were reprinted under the title of _the first duty of women_. { b} 'to inculcate the duty of earning money,' she declares, 'is the principal point in these articles.' 'it is to the feminine half of the world that the commonplace duty of providing for themselves is recommended,' and she enforces her doctrine with considerable point, and by means of arguments much more accepted in our day than in hers. miss taylor died in march , at high royd, in yorkshire, at the age of seventy-six. she will always occupy an honourable place in the bronte story. chapter x: margaret wooler the kindly, placid woman who will ever be remembered as charlotte bronte's schoolmistress, had, it may be safely said, no history. she was a good-hearted woman, who did her work and went to her rest with no possible claim to a place in biography, save only that she assisted in the education of two great women. for that reason her brief story is worth setting forth here. 'i am afraid we cannot give you very much information about our aunt, miss wooler,' writes one of her kindred. 'she was the eldest of a large family, born june th, . she was extremely intelligent and highly educated, and throughout her long life, which lasted till within a week of completing her ninety-third year, she took the greatest interest in religious, political, and every charitable work, being a life governor to many institutions. part of her early life was spent in the isle of wight with relations, where she was very intimate with the sewell family, one of whom was the author of _amy herbert_. by her own family, she was ever looked up to with the greatest respect, being always called "sister" by her brothers and sisters all her life. after she retired from her school at roe head, and afterwards dewsbury moor, she used sometimes to make her home for months together with my father and mother at heckmondwike vicarage; then she would go away for a few months to the sea-side, either alone or with one of her sisters. the last ten or twelve years of her life were spent at gomersall, along with two of her sisters and a niece. the three sisters all died within a year, the youngest going first and the eldest last. they are buried in birstall churchyard, close to my parents and sister. 'miss bronte was her pupil when at roe head; the late miss taylor and miss e. nussey were also her pupils at the same time. afterwards miss bronte stayed on as governess. my father prepared miss bronte for confirmation when he was curate-in-charge at mirfield parish church. when miss bronte was married, miss wooler was one of the guests. mr. bronte, not feeling well enough to go to church that morning, my aunt gave her away, as she had no other relative there to do it. 'miss wooler kept up a warm friendship with her former pupil, up to the time of her death. 'my aunt was a most loyal subject, and devotedly attached to the church. she made a point of reading the bible steadily through every year, and a chapter out of her italian testament each day, for she used to say "she never liked to lose anything she had learnt." it was always a pleasure, too, if she met with any one who could converse with her in french. 'i fear these few items will not be of much use, but it is difficult to record anything of one who led such a quiet and retiring, but useful life.' 'my recollections of miss wooler,' writes miss nussey, 'are, that she was short and stout, but graceful in her movements, very fluent in conversation and with a very sweet voice. she had charlotte and myself to stay with her sometimes after we left school. we had delightful sitting-up times with her when the pupils had gone to bed. she would treat us so confidentially, relating her six years' residence in the isle of wight with an uncle and aunt--dr. more and his wife. dr. more was on the military staff, and the society of the island had claims upon him. mrs. more was a fine woman and very benevolent. personally, miss wooler was like a lady abbess. she wore white, well-fitting dresses embroidered. her long hair plaited, formed a coronet, and long large ringlets fell from her head to shoulders. she was not pretty or handsome, but her quiet dignity made her presence imposing. she was nobly scrupulous and conscientious--a woman of the greatest self-denial. her income was small. she lived on half of it, and gave the remainder to charitable objects.' it is clear that charlotte was very fond of her schoolmistress, although they had one serious difference during the brief period of her stay at dewsbury moor with anne. anne was home-sick and ill, and miss wooler, with her own robust constitution, found it difficult to understand anne's illness. charlotte, in arms for her sister, spoke out with vehemence, and both the sisters went home soon afterwards. { } here are a bundle of letters addressed to miss wooler. to miss wooler 'haworth, _august_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--since you wish to hear from me while you are from home, i will write without further delay. it often happens that when we linger at first in answering a friend's letter, obstacles occur to retard us to an inexcusably late period. 'in my last i forgot to answer a question you asked me, and was sorry afterwards for the omission; i will begin, therefore, by replying to it, though i fear what i can give will now come a little late. you said mrs. chapham had some thoughts of sending her daughter to school, and wished to know whether the clergy daughters' school at casterton was an eligible place. 'my personal knowledge of that institution is very much out of date, being derived from the experience of twenty years ago; the establishment was at that time in its infancy, and a sad rickety infancy it was. typhus fever decimated the school periodically, and consumption and scrofula in every variety of form, which bad air and water, and bad, insufficient diet can generate, preyed on the ill-fated pupils. it would not then have been a fit place for any of mrs. chapham's children. but, i understand, it is very much altered for the better since those days. the school is removed from cowan bridge (a situation as unhealthy as it was picturesque--low, damp, beautiful with wood and water) to casterton; the accommodation, the diet, the discipline, the system of tuition, all are, i believe, entirely altered and greatly improved. i was told that such pupils as behaved well and remained at school till their educations were finished were provided with situations as governesses if they wish to adopt that vocation, and that much care was exercised in the selection; it was added they were also furnished with an excellent wardrobe on quitting casterton. 'if i have the opportunity of reading _the life of dr. arnold_, i shall not fail to profit thereby; your recommendation makes me desirous to see it. do you remember once speaking with approbation of a book called _mrs. leicester's school_, which you said you had met with, and you wondered by whom it was written? i was reading the other day a lately published collection of the _letters of charles lamb_, edited by serjeant talfourd, where i found it mentioned that _mrs. leicester's school_ was the first production of lamb and his sister. these letters are themselves singularly interesting; they have hitherto been suppressed in all previous collections of lamb's works and relics, on account of the frequent allusions they contain to the unhappy malady of miss lamb, and a frightful incident which darkened her earlier years. she was, it appears, a woman of the sweetest disposition, and, in her normal state, of the highest and clearest intellect, but afflicted with periodical insanity which came on once a year, or oftener. to her parents she was a most tender and dutiful daughter, nursing them in their old age, when one was physically and the other mentally infirm, with unremitting care, and at the same time toiling to add something by needlework to the slender resources of the family. a succession of laborious days and sleepless nights brought on a frenzy fit, in which she had the miserable misfortune to kill her own mother. she was afterwards placed in a madhouse, where she would have been detained for life, had not her brother charles promised to devote himself to her and take her under his care--and for her sake renounce a project of marriage he then entertained. an instance of abnegation of self scarcely, i think, to be paralleled in the annals of the "coarser sex." they passed their subsequent lives together--models of fraternal affection, and would have been very happy but for the dread visitation to which mary lamb continued liable all her life. i thought it both a sad and edifying history. your account of your little niece's naive delight in beholding the morning sea for the first time amused and pleased me; it proves she has some sensations--a refreshing circumstance in a day and generation when the natural phenomenon of children wholly destitute of all pretension to the same is by no means an unusual occurrence. 'i have written a long letter as you requested me, but i fear you will not find it very amusing. with love to your little companion,--believe me, my dear miss wooler, yours affectionately and respectfully, 'c. bronte. 'papa, i am most thankful to say, continues in very good health, considering his age. my sisters likewise are pretty well.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _march_ _st_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i had been wishing to hear from you for some time before i received your last. there has been so much sickness during the last winter, and the influenza especially has been so severe and so generally prevalent, that the sight of suffering around us has frequently suggested fears for absent friends. ellen nussey told me, indeed, that neither you nor miss c. wooler had escaped the influenza, but, since your letter contains no allusion to your own health or hers, i trust you are completely recovered. i am most thankful to say that papa has hitherto been exempted from any attack. my sister and myself have each had a visit from it, but anne is the only one with whom it stayed long or did much mischief; in her case it was attended with distressing cough and fever; but she is now better, though it has left her chest weak. 'i remember well wishing my lot had been cast in the troubled times of the late war, and seeing in its exciting incidents a kind of stimulating charm which it made my pulse beat fast only to think of--i remember even, i think, being a little impatient that you would not fully sympathise with my feelings on this subject, that you heard my aspirations and speculations very tranquilly, and by no means seemed to think the flaming sword could be any pleasant addition to the joys of paradise. i have now outlived youth; and, though i dare not say that i have outlived all its illusions, that the romance is quite gone from life, the veil fallen from truth, and that i see both in naked reality, yet, certainly, many things are not to me what they were ten years ago; and amongst the rest, "the pomp and circumstance of war" have quite lost in my eyes their factitious glitter. i have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life both in nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale diverts men's minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and, for the time, gives them something like largeness of views; but, as little doubt have i that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface--in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust by their violence the vital energies of the countries where they occur. that england may be spared the spasms, cramps, and frenzy-fits now contorting the continent and threatening ireland, i earnestly pray! 'with the french and irish i have no sympathy. with the germans and italians i think the case is different--as different as the love of freedom is from the lust of license.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _september_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--when i tell you that i have already been to the lakes this season, and that it is scarcely more than a month since i returned, you will understand that it is no longer within my power to accept your kind invitation. 'i wish i could have gone to you. i wish your invitation had come first; to speak the truth, it would have suited me better than the one by which i profited. it would have been pleasant, soothing, in many ways beneficial, to have spent two weeks with you in your cottage-lodgings. but these reflections are vain. i have already had my excursion, and there is an end of it. sir j. k. shuttleworth is residing near windermere, at a house called "the briary," and it was there i was staying for a little while in august. he very kindly showed me the scenery--_as it can be seen from a carriage_--and i discerned that the "lake country" is a glorious region, of which i had only seen the similitude in dream--waking or sleeping. but, my dear miss wooler, i only half enjoyed it, because i was only half at my ease. decidedly i find it does not agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything. i longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these i was obliged to control, or rather, suppress, for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the "lioness," the authoress, the artist. sir j. k. shuttleworth is a man of ability and intellect, but not a man in whose presence one willingly unbends. 'you say you suspect i have found a large circle of acquaintance by this time. no, i cannot say that i have. i doubt whether i possess either the wish or the power to do so. a few friends i should like to know well; if such knowledge brought proportionate regard i could not help concentrating my feelings. dissipation, i think, appears synonymous with dilution. however, i have as yet scarcely been tried. during the month i spent in london in the spring, i kept very quiet, having the fear of "lionising" before my eyes. i only went out once to dinner, and was once present at an evening party; and the only visits i have paid have been to sir j. k. shuttleworth and my publishers. from this system i should not like to depart. as far as i can see, indiscriminate visiting tends only to a waste of time and a vulgarising of character. besides, it would be wrong to leave papa often; he is now in his th year, the infirmities of age begin to creep upon him. during the summer he has been much harassed by chronic bronchitis, but, i am thankful to say, he is now somewhat better. i think my own health has derived benefit from change and exercise. 'you ask after ellen nussey. when i saw ellen, about two months ago, she looked remarkably well. i sometimes hear small fragments of gossip which amuse me. somebody professes to have authority for saying that "when miss bronte was in london she neglected to attend divine service on the sabbath, and in the week spent her time in going about to balls, theatres, and operas." on the other hand, the london quidnuncs make my seclusion a matter of wonder, and devise twenty romantic fictions to account for it. formerly i used to listen to report with interest and a certain credulity; i am now grown deaf and sceptical. experience has taught me how absolutely devoid of foundations her stories may be. 'with the sincere hope that your own health is better, and kind remembrances to all old friends whenever you see them or write to them (and whether or not their feeling to me has ceased to be friendly, which i fear is the case in some instances),--i am, my dear miss wooler, always yours, affectionately and respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--my first feeling on receiving your note was one of disappointment; but a little consideration sufficed to show me that "all was for the best." in truth, it was a great piece of extravagance on my part to ask you and ellen together; it is much better to divide such good things. to have your visit in _prospect_ will console me when hers is in _retrospect_. not that i mean to yield to the weakness of clinging dependently to the society of friends, however dear, but still as an occasional treat i must value and even seek such society as a necessary of life. let me know, then, whenever it suits your convenience to come to haworth, and, unless some change i cannot now foresee occurs, a ready and warm welcome will await you. should there be any cause rendering it desirable to defer the visit, i will tell you frankly. 'the pleasures of society i cannot offer you, nor those of fine scenery, but i place very much at your command the moors, some books, a series of "curling-hair times," and an old pupil into the bargain. ellen may have told you that i have spent a month in london this summer. when you come you shall ask what questions you like on that point, and i will answer to the best of my stammering ability. do not press me much on the subject of the "crystal palace." i went there five times, and certainly saw some interesting things, and the _coup d'oeil_ is striking and bewildering enough, but i never was able to get up any raptures on the subject, and each renewed visit was made under coercion rather than my own free-will. it is an excessively bustling place; and, after all, it's wonders appeal too exclusively to the eye and rarely touch the heart or head. i make an exception to the last assertion in favour of those who possess a large range of scientific knowledge. once i went with sir david brewster, and perceived that he looked on objects with other eyes than mine. 'ellen i find is writing, and will therefore deliver her own messages of regard. if papa were in the room he would, i know, desire his respects; and you must take both respects and a good bundle of something more cordial from yours very faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _september_ _nd_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--our visitor (a relative from cornwall) having left us, the coast is now clear, so that whenever you feel inclined to come, papa and i will be truly glad to see you. i _do_ wish the splendid weather we have had and are having may accompany you here. i fear i have somewhat grudged the fine days, fearing a change before you come.--believe me, with papa's regards, yours respectfully and affectionately, 'c. bronte. 'come soon; if you can, on wednesday.' to miss ellen nussey '_october_ _rd_, . 'dear nell,--do not think i have forgotten you because i have not written since your last. every day i have had you more or less in my thoughts, and wondered how your mother was getting on; let me have a line of information as soon as possible. i have been busy, first with a somewhat unexpected visitor, a cousin from cornwall, who has been spending a few days with us, and now with miss wooler, who came on monday. the former personage we can discuss any time when we meet. miss wooler is and has been very pleasant. she is like good wine: i think time improves her; and really whatever she may be in person, in mind she is younger than when at roe head. papa and she get on extremely well. i have just heard papa walk into the dining-room and pay her a round compliment on her good-sense. i think so far she has been pretty comfortable and likes haworth, but as she only brought a small hand-basket of luggage with her she cannot stay long. 'how are _you_? write directly. with my love to your mother, etc., good-bye, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. to miss wooler '_february_ _th_, . 'ellen nussey, it seems, told you i spent a fortnight in london last december; they wished me very much to stay a month, alleging that i should in that time be able to secure a complete circle of acquaintance, but i found a fortnight of such excitement quite enough. the whole day was usually spent in sight-seeing, and often the evening was spent in society; it was more than i could bear for a length of time. on one occasion i met a party of my critics--seven of them; some of them had been very bitter foes in print, but they were prodigiously civil face to face. these gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, showy, than the few authors i saw. mr. thackeray, for instance, is a man of quiet, simple demeanour; he is however looked upon with some awe and even distrust. his conversation is very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant. it was proposed to me to see charles dickens, lady morgan, mesdames trollope, gore, and some others, but i was aware these introductions would bring a degree of notoriety i was not disposed to encounter; i declined, therefore, with thanks. 'nothing charmed me more during my stay in town than the pictures i saw. one or two private collections of turner's best water-colour drawings were indeed a treat; his later oil-paintings are strange things--things that baffle description. 'i twice saw macready act--once in _macbeth_ and once in _othello_. i astonished a dinner-party by honestly saying i did not like him. it is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting. anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style i could scarcely have imagined. the fact is, the stage-system altogether is hollow nonsense. they act farces well enough: the actors comprehend their parts and do them justice. they comprehend nothing about tragedy or shakespeare, and it is a failure. i said so; and by so saying produced a blank silence--a mute consternation. i was, indeed, obliged to dissent on many occasions, and to offend by dissenting. it seems now very much the custom to admire a certain wordy, intricate, obscure style of poetry, such as elizabeth barrett browning writes. some pieces were referred to about which currer bell was expected to be very rapturous, and failing in this, he disappointed. 'london people strike a provincial as being very much taken up with little matters about which no one out of particular town-circles cares much; they talk, too, of persons--literary men and women--whose names are scarcely heard in the country, and in whom you cannot get up an interest. i think i should scarcely like to live in london, and were i obliged to live there, i should certainly go little into company, especially i should eschew the literary coteries. 'you told me, my dear miss wooler, to write a long letter. i have obeyed you.--believe me now, yours affectionately and respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--your kind note holds out a strong temptation, but one that _must be resisted_. from home i must not go unless health or some cause equally imperative render a change necessary. for nearly four months now (_i.e._ since i became ill) i have not put pen to paper. my work has been lying untouched, and my faculties have been rusting for want of exercise. further relaxation is out of the question, and i _will not permit myself to think of it_. my publisher groans over my long delays; i am sometimes provoked to check the expression of his impatience with short and crusty answers. 'yet the pleasure i now deny myself i would fain regard as only deferred. i heard something about your proposing to visit scarbro' in the course of the summer, and could i by the close of july or august bring my task to a certain point, how glad should i be to join you there for awhile! 'ellen will probably go to the south about may to make a stay of two or three months; she has formed a plan for my accompanying her and taking lodgings on the sussex coast; but the scheme seems to me impracticable for many reasons, and, moreover, my medical man doubts the advisability of my going southward in summer, he says it might prove very enervating, whereas scarbro' or burlington would brace and strengthen. however, i dare not lay plans at this distance of time. for me so much must depend, first on papa's health (which throughout the winter has been, i am thankful to say, really excellent), and second, on the progress of work, a matter not wholly contingent on wish or will, but lying in a great measure beyond the reach of effort and out of the pale of calculation. 'i will not write more at present, as i wish to save this post. all in the house would join in kind remembrances to you if they knew i was writing. tabby and martha both frequently inquire after miss wooler, and desire their respects when an opportunity offers of presenting the same.--believe me, yours always affectionately and respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _september_ _nd_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i have delayed answering your very kind letter till i could speak decidedly respecting papa's health. for some weeks after the attack there were frequent variations, and once a threatening of a relapse, but i trust his convalescence may now be regarded as confirmed. the acute inflammation of the eye, which distressed papa so much as threatening loss of sight, but which i suppose was merely symptomatic of the rush of blood to the brain, is now quite subsided; the partial paralysis has also disappeared; the appetite is better; weakness with occasional slight giddiness seem now the only lingering traces of disease. i am assured that with papa's excellent constitution, there is every prospect of his still being spared to me for many years. 'for two things i have reason to be most thankful, viz., that the mental faculties have remained quite untouched, and also that my own health and strength have been found sufficient for the occasion. solitary as i certainly was at filey, i yet derived great benefit from the change. 'it would be pleasant at the sea-side this fine warm weather, and i should dearly like to be there with you; to such a treat, however, i do not now look forward at all. you will fully understand the impossibility of my enjoying peace of mind during absence from papa under present circumstances; his strength must be very much more fully restored before i can think of leaving home. 'my dear miss wooler, in case you should go to scarbro' this season, may i request you to pay one visit to the churchyard and see if the inscription on the stone has been altered as i directed. we have heard nothing since on the subject, and i fear the alteration may have been neglected. 'ellen has made a long stay in the south, but i believe she will soon return now, and i am looking forward to the pleasure of having her company in the autumn. 'with kind regards to all old friends, and sincere love to yourself,--i am, my dear miss wooler, yours affectionately and respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _september_ _st_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i was truly sorry to hear that when ellen called at the parsonage you were suffering from influenza. i know that an attack of this debilitating complaint is no trifle in your case, as its effects linger with you long. it has been very prevalent in this neighbourhood. i did not escape, but the sickness and fever only lasted a few days and the cough was not severe. papa, i am thankful to say, continues pretty well; ellen thinks him little, if at all altered. 'and now for your kind present. the book will be precious to me--chiefly, perhaps, for the sake of the giver, but also for its own sake, for it is a good book; and i wish i may be enabled to read it with some approach to the spirit you would desire. its perusal came recommended in such a manner as to obviate danger of neglect; its place shall always be on my dressing-table. 'as to the other part of the present, it arrived under these circumstances: 'for a month past an urgent necessity to buy and make some things for winter-wear had been importuning my conscience; the _buying_ might be soon effected, but the _making_ was a more serious consideration. at this juncture ellen arrives with a good-sized parcel, which, when opened, discloses the things i required, perfectly made and of capital useful fabric; adorned too--which seemly decoration it is but too probable i might myself have foregone as an augmentation of trouble not to be lightly incurred. i felt strong doubts as to my right to profit by this sort of fairy gift, so unlooked for and so curiously opportune; on reading the note accompanying the garments, i am told that to accept will be to confer a favour(!) the doctrine is too palatable to be rejected; i even waive all nice scrutiny of its soundness--in short, i submit with as good a grace as may be. 'ellen has only been my companion one little week. i would not have her any longer, for i am disgusted with myself and my delays, and consider it was a weak yielding to temptation in me to send for her at all; but, in truth, my spirits were getting low--prostrate sometimes, and she has done me inexpressible good. i wonder when i shall see you at haworth again. both my father and the servants have again and again insinuated a distinct wish that you should be requested to come in the course of the summer and autumn, but i always turned a deaf ear: "not yet," was my thought, "i want first to be free--work first, then pleasure." 'i venture to send by ellen a book which may amuse an hour: a scotch tale by a minister's wife. it seems to me well told, and may serve to remind you of characters and manners you have seen in scotland. when you have time to write a line, i shall feel anxious to hear how you are. with kind regards to all old friends, and truest affection to yourself; in which ellen joins me,--i am, my dear miss wooler, yours gratefully and respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i wished much to write to you immediately on my return home, but i found several little matters demanding attention, and have been kept busy till now. 'i reached home about five o'clock in the afternoon, and the anxiety which is inseparable from a return after absence was pleasantly relieved by finding papa well and cheerful. he inquired after you with interest. i gave him your kind regards, and he specially charged me whenever i wrote to present his in return, and to say also that he hoped to see you at haworth at the earliest date which shall be convenient to you. 'the week i spent at hornsea was a happy and pleasant week. thank you, my dear miss wooler, for the true kindness which gave it its chief charm. i shall think of you often, especially when i walk out, and during the long evenings. i believe the weather has at length taken a turn: to-day is beautifully fine. i wish i were at hornsea and just now preparing to go out with you to walk on the sands or along the lake. i would not have you to fatigue yourself with writing to me when you are not inclined, but yet i should be glad to hear from you some day ere long. when you _do_ write, tell me how you liked _the experience of life_, and whether you have read _esmond_, and what you think of it.--believe me always yours, with true affection and respect, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'brookroyd, _december_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--since you were so kind as to take some interest in my small tribulation of saturday, i write a line to tell you that on sunday morning a letter came which put me out of pain and obviated the necessity of an impromptu journey to london. 'the _money transaction_, of course, remains the same, and perhaps is not quite equitable; but when an author finds that his work is cordially approved, he can pardon the rest--indeed, my chief regret now lies in the conviction that papa will be disappointed: he expected me to earn pounds, nor did i myself anticipate that a lower sum would be offered; however, pounds is not to be despised. { } 'your sudden departure from brookroyd left a legacy of consternation to the bereaved breakfast-table. ellen was not easily to be soothed, though i diligently represented to her that you had quitted haworth with the same inexorable haste. i am commissioned to tell you, first, that she has decided not to go to yarmouth till after christmas, her mother's health having within the last few days betrayed some symptoms not unlike those which preceded her former illness; and though it is to be hoped that those may pass without any untoward result, yet they naturally increase ellen's reluctance to leave home for the present. 'secondly, i am to say, that when the present you left came to be examined, the costliness and beauty of it inspired some concern. ellen thinks you are too kind, as i also think every morning, for i am now benefiting by your kind gift. 'with sincere regards to all at the parsonage,--i am, my dear miss wooler, yours respectfully and affectionately, 'c. bronte. '_p.s._--i shall direct that _esmond_ (mr. thackeray's work) shall be sent on to you as soon as the hunsworth party have read it. it has already reached a second edition.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--your last kind note would not have remained so long unanswered if i had been in better health. while ellen was with me, i seemed to revive wonderfully, but began to grow worse again the day she left; and this falling off proved symptomatic of a relapse. my doctor called the next day; he said the headache from which i was suffering arose from inertness in the liver. 'thank god, i now feel better; and very grateful am i for the improvement--grateful no less for my dear father's sake than for my own. 'most fully can i sympathise with you in the anxiety you express about your friend. the thought of his leaving england and going out alone to a strange country, with all his natural sensitiveness and retiring diffidence, is indeed painful; still, my dear miss wooler, should he actually go to america, i can but then suggest to you the same source of comfort and support you have suggested to me, and of which indeed i know you never lose sight--namely, reliance on providence. "god tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and he will doubtless care for a good, though afflicted man, amidst whatever difficulties he may be thrown. when you write again, i should be glad to know whether your anxiety on this subject is relieved. i was truly glad to learn through ellen that ilkley still continued to agree with your health. earnestly trusting that the new year may prove to you a happy and tranquil time,--i am, my dear miss wooler, sincerely and affectionately yours, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--i received your letter here in london where i have been staying about three weeks, and shall probably remain a few days longer. _villette_ is to be published to-morrow. its appearance has been purposely delayed hitherto, to avoid discourteous clashing with mrs. gaskell's new work. your name was one of the first on the list of presentees, and directed to the parsonage, where i shall also send this letter, as you mention that you are to leave halifax at the close of this week. i will bear in mind what you say about mrs. morgan; and should i ever have an opportunity of serving her, will not omit to do so. i only wish my chance of being useful were greater. schools seem to be considered almost obsolete in london. ladies' colleges, with professors for every branch of instruction, are superseding the old-fashioned seminary. how the system will work i can't tell. i think the college classes might be very useful for finishing the education of ladies intended to go out as governesses, but what progress little girls will make in them seems to me another question. 'my dear miss wooler, i read attentively all you say about miss martineau; the sincerity and constancy of your solicitude touches me very much. i should grieve to neglect or oppose your advice, and yet i do not feel that it would be right to give miss martineau up entirely. there is in her nature much that is very noble. hundreds have forsaken her, more, i fear, in the apprehension that their fair names may suffer if seen in connection with hers, than from any pure convictions, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on her fatal tenets. with these fair-weather friends i cannot bear to rank. and for her sin, is it not one of those which god and not man must judge? 'to speak the truth, my dear miss wooler, i believe if you were in my place, and knew miss martineau as i do--if you had shared with me the proofs of her rough but genuine kindliness, and had seen how she secretly suffers from abandonment, you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the sin, and feel as if the right lay rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait, while that adherence is unfashionable and unpopular, than in turning on her your back when the world sets the example. i believe she is one of those whom opposition and desertion make obstinate in error, while patience and tolerance touch her deeply and keenly, and incline her to ask of her own heart whether the course she has been pursuing may not possibly be a faulty course. however, i have time to think of this subject, and i shall think of it seriously. 'as to what i have seen in london during my present visit, i hope one day to tell you all about it by our fireside at home. when you write again will you name a time when it would suit you to come and see me; everybody in the house would be glad of your presence; your last visit is pleasantly remembered by all. 'with kindest regards,--i am always, affectionately and respectfully yours, 'c. bronte.' a note to miss nussey written after charlotte's death indicates a fairly shrewd view on the part of miss wooler as regards the popularity of her friend. to miss ellen nussey 'my dear miss ellen,--the third edition of charlotte's life has at length ventured out. our curate tells me he is assured it is quite inferior to the former ones. so you see mrs. gaskell displayed worldly wisdom in going out of her way to furnish gossip for the discerning public. did i mention to you that mrs. gibson knows two or three young ladies in hull who finished their education at mme. heger's pension? mrs. g. said they read _villette_ with keen interest--of course they would. i had a nice walk with a suffolk lady, who was evidently delighted to meet with one who had personally known our dear c. b., and would not soon have wearied of a conversation in which she was the topic.--love to yourself and sisters, from--your affectionate, 'm. wooler.' chapter xi: the curates at haworth something has already been said concerning the growth of the population of haworth during the period of mr. bronte's incumbency. it was in , and in . this makes it natural that mr. bronte should have applied to his bishop for assistance in his pastoral duty, and such aid was permanently granted him in , when mr. william weightman became his first curate. { } mr. weightman would appear to have been a favourite. he many times put in an appearance at the parsonage, although i do not recognise him in any one of charlotte's novels, and he certainly has no place among the three famous curates of _shirley_. he would seem to have been the only man, other than her father and brother, whom emily was known to tolerate. we know that the girls considered him effeminate, and they called him 'celia amelia,' under which name he frequently appears in charlotte's letters to ellen nussey. that he was good-natured seems to be indisputable. there is one story of his walking to bradford to post valentines to the incumbent's daughters, when he found they had never received any. there is another story of a trip to keighley to hear him lecture. he was a bit of a poet, it seems, and ellen nussey was the heroine of some of his verses when she visited at haworth. here is a letter which throws some light upon charlotte's estimate of the young man--he was twenty-three years of age at this time. to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear mrs. eleanor,--i wish to scold you with a forty-horse power for having told mary taylor that i had requested you not to tell her everything, which piece of information has thrown her into tremendous ill-humour, besides setting the teeth of her curiosity on edge. tell her forthwith every individual occurrence, including valentines, "fair e---, fair e---," etc.; "away fond love," etc.; "soul divine," and all; likewise the painting of miss celia amelia weightman's portrait, and that _young lady's_ frequent and agreeable visits. by-the-bye, i inquired into the opinion of that intelligent and interesting young person respecting you. it was a favourable one. "she" thought you a fine-looking girl, and a very good girl into the bargain. have you received the newspaper which has been despatched, containing a notice of "her" lecture at keighley? mr. morgan came and stayed three days. by miss weightman's aid, we got on pretty well. it was amazing to see with what patience and good-temper the innocent creature endured that fat welshman's prosing, though she confessed afterwards that she was almost done up by his long stories. we feel very dull without you. i wish those three weeks were to come over again. aunt has been at times precious cross since you went--however, she is rather better now. i had a bad cold on sunday and stayed at home most of the day. anne's cold is better, but i don't consider her strong yet. what did your sister anne say about my omitting to send a drawing for the jew basket? i hope she was too much occupied with the thoughts of going to earnley to think of it. i am obliged to cut short my letter. everybody in the house unites in sending their love to you. miss celia amelia weightman also desires to be remembered. write soon again and--believe me, yours unalterably, 'charivari.' he would seem to have been a much teased curate. now it is miss ellen nussey, now a miss agnes walton, who is supposed to be the object of his devotion. to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear mrs. menelaus,--i think i am exceedingly good to write to you so soon, indeed i am quite afraid you will begin to consider me intrusive with my frequent letters. i ought by right to let an interval of a quarter of a year elapse between each communication, and i will, in time; never fear me. i shall improve in procrastination as i get older. 'my hand is trembling like that of an old man, so i don't expect you will be able to read my writing; never mind, put the letter by and i'll read it to you the next time i see you. 'i have been painting a portrait of agnes walton for our friend miss celia amelia. you would laugh to see how his eyes sparkle with delight when he looks at it, like a pretty child pleased with a new plaything. good-bye to you. let me have no more of your humbug about cupid, etc. you know as well as i do it is all groundless trash. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _th_, . 'dear mrs. ellen,--i was very well pleased with your capital long letter. a better farce than the whole affair of that letter-opening (ducks and mr. weightman included) was never imagined. { } by-the-bye, speaking of mr. w., i told you he was gone to pass his examination at ripon six weeks ago. he is not come back yet, and what has become of him we don't know. branwell has received one letter since he went, speaking rapturously of agnes walton, describing certain balls at which he had figured, and announcing that he had been twice over head and ears desperately in love. it is my devout belief that his reverence left haworth with the fixed intention of never returning. if he does return, it will be because he has not been able to get a "living." haworth is not the place for him. he requires novelty, a change of faces, difficulties to be overcome. he pleases so easily that he soon gets weary of pleasing at all. he ought not to have been a parson; certainly he ought not. our _august_ relations, as you choose to call them, are gone back to london. they never stayed with us, they only spent one day at our house. have you seen anything of the miss woolers lately? i wish they, or somebody else, would get me a situation. i have answered advertisements without number, but my applications have met with no success. 'caliban.' one wonders if a single letter by charlotte bronte applying for a 'situation' has been preserved! i have not seen one. to miss ellen nussey '_september_ _th_, . 'i know mrs. ellen is burning with eagerness to hear something about william weightman. i think i'll plague her by not telling her a word. to speak heaven's truth, i have precious little to say, inasmuch as i seldom see him, except on a sunday, when he looks as handsome, cheery, and good-tempered as usual. i have indeed had the advantage of one long conversation since his return from westmorland, when he poured out his whole warm fickle soul in fondness and admiration of agnes walton. whether he is in love with her or not i can't say; i can only observe that it sounds very like it. he sent us a prodigious quantity of game while he was away--a brace of wild ducks, a brace of black grouse, a brace of partridges, ditto of snipes, ditto of curlews, and a large salmon. if you were to ask mr. weightman's opinion of my character just now, he would say that at first he thought me a cheerful chatty kind of body, but that on farther acquaintance he found me of a capricious changeful temper, never to be reckoned on. he does not know that i have regulated my manner by his--that i was cheerful and chatty so long as he was respectful, and that when he grew almost contemptuously familiar i found it necessary to adopt a degree of reserve which was not natural, and therefore was very painful to me. i find this reserve very convenient, and consequently i intend to keep it up.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear nell,--you will excuse this scrawled sheet of paper, inasmuch as i happen to be out of that article, this being the only available sheet i can find in my desk. i have effaced one of the delectable portraitures, but have spared the others--lead pencil sketches of horse's head, and man's head--being moved to that act of clemency by the recollection that they are not the work of my hand, but of the sacred fingers of his reverence william weightman. you will discern that the eye is a little too elevated in the horse's head, otherwise i can assure you it is no such bad attempt. it shows taste and something of an artist's eye. the fellow had no copy for it. he sketched it, and one or two other little things, when he happened to be here one evening, but you should have seen the vanity with which he afterwards regarded his productions. one of them represented the flying figure of fame inscribing his own name on the clouds. 'mrs. brook and i have interchanged letters. she expressed herself pleased with the style of my application--with its candour, etc. (i took care to tell her that if she wanted a showy, elegant, fashionable personage, i was not the man for her), but she wants music and singing. i can't give her music and singing, so of course the negotiation is null and void. being once up, however, i don't mean to sit down till i have got what i want; but there is no sense in talking about unfinished projects, so we'll drop the subject. consider this last sentence a hint from me to be applied practically. it seems miss wooler's school is in a consumptive state of health. i have been endeavouring to obtain a reinforcement of pupils for her, but i cannot succeed, because mrs. heap is opening a new school in bradford. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i promised to write to you, and therefore i must keep my promise, though i have neither much to say nor much time to say it in. 'mary taylor's visit has been a very pleasant one to us, and i believe to herself also. she and mr. weightman have had several games at chess, which generally terminated in a species of mock hostility. mr. weightman is better in health; but don't set your heart on him, i'm afraid he is very fickle--not to you in particular, but to half a dozen other ladies. he has just cut his _inamorata_ at swansea, and sent her back all her letters. his present object of devotion is caroline dury, to whom he has just despatched a most passionate copy of verses. poor lad, his sanguine temperament bothers him grievously. 'that swansea affair seems to me somewhat heartless as far as i can understand it, though i have not heard a very clear explanation. he sighs as much as ever. i have not mentioned your name to him yet, nor do i mean to do so until i have a fair opportunity of gathering his real mind. perhaps i may never mention it at all, but on the contrary carefully avoid all allusion to you. it will just depend upon the further opinion i may form of his character. i am not pleased to find that he was carrying on a regular correspondence with this lady at swansea all the time he was paying such pointed attention to you; and now the abrupt way in which he has cut her off, and the evident wandering instability of his mind is no favourable symptom at all. i shall not have many opportunities of observing him for a month to come. as for the next fortnight, he will be sedulously engaged in preparing for his ordination, and the fortnight after he will spend at appleby and crackenthorp with mr. and miss walton. don't think about him; i am not afraid you will break your heart, but don't think about him. 'give my love to mercy and your mother, and,--believe me, yours sincerely, 'ca'ira.' to miss ellen nussey 'rawdon, _march_ _rd_, . 'my dear ellen,--i dare say you have received a valentine this year from our bonny-faced friend the curate of haworth. i got a precious specimen a few days before i left home, but i knew better how to treat it than i did those we received a year ago. i am up to the dodges and artifices of his lordship's character. he knows i know him, and you cannot conceive how quiet and respectful he has long been. mind i am not writing against him--i never _will_ do that. i like him very much. i honour and admire his generous, open disposition, and sweet temper--but for all the tricks, wiles, and insincerities of love, the gentleman has not his match for twenty miles round. he would fain persuade every woman under thirty whom he sees that he is desperately in love with her. i have a great deal more to say, but i have not a moment's time to write it in. my dear ellen, _do_ write to me soon, don't forget.--good-bye.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _st_, . 'my dearest ellen,--i do not know how to wear your pretty little handcuffs. when you come you shall explain the mystery. i send you the precious valentine. make much of it. remember the writer's blue eyes, auburn hair, and rosy cheeks. you may consider the concern addressed to yourself, for i have no doubt he intended it to suit anybody. 'fare-thee-well. 'c. b.' then there are these slighter inferences, that concerning anne being particularly interesting. 'write long letters to me, and tell me everything you can think of, and about everybody. "his young reverence," as you tenderly call him, is looking delicate and pale; poor thing, don't you pity him? i do from my heart! when he is well, and fat, and jovial, i never think of him, but when anything ails him i am always sorry. he sits opposite to anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention, and anne is so quiet, her look so downcast, they are a picture.' '_july_ _th_, . 'our revered friend, w. w., is quite as bonny, pleasant, lighthearted, good-tempered, generous, careless, fickle, and unclerical as ever. he keeps up his correspondence with agnes walton. during the last spring he went to appleby, and stayed upwards of a month.' during the governess and brussels episodes in charlotte's life we lose sight of mr. weightman, and the next record is of his death, which took place in september , while charlotte and emily were in brussels. mr. bronte preached the funeral sermon, { } stating by way of introduction that for the twenty years and more that he had been in haworth he had never before read his sermon. 'this is owing to a conviction in my mind,' he says, 'that in general, for the ordinary run of hearers, extempore preaching, though accompanied with some peculiar disadvantages, is more likely to be of a colloquial nature, and better adapted, on the whole, to the majority.' his departure from the practice on this occasion, he explains, is due to the request that his sermon should be printed. mr. weightman, he told his hearers, was a native of westmoreland, educated at the university of durham. 'while he was there,' continued mr. bronte, 'i applied to the justly venerated apostolical bishop of this diocese, requesting his lordship to send me a curate adequate to the wants and wishes of the parishioners. this application was not in vain. our diocesan, in the scriptural character of the overlooker and head of his clergy, made an admirable choice, which more than answered my expectations, and probably yours. the church pastoral aid society, in their pious liberality, lent their pecuniary aid, without which all efforts must have failed.' 'he had classical attainments of the first order, and, above all, his religious principles were sound and orthodox,' concludes mr. bronte. mr. weightman was twenty-six years of age when he died. his successor was mr. peter augustus smith, whom charlotte bronte has made famous in _shirley_ as mr. malone, curate of briarfield. mr. smith was mr. a. b. nicholls's predecessor at haworth. here is charlotte bronte's vigorous treatment of him in a letter to her friend. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--we were all very glad to get your letter this morning. _we_, i say, as both papa and emily were anxious to hear of the safe arrival of yourself and the little _varmint_. { } 'as you conjecture, emily and i set to shirt-making the very day after you left, and we have stuck to it pretty closely ever since. we miss your society at least as much as you miss ours, depend upon it. would that you were within calling distance, that you could as you say burst in upon us in an afternoon, and, being despoiled of your bonnet and shawl, be fixed in the rocking-chair for the evening once or twice every week. i certainly cherished a dream during your stay that such might one day be the case, but the dream is somewhat dissipating. i allude of course to mr. smith, to whom you do not allude in your letter, and i think you foolish for the omission. i say the dream is dissipating, because mr. smith has not mentioned your name since you left, except once when papa said you were a nice girl, he said, "yes, she is a nice girl--rather quiet. i suppose she has money," and that is all. i think the words speak volumes; they do not prejudice one in favour of mr. smith. i can well believe what papa has often affirmed, and continues to affirm, _i.e._, that mr. smith is a very fickle man, that if he marries he will soon get tired of his wife, and consider her as a burden, also that money will be a principal consideration with him in marrying. 'papa has two or three times expressed a fear that since mr. smith paid you so much attention he will perhaps have made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort. i tell him i think not, as i believe you to be mistress of yourself in those matters. still, he keeps saying that i am to write to you and dissuade you from thinking of him. i never saw papa make himself so uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on such subjects. 'mr. smith be hanged! i never thought very well of him, and i am much disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. i have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained?--it is not worth while. 'be sure you write to me and immediately, and tell me whether you have given up eating and drinking altogether. i am not surprised at people thinking you looked pale and thin. i shall expect another letter on thursday--don't disappoint me. 'my best regards to your mother and sisters.--yours, somewhat irritated, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey 'dear nell,--i did not "swear at the postman" when i saw another letter from you. and i hope you will not "swear" at me when i tell you that i cannot think of leaving home at present, even to have the pleasure of joining you at harrogate, but i am obliged to you for thinking of me. i have nothing new about rev. lothario smith. i think i like him a little bit less every day. mr. weightman was worth mr. smiths tied in a bunch. good-bye. i fear by what you say, "flossy jun." behaves discreditably, and gets his mistress into scrapes. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i received your kind note last saturday, and should have answered it immediately, but in the meantime i had a letter from mary taylor, and had to reply to her, and to write sundry letters to brussels to send by opportunity. my sight will not allow me to write several letters per day, so i was obliged to do it gradually. 'i send you two more circulars because you ask for them, not because i hope their distribution will produce any result. i hope that if a time should come when emily, anne, or i shall be able to serve you, we shall not forget that you have done your best to serve us. 'mr. smith is gone hence. he is in ireland at present, and will stay there six weeks. he has left neither a bad nor a good character behind him. nobody regrets him, because nobody could attach themselves to one who could attach himself to nobody. i thought once he had a regard for you, but i do not think so now. he has never asked after you since you left, nor even mentioned you in my hearing, except to say once when i purposely alluded to you, that you were "not very locomotive." the meaning of the observation i leave you to divine. 'yet the man is not without points that will be most useful to himself in getting through life. his good qualities, however, are all of the selfish order, but they will make him respected where better and more generous natures would be despised, or at least neglected. 'mr. grant fills his shoes at present decently enough--but one cares naught about these sort of individuals, so drop them. 'mary taylor is going to leave our hemisphere. to me it is something as if a great planet fell out of the sky. yet, unless she marries in new zealand, she will not stay there long. 'write to me again soon and i promise to write you a regular long letter next time. 'c. bronte.' the mr. grant here described had come to haworth as master of the small grammar school in which branwell had received some portion of his education. he is the mr. donne, curate of whinbury, in _shirley_. whinbury is oxenhope, of which village and district mr. grant after a time became incumbent. the district was taken out of haworth chapelry, and mr. grant collected the funds to build a church, schoolhouse, and parsonage. he died at oxenhope, many years ago, greatly respected by his parishioners. he seems to have endured good-naturedly much chaff from mr. bronte and others, who always called him mr. donne. it was the opinion of many of his acquaintances that the satire of _shirley_ had improved his disposition. mr. smith left haworth in , to become curate of the parish church of keighley. he became, at a later date, incumbent of a district church, but, his health failing, he returned to his native country, where he died. to miss ellen nussey '_october_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i send you two additional circulars, and will send you two more, if you desire it, when i write again. i have no news to give you. mr. smith leaves in the course of a fortnight. he will spend a few weeks in ireland previously to settling at keighley. he continues just the same: often anxious and bad-tempered, sometimes rather tolerable--just supportable. how did your party go off? how are you? write soon, and at length, for your letters are a great comfort to me. we are all pretty well. remember me kindly to each member of the household at brookroyd.--yours, 'c. b.' the third curate of _shirley_, mr. sweeting of nunnely, was mr. richard bradley, curate of oakworth, an outlying district of keighley parish. he is at this present time vicar of haxby, yorkshire, but far too aged and infirm to have any memories of those old haworth days. mr. bronte's one other curate was mr. de renzi, who occupied the position for a little more than a year,--during the period, in fact, of mr. bronte's quarrel with mr. nicholls for aspiring to become his son-in-law. after he left haworth, mr. de renzi became a curate at bradford. he has been dead for some years. the story of mr. nicholls's curacy belongs to another chapter. it is sufficient testimony to his worth, however, that he was able to win charlotte bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'i think he must be like all the curates i have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.' chapter xii: charlotte bronte's lovers charlotte bronte was not beautiful, but she must have been singularly fascinating. that she was not beautiful there is abundant evidence. when, as a girl of fifteen, she became a pupil at roe head, mary taylor once told her to her face that she was ugly. ugly she was not in later years. all her friends emphasise the soft silky hair, and the beautiful grey eyes which in moments of excitement seemed to glisten with remarkable brilliancy. but she had a sallow complexion, and a large nose slightly on one side. she was small in stature, and, in fact, the casual observer would have thought her a quaint, unobtrusive little body. mr. grundy's memory was very defective when he wrote about the brontes; but, with the exception of the reference to red hair--and all the girls had brown hair--it would seem that he was not very wide of the mark when he wrote of 'the daughters--distant and distrait, large of nose, small of figure, red of hair, prominent of spectacles, showing great intellectual development, but with eyes constantly cast down, very silent, painfully retiring.' charlotte was indeed painfully shy. miss wheelwright, who saw much of her during her visits to london in the years of her literary success, says that she would never enter a room without sheltering herself under the wing of some taller friend. a resident of haworth, still alive, remembers the girls passing him frequently on the way down to the shops, and their hands would involuntarily be lifted to the face on the side nearest to him, with a view to avoid observation. this was not affectation; it was absolute timidity. miss wheelwright always thought george richmond's portrait--for which charlotte sat during a stay at dr. wheelwright's in phillimore place--entirely flattering. many of charlotte's friends were pleased that it should be so, but there can be no doubt that the magnificent expanse of forehead was an exaggeration. charlotte's forehead was high, but very narrow. all this is comparatively unimportant. charlotte certainly was under no illusion; and we who revere her to-day as one of the greatest of englishwomen need have no illusions. it is sufficient that, if not beautiful, charlotte possessed a singular charm of manner, and, when interested, an exhilarating flow of conversation which carried intelligent men off their feet. she had at least four offers of marriage. the three lovers she refused have long since gone to their graves, and there can be no harm now in referring to the actual facts as they present themselves in charlotte's letters. two of these offers of marriage were made in one year, when she was twenty-three years of age. her first proposal came from the brother of her friend ellen nussey. henry nussey was a curate at donnington when he asked charlotte bronte to be his wife. two letters on the subject, one of which is partly printed in a mangled form in mrs. gaskell's memoir, speak for themselves. to rev. henry nussey 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--before answering your letter i might have spent a long time in consideration of its subject; but as from the first moment of its reception and perusal i determined on what course to pursue, it seemed to me that delay was wholly unnecessary. you are aware that i have many reasons to feel grateful to your family, that i have peculiar reasons for affection towards one at least of your sisters, and also that i highly esteem yourself--do not therefore accuse me of wrong motives when i say that my answer to your proposal must be a _decided negative_. in forming this decision, i trust i have listened to the dictates of conscience more than to those of inclination. i have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you, but i feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. it has always been my habit to study the characters of those amongst whom i chance to be thrown, and i think i know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. the character should not be too marked, ardent, and original, her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her _personal attractions_ sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride. as for me, you do not know me; i am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose; you would think me romantic and eccentric; you would say i was satirical and severe. however, i scorn deceit, and i will never, for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid, take a worthy man whom i am conscious i cannot render happy. before i conclude, let me thank you warmly for your other proposal regarding the school near donnington. it is kind in you to take so much interest about me; but the fact is, i could not at present enter upon such a project because i have not the capital necessary to insure success. it is a pleasure to me to hear that you are so comfortably settled and that your health is so much improved. i trust god will continue his kindness towards you. let me say also that i admire the good-sense and absence of flattery and cant which your letter displayed. farewell. i shall always be glad to hear from you as a _friend_.--believe me, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dearest ellen,--when your letter was put into my hands, i said, "she is coming at last, i hope," but when i opened it and found what the contents were, i was vexed to the heart. you need not ask me to go to brookroyd any more. once for all, and at the hazard of being called the most stupid little wretch that ever existed, i _won't_ go till you have been to haworth. i don't blame _you_, i believe you would come if you might; perhaps i ought not to blame others, but i am grieved. 'anne goes to blake hall on the th of april, unless some further unseen cause of delay should occur. i've heard nothing more from mrs. thos. brook as yet. papa wishes me to remain at home a little longer, but i begin to be anxious to set to work again; and yet it will be _hard work_ after the indulgence of so many weeks, to return to that dreary "gin-horse" round. 'you ask me, my dear ellen, whether i have received a letter from henry. i have, about a week since. the contents, i confess, did a little surprise me, but i kept them to myself, and unless you had questioned me on the subject, i would never have adverted to it. henry says he is comfortably settled at donnington, that his health is much improved, and that it is his intention to take pupils after easter. he then intimates that in due time he should want a wife to take care of his pupils, and frankly asks me to be that wife. altogether the letter is written without cant or flattery, and in a common-sense style, which does credit to his judgment. 'now, my dear ellen, there were in this proposal some things which might have proved a strong temptation. i thought if i were to marry henry nussey, his sister could live with me, and how happy i should be. but again i asked myself two questions: do i love him as much as a woman ought to love the man she marries? am i the person best qualified to make him happy? alas! ellen, my conscience answered _no_ to both these questions. i felt that though i esteemed, though i had a kindly leaning towards him, because he is an amiable and well-disposed man, yet i had not, and could not have, that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and, if ever i marry, it must be in that light of adoration that i will regard my husband. ten to one i shall never have the chance again; but _n'importe_. moreover, i was aware that henry knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. why, it would startle him to see me in my natural home character; he would think i was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed. i could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband. i would laugh, and satirise, and say whatever came into my head first. and if he were a clever man, and loved me, the whole world weighed in the balance against his smallest wish should be light as air. could i, knowing my mind to be such as that, conscientiously say that i would take a grave, quiet, young man like henry? no, it would have been deceiving him, and deception of that sort is beneath me. so i wrote a long letter back, in which i expressed my refusal as gently as i could, and also candidly avowed my reasons for that refusal. i described to him, too, the sort of character that would suit him for a wife.--good-bye, my dear ellen. 'c. bronte.' mr. nussey was a very good man, with a capacity for making himself generally esteemed, becoming in turn vicar of earnley, near chichester, and afterwards of hathersage, in derbyshire. it was honourable to his judgment that he had aspired to marry charlotte bronte, who, as we know, had neither money nor much personal attraction, and at the time no possible prospect of literary fame. her common-sense letter in reply to his proposal had the desired effect. he speedily took the proffered advice, and six months later we find her sending him a letter of congratulation upon his engagement to be married. to rev. henry nussey 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have delayed answering your last communication in the hopes of receiving a letter from ellen, that i might be able to transmit to you the latest news from brookroyd; however, as she does not write, i think i ought to put off my reply no longer lest you should begin to think me negligent. as you rightly conjecture, i had heard a little hint of what you allude to before, and the account gave me pleasure, coupled as it was with the assurance that the object of your regard is a worthy and estimable woman. the step no doubt will by many of your friends be considered scarcely as a prudent one, _since_ fortune is not amongst the number of the young lady's advantages. for my own part, i must confess that i esteem you the more for not hunting after wealth if there be strength of mind, firmness of principle, and sweetness of temper to compensate for the absence of that usually all-powerful attraction. the wife who brings riches to her husband sometimes also brings an idea of her own importance and a tenacity about what she conceives to be her rights, little calculated to produce happiness in the married state. most probably she will wish to control when nature and affection bind her to submit--in this case there cannot, i should think, be much comfort. 'on the other hand, it must be considered that when two persons marry without money, there ought to be moral courage and physical exertion to atone for the deficiency--there should be spirit to scorn dependence, patience to endure privation, and energy to labour for a livelihood. if there be these qualities, i think, with the blessing of god, those who join heart and hand have a right to expect success and a moderate share of happiness, even though they may have departed a step or two from the stern maxims of worldly prudence. the bread earned by honourable toil is sweeter than the bread of idleness; and mutual love and domestic calm are treasures far preferable to the possessions rust can corrupt and moths consume away. 'i enjoyed my late excursion with ellen with the greater zest because such pleasures have not often chanced to fall in my way. i will not tell you what i thought of the sea, because i should fall into my besetting sin of enthusiasm. i may, however, say that its glories, changes, its ebbs and flow, the sound of its restless waves, formed a subject for contemplation that never wearied either the eye, the ear, or the mind. our visit at easton was extremely pleasant; i shall always feel grateful to mr. and mrs. hudson for their kindness. we saw agnes burton, during our stay, and called on two of your former parishioners--mrs. brown and mrs. dalton. i was pleased to hear your name mentioned by them in terms of encomium and sincere regard. ellen will have detailed to you all the minutia of our excursion; a recapitulation from me would therefore be tedious. i am happy to say that her health appeared to be greatly improved by the change of air and regular exercise. i am still at home, as i have not yet heard of any situation which meets with the approbation of my friends. i begin, however, to grow exceedingly impatient of a prolonged period of inaction. i feel i ought to be doing something for myself, for my health is now so perfectly re-established by this long rest that it affords me no further pretext for indolence. with every wish for your future welfare, and with the hope that whenever your proposed union takes place it may contribute in the highest sense to your good and happiness,--believe me, your sincere friend, 'c. bronte. '_p.s._--remember me to your sister mercy, who, i understand, is for the present your companion and housekeeper.' the correspondence did not end here. indeed, charlotte was so excellent a letter-writer, that it must have been hard indeed for any one who had had any experience of her in that capacity to readily forgo its continuance. to rev. henry nussey 'haworth, _may_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--in looking over my papers this morning i found a letter from you of the date of last february with the mark upon it unanswered. your sister ellen often accuses me of want of punctuality in answering letters, and i think her accusation is here justified. however, i give you credit for as much considerateness as will induce you to excuse a greater fault than this, especially as i shall hasten directly to repair it. 'the fact is, when the letter came ellen was staying with me, and i was so fully occupied in talking to her that i had no time to think of writing to others. this is no great compliment, but it is no insult either. you know ellen's worth, you know how seldom i see her, you partly know my regard for her; and from these premises you may easily draw the inference that her company, when once obtained, is too valuable to be wasted for a moment. one woman can appreciate the value of another better than a man can do. men very often only see the outside gloss which dazzles in prosperity, women have opportunities for closer observation, and they learn to value those qualities which are useful in adversity. 'there is much, too, in that mild even temper and that placid equanimity which keep the domestic hearth always bright and peaceful--this is better than the ardent nature that changes twenty times in a day. i have studied ellen and i think she would make a good wife--that is, if she had a good husband. if she married a fool or a tyrant there is spirit enough in her composition to withstand the dictates of either insolence or weakness, though even then i doubt not her sense would teach her to make the best of a bad bargain. 'you will see my letters are all didactic. they contain no news, because i know of none which i think it would interest you to hear repeated. i am still at home, in very good health and spirits, and uneasy only because i cannot yet hear of a situation. 'i shall always be glad to have a letter from you, and i promise when you write again to be less dilatory in answering. i trust your prospects of happiness still continue fair; and from what you say of your future partner i doubt not she will be one who will help you to get cheerfully through the difficulties of this world and to obtain a permanent rest in the next; at least i hope such may be the case. you do right to conduct the matter with due deliberation, for on the step you are about to take depends the happiness of your whole lifetime. 'you must not again ask me to write in a regular literary way to you on some particular topic. i cannot do it at all. do you think i am a blue-stocking? i feel half inclined to laugh at you for the idea, but perhaps you would be angry. what was the topic to be? chemistry? or astronomy? or mechanics? or conchology? or entomology? or what other ology? i know nothing at all about any of these. i am not scientific; i am not a linguist. you think me far more learned than i am. if i told you all my ignorance, i am afraid you would be shocked; however, as i wish still to retain a little corner in your good opinion, i will hold my tongue.--believe me, yours respectfully, 'c. bronte.' to rev. henry nussey '_january_ th, . 'dear sir,--it is time i should reply to your last, as i shall fail in fulfilling my promise of not being so dilatory as on a former occasion. 'i shall be glad to receive the poetry which you offer to send me. you ask me to return the gift in kind. how do you know that i have it in my power to comply with that request? once indeed i was very poetical, when i was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, but i am now twenty-four, approaching twenty-five, and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of some of its superfluous colouring. at this age it is time that the imagination should be pruned and trimmed, that the judgment should be cultivated, and a few, at least, of the countless illusions of early youth should be cleared away. i have not written poetry for a long while. 'you will excuse the dulness, morality, and monotony of this epistle, and--believe me, with all good wishes for your welfare here and hereafter, your sincere friend, 'c. bronte.' this letter closes the correspondence; but, as we have seen, charlotte spent three pleasant weeks in mr. nussey's home with his sister ellen when that gentleman became vicar of hathersage, in derbyshire. she thus congratulates her friend when mr. nussey is appointed to the latter living. to miss ellen nussey '_july_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i am very glad to hear of henry's good fortune. it proves to me what an excellent thing perseverance is for getting on in the world. calm self-confidence (not impudence, for that is vulgar and repulsive) is an admirable quality; but how are those not naturally gifted with it to attain it? we all here get on much as usual. papa wishes he could hear of a curate, that mr. smith may be at liberty to go. good-bye, dear ellen. i wish to you and yours happiness, health, and prosperity. 'write again before you go to burlington. my best love to mary. 'c. bronte.' meanwhile, as i have said, a second lover appeared on the field in this same year, , and the quickness of his wooing is a remarkable testimony to the peculiar fascination which miss bronte must have exercised. to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _th_, . 'my dearest ellen,--i have an odd circumstance to relate to you--prepare for a hearty laugh! the other day mr. hodgson, papa's former curate, now a vicar, came over to spend the day with us, bringing with him his own curate. the latter gentleman, by name mr. price, is a young irish clergyman, fresh from dublin university. it was the first time we had any of us seen him, but, however, after the manner of his countrymen, he soon made himself at home. his character quickly appeared in his conversation: witty, lively, ardent, clever too, but deficient in the dignity and discretion of an englishman. at home, you know, ellen, i talk with ease, and am never shy, never weighed down and oppressed by that miserable _mauvaise honte_ which torments and constrains me elsewhere. so i conversed with this irishman and laughed at his jests, and though i saw faults in his character, excused them because of the amusement his originality afforded. i cooled a little, indeed, and drew in towards the latter part of the evening, because he began to season his conversation with something of hibernian flattery, which i did not quite relish. however, they went away, and no more was thought about them. a few days after i got a letter, the direction of which puzzled me, it being in a hand i was not accustomed to see. evidently, it was neither from you nor mary taylor, my only correspondents. having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young irishman! well! thought i, i have heard of love at first sight, but this beats all. i leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the injustice of guessing wrong. when we meet i'll show you the letter. i hope you are laughing heartily. this is not like one of my adventures, is it? it more nearly resembles martha taylor's. i am certainly doomed to be an old maid. never mind, i made up my mind to that fate ever since i was twelve years old. write soon. 'c. bronte.' it was not many months after this that we hear the last of poor mr. price. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--mr. price is dead. he had fallen into a state of delicate health for some time, and the rupture of a blood-vessel carried him off. he was a strong, athletic-looking man when i saw him, and that is scarcely six months ago. though i knew so little of him, and of course could not be deeply or permanently interested in what concerned him, i confess, when i suddenly heard he was dead, i felt both shocked and saddened: it was no shame to feel so, was it? i scold you, ellen, for writing illegibly and badly, but i think you may repay the compliment with cent per cent interest. i am not in the humour for writing a long letter, so good-bye. god bless you. 'c. b.' there are many thoughts on marriage scattered through charlotte's correspondence. it was a subject upon which she never wearied of asking questions, and of finding her own answers. 'i believe it is better to marry _to_ love than to marry _for_ love,' she says on one occasion. and in reference to the somewhat uncertain attitude of the admirer of one of her friends, she thus expresses herself to miss nussey: to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'my dearest nell,--that last letter of thine treated of matters so high and important i cannot delay answering it for a day. now i am about to write thee a discourse, and a piece of advice which thou must take as if it came from thy grandmother. but in the first place, before i begin with thee, i have a word to whisper in the ear of mr. vincent, and i wish it could reach him. in the name of st. chrysostom, st. simon, and st. jude, why does not that amiable young gentleman come forward like a man and say all that he has to say personally, instead of trifling with kinsmen and kinswomen. "mr. vincent," i say, "go personally, and say: 'miss ---, i want to speak to you.' miss --- will of course civilly answer: 'i am at your service, mr. vincent.' and then, when the room is cleared of all but yourself and herself, just take a chair nearer. insist upon her laying down that silly . . . work, and listening to you. then begin, in a clear, distinct, deferential, but determined voice: 'miss ---, i have a question to put to you--a very important question: "will you take me as your husband, for better, for worse. i am not a rich man, but i have sufficient to support us. i am not a great man, but i love you honestly and truly. miss ---, if you knew the world better you would see that this is an offer not to be despised--a kind attached heart and a moderate competency." do this, mr. vincent, and you may succeed. go on writing sentimental and love-sick letters to ---, and i would not give sixpence for your suit." so much for mr. vincent. now miss ---'s turn comes to swallow the black bolus, called a friend's advice. say to her: "is the man a fool? is he a knave? a humbug, a hypocrite, a ninny, a noodle? if he is any or all of these, of course there is no sense in trifling with him. cut him short at once--blast his hopes with lightning rapidity and keenness. is he something better than this? has he at least common sense, a good disposition, a manageable temper? then consider the matter." say further: "you feel a disgust towards him now--an utter repugnance. very likely, but be so good as to remember you don't know him; you have only had three or four days' acquaintance with him. longer and closer intimacy might reconcile you to a wonderful extent. and now i'll tell you a word of truth, at which you may be offended or not as you like." say to her: "from what i know of your character, and i think i know it pretty well, i should say you will never love before marriage. after that ceremony is over, and after you have had some months to settle down, and to get accustomed to the creature you have taken for your worse half, you will probably make a most affectionate and happy wife; even if the individual should not prove all you could wish, you will be indulgent towards his little follies and foibles, and will not feel much annoyance at them. this will especially be the case if he should have sense sufficient to allow you to guide him in important matters." say also: "i hope you will not have the romantic folly to wait for what the french call 'une grande passion.' my good girl, 'une grande passion' is 'une grande folie.' mediocrity in all things is wisdom; mediocrity in the sensations is superlative wisdom." say to her: "when you are as old as i am (i am sixty at least, being your grandmother), you will find that the majority of those worldly precepts, whose seeming coldness shocks and repels us in youth, are founded in wisdom." 'no girl should fall in love till the offer is actually made. this maxim is just. i will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. if she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart she is a fool. if she ever loves so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool. 'i have two studies: you are my study for the success, the credit, and the respectability of a quiet, tranquil character; mary is my study for the contempt, the remorse, the misconstruction which follow the development of feelings in themselves noble, warm, generous, devoted, and profound, but which, being too freely revealed, too frankly bestowed, are not estimated at their real value. i never hope to see in this world a character more truly noble. she would die willingly for one she loved. her intellect and her attainments are of the very highest standard. yet i doubt whether mary will ever marry. mr. weightman expresses himself very strongly on young ladies saying "no," when they mean "yes." he assures me he means nothing personal. i hope not. assuredly i quite agree with him in his disapprobation of such a senseless course. it is folly indeed for the tongue to stammer a negative when the heart is proclaiming an affirmative. or rather, it is an act of heroic self-denial, of which _i_ for one confess myself wholly incapable. _i would not tell such a lie_ to gain a thousand pounds. write to me again soon. what made you say i admired hippocrates? it is a confounded "fib." i tried to find something admirable in him, and failed.' 'he is perhaps only like the majority of men' (she says of an acquaintance). 'certainly those men who lead a gay life in their youth, and arrive at middle-age with feelings blunted and passions exhausted, can have but one aim in marriage--the selfish advancement of their interest. hard to think that such men take as wives--as second-selves--women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence, such sincerity to their own hollowness, such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice--to think this, troubles the soul to its inmost depths. nature and justice forbid the banns of such wedlock.' to miss ellen nussey '_august_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--anne and i both thank you for your kind invitation. and our thanks are not mere words of course--they are very sincere, both as addressed to yourself and your mother and sisters. but we cannot accept it; and i _think_ even _you_ will consider our motives for declining valid this time. 'in a fortnight i hope to go with papa to manchester to have his eyes couched. emily and i made a pilgrimage there a week ago to search out an operator, and we found one in the person of mr. wilson. he could not tell from the description whether the eyes were ready for an operation. papa must therefore necessarily take a journey to manchester to consult him. if he judges the cataract ripe, we shall remain; if, on the contrary, he thinks it not yet sufficiently hardened, we shall have to return--and papa must remain in darkness a while longer. 'there is a defect in your reasoning about the feelings a wife ought to experience. who holds the purse will wish to be master, ellen, depend on it, whether man or woman. who provided the cash will now and then value himself, or herself, upon it, and, even in the case of ordinary minds, reproach the less wealthy partner. besides, no husband ought to be an object of charity to his wife, as no wife to her husband. no, dear ellen; it is doubtless pleasant to marry _well_, as they say, but with all pleasures are mixed bitters. i do not wish for my friend a very rich husband. i should not like her to be regarded by any man ever as "a sweet object of charity." give my sincere love to all.--yours, 'c. bronte.' many years were to elapse before charlotte bronte received her third offer of marriage. these were the years of brussels life, and the year during which she lost her sisters. it came in the period of her early literary fame, and indeed was the outcome of it. mr. james taylor was in the employment of smith & elder. he was associated with the literary department, and next in command to mr. w. s. williams as adviser to the firm. mr. williams appears to have written to miss bronte suggesting that mr. taylor should come to haworth in person for the manuscript of her new novel, _shirley_, and here is charlotte's reply. to w. s. williams '_august_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i think the best title for the book would be _shirley_, without any explanation or addition--the simpler and briefer, the better. 'if mr. taylor calls here on his return to town he might take charge of the ms.; i would rather intrust it to him than send it by the ordinary conveyance. did i see mr. taylor when i was in london? i cannot remember him. 'i would with pleasure offer him the homely hospitalities of the parsonage for a few days, if i could at the same time offer him the company of a brother, or if my father were young enough and strong enough to walk with him on the moors and show him the neighbourhood, or if the peculiar retirement of papa's habits were not such as to render it irksome to him to give much of his society to a stranger, even in the house. without being in the least misanthropical or sour-natured, papa habitually prefers solitude to society, and custom is a tyrant whose fetters it would now be impossible for him to break. were it not for difficulties of this sort, i believe i should ere this have asked you to come down to yorkshire. papa, i know, would receive any friend of mr. smith's with perfect kindness and goodwill, but i likewise know that, unless greatly put out of his way, he could not give a guest much of his company, and that, consequently, his entertainment would be but dull. 'you will see the force of these considerations, and understand why i only ask mr. taylor to come for a day instead of requesting the pleasure of his company for a longer period; you will believe me also, and so will he, when i say i shall be most happy to see him. he will find haworth a strange uncivilised little place, such as, i daresay, he never saw before. it is twenty miles distant from leeds; he will have to come by rail to keighley (there are trains every two hours i believe). he must remember that at a station called shipley the carriages are changed, otherwise they will take him on to skipton or colne, or i know not where. when he reaches keighley, he will yet have four miles to travel; a conveyance may be hired at the devonshire arms--there is no coach or other regular communication. 'i should like to hear from him before he comes, and to know on what day to expect him, that i may have the ms. ready; if it is not quite finished i might send the concluding chapter or two by post. 'i advise you to send this letter to mr. taylor--it will save you the trouble of much explanation, and will serve to apprise him of what lies before him; he can then weigh well with himself whether it would suit him to take so much trouble for so slight an end.--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to james taylor, cornhill. '_september_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--it will be quite convenient to my father and myself to secure your visit on saturday the th inst. 'the ms. is now complete, and ready for you. 'trusting that you have enjoyed your holiday and derived from your excursion both pleasure and profit,--i am, dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' mr. taylor was small and red-haired. there are two portraits of him before me. they indicate a determined, capable man, thick-set, well bearded: on the whole a vigorous and interesting personality. in any case, mr. taylor lost his heart to charlotte, and was much more persistent than earlier lovers. he had also the advantage of mr. bronte's goodwill. this is all there is to add to the letters themselves. to miss ellen nussey '_september_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i found after sealing my last note to you that i had forgotten after all to inclose amelia's letter; however, it appears it does not signify. while i think of it i must refer to an act of petty larceny committed by me when i was last at brookroyd. do you remember lending me a parasol, which i should have left with you when we parted at leeds? i unconsciously carried it away in my hand. you shall have it when you next come to haworth. 'i wish, dear ellen, you would tell me what is the "twaddle about my marrying, etc.," which you hear. if i knew the details i should have a better chance of guessing the quarter from which such gossip comes--as it is, i am quite at a loss. whom am i to marry? i think i have scarcely seen a single man with whom such a union would be possible since i left london. doubtless there are men whom, if i chose to encourage, i might marry; but no matrimonial lot is even remotely offered me which seems to me truly desirable. and even if that were the case, there would be many obstacles. the least allusion to such a thing is most offensive to papa. 'an article entitled _currer bell_ has lately appeared in the _palladium_, a new periodical published in edinburgh. it is an eloquent production, and one of such warm sympathy and high appreciation as i had never expected to see. it makes mistakes about authorships, etc., but these i hope one day to set right. mr. taylor (the little man) first informed me of this article. i was somewhat surprised to receive his letter, having concluded nine months ago that there would be no more correspondence from that quarter. i inclose you a note from him received subsequently, in answer to my acknowledgment. read it and tell me exactly how it impresses you regarding the writer's character, etc. his little newspaper disappeared for some weeks, and i thought it was gone to the tomb of the capulets; however, it has reappeared, with an explanation that he had feared its regular transmission might rather annoy than gratify. i told him this was a mistake--that i was well enough pleased to receive it, but hoped he would not make a task of sending it. for the rest, i cannot consider myself placed under any personal obligation by accepting this newspaper, for it belongs to the establishment of smith & elder. this little taylor is deficient neither in spirit nor sense. 'the report about my having published again is, of course, an arrant lie. 'give my kind regards to all, and--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. b.' her friend's reference to _jupiter_ is to another suggested lover, and the kindly allusion to the 'little man' may be taken to imply that had he persevered, or not gone off to india, whither he was sent to open a branch establishment in bombay for smith & elder, mr. taylor might possibly have been successful in the long run. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i am very sorry to hear that amelia is again far from well; but i think both she and i should try and not be too anxious. even if matters do not prosper this time, all may go as well some future day. i think it is not these _early_ mishaps that break the constitution, but those which occur in a much later stage. she must take heart--there may yet be a round dozen of little joe taylors to look after--run after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go--that is, with a generous use of pickled birch. from whom do you think i have received a couple of notes lately? from alice. they are returned from the continent, it seems, and are now at torquay. the first note touched me a little by what i thought its subdued tone; i trusted her character might be greatly improved. there were, indeed, traces of the "old adam," but such as i was willing to overlook. i answered her soon and kindly. in reply i received to-day a longish letter, full of clap-trap sentiment and humbugging attempts at fine writing. in each production the old trading spirit peeps out; she asks for autographs. it seems she had read in some paper that i was staying with miss martineau; thereupon she applies for specimens of her handwriting, and wordsworth's, and southey's, and my own. the account of her health, if given by any one else, would grieve and alarm me. she talks of fearing that her constitution is almost broken by repeated trials, and intimates a doubt as to whether she shall live long: but, remembering her of old, i have good hopes that this may be a mistake. her "beloved papa and mama" and her "precious sister," she says, are living, and "gradely." (that last is my word. i don't know whether they use it in birstall as they do here--it means in a middling way.) 'you are to say no more about "jupiter" and "venus"--what do you mean by such heathen trash? the fact is, no fallacy can be wilder, and i won't have it hinted at even in jest, because my common sense laughs it to scorn. the idea of the "little man" shocks me less--it would be a more likely match if "matches" were at all in question, which _they are not_. he still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment, and knowledge, worthy to have been the product of a giant. you may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please; but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation. however, i am not bothered by much vehement ardour--there is the nicest distance and respect preserved now, which makes matters very comfortable. 'this is all nonsense, nell, and so you will understand it.--yours very faithfully, 'c. b. 'the name of miss martineau's coadjutor is atkinson. she often writes to me with exceeding cordiality.' to james taylor, cornhill '_march_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--yesterday i despatched a box of books to cornhill, including the number of the _north british review_ which you kindly lent me. the article to which you particularly directed my attention was read with pleasure and interest, and if i do not now discuss it more at length, it is because i am well aware how completely your attention must be at present engrossed, since, if i rightly understood a brief paragraph in mr. smith's last note, you are now on the eve of quitting england for india. 'i will limit myself, then, to the expression of a sincere wish for your welfare and prosperity in this undertaking, and to the hope that the great change of climate will bring with it no corresponding risk to health. i should think you will be missed in cornhill, but doubtless "business" is a moloch which demands such sacrifices. 'i do not know when you go, nor whether your absence is likely to be permanent or only for a time; whichever it be, accept my best wishes for your happiness, and my farewell, if i should not again have the opportunity of addressing you.--believe me, sincerely yours, 'c. bronte.' to james taylor, cornhill '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i had written briefly to you before i received yours, but i fear the note would not reach you in time. i will now only say that both my father and myself will have pleasure in seeing you on your return from scotland--a pleasure tinged with sadness certainly, as all partings are, but still a pleasure. 'i do most entirely agree with you in what you say about miss martineau's and mr. atkinson's book. i deeply regret its publication for the lady's sake; it gives a death-blow to her future usefulness. who can trust the word, or rely on the judgment, of an avowed atheist? 'may your decision in the crisis through which you have gone result in the best effect on your happiness and welfare; and indeed, guided as you are by the wish to do right and a high sense of duty, i trust it cannot be otherwise. the change of climate is all i fear; but providence will over-rule this too for the best--in him you can believe and on him rely. you will want, therefore, neither solace nor support, though your lot be cast as a stranger in a strange land.--i am, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte. 'when you shall have definitely fixed the time of your return southward, write me a line to say on what day i may expect you at haworth. 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--mr. taylor has been and is gone; things are just as they were. i only know in addition to the slight information i possessed before, that this indian undertaking is necessary to the continued prosperity of the firm of smith, elder, & co., and that he, taylor, alone was pronounced to possess the power and means to carry it out successfully--that mercantile honour, combined with his own sense of duty, obliged him to accept the post of honour and of danger to which he has been appointed, that he goes with great personal reluctance, and that he contemplates an absence of five years. 'he looked much thinner and older. i saw him very near, and once through my glass; the resemblance to branwell struck me forcibly--it is marked. he is not ugly, but very peculiar; the lines in his face show an inflexibility, and, i must add, a hardness of character which do not attract. as he stood near me, as he looked at me in his keen way, it was all i could do to stand my ground tranquilly and steadily, and not to recoil as before. it is no use saying anything if i am not candid. i avow then, that on this occasion, predisposed as i was to regard him very favourably, his manners and his personal presence scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview. he gave me a book at parting, requesting in his brief way that i would keep it for his sake, and adding hastily, "i shall hope to hear from you in india--your letters _have_ been and _will_ be a greater refreshment than you can think or i can tell." 'and so he is gone; and stern and abrupt little man as he is--too often jarring as are his manners--his absence and the exclusion of his idea from my mind leave me certainly with less support and in deeper solitude than before. 'you see, dear nell, though we are still precisely on the same level--_you_ are not isolated. i feel that there is a certain mystery about this transaction yet, and whether it will ever be cleared up to me i do not know; however, my plain duty is to wean my mind from the subject, and if possible to avoid pondering over it. in his conversation he seemed studiously to avoid reference to mr. smith individually, speaking always of the "house"--the "firm." he seemed throughout quite as excited and nervous as when i first saw him. i feel that in his way he has a regard for me--a regard which i cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--thank you for your kind note; it was just like you to write it _though_ it was your school-day. i never knew you to let a slight impediment stand in the way of a friendly action. 'certainly i shall not soon forget last friday, and _never_, i think, the evening and night succeeding that morning and afternoon. evils seldom come singly. and soon after mr. taylor was gone, papa, who had been better, grew much worse. he went to bed early, and was very sick and ill for an hour; and when at last he began to doze, and i left him, i came down to the dining-room with a sense of weight, fear, and desolation hard to express and harder to endure. a wish that you were with me _did_ cross my mind, but i repulsed it as a most selfish wish; indeed, it was only short-lived: my natural tendency in moments of this sort is to get through the struggle alone--to think that one is burdening and racking others makes all worse. 'you speak to me in soft consolating accents, but i hold far sterner language to myself, dear nell. 'an absence of five years--a dividing expanse of three oceans--the wide difference between a man's active career and a woman's passive existence--these things are almost equivalent to an eternal separation. but there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these. would mr. taylor and i ever suit? could i ever feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband? friendship--gratitude--esteem i have, but each moment he came near me, and that i could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. now that he is away i feel far more gently towards him; it is only close by that i grow rigid--stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger, which nothing softens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of his manner. i did not want to be proud, nor intend to be proud, but i was forced to be so. 'most true is it that we are over-ruled by one above us--that in his hands our very will is as clay in the hands of the potter. 'papa continues very far from well, though yesterday, and i hope this morning, he is a little better. how is your mother? give my love to her and your sister. how are you? have you suffered from tic since you returned home? did they think you improved in looks? 'write again soon.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _rd_, . 'my dear ellen,--i have heard from mr. taylor to-day--a quiet little note. he returned to london a week since on saturday; he has since kindly chosen and sent me a parcel of books. he leaves england may th. his note concludes with asking whether he has any chance of seeing me in london before that time. i must tell him that i have already fixed june for my visit, and therefore, in all human probability, we shall see each other no more. 'there is still a want of plain mutual understanding in this business, and there is sadness and pain in more ways than one. my conscience, i can truly say, does not _now_ accuse me of having treated mr. taylor with injustice or unkindness. what i once did wrong in this way, i have endeavoured to remedy both to himself and in speaking of him to others--mr. smith to wit, though i more than doubt whether that last opinion will ever reach him. i am sure he has estimable and sterling qualities; but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband. it would sound harsh were i to tell even _you_ of the estimate i felt compelled to form respecting him. dear nell, i looked for something of the gentleman--something i mean of the _natural_ gentleman; you know i can dispense with acquired polish, and for looks, i know myself too well to think that i have any right to be exacting on that point. i could not find one gleam, i could not see one passing glimpse of true good-breeding. it is hard to say, but it is true. in mind too, though clever, he is second-rate--thoroughly second-rate. one does not like to say these things, but one had better be honest. were i to marry him my heart would bleed in pain and humiliation; i could not, _could not_ look up to him. no; if mr. taylor be the only husband fate offers to me, single i must always remain. but yet, at times i grieve for him, and perhaps it is superfluous, for i cannot think he will suffer much: a hard nature, occupation, and change of scene will befriend him. 'with kind regards to all,--i am, dear nell, your middle-aged friend, 'c. bronte. 'write soon.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i have had a long kind letter from miss martineau lately. she says she is well and happy. also, i have had a very long letter from mr. williams. he speaks with much respect of mr. taylor. i discover with some surprise, papa has taken a decided liking to mr. taylor. the marked kindness of his manner when he bid him good-bye, exhorting him to be "true to himself, his country, and his god," and wishing him all good wishes, struck me with some astonishment. whenever he has alluded to him since, it has been with significant eulogy. when i alluded that he was no gentleman, he seemed out of patience with me for the objection. you say papa has penetration. on this subject i believe he has indeed. i have told him nothing, yet he seems to be _au fait_ to the whole business. i could think at some moments his guesses go farther than mine. i believe he thinks a prospective union, deferred for five years, with such a decorous reliable personage, would be a very proper and advisable affair. 'how has your tic been lately? i had one fiery night when this same dragon "tic" held me for some hours with pestilent violence. it still comes at intervals with abated fury. owing to this and broken sleep, i am looking singularly charming, one of my true london looks--starved out and worn down. write soon, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey ' gloucester place, 'hyde park, _june_ _nd_, . 'dear ellen,--mr. taylor has gone some weeks since. i hear more open complaints now about his temper. of mr. williams' society i have enjoyed one evening's allowance, and liked it and him as usual. on such occasions his good qualities of ease, kindliness, and intelligence are seen, and his little faults and foibles hidden. mr. smith is somewhat changed in appearance. he looks a little older, darker, and more careworn; his ordinary manner is graver, but in the evening his spirits flow back to him. things and circumstances seem here to be as usual, but i fancy there has been some crisis in which his energy and filial affection have sustained them all. this i judge from the fact that his mother and sisters are more peculiarly bound to him than ever, and that his slightest wish is an unquestioned law.--faithfully yours, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'november _th_, . 'dear ellen,--papa, tabby, and martha are at present all better, yet none of them well. martha at present looks feeble. i wish she had a better constitution. as it is, one is always afraid of giving her too much to do; and yet there are many things i cannot undertake myself, and we do not like to change when we have had her so long. how are you getting on in the matter of servants? the other day i received a long letter from mr. taylor. i told you i did not expect to hear thence, nor did i. the letter is long, but it is worth your while to read it. in its way it has merit, that cannot be denied; abundance of information, talent of a certain kind, alloyed (i think) here and there with errors of taste. he might have spared many of the details of the bath scene, which, for the rest, tallies exactly with mr. thackeray's account of the same process. this little man with all his long letters remains as much a conundrum to me as ever. your account of the domestic joys at hunsworth amused me much. the good folks seem very happy--long may they continue so! it somewhat cheers me to know that such happiness _does_ exist on the earth. return mr. taylor's letter when you have read it. with love to your mother,--i am, dear nell, sincerely yours, 'c. b.' to james taylor, bombay 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--both your communications reached me safely--the note of the th september and the letter of the nd october. you do yourself less than justice when you stigmatise the latter as "ill-written." i found it quite legible, nor did i lose a word, though the lines and letters were so close. i should have been sorry if such had not been the case, as it appeared to me throughout highly interesting. it is observable that the very same information which we have previously collected, perhaps with rather languid attention, from printed books, when placed before us in familiar manuscript, and comprising the actual experience of a person with whom we are acquainted, acquires a new and vital interest: when we know the narrator we seem to realise the tale. 'the bath scene amused me much. your account of that operation tallies in every point with mr. thackeray's description in the _journey from cornhill to grand cairo_. the usage seems a little rough, and i cannot help thinking that equal benefit might be obtained through less violent means; but i suppose without the previous fatigue the after-sensation would not be so enjoyable, and no doubt it is that indolent after-sensation which the self-indulgent mahometans chiefly cultivate. i think you did right to disdain it. 'it would seem to me a matter of great regret that the society at bombay should be so deficient in all intellectual attraction. perhaps, however, your occupations will so far absorb your thoughts as to prevent them from dwelling painfully on this circumstance. no doubt there will be moments when you will look back to london and scotland, and the friends you have left there, with some yearning; but i suppose business has its own excitement. the new country, the new scenes too, must have their interest; and as you will not lack books to fill your leisure, you will probably soon become reconciled to a change which, for some minds, would too closely resemble exile. 'i fear the climate--such as you describe it--must be very trying to an european constitution. in your first letter, you mentioned october as the month of danger; it is now over. whether you have passed its ordeal safely, must yet for some weeks remain unknown to your friends in england--they can but _wish_ that such may be the case. you will not expect me to write a letter that shall form a parallel with your own either in quantity or quality; what i write must be brief, and what i communicate must be commonplace and of trivial interest. 'my father, i am thankful to say, continues in pretty good health. i read portions of your letter to him and he was interested in hearing them. he charged me when i wrote to convey his very kind remembrances. 'i had myself ceased to expect a letter from you. on taking leave at haworth you said something about writing from india, but i doubted at the time whether it was not one of those forms of speech which politeness dictates; and as time passed, and i did not hear from you, i became confirmed in this view of the subject. with every good wish for your welfare,--i am, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--all here is much as usual, and i was thinking of writing to you this morning when i received your note. i am glad to hear your mother bears this severe weather tolerably, as papa does also. i had a cold, chiefly in the throat and chest, but i applied cold water, which relieved me, i think, far better than hot applications would have done. the only events in my life consist in that little change occasional letters bring. i have had two from miss wooler since she left haworth which touched me much. she seems to think so much of a little congenial company. she says she has not for many days known such enjoyment as she experienced during the ten days she stayed here. yet you know what haworth is--dull enough. 'how could you imagine your last letter offended me? i only disagreed with you on _one point_. the little man's disdain of the sensual pleasure of a turkish bath had, i must own, my approval. before answering his epistle i got up my courage to write to mr. williams, through whose hands or those of mr. smith i knew the indian letter had come, and beg him to give me an impartial judgment of mr. taylor's character and disposition, owning that i was very much in the dark. i did not like to continue correspondence without further information. i got the answer, which i inclose. you say nothing about the hunsworth turtle-doves--how are they? and how is the branch of promise? i hope doing well.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_january_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i am glad of the opportunity of writing to you, for i have long wished to send you a little note, and was only deterred from doing so by the conviction that the period preceding christmas must be a very busy one to you. 'i have wished to thank you for your last, which gave me very genuine pleasure. you ascribe to mr. taylor an excellent character; such a man's friendship, at any rate, should not be disregarded; and if the principles and disposition be what you say, faults of manner and even of temper ought to weigh light in the balance. i always believed in his judgment and good-sense, but what i doubted was his kindness--he seemed to me a little too harsh, rigid, and unsympathising. now, judgment, sense, principle are invaluable and quite indispensable points, but one would be thankful for a _little_ feeling, a _little_ indulgence in addition--without these, poor fallible human nature shrinks under the domination of the sterner qualities. i answered mr. taylor's letter by the mail of the th november, sending it direct, for, on reflection, i did not see why i should trouble you with it. 'did your son frank call on mrs. gaskell? and how did he like her? 'my health has not been very satisfactory lately, but i think, though i vary almost daily, i am much better than i was a fortnight ago. all the winter the fact of my never being able to stoop over a desk without bringing on pain and oppression in the chest has been a great affliction to me, and the want of tranquil rest at night has tried me much, but i hope for the better times. the doctors say that there is no organic mischief. 'wishing a happy new year to you, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i hope both your mother's cold and yours are quite well ere this. papa has got something of his spring attack of bronchitis, but so far it is in a greatly ameliorated form, very different to what it has been for three years past. i do trust it may pass off thus mildly. i continue better. 'dear nell, i told you from the beginning that my going to sussex was a most improbable event; i tell you now that unless want of health should absolutely compel me to give up work and leave home (which i trust and hope will not be the case) i _certainly shall not think of going_. it is better to be decided, and decided i must be. you can never want me less than when in sussex surrounded by amusement and friends. i do not know that i shall go to scarbro', but it might be possible to spare a fortnight to go there (for the sake of a sad duty rather than pleasure), when i could not give a month to a longer excursion. i have not a word of news to tell you. many mails have come from india since i was at brookroyd. expectation would at times be on the alert, but disappointment knocked her down. i have not heard a syllable, and cannot think of making inquiries at cornhill. well, long suspense in any matter usually proves somewhat cankering, but god orders all things for us, and to his will we must submit. be sure to keep a calm mind; expect nothing.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' when mr. taylor returned to england in charlotte bronte was dead. his after-life was more successful than happy. he did not, it is true, succeed in bombay with the firm of smith, taylor & co. that would seem to have collapsed. but he made friends in bombay and returned there in as editor of the _bombay gazette_ and the _bombay quarterly review_. a little later he became editor of the _bombay saturday review_, which had not, however, a long career. mr. taylor's successes were not journalistic but mercantile. as secretary of the bombay chamber of commerce, which appointment he obtained in , he obtained much real distinction. to this post he added that of registrar of the university of bombay and many other offices. he was elected sheriff in , in which year he died. an imposing funeral ceremony took place in the cathedral, and he was buried in the bombay cemetery, where his tomb may be found to the left of the entrance gates, inscribed-- james taylor. died april , , aged . he married during his visit to england, but the marriage was not a happy one. that does not belong to the present story. here, however, is a cutting from the _times_ marriage record in :-- 'on the rd inst., at the church of st. john the evangelist, st. pancras, by the rev. james moorhouse, m.a., james taylor, esq., of furnival's-inn, and bombay, to annie, widow of adolph ritter, of vienna, and stepdaughter of thos. harrison, esq., of birchanger place, essex.' chapter xiii: literary ambitions we have seen how charlotte bronte and her sisters wrote from their earliest years those little books which embodied their vague aspirations after literary fame. now and again the effort is admirable, notably in _the adventures of ernest alembert_, but on the whole it amounts to as little as did the juvenile productions of shelley. that poet, it will be remembered, wrote _zastrozzi_ at nineteen, and much else that was bad, some of which he printed. charlotte bronte was mercifully restrained by a well-nigh empty purse from this ill-considered rashness. it was not till the death of their aunt had added to their slender resources that the bronte girls conceived the idea of actually publishing a book at their own expense. they communicated with the now extinct firm of aylott & jones of paternoster row, and charlotte appears to have written many letters to the firm, { } only two or three of which are printed by mrs. gaskell. the correspondence is comparatively insignificant, but as the practical beginning of charlotte's literary career, the hitherto unpublished letters which have been preserved are perhaps worth reproducing here. to aylott & jones '_january_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--may i request to be informed whether you would undertake the publication of a collection of short poems in one volume, vo. 'if you object to publishing the work at your own risk, would you undertake it on the author's account?--i am, gentlemen, your obedient humble servant, 'c. bronte. 'address--rev. p. bronte, haworth, bradford, yorkshire.' to aylott & jones '_march_ _rd_, . 'gentlemen,--i send a draft for pounds, s., being the amount of your estimate. 'i suppose there is nothing now to prevent your immediately commencing the printing of the work. 'when you acknowledge the receipt of the draft, will you state how soon it will be completed?--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_march_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--i have received the proof-sheet, and return it corrected. if there is any doubt at all about the printer's competency to correct errors, i would prefer submitting each sheet to the inspection of the authors, because such a mistake, for instance, as _tumbling_ stars, instead of _trembling_, would suffice to throw an air of absurdity over a whole poem; but if you know from experience that he is to be relied on, i would trust to your assurance on the subject, and leave the task of correction to him, as i know that a considerable saving both of time and trouble would be thus effected. 'the printing and paper appear to me satisfactory. of course i wish to have the work out as soon as possible, but i am still more anxious that it should be got up in a manner creditable to the publishers and agreeable to the authors.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_march_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--i return you the second proof. the authors have finally decided that they would prefer having all the proofs sent to them in turn, but you need not inclose the ms., as they can correct the errors from memory.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_march_ _rd_, . 'gentlemen,--as the proofs have hitherto come safe to hand under the direction of c. bronte, _esq_., i have not thought it necessary to request you to change it, but a little mistake having occurred yesterday, i think it will be better to send them to me in future under my real address, which is miss bronte, rev. p. bronte, etc.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_april_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--c., e., and a. bell are now preparing for the press a work of fiction, consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales, which may be published either together, as a work of three volumes, of the ordinary novel size, or separately as single volumes, as shall be deemed most advisable. 'it is not their intention to publish these tales on their own account. they direct me to ask you whether you would be disposed to undertake the work, after having, of course, by due inspection of the ms., ascertained that its contents are such as to warrant an expectation of success. 'an early answer will oblige, as, in case of your negativing the proposal, inquiry must be made of other publishers.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_april_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--i have to thank you for your obliging answer to my last. the information you give is of value to us, and when the ms. is completed your suggestions shall be acted on. 'there will be no preface to the poems. the blank leaf may be filled up by a table of contents, which i suppose the printer will prepare. it appears the volume will be a thinner one than was calculated on.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_may_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--the books may be done up in the style of moxon's duodecimo edition of wordsworth. 'the price may be fixed at s., or if you think that too much for the size of the volume, say s. 'i think the periodicals i mentioned in my last will be sufficient for advertising in at present, and i should not wish you to lay out a larger sum than pounds, especially as the estimate is increased by nearly pounds, in consequence, it appears, of a mistake. i should think the success of a work depends more on the notice it receives from periodicals, than on the quantity of advertisements. 'if you do not object, the additional amount of the estimate can be remitted when you send in your account at the end of the first six months. 'i should be obliged to you if you could let me know how soon copies can be sent to the editors of the magazines and newspapers specified.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_may_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--i received yours of the nd this morning. i now transmit pounds, being the additional sum necessary to defray the entire expense of paper and printing. it will leave a small surplus of s. d., which you can place to my account. 'i am glad you have sent copies to the newspapers you mention, and in case of a notice favourable or otherwise appearing in them, or in any of the other periodicals to which copies have been sent, i should be obliged to you if you would send me down the numbers; otherwise, i have not the opportunity of seeing these publications regularly. i might miss it, and should the poems be remarked upon favourably, it is my intention to appropriate a further sum to advertisements. if, on the other hand, they should pass unnoticed or be condemned, i consider it would be quite useless to advertise, as there is nothing, either in the title of the work or the names of the authors, to attract attention from a single individual.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to aylott & jones '_july_ _th_, . 'gentlemen,--i am directed by the messrs. bell to acknowledge the receipt of the _critic_ and the _athenaeum_ containing notices of the poems. 'they now think that a further sum of pounds may be devoted to advertisements, leaving it to you to select such channels as you deem most advisable. 'they would wish the following extract from the _critic_ to be appended to each advertisement:-- '"they in whose hearts are chords strung by nature to sympathise with the beautiful and the true, will recognise in these compositions the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect." 'they likewise request you to send copies of the poems to _fraser's magazine_, _chambers' edinburgh journal_, the globe, and _examiner_.--i am, gentlemen, yours truly, 'c. bronte.' to an appreciative editor currer bell wrote as follows:-- to the editor of the 'dublin university magazine.' '_october_ _th_, . 'sirs,--i thank you in my own name and that of my brothers, ellis and acton, for the indulgent notice that appeared in your last number of our first humble efforts in literature; but i thank you far more for the essay on modern poetry which preceded that notice--an essay in which seems to me to be condensed the very spirit of truth and beauty. if all or half your other readers shall have derived from its perusal the delight it afforded to myself and my brothers, your labours have produced a rich result. 'after such criticism an author may indeed be smitten at first by a sense of his own insignificance--as we were--but on a second and a third perusal he finds a power and beauty therein which stirs him to a desire to do more and better things. it fulfils the right end of criticism: without absolutely crushing, it corrects and rouses. i again thank you heartily, and beg to subscribe myself,--your constant and grateful reader, 'currer bell.' the reception which it met with from the public may be gathered from the following letter which accompanied de quincey's copy. { } to thomas de quincey. '_june_ _th_, . 'sirs,--my relatives, ellis and acton bell, and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems. 'the consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us: our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it. in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two, himself only knows. 'before transferring the edition to the trunkmakers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell; and we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works.--i am, sir, yours very respectfully, 'currer bell.' charlotte bronte could not have carried out the project of distribution to any appreciable extent, as a considerable 'remainder' appear to have been bound up with a new title-page by smith & elder. with this smith & elder title-page, the book is not uncommon, whereas, with the aylott & jones title-page it is exceedingly rare. perhaps there were a dozen review copies and a dozen presentation copies, in addition to the two that were sold, but only three or four seem to have survived for the pleasure of the latter-day bibliophile. here is the title-page in question: poems by currer, ellis and acton bell london aylott & jones, paternoster row we see by the letter to aylott & jones the first announcement of _wuthering heights_, _agnes grey_, and _the professor_. it would not seem that there was much, or indeed any, difficulty in disposing of _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_. they bear the imprint of newby of mortimer street, and they appeared in three uniform volumes, the two first being taken up by _wuthering heights_, and the third by _agnes grey_, { a} which is quaintly marked as if it were a three-volumed novel in itself, having 'volume iii' on title-page and binding. i have said that there were no travels before the manuscripts of emily and anne. that is not quite certain. mrs. gaskell implies that there were; but, at any rate, there is no definite information on the subject. newby, it is clear, did not publish them until all the world was discussing _jane eyre_. _the professor_, by currer bell, had, however, travel enough! it was offered to six publishers in succession before it came into the hands of mr. w. s. williams, the 'reader' for smith & elder. the circumstance of its courteous refusal by that firm, and the suggestion that a three-volumed novel would be gladly considered, are within the knowledge of all charlotte bronte's admirers. { b} one cannot but admire the fearless and uncompromising honesty with which charlotte bronte sent the mss. round with all its previous journeys frankly indicated. it is not easy at this time of day to understand why mr. williams refused _the professor_. the story is incomparably superior to the average novel, and, indeed, contains touches which are equal to anything that currer bell ever wrote. it seems to me possible that charlotte bronte rewrote the story after its rejection, but the manuscript does not bear out that impression. { c} charlotte bronte's method of writing was to take a piece of cardboard--the broken cover of a book, in fact--and a few sheets of note-paper, and write her first form of a story upon these sheets in a tiny handwriting in pencil. she would afterwards copy the whole out upon quarto paper very neatly in ink. none of the original pencilled mss. of her greater novels have been preserved. the extant manuscripts of _jane eyre_ and _the professor_ are in ink. _jane eyre_ was written, then, under mr. williams's kind encouragement, and immediately accepted. it was published in the first week of october . the following letters were received by mr. williams while the book was beginning its course. to w. s. williams '_october_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i thank you sincerely for your last letter. it is valuable to me because it furnishes me with a sound opinion on points respecting which i desired to be advised; be assured i shall do what i can to profit by your wise and good counsel. 'permit me, however, sir, to caution you against forming too favourable an idea of my powers, or too sanguine an expectation of what they can achieve. i am myself sensible both of deficiencies of capacity and disadvantages of circumstance which will, i fear, render it somewhat difficult for me to attain popularity as an author. the eminent writers you mention--mr. thackeray, mr. dickens, mrs. marsh, { } etc., doubtless enjoyed facilities for observation such as i have not; certainly they possess a knowledge of the world, whether intuitive or acquired, such as i can lay no claim to, and this gives their writings an importance and a variety greatly beyond what i can offer the public. 'still, if health be spared and time vouchsafed me, i mean to do my best; and should a moderate success crown my efforts, its value will be greatly enhanced by the proof it will seem to give that your kind counsel and encouragement have not been bestowed on one quite unworthy.--yours respectfully, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i do not know whether the _dublin university magazine_ is included in the list of periodicals to which messrs. smith & elder are accustomed to send copies of new publications, but as a former work, the joint production of myself and my two relatives, ellis and acton bell, received a somewhat favourable notice in that magazine, it appears to me that if the editor's attention were drawn to _jane eyre_ he might possibly bestow on it also a few words of remark. 'the_ critic_ and the _athenaeum_ also gave comments on the work i allude to. the review in the first-mentioned paper was unexpectedly and generously eulogistic, that in the _athenaeum_ more qualified, but still not discouraging. i mention these circumstances and leave it to you to judge whether any advantage is derivable from them. 'you dispensed me from the duty of answering your last letter, but my sense of the justness of the views it expresses will not permit me to neglect this opportunity both of acknowledging it and thanking you for it.--yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--your advice merits and shall have my most serious attention. i feel the force of your reasoning. it is my wish to do my best in the career on which i have entered. so i shall study and strive; and by dint of time, thought, and effort, i hope yet to deserve in part the encouragement you and others have so generously accorded me. but time will be necessary--that i feel more than ever. in case of _jane eyre_ reaching a second edition, i should wish some few corrections to be made, and will prepare an errata. how would the accompanying preface do? i thought it better to be brief. 'the _observer_ has just reached me. i always compel myself to read the analysis in every newspaper-notice. it is a just punishment, a due though severe humiliation for faults of plan and construction. i wonder if the analysis of other fictions read as absurdly as that of _jane eyre_ always does.--i am, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell.' the following letter is interesting because it discusses the rejected novel, and refers to the project of recasting it, which ended in the writing of _villette_. { } to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have just received your kind and welcome letter of the th. i shall proceed at once to discuss the principal subject of it. 'of course a second work has occupied my thoughts much. i think it would be premature in me to undertake a serial now--i am not yet qualified for the task: i have neither gained a sufficiently firm footing with the public, nor do i possess sufficient confidence in myself, nor can i boast those unflagging animal spirits, that even command of the faculty of composition, which as you say, and, i am persuaded, most justly, is an indispensable requisite to success in serial literature. i decidedly feel that ere i change my ground i had better make another venture in the three volume novel form. 'respecting the plan of such a work, i have pondered it, but as yet with very unsatisfactory results. three commencements have i essayed, but all three displease me. a few days since i looked over _the professor_. i found the beginning very feeble, the whole narrative deficient in incident and in general attractiveness. yet the middle and latter portion of the work, all that relates to brussels, the belgian school, etc., is as good as i can write: it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of _jane eyre_. it gives, i think, a new view of a grade, an occupation, and a class of characters--all very commonplace, very insignificant in themselves, but not more so than the materials composing that portion of _jane eyre_ which seems to please most generally. 'my wish is to recast _the professor_, add as well as i can what is deficient, retrench some parts, develop others, and make of it a three volume work--no easy task, i know, yet i trust not an impracticable one. 'i have not forgotten that _the professor_ was set aside in my agreement with messrs. smith & elder; therefore before i take any step to execute the plan i have sketched, i should wish to have your judgment on its wisdom. you read or looked over the ms.--what impression have you now respecting its worth? and what confidence have you that i can make it better than it is? 'feeling certain that from business reasons as well as from natural integrity you will be quite candid with me, i esteem it a privilege to be able thus to consult you.--believe me, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell. '_wuthering heights_ is, i suppose, at length published, at least mr. newby has sent the authors their six copies. i wonder how it will be received. i should say it merits the epithets of "vigorous" and "original" much more decidedly than _jane eyre_ did. _agnes grey_ should please such critics as mr. lewes, for it is "true" and "unexaggerated" enough. the books are not well got up--they abound in errors of the press. on a former occasion i expressed myself with perhaps too little reserve regarding mr. newby, yet i cannot but feel, and feel painfully, that ellis and acton have not had the justice at his hands that i have had at those of messrs. smith & elder.' to w. s. williams '_december_ _st_, . 'dear sirs,--i think, for the reasons you mention, it is better to substitute _author_ for _editor_. i should not be ashamed to be considered the author of _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_, but, possessing no real claim to that honour, i would rather not have it attributed to me, thereby depriving the true authors of their just meed. 'you do very rightly and very kindly to tell me the objections made against _jane eyre_--they are more essential than the praises. i feel a sort of heart-ache when i hear the book called "godless" and "pernicious" by good and earnest-minded men; but i know that heart-ache will be salutary--at least i trust so. 'what is meant by the charges of _trickery_ and _artifice_ i have yet to comprehend. it was no art in me to write a tale--it was no trick in messrs. smith & elder to publish it. where do the trickery and artifice lie? 'i have received the _scotsman_, and was greatly amused to see jane eyre likened to rebecca sharp--the resemblance would hardly have occurred to me. 'i wish to send this note by to-day's post, and must therefore conclude in haste.--i am, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--your letter made me ashamed of myself that i should ever have uttered a murmur, or expressed by any sign that i was sensible of pain from the unfavourable opinions of some misjudging but well-meaning people. but, indeed, let me assure you, i am not ungrateful for the kindness which has been given me in such abundant measure. i can discriminate the proportions in which blame and praise have been awarded to my efforts: i see well that i have had less of the former and more of the latter than i merit. i am not therefore crushed, though i may be momentarily saddened by the frown, even of the good. 'it would take a great deal to crush me, because i know, in the first place, that my own intentions were correct, that i feel in my heart a deep reverence for religion, that impiety is very abhorrent to me; and in the second, i place firm reliance on the judgment of some who have encouraged me. you and mr. lewes are quite as good authorities, in my estimation, as mr. dilke or the editor of the _spectator_, and i would not under any circumstances, or for any opprobrium, regard with shame what my friends had approved--none but a coward would let the detraction of an enemy outweigh the encouragement of a friend. you must not, therefore, fulfil your threat of being less communicative in future; you must kindly tell me all. 'miss kavanagh's view of the maniac coincides with leigh hunt's. i agree with them that the character is shocking, but i know that it is but too natural. there is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind, and a fiend-nature replaces it. the sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end. the aspect, in such cases, assimilates with the disposition--all seem demonized. it is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that i have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling: i have erred in making _horror_ too predominant. mrs. rochester, indeed, lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin is itself a species of insanity--the truly good behold and compassionate it as such. '_jane eyre_ has got down into yorkshire, a copy has even penetrated into this neighbourhood. i saw an elderly clergyman reading it the other day, and had the satisfaction of hearing him exclaim, "why, they have got --- school, and mr. --- here, i declare! and miss ---" (naming the originals of lowood, mr. brocklehurst and miss temple). he had known them all. i wondered whether he would recognise the portraits, and was gratified to find that he did, and that, moreover, he pronounced them faithful and just. he said, too, that mr. --- (brocklehurst) "deserved the chastisement he had got." 'he did not recognise currer bell. what author would be without the advantage of being able to walk invisible? one is thereby enabled to keep such a quiet mind. i make this small observation in confidence. 'what makes you say that the notice in the _westminster review_ is not by mr. lewes? it expresses precisely his opinions, and he said he would perhaps insert a few lines in that periodical. 'i have sometimes thought that i ought to have written to mr. lewes to thank him for his review in _fraser_; and, indeed, i did write a note, but then it occurred to me that he did not require the author's thanks, and i feared it would be superfluous to send it, therefore i refrained; however, though i have not _expressed_ gratitude i have _felt_ it. 'i wish you, too, _many many_ happy new years, and prosperity and success to you and yours.--believe me, etc., 'currer bell. 'i have received the _courier_ and the _oxford chronicle_.' to w. s. williams '_january_ _nd_, . 'dear sir,--i have received the _morning herald_, and was much pleased with the notice, chiefly on account of the reference made to that portion of the preface which concerns messrs. smith & elder. if my tribute of thanks can benefit my publishers, it is desirable that it should have as much publicity as possible. 'i do not know if the part which relates to mr. thackeray is likely to be as well received; but whether generally approved of and understood or not, i shall not regret having written it, for i am convinced of its truth. 'i see i was mistaken in my idea that the _athenaeum_ and others wished to ascribe the authorship of _wuthering heights_ to currer bell; the contrary is the case, _jane eyre_ is given to ellis bell; and mr. newby, it appears, thinks it expedient so to frame his advertisements as to favour the misapprehension. if mr. newby had much sagacity he would see that ellis bell is strong enough to stand without being propped by currer bell, and would have disdained what ellis himself of all things disdains--recourse to trickery. however, ellis, acton, and currer care nothing for the matter personally; the public and the critics are welcome to confuse our identities as much as they choose; my only fear is lest messrs. smith & elder should in some way be annoyed by it. 'i was much interested in your account of miss kavanagh. the character you sketch belongs to a class i peculiarly esteem: one in which endurance combines with exertion, talent with goodness; where genius is found unmarred by extravagance, self-reliance unalloyed by self-complacency. it is a character which is, i believe, rarely found except where there has been toil to undergo and adversity to struggle against: it will only grow to perfection in a poor soil and in the shade; if the soil be too indigent, the shade too dank and thick, of course it dies where it sprung. but i trust this will not be the case with miss kavanagh. i trust she will struggle ere long into the sunshine. in you she has a kind friend to direct her, and i hope her mother will live to see the daughter, who yields to her such childlike duty, both happy and successful. 'you asked me if i should like any copies of the second edition of _jane eyre_, and i said--no. it is true i do not want any for myself or my acquaintances, but if the request be not unusual, i should much like one to be given to miss kavanagh. if you would have the goodness, you might write on the fly-leaf that the book is presented with the author's best wishes for her welfare here and hereafter. my reason for wishing that she should have a copy is because she said the book had been to her a _suggestive_ one, and i know that suggestive books are valuable to authors. 'i am truly sorry to hear that mr. smith has had an attack of the prevalent complaint, but i trust his recovery is by this time complete. i cannot boast entire exemption from its ravages, as i now write under its depressing influence. hoping that you have been more fortunate,--i am, dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have received the _christian remembrancer_, and read the review. it is written with some ability; but to do justice was evidently not the critic's main object, therefore he excuses himself from performing that duty. 'i daresay the reviewer imagines that currer bell ought to be extremely afflicted, very much cut up, by some smart things he says--this however is not the case. c. bell is on the whole rather encouraged than dispirited by the review: the hard-wrung praise extorted reluctantly from a foe is the most precious praise of all--you are sure that this, at least, has no admixture of flattery. i fear he has too high an opinion of my abilities and of what i can do; but that is his own fault. in other respects, he aims his shafts in the dark, and the success, or, rather, ill-success of his hits makes me laugh rather than cry. his shafts of sarcasm are nicely polished, keenly pointed; he should not have wasted them in shooting at a mark he cannot see. 'i hope such reviews will not make much difference with me, and that if the spirit moves me in future to say anything about priests, etc., i shall say it with the same freedom as heretofore. i hope also that their anger will not make _me_ angry. as a body, i had no ill-will against them to begin with, and i feel it would be an error to let opposition engender such ill-will. a few individuals may possibly be called upon to sit for their portraits some time; if their brethren in general dislike the resemblance and abuse the artist--_tant pis_!--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' it seems that mr. williams had hinted that charlotte might like to emulate thackeray by illustrating her own books. to w. s. williams '_march_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have just received the copy of the second edition, and will look over it, and send the corrections as soon as possible; i will also, since you think it advisable, avail myself of the opportunity of a third edition to correct the mistake respecting the authorship of _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_. 'as to your second suggestion, it is, one can see at a glance, a very judicious and happy one; but i cannot adopt it, because i have not the skill you attribute to me. it is not enough to have the artist's eye, one must also have the artist's hand to turn the first gift to practical account. i have, in my day, wasted a certain quantity of bristol board and drawing-paper, crayons and cakes of colour, but when i examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems as if during the years it has been lying closed some fairy had changed what i once thought sterling coin into dry leaves, and i feel much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire; i see they have no value. if, then, _jane eyre_ is ever to be illustrated, it must be by some other hand than that of its author. but i hope no one will be at the trouble to make portraits of my characters. bulwer and byron heroes and heroines are very well, they are all of them handsome; but my personages are mostly unattractive in look, and therefore ill-adapted to figure in ideal portraits. at the best, i have always thought such representations futile. you will not easily find a second thackeray. how he can render, with a few black lines and dots, shades of expression so fine, so real; traits of character so minute, so subtle, so difficult to seize and fix, i cannot tell--i can only wonder and admire. thackeray may not be a painter, but he is a wizard of a draughtsman; touched with his pencil, paper lives. and then his drawing is so refreshing; after the wooden limbs one is accustomed to see pourtrayed by commonplace illustrators, his shapes of bone and muscle clothed with flesh, correct in proportion and anatomy, are a real relief. all is true in thackeray. if truth were again a goddess, thackeray should be her high priest. 'i read my preface over with some pain--i did not like it. i wrote it when i was a little enthusiastic, like you, about the french revolution. i wish i had written it in a cool moment; i should have said the same things, but in a different manner. one may be as enthusiastic as one likes about an author who has been dead a century or two, but i see it is a fault to bore the public with enthusiasm about a living author. i promise myself to take better care in future. _still_ i will _think_ as i please. 'are the london republicans, and _you_ amongst the number, cooled down yet? i suppose not, because your french brethren are acting very nobly. the abolition of slavery and of the punishment of death for political offences are two glorious deeds, but how will they get over the question of the organisation of labour! such theories will be the sand-bank on which their vessel will run aground if they don't mind. lamartine, there is not doubt, would make an excellent legislator for a nation of lamartines--but where is that nation? i hope these observations are sceptical and cool enough.--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sirs,--i have already acknowledged in a note to mr. smith the receipt of the parcel of books, and in my thanks for this well-timed attention i am sure i ought to include you; your taste, i thought, was recognisable in the choice of some of the volumes, and a better selection it would have been difficult to make. 'to-day i have received the _spectator_ and the _revue des deux mondes_. the _spectator_ consistently maintains the tone it first assumed regarding the bells. i have little to object to its opinion as far as currer bell's portion of the volume is concerned. it is true the critic sees only the faults, but for these his perception is tolerably accurate. blind is he as any bat, insensate as any stone, to the merits of ellis. he cannot feel or will not acknowledge that the very finish and _labor limae_ which currer wants, ellis has; he is not aware that the "true essence of poetry" pervades his compositions. because ellis's poems are short and abstract, the critics think them comparatively insignificant and dull. they are mistaken. 'the notice in the _revue des deux mondes_ is one of the most able, the most acceptable to the author, of any that has yet appeared. eugene forcade understood and enjoyed _jane eyre_. i cannot say that of all who have professed to criticise it. the censures are as well-founded as the commendations. the specimens of the translation given are on the whole good; now and then the meaning of the original has been misapprehended, but generally it is well rendered. 'every cup given us to taste in this life is mixed. once it would have seemed to me that an evidence of success like that contained in the _revue_ would have excited an almost exultant feeling in my mind. it comes, however, at a time when counteracting circumstances keep the balance of the emotions even--when my sister's continued illness darkens the present and dims the future. that will seem to me a happy day when i can announce to you that emily is better. her symptoms continue to be those of slow inflammation of the lungs, tight cough, difficulty of breathing, pain in the chest, and fever. we watch anxiously for a change for the better--may it soon come.--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte. 'as i was about to seal this i received your kind letter. truly glad am i to hear that fanny is taking the path which pleases her parents. i trust she may persevere in it. she may be sure that a contrary one will never lead to happiness; and i should think that the reward of seeing you and her mother pleased must be so sweet that she will be careful not to run the risk of forfeiting it. 'it is somewhat singular that i had already observed to my sisters, i did not doubt it was mr. lewes who had shown you the _revue_.' the many other letters referring to emily's last illness have already been printed. when the following letters were written, emily and anne were both in their graves. to james taylor, cornhill '_march_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--the parcel arrived on saturday evening. permit me to express my sense of the judgment and kindness which have dictated the selection of its contents. they appear to be all good books, and good books are, we know, the best substitute for good society; if circumstances debar me from the latter privilege, the kind attentions of my friends supply me with ample measure of the former. 'thank you for your remarks on _shirley_. some of your strictures tally with some by mr. williams. you both complain of the want of distinctness and impressiveness in my heroes. probably you are right. in delineating male character i labour under disadvantages: intuition and theory will not always adequately supply the place of observation and experience. when i write about women i am sure of my ground--in the other case, i am not so sure. 'here, then, each of you has laid the critical finger on a point that by its shrinking confesses its vulnerability; whether the disapprobation you intimate respecting the briarchapel scenes, the curates, etc., be equally merited, time will show. i am well aware what will be the author's present meed for these passages: i anticipate general blame and no praise. and were my motive-principle in writing a thirst for popularity, or were the chief check on my pen a dread of censure, i should withdraw these scenes--or rather, i should never have written them. i will not say whether the considerations that really govern me are sound, or whether my convictions are just; but such as they are, to their influence i must yield submission. they forbid me to sacrifice truth to the fear of blame. i accept their prohibition. 'with the sincere expression of my esteem for the candour by which your critique is distinguished,--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_august_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--since i last wrote to you i have been getting on with my book as well as i can, and i think i may now venture to say that in a few weeks i hope to have the pleasure of placing the ms. in the hands of mr. smith. 'the _north british review_ duly reached me. i read attentively all it says about _e. wyndham_, _jane eyre_, and _f. hervey_. much of the article is clever, and yet there are remarks which--for me--rob it of importance. 'to value praise or stand in awe of blame we must respect the source whence the praise and blame proceed, and i do not respect an inconsistent critic. he says, "if _jane eyre_ be the production of a woman, she must be a woman unsexed." 'in that case the book is an unredeemed error and should be unreservedly condemned. _jane eyre_ is a woman's autobiography, by a woman it is professedly written. if it is written as no woman would write, condemn it with spirit and decision--say it is bad, but do not eulogise and then detract. i am reminded of the _economist_. the literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man, and pronounced it "odious" if the work of a woman. 'to such critics i would say, "to you i am neither man nor woman--i come before you as an author only. it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which i accept your judgment." 'there is a weak comment, having no pretence either to justice or discrimination, on the works of ellis and acton bell. the critic did not know that those writers had passed from time and life. i have read no review since either of my sisters died which i could have wished _them_ to read--none even which did not render the thought of their departure more tolerable to me. to hear myself praised beyond them was cruel, to hear qualities ascribed to them so strangely the reverse of their real characteristics was scarce supportable. it is sad even now; but they are so remote from earth, so safe from its turmoils, i can bear it better. 'but on one point do i now feel vulnerable: i should grieve to see my father's peace of mind perturbed on my account; for which reason i keep my author's existence as much as possible out of his way. i have always given him a carefully diluted and modified account of the success of _jane eyre_--just what would please without startling him. the book is not mentioned between us once a month. the _quarterly_ i kept to myself--it would have worried papa. to that same _quarterly_ i must speak in the introduction to my present work--just one little word. you once, i remember, said that review was written by a lady--miss rigby. are you sure of this? 'give no hint of my intention of discoursing a little with the _quarterly_. it would look too important to speak of it beforehand. all plans are best conceived and executed without noise.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_august_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i can only write very briefly at present--first to thank you for your interesting letter and the graphic description it contained of the neighbourhood where you have been staying, and then to decide about the title of the book. 'if i remember rightly, my cornhill critics objected to _hollow's mill_, nor do i now find it appropriate. it might rather be called _fieldhead_, though i think _shirley_ would perhaps be the best title. shirley, i fancy, has turned out the most prominent and peculiar character in the work. 'cornhill may decide between _fieldhead_ and _shirley_.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' the famous _quarterly review_ article by miss rigby, afterwards lady eastlake, { } appeared in december , under the title of '_vanity fair_, _jane eyre_, and governesses.' it was a review of two novels and a treatise on schools, and but for one or two offensive passages might have been pronounced fairly complimentary. to have coupled _jane eyre_ with thackeray's great book, at a time when thackeray had already reached to heroic proportions in the literary world, was in itself a compliment. it is small wonder that the speculation was hazarded that j. g. lockhart, the editor of the _quarterly_, had himself supplied the venom. he could display it on occasion. it is quite clear now, however, that that was not the case. miss rigby was the reviewer who thought it within a critic's province to suggest that the writer might be a woman 'who had forfeited the society of her sex.' lockhart must have read the review hastily, as editors will on occasion. he writes to his contributor on november , , before the article had appeared:-- 'about three years ago i received a small volume of 'poems by currer, acton, and ellis bell,' and a queer little note by currer, who said the book had been published a year, and just two copies sold, so they were to burn the rest, but distributed a few copies, mine being one. i find what seems rather a fair review of that tiny tome in the _spectator_ of this week; pray look at it. 'i think the poems of currer much better than those of acton and ellis, and believe his novel is vastly better than those which they have more recently put forth. 'i know nothing of the writers, but the common rumour is that they are brothers of the weaving order in some lancashire town. at first it was generally said currer was a lady, and mayfair circumstantialised by making her the _chere amie_ of mr. thackeray. but your skill in "dress" settles the question of sex. i think, however, some woman must have assisted in the school scenes of _jane eyre_, which have a striking air of truthfulness to me--an ignoramus, i allow, on such points. 'i should say you might as well glance at the novels by acton and ellis bell--_wuthering heights_ is one of them. if you have any friend about manchester, it would, i suppose, be easy to learn accurately as to the position of these men.' { } this was written in november, and it was not till december that the article appeared. apart from the offensive imputations upon the morals of the author of _jane eyre_, which reduces itself to smart impertinence when it is understood that miss rigby fully believed that the author was a man, the review is not without its compensations for a new writer. the 'equal popularity' of _jane eyre_ and _vanity fair_ is referred to. 'a very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' there is droll irony, when charlotte bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment are considered, in the following:-- 'we do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority, and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written _jane eyre_.' in another passage miss rigby, musing upon the masculinity of the author, finally clinches her arguments by proofs of a kind. 'no woman _trusses game_, and garnishes dessert dishes with the same hands, or talks of so doing in the same breath. above all, no woman attires another in such fancy dresses as jane's ladies assume. miss ingram coming down irresistible in a _morning_ robe of sky-blue crape, a gauze azure scarf twisted in her hair!! no lady, we understand, when suddenly roused in the night, would think of hurrying on "a frock." they have garments more convenient for such occasions, and more becoming too.' _wuthering heights_ is described as 'too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable to the most vitiated class of english readers.' this no doubt was miss rigby's interpolation in the proofs in reply to her editor's suggestion that she should 'glance at the novels by acton and ellis bell.' it is a little difficult to understand the _quarterly_ editor's method, or, indeed, the letter to miss rigby which i have quoted, as he had formed a very different estimate of the book many months before. 'i have finished the adventures of miss jane eyre,' he writes to mrs. hope (dec. th, ), 'and think her far the cleverest that has written since austen and edgeworth were in their prime, worth fifty trollopes and martineaus rolled into one counterpane, with fifty dickenses and bulwers to keep them company--but rather a brazen miss.' { } when the _quarterly review_ appeared, charlotte bronte, as we have seen, was in dire domestic distress, and it was not till many months later, when a new edition of _jane eyre_ was projected, that she discussed with her publishers the desirability of an effective reply, which was not however to disclose her sex and environment. a first preface called 'a word to the _quarterly_' was cancelled, and after some debate, the preface which we now have took its place. the 'book' is of course _shirley_. to w. s. williams '_august_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--the book is now finished (thank god) and ready for mr. taylor, but i have not yet heard from him. i thought i should be able to tell whether it was equal to _jane eyre_ or not, but i find i cannot--it may be better, it may be worse. i shall be curious to hear your opinion, my own is of no value. i send the preface or "word to the _quarterly_" for your perusal. 'whatever now becomes of the work, the occupation of writing it has been a boon to me. it took me out of dark and desolate reality into an unreal but happier region. the worst of it is, my eyes are grown somewhat weak and my head somewhat weary and prone to ache with close work. you can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the theme, and when you so give yourself, you lose appetite and sleep--it cannot be helped. 'at what time does mr. smith intend to bring the book out? it is his now. i hand it and all the trouble and care and anxiety over to him--a good riddance, only i wish he fairly had it.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_august_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i cannot change my preface. i can shed no tears before the public, nor utter any groan in the public ear. the deep, real tragedy of our domestic experience is yet terribly fresh in my mind and memory. it is not a time to be talked about to the indifferent; it is not a topic for allusion to in print. 'no righteous indignation can i lavish on the _quarterly_. i can condescend but to touch it with the lightest satire. believe me, my dear sir, "c. bronte" must not here appear; what she feels or has felt is not the question--it is "currer bell" who was insulted--he must reply. let mr. smith fearlessly print the preface i have sent--let him depend upon me this once; even if i prove a broken reed, his fall cannot be dangerous: a preface is a short distance, it is not three volumes. 'i have always felt certain that it is a deplorable error in an author to assume the tragic tone in addressing the public about his own wrongs or griefs. what does the public care about him as an individual? his wrongs are its sport; his griefs would be a bore. what we deeply feel is our own--we must keep it to ourselves. ellis and acton bell were, for me, emily and anne; my sisters--to me intimately near, tenderly dear--to the public they were nothing--worse than nothing--beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepresented. if i live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet.--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ , . 'my dear sir,--your letter gave me great pleasure. an author who has showed his book to none, held no consultation about plan, subject, characters, or incidents, asked and had no opinion from one living being, but fabricated it darkly in the silent workshop of his own brain--such an author awaits with a singular feeling the report of the first impression produced by his creation in a quarter where he places confidence, and truly glad he is when that report proves favourable. 'do you think this book will tend to strengthen the idea that currer bell is a woman, or will it favour a contrary opinion? 'i return the proof-sheets. will they print all the french phrases in italics? i hope not, it makes them look somehow obtrusively conspicuous. 'i have no time to add more lest i should be too late for the post.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--your advice is very good, and yet i cannot follow it: i _cannot_ alter now. it sounds absurd, but so it is. 'the circumstances of shirley's being nervous on such a matter may appear incongruous because i fear it is not well managed; otherwise it is perfectly natural. in such minds, such odd points, such queer unexpected inconsistent weaknesses _are_ found--perhaps there never was an ardent poetic temperament, however healthy, quite without them; but they never communicate them unless forced, they have a suspicion that the terror is absurd, and keep it hidden. still the thing is badly managed, and i bend my head and expect in resignation what, _here_, i know i deserve--the lash of criticism. i shall wince when it falls, but not scream. 'you are right about goth, you are very right--he is clear, deep, but very cold. i acknowledge him great, but cannot feel him genial. 'you mention the literary coteries. to speak the truth, i recoil from them, though i long to see some of the truly great literary characters. however, this is not to be yet--i cannot sacrifice my incognito. and let me be content with seclusion--it has its advantages. in general, indeed, i am tranquil, it is only now and then that a struggle disturbs me--that i wish for a wider world than haworth. when it is past, reason tells me how unfit i am for anything very different. yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--you observed that the french of _shirley_ might be cavilled at. there is a long paragraph written in the french language in that chapter entitled "_le coeval damped_." i forget the number. i fear it will have a pretentious air. if you deem it advisable, and will return the chapter, i will efface, and substitute something else in english.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to james taylor, cornhill '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--it is time i answered the note which i received from you last thursday; i should have replied to it before had i not been kept more than usually engaged by the presence of a clergyman in the house, and the indisposition of one of our servants. 'as you may conjecture, it cheered and pleased me much to learn that the opinion of my friends in cornhill was favourable to _shirley_--that, on the whole, it was considered no falling off from _jane eyre_. i am trying, however, not to encourage too sanguine an expectation of a favourable reception by the public: the seeds of prejudice have been sown, and i suppose the produce will have to be reaped--but we shall see. 'i read with pleasure _friends in council_, and with very great pleasure _the thoughts and opinions of a statesman_. it is the record of what may with truth be termed a beautiful mind--serene, harmonious, elevated, and pure; it bespeaks, too, a heart full of kindness and sympathy. i like it much. 'papa has been pretty well during the past week, he begs to join me in kind remembrances to yourself.--believe me, my dear sir, yours very sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have made the alteration; but i have made it to please cornhill, not the public nor the critics. 'i am sorry to say newby does know my real name. i wish he did not, but that cannot be helped. meantime, though i earnestly wish to preserve my incognito, i live under no slavish fear of discovery. i am ashamed of nothing i have written--not a line. 'the envelope containing the first proof and your letter had been received open at the general post office and resealed there. perhaps it was accident, but i think it better to inform you of the circumstance.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i am chagrined about the envelope being opened: i see it is the work of prying curiosity, and now it would be useless to make a stir--what mischief is to be apprehended is already done. it was not done at haworth. i know the people of the post-office there, and am sure they would not venture on such a step; besides, the haworth people have long since set me down as bookish and quiet, and trouble themselves no farther about me. but the gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife at keighley; there they are sadly puzzled to guess why i never visit, encourage no overtures to acquaintance, and always stay at home. those packets passing backwards and forwards by the post have doubtless aggravated their curiosity. well, i am sorry, but i shall try to wait patiently and not vex myself too much, come what will. 'i am glad you like the english substitute for the french _devour_. 'the parcel of books came on saturday. i write to mr. taylor by this post to acknowledge its receipt. his opinion of _shirley_ seems in a great measure to coincide with yours, only he expresses it rather differently to you, owing to the difference in your casts of mind. are you not different on some points?--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _st_, 'my dear sir,--i reached home yesterday, and found your letter and one from mr. lewes, and one from the peace congress committee, awaiting my arrival. the last document it is now too late to answer, for it was an invitation to currer bell to appear on the platform at their meeting at exeter hall last tuesday! a wonderful figure mr. currer bell would have cut under such circumstances! should the "peace congress" chance to read _shirley_ they will wash their hands of its author. 'i am glad to hear that mr. thackeray is better, but i did not know he had been seriously ill, i thought it was only a literary indisposition. you must tell me what he thinks of _shirley_ if he gives you any opinion on the subject. 'i am also glad to hear that mr. smith is pleased with the commercial prospects of the work. i try not to be anxious about its literary fate; and if i cannot be quite stoical, i think i am still tolerably resigned. 'mr. lewes does not like the opening chapter, wherein he resembles you. 'i have permitted myself the treat of spending the last week with my friend ellen. her residence is in a far more populous and stirring neighbourhood than this. whenever i go there i am unavoidably forced into society--clerical society chiefly. 'during my late visit i have too often had reason, sometimes in a pleasant, sometimes in a painful form, to fear that i no longer walk invisible. _jane eyre_, it appears, has been read all over the district--a fact of which i never dreamt--a circumstance of which the possibility never occurred to me. i met sometimes with new deference, with augmented kindness: old schoolfellows and old teachers, too, greeted me with generous warmth. and again, ecclesiastical brows lowered thunder at me. when i confronted one or two large-made priests, i longed for the battle to come on. i wish they would speak out plainly. you must not understand that my schoolfellows and teachers were of the clergy daughters school--in fact, i was never there but for one little year as a very little girl. i am certain i have long been forgotten; though for myself, i remember all and everything clearly: early impressions are ineffaceable. 'i have just received the _daily news_. let me speak the truth--when i read it my heart sickened over it. it is not a good review, it is unutterably false. if _shirley_ strikes all readers as it has struck that one, but--i shall not say what follows. 'on the whole i am glad a decidedly bad notice has come first--a notice whose inexpressible ignorance first stuns and then stirs me. are there no such men as the helstones and yorkes? 'yes, there are. 'is the first chapter disgusting or vulgar? '_it is not_, _it is real_. 'as for the praise of such a critic, i find it silly and nauseous, and i scorn it. 'were my sisters now alive they and i would laugh over this notice; but they sleep, they will wake no more for me, and i am a fool to be so moved by what is not worth a sigh.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. b. 'you must spare me if i seem hasty, i fear i really am not so firm as i used to be, nor so patient. whenever any shock comes, i feel that almost all supports have been withdrawn.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i did not receive the parcel of copies till saturday evening. everything sent by bradford is long in reaching me. it is, i think, better to direct: keighley. i was very much pleased with the appearance and getting up of the book; it looks well. 'i have got the _examiner_ and your letter. you are very good not to be angry with me, for i wrote in indignation and grief. the critic of the _daily news_ struck me as to the last degree incompetent, ignorant, and flippant. a thrill of mutiny went all through me when i read his small effusion. to be judged by such a one revolted me. i ought, however, to have controlled myself, and i did not. i am willing to be judged by the _examiner_--i like the _examiner_. fonblanque has power, he has discernment--i bend to his censorship, i am grateful for his praise; his blame deserves consideration; when he approves, i permit myself a moderate emotion of pride. am i wrong in supposing that critique to be written by mr. fonblanque? but whether it is by him or forster, i am thankful. 'in reading the critiques of the other papers--when i get them--i will try to follow your advice and preserve my equanimity. but i cannot be sure of doing this, for i had good resolutions and intentions before, and, you see, i failed. 'you ask me if i am related to nelson. no, i never heard that i was. the rumour must have originated in our name resembling his title. i wonder who that former schoolfellow of mine was that told mr. lewes, or how she had been enabled to identify currer bell with c. bronte. she could not have been a cowan bridge girl, none of them can possibly remember me. they might remember my eldest sister, maria; her prematurely-developed and remarkable intellect, as well as the mildness, wisdom, and fortitude of her character might have left an indelible impression on some observant mind amongst her companions. my second sister, elizabeth, too, may perhaps be remembered, but i cannot conceive that i left a trace behind me. my career was a very quiet one. i was plodding and industrious, perhaps i was very grave, for i suffered to see my sisters perishing, but i think i was remarkable for nothing.--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i have received since i wrote last the globe, standard of freedom, britannia, economist, and weekly chronicle. 'how is _shirley_ getting on, and what is now the general feeling respecting the work? 'as far as i can judge from the tone of the newspapers, it seems that those who were most charmed with _jane eyre_ are the least pleased with _shirley_; they are disappointed at not finding the same excitement, interest, stimulus; while those who spoke disparagingly of _jane eyre_ like _shirley_ a little better than her predecessor. i suppose its dryer matter suits their dryer minds. but i feel that the fiat for which i wait does not depend on newspapers, except, indeed, such newspapers as the _examiner_. the monthlies and quarterlies will pronounce it, i suppose. mere novel-readers, it is evident, think _shirley_ something of a failure. still, the majority of the notices have on the whole been favourable. that in the _standard of freedom_ was very kindly expressed; and coming from a dissenter, william howitt, i wonder thereat. 'are you satisfied at cornhill, or the contrary? i have read part of _the caxtons_, and, when i have finished, will tell you what i think of it; meantime, i should very much like to hear your opinion. perhaps i shall keep mine till i see you, whenever that may be. 'i am trying by degrees to inure myself to the thought of some day stepping over to keighley, taking the train to leeds, thence to london, and once more venturing to set foot in the strange, busy whirl of the strand and cornhill. i want to talk to you a little and to hear by word of mouth how matters are progressing. whenever i come, i must come quietly and but for a short time--i should be unhappy to leave papa longer than a fortnight.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--if it is discouraging to an author to see his work mouthed over by the entirely ignorant and incompetent, it is equally reviving to hear what you have written discussed and analysed by a critic who is master of his subject--by one whose heart feels, whose powers grasp the matter he undertakes to handle. such refreshment eugene forcade has given me. were i to see that man, my impulse would be to say, "monsieur, you know me, i shall deem it an honour to know you." 'i do not find that forcade detects any coarseness in the work--it is for the smaller critics to find that out. the master in the art--the subtle-thoughted, keen-eyed, quick-feeling frenchman, knows the true nature of the ingredients which went to the composition of the creation he analyses--he knows the true nature of things, and he gives them their right name. 'yours of yesterday has just reached me. let me, in the first place, express my sincere sympathy with your anxiety on mrs. williams's account. i know how sad it is when pain and suffering attack those we love, when that mournful guest sickness comes and takes a place in the household circle. that the shadow may soon leave your home is my earnest hope. 'thank you for sir j. herschel's note. i am happy to hear mr. taylor is convalescent. it may, perhaps, be some weeks yet before his hand is well, but that his general health is in the way of re-establishment is a matter of thankfulness. 'one of the letters you sent to-day addressed "currer bell" has almost startled me. the writer first describes his family, and then proceeds to give a particular account of himself in colours the most candid, if not, to my ideas, the most attractive. he runs on in a strain of wild enthusiasm about _shirley_, and concludes by announcing a fixed, deliberate resolution to institute a search after currer bell, and sooner or later to find him out. there is power in the letter--talent; it is at times eloquently expressed. the writer somewhat boastfully intimates that he is acknowledged the possessor of high intellectual attainments, but, if i mistake not, he betrays a temper to be shunned, habits to be mistrusted. while laying claim to the character of being affectionate, warm-hearted, and adhesive, there is but a single member of his own family of whom he speaks with kindness. he confesses himself indolent and wilful, but asserts that he is studious and, to some influences, docile. this letter would have struck me no more than the others rather like it have done, but for its rash power, and the disagreeable resolve it announces to seek and find currer bell. it almost makes me feel like a wizard who has raised a spirit he may find it difficult to lay. but i shall not think about it. this sort of fervour often foams itself away in words. 'trusting that the serenity of your home is by this time restored with your wife's health,--i am, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_february_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--yesterday, just after dinner, i heard a loud bustling voice in the kitchen demanding to see mr. bronte. somebody was shown into the parlour. shortly after, wine was rung for. "who is it, martha?" i asked. "some mak of a tradesman," said she. "he's not a gentleman, i'm sure." the personage stayed about an hour, talking in a loud vulgar key all the time. at tea-time i asked papa who it was. "why," said he, "no other than the vicar of b---!" { } papa had invited him to take some refreshment, but the creature had ordered his dinner at the black bull, and was quite urgent with papa to go down there and join him, offering by way of inducement a bottle, or, if papa liked, "two or three bottles of the best wine haworth could afford!" he said he was come from bradford just to look at the place, and reckoned to be in raptures with the wild scenery! he warmly pressed papa to come and see him, and to bring his daughter with him!!! does he know anything about the books, do you think; he made no allusion to them. i did not see him, not so much as the tail of his coat. martha said he looked no more like a parson than she did. papa described him as rather shabby-looking, but said he was wondrous cordial and friendly. papa, in his usual fashion, put him through a regular catechism of questions: what his living was worth, etc., etc. in answer to inquiries respecting his age he affirmed himself to be thirty-seven--is not this a lie? he must be more. papa asked him if he were married. he said no, he had no thoughts of being married, he did not like the trouble of a wife. he described himself as "living in style, and keeping a very hospitable house." 'dear nell, i have written you a long letter; write me a long one in answer. 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have received the _dublin review_, and your letter inclosing the indian notices. i hope these reviews will do good; they are all favourable, and one of them (the _dublin_) is very able. i have read no critique so discriminating since that in the _revue des deux mondes_. it offers a curious contrast to lewes's in the _edinburgh_, where forced praise, given by jerks, and obviously without real and cordial liking, and censure, crude, conceited, and ignorant, were mixed in random lumps--forming a very loose and inconsistent whole. 'are you aware whether there are any grounds for that conjecture in the _bengal hurkaru_, that the critique in the _times_ was from the pen of mr. thackeray? i should much like to know this. if such were the case (and i feel as if it were by no means impossible), the circumstance would open a most curious and novel glimpse of a very peculiar disposition. do you think it likely to be true? 'the account you give of mrs. williams's health is not cheering, but i should think her indisposition is partly owing to the variable weather; at least, if you have had the same keen frost and cold east winds in london, from which we have lately suffered in yorkshire. i trust the milder temperature we are now enjoying may quickly confirm her convalescence. with kind regards to mrs. williams,--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i cannot let the post go without thanking mr. smith through you for the kind reply to greenwood's application; and, i am sure, both you and he would feel true pleasure could you see the delight and hope with which these liberal terms have inspired a good and intelligent though poor man. he thinks he now sees a prospect of getting his livelihood by a method which will suit him better than wool-combing work has hitherto done, exercising more of his faculties and sparing his health. he will do his best, i am sure, to extend the sale of the cheap edition of _jane eyre_; and whatever twinges i may still feel at the thought of that work being in the possession of all the worthy folk of haworth and keighley, such scruples are more than counterbalanced by the attendant good;--i mean, by the assistance it will give a man who deserves assistance. i wish he could permanently establish a little bookselling business in haworth: it would benefit the place as well as himself. 'thank you for the _leader_, which i read with pleasure. the notice of newman's work in a late number was very good.--believe me, my dear sir, in haste, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i have received the copy of _jane eyre_. to me the printing and paper seem very tolerable. will not the public in general be of the same opinion? and are you not making yourselves causelessly uneasy on the subject? 'i imagine few will discover the defects of typography unless they are pointed out. there are, no doubt, technical faults and perfections in the art of printing to which printers and publishers ascribe a greater importance than the majority of readers. 'i will mention mr. smith's proposal respecting the cheap publications to greenwood. i believe him to be a man on whom encouragement is not likely to be thrown away, and who, if fortune should not prove quite adverse, will contrive to effect something by dint of intelligence and perseverance. 'i am sorry to say my father has been far from well lately--the cold weather has tried him severely; and, till i see him better, my intended journey to town must be deferred. with sincere regards to yourself and other cornhill friends,--i am, my dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i trust your suggestion for miss kavanagh's benefit will have all success. it seems to me truly felicitous and excellent, and, i doubt not, she will think so too. the last class of female character will be difficult to manage: there will be nice points in it--yet, well-managed, both an attractive and instructive book might result therefrom. one thing may be depended upon in the execution of this plan. miss kavanagh will commit no error, either of taste, judgment, or principle; and even when she deals with the feelings, i would rather follow the calm course of her quiet pen than the flourishes of a more redundant one where there is not strength to restrain as well as ardour to impel. 'i fear i seemed to you to speak coolly of the beauty of the lake scenery. the truth is, it was, as scenery, exquisite--far beyond anything i saw in scotland; but it did not give me half so much pleasure, because i saw it under less congenial auspices. mr. smith and sir j. k. shuttleworth are two different people with whom to travel. i need say nothing of the former--you know him. the latter offers me his friendship, and i do my best to be grateful for the gift; but his is a nature with which it is difficult to assimilate--and where there is no assimilation, how can there be real regard? nine parts out of ten in him are utilitarian--the tenth is artistic. this tithe of his nature seems to me at war with all the rest--it is just enough to incline him restlessly towards the artist class, and far too little to make him one of them. the consequent inability to _do_ things which he _admires_, embitters him i think--it makes him doubt perfections and dwell on faults. then his notice or presence scarcely tend to set one at ease or make one happy: he is worldly and formal. but i must stop--have i already said too much? i think not, for you will feel it is said in confidence and will not repeat it. 'the article in the _palladium_ is indeed such as to atone for a hundred unfavourable or imbecile reviews. i have expressed what i think of it to mr. taylor, who kindly wrote me a letter on the subject. i thank you also for the newspaper notices, and for some you sent me a few weeks ago. 'i should much like to carry out your suggestions respecting a reprint of _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_ in one volume, with a prefatory and explanatory notice of the authors; but the question occurs, would newby claim it? i could not bear to commit it to any other hands than those of mr. smith. _wildfell hall_, it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. the choice of subject in that work is a mistake: it was too little consonant with the character, tastes, and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer. she wrote it under a strange, conscientious, half-ascetic notion of accomplishing a painful penance and a severe duty. blameless in deed and almost in thought, there was from her very childhood a tinge of religious melancholy in her mind. this i ever suspected, and i have found amongst her papers mournful proofs that such was the case. as to additional compositions, i think there would be none, as i would not offer a line to the publication of which my sisters themselves would have objected. 'i must conclude or i shall be too late for the post.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--mr. newby undertook first to print copies of _wuthering heights_, but he afterwards declared he had only printed . i doubt whether he could be induced to return the pounds without a good deal of trouble--much more than i should feel justified in delegating to mr. smith. for my own part, the conclusion i drew from the whole of mr. newby's conduct to my sisters was that he is a man with whom it is desirable to have little to do. i think he must be needy as well as tricky--and if he is, one would not distress him, even for one's rights. 'if mr. smith thinks right to reprint _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_, i would prepare a preface comprising a brief and simple notice of the authors, such as might set at rest all erroneous conjectures respecting their identity--and adding a few poetical remains of each. 'in case this arrangement is approved, you will kindly let me know, and i will commence the task (a sad, but, i believe, a necessary one), and send it when finished.--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--on the whole it is perhaps as well that the last paragraph of the preface should be omitted, for i believe it was not expressed with the best grace in the world. you must not, however, apologise for your suggestion--it was kindly meant and, believe me, kindly taken; it was not _you_ i misunderstood--not for a moment, i never misunderstand you--i was thinking of the critics and the public, who are always crying for a moral like the pharisees for a sign. does this assurance quite satisfy you? 'i forgot to say that i had already heard, first from miss martineau, and subsequently through an intimate friend of sydney yendys (whose real name is mr. dobell) that it was to the author of the _roman_ we are indebted for that eloquent article in the _palladium_. i am glad you are going to send his poem, for i much wished to see it. 'may i trouble you to look at a sentence in the preface which i have erased, because on reading it over i was not quite sure about the scientific correctness of the expressions used. metal, i know, will burn in vivid-coloured flame, exposed to galvanic action, but whether it is consumed, i am not sure. perhaps you or mr. taylor can tell me whether there is any blunder in the term employed--if not, it might stand.--i am, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' miss bronte would seem to have corresponded with mr. george smith, and not with mr. williams, over her third novel, _villette_, and that correspondence is to be found in mrs. gaskell's biography. to w. s. williams '_february_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i cannot lose any time in telling you that your letter, after all, gave me heart-felt satisfaction, and such a feeling of relief as it would be difficult to express in words. the fact is, what goads and tortures me is not any anxiety of my own to publish another book, to have my name before the public, to get cash, etc., but a haunting fear that my dilatoriness disappoints others. now the "others" whose wish on the subject i really care for, reduces itself to my father and cornhill, and since cornhill ungrudgingly counsels me to take my own time, i think i can pacify such impatience as my dear father naturally feels. indeed, your kind and friendly letter will greatly help me. 'since writing the above, i have read your letter to papa. your arguments had weight with him: he approves, and i am content. i now only regret the necessity of disappointing the _palladium_, but that cannot be helped.--good-bye, my dear sir, yours very sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_tuesday morning_. 'dear ellen,--the rather dark view you seem inclined to take of the general opinion about _villette_ surprises me the less, dear nell, as only the more unfavourable reviews seem to have come in your way. some reports reach me of a different tendency; but no matter, time will shew. as to the character of lucy snow, my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which jane eyre was raised by some injudicious admirers. she is where i meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her. 'i cannot accept your kind invitation. i must be at home at easter, on two or three accounts connected with sermons to be preached, parsons to be entertained, mechanics' institute meetings and tea-drinkings to be solemnised, and ere long i have promised to go and see mrs. gaskell; but till this wintry weather is passed, i would rather eschew visiting anywhere. i trust that bad cold of yours is _quite_ well, and that you will take good care of yourself in future. that night work is always perilous.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss wooler 'haworth, _april_ _th_, . 'my dear miss wooler,--your last kind letter ought to have been answered long since, and would have been, did i find it practicable to proportion the promptitude of the response to the value i place upon my correspondents and their communications. you will easily understand, however, that the contrary rule often holds good, and that the epistle which importunes often takes precedence of that which interests. 'my publishers express entire satisfaction with the reception which has been accorded to _villette_, and indeed the majority of the reviews has been favourable enough; you will be aware, however, that there is a minority, small in number but influential in character, which views the work with no favourable eye. currer bell's remarks on romanism have drawn down on him the condign displeasure of the high church party, which displeasure has been unequivocally expressed through their principal organs--the _guardian_, the _english churchman_, and the _christian remembrancer_. i can well understand that some of the charges launched against me by those publications will tell heavily to my prejudice in the minds of most readers--but this must be borne; and for my part, i can suffer no accusation to oppress me much which is not supported by the inward evidence of conscience and reason. '"extremes meet," says the proverb; in proof whereof i would mention that miss martineau finds with _villette_ nearly the same fault as the puseyites. she accuses me with attacking popery "with virulence," of going out of my way to assault it "passionately." in other respects she has shown with reference to the work a spirit so strangely and unexpectedly acrimonious, that i have gathered courage to tell her that the gulf of mutual difference between her and me is so wide and deep, the bridge of union so slight and uncertain, i have come to the conclusion that frequent intercourse would be most perilous and unadvisable, and have begged to adjourn _sine die_ my long projected visit to her. of course she is now very angry, and i know her bitterness will not be short-lived--but it cannot be helped. 'two or three weeks since i received a long and kind letter from mr. white, which i answered a short time ago. i believe mr. white thinks me a much hotter advocate for _change_ and what is called "political progress" than i am. however, in my reply, i did not touch on these subjects. he intimated a wish to publish some of his own mss. i fear he would hardly like the somewhat dissuasive tendency of my answer; but really, in these days of headlong competition, it is a great risk to publish. if all be well, i purpose going to manchester next week to spend a few days with mrs. gaskell. ellen's visit to yarmouth seems for the present given up; and really, all things considered, i think the circumstance is scarcely to be regretted. 'do you not think, my dear miss wooler, that you could come to haworth before you go to the coast? i am afraid that when you once get settled at the sea-side your stay will not be brief. i must repeat that a visit from you would be anticipated with pleasure, not only by me, but by every inmate of haworth parsonage. papa has given me a general commission to send his respects to you whenever i write--accept them, therefore, and--believe me, yours affectionately and sincerely, 'c. bronte.' chapter xiv: william smith williams in picturing the circle which surrounded charlotte bronte through her brief career, it is of the utmost importance that a word of recognition should be given, and that in no half-hearted manner, to mr. william smith williams, who, in her later years, was charlotte bronte's most intimate correspondent. the letters to mr. williams are far and away the best that charlotte wrote, at least of those which have been preserved. they are full of literary enthusiasm and of intellectual interest. they show charlotte bronte's sound judgment and good heart more effectually than any other material which has been placed at the disposal of biographers. they are an honour both to writer and receiver, and, in fact, reflect the mind of the one as much as the mind of the other. charlotte has emphasised the fact that she adapted herself to her correspondents, and in her letters to mr. williams we have her at her very best. mr. williams occupied for many years the post of 'reader' in the firm of smith & elder. that is a position scarcely less honourable and important than authorship itself. in our own days mr. george meredith and mr. john morley have been 'readers,' and mr. james payn has held the same post in the firm which published the bronte novels. mr. williams, who was born in , and died in , had an interesting career even before he became associated with smith & elder. in his younger days he was apprenticed to taylor & hessey of fleet street; and he used to relate how his boyish ideals of coleridge were shattered on beholding, for the first time, the bulky and ponderous figure of the great talker. when keats left england, for an early grave in rome, it was mr. williams who saw him off. hazlitt, leigh hunt, and many other well-known men of letters were friendly with mr. williams from his earliest days, and he had for brother-in-law, wells, the author of _joseph and his brethren_. in his association with smith & elder he secured the friendship of thackeray, of mrs. gaskell, and of many other writers. he attracted the notice of ruskin by a keen enthusiasm for the work of turner. it was he, in fact, who compiled that most interesting volume of _selections from the writings of john ruskin_, which has long gone out of print in its first form, but is still greatly sought for by the curious. in connection with this volume i may print here a letter written by john ruskin's father to mr. williams, and i do so the more readily, as mr. williams's name was withheld from the title-page of the _selections_. to w. s. williams denmark hill, _th november_, . 'my dear sir,--i am requested by mrs. ruskin to return her very sincere and grateful thanks for your kind consideration in presenting her with so beautifully bound a copy of the _selections_ from her son's writings; and which she will have great pleasure in seeing by the side of the very magnificent volumes which the liberality of the gentlemen of your house has already enriched our library with. 'mrs. ruskin joins me in offering congratulations on the great judgment you have displayed in your _selections_, and, sending my own thanks and those of my son for the handsome gift to mrs. ruskin,--i am, my dear sir, yours very truly, 'john james ruskin.' what charlotte bronte thought of mr. williams is sufficiently revealed by the multitude of letters which i have the good fortune to print, and that she had a reason to be grateful to him is obvious when we recollect that to him, and to him alone, was due her first recognition. the parcel containing _the professor_ had wandered from publisher to publisher before it came into the hands of mr. williams. it was he who recognised what all of us recognise now, that in spite of faults it is really a most considerable book. i am inclined to think that it was refused by smith & elder rather on account of its insufficient length than for any other cause. at any rate it was the length which was assigned to her as a reason for non-acceptance. she was told that another book, which would make the accredited three volume novel, might receive more favourable consideration. charlotte bronte took mr. williams's advice. she wrote _jane eyre_, and despatched it quickly to smith & elder's house in cornhill. it was read by mr. williams, and read afterwards by mr. george smith; and it was published with the success that we know. charlotte awoke to find herself famous. she became a regular correspondent with mr. williams, and not less than a hundred letters were sent to him, most of them treating of interesting literary matters. one of mr. williams's daughters, i may add, married mr. lowes dickenson the portrait painter; his youngest child, a baby when miss bronte was alive, is famous in the musical world as miss anna williams. the family has an abundance of literary and artistic association, but the father we know as the friend and correspondent of charlotte bronte. he still lives also in the memory of a large circle as a kindly and attractive--a singularly good and upright man. comment upon the following letters is in well-nigh every case superfluous. to w. s. williams '_february_ _th_ . 'my dear sir,--i thank you for your note; its contents moved me much, though not to unmingled feelings of exultation. louis philippe (unhappy and sordid old man!) and m. guizot doubtless merit the sharp lesson they are now being taught, because they have both proved themselves men of dishonest hearts. and every struggle any nation makes in the cause of freedom and truth has something noble in it--something that makes me wish it success; but i cannot believe that france--or at least paris--will ever be the battle-ground of true liberty, or the scene of its real triumphs. i fear she does not know "how genuine glory is put on." is that strength to be found in her which will not bend "but in magnanimous meekness"? have not her "unceasing changes" as yet always brought "perpetual emptiness"? has paris the materials within her for thorough reform? mean, dishonest guizot being discarded, will any better successor be found for him than brilliant, unprincipled thiers? 'but i damp your enthusiasm, which i would not wish to do, for true enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash i admire wherever i see it. 'the little note inclosed in yours is from a french lady, who asks my consent to the translation of _jane eyre_ into the french language. i thought it better to consult you before i replied. i suppose she is competent to produce a decent translation, though one or two errors of orthography in her note rather afflict the eye; but i know that it is not unusual for what are considered well-educated french women to fail in the point of writing their mother tongue correctly. but whether competent or not, i presume she has a right to translate the book with or without my consent. she gives her address: mdlle b--- { } w. cumming, esq., north bank, regent's park. 'shall i reply to her note in the affirmative? 'waiting your opinion and answer,--i remain, dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_february_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have done as you advised me respecting mdlle b---, thanked her for her courtesy, and explained that i do not wish my consent to be regarded in the light of a formal sanction of the translation. 'from the papers of saturday i had learnt the abdication of louis philippe, the flight of the royal family, and the proclamation of a republic in france. rapid movements these, and some of them difficult of comprehension to a remote spectator. what sort of spell has withered louis philippe's strength? why, after having so long infatuatedly clung to guizot, did he at once ignobly relinquish him? was it panic that made him so suddenly quit his throne and abandon his adherents without a struggle to retain one or aid the other? 'perhaps it might have been partly fear, but i daresay it was still more long-gathering weariness of the dangers and toils of royalty. few will pity the old monarch in his flight, yet i own he seems to me an object of pity. his sister's death shook him; years are heavy on him; the sword of damocles has long been hanging over his head. one cannot forget that monarchs and ministers are only human, and have only human energies to sustain them; and often they are sore beset. party spirit has no mercy; indignant freedom seldom shows forbearance in her hour of revolt. i wish you _could_ see the aged gentleman trudging down cornhill with his umbrella and carpet-bag, in good earnest; he would be safe in england: john bull might laugh at him but he would do him no harm. 'how strange it appears to see literary and scientific names figuring in the list of members of a provisional government! how would it sound if carlyle and sir john herschel and tennyson and mr. thackeray and douglas jerrold were selected to manufacture a new constitution for england? whether do such men sway the public mind most effectually from their quiet studies or from a council-chamber? 'and thiers is set aside for a time; but won't they be glad of him by-and-by? can they set aside entirely anything so clever, so subtle, so accomplished, so aspiring--in a word, so thoroughly french, as he is? is he not the man to bide his time--to watch while unskilful theorists try their hand at administration and fail; and then to step out and show them how it should be done? 'one would have thought political disturbance the natural element of a mind like thiers'; but i know nothing of him except from his writings, and i always think he writes as if the shade of bonaparte were walking to and fro in the room behind him and dictating every line he pens, sometimes approaching and bending over his shoulder, _pour voir de ses yeux_ that such an action or event is represented or misrepresented (as the case may be) exactly as he wishes it. thiers seems to have contemplated napoleon's character till he has imbibed some of its nature. surely he must be an ambitious man, and, if so, surely he will at this juncture struggle to rise. 'you should not apologise for what you call your "crudities." you know i like to hear your opinions and views on whatever subject it interests you to discuss. 'from the little inscription outside your note i conclude you sent me the _examiner_. i thank you therefore for your kind intention and am sorry some unscrupulous person at the post office frustrated it, as no paper has reached my hands. i suppose one ought to be thankful that letters are respected, as newspapers are by no means sure of safe conveyance.--i remain, dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i take a large sheet of paper, because i foresee that i am about to write another long letter, and for the same reason as before, viz., that yours interested me. 'i have received the _morning chronicle_, and was both surprised and pleased to see the passage you speak of in one of its leading articles. an allusion of that sort seems to say more than a regular notice. i _do_ trust i may have the power so to write in future as not to disappoint those who have been kind enough to think and speak well of _jane eyre_; at any rate, i will take pains. but still, whenever i hear my one book praised, the pleasure i feel is chastened by a mixture of doubt and fear; and, in truth, i hardly wish it to be otherwise: it is much too early for me to feel safe, or to take as my due the commendation bestowed. 'some remarks in your last letter on teaching commanded my attention. i suppose you never were engaged in tuition yourself; but if you had been, you could not have more exactly hit on the great qualification--i had almost said the _one_ great qualification--necessary to the task: the faculty, not merely of acquiring but of imparting knowledge--the power of influencing young minds--that natural fondness for, that innate sympathy with, children, which, you say, mrs. williams is so happy as to possess. he or she who possesses this faculty, this sympathy--though perhaps not otherwise highly accomplished--need never fear failure in the career of instruction. children will be docile with them, will improve under them; parents will consequently repose in them confidence. their task will be comparatively light, their path comparatively smooth. if the faculty be absent, the life of a teacher will be a struggle from beginning to end. no matter how amiable the disposition, how strong the sense of duty, how active the desire to please; no matter how brilliant and varied the accomplishments; if the governess has not the power to win her young charge, the secret to instil gently and surely her own knowledge into the growing mind intrusted to her, she will have a wearing, wasting existence of it. to _educate_ a child, as i daresay mrs. williams has educated her children, probably with as much pleasure to herself as profit to them, will indeed be impossible to the teacher who lacks this qualification. but, i conceive, should circumstances--as in the case of your daughters--compel a young girl notwithstanding to adopt a governess's profession, she may contrive to _instruct_ and even to instruct well. that is, though she cannot form the child's mind, mould its character, influence its disposition, and guide its conduct as she would wish, she may give lessons--even good, clear, clever lessons in the various branches of knowledge. she may earn and doubly earn her scanty salary as a daily governess. as a school-teacher she may succeed; but as a resident governess she will never (except under peculiar and exceptional circumstances) be happy. her deficiency will harass her not so much in school-time as in play-hours; the moments that would be rest and recreation to the governess who understood and could adapt herself to children, will be almost torture to her who has not that power. many a time, when her charge turns unruly on her hands, when the responsibility which she would wish to discharge faithfully and perfectly, becomes unmanageable to her, she will wish herself a housemaid or kitchen girl, rather than a baited, trampled, desolate, distracted governess. 'the governesses' institution may be an excellent thing in some points of view, but it is both absurd and cruel to attempt to raise still higher the standard of acquirements. already governesses are not half nor a quarter paid for what they teach, nor in most instances is half or a quarter of their attainments required by their pupils. the young teacher's chief anxiety, when she sets out in life, always is to know a great deal; her chief fear that she should not know enough. brief experience will, in most instances, show her that this anxiety has been misdirected. she will rarely be found too ignorant for her pupils; the demand on her knowledge will not often be larger than she can answer. but on her patience--on her self-control, the requirement will be enormous; on her animal spirits (and woe be to her if these fail!) the pressure will be immense. 'i have seen an ignorant nursery-maid who could scarcely read or write, by dint of an excellent, serviceable, sanguine, phlegmatic temperament, which made her at once cheerful and unmoveable; of a robust constitution and steady, unimpassionable nerves, which kept her firm under shocks and unharassed under annoyances--manage with comparative ease a large family of spoilt children, while their governess lived amongst them a life of inexpressible misery: tyrannised over, finding her efforts to please and teach utterly vain, chagrined, distressed, worried--so badgered, so trodden on, that she ceased almost at last to know herself, and wondered in what despicable, trembling frame her oppressed mind was prisoned, and could not realise the idea of ever more being treated with respect and regarded with affection--till she finally resigned her situation and went away quite broken in spirit and reduced to the verge of decline in health. 'those who would urge on governesses more acquirements, do not know the origin of their chief sufferings. it is more physical and mental strength, denser moral impassibility that they require, rather than additional skill in arts or sciences. as to the forcing system, whether applied to teachers or taught, i hold it to be a cruel system. 'it is true the world demands a brilliant list of accomplishments. for pounds per annum, it expects in one woman the attainments of several professors--but the demand is insensate, and i think should rather be resisted than complied with. if i might plead with you in behalf of your daughters, i should say, "do not let them waste their young lives in trying to attain manifold accomplishments. let them try rather to possess thoroughly, fully, one or two talents; then let them endeavour to lay in a stock of health, strength, cheerfulness. let them labour to attain self-control, endurance, fortitude, firmness; if possible, let them learn from their mother something of the precious art she possesses--these things, together with sound principles, will be their best supports, their best aids through a governess's life. 'as for that one who, you say, has a nervous horror of exhibition, i need not beg you to be gentle with her; i am sure you will not be harsh, but she must be firm with herself, or she will repent it in after life. she should begin by degrees to endeavour to overcome her diffidence. were she destined to enjoy an independent, easy existence, she might respect her natural disposition to seek retirement, and even cherish it as a shade-loving virtue; but since that is not her lot, since she is fated to make her way in the crowd, and to depend on herself, she should say: i will try and learn the art of self-possession, not that i may display my accomplishments, but that i may have the satisfaction of feeling that i am my own mistress, and can move and speak undaunted by the fear of man. while, however, i pen this piece of advice, i confess that it is much easier to give than to follow. what the sensations of the nervous are under the gaze of publicity none but the nervous know; and how powerless reason and resolution are to control them would sound incredible except to the actual sufferers. 'the rumours you mention respecting the authorship of _jane eyre_ amused me inexpressibly. the gossips are, on this subject, just where i should wish them to be, _i.e._, as far from the truth as possible; and as they have not a grain of fact to found their fictions upon, they fabricate pure inventions. judge erle must, i think, have made up his story expressly for a hoax; the other _fib_ is amazing--so circumstantial! called on the author, forsooth! where did he live, i wonder? in what purlieu of cockayne? here i must stop, lest if i run on further i should fill another sheet.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'currer bell. '_p.s._--i must, after all, add a morsel of paper, for i find, on glancing over yours, that i have forgotten to answer a question you ask respecting my next work. i have not therein so far treated of governesses, as i do not wish it to resemble its predecessor. i often wish to say something about the "condition of women" question, but it is one respecting which so much "cant" has been talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. it is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked, but where or how could another be opened? many say that the professions now filled only by men should be open to women also; but are not their present occupants and candidates more than numerous enough to answer every demand? is there any room for female lawyers, female doctors, female engravers, for more female artists, more authoresses? one can see where the evil lies, but who can point out the remedy? when a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident; when her destiny isolates her, i suppose she must do what she can, live as she can, complain as little, bear as much, work as well as possible. this is not high theory, but i believe it is sound practice, good to put into execution while philosophers and legislators ponder over the better ordering of the social system. at the same time, i conceive that when patience has done its utmost and industry its best, whether in the case of women or operatives, and when both are baffled, and pain and want triumph, the sufferer is free, is entitled, at last to send up to heaven any piercing cry for relief, if by that cry he can hope to obtain succour.' to w. s. williams '_june_ , . 'my dear sir,--i snatch a moment to write a hasty line to you, for it makes me uneasy to think that your last kind letter should have remained so long unanswered. a succession of little engagements, much more importunate than important, have quite engrossed my time lately, to the exclusion of more momentous and interesting occupations. interruption is a sad bore, and i believe there is hardly a spot on earth, certainly not in england, quite secure from its intrusion. the fact is, you cannot live in this world entirely for one aim; you must take along with some single serious purpose a hundred little minor duties, cares, distractions; in short, you must take life as it is, and make the best of it. summer is decidedly a bad season for application, especially in the country; for the sunshine seems to set all your acquaintances astir, and, once bent on amusement, they will come to the ends of the earth in search thereof. i was obliged to you for your suggestion about writing a letter to the _morning chronicle_, but i did not follow it up. i think i would rather not venture on such a step at present. opinions i would not hesitate to express to you--because you are indulgent--are not mature or cool enough for the public; currer bell is not carlyle, and must not imitate him. 'whenever you can write to me without encroaching too much on your valuable time, remember i shall always be glad to hear from you. your last letter interested me fully as much as its two predecessors; what you said about your family pleased me; i think details of character always have a charm even when they relate to people we have never seen, nor expect to see. with eight children you must have a busy life; but, from the manner in which you allude to your two eldest daughters, it is evident that they at least are a source of satisfaction to their parents; i hope this will be the case with the whole number, and then you will never feel as if you had too many. a dozen children with sense and good conduct may be less burdensome than one who lacks these qualities. it seems a long time since i heard from you. i shall be glad to hear from you again.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _june_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--thank you for your two last letters. in reading the first i quite realised your may holiday; i enjoyed it with you. i saw the pretty south-of-england village, so different from our northern congregations of smoke-dark houses clustered round their soot-vomiting mills. i saw in your description, fertile, flowery essex--a contrast indeed to the rough and rude, the mute and sombre yet well-beloved moors over-spreading this corner of yorkshire. i saw the white schoolhouse, the venerable school-master--i even thought i saw you and your daughters; and in your second letter i see you all distinctly, for, in describing your children, you unconsciously describe yourself. 'i may well say that your letters are of value to me, for i seldom receive one but i find something in it which makes me reflect, and reflect on new themes. your town life is somewhat different from any i have known, and your allusions to its advantages, troubles, pleasures, and struggles are often full of significance to me. 'i have always been accustomed to think that the necessity of earning one's subsistence is not in itself an evil, but i feel it may become a heavy evil if health fails, if employment lacks, if the demand upon our efforts made by the weakness of others dependent upon us becomes greater than our strength suffices to answer. in such a case i can imagine that the married man may wish himself single again, and that the married woman, when she sees her husband over-exerting himself to maintain her and her children, may almost wish--out of the very force of her affection for him--that it had never been her lot to add to the weight of his responsibilities. most desirable then is it that all, both men and women, should have the power and the will to work for themselves--most advisable that both sons and daughters should early be inured to habits of independence and industry. birds teach their nestlings to fly as soon as their wings are strong enough, they even oblige them to quit the nest if they seem too unwilling to trust their pinions of their own accord. do not the swallow and the starling thus give a lesson by which man might profit? 'it seems to me that your kind heart is pained by the thought of what your daughter may suffer if transplanted from a free and indulged home existence to a life of constraint and labour amongst strangers. suffer she probably will; but take both comfort and courage, my dear sir, try to soothe your anxiety by this thought, which is not a fallacious one. hers will not be a barren suffering; she will gain by it largely; she will "sow in tears to reap in joy." a governess's experience is frequently indeed bitter, but its results are precious: the mind, feeling, temper are there subjected to a discipline equally painful and priceless. i have known many who were unhappy as governesses, but not one who regretted having undergone the ordeal, and scarcely one whose character was not improved--at once strengthened and purified, fortified and softened, made more enduring for her own afflictions, more considerate for the afflictions of others, by passing through it. 'should your daughter, however, go out as governess, she should first take a firm resolution not to be too soon daunted by difficulties, too soon disgusted by disagreeables; and if she has a high spirit, sensitive feelings, she should tutor the one to submit, the other to endure, _for the sake of those at home_. that is the governess's best talisman of patience, it is the best balm for wounded susceptibility. when tried hard she must say, "i will be patient, not out of servility, but because i love my parents, and wish through my perseverance, diligence, and success, to repay their anxieties and tenderness for me." with this aid the least-deserved insult may often be swallowed quite calmly, like a bitter pill with a draught of fair water. 'i think you speak excellent sense when you say that girls without fortune should be brought up and accustomed to support themselves; and that if they marry poor men, it should be with a prospect of being able to help their partners. if all parents thought so, girls would not be reared on speculation with a view to their making mercenary marriages; and, consequently, women would not be so piteously degraded as they now too often are. 'fortuneless people may certainly marry, provided they previously resolve never to let the consequences of their marriage throw them as burdens on the hands of their relatives. but as life is full of unforeseen contingencies, and as a woman may be so placed that she cannot possibly both "guide the house" and earn her livelihood (what leisure, for instance, could mrs. williams have with her eight children?), young artists and young governesses should think twice before they unite their destinies. 'you speak sense again when you express a wish that fanny were placed in a position where active duties would engage her attention, where her faculties would be exercised and her mind occupied, and where, i will add, not doubting that my addition merely completes your half-approved idea, the image of the young artist would for the present recede into the background and remain for a few years to come in modest perspective, the finishing point of a vista stretching a considerable distance into futurity. fanny may feel sure of this: if she intends to be an artist's wife she had better try an apprenticeship with fortune as a governess first; she cannot undergo a better preparation for that honourable (honourable if rightly considered) but certainly not luxurious destiny. 'i should say then--judging as well as i can from the materials for forming an opinion your letter affords, and from what i can thence conjecture of fanny's actual and prospective position--that you would do well and wisely to put your daughter out. the experiment might do good and could not do harm, because even if she failed at the first trial (which is not unlikely) she would still be in some measure benefited by the effort. 'i duly received _mirabeau_ from mr. smith. i must repeat, it is really _too_ kind. when i have read the book, i will tell you what i think of it--its subject is interesting. one thing a little annoyed me--as i glanced over the pages i fancied i detected a savour of carlyle's peculiarities of style. now carlyle is a great man, but i always wish he would write plain english; and to imitate his germanisms is, i think, to imitate his faults. is the author of this work a manchester man? i must not ask his name, i suppose.--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'currer bell.' to w. s. williams '_june_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--after reading a book which has both interested and informed you, you like to be able, on laying it down, to speak of it with unqualified approbation--to praise it cordially; you do not like to stint your panegyric, to counteract its effect with blame. 'for this reason i feel a little difficulty in telling you what i think of _the life of mirabeau_. it has interested me much, and i have derived from it additional information. in the course of reading it, i have often felt called upon to approve the ability and tact of the writer, to admire the skill with which he conducts the narrative, enchains the reader's attention, and keeps it fixed upon his hero; but i have also been moved frequently to disapprobation. it is not the political principles of the writer with which i find fault, nor is it his talents i feel inclined to disparage; to speak truth, it is his manner of treating mirabeau's errors that offends--then, i think, he is neither wise nor right--there, i think, he betrays a little of crudeness, a little of presumption, not a little of indiscretion. 'could you with confidence put this work into the hands of your son, secure that its perusal would not harm him, that it would not leave on his mind some vague impression that there is a grandeur in vice committed on a colossal scale? whereas, the fact is, that in vice there is no grandeur, that it is, on whichever side you view it, and in whatever accumulation, only a foul, sordid, and degrading thing. the fact is, that this great mirabeau was a mixture of divinity and dirt; that there was no divinity whatever in his errors, they were all sullying dirt; that they ruined him, brought down his genius to the kennel, deadened his fine nature and generous sentiments, made all his greatness as nothing; that they cut him off in his prime, obviated all his aims, and struck him dead in the hour when france most needed him. 'mirabeau's life and fate teach, to my perception, the most depressing lesson i have read for years. one would fain have hoped that so many noble qualities must have made a noble character and achieved noble ends. no--the mighty genius lived a miserable and degraded life, and died a dog's death, for want of self-control, for want of morality, for lack of religion. one's heart is wrung for mirabeau after reading his life; and it is not of his greatness we think, when we close the volume, so much as of his hopeless recklessness, and of the sufferings, degradation, and untimely end in which it issued. it appears to me that the biographer errs also in being too solicitous to present his hero always in a striking point of view--too negligent of the exact truth. he eulogises him too much; he subdues all the other characters mentioned and keeps them in the shade that mirabeau may stand out more conspicuously. this, no doubt, is right in art, and admissible in fiction; but in history (and biography is the history of an individual) it tends to weaken the force of a narrative by weakening your faith in its accuracy. to w. s. williams chapter coffee-house, ivy lane, '_july_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--your invitation is too welcome not to be at once accepted. i should much like to see mrs. williams and her children, and very much like to have a quiet chat with yourself. would it suit you if we came to-morrow, after dinner--say about seven o'clock, and spent sunday evening with you? 'we shall be truly glad to see you whenever it is convenient to you to call.--i am, my dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--we reached home safely yesterday, and in a day or two i doubt not we shall get the better of the fatigues of our journey. 'it was a somewhat hasty step to hurry up to town as we did, but i do not regret having taken it. in the first place, mystery is irksome, and i was glad to shake it off with you and mr. smith, and to show myself to you for what i am, neither more nor less--thus removing any false expectations that may have arisen under the idea that currer bell had a just claim to the masculine cognomen he, perhaps somewhat presumptuously, adopted--that he was, in short, of the nobler sex. 'i was glad also to see you and mr. smith, and am very happy now to have such pleasant recollections of you both, and of your respective families. my satisfaction would have been complete could i have seen mrs. williams. the appearance of your children tallied on the whole accurately with the description you had given of them. fanny was the one i saw least distinctly; i tried to get a clear view of her countenance, but her position in the room did not favour my efforts. 'i had just read your article in the _john bull_; it very clearly and fully explains the cause of the difference obvious between ancient and modern paintings. i wish you had been with us when we went over the exhibition and the national gallery; a little explanation from a judge of art would doubtless have enabled us to understand better what we saw; perhaps, one day, we may have this pleasure. 'accept my own thanks and my sister's for your kind attention to us while in town, and--believe me, yours sincerely, 'charlotte bronte. 'i trust mrs. williams is quite recovered from her indisposition.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _july_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i have lately been reading _modern painters_, and i have derived from the work much genuine pleasure and, i hope, some edification; at any rate, it made me feel how ignorant i had previously been on the subject which it treats. hitherto i have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art; i feel more as if i had been walking blindfold--this book seems to give me eyes. i _do_ wish i had pictures within reach by which to test the new sense. who can read these glowing descriptions of turner's works without longing to see them? however eloquent and convincing the language in which another's opinion is placed before you, you still wish to judge for yourself. i like this author's style much: there is both energy and beauty in it; i like himself too, because he is such a hearty admirer. he does not give turner half-measure of praise or veneration, he eulogises, he reverences him (or rather his genius) with his whole soul. one can sympathise with that sort of devout, serious admiration (for he is no rhapsodist)--one can respect it; and yet possibly many people would laugh at it. i am truly obliged to mr. smith for giving me this book, not having often met with one that has pleased me more. 'you will have seen some of the notices of _wildfell hall_. i wish my sister felt the unfavourable ones less keenly. she does not _say_ much, for she is of a remarkably taciturn, still, thoughtful nature, reserved even with her nearest of kin, but i cannot avoid seeing that her spirits are depressed sometimes. the fact is, neither she nor any of us expected that view to be taken of the book which has been taken by some critics. that it had faults of execution, faults of art, was obvious, but faults of intention or feeling could be suspected by none who knew the writer. for my own part, i consider the subject unfortunately chosen--it was one the author was not qualified to handle at once vigorously and truthfully. the simple and natural--quiet description and simple pathos are, i think, acton bell's forte. i liked _agnes grey_ better than the present work. 'permit me to caution you not to speak of my sisters when you write to me. i mean, do not use the word in the plural. ellis bell will not endure to be alluded to under any other appellation than the _nom de plume_. i committed a grand error in betraying his identity to you and mr. smith. it was inadvertent--the words, "we are three sisters" escaped me before i was aware. i regretted the avowal the moment i had made it; i regret it bitterly now, for i find it is against every feeling and intention of ellis bell. 'i was greatly amused to see in the _examiner_ of this week one of newby's little cobwebs neatly swept away by some dexterous brush. if newby is not too old to profit by experience, such an exposure ought to teach him that "honesty is indeed the best policy." 'your letter has just been brought to me. i must not pause to thank you, i should say too much. our life is, and always has been, one of few pleasures, as you seem in part to guess, and for that reason we feel what passages of enjoyment come in our way very keenly; and i think if you knew _how_ pleased i am to get a long letter from you, you would laugh at me. 'in return, however, i smile at you for the earnestness with which you urge on us the propriety of seeing something of london society. there would be an advantage in it--a great advantage; yet it is one that no power on earth could induce ellis bell, for instance, to avail himself of. and even for acton and currer, the experiment of an introduction to society would be more formidable than you, probably, can well imagine. an existence of absolute seclusion and unvarying monotony, such as we have long--i may say, indeed, ever--been habituated to, tends, i fear, to unfit the mind for lively and exciting scenes, to destroy the capacity for social enjoyment. 'the only glimpses of society i have ever had were obtained in my vocation of governess, and some of the most miserable moments i can recall were passed in drawing-rooms full of strange faces. at such times, my animal spirits would ebb gradually till they sank quite away, and when i could endure the sense of exhaustion and solitude no longer, i used to steal off, too glad to find any corner where i could really be alone. still, i know very well, that though that experiment of seeing the world might give acute pain for the time, it would do good afterwards; and as i have never, that i remember, gained any important good without incurring proportionate suffering, i mean to try to take your advice some day, in part at least--to put off, if possible, that troublesome egotism which is always judging and blaming itself, and to try, country spinster as i am, to get a view of some sphere where civilised humanity is to be contemplated. 'i smile at you again for supposing that i could be annoyed by what you say respecting your religious and philosophical views; that i could blame you for not being able, when you look amongst sects and creeds, to discover any one which you can exclusively and implicitly adopt as yours. i perceive myself that some light falls on earth from heaven--that some rays from the shrine of truth pierce the darkness of this life and world; but they are few, faint, and scattered, and who without presumption can assert that he has found the _only_ true path upwards? 'yet ignorance, weakness, or indiscretion, must have their creeds and forms; they must have their props--they cannot walk alone. let them hold by what is purest in doctrine and simplest in ritual; _something_, they _must_ have. 'i never read emerson; but the book which has had so healing an effect on your mind must be a good one. very enviable is the writer whose words have fallen like a gentle rain on a soil that so needed and merited refreshment, whose influence has come like a genial breeze to lift a spirit which circumstances seem so harshly to have trampled. emerson, if he has cheered you, has not written in vain. 'may this feeling of self-reconcilement, of inward peace and strength, continue! may you still be lenient with, be just to, yourself! i will not praise nor flatter you, i should hate to pay those enervating compliments which tend to check the exertions of a mind that aspires after excellence; but i must permit myself to remark that if you had not something good and superior in you, something better, whether more _showy_ or not, than is often met with, the assurance of your friendship would not make one so happy as it does; nor would the advantage of your correspondence be felt as such a privilege. 'i hope mrs. williams's state of health may soon improve and her anxieties lessen. blameable indeed are those who sow division where there ought to be peace, and especially deserving of the ban of society. 'i thank both you and your family for keeping our secret. it will indeed be a kindness to us to persevere in doing so; and i own i have a certain confidence in the honourable discretion of a household of which you are the head.--believe me, yours very sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--not feeling competent this evening either for study or serious composition, i will console myself with writing to you. my malady, which the doctors call a bilious fever, lingers, or rather it returns with each sudden change of weather, though i am thankful to say that the relapses have hitherto been much milder than the first attack; but they keep me weak and reduced, especially as i am obliged to observe a very low spare diet. 'my book, alas! is laid aside for the present; both head and hand seem to have lost their cunning; imagination is pale, stagnant, mute. this incapacity chagrins me; sometimes i have a feeling of cankering care on the subject, but i combat it as well as i can; it does no good. 'i am afraid i shall not write a cheerful letter to you. a letter, however, of some kind i am determined to write, for i should be sorry to appear a neglectful correspondent to one from whose communications i have derived, and still derive, so much pleasure. do not talk about not being on a level with currer bell, or regard him as "an awful person"; if you saw him now, sitting muffled at the fireside, shrinking before the east wind (which for some days has been blowing wild and keen over our cold hills), and incapable of lifting a pen for any less formidable task than that of writing a few lines to an indulgent friend, you would be sorry not to deem yourself greatly his superior, for you would feel him to be a poor creature. 'you may be sure i read your views on the providence of god and the nature of man with interest. you are already aware that in much of what you say my opinions coincide with those you express, and where they differ i shall not attempt to bias you. thought and conscience are, or ought to be, free; and, at any rate, if your views were universally adopted there would be no persecution, no bigotry. but never try to proselytise, the world is not yet fit to receive what you and emerson say: man, as he now is, can no more do without creeds and forms in religion than he can do without laws and rules in social intercourse. you and emerson judge others by yourselves; all mankind are not like you, any more than every israelite was like nathaniel. '"is there a human being," you ask, "so depraved that an act of kindness will not touch--nay, a word melt him?" there are hundreds of human beings who trample on acts of kindness and mock at words of affection. i know this though i have seen but little of the world. i suppose i have something harsher in my nature than you have, something which every now and then tells me dreary secrets about my race, and i cannot believe the voice of the optimist, charm he never so wisely. on the other hand, i feel forced to listen when a thackeray speaks. i know truth is delivering her oracles by his lips. 'as to the great, good, magnanimous acts which have been performed by some men, we trace them up to motives and then estimate their value; a few, perhaps, would gain and many lose by this test. the study of motives is a strange one, not to be pursued too far by one fallible human being in reference to his fellows. 'do not condemn me as uncharitable. i have no wish to urge my convictions on you, but i know that while there are many good, sincere, gentle people in the world, with whom kindness is all-powerful, there are also not a few like that false friend (i had almost written _fiend_) whom you so well and vividly described in one of your late letters, and who, in acting out his part of domestic traitor, must often have turned benefits into weapons wherewith to wound his benefactors.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--my critics truly deserve and have my genuine thanks for the friendly candour with which they have declared their opinions on my book. both mr. williams and mr. taylor express and support their opinions in a manner calculated to command careful consideration. in my turn i have a word to say. you both of you dwell too much on what you regard as the _artistic_ treatment of a subject. say what you will, gentlemen--say it as ably as you will--truth is better than art. burns' songs are better than bulwer's epics. thackeray's rude, careless sketches are preferable to thousands of carefully finished paintings. ignorant as i am, i dare to hold and maintain that doctrine. 'you must not expect me to give up malone and donne too suddenly--the pair are favourites with me; they shine with a chastened and pleasing lustre in that first chapter, and it is a pity you do not take pleasure in their modest twinkle. neither is that opening scene irrelevant to the rest of the book, there are other touches in store which will harmonise with it. 'no doubt this handling of the surplice will stir up such publications as the _christian remembrancer_ and the _quarterly_--those heavy goliaths of the periodical press; and if i alone were concerned, this possibility would not trouble me a second. full welcome would the giants be to stand in their greaves of brass, poising their ponderous spears, cursing their prey by their gods, and thundering invitations to the intended victim to "come forth" and have his flesh given to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field. currer bell, without pretending to be a david, feels no awe of the unwieldy anakim; but--comprehend me rightly, gentlemen--it would grieve him to involve others in blame: any censure that would really injure and annoy his publishers would wound himself. therefore believe that he will not act rashly--trust his discretion. 'mr. taylor is right about the bad taste of the opening apostrophe--that i had already condemned in my own mind. enough said of a work in embryo. permit me to request in conclusion that the ms. may now be returned as soon as convenient. 'the letter you inclosed is from mary howitt. it contained a proposal for an engagement as contributor to an american periodical. of course i have negatived it. when i _can_ write, the book i have in hand must claim all my attention. oh! if anne were well, if the void death has left were a little closed up, if the dreary word _nevermore_ would cease sounding in my ears, i think i could yet do something. 'it is a long time since you mentioned your own family affairs. i trust mrs. williams continues well, and that fanny and your other children prosper.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_july_ _rd_, . 'my dear sir,--you do right to address me on subjects which compel me, in order to give a coherent answer, to quit for a moment my habitual train of thought. the mention of your healthy-living daughters reminds me of the world where other people live--where i lived once. theirs are cheerful images as you present them--i have no wish to shut them out. 'from all you say of ellen, the eldest, i am inclined to respect her much. i like practical sense which works to the good of others. i esteem a dutiful daughter who makes her parents happy. 'fanny's character i would take on second hand from nobody, least of all from her kind father, whose estimate of human nature in general inclines rather to what _ought_ to be than to what _is_. of fanny i would judge for myself, and that not hastily nor on first impressions. 'i am glad to hear that louisa has a chance of a presentation to queen's college. i hope she will succeed. do not, my dear sir, be indifferent--be earnest about it. come what may afterwards, an education secured is an advantage gained--a priceless advantage. come what may, it is a step towards independency, and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency. it does credit both to louisa's heart and head that she herself wishes to get this presentation. encourage her in the wish. your daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands. your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way honourably through life. do not wish to keep them at home. believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid, and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. whenever i have seen, not merely in humble, but in affluent homes, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, i have pitied them from my heart. it is doubtless well--very well--if fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature. 'should louisa eventually go out as a governess, do not be uneasy respecting her lot. the sketch you give of her character leads me to think she has a better chance of happiness than one in a hundred of her sisterhood. of pleasing exterior (that is always an advantage--children like it), good sense, obliging disposition, cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for exercise, by its mutiny under restraint--louisa thus endowed will find the post of governess comparatively easy. if she be like her mother--as you say she is--and if, consequently, she is fond of children, and possesses tact for managing them, their care is her natural vocation--she ought to be a governess. 'your sketch of braxborne, as it is and as it was, is sadly pleasing. i remember your first picture of it in a letter written a year ago--only a year ago. i was in this room--where i now am--when i received it. i was not alone then. in those days your letters often served as a text for comment--a theme for talk; now, i read them, return them to their covers and put them away. johnson, i think, makes mournful mention somewhere of the pleasure that accrues when we are "solitary and cannot impart it." thoughts, under such circumstances, cannot grow to words, impulses fail to ripen to actions. 'lonely as i am, how should i be if providence had never given me courage to adopt a career--perseverance to plead through two long, weary years with publishers till they admitted me? how should i be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? in that case i should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. as it is, something like a hope and motive sustains me still. i wish all your daughters--i wish every woman in england, had also a hope and motive. alas! there are many old maids who have neither.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_july_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i must rouse myself to write a line to you, lest a more protracted silence should seem strange. 'truly glad was i to hear of your daughter's success. i trust its results may conduce to the permanent advantage both of herself and her parents. 'of still more importance than your children's education is your wife's health, and therefore it is still more gratifying to learn that your anxiety on that account is likely to be alleviated. for her own sake, no less than for that of others, it is to be hoped that she is now secured from a recurrence of her painful and dangerous attacks. it was pleasing, too, to hear of good qualities being developed in the daughters by the mother's danger. may your girls always so act as to justify their father's kind estimate of their characters; may they never do what might disappoint or grieve him. 'your suggestion relative to myself is a good one in some respects, but there are two persons whom it would not suit; and not the least incommoded of these would be the young person whom i might request to come and bury herself in the hills of haworth, to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect, the dead silence of a village parsonage--in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long--for her atmosphere, and a grave, silent spinster for her companion. i should not like to see youth thus immured. the hush and gloom of our house would be more oppressive to a buoyant than to a subdued spirit. the fact is, my work is my best companion; hereafter i look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give. for society, long seclusion has in a great measure unfitted me, i doubt whether i should enjoy it if i might have it. sometimes i think i should, and i thirst for it; but at other times i doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. the prisoner in solitary confinement, the toad in the block of marble, all in time shape themselves to their lot.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_september_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i want to know your opinion of the subject of this proof-sheet. mr. taylor censured it; he considers as defective all that portion which relates to shirley's nervousness--the bite of the dog, etc. how did it strike you on reading it? 'i ask this though i well know it cannot now be altered. i can work indefatigably at the correction of a work before it leaves my hands, but when once i have looked on it as completed and submitted to the inspection of others, it becomes next to impossible to alter or amend. with the heavy suspicion on my mind that all may not be right, i yet feel forced to put up with the inevitably wrong. 'reading has, of late, been my great solace and recreation. i have read j. c. hare's _guesses at truth_, a book containing things that in depth and far-sought wisdom sometimes recall the _thoughts_ of pascal, only it is as the light of the moon recalls that of the sun. 'i have read with pleasure a little book on _english social life_ by the wife of archbishop whately. good and intelligent women write well on such subjects. this lady speaks of governesses. i was struck by the contrast offered in her manner of treating the topic to that of miss rigby in the _quarterly_. how much finer the feeling--how much truer the feeling--how much more delicate the mind here revealed! 'i have read _david copperfield_; it seems to me very good--admirable in some parts. you said it had affinity to _jane eyre_. it has, now and then--only what an advantage has dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things! i am beginning to read eckermann's _goethe_--it promises to be a most interesting work. honest, simple, single-minded eckermann! great, powerful, giant-souled, but also profoundly egotistical, old johann wolfgang von goethe! he _was_ a mighty egotist--i see he was: he thought no more of swallowing up poor eckermann's existence in his own than the whale thought of swallowing jonah. 'the worst of reading graphic accounts of such men, of seeing graphic pictures of the scenes, the society, in which they moved, is that it excites a too tormenting longing to look on the reality. but does such reality now exist? amidst all the troubled waters of european society does such a vast, strong, selfish, old leviathan now roll ponderous! i suppose not.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--the books came yesterday evening just as i was wishing for them very much. there is much interest for me in opening the cornhill parcel. i wish there was not pain too--but so it is. as i untie the cords and take out the volumes, i am reminded of those who once on similar occasions looked on eagerly; i miss familiar voices commenting mirthfully and pleasantly; the room seems very still, very empty; but yet there is consolation in remembering that papa will take pleasure in some of the books. happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness--it has no taste. 'i hope mrs. williams continues well, and that she is beginning to regain composure after the shock of her recent bereavement. she has indeed sustained a loss for which there is no substitute. but rich as she still is in objects for her best affections, i trust the void will not be long or severely felt. she must think, not of what she has lost, but of what she possesses. with eight fine children, how can she ever be poor or solitary!--believe me, dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i own i was glad to receive your assurance that the calcutta paper's surmise was unfounded. { } it is said that when we _wish_ a thing to be true, we are prone to believe it true; but i think (judging from myself) we adopt with a still prompter credulity the rumour which shocks. 'it is very kind in dr. forbes to give me his book. i hope mr. smith will have the goodness to convey my thanks for the present. you can keep it to send with the next parcel, or perhaps i may be in london myself before may is over. that invitation i mentioned in a previous letter is still urged upon me, and well as i know what penance its acceptance would entail in some points, i also know the advantage it would bring in others. my conscience tells me it would be the act of a moral poltroon to let the fear of suffering stand in the way of improvement. but suffer i shall. no matter. 'the perusal of _southey's life_ has lately afforded me much pleasure. the autobiography with which it commences is deeply interesting, and the letters which follow are scarcely less so, disclosing as they do a character most estimable in its integrity and a nature most amiable in its benevolence, as well as a mind admirable in its talent. some people assert that genius is inconsistent with domestic happiness, and yet southey was happy at home and made his home happy; he not only loved his wife and children _though_ he was a poet, but he loved them the better _because_ he was a poet. he seems to have been without taint of worldliness. london with its pomps and vanities, learned coteries with their dry pedantry, rather scared than attracted him. he found his prime glory in his genius, and his chief felicity in home affections. i like southey. 'i have likewise read one of miss austen's works--_emma_--read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which miss austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable. anything like warmth or enthusiasm--anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as _outre_ and extravagant. she does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel english people curiously well. there is a chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. the passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition--too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this miss austen ignores. she no more, with her mind's eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. jane austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (_not senseless_) woman. if this is heresy, i cannot help it. if i said it to some people (lewes for instance) they would directly accuse me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but i am not afraid of your falling into any such vulgar error.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i have read lord john russell's letter with very great zest and relish, and think him a spirited sensible little man for writing it. he makes no old-womanish outcry of alarm and expresses no exaggerated wrath. one of the best paragraphs is that which refers to the bishop of london and the puseyites. oh! i wish dr. arnold were yet living, or that a second dr. arnold could be found! were there but ten such men amongst the hierarchs of the church of england she might bid defiance to all the scarlet hats and stockings in the pope's gift. her sanctuaries would be purified, her rites reformed, her withered veins would swell again with vital sap; but it is not so. 'it is well that _truth_ is _indestructible_--that ruin cannot crush nor fire annihilate her divine essence. while forms change and institutions perish, "_truth_ is great and shall prevail." 'i am truly glad to hear that miss kavanagh's health is improved. you can send her book whenever it is most convenient. i received from cornhill the other day a periodical containing a portrait of jenny lind--a sweet, natural, innocent peasant-girl face, curiously contrasted with an artificial fine-lady dress. i _do_ like and esteem jenny's character. yet not long since i heard her torn to pieces by the tongue of detraction--scarcely a virtue left--twenty odious defects imputed. 'there was likewise a most faithful portrait of r. h. home, with his imaginative forehead and somewhat foolish-looking mouth and chin, indicating that mixed character which i should think he owns. mr. home writes well. that tragedy on the _death of marlowe_ reminds me of some of the best of dumas' dramatic pieces.--yours very sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_, . 'dear ellen,--i sent yesterday the _leader_ newspaper, which you must always send to hunsworth as soon as you have done with it. i will continue to forward it as long as i get it. 'i am trying a little hydropathic treatment; i like it, and i think it has done me good. inclosed is a letter received a few days since. i wish you to read it because it gives a very fair notion both of the disposition and mind; read, return, and tell me what you think of it. 'thackeray has given dreadful trouble by his want of punctuality. mr. williams says if he had not been helped out with the vigour, energy, and method of mr. smith, he must have sunk under the day and night labour of the last few weeks. 'write soon. 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_july_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i delayed answering your very interesting letter until the box should have reached me; and now that it is come i can only acknowledge its arrival: i cannot say at all what i felt as i unpacked its contents. these cornhill parcels have something of the magic charm of a fairy gift about them, as well as of the less poetical but more substantial pleasure of a box from home received at school. you have sent me this time even more books than usual, and all good. 'what shall i say about the twenty numbers of splendid engravings laid cozily at the bottom? the whole vernon gallery brought to one's fireside! indeed, indeed i can say nothing, except that i will take care, and keep them clean, and send them back uninjured.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i have true pleasure in inclosing for your son frank a letter of introduction to mrs. gaskell, and earnestly do i trust the acquaintance may tend to his good. to make all sure--for i dislike to go on doubtful grounds--i wrote to ask her if she would permit the introduction. her frank, kind answer pleased me greatly. 'i have received the books. i hope to write again when i have read _the fair carew_. the very title augurs well--it has no hackneyed sound.--believe me, sincerely yours, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _may_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--the box of books arrived safely yesterday evening, and i feel especially obliged for the selection, as it includes several that will be acceptable and interesting to my father. 'i despatch to-day a box of return books. among them will be found two or three of those just sent, being such as i had read before--_i.e._, moore's _life and correspondence_, st and nd vols.; lamartine's _restoration of the monarchy_, etc. i have thought of you more than once during the late bright weather, knowing how genial you find warmth and sunshine. i trust it has brought this season its usual cheering and beneficial effect. remember me kindly to mrs. williams and her daughters, and,--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i forwarded last week a box of return books to cornhill, which i trust arrived safely. to-day i received the _edinburgh guardian_, { } for which i thank you. 'do not trouble yourself to select or send any more books. these courtesies must cease some day, and i would rather give them up than wear them out.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' chapter xv: william makepeace thackeray the devotion of charlotte bronte to thackeray, or rather to thackeray's genius, is a pleasant episode in literary history. in he sent miss bronte, as we have seen, a copy of _vanity fair_. in he sent her a copy of _esmond_, with the more cordial inscription which came of friendship. [picture: second thackeray inscription] the second edition of _jane eyre_ was dedicated to him as possessed of 'an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised,' and as 'the first social regenerator of the day.' and when currer bell was dead, it was thackeray who wrote by far the most eloquent tribute to her memory. when a copy of lawrence's portrait of thackeray { } was sent to haworth by mr. george smith, charlotte bronte stood in front of it and, half playfully, half seriously, shook her fist, apostrophising its original as 'thou titan!' with all this hero-worship, it may be imagined that no favourable criticism gave her more unqualified pleasure than that which came from her 'master,' as she was not indisposed to consider one who was only seven years her senior, and whose best books were practically contemporaneous with her own. to w. s. williams 'haworth, _october_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--your last letter was very pleasant to me to read, and is very cheering to reflect on. i feel honoured in being approved by mr. thackeray, because i approve mr. thackeray. this may sound presumptuous perhaps, but i mean that i have long recognised in his writings genuine talent, such as i admired, such as i wondered at and delighted in. no author seems to distinguish so exquisitely as he does dross from ore, the real from the counterfeit. i believed too he had deep and true feelings under his seeming sternness. now i am sure he has. one good word from such a man is worth pages of praise from ordinary judges. 'you are right in having faith in the reality of helen burns's character; she was real enough. i have exaggerated nothing there. i abstained from recording much that i remember respecting her, lest the narrative should sound incredible. knowing this, i could not but smile at the quiet self-complacent dogmatism with which one of the journals lays it down that "such creations as helen burns are very beautiful but very untrue." 'the plot of _jane eyre_ may be a hackneyed one. mr. thackeray remarks that it is familiar to him. but having read comparatively few novels, i never chanced to meet with it, and i thought it original. the work referred to by the critic of the _athenaeum_, i had not had the good fortune to hear of. 'the _weekly chronicle_ seems inclined to identify me with mrs. marsh. i never had the pleasure of perusing a line of mrs. marsh's in my life, but i wish very much to read her works, and shall profit by the first opportunity of doing so. i hope i shall not find i have been an unconscious imitator. 'i would still endeavour to keep my expectations low respecting the ultimate success of _jane eyre_. but my desire that it should succeed augments, for you have taken much trouble about the work, and it would grieve me seriously if your active efforts should be baffled and your sanguine hopes disappointed. excuse me if i again remark that i fear they are rather _too_ sanguine; it would be better to moderate them. what will the critics of the monthly reviews and magazines be likely to see in _jane eyre_ (if indeed they deign to read it), which will win from them even a stinted modicum of approbation? it has no learning, no research, it discusses no subject of public interest. a mere domestic novel will, i fear, seem trivial to men of large views and solid attainments. 'still, efforts so energetic and indefatigable as yours ought to realise a result in some degree favourable, and i trust they will.--i remain, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell. '_october_ _th_, . 'i have just received the _tablet_ and the _morning advertiser_. neither paper seems inimical to the book, but i see it produces a very different effect on different natures. i was amused at the analysis in the _tablet_, it is oddly expressed in some parts. i think the critic did not always seize my meaning; he speaks, for instance, of "jane's inconceivable alarm at mr. rochester's repelling manner." i do not remember that.' to w. s. williams '_december_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i have delayed writing to you in the hope that the parcel you sent would reach me; but after making due inquiries at the keighley, bradford, and leeds stations and obtaining no news of it, i must conclude that it has been lost. 'however, i have contrived to get a sight of _fraser's magazine_ from another quarter, so that i have only to regret mr. home's kind present. will you thank that gentleman for me when you see him, and tell him that the railroad is to blame for my not having acknowledged his courtesy before? 'mr. lewes is very lenient: i anticipated a degree of severity which he has spared me. this notice differs from all the other notices. he must be a man of no ordinary mind: there is a strange sagacity evinced in some of his remarks; yet he is not always right. i am afraid if he knew how much i write from intuition, how little from actual knowledge, he would think me presumptuous ever to have written at all. i am sure such would be his opinion if he knew the narrow bounds of my attainments, the limited scope of my reading. 'there are moments when i can hardly credit that anything i have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as mr. thackeray, sir john herschel, mr. fonblanque, leigh hunt, and mr. lewes--that my humble efforts should have had such a result is a noble reward. 'i was glad and proud to get the bank bill mr. smith sent me yesterday, but i hardly ever felt delight equal to that which cheered me when i received your letter containing an extract from a note by mr. thackeray, in which he expressed himself gratified with the perusal of _jane eyre_. mr. thackeray is a keen ruthless satirist. i had never perused his writings but with blended feelings of admiration and indignation. critics, it appears to me, do not know what an intellectual boa-constrictor he is. they call him "humorous," "brilliant"--his is a most scalping humour, a most deadly brilliancy: he does not play with his prey, he coils round it and crushes it in his rings. he seems terribly in earnest in his war against the falsehood and follies of "the world." i often wonder what that "world" thinks of him. i should think the faults of such a man would be distrust of anything good in human nature--galling suspicion of bad motives lurking behind good actions. are these his failings? 'they are, at any rate, the failings of his written sentiments, for he cannot find in his heart to represent either man or woman as at once good and wise. does he not too much confound benevolence with weakness and wisdom with mere craft? 'but i must not intrude on your time by too long a letter.--believe me, yours respectfully, 'c. bell. 'i have received the _sheffield iris_, the _bradford observer_, the _guardian_, the _newcastle guardian_, and the _sunday times_ since you wrote. the contrast between the notices in the two last named papers made me smile. the _sunday times_ almost denounces _jane eyre_ as something very reprehensible and obnoxious, whereas the _newcastle guardian_ seems to think it a mild potion which may be "safely administered to the most delicate invalid." i suppose the public must decide when critics disagree.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _december_ _rd_, . 'dear sir,--i am glad that you and messrs. smith & elder approve the second preface. 'i send an errata of the first volume, and part of the second. i will send the rest of the corrections as soon as possible. 'will the inclosed dedication suffice? i have made it brief, because i wished to avoid any appearance of pomposity or pretension. 'the notice in the _church of england journal_ gratified me much, and chiefly because it _was_ the _church of england journal_. whatever such critics as he of the _mirror_ may say, i love the church of england. her ministers, indeed, i do not regard as infallible personages, i have seen too much of them for that, but to the establishment, with all her faults--the profane athanasian creed _ex_cluded--i am sincerely attached. 'is the forthcoming critique on mr. thackeray's writings in the _edinburgh review_ written by mr. lewes? i hope it is. mr. lewes, with his penetrating sagacity and fine acumen, ought to be able to do the author of _vanity fair_ justice. only he must not bring him down to the level of fielding--he is far, far above fielding. it appears to me that fielding's style is arid, and his views of life and human nature coarse, compared with thackeray's. 'with many thanks for your kind wishes, and a cordial reciprocation of them,--i remain, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell. 'on glancing over this scrawl, i find it so illegibly written that i fear you will hardly be able to decipher it; but the cold is partly to blame for this--my fingers are numb.' the dedication here referred to is that to thackeray. people had been already suggesting that the book might have been written by thackeray under a pseudonym; others had implied, knowing that there was 'something about a woman' in thackeray's life, that it was written by a mistress of the great novelist. indeed, the _quarterly_ had half hinted as much. currer bell, knowing nothing of the gossip of london, had dedicated her book in single-minded enthusiasm. her distress was keen when it was revealed to her that the wife of mr. thackeray, like the wife of rochester in _jane eyre_, was of unsound mind. however, a correspondence with him would seem to have ended amicably enough. { } to w. s. williams 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i need not tell you that when i saw mr. thackeray's letter inclosed under your cover, the sight made me very happy. it was some time before i dared open it, lest my pleasure in receiving it should be mixed with pain on learning its contents--lest, in short, the dedication should have been, in some way, unacceptable to him. 'and, to tell you the truth, i fear this must have been the case; he does not say so, his letter is most friendly in its noble simplicity, but he apprises me, at the commencement, of a circumstance which both surprised and dismayed me. 'i suppose it is no indiscretion to tell you this circumstance, for you doubtless know it already. it appears that his private position is in some points similar to that i have ascribed to mr. rochester; that thence arose a report that _jane eyre_ had been written by a governess in his family, and that the dedication coming now has confirmed everybody in the surmise. 'well may it be said that fact is often stranger than fiction! the coincidence struck me as equally unfortunate and extraordinary. of course i knew nothing whatever of mr. thackeray's domestic concerns, he existed for me only as an author. of all regarding his personality, station, connections, private history, i was, and am still in a great measure, totally in the dark; but i am _very very_ sorry that my inadvertent blunder should have made his name and affairs a subject for common gossip. 'the very fact of his not complaining at all and addressing me with such kindness, notwithstanding the pain and annoyance i must have caused him, increases my chagrin. i could not half express my regret to him in my answer, for i was restrained by the consciousness that that regret was just worth nothing at all--quite valueless for healing the mischief i had done. 'can you tell me anything more on this subject? or can you guess in what degree the unlucky coincidence would affect him--whether it would pain him much and deeply; for he says so little himself on the topic, i am at a loss to divine the exact truth--but i fear. 'do not think, my dear sir, from my silence respecting the advice you have, at different times, given me for my future literary guidance, that i am heedless of, or indifferent to, your kindness. i keep your letters and not unfrequently refer to them. circumstances may render it impracticable for me to act up to the letter of what you counsel, but i think i comprehend the spirit of your precepts, and trust i shall be able to profit thereby. details, situations which i do not understand and cannot personally inspect, i would not for the world meddle with, lest i should make even a more ridiculous mess of the matter than mrs. trollope did in her _factory boy_. besides, not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will i ever affect that i do not really experience. yet though i must limit my sympathies; though my observation cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt; though many doors of knowledge which are open for you are for ever shut for me; though i must guess and calculate and grope my way in the dark, and come to uncertain conclusions unaided and alone where such writers as dickens and thackeray, having access to the shrine and image of truth, have only to go into the temple, lift the veil a moment, and come out and say what they have seen--yet with every disadvantage, i mean still, in my own contracted way, to do my best. imperfect my best will be, and poor, and compared with the works of the true masters--of that greatest modern master thackeray in especial (for it is him i at heart reverence with all my strength)--it will be trifling, but i trust not affected or counterfeit.--believe me, my dear sir, yours with regard and respect, 'currer bell.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--the notice from the _church of england quarterly review_ is not on the whole a bad one. true, it condemns the tendency of _jane eyre_, and seems to think mr. rochester should have been represented as going through the mystic process of "regeneration" before any respectable person could have consented to believe his contrition for his past errors sincere; true, also, that it casts a doubt on jane's creed, and leaves it doubtful whether she was hindoo, mahommedan, or infidel. but notwithstanding these eccentricities, it is a conscientious notice, very unlike that in the _mirror_, for instance, which seemed the result of a feeble sort of spite, whereas this is the critic's real opinion: some of the ethical and theological notions are not according to his system, and he disapproves of them. 'i am glad to hear that mr. lewes's new work is soon to appear, and pleased also to learn that messrs. smith & elder are the publishers. mr. lewes mentioned in the last note i received from him that he had just finished writing his new novel, and i have been on the look out for the advertisement of its appearance ever since. i shall long to read it, if it were only to get a further insight into the author's character. i read _ranthorpe_ with lively interest--there was much true talent in its pages. two thirds of it i thought excellent, the latter part seemed more hastily and sketchily written. 'i trust miss kavanagh's work will meet with the success that, from your account, i am certain she and it deserve. i think i have met with an outline of the facts on which her tale is founded in some periodical, _chambers' journal_ i believe. no critic, however rigid, will find fault with "the tendency" of her work, i should think. 'i will tell you why you cannot fully sympathise with the french, or feel any firm confidence in their future movements: because too few of them are lamartines, too many ledru rollins. that, at least, is my reason for watching their proceedings with more dread than hope. with the germans it is different: to their rational and justifiable efforts for liberty one can heartily wish well. 'it seems, as you say, as if change drew near england too. she is divided by the sea from the lands where it is making thrones rock, but earthquakes roll lower than the ocean, and we know neither the day nor the hour when the tremor and heat, passing beneath our island, may unsettle and dissolve its foundations. meantime, one thing is certain, all will in the end work together for good. 'you mention thackeray and the last number of _vanity fair_. the more i read thackeray's works the more certain i am that he stands alone--alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling (his feeling, though he makes no noise about it, is about the most genuine that ever lived on a printed page), alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control. thackeray is a titan, so strong that he can afford to perform with calm the most herculean feats; there is the charm and majesty of repose in his greatest efforts; _he_ borrows nothing from fever, his is never the energy of delirium--his energy is sane energy, deliberate energy, thoughtful energy. the last number of _vanity fair_ proves this peculiarly. forcible, exciting in its force, still more impressive than exciting, carrying on the interest of the narrative in a flow, deep, full, resistless, it is still quiet--as quiet as reflection, as quiet as memory; and to me there are parts of it that sound as solemn as an oracle. thackeray is never borne away by his own ardour--he has it under control. his genius obeys him--it is his servant, it works no fantastic changes at its own wild will, it must still achieve the task which reason and sense assign it, and none other. thackeray is unique. i _can_ say no more, i _will_ say no less.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _nd_, . 'your generous indignation against the _quarterly_ touched me. but do not trouble yourself to be angry on currer bell's account; except where the may-fair gossip and mr. thackeray's name were brought in he was never stung at all, but he certainly thought that passage and one or two others quite unwarrantable. however, slander without a germ of truth is seldom injurious: it resembles a rootless plant and must soon wither away. 'the critic would certainly be a little ashamed of herself if she knew what foolish blunders she had committed, if she were aware how completely mr. thackeray and currer bell are strangers to each other, that _jane eyre_ was written before the author had seen one line of _vanity fair_, or that if c. bell had known that there existed in mr. thackeray's private circumstances the shadow of a reason for fancying personal allusion, so far from dedicating the book to that gentleman, he would have regarded such a step as ill-judged, insolent, and indefensible, and would have shunned it accordingly.--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_august_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--my sister anne thanks you, as well as myself, for your just critique on _wildfell hall_. it appears to me that your observations exactly hit both the strong and weak points of the book, and the advice which accompanies them is worthy of, and shall receive, our most careful attention. 'the first duty of an author is, i conceive, a faithful allegiance to truth and nature; his second, such a conscientious study of art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities. the bells are very sincere in their worship of truth, and they hope to apply themselves to the consideration of art, so as to attain one day the power of speaking the language of conviction in the accents of persuasion; though they rather apprehend that whatever pains they take to modify and soften, an abrupt word or vehement tone will now and then occur to startle ears polite, whenever the subject shall chance to be such as moves their spirits within them. 'i have already told you, i believe, that i regard mr. thackeray as the first of modern masters, and as the legitimate high priest of truth; i study him accordingly with reverence. he, i see, keeps the mermaid's tail below water, and only hints at the dead men's bones and noxious slime amidst which it wriggles; _but_, his hint is more vivid than other men's elaborate explanations, and never is his satire whetted to so keen an edge as when with quiet mocking irony he modestly recommends to the approbation of the public his own exemplary discretion and forbearance. the world begins to know thackeray rather better than it did two years or even a year ago, but as yet it only half knows him. his mind seems to me a fabric as simple and unpretending as it is deep-founded and enduring--there is no meretricious ornament to attract or fix a superficial glance; his great distinction of the genuine is one that can only be fully appreciated with time. there is something, a sort of "still profound," revealed in the concluding part of _vanity fair_ which the discernment of one generation will not suffice to fathom. a hundred years hence, if he only lives to do justice to himself, he will be better known than he is now. a hundred years hence, some thoughtful critic, standing and looking down on the deep waters, will see shining through them the pearl without price of a purely original mind--such a mind as the bulwers, etc., his contemporaries have _not_,--not acquirements gained from study, but the thing that came into the world with him--his inherent genius: the thing that made him, i doubt not, different as a child from other children, that caused him, perhaps, peculiar griefs and struggles in life, and that now makes him as a writer unlike other writers. excuse me for recurring to this theme, i do not wish to bore you. 'you say mr. huntingdon reminds you of mr. rochester. does he? yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows. mr. rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. he is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. his nature is like wine of a good vintage: time cannot sour, but only mellows him. such at least was the character i meant to pourtray. 'heathcliffe, again, of _wuthering heights_ is quite another creation. he exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. the worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the heights. 'i must not forget to thank you for the _examiner_ and _atlas_ newspapers. poor mr. newby! it is not enough that the _examiner_ nails him by both ears to the pillory, but the _atlas_ brands a token of disgrace on his forehead. this is a deplorable plight, and he makes all matters worse by his foolish little answers to his assailants. it is a pity that he has no kind friend to suggest to him that he had better not bandy words with the _examiner_. his plea about the "printer" was too ludicrous, and his second note is pitiable. i only regret that the names of ellis and acton bell should perforce be mixed up with his proceedings. my sister anne wishes me to say that should she ever write another work, mr. smith will certainly have the first offer of the copyright. 'i hope mrs. williams's health is more satisfactory than when you last wrote. with every good wish to yourself and your family,--believe me, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i am again at home; and after the first sensations consequent on returning to a place more dumb and vacant than it once was, i am beginning to feel settled. i think the contrast with london does not make haworth more desolate; on the contrary, i have gleaned ideas, images, pleasant feelings, such as may perhaps cheer many a long winter evening. 'you ask my opinion of your daughters. i wish i could give you one worth acceptance. a single evening's acquaintance does not suffice with me to form an _opinion_, it only leaves on my mind an _impression_. they impressed me, then, as pleasing in manners and appearance: ellen's is a character to which i could soon attach myself, and fanny and louisa have each their separate advantages. i can, however, read more in a face like mrs. williams's than in the smooth young features of her daughters--time, trial, and exertion write a distinct hand, more legible than smile or dimple. i was told you had once some thoughts of bringing out fanny as a professional singer, and it was added fanny did not like the project. i thought to myself, if she does not like it, it can never be successfully executed. it seems to me that to achieve triumph in a career so arduous, the artist's own bent to the course must be inborn, decided, resistless. there should be no urging, no goading; native genius and vigorous will should lend their wings to the aspirant--nothing less can lift her to real fame, and who would rise feebly only to fall ignobly? an inferior artist, i am sure, you would not wish your daughter to be, and if she is to stand in the foremost rank, only her own courage and resolve can place her there; so, at least, the case appears to me. fanny probably looks on publicity as degrading, and i believe that for a woman it is degrading if it is not glorious. if i could not be a lind, i would not be a singer. 'brief as my visit to london was, it must for me be memorable. i sometimes fancied myself in a dream--i could scarcely credit the reality of what passed. for instance, when i walked into the room and put my hand into miss martineau's, the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary. again, when mr. thackeray was announced, and i saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice, the whole incident was truly dream-like, i was only certain it was true because i became miserably destitute of self-possession. amour propre suffers terribly under such circumstances: woe to him that thinks of himself in the presence of intellectual greatness! had i not been obliged to speak, i could have managed well, but it behoved me to answer when addressed, and the effort was torture--i spoke stupidly. 'as to the band of critics, i cannot say they overawed me much; i enjoyed the spectacle of them greatly. the two contrasts, forster and chorley, have each a certain edifying carriage and conversation good to contemplate. i by no means dislike mr. forster--quite the contrary, but the distance from his loud swagger to thackeray's simple port is as the distance from shakespeare's writing to macready's acting. 'mr. chorley tantalised me. he is a peculiar specimen--one whom you could set yourself to examine, uncertain whether, when you had probed all the small recesses of his character, the result would be utter contempt and aversion, or whether for the sake of latent good you would forgive obvious evil. one could well pardon his unpleasant features, his strange voice, even his very foppery and grimace, if one found these disadvantages connected with living talent and any spark of genuine goodness. if there is nothing more than acquirement, smartness, and the affectation of philanthropy, chorley is a fine creature. 'remember me kindly to your wife and daughters, and--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--here i am at haworth once more. i feel as if i had come out of an exciting whirl. not that the hurry or stimulus would have seemed much to one accustomed to society and change, but to me they were very marked. my strength and spirits too often proved quite insufficient for the demand on their exertions. i used to bear up as well and as long as i possibly could, for, whenever i flagged, i could see mr. smith became disturbed; he always thought that something had been said or done to annoy me, which never once happened, for i met with perfect good breeding even from antagonists--men who had done their best or worst to write me down. i explained to him, over and over again, that my occasional silence was only failure of the power to talk, never of the will, but still he always seemed to fear there was another cause underneath. 'mrs. smith is rather stern, but she has sense and discrimination; she watched me very narrowly. when surrounded by gentlemen she never took her eye from me. i liked the surveillance, both when it kept guard over me amongst many, or only with her cherished one. she soon, i am convinced, saw in what light i received all, thackeray included. her "george" is a very fine specimen of a young english man of business; so i regard him, and i am proud to be one of his props. 'thackeray is a titan of mind. his presence and powers impress me deeply in an intellectual sense; i do not see him or know him as a man. all the others are subordinate to these. i have esteem for some, and, i trust, courtesy for all. i do not, of course, know what they thought of me, but i believe most of them expected me to come out in a more marked eccentric, striking light. i believe they desired more to admire and more to blame. i felt sufficiently at my ease with all except thackeray, and with him i was painfully stupid. 'now, dear nell, when can you come to haworth? settle, and let me know as soon as you can. give my best love to all.--yours, 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--mrs. ellis has made her "morning call." i rather relished her chat about _shirley_ and _jane eyre_. she praises reluctantly and blames too often affectedly. but whenever a reviewer betrays that he has been thoroughly influenced and stirred by the work he criticises, it is easy to forgive the rest--hate and personality excepted. 'i have received and perused the _edinburgh review_--it is very brutal and savage. i am not angry with lewes, but i wish in future he would let me alone, and not write again what makes me feel so cold and sick as i am feeling just now. 'thackeray's christmas book at once grieved and pleased me, as most of his writings do. i have come to the conclusion that whenever he writes, mephistopheles stands on his right hand and raphael on his left; the great doubter and sneerer usually guides the pen, the angel, noble and gentle, interlines letters of light here and there. alas! thackeray, i wish your strong wings would lift you oftener above the smoke of cities into the pure region nearer heaven! 'good-bye for the present.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--your indisposition was, i have no doubt, in a great measure owing to the change in the weather from frost to thaw. i had one sick-headachy day; but, for me, only a slight attack. you must be careful of cold. i have just written to amelia a brief note thanking her for the cuffs, etc. it was a burning shame i did not write sooner. herewith are inclosed three letters for your perusal, the first from mary taylor. there is also one from lewes and one from sir j. k. shuttleworth, both which peruse and return. i have also, since you went, had a remarkable epistle from thackeray, long, interesting, characteristic, but it unfortunately concludes with the strict injunction, _show this letter to no one_, adding that if he thought his letters were seen by others, he should either cease to write or write only what was conventional; but for this circumstance i should have sent it with the others. i answered it at length. whether my reply will give satisfaction or displeasure remains yet to be ascertained. thackeray's feelings are not such as can be gauged by ordinary calculation: variable weather is what i should ever expect from that quarter, yet in correspondence as in verbal intercourse, this would torment me.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, hyde park, 'london, _thursday morning_. 'dear papa,--i write one hasty line just to tell you that i got here quite safely at ten o'clock last night without any damage or smash in tunnels or cuttings. mr. and mrs. smith met me at the station and gave me a kind and cordial welcome. the weather was beautiful the whole way, and warm; it is the same to-day. i have not yet been out, but this afternoon, if all be well, i shall go to mr. thackeray's lecture. i don't know when i shall see the exhibition, but when i do, i shall write and tell you all about it. i hope you are well, and will continue well and cheerful. give my kind regards to tabby and martha, and--believe me, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' it cannot be said that charlotte bronte and thackeray gained by personal contact. 'with him i was painfully stupid,' she says. it was the case of heine and goethe over again. heine in the presence of the king of german literature could talk only of the plums in the garden. charlotte bronte in the presence of her hero thackeray could not express herself with the vigour and intelligence which belonged to her correspondence with mr. williams. miss bronte, again, was hyper-critical of the smaller vanities of men, and, as has been pointed out, she emphasised in _villette_ a trivial piece of not unpleasant egotism on thackeray's part after a lecture--his asking her if she had liked it. this question, which nine men out of ten would be prone to ask of a woman friend, was 'over-eagerness' and '_naivete_' in her eyes. thackeray, on his side, found conversation difficult, if we may judge by a reminiscence by his daughter mrs. ritchie:-- 'one of the most notable persons who ever came into our bow-windowed drawing-room in young street is a guest never to be forgotten by me--a tiny, delicate, little person, whose small hand nevertheless grasped a mighty lever which set all the literary world of that day vibrating. i can still see the scene quite plainly--the hot summer evening, the open windows, the carriage driving to the door as we all sat silent and expectant; my father, who rarely waited, waiting with us; our governess and my sister and i all in a row, and prepared for the great event. we saw the carriage stop, and out of it sprang the active well-knit figure of mr. george smith, who was bringing miss bronte to see our father. my father, who had been walking up and down the room, goes out into the hall to meet his guests, and then, after a moment's delay, the door opens wide, and the two gentlemen come in, leading a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, pale, with fair straight hair, and steady eyes. she may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little _barege_ dress, with a pattern of faint green moss. she enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness; our hearts are beating with wild excitement. this, then, is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all london talking, reading, speculating; some people even say our father wrote the books--the wonderful books. to say that we little girls had been given _jane eyre_ to read scarcely represents the facts of the case; to say that we had taken it without leave, read bits here and read bits there, been carried away by an undreamed-of and hitherto unimagined whirlwind into things, times, places, all utterly absorbing, and at the same time absolutely unintelligible to us, would more accurately describe our state of mind on that summer's evening as we look at jane eyre--the great jane eyre--the tiny little lady. the moment is so breathless that dinner comes as a relief to the solemnity of the occasion, and we all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm; for, though genius she may be, miss bronte can barely reach his elbow. my own personal impressions are that she is somewhat grave and stern, especially to forward little girls who wish to chatter. mr. george smith has since told me how she afterwards remarked upon my father's wonderful forbearance and gentleness with our uncalled-for incursions into the conversation. she sat gazing at him with kindling eyes of interest, lighting up with a sort of illumination every now and then as she answered him. i can see her bending forward over the table, not eating, but listening to what he said as he carved the dish before him. 'i think it must have been on this very occasion that my father invited some of his friends in the evening to meet miss bronte--for everybody was interested and anxious to see her. mrs. crowe, the reciter of ghost-stories, was there. mrs. brookfield, mrs. carlyle, mr. carlyle himself was present, so i am told, railing at the appearance of cockneys upon scotch mountain sides; there were also too many americans for his taste, "but the americans were as gods compared to the cockneys," says the philosopher. besides the carlyles, there were mrs. elliott and miss perry, mrs. procter and her daughter, most of my father's habitual friends and companions. in the recent life of lord houghton i was amused to see a note quoted in which lord houghton also was convened. would that he had been present--perhaps the party would have gone off better. it was a gloomy and a silent evening. every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. miss bronte retired to the sofa in the study, and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess, miss truelock. the room looked very dark, the lamp began to smoke a little, the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant, my father was too much perturbed by the gloom and the silence to be able to cope with it at all. mrs. brookfield, who was in the doorway by the study, near the corner in which miss bronte was sitting, leant forward with a little commonplace, since brilliance was not to be the order of the evening. "do you like london, miss bronte?" she said; another silence, a pause, then miss bronte answers, "yes and no," very gravely. mrs. brookfield has herself reported the conversation. my sister and i were much too young to be bored in those days; alarmed, impressed we might be, but not yet bored. a party was a party, a lioness was a lioness; and--shall i confess it?--at that time an extra dish of biscuits was enough to mark the evening. we felt all the importance of the occasion: tea spread in the dining-room, ladies in the drawing-room. we roamed about inconveniently, no doubt, and excitedly, and in one of my incursions crossing the hall, after miss bronte had left, i was surprised to see my father opening the front door with his hat on. he put his fingers to his lips, walked out into the darkness, and shut the door quietly behind him. when i went back to the drawing-room again, the ladies asked me where he was. i vaguely answered that i thought he was coming back. i was puzzled at the time, nor was it all made clear to me till long years afterwards, when one day mrs. procter asked me if i knew what had happened once when my father had invited a party to meet jane eyre at his house. it was one of the dullest evenings she had ever spent in her life, she said. and then with a good deal of humour she described the situation--the ladies who had all come expecting so much delightful conversation, and the gloom and the constraint, and how, finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone off to his club. the ladies waited, wondered, and finally departed also; and as we were going up to bed with our candles after everybody was gone, i remember two pretty miss l---s, in shiny silk dresses, arriving, full of expectation. . . . we still said we thought our father would soon be back, but the miss l---s declined to wait upon the chance, laughed, and drove away again almost immediately.' { } to rev. p. bronte '_may_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i must write another line to you to tell you how i am getting on. i have seen a great many things since i left home about which i hope to talk to you at future tea-times at home. i have been to the theatre and seen macready in macbeth. i have seen the pictures in the national gallery. i have seen a beautiful exhibition of turner's paintings, and yesterday i saw mr. thackeray. he dined here with some other gentlemen. he is a very tall man--above six feet high, with a peculiar face--not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look. he was not told who i was, he was not introduced to me, but i soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles; and when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said, "shake hands"; so i shook hands. he spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way. it is better, i should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage. i listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen. all he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory. i get on quietly. most people know me i think, but they are far too well bred to show that they know me, so that there is none of that bustle or that sense of publicity i dislike. 'i hope you continue pretty well; be sure to take care of yourself. the weather here is exceedingly changeful, and often damp and misty, so that it is necessary to guard against taking cold. i do not mean to stay in london above a week longer, but i shall write again two or three days before i return. you need not give yourself the trouble of answering this letter unless you have something particular to say. remember me to tabby and martha.--i remain, dear papa, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park, london, _may_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i have now heard one of mr. thackeray's lectures and seen the great exhibition. on thursday afternoon i went to hear the lecture. it was delivered in a large and splendid kind of saloon--that in which the great balls of almacks are given. the walls were all painted and gilded, the benches were sofas stuffed and cushioned and covered with blue damask. the audience was composed of the _elite_ of london society. duchesses were there by the score, and amongst them the great and beautiful duchess of sutherland, the queen's mistress of the robes. amidst all this thackeray just got up and spoke with as much simplicity and ease as if he had been speaking to a few friends by his own fireside. the lecture was truly good: he has taken pains with the composition. it was finished without being in the least studied; a quiet humour and graphic force enlivened it throughout. he saw me as i entered the room, and came straight up and spoke very kindly. he then took me to his mother, a fine, handsome old lady, and introduced me to her. after the lecture somebody came behind me, leaned over the bench, and said, "will you permit me, as a yorkshireman, to introduce myself to you?" i turned round, was puzzled at first by the strange face i met, but in a minute i recognised the features. "you are the earl of carlisle," i said. he smiled and assented. he went on to talk for some time in a courteous, kind fashion. he asked after you, recalled the platform electioneering scene at haworth, and begged to be remembered to you. dr. forbes came up afterwards, and mr. monckton milnes, a yorkshire member of parliament, who introduced himself on the same plea as lord carlisle. 'yesterday we went to the crystal palace. the exterior has a strange and elegant but somewhat unsubstantial effect. the interior is like a mighty vanity fair. the brightest colours blaze on all sides; and ware of all kinds, from diamonds to spinning jennies and printing presses, are there to be seen. it was very fine, gorgeous, animated, bewildering, but i liked thackeray's lecture better. 'i hope, dear papa, that you are keeping well. with kind regards to tabby and martha, and hopes that they are well too,--i am, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park, _june_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i was very glad to hear that you continued in pretty good health, and that mr. cartman came to help you on sunday. i fear you will not have had a very comfortable week in the dining-room; but by this time i suppose the parlour reformation will be nearly completed, and you will soon be able to return to your old quarters. the letter you sent me this morning was from mary taylor. she continues well and happy in new zealand, and her shop seems to answer well. the french newspaper duly arrived. yesterday i went for the second time to the crystal palace. we remained in it about three hours, and i must say i was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. it is a wonderful place--vast, strange, new, and impossible to describe. its grandeur does not consist in _one_ thing, but in the unique assemblage of _all_ things. whatever human industry has created, you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill-machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description--to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. it may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as eastern genii might have created. it seems as if magic only could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth--as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. the multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day i was there, not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen--the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance. 'mr. thackeray is in high spirits about the success of his lectures. it is likely to add largely both to his fame and purse. he has, however, deferred this week's lecture till next thursday, at the earnest petition of the duchesses and marchionesses, who, on the day it should have been delivered, were necessitated to go down with the queen and court to ascot races. i told him i thought he did wrong to put it off on their account--and i think so still. the amateur performance of bulwer's play for the guild of literature has likewise been deferred on account of the races. i hope, dear papa, that you, mr. nicholls, and all at home continue well. tell martha to take her scrubbing and cleaning in moderation and not overwork herself. with kind regards to her and tabby,--i am, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park, _june_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--if all be well, and if martha can get the cleaning, etc., done by that time, i think i shall be coming home about the end of next week or the beginning of the week after. i have been pretty well in london, only somewhat troubled with headaches, owing, i suppose, to the closeness and oppression of the air. the weather has not been so favourable as when i was last here, and in wet and dark days this great babylon is not so cheerful. all the other sights seem to give way to the great exhibition, into which thousands and tens of thousands continue to pour every day. i was in it again yesterday afternoon, and saw the ex-royal family of france--the old queen, the duchess of orleans, and her two sons, etc., pass down the transept. i almost wonder the londoners don't tire a little of this vast vanity fair--and, indeed, a new toy has somewhat diverted the attention of the grandees lately, viz., a fancy ball given last night by the queen. the great lords and ladies have been quite wrapt up in preparations for this momentous event. their pet and darling, mr. thackeray, of course sympathises with them. he was here yesterday to dinner, and left very early in the evening in order that he might visit respectively the duchess of norfolk, the marchioness of londonderry, ladies chesterfield and clanricarde, and see them all in their fancy costumes of the reign of charles ii. before they set out for the palace! his lectures, it appears, are a triumphant success. he says they will enable him to make a provision for his daughters; and mr. smith believes he will not get less than four thousand pounds by them. he is going to give two courses, and then go to edinburgh and perhaps america, but _not_ under the auspices of barnum. amongst others, the lord chancellor attended his last lecture, and mr. thackeray says he expects a place from him; but in this i think he was joking. of course mr. t. is a good deal spoiled by all this, and indeed it cannot be otherwise. he has offered two or three times to introduce me to some of his great friends, and says he knows many great ladies who would receive me with open arms if i would go to their houses; but, seriously, i cannot see that this sort of society produces so good an effect on him as to tempt me in the least to try the same experiment, so i remain obscure. 'hoping you are well, dear papa, and with kind regards to mr. nicholls, tabby, and martha, also poor old keeper and flossy,--i am, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte. '_p.s._--i am glad the parlour is done and that you have got safely settled, but am quite shocked to hear of the piano being dragged up into the bedroom--there it must necessarily be absurd, and in the parlour it looked so well, besides being convenient for your books. i wonder why you don't like it.' there are many pleasant references to thackeray to be found in mrs. gaskell's book, including a letter to mr. george smith, thanking him for the gift of the novelist's portrait. 'he looks superb in his beautiful, tasteful, gilded gibbet,' she says. a few years later, and thackeray was to write the eloquent tribute to his admirer, which is familiar to his readers: 'i fancied an austere little joan of arc marching in upon us and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals.' 'she gave me,' he tells us, 'the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person. a great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble english, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? what a story is that of the family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy yorkshire moors!' chapter xvi: literary friendships there is a letter, printed by mrs. gaskell, from charlotte bronte to ellen nussey, in which miss bronte, when a girl of seventeen, discusses the best books to read, and expresses a particular devotion to sir walter scott. during those early years she was an indefatigable student of literature. she read all that her father's study and the keighley library could provide. when the years brought literary fame and its accompanying friendships, she was able to hold her own with the many men and women of letters whom she was destined to meet. her staunchest friend was undoubtedly mr. williams, who sent her, as we have seen, all the newest books from london, and who appears to have discussed them with her as well. next to mr. williams we must place his chief at cornhill, mr. george smith, and mr. smith's mother. mr. smith happily still lives to reign over the famous house which introduced thackeray, john ruskin, and charlotte bronte to the world. what charlotte thought of him may be gathered from her frank acknowledgment that he was the original of dr. john in _villette_, as his mother was the original of mrs. bretton--perhaps the two most entirely charming characters in charlotte bronte's novels. mrs. smith and her son lived, at the beginning of the friendship, at westbourne place, but afterwards removed to gloucester terrace, and charlotte stayed with them at both houses. it was from the former that this first letter was addressed. to miss ellen nussey ' westbourne place, 'bishop's road, london. 'dear ellen,--i have just remembered that as you do not know my address you cannot write to me till you get it; it is as above. i came to this big babylon last thursday, and have been in what seems to me a sort of whirl ever since; for changes, scenes, and stimulus which would be a trifle to others, are much to me. i found when i mentioned to mr. smith my plan of going to dr. wheelwright's it would not do at all--he would have been seriously hurt. he made his mother write to me, and thus i was persuaded to make my principal stay at his house. i have found no reason to regret this decision. mrs. smith received me at first like one who had received the strictest orders to be scrupulously attentive. i had fires in my bed-room evening and morning, wax candles, etc., etc. mrs. smith and her daughters seemed to look upon me with a mixture of respect and alarm. but all this is changed--that is to say, the attention and politeness continues as great as ever, but the alarm and estrangement are quite gone. she treats me as if she liked me, and i begin to like her much; kindness is a potent heart-winner. i had not judged too favourably of her son on a first impression; he pleases me much. i like him better even as a son and brother than as a man of business. mr. williams, too, is really most gentlemanly and well-informed. his weak points he certainly has, but these are not seen in society. mr. taylor--the little man--has again shown his parts; in fact, i suspect he is of the helstone order of men--rigid, despotic, and self-willed. he tries to be very kind and even to express sympathy sometimes, but he does not manage it. he has a determined, dreadful nose in the middle of his face, which, when poked into my countenance, cuts into my soul like iron. still, he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity. to turn to mr. williams after him, or to mr. smith himself, is to turn from granite to easy down or warm fur. i have seen thackeray. 'c. bronte.' to james taylor, cornhill '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i am afraid mr. williams told you i was sadly "put out" about the _daily news_, and i believe it is to that circumstance i owe your letters. but i have now made good resolutions, which were tried this morning by another notice in the same style in the _observer_. the praise of such critics mortifies more than their blame; an author who becomes the object of it cannot help momentarily wishing he had never written. and to speak of the press being still ignorant of my being a woman! why can they not be content to take currer bell for a man? 'i imagined, mistakenly it now appears, that _shirley_ bore fewer traces of a female hand than _jane eyre_; that i have misjudged disappoints me a little, though i cannot exactly see where the error lies. you keep to your point about the curates. since you think me to blame, you do right to tell me so. i rather fancy i shall be left in a minority of one on that subject. 'i was indeed very much interested in the books you sent. eckermann's _conversations with goethe_, _guesses at truth_, _friends in council_, and the little work on english social life pleased me particularly, and the last not least. we sometimes take a partiality to books as to characters, not on account of any brilliant intellect or striking peculiarity they boast, but for the sake of something good, delicate, and genuine. i thought that small book the production of a lady, and an amiable, sensible woman, and i like it. 'you must not think of selecting any more works for me yet, my stock is still far from exhausted. 'i accept your offer respecting the _athenaeum_; it is a paper i should like much to see, providing you can send it without trouble. it shall be punctually returned. 'papa's health has, i am thankful to say, been very satisfactory of late. the other day he walked to keighley and back, and was very little fatigued. i am myself pretty well. 'with thanks for your kind letter and good wishes,--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' mrs. gaskell has much to say of miss bronte's relations with george henry lewes. { } he was a critic with whom she had much correspondence and not a few differences. it will be remembered that charlotte describes him as bearing a resemblance to emily--a curious circumstance by the light of the fact that lewes was always adjudged among his acquaintances as a peculiarly ugly man. here is a portion of a letter upon which mrs. gaskell practised considerable excisions, and of which she prints the remainder:-- to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'i have seen lewes. he is a man with both weakness and sins, but unless i err greatly, the foundation of his nature is not bad; and were he almost a fiend in character i could not feel otherwise to him than half-sadly, half-tenderly. a queer word that last, but i use it because the aspect of lewes's face almost moves me to tears, it is so wonderfully like emily--her eyes, her features, the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead--even, at moments, the expression. whatever lewes does or says, i believe i cannot hate him. another likeness i have seen, too, that touched me sorrowfully. you remember my speaking of a miss kavanagh, a young authoress, who supported her mother by her writings. hearing from mr. williams that she had a longing to see me, i called on her yesterday. i found a little, almost dwarfish figure, to which even i had to look down; not deformed--that is, not hunch-backed, but long-armed and with a large head, and (at first sight) a strange face. she met me half-frankly, half-tremblingly; we sat down together, and when i had talked with her five minutes, her face was no longer strange, but mournfully familiar--it was martha taylor on every lineament. i shall try to find a moment to see her again. she lives in a poor but clean and neat little lodging. her mother seems a somewhat weak-minded woman, who can be no companion to her. her father has quite deserted his wife and child, and this poor little, feeble, intelligent, cordial thing wastes her brains to gain a living. she is twenty-five years old. i do not intend to stay here, at the furthest, more than a week longer; but at the end of that time i cannot go home, for the house at haworth is just now unroofed; repairs were become necessary. 'i should like to go for a week or two to the sea-side, in which case i wonder whether it would be possible for you to join me. meantime, with regards to all--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. b.' but her acquaintance with lewes had apparently begun three years earlier. to w. s. williams '_november_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i should be obliged to you if you will direct the inclosed to be posted in london as i wish to avoid giving any clue to my place of residence, publicity not being my ambition. 'it is an answer to the letter i received yesterday, favoured by you. this letter bore the signature g. h. lewes, and the writer informs me that it is his intention to write a critique on _jane eyre_ for the december number of _fraser's magazine_, and possibly also, he intimates, a brief notice to the _westminster review_. upon the whole he seems favourably inclined to the work, though he hints disapprobation of the melodramatic portions. 'can you give me any information respecting mr. lewes? what station he occupies in the literary world and what works he has written? he styles himself "a fellow novelist." there is something in the candid tone of his letter which inclines me to think well of him. 'i duly received your letter containing the notices from the _critic_, and the two magazines, and also the _morning post_. i hope all these notices will work together for good; they must at any rate give the book a certain publicity.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' mr. r. h. horne { } sent her his _orion_. to r. h. horne '_december_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--you will have thought me strangely tardy in acknowledging your courteous present, but the fact is it never reached me till yesterday; the parcel containing it was missent--consequently it lingered a fortnight on its route. 'i have to thank you, not merely for the gift of a little book of pages, but for that of a _poem_. very real, very sweet is the poetry of _orion_; there are passages i shall recur to again and yet again--passages instinct both with power and beauty. all through it is genuine--pure from one flaw of affectation, rich in noble imagery. how far the applause of critics has rewarded the author of _orion_ i do not know, but i think the pleasure he enjoyed in its composition must have been a bounteous meed in itself. you could not, i imagine, have written that epic without at times deriving deep happiness from your work. 'with sincere thanks for the pleasure its perusal has afforded me,--i remain, dear sir, yours faithfully, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear sir,--i write a line in haste to apprise you that i have got the parcel. it was sent, through the carelessness of the railroad people, to bingley, where it lay a fortnight, till a haworth carrier happening to pass that way brought it on to me. 'i was much pleased to find that you had been kind enough to forward the _mirror_ along with _fraser_. the article on "the last new novel" is in substance similar to the notice in the _sunday times_. one passage only excited much interest in me; it was that where allusion is made to some former work which the author of _jane eyre_ is supposed to have published--there, i own, my curiosity was a little stimulated. the reviewer cannot mean the little book of rhymes to which currer bell contributed a third; but as that, and _jane eyre_, and a brief translation of some french verses sent anonymously to a magazine, are the sole productions of mine that have ever appeared in print, i am puzzled to know to what else he can refer. 'the reviewer is mistaken, as he is in perverting my meaning, in attributing to me designs i know not, principles i disown. 'i have been greatly pleased with mr. r. h. horne's poem of _orion_. will you have the kindness to forward to him the inclosed note, and to correct the address if it is not accurate?--believe me, dear sir, yours respectfully, 'c. bell.' the following elaborate criticism of one of mr. lewes's now forgotten novels is almost pathetic; it may give a modern critic pause in his serious treatment of the abundant literary ephemera of which we hear so much from day to day. to w. s. williams '_may_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i am glad you sent me your letter just as you had written it--without revisal, without retrenching or softening touch, because i cannot doubt that i am a gainer by the omission. 'it would be useless to attempt opposition to your opinions, since, in fact, to read them was to recognise, almost point for point, a clear definition of objections i had already felt, but had found neither the power nor the will to express. not the power, because i find it very difficult to analyse closely, or to criticise in appropriate words; and not the will, because i was afraid of doing mr. lewes injustice. i preferred overrating to underrating the merits of his work. 'mr. lewes's sincerity, energy, and talent assuredly command the reader's respect, but on what points he depends to win his attachment i know not. i do not think he cares to excite the pleasant feelings which incline the taught to the teacher as much in friendship as in reverence. the display of his acquirements, to which almost every page bears testimony--citations from greek, latin, italian, spanish, french, and german authors covering as with embroidery the texture of his english--awes and astonishes the plain reader; but if, in addition, you permit yourself to require the refining charm of delicacy, the elevating one of imagination--if you permit yourself to be as fastidious and exacting in these matters as, by your own confession, it appears _you_ are, then mr. lewes must necessarily inform you that he does not deal in the article; probably he will add that _therefore_ it must be non-essential. i should fear he might even stigmatise imagination as a figment, and delicacy as an affectation. 'an honest rough heartiness mr. lewes will give you; yet in case you have the misfortune to remark that the heartiness might be quite as honest if it were less rough, would you not run the risk of being termed a sentimentalist or a dreamer? 'were i privileged to address mr. lewes, and were it wise or becoming to say to him exactly what one thinks, i should utter words to this effect-- '"you have a sound, clear judgment as far as it goes, but i conceive it to be limited; your standard of talent is high, but i cannot acknowledge it to be the highest; you are deserving of all attention when you lay down the law on principles, but you are to be resisted when you dogmatise on feelings. '"to a certain point, mr. lewes, you can go, but no farther. be as sceptical as you please on whatever lies beyond a certain intellectual limit; the mystery will never be cleared up to you, for that limit you will never overpass. not all your learning, not all your reading, not all your sagacity, not all your perseverance can help you over one viewless line--one boundary as impassable as it is invisible. to enter that sphere a man must be born within it; and untaught peasants have there drawn their first breath, while learned philosophers have striven hard till old age to reach it, and have never succeeded." i should not dare, nor would it be right, to say this to mr. lewes, but i cannot help thinking it both of him and many others who have a great name in the world. 'hester mason's character, career, and fate appeared to me so strange, grovelling, and miserable, that i never for a moment doubted the whole dreary picture was from the life. i thought in describing the "rustic poetess," in giving the details of her vulgar provincial and disreputable metropolitan notoriety, and especially in touching on the ghastly catastrophe of her fate, he was faithfully recording facts--thus, however repulsively, yet conscientiously "pointing a moral," if not "adorning a tale"; but if hester be the daughter of lewes's imagination, and if her experience and her doom be inventions of his fancy, i wish him better, and higher, and truer taste next time he writes a novel. 'julius's exploit with the side of bacon is not defensible; he might certainly, for the fee of a shilling or sixpence, have got a boy to carry it for him. 'captain heath, too, must have cut a deplorable figure behind the post-chaise. 'mrs. vyner strikes one as a portrait from the life; and it equally strikes one that the artist hated his original model with a personal hatred. she is made so bad that one cannot in the least degree sympathise with any of those who love her; one can only despise them. she is a fiend, and therefore not like mr. thackeray's rebecca, where neither vanity, heartlessness, nor falsehood have been spared by the vigorous and skilful hand which portrays them, but where the human being has been preserved nevertheless, and where, consequently, the lesson given is infinitely more impressive. we can learn little from the strange fantasies of demons--we are not of their kind; but the vices of the deceitful, selfish man or woman humble and warn us. in your remarks on the good girls i concur to the letter; and i must add that i think blanche, amiable as she is represented, could never have loved her husband after she had discovered that he was utterly despicable. love is stronger than cruelty, stronger than death, but perishes under meanness; pity may take its place, but pity is not love. 'so far, then, i not only agree with you, but i marvel at the nice perception with which you have discriminated, and at the accuracy with which you have marked each coarse, cold, improbable, unseemly defect. but now i am going to take another side: i am going to differ from you, and it is about cecil chamberlayne. 'you say that no man who had intellect enough to paint a picture, or write a comic opera, could act as he did; you say that men of genius and talent may have egregious faults, but they cannot descend to brutality or meanness. would that the case were so! would that intellect could preserve from low vice! but, alas! it cannot. no, the whole character of cecil is painted with but too faithful a hand; it is very masterly, because it is very true. lewes is nobly right when he says that intellect is _not_ the highest faculty of man, though it may be the most brilliant; when he declares that the _moral_ nature of his kind is more sacred than the _intellectual_ nature; when he prefers "goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice to all the talents in the world." 'there is something divine in the thought that genius preserves from degradation, were it but true; but savage tells us it was not true for him; sheridan confirms the avowal, and byron seals it with terrible proof. 'you never probably knew a cecil chamberlayne. if you had known such a one you would feel that lewes has rather subdued the picture than overcharged it; you would know that mental gifts without moral firmness, without a clear sense of right and wrong, without the honourable principle which makes a man rather proud than ashamed of honest labour, are no guarantee from even deepest baseness. 'i have received the _dublin university magazine_. the notice is more favourable than i had anticipated; indeed, i had for a long time ceased to anticipate any from that quarter; but the critic does not strike one as too bright. poor mr. james is severely handled; _you_, likewise, are hard upon him. he always strikes me as a miracle of productiveness. 'i must conclude by thanking you for your last letter, which both pleased and instructed me. you are quite right in thinking it exhibits the writer's character. yes, it exhibits it _unmistakeably_ (as lewes would say). and whenever it shall be my lot to submit another ms. to your inspection, i shall crave the full benefit of certain points in that character: i shall ever entreat my _first critic_ to be as impartial as he is friendly; what he feels to be out of taste in my writings, i hope he will unsparingly condemn. in the excitement of composition, one is apt to fall into errors that one regrets afterwards, and we never feel our own faults so keenly as when we see them exaggerated in others. 'i conclude in haste, for i have written too long a letter; but it is because there was much to answer in yours. it interested me. i could not help wishing to tell you how nearly i agreed with you.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bell.' to w. s. williams '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--your note was very welcome. i purposely impose on myself the restraint of writing to you seldom now, because i know but too well my letters cannot be cheering. yet i confess i am glad when the post brings me a letter: it reminds me that if the sun of action and life does not shine on us, it yet beams full on other parts of the world--and i like the recollection. 'i am not going to complain. anne has indeed suffered much at intervals since i last wrote to you--frost and east wind have had their effect. she has passed nights of sleeplessness and pain, and days of depression and languor which nothing could cheer--but still, with the return of genial weather she revives. i cannot perceive that she is feebler now than she was a month ago, though that is not saying much. it proves, however, that no rapid process of destruction is going on in her frame, and keeps alive a hope that with the renovating aid of summer she may yet be spared a long time. 'what you tell me of mr. lewes seems to me highly characteristic. how sanguine, versatile, and self-confident must that man be who can with ease exchange the quiet sphere of the author for the bustling one of the actor! i heartily wish him success; and, in happier times, there are few things i should have relished more than an opportunity of seeing him in his new character. 'the cornhill books are still our welcome and congenial resource when anne is well enough to enjoy reading. carlyle's _miscellanies_ interest me greatly. we have read _the emigrant family_. the characters in the work are good, full of quiet truth and nature, and the local colouring is excellent; yet i can hardly call it a good novel. reflective, truth-loving, and even elevated as is alexander harris's mind, i should say he scarcely possesses the creative faculty in sufficient vigour to excel as a writer of fiction. he _creates_ nothing--he only copies. his characters are portraits--servilely accurate; whatever is at all ideal is not original. _the testimony to the truth_ is a better book than any tale he can write will ever be. am i too dogmatical in saying this? 'anne thanks you sincerely for the kind interest you take in her welfare, and both she and i beg to express our sense of mrs. williams's good wishes, which you mentioned in a former letter. we are grateful, too, to mr. smith and to all who offer us the sympathy of friendship. 'whenever you can write with pleasure to yourself, remember currer bell is glad to hear from you, and he will make his letters as little dreary as he can in reply.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' it was always a great trouble to miss wheelwright, whose friendship, it will be remembered, she had made in brussels, that charlotte was monopolised by the smiths on her rare visits to london, but she frequently came to call at lower phillimore place. to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, keighley, _december_ _th_, . 'my dear laetitia,--i have just time to save the post by writing a brief note. i reached home safely on saturday afternoon, and, i am thankful to say, found papa quite well. 'the evening after i left you passed better than i expected. thanks to my substantial lunch and cheering cup of coffee, i was able to wait the eight o'clock dinner with complete resignation, and to endure its length quite courageously, nor was i too much exhausted to converse; and of this i was glad, for otherwise i know my kind host and hostess would have been much disappointed. there were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides mr. smith, but of these, five were critics--a formidable band, including the literary rhadamanthi of the _times_, the _athenaeum_, the _examiner_, the _spectator_, and the _atlas_: men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive. i did not know how much their presence and conversation had excited me till they were gone, and then reaction commenced. when i had retired for the night i wished to sleep; the effort to do so was vain--i could not close my eyes. night passed, morning came, and i rose without having known a moment's slumber. so utterly worn out was i when i got to derby, that i was obliged to stay there all night. 'the post is going. give my affectionate love to your mamma, emily, fanny, and sarah anne. remember me respectfully to your papa, and--believe me, dear laetitia, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' miss wheelwright's other sisters well remember certain episodes in connection with these london visits. they recall charlotte's anxiety and trepidation at the prospect of meeting thackeray. they recollect her simple, dainty dress, her shy demeanour, her absolutely unspoiled character. they tell me it was in the _illustrated london news_, about the time of the publication of _shirley_, that they first learnt that currer bell and charlotte bronte were one. they would, however, have known that _shirley_ was by a brussels pupil, they declared, from the absolute resemblance of hortense moore to one of their governesses--mlle. hausse. at the end of miss bronte and miss martineau became acquainted. charlotte's admiration for her more strong-minded sister writer was at first profound. to james taylor '_january_ _st_, . 'my dear sir,--i am sorry there should have occurred an irregularity in the transmission of the papers; it has been owing to my absence from home. i trust the interruption has occasioned no inconvenience. your last letter evinced such a sincere and discriminating admiration for dr. arnold, that perhaps you will not be wholly uninterested in hearing that during my late visit to miss martineau i saw much more of fox how and its inmates, and daily admired, in the widow and children of one of the greatest and best men of his time, the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing. of my kind hostess herself i cannot speak in terms too high. without being able to share all her opinions, philosophical, political, or religious, without adopting her theories, i yet find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency, benevolence, perseverance in her practice such as wins the sincerest esteem and affection. she is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life--than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. she seems to me the benefactress of ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. the government of her household is admirably administered; all she does is well done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest female occupation. no sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under her rule, and yet she is not over strict nor too rigidly exacting; her servants and her poor neighbours love as well as respect her. 'i must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much about her, merely because my own mind is just now deeply impressed with what i have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth. faults she has, but to me they appear very trivial weighed in the balance against her excellencies. 'with every good wish of the season,--i am, my dear sir, yours very sincerely, 'c. bronte.' meanwhile the excitement which _shirley_ was exciting in currer bell's home circle was not confined to the curates. here is a letter which canon heald (cyril hall) wrote at this time:-- to miss ellen nussey 'birstall, near leeds, ' _th_ _january_ . 'dear ellen,--fame says you are on a visit with the renowned currer bell, the "great unknown" of the present day. the celebrated _shirley_ has just found its way hither. and as one always reads a book with more interest when one has a correct insight into the writer's designs, i write to ask a favour, which i ought not to be regarded presumptuous in saying that i think i have a species of claim to ask, on the ground of a sort of "poetical justice." the interpretation of this enigma is, that the story goes that either i or my father, i do not exactly know which, are part of "currer bell's" stock-in-trade, under the title of mr. hall, in that mr. hall is represented as black, bilious, and of dismal aspect, stooping a trifle, and indulging a little now and then in the indigenous dialect. this seems to sit very well on your humble servant--other traits do better for my good father than myself. however, though i had no idea that i should be made a means to amuse the public, currer bell is perfectly welcome to what she can make of so unpromising a subject. but i think _i have a fair claim in return to be let into the secret of the company i have got into_. some of them are good enough to tell, and need no oedipus to solve the riddle. i can tabulate, for instance, the yorke family for the taylors, mr. moore--mr. cartwright, and mr. helstone is clearly meant for mr. robertson, though the authoress has evidently got her idea of his character through an unfavourable medium, and does not understand the full value of one of the most admirable characters i ever knew or expect to know. may thinks she descries cecilia crowther and miss johnston (afterwards mrs. westerman) in two old maids. 'now pray get us a full light on all other names and localities that are adumbrated in this said _shirley_. when some of the prominent characters will be recognised by every one who knows our quarters, there can be no harm in letting one know who may be intended by the rest. and, if necessary, i will bear currer bell harmless, and not let the world know that i have my intelligence from head-quarters. as i said before, i repeat now, that as i or mine are part of the stock-in-trade, i think i have an equitable claim to this intelligence, by way of my dividend. mary and harriet wish also to get at this information; and the latter at all events seems to have her own peculiar claim, as fame says she is "in the book" too. one had need "walk . . . warily in these dangerous days," when, as burns (is it not he?) says-- 'a chield's among you taking notes, and faith he'll prent it.'-- 'yours sincerely, 'w. m. heald. 'mary and harriet unite with me in the best wishes of the season to you and c--- b---. pray give my best respects to mr. bronte also, who may have some slight remembrance of me as a child. i just remember him when at hartshead.' { } to w. s. williams '_february_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have despatched to-day a parcel containing _the caxtons_, macaulay's _essays_, _humboldt's letters_, and such other of the books as i have read, packed with a picturesque irregularity well calculated to excite the envy and admiration of your skilful functionary in cornhill. by-the-bye, he ought to be careful of the few pins stuck in here and there, as he might find them useful at a future day, in case of having more bonnets to pack for the east indies. whenever you send me a new supply of books, may i request that you will have the goodness to include one or two of miss austen's. i am often asked whether i have read them, and i excite amazement by replying in the negative. i have read none except _pride and prejudice_. miss martineau mentioned _persuasion_ as the best. 'thank you for your account of the _first performance_. it was cheering and pleasant to read it, for in your animated description i seemed to realise the scene; your criticism also enables me to form some idea of the play. lewes is a strange being. i always regret that i did not see him when in london. he seems to me clever, sharp, and coarse; i used to think him sagacious, but i believe now he is no more than shrewd, for i have observed once or twice that he brings forward as grand discoveries of his own, information he has casually received from others--true sagacity disdains little tricks of this sort. but though lewes has many smart and some deserving points about him, he has nothing truly great; and nothing truly great, i should think, will he ever produce. yet he merits just such successes as the one you describe--triumphs public, brief, and noisy. notoriety suits lewes. fame--were it possible that he could achieve her--would be a thing uncongenial to him: he could not wait for the solemn blast of her trumpet, sounding long, and slowly waxing louder. 'i always like your way of mentioning mr. smith, because my own opinion of him concurs with yours; and it is as pleasant to have a favourable impression of character confirmed, as it is painful to see it dispelled. i am sure he possesses a fine nature, and i trust the selfishness of the world and the hard habits of business, though they may and must modify him disposition, will never quite spoil it. 'can you give me any information respecting sheridan knowles? a few lines received from him lately, and a present of his _george lovel_, induce me to ask the question. of course i am aware that he is a dramatic writer of eminence, but do you know anything about him as a man? 'i believe both _shirley_ and _jane eyre_ are being a good deal read in the north just now; but i only hear fitful rumours from time to time. i ask nothing, and my life of anchorite seclusion shuts out all bearers of tidings. one or two curiosity-hunter have made their way to haworth parsonage, but our rude hill and rugged neighbourhood will, i doubt not, form a sufficient barrier to the frequent repetition of such visits.--believe me, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' the most permanent friend among the curiosity-hunters, was sir james kay-shuttleworth, { } who came a month later to haworth. to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i scribble you a line in haste to tell you of my proceedings. various folks are beginning to come boring to haworth, on the wise errand of seeing the scenery described in _jane eyre_ and _shirley_; amongst others, sir j. k. shuttleworth and lady s. have persisted in coming; they were here on friday. the baronet looks in vigorous health; he scarcely appears more than thirty-five, but he says he is forty-four. lady shuttleworth is rather handsome, and still young. they were both quite unpretending. when here they again urged me to visit them. papa took their side at once--would not hear of my refusing. i must go--this left me without plea or defence. i consented to go for three days. they wanted me to return with them in the carriage, but i pleaded off till to-morrow. i wish it was well over. 'if all be well i shall be able to write more about them when i come back. sir j. is very courtly--fine-looking; i wish he may be as sincere as he is polished.--in haste, yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to w. s. williams '_march_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i found your letter with several others awaiting me on my return home from a brief stay in lancashire. the mourning border alarmed me much. i feared that dread visitant, before whose coming every household trembles, had invaded your hearth and taken from you perhaps a child, perhaps something dearer still. the loss you have actually sustained is painful, but so much _less_ painful than what i had anticipated, that to read your letter was to be greatly relieved. still, i know what mrs. williams will feel. we can have but one father, but one mother, and when either is gone, we have lost what can never be replaced. offer her, under this affliction, my sincere sympathy. i can well imagine the cloud these sad tidings would cast over your young cheerful family. poor little dick's exclamation and burst of grief are most naive and natural; he felt the sorrow of a child--a keen, but, happily, a transient pang. time will, i trust, ere long restore your own and your wife's serenity and your children's cheerfulness. 'i mentioned, i think, that we had one or two visitors at haworth lately; amongst them were sir james kay-shuttleworth and his lady. before departing they exacted a promise that i would visit them at gawthorpe hall, their residence on the borders of east lancashire. i went reluctantly, for it is always a difficult and painful thing to me to meet the advances of people whose kindness i am in no position to repay. sir james is a man of polished manners, with clear intellect and highly cultivated mind. on the whole, i got on very well with him. 'his health is just now somewhat broken by his severe official labours; and the quiet drives to old ruins and old halls situate amongst older hills and woods, the dialogues (perhaps i should rather say monologues, for i listened far more than i talked) by the fireside in his antique oak-panelled drawing-room, while they suited him, did not too much oppress and exhaust me. the house, too, is very much to my taste, near three centuries old, grey, stately, and picturesque. on the whole, now that the visit is over, i do not regret having paid it. the worst of it is that there is now some menace hanging over my head of an invitation to go to them in london during the season--this, which would doubtless be a great enjoyment to some people, is a perfect terror to me. i should highly prize the advantages to be gained in an extended range of observation, but i tremble at the thought of the price i must necessarily pay in mental distress and physical wear and tear. but you shall have no more of my confessions--to you they will appear folly.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i have got home again, and now that the visit is over, i am, as usual, glad i have been; not that i could have endured to prolong it: a few days at once, in an utterly strange place, amongst utterly strange faces, is quite enough for me. 'when the train stopped at burnley, i found sir james waiting for me. a drive of about three miles brought us to the gates of gawthorpe, and after passing up a somewhat desolate avenue, there towered the hall--grey, antique, castellated, and stately--before me. it is years old, and, within as without, is a model of old english architecture. the arms and the strange crest of the shuttleworths are carved on the oak pannelling of each room. they are not a parvenue family, but date from the days of richard iii. this part of lancashire seems rather remarkable for its houses of ancient race. the townleys, who live near, go back to the conquest. 'the people, however, were of still more interest to me than the house. lady shuttleworth is a little woman, thirty-two years old, with a pretty, smooth, lively face. of pretension to aristocratic airs she may be entirely acquitted; of frankness, good-humour, and activity she has enough; truth obliges me to add, that, as it seems to me, grace, dignity, fine feeling were not in the inventory of her qualities. these last are precisely what her husband possesses. in manner he can be gracious and dignified; his tastes and feelings are capable of elevation; frank he is not, but, on the contrary, politic; he calls himself a man of the world and knows the world's ways; courtly and affable in some points of view, he is strict and rigorous in others. in him high mental cultivation is combined with an extended range of observation, and thoroughly practical views and habits. his nerves are naturally acutely sensitive, and the present very critical state of his health has exaggerated sensitiveness into irritability. his wife is of a temperament precisely suited to nurse him and wait on him; if her sensations were more delicate and acute she would not do half so well. they get on perfectly together. the children--there are four of them--are all fine children in their way. they have a young german lady as governess--a quiet, well-instructed, interesting girl, whom i took to at once, and, in my heart, liked better than anything else in the house. she also instinctively took to me. she is very well treated for a governess, but wore the usual pale, despondent look of her class. she told me she was home-sick, and she looked so. 'i have received the parcel containing the cushion and all the etcetera, for which i thank you very much. i suppose i must begin with the group of flowers; i don't know how i shall manage it, but i shall try. i have a good number of letters to answer--from mr. smith, from mr. williams, from thornton hunt, laetitia wheelwright, harriet dyson--and so i must bid you good-bye for the present. write to me soon. the brief absence from home, though in some respects trying and painful in itself, has, i think, given me a little better tone of spirit. all through this month of february i have had a crushing time of it. i could not escape from or rise above certain most mournful recollections--the last few days, the sufferings, the remembered words, most sorrowful to me, of those who, faith assures me, are now happy. at evening and bed-time such thoughts would haunt me, bringing a weary heartache. good-bye, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--my visit is again postponed. sir james shuttleworth, i am sorry to say, is most seriously ill. two physicians are in attendance twice a day, and company and conversation, even with his own relatives, are prohibited as too exciting. notwithstanding this, he has written two notes to me himself, claiming a promise that i will wait till he is better, and not allow any one else "to introduce me" as he says, "into the oceanic life of london." sincerely sorry as i was for him, i could not help smiling at this sentence. but i shall willingly promise. i know something of him, and like part, at least, of what i do know. i do not feel in the least tempted to change him for another. his sufferings are very great. i trust and hope god will be pleased to spare his mind. i have just got a note informing me that he is something better; but, of course, he will vary. lady shuttleworth is much, much to be pitied too; his nights, it seems, are most distressing.--good-bye, dear nell. write soon to 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park gardens, _june_ _rd_, . 'dear ellen,--i came to london last thursday. i am staying at mrs. smith's, who has changed her residence, as the address will show. a good deal of writing backwards and forwards, persuasion, etc., took place before this step was resolved on; but at last i explained to sir james that i had some little matters of business to transact, and that i should stay quietly at my publisher's. he has called twice, and lady shuttleworth once; each of them alone. he is in a fearfully nervous state. to my great horror he talks of my going with them to hampton court, windsor, etc. god knows how i shall get on. i perfectly dread it. 'here i feel very comfortable. mrs. smith treats me with a serene, equable kindness which just suits me. her son is, as before, genial and kindly. i have seen very few persons, and am not likely to see many, as the agreement was that i was to be very quiet. we have been to the exhibition of the royal academy, to the opera, and the zoological gardens. the weather is splendid. i shall not stay longer than a fortnight in london. the feverishness and exhaustion beset me somewhat, but not quite so badly as before, as indeed i have not yet been so much tried. i hope you will write soon and tell me how you are getting on. give my regards to all.--yours faithfully, 'c. b.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park gardens, _june_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i was very glad to get your letter this morning, and still more glad to learn that your health continues in some degree to improve. i fear you will feel the present weather somewhat debilitating, at least if it is as warm in yorkshire as in london. i cannot help grudging these fine days on account of the roofing of the house. it is a great pity the workmen were not prepared to begin a week ago. 'since i wrote i have been to the opera; to the exhibition of the royal academy, where there were some fine paintings, especially a large one by landseer of the duke of wellington on the field of waterloo, and a grand, wonderful picture of martin's from campbell's poem of the "last man," showing the red sun fading out of the sky, and all the soil of the foreground made up of bones and skulls. the secretary of the zoological society also sent me an honorary ticket of admission to their gardens, which i wish you could see. there are animals from all parts of the world inclosed in great cages in the open air amongst trees and shrubs--lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, numberless monkies, camels, five or six cameleopards, a young hippopotamus with an egyptian for its keeper; birds of all kinds--eagles, ostriches, a pair of great condors from the andes, strange ducks and water-fowl which seem very happy and comfortable, and build their nests amongst the reeds and sedges of the lakes where they are kept. some of the american birds make inexpressible noises. 'there are also all sorts of living snakes and lizards in cages, some great ceylon toads not much smaller than flossy, some large foreign rats nearly as large and fierce as little bull-dogs. the most ferocious and deadly-looking things in the place were these rats, a laughing hyena (which every now and then uttered a hideous peal of laughter such as a score of maniacs might produce) and a cobra di capello snake. i think this snake was the worst of all: it had the eyes and face of a fiend, and darted out its barbed tongue sharply and incessantly. 'i am glad to hear that tabby and martha are pretty well. remember me to them, and--believe me, dear papa, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte. 'i hope you don't care for the notice in _sharpe's magazine_; it does not disturb me in the least. mr. smith says it is of no consequence whatever in a literary sense. sharpe, the proprietor, was an apprentice of mr. smith's father.' to miss ellen nussey ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park gardens, _june_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i am leaving london, if all be well, on tuesday, and shall be very glad to come to you for a few days, if that arrangement still remains convenient to you. i intend to start at nine o'clock a.m. by the express train, which arrives in leeds thirty-five minutes past two. i should then be at batley about four in the afternoon. would that suit? 'my london visit has much surpassed my expectations this time; i have suffered less and enjoyed more than before. rather a trying termination yet remains to me. mrs. smith's youngest son is at school in scotland, and george, her eldest, is going to fetch him home for the vacation. the other evening he announced his intention of taking one of his sisters with him, and proposed that miss bronte should go down to edinburgh and join them there, and see that city and its suburbs. i concluded he was joking, laughed and declined; however, it seems he was in earnest. the thing appearing to me perfectly out of the question, i still refused. mrs. smith did not favour it; you may easily fancy how she helped me to sustain my opposition, but her worthy son only waxed more determined. his mother is master of the house, but he is master of his mother. this morning she came and entreated me to go. "george wished it so much"; he had begged her to use her influence, etc., etc. now i believe that george and i understand each other very well, and respect each other very sincerely. we both know the wide breach time has made between us; we do not embarrass each other, or very rarely; my six or eight years of seniority, to say nothing of lack of all pretension to beauty, etc., are a perfect safeguard. i should not in the least fear to go with him to china. i like to see him pleased, i greatly _dis_like to ruffle and disappoint him, so he shall have his mind; and if all be well, i mean to join him in edinburgh after i shall have spent a few days with you. with his buoyant animal spirits and youthful vigour he will make severe demands on my muscles and nerves, but i daresay i shall get through somehow, and then perhaps come back to rest a few days with you before i go home. with kind regards to all at brookroyd, your guests included,--i am, dear ellen, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. 'write by return of post.' to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'my dear laetitia,--i promised to write to you when i should have returned home. returned home i am, but you may conceive that many, many matters solicit attention and demand arrangement in a house which has lately been turned topsy-turvy in the operation of unroofing. drawers and cupboards must wait a moment, however, while i fulfil my promise, though it is imperatively necessary that this fulfilment should be achieved with brevity. 'my stay in scotland was short, and what i saw was chiefly comprised in edinburgh and the neighbourhood, in abbotsford and melrose, for i was obliged to relinquish my first intention of going from glasgow to oban and thence through a portion of the highlands. but though the time was brief, and the view of objects limited, i found such a charm of situation, association, and circumstances that i think the enjoyment experienced in that little space equalled in degree and excelled in kind all which london yielded during a month's sojourn. edinburgh compared to london is like a vivid page of history compared to a huge dull treatise on political economy; and as to melrose and abbotsford, the very names possess music and magic. 'i am thankful to say that on my return home i found papa pretty well. full often had i thought of him when i was far away; and deeply sad as it is on many accounts to come back to this old house, yet i was glad to be with him once more. 'you were proposing, i remember, to go into the country; i trust you are there now and enjoying this fine day in some scene where the air will not be tainted, nor the sunshine dimmed, by london smoke. if your papa, mamma, or any of your sisters are within reach, give them my kindest remembrances--if not, save such remembrances till you see them.--believe me, my dear laetitia, yours hurriedly but faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte 'ambleside, _august_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i think i shall not come home till thursday. if all be well i shall leave here on monday and spend a day or two with ellen nussey. i have enjoyed my visit exceedingly. sir j. k. shuttleworth has called several times and taken me out in his carriage. he seems very truly friendly; but, i am sorry to say, he looks pale and very much wasted. i greatly fear he will not live very long unless some change for the better soon takes place. lady s. is ill too, and cannot go out. i have seen a good deal of dr. arnold's family, and like them much. as to miss martineau, i admire her and wonder at her more than i can say. her powers of labour, of exercise, and social cheerfulness are beyond my comprehension. in spite of the unceasing activity of her colossal intellect she enjoys robust health. she is a taller, larger, and more strongly made woman than i had imagined from that first interview with her. she is very kind to me, though she must think i am a very insignificant person compared to herself. she has just been into the room to show me a chapter of her history which she is now writing, relating to the duke of wellington's character and his proceedings in the peninsula. she wanted an opinion on it, and i was happy to be able to give a very approving one. she seems to understand and do him justice. 'you must not direct any more letters here as they will not reach me after to-day. hoping, dear papa, that you are well, and with kind regards to tabby and martha,--i am, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to w. s. williams '_october_ _nd_, . 'my dear sir,--i have to thank you for the care and kindness with which you have assisted me throughout in correcting these _remains_. 'whether, when they are published, they will appear to others as they do to me, i cannot tell. i hope not. and indeed i suppose what to me is bitter pain will only be soft pathos to the general public. 'miss martineau has several times lately asked me to go and see her; and though this is a dreary season for travelling northward, i think if papa continues pretty well i shall go in a week or two. i feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude. i had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what could be derived from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce. it is not so. even intellect, even imagination, will not dispense with the ray of domestic cheerfulness, with the gentle spur of family discussion. late in the evenings, and all through the nights, i fall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the past--to memory; and memory is both sad and relentless. this will never do, and will produce no good. i tell you this that you may check false anticipations. you cannot help me, and must not trouble yourself in any shape to sympathise with me. it is my cup, and i must drink it, as others drink theirs.--yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' among miss bronte's papers i find the following letter to miss martineau, written with a not unnatural resentment after the publication of a severe critique of _shirley_. to miss harriet martineau. 'my dear miss martineau,--i think i best show my sense of the tone and feeling of your last, by immediate compliance with the wish you express that i should send your letter. i inclose it, and have marked with red ink the passage which struck me dumb. all the rest is fair, right, worthy of you, but i protest against this passage; and were i brought up before the bar of all the critics in england, to such a charge i should respond, "not guilty." 'i know what _love_ is as i understand it; and if man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then is there nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish in this earth, as i comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth, and disinterestedness.--yours sincerely, 'c. b. 'to differ from you gives me keen pain.' to james taylor, cornhill '_november_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--mrs. arnold seemed an amiable, and must once have been a very pretty, woman; her daughter i liked much. there was present also a son of chevalier bunsen, with his wife, or rather bride. i had not then read dr. arnold's life--otherwise, the visit would have interested me even more than it actually did. 'mr. williams told me (if i mistake not) that you had recently visited the lake country. i trust you enjoyed your excursion, and that our english lakes did not suffer too much by comparison in your memory with the scottish lochs.--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'ambleside, _december_ _st_, . 'dear ellen,--i have managed to get off going to sir j. k. shuttleworth's by a promise to come some other time. i thought i really should like to spend two or three days with you before going home; therefore, if it is not inconvenient for you, i will come on monday and stay till thursday. i shall be at bradford (d.v.) at ten minutes past two, monday afternoon, and can take a cab at the station forward to birstall. i have truly enjoyed my visit. i have seen a good many people, and all have been so marvellously kind; not the least so the family of dr. arnold. miss martineau i relish inexpressibly. sir james has been almost every day to take me a drive. i begin to admit in my own mind that he is sincerely benignant to me. i grieve to say he looks to me as if wasting away. lady shuttleworth is ill. she cannot go out, and i have not seen her. till we meet, good-bye. 'c. bronte.' it was during this visit to ambleside that charlotte bronte and matthew arnold met. 'at seven,' writes mr. arnold from fox how (december , ), 'came miss martineau and miss bronte (jane eyre); talked to miss martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the church of england, and, wretched man that i am, promised to go and see her cow-keeping miracles { a} to-morrow--i, who hardly know a cow from a sheep. i talked to miss bronte (past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes, though) of her curates, of french novels, and her education in a school at brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at half-past nine, and came to talk to you.' { b} by the light of this 'impression,' it is not a little interesting to see what miss bronte, 'past thirty and plain,' thought of mr. matthew arnold! to james taylor, cornhill, '_january_ _th_, . 'my dear sir,--i fancy the imperfect way in which my last note was expressed must have led you into an error, and that you must have applied to mrs. arnold the remarks i intended for miss martineau. i remember whilst writing about "my hostess" i was sensible to some obscurity in the term; permit me now to explain that it referred to miss martineau. 'mrs. arnold is, indeed, as i judge from my own observations no less than from the unanimous testimony of all who really know her, a good and amiable woman, but the intellectual is not her forte, and she has no pretensions to power or completeness of character. the same remark, i think, applies to her daughters. you admire in them the kindliest feeling towards each other and their fellow-creatures, and they offer in their home circle a beautiful example of family unity, and of that refinement which is sure to spring thence; but when the conversation turns on literature or any subject that offers a test for the intellect, you usually felt that their opinions were rather imitative than original, rather sentimental than sound. those who have only seen mrs. arnold once will necessarily, i think, judge of her unfavourably; her manner on introduction disappointed me sensibly, as lacking that genuineness and simplicity one seemed to have a right to expect in the chosen life-companion of dr. arnold. on my remarking as much to mrs. gaskell and sir j. k. shuttleworth, i was told for my consolation it was a "conventional manner," but that it vanished on closer acquaintance; fortunately this last assurance proved true. it is observable that matthew arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother's defect. striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeases from its seeming foppery. i own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of dr. arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. i was told, however, that "mr. arnold improved upon acquaintance." so it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational acquirements, displaced superficial affectations. i was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation. most unfortunate for him, doubtless, has been the untimely loss of his father. 'my visit to westmoreland has certainly done me good. physically, i was not ill before i went there, but my mind had undergone some painful laceration. in the course of looking over my sister's papers, mementos, and memoranda, that would have been nothing to others, conveyed for me so keen a sting. near at hand there was no means of lightening or effacing the sad impression by refreshing social intercourse; from my father, of course, my sole care was to conceal it--age demanding the same forbearance as infancy in the communication of grief. continuous solitude grew more than i could bear, and, to speak truth, i was glad of a change. you will say that we ought to have power in ourselves either to bear circumstances or to bend them. true, we should do our best to this end, but sometimes our best is unavailing. however, i am better now, and most thankful for the respite. 'the interest you so kindly express in my sister's works touches me home. thank you for it, especially as i do not believe you would speak otherwise than sincerely. the only notices that i have seen of the new edition of _wuthering heights_ were those in the _examiner_, the _leader_, and the _athenaeum_. that in the _athenaeum_ somehow gave me pleasure: it is quiet but respectful--so i thought, at least. 'you asked whether miss martineau made me a convert to mesmerism? scarcely; yet i heard miracles of its efficacy and could hardly discredit the whole of what was told me. i even underwent a personal experiment; and though the result was not absolutely clear, it was inferred that in time i should prove an excellent subject. 'the question of mesmerism will be discussed with little reserve, i believe, in a forthcoming work of miss martineau's, and i have some painful anticipations of the manner in which other subjects, offering less legitimate ground for speculation, will be handled. 'you mention the _leader_; what do you think of it? i have been asked to contribute; but though i respect the spirit of fairness and courtesy in which it is on the whole conducted, its principles on some points are such that i have hitherto shrunk from the thought of seeing my name in its columns. 'thanking you for your good wishes,--i am, my dear sir, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear laetitia,--a spare moment must and shall be made for you, no matter how many letters i have to write (and just now there is an influx). in reply to your kind inquiries, i have to say that my stay in london and excursion to scotland did me good--much good at the time; but my health was again somewhat sharply tried at the close of autumn, and i lost in some days of indisposition the additional flesh and strength i had previously gained. this resulted from the painful task of looking over letters and papers belonging to my sisters. many little mementos and memoranda conspired to make an impression inexpressibly sad, which solitude deepened and fostered till i grew ill. a brief trip to westmoreland has, however, i am thankful to say, revived me again, and the circumstance of papa being just now in good health and spirits gives me many causes for gratitude. when we have but one precious thing left we think much of it. 'i have been staying a short time with miss martineau. as you may imagine, the visit proved one of no common interest. she is certainly a woman of wonderful endowments, both intellectual and physical, and though i share few of her opinions, and regard her as fallible on certain points of judgment, i must still accord her my sincerest esteem. the manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration, while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude. 'your description of the magician paxton's crystal palace is quite graphic. whether i shall see it or not i don't know. london will be so dreadfully crowded and busy this season, i feel a dread of going there. 'compelled to break off, i have only time to offer my kindest remembrances to your whole circle, and my love to yourself.--yours ever, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte ' gloucester terrace, hyde park, 'london, _june_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i write a line in haste to tell you that i find they will not let me leave london till next tuesday; and as i have promised to spend a day or two with mrs. gaskell on my way home, it will probably be friday or saturday in next week before i return to haworth. martha will thus have a few days more time, and must not hurry or overwork herself. yesterday i saw cardinal wiseman and heard him speak. it was at a meeting for the roman catholic society of st. vincent de paul; the cardinal presided. he is a big portly man something of the shape of mr. morgan; he has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. he came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite. he was dressed in black like a bishop or dean in plain clothes, but wore scarlet gloves and a brilliant scarlet waistcoat. a bevy of inferior priests surrounded him, many of them very dark-looking and sinister men. the cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting methodist preacher. the audience seemed to look up to him as to a god. a spirit of the hottest zeal pervaded the whole meeting. i was told afterwards that except myself and the person who accompanied me there was not a single protestant present. all the speeches turned on the necessity of straining every nerve to make converts to popery. it is in such a scene that one feels what the catholics are doing. most persevering and enthusiastic are they in their work! let protestants look to it. it cheered me much to hear that you continue pretty well. take every care of yourself. remember me kindly to tabby and martha, also to mr. nicholls, and--believe me, dear papa, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i shall have to stay in london a few days longer than i intended. sir j. k. shuttleworth has found out that i am here. i have some trouble in warding off his wish that i should go directly to his house and take up my quarters there, but mrs. smith helped me, and i got off with promising to spend a day. i am engaged to spend a day or two with mrs. gaskell on my way home, and could not put her off, as she is going away for a portion of the summer. lady shuttleworth looks very delicate. papa is now very desirous i should come home; and when i have as quickly as possible paid my debts of engagements, home i must go. next tuesday i go to manchester for two days. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey ' gloucester terrace, 'hyde park, _june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i cannot now leave london till friday. to-morrow is mr. smith's only holiday. mr. taylor's departure leaves him loaded with work. more than once since i came he has been kept in the city till three in the morning. he wants to take us all to richmond, and i promised last week i would stay and go with him, his mother, and sisters. i go to mrs. gaskell's on friday.--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte, haworth, yorks ' gloucester terrace, '_june_ _th_, . 'dear papa,--i have not yet been able to get away from london, but if all be well i shall go to-morrow, stay two days with mrs. gaskell at manchester, and return home on monday th _without fail_. during this last week or ten days i have seen many things, some of them very interesting, and have also been in much better health than i was during the first fortnight of my stay in london. sir james and lady shuttleworth have really been very kind, and most scrupulously attentive. they desire their regards to you, and send all manner of civil messages. the marquis of westminster and the earl of ellesmere each sent me an order to see their private collection of pictures, which i enjoyed very much. mr. rogers, the patriarch-poet, now eighty-seven years old, invited me to breakfast with him. his breakfasts, you must understand, are celebrated throughout europe for their peculiar refinement and taste. he never admits at that meal more than four persons to his table: himself and three guests. the morning i was there i met lord glenelg and mrs. davenport, a relation of lady shuttleworth's, and a very beautiful and fashionable woman. the visit was very interesting; i was glad that i had paid it after it was over. an attention that pleased and surprised me more i think than any other was the circumstance of sir david brewster, who is one of the first scientific men of his day, coming to take me over the crystal palace and pointing out and explaining the most remarkable curiosities. you will know, dear papa, that i do not mention those things to boast of them, but merely because i think they will give you pleasure. nobody, i find, thinks the worse of me for avoiding publicity and declining to go to large parties, and everybody seems truly courteous and respectful, a mode of behaviour which makes me grateful, as it ought to do. good-bye till monday. give my best regards to mr. nicholls, tabby, and martha, and--believe me your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' chapter xvii: the rev. arthur bell nicholls without the kindly assistance of mr. arthur bell nicholls, this book could not have been written, and i might therefore be supposed to guide my pen with appalling discretion in treating of the married life of charlotte bronte. there are, however, no painful secrets to reveal, no skeletons to lay bare. mr. nicholls's story is a very simple one; and that it is entirely creditable to him, there is abundant evidence. amid the full discussion to which the lives of the brontes have necessarily been subjected through their ever-continuous fame, it was perhaps inevitable that a contrary opinion should gain ground. many of mr. nicholls's relatives in his own country have frequently sighed over the perverted statements which have obtained currency. 'it is cruel that your uncle arthur, the best of men, as we know, should be thus treated,' was the comment of mr. nicholls's brother to his daughter after reading an unfriendly article concerning charlotte's husband. yet it was not unnatural that such an estimate should get abroad; and i may frankly admit that until i met mr. nicholls i believed that charlotte bronte's marriage had been an unhappy one--an opinion gathered partly from mrs. gaskell, partly from current tradition in yorkshire. mrs. gaskell, in fact, did not like mr. nicholls, and there were those with whom she came in contact while writing miss bronte's life who were eager to fan that feeling in the usually kindly biographer. mr. nicholls himself did not work in the direction of conciliation. he was, as we shall see, a scotchman, and scottish taciturnity brought to bear upon the genial and jovial yorkshire folk did not make for friendliness. further, he would not let mrs. gaskell 'edit' and change _the professor_, and here also he did wisely and well. he hated publicity, and above all things viewed the attempt to pierce the veil of his married life with almost morbid detestation. who shall say that he was not right, and that his retirement for more than forty years from the whole region of controversy has not abundantly justified itself? one at least of miss bronte's friends has been known in our day to complain bitterly of all the trouble to which she has been subjected by the ill-considered zeal of bronte enthusiasts. mr. nicholls has escaped all this by a judicious silence. now that forty years and more have passed since his wife's death, it cannot be inopportune to tell the public all that they can fairly ask to know. mr. nicholls was born in co. antrim in , but of scottish parents on both sides. he was left at the age of seven to the charge of an uncle--the rev. alan bell--who was headmaster of the royal school at banagher, in king's co. mr. nicholls afterwards entered trinity college, dublin, and it was thence that he went to haworth, his first curacy. he succeeded a fellow countryman, mr. peter augustus smith, in . the first impression we have of the new curate in charlotte's letters is scarcely more favourable than that of his predecessors. to miss ellen nussey '_october_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--we are getting on here the same as usual, only that branwell has been more than ordinarily troublesome and annoying of late; he leads papa a wretched life. mr. nicholls is returned just the same. i cannot for my life see those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered; his narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly. i fear he is indebted to your imagination for his hidden treasure.--yours, 'c. b.' to miss ellen nussey '_july_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--who gravely asked you whether miss bronte was not going to be married to her papa's curate? i scarcely need say that never was rumour more unfounded. a cold faraway sort of civility are the only terms on which i have ever been with mr. nicholls. i could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him even as a joke. it would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow curates for half a year to come. they regard me as an old maid, and i regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex. 'write to me again soon, whether you have anything particular to say or not. give my sincere love to your mother and sisters. 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i will just write a brief despatch to say that i received yours and that i was very glad to get it. i do not know when you have been so long without writing to me before. i had begun to imagine you were gone to your brother joshua's. 'papa continues to do very well. he read prayers twice in the church last sunday. next sunday he will have to take the whole duty of the three services himself, as mr. nicholls is in ireland. remember me to your mother and sisters. write as soon as you possibly can after you get to oundle. good luck go with you. 'c. bronte.' that scotch reticence held sway, and told against mr. nicholls for many a day to come. [picture: the rev. arthur bell nicholls] to miss ellen nussey '_october_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i have been expecting you to write to me; but as you don't do it, and as, moreover, you may possibly think it is my turn, and not yours, though on that point i am far from clear, i shall just send you one of my scrubby notes for the express purpose of eliciting a reply. anne was very much pleased with your letter; i presume she has answered it before now. i would fain hope that her health is a little stronger than it was, and her spirits a little better, but she leads much too sedentary a life, and is continually sitting stooping either over a book or over her desk. it is with difficulty we can prevail upon her to take a walk or induce her to converse. i look forward to next summer with the confident intention that she shall, if possible, make at least a brief sojourn at the sea-side. 'i am sorry i inoculated you with fears about the east wind; i did not feel the last blast so severely as i have often done. my sympathies were much awakened by the touching anecdote. did you salute your boy-messenger with a box on the ear the next time he came across you? i think i should have been strongly tempted to have done as much. mr. nicholls is not yet returned. i am sorry to say that many of the parishioners express a desire that he should not trouble himself to recross the channel. this is not the feeling that ought to exist between shepherd and flock. it is not such as is prevalent at birstall. it is not such as poor mr. weightman excited. 'give my best love to all of them, and--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' the next glimpse is more kindly. to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i cannot but be concerned to hear of your mother's illness; write again soon, if it be but a line, to tell me how she gets on. this shadow will, i trust and believe, be but a passing one, but it is a foretaste and warning of what _must come_ one day. let it prepare your mind, dear ellen, for that great trial which, if you live, it _must_ in the course of a few years be your lot to undergo. that cutting asunder of the ties of nature is the pain we most dread and which we are most certain to experience. lewes's letter made me laugh; i cannot respect him more for it. sir j. k. shuttleworth's letter did not make me laugh; he has written again since. i have received to-day a note from miss alexander, daughter, she says, of dr. alexander. do you know anything of her? mary taylor seems in good health and spirits, and in the way of doing well. i shall feel anxious to hear again soon. 'c. b. '_p.s._--mr. nicholls has finished reading _shirley_; he is delighted with it. john brown's wife seriously thought he had gone wrong in the head as she heard him giving vent to roars of laughter as he sat alone, clapping his hands and stamping on the floor. he would read all the scenes about the curates aloud to papa. he triumphed in his own character. { } what mr. grant will say is another thing. no matter.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _july_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--i hope you have taken no cold from your wretched journey home; you see you should have taken my advice and stayed till saturday. didn't i tell you i had a "presentiment" it would be better for you to do so? 'i am glad you found your mother pretty well. is she disposed to excuse the wretched petrified condition of the bilberry preserve, in consideration of the intent of the donor? it seems they had high company while you were away. you see what you lose by coming to haworth. no events here since your departure except a long letter from miss martineau. (she did not write the article on "woman" in the _westminster_; by the way, it is the production of a man, and one of the first philosophers and political economists and metaphysicians of the day.) { } item, the departure of mr. nicholls for ireland, and his inviting himself on the eve thereof to come and take a farewell tea; good, mild, uncontentious. item, a note from the stiff-like chap who called about the epitaph for his cousin. i inclose this--a finer gem in its way it would be difficult to conceive. you need not, however, be at the trouble of returning it. how are they at hunsworth yet? it is no use saying whether i am solitary or not; i drive on very well, and papa continues pretty well.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' i print the next letter here because, although it contains no reference to mr. nicholls, it has a bearing upon the letter following it. dr. wheelwright shared mr. bronte's infirmity of defective eyesight. to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, _april_ _th_, . 'dear laetitia,--your last letter gave me much concern. i had hoped you were long ere this restored to your usual health, and it both pained and surprised me to hear that you still suffer so much from debility. i cannot help thinking your constitution is naturally sound and healthy. can it be the air of london which disagrees with you? for myself, i struggled through the winter and the early part of spring often with great difficulty. my friend stayed with me a few days in the early part of january--she could not be spared longer. i was better during her visit, but had a relapse soon after she left me, which reduced my strength very much. it cannot be denied that the solitude of my position fearfully aggravated its other evils. some long, stormy days and nights there were when i felt such a craving for support and companionship as i cannot express. sleepless, i lay awake night after night; weak and unable to occupy myself, i sat in my chair day after day, the saddest memories my only company. it was a time i shall never forget, but god sent it and it must have been for the best. 'i am better now, and very grateful do i feel for the restoration of tolerable health; but, as if there was always to be some affliction, papa, who enjoyed wonderful health during the whole winter, is ailing with his spring attack of bronchitis. i earnestly trust it may pass over in the comparatively ameliorated form in which it has hitherto shown itself. 'let me not forget to answer your question about the cataract. tell your papa my father was seventy at the time he underwent an operation; he was most reluctant to try the experiment--could not believe that at his age and with his want of robust strength it would succeed. i was obliged to be very decided in the matter and to act entirely on my own responsibility. nearly six years have now elapsed since the cataract was extracted (it was not merely depressed). he has never once, during that time, regretted the step, and a day seldom passes that he does not express gratitude and pleasure at the restoration of that inestimable privilege of vision whose loss he once knew. 'i hope the next tidings you hear of your brother charles will be satisfactory for his parents' and sisters' sake as well as his own. your poor mamma has had many successive trials, and her uncomplaining resignation seems to offer us all an example worthy to be followed. remember me kindly to her, to your papa, and all your circle, and--believe me, with best wishes to yourself, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to rev. p. bronte, haworth, yorks 'cliff house, filey, _june_ _nd_, . 'dear papa,--thank you for your letter, which i was so glad to get that i think i must answer it by return of post. i had expected one yesterday, and was perhaps a little unreasonably anxious when disappointed, but the weather has been so very cold that i feared either you were ill or martha worse. i hope martha will take care of herself. i cannot help feeling a little uneasy about her. 'on the whole i get on very well here, but i have not bathed yet as i am told it is much too cold and too early in the season. the sea is very grand. yesterday it was a somewhat unusually high tide, and i stood about an hour on the cliffs yesterday afternoon watching the tumbling in of great tawny turbid waves, that made the whole shore white with foam and filled the air with a sound hollower and deeper than thunder. there are so very few visitors at filey yet that i and a few sea-birds and fishing-boats have often the whole expanse of sea, shore, and cliff to ourselves. when the tide is out the sands are wide, long, and smooth, and very pleasant to walk on. when the high tides are in, not a vestige of sand remains. i saw a great dog rush into the sea yesterday, and swim and bear up against the waves like a seal. i wonder what flossy would say to that. 'on sunday afternoon i went to a church which i should like mr. nicholls to see. it was certainly not more than thrice the length and breadth of our passage, floored with brick, the walls green with mould, the pews painted white, but the paint almost all worn off with time and decay. at one end there is a little gallery for the singers, and when these personages stood up to perform they all turned their backs upon the congregation, and the congregation turned _their_ backs on the pulpit and parson. the effect of this manoeuvre was so ludicrous, i could hardly help laughing; had mr. nicholls been there he certainly would have laughed out. looking up at the gallery and seeing only the broad backs of the singers presented to their audience was excessively grotesque. there is a well-meaning but utterly inactive clergyman at filey, and methodists flourish. 'i cannot help enjoying mr. butterfield's defeat; and yet in one sense this is a bad state of things, calculated to make working people both discontented and insubordinate. give my kind regards, dear papa, to mr. nicholls, tabby, and martha. charge martha to beware of draughts, and to get such help in her cleaning as she shall need. i hope you will continue well.--believe me, your affectionate daughter, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_december_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i return the note, which is highly characteristic, and not, i fear, of good omen for the comfort of your visit. there must be something wrong in herself as well as in her servants. i inclose another note which, taken in conjunction with the incident immediately preceding it, and with a long series of indications whose meaning i scarce ventured hitherto to interpret to myself, much less hint to any other, has left on my mind a feeling of deep concern. this note you will see is from mr. nicholls. 'i know not whether you have ever observed him specially when staying here. your perception is generally quick enough--_too_ quick, i have sometimes thought; yet as you never said anything, i restrained my own dim misgivings, which could not claim the sure guide of vision. what papa has seen or guessed i will not inquire, though i may conjecture. he has minutely noticed all mr. nicholls's low spirits, all his threats of expatriation, all his symptoms of impaired health--noticed them with little sympathy and much indirect sarcasm. on monday evening mr. nicholls was here to tea. i vaguely felt without clearly seeing, as without seeing i have felt for some time, the meaning of his constant looks, and strange, feverish restraint. after tea i withdrew to the dining-room as usual. as usual, mr. nicholls sat with papa till between eight and nine o'clock; i then heard him open the parlour door as if going. i expected the clash of the front door. he stopped in the passage; he tapped; like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. he entered; he stood before me. what his words were you can guess; his manner you can hardly realise, nor can i forget it. shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently, yet with difficulty, he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response. 'the spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like thus trembling, stirred, and overcome, gave me a kind of strange shock. he spoke of sufferings he had borne for months, of sufferings he could endure no longer, and craved leave for some hope. i could only entreat him to leave me then and promise a reply on the morrow. i asked him if he had spoken to papa. he said he dared not. i think i half led, half put him out of the room. when he was gone i immediately went to papa, and told him what had taken place. agitation and anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued; if i had _loved_ mr. nicholls, and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used, it would have transported me past my patience; as it was, my blood boiled with a sense of injustice. but papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with: the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord, and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot. i made haste to promise that mr. nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal. 'i wrote yesterday and got this note. there is no need to add to this statement any comment. papa's vehement antipathy to the bare thought of any one thinking of me as a wife, and mr. nicholls's distress, both give me pain. attachment to mr. nicholls you are aware i never entertained, but the poignant pity inspired by his state on monday evening, by the hurried revelation of his sufferings for many months, is something galling and irksome. that he cared something for me, and wanted me to care for him, i have long suspected, but i did not know the degree or strength of his feelings. dear nell, good-bye.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. 'i have letters from sir j. k. shuttleworth and miss martineau, but i cannot talk of them now.' with this letter we see the tragedy beginning. mr. bronte, with his daughter's fame ringing in his ears, thought she should do better than marry a curate with a hundred pounds per annum. for once, and for the only time in his life there is reason to believe, his passions were thoroughly aroused. it is to the honour of mr. nicholls, and says much for his magnanimity, that he has always maintained that mr. bronte was perfectly justified in the attitude he adopted. his present feeling for mr. bronte is one of unbounded respect and reverence, and the occasional unfriendly references to his father-in-law have pained him perhaps even more than when he has been himself the victim. 'attachment to mr. nicholls you are aware i never entertained.' a good deal has been made of this and other casual references of charlotte bronte to her slight affection for her future husband. martha brown, the servant, used in her latter days to say that charlotte would come into the kitchen and ask her if it was right to marry a man one did not entirely love--and martha brown's esteem for mr. nicholls was very great. but it is possible to make too much of all this. it is a commonplace of psychology to say that a woman's love is of slow growth. it is quite certain that charlotte bronte suffered much during this period of alienation and separation; that she alone secured mr. nicholls's return to haworth, after his temporary estrangement from mr. bronte; and finally, that the months of her married life, prior to her last illness, were the happiest she was destined to know. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear nell,--you may well ask, how is it? for i am sure i don't know. this business would seem to me like a dream, did not my reason tell me it has long been brewing. it puzzles me to comprehend how and whence comes this turbulence of feeling. 'you ask how papa demeans himself to mr. nicholls. i only wish you were here to see papa in his present mood: you would know something of him. he just treats him with a hardness not to be bent, and a contempt not to be propitiated. the two have had no interview as yet; all has been done by letter. papa wrote, i must say, a most cruel note to mr. nicholls on wednesday. in his state of mind and health (for the poor man is horrifying his landlady, martha's mother, by entirely rejecting his meals) i felt that the blow must be parried, and i thought it right to accompany the pitiless despatch by a line to the effect that, while mr. nicholls must never expect me to reciprocate the feeling he had expressed, yet, at the same time, i wished to disclaim participation in sentiments calculated to give him pain; and i exhorted him to maintain his courage and spirits. on receiving the two letters, he set off from home. yesterday came the inclosed brief epistle. 'you must understand that a good share of papa's anger arises from the idea, not altogether groundless, that mr. nicholls has behaved with disingenuousness in so long concealing his aim. i am afraid also that papa thinks a little too much about his want of money; he says the match would be a degradation, that i should be throwing myself away, that he expects me, if i marry at all, to do very differently; in short, his manner of viewing the subject is on the whole far from being one in which i can sympathise. my own objections arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes, principles. 'how are you getting on, dear nell, and how are all at brookroyd? remember me kindly to everybody.--yours, wishing devoutly that papa would resume his tranquillity, and mr. nicholls his beef and pudding, 'c. bronte. 'i am glad to say that the incipient inflammation in papa's eye is disappearing.' to miss ellen nussey '_january_ _nd_, . 'dear nell,--i thought of you on new year's night, and hope you got well over your formidable tea-making. i trust that tuesday and wednesday will also pass pleasantly. i am busy too in my little way preparing to go to london this week, a matter which necessitates some little application to the needle. i find it is quite necessary i should go to superintend the press, as mr. smith seems quite determined not to let the printing get on till i come. i have actually only received three proof-sheets since i was at brookroyd. papa wants me to go too, to be out of the way, i suppose; but i am sorry for one other person whom nobody pities but me. martha is bitter against him; john brown says "he should like to shoot him." they don't understand the nature of his feelings, but i see now what they are. he is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep, like an underground stream, running strong, but in a narrow channel. he continues restless and ill; he carefully performs the occasional duty, but does not come near the church, procuring a substitute every sunday. a few days since he wrote to papa requesting permission to withdraw his resignation. papa answered that he should only do so on condition of giving his written promise never again to broach the obnoxious subject either to him or to me. this he has evaded doing, so the matter remains unsettled. i feel persuaded the termination will be his departure for australia. dear nell, without loving him, i don't like to think of him suffering in solitude, and wish him anywhere so that he were happier. he and papa have never met or spoken yet. i am very glad to learn that your mother is pretty well, and also that the piece of challenged work is progressing. i hope you will not be called away to norfolk before i come home: i should like you to pay a visit to haworth first. write again soon.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--we had the parsons to supper as well as to tea. mr. n. demeaned himself not quite pleasantly. i thought he made no effort to struggle with his dejection but gave way to it in a manner to draw notice; the bishop was obviously puzzled by it. mr. nicholls also showed temper once or twice in speaking to papa. martha was beginning to tell me of certain "flaysome" looks also, but i desired not to hear of them. the fact is, i shall be most thankful when he is well away. i pity him, but i don't like that dark gloom of his. he dogged me up the lane after the evening service in no pleasant manner. he stopped also in the passage after the bishop and the other clergy were gone into the room, and it was because i drew away and went upstairs that he gave that look which filled martha's soul with horror. she, it seems, meantime, was making it her business to watch him from the kitchen door. if mr. nicholls be a good man at bottom, it is a sad thing that nature has not given him the faculty to put goodness into a more attractive form. into the bargain of all the rest he managed to get up a most pertinacious and needless dispute with the inspector, in listening to which all my old unfavourable impressions revived so strongly, i fear my countenance could not but shew them. 'dear nell, i consider that on the whole it is a mercy you have been at home and not at norfolk during the late cold weather. love to all at brookroyd.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_march_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i am sure miss wooler would enjoy her visit to you, as much as you her company. dear nell, i thank you sincerely for your discreet and friendly silence on the point alluded to. i had feared it would be discussed between you two, and had an inexpressible shrinking at the thought; now less than ever does it seem a matter open to discussion. i hear nothing, and you must quite understand that if i feel any uneasiness it is not that of confirmed and fixed regard, but that anxiety which is inseparable from a state of absolute uncertainty about a somewhat momentous matter. i do not know, i am not sure myself, that any other termination would be better than lasting estrangement and unbroken silence. yet a good deal of pain has been and must be gone through in that case. however, to each his burden. 'i have not yet read the papers; d.v. i will send them to-morrow.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. 'understand that in whatever i have said above, it was not for pity or sympathy. i hardly pity myself. only i wish that in all matters in this world there was fair and open dealing, and no underhand work.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _april_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--my visit to manchester is for the present put off by mr. morgan having written to say that since papa will not go to buckingham to see him he will come to yorkshire to see papa; when, i don't yet know, and i trust in goodness he will not stay long, as papa really cannot bear putting out of his way. i must wait, however, till the infliction is over. 'you ask about mr. nicholls. i hear he has got a curacy, but do not yet know where. i trust the news is true. he and papa never speak. he seems to pass a desolate life. he has allowed late circumstances so to act on him as to freeze up his manner and overcast his countenance not only to those immediately concerned but to every one. he sits drearily in his rooms. if mr. grant or any other clergyman calls to see, and as they think, to cheer him, he scarcely speaks. i find he tells them nothing, seeks no confidant, rebuffs all attempts to penetrate his mind. i own i respect him for this. he still lets flossy go to his rooms, and takes him to walk. he still goes over to see mr. sowden sometimes, and, poor fellow, that is all. he looks ill and miserable. i think and trust in heaven that he will be better as soon as he fairly gets away from haworth. i pity him inexpressibly. we never meet nor speak, nor dare i look at him; silent pity is just all that i can give him, and as he knows nothing about that, it does not comfort. he is now grown so gloomy and reserved that nobody seems to like him. his fellow-curates shun trouble in that shape; the lower orders dislike it. papa has a perfect antipathy to him, and he, i fear, to papa. martha hates him. i think he might almost be _dying_ and they would not speak a friendly word to or of him. how much of all this he deserves i can't tell; certainly he never was agreeable or amiable, and is less so now than ever, and alas! i do not know him well enough to be sure that there is truth and true affection, or only rancour and corroding disappointment at the bottom of his chagrin. in this state of things i must be, and i am, _entirely passive_. i may be losing the purest gem, and to me far the most precious, life can give--genuine attachment--or i may be escaping the yoke of a morose temper. in this doubt conscience will not suffer me to take one step in opposition to papa's will, blended as that will is with the most bitter and unreasonable prejudices. so i just leave the matter where we must leave all important matters. 'remember me kindly to all at brookroyd, and--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ th, . 'dear ellen,--the east winds about which you inquire have spared me wonderfully till to-day, when i feel somewhat sick physically, and not very blithe mentally. i am not sure that the east winds are entirely to blame for this ailment. yesterday was a strange sort of a day at church. it seems as if i were to be punished for my doubts about the nature and truth of poor mr. nicholls's regard. having ventured on whit sunday to stop the sacrament, i got a lesson not to be repeated. he struggled, faltered, then lost command over himself--stood before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants white, shaking, voiceless. papa was not there, thank god! joseph redman spoke some words to him. he made a great effort, but could only with difficulty whisper and falter through the service. i suppose he thought this would be the last time; he goes either this week or the next. i heard the women sobbing round, and i could not quite check my own tears. what had happened was reported to papa either by joseph redman or john brown; it excited only anger, and such expressions as "unmanly driveller." compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for than sap from firewood. 'i never saw a battle more sternly fought with the feelings than mr. nicholls fights with his, and when he yields momentarily, you are almost sickened by the sense of the strain upon him. however, he is to go, and i cannot speak to him or look at him or comfort him a whit, and i must submit. providence is over all, that is the only consolation.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i cannot help feeling a certain satisfaction in finding that the people here are getting up a subscription to offer a testimonial of respect to mr. nicholls on his leaving the place. many are expressing both their commiseration and esteem for him. the churchwardens recently put the question to him plainly: why was he going? was it mr. bronte's fault or his own? "his own," he answered. did he blame mr. bronte? "no! he did not: if anybody was wrong it was himself." was he willing to go? "no! it gave him great pain." yet he is not always right. i must be just. he shows a curious mixture of honour and obstinacy--feeling and sullenness. papa addressed him at the school tea-drinking, with _constrained_ civility, but still with _civility_. he did not reply civilly; he cut short further words. this sort of treatment offered in public is what papa never will forget or forgive, it inspires him with a silent bitterness not to be expressed. i am afraid both are unchristian in their mutual feelings. nor do i know which of them is least accessible to reason or least likely to forgive. it is a dismal state of things. 'the weather is fine now, dear nell. we will take these sunny days as a good omen for your visit to yarmouth. with kind regards to all at brookroyd, and best wishes to yourself,--i am, yours sincerely, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--you will want to know about the leave-taking? the whole matter is but a painful subject, but i must treat it briefly. the testimonial was presented in a public meeting. mr. taylor and mr. grant were there. papa was not very well and i advised him to stay away, which he did. as to the last sunday, it was a cruel struggle. mr. nicholls ought not to have had to take any duty. 'he left haworth this morning at six o'clock. yesterday evening he called to render into papa's hands the deeds of the national school, and to say good-bye. they were busy cleaning--washing the paint, etc., in the dining-room, so he did not find me there. i would not go into the parlour to speak to him in papa's presence. he went out, thinking he was not to see me; and indeed, till the very last moment, i thought it best not. but perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate, and remembering his long grief, i took courage and went out, trembling and miserable. i found him leaning against the garden door in a paroxysm of anguish, sobbing as women never sob. of course i went straight to him. very few words were interchanged, those few barely articulate. several things i should have liked to ask him were swept entirely from my memory. poor fellow! but he wanted such hope and such encouragement as i could not give him. still, i trust he must know now that i am not cruelly blind and indifferent to his constancy and grief. for a few weeks he goes to the south of england, afterwards he takes a curacy somewhere in yorkshire, but i don't know where. 'papa has been far from strong lately. i dare not mention mr. nicholls's name to him. he speaks of him quietly and without opprobrium to others, but to me he is implacable on the matter. however, he is gone--gone, and there's an end of it. i see no chance of hearing a word about him in future, unless some stray shred of intelligence comes through mr. sowden or some other second-hand source. in all this it is not i who am to be pitied at all, and of course nobody pities me. they all think in haworth that i have disdainfully refused him. if pity would do mr. nicholls any good, he ought to have, and i believe has it. they may abuse me if they will; whether they do or not i can't tell. 'write soon and say how your prospects proceed. i trust they will daily brighten.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss laetitia wheelwright 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dear laetitia,--i was very glad to see your handwriting again; it is, i believe, a year since i heard from you. again and again you have recurred to my thoughts lately, and i was beginning to have some sad presages as to the cause of your silence. your letter happily does away with all these; it brings, on the whole, good tidings both of your papa, mamma, your sister, and, last but not least, your dear respected english self. 'my dear father has borne the severe winter very well, a circumstance for which i feel the more thankful, as he had many weeks of very precarious health last summer, following an attack from which he suffered last june, and which for a few hours deprived him totally of sight, though neither his mind, speech, nor even his powers of motion were in the least affected. i can hardly tell you how thankful i was, dear laetitia, when, after that dreary and almost despairing interval of utter darkness, some gleam of daylight became visible to him once more. i had feared that paralysis had seized the optic nerve. a sort of mist remained for a long time, and indeed his vision is not yet perfectly clear, but he can read, write, and walk about, and he preaches _twice_ every sunday, the curate only reading the prayers. _you_ can well understand how earnestly i pray that sight may be spared him to the end; he so dreads the privation of blindness. his mind is just as strong and active as ever, and politics interest him as they do _your_ papa. the czar, the war, the alliance between france and england--into all these things he throws himself heart and soul. they seem to carry him back to his comparatively young days, and to renew the excitement of the last great european struggle. of course, my father's sympathies, and mine too, are all with justice and europe against tyranny and russia. 'circumstanced as i have been, you will comprehend that i had neither the leisure nor inclination to go from home much during the past year. i spent a week with mrs. gaskell in the spring, and a fortnight with some other friends more recently, and that includes the whole of my visiting since i saw you last. my life is indeed very uniform and retired, more so than is quite healthful either for mind or body; yet i feel reason for often renewed feelings of gratitude in the sort of support which still comes and cheers me from time to time. my health, though not unbroken, is, i sometimes fancy, rather stronger on the whole than it was three years ago; headache and dyspepsia are my worst ailments. whether i shall come up to town this season for a few days i do not yet know; but if i do i shall hope to call in phillimore place. with kindest remembrances to your papa, mamma, and sisters,--i am, dear laetitia, affectionately yours, 'c. bronte.' mr. nicholls's successor did not prove acceptable to mr. bronte. he complained again and again, and one day charlotte turned upon her father and told him pretty frankly that he was alone to blame--that he had only to let her marry mr. nicholls, with whom she corresponded and whom she really loved, and all would be well. a little arrangement, the transfer of mr. nicholls's successor, mr. de renzi, to a bradford church, and mr. nicholls left his curacy at kirk-smeaton and returned once more to haworth as an accepted lover. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _march_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--the inclosure in yours of yesterday puzzled me at first, for i did not immediately recognise my own hand-writing; when i did, the sensation was one of consternation and vexation, as the letter ought by all means to have gone on friday. it was intended to relieve him of great anxiety. however, i trust he will get it to-day; and on the whole, when i think it over, i can only be thankful that the mistake was no worse, and did not throw the letter into the hands of some indifferent and unscrupulous person. i wrote it after some days of indisposition and uneasiness, and when i felt weak and unfit to write. while writing to him, i was at the same time intending to answer your note, which i suppose accounts for the confusion of ideas, shown in the mixed and blundering address. 'i wish you could come about easter rather than at another time, for this reason: mr. nicholls, if not prevented, proposes coming over then. i suppose he will stay at mr. grant's, as he has done two or three times before, but he will be frequently coming here, which would enliven your visit a little. perhaps, too, he might take a walk with us occasionally. altogether it would be a little change, such as, you know, i could not always offer. 'if all be well he will come under different circumstances to any that have attended his visits before; were it otherwise, i should not ask you to meet him, for when aspects are gloomy and unpropitious, the fewer there are to suffer from the cloud the better. 'he was here in january and was then received, but not pleasantly. i trust it will be a little different now. 'papa breakfasts in bed and has not yet risen; his bronchitis is still troublesome. i had a bad week last week, but am greatly better now, for my mind is a little relieved, though very sedate, and rising only to expectations the most moderate. 'sometime, perhaps in may, i may hope to come to brookroyd, but, as you will understand from what i have now stated, i could not come before. 'think it over, dear nell, and come to haworth if you can. write as soon as you can decide.--yours affectionately, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _st_, . 'my dear ellen,--you certainly were right in your second interpretation of my note. i am too well aware of the dulness of haworth for any visitor, not to be glad to avail myself of the chance of offering even a slight change. but this morning my little plans have been disarranged by an intimation that mr. nicholls is coming on monday. i thought to put him off, but have not succeeded. as easter now consequently seems an unfavourable period both from your point of view and mine, we will adjourn it till a better opportunity offers. meantime, i thank you, dear ellen, for your kind offer to come in case i wanted you. papa is still very far from well: his cough very troublesome, and a good deal of inflammatory action in the chest. to-day he seems somewhat better than yesterday, and i earnestly hope the improvement may continue. 'with kind regards to your mother and all at brookroyd,--i am, dear ellen, yours affectionately, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _april_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--thank you for the collar; it is very pretty, and i will wear it for the sake of her who made and gave it. 'mr. nicholls came on monday, and was here all last week. matters have progressed thus since july. he renewed his visit in september, but then matters so fell out that i saw little of him. he continued to write. the correspondence pressed on my mind. i grew very miserable in keeping it from papa. at last sheer pain made me gather courage to break it. i told all. it was very hard and rough work at the time, but the issue after a few days was that i obtained leave to continue the communication. mr. nicholls came in january; he was ten days in the neighbourhood. i saw much of him. i had stipulated with papa for opportunity to become better acquainted. i had it, and all i learnt inclined me to esteem and affection. still papa was very, very hostile, bitterly unjust. 'i told mr. nicholls the great obstacle that lay in his way. he has persevered. the result of this, his last visit, is, that papa's consent is gained, that his respect, i believe, is won, for mr. nicholls has in all things proved himself disinterested and forbearing. certainly, i must respect him, nor can i withhold from him more than mere cool respect. in fact, dear ellen, i am engaged. 'mr. nicholls, in the course of a few months, will return to the curacy of haworth. i stipulated that i would not leave papa; and to papa himself i proposed a plan of residence which should maintain his seclusion and convenience uninvaded, and in a pecuniary sense bring him gain instead of loss. what seemed at one time impossible is now arranged, and papa begins really to take a pleasure in the prospect. 'for myself, dear ellen, while thankful to one who seems to have guided me through much difficulty, much and deep distress and perplexity of mind, i am still very calm, very inexpectant. what i taste of happiness is of the soberest order. i trust to love my husband. i am grateful for his tender love to me. i believe him to be an affectionate, a conscientious, a high-principled man; and if, with all this, i should yield to regrets that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts are not added, it seems to me i should be most presumptuous and thankless. 'providence offers me this destiny. doubtless, then, it is the best for me. nor do i shrink from wishing those dear to me one not less happy. 'it is possible that our marriage may take place in the course of the summer. mr. nicholls wishes it to be in july. he spoke of you with great kindness, and said he hoped you would be at our wedding. i said i thought of having no other bridesmaid. did i say rightly? i mean the marriage to be literally as quiet as possible. 'do not mention these things just yet. i mean to write to miss wooler shortly. good-bye. there is a strange half-sad feeling in making these announcements. the whole thing is something other than imagination paints it beforehand; cares, fears, come mixed inextricably with hopes. i trust yet to talk the matter over with you. often last week i wished for your presence and said so to mr. nicholls--arthur, as i now call him, but he said it was the only time and place when he could not have wished to see you. good-bye.--yours affectionately, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'my own dear nell,--i hope to see you somewhere about the second week in may. 'the manchester visit is still hanging over my head. i have deferred it, and deferred it, but have finally promised to go about the beginning of next month. i shall only stay three days, then i spend two or three days at hunsworth, then come to brookroyd. the three visits must be compressed into the space of a fortnight, if possible. 'i suppose i shall have to go to leeds. my purchases cannot be either expensive or extensive. you must just resolve in your head the bonnets and dresses; something that can be turned to decent use and worn after the wedding-day will be best, i think. 'i wrote immediately to miss wooler and received a truly kind letter from her this morning. if you think she would like to come to the marriage i will not fail to ask her. 'papa's mind seems wholly changed about the matter, and he has said both to me and when i was not there, how much happier he feels since he allowed all to be settled. it is a wonderful relief for me to hear him treat the thing rationally, to talk over with him themes on which once i dared not touch. he is rather anxious things should get forward now, and takes quite an interest in the arrangement of preliminaries. his health improves daily, though this east wind still keeps up a slight irritation in the throat and chest. 'the feeling which had been disappointed in papa was ambition, paternal pride--ever a restless feeling, as we all know. now that this unquiet spirit is exorcised, justice, which was once quite forgotten, is once more listened to, and affection, i hope, resumes some power. 'my hope is that in the end this arrangement will turn out more truly to papa's advantage than any other it was in my power to achieve. mr. nicholls in his last letter refers touchingly to his earnest desire to prove his gratitude to papa, by offering support and consolation to his declining age. this will not be mere talk with him--he is no talker, no dealer in professions.--yours affectionately, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_april_ _th_, . 'my dear ellen,--i have delayed writing till i could give you some clear notion of my movements. if all be well, i go to manchester on the st of may. thence, on thursday, to hunsworth till monday, when (d.v.) i come to brookroyd. i must be at home by the close of the week. papa, thank god! continues to improve much. he preached twice on sunday and again on wednesday, and was not tired; his mind and mood are different to what they were, so much more cheerful and quiet. i trust the illusions of ambition are quite dissipated, and that he really sees it is better to relieve a suffering and faithful heart, to secure its fidelity, a solid good, than unfeelingly to abandon one who is truly attached to his interest as well as mine, and pursue some vain empty shadow. 'i thank you, dear ellen, for your kind invitation to mr. nicholls. he was asked likewise to manchester and hunsworth. i would not have opposed his coming had there been no real obstacle to the arrangement--certain little awkwardnesses of feeling i would have tried to get over for the sake of introducing him to old friends; but it so happens that he cannot leave on account of his rector's absence. mr. c. will be in town with his family till june, and he always stipulates that his curate shall remain at kirk-smeaton while he is away. 'how did you get on at the oratorio? and what did miss wooler say to the proposal of being at the wedding? i have many points to discuss when i see you. i hope your mother and all are well. with kind remembrances to them, and true love to you,--i am, dear nell, faithfully yours, 'c. bronte. 'when you write, address me at mrs. gaskell's, plymouth grove, manchester.' to miss ellen nussey '_may_ _nd_, . 'dear ellen,--i wonder how you are, and whether that harassing cough is better. be scrupulously cautious about undue exposure. just now, dear ellen, an hour's inadvertence might cause you to be really ill. so once again, take care. since i came home i have been very busy stitching. the little new room is got into order, and the green and white curtains are up; they exactly suit the papering, and look neat and clean enough. i had a letter a day or two since announcing that mr. nicholls comes to-morrow. i feel anxious about him, more anxious on one point than i dare quite express to myself. it seems he has again been suffering sharply from his rheumatic affection. i hear this not from himself, but from another quarter. he was ill while i was at manchester and brookroyd. he uttered no complaint to me, dropped no hint on the subject. alas! he was hoping he had got the better of it, and i know how this contradiction of his hopes will sadden him. for unselfish reasons he did so earnestly wish this complaint might not become chronic. i fear, i fear. but, however, i mean to stand by him now, whether in weal or woe. this liability to rheumatic pain was one of the strong arguments used against the marriage. it did not weigh somehow. if he is doomed to suffer, it seems that so much the more will he need care and help. and yet the ultimate possibilities of such a case are appalling. you remember your aunt. well, come what may, god help and strengthen both him and me. i look forward to to-morrow with a mixture of impatience and anxiety. poor fellow! i want to see with my own eyes how he is. 'it is getting late and dark. write soon, dear ellen. goodnight and god bless you.--yours affectionately, 'c. bronte. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _may_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--your letter was very welcome, and i am glad and thankful to learn you are better. still, beware of presuming on the improvement--don't let it make you careless. mr. nicholls has just left me. your hopes were not ill-founded about his illness. at first i was thoroughly frightened. however, inquiring gradually relieved me. in short, i soon discovered that my business was, instead of sympathy, to rate soundly. the patient had wholesome treatment while he was at haworth, and went away singularly better; perfectly unreasonable, however, on some points, as his fallible sex are not ashamed to be. 'man is, indeed, an amazing piece of mechanism when you see, so to speak, the full weakness of what he calls his strength. there is not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for spoilt petulance of his wilful nonsense. i bought a border for the table-cloth and have put it on. 'good-bye, dear ellen. write again soon, and mind and give a bulletin.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte.' to miss ellen nussey '_june_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--papa preached twice to-day as well and as strongly as ever. it is strange how he varies, how soon he is depressed and how soon revived. it makes me feel so thankful when he is better. i am thankful too that you are stronger, dear nell. my worthy acquaintance at kirk-smeaton refuses to acknowledge himself better yet. i am uneasy about not writing to miss wooler. i fear she will think me negligent, while i am only busy and bothered. i want to clear up my needlework a little, and have been sewing against time since i was at brookroyd. mr. nicholls hindered me for a full week. 'i like the card very well, but not the envelope. i should like a perfectly plain envelope with a silver initial. 'i got my dresses from halifax a day or two since, but have not had time to have them unpacked, so i don't know what they are like. 'next time i write, i hope to be able to give you clear information, and to beg you to come here without further delay. good-bye, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. bronte. 'i had almost forgotten to mention about the envelopes. mr. nicholls says i have ordered far too few; he thinks sixty will be wanted. is it too late to remedy this error? there is no end to his string of parson friends. my own list i have not made out.' charlotte bronte's list of friends, to whom wedding-cards were to be sent, is in her own handwriting, and is not without interest:-- send cards to the rev. w. morgan, rectory, hulcott, aylesbury, bucks. joseph branwell, esq., thamar terrace, launceston. cornwall. dr. wheelwright, phillimore place, kensington, london. george smith, esq., cornhill, london. mrs. and misses smith, cornhill, london. w. s. williams, esq., cornhill, london. r. monckton milnes, esq. mrs. gaskell, plymouth grove, manchester. francis bennoch, esq., park, blackheath, london. george taylor, esq., stanbury. mrs. and miss taylor. h. merrall, esq., lea sykes, haworth. e. merrall, esq., ebor house, haworth. r. butterfield, esq., woodlands, haworth. r. thomas, esq., haworth. j. pickles, esq., brow top, haworth. wooler family. brookroyd. { } the following was written on her wedding day, june th, . to miss ellen nussey '_thursday evening_. 'dear ellen,--i scribble one hasty line just to say that after a pleasant enough journey we have got safely to conway; the evening is wet and wild, though the day was fair chiefly, with some gleams of sunshine. however, we are sheltered in a comfortable inn. my cold is not worse. if you get this scrawl to-morrow and write by return, direct to me at the post-office, bangor, and i may get it on monday. say how you and miss wooler got home. give my kindest and most grateful love to miss wooler whenever you write. on monday, i think, we cross the channel. no more at present.--yours faithfully and lovingly, 'c. b. n.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _august_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i earnestly hope you are by yourself now, and relieved from the fag of entertaining guests. you do not complain, but i am afraid you have had too much of it. 'since i came home i have not had an unemployed moment. my life is changed indeed: to be wanted continually, to be constantly called for and occupied seems so strange; yet it is a marvellously good thing. as yet i don't quite understand how some wives grow so selfish. as far as my experience of matrimony goes, i think it tends to draw you out of, and away from yourself. 'we have had sundry callers this week. yesterday mr. sowden and another gentleman dined here, and mr. and mrs. grant joined them at tea. 'i do not think we shall go to brookroyd soon, on papa's account. i do not wish again to leave home for a time, but i trust you will ere long come here. 'i really like mr. sowden very well. he asked after you. mr. nicholls told him we expected you would be coming to stay with us in the course of three or four weeks, and that he should then invite him over again as he wished us to take sundry rather long walks, and as he should have his wife to look after, and she was trouble enough, it would be quite necessary to have a guardian for the other lady. mr. sowden seemed perfectly acquiescent. 'dear nell, during the last six weeks, the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed: i know more of the realities of life than i once did. i think many false ideas are propagated, perhaps unintentionally. i think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintance to marry, much to blame. for my part, i can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what i always said in theory, "wait god's will." indeed, indeed, nell, it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. man's lot is far, far different. tell me when you think you can come. papa is better, but not well. how is your mother? give my love to her.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls. 'have i told you how much better mr. nicholls is? he looks quite strong and hale; he gained lbs. during the four weeks we were in ireland. to see this improvement in him has been a main source of happiness to me, and to speak truth, a subject of wonder too.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _august_ _th_. 'dear ellen,--can you come here on wednesday week (sept. th)? try to arrange matters to do so if possible, for it will be better than to delay your visit till the days grow cold and short. i want to see you again, dear nell, and my husband too will receive you with pleasure; and he is not diffuse of his courtesies or partialities, i can assure you. one friendly word from him means as much as twenty from most people. 'we have been busy lately giving a supper and tea-drinking to the singers, ringers, sunday-school teachers, and all the scholars of the sunday and national schools, amounting in all to some souls. it gave satisfaction and went off well. 'papa, i am thankful to say, is much better; he preached last sunday. how does your mother bear this hot weather? write soon, dear nell, and say you will come.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. n.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _september_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i send a french paper to-day. you would almost think i had given them up, it is so long since one was despatched. the fact is, they had accumulated to quite a pile during my absence. i wished to look them over before sending them off, and as yet i have scarcely found time. that same time is an article of which i once had a large stock always on hand; where it is all gone now it would be difficult to say, but my moments are very fully occupied. take warning, ellen, the married woman can call but a very small portion of each day her own. not that i complain of this sort of monopoly as yet, and i hope i never shall incline to regard it as a misfortune, but it certainly exists. we were both disappointed that you could not come on the day i mentioned. i have grudged this splendid weather very much. the moors are in glory, i never saw them fuller of purple bloom. i wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, i fear, will be faded and sere. as soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write and let me know. 'papa continues greatly better. my husband flourishes; he begins indeed to express some slight alarm at the growing improvement in his condition. i think i am decent, better certainly than i was two months ago, but people don't compliment me as they do arthur--excuse the name, it has grown natural to use it now. i trust, dear nell, that you are all well at brookroyd, and that your visiting stirs are pretty nearly over. i compassionate you from my heart for all the trouble to which you must be put, and i am rather ashamed of people coming sponging in that fashion one after another; get away from them and come here.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--arthur wishes you would burn my letters. he was out when i commenced this letter, but he has just come in. it is not "old friends" he mistrusts, he says, but the chances of war--the accidental passing of letters into hands and under eyes for which they were never written. 'all this seems mighty amusing to me; it is a man's mode of viewing correspondence. men's letters are proverbially uninteresting and uncommunicative. i never quite knew before why they made them so. they may be right in a sense: strange chances do fall out certainly. as to my own notes, i never thought of attaching importance to them or considering their fate, till arthur seemed to reflect on both so seriously. 'i will write again next week if all be well to name a day for coming to see you. i am sure you want, or at least ought to have, a little rest before you are bothered with more company; but whenever i come, i suppose, dear nell, under present circumstances, it will be a quiet visit, and that i shall not need to bring more than a plain dress or two. tell me this when you write.--believe me faithfully yours, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i am only just at liberty to write to you; guests have kept me very busy during the last two or three days. sir j. kay-shuttleworth and a friend of his came here on saturday afternoon and stayed till after dinner on monday. 'when i go to brookroyd, arthur will take me there and stay one night, but i cannot yet fix the time of my visit. good-bye for the present, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _st_, , 'dear ellen,--you ask about mr. sowden's matter. he walked over here on a wild rainy day. we talked it over. he is quite disposed to entertain the proposal, but of course there must be close inquiry and ripe consideration before either he or the patron decide. meantime mr. sowden { } is most anxious that the affairs be kept absolutely quiet; in the event of disappointment it would be both painful and injurious to him if it should be rumoured at hebden bridge that he has had thoughts of leaving. arthur says if a whisper gets out these things fly from parson to parson like wildfire. i cannot help somehow wishing that the matter should be arranged, if all on examination is found tolerably satisfactory. 'papa continues pretty well, i am thankful to say; his deafness is wonderfully relieved. winter seems to suit him better than summer; besides, he is settled and content, as i perceive with gratitude to god. 'dear ellen, i wish you well through every trouble. arthur is not in just now or he would send a kind message.--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _november_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--arthur somewhat demurs about my going to brookroyd as yet; fever, you know, is a formidable word. i cannot say i entertain any apprehensions myself further than this, that i should be terribly bothered at the idea of being taken ill from home and causing trouble; and strangers are sometimes more liable to infection than persons living in the house. 'mr. sowden has seen sir j. k. shuttleworth, but i fancy the matter is very uncertain as yet. it seems the bishop of manchester stipulates that the clergyman chosen should, if possible, be from his own diocese, and this, arthur says, is quite right and just. an exception would have been made in arthur's favour, but the case is not so clear with mr. sowden. however, no harm will have been done if the matter does not take wind, as i trust it will not. write very soon, dear nell, and,--believe me, yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i shall not get leave to go to brookroyd before christmas now, so do not expect me. for my own part i really should have no fear, and if it just depended on me i should come. but these matters are not quite in my power now: another must be consulted; and where his wish and judgment have a decided bias to a particular course, i make no stir, but just adopt it. arthur is sorry to disappoint both you and me, but it is his fixed wish that a few weeks should be allowed yet to elapse before we meet. probably he is confirmed in this desire by my having a cold at present. i did not achieve the walk to the waterfall with impunity. though i changed my wet things immediately on returning home, yet i felt a chill afterwards, and the same night had sore throat and cold; however, i am better now, but not quite well. 'did i tell you that our poor little flossy is dead? he drooped for a single day, and died quietly in the night without pain. the loss even of a dog was very saddening, yet perhaps no dog ever had a happier life or an easier death. 'papa continues pretty well, i am happy to say, and my dear boy flourishes. i do not mean that he continues to grow stouter, which one would not desire, but he keeps in excellent condition. 'you would wonder, i dare say, at the long disappearance of the french paper. i had got such an accumulation of them unread that i thought i would not wait to send the old ones; now you will receive them regularly. i am writing in haste. it is almost inexplicable to me that i seem so often hurried now; but the fact is, whenever arthur is in i must have occupations in which he can share, or which will not at least divert my attention from him--thus a multitude of little matters get put off till he goes out, and then i am quite busy. goodbye, dear ellen, i hope we shall meet soon.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _december_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--i return the letter. it is, as you say, very genuine, truthful, affectionate, maternal--without a taint of sham or exaggeration. mary will love her child without spoiling it, i think. she does not make an uproar about her happiness either. the longer i live the more i suspect exaggerations. i fancy it is sometimes a sort of fashion for each to vie with the other in protestations about their wonderful felicity, and sometimes they--fib. i am truly glad to hear you are all better at brookroyd. in the course of three or four weeks more i expect to get leave to come to you. i certainly long to see you again. one circumstance reconciles me to this delay--the weather. i do not know whether it has been as bad with you as with us, but here for three weeks we have had little else than a succession of hurricanes. 'in your last you asked about mr. sowden and sir james. i fear mr. sowden has little chance of the living; he had heard nothing more of it the last time he wrote to arthur, and in a note he had from sir james yesterday the subject is not mentioned. 'you inquire too after mrs. gaskell. she has not been here, and i think i should not like her to come now till summer. she is very busy with her story of _north and south_. 'i must make this note short that it may not be overweight. arthur joins me in sincere good wishes for a happy christmas, and many of them to you and yours. he is well, thank god, and so am i, and he is "my dear boy," certainly dearer now than he was six months ago. in three days we shall actually have been married that length of time! good-bye, dear nell.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' at the beginning of mr. and mrs. nicholls visited sir james kay-shuttleworth at gawthorpe. i know of only four letters by her, written in this year. to miss ellen nussey 'haworth, _january_ _th_, . 'dear ellen,--since our return from gawthorpe we have had a mr. bell, one of arthur's cousins, staying with us. it was a great pleasure. i wish you could have seen him and made his acquaintance; a true gentleman by nature and cultivation is not after all an everyday thing. 'as to the living of habergham or padiham, it appears the chance is doubtful at present for anybody. the present incumbent wishes to retract his resignation, and declares his intention of appointing a curate for two years. i fear mr. sowden hardly produced a favourable impression; a strong wish was expressed that arthur could come, but that is out of the question. 'i very much wish to come to brookroyd, and i hope to be able to write with certainty and fix wednesday, the st january, as the day; but the fact is i am not sure whether i shall be well enough to leave home. at present i should be a most tedious visitor. my health has been really very good since my return from ireland till about ten days ago, when the stomach seemed quite suddenly to lose its tone; indigestion and continual faint sickness have been my portion ever since. don't conjecture, dear nell, for it is too soon yet, though i certainly never before felt as i have done lately. but keep the matter wholly to yourself, for i can come to no decided opinion at present. i am rather mortified to lose my good looks and grow thin as i am doing just when i thought of going to brookroyd. dear ellen, i want to see you, and i hope i shall see you well. my love to all.--yours faithfully, 'c. b. nicholls.' there were three more letters, but they were written in pencil from her deathbed. two of them are printed by mrs. gaskell--one to miss nussey, the other to miss wheelwright. here is the third and last of all. to miss ellen nussey 'my dear ellen,--thank you very much for mrs. hewitt's sensible clear letter. thank her too. in much her case was wonderfully like mine, but i am reduced to greater weakness; the skeleton emaciation is the same. i cannot talk. even to my dear, patient, constant arthur i can say but few words at once. 'these last two days i have been somewhat better, and have taken some beef-tea, a spoonful of wine and water, a mouthful of light pudding at different times. 'dear ellen, i realise full well what you have gone through and will have to go through with poor mercy. oh, may you continue to be supported and not sink. sickness here has been terribly rife. kindest regards to mr. and mrs. clapham, your mother, mercy. write when you can.--yours, 'c. b. nicholls.' little remains to be said. this is not a biography but a bundle of correspondence, and i have only to state that mrs. nicholls died of an illness incidental to childbirth on march st , and was buried in the bronte tomb in haworth church. her will runs as follows:-- extracted from the district probate registry at york attached to her majesty's high court of justice. _in the name of god_. _amen_. _i_, charlotte nicholls, _of haworth in the parish of bradford and county of york_, _being of sound and disposing mind_, _memory_, _and understanding_, _but mindful of my own mortality_, _do this seventeenth day of february_, _in the year of our lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five_, _make this my last will and testament in manner and form following_, _that is to say_: _in case i die without issue i give and bequeath to my husband all my property to be his absolutely and entirely_, _but_, _in case i leave issue i bequeath to my husband the interest of my property during his lifetime_, _and at his death i desire that the principal should go to my surviving child or children_; _should there be more than one child_, _share and share alike_. _and i do hereby make and appoint my said husband_, _arthur bell nicholls_, _clerk_, _sole executor of this my last will and testament_; _in witness whereof i have to this my last will and testament subscribed my hand_, _the day and year first above written_--charlotte nicholls. _signed and acknowledged by the said testatrix_ charlotte nicholls, _as and for her last will and testament in the presence of us_, _who_, _at her request_, _in her presence and in presence of each other_, _have at the same time hereunto_ _subscribed our names as witnesses thereto_: _patrick bronte_, b.a. _incumbent of haworth_, _yorkshire_; _martha brown_. _the eighteenth day of april_ , _the will of_ charlotte nicholls, _late of haworth in the parish of bradford in the county of york_ (_wife of the reverend arthur bell nicholls_, _clerk in holy orders_) (_having bona notabilia within the province of york_). _deceased was proved in the prerogative court of york by the oath of the said arthur bell nicholls_ (_the husband_), _the sole executor to whom administration was granted_, _he having been first sworn duly to administer_. testatrix died st march . it is easy as fruitless to mourn over 'unfulfilled renown,' but it is not easy to believe that the future had any great things in store. miss bronte's four novels will remain for all time imperishable monuments of her power. she had touched with effect in two of them all that she knew of her home surroundings, and in two others all that was revealed to her of a wider life. more she could not have done with equal effect had she lived to be eighty. hers was, it is true, a sad life, but such gifts as these rarely bring happiness with them. it was surely something to have tasted the sweets of fame, and a fame so indisputably lasting. mr. nicholls stayed on at haworth for the six years that followed his wife's death. when mr. bronte died he returned to ireland. some years later he married again--a cousin, miss bell by name. that second marriage has been one of unmixed blessedness. i found him in a home of supreme simplicity and charm, esteemed by all who knew him and idolised in his own household. it was not difficult to understand that charlotte bronte had loved him and had fought down parental opposition in his behalf. the qualities of gentleness, sincerity, unaffected piety, and delicacy of mind are his; and he is beautifully jealous, not only for the fair fame of currer bell, but--what she would equally have loved--for her father, who also has had much undue detraction in the years that are past. that mr. nicholls may long continue to enjoy the kindly calm of his irish home will be the wish of all who have read of his own continuous devotion to a wife who must ever rank among the greatest of her sex. footnotes { } although so stated by professor a. w. ward in the _dictionary of national biography_, vol. xxi. { } 'mama's last days,' it runs, 'had been full of loving thought and tender help for others. she was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words.' { } 'some of the west ridingers are very angry, and declare they are half-a-century in civilisation before some of the lancashire folk, and that this neighbourhood is a paradise compared with some districts not far from manchester.'--ellen nussey to mrs. gaskell, april th, . { } 'to this bold statement (i.e. that love-letters were found in branwell's pockets) martha brown gave to me a flat contradiction, declaring that she was employed in the sick room at the time, and had personal knowledge that not one letter, nor a vestige of one, from the lady in question, was so found.'--leyland. _the bronte family_, vol. ii. p. . { } mrs. gaskell had described charlotte bronte's features as 'plain, large, and ill-set,' and had written of her 'crooked mouth and large nose'--while acknowledging the beauty of hair and eyes. { } mrs. lawry of muswell hill, to whose courtesy in placing these and other papers at my disposal i am greatly indebted. { } 'patrick branty' is written in another handwriting in the list of admissions at st. john's college, cambridge. dr. j. a. erskine stuart, who has a valuable note on the subject in an article on 'the bronte nomenclature' (bronte society's publications, pt. iii.), has found the name as brunty, bruntee, bronty, and branty--but never in patrick bronte's handwriting. there is, however, no signature of mr. bronte's extant prior to . { } 'i translated this' (_i.e._ an irish romance) 'from a manuscript in my possession made by one patrick o'prunty, an ancestor probably of charlotte bronte, in .' _the story of early gaelic literature_, p. . by douglas hyde, ll.d. t. fisher uwin, . { } mrs. gaskell says 'dec. th'; but miss charlotte branwell of penzance writes to me as follows:--'my aunt maria branwell, after the death of her parents, went to yorkshire on a visit to her relatives, where she met the rev. patrick bronte. they soon became engaged to be married. jane fennell was previously engaged to the rev. william morgan. and when the time arrived for their marriage, mr. fennell said he should have to give his daughter and niece away, and if so, he could not marry them; so it was arranged that mr. morgan should marry mr. bronte and maria branwell, and afterwards mr. bronte should perform the same kindly office towards mr. morgan and jane fennell. so the bridegrooms married each other and the brides acted as bridesmaids to each other. my father and mother, joseph and charlotte branwell, were married at madron, which was then the parish church of penzance, on the same day and hour. perhaps a similar case never happened before or since: two sisters and four first cousins being united in holy matrimony at one and the same time. and they were all happy marriages. mr. bronte was perhaps peculiar, but i have always heard my own dear mother say that he was devotedly fond of his wife, and she of him. these marriages were solemnised on the th of december .' { } the passage in brackets is quoted by mrs. gaskell. { } the passage in brackets is quoted, not quite accurately, by mrs. gaskell. { } the following letter indicates mr. bronte's independence of spirit. it was written after charlotte's death: 'haworth, nr. keighley, _january_ _th_, . 'sir,--your letter which i have received this morning gives both to mr. nicholls and me great uneasiness. it would seem that application has been made to the duke of devonshire for money to aid the subscription in reference to the expense of apparatus for heating our church and schools. this has been done without our knowledge, and most assuredly, had we known it, would have met with our strongest opposition. we have no claim on the duke. his grace honour'd us with a visit, in token of his respect for the memory of the dead, and his liberality and munificence are well and widely known; and the mercenary, taking an unfair advantage of these circumstances, have taken a step which both mr. nicholls and i utterly regret and condemn. in answer to your query, i may state that the whole expense for both the schools and church is about one hundred pounds; and that after what has been and may be subscribed, there may fifty pounds remain as a debt. but this may, and ought, to be raised by the inhabitants, in the next year after the depression of trade shall, it is hoped, have passed away. i have written to his grace on the subject--i remain, sir, your obedient servant, 'p. bronte. 'sir joseph paxton, bart., 'hardwick hall, 'chesterfield.' { a} the vicar, the rev. j. jolly, assures me, as these pages are passing through the press, that he is now moving it into the new church. { b} _baptisms solomnised in the parish of bradford and chapelry of thornton in the county of york_. _when _child's _parent's _parent's _abode_. _quality_, _by whom the baptized_. christian name_ name_ _trade or ceremony was name_. (_christian_). (_surname_). profession_. performed_. _charlotte _the rev. _bronte_ _thornton_ _minister of _wm. morgan _th_ _june_ daughter of_ patrick and thornton_ minster of christ maria_. church bradford_. _patrick _patrick and _bronte_ _thornton_ _minister_ _jno. fennell _july_ branwell son maria_. officiating of_ minister_. _emily jane _the rev. _bronte_ a.b. _thornton _minister of _wm. morgan _th_ daughter of_ patrick and parsonage_ thornton_ minster of christ _august_ maria_. church bradford_. _anne daughter _the rev. _bronte_ _minister of _wm. morgan _march_ _th_ of_ patrick and haworth_ minster of christ maria_. church bradford_. { } at the same time it is worth while quoting from a letter by 'a. h.' in august . a. h. was a teacher who was at cowan bridge during the time of the residence of the little brontes there. 'in july the rev. mr. bronte arrived at cowan bridge with two of his daughters, maria and elizabeth, and years of age. the children were delicate; both had but recently recovered from the measles and whooping-cough--so recently, indeed, that doubts were entertained whether they could be admitted with safety to the other pupils. they were received, however, and went on so well that in september their father returned, bringing with him two more of his children--charlotte, [she was really but ] and emily, years of age. during both these visits mr. bronte lodged at the school, sat at the same table with the children, saw the whole routine of the establishment, and, so far as i have ever known, was satisfied with everything that came under his observation. '"the two younger children enjoyed uniformly good health." charlotte was a general favourite. to the best of my recollection she was never under disgrace, however slight; punishment she certainly did _not _experience while she was at cowan bridge. 'in size, charlotte was remarkably diminutive; and if, as has been recently asserted, she never grew an inch after leaving the clergy daughters' school, she must have been a _literal dwarf_, and could not have obtained a situation as teacher in a school at brussels, or anywhere else; the idea is absurd. in respect of the treatment of the pupils at cowan bridge, i will say that neither mr. bronte's daughters nor any other of the children were denied a sufficient quantity of food. any statement to the contrary is entirely false. the daily dinner consisted of meat, vegetables, and pudding, in abundance; the children were permitted, and expected, to ask for whatever they desired, and were never limited. 'it has been remarked that the food of the school was such that none but starving children could eat it; and in support of this statement reference is made to a certain occasion when the medical attendant was consulted about it. in reply to this, let me say that during the spring of a low fever, although not an alarming one, prevailed in the school, and the managers, naturally anxious to ascertain whether any local cause occasioned the epidemic, took an opportunity to ask the physician's opinion of the food that happened to be then on the table. i recollect that he spoke rather scornfully of a baked rice pudding; but as the ingredients of this dish were chiefly, rice, sugar, and milk, its effects could hardly have been so serious as have been affirmed. i thus furnish you with the simple fact from which those statements have been manufactured. 'i have not the least hesitation in saying that, upon the whole, the comforts were as many and the privations as few at cowan bridge as can well be found in so large an establishment. how far young or delicate children are able to contend with the necessary evils of a public school is, in my opinion, a very grave question, and does not enter into the present discussion. 'the younger children in all larger institutions are liable to be oppressed; but the exposure to this evil at cowan bridge was not more than in other schools, but, as i believe, far less. then, again, thoughtless servants will occasionally spoil food, even in private families; and in public schools they are likely to be still less particular, unless they are well looked after. 'but in this respect the institution in question compares very favourably with other and more expensive schools, as from personal experience i have reason to know.--a.h., august .'--from _a vindication of the clergy daughters' school and the rev. w. carus wilson from the remarks in_ '_the life of charlotte bronte_,' _by the rev. h. shepheard_, _m.a. london_: _seeley_, _jackson_, _and halliday_, . { } the rev. william weightman. { } it is interesting to note that charlotte sent one of her little pupils a gift-book during the holidays. the book is lost, but the fly-leaf of it, inscribed 'sarah louisa white, from her friend c. bronte, july , ,' is in the possession of mr. w. lowe fleeming, of wolverhampton. { } 'upperwood house, rawdon, _september _ _th_, . 'dear aunt,--i have heard nothing of miss wooler yet since i wrote to her intimating that i would accept her offer. i cannot conjecture the reason of this long silence, unless some unforeseen impediment has occurred in concluding the bargain. meantime, a plan has been suggested and approved by mr. and mrs. white, and others, which i wish now to impart to you. my friends recommend me, if i desire to secure permanent success, to delay commencing the school for six months longer, and by all means to contrive, by hook or by crook, to spend the intervening time in some school on the continent. they say schools in england are so numerous, competition so great, that without some such step towards attaining superiority we shall probably have a very hard struggle, and may fail in the end. they say, moreover, that the loan of pounds, which you have been so kind as to offer us, will, perhaps, not be all required now, as miss wooler will lend us the furniture; and that, if the speculation is intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum, at least, ought to be laid out in the manner i have mentioned, thereby insuring a more speedy repayment both of interest and principal. 'i would not go to france or to paris. i would go to brussels, in belgium. the cost of the journey there, at the dearest rate of travelling, would be pounds; living is there little more than half as dear as it is in england, and the facilities for education are equal or superior to any other place in europe. in half a year, i could acquire a thorough familiarity with french. i could improve greatly in italian, and even get a dash of german, _i.e._, providing my health continued as good as it is now. martha taylor is now staying in brussels, at a first-rate establishment there. i should not think of going to the chateau de kockleberg, where she is resident, as the terms are much too high; but if i wrote to her, she, with the assistance of mrs. jenkins, the wife of the british consul, would be able to secure me a cheap and decent residence and respectable protection. i should have the opportunity of seeing her frequently, she would make me acquainted with the city; and, with the assistance of her cousins, i should probably in time be introduced to connections far more improving, polished, and cultivated, than any i have yet known. 'these are advantages which would turn to vast account, when we actually commenced a school--and, if emily could share them with me, only for a single half-year, we could take a footing in the world afterwards which we can never do now. i say emily instead of anne; for anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered. i feel certain, while i am writing, that you will see the propriety of what i say; you always like to use your money to the best advantage; you are not fond of making shabby purchases; when you do confer a favour, it is often done in style; and depend upon it , or pounds, thus laid out, would be well employed. of course, i know no other friend in the world to whom i could apply on this subject except yourself. i feel an absolute conviction that, if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition? when he left ireland to go to cambridge university, he was as ambitious as i am now. i want us all to go on. i know we have talents, and i want them to be turned to account. i look to you, aunt, to help us. i think you will not refuse. i know, if you consent, it shall not be my fault if you ever repent your kindness. with love to all, and the hope that you are all well,--believe me, dear aunt, your affectionate niece, 'miss branwell. c. bronte.' _mrs. gaskell's_ '_life_.' _corrected and completed from original letter in the possession of mr. a. b. nicholls_. { } miss mary dixon, the sister of mr. george dixon, m.p., is still alive, but she has unfortunately not preserved her letters from charlotte bronte. { a} 'the brontes at brussels,' by frederika macdonald.--_the woman at home_, july . { b} this statement has received the separate endorsement of the rev. a. b. nicholls and of miss ellen nussey. { } m. and mme. heger celebrated their golden wedding in , but mme. heger died the next year. m. constantin heger lived to be eighty-seven years of age, dying at rue nettoyer, brussels, on the th of may . he was born in brussels in , took part in the belgian revolution of , and fought in the war of independence against the dutch. he was twice married, and it was his second wife who was associated with charlotte bronte. she started the school in the rue d'isabelle, and m. heger took charge of the upper french classes. in an obituary article written by m. colin of _l'etoile belge_ in _the sketch_ (june , ), which was revised by dr. heger, the only son of m. heger, it is stated that charlotte bronte was piqued at being refused permission to return to the pensionnat a third time, and that _villette_ was her revenge. we know that this was not the case. the pensionnat heger was removed in to the avenue louise. the building in the rue d'isabelle will shortly be pulled down. { } _pictures of the past_, by francis h. grundy, c.e: griffith & farran, ; _emily bronte_, by a. mary f. robinson: w. h. allen, ; _the bronte family_, _with special reference to patrick branwell bronte_, by francis a. leyland: hurst & blackett, vols. . { } after mr. bronte's death mr. nicholls removed it to ireland. being of opinion that the only accurate portrait was that of emily, he cut this out and destroyed the remainder. the portrait of emily was given to martha brown, the servant, on one of her visits to mr. nicholls, and i have not been able to trace it. there are three or four so-called portraits of emily in existence, but they are all repudiated by mr. nicholls as absolutely unlike her. the supposed portrait which appeared in _the woman at home_ for july is now known to have been merely an illustration from a 'book of beauty,' and entirely spurious. { } there are two portraits of branwell in existence, both of them in the possession of mr. nicholls. one of them is a medallion by his friend leyland, the other the silhouette which accompanies this chapter. they both suggest, mainly on account of the clothing, a man of more mature years than branwell actually attained to. { } in the _mirror_, , mr. phillips, under the pseudonym of 'january searle,' wrote a readable biography of wordsworth. { a} charlotte writes from dewsbury moor (october , ):--'my sister emily is gone into a situation as teacher in a large school of near forty pupils, near halifax. i have had one letter from her since her departure--it gives an appalling account of her duties. hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. this is slavery. i fear she will never stand it.'--mrs. gaskell's _life_. { b} _haworth churchyard_, _april_ , by matthew arnold. macmillan & co. { } see chap. xiii., page . { } a dog, referred to elsewhere as flossie, junior. { } it was sent to mr. williams on six half-sheets of note-paper and was preserved by him. { } although _jane eyre_ has been dramatised by several hands, the play has never been as popular as one might suppose from a story of such thrilling incident. i can find no trace of the particular version which is referred to in this letter, but in the next year the novel was dramatised by john brougham, the actor and dramatist, and produced in new york on march , . brougham is rather an interesting figure. an irishman by birth, he had a chequered experience of every phase of theatrical life both in london and new york. it was he who adapted 'the queen's motto' and 'lady audley's secret,' and he collaborated with dion boucicault in 'london assurance.' in he seems to have been managing niblo's garden in new york, and in the following year the lyceum theatre in broadway. miss wemyss took the title role in _jane eyre_, j. gilbert was rochester, and mrs. j. gilbert was lady ingram; and though the play proved only moderately successful, it was revived in at laura keene's varieties at new york, with laura keene as jane eyre. this version has been published by samuel french, and is also in dick's _penny plays_. divided into five acts and twelve scenes, brougham starts the story at lowood academy. the second act introduces us to rochester's house, and the curtain descends in the fourth as jane announces that the house is in flames. at the end of the fifth, brougham reproduced _verbatim_ much of the conversation of the dialogue between rochester and jane. perhaps the best-known dramatisation of the novel was that by the late w. g. wills, who divided the story into four acts. his play was produced on saturday, december , , at the globe theatre, by mrs. bernard-beere, with the following cast:-- _jane eyre_ mrs. bernard-beere _lady ingram_ miss carlotta leclercq _blanche ingram_ miss kate bishop _mary ingram_ miss maggie hunt _miss beechey_ miss nellie jordan _mrs. fairfax_ miss alexes leighton _grace poole_ miss masson _bertha_ miss d'almaine _adele_ mdlle. clemente colle _mr. rochester_ mr. charles kelly _lord desmond_ mr. a. m. denison _rev. mr. price_ mr. h. e. russel _nat lee_ mr. h. h. cameron _james_ mr. c. stevens mr. wills confined the story to thornfield hall. one critic described the drama at the time as 'not so much a play as a long conversation.' a few years ago james willing made a melodrama of _jane eyre_ under the title of _poor relations_. this piece was performed at the standard, surrey, and park theatres. a version of the story, dramatised by charlotte birch-pfeiffer, called _die waise von lowood_, has been rather popular in germany. { a} alexander harris wrote _a converted atheist's testimony to the truth of christianity_, and other now forgotten works. { b} julia kavanagh ( - ). her father, m. p. kavanagh, wrote _the wanderings of lucan and dinah_, a poetical romance, and other works. miss kavanagh was born at thurles and died at nice. her first book, _the three paths_, a tale for children, was published in . _madeline_, a story founded on the life of a peasant girl of auvergne, in . _women in france during the eighteenth century_ appeared in , _nathalie_ the same year. in the succeeding years she wrote innumerable stories and biographical sketches. { } it runs thus:-- '_december_ _th_, . 'the patient, respecting whose case dr. epps is consulted, and for whom his opinion and advice are requested, is a female in her th year. a peculiar reserve of character renders it difficult to draw from her all the symptoms of her malady, but as far as they can be ascertained they are as follows:-- her appetite failed; she evinced a continual thirst, with a craving for acids, and required a constant change of beverage. in appearance she grew rapidly emaciated; her pulse--the only time she allowed it to be felt--was found to be per minute. the patient usually appeared worse in the forenoon, she was then frequently exhausted and drowsy; toward evening she often seemed better. 'expectoration accompanies the cough. the shortness of breath is aggravated by the slightest exertion. the patient's sleep is supposed to be tolerably good at intervals, but disturbed by paroxysms of coughing. her resolution to contend against illness being very fixed, she has never consented to lie in bed for a single day--she sits up from in the morning till at night. all medical aid she has rejected, insisting that nature should be left to take her own course. she has taken no medicine, but occasionally, a mild aperient and locock's cough wafers, of which she has used about per diem, and considers their effect rather beneficial. her diet, which she regulates herself, is very simple and light. 'the patient has hitherto enjoyed pretty good health, though she has never looked strong, and the family constitution is not supposed to be robust. her temperament is highly nervous. she has been accustomed to a sedentary and studious life. 'if dr. epps can, from what has here been stated, give an opinion on the case and prescribe a course of treatment, he will greatly oblige the patient's friends. 'address--miss bronte, parsonage, haworth, bradford, yorks.' { a} the original of this letter is lost, so that it is not possible to fill in the hiatus. { b} emily--who was called the major, because on one occasion she guarded miss nussey from the attentions of mr. weightman during an evening walk. { } in his next letter mr. williams informed her that miss rigby was the writer of the _quarterly_ article. { } in hathersage church is the altar tomb of robert eyre who fought at agincourt and died on the st of may , also of his wife joan eyre who died on the th of may . this joan eyre was heiress of the house of padley, and brought the padley estates into the eyre family. there is a sanctus bell of the fifteenth century with a latin inscription, 'pray for the souls of robert eyre and joan his wife.'--rev. thomas keyworth on 'morton village and _jane eyre_'--a paper read before the bronte society at keighley, . { a} _miss miles_, _or a tale of yorkshire life sixty years ago_, by mary taylor. rivingtons, . { b} _the first duty of women_. a series of articles reprinted from the _victorian magazine_, to , by mary taylor. . { } see letter to ellen nussey, page . { } miss bronte was paid pounds in all for her three novels, and mr. nicholls received an additional pounds for the copyright of _the professor_. { } a mr. hodgson is spoken of earlier, but he would seem to have been only a temporary help. { } referring to a present of birds which the curate had sent to miss nussey. { } a funeral sermon for the late rev. william weightman, m.a., preached in the church at haworth on sunday the nd of october by the rev. patrick bronte, a.b., incumbent. the profits, if any, to go in aid of the sunday school. halifax--printed by j. u. walker, george street, . price sixpence. { } a little dog, called in the next letter 'flossie, junr.,' which indicates its parentage. flossy was the little dog given by the robinsons to anne. { } the originals are in the possession of mr. alfred morrison of carlton house terrace, london. { } _de quincey memorials_, by alexander h. japp. vols. . william heinemann. { a} _agnes grey_, a novel, by acton bell. vol. iii. london, thomas cautley newby, publisher, mortimer street, cavendish square. { b} and yet the error not infrequently occurs, and was recently made by professor saintsbury (_nineteenth century literature_), of assuming that it was _jane eyre_ which met with many refusals. { c} mr. nicholls assures me that the manuscript was not rewritten after his marriage, although i had thought it possible, not only on account of its intrinsic merits, which have not been sufficiently acknowledged, but on account of the singular fact that mlle. henri, the charming heroine, is married in a white muslin dress, and that her going-away dress was of lilac silk. these were the actual wedding dresses of mrs. nicholls. { } anne marsh ( - ), a daughter of james caldwell, j.p., of linley wood, staffordshire, married a son of the senior partner in the london banking firm of marsh, stacey, & graham. her first volume appeared in , and contained, under the title of _two old men's tales_, two stories, _the admiral's daughter_ and _the deformed_, which won considerable popularity. _emilia wyndham_, _time_, _the avenger_, _mount sorel_, and _castle avon_, are perhaps the best of her many subsequent novels. { } _the professor_ was published, with a brief note by mr. nicholls, two years after the death of its author. _the professor_, a tale, by currer bell, in two volumes. smith, elder & co., cornhill, . { } lady eastlake died in . { } _letters and journals_ of lady eastlake, edited by her nephew, charles eastlake smith, vol. i. pp. , (john murray). { } _life of j. g. lockhart_, by andrew lang. published by john nimmo. mr. lang has courteously permitted me to copy this letter from his proof-sheets. { } name of place is erased in original. { } thus in original letter. { } that thackeray had written a certain unfavourable critique of _shirley_. { } this article was by john skelton (_shirley_). { } now in the possession of mr. a. b. nicholls. { } thackeray writes to mr. brookfield, in october , as follows:--'old dilke of the _athenaeum_ vows that procter and his wife, between them, wrote _jane eyre_; and when i protest ignorance, says, "pooh! you know who wrote it--you are the deepest rogue in england, etc." i wonder whether it can be true? it is just possible. and then what a singular circumstance is the + fire of the two dedications' [_jane eyre_ to thackeray, _vanity fair_ to barry cornwall].--_a collection of letters to w. m. thackeray_, - . smith and elder. { } _chapters from some memories_, by anne thackeray ritchie. macmillan and co. mrs. ritchie and her publishers kindly permit me to incorporate her interesting reminiscence in this chapter. { } george henry lewes ( - ). published _biographical history of philosophy_, - ; _ranthorpe_, ; _rose_, _blanche_, _and violet_, ; _life of goethe_, . editor of the _fortnightly review_, - . _problems of life and mind_, - ; and many other works. { } richard hengist horne ( - ). published _cosmo de medici_, ; _orion_, an epic poem in ten books, passed through six editions in , the first three editions being issued at a farthing; _a new spirit of the age_, ; _letters of e. b. browning to r. h. horne_, . { } printed by the kind permission of the rev. c. w. heald, of chale, i.w. { } sir james kay-shuttleworth ( - ). a doctor of medicine, who was made a baronet in , on resigning the secretaryship of the committee of council on education; assumed the name of shuttleworth on his marriage, in , to janet, the only child and heiress of robert shuttleworth of gawthorpe hall, burnley (died ). his son, the present baronet, is the right hon. sir ughtred james kay-shuttleworth. { a} some experiments on a farm of two acres. { b} letters of matthew arnold, collected and arranged by george w. e. russell. { } mr. nicholls is the mr. macarthey of _shirley_. here is the reference which not unnaturally gratified him:--'perhaps i ought to remark that, on the premature and sudden vanishing of mr. malone from the stage of briarfield parish . . . there came as his successor, another irish curate, mr. macarthey. i am happy to be able to inform you, _with truth_, that this gentleman did as much credit to his country as malone had done it discredit; he proved himself as decent, decorous, and conscientious, as peter was rampant, boisterous, and--(this last epithet i choose to suppress, because it would let the cat out of the bag). he laboured faithfully in the parish; the schools, both sunday and day-schools, flourished under his sway like green bay-trees. being human, of course he had his faults; these, however, were proper, steady-going, clerical faults: the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a dissenter would unhinge him for a week; the spectacle of a quaker wearing his hat in the church, the thought of an unbaptized fellow-creature being interred with christian rites--these things could make strange havoc in mr. macarthey's physical and mental economy; otherwise he was sane and rational, diligent and charitable.'--_shirley_, chap. xxxvii. { } john stuart mill, who, however, attributed the authorship of this article to his wife. { } the nusseys. { } the rev. george sowden, vicar of hebden bridge, halifax, and honorary canon of wakefield, is still alive. index abbotsford, - . academy of arts royal, , , . _agnes grey_--its publication, , , , ; reprint, , ; charlotte on, , , , ; value of, . ahaderg, county down, . alexander, miss, . ambleside, , , , , . _amy herbert_, . antwerp, . appleby, , . arnold, matthew, , , , . arnold, dr., , , , , , , , . arnold, mrs. thomas, , . _athanaeum_, , , , , , , . atkinson, mr., , , . _atlas_, , . austen, jane, , . aylott & jones, - , . bangor, . 'beck, madame.' _see_ heger, madame. bedford, mr., , . bell, rev. alan, . bell chapel, thornton, . _bengal hurkaru_, . bennoch, francis, . bernard-beere, mrs., . _berwick warder_, . bierly, . birch-pfeiffer, charlotte, . birrell, augustine, , . birstall, , , , , , , , , , . 'black bull,' haworth, , . _blackwood's magazine_, , , , . blake hall, , , , . blanche, mdlle., , . bolitho, sons, & co, . _bombay gazette_, . borrow's _bible in spain_, . bowling green inn, bradford, . bradford, , , , , , , , , , , . _bradford observer_, , . _bradford review_, . bradley, rev. richard, . branwells of cornwall, . branwell, anne, . branwell, charlotte, , . branwell, eliza, . branwell, elizabeth, , , , , , , , - , , , . branwell, john, . branwell, joseph, , . branwell, margaret, . branwell, maria. _see_ bronte, mrs. branwell, thomas, . branty, . braxborne, . bremer, frederika, . 'bretton mrs.' _see_ smith, mrs. brewster, sir david, , . briery, windermere, . britannia, . 'brocklehurst mr.' _see_ wilson, carus. bromsgrove, . bronte, anne chapter vii., - birth, ; baptism, , ; at haworth, ; as governess, , , , , , , , ; at brussels, ; at scarborough, , , , , ; in miss branwell's will, ; and charlotte, , , ; as emily's chum, , , , , ; and miss nussey, , - , , , , ; and the misses robinson, , , ; and mr. weightman, ; her dog (_see_ flossie); her drawings, ; her letters, ; her unpublished mss, , , , - , ; her novels (see _agnes grey_ and _the tenant of wildfell hall_) her poems, - ; her portrait, ; her illness and death, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; her grave, . bronte, branwell chapter v., - ; birth, , ; baptism, ; at school, , , ; at the royal academy of arts, , , ; at luddenden foot, , , , , ; in his aunt's will, , , ; and anne, ; and charlotte, , , , , , , , , , , ; charlotte's letters to, - , , , ; and emily, ; and his father, , , , , ; and hartley coleridge, - ; and f. h. grundy, ; jane eyre, , ; and miss nussey, , ; and the robinsons, , , , , - , , , ; his sketches, , , ; his writings, , , , - ; his translation of horace, ; his portrait, ; his character, ; his idleness, , , , ; his death, , - , , . bronte, charlotte birth, ; baptism, ; her place at the haworth dinner-table, ; childhood, - ; her father (_see_ bronte, patrick) her mother (_see_ bronte, mrs. patrick) her sisters (_see_ bronte, anne; bronte, emily; _agnes grey_; _tenant of wildfell hall_; _wuthering heights_) her brother (_see_ bronte, branwell) her school life (_see_ wooler, margaret; cowan bridge; and roe head) her school friends (_see_ nussey, ellen; taylor, mary) at the sidgwicks' (_q.v._), - ; at the whites' (_q.v._), - ; at brussels (_see_ heger m. and madame; jenkins, rev. mr.; the _professor_; _villette_; wheelwright, laetitia); in london, , , , , , , - ; her father's curates, - (_see also_ de renzi, rev. mr.; nicholls, rev. a. b.; smith, rev. peter augustus; weightman, rev. w.; and _shirley_) her lovers, - (_see also_ nicholls, rev. a. b.; nussey, rev. henry; taylor, james) her literary ambitions, - ; her unpublished literary work, - , ; her published work (see _jane eyre_, _the professor_, _shirley_, _villette_, _poems_); her publishers (_see_ aylott & jones, newby, and smith elder & co); her literary friendships, - (_see also_ gaskell, mrs.; martineau, harriet; smith, george; thackeray, w. m.; williams, w. s.); her critics (_see_ eastlake, lady; kingsley, charles; lewes, g. h.; and various periodicals); her marriage, , , , (_see_ nicholls, rev. a. b.); her appearance, , , , ; her death, ; her grave, , ; her will, , ; her biography, - (_see also_ gaskell, mrs.; grundy, f. h.; leyland, f. a.; nussey, ellen; reid, sir wemyss); her portrait, , ; on affection for her family, ; on children, - , ; on female friendships, ; on governessing, , , ; on ladies' college, ; on women in the professions, , , , ; on marriage, , - , , , - , , , , , , ; on spinsters, ; on men, , ; on authors and bookmakers, ; on her critics, , ; on lionising, , ; on literary coteries, , , , ; on money rewards of literature, ; on the art of biography, ; on her heroes, ; on the french, ; on french politics, , ; on war, ; on shakespeare-acting, ; on dancing, ; on the bible, , ; on religion, , , , ; on the value of work, , . bronte, elizabeth, , , , . bronte, emily chapter vi, - ; birth, ; baptism, ; at haworth, , ; her childhood, ; her school days, ; as a teacher, , ; at brussels, , , , , , ; as anne's chum, , ; in miss branwell's will, ; and the french newspapers, ; charlotte's letters to, , , , , , ; her religion, , , ; her portrait, - ; her likeness to g. h. lewes, ; her messages to miss nussey, - , , ; her dog (_see_ keeper); her sketches, , , ; her unpublished writings, , , , , , - ; her novel (see _wuthering heights_); her poetry, , , - ; her illness and death, , - , , ; her character, , , , , , , ; matthew arnold on, ; charlotte on, , , ; sydney dobell on, ; a. mary f. robinson on, , ; swinburne on, ; dr. wright on, , ; bronte, hugh, , . bronte, maria, , , , , . bronte, museum, . bronte, name, . bronte, rev. patrick chapter , - his pedigree, - , , ; at cambridge, , ; at weatherfield, - ; at hartshead, - , ; at thornton, ; goes to haworth, ; his courtship, , - ; his marriage, , ; his wife (_see_ bronte, mrs. patrick); his church, (_see also_ haworth) his curates, - ; his home, ; his study, , ; his children at home, - ; takes his children to school, ; his view of his daughters' literary successes, ; and miss branwell, , ; and his son, , , , , , ; and charlotte, , , , , , , , ; charlotte's letters to, , , , - , , , , ; and charlotte's biography, , , - , , , , ; and charlotte's wedding, (_see also_ nicholls rev. a. b.); and emily, , , ; and mary burder, , ; and rev. a. b. nicholls, , , , , , - , , , , ; and miss nussey, , , , , , ; and flossy's death, ; and james taylor, ; and miss wooler, , , ; his gun, ; his illnesses, , , , , , , , , , , , ; his poems, ; his character, , ; his recluse habits, , ; mrs. gaskell's view of, , ; his death, , ; his will, . bronte, mrs. patrick--her pedigree, ; her love letters, , - ; her marriage, ; her life at haworth, - ; her portrait, . bronte, pedigree, , . brook, mrs., , . brookfield, mrs., , . brookroyd, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . brougham, john, . broughton-in-furness, , . brown, john, , , , . brown, martha, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . brown, tabby, , , , , , , , , , , . brown, william, . browning, mrs., , . bruntee, . brunty, . brussels, , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , . bunsen, chevalier, . burder, miss mary, , . burnet, rev. dr., vicar of bradford, . 'burns, helen.' _see_ bronte maria. burns, robert, , . butterfield, r, . caldwell, james, . carlisle, earl of, . carlyle, mrs., . carlyle, thomas, , , , , , . carter family, . cartman, rev. dr., , . cartwright's mill, . catholics, charlotte and, , , . _caxtons_, _the_, , , . _chambers' journal_, , , . chapham, mrs., . chappelle, m., . chesterfield, lady, . chorley, mr., . _christian remembrancer_, , , . _church of england journal_, . clanricarde, lady, . clapham, mr., . clapham, mrs., , , . clergy daughters' school, , , . colburn, mr., . coleridge, hartley, , . coleridge, s. t., . colin, m. of _l'etoile belge_, . collins, mrs., . _cornhill magazine_, . _cottage poems_, . _cottage in the wood_, , . _courier_, . coverley church, . cowan bridge, , , , , , , , . crackenthorp, . _cranford_, . 'crimsworth', . _critic_, , , , , . crosstone parsonage, , , . crowe, mrs., . crystal palace, , , , . curates at haworth, , - . curie's homoeopathy, . 'daily news', , , , . davenport, mrs., . _david copperfield_, . de quincey, thomas, . derby, . de renzi, rev. mr., , , . devonshire, duke of, . dewsbury, . dewsbury moor, , , , , , , , , , . dickens, charles, , , , . dickenson, lowes, . _die waise von lowood_, . dilke, c. w., , . dixon, george, , , , . dixon miss mary, , , . dobell, sydney, , . dobsons of bradford, . 'donne, mr.' _see_ grant rev. mr. donnington, , . douro, marquis of, , , , , . drury, rev. mr., . _dublin review_, . _dublin university magazine_, , , . dury, caroline, . dury, rev. theodore, . dyson, harriet, . earnley rectory, , , . eastlake, lady, , , , , , , . easton, . eckermann's _goethe_, , . _economist_, , , . edinburgh, charlotte in, , , . _edinburgh guardian_, . _edinburgh review_, , , . _edward orland_, . ellesmere, earl of, . elliott, mrs., . elliotson, dr., . ellis, mrs., . 'emanuel paul.' _see_ heger, m. emerson, , , . _emma_, , . epps, dr., . _esmond_, , , . euston square, . _examiner_, , , , , , , , . exeter hall, . _experience of life_, . eyre, joan, . eyre, robert (died ), . 'fair carew, the', . _fanny hervey_, . 'fanshawe, ginevra.' _see_ miller, maria. fawcets of bradford, . fennell, rev. john, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . fennell, jane (mrs. morgan), , , , . fielding, henry, . filey, . _first performance_, _the_, . fitzwilliam, earl, . fleeming, w. lowe, . flossie, jun., , , . flossy, the dog, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . forbes, dr., , , , , . forcade, eugene, , . forster, john, , . fonblanque, mr., , . _fraser's magazine_, , , , , , , . garrs, nancy, , . garrs, sarah, . gaskell mrs--the biography of charlotte bronte, - ; its hiatuses and blunders, , , , , , , , , , , ; on branwell, , , , ; charlotte on, , ; visited by charlotte, , , , , , , , ; visits charlotte, , ; and charlotte's wedding, ; on emily, , ; and patrick, , , , , , , , , , ; and m. heger, , ; and kingsley, ; and lewes, ; and rev. a. b. nicholls, , , , , , ; and miss nussey, , , , ; and the robinsons, - , , ; and mary taylor, , , ; and thackeray, ; and frank williams, ; and rev. carus wilson, ; miss wooler on, ; _cranford_, ; _mary barton_, , ; _north and south_, . gaskell, miss meta, , . gaskell, rev. w, , , . gawthorpe hall, , , . george lovel, . gibson, mrs., . _gleneden's dream_, - . glenelg, lord, . _globe_, . godwin, william, . goethe, , , , , . gomersall, , , . _gondaland chronicles_, , , , , . gorham, mary, . grant, rev. mr., , , , , , , , , . greenwood, j, , , . growler, dog, . grundy's _pictures of the past_, , , , , . guizot, , . habergham, . halifax, , , , , , . hardy, mr., . hare's _guesses at truth_, , . harris, miss, . harris, alexander, , , , , . harrison, thomas, . hartshead, , , , , , , , , , , . hathersage, , , , , , , . hausse, mdlle., , . haworth--church, , , , ; curates, - ; library, ; museum, ; parsonage, , , , , , ; 'lodge of the three graces', ; village in , ; villagers, , , ; mrs. gaskell and, , , ; _see also_ nicholls, nussey, taylor, williams. haxby, . hazlitt, william, . heald, canon, . heald, mary, , , . heald, harriet, . heap, mrs., . 'heathcliffe', . heaton, robert, . hebden bridge, , , . heckmondwike, v, . heger, dr., . heger, m., , , - . heger, madame, , , , , , , , , , , . heger's pensionnat, - , , , . helps's _friends in council_, , . hero, the hawk, , . herschel, sir john, , , . hervey, fanny, , . hewitt, mrs., . hexham, . hoby, miss, . hodgson rev. mr., , . homoeopathy, , , , . horne, r. h., , , , . hornsea, . hotel clusyenaar, . houghton. _see_ milnes, monckton. howitt, mary, . howitt, william, . hunsworth, , , , , . hunt, leigh, , , , . hunt, thornton, . hyde, dr. douglas, . hydropathy, , . ilkley, , . _illustrated london news_, . _imitation_ of thomas a kempis, , . ingham, mrs., , . 'ingram, miss', . ireland, , , , , , , , . 'ireland, an adventure in', - . 'jane eyre,' authorship, , , , , ; inception, , , , , ; where written, ; manuscript of, ; publication, ; preface, , , ; dedication, , ; reprint, ; proposed illustration of, - ; in french, , ; reception, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; dramatised, - ; cowan bridge controversy, ; 'brocklehurst', , , ; 'helen burns', , ; 'miss ingram', ; 'mrs. read', ; 'rochester', , , , , ; 'mrs. rochester', , ; charlotte on, , , ; branwell on, ; hugh bronte on, ; kingsley on, ; mary taylor on, , . jannoy, hortense, . japp's _de quincey memorials_, . _jar of honey_, . jenkins, rev. mr., , , , , , , . jerrold, douglas, . _john bull_, . 'john, dr.' _see_ smith, george. johnson, dr., . jolly, rev. j, . _journal from cornhill_ etc, , . 'jupiter', - . kavanagh, julia, , , , , , , , , , , , . kavanagh, m.p., . keats, . keene, laura, . keeper, the dog, , , , , , , , , , , . keighley, , , , , , . _kenilworth_, . keyworth, rev. thomas, . kingsley, charles, , . kingston, anne, . kingston, elizabeth jane, , . kirk-smeaton, , . kirkstall abbey, , . knowles, sheridan, . lamartine, . lamb, charles, . lamb, mary, . lang's _lockhart_, . lawry, mrs., of muswell hill, . _leader_, , . leeds, , , , , . _leeds mercury_, . lewes, george henry, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . leyland's _bronte family_, , , , , , . liege, . lille, , . lind, jenny, , . lockhart, j. g., , , . london. _see_ bronte, charlotte, in london. london bridge wharf, . londonderry, marchioness of, . louis philippe, , . 'lowood school', , . luddenden foot, , , , . luddite riots, . lynn, eliza, , . lyttleton's _advice to a lady_, . lytton bulwer, , , , , , . 'macarthey, mr.' _see_ nicholls. macaulay's _history_, , . macdonald, frederika, . _macmillan's magazine_, . macready, the actor, , , . _madeline_, , , . _maid of killarney_, , . 'malone, mr.' _see_ smith rev. peter a. manchester, , , , , , , . marsh, mrs., , . martineau, harriet, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . martineau, rev. james, . _mary barton_, , . marzials, madame, . mayers, h. s., . meredith, george, . merrall, e, . merrall, h, . miles, rev. oddy, . mill, john stuart, . miller, maria (mrs. robertson), . mills, mrs., . milnes, monckton, , , . mirabeau, - . mirfield, , . _mirror_, , , , . miry shay, near bradford, . _miss miles_, . _mrs. leicester's school_, . _modern painters_, , . moore's _life_, . _moorland cottage_, . more, dr., . morgan, lady, . morgan, mrs., . morgan, rev. william, , , , , , , , . morley, . morley, john, . _morning chronicle_, , , . _morning herald_, , , , . _morning post_, . morrison, alfred, . morton village, . mossman, miss, . muhl, mdlle., . napoleon, . national gallery, , . near and far oxenhope, . nelson, lord, , , , . newby, thomas cautley, , , , , , , , , , , , . _newcastle guardian_, . newman, cardinal, . newton & robinson, . nicholls, rev. a. b. chapter xvii, - ; birth, ; character, ; charlotte refers to, , , , , , , , , , , ; mrs. gaskell's view of, ; and rev. patrick bronte, , , , , , , , , , , ; wooing of charlotte, , , , , ; marriage with charlotte, - ; marriage with miss bell, ; his study at haworth, ; in ireland, , , , ; on charlotte's letters, ; and mrs. gaskell's biography, , , - , , ; and _charlotte bronte and her circle_, v, , , , ; and cowan bridge controversy, ; his relics of the brontes, - , , , , . nicholls, mrs. a. b. (_secunda_), . nicoll, dr. robertson, v. noel, baptist, . norfolk, duchess of, . _north american review_, . _north british review_, , . nussey, ellen chapter viii, - ; her pedigree, ; at school, , , , ; at haworth, , , , , , , , ; in sussex, , ; visited by charlotte, , ; help to mrs. gaskell, - , , ; _the story of charlotte bronte's life_, , ; recollections of anne, ; recollections of emily, - ; recollections of miss wooler, ; charlotte's admiration for, ; mary taylor on, , ; letters from anne, - ; letters from charlotte, v, - , - , , , - , , , - , - , , , , , - , - , - , , - , - , - , - , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , - , - ; letter from emily, ; letter from canon heald, ; letter from martha taylor, ; letter from mary taylor, , . nussey, george, , , . nussey, rev. henry, , , , , - . nussey, mrs. henry, , , . nussey, john, . nussey, mrs., , , . nussey, mercy, , , , , . nussey, richard, . nussey, sarah, . oakworth, . _observer_, , . o'callaghan castle, - . o'prunty, patrick, . _orion_, , . orleans, duchess of, . outhwaite, miss, , . _oxford chronicle_, . padiham, . 'pag.' _see_ taylor, mary. _palladium_, , , , . paris, charlotte and, , . pascal's _thoughts_, . patchet, miss, , . paxton, sir joseph, . payn, james, . _pendennis_, . penzance, , , , , , , . perry, miss, . phillips, george searle, . pickles, j, . poems by the sisters--in manuscript, - ; aylott & jones's edition, - , , . _poor relations_, . port nicholson, n.z., . portraits--of anne, ; of branwell, ; of charlotte, , ; of emily, . postlethwaite, mr., . _prelude_, wordsworth's, . price, rev. mr., - . procter, mrs., , . _professor_, _the_--its inception, , , ; where written, ; the manuscript, ; seeking a publisher, , , ; its publication, , ; charlotte on, ; mrs. gaskell's proposed recasting of, . prunty, . puseyite struggle, , . 'quarterly review', , , , , , , , , , , , , , . railway panic, . rands of bradford, . _ranthorpe_, , . rawson, mr., . read, mrs. _see_ branwell, elizabeth. redhead, rev. mr., . redman, joseph, , . reform bill, . reid, sir wemyss, vi, , . 'reuter, mdlle. zoraide.' _see_ heger, madame. revue des deux mondes, , , . richmond's portrait of charlotte, . rigby, miss. _see_ eastlake, lady. ringrose, miss, , , . ritchie, mrs. richmond, - . 'rivers, st john', . robertson, mr. ('helstone'), , . robinson, rev. edmund, , , , , . robinson, mrs. edmund, , , , , , , , . robinson, edmund jun., , . robinson, misses, , , , . robinson, william, of leeds, . robinson's _emily bronte_, , . 'rochester', , , , , . 'rochester, mrs.', , . roe head, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . rogers, samuel, . rouse mill, . ruddock, dr., , . 'rue fossette.' _see_ rue d'isabelle. rue d'isabelle, , , , , , . _rural minstrel_, . ruskin, john, , , , . ruskin john james, . russell, lord john, . rydings, , . s. gudule, . st. john's college, cambridge, , . samplers worked by the branwells, ; by the brontes, , , . saunders, rev. moses, . scarborough, , , , , , , , , , , . _scotsman_, . scott, sir walter, , , , . sewell, elizabeth, . shaen, william, . _sharpe's magazine_, , . _sheffield iris_, . _shirley_, the curates of, , , , , , ; other characters in, , , , ; authorship of, , , ; french in, ; charlotte on, , , , ; charles kingsley on, ; harriet martineau on, , ; rev. a. b. nicholls on, ; mary taylor on, , ; general reception of, , , , , , , , . shuttleworth, lady, , , , , , . shuttleworth, sir james kay, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . shuttleworth, sir u. j. kay, . sidgwicks of stonegappe, - , , , . skelton, john, . _sketch_, _the_, . skipton, , . smith elder & co, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . smith, george; and anne, ; and emily, ; and _jane eyre_, , , , ; and _shirley_, , , , , , , ; and _villette_, , ; and _wuthering heights_, ; sends books to charlotte, , , , , , ; meets charlotte, , , - , , ; writes charlotte, ; and james taylor, , , ; and thackeray, , - , , ; charlotte's opinion of, , , , , , ; and charlotte's marriage, . smith, mrs. (mother of george smith), , , , , , , , . smith, rev. peter augustus, , , , , , . 'snowe, lucy', , . sophia, mdlle., . southey, . sowden, rev. george, , , , , , , , . sowerby bridge, . _spectator_, , , , . stanbury, , . _standard of freedom_, , , . stephen, sir james, . stephen, leslie, . stephenson, mr., . stonegappe, , , . stuart, dr. j. a. erskine, . _sun_, . _sunday times_, , . sutherland, duchess of, . swain, mrs. john, . swarcliffe, - . 'sweeting, rev. mr.' _see_ bradley. swinburne, a. c., on emily, . 'tablet', . talfourd's _lamb_, . tatham, mr., . taylor, ellen, , , , , , . taylor, george, , . taylor, henry, , . taylor, james appearance, ; history, , - ; illness, , ; at haworth, , ; charlotte on, - , , , , , , , , , , ; charlotte's letters to, , , , , , , , ; his opinion of _shirley_, , ; and mrs. gaskell's biography, ; his marriage, ; his death, . taylor, mrs. james, . taylor, jessie, . taylor, joe, . taylor, john, . taylor, joshua, . taylor, louisa, , . taylor, martha, , , , , , , , . taylor, mr., father of mary taylor, , , . taylor, mary chapter ix, - ; at school, , ; in brussels, , , , , ; in new zealand, , , , , - , ; illness of, , ; letters to charlotte, , - , - , ; description of charlotte, ; charlotte and, , , , , , , , , ; and mrs. gaskells biography, , - , ; miss nussey's description of, - . taylor, rose, . taylor & hessey, . taylor waring, , , , . taylor yorke, . teale, mr., , . 'temple, miss', . _tenant of wildfell hall_, writing of, ; publication, ; reception of, , ; its value, . tennyson's _poems_, . thackeray, william chapter xv, - ; on charlotte, , , ; on _jane eyre_, , , ; _jane eyre_ dedicated to, , ; compared to charlotte, - , ; visited by charlotte, , , - , ; sends _vanity fair_ to charlotte, , ; his illness, ; his illustrations, ; his lectures, , ; charlotte on, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; lady eastlake on, ; charles kingsley on, ; his friendship with w. s. williams, . thackeray, mrs., . thiers, , , . thomas, r, . thornton, , , , , . thorp green, , , , , , , . _three paths_, . tiger, , . tighe, rev. mr., . _times_, , , , , . tootill, john, . trollope, mrs., , , . truelock, miss, . turner, j. m. w., , , , . upperwood house, rawdon, - , , . 'vanity fair', , , , , , , . 'verdopolis', . vernon, solala, . _victorian magazine_, . victoria, queen, , . _villette_--its inception, , , , , , , ; publication, ; its reception, , , ; george smith and, , ; in brussels, ; confession, incident in, . vincent, mr., . voltaire's _henriade_, . wainwright, mrs., . walker, reuben, . walton, miss agnes, , , . watman, rev. mr., . watt's _improvement of the mind_, . weatherfield, essex, , . _weekly chronicle_, , . weightman, rev. william, , , , , , , - , , , . wellesley, lord charles, , . wellington, duke of, , , . wellington, n. z., , , , , , . wells's _joseph and his brethren_, . wesley, john, , . westerman, mrs., . westminster, marquis of, . _westminster review_, , , . whately's _english social life_, . wheelwright, dr., , , , , , , . wheelwright, laetitia, , , , , , , , , , , , , , . wheelwright, mrs., . white, sarah louisa, . whites of rawdon, - , , , , , , . williams, anna, . williams, e. thornton, vi, . williams, ellen, . williams, fanny, , , , , , , . williams, frank, , . williams, louisa, , . williams, w. s. chapter xiv, - ; discovery of charlotte, ; sends books to charlotte, ; and _the professor_, ; on _wuthering heights_, ; charlotte's letters to, vi, - , , - , - , - , - , - , , , , , , - , - , - , , , - , - , ; meets charlotte, ; charlotte's description of, ; and charlotte's wedding, . williams, mrs., , , , , , , , , , , , , , . willing, james, . wills, w. g., . wilson, rev. carus, , , , . windermere, , . wise, thomas j., vi. wiseman, cardinal, . wood, mr. butler, vi. wood house grove, , , , , , , , . woodward, mr., of wellington n. z., . wooler, miss c., . wooler, mr., . wooler, mrs., . wooler, margaret chapter x, - ; her history, - ; her school, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; charlotte's letters to, , - , , , - , - ; charlotte and, , , , , , ; miss nussey on, - ; at the nusseys', ; and mary taylor, , , ; and charlotte's wedding, , ; and mrs. gaskell, , , , . wordsworth, william, , , . wright's _brontes in ireland_, , . _wuthering heights_--its inception, , , , , ; authorship of, , , , , ; publication of, , ; reception of, , , ; reprint of, , ; its light on emily, ; charlotte on, , , ; sent to mrs. gaskell, . yarmouth, . yates, w. w., vi. york, , . 'yorke, rose.' _see_ taylor mary. '--- of briarmains.' _see_ taylor, mr., banker. _young men's magazine_, , . zoological gardens, . [illustration] autobiography letters and literary remains of mrs. piozzi (thrale) edited with notes and an introductory account of her life and writings by a. hayward, esq. q.c. * * * * * welcome, associate forms, where'er we turn fill, streatham's hebe, the johnsonian urn--st. stephen's * * * * * in two volumes vol. i. second edition london longman, green, longman, and roberts * * * * * preface to the second edition. * * * * * the first edition of a work of this kind is almost necessarily imperfect; since the editor is commonly dependent for a great deal of the required information upon sources the very existence of which is unknown to him till reminiscences are revived, and communications invited, by the announcement or publication of the book. some valuable contributions reached me too late to be properly placed or effectively worked up; some, too late to be included at all. the arrangement in this edition will therefore, i trust, be found less faulty than in the first, whilst the additions are large and valuable. they principally consist of fresh extracts from mrs. piozzi's private diary ("thraliana"), amounting to more than fifty pages; of additional marginal notes on books, and of copious extracts from letters hitherto unpublished. amongst the effects of her friend conway, the actor, after his untimely death by drowning in north america, were a copy of mrs. piozzi's "travel book" and a copy of johnson's "lives of the poets," each enriched by marginal notes in her handwriting. such of those in the "travel book" as were thought worth printing appeared in "the atlantic monthly" for june last, from which i have taken the liberty of copying the best. the "lives of the poets" is now the property of mr. william alexander smith, of new york, who was so kind as to open a communication with me on the subject, and to have the whole of the marginal notes transcribed for my use at his expense. animated by the same liberal wish to promote a literary undertaking, mr. j.e. gray, son of the rev. dr. robert gray, late bishop of bristol, has placed at my disposal a series of letters from mrs. piozzi to his father, extending over nearly twenty-five years (from to the year of her death) and exceeding a hundred in number. these have been of the greatest service in enabling me to complete and verify the summary of that period of her life. so much light is thrown by the new matter, especially by the extracts from "thraliana," on the alleged rupture between johnson and mrs. piozzi, that i have re-cast or re-written the part of the introduction relating to it, thinking that no pains should be spared to get at the merits of a controversy which now involves, not only the moral and social qualities of the great lexicographer, but the degree of confidence to be placed in the most brilliant and popular of modern critics, biographers and historians. it is no impeachment of his integrity, no detraction from the durable elements of his fame, to offer proof that his splendid imagination ran away with him, or that reliance on his wonderful memory made him careless of verifying his original impressions before recording them in the most gorgeous and memorable language. no one likes to have foolish or erroneous notions imputed to him, and i have pointed out some of the misapprehensions into which an able writer in the "edinburgh review" (no. ) has been hurried by his eagerness to vindicate lord macaulay. moreover, this struck me to be as good a form as any for re-examining the subject in all its bearings; and now that it has become common to reprint articles in a collected shape, the comments of a first-rate review can no longer be regarded as transitory. i gladly seize the present opportunity to offer my best acknowledgments for kind and valuable aid in various shapes, to the marquis of lansdowne, his excellency m. sylvain van de weyer (the belgian minister), the viscountess combermere, mr. and the hon. mrs. monckton milnes, the hon. mrs. rowley, miss angharad lloyd, and the rev. w.h. owen, vicar of st. asaph and dymerchion. , st. james's street: oct. th, . * * * * * contents of the first volume origin and materials of the work object of the introduction origin, education, and character of thrale introduction of johnson to the thrales johnson's habits at the period his household his social position society at streatham blue stocking parties johnson's fondness for female society nature of his intimacy with mrs. thrale his verses to her her age her personal appearance and handwriting portraits of her boswell at streatham her behaviour to johnson her acquirements johnson's estimate of her popular estimate of her manners of her time madame d'arblay at streatham her account of conversations there johnson's politeness mrs. thrale's domestic trials electioneering with johnson thrale's embarrassments, and johnson's advice johnson on housekeeping and dress his opinions on marriage johnson in the country johnson fond of riding in a carriage, but a bad traveller his want of taste for music or painting tour in wales tour in france baretti campbell's diary mrs. thrale's account of her quarrel with baretti his account alleged slight to johnson miss streatfield thrale's infidelity madame d'arblay as an inmate dr. burney mrs. thrale canvassing southwark attack by rioters on the brewhouse thrale's illness and winter in grosvenor square proposed tour thrale's death his will johnson as executor her management of the brewery italian translation a strange incident mrs. montagu--mr. crutchley sale of the brewery mrs. thrale's introduction to piozzi scene with him at dr. burney's her early impressions of him melancholy reflections johnson's regard for thrale mrs. thrale's and johnson's feelings towards each other johnson at streatham after thrale's death piozzi--verses to him johnson's health self-communings town gossip verses on pacchierotti fears for johnson reports of her marrying again reasons for quitting streatham resolution to quit approved by johnson complaints of johnson's indifference piozzi--to marry or not to marry was johnson driven out of streatham his farewell to streatham his last year there johnson and mrs. thrale at brighton conflicting feelings gives up piozzi meditated journey to italy parting with piozzi unkindness of daughters position as regards johnson objections to him as an inmate parting with piozzi verses to him on his departure her undiminished regard for johnson proved by their correspondence character of daughters madame d'arblay, scene with johnson lord brougham's commentary correspondence with johnson recall of piozzi trip to london verses to piozzi on his return journey with daughters feelings on piozzi's return, and marriage objections to her second marriage discussed correspondence with madame d'arblay on the marriage objections of daughters--lady keith correspondence with johnson as to the marriage baretti's story of her alleged deceit her uniform kindness to johnson johnson's feelings and conduct miss wynn's commonplace book johnson's unfounded objections to the marriage and erroneous impressions of piozzi miss seward's account of his loves misrepresentation and erroneous theory of a critic last days and death of johnson lord macaulay's summary of mrs. piozzi's treatment of johnson life in italy projected work on johnson the florence miscellany correspondence with cadell and publication of the "anecdotes" her alleged inaccuracy, with instances h. walpole peter pindar h. walpole again hannah more marginal notes on the "anecdotes" extracts from dr. lort's letters her thoughts on her return from italy her reception miss seward's impressions of her and piozzi publication of the "letters" opinions on them--madame d'arblay, queen charlotte, hannah more, and miss seward baretti's libellous attacks her character of him on his death "the sentimental mother" "johnson's ghost" the travel book offer to cadell publication of the book and criticisms--walpole and miss seward mrs. piozzi's theory of style attacked by walpole and gifford the preface extracts anecdote of goldsmith publication of her "synonyms"--gifford's attack extract remarks on the appearance of boswell's life of johnson "retrospection" moore's anecdotes of her and piozzi lord lansdowne's visit and impressions adoption and education of piozzi's nephew, afterwards sir john salusbury life in wales character and habits of piozzi brynbella illness and death of piozzi miss thrale's marriage the conway episode anecdotes celebration of her eightieth birthday her death and will madame d'arblay's parallel between mrs. piozzi and madame de staël character of mrs. piozzi, moral and intellectual * * * * * autobiography &c. of mrs. piozzi vol. i * * * * * introduction: life and writings of mrs. piozzi. dr. johnson was hailed the colossus of literature by a generation who measured him against men of no common mould--against hume, robertson, gibbon, warburton, the wartons, fielding, richardson, smollett, gray, goldsmith, and burke. any one of these may have surpassed the great lexicographer in some branch of learning or domain of genius; but as a man of letters, in the highest sense of the term, he towered pre-eminent, and his superiority to each of them (except burke) in general acquirements, intellectual power, and force of expression, was hardly contested by his contemporaries. to be associated with his name has become a title of distinction in itself; and some members of his circle enjoy, and have fairly earned, a peculiar advantage in this respect. in their capacity of satellites revolving round the sun of their idolatry, they attracted and reflected his light and heat. as humble companions of their _magnolia grandiflora_, they did more than live with it[ ]; they gathered and preserved the choicest of its flowers. thanks to them, his reputation is kept alive more by what has been saved of his conversation than by his books; and his colloquial exploits necessarily revive the memory of the friends (or victims) who elicited and recorded them. [footnote : "je ne suis pas la rose, mais j'ai vécu près d'elle."--_constant_.] if the two most conspicuous among these have hitherto gained notoriety rather than what is commonly understood by fame, a discriminating posterity is already beginning to make reparation for the wrong. boswell's "letters to temple," edited by mr. francis, with "boswelliana," printed for the philobiblion society by mr. milnes, led, in , to a revisal of the harsh sentence passed on one whom the most formidable of his censors, lord macaulay, has declared to be not less decidedly the first of biographers, than homer is the first of heroic poets, shakspeare the first of dramatists, or demosthenes the first of orators. the result was favourable to boswell, although the vulnerable points of his character were still more glaringly displayed. the appeal about to be hazarded on behalf of mrs. piozzi, will involve little or no risk of this kind. her ill-wishers made the most of the event which so injuriously affected her reputation at the time of its occurrence; and the marked tendency of every additional disclosure of the circumstances has been to elevate her. no candid person will read her autobiography, or her letters, without arriving at the conclusion that her long life was morally, if not conventionally, irreproachable; and that her talents were sufficient to confer on her writings a value and attraction of their own, apart from what they possess as illustrations of a period or a school. when the papers which form the basis of this work were laid before lord macaulay, he gave it as his opinion that they afforded materials for a "most interesting and durably popular volume."[ ] [footnote : his letter, dated august , , was addressed to mr. t. longman. the editorship of the papers was not proposed to me till after his death, and i had never any personal communication with him on the subject; although in the edinburgh review for july , i ventured, with the same freedom which i have used in vindicating mrs. piozzi, to dispute the paradoxical judgment he had passed on boswell. the materials which reached me after i had undertaken the work, and of which he was not aware, would nearly fill a volume.] they comprise:-- . autobiographical memoirs. . letters, mostly addressed to the late sir james fellowes. . fugitive pieces of her composition, most of which have never appeared in print. . manuscript notes by her on wraxall's memoirs, and on her own published works, namely: "anecdotes of the late samuel johnson, ll.d., during the last twenty years of his life," one volume, : "letters to and from the late samuel johnson, ll.d., &c.," in two volumes, : "observations and reflections made in the course of a journey through france, italy, and germany," in two volumes, : "retrospection; or, review of the most striking and important events, characters, situations, and their consequences which the last eighteen hundred years have presented to the view of mankind," in two volumes, quarto, . the "autobiographical memoirs," and the annotated books, were given by her to the late sir james fellowes, of adbury house, hants, m.d., f.r.s., to whom the letters were addressed. he and the late sir john piozzi salusbury were her executors, and the present publication takes place in pursuance of an agreement with their personal representatives, the rev. g.a. salusbury, rector of westbury, salop, and captain j. butler fellowes. large and valuable additions to the original stock of materials have reached me since the announcement of the work. the rev. dr. wellesley, principal of new inn hall, has kindly placed at my disposal his copy of boswell's "life of johnson" (edition of ), plentifully sprinkled with marginal notes by mrs. piozzi. the rev. samuel lysons, of hempsted court, gloucester, has liberally allowed me the free use of his valuable collection of books and manuscripts, including numerous letters from mrs. piozzi to his father and uncle, the rev. daniel lysons and mr. samuel lysons. from to mrs. piozzi kept a copious diary and note-book, called "thraliana." johnson thus alludes to it in a letter of september th, : "as you have little to do, i suppose you are pretty diligent at the 'thraliana;' and a very curious collection posterity will find it. do not remit the practice of writing down occurrences as they arise, of whatever kind, and be very punctual in annexing the dates. chronology, you know, is the eye of history. do not omit painful casualties or unpleasing passages; they make the variegation of existence; and there are many passages of which i will not promise, with Æneas, _et hæc olim meminisse juvabit_." "thraliana," which at one time she thought of burning, is now in the possession of mr. salusbury, who deems it of too private and delicate a character to be submitted to strangers, but has kindly supplied me with some curious passages and much valuable information extracted from it. i shall have many minor obligations to acknowledge as i proceed. unless mrs. piozzi's character and social position are freshly remembered, her reminiscences and literary remains will lose much of their interest and utility. it has therefore been thought advisable to recapitulate, by way of introduction, what has been ascertained from other sources concerning her; especially during her intimacy with johnson, which lasted nearly twenty years, and exercised a marked influence on his tone of mind. "this year ( )," says boswell, "was distinguished by his (johnson) being introduced into the family of mr. thrale, one of the most eminent brewers in england, and member of parliament for the borough of southwark.... johnson used to give this account of the rise of mr. thrale's father: 'he worked at six shillings a week for twenty years in the great brewery, which afterwards was his own. the proprietor of it had an only daughter, who was married to a nobleman. it was not fit that a peer should continue the business. on the old man's death, therefore, the brewery was to be sold. to find a purchaser for so large a property was a difficult matter; and after some time, it was suggested that it would be advisable to treat with thrale, a sensible, active, honest man, who had been employed in the house, and to transfer the whole to him for thirty thousand pounds, security being taken upon the property. this was accordingly settled. in eleven years thrale paid the purchase money. he acquired a large fortune, and lived to be a member of parliament for southwark. but what was most remarkable was the liberality with which he used his riches. he gave his son and daughters the best education. the esteem which his good conduct procured him from the nobleman who had married his master's daughter made him be treated with much attention; and his son, both at school and at the university of oxford, associated with young men of the first rank. his allowance from his father, after he left college, was splendid; not less than a thousand a year. this, in a man who had risen as old thrale did, was a very extraordinary instance of generosity. he used to say, 'if this young dog does not find so much after i am gone as he expects, let him remember that he has had a great deal in my own time.'" what is here stated regarding thrale's origin, on the alleged authority of johnson, is incorrect. the elder thrale was the nephew of halsey, the proprietor of the brewery whose daughter was married to a nobleman (lord cobham), and he naturally nourished hopes of being his uncle's successor. in the abbey church of st. albans, there is a monument to some members of the thrale family who died between and , adorned with a shield of arms and a crest on a ducal coronet. mrs. thrale's marginal note on boswell's account of her husband's family is curious and characteristic: "edmund halsey was son to a miller at st. albans, with whom he quarrelled, like ralph in the 'maid of the mill,' and ran away to london with a very few shillings in his pocket.[ ] he was eminently handsome, and old child of the anchor brewhouse, southwark, took him in as what we call a broomstick clerk, to sweep the yard, &c. edmund halsey behaved so well he was soon preferred to be a house-clerk, and then, having free access to his master's table, married his only daughter, and succeeded to the business upon child's demise. being now rich and prosperous, he turned his eyes homewards, where he learned that sister sukey had married a hardworking man at offley in hertfordshire, and had many children. he sent for one of them to london (my mr. thrale's father); said he would make a man of him, and did so: but made him work very hard, and treated him very roughly, halsey being more proud than tender, and his only child, a daughter, married to lord cobham. "old thrale, however, as these fine writers call him,--then a young fellow, and, like his uncle, eminent for personal beauty,--made himself so useful to mr. halsey that the weight of the business fell entirely on him; and while edmund was canvassing the borough and visiting the viscountess, ralph thrale was getting money both for himself and his principal: who, envious of his success with a wench they both liked but who preferred the young man to the old one, died, leaving him never a guinea, and he bought the brewhouse of lord and lady cobham, making an excellent bargain, with the money he had saved." [footnote : in "thraliana" she says: "strolled to london with only _s._ _d._ in his pocket."] when, in the next page but one, boswell describes thrale as presenting the character of a plain independent english squire, she writes: "no, no! mr. thrale's manners presented the character of a gay man of the town: like millamant, in congreve's comedy, he abhorred the country and everything in it." in "thraliana" after a corresponding statement, she adds: "he (the elder thrale) educated his son and three daughters quite in a high style. his son he wisely connected with the cobhams and their relations, grenvilles, lyttletons, and pitts, to whom he lent money, and they lent assistance of every other kind, so that my mr. thrale was bred up at stowe, and stoke and oxford, and every genteel place; had been abroad with lord westcote, whose expenses old thrale cheerfully paid, i suppose, who was thus a kind of tutor to the young man, who had not failed to profit by these advantages, and who was, when he came down to offley to see his father's birthplace, a very handsome and well accomplished gentleman." after expatiating on the advantages of birth, and the presumption of new men in attempting to found a new system of gentility, boswell proceeds: "mr. thrale had married miss hester lynch salusbury, of good welsh extraction, a lady of lively talents, improved by education. that johnson's introduction into mr. thrale's family, which contributed so much to the happiness of his life, was owing to her desire for his conversation, is a very probable and the general supposition; but it is not the truth. mr. murphy, who was intimate with mr. thrale, having spoken very highly of dr. johnson, he was requested to make them acquainted. this being mentioned to johnson, he accepted of an invitation to dinner at thrale's, and was so much pleased with his reception both by mr. and mrs. thrale, and they so much pleased with him, that his invitations to their house were more and more frequent, till at last he became one of the family, and an apartment was appropriated to him, both in their house at southwark and in their villa at streatham." long before this was written, boswell had quarrelled with mrs. thrale (as it is most convenient to call her till her second marriage), and he takes every opportunity of depreciating her. he might at least, however, have stated that, instead of sanctioning the "general supposition" as to the introduction, she herself supplied the account of it which he adopts. in her "anecdotes" she says: "the first time i ever saw this extraordinary man was in the year , when mr. murphy, who had long been the friend and confidential intimate of mr. thrale, persuaded him to wish for johnson's conversation, extolling it in terms which that of no other person could have deserved, till we were only in doubt how to obtain his company, and find an excuse for the invitation. the celebrity of mr. woodhouse, a shoemaker, whose verses were at that time the subject of common discourse, soon afforded a pretence[ ], and mr. murphy brought johnson to meet him, giving me general caution not to be surprised at his figure, dress, or behaviour[ ].... mr. johnson liked his new acquaintance so much, however, that from that time he dined with us every thursday through the winter, and in the autumn of the next year he followed us to brighthelmstone, whence we were gone before his arrival; so he was disappointed and enraged, and wrote us a letter expressive of anger, which we were very desirous to pacify, and to obtain his company again if possible. mr. murphy brought him back to us again very kindly, and from that time his visits grew more frequent, till in the year his health, which he had always complained of, grew so exceedingly bad, that he could not stir out of his room in the court he inhabited for many weeks together, i think months." [footnote : "he (johnson) spoke with much contempt of the notice taken of woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker. he said that it was all vanity and childishness, and that such objects were to those who patronised them, mere mirrors of their own superiority. they had better, said he, furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. he may make an excellent shoemaker, but can never make a good poet. a schoolboy's exercise may be a pretty thing for a schoolboy, but it is no treat to a man."--_maxwell's collectanea_.] the "anecdotes" were written in italy, where she had no means of reference. the account given in "thraliana" has a greater air of freshness, and proves boswell right as to the year. "it was on the second thursday of the month of january, , that i first saw mr. johnson in a room. murphy, whose intimacy with mr. thrale had been of many years' standing, was one day dining with us at our house in southwark, and was zealous that we should be acquainted with johnson, of whose moral and literary character he spoke in the most exalted terms; and so whetted our desire of seeing him soon that we were only disputing _how_ he should be invited, _when_ he should be invited, and what should be the pretence. at last it was resolved that one woodhouse, a shoemaker, who had written some verses, and been asked to some tables, should likewise be asked to ours, and made a temptation to mr. johnson to meet him: accordingly he came, and mr. murphy at four o'clock brought mr. johnson to dinner. we liked each other so well that the next thursday was appointed for the same company to meet, exclusive of the shoemaker, and since then johnson has remained till this day our constant acquaintance, visitor, companion, and friend." in the "anecdotes" she goes on to say that when she and her husband called on johnson one morning in johnson's court, fleet street, he gave way to such an uncontrolled burst of despair regarding the world to come, that mr. thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing one hand before it, and desired her to prevail on him to quit his close habitation for a period and come with them to streatham. he complied, and took up his abode with them from before midsummer till after michaelmas in that year. during the next sixteen years a room in each of their houses was set apart for him. the principal difficulty at first was to induce him to live peaceably with her mother, who took a strong dislike to him, and constantly led the conversation to topics which he detested, such as foreign news and politics. he revenged himself by writing to the newspapers accounts of events which never happened, for the sole purpose of mystifying her; and probably not a few of his mischievous fictions have passed current for history. they made up their differences before her death, and a latin epitaph of the most eulogistic order from his pen is inscribed upon her tomb. it had been well for mrs. thrale and her guests if there had existed no more serious objection to johnson as an inmate. at the commencement of the acquaintance, he was fifty-six; an age when habits are ordinarily fixed: and many of his were of a kind which it required no common temper and tact to tolerate or control. they had been formed at a period when he was frequently subjected to the worst extremities of humiliating poverty and want. he describes savage, without money to pay for a night's lodging in a cellar, walking about the streets till he was weary, and sleeping in summer upon a bulk or in winter amongst the ashes of a glass-house. he was savage's associate on several occasions of the sort. he told sir joshua reynolds that, one night in particular, when savage and he walked round st. james's square for want of a lodging, they were not at all depressed; but in high spirits, and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister, and "resolved they would stand by their country." whilst at college he threw away the shoes left at his door to replace the worn-out pair in which he appeared daily. his clothes were in so tattered a state whilst he was writing for the "gentleman's magazine" that, instead of taking his seat at cave's table, he sate behind a screen and had his victuals sent to him. talking of the symptoms of christopher smart's madness, he said, "another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and i have no passion for it." his deficiency in this respect seems to have made a lasting impression on his hostess. referring to a couplet in "the vanity of human wishes":-- "through all his veins the fever of renown _spreads_ from the strong contagion of the gown," "he had desired me (says boswell) to change _spreads_ into _burns._ i thought this alteration not only cured the fault, but was more poetical, as it might carry an allusion to the shirt by which hercules was inflamed." she has written in the margin: "every fever burns i believe; but bozzy could think only on nessus' dirty shirt, or dr. johnson's." in another marginal note she disclaims that attention to the doctor's costume for which boswell gives her credit, when, after relating how he had been called into a shop by johnson to assist in the choice of a pair of silver buckles, he adds: "probably this alteration in dress had been suggested by mrs. thrale, by associating with whom his external appearance was much improved." she writes: "it was suggested by mr. thrale, not by his wife." in general his wigs were very shabby, and their foreparts were burned away by the near approach of the candle, which his short-sightedness rendered necessary in reading. at streatham, mr. thrale's valet had always a better wig ready, with which he met johnson at the parlour door when dinner was announced, and as he went up stairs to bed, the same man followed him with another. one of his applications to cave for a trifling advance of money is signed _impransus_ (dinnerless); and he told boswell that he could fast two days without inconvenience, and had never been hungry but once. what he meant by hungry is not easy to explain, for his every day manner of eating was that of a half-famished man. when at table, he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks were riveted to his plate, till he had satisfied his appetite; which was indulged with such in-* tenseness, that the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible. until he left off drinking fermented liquors altogether, he acted on the maxim "claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes." he preferred the strongest because he said it did its work (_i.e._ intoxicate) the soonest. he used to pour capillaire into his port wine, and melted butter into his chocolate. his favourite dishes are accurately enumerated by peter pindar: madame piozzi _(loquitur)._ "dear doctor johnson loved a leg of pork, and hearty on it would his grinders work: he lik'd to eat it so much over done, that _one_ might shake the flesh from off the bone. a veal pye too, with sugar crammed and plums, was wondrous grateful to the doctor's gums. though us'd from morn to night on fruit to stuff, he vow'd his belly never had enough." mr. thackeray relates in his "irish sketches" that on his asking for currant jelly for his venison at a public dinner, the waiter replied, "it's all gone, your honour, but there's some capital lobster sauce left." this would have suited johnson equally well, or better: he was so fond of lobster sauce that he would call for the sauce-boat and pour the whole of its remaining contents over his plum pudding. a clergyman who once travelled with him relates, "the coach halted as usual for dinner, which seemed to be a deeply interesting business to johnson, who vehemently attacked a dish of stewed carp, using his fingers only in feeding himself." at the dinner when he passed his celebrated sentence on the leg of mutton--"that it was as bad as bad could be: ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-dressed"--the ladies, his fellow-passengers, observed his loss or equanimity with wonder. two of mrs. thrale's marginal notes on boswell refer to her illustrious friend's mode of eating. on his reported remark, that "a dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him," she adds, "which johnson would never have done." when boswell, describing the dinner with wilkes at davies', says, "no man eat more heartily than johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate," she strikes in with--"what was gustful rather: what was strong that he could taste it, what was tender that he could chew it." when boswell describes him as occupied for a considerable time in reading the "memoirs of fontenelle," leaning and swinging upon the low gate into the court (at streatham) without his hat, her note is: "i wonder how he liked the story of the asparagus,"--an obvious hint at his selfish habits of indulgence at table. with all this he affected great nicety of palate, and did not like being asked to a plain dinner. "it was a good dinner enough," he would remark, "but it was not a dinner to ask a man to." he was so displeased with the performances of a nobleman's french cook, that he exclaimed with vehemence, "i'd throw such a rascal into the river;" and in reference to one of his edinburgh hosts he said, "as for maclaurin's imitation of a made dish, it was a wretched attempt." his voice was loud, and his gesticulations, voluntary or involuntary, singularly uncouth. he had superstitious fancies about crossing thresholds or squares in the carpet with the right or left leg foremost, and when he did not appear at dinner might be found vainly endeavouring to pass a particular spot in the anteroom. he loved late hours, or more properly (say mrs. thrale) hated early ones. nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of going to bed, which he never would call going to rest, or suffer another to call it so. "i lie down that my acquaintance may sleep; but i lie down to endure oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety and pain." when people could be induced to sit up with him, they were often amply compensated by his rich flow of mind; but the resulting sacrifice of health and comfort in an establishment where this sitting up became habitual, was inevitably great.[ ] instead of being grateful, he always maintained that no one forbore his own gratification for the purpose of pleasing another, and "if one did sit up, it was probably to amuse oneself." boswell excuses his wife for not coinciding in his enthusiasm, by admitting that his illustrious friend's irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as turning the candles with their ends downwards when they did not burn bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not but be displeasing to a lady. he was generally last at breakfast, but one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when afterwards twitted by mrs. thrale with irregularity, he replied, "madam, i do not like to come down to vacuity." [footnote : dr. burney states that in "he very frequently met johnson at streatham, where they had many long conversations, after sitting up as long as the fire and candles lasted, and much longer than the patience of the servants subsisted."] he was subject to dreadful fits of depression, caused or accompanied by compunction for venial or fancied sins, by the fear of death or madness--(the only things he did fear), and by ingrained ineradicable disease. when boswell speaks of his "striving against evil," "ay," she writes in the margin, "and against the king's evil." if his early familiarity with all the miseries of destitution, aggravated by disease, had increased his natural roughness and irritability, on the other hand it had helped largely to bring out his sterling virtues,--his discriminating charity, his genuine benevolence, his well-timed generosity, his large-hearted sympathy with real suffering. but he required it to be material and positive, and scoffed at mere mental or sentimental woes. "the sight of people who want food and raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly fellow like me has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to vanity or softness." he said it was enough to make a plain man sick to hear pity lavished on a family reduced by losses to exchange a fine house for a snug cottage; and when condolence was demanded for a lady of rank in mourning for a baby, he contrasted her with a washerwoman with half-a-dozen children dependent on her daily labour for their daily bread.[ ] [footnote : "it's weel wi' you gentles that can sit in the house wi' handkerchers at your een when ye lose a friend; but the like o' us maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as hard as any hammer."--_the antiquary_. for this very reason the "gentles" commonly suffer most.] lord macaulay thus portrays the objects of johnson's hospitality as soon as he had got a house to cover them. "it was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought together. at the head of the establishment he had placed an old lady named williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her poverty. but in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, mrs. desmoulins, whose family he had known many years before in staffordshire. room was found for the daughter of mrs. desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as mrs. carmichael, but whom her generous host called polly. an old quack doctor called levet, who bled and dosed coalheavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, completed this menagerie."[ ] [footnote : miscellaneous writings, vol. i. p. .] mrs. williams was the daughter of a physician, and of a good welsh family, who did not leave her dependent on johnson. she is termed by madame d'arblay a very pretty poet, and was treated with uniform respect by him.[ ] all the authorities for the account of levet were collected by hawkins[ ]: from these it appears that his patients were "chiefly of the lowest class of tradesmen," and that, although he took all that was offered him by way of fee, including meat and drink, he demanded nothing from the poor, nor was known in any instance to have enforced the payment of even what was justly his due. hawkins adds that he (levet) had acted for many years in the capacity of surgeon and apothecary to johnson under the direction of dr. lawrence. [footnote : miss cornelia knight, in her "autobiography," warmly vindicates her respectability, and refers to a memoir, by lady knight, in the "european magazine" for oct. .] [footnote : life of johnson, p. - .] "when fainting nature called for aid, and hovering death prepared the blow, his vigorous remedy display'd the power of art without the show; no summons mocked by chill delay, _no petty gains disdained by pride,_ the modest wants of every day the toil of every day supplied." johnson's verses, compared with lord macaulay's prose, strikingly shew how the same subject can be degraded or elevated by the mode of treatment; and how easily the historian or biographer, who expands his authorities by picturesque details, may brighten or darken characters at will. to complete the picture of johnson's interior, it should be added that the inmates of his house were quarrelling from, morning to night with one another, with his negro servant, or with himself. in one of his letters to mrs. thrale, he says, "williams hates everybody: levet hates desmoulins, and does not love williams: desmoulins hates them both: poll (miss carmichael) loves none of them." in a conversation at streatham, reported by madame d'arblay, the _menagerie_ was thus humorously described:-- "_mrs. thrale_.--mr. levet, i suppose, sir, has the office of keeping the hospital in health? for he is an apothecary. "_dr. j_.--levet, madam, is a brutal fellow, but i have a good regard for him; for his brutality is in his manners, not his mind. "_mr. thrale_.--but how do you get your dinners drest? "_dr. j_.--why de mullin has the chief management of the kitchen; but our roasting is not magnificent, for we have no jack. "_mr. t_.--no jack? why how do they manage without? "_dr. j_.--small joints, i believe, they manage with a string, and larger are done at the tavern. i have some thoughts (with a profound gravity) of buying a jack, because i think a jack is some credit to a house. "_mr. t_.--well, but you will have a spit, too? "_dr. j_.--no, sir, no; that would be superfluous; for we shall never use it; and if a jack is seen, a spit will be presumed! "_mrs. t_.--but pray, sir, who is the poll you talk of? she that you used to abet in her quarrels with mrs. williams, and call out,' at her again, poll! never flinch, poll!' "_dr. j_.--why i took to poll very well at first, but she won't do upon a nearer examination. "_mrs. t_.--how came she among you, sir? "_dr. j_.--why i don't rightly remember, but we could spare her very well from us. poll is a stupid slut; i had some hopes of her at first; but when i talked to her tightly and closely, i could make nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and i could never persuade her to be categorical." the effect of an unbroken residence with such inmates, on a man of irritable temper subject to morbid melancholy, may be guessed; and the merit of the thrales in rescuing him from it, and in soothing down his asperities, can hardly be over-estimated. lord macaulay says, they were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated preferred their house to every other in london; and suggests that even the peculiarities which seem to unfit him for civilised society, including his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, and the ravenous eagerness with which he devoured his food, increased the interest which his new associates took in him. his hostess does not appear to have viewed them in that light, and she was able to command the best company of the intellectual order without the aid of a "lion," or a bear. if his conversation attracted many, it drove away many, and silenced more. he accounted for the little attention paid him by the great, by saying that "great lords and great ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped," as if this was peculiar to them as a class. "my leddie," remarks cuddie in "old mortality," "canna weel bide to be contradicted, as i ken neabody likes, if they could help themselves." johnson was in the zenith of his fame when literature, politics, and fashion began to blend together again by hardly perceptible shades, like the colours in shot-silk, as they had partially done in the augustan age of queen anne. one marked sign was the formation of the literary club (the club, as it still claims to be called), which brought together fox, burke, gibbon, johnson, goldsmith, garrick, reynolds, and beauclerc, besides blackballing a bishop (the bishop of chester), and a lord-chancellor (camden).[ ] yet it is curious to observe within how narrow a circle of good houses the doctor's engagements were restricted. reynolds, paoli, beauclerc, allan ramsay, hoole, dilly, strahan, lord lucan, langton, garrick, and the club formed his main reliance as regards dinners; and we find boswell recording with manifest symptoms of exultation in : "i dined with him at a bishop's where were sir joshua reynolds, mr. berenger, and some more company. he had dined the day before at another bishop's." his reverence for the episcopal bench well merited some return on their part. mr. seward saw him presented to the archbishop of york, and described his bow to an archbishop as such a studied elaboration of homage, such an extension of limb, such a flexion of body, as have seldom or ever been equalled. the lay nobility were not equally grateful, although his deference for the peerage was extreme. except in scotland or on his travels, he is seldom found dining with a nobleman. [footnote : canning was blackballed the first time he was proposed. he was elected in , mr. windham being his proposer, and dr. burney his seconder.] it is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say that he owed more social enjoyment to the thrales than to all the rest of his acquaintance put together. holland house alone, and in its best days, would convey to persons living in our time an adequate conception of the streatham circle, when it comprised burke, reynolds, garrick, goldsmith, boswell, murphy, dr. burney and his daughter, mrs. montagu, mrs. boscawen, mrs. crewe, lord loughborough, dunning (afterwards lord ashburton), lord mulgrave, lord westcote, sir lucas and mr. (afterwards sir william) pepys, major holroyd afterwards lord sheffield, the bishop of london and mrs. porteous, the bishop of peterborough and mrs. hinchcliffe, miss gregory, miss streatfield, &c. as at holland house, the chief scene of warm colloquial contest or quiet interchange of mind was the library, a large and handsome room, which the pencil of reynolds gradually enriched with portraits of all the principal persons who had conversed or studied in it. to supply any deficiencies on the shelves, a hundred pounds, madame d'arblay states, was placed at johnson's disposal to expend in books; and we may take it for granted that any new publication suggested by him was ordered at once. but a bookish couple, surrounded by a literary set, were surely not exclusively dependent on him for this description of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by reason of it. whilst the "lives of the poets" was in progress, dr. johnson "would frequently produce one of the proof sheets to embellish the breakfast table, which was always in the library, and was certainly the most sprightly and agreeable meeting of the day." ... "these proof sheets mrs. thrale was permitted to read aloud, and the discussions to which they led were in the highest degree entertaining."[ ] [footnote : "memoirs of dr. burney," &c., by his daughter, madame d'arblay. in three volumes, . vol. ii. p. - .] it was mainly owing to his domestication with the thrales that he began to frequent drawing-rooms at an age when the arm-chair at home or at the club has an irresistible charm for most men of sedentary pursuits. it must be admitted that the evening parties in which he was seen, afforded a chance of something better than the "unidead chatter of girls," with an undue fondness for which he reproached langton; for the _blue stocking_ clubs had just come into fashion,--so called from a casual allusion to the blue stockings of an _habitué_, mr. stillingfleet.[ ] their founders were mrs. vesey and mrs. montagu; but according to madame d'arblay, "more bland and more gleeful than that of either of them, was the personal celebrity of mrs. thrale. mrs. vesey, indeed, gentle and diffident, dreamed not of any competition, but mrs. montagu and mrs. thrale had long been set up as rival candidates for colloquial eminence, and each of them thought the other alone worthy to be her peer. openly therefore when they met, they combated for precedence of admiration, with placid though high-strained intellectual exertion on the one side, and an exuberant pleasantry or classical allusion or quotation on the other; without the smallest malice in either." [footnote : the first of these was then (about ) in the meridian of its lustre, but had been instituted many years previously at bath, it owed its name to an apology made by mr. stillingfleet in declining to accept an invitation to a literary meeting at mrs. vesey's, from not being, he said, in the habit of displaying a proper equipment for an evening assembly. "pho, pho," said she, "don't mind dress. come in your blue stockings." with which words, humorously repeating them as he entered the apartment of the chosen coterie, mr. stillingfleet claimed permission for entering according to order. and these words, ever after, were fixed, in playful stigma, upon mrs. vesey's associations. _(madame d'arblay.)_ boswell also traces the term to stillingfleet's blue stockings; and hannah more's "bas-bleu" gave it a permanent place in literature.] a different account of the origin of bluestocking parties was given by lady crewe to a lady who has allowed me to copy her note of the conversation, made at the time ( ): "lady crewe told me that her mother (mrs. greville), the duchess of portland, and mrs. montagu were the first who began the conversation parties in imitation of the noted ones, _temp._ madame de sevigne', at rue st. honore. madame de polignac, one of the first guests, came in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in paris. mrs. greville and all the lady members of mrs. montagu's _club_, adopted the _mode_. a foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at mrs. montagu's _soirée_, wrote to tell a friend of the charming intellectual party, who had one rule; 'they wear blue stockings as a distinction.'" wraxall, who makes the same comparison, remarks: "mrs. thrale always appeared to me to possess at least as much information, a mind as cultivated, and more brilliancy of intellect than mrs. montagu, but she did not descend among men from such an eminence, and she talked much more, as well as more unguardedly, on every subject. she was the provider and conductress of johnson, who lived almost constantly under her roof, or more properly under that of mr. thrale, both in town and at streatham. he did not, however, spare her more than other women in his attacks if she courted and provoked his animadversions." although he seldom appeared to greater advantage than when under the combined spell of feminine influence and rank, his demeanour varied with his mood. on miss monkton's (afterwards countess of cork) insisting, one evening, that sterne's writings were very pathetic, johnson bluntly denied it. "i am sure," she rejoined, "they have affected me." "why," said johnson, smiling and rolling himself about, "that is because, dearest, you're a dunce." when she some time afterwards mentioned this to him, he said, with equal truth and politeness, "madam, if i had thought so, i certainly should not have said it." he did not come off so well on another occasion, when the presence of women he respected might be expected to operate as a cheek. talking, at mrs. garrick's, of a very respectable author, he told us, says boswell, "a curious circumstance in his life, which was that he had married a printer's devil. _reynolds_. 'a printer's devil, sir! why, i thought a printer's devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.' _johnson_. 'yes, sir. but i suppose he had her face washed, and put clean clothes on her.' then, looking very serious, and very earnest. 'and she did not disgrace him;--the woman had a bottom of good sense.' the word _bottom_ thus introduced was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing; though i recollect that the bishop of killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while miss hannah more slily hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the same settee with her. his pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it: he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotic power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, 'where's the merriment?' then collecting himself, and looking awful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, 'i say the _woman_ was _fundamentally_ sensible;' as if he had said, hear this now, and laugh if you dare. we all sat composed as at a funeral." this resembles the influence exercised by the "great commoner" over the house of commons. an instance being mentioned of his throwing an adversary into irretrievable confusion by an arrogant expression of contempt, the late mr. charles butler asked the relator, an eye-witness, whether the house did not laugh at the ridiculous figure of the poor member. "no, sir," was the reply, "we were too much awed to laugh." it was a marked feature in johnson's character that he was fond of female society; so fond, indeed, that on coming to london he was obliged to be on his guard against the temptations to which it exposed him. he left off attending the green room, telling grarrick, "i'll come no more behind your scenes, davy; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities." the proneness of his imagination to wander in this forbidden field is unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at sky, in support of the doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable: "i have _often_ thought that, if i kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton, i mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. i would have no silks: you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so; linen detects its own dirtiness." his virtue thawed instead of becoming more rigid in the north. "this evening," records boswell of their visit to an hebridean chief, "one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little woman, good-humouredly sat down upon dr. johnson's knee, and being encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck and kissed him. 'do it again,' said he, 'and let us see who will tire first.' he kept her on his knee some time whilst he and she drank tea." the rev. dr. maxwell relates in his "collectanea," that "two young women from staffordshire visited him when i was present, to consult him on the subject of methodism, to which they were inclined. 'come,' said he, 'you pretty fools, dine with maxwell and me at the mitre, and we will talk over that subject:' which they did, and after dinner he took one of them upon his knee, and fondled her for half an hour together." [ ] [footnote : "amongst his singularities, his love of conversing with the prostitutes he met in the streets, was not the least. he has been known to carry some of these unfortunate creatures into a tavern, for the sake of striving to awaken in them a proper sense of their condition. i remember, he said, once asking one of them for what purpose she supposed her maker had bestowed on her so much beauty. her answer was, 'to please the gentlemen, to be sure; for what other purpose could it be given me?" _(johnsoniana.)_ he once carried one, fainting from exhaustion, home on his back.] women almost always like men who like women; or as the phenomenon is explained by pope-- "lust, through some certain strainers well refined, is gentle love, and charms all womankind." johnson, despite of his unwieldy figure, scarred features and uncouth gestures, was a favourite with the fair, and talked of affairs of the heart as things of which he was entitled to speak from personal experience as confidently as of any other moral or social topics. he told mrs. thrale, without the smallest consciousness of presumption or what mr. square would term the unfitness of things, of his and lord lyttleton's having contended for miss boothby's preference with an emulation that occasioned hearty disgust and ended in lasting animosity. "you may see," he added, when the lives of the poets were printed, "that dear boothby is at my heart still. she would delight in that fellow lyttleton's company though, all that i could do, and i cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like hers." [ ] [footnote : in point of personal advantages the man of rank and fashion and the scholar were nearly on a par. "but who is this astride the pony, so long, so lean, so lank, so bony? dat be de great orator, littletony."] mr. croker surmises that "molly aston," not "dear boothby," must have been the object of this rivalry[ ]; and the surmise is strengthened by johnson's calling molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding (to mrs. thrale), "my wife was a little jealous, and happening one day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, mrs. johnson made the wench look at my hand, but soon repented of her curiosity,'for,' says the gipsy, 'your heart is divided between a betty and a molly: betty loves you best, but you take most delight in molly's company.' when i turned about to laugh, i saw my wife was crying. pretty charmer, she had no reason." this pretty charmer was in her forty-eighth year when he married her, he being then twenty-seven. he told beauclerc that it was a love match on both sides; and garrick used to draw ludicrous pictures of their mutual fondness, which he heightened by representing her as short, fat, tawdrily dressed, and highly rouged. [footnote : see "croker's boswell," p. , and malone's note in the prior edition.] on the question whether "molly aston" or "dear boothby" was the cause of his dislike of lyttleton, one of mrs. piozzi's marginal notes is decisive. "mrs. thrale (says boswell) suggests that he was offended by molly aston's preference of his lordship to him." she retorts: "i never said so. i believe lord lyttleton and molly aston were not acquainted. no, no: it was miss boothby whose preference he professed to have been jealous of, and so i said in the 'anecdotes.'" one of rochefoucauld's maxims is: "young women who do not wish to appear _coquette_, and men of advanced years who do not wish to appear ridiculous, should never speak of love as of a thing in which they might take part." mrs. thrale relates an amusing instance of johnson's adroitness in escaping from the dilemma: "as we had been saying one day that no subject failed of receiving dignity from the manner in which mr. johnson treated it, a lady at my house said, she would make him talk about love; and took her measures accordingly, deriding the novels of the day because they treated about love. 'it is not,' replied our philosopher, 'because they treat, as you call it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are despicable: we must not ridicule a passion which he who never felt, never was happy, and he who laughs at, never deserves to feel--a passion which has caused the change of empires, and the loss of worlds--a passion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.' he thought he had already said too much. 'a passion, in short,' added he, with an altered tone, 'that consumes me away for my pretty fanny here, and she 'is very cruel,' speaking of another lady (miss burney) in the room." as the high-flown language which he occasionally employed in addressing or discussing women, has originated a theory that the basis or essence of his character was romance, it may be as well to contrast what he said in soberer moods on love. he remarked to dr. maxwell, that "its violence and ill-effects were much exaggerated; for who knows any real sufferings on that head, more than from the exorbitancy of any other passion?" on boswell asking him whether he did not suppose that there are fifty women in the world with any of whom a man may be as happy as with any one woman in particular, he replied, "ay, sir, fifty thousand. i believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the lord-chancellor upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances without the parties having any choice in the matter." on another occasion he observed that sensible men rarely married for love. these peculiarities throw light on more questions than one relating to johnson's prolonged intimacy and alleged quarrel with mrs. thrale. his gallantry, and the flattering air of deferential tenderness which he threw into his commerce with his female favourites, may have had little less to do with his domestication at streatham than his celebrity, his learning, or his wit. the most submissive wife will manage to dislodge an inmate who is displeasing to her, "aye, a marriage, man," said bucklaw to his led captain, "but wherefore droops thy mighty spirit? the board will have a corner, and the corner will have a trencher, and the trencher will have a glass beside it; and the board end shall be filled, and the trencher and the glass shall be replenished for thee, if all the petticoats in lothian had sworn the contrary." "so says many an honest fellow," said craigenfelt, "and some of my special friends; but curse me if i know the reason, the women could never bear me, and always contrived to trundle me out before the honey-moon was over."[ ] [footnote : bride of lammermoor.] it was all very well for johnson to tell boswell, "i know no man who is more master of his wife and family than thrale. if he holds up a finger, he is obeyed." the sage never acted on the theory, and instead of treating the wife as a cipher, lost no opportunity of paying court to her, though in a manner quite compatible with his own lofty spirit of independence and self-respect. thus, attention having been called to some italian verses by baretti, he converted them into an elegant compliment to her by an improvised paraphrase: "viva! viva la padrona! tutta bella, e tutta buona, la padrona e un angiolella tutta buona e tutta bella; tutta bella e tutta buona; viva! viva la padrona!" "long may live my lovely hetty! always young and always pretty; always pretty, always young, live my lovely hetty long! always young and always pretty; long may live my lovely hetty!" her marginal note in the copy of the "anecdotes" presented by her to sir james fellowes in is:--"i heard these verses sung at mr. thomas's by three voices not three weeks ago." it was in the eighth year of their acquaintance that johnson solaced his fatigue in the hebrides by writing a latin ode to her. "about fourteen years since," wrote sir walter scott, in , "i landed in sky with a party of friends, and had the curiosity to ask what was the first idea on every one's mind at landing. all answered separately that it was this ode." thinking miss cornelia knight's version too diffuse, i asked mr. milnes for a translation or paraphrase, and he kindly complied by producing these spirited stanzas: "where constant mist enshrouds the rocks, shattered in earth's primeval shocks, and niggard nature ever mocks the labourer's toil, i roam through clans of savage men, untamed by arts, untaught by pen; or cower within some squalid den o'er reeking soil. through paths that halt from stone to stone, amid the din of tongues unknown, one image haunts my soul alone, thine, gentle thrale! soothes she, i ask, her spouse's care? does mother-love its charge prepare? stores she her mind with knowledge rare, or lively tale? forget me not! thy faith i claim, holding a faith that cannot die, that fills with thy benignant name these shores of sky." "on another occasion," says mrs. thrale, in the "anecdotes," "i can boast verses from dr. johnson. as i went into his room the morning of my birthday once and said to him, 'nobody sends me any verses now, because i am five-and-thirty years old; and stella was fed with them till forty-six, i remember.' my being just recovered from illness and confinement will account for the manner in which he burst out suddenly, for so he did without the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a minute before: "oft in danger, yet alive, we are come to thirty-five; long may better years arrive, better years than thirty-five. could philosophers contrive life to stop at thirty-five, time his hours should never drive o'er the bounds of thirty-five. high to soar, and deep to dive, nature gives at thirty-five. ladies, stock and tend your hive, trifle not at thirty-five; for howe'er we boast and strive, life declines from thirty-five; he that ever hopes to thrive must begin by thirty-five; and all who wisely wish to wive must look on thrale at thirty-five." "'and now,' said he, as i was writing them down, 'you may see what it is to come for poetry to a dictionary-maker; you may observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly.' and so they do." byron's estimate of life at the same age, is somewhat different: "too old for youth--too young, at thirty-five to herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, i wonder people should he left alive. but since they are, that epoch is a bore." lady aldborough, whose best witticisms unluckily lie under the same merited ban as rochester's best verses, resolved not to pass twenty-five, and had her passport made out accordingly till her death at eighty-five. she used to boast that, whenever a foreign official objected, she never failed to silence him by the remark, that he was the first gentleman of his country who ever told a lady she was older than she said she was. actuated probably by a similar feeling, and in the hope of securing to herself the benefit of the doubt, mrs. thrale omitted in the "anecdotes" the year when these verses were addressed to her, and a sharp controversy has been raised as to the respective ages of herself and dr. johnson at the time. it is thus summed up by one of the combatants: "in one place mr. croker says that at the commencement of the intimacy between dr. johnson and mrs. thrale, in , the lady was twenty-five years old. in other places he says that mrs. thrale's thirty-fifth year coincided with johnson's seventieth. johnson was born in . if, therefore, mrs. thrale's thirty-fifth year coincided with johnson's seventieth, she could have been only twenty-one years old in . this is not all. mr. croker, in another place, assigns the year as the date of the complimentary lines which johnson made on mrs. thrale's thirty-fifth birthday. if this date be correct mrs. thrale must have been born in , and could have been only twenty-three when her acquaintance commenced. mr. croker, therefore, gives us three different statements as to her age. two of the three must be incorrect. we will not decide between them."[ ] [footnote : macaulay's essays.] mr. salusbury, referring to a china bowl in his possession, says: "the slip of paper now in it is in my father's handwriting, and copied, i have heard him say, from the original slip, which was worn out by age and fingering. the exact words are, 'in this bason was baptised hester lynch salusbury, th jan. - old style, at bodville in carnarvonshire.'" the incident of the verses is thus narrated in "thraliana": "and this year, [ ], when i told him that it was my birthday, and that i was then thirty-five years old, he repeated me these verses, which i wrote down from his mouth as he made them." if she was born in - , she must have been thirty-six in ; and there is no perfectly satisfactory settlement of the controversy, which many will think derives its sole importance from the two chief controversialists. [footnote : in one of her memorandum books, .] the highest authorities differ equally about her looks. "my readers," says boswell, "will naturally wish for some representation of the figures of this couple. mr. thrale was tall, well-proportioned, and stately. as for _madam_, or _my mistress_, by which epithets johnson used to mention mrs. thrale, she was short, plump, and brisk." "he should have added," observes mr. croker, "that she was very pretty." this was not her own opinion, nor that of her cotemporaries, although her face was attractive from animation and expression, and her personal appearance pleasing on the whole. sometimes, when visiting the author of "piozziana,"[ ] she used to look at her little self, as she called it, and spoke drolly of what she once was, as if speaking of some one else; and one day, turning to him, she exclaimed: "no, i never was handsome: i had always too many strong points in my face for beauty." on his expressing a doubt of this, and hinting that dr. johnson was certainly an admirer of her personal charms, she replied that his devotion was at least as warm towards the table and the table-cloth at streatham. [footnote : "piozziana; or recollections of the late mrs. piozzi, with remarks. by a friend." (the rev. e. mangin.) moxon, . these reminiscences, unluckily limited to the last eight or ten years of her life at bath, contain much curious information, and leave a highly favourable impression of mrs. piozzi.] one day when he was ill, exceedingly low-spirited, and persuaded that death was not far distant, she appeared before him in a dark-coloured gown, which his bad sight, and worse apprehensions, made him mistake for an iron-grey. "'why do you delight,' said he, 'thus to thicken the gloom of misery that surrounds me? is not here sufficient accumulation of horror without anticipated mourning?'--'this is not mourning, sir!' said i, drawing the curtain, that the light might fall upon the silk, and show it was a purple mixed with green.--'well, well!' replied he, changing his voice; 'you little creatures should never wear those sort of clothes, however; they are unsuitable in every way. what! have not all insects gay colours?'" according to the author of "piozziana," who became acquainted with her late in life, "she was short, and though well-proportioned, broad, and deep-chested. her hands were muscular and almost coarse, but her writing was, even in her eightieth year, exquisitely beautiful; and one day, while conversing with her on the subject of education, she observed that 'all misses now-a-days, wrote so like each other, that it was provoking;' adding, 'i love to see individuality of character, and abhor sameness, especially in what is feeble and flimsy.' then, spreading her hand, she said, 'i believe i owe what you are pleased to call my good writing, to the shape of this hand, for my uncle, sir robert cotton, thought it was too manly to be employed in writing like a boarding-school girl; and so i came by my vigorous, black manuscript.'" it was fortunate that the hand-writing compensated for the hands; and as she attached great importance to blood and race, that she did not live to read byron's "thoroughbred and tapering fingers," or to be shocked by his theory that "the hand is almost the only sign of blood which aristocracy can generate." her bath friend appeals to a miniature (engraved for this work) by roche, of bath, taken when she was in her seventy-seventh year. like cromwell, who told the painter that if he softened a harsh line or so much as omitted a wart, he should never be paid a sixpence,--she desired the artist to paint her face deeply rouged, which it always was[ ], and to introduce a trivial deformity of the jaw, produced by a horse treading on her as she lay on the ground after a fall. in this respect she proved superior to johnson; who, with all his love of truth, could not bear to be painted with his defects. he was displeased at being drawn holding a pen close to his eye; and on its being suggested that reynolds had painted himself holding his ear in his hand to catch the sound, he replied: "he may paint himself as deaf as he pleases, but i will not be blinking sam." [footnote : "one day i called early at her house, and as i entered her drawing-room, she passed me, saying, 'dear sir, i will be with you in a few minutes; but, while i think of it, i must go to my dressing-closet and paint my face, which i forgot to do this morning.' accordingly she soon returned, wearing the requisite quantity of bloom; which, it must be noticed, was not in the least like that of youth and beauty. i then said that i was surprised she should so far sacrifice to fashion, as to take that trouble. her answer was that, as i might conclude, her practice of painting did not proceed from any silly compliance with bath fashion, or any fashion; still less, if possible, from the desire of appearing younger than she was, but from this circumstance, that in early life she had worn rouge, as other young persons did in her day, as a part of dress; and after continuing the habit for some years, discovered that it had introduced a dull yellow colour into her complexion, quite unlike that of her natural skin, and that she wished to conceal the deformity."--_piozziana_.] reynolds' portrait of mrs. thrale conveys a highly agreeable impression of her; and so does hogarth's, when she sat to him for the principal figure in "the lady's last stake." she was then only fourteen; and he probably idealised his model; but that he also produced a striking likeness, is obvious on comparing his picture with the professed portraits. the history of this picture (which has been engraved, at lord macaulay's suggestion, for this work) will be found in the autobiography and the letters. boswell's account of his first visit to streatham gives a tolerably fair notion of the footing on which johnson stood there, and the manner in which the interchange of mind was carried on between him and the hostess. this visit took place in october, , four years after johnson's introduction to her; and boswell's absence from london, in which he had no fixed residence during johnson's life, will hardly account for the neglect of his illustrious friend in not procuring him a privilege which he must have highly coveted and would doubtless have turned to good account. "on the th of october i complied with this obliging invitation; and found, at an elegant villa, six miles from town, every circumstance that can make society pleasing. johnson, though quite at home, was yet looked up to with an awe, tempered by affection, and seemed to be equally the care of his host and hostess. i rejoiced at seeing him so happy." "mrs. thrale disputed with him on the merit of prior. he attacked him powerfully; said he wrote of love like a man who had never felt it; his love verses were college verses: and he repeated the song, 'alexis shunn'd his fellow swains,' &c. in so ludicrous a manner, as to make us all wonder how any one could have been pleased with such fantastical stuff. mrs. thrale stood to her guns with great courage, in defence of amorous ditties, which johnson despised, till he at last silenced her by saving, 'my dear lady, talk no more of this. nonsense can be defended but by nonsense.' "mrs. thrale then praised garrick's talents for light gay poetry; and, as a specimen, repeated his song in 'florizel and perdita,' and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:-- "'i'd smile with the simple, and feed with the poor.' "_johnson._--'nay, my dear lady, this will never do. poor david! smile with the simple!--what folly is that? and who would feed with the poor that can help it? no, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.'" boswell adds, that he repeated this sally to glarrick, and wondered to find his sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it; on which mrs. thrale remarks, "how odd to go and tell the man!" the independent tone she took when she deemed the doctor unreasonable, is also proved by boswell in his report of what took place at streatham in reference to lord marchmont's offer to supply information for the life of pope: "elated with the success of my spontaneous exertion to procure material and respectable aid to johnson for his very favourite work, 'the lives of the poets,' i hastened down to mr. thrale's, at streatham, where he now was, that i might insure his being at home next day; and after dinner, when i thought he would receive the good news in the best humour, i announced it eagerly: 'i have been at work for you to-day, sir. i have been with lord marchmont. he bade me tell you he has a great respect for you, and will call on you to-morrow at one o'clock, and communicate all he knows about pope.' _johnson._ 'i shall not be in town to-morrow. i don't care to know about pope.' _mrs. thrale_ (surprised, as i was, and a little angry). 'i suppose, sir, mr. boswell thought that as you are to write pope's life, you would wish to know about him.' _johnson._ 'wish! why yes. if it rained knowledge, i'd hold out my hand; but i would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it.' there was no arguing with him at the moment. sometime afterwards he said, 'lord marchmont will call upon me, and then i shall call on lord marchmont.' mrs. thrale was uneasy at this unaccountable caprice: and told me, that if i did not take care to bring about a meeting between lord marchmont and him, it would never take place, which would be a great pity." the ensuing conversation is a good sample of the freedom and variety of "talk" in which johnson luxuriated, and shows how important a part mrs. thrale played in it: "mrs. thrale told us, that a curious clergyman of our acquaintance (dr. lort is named in the margin) had discovered a licentious stanza, which pope had originally in his 'universal prayer,' before the stanza,-- "'what conscience dictates to be done, or warns us not to do,' &c. it was this:-- "'can sins of moment claim the rod of everlasting fires? and that offend great nature's god which nature's self inspires." and that dr. johnson observed, it had been borrowed from _guarini_. there are, indeed, in _pastor fido_, many such flimsy superficial reasonings as that in the last two lines of this stanza. "_boswell_. 'in that stanza of pope's, "_rod of fires_" is certainly a bad metaphor.' _mrs. thrale_. 'and "sins of _moment_" is a faulty expression; for its true import is _momentous_, which cannot be intended.' _johnson_. 'it must have been written "of _moments_." of _moment_, is _momentous_; of _moments, momentary_. i warrant you, however, pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out.' "talking of divorces, i asked if othello's doctrine was not plausible:-- "'he that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's not robb'd at all.' dr. johnson and mrs. thrale joined against this. _johnson_. 'ask any man if he'd wish not to know of such an injury.' _boswell_. 'would you tell your friend to make him unhappy?' _johnson_. 'perhaps, sir, i should not: but that would be from prudence on my own account. a man would tell his father.' _boswell_. 'yes; because he would not have spurious children to get any share of the family inheritance.' _mrs. thrale_. 'or he would tell his brother.' _boswell_. 'certainly his _elder_ brother.... would you tell mr. ----?' (naming a gentleman who assuredly was not in the least danger of so miserable a disgrace, though married to a fine woman). _johnson_. 'no, sir: because it would do no good; he is so sluggish, he'd never go to parliament and get through a divorce.'" _marginal note_: "langton." there is every reason to believe that her behaviour to johnson was uniformly marked by good-breeding and delicacy. she treated him with a degree of consideration and respect which he did not always receive from other friends and admirers. a foolish rumour having got into the newspapers that he had been learning to dance of vestris, it was agreed that lord charlemont should ask him if it was true, and his lordship with (it is shrewdly observed) the characteristic spirit of a general of irish volunteers, actually put the question, which provoked a passing feeling of irritation. opposite boswell's account of this incident she has written, "was he not right in hating to be so treated? and would he not have been right to have loved me better than any of them, because i never did make a lyon of him?" one great charm of her companionship to cultivated men was her familiarity with the learned languages, as well as with french, italian, and spanish. the author of "piozziana" says: "she not only read and wrote hebrew, greek, and latin, but had for sixty years constantly and ardently studied the scriptures and the works of commentators in the original languages." she did not know greek, and he probably over-estimated her other acquirements, which boswell certainly underestimates when he speaks slightingly of them on the strength of johnson's having said: "it is a great mistake to suppose that she is above him (thrale) in literary attainments. she is more flippant, but he has ten times her learning: he is a regular scholar; but her learning is that of a school-boy in one of the lower forms." if this were so, it is strange that thrale should cut so poor a figure, should seem little better than a nonentity, whilst every imaginable topic was under animated discussion at his table; for boswell was more ready to report the husband's sayings than the wife's. in a marginal note on one of the printed letters she says: "mr. thrale was a very merry talking man in ; but the distress of , which affected his health, his hopes, and his whole soul, affected his temper too. perkins called it being planet struck, and i am not sure he was ever completely the same man again." the notes of his conversation during the antecedent period are equally meagre.[ ] he is described by madame d'arblay as taking a singular amusement in hearing, instigating, and provoking a war of words, alternating triumph and overthrow, between clever and ambitious colloquial combatants. [footnote : "pray, doctor, said a gentleman to johnson, is mr. thrale a man of conversation, or is he only wise and silent?' 'why, sir, his conversation does not show the _minute_ hand; but he generally strikes the hour very correctly.'"--_johnsoniana_.] no one would have expected to find her as much at home in greek and latin authors as a man of fair ability who had received and profited by an university education, but she could appreciate a classical allusion or quotation, and translate off-hand a latin epigram. "mary aston," said johnson, "was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a whig; and she talked all in praise of liberty; and so i made this epigram upon her. she was the loveliest creature i ever saw! "'liber ut esse velim, suasisti, pulchra maria, ut maneam liber, pulchra maria, vale!' "will it do this way in english, sir? (said mrs. thrale)-- "'persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you, if freedom we seek, fair maria, adieu." mr. croker's version is:-- "'you wish me, fair maria, to be free, then, fair maria, i must fly from thee.' boswell also has tried his hand at it; and a correspondent of the "gentleman's magazine" suggests that johnson had in his mind an epigram on a young lady who appeared at a masquerade in paris, habited as a jesuit, during the height of the contention between the jansenists and molinists concerning free will:-- "on s'étonne ici que calviniste eût pris l'habit de moliniste, puisque que cette jeune beauté Ôte à chacun sa liberté, n'est ce pas une janséniste."[ ] [footnote : "menagiana," vol. iii. p. . edition of . equally happy were lord chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at a dublin ball, with an orange breastknot:-- mrs. thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to strike in, as when johnson was declaiming paradoxically against action in oratory: "action can have no effect on reasonable minds. it may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument." _mrs. thrale_. "what then, sir, becomes of demosthenes' saying, action, action, action?" _johnson_. "demosthenes, madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, to a barbarous people." "the polished athenians!" is her marginal protest, and a conclusive one. in english literature she was rarely at fault. in "pretty tory, where's the jest to wear that riband on thy breast, when that same breast betraying shows the whiteness of the rebel rose?" white was adopted by the malcontent irish as the french emblem. johnson's epigram may have been suggested by propertius: "nullus liber erit si quis amare volet."] reference to the flattery lavished on garrick by lord mansfield and lord chatham, johnson had said, "when he whom everybody else flatters, flatters me, then i am truly happy." _mrs. thrale_. "the sentiment is in congreve, i think." _johnson_. "yes, madam, in 'the way of the world.' "'if there's delight in love, 'tis when i see the heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.'" when johnson is reported saying, "those who have a style of distinguished excellence can always be distinguished," she objects: "it seems not. the lines always quoted as dryden's, beginning, 'to die is landing on some silent shore,' are garth's after all." johnson would have been still less pleased at her discovery that a line in his epitaph on phillips, "till angels wake thee with a note like thine," was imitated from pope's "and saints embrace thee with a love like mine." in one of her letters to him (june, ) she writes: "meantime let us be as _merry_ as reading burton upon _melancholy_ will make us. you bid me study that book in your absence, and now, what have i found? why, i have found, or fancied, that he has been cruelly plundered: that milton's first idea of 'l'allegro' and 'il penseroso' were suggested by the verses at the beginning; that savage's speech of suicide in the 'wanderer' grew up out of a passage you probably remember towards the th page; that swift's tale of the woman that holds water in her mouth, to regain her husband's love by silence, had its source in the same farrago; and that there is an odd similitude between my lord's trick upon sly the tinker, in shakspeare's 'taming of the shrew,' and some stuff i have been reading in burton." it would be easy to heap proof upon proof of the value and variety of mrs. thrale's contributions to the colloquial treasures accumulated by boswell and other members of the set; and johnson's deliberate testimony to her good qualities of head and heart will far more than counterbalance any passing expressions of disapproval or reproof with her mistimed vivacity, or alleged disregard of scrupulous accuracy in narrative, may have called forth. no two people ever lived much together for a series of years without many fretful, complaining, dissatisfied, uncongenial moments,--without letting drop captious or unkind expressions, utterly at variance with their habitual feelings and their matured judgments of each other. the hasty word, the passing sarcasm, the sly hit at an acknowledged foible, should count for nothing in the estimate, when contrasted with earnest and deliberate assurances, proceeding from one who was commonly too proud to flatter, and in no mood for idle compliment when he wrote. "never (he writes in ) imagine that your letters are long; they are always too short for my curiosity. i do not know that i was ever content with a single perusal.... my nights are grown again very uneasy and troublesome. i know not that the country will mend them; but i hope your company will mend my days. though i cannot now expect much attention, and would not wish for more than can be spared from the poor dear lady (her mother), yet i shall see you and hear you every now and then; and to see and hear you, is always to hear wit, and to see virtue." he would not suffer her to be lightly spoken of in his presence, nor permit his name to be coupled jocularly with hers. "i yesterday told him," says boswell, when they were traversing the highlands, "i was thinking of writing a poetical letter to him, on his return from scotland, in the style of swift's humorous epistle in the character of mary gulliver to her husband, captain lemuel gulliver, on his return to england from the country of the houyhnhnms:-- "'at early morn i to the market haste, studious in ev'ry thing to please thy taste. a curious _fowl_ and _sparagrass_ i chose; (for i remember you were fond of those:) three shillings cost the first, the last seven groats; sullen you turn from both, and call for oats.' he laughed, and asked in whose name i would write it. i said in mrs. thrale's. he was angry. 'sir, if you have any sense of decency or delicacy, you won't do that.' _boswell_. 'then let it be in cole's, the landlord of the mitre tavern, where we have so often sat together.' _johnson_. 'ay, that may do.'" again, at inverary, when johnson called for a gill of whiskey that he might know what makes a scotchman happy, and boswell proposed mrs. thrale as their toast, he would not have _her_ drunk in whiskey. peter pindar has maliciously added to this reproof:-- "we supped most royally, were vastly frisky, when johnson ordered up a gill of whiskey. taking the glass, says i, 'here's mistress thrale,' 'drink her in _whiskey_ not,' said he, 'but _ale_.'" so far from making light of her scholarship, he frequently accepted her as a partner in translations from the latin. the translations from boethius, printed in the second volume of the letters, are their joint composition. after recapitulating johnson's other contributions to literature in , boswell says, "'the fountains,' a beautiful little fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite simplicity, is one of johnson's productions; and i cannot withhold from mrs. thrale the praise of being the author of that admirable poem 'the three warnings.'" _marginal note_: "how sorry he is!" both the tale and the poem were written for a collection of "miscellanies," published by mrs. williams in that year. the character of floretta in "the fountains" was intended for mrs. thrale, and she thus gracefully alludes to it in a letter to johnson in feb. : "the newspapers would spoil my few comforts that are left if they could; but you tell me that's only because i have the reputation, whether true or false, of being a _wit_ forsooth; and you remember _poor floretta_, who was teased into wishing away her spirit, her beauty, her fortune, and at last even her life, never could bear the bitter water which was to have washed away her wit; which she resolved to keep with all its consequences." her fugitive pieces, mostly in verse, thrown off from time to time at all periods of her life, are numerous; and the best of them that have been recovered will be included in these volumes. in a letter to the author of "piozziana," she says:--"when wilkes and liberty were at their highest tide, i was bringing or losing children every year; and my studies were confined to my nursery; so, it came into my head one day to send an infant alphabet to the 'st. james chronicle':-- "'a was an alderman, factious and proud; b was a bellas that blustered aloud, &c.' "in a week's time dr. johnson asked me if i knew who wrote it? 'why, who did write it, sir?' said i. 'steevens,' was the reply. some time after that, years for aught i know, he mentioned to me steevens's veracity! 'no, no;' answered h.l.p., anything but that;' and told my story; showing him by incontestable proofs that it was mine. johnson did not utter a word, and we never talked about it any more. i durst not introduce the subject; but it served to hinder s. from visiting at the house: i suppose johnson kept him away." it does not appear that steevens claimed the alphabet; which may have suggested the celebrated squib that appeared in the "new whig guide," and was popularly attributed to mr. croker. it was headed "the political alphabet; or, the young member's a b c," and begins: "a was an althorpe, as dull as a hog: b was black brougham, a surly cur dog: c was a cochrane, all stripped of his lace." what widely different associations are now awakened by these names! the sting is in the tail: "w was a warre, 'twixt a wasp and a worm, but x y and z are not found in this form, unless moore, martin, and creevey be said (as the last of mankind) to be x y and z." amongst miss reynolds' "recollections" will be found:--"on the praises of mrs. thrale, he (johnson) used to dwell with a peculiar delight, a paternal fondness, expressive of conscious exultation in being so intimately acquainted with her. one day, in speaking of her to mr. harris, author of 'hermes,' and expatiating on her various perfections,--the solidity of her virtues, the brilliancy of her wit, and the strength of her understanding, &c.--he quoted some lines (a stanza, i believe, but from what author i know not[ ]), with which he concluded his most eloquent eulogium, and of these i retained but the two last lines:-- 'virtues--of such a generous kind, pure in the last recesses of the mind.'" [footnote : dryden's translation of persius.] the place assigned to mrs. thrale by the popular voice amongst the most cultivated and accomplished women of the day, is fixed by some verses printed in the "morning herald" of march th, , which attracted much attention. they were commonly attributed to mr. (afterwards sir w.w.) pepys, and madame d'arblay, who alludes to them complacently, thought them his; but he subsequently repudiated the authorship, and the editor of her memoirs believes that they were written by dr. burney. they were provoked by the proneness of the herald to indulge in complimentary allusions to ladies of the demirep genus: "herald, wherefore thus proclaim nought of women but the _shame_? quit, oh, quit, at least awhile, perdita's too luscious smile; wanton worsley, stilted daly, heroines of each blackguard alley; better sure record in story such as shine their sex's glory! herald! haste, with me proclaim those of literary fame. hannah more's pathetic pen, painting high th' impassion'd scene; carter's piety and learning, little burney's quick discerning; cowley's neatly pointed wit, healing those her satires hit; smiling streatfield's iv'ry neck, nose, and notions--_à la grecque!_ let chapone retain a place, and the mother of her grace[ ], each art of conversation knowing, high-bred, elegant boscawen; thrale, in whose expressive eyes sits a soul above disguise, skill'd with-wit and sense t'impart feelings of a generous heart. lucan, leveson, greville, crewe; fertile-minded montagu, who makes each rising art her care, 'and brings her knowledge from afar!' whilst her tuneful tongue defends authors dead, and absent friends; bright in genius, pure in fame:-- herald, haste, and these proclaim!" [footnote : mrs. boscawen was the mother of the duchess of beaufort and mrs. leveson gower: "all leveson's sweetness, and all beaufort's grace."] these lines merit attention for the sake of the comparison they invite. an outcry has recently been raised against the laxity of modern fashion, in permitting venal beauty to receive open homage in our parks and theatres, and to be made the subject of prurient gossip by maids and matrons who should ignore its existence. but we need not look far beneath the surface of social history to discover that the irregularity in question is only a partial revival of the practice of our grandfathers and grandmothers, much as a crinoline may be regarded as a modified reproduction of the hoop. junius thus denounces the duke of grafton's indecorous devotion to nancy parsons: "it is not the private indulgence, but the public insult, of which i complain. the name of miss parsons would hardly have been known, if the first lord of the treasury had not led her in triumph through the opera house, even in the presence of the queen." lord march (afterwards duke of queensberry) was a lord of the bedchamber in the decorous court of george the third, when he wrote thus to selwyn: "i was prevented from writing to you last friday, by being at newmarket with my little girl (signora zamperini, a noted dancer and singer). i had the whole family and cocchi. the beauty went with me in my chaise, and the rest in the old landau." we have had boswell's impression of his first visit to streatham; and madame d'arblay's account of hers confirms the notion that my mistress, not my master, was the presiding genius of the place. "_london, august_ ( ).--i have now to write an account of the most consequential day i have spent since my birth: namely, my streatham visit. "our journey to streatham was the least pleasant part of the day, for the roads were dreadfully dusty, and i was really in the fidgets from thinking what my reception might be, and from fearing they would expect a less awkward and backward kind of person than i was sure they would find. "mr. thrale's house is white, and very pleasantly situated, in a fine paddock. mrs. thrale was strolling about, and came to us as we got out of the chaise. "she then received me, taking both my hands, and with mixed politeness and cordiality welcomed me to streatham. she led me into the house, and addressed herself almost wholly for a few minutes to my father, as if to give me an assurance she did not mean to regard me as a show, or to distress or frighten me by drawing me out. afterwards she took me up stairs, and showed me the house, and said she had very much wished to see me at streatham, and should always think herself much obliged to dr. burney for his goodness in bringing me, which she looked upon as a very great favour. "but though we were some time together, and though she was so very civil, she did not _hint_ at my book, and i love her much more than ever for her delicacy in avoiding a subject which she could not but see would have greatly embarrassed me. "when we returned to the music-room, we found miss thrale was with my father. miss thrale is a very fine girl, about fourteen years of age, but cold and reserved, though full of knowledge and intelligence. "soon after, mrs. thrale took me to the library; she talked a little while upon common topics, and then, at last, she mentioned 'evelina.' "i now prevailed upon mrs. thrale to let me amuse myself, and she went to dress. i then prowled about to choose some book, and i saw, upon the reading-table, 'evelina.' i had just fixed upon a new translation of cicero's 'lælius,' when the library door was opened, and mr. seward entered. i instantly put away my book, because i dreaded being thought studious and affected. he offered his service to find anything for me, and then, in the same breath, ran on to speak of the book with which i had myself 'favoured the world!' "the exact words he began with i cannot recollect, for i was actually confounded by the attack; and his abrupt manner of letting me know he was _au fait_ equally astonished and provoked me. how different from the delicacy of mr. and mrs. thrale!" a high french authority has laid down that good breeding consists in rendering to all what is socially their due. this definition is imperfect. good breeding is best displayed by putting people at their ease; and mrs. thrale's manner of putting the young authoress at her ease was the perfection of delicacy and tact. if johnson's entrance on the stage had been premeditated, it could hardly have been more dramatically ordered. "when we were summoned to dinner, mrs. thrale made my father and me sit on each side of her. i said that i hoped i did not take dr. johnson's place;--for he had not yet appeared. "'no,' answered mrs. thrale, 'he will sit by you, which i am sure will give him great pleasure.' "soon after we were seated, this great man entered. i have so true a veneration for him, that the very sight of him inspires me with delight and reverence, notwithstanding the cruel infirmities to which he is subject; for he has almost perpetual convulsive movements, either of his hands, lips, feet, or knees, and sometimes of all together. "mrs. thrale introduced me to him, and he took his place. we had a noble dinner, and a most elegant dessert. dr. johnson, in the middle of dinner, asked mrs. thrale what was in some little pies that were near him. "'mutton,' answered she, 'so i don't ask you to eat any, because i know you despise it.' "'no, madam, no,' cried he: 'i despise nothing that is good of its sort; but i am too proud now to eat of it. sitting by miss burney makes me very proud to-day!' "'miss burney,' said mrs. thrale, laughing, 'you must take great care of your heart if dr. johnson attacks it; for i assure you he is not often successless.' "'what's that you say, madam?' cried he; 'are you making mischief between the young lady and me already?' "a little while after he drank miss thrale's health and mine, and then added: "'tis a terrible thing that we cannot wish young ladies well, without wishing them to become old women.'" madame d'arblay's memoirs are sadly defaced by egotism, and gratified vanity may have had a good deal to do with her unqualified admiration of mrs. thrale; for "evelina" (recently published) was the unceasing topic of exaggerated eulogy during the entire visit. still so acute an observer could not be essentially wrong in an account of her reception, which is in the highest degree favourable to her newly acquired friend. of her second visit she says: "our journey was charming. the kind mrs. thrale would give courage to the most timid. she did not ask me questions, or catechise me upon what i knew, or use any means to draw me out, but made it her business to draw herself out--that is, to start subjects, to support them herself, and take all the weight of the conversation, as if it behoved her to find me entertainment. but i am so much in love with her, that i shall be obliged to run away from the subject, or shall write of nothing else. "when we arrived here, mrs. thrale showed me my room, which is an exceeding pleasant one, and then conducted me to the library, there to divert myself while she dressed. "miss thrale soon joined me: and i begin to like her. mr. thrale was neither well nor in spirits all day. indeed, he seems not to be a happy man, though he has every means of happiness in his power. but i think i have rarely seen a very rich man with a light heart and light spirits." the concluding remark, coming from such a source, may supply an improving subject of meditation or inquiry; if found true, it may help to suppress envy and promote contentment. thrale's state of health, however, accounts for his depression independently of his wealth, which rested on too precarious a foundation to allow of unbroken confidence and gaiety. "at tea (continues the diarist) we all met again, and dr. johnson was gaily sociable. he gave a very droll account of the children of mr. langton-- "'who,' he said, 'might be very good children if they were let alone; but the father is never easy when he is not making them do something which they cannot do; they must repeat a fable, or a speech, or the hebrew alphabet; and they might as well count twenty, for what they know of the matter: however, the father says half, for he prompts every other word. but he could not have chosen a man who would have been less entertained by such means.' "'i believe not!' cried mrs. thrale: 'nothing is more ridiculous than parents cramming their children's nonsense down other people's throats. i keep mine as much out of the way as i can.' "'yours, madam,' answered he, 'are in nobody's way; no children can be better managed or less troublesome; but your fault is, a too great perverseness in not allowing anybody to give them anything. why should they not have a cherry, or a gooseberry, as well as bigger children?' "indeed, the freedom with which dr. johnson condemns whatever he disapproves, is astonishing; and the strength of words he uses would, to most people, be intolerable; but mrs. thrale seems to have a sweetness of disposition that equals all her other excellences, and far from making a point of vindicating herself, she generally receives his admonitions with the most respectful silence." but it must not be supposed that this was done without an effort. when boswell speaks of johnson's "accelerating her pulsation," she adds, "he checked it often enough, to be sure." another of the conversations which occurred during this visit is characteristic of all parties: "we had been talking of colours, and of the fantastic names given to them, and why the palest lilac should be called a _soupir étouffé_. "'why, madam,' said he, with wonderful readiness, 'it is called a stifled sigh because it is checked in its progress, and only half a colour.' "i could not help expressing my amazement at his universal readiness upon all subjects, and mrs. thrale said to him, "'sir, miss burney wonders at your patience with such stuff; but i tell her you are used to me, for i believe i torment you with more foolish questions than anybody else dares do.' "'no, madam,' said he, 'you don't torment me;--you teaze me, indeed, sometimes.' "'ay, so i do, dr. johnson, and i wonder you bear with my nonsense.' "'no, madam, you never talk nonsense; you have as much sense, and more wit, than any woman i know!' "'oh,' cried mrs. thrale, blushing, 'it is my turn to go under the table this morning, miss burney!' "'and yet,' continued the doctor, with the most comical look, 'i have known all the wits, from mrs. montagu down to bet flint!' "'bet flint,' cried mrs. thrale; 'pray who is she?' "'oh, a fine character, madam! she was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot.' "'and, for heaven's sake, how came you to know her?' "'why, madam, she figured in the literary world, too! bet flint wrote her own life, and called herself cassandra, and it was in verse. so bet brought me her verses to correct; but i gave her a half-a-crown, and she liked it as well.' "'and pray what became of her, sir?' "'why, madam, she stole a quilt from the man of the house, and he had her taken up: but bet flint had a spirit not to be subdued; so when she found herself obliged to go to jail, she ordered a sedan chair, and bid her footboy walk before her. however, the boy proved refractory, for he was ashamed, though his mistress was not.' "'and did she ever get out of jail again, sir?' "'yes, madam; when she came to her trial, the judge acquitted her. "so now," she said to me, "the quilt is my own, and now i'll make a petticoat of it."[ ] oh, i loved bet flint!' "bless me, sir!' cried mrs. thrale, 'how can all these vagabonds contrive to get at _you_, of all people?' "'oh the dear creatures!' cried he, laughing heartily, 'i can't but be glad to see them!'" [footnote : this story is told by boswell, roy. vo, edit. p. .] madame d'arblay's notes (in her diary) of the conversation and mode of life at streatham are full and spirited, and exhibit johnson in moods and situations in which he was seldom seen by boswell. the adroitness with which he divided his attentions amongst the ladies, blending approval with instruction, and softening contradiction or reproof by gallantry, gives plausibility to his otherwise paradoxical claim to be considered a polite man.[ ] he obviously knew how to set about it, and (theoretically at least) was no mean proficient in that art of pleasing which attracts "rather by deference than compliment, and wins e'en by a delicate dissent." [footnote : "when the company were retired, we happened to be talking of dr. barnard, the provost of eton, who died about that time; and after a long and just eulogium on his wit, his learning, and goodness of heart--'he was the only man, too,' says mr. johnson, quite seriously, 'that did justice to my good breeding; and you may observe that i am well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity. no man,' continued he, not observing the amazement of his hearers, 'no man is so cautious not to interrupt another; no man thinks it so necessary to appear attentive when others are speaking; no man so steadily refuses preference to himself, or so willingly bestows it on another, as i do; nobody holds so strongly as i do the necessity of ceremony, and the ill effects which follow the breach of it: yet people think me rude; but barnard did me justice.'"--_anecdotes_. "i think myself a very polite man,"--_boswell_. .] sir henry bulwer (in his "france") says that louis the fourteenth was entitled to be called a man of genius, if only from the delicate beauty of his compliments. mrs. thrale awards the palm of excellence in the same path to johnson. "your compliments, sir, are made seldom, but when they are made, they have an elegance unequalled; but then, when you are angry, who dares make speeches so bitter and so cruel?" "i am sure," she adds, after a semblance of defence on his part, "i have had my share of scolding from you." _johnson_. "it is true, you have, but you have borne it like an angel, and you have been the better for it." as the discussion proceeds, he accuses her of often provoking him to say severe things by unreasonable commendation; a common mode of acquiring a character for amiability at the expense of one's intimates, who are made to appear uncharitable by being thus constantly placed on the depreciating side. some years prior to this period ( ) mrs. thrale's mind and character had undergone a succession of the most trying ordeals, and was tempered and improved, without being hardened, by them. in allusion to what she suffered in child-bearing, she said later in life that she had nine times undergone the sentence of a convict,--confinement with hard labour. child after child died at the age when the bereavement is most affecting to a mother. her husband's health kept her in a constant state of apprehension for his life, and his affairs became embarrassed to the very verge of bankruptcy. so long as they remained prosperous, he insisted on her not meddling with them in any way, and even required her to keep to her drawing-room and leave the conduct of their domestic establishment to the butler and housekeeper. but when (from circumstances detailed in the "autobiography") his fortune was seriously endangered, he wisely and gladly availed himself of her prudence and energy, and was saved by so doing. i have now before me a collection of autograph letters from her to mr. perkins, then manager and afterwards one of the proprietors of the brewery, from which it appears that she paid the most minute attention to the business, besides undertaking the superintendence of her own hereditary estate in wales. on september , , she writes to mr. perkins, who was on a commercial journey:-- "mr. thrale is still upon his little tour; i opened a letter from you at the counting-house this morning, and am sorry to find you have so much trouble with grant and his affairs. how glad i shall be to hear that matter is settled at all to your satisfaction. his letter and remittance came while i was there to-day.... careless, of the 'blue posts,' has turned refractory, and applied to hoare's people, who have sent him in their beer. i called on him to-day, however, and by dint of an unwearied solicitation, (for i kept him at the coach side a full half-hour) i got his order for six butts more as the final trial." examples of fine ladies pressing tradesmen for their votes with compromising importunity are far from rare, but it would be difficult to find a parallel for johnson's hetty doing duty as a commercial traveller. she was simultaneously obliged to anticipate the electioneering exploits of the duchess of devonshire and mrs. crewe; and in after life, having occasion to pass through southwark, she expresses her astonishment at no longer recognising a place, every hole and corner of which she had three times visited as a canvasser. after the death of mr. thrale, a friend of mr. h. thornton canvassed the borough on behalf of that gentleman. he waited on mrs. thrale, who promised her support. she concluded her obliging expressions by saying:--"i wish your friend success, and i think he will have it: he may probably come in for two parliaments, but if he tries for a third, were he an angel from heaven, the people of southwark would cry, 'not _this_ man, but barabbas.'"[ ] [footnote : miss laetitia matilda hawkins vouches for this story.--"memoir, &c." vol. i. p. , note, where she adds:--"i have heard it said, that into whatever company she (mrs. t.) fell, she could be the most agreeable person in it."] on one of her canvassing expeditions, johnson accompanied her, and a rough fellow, a hatter by trade, seeing the moralist's hat in a state of decay, seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the back with the other, cried out, "ah, master johnson, this is no time to be thinking about hats." "no, no, sir," replied the doctor, "hats are of no use now, as you say, except to throw up in the air and huzzah with;" accompanying his words with the true election halloo. thrale had serious thoughts of repaying johnson's electioneering aid in kind, by bringing him into parliament. sir john hawkins says that thrale had two meetings with the minister (lord north), who at first seemed inclined to find johnson a seat, but eventually discountenanced the project. lord stowell told mr. croker that lord north did not feel quite sure that johnson's support might not sometimes prove rather an incumbrance than a help. "his lordship perhaps thought, and not unreasonably, that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes." flood doubted whether johnson, being long used to sententious brevity and the short flights of conversation, would have succeeded in the expanded kind of argument required in public speaking. burke's opinion was, that if he had come early into parliament, he would have been the greatest speaker ever known in it. upon being told this by reynolds, he exclaimed, "i should like to try my hand now." on boswell's adding that he wished he _had_, mrs. thrale writes: "boswell had leisure for curiosity: ministers had not. boswell would have been equally amused by his failure as by his success; but to lord north there would have been no joke at all in the experiment ending untowardly." he was equally ready with advice and encouragement during the difficulties connected with the brewery. he was not of opinion with aristotle and parson adams, that trade is below a philosopher[ ]; and he eagerly buried himself in computing the cost of the malt and the possible profits on the ale. in october , he writes from lichfield: [footnote : "trade, answered adams, is below a philosopher, as aristotle proves in his first chapter of 'politics,' and unnatural, as it is managed now."--_joseph andrews_.] "do not suffer little things to disturb you. the brew-house must be the scene of action, and the subject of speculation. the first consequence of our late trouble ought to be, an endeavour to brew at a cheaper rate; an endeavour not violent and transient, but steady and continual, prosecuted with total contempt of censure or wonder, and animated by resolution not to stop while more can be done. unless this can be done, nothing can help us; and if this be done, we shall not want help. surely there is something to be saved; there is to be saved whatever is the difference between vigilance and neglect, between parsimony and profusion. the price of malt has risen again. it is now two pounds eight shillings the quarter. ale is sold in the public-houses at sixpence a quart, a price which i never heard of before." in november of the same year, from ashbourne: "dear madam,--so many days and never a letter!--_fugere fides, pietasque pudorque_. this is turkish usage. and i have been hoping and hoping. but you are so glad to have me out of your mind.[ ] "i think you were quite right in your advice about the thousand pounds, for the payment could not have been delayed long; and a short delay would have lessened credit, without advancing interest. but in great matters you are hardly ever mistaken." [footnote : this tone of playful reproach, when adopted by johnson at a later period, has been cited as a proof of actual ill-treatment.] in may , : "why should mr. t---- suppose, that what i took the liberty of suggesting was concerted with you? he does not know how much i revolve his affairs, and how honestly i desire his prosperity. i hope he has let the hint take some hold of his mind." in the copy of the printed letters presented by mrs. thrale to sir james fellowes, the blank is filled up with the name of thrale, and the passage is thus annotated in her handwriting: "concerning his (thrale's) connection with quack chemists, quacks of all sorts; jumping up in the night to go to marlbro' street from southwark, after some advertising mountebank, at hazard of his life," in "thraliana": " _th july_, .--mr. thrale overbrewed himself last winter and made an artificial scarcity of money in the family which has extremely lowered his spirits. mr. johnson endeavoured last night, and so did i, to make him promise that he would never more brew a larger quantity of beer in one winter than , barrels[ ], but my master, mad with the noble ambition of emulating whitbread and calvert, two fellows that he despises,--could scarcely be prevailed on to promise even _this_, that he will not brew more than four score thousand barrels a year for five years to come. he did promise that much, however; and so johnson bade me write it down in the 'thraliana';--and so the wings of speculation are clipped a little--very fain would i have pinioned her, but i had not strength to perform the operation." [footnote : "if he got but _s._ _d._ by each barrel, , half crowns are £ , ; and what more would mortal man desire than an income of ten thousand a year--five to spend, and five to lay up?"] that johnson's advice was neither thrown away nor undervalued, may be inferred from an incident related by boswell. mr. perkins had hung up in the counting-house a fine proof of the mezzotinto of dr. johnson by doughty; and when mrs. thrale asked him, somewhat flippantly, "why do you put him up in the counting-house?" mr. perkins answered, "because, madam, i wish to have one wise man there." "sir," said johnson, "i thank you. it is a very handsome compliment, and i believe you speak sincerely." he was in the habit of paying the most minute attention to every branch of domestic economy, and his suggestions are invariably marked by shrewdness and good sense. thus when mrs. thrale was giving evening parties, he told her that though few people might be hungry after a late dinner, she should always have a good supply of cakes and sweetmeats on a side table, and that some cold meat and a bottle of wine would often be found acceptable. notwithstanding the imperfection of his eyesight, and his own slovenliness, he was a critical observer of dress and demeanour, and found fault without ceremony or compunction when any of his canons of taste or propriety were infringed. several amusing examples are enumerated by mrs. thrale: "i commended a young lady for her beauty and pretty behaviour one day, however, to whom i thought no objections could have been made. 'i saw her,' said dr. johnson, 'take a pair of scissors in her left hand though; and for all her father is now become a nobleman, and as you say excessively rich, i should, were i a youth of quality ten years hence, hesitate between a girl so neglected, and a _negro_.' "it was indeed astonishing how he _could_ remark such minuteness with a sight so miserably imperfect; but no accidental position of a riband escaped him, so nice was his observation, and so rigorous his demands of propriety. when i went with him to litchfield, and came downstairs to breakfast at the inn, my dress did not please him, and he made me alter it entirely before he would stir a step with us about the town, saying most satirical things concerning the appearance i made in a riding-habit; and adding, ''tis very strange that such eyes as yours cannot discern propriety of dress: if i had a sight only half as good, i think i should see to the centre.' "another lady, whose accomplishments he never denied, came to our house one day covered with diamonds, feathers, &c., and he did not seem inclined to chat with her as usual. i asked him why? when the company was gone. 'why, her head looked so like that of a woman who shows puppets,' said he, 'and her voice so confirmed the fancy, that i could not bear her to-day; when she wears a large cap, i can talk to her.' "when the ladies wore lace trimmings to their clothes, he expressed his contempt of the reigning fashion in these terms: 'a brussels trimming is like bread-sauce,' said he, 'it takes away the glow of colour from the gown, and gives you nothing instead of it; but sauce was invented to heighten the flavour of our food, and trimming is an ornament to the manteau, or it is nothing. learn,' said he, 'that there is propriety or impropriety in every thing how slight soever, and get at the general principles of dress and of behaviour; if you then transgress them, you will at least know that they are not observed.'" madame d'arblay confirms this account. he had just been finding fault with a bandeau worn by lady lade, a very large woman, standing six feet high without her shoes: "_dr. j._--the truth is, women, take them in general, have no idea of grace. fashion is all they think of. i don't mean mrs. thrale and miss burney, when i talk of women!--they are goddesses!--and therefore i except them. "_mrs. thrale._--lady lade never wore the bandeau, and said she never would, because it is unbecoming. "_dr. j. (laughing.)_--did not she? then is lady lade a charming woman, and i have yet hopes of entering into engagements with her! "_mrs. t._--well, as to that i can't say; but to be sure, the only similitude i have yet discovered in you, is in size: there you agree mighty well. "_dr. j._--why, if anybody could have worn the bandeau, it must have been lady lade; for there is enough of her to carry it off; but you are too little for anything ridiculous; that which seems nothing upon a patagonian, will become very conspicuous upon a lilliputian, and of you there is so little in all, that one single absurdity would swallow up half of you." matrimony was one of his favourite subjects, and he was fond of laying down and refining on the duties of the married state, with the amount of happiness and comfort to be found in it. but once when he was musing over the fire in the drawing-room at streatham, a young gentleman called to him suddenly, "mr. johnson, would you advise me to marry?" "i would advise no man to marry, sir," replied the doctor in a very angry tone, "who is not likely to propagate understanding;" and so left the room. "our companion," adds mrs. thrale, in the "anecdotes," "looked confounded, and i believe had scarce recovered the consciousness of his own existence, when johnson came back, and, drawing his chair among us, with altered looks and a softened voice, joined in the general chat, insensibly led the conversation to the subject of marriage, where he laid himself out in a dissertation so useful, so elegant, so founded on the true knowledge of human life, and so adorned with beauty of sentiment, that no one ever recollected the offence, except to rejoice in its consequences." the young gentleman was mr. thrale's nephew, sir john lade; who was proposed, half in earnest, whilst still a minor, by the doctor as a fitting mate for the author of "evelina." he married a woman of the town, became a celebrated member of the four-in-hand club, and contrived to waste the whole of a fine fortune before he died. in "thraliana" she says:--"lady lade consulted him about her son, sir john. 'endeavour, madam,' said he, 'to procure him knowledge; for really ignorance to a rich man is like fat to a sick sheep, it only serves to call the rooks about him.' on the same occasion it was that he observed how a mind unfurnished with subjects and materials for thinking can keep up no dignity at all in solitude. 'it is,' says he, 'in the state of a mill without grist.'" the attractions of streatham must have been very strong, to induce johnson to pass so much of his time away from "the busy hum of men" in fleet street, and "the full tide of human existence" at charing cross. he often found fault with mrs. thrale for living so much in the country, "feeding the chickens till she starved her understanding." walking in a wood when it rained, she tells us, "was the only rural image he pleased his fancy with; for he would say, after one has gathered the apples in an orchard, one wishes them well baked, and removed to a london eating-house for enjoyment." this is almost as bad as the foreigner, who complained that there was no ripe fruit in england but the roasted apples. amongst other modes of passing time in the country, johnson once or twice tried hunting and, mounted on an old horse of mr. thrale's, acquitted himself to the surprise of the "field," one of whom delighted him by exclaiming, "why johnson rides as well, for ought i see, as the most illiterate fellow in england." but a trial or two satisfied him-- "he thought at heart like courtly chesterfield, who after a long chase o'er hills, dales, fields, and what not, though he rode beyond all price, ask'd next day,'if men ever hunted twice?'" it is very strange, and very melancholy, was his reflection, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them. the mode of locomotion in which he delighted was the vehicular. as he was driving rapidly in a postchaise with boswell, he exclaimed, "life has not many things better than this." on their way from dr. taylor's to derby in , he said, "if i had no duties, and no reference to futurity, i would spend my life in driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty woman, but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation." mr. croker attributes his enjoyment to the novelty of the pleasure; his poverty having in early life prevented him from travelling post. but a better reason is given by mrs. thrale: "i asked him why he doated on a coach so? and received for answer, that in the first place, the company were shut in with him _there_; and could not escape, as out of a room; in the next place, he heard all that was said in a carriage, where it was my turn to be deaf; and very impatient was he at my occasional difficulty of hearing. on this account he wished to travel all over the world: for the very act of going forward was delightful to him, and he gave himself no concern about accidents, which he said never happened; nor did the running-away of the horses at the edge of a precipice between vernon and st. denys in france convince him to the contrary: 'for nothing came of it,' he said, 'except that mr. thrale leaped out of the carriage into a chalk-pit, and then came up again, looking as _white_!' when the truth was, all their lives were saved by the greatest providence ever exerted in favour of three human creatures: and the part mr. thrale took from desperation was the likeliest thing in the world to produce broken limbs and death." the drawbacks on his gratification and on that of his fellow travellers were his physical defects, and his utter insensibility to the beauty of nature, as well as to the fine arts, in so far as they were addressed to the senses of sight and hearing. "he delighted," says mrs. thrale, "no more in music than painting; he was almost as deaf as he was blind; travelling with dr. johnson was, for these reasons, tiresome enough. mr. thrale loved prospects, and was mortified that his friend could not enjoy the sight of those different dispositions of wood and water, hill and valley, that travelling through england and france affords a man. but when he wished to point them out to his companion: 'never heed such nonsense,' would be the reply: 'a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another: let us, if we _do_ talk, talk about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind." it is no small deduction from our admiration of johnson, and no trifling enhancement of his friends' kindness in tolerating his eccentricities, that he seldom made allowance for his own palpable and undeniable deficiencies. as well might a blind man deny the existence of colours, as a purblind man assert that there was no charm in a prospect, or in a claude or titian, because he could see none. once, by way of pleasing reynolds, he pretended to lament that the great painter's genius was not exerted on stuff more durable than canvas, and suggested copper. sir joshua urged the difficulty of procuring plates large enough for historical subjects. "what foppish obstacles are these!" exclaimed johnson. "here is thrale has a thousand ton of copper: you may paint it all round if you will, i suppose; it will serve him to brew in afterwards. will it not, sir?" (to thrale, who sate by.) he always "civilised" to dr. burney, who has supplied the following anecdote: "after having talked slightingly of music, he was observed to listen very attentively while miss thrale played on the harpsichord; and with eagerness he called to her, 'why don't you dash away like burney?' dr. burney upon this said to him, 'i believe, sir, we shall make a musician of you at last.' johnson with candid complacency replied, 'sir, i shall be glad to have a new sense given to me.'" in , the thrales made a tour in wales, mainly for the purpose of revisiting her birthplace and estates. they were accompanied by johnson, who kept a diary of the expedition, beginning july th and ending september th. it was preserved by his negro servant, and boswell had no suspicion of its existence, for he says, "i do not find that he kept any journal or notes of what he saw there." the diary was first published by mr. duppa in ; and some manuscript notes by mrs. thrale which reached that gentleman too late for insertion, have been added in mr. murray's recent edition of the life. the first entry is: "_tuesday, july _.--we left streatham a.m. price of four horses two shillings a mile. barnet . p.m. on the road i read 'tully's epistles.' at night at dunstable." at chester, he records:--"we walked round the walls, which are complete, and contain one mile, three quarters, and one hundred and one yards." mrs. thrale's comment is, "of those ill-fated walls dr. johnson might have learned the extent from any one. he has since put me fairly out of countenance by saying, 'i have known _my mistress_ fifteen years, and never saw her fairly out of humour but on chester wall.' it was because he would keep miss thrale beyond her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall, where from the want of light, i apprehended some accident to her, perhaps to him." he thus describes mrs. thrale's family mansion: "_saturday, july ._--we went to bâch y graig, where we found an old house, built , in an uncommon and incommodious form--my mistress chatted about tiring, but i prevailed on her to go to the top--the floors have been stolen: the windows are stopped--the house was less than i seemed to expect--the river clwyd is a brook with a bridge of one arch, about one third of a mile--the woods have many trees, generally young; but some which seem to decay--they have been lopped--the house never had a garden--the addition of another story would make an useful house, but it cannot be great." on the th august, they visited rhuddlan castle and bodryddan[ ], of which he says:-- [footnote : now the property of mr. shipley conway, the great-grandson of johnson's acquaintance, the bishop of st. asaph, and representative, through females, of sir john conway or conwy, to whom rhuddlan castle, with its domain, was granted by edward the first.] "stapylton's house is pretty: there are pleasing shades about it, with a constant spring that supplies a cold bath. we then went out to see a cascade. i trudged unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry. the water was, however, turned on, and produced a very striking cataract."[ ] [footnote : bowles, the poet, on the unexpected arrival of a party to see his grounds, was overheard giving a hurried order to set the fountain playing and carry the hermit his beard.] mrs. piozzi remarks on this passage: "he teased mrs. cotton about her dry cascade till she was ready to cry." mrs. cotton, _née_ stapylton, married the eldest son of sir lynch cotton, and was the mother of field-marshal viscount combermere. she said that johnson, despite of his rudeness, was at times delightful, having a manner peculiar to himself in relating anecdotes that could not fail to attract both old and young. her impression was that mrs. thrale was very vexatious in wishing to engross all his attention, which annoyed him much. this, i fancy, is no uncommon impression, when we ourselves are anxious to attract notice. the range of hills bordering the valley or delta of the clwyd, is very fine. on their being pointed out to him by his host, he exclaimed: "hills, do you call them?--mere mole-hills to the alps or to those in scotland." on being told that sir richard clough had formed a plan for making the river navigable to rhyddlan, he broke out into a loud fit of laughter, and shouted--"why, sir, i could clear any part of it by a leap." he probably had seen neither the hills nor the river, which might easily be made navigable. on two occasions, johnson incidentally imputes a want of liberality to mrs. thrale, which the general tenor of her conduct belies: "_august ._--we went to dymerchion church, where the old clerk acknowledged his mistress. it is the parish church of bâch y graig; a mean fabric; mr. salusbury (mrs. thrale's father) was buried in it.... the old clerk had great appearance of joy, and foolishly said that he was now willing to die. he had only a crown given him by my mistress." "_august ._--mrs. thrale lost her purse. she expressed so much uneasiness that i concluded the sum to be very great; but when i heard of only seven guineas, i was glad to find she had so much sensibility of money." johnson might have remarked, that the annoyance we experience from a loss is seldom entirely regulated by the pecuniary value of the thing lost. on the way to holywell he sets down: "talk with mistress about flattery;" on which she notes: "he said i flattered the people to whose houses we went: i was saucy and said i was obliged to be civil for two, meaning himself and me.[ ] he replied nobody would thank me for compliments they did not understand. at gwanynog (mr. middleton's), however, _he_ was flattered, and was happy of course." [footnote : madame d'arblay reports mrs. thrale saying to johnson at streatham, in september, : "i remember, sir, when we were travelling in wales, how you called me to account for my civility to the people; 'madam,' you said, 'let me have no more of this idle commendation of nothing. why is it, that whatever you see, and whoever you see, you are to be so indiscriminately lavish of praise?' 'why i'll tell you, sir,' said i, 'when i am with you, and mr. thrale, and queeny, i am obliged to be civil for four!'"] the other entries referring to the thrales are: "_august_ .--we went to visit bodville, the place where mrs. thrale was born, and the churches called tydweilliog and llangwinodyl, which she holds by impropriation." "_august_ .--we went to see bodville. mrs. thrale remembered the rooms, and wandered over them, with recollections of her childhood. this species of pleasure is always melancholy.... mr. thrale purposes to beautify the churches, and, if he prospers, will probably restore the tithes. mrs. thrale visited a house where she had been used to drink milk, which was left, with an estate of _l._ a year, by one lloyd, to a married woman who lived with him." "_august_ .--_note_. queeny's goats, , i think." without mr. duppa's aid this last entry would be a puzzle for commentators. his note is: "mr. thrale was near-sighted, and could not see the goats browsing on snowdon, and he promised his daughter, who was a child of ten years old, a penny for every goat she would show him, and dr. johnson kept the account; so that it appears her father was in debt to her one hundred and forty-nine pence. _queeny_ was an epithet, which had its origin in the nursery, by which (in allusion to _queen_ esther) miss thrale (whose name was esther) was always distinguished by johnson." she was named, after her mother, hester, not esther. on september , johnson sets down: "we came, to lord sandys', at ombersley, where we were treated with great civility." it was here, as he told mrs. thrale, that for the only time in his life he had as much wall fruit as he liked; yet she says that he was in the habit of eating six or seven peaches before breakfast during the fruit season at streatham. swift was also fond of fruit: "observing (says scott) that a gentleman in whose garden he walked with some friends, seemed to have no intention to request them to eat any, the dean remarked that it was a saying of his dear grandmother: "'always pull a peach when it is within your reach;' and helping himself accordingly, his example was followed by the whole company." thomson, the author of the "castle of indolence," was once seen lounging round lord burlington's garden, with his hands in his waistcoat pockets, biting off the sunny sides of the peaches. johnson's dislike to the lyttletons was not abated by his visit to hagley, of which he says, "we made haste away from a place where all were offended." mrs. thrale's explanation is: "mrs. lyttelton, _ci-devant_ caroline bristow, forced me to play at whist against my liking, and her husband took away johnson's candle that he wanted to read by at the other end of the room. those, i trust, were the offences." he was not in much better humour at combermere abbey, the seat of her relative, sir lynch cotton, which is beautifully situated on one of the finest lakes in england. he commends the place grudgingly, passes a harsh judgment on lady cotton, and is traditionally recorded to have made answer to the baronet who inquired what he thought of a neighbouring peer (lord kilmorey): "a dull, commonplace sort of man, just like you and your brother." in a letter to levet, dated lleweny, in denbighshire, august , , printed by boswell, is this sentence: "wales, so far as i have yet seen of it, is a very beautiful and rich country, all enclosed and planted." her marginal note is: "yet to please mr. thrale, he feigned abhorrence of it." i am indebted to an intelligent and accurate in-formant for a curious incident of the welsh tour: "dr. johnson was taken by mr. and mrs. thrale to dine at maesnynan, with my relation, mr. lloyd, who, with his pretty young daughter (motherless), received them at the door. all came out of the carriage except the great lexicographer, who was crouching in what my uncle jokingly called the poets' corner, deeply interested evidently with the book he was reading. a wink from mrs. thrale, and a touch of her hand, silenced the host. she bade the coachman not move, and desired the people in the house to let mr. johnson read on till dinner was on the table, when she would go and whistle him to it. she always had a whistle hung at her girdle, and this she used, when in wales, to summon him and her daughters[ ], when in or out of doors. mr. lloyd and all the visitors went to see the effect of the whistle, and found him reading intently with one foot on the step of the carriage, where he had been (a looker-on said) five minutes." [footnote : "he cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleas'd he could whistle them back."] "this scene is well told by miss burney, in her 'camilla'[ ] _ex relatione_ mrs. williams (lady cotton's sister, who was present) and beata lloyd, whose brother, colonel thomas lloyd, of the guards, was the brummell of his day, celebrated for his manly beauty and accomplishments. i heard lord crewe say that colonel lloyd's horse, and his graceful manner of mounting him, used to attract members of both houses (he among them) to _turn out_ to see him mount guard; and the princesses were forbidden, when driving out, to go so often that way and at that time." [footnote : book viii. chap, iv., dr. orkborne is described standing on the staircase of an inn absorbed in the composition of a paragraph whilst the party are at dinner.] their impressions of one another as travelling companions were sufficiently favourable to induce the party (with the addition of baretti) to make a short tour in france in the autumn of the year following, , during part of which johnson kept a diary in the same laconic and elliptical style. the only allusion to either of his friends is: "we went to sansterre, a brewer. he brews with about as much malt as mr. thrale, and sells his beer at the same price, though he pays no duty for malt, and little more than half as much for beer. beer is sold retail at sixpence a bottle." in a letter to levet, dated paris, oct. , , he says: "we went to see the king and queen at dinner, and the queen was so impressed by miss, that she sent one of the gentlemen to inquire who she was. i find all true that you have ever told me at paris. mr. thrale is very liberal, and keeps us two coaches, and a very fine table; but i think our cookery very bad. mrs. thrale got into a convent of english nuns, and i talked with her through the grate, and i am very kindly used by the english benedictine friars." a striking instance of johnson's occasional impracticability occurred during this journey: "when we were at rouen together," says mrs. thrale, "he took a great fancy to the abbe kofiette, with whom he conversed about the destruction of the order of jesuits, and condemned it loudly, as a blow to the general power of the church, and likely to be followed with many and dangerous innovations, which might at length become fatal to religion itself, and shake even the foundation of christianity. the gentleman seemed to wonder and delight in his conversation: the talk was all in latin, which both spoke fluently, and mr. johnson pronounced a long eulogium upon milton with so much ardour, eloquence, and ingenuity, that the abbé rose from his seat and embraced him. my husband seeing them apparently so charmed with the company of each other, politely invited the abbé to england, intending to oblige his friend; who, instead of thanking, reprimanded him severely before the man, for such a sudden burst of tenderness towards a person he could know nothing at all of; and thus put a sudden finish to all his own and mr. thrale's entertainment from the company of the abbé roffette." in a letter dated may , , also, mrs. thrale alludes to more than one disagreement in france: "when did i ever plague you about contour, and grace, and expression? i have dreaded them all three since that hapless day at compiegne, when you teased me so, and mr. thrale made what i hoped would have proved a lasting peace; but french ground is unfavourable to fidelity perhaps, and so now you begin again: after having taken five years' breath, you might have done more than this. say another word, and i will bring up afresh the history of your exploits at st. denys and how cross you were for nothing--but some how or other, our travels never make any part either of our conversation or correspondence." joseph baretti, who now formed one of the family, is so mixed up with their history that some account of him becomes indispensable. he was a piedmontese, whose position in his native country was not of a kind to tempt him to remain in it, when lord charlemont, to whom he had been useful in italy, proposed his coming to england. his own story was that he had lost at play the little property he had inherited from his father, an architect. the education given him by his parents was limited to latin; he taught himself english, french, spanish, and portuguese. his talents, acquirements, and strength of mind must have been considerable, for they soon earned him the esteem and friendship of the most eminent members of the johnsonian circle, in despite of his arrogance. he came to england in ; is kindly mentioned in one of johnson's letters in ; and when he was in italy in , his illustrious friend's letters to him are marked by a tone of affectionate interest. ceremony and tenderness are oddly blended in the conclusion of one of them: "may you, my baretti, be very happy at milan, or some other place nearer to, sir, your most affectionate humble servant, samuel johnson." johnson remarked of baretti in : "i know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than baretti. there are strong powers in his mind. he has not indeed many hooks, but with what hooks he has, he grapples very forcibly." cornelia knight was "disgusted by his satirical madness of manner," although admitting him to be a man of great learning and information. madame d'arblay was more struck by his rudeness and violence than by his intellectual vigour. "thraliana" confirms johnson's estimate of baretti's capacity: "will. burke was tart upon mr. baretti for being too dogmatical in his talk about politics. 'you have,' says he, 'no business to be investigating the characters of lord falkland or mr. hampden. you cannot judge of their merits, they are no countrymen of yours.' 'true,' replied baretti, 'and you should learn by the same rule to speak very cautiously about brutus and mark antony; they are my countrymen, and i must have their characters tenderly treated by foreigners.' "baretti could not endure to be called, or scarcely thought, a foreigner, and indeed it did not often occur to his company that he was one; for his accent was wonderfully proper, and his language always copious, always nervous, always full of various allusions, flowing too with a rapidity worthy of admiration, and far beyond the power of nineteen in twenty natives. he had also a knowledge of the solemn language and the gay, could be sublime with johnson, or blackguard with the groom; could dispute, could rally, could quibble, in our language. baretti has, besides, some skill in music, with a bass voice, very agreeable, besides a falsetto which he can manage so as to mimic any singer he hears. i would also trust his knowledge of painting a long way. these accomplishments, with his extensive power over every modern language, make him a most pleasing companion while he is in good humour; and his lofty consciousness of his own superiority, which made him tenacious of every position, and drew him into a thousand distresses, did not, i must own, ever disgust me, till he began to exercise it against myself, and resolve to reign in our house by fairly defying the mistress of it. pride, however, though shocking enough, is never despicable, but vanity, which he possessed too, in an eminent degree, will sometimes make a man near sixty ridiculous. "france displayed all mr. baretti's useful powers--he bustled for us, he catered for us, he took care of the child, he secured an apartment for the maid, he provided for our safety, our amusement, our repose; without him the pleasure of that journey would never have balanced the pain. and great was his disgust, to be sure, when he caught us, as he often did, ridiculing french manners, french sentiments, &c. i think he half cryed to mrs. payne, the landlady at dover, on our return, because we laughed at french cookery, and french accommodations. oh, how he would court the maids at the inns abroad, abuse the men perhaps! and that with a facility not to be exceeded, as they all confessed, by any of the natives. but so he could in spain, i find, and so 'tis plain he could here. i will give one instance of his skill in our low street language. walking in a field near chelsea, he met a fellow, who, suspecting him from dress and manner to be a foreigner, said sneeringly, 'come, sir, will you show me the way to france?' 'no, sir,' says baretti, instantly, 'but i will show you the way to tyburn.' such, however, was his ignorance in a certain line, that he once asked johnson for information who it was composed the pater noster, and i heard him tell evans[ ] the story of dives and lazarus as the subject of a poem he once had composed in the milanese dialect, expecting great credit for his powers of invention. evans owned to me that he thought the man drunk, whereas poor baretti was, both in eating and drinking, a model of temperance. had he guessed evans's thoughts, the parson's gown would scarcely have saved him a knouting from the ferocious italian." [footnote : evans was a clergyman and rector of southwark.] on oct. , , baretti was tried at the old bailey on a charge of murder, for killing with a pocket knife one of three men who, with a woman of the town, hustled him in the haymarket.[ ] he was acquitted, and the event is principally memorable for the appearance of johnson, burke, grarrick, and beauclerc as witnesses to character. the substance of johnson's evidence is thus given in the "gentleman's magazine": [footnote : in his defence, he said:--"i hope it will be seen that my knife was neither a weapon of offence or defence. i wear it to carve fruit and sweetmeats, and not to kill my fellow creatures. it is a general custom in france not to put knives on the table, so that even ladies wear them in their pockets for general use."] "_dr. j_.--i believe i began to be acquainted with mr. baretti about the year or . i have been intimate with him. he is a man of literature, a very studious man, a man of great diligence. he gets his living by study. i have no reason to think he was ever disordered with liquor in his life. a man that i never knew to be otherwise than peaceable, and a man that i take to be rather timorous.--_q_. was he addicted to pick up women in the streets?--_dr. j. i_ never knew that he was.--_q_. how is he as to eyesight?--_dr. j._ he does not see me now, nor do i see him. i do not believe he could be capable of assaulting any body in the street, without great provocation." it would seem that johnson's sensibility, such as it was, was not very severely taxed. "_boswell_.--but suppose now, sir, that one of your intimate friends were apprehended for an offence for which he might be hanged? "_johnson_.---i should do what i could to bail him; but if he were once fairly hanged, i should not suffer. "_boswell_.--would you eat your dinner that day, sir? "_johnson_.--yes, sir, and eat it as if he were eating it with me. why, there's baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow. friends have risen up for him on every side, yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plum-pudding the less. sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in depressing the mind." steevens relates that one evening previous to the trial a consultation of baretti's friends was held at the house of mr. cox, the solicitor. johnson and burke were present, and differed as to some point of the defence. on steevens observing to johnson that the question had been agitated with rather too much warmth, "it may be so," replied the sage, "for burke and i should have been of one opinion if we had had no audience." this is coming very near to-- "would rather that the man should die than his prediction prove a lie." two anecdotes of baretti during his imprisonment are preserved in "thraliana": "when johnson and burke went to see baretti in newgate, they had small comfort to give him, and bid him not hope too strongly. 'why what can _he_ fear,' says baretti, placing himself between 'em, 'that holds two such hands as i do?' "an italian came one day to baretti, when he was in newgate for murder, to desire a letter of recommendation for the teaching of his scholars, when he (baretti) should be hanged. 'you rascal,' replies baretti, in a rage, 'if i were not _in my own apartment_, i would kick you down stairs directly,'" the year after his acquittal baretti published "travels through spain, portugal, and france;" thus mentioned by johnson in a letter to mrs, thrale, dated lichfield, july , : "that baretti's book would please you all, i made no doubt. i know not whether the world has ever seen such travels before. those whose lot it is to ramble can seldom write, and those who know how to write can seldom ramble." the rate of pay showed that the world was aware of the value of the acquisition. he gained _ l._ by this book. his "frusta letteraria," published some time before in italy, had also attracted much attention, and, according to johnson, he was the first who ever received money for copyright in italy, in a biographical notice of baretti which appeared in the "gentleman's magazine" for may, , written by dr. vincent, dean of westminster, it is stated that it was not distress which compelled him to accept mr. thrale's hospitality, but that he was overpersuaded by johnson, contrary to his own inclination, to undertake the instruction of the misses thrale in italian. "he was either nine or eleven years almost entirely in that family," says the dean, "though he still rented a lodging in town, during which period he expended his own _ l._, and received nothing in return for his instruction, but the participation of a good table, and _ l._ by way of presents. instead of his letters to mrs. piozzi in the 'european magazine,' had he told this plain unvarnished tale, he would have convicted that lady of avarice and ingratitude, without incurring the danger of a reply, or exposing his memory to be insulted by her advocates." he was less than three years in the family. as he had a pension of _ l._ a year, besides the interest of his _ l._, he did not want money. if he had been allowed to want it, the charge of avarice would lie at mr., not mrs., thrale's door; and his memory was exposed to no insult beyond the stigma which (as we shall presently see) his conduct and language necessarily fixed upon it. all his literary friends did not entertain the same high opinion of him. an unpublished letter from dr. warton to his brother contains the following passage: "he (huggins, the translator of ariosto) abuses baretti infernally, and says that he one day lent baretti a gold watch, and could never get it afterwards; that after many excuses baretti, skulked, and then got johnson to write to mr. huggins a suppliant letter; that this letter stopped huggins awhile, while baretti got a protection from the sardinian ambassador; and that, at last, with great difficulty, the watch was got from a pawnbroker to whom baretti had sold it." this extract is copied from a valuable contribution to the literary annals of the eighteenth century, for which we are indebted to the colonial press.[ ] it is the diary of an irish clergyman, containing strong internal evidence of authenticity, although nothing more is known of it than that the manuscript was discovered behind an old press in one of the offices of the supreme court of new south wales. that such a person saw a good deal of johnson in , is proved by boswell, whose accuracy is frequently confirmed in return. in one marginal note mrs. thrale says: "he was a fine showy talking man. johnson liked him of all things in a year or two." in another: "dr. campbell was a very tall handsome man, and, speaking of some other _high_-bernian, used this expression: 'indeed now, and upon my honour, sir, i am but a twitter to him.'"[ ] [footnote : diary of a visit to england in . by an irishman (the rev. doctor thomas campbell, author of "a philosophical survey of the south of ireland.") and other papers by the same hand. with notes by samuel raymond, m.a., prothonotary of the supreme court of new south wales. sydney. waugh and cox. .] [footnote : he is similarly described in the "letters," vol. i. p. .] several of his entries throw light on the thrale establishment: "_ th._--this day i called at mr. thrale's, where i was received with all respect by mr. and mrs. thrale. she is a very learned lady, and joins to the charms of her own sex, the manly understanding of ours. the immensity of the brewery astonished me." "_ th._--dined with mr. thrale along with dr. johnson, and baretti. baretti is a plain sensible man, who seems to know the world well. he talked to me of the invitation given him by the college of dublin, but said it ( _l._ a year and rooms) was not worth his acceptance; and if it had been, he said, in point of profit, still he would not have accepted it, for that now he could not live out of london. he had returned a few years ago to his own country, but he could not enjoy it; and he was obliged to return to london, to those connexions he had been making for near thirty years past. he told me he had several families with whom, both in town and country, he could go at any time and spend a month: he is at this time on these terms at mr. thrale's, and he knows how to keep his ground. talking as we were at tea of the magnitude of the beer vessels, he said there was one thing in mr. thrale's house still more extraordinary;--meaning his wife. she gulped the pill very prettily,--so much for baretti! "johnson, you are the very man lord chesterfield describes: a hottentot indeed, and though your abilities are respectable, you never can be respected yourself! he has the aspect of an idiot, without the faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one feature--with the most awkward garb, and unpowdered grey wig, on one side only of his head--he is for ever dancing the devil's jig, and sometimes he makes the most driveling effort to whistle some thought in his absent paroxysms." "_ th._--dined at mr. thrale's where there were ten or more gentlemen, and but one lady besides mrs. thrale. the dinner was excellent: first course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head, and a capon larger than some of our irish turkeys, at foot; third course, four different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry, and a fourth; in each remove there were i think fourteen dishes. the two first courses were served in massy plate. i sat beside baretti, which was to me the richest part of the entertainment. he and mr. and mrs. thrale joined in expressing to me dr. johnson's concern that he could not give me the meeting that day, but desired that i should go and see him." "_april st._--dined at mr. thrale's, whom in proof of the magnitude of london, i cannot help remarking, no coachman, and this is the third i have called, could find without inquiry. but of this by the way. there was murphy, boswell, and baretti: the two last, as i learned just before i entered, are mortal foes, so much so that murphy and mrs. thrale agreed that boswell expressed a desire that baretti should be hanged upon that unfortunate affair of his killing, &c. upon this hint, i went, and without any sagacity, it was easily discernible, for upon baretti's entering boswell did not rise, and upon baretti's descry of boswell he grinned a perturbed glance. politeness however smooths the most hostile brows, and theirs were smoothed. johnson was the subject, both before and after dinner, for it was the boast of all but myself, that under that roof were the doctor's fast friends. his _bon-mots_ were retailed in such plenty, that they, like a surfeit, could not lie upon my memory." "n.b. the 'tour to the western isles' was written an twenty days, and the 'patriot' in three; 'taxation no tyranny,' within a week: and not one of them would have yet seen the light, had it not been for mrs. thrale and baretti, who stirred him up by laying wagers." "_april th._--dined with thrale, where dr. johnson was, and boswell (and baretti as usual). the doctor was not in as good spirits as he was at dilly's. he had supped the night before with lady ----, miss jeffries, one of the maids of honour, sir joshua reynolds, &c., at mrs. abington's. he said sir c. thompson, and some others who were there, spoke like people who had seen good company, and so did mrs. abington herself, who could not have seen good company." boswell's note, alluding to the same topic, is: "on saturday, april , i dined with him at mr. thrale's, where we met the irish dr. campbell. johnson had supped the night before at mrs. abington's with some fashionable people whom he named; and he seemed much pleased with having made one in so elegant a circle. nor did he omit to pique his _mistress_ a little with jealousy of her housewifery; for he said, with a smile, 'mrs. abington's jelly, my dear lady, was better than yours.'" the next year is chiefly memorable for the separation from baretti, thus mentioned in "thraliana": "baretti had a comical aversion to mrs. macaulay, and his aversions are numerous and strong. if i had not once written his character in verse,[ ] i would now write it in prose, for few people know him better: he was--_dieu me pardonne_, as the french say--my inmate for very near three years; and though i really liked the man once for his talents, and at last was weary of him for the use he made of them, i never altered my sentiments concerning him; for his character is easily seen, and his soul above disguise, haughty and insolent, and breathing defiance against all mankind; while his powers of mind exceed most people's, and his powers of purse are so slight that they leave him dependent on all. baretti is for ever in the state of a stream dammed up: if he could once get loose, he would bear down all before him. "every soul that visited at our house while he was master of it, went away abhorring it; and mrs. montagu, grieved to see my meekness so imposed upon, had thoughts of writing me on the subject an anonymous letter, advising me to break with him. seward, who tried at last to reconcile us, confessed his wonder that we had lived together so long. johnson used to oppose and battle him, but never with his own consent: the moment he was cool, he would always condemn himself for exerting his superiority over a man who was his friend, a foreigner, and poor: yet i have been told by mrs. montagu that he attributed his loss of our family to johnson: ungrateful and ridiculous! if it had not been for his mediation, i would not so long have borne trampling on, as i did for the last two years of our acquaintance. "not a servant, not a child, did he leave me any authority over; if i would attempt to correct or dismiss them, there was instant appeal to mr. baretti, who was sure always to be against me in every dispute. with mr. thrale i was ever cautious of contending, conscious that a misunderstanding there could never answer, as i have no friend or relation in the world to protect me from the rough treatment of a husband, should he chuse to exert his prerogatives; but when i saw baretti openly urging mr. thrale to cut down some little fruit trees my mother had planted and i had begged might stand, i confess i did take an aversion to the creature, and secretly resolved his stay should not be prolonged by my intreaties whenever his greatness chose to take huff and be gone. as to my eldest daughter, his behaviour was most ungenerous; he was perpetually spurring her to independence, telling her she had more sense and would have a better fortune than her mother, whose admonitions she ought therefore to despise; that she ought to write and receive her own letters _now_, and not submit to an authority i could not keep up if she once had the spirit to challenge it; that, if i died in a lying-in which happened while he lived here, he hoped mr. thrale would marry miss whitbred, who would be a pretty companion for hester, and not tyrannical and overbearing like me. was i not fortunate to see myself once quit of a man like this? who thought his dignity was concerned to set me at defiance, and who was incessantly telling lies to my prejudice in the ears of my husband and children? when he walked out of the house on the th day of july, , i wrote down what follows in my table book. "_ july, ._--this day is made remarkable by the departure of mr. baretti, who has, since october, , been our almost constant inmate, companion, and, i vainly hoped, our friend. on the th of november, , mr. thrale let him have _ l._ and at our return from france _ l._ more, besides his clothes and pocket money: in return to all this, he instructed our eldest daughter--or thought he did--and puffed her about the town for a wit, a genius, a linguist, &c. at the beginning of the year , we purposed visiting italy under his conduct, but were prevented by an unforeseen and heavy calamity: that baretti, however, might not be disappointed of money as well as of pleasure, mr. thrale presented him with guineas, which at first calmed his wrath a little, but did not, perhaps, make amends for his vexation; this i am the more willing to believe, as dr. johnson not being angry too, seemed to grieve him no little, after all our preparations made. "now johnson's virtue was engaged; and he, i doubt not, made it a point of conscience not to increase the distresses of a family already oppressed with affliction. baretti, however, from this time grew sullen and captious; he went on as usual notwithstanding, making streatham his home, carrying on business there, when he thought he had any to do, and teaching his pupil at by-times when he chose so to employ himself; for he always took his choice of hours, and would often spitefully fix on such as were particularly disagreeable to me, whom he has now not liked a long while, if ever he did. he professed, however, a violent attachment to our eldest daughter; said if _she_ had died instead of her poor brother, he should have destroyed himself, with many as wild expressions of fondness. within these few days, when my back was turned, he would often be telling her that he would go away and stay a month, with other threats of the same nature; and she, not being of a caressing or obliging disposition, never, i suppose, soothed his anger or requested his stay. "of all this, however, i can know nothing but from _her_, who is very reserved, and whose kindness i cannot so confide in as to be sure she would tell me all that passed between them; and her attachment is probably greater to him than me, whom he has always endeavoured to lessen as much as possible, both in her eyes and--what was worse--her father's, by telling him how my parts had been over-praised by johnson, and over-rated by the world; that my daughter's skill in languages, even at the age of fourteen, would vastly exceed mine, and such other idle stuff; which mr. thrale had very little care about, but which hetty doubtless thought of great importance. be this as it may, no angry words ever passed between him and me, except perhaps now and then a little spar or so when company was by, in the way of raillery merely. "yesterday, when sir joshua and fitzmaurice dined here, i addressed myself to him with great particularity of attention, begging his company for saturday, as i expected ladies, and said he must come and flirt with them, &c. my daughter in the meantime kept on telling me that mr. baretti was grown very old and very cross, would not look at her exercises, but said he would leave this house soon, for it was no better than pandæmonium. accordingly, the next day he packed up his cloke-bag, which he had not done for three years, and sent it to town; and while we were wondering what he would say about it at breakfast, he was walking to london himself, without taking leave of any one person, except it may be the girl, who owns they had much talk, in the course of which he expressed great aversion to me and even to her, who, he said, he once thought well of. "now whether she had ever told the man things that i might have said of him in his absence, by way of provoking him to go, and so rid herself of his tuition; whether he was puffed up with the last guineas and longed to be spending it _all' italiano;_ whether he thought mr. thrale would call him back, and he should be better established here than ever; or whether he really was idiot enough to be angry at my threatening to whip susan and sophy for going out of bounds, although _he_ had given them leave, for hetty said that was the first offence he took huff at, i never now shall know, for he never expressed himself as an offended man to me, except one day when he was not shaved at the proper hour forsooth, and then i would not quarrel with him, because nobody was by, and i knew him be so vile a lyar that i durst not trust his tongue with a dispute. he is gone, however, loaded with little presents from me, and with a large share too of my good opinion, though i most sincerely rejoice in his departure, and hope we shall never meet more but by chance. "since our quarrel i had occasion to talk of him with tom davies, who spoke with horror of his ferocious temper; 'and yet,' says i, 'there is great sensibility about baretti: i have seen tears often stand in his eyes.' 'indeed,' replies davies, 'i should like to have seen that sight vastly, when--even butchers weep.'" [footnote : in "the streatham portraits." (see vol. ii.)] his intractable character appears from his own account of the rupture: "when madam took it into her head to give herself airs, and treat me with some coldness and superciliousness, i did not hesitate to set down at breakfast my dish of tea not half drank, go for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room, turn my back to the house _insalutato hospite_, and walk away to london without uttering a syllable, fully resolved never to see her again, as was the case during no less than four years; nor had she and i ever met again as friends if she and her husband had not chanced upon me after that lapse of time at the house of a gentleman near beckenham, and coaxed me into a reconciliation, which, as almost all reconciliations prove, was not very sincere on her side or mine; so that there was a total end of it on mr. thrale's demise, which happened about three years after."[ ] [footnote : the european magazine, .] the monotony of a constant residence at streatham was varied by trips to bath or brighton; and it was so much a matter of course for johnson to make one of the party, that when ( ), not expecting him so soon back from a journey with boswell, the thrale family and baretti started for bath without him, boswell is disposed to treat their departure without the lexicographer as a slight: "this was not showing the attention which might have been expected to the 'guide, philosopher, and friend;' the _imlac_ who had hastened from the country to console a distressed mother, who he understood was very anxious for his return. they had, i found, without ceremony, proceeded on their journey. i was glad to understand from him that it was still resolved that his tour to italy with mr. and mrs. thrale should take place, of which he had entertained some doubt, on account of the loss which they had suffered; and his doubts afterwards appeared to be well founded. he observed, indeed, very justly, that 'their loss was an additional reason for their going abroad; and if it had not been fixed that he should have been one of the party, he would force them out; but he would not advise them unless his advice was asked, lest they might suspect that he recommended what he wished on his own account.' i was not pleased that his intimacy with mr. thrale's family, though it no doubt contributed much to his comfort and enjoyment, was not without some degree of restraint[ ]: not, as has been grossly suggested[ ], that it was required of him as a task to talk for the entertainment of them and their company; but that he was not quite at his ease: which, however, might partly be owing to his own honest pride--that dignity of mind which is always jealous of appearing too compliant." [footnote : (_marginal note_). "what restraint can he mean? johnson kept every one else under restraint."] [footnote : (_marginal note._) "i do not believe it ever was suggested."] in his first letter of condolence on mr. thrale's death, johnson speaks of her having enjoyed happiness in marriage, "to a degree of which, without personal knowledge, i should have thought the description fabulous." the "autobiography" and "thraliana" tell a widely different tale. the mortification of not finding herself appreciated by her husband was poignantly increased, during the last years of his life, by finding another offensively preferred to her. he was so fascinated by one of her fair friends, as to lose sight altogether of what was due to appearances or to the feelings of his wife. a full account of the lady in question is given in the "thraliana": "_miss streatfield_.--i have since heard that dr. collier picked up a more useful friend, a mrs. streatfield, a widow, high in fortune and rather eminent both for the beauties of person and mind; her children, i find, he has been educating; and her eldest daughter is just now coming out into the world with a great character for elegance and literature.--_ november, ._" "_ may, ._--the person who wrote the title of this book at the top of the page, on the other side--left hand--in the black letter, was the identical miss sophia streatfield, mentioned in 'thraliana,' as pupil to poor dear doctor collier, after he and i had parted. by the chance meeting of some of the currents which keep this ocean of human life from stagnating, this lady and myself were driven together nine months ago at brighthelmstone: we soon grew intimate from having often heard of each other, and i have now the honour and happiness of calling her my friend. her face is eminently pretty; her carriage elegant; her heart affectionate, and her mind cultivated. there is above all this an attractive sweetness in her manner, which claims and promises to repay one's confidence, and which drew from me the secret of my keeping a 'thraliana,' &c. &c. &c." "_jan. ._--mr. thrale is fallen in love, really and seriously, with sophy streatfield; but there is no wonder in that; she is very pretty, very gentle, soft, and insinuating; hangs about him, dances round him, cries when she parts from him, squeezes his hand slyly, and with her sweet eyes full of tears looks so fondly in his face[ ]--and all for love of me as she pretends; that i can hardly, sometimes, help laughing in her face. a man must not be a _man_ but an _it_, to resist such artillery. marriott said very well, "'man flatt'ring man, not always can prevail, but woman flatt'ring man, can never fail.' "murphy did not use, i think, to have a good opinion of me, but he seems to have changed his mind this christmas, and to believe better of me. i am glad on't to be sure: the suffrage of such a man is well worth having: he sees thrale's love of the fair s.s. i suppose: approves my silent and patient endurance of what i could not prevent by more rough and sincere behaviour." [footnote : "and merlin look'd and half believed her true, so tender was her voice, so fair her face, so sweetly gleam'd her eyes behind her tears, like sunlight on the plain, behind a shower." _idylls of the king.--vivien._] " _january_, .--sophy streatfield is come to town: she is in the 'morning post' too, i see (to be in the 'morning post' is no good thing). she has won wedderburne's heart from his wife, i believe, and few married women will bear _that_ patiently if i do; they will some of them wound her reputation, so that i question whether it can recover. lady erskine made many odd inquiries about her to me yesterday, and winked and looked wise at her sister. the dear s.s. must be a little on her guard; nothing is so spiteful as a woman robbed of a heart she thinks she has a claim upon. she will not lose _that_ with temper, which she has taken perhaps no pains at all to preserve: and i do not observe with any pleasure, i fear, that my husband prefers miss streatfield to me, though i must acknowledge her younger, handsomer, and a better scholar. of her chastity, however, i never had a doubt: she was bred by dr. collier in the strictest principles of piety and virtue; she not only knows she will be always chaste, but she knows why she will be so.[ ] mr. thrale is now by dint of disease quite out of the question, so i am a disinterested spectator; but her coquetry is very dangerous indeed, and i wish she were married that there might be an end on't. mr. thrale loves her, however, sick or well, better by a thousand degrees than he does me or any one else, and even now desires nothing on earth half so much as the sight of his sophia. "'e'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries! e'en in our ashes live their wonted fires!' "the saturday before mr. thrale was taken ill, saturday, th february--he was struck monday, st february--we had a large party to tea, cards, and supper; miss streatfield was one, and as mr. thrale sate by her, he pressed her hand to his heart (as she told me herself), and said 'sophy, we shall not enjoy this long, and to-night i will not be cheated of my only comfort.' poor soul! how shockingly tender! on the first fryday that he spoke after his stupor, she came to see him, and as she sate by the bedside pitying him, 'oh,' says he, 'who would not suffer even all that i have endured to be pitied by you!' this i heard myself." [footnote : "besides, her inborn virtue fortify, they are most firmly good, who best know why."] "here is sophy streatfield again, handsomer than ever, and flushed with new conquests; the bishop of chester feels her power, i am sure; she showed me a letter from him that was as tender and had all the tokens upon it as strong as ever i remember to have seen 'em; i repeated to her out of pope's homer--'very well, sophy,' says i: "'range undisturb'd among the hostile crew, but touch not hinchliffe[ ], hinchliffe is my due.' miss streatfield (says my master) could have quoted these lines in the greek; his saying so piqued me, and piqued me because it was true. i wish i understood greek! mr. thrale's preference of her to me never vexed me so much as my consciousness--or fear at least--that he has reason for his preference. she has ten times my beauty, and five times my scholarship: wit and knowledge has she none." [footnote : for hector. hinchliffe was bishop of peterborough.] "_may_, .--sophy streatfield is an incomprehensible girl; here has she been telling me such tender passages of what passed between her and mr. thrale, that she half frights me somehow, at the same time declaring her attachment to vyse yet her willingness to marry lord loughborough. good god! what an uncommon girl! and handsome almost to perfection, i think: delicate in her manners, soft in her voice, and strict in her principles: i never saw such a character, she is wholly out of my reach; and i can only say that the man who runs mad for sophy streatfield has no reason to be ashamed of his passion; few people, however, seem disposed to take her for life--everybody's admiration, as mrs. byron says, and nobody's choice. "_streatham, january st_, .--sophy streatfield has begun the new year nicely with a new conquest. poor dear doctor burney! _he_ is now the reigning favourite, and she spares neither pains nor caresses to turn that good man's head, much to the vexation of his family; particularly my fanny, who is naturally provoked to see sport made of her father in his last stage of life by a young coquet, whose sole employment in this world seems to have been winning men's hearts on purpose to fling them away. how she contrives to keep bishops, and brewers, and doctors, and directors of the east india company, all in chains so, and almost all at the same time, would amaze a wiser person than me; i can only say let us mark the end! hester will perhaps see her out and pronounce, like solon, on her wisdom and conduct." as this lady has excited great interest, and was much with the thrales, i will add what i have been able to ascertain concerning her. she is frequently mentioned in madame d'arblay's diary: "_streatham, sept_. .--to be sure she (mrs. thrale) saw it was not totally disagreeable to me; though i was really astounded when she hinted at my becoming a rival to miss streatfield in the doctor's good graces. "'i had a long letter,' she said, 'from sophy streatfield t'other day, and she sent dr. johnson her elegant edition of the 'classics;' but when he had read the letter, he said 'she is a sweet creature, and i love her much; but my little burney writes a better letter.' now,' continued she, 'that is just what i wished him to say of you both.'" "_streatham, sept_. .--mr. seward, you know, told me that she had tears at command, and i begin to think so too, for when mrs. thrale, who had previously told me i should see her cry, began coaxing her to stay, and saying, 'if you go, i shall know you don't love me so well as lady gresham,'--she did cry, not loud indeed, nor much, but the tears came into her eyes, and rolled down her fine cheeks. "'come hither, miss burney,' cried mrs. thrale; 'come and see miss streatfield cry!' "i thought it a mere _badinage_. i went to them, but when i saw real tears, i was shocked, and saying, 'no, i won't look at her,' ran away frightened, lest she should think i laughed at her, which mrs. thrale did so openly, that, as i told her, had she served me so, i should have been affronted with her ever after. "miss streatfield, however, whether from a sweetness not to be ruffled, or from not perceiving there was any room for taking offence, gently wiped her eyes, and was perfectly composed!" "_streatham, june_, .--seward, said mrs. thrale, had affronted johnson, and then johnson affronted seward, and then the s.s. cried. "_sir philip_ (_clerke_).--well, i have heard so much of these tears, that i would give the universe to have a sight of them. "_mrs. thrale_.--well, she shall cry again, if you like it. "_s.s._.--no, pray, mrs. thrale. "_sir philip_.--oh, pray do! pray let me see a little of it. "_mrs. thrale_.--yes, do cry a little sophy [in a wheedling voice], pray do! consider, now, you are going to-day, and it's very hard if you won't cry a little: indeed, s.s., you ought to cry. "now for the wonder of wonders. when mrs. thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a nurse soothing a baby, had run on for some time,--while all the rest of us, in laughter, joined in the request,--two crystal tears came into the soft eyes of the s.s., and rolled gently down her cheeks! such a sight i never saw before, nor could i have believed. she offered not to conceal or dissipate them: on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by everybody. she looked, indeed, uncommonly handsome; for her pretty face was not, like chloe's, blubbered; it was smooth and elegant, and neither her features nor complexion were at all ruffled; nay, indeed, she was smiling all the time. "'look, look!' cried mrs. thrale; 'see if the tears are not come already.' "loud and rude bursts of laughter broke from us all at once. how, indeed, could they be restrained?" "_streatham, sunday, june_ , .--after church we all strolled round the grounds, and the topic of our discourse was miss streatfield. mrs. thrale asserted that she had a power of captivation that was irresistible; that her beauty, joined to her softness, her caressing manners, her tearful eyes, and alluring looks, would insinuate her into the heart of any man she thought worth attacking. "sir philip declared himself of a totally different opinion, and quoted dr. johnson against her, who had told him that, taking away her greek, she was as ignorant as a butterfly. "mr. seward declared her greek was all against her with him, for that, instead of reading pope, swift, or the spectator--books from which she might derive useful knowledge and improvement--it had led her to devote all her reading time to the first eight books of homer. "'but,' said mrs. thrale, 'her greek, you must own, has made all her celebrity;--you would have heard no more of her than of any other pretty girl, but for that.' "'what i object to,' said sir philip, 'is her avowed preference for this parson. surely it is very indelicate in any lady to let all the world know with whom she is in love!" "'the parson,' said the severe mr. seward, 'i suppose, spoke first,--or she would as soon have been in love with you, or with me!' "you will easily believe i gave him no pleasant look." the parson was the rev. dr. vyse, rector of lambeth. he had made an imprudent marriage early in life, and was separated from his wife, of whom he hoped to get rid either by divorce or by her death, as she was reported to be in bad health. under these circumstances, he had entered into a conditional engagement with the fair s.s.; but eventually threw her over, either in despair at his wife's longevity or from caprice. on the mention of his name by boswell, mrs. piozzi writes opposite: "whose connection with sophia streatfield was afterwards so much talked about, and i suppose never understood: certainly not at all by h.l.p." to return to the d'arblay diary: "_streatham, june_ , .--we had my dear father and sophy streatfield, who, as usual, was beautiful, caressing, amiable, sweet, and--fatiguing." "_streatham, aug_. .--some time after sophy streatfield was talked of,--oh, with how much impertinence! as if she was at the service of any man who would make proposals to her! yet mr. seward spoke of her with praise and tenderness all the time, as if, though firmly of this opinion, he was warmly her admirer. from such admirers and such admiration heaven guard me! mr. crutchley said but little; but that little was bitter enough. "'however,' said mr. seward, 'after all that can be said, there is nobody whose manners are more engaging, nobody more amiable than the little sophy; and she is certainly very pretty; i must own i have always been afraid to trust myself with her.' "here mr. crutchley looked very sneeringly. "'nay, 'squire,' cried mr. seward, 'she is very dangerous, i can tell you; and if she had you at a fair trial, she would make an impression that would soften-even your hard heart.' "'no need of any further trial,' said he, laughing, 'for she has done that already; and so soft was the impression that it absolutely all dissolved!--melted quite away, and not a trace of it left!' "mr. seward then proposed that she should marry sir john miller, who has just lost his wife; and very gravely said, he had a great mind to set out for tunbridge, and carry her with him to bath, and so make the match without delay! "'but surely,' said mrs. thrale, 'if you fail, you will think yourself bound in honour to marry her yourself?' "'why, that's the thing,' said he; 'no, i can't take the little sophy myself; i should have too many rivals; rivals; no, that won't do.' "how abominably conceited and _sure_ these pretty gentlemen are! however, mr. crutchley here made a speech that half won my heart. "'i wish,' said he, 'miss streatfield was here at this moment to cuff you, seward!' "'cuff me,' cried he. 'what, the little sophy!--and why?' "'for disposing of her so freely. i think a man deserves to be cuffed for saying _any_ lady will marry him.' "i seconded this speech with much approbation." "_london, jan._ .--before they went came miss streatfield, looking pale, but very elegant and pretty. she was in high spirits, and i hope has some reason. she made, at least, speeches that provoked such surmises. when the jacksons went,-- "'that,' said i, 'is the celebrated jackson of exeter; i dare say you would like him if you knew him.' "'i dare say i should,' cried she, simpering; 'for he has the two requisites for me,--he is tall and thin.' "to be sure, this did not at all call for raillery! dr. vyse has always been distinguished by these two epithets. i said, however, nothing, as my mother was present; but she would not let my looks pass unnoticed. "'oh!' cried she, 'how wicked you look!--no need of seeing mrs. siddons for expression!--however, you know how much that is my taste,--tall and thin!--but you don't know how _apropos_ it is just now!'" nine years after the last entry, we find: "_may_ , .--we now met mrs. porteous; and who should be with her but the poor pretty s.s., whom so long i had not seen, and who has now lately been finally given up by her long-sought and very injurious lover, dr. vyse? "she is sadly faded, and looked disturbed and unhappy but still beautiful, though no longer blooming; and still affectionate, though absent and evidently absorbed. we had a little chat together about the thrales. in mentioning our former intimacy with them, 'ah, those,' she cried, 'were happy times!' and her eyes glistened. poor thing! hers has been a lamentable story!--imprudence and vanity have rarely been mixed with so much sweetness, and good-humour, and candour, and followed with more reproach and ill success. we agreed to renew acquaintance next winter; at present she will be little more in town." in a letter to madame d'arblay, oct. , , mrs. piozzi says: "fell, the bookseller in bond street, told me a fortnight or three weeks ago, that miss streatfield lives where she did in his neighbourhood, clifford street, s.s. still." on the th january, : "'the once charming s.s. had inquired for me of nornaville and fell, the old bond street book-sellers, so i thought she meditated writing, but was deceived." the story she told the author of "piozziana," in proof of johnson's want of firmness, clearly refers to this lady: "i had remarked to her that johnson's readiness to condemn any moral deviation in others was, in a man so entirely before the public as he was, nearly a proof of his own spotless purity of conduct. she said, 'yes, johnson was, on the whole, a rigid moralist; but he could be ductile, i may say, servile; and i will give you an instance. we had a large dinner-party at our house; johnson sat on one side of me, and burke on the other; and in the company there was a young female (mrs. piozzi named her), to whom i, in my peevishness, thought mr. thrale superfluously attentive, to the neglect of me and others; especially of myself, then near my confinement, and dismally low-spirited; notwithstanding which, mr. t. very unceremoniously begged of me to change place with sophy ----, who was threatened with a sore throat, and might be injured by sitting near the door. i had scarcely swallowed a spoonful of soup when this occurred, and was so overset by the coarseness of the proposal, that i burst into tears, said something petulant--that perhaps ere long, the lady might be at the head of mr. t.'s table, without displacing the mistress of the house, &c., and so left the apartment. i retired to the drawing-room, and for an hour or two contended with my vexation, as i best could, when johnson and burke came up. on seeing them, i resolved to give a _jobation_ to both, but fixed on johnson for my charge, and asked him if he had noticed what passed, what i had suffered, and whether allowing for the state of my nerves, i was much to blame? he answered, "why, possibly not; your feelings were outraged." i said, "yes, greatly so; and i cannot help remarking with what blandness and composure you _witnessed_ the outrage. had this transaction been told of others, your anger would have known no bounds; but, towards a man who gives good dinners &c., you were meekness itself!" johnson coloured, and burke, i thought, looked foolish; but i had not a word of answer from either.'" the only excuse for mr. thrale is to be found in his mental and bodily condition at the time, which made it impossible for johnson or burke to interfere without a downright quarrel with him, nor without making matters worse. this, however, is not the only instance in which johnson witnessed thrale's laxity of morals without reproving it. opposite the passage in which boswell reports johnson as palliating infidelity in a husband by the remark, that the man imposes no bastards on his wife, she writes: "sometimes he does. johnson knew a man who did, and the lady took very tender care of them." madame d'arblay was not uniformly such a source of comfort to her as that lady supposed. the entries in "thraliana" relating to her show this: "_august,_ .--fanny burney has been a long time from me; i was glad to see her again; yet she makes me miserable too in many respects, so restlessly and apparently anxious, lest i should give myself airs of patronage or load her with the shackles of dependance. i live with her always in a degree of pain that precludes friendship--dare not ask her to buy me a ribbon--dare not desire her to touch the bell, lest she should think herself injured--lest she should forsooth appear in the character of miss neville, and i in that of the widow bromley. see murphy's 'know your own mind.'" "fanny burney has kept her room here in my house seven days, with a fever or something that she called a fever; i gave her every medicine and every slop with my own hand; took away her dirty cups, spoons, &c.; moved her tables: in short, was doctor, and nurse and maid--for i did not like the servants should have additional trouble lest they should hate her for it. and now,--with the true gratitude of a wit, she tells me that the world thinks the better of me for my civilities to her. it does? does it?" "miss burney was much admired at bath ( ); the puppy-men said, 'she had such a drooping air and such a timid intelligence;' or, 'a timid air,' i think it was,' and a drooping intelligence;' never sure was such a collection of pedantry and affectation as rilled bath when we were on that spot. how everything else and everybody set off my gallant bishop. 'quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.' of all the people i ever heard read verse in my whole life, the best, the most perfect reader, is the bishop of peterboro' (hinchcliffe.)"[ ] [footnote : in a marginal note on boswell, she says: "the people (in ) did read shamefully. yet mr. lee, the poet, many years before johnson was born, read so gracefully, the players would not accept his tragedies till they had heard them from other lips: his own (they said) sweetened all which proceeded from them." speaker onslow equally was celebrated for his manner of reading.] "_july st_, .--mrs. byron, who really loves me, was disgusted at miss burney's carriage to me, who have been such a friend and benefactress to her: not an article of dress, not a ticket for public places, not a thing in the world that she could not command from me: yet always insolent, always pining for home, always preferring the mode of life in st. martin's street to all i could do for her. she is a saucy-spirited little puss to be sure, but i love her dearly for all that; and i fancy she has a real regard for me, if she did not think it beneath the dignity of a wit, or of what she values more--the dignity of dr. burnett's daughter--to indulge it. such dignity! the lady louisa of leicester square![ ] in good time!" [footnote : alluding to a character in "evelina."] " .--what a blockhead dr. burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else? johnson is enraged at the silliness of their family conduct, and mrs. byron disgusted; i confess myself provoked excessively, but i love the girl so dearly--and the doctor, too, for that matter, only that he has such odd notions of superiority in his own house, and will have his children under his feet forsooth, rather than let 'em live in peace, plenty, and comfort anywhere from home. if i did not provide fanny with every wearable--every wishable, indeed,--it would not vex me to be served so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of st. martin's street, makes one at once merry and mortified. "dr. burney did not like his daughter should learn latin even of johnson, who offered to teach her for friendship, because then she would have been as wise as himself forsooth, and latin was too masculine for misses. a narrow-souled goose-cap the man must be at last, agreeable and amiable all the while too, beyond almost any other human creature. well, mortal man is but a paltry animal! the best of us have such drawbacks both upon virtue, wisdom, and knowledge." in what his daughter calls a doggrel list of his friends and his feats, dr. burney has thus mentioned the thrales: " .--this year's acquaintance began with the thrales, where i met with great talents 'mongst females and males, but the best thing it gave me from that time to this, was the freedom it gave me to sound the abyss, at my ease and my leisure, of johnson's great mind, where new treasures unnumber'd i constantly find." highly to her credit, mrs. thrale did not omit any part of her own duties to her husband because he forgot his. in march, , she writes to johnson: "i am willing to show myself in southwark, or in any place, for my master's pleasure or advantage; but have no present conviction that to be re-elected would be advantageous, so shattered a state as his nerves are in just now.--do not you, however, fancy for a moment, that i shrink from fatigue--or desire to escape from doing my duty;--spiting one's antagonist is a reason that never ought to operate, and never does operate with me: i care nothing about a rival candidate's innuendos, i care only about my husband's health and fame; and if we find that he earnestly wishes to be once more member for the borough--he _shall_ be member, if anything done or suffered by me will help make him so." in the may following she writes: "meanwhile, heaven send this southwark election safe, for a disappointment would half kill my husband, and there is no comfort in tiring every friend to death in such a manner and losing the town at last." this was an agitating month. in "thraliana ": "_ th may_, .--i got back to bath again and staid there till the riots[ ] drove us all away the first week in june: we made a dawdling journey, cross country, to brighthelmstone, where all was likely to be at peace: the letters we found there, however, shewed us how near we were to ruin here in the borough: where nothing but the astonishing presence of mind shewed by perkins in amusing the mob with meat and drink and huzzas, till sir philip jennings clerke could get the troops and pack up the counting-house bills, bonds, &c. and carry them, which he did, to chelsea college for safety,--could have saved us from actual undoing. the villains _had_ broke in, and our brewhouse would have blazed in ten minutes, when a property of £ , would have been utterly lost, and its once flourishing possessors quite undone. "let me stop here to give god thanks for so very undeserved, so apparent, an interposition of providence in our favour. "i left mr. thrale at brighthelmstone and came to town again to see what was left to be done: we have now got arms and mean to defend ourselves by force if further violence is intended. sir philip comes every day at some hour or another--good creature, how kind he is! and how much i ought to love him! god knows i am not in this case wanting to my duty. i have presented perkins, with my master's permission, with two hundred guineas, and a silver urn for his lady, with his own cypher on it and this motto--mollis responsio, iram avertit." [footnote : the lord george gordon riots.] in the spring of , "i found," says boswell, "on visiting mr. thrale that he was now very ill, and had removed, i suppose by the solicitation of mrs. thrale, to a house in grosvenor square." she has written opposite: "spiteful again! he went by direction of his physicians where they could easiest attend to him." the removal to grosvenor square is thus mentioned in "thraliana": "_monday, january th_, .--so now we are to spend this winter in grosvenor square; my master has taken a ready-furnished lodging-house there, and we go in to-morrow. he frighted me cruelly a while ago; he would have lady shelburne's house, one of the finest in london; he would buy, he would build, he would give twenty to thirty guineas a week for a house. oh lord, thought i, the people will sure enough throw stones at me now when they see a dying man go to such mad expenses, and all, as they will naturally think, to please a wife wild with the love of expense. this was the very thing i endeavoured to avoid by canvassing the borough for him, in hopes of being through that means tyed to the brewhouse where i always hated to live till now, that i conclude his constitution lost, and that the world will say _i_ tempt him in his weak state of body and mind to take a fine house for me at the flashy end of the town." "he however, dear creature, is as absolute, ay, and ten times more so, than ever, since he suspects his head to be suspected, and to grosvenor square we are going, and i cannot be sorry, for it will doubtless be comfortable enough to see one's friends commodiously, and i have long wished to quit _harrow corner_, to be sure; how could one help it? though i did "'call round my casks each object of desire' all last winter: but it was a heavy drag too, and what signifies resolving _never_ to be pleased? i will make myself comfortable in my new habitation, and be thankful to god and my husband." on february , , she writes to madame d'arblay: "yesterday i had a conversazione. mrs. montagu was brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk. sophy smiled, piozzi sung, pepys panted with admiration, johnson was good humoured, lord john clinton attentive, dr. bowdler lame, and my master not asleep. mrs. ord looked elegant, lady rothes dainty, mrs. davenant dapper, and sir philip's curls were all blown about by the wind. mrs. byron rejoices that her admiral and i agree so well; the way to his heart is connoisseurship it seems, and for a background and contorno, who comes up to mrs. thrale, you know." in "thraliana": "_sunday, march th_, .--well! now i have experienced the delights of a london winter, spent in the bosom of flattery, gayety, and grosvenor square; 'tis a poor thing, however, and leaves a void in the mind, but i have had my compting-house duties to attend, my sick master to watch, my little children to look after, and how much good have i done in any way? not a scrap as i can see; the pecuniary affairs have gone on perversely: how should they chuse [an omission here] when the sole proprietor is incapable of giving orders, yet not so far incapable as to be set aside! distress, fraud, folly, meet me at every turn, and i am not able to fight against them all, though endued with an iron constitution, which shakes not by sleepless nights or days severely fretted. "mr. thrale talks now of going to spa and italy again; how shall we drag him thither? a man who cannot keep awake four hours at a stroke &c. well! this will indeed be a tryal of one's patience; and who must go with us on this expedition? mr. johnson!--he will indeed be the only happy person of the party; he values nothing _under_ heaven but his own mind, which is a spark _from_ heaven, and that will be invigorated by the addition of new ideas. if mr. thrale dies on the road, johnson will console himself by learning how it is to travel with a corpse: and, after all, such reasoning is the true philosophy--one's heart is a mere incumbrance--would i could leave mine behind. the children shall go to their sisters at kensington, mrs. cumyns may take care of them all. god grant us a happy meeting some _where_ and some _time_! "baretti should attend, i think; there is no man who has so much of every language, and can manage so well with johnson, is so tidy on the road, so active top to obtain good accommodations. he is the man in the world, i think, whom i most abhor, and who _hates_ and _professes_ to _hate me_ the most; but what does that signifie? he will be careful of mr. thrale and hester whom he _does_ love--and he won't strangle _me_, i suppose. somebody we _must_ have. croza would court our daughter, and piozzi could not talk to johnson, nor, i suppose, do one any good but sing to one,--and how should we _sing songs in a strange land_? baretti must be the man, and i will beg it of him as a favour. oh, the triumph he will have! and the lyes he will tell!" thrale's death is thus described in "thraliana": "on the sunday, the st of april, i went to hear the bishop of peterborough preach at may fair chapel, and though the sermon had nothing in it particularly pathetic, i could not keep my tears within my eyes. i spent the evening, however, at lady rothes', and was cheerful. found sir john lade, johnson, and boswell, with mr. thrale, at my return to the square. on monday morning mr. evans came to breakfast; sir philip and dr. johnson to dinner--so did baretti. mr. thrale eat voraciously--so voraciously that, encouraged by jebb and pepys, who had charged me to do so, i checked him rather severely, and mr. johnson added these remarkable words: "sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide." he did not, however, desist, and sir philip said, he eat apparently in defiance of control, and that it was better for us to say nothing to him. johnson observed that he thought so too; and that he spoke more from a sense of duty than a hope of success. baretti and these two spent the evening with me, and i was enumerating the people who were to meet the indian ambassadors on the wednesday. i had been to negri's and bespoke an elegant entertainment. "on the next day, tuesday the rd, mrs. hinchliffe called on me in the morning to go see webber's drawings of the south sea rareties. we met the smelts, the ords, and numberless _blues_ there, and displayed our pedantry at our pleasure. going and coming, however, i quite teazed mrs. hinchliffe with my low-spirited terrors about mr. thrale, who had not all this while one symptom worse than he had had for months; though the physicians this tuesday morning agreed that a continuation of such dinners as he had lately made would soon dispatch a life so precarious and uncertain. when i came home to dress, piozzi, who was in the next room teaching hester to sing, began lamenting that he was engaged to mrs. locke on the following evening, when i had such a world of company to meet these fine orientals; he had, however, engaged roncaglia and sacchini to begin with, and would make a point of coming himself at nine o'clock if possible. i gave him the money i had collected for his benefit-- _l_. i remember it was--a banker's note--and burst out o' crying, and said, i was sure i should not go to it. the man was shocked, and wondered what i meant. nay, says i, 'tis mere lowness of spirits, for mr. thrale is very well now, and is gone out in his carriage to spit cards, as i call'd it--sputar le carte. just then came a letter from dr. pepys, insisting to speak with me in the afternoon, and though there was nothing very particular in the letter considering our intimacy, i burst out o' crying again, and threw myself into an agony, saying, i was sure mr. thrale would dye. "miss owen came to dinner, and mr. thrale came home so well! and in such spirits! he had invited more people to my concert, or conversazione, or musical party, of the next day, and was delighted to think what a show we should make. he eat, however, more than enormously. six things the day before, and eight on this day, with strong beer in such quantities! the very servants were frighted, and when pepys came in the evening he said this could not last--either there must be _legal_[ ] restraint or certain death. dear mrs. byron spent the evening with me, and mr. crutchley came from sunning-hill to be ready for the morrow's flash. johnson was at the bishop of chester's. i went down in the course of the afternoon to see after my master as usual, and found him not asleep, but sitting with his legs up--_because_, as he express'd it. i kissed him, and said how good he was to be so careful of himself. he enquired who was above, but had no disposition to come up stairs. miss owen and mrs. byron now took their leave. the dr. had been gone about twenty minutes when hester went down to see her papa, and found him on the floor. what's the meaning of this? says she, in an agony. i chuse it, replies mr. thrale firmly; i lie so o' purpose. she ran, however, to call his valet, who was gone out--happy to leave him so particularly _well_, as he thought. when my servant went instead, mr. thrale bid him begone, in a firm tone, and added that he was very well and chose to lie so. by this time, however, mr. crutchley was run down at hetty's intreaty, and had sent to fetch pepys back. he was got but into upper brook street, and found his friend in a most violent fit of the apoplexy, from which he only recovered to relapse into another, every one growing weaker as his strength grew less, till six o'clock on wednesday morning, th april, , when he died. sir richard jebb, who was fetched at the beginning of the distress, seeing death certain, quitted the house without even prescribing. pepys did all that could be done, and johnson, who was sent for at eleven o'clock, never left him, for while breath remained he still hoped. i ventured in once, and saw them cutting his clothes off to bleed him, but i saw no more." [footnote : (_note_ by mrs. t.). "i rejected all propositions of the sort, and said, as he had got the money, he had the best right to throw it away.... i should always prefer my husband, to my children: let him do his _own_ way."] we learn from madame d'arblay's journal, that, towards the end of march, , mr. thrale had resolved on going abroad with his wife, and that johnson was to accompany them, but a subsequent entry states that the doctors condemned the plan; and "therefore," she adds, "it is settled that a great meeting of his friends is to take place before he actually prepares for the journey, and they are to encircle him in a body, and endeavour, by representations and entreaties, 'to prevail with him to give it up; and i have little doubt myself but, amongst us, we shall be able to succeed." this is one of the oddest schemes ever projected by a set of learned and accomplished gentlemen and ladies for the benefit of a hypochondriac patient. its execution was prevented by his death. a hurried note from mrs. thrale announcing the event, beginning, "write to me, pray for me," is endorsed by madame d'arblay: "written a few hours after the death of mr. thrale, which happened by a sudden stroke of apoplexy, on the morning of a day on which half the fashion of london had been invited to an intended assembly at his house in grosvenor square." these invitations had been sent out by his own express desire: so little was he aware of his danger. letters and messages of condolence poured in from all sides. johnson (in a letter dated april th) said all that could be said in the way of counsel or consolation: "i do not exhort you to reason yourself into tranquillity. we must first pray, and then labour; first implore the blessing of god, and those means which he puts into our hands. cultivated ground, has few weeds; a mind occupied by lawful business, has little room for useless regret. "we read the will to-day; but i will not fill my first letter with any other account than that, with all my zeal for your advantage, i am satisfied; and that the other executors, more used to consider property than i, commended it for wisdom and equity. yet, why should i not tell you that you have five hundred pounds for your immediate expenses, and two thousand pounds a-year, with both the houses and all the goods? "let us pray for one another, that the time, whether long or short, that shall yet be granted us, may be well spent; and that when this life, which at the longest is very short, shall come to an end, a better may begin which shall never end." on april th he writes: "dearest madam,--that you are gradually recovering your tranquillity, is the effect to be humbly expected from trust in god. do not represent life as darker than it is. your loss has been very great, but you retain more than almost any other can hope to possess. you are high in the opinion of mankind; you have children from whom much pleasure may be expected; and that you will find many friends, you have no reason to doubt. of my friendship, be it worth more or less, i hope you think yourself certain, without much art or care. it will not be easy for me to repay the benefits that i have received; but i hope to be always ready at your call. our sorrow has different effects; you are withdrawn into solitude, and i am driven into company. _i_ am afraid of thinking what i have lost. i never had such a friend before. let me have your prayers and those of my dear queeny. "the prudence and resolution of your design to return so soon to your business and your duty deserves great praise; i shall communicate it on wednesday to the other executors. be pleased to let me know whether you would have me come to streatham to receive you, or stay here till the next day." johnson was one of the executors and took pride in discharging his share of the trust. mrs. thrale's account of the pleasure he took in signing the documents and cheques, is incidentally confirmed by boswell: "i could not but be somewhat diverted by hearing johnson talk in a pompous manner of his new office, and particularly of the concerns of the brewery, which it was at last resolved should be sold. lord lucan tells a very good story, which, if not precisely exact, is certainly characteristical; that when the sale of thrale's brewery was going forward, johnson appeared bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, 'we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'" the executors had legacies of _l._ each; johnson, to the surprise of his friends, being placed on no better footing than the rest. he himself was certainly disappointed. mrs. thrale says that his complacency towards thrale was not wholly devoid of interested motives; and she adds that his manner towards reynolds and dr. taylor was also softened by the vague expectation of being named in their wills. one of her marginal notes is: "johnson mentioned to reynolds that he had been told by taylor he was to be his heir. his fondness for reynolds, ay, and for thrale, had a dash of interest to keep it warm." again, on his saying to reynolds, "i did not mean to offend you,"--"he never would offend reynolds: he had his reason." many and heavy as were the reproaches subsequently heaped upon the widow, no one has accused her of having been found wanting in energy, propriety, or self-respect at this period. she took the necessary steps for promoting her own interests and those of her children with prudence and promptitude. madame d'arblay, who was carrying on a flirtation with one of the executors (mr. crutchley), and had personal motives for watching their proceedings, writes, april th:-- "miss thrale is steady and constant, and very sincerely grieved for her father. "the four executors, mr. cator, mr. crutchley, mr. henry smith, and dr. johnson, have all behaved generously and honourably, and seem determined to give mrs. thrale all the comfort and assistance in their power. she is to carry on the business jointly with them. poor soul! it is a dreadful toil and worry to her." in "thraliana": "_streatham, st may_, .--i have now appointed three days a week to attend at the counting-house. if an angel from heaven had told me twenty years ago that the man i knew by the name of _dictionary johnson_ should one day become partner with me in a great trade, and that we should jointly or separately sign notes, drafts, &c., for three or four thousand pounds of a morning, how unlikely it would have seemed ever to happen! unlikely is no word tho',--it would have seemed _incredible_, neither of us then being worth a groat, god knows, and both as immeasurably removed from commerce as birth, literature, and inclination could get us. johnson, however, who desires above all other good the accumulation of new ideas, is but too happy with his present employment; and the influence i have over him, added to his own solid judgment and a regard for truth, will at last find it in a small degree difficult to win him from the dirty delight of seeing his name in a new character flaming away at the bottom of bonds and leases." * * * * * "apropos to writing verses in a language one don't understand, there is always the allowance given, and that allowance (like our excise drawbacks) commonly larger than it ought to be. the following translation of the verses written with a knife, has been for this reason uncommonly commended, though they have no merit except being done quick. piozzi asked me on sunday morning if ever i had seen them, and could explain them to _him_, for that he heard they were written by his friend mr. locke. the book in which they were reposited was not ferreted out, however, till monday night, and on tuesday morning i sent him verses and translation: we used to think the original was garrick's, i remember." translation of the verses written with a knife. "taglia amore un coltello, cara, l'hai sentita dire; per l'amore alla moda, esso poco può soffrire. cuori che non mai fur giunti pronti stanno a separar, cari nodi come i nostri non son facili tagliar. questo dico, che se spezza tua tenera bellezza, molto ancor ci resterà; della mia buona fede il coltello non s'avvede, nè di tua gran bontà. che tagliare speranze ben tutto si puo, per piaceri goduti oh, questo poi no? dolci segni! cari pegni! di felècità passata, non temer la coltellata, resterete--io loro: se del caro ben gradita, trovo questa donatura, via pur la tagliatura sol d'amore sta ferita." "the power of emptying one's head of a great thing and filling it with little ones to amuse care, is no small power, and i am proud of being able to write italian verses while i am bargaining , _l_., and settling an event of the highest consequence to my own and my children's welfare. david barclay, the rich quaker, will treat for our brewhouse, and the negotiation is already begun. my heart palpitates with hope and fear--my head is bursting with anxiety and calculation; yet i can listen to a singer and translate verses about a knife." "mrs. montagu has been here; she says i ought to have a statue erected to me for my diligent attendance on my compting-house duties. the _wits_ and the _blues_ (as it is the fashion to call them) will be happy enough, no doubt, to have me safe at the brewery--_out of their way_." "a very strange thing happened in the year , and i never wrote it down,--i must write it down now. a woman came to london from a distant county to prosecute some business, and fell into distress; she was sullen and silent, and the people with whom her affairs connected her advised her to apply for assistance to some friend. what friends can i have in london? says the woman, nobody here knows anything of me. one can't tell _that_, was the reply. where have you lived? i have wandered much, says she, but i am originally from litchfield. who did you know in litchfield in your youth? oh, nobody of any note, i'll warrant: i knew one _david garrick_, indeed, but i once heard that he turned strolling player, and is probably dead long ago; i also knew an obscure man, _samuel johnson_, very good he was too; but who can know anything of poor johnson? i was likewise acquainted with _robert james_, a quack doctor. _he_ is, i suppose, no very reputable connection if i could find him. thus did this woman name and discriminate the three best known characters in london--perhaps in europe." "'such,' says mrs. montagu, 'is the dignity of mrs. thrale's virtue, and such her superiority in all situations of life, that nothing now is wanting but an earthquake to show how she will behave on _that_ occasion.' oh, brave mrs. montagu! she is a monkey, though, to quarrel with johnson so about lyttleton's life: if he was a great character, nothing said of him in that book can hurt him; if he was not a great character, they are bustling about nothing." "mr. crutchley lives now a great deal with me; the business of executor to mr. thrale's will makes much of his attendance necessary, and it begins to have its full effect in seducing and attaching him to the house,--miss burney's being always about me is probably another reason for his close attendance, and i believe it is so. what better could befall miss burney, or indeed what better could befall _him_, than to obtain a woman of honour, and character, and reputation for superior understanding? i would be glad, however, that he fell honestly in love with her, and was not trick'd or trapp'd into marriage, poor fellow; he is no match for the arts of a novel-writer. a mighty particular character mr. crutchley is: strangely mixed up of meanness and magnificence; liberal and splendid in large sums and on serious occasions, narrow and confined in the common occurrences of life; warm and generous in some of his motives, frigid and suspicious, however, for eighteen hours at least out of the twenty-four; likely to be duped, though always expecting fraud, and easily disappointed in realities, though seldom flattered by fancy. he is supposed by those that knew his mother and her connections to be mr. thrale's natural son, and in many things he resembles him, but not in person: as he is both ugly and awkward. mr. thrale certainly believed he was his son, and once told me as much when sophy streatfield's affair was in question but nobody could persuade him to court the s.s. oh! well does the custom-house officer green say,-- "'coquets! leave off affected arts, gay fowlers at a flock of hearts; woodcocks, to shun your snares have skill, you show so plain you strive to kill.'" "_ rd june_, .--well! here have i, with the grace of god and the assistance of good friends, completed--i really think very happily--the greatest event of my life. i have sold my brewhouse to barclay, the rich quaker, for , _l_., to be in four years' time paid. i have by this bargain purchased peace and a stable fortune, restoration to my original rank in life, and a situation undisturbed by commercial jargon, unpolluted by commercial frauds, undisgraced by commercial connections. they who succeed me in the house have purchased the power of being rich beyond the wish of rapacity[ ], and i have procured the improbability of being made poor by flights of the fairy, speculation. 'tis thus that a woman and men of feminine minds always--i speak popularly--decide upon life, and chuse certain mediocrity before probable superiority; while, as eton graham says sublimely,-- "'nobler souls, fir'd with the tedious and disrelish'd good, seek their employment in acknowledg'd ill, danger, and toil, and pain.' "on this principle partly, and partly on worse, was dear mr. johnson something unwilling--but not much at last--to give up a trade by which in some years , _l._ or , _l._ had undoubtedly been got, but by which, in some years, its possessor had suffered agonies of terror and tottered twice upon the verge of bankruptcy. well! if thy own conscience acquit, who shall condemn thee? not, i hope, the future husbands of our daughters, though i should think it likely enough; however, as johnson says very judiciously, they must either think right or wrong: if they think right, let us now think with them; if wrong, let us never care what they think. so adieu to brewhouse, and borough wintering; adieu to trade, and tradesmen's frigid approbation; may virtue and wisdom sanctify our contract, and make buyer and seller happy in the bargain!" [footnote : there is a curious similarity here to johnson's phrase, "the potentiality of becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice."] after mentioning some friends who disapproved of the sale, she adds: "mrs. montagu has sent me her approbation in a letter exceedingly affectionate and polite. 'tis over now, tho', and i'll clear my head of it and all that belongs to it; i will go to church, give god thanks, receive the sacrament and forget the frauds, follies, and inconveniences of a commercial life this day." madame d'arblay was at streatham on the day of the sale, and gives a dramatic colour to the ensuing scene: "_streatham, thursday_.--this was the great and most important day to all this house, upon which the sale of the brewery was to be decided. mrs. thrale went early to town, to meet all the executors, and mr. barclay, the quaker, who was the _bidder_. she was in great agitation of mind, and told me, if all went well she would wave a white pocket-handkerchief out of the coach window. "four o'clock came and dinner was ready, and no mrs. thrale. five o'clock followed, and no mrs. thrale. queeny and i went out upon the lawn, where we sauntered, in eager expectation, till near six, and then the coach appeared in sight, and a white pocket-handkerchief was waved from it. i ran to the door of it to meet her, and she jumped out of it, and gave me a thousand embraces while i gave my congratulations. we went instantly to her dressing-room, where she told me, in brief, how the matter had been transacted, and then we went down to dinner. dr. johnson and mr. crutchley had accompanied her home." the event is thus announced to langton by johnson, in a letter printed by boswell, dated june , : "you will perhaps be glad to hear that mrs. thrale is disencumbered of her brewhouse, and that it seemed to the purchaser so far from an evil that he was content to give for it , _l_. is the nation ruined." _marginal note_: "i suppose he was neither glad nor sorry." thrale died on the th april, , and mrs. thrale left streatham on the th october, . the intervening eighteen months have been made the subject of an almost unprecedented amount of misrepresentation. hawkins, boswell, madame d'arblay, and lord macaulay have vied with each other in founding uncharitable imputations on her conduct at this period of her widowhood; and it has consequently become necessary to recapitulate the authentic evidence relating to it. as piozzi's name will occur occasionally, he must now be brought upon the scene. he is first mentioned in "thraliana" thus: "_brighton, july_, .--i have picked up piozzi here, the great italian singer. he is amazingly like my father. he shall teach hester." a detailed account of the commencement of the acquaintance is given in one of the autobiographical fragments. she says he was recommended to her by letter by madame d'arblay as "a man likely to lighten the burthen of life to her," and that both she and mr. thrale took to him at once. madame d'arblay is silent as to the introduction or recommendation; but gives an amusing account of one of their first meetings: "a few months after the streathamite morning visit to st. martin's street, an evening party was arranged by dr. burney, for bringing thither again dr. johnson and mrs. thrale, at the desire of mr. and mrs. greville and mrs. crewe; who wished, under the quiet roof of dr. burney, to make acquaintance with these celebrated personages." the conversation flagged, and recourse was had to music-- "piozzi, a first-rate singer, whose voice was deliciously sweet, and whose expression was perfect, sung in his very best manner, from his desire to do honour to _il capo di casa_; but _il capo di casa_ and his family alone did justice to his strains: neither the grevilles nor the thrales heeded music beyond what belonged to it as fashion: the expectations of the grevilles were all occupied by dr. johnson; and those of the thrales by the authoress of the ode to indifference. when piozzi, therefore, arose, the party remained as little advanced in any method or pleasure for carrying on the evening, as upon its first entrance into the room.... "dr. burney now began to feel considerably embarrassed; though still he cherished hopes of ultimate relief from some auspicious circumstance that, sooner or later, would operate, he hoped, in his favour, through the magnetism of congenial talents. "vainly, however, he sought to elicit some observations that might lead to disserting discourse; all his attempts received only quiet, acquiescent replies, 'signifying nothing.' every one was awaiting some spontaneous opening from dr. johnson. "mrs. thrale, of the whole coterie, was alone at her ease. she feared not dr. johnson; for fear made no part of her composition; and with mrs. greville, as a fair rival genius, she would have been glad, from curiosity, to have had the honour of a little tilt, in full carelessness of its event; for though triumphant when victorious, she had spirits so volatile, and such utter exemption from envy or spleen, that she was gaily free from mortification when vanquished. but she knew the meeting to have been fabricated for dr. johnson; and, therefore, though not without difficulty, constrained herself to be passive. "when, however, she observed the sardonic disposition of mr. greville to stare around him at the whole company in curious silence, she felt a defiance against his aristocracy beat in every pulse; for, however grandly he might look back to the long ancestry of the brookes and the grevilles, she had a glowing consciousness that her own blood, rapid and fluent, flowed in her veins from adam of saltsberg; and, at length, provoked by the dullness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the most barren of human faculties; she grew tired of the music, and yet more tired of remaining, what as little suited her inclinations as her abilities, a mere cipher in the company; and, holding such a position, and all its concomitants, to be ridiculous, her spirits rose rebelliously above her control; and, in a fit of utter recklessness of what might be thought of her by her fine new acquaintance, she suddenly, but softly, arose, and stealing on tip-toe behind signor piozzi, who was accompanying himself on the piano-forte to an animated _arria parlante_, with his back to the company, and his face to the wall; she ludicrously began imitating him by squaring her elbows, elevating them with ecstatic shrugs of the shoulders, and casting up her eyes, while languishingly reclining her head; as if she were not less enthusiastically, though somewhat more suddenly, struck with the transports of harmony than himself. "this grotesque ebullition of ungovernable gaiety was not perceived by dr. johnson, who faced the fire, with his back to the performer and the instrument. but the amusement which such an unlooked for exhibition caused to the party, was momentary; for dr. burney, shocked lest the poor signor should observe, and be hurt by this mimicry, glided gently round to mrs. thrale, and, with something between pleasantness and severity, whispered to her, 'because, madam, you have no ear yourself for music, will you destroy the attention of all who, in that one point, are otherwise gifted?' "it was now that shone the brightest attribute of mrs. thrale, sweetness of temper. she took this rebuke with a candour, and a sense of its justice the most amiable: she nodded her approbation of the admonition; and, returning to her chair, quietly sat down, as she afterwards said, like a pretty little miss, for the remainder of one of the most humdrum evenings that she had ever passed. "strange, indeed, strange and most strange, the event considered, was this opening intercourse between mrs. thrale and signor piozzi. little could she imagine that the person she was thus called away from holding up to ridicule, would become, but a few years afterwards, the idol of her fancy and the lord of her destiny! and little did the company present imagine, that this burlesque scene was but the first of a drama the most extraordinary of real life, of which these two persons were to be the hero and heroine: though, when the catastrophe was known, this incident, witnessed by so many, was recollected and repeated from coterie to coterie throughout london, with comments and sarcasms of endless variety."[ ] [footnote : memoirs of dr. burney, &c., vol. ii, pp. -- .] madame d'arblay mentioned the same circumstance in conversation to the rev. w. harness: yet it seems strange in connection with an entry in "thraliana" from which it would appear that her friend was far from wanting in susceptibility to sweet sounds: " _august_, .--piozzi is become a prodigious favourite with me, he is so intelligent a creature, so discerning, one can't help wishing for his good opinion; his singing surpasses everybody's for taste, tenderness, and true elegance; his hand on the forte piano too is so soft, so sweet, so delicate, every tone goes to the heart, i think, and fills the mind with emotions one would not be without, though inconvenient enough sometimes. he wants nothing from us: he comes for his health he says: i see nothing ail the man but pride. the newspapers yesterday told what all the musical folks gained, and set piozzi down _l_. o' year." on the th august, , madame d'arblay writes: "i have not seen piozzi: he left me your letter, which indeed is a charming one, though its contents puzzled me much whether to make me sad or merry." mrs. thrale was still at brighton; so that the scene at dr. burney's must have occurred subsequently; when she had already begun to find piozzi what the neapolitan ladies understand by _simpatico_. madame d'arblay's "memoirs," as i shall have occasion to point out, are by no means so trustworthy a register of dates, facts, or impressions as her "diary." whilst thrale lived, mrs. thrale's regard for piozzi was certainly not of a nature to cause scandal or provoke censure, and as it ripened into love, it may be traced, step by step, from the frankest and fullest of all possible unveilings of the heart. rare indeed are the instances in which such revelations as we find in "thraliana" could be risked by either man or woman, without giving scope to malevolence; and they should not only be judged as a whole and by the context, but the most favourable construction should be put upon them. when, in this sort of self-communing, every passing emotion, every transitory inclination, is set down, it would be unfair and even foolish to infer that the emotion at once became a passion, or that the inclination was criminally indulged. the next notice of piozzi occurs in madame d'arblay's "diary" for july th, : "you will believe i was not a little surprised to see sacchini. he is going to the continent with piozzi, and mrs. thrale invited them both to spend the last day at streatham, and from hence proceed to margate.... the first song he sang, beginning 'en quel amabil volto,' you may perhaps know, but i did not; it is a charming mezza bravura. he and piozzi then sung together the duet of the 'amore soldato;' and nothing could be much more delightful; piozzi taking pains to sing his very best, and sacchini, with his soft but delicious whisper, almost thrilling me by his exquisite and pathetic expression. they then went through that opera, great part of 'creso,' some of 'erifile,' and much of 'rinaldo.'" piozzi's attentions had attracted johnson's notice without troubling his peace. on november th, , he wrote from ashbourne: "piozzi, i find, is coming in spite of miss harriet's prediction, or second sight, and when _he_ comes and _i_ come, you will have two about you that love you; and i question if either of us heartily care how few more you have. but how many soever they may be, i hope you keep your kindness for me, and i have a great mind to have queeny's kindness too." again, december rd, : "you have got piozzi again, notwithstanding pretty harriet's dire denunciations. the italian translation which he has brought, you will find no great accession to your library, for the writer seems to understand very little english. when we meet we can compare some passages. pray contrive a multitude of good things for us to do when we meet. something that may _hold all together_; though if any thing makes _me_ love you more, it is going from you." we learn from "thraliana," that the entanglement with piozzi was not the only one of which streatham was contemporaneously the scene: "_august,_ .--i begin to wish in good earnest that miss burney should make impression on mr. crutchley. i think she honestly loves the man, who in his turn appears to be in love with some one else--hester, i fear, oh! that would indeed be unlucky! people have said so a long while, but i never thought it till now; young men and women will always be serving one so, to be sure, if they live at all together, but i depended on burney keeping him steady to herself. queeny behaves like an angel about it. mr. johnson says the name of crutchley comes from _croix lea_, the cross meadow; _lea_ is a meadow, i know, and _crutch_, a crutch stick, is so called from having the handle go _crosswise_." "_september,_ .--my five fair daughters too! i have so good a pretence to wish for long life to see them settled. like the old fellow in 'lucian,' one is never at a loss for an excuse. they are five lovely creatures to be sure, but they love not me. is it my fault or theirs?" "_ th october_, .--yesterday was my wedding-day; it was a melancholy thing to me to pass it without the husband of my youth. "'long tedious years may neither moan, sad, deserted, and alone; may neither long condemned to stay wait the second bridal day!!!'[ ] "let me thank god for my children, however, my fortune, and my friends, and be contented if i cannot be happy." [footnote : _note by mrs. t._: "samuel wesley's verses, making part of an epithalamium."] "_ th october_, .--my maid margaret rice dreamed last night that my eldest daughter was going to be married to mr. crutchley, but that mr. thrale _himself_ prevented her. an odd thing to me, who think mr. crutchley is his son." although the next day but one after thrale's death johnson carried boswell to dine at the queen's arms' club, his grief was deep and durable. indeed, it is expressed so often and so earnestly as to rebut the presumption that "my mistress" was the sole or chief tie which bound him to streatham. amongst his prayers and meditations is the following: "_good friday, april th_, .--on wednesday, th, was buried my dear friend thrale, who died on wednesday, th; and with him were buried many of my hopes and pleasures. about five, i think, on wednesday morning, he expired. i felt almost the last flutter of his pulse, and looked for the last time upon the face that for fifteen years had never been turned upon me but with respect or benignity. farewell. may god, that delighteth in mercy, have had mercy on thee! i had constantly prayed for him some time before his death. the decease of him, from whose friendship i had obtained many opportunities of amusement, and to whom i turned my thoughts as to a refuge from misfortunes, has left me heavy. but my business is with myself." on the same paper is a note: "my first knowledge of thrale was in . i enjoyed his favours for almost a fourth part of my life." on the th march, , he wrote thus to langton: "of my life, from the time we parted, the history is mournful. the spring of last year deprived me of thrale, a man whose eye for fifteen years had scarcely been turned upon me but with respect or tenderness; for such another friend, the general course of human things will not suffer man to hope. i passed the summer at streatham, but there was no thrale; and having idled away the summer with a weakly body and neglected mind, i made a journey to staffordshire on the edge of winter. the season was dreary, i was sickly, and found the friends sickly whom i went to see." there is ample evidence that he neither felt nor suspected any diminution of kindness or regard, and continued, till their final departure from streatham, to treat it as his home. in november she writes, "do not forget streatham and its inhabitants, who are all much yours;" and he replies: "birmingham, dec. th, . "dear madam,--i am come to this place on my way to london and to streatham. i hope to be in london on tuesday or wednesday, and streatham on thursday, by your kind conveyance. i shall have nothing to relate either wonderful or delightful. but remember that you sent me away, and turned me out into the world, and you must take the chance of finding me better or worse. this you may know at present, that my affection for you is not diminished, and my expectation from you is increased. do not neglect me, nor relinquish me. nobody will ever love you better or honour you more." "feb. th, . "dearest lady,--i am better, but not yet well; but hope springs eternal. as soon as i can think myself not troublesome, you may be sure of seeing me, _for such a place to visit nobody ever had_. dearest madam, do not think me worse than i am; be sure, at least, that whatever happens to me, i am with all the regard that admiration of excellence and gratitude for kindness can excite, madam, your" &c. in "thraliana": "_ rd february, (harley street)_.--the truth is, mr. johnson has some occult disorder that i cannot understand; jebb and bromfield fancy it is water between the heart and pericardium--i do not think it is _that_, but i do not know what it is. he apprehends no danger himself, and he knows more of the matter than any of them all." on february th, , he writes to malone: "i have for many weeks been so much out of order, that i have gone out only in a coach to mrs. thrale's, where i can use all the freedom that sickness requires." on march th, , to mrs. grastrell and mrs. aston: "when dr. falconer saw me, i was at home only by accident, for i lived much with mrs. thrale, and had all the care from her that she could take or could be taken." april th, , to mrs. thrale: "madam,--i have been very much out of order since you sent me away; but why should i tell you, who do not care, nor desire to know? i dined with mr. paradise on monday, with the bishop of st. asaph yesterday, with the bishop of chester i dine to-day, and with the academy on saturday, with mr. hoole on monday, and with mrs. garrick on thursday, the nd of may, and then--what care you? _what then_? "the news run, that we have taken seventeen french transports; that langton's lady is lying down with her eighth child, all alive; and mrs. carter's miss sharpe is going to marry a schoolmaster sixty-two years old. "do not let mr. piozzi nor any body else put me quite out of your head, and do not think that any body will love you like your" &c. "april th, . "mrs. sheridan refused to sing, at the duchess of devonshire's request, a song to the prince of wales. they pay for the theatre neither principal nor interest; and poor garrick's funeral expenses are yet unpaid, though the undertaker is broken. could you have a better purveyor for a little scandal? but i wish i was at streatham. i beg miss to come early, and i may perhaps reward you with more mischief." she went to streatham on the th april, , and johnson evidently with her. in "thraliana" she writes: "_saturday, th may, ._--to-day i bring home to streatham my poor dr. johnson: he went to town a week ago by the way of amusing himself, and got so very ill that i thought i should never get him home alive,"--by _home_ meaning streatham. johnson to mrs. thrale: "june th, . "this day i dined upon skate, pudding, goose, and your asparagus, and could have eaten more, but was prudent. pray for me, dear madam; i hope the tide has turned. the change that i feel is more than i durst have hoped, or than i thought possible; but there has not yet passed a whole day, and i may rejoice perhaps too soon. come and see me, and when you think best, upon due consideration, take me away." from her to him: "streatham, june th, . "dear sir,--i am glad you confess yourself peevish, for confession must precede amendment. do not study to be more unhappy than you are, and if you can eat and sleep well, do not be frighted, for there can be no real danger. are you acquainted with dr. lee, the master of baliol college? and are you not delighted with his gaiety of manners and youthful vivacity now that he is eighty-six years old? i never heard a more perfect or excellent pun than his, when some one told him how, in a late dispute among the privy counsellors, the lord chancellor (thurlow) struck the table with such violence that he split it. 'no, no,' replied the master, drily, 'i can hardly persuade myself that he _split the table_, though i believe he _divided the board_.' will you send me anything better from oxford than this? for there must be no more fastidiousness now; no more refusing to laugh at a good quibble, when you so loudly profess the want of amusement and the necessity of diversion." from him to her: "oxford, june th, . "oxford has done, i think, what for the present it can do, and i am going slyly to take a place in the coach for wednesday, and you or my sweet queeny will fetch me on thursday, and see what you can make of me." hannah more met him during this visit to oxford, and writes, june th, : "who do you think is my principal cicerone at oxford? only dr. johnson! and we do so gallant it about." madame d'arblay, then at streatham, writes, june th, : "dr. johnson, who had been in town some days, returned, and mr. crutchley came also, as well as my father." after describing some lively conversation, she adds: "i have _very often_, though i mention them not, long and melancholy discourses with dr. johnson, about our dear deceased master, whom, indeed, he regrets unceasingly; but i love not to dwell on subjects of sorrow when i can drive them away, especially to you (her sister), upon this account as you were so much a stranger to that excellent friend, whom you only lamented for the sake of those who survived him." he had only returned that very day, and she had been absent from streatham, as she states elsewhere, till "the cecilian business was arranged," _i.e._ till the end of may. on the th august, (this date is material) johnson writes to boswell: "dear sir,--being uncertain whether i should have any call this autumn into the country, i did not immediately answer your kind letter. i have no call; but if you desire to meet me at ashbourne, i believe i can come thither; if you had rather come to london, i can stay at streatham: take your choice." this was two days after mrs. thrale, with his full concurrence, had made up her mind to let streatham. he treats it, notwithstanding, as at his disposal for a residence so long as she remains in it. the books and printed letters from which most of these extracts are taken, have been all along accessible to her assailants. those from "thraliana," which come next, are new: "_ th november_, .--i have got my piozzi[ ] home at last; he looks thin and battered, but always kindly upon me, i think. he brought me an italian sonnet written in his praise by marco capello, which i instantly translated of course; but he, prudent creature, insisted on my burning it, as he said it would inevitably get about the town how _he_ was praised, and how mrs. thrale translated and echoed the praises, so that, says he, i shall be torn in pieces, and you will have some _infamità_ said of you that will make you hate the sight of me. he was so earnest with me that i could not resist, so burnt my sonnet, which was actually very pretty; and now i repent i did not first write it into the thraliana. over leaf, however, shall go the translation, which happens to be done very closely, and the last stanza is particularly exact. i must put it down while i remember it: . "'favoured of britain's pensive sons, though still thy name be found, though royal thames where'er he runs returns the flattering sound, . though absent thou, on every joy her gloom privation flings, and pleasure, pining for employ, now droops her nerveless wings, . yet since kind fates thy voice restore to charm our land again[ ],-- return not to their rocky shore, nor tempt the angry main. . nor is their praise of so much worth, nor is it justly given, that angels sing to them on earth who slight the road to heaven.' "he tells me--piozzi does--that his own country manners greatly disgusted him, after having been used to ours; but milan is a comfortable place, i find. if he does not fix himself for life here, he will settle to lay his bones at milan. the marquis d'araciel, his friend and patron, who resides there, divides and disputes his heart with me: i shall be loth to resign it." [footnote : this mode of expression did not imply then what it might now. see _ante_, p. , where johnson writes to "my baretti."] [footnote : "capello is a venetian poet."] "_ th december, ._--dear mr. johnson is at last returned; he has been a vast while away to see his country folks at litchfield. my fear is lest he should grow paralytick,--there are really some symptoms already discoverable, i think, about the mouth particularly. he will drive the gout away so when it comes, and it must go _somewhere_. queeny works hard with him at the classicks; i hope she will be _out_ of leading-strings at least before he gets _into_ them, as poor women say of their children." "_ st january, ._--let me not, while censuring the behaviour of others, however, give cause of censure by my own. i am beginning a new year in a new character. may it be worn decently yet lightly! i wish not to be rigid and fright my daughters by too much severity. i will not be wild and give them reason to lament the levity of my life. resolutions, however, are vain. to pray for god's grace is the sole way to obtain it--'strengthen thou, o lord, my virtue and my understanding, preserve me from temptation, and acquaint me with myself; fill my heart with thy love, restrain it by thy fear, and keep my soul's desires fixed wholly on that place where only true joys are to be found, through jesus christ our lord,--amen.'" _january_, .--(after stating her fear of illness and other ills.) "_if_ nothing of all these misfortunes, however, befall one; _if_ for my sins god should take from me my monitor, my friend, my inmate, my dear doctor johnson; _if_ neither i should marry, nor the brewhouse people break; _if_ the ruin of the nation should not change the situation of affairs so that one could not receive regular remittances from england: and _if_ piozzi should not pick him up a wife and fix his abode in this country,--_if_, therefore, and _if_ and _if_ and _if_ again all should conspire to keep my present resolution warm, i certainly would, at the close of the four years from the sale of the southwark estate, set out for italy, with my two or three eldest girls, and see what the world could show me." in a marginal note, she adds: "travelling with mr. johnson _i_ cannot bear, and leaving him behind _he_ could not bear, so his life or death must determine the execution or laying aside my schemes. i wish it were within reason to _hope_ he could live four years." "_streatham, th january_, .--i have taken a house in harley street for these three months next ensuing, and hope to have some society,--not company tho': crowds are out of the question, but people will not come hither on short days, and 'tis too dull to live all alone so. the world will watch me at first, and think i come o' husband-hunting for myself or my fair daughters, but when i have behaved prettily for a while, they will change their mind." "_harley street, th january_, .--the first seduction comes from pepys. i had a letter to-day desiring me to dine in wimpole street, to meet mrs. montagu and a whole _army of blues_, to whom i trust my refusal will afford very pretty speculation ... and they may settle my character and future conduct at their leisure. pepys is a worthless fellow at last; he and his brother run about the town, spying and enquiring what mrs. thrale is to do this winter, what friends she is to see, what men are in her confidence, how soon she will be _married_, &c.; the brother dr.--the medico, as we call him--lays wagers about me, i find; god forgive me, but they'll make me hate them both, and they are no better than two fools for their pains, for i was willing to have taken them to my heart." "they say pacchierotti, the famous soprano singer, is ill, and _they say_ lady mary duncan, his frightful old protectress, has made him so by her _caresses dénaturées_. a little envy of the new woman, allegrante, has probably not much mended his health, for pacchierotti, dear creature, is envious enough. i was, however, turning over horace yesterday, to look for the expression _tenui fronte_[ ], in vindication of my assertion to johnson that low foreheads were classical, when the th ode of the first book of horace struck me so, i could not help imitating it while the scandal was warm in my mind: . "'he's sick indeed! and very sick, for if it is not all a trick you'd better look about ye. dear lady mary, prythee tell why thus by loving him too well you kill your pacchierotti? . nor sun nor dust can he abide, nor careless in a snaffle ride, the steed we saw him mount ill. _you_ stript him of his manly force, when tumbling headlong from his horse he pressed the plains of fonthill.[ ] . why the full opera should he shun? where crowds of critics smiling run, to applaud their allegrante. why is it worse than viper's sting, to see them clap, or hear her sing? surely he's envious, ain't he? . forbear his house, nor haunt his bed with that strange wig and fearful head, then, though he now so ill is, we o'er his voice again may doze, when, cover'd warm with women's clothes, he acts a young achilles.'" [footnote : insignem tenui fronte lycorida cyri torret amor-- but _tenuis_ is _small_ or _narrow_ rather than _low_. one of fielding's beauties, sophia western, has a low forehead: another, fanny, a high one.] [footnote : _note by mrs. t.:_ "fonthill, the seat of young beckford. they set him o' horseback, and he tumbled off."] "_ st february, ._--here is mr. johnson ill, very ill indeed, and--i do not see what ails him; 'tis repelled gout, i fear, fallen on the lungs and breath of course. what shall we do for him? if i lose _him_, i am more than undone; friend, father, guardian, confident!--god give me health and patience. what shall i do?" "_harley street, th april, ._--when i took off my mourning, the watchers watched me very exactly, 'but they whose hands were mightiest have found nothing:' so i shall leave the town, i hope, in a good disposition towards me, though i am sullen enough with the town for fancying me such an amorous idiot that i am dying to enjoy every filthy fellow. god knows how distant such dispositions are from the heart and constitution of h.l.t. lord loughboro', sir richard jebb, mr. piozzi, mr. selwyn, dr. johnson, every man that comes to the house, is put in the papers for me to marry. in good time, i wrote to-day to beg the 'morning herald' would say no more about me, good or bad." "_streatham, th april, ._--i am returned to streatham, pretty well in health and very sound in heart, notwithstanding the watchers and the wager-layers, who think more of the charms of their sex by half than i who know them better. love and friendship are distinct things, and i would go through fire to serve many a man whom nothing less than fire would force me to go to bed to. somebody mentioned my going to be married t'other day, and johnson was joking about it. i suppose, sir, said i, they think they are doing me honour with these imaginary matches, when, perhaps the man does not exist who would do me honour by marrying me! this, indeed, was said in the wild and insolent spirit of baretti, yet 'tis nearer the truth than one would think for. a woman of passable person, ancient family, respectable character, uncommon talents, and three thousand a year, has a right to think herself any man's equal, and has nothing to seek but return of affection from whatever partner she pitches on. to marry for love would therefore be rational in me, who want no advancement of birth or fortune, and _till i am in love_, i will not marry, nor perhaps then." "_ nd august, ._--an event of no small consequence to our little family must here be recorded in the 'thraliana.' after having long intended to go to italy for pleasure, we are now settling to go thither for convenience. the establishment of expense here at streatham is more than my income will answer; my lawsuit with lady salusbury turns out worse in the event and infinitely more costly than i could have dreamed on; _l._ is supposed necessary to the payment of it, and how am i to raise _l_.? my trees will (after all my expectations from them) fetch but _l_., the money lent perkins on his bond _l_., the hertfordshire copyholds may perhaps be worth _l_., and where is the rest to spring from? i must go abroad and save money. to show italy to my girls, and be showed it by piozzi, has long been my dearest wish, but to leave mr. johnson shocked me, and to take him appeared impossible. his recovery, however, from an illness we all thought dangerous, gave me courage to speak to him on the subject, and this day (after having been let blood) i mustered up resolution to tell him the necessity of changing a way of life i had long been displeased with. i added that i had mentioned the matter to my eldest daughter, whose prudence and solid judgment, unbiassed by passion, is unequalled, as far as my experience has reached; that she approved the scheme, and meant to partake it, though of an age when she might be supposed to form connections here in england--attachments of the tenderest nature; that she declared herself free and resolved to follow my fortunes, though perfectly aware temptations might arise to prevent me from ever returning--a circumstance she even mentioned herself. "mr. johnson thought well of the project, and wished me to put it early in execution: seemed less concerned at parting with me than i wished him: thought his pupil miss thrale quite right in forbearing to marry young, and seemed to entertain no doubt of living to see us return rich and happy in two or three years' time. he told hester in my absence that he would not go with me if i asked him. see the importance of a person to himself. i fancied mr. johnson could not have existed without me, forsooth, as we have now lived together for above eighteen years. i have so fondled him in sickness and in health. not a bit of it. he feels nothing in parting with me, nothing in the least; but thinks it a prudent scheme, and goes to his books as usual. this is philosophy and truth; he always said he hated a _feeler_.... "the persecution i endure from men too who want to marry me--in good time--is another reason for my desiring to be gone. i wish to marry none of them, and sir philip's teazing me completed my mortification; to see that one can rely on _nobody!_ the expences of this house, however, which are quite past my power to check, is the true and rational cause of our departure. in italy we shall live with twice the respect and at half the expence we do here; the language is familiar to me and i love the italians; i take with me all i love in the world except my two baby daughters, who will be left safe at school; and since mr. johnson cares nothing for the loss of my personal friendship and company, there is no danger of any body else breaking their hearts. my sweet burney and mrs. byron will perhaps think they are sorry, but my consciousness that no one _can_ have the cause of concern that johnson has, and my conviction that he has _no concern at all_, shall cure me of lamenting friends left behind." in the margin of this entry she has written, "i begin to see (now everything shows it) that johnson's connection with me is merely an interested one; he _loved_ mr. thrale, i believe, but only wished to find in me a careful nurse and humble friend for his sick and his lounging hours; yet i really thought he could not have _existed_ without _my conversation_ forsooth! he cares more for my roast beef and plum pudden, which he now devours too dirtily for endurance; and since he is glad to get rid of me, i'm sure i have good cause to desire the getting rid of him." no great stress should be laid on this ebullition of mortified self-love; but it occurs oddly enough at the very time when, according to lord macaulay, she was labouring to produce the very feeling that irritated her. "_august th_, .--he (piozzi) thinks still more than he says, that i shall give him up; and if queeney made herself more amiable to me, and took the proper methods--i suppose i should." "_ september_ , _streatham_.--and now i am going to leave streatham (i have let the house and grounds to lord shelburne, the expence of it eat me up) for three years, where i lived--never happily indeed, but always easily: the more so perhaps from the total absence of love and ambition-- "'else these two passions by the way might chance to show us scurvy play.'" ten days later (october st) she thus argues out the question of marriage: "now! that dear little discerning creature, fanny burney, says i'm in love with piozzi: very likely; he is so amiable, so honourable, so much above his situation by his abilities, that if "'fate had not fast bound her with styx nine times round her, sure musick and love were victorious.' but if he is ever so worthy, ever so lovely, he is _below me_ forsooth! in what is he below me? in virtue? i would i were above him. in understanding? i would mine were from this instant under the guardianship of his. in birth? to be sure he is below me in birth, and so is almost every man i know or have a chance to know. but he is below me in fortune: is mine sufficient for us both?--more than amply so. does he deserve it by his conduct, in which he has always united warm notions of honour with cool attention to oeconomy, the spirit of a gentleman with the talents of a professor? how shall any man deserve fortune, if he does not? but i am the guardian of five daughters by mr. thrale, and must not disgrace _their_ name and family. was then the man my mother chose for me of higher extraction than him i have chosen for myself? no,--but his fortune was higher.... i wanted fortune then, perhaps: do i want it now?--not at all; but i am not to think about myself; i married the first time to please my mother, i must marry the second time to please my daughter. i have always sacrificed my own choice to that of others, so i must sacrifice it again: but why? oh, because i am a woman of superior understanding, and must not for the world degrade myself from my situation in life. but if i _have_ superior understanding, let me at least make use of it for once, and rise to the rank of a human being conscious of its own power to discern good from ill. the person who has uniformly acted by the will of others has hardly that dignity to boast. "but once again: i am guardian to five girls; agreed: will this connection prejudice their bodies, souls, or purse? my marriage may assist _my_ health, but i suppose it will not injure _theirs_. will his company or companions corrupt their morals? god forbid; if i did not believe him one of the best of our fellow beings, i would reject him instantly. can it injure their fortunes? could he impoverish (if he would) five women, to whom their father left _ , l._ each, independent almost of possibilities?--to what then am i guardian? to their pride and prejudice? and is anything else affected by the alliance? now for more solid objections. is not the man of whom i desire protection, a foreigner? unskilled in the laws and language of our country? certainly. is he not, as the french say, _arbitre de mon sort?_ and from the hour he possesses my person and fortune, have i any power of decision how or where i may continue or end my life? is not the man, upon the continuance of whose affection my whole happiness depends, _younger_ than myself[ ], and is it wise to place one's happiness on the continuance of _any_ man's affection? would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? on the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? when i lost mr. thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to soothe me; but which of my children or quondam friends would look with kindness upon piozzi's widow? if i bring children by him, must they not be catholics, and must not i live among people the _ritual_ part of whose religion i disapprove? "these are _my_ objections, these _my_ fears: not those of being censured by the world, as it is called, a composition of vice and folly, though 'tis surely no good joke to be talked of "'by each affected she that tells my story, and blesses her good stars that _she_ was prudent.' "these objections would increase in strength, too, if my present state was a happy one, but it really is not. i live a quiet life, but not a pleasant one. my children govern without loving me; my servants devour and despise me; my friends caress and censure me; my money wastes in expences i do not enjoy, and my time in trifles i do not approve. every one is made insolent, and no one comfortable; my reputation unprotected, my heart unsatisfied, my health unsettled. i will, however, resolve on nothing. i will take a voyage to the continent in spring, enlarge my knowledge and repose my purse. change of place may turn the course of these ideas, and external objects supply the room of internal felicity. if he follow me, i may reject or receive at pleasure the addresses of a man who follows on _no explicit promise_, nor much probability of success, for i would really wish to marry no more without the consent of my children (such i mean as are qualified to give their opinions); and how should _miss thrales_ approve of my marrying _mr. piozzi_? here then i rest, and will torment my mind no longer, but commit myself, as he advises, to the hand of providence, and all will end _all' ottima perfezzione_. "written at streatham, st october, ." [footnote : _note by mrs. piozzi_: "he was half a year _older_ when our registers were both examined."] "_october, ._--there is no mercy for me in this island. i am more and more disposed to try the continent. one day the paper rings with my marriage to johnson, one day to crutchley, one day to seward. i give no reason for such impertinence, but cannot deliver myself from it. whitbred, the rich brewer, is in love with me too; oh, i would rather, as ann page says, be set breast deep in the earth[ ] and bowled to death with turnips. "mr. crutchley bid me make a curtsey to my daughters for keeping me out of a goal (_sic_), and the newspapers insolent as he! how shall i get through? how shall i get through? i have not deserved it of any of them, as god knows. "philip thicknesse put it about bath that i was a poor girl, a mantua maker, when mr. thrale married me. it is an odd thing, but miss thrales like, i see, to have it believed." [footnote : anne page says, "quick in the earth."] the general result down to this point is that, whatever the disturbance in mrs. thrale's heart and mind, johnson had no ground of complaint, nor ever thought he had, which is the essential point in controversy. in other words, he was not driven, hinted, or manoeuvred out of streatham. yet almost all his worshippers have insisted that he was. hawkins, after mentioning the kind offices undertaken by johnson (which constantly took him to streatham) says:--"nevertheless it was observed by myself, and other of johnson's friends, that soon after the decease of mr. thrale, his visits to streatham became less and less frequent, and that he studiously avoided the mention of the place or the family." this statement is preposterous, and is only to be partially accounted for by the fact that hawkins, as his daughter informs us, had no personal acquaintance with mrs. thrale or streatham. boswell, who was in scotland when johnson and mrs. thrale left streatham together, gratuitously infers that he left it alone, angry and mortified, in consequence of her altered manner: "the death of mr. thrale had made a very material alteration with respect to johnson's reception in that family. the manly authority of the husband no longer curbed the lively exuberance of the lady; and as her vanity had been fully gratified, by having the colossus of literature attached to her for many years, she gradually became less assiduous to please him. whether her attachment to him was already divided by another object, i am unable to ascertain; but it is plain that johnson's penetration was alive to her neglect or forced attention; for on the th of october this year we find him making a 'parting use of the library' at streatham, and pronouncing a prayer which he composed on leaving mr. thrale's family. "'almighty god, father of all mercy, help me by thy grace, that i may, with humble and sincere thankfulness, remember the comforts and conveniences which i have enjoyed at this place; and that i may resign them with holy submission, equally trusting in thy protection when thou givest, and when thou takest away. have mercy upon me, o lord! have mercy upon me! to thy fatherly protection, o lord, i commend this family. bless, guide, and defend them, that they may so pass through this world, as finally to enjoy in thy presence everlasting happiness, for jesus christ's sake. amen.' "one cannot read this prayer without some emotions not very favourable to the lady whose conduct occasioned it. "the next day, he made the following memorandum: "'_october ._--i was called early. i packed up my bundles, and used the foregoing prayer, with my morning devotions somewhat, i think, enlarged. being earlier than the family, i read st. paul's farewell in the acts, and then read fortuitously in the gospels,--which was my parting use of the library.'" mr. croker, whose protest against the groundless insinuations of boswell should have put subsequent writers on their guard, states in a note:--"he seems to have taken leave of the kitchen as well as the church at streatham in latin." the note of his last dinner there, done into english, would run thus: "oct. th, sunday, . "i dined at streatham on boiled leg of lamb, with spinach, the stuffing of flour and raisins, round of beef, and turkey poult; and after the meat service, figs, grapes, not yet ripe in consequence of the bad season, with peaches, also hard. i took my place at table in no joyful mood, and partook of the food moderately, lest i should finish by intemperance. if i rightly remember, the banquet at the funeral of hadon came into my mind.[ ] when shall i revisit streatham?" [footnote : "si recte memini in mentem venerunt epulæ in exequiis hadoni celebratæ." i cannot explain this allusion.] the exclamation "when shall i revisit streatham?" loses much of its pathos when connected with these culinary details. madame d'arblay's description of the last year at streatham is too important to be much abridged: "dr. burney, _when the cecilian business was arranged_[ ], again conveyed the memorialist to streatham. no further reluctance on his part, nor exhortations on that of mr. crisp, sought to withdraw her from that spot, where, while it was in its glory, they had so recently, and with pride, seen her distinguished. and truly eager was her own haste, when mistress of her time, to try once more to soothe those sorrows and chagrins in which she had most largely participated, by answering to the call, which had never ceased tenderly to pursue her, of return. "with alacrity, therefore, though not with gaiety, they re-entered the streatham gates--but they soon perceived that they found not what they had left! "changed, indeed, was streatham! gone its chief, and changed his relict! unaccountably, incomprehensibly, indefinably changed! she was absent and agitated; not two minutes could she remain in a place; she scarcely seemed to know whom she saw; her speech was so hurried it was hardly intelligible; her eyes were assiduously averted from those who sought them; and her smiles were faint and forced." [footnote : this may mean when the arrangements were made for the publication, or when the book was published. it was published about the beginning of june, .] "the mystery, however, soon ceased; the solicitations of the most affectionate sympathy could not long be urged in vain;--the mystery passed away--not so the misery! that, when revealed, was but to both parties doubled, from the different feelings set in movement by its disclosure. "the astonishing history of the enigmatical attachment which impelled mrs. thrale to her second marriage, is now as well known as her name: but its details belong not to the history of dr. burney; though the fact too deeply interested him, and was too intimately felt in his social habits, to be passed over in silence in any memoirs of his life. "but while ignorant yet of its cause, more and more struck he became at every meeting, by a species of general alienation which pervaded all around at streatham. his visits, which, heretofore, had seemed galas to mrs. thrale, were now begun and ended almost without notice: and all others,--dr. johnson not excepted,--were cast into the same gulph of general neglect, or forgetfulness;--all,--save singly this memorialist!--to whom, the fatal secret once acknowledged, mrs. thrale clung for comfort; though she saw, and generously pardoned, how wide she was from meeting approbation. "in this retired, though far from tranquil manner, _passed many months; during which_, with the acquiescent consent of the doctor, his daughter, wholly devoted to her unhappy friend, _remained uninterruptedly at sad and altered streatham;_ sedulously avoiding, what at other times she most wished, a _tête-à-tête_ with her father. bound by ties indissoluble of honour not to betray a trust that, in the ignorance of her pity, she had herself unwittingly sought, even to him she was as immutably silent, on this subject, as to all others--save, singly, to the eldest daughter of the house: whose conduct, through scenes of dreadful difficulty, notwithstanding her extreme youth, was even exemplary; and to whom the self-beguiled, yet generous mother, gave full and free permission to confide every thought and feeling to the memorialist." * * * * * "various incidental circumstances began, at length, to open the reluctant eyes of dr. burney to an impelled, though clouded foresight, of the portentous event which might latently be the cause of the alteration of all around at streatham. he then naturally wished for some explanation with his daughter, though he never forced, or even claimed her confidence; well knowing, that voluntarily to give it him had been her earliest delight. "but in taking her home with him one morning, to pass a day in st. martin's street, he almost involuntarily, in driving from the paddock, turned back his head towards the house, and, in a tone the most impressive, sighed out: 'adieu, streatham!--adieu!'" * * * * * "_a few weeks earlier_, the memorialist had passed a nearly similar scene with dr. johnson. not, however, she believes, from the same formidable species of surmise; but from the wounds inflicted upon his injured sensibility, through the palpably altered looks, tone, and deportment, of the bewildered lady of the mansion; who, cruelly aware what would be his wrath, and how overwhelming his reproaches against her projected union, wished to break up their residing under the same roof before it should be proclaimed. "this gave to her whole behaviour towards dr. johnson, a sort of restless petulancy, of which she was sometimes hardly conscious, at others, nearly reckless; but which hurt him far more than she purposed, _though short of the point at which she aimed_, of precipitating a change of dwelling that would elude its being cast, either by himself or the world, upon a passion that her understanding blushed to own, even while she was sacrificing to it all of inborn dignity that she had been bred to hold most sacred. "dr. johnson, while still uninformed of an entanglement it was impossible he should conjecture, attributed her varying humours to the effect of wayward health meeting a sort of sudden wayward power: and imagined that caprices, which he judged to be partly feminine, _and partly wealthy_, would soberise themselves away in being unnoticed." "but at length, as she became more and more dissatisfied with her own situation, and impatient for its relief, she grew less and less scrupulous with regard to her celebrated guest: she slighted his counsel; did not heed his remonstrances; avoided his society; was ready at a moment's hint to lend him her carriage when he wished to return to bolt court; but awaited a formal request to accord it for bringing him back. "the doctor then began to be stung; his own aspect became altered; and depression, with indignant uneasiness, sat upon his venerable front. "it was at this moment that, finding the memorialist was going one morning to st. martin's street, he desired a cast thither in the carriage, and then to be set down at bolt court. "aware of his disturbance, and far too well aware how short it was of what it would become when the cause of all that passed should be detected, it was in trembling that the memorialist accompanied him to the coach, filled with dread of offending him by any reserve, should he force upon her any inquiry; and yet impressed with the utter impossibility of betraying a trusted secret. "his look was stern, though dejected, as he followed her into the vehicle; but when his eye, which, however short-sighted, was quick to mental perception, saw how ill at ease appeared his companion, all sternness subsided into an undisguised expression of the strongest emotion, that seemed to claim her sympathy, though to revolt from her compassion; while, with a shaking hand, and pointing finger, he directed her looks to the mansion from which they were driving; and, when they faced it from the coach window, as they turned into streatham common, tremulously exclaiming: 'that house ... is lost to _me_--for ever!' "during a moment he then fixed upon her an interrogative eye, that impetuously demanded: 'do you not perceive the change i am experiencing?' "a sorrowing sigh was her only answer. "pride and delicacy then united to make him leave her to her taciturnity. "he was too deeply, however, disturbed to start or to bear any other subject; and neither of them uttered a single word till the coach stopt in st. martin's street, and the house and the carriage door were opened for their separation! he then suddenly and expressively looked at her, abruptly grasped her hand, and, with an air of affection, though in a low, husky voice, murmured rather than said: 'good morning, dear lady!' but turned his head quickly away, to avoid any species of answer." "she was deeply touched by so gentle an acquiescence in her declining the confidential discourse upon which he had indubitably meant to open, relative to this mysterious alienation. but she had the comfort to be satisfied, that he saw and believed in her sincere participation in his feelings; while he allowed for the grateful attachment that bound her to a friend so loved; who, to her at least, still manifested a fervour of regard that resisted all change; alike from this new partiality, and from the undisguised, and even strenuous opposition of the memorialist to its indulgence." the memoirs of dr. burney, by his daughter, published in , together with her diary and letters, supplied the materials of lord macaulay's celebrated article on madame d'arblay in the "edinburgh review" for january, , since reprinted amongst his essays. he describes the memoirs as a book "which it is impossible to read without a sensation made up of mirth, shame, and loathing," and adds:--"the two works are lying side by side before us; and we never turn from the memoirs to the diary without a sense of relief. the difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer's shop, scented with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in may."[ ] [footnote : critical and historical essays (one volume edition), , p. . the memoirs were composed between and , more than forty years after the occurrence of the scenes i have quoted from them.] the passages i have quoted amply establish the justice of this comparison, for they are utterly irreconcileable with the unvarnished statements of the diary; from which we learn that "cecilia" was published about the beginning of june, when johnson was absent from streatham; that the diarist had left streatham prior to august th, and did not return to it again that year. how could she have passed many months there after she was entrusted with the great secret, which (as stated in "thraliana") she only guessed in september or october? how again could johnson have attributed mrs. thrale's conduct to caprices "partly wealthy," when he knew that one main source of her troubles was pecuniary; or how can his alleged sense of ill-treatment be reconciled with his own letters? that he groaned over the terrible disturbance of his habits involved in the abandonment of streatham, is likely enough; but as the only words he uttered were, "that house is lost to _me_ for ever," and "good morning, dear lady," the accompanying look is about as safe a foundation for a theory of conduct or feeling as lord burleigh's famous nod in "the critic." the philosopher was at this very time an inmate of streatham, and probably returned that same evening to register a sample of its hospitality. at all events, we know that, spite of hints and warnings, sighs and groans, he stuck to streatham to the last; and finally left it with mrs. thrale, as a member of her family, to reside in her house at brighton, as her guest, for six weeks.[ ] to talk of conscious ill-treatment or wounded dignity, in the teeth of facts like these, is laughable. [footnote : the edinburgh reviewer says, "johnson went in oct. from streatham to brighton, where he lived a kind of boarding-house life;" and adds, "he was not asked out into company with his fellow-lodgers." the thrales had a handsome furnished house at brighton, which is mentioned both in the correspondence and autobiography. it is amusing enough to watch these attempts to shade away the ruinous effect of the brighton trip on lord macaulay's streatham pathos.] madame d'arblay joined the party as mrs. thrale's guest on the th october, and on the th she writes: "at dinner, we had dr. delap and mr. selwyn, who accompanied us in the evening to a ball; as did also dr. johnson, to the universal amazement of all who saw him there:--but he said he had found it so dull being quite alone the preceding evening, that he determined upon going with us: 'for,' he said, 'it cannot be worse than being alone.' strange that he should think so! i am sure i am not of his mind." on the th, she records that johnson behaved very rudely to mr. pepys, and fairly drove him from the house. the entry for november th is remarkable:--"we spent this evening at lady de ferrars, where dr. johnson accompanied us, for the first time he has been invited of our parties since my arrival." on the th november, she tells us that mrs. and the three miss thrales and herself got up early to bathe. "we then returned home, and dressed by candle-light, and, _as soon as we could get dr. johnson ready_, we set out upon our journey in a coach and a chaise, and arrived in argyll street at dinner time. mrs. thrale has there fixed her tent for this short winter, which will end with the beginning of april, when her foreign journey takes place." one incident of this brighton trip is mentioned in the "anecdotes": "we had got a little french print among us at brighthelmstone, in november , of some people skaiting, with these lines written under: 'sur un mince chrystal l'hyver conduit leurs pas, le precipice est sous la glace; telle est de nos plaisirs la légère surface, glissez, mortels; n'appuyez pas.' "and i begged translations from every body: dr. johnson gave me this: 'o'er ice the rapid skater flies, with sport above and death below; where mischief lurks in gay disguise, thus lightly touch and quickly go.' "he was, however, most exceedingly enraged when he knew that in the course of the season i had asked half a dozen acquaintance to do the same thing; and said, it was a piece of treachery, and done to make every body else look little when compared to my favourite friends the _pepyses_, whose translations were unquestionably the best."[ ] [footnote : by sir lucas: "o'er the ice, as o'er pleasure, you lightly should glide, both have gulphs which their flattering surfaces hide." by sir william: "swift o'er the level how the skaiters slide, and skim the glitt'ring surface as they go: thus o'er life's specious pleasures lightly glide, but pause not, press not on the gulph below."] madame d'arblay's diary describes the outward and visible state of things at brighton. "thraliana" lays bare the internal history, the struggles of the understanding and the heart: "at brighthelmstone, whither i went when i left streatham, th october , i heard this comical epigram about the irish volunteers: "'there's not one of us all, my brave boys, but would rather do ought than offend great king george our good father; but our country, you know, my dear lads, is our _mother_, and that is a much surer side than the other.'" "i had looked ill, or perhaps appeared to feel so much, that my eldest daughter would, out of tenderness perhaps, force me to an explanation. i could, however, have evaded it if i would; but my heart was bursting, and partly from instinctive desire of unloading it--partly, i hope, from principle, too--i called her into my room and fairly told her the truth; told her the strength of my passion for piozzi, the impracticability of my living without him, the opinion i had of his merit, and the resolution i had taken to marry him. of all this she could not have been ignorant before. i confessed my attachment to him and her together with many tears and agonies one day at streatham; told them both that i wished i had two hearts for their sakes, but having only one i would break it between them, and give them each _ciascheduno la metà!_ after that conversation she consented to go abroad with me, and even appointed the place (lyons), to which piozzi meant to follow us. he and she talked long together on the subject; yet her never mentioning it again made me fear she was not fully apprized of my intent, and though her concurrence might have been more easily obtained when left only to my influence in a distant country, where she would have had no friend to support her different opinion--yet i scorned to take such mean advantage, and told her my story _now_, with the winter before her in which to take her measures--her guardians at hand--all displeased at the journey: and to console her private distress i called into the room to her my own bosom friend, my beloved fanny burney, whose interest as well as judgment goes all against my marriage; whose skill in life and manners is superior to that of any man or woman in this age or nation; whose knowledge of the world, ingenuity of expedient, delicacy of conduct, and zeal in the cause, will make her a counsellor invaluable, and leave me destitute of every comfort, of every hope, of every expectation. "such are the hands to which i have cruelly committed thy cause--my honourable, ardent, artless piozzi!! yet i should not deserve the union i desire with the most disinterested of all human hearts, had i behaved with less generosity, or endeavoured to gain by cunning what is withheld by prejudice. had i set my heart upon a scoundrel, i might have done virtuously to break it and get loose; but the man i love, i love for his honesty, for his tenderness of heart, his dignity of mind, his piety to god, his duty to his mother, and his delicacy to me. in being united to this man only can i be happy in this world, and short will be my stay in it, if it is not passed with him." "_brighthelmstone, th november _.--for him i have been contented to reverse the laws of nature, and request of my child that concurrence which, at my age and a widow, i am not required either by divine or human institutions to ask even of a parent. the life i gave her she may now more than repay, only by agreeing to what she will with difficulty prevent; and which, if she does prevent, will give her lasting remorse; for those who stab _me_ shall hear me groan: whereas if she will--but how can she?--gracefully or even compassionately consent; if she will go abroad with me upon the chance of his death or mine preventing our union, and live with me till she is of age-- ... perhaps there is no heart so callous by avarice, no soul so poisoned by prejudice, no head so feather'd by foppery, that will forbear to excuse her when she returns to the rich and the gay--for having saved the life of a mother thro' compliance, extorted by anguish, contrary to the received opinions of the world." "_brighthelmstone, th november, _.--what is above written, though intended only to unload my heart by writing it, i shewed in a transport of passion to queeney and to burney. sweet fanny burney cried herself half blind over it; said there was no resisting such pathetic eloquence, and that, if she was the daughter instead of the friend, she should be tempted to attend me to the altar; but that, while she possessed her reason, nothing should seduce her to approve what reason itself would condemn: that children, religion, situation, country, and character--besides the diminution of fortune by the certain loss of _l._ a year, were too much to sacrifice for any _one man_. if, however, i were resolved to make the sacrifice, _a la bonne heure!_ it was an astonishing proof of an attachment very difficult for mortal man to repay." "i will talk no more about it." what comes next was written in london: "_nov. , _.--i have given my piozzi some hopes--dear, generous, prudent, noble-minded creature; he will hardly permit himself to believe it ever can be--_come quei promessi miracoli_, says he, _che non vengono mai_. for rectitude of mind and native dignity of soul i never saw his fellow." "_dec. , _.--the guardians have met upon the scheme of putting our girls in chancery. i was frighted at the project, not doubting but the lord chancellor would stop us from leaving england, as he would certainly see no joke in three young heiresses, his wards, quitting the kingdom to frisk away with their mother into italy: besides that i believe mr. crutchley proposed it merely for a stumbling-block to my journey, as he cannot bear to have hester out of his sight. "nobody much applauded my resolution in going, but johnson and cator said they would not concur in stopping me by violence, and crutchley was forced to content himself with intending to put the ladies under legal protection as soon as we should be across the sea. this measure i much applaud, for if i die or marry in italy their fortunes will be safer in chancery than any how else. cator[ ] said _i_ had a right to say that going to italy would benefit the children as much as _they_ had to say it would _not_; but i replied that as i really did not mean anything but my own private gratification by the voyage, nothing should make me say i meant _their_ good by it; and that it would be like saying i eat roast beef to mend my daughters' complexions. the result of all is that we certainly _do go_. i will pick up what knowledge and pleasure i can here this winter to divert myself, and perhaps my _compagno fidele_ in distant climes and future times, with the recollection of england and its inhabitants, all which i shall be happy and content to leave _for him_." [footnote : _note by mrs. t.:_ "cator said likewise that the attorney's bill ought to be paid by the ladies as a bill of mr. thrale's, but i replied that perhaps i might marry and give my estate away, and if so it would be unjust that they should pay the bill which related to that estate only. besides, if i should leave it to hester, says i, ... why should susan and sophy and cecilia and harriet pay the lawyer's bill for their sister's land? he agreed to this plea, and i will live on bread and water, but i will pay norris myself. 'tis but being a better huswife in pins."] madame d'arblay writes, friday, december th, : "i dined with mrs. thrale and dr. johnson, who was very comic and good-humoured.... mrs. thrale, who was to have gone with me to mrs. orde's, gave up her visit in order to stay with dr. johnson. miss thrale, therefore, and i went together." i return to "thraliana": "_january_, .--a fit of jealousy seized me the other day: some viper had stung me up to a notion that my piozzi was fond of a miss chanon. i call'd him gently to account, and after contenting myself with slight excuses, told him that, whenever we married, i should, however, desire to see as little as possible of the lady _chez nous_." there is a large gap in "thraliana" just in the most interesting part of the story of her parting with piozzi in , and his recall. "_january , _.--adieu to all that's dear, to all that's lovely; i am parted from my life, my soul, my piozzi. if i can get health and strength to write my story here, 'tis all i wish for now--oh misery! [here are four pages missing.] the cold dislike of my eldest daughter i thought might wear away by familiarity with his merit, and that we might live tolerably together, or, at least, part friends--but no; her aversion increased daily, and she communicated it to the others; they treated _me_ insolently, and _him_ very strangely--running away whenever he came as if they saw a serpent--and plotting with their governess--a cunning italian--how to invent lyes to make me hate him, and twenty such narrow tricks. by these means the notion of my partiality took air, and whether miss thrale sent him word slily or not i cannot tell, but on the th january, , mr. crutchley came hither to conjure me not to go to italy; he had heard such things, he said, and by _means_ next to _miraculous_. the next day, sunday, th, fanny burney came, said i must marry him instantly or give him up; that my reputation would be lost else. "i actually groaned with anguish, threw myself on the bed in an agony which my fair daughter beheld with frigid indifference. she had indeed never by one tender word endeavoured to dissuade me from the match, but said, coldly, that if i _would_ abandon my children i _must_; that their father had not deserved such treatment from me; that i should be punished by piozzi's neglect, for that she knew he hated me; and that i turned out my offspring to chance for his sake, like puppies in a pond to swim or drown according as providence pleased; that for her part she must look herself out a place like the other servants, for my face would she never see more.' 'nor write to me?' said i. 'i shall not, madam,' replied she with a cold sneer, 'easily find out your address; for you are going you know not whither, i believe.' "susan and sophy said nothing at all, but they taught the two young ones to cry 'where are you going, mama? will you leave us and die as our poor papa did?' there was no standing _that_., so i wrote my lover word that my mind was all distraction, and bid him come to me the next morning, th january--my birthday--and spent the sunday night in torture not to be described. my falsehood to my piozzi, my strong affection for him, the incapacity i felt in myself to resign the man i so adored, the hopes i had so cherished, inclined me strongly to set them all at defiance, and go with him to church to sanctify the promises i had so often made him; while the idea of abandoning the children of my first husband, who left me so nobly provided for, and who depended on my attachment to his offspring, awakened the voice of conscience, and threw me on my knees to pray for _his_ direction who was hereafter to judge my conduct. his grace illuminated me, his power strengthened me, and i flew to my daughter's bed in the morning and told her my resolution to resign my own, my dear, my favourite purpose, and to prefer my children's interest to my love. she questioned my ability to make the sacrifice; said one word from him would undo all my--[here two pages are missing]. "i told dr. johnson and mr. crutchley three days ago that i had determined--seeing them so averse to it--that i would not go abroad, but that, if i did not leave england, i _would_ leave london, where i had not been treated to my mind, and where i had flung away much unnecessary money with little satisfaction; that i was greatly in debt, and somewhat like distress'd: that borrowing was always bad, but of one's children worst: that mr. crutchley's objection to their lending me their money when i had a mortgage to offer as security, was unkind and harsh: that i would go live in a little way at bath till i had paid all my debts and cleared my income: that i would no more be tyrannized over by people who hated or people who plundered me, in short that i would retire and save my money and lead this uncomfortable life no longer. they made little or no reply, and i am resolved to do as i declared. i will draw in my expenses, lay by every shilling i can to pay off debts and mortgages, and perhaps--who knows? i may in six or seven years be freed from all incumbrances, and carry a clear income of _l._ a year and an estate of _l._ in land to the man of my heart. may i but live to discharge my obligations to those who _hate me_; it will be paradise to discharge them to him who _loves me_." "_april, _.--i will go to bath: nor health, nor strength, nor my children's affections, have i. my daughter does not, i suppose, much delight in this scheme [viz, retrenchment of expenses and removal to bath], but why should i lead a life of delighting her, who would not lose a shilling of interest or an ounce of pleasure to save my life from perishing? when i was near losing my existence from the contentions of my mind, and was seized with a temporary delirium in argyll street, she and her two eldest sisters laughed at my distress, and observed to dear fanny burney, that it was _monstrous droll_. _she_ could hardly suppress her indignation. "piozzi was ill.... a sore throat, pepys said it was, with four ulcers in it: the people about me said it had been lanced, and i mentioned it slightly before the girls.' has he cut his own throat?' says miss thrale in her quiet manner. this was less inexcusable because she hated him, and the other was her sister; though, had she exerted the good sense i thought her possessed of, she would not have treated him so: had she adored, and fondled, and respected him as he deserved from her hands, and from the heroic conduct he shewed in january when he gave into her hands, that dismal day, all my letters containing promises of marriage, protestations of love, &c., who knows but she might have kept us separated? but never did she once caress or thank me, never treat him with common civility, except on the very day which gave her hopes of our final parting. worth while to be sure it was, to break one's heart for her! the other two are, however, neither wiser nor kinder; all swear by her i believe, and follow her footsteps exactly. mr. thrale had not much heart, but his fair daughters have none at all."[ ] [footnote : this is the very accusation they brought against her.] johnson was not called in to counsel on these matters of the heart, but he was not cast off or neglected. madame d'arblay lands him in argyll street on the th november, . we hear of him at mrs. thrale's house or in her company repeatedly from madame d'arblay and dr. lort. "johnson," writes dr. lort, january th, , "is much better. i saw him the other evening at madame thrale's in very good spirits." boswell says: "on friday, march , ( ) having arrived in london the night before, i was glad to find him at mrs. thrale's house, in argyle street, appearances of friendship between them being still kept up. i was shown into his room; and after the first salutation he said, 'i am glad you are come; i am very ill'.... "he sent a message to acquaint mrs. thrale that i was arrived. i had not seen her since her husband's death. she soon appeared, and favoured me with an invitation to stay to dinner, which i accepted. there was no other company but herself and three of her daughters, dr. johnson, and i. she too said she was very glad i was come; for she was going to bath, and should have been sorry to leave dr. johnson before i came. this seemed to be attentive and kind; and i, _who had not been informed of any change, imagined all to be as well as formerly_. he was little inclined to talk at dinner, and went to sleep after it; but when he joined us in the drawing-room he seemed revived, and was again himself." this is quite decisive so far as boswell is concerned, and disposes at once of all his preceding insinuations to her disadvantage. he had not seen her before since thrale's death; and now, finding them together and jealously scrutinising their tone and manner towards each, he imagined all to be as well as formerly.[ ] that they were on the point of living apart, and of keeping up their habitual interchange of mind exclusively by letters, is no proof that either was capriciously or irrecoverably estranged. [footnote : "now on march , , fifteen months before the marriage in question, boswell speaks of the severance of the old friendship as effected: 'appearances of friendship,' he says, 'were still maintained between them.' boswell was at feud with the lady when he wrote, as we all know. but his evidence is surely sufficient as to the fact of the rupture, though not as to its causes."--_(edin. rev._ p. .) boswell's concluding evidence, that to the best of his knowledge and observation, there was no change or rupture, is suppressed!] the pleasures of intimacy in friendship depend far more on external circumstances than people of a sentimental turn of mind are willing to concede; and when constant companionship ceases to suit the convenience of both parties, the chances are that it will be dropped on the first favourable opportunity. admiration, esteem, or affection may continue to be felt for one whom, from altered habits or new ties, we can no longer receive as an inmate or an established member of the family. johnson was now in his seventy-fourth year, haunted by the fear of death, and fond of dwelling nauseously on his ailments and proposed remedies. from what passed at brighton, it would seem that there were moods in which he was positively unbearable, and could not be received in a house without driving every one else out of it. in a roomy mansion like streatham he might be endured, because he could be kept out of the way; but in an ordinary town-house or small establishment, such a guest would resemble an elephant in a private menagerie. there is also a very great difference, when arrangements are to be made for the domestication of a male visitor, between a family with a male head, and one consisting exclusively of females. let any widow with daughters make the case her own, and imagine herself domesticated in argyll or harley street with the lexicographer. the manly authority of thrale was required to keep johnson in order quite as much as to steady the imputed flightiness of the lady; and his idolaters must really remember that she was a sentient being, with feelings and affections which she was fully entitled to consult in arranging her scheme of life. when lord macaulay and his school tacitly assume that these are to weigh as dust in the balance against the claims of learning, they argue like sundry upholders of the temporal sovereignty of the pope, who contend that his subjects should complacently endure any amount of oppression rather than endanger (what they deem) the vital interests of the church. when it is maintained that the discomfort was amply repaid by the glory he conferred, we are reminded of what the strasbourg goose undergoes for fame: "crammed with food, deprived of drink, and fixed near a great fire, before which it is nailed with its feet upon a plank, this goose passes, it must be owned, an uncomfortable life. the torment would indeed be intolerable, if the idea of the lot which awaits him did not serve as a consolation. but when he reflects that his liver, bigger than himself, loaded with truffles, and clothed in a scientific _patè_, will, through the instrumentality of m. corcellet, diffuse all over europe the glory of his name, he resigns himself to his destiny, and suffers not a tear to flow."[ ] [footnote : almanach des gourmands.] her case for a separation _de corps_ is thus stated in the "anecdotes ": "all these exactnesses in a man who was nothing less than exact himself, made him extremely impracticable as an inmate, though most instructive as a companion, and useful as a friend. mr. thrale too could sometimes overrule his rigidity, by saying coldly, 'there, there, now we have had enough for one lecture, dr. johnson, we will not be upon education any more till after dinner, if you please,'--or some such speech; but when there was nobody to restrain his dislikes, it was extremely difficult to find any body with whom he could converse, without living always on the verge of a quarrel, or of something too like a quarrel to be pleasing. i came into the room, for example, one evening, where he and a gentleman, whose abilities we all respected exceedingly, were sitting; a lady who had walked in two minutes before me had blown 'em both into a flame, by whispering something to mr. s----d, which he endeavoured to explain away, so as not to affront the doctor, whose suspicions were all alive. 'and have a care, sir,' said he, just as i came in; 'the old lion will not bear to be tickled.'[ ] the other was pale with rage, the lady wept at the confusion she had caused, and i could only say with lady macbeth, 'so! you've displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting with most admir'd disorder.' "such accidents, however, occurred too often, and i was forced to take advantage of my lost lawsuit, and plead inability of purse to remain longer in london or its vicinage. i had been crossed in my intentions of going abroad, and found it convenient, for every reason of health, peace, and pecuniary circumstances, to retire to bath, where i knew mr. johnson would not follow me, and where i could for that reason command some little portion of time for my own use; a thing impossible while i remained at streatham or at london, as my hours, carriage, and servants, had long been at his command, who would not rise in the morning till twelve o'clock perhaps, and oblige me to make breakfast for him till the bell rung for dinner, though much displeased if the toilet was neglected, and though much of the time we passed together was spent in blaming or deriding, very justly, my neglect of economy, and waste of that money which might make many families happy. the original reason of our connexion, his _particularly disordered health and spirits_[ ], had been long at an end, and he had no other ailments than old age and general infirmity, which every professor of medicine was ardently zealous and generally attentive to palliate, and to contribute all in their power for the prolongation of a life so valuable. "veneration for his virtue, reverence for his talents, delight in his conversation, and habitual endurance of a yoke my husband first put upon me, and of which he contentedly bore his share for sixteen or seventeen years, made me go on so long with mr. johnson; but the perpetual confinement i will own to have been terrifying in the first years of our friendship, and irksome in the last, nor could i pretend to support it without help, when my coadjutor was no more. to the assistance we gave him, the shelter our house afforded to his uneasy fancies, and to the pains we took to soothe or repress them, the world perhaps is indebted for the three political pamphlets, the new edition and correction of his dictionary, and for the poets' lives, which he would scarce have lived, i think, and kept his faculties entire, to have written, had not incessant care been exerted at the time of his first coming to be our constant guest in the country; and several times after that, when he found himself particularly oppressed with diseases incident to the most vivid and fervent imaginations. i shall for ever consider it as the greatest honour which could be conferred on any one, to have been the confidential friend of dr. johnson's health; and to have in some measure, with mr. thrale's assistance, saved from distress at least, if not from worse, a mind great beyond the comprehension of common mortals and good beyond all hope of imitation from perishable beings." [footnote : this must be the quarrel between johnson and seward at which miss streatfield cried. _(antè,_ p. .)] [footnote : these words are underlined in the manuscript.] this was written in italy in , when, painfully alive to the insults heaped upon her on johnson's account, she may be excused for dwelling on what she had endured for his sake. but if, as may be inferred from her statement, some of the cordiality shewn him during the palmy days of their intimacy was forced, this rather enhances than lessens the merit of her services, which thus become elevated into sacrifices. the question is not how she uniformly felt, but how she uniformly behaved to him; and the fact of her being obliged to retire to bath to get out of his way proves that there had been no rupture, no coolness, no serious offence given or taken on either side, up to april, ; just one year-and-a-half after the alleged expulsion from streatham. there were ample avowable reasons for her retirement, and no suspicion could have crossed johnson's mind that he was an incumbrance, or he would not have been found at her house by boswell, as he was found on the st march, , when she said "she was going to bath, and should have been sorry to leave dr. johnson before i came." considering the heart-rending struggle in which she was engaged at this time, with the aggravated infliction of an unsympathising and dogmatic friend, the wonder is how she retained her outward placidity at all. "_sunday morning, th april_, .--i have been very busy preparing to go to bath and save my money; the welch settlement has been examined and rewritten by cator's desire in such a manner that a will can revoke it or charge the estate, or anything. i signed my settlement yesterday, and, before i slept, wrote my will, charging the estate with pretty near _ l_. but what signifies it? my daughters deserve no thanks from my tenderness and they want no pecuniary help from my purse--let me provide in some measure, for my dear, my absent piozzi.--god give me strength to part with him courageously.--i expect him every instant to breakfast with me for the _last time_.--gracious heavens, what words are these! oh no, for mercy may we but meet again! and without diminished kindness. oh my love, my love! "we did meet and part courageously. i persuaded him to bring his old friend mecci, who goes abroad with him and has long been his confidant, to keep the meeting from being too tender, the separation from being too poignant--his presence was a restraint on our conduct, and a witness of our vows, which we renewed with fervour, and will keep sacred in absence, adversity, and age. when all was over i flew to my dearest, loveliest friend, my fanny burney, and poured all my sorrows into her tender bosom." "_bath, april th, ._--here i am, settled in my plan of economy, with three daughters, three maids and a man," &c. piozzi left england the night of the th may, . "come, friendly muse! some rhimes discover with which to meet my dear at dover, fondly to bless my wandering lover and make him dote on dirty dover. call each fair wind to waft him over, nor let him linger long at dover, but there from past fatigues recover, and write his love some lines from dover. too well he knows his skill to move her, to meet him two years hence at dover, when happy with her handsome rover she'll bless the day she din'd at dover." "_russell street, bath, thursday, th may_, .--i sent him these verses to divert him on his passage. dear angel! _this day_ he leaves a nation to which he was sent for my felicity perhaps, i hope for his own. may i live but to make him happy, and hear him say 'tis _me_ that make him so!"-- in a note on the passage in which he states that johnson studiously avoided all mention of streatham or the family after thrale's death, hawkins says:--"it seems that between him and the widow there was a formal taking of leave, for i find in his diary the following note: ' , april th, i took leave of mrs. thrale. i was much moved. i had some expostulations with her. she said she was likewise affected. i commended the thrales with great good will to god; may my petitions have been heard.'" this being the day before her parting interview with piozzi, no doubt she was much affected: and as the newspapers had already taken up the topic of her engagement, the expostulations probably referred to it. preceding commentators were not bound to know what is now learned from "thraliana"; but they were bound to know what might always have been learned from johnson's printed letters; and the tone of these from the separation in april, , to the marriage in july, , is identically the same as at any period of the intimacy which can be specified. there are the same warm expressions of regard, the same gratitude for acknowledged kindness, the same alternations of hope and disappointment, the same medical details, and the same reproaches for silence or fancied coldness, in which he habitually indulged towards all his female correspondents. shew me a complaint or reproach, and i will instantly match it with one from a period when the intimacy was confessedly and notoriously at its height. if her occasional explosions of irritability are to be counted, what inference is to be drawn from johnson's depreciatory remarks on her, and indeed on everybody, so carefully treasured up by hawkins and boswell? on june th, , he writes to her: "your last letter was very pleasing; it expressed kindness to me, and some degree of placid acquiescence in your present mode of life, _which is, i think, the best which is at present within your reach_. "my powers and attention have for a long time been almost wholly employed upon my health, i hope not wholly without success, but solitude is very tedious." she replies: "bath, june th, . "i believe it is too true, my dear sir, that you think on little except yourself and your own health, but then they are subjects on which every one else would think too--and that is a great consolation. "i am willing enough to employ all my thoughts upon _myself_, but there is nobody here who wishes to think with or about me, so i am very sick and a little sullen, and disposed now and then to say, like king david, 'my lovers and my friends have been put away from me, and my acquaintance hid out of my sight.' if the last letter i wrote showed some degree of placid acquiescence in a situation, which, however displeasing, is the best i can get at just now, i pray god to keep me in that disposition, and to lay no more calamity upon me which may again tempt me to murmur and complain. _in the meantime assure yourself of my undiminished kindness and veneration: they have been long out of accident's power either to lessen or increase."_.... "that _you_ should be solitary is a sad thing, and a strange one too, when every body is willing to drop in, and for a quarter of an hour at least, save you from a _tête-à-tête_ with yourself. i never could catch a moment when you were alone whilst we were in london, and miss thrale says the same thing." a few days afterwards, june th, he writes: "i am sitting down in no cheerful solitude to write a narrative which would once have affected you with tenderness and sorrow, but which you will perhaps pass over now with the careless glance of frigid indifference. for this diminution of regard, however, i know not whether i ought to blame you, who may have reasons which i cannot know, and i do not blame myself, who have for a great part of human life done you what good i could, and have never done you evil." two days before, he had suffered a paralytic stroke, and lost the power of speech for a period. after minutely detailing his ailments and their treatment by his medical advisers, he proceeds: "how this will be received by you i know not. i hope you will sympathise with me; but perhaps "my mistress gracious, mild, and good, cries! is he dumb? 'tis time he should. "but can this be possible? i hope it cannot. i hope that what, when i could speak, i spoke of you, and to you, will be in a sober and serious hour remembered by you; and surely it cannot be remembered but with some degree of kindness. i have loved you with virtuous affection; i have honoured you with sincere esteem. let not all our endearments be forgotten, but let me have in this great distress your pity and your prayers. _you see, i yet turn to you with my complaints as a settled and unalienable friend_; do not, do not drive me from you, for i have not deserved either neglect or hatred. "o god! give me comfort and confidence in thee; forgive my sins; and if it be thy good pleasure, relieve my diseases for jesus christ's sake. amen. _"i am almost ashamed of this querulous letter, but now it is written, let it go."_ the edinburgh reviewer quotes the first paragraph of this letter to prove johnson's consciousness of change on her side, and omits all mention of the passages in which he turns to her as "a settled and unalienable friend," and apologises for his querulousness! some time before (november ), she had written to him: "my health is growing very bad, to be sure. i will starve still more rigidly for a while, and watch myself carefully; but more than six months will i not bestow upon that subject; you shall not have in me a valetudinary correspondent, _who is always writing such letters, that to read the labels tied on bottles by an apothecary's boy would be more eligible and amusing_; nor will i live, like flavia in 'law's serious call,' who spends half her time and money on herself, with sleeping draughts, and waking draughts, and cordials and broths. my desire is always to determine against my own gratification, so far as shall be possible for my body to co-operate with my mind, and you will not suspect me of wearing blisters, and living wholly upon vegetables for sport. if that will do, the disorder may be removed; but if health is gone, and gone for ever, we will act as zachary pearce the famous bishop of rochester did, when he lost the wife he loved so--call for one glass to the health of her who is departed, never more to return--and so go quietly back to the usual duties of life, and forbear to mention her again from that time till the last day of it." instead of acting on the same principle, he perseveres in addressing his "ideal urania" as if she had been a consulting physician: "london, june th, . "dearest madam,--i think to send you for some time a regular diary. you will forgive the gross images which disease must necessarily present. dr. lawrence said that medical treatises should be always in latin. the two vesicatories did not perform well," &c. &c. "june , . "_your offer, dear madam, of coming to me, is charmingly kind_; but i will lay it up for future use, and then let it not be considered as obsolete; _a time of dereliction may come, when i may have hardly any other friend_, but in the present exigency i cannot name one who has been deficient in civility or attention. what man can do for man has been done for me. write to me very often." that the offer was serious and heartfelt, is clear from "thraliana": "_bath, june th_, .--a stroke of the palsy has robbed johnson of his speech, i hear. dreadful event! and i at a distance. poor fellow! a letter from himself, _in his usual style_, convinces me that none of his faculties have failed, and his physicians say that all present danger is over." he writes: "june th, . "both queeny's letter and yours gave me, to-day, great pleasure. think as well and as kindly of me as you can, but do not flatter me. cool reciprocations of esteem are the great comforts of life; hyberbolical praise only corrupts the tongue of the one, and the ear of the other." "june th, . "your letter is just such as i desire, and as from you i hope always to deserve." her own state of mind at this time may be collected from "thraliana": "_june, _ .--most sincerely do i regret the sacrifice i have made of health, happiness, and the society of a worthy and amiable companion, to the pride and prejudice of three insensible girls, who would see nature perish without concern ... were their gratification the cause. "the two youngest have, for ought i see, hearts as impenetrable as their sister. they will all starve a favourite animal--all see with unconcern the afflictions of a friend; and when the anguish i suffered on their account last winter, in argyll street, nearly took away my life and reason, the younger ridiculed as a jest those agonies which the eldest despised as a philosopher. when all is said, they are exceeding valuable girls--beautiful in person, cultivated in understanding, and well-principled in religion: high in their notions, lofty in their carriage, and of intents equal to their expectations; wishing to raise their own family by connections with some more noble ... and superior to any feeling of tenderness which might clog the wheels of ambition. what, however, is my state? who am condemned to live with girls of this disposition? to teach without authority; to be heard without esteem; to be considered by them as their superior in fortune, while i live by the money borrowed from them; and in good sense, when they have seen me submit my judgment to theirs at the hazard of my life and wits. oh, 'tis a pleasant situation! and whoever would wish, as the greek lady phrased it, to teize himself and repent of his sins, let him borrow his children's money, be in love against their interest and prejudice, forbear to marry by their advice, and then shut himself up and live with them."[ ] [footnote : after buckingham had been some time married to fairfax's daughter, he said it was like marrying the devil's daughter and keeping house with your father-in-law.] is it possible to misconstrue such a letter as the following from johnson to her, now that the querulous and desponding tone of the writer is familiar to us? "london, nov. th, . "dear madam,--since you have written to me with the attention and tenderness of ancient time, your letters give me a great part of the pleasure which a life of solitude admits. you will never bestow any share of your good-will on one who deserves better. those that have loved longest, love best. a sudden blaze of kindness may by a single blast of coldness be extinguished, but that fondness which length of time has connected with many circumstances and occasions, though it may for a while be suppressed by disgust or resentment, with or without a cause, is hourly revived by accidental recollection.[ ] to those that have lived long together, every thing heard and every thing seen recals some pleasure communicated, or some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel, or some slight endearment. esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. a friend may be often found and lost, but an _old friend_ never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost." [footnote : "yet, oh yet thyself deceive not: love may sink by slow decay, but by sudden wrench believe not hearts can thus be torn away."--byron.] the date of the following scene, as described by madame d'arblay in the "memoirs," is towards the end of november, : "nothing had yet publicly transpired, with certainty or authority, relative to the projects of mrs. thrale, who had now been nearly a year at bath[ ]; though nothing was left unreported, or unasserted, with respect to her proceedings. nevertheless, how far dr. johnson was himself informed, or was ignorant on the subject, neither dr. burney nor his daughter could tell; and each equally feared to learn. "scarcely an instant, however, was the latter left alone in bolt court, ere she saw the justice of her long apprehensions; for while she planned speaking upon some topic that might have a chance to catch the attention of the doctor, a sudden change from kind tranquillity to strong austerity took place in his altered countenance; and, startled and affrighted, she held her peace.... "thus passed a few minutes, in which she scarcely dared breathe; while the respiration of the doctor, on the contrary, was of asthmatic force and loudness; then, suddenly turning to her, with an air of mingled wrath and woe, he hoarsely ejaculated: 'piozzi!' "he evidently meant to say more; but the effort with which he articulated that name robbed him of any voice for amplification, and his whole frame grew tremulously convulsed. "his guest, appalled, could not speak; but he soon discerned that it was grief from coincidence, not distrust from opposition of sentiment, that caused her taciturnity. this perception calmed him, and he then exhibited a face 'in sorrow more than anger.' his see-sawing abated of its velocity, and, again fixing his looks upon the fire, he fell into pensive rumination. "at length, and with great agitation, he broke forth with: 'she cares for no one! you, only--you, she loves still!--but no one--and nothing else!--you she still loves----' "a half smile now, though of no very gay character, softened a little the severity of his features, while he tried to resume some cheerfulness in adding: 'as ... she loves her little finger!' "it was plain by this burlesque, or, perhaps, playfully literal comparison, that he meant now, and tried, to dissipate the solemnity of his concern. "the hint was taken; his guest started another subject; and this he resumed no more. he saw how distressing was the theme to a hearer whom he ever wished to please, not distress; and he named mrs. thrale no more! common topics took place, till they were rejoined by dr. burney, whom then, and indeed always, he likewise spared upon this subject." [footnote : about six months.] after quoting this description at length, lord brougham remarks: "now johnson was, perhaps unknown to himself, in love with mrs. thrale, but for miss burney's thoughtless folly there can be no excuse. and her father, a person of the very same rank and profession with mr. piozzi, appears to have adopted the same senseless cant, as if it were less lawful to marry an italian musician than an english. to be sure, miss burney says, that mrs. thrale was lineally descended from adam de saltsburg, who came over with the conqueror. but assuredly that worthy, unable to write his name, would have held dr. johnson himself in as much contempt as his fortunate rival, and would have regarded his alliance as equally disreputable with the italian's, could his consent have been asked."[ ] [footnote : lives of men of letters, &c, vol. ii.] if the scene took place at all, it must have taken place within a few days after the profession of satisfied and unaltered friendship contained in johnson's letter of november th. his next letter is to miss thrale: "nov. th, . "dear miss,--here is a whole week, and nothing heard from your house. baretti said what a wicked house it would be, and a wicked house it is. of you, however, i have no complaint to make, for i owe you a letter. still i live here by my own self, and have had of late very bad nights; but then i have had a pig to dinner, which mr. perkins gave me. thus life is chequered." on february th, , dr. lort writes to bishop percy: "poor dr. johnson has had a very bad winter, attended by heberden and brocklesby, who neither of them expected he would have survived the frost: that being gone, he still remains, and i hope will now continue, at least till the next severe one. it has indeed carried off a great many old people." johnson to mrs. thrale: "march th, . "your kind expressions gave me great pleasure; do not reject me from your thoughts. shall we ever exchange confidence by the fireside again?" he was so absorbed with his own complaints as to make no allowance for hers. yet her health was in a very precarious state, and in the autumn of the same year, his complaints of silence and neglect were suspended by the intelligence that her daughter sophia was lying at death's door. on march th, , she writes: "you tell one of my daughters that you know not with distinctness the cause of my complaints. i believe she who lives with me knows them no better; one very dreadful one is however removed by dear sophia's recovery. it is kind in you to quarrel no more about expressions which were not meant to offend; but unjust to suppose, i have not lately thought myself dying. let us, however, take the prince of abyssinia's advice, _and not add to the other evils of life the bitterness of controversy._ if courage is a noble and generous quality, let us exert it _to_ the last, and _at_ the last: if faith is a christian virtue, let us willingly receive and accept that support it will most surely bestow--and do permit me to repeat those words with which i know not why you were displeased: _let us leave behind us the best example that we can_. "all this is not written by a person in high health and happiness, but by a fellow-sufferer, who has more to endure than she can tell, or you can guess; and now let us talk of the severn salmons, which will be coming in soon; i shall send you one of the finest, and shall be glad to hear that your appetite is good." johnson to mrs. thrale: "april st, . "the hooles, miss burney, and mrs. hull (wesley's sister), feasted yesterday with me very cheerfully on your noble salmon. mr. allen could not come, and i sent him a piece, and a great tail is still left." "april th, . "mrs. davenant called to pay me a guinea, but i gave two for you. whatever reasons you have for frugality, it is not worth while to save a guinea a year by withdrawing it from a public charity." "whilst i am writing, the post has brought me your kind letter. do not think with dejection of your own condition: a little patience will probably give you health: it will certainly give you riches, and all the accommodations that riches can procure." up to this time she had put an almost killing restraint on her inclinations, and had acted according to johnson's advice in everything but the final abandonment of piozzi; yet boswell reports him as saying, may th: "sir, she has done everything wrong since thrale's bridle was off her neck." the next extracts are from "thraliana": "_bath, nov. th, ._--sophia will live and do well; i have saved my daughter, perhaps obtained a friend. they are weary of seeing me suffer so, and the eldest beg'd me yesterday not to sacrifice my life to her convenience. she now saw my love of piozzi was incurable, she said. absence had no effect on it, and my health was going so fast she found that i should soon be useless either to her or him. it was the hand of god and irresistible, she added, and begged me not to endure any longer such unnecessary misery. "so now we may be happy if we will, and now i trust _some_ [_(sic) query "no?_"] other cross accident will start up to torment us; i wrote my lover word that he might come and fetch me, but the alps are covered with snow, and if his prudence is not greater than his affection--my life will yet be lost, for it depends on his safety. should he come at my call, and meet with any misfortune on the road ... death, with accumulated agonies, would end me. may heaven avert such insupportable distress!" "_dec._ .--my dearest piozzi's miss chanon is in distress. i will send her _l_. perhaps he loved her; perhaps she loved _him_; perhaps both; yet i have and will have confidence in his honour. i will not suffer love or jealousy to narrow a heart devoted to _him_. he would assist her if he were in england, and _she_ shall not suffer for his absence, tho' i _do_. she and her father have reported many things to my prejudice; she will be ashamed of herself when she sees me forgive and assist her. o lord, give me grace so to return good for evil as to obtain thy gracious favour who died to procure the salvation of thy professed enemies. 'tis a good xmas work!" "_bath, jan. th_, .--on this day twelvemonths ... oh dreadfullest of all days to me i did i send for my piozzi and tell him we must part. the sight of my countenance terrified dr. pepys, to whom i went into the parlour for a moment, and the sight of the agonies i endured in the week following would have affected anything but interest, avarice, and pride personified, ... with such, however, i had to deal, so my sorrows were unregarded. seeing them continue for a whole year, indeed, has mollified my strong-hearted companions, and they _now_ relent in earnest and wish me happy: i would now therefore be _loath to dye_, yet how shall i recruit my constitution so as to live? the pardon certainly did arrive the very instant of execution--for i was ill beyond all power of description, when my eldest daughter, bursting into tears, bid me call home the man of my heart, and not expire by slow torture in the presence of my children, who had my life in their power. 'you are dying _now_,' said she. 'i know it,' replied i, 'and i should die in peace had i but seen him _once again_.' 'oh send for him,' said she, 'send for him quickly!' 'he is at milan, child,' replied i, 'a thousand miles off!' 'well, well,' returns she, 'hurry him back, or i myself will send him an express.' at these words i revived, and have been mending ever since. this was the first time that any of us had named the name of piozzi to each other since we had put our feet into the coach to come to bath. i had always thought it a point of civility and prudence never to mention what could give nothing but offence, and cause nothing but disgust, while they desired nothing less than a revival of old uneasiness; so we were all silent on the subject, and miss thrale thought him dead." according to the autobiography, the daughters did not conclusively relent till the end of april or the beginning of may, when a missive was dispatched for piozzi, and mrs. thrale went to london to make the requisite preparations. _mrs. thrale to miss f. burney_. "mortimer street, cavendish square, "tuesday night, may, . "i am come, dearest burney. it is neither dream nor fiction; though i love you dearly, or i would not have come. absence and distance do nothing towards wearing out real affection; so you shall always find it in your true and tender h.l.t. "i am somewhat shaken bodily, but 'tis the mental shocks that have made me unable to bear the corporeal ones. 'tis past ten o'clock, however, and i must lay myself down with the sweet expectation of seeing my charming friend in the morning to breakfast. i love dr. burney too well to fear him, and he loves me too well to say a word which should make me love him less." _journal (madame d'arblay's) resumed_. "may .--let me now, my susy, acquaint you a little more connectedly than i have done of late how i have gone on. the rest of that week i devoted almost wholly to sweet mrs. thrale, whose society was truly the most delightful of cordials to me, however, at times mixed with bitters the least palatable. "one day i dined with mrs. grarrick to meet dr. johnson, mrs. carter, miss hamilton, and dr. and miss cadogan; and one evening i went to mrs. vesey, to meet almost everybody,--the bishop of st. asaph, and all the shipleys, bishop chester and mrs. porteous, mrs. and miss ord, sir joshua reynolds and miss palmer, mrs. buller, all the burrows, mr. walpole, mrs. boscawen, mrs. grarrick, and miss more, and some others. but all the rest of my time i gave wholly to dear mrs. thrale, who lodged in mortimer street, and who saw nobody else. were i not sensible of her goodness, and full of incurable affection for her, should i not be a monster? * * * * * "i parted most reluctantly with my dear mrs. thrale, whom, when or how, i shall see again, heaven only knows! but in sorrow we parted--on _my_ side in real affliction." the excursion is thus mentioned in "thraliana": "_ th may_, .--here is the most sudden and beautiful spring ever seen after a dismal winter: so may god grant me a renovation of comfort after my many and sharp afflictions. i have been to london for a week to visit fanny burney, and to talk over my intended (and i hope approaching) nuptials, with mr. borghi: a man, as far as i can judge in so short an acquaintance with him, of good sense and real honour:--who loves my piozzi, _likes_ my conversation, and wishes to serve us sincerely. he has recommended duane to take my power of attorney, and cator's loss will be the less felt. duane's name is as high as the monument, and his being known familiarly to borghi will perhaps quicken his attention to our concerns. "dear burney, who loves me _kindly_ but the world _reverentially_, was, i believe, equally pained as delighted with my visit: ashamed to be seen in my company, much of her fondness for me must of course be diminished; yet she had not chatted freely so long with anybody but mrs. philips, that my coming was a comfort to her. we have told all to her father, and he behaved with the utmost propriety. "nobody likes my settling at milan except myself and piozzi; but i think 'tis nobody's affair but our own: it seems to me quite irrational to expose ourselves to unnecessary insults, and by going straight to italy all will be avoided." the crisis is told in "thraliana": "_ th june_, .--i sent these lines to meet piozzi on his return. they are better than those he liked so last year at dover: "over mountains, rivers, vallies, see my love returns to calais, after all their taunts and malice, ent'ring safe the gates of calais, while delay'd by winds he dallies, fretting to be kept at calais, muse, prepare some sprightly sallies to divert my dear at calais, say how every rogue who rallies envies him who waits at calais for her that would disdain a palace compar'd to piozzi, love, and calais." "_ th june_, .--he is set out sure enough, here are letters from turin to say so.... now the misses _must_ move; they are very loath to stir: from affection perhaps, or perhaps from art--'tis difficult to know.--oh 'tis, yes, it is from tenderness, they want me to go with them to see wilton, stonehenge, &c.--i _will_ go with them to be sure." "_ th june, sunday_.--we went to wilton, and also to fonthill; they make an admirable and curious contrast between ancient magnificence and modern glare: gothic and grecian again, however. a man of taste would rather possess lord pembroke's seat, or indeed a single room in it; but one feels one should live happier at beckford's.--my daughters parted with me at last prettily enough _considering_ (as the phrase is). we shall perhaps be still better friends apart than together. promises of correspondence and kindness were very sweetly reciprocated, and the eldest wished for piozzi's safe return very obligingly. "i fancy two days more will absolutely bring him to bath. the present moments are critical and dreadful, and would shake stronger nerves than mine! oh lord, strengthen me to do thy will i pray." "_ th june_.--i am not _yet sure of_ seeing him again--not _sure_ he lives, not _sure_ he loves me _yet_.... should anything happen now!! oh, i will not trust myself with such a fancy: it will either kill me or drive me distracted." "_bath, nd july_, .--the happiest day of my whole life, i think--yes, quite the happiest: my piozzi came home yesterday and dined with me; but my spirits were too much agitated, my heart was too much dilated. i was too _painfully_ happy _then_; my sensations are more quiet to-day, and my felicity less tumultuous." written in the margin of the last entry--"we shall go to london about the affairs, and there be married in the romish church." "_ th july_, .--i am returned from church the happy wife of my lovely faithful piozzi ... subject of my prayers, object of my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem.--his nerves have been horribly shaken, yet he lives, he loves me, and will be mine for ever. he has sworn, in the face of god and the whole christian church; catholics, protestants, all are witnesses." in one of her memorandum books she has set down: "we were married according to the romish church in one of our excursions to london, by mr. smith, padre smit as they called him, chaplain to the spanish ambassador.... mr. morgan tacked us together at st. james's, bath, th july, , and on the first day i think of september, certainly the first week, we took leave of england." when her first engagement with piozzi became known, the newspapers took up the subject, and rang the changes on the amorous disposition of the widow, and the adroit cupidity of the fortune-hunter. on the announcement of the marriage, they recommenced the attack, and people of our day can hardly form a notion of the storm of obloquy that broke upon her, except from its traces, which have never been erased. to this hour, we may see them in the confirmed prejudices of writers like mr. croker and lord macaulay, who, agreeing in little else, agree in denouncing "this miserable _més_alliance" with one who figures in their pages sometimes as a music-master, sometimes as a fiddler, never by any accident in his real character of a professional singer and musician of established reputation, pleasing manners, ample means, and unimpeachable integrity. the repugnance of the daughters to the match was reasonable and intelligible, but to appreciate the tone taken by her friends, we must bear in mind the social position of italian singers and musical performers at the period. "amusing vagabonds" are the epithets by which lord byron designates catalani and naldi, in [ ]; and such is the light in which they were undoubtedly regarded in . mario would have been treated with the same indiscriminating illiberality as piozzi. [footnote : "well may the nobles of our present race watch each distortion of a naldi's face; well may they smile on italy's buffoons, and worship catalani's pantaloons." "naldi and catalani require little notice; for the visage of the one and the salary of the other will enable us long to recollect these amusing vagabonds."--_english bards and scotch reviewers_. artists in general, and men of letters by profession, did not rank much higher in the fine world. (see miss berry's "england and france," vol. ii. p. .) a german author, non-noble, had a _liaison_ with a prussian woman of rank. on her husband's death he proposed marriage, and was indignantly refused. the lady was conscious of no degradation from being his mistress, but would have forfeited both caste and self-respect by becoming his wife.] did those who took the lead in censuring or repudiating mrs. piozzi, ever attempt to enter into her feelings, or weigh her conduct with reference to its tendency to promote her own happiness? could they have done so, had they tried? rarely can any one so identify himself or herself with another as to be sure of the soundness of the counsel or the justice of the reproof. she was neither impoverishing her children (who had all independent fortunes) nor abandoning them. she was setting public opinion at defiance, which is commonly a foolish thing to do; but what is public opinion to a woman whose heart is breaking, and who finds, after a desperate effort, that she is unequal to the sacrifice demanded of her? she accepted piozzi deliberately, with full knowledge of his character; and she never repented of her choice. the lady cathcart, whose romantic story is mentioned in "castle rackrent," was wont to say:--"i have been married three times; the first for money, the second for rank, the third for love; and the third was worst of all." mrs. piozzi's experience would have led to an opposite conclusion. her love match was a singularly happy one; and the consciousness that she had transgressed conventional observances or prejudices, not moral rules, enabled her to outlive and bear down calumny.[ ] [footnote : the _pros_ and _cons_ of the main question at issue are well stated in _corinne_: "ah, pour heureux,' interrompit le comte d'erfeuil, 'je n'en crois rien: on n'est heureux que par ce qui est convenable. la société a, quoi qu'on fasse, beaucoup d'empire sur le bonheur; et ce qu'elle n'approuve pas, il ne faut jamais le faire.' 'on vivrait done toujours pour ce que la société dira de nous,' reprit oswald; 'et ce qu'on pense et, ce qu'on sent ne servirait jamais de guide.' 'c'est très bien dit,' reprit le comte, 'très-philosophiquement pensé; mais avec ces maximes là, l'on se perd; et quand l'amour est passé, le blâme de l'opinion reste. moi qui vous paraîs léger, je ne ferai jamais rien qui puisse m'attirer la désapprobation du monde. on peut se permettre de petites libertés, d'aimables plaisanteries, qui annoncent de l'indépendance dans la manière d'agir; car, quand cela touche au sérieux.'--'mais le sérieux, repondit lord nelvil, 'c'est l'amour et le bonheur.'"--_corinne_, liv. ix. ch. .] in reference to these passages, the edinburgh reviewer remarks: "nothing can be more reasonable; and we should certainly live in a more peaceful (if not more entertaining) world, if nobody in it reproved another until he had so far identified himself with the culprit as to be sure of the justice of the reproof; perhaps, also, if a fiddler were rated higher in society than a duke without accomplishments, and a carpenter far higher than either. but neither reasoning nor gallantry will alter the case, nor prevail over the world's prejudice against unequal marriages, any more than its prejudices in favour of birth and fashion. it has never been quite established to the satisfaction of the philosophic mind, why the rule of society should be that 'as the husband, so the wife is,' and why a lady who contracts a marriage below her station is looked on with far severer eyes than a gentleman _qui s'encanaille_ to the same degree. but these things are so,--as the next dame of rank and fortune, and widow of an m.p., who, rashly relying on mr. hayward's assertion that the world has grown wiser, espouses a foreign 'professional,' will assuredly find to her cost, although she may escape the ungenerous public attacks which poor mrs. piozzi earned by her connexion with literary men." in they hanged for crimes which we should think adequately punished by a short imprisonment; as they hooted and libelled for transgressions or errors which, whatever their treatment by a portion of our society, would certainly not provoke the thunders of our press. i think (though i made no assertion of the kind) that the world has grown wiser; and the reviewer admits as much when he says that his supposititious widow "may escape the ungenerous public attacks which poor mrs. piozzi earned by her connexion with literary men." but where do i recommend unequal marriages, or dispute the claims of birth and fashion, or maintain that a fiddler should be rated higher than a duke without accomplishments, and a carpenter _far_ higher than either? all this is utterly beside the purpose; and surely there is nothing reprehensible in the suggestion that, before harshly reproving another, we should do our best to test the justice of the reproof by trying to make the case our own. goethe proposed to extend the self-same rule to criticism. one of his favourite canons was that a critic should always endeavour to place himself temporarily in the author's point of view. if the reviewer had done so, he might have avoided several material misapprehensions and misstatements, which it is difficult to reconcile with the friendly tone of the article or the known ability of the writer. envy at piozzi's good fortune sharpened the animosity of assailants like baretti, and the loss of a pleasant house may have had a good deal to do with the sorrowing indignation of her set. her meditated social extinction amongst them might have been commemorated in the words of the french epitaph: "ci git une de qui la vertu etait moins que la table encensée; on ne plaint point la femme abattue, mais bien la table renversée." which may be freely rendered: "here lies one who adulation by dinners more than virtues earn'd; whose friends mourned not her reputation-- but her table--overturned." madame d'arblay has recorded what took place between mrs. piozzi and herself on the occasion: _miss f. burney to mrs. piozzi_. "norbury park, aug. , . "when my wondering eyes first looked over the letter i received last night, my mind instantly dictated a high-spirited vindication of the consistency, integrity, and faithfulness of the friendship thus abruptly reproached and cast away. but a sleepless night gave me leisure to recollect that you were ever as generous as precipitate, and that your own heart would do justice to mine, in the cooler judgment of future reflection. committing myself, therefore, to that period, i determined simply to assure you, that if my last letter hurt either you or mr. piozzi, i am no less sorry than surprised; and that if it offended you, i sincerely beg your pardon. "not to that time, however, can i wait to acknowledge the pain an accusation so unexpected has caused me, nor the heartfelt satisfaction with which i shall receive, when you are able to write it, a softer renewal of regard. "may heaven direct and bless you! "f.b. "n.b. this is the sketch of the answer which f.b. most painfully wrote to the unmerited reproach of not sending _cordial congratulations_ upon a marriage which she had uniformly, openly, and with deep and avowed affliction, thought wrong." _mrs. piozzi to miss burney_. "'wellbeck street, no. , cavendish square. "'friday, aug. , . "'give yourself no serious concern, sweetest burney, all is well, and i am too happy myself to make a friend otherwise; quiet your kind heart immediately, and love my husband if you love his and your "'h.l. piozzi.' "n.b. to this kind note, f.b. wrote the warmest and most affectionate and heartfelt reply; but never received another word! and here and thus stopped a correspondence of six years of almost unequalled partiality, and fondness on her side; and affection, gratitude, admiration, and sincerity on that of f.b., who could only conjecture the cessation to be caused by the resentment of piozzi, when informed of her constant opposition to the union." if f.b. thought it wrong, she knew it to be inevitable, and in the conviction that it was so, she and her father had connived at the secret preparations for it in the preceding may. a very distinguished friend, whose masterly works are the result of a consummate study of the passions, after dwelling on the "impertinence" of the hostility her marriage provoked, writes: "she was evidently a very vain woman, but her vanity was sensitive, and very much allied to that exactingness of heart which gives charm and character to woman. i suspect it was this sensitiveness which made her misunderstood by her children." the justness of this theory of her conduct is demonstrated by the self-communings in "thraliana;" and she misunderstood them as much as they misunderstood her. by her own showing she had little reason to complain of what they _did_ in the matter of the marriage; it was what they said, or rather did not say, that irritated her. she yearned for sympathy, which was sternly, chillingly, almost insultingly withheld. in , she wrote thus to dr. gray: "what a good example have you set them (his children)! going to visit dear mama at twickenham--long may they keep their parents, pretty creatures! and long may they have sense to know and feel that no love is like parental affection,--the only good perhaps which cannot be flung away."[ ] [footnote : "we may have many friends in life, but we can only have one mother: a discovery, says gray, which i never made till it was too late."--rogers.] madame d'arblay states that her father was not disinclined to admit mrs. piozzi's right to consult her own notions of happiness in the choice of a second husband, had not the paramount duty of watching over her unmarried daughters interfered. but they might have accompanied her to italy as was once contemplated; and had they done so, they would have seen everything and everybody in it under the most favourable auspices. the course chosen for them by the eldest was the most perilous of the two submitted for their choice. the lady, miss nicholson, whom their mother had so carefully selected as their companion, soon left them; or according to another version was summarily dismissed by miss thrale (afterwards viscountess keith), who fortunately was endowed with high principle, firmness, and energy. she could not take up her abode with either of her guardians, one a bachelor under forty, the other the prototype of briggs, the old miser in "cæcilia." she could not accept johnson's hospitality in bolt court, still tenanted by the survivors of his menagerie; where, a few months later, she sate by his death-bed and received his blessing. she therefore called to her aid an old nurse-maid, named tib, who had been much trusted by her father, and with this homely but respectable duenna, she shut herself up in the house at brighton, limited her expenses to her allowance of _l._ a-year, and resolutely set about the course of study which seemed best adapted to absorb attention and prevent her thoughts from wandering. hebrew, mathematics, fortification, and perspective have been named to me by one of trusted friends as specimens of her acquirements and her pursuits. "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may." in that solitary abode at brighton, and in the companionship of tib, may have been laid the foundation of a character than which few, through the changeful scenes of a long and prosperous life, have exercised more beneficial influence or inspired more genuine esteem. on coming of age, and being put into possession of her fortune, she hired a house in london, and took her two eldest sisters to live with her. they had been at school whilst she was living at brighton. the fourth and youngest, afterwards mrs. mostyn, had accompanied the mother. on the return of mr. and mrs. piozzi, miss thrale made a point of paying them every becoming attention, and piozzi was frequently dining with her. latterly, she used to speak of him as a very worthy sort of man, who was not to blame for marrying a rich and distinguished woman who took a fancy to him. the other sisters seem to have adopted the same tone; and so far as i can learn, no one of them is open to the imputation of filial unkindness, or has suffered from maternal neglect in a manner to bear out dr. burney's forebodings by the result. occasional expressions of querulousness are matters of course in family differences, and are seldom totally suppressed by the utmost exertion of good feeling and good sense. johnson's idolised wife was, at the lowest estimate, twenty-one years older than himself when he married her; and her sons were so disgusted by the connection, that they dropped the acquaintance. yet it never crossed his mind that "hetty" had as much right to please herself as "tetty." of the six letters that passed between him and mrs. piozzi on the subject of the marriage, only two (nos. and ) have hitherto been made public; and the incompleteness of the correspondence has caused the most embarrassing confusion in the minds of biographers and editors, too prone to act on the maxim that, wherever female reputation is concerned, we should hope for the best and believe the worst. hawkins, apparently ignorant that she had written to johnson, to announce her intention, says, "he was made uneasy by a report" which induced him to write a strong letter of remonstrance, of which what he calls an _adumbration_ was published in the "gentleman's magazine" for december . mr. croker, avoiding a similar error, says:--"in the lady's own (part) publication of the correspondence, this letter (no. ) is given as from mrs. piozzi, and is signed with the initial of her name: dr. johnson's answer is also addressed to mrs. piozzi, and both the letters allude to the matter as _done_; yet it appears by the periodical publications of the day, that the marriage did not take place until the th july. the editor knew not how to account for this but by supposing that mrs. piozzi, to avoid johnson's importunity, had stated that as done which was only _settled to be done_." the matter of fact is made plain by the circular (no. ) which states that "piozzi is coming back from italy." he arrived on july st, after a fourteen months' absence, which proved both his loyalty and the sincerity of the struggle in her own heart and mind. her letter (no. ) as printed, is not signed with the initial of her name; and both dr. johnson's autograph letters are addressed to _mrs. thrale_. but she has occasioned the mistake into which so many have fallen, by her mode of heading these when she printed the two-volume edition of "letters" in . by the kindness of mr. salusbury i am now enabled to print the whole correspondence, with the exception of her last letter, which she describes. no. . _mrs. piozzi to dr. johnson_. "bath, june . "my dear sir,--the enclosed is a circular letter which i have sent to all the guardians, but our friendship demands somewhat more; it requires that i should beg your pardon for concealing from you a connexion which you must have heard of by many, but i suppose never believed. indeed, my dear sir, it was concealed only to save us both needless pain; i could not have borne to reject that counsel it would have killed me to take, and i only tell it you now because all is irrevocably settled and out of your power to prevent. i will say, however, that the dread of your disapprobation has given me some anxious moments, and though perhaps i am become by many privations the most independent woman in the world, i feel as if acting without a parent's consent till you write kindly to "your faithful servant." no. . _circular_. "sir,--as one of the executors of mr. thrale's will and guardian to his daughters, i think it my duty to acquaint you that the three eldest left bath last friday ( th) for their own house at brighthelmstone in company with an amiable friend, miss nicholson, who has sometimes resided with us here, and in whose society they may, i think, find some advantages and certainly no disgrace. i waited on them to salisbury, wilton, &c., and offered to attend them to the seaside myself, but they preferred this lady's company to mine, having heard that mr. piozzi is coming back from italy, and judging perhaps by our past friendship and continued correspondence that his return would be succeeded by our marriage. "i have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. "bath, june , ." no. .[ ] [footnote : what johnson termed an "adumbration" of this letter appeared in the "gentleman's magazine" for dec. : "madam,--if you are already ignominiously married, you are lost beyond all redemption;--if you are not, permit me one hour's conversation, to convince you that such a marriage must not take place. if, after a whole hour's reasoning, you should not be convinced, you will still be at liberty to act as you think proper. i have been extremely ill, and am still ill; but if you grant me the audience i ask, i will instantly take a post-chaise and attend you at bath. pray do not refuse this favour to a man who hath so many years loved and honoured you."] "madam,--if i interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married: if it is yet undone, let us _once_ more _talk_ together. if you have abandoned your children and your religion, god forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. if the last act is yet to do, i who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and _served you_[ ], i who long thought you the first of womankind, entreat that, before your fate is irrevocable, i may once more see you. i was, i once was, madam, most truly yours, "sam. johnson. "july , . "i will come down, if you permit it." [footnote : the four words which i have printed in italics are indistinctly written, and cannot be satisfactorily made out.] no. . "july , . "sir,--i have this morning received from you so rough a letter in reply to one which was both tenderly and respectfully written, that i am forced to desire the conclusion of a correspondence which i can bear to continue no longer. the birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first; his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner, and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. it is want of fortune, then, that is ignominious; the character of the man i have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. the religion to which he has been always a zealous adherent will, i hope, teach him to forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, i hope, enable me to bear them at once with dignity and patience. to hear that i have forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult i ever yet received. my fame is as unsullied as snow, or i should think it unworthy of him who must henceforth protect it. "i write by the coach the more speedily and effectually to prevent your coming hither. perhaps by my fame (and i hope it is so) you mean only that celebrity which is a consideration of a much lower kind. i care for that only as it may give pleasure to my husband and his friends. "farewell, dear sir, and accept my best wishes. you have always commanded my esteem, and long enjoyed the fruits of a friendship _never infringed by one harsh expression on my part during twenty years of familiar talk. never did i oppose your will, or control your wish; nor can your unmerited severity itself lessen my regard_; but till you have changed your opinion of mr. piozzi, let us converse no more. god bless you." no. . _to mrs. piozzi_. "london, july , . "dear madam,--what you have done, however i may lament it, i have no pretence to resent, as it has not been injurious to me: i therefore breathe out one sigh more of tenderness, perhaps useless, but at least sincere. "i wish that god may grant you every blessing, that you may be happy in this world for its short continuance, and eternally happy in a better state; and whatever i can contribute to your happiness i am very ready to repay, for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched. "do not think slightly of the advice which i now presume to offer. prevail upon mr. piozzi to settle in england: you may live here with more dignity than in italy, and with more security; your rank will be higher, and your fortune more under your own eye. i desire not to detail all my reasons, but every argument of prudence and interest is for england, and only some phantoms of imagination seduce you to italy. "i am afraid, however, that my counsel is vain, yet i have eased my heart by giving it. "when queen mary took the resolution of sheltering herself in england, the archbishop of st. andrew's, attempting to dissuade her, attended on her journey; and when they came to the irremeable stream[ ] that separated the two kingdoms, walked by her side into the water, in the middle of which he seized her bridle, and with earnestness proportioned to her danger and his own affection pressed her to return. the queen went forward.--if the parallel reaches thus far, may it go no farther.--the tears stand in my eyes. "i am going into derbyshire, and hope to be followed by your good wishes, for i am, with great affection, "your, &c. "any letters that come for me hither will be sent me." [footnote : queen mary left the scottish for the english coast, on the firth of solway, in a fishing-boat. the incident to which johnson alludes is introduced in "the abbot;" where the scene is laid on the sea-shore. the unusual though expressive term "irremeable," is defined in his dictionary, "admitting no return." his authority is dryden's virgil: "the keeper dream'd, the chief without delay pass'd on, and took th' irremeable way." the word is a latin one anglicised: "evaditque celer ripam irremeabilis undæ."] in a memorandum on this letter, she says:--"i wrote him (no. ) a very kind and affectionate farewell." before calling attention to the results of this correspondence, i must notice a charge built upon it by the reviewer, with the respectable aid of the foul-mouthed and malignant baretti: "this letter is now printed for the first time by mr. hayward. but he has omitted to notice the light which is thrown on it by baretti's account of the marriage. that account is given in the 'european magazine' for . it is very circumstantial, and too long to transcribe, but the upshot is this: he says that, in order to meet her returning lover, she left bath with her daughters as for a journey to brighton; quitted them on some pretence at salisbury, and posted off to town, _deceiving dr. johnson, who continued to direct to her at bath as usual_.[ ] 'in london she kept herself concealed for some days in my parish, and not very far distant from my own habitation, ... in suffolk street, middlesex hospital.' 'in a _few weeks_,' he adds, 'she was in a condition personally to resort to mr. greenland (her lawyer) to settle preliminaries, then returned to bath with piozzi, and there was married.' now baretti was a libeller, _and not to be believed except upon compulsion_; but if he does speak the truth, then the date, 'bath, june ,' of her circular letter, is a mystification; so is the passage in her letter to johnson of july _ _, about 'sending it by the coach to prevent his coming.' of course she was mortally afraid of the doctor's coming, for if he had come he would have found her flown. according to this supposition, she did not return to bath at all, but remained perdue in london, with her lover, during the whole 'correspondence.' is it the true one? "we cannot but suspect that it is, and that the solution of the whole of this little domestic mystery is to be found in a passage in the 'autobiographical memoir,' vol. i. p. . there were _two_ marriages:-- "'miss nicholson went with us to stonehenge, wilton, &c., _whence i returned to bath_ to wait for piozzi. he was here on the eleventh day after he got dobson's letter. in twenty-six more we were married _in london_ by the spanish ambassador's chaplain, and returned hither to be married by mr. morgan, of bath, at st. james's church, july , .' "now in order to make this account tally with baretti's we must allow for a slight exertion of that talent for 'white lies' on the lady's part, of which her friends, johnson included, used half playfully and half in earnest to accuse her. and we are afraid baretti's story does appear, on the face of it, the more probable of the two. it does seem more likely, since they were to be married in london (of which baretti knew nothing), that she met piozzi secretly in london on his arrival, than that she performed the awkward evolutions of returning from salisbury to bath to wait for him there, then going to london in company with him to be married, and then back to bath to be married over again. but if this be so, then the london marriage most likely took place almost immediately on the meeting of the enamoured couple, and while the 'correspondence' was going on. in which case the words in the 'memoir' 'in twenty-six days,' &c., were apparently intended, by a little bit of feminine adroitness, to appear to apply to this first marriage,--of the suddenness of which she may have been ashamed,--while they really apply to the conclusion of the whole affair by the _second_. will any one have the croker-like curiosity to inquire whether any record remains of the dates of marriages celebrated by the spanish ambassador's chaplain?"[ ] [footnote : these words, italicised by the reviewer, contain the pith of the charge, which has no reference to her visit to london six weeks before.] [footnote : edinb. review, no. , p. .] why croker-like curiosity? was there anything censurable in the curiosity which led an editor to ascertain whether a novel like "evelina" was written by a girl of eighteen or a woman of twenty-six? but lord macaulay sneered at the inquiry[ ], and his worshippers must go on sneering like their model--_vitiis imitabile_. the certificate of the london marriage (now before me) shews that it was solemnised on the rd july, by a clergyman named richard smith, in the presence of three attesting witnesses. this, and the entries in "thraliana," prove baretti's whole story to be false. "now baretti was a libeller, and not to be believed except upon compulsion;" meaning, i suppose, without confirmatory evidence strong enough to dispense with his testimony altogether. he was notorious for his _black_ lies. yet he is believed eagerly, willingly, upon no compulsion, and without any confirmatory evidence at all. [footnote : the following passage is reprinted in the corrected edition of lord macaulay's essays:--"there was no want of low minds and bad hearts in the generation which witnessed her (miss burney's) first appearance. there was the envious kenrick and the savage wolcot; the asp george steevens and the polecat john williams. it did not, however, occur to them to search the parish register of lynn, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. that truly chivalrous exploit was reserved for a bad writer of our own time, whose spite she had provoked by not furnishing him with materials for a worthless edition of boswell's life of johnson, some sheets of which our readers have doubtless seen round parcels of better books." there is reason to believe that the entry mr. croker copied was that of the baptism of an elder sister of the same name who died before the birth of the famous fanny.] the internal evidence of the improbability of the story has disappeared in the reviewer's paraphrase. baretti says that at salisbury "she suddenly declared that a letter she found of great importance demanded her immediate presence _in london_.... but johnson did not know the least tittle of this transaction, and he continued to direct his letters to bath as usual, expressing, no doubt, an immense wonder _at her pertinacious silence_." so she told her daughters that she was going to london, whilst she deceived johnson, who was sure to learn the truth from them; and he was wondering at her pertinacious silence at the very time when he was receiving letters from her, dated bath! why, having formally announced her determination to marry piozzi, she should not give him the meeting in london if she chose, fairly passes my comprehension. whilst the reviewer thinks he is strengthening one point, he is palpably weakening another. she would not have been "mortally afraid of the doctor's coming," if she had already thrown him off and finally broken with him? that she was afraid, and had reason to be so, is quite consistent with my theory, quite inconsistent with lord macaulay's and the critic's. johnson's letter (no. ) is that of a coarse man who had always been permitted to lecture and dictate with impunity. her letter (no. ) is that of a sensitive woman, who, for the first time, resents with firmness and retorts with dignity. the sentences i have printed in italics speak volumes. "never did i oppose your will, or control your wish, nor can your unmitigated severity itself lessen my regard." there is a shade of submissiveness in her reply, yet, on receiving it, he felt as a falcon might feel if a partridge were to shew fight. nothing short of habitual deference on her part, and unrepressed indulgence of temper on _his_, can account for or excuse his not writing before this unexpected check as he wrote after it. if he had not been systematically humoured and flattered, he would have seen at a glance that he had "no pretence to resent," and have been ready at once to make the best return in his power for "that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." she wrote him a kind and affectionate farewell; and there (so far as we know) ended their correspondence. but in "thraliana" she sets down: "_milan, th nov_. .--i have got dr. johnson's picture here, and expect miss thrale's with impatience. i do love them dearly, as ill as they have used me, and always shall. poor johnson did not _mean_ to use me ill. he only grew upon indulgence till patience could endure no further." in a letter to mr. s. lysons from milan, dated december th, , which proves that she was not frivolously employed, she says: "my next letter shall talk of the libraries and botanical gardens, and twenty other clever things here. i wish you a comfortable christmas, and a happy beginning of the year . do not neglect dr. johnson: you will never see any other mortal so wise or so good. i keep his picture in my chamber, and his works on my chimney." "forgiveness to the injured doth belong, but they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong." what he said of her can only be learned from her bitter enemies or hollow friends, who have preserved nothing kindly or creditable. hawkins states that a letter from johnson to himself contained these words:--"poor thrale! i thought that either her virtue or her vice (meaning her love of her children or her pride) would have saved her from such a marriage. she is now become a subject for her enemies to exult over, and for her friends, if she has any left, to forget or pity." madame d'arblay gives two accounts of the last interview she ever had with johnson,--on the th november, . in the "diary" she sets down: "i had seen miss t. the day before." "'so,' said he, 'did i.' "i then said, 'do you ever, sir, hear, from her mother?' "'no,' cried he, 'nor write to her. i drive her quite from my mind. if i meet with one of her letters, i burn it instantly.[ ] i have burnt all i can find. i never speak of her, and i desire never to hear of her name. i drive her, as i said, wholly from my mind.'" [footnote : if this was true, it is strange that he did not destroy the letter (no. ) which gave him so sudden and mortifying a check. miss hawkins says in her memoirs: "it was i who discovered the letter. i carried it to my father; he enclosed and sent it to her, _there never having been any intercourse between them_." anything from hawkins about streatham and its inmates must therefore have been invention or hearsay.] in the "memoirs," describing the same interview, she says:--"we talked then of poor mrs. thrale, but only for a moment, for i saw him greatly incensed, and with such severity of displeasure, that i hastened to start another subject, and he solemnly enjoined me to mention that no more." this was only eighteen days before he died, and he might be excused for being angry at the introduction of any agitating topic. it would stain his memory, not hers, to prove that, belying his recent professions of tenderness and gratitude, he directly or indirectly encouraged her assailants. "i was tempted to observe," says the author of "piozziana," "that i thought, as i still do, that johnson's anger on the event of her second marriage was excited by some feeling of disappointment; and that i suspected he had formed some hope of attaching her to himself. it would be disingenuous on my part to attempt to repeat her answer. i forget it; but the impression on my mind is that she did not contradict me." sir james fellowes' marginal note on this passage is: "this was an absurd notion, and i can undertake to say it was the last idea that ever entered her head; for when i once alluded to the subject, she ridiculed the idea: she told me she always felt for johnson the same respect and veneration as for a pascal."[ ] [footnote : when sheridan was accused of making love to mrs. siddons, he said he should as soon think of making love to the archbishop of canterbury.] on the margin of the passage in which boswell says, "johnson wishing to unite himself with this rich widow was much talked of, but i believe without foundation,"--she has written, "i believe so too!!" the report sufficed to bring into play the light artillery of the wits, one of whose best hits was an "ode to mrs. thrale, by samuel johnson, ll.d., on their approaching nuptials," beginning: "if e'er my fingers touched the lyre, in satire fierce, in pleasure gay, shall not my thralia's smiles inspire, shall sam refuse the sportive lay? "my dearest lady, view your slave, rehold him as your very _scrub_: ready to write as author grave, or govern well the brewing tub. "to rich felicity thus raised, my bosom glows with amorous fire; porter no longer shall be praised, 'tis i myself am _thrale's entire_." she has written opposite these lines, "whose fun was this? it is better than the other." the other was: "cervisial coctor's viduate dame, opinst thou this gigantick frame, procumbing at thy shrine, shall catinated by thy charms, a captive in thy ambient arms perennially be thine." she writes opposite: "whose silly fun was this? soame jenyn's?" the following paragraph is copied from the note-book of the late miss williams wynn[ ], who had recently been reading a large collection of mrs. piozzi's letters addressed to a welsh neighbour: [footnote : daughter of sir watkyn wynn (the fourth baronet) and granddaughter of george grenville, the minister. she was distinguished by her literary taste and acquirements, as well as highly esteemed for the uprightness of her character, the excellence of her understanding, and the kindness of her heart. her journals and note-books, carefully kept during a long life passed in the best society, are full of interesting anecdotes and curious extracts from rare books and manuscripts. they are now in the possession of her niece, the honourable mrs. rowley.] "_london, march_, .--i have had an opportunity of talking to old sir william pepys on the subject of his old friend, mrs. piozzi, and from his conversation am more than ever impressed with the idea that she was one of the most inconsistent characters that ever existed. sir william says he never met with any human being who possessed the talent of conversation in such a degree. i naturally felt anxious to know whether piozzi could in any degree add to this pleasure, and found, as i expected, that he could not even understand her. "her infatuation for him seems perfectly unaccountable. johnson in his rough (i may here call it brutal) manner said to her, 'why ma'am, he is not only a stupid, ugly dog, but he is an old dog too.' sir william says he really believes that she combated her inclination for him as long as possible; so long, that her senses would have failed her if she had attempted to resist any longer. she was perfectly aware of her degradation. one day, speaking to sir william of some persons whom he had been in the habit of meeting continually at streatham during the lifetime of mr. thrale, she said, not one of them has taken the smallest notice of me ever since: they dropped me before i had done anything wrong. piozzi was literally at her elbow when she said this." the reviewer quotes the remark, "she was perfectly aware of her degradation," as resting on the personal responsibility of miss wynn, "who knew her in later life in wales." the context shews that miss wynn (who did not know her) was simply repeating the impressions of sir william pepys, one of the bitterest opponents of the marriage, to whom she certainly never said anything derogatory to her second husband. the uniform tenor of her letters and her conduct shew that she never regarded her second marriage as discreditable, and always took a high and independent, instead of a subdued or deprecating, tone with her alienated friends. a bare statement of the treatment she received from them is surely no proof of conscious degradation. in a letter to a welsh neighbour, near the end of her life, some time in , she says: "mrs. mostyn (her youngest daughter) has written again on the road back to italy, where she likes the piozzis above all people, she says, _if they were not so proud of their family_. would not that make one laugh two hours before one's own death? but i remember when lady egremont raised the whole nation's ill will here, while the saxons were wondering how count bruhle could think of marrying a lady born miss carpenter. the lombards doubted in the meantime of my being a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer. a pretty world, is it not? a ship of fooles, according to the old poem; and they will upset the vessel by and by." this is not the language of one who wished to apologise for a misalliance. as to piozzi's assumed want of youth and good looks, johnson's knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have prevented him from urging this as an insuperable objection. he might have recollected the roman matron in juvenal, who considers the world well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he might have quoted spenser's description of one-- "who rough and rude and filthy did appear, unseemly man to please fair lady's eye, yet he of ladies oft was loved dear, when fairer faces were bid standen by: oh! who can tell the bent of woman's phantasy?" madame campan, speaking of caroline of naples, the sister of marie antoinette, says, she had great reason to complain of the insolence of a spaniard named las casas, whom the king, her father-in-law, had sent to persuade her to remove m. acton[ ] from the conduct of affairs and from about her person. she had told him, to convince him of the nature of her sentiments, that she would have acton painted and sculptured by the most celebrated artists of italy, and send his bust and his portrait to the king of spain, to prove to him that the desire of fixing a man of superior capacity could alone have induced her to confer the favour he enjoyed. las casas had dared to reply, that she would be taking useless trouble; that a man's ugliness did not always prevent him from pleasing, and that the king of spain had too much experience to be ignorant that the caprices of a woman were inexplicable. johnson may surely be allowed credit for as much knowledge of the sex as the king of spain. [footnote : m. acton, as madame campan calls him, was a member of the ancient english family of that name. he succeeded to the baronetcy in , and was the grandfather of sir john e.e. dalberg acton, bart., m.p., &c.] others were simultaneously accusing her of marrying a young man to indulge a sensual inclination. the truth is, piozzi was a few months older than herself, and was neither ugly nor disagreeable. madame d'arblay has been already quoted as to his personal appearance, and miss seward (october, ) writes: "i am become acquainted with mr. and mrs. piozzi. her conversation is that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees. dr. johnson told me truth when he said she had more colloquial wit than most of our literary women; it is indeed a fountain of perpetual flow. but he did not tell me truth when he asserted that piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. mr. piozzi is a handsome man, in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. i am charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument. surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song." the concluding sentence contains what partridge would call a _non sequitur_, for the finest musical sensibility may coexist with the most commonplace qualities. but the lady's evidence is clear on the essential point; and another passage from her letters may assist us in determining the precise nature of johnson's feelings towards mrs. piozzi, and the extent to which his later language and conduct regarding her were influenced by pique: "love is the great softener of savage dispositions. johnson had always a metaphysic passion for one princess or another: first, the rustic lucy porter, before he married her nauseous mother; next the handsome, but haughty, molly aston; next the sublimated, methodistic hill boothby, who read her bible in hebrew; and lastly, the more charming mrs. thrale, with the beauty of the first, the learning of the second, and with more worth than a bushel of such sinners and such saints. it is ridiculously diverting to see the old elephant forsaking his nature before these princesses: "'to make them mirth, use all his might, and writhe, his mighty form disporting.' "_this last and long-enduring passion for mrs. thrale was, however, composed perhaps of cupboard love, platonic love, and vanity tickled and gratified, from morn to night, by incessant homage_. the two first ingredients are certainly oddly heterogeneous; but johnson, in religion and politics, in love and in hatred, was composed of such opposite and contradictory materials, as never before met in the human mind. this is the reason why folk are never weary of talking, reading, and writing about a man-- "'so various that he seem'd to be, not one, but all mankind's epitome.'" after quoting the sentence printed in italics, the reviewer says: "on this hint mr. hayward enlarges, nothing loth." i quoted the entire letter without a word of comment, and what is given as my "enlarging" is an _olla podrida_ of sentences torn from the context in three different and unconnected passages of this introduction. the only one of them which has any bearing on the point shews, though garbled, that, in attributing motives, i distinguished between johnson and his set. having thus laid the ground for fixing on me opinions i had nowhere professed, the reviewer asks, "had mr. hayward, when he passed such slighting judgment on the motives of the venerable sage who awes us still, no fear before his eyes of the anathema aimed by carlyle at croker for similar disparagement? 'as neediness, and greediness, and vain glory are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even a johnson, acts, or can think of acting, on any other principle. whatever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two former categories, need and greed, is without scruple ranged under the latter.'"[ ] [footnote : edinb, review, no. , p. .] this style of criticism is as loose as it is unjust; for one main ingredient in miss seward's mixture is platonic love, which cannot be referred to either of the three categories. her error lay in not adding a fourth ingredient,--the admiration which johnson undoubtedly felt for the admitted good qualities of mrs. thrale. but the lady was nearer the truth than the reviewer, when he proceeds in this strain: "we take an entirely different view at once of the character and the feelings of johnson. rude, uncouth, arrogant as he was--spoilt as he was, which is far worse, by flattery and toadying and the silly homage of inferior worshippers--selfish as he was in his eagerness for small enjoyments and disregard of small attentions--that which lay at the very bottom of his character, that which constitutes the great source of his power in life, and connects him after death with the hearts of all of us, is his spirit of imaginative romance. he was romantic in almost all things--in politics, in religion, in his musings on the supernatural world, in friendship for men, and in love for women." * * * * * "such was his fancied 'padrona,' his 'mistress,' his 'thralia dulcis,' a compound of the bright lady of fashion and the ideal urania who rapt his soul into spheres of perfection." imaginative romance in politics, in religion, and in musings on the supernatural world, is here only another term for prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and credulity--for rabid toryism, high church doctrines verging on romanism, and a confirmed belief in ghosts. imaginative romance in love and friendship is an elevating, softening, and refining influence, which, especially when it forms the basis of character, cannot co-exist with habitual rudeness, uncouthness, arrogance, love of toadying, selfishness, and disregard of what johnson himself called the minor morals. equally heterogeneous is the "compound of the bright lady of fashion and the ideal urania." a goddess in crinoline would be a semi-mundane creature at best; and the image unluckily suggests that johnson was unphilosophically, not to say vulgarly, fond of rank, fashion, and their appendages. his imagination, far from being of the richest or highest kind, was insufficient for the attainment of dramatic excellence, was insufficient even for the nobler parts of criticism. nor had he much to boast of in the way of delicacy of perception or sensibility. his strength lay in his understanding; his most powerful weapon was argument: his grandest quality was his good sense. thurlow, speaking of the choice of a successor to lord mansfield, said, "i hesitated long between the intemperance of kenyon, and the corruption of buller; not but what there was a d----d deal of corruption in kenyon's intemperance, and a d----d deal of intemperance in buller's corruption." just so, we may hesitate long between the romance and the worldliness of johnson, not but what there was a d----d deal of romance in his worldliness, and a d----d deal of worldliness in his romance. the late lord alvanley, whose heart was as inflammable as his wit was bright, used to tell how a successful rival in the favour of a married dame offered to retire from the field for _ _., saying, "i am a younger son: her husband does not give dinners, and they have no country house: no _liaison_ suits me that does not comprise both." at the risk of provoking mr. carlyle's anathema, i now avow my belief that johnson was, nay, boasted of being, open to similar influences; and as for his "ideal uranias," no man past seventy idealises women with whom he has been corresponding for years about his or their "natural history," to whom he sends recipes for "lubricity of the bowels," with an assurance that it has had the best effect upon his own.[ ] [footnote : letters, vol. ii. p. . the letter containing the recipe actually begins "my dear angel." had johnson forgotten swift's lines on celia? or the repudiation of the divine nature by ermodotus, which occurs twice in plutarch? the late lord melbourne complained that two ladies of quality, sisters, told him too much of their "natural history."] rough language, too, although not incompatible with affectionate esteem, can hardly be reconciled with imaginative romance-- "perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me down stairs?" "his ugly old wife," says the reviewer, "was an angel." yes, an angel so far as exalted language could make her one; and he had always half-a-dozen angels or goddesses on his list. "_je change d'objet, mais la passion reste_." for this very reason, i repeat, his affection for mrs. piozzi was not a deep, devoted, or absorbing feeling at any time; and the gloom which settled upon the evening of his days was owing to his infirmities and his dread of death, not to the loosening of cherished ties, nor to the compelled solitude of a confined dwelling in bolt court. the plain matter of fact is that, during the last two years of his life, he was seldom a month together at his own house, unless when the state of his health prevented him from enjoying the hospitality of his friends. when the fatal marriage was announced, he was planning what boswell calls a jaunt into the country; and in a letter dated lichfield, oct. , , he says: "i passed the first part of the summer at oxford (with dr. adams); afterwards i went to lichfield, then to ashbourne (dr. taylor's), and a week ago i returned to lichfield." in the journal which he kept for dr. brocklesby, he writes, oct. : "the town is my element; there are my friends, there are my books to which i have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements. sir joshua told me long ago that my vocation was to public life; and i hope still to keep my station, till god shall bid me _go in peace_." boswell reports him saying about this time, "sir, i look upon every day to be lost when i do not make a new acquaintance." after another visit to dr. adams, at pembroke college, he returned on the th nov. to london, where he died on the th dec. . the proximate cause of his death was dropsy; and there is not the smallest sign of its having been accelerated or embittered by unkindness or neglect. whoever has accompanied me thus far will be fully qualified to form an independent opinion of lord macaulay's dashing summary of mrs. piozzi's imputed ill-treatment of johnson: "johnson was now in his seventy-second year. the infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. that inevitable event of which he never thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death. he had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. every year he lost what could never be replaced. the strange dependants to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. the kind and generous thrale was no more; and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside him. but she survived to be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond any thing in the world, tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her grave. "with some estimable, and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent. the control of a mind more steadfast than her own was necessary to her respectability. while she was restrained by her husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour. but he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. she soon fell in love with a music-master from brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire. her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this degrading passion. but the struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her health. conscious that her choice was one which johnson could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection. her manner towards him changed. she was sometimes cold and sometimes petulant. she did not conceal her joy when he left streatham: she never pressed him to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. he took the very intelligible hints which she gave. he read, for the last time, a chapter of the greek testament in the library which had been formed by himself. in a solemn and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates to the divine protection, and, with emotions which choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind fleet street, where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out. "here, in june , he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. but other maladies came thick upon him. his asthma tormented him day and night. dropsical symptoms made their appearance. while sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life, had married an italian fiddler; that all london was crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the ephesian matron and the two pictures in hamlet. he vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. he never uttered her name. every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. she meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened across mount cenis, and learned, while passing a merry christmas of concerts and lemonade-parties at milan, that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated, had ceased to exist."[ ] [footnote : "encyclopædia britannica," last edition. the essay on johnson is reprinted in the first volume of lord macaulay's "miscellaneous writings."] "splendid recklessness," is the happy expression used by the "saturday review" in characterising this account of the alleged rupture with its consequences; and no reader will fail to admire the rhetorical skill with which the expulsion from streatham with its library formed by himself, the chapter in the greek testament, the gloomy and desolate home, the music-master in whom nobody but herself could see anything to admire, the few and evil days, the emotions that convulsed the frame, the painful and melancholy death, and the merry christmas of concerts and lemonade parties, have been grouped together with the view of giving picturesqueness, impressive unity, and damnatory vigour to the sketch. "action, action, action," says the orator; "effect, effect, effect," says the historian. give archimedes a place to stand on, and he would move the world. give fouché a line of a man's handwriting, and he would engage to ruin him. give lord macaulay the semblance of an authority, an insulated fact or phrase, a scrap of a journal, or the tag end of a song, and on it, by the abused prerogative of genius, he would construct a theory of national or personal character, which should confer undying glory or inflict indelible disgrace. johnson was never driven or expelled from mrs. piozzi's house or family: if very intelligible hints were given, they certainly were not taken; the library was not formed by him; the testament may or may not have been greek; his powerful frame shook with no convulsions but what may have been occasioned by the unripe grapes and hard peaches; he did not leave streatham for his gloomy and desolate house behind fleet street; the few and evil days (two years, nine weeks) did not run out in that house; the music-master was generally admired and esteemed; and the merry christmas of concerts and lemonade-parties is simply another sample of the brilliant historian's mode of turning the abstract into the concrete in such a manner as to degrade or elevate at will. an italian concert is not a merry meeting; and a lemonade-party, i presume, is a party where (instead of _eau-sucrée_ as at paris) the refreshment handed about is lemonade: not an enlivening drink at christmas. in a word, all these graphic details are mere creations of the brain, and the general impression intended to be conveyed by them is false, substantially false; for mrs. piozzi never behaved otherwise than kindly and considerately to johnson at any time. her life in italy has been sketched in her best manner by her own lively pen in the "autobiography" and what she calls the "travel book," to be presently mentioned. scattered notices of her proceedings occur in her letters to mr. lysons, and in the printed correspondence of her cotemporaries. on the th october, , she writes to mr. lysons from turin: "we are going to alexandria, genoa, and pavia, and then to milan for the winter, as mr. piozzi finds friends everywhere to delay us, and i hate hurry and fatigue; it takes away all one's attention. lyons was a delightful place to me, and we were so feasted there by my husband's old acquaintances. the duke and duchess of cumberland too paid us a thousand caressing civilities where we met with them, and we had no means of musical parties neither. the prince of sisterna came yesterday to visit mr. piozzi, and present me with the key of his box at the opera for the time we stay at turin. here's honour and glory for you! when miss thrale hears of it, she will write perhaps; the other two are very kind and affectionate." in "thraliana": "_ rd november_, .--yesterday i received a letter from mr. baretti, full of the most flagrant and bitter insults concerning my late marriage with mr. piozzi, against whom, however, he can bring no heavier charge than that he disputed on the road with an innkeeper concerning the bill in his last journey to italy; while he accuses me of murder and fornication in the grossest terms, such as i believe have scarcely ever been used even to his old companions in newgate, whence he was released to scourge the families which cherished, and bite the hands that have since relieved him. could i recollect any provocation i ever gave the man, i should be less amazed, but he heard, perhaps, that johnson had written me a rough letter, and thought he would write me a brutal one: like the jewish king, who, trying to imitate solomon without his understanding, said, 'my father whipped you with whips, but i will whip you with scorpions.'" "milan, dec. . "i correspond constantly and copiously with such of my daughters as are willing to answer my letters, and i have at last received one cold scrap from the eldest, which i instantly and tenderly replied to. mrs. lewis too, and miss nicholson, have had accounts of my health, for i found _them_ disinterested and attached to me: those who led the stream, or watched which way it ran, that they might follow it, were not, i suppose, desirous of my correspondence, and till they are so, shall not be troubled with it." miss nicholson was the lady left with the daughters, and mrs. piozzi could have heard no harm of her from them or others when she wrote thus. the same inference must be drawn from the allusions to this lady at subsequent periods. after stating that she "dined at the minister's o' tuesday, and he called all the wise men about me with great politeness indeed"--"once more," she continues, "keep me out of the newspapers if you possibly can: they have given me many a miserable hour, and my enemies many a merry one: but i have not deserved public persecution, and am very happy to live in a place where one is free from unmerited insolence, such as london abounds with. "'illic credulitas, illic temerarius error.' god bless you, and may you conquer the many-headed monster which i could never charm to silence." in "thraliana," she says: "_january_, .--i see the english newspapers are full of gross insolence to me: all burst out, as i guessed it would, upon the death of dr. johnson. but mr. boswell (who i plainly see is the author) should let the _dead_ escape from his malice at least. i feel more shocked at the insults offered to mr. thrale's memory than at those cast on mr. piozzi's person. my present husband, thank god! is well and happy, and able to defend himself: but dear mr. thrale, that had fostered these cursed wits so long! to be stung by their malice even in the grave, is too cruel:-- "'nor church, nor churchyards, from such fops are free.'"[ ]--pope. [footnote : probably misquoted for-- "no place is sacred, not the church is free." _prologue to the satires_.] the license of our press is a frequent topic of complaint. but here is a woman who had never placed herself before the public in any way so as to give them a right to discuss her conduct or affairs, not even as an author, made the butt of every description of offensive personality for months, with the tacit encouragement of the first moralist of the age. january th, , she writes from milan:--"the minister, count wilsick, has shown us many distinctions, and we are visited by the first families in milan. the venetian resident will, however, be soon sent to the court of london, and give a faithful account, as i am sure, to all their _obliging_ inquiries." in "thraliana": "_ th jan_., .--i have recovered myself sufficiently to think what will be the consequence to me of johnson's death, but must wait the event, as all thoughts on the future in this world are vain. six people have already undertaken to write his life, i hear, of which sir john hawkins, mr. boswell, tom davies, and dr. kippis are four. piozzi says he would have me add to the number, and so i would, but that i think my anecdotes too few, and am afraid of saucy answers if i send to england for others. the saucy answers _i_ should disregard, but my heart is made vulnerable by my late marriage, and i am certain that, to spite me, they would insult my husband. "poor johnson! i see they will leave _nothing untold_ that i laboured so long to keep secret; and i was so very delicate _in trying to conceal his [fancied][ ] insanity_ that i retained no proofs of it, or hardly any, nor even mentioned it in these books, lest by my dying first _they_ might be printed and the secret (for such i thought it) discovered. i used to tell him in jest that his biographers would be at a loss concerning some orange-peel he used to keep in his pocket, and many a joke we had about the lives that would be published. rescue me out of their hands, my dear, and do it yourself, said he; taylor, adams, and hector will furnish you with juvenile anecdotes, and baretti will give you all the rest that you have not already, for i think baretti is a lyar only when he speaks of himself. oh, said i, baretti told me yesterday that you got by heart six pages of machiavel's history once, and repeated them thirty years afterwards word for word. why this is a _gross_ lye, said johnson, i never read the book at all. baretti too told me of you (said i) that you once kept sixteen cats in your chamber, and yet they scratched your legs to such a degree, you were forced to use mercurial plaisters for some time after. why this (replied johnson) is an unprovoked lye indeed; i thought the fellow would not have broken through divine and human laws thus to make puss his heroine, but i see i was mistaken." [footnote : sic in the ms. see _antè_, p. .] on february rd, , horace walpole writes from london to sir horace mann at florence:--"i have lately been lent a volume of poems composed and printed at florence, in which another of our exheroines, mrs. piozzi, has a considerable share; her associates three of the english bards who assisted in the little garland which ramsay the painter sent me. the present is a plump octavo; and if you have not sent me a copy by our nephew, i should be glad if you could get one for me: not for the merit of the verses, which are moderate enough and faint imitations of our good poets; but for a short and sensible and genteel preface by la piozzi, from whom i have just seen a very clever letter to mrs. montagu, to disavow a jackanapes who has lately made a noise here, one boswell, by anecdotes of dr. johnson. in a day or two we expect another collection by the same signora." her associates were greathead, merry, and parsons. the volume in question was "the florence miscellany." "a copy," says mr. lowndes, "having fallen into the hands of w. grifford, gave rise to his admirable satire of the 'baviad and moeviad.'" in his journal of the tour to the hebrides, boswell makes johnson say of mrs. montagu's "essay on shakespeare": "reynolds is fond of her book, and i wonder at it; for neither i, nor beauclerc, nor mrs. thrale could get through it." this is what mrs. piozzi wrote to disavow, so far as she was personally concerned. in a subsequent letter from vienna, she says: "mrs. montagu has written to me very sweetly." the other collection expected from her was her "anecdotes of the late samuel johnson, during the last twenty years of his life. printed for t. cadell in the strand, ." she opened the matter to mr. cadell in the following terms: "florence, th june, . "_sir_.,--as you were at once the bookseller and friend of dr. johnson, who always spoke of your character in the kindest terms, i could wish you likewise to be the publisher of some anecdotes concerning the last twenty years of his life, collected by me during the many days i had opportunity to spend in his instructive company, and digested into method since i heard of his death. as i have a large collection of his letters in england, besides some verses, known only to myself, i wish to delay printing till we can make two or three little volumes, not unacceptable, perhaps, to the public; but i desire my intention to be notified, for divers reasons, and, if you approve of the scheme, should wish it to be immediately advertized. my return cannot be in less than twelve months, and we may be detained still longer, as our intention is to complete the tour of italy; but the book is in forwardness, and it has been seen by many english and italian friends." on july th, , she writes from florence: "we celebrated our wedding anniversary two days ago with a magnificent dinner and concert, at which the prince corsini and his brother the cardinal did us the honour of assisting, and wished us joy in the tenderest and politest terms. lord and lady cowper, lord pembroke, and _all_ the english indeed, doat on my husband, and show us every possible attention." on the th july, , she writes again to mr. cadell:--"i am favoured with your answer and pleased with the advertisement, but it will be impossible to print the verses till my return to england, as they are all locked up with other papers in the bank, nor should i choose to put the key (which is now at milan) in any one's hand except my own." she therefore proposes that the "anecdotes" shall be printed first, and published separately. on the th october, , she writes from sienna: "i finished my 'anecdotes of dr. johnson' at florence, and taking them with me to leghorn, got a clear transcript made there, such as i hope will do for you to print from; though there may be some errors, perhaps many, which have escaped me, as i am wholly unused to the business of sending manuscripts to the press, and must rely on you to get everything done properly when, it comes into your hands." such was the surviving ascendency of johnson, or such the placability of her disposition, that, but for piozzi's remonstrances, she would have softened down her "anecdotes" to an extent which would have destroyed much of their sterling value. mr. lysons made the final bargain with cadell, and had full power to act for her. she writes thus to cadell: "rome, th march, . "sir,--i hasten to tell you that i am perfectly pleased and contented with the alterations made by my worthy and amiable friends in the 'anecdotes of johnson's life.' whatever is done by sir lucas pepys is certainly well done, and i am happy in the thoughts of his having interested himself about it. mr. lysons was very judicious and very kind in going to the bishop of peterboro', and him and dr. lort for advice. there is no better to be had in the world, i believe; and it is my desire that they should be always consulted about any future transactions of the same sort relating to, sir, your most obedient servant, "h. l. piozzi."[ ] [footnote : the letters to mr. cadell were published in the "gentleman's magazine" for march and april, .] the early portions of "thraliana" were evidently amongst the papers locked up in the bank, and she consequently wrote most of the anecdotes from memory, which may account for some minor discrepancies, like that relating to the year in which she made the acquaintance with johnson. the book attracted great attention; and whilst some affected to discover in it the latent signs of wounded vanity and pique, others vehemently impugned its accuracy. foremost amongst her assailants stood boswell, who had an obvious motive for depreciating her, and he attempts to destroy her authority, first, by quoting johnson's supposed imputations on her veracity; and secondly, by individual instances of her alleged departure from truth. thus, johnson is reported to have said:--"it is amazing, sir, what deviations there are from precise truth, in the account which is given of almost everything. i told mrs. thrale, you have so little anxiety about truth that you never tax your memory with the exact thing." her proneness to exaggerated praise especially excited his indignation, and he endeavours to make her responsible for his rudeness on the strength of it. "mrs. thrale gave high praise to mr. dudley long (now north). _johnson_. 'nay, my dear lady, don't talk so. mr. long's character is very _short_. it is nothing. he fills a chair. he is a man of genteel appearance, and that is all. i know nobody who blasts by praise as you do: for whenever there is exaggerated praise, every body is set against a character. they are provoked to attack it. now there is pepys; you praised that man with such disproportion, that i was incited to lessen him, perhaps more than he deserves. _his blood is upon your head_. by the same principle, your malice defeats itself; for your censure is too violent. and yet (looking to her with a leering smile) she is the first woman in the world, could she but restrain that wicked tongue of hers;--she would be the only woman, could she but command that little whirligig.'" opposite the words i have printed in italics she has written: "an expression he would not have used; no, not for worlds." in boswell's note of a visit to streatham in , we find:-- "next morning, while we were at breakfast, johnson gave a very earnest recommendation of what he himself practised with the utmost conscientiousness: i mean a strict attention to truth even in the most minute particulars. 'accustom your children,' said he, 'constantly to this: if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them: you do not know where deviation from truth will end.' _boswell_. 'it may come to the door: and when once an account is at all varied in one circumstance, it may by degrees be varied so as to be totally different from what really happened.' our lively hostess, whose fancy was impatient of the rein, fidgeted at this, and ventured to say 'nay, this is too much. if dr. johnson should forbid me to drink tea, i would comply, as i should feel the restraint only twice a day: but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching.' _johnson_. 'well, madam, and you _ought_ to be perpetually watching. it is more from carelessness about truth, than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.'" now for the illustrative incident, which occurred during the same visit:-- "i had before dinner repeated a ridiculous story told me by an old man, who had been a passenger with me in the stage-coach to-day. mrs. thrale, having taken occasion to allude to it in talking to me, called it, 'the story told you by the old _woman_.' 'now, madam,' said i, 'give me leave to catch you in the fact: it was not an old _woman_, but an old _man_, whom i mentioned as having told me this.' i presumed to take an opportunity, in the presence of johnson, of showing this lively lady how ready she was, unintentionally, to deviate from exact authenticity of narration." in the margin: "mrs. thrale knew there was no such thing as an old man: when a man gets superannuated, they call him an old woman." the remarks on the value of truth attributed to johnson are just and sound in the main, but when they are pointed against character, they must be weighed in reference to the very high standard he habitually insisted upon. he would not allow his servant to say he was not at home when he was. "a servant's strict regard for truth," he continued, "must be weakened by such a practice. a philosopher may know that it is merely a form of denial; but few servants are such nice distinguishers. if i accustom a servant to tell a lie for me, have i not reason to apprehend that he will tell many lies for himself?" one of his townspeople, mr. wickens, of lichfield, was walking with him in a small meandering shrubbery formed so as to hide the termination, and observed that it might be taken for an extensive labyrinth, but that it would prove a deception, though it was, indeed, not an unpardonable one. "sir," exclaimed johnson, "don't tell me of deception; a lie, sir, is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear." whilst he was in one of these paradoxical humours, there was no pleasing him; and he has been known to insult persons of respectability for repeating current accounts of events, sounding new and strange, which turned out to be literally true; such as the red-hot shot at gibraltar, or the effects of the earthquake at lisbon. yet he could be lax when it suited him, as speaking of epitaphs: "the writer of an epitaph should not be considered as saying nothing but what is strictly true. allowance must be made for some degree of exaggerated praise. in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath." is he upon oath in narrating an anecdote? or could he do more than swear to the best of his recollection and belief, if he was. boswell's notes of conversations are wonderful results of a peculiar faculty, or combination of faculties, but the utmost they can be supposed to convey is the substance of what took place, in an exceedingly condensed shape, lighted up at intervals by the _ipsissima verba_, of the speaker. "whilst he went on talking triumphantly," says boswell, "i was fixed in admiration, and said to mrs. thrale, 'o for short-hand to take this down!' 'you'll carry it all in your head,' said she; 'a long head is as good as short-hand.'" on his boasting of the efficiency of his own system of short-hand to johnson, he was put to the test and failed. mrs. piozzi at once admits and accounts for the inferiority of her own collection of anecdotes, when she denounces "a trick which i have seen played on common occasions, of sitting steadily down at the other end of the room, to write at the moment what should be said in company, either _by_ dr. johnson or _to_ him, i never practised myself, nor approved of in another. there is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a conversation assembly room would become tremendous as a court of justice." this is a hit at boswell, who (as regards johnson himself) had full licence to take notes the best way he could. madame d'arblay's are much fuller, and bear a suspicious resemblance to the dialogues in her novels. in a reply to boswell, dated december th, , miss seward pointedly remarks: "dr. johnson's frequently-expressed contempt for mrs. thrale on account of that want of veracity which he imputes to her, at least as mr. boswell has recorded, either convicts him of narrating what johnson never said, or johnson himself of that insincerity of which there are too many instances, amidst all the recorded proofs of his unprovoked personal rudeness, to those with whom he conversed; for, this repeated contempt was coeval with his published letters, which express such high and perfect esteem for that lady, which declare that 'to hear her, was to hear wisdom, that to see her, was to see virtue.'" lord macaulay and his advocate in the "edinburgh review," who speak of mrs. piozzi's "white lies," have not convicted her of one; and mr. croker bears strong testimony to her accuracy. mrs. piozzi prefaces some instances of johnson's rudeness and harshness by the remark, that "he did not hate the persons he treated with roughness, or despise them whom he drove from him by apparent scorn. he really loved and respected many whom he would not suffer to love him." boswell echoes the remark, multiplies the instances, and then accuses her of misrepresenting their friend. after mentioning a discourteous reply to robertson the historian, which was subsequently confirmed by boswell, she proceeds to show that johnson was no gentler to herself or those for whom he had the greatest regard. "when i one day lamented the loss of a first cousin, killed in america, 'prithee, my dear (said he), have done with canting: how would the world be worse for it, i may ask, if all your relations were at once spitted like larks and roasted for presto's supper?'--presto was the dog that lay under the table." to this boswell opposes the version given by baretti: "mrs. thrale, while supping very heartily upon larks, laid down her knife and fork, and abruptly exclaimed, 'o, my dear johnson! do you know what has happened? the last letters from abroad have brought us an account that our poor cousin's head was taken off by a cannon-ball.' johnson, who was shocked both at the fact and her light unfeeling manner of mentioning it, replied, 'madam, it would give _you_ very little concern if all your relations were spitted like those larks, and dressed for presto's supper." this version, assuming its truth, aggravates the personal rudeness of the speech. but her marginal notes on the passage are: "boswell appealing to baretti for a testimony of the truth is comical enough! i never addressed him (johnson) so familiarly in my life. i never did eat any supper, and there were no larks to eat." "upon mentioning this story to my friend mr. wilkes," adds boswell, "he pleasantly matched it with the following sentimental anecdote. he was invited by a young man of fashion at paris to sup with him and a lady who had been for some time his mistress, but with whom he was going to part. he said to mr. wilkes that he really felt very much for her, she was in such distress, and that he meant to make her a present of louis d'ors. mr. wilkes observed the behaviour of mademoiselle, who sighed indeed very piteously, and assumed every pathetic air of grief, but ate no less than three french pigeons, which are as large as english partridges, besides other things. mr. wilkes whispered the gentleman, 'we often say in england, "excessive sorrow is exceeding dry," but i never heard "excessive sorrow is exceeding hungry." perhaps one hundred will do. the gentleman took the hint." mrs. piozzi's marginal ebullition is: "very like my hearty supper of larks, who never eat supper at all, nor was ever a hot dish seen on the table after dinner at streatham park." two instances of inaccuracy, announced as particularly worthy of notice, are supplied by "an eminent critic," understood to be malone, who begins by stating, "i have often been in his (johnson's) company, and never _once_ heard him say a severe thing to any one; and many others can attest the same." malone had lived very little with johnson, and to appreciate his evidence, we should know what he and boswell would agree to call a severe thing. once, on johnson's observing that they had "good talk" on the "preceding evening," "yes, sir," replied boswell, "you tossed and gored several persons." do tossing and goring come within the definition of severity? in another place he says, "i have seen even mrs. thrale stunned;" and miss reynolds relates that "one day at her own table he spoke so very roughly to her, that every one present was surprised that she could bear it so placidly; and on the ladies withdrawing, i expressed great astonishment that dr. johnson should speak so harshly to her, but to this she said no more than 'oh, dear, good man.'" one of the two instances of mrs. piozzi's inaccuracy is as follows:--"he once bade a very celebrated lady (hannah more) who praised him with too much zeal perhaps, or perhaps too strong an emphasis (which always offended him) consider what her flattery was worth before she choaked _him_ with it." now, exclaims mr. malone, let the genuine anecdote be contrasted with this: "the person thus represented as being harshly treated, though a very celebrated lady, was _then_ just come to london from an obscure situation in the country. at sir joshua reynolds's one evening, she met dr. johnson. she very soon began to pay her court to him in the most fulsome strain. 'spare me, i beseech you, dear madam,' was his reply. she still _laid it on_. 'pray, madam, let us have no more of this,' he rejoined. not paying any attention to these warnings, she continued still her eulogy. at length, provoked by this indelicate and _vain_ obtrusion of compliments, he exclaimed, 'dearest lady, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely.' "how different does this story appear, when accompanied with all those circumstances which really belong to it, but which mrs. thrale either did not know, or has suppressed!" how do we know that these circumstances really belong to it? what essential difference do they make? and how do they prove mrs. thrale's inaccuracy, who expressly states the nature of the probable, though certainly most inadequate, provocation. the other instance is a story which she tells on mr. thrale's authority, of an argument between johnson and a gentleman, which the master of the house, a nobleman, tried to cut short by saying loud enough for the doctor to hear, "our friend has no meaning in all this, except just to relate at the club to-morrow how he teased johnson at dinner to-day; this is all to do himself honour." "no, upon my word," replied the other, "i see no honour in it, whatever you may do." "well, sir," returned mr. johnson sternly, "if you do not see the honour, i am sure i feel the disgrace." malone, on the authority of a nameless friend, asserts that it was not at the house of a nobleman, that the gentleman's remark was uttered in a low tone, and that johnson made no retort at all. as mrs. piozzi could hardly have invented the story, the sole question is, whether mr. thrale or malone's friend was right. she has written in the margin: "it was the house of thomas fitzmaurice, son to lord shelburne, and pottinger the hero."[ ] "mrs. piozzi," says boswell, "has given a similar misrepresentation of johnson's treatment of garrick in this particular (as to the club), as if he had used these contemptuous expressions: 'if garrick does apply, i'll blackball him. surely one ought to sit in a society like ours-- "'unelbow'd by a gamester, pimp, or player.'" the lady retorts, "he did say so, and mr. thrale stood astonished." johnson was constantly depreciating the profession of the stage.[ ] [footnote : "being in company with count z----, at lord ----'s table, the count thinking the doctor too dogmatical, observed, he did not at all think himself honoured by the conversation.' and what is to become of me, my lord, who feel myself actually disgraced?"--_johnsoniana_, p. , first edition.] [footnote : "_boswell_. there, sir, you are always heretical, you never will allow merit to a player. _johnson_. merit, sir, what merit? do you respect a rope-dancer or a ballad-singer?"--_boswell's life of johnson_, p. .] whilst finding fault with mrs. piozzi for inaccuracy in another place, boswell supplies an additional example of johnson's habitual disregard of the ordinary rules of good breeding in society:-- "a learned gentleman [dr. vansittart], who, in the course of conversation, wished to inform us of this simple fact, that the council upon the circuit of shrewsbury were much bitten by fleas, took, i suppose, seven or eight minutes in relating it circumstantially. he in a plenitude of phrase told us, that large bales of woollen cloth were lodged in the town-hall; that by reason of this, fleas nestled there in prodigious numbers; that the lodgings of the council were near the town-hall; and that those little animals moved from place to place with wonderful agility. johnson sat in great impatience till the gentleman had finished his tedious narrative, and then burst out (playfully however), 'it is a pity, sir, that you have not seen a lion; for a flea has taken you such a time, that a lion must have served you a twelve-month.'" he complains in a note that mrs. piozzi, to whom he told the anecdote, has related it "as if the gentleman had given the natural history of the mouse." but, in a letter to johnson she tells _him_ "i have seen the man that saw the mouse," and he replies "poor v----, he is a good man, &c.;" so that her version of the story is the best authenticated. opposite boswell's aggressive paragraph she has written: "i saw old mitchell of brighthelmstone affront him (johnson) terribly once about fleas. johnson, being tired of the subject, expressed his impatience of it with coarseness. 'why, sir,' said the old man, 'why should not flea bite o'me be treated as phlebotomy? it empties the capillary vessels.'" boswell's life of johnson was not published till ; but the controversy kindled by the tour to the hebrides and the anecdotes, raged fiercely enough to fix general attention and afford ample scope for ridicule: "the bozzi &c. subjects," writes hannah more in april , "are not exhausted, though everybody seems heartily sick of them. everybody, however, conspires not to let them drop. _that_, the cagliostro, and the cardinal's necklace, spoil all conversation, and destroyed a very good evening at mr. pepys' last night." in one of walpole's letters about the same time we find: "all conversation turns on a trio of culprits--hastings, fitzgerald, and the cardinal de rohan.... so much for tragedy. our comic performers are boswell and dame piozzi. the cock biographer has fixed a direct lie on the hen, by an advertisement in which he affirms that he communicated his manuscript to madame thrale, and that she made no objection to what he says of her low opinion of mrs. montagu's book. it is very possible that it might not be her real opinion, but was uttered in compliment to johnson, or for fear he should spit in her face if she disagreed with him; but how will she get over her not objecting to the passage remaining? she must have known, by knowing boswell, and by having a similar intention herself, that his 'anecdotes' would certainly be published: in short, the ridiculous woman will be strangely disappointed. as she must have heard that _the whole first impression of her book was sold the first day_, no doubt she expected on her landing, to be received like the governor of gibraltar, and to find the road strewed with branches of palm. she, and boswell, and their hero, are the joke of the public. a dr. walcot, _soi-disant_ peter pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue, in which boswell and the signora are the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed. the print-shops teem with satiric prints in them: one in which boswell, as a monkey, is riding on johnson, the bear, has this witty inscription, 'my friend _delineavit_.' but enough of these mountebanks." what walpole calls the absurdest passages are precisely those which possess most interest for posterity; namely, the minute personal details, which bring johnson home to the mind's eye. peter pindar, however, was simply labouring in his vocation when he made the best of them, as in the following lines. his satire is in the form of a town eclogue, in which bozzy and madame piozzi contend in anecdotes, with hawkins for umpire: bozzy. "one thursday morn did doctor johnson wake, and call out 'lanky, lanky,' by mistake-- but recollecting--'bozzy, bozzy,' cry'd-- for in _contractions_ johnson took a pride!" madame piozzi. "i ask'd him if he knock'd tom osborn down; as such a tale was current through the town,-- says i, 'do tell me, doctor, what befell.'-- 'why, dearest lady, there is nought to _tell_; 'i ponder'd on the _proper'st_ mode to _treat_ him-- 'the dog was impudent, and so i beat him! 'tom, like a fool, proclaim'd his fancied wrongs; '_others_, that i belabour'd, held their tongues.'" "did any one, that he was _happy_, cry-- johnson would tell him plumply, 'twas a lie. a lady told him she was really so; on which he sternly answer'd, 'madam, no! 'sickly you are, and ugly--foolish, poor; 'and therefore can't he happy, i am sure. ''twould make a fellow hang himself, whose ear 'were, from such creatures, forc'd such stuff to hear.'" bozzy. "lo, when we landed on the isle of mull, the megrims got into the doctor's skull: with such bad humours he began to fill, i thought he would not go to icolmkill: but lo! those megrims (wonderful to utter!) were banish'd all by tea and bread and butter!" at last they get angry, and tell each other a few home truths:-- bozzy. "how could your folly tell, so void of truth, that miserable story of the youth, who, in your book, of doctor johnson begs most seriously to know if cats laid eggs!" madame piozzi. "_who_ told of mistress montagu the lie-- so palpable a falsehood?--bozzy, fie!" bozzy. "_who_, madd'ning with an anecdotic itch, declar'd that johnson call'd his mother _b-tch?_" madame piozzi. "_who_, from m'donald's rage to save his snout, cut twenty lines of defamation out?" bozzy. "_who_ would have said a word about sam's wig, or told the story of the peas and pig? who would have told a tale so very flat, of frank the black, and hodge the mangy cat?" madame piozzi. "good me! you're grown at once confounded _tender_; of doctor johnson's fame a _fierce_ defender: i'm sure you've mention'd many a pretty story not much redounding to the doctor's glory. _now_ for a _saint_ upon us you would palm him-- first _murder_ the poor man, and then _embalm him!_" bozzy. "well, ma'am! since all that johnson said or wrote, you hold so sacred, how have you forgot to grant the wonder-hunting world a reading of sam's epistle, just before your _wedding_: beginning thus, (in strains not form'd to flatter) 'madam, '_if that most ignominious matter 'be not concluded_'--[ ] farther shall i say? no--we shall have it from _yourself_ some day, to justify your passion for the _youth_, with all the charms of eloquence and truth." madame piozzi. "what was my marriage, sir, to _you_ or _him?_ _he_ tell me what to do!--a pretty whim! _he_, to _propriety_, (the beast) _resort!_ as well might _elephants preside_ at _court_. lord! let the world to _damn_ my match _agree;_ good god! james boswell, what's _that world_ to _me?_ the folks who paid respects to mistress thrale, fed on her pork, poor souls! and swill'd her ale, may _sicken_ at piozzi, nine in ten-- turn up the nose of scorn--good god! what then? for _me_, the dev'l may fetch their souls so _great_; _they_ keep their homes, and _i_, thank god, my meat. when they, poor owls! shall beat their cage, a jail, i, unconfin'd, shall spread my peacock tail; free as the birds of air, enjoy my ease, choose my own food, and see what climes i please. _i_ suffer only--if i'm in the wrong: so, now, you prating puppy, hold your tongue." [footnote : this evidently referred to the "adumbration" of johnson's letter (no. ), _antè_, p. .] walpole's opinion of the book itself had been expressed in a preceding letter, dated march th, : "two days ago appeared madame piozzi's anecdotes of dr. johnson. i am lamentably disappointed--in her, i mean: not in him. i had conceived a favourable opinion of her capacity. but this new book is wretched; a high-varnished preface to a heap of rubbish in a very vulgar style, and too void of method even for such a farrago. . . the signora talks of her doctor's _expanded_ mind and has contributed her mite to show that never mind was narrower. in fact, the poor woman is to be pitied: he was mad, and his disciples did not find it out[ ], but have unveiled all his defects; nay, have exhibited all his brutalities as wit, and his worst conundrums as humour. judge! the piozzi relates that a young man asking him where palmyra was, he replied: 'in ireland: it was a bog planted with palm trees.'" [footnote : see _antè_, p. and .] walpole's statement, that the whole first impression was sold the first day, is confirmed by one of her letters, and may be placed alongside of a statement of johnson's reported in the book. clarissa being mentioned as a perfect character, "on the contrary (said he) you may observe that there is always something which she prefers to truth. fielding's amelia was the most pleasing heroine of all the romances; but that vile broken nose never cured, ruined the sale of perhaps the only book, which, being printed off betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night." when the king sent for a copy of the "anecdotes" on the evening of the publication, there was none to be had. in april, , hannah more writes: "mrs. piozzi's book is much in fashion. it is indeed entertaining, but there are two or three passages exceedingly unkind to garrick which filled me with indignation. if johnson had been envious enough to utter them, she might have been prudent enough to suppress them." in a preceding letter she had said: "boswell tells me he is printing anecdotes of dr. johnson, not his _life_, but, as he has the vanity to call it, his _pyramid_, i besought his tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. he said roughly, he would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody." the retort will serve for both mrs. piozzi and himself. mrs. piozzi writes from venice, may th, : "cadell says he never yet published a work the sale of which was so rapid, and that rapidity of so long continuance. i suppose the fifth edition will meet me at my return." "milan, july th, . "if cadell would send me some copies, i should be very much obliged to him. _'tis like living without a looking-glass never to see one's own book so_." the copy of the "anecdotes" in my possession has two inscriptions on the blank leaves before the title-page. the one is in mrs. piozzi's handwriting: "this little dirty book is kindly accepted by sir james fellowes from his obliged friend, h.l. piozzi, th february, ;" the other: "this copy of the 'anecdotes' was found at bath, covered with dirt, the book having been long out of print[ ], and after being bound was presented to me by my excellent friend, h.l.p. (signed) j.f." [footnote : the "anecdotes" were reprinted by messrs. longman in , and form part of their "traveller's library."] it is enriched by marginal notes in her handwriting, which enable us to fill up a few puzzling blanks, besides supplying some information respecting men and books, which will be prized by all lovers of literature. one of the anecdotes runs thus: "i asked him once concerning the conversation powers of a gentleman with whom i was myself unacquainted. 'he talked to me at the club one day (replies our doctor) concerning catiline's conspiracy; so i withdrew my attention, and thought about tom thumb.'" in the margin is written "charles james fox." mr. croker came to the conclusion that the gentleman was mr. vesey. boswell says that fox never talked with any freedom in the presence of johnson, who accounted for his reserve by suggesting that a man who is used to the applause of the house of commons, has no wish for that of a private company. but the real cause was his sensitiveness to rudeness, his own temper being singularly sweet. by an odd coincidence he occupied the presidential chair at the club on the evening when johnson emphatically declared patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel. again: "on an occasion of less consequence, when he turned his back on lord bolingbroke in the rooms of brighthelmstone, he made this excuse: 'i am not obliged, sir,' said he to mr. thrale, who stood fretting, 'to find reasons for respecting the rank of him who will not condescend to declare it by his dress or some other visible mark: what are stars and other signs of superiority made for?' the next evening, however, he made us comical amends, by sitting by the same nobleman, and haranguing very loudly about the nature, and use, and abuse, of divorces. many people gathered round them to hear what was said, and when my husband called him away, and told him to whom he had been talking, received an answer which i will not write down." the marginal note is: "he said: 'why, sir, i did not know the man. if he will put on no other mark of distinction, let us make him wear his horns.'" lord bolingbroke had divorced his wife, afterwards lady diana beauclerc, for infidelity. a marginal note naming the lady of quality (lady catherine wynne) mentioned in the following anecdote, verifies mr. croker's conjectural statement concerning her: "for a lady of quality, since dead, who received us at her husband's seat in wales, with less attention than he had long been accustomed to, he had a rougher denunciation: 'that woman,' cries johnson, 'is like sour small beer, the beverage of her table, and produce of the wretched country she lives in: like that, she could never have been a good thing, and even that bad thing is spoiled.' it was in the same vein of asperity, and i believe with something like the same provocation, that he observed of a scotch lady, 'that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive,' said he, 'she would sting.'" from similar notes we learn that the "somebody" who declared johnson "a tremendous converser" was george grarrick; and that it was dr. delap, of sussex, to whom, when lamenting the tender state of his _inside_, he cried out: "dear doctor, do not be like the spider, man, and spin conversation thus incessantly out of thy own bowels." on the margin of the page in which hawkins browne is commended as the most delightful of conversers, she has written: "who wrote the 'imitation of all the poets' in his own ludicrous verses, praising the pipe of tobacco. of hawkins browne, the pretty mrs. cholmondeley said she was soon tired; because the first hour he was so dull, there was no bearing him; the second he was so witty, there was no bearing him; the third he was so drunk, there was no bearing him." [ ] [footnote : query, whether this is the gentleman immortalised by peter plymley: "in the third year of his present majesty (george iii.) and in the thirtieth of his own age, mr. isaac hawkins brown, then upon his travels, danced one evening at the court of naples. his dress was a volcano silk, with lava buttons. whether (as the neapolitan wits said) he had studied dancing under saint vitus, or whether david, dancing in a linen vest, was his model, is not known; but mr. brown danced with such inconceivable alacrity and vigour, that he threw the queen of naples into convulsions of laughter, which terminated in a miscarriage, and changed the dynasty of the neapolitan throne."] in the "anecdotes" she relates that one day in wales she meant to please johnson with a dish of young peas. "are they not charming?" said i, while he was eating them. "perhaps," said he, "they would be so--to a pig;" meaning (according to the marginal note), because they were too little boiled. pennant, the historian, used to tell this as having happened at mrs. cotton's, who, according to him, called out, "then do help yourself, mr. johnson." but the well-known high breeding of the lady justifies a belief that this is one of the many repartees which, if conceived, were never uttered at the time.[ ] [footnote : i have heard on good authority that pennant afterwards owned it as his own invention.] when a lincolnshire lady, shewing johnson a grotto, asked him: "would it not be a pretty cool habitation in summer?" he replied: "i think it would, madam, _for a toad_." talking of gray's odes, he said, "they are forced plants, raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants: they are but cucumbers after all." a gentleman present, who had been running down ode-writing in general, as a bad species of poetry, unluckily said, "had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than odes." "yes, sir," said johnson, "_for a hog_." to return to the anecdotes: "of the various states and conditions of humanity, he despised none more, i think, than the man who marries for maintenance: and of a friend who made his alliance on no higher principles, he said once, 'now has that fellow,' it was a nobleman of whom we were speaking, 'at length obtained a certainty of three meals a day, and for that certainty, like his brother dog in the fable, he will get his neck galled for life with a collar.'" the nobleman was lord sandys. "he recommended, on something like the same principle, that when one person meant to serve another, he should not go about it slily, or, as we say, underhand, out of a false idea of delicacy, to surprise one's friend with an unexpected favour; 'which, ten to one,' says he, 'fails to oblige your acquaintance, who had some reasons against such a mode of obligation, which you might have known but for that superfluous cunning which you think an elegance. oh! never be seduced by such silly pretences,' continued he; 'if a wench wants a good gown, do not give her a fine smelling-bottle, because that is more delicate: as i once knew a lady lend the key of her library to a poor scribbling dependant, as if she took the woman for an ostrich that could digest iron.'" this lady was mrs. montagu. "i mentioned two friends who were particularly fond of looking at themselves in a glass--'they do not surprise me at all by so doing,' said johnson: 'they see reflected in that glass, men who have risen from almost the lowest situations in life; one to enormous riches, the other to everything this world can give--rank, fame, and fortune. they see, likewise, men who have merited their advancement by the exertion and improvement of those talents which god had given them; and i see not why they should avoid the mirror.'" the one, she writes, was mr. cator, the other, wedderburne. another great lawyer and very ugly man, dunning, lord ashburton, was remarkable for the same peculiarity, and had his walls covered with looking-glasses. his personal vanity was excessive; and his boast that a celebrated courtesan had died with one of his letters in her hand, provoked one of wilkes's happiest repartees. opposite a passage descriptive of johnson's conversation she has written: "we used to say to one another familiarly at streatham park, 'come, let us go into the library, and make johnson speak ramblers.'" dr. lort writes to bishop percy: "december th, . "i had a letter lately from mrs. piozzi, dated vienna, november , in which she says that, after visiting prague and dresden, she shall return home by brussels, whither i have written to her; and i imagine she will be in london early in the new year. miss thrale is at her own house at brighthelmstone, accompanied by a very respectable companion, an officer's widow, recommended to her as such.[ ] there is a new life of johnson published by a dr. towers, a dissenting minister and dr. kippis's associate in the biographia britannica, for which work i take it for granted this life is to be hashed up again when the letter 'j' takes its turn. there is nothing new in it; and the author gives johnson and his biographers all fair play, except when he treats of his political opinions and pamphlets. i was glad to hear that johnson confessed to dr. fordyce, a little before his death, that he had offended both god and man by his pride of understanding.[ ] sir john hawkins' life of him is also finished, and will be published with the works in february next. from all these i suppose boswell will borrow largely to make up his quarto life;--and so our modern authors proceed, preying on one another, and complaining sorely of each other." [footnote : the hon. mrs. murray, afterwards mrs. aust!] [footnote : he used very different language to langton.] "march th, . "i had a letter lately from mrs. piozzi from brussels, intimating that she should soon be in england, and i expect every day to hear of her arrival. i do not believe that she purchased a marquisate abroad; but it is said, with some probability, that she will here get the king's license, or an act of parliament, to change her name to salusbury, her maiden name. sir john hawkins, i am told, bears hard upon her in his 'life of johnson.'" "march st, . "mr. and mrs. piozzi are arrived at an hotel in pall mall, and are about to take a house in hanover square; they were with me last saturday evening, when i asked some of her friends to meet her; she looks very well, and seems in good spirits; told me she had been that morning at the bank to get 'johnson's correspondence' amongst other papers, which she means forthwith to commit to the press. there is a bookseller has printed two supplementary volumes to hawkins' eleven, consisting almost wholly of the 'lilliputian speeches.' hawkins has printed a review of the 'sublime and beautiful' as johnson's, which murphy says was his." "march th, . "mrs. piozzi and her _caro sposo_ seem very happy here at a good house in hanover square, where i am invited to a rout next week, the first i believe she has attempted, and then will be seen who of her old acquaintance continue such. she is now printing johnson's letters in vols. octavo, with some of her own; but if they are not ready before the recess they will not be published till next winter. poor sir john hawkins, i am told, is pulled all to pieces in the review." sir john was treated according to his deserts, and did not escape whipping. one of the severest castigations was inflicted by porson. before mentioning her next publication, i will show from "thraliana" her state of mind when about to start for england, and her impressions of things and people on her return: " .--it has always been my maxim never to influence the inclination of another: mr. thrale, in consequence, lived with me seventeen and a half years, during which time i tried but twice to persuade him to _do_ anything, and but once, and that in vain, to let anything alone. even my daughters, as soon as they could reason, were always allowed, and even encouraged, by me to reason their own way, and not suffer their respect or affection for me to mislead their judgment. let us keep the mind clear if we can from prejudices, or truth will never be found at all.[ ] the worst part of this disinterested scheme is, that other people are not of my mind, and if i resolve not to use my lawful influence to make my children love me, the lookers-on will soon use their unlawful influence to make them hate me: if i scrupulously avoid persuading my husband to become a lutheran or be of the english church, the romanists will be diligent to teach him all the narrowness and bitterness of their own unfeeling sect, and soon persuade him that it is not delicacy but weakness makes me desist from the combat. well! let me do right, and leave the consequences in his hand who alone sees every action's motive and the true cause of every effect: let me endeavour to please god, and to have only my own faults and follies, not those of another, to answer for." [footnote : "clear your mind of _cant_."--johnson.] " , _may_ _st_.--it was not wrong to come home after all, but very right. the italians would have said we were afraid to face england, and the english would have said we were confined abroad in prisons or convents or some stuff. i find mr. smith (one of our daughter's guardians) told that poor baby cecilia a fine staring tale how my husband locked me up at milan and fed me on bread and water, to make the child hate mr. piozzi. good god! what infamous proceeding was this! my husband never saw the fellow, so could not have provoked him." "_may_ _th_.--we bad a fine assembly last night indeed: in my best days i never had finer: there were near a hundred people in the rooms which were besides much admired." " , _january_ _st_.--how little i thought this day four years that i should celebrate this st of january, , here at bath, surrounded with friends and admirers? the public partial to _me_, and almost every individual whose kindness is worth wishing for, sincerely attached to my husband." "mrs. byron is converted by piozzi's assiduity, she really likes him now: and sweet mrs. lambert told everybody at bath she was in love with him." "i have passed a delightful winter in spite of them, caressed by my friends, adored by my husband, amused with every entertainment that is going forward: what need i think about three sullen misses? ... and yet!"---- "_august_ _st_--baretti has been grossly abusive in the 'european magazine' to me: _that_ hurts me but little; what shocks me is that those treacherous burneys should abet and puff him. he is a most ungrateful because unprincipled wretch; but i _am_ sorry that anything belonging to dr. burney should be so monstrously wicked." " , _january_ _th_.--mrs. siddons dined in a coterie of my unprovoked enemies yesterday at porteous's. she mentioned our concerts, and the erskines lamented their absence from one we gave two days ago, at which mrs. garrick was present and gave a good report to the _blues_. charming blues! blue with venom i think; i suppose they begin to be ashamed of their paltry behaviour. mrs. grarrick, more prudent than any of them, left a loophole for returning friendship to fasten through, and it _shall_ fasten: that woman has lived a _very wise life_, regular and steady in her conduct, attentive to every word she speaks and every step she treads, decorous in her manners and graceful in her person. my fancy forms the queen just like mrs. grarrick: they are countrywomen and have, as the phrase is, had a hard card to play; yet never lurched by tricksters nor subdued by superior powers, they will rise from the table unhurt either by others or themselves ... having played a _saving game. i_ have run risques to be sure, that i have; yet-- "'when after some distinguished leap she drops her pole and seems to slip, straight gath'ring all her active strength, she rises higher half her length;' and better than _now_ i have never stood with the world in general, i believe. may the books just sent to press confirm the partiality of the public!" " , _january_.--i have a great deal more prudence than people suspect me for: they think i act by chance while i am doing nothing in the world unintentionally, and have never, i dare say, in these last fifteen years uttered a word to husband, or child, or servant, or friend, without being very careful what it should be. often have i spoken what i have repented after, but that was want of _judgment_, not of _meaning_. what i said i meant to say at the time, and thought it best to say, ... i do not err from haste or a spirit of rattling, as people think i do: when i err, 'tis because i make a false conclusion, not because i make no conclusion at all; when i rattle, i rattle on purpose." " , _may_ _st_.--mrs. montagu wants to make up with me again. i dare say she does; but i will not be taken and left even at the pleasure of those who are much nearer and dearer to me than mrs. montagu. we want no flash, no flattery. i never had more of either in my life, nor ever lived half so happily: mrs. montagu wrote creeping letters when she wanted my help, or foolishly _thought_ she did, and then turned her back upon me and set her adherents to do the same. i despise such conduct, and mr. pepys, mrs. ord, &c. now sneak about and look ashamed of themselves--well they may!" " , _march_ _th_.--i met miss burney at an assembly last night--'tis six years since i had seen her: she appeared most fondly rejoyced, in good time! and mrs. locke, at whose house we stumbled on each other, pretended that she had such a regard for me, &c. i answered with ease and coldness, but in exceeding good humour: and we talked of the king and queen, his majesty's illness and recovery ... and all ended, as it should do, with perfect indifference." "i saw _master pepys_[ ] too and mrs. ord; and only see how foolish and how mortified the people do but look." [footnote : this is sir w. pepys mentioned _antè_, p. .] "barclay and perkins live very genteelly. i dined with them at our brewhouse one day last week. i felt so oddly in the old house where i had lived so long." "the pepyses find out that they have used me very ill.... i hope they find out too that i do not care, seward too sues for reconcilement underhand ... so they do all; and i sincerely forgive them--but, like the linnet in 'metastasio'-- "'cauto divien per prova nè più tradir si fà.' "'when lim'd, the poor bird thus with eagerness strains, nor regrets his torn wing while his freedom he gains: the loss of his plumage small time will restore, and once tried the false twig--it shall cheat him no more.'" " , _july_ _th_.--we have kept our seventh wedding day and celebrated our return to _this house_[ ] with prodigious splendour and gaiety. seventy people to dinner.... never was a pleasanter day seen, and at night the trees and front of the house were illuminated with coloured lamps that called forth our neighbours from all the adjacent villages to admire and enjoy the diversion. many friends swear that not less than a thousand men, women, and children might have been counted in the house and grounds, where, though all were admitted, nothing was stolen, lost, or broken, or even damaged--a circumstance almost incredible; and which gave mr. piozzi a high opinion of english gratitude and respectful attachment." [footnote : streatham.] " , _december st_.--dr. parr and i are in correspondence, and his letters are very flattering: i am proud of his notice to be sure, and he seems pleased with my acknowledgments of esteem: he is a prodigious scholar ... but in the meantime i have lost dr. lort."[ ] [footnote : he died november th, .] in the conway notes, she thus sums up her life from march to : "on first reaching london, we drove to the royal hotel in pall mall, and, arriving early, i proposed going to the play. there was a small front box, in those days, which held only two; it made the division, or connexion, with the side boxes, and, being unoccupied, we sat in it, and saw mrs. siddons act imogen, i well remember, and mrs. jordan, priscilla tomboy. mr. piozzi was amused, and the next day was spent in looking at houses, counting the cards left by old acquaintances, &c. the lady-daughters came, behaved with cold civility, and asked what i thought of _their_ decision concerning cecilia, then at school. no reply was made, or a gentle one; but she was the first cause of contention among us. the lawyers gave her into my care, and we took her home to our new habitation in hanover square, which we opened with music, cards, &c., on, i think, the nd march. miss thrales refused their company; so we managed as well as we could. our affairs were in good order, and money ready for spending. the world, as it is called, appeared good-humoured, and we were soon followed, respected, and admired. the summer months sent us about visiting and pleasuring, ... and after another gay london season, streatham park, unoccupied by tenants, called us as if _really home_. mr. piozzi, with more generosity than prudence, spent two thousand pounds on repairing and furnishing it in ;--and we had danced all night, i recollect, when the news came of louis seize's escape from, and recapture by, his rebel subjects.'" the following are some of the names most frequently mentioned in her diary as visiting or corresponding with her after her return from italy: lord fife, dr. moore, the kembles, dr. currie, mrs. lewis (widow of the dean of ossory), dr. lort, sir lucas pepys, mr. selwin, sammy lysons (_sic_), sir philip clerke, hon. mrs. byron, mrs. siddons, arthur murphy, mr. and mrs. whalley, the greatheads, mr. parsons, miss seward, miss lee, dr. barnard (bishop of killaloe, better known as dean of derry), hinchcliffe (bishop of peterborough), mrs. lambert, the staffords, lord huntingdon, lady betty cobb and her daughter mrs. gould, lord dudley, lord cowper, lord pembroke, marquis araciel, count marteningo, count meltze, mrs. drummond smith, mr. chappelow, mrs. hobart, miss nicholson, mrs. locke, lord deerhurst. resentment for her imputed unkindness to johnson might have been expected to last longest at his birthplace. but miss seward writes from lichfield, october th, : "mrs. piozzi completely answers your description: her conversation is indeed that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees.... i shall always feel indebted to him (mr. perkins) for eight or nine hours of mr. and mrs. piozzi's society. they passed one evening here, and i the next with them at their inn." again to miss helen williams, lichfield, december, th, : "yes, it is very true, on the evening he (colonel barry) mentioned to you, when mrs. piozzi honoured this roof, his conversation greatly contributed to its attic spirit. till that day i had never conversed with her. there has been no exaggeration, there could be none, in the description given you of mrs. piozzi's talents for conversation; at least in the powers of classic allusion and brilliant wit." mrs. piozzi's next publication was "letters to and from the late samuel johnson, ll.d., &c." in the preface she speaks of the "anecdotes" having been received with a degree of approbation she hardly dared to hope, and exclaims, "may these letters in some measure pay my debt of gratitude! they will not surely be the _first_, the _only_ thing written by johnson, with which our nation has not been pleased." ... "the good taste by which our countrymen are distinguished, will lead them to prefer the native thoughts and unstudied phrases scattered over these pages to the more laboured elegance of his other works; as bees have been observed to reject roses, and fix upon the wild fragrance of a neighbouring heath." whenever johnson took pen in hand, the chances were, that what he produced would belong to the composite order; the unstudied phrases were reserved for his "talk;" and he wished his letters to be preserved.[ ] the main value of these consists in the additional illustrations they afford of his conduct in private life, and of his opinions on the management of domestic affairs. the lack of literary and public interest is admitted and excused: [footnote : "do you keep my letters? i am not of your opinion that i shall not like to read them hereafter."--_letters_, vol. i. p. .] "none but domestic and familiar events can be expected from a private correspondence; no reflexions but such as they excite can be found there; yet whoever turns away disgusted by the insipidity with which this, and i suppose every correspondence must naturally and almost necessarily begin--will here be likely to lose some genuine pleasure, and some useful knowledge of what our heroic milton was himself contented to respect, as "'that which before thee lies in daily life.' "and should i be charged with obtruding trifles on the public, i might reply, that the meanest animals preserved in amber become of value to those who form collections of natural history; that the fish found in monte bolca serve as proofs of sacred writ; and that the cart-wheel stuck in the rock of tivoli, is now found useful in computing the rotation of the earth." in "thraliana" she thus refers to the reception of the book: "the letters are out. they were published on saturday, th of march. cadell printed , copies, and says , are already sold. my letter to jack rice on his marriage (vol. i. p. ), seems the universal favourite. the book is well spoken of on the whole; yet cadell murmurs. i cannot make out why." this entry is not dated; the next is dated march th, . "this collection," says boswell, "as a proof of the high estimation set on any thing that came from his pen, was sold by that lady for the sum of _l_." she has written on the margin: "how spiteful." boswell states that "horace walpole thought johnson a more amiable character after reading his letters to mrs. thrale, but never was one of the true admirers of that great man." madame d'arblay came to an opposite conclusion; in her diary, january th, , she writes: "to-day mrs. schwellenberg did me a real favour, and with real good nature, for she sent me the letters of my poor lost friends, dr. johnson and mrs. thrale, which she knew me to be almost pining to procure. the book belongs to the bishop of carlisle, who lent it to mr. turbulent, from whom it was again lent to the queen, and so passed on to mrs. s. it is still unpublished. with what a sadness have i been reading! what scenes has it revived! what regrets renewed! these letters have not been more improperly published in the whole than they are injudiciously displayed in their several parts. she has given all, every word, and thinks that perhaps a justice to dr. johnson, which, in fact, is the greatest injury to his memory. "the few she has selected of her own do her, indeed, much credit; she has discarded all that were trivial and merely local, and given only such as contain something instructive, amusing, or ingenious." she admits only four of johnson's letters to be worthy of his exalted powers: one upon death, in considering its approach, as we are surrounded, or not, by mourners; another upon the sudden death of mrs. thrale's only son. her chief motive for "almost pining" for the book, steeped as she was in egotism, may be guessed: "our name once occurred; how i started at its sight! 'tis to mention the party that planned the first visit to our house." she says she had so many attacks upon "her (mrs. piozzi's) subject," that at last she fairly begged quarter. yet nothing she could say could put a stop to, "how can you defend her in this? how can you justify her in that? &c. &c." "alas! that i cannot defend her is precisely the reason i can so ill bear to speak of her. how differently and how sweetly has the queen conducted herself upon this occasion. eager to see the letters, she began reading them with the utmost avidity. a natural curiosity arose to be informed of several names and several particulars, which she knew i could satisfy; yet when she perceived how tender a string she touched, she soon suppressed her inquiries, or only made them with so much gentleness towards the parties mentioned, that i could not be distressed in my answers; and even in a short time i found her questions made in so favourable a disposition, that i began secretly to rejoice in them, as the means by which i reaped opportunity of clearing several points that had been darkened by calumny, and of softening others that had been viewed wholly through false lights. to lessen disapprobation of a person, and so precious to me in the opinion of another, so respectable both in rank and virtue, was to me a most soothing task, &c." this is precisely what many will take the liberty to doubt; or why did she shrink from it, or why did she not afford to others the explanations which proved so successful with the queen? the day following (jan. th), her feelings were so worked upon by the harsh aspersions on her friend, that she was forced, she tells us, abruptly to quit the room; leaving not her own (like sir peter teazle) but her friend's character behind her: "i returned when i could, and the subject was over. when all were gone, mrs. schwellenberg said, 'i have told it mr. fisher, that he drove you out from the room, and he says he won't do it no more.' "she told me next, that in the second volume i also, was mentioned. where she may have heard this i cannot gather, but it has given me a sickness at heart, inexpressible. it is not that i expect severity; for at the time of that correspondence, at all times indeed previous to the marriage with piozzi, if mrs. thrale loved not f. b., where shall we find faith in words, or give credit to actions. but her present resentment, however unjustly incurred, of my constant disapprobation of her conduct, may prompt some note, or other mark, to point out her change of sentiment. but let me try to avoid such painful expectations; at least not to dwell upon them. o, little does she know how tenderly at this moment i could run into her arms, so often opened to receive me with a cordiality i believed inalienable. and it was sincere then, i am satisfied; pride, resentment of disapprobation, and consciousness if unjustifiable proceedings--these have now changed her; but if we met, and she saw and believed my faithful regard, how would she again feel all her own return! well, what a dream i am making!" the ingrained worldliness of the diarist is ill-concealed by the mask of sensibility. the correspondence that passed between the ladies during their temporary rupture (_antè_, p. ) shews that there was nothing to prevent her from flying into her friend's arms, could she have made up her mind to be seen on open terms of affectionate intimacy with one who was repudiated by the court. in a subsequent conversation with which the queen honoured her on the subject, she did her best to impress her majesty with the belief that mrs. piozzi's conduct had rendered it impossible for her former friends to allude to her without regret, and she ended by thanking her royal mistress for her forbearance. "indeed," cried she, with eyes strongly expressive of the complacency with which she heard me, "i have always spoken as little as possible upon this affair. i remember but twice that i have named it: once i said to the bishop of carlisle that i thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to mr. langton, at the drawing-room i said, 'your friend dr. johnson, sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, and his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but i think he wanted one friend more.' 'what for, ma'am?' cried he. 'a friend to suppress them,' i answered. and, indeed, this is all i ever said about the business." hannah more's opinion of the letters is thus expressed in her memoirs: "they are such as ought to have been written but ought not to have been printed: a few of them are very good: sometimes he is moral, and sometimes he is kind. the imprudence of editors and executors is an additional reason why men of parts should be afraid to die.[ ] burke said to me the other day, in allusion to the innumerable lives, anecdotes, remains, &c. of this great man, 'how many maggots have crawled out of that great body!'" [footnote : in reference to the late lord campbell's "lives of the lord chancellors," it was remarked, that, as regards persons who had attained the dignity, the threatened continuation of the work had added a new pang to death. i am assured by the ex-chancellor to whom i attributed this joke, that it was made by sir charles wetherell at a dinner at lincoln's-inn.] miss seward writes to mrs. knowles, april, : "and now what say you to the last publication of your sister wit, mrs. piozzi? it is well that she has had the good nature to extract almost all the corrosive particles from the old growler's letters. by means of her benevolent chemistry, these effusions of that expansive but gloomy spirit taste more oily and sweet than one could have imagined possible." the letters contained two or three passages relating to baretti, which exasperated him to the highest pitch. one was in a letter from johnson, dated july th, : "the doctor says, that if mr. thrale comes so near as derby without seeing us, it will be a sorry trick. i wish, for my part, that he may return soon, and rescue the fair captives from the tyranny of b----i. poor b----i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient. he means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise. to be frank, he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent, is to be rude. forgive him, dearest lady, the rather, because of his misbehaviour, i am afraid he learned part of me. i hope to set him hereafter a better example." the most galling was in a letter of hers to dr. johnson: "how does dr. taylor do? he was very kind i remember when my thunder-storm came first on, so was count manucci, so was mrs. montagu, so was everybody. the world is not guilty of much general harshness, nor inclined i believe to increase pain which they do not perceive to be deserved.--baretti alone tried to irritate a wound so very deeply inflicted, and he will find few to approve his cruelty. your friendship is our best cordial; continue it to us, dear sir, and write very soon." in the margin of the printed copy is written, "cruel, cruel baretti." he had twitted her, whilst mourning over a dead child, with having killed it by administering a quack medicine instead of attending to the physician's prescriptions; a charge which he acknowledged and repeated in print. he published three successive papers in "the european magazine" for , assailing her with the coarsest ribaldry. "i have just read for the first time," writes miss seward in june, , "the base, ungentleman-like, unmanly abuse of mrs. piozzi by that italian assassin, baretti. the whole literary world should unite in publicly reprobating such venomed and foul-mouthed railing." he died soon afterwards, may th, , and the notice of him in the "gentleman's magazine" begins: "mrs. piozzi has reason to rejoice in the death of mr. baretti, for he had a very long memory and malice to relate all he knew." and a good deal that he did not know, into the bargain; as when he prints a pretended conversation between mr. and mrs. thrale about piozzi, which he afterwards admits to be a gratuitous invention and rhetorical figure of his own, for conveying what is a foolish falsehood on the face of it. baretti's death is thus noticed in "thraliana," th may, : "baretti is dead. poor baretti! i am sincerely sorry for him, and as zanga says, 'if i lament thee, sure thy worth was great.' he was a manly character, at worst, and died, as he lived, less like a christian than a philosopher, refusing all spiritual or corporeal assistance, both which he considered useless to him, and perhaps they were so. he paid his debts, called in some single acquaintance, told him he was dying, and drove away that _panada_ conversation which friends think proper to administer at sick-bedsides with becoming steadiness, bid him write his brothers word that he was dead, and gently desired a woman who waited to leave him quite alone. no interested attendants watching for ill-deserved legacies, no harpy relatives clung round the couch of baretti. he died! "'and art thou dead? so is my enmity: i war not with the dead.' "baretti's papers--manuscripts i mean--have been all burnt by his executors without examination, they tell me. so great was his character as a mischief-maker, that vincent and fendall saw no nearer way to safety than that hasty and compendious one. many people think 'tis a good thing for me, but as i never trusted the man, i see little harm he could have done me." in the fury of his onslaught baretti forgot that he was strengthening her case against johnson, of whom he says: "his austere reprimand, and unrestrained upbraidings, when face to face with her, always delighted mr. thrale and were approved even by her children. 'harry,' said his father to her son, 'are you listening to what the doctor and mamma are talking about?' 'yes, papa.' and quoth mr. thrale, 'what are they saying?' 'they are disputing, and mamma has just such a chance with dr. johnson as presto (a little dog) would have were he to fight dash (a big one).'" he adds that she left the room in a huff to the amusement of the party. if scenes like this were frequent, no wonder the "yoke" became unendurable. baretti was obliged to admit that, when johnson died, they were not on speaking terms. his explanation is that johnson irritated him by an allusion to his being beaten by omai, the sandwich islander, at chess. mrs. piozzi's marginal note on omai is: "when omai played at chess and at backgammon with baretti, everybody admired at the savage's good breeding and at the european's impatient spirit." amongst her papers was the following sketch of his character, written for "the world" newspaper. "_mr. conductor_.--let not the death of baretti pass unnoticed by 'the world,' seeing that baretti was a wit if not a scholar: and had for five-and-thirty years at least lived in a foreign country, whose language he so made himself completely master of, that he could satirise its inhabitants in their own tongue, better than they knew how to defend themselves; and often pleased, without ever praising man or woman in book or conversation. long supported by the private bounty of friends, he rather delighted to insult than flatter; he at length obtained competence from a public he esteemed not: and died, refusing that assistance he considered as useless--leaving no debts (but those of gratitude) undischarged; and expressing neither regret of the past, nor fear of the future, i believe. strong in his prejudices, haughty and independent in his spirit, cruel in his anger,--even when unprovoked; vindictive to excess, if he through misconception supposed himself even slightly injured, pertinacious in his attacks, invincible in his aversions: the description of menelaus in 'homer's iliad,' as rendered by pope, exactly suits the character of baretti: "'so burns the vengeful hornet, soul all o'er, repuls'd in vain, and thirsty still for gore; bold son of air and heat on angry wings, untamed, untired, he turns, attacks, and stings.'" in reference to this article, she remarks in "thraliana": "there seems to be a language now appropriated to the newspapers, and a very wretched and unmeaning language it is. yet a certain set of expressions are so necessary to please the diurnal readers, that when johnson and i drew up an advertisement for charity once, i remember the people altered our expressions and substituted their own, with good effect too. the other day i sent a character of baretti to 'the world,' and read it two mornings after more altered than improved in my mind: but no matter: they will talk of _wielding_ a language, and of _barbarous_ infamy,--sad stuff, to be sure, but such is the taste of the times. they altered even my quotation from pope; but that was too impudent." the comparison of baretti to the hornet was truer than she anticipated: _animamque in vulnere ponit_. internal evidence leads almost irresistibly to the conclusion that he was the author or prompter of "the _sentimental_ mother: a comedy in five acts. the legacy of an old friend, and his 'last moral lesson' to mrs. hester lynch thrale, now mrs. hester lynch piozzi. london: printed for james ridgeway, york street, st. james's square, . price three shillings." the principal _dramatis personæ_ are mr. timothy tunskull (thrale), lady fantasma tunskull, two misses tunskull, and signor squalici. lady fantasma is vain, affected, silly, and amorous to excess. not satisfied with squalici as her established gallant, she makes compromising advances to her daughter's lover on his way to a _tête-à-téte_ with the young lady, who takes her wonted place on his knee with his arm round her waist. squalici is also a domestic spy, and in league with the mother to cheat the daughters of their patrimony. mr. tunskull is a respectable and complacent nonentity. the dialogue is seasoned with the same malicious insinuations which mark baretti's letters in the "european magazine;" without the saving clause with which shame or fear induced him to qualify them, namely, that no breach of chastity was suspected or believed. it is difficult to imagine who else would have thought of reverting to thrale's establishment eight years after it had been broken up by death; and in one of his papers in the "european magazine," he holds out a threat that she might find herself the subject of a play: "who knows but some one of our modern dramatic geniusses may hereafter entertain the public with a laughable comedy in five long acts, entitled, with singular propriety, 'the _scientific_ mother'?" mrs. piozzi had some-how contracted a belief, to which she alludes more than once with unfeigned alarm, that mr. samuel lysons had formed a collection of all the libels and caricatures of which she was the subject on the occasion of her marriage. his collections have been carefully examined, and the sole semblance of warrant for her fears is an album or scrap-book containing numerous extracts from the reviews and newspapers, relating to her books. the only caricature preserved in it is the celebrated one by sayers entitled "johnson's ghost." the ghost, a flattering likeness of the doctor, addresses a pretty woman seated at a writing table: "when streatham spread its pleasant board, i opened learning's valued hoard, and as i feasted, prosed. good things i said, good things i eat, i gave you knowledge for your meat, and thought th' account was closed. "if obligations still i owed, you sold each item to the crowd, i suffered by the tale. for god's sake, madam, let me rest, no longer vex your _quondam_ guest, i'll pay you for your ale." when a prize was offered for the best address on the rebuilding of drury lane, sheridan proposed an additional reward for one without a phoenix. equally acceptable for its rarity would be a squib on mrs. piozzi without a reference to the brewery. her manuscript notes on the two volumes of letters are numerous and important, comprising some curious fragments of autobiography, written on separate sheets of paper and pasted into the volumes opposite to the passages which they expand or explain. they would create an inconvenient break in the narrative if introduced here, and they are reserved for a separate section. her next literary labour is thus mentioned in "thraliana": "while piozzi was gone to london i worked at my travel book, and wrote it in two months complete--but 'tis all to correct and copy over again. while my husband was away i wrote him these lines: he staid just a fortnight: "i think i've worked exceeding hard to finish five score pages. i write you this upon a card, in hopes you'll pay my wages. the servants all get drunk or mad, this heat their blood enrages, but your return will make me glad,-- that hope one pain assuages. "to shew more kindness, we defy all nations and all ages, and quite prefer your company to all the seven sages. then hasten home, oh, haste away! and lengthen not your stages; we then will sing, and dance and play, and quit awhile our cages." she had now taken rank as a popular writer, and thought herself entitled to use corresponding language to her publisher: "mr. cadell,--sir, this is a letter of business. i have finished the book of observations and reflections made in the course of my journey thro' france, italy, and germany, and if you have a mind to purchase the ms. i make you the first offer of it. here, if complaints had any connection with business, i would invent a thousand, and they should be very kind ones too; but it is better to tell you the size and price of the book. my calculations bring it to a thousand pages of letter-press like dr. moore's; or you might print it in three small volumes, to go with the 'anecdotes.' be that as it will, the price, at a word (as the advertisers say of their horse), is guineas and twelve copies to give away, though i will not, like them, warrant it free from blemishes. no creature has looked over the papers but lord huntingdon, and he likes them exceedingly. direct your answer here, if you write immediately; if not, send the letter under cover to mrs. lewis, london street, reading, berks; and believe me, dear sir, your faithful humble servant, "h. l. piozzi. "bennet street, bath, friday, nov. th, ." whether these terms were accepted, does not appear; but in dec. she published (cadell and strahan) "observations and reflections made in the course of a journey through france, italy, and germany," in two volumes octavo of about pages each. as happened to almost everything she did or wrote, this book, which she calls the "travel-book," was by turns assailed with inveterate hostility and praised with animated zeal. it would seem that sustained calumny had seasoned her against the malevolence of criticism. on the passage in johnson's letter to t. warton, "i am little afraid for myself," her comment is: "that is just what i feel when insulted, not about literary though, but social quarrels. the others are not worth a thought." in "thraliana," dec. th, , she writes: "i think my observations and reflexions in italy, &c., have been, upon the whole, exceedingly well liked, and much read." walpole writes to mrs. carter, june th, : "i do not mean to misemploy much of your time, which i know is always passed in good works, and usefully. you have, therefore, probably not looked into piozzi's travels. i, who have been almost six weeks lying on a couch, have gone through them. it was said that addison might have written his without going out of england. by the excessive vulgarisms so plentiful in these volumes, one might suppose the writer had never stirred out of the parish of st. giles. her latin, french, and italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better have studied her own language before she floundered into other tongues. her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she talks: methinks, then, she should talk as she would write. there are many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told though baretti is dead." miss seward, much to her credit, repeated to mrs. piozzi both the praise and the blame she had expressed to others. on december st, , she writes: "suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. no work of the sort i ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes and amongst the people it describes. wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages--but the infinite inequality of the style!--permit me to acknowledge to you what i have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that mrs. piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages!--that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange _dids_, and _does_, and _thoughs_, and _toos_, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence;--which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in jewels." mrs. piozzi's theory was that books should he written in the same colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated persons in conversation, "be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;" and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her fondness for familiarity too far. the period was unluckily chosen for carrying such a theory into practice; for johnson's authority had discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite society. the laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of pronunciation, which more or less affect spelling, still more so. "when," said johnson, "i published the plan of my dictionary, lord chesterfield told me that the word _great_ should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _state_; and sir william yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _seat_, and that none but an irishman would pronounce it _grait_. now here were two men of the highest rank, one the best speaker in the house of lords, the other the best speaker in the house of commons, differing entirely." mrs. piozzi has written on the margin:--"sir william was in the right." two well-known couplets of pope imply similar changes:-- "dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, and so obliging that he ne'er obliged." * * * * * "here thou, great anna, whom three realms obey, dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea." within living memory, elderly people of quality, both in writing and conversation, stuck to lunnun, brummagem, and cheyny (china). charles fox would not give up "bour_dux_." johnson pronounced "heard" _heerd_. in "flirtation" was deemed a vulgar word.[ ] lord byron wrote _redde_ (for _read_, in the past tense), and lord dudley declined being helped to apple _tart_. when, therefore, we find mrs. piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity. i have commonly retained her original syntax, and her spelling, which frequently varies within a page. [footnote : "those abstractions of different pairs from the rest of the society, which i must call 'flirtation,' spite of the vulgarity of the term."--_journal kept during a visit to germany_ in and . edited by the dean of westminster (not published), p. .] two days afterwards, walpole returns to the charge in a letter to miss berry, which is alone sufficient to prove the worthlessness of his literary judgments:-- "read 'sindbad the sailor's voyages,' and you will be sick of Æneas's. what woful invention were the nasty poultry that dunged on his dinner, and ships on fire turned into nereids! a barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius.... i do not think the sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates. however, if you could wade through two octavos of dame piozzi's _though's_ and _so's_ and _i trows_, and cannot listen to seven volumes of scheherezade's narratives, i will sue for a divorce in foro parnassi, and boccalini shall be my proctor." a single couplet of gifford's was more damaging than all walpole's petulance: "see thrale's grey widow with a satchel roam, and bring in pomp laborious nothings home."[ ] [footnote : "she, one evening, asked me abruptly if i did not remember the scurrilous lines in which she had been depicted by gifford in his 'baviad and moeviad.' and, not waiting for my answer, for i was indeed too much embarrassed to give one quickly, she recited the verses in question, and added, 'how do you think "thrale's grey widow" revenged herself? i contrived to get myself invited to meet him at supper at a friend's house, (i think she said in pall mall), soon after the publication of his poem, sate opposite to him, saw that he was "perplexed in the extreme;" and smiling, proposed a glass of wine as a libation to our future good fellowship. gifford was sufficiently a man of the world to understand me, and nothing could be more courteous and entertaining than he was while we remained together.'"--_piozziana_.] this condemnatory verse is every way unjust. the nothings, or somethings, which form the staple of the book, are not laboured; and they are presented without the semblance of pomp or pretension. the preface commences thus: "i was made to observe at rome some vestiges of an ancient custom very proper in those days. it was the parading of the street by a set of people called preciæ, who went some minutes before the flamen dialis, to bid the inhabitants leave work or play, and attend wholly to the procession; but if ill-omens prevented the pageants from passing, or if the occasion of the show was scarce deemed worthy its celebration, these precise stood a chance of being ill-treated by the spectators. a prefatory introduction to a work like this can hope little better usage from the public than they had. it proclaims the approach of what has often passed by before; adorned most certainly with greater splendour, perhaps conducted with greater regularity and skill. yet will i not despair of giving at least a momentary amusement to my countrymen in general; while their entertainment shall serve as a vehicle for conveying expressions of particular kindness to those foreign individuals, whose tenderness softened the sorrows of absence, and who eagerly endeavoured by unmerited attentions to supply the loss of their company, on whom nature and habit had given me stronger claims." the preface concludes with the happy remark that--"the labours of the press resemble those of the toilette: both should be attended to and finished with care; but once completed, should take up no more of our attention, unless we are disposed at evening to destroy all effect of our morning's study." it would be difficult to name a book of travels in which anecdotes, observations, and reflections are more agreeably mingled, or one from which a clearer bird's-eye view of the external state of countries visited in rapid succession may be caught. i can only spare room for a few short extracts: "the contradictions one meets with every moment at paris likewise strike even a cursory observer,--a countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, a dirty black handkerchief about her neck, and a flat silver ring on her finger, like our ale-wives; a _femme publique_, dressed avowedly for the purposes of alluring the men, with a not very small crucifix hanging at her bosom;--and the virgin mary's sign at an ale-house door, with these words, "'je suis la mère de mon dieu, et la gardienne de ce lieu.'" "i have stolen a day to visit my old acquaintance the english austin nuns at the foffèe, and found the whole community alive and cheerful; they are many of them agreeable women, and having seen dr. johnson with me when i was last abroad, inquired much for him: mrs, fermor, the prioress, niece to belinda in the rape of the lock, taking occasion to tell me, comically enough, 'that she believed there was but little comfort to be found in a house that harboured _poets_; for that she remembered mr. pope's praise made her aunt very troublesome and conceited, while his numberless caprices would have employed ten servants to wait on him; and he gave one,' (said she) 'no amends by his talk neither, for he only sate dozing all day, when the sweet wine was out, and made his verses chiefly in the night; during which season he kept himself awake by drinking coffee, which it was one of the maids' business to make for him, and they took it by turns.'" at milan she institutes a delicate inquiry: "the women are not behind-hand in openness of confidence and comical sincerity. we have all heard much of italian cicisbeism; i had a mind to know how matters really stood; and took the nearest way to information by asking a mighty beautiful and apparently artless young creature, _not noble_, how that affair was managed, for there is no harm done _i am sure_, said i: 'why no,' replied she, 'no great _harm_ to be sure: except wearisome attentions from a man one cares little about; for my own part,' continued she, 'i detest the custom, as i happen to love my husband excessively, and desire nobody's company in the world but his. we are not _people of fashion_ though you know, nor at all rich; so how should we set fashions for our betters? they would only say, see how jealous he is! if _mr. such-a-one_ sat much with me at home, or went with me to the corso; and i _must_ go with some gentleman you know: and the men are such ungenerous creatures, and have such ways with them: i want money often, and this _cavaliere servente_ pays the bills, and so the connection draws closer--_that's all_.' and your husband! said i--'oh, why he likes to see me well dressed; he is very good-natured, and very charming; i love him to my heart.' and your confessor! cried i.--'oh! why he is _used to it_'--in the milanese dialect--_è assuefaà."_ "an english lady asked of an italian what were the actual and official duties of the strange thing, some women set a value on, which hovers oft about some married beauties, called 'cavalier servente,' a pygmalion whose statues warm, i fear! too true 't is beneath his art. the dame, press'd to disclose them, said, lady, i beseech you to _suppose them_."[ ] [footnote : "don juan," canto ix. see also "beppo," verses , : "but heaven preserve old england from such courses! or what becomes of damage and divorces?"] at venice, the tone was somewhat different from what would be employed now by the finest lady on the grand canal: "this firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which i once heard a venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one angel to another), accounts immediately for a little conversation which i am now going to relate. "here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this town in the manner of the streets at paris. 'i hope,' said i, 'that they will hang the murderer.' 'i rather hope,' replied a very sensible lady who sate near me, 'that they will hang the person who broke the lamps: for,' added she, 'the first committed his crime only out of revenge, poor fellow!! because the other had got his mistress from him by treachery; but this creature has had the impudence to break our fine new lamps, all for the sake of spiting _the arch-duke!!_' the arch-duke meantime hangs nobody at all; but sets his prisoners to work upon the roads, public buildings, &c., where they labour in their chains; and where, strange to tell! they often insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as they go by; and, stranger still, they are not punished for it when they do." ... the lover sacrificing his reputation, his liberty, or his life, to save the fair fame of his mistress, is not an unusual event in fiction, whatever it may be in real life. balzac, charles de bernard, and m. de jarnac have each made a self-sacrifice of this kind the basis of a romance. but neither of them has hit upon a better plot than might be formed out of the following venetian story: "some years ago then, perhaps a hundred, one of the many spies who ply this town by night, ran to the state inquisitor, with information that such a nobleman (naming him) had connections with the french ambassador, and went privately to his house every night at a certain hour. the _messergrando_, as they call him, could not believe, nor would proceed, without better and stronger proof, against a man for whom he had an intimate personal friendship, and on whose virtue he counted with very particular reliance. another spy was therefore set, and brought back the same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for _foscarini_ in the morning, whom the populace attended all weeping to his door. "nothing but resolute denial of the crime alleged could however be forced from the firm-minded citizen, who, sensible of the discovery, prepared for that punishment he knew to be inevitable, and submitted to the fate his friend was obliged to inflict: no less than a dungeon for life, that dungeon so horrible that i have heard mr. howard was not permitted to see it. "the people lamented, but their lamentations were vain. the magistrate who condemned him never recovered the shock: but foscarini was heard of no more, till an old lady died forty years after in paris, whose last confession declared she was visited with amorous intentions by a nobleman of venice whose name she never knew, while she resided there as companion to the ambassadress. so was foscarini lost! so died he a martyr to love, and tenderness for female reputation!" the mendicanti was a venetian institution which deserves to be commemorated for its singularity: "apropos to singing;--we were this evening carried to a well-known conservatory called the mendicanti, who performed an oratorio in the church with great, and i dare say deserved applause. it was difficult for me to persuade myself that all the performers were women, till, watching carefully, our eyes convinced us, as they were but slightly grated. the sight of girls, however, handling the double bass, and blowing into the bassoon, did not much please _me_; and the deep-toned voice of her who sung the part of saul seemed an odd unnatural thing enough. "well! these pretty sirens were delighted to seize upon us, and pressed our visit to their parlour with a sweetness that i know not who would have resisted. we had no such intent; and amply did their performance repay my curiosity for visiting venetian beauties, so justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. they accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which their country is renowned. "the school, however, is running to ruin apace; and perhaps the conduct of the married women here may contribute to make such _conservatorios_ useless and neglected. when the duchess of montespan asked the famous louison d'arquien, by way of insult, as she pressed too near her, '_comment alloit le metier_?' '_depuis que les dames s'en mèlent_,' (replied the courtesan with no improper spirit,) '_il ne vaut plus rien_.'" describing florence, she says:-- "sir horace mann is sick and old; but there are conversations at his house of a saturday evening, and sometimes a dinner, to which we have been almost always asked." so much for walpole's assertion that "she had broken with his horace, because he could not invite her husband with the italian nobility." she held her own, if she did not take the lead, in whatever society she happened to be thrown, and no one could have objected to piozzi without breaking with her. in point of fact, no one did object to him. one of her notes on naples is: "well, well! if the neapolitans do bury christians like dogs, they make some singular compensations we will confess, by nursing dogs like christians. a very veracious man informed me yester morning, that his poor wife was half broken-hearted at hearing such a countess's dog was run over; 'for,' said he, 'having suckled the pretty creature herself, she loved it like one of her children.' i bid him repeat the circumstance, that no mistake might be made: he did so; but seeing me look shocked, or ashamed, or something he did not like,--'why, madam,' said the fellow, 'it is a common thing enough for ordinary men's wives to suckle the lap-dogs of ladies of quality:' adding, that they were paid for their milk, and he saw no harm in gratifying one's _superiors_. as i was disposed to see nothing _but_ harm in disputing with such a competitor, our conference finished soon; but the fact is certain." on the margin she has written: "mrs. greathead could scarcely be made to credit so hideous a fact, till i showed her the portrait (at a broker's shop) of a woman _suckling a cat_." cornelia knight says: "mr. and mrs. piozzi passed the winter at naples and gave little concerts. he played with great taste on the pianoforte, and used to carry about a miniature one in his carriage." whilst discussing the propriety of complying with the customs of the country, she relates: "poor dr. goldsmith said once--'i would advise every young fellow setting out in life _to love gravy_:'--and added, that he had formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited, because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy." mr. forster thinks that the concluding anecdote conveys a false impression of one "who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor poll." "mrs. piozzi, in her travels, quite solemnly sets forth that poor dr. goldsmith said once, 'i would advise every young fellow setting forth in life to love gravy,' alleging for it the serious reason that 'he had formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy.' imagine the dullness that would convert a jocose saying of this kind into an unconscious utterance of grave absurdity."[ ] in his index may be read: "mrs. piozzi's absurd instance of goldsmith's absurdity." mrs. piozzi does not quote the saying as an instance of absurdity; nor set it forth solemnly. she repeats it, as an illustration of her argument, in the same semi-serious spirit in which it was originally hazarded. sydney smith took a different view of this grave gravy question. on a young lady's declining gravy, he exclaimed: "i have been looking all my life for a person who, on principle, rejected gravy: let us vow eternal friendship." [footnote : life of goldsmith, vol. ii. p. . mr. forster allows her the credit of discovering the lurking irony in goldsmith's verses on cumberland, vol. ii. p. .] the "british synonymy" appeared in . it was thus assailed by gifford: "though 'no one better knows his own house' than i the vanity of this woman; yet the idea of her undertaking such a work had never entered my head; and i was thunderstruck when i first saw it announced. to execute it with any tolerable degree of success, required a rare combination of talents, among the least of which may be numbered neatness of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and mrs. piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapability of defining a single term in the language, and just as much latin from a child's syntax, as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal. 'if such a one be fit to write on synonimes, speak.' pignotti himself laughs in his sleeve; and his countrymen, long since undeceived, prize the lady's talents at their true worth, "et centum tales[ ] curto centusse licentur." [footnote : quere thrales?--_printer's devil_."] other critics have been more lenient or more just. enough philosophical knowledge and acuteness were discovered in the work to originate a rumour that she had retained some of the great lexicographer's manuscripts, or derived a posthumous advantage, in some shape, from her former intimacy with him. in "thraliana," denbigh, nd january, , she writes: "my 'synonimes' have been reviewed at last. the critics are all civil for aught i see, and nearly just, except when they say that johnson left some fragments of a work upon synonymy: of which god knows i never heard till now one syllable; never had he and i, in all the time we lived together, any conversation upon the subject." even walpole admits that it has some marked and peculiar merits, although its value consists rather in the illustrative matter, than in the definitions and etymologies. thus, in distinguishing between _lavish_, _profuse_ and _prodigal_, she relates: "two gentlemen were walking leisurely up the hay-market some time in the year , lamenting the fate of the famous cuzzona, an actress who some time before had been in high vogue, but was then as they heard in a very pitiable situation. 'let us go and visit her,' said one of them, 'she lives but over the way.' the other consented; and calling at the door, they were shown up stairs, but found the faded beauty dull and spiritless, unable or unwilling to converse on any subject. 'how's this?' cried one of her consolers, 'are you ill? or is it but low spirits chains your tongue so?'--'neither,' replied she: ''tis hunger i suppose. i ate nothing yesterday, and now 'tis past six o'clock, and not one penny have i in the world to buy me any food.'--'come with us instantly to a tavern; we will treat you with the best roast fowls and port wine that london can produce.'--'but i will have neither my dinner nor my place of eating it prescribed to _me_,' answered cuzzona, in a sharper tone, 'else i need never have wanted.' 'forgive me,' cries the friend; 'do your own way; but eat in the name of god, and restore fainting nature.'--she thanked him then; and, calling to her a friendly wretch who inhabited the same theatre of misery, gave _him_ the guinea the visitor accompanied his last words with; 'and run with this money,' said she, 'to such a wine-merchant,' (naming him); 'he is the only one keeps good tokay by him. 'tis a guinea a bottle, mind you,' to the boy; 'and bid the gentleman you buy it of give you a loaf into the bargain,--he won't refuse.' in half an hour or less the lad returned with the tokay. 'but where,' cries cuzzona, 'is the loaf i spoke for?' 'the merchant would give me no loaf,' replies her messenger; 'he drove me from the door, and asked if i took him for a baker.' 'blockhead!' exclaims she; 'why i must have bread to my wine, you know, and i have not a penny to purchase any. go beg me a loaf directly.' the fellow returns once more with one in his hand and a halfpenny, telling 'em the gentleman threw him three, and laughed at his impudence. she gave her mercury the money, broke the bread into a wash-hand basin which stood near, poured the tokay over it, and devoured the whole with eagerness. this was indeed a heroine in profusion. some active well-wishers procured her a benefit after this; she gained about _l_., 'tis said, and laid out two hundred of the money instantly in a _shell-cap_. they wore such things then." when savage got a guinea, he commonly spent it in a tavern at a sitting; and referring to the memorable morning when the "vicar of wakefield" was produced, johnson says: "i sent him (goldsmith) a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. i accordingly went as soon as i was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent. i perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of madeira and a glass before him." mrs. piozzi continues: "but doctor johnson had always some story at hand to check extravagant and wanton wastefulness. his improviso verses made on a young heir's coming of age are highly capable of restraining such folly, if it is to be restrained: they never yet were printed, i believe. "'long expected one-and-twenty, lingering year, at length is flown; pride and pleasure, pomp and plenty, great sir john, are now your own. loosen'd from the minor's tether, free to mortgage or to sell, wild as wind, and light as feather, bid the sons of thrift farewell. call the betseys, kates, and jennies, all the names that banish care; lavish of your grandsire's guineas, show the spirit of an heir. all that prey on vice or folly joy to see their quarry fly; there the gamester light and jolly, there the lender grave and sly. wealth, my lad, was made to wander, let it wander as it will; call the jockey, call the pander, bid them come and take their fill. when the bonny blade carouses, pockets full, and spirits high-- what are acres? what are houses? only dirt or wet or dry. should the guardian friend or mother tell the woes of wilful waste; scorn their counsel, scorn their pother-- you can hang or drown at last.'" these verses were addressed to thrale's nephew, sir john lade, in august, . they bear a strong resemblance to some of burns' in his "beggar's sonata," written in :-- "what is title, what is treasure, what is reputation's care; if we lead a life of pleasure, can it matter how or where?" boswell's "life of johnson" was published in may, . it is thus mentioned in "thraliana":-- "_may_, .--mr. boswell's book is coming out, and the wits expect me to tremble: what will the fellow say? ... that has not been said already." no date, but previous to th may, .--"i have been now laughing and crying by turns, for two days, over boswell's book. that poor man should have a _bon bouillon_ and be put to bed ... he is quite light-headed, yet madmen, drunkards, and fools tell truth, they say ... and if johnson was to me the back friend he has represented ... let it cure me of ever making friendship more with any human being." "_ th may_, .--the death of my son, so suddenly, so horribly produced before my eyes now suffering from the tears then shed ... so shockingly brought forward in boswell's two guinea book, made me very ill this week, very ill indeed[ ]; it would make the modern friends all buy the work i fancy, did they but know how sick the _ancient_ friends had it in their power to make me, but i had more wit than tell any of 'em. and what is the folly among all these fellows of wishing we may know one another in the next world.... comical enough! when we have only to expect deserved reproaches for breach of confidence and cruel usage. sure, sure i hope, rancour and resentment will at least be put off in the last moments: ... sure, surely, we shall meet no more, except on the great day when each is to answer to other and before other.... after _that_ i hope to keep better company than any of them." [footnote : the death of her son is not unkindly mentioned by boswell. see p. , roy. oct. edit. but the imputations on her veracity rest exclusively on his prejudiced testimony.] in , mrs. piozzi published "retrospection; or a review of the most striking and important events, characters, situations, and their consequences, which the last eighteen hundred years have presented to the view of mankind." it is in two volumes quarto, containing rather more than pages. a fitting motto for it would have been _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis._ the subject, or range of subjects, was beyond her grasp; and the best that can be said of the book is that a good general impression of the stream of history, lighted up with some striking traits of manners and character, may be obtained from it. it would have required the united powers and acquirements of raleigh, burke, gibbon, and voltaire to fill so vast a canvass with appropriate groups and figures; and she is more open to blame for the ambitious conception of the work than for her comparative failure in the execution. in she writes to dr. gray: "the truth is, my plans stretch too far for these times, or for my own age; but the wish, though scarce hope, of my heart, is to finish the work i am engaged in, get you to look it over for me, and print in march ." she published it in january , but it was not looked over by her learned correspondent. some slight misgiving is betrayed in the preface: "if i should have made improper choice of facts, and if i should be found at length most to resemble maister fabyan of old, who writing the life of henry v. lays heaviest stress on a new weathercock set-up on st. paul's steeple during that eventful reign, my book must share the fate of his, and be like that forgotten: reminding before its death perhaps a friend or two of a poor man (macbean) living in later times, that doctor johnson used to tell us of; who being advised to take subscriptions for a new geographical dictionary, hastened to bolt court and begged advice. there having listened carefully for half-an-hour, 'ah, but dear sir,' exclaimed the admiring parasite, 'if i am to make all this eloquent ado about athens and rome, where shall we find place, do you think, for richmond, or aix la chapelle?'" writing from bath, december th, , she says: "the 'gentleman's magazine' for july contained my answer to such critics as confined themselves to faults i could have helped committing--had they been faults. those who merely told disagreeable truths concerning my person, or dress, or age, or such stuff, expected, of course, no reply. there are innumerable press errors in the book, from my being obliged to print on new year's day--during an insurrection of the printers. these the 'critical review' laid hold of with an acuteness sharpened by malignity." moore, who was staying at bowood, sets down in his diary for april, : "lord l. in the evening, quoted a ridiculous passage from the preface to mrs. piozzi's 'retrospections,' in which, anticipating the ultimate perfection of the human race, she says she does not despair of the time arriving when 'vice will take refuge in the arms of impossibility.' mentioned also an ode of hers to posterity, beginning, 'posterity, gregarious dame,' the only meaning of which must be, a lady _chez qui_ numbers assemble--a lady at _home_."[ ] [footnote : memoirs, &c., vol. iv. p. .] there is no such passage in the preface to "retrospection," and the ode is her "ode to society," who is not improperly addressed as "gregarious." "i repeated," adds moore, "what jekyll told the other day of bearcroft saying to mrs. piozzi, when thrale, after she had repeatedly called him mr. beercraft: 'beercraft is not my name, madam; it may be your trade, but it is not my name.'" it may always be questioned whether this offensive description of repartee was really uttered at the time. but bearcroft was capable of it. he began his cross-examination of mr. vansittart by--"with your leave, sir, i will call you mr. van for shortness." "as you please, sir, and i will call you mr. bear." towards the end of , mrs. piozzi left streatham for her seat in north wales, where ( or ) she was visited by a young nobleman, now an eminent statesman, distinguished by his love of literature and the fine arts, who has been good enough to recall and write down his impressions of her for me: "i did certainly know madame piozzi, but had no habits of acquaintance with her, and she never lived in london to my knowledge. when in my youth i made a tour in wales--times when all inns were bad, and all houses hospitable--i put up for a day at her house, i think in denbighshire, the proper name of which was bryn, and to which, on the occasion of her marriage i was told, she had recently added the name of bella. i remember her taking me into her bed-room to show me the floor covered with folios, quartos, and octavos, for consultation, and indicating the labour she had gone through in compiling an immense volume she was then publishing, called 'retrospection.' she was certainly what was called, and is still called, blue, and that of a deep tint, but good humoured and lively, though affected; her husband, a quiet civil man, with his head full of nothing but music. "i afterwards called on her at bath, where she chiefly resided. i remember it was at the time madame de staël's 'delphine,' and 'corinne,' came out[ ], and that we agreed in preferring 'delphine,' which nobody reads now, to 'corinne,' which most people read then, and a few do still. she rather avoided talking of johnson. these are trifles, not worth recording, but i have put them down that you might not think me neglectful of your wishes; but now _j'ai vuidé mon sac_." [footnote : "delphine" appeared in ; "corinne," in .] her mode of passing her time when she had ceased writing books, with the topics which interested her, will be best learned from her letters. her vivacity never left her, and the elasticity of her spirits bore up against every kind of depression. a lady who met her on her way to wynnstay in january, , describes her as "skipping about like a kid, quite a figure of fun, in a tiger skin shawl, lined with scarlet, and _only_ five colours upon her head-dress--on the top of a flaxen wig a bandeau of blue velvet, a bit of tiger ribbon, a white beaver hat and plume of black feathers--as gay as a lark." in a letter, dated jan. , to a welsh neighbour, mrs. piozzi says: "mr. piozzi has lost considerably in purse, by the cruel inroads of the french in italy, and of all his family driven from their quiet homes, has at length with difficulty saved one little boy who is now just turned of five years old. we have got him here (bath) since i wrote last, and his uncle will take him to school next week; for as our john has nothing but his talents and education to depend upon, he must be a scholar, and we will try hard to make him a very good one. "my poor little boy from lombardy said as i walked him across our market, 'these are sheeps' heads, are they not, aunt? i saw a basket of men's heads at brescia.' "as he was by a lucky chance baptized, in compliment to me, john salusbury, five years ago, when happier days smiled on his family, he will be known in england by no other, and it will be forgotten he is a foreigner. a lucky circumstance for one who is intended to work his way among our islanders by talent, diligence, and education." she thus mentions this event in "thraliana," january th, : "italy is ruined and england threatened. i have sent for one little boy from among my husband's nephews. he was christened john salusbury: he shall be naturalised, and then we will see whether he will be more grateful and natural and comfortable than miss thrales have been to the mother they have at length driven to desperation." she could hardly have denied her husband the satisfaction of rescuing a single member of his family from the wreck; and they were bound to provide handsomely for the child of their adoption. whether she carried the sentiment too far in giving him the entire estate (not a large one) is a very different question; on which she enters fearlessly in one of the fragments of the autobiography. in a marginal note on one of the printed letters in which johnson writes: "mrs. davenant says you regain your health,"--she remarks: "mrs. davenant neither knew nor cared, as she wanted her brother harry cotton to marry lady keith, and i offered my estate with her. miss thrale said she wished to have nothing to do either with my family or my fortune. they were all cruel and all insulting." her fits of irritation and despondency never lasted long. her mode of bringing up her adopted nephew was more in accordance with her ultimate liberality, than with her early intentions or professions of teaching him to "work his way among our islanders." instead of suffering him to travel to and from the university by coach, she insisted on his travelling post; and she is said to have remarked to the mother of a welsh baronet, who was similarly anxious for the comfort and dignity of her heir, "other people's children are baked in coarse common pie dishes, ours in patty-pans." she was misreported, or afterwards improved upon the thought; for, in june , she writes to dr. gray: "he is a boy of excellent principle. education at a private school has an effect like baking loaves in a tin. the bread is more insipid, but it comes out _clean_; and mr. gray laughed, when at breakfast this morning, our undercrusts suggested the comparison." in the conway notes, she says: "had we vexations enough? we had certainly many pleasures. the house in wales was beautiful, and the boy was beautiful too. mr. piozzi said i had spoiled my own children and was spoiling his. my reply was, that i loved spoiling people, and hated any one i could not spoil. am i not now trying to spoil dear mr. conway?" when she talks of spoiling, she must not be understood literally. in she writes from bath to dr. gray: "sir john and lady salusbury staid with me six or seven weeks, and made themselves most beloved among us. they are very good young creatures.... my children read your _key_ to each other on sunday noons: the _connection_ on sunday nights. you remember me hoping and proposing to make dear salusbury a gentleman, a christian, and a scholar; and when one has succeeded in the first two wishes, there is no need to fret if the third does fail a _little_. such is my situation concerning my _adopted_, as you are accustomed to call him." before she died she had the satisfaction of seeing him sheriff of his county; and on carrying up an address, he was knighted and became sir john salusbury piozzi salusbury. miss williams wynn has preserved a somewhat apocryphal anecdote of his disinterestedness: "when i read her (mrs. p.'s) lamentations over her poverty, i could not help believing that sir j. salusbury had proved ungrateful to his benefactress. for the honour of human nature i rejoice to find this is not the case. when he made known to his aunt his wish to marry, she promised to make over to him the property of brynbella. even before the marriage was concluded she had distressed herself by her lavish expenditure at streatham. i saw by the letters that gillow's bill amounted to near , _l_., and mr. (the late sir john) williams tells me she had continually very large parties from london. sir john salusbury then came to her, offered to relinquish all her promised gifts and the dearest wish of his heart, saying he should be most grateful to her if she would only give him a commission in the army, and let him seek his fortune. at the same time he added that he made this offer because all was still in his power, but that from the moment he married, she must be aware that it would be no longer so, that he should not feel himself justified in bringing a wife into distress of circumstances, nor in entailing poverty on children unborn.[ ] she refused; he married; and she went on in her course of extravagance. she had left herself a life income only, and large as it was, no tradesman would wait a reasonable time for payment; she was nearly eighty; and they knew that at her death nothing would be left to pay her debts, and so they seized the goods." [footnote : if the estate was settled in the usual manner, he would have only a life estate; and i believe it was so settled.] when fielding, the novelist, rather boastingly avowed that he never knew, and believed he never should know, the difference between a shilling and sixpence, he was told: "yes, the time will come when you will know it--when you have only eighteen pence left." if the author of "tom jones" could not be taught the value of money, we must not be too hard on mrs. piozzi for not learning it, after lesson upon lesson in the hard school of "impecuniosity." whilst piozzi lived, her affairs were faithfully and carefully administered. although they built brynbella, spent a good deal of money on streatham, and lived handsomely, they never wanted money. he had a moderate fortune, the produce of his professional labours, and left it, neither impaired nor materially increased, to his family. with peculiar reference probably to her habits of profuse expenditure, he used to say that "white monies were good for ladies, yellow for gentlemen." he took the guineas under his especial charge, leaving only the silver to her. this was a matter of notoriety in the neighbourhood, and the tenants, to please her or humour the joke, sometimes brought bags of shillings and sixpences in part payment of their rents. in the conway notes she says: "our head-quarters were in wales, where dear piozzi repaired my church, built a new vault for my old ancestors, chose the place in it where he and i are to repose together.... he lived some twenty-five years with me, however, but so punished with gout that we found bath the best wintering-place for many, many seasons.--mrs. siddons' last appearance there he witnessed, when she played calista to dimond's lothario, in which he looked _so_ like garrick, it shocked us _all three_, i believe; for garrick adored mr. piozzi, and siddons hated the little great man to her heart. poor dimond! he was a well-bred, pleasing, worthy creature, and did the honours of his own house and table with peculiar grace indeed. no likeness in private life or manner,--none at all; no wit, no fun, no frolic humour had mr. dimond:--no grace, no dignity, no real unaffected elegance of mien or behaviour had his predecessor, david,--whose partiality to my fastidious husband was for that reason never returned. merriment, difficult for _him_ to comprehend, made no amends for the want of that which no one understood better,--so he hated all the wits but murphy." there is hardly a family of note or standing within visiting distance of their place, that has not some tradition or reminiscence to relate concerning them; and all agree in describing him as a worthy good sort of man, obliging, inoffensive, kind to the poor, principally remarkable for his devotion to music, and utterly unable to his dying day to familiarise himself with the english language or manners. it is told of him that being required to pay a turnpike toll near the house of a country neighbour whom he was on his way to visit, he took it for granted that the toll went into his neighbour's pocket, and proposed setting up a gate near brynbella with the view of levying toll in his turn. in september, , she wrote from brynbella to dr. gray: "dear mr. piozzi, who takes men out of misery so far as his power extends in this neighbourhood, feels flattered and encouraged by your very kind approbation. he has been getting rugs for the cottagers' beds to keep them warm this winter, while we are away, and they all take me into their sleeping rooms when i visit them _now_, to show how comfortably they live. as for the old hut you so justly abhorred, and so kindly noticed--it is knocked down and its coarse name too, potlicko: we call it cottage-o'-the-park. some recurrence to the original derivation in soup season will not, however, be much amiss i suppose." "amongst the company," says moore, "was mrs. john kemble. she mentioned an anecdote of piozzi, who upon calling upon some old lady of quality, was told by the servant, she was 'indifferent.' 'is she indeed?' answered piozzi, huffishly, 'then pray tell her i can be as indifferent as she;' and walked away."[ ] [footnote : moore's memoirs, vol. iv. p. .] till he was disabled by the gout, his principal occupation was his violin, and it was her delight to listen to him. she more than once observed to the vicar, "such music is quite heavenly." "i am in despair," cried out the village fiddler, "i may now stick my fiddle in my thatched roof, for a greater performer is come to reside in the parish." the existing superstition of the country is that his spirit, playing on his favourite instrument, still haunts one wing of brynbella. if he designed the building, his architectural taste does not merit the praises she lavishes on it. the exterior is not prepossessing; but there is a look of comfort about the house; the interior is well arranged: the situation, which commands a fine and extensive view of the upper part of the valley of the clywd, is admirably chosen; the garden and grounds are well laid out; and the walks through the woods on either side, especially one called the lovers' walk, are remarkably picturesque. altogether, brynbella may be fairly held to merit the appellation of a "pretty villa." the name implies a compliment to piozzi's country as well as to his taste; for she meant it to typify the union between wales and italy in his and her own proper persons. she says in the conway notes: "mr. piozzi built the house for me, he said; my own old chateau, bachygraig by name, tho' very curious, was wholly uninhabitable; and we called the italian villa he set up as mine in the vale of cluid, brynbella, or the beautiful brow, making the name half welsh and half italian, as _we_ were." dr. burney, in a letter to his daughter, thus described the position and feelings of the couple towards each other in : "during my invalidity at bath i had an unexpected visit from your streatham friend, of whom i had lost sight for more than ten years. she still looks very well, but is graver, and candour itself; though she still says good things, and writes admirable notes and letters, i am told, to my granddaughters c. and m., of whom she is very fond. we shook hands very cordially, and avoided any allusion to our long separation and its cause. the _caro sposo_ still lives, but is such an object from the gout, that the account of his sufferings made me pity him sincerely; he wished, she told me, 'to see his old and worthy friend,' and _un beau matin_ i could not refuse compliance with his wish. she nurses him with great affection and tenderness, never goes out or has company when he is in pain." in the conway notes she says: "piozzi's fine hand upon the organ and pianoforte deserted him. gout, such as i never knew, fastened on his fingers, distorting them into every dreadful shape.... a little girl, shown to him as a musical wonder of five years old, said, 'pray, sir, why are your fingers wrapped up in black silk so?' 'my dear,' replied he, 'they are in mourning for my voice.' 'oh, me!' cries the child, '_is she dead?_' he sung an easy song, and the baby exclaimed, 'ah, sir! you are very naughty--you tell fibs!' poor dears! and both gone now!" "when life was gradually, but perceptibly, closing round him at bath, in , i asked him if he would wish to converse with a romish priest,--we had full opportunity there. 'by no means,' said he. 'call mr. leman of the crescent.' we did so,--poor bessy ran and fetched him. mr. piozzi received the blessed sacrament at his hands; but recovered sufficiently to go home and die in his own house." he died of gout at brynbella in march , and was buried in a vault constructed by her desire in dymerchion church. there is a portrait of him (period and painter unknown) still preserved amongst the family portraits at brynbella. it is that of a good-looking man of about forty, in a straight-cut brown coat with metal buttons, lace frill and ruffles, and some leaves of music in his hand. there are also two likenesses of mrs. piozzi: one a three-quarter length (kit-kat), taken apparently when she was about forty; the other a miniature of her at an advanced age. both confirm her description of herself as too strong-featured to be pretty. the hands in the three-quarter length are gloved. brynbella continued her headquarters till , when she gave it up to sir john salusbury. from that period she resided principally at bath and clifton, occasionally visiting streatham or making summer trips to the seaside. that she and her eldest daughter should ever be again (if they ever were) on a perfect footing of confidence and affection, was a moral impossibility. estrangements are commonly durable in proportion to the closeness of the tie that has been severed; and it is no more than natural that each party, yearning for a reconciliation and not knowing that the wish is reciprocated, should persevere in casting the blame of the prolonged coldness on the other. occasional sarcasms no more prove disregard or indifference, than swift's "only a woman's hair" implies contempt for the sex. miss thrale's marriage with lord keith in is thus mentioned in "thraliana": "the 'thraliana' is coming to an end; so are the thrales. the eldest is married now. admiral lord keith the man; a _good_ man for ought i hear: a _rich_ man for ought i am told: a _brave_ man we have always heard: and a _wise_ man i trow by his choice. the name no new one, and excellent for a charade, _e.g_. "a faery my first, who to fame makes pretence; my second a rock, dear britannia's defence; in my third when combined will too quickly be shown the faery and rock in our brave elphin-stone." her way of life after piozzi's death may be collected from the letters, with the exception of one strange episode towards the end. when nearly eighty, she took a fancy for an actor named conway, who came out on the london boards in , and had the honour of acting romeo and jaffier to the juliet and belvidera of miss o'neill (lady becher). he also acted with her in dean milman's fine play, "fazio." but it was his ill fate to reverse churchill's famous lines: "before such merits all objections fly, pritchard's genteel, and garrick's six feet high." conway was six feet high, and a very handsome man to boot; but his advantages were purely physical; not a spark of genius animated his fine features and commanding figure, and he was battling for a moderate share of provincial celebrity, when mrs. piozzi fell in with him at bath. it has been rumoured in flintshire that she wished to marry him, and offered sir john salusbury a large sum in ready money (which she never possessed) to give up brynbella (which he could not give up), that she might settle it on the new object of her affections. but none of the letters or documents that have fallen in my way afford even plausibility to the rumour, and some of the testamentary papers in which his name occurs, go far towards discrediting the belief that her attachment ever went beyond admiration and friendship expressed in exaggerated terms.[ ] [footnote : since the appearance of the first edition of this work, it has been stated on the authority of a distinguished man of letters that conway shewed the late charles mathews a letter from mrs. piozzi, offering marriage.--_new monthly magazine_ (edited by mr. harrison ainsworth) for april, .] conway threw himself overboard and was drowned in a voyage from new york to charleston in . his effects were sold at new york, and amongst them a copy of the folio edition of young's "night thoughts," in which he had made a note of its having been presented to him by his "dearly attached friend, the celebrated mrs. piozzi." in the preface to "love letters of mrs. piozzi, written when she was eighty, to william augustus conway," published in london in , it is stated that the originals, seven in number, were purchased by an american "lady," who permitted a "gentleman" to take copies and use them as he might think fit. what this "gentleman" thought fit, was to publish them with a catchpenny title and an alleged extract by way of motto to sanction it. the genuineness of the letters is doubtful, and the interpolation of three or four sentences would alter their entire tenor. but taken as they stand, their language is not warmer than an old woman of vivid fancy and sensibility might have deemed warranted by her age. "tell mr. johnson i love him exceedingly," is the mission given by the old countess of eglinton to boswell in . _l'age n'a point de sexe_; and no one thought the worse of madame du deffand for the impassioned tone in which she addressed horace walpole, whose dread of ridicule induced him to make a most ungrateful return to her fondness.[ ] years before the formation of this acquaintance, mrs. piozzi had acquired the difficult art of growing old; _je sais vieillir_: she dwells frequently but naturally on her age: she contemplates the approach of death with firmness and without self-deception: and her elasticity of spirit never for a moment suggests the image of an antiquated coquette. of the seven letters in question, the one cited as most compromising is the sixth, in which conway is exhorted to bear patiently a rebuff he had just received from some younger beauty: [footnote : "the old woman's fancy for mr. conway represents a relation of warm friendship that is of every-day occurrence between youth and age that is not crabbed."--_the examiner_, feb. , .] "'tis not a year and a quarter since, dear conway, accepting of my portrait sent to birmingham, said to the bringer, 'oh if _your lady_ but retains her friendship: oh if i can but keep _her_ patronage, i care not for the rest.' and now, when that friendship follows you through sickness and through sorrow; now that her patronage is daily rising in importance: upon a lock of hair given or refused by une petite traitresse, hangs all the happiness of my once high-spirited and high-blooded friend. let it not be so. exalt thy love: dejected heart--and rise superior to such narrow minds. do not however fancy she will ever be punished in the way you mention: no, no; she'll wither on the thorny stem dropping the faded and ungathered leaves:--a china rose, of no good scent or flavour--false in apparent sweetness, deceitful when depended on--unlike the flower produced in colder climates, which is sought for in old age, preserved _even after death_, a lasting and an elegant perfume,--a medicine, too, for those whose shattered nerves require _astringent remedies_. "and now, dear sir, let me request of you--to love yourself--and to reflect on the necessity of not dwelling on any _particular subject_ too long, or too intensely. it is really very dangerous to the health of body and soul. besides that our time here is but short; a mere preface to the great book of eternity: and 'tis scarce worthy of a reasonable being not to keep the end of human existence so far in view that we may tend to it--either directly or obliquely in every step. this is preaching--but remember how the sermon is written at three, four, and five o'clock by an octogenary pen--a heart (as mrs. lee says) twenty-six years old: and as h.l.p. feels it to be,--all your own. suffer your dear noble self to be in some measure benefited by the talents which are left _me_; your health to be restored by soothing consolations while _i remain here_, and am able to bestow them. all is not lost yet. you _have_ a friend, and that friend is piozzi." conway's "high blood" was as great a recommendation to mrs. piozzi as his good looks, and he vindicated his claim to noble descent by his conduct, which was disinterested and gentlemanlike throughout. moore sets down in his diary, april , : "breakfasted with the fitzgeralds. took me to call on mrs. piozzi; a wonderful old lady; faces of other times seemed to crowd over her as she sat,--the johnsons, reynoldses, &c. &c.: though turned eighty, she has all the quickness and intelligence of a gay young woman." nichol, the bookseller, had said that "johnson was the link that connected shakespeare with the rest of mankind." on hearing this, mrs. piozzi at eighty exclaimed, "oh, the dear fellow, i must give him a kiss for that idea." when nichol told the story, he added, "i never got it, and she went out of the world a kiss in my debt." one of the most characteristic feats or freaks of this extraordinary woman was the celebration of her eightieth birthday by a concert, ball, and supper, to between six and seven hundred people, at the kingston rooms, bath, on the th january, . at the conclusion of the supper, her health was proposed by admiral sir james sausmarez, and drunk with three times three. the dancing began at two, when she led off with her adopted son, sir john salusbury, dancing (according to the author of "piozziana," an eye-witness) "with astonishing elasticity, and with all the true air of dignity which might have been expected of one of the best bred females in society." when fears were expressed that she had done too much, she replied:--"no: this sort of thing is greatly in the mind; and i am almost tempted to say the same of growing old at all, especially as it regards those of the usual concomitants of age, viz., laziness, defective sight, and ill-temper." "so far from feeling fatigued or exhausted on the following day by her exertions," remarks sir james fellowes in a note on this event, "she amused us by her sallies of wit, and her jokes on 'tully's offices,' of which her guests had so eagerly availed themselves.". tully was the cook and confectioner, the bath gunter, who provided the supper. mrs. piozzi died in may, . her death is circumstantially communicated in a letter from mrs. pennington, the lady mentioned in miss seward's correspondence as the beautiful and agreeable sophia weston:-- "hot wells, may th, . "dear miss willoughby,--it is my painful task to communicate to you, who have so lately been the kind associate of dearest mrs. piozzi, the irreparable loss we have all sustained in that incomparable woman and beloved friend. "she closed her various life about nine o'clock on wednesday, after an illness of ten days, with as little suffering as could be imagined under these awful circumstances. her bed-side was surrounded by her weeping daughters: lady keith and mrs. hoare arrived in time to be fully recognised[ ]; miss thrale, who was absent from town, only just before she expired, but with the satisfaction of seeing her breathe her last in peace. "nothing could behave with more tenderness and propriety than these ladies, whose conduct, i am convinced, has been much misrepresented and calumniated by those who have only attended to _one_ side of the history: but may all that is past be now buried in oblivion! retrospection seldom improves our view of any subject. sir john salusbury was too distant, the close of her illness being so rapid, for us to entertain any expectation of his arriving in time to see the dear deceased. he only reached clifton late _last_ night. i have not yet seen him; my whole time has been devoted to the afflicted ladies." [footnote : on hearing of their arrival she is reported to have said, "now, i shall die in state."] mrs. pennington told a friend that mrs. piozzi's last words were: "i die in the trust and the fear of god." when she was attended by sir george gibbes, being unable to articulate, she traced a coffin in the air with her hands and lay calm. her will, dated the th march, , makes sir john salusbury piozzi salusbury heir to all her real and personal property with the exception of some small bequests, sir james fellowes and sir john salusbury being appointed executors. a memorandum signed by sir james fellowes runs thus:--"after i had read the will, lady keith and her two sisters present, said they had long been prepared for the contents and for such a disposition of the property, and they acknowledged the validity of the will." * * * * * in any endeavour to solve the difficult problem of mrs. piozzi's conduct and character, it should be kept in view that the highest testimony to her worth has been volunteered by those with whom she passed the last years of her life in the closest intimacy. she had become completely reconciled to madame d'arblay, with whom she was actively corresponding when she died, and her mixed qualities of head and heart are thus summed up in that lady's diary, may, : "i have lost now, just lost, my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend, mrs. thrale piozzi, who preserved her fine faculties, her imagination, her intelligence, her powers of allusion and citation, her extraordinary memory, and her almost unexampled vivacity, to the last of her existence. she was in her eighty-second year, and yet owed not her death to age nor to natural decay, but to the effects of a fall in a journey from penzance to clifton. on her eightieth birthday she gave a great ball, concert, and supper, in the public rooms at bath, to upwards of two hundred persons, and the ball she opened herself. she was, in truth, a most wonderful character for talents and eccentricity, for wit, genius, generosity, spirit, and powers of entertainment. "she had a great deal both of good and not good, in common with madame de staël holstein. they had the same sort of highly superior intellect, the same depth of learning, the same general acquaintance with science, the same ardent love of literature, the same thirst for universal knowledge, and the same buoyant animal spirits, such as neither sickness, sorrow, nor even terror, could subdue. their conversation was equally luminous, from the sources of their own fertile minds, and from their splendid acquisitions from the works and acquirements of others. both were zealous to serve, liberal to bestow, and graceful to oblige; and both were truly high-minded in prizing and praising whatever was admirable that came in their way. neither of them was delicate nor polished, though each was flattering and caressing; but both had a fund inexhaustible of good humour, and of sportive gaiety, that made their intercourse with those they wished to please attractive, instructive, and delightful; and though not either of them had the smallest real malevolence in their compositions, neither of them could ever withstand the pleasure of uttering a repartee, let it wound whom it might, even though each would serve the very person they goaded with all the means in their power. both were kind, charitable, and munificent, and therefore beloved; both were sarcastic, careless, and daring, and therefore feared. the morality of madame de staël was by far the most faulty, but so was the society to which she belonged; so were the general manners of those by whom she was encircled." there is one real point of similarity between madame de staël and mrs. piozzi, which has been omitted in the parallel. both were treated much in the same manner by the amiable, sensitive, and unsophisticated fanny burney. in feb. , she wrote to her father, then at paris, to announce her intimacy with a small "colony" of distinguished emigrants settled at richmond, the cynosure of which was the far-famed daughter of necker. he writes to caution her on the strength of a suspicious _liaison_ with m. de narbonne. she replies by declaring her belief that the charge is a gross calumny. "indeed, i think you could not spend a day with them and not see that their commerce is that of pure, but exalted and most elegant, friendship. i would, nevertheless, give the world to avoid being a guest under their roof, now that i have heard even the shadow of such a rumour." if mr. croker was right, she was then in her forty-second year; at all events, no tender, timid, delicate maiden, ready to start at a hint or semblance of impropriety; and she waved her scruples without hesitation when they stood in the way of her intercourse with m. d'arblay, whom she married in july , he being then employed in transcribing madame de staël's essay on the influence of the passions. as to the parallel, with all due deference to madame d'arblay's proved sagacity aided by her personal knowledge of her two gifted friends, it may be suggested that they present fewer points of resemblance than any two women of at all corresponding celebrity.[ ] the superiority in the highest qualities of mind will be awarded without hesitation to the french woman, although m. thiers terms her writings the perfection of mediocrity. she grappled successfully with some of the weightiest and subtlest questions of social and political science; in criticism she displayed powers which schlegel might have envied while he aided their fullest development in her "germany"; and her "corinne" ranks amongst the best of those works of fiction which excel in description, reflection, and sentiment, rather than in pathos, fancy, stirring incident, or artfully contrived plot. but her tone of mind was so essentially and notoriously masculine, that when she asked talleyrand whether he had read her "delphine," he answered, "non, madame, mais on m'a dit que-nous y sommes tous les deux déguisés en femmes."[ ] this was a material drawback on her agreeability: in a moment of excited consciousness, she exclaimed, that she would give all her fame for the power of fascinating; and there was no lack of bitterness in her celebrated repartee to the man who, seated between her and madame recamier, boasted of being between wit and beauty, "oui, et sans posséder ni l'un ni l'autre."[ ] the view from richmond park she called "calme et animée, ce qu'on doit être, et que je ne suis pas." [footnote : lady morgan and madame de genlis have been suggested as each presenting a better subject for a parallel.] [footnote : "to understand the point of this answer," says mr. mackintosh, "it must be known that an old countess is introduced in the novel full of cunning, finessing, and trick, who was intended to represent talleyrand, and delphine was intended for herself."--_life of sir james mackintosh_, vol. ii. p. .] [footnote : this _mot_ is given to talleyrand in lady holland's life of sydney smith. but it may be traced to one mentioned by hannah more in , as then current in paris. one of the _notables_ fresh from his province was teased by two _petits maîtres_ to tell them who he was. "eh bien donc, le voici: je suis ni sot ni fat, mais je suis entre les deux."--_memoirs of hannah more_, vol. ii. p. .] in london she was soon voted a bore by the wits and people of fashion. she thought of convincing whilst they thought of dining. sheridan and brummell delighted in mystifying her. byron complained that she was always talking of himself or herself[ ], and concludes his account of a dinner-party by the remark:--"but we got up too soon after the women; and mrs. corinne always lingers so long after dinner, that we wish her--in the drawing-room." in another place he says: "i saw curran presented to madame de staël at mackintosh's; it was the grand confluence between the rhone and the saône, and they were both so d--d ugly that i could not help wondering how the best intellects of france and england could have taken up respectively such residences." he afterwards qualifies this opinion: "her figure was not bad; her legs tolerable; her arms good: altogether i can conceive her having been a desirable woman, allowing a little imagination for her soul, and so forth. she would have made a great man." [footnote : johnson told boswell: "you have only two topics, yourself and myself, and i am heartily sick of both."] this is just what mrs. piozzi never would have made. her mind, despite her masculine acquirements, was thoroughly feminine: she had more tact than genius, more sensibility and quickness of perception than depth, comprehensiveness, or continuity of thought. but her very discursiveness prevented her from becoming wearisome: her varied knowledge supplied an inexhaustible store of topics and illustrations; her lively fancy placed them in attractive lights; and her mind has been well likened to a kaleidoscope which, whenever its glittering and heterogeneous contents are moved or shaken, surprises by some new combination of colour or of form. she professed to write as she talked; but her conversation was doubtless better than her books: her main advantages being a well-stored memory, fertility of images, aptness of allusion, and _apropos_. her colloquial excellence and her agreeability are established by the unanimous testimony of her cotemporaries. her fame in this respect rests on the same basis as that of all great wits, all great actors, and many great orators. to question it for want of more tangible and durable proofs, would be as unreasonable as to question sydney smith's humour, hook's powers of improvisation, garrick's richard, or sheridan's begum speech. but _ex pede herculem_. marked indications of her quality will be found in her letters and her books. "both," remarks an acute and by no means partial critic[ ], "are full of happy touches, and here and there will be found in them those deep and piercing thoughts which come intuitively to people of genius." [footnote : the athenæum. jan. th, .] surely these are happy touches: "i hate a general topic as a pretty woman hates a general mourning when black does not become her complexion." "life is a schoolroom, not a playground." in allusion to the rage for scientific experiment in : "never was poor nature so put to the rack, and never, of course, was she made to tell so many lies." "science (i.e. learning), which acted as a sceptre in the hand of johnson, and was used as a club by dr. parr, became a lady's fan, when played with by george henry glasse." "hope is drawn with an anchor always, and common sense is never strong enough to draw it up." "the poppy which nature sows among the corn, to shew us that sleep is as necessary as bread." [ ] [footnote : or to shew us that the harvest diminishes with sloth, and that what we gain in sleep we lose in bread. but _qui dort, dine_.] "the best writers are not the best friends; and the last character is more to be valued than the first by cotemporaries: after fifty years, indeed, the others carry away all the applause." this is the reason why posterity always takes part with the famous author or man of genius against those who witnessed his meanness or suffered from his selfishness; why fresh apologists will constantly be found for bacon's want of principle and johnson's want of manners. in the course of his famous definition or description of wit, barrow says: "sometimes it lieth in pat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial saying: sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense or the affinity of their sound." if this be so, she possessed it in abundance. in a letter, dated bath, th april, ,--about the time when talleyrand said of lady f.s.'s robe: "_elle commence trop tard et finit trop tôt_,"--she writes: "a genteel young clergyman, in our upper crescent, told his mamma about ten days ago, that he had lost his heart to pretty miss prideaux, and that he must absolutely marry her or die. _la chère mère_ of course replied gravely: 'my dear, you have not been acquainted with the lady above a fortnight: let me recommend you to see more of her.' 'more of her!' exclaimed the lad, 'why i have seen down to the fifth rib on each side already.' this story will serve to convince captain t. fellowes and yourself, that as you have always acknowledged the british belles to _exceed_ those of every other nation, you may now say with truth, that they _outstrip_ them." on the st july, : "the heat has certainly exhausted my faculties, and i have but just life enough left to laugh at the fourteen tailors who, united under a flag with '_liberty and independence_' on it, went to vote for some of these gay fellows, i forget which, but the motto is ill chosen, said i, they should have written up, '_measures not men_'" her verses are advantageously distinguished amongst those of her blue-stocking contemporaries by happy turns of thought and expression, natural playfulness, and an abundant flow of idiomatic language. but her facility was a fatal gift, as it has proved to most female aspirants to poetic fame, who rarely stoop to the labour of the file. although the first rule laid down by goldsmith's connoisseur[ ] is far from universally applicable to productions of the pencil or the pen, all fruitful writers would do well to act upon it, and what mrs. piozzi could do when she took pains is decisively proved by her "streatham portraits." [footnote : "upon my asking him how he had acquired the art of a conoscente so very suddenly, he assured me that nothing was more easy. the whole secret consisted in an adherence to two rules: the one always to observe that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other to praise the works of pietro perugino."--_the vicar of wakefield_, ch. xx.] she was wanting in refinement, which very few of the eighteenth century wits and authors possessed according to more modern notions; and she abounded in vanity, which, if not necessarily a baneful or unamiable quality, is a fruitful source of folly and peculiarly calculated to provoke censure or ridicule. in her, fortunately, its effects were a good deal modified by the frankness of its avowal and display, by her habits of self-examination, by her impulsive generosity of character, and by her readiness to admit the claims and consult the feelings of others. to seek out and appreciate merit as she appreciated it, is a high merit in itself. her piety was genuine; and old-fashioned politicians, whose watchword is church and king, will be delighted with her politics. literary men, considering how many curious inquiries depend upon her accuracy, will be more anxious about her truthfulness, and i have had ample opportunities of testing it; having not only been led to compare her narratives with those of others, but to collate her own statements of the same transactions or circumstances at distant intervals or to different persons. it is difficult to keep up a large correspondence without frequent repetition. sir walter scott used to write precisely the same things to three or four fine-lady friends, and mrs. piozzi could no more be expected to find a fresh budget of news or gossip for each epistle than the author of "waverley." thus, in , she writes to a welsh baronet from bath: "we have had a fine dr. holland here.[ ] he has seen and written about the ionian islands; and means now to practise as a physician, exchanging the cyclades, say we wits and wags, for the sick ladies. we made quite a lion of the man. i was invited to every house he visited at for the last three days; so i got the _queue du lion_ despairing of _le coeur_." [footnote : sir henry holland, bart., who, with many other titles to distinction, is one of the most active and enterprising of modern travellers.] two other letters written about the same time contain the same piece of intelligence and the same joke. she was very fond of writing marginal notes; and after annotating one copy of a book, would take up another and do the same. i have never detected a substantial variation in her narratives, even in those which were more or less dictated by pique; and as she generally drew upon the "thraliana" for her materials, this, having been carefully and calmly compiled, affords an additional guarantee for her accuracy. her taste for reading never left her or abated to the last. in reference to a remark (in boswell) on the irksomeness of books to people of advanced age, she writes: "not to me at eighty years old: being grieved that year ( ) particularly, i was forced upon study to relieve my mind, and it had the due effect. i wrote this note in ." she sometimes gives anecdotes of authors. thus, in the letter just quoted, she says: "lord byron protests his wife was a fortune without money, a belle without beauty, and a blue-stocking without either wit or learning." but her literary information grew scanty as she grew old: "the literary world (she writes in ) is to me terra incognita, far more deserving of the name, now parry and ross are returned, than any part of the polar regions:" and her opinions of the rising authors are principally valuable as indications of the obstacles which budding reputations must overcome. "pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of music on different characters, holds equally true of genius: so many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. the beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a spectre."[ ] the octogenarian critic of the johnsonian school recoils from "frankenstein" as from an incarnation of the evil spirit: she does not know what to make of the "tales of my landlord"; and she inquires of an irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange caricature, castle rack rent." contemporary judgments such as these (not more extravagant than horace walpole's) are to the historian of literature what fossil remains are to the geologist. [footnote : coleridge, "aids to reflection."] although perhaps no biographical sketch was ever executed, as a labour of love, without an occasional attack of what lord macaulay calls the _lues boswelliana_ or fever of admiration, i hope it is unnecessary for me to say that i am not setting up mrs. piozzi as a model letter-writer, or an eminent author, or a pattern of the domestic virtues, or a fitting object of hero or heroine worship in any capacity. all i venture to maintain is, that her life and character, if only for the sake of the "associate forms," deserve to be vindicated against unjust reproach, and that she has written many things which are worth snatching from oblivion or preserving from decay. end of the first volume. london printed by spottiswoode and co. new-street square [transcriber's note: helen c. black, article "mrs. hungerford" in _notable women authors of the day_ ( ) edition] notable women authors of the day, by helen c. black _with portraits_ london: maclaren and company waithman street, pilgrim street, e.c. contents (...) _mrs. hungerford_ (...) it is well worth encountering the perils of the sea, even in the middle of winter, and in the teeth of a north-east wind, if only to experience the absolute comfort and ease with which, in these space-annihilating days, the once-dreaded journey from england to the emerald isle can be made. you have resolved to accept a hospitable invitation from mrs. hungerford, the well-known author of _molly bawn_, etc., to visit her at her lovely house, st. brenda's, bandon, co. cork, where a 'hearty irish welcome' is promised, and though circumstances prevent your availing yourself of the 'month's holiday' so kindly offered, and limit an absence from home to but four days, it is delightful to find that, travelling by the best of all possible routes--the irish mail--it is to be accomplished easily and without any fatiguing haste. having given due notice of your intentions, you arrive at euston just in time for the . a.m. express, and find that by the kindness of the station-master a compartment is reserved, and every arrangement, including an excellent meal, is made for your comfort. the carriages are lighted by electricity, and run so smoothly that it is possible to get a couple of hours' good sleep, which the very early start has made so desirable. on reaching holyhead at . p.m. to the minute, you are met by the courteous and attentive marine superintendant captain cay, r.n., who takes you straight on board the _ireland_, the newest addition to the fleet of fine ships, owned by the city of dublin steam packet company. she is a magnificent vessel, feet long, feet in beam, , tons, and , horse-power; her fine, broad bridge, handsome deck-houses, and brass work glisten in the bright sunlight. she carries electric light; and the many airy private cabins indicate that, though built for speed, the comfort of her passengers has been a matter of much consideration. she is well captained, well officered, well manned, and well navigated. the good-looking, weather-beaten captain kendall is indeed the commodore of the company, and has made the passage for nearly thirty years. there is an unusually large number of passengers to-day, for it is the first week of the accelerated speed, and it is amusing to notice the rapidity with which the mails are shipped, on men's backs, which plan is found quicker than any appliance. captain cay remarks that it is no uncommon thing to ship seven hundred sacks on foreign mail days; he says, too, that never since these vessels were started has there been a single accident to life or limb. but the last bag is on board, steam is up, and away goes the ship past the south stack lighthouse, built on an island under precipitous cliffs, from which a gun is fired when foggy, and in about an hour the irish coast becomes visible, howth and bray head. the sea gets pretty rough, but luckily does not interfere with your excellent appetite for the first-class refreshments supplied. the swift-revolving paddles churn the big waves into a thick foam as the good ship _ireland_ ploughs her way through at the rate of twenty knots an hour, 'making good weather of it', and actually accomplishes the voyage in three hours and fifteen minutes--one of the shortest runs on record. the punctuality with which these mail packets make the passage in all weathers is indeed truly wonderful--a fact which is experienced a few days later on the return journey. kingstown is reached at . p.m. (irish time), where the mail train is waiting to convey passengers by the new loop line that runs in a curve right through 'dear dirty dublin', as it is popularly called, to kingsbridge, and so on to cork, where you put up for the night at the imperial hotel. another bright sunshiny morning opens, and shows old cork at her best. cork! the old city of father prout's poem, 'the bells of shandon', which begins thus: with deep affection and recollection i often think of shandon bells, whose sounds so wild would in days of childhood fling round my cradle their magic spells, on this i ponder where'er i wander, and thus grow fonder, sweet cork, of thee; with the bells of shandon that sound so grand on, etc. etc. the river lee runs through the handsome little city, and has often been favourably compared with the rhine. but bandon must be reached, which is easily managed in an hour by rail, and there you are met by your host with a neat dog-cart, and good grey mare; being in light marching order, your kit is quickly stowed away by a smart-looking groom, and soon you find yourself tearing along at a spanking pace through the 'most protestant' town of bandon, where mr. hungerford pulls up for a moment to point out the spot where once the old gates stood, whereon was written the legend, 'let no papist enter here'. years after, a priest in the dead of night added to it. he wrote: whoever wrote this, wrote it _well_ the same is written on the gates of _hell_. then up the hill past ballymoden church, in through the gates of castle bernard, past lord bandon's beautiful old castle covered with exquisite ivy, out through a second gate, over the railway, a drive of twenty minutes in all, and so up to the gates of st. brenda's. a private road of about half a mile long, hedged on either side by privet and hawthorn and golden furze, leads to the avenue proper, the entrance gate which is flanked by two handsome deodars. it takes a few minutes more to arrive at a large, square, ivy-clad house, and ere there is time to take in an idea of its gardens and surroundings, the great hall door is flung open, a little form trips down the stone steps, and almost before the horse has come to a standstill, mrs. hungerford gives you indeed the 'hearty irish welcome' she promised. it is now about four o'clock, and the day is growing dark. your hostess draws you in hastily out of the cold, into a spacious hall lighted by a hanging eastern lamp, and by two other lamps let into the wide circular staircase at the lower end of it. the drawing-room door is open, and a stream of ruddy light from half-a-dozen crimson shaded lamps, rushing out, seems to welcome you too. it is a large, handsome room, very lofty, and charmingly furnished, with a persian carpet, tiny tables, low lounging chairs, innumerable knick-knacks of all kinds, ferns, winter flowers of every sort, screens and palms. a great fire of pine-logs is roaring up the chimney. the piano is draped with bokhara plush, and everywhere the latest magazines, novels, and papers are scattered. mrs. hungerford is a very tiny woman, but slight and well-proportioned. her large hazel eyes, sparkling with fun and merriment, are shaded by thick, curly lashes. she has a small, determined mouth, and the chin slightly upturned, gives a _piquante_ expression to the intelligent face--so bright and vivacious. her hair is of a fair-brown colour, a little lighter than her eyelashes, and is piled up high on the top of her head, breaking away into natural curls over her brow. she is clad in an exquisite tea-gown of dark blue plush, with a soft, hanging, loose front of a lighter shade of silk. some old lace ruffles finish off the wrists and throat, and she wears a pair of little high-heeled _louis quinze_ shoes, which display her small and pretty feet. she looks the embodiment of good temper, merry wit, and _espièglerie_. it is difficult to realize that she is the mother of the six children who are grouped in the background. one lovely little fairy, 'vera', ages three and a half, runs clinging up to her skirts, and peeps out shyly. her delicate colouring suggests a bit of dainty dresden china. later on, you discover that this is actually the pet name by which she is known, being indeed quite famous here as a small beauty. 'master tom', a splendid roly-poly fellow, aged sixteen months is playing with a heap of toys on the rug near the fire and is carefully watched over by a young brother of five. the three other girls are charming little maidens. the eldest, though but in her early teens, is intellectual and studious; the second has a decided talent for painting, whilst the third, says her mother, laughing, 'is a consummate idler, but witty and clever'. by and bye your hostess takes you into what she calls her 'den', for a long, undisturbed chat, and this room also bears the stamp of her taste and love of study. a big log fire burns merrily here, too, in the huge grate, and lights up a splendid old oak cabinet, reaching from floor to ceiling, which, with four more bookcases, seems literally crammed with dictionaries, books of reference, novels, and other light literature; but the picturesque is not wanting, and there are plenty of other decorations, such as paintings, flowers, and valuable old china to be seen. here the clever little author passes three hours every morning. she is, as usual, over-full of work, sells as fast as she can write, and has at the present time more commissions than she can get through during the next few years. everything is very orderly--each big or little bundle of mss. is neatly tied together and duly labelled. she opens one drawer of a great knee-hole writing table, which discloses hundreds of half sheets of paper. 'yes', she says, with a laugh; 'i scribble my notes on these: they are the backs of my friends' letters; how astonished many of them would be if they knew that the last half sheet they write me becomes on the spot a medium for the latest full-blown accounts of a murder, or a laugh, or a swindle, perhaps, more frequently, a flirtation! i am a bad sleeper', she adds, 'i think my brain is too active, for i always plan out my best scenes at night, and write them out in the morning without any trouble'. she finds, too, that driving has a curious effect upon her; the action of the air seems to stimulate her. she dislikes talking, or being talked to, when driving, but loves to think, and to watch the lovely variations of the world around her, and often comes home filled with fresh ideas, scenes, and conversations, which she scribbles down without even waiting to throw off her furs. asking her how she goes to work about her plot, she answers with a reproachful little laugh--'that is unkind! you know i never _have_ a plot really, not the _bona fide_ plot one looks for in a novel. an idea comes to me, or i to it', she says, airily, 'a scene--a situation--a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint i begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? 'indeed, no', she replies; 'it has frequently happened to me that i have written the last chapter first, and so, as it were, worked backwards'. 'phyllis' was the young author's first work. it was written before she was nineteen, and was read by mr. james payn, who accepted it for messrs. smith elder & co. mrs. hungerford is the daughter of the late rev. canon hamilton, rector and vicar choral of st. faughnan's cathedral in ross carberry, co. cork, one of the oldest churches in ireland. her grandfather was john hamilton, of vesington, dunboyne, a property thirteen miles out of dublin. the family is very old, very distinguished, and came over from scotland to ireland in the reign of james i. most of her family are in the army; but of literary talent, she remarks, it has but little to boast. her principal works are _phyllis_, _molly bawn_, _mrs. geoffrey_, _portia_, _rossmoyne_, _undercurrents_, _a life's remorse_, _a born coquette_, _a conquering heroine_. she has written up to this time thirty-two novels, besides uncountable articles for home and american papers. in the latter country she enjoys an enormous popularity, and everything she writes is rapidly printed off. first sheets of the novels in hand are bought from her for american publications, months before there is any chance of their being completed. in australia, too, her books are eagerly looked for, whilst every story she has ever written can be found in the tauchnitz series. she began to write when very young, at school taking always the prize in composition. as a mere child she could always keep other children spellbound whilst telling them fairy stories of her own invention. 'i remember', she says, turning round with a laugh, 'when i was about ten years old, writing a ghost story which so frightened myself, that when i went to bed that night, i couldn't sleep till i had tucked my head under the bedclothes'. 'this', she adds, 'i have always considered my _chef d'oeuvre_, as i don't believe i have ever succeeded in frightening anyone ever since'. at eighteen she gave herself up seriously, or rather, gaily, to literary work. all her books teem with wit and humor. one of her last creations, the delightful old butler, murphy, in _a born coquette_, is equal to anything ever written by her compatriot, charles lever. not that she has devoted herself entirely to mirth-moving situations. the delicacy of her love scenes, the lightness of touch that distinguishes her numerous flirtations can only be equalled by the pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. her descriptions of scenery are specially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. she is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, 'no nice girl would allow her mother to read'. mrs. hungerford married first when very young, but her husband died in less than six years, leaving her with three little girls. in she married mr. henry hungerford. he also is irish, and his father's place, cahirmore, of about eleven thousand acres, lies nearly twenty miles to the west of bandon. 'it may interest you', she says, 'to hear that my husband was at the same school as mr. rider haggard. i remember when we were all much younger than we are now, the two boys came over for their holidays to cahirmore, and one day in my old home "milleen" we all went down to the kitchen to cast bullets. we little thought then that the quiet, shy schoolboy, was destined to be the author of "king solomon's mines"'. nothing less than a genius is mrs. hungerford at gardening. her dress protected by a pretty holland apron, her hands encased in brown leather gloves, she digs and delves. followed by many children, each armed with one of 'mother's own' implements--for she has her own little spade and hoe, and rake, and trowel, and fork--she plants her own seeds, and pricks her own seedlings, prunes, grafts, and watches with the deepest eagerness to see them grow. in springtime, her interest is alike divided between the opening buds of her daffodils, and the breaking of the eggs of the first little chickens, for she has a fine poultry yard too, and is very successful in her management of it. she is full of vitality, and is the pivot on which every member of the house turns. blessed with an adoring husband, and healthy, handsome, obedient children, who come to her for everything and tell her anything, her life seems idyllic. 'now and then', she remarks laughing, 'i really have great difficulty in securing two quiet hours for my work'; but everything is done in such method and order, the writing included, there is little wonder that so much is got through. it is a full, happy, complete life. 'i think', she adds, 'my one great dread and anxiety is a review. i never yet have got over my terror of it, and as each one arrives, i tremble and quake afresh ere reading'. _april's lady_ is one of the author's lately published works. it is in the three volumes, and ran previously as a serial in _belgravia_. _lady patty_, a society sketch drawn from life, has a most favourable reception from the critics and public alike, but in her last novel, very cleverly entitled _nor wife nor maid_, mrs. hungerford is to be seen, or rather read, at her best. this charming book, so full of pathos, so replete with tenderness, ran into a second edition in about ten days. in it the author has taken somewhat of a departure from her usual lively style. here she has indeed given 'sorrow words'. the third volume is so especially powerful and dramatic, that it keeps the attention chained. the description indeed of poor mary's grief and despair are hardly to be outdone. the plot contains a delicate situation, most delicately worked out. not a word or suspicion of a word jars upon the reader. it is not however all gloom. there is in it a second pair of lovers who help to lift the clouds, and bring a smile to the lips of the reader. mrs. hungerford does not often leave her pretty irish home. what with her incessant literary work, her manifold domestic occupations, and the cares of her large family, she can seldom be induced to quit what she calls, 'an out and out country life', even to pay visits to her english friends. mrs. hungerford unhesitatingly declares that everything in the house seems wrong, and there is a howl of dismay from the children when the presiding genius even suggests a few days' leave of absence. last year, however, she determined to go over london at the pressing invitation of a friend, in order to make the acquaintance of some of her distinguished brothers and sisters of the pen, and she speaks of how thoroughly she enjoyed that visit, with an eager delight. 'everyone was so kind', she says, 'so flattering, far, far too flattering. they all seemed to have some pretty thing to say to me. i have felt a little spoilt ever since. however, i am going to try what a little more flattery will do for me, so mr. hungerford and i hope to accept, next spring, a second invitation from the same friend, who wants us to go to a large ball she is going to give some time in may for some charitable institution--a cottage hospital i believe; but come', she adds, suddenly springing up, 'we have spent quite too much time over my stupid self. come back to the drawing-room and the chicks, i am sure they must be wondering where we are, and the tea and the cakes are growing cold'. at this moment the door opens, and her husband, gun in hand, with muddy boots and gaiters, nods to you from the threshold; he says he dare not enter the 'den' in this state, and hurries up to change before joining the tea table. 'he is a great athlete', says his wife, 'good at cricket, football, and hockey, and equally fond of shooting, fishing, and riding'. that he is a capital whip, you have already found out. in the morning you see from the library window a flower garden and shrubbery, with rose trees galore, and after breakfast a stroll round the place is proposed. a brisk walk down the avenue first, and then back to the beech trees standing on the lawn, which slopes away from the house down to a river running at the bottom of a deep valley, up the long gravelled walk by the hall door, and you turn into a handsome walled kitchen garden, where fruit trees abound--apple and pear trees laden with fruit, a quarter of an acre of strawberry beds, and currant and raspberry bushes in plenty. but time and tide, trains and steamers, wait to for no man, or woman either. a few hours later you regretfully bid adieu to the charming little author, and watch her until the bend of the road hides her from your sight. mr. hungerford sees you through the first stage of the journey, which is all accomplished satisfactorily, and you reach home to find that whilst you have been luxuriating in fresh sea and country air, london has been wrapped in four days of gloom and darkness." complement: helen c. black, _in memoriam the late mrs. hungerford_ from _the englishwoman_ april pp. - "the sad news of the death of the popular and well-known author, mrs. hungerford, has caused a universal thrill of sorrow, no less to her many friends than to the large section of the reading public, in every part of the globe where the english tongue is spoken, who delight in her simple but bright and witty love-stories, so full of pathos, so replete with tenderness and human interest. the melancholy event took place on sunday morning, the th january, after many weeks' illness from typhoid fever, and has deprived what the beloved little writer was wont to call 'a perfectly happy and idyllic irish home' of its chiefest treasure. the late mrs. hungerford came before the public at the early age of eighteen, when she made an immediate success with her first novel, _phyllis_, which was read and accepted by mr. james payn, then reader for messrs. smith elder & co. her natural bent towards literature had, however, manifested itself in childhood, when she took at school all the prizes in composition, and used to keep her playfellows enthralled by the stories and fairy-tales she invented and wrote for them. on leaving school she at once decided to adopt the pen as a profession, in which she has had so successful a career. the tone of _phyllis_ was so fresh and ingenuous that it soon found favour with the public, and was shortly followed by the far-famed _molly bawn_--a title which was peculiarly associated with her, inasmuch as it was the name by which many friends called her--and a long series, numbering over forty novels, besides countless short stories for home and american magazines, where, together with australia and india, she enjoyed a vast popularity. in america everything she wrote was rapidly printed off, first sheets of novels in hand being bought from her for transatlantic publications long before there was any chance of their being completed, while every story she ever wrote can be found in the tauchnitz series. among her earlier works are _portia_, _mrs. geoffrey_, _airy fairy lilian_, _rossmoyne_, etc., which were followed as years rolled on, by _undercurrents_, _a life's remorse_, _a born coquette_--where her creation of the delightful old butler, murphy, is equal to anything ever written by her compatriot charles lever--, _nor wife, nor maid_, _the professor's experiment_, etc. the latest work that she lived to see published is a collection of clever, crisp stories, entitled _an anxious moment_, which, with a strange and pathetic significance, terminates with a brief paper called 'how i write my novels'. two posthumous works were left completed, bearing the names, respectively, of _lovice_, just issued, and _the coming of chloe_, which will shortly be brought out. thoroughly wholesome in tone, bright and sparkling in style, the delicacy of here love-scenes and the lightness of touch that distinguishes her character sketches can only be equalled by the pathos, which every now and then she has thrown in, as if to temper her vivacity with a little shade. here and there, as in the case of _nor wife, nor maid_, she has struck a powerfully dramatic note, while her descriptions of scenery are especially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. the late mrs. hungerford was the daughter of the late rev. canon hamilton, rector and vicar choral of st. faughman's cathedral, ross carberry, co. cork, one of the oldest churches in ireland. her grandfather was john hamilton, of vesington, dunboyne, a property thirteen miles out of dublin. the family is very old, very distinguished, and came over from scotland to ireland in the reign of james i. she was first married when very young, but her husband died five and a half years later, leaving her with three little girls. in , _en secondes noces_, she married mr. thomas henry hungerford, of st. brenda's, bandon, co. cork, whose father's estate cahirmore, of about eleven thousand acres, lies nearly twenty miles to the west of bandon. by this most happy union, she has left three children--two sons and a daughter. thoroughly domestic in all her tastes, with a love of gardening, and a practical knowledge of all the details of country life, which tend to make the home so comfortable, her unfailing sweet temper, ready wit and _espièglerie_, her powers of sympathy and strong common sense, caused her to be the life and center of her large household. tenderly attached to her husband and family, by all of whom she was adored, she used often to say, with joy and pride, 'they came to her for everything, and told her everything, and it was a union of perfect love, confidence, and peace'. in social life she numbered a large circle of friends, to whom she was deservedly endeared by her many engaging qualities; she possessed, indeed, a magnetism which drew all hearts towards her. but seldom could mrs. hungerford be induced to leave her picturesque irish home, even to pay visits to her friends in england. her manifold duties, the cares of a large family, and her incessant literary work filled up a life that was complete, useful, and congenial, and leaves behind an irreparable blank. a brief description of the well-beloved little author and her pretty home will be interesting to those who knew her not, save through her works. she was a very tiny woman, but slight and well-proportioned, with baby hands and feet. the large hazel eyes, that sparkled with fun and merriment, were shaded by thick curly lashes; a small, determined mouth and slightly upturned chin gave a piquant expression to the intelligent face--so bright and vivacious. her hair, of a fair brown colour, a little lighter than the eyelashes, was worn piled up on the top of her head, and broke away into natural curls over a broad and intellectual brow. driving up the hill, past ballymoden church, in through the gates of castle barnard, lord bandon's beautiful old place covered with ivy, out through a second gate and over the railway, the gates of st. brenda are reached. a private road, about half a mile long, hedged on either side with privet, hawthorn and golden furze, leads to the avenue proper, the entrance gate of which is flanked by two handsome deodars. it takes a few minutes more to arrive at the large square ivy-clad house an grounds, where beech trees stand on the lawn sloping away down to a river running at the bottom of a deep valley. the long gravelled walk by the hall door turns into a handsome walled kitchen garden, where apple and pear trees abound, together with a quarter of an acre of strawberry beds, currant, gooseberry, and raspberry bushes in plenty. from the library window can be seen the flower garden and shrubbery and a large variety of rose trees. close by is her own special plot where she delighted to work with her own little implements, spade, trowel, hoe, and rake, planting her seeds, pricking her seedlings, pruning, grafting, and watching with deepest eagerness to see them grow. in spring-time her interest was alike divided between the opening buds of her daffodils and the breaking of the eggs of the first little chickens in the fine poultry yard, in the management of which she was so successful. but among all these multifarious and healthy outdoor occupations in which she delighted, mrs. hungerford invariably secured three hours daily for her literary pursuits, when everything was done with such method and order, the writing included, that there was little wonder that she got through so much. her own writing-room bears the stamp of her taste and her love of study, where the big log-fire burned in the huge grate, and lighted up a splendid old oak cabinet that reaches from floor to ceiling, which, together with four other bookcases, are literally crammed to overflowing, while the picturesque is not wanting, as the many paintings, old china, ferns, plants and winter flowers can testify. on the great knee-hole writing table lies the now silent pen where last she used it, with each big or little bundle of mss. methodically labelled, and a long list of engagements for work, extending into future years, now, alas! destined to remain unfulfilled! with so active a brain she was a bad sleeper, and always planned out her best schemes during the night, and wrote them out in the morning without difficulty. driving, too, had a curious effect upon her; the action of the air seemed to stimulate her, and she disliked talking, or being talked to, when driving. she loved to think and to watch the lovely variations of the world around her, and would often come home filled with fresh ideas, scenes, and conversations, which she used to note down without even waiting to throw off her furs. if questioned how she went to work about a plot she would reply, with a reproachful little laugh, 'i never have a plot really, not the _bona fide_ plot one looks for in a novel. an idea comes to me, or i to it--a scene, a situation, a young man or a young woman--and on that mental hint i begin to build, and it has frequently happened to me that i have written the last chapter first, and so, as it were, worked backwards'. but in whatsoever form the gifted writer composed her novels the result was the same, and she will be widely mourned by the many, who in hours of sickness, of carking care or sorrow, owed a temporary respite from heavy thought, or the laugh that banishes ennui, to her ready pen--grave and gay by turns, but in every mood bewitching. during her long illness, with its constant relapses, its alternations of now hope, now despair, her patience and unselfishness were exhibited to a remarkable degree. ever fearful to give trouble, hopeful and wishing to encourage the loved ones around her, she maintained a gentle cheerfulness and resignation, and finally passed away so peacefully that her sorrowing husband and children scarcely realised the moment when her spirit winged its flight to the better land, whence she, being dead, 'yet speaketh', for 'to live in hearts we leave behind is not to die'." eminent women series edited by john h. ingram emily brontË all rights reserved. emily brontË by a. mary f. robinson second edition. london: w. h. allen and co. , waterloo place . [all rights reserved] london: printed by w. h. allen and co., waterloo place. s.w. contents. page introduction chapter i. parentage chapter ii. babyhood chapter iii. cowan's bridge chapter iv. childhood chapter v. going to school chapter vi. girlhood at haworth chapter vii. in the rue d'isabelle chapter viii. a retrospect chapter ix. the recall chapter x. the prospectuses chapter xi. branwell's fall chapter xii. writing poetry chapter xiii. troubles chapter xiv. wuthering heights: its origin chapter xv. wuthering heights: the story chapter xvi. 'shirley' chapter xvii. branwell's end chapter xviii. emily's death finis! * * * * * list of authorities. - . the works of currer, ellis, and acton bell. . life of charlotte brontë. _mrs. gaskell. st and nd editions._ . charlotte brontë. _t. wemyss reid._ . note on charlotte brontë. _a. c. swinburne._ . three great englishwomen. _p. bayne._ ms. lecture on emily brontë. _t. wemyss reid._ ms. notes on emily and charlotte brontë. _miss ellen nussey._ ms. letters of charlotte and branwell brontë. . reminiscences of the brontës. _miss e. nussey._ . unpublished letters of charlotte, emily, and anne brontë. _hours at home._ . emily brontë's annotated copy of her poems. . branwell brontë: in the "mirror." _g. s. phillips._ . pictures of the past. _f. h. grundy._ . prospectus of the clergymen's daughters' school at cowan's bridge. . preface to wuthering heights. _charlotte brontë._ . biographical notice of ellis and acton bell. _charlotte brontë._ . wuthering heights: in the "palladium." _sydney dobell._ personal reminiscences of mrs. wood, mrs. ratcliffe, mrs. brown, and mr. william wood, of haworth. - . poems of patrick brontë, b.a., incumbent of haworth. . haworth: past and present. _j. horsfall turner._ * * * * * emily brontË. introduction. there are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. so much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to form a public capable of appreciating it. such marvellous fragments reach us of elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number of copies of 'prometheus unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. we know too well "what porridge had john keats," and remember with misgiving the turtle to which we treated hobbs and nobbs at dinner, and how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards. let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of all heroes dead within a hundred years. let us, in laying claim to an infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other side of time's whispering gallery. shall we therefore pronounce only on chaucer and shakespeare, on gower and our learned ben? alas! we are too sure of their relative merits; we stake our reputations with no qualms, no battle-ardours. these we reserve to them for whom the future is not yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our hero is in our hands. but very gradually the victory is gained. a taste is unconsciously formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of art--qualities which blake in his garret, millet without the sou, set down in immortal work. at last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons his discovery. mr. swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'wuthering heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where coleridge and webster, hofmann and leopardi have their place. until then, a few brave lines of welcome from sydney dobell, one fine verse of mr. arnold's, one notice from mr. reid, was all the praise that had been given to the book by those in authority. here and there a mill-girl in the west riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the lending library; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air; or some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. but these readers were not many; even yet the book is not popular. for, in truth, the qualities that distinguish emily brontë are not those which are of the first necessity to a novelist. she is without experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no atmosphere of broad humanity like george eliot; she has not jane austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for charlotte brontë a place between cervantes and victor hugo. emily brontë is of a different class. her imagination is narrower, but more intense; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present: no writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate fidelity, but this is all of nature that she describes. her narrow fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'villette' and 'shirley'; paul emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind, there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of heathcliff dying of joy--an unnatural, unreal joy--his panther nature paralysed, _anéanti_, in a delirium of visionary bliss. only an imagination of the rarest power could conceive such a dénouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common horrors, no vulgar bedlam frenzy; but by the torturing apprehension of a happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of realisation. only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch, absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone connects this world with the land of dreams. few have trod that perilous bridge with the fearlessness of emily brontë: that is her own ground and there she wins our highest praise; but place her on the earth, ask her to interpret for us the common lives of the surrounding people, she can give no answer. the swift and certain spirit moves with the clumsy hesitating gait of a bird accustomed to soar. she tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable of seeing are equally characteristic. all the wildness of that moorland, all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she divined and appropriated; but not the life of the village at her feet, not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternations of wealth and poverty; not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and while the west riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and nearly every place in 'jane eyre' and 'shirley,' not a single character in 'wuthering heights' ever climbed the hills round haworth. say that two foreigners have passed through staffordshire, leaving us their reports of what they have seen. the first, going by day, will tell us of the hideous blackness of the country; but yet more, no doubt, of that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for, women with little children in their arms; and he would notice the blue sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. but the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of the fire. the meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at work in the encompassing night. so differently did the black country of this world appear to charlotte, clear-seeing and compassionate, and to emily brontë, a traveller through the shadows. each faithfully recorded what she saw, and the place was the same, but how unlike the vision! the spectacles of temperament colour the world very differently for each beholder; and, to understand the vision, we too should for a moment look through the seer's glass. to gain some such transient glance, to gain and give some such momentary insight into the character of emily brontë, has been the aim i have tried to make in this book. that i have not fulfilled my desire is perhaps inevitable--the task has been left too long. if i have done anything at all i feel that much of the reward is due to my many and generous helpers. foremost among them i must thank dr. ingham, my kind host at haworth, mrs. wood, mr. william wood, mrs. brown, and mrs. ratcliffe of that parish--all of whom had known the now perished family of brontë; and my thanks are due no less to mr. t. wemyss reid, as will be seen further on, to mr. j. h. ingram, and to mr. biddell, who have collected much valuable information for my benefit; and most of all do i owe gratitude and thankfulness to miss ellen nussey, without whose generous help my work must have remained most ignorant and astray. to her, had it been worthier, had it been all the subject merits, and yet without those shadows of gloom and trouble enjoined by the nature of the story; to her, could i only have spoken of the high noble character of emily brontë and not of the great trials of her life, i should have ventured to dedicate this study. but to emily's friend i only offer what, through her, i have learned of emily; she, who knew so little of branwell's shames and sorrow is unconcerned with this, their sad and necessary record. only the lights and sunshine of my work i dedicate to her. it may be that i have given too great a share to the shadows, to the manifold follies and failures of branwell brontë. yet in emily brontë's life the shaping influences were so few, and the sins of this beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the shock which turned the fantasy of the 'poems' into the tragedy of 'wuthering heights.' it would have been to leave untold the patience, the courage, the unselfishness which perfected emily brontë's heroic character; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having chosen to invent the crimes and violence of her _dramatis personæ_. not so, alas! they were but reflected from the passion and sorrow that darkened her home; it was no perverse fancy which drove that pure and innocent girl into ceaseless brooding on the conquering force of sin and the supremacy of injustice. she brooded over the problem night and day; she took its difficulties passionately to heart; in the midst of her troubled thoughts she wrote 'wuthering heights.' from the clear spirit which inspires the end of her work, we know that the storm is over; we know that her next tragedy would be less violent. but we shall never see it; for--and it is by this that most of us remember her--suddenly and silently she died. she died, before a single word of worthy praise had reached her. she died with her work misunderstood and neglected. and yet not unhappy. for her home on the moors was very dear to her, the least and homeliest duties pleasant; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life. would that i could show her as she was!--not the austere and violent poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place; but brave to fate and timid of man; stern to herself, forbearing to all weak and erring things; silent, yet sometimes sparkling with happy sallies. for to represent her as she was would be her noblest and most fitting monument. chapter i. parentage. emily brontë was born of parents without any peculiar talent for literature. it is true that her mother's letters are precisely and prettily written. it is true that her father published a few tracts and religious poems. but in neither case is there any vestige of literary or poetical endowment. few, indeed, are the parish magazines which could not show among their contents poems and articles greatly superior to the weak and characterless effusions of the father of the brontës. the fact seems important; because in this case not one member of a family, but a whole family, is endowed in more or less degree with faculties not derived from either parent. for children may inherit genius from parents who are themselves not gifted, as two streaming currents of air unite to form a liquid with properties different from either; and never is biography more valuable than when it allows us to perceive by what combination of allied qualities, friction of opposing temperaments, recurrence of ancestral traits, the subtle thing we call character is determined. in this case, since, as i have said, the whole family manifested a brilliance not to be found in either parent, such a study would be peculiarly interesting. but, unfortunately, the history of the children's father and the constitution of the children's mother is all that is clear to our investigation. yet even out of this very short pedigree two important factors of genius declare themselves--two potent and shaping inheritances. from their father, currer, ellis, and acton derived a strong will. from their mother, the disease that slew emily and anne in the prime of their youth and made charlotte always delicate and ailing. in both cases the boy, patrick branwell, was very slightly affected; but he too died young, from excesses that suggest a taint of insanity in his constitution. insanity and genius stand on either side consumption, its worse and better angels. let none call it impious or absurd to rank the greatest gift to mankind as the occasional result of an inherited tendency to tubercular disease. there are of course very many other determining causes; yet is it certain that inherited scrofula or phthisis may come out, not in these diseases, or not only in these diseases, but in an alteration, for better or for worse, of the condition of the mind. out of evil good may come, or a worse evil. the children's father was a nervous, irritable and violent man, who endowed them with a nervous organisation easily disturbed and an indomitable force of volition. the girls, at least, showed both these characteristics. patrick branwell must have been a weaker, more brilliant, more violent, less tenacious, less upright copy of his father; and seems to have suffered no modification from the patient and steadfast moral nature of his mother. she was the model that her daughters copied, in different degrees, both in character and health. passion and will their father gave them. their genius came directly from neither parent; but from the constitution of their natures. in addition, on both sides, the children got a celtic strain; and this is a matter of significance, meaning a predisposition to the superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work. their mother, maria branwell, was of a good middle-class cornish family, long established as merchants in penzance. their father was the son of an irish peasant, hugh prunty, settled in the north of ireland, but native to the south. the history of the rev. patrick brontë, b.a. (whose fine greek name, shortened from the ancient irish appellation of bronterre, was so naïvely admired by his children), is itself a remarkable and interesting story. the reverend patrick brontë was one of the ten children of a peasant proprietor at ahaderg in county down. the family to which he belonged inherited strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing soil. they must have been very poor, those ten children, often hungry, cold and wet; but these adverse influences only seemed to brace the sinews of patrick prunty and to nerve his determination to rise above his surroundings. he grew up a tall and strong young fellow, unusually handsome with a well-shaped head, regular profile and fine blue eyes. a vivacious impressible manner effectually masked a certain selfishness and rigour of temperament which became plain in after years. he seemed a generous, quick, impulsive lad. when he was sixteen years of age patrick left his father's roof resolved to earn a position for himself. at drumgooland, a neighbouring hamlet, he opened what is called in ireland a public school; a sort of hedge-school for village children. he stuck to his trade for five or six years, using his leisure to perfect himself in general knowledge, mathematics, and a smattering of greek and latin. his efforts deserved to be crowned with success. the rev. mr. tighe, the clergyman of the parish, was so struck with patrick prunty's determination and ability that he advised him to try for admittance at one of the english universities; and when the young man was about five-and-twenty he went, with mr. tighe's help, to cambridge, and entered at st. john's. he left ireland in july, , never to visit it again. he never cared to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. he never found the means to revisit mother or home, friends or country. between patrick brontë, proud of his greek profile and his greek name, the handsome undergraduate at st. john's, and the nine shoeless, hungry young pruntys of ahaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles. under his warm and passionate exterior a fixed resolution to get on in the world was hidden; but, though cold, the young man was just and self-denying, and as long as his mother lived she received twenty pounds a year, spared with difficulty from his narrow income. patrick brontë stayed four years at cambridge; when he left he had dropped his irish accent and taken his b.a. on leaving st. john's he was ordained to a curacy in essex. the young man's energy, of the sort that only toils to reach a given personal end, had carried him far on the way to success. at twenty hedge-schoolmaster at drumgooland, patrick brontë was at thirty a respectable clergyman of the church of england, with an assured position and respectable clerical acquaintance. he was getting very near the goal. he did not stay long in essex. a better curacy was offered to him at hartshead, a little village between huddersfield and halifax in yorkshire. while he was at hartshead the handsome inflammable irish curate met maria branwell at her uncle's parsonage near leeds. it was not the first time that patrick brontë had fallen in love; people in the neighbourhood used to smile at his facility for adoration, and thought it of a piece with his enthusiastic character. they were quite right; in his strange nature the violence and the coldness were equally genuine, both being a means to gratify some personal ambition, desire, or indolence. it is not an uncommon irish type; self-important, upright, honourable, yet with a bent towards subtlety: abstemious in habit, but with freaks of violent self-indulgence; courteous and impulsive towards strangers, though cold to members of the household; naturally violent, and often assuming violence as an instrument of authority; selfish and dutiful; passionate, and devoid of intense affection. miss branwell was precisely the little person with whom it was natural that such a man, a self-made man, should fall in love. she was very small, quiet and gentle, not exactly pretty, but elegant and ladylike. she was, indeed, a well-educated young lady of good connections; a very phoenix she must have seemed in the eyes of a lover conscious of a background of pruntyism and potatoes. she was about twenty-one and he thirty-five when they first met in the early summer of . they were engaged in august. miss branwell's letters reveal a quiet intensity of devotion, a faculty of judgment, a willingness to forgive passing slights that must have satisfied the absolute and critical temper of her lover. under the devotion and the quietness there is, however, the note of an independent spirit, and the following extract, with its capability of self-reliance and desire to rely upon another, reminds one curiously of passages in her daughter charlotte's writings:-- "for some years i have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever; so far from it that my sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother used to consult me on every occasion of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my words and actions: perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that i do not boast of it. i have many times felt it a disadvantage, and although, i thank god, it has never led me into error, yet in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt i have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor." years afterwards, when maria branwell's letters were given into the hands of her daughter charlotte and that daughter's most dear and faithful friend, the two young women felt a keen pang of retrospective sympathy for the gentle independent little person who, even before her marriage, had time to perceive that her guide and instructor was not the infallible mentor she had thought him at the first. i quote the words of charlotte's friend, of more authority and weight on this matter than those of any other person living, taken from a manuscript which she has placed at my disposal:-- "miss branwell's letters showed that her engagement, though not a prolonged one, was not as happy as it ought to have been. there was a pathos of apprehension (though gently expressed) in part of the correspondence lest mr. brontë should cool in his affection towards her, and the readers perceived with some indignation that there had been a just cause for this apprehension. mr. brontë, with all his iron strength and power of will, had his weakness, and one which, wherever it exists, spoils and debases the character--he had _personal vanity_. miss branwell's finer nature rose above such weakness; but she suffered all the more from evidences of it in one to whom she had given her affections and whom she was longing to look up to in all things." on the th of december, , this disillusioned, loving little lady was married to patrick brontë, from her uncle's parsonage near leeds. the young couple took up their abode at hartshead, mr. brontë's curacy. three years afterwards they moved, with two little baby girls, maria and elizabeth, to a better living at thornton. the country round is desolate and bleak; great winds go sweeping by; young mrs. brontë, whose husband generally sat alone in his study, would have missed her cheerful home in sunny penzance (being delicate and prone to superstition), but that she was a patient and uncomplaining woman, and she had scant time for thought among her many cares for the thick-coming little lives that peopled her yorkshire home. in charlotte brontë was born. in the next year patrick branwell. in emily jane. in anne. then the health of their delicate and consumptive mother began to break. after seven years' marriage and with six young children, mr. and mrs. brontë moved on the th of february, , to their new home at haworth vicarage. the village of haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an abrupt low hill. such hills, more steep than high, are congregated round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. not a wood, not a river. as far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish grey of the stone. now and then a toppling, gurgling mill-beck gives life to the scene. but the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from yorkshire into lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places. white with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. but there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. the shadows of the coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. a hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of livid greenness round their rise. a hundred birds of every kind are flying and singing there. larks sing; cuckoos call; all the tribes of linnets and finches twitter in the bushes; plovers moan; wild ducks fly past; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry, blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly over the treeless and houseless moors. there in the spring you may take in your hands the weak, halting fledgelings of the birds; rabbits and game multiply in the hollows. there in the autumn the crowds of bees, mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village street. the winds, the clouds, nature and life, must be the friends of those who would love the moors. but young mrs. brontë never could go on the moors. she was frail and weak, poor woman, when she came to live in the oblong grey stone parsonage on the windy top of the hill. the village ran sheer down at her feet; but she could not walk down the steep rough-paven street, nor on the pathless moors. she was very ill and weak; her husband spent nearly all his time in the study, writing his poems, his tracts, and his sermons. she had no companions but the children. and when, in a very few months, she found that she was sickening of a cancer, she could not bear to see much of the children that she must leave so soon. who dare say if that marriage was happy? mrs. gaskell, writing in the life and for the eyes of mr. brontë, speaks of his unwearied care, his devotion in the night-nursing. but before that fatal illness was declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife's loneliness during her husband's lengthy, ineffectual studies; of her patient suffering of his violent temper. she does not say, but we may suppose, with what inward pleasure mrs. brontë witnessed her favourite silk dress cut into shreds because her husband's pride did not choose that she should accept a gift; or watched the children's coloured shoes thrown on the fire, with no money in her purse to get new ones; or listened to her husband's cavil at the too frequent arrival of his children; or heard the firing of his pistol-shots at the out-house doors, the necessary vent of a passion not to be wreaked in words. she was patient, brave, lonely, and silent. but mr. wemyss reid, who has had unexampled facilities for studying the brontë papers, does not scruple to speak of mr. brontë's "persistent coldness and neglect" of his wife, his "stern and peremptory" dealings with her, of her "habitual dread of her lordly master"; and the manuscript which i have once already quoted alludes to the "hard and inflexible will which raised itself sometimes into tyranny and cruelty." it is within the character of the man that all this should be true. safely wed, the woman to whom he had made hot love would experience no more of his impulsive tenderness. he had provided for her and done his duty; her duty was to be at hand when he needed her. yet, imminent death once declared, all his uprightness, his sense of honour, would call on him to be careful to the creature he had vowed to love and cherish, all his selfishness would oblige him to try and preserve the mother of six little children under seven years of age. "they kept themselves very close," the village people said; and at least in this last illness the husband and wife were frequently together. their love for each other, new revived and soon to close, seemed to exclude any thought of the children. we hear expressly that mr. brontë, from natural disinclination, and mrs. brontë, from fear of agitation, saw very little of the small earnest babies who talked politics together in the "children's study," or toddled hand in hand over the neighbouring moors. meanwhile the young mother grew weaker day by day, suffering great pain and often unable to move. but repining never passed her lips. perhaps she did not repine. perhaps she did not grieve to quit her harassed life, the children she so seldom saw, her constant pain, the husband "not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient."[ ] for some months she lay still, asking sometimes to be lifted in bed that she might watch the nurse cleaning the grate, because she did it as they did in cornwall. for some months she suffered more and more. in september, , she died. footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter ii. babyhood. after his wife's death the rev. mr. brontë's life grew yet more secluded from ordinary human interests. he was not intimate with his parishioners; scarcely more intimate with his children. he was proud of them when they said anything clever, for, in spite of their babyhood, he felt at such moments that they were worthy of their father; but their forlorn infancy, their helpless ignorance, was no appeal to his heart. some months before his wife's death he had begun to take his dinner alone, on account of his delicate digestion; and he continued the habit, seeing the children seldom except at breakfast and tea, when he would amuse the elders by talking tory politics with them, and entertain the baby, emily, with his irish tales of violence and horror. perhaps on account of this very aloofness, he always had a great influence over the children; he did not care for any dearer relation. his empty days were filled with occasional visits to some sick person in the village; with long walks alone over the moors, and with the composition of his 'cottage in the wood' and those grandiloquent sermons which still linger in the memory of haworth. occasionally a clergyman from one of the neighbouring villages would walk over to see him; but as mrs. brontë had died so soon after her arrival at haworth their wives never came, and the brontë children had no playfellows in the vicarages near; nor were they allowed to associate with the village children. this dull routine life suited mr. brontë. he had laboured for many years and now he took his repose. we get no further sign of the impatient energies of his youth. he had changed, developed; even as those sea-creatures develop, who, having in their youth fins, eyes and sensitive feelers, become, when once they find their resting-place, motionlessly attached to it, losing one after the other, sight, movement, and even sensation, everything but the faculty to adhere. meanwhile the children were left alone. for sympathy and amusement they only had each other to look to; and never were brother and sisters more devoted. maria, the eldest, took care of them all--she was an old-fashioned, motherly little girl; frail and small in appearance, with thoughtful, tender ways. she was very careful of her five little ones, this seven-year-old mother of theirs, and never seems to have exerted the somewhat tyrannic authority usually wielded by such youthful guardians. indeed, for all her seniority, she was the untidy one of the family herself; it was against her own faults only that she was severe. she must have been a very attaching little creature, with her childish delinquencies and her womanly cares; protecting her little family with gentle love and discussing the debates in parliament with her father. charlotte remembered her to the end of her life with passionate clinging affection and has left us her portrait in the pathetic figure of helen burns. this delicate, weak-chested child of seven was the head of the nursery. then came elizabeth, less clearly individualised in her sisters' memory. she also bore in her tiny body the seeds of fatal consumption. next came impetuous charlotte, always small and pale. then red-headed, talkative patrick branwell. lastly emily and anne, mere babies, toddling with difficulty over the paven path to the moors. such a family demanded the closest care, the most exact attention. this was perhaps impossible on an income of £ a year, when the mother lay upstairs dying of a disease that required constant nursing. still the conditions of the brontës' youth were unnecessarily unhealthy. it could not be helped that these delicate children should live on the bleak wind-swept hill where consumption is even now a scourge; it could not be helped that their home was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard; it could not be helped that they were left without a mother in their babyhood; but never, short of neglect, were delicate children less considered. the little ones, familiar with serious illness in the house, expected small indulgence. they were accustomed to think nothing so necessary as that they should amuse themselves in quiet, and keep out of the way. the lesson learned so young remained in the minds of the five sisters all their lives. from their infancy they were retired and good; it was only patrick branwell who sometimes showed his masculine independence by a burst of natural naughtiness. they were the quietest of children by nature and necessity. the rooms at haworth parsonage were small and few. there were in front two moderate-sized parlours looking on the garden, that on the right being mr. brontë's study, and the larger one opposite the family sitting-room. behind these was a sort of empty store-room and the kitchens. on the first floor there was a servants'-room, where the two servants slept, over the back premises; and a bedroom over each of the parlours. between these and over the entrance passage was a tiny slip of a room, scarcely larger than a linen-closet, scarcely wider than the doorway and the window-frame that faced each other at either end. during the last months of mrs. brontë's illness, when it became necessary that she should have a bedroom to herself, all the five little girls were put to sleep in this small and draughty closet, formerly the children's study. there can scarcely have been room to creep between their beds. very quiet they must have been; for any childish play would have disturbed the dying mother on the one side, and the anxious irritable father on the other. and all over the house they must keep the same hushed calm, since the low stone-floored rooms would echo any noise. very probably they were not unhappy children for all their quietness. they enjoyed the most absolute freedom, dearest possession of childhood. when they were tired of reading the papers (they seemed to have had no children's books), or of discussing the rival merits of bonaparte and the duke of wellington, they were free to go along the paven way over the three fields at the back, till the last steyle-hole in the last stone wall let them through on to the wide and solitary moors. there in all weathers they might be found; there they passed their happiest hours, uncontrolled as the birds overhead. one rule seems to have been made by their father for the management of these precocious children with their consumptive taint, with their mother dying of cancer--that one rule of mr. brontë's making, still preserved to us, is that the children should eat no meat. the rev. patrick brontë, b.a., had grown to heroic proportions on potatoes; he knew no reason why his children should fare differently. the children never grumbled; so mrs. brontë's sick-nurse told mrs. gaskell: "you would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. maria would shut herself up in the children's study with a newspaper and be able to tell one everything when she came out; debates in parliament, and i don't know what all. she was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. but there never were such good children. i used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children i had ever seen. in part, i set it down to a fancy mr. brontë had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. it was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner; but they never seemed to wish for anything else. they were good little creatures. emily was the prettiest." this pretty emily of two years old was no mother's constant joy. that early shaping tenderness, those recurring associations of reverent love, must be always missing in her memories. remembering her earliest childhood, she would recall a constant necessity of keeping joys and sorrows quiet, not letting others hear; she would recall the equal love of children for each other, the love of the only five children she knew in all the world; the free wide moors where she might go as she pleased, and where the rabbits played and the moor-game ran and the wild birds sang and flew. mrs. brontë's death can have made no great difference to any of her children save maria, who had been her constant companion at thornton; friendly and helpful as a little maiden of six can be to the worried, delicate mother of many babies. emily and anne would barely remember her at all. charlotte could only just recall the image of her mother playing with patrick branwell one twilight afternoon. an empty room, a cessation of accustomed business, their mother's death can have meant little more than that to the younger children. for about a year they were left entirely to their own devices, and to the rough care of kind-hearted, busy servants. they devised plays about great men, read the newspapers, and worshipped the duke of wellington, strolled over the moors at their own sweet will, knowing and caring absolutely for no creature outside the walls of their own home. to these free, hardy, independent little creatures mr. brontë announced one morning that their maiden aunt from cornwall, their mother's eldest sister, was coming to superintend their education. "miss branwell was a very small, antiquated little lady. she wore caps large enough for half-a-dozen of the present fashion, and a front of light auburn curls over her forehead. she always dressed in silk. she had a horror of the climate so far north, and of the stone floors in the parsonage.... she talked a great deal of her younger days--the gaieties of her dear native town penzance, the soft, warm climate, &c. she gave one the idea that she had been a belle among her own home acquaintance. she took snuff out of a very pretty gold snuff-box, which she sometimes presented to you with a little laugh, as if she enjoyed the slight shock of astonishment visible in your countenance.... she would be very lively and intelligent, and tilt arguments against mr. brontë without fear." so miss ellen nussey recalls the elderly, prim miss branwell about ten years later than her first arrival in yorkshire. but it is always said of her that she changed very little. miss nussey's striking picture will pretty accurately represent the maiden lady of forty, who, from a stringent and noble sense of duty, left her southern, pleasant home to take care of the little orphans running wild at haworth parsonage. it is easy to imagine with what horrified astonishment aunt and nieces must have regarded each others' peculiarities. it was, no doubt, an estimable advantage for the children to have some related lady in authority over them. henceforth their time was no longer free for their own disposal. they said lessons to their father, they did sewing with their aunt, and learned from her all housewifely duties. the advantage would have been a blessing had their aunt been a woman of sweet-natured, motherly turn; but the change from perfect freedom to her old-maidish discipline was not easy to bear--a bitter good, a strengthening but disagreeable tonic, making the children yet less expansive, yet more self-contained and silent. patrick branwell was the favourite with his aunt, the naughty, clever, brilliant, rebellious, affectionate patrick. next to him she always preferred the pretty, gentle baby anne, with her sweet, clinging ways, her ready submission, her large blue eyes and clear pink-and-white complexion. charlotte, impulsive, obstinate and plain, the rugged, dogged emily, were not framed to be favourites with her. many a fierce tussle of wills, many a grim listening to over-frivolous reminiscence, must have shown the aunt and her nieces the difference of their natures. maria, too, the whilom head of the nursery, must have found submission hard; but hers was a singularly sweet and modest nature. of elizabeth but little is remembered. mr. brontë, now that the children were growing out of babyhood, seems to have taken a certain pride in them. probably their daily lessons showed him the character and talent hidden under those pale and grave little countenances. in a letter to mrs. gaskell he recounts instances of their early talent. more home-loving fathers will smile at the simple yet theatric means he took to discover the secret of his children's real dispositions. 'twas a characteristic inspiration, worthy the originator of the ancient name of brontë. a certain simplicity of confidence in his own subtlety gives a piquant flavour to the manner of telling the tale:-- "a circumstance now occurs to my mind which i may as well mention. when my children were very young, when, as far as i can remember, the eldest was about ten years of age and the youngest four, thinking that they knew more than i had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, i deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover i might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house i told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask. "i began with the youngest (anne, afterwards acton bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, 'age and experience.' i asked the next (emily, afterwards ellis bell) what i had best do with her brother branwell, who sometimes was a naughty boy; she answered, 'reason with him; and when he won't listen to reason whip him.' i asked branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of men and women; he answered, 'by considering the difference between them as to their bodies.' i then asked charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, 'the bible.' and what was the next best; she answered, 'the book of nature.' i then asked the next (elizabeth, who seems to have taken miss branwell's teaching to heart) what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, 'that which would make her rule her house well.' lastly, i asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, 'by laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.' i may not have given precisely their words, but i have nearly done so, as they have made a deep and lasting impression on my memory. the substance, however, was exactly what i have stated." the severely practical character of emily's answer is a relief from the unchildish philosophy of branwell, maria, and the baby. a child of four years old who prefers age and experience to a tartlet and some sweets must be an unnatural product. but the brontës seem to have had no childhood; unlimited discussion of debates, long walks without any playfellows, the free perusal of methodist magazines, this is the pabulum of their infancy. years after, when they asked some school-children to tea, the clergyman's young daughters had to ask their little scholars to teach them how to play. it was the first time they had ever cared to try. what their childhood had really taught them was the value of their father's quaint experiment. they learned to speak boldly from under a mask. restrained, enforcedly quiet, assuming a demure appearance to cloak their passionate little hearts, the five sisters never spoke their inmost mind in look, word, or gesture. they saved the leisure in which they could not play to make up histories, dramas, and fairy tales, in which each let loose, without noise, without fear of check, the fancies they never tried to put into action as other children are wont to. charlotte wrote tales of heroism and adventure. emily cared more for fairy tales, wild, unnatural, strange fancies, suggested no doubt in some degree by her father's weird irish stories. already in her nursery the peculiar bent of her genius took shape. meanwhile the regular outer life went on--the early rising, the dusting and pudding-making, the lessons said to their father, the daily portion of sewing accomplished in miss branwell's bedroom, because that lady grew more and more to dislike the flagged flooring of the sitting-room. every day, some hour snatched for a ramble on the moors; peaceful times in summer when the little girls took their sewing under the stunted thorns and currants in the garden, the clicking sound of miss branwell's pattens indistinctly heard within. happy times when six children, all in all to each other, told wonderful stories in low voices for their own entrancement. then, one spring, illness in the house; the children suffering a complication of measles and whooping-cough. they never had such happy times again, for it was thought better that the two elders should go away after their sickness; should get their change of air at some good school. mr. brontë made inquiries and heard of an institution established for clergymen's daughters at cowan's bridge, a village on the high road between leeds and kendal. after some demurring the school authorities consented to receive the children, now free from infection, though still delicate and needing care. thither mr. brontë took maria and elizabeth in the july of . emily and charlotte followed in september. chapter iii. cowan's bridge. "it was in the year that the school for clergymen's daughters was first projected. the place was only then contemplated as desirable in itself, and as a place which might probably be feasible at some distant day. the mention of it, however, to only two friends in the south having met with their warm approbation and a remittance of £ , an opening seemed to be made for the commencement of the work. "with this sum in hand, in a reliance upon him who has all hearts at his disposal, and to whom belong the silver and the gold, the premises at cowan's bridge were purchased, the necessary repairs and additions proceeded with, and the school was furnished and opened in the spring of . the whole expense of the purchase and outfit amounted to £ _s._ _d._ "the scanty provision of a large portion of the clergy of the established church has long been a source of regret; and very efficient means have been adopted in various ways to remedy it. the sole object of the clergy daughters' school is to add, in its measure, to these means, by placing a good female education within reach of the poorest clergy. and by them the seasonable aid thus afforded has been duly appreciated. the anxiety and toil which necessarily attend the management of such an institution have been abundantly repaid by the gratitude which has been manifested among the parents of the pupils. "it has been a very gratifying circumstance that the clergy daughters' school has been enabled to follow up the design of somewhat kindred institutions in london. pupils have come to it as apprentices from the corporation of the sons of the clergy; and likewise from the clergy orphan school, in which the education is of a limited nature and the pupils are not allowed to remain after the age of sixteen. "the school is situated in the parish of tunstall, on the turnpike road from leeds to kendal, between which towns a coach runs daily, and about two miles from the town of kirkby lonsdale. "each pupil pays £ a year (half in advance) for clothing, lodging, boarding, and educating; £ entrance towards the expense of books, and £ entrance for pelisses, frocks, bonnets, &c., which they wear all alike.[ ] so that the first payment which a pupil is required to bring with her is £ ; and the subsequent half-yearly payment £ . if french, music, or drawing is learnt, £ a year additional is paid for each of these. "the education is directed according to the capacities of the pupils and the wishes of their friends. in all cases the great object in view is their intellectual and religious improvement; and to give that plain and useful education which may best fit them to return with respectability and advantage to their own homes; or to maintain themselves in the different stations of life to which providence may call them." ... here comes some explanation of the treasurer's accounts. then the report recommences:-- "low as the terms are, it has been distressing to discover that in many cases clergymen who have applied on behalf of their daughters have been unable to avail themselves of the benefits of the school from the inadequacy of their means to raise the required payments. "the projectors' object will not be fully realised until the means are afforded of reducing the terms still lower, in extreme cases, at the discretion of the committee. and he trusts that the time will arrive when, either by legacies or otherwise, the school may be placed within the reach of those of the clergy for whom it is specially intended--namely, the _most_ destitute. "the school is open to the whole kingdom. donors and subscribers gain the first attention in the recommendation of pupils; and the only inquiry made upon applications for admission is into the really necessitous circumstances of the applicant. "there are now ninety pupils in the school (the number that can be accommodated) and several are waiting for admission. "the school is under the care of mrs. harben, as superintendent, eight teachers, and two under-teachers. "to god belongs the glory of the degree of success which has attended this undertaking, and which has far exceeded the most sanguine expectations. but the expression of very grateful acknowledgment must not be wanting towards the many benefactors who have so readily and so bountifully rendered their assistance. they have their recompense in the constant prayers which are offered up from many a thankful heart for all who support this institution." thus excellently and moderately runs the fourth year's report of the philanthropic gymnase moronval, evangelical dotheboys hall, familiar to readers of 'jane eyre.' when these congratulations were set in type, those horrors of starvation, cruelty, and fever were all accomplished which brought death to many children, and to those that lived an embittering remembrance of wrong. the two brontë girls who survived their school days brought from them a deep distrust of human kindness, a difficult belief in sincere affection, not natural to their warm and passionate spirits. they brought away yet more enfeebled bodies, prone to disease; they brought away the memory of two dear sisters dead. "to god be the glory," says the report. rather, let us pray, to the rev. william carus wilson. the report quoted above was issued six years after the autumn in which the little brontës were sent to cowan's bridge; it was not known then in what terms one of those pale little girls would thank her benefactors, would speak of her advantages. she spoke at last, and generations of readers have held as filthy rags the righteousness of that institution, thousands of charitable hearts have beat high with indignation at the philanthropic vanity which would save its own soul by the sufferings of little children's tender bodies. yet by an odd anomaly this ogre benefactor, this brocklehurst, must have been a zealous and self-sacrificing enthusiast, with all his goodness spoiled by an imperious love of authority, an extravagant conceit. it was in the first year of the school that the little brontë girls left their home on the moors for cowan's bridge. it was natural that as yet many things should go wrong and grate in the unperfected order of the house; equally natural that the children should fail to make excuses: poor little prisoners pent, shivering and starved, in an unkind asylum from friends and liberty. the school, long and low, more like an unpretending farmhouse than an institution, forms two sides of an oblong. the back windows look out on a flat garden about seventy yards across. part of the house was originally a cottage; the longer part a disused bobbin-mill, once turned by the stream which runs at the side of the damp, small garden. the ground floor was turned into schoolrooms, the dormitories were above, the dining-room and the teachers'-room were in the cottage at the end. all the rooms were paved with stone, low-ceiled, small-windowed; not such as are built for growing children, working in large classes together. no board of managers would permit the poorest children of our london streets to work in such ill-ventilated schoolrooms. the bobbin-mill, not built for habitation, was, no doubt, faulty and insufficient in drainage. the situation of the house, chosen for its nearness to the stream, was damp and cold, on a bleak, unsheltered plain, picturesque enough in summer with the green alders overhanging the babbling beck, but in winter bitter chill. in this dreary house of machines, the place of the ousted wheels and springs was taken by ninety hungry, growing little human beings, all dressed alike in the coarse, ill-fitting garments of charity, all taught to look, speak, and think alike, all commended or held up to reprobation according as they resembled or diverged from the machines whose room they occupied and whose regular, thoughtless movement was the model of their life. these children chiefly owed their excellent education, their miserable food and lodging, to the exertions of a rich clergyman from willingdon, the nearest village. the rev. carus wilson was a person of importance in the neighbourhood; a person who was looked to in emergencies, who prided himself on his prudence, foresight, and efficiency in helping others. with this, none the less a man of real and zealous desire to do good, an energetic, sentient person capable of seeing evils and devising remedies. he wished to help: he wished no less that it should be known he had helped. pitying the miserable conditions of many of his fellow-workers, he did not rest till he had founded a school where the daughters of the poor clergy should receive a fair education at a nominal price. when the money for the school was forthcoming, the property was vested in twelve trustees; mr. wilson was one. he was also treasurer and secretary. nearly all the work, the power, the supervision, the authority of the affair, he took upon his shoulders. he was not afraid of work, and he loved power. he would manage, he would be overseer, he would guide, arrange, and counsel. so sure did he feel of his capacity to move all springs himself, that he seems to have exercised little pains and less discretion in appointing his subordinates. good fortune sent him a gentle, wise, and noble woman as superintendent; but the other teachers were less capable, some snappish, some without authority. the housekeeper, who should have been chosen with the greatest care, since in her hands lay the whole management and preparation of the food of these growing children, was a slovenly, wasteful woman, taken from mr. wilson's kitchen, and much believed in by himself. nevertheless to her door must we lay much of the misery of "lowood." the funds were small and somewhat uncertain. honour and necessity alike compelled a certain economy. mr. wilson contracted for the meat, flour, and milk, and frequently himself inspected the supplies. but perhaps he did not inspect the kitchen. the "lowood" scholars had many tales to tell of milk turned sour in dirty pans; of burnt porridge with disgusting fragments in it from uncleanly cooking vessels; of rice boiled in water from the rain-cask, flavoured with dead leaves, and the dust of the roof; of beef salted when already tainted by decomposition; of horrible resurrection-pies made of unappetising scraps and rancid fat. the meat, flour, milk and rice were doubtless good enough when mr. wilson saw them, but the starved little school-girls with their disappointed hunger had neither the courage to complain nor the impartiality to excuse. for the rest, it was not easy to complain to mr. wilson. his sour evangelicism led him to the same conclusion as the avarice of a less disinterested yorkshire schoolmaster; he would have bade them conquer human nature. being a very proud man, he sought to cultivate humility in others. the children were all dressed alike, all wearing in summer plain straw cottage bonnets, white frocks on sundays and nankeen in the week; all wearing in winter purple stuff frocks and purple pelisses--a serviceable and appropriate raiment which should allow no envies, jealousies, or flatteries. they should not be vain, neither should they be greedy. a request for nicer-tasting food would have branded the asker with the lasting contempt of the rev. william carus wilson, trustee, treasurer, and secretary. they were to learn that it was wrong to like pretty things to wear, nice things to eat, pleasant games to play; these little scholars taken half on charity. mr. wilson was repulsed by the apple-and-pegtop side of a child's nature; he deliberately ignored it. once in this grim, cold, hungry house of charity, there was little hope of escape. all letters and parcels were inspected by the superintendent; no friends of the pupils were allowed in the school, except for a short call of ceremony. but it is probable that maria and elizabeth, sent on before, had no thought of warning their smaller sisters. so destitute of all experience were they, that probably they imagined all schools like cowan's bridge; so anxious to learn, that no doubt they willingly accepted the cold, hunger, deliberate unkindness, which made their childhood anxious and old. the lot fell heaviest on the elder sister, clever, gentle, slovenly maria. the principal lesson taught at cowan's bridge was the value of routine. maria, with her careless ways, ready opinions, gentle loving incapacity to become a machine, maria was at discord with every principle of cowan's bridge. she incurred the bitter resentment of one of the teachers, who sought all means of humiliating and mortifying the sweet-natured, shiftless little creature. when, in september, bright, talkative charlotte and baby emily came to cowan's bridge, they found their idolised little mother, their maria, the butt, laughingstock and scapegrace of the school. things were better for the two younger ones, charlotte, a bright clever little girl, and emily, the prettiest of the little sisters, "a darling child, under five years of age, quite the pet nursling of the school."[ ] but though at first, no doubt, these two babies were pleased by the change of scene and the companionship of children, trouble was to befall them. not the mere distasteful scantiness of their food, the mere cold of their bodies; they saw their elder sister grow thinner, paler day by day, no care taken of her, no indulgence made for her weakness. the poor ill-used, ill-nourished child grew very ill without complaining; but at last even the authorities at cowan's bridge perceived that she was dying. they sent for mr. brontë in the spring of . he had not heard of her illness in any of his children's letters, duly inspected by the superintendent. he had heard no tales of poor food, damp rooms, neglect. he came to cowan's bridge and saw maria, his clever little companion, thin, wasted, dying. the poor father felt a terrible shock. he took her home with him, away from the three little sisters who strained their eyes to look after her. she went home to haworth. a few days afterwards she died. not many weeks after maria's death, when the spring made lowood bearable, when the three saddened little sisters no longer waked at night for the cold, no longer lame with bleeding feet, could walk in the sunshine and pick flowers, when april grew into may, an epidemic of sickness came over cowan's bridge. the girls one by one grew weak and heavy, neither scolding nor texts roused them now; instead of spending their play-hours in games in the sweet spring air, instead of picking flowers or running races, these growing children grew all languid, flaccid, indolent. there was no stirring them to work or play. increasing illness among the girls made even their callous guardians anxious at last. elizabeth brontë was one of the first to flag. it was not the fever that ailed her, the mysterious undeclared fever that brooded over the house; her frequent cough, brave spirits, clear colour pointed to another goal. they sent her home in the care of a servant; and before the summer flushed the scanty borders of flowers on the newest graves in haworth churchyard, elizabeth brontë was dead, no more to hunger, freeze, or sorrow. her hard life of ten years was over. the second of the brontë sisters had fallen a victim to consumption. discipline was suddenly relaxed for those remaining behind at cowan's bridge. there was more to eat, for there were fewer mouths to feed; there was more time to play and walk, for there were none to watch and restrain the eager children, who played, eat, shouted, ran riot, with a certain sense of relief, although they knew they were only free because death was in the house and pestilence in the air. the woody hollow of cowan's bridge was foggy, unwholesome, damp. the scholars underfed, cramped, neglected. their strange indolence and heaviness grew stronger and stronger with the spring. all at once forty-five out of the eighty girls lay sick of typhus-fever. many were sent home only to die, some died at cowan's bridge. all that could, sent for their children home. among the few who stayed in the fever-breeding hollow, in the contaminated house, where the odours of pastilles and drugs blended with, but could not conquer, the faint sickening smell of fever and mortality, among these abandoned few were charlotte and emily brontë. thanks to the free, reckless life, the sunshine, the novel abundance of food, the two children did not take the infection. things, indeed, were brighter for them now, or would have been, could the indignant spirit in these tiny bodies have forgiven or forgotten the deaths of their two sisters. reform had come to cowan's bridge, and with swift strides cleared away the old order of things. the site was declared unhealthy; the clothing insufficient; the water fetid and brackish. when the doctor who inspected the school was asked to taste the daily food of the scholars he spat it out of his mouth. everything, everything must be altered. it was a time of sore and grievous humiliation to mr. wilson. he had felt no qualms, no doubts; he had worked very hard, he thought things were going very well. the accounts were in excellent order, the education thorough and good, the system elaborate, the girls really seemed to be acquiring a meek and quiet spirit; and, to quote the prospectus, "the great object in view is their intellectual and religious improvement." then stepped in unreckoned-with disease, and the model institution became a by-word of reproach to the county and the order to which it belonged. people, however, were not unjust to the influential and wealthy treasurer, trustee, and secretary. they admitted his energy, financial capacities, and turn for organisation. all they did was to qualify the rigour of his management. he still continued treasurer, but the funds were entrusted to a committee. he kept his post of inspector, but assistants were appointed to share his responsibilities. the school was given in charge to a new housekeeper; larger and better rations of food were given out. finally a subscription was set on foot to build a better house in a healthier spot. when charlotte and emily brontë went home for the midsummer holidays, reform was in full swing at cowan's bridge. they went home, two out of the four children who had left their happy home six months before. they went home to find no motherly maria, no sturdy, patient elizabeth. the walks on the moors, the tales under the thorn-trees must henceforth be incomplete. the two elders of that little band were no longer to be found in house or garden--they lay quiet under a large paving-stone close to the vicarage pew at church. the three little sisters, the one little brother, must have often thought on their quiet neighbours when the sermon was very long. thus early familiarised and neighbourly with death, one of them at least, tall, courageous emily, grew up to have no dreary thoughts of it, neither any dreams of a far-off heaven. when the holidays were over, the two sisters returned to school. their father, strangely enough, had no fear to send them to that fatal place. their aunt, with her two favourites at home, was not over-anxious. charlotte and emily went back to cowan's bridge. but before the winter they were ill: the damp air, the unhealthy site (for as yet the new house was not built) brought out the weakness of their constitutions. bearing the elder sisters' fate in view, the authorities warned mr. brontë, and the two children came home to haworth. footnotes: [footnote : it is very much wished that the pupils should wear only their school dress during the vacations.] [footnote : mrs. harben to mrs. gaskell.] chapter iv. childhood. the home to which charlotte and emily returned was not a very much more healthy spot than that they left; but it was home. it was windy and cold, and badly drained. mr. brontë was ever striving to stir up his parishioners to improve the sanitary conditions of the place; but for many years his efforts were in vain. the canny yorkshire folk were loth to put their money underground, and it was hard to make them believe that the real cause of the frequent epidemics and fevers in haworth was such as could be cured by an effective system of subsoil drainage. it was cheaper and easier to lay the blame at the doors of providence. so the parson preached in vain. well might he preach, for his own house was in the thick of the evil. "as you left the parsonage-gate you looked upon the stonecutter's chipping-shed, which was piled with slabs ready for use, and to the ear there was the incessant 'chip, chip' of the recording chisel as it graved in the 'in memoriams' of the departed." so runs miss nussey's manuscript. she also tells of the constant sound of the passing bell; of the frequent burials in the thronged churchyard. no cheerful, healthy home for sensitive, delicate children. "from the parsonage windows the first view was the plot of grass edged by a wall, a thorn-tree or two, and a few shrubs and currant-bushes that did not grow. next to these was the large and half-surrounding churchyard, so full of gravestones that hardly a strip of grass could be seen in it." beyond this the moors, the wild, barren, treeless moors, that stretch away for miles and miles, feeding a few herds of mountain sheep, harbouring some wild conies and hares, giving a nesting-place to the birds of heaven, and, for the use of man, neither grain nor pasturage, but quarries of stone and piles of peat luridly smouldering up there on autumn nights. such is the home to which emily brontë clung with the passionate love of the swiss for his white mountains, with a homesickness in absence that strained the very cords of life. yet her childhood in that motherless home had few of the elements of childish happiness, and its busy strictness of daily life was saddened by the loss of maria and elizabeth, dear, never-forgotten playfellows. charlotte, now the eldest of the family, was only two years older than emily, but her sense of responsibility made her seem quite of a different age. it was little anne who was emily's companion--delicate, shrinking, pretty anne, miss branwell's favourite. anne could enter only into the easiest or lightest of her sister's moods, and yet she was so dear that emily never sought another friend. so from childhood she grew accustomed to keep her own confidence upon her deepest thoughts and liveliest fancies. a quiet regular life--carpet-brushing, sewing, dusting in the morning. then some necessary lessons said to their aunt upstairs; then, in the evening, while mr. brontë wrote his sermons in the study and miss branwell sat in her bedroom, the four children, alone in the parlour, or sitting by the kitchen fire, while tabby, the servant, moved briskly about, would write their magazines or make their plays. there was a great deal about politics still in the plays. mr. brontë, who took a keen interest in the affairs of the world, always told the children the chief public news of the day, and let them read what newspapers and magazines they could lay hold on. so the little brontës prattled of the duke of wellington when other children still have jack the giantkiller for a hero; the marquis of douro was their prince charming; their yahoos, the catholics; their potent evil genii the liberal ministry. "our plays were established," says charlotte, the family chronicler, in her history of the year : "'young men,' june, ; 'our fellows,' july, ; 'islanders,' december, . these are our three great plays that are not kept secret. emily's and my best plays were established the st of december, ; the others, march, . best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones. all our plays are very strange ones. their nature i need not write on paper, for i think i shall always remember them. the 'young men's' play took its rise from some wooden soldiers branwell had; 'our fellows' from Æsop's fables; and the 'islanders' from several events which happened. i will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly if i can. first, 'young men.' papa bought branwell some wooden soldiers at leeds; when papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning branwell came to our door" (the little room over the passage. anne slept with her aunt) "with a box of soldiers. emily and i jumped out of bed, and i snatched up one and exclaimed, 'this is the duke of wellington! this shall be the duke.' when i had said this, emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers; when anne came down, she said one should be hers. mine was the prettiest of the whole, the tallest and the most perfect in every part. emily's was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him 'gravey.' anne's was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him 'waiting-boy.' branwell chose his, and called him bonaparte." in another play emily chooses sir walter scott, mr. lockhart and johnny lockhart as her representatives; charlotte the duke of wellington, the marquis of douro, mr. abernethy, and christopher north. this last personage was indeed of great importance in the eyes of the children, for _blackwood's magazine_ was their favourite reading. on their father's shelves were few novels, and few books of poetry. the clergyman's study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and reference; for the children there were only the wild romances of southey, the poems of sir walter scott, left by their cornish mother, and "some mad methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad letters of mrs. elizabeth rowe from the dead to the living," familiar to readers of 'shirley.' to counterbalance all this romance and terror, the children had their interest in politics and _blackwood's magazine_, "the most able periodical there is," says thirteen-year-old charlotte. they also saw _john bull_, "a high tory, very violent, the _leeds mercury_, _leeds intelligencer_, a most excellent tory newspaper," and thus became accomplished fanatics in all the burning questions of the day. miss branwell took care that the girls should not lack more homely knowledge. each took her share in the day's work, and learned all details of it as accurately as any german maiden at her cookery school. emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework; there she felt able and necessary; and, doubtless, upstairs, grimly listening to prim miss branwell's stories of bygone gaieties, this awkward growing girl was glad to remember that she too was of importance to the household, despite her tongue-tied brooding. the girls fared well enough; but not so their brother. branwell's brilliant purposelessness, celtic gaiety, love of amusement and light heart made him the most charming playfellow, but a very anxious charge. friends advised mr. brontë to send his son to school, but the peculiar vanity which made him model his children's youth in all details on his own forbad him to take their counsel. since he had fed on potatoes, his children should eat no meat. since he had grown up at home as best he might, why should patrick branwell go to school? every day the father gave a certain portion of his time to working with his boy; but a clergyman's time is not his own, and often he was called away on parish business. doubtless mr. brontë thought these tutorless hours were spent, as he would have spent them, in earnest preparation of difficult tasks. but branwell, with all his father's superficial charm of manner, was without the underlying strength of will, and he possessed, unchecked, the temptations to self-indulgence, to which his father seldom yielded, counteracting them rather by an ascetic regimen of life. these long afternoons were spent, not in work, but in mischievous companionship with the wilder spirits of the village, to whom "t' vicar's patrick" was the standard of brilliant leadership in scrapes. no doubt their admiration flattered branwell, and he enjoyed the noisy fun they had together. nevertheless he did not quite neglect his sisters. charlotte has said that at this time she loved him even as her own soul--a serious phrase upon those serious lips. but it was emily and branwell who were most to each other: bright, shallow, exacting brother; silent, deep-brooding, unselfish sister, more anxious to give than to receive. in january, , charlotte went to school at miss wooler's, at roe head, twenty miles away; and branwell and emily were thrown yet more upon each other for sympathy and entertainment. charlotte stayed a year and a half at school, and returned in the july of to teach emily and anne what she had learnt in her absence; english-french, english and drawing was pretty nearly all the instruction she could give. happily genius needs no curriculum. nevertheless the sisters toiled to extract their utmost boon from such advantages as came within their range. every morning from nine till half-past twelve they worked at their lessons; then they walked together over the moors, just coming into flower. these moors knew a different emily to the quiet girl of fourteen who helped in the housework and learned her lessons so regularly at home. on the moors she was gay, frolicsome, almost wild. she would set the others laughing with her quaint humorous sallies and genial ways. she was quite at home there, taking the fledgeling birds in her hands so softly that they were not afraid, and telling stories to them. a strange figure--tall, slim, angular, with all her inches not yet grown; a quantity of dark-brown hair, deep beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion, features somewhat strong and stern, the mouth prominent and resolute. the sisters, and sometimes branwell, would go far on the moors; sometimes four miles to keighley in the hollow over the ridge, unseen from the heights, but brooded over always by a dim film of smoke, seemingly the steam rising from some fiery lake. the sisters now subscribed to a circulating library at keighley, and would gladly undertake the rough walk of eight miles for the sake of bringing back with them a novel by scott, or a poem by southey. at keighley, too, they bought their paper. the stationer used to wonder how they could get through so much. other days they went over stanbury moor to the waterfall, a romantic glen in the heathy side of the hill where a little stream drips over great boulders, and where some slender delicate birches spring, a wonder in this barren country. this was a favourite haunt of emily, and indeed they all loved the spot. here they would use some of their paper, for they still kept up their old habit of writing tales and poems, and loved to scribble out of doors. and some of it they would use in drawing, since at this time they were taking lessons, and emily and charlotte were devoted to the art: charlotte making copies with minuteness and exact fidelity; emily drawing animals and still-life with far greater freedom and certainty of touch. some of charlotte's paper, also, must have gone in letter-writing. she had made friends at school, an event of great importance to that narrow circle. one of these friends, the dearest, was unknown to haworth. many a time must emily and anne have listened to accounts of the pretty, accomplished, lively girl, a favourite in many homes, who had won the heart of their shy plain sister. she was, indeed, used to a very different life, this fair young girl, but her bright youth and social pleasures did not blind her to the fact that oddly-dressed, old-fashioned charlotte brontë was the most remarkable person of her acquaintance. she was the first, outside charlotte's home, to discover her true character and genius; and that at an age, in a position, when most girls would be too busy with visions of a happy future for themselves to sympathise with the strange activities, the morbid sensitiveness, of such a mind as charlotte possessed. but so early this girl loved her; and lives still, the last to have an intimate recollection of the ways, persons and habits of the brontë household. in september, , charlotte left home again on a fortnight's visit to the home of this dear friend. branwell took her there. he had probably never been from home before. he was in wild spirits at the beauty of the house and grounds, inspecting, criticising everything, pouring out a stream of comments, rich in studio terms, taking views in every direction of the old battlemented house, and choosing "bits" that he would like to paint, delighting the whole family with his bright cleverness, and happy irish ways. meanwhile charlotte looked on, shy and dull. "i leave you in paradise!" cried branwell, and betook himself over the moor to make fine stories of his visit to emily and anne in the bare little parlour at haworth. charlotte's friend, ellen, sent her home laden with apples for her two young sisters: "elles disent qu'elles sont sûr que mademoiselle e. est très-aimable et bonne; l'une et l'autre sont extrêmement impatientes de vous voir; j'espère que dans peu de mois elles auront ce plaisir----" so writes charlotte in the quaint anglo-french that the friends wrote to each other for practice. but winter was approaching, and winter is dreary at haworth. miss branwell persuaded the eager girls to put off their visitor till summer made the moors warm and dry, and beautiful, so that the young people could spend much of their time out of doors. in the summer of ellen came to haworth. miss ellen nussey is the only person living who knew emily brontë on terms of intimate equality, and her testimony carries out that of those humbler friends who helped the parson's busy daughter in her cooking and cleaning; from all alike we hear of an active, genial, warm-hearted girl, full of humour and feeling to those she knew, though shy and cold in her bearing to strangers. a different being to the fierce impassioned vestal who has seated herself in emily's place of remembrance. in emily was nearly fifteen, a tall long-armed girl, full grown, elastic of tread; with a slight figure that looked queenly in her best dresses, but loose and boyish when she slouched over the moors, whistling to her dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth. a tall, thin, loose-jointed girl--not ugly, but with irregular features and a pallid thick complexion. her dark brown hair was naturally beautiful, and in later days looked well, loosely fastened with a tall comb at the back of her head; but in she wore it in an unbecoming tight curl and frizz. she had very beautiful eyes of hazel colour. "kind, kindling, liquid eyes," says the friend who survives all that household. she had an aquiline nose, a large expressive, prominent mouth. she talked little. no grace or style in dress belonged to emily, but under her awkward clothes her natural movements had the lithe beauty of the wild creatures that she loved. she was a great walker, spending all her leisure on the moors. she loved the freedom there, the large air. she loved the creatures, too. never was a soul with a more passionate love of mother earth, of every weed and flower, of every bird, beast, and insect that lived. she would have peopled the house with pets had not miss branwell kept her niece's love of animals in due subjection. only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlour at stated hours, but out of doors emily made friends with all the beasts and birds. she would come home carrying in her hands some young bird or rabbit, and softly talking to it as she came. "ee, miss emily," the young servant would say, "one would think the bird could understand you." "i am sure it can," emily would answer. "oh, i am sure it can." the girls would take their friend [for] long walks on the moor. when they went very far, tabby, their old factotum, insisted on escorting them, unless branwell took that duty on himself, for they were still "childer" in her eyes. emily and anne walked together. they and branwell would ford the streams and place stepping-stones for the elder girls. at every point of view, at every flower, the happy little party would stop to talk, admire, and theorise in concert. emily's reserve had vanished as morning mists. she was full of glee and gladness, on her own demesne, no longer awkward and silent. on fine days emily and anne would persuade the others to walk to the waterfall which made an island of brilliant green turf in the midst of the heather, set with clear springs, shaded with here and there a silver birch, and dotted with grey boulders, beautiful resting-places. here the four girls--the "quartette" as they called themselves--would go and sit and listen to ellen's stories of the world they had not seen. or emily, half-reclining on a slab of stone, would play like a young child with the tadpoles in the water, making them swim about, and she would fall to moralising on the strong and the weak, the brave and the cowardly, as she chased the creatures with her hand. having rested, they would trudge home again a merry party, save when they met some wandering villager. then the parson's three daughters would walk on, hushed and timid. at nine the sewing was put by, and the four girls would talk and laugh, pacing round the parlour. miss branwell went to bed early, and the young people were left alone in the curtainless clean parlour, with its grey walls and horse-hair furniture. but with good company no room is poorly furnished; and they had much to say, and much to listen to, on nights when branwell was at home. oftenest they must have missed him; since, whenever a visitor stayed at the "black bull," the little inn across the churchyard, the landlord would send up for "t' vicar's patrick" to come and amuse the guests with his brilliant rhodomontade. not much writing went on in ellen's presence, but gay discussion, making of stories, and serious argument. they would talk sometimes of dead maria and elizabeth, always remembered with an intensity of love. about eight o'clock mr. brontë would call the household to family prayers: and an hour afterwards he used to bolt the front door, and go upstairs to bed, always stopping at the sitting-room with a kindly admonition to the "children" not to be late. at last the girls would stop their chatter, and retire for the night, emily giving her bed to the visitor and taking a share of the servants' room herself. at breakfast the next morning ellen used to listen with shrinking amazement to the stories of wild horror that mr. brontë loved to relate, fearful stories of superstitious ireland, or barbarous legends of the rough dwellers on the moors; ellen would turn pale and cold to hear them. sometimes she marvelled as she caught sight of emily's face, relaxed from its company rigour, while she stooped down to hand her porridge-bowl to the dog: she wore a strange expression, gratified, pleased, as though she had gained something which seemed to complete a picture in her mind. for this silent emily, talking little save in rare bursts of wild spirits; this energetic housewife, cooking and cleaning as though she had no other aim in view than the providing for the day's comfort; this was the same emily who at five years of age used to startle the nursery with her fantastic fairy stories. two lives went on side by side in her heart, neither ever mingling with or interrupting the other. practical housewife with capable hands, dreamer of strange horrors: each self was independent of the companion to which it was linked by day and night. people in those days knew her but as she seemed--"t' vicar's emily"--a shy awkward girl, never teaching in the sunday school like her sisters, never talking with the villagers like merry branwell, but very good and hearty in helping the sick and distressed: not pretty in the village estimation--a "slinky lass," no prim, trim little body like pretty anne, nor with charlotte brontë's taste in dress; just a clever lass with a spirit of her own. so the village judged her. at home they loved her with her strong feelings, untidy frocks, indomitable will, and ready contempt for the common-place; she was appreciated as a dear and necessary member of the household. of emily's deeper self, her violent genius, neither friend nor neighbour dreamed in those days. and to-day it is only this emily who is remembered. days went on, pleasant days of autumn, in which charlotte and her friend roamed across the blooming moors, in which anne and emily would take their little stools and big desks into the garden, and sit and scribble under the currant-bushes, stopping now and then to pluck the ripe fruit. then came chill october, bringing cold winds and rain. ellen went home, leaving an empty chair in the quartette, leaving charlotte lonelier, and even emily and anne a little dull. "they never liked any one as well as you," says charlotte. winter came, more than usually unhealthy that year, and the moors behind the house were impassable with snow and rain. miss branwell continually bemoaned the warm and flowery winters of penzance, shivering over the fire in her bedroom; mr. brontë was ill; outside the air was filled with the mournful sound of the passing bell. but the four young people sitting round the parlour hearth-place were not cold or miserable. they were dreaming of a happy and glorious future, a great career in art; not for charlotte, not for emily or anne, they were only girls; their dreams were for the hope and promise of the house--for branwell. chapter v. going to school. emily was now sixteen years old, and though the people in the village called her "t' cleverest o' t' brontë childer," she had little to show of her cleverness. her education was as home-made as her gowns, not such as would give distinction to a governess; and a governess emily would have to be. the brontë sisters were too severe and noble in their theories of life ever to contemplate marriage as a means of livelihood; but even worldly sisters would have owned that there was little chance of impatient emily marrying at all. she was almost violent in her dislike of strangers. the first time that ellen stayed at haworth, charlotte was ill one day and could not go out with her friend. to their surprise emily volunteered to take the stranger a walk over the moors. charlotte waited anxiously for their return, fearing some outbreak of impatience or disdain on the part of her untamable sister. the two girls at last came home. "how did emily behave?" asked charlotte, eagerly, drawing her friend aside. she had behaved well; she had shown her true self, her noble, energetic, truthful soul, and from that day there was a real friendship between the gentle ellen and the intractable emily; but none the less does charlotte's question reveal in how different a manner the girl regarded strangers as a rule. in after days when the curates, looking for mr. brontë in his study, occasionally found emily there instead, they used to beat such a hasty retreat that it was quite an established joke at the parsonage that emily appeared to the outer world in the likeness of an old bear. she hated strange faces and strange places. her sisters must have seen that such a temperament, if it made her unlikely to attract a husband or to wish to attract one, also rendered her lamentably unfit to earn her living as a governess. in those days they could not tell that the defect was incurable, a congenital infirmity of nature; and doubtless charlotte, the wise elder sister, thought she had found a cure for both the narrow education and the narrow sympathies when she suggested that emily should go to school. she writes to her friend in july, :-- "i had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you at haworth this summer, but human affairs are mutable, and human resolutions must bend to the course of events. we are all about to divide, break up, separate. emily is going to school, branwell is going to london, and i am going to be a governess. this last determination i formed myself, knowing i should have to take the step sometime, and 'better sune as syne,' to use a scotch proverb; and knowing well that papa would have enough to do with his limited income, should branwell be placed at the royal academy and emily at roe head. where am i going to reside? you will ask. within four miles of you, at a place neither of us are unacquainted with, being no other than the identical roe head mentioned above. yes! i am going to teach in the very school where i was myself taught. miss wooler made me the offer, and i preferred it to one or two proposals of private governess-ship which i had before received. i am sad--very sad--at the thoughts of leaving home; but duty--necessity--these are stern mistresses, who will not be disobeyed. did i not once say you ought to be thankful for your independence? i felt what i said at the time, and i repeat it now with double earnestness; if anything would cheer me it is the idea of being so near you. surely you and polly will come and see me; it would be wrong in me to doubt it; you were never unkind yet. emily and i leave home on the th of this month; the idea of being together consoles us both somewhat, and, truth, since i must enter a situation, 'my lines have fallen in pleasant places.' i both love and respect miss wooler."[ ] the wrench of leaving home, so much dreaded by charlotte, was yet sharper to her younger sister, morbidly fearful of strangers, eccentric, unable to live without wide liberty. to go to school; it must have had a dreadful sound to that untamable, free creature, happiest alone with the dogs on the moors, with little sentiment or instinct for friendship; no desire to meet her fellows. emily was perfectly happy at haworth cooking the dinner, ironing the linen, writing poems at the waterfall, taking her dog for miles over the moors, pacing round the parlour with her arm round gentle anne's waist. now she would have to leave all this, to separate from her dear little sister. but she was reasonable and just, and, feeling the attempt should be made, she packed up her scanty wardrobe, and, without repining, set out with charlotte for roe head. charlotte knew where she was going. she loved and respected miss wooler; but with what anxiety must emily have looked for the house where she was to live and not to be at home. at last she saw it, a cheerful, roomy, country house, standing a little apart in a field. there was a wide and pleasant view of fields and woods; but the green prospect was sullied and marred by the smoke from the frequent mills. green fields, grey mills, all told of industry, labour, occupation. there was no wild stretch of moorland here, no possibility of solitude. i think when emily brontë saw the place, she must have known very well she would not be happy there. "my sister emily loved the moors," says charlotte, writing of these days in the latter solitude--"flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an eden. she found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was liberty. liberty was the breath of emily's nostrils; without it she perished. the change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring. her nature was here too strong for her fortitude. every morning, when she woke, the visions of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. nobody knew what ailed her but me. i knew only too well. in this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. i felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home." thus looking on, charlotte grew alarmed. she remembered the death of maria and elizabeth, and feared, feared with anguish, lest this best-beloved sister should follow them. she told miss wooler of her fear, and the schoolmistress, conscious of her own kindness and a little resentful at emily's distress, consented that the girl should be sent home without delay. she did not care for emily, and was not sorry to lose her. so in october she returned to haworth, to the only place where she was happy and well. she returned to harder work and plainer living than she had known at school; but also to home, liberty, comprehension, her animals, and her flowers. in her native atmosphere she very soon recovered the health and strength that seemed so natural to her swift spirit; that were, alas, so easily endangered. she had only been at school three months. even so short an absence may very grievously alter the aspect of familiar things. haworth itself was the same; prim, tidy miss branwell still pattered about in her huge caps and tiny clogs; the vicar still told his horrible stories at breakfast, still fought vain battles with the parishioners who would not drain the village, and the women who would dry their linen on the tombstones. anne was still as transparently pretty, as pensive and pious as of old; but over the hope of the house, the dashing, clever branwell, who was to make the name of brontë famous in art, a dim, tarnishing change had come. emily must have seen it with fresh eyes, left more and more in branwell's company, when, after the christmas holidays, anne returned with charlotte to roe head. there is in none of charlotte's letters any further talk of sending branwell to the royal academy. he earnestly desired to go, and for him, the only son, any sacrifice had willingly been made. but there were reasons why that brilliant unprincipled lad should not be trusted now, alone in london. too frequent had been those visits to the "black bull," undertaken, at first, to amuse the travellers from london, leeds and manchester, who found their evenings dull. the vicar's lad was following the proverbial fate of parsons' sons. little as they foreboded the end in store, greatly as they hoped all his errors were a mere necessary attribute of manliness, the sisters must have read in his shaken nerves the dissipation for which their clever branwell was already remarkable in haworth. it is true that to be sometimes the worse for drink was no uncommon fault fifty years ago in yorkshire; but the gradual coarsening of branwell's nature, the growing flippancy, the altered health, must have given a cruel awakening to his sisters' dreams for his career. in this deterioration was at the beginning; a weed in bud that could only bear a bitter and poisonous fruit. emily hoped the best; his father did not seem to see his danger; miss branwell spoiled the lad; and the village thought him a mighty pleasant young gentleman with a smile and a bow for every one, fond of a glass and a chat in the pleasant parlour of the "black bull" at nights; a gay, feckless, red-haired, smiling young fellow, full of ready courtesies to all his friends in the village; yet, none the less as full of thoughtless cruelties to his friends at home. for the rest, he had nothing to do, and was scarcely to blame if he could not devote sixteen hours a day to writing verses for the _leeds mercury_, his only ostensible occupation. it seems incredible that mr. brontë, who well understood the peculiar temptations to which his son lay open, could have suffered him to loaf about the village, doing nothing, month after month, lured into ill by no set purpose, but by a weak social temper and foolish friends. yet so it was, and with such training, little hope of salvation could there be for that vain, somewhat clever, untruthful, fascinating boy. so things went on, drearily enough in reality, though perhaps more pleasantly in seeming--for branwell, with his love of approbation and ready affectionateness, took all trouble consistent with self-indulgence to avoid the noise of his misdemeanours reaching home. thus things went on till charlotte returned from miss wooler's with little anne in the midsummer holidays of . an interval of happiness to lonely emily; charlotte's friend came to the grey cold-looking parsonage, enlivening that sombre place with her gay youth and sweet looks. home with four young girls in it was more attractive to branwell than the alluring parlour of the "black bull." the harvest moon that year can have looked on no happier meeting. "it would not be right," says the survivor of those eager spirits, "to pass over one record which should be made of the sisters' lives together, after their school-days, and before they were broken in health by their efforts to support themselves, that at this time they had all a taste of happiness and enjoyment. they were beginning to feel conscious of their powers, they were rich in each other's companionship, their health was good, their spirits were high, there was often joyousness and mirth; they commented on what they read; analysed articles and their writers also; the perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly. the evening march in the sitting-room, a constant habit learned at school, kept time with their thoughts and feelings, it was free and rapid; they marched in pairs, emily and anne, charlotte and her friend, with arms twined round each other in child-like fashion, except when charlotte, in an exuberance of spirit, would for a moment start away, make a graceful pirouette (though she had never learned to dance) and return to her march." so the evenings passed and the days, in happy fashion for a little while. then charlotte and anne went back to miss wooler's, and emily, too, took up the gauntlet against necessity. she was not of a character to let the distastefulness of any duty hinder her from undertaking it. she was very stern in her dealings with herself, though tender to the erring, and anxious to bear the burdens of the weak. she allowed no one but herself to decide what it behoved her to do. she could not see charlotte labour, and not work herself. at home she worked, it is true, harder than servants; but she felt it right not only to work, but to earn. so, having recovered her natural strength, she left haworth in september, and charlotte writes from school to her friend: "my sister emily has gone into a situation as teacher in a large school near halifax. i have had one letter from her since her departure; it gives an appalling account of her duties; hard labour from six in the morning to eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. this is slavery. i fear she can never stand it." she stood it, however, all that term; came back to haworth for a brief rest at christmas, and again left it for the hated life she led, drudging among strangers. but when spring came back, with its feverish weakness, with its beauty and memories, to that stern place of exile, she failed. her health broke down, shattered by long-resisted homesickness. weary and mortified at heart, emily again went back to seek life and happiness on the wild moors of haworth. footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter vi. girlhood at haworth. the next two years passed very solitarily for emily at haworth; the brontës were too poor for all to stay at home, and since it was definitely settled that emily could not live away, she worked hard at home while her sisters went out in the world to gain their bread. she had no friend besides her sisters; far-off anne was her only confidant. outside her own circle the only person that she cared to meet was charlotte's friend ellen, and, of course, ellen did not come to haworth while charlotte was away. branwell, too, was absent. his first engagement was as usher in a school; but, mortified by the boys' sarcasms on his red hair and "downcast smallness," he speedily threw up his situation and returned to haworth to confide his wounded vanity to the tender mercies of the rough and valiant emily, or to loaf about the village seeking readier consolation. then he went as private tutor to a family in broughton-in-furness. one letter of his thence despatched to some congenial spirit in haworth, long since dead, has been lent to me by the courtesy of mr. william wood, one of the last of branwell's companions, in whose possession the torn, faded sheet remains. much of it is unreadable from accidental rents and the purposed excision of private passages, and part of that which can be read cannot be quoted; such as it is, the letter is valuable as showing what things in life seemed desirable and worthy of attainment to this much-hoped-in brother of the austere emily, the courageous charlotte, the pious anne. "broughton-in-furness, march . "old knave of trumps, "don't think i have forgotten you though i have delayed so long in writing to you. it was my purpose to send you a yarn as soon as i could find materials to spin one with. and it is only just now i have had time to turn myself round and know where i am. "if you saw me now you would not know me, and you would laugh to hear the character the people give me. oh, the falsehood and hypocrisy of this world! i am fixed in a little town retired by the seashore, embowered in woody hills that rise round me, huge, rocky, and capped with clouds. my employer is a retired county magistrate and large landholder, of a right hearty, generous disposition. his wife is a quiet, silent, amiable woman; his sons are two fine, spirited lads. my landlord is a respectable surgeon, and six days out of seven as drunk as a lord; his wife is a bustling, chattering, kind-hearted soul; his daughter--oh! death and damnation! well, what am i? that is, what do they think i am?--a most sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of good works, the treasure-house of righteous thought. cards are shuffled under the tablecloth, glasses are thrust into the cupboard, if i enter the room. i take neither spirit, wine, nor malt liquors. i dress in black, and smile like a saint or martyr. every lady says, 'what a good young gentleman is the postlethwaites' tutor.' this is fact, as i am a living soul, and right comfortably do i laugh at them; but in this humour do i mean them to continue. i took a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at kendal the night after i [left]. there was a party of gentlemen at the royal hotel; i joined them and ordered in supper and 'toddy as hot as hell.' they thought i was a physician, and put me into the chair. i gave them some toasts of the stiffest sort ... washing them down at the same time till the room spun round and the candles danced in their eyes. one was a respectable old gentleman with powdered head, rosy cheeks, fat paunch, and ringed fingers ... he led off with a speech, and in two minutes, in the very middle of a grand sentence, stopped, wagged his head, looked wildly round, stammered, coughed, stopped again, called for his slippers, and so the waiter helped him to bed. next a tall irish squire and a native of the land of israel began to quarrel about their countries, and in the warmth of argument discharged their glasses each at his neighbour's throat, instead of his own. i recommended blisters, bleeding [here illegible], so i flung my tumbler on the floor, too, and swore i'd join old ireland. a regular rumpus ensued, but we were tamed at last, and i found myself in bed next morning, with a bottle of porter, a glass, and corkscrew beside me. since then i have not tasted anything stronger than milk and water, nor, i hope, shall i till i return at midsummer, when we will see about it. i am getting as fat as prince win at springhead and as godly as his friend parson winterbottom. my hand shakes no longer: i write to the bankers at ulverston with mr. postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea and talking slander with old ladies. as to the young ones, i have one sitting by me just now, fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen. she little thinks the devil is as near her. i was delighted to see thy note, old squire, but don't understand one sentence--perhaps you will know what i mean............ .......................... how are all about you? i long... [all torn next] everything about haworth folk. does little nosey think i have forgotten him. no, by jupiter! nor is alick either. i'll send him a remembrance one of these days. but i must talk to some one prettier; so good night, old boy. write directly, and believe me to be thine, "the philosopher." branwell's boasted reformation was not kept up for long. soon he came back as heartless, as affectionate, as vain, as unprincipled as ever, to laugh and loiter about the steep street of haworth. then he went to bradford as a portrait-painter, and--so impressive is audacity--actually succeeded for some months in gaining a living there, although his education was of the slenderest, and, judging from the specimens still treasured in haworth, his natural talent on a level with that of the average new student in any school of art. his tawny mane, his pose of untaught genius, his verses in the poet's corner of the paper could not for ever keep afloat this untaught and thriftless portrait-painter of twenty. soon there came an end to his painting there. he disappeared from bradford suddenly, heavily in debt, and was lost to sight, until unnerved, a drunkard, and an opium-eater, he came back to home and emily at haworth. meanwhile impetuous charlotte was growing nervous and weak, gentle anne consumptive and dejected, in their work away from home; and emily was toiling from dawn till dusk with her old servant tabby for the old aunt who never cared for her, and the old father always courteous and distant. they knew the face of necessity more nearly than any friend's, those brontë girls, and the pinch of poverty was for their own foot; therefore were they always considerate to any that fell into the same plight. during the christmas holidays of , old tabby fell on the steep and slippery street and broke her leg. she was already nearly seventy, and could do little work; now her accident laid her completely aside, leaving emily, charlotte, and anne to spend their christmas holidays in doing the housework and nursing the invalid. miss branwell, anxious to spare the girls' hands and her brother-in-law's pocket, insisted that tabby should be sent to her sister's house to be nursed and another servant engaged for the parsonage. tabby, she represented, was fairly well off, her sister in comfortable circumstances; the parsonage kitchen might supply her with broths and jellies in plenty, but why waste the girls' leisure and scanty patrimony on an old servant competent to keep herself. mr. brontë was finally persuaded, and his decision made known. but the girls were not persuaded. tabby, so they averred, was one of the family, and they refused to abandon her in sickness. they did not say much, but they did more than say--they starved. when the tea was served, the three sat silent, fasting. next morning found their will yet stronger than their hunger--no breakfast. they did the day's work, and dinner came. still they held out, wan and sunk. then the superiors gave in. the girls gained their victory--no stubborn freak, but the right to make a generous sacrifice, and to bear an honourable burden. that christmas, of course, there could be no visiting nor the next. tabby was slow in getting well; but she did not outweary the patience of her friends. two years later, charlotte writes to her old schoolfellow:-- "december , . "we are at present, and have been during the last month, rather busy, as for that space of time we have been without a servant, except a little girl to run errands. poor tabby became so lame that she was at length obliged to leave us. she is residing with her sister, in a little house of her own, which she bought with her own savings a year or two since. she is very comfortable, and wants nothing. as she is near we see her very often. in the meantime, emily and i are sufficiently busy, as you may suppose: i manage the ironing and keep the rooms clean; emily does the baking and attends to the kitchen. we are such odd animals that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new face among us. besides, we do not despair of tabby's return, and she shall not be supplanted by a stranger in her absence. i excited aunt's wrath very much by burning the clothes the first time i attempted to iron; but i do better now. human feelings are queer things; i am much happier blackleading the stoves, making the beds, and sweeping the floors at home than i should be living like a fine lady anywhere else."[ ] the year found emily, branwell, and charlotte all at home together. unnerved and dissipated as he was, branwell was still a welcome presence; his gay talk still awakened glad promises in the ambitious and loving household which hoped all things from him. his mistakes and faults they pardoned; thinking, poor souls, that the strong passions which led him astray betokened a strong character and not a powerless will. it was still to branwell that they looked for the fame of the family. their poems, their stories, were to these girls but a legitimate means of amusement and relief. the serious business of their life was to teach, to cook, to clean; to earn or save the mere expense of their existence. no dream of literary fame gave a purpose to the quiet days of emily brontë. charlotte and branwell, more impulsive, more ambitious, had sent their work to southey, to coleridge, to wordsworth, in vain, pathetic hope of encouragement, or recognition. not so the sterner emily, to whom expression was at once a necessity and a regret. emily's brain, emily's locked desk, these and nothing else knew the degree of her passion, her genius, her power. and yet acknowledged power would have been sweet to that dominant spirit. meanwhile the immediate difficulty was to earn a living. even those patient and courageous girls could not accept the thought of a whole lifetime spent in dreary governessing by charlotte and anne, in solitary drudgery by homekeeping emily. one way out of this hateful vista seemed not impossible of attainment. for years it was the wildest hope, the cherished dream of the author of 'wuthering heights' and the author of 'villette.' and what was this dear and daring ambition?--to keep a ladies' school at haworth. far enough off, difficult to reach, it looked to them, this paltry common-place ideal of theirs. for the house with its four bedrooms would have to be enlarged; for the girls' education, with its anglo-french and stumbling music, would have to be adorned by the requisite accomplishments. this would take time; time and money; two luxuries most hard to get for the vicar of haworth's harassed daughters. they would sigh, and suddenly stop in their making of plans and drawing up of circulars. it seemed so difficult. one person, indeed, might help them. miss branwell had saved out of her annuity of £ a year. she had a certain sum; small enough, but to charlotte and emily it seemed as potent as the fairy's wand. the question was, would she risk it? it seemed not. the old lady had always chiefly meant her savings for the dear prodigal who bore her name, and emily and charlotte were not her favourites. the girls indeed only asked for a loan, but she doubted, hesitated, doubted again. they were too proud to take an advantage so grudgingly proffered; and while their talk was still of what means they might employ, while they still painfully toiled through improper french novels as "the best substitute for french conversation," they gave up the dream for the present, and charlotte again looked out for a situation. nearly a year elapsed before she found it--a happy year, full of plans and talks with emily and free from any more pressing anxiety than anne's delicate health always gave her sisters. branwell was away and doing well as station-master at luddendenfoot, "set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the leeds and manchester railway." ellen came to stay at haworth in the summer; it was quite sociable and lively now in the grey house on the moors; for, compelled by failing health, mr. brontë had engaged the help of a curate, and the haworth curate brought his clerical friends about the house, to the great disgust of emily, and the half-sentimental fluttering of pensive anne, which laid on charlotte the responsibility of talking for all three. in the holidays when anne was at home all the old glee and enjoyment of life returned. there was, moreover, the curate, "bonnie, pleasant, light-hearted, good-tempered, generous, careless, crafty, fickle, and unclerical," to add piquancy to the situation. "he sits opposite to anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the corners of his eyes--and she is so quiet, her look so downcast; they are a picture," says merry charlotte. this first curate at haworth was exempted from emily's liberal scorn; he was a favourite at the vicarage, a clever, bright-spirited, and handsome youth, greatly in miss branwell's good graces. he would tease and flatter the old lady with such graciousness as made him ever sure of a welcome; so that his daily visits to mr. brontë's study were nearly always followed up by a call in the opposite parlour, when miss branwell would frequently leave her upstairs retreat and join in the lively chatter. she always presided at the tea-table, at which the curate was a frequent guest, and her nieces would be kept well amused all through the tea hour by the curate's piquant sallies, baffling the old lady in her little schemes of control over the three high-spirited girls. none enjoyed the fun more than quiet emily, always present and amused, "her countenance glimmering as it always did when she enjoyed herself," miss ellen nussey tells me. many happy legends, too familiar to be quoted here, record the light heart and gay spirit that emily bore in those untroubled days. foolish, pretty little stories of her dauntless protection of the other girls from too pressing suitors. never was duenna so gallant, so gay, and so inevitable. in compliment to the excellence of her swashing and martial outside on such occasions, the little household dubbed her "the major," a name that stuck to her in days when the dash and gaiety of her soldiery bearing was sadly sobered down, and only the courage and dauntless heart remained. but in these early days of , emily was as happy as other healthy country girls in a congenial home. "she did what we did," says miss nussey, "and never absented herself when she could avoid it--life at this period must have been sweet and pleasant to her." an equal unchequered life, in which trifles seemed of great importance. we hear of the little joys and adventures of those days, so faithfully and long remembered, with a pathetic pleasurableness. so slight they are, and all their colour gone, like pressed roses, though a faint sweetness yet remains. the disasters when miss branwell was cross and in no humour to receive her guests; the long-expected excitement of a walk over the moors to keighley where the curate was to give a lecture, the alarm and flurry when the curate, finding none of the four girls had ever received a valentine, proposed to send one to each on the next valentine's day. "no, no, the elders would never allow it, and yet it would certainly be an event to receive a valentine; still, there would be such a lecture from miss branwell." "oh no," he said, "i shall post them at bradford." and to bradford he walked, ten miles and back again, so that on the eventful th of february the anxiously-expected postman brought four valentines, all on delicately tinted paper, all enhanced by a verse of original poetry, touching on some pleasant characteristic in each recipient. what merriment and comparing of notes! what pleased feigning of indignation! the girls determined to reward him with a rowland for his oliver, and charlotte wrote some rhymes full of fun and raillery which all the girls signed--emily entering into all this with much spirit and amusement--and finally despatched in mystery and secret glee. at last this pleasant fooling came to an end. charlotte advertised for a place, and found it. while she was away she had a letter from miss wooler, offering charlotte the goodwill of her school at dewsbury moor. it was a chance not to be lost, although what inducement emily and charlotte could offer to their pupils it is not easy to imagine. but it was above all things necessary to make a home where delicate anne might be sheltered, where homesick emily could be happy, where charlotte could have time to write, where all might live and work together. miss wooler's offer was immediately accepted. miss branwell was induced to lend the girls £ . no answer came from miss wooler. then ambitious charlotte, from her situation away, wrote to miss branwell at haworth[ ]:-- "september , . "dear aunt, "i have heard nothing of miss wooler yet since i wrote to her, intimating that i would accept her offer. i cannot conjecture the reason of this long silence, unless some unforeseen impediment has occurred in concluding the bargain. meantime a plan has been suggested and approved by mr. and mrs. ---- and others which i wish now to impart to you. my friends recommend, if i desire to secure permanent success, to delay commencing the school for six months longer, and by all means to contrive, by hook or by crook, to spend the intervening time in some school on the continent. they say schools in england are so numerous, competition so great, that without some such step towards attaining superiority, we shall probably have a very hard struggle and may fail in the end. they say, moreover, that the loan of £ , which you have been so kind as to offer us, will perhaps not be all required now, as miss wooler will lend us the furniture; and that, if the speculation is intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum, at least, ought to be laid out in the manner i have mentioned, thereby insuring a more speedy repayment both of interest and principal. "i would not go to france or to paris. i would go to brussels, in belgium. the cost of the journey there, at the dearest rate of travelling, would be £ , living is there little more than half as dear as it is in england, and the facilities for education are equal or superior to any place in europe. in half a year i could acquire a thorough familiarity with french. i could improve greatly in italian and even get a dash at german; _i.e._ providing my health continued as good as it is now.... "these are advantages which would turn to real account when we actually commenced a school; and, if emily could share them with me, we could take a footing in the world afterwards which we never can do now. i say emily instead of anne; for anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered. i feel certain, while i am writing, that you will see the propriety of what i say. you always like to use your money to the best advantage. you are not fond of making shabby purchases; when you do confer a favour it is often done in style; and depend upon it £ or £ , thus laid out, would be well employed. of course, i know no other friend in the world to whom i could apply on this subject besides yourself. i feel an absolute conviction that if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition. when he left ireland to go to cambridge university he was as ambitious as i am now." that was true. it must have struck a vibrant chord in the old man's breast. absorbed in parish gossip and his 'cottage poems,' caring no longer for the world but only for newspaper reports of it, actively idle, living a resultless life of ascetic self-indulgence, the vicar of haworth was very proud of his energetic past. he had always held it up to his children as a model for them to copy. charlotte's appeal would certainly secure her father as an ally to her cause. miss branwell, on the other hand, would not wish for displays of ambition in her already too irrepressible nieces. but she was getting old; it would be a comfort to her, after all, to see them settled, and prosperously settled through her generosity. "i look to you, aunt, to help us. i think you will not refuse," charlotte had said. how, indeed, could miss branwell, living in their home, be happy, and refuse? yet many discussions went on before anxious charlotte got the answer. emily, whom it concerned as nearly, must have listened waiting in a strange perturbation of hope and fear. to leave home--she knew well what it meant. since she was six years old she had never left yorkshire; but those months of wearying homesickness at roe head, at halifax, must have most painfully rushed back upon her memory. haworth was health, content, the very possibility of existence to this girl. to leave haworth for a strange town beyond the seas, to see strange faces all round, to hear and speak a strange language, charlotte's welcome prospect of adventure must have taken a nightmare shape to emily. and for this she must hope; this she must desire, plead for if necessary, and at least uphold. for charlotte said the thing was essential to their future; and in all details of management, charlotte's word was law to her sisters. even emily, the independent, indomitable emily, so resolute in keeping to any chosen path, looked to charlotte to choose the way in practical affairs. at length consent was secured, written and despatched. gleeful charlotte gave notice to her employers and soon set out for home. there was much to be done. "letters to write to brussels, to lille and to london, lots of work to be done, besides clothes to repair." it was decided that the sisters should give up their chance of the school at dewsbury moor, since the site was low and damp, and had not suited anne. on their return from brussels they were to set up a school in some healthy seaside place in the east riding. burlington was the place where their fancy chiefly dwelt. to this beautiful and healthy spot, fronting the sea, eager pupils would flock for the benefit of instruction by three daughters of a clergyman, "educated abroad" (for six months) speaking thorough french, improved italian and a dash of german. a scintillating programme of accomplishment danced before their eyes. there were, however, many practical difficulties to be vanquished first. the very initial step, the choice of a school, was hard to take. charlotte writes to ellen:-- "january , . "we expect to leave england in about three weeks, but we are not yet certain as to the day, as it will depend on the convenience of a french lady now in london, madame marzials, under whose escort we are to sail. our place of destination is changed. papa received an unfavourable account from mr. or rather from mrs. jenkins of the french schools in bruxelles, representing them as of an inferior caste in many respects. on further inquiry an institution at lille in the north of france was highly recommended by baptist noel and other clergymen, and to that place it is decided that we are to go. the terms are £ a year for each pupil for board and french alone; but a separate room will be allowed for this sum; without this indulgence they are something lower. i considered it kind in aunt to consent to an extra sum for a separate room. we shall find it a great privilege in many ways. i regret the change from bruxelles to lille on many accounts." for charlotte to regret the change was for an improvement to be discovered. she had set her heart on going to brussels; mrs. jenkins redoubled her efforts and at length discovered the pensionnat of madame héger in the rue d'isabelle. thither, as all the world is aware, charlotte and emily brontë, both of age, went to school. "we shall leave england in about three weeks." the words had a ring of happy daring in charlotte's ears. since at six years of age she had set out alone to discover the golden city, romance, discovery, adventure, were sweet promises to her. she had often wished to see the world; now she will see it. she had thirsted for knowledge; here is the source. she longed to add new notes to that gamut of human character which she could play with so profound a science; she shall make a masterpiece out of her acquisitions. at this time her letters are full of busy gaiety, giving accounts of her work, making plans, making fun. as happy and hopeful a young woman as any that dwells in haworth parish. emily is different. it is she who imagined the girl in heaven who broke her heart with weeping for earth, till the angels cast her out in anger, and flung her into the middle of the heath, to wake there sobbing for joy. she did not care to know fresh people; she hates strangers; to walk with her bulldog, keeper, over the moors is her best adventure. to learn new things is very well, but she prizes above everything originality and the wild provincial flavour of her home. what she strongly, deeply loves is her moorland home, her own people, the creatures on the heath, the dogs who always feed from her hands, the flowers in the bleak garden that only grow at all because of the infinite care she lavishes upon them. the stunted thorn under which she sits to write her poems, is more beautiful to her than the cedars of lebanon. to each and all of these she must now bid farewell. it is in a different tone that she says in her adieus, "we shall leave england in about three weeks." footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter vii. in the rue d'isabelle. the rue d'isabelle had a character of its own. it lies below your feet as you stand in the rue royale, near the statue of general béliard. four flights of steps lead down to the street, half garden, half old houses, with at one end a large square mansion, owning the garden that runs behind it and to the right of it. the house is old; a latin inscription shows it to have been given to the great guild of cross-bowmen by queen isabelle in the early years of the th century. the garden is older; long before the guild of the cross-bowmen of the great oath, in deference to the wish of queen isabelle, permitted the street to be made through it, the garden had been their exercising place. there isabelle herself, a member of their order, had shot down the bird. but the garden had a yet more ancient past; when apple-trees, pear-trees and alleys of bruges cherries, when plots of marjoram and mint, of thyme and sweet-basil, filled the orchard and herbary of the hospital of the poor. and the garden itself, before trees or flowers were planted, had resounded with the yelp of the duke's hounds, when, in the thirteenth century, it had been the fosse-aux-chiens. this historic garden, this mansion, built by a queen for a great order, belonged in to monsieur and madame héger, and was a famous pensionnat de demoiselles. there the vicar of haworth brought his two daughters one february day, spent one night in brussels and went straight back to his old house on the moors, so modern in comparison with the mansion in rue d'isabelle. a change, indeed, for emily and charlotte. even now, brussels (the headquarters of catholicism far more than modern rome) has a taste for pageantry that recalls mediæval days. the streets decked with boughs and strewn with flowers, through which pass slowly the processions of the church, white-clad children, boys like angels scattering roses, standard-bearers with emblazoned banners. surpliced choristers singing latin praises, acolytes in scarlet swinging censers, reliquaries and images, before which the people fall down in prayer; all this to-day is no uncommon sight in brussels, and must have been yet more frequent in . the flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall mary-lilies and delicate _roses d'amour_, filling the quaint mediæval square before the beautiful old façade of the hôtel de ville. ste.-gudule with its spires and arches; the montagne de la cour (almost as steep as haworth street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls a sober glory of colours, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds, brown golds, most vivid greens. all this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls from yorkshire; and charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strangeness. but emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home--she longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for haworth. the two brontës were very different to the belgian school-girls in madame héger's pensionnat. they were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school--twenty-four and twenty-six--and they seemed to feel their position; their speech was strained and odd; all the "sceptical, wicked, immoral french novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for french conversation to be met with," which the girls had toiled through with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent nor the artificial idioms of their yorkshire french. monsieur héger, indeed, considered that they knew no french at all. their manners, even among english people, were stiff and prim; the hearty, vulgar, genial expansion of their belgian schoolfellows must have made them seem as lifeless as marionettes. their dress--haworth had permitted itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves (emily's pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little charlotte, but a very caricature of mediævalism on emily's tall, thin, slender figure. they knew they were not in their element and kept close together, rarely speaking. yet monsieur héger, patiently watching, felt the presence of a strange power under those uncouth exteriors. an odd little man of much penetration, this french schoolmaster. "_homme de zèle et de conscience, il possède à un haut degré l'éloquence du bon sens et du coeur._" fierce and despotic in the exaction of obedience, yet tender of heart, magnanimous and tyrannical, absurdly vain and absolutely unselfish. his wife's school was a kingdom to him; he brought to it an energy, a zeal, a faculty of administration worthy to rule a kingdom. it was with the delight of a botanist discovering a rare plant in his garden, of a politician detecting a future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two english pupils above their schoolfellows. he watched them silently for some weeks. when he had made quite sure, he came forwards and, so to speak, claimed them for his own. charlotte at once accepted the yoke. all that he set her to do she toiled to accomplish; she followed out his trains of thought; she adopted the style he recommended; she gave him in return for all his pains the most unflagging obedience, the affectionate comprehension of a large intelligence. she writes to ellen of her delight in learning and serving: "it is very natural to me to submit, very unnatural to command." not so with emily. the qualities which her sister understood and accepted, irritated her unspeakably. the masterfulness in little things, the irritability, the watchfulness of the fiery little professor of rhetoric were utterly distasteful to her. she contradicted his theories to his face; she did her lessons well, but as she chose to do them. she was as indomitable, fierce, unappeasable, as charlotte was ready and submissive. and yet it was emily who had the larger share of monsieur héger's admiration. egotistic and exacting he thought her, who never yielded to his petulant, harmless egoism, who never gave way to his benevolent tyranny; but he gave her credit for logical powers, for a capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman. she, not charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned. he fancied she might be a great historian, so he told mrs. gaskell. "her faculty of imagination was such, her views of scenes and characters would have been so vivid and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions or his cooler perception of the truth. she should have been a man: a great navigator!" cried the little, dark, enthusiastic rhetorician. "her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life!" yet they were never friends; though monsieur héger could speak so well of emily at a time, be it remembered, when it was charlotte's praises that were sought, when emily's genius was set down as a lunatic's hobgoblin of nightmare potency. he and she were alike too imperious, too independent, too stubborn. a couple of swords, neither of which could serve to sheathe the other. that time in brussels was wasted upon emily. the trivial characters which charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. the new impressions which gave another scope to charlotte's vision were nothing to her. all that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of that conventional pensionnat de demoiselles, was invisible to emily. notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow. poor girl, she was sick for home. it was all nothing to her, less than a dream, this place she lived in. charlotte's engrossment in her new life, her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to this embittered heart. she would laugh when she found her elder sister trying to arrange her homely gowns in the french taste, and stalk silently through the large schoolrooms with a fierce satisfaction in her own ugly sleeves, in the haworth cut of her skirts. she seldom spoke a word to any one; only sometimes she would argue with monsieur héger, perhaps secretly glad to have the chance of shocking charlotte. if they went out to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering "yes" and "no;" inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. when her work was done she would walk in the cross-bowmen's ancient garden, under the trees, leaning on her shorter sister's arm, pale, silent--a tall, stooping figure. often she said nothing at all. charlotte, also, was very profitably speechless; under her eyes 'villette' was taking shape. but emily did not think of brussels. she was dreaming of haworth. one poem that she wrote at this time may appropriately be quoted here. it was, charlotte tells us, "composed at twilight, in the schoolroom, when the leisure of the evening play-hour brought back, in full tide, the thoughts of home:" "a little while, a little while, the weary task is put away, and i can sing and i can smile alike, while i have holiday. "where wilt thou go, my harassed heart-- what thought, what scene invites thee now? what spot, or near or far apart, has rest for thee, my weary brow? "there is a spot mid barren hills, where winter howls and driving rain; but, if the dreary tempest chills, there is a light that warms again. "the house is old, the trees are bare, moonless above bends twilight's dome, but what on earth is half so dear-- so longed for--as the hearth of home? "the mute bird sitting on the stone, the dark moss dripping from the wall, the thorn-tree gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, i love them; how i love them all! "and, as i mused, the naked room, the alien fire-light died away; and from the midst of cheerless gloom i passed to bright, unclouded day. "a little and a lone green lane, that opened on a common wide; a distant, dreary, dim, blue chain of mountains circling every side: "a heaven so dear, an earth so calm, so sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; and--deepening still the dream-like charm-- wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. "_that_ was the scene, i knew it well; i knew the turfy pathway's sweep, that, winding o'er each billowy swell, marked out the tracks of wandering sheep. "could i have lingered but an hour, it well had paid a week of toil; but truth has banished fancy's power, restraint and heavy task recoil. "even as i stood with raptured eye, absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, my hour of rest had fleeted by, and back came labour, bondage, care." charlotte meanwhile writes in good, even in high spirits to her friend: "i think i am never unhappy, my present life is so delightful, so congenial, compared to that of a governess. my time, constantly occupied, passes too rapidly. hitherto both emily and i have had good health, and therefore we have been able to work well. there is one individual of whom i have not yet spoken--monsieur héger, the husband of madame. he is professor of rhetoric--a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable as to temperament--a little, black, ugly being, with a face that varies in expression; sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena, occasionally--but very seldom--he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not a hundred times removed from what you would call mild and gentleman-like. he is very angry with me just at present, because i have written a translation which he chose to stigmatise as 'peu correct.' he did not tell me so, but wrote the words on the margin of my book, and asked, in brief, stern phrase, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations? adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable." the reader will already have recognised in the black, ugly, choleric little professor of rhetoric, the one absolutely natural hero of a woman's novel, the beloved and whimsical figure of the immortal monsieur paul emanuel. "he and emily," adds charlotte, "don't draw well together at all. emily works like a horse, and she has had great difficulties to contend with, far greater than i have had." emily did indeed work hard. she was there to work, and not till she had learned a certain amount would her conscience permit her to return to haworth. it was for dear liberty that she worked. she began german, a favourite study in after years, and of some purpose, since the style of hofmann left its impression on the author of 'wuthering heights.' she worked hard at music; and in half a year the stumbling schoolgirl became a brilliant and proficient musician. her playing is said to have been singularly accurate, vivid, and full of fire. french, too, both in grammar and in literature, was a constant study. monsieur héger recognised the fact that in dealing with the brontës he had not to make the customary allowances for a schoolgirl's undeveloped inexperience. these were women of mature and remarkable intelligence. the method he adopted in teaching them was rather that of a university professor than such as usually is used in a pensionnat. he would choose some masterpiece of french style, some passage of eloquence or portraiture, read it to them with a brief lecture on its distinctive qualities, pointing out what was exaggerated, what apt, what false, what subtle in the author's conception or his mode of expressing it. they were then dismissed to make a similar composition, without the aid of grammar or dictionary, availing themselves as far as possible of the _nuances_ of style and the peculiarities of method of the writer chosen as the model of the hour. in this way the girls became intimately acquainted with the literary _technique_ of the best french masters. to charlotte the lessons were of incalculable value, perfecting in her that clear and accurate style which makes her best work never wearisome, never old-fashioned. but the very thought of imitating any one, especially of imitating any french writer, was repulsive to emily, "rustic all through, moorish, wild and knotty as a root of heath."[ ] when monsieur héger had explained his plan to them, "emily spoke first; and said that she saw no good to be derived from it; and that by adopting it they would lose all originality of thought and expression. she would have entered into an argument on the subject, but for this monsieur héger had no time. charlotte then spoke; she also doubted the success of the plan; but she would follow out monsieur héger's advice, because she was bound to obey him while she was his pupil."[ ] charlotte soon found a keen enjoyment in this species of literary composition, yet emily's _devoir_ was the best. they are, alas, no longer to be seen, no longer in the keeping of so courteous and proud a guardian as mrs. gaskell had to deal with; but she and monsieur héger both have expressed their opinions that in genius, imagination, power and force of language, emily was the superior of the two sisters. so great was the personality of this energetic, silent, brooding, ill-dressed young englishwoman, that all who knew her recognised in her the genius they were slow to perceive in her more sociable and vehement sister. madame héger, the worldly, cold-mannered, _surveillante_ of villette, avowed the singular force of a nature most antipathetic to her own. yet emily had no companions; the only person of whom we hear, in even the most negative terms of friendliness, is one of the teachers, a certain mademoiselle marie, "talented and original, but of repulsive and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except emily and myself, her bitter enemies." no less arbitrary and repulsive seemed poor emily herself, a sprig of purple heath at discord with those bright, smooth geraniums and lobelias; emily, of whom every surviving friend extols the never-failing, quiet unselfishness, the genial spirit ready to help, the timid but faithful affection. she was so completely _hors de son assiette_ that even her virtues were misplaced. there was always one thing she could do, one thing as natural as breath to emily--determined labour. in that merciful engrossment she could forget her heart-sick weariness and the jarring strangeness of things; every lesson conquered was another step taken on the long road home. and the days allowed ample space for work, although it was supported upon a somewhat slender diet. counting boarders and externes, madame héger's school numbered over a hundred pupils. these were divided into three classes; the second, in which the brontës were, containing sixty students. in the last row, side by side, absorbed and quiet, sat emily and charlotte. soon after rising, the pensionnaires were given their light belgian breakfast of coffee and rolls. then from nine to twelve they studied. three mistresses and seven professors were engaged to take the different classes. at twelve a lunch of bread and fruit; then a turn in the green alley, charlotte and emily always walking together. from one till two fancy-work; from two till four, lessons again. then dinner: the one solid meal of the day. from five till six the hour was free, emily's musing-hour. from six till seven the terrible _lecture pieuse_, hateful to the brontës' protestant spirit. at eight a supper of rolls and water; then prayers, and to bed. the room they slept in was a long school-dormitory. after all they could not get the luxury, so much desired, of a separate room. but their two beds were alone together at the further end, veiled in white curtains; discreet and retired as themselves. here, after the day's hard work, they slept. in sleep, one is no longer an exile. but often emily did not sleep. the old well-known pain, wakefulness, longing, was again beginning to relax her very heartstrings. "the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright heretic and english spirit from the gentle jesuitry of the foreign and romish system. once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer, but the victory cost her dear. she was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote english village, the old parsonage house and desolate yorkshire hills."[ ] but not yet, not yet, this happiness! the opportunity that had been so hardly won must not be thrown away before the utmost had been made of it. and she was not utterly alone. charlotte was there. the success that she had in her work must have helped a little to make her foreign home tolerable to her. soon she knew enough of music to give lessons to the younger pupils. then german, costing her and charlotte an extra ten francs the month, as also much severe study and struggle. charlotte writes in the summer: "emily is making rapid progress in french, german, music and drawing. monsieur and madame héger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character under her singularities." it was doubtful, even, whether they would come home in september. madame héger made a proposal to her two english pupils for them to stay on, without paying, but without salary, for half a year. she would dismiss her english teacher, whose place charlotte would take. emily was to teach music to the younger pupils. the proposal was kind and would be of advantage to the sisters. charlotte declared herself inclined to accept it. "i have been happy in brussels," she averred. and emily, though she, indeed, was not happy, acknowledged the benefit to be derived from a longer term of study. six months, after all, was rather short to gain a thorough knowledge of french, with italian and german, when you add to these acquirements music and drawing, which emily worked at with a will. besides, she could not fail again, could not go back to haworth leaving charlotte behind; neither could she spoil charlotte's future by persuading her to reject madame héger's terms. so both sisters agreed to stay in brussels. they were not utterly friendless there; two miss taylors, schoolfellows and dear friends of charlotte's, were at school at the château de kokleberg, just outside the barriers. readers of 'shirley' know them as rose and jessie yorke. the brontës met them often, nearly every week, at some cousins of the taylors, who lived in the town. but this diversion, pleasant to charlotte, was merely an added annoyance to emily. she would sit stiff and silent, unable to say a word, longing to be somewhere at her ease. mrs. jenkins, too, had begun with asking them to spend their sundays with her; but emily never said a word, and charlotte, though sometimes she got excited and spoke well and vehemently, never ventured on an opinion till she had gradually wheeled round in her chair with her back to the person she addressed. they were so shy, so rustic, mrs. jenkins gave over inviting them, feeling that they did not like to refuse, and found it no pleasure to come. charlotte, indeed, still had the taylors, their cousins, and the family of a doctor living in the town, whose daughter was a pupil and friend of hers. charlotte, too, had madame héger and her admired professor of rhetoric; but emily had no friend except her sister. nevertheless it was settled they should stay. the _grandes vacances_ began on the th of august, and, as the journey to yorkshire cost so much, and as they were anxious to work, the brontë girls spent their holidays in rue d'isabelle. besides themselves only six or eight boarders remained. all their friends were away holiday-making; but they worked hard, preparing their lessons for the masters who, holidayless as they, had stayed behind in white, dusty, blazing, airless brussels, to give lectures to the scanty class at madame héger's pensionnat. so the dreary six weeks passed away. in october the term began again, the pupils came back, new pupils were admitted, monsieur héger was more gesticulatory, vehement, commanding than usual, and madame, in her quiet way, was no less occupied. life and youth filled the empty rooms. the brontë girls, sad enough indeed, for their friend martha taylor had died suddenly at the château de kokleberg, were, notwithstanding, able to feel themselves in a more natural position for women of their age. charlotte, henceforth, by monsieur héger's orders, "mademoiselle charlotte," was the new english teacher; emily the assistant music-mistress. but, in the middle of october, in the first flush of their employment, came a sudden recall to haworth. miss branwell was very ill. immediately the two girls, who owed so much to her, who, but for her bounty, could never have been so far away in time of need, decided to go home. they broke their determination to monsieur and madame héger, who, sufficiently generous to place the girls' duty before their own convenience, upheld them in their course. they hastily packed up their things, took places _viâ_ antwerp to london, and prepared to start. at the last moment, the trunks packed, in the early morning the postman came. he brought another letter from haworth. their aunt was dead. so much the greater need that they should hasten home. their father, left without his companion of twenty years, to keep his house, to read to him at night, to discuss with him on equal terms, their father would be lonely and distressed. henceforth one of his daughters must stay with him. anne was in an excellent situation; must they ask her to give it up? and what now of the school, the school at burlington? there was much to take counsel over and consider; they must hurry home. so, knowing the worst, their future hanging out of shape and loose before their eyes, they set out on their dreary journey knowing not whether or when they might return. footnotes: [footnote : c. brontë.] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : c. brontë. memoir of her sisters.] chapter viii. a retrospect. "poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable brontë! no history records your many struggles after the good--your wit, brilliance, attractiveness, eagerness for excitement--all the qualities which made you such 'good company' and dragged you down to an untimely grave." thus ejaculates mr. francis h. grundy, remembering the boon-companion of his early years, the half-insane, pitiful creature that opium and brandy had made of clever branwell at twenty-two. returned from bradford, his nervous system racked by opium fumes, he had loitered about at haworth until his father, stubborn as he was, perceived the obvious fact that every idle day led his only son more hopelessly down to the pit of ruin. at last he exerted his influence to find some work for branwell, and obtained for his reckless, fanciful, morbid lad the post of station-master at a small roadside place, luddendenfoot by name, on the lancashire and yorkshire railway. thither he went some months before charlotte and emily left for brussels. it was there mr. grundy met him; a novel station-master. "had a position been chosen for this strange creature for the express purpose of driving him several steps to the bad, this must have been it. the line was only just opened. the station was a rude wooden hut, and there was no village near at hand. alone in the wilds of yorkshire, with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking, hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to come, what was this morbid man, who couldn't bear to be alone, to do?"[ ] what branwell always did, in fine, was that which was easiest to him to do. he drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. he left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. about this time mr. grundy, then an engineer at halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went a little better. drink and riot had not embellished the tawny-maned, laughing, handsome darling of haworth. here is his portrait as at this time he appeared to his friend: "he was insignificantly small--one of his life's trials. he had a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead--to help his height, i fancy--a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep-sunk and still further hidden by the never-removed spectacles; prominent nose, but weak lower features. he had a downcast look, which never varied, save for a rapid momentary glance at long intervals. small and thin of person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight." yet this insignificant, sunken-eyed slip of humanity had a spell for those who heard him speak. there was no subject, moral, intellectual, or philosophic too remote or too profound for him to measure it at a moment's notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-line of his brilliant vanity. he would talk for hours: be eloquent, convincing, almost noble; and afterwards accompany his audience to the nearest public-house. "at times we would drive over in a gig to haworth (twelve miles) and visit his people. he was there at his best, and would be eloquent and amusing, although sometimes he would burst into tears when returning, and swear that he meant to amend. i believe, however, that he was half mad and could not control himself."[ ] so must his friends in kindness think. mad; if haunting, morbid dreads and fancies conjured up by poisonous drugs and never to be laid; if a will laid prostrate under the yoke of unclean habits; if a constitution prone to nervous derangement and blighted by early excess; if such things forcing him by imperceptible daily pressure to choose the things he loathed, to be the thing he feared, to act a part abhorrent to his soul; if such estranging and falsification of a man's true self may count as lunacy, the luckless, worthless boy was mad. it must have galled him, going home, to be welcomed so kindly, hoped so much from, by those who had forgiven amply, and did not dream how heavy a mortgage had since been laid upon their pardon; to have talked to the prim, pretty old lady who denied herself every day to save an inheritance for him; to watch pious, gentle anne into whose dreams the sins she prayed against had never entered; worst of all, the sight of his respectable, well-preserved father, honoured by all the parish, successful, placed by his own stern, continued, will high beyond the onslaughts of temptation, yet with a temperament singularly akin to that morbid, passionate son's. so he would weep going home; weep for his falling off, and perhaps more sincerely for the short life of his contrition. then the long evenings alone with his thoughts in that lonely place would make him afraid of repentance, afraid of god, himself, night, all. he would drink. he had fits of as contrary pride. "he was proud of his name, his strength and his abilities." proud of his name! he wrote a poem on it, "brontë," an eulogy of nelson, which won the patronising approbation of leigh hunt, miss martineau and others, to whom, at his special request, it was submitted. had he ever heard of his dozen aunts and uncles, the pruntys of ahaderg? or if not, with what sensations must the vicar of haworth have listened to this blazoning forth and triumphing over the glories of his ancient name? branwell had fits of passion, too, the repetition of his father's vagaries. "i have seen him drive his doubled fist through the panels of a door--it seemed to soothe him." the rough side of his nature got full play, and perhaps won him some respect denied to his cleverness, in the society amongst which he was chiefly thrown. for a little time the companionship of mr. grundy served to rescue him from utter abandonment to license. but, in the midst of this improvement, the crash came. as he had sown, he reaped. those long absences, drinking at the houses of his friends, had been turned to account by the one other inhabitant of the station at luddendenfoot. the luggage porter was left to keep the books, and, following his master's example, he sought his own enjoyment before his employers' gain. he must have made a pretty penny out of those escapades of branwell's, for some months after the vicar of haworth had obtained his son's appointment, when the books received their customary examination, serious defalcations were discovered. an inquiry was instituted, which brought to light branwell's peculiar method of managing the station. the lad himself was not suspected of actual theft; but so continued, so glaring had been his negligence, so hopeless the cause, that he was summarily dismissed the company's service, and sent home in dire disgrace to haworth. he came home not only in disgrace, but ill. never strong, his constitution was deranged and broken by his excesses; yet, strangely enough, consumption, which carried off so prematurely the more highly-gifted, the more strongly-principled daughters of the house, consumption, which might have been originally produced by the vicious life this youth had led, laid no claim upon him. his mother's character and her disease descended to her daughters only. branwell inherited his father's violent temper, strong passions and nervous weakness without the strength of will and moral fibre that made his father remarkable. probably this brilliant, weak, shallow, selfish lad reproduced accurately enough the characteristics of some former prunty; for patrick branwell was as distinctly an irishman as if his childhood had been spent in his grandfather's cabin at ahaderg. he came home to find his sisters all away. anne in her situation as governess. emily and charlotte in rue d'isabelle. no one, therefore, to be a check upon his habits, save the neat old lady, growing weaker day by day, who spent nearly all her time in her bedroom to avoid the paven floors of the basement; and the father, who did not care for company, took his meals alone for fear of indigestion, and found it necessary to spend the succeeding time in perfect quiet. the greater part of the day was, therefore, at branwell's uncontrolled, unsupervised disposal. to do him justice, he does seem to have made so much effort after a new place of work as was involved in writing letters to his friend grundy, and probably to others, suing for employment. but his offence had been too glaring to be condoned. mr. grundy seems to have advised the hapless young man to take shelter in the church, where the influence of his father and his mother's relatives might help him along; but, as branwell said, he had not a single qualification, "save, perhaps hypocrisy." parson's sons rarely have a great idea of the church. the energy, self-denial, and endurance which a clergyman ought to possess were certainly not in branwell's line. besides, how could he take his degree? montgomery, it seems, recommended him to make trial of literature. "all very well, but i have little conceit of myself and great desire for activity. you say that you write with feelings similar to those with which you last left me; keep them no longer. i trust i am somewhat changed, or i should not be worth a thought; and though nothing could ever give me your buoyant spirits and an outward man corresponding therewith, i may, in dress and appearance, emulate something like ordinary decency. and now, wherever coming years may lead--greenland's snows or sands of afric--i trust, etc. th june, ."[ ] it is doubtful, judging from branwell's letters and his verses, whether anything much better than his father's 'cottage in the wood' would have resulted from his following the advice of james montgomery. fluent ease, often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright, felicitous touch, with here and there a smack of the conventional hymn-book and pulpit twang--such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left of the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of haworth. real genius is perhaps seldom of such showy temperament. poor branwell! it needed greater strength than his to retrieve that first false step into ruin. he cannot help himself, and can find no one to help him; he appeals again to mr. grundy (in a letter which must, from internal evidence, have been written about this time, although a different and impossible year is printed at its heading):-- "dear sir, "i cannot avoid the temptation to cheer my spirits by scribbling a few lines to you while i sit here alone, all the household being at church--the sole occupant of an ancient parsonage among lonely hills, which probably will never hear the whistle of an engine till i am in my grave. "after experiencing, since my return home, extreme pain and illness, with mental depression worse than either, i have at length acquired health and strength and soundness of mind, far superior, i trust, to anything shown by that miserable wreck you used to know under my name. i can now speak cheerfully and enjoy the company of another without the stimulus of six glasses of whisky. i can write, think and act with some apparent approach to resolution, and i only want a motive for exertion to be happier than i have been for years. but i feel my recovery from _almost insanity_ to be retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees--nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me--no one to speak to except crabbed old greeks and romans who have been dust the last five [_sic_] thousand years. and yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for i would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant, yet cold debauchery, the determination to find out how far mind could carry body without both being chucked into hell, which too often marked my conduct when there, lost as i was to all i really liked, and seeking relief in the indulgence of feelings which form the blackest spot in my character. "yet i have something still left me which may do me service. but i ought not to remain too long in solitude, for the world soon forgets those who have bidden it 'good-bye.' quiet is an excellent cure, but no medicine should be continued after a patient's recovery, so i am about, though ashamed of the business, to dun you for answers to ----. "excuse the trouble i am giving to one on whose kindness i have no claim, and for whose services i am offering no return except gratitude and thankfulness, which are already due to you. give my sincere regards to mr. stephenson. a word or two to show you have not altogether forgotten me will greatly please, "yours, etc." alas, no helping hand rescued the sinking wretch from the quicksands of idle sensuality which slowly engulfed him! yet, at this time, there might have been hope, had he been kept from evil. deliver himself he could not. his "great desire for activity" seems to have had to be in abeyance for some months, for on the th of october he is still at haworth. he then writes to mr. grundy again. the letter brings us up to the time when--in the cheerless morning--charlotte and emily set out on their journey homewards; it reveals to us how much real undeserved suffering must have been going on side by side with branwell's purposeless miseries in the grey old parsonage at haworth. the good methodical old maiden aunt--who for twenty years had given the best of her heart to this gay affectionate nephew of hers--had come down to the edge of the grave, having waited long enough to see the hopeless fallacy of all her dreams for him, all her affection. branwell, who was really tender-hearted, must have been sobered then. he writes to mr. grundy in a sincere and manly strain:-- "my dear sir, "there is no misunderstanding. i have had a long attendance at the death-bed of the rev. mr. weightman, one of my dearest friends, and now i am attending at the death-bed of my aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. i expect her to die in a few hours. "as my sisters are far from home, i have had much on my mind, and these things must serve as an apology for what was never intended as neglect of your friendship to us. "i had meant not only to have written to you, but to the rev. james martineau, gratefully and sincerely acknowledging the receipt of his most kindly and truthful criticism--at least in advice, though too generous far in praise--but one sad ceremony must, i fear, be gone through first. give my most sincere respects to mr. stephenson, and excuse this scrawl; my eyes are too dim with sorrow to see well. believe me, your not very happy, but obliged friend and servant, "p. b. brontË." but not till three days later the end came. by that time anne was home to tend the woman who had taken her, a little child, into her love and always kept her there. anne had ever lived gladly with miss branwell; her more dejected spirit did not resent the occasional oppressions, the little tyrannies, which revolted charlotte and silenced emily. and, at the last, all the constant self-sacrifice of those twenty years, spent for their sake in a strange and hated country, would shine out, and yet more endear the sufferer to those who had to lose her. on the th of october branwell again writes to his friend:-- "my dear sir, "as i don't want to lose a _real_ friend, i write in deprecation of the tone of your letter. death only has made me neglectful of your kindness, and i have lately had so much experience with him, that your sister would _not now_ blame me for indulging in gloomy visions either of this world or of another. i am incoherent, i fear, but i have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as i would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and i have now lost the pride and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood. i have suffered such sorrow since i last saw you at haworth, that i do not now care if i were fighting in india, or ---- since, when the mind is depressed, danger is the most effectual cure." miss branwell was dead. all was over: she was buried on a tuesday morning, before charlotte and emily, having travelled night and day, got home. they found mr. brontë and anne sitting together, quietly mourning the customary presence to be known no more. branwell was not there. it was the first time he would see his sisters since his great disgrace; he could not wait at home to welcome them. miss branwell's will had to be made known. the little property that she had saved out of her frugal income was all left to her three nieces. branwell had been her darling, the only son, called by her name; but his disgrace had wounded her too deeply. he was not even mentioned in her will. footnotes: [footnote : 'pictures of the past.' f. h. grundy.] [footnote : 'pictures of the past.'] [footnote : 'pictures of the past.'] chapter ix. the recall. suddenly recalled from what had seemed the line of duty, with all their future prospects broken, the three sisters found themselves again at haworth together. there could be no question now of their keeping a school at burlington; if at all, it must be at haworth, where their father could live with them. miss branwell's legacies would amply provide for the necessary alterations in the house; the question before them was whether they should immediately begin these alterations, or first of all secure a higher education to themselves. at all events one must stay at home to keep house for mr. brontë. emily quickly volunteered to be the one. her offer was welcome to all; she was the most experienced housekeeper. anne had a comfortable situation, which she might resume at the end of the christmas holidays, and charlotte was anxious to get back to brussels. it would certainly be of advantage to their school, that cherished dream now so likely to come true, that the girls should be able to teach german, and that one of them at least should speak french with fluency and well. monsieur héger wrote to mr. brontë when charlotte and emily left, pointing out how much more stable and enduring their advantages would become, could they continue for another year at brussels. "in a year," he says, "each of your daughters would be completely provided against the future; each of them was acquiring at the same time instruction and the science to instruct. mademoiselle emily has been learning the piano, receiving lessons from the best master that we have in brussels, and already she had little pupils of her own; she was therefore losing at the same time a remainder of ignorance, and one, more embarrassing still, of timidity. mademoiselle charlotte was beginning to give lessons in french, and was acquiring that assurance and _aplomb_ so necessary to a teacher. one year more, at the most, and the work had been completed, and completed well." emily, as we know, refused the lure. once at haworth, she was not to be induced, by offer of any advantages, to quit her native heath. on the other hand, charlotte desired nothing better. hers was a nature very capable of affection, of gratitude, of sentiment. it would have been a sore wrench to her to break so suddenly with her busy, quiet life in the old mansion, rue d'isabelle. almost imperceptibly she had become fast friends with the place. mary taylor had left, it is true, and bright, engaging martha slept there, too sound to hear her, in the protestant cemetery. but in foreign, heretic, distant brussels there were calling memories for the downright, plain little yorkshire woman. she could not choose but hear. the blackavised, tender-hearted, fiery professor, for whom she felt the reverent, eager friendship that intellectual girls often give to a man much older than they; the doctor's family; even madame beck; even the belgian schoolgirls--she should like to see them all again. she did not perhaps realise how different a place brussels would seem without her sister. and it would certainly be an advantage for the school that she should know german. for these, and many reasons, charlotte decided to renounce a salary of £ a year offered her in england, and to accept that of £ which she would earn in brussels. thus it was determined that at the end of the christmas holidays the three sisters were again to be divided. but first they were nearly three months together. branwell was at home. even yet at haworth that was a pleasure and not a burden. his sisters never saw him at his worst; his vehement repentance brought conviction to their hearts. they still hoped for his future, still said to each other that men were different from women, and that such strong passions betokened a nature which, if once directed right, would be passionately right. they did not feel the miserable flabbiness of his moral fibre; did not know that the weak slip down when they try to stand, and cannot march erect. they were both too tender and too harsh with their brother, because they could not recognise what a mere, poor creature was this erring genius of theirs. thus, when the first shock was over, the reunited family was most contented. lightly, naturally, as an autumn leaf, the old aunt had fallen out of the household, her long duties over; and they--though they loved and mourned her--they were freer for her departure. there was no restraint now on their actions, their opinions; they were mistresses in their own home. it was a happy christmas, though not free from burden. the sisters, parted for so long, had much experience to exchange, many plans to make. they had to revisit their old haunts on the moors, white now with snow. there were walks to the library at keighley for such books as had been added during their absence. ellen came to haworth. then, at the end of january , anne went back to her duties, and charlotte set off alone for brussels. emily was left behind with branwell; but not for long. it must have been about this time that the ill-fated young man obtained a place as tutor in the house where anne was governess. it appeared a most fortunate connection; the family was well known for its respectable position, came of a stock eminent in good works, and the sisters might well believe that, under anne's gentle influence and such favouring auspices, their brother would be led into the way of the just. then emily was alone in the grey house, save for her secluded father and old tabby, now over seventy. she was not unhappy. no life could be freer than her own; it was she that disposed, she too that performed most of the household work. she always got up first in the morning and did the roughest part of the day's labour before frail old tabby came down; since kindness and thought for others were part of the nature of this unsocial, rugged woman. she did the household ironing and most of the cookery. she made the bread; and her bread was famous in haworth for its lightness and excellence. as she kneaded the dough, she would glance now and then at an open book propped up before her. it was her german lesson. but not always did she study out of books; those who worked with her in that kitchen, young girls called in to help in stress of business, remember how she would keep a scrap of paper, a pencil, at her side, and how, when the moment came that she could pause in her cooking or her ironing, she would jot down some impatient thought and then resume her work. with these girls she was always friendly and hearty--"pleasant, sometimes quite jovial like a boy," "so genial and kind, a little masculine," say my informants; but of strangers she was exceedingly timid, and if the butcher's boy or the baker's man came to the kitchen door she would be off like a bird into the hall or the parlour till she heard their hob-nails clumping down the path. no easy getting sight of that rare bird. therefore, it may be, the haworth people thought more of her powers than of those of anne or charlotte, who might be seen at school any sunday. they say: "a deal o' folk thout her th' clever'st o' them a', hasumiver shoo wur so timid, shoo cudn't frame to let it aat." for amusements she had her pets and the garden. she always fed the animals herself: the old cat; flossy, anne's favourite spaniel; keeper, the fierce bulldog, her own constant, dear companion, whose portrait, drawn by her spirited hand, is still extant. and the creatures on the moor were all, in a sense, her pets and familiar with her. the intense devotion of this silent woman to all manner of dumb creatures has something pathetic, inexplicable, almost deranged. "she never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals," said some shallow jumper at conclusions to mrs. gaskell. regard and help and staunch friendliness to all in need was ever characteristic of emily brontë; yet between her nature and that of the fierce, loving, faithful keeper, that of the wild moor-fowl, of robins that die in confinement, of quick-running hares, of cloud-sweeping, tempest-boding sea-mews, there was a natural likeness. the silent-growing flowers were also her friends. the little garden, open to all the winds that course over lees moor and stillingworth moor to the blowy summit of haworth street--that little garden whose only bulwark against the storm was the gravestones outside the railing, the stunted thorns and currant-bushes within--was nevertheless the home of many sweet and hardy flowers, creeping up under the house and close to the shelter of the bushes. so the days went swiftly enough in tending her house, her garden, her dumb creatures. in the evenings she would sit on the hearthrug in the lonely parlour, one arm thrown round keeper's tawny neck, studying a book. for it was necessary to study. after the next christmas holidays the sisters hoped to reduce to practice their long-cherished vision of keeping school together. letters from brussels showed emily that charlotte was troubled, excited, full of vague disquiet. she would be glad, then, to be home, to use the instrument it had cost so much pains to perfect. a costly instrument, indeed, wrought with love, anguish, lonely fears, vanquished passion; but in that time no one guessed that, not the school-teacher's german, not the fluent french acquired abroad, was the real result of this terrible firing, but a novel to be called 'villette.' emily then, "mine bonnie love," as charlotte used to call her, cannot have been quite certain of this dear sister's happiness; and as time went on anne's letters, too, began to give disquieting tidings. not that her health was breaking down; it was, as usual, branwell whose conduct distressed his sisters. he had altered so strangely; one day in the wildest spirits, the next moping in despair, giving himself mysterious airs of importance, expressing himself more than satisfied with his situation, smiling oddly, then, perhaps, the next moment all remorse and gloom. anne could not understand what ailed him, but feared some evil. at home, moreover, troubles slowly increased. old tabby grew very ill and could do no work; the girl hannah left; emily had all the business of investing the little property belonging to the three sisters since miss branwell's death; worse still, old mr. brontë's health began to flag, his sight to fail. worst of all--in that darkness, despair, loneliness--the old man, so emily feared, acquired the habit of drinking, though not to excess, yet more than his abstemious past allowed. doubtless she exaggerated her fears, with branwell always present in her thoughts. but emily grew afraid, alone at haworth, responsible, knowing herself deficient in that controlling influence so characteristic of her elder sister. her burden of doubt was more than she could bear. she decided to write to charlotte. on the nd of january, , charlotte arrived at haworth. on the rd of the month she wrote to her friend:-- "everyone asks me what i am going to do now that i am returned home, and everyone seems to expect that i should immediately commence a school. in truth it is what i should wish to do. i desire it above all things, i have sufficient money for the undertaking, and i hope now sufficient qualifications to give me a fair chance of success; yet i cannot yet permit myself to enter upon life--to touch the object which seems now within my reach, and which i have been so long straining to attain. you will ask me why? it is on papa's account; he is now, as you know, getting old; and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. i have felt for some months that i ought not to be away from him, and i feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him (at least as long as branwell and anne are absent) in order to pursue selfish interests of my own. with the help of god, i will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait. "i suffered much before i left brussels. i think, however long i live, i shall not forget what the parting with monsieur héger cost me. it grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, disinterested a friend.... haworth seems such a lonely quiet spot, buried away from the world. i no longer regard myself as young, indeed, i shall soon be twenty-eight; and it seems as if i ought to be working, and braving the rough realities of the world, as other people do----."[ ] wait, eager charlotte, there are in store for you enough and to spare of rude realities, enough of working and braving, in this secluded haworth. no need to go forth in quest of dangers and trials. the air is growing thick with gloom round your mountain eyrie. high as it is, quiet, lonely, the storms of heaven and the storms of earth have found it out, to break there. footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter x. the prospectuses. gradually charlotte's first depression wore away. long discussions with emily, as they took their walks over the moors, long silent brooding of ways and means, as they sat together in the parlour making shirts for branwell, long thinking, brought new counsel. she went, moreover, to stay with her friend ellen, and the change helped to restore her weakened health. she writes to her friend:-- "march "dear nell, "i got home safely and was not too much tired on arriving at haworth. i feel rather better to-day than i have been, and in time i hope to regain more strength. i found emily and papa well, and a letter from branwell intimating that he and anne are pretty well too. emily is much obliged to you for the seeds you sent. she wishes to know if the sicilian pea and the crimson cornflower are hardy flowers, or if they are delicate and should be sown in warm and sheltered situations. write to me to-morrow and let me know how you all are, if your mother continues to get better.... "good morning, dear nell, i shall say no more to you at present. "c. brontË." "monday morning. "our poor little cat has been ill two days and is just dead. it is piteous to see even an animal lying lifeless. emily _is_ sorry." side by side with all these lighter cares went on the schemes for the school. at last the two sisters determined to begin as soon as they saw a fair chance of getting pupils. they began the search in good earnest; but fortunately, postponed the necessary alterations in the house until they had the secure promise of, at any rate, three or four. then their demands lessened as day by day that chance became more difficult and fainter. in early summer charlotte writes: "as soon as i can get a chance of only _one_ pupil, i will have cards of terms printed and will commence the repairs necessary in the house. i wish all to be done before the winter. i think of fixing the board and english education at £ per annum." still no pupil was heard of, but the girls went courageously on, writing to every mother of daughters with whom they could claim acquaintance. but, alas, it was the case with one, that her children were already at school in liverpool, with another that her child had just been promised to miss c., with a third that she thought the undertaking praiseworthy, but haworth was so very remote a spot. in vain did the girls explain that from some points of view the retired situation was an advantage; since, had they set up school in some fashionable place, they would have had house-rent to pay, and could not possibly have offered an excellent education for £ a year. parents are an expectant people. still, every lady promised to recommend the school to mothers less squeamish, or less engaged; and, knowing how well they would show themselves worthy of the chance, once they had obtained it, charlotte and emily took heart to hope. the holidays arrived and still nothing was settled. anne came home and helped in the laying of schemes and writing of letters--but, alas, branwell also came home, irritable, extravagant, wildly gay, or gloomily moping. his sisters could no longer blind themselves to the fact that he drank, drank habitually, to excess. and anne had fears--vague, terrible, foreboding--which she could not altogether make plain. by this time they had raised the charge to £ , considering, perhaps, that their first offer had been so low as to discredit their attempt. but still they got no favourable answers. it was hard, for the girls had not been chary of time, money, or trouble to fit themselves for their occupation. looking round they could count up many schoolmistresses far less thoroughly equipped. only the brontës had no interest. meanwhile branwell amused himself as best he could. there was always the "black bull," with its admiring circle of drink-fellows, and the girls who admired patrick's courteous bow and patrick's winning smile. good people all, who little dreamed how much vice, how much misery they were encouraging by their approbation. mr. grundy, too, came over now and then to see his old friend. "i knew them all," he says--"the father, upright, handsome, distantly courteous, white-haired, tall; knowing me as his son's friend, he would treat me in the grandisonian fashion, coming himself down to the little inn to invite me, a boy, up to his house, where i would be coldly uncomfortable until i could escape with patrick branwell to the moors. the daughters--distant and distrait, large of nose, small of figure, red of hair (!), prominent of spectacles; showing great intellectual development, but with eyes constantly cast down, very silent, painfully retiring. this was about the time of their first literary adventures, say or ."[ ] but of literary adventure there was at present little thought. the school still occupied their thoughts and dreams. at last, no pupil coming forward, some cards of terms were printed and given for distribution to the friends of charlotte and anne; emily had no friends. there are none left of them, those pitiful cards of terms never granted; records of such unfruitful hopes. they have fitly vanished, like the ghosts of children never born; and quicker still to vanish was the dream that called them forth. the weeks went on, and every week of seven letterless mornings, every week of seven anxious nights, made the sisters more fully aware that notice and employment would not come to them in the way they had dreamed; made them think it well that branwell's home should not be the dwelling of innocent children. anne went back to her work leaving the future as uncertain as before. in october charlotte, always the spokeswoman, writes again to her friend and diligent helper in this matter:-- "dear nell, "i, emily, and anne are truly obliged to you for the efforts you have made in our behalf; and if you have not been successful you are only like ourselves. everyone wishes us well; but there are no pupils to be had. we have no present intention, however, of breaking our hearts on the subject; still less of feeling mortified at our defeat. the effort must be beneficial, whatever the result may be, because it teaches us experience and an additional knowledge of this world. "i send you two additional circulars, and will send you two more, if you desire it, when i write again." those four circulars also came to nothing; it was now more than six months since the three sisters had begun their earnest search for pupils: more than three years since they had taken for the ruling aim of their endeavours the formation of this little school. not one pupil could they secure; not one promise. at last they knew that they were beaten. in november charlotte writes again to ellen:-- "we have made no alterations yet in our house. it would be folly to do so while there is so little likelihood of our ever getting pupils. i fear you are giving yourself too much trouble on our account. "depend on it, if you were to persuade a mama to bring her child to haworth, the aspect of the place would frighten her, and she would probably take the dear girl back with her instanter. we are glad that we have made the attempt, and we will not be cast down because it has not succeeded."[ ] there was no more to be said, only to put carefully by, as one puts by the thoughts of an interrupted marriage, all the dreams that had filled so many months only to lay aside in a drawer, as one lays aside the long sewn at garments of a still-born child, the plans drawn out for the builder, the printed cards, the lists of books to get; only to face again a future of separate toil among strangers, to renounce the vision of a home together. footnotes: [footnote : 'pictures of the past.'] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter xi. branwell's fall. as the spring grew upon the moors, dappling them with fresh verdant shoots, clearing the sky overhead, loosening the winds to rush across them; as the beautiful season grew ripe in haworth, every one of its days made clearer to the two anxious women waiting there in what shape their blurred foreboding would come true at last. they seldom spoke of branwell now. it was a hard and anxious time, ever expectant of an evil just at hand. minor troubles, too, gathered round this shapeless boded grief: mr. brontë was growing blind; charlotte, ever nervous, feared the same fate, and could do but little sewing with her weak, cherished eyesight. anne's letters told of health worn out by constant, agonising suspicion. it was emily, that strong bearer of burdens, on whom the largest share of work was laid. charlotte grew really weak as the summer came. her sensitive, vehement nature felt anxiety as a physical pain. she was constantly with her father; her spirit sank with his, as month by month his sight grew sensibly weaker. the old man, to whom his own importance was so dear, suffered keenly, indeed, from the fear of actual blindness, and more from the horror of dependence, than from the dread of pain or privation. "he fears he will be nothing in the parish," says sorrowful charlotte. and as her father, never impatient, never peevish, became more deeply cast down and anxious, she, too, became nervous and fearful; she, too, dejected. at last, when june came and brought no brightness to that grey old house, with the invisible shadow ever hovering above it, charlotte was persuaded to seek rest and change in the home of her friend near leeds. anne was home now; she had come back ill, miserable. she had suspicions that made her feel herself degraded, pure soul, concerning her brother's relation with her employer's wife. many letters had passed between them, through her hands too. too often had she heard her unthinking little pupils threaten their mother into more than customary indulgence, saying: "unless you do as we wish, we shall tell papa about mr. brontë." the poor girl felt herself an involuntary accomplice to that treachery, that deceit. to lie down at night under the roof, to break by day the bread of the good, sick, bedridden man, whose honour, she could not but fear, was in jeopardy from her own brother, such dire strain was too great for that frail, dejected nature. and yet to say openly to herself that branwell had committed this disgrace--it was impossible. rather must her suspicions be the morbid promptings of a diseased mind. she was wicked to have felt them. poor, gentle anne, sweet, "prim, little body," such scenes, such unhallowed vicinities of lust, were not for you. at last sickness came and set her free. she went home. home, with its constant labour, pure air of good works; home, with its sickness and love, its dread for others and noble sacrifice of self; how welcome was it to her wounded spirit! and yet this infinitely lighter torment was wearing charlotte out. they persuaded her to go away, and, when she had yielded, strove to keep her away. emily writes to ellen in july:-- "dear miss nussey--if you have set your heart on charlotte staying another week, she has our united consent. i, for one, will take everything easy on sunday. i am glad she is enjoying herself; let her make the most of the next seven days to return stout and hearty. love to her and you from anne and myself, and tell her all are well at home.--yours, "emily brontË." charlotte stayed the extra week, benefiting largely thereby. she started for home, and enjoyed her journey, for she travelled with a french gentleman, and talked again with delight the sweet language which had left such lingering echoes in her memory, which forbade her to feel quite contented any more in her secluded yorkshire home. slight as it was, the little excitement did her good; feeling brave and ready to face and fight with a legion of shadows, she reached the gate of her own home, went in. branwell was there. he had been sent home a day or two before, apparently for a holiday. he must have known that some discovery had been made at last; he must have felt he never would return. anne, too, must have had some misgivings; yet the worst was not known yet. emily, at least, could not guess it. not for long this truce with open disgrace. the very day of charlotte's return a letter had come for branwell from his employer. all had been found out. this letter commanded branwell never to see again the mother of the children under his care, never set foot in her home, never write or speak to her. branwell, who loved her passionately, had in that moment no thought for the shame, the black disgrace, he had brought on his father's house. he stormed, raved, swore he could not live without her; cried out against her next for staying with her husband. then prayed the sick man might die soon; they would yet be happy. ah, he would never see her again! a strange scene in the quiet parlour of a country vicarage, this anguish of guilty love, these revulsions from shameful ecstasy to shameful despair. branwell raved on, delirious, agonised; and the blind father listened, sick at heart, maybe self-reproachful; and the gentle sister listened, shuddering, as if she saw hell lying open at her feet. emily listened, too, indignant at the treachery, horrified at the shame; yet with an immense pity in her fierce and loving breast. to this scene charlotte entered. charlotte, with her vehement sense of right; charlotte, with her sturdy indignation; when she, at last understood the whole guilty corrupted passion that had wrecked two homes, she turned away with something in her heart suddenly stiffened, dead. it was her passionate love for this shameful, erring brother, once as dear to her as her own soul. yet she was very patient. she writes to a friend quietly and without too much disdain:-- "we have had sad work with branwell. he thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his agony of mind" (in what fashion, the reader knows ere now) "no one in this house could have rest, and at last we have been obliged to send him from home for a week, with some one to look after him. he has written to me this morning, expressing some sense of contrition ... but as long as he remains at home, i scarce dare hope for peace in the house. we must all, i fear, prepare for a season of distress and disquietude."[ ] a weary and a hopeless time. branwell came back, better in body, but in nowise holier in mind. his one hope was that his enemy might die, die soon, and that things might be as they had been before. no thought of repentance. what money he had, he spent in gin or opium, anything to deaden recollection. a woman still lives at haworth, who used to help in the housework at the "black bull." she still remembers how, in the early morning, pale, red-eyed, he would come into the passage of the inn, with his beautiful bow and sweep of the lifted hat, with his courteous smile and ready "good morning, anne!" then he would turn to the bar, and feeling in his pockets for what small moneys he might have--sixpence, eightpence, tenpence, as the case might be--he would order so much gin and sit there drinking till it was all gone, then still sit there silent; or sometimes he would passionately speak of the woman he loved, of her beauty, sweetness, of how he longed to see her again; he loved to speak of her even to a dog; he would talk of her by the hour to his dog. yet--lest we pity this real despair--let us glance at one of this man's letters. how could such vulgar weakness, such corrupt and loathsome sentimentality, such maudlin micawber-penitence, yet feel so much! no easy task to judge of a misery too perverse for pity, too sincere for absolute contempt. it is again to mr. grundy that he writes:-- "since i last shook hands with you in halifax, two summers ago, my life, till lately, has been one of apparent happiness and indulgence. you will ask--'why does he complain then?' i can only reply by showing the undercurrent of distress which bore my bark to a whirl-pool, despite the surface-waves of life that seemed floating me to peace. in a letter begun in the spring of " (_sic_; ?) "and never finished owing to incessant attacks of illness, i tried to tell you that i was tutor to the son of a wealthy gentleman whose wife is sister to the wife of ----, an m.p., and the cousin of lord ----. this lady (though her husband detested me) showed me a degree of kindness which, when i was deeply grieved one day at her husband's conduct, ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling. my admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper, and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given ... although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which i had little looked for. three months since i received a furious letter from my employer, threatening to shoot me if i returned from my vacation which i was passing at home; and letters from her lady's-maid and physician informed me of the outbreak, only checked by her firm courage and resolution that whatever harm came to her none should come to me.... i have lain for nine long weeks, utterly shattered in body and broken down in mind. the probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate never rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief. i dreaded, too, the wreck of my mind and body, which--god knows--during a short life have been most severely tried. eleven continuous nights of sleepless horror reduced me to almost blindness, and being taken into wales to recover, the sweet scenery, the sea, the sound of music caused me fits of unspeakable distress. you will say: 'what a fool!' but if you knew the many causes that i have for sorrow, which i cannot even hint at here, you would perhaps pity as well as blame. at the kind request of mr. macaulay and mr. baines, i have striven to arouse my mind by writing something worthy of being read, but i really cannot do so. of course you will despise the writer of all this. i can only answer that the writer does the same and would not wish to live, if he did not hope that work and change may yet restore him. "apologising sincerely for what seems like whining egotism, and hardly daring to hint about days when, in your company, i could sometimes sink the thoughts which 'remind me of departed days,' i fear 'departed never to return,' i remain, &c."[ ] unhappy branwell! some consolation he derives in his utmost sorrow from the fact that the lady of his love can employ her own lady's-maid and physician to write letters to her exiled lover. it is clear that his pride is gratified by this irregular association with a lord. he can afford to wait, stupefied with drink and drugs, till that happy time shall come when he can step forward and claim "herself and estate," henceforward branwell brontë, esq., j.p., and a person of position in the county. such paradisal future dawns above this present purgatory of pains and confusion. that phrase concerning "herself and estate" is peculiarly apocalyptic. it sheds a quite new light upon a fact which, in mrs. gaskell's time, was regarded as a proof that some remains of conscience still stirred within this miserable fellow. some months after his dismissal, towards the end of this unhappy year of , he met this lady at harrogate by appointment. it is said that she proposed a flight together, ready to forfeit all her grandeur. it was branwell who advised patience, and a little longer waiting. maybe, though she herself was dear, "although seventeen years my senior," "herself and estate" was estimably dearer. and yet he was in earnest, yet it was a question of life and death, of heaven or hell, with him. if he could not have her, he would have nothing. he would ruin himself and all he could. most like, in this rage of vain despair, some passionate baby that shrieks, and hits, and tears, convulsed because it may not have the moon. small wonder that charlotte's coldness, aggravated by continual outrage on branwell's part, gradually became contempt and silence. in proportion as she had exulted in this brother, hoped all for him, did she now shrink from him, bitterly chill at heart. "i begin to fear," she says, the once ambitious sister, "that he has rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life." she cannot ask ellen to come to see her, because he is in the house. "and while _he_ is here, _you_ shall not come. i am more confirmed in that resolution the more i see of him. i wish i could say one word to you in his favour, but i cannot. i will hold my tongue."[ ] for some while she hoped that the crisis would pass, and that then--no matter how humbly, the more obscurely the better--he would at least earn honest bread away from home. such was not his intention. he professed to be too ill to leave haworth; and ill, no doubt, he was from continual eating of opium, and daily drinking of drams. he stuck to his comfortable quarters, to the "black bull" just across the churchyard, heedless of what discomfort he gave to others. "branwell offers no prospect of hope," says charlotte, again. "how can we be more comfortable so long as branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of improving? it has been intimated that he would be received again where he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily, but he refuses to make the effort. he will not work, and at home he is a drain on every resource, an impediment to all happiness. but there's no use in complaining----" small use indeed; yet once more she forced herself to make the hopeless effort, after some more than customary outbreak of the man who was drinking himself into madness and ruin. she writes in the march of to her friend and comforter, ellen:-- "i went into the room where branwell was, to speak to him, about an hour after i got home; it was very forced work to address him. i might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice, and made no reply; he was stupefied. my fears were not vain. i hear that he got a sovereign while i have been away, under pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed it at a public-house, and has employed it as was to be expected..., concluded her account by saying that he was a 'hopeless being.' it is too true. in his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is."[ ] it must be about that time that she for ever gave up expostulation or complaint in this matter. "i will hold my tongue," she had said, and she kept her word. for more than two years she held an utter silence to him; living under the same roof, witnessing day by day his ever-deepening degradation, no syllable crossed her lips to him. since she could not (for the sake of those she loved and might comfort) refuse the loathsome daily touch and presence of sin, she endured it, but would have no fellowship therewith. she had no right over it, it none over her. she looked on speechless; that man was dead to her. anne, in whom the fibre of indignation was less strong, followed less sternly in her sister's wake. "she had," says charlotte in her 'memoir,' "in the course of her life been called upon to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw went very deeply into her mind; it did her harm." the spectacle of this harm, coming undeserved to so dear, frail and innocent a creature, absorbed all charlotte's pity. there was none left for branwell. but there was one woman's heart strong enough in its compassion to bear the daily disgusts, weaknesses, sins of branwell's life, and yet persist in aid and affection. night after night, when mr. brontë was in bed, when anne and charlotte had gone upstairs to their room, emily still sat up, waiting. she often had very long to wait in the silent house before the staggering tread, the muttered oath, the fumbling hand at the door, bade her rouse herself from her sad thoughts and rise to let in the prodigal, and lead him in safety to his rest. but she never wearied in her kindness. in that silent home, it was the silent emily who had ever a cheering word for branwell; it was emily who still remembered that he was her brother, without that remembrance freezing her heart to numbness. she still hoped to win him back by love; and the very force and sincerity of his guilty passion (an additional horror and sin in her sisters' eyes) was a claim on emily, ever sympathetic to violent feeling. thus it was she who, more than the others, became familiarised with the agony, and doubts, and shame of that tormented soul; and if, in her little knowledge of the world, she imagined such wrested passions to be natural, it is not upon her, of a certainty, that the blame of her pity shall be laid. as the time went on and branwell grew worse and wilder, it was well for the lonely watcher that she was strong. at last he grew ill, and would be content to go to bed early and lie there half-stupefied with opium and drink. one such night, their father and branwell being in bed, the sisters came upstairs to sleep. emily had gone on first into the little passage room where she still slept, when charlotte, passing branwell's partly-opened door, saw a strange bright flare inside. "oh, emily!" she cried, "the house is on fire!" emily came out, her fingers at her lips. she had remembered her father's great horror of fire; it was the one dread of a brave man; he would have no muslin curtains, no light dresses in his house. she came out silently and saw the flame; then, very white and determined, dashed from her room downstairs into the passage, where every night full pails of water stood. one in each hand she came upstairs. anne, charlotte, the young servant, shrinking against the wall, huddled together in amazed horror--emily went straight on and entered the blazing room. in a short while the bright light ceased to flare. fortunately the flame had not reached the woodwork: drunken branwell, turning in his bed, must have upset the light on to his sheets, for they and the bed were all on fire, and he unconscious in the midst when emily went in, even as jane eyre found mr. rochester. but it was with no reasonable, thankful human creature with whom emily had to deal. after a few long moments, those still standing in the passage saw her stagger out, white, with singed clothes, half-carrying in her arms, half-dragging, her besotted brother. she placed him in her bed, and took away the light; then assuring the hysterical girls that there could be no further danger, she bade them go and rest--but where she slept herself that night no one remembers now. it must be very soon after this that branwell began to sleep in his father's room. the old man, courageous enough, and conceiving that his presence might be some slight restraint on the drunken furies of his unhappy son, persisted in this arrangement, though often enough the girls begged him to relinquish it, knowing well enough what risk of life he ran. not infrequently branwell would declare that either he or his father should be dead before the morning; and well might it happen that in his insensate delirium he should murder the blind old man. "the sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. in the mornings young brontë would saunter out, saying with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, 'the poor old man and i have had a terrible night of it. he does his best--the poor old man!--but it's all over with me'" (whimpering) "'it's _her_ fault, _her_ fault.'"[ ] and in such fatal progress two years went on, bringing the suffering in that house ever lower, ever deeper, sinking it day by day from bad to worse. footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : 'pictures of the past.'] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] chapter xii. writing poetry. while emily brontë's hands were full of trivial labour, while her heart was buried with its charge of shame and sorrow, think not that her mind was more at rest. she had always used her leisure to study or create; and the dreariness of existence made this inner life of hers doubly precious now. there is a tiny copy of the 'poems' of ellis, currer, and acton bell, which was emily's own, marked with her name and with the date of every poem carefully written under its title, in her own cramped and tidy writing. it has been of great use to me in classifying the order of these poems, chiefly hymns to imagination, emily's "comforter," her "fairy-love;" beseeching her to light such a light in the soul that the dull clouds of earthly skies may seem of scant significance. the light that should be lit was indeed of supernatural brightness; a flame from under the earth; a flame of lightning from the skies; a beacon of awful warning. although so much is scarcely evident in these early poems, gleaming with fantastic glow-worm fires, fairy prettinesses, or burning as solemnly and pale as tapers lit in daylight round a bier, yet, in whatever shape, "the light that never was on sea or land," the strange transfiguring shine of imagination, is present there. no one in the house ever saw what things emily wrote in the moments of pause from her pastry-making, in those brief sittings under the currants, in those long and lonely watches for her drunken brother. she did not write to be read, but only to relieve a burdened heart. "one day," writes charlotte in , recollecting the near, vanished past, "one day in the autumn of , i accidentally lighted on a manuscript volume of verse in my sister emily's handwriting. of course i was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse. i looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me,--a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. i thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. to my ear, they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy and elevating." very true; these poems with their surplus of imagination, their instinctive music and irregular rightness of form, their sweeping impressiveness, effects of landscape, their scant allusions to dogma or perfidious man, are, indeed, not at all like the poetry women generally write. the hand that painted this single line, "the dim moon struggling in the sky," should have shaken hands with coleridge. the voice might have sung in concert with blake that sang this single bit of a song: "hope was but a timid friend; she sat without the grated den, watching how my fate would tend, even as selfish-hearted men. "she was cruel in her fear; through the bars, one dreary day, i looked out to see her there, and she turned her face away!" had the poem ended here it would have been perfect, but it and many more of these lyrics have the uncertainty of close that usually marks early work. often incoherent, too, the pictures of a dream rapidly succeeding each other without logical connection; yet scarcely marred by the incoherence, since the effect they seek to produce is not an emotion, not a conviction, but an impression of beauty, or horror, or ecstasy. the uncertain outlines are bathed in a vague golden air of imagination, and are shown to us with the magic touch of a coleridge, a leopardi--the touch which gives a mood, a scene, with scarce an obvious detail of either mood or scene. we may not understand the purport of the song, we understand the feeling that prompted the song, as, having done with reading 'kubla khan,' there remains in our mind, not the pictured vision of palace or dancer, but a personal participation in coleridge's heightened fancy, a setting-on of reverie, an impression. read this poem, written in october, -- "the philosopher. "enough of thought, philosopher, too long hast thou been dreaming unlightened, in this chamber drear, while summer's sun is beaming! space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain concludes thy musings once again? "oh, for the time when i shall sleep without identity, and never care how rain may steep, or snow may cover me! no promised heaven, these wild desires could all, or half fulfil; no threatened hell, with quenchless fires, subdue this quenchless will! "so said i, and still say the same; still, to my death, will say-- three gods, within this little frame, are warring night and day; heaven could not hold them all, and yet they all are held in me, and must be mine till i forget my present entity! oh, for the time, when in my breast their struggles will be o'er! oh, for the day, when i shall rest, and never suffer more! "i saw a spirit, standing, man, where thou dost stand--an hour ago, and round his feet three rivers ran, of equal depth, and equal flow-- a golden stream, and one like blood, and one like sapphire seemed to be; but, where they joined their triple flood it tumbled in an inky sea. the spirit sent his dazzling gaze down through that ocean's gloomy night then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, the glad deep sparkled wide and bright-- white as the sun, far, far more fair, than its divided sources were! "and even for that spirit, seer, i've watched and sought my life-time long; sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air-- an endless search, and always wrong! had i but seen his glorious eye _once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me, i ne'er had raised this coward cry to cease to think, and cease to be; i ne'er had called oblivion blest, nor, stretching eager hands to death, implored to change for senseless rest this sentient soul, this living breath-- "oh, let me die--that power and will their cruel strife may close; and conquered good, and conquering ill be lost in one repose!" some semblance of coherence may, no doubt, be given to this poem by making the three first and the last stanzas to be spoken by the questioner, and the fourth by the philosopher. even so, the subject has little charm. what we care for is the surprising energy with which the successive images are projected, the earnest ring of the verse, the imagination which invests all its changes. the man and the philosopher are but the clumsy machinery of the magic-lantern, the more kept out of view the better. "conquered good and conquering ill!" a thought that must often have risen in emily's mind during this year and those succeeding. a gloomy thought, sufficiently strange in a country parson's daughter; one destined to have a great result in her work. of these visions which make the larger half of emily's contribution to the tiny book, none has a more eerie grace than this day-dream of the th of march, , sampled here by a few verses snatched out of their setting rudely enough:-- "on a sunny brae, alone i lay one summer afternoon; it was the marriage-time of may with her young lover, june. * * * * * "the trees did wave their plumy crests, the glad birds carolled clear; and i, of all the wedding guests, was only sullen there. * * * * * "now, whether it were really so, i never could be sure, but as in fit of peevish woe, i stretched me on the moor, "a thousand thousand gleaming fires seemed kindling in the air; a thousand thousand silvery lyres resounded far and near: "methought, the very breath i breathed was full of sparks divine, and all my heather-couch was wreathed by that celestial shine! "and, while the wide earth echoing rung to their strange minstrelsy, the little glittering spirits sung, or seemed to sing, to me." * * * * * what they sang is indeed of little moment enough--a strain of the vague pantheistic sentiment common always to poets, but her manner of representing the little airy symphony is charming. it recalls the fairy-like brilliance of the moors at sunset, when the sun, slipping behind a western hill, streams in level rays on to an opposite crest, gilding with pale gold the fawn-coloured faded grass; tangled in the film of lilac seeding grasses, spread, like the bloom on a grape, over all the heath; sparkling on the crisp edges of the heather blooms, pure white, wild-rose colour, shell-tinted, purple; emphasising every grey-green spur of the undergrowth of ground-lichen; striking every scarlet-splashed, white-budded spray of ling: an iridescent, shimmering, dancing effect of white and pink and purple flowers; of lilac bloom, of grey-green and whitish-grey buds and branches, all crisply moving and dancing together in the breeze on the hilltop. i have quoted that windy night in a line-- "the dim moon struggling in the sky." here is another verse to show how well she watched from her bedroom's wide window the grey far-stretching skies above the black far-stretching moors-- "and oh, how slow that keen-eyed star has tracked the chilly grey; what, watching yet! how very far the morning lies away." such direct, vital touches recall well-known passages in 'wuthering heights:' catharine's pictures of the moors; that exquisite allusion to gimmerton chapel bells, not to be heard on the moors in summer when the trees are in leaf, but always heard at wuthering heights on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain. but not, alas! in such fantasy, in such loving intimacy with nature, might much of emily's sorrowful days be passed. nor was it in her nature that all her dreams should be cheerful. the finest songs, the most peculiarly her own, are all of defiance and mourning, moods so natural to her that she seems to scarcely need the intervention of words in their confession. the wild, melancholy, and elevating music of which charlotte wisely speaks is strong enough to move our very hearts to sorrow in such verses as the following, things which would not touch us at all were they written in prose; which have no personal note. yet listen-- "death! that struck when i was most confiding in my certain faith of joy to be-- strike again, time's withered branch dividing from the fresh root of eternity! "leaves, upon time's branch, were growing brightly, full of sap, and full of silver dew; birds beneath its shelter gathered nightly; daily round its flowers the wild bees flew. "sorrow passed, and plucked the golden blossom." solemn, haunting with a passion infinitely beyond the mere words, the mere image; because, in some wonderful way, the very music of the verse impresses, reminds us, declares the holy inevitable losses of death. a finer poem yet is 'remembrance,' written two years later, in the march of ; here the words and the thought are worthy of the music and the mood. it has vital passion in it; though it can scarcely be personal passion, since, "fifteen wild decembers" before , emily brontë was a girl of twelve years old, companionless, save for still living sisters, branwell, her aunt, and the vicarage servants. here, as elsewhere in the present volume, the creative instinct reveals itself in imagining emotions and not characters. the artist has supplied the passion of the lover. "cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee, far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! have i forgot, my only love, to love thee, severed at last by time's all-severing wave? "now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover over the mountains, on that northern shore, resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover thy noble heart for ever, evermore? "cold in the earth--and fifteen wild decembers, from those brown hills, have melted into spring: faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers after such years of change and suffering! "sweet love of youth, forgive, if i forget thee, while the world's tide is bearing me along; other desires and other hopes beset me, hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong. "no later light has lightened up my heaven, no second morn has ever shone for me; all my life's bliss from thy dear life was given, all my life's bliss is in the grave with thee. "but, when the days of golden dreams had perished, and even despair was powerless to destroy, then did i learn how existence could be cherished, strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy. "then did i check the tears of useless passion-- weaned my young soul from yearning after thine; sternly denied its burning wish to hasten down to that tomb already more than mine. "and, even yet, i dare not let it languish, dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, how could i seek the empty world again?" better still, of a standard excellence, is a little poem, which, by some shy ostrich prompting, emily chose to call "the old stoic. "riches i hold in light esteem; and love i laugh to scorn; and lust of fame was but a dream that vanished with the morn: "and if i pray, the only prayer that moves my lips for me is, 'leave the heart that now i bear, and give me liberty!' "yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'tis all that i implore; in life and death, a chainless soul, with courage to endure." throughout the book one recognises the capacity for producing something finer and quite different from what is here produced; one recognises so much, but not the author of 'wuthering heights.' grand impressions of mood and landscape reveal a remarkably receptive artistic temperament; splendid and vigorous movement of lines shows that the artist is a poet. then we are in a _cul-de-sac_. there is no hint of what kind of poet--too reserved to be consistently lyric, there is not sufficient evidence of the dramatic faculty to help us on to the true scent. all we can say is that we have before us a mind capable of very complete and real illusions, haunted by imagination, always fantastic, and often terrible; a temperament reserved, fearless and brooding; a character of great strength and ruggedness, extremely tenacious of impressions. we must call in monsieur taine and his _milieu_ to account for 'wuthering heights.' this first volume reveals an overpowering imagination which has not yet reached its proper outlet. it is painful, in reading these early poems, to feel how ruthless and horrible that strong imagination often was, as yet directed on no purposed line. sometimes, indeed, sweet fancies came to emily, but often they were visions of black dungeons, scenes of death, and hopeless parting, of madness and agony. "so stood i, in heaven's glorious sun, and in the glare of hell; my spirit drank a mingled tone, of seraph's song, and demon's moan; what my soul bore, my soul alone within itself may tell!" it is painful, indeed, to think that the surroundings of this violent imagination, with its bias towards the capricious and the terrifying, were loneliness, sorrow, enforced companionship with degradation; a life so bitter, for a long time, and made so bitter through another's fault, that emily welcomed her fancies, even the gloomiest, as a happy outlet from reality. "oh, dreadful is the check--intense the agony-- when the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; when the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, the soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain." such were the verses that charlotte discovered one autumn day of , which surprised her, with good reason, by their originality and music. emily was not pleased by what in her eyes, so jealous of her liberty, must have seemed a deliberate interference with her property. "my sister emily," continues charlotte, "was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery i had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication. i knew, however, that a mind like hers could not be without some latent spark of honourable ambition, and refused to be discouraged in my attempts to fan that spark to flame. "meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since emily's had given me pleasure, i might like to look at some of hers. i could not but be a partial judge, yet i thought that these verses, too, had a sweet sincere pathos of their own." only a partial judge could find anything much to praise in gentle anne's trivial verses. had the book an index of first lines, what a scathing criticism on the contents would it be! "sweet are thy strains, celestial bard." "i'll rest me in this sheltered bower." "oh, i am very weary, though tears no longer flow." from such beginnings we too clearly foresee the hopeless bathos of the end. poor child, her real, deep sorrows, expressed in such worn-out ill-fitting phrases, are as little touching as the beauty of a london shopgirl under the ready-made cast-off adornments of her second-hand finery. charlotte, however, knowing the real sorrow, the real meekness that inspired them, not unnaturally put into the trivial verses the pathos of the writer's circumstances. of a truth, her own poems are not such as would justify any great rigour of criticism. they are often, as poems, actually inferior to anne's, her manner of dragging in a tale or a moral at the end of a lyric having quite a comical effect; yet, on the whole, her share of the book clearly distinguishes her as an eloquent and imaginative _raconteuse_, at the same time that it denies her the least sprout, the smallest leaf, of that flowerless wreath of bays which emily might claim. but at that time the difference was not so clearly distinguishable; though charlotte ever felt and owned her sister's superiority in this respect, it was not recognised as of a sort to quite outshine her own little tales in verse, and quite outlustre anne's pious effusions. a packet of manuscript was selected, a little packet written in three different hands and signed by three names. the sisters did not wish to reveal their identity; they decided on a _nom de plume_, and chose the common north-country surname of bell. they did not wish to be known as women: "we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudices;" yet their fastidious honour prevented them from wearing a mask they had no warrant for; to satisfy both scruples they assumed names that might equally belong to a man or a woman. in the part of yorkshire where they lived children are often christened by family names; over the shops they would see "sunderland akroyd," varied by "pighills sunderland," with scarce a john or james to bear them company. so there was nothing strange to them in the fashion so ingeniously turned to their own uses. ellis veiled emily; currer, charlotte; acton, anne. the first and last are common names enough--a miss currer who was one of the subscribers to cowan's bridge may have suggested her pseudonym to charlotte. at last every detail was discussed, decided, and the packet sent off to london to try its fortunes in the world:-- "this bringing out of our little book was hard work. as was to be expected neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset; though inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of others. the great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied. being greatly harassed by this obstacle, i ventured to apply to the messrs. chambers of edinburgh for a word of advice: _they_ may have forgotten the circumstance, but _i_ have not; for from them i received a brief and business-like but civil and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at last made a way."[ ] ultimately the three sisters found a publisher who would undertake the work upon commission; a favourable answer came from messrs. aylott & jones, of paternoster row, who estimated the expense of the book at thirty guineas. it was a great deal for the three sisters to spare from their earnings, but they were eager to print, eager to make sacrifices, as though in some dim way they saw already the glorious goal. but at present there was business to do. they bought one of the numerous little primers that are always on sale to show the poor vain moth of amateur authorship how least to burn his wings--little books more eagerly bought and read than any of those that they bring into the world. such a publisher's guide, meant for ambitious schoolboys, the brontës bought and studied as anxiously as they. by the end of february all was settled, the type decided upon, the money despatched, the printers at work. emily brontë's copy is dated may th, . what eagerness at the untying of the parcel in which those first copies came! what disappointment, chequered with ecstasy, at reading their own verse, unaltered, yet in print! an experience not so common then as now; to be a poetess in those days had a certain distinction, and the three sisters must have anxiously waited for a greeting. the poems had been despatched to many magazines: _colburne's_, _bentley's_, _hood's_, _jerrold's_, _blackwood's_, their early idol; to the _edinburgh review_, _tait's edinburgh magazine_, the _dublin university magazine_; to the _athenæum_, the _literary gazette_, the _critic_, and to the _daily news_, the _times_, and to the _britannia_ newspaper. surely from some quarter they would hear such an authentic word of warning or welcome as should confirm at once their hopes or their despairs. they had grown used to waiting; but they had long to wait. at last, on july th, the _athenæum_ reviewed their book in a short paragraph, and it is remarkable that, though in such reviews of the poems as appeared after the publication of 'jane eyre,' it is always currer bell's "fine sense of nature," currer bell's "matured intellect and masterly hand," that wins all the praise; still, in this early notice, the yet unblinded critic has perceived to whom the palm is due. ellis bell he places first of the three supposed brothers, naming him "a fine quaint spirit with an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted." next to him the critic ranks currer, lastly anne. scarce another notice did they see. the little book was evidently a failure; it had fallen still-born from the press. were all their hopes to die as soon as they were born? at least they resolved not to be too soon baffled, and already, in the thick of their disappointment, began to lay the plots of the novels they would write. like our army, they gained their battles by never owning they were beaten. they kept it all to themselves, this disappointment, these resolutions. when the inquisitive postman asked mr. brontë if he knew who was that mr. currer bell for whom so many letters always came, the old gentleman answered with a sense of authority, "my good man, there is no such person in the parish;" and when, on rare occasions, branwell came into the room where they were writing, no word was said of the work that was going on. not even to the sisterly ellen, so near to all their hearts, was any confession made of the way they spent their time. "we have done nothing (to _speak_ of) since you were here," says conscientious anne. nevertheless their friend drew her conclusions. about this time she came to stay at haworth, and sometimes (a little amused at their reticence) she would tease them with her suspicions, to charlotte's alarmed surprise. once, at this time, when they were walking on the moor together, a sudden change and light came into the sky. "look," said charlotte; and the four girls looked up and saw three suns shining clearly overhead. they stood a little while silently gazing at the beautiful parhelion; charlotte, her friend, and anne clustered together, emily a little higher, standing on a heathery knoll. "that is you!" said ellen at last. "you are the three suns." "hush!" cried charlotte, indignant at the too shrewd nonsense of her friend; but as ellen, her suspicions confirmed by charlotte's violence, lowered her eyes to the earth again, she looked a moment at emily. she was still standing on her knoll, quiet, satisfied; and round her lips there hovered a very soft and happy smile. she was not angry, the independent emily. she had liked the little speech. footnotes: [footnote : 'memoir.' c. b.] chapter xiii. troubles. while emily brontë was striving to create a world of fancy and romance natural to her passionate spirit, the real, everyday existence in which she had to work and endure was becoming day by day more anxious and troubled. an almost unliveable life it seems, recalling it, stifled with the vulgar tragedy of branwell's woes, the sordid cares that his debts entailed, the wearing anxiety that watched the oncoming blindness of old mr. brontë. these months of during which, let us remember, emily was writing 'wuthering heights,' must have been the heaviest and dreariest of her days; it was during their weary course that she at last perceived how utterly hopeless, how insensible to good, must be the remaining life of her brother. for so long as the future was left him, branwell never reached the limit of abasement. he drank to drown sorrow, to deaden memory and the flight of time; he went far, but not too far to turn back when the day should dawn which should recall him to prosperity and happiness. he was still, though perverted and debased, capable of reform and susceptible to holy influences. he had not finally cast away goodness and honour; they were but momentarily discarded, like rings taken off for heavy work; by-and-by he would put them on again. suddenly the future was taken away. one morning, about six months after his dismissal, a letter came for branwell announcing the death of his former employer. all he had ever hoped for lay at his feet--the good, wronged man was dead. his wife, his wealth, should now make branwell glad. a new life, earned by sin and hatred, should begin; a new good life, honourable and happy. it was in branwell's nature to be glad when peace and honour came to him, although he would make no effort to attain them, and this morning he was very happy. "he fair danced down the churchyard as if he were out of his mind; he was so fond of that woman," says my informant. the next morning he rose, dressed himself with care, and prepared for a journey, but before he had even set out from haworth two men came riding to the village post haste. they sent for branwell, and when he arrived, in a great state of excitement, one of the riders dismounted and went with him into the "black bull." they went into the brown parlour of the inn, the cheerful, wainscotted parlour, where branwell had so often lorded it over his boon companions from his great three-cornered chair. after some time the messenger rose and left; and those who were in the inn thought they heard a strange noise in the parlour--a bleating like a calf's. yet, being busy people, they did not go in to see if anything had happened, and amid the throng of their employments the sound passed out of their ears and out of their memory. hours afterwards the young girl who used to help in the housework at the inn, the anne who still remembers branwell's fluent greetings, found occasion to enter the parlour. she went in and found him on the floor, looking changed and dreadful. he had fallen down in a sort of stupefied fit. after that day he was an altered being. the message he had heard had changed the current of his life. it was not the summons he expected; but a prayer from the woman he loved not to come near her, not to tempt her to ruin; if she saw him once, the care of her children, the trust of their fortunes, all was forfeited. she entreated him to keep away; anxious, perhaps, in this sudden loneliness of death, to retrieve the past, or by some tender superstition made less willing to betray the dead than the living; or, it may be, merely eager to retain at all costs the rank, the station, the honours to which she was accustomed. be it as it may, branwell found himself forgotten. "oh, dreadful heart of woman, that in one day forgets what man remembers, forgetting him therewith." after that day he was different. he despaired, and drank himself to death, drinking to the grave and forgetfulness, gods of his sabbath, and borrowing a transient pleasure at fearful interest. but to such a man the one supreme temptation is enjoyment: it must be had, though life and heaven go forfeit. and while he caroused, "and by his whole manner gave indications of intense enjoyment,"[ ] his old father grew quite blind, anne day by day more delicate and short of breath, ambitious charlotte pined like an eagle in a cage, and emily, writing 'wuthering heights,' called those affected who found the story more terrible than life. it was she who saw most of her abandoned brother, for anne could only shudder at his sin, and charlotte was too indignant for pity. but emily, the stern, charitable woman, who spared herself no pang, who loved to carry tenderly the broken-winged nestlings in her hardworking hands, emily was not revolted by his weakness. shall i despise the deer for his timid swiftness to fly, or the leveret because it cannot die bravely, or mock the death-agony of the wolf because the beast is gaunt and foul to see? she asks herself in one of the few personal poems she has left us. no! an emphatic no; for emily brontë had a place in her heart for all the wild children of nature, and to despise them for their natural instincts was impossible to her. and thus it came about that she ceased to grow indignant at branwell's follies; she made up her mind to accept with angerless sorrow his natural vices. all that was left of her ready disdain was an extreme patience which expected no reform, asked no improvement; the patience she had for the leveret and the wolf, things contemptible and full of harm, yet not so by their own choice; the patience of acquiescent and hopeless despair. branwell's pity was all for himself. he did not spare the pious household forced into the contamination of his evil habits. "nothing happens at haworth," says charlotte; "nothing at least of a pleasant kind. one little incident occurred about a week ago to sting us into life; but, if it give no more pleasure for you to hear than it does for us to witness, you will scarcely thank me for adverting to it. it was merely the arrival of a sheriff's officer on a visit to branwell, inviting him either to pay his debts or take a trip to york. of course his debts had to be paid. it is not agreeable to lose money, time after time, in this way; but where is the use of dwelling on such subjects. it will make him no better."[ ] reproaches only hardened his heart and made him feel himself more than ever abused by circumstances and fate. "sometimes,"[ ] says mr. phillips, "he would complain of the way he was treated at home, and, as an instance, related the following:-- "one of the sunday-school girls, in whom he and all his house took much interest, fell very sick, and they were afraid she would not live. "'i went to see the poor little thing,' he said, 'sat with her half-an-hour and read a psalm to her and a hymn at her request. i felt very much like praying with her too,' he added, his voice trembling with emotion, 'but you see i was not good enough. how dare i pray for another, who had almost forgotten how to pray for myself? i came away with a heavy heart, for i felt sure she would die, and went straight home, where i fell into melancholy musings. i wanted somebody to cheer me. i often do; but no kind word finds its way to my ears, much less to my heart. charlotte observed my depression, and asked what ailed me. so i told her. she looked at me with a look which i shall never forget, if i live to be a hundred years old--which i never shall. it was not like her at all. it wounded me, as if some one had struck me a blow in the mouth. it involved ever so many things in it. it was a dubious look. it ran over me, questioning and examining, as if i had been a wild beast. it said, 'did my ears deceive me, or did i hear ought?' and then came the painful, baffled expression which was worse than all. it said, 'i wonder if that's true?' but, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me and said, 'she is my little scholar and i will go and see her.' i replied not a word. i was too much cut up. when she was gone, i came over here to the "black bull" and made a night of it in sheer disgust and desperation. why could they not give me some credit when i was trying to be good?'" in such wise the summer of drew on, wearily enough, with increased economies in the already frugal household, that branwell's debts might honourably be paid, with gathering fears for the father, on whom dyspepsia and blindness were laying heavy hands. he could no longer see to read; he, the great walker who loved to ramble alone, could barely grope his way about; all that was left to him of sight was the ability to recognise well-known figures standing in a strong light. yet he still continued to preach; standing grey and sightless in the pulpit, uttering what words (perforce unstudied) came to his lips. himself in his sorrowful age and stern endurance a most noble and comprehensible sermon. his spirits were much depressed; for now he could no longer forget himself in his lonely studies, no longer walk on the free moors alone when trouble invaded the narrow house below. he lived now of necessity in intimate relation with his children; he depended on them. and now he made acquaintance with the heroic nature of his daughters, and saw the petty drudgery of their lives, and how worthily they turned it to a grace in the wearing of it. and now he saw clearly the vain, dependent, passionate temperament of his son, and knew how, by the lack of training, the plant had been ruined and draggled in the mire, which might have beautifully flowered and borne good fruit had it been staked and supported; the poor espalier thing that could not stand alone. nemesis had visited his home. he felt the consequences of his selfishness, his arrogance, his cold isolation, and bitterly, bitterly he mourned. the cataract grew month by month, a thickening veil that blotted out the world; and month by month the old blind man sat wearily thinking through the day of his dear son's ruin, for he had ever loved branwell the best, and lay at night listening for his footsteps; while below, alone, his daughter watched as wearily for the prodigal's return. the three girls looked on and longed to help. all that they could do they did, charlotte being her father's constant helper and companion; but all they could do was little. they would not reconcile themselves to see him sink into blindness. they busied themselves in collecting what information they could glean concerning operations upon cataract, and the names of oculists. but at present there was nothing to do but wait and endure; for even they, with their limited knowledge, could tell that their father's eyes were not ready yet for the surgeon's knife. meanwhile they worked in secret at their novels. so soon as the poems had been sent off, and even when it was evident that that venture, too, had failed, the sisters determined to try and earn a livelihood by writing. they could no longer leave their home, their father being helpless and branwell worse than helpless; yet, with ever-increasing expenses and no earnings, bare living was difficult to compass. the future, too, was uncertain; should their father's case prove hopeless, should he become quite blind, ill, incapable of work, they would be homeless indeed. with such gloomy boding in their hearts, with such stern impelling necessity bidding them strive and ever strive again, as a baffled swimmer strives for land, these three sisters began their work. two of them, in after time, were to be known through all the world, were to be influences for all time to come and, a new glory in the world not known before their days, were to make up "with mrs. browning, the perfect trinity of english female fame."[ ] but with little thought of this, heavily and very wearily, they set out upon their undertaking. every evening when the sewing was put away the writing was begun, the three sisters, sitting round the table, or more often marching round and round the room as in their schoolgirl days, would hold solemn council over the progress of their work. the division of chapters, the naming of characters, the progress of events, was then decided, so that each lent a hand to the other's work. then, such deliberations done, the paper would be drawn out, and the casual notes of the day corrected and writ fair; and for an hour or more there would be no sound save the scratching of pens on the paper and the gusty wailing of the wind outside. such methodical work makes rapid progress. in a few months each sister had a novel completed. charlotte, a grave and quiet study of belgian life and character, 'the professor;' anne, a painstaking account of a governess's trials, which she entitled 'agnes grey.' emily's story was very different, and less perceptibly interwoven with her own experience. we all know at least the name of 'wuthering heights.' the novels were sent off, and at first seemed even less likely of success than the school had been, or the book of verses. publisher after publisher rejected them; then, thinking that perhaps it was not cunning to send the three novels in a batch, since the ill-success of one might prejudice all, the sisters sent them separately to try their chance. but ever with the same result--month after month, came rejection. at home affairs continued no less disheartening. branwell often laid up with violent fits of sickness, mr. brontë becoming more utterly blind. at last, in the end of july, emily and charlotte set out for manchester to consult an oculist. there they heard of mr. wilson as the best, and to him they went; but only to find that no decisive opinion could be given until their father's eyes had been examined. yet, not disheartened, they went back to haworth; for at least they had discovered a physician and had made sure that, even at their father's advanced age, an operation might prove successful. therefore, at the end of august, charlotte, who was her father's chief companion and the most easily spared from home, took old mr. brontë to manchester. mr. wilson pronounced his eyes ready for the operation, and the old man and his daughter went into lodgings for a month. "i wonder how emily and anne will get on at home with branwell," says charlotte, accustomed to be the guide and leader of that little household. hardly enough, no doubt; for anne was little fitted now to struggle against fate. she never had completely rallied from the prolonged misery of her sojourn with branwell in that fatal house which was to blight their future and be blighted by them. she grew weaker and weaker, that "gentle little one," so tender, so ill fitted to her rugged and gloomy path of life. emily looked on with a breaking heart; trouble encompassed her on every side; her father blind in manchester; her brother drinking himself to death at home; her sister failing, paling day by day; and every now and then a letter would come announcing that such and such a firm of publishers had no use for 'agnes grey' and 'wuthering heights.' charlotte in manchester fared little better. 'the professor' had been returned to her on the very day of her father's operation, when (bearing this unspoken-of blow as best she might) she had to stay in the room while the cataract was removed from his eyes. exercise makes courage strong; that evening, when her father in his darkened room might no longer speak or be spoken to, that very evening she began 'jane eyre.' this was being braver than brave emily, who has left us nothing, save a few verses, written later than 'wuthering heights.' but at haworth there was labour and to spare for every instant of the busy days, and charlotte, in manchester, found her unaccustomed leisure and unoccupied confinement very dreary. towards the end of september mr. brontë was pronounced on a fair way to recovery, and he and charlotte set out for haworth. it was a happy home-coming, for things had prospered better than charlotte had dared to hope during the latter weeks of her absence. every day the old man grew stronger, and little by little his sight came back. he could see the glorious purple of the moors, emily's moors, no less beloved in her sorrowing womanhood than in her happy hoyden time of youth. he could see his children's faces, and the miserable change in branwell's features. he began to be able to read a little, a very little at a time, and by november was sufficiently recovered to take the whole duty of the three sunday services upon himself. not long after this time, three members of that quiet household were still further cheered by learning that 'agnes grey' and 'wuthering heights' had found acceptance at the hands of a publisher. acceptance; but upon impoverishing terms. still, for so much they were thankful. to write, and bury unread the things one has written, is playing music upon a dumb piano. who plays, would fain be heard. footnotes: [footnote : george searle phillips.] [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : 'branwell brontë.' g. s. phillips.] [footnote : a. c. swinburne. 'note on charlotte brontë.'] chapter xiv. 'wuthering heights:' its origin. a grey old parsonage standing among graves, remote from the world on its wind-beaten hill-top, all round the neighbouring summits wild with moors; a lonely place among half-dead ash-trees and stunted thorns, the world cut off on one side by the still ranks of the serried dead, and distanced on the other by mile-long stretches of heath: such, we know, was emily brontë's home. an old, blind, disillusioned father, once prone to an extraordinary violence of temper, but now grown quiet with age, showing his disappointment with life by a melancholy cynicism that was quite sincere; two sisters, both beloved, one, fired with genius and quick to sentiment, hiding her enthusiasm under the cold demeanour of the ex-governess, unsuccessful, and unrecognised; the other gentler, dearer, fairer, slowly dying, inch by inch, of the blighting neighbourhood of vice. one brother, scarce less dear, of set purpose drinking himself to death out of furious thwarted passion for a mistress that he might not marry: these were the members of emily brontë's household. herself we know: inexperienced, courageous, passionate, and full of pity. was it wonderful that she summed up life in one bitter line?-- "conquered good and conquering ill." her own circumstances proved the axiom true, and of other lives she had but little knowledge. whom should she ask? the gentle ellen who seemed of another world, and yet had plentiful troubles of her own? the curates she despised for their narrow priggishness? the people in the village of whom she knew nothing save when sickness, wrong, or death summoned her to their homes to give help and protection? her life had given only one view of the world, and she could not realise that there were others which she had not seen. "i am bound to avow," says charlotte, "that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom she lived than a nun has of the country people that pass her convent gates. my sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or to take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. though her feeling for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced; and yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word. hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered of the real concerning them was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more powerful than sportive, found in such traits materials whence it wrought creations like heathcliff, like earnshaw, like catharine. having formed these beings she did not know what she had done. if the auditors of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable--of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night and disturbed mental peace by day, ellis bell would wonder what was meant and suspect the complainant of affectation. had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree--loftier and straighter, wider spreading--and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripening and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work, to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable."[ ] yet no human being is wholly free, none wholly independent, of surroundings. and emily brontë least of all could claim such immunity. we can with difficulty just imagine her a prosperous heiress, loving and loved, high-spirited and even hoydenish; but with her cavalier fantasy informed by a gracious splendour all her own, we can just imagine emily brontë as shirley keeldar, but scarcely shirley keeldar writing 'wuthering heights.' emily brontë away from her moors, her loneliness, her poverty, her discipline, her companionship with genius, violence and degradation, would have taken another colour, as hydrangeas grow now red, now blue, according to the nature of the soil. it was not her lack of knowledge of the world that made the novel she wrote become 'wuthering heights,' not her inexperience, but rather her experience, limited and perverse, indeed, and specialised by a most singular temperament, yet close and very real. her imagination was as much inspired by the circumstances of her life, as was anne's when she wrote the 'tenant of wildfell hall,' or charlotte's in her masterpiece 'villette;' but, as in each case the imagination was of a different quality, experience, acting upon it, produced a distinct and dissimilar result; a result obtained no less by the contrariety than by the harmony of circumstance. for our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so detestably environs us. the fact that charlotte brontë knew chiefly clergymen is largely responsible for 'shirley,' that satirical eulogy of the church and apotheosis of sunday-school teachers. but emily, living in this same clerical evangelistic atmosphere, is revolted, forced to the other extreme; and, while sheltering her true opinions from herself under the all-embracing term "broad church," we find in her writings no belief so strong as the belief in the present use and glory of life; no love so great as her love for earth--earth the mother and grave; no assertion of immortality, but a deep certainty of rest. there is no note so often struck in all her work, and struck with such variety of emphasis, as this: that good for goodness' sake is desirable, evil for evil's sake detestable, and that for the just and the unjust alike there is rest in the grave. this quiet clergyman's daughter, always hearing evil of dissenters, has therefore from pure courage and revolted justice become a dissenter herself. a dissenter in more ways than one. never was a nature more sensitive to the stupidities and narrowness of conventional opinion, a nature more likely to be found in the ranks of the opposition; and with such a nature indignation is the force that most often looses the gate of speech. the impulse to reveal wrongs and sufferings as they really are, is overwhelmingly strong; although the revelation itself be imperfect. what, then, would this inexperienced yorkshire parson's daughter reveal? the unlikeness of life to the authorised pictures of life; the force of evil, only conquerable by the slow-revolving process of nature which admits not the eternal duration of the perverse; the grim and fearful lessons of heredity; the sufficiency of the finite to the finite, of life to life, with no other reward than the conduct of life fulfils to him that lives; the all-penetrating kinship of living things, heather-sprig, singing lark, confident child, relentless tyrant; and, not least, not least to her already in its shadow, the sure and universal peace of death. a strange evangel from such a preacher; but a faith evermore emphasised and deeper rooted in emily's mind by her incapacity to acquiesce in the stiff, pragmatic teaching, the narrow prejudice, of the calvinists of haworth. yet this very calvinism influenced her ideas, this doctrine she so passionately rejected, calling herself a disciple of the tolerant and thoughtful frederick maurice, and writing, in defiance of its flames and shriekings, the most soothing consolations to mortality that i remember in our tongue. nevertheless, so dual-natured is the force of environment, this antagonistic faith, repelling her to the extreme rebound of belief, did not send her out from it before she had assimilated some of its sternest tenets. from this doctrine of reward and punishment she learned that for every unchecked evil tendency there is a fearful expiation; though she placed it not indeed in the flames of hell, but in the perverted instincts of our own children. terrible theories of doomed incurable sin and predestined loss warned her that an evil stock will only beget contamination: the children of the mad must be liable to madness; the children of the depraved, bent towards depravity; the seed of the poison-plant springs up to blast and ruin, only to be overcome by uprooting and sterilisation, or by the judicious grafting, the patient training of many years. thus prejudiced and evangelical haworth had prepared the woman who rejected its hebraic dogma, to find out for herself the underlying truths. she accepted them in their full significance. it has been laid as a blame to her that she nowhere shows any proper abhorrence of the fiendish and vindictive heathcliff. she who reveals him remembers the dubious parentage of that forsaken seaport baby, "lascar or gipsy;" she remembers the ishmaelitish childhood, too much loved and hated, of the little interloper whose hand was against every man's hand. remembering this, she submits as patiently to his swarthy soul and savage instincts as to his swarthy skin and "gibberish that nobody could understand." from thistles you gather no grapes. no use, she seems to be saying, in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. the very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained doomed child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous. and how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's crime. even for such there must be rest. no possibility in the just and reverent mind of emily brontë that the god whom she believed to be the very fount and soul of life could condemn to everlasting fire the victims of morbid tendencies not chosen by themselves. no purgatory, and no everlasting flame, is needed to purify the sins of heathcliff; his grave on the hillside will grow as green as any other spot of grass, moor-sheep will find the grass as sweet, heath and harebells will grow of the same colour on it as over a baby's grave. for life and sin and punishment end with death to the dying man; he slips his burden then on to other shoulders, and no visions mar his rest. "i wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." so ends the last page of 'wuthering heights.' so much for the theories of life and evil that the clash of circumstance and character struck out from emily brontë. it happened, as we know, that she had occasion to test these theories; and but for that she could never have written 'wuthering heights.' not that the story, the conception, would have failed. after all there is nothing more appalling in the violent history of that upland farm than many a midland manor set thick in elms, many a wild country-house of wales or cornwall could unfold. stories more socially painful than the mere brute violence of the earnshaws; of madness and treachery, stories of girls entrapped unwillingly into a lunatic marriage that the estate might have an heir; legends of fearful violence, of outcast children, dishonoured wives, horrible and persistent evil. who, in the secret places of his memory, stores not up such haunting gossip? and emily, familiar with all the wild stories of haworth for a century back, and nursed on grisly irish horrors, tales of , tales of oppression and misery, emily, with all this eerie lore at her finger-ends, would have the less difficulty in combining and working the separate motives into a consistent whole, that she did not know the real people whose histories she knew by heart. no memory of individual manner, dominance or preference for an individual type, caught and disarranged her theories, her conception being the completer from her ignorance. this much her strong reason and her creative power enabled her to effect. but this is not all. this is the plot; but to make a character speak, act, rave, love, live, die, through a whole lifetime of events, even as the readers feel convinced he must have acted, must have lived and died, this demands at least so much experience of a somewhat similar nature as may serve for a base to one's imagination, a reserve of certainty and reassurance on which to draw in times of perplexity and doubt. branwell, who sat to anne sorrily enough for the portrait of henry huntingdon, served his sister emily, not indeed as a model, a thing to copy, but as a chart of proportions by which to measure, and to which to refer, for correct investiture, the inspired idea. mr. wemyss reid (whose great knowledge of the brontë history and still greater kindness in admitting me to his advantages as much as might be, i cannot sufficiently acknowledge)--this capable critic perceives a _bonâ fide_ resemblance between the character of heathcliff and the character of branwell brontë as he appeared to his sister emily. so much, bearing in mind the verse concerning the leveret, i own i cannot see. branwell seems to me more nearly akin to heathcliff's miserable son than to heathcliff. but that, in depicting heathcliff's outrageous thwarted love for catharine, emily did draw upon her experience of her brother's suffering, this extract from an unpublished lecture of mr. reid's will sufficiently reveal[ ]:-- "it was in the enforced companionship of this lost and degraded man that emily received, i am sure, many of the impressions which were subsequently conveyed to the pages of her book. has it not been said over and over again by critics of every kind that 'wuthering heights' reads like the dream of an opium-eater? and here we find that during the whole time of the writing of the book an habitual and avowed opium-eater was at emily's elbow. i said that perhaps the most striking part of 'wuthering heights' was that which deals with the relations of heathcliff and catharine after she had become the wife of another. whole pages of the story are filled with the ravings and ragings of the villain against the man whose life stands between him and the woman he loves. similar ravings are to be found in all the letters of branwell brontë written at this period of his career; and we may be sure that similar ravings were always on his lips as, moody and more than half mad, he wandered about the rooms of the parsonage at haworth. nay, i have found some striking verbal coincidences between branwell's own language and passages in 'wuthering heights.' in one of his own letters there are these words in reference to the object of his passion: 'my own life without her will be hell. what can the so-called love of her wretched sickly husband be to her compared with mine?' now, turn to 'wuthering heights' and you will read these words: 'two words would comprehend my future--death and hell; existence after losing her would be hell. yet i was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued edgar linton's attachment more than mine. if he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love in eighty years as much as i could in a day.'" so much share in 'wuthering heights' branwell certainly had. he was a page of the book in which his sister studied; he served, as to an artist's temperament all things unconsciously serve, for the rough block of granite out of which the work is hewn, and, even while with difficulty enduring his vices, emily undoubtedly learned from them those darker secrets of humanity necessary to her tragic incantation. they served her, those dreaded, passionate outbreaks of her brother's, even as the moors she loved, the fancy she courted, served her. strange divining wand of genius, that conjures gold out of the miriest earth of common life; strange and terrible faculty laying up its stores and half-mechanically drawing its own profit out of our slightest or most miserable experiences, noting the gesture with which the mother hears of her son's ruin, catching the faint varying shadow that the white wind-shaken window-blind sends over the dead face by which we watch, drawing its life from a thousand deaths, humiliations, losses, with a hand in our sharpest joys and bitterest sorrows; this faculty was emily brontë's, and drew its profit from her brother's shame. here ended branwell's share in producing 'wuthering heights.' but it is not well to ignore his claim to its entire authorship; for in the contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones. the vain boast of an unprincipled dreamer, half-mad with opium, half-drunk with gin, meaning nothing but the desire to be admired at any cost, has been given too much prominence by those lovers of sensation who prefer any startling lie to an old truth. their ranks have been increased by the number of those who, ignorant of the true circumstances of emily's life, found it impossible that an inexperienced girl could portray so much violence and such morbid passion. on the contrary, given these circumstances, none but a personally inexperienced girl could have treated the subject with the absolute and sexless purity which we find in 'wuthering heights.' how _infecte_, commonplace, and ignominious would branwell, relying on his own recollections, have made the thwarted passion of a violent adventurer for a woman whose sickly husband both despise! that purity as of polished steel, as cold and harder than ice, that freedom in dealing with love and hate, as audacious as an infant's love for the bright flame of fire, could only belong to one whose intensity of genius was rivalled by the narrowness of her experience--an experience limited not only by circumstances, but by a nature impervious to any fierier sentiment than the natural love of home and her own people, beginning before remembrance and as unconscious as breathing. the critic, having emily's poems and the few remaining verses and letters of branwell, cannot doubt the incapacity of that unnerved and garrulous prodigal to produce a work of art so sustained, passionate, and remote. for in no respect does the terse, fiery, imaginative style of emily resemble the weak, disconnected, now vulgar, now pretty mannerisms of branwell. there is, indeed, scant evidence that the writer of emily's poems could produce 'wuthering heights;' but there is, at any rate, the impossibility that her work could be void of fire, concentration, and wild fancy. as great an impossibility as that vulgarity and tawdriness should not obtrude their ugly heads here and there from under branwell's finest phrases. and since there is no single vulgar, trite, or micawber-like effusion throughout 'wuthering heights;' and since heathcliff's passion is never once treated in the despicable would-be worldly fashion in which branwell describes his own sensations, and since at the time that 'wuthering heights' was written he was manifestly, and by his own confession, too physically prostrate for any literary effort, we may conclude that branwell did not write the book. on the other side we have not only the literary evidence of the similar qualities in 'wuthering heights' and in the poems of ellis bell, but the express and reiterated assurance of charlotte brontë, who never even dreamed, it would seem, that it could be supposed her brother wrote the book; the testimony of the publishers who made their treaty with ellis bell; of the servant martha who saw her mistress writing it; and--most convincing of all to those who have appreciated the character of emily brontë--the impossibility that a spirit so upright and so careless of fame should commit a miserable fraud to obtain it. indeed, so baseless is this despicable rumour that to attack it seems absurd, only sometimes it is wise to risk an absurdity. puny insects, left too long unhurt, may turn out dangerous enemies irretrievably damaging the fertile vine on which they fastened in the security of their minuteness. to the three favouring circumstances of emily's masterpiece, which we have already mentioned--the neighbourhood of her home, the character of her disposition, the quality of her experience--a fourth must be added, inferior in degree, and yet not absolutely unimportant. this is her acquaintance with german literature, and especially with hoffmann's tales. in emily brontë's day, romance and germany had one significance; it is true that in london and in prose the german influence was dying out, but in distant haworth, and in the writings of such poets as emily would read, in scott, in southey, most of all in coleridge, with whose poems her own have so distinct an affinity, it is still predominant. of the materialistic influence of italy, of atheist shelley, byron with his audacity and realism, sensuous keats, she would have little experience in her remote parsonage. and, had she known them, they would probably have made no impression on a nature only susceptible to kindred influences. thackeray, her sister's hero, might have never lived for all the trace of him we find in emily's writings; never is there any single allusion in her work to the most eventful period of her life, that sight of the lusher fields and taller elms of middle england; that glimpse of hurrying vast london; that night on the river, the sun slipping behind the masts, doubly large through the mist and smoke in which the houses, bridges, ships are all spectral and dim. no hint of this, nor of the sea, nor of belgium, with its quaint foreign life; nor yet of that french style and method so carefully impressed upon her by monsieur héger, and which so decidedly moulded her elder sister's art. but in the midst of her business at haworth we catch a glimpse of her reading her german book at night, as she sits on the hearthrug with her arm round keeper's neck; glancing at it in the kitchen, where she is making bread, with the volume of her choice propped up before her; and by the style of the novel jotted down in the rough, almost simultaneously with her reading, we know that to her the study of german was not--like french and music--the mere necessary acquirement of a governess, but an influence that entered her mind and helped to shape the fashion of her thoughts. so much preface is necessary to explain, not the genius of emily brontë, but the conditions of that genius--there is no use saying more. the aim of my writing has been missed if the circumstances of her career are not present in the mind of my reader. it is too late at this point to do more than enumerate them, and briefly point to their significance. such criticism, in face of the living work, is all too much like glancing in a green and beautiful country at a map, from which one may, indeed, ascertain the roads that lead to it and away, and the size of the place in relation to surrounding districts, but which can give no recognisable likeness of the scene which lies all round us, with its fresh life forgotten and its beauty disregarded. therefore let us make an end of theory and turn to the book on which our heroine's fame is stationed, fronting eternity. it may be that in unravelling its story and noticing the manner in which its facts of character and circumstance impressed her mind, we may, for a moment, be admitted to a more thorough and clearer insight into its working than we could earn by the completest study of external evidence, the most earnest and sympathising criticism. footnotes: [footnote : 'memoir.' charlotte brontë.] [footnote : 'emily brontë.' t. wemyss reid.] chapter xv. 'wuthering heights:' the story. on the summit of haworth hill, beyond the street, stands a grey stone house, which is shown as the original of 'wuthering heights.' a few scant and wind-baffled ash-trees grow in front, the moors rise at the back stretching away for miles. it is a house of some pretensions, once the parsonage of grimshaw, that powerful wesleyan preacher who, whip in hand, used to visit the "black bull" on sunday morning and lash the merrymakers into chapel to listen to his sermon. somewhat fallen from its former pretensions, it is a farmhouse now, with much such an oak-lined and stone-floored house-place as is described in 'wuthering heights.' over the door there is, moreover, a piece of carving: h. e. , a close enough resemblance to "hareton earnshaw, "--but the "wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys" are nowhere to be found. neither do we notice "the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house and a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way as if craving alms of the sun," and, to my thinking, this fine old farm of sowdens is far too near the mills of haworth to represent the god-forsaken, lonely house of emily's fancy. having seen the place, as in duty bound, one returns more than ever impressed by the fact that while every individual and every site in charlotte's novels can be clearly identified, emily's imagination and her power of drawing conclusions are alone responsible for the character of her creations. this is not saying that she had no data to go upon. had she not seen sowdens, and many more such houses, she would never have invented 'wuthering heights;' the story and passion of branwell set on her fancy to imagine the somewhat similar story and passion of heathcliff. but in the process of her work, the nature of her creations completely overmastered the facts and memories which had induced her to begin. these were but the handful of dust which she took to make her man; and the qualities and defects of her masterpiece are both largely accounted for when we remember that her creation of character was quite unmodified by any attempt at portraiture. therefore in 'wuthering heights' it is with a story, a fancy picture, that we have to deal; in drawing and proportion not unnatural, but certainly not painted after nature. to quote her sister's beautiful comments-- "'wuthering heights' was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. the statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur--power. he wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. with time and labour the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half-statue, half-rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot." of the rude chisel we find plentiful traces in the first few chapters of the book. the management of the narrative is singularly clumsy, introduced by a mr. lockwood--a stranger to the north, an imaginary misanthropist, who has taken a grange on the moor to be out of the way of the world--and afterwards continued to him by his housekeeper to amuse the long leisures of a winter illness. but, passing over this initial awkwardness of conception, we find a manner equal to the matter and somewhat resent charlotte's eloquent comparison; for there are touches, fine and delicate, that only a practised hand may dare to give, and there is feeling in the book, not only "terrible and goblin-like," but patient and constant, sprightly and tender, consuming and passionate. we find, getting over the inexperienced beginning, that the style of the work is noble and accomplished, and that--far from being a half-hewn and casual fancy, a head surmounting a trunk of stone--its plan is thought out with scientific exactness, no line blurred, no clue forgotten, the work of an intense and poetic temperament whose vision is too vivid to be incongruous. the first four chapters of 'wuthering heights' are merely introductory. they relate mr. lockwood's visit there, his surprise at the rudeness of the place in contrast with the foreign air and look of breeding that distinguished mr. heathcliff and his beautiful daughter-in-law. he also noticed the profound moroseness and ill-temper of everybody in the house. overtaken by a snowstorm, he was, however, constrained to sleep there and was conducted by the housekeeper to an old chamber, long unused, where (since at first he could not sleep) he amused himself by looking over a few mildewed books piled on one corner of the window-ledge. they and the ledge were scrawled all over with writing, _catharine earnshaw_, sometimes varied to _catharine heathcliff_, and again to _catharine linton_. nothing save these three names was written on the ledge, but the books were covered in every fly-leaf and margin with a pen-and-ink commentary, a sort of diary, as it proved, scrawled in a childish hand. mr. lockwood spent the first portion of the night in deciphering this faded record; a string of childish mishaps and deficiencies dated a quarter of a century ago. evidently this catharine earnshaw must have been one of heathcliff's kin, for he figured in the narrative as her fellow-scapegrace, and the favourite scapegoat of her elder brother's wrath. after some time mr. lockwood fell asleep, to be troubled by harassing dreams, in one of which he fancied that this childish catharine earnshaw, or rather her spirit, was knocking and scratching at the fir-scraped window-pane, begging to be let in. overcome with the intense horror of nightmare, he screamed aloud in his sleep. waking suddenly up he found to his confusion that his yell had been heard, for heathcliff appeared, exceedingly angry that any one had been allowed to sleep in the oak-closeted room. "if the little fiend had got in at the window she probably would have strangled me," i returned... "catharine linton or earnshaw, or however she was called--she must have been a changeling, wicked little soul! she told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years; a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, i've no doubt. "scarcely were these words uttered when i recollected the association of heathcliff's with catharine's name in the books.... i blushed at my inconsideration--but, without showing further consciousness of the offence, i hastened to add, 'the truth is, sir, i passed the first part of the night in--.' here i stopped afresh--i was about to say 'perusing those old volumes,' then it would have revealed my knowledge of their written as well as their printed contents; so i went on, 'in spelling over the name scratched on that window-ledge: a monotonous occupation calculated to set me asleep, like counting, or--.' 'what _can_ you mean by talking in this way to _me_!' thundered heathcliff with savage vehemence. 'how--how _dare_ you, under my roof? god! he's mad to speak so!' and he struck his forehead with rage. "i did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that i took pity and proceeded with my dreams.... heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed, as i spoke; finally sitting down almost concealed behind it. i guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an excess of violent emotion. not liking to show him that i had heard the conflict, i continued my toilette rather noisily ... and soliloquised on the length of the night. 'not three o'clock yet! i could have taken oath it had been six. time stagnates here: we must surely have retired to rest at eight!' "'always at nine in winter, and rise at four,' said my host, suppressing a groan; and, as i fancied, by the motion of his arm's shadow, dashing a tear from his eyes. 'mr. lockwood,' he added, 'you may go into my room: you'll only be in the way, coming downstairs so early.... take the candle and go where you please. i shall join you directly. keep out of the yard, though, the dogs are unchained; and the house--juno mounts sentinel there, and--nay, you can only ramble about the steps and passages. but, away with you! i'll come in two minutes.' "i obeyed, so far as to quit the chamber; when, ignorant where the narrow lobbies led, i stood still, and was witness, involuntarily, to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord which belied oddly his apparent sense. he got on to the bed, and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. 'come in! come in!' he sobbed, 'cathy, do come! oh, my heart's darling! hear me _this_ time, catharine, at last!' the spectre showed a spectre's ordinary caprice: it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled wildly through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the light. "there was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and i drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony; though _why_ was beyond my comprehension." mr. lockwood got no clue to the mystery at 'wuthering heights'; and later on returned to thrushcross grange, to fall ill of a lingering fever. during his recovery he heard the history of his landlord, from his housekeeper, who had been formerly an occupant of 'wuthering heights,' and after that, for many years, the chief retainer at thrushcross grange, where young mrs. heathcliff used to live when she still was catharine linton. "do you know anything of mr. heathcliff's story?" said mr. lockwood to his housekeeper, nelly dean. "it's a cuckoo's, sir," she answered. it is at this point that the history of 'wuthering heights' commences, that violent and bitter history of the "little dark thing harboured by a good man to his bane," carried over the threshold, as christabel lifted geraldine, out of pity for the weakness which, having grown strong, shall crush the hand that helped it; carried over the threshold, as evil spirits are carried, powerless to enter of themselves, and yet no evil demon, only a human soul lost and blackened by tyranny, injustice and congenital ruin. the story of 'wuthering heights,' is the story of heathcliff. it begins with the sudden journey of the old squire, mr. earnshaw, to liverpool one summer morning at the beginning of harvest. he had asked the children each to choose a present, "only let it be little, for i shall walk there and back, sixty miles each way:" and the son hindley, a proud, high-spirited lad of fourteen, had chosen a fiddle; six-year-old cathy, a whip, for she could ride any horse in the stable; and nelly dean, their humble playfellow and runner of errands, had been promised a pocketful of apples and pears. it was the third night since mr. earnshaw's departure, and the children, sleepy and tired, had begged their mother to let them sit up a little longer--yet a little longer--to welcome their father, and see their new presents. at last--just about eleven o'clock--mr. earnshaw came back, laughing and groaning over his fatigue; and opening his greatcoat, which he held bundled up in his arms, he cried: "'see here, wife! i was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e'en take it as a gift of god; though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil.' "we crowded round, and over miss cathy's head i had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk; indeed, its face looked older than catharine's; yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. i was frightened, and mrs. earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? what he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? the master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that i could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there; because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it." so the child entered 'wuthering heights,' a cause of dissension from the first. mrs. earnshaw grumbled herself calm; the children went to bed crying, for the fiddle had been broken and the whip lost in carrying the little stranger for so many miles. but mr. earnshaw was determined to have his _protégé_ respected; he cuffed saucy little cathy for making faces at the new comer, and turned nelly dean out of the house for having set him to sleep on the stairs because the children would not have him in their bed. and when she ventured to return some days afterwards, she found the child adopted into the family, and called by the name of a son who had died in childhood--heathcliff. nevertheless, he had no enviable position. cathy, indeed, was very thick with him, and the master had taken to him strangely, believing every word he said, "for that matter he said precious little, and generally the truth," but mrs. earnshaw disliked the little interloper and never interfered in his behalf when hindley, who hated him, thrashed and struck the sullen, patient child, who never complained, but bore all his bruises in silence. this endurance made old earnshaw furious when he discovered the persecutions to which this mere baby was subjected; the child soon discovered it to be a most efficient instrument of vengeance. "i remember mr. earnshaw once bought a couple of colts at the parish fair, and gave the lads each one. heathcliff took the handsomest, but it soon fell lame, and when he discovered it, he said to hindley: 'you must exchange horses with me, i don't like mine; and if you don't i shall tell your father of the three thrashings you've given me this week, and show him my arm which is black to the shoulder.' hindley put out his tongue, and cuffed him over the ears. 'you'd better do it at once,' he persisted, escaping to the porch (they were in the stable). 'you'll have to; and if i speak of these blows you'll get them back with interest.' 'off, dog!' cried hindley, threatening him with an iron weight, used for weighing potatoes and hay. 'throw it,' he replied, standing still, 'and then i'll tell how you boasted you would turn me out of doors as soon as he died, and see whether he will not turn you out directly. hindley threw it, hitting him on the breast, and down he fell, but staggered up immediately, breathless and white; and had not i prevented it, he would have gone just so to the master and got full revenge by letting his condition plead for him, intimating who had caused it. 'take my colt, gipsy, then,' said young earnshaw. 'and i pray that he may break your neck; take him and be damned, you beggarly interloper! and wheedle my father out of all he has: only afterwards show him what you are, imp of satan. and take that; i hope he'll kick out your brains!' "heathcliff had gone to loose the beast and shift it to his own stall; he was passing behind it when hindley finished his speech by knocking him under its feet, and, without stopping to examine whether his hopes were fulfilled, ran away as fast as he could. i was surprised to witness how coolly the child gathered himself up and went on with his intention; exchanging saddles and all, and then sitting down on a bundle of hay to overcome the qualm which the violent blow occasioned, before he entered the house. i persuaded him easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises on the horse: he heeded little what tale was told so that he had what he wanted. he complained so seldom, indeed, of such things as these that i really thought him not vindictive; i was deceived completely, as you will hear." so the division grew. this malignant, uncomplaining child, with foreign skin and eastern soul, could only breed discord in that yorkshire home. he could not understand what was honourable by instinct to an english mind. he was quick to take an advantage, long-suffering, sly, nursing his revenge in silence like a vindictive slave, until at last the moment of retribution should be his; sufficiently truthful and brave to have grown noble in another atmosphere, but with a ready bent to underhand and brooding vengeance. insensible, it seemed, to gratitude. proud with the unreasoning pride of an oriental; cruel, and violently passionate. one soft and tender speck there was in this dark and sullen heart; it was an exceedingly great and forbearing love for the sweet, saucy, naughty catharine. but this one affection only served to augment the mischief that he wrought. he who had estranged son from father, husband from wife, severed brother from sister as completely; for hindley hated the swarthy child who was cathy's favourite companion. when mrs. earnshaw died, two years after heathcliff's advent, hindley had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and heathcliff as an intolerable usurper. so, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house. in the course of time mr. earnshaw began to fail. his strength suddenly left him, and he grew half childish, irritable, and extremely jealous of his authority. he considered any slight to heathcliff as a slight to his own discretion; so that, in the master's presence, the child was deferred to and courted from respect for that master's weakness, while, behind his back, the old wrongs, the old hatred, showed themselves unquenched. and so the child grew up bitter and distrustful. matters got a little better for a while, when the untameable hindley was sent to college; yet still there was disturbance and disquiet, for mr. earnshaw did not love his daughter catharine, and his heart was yet further embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old joseph the servant; the wearisomest "self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a bible to take the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours." but catharine, though slighted for heathcliff, and nearly always in trouble on his account, was much too fond of him to be jealous. "the greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from heathcliff.... certainly she had ways with her such as i never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day; from the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we hadn't a minute's security that she wouldn't be in mischief. her spirits were always at high-watermark, her tongue always going--singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. a wild, wicked slip she was; but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish. and after all, i believe, she meant no harm; for, when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she wouldn't keep your company and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her. in play she liked exceedingly to act the little mistress, using her hands freely and commanding her companions." suddenly this pretty, mischievous sprite was left fatherless; mr. earnshaw died quietly, sitting in his chair by the fireside one october evening. mr. hindley, now a young man of twenty, came home to the funeral, to the great astonishment of the household bringing a wife with him. a rush of a lass, spare and bright-eyed, with a changing, hectic colour, hysterical, and full of fancies, fickle as the winds, now flighty and full of praise and laughter, now peevish and languishing. for the rest, the very idol of her husband's heart. a word from her, a passing phrase of dislike for heathcliff, was enough to revive all young earnshaw's former hatred of the boy. heathcliff was turned out of their society, no longer allowed to share cathy's lessons, degraded to the position of an ordinary farm-servant. at first heathcliff did not mind. cathy taught him what she learned, and played or worked with him in the fields. cathy ran wild with him, and had a share in all his scrapes; they both bade fair to grow up regular little savages, while hindley earnshaw kissed and fondled his young wife utterly heedless of their fate. an adventure suddenly changed the course of their lives. one sunday evening cathy and heathcliff ran down to thrushcross grange to peep through the windows and see how the little lintons spent their sundays. they looked in, and saw isabella at one end of the, to them, splendid drawing-room, and edgar at the other, both in floods of tears, peevishly quarrelling. so elate were the two little savages from wuthering heights at this proof of their neighbours' inferiority, that they burst into peals of laughter. the little lintons were terrified, and, to frighten them still more, cathy and heathcliff made a variety of frightful noises; they succeeded in terrifying not only the children but their silly parents, who imagined the yells to come from a gang of burglars, determined on robbing the house. they let the dogs loose, in this belief, and the bulldog seized cathy's bare little ankle, for she had lost her shoes in the bog. while heathcliff was trying to throttle off the brute, the man-servant came up, and, taking both the children prisoner, conveyed them into the lighted hall. there, to the humiliation and surprise of the lintons, the lame little vagrant was discovered to be miss earnshaw, and her fellow-misdemeanant, "that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to liverpool--a little lascar, or an american or spanish castaway." cathy stayed five weeks at thrushcross grange, by which time her ankle was quite well, and her manners much improved. young mrs. earnshaw had tried her best, during this visit, to endeavour by a judicious mixture of fine clothes and flattery to raise the standard of cathy's self-respect. she went home, then, a beautiful and finely-dressed young lady, to find heathcliff in equal measure deteriorated; the mere farm-servant, whose clothes were soiled with three months' service in mire and dust, with unkempt hair and grimy face and hands. "'heathcliff, you may come forward,' cried mr. hindley, enjoying his discomfiture, and gratified to see what a forbidding young blackguard he would be compelled to present himself. 'you may come and wish miss catharine welcome, like the other servants.' cathy, catching a glimpse of her friend in his concealment, flew to embrace him, she bestowed seven or eight kisses on his cheek within the second, and then stopped, and, drawing back, burst into a laugh, exclaiming: 'why, how very black and cross you look! and how--how funny and grim! but that's because i'm used to edgar and isabella linton.' "'well, heathcliff, have you forgotten me? shake hands, heathcliff,' said mr. earnshaw, condescendingly, 'once in a way, that is permitted.' "'i shall not,' replied the boy, finding his tongue at last. 'i shall not stand to be laughed at. i shall not bear it.'" from this time catharine's friendship with heathcliff was chequered by intermittent jealousy on his side and intermittent disgust upon hers; and for this evil turn, far more than for any coarser brutality, heathcliff longed for revenge on hindley earnshaw. meanwhile edgar linton, greatly smitten with the beautiful catharine, went from time to time to visit at wuthering heights. he would have gone far oftener, but that he had a terror of hindley earnshaw's reputation, and shrank from encountering him. for this fine young oxford gentleman, this proud young husband, was sinking into worse excesses than any of his wild earnshaw ancestors. a defiant sorrow had driven him to desperation. in the summer following catharine's visit to thrushcross grange, his only son and heir had been born. an occasion of great rejoicings, suddenly dashed by the discovery that his wife, his idol, was fast sinking in consumption. hindley refused to believe it, and his wife kept her flighty spirits till the end; but one night, while leaning on his shoulder, a fit of coughing took her--a very slight one. she put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead. hindley grew desperate, and gave himself over to wild companions, to excesses of dissipation, and tyranny. "his treatment of heathcliff was enough to make a fiend of a saint." heathcliff bore it with sullen patience, as he had borne the blows and kicks of his childhood, turning them into a lever for extorting advantages; the aches and wants of his body were redeemed by a fierce joy at heart, for in this degradation of hindley earnshaw he recognised the instrument of his own revenge. time went on, ever making a sharper difference between this gipsy hind and his beautiful young mistress; time went on, leaving the two fast friends enough, but leaving also in the heart of heathcliff a passionate rancour against the man who, of set purpose, had made him unworthy of catharine's hand, and of the other man on whom it was to be bestowed. for edgar linton was infatuated with the naughty, tricksy young beauty of wuthering heights. her violent temper did not frighten him, although his own character was singularly sweet, placid and feeble; her compromising friendship with such a mere boor as young heathcliff was only a trifling annoyance easily to be excused. and when his own father and mother died of a fever caught in nursing her he did not love her less for the sorrow she brought. a fever she had wilfully taken in despair, and a sudden sickness of life. one evening pretty cathy came into the kitchen to tell nelly dean that she had engaged herself to marry edgar linton. heathcliff, unseen, was seated on the other side the settle, on a bench by the wall, quite hidden from those at the fireside. cathy was very elated, but not at all happy. edgar was rich, handsome, young, gentle, passionately in love with her; still she was miserable. nelly dean, who was nursing the baby hareton by the fire, finally grew out of patience with her whimsical discontent. "'your brother will be pleased,'" she said; "'the old lady and gentleman will not object, i think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love edgar, and edgar loves you. all seems smooth and easy; where is the obstacle?' "'_here!_ and here!' replied catharine, striking one hand on her forehead and the other on her breast. 'in whichever place the soul lives. in my soul and in my heart i'm convinced i'm wrong.' "'that's very strange. i cannot make it out.' "'it's my secret. but if you will not mock at me, i'll explain it. i can't do it distinctly; but i'll give you a feeling of how i feel.' "'she seated herself by me again; her countenance grew sadder and graver, and her clasped hands trembled. "'nelly, do you never dream queer dreams?' she said, suddenly, after some minutes' reflection. "'yes, now and then,' i answered. "'and so do i. i've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. and this is one: i'm going to tell it, but take care not to smile at any part of it.' "'oh, don't, miss catharine,' i cried. 'we're dismal enough without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us....' "she was vexed, but she did not proceed. apparently taking up another subject, she recommenced in a short time. "'if i were in heaven, nelly, i should be extremely miserable.' "'because you are not fit to go there,' i answered; 'all sinners would be miserable in heaven.' "'but it is not that. i dreamt once that i was there.' "'i tell you, i won't hearken to your dreams, miss catharine. i'll go to bed,' i interrupted again. "she laughed, and held me down, for i made a motion to leave my chair. "'this is nothing,' cried she; 'i was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be any home; and i broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of wuthering heights, where i woke sobbing for joy. that will do to explain my secret as well as the other. i've no more business to marry edgar linton than i have to be in heaven; and, if the wicked man in there hadn't brought heathcliff so low, i shouldn't have thought of it. it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now, so he shall never know how i love him; and that, not because he's handsome, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.' "ere this speech ended i became sensible of heathcliff's presence. having noticed a slight movement, i turned my head, and saw him rise from the bench and steal out noiselessly. he had listened till he had heard catharine say that it would degrade her to marry him, and then he stayed to hear no further. my companion, sitting on the ground, was prevented by the back of the settle from remarking his presence or departure; but i started, and bade her hush. "'why?' she asked, gazing nervously round. "'joseph is here,' i answered, catching opportunely the roll of his cart-wheels up the road, 'and heathcliff will be coming in with him.... unfortunate creature, as soon as you become mrs. linton he loses friend and love and all. have you considered how you'll bear the separation, and how he'll bear to be quite deserted in the world? because, miss catharine....' "'he quite deserted! we separated!' she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. 'who is to separate us, pray! they'll meet the fate of milo. not as long as i live, ellen; for no mortal creature. every linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before i could consent to forsake heathcliff.... my great miseries in this world have been heathcliff's miseries, and i watched and felt each from the beginning. my great thought in living is himself. if all else perished, and _he_ remained, _i_ should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: i should not seem a part of it. my love for linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, i'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. my love for heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath; a source of little visible delight, but necessary. nelly, i am heathcliff. he's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than i am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. so don't talk of our separation again; it is impracticable; and----' "she paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown; but i jerked it forcibly away. i was out of patience with her folly." poor cathy! beautiful, haughty, and capricious; who should guide and counsel her? her besotted, drunken brother? the servant who did not love her and was impatient of her weathercock veerings? no. and heathcliff, who, brutalised and rude as he was, at least did love and understand her? heathcliff, who had walked out of the house, her rejection burning in his ears, not to enter it till he was fitted to exact both love and vengeance. he did not come back that night, though the thunder rattled and the rain streamed over wuthering heights; though cathy, shawl-less in the wind and wet, stood calling him through the violent storms that drowned and baffled her cries. all night she would not leave the hearth, but lay on the settle sobbing and moaning, all soaked as she was, with her hands on her face and her face to the wall. a strange augury for her marriage, these first dreams of her affianced love--not dreams, indeed, but delirium; for the next morning she was burning and tossing in fever, near to death's door as it seemed. but she won through, and edgar's parents carried her home to nurse. as we know, they took the infection and died within a few days of each other. nor was this the only ravage that the fever made. catharine, always hasty and fitful in temper, was henceforth subject at rare intervals to violent and furious rages, which threatened her life and reason by their extremity. the doctor said she ought not to be crossed; she ought to have her own way, and it was nothing less than murder in her eyes for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her. but the strained temper, the spoiled, authoritative ways, the saucy caprices of his bride, were no blemishes in edgar linton's eyes. "he was infatuated, and believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to gimmerton chapel three years subsequent to his father's death." despite so many gloomy auguries the marriage was a happy one at first. catharine was petted and humoured by every one, with edgar for a perpetual worshipper; his pretty, weak-natured sister isabella as an admiring companion; and for the necessary spectator of her happiness, nelly dean, who had been induced to quit her nursling at wuthering heights. suddenly heathcliff returned, not the old heathcliff, but a far more dangerous enemy, a tall, athletic, well-formed man, intelligent, and severe. "a half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes, full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified, though too stern for grace." a formidable rival for boyish edgar linton, with his only son's petulance, constitutional timidity, and weak health. cathy, though she was really attached to her husband, gave him cruel pain by her undisguised and childish delight at heathcliff's return; he had a presentiment that evil would come of the old friendship thus revived, and would willingly have forbidden heathcliff the house; but edgar, so anxious lest any cross be given to his wife, with a double reason then for tenderly guarding her health, could not inflict a serious sorrow upon her with only a baseless jealousy for its excuse. thus, heathcliff became intimate at thrushcross grange, the second house to which he was made welcome, the second hearth he meant to ruin. at this time he was lodging at wuthering heights. on his return he had first intended, he told catharine, "just to have one glimpse of your face, a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself." catharine's welcome changed this plan; her brother was safe from heathcliff's violence; but not from his hate. the score was being settled in a different fashion. hindley--who was eager to get money for his gambling and who had drunk his wits away--was only too glad to take heathcliff as lodger, boon-companion, and fellow card-player at once. and heathcliff was content to wait and take his revenge sip by sip, encouraging his old oppressor in drink and gaming, watching him lose acre after acre of his land, knowing that sooner or later earnshaw would lose everything, and he, heathcliff, be master of wuthering heights, with hindley's son for his servant. revenge is sweet. meanwhile, wuthering heights was a handy lodging, at walking distance from the grange. but soon his visits were cut off. isabella linton--a charming girl of eighteen with an _espiégle_ face and a thin sweetness of disposition that could easily turn sour--isabella linton fell in love with heathcliff. to do him justice he had never dreamed of marrying her, until one day catharine, in a fit of passion, revealed the poor girl's secret. heathcliff pretended not to believe her, but isabel was her brother's heir, and to marry her, inherit edgar's money, and ill-use his sister, would, indeed, be a fair revenge on catharine's husband. at first it was merely as an artistically pleasurable idea, a castle in the air, to be dreamed about, not built, that this scheme suggested itself to heathcliff. but one day, when he had been detected in an experimental courting of isabel, edgar linton, glad of an excuse, turned him out of doors. then, in a paroxysm of hatred, never-satisfied revenge, and baffled passion, heathcliff struck with the poisoned weapon ready to his hand. he persuaded isabel to run away with him--no difficult task--and they eloped together one night to be married. isabella--poor, weak, romantic, sprightly isabel--was not missed at first; for very terrible trouble had fallen upon the grange. catharine, in a paroxysm of rage at the dismissal of heathcliff, quarrelled violently with edgar, and shut herself up in her own room. for three days and nights she remained there, eating nothing; edgar, secluded in his study, expecting every moment that she would come down and ask his forgiveness; nelly dean, who alone knew of her determined starving, resolved to say nothing about it, and conquer, once for all, the haughty and passionate spirit which possessed her beautiful young mistress. so three days went by. catharine still refused all her food, and unsympathetic ellen still resolved to let her starve, if she chose, without a remonstrance. on the third day catharine unbarred her door and asked for food; and now ellen dean was too frightened to exult. her mistress was wasted, haggard, wild, as if by months of illness; the too-presumptuous servant remembered the doctor's warning, and dreaded her master's anger, when he should discover catharine's real condition. on this servant's obstinate cold-heartedness rests the crisis of 'wuthering heights;' had ellen dean, at the first, attempted to console the violent, childish catharine, had she acquainted edgar of the real weakness underneath her pride, catharine would have had no fatal illness and left no motherless child; and had moping isabel, instead of being left to weep alone about the park and garden, been conducted to her sister's room and shown a real sickness to nurse, a real misery to mend, she would not have gone away with heathcliff, and wedded herself to sorrow, out of a fanciful love in idleness. it is characteristic of emily brontë's genius that she should choose so very simple and homely a means for the production of most terrible results. a fit she had had alone and untended during those three days of isolated starvation had unsettled catharine's reason. the gradual coming-on of her delirium is given with a masterly pathos that webster need not have made more strong, nor fletcher more lovely and appealing:-- "a minute previously she was violent; now, supported on one arm and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made in the pillows and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species: her mind had strayed to other associations. "'that's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself, 'and this is a wild duck's, and this is a pigeon's. ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the pillows--no wonder i couldn't die! let me take care to throw it on the floor when i lie down. and here is a moorcock's; and this--i should know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's. bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. it wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. this feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. heathcliff set a trap over it and the old ones dare not come. i made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't. yes, here are more! did he shoot my lapwings, nelly? are they red, any of them? let me look.' "'give over with that baby-work!' i interrupted, dragging the pillow away, and turning the holes towards the mattress, for she was removing its contents by handfuls. 'lie down and shut your eyes: you're wandering. there's a mess! the down is flying about like snow.' "i went here and there collecting it. "'i see in you, nelly,' she continued, dreamily, 'an aged woman: you have grey hair and bent shoulders. this bed is the fairy cave under peniston crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending while i am near that they are only locks of wool. that's what you'll come to fifty years hence: i know you are not so now. i'm not wandering; you're mistaken, or else i should believe you really _were_ that withered hag, and i should think i _was_ under peniston crag; and i'm conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making the black press shine like jet.' "'the black press? where is that?' i asked. 'you are talking in your sleep.' "'it's against the wall as it always is,' she replied. 'it _does_ appear odd. i see a face in it!' "'there's no press in the room and never was,' said i, resuming my seat, and looping up the curtain that i might watch her. "'don't _you_ see that face?' she inquired, gazing earnestly at the mirror. "and say what i could i was incapable of making her comprehend it to be her own; so i rose and covered it with a shawl. "'it's behind there still!' she pursued, anxiously, 'and it stirred. who is it? i hope it will not come out when you are gone. oh, nelly! the room is haunted! i'm afraid of being alone.' "i took her hand in mine, and bid her be composed, for a succession of shudders convulsed her frame, and she would keep straining her gaze towards the glass. "'there's nobody here!' i insisted. 'it was _yourself_ mrs. linton: you knew it a while since.' "'myself!' she gasped, 'and the clock is striking twelve. it's true then! that's dreadful.' "her fingers clutched the clothes, and gathered them over her eyes." this scene was the beginning of a long and fearful brain-fever, from which, owing to her husband's devoted and ceaseless care, catharine recovered her life, but barely her reason. that hung in the balance, a touch might settle it on the side of health or of madness. not until the beginning of this fever was isabella's flight discovered. her brother was too concerned with his wife's illness to feel as heart-broken as heathcliff hoped. he was not violent against his sister, nor even angry; only, with the mild steady persistence of his nature, he refused to hold any communication with heathcliff's wife. but when, at the beginning of catharine's recovery, ellen dean received a letter from isabella, declaring the extreme wretchedness of her life at wuthering heights, where heathcliff was master now, edgar linton willingly accorded the servant permission to go and see his sister. arrived at wuthering heights, she found that once plentiful homestead sorely ruined and deteriorated by years of thriftless dissipation; and isabella linton, already metamorphosed into a wan and listless slattern, broken-spirited and pale. as a pleasant means of entertaining his wife and her old servant, heathcliff discoursed on his love for catharine and on his conviction that she could not really care for edgar linton. "'catharine has a heart as deep as i have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection monopolised by him. tush! he is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog or her horse. it is not in him to be loved like me. how can she love in him what he has not?'" nelly dean, unhindered by the sight of isabella's misery, or by the memory of the wrongs her master already suffered from this estimable neighbour, was finally cajoled into taking a letter from him to the frail half-dying catharine, appointing an interview. for heathcliff persisted that he had no wish to make a disturbance, or to exasperate mr. linton, but merely to see his old playfellow again, to learn from her own lips how she was, and whether in anything he could serve her. the letter was taken and given; the meeting came about one sunday when all the household save ellen dean were at church. catharine, pale, apathetic, but more than ever beautiful in her mazed weakness of mind and body; heathcliff, violent in despair, seeing death in her face, alternately upbraiding her fiercely for causing him so much misery, and tenderly caressing the altered, dying face. never was so strange a love scene. it is not a scene to quote, not noticeable for its eloquent passages or the beauty of casual phrases, but for its sustained passion, desperate, pure, terrible. it must be read in its sequence and its entirety. nor can i think of any parting more terrible, more penetrating in its anguish than this. romeo and juliet part; but they have known each other but for a week. there is no scene that heathcliff can look upon in which he has not played with catharine: and, now that she is dying, he must not watch with her. troilus and cressida part; but cressida is false, and troilus has his country left him. what country has heathcliff, the outcast, nameless, adventurer? antonio and his duchess; but they have belonged to each other and been happy; these two are eternally separate. their passion is only heightened by its absolute freedom from desire; even the wicked and desperate heathcliff has no ignoble love for catharine; all he asks is that she live, and that he may see her; that she may be happy even if it be with linton. "i would never have banished him from her society, while she desired his," asserts heathcliff, and now she is mad with grief and dying. the consciousness of their strained and thwarted natures, moreover, makes us the more regretful they must sever. had he survived, romeo would have been happy with rosalind, after all; probably juliet would have married paris. but where will heathcliff love again, the perverted, morose, brutalised heathcliff, whose only human tenderness has been his love for the capricious, lively, beautiful young creature, now dazed, now wretched, now dying in his arms? the very remembrance of his violence and cruelty renders more awful the spectacle of this man, sitting with his dying love, silent; their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears. at last they parted: catharine unconscious, half-dead. that night her puny, seven-months' child was born; that night the mother died, unutterably changed from the bright imperious creature who entered that house as a kingdom, not yet a year ago. by her side, in the darkened chamber, her husband lay, worn out with anguish. outside, dashing his head against the trees in a berserker-wrath with fate, heathcliff raged, not to be consoled. "'her senses never returned: she recognised nobody from the time you left her,' i said. 'she lies with a sweet smile upon her face, and her latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days. her life closed in a gentle dream--may she wake as kindly in the other world!' "'may she wake in torment!' he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot and groaning in a paroxysm of ungovernable passion. 'why, she's a liar to the end! where is she? not _there_--not in heaven--not perished--where? oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings. and i pray one prayer. i repeat it till my tongue stiffens. catharine earnshaw, may you not rest as long as i am living. you said i killed you--haunt me then! the murdered do haunt their murderers, i believe. i know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only _do_ not leave me in this abyss where i cannot find you! oh, god, it is unutterable! i _cannot_ live without my life. i _cannot_ live without my soul.' "he dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears. i observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained; probably the scene i witnessed was the repetition of others acted during the night. it hardly moved my compassion, it appalled me." from this time a slow insidious madness worked in heathcliff. when it was at its height he was not fierce, but strangely silent, scarcely breathing; hushed, as a person who draws his breath to hear some sound only just not heard as yet, as a man who strains his eyes to see the speck on the horizon which will rise the next moment, the next instant, and grow into the ship that brings his treasure home. "when i sat in the house with hareton, it seemed that on going out i should meet her; when i walked on the moors, i should meet her coming in. when i went from home, i hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the heights i was certain; and when i slept in her chamber--i was beaten out of that. i couldn't lie there; for the moment i closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow, as she did when a child; and i must open my lids to see. and so i opened and closed them a hundred times a night to be always disappointed. it was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years." this mania of expectation stretching the nerves to their uttermost strain, relaxed sometimes; and then heathcliff was dangerous. when filled with the thought of catharine, the world was indifferent to him; but when this possessing memory abated ever so little, he remembered that the world was his enemy, had cheated him of catharine. then avarice, ambition, revenge, entered into his soul, and his last state was worse than his first. cruel, with the insane cruelty, the bloodmania of an ezzelin, he never was; his cruelties had a purpose, the sufferings of the victims were a detail not an end. yet something of that despot's character, refined into torturing the mind and not the flesh, chaste, cruel, avaricious of power, something of that southern morbidness in crime, distinguishes heathcliff from the villains of modern english tragedies. placed in the italian renaissance, with cyril tourneur for a chronicler, heathcliff would not have awakened the outburst of incredulous indignation which greeted his appearance in a nineteenth century romance. soon after the birth of the younger catharine, isabella heathcliff escaped from her husband to the south of england. he made no attempt to follow her, and in her new home she gave birth to a son, linton--the fruit of timidity and hatred, fear and revulsion--"from the first she reported him to be an ailing, peevish creature." meanwhile little catharine grew up the very light of her home, an exquisite creature with her father's gentle, constant nature inspired by a spark of her mother's fire and lightened by a gleam of her wayward caprice. she had the earnshaws' handsome dark eyes and the lintons' fair skin, regular features and curling yellow hair. "that capacity for intense attachments reminded me of her mother. still she did not resemble her; her anger was never furious; her love never fierce; it was deep and tender." cathy was in truth a charming creature, though less passionate and strange a nature than catharine earnshaw, not made to be loved as wildly nor as deeply mistrusted. edgar, grown a complete hermit, devoted himself to his child, who spent a life as happy and secluded as a princess in a fairy story, seldom venturing outside the limits of the park and never by herself. edgar had never forgotten his sorrow for the death of his young wife; he loved her memory with steady constancy. if--and i think we may--if we allow that every author has some especial quality with which, in more or less degree, he endows all his children--if we grant that shakespeare's people are all meditative, even the sprightly rosalind and the clownish dogberry--if we allow that all our acquaintances in dickens are a trifle self-conscious, in george eliot conscientious to such an extent that even tito melema feels remorse for conduct which, granted his period and his character, would more naturally have given him satisfaction--then we must allow that emily brontë's special mark is constancy. passionate, insane constancy in heathcliff; perverse, but intense in the elder catharine; steady and holy in edgar linton; even the hard and narrow ellen dean; even joseph, the hypocritical pharisee, are constant until death. wild hindley earnshaw drinks himself to death for grief at losing his consumptive wife; hareton loves to the end the man who has usurped his place, degraded him, fed him on blows and exaction: and it is constancy in absence that embitters and sickens the younger catharine. even isabella heathcliff, weak as she is, is not fickle. even linton heathcliff, who, of all the characters in fiction, may share with barnes newcome the bad eminence of supreme unlovableness, even he loves his mother and catharine, and, in his selfish way, loves them to the end. the years passed, nothing happened, save that hindley earnshaw died, and heathcliff--to whom every yard had been mortgaged, took possession of the place; hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, "being reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, lives as a servant in his own house, deprived of the advantages of wages, quite unable to right himself because of his friendlessness, and his ignorance that he has been wronged." the eventless years went by till catharine was thirteen, when mrs. heathcliff died, and edgar went to the south of england to fetch her son. little cathy, during her father's absence, grew impatient of her confinement to the park; there was no one to escort her over the moors, so one day she leapt the fence, got lost, and was finally sheltered at wuthering heights, of which place and of all its inmates she had been kept in total ignorance. she promised to keep the visit a secret from her father, lest he should dismiss ellen dean. she was very indignant at being told that rudely-bred hareton was her cousin; and when that night linton--delicate, pretty, pettish linton--arrived, she infinitely preferred his cousinship. the next morning she found linton gone, his father having sent for him to wuthering heights; edgar linton, however, did not tell his daughter that her cousin was so near, he would not for worlds she should cross the threshold of that terrible house. but one day, cathy and ellen dean met heathcliff on the moors, and he half persuaded, half forced them to come home and see his son, grown a most despicable, puling, ailing creature, half-violent, half-terrified. cathy's kind little heart did not see the faults, she only saw that her cousin was ill, unhappy, in need of her; she was easily entrapped, one winter, when her father and ellen dean were both ill, into a secret engagement with this boy-cousin, the only lad, save uncouth hareton, whom she had ever seen. every night, when her day's nursing was done, she rode over to wuthering heights to pet and fondle linton. heathcliff did all he could to favour the plan. he knew his son was dying, notwithstanding that every care was taken to preserve the heir of wuthering heights and thrushcross grange. it is true that cathy had a rival claim; to marry her to linton would be to secure the title, get a wife for his dying son to preserve the line of inheritance, and certainly to break edgar linton's heart. heathcliff's love of revenge and love of power combined to make the scheme a thing to strive for and desire. he grew desperate as the boy got weaker and weaker; it was but too likely that he would die before his dying uncle, and, if edgar linton survived, thrushcross grange was lost to heathcliff. as a last resource he made his son write to edgar linton and beg for an interview on neutral ground. edgar, who, ignorant of linton heathcliff's true character, saw no reason why cathy should not marry her cousin if they loved each other, allowed ellen dean to take her little mistress, now seventeen years old, on to the moors where linton heathcliff was to meet them. cathy was loath to leave her father even for an hour, he was so ill; but she had been told linton was dying, so nerved herself to go once more on the moors: they found linton in a strange state, terrified, exhausted, despondent, making spasmodic love to cathy as if it were a lesson he had been beaten into learning. she wished to return, but the boy declared himself, and looked, too ill to go back alone. they escorted him home to the heights, and heathcliff persuaded them to enter, saying he would go for a doctor for his sick lad. but, once they were in the house, he showed his hand. the doors were bolted; the servants and hareton away. neither tears nor prayers would induce him to let his victims go till catharine was linton's wife, and so, he told her, till her father had died in solitude. but five days after, catharine linton, now catharine heathcliff, contrived an escape in time to console her father's dying hours with a false belief in her happiness; a noble lie, for edgar linton died contented, kissing his daughter's cheek, ignorant of the misery in store for her. the next day heathcliff came over to the grange to recapture his prey, but now catharine did not mind; her father dead, she received all the affronts and stings of fate with an enduring apathy; it was only her that they injured. a few days after linton died in the night, alone with his bride. after a year's absolute misery and loneliness, catharine's lot was a little lightened by mr. heathcliff's preferring ellen dean to the vacant post of housekeeper at wuthering heights. for the all-absorbing presence of catharine earnshaw had nearly secluded heathcliff from enmity with the world; he was seldom violent now. he became yet more and more disinclined to society, sitting alone, seldom eating, often walking about the whole night. his face changed, and the look of brooding hate gave way to a yet more alarming expression--an excited, wild, unnatural appearance of joy. he complained of no illness, yet he was very pale, bloodless, "and his teeth visible now and then in a kind of smile; his frame shivering, not as one shivers with chill or weakness, but as a tight-stretched cord vibrates--a strong thrilling, rather than trembling." at last his mysterious absorption, the stress of his expectation, became so intense that he could not eat. animated with hunger, he would sit down to his meal, then suddenly start, as if he saw something, glance at the door or the window and go out. weary and pale, he could not sleep; but left his bed hurriedly, and went out to pace the garden till break of day. "'it is not my fault,' he replied, 'that i cannot eat or rest. i assure you it is through no settled design. i'll do both as soon as i possibly can. but you might as well bid a man struggling in the water rest within arm's-length of the shore. i must reach it first and then i'll rest. as to repenting of my injustices, i've done no injustice and i repent of nothing. i'm too happy, and yet i'm not happy enough. my soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.'" meanwhile the schemes of a life, the deeply-laid purposes of his revenge, were toppling unheeded all round him, like a house of cards. his son was dead. hareton earnshaw, the real heir of wuthering heights, and catharine, the real heir of thrushcross grange, had fallen in love with each other. a most unguessed-at and unlikely finale; yet most natural. for catharine was spoiled, accomplished, beautiful, proud--yet most affectionate and tender-hearted: and hareton rude, surly, ignorant, fierce; yet true as steel, staunch, and with a very loving faithful heart, constant even to the man who had, of set purpose, brutalised him and kept him in servitude. "'hareton is damnably fond of me!' laughed heathcliff. 'you'll own that i've out-matched hindley there. if the dead villain could rise from the grave to abuse me for his offspring's wrongs, i should have the fun of seeing the said offspring fight him back again, indignant that he should dare to rail at the one friend he has in the world.' "'he'll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance,'" cried heathcliff in exultation; but love can do as much as hatred. heathcliff, himself as great a boor at twenty, contrived to rub off his clownishness in order to revenge himself upon his enemies; catharine linton's love inspired hareton to as great an effort. this odd, rough love-story, as harshly-sweet as wortle-berries, as dry and stiff in its beauty as purple heather-sprays, is the most purely human, the only tender interest of wuthering heights. it is the necessary and lawful anti-climax to heathcliff's triumph, the final reassertion of the pre-eminence of right. "conquered good, and conquering ill" is often pitiably true; but not an everlasting law, only a too frequent accident. perceiving this, emily brontë shows the final discomfiture of heathcliff, who, kinless and kithless, was in the end compelled to see the property he has so cruelly amassed descend to his hereditary enemies. and he was baffled, not so much by cathy's and hareton's love affairs as by this sudden reaction from violence, this slackening of the heartstrings, which left him nerveless and anæmic, a prey to encroaching monomania. he had spent his life in crushing the berries for his revenge, in mixing that dark and maddening draught; and when the final moment came, when he lifted it to his lips, desire had left him, he had no taste for it. "i've done no injustices," said heathcliff; and though his life had been animated by hate, revenge and passion, let us reflect who have been his victims. not the old squire who first sheltered him; for the old man never lived to know his favourite's baseness, and only derived comfort from his presence. catharine earnshaw suffered, not from the character of her lover, but because she married a man she merely liked, with her eyes open to the fact that she was thereby wronging the man she loved. "you deserve this," said heathcliff, when she was dying. "you have killed yourself. because misery and degradation and death, and nothing that god or satan could inflict would ever have parted us: _you_, of your own will, did it." not the morality of mayfair, but one whose lessons, stern and grim enough, must ever be sorrowfully patent to such erring and passionate spirits. the third of heathcliff's victims then, or rather the first, was hindley earnshaw. but if hindley had not already been a gamester and a drunkard, a violent and soulless man, heathcliff could have gained no power over him. hindley welcomed heathcliff, as faustus the devil, because he could gratify his evil desires; because, in his presence, there was no need to remember shame, nor high purposes, nor forsaken goodness; and when the end comes, and he shall forfeit his soul, let him remember that there were two at that bargain. isabella linton was the most pitiable sufferer. victim we can scarcely call her, who required no deception, but courted her doom. and after all, a marriage chiefly desired in order to humiliate a sister-in-law and show the bride to be a person of importance, was not intolerably requited by three months of wretched misery; after so much she is suffered to escape. from edgar linton, as we have seen, heathcliff's blows fell aside unharming, as the executioner's strokes from a legendary martyr. he never learnt how secondary a place he held in his wife's heart, he never knew the misery of his only daughter--misery soon to be turned into joy. he lived and died, patient, happy, trustful, unvisited by the violence and fury that had their centre so near his hearth. the younger catharine and hareton suffered but a temporary ill; the misery they endured together taught them to love; the tyrant's rod had blossomed into roses. and he, lonely and palsied at heart, eating out his soul in bitter solitude, he saw his plans of vengeance all frustrated, so much elaboration so simply counteracted; it was he that suffered. he suffered now: and catharine earnshaw who helped him to ruin by her desertion, and hindley who perverted him by early oppression, they suffered at his hands. but not the sinless, the constant, the noble; misery, in the end, shifts its dull mists before the light of such clear spirits: [greek: ta drasanti pathein]. "'it is a poor conclusion, is it not?' said heathcliff, 'an absurd termination to my violent exertions. i get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, i find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished.' * * * * * "five minutes ago hareton seemed to be a personification of my youth, not a human being: i felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. in the first place, his startling likeness to catharine connected him fearfully with her. that, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination is in reality the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? i cannot look down to the floor but her features are shaped in the flags! in every cloud, in every tree--filling the air by night and caught by glimpses in every object by day--i am surrounded by her image. the most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with a resemblance. the entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that i have lost her! well, hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish---- "but it is frenzy to repeat these thoughts to you: only it will let you know why, with a reluctance to be always alone, his society is no benefit; rather an aggravation of the constant torment i suffer; and it partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on together. i can give them no attention any more." sweet, forward catharine and coy, passionate hareton got on very prettily together. i can recall no more touching and lifelike scene than that first love-making of theirs, one rainy afternoon, in the kitchen where nelly dean is ironing the linen. hareton, sulky and miserable, sitting by the fire, hurt by a gunshot wound, but yet more by the manifold rebuffs of pretty cathy. she, with all her sauciness, limp in the dull, wet weather, coaxing him into good temper with the sweetest advancing graces. it is strange that in speaking of 'wuthering heights' this beautiful episode should be so universally forgotten, and only the violence and passion of more terrible passages associated with emily brontë's name. yet, out of the strong cometh forth the sweet; and the best honey from the dry heather-bells. meanwhile, heathcliff let them go on, frightening them more by his strange mood of abstraction than by his accustomed ferocity. he could give them no attention any more. for four days he could neither eat nor rest, till his cheeks grew hollow and his eyes bloodshot, like a person starving with hunger, and growing blind with loss of sleep. at last one early morning, when the rain was streaming in at heathcliff's flapping lattice, nelly dean, like a good housewife, went in to shut it to. the master must be up or out, she said. but pushing back the panels of the inclosed bed, she found him there, laid on his back, his open eyes keen and fierce; quite still, though his face and throat were washed with rain; quite still, with a frightful, lifelike gaze of exultation under his brows, with parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered--quite still and harmless now; dead and stark. dead, before any vengeance had overtaken him other than the slow, retributive sufferings of his own breast; dead, slain by too much hope, and an unnatural joy. never before had any villain so strange an end; never before had any sufferer so protracted and sinister a torment, "beguiled with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years." no more public nor authoritative punishment. hareton passionately mourned his lost tyrant, weeping in bitter earnest, and kissing the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrunk from contemplating. and heathcliff's memory was sacred, having in the youth he ruined a most valiant defender. even catharine might never bemoan his wickednesses to her husband. no execrations in this world or the next; a great quiet envelops him. his violence was not strong enough to reach that final peace and mar its completeness. [his] grave is next to catharine's, and near to edgar linton's; over them all the wild bilberry springs, and the peat-moss and heather. they do not reck of the passion, the capricious sweetness, the steady goodness that lie underneath. it is all one to them and to the larks singing aloft. "i lingered round the graves under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." so ends the story of wuthering heights. the world is now agreed to accept that story as a great and tragic study of passion and sorrow, a wild picture of storm and moorland, of outraged goodness and ingratitude. the world which has crowned 'king lear' with immortality, keeps a lesser wreath for 'wuthering heights.' but in , the peals of triumph which acclaimed the success of 'jane eyre' had no echo for the work of ellis bell. that strange genius, brooding and foreboding, intense and narrow, was passed over, disregarded. one author, indeed, in one review, sydney dobell, in the _palladium_ spoke nobly and clearly of the energy and genius of this book; but when that clarion augury of fame at last was sounded, emily did not hear. two years before they had laid her in the tomb. no praise for ellis bell. it is strange to think that of charlotte's two sisters it was anne who had the one short draught of exhilarating fame. when the 'tenant of wildfell hall' was in proof, ellis's and acton's publisher sold it to an american firm as the last and finest production of the author of 'jane eyre' and 'wuthering heights.' strange, that even a publisher could so blunder, even for his own interest. however, this mistake caused sufficient confusion at cornhill to make it necessary that the famous charlotte, accompanied by anne, in her quality of secondary and mistakable genius, should go to town and explain their separate existence. no need to disturb the author of 'wuthering heights,' that crude work of a 'prentice hand, over whose reproduction no publishers quarrelled; such troublesome honours were not for her. "yet," says charlotte, "i must not be understood to make these things subject for reproach or complaint; i dare not do so; respect for my sister's memory forbids me. by her any such querulous manifestation would have been regarded as an unworthy and offensive weakness." when, indeed, did the murmur of complaint pass those pale, inspired lips? failure can have come to her with no shock of aghast surprise. all her plans had failed; branwell's success, the school, her poems: her strong will, had not carried them on to success. but though it could not bring success, it could support her against despair. when this last, dearest, strongest work of hers was weighed in the world's scales and found wanting, she did not sigh, resign herself, and think the battle over; she would have fought again. but the battle was over, over before victory was declared. no more failures, no more strivings for that brave spirit. it was in july that charlotte and anne returned from london, in july when the heather is in bud; scarce one last withered spray was left in december to place on emily's deathbed. chapter xvi. 'shirley.' while 'wuthering heights' was still in the reviewer's hands, emily brontë's more fortunate sister was busy on another novel. this book has never attained the steady success of her masterpiece, 'villette,' neither did it meet with the _furor_ which greeted the first appearance of 'jane eyre.' it is, indeed, inferior to either work; a very quiet study of yorkshire life, almost pettifogging in its interest in ecclesiastical squabbles, almost absurd in the feminine inadequacy of its heroes. and yet 'shirley' has a grace and beauty of its own. this it derives from the charm of its heroines--caroline helstone, a lovely portrait in character of charlotte's dearest friend, and shirley herself, a fancy likeness of emily brontë. emily brontë, but under very different conditions. no longer poor, no longer thwarted, no longer acquainted with misery and menaced by untimely death; not thus, but as a loving sister would fain have seen her, beautiful, triumphant, the spoiled child of happy fortune. yet in these altered circumstances shirley keeps her likeness to charlotte's hardworking sister; the disguise, haply baffling those who, like mrs. gaskell, "have not a pleasant impression of emily brontë," is very easily penetrated by those who love her. under the pathetic finery so lovingly bestowed, under the borrowed splendours of a thousand a year, a lovely face, an ancestral manor-house, we recognise our hardy and headstrong heroine, and smile a little sadly at the inefficiency of this masquerade of grandeur, so indifferent and unnecessary to her. we recognise charlotte's sister; but not the author of 'wuthering heights.' through these years we discern the brilliant heiress to be a person of infinitely inferior importance to the ill-dressed and overworked vicar's daughter. imperial shirley, no need to wave your majestic wand, we have bowed to it long ago unblinded; and all its illusive splendours are not so potent as that worn-down goose-quill which you used to wield in the busy kitchen of your father's parsonage. yet without that admirable portrait we should have scant warrant for our conception of emily brontë's character. her work is singularly impersonal. you gather from it that she loved the moors, that from her youth up the burden of a tragic fancy had lain hard upon her; that she had seen the face of sorrow close, meeting that medusa-glance with rigid and defiant fortitude. so much we learn; but this is very little--a one-sided truth and therefore scarcely a truth at all. charlotte's portrait gives us another view, and fortunately there are still a few alive of the not numerous friends of emily brontë. every trait, every reminiscence paints in darker, clearer lines, the impression of character which 'shirley' leaves upon us. shirley is indeed the exterior emily, the emily that was to be met and known thirty-five years ago, only a little polished, with the angles a little smoothed, by a sister's anxious care. the nobler emily, deeply-suffering, brooding, pitying, creating, is only to be found in a stray word here and there, a chance memory, a happy answer, gathered from the pages of her work, and the loving remembrance of her friends; but these remnants are so direct, unusual, personal, and characteristic, this outline is of so decided a type, that it affects us more distinctly than many stippled and varnished portraits do. but to know how emily brontë looked, moved, sat and spoke, we still return to 'shirley.' a host of corroborating memories start up in turning the pages. who but emily was always accompanied by a "rather large, strong, and fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed between a mastiff and a bulldog?" it is familiar to us as una's lion; we do not need to be told, currer bell, that she always sat on the hearthrug of nights, with her hand on his head, reading a book; we remember well how necessary it was to secure him as an ally in winning her affection. has not a dear friend informed us that she first obtained emily's heart by meeting, without apparent fear or shrinking, keeper's huge springs of demonstrative welcome? certainly "captain keeldar," with her cavalier airs, her ready disdain, her love of independence, does bring back with vivid brilliance the memory of our old acquaintance, "the major." we recognise that pallid slimness, masking an elastic strength which seems impenetrable to fatigue--and we sigh, recalling a passage in anne's letters, recording how, when rheumatism, coughs, and influenza made an hospital of haworth vicarage during the visitations of the dread east wind, emily alone looked on and wondered why anyone should be ill--"she considers it a very uninteresting wind; it does not affect her nervous system." we know her, too, by her kindness to her inferiors. a hundred little stories throng our minds. unforgotten delicacies made with her own hands for her servant's friend, yet-remembered visits of martha's little cousin to the kitchen, where miss emily would bring in her own chair for the ailing girl; anecdotes of her early rising through many years to do the hardest work, because the first servant was too old, and the second too young to get up so soon; and she, emily, was so strong. a hundred little sacrifices, dearer to remembrance than shirley's open purse, awaken in our hearts and remind us that, after all, emily was the nobler and more lovable heroine of the twain. how characteristic, too, the touch that makes her scornful of all that is dominant, dogmatic, avowedly masculine in the men of her acquaintance; and gentleness itself to the poetic philip nunnely, the gay, boyish mr. sweeting, the sentimental louis, the lame, devoted boy-cousin who loves her in pathetic canine fashion. that courage, too, was hers. not only shirley's flesh, but emily's, felt the tearing fangs of the mad dog to whom she had charitably offered food and water; not only shirley's flesh, but hers, shrank from the light scarlet, glowing tip of the italian iron with which she straightway cauterised the wound, going quickly into the laundry and operating on herself without a word to any one. emily, also, singlehanded and unarmed, punished her great bulldog for his household misdemeanours, in defiance of an express warning not to strike the brute, lest his uncertain temper should rouse him to fly at the striker's throat. and it was she who fomented his bruises. this prowess and tenderness of shirley's is an old story to us. and shirley's love of picturesque and splendid raiment is not without an echo in our memories. it was emily who, shopping in bradford with charlotte and her friend, chose a white stuff patterned with lilac thunder and lightning, to the scarcely concealed horror of her more sober companions. and she looked well in it; a tall, lithe creature, with a grace half-queenly, half-untamed in her sudden, supple movements, wearing with picturesque negligence her ample purple-splashed skirts; her face clear and pale; her very dark and plenteous brown hair fastened up behind with a spanish comb; her large grey-hazel eyes, now full of indolent, indulgent humour, now glimmering with hidden meanings, now quickened into flame by a flash of indignation, "a red ray piercing the dew." she, too, had shirley's taste for the management of business. we remember charlotte's disquiet when emily insisted on investing miss branwell's legacies in york and midland railway shares. "she managed, in a most handsome and able manner for me when i was in brussels, and prevented by distance from looking after our interests, therefore i will let her manage still and take the consequences. disinterested and energetic she certainly is; and, if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as i could wish, i must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity, and, as long as we can regard those whom we love, and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by what appear to us headstrong and unreasonable notions."[ ] so speaks the kind elder sister, the author of 'shirley.' but there are some who will never love either type or portrait. sydney dobell spoke a bitter half-truth when, ignorant of shirley's real identity, he declared: "we have only to imagine shirley keeldar poor to imagine her repulsive." the silenced pride, the thwarted generosity, the unspoken power, the contained passion of such a nature are not qualities which touch the world when it finds them in an obscure and homely woman. even now, very many will not love a heroine so independent of their esteem. they will resent the frank imperiousness, caring not to please, the unyielding strength, the absence of trivial submissive tendernesses, for which she makes amends by such large humane and generous compassion. "in emily's nature," says her sister, "the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial taste and an unpretending outside, lay a power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom--her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life--she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her legitimate advantage. an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. her will was not very flexible and it generally opposed her interest. her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending."[ ] so speaks emily's inspired interpreter, whose genius has not made her sister popular. 'shirley' is not a favourite with a modern public. emily brontë was born out of date. athene, leading the nymphs in their headlong chase down the rocky spurs of olympus, and stopping in full career to lift in her arms the weanlings, tender as dew, or the chance-hurt cubs of the mountain, might have chosen her as her hunt-fellow. or brunhilda, the strong valkyr, dreading the love of man, whose delight is battle and the wild summits of hills, forfeiting her immortality to shield the helpless and the weak; she would have recognised the kinship of this last-born sister. but we moderns care not for these. our heroines are juliet, desdemona and imogen, our examples dorothea brooke and laura pendennis, women whose charm is a certain fragrance of affection. 'shirley' is too independent for our taste; and, for the rest, we are all in love with caroline helstone. disinterested, headstrong, noble emily brontë, at this time, while your magical sister was weaving for you, with golden words, a web of fate as fortunate as dreams, the true norns were spinning a paler shrouding garment. you were never to see the brightest things in life. sisterly love, free solitude, unpraised creation, were to remain your most poignant joys. no touch of love, no hint of fame, no hours of ease, lie for you across the knees of fate. neither rose nor laurel will be shed on your coffined form. meanwhile, your sister writes and dreams for shirley. terrible difference between ideas and truth; wonderful magic of the unreal to take their sting from the veritable wounds we endure! neither rose nor laurel will we lay reverently for remembrance over the tomb where you sleep; but the flower that was always your own, the wild, dry heather. you, who were, in your sister's phrase, "moorish, wild and knotty as a root of heath," you grew to your own perfection on the waste where no laurel rustles its polished leaves, where no sweet, fragile rose ever opened in the heart of june. the storm and the winter darkness, the virgin earth, the blasting winds of march, would have slain them utterly; but all these served to make the heather light and strong, to flush its bells with a ruddier purple, to fill its cells with honey more pungently sweet. the cold wind and wild earth make the heather; it would not grow in the sheltered meadows. and you, had you known the fate that love would have chosen, you too would not have thrived in your full bloom. another happy, prosperous north-country matron would be dead. but now you live, still singing of freedom, the undying soul of courage and loneliness, another voice in the wind, another glory on the mountain-tops, emily brontë, the author of 'wuthering heights.' footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] [footnote : 'biographical notice.' c. brontë.] chapter xvii. branwell's end. the autumn of the year was tempestuous and wild, with sudden and frequent changes of temperature, and cold penetrating wind. those chilling blasts whirling round the small grey parsonage on its exposed hill-top, brought sickness in their train. anne and charlotte drooped and languished; branwell, too, was ill. his constitution seemed shattered by excesses which he had not the resolution to forego. often he would sleep most of the day; or at least sit dosing hour after hour in a lethargy of weakness; but with the night this apathy would change to violence and suffering. "papa, and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him," writes charlotte in the last days of july. yet, so well the little household knew the causes of this reverse, no immediate danger was suspected. he was weak, certainly, and his appetite failed; but opium-eaters are not strong nor hungry. neither branwell himself, nor his relations, nor any physician consulted in his case thought it one of immediate danger; it seemed as if this dreary life might go on for ever, marking its hours by a perpetual swing and rebound of excess and suffering. during this melancholy autumn mr. grundy was staying at skipton, a town about seventeen miles from haworth. mindful of his old friend, he invited branwell to be his guest; but the dying youth was too weak to make even that little journey, although he longed for the excitement of change. mr. grundy was so much moved by the miserable tone of branwell's letter that he drove over to haworth to see for himself what ailed his old companion. he was very shocked at the change. pale, sunk, tremulous, utterly wrecked; there was no hope for branwell now; he had again taken to eating opium. anything for excitement, for a variation to his incessant sorrow. weak as he was, and scarcely able to leave his bed, he craved piteously for an appointment of any kind, any reason for leaving haworth, for getting quit of his old thoughts, any post anywhere for heaven's sake so it were out of their whispering. he had not long to wait. later in that cold and bleak september mr. grundy again visited haworth. he sent to the vicarage for branwell, and ordered dinner and a fire to welcome him; the room looked cosy and warm. while mr. grundy sat waiting for his guest, the vicar was shown in. he, too, was strangely altered; much of his old stiffness of manner gone; and it was with genuine affection that he spoke of branwell, and almost with despair that he touched on his increasing miseries. when mr. grundy's message had come, the poor, self-distraught sufferer had been lying ill in bed, apparently too weak to move; but the feverish restlessness which marked his latter years was too strong to resist the chance of excitement. he had insisted upon coming, so his father said, and would immediately be ready. then the sorrowful half-blind old gentleman made his adieus to his son's host, and left the inn. "presently the door opened cautiously, and a head appeared. it was a mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating round a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness--all told the sad tale but too surely. i hastened to my friend, greeted him in my gayest manner, as i knew he best liked, drew him quickly into the room, and forced upon him a stiff glass of hot brandy. under its influence and that of the bright, cheerful surroundings, he looked frightened--frightened of himself. he glanced at me a moment, and muttered something of leaving a warm bed to come out in the cold night. another glass of brandy, and returning warmth gradually brought him back to something like the brontë of old. he even ate some dinner, a thing which he said he had not done for long; so our last interview was pleasant though grave. i never knew his intellect clearer. he described himself as waiting anxiously for death--indeed, longing for it, and happy, in these his sane moments, to think it was so near. he once again declared that that death would be due to the story i knew, and to nothing else. "when at last i was compelled to leave, he quietly drew from his coat-sleeve a carving-knife, placed it on the table, and, holding me by both hands, said that, having given up all hopes of ever seeing me again, he imagined when my message came that it was a call from satan. dressing himself, he took the knife which he had long secreted, and came to the inn, with a full determination to rush into the room and stab the occupant. in the excited state of his mind, he did not recognise me when he opened the door, but my voice and manner conquered him, and 'brought him home to himself,' as he expressed it. i left him standing bare-headed in the road with bowed form and dropping tears."[ ] he went home, and a few days afterwards he died. that little intervening time was happier and calmer than any he had known for years; his evil habits, his hardened feelings slipped, like a mask, from the soul already touched by the final quiet. he was singularly altered and softened, gentle and loving to the father and sisters who had borne so much at his hands. it was as though he had awakened from the fierce delirium of a fever; weak though he was and shattered, they could again recognise in him their branwell of old times, the hope and promise of all their early dreams. neither they nor he dreamed that the end was so near; he had often talked of death, but now that he stood in the shadow of its wings, he was unconscious of that subduing presence. and it is pleasant to think that the sweet demeanour of his last days was not owing to the mere cowardly fear of death; but rather a return of the soul to its true self, a natural dropping-off of all extraneous fever and error, before the suffering of its life should close. half an hour before he died branwell was unconscious of danger; he was out in the village two days before, and was only confined to bed one single day. the next morning was a sunday, the twenty-fourth of september. branwell awoke to it perfectly conscious, and through the holy quiet of that early morning he lay, troubled by neither fear nor suffering, while the bells of the neighbouring church, the neighbouring tower whose fabulous antiquity had furnished him with many a boyish pleasantry, called the villagers to worship. they all knew him, all as they passed the house would look up and wonder if "t' vicar's patrick" were better or worse. but those of the parsonage were not at church: they watched in branwell's hushed and peaceful chamber. suddenly a terrible change came over the quiet face; there was no mistaking the sudden, heart-shaking summons. and now charlotte sank; always nervous and highly strung, the mere dread of what might be to come, laid her prostrate. they led her away, and for a week she kept her bed in sickness and fever. but branwell, the summoned, the actual sufferer, met death with a different face. he insisted upon getting up; if he had succumbed to the horrors of life he would defy the horrors of extinction; he would die as he thought no one had ever died before, standing. so, like some ancient celtic hero, when the last agony began, he rose to his feet; hushed and awe-stricken, the old father, praying anne, loving emily, looked on. he rose to his feet and died erect after twenty minutes' struggle. they found his pockets filled with the letters of the woman he had so passionately loved. he was dead, this branwell who had wrung the hearts of his household day by day, who drank their tears as wine. he was dead, and now they mourned him with acute and bitter pain. "all his vices were and are nothing now; we remember only his woes," writes charlotte. they buried him in the same vault that had been opened twenty-three years ago to receive the childish, wasted corpses of elizabeth and maria. sunday came round, recalling minute by minute the ebbing of his life, and emily brontë, pallid and dressed in black, can scarcely have heard her brother's funeral sermon for looking at the stone which hid so many memories, such useless compassion. she took her brother's death very much to heart, growing thin and pale and saying nothing. she had made an effort to go to church that sunday, and as she sat there, quiet and hollow-eyed, perhaps she felt it was well that she had looked upon his resting-place, upon the grave where so much of her heart was buried. for, after his funeral, she never rallied; a cold and cough, taken then, gained fearful hold upon her, and she never went out of doors after that memorable sunday. but looking on her quiet, uncomplaining eyes, you would not have guessed so much. "emily and anne are pretty well," says charlotte, on the ninth of october, "though anne is always delicate and emily has a cold and cough at present." footnotes: [footnote : 'pictures of the past.'] chapter xviii. emily's death. already by the th of october of this melancholy year of emily's cough and cold had made such progress as to alarm her careful elder sister. before branwell's death she had been, to all appearance, the one strong member of a delicate family. by the side of fragile anne (already, did they but know it, advanced in tubercular consumption), of shattered branwell, of charlotte, ever nervous and ailing, this tall, muscular emily had appeared a tower of strength. working early and late, seldom tired and never complaining, finding her best relaxation in long, rough walks on the moors, she seemed unlikely to give them any poignant anxiety. but the seeds of phthisis lay deep down beneath this fair show of life and strength; the shock of sorrow which she experienced for her brother's death developed them with alarming rapidity. the weariness of absence had always proved too much for emily's strength. away from home we have seen how she pined and sickened. exile made her thin and wan, menaced the very springs of life. and now she must endure an inevitable and unending absence, an exile from which there could be no return. the strain was too tight, the wrench too sharp: emily could not bear it and live. in such a loss as hers, bereaved of a helpless sufferer, the mourning of those who remain is embittered and quickened a hundred times a day when the blank minutes come round for which the customary duties are missing, when the unwelcome leisure hangs round the weary soul like a shapeless and encumbering garment. it was emily who had chiefly devoted herself to branwell. he being dead, the motive of her life seemed gone. had she been stronger, had she been more careful of herself at the beginning of her illness, she would doubtless have recovered, and we shall never know the difference in our literature which a little precaution might have made. but emily was accustomed to consider herself hardy; she was so used to wait upon others that to lie down and be waited on would have appeared to her ignominious and absurd. both her independence and her unselfishness made her very chary of giving trouble. it is, moreover, extremely probable that she never realised the extent of her own illness; consumption is seldom a malady that despairs; attacking the body it leaves the spirit free, the spirit which cannot realise a danger by which it is not injured. a little later on when it was anne's turn to suffer, she is choosing her spring bonnet four days before her death. which of us does not remember some such pathetic tale of the heart-wringing, vain confidence of those far gone in phthisis, who bear on their faces the marks of death for all eyes but their own to read? to those who look on, there is no worse agony than to watch the brave bearing of these others unconscious of the sudden grave at their feet. charlotte and anne looked on and trembled. on the th of october, charlotte, still delicate from the bilious fever which had prostrated her on the day of branwell's death, writes these words already full of foreboding: "i feel much more uneasy about my sister than myself just now. emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. i fear she has pain in her chest, and i sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly. she looks very thin and pale. her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. it is useless to question her; you get no answer. it is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted."[ ] it was, in fact, an acute inflammation of the lungs which this unfortunate sufferer was trying to subdue by force of courage. to persons of strong will it is difficult to realise that their disease is not in their own control. to be ill, is with them an act of acquiescence; they have consented to the demands of their feeble body. when necessity demands the sacrifice, it seems to them so easy to deny themselves the rest, the indulgence. they set their will against their weakness and mean to conquer. they will not give up. emily would not give up. she felt herself doubly necessary to the household in this hour of trial. charlotte was still very weak and ailing. anne, her dear little sister, was unusually delicate and frail. even her father had not quite escaped. that she, emily, who had always been relied upon for strength and courage and endurance, should show herself unworthy of the trust when she was most sorely needed; that she, so inclined to take all duties on herself, so necessary to the daily management of the house, should throw up her charge in this moment of trial, cast away her arms in the moment of battle, and give her fellow-sufferers the extra burden of her weakness; such a thing was impossible to her. so the vain struggle went on. she would resign no one of her duties, and it was not till within the last weeks of her life that she would so much as suffer the servant to rise before her in the morning and take the early work. she would not endure to hear of remedies; declaring that she was not ill, that she would soon be well, in the pathetic self-delusion of high-spirited weakness. and charlotte and anne, for whose sake she made this sacrifice, suffered terribly thereby. willingly, thankfully would they have taken all her duties upon them; they burned to be up and doing. but--seeing how weak she was--they dare not cross her; they had to sit still and endure to see her labour for their comfort with faltering and death-cold hands. "day by day," says charlotte, "day by day when i saw with what a front she met suffering, i looked on her with a wonder of anguish and love. i have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, i have never seen her parallel in anything. stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. the awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. to stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render." the time went on. anxious to try what influence some friend, not of their own household, might exert upon this wayward sister, charlotte thought of inviting miss nussey to haworth. emily had ever been glad to welcome her. but when the time came it was found that the least disturbance of the day's routine would only make emily's burden heavier. and that scheme, too, was relinquished. another month had gone. emily, paler and thinner, but none less resolute, fulfilled her duties with customary exactness, and insisted on her perfect health with defiant fortitude. on the rd of november, charlotte writes again:-- "i told you emily was ill in my last letter. she has not rallied yet. she is _very_ ill. i believe if you were to see her your impression would be that there is no hope. a more hollow, wasted, pallid aspect i have not beheld. the deep, tight cough continues; the breathing after the least exertion is a rapid pant; and these symptoms are accompanied by pains in the chest and side. her pulse, the only time she allowed it to be felt, was found to beat per minute. in this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings; she will scarcely allow her feelings to be alluded to." "no poisoning doctor" should come near her, emily declared with the irritability of her disease. it was an insult to her will, her resolute endeavours. she was not, would not, be ill, and could therefore need no cure. perhaps she felt, deep in her heart, the conviction that her complaint was mortal; that a delay in the sentence was all that care and skill could give; for she had seen maria and elizabeth fade and die, and only lately the physicians had not saved her brother. but charlotte, naturally, did not feel the same. unknown to emily, she wrote to a great london doctor drawing up a statement of the case and symptoms as minute and careful as she could give. but either this diagnosis by guesswork was too imperfect, or the physician saw that there was no hope; for his opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of any use. he sent a bottle of medicine, but emily would not take it. december came, and still the wondering, anxious sisters knew not what to think. by this time mr. brontë also had perceived the danger of emily's state, and he was very anxious. yet she still denied that she was ill with anything more grave than a passing weakness; and the pain in her side and chest appeared to diminish. sometimes the little household was tempted to take her at her word, and believe that soon, with the spring, she would recover; and then, hearing her cough, listening to the gasping breath with which she climbed the short staircase, looking on the extreme emaciation of her form, the wasted hands, the hollow eyes, their hearts would suddenly fail. life was a daily contradiction of hope and fear. the days drew on towards christmas; it was already the middle of december, and still emily was about the house, able to wait upon herself, to sew for the others, to take an active share in the duties of the day. she always fed the dogs herself. one monday evening, it must have been about the th of december, she rose as usual to give the creatures their supper. she got up, walking slowly, holding out in her thin hands an apronful of broken meat and bread. but when she reached the flagged passage the cold took her; she staggered on the uneven pavement and fell against the wall. her sisters, who had been sadly following her, unseen, came forwards much alarmed and begged her to desist; but, smiling wanly, she went on and gave floss and keeper their last supper from her hands. the next morning she was worse. before her waking, her watching sisters heard the low, unconscious moaning that tells of suffering continued even in sleep; and they feared for what the coming year might hold in store. of the nearness of the end they did not dream. charlotte had been out over the moors, searching every glen and hollow for a sprig of heather, however pale and dry, to take to her moor-loving sister. but emily looked on the flower laid on her pillow with indifferent eyes. she was already estranged and alienate from life. nevertheless she persisted in rising, dressing herself alone, and doing everything for herself. a fire had been lit in the room, and emily sat on the hearth to comb her hair. she was thinner than ever now--the tall, loose-jointed "slinky" girl--her hair in its plenteous dark abundance was all of her that was not marked by the branding finger of death. she sat on the hearth combing her long brown hair. but soon the comb slipped from her feeble grasp into the cinders. she, the intrepid, active emily, watched it burn and smoulder, too weak to lift it, while the nauseous, hateful odour of burnt bone rose into her face. at last the servant came in: "martha," she said, "my comb's down there; i was too weak to stoop and pick it up." i have seen that old, broken comb, with a large piece burned out of it; and have thought it, i own, more pathetic than the bones of the eleven thousand virgins at cologne, or the time-blackened holy face of lucca. sad, chance confession of human weakness; mournful counterpart of that chainless soul which to the end maintained its fortitude and rebellion. the flesh is weak. since i saw that relic, the strenuous verse of emily brontë's last poem has seemed to me far more heroic, far more moving; remembering in what clinging and prisoning garments that free spirit was confined. the flesh was weak, but emily would grant it no indulgence. she finished her dressing, and came very slowly, with dizzy head and tottering steps, downstairs into the little bare parlour where anne was working and charlotte writing a letter. emily took up some work and tried to sew. her catching breath, her drawn and altered face were ominous of the end. but still a little hope flickered in those sisterly hearts. "she grows daily weaker," wrote charlotte, on that memorable tuesday morning; seeing surely no portent that this--this! was to be the last of the days and the hours of her weakness. the morning drew on to noon, and emily grew worse. she could no longer speak, but--gasping in a husky whisper--she said: "if you will send for a doctor. i will see him now!" alas, it was too late. the shortness of breath and rending pain increased; even emily could no longer conceal them. towards two o'clock her sisters begged her, in an agony, to let them put her to bed. "no, no," she cried; tormented with the feverish restlessness that comes before the last, most quiet peace. she tried to rise, leaning with one hand upon the sofa. and thus the chord of life snapped. she was dead. she was twenty-nine years old. they buried her, a few days after, under the church pavement; under the slab of stone where their mother lay, and maria and elizabeth and branwell. she who had so mourned her brother had verily found him again, and should sleep well at his side. [greek: philê met' autou keisomai, philou meta.] and though no wind ever rustles over the grave on which no scented heather springs, nor any bilberry bears its sprigs of greenest leaves and purple fruit, she will not miss them now; she who wondered how any could imagine unquiet slumbers for them that sleep in the quiet earth. they followed her to her grave--her old father, charlotte, the dying anne; and as they left the doors, they were joined by another mourner, keeper, emily's dog. he walked in front of all, first in the rank of mourners; and perhaps no other creature had known the dead woman quite so well. when they had lain her to sleep in the dark, airless vault under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard, and had entered the empty house again, keeper went straight to the door of the room where his mistress used to sleep, and lay down across the threshold. there he howled piteously for many days; knowing not that no lamentations could wake her any more. over the little parlour below a great calm had settled. "why should we be otherwise than calm," says charlotte, writing to her friend on the st of december. "the anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. we feel she is at peace. no need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. emily does not feel them." the death was over, indeed, and the funeral day was past; yet one duty remained to the heart-wrung mourners, not less poignant than the sight of the dead changed face, not less crushing than the thud of stones and clods on the coffin of one beloved. they took the great brown desk in which she used to keep her papers, and sorted and put in order all that they found in it. how appealing the sight of that hurried, casual writing of a hand now stark in death! how precious each of those pages whose like should never be made again till the downfall of the earth in the end of time! how near, how utterly cut-off, the past! they found no novel, half-finished or begun, in the old brown desk which she used to rest on her knees, sitting under the thorns. but they discovered a poem, written at the end of emily's life, profound, sincere, as befits the last words one has time to speak. it is the most perfect and expressive of her work: the fittest monument to her heroic spirit. thus run the last lines she ever traced: "no coward soul is mine, no trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere; i see heaven's glories shine, and faith shines equal, arming me from fear. "o god, within my breast, almighty, ever-present deity! life, that in me has rest, as i--undying life--have power in thee. "vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts: unutterably vain; worthless as withered weeds, or idlest froth amid the boundless main, "to waken doubt in one holding so fast by thine infinity; so surely anchored on the steadfast rock of immortality. "with wide-embracing love thy spirit animates eternal years, pervades and broods above, changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. "though earth and man were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and thou wert left alone, every existence would exist in thee. "there is not room for death, no atom that his might could render void; thou--thou art being, breath, and what thou art may never be destroyed." footnotes: [footnote : mrs. gaskell.] finis! "she died in a time of promise." so writes charlotte, in the first flush of her grief. "she died in a time of promise;" having done much, indeed, having done enough to bring her powers to ripe perfection. and the fruit of that perfection is denied us. she died, between the finishing of labour and the award of praise. before the least hint of the immortality that has been awarded her could reach her in her obscure and distant home. without one success in all her life, with her school never kept, her verses never read, her novel never praised, her brother dead in ruin. all her ambitions had flagged and died of the blight. but she was still young, ready to live, eager to try again. "she died in a time of promise. we saw her taken from life in its prime." truly a prime of sorrow, the dark mid-hour of the storm, dark with the grief gone by and the blackness of the on-coming grief. with branwell dead, with her dearest sister dying, emily died. had she lived, what profit could she have made of her life? for us, indeed, it would have been well; but for her? fame in solitude is bitter food; and anne will die in may; and charlotte six years after; and emily never could make new friends. better far for her, that loving, faithful spirit, to die while still her life was dear, while still there was hope in the world, than to linger on a few years longer, in loneliness and weakness, to quit in fame and misery a disillusioned life. "she died in a time of promise. we saw her taken from life in its prime. but it is god's will, and the place where she is gone is better than that she has left." truly better, to leave her soul to speak in the world for aye, for the wind to be stronger for her breath, and the heather more purple from her heart; better far to be lost in the all-embracing, all-transmuting process of life, than to live in cramped and individual pain. so at least, wrong or right, thought this woman who loved the earth so well. she was not afraid to die. the thought of death filled her with no perplexities; but with assured and happy calm. she held it more glorious than fame, and sweeter than love, to give her soul to god and her body to the earth. and which of us shall carp at the belief which made a very painful life contented? "the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. i'm tired of being enclosed here. i'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it and in it. you think you are better and more fortunate than i, in full health and strength; you are sorry for me--very soon that will be altered. i shall be sorry for you. i shall be incomparably above and beyond you all."[ ] ah, yes; incomparably above and beyond. not only because of the keen vision with which she has revealed the glorious world in which her memory is fresher wind, and brighter sunshine, not only for that; but because the remembrance of her living self is a most high and noble precept. never before were hands so inspired alike for daily drudgery and for golden writing never to fade. never was any heart more honourable and strong, nor any more pitiful to shameful weakness. seldom, indeed, has any man, more seldom still any woman, owned the inestimable gift of genius and never once made it an excuse for a weakness, a violence, a failing, which in other mortals we condemn. no deed of hers requires such apology. therefore, being dead she persuades us to honour; and not only her works but the memory of her life shall rise up and praise her, who lived without praise so well. footnotes: [footnote : 'wuthering heights.'] the end. london: printed by w. h. allen and co., waterloo place. s.w. * * * * * crown vo., cloth, s. d. each. eminent women series edited by john h. ingram. the following volumes are now ready:-- george eliot. by mathilde blind. emily brontË. by a. mary f. robinson. george sand. by bertha thomas. mary lamb. by anne gilchrist. margaret fuller. by julia ward howe. maria edgeworth. by helen zimmern. london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. crown vo., cloth, s. d. each. eminent women series edited by john h. ingram. volumes in preparation. elizabeth fry. by mrs. e. r. pitman. madame roland. by mathilde blind. harriet martineau. by mrs. fenwick miller. countess of albany. by vernon lee. london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. $/ * * * * * _by the same authors._ tropical trials. a handbook for women in the tropics. contains chapters dealing with the following subjects:-- i.--introductory: general remarks on tropical climates. ii.--clothing and outfit. iii.--hints on travelling by land and by water. iv.--diet, and hints on domestic economy. v.--on the maintenance of health. vi.--management and rearing of children. the suggestions offered are based on practical experience, and the book is written in untechnical language, with a view to rendering it alike intelligible and useful to those for whom it is intended. london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. * * * * * books on horses and riding. ladies on horseback. learning, park riding, and hunting; with hints upon costume, and numerous anecdotes. by mrs. power o'donoghue (nannie lambert), authoress of "the knave of clubs," "horses and horsemen," "grandfather's hunter," &c. crown vo., with portrait, s. the horse; as he was, as he is, and as he ought to be. by james irvine lupton, f.r.c.v.s., author of "the external anatomy of the horse," &c. crown vo., illustrated, s. d. how to ride and school a horse; with a system of horse gymnastics. by edward l. anderson. crown vo., s. d. a system of school training for horses. by edward l. anderson, author of "how to ride and school a horse." crown vo., s. d. the management and treatment of the horse in stable, field, and on the road. by a stud groom. new edition. [_in the press._ illustrated horse doctor. being an accurate and detailed account, accompanied by more than pictorial representations, characteristic of the various diseases to which the equine race are subjected; together with the latest mode of treatment, and all the requisite prescriptions written in plain english. by edward mayhew, m.r.c.v.s. vo., s. d. illustrated horse management. containing descriptive remarks upon anatomy, medicine, shoeing, teeth, food, vices, stables; likewise a plain account of the situation, nature, and value of the various points; together with comments on grooms, dealers, breeders, breakers, and trainers. embellished with more than engravings from original designs made expressly for this work. by e. mayhew. a new edition, revised and improved by j. i. lupton, m.r.c.v.s. vo., s. london: w. h. allen & co., , waterloo place. * * * * * _crown vo. s. d. each volume._ eminent women series. edited by john h. ingram. volumes already issued:-- george eliot. by mathilde blind. emily brontË. by a. mary f. robinson. george sand. by bertha thomas. mary lamb. by anne gilchrist. maria edgeworth. by helen zimmern. margaret fuller. by julia ward howe. elizabeth fry. by mrs. e. r. pitman. countess of albany. by vernon lee. harriet martineau. by mrs. fenwick miller. volumes in preparation:-- susannah wesley. by mrs. e. clarke. mary wollstonecraft. by elizabeth robins pennell. madame roland. by mathilde blind. madame de stael. by bella duffy. margaret of navarre. by mary a. robinson. vittoria colonna. by miss a. kennard. london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. * * * * * eminent women series. _opinions of the press._ george eliot. by mathilde blind. "miss blind's book is a most excellent and careful study of a great genius."--_vanity fair._ "no page of this interesting monograph should be skipped."--_graphic._ "nothing is more needed in the present day than short treatises on great writers like these. miss blind has spared no pains to make a coherent and attractive narrative, and has succeeded in presenting us with a complete biography; interspersing her account with incisive criticisms."--_british quarterly review._ emily brontË. by a. mary f. robinson. "miss robinson makes the biographical part of her book of extreme interest, while her criticism of her author is just, searching, and brilliant."--_truth._ "in the volume before us we have a critical biography of the author of 'wuthering heights,' and presenting to the mind's eye a clear and definite conception of the truest and most unalloyed genius this country has produced. what mrs. gaskell did for charlotte brontë, miss robinson has with equal grace and sympathy done for her younger sister."--_manchester courier._ "emily brontë is lovingly and faithfully presented both as a woman and as a writer, and the volume is one for which all lovers of literature will thank miss robinson, and the editor who persuaded her to perform the task."--_derby mercury._ george sand. by bertha thomas. "miss thomas' book is well written and fairly complete; she is well intentioned, always fair, and her book deserves decided recommendation as an introduction to its subject."--_athenæum._ "in this unpretending volume general readers will find all that they need to know about the life and writings of george sand. miss thomas has accomplished a rather difficult task with great adroitness."--_st. james' gazette._ "a life of george sand written carefully and with adequate knowledge, must, and doubtless will, be of interest to many readers, and this little book shows both care and knowledge."--_vanity fair._ london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. * * * * * eminent women series. _opinions of the press._ mary lamb. by anne gilchrist. "mrs. gilchrist's 'mary lamb' is a painstaking cultivated sketch, written with knowledge and feeling."--_pall mall gazette._ "to her task of recording this life, mrs. gilchrist has evidently brought wide reading and accurate knowledge. she is to be congratulated on the clearness and interest of her narrative, on the success with which she has placed before us one of the gentlest and most pathetic figures of english literature."--_academy._ "a thoroughly delightful volume, lovingly sympathetic in its portraiture, and charged with much new and interesting matter."--_harpers' magazine._ "to all persons who enjoy a narrative of private life, and to all who desire a greater intimacy than they have hitherto enjoyed with elia and bridget, we cordially recommend mrs. gilchrist's 'mary lamb.'"--_vanity fair._ maria edgeworth. by helen zimmern. "a very pleasing resumé of the life and works of our gifted countrywoman."--_freeman's journal._ "an interesting biography."--_echo._ "miss zimmern is the first to tell the story as a whole for english readers, and the way in which she describes the irish home, the literary partnership of eccentric father and obedient daughter, the visit to france, and miss edgeworth's sight of certain french celebrities including madame de genlis, is full of liveliness."--_pall mall gazette._ margaret fuller. by julia ward howe. "a very fresh and engaging piece of biography, and a worthy addition to mr. ingram's carefully-selected and well-edited series."--_freeman's journal._ "well worthy of association with its popular predecessors, and among the new books that should be read."--_derby mercury._ london: w. h. allen & co. waterloo place. s.w. * * * * * eminent women series. _opinions of the press._ elizabeth fry. by mrs. e. r. pitman. "of all english philanthropists, none exhibits a nobler nature or is worthier of a permanent record than mrs. fry. for this reason we welcome the sketch of her by mrs. pitman, published in the eminent women series."--_times._ "an excellent idea of mrs. fry's noble life and work can be got from mrs. pitman's simple but impressive work."--_contemporary review._ "one of the best and most interesting of the series."--_literary world._ "this is a good book, worthy of a place in the interesting eminent women series."--_spectator._ "excellent in arrangement and proportioned with judgment."--_academy._ countess of albany. by vernon lee. "the accomplished authoress has done her work _con amore_, and left no stone unturned in her endeavour to show the world the flesh-and-blood aspect of the wife of the young pretender and of her lover, the poet alfieri."--_lady's pictorial._ "every page of the book bears witness to the author's ability and determination to realize her subject, and make readers realize it."--_athenæum._ "there is a vivid power in vernon lee's realization of florentine life and society, and much beauty and glow of colour in her descriptions."--_saturday review._ "this romantic biography is as exciting as any work of imagination, and the incisive and graphic style of its author renders it singularly attractive."--_morning post._ harriet martineau. by mrs. fenwick miller. "a faithful and sympathetic account of this remarkable woman."--_scotsman._ "as a reflective broad-minded woman's faithful description of another woman's private life and brilliant literary career, this critical sketch is admirable."--_whitehall review._ "it is not in any sense of the word a compilation, but a memoir which is a model of that conciseness which is not incompatible with distinct portraiture or with a fresh and living interest in the narrative."--_daily news._ "mrs. miller has done her difficult work well, and her volume is one of the ablest and most interesting of the able and interesting series to which it belongs."--_derby mercury._ london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. * * * * * transcriber's note: every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been corrected. corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below: page : typographical error corrected in front two moderate-sized parlours looking on the garden, hat[that] on the right being mr. brontë's study, and page : added quote mark ["]the projectors' object will not be fully realised until the means are afforded of reducing the terms still lower, page : added possible dropped word the girls would take their friend [for] long walks on the moor. when they page : typographical errors corrected before his employers' gain. he must have made a pretty penny out of those escapades of barnwell's[branwell's], for some strong, his constitution was deranged and broken by his excesses; yet, strangly[strangely] enough, consumption, page : typographical error corrected in that controlling influence so characteristic of her elder sister. her burden of doubt was more that[than] she could page : typographical error corrected from them i received a brief and business-like but civi[civil] and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at page : typographical error corrected and full of pity. was is[it] wonderful that she summed up life in one bitter line?-- page : typographical error corrected had driven him to desperation. in the summer following catharine's visit to thushcross[thrushcross] grange, his page : added comma know how i love him; and that, not because he's handsome, nelly[,] but because he's more myself than i am. whatever page : added missing word quiet envelops him. his violence was not strong enough to reach that final peace and mar its completeness. [his] grave is next to catharine's, and near to edgar linton's; http://www.archive.org/details/lifelettersofmar marsuoft transcriber's note: the original text includes greek characters. for this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. the original text includes a blank space surrounded by brackets. this is represented as [____] in this text version. the life and letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley i [illustration: photogravure by annan & swan _mrs shelley._ _after a portrait by rothwell,_ _in the possession of sir percy f. shelley, bart._] the life & letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley by mrs. julian marshall with portraits and facsimile in two volumes vol. i london richard bentley & son publishers in ordinary to her majesty the queen preface the following biography was undertaken at the request of sir percy and lady shelley, and has been compiled from the ms. journals and letters in their possession, which were entrusted to me, without reserve, for this purpose. the earlier portions of the journal having been placed also at professor dowden's disposal for his _life of shelley_, it will be found that in my first volume many passages indispensable to a life of mary shelley have already appeared, in one form or another, in professor dowden's pages. this fact i have had to ignore, having indeed settled on the quotations necessary to my narrative before the _life of shelley_ appeared. they are given without comment or dilution, just as they occur; where omissions are made it is in order to avoid repetition, or because the everyday entries refer to trivial circumstances uninteresting to the general reader. letters which have previously been published are shortened when they are only of moderate interest; unpublished letters are given complete wherever possible. those who hope to find in these pages much new circumstantial evidence on the vexed subject of shelley's separation from his first wife will be disappointed. no contemporary document now exists which puts the case beyond the reach of argument. collateral evidence is not wanting, but even were this not beyond the scope of the present work it would be wrong on the strength of it to assert more than that shelley himself felt certain of his wife's unfaithfulness. of that there is no doubt, nor of the fact that all such evidence as did afterwards transpire went to prove him more likely to have been right than wrong in his belief. my first thanks are due to sir percy and lady shelley for the use of their invaluable documents,--for the photographs of original pictures which form the basis of the illustrations,--and last, not least, for their kindly help and sympathy during the fulfilment of my task. i wish especially to express my gratitude to mrs. charles call for her kind permission to me to print the letters of her father, mr. trelawny, which are among the most interesting of my unpublished materials. i have to thank miss stuart, from whom i obtained important letters from mr. baxter and godwin; and mr. a. c. haden, through whom i made the acquaintance of miss christy baxter. to professor dowden, and, above all, to mr. garnett, i am indebted for much valuable help, i may say, of all kinds. florence a. marshall. contents pages chapter i introductory remarks--account of william godwin and mary wollstonecraft. . their marriage--birth of their daughter--death of mary godwin - chapter ii august -june . godwin goes to reside at the "polygon." - . his despondency--repeated proposals of marriage to various ladies. . marriage with mrs. clairmont. . enters business as a publisher--books for children. . removes to skinner street, holborn. . aaron burr's first visit to england. . mrs. godwin and the children go to margate and ramsgate--mary's health improves--she remains till christmas at miss petman's. . aaron burr's sojourn in england--intimacy with the godwins--extracts from his journal--mary is invited to stay with the baxters at dundee - chapter iii june -may . mary sails for dundee--godwin's letter to mr. baxter-- the baxters--mary stays with them five months--returns to london with christy baxter--the shelleys dine in skinner street (nov. )--christy's enjoyment of london. . godwin's letter to an anonymous correspondent describing fanny and mary--mary and christy go back to dundee (june )--mary's reminiscences of this time in the preface to _frankenstein_. . mary returns home (march )--domestic trials--want of guidance--mrs. godwin's jealousy--shelley calls on godwin (may ) - chapter iv april-june account of shelley's first introduction of himself to godwin--his past history--correspondence ( )--shelley goes to ireland--publishes address to the irish people-- godwin disapproves--failure of shelley's schemes--godwin's fruitless journey to lynmouth ( )--the godwins and shelleys meet in london--the shelleys leave town (nov. ). . mary makes acquaintance with shelley in may-- description of her--shelley's depression of spirits--his genius and personal charm--he and mary become intimate--their meetings by mary wollstonecraft's grave--episode described by hogg--godwin's distress for money and dependence on shelley--shelley constantly at skinner street--he and mary own their mutual love--he gives her his copy of "queen mab"--his inscription--her inscription--hopelessness - chapter v june-august retrospective history of shelley's first marriage-- estrangement between him and harriet after their visit to scotland in --deterioration in harriet--shelley's deep dejection--he is much attracted by mrs. boinville and her circle--his conclusions respecting harriet--their effect on him--harriet is at bath--she becomes anxious to hear of him--godwin writes to her--she comes to town and sees shelley, who informs her of his intentions--godwin goes to see her--he talks to shelley and to jane clairmont--the situation is intolerable--shelley tells mary everything-- they leave england precipitately, accompanied by jane clairmont (july ) - chapter vi august-september . (july).--they cross to calais--mrs. godwin arrives in pursuit of jane--jane thinks of returning, but changes her mind and remains--mrs. godwin departs--joint journal of shelley and mary--they arrive at paris without any money-- they procure some, and set off to walk through france with a donkey--it is exchanged for a mule, and that for a carriage--journal--they arrive in switzerland, and having settled themselves for the winter, at once start to come home--they arrive in england penniless, and have to obtain money through harriet--they go into lodgings in london - chapter vii september -may . (september).--godwin's mortification at what had happened--false reports concerning him--keeps shelley well in sight, but will only communicate with him through a solicitor--general demoralisation of the household--mrs. godwin and fanny peep in at shelley's windows--poverty of the shelleys--harriet's creditors--shelley's many dependents--he has to hide from bailiffs--jane's excitability--studious habits of shelley and mary--extracts from journal. . shelley's grandfather dies--increase of income--mary's first baby born--it dies--her regret--fanny comes to see her--frequent change of lodgings--hogg a constant visitor-- peacock imprisoned for debt--he writes to the shelleys--jane a source of much annoyance--she chooses to be called "clara"--plans for her future--she departs to lynmouth - chapter viii may -september . objections raised to clara's return to skinner street-- her letter to fanny godwin from lynmouth--the shelleys make a tour in south devon--shelley seeks for houses--letter from mary--they settle at bishopsgate--boating expedition--happy summer--shelley writes "alastor." . mary's son william born--list of books read by shelley and mary in --clara's project of going on the stage--her connection with byron--she introduces him to the shelleys-- shelley's efforts to raise money for godwin--godwin's rapacity--refuses to take a cheque made out in shelley's name--shelley escapes from england--is persuaded by clara (now called "clare" or "claire") to go to geneva--mary's descriptive letters--byron arrives at geneva--association of shelley and byron--origin of _frankenstein_ as related by mary--she begins to write it--voyage of shelley and byron round the lake of geneva--tour to the valley of chamouni-- journal--return to england (august)--mary and clare go to bath, and shelley to marlow - chapter ix september -february . life in lodgings at bath--anxieties--letters from fanny--her pleadings on godwin's behalf--her own disappointment--she leaves home in despair--dies by her own hand at swansea (october )--shelley's visit to marlow-- letter from mary--shelley's search for harriet--he hears of her death--his yearning after his children--marriage with mary (dec. ). . birth of clare's infant (jan. )--visit of the shelleys to the leigh hunts at hampstead--removal to marlow - chapter x march -march (march).--albion house--description--visit of the leigh hunts--shelley's benevolence to the poor--lord eldon's decree depriving shelley of the custody of his children--his indignation and grief--godwin's continued impecuniosity and exactions--charles clairmont's requests--mary's visit to skinner street--_frankenstein_ is published--_journal of a six weeks' tour_--shelley writes _revolt of islam_--allegra's presence the cause of serious annoyance to the shelleys--mr. baxter's visit of discovery to marlow--birth of mary's daughter clara (sept. )--mr. baxter's second visit--his warm appreciation of shelley--fruitless efforts to convert his daughter isabel to his way of thinking--the shelleys determine to leave marlow--shelley's ill-health--mary's letters to him in london--desirability of sending allegra to her father--they decide on going abroad and taking her. . stay in london--the booths and baxters break off acquaintance with the shelleys--shelley suffers from ophthalmia--preparations for departure--the three children are christened--the whole party leave england (march ) - chapter xi march -june (march).--journey to milan--allegra sent to venice-- leghorn--acquaintance with the gisbornes--lucca--mary's wish for literary work--shelley and clare go to venice--the hoppners--byron's villa at este--clara's illness--letters-- shelley to mary--mary to mrs. gisborne--journey to venice-- clara dies--godwin's letter to mary--este--venice--journey to rome--naples--shelley's depression of spirits. . discovery of paolo's intrigue with elise--they are married--return to rome--enjoyment--shelley writes _prometheus unbound_ and the _cenci_--miss curran--delay in leaving rome--william shelley's illness and death - chapter xii june -september (august).--leghorn--journal--mary's misery and utter collapse of spirits--letters to miss curran and mrs. hunt-- the gisbornes--henry reveley's project of a steamboat-- shelley's ardour--letter from godwin--removal to florence-- acquaintance with mrs. mason (lady mountcashel)--birth of percy (nov. ). . mary writes _valperga_--alarm about money--removal to pisa--paolo's infamous plot--shelley seeks legal aid--casa ricci, leghorn--"letter to maria gisborne"--uncomfortable relations of mary and clare--godwin's distress and petitions for money--vexations and anxieties--baths of san giuliano-- general improvement--shelley writes _witch of atlas_ - chapter xiii september -august . abandonment of the steamboat project--disappointment-- wet season--the serchio in flood--return to pisa--medwin--his illness--clare takes a situation at florence. . pisan acquaintances--pacchiani--sgricci--prince mavrocordato--emilia viviani--mary's greek studies--shelley's trance of emilia--it passes--the williams' arrive--friendship with the shelleys--allegra placed in a convent--clare's despair--shelley's passion for boating--they move to pugnano--"the boat on the serchio"--mary sits to e. williams for her portrait--shelley visits byron at ravenna - chapter xiv august-november . letters from shelley to mary--he hears from lord byron of a scandalous story current about himself--mary, at his request, writes to mrs. hoppner confuting the charges--letter entrusted to lord byron, who neglects to forward it--shelley visits allegra at bagnacavallo--winter at pisa--"tre palazzi di chiesa"--letters: mary to miss curran; clare to mary; shelley to ollier--_valperga_ is sent to godwin--his letter accepting the gift (jan. )--extracts - chapter xv november -april . byron comes to pisa--letter from mary to mrs. gisborne--journal--trelawny arrives--mary's first impression of him--his description of her--his wonder on seeing shelley--life at pisa--letters from mary to mrs. gisborne and mrs. hunt--clare's disquiet--her plans for getting possession of allegra--affair of the dragoon--judicial inquiry--projected colony at spezzia--shelley invites clare to come--she accepts--difficulty in finding houses-- allegra's death - chapter xvi april-july (april).--difficulty in breaking the news to clare-- mary in weak health--clare, mary, and percy sent to spezzia-- letter from shelley--he follows with the williams'--casa magni--clare hears the truth--her grief--domestic worries-- mary's illness and suffering--shelley's great enjoyment of the sea--williams' journal--the _ariel_--godwin's affairs and threatened bankruptcy--cruel letters--they are kept back from mary--mary's letter to mrs. gisborne--her serious illness-- shelley's nervous attacks, dreams and visions--mrs. williams' society soothing to him--arrival of the leigh hunts at genoa--shelley and williams go to meet them at pisa--they sail for leghorn--mary's gloomy forebodings--letters from shelley and mrs. williams--the voyagers' return is anxiously awaited--they never come--loss of the _ariel_ - the life and letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley chapter i they say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, of glorious parents, thou aspiring child. i wonder not, for one then left the earth whose life was like a setting planet mild, which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled of its departing glory: still her fame shines on thee thro' the tempest dark and wild which shakes these latter days; and thou canst claim the shelter, from thy sire, of an immortal name. shelley. "so you really have seen godwin, and had little mary in your arms! the only offspring of a union that will certainly be matchless in the present generation." so, in , wrote sir henry taylor's mother to her husband, who had travelled from durham to london for the purpose of making acquaintance with the famous author of _political justice_. this "little mary," the daughter of william and mary wollstonecraft godwin, was destined herself to form a union the memory of which will live even longer than that of her illustrious parents. she is remembered as _mary shelley_, wife of the poet. in any complete account of his life she plays, next to his, the most important part. young as she was during the few years they passed together, her character and her intellect were strong enough to affect, to modify, in some degree to mould his. that he became what he did is in great measure due to her. this, if nothing more were known of her, would be sufficient to stamp her as a remarkable woman, of rare ability and moral excellence, well deserving of a niche in the almost universal biographical series of the present day. but, besides this, she would have been eminent among her sex at any time, in any circumstances, and would, it cannot be doubted, have achieved greater personal fame than she actually did but for the fact that she became, at a very early age, the wife of shelley. not only has his name overshadowed her, but the circumstances of her association with him were such as to check to a considerable extent her own sources of invention and activity. had that freedom been her lot in which her mother's destiny shaped itself, her talents must have asserted themselves as not inferior, as in some respects superior, to those of mary wollstonecraft. this is the answer to the question, sometimes asked,--as if, in becoming shelley's wife, she had forfeited all claim to individual consideration,--why any separate life of her should be written at all. even as a completion of shelley's own story, mary's life is necessary. there remains the fact that her husband's biographers have been busy with her name. it is impossible now to pass it over in silence and indifference. she has been variously misunderstood. it has been her lot to be idealised as one who gave up all for love, and to be condemned and anathematised for the very same reason. she has been extolled for perfections she did not possess, and decried for the absence of those she possessed in the highest degree. she has been lauded as a genius, and depreciated as one overrated, whose talent would never have been heard of at all but for the name of shelley. to her husband she has been esteemed alternately a blessing and the reverse. as a fact, it is probable that no woman of like endowments and promise ever abdicated her own individuality in favour of another so transcendently greater. to consider mary altogether apart from shelley is, indeed, not possible, but the study of the effect, on life and character, of this memorable union is unique of its kind. from shelley's point of view it has been variously considered; from mary's, as yet, not at all. mary wollstonecraft godwin was born on the th of august . her father, the philosopher and philosophical novelist, william godwin, began his career as a dissenting minister in norfolk, and something of the preacher's character adhered to him all his life. not the apostolic preacher. no enthusiasm of faith or devotion, no constraining fervour, eliciting the like in others, were his, but a calm, earnest, philosophic spirit, with an irresistible impulse to guide and advise others. this same calm rationalism got the better, in no long time, of his religious creed, which he seems to have abandoned slowly, gradually, and deliberately, without painful struggle. his religion, of the head alone, was easily replaced by other views for which intellectual qualities were all-sufficient. of a cool, unemotional temperament, safe from any snares of passion or imagination, he became the very type of a town philosopher. abstractions of the intellect and the philosophy of politics were his world. he had a true townsman's love of the theatre, but external nature for the most part left him unaffected, as it found him. with the most exalted opinion of his own genius and merit, he was nervously susceptible to the criticism of others, yet always ready to combat any judgment unfavourable to himself. never weary of argument, he thought that by its means, conducted on lines of reason, all questions might be finally settled, all problems satisfactorily and speedily solved. hence the fascination he possessed for those in doubt and distress of mind. cool rather than cold-hearted, he had a certain benignity of nature which, joined to intellectual exaltation, passed as warmth and fervour. his kindness was very great to young men at the "storm and stress" period of their lives. they for their part thought that, as he was delighted to enter into, discuss and analyse their difficulties, he must, himself, have felt all these difficulties and have overcome them; and, whether they followed his proffered advice or not, they never failed to look up to him as an oracle. friendships godwin had, but of love he seems to have kept absolutely clear until at the age of forty-three he met mary wollstonecraft. he had not much believed in love as a disturbing element, and had openly avowed in his writings that he thought it usurped far too large a place in the ordinary plan of human life. he did not think it needful to reckon with passion or emotion as factors in the sum of existence, and in his ideal programme they played no part at all. mary wollstonecraft was in all respects his opposite. her ardent, impulsive, irish nature had stood the test of an early life of much unhappiness. her childhood's home had been a wretched one; suffering and hardship were her earliest companions. she had had not only to maintain herself, but to be the support of others weaker than herself, and many of these had proved unworthy of her devotion. but her rare nature had risen superior to these trials, which, far from crushing her, elicited her finest qualities. the indignation aroused in her by injustice and oppression, her revolt against the consecrated tyranny of conventionality, impelled her to raise her voice in behalf of the weak and unfortunate. the book which made her name famous, _a vindication of the rights of women_, won for her then, as it has done since, an admiration from half of mankind only equalled by the reprobation of the other half. yet most of its theories, then considered so dangerously extreme, would to-day be contested by few, although the frankness of expression thought so shocking now attracted no special notice then, and indicated no coarseness of feeling, but only the habit of calling things by their names. in , desiring to become better acquainted with the french language, and also to follow on the spot the development of france's efforts in the cause of freedom, she went to paris, where, in a short time, owing to the unforeseen progress of the revolution, she was virtually imprisoned, in the sense of being unable to return to england. here she met captain gilbert imlay, an american, between whom and herself an attachment sprang up, and whose wife, in all but the legal and religious ceremony, she became. this step she took in full conscientiousness. had she married imlay she must have openly declared her true position as a british subject, an act which would have been fraught with the most dangerous, perhaps fatal consequences to them both. a woman of strong religious feeling, she had upheld the sanctity of marriage in her writings, yet not on religious grounds. the heart of marriage, and reason for it, with her, was love. she regarded herself as imlay's lawful wife, and had perfect faith in his constancy. it wore out, however, and after causing her much suspense, anxiety, and affliction, he finally left her with a little girl some eighteen months old. her grief was excessive, and for a time threatened to affect her reason. but her healthy temperament prevailed, and the powerful tie of maternal love saved her from the consequences of despair. it was well for her that she had to work hard at her literary occupations to support herself and her little daughter. it was at this juncture that she became acquainted with william godwin. they had already met once, before mary's sojourn in france, but at this first interview neither was impressed by the other. since her return to london he had shunned her because she was too much talked about in society. imagining her to be obtrusively "strong-minded" and deficient in delicacy, he was too strongly prejudiced against her even to read her books. but by degrees he was won over. he saw her warmth of heart, her generous temper, her vigour of intellect; he saw too that she had suffered. such susceptibility as he had was fanned into warmth. his critical acumen could not but detect her rare quality and worth, although the keen sense of humour and irish charm which fascinated others may, with him, have told against her for a time. but the nervous vanity which formed his closest link with ordinary human nature must have been flattered by the growing preference of one so widely admired, and whom he discovered to be even more deserving of admiration and esteem than the world knew. as to her, accustomed as she was to homage, she may have felt that for the first time she was justly appreciated, and to her wounded and smarting susceptibilities this balm of appreciation must have been immeasurable. her first freshness of feeling had been wasted on a love which proved to have been one-sided and which had recoiled on itself. to love and be loved again was the beginning of a new life for her. and so it came about that the coldest of men and the warmest of women found their happiness in each other. thus drawn together, the discipline afforded to her nature by the rudest realities of life, to his by the severities of study, had been such as to promise a growing and a lasting companionship and affection. in the short memoir of his wife, prefixed by godwin to his published collection of her letters, he has given his own account, a touching one, of the growth and recognition of their love. the partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which i have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love. it would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. one sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. i am not conscious that either party can assume to have the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey, in the affair. when in the course of things the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other.... there was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. it was friendship melting into love. they did not, however, marry at once. godwin's opinion of marriage, looked on as indissoluble, was that it was "a law, and the worst of all laws." in accordance with this view, the ceremony did not take place till their union had lasted some months, and when it did, it was regarded by godwin in the light of a distinct concession. he expresses himself most decisively on this point in a letter to his friend, mr. wedgwood of etruria (printed by mr. kegan paul in his memoirs of godwin), announcing his marriage, which had actually taken place a month before, but had been kept secret. some persons have found an inconsistency between my practice in this instance and my doctrines. but i cannot see it. the doctrine of my _political justice_ is, that an attachment in some degree permanent between two persons of opposite sexes is right, but that marriage, as practised in european countries, is wrong. i still adhere to that opinion. nothing but a regard for the happiness of the individual, which i have no right to ignore, could have induced me to submit to an institution which i wish to see abolished, and which i would recommend to my fellow-men never to practise but with the greatest caution. having done what i thought was necessary for the peace and respectability of the individual, i hold myself no otherwise bound than i was before the ceremony took place. it is certain that he did not repent his concession. but their wedded happiness was of short duration. on th august a little girl was born to them. all seemed well at first with the mother. but during the night which followed alarming symptoms made their appearance. for a time it was hoped that these had been overcome, and a deceptive rally of two days set godwin free from anxiety. but a change for the worst supervened, and after four days of intense suffering, sweetly and patiently borne, mary died, and godwin was again alone. chapter ii august -june alone, in the sense of absence of companionship, but not alone in the sense that he was before, for, when he lost his wife, two helpless little girl-lives were left dependent on him. one was fanny, mary wollstonecraft's child by imlay, now three and a half years old; the other the newly-born baby, named after her mother, mary wollstonecraft, and the subject of this memoir. the tenderness of her mother's warm heart, her father's ripe wisdom, the rich inheritance of intellect and genius which was her birthright, all these seemed to promise her the happiest of childhoods. but these bright prospects were clouded within a few hours of her birth by that change in her mother's condition which, ten days later, ended in death. the little infant was left to the care of a father of much theoretic wisdom but profound practical ignorance, so confirmed in his old bachelor ways by years and habit that, even when love so far conquered him as to make him quit the single state, he declined family life, and carried on a double existence, taking rooms a few doors from his wife's home, and combining the joys--as yet none of the cares--of matrimony with the independence, and as much as possible of the irresponsibility, of bachelorhood. godwin's sympathies with childhood had been first elicited by his intercourse with little fanny imlay, whom, from the time of his union, he treated as his own daughter, and to whom he was unvaryingly kind and indulgent. he moved at once after his wife's death into the house, polygon, somers town, where she had lived, and took up his abode there with the two children. they had a nurse, and various lady friends of the godwins, mrs. reveley and others, gave occasional assistance or superintendence. an experiment was tried of a lady-housekeeper which, however, failed, as the lady in becoming devoted to the children showed a disposition to become devoted to godwin also, construing civilities into marked attentions, resenting fancied slights, and becoming at last an insupportable thorn in the poor philosopher's side. his letters speak of his despondency and feeling of unfitness to have the care of these young creatures devolved on him, and with this sense there came also the renewed perception of the rare maternal qualities of the wife he had lost. "the poor children!" he wrote, six weeks after his bereavement. "i am myself totally unfitted to educate them. the scepticism which perhaps sometimes leads me right in matters of speculation is torment to me when i would attempt to direct the infant mind. i am the most unfit person for this office; she was the best qualified in the world. what a change! the loss of the children is less remediless than mine. you can understand the difference." the immediate consequence of this was that he, who had passed so many years in contented bachelorhood, made, within a short time, repeated proposals of marriage to different ladies, some of them urged with a pertinacity nothing short of ludicrous, so ingenuously and argumentatively plain does he make it that he found it simply incredible any woman should refuse him to whom he had condescended to propose. his former objections to marriage are never now alluded to and seem relegated to the category of obsolete theories. nothing testifies so strongly to his married happiness as his constant efforts to recover any part of it, and his faith in the possibility of doing so. in he proposed again and again to a miss lee whom he had not seen half a dozen times. in he importuned the beautiful mrs. reveley, who had, herself, only been a widow for a month, to marry him. he was really attached to her, and was much wounded when, not long after, she married a mr. gisborne. during godwin's preoccupations and occasional absences, the kindest and most faithful friend the children had was james marshall, who acted as godwin's amanuensis, and was devotedly attached to him and all who belonged to him. in godwin married a mrs. clairmont, his next-door neighbour, a widow with a son, charles, about fanny's age, and a daughter, jane, somewhat younger than little mary. the new mrs. godwin was a clever, bustling, second-rate woman, glib of tongue and pen, with a temper undisciplined and uncontrolled; not bad-hearted, but with a complete absence of all the finer sensibilities; possessing a fund of what is called "knowledge of the world," and a plucky, enterprising, happy-go-lucky disposition, which seemed to the philosophic and unpractical godwin, in its way, a manifestation of genius. besides, she was clever enough to admire godwin, and frank enough to tell him so, points which must have been greatly in her favour. although her father's remarriage proved a source of lifelong unhappiness to mary, it may not have been a bad thing for her and fanny at the time. instead of being left to the care of servants, with the occasional supervision of chance friends, they were looked after with solicitous, if not always the most judicious care. the three little girls were near enough of an age to be companions to each other, but fanny was the senior by three years and a half. she bore godwin's name, and was considered and treated as the eldest daughter of the house. godwin's worldly circumstances were at all times most precarious, nor had he the capability or force of will to establish them permanently on a better footing. his earnings from his literary works were always forestalled long before they were due, and he was in the constant habit of applying to his friends for loans or advances of money which often could only be repaid by similar aid from some other quarter. in the hope of mending their fortunes a little, mrs. godwin, in , induced her husband to make a venture as a publisher. he set up a small place of business in hanway street, in the name of his foreman, baldwin, deeming that his own name might operate prejudicially with the public on account of his advanced political and social opinions, and also that his own standing in the literary world might suffer did it become known that he was connected with trade. mrs. godwin was the chief practical manager in this business, which finally involved her husband in ruin, but for a time promised well enough. the chief feature in the enterprise was a "magazine of books for the use and amusement of children," published by godwin under the name of baldwin; books of history, mythology, and fable, all admirably written for their special purpose. he used to test his juvenile works by reading them to his children and observing the effect. their remark would be (so he says), "how easy this is! why, we learn it by heart almost as fast as we read it." "their suffrage," he adds, "gave me courage, and i carried on my work to the end." mrs. godwin translated, for the business, several childrens' books from the french. among other works specially written, lamb's _tales from shakespeare_ owes its existence to "m. j. godwin & co.," the name under which the firm was finally established. new and larger premises were taken in skinner street, holborn, and in the autumn of the whole family, which now included five young ones, of whom charles clairmont was the eldest, and william, the son of godwin and his second wife, the youngest, removed to a house next door to the publishing office. here they remained until . no continuous record exists of the family life, and the numerous letters of godwin and mrs. godwin when either was absent from home contain only occasional references to it. both parents were too much occupied with business systematically to superintend the children's education. mrs. godwin, however, seems to have taken a bustling interest in ordering it, and scrupulously refers to godwin all points of doubt or discussion. from his letters one would judge that, while he gave due attention to each point, discussing _pros_ and _cons_ with his deliberate impartiality, his wife practically decided everything. although they sometimes quarrelled (on one occasion to the extent of seriously proposing to separate) they always made it up again, nor is there any sign that on the subject of the children's training they ever had any real difference of opinion. mrs. godwin's jealous fussiness gave godwin abundant opportunities for the exercise of philosophy, and to the inherent untruthfulness of her manner and speech he remained strangely and philosophically blind. from allusions in letters we gather that the children had a daily governess, with occasional lessons from a master, mr. burton. it is often asserted that mrs. godwin was a harsh and cruel stepmother, who made the children's home miserable. there is nothing to prove this. later on, when moral guidance and sympathy were needed, she fell short indeed of what she might have been. but for the material wellbeing of the children she cared well enough, and was at any rate desirous that they should be happy, whether or not she always took the best means of making them so. and godwin placed full confidence in her practical powers. in may mrs. godwin and all the children except fanny, who stayed at home to keep house for godwin, went for sea-bathing to margate, moving afterwards to ramsgate. this had been urged by mr. cline, the family doctor, for the good of little mary, who, during some years of her otherwise healthy girlhood, suffered from a weakness in one arm. they boarded at the house of a miss petman, who kept a ladies' school, but had their sleeping apartments at an inn or other lodging. mary, however, was sent to stay altogether at miss petman's, in order to be quiet, and in particular to be out of the way of little william, "he made so boisterous a noise when going to bed at night." the sea-breezes soon worked the desired effect. "mary's arm is better," writes mrs. godwin on the th of june. "she begins to move and use it." so marked and rapid was the improvement that mrs. godwin thought it would be as well to leave her behind for a longer stay when the rest returned to town, and wrote to consult godwin about it. his answer is characteristic. when i do not answer any of the lesser points in your letters, it is because i fully agree with you, and therefore do not think it necessary to draw out an answer point by point, but am content to assent by silence.... this was the case as to mary's being left in the care of miss petman. it was recommended by mr. cline from the first that she should stay six months; to this recommendation we both assented. it shall be so, if it can, and undoubtedly i conceived you, on the spot, most competent to select the residence. mary accordingly remained at miss petman's as a boarder, perhaps as a pupil also, till th december, when, from her father's laconic but minute and scrupulously accurate diary, we learn that she returned home. for the next five months she was in skinner street, participating in its busy, irregular family life, its ups and downs, its anxieties, discomforts, and amusements, its keen intellectual activity and lively interest in social and literary matters, in all of which the young people took their full share. entries are frequent in godwin's diary of visits to the theatre, of tea-drinkings, of guests of all sorts at home. one of these guests affords us, in his journal, some agreeable glimpses into the godwin household. this was the celebrated aaron burr, sometime vice-president of the united states, now an exile and a wanderer in europe. at the time of his election he had got into disgrace with his party, and, when nominated for the governorship of new york, he had been opposed and defeated by his former allies. the bitter contest led to a duel between him and alexander hamilton, in which the latter was killed. disfranchised by the laws of new york for having fought a duel, and indicted (though acquitted) for murder in new jersey, burr set out on a journey through the western states, nourishing schemes of sedition and revenge. when he purchased , acres of land on the red river, and gave his adherents to understand that the spanish dominions were to be conquered, his proceedings excited alarm. president jefferson issued a proclamation against him, and he was arrested on a charge of high treason. nothing could, however, be positively proved, and after a six months' trial he was liberated. he at once started for europe, having planned an attack on mexico, for which he hoped to get funds and adherents. he was disappointed, and during the four years which he passed in europe he often lived in the greatest poverty. on his first visit to england, in , burr met godwin only once, but the entry in his journal, besides bearing indirect witness to the great celebrity of mary wollstonecraft in america, gives an idea of the kind of impression made on a stranger by the second mrs. godwin. "i have seen the two daughters of mary wollstonecraft," he writes. "they are very fine children (the eldest no longer a child, being now fifteen), but scarcely a discernible trace of the mother. now godwin has been seven or eight years married to a second wife, a sensible, amiable woman." for the next four years burr was a wanderer in holland and france. his journal, kept for the benefit of his daughter theodosia, to whom he also addressed a number of letters, is full of strange and stirring interest. in he came back to england, where it was not long before he drifted to godwin's door. burr's character was licentious and unscrupulous, but his appearance and manners were highly prepossessing; he made friends wherever he went. the godwin household was full of hospitality for such bohemian wanderers as he. always itself in a precarious state of fortune, it held out the hand of fellowship to others whose existence from day to day was uncertain. a man of brains and ideas, of congenial and lively temperament, was sure of a fraternal welcome. and though many of godwin's older friends were, in time, estranged from him through their antipathy to his wife, she was full of patronising good-nature for a man like burr, who well knew how to ingratiate himself. _burr's journal, february , ._--had only time to get to godwin's, where we dined. in the evening william, the only son of william godwin, a lad of about nine years old, gave his weekly lecture: having heard how coleridge and others lectured, he would also lecture, and one of his sisters (mary, i think) writes a lecture which he reads from a little pulpit which they have erected for him. he went through it with great gravity and decorum. the subject was "the influence of government on the character of a people." after the lecture we had tea, and the girls danced and sang an hour, and at nine came home. nothing can give a pleasanter picture of the family, the lively-minded children keenly interested in all the subjects and ideas they heard freely discussed around them; the elders taking pleasure in encouraging the children's first essays of intellect; mary at fourteen already showing her powers of thought and inborn vocation to write, and supplying her little brother with ideas. the reverse of the medal appears in the next entry, for the genial unconventional household was generally on the verge of ruin, and dependent on some expected loan for subsistence in the next few months. when once the sought-for assistance came they revelled in momentary relief from care. _journal, february ._--have gone this evening to godwin's. they are in trouble. some financial affair. it did not weigh long on their spirits. _february ._--called at godwin's to leave the newspapers which i borrowed yesterday, and to get that of to-day. _les goddesses_ (so he habitually designates the three girls) kept me by acclamation to tea with _la printresse_ hopwood. i agreed to go with the girls to call on her on friday. _february ._--was engaged to dine to-day at godwin's, and to walk with the four dames. after dinner to the hopwoods. all which was done. _march ._--to godwin's, where i took tea with the children in their room. _march ._--to godwin's. he was out. madame and _les enfans_ upstairs in the bedroom, where they received me, and i drank tea with his _enfans_.... terribly afraid of vigils to-night, for jane made my tea, and, i fear, too strong. it is only fan that i can trust. _march ._--to godwin's, where took tea with the children, who always have it at . mr. and madame at . _march ._--on to godwin's; found him at breakfast and joined him. madame a-bed. _later._--mr. and mrs. godwin would not give me their account, which must be five or six pounds, a very serious sum for them. they say that when i succeed in the world they will call on me for help. this probably means that the godwins had lent him money. he was well-nigh penniless, and mrs. godwin exerted herself to get resources for him, to sell one or two books of value which he had, and to get a good price for his watch. she knew a good deal of the makeshifts of poverty, and none of the family seemed to have grudged time or trouble if they could do a good turn to this companion in difficulties. it is a question whether, when they talked of his succeeding in the world, they were aware of the particular form of success for which he was scheming; in any case they seem to have been content to take him as they found him. they were the last friends from whom he parted on the eve of sailing for america. his entry just before starting is-- called and passed an hour with the godwins. that family does really love me. fanny, mary, and jane, also little william: you must not forget, either, hannah hopwood, _la printresse_. these few months were, very likely, the brightest which mary ever passed at home. her rapidly growing powers of mind and observation were nourished and developed by the stimulating intellectual atmosphere around her; to the anxieties and uncertainties which, like birds of ill-omen, hovered over the household and were never absent for long together, she was well accustomed, besides which she was still too young to be much affected by them. she was fond of her sisters, and devoted to her father. mrs. godwin's temperament can never have been congenial to hers, but occasions of collision do not appear to have been frequent, and fanny, devoted and unselfish, only anxious for others to be happy and ready herself to serve any of them, was the link between them all. mary's health was, however, not yet satisfactory, and before the summer an opportunity which offered itself of change of air was willingly accepted on her behalf by mr. and mrs. godwin. in godwin had made the acquaintance of mr. william baxter of dundee, on the introduction of mr. david booth, who afterwards became baxter's son-in-law. baxter, a man of liberal mind, independence of thought and action, and kindly nature, shared to the full the respect entertained by most thinking men of that generation for the author of _political justice_. godwin, always accessible to sympathetic strangers, was at once pleased with this new acquaintance. "i thank you," he wrote to booth, "for your introduction of mr. baxter. i dare swear he is an honest man, and he is no fool." during baxter's several visits to london they became better acquainted. charles clairmont too, went to edinburgh in , as a clerk in constable's printing office, where he met and made friends with baxter's son robert, who, as well as his father, visited the skinner street household in london, and through whom the intimacy was cemented. in this way it was that mary was invited to come on a long visit to the baxters at their house, "the cottage," on the banks of the tay, just outside dundee, on the road to broughty ferry. the family included several girls, near mary's own age, and with true scotch hospitality they pressed her to make one of their family circle for an indefinite length of time, until sea-air and sea-bathing should have completed the recovery begun the year before at ramsgate, but which could not be maintained in the smoky air and indoor life of london. accordingly, mary sailed for dundee on the th of june . chapter iii june -may godwin to baxter. skinner street, london. _ th june ._ my dear sir--i have shipped off to you by yesterday's packet, the _osnaburgh_, captain wishart, my only daughter. i attended her, with her two sisters, to the wharf, and remained an hour on board, till the vessel got under way. i cannot help feeling a thousand anxieties in parting with her, for the first time, for so great a distance, and these anxieties were increased by the manner of sending her, on board a ship, with not a single face around her that she had ever seen till that morning. she is four months short of fifteen years of age. i, however, spoke to the captain, using your name; i beside gave her in charge to a lady, by name i believe mrs. nelson, of great st. helen's, london, who was going to your part of the island in attendance upon an invalid husband. she was surrounded by three daughters when i spoke to her, and she answered me very agreeably. "i shall have none of my own daughters with me, and shall therefore have the more leisure to attend to yours." i daresay she will arrive more dead than alive, as she is extremely subject to sea-sickness, and the voyage will, not improbably, last nearly a week. mr. cline, the surgeon, however, decides that a sea-voyage would probably be of more service to her than anything. i am quite confounded to think what trouble i am bringing on you and your family, and to what a degree i may be said to have taken you in when i took you at your word in your invitation upon so slight an acquaintance. the old proverb says, "he is a wise father who knows his own child," and i feel the justness of the apothegm on the present occasion. there never can be a perfect equality between father and child, and if he has other objects and avocations to fill up the greater part of his time, the ordinary resource is for him to proclaim his wishes and commands in a way somewhat sententious and authoritative, and occasionally to utter his censures with seriousness and emphasis. it can, therefore, seldom happen that he is the confidant of his child, or that the child does not feel some degree of awe or restraint in intercourse with him. i am not, therefore, a perfect judge of mary's character. i believe she has nothing of what is commonly called vices, and that she has considerable talent. but i tremble for the trouble i may be bringing on you in this visit. in my last i desired that you would consider the first two or three weeks as a trial, how far you can ensure her, or, more fairly and impartially speaking, how far her habits and conceptions may be such as to put your family very unreasonably out of their way; and i expect from the frankness and ingenuousness of yours of the th inst. (which by the way was so ingenuous as to come without a seal) that you will not for a moment hesitate to inform me if such should be the case. when i say all this, i hope you will be aware that i do not desire that she should be treated with extraordinary attention, or that any one of your family should put themselves in the smallest degree out of their way on her account. i am anxious that she should be brought up (in this respect) like a philosopher, even like a cynic. it will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character. i should also observe that she has no love of dissipation, and will be perfectly satisfied with your woods and your mountains. i wish, too, that she should be _excited_ to industry. she has occasionally great perseverance, but occasionally, too, she shows great need to be roused. you are aware that she comes to the sea-side for the purpose of bathing. i should wish that you would inquire now and then into the regularity of that. she will want also some treatment for her arm, but she has mr. cline's directions completely in all these points, and will probably not require a professional man to look after her while she is with you. in all other respects except her arm she has admirable health, has an excellent appetite, and is capable of enduring fatigue. mrs. godwin reminds me that i ought to have said something about troubling your daughters to procure a washerwoman. but i trust that, without its being necessary to be thus minute, you will proceed on the basis of our being earnest to give you as little trouble as the nature of the case will allow.--i am, my dear sir, with great regard, yours, william godwin. at dundee, with the baxters, mary remained for five months. she was treated as a sister by the baxter girls, one of whom, isabella, afterwards the wife of david booth, became her most intimate friend. an elder sister, miss christian baxter, to whom the present writer is indebted for a few personal reminiscences of mary godwin, only died in , and was probably the last survivor of those who remembered mary in her girlhood. they were all fond of their new companion. she was agreeable, vivacious, and sparkling; very pretty, with fair hair and complexion, and clear, bright white skin. the baxters were people of education and culture, active minded, fond of reading, and alive to external impressions. the young people were well and carefully brought up. mary shared in all their studies. music they did not care for, but all were fond of drawing and painting, and had good lessons. a great deal of time was spent in touring about, in long walks and drives through the moors and mountains of forfarshire. they took pains to make mary acquainted with all the country round, besides which it was laid on her as a duty to get as much fresh air as she could, and she must greatly have enjoyed the well-ordered yet easy life, the complete change of scene and companionship. when, on the th of november, she arrived again in skinner street, she brought christy baxter with her, for a long return visit to london. if mary had enjoyed her country outing, still more keenly did the homely scotch girl relish her first taste of london life and society. at ninety-two years old the impression of her pleasure in it, of her interest in all the notable people with whom she came in contact, was as vivid as ever. the literary and artistic circle which still hung about the skinner street philosophers was to christy a new world, of which, except from books, she had formed no idea. books, however, had laid the foundation of keenest interest in all she was to see. she was constantly in company with lamb, hazlitt, coleridge, constable, and many more, hitherto known to her only by name. of charles lamb especially, of his wit, humour, and quaintness she retained the liveliest recollection, and he had evidently a great liking for her, referring jokingly to her in his letters as "doctor christy," and often inviting her, with the godwin family, to tea, to meet her relatives, when up in town, or other friends. on th november, the very day after the two girls arrived in london, a meeting occurred of no special interest to christy at the time, and which she would have soon forgotten but for subsequent events. three guests came to dinner at godwin's. these were percy bysshe shelley with his wife harriet, and her sister, eliza westbrook. christy baxter well remembered this, but her chief recollection was of harriet, her beauty, her brilliant complexion and lovely hair, and the elegance of her purple satin dress. of shelley, how he looked, what he said or did, what they all thought of him, she had observed nothing, except that he was very attentive to harriet. the meeting was of no apparent significance and passed without remark: little indeed did any one foresee the drama soon to follow. plenty of more important days, more interesting meetings to christy, followed during the next few months. she shared mary's room during this time, but her memory, in old age, afforded few details of their everyday intercourse. indeed, although they spent so much time together, these two were never very intimate. isabella baxter, afterwards mrs. booth, was mary's especial friend and chief correspondent, and it is much to be regretted that none of their girlish letters have been preserved. the four girls had plenty of liberty, and, what with reading and talk, with constantly varied society enjoyed in the intimate unconstrained way of those who cannot afford the _appareil_ of convention, with tolerably frequent visits at friends' houses and not seldom to the theatre, when godwin, as often happened, got a box sent him, they had plenty of amusement too. godwin's diary keeps a wonderfully minute skeleton account of all their doings. christy enjoyed it all as only a novice can do. all her recollections of the family life were agreeable; if anything had left an unpleasing impression it had faded away in , when the present writer saw her. for godwin she entertained a warm respect and affection. they did not see very much of him, but christy was a favourite of his, and he would sometimes take a quiet pleasure, not unmixed with amusement, in listening to their girlish talks and arguments. one such discussion she distinctly remembered, on the subject of woman's vocation, as to whether it should be purely domestic, or whether they should engage in outside interests. mary and jane upheld the latter view, fanny and christy the other. mrs. godwin was kind to christy, who always saw her best side, and never would hear a word said against her. her deficiencies were not palpable to an outsider whom she liked and chose to patronise, nor did christy appear to have felt the inherent untruthfulness in mrs. godwin's character, although one famous instance of it was recorded by isabella baxter, and is given at length in mr. kegan paul's _life of godwin_. the various members of the family had more independence of habits than is common in english domestic life. this was perhaps a relic of godwin's old idea, that much evil and weariness resulted from the supposed necessity that the members of a family should spend all or most of their time in each other's company. he always breakfasted alone. mrs. godwin did so also, and not till mid-day. the young folks had theirs together. dinner was a family meal, but supper seems to have been a movable feast. jane clairmont, of whose education not much is known beyond the fact that she was sometimes at school, was at home for a part if not all of this time. she was lively and quick-witted, and probably rather unmanageable. fanny was more reflective, less sanguine, more alive to the prosaic obligations of life, and with a keen sense of domestic duty, early developed in her by necessity and by her position as the eldest of this somewhat anomalous family. godwin, by nature as undemonstrative as possible, showed more affection to fanny than to any one else. he always turned to her for any little service he might require. it seemed, said christy, as though he would fain have guarded against the possibility of her feeling that she, an orphan, was less to him than the others. christy was of opinion that fanny was not made aware of her real position till her quite later years, a fact which, if true, goes far towards explaining much of her after life. it seems most likely, at any rate, that at this time she was unacquainted with the circumstances of her birth. to godwin she had always seemed like his own eldest child, the first he had cared for or who had been fond of him, and his dependence on her was not surprising, for no daughter could have tended him with more solicitous care; besides which, she was one of those people, ready to do anything for everybody, who are always at the beck and call of others, and always in request. she filled the home, to which mary, so constantly absent, was just now only a visitor. it must have been at about this time that godwin received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who expressed much curiosity to know whether his children were brought up in accordance with the ideas, by some considered so revolutionary and dangerous, of mary wollstonecraft, and what the result was of reducing her theories to actual practice. godwin's answer, giving his own description of her two daughters, has often been printed, but it is worth giving here. your inquiries relate principally to the two daughters of mary wollstonecraft. they are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system of their mother. i lost her in , and in i married a second time. one among the motives which led me to choose this was the feeling i had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. the present mrs. godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither mrs. godwin nor i have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly endeavour, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the minds and characters of the younger branches of the family. of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. she is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. my own daughter is, i believe, very pretty. fanny is by no means handsome, but, in general, prepossessing. on the d of june mary accompanied christy back to dundee, where she remained for the next ten months. no account remains of her life there, but there can be doubt that her mental and intellectual powers matured rapidly, and that she learned, read, and thought far more than is common even with clever girls of her age. the girl who at seventeen is an intellectual companion for a shelley cannot often have needed to be "excited to industry," unless indeed when she indulged in day-dreams, as, from her own account given in the preface to her novel of _frankenstein_, we know she sometimes did. proud of her parentage, idolising the memory of her mother, about whom she gathered and treasured every scrap of information she could obtain, and of whose history and writings she probably now learned more than she had done at home, accustomed from her childhood to the daily society of authors and literary men, the pen was her earliest toy, and now the attempt at original composition was her chosen occupation. "as a child," she says, "i scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.' still i had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air,--the indulging in waking dreams,--the following up trains of thought which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. my dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. in the latter i was a close imitator, rather doing as others had done than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. what i wrote was intended at least for one other eye--my childhood's companion and friend" (probably isabel baxter)--"but my dreams were all my own. i accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed, my dearest pleasure when free. "i lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in scotland. i made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the tay, near dundee. blank and dreary on retrospection i call them; they were not so to me then. they were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded i could commune with the creatures of my fancy. i wrote then, but in a most commonplace style. it was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. i did not make myself the heroine of my tales. life appeared to me too commonplace an affair as regarded myself. i could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but i was not confined to my own identity, and i could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me, at that age, than my own sensations." from the entry in godwin's diary, "m. w. g. at supper," for th march , we learn that mary returned to skinner street on that day. she now resumed her place in the home circle, a very different person from the little mary who went to ramsgate in . although only sixteen and a half she was in the bloom of her girlhood, very pretty, very interesting in appearance, thoughtful and intelligent beyond her years. she did not settle down easily into her old place, and probably only realised gradually how much she had altered since she last lived at home. perhaps, too, she saw that home in a new light. after the well-ordered, cheerful family life of the baxters, the somewhat bohemianism of skinner street may have seemed a little strange. a household with a philosopher for one of its heads, and a fussy, unscrupulous woman of business for the other, may have its amusing sides, and we have seen that it had; but it is not necessarily comfortable, still less sympathetic to a young and earnest nature, just awakening to a consciousness of the realities of life, at that transition stage when so much is chaotic and confusing to those who are beginning to think and to feel. one may well imagine that all was not smooth for poor mary. her stepmother's jarring temperament must have grated on her more keenly than ever after her long absence. years and anxieties did not improve mrs. godwin's temper, nor bring refinement or a nice sense of honour to a nature singularly deficient in both. mary must have had to take refuge from annoyance in day-dreams pretty frequently, and this was a sure and constant source of irritation to her stepmother. jane clairmont, wilful, rebellious, witty, and probably a good deal spoilt, whose subsequent conduct shows that she was utterly unamenable to her mother's authority, was, at first, away at school. fanny was the good angel of the house, but her persistent defence of every one attacked, and her determination to make the best of things and people as they were, seemed almost irritating to those who were smarting under daily and hourly little grievances. compliance often looks like cowardice to the young and bold. nor did mary get any help from her father. a little affection and kindly sympathy from him would have gone a long way with her, for she loved him dearly. long afterwards she alluded to his "calm, silent disapproval" when displeased, and to the bitter remorse and unhappiness it would cause her, although unspoken, and only instinctively felt by her. all her stepmother's scoldings would have failed to produce a like effect. but godwin, though sincerely solicitous about the children's welfare, was self-concentrated, and had little real insight into character. besides, he was, as usual, hampered about money matters; and when constant anxiety as to where to get his next loan was added to the preoccupation of authorship, and the unavoidable distraction of such details as reached him of the publishing business, he had little thought or attention to bestow on the daughter who had arrived at so critical a time of her mental and moral history. he welcomed her home, but then took little more notice of her. if she and her stepmother disagreed, godwin, when forced to take part in the matter, probably found it the best policy to side with his wife. yet the situation would have been worth his attention. here was this girl, mary wollstonecraft's daughter, who had left home a clever, unformed child, who had returned to it a maiden in her bloom, pretty and attractive, with ardour, ability, and ambition, with conscious powers that had not found their right use, with unsatisfied affections seeking an object. true, she might in time have found threads to gather up in her own home. but she was young, impatient, and unhappy. mrs. godwin was repellent, uncongenial, and very jealous of her. all that a daughter could do for godwin seemed to be done by fanny. when jane came home it was on her that mary was chiefly thrown for society. her lively spirits and quick wit made her excellent company, and she was ready enough to make the most of grievances, and to head any revolt. fanny, far more deserving of sisterly sympathy and far more in need of it, seemed to belong to the opposite camp. time, kindly judicious guidance, and sustained effort on her own part might have cleared mary's path and made things straight for her. her heart was as sound and true as her intellect, but this critical time was rendered more dangerous, it may well be, by her knowledge of the existence of many theories on vexed subjects, making her feel keenly her own inexperience and want of a guide. the guide she found was one who himself had wandered till now over many perplexing paths, led by the light of a restless, sleepless genius, and an inextinguishable yearning to find, to know, to do, to be the best. godwin's diary records on the th of may "shelley calls." as far as can be known this was the first occasion since the dinner of the th of november , when mary wollstonecraft godwin saw percy bysshe shelley. chapter iv april-june although she had seen shelley only once, mary had heard a good deal about him. more than two years before this time godwin had received a letter from a stranger, a very young man, desirous of becoming acquainted with him. the writer had, it said, been under the impression that the great philosopher, the object of his reverential admiration, whom he now addressed, was one of the mighty dead. that such was not the case he had now learned for the first time, and the most ardent wish of his heart was to be admitted to the privilege of intercourse with one whom he regarded as "a luminary too bright for the darkness which surrounds him." "if," he concluded, "desire for universal happiness has any claim upon your preference, that desire i can exhibit." such neophytes never knelt to godwin in vain. he did not, at first, feel specially interested in this one; still, the kindly tone of his reply led to further correspondence, in the course of which the new disciple, mr. percy bysshe shelley, gave godwin a sketch of the events of his past life. godwin learned that his correspondent was the son of a country squire in sussex, was heir to a baronetcy and a considerable fortune; that he had been expelled from oxford for publishing, and refusing to deny the authorship of, a pamphlet called "the necessity of atheism"; that his father, having no sympathy either with his literary tastes or speculative views, and still less with his method of putting the latter in practice, had required from him certain concessions and promises which he had declined to make, and so had been cast off by his family, his father refusing to communicate with him, except through a solicitor, allowing him a sum barely enough for his own wants, and that professedly to "prevent his cheating strangers." that, undeterred by all this, he had, at nineteen, married a woman three years younger, whose "pursuits, hopes, fears, and sorrows" had been like his own; and that he hoped to devote his life and powers to the regeneration of mankind and society. there was something remarkable about these letters, something that bespoke a mind, ill-balanced it might be, but yet of no common order. whatever the worth of the writer's opinions, there could be no doubt that he had the gift of eloquence in their expression. half interested and half amused, with a vague perception of shelley's genius, and a certain instinctive deference of which he could not divest himself towards the heir to £ a year, godwin continued the correspondence with a frequency and an unreserve most flattering to the younger man. not long after this, the disciple announced that he had gone off, with his wife and her sister, to ireland, for the avowed purpose of forwarding the catholic emancipation and the repeal of the union. his scheme was "the organisation of a society whose institution shall serve as a bond to its members for the purposes of virtue, happiness, liberty, and wisdom, by the means of intellectual opposition to grievances." he published and distributed an "address to the irish people," setting before them their grievances, their rights, and their duties. this object godwin regarded as an utter mistake, its practical furtherance as extremely perilous. dreading the contagion of excitement, its tendency to prevent sober judgment and promote precipitate action, he condemned associations of men for any public purpose whatever. his calm temperament would fain have dissevered impulse and action altogether as cause and effect, and he had a shrinking, constitutional as well as philosophic, from any tendency to "strike while the iron is hot." "the thing most to be desired," he wrote, "is to keep up the intellectual, and in some sense the solitary fermentation, and to procrastinate the contact and consequent action." "shelley! you are preparing a scene of blood," was his solemn warning. nothing could have been further from shelley's thoughts than such a scene. surprised and disappointed, he ingenuously confessed to godwin that his association scheme had grown out of notions of political justice, first generated by godwin's own book on that subject; and the mentor found himself in the position of an involuntary illustration of his own theory, expressed in the _enquirer_ (essay xx), "it is by no means impossible that the books most pernicious in their effects that ever were produced, were written with intentions uncommonly elevated and pure." shelley, animated by an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, looked to association as likely to spread a contagion indeed, but a contagion of good. the revolution he preached was a millennium. if you are convinced of the truth of your cause, trust wholly to its truth; if you are not convinced, give it up. in no case employ violence; the way to liberty and happiness is never to transgress the rules of virtue and justice. before anything can be done with effect, habits of sobriety, regularity, and thought must be entered into and firmly resolved on. i will repeat, that virtue and wisdom are necessary to true happiness and liberty. before the restraints of government are lessened, it is fit that we should lessen the necessity for them. before government is done away with, we must reform ourselves. it is this work which i would earnestly recommend to you. o irishmen, reform yourselves.[ ] whatever evil results godwin may have apprehended from shelley's proceedings, these sentiments taken in the abstract could not but enlist his sympathies to some extent on behalf of the deluded young optimist, nor did he keep the fact a secret. shelley's letters, as well as the irish pamphlet, were eagerly read and discussed by all the young philosophers of skinner street. "you cannot imagine," godwin wrote to him, "how much all the females of my family--mrs. godwin and three daughters--are interested in your letters and your history." publicly propounded, however, shelley's sentiments proved insufficiently attractive to those to whom they were addressed. at a public meeting where he had ventured to enjoin on catholics a tolerance so universal as to embrace not only jews, turks, and infidels, but protestants also, he narrowly escaped being mobbed. it was borne in upon him before long that the possibility, under existing conditions, of realising his scheme for associations of peace and virtue, was doubtful and distant. he abandoned his intention and left ireland, professedly in submission to godwin, but in fact convinced by what he had seen. godwin was delighted. "now i can call you a friend," he wrote, and the good understanding of the two was cemented. after repeated but fruitless invitations from the shelleys to the whole godwin party to come and stay with them in wales, godwin, early in the autumn of this year ( ) actually made an expedition to lynmouth, where his unknown friends were staying, in the hope of effecting a personal acquaintance, but his object was frustrated, the shelleys having left the place just before he arrived. they first met in london, in the month of october, and frequent, almost daily intercourse took place between the families. on the last day of their stay in town the shelleys, with eliza westbrook, dined in skinner street. mary godwin, who had been for five months past in scotland, had returned, as we know, with christy baxter the day before, and was, no doubt, very glad not to miss this opportunity of seeing the interesting young reformer of whom she had heard so much. his wife he had always spoken of as one who shared his tastes and opinions. no doubt they all thought her a fortunate woman, and mary in after years would well recall her smiling face, and pink and white complexion, and her purple satin gown. during the year and a half that had elapsed since that time mary had been chiefly away, and had heard little if anything of shelley. in the spring of , however, he came up to town to see her father on business,--business in which godwin was deeply and solely concerned, about which he was desperately anxious, and in which mary knew that shelley was doing all in his power to help him. these matters had been going on for some time, when, on the th of may, he came to skinner street, and mary and he renewed acquaintance. both had altered since the last time they met. mary, from a child had grown into a young, attractive, and interesting girl. hers was not the sweet sensuous loveliness of her mother, but with her well-shaped head and intellectual brow, her fine fair hair and liquid hazel eyes, and a skin and complexion of singular whiteness and purity, she possessed beauty of a rare and refined type. she was somewhat below the medium height; very graceful, with drooping shoulders and swan-like throat. the serene eloquent eyes contrasted with a small mouth, indicative of a certain reserve of temperament, which, in fact, always distinguished her, and beneath which those who did not know her might not have suspected her vigour of intellect and fearlessness of thought. shelley, too, was changed; why, was in his case not so evident. mary would have heard how, just before her return home, he had been remarried to his wife; godwin, the opponent of matrimony, having, mysteriously enough, been instrumental in procuring the licence for this superfluous ceremony; superfluous, as the parties had been quite legally married in scotland three years before. his wife was not now with him in london. he was alone, and appeared saddened in aspect, ailing in health, unsettled and anxious in mind. it was impossible that mary should not observe him with interest. she saw that, although so young a man, he not only could hold his own in discussion of literary, philosophical, or political questions with the wisest heads and deepest thinkers of his generation, but could throw new light on every subject he touched. his glowing imagination transfigured and idealised what it dwelt on, while his magical words seemed to recreate whatever he described. she learned that he was a poet. his conversation would call up her old day-dreams again, though, before it, they paled and faded like morning mists before the sun. she saw, too, that his disposition was most amiable, his manners gentle, his conversation absolutely free from suspicion of coarseness, and that he was a disinterested and devoted friend. before long she must have become conscious that he took pleasure in talking with her. she could not but see that, while his melancholy and disquiet grew upon him every day, she possessed the power of banishing it for the time. her presence illumined him; life and hopeful enthusiasm would flash anew from him if she was by. this intercourse stimulated all her intellectual powers, and its first effect was to increase her already keen desire of knowledge. to keep pace with the electric mind of this companion required some effort on her part, and she applied herself with renewed zeal to her studies. nothing irritated her stepmother so much as to see her deep in a book, and in order to escape from mrs. godwin's petty persecution mary used, whenever she could, to transport herself and her occupations to old st. pancras churchyard, where she had been in the habit of coming to visit her mother's grave. there, under the shade of a willow tree, she would sit, book in hand, and sometimes read, but not always. the day-dreams of dundee would now and again return upon her. how long she seemed to have lived since that time! life no longer seemed "so commonplace an affair," nor yet her own part in it so infinitesimal if shelley thought her conversation and companionship worth the having. before very long he had found out the secret of her retreat, and used to meet her there. he revered the memory of mary wollstonecraft, and her grave was to him a consecrated shrine of which her daughter was the priestess. by june they had become intimate friends, though mary was still ignorant of the secret of his life. on the th of june occurred the meeting described by hogg in his _life of shelley_. the two friends were walking through skinner street when shelley said to hogg, "i must speak with godwin; come in, i will not detain you long." hogg continues-- i followed him through the shop, which was the only entrance, and upstairs we entered a room on the first floor; it was shaped like a quadrant. in the arc were windows; in one radius a fireplace, and in the other a door, and shelves with many old books. william godwin was not at home. bysshe strode about the room, causing the crazy floor of the ill-built, unowned dwelling-house to shake and tremble under his impatient footsteps. he appeared to be displeased at not finding the fountain of political justice. "where is godwin?" he asked me several times, as if i knew. i did not know, and, to say the truth, i did not care. he continued his uneasy promenade; and i stood reading the names of old english authors on the backs of the venerable volumes, when the door was partially and softly opened. a thrilling voice called "shelley!" a thrilling voice answered "mary!" and he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king. a very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in london at that time, had called him out of the room. he was absent a very short time, a minute or two, and then returned. "godwin is out, there is no use in waiting." so we continued our walk along holborn. "who was that, pray?" i asked, "a daughter?" "yes." "a daughter of william godwin?" "the daughter of godwin and mary." hogg asked no more questions, but something in this momentary interview and in the look of the fair-haired girl left an impression on his mind which he did not at once forget. godwin was all this time seeking and encouraging shelley's visits. he was in feverish distress for money, bankruptcy was hanging over his head; and shelley was exerting all his energies and influence to raise a large sum, it is said as much as £ , for him. it is a melancholy fact that the philosopher had got to regard those who, in the thirsty search for truth and knowledge, had attached themselves to him, in the secondary light of possible sources of income, and, when in difficulties, he came upon them one after another for loans or advances of money, which, at first begged for as a kindness, came to be claimed by him almost as a right. shelley's own affairs were in a most unsatisfactory state. £ a year from his father, and as much from his wife's father was all he had to depend upon, and his unsettled life and frequent journeys, generous disposition and careless ways, made fearful inroads on his narrow income, notwithstanding the fact that he lived with spartan frugality as far as his own habits were concerned. little as he had, he never knew how little it was nor how far it would go, and, while he strained every nerve to save from ruin one whom he still considered his intellectual father, he was himself sorely hampered by want of money. visits to lawyers by godwin, shelley, or both, were of increasingly frequent occurrence during may; in june we learn of as many as two or three in a day. while this was going on, shelley, the forlorn hope of skinner street, could not be lost sight of. if he seemed to find pleasure in mary's society, this probably flattered mary's father, who, though really knowing little of his child, was undoubtedly proud of her, her beauty, and her promise of remarkable talent. like other fathers, he thought of her as a child, and, had there been any occasion for suspicion or remark, the fact of shelley's being a married man with a lovely wife, would take away any excuse for dwelling on it. the shelleys had not been favourites with mrs. godwin, who, the year before, had offended or chosen to quarrel with harriet shelley. the respective husbands had succeeded in smoothing over the difficulty, which was subsequently ignored. no love was lost, however, between the shelleys and the head of the firm of m. j. godwin & co., who, however, was not now likely to do or say anything calculated to drive from the house one who, for the present, was its sole chance of existence. from the th of june until the end of the month shelley was at skinner street every day, often to dinner. by that time he and mary had realised, only too well, the depth of their mutual feeling, and on some one day, what day we do not know, they owned it to each other. his history was poured out to her, not as it appears in the cold impartial light of after years perhaps, but as he felt it then, aching and smarting from life's fresh wounds and stings. she heard of his difficulties, his rebuffs, his mistakes in action, his disappointments in friendship, his fruitless sacrifices for what he held to be the truth; his hopes and his hopelessness, his isolation of soul and his craving for sympathy. she guessed, for he was still silent on this point, that he found it not in his home. she faced her feelings then; they were past mistake. but it never occurred to her mind that there was any possible future but a life's separation to souls so situated. she could be his friend, never anything more to him. as a memento of that interview shelley gave or sent her a copy of _queen mab_, his first published poem. this book (still in existence) has, written in pencil inside the cover, the name "mary wollstonecraft godwin," and, on the inner flyleaf, the words, "you see, mary, i have not forgotten you." under the printed dedication to his wife is the enigmatic but suggestive remark, carefully written in ink, "count slobendorf was about to marry a woman, who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison."[ ] on the flyleaves at the end mary wrote in july -- this book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, i may write what i please. yet what shall i write? that i love the author beyond all powers of expression, and that i am parted from him. dearest and only love, by that love we have promised to each other, although i may not be yours, i can never be another's. but i am thine, exclusively thine. by the kiss of love, the glance none saw beside, the smile none else might understand, the whispered thought of hearts allied, the pressure of the thrilling hand.[ ] i have pledged myself to thee, and sacred is the gift. i remember your words. "you are now, mary, going to mix with many, and for a moment i shall depart, but in the solitude of your chamber i shall be with you." yes, you are ever with me, sacred vision. but ah! i feel in this was given a blessing never meant for me, thou art too like a dream from heaven for earthly love to merit thee.[ ] with this mutual consciousness, yet obliged inevitably to meet, thrown constantly in each other's way, mary obliged too to look on shelley as her father's benefactor and support, their situation was a miserable one. as for shelley, when he had once broken silence he passed rapidly from tender affection to the most passionate love. his heart and brain were alike on fire, for at the root of his deep depression and unsettlement lay the fact, known as yet only to himself, of complete estrangement between himself and his wife. chapter v june-august perhaps of all the objects of shelley's devotion up to this time, harriet, his wife, was the only one with whom he had never, in the ideal sense, been in love. possibly this was one reason that against her alone he never had the violent revulsion, almost amounting to loathing, which was the usual reaction after his other passionate illusions. he had eloped with her when they were but boy and girl because he found her ready to elope with him, and because he was persuaded that she was a victim of tyranny and oppression, which, to this modern knight-errant, was tantamount to an obligation laid on him to rescue her. having eloped with her, he had married her, for her sake, and from a sense of chivalry, only with a quaint sort of apology to his friend hogg for this early departure from his own principles and those of the philosophic writers who had helped to mould his views. his affection for his wife had steadily increased after their marriage; she was fond of him and satisfied with her lot, and had made things very easy for him. she could not give him anything very deep in the way of love, but in return she was not very exacting; accommodating herself with good humour to all his vagaries, his changes of mood and plan, and his romantic friendships. even the presence of her elder sister eliza, who at an early period established herself as a member of their household, did not destroy although it did not add to their peace. it was during their stay in scotland, in , that the first shadow arose between them, and from this time harriet seems to have changed. she became cold and indifferent. during the next winter, when they lived at bracknell, she grew frivolous and extravagant, even yielding to habits of self-indulgence most repugnant to one so abstemious as shelley. he, on his part, was more and more drawn away from the home which had become uncongenial by the fascinating society of his brilliant, speculative friend, mrs. boinville (the white-haired "maimuna"), her daughter and sister. they were kind and encouraging to him, and their whole circle was cheerful, genial, and intellectual. this intimacy tended to widen the breach between husband and wife, while supplying none of the moral help which might have braced shelley to meet his difficulty. his letters and the stanza addressed to mrs. boinville[ ] show the profound depression under which he laboured in april and may. his pathetic poem to harriet, written in may, expresses only too plainly what he suffered from her alienation, and also his keen consciousness of the moral dangers that threatened him from the loosening of old ties, if left to himself unsupported by sympathy at home. but such feeling as harriet had was at this time quite blunted. she had treated his unsettled depression and gloomy abstraction as coldness and sullen discontent, and met them with careless unconcern. always a puppet in the hands of some one stronger than herself, she was encouraged by her elder sister, "the ever-present eliza," the object of shelley's abhorrence, to meet any want of attention on his part by this attitude of indifference; presumably on the assumption that men do not care for what they can have cheaply, and that the best way for a wife to keep a husband's affection is to show herself independent of it. good-humoured and shallow, easy-going and fond of amusement, she probably yielded to these counsels without difficulty. she was much admired by other men, and accepted their admiration willingly. from evidence which came to light not many years later, it appears shelley thought he had reason to believe she had been misled by one of these admirers, and that he became aware of this in june . no word of it was breathed by him at the time, and the painful story might never have been divulged but for subsequent events which dragged into publicity circumstances which he intended should be buried in oblivion. this is not a life of shelley, and the evidence of all this matter,--such evidence, that is, as has escaped destruction,--must be looked for elsewhere. in the lawsuit which he undertook after harriet's death to obtain possession of his children by her, he was content to state, "i was united to a woman of whom delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions." that time only confirmed his conviction of is clearly proved by his letter, written six years afterwards, to southey, who had accused him of guilt towards both his first and second wives. i take god to witness, if such a being is now regarding both you and me, and i pledge myself if we meet, as perhaps you expect, before him after death, to repeat the same in his presence, that you accuse me wrongfully. i am innocent of ill, either done or intended, the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from me. if you were my friend, i could tell you a history that would make you open your eyes, but i shall certainly never make the public my familiar confidant. it is quite certain that in june shelley, who had for months found his wife heartless, became convinced that she had also been faithless. a breach of the marriage vow was not, now or at any other time, regarded by him in the light of a heinous or unpardonable sin. like his master godwin, who held that right and wrong in these matters could only be decided by the circumstances of each individual case, he considered the vow itself to be the mistake, superfluous where it was based on mutual affection, tyrannic or false where it was not. nor did he recognise two different laws, for men and for women, in these respects. his subsequent relations with harriet show that, deeply as she had wounded him, he did not consider her criminally in fault. could she indeed be blamed for applying in her own way the dangerous principles of which she had heard so much? but she had ceased to care for him, and the death of mutual love argued, to his mind, the loosening of the tie. he had been faithful to her; her faithlessness cut away the ground from under his feet and left him defenceless against a new affection. no wonder that when his friend peacock went, by his request, to call on him in london, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind, "suffering like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection." his eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. he caught up a bottle of laudanum and said, "i never part from this!" he added, "i am always repeating to myself your lines from sophocles-- man's happiest lot is not to be, and when we tread life's thorny steep most blest are they, who, earliest free, descend to death's eternal sleep." harriet had been absent for some time at bath, but now, growing anxious at the rarity of news from her husband, she wrote up to hookham, his publisher, entreating to know what had become of him, and where he was. godwin, who called at hookham's the next day, heard of this letter, and began at last to awaken to the consciousness that something he did not understand was going on between shelley and his daughter. it is strange that mrs. godwin, a shrewd and suspicious woman, should not before now have called his attention to the fact. his diary for th july records a "talk with mary." what passed has not transpired. probably godwin "restricted himself to uttering his censures with seriousness and emphasis,"[ ] probably mary said little of any sort. on the th of july harriet shelley came up to town, summoned thither by a letter from her husband. he informed her of his determination to separate, and of his intention to take immediate measures securing her a sufficient income for her support. he fully expected that harriet would willingly concur in this arrangement, but she did no such thing; perhaps she did not believe he would carry it out. she never at any time took life seriously; she looked on the rupture between herself and shelley as trivial and temporary, and had no wish to make it otherwise. godwin called on her two or three times; he was aware of the estrangement, and probably hoped by argument and discussion to restore matters to their old footing and bring peace and equanimity to his own household. but although harriet was quite aware of shelley's love for godwin's daughter, and knew, too, that deeds were being prepared to assure her own separate maintenance, she said nothing to godwin, nor did her family give him any hint. the impending elopement, with all its consequences to godwin, were within her power to prevent, but she allowed matters to take their course. godwin, evidently very uncomfortable, chronicles a "talk with p. b. s.," and, on d july, a "talk with jane." but circumstances moved faster than he expected, and these many talks and discussions and complicated moves and counter-moves only made the position intolerable, and precipitated the final crisis. towards the close of that month shelley's confession was wrung from him: he told mary the whole truth, and how, though legally bound, he held himself morally free to offer himself to her if she would be his. to her, passionately devoted to the one man who was and was ever to remain the sun and centre of her existence, the thought of a wife indifferent to him, hard to him, false to him, was sacrilege; it was torture. she had not been brought up to look on marriage as a divine institution; she had probably never even heard it discussed but on grounds of expediency. harriet was his legal wife, so he could not marry mary, but what of that, after all? if there was a sacrifice in her power to make for him, was not that the greatest joy, the greatest honour that life could have in store for her? that her father would openly condemn her she knew, for she must have known that godwin's practice did not move on the same lofty plane as his principles. was he not at that moment making himself debtor to a man whose integrity he doubted? had he not, in twice marrying, taken care to proclaim, both to his friends and the public, that he did so _in spite_ of his opinions, which remained unchanged and unretracted, until some inconvenient application of them forced from him an expression of disapproval? her mother too, had she not held that ties which were dead should be buried? and though not, like godwin, condemning marriage as an institution, had she not been twice induced to form a connection which in one instance never was, in the other was not for some time consecrated by law? who was mary herself, that she should withstand one whom she felt to be the best as well as the cleverest man she had ever known? to talent she had been accustomed all her life, but here she saw something different, and what of all things calls forth most ardent response from a young and pure-minded girl, _a genius for goodness_; an aspiration and devotion such as she had dreamed of but never known, with powers which seemed to her absolutely inspired. she loved him, and she appreciated him,--as time abundantly showed,--rightly. she conceived that she wronged by her action no one but herself, and she did not hesitate. she pledged her heart and hand to shelley for life, and she did not disappoint him, nor he her. to the end of their lives, tried as they were to be by every kind of trouble, neither one nor the other ever repented the step they now took, nor modified their opinion of the grounds on which they took it. how shelley regarded it in after years we have already seen. mary, writing during her married life, when her judgment had been matured and her youthful buoyancy of spirit only too well sobered by stern and bitter experience, can find no harder name for it than "an imprudence." many years after, in , alluding to shelley's separation from harriet, she remarks, "his justification is, to me, obvious." and at a later date still, when she had been seventeen years a widow, she wrote in the preface to her edition of shelley's _poems_-- i abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions they engendered inspired his poetry. this is not the time to relate the truth, and i should reject any colouring of the truth. no account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall i further allude to them than to remark that the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as shelley, may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially, his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary. but they never "made the public their familiar confidant." they screened the erring as far as it was in their power to do so, although their reticence cost them dear, for it lent a colouring of probability to the slanders and misconstruction of all kinds which it was their constant fate to endure for others' sake, which pursued them to their lives' end, and beyond it. life, which is to no one what he expects, had many clouds for them. mary's life reached its zenith too suddenly, and with happiness came care in undue proportion. the future of intellectual expansion and creation which might have been hers was not to be fully realised, but perfections of character she might never have attained developed themselves as her nature was mellowed and moulded by time and by suffering. shelley's rupture with his first wife marks the end of his boyhood. up to that time, thanks to his poetic temperament, his were the strong and simple, but passing impulses and feelings of a child. "a being of large discourse" he assuredly was, but not as yet "looking before and after." now he was to acquire the doubtful blessing of that faculty. like undine when she became endued with a soul, he gained an immeasurable good, while he lost a something that never returned. early in the morning of th july mary godwin secretly left her father's house, accompanied by jane clairmont, and they started with shelley in a post-chaise for dover. chapter vi august -january from the day of their departure a joint journal was kept by shelley and mary, which tells their subsequent adventures and vicissitudes with the utmost candour and _naïveté_. a great deal of the earlier portion is written by shelley, but after a time mary becomes the principal diarist, and the latter part is almost entirely hers. its account of their first wanderings in france and switzerland was put into narrative form by her two or three years later, and published under the title _journal of a six weeks' tour_. but the transparent simplicity of the journal is invaluable, and carries with it an absolute conviction which no studied account can emulate or improve upon. considerable portions are, therefore, given in their entirety. that th of july was a hotter day than had been known in england for many years. between the sultry heat and exhaustion from the excitement and conflicting emotions of the last days, poor mary was completely overcome. "the heat made her faint," wrote shelley, "it was necessary at every stage that she should repose. i was divided between anxiety for her health and terror lest our pursuers should arrive. i reproached myself with not allowing her sufficient time to rest, with conceiving any evil so great that the slightest portion of her comfort might be sacrificed to avoid it. "at dartford we took four horses, that we might outstrip pursuit. we arrived at dover before four o'clock." "on arriving at dover," writes mary,[ ] "i was refreshed by a sea-bath. as we very much wished to cross the channel with all possible speed, we would not wait for the packet of the following day (it being then about four in the afternoon), but hiring a small boat, resolved to make the passage the same evening, the seamen promising us a voyage of two hours. "the evening was most beautiful; there was but little wind, and the sails flapped in the flagging breeze; the moon rose, and night came on, and with the night a slow, heavy swell and a fresh breeze, which soon produced a sea so violent as to toss the boat very much. i was dreadfully sea-sick, and, as is usually my custom when thus affected, i slept during the greater part of the night, awaking only from time to time to ask where we were, and to receive the dismal answer each time, 'not quite halfway.' "the wind was violent and contrary; if we could not reach calais the sailors proposed making for boulogne. they promised only two hours' sail from shore, yet hour after hour passed, and we were still far distant, when the moon sunk in the red and stormy horizon and the fast-flashing lightning became pale in the breaking day. "we were proceeding slowly against the wind, when suddenly a thunder squall struck the sail, and the waves rushed into the boat: even the sailors acknowledged that our situation was perilous; but they succeeded in reefing the sail; the wind was now changed, and we drove before the gale directly to calais." _journal_ (shelley).--mary did not know our danger; she was resting between my knees, that were unable to support her; she did not speak or look, but i felt that she was there. i had time in that moment to reflect, and even to reason upon death; it was rather a thing of discomfort and disappointment than horror to me. we should never be separated, but in death we might not know and feel our union as now. i hope, but my hopes are not unmixed with fear for what may befall this inestimable spirit when we appear to die. the morning broke, the lightning died away, the violence of the wind abated. we arrived at calais, whilst mary still slept; we drove upon the sands. suddenly the broad sun rose over france. godwin's diary for th july runs, "_five in the morning._ m. j. for dover." mrs. godwin, in fact, started in pursuit of the fugitives as soon as they were missed. neither shelley nor mary were the objects of her anxiety, but her own daughter. jane clairmont, who cared no more for her mother than she did for any one else, had guessed mary's secret or insinuated herself into her confidence some time before the final _dénouement_ of the love-affair. wild and wayward, ready for anything in the shape of a romantic adventure, and longing for freedom from the restraints of home, she had sympathised with, and perhaps helped shelley and mary. she was in no wise anxious to be left to mope alone, nor to be exposed to cross-questioning she could ill have met. she claimed to escape with them as a return for her good offices, and whatever mary may have thought or wished, shelley was not one to leave her behind "in slavery." mrs. godwin arrived at calais by the very packet the fugitives had refused to wait for. _journal_ (shelley).--in the evening captain davidson came and told us that a fat lady had arrived who said i had run away with her daughter; it was mrs. godwin. jane spent the night with her mother. _july ._--jane informs us that she is unable to withstand the pathos of mrs. godwin's appeal. she appealed to the municipality of paris, to past slavery and to future freedom. i counselled her to take at least half an hour for consideration. she returned to mrs. godwin and informed her that she resolved to continue with us. mrs. godwin departed without answering a word. it is difficult to understand how this mother had so little authority over her own girl of sixteen. she might rule godwin, but she evidently could not influence, far less rule her daughter. shelley's influence, as far as it was exerted at all, was used in favour of jane's remaining with them, and he paid dearly in after years for the heavy responsibility he now assumed. the travellers proceeded to paris, where they were obliged to remain longer than they intended, finding themselves so absolutely without money, nothing having been prearranged in their sudden flight, that shelley had to sell his watch and chain for eight napoleons. funds were at last procured through tavernier, a french man of business, and they were free to put into execution the plan they had resolved upon, namely, to _walk_ through france, buying an ass to carry their portmanteau and one of them by turns. _journal, august _ (mary).--jane and shelley go to the ass merchant; we buy an ass. the day spent in preparation for departure. their landlady tried to dissuade them from their design. she represented to us that a large army had been recently disbanded, that the soldiers and officers wandered idle about the country, and that _les dames seroient certainement enlevées_. but we were proof against her arguments, and, packing up a few necessaries, leaving the rest to go by the diligence, we departed in a _fiacre_ from the door of the hotel, our little ass following.[ ] _journal_ (mary).--we set out to charenton in the evening, carrying the ass, who was weak and unfit for labour, like the miller and his son. we dismissed the coach at the barrier. it was dusk, and the ass seemed totally unable to bear one of us, appearing to sink under the portmanteau, though it was small and light. we were, however, merry enough, and thought the leagues short. we arrived at charenton about ten. charenton is prettily situated in a valley, through which the seine flows, winding among banks variegated with trees. on looking at this scene c... (jane) exclaimed, "oh! this is beautiful enough; let us live here." this was her exclamation on every new scene, and as each surpassed the one before, she cried, "i am glad we did not live at charenton, but let us live here."[ ] _august _ (shelley).--we sell our ass and purchase a mule, in which we much resemble him who never made a bargain but always lost half. the day is most beautiful. (mary).--about nine o'clock we departed; we were clad in black silk. i rode on the mule, which carried also our portmanteau. s. and c. (jane) followed, bringing a small basket of provisions. at about one we arrived at gros-bois, where, under the shade of trees, we ate our bread and fruit, and drank our wine, thinking of don quixote and sancho panza. _thursday, august _ (mary).--from provins we came to nogent. the town was entirely desolated by the cossacks; the houses were reduced to heaps of white ruins, and the bridge was destroyed. proceeding on our way we left the great road and arrived at st. aubin, a beautiful little village situated among trees. this village was also completely destroyed. the inhabitants told us the cossacks had not left one cow in the village. notwithstanding the entreaties of the people, who eagerly desired us to stay all night, we continued our route to trois maisons, three long leagues farther, on an unfrequented road, and which in many places was hardly perceptible from the surrounding waste.... as night approached our fears increased that we should not be able to distinguish the road, and mary expressed these fears in a very complaining tone. we arrived at trois maisons at nine o'clock. jane went up to the first cottage to ask our way, but was only answered by unmeaning laughter. we, however, discovered a kind of an _auberge_, where, having in some degree satisfied our hunger by milk and sour bread, we retired to a wretched apartment to bed. but first let me observe that we discovered that the inhabitants were not in the habit of washing themselves, either when they rose or went to bed. _friday, august ._--we did not set out from here till eleven o'clock, and travelled a long league under the very eye of a burning sun. shelley, having sprained his leg, was obliged to ride all day. _saturday, august _ (troyes).--we are disgusted with the excessive dirt of our habitation. shelley goes to inquire about conveyances. he sells the mule for forty francs and the saddle for sixteen francs. in all our bargains for ass, saddle, and mule we lose more than fifteen napoleons. money we can but little spare now. jane and shelley seek for a conveyance to neufchâtel. from troyes shelley wrote to harriet, expressing his anxiety for her welfare, and urging her in her own interests to come out to switzerland, where he, who would always remain her best and most disinterested friend, would procure for her some sweet retreat among the mountains. he tells her some details of their adventures in the simplest manner imaginable; never, apparently, doubting for a moment but that they would interest her as much as they did him. harriet, it is needless to say, did not come. had she done so, she would not have found shelley, for, as the sequel shows, he was back in london almost as soon as she could have got to switzerland. _journal, august _ (mary).--at four in the morning we depart from troyes, and proceed in the new vehicle to vandeuvres. the village remains still ruined by the war. we rest at vandeuvres two hours, but walk in a wood belonging to a neighbouring chateau, and sleep under its shade. the moss was so soft; the murmur of the wind in the leaves was sweeter than Ã�olian music; we forgot that we were in france or in the world for a time. * * * * * _august ._--the _voiturier_ insists upon our passing the night at the village of mort. we go out on the rocks, and shelley and i read part of _mary_, a fiction. we return at dark, and, unable to enter the beds, we pass a few comfortless hours by the kitchen fireside. _thursday, august ._--we leave mort at four. after some hours of tedious travelling, through a most beautiful country, we arrive at noè. from the summit of one of the hills we see the whole expanse of the valley filled with a white, undulating mist, over which the piny hills pierced like islands. the sun had just risen, and a ray of the red light lay on the waves of this fluctuating vapour. to the west, opposite the sun, it seemed driven by the light against the rock in immense masses of foaming cloud until it becomes lost in the distance, mixing its tints with the fleecy sky. at noè, whilst our postillion waited, we walked into the forest of pines; it was a scene of enchantment, where every sound and sight contributed to charm. our mossy seat in the deepest recesses of the wood was enclosed from the world by an impenetrable veil. on our return the postillion had departed without us; he left word that he expected to meet us on the road. we proceeded there upon foot to maison neuve, an _auberge_ a league distant. at maison neuve he had left a message importing that he should proceed to pontarlier, six leagues distant, and that unless he found us there he should return. we despatched a boy on horseback for him; he promised to wait for us at the next village; we walked two leagues in the expectation of finding him there. the evening was most beautiful; the horned moon hung in the light of sunset that threw a glow of unusual depth of redness above the piny mountains and the dark deep valleys which they included. at savrine we found, according to our expectation, that m. le voiturier had pursued his journey with the utmost speed. we engaged a _voiture_ for pontarlier. jane very unable to walk. the moon becomes yellow and hangs close to the woody horizon. it is dark before we arrive at pontarlier. the postillion tells many lies. we sleep, for the first time in france, in a clean bed. _friday, august ._--we pursue our journey towards neufchâtel. we pass delightful scenes of verdure surpassing imagination; here first we see clear mountain streams. we pass the barrier between france and switzerland, and, after descending nearly a league, between lofty rocks covered with pines and interspersed with green glades, where the grass is short and soft and beautifully verdant, we arrive at st. sulpice. the mule is very lame; we determined to engage another horse for the remainder of the way. our _voiturier_ had determined to leave us, and had taken measures to that effect. the mountains after st. sulpice become loftier and more beautiful. two leagues from neufchâtel we see the alps; hill after hill is seen extending its craggy outline before the other, and far behind all, towering above every feature of the scene, the snowy alps; they are miles distant; they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white that arrange themselves on the horizon in summer. this immensity staggers the imagination, and so far surpasses all conception that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they are indeed mountains. we arrive at neufchâtel and sleep. _saturday, august ._--we consult on our situation. there are no letters at the _bureau de poste_; there cannot be for a week. shelley goes to the banker's, who promises an answer in two hours; at the conclusion of the time he sends for shelley, and, to our astonishment and consolation, shelley returns staggering under the weight of a large canvas bag full of silver. shelley alone looks grave on the occasion, for he alone clearly apprehends that francs and écus and louis d'or are like the white and flying cloud of noon, that is gone before one can say "jack robinson." shelley goes to secure a place in the diligence; they are all taken. he meets there with a swiss who speaks english; this man is imbued with the spirit of true politeness. he endeavours to perform real services, and seems to regard the mere ceremonies of the affair as things of very little value. he makes a bargain with a _voiturier_ to take us to lucerne for eighteen écus. we arrange to depart at four the next morning. our swiss friend appoints to meet us there. _sunday, august ._--go from neufchâtel at six; our swiss accompanies us a little way out of town. there is a mist to-day, so we cannot see the alps; the drive, however, is interesting, especially in the latter part of the day. shelley and jane talk concerning jane's character. we arrive before seven at soleure. shelley and mary go to the much-praised cathedral, and find it very modern and stupid. _monday, august ._--leave soleure at half-past five; very cold indeed, but we now again see the magnificent mountains of le valais. mary is not well, and all are tired of wheeled machines. shelley is in a jocosely horrible mood. we dine at zoffingen, and sleep there two hours. in our drive after dinner we see the mountains of st. gothard, etc. change our plan of going over st. gothard. arrive tired to death; find at the room of the inn a horrible spinet and a case of stuffed birds. sup at _table d'hôte_. _tuesday, august ._--we leave at four o'clock and arrive at lucerne about ten. after breakfast we hire a boat to take us down the lake. shelley and mary go out to buy several needful things, and then we embark. it is a most divine day; the farther we advance the more magnificent are the shores of the lake--rock and pine forests covering the feet of the immense mountains. we read part of l'abbé barruel's _histoire du jacobinisme_. we land at bessen, go to the wrong inn, where a most comical scene ensues. we sleep at brunnen. before we sleep, however, we look out of window. _wednesday, august ._--we consult on our situation. we cannot procure a house; we are in despair; the filth of the apartment is terrible to mary; she cannot bear it all the winter. we propose to proceed to fluelen, but the wind comes from italy, and will not permit. at last we find a lodging in an ugly house they call the château for one louis a month, which we take; it consists of two rooms. mary and shelley walk to the shore of the lake and read the description of the siege of jerusalem in tacitus. we come home, look out of window and go to bed. _thursday, august ._--we read abbé barruel. shelley and jane make purchases; we pack up our things and take possession of our house, which we have engaged for six months. receive a visit from the _médecin_ and the old abbé, whom, it must be owned, we do not treat with proper politeness. we arrange our apartment, and write part of shelley's romance. _friday, august ._--write the romance till three o'clock. propose crossing mount st. gothard. determine at last to return to england; only wait to set off till the washerwoman brings home our linen. the little frenchman arrives with tubs and plums and scissors and salt. the linen is not dry; we are compelled to wait until to-morrow. we engage a boat to take us to lucerne at six the following morning. _saturday, august ._--we depart at seven; it rains violently till just the end of our voyage. we conjecture the astonishment of the good people at brunnen. we arrive at lucerne, dine, then write a part of the romance, and read _shakespeare_. interrupted by jane's horrors; pack up. we have engaged a boat for basle. _sunday, august ._--depart at six o'clock. the river is exceedingly beautiful; the waves break on the rocks, and the descents are steep and rapid. it rained the whole day. we stopped at mettingen to dine, and there surveyed at our ease the horrid and slimy faces of our companions in voyage; our only wish was to absolutely annihilate such uncleanly animals, to which we might have addressed the boatman's speech to pope: "'twere easier for god to make entirely new men than attempt to purify such monsters as these." after a voyage in the rain, rendered disagreeable only by the presence of these loathsome "creepers," we arrive, shelley much exhausted, at dettingen, our resting-place for the night. it never seems to have occurred to them before arriving in switzerland that they had no money wherewith to carry out their further plans, that it was more difficult to obtain it abroad than at home, and that the remainder of their little store would hardly suffice to take them back to england. no sooner thought, however, than done. they gave themselves no rest after their long and arduous journey, but started straight back viâ the rhine, arriving in rotterdam on th september with only twenty écus remaining, having been "horribly cheated." "make arrangements, and talk of many things, past, present, and to come." _journal, friday, september ._--we have arranged with a captain to take us to england--three guineas a-piece; at three o'clock we sail, and in the evening arrive at marsluys, where a bad wind obliges us to stay. _saturday, september ._--we remain at marsluys, mary begins _hate_, and gives shelley the greater pleasure. shelley writes part of his romance. sleep at marsluys. wind contrary. _sunday, september ._--the wind becomes more favourable. we hear that we are to sail. mary writes more of her _hate_. we depart, cross the bar; the sea is horribly tempestuous, and mary is nearly sick, nor is shelley much better. there is an easterly gale in the night which almost kills us, whilst it carries us nearer our journey's end. _monday, september ._--it is calm; we remain on deck nearly the whole day. mary recovers from her sickness. we dispute with one man upon the slave trade. the wanderers arrived at last at gravesend, not only penniless, but unable even to pay their passage money, or to discharge the hackney coach in which they drove about from place to place in search of assistance. at the time of shelley's sudden flight, the deeds by which part of his income was transferred to harriet were still in preparation only, and he had, without thinking of the consequences of his act, written from switzerland to his bankers, directing them to honour her calls for money, as far as his account allowed of it. she must have availed herself so well of this permission that now he found he could only obtain the sum he wanted by applying for it to her. the relations between shelley and harriet, must, at first, have seemed to mary as incomprehensible as they still do to readers of the _journal_. their interviews, necessarily very frequent in the next few months, were, on the whole, quite friendly. shelley was kind and perfectly ingenuous and sincere; harriet was sometimes "civil" and good tempered, sometimes cross and provoking. but on neither side was there any pretence of deep pain, of wounded pride or bitter constraint. _journal, tuesday, september ._--we arrive at gravesend, and with great difficulty prevail on the captain to trust us. we go by boat to london; take a coach; call on hookham. t. h. not at home. c. treats us very ill. call at voisey's. henry goes to harriet. shelley calls on her, whilst poor mary and jane are left in the coach for two whole hours. our debt is discharged. shelley gets clothes for himself. go to strafford hotel, dine, and go to bed. _wednesday, september ._--talk and read the newspaper. shelley calls on harriet, who is certainly a very odd creature; he writes several letters; calls on hookham, and brings home wordsworth's _excursion_, of which we read a part, much disappointed. he is a slave. shelley engages lodgings, to which we remove in the evening. shelley now lost no time in putting himself in communication with skinner street, and on the first day after they settled in their new lodgings he addressed a letter to godwin. chapter vii september -may whatever may have been godwin's degree of responsibility for the opinions which had enabled shelley to elope in all good faith with his daughter, and which saved her from serious scruple in eloping with shelley, it would be impossible not to sympathise with the father's feelings after the event. people do not resent those misfortunes least which they have helped to bring on themselves, and no one ever derived less consolation from his own theories than did godwin from his, as soon as they were unpleasantly put into practice. he had done little to win his daughter's confidence, but he was keenly wounded by the proof she had given of its absence. his pride, as well as his affection, had suffered a serious blow through her departure and that of jane. for a philosopher like him, accustomed to be looked up to and consulted on matters of education, such a failure in his own family was a public stigma. false and malicious reports got about, which had an additional and peculiar sting from their originating partly in his well-known impecuniosity. it was currently rumoured that he had sold the two girls to shelley for £ and £ respectively. no wonder that godwin, accustomed to look down from a lofty altitude on such minor matters as money and indebtedness, felt now that he could not hold up his head. he shunned his old friends, and they, for the most part, felt this and avoided him. his home was embittered and spoilt. mrs. godwin, incensed at jane's conduct, vented her wrath in abuse and invective on shelley and mary. no one has thought it worth while to record how poor fanny was affected by the first news of the family calamity. it must have reached her in ireland, and her subsequent return home was dismal indeed. the loss of her only sister was a bitter grief to her; and, strong as was her disapproval of that sister's conduct, it must have given her a pang to feel that the culpable jane had enjoyed shelley's and mary's confidence, while she who loved them with a really unselfish love, had been excluded from it. what could she now say or do to cheer godwin? how parry mrs. godwin's inconsiderate and intemperate complaints and innuendos? no doubt fanny had often stood up for mary with her stepmother, and now mary herself had cut the ground from under her feet. charles clairmont was at home again; ostensibly on the plea of helping in the publishing business, but as a fact idling about, on the lookout for some lucky opening. he cared no more than did jane for the family (including his own mother) in skinner street: like every clairmont, he was an adventurer, and promptly transferred his sympathies to any point which suited himself. to crown all, william, the youngest son, had become infected with the spirit of revolt, and had, as godwin expresses it, "eloped for two nights," giving his family no little anxiety. the first and immediate result of shelley's letter to godwin was _a visit to his windows_ by mrs. godwin and fanny, who tried in this way to get a surreptitious peep at the three truants. shelley went out to them, but they would not speak to him. late that evening, however, charles clairmont appeared. he was to be another thorn in the side of the interdicted yet indispensable shelley. he did not mind having a foot in each camp, and had no scruples about coming as often and staying as long as he liked, or in retailing a large amount of gossip. they discussed william's escapade, and the various plans for the immuring of jane, if she could be caught. this did not predispose jane to listen to the overtures subsequently made to her from time to time by her relatives. godwin replied to shelley's letter, but declined all further communication with him except through a solicitor. mrs. godwin's spirit of rancour was such that, several weeks later, she, on one occasion, forbade fanny to come down to dinner because she had received a lock of mary's hair, probably conveyed to her by charles clairmont, who, in return, did not fail to inform mary of the whole story. in spite, however, of this vehement show of animosity, shelley was kept through one channel or another only too well informed of godwin's affairs. indeed, he was never suffered to forget them for long at a time. no sign of impatience or resentment ever appears in his journal or letters. not only was godwin the father of his beloved, but he was still, to shelley, the fountain-head of wisdom, philosophy, and inspiration. mary, too, was devoted to her father, and never wavered in her conviction that his inimical attitude proceeded from no impulse of his own mind, but that he was upheld in it by the influence and interference of mrs. godwin. the journal of shelley and mary for the next few months is, in its extreme simplicity, a curious record of a most uncomfortable time; a medley of lodgings, lawyers, money-lenders, bailiffs, wild schemes, and literary pursuits. penniless themselves, they were yet responsible for hundreds and thousands of pounds of other people's debts; there was harriet running up bills at shops and hotels and sending her creditors on to shelley; godwin perpetually threatened with bankruptcy, refusing to see the man who had robbed him of his daughter, yet with literally no other hope of support but his help; jane clairmont now, as for years to come, entirely dependent on them for everything; shelley's friends quartering themselves on him all day and every day, often taking advantage of his love of society and intellectual friction, of mary's youth and inexperience and compliant good-nature, to live at his expense, and, in one case at least, to obtain from him money which he really had not got, and could only borrow, at ruinous interest, on his expectations. he had frequently to be in hiding from bailiffs, change his lodgings, sleep at friends' houses or at different hotels, getting his letters when he could make a stealthy appointment to meet mary, perhaps at st. paul's, perhaps at some street corner or outside some coffee-house,--anywhere where he might escape observation. he was not always certain how far he could rely on those whom he had considered his friends, such as the brothers hookham. rightly or wrongly, he was led to imagine that harriet, from motives of revenge, was bent on ruining godwin, and that for this purpose she would aid and abet in his own arrest, by persuading the hookhams in such a case to refuse bail. the rumour of this conspiracy was conveyed to the shelleys in a note from fanny, who, for godwin's sake and theirs, broke through the stern embargo laid on all communication. yet through all these troubles and bewilderments there went on a perpetual under-current of reading and study, thought and discussion. the actual existence was there, and all these external accidents of circumstance, the realities in ordinary lives were, in these extraordinary lives, treated really as accidents, as passing hindrances to serious purpose, and no more. nothing but mary's true love for shelley and perfect happiness with him could have tided her over this time. youth, however, was a wonderful helper, added to the unusual intellectual vigour and vivacity which made it possible for her, as it would be to few girls of seventeen, to forget the daily worries of life in reading and study. perhaps at no time was the even balance of her nature more clearly manifested than now, when, after living through a romance that will last in story as long as the name of shelley, her existence revolutionised, her sensibilities preternaturally stimulated, having taken, as it were, a life's experiences by cumulation in a few months; weak and depressed in health, too, she still had sufficient energy and self-control to apply herself to a solid course of intellectual training. jane's presence added to their unsettlement, although at times it may have afforded them some amusement. wilful, fanciful, with a sense of humour and many good impulses, but with that decided dash of charlatanism which characterised the clairmonts, and little true sensibility, she was a willing disciple for any wild flights of fancy, and a keen participator in all impossible projects and harum-scarum makeshifts. her presence stimulated and enlivened shelley, her whims and fancies did not seriously affect, beyond amusing him, and she was an indefatigable companion for him in his walks and wanderings, now that mary was becoming less and less able to go about. to mary, however, she must often have been an incubus, a perpetual _third_, and one who, if sometimes useful, often gave a great deal of trouble too. she did not bring to mary, as she did to shelley, the charm of novelty; nor does the unfolding of one girl's character present to another girl whose character is also in process of development such attractive problems as it does to a young and speculative man. mary was too noble by nature and too perfectly in accord with shelley to indulge in actual jealousy of jane's companionship with him; still, she must often have had a weary time when those two were scouring the town on their multifarious errands; misunderstandings, also, would occur, only to be removed by long and patient explanation. jane (or "clara," as about this time she elected to call herself, in preference to her own less romantic name) was hardly more than a child, and in some respects a very childish child. excitable and nervous, she had no idea of putting constraint upon herself for others' sake, and gave her neighbours very little rest, as she preferred any amount of scenes to humdrum quiet. she and shelley would sit up half the night, amusing themselves with wild speculations, natural and supernatural, till she would go off into hysterics or trances, or, when she had at last gone to bed, would walk in her sleep, see phantoms, and frighten them all with her terrors. in the end she was invariably brought to poor mary, who, delicate in health, had gone early to rest, but had to bestir herself to bring jane to reason, and to "console her with her all-powerful benevolence," as shelley describes it. every page of the journal testifies to the extreme youth of the writers; likely and unlikely events are chronicled with equal simplicity. where all is new, one thing is not more startling than another; and the commonplaces of everyday life may afford more occasion for surprise than the strangest anomalies. specimens only of the diary can be given here, and they are best given without comment. _sunday, september ._--mary receives her first lesson in greek. she reads the _curse of kehama_, while shelley walks out with peacock, who dines. shelley walks part of the way home with him. curious account of harriet. we talk, study a little greek, and go to bed. _tuesday, september ._--shelley writes to hookham and tavernier; goes with hookham to ballachy's. mary reads _political justice_ all the morning. study greek. in the evening shelley reads _thalaba_ aloud. _monday, september ._--shelley goes with peacock to ballachy's, and engages lodgings at pancras. visit from mrs. pringer. read _political justice_ and the _empire of the nairs_. _tuesday, september ._--read _political justice_; finish the _nairs_; pack up and go to our lodgings in somers town. _friday, september ._--after breakfast walk to hampstead heath. discuss the possibility of converting and liberating two heiresses; arrange a plan on the subject.... peacock calls; talk with him concerning the heiresses and marian, arrange his marriage. _sunday, october ._--peacock comes after breakfast; walk over primrose hill; sail little boats; return a little before four; talk. read _political justice_ in the evening; talk. _monday, october ._--read _political justice_. hookham calls. walk with peacock to the lake of nangis and set off little fire-boats. after dinner talk and let off fireworks. talk of the west of ireland plan. _wednesday, october ._--peacock at breakfast. walk to the lake of nangis and sail fire-boats. read _political justice_. shelley reads the _ancient mariner_ aloud. letter from harriet, very civil. £ for £ . _friday, october _ (shelley).--read _political justice_. peacock calls. jane, for some reason, refuses to walk. we traverse the fields towards hampstead. under an expansive oak lies a dead calf; the cow, lean from grief, is watching it. (contemplate subject for poem.) the sunset is beautiful. return at . peacock departs. mary goes to bed at half-past ; shelley sits up with jane. talk of oppression and reform, of cutting squares of skin from the soldiers' backs. jane states her conception of the subterranean community of women. talk of hogg, harriet, miss hitchener, etc. at o'clock shelley observes that it is the witching time of night; he inquires soon after if it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears; in half an hour the question is repeated in a different form; at they retire awestruck and hardly daring to breathe. shelley says to jane, "good-night;" his hand is leaning on the table; he is conscious of an expression in his countenance which he cannot repress. jane hesitates. "good-night" again. she still hesitates. "did you ever read the tragedy of _orra_?" said shelley. "yes. how horribly you look!--take your eyes off." "good-night" again, and jane runs to her room. shelley, unable to sleep, kissed mary, and prepared to sit beside her and read till morning, when rapid footsteps descended the stairs. jane was there; her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay--it beamed with a whiteness that seemed almost like light; her lips and cheeks were of one deadly hue; the skin of her face and forehead was drawn into innumerable wrinkles--the lineaments of terror that could not be contained; her hair came prominent and erect; her eyes were wide and staring, drawn almost from the sockets by the convulsion of the muscles; the eyelids were forced in, and the eyeballs, without any relief, seemed as if they had been newly inserted, in ghastly sport, in the sockets of a lifeless head. this frightful spectacle endured but for a few moments--it was displaced by terror and confusion, violent indeed, and full of dismay, but human. she asked me if i had touched her pillow (her tone was that of dreadful alarm). i said, "no, no! if you will come into the room i will tell you." i informed her of mary's pregnancy; this seemed to check her violence. she told me that a pillow placed upon her bed had been removed, in the moment that she turned her eyes away to a chair at some distance, and evidently by no human power. she was positive as to the facts of her self-possession and calmness. her manner convinced me that she was not deceived. we continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries. i read part of _alexy_; i repeated one of my own poems. our conversation, though intentionally directed to other topics, irresistibly recurred to these. our candles burned low; we feared they would not last until daylight. just as the dawn was struggling with moonlight, jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before; she described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness and conscious power over her. i covered my face with my hands, and spoke to her in the most studied gentleness. it was ineffectual; her horror and agony increased even to the most dreadful convulsions. she shrieked and writhed on the floor. i ran to mary; i communicated in few words the state of jane. i brought her to mary. the convulsions gradually ceased, and she slept. at daybreak we examined her apartment and found her pillow on the chair. _saturday, october _ (mary).--read _political justice_. we walked out; when we return shelley talks with jane, and i read _wrongs of women_. in the evening we talk and read. _tuesday, october ._--read _political justice_. shelley goes to the westminster insurance office. study greek. peacock dines. receive a refusal about the money.... have a good-humoured letter from harriet, and a cold and even sarcastic one from mrs. boinville. shelley reads the _history of the illuminati_, out of barruel, to us. _wednesday, october ._--read _political justice_. a letter from marshall; jane goes there. when she comes home we go to cheapside; returning, an occurrence. deliberation until ; burn the letter; sleep early. _thursday, october ._--communicate the burning of the letter. much dispute and discussion concerning its probable contents. alarm. determine to quit london; send for £ from hookham. change our resolution. go to the play. the extreme depravity and disgusting nature of the scene; the inefficacy of acting to encourage or maintain the delusion. the loathsome sight of men personating characters which do not and cannot belong to them. shelley displeased with what he saw of kean. return. alarm. we sleep at the stratford hotel. _friday, october _ (shelley).--jane's insensibility and incapacity for the slightest degree of friendship. the feelings occasioned by this discovery prevent me from maintaining any measure in security. this highly incorrect; subversion of the first principles of true philosophy; characters, particularly those which are unformed, may change. beware of weakly giving way to trivial sympathies. content yourself with one great affection--with a single mighty hope; let the rest of mankind be the subjects of your benevolence, your justice, and, as human beings, of your sensibility; but, as you value many hours of peace, never suffer more than one even to approach the hallowed circle. nothing should shake the truly great spirit which is not sufficiently mighty to destroy it. peacock calls. i take some interest in this man, but no possible conduct of his would disturb my tranquillity.... converse with jane; her mind unsettled; her character unformed; occasion of hope from some instances of softness and feeling; she is not entirely insensible to concessions, new proofs that the most exalted philosophy, the truest virtue, consists in an habitual contempt of self; a subduing of all angry feelings; a sacrifice of pride and selfishness. when you attempt benefit to either an individual or a community, abstain from imputing it as an error that they despise or overlook your virtue. these are incidental reflections which arise only indirectly from the circumstances recorded. walk with peacock to the pond; talk of marian and greek metre. peacock dines. in the evening read cicero and the _paradoxa_. night comes; jane walks in her sleep, and groans horribly; listen for two hours; at length bring her to mary. begin _julius_, and finish the little volume of cicero. the next morning the chimney board in jane's room is found to have walked leisurely into the middle of the room, accompanied by the pillow, who, being very sleepy, tried to get into bed again, but sat down on his back. _saturday, october _ (mary).--after breakfast read _political justice_. shelley goes with peacock to ballachy's. a disappointment; it is put off till monday. they then go to homerton. finish _st. leon_. jane writes to marshall. a letter from my father. talking; jane and i walk out. shelley and peacock return at . shelley advises jane not to go. jane's letter to my father. a refusal. talk about going away, and, as usual, settle nothing. _wednesday, october ._--finish _political justice_, read _caleb williams_. shelley goes to the city, and meets with a total failure. send to hookham. shelley reads a part of _comus_ aloud. _thursday, october ._--shelley goes to the city. finish _caleb williams_; read to jane. peacock calls; he has called on my father, who will not speak about shelley to any one but an attorney. oh! philosophy!... _saturday, october ._--finish the _life of alfieri_. go to the tomb (mary wollstonecraft's), and read the _essay on sepulchres_ there. shelley is out all the morning at the lawyer's, but nothing is done.... in the evening a letter from fanny, warning us of the hookhams. jane and shelley go after her; they find her, but fanny runs away. _monday, october ._--read aloud to jane. at go out to meet shelley. walk up and down fleet street; call at peacock's; return to fleet street; call again at peacock's; return to pancras; remain an hour or two. people call; i suppose bailiffs. return to peacock's. call at the coffee-house; see shelley; he has been to ballachy's. good hopes; to be decided thursday morning. return to peacock's; dine there; get money. return home in a coach; go to bed soon, tired to death. _thursday, october ._--write to shelley. jane goes to fanny.... call at peacock's; go to the hotel; shelley not there. go back to peacock's. peacock goes to shelley. meet shelley in holborn. walk up and down bartlett's buildings.... come with him to peacock's; talk with him till ; return to pancras without him. jane in the dumps all evening about going away. _wednesday, october ._--a visit from shelley's old friends;[ ] they go away much disappointed and very angry. he has written to t. hookham to ask him to be bail. return to pancras about . read all the evening. _thursday, october ._--write to fanny all morning. we had received letters from skinner street in the morning. fanny is very doleful, and c. c. contradicts in one line what he had said in the line before. after two go to st. paul's; meet shelley; go with him in a coach to hookham's; h. is out; return; leave him and proceed to pancras. he has not received a definitive answer from ballachy; meet a money-lender, of whom i have some hopes. read aloud to jane in the evening. jane goes to sleep. write to shelley. a letter comes enclosing a letter from hookham consenting to justify bail. harriet has been to work there against my father. _tuesday, november ._--learn greek all morning. shelley goes to the 'change. jane calls.[ ] people want their money; won't send up dinner, and we are all very hungry. jane goes to hookham. shelley and i talk about her character. jane returns without money. writes to fanny about coming to see her; she can't come. writes to charles. goes to peacock to send him to us with some eatables; he is out. charles promises to see her. she returns to pancras; he goes there, and tells the dismal state of the skinner street affairs. shelley goes to peacock's; comes home with cakes. wait till t. hookham sends money to pay the bill. shelley returns to pancras. have tea, and go to bed. shelley goes to peacock's to sleep. these are two specimens of the notes constantly passing between them. mary to shelley. _ th october._ for what a minute did i see you yesterday. is this the way, my beloved, we are to live till the th? in the morning when i wake i turn to look on you. dearest shelley, you are solitary and uncomfortable. why cannot i be with you, to cheer you and press you to my heart? ah! my love, you have no friends; why, then, should you be torn from the only one who has affection for you? but i shall see you to-night, and this is the hope i shall live on through the day. be happy, dear shelley, and think of me! i know how tenderly you love me, and how you repine at your absence from me. when shall we be free of treachery? i send you the letter i told you of from harriet, and a letter we received yesterday from fanny; the history of this interview i will tell you when i come. i was so dreadfully tired yesterday that i was obliged to take a coach home. forgive this extravagance, but i am so very weak at present, and i had been so agitated through the day, that i was not able to stand; a morning's rest, however, will set me quite right again; i shall be well when i meet you this evening. will you be at the door of the coffee-house at o'clock, as it is disagreeable to go into those places. i shall be there exactly at that time, and we can go into st. paul's, where we can sit down. i send you _diogenes_, as you have no books. hookham was so ill-tempered as not to send the book i asked for. so this is the end of my letter, dearest love. what do they mean?[ ] i detest mrs. godwin; she plagues my father out of his life; and these----well, no matter. why will godwin not follow the obvious bent of his affections, and be reconciled to us? no; his prejudices, the world, and _she_--all these forbid it. what am i to do? trust to time, of course, for what else can i do. good-night, my love; to-morrow i will seal this blessing on your lips. press me, your own mary, to your heart. perhaps she will one day have a father; till then be everything to me, love; and, indeed, i will be a good girl, and never vex you. i will learn greek and----but when shall we meet when i may tell you all this, and you will so sweetly reward me? but good-night; i am wofully tired, and so sleepy. one kiss--well, that is enough--to-morrow! shelley to mary. _ th october._ my beloved mary--i know not whether these transient meetings produce not as much pain as pleasure. what have i said? i do not mean it. i will not forget the sweet moments when i saw your eyes--the divine rapture of the few and fleeting kisses. yet, indeed, this must cease; indeed, we must not part thus wretchedly to meet amid the comfortless tumult of business; to part i know not how. well, dearest love, to-morrow--to-morrow night. that eternal clock! oh! that i could "fright the steeds of lazy-paced time." i do not think that i am less impatient now than formerly to repossess--to entirely engross--my own treasured love. it seems so unworthy a cause for the slightest separation. i could reconcile it to my own feelings to go to prison if they would cease to persecute us with interruptions. would it not be better, my heavenly love, to creep into the loathliest cave so that we might be together. mary, love, we must be united; i will not part from you again after saturday night. we must devise some scheme. i must return. your thoughts alone can waken mine to energy; my mind without yours is dead and cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down. it seems as if you alone could shield me from impurity and vice. if i were absent from you long, i should shudder with horror at myself; my understanding becomes undisciplined without you. i believe i must become in mary's hands what harriet was in mine. yet how differently disposed--how devoted and affectionate--how, beyond measure, reverencing and adoring--the intelligence that governs me! i repent me of this simile; it is unjust; it is false. nor do i mean that i consider you much my superior, evidently as you surpass me in originality and simplicity of mind. how divinely sweet a task it is to imitate each other's excellences, and each moment to become wiser in this surpassing love, so that, constituting but one being, all real knowledge may be comprised in the maxim [greek: gnôthi seauton]--(know thyself)--with infinitely more justice than in its narrow and common application. i enclose you hookham's note; what do you think of it? my head aches; i am not well; i am tired with this comfortless estrangement from all that is dear to me. my own dearest love, good-night. i meet you in staples inn at twelve to-morrow--half an hour before twelve. i have written to hooper and sir j. shelley. _journal, thursday, november _ (mary).--work; write to shelley; read greek grammar. receive a letter from mr. booth; so all my hopes are over there. ah! isabel; i did not think you would act thus. read and work in the evening. receive a letter from shelley. write to him. [letter not transcribed here.] _sunday, november ._--talk to shelley. he writes a great heap of letters. read part of _st. leon_. talk with him all evening; this is a day devoted to love in idleness. go to sleep early in the evening. shelley goes away a little before . _wednesday, november ._--pack up all morning; leave pancras about ; call at peacock's for shelley; charles clairmont has been for £ . go to nelson square. jane gloomy; she is very sullen with shelley. well, never mind, my love--we are happy. _thursday, november ._--jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day. we send to peacock's, but no good news arrives. lambert has called there, and says he will write. read a little of _petronius_, a most detestable book. shelley is out all the morning. in the evening read louvet's _memoirs_--go to bed early. shelley and jane sit up till , talking; shelley talks her into a good humour. _sunday, november ._--write in the morning; very unwell all day. fanny sends a letter to jane to come to blackfriars road; jane cannot go. fanny comes here; she will not see me; hear everything she says, however. they think my letter cold and _indelicate_! god bless them. papa tells fanny if she sees me he will never speak to her again; a blessed degree of liberty this! he has had a very impertinent letter from christy baxter. the reason she comes is to ask jane to skinner street to see mrs. godwin, who they say is dying. jane has no clothes. fanny goes back to skinner street to get some. she returns. jane goes with her. shelley returns (he had been to hookham's); he disapproves. write and read. in the evening talk with my love about a great many things. we receive a letter from jane saying she is very happy, and she does not know when she will return. turner has called at skinner street; he says it is too far to nelson square. i am unwell in the evening. _journal, november _ (shelley).--mary is unwell. receive a note from hogg; cloth from clara. i wish this girl had a resolute mind. without firmness understanding is impotent, and the truest principles unintelligible. charles calls to confer concerning lambert; walk with him. go to 'change, to peacock's, to lambert's; receive £ . in the evening hogg calls; perhaps he still may be my friend, in spite of the radical differences of sympathy between us; he was pleased with mary; this was the test by which i had previously determined to judge his character. we converse on many interesting subjects, and mary's illness disappears for a time. _thursday, november _ (shelley).--disgusting dreams have occupied the night. (mary).--very unwell. jane calls; converse with her. she goes to skinner street; tells papa that she will not return; comes back to nelson square with shelley; calls at peacock's. shelley read aloud to us in the evening out of adolphus's _lives_. _wednesday, november ._--very ill all day. shelley and jane out all day shopping about the town. shelley reads _edgar huntley_ to us. shelley and jane go to hookham's. hogg comes in the meantime; he stops all the evening. shelley writes his critique till half-past . _saturday, november ._--very ill. shelley and jane go out to call at mrs. knapp's; she receives jane kindly; promises to come and see me. i go to bed early. charles clairmont calls in the evening, but i do not see him. _sunday, november ._--still very ill; get up very late. in the evening shelley reads aloud out of the _female revolutionary plutarch_. hogg comes in the evening.... get into an argument about virtue, in which hogg makes a sad bungle; quite muddled on the point, i perceive. _tuesday, november ._--work all day. heigh ho! clara and shelley go before breakfast to parker's. after breakfast, shelley is as badly off as i am with my work, for he is out all day with those lawyers. in the evening shelley and jane go in search of charles clairmont; they cannot find him. read _philip stanley_--very stupid. _tuesday, december ._--very unwell. shelley and clara walk out, as usual, to heaps of places. read _agathon_, which i do not like so well as _peregrine_.... a letter from hookham, to say that harriet has been brought to bed of a son and heir. shelley writes a number of circular letters of this event, which ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells, etc., for it is the son _of his wife_. hogg comes in the evening; i like him better, though he vexed me by his attachment to sporting. a letter from harriet confirming the news, in a letter from a _deserted wife_!! and telling us he has been born a week. _wednesday, december ._--clara and shelley go out together; shelley calls on the lawyers and on harriet, who treats him with insulting selfishness; they return home wet and very tired. read _agathon_. i like it less to-day; he discovers many opinions which i think detestable. work. in the evening charles clairmont comes. hear that place is trying to raise £ to pay hume on shelley's _post obit_; affairs very bad in skinner street; afraid of a call for the rent; all very bad. shelley walks home with charles clairmont; goes to hookham's about the £ to lend my father. hookham out. he returns; very tired. work in the evening. _thursday, december ._--shelley and clara go to hookham's; get the £ for my father; they are out, as usual, all morning. finish _agathon_. i do not like it; wieland displays some most detestable opinions; he is one of those men who alter all their opinions when they are about forty, and then think it will be the same with every one, and that they are themselves the only proper monitors of youth. work. when shelley and clara return, shelley goes to lambert's; out. work. in the evening hogg comes; talk about a great number of things; he is more sincere this evening than i have seen him before. odd dreams. _friday, december ._--still ill; heigh ho! finish _jane talbot_. hume calls at half-past ; he tells of the great distress in skinner street; i do not see him. hookham calls; hasty little man; he does not stay long. in the evening hogg comes. shelley and clara are at first out; they have been to look for charles clairmont; they find him, and walk with him some time up and down ely place. shelley goes to sleep early; very tired. we talk about flowers and trees in the evening; a country conversation. _saturday, december ._--very ill. shelley and clara go to pike's; when they return, shelley goes to walk round the square. talk with shelley in the evening; he sleeps, and i lie down on the bed. jane goes to pike's at . charles clairmont comes, and talks about several things. mrs. godwin did not allow fanny to come down to dinner on her receiving a lock of my hair. fanny of course behaves slavishly on the occasion. he goes at half-past . _sunday, december ._--better, but far from well. pass a very happy morning with shelley. charles clairmont comes at dinner-time, the skinner street folk having gone to dine at the kennie's. jane and he take a long walk together. shelley and i are left alone. hogg comes after clara and her brother return. c. c. flies from the field on his approach. conversation as usual. get worse towards night. _monday, december _ (shelley).--mary rather better this morning. jane goes to hume's about godwin's bills; learn that lambert is inclined, but hesitates. hear of a woman--supposed to be the daughter of the duke of montrose--who has the head of a hog. _suetonius_ is finished, and shelley begins the _historia augustana_. charles clairmont comes in the evening; a discussion concerning female character. clara imagines that i treat her unkindly; mary consoles her with her all-powerful benevolence. i rise (having already gone to bed) and speak with clara; she was very unhappy; i leave her tranquil. _tuesday, december _ (mary).--shelley goes to pike's; take a short walk with him first. unwell. a letter from harriet, who threatens shelley with her lawyer. in the evening read _emilia galotti_. hogg comes. converse of various things. he goes at twelve. _wednesday, december _ (shelley).--mary is better. shelley goes to pike's, to the insurance offices, and the lawyer's; an agreement entered into for £ for £ . a letter from wales, offering _post obit_. shelley goes to hume's; mary reads miss baillie's plays in the evening. shelley goes to bed at ; mary at . _saturday, december _ (mary).--read _view of french revolution_. walk out with shelley, and spend a dreary morning waiting for him at mr. peacock's. in the evening hogg comes. i like him better each time; it is a pity that he is a lawyer; he wasted so much time on that trash that might be spent on better things. _sunday, december ._--christmas day. have a very bad side-ache in the morning, so i rise late. charles clairmont comes and dines with us. in the afternoon read miss baillie's plays. hogg spends the evening with us; conversation, as usual. _monday, december _ (shelley).--the sweet maie asleep; leave a note with her. walk with clara to pike's, etc. go to hampstead and look for a house; we return in a return-chaise; find that laurence has arrived, and consult for mary; she has read miss baillie's plays all day. mary better this evening. shelley very much fatigued; sleeps all the evening. read _candide_. _tuesday, december _ (mary).--not very well; shelley very unwell. read _de montfort_, and talk with shelley in the evening. read _view of the french revolution_. hogg comes in the evening; talk of heaps of things. shelley's odd dream. _wednesday, december ._--shelley and clara out all the morning. read _french revolution_ in the evening. shelley and i go to gray's inn to get hogg; he is not there; go to arundel street; can't find him. go to garnerin's. lecture on electricity; the gases, and the phantasmagoria; return at half-past . shelley goes to sleep. read _view of french revolution_ till ; go to bed. _friday, december ._--shelley and jane go out as usual. read bryan edwards's _account of west indies_. they do not return till past seven, having been locked into kensington gardens; both very tired. hogg spends the evening with us. _saturday, december _ (shelley).--the poor maie was very weak and tired all day. shelley goes to pike's and humes' and mrs. peacock's;[ ] return very tired, and sleeps all the evening. the maie goes to sleep early. new year's eve. in january shelley's grandfather, sir bysshe, died, and his father, mr. timothy shelley, succeeded to the baronetcy and estate. by an arrangement with his father, according to which he relinquished all claim on a certain portion of his patrimony, shelley now became possessed of £ a year (£ a year of which he at once set apart for harriet), as well as a considerable sum of ready money for the relief of his present necessities. £ of this he also sent to harriet to pay her debts. the next few entries in the journal were, however, written before this event. _thursday, january _ (mary).--go to breakfast at hogg's; shelley leaves us there and goes to hume's. when he returns we go to newman street; see the statue of theoclea; it is a divinity that raises your mind to all virtue and excellence; i never beheld anything half so wonderfully beautiful. return home very ill. expect hogg in the evening, but he does not come. too ill to read. _friday, january ._--walk to mrs. peacock's with clara. walk with hogg to theoclea; she is ten thousand times more beautiful to-day than ever; tear ourselves away. return to nelson square; no one at home. hogg stays a short time with me. shelley had stayed at home till to see ryan;[ ] he does not come. goes out about business. in the evening shelley and clara go to garnerin's.... very unwell. hogg comes. shelley and clara return at ten. conversation as usual. shelley reads "ode to france" aloud, and repeats the poem to "tranquillity." talk with shelley afterwards for some time; at length go to sleep. shelley goes out and sits in the other room till ; i then call him. talk. shelley goes to sleep; at shelley rises and goes out. the next entry is made during shelley's short absence in sussex, after his grandfather's death. clara had accompanied him on his journey. _(date between january and january )._--letter from peacock to say that he is in prison.... his debt is £ .... write to peacock and send him £ . hogg dines with me and spends the evening; letter from hookham. _friday, january ._--a letter from clara. while i am at breakfast shelley and clara arrive. the will has been opened, and shelley is referred to whitton. his father would not allow him to enter field place; he sits before the door and reads _comus_. dr. blocksome comes out; tells him that his father is very angry with him. sees my name in milton.... hogg dines, and spends the evening with us. _sunday, january ._--in the evening shelley, clara, and hogg sleep. read gibbon.... hogg goes at half-past . shelley and clara explain as usual. _monday, january ._--work all day. shelley reads livy. in the evening shelley reads _paradise regained_ aloud, and then goes to sleep. hogg comes at . talk and work. hogg sleeps here. _wednesday, february ._--read gibbon (end of vol. i.) shelley reads livy in the evening. work. shelley and clara sleep. hogg comes and sleeps here. mrs. hill calls. _sunday, february ._--read gibbon. take a long walk in kensington gardens and the park; meet clairmont as we return, and hear that my father wishes to see a copy of the codicil, because he thinks shelley is acting rashly. all this is very odd and inconsistent, but i never quarrel with inconsistency; folks must change their minds. after dinner talk. shelley finishes gibbon's _memoirs_ aloud. clara, shelley, and hogg sleep. read gibbon. shelley writes to longdill and clairmont. hogg ill, but we cannot persuade him to stay; he goes at half-past . _wednesday, february ._--ash wednesday. so hogg stays all day. we are to move to-day, so shelley and clara go out to look for lodgings. hogg and i pack, and then talk. shelley and clara do not return till ; they have not succeeded; go out again; they get apartments at hans place; move. in the evening talk and read gibbon. letters. pike calls; insolent plague. hogg goes at half-past . _tuesday, february _ (shelley).--shelley goes to longdill's and hayward's, and returns feverish and fatigued. maie finishes the third volume of gibbon. all unwell in the evening. hogg comes and puts us to bed. hogg goes at half-past . in this month, probably on the d (but that page of the diary is torn), when they had been hardly more than a week in their last new lodgings, a little girl was born. although her confinement was premature, mary had a favourable time; the infant, a scarcely seven months' child, was not expected to live; it survived, however, for some days. it might possibly have been saved, had it had an ordinary chance of life given it, but, on the ninth day of its existence, the whole family moved yet again to new lodgings. how the young mother ever recovered from the fatigues, risks, and worries she had to go through at this critical time may well be wondered. it is more than probable that the unreasonable demands made on her strength and courage during this month and those which preceded it laid the foundation of much weak health later on. the child was sacrificed. four days after the move it was found in the morning dead by its mother's side. the poor little thing was a mere passing episode in shelley's troubled, hurried existence. only to mary were its birth and death a deep and permanent experience. apart from her love for shelley, her affections had been chiefly of the intellectual kind, and even in her relation with him mental affinity had played a great part. a new chord in her temperament was set vibrating by the advent of this baby, the maternal one, quite absent from her disposition before, and which was to assert itself at last as the keynote of her nature. hogg, who was almost constantly with them at this time, seems to have been kind, helpful, and sympathetic. the baby's birth was too much for fanny godwin's endurance and fortitude. up to this time she had, in accordance with what she conceived to be her duty, held aloof from the shelleys, but, the barrier once broken down, she came repeatedly to see them. mrs. godwin showed that she had a soft spot in her heart by sending mary, through fanny, a present of linen, no doubt most welcome at this unprepared-for crisis. beyond this she was unrelenting. her pride, however, was not so strong as her feminine curiosity, which she indulged still by parading before the windows and trying to get peeps at the people behind them. she was annoyed with fanny, who now, however, held her own course, feeling that her duty could not be all on one side while her family consented to be dependent, and that every moment of her father's peace and safety were due entirely to this shelley whom he would not see. _journal, february _ (shelley) (after the baby's birth).--maie perfectly well and at ease. the child is not quite seven months; the child not expected to live. shelley sits up with maie, much exhausted and agitated. hogg sleeps here. _thursday, february ._--mary quite well; the child unexpectedly alive, but still not expected to live. hogg returns in the evening at half-past . shelley writes to fanny requesting her to come and see maie. fanny comes and remains the whole night, the godwins being absent from home. charles comes at with linen from mrs. godwin. hogg departs at . £ from longdill. _friday, february ._--maie still well; favourable symptoms in the child; we may indulge some hopes. hogg calls at . fanny departs. dr. clarke calls; confirms our hopes of the child. shelley finishes second volume of livy, p. . hogg comes in the evening. shelley very unwell and exhausted. _saturday, february ._--the child very well; maie very well also; drawing milk all day. shelley is very unwell. _sunday, february _ (mary).--maie rises to-day. hogg comes; talk; she goes to bed at . hogg calls at the lodgings we have taken. read _corinne_. shelley and clara go to sleep. hogg returns; talk with him till past . he goes. shelley and clara go down to tea. just settling to sleep when a knock comes to the door; it is fanny; she came to see how we were; she stays talking till half-past , and then leaves the room that shelley and mary may sleep. shelley has a spasm. _monday, february ._--rise; talk and read _corinne_. hogg comes in the evening. shelley and clara go out about a cradle.... _tuesday, february ._--i come downstairs; talk, nurse the baby, read _corinne_, and work. shelley goes to pemberton about his health. _wednesday, march ._--nurse the baby, read _corinne_, and work. shelley and clara out all morning. in the evening peacock comes. talk about types, editions, and greek letters all the evening. hogg comes. they go away at half-past . bonaparte invades france. _thursday, march ._--a bustle of moving. read _corinne_. i and my baby go about . shelley and clara do not come till . hogg comes in the evening. _friday, march ._--nurse my baby; talk, and read _corinne_. hogg comes in the evening. _saturday, march ._--read, talk, and nurse. shelley reads the _life of chaucer_. hogg comes in the evening and sleeps. _sunday, march ._--shelley and clara go to town. hogg here all day. read _corinne_ and nurse my baby. in the evening talk. shelley finishes the _life of chaucer_. hogg goes at . _monday, march ._--find my baby dead. send for hogg. talk. a miserable day. in the evening read _fall of the jesuits_. hogg sleeps here. _tuesday, march ._--shelley and clara go after breakfast to town. write to fanny. hogg stays all day with us; talk with him, and read the _fall of the jesuits_ and _rinaldo rinaldini_. not in good spirits. hogg goes at . a fuss. to bed at . _wednesday, march ._--finish _rinaldini_. talk with shelley. in very bad spirits, but get better; sleep a little in the day. in the evening net. hogg comes; he goes at half-past . clara has written for fanny, but she does not come. _thursday, march ._--read and talk. still think about my little baby. 'tis hard, indeed, for a mother to lose a child. hogg and charles clairmont come in the evening. c. c. goes at . hogg stays all night. read fontenelle, _plurality of worlds_. _friday, march ._--hogg's holidays begin. shelley, hogg, and clara go to town. hogg comes back soon. talk and net. hogg now remains with us. put the room to rights. _saturday, march ._--very unwell. hogg goes to town. talk about clara's going away; nothing settled; i fear it is hopeless. she will not go to skinner street; then our house is the only remaining place, i see plainly. what is to be done? hogg returns. talk, and hogg reads the _life of goldoni_ aloud. _sunday, march ._--talk a great deal. not well, but better. very quiet all the morning, and happy, for clara does not get up till . in the evening read gibbon, fourth volume; go to bed at . _monday, march ._--shelley and clara go to town. stay at home; net, and think of my little dead baby. this is foolish, i suppose; yet, whenever i am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point--that i was a mother, and am so no longer. fanny comes, wet through; she dines, and stays the evening; talk about many things; she goes at half-past . cut out my new gown. _tuesday, march ._--shelley calls on dr. pemberton. net till breakfast. shelley reads _religio medici_ aloud, after hogg has gone to town. work; finish hogg's purse. shelley and i go upstairs and talk of clara's going; the prospect appears to me more dismal than ever; not the least hope. this is, indeed, hard to bear. in the evening hogg reads gibbon to me. charles clairmont comes in the evening. _sunday, march ._--dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. awake and find no baby. i think about the little thing all day. not in good spirits. shelley is very unwell. read gibbon. charles clairmont comes. hogg goes to town till dinner-time. talk with charles clairmont about skinner street. they are very badly off there. i am afraid nothing can be done to save them. c. c. says that he shall go to america; this i think a rather wild project in the clairmont style. play a game of chess with clara. in the evening shelley and hogg play at chess. shelley and clara walk part of the way with charles clairmont. play chess with hogg, and then read gibbon. _monday, march ._--dream again about my baby. work after breakfast, and then go with shelley, hogg, and clara to bullock's museum; spend the morning there. return and find more letters for a. z.--one from a "disconsolate widow."[ ] _wednesday, march ._--talk, and read the papers. read gibbon all day. charles clairmont calls about shelley lending £ . we do not return a decisive answer. * * * * * _thursday, march ._--read gibbon. shelley reads livy. walk with shelley and hogg to arundel street. read _le diable boiteux_. hear that bonaparte has entered paris. as we come home, meet my father and charles clairmont.... c. c. calls; he tells us that papa saw us, and that he remarked that shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked. * * * * * _tuesday, march ._--work in the morning and then walk out to look at house. _saturday, april ._--peacock comes at breakfast-time; hogg and he go to town. read _l'esprit des nations_. settle to go to virginia water. * * * * * _sunday, april ._--rise at . charles clairmont comes to breakfast at . read some lines of ovid before breakfast; after, walk with shelley, hogg, clara, and c. c. to pond in kensington gardens; return about . c. c. goes to skinner street. read ovid with hogg (finish second fable). shelley reads gibbon and _pastor fido_ with clara. in the evening read _l'esprit des nations_. shelley reads gibbon, _pastor fido_, and the story of myrrha in ovid. _monday, april ._--read voltaire before breakfast. after breakfast work. shelley passes the morning with harriet, who is in a surprisingly good humour. mary reads third fable of ovid: shelley and clara read _pastor fido_. shelley reads gibbon. mrs. godwin after dinner parades before the windows. talk in the evening with hogg about mountains and lakes and london. _tuesday, april ._--work in the morning. receive letters from skinner street to say that mamma had gone away in the pet, and had stayed out all night. read fourth and fifth fables of ovid.... after tea, work. charles clairmont comes. _saturday, april ._--read ovid till . shelley and clara finish _pastor fido_, and then go out about clara's lottery ticket; draws. clara's ticket comes up a prize. she buys two desks after dinner. read ovid (ninety-five lines). shelley and clara begin _orlando furioso_. a very grim dream. _friday, april ._--after breakfast go with shelley to peacock's. shelley goes to longdill's. read third canto of the _lord of the isles_. return about . shelley goes to harriet to procure his son, who is to appear in one of the courts. after dinner look over w. w.'s poems. after tea read forty lines of ovid. fanny comes and gives us an account of hogan's threatened arrest of my father. shelley walks home part of the way with her. very sleepy. shelley reads one canto of ariosto. _saturday, april ._--read a little of ovid. shelley goes to harriet's about his son. work. fanny comes. shelley returns at ; he has been much teased with harriet. he has been to longdill's, whitton's, etc., and at length has got a promise that he shall appear monday. after dinner fanny goes. read sixty lines of ovid. shelley and clara read to the middle of the fourteenth canto of ariosto. shortly after this several leaves of the journal are lost. _friday, may ._--after breakfast to marshall's,[ ] but do not see him. go to the tomb. shelley goes to longdill's. return soon. read spenser; construe ovid.... after dinner talk with shelley; then shelley and clara go out.... fanny comes; she tells us of marshall's servant's death. papa is to see mrs. knapp to-morrow. read spenser. walk home with fanny and with shelley.... shelley reads seneca. _monday, may ._--go out with shelley to mrs. knapp; not at home. buy shelley a pencil-case. return at . read spenser. go again with shelley to mrs. knapp; she cannot take clara. read spenser after dinner. clara goes out with shelley. talk with jefferson (hogg); write to marshall. read spenser. they return at . very tired; go to bed early. jefferson scolds. _wednesday, may ._--not very well; rise late. walk to marshall's, and talk with him for an hour. go with jefferson and shelley to british museum--attend most to the statues; return at . construe ovid. after dinner construe ovid ( lines); finish second book of spenser, and read two cantos of the third. shelley reads seneca every day and all day. _friday, may ._--not very well. after breakfast read spenser. shelley goes out with his friend; he returns first. construe ovid ( lines); read spenser. jefferson returns at half-past , and tells us that poor sawyer is to be hung. these blessed laws! after dinner read spenser. read over the ovid to jefferson, and construe about ten lines more. read spenser. shelley and the lady walk out. after tea, talk; write greek characters. shelley and his friend have a last conversation. _saturday, may ._--clara goes; shelley walks with her. c. c. comes to breakfast; talk. shelley goes out with him. read spenser all day (finish canto , book v.) jefferson does not come till . get very anxious about shelley; go out to meet him; return; it rains. shelley returns at half-past ; the business is finished. after dinner shelley is very tired, and goes to sleep. read ovid ( lines). c. c. comes to tea. talk of pictures. (mary).--a tablespoonful of the spirit of aniseed, with a small quantity of spermaceti. (shelley)-- drops of human blood, grains of gunpowder, / oz. of putrified brain, mashed grave worms--the pecksie's doom salve. the maie and her elfin knight. i begin a new journal with our regeneration. chapter viii may -september "our regeneration" meant, in other words, the departure of jane or "clara" clairmont who, on the plea of needing change of air, went off by herself into cottage lodgings at lynmouth, in north devon. she had never shown any very great desire to go back to her family in skinner street, but even had it been otherwise, objections had now been raised to her presence there which made her return difficult if not impossible. fanny godwin's aunts, everina wollstonecraft and mrs. bishop, were principals of a select ladies' school in dublin, and intended that, on their own retirement, their niece should succeed them in its management. they strongly objected now to her associating with miss clairmont, pointing out that, even if her morals were not injured, her professional prospects must be marred by the fact being generally known of her connection and companionship with a girl who undoubtedly had run away from home, and who was, untruly but not groundlessly, reported to be concerned in a notorious scandal. her continued presence in the shelley household, a thing probably never contemplated at the time of their hurried flight, was manifestly undesirable, on many grounds. to mary it was a perpetual trial, and must, in the end, have tended towards disagreement between her and shelley, while it put clara herself at great and unjust social disadvantage. not that she heeded that, or regretted the barrier that divided her from skinner street, where poverty and anxiety and gloom reigned paramount, and where she would have been watched with ceaseless and unconcealed suspicion. she had heard that her relations had even discussed the advisability of immuring her in a convent if she could be caught,--but she did not mean to be caught. she advertised for a situation as companion; nothing, however, came of this. an idea of sending her to board in the family of a mrs. knapp seems to have been entertained for some months both by godwins and shelleys, charles clairmont probably acting as a medium between the two households. but, after appearing well disposed at first, mrs. knapp thought better of the plan. she did not want, and would not have clara. the final project, that of the lynmouth lodgings, was a sudden idea, suddenly carried out, and devised with the shelleys independently of the godwins, who were not consulted, nor even informed, until it had been put into execution. so much is to be gathered from the letter which clara wrote to fanny a fortnight after her arrival. clara to fanny. _sunday, th may ._ my dear fanny--mary writes me that you thought me unkind in not letting you know before my departure; indeed, i meant no unkindness, but i was afraid if i told you that it might prevent my putting a plan into execution which i preferred before all the mrs. knapps in the world. here i am at liberty; there i should have been under a perpetual restraint. mrs. knapp is a forward, impertinent, superficial woman. here there are none such; a few cottages, with little, rosy-faced children, scolding wives, and drunken husbands. i wish i had a more amiable and romantic picture to present to you, such as shepherds and shepherdesses, flocks and madrigals; but this is the truth, and the truth is best at all times. i live in a little cottage, with jasmine and honeysuckle twining over the window; a little downhill garden full of roses, with a sweet arbour. there are only two gentlemen's seats here, and they are both absent. the walks and shrubberies are quite open, and are very delightful. mr. foote's stands at top of the hill, and commands distant views of the whole country. a green tottering bridge, flung from rock to rock, joins his garden to his house, and his side of the bridge is a waterfall. one tumbles directly down, and then flows gently onward, while the other falls successively down five rocks, and seems like water running down stone steps. i will tell you, so far, that it is a valley i live in, and perhaps one you may have seen. two ridges of mountains enclose the village, which is situated at the west end. a river, which you may step over, runs at the foot of the mountains, and trees hang so closely over, that when on a high eminence you sometimes lose sight of it for a quarter of a mile. one ridge of hills is entirely covered with luxuriant trees, the opposite line is entirely bare, with long pathways of slate and gray rocks, so that you might almost fancy they had once been volcanic. well, enough of the valleys and the mountains. you told me you did not think i should ever be able to live alone. if you knew my constant tranquillity, how cheerful and gay i am, perhaps you would alter your opinion. i am perfectly happy. after so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how enraptured i am with this dear little quiet spot. i am as happy when i go to bed as when i rise. i am never disappointed, for i know the extent of my pleasures; and let it rain or let it be fair weather, it does not disturb my serene mood. this is happiness; this is that serene and uninterrupted rest i have long wished for. it is in solitude that the powers concentre round the soul, and teach it the calm, determined path of virtue and wisdom. did you not find this--did you not find that the majestic and tranquil mountains impressed deep and tranquil thoughts, and that everything conspired to give a sober temperature of mind, more truly delightful and satisfying than the gayest ebullitions of mirth? the foaming cataract and tall rock haunt me like a passion. now for a little chatting. i was quite delighted to hear that papa had at last got £ . riches seem to fly from genius. i suppose, for a month or two, you will be easy--pray be cheerful. i begin to think there is no situation without its advantages. you may learn wisdom and fortitude in adversity, and in prosperity you may relieve and soothe. i feel anxious to be wise; to be capable of knowing the best; of following resolutely, however painful, what mature and serious thought may prescribe; and of acquiring a prompt and vigorous judgment, and powers capable of execution. what are you reading? tell charles, with my best love, that i will never forgive him for having disappointed me of wordsworth, which i miss very much. ask him, likewise, to lend me his coleridge's poems, which i will take great care of. how is dear willy? how is every one? if circumstances get easy, don't you think papa and mamma will go down to the seaside to get up their health a little? write me a very long letter, and tell me everything. how is your health? now do not be melancholy; for heaven's sake be cheerful; so young in life, and so melancholy! the moon shines in at my window, there is a roar of waters, and the owls are hooting. how often do i not wish for a curfew!--"swinging slow with sullen roar!" pray write to me. do, there's a good fanny.--affectionately yours, m. j. clairmont. miss fanny godwin, skinner street, snow hill, london. how long this delightful life of solitude lasted is not exactly known. for a year after this time both clara's journal and that of shelley and mary are lost, and the next thing we hear of clara is her being in town in the spring of , when she first made lord byron's acquaintance. mary, at any rate, enjoyed nearly a year of comparative peace and _tête-à-tête_ with shelley, which, after all she had gone through, must have been happiness indeed. had she known that it was the only year she would ever pass with him without the presence of a third person, it may be that--although her loyalty to shelley stood every test--her heart might have sunk within her. but, happily for her, she could not foresee this. her letter from clifton shows that clara's shadow haunted her at times. still she was happy, and at peace. her health, too, was better; and, though always weighed down by godwin's anxieties, she and shelley were, themselves, free for once from the pinch of actual penury and the perpetual fear of arrest. in june they made a tour in south devon, and very probably paid clara a visit in her rural retirement; after which mary stayed for some time at clifton, while shelley travelled about looking for a country house to suit them. it was during one of his absences that mary wrote to him the letter referred to above. mary to shelley. clifton, _ th july _. my beloved shelley--what i am now going to say is not a freak from a fit of low spirits, but it is what i earnestly entreat you to attend to and comply with. we ought not to be absent any longer; indeed we ought not. i am not happy at it. when i retire to my room, no sweet love; after dinner, no shelley; though i have heaps of things _very particular_ to say; in fine, either you must come back, or i must come to you directly. you will say, shall we neglect taking a house--a dear home? no, my love, i would not for worlds give up that; but i know what seeking for a house is, and, trust me, it is a very, _very_ long job, too long for one love to undertake in the absence of the other. dearest, i know how it will be; we shall both of us be put off, day after day, with the hopes of the success of the next day's search, for i am frightened to think how long. do you not see it in this light, my own love? we have been now a long time separated, and a house is not yet in sight; and even if you should fix on one, which i do not hope for in less than a week, then the settling, etc. indeed, my love, i cannot bear to remain so long without you; so, if you will not give me leave, expect me without it some day; and, indeed, it is very likely that you may, for i am quite sick of passing day after day in this hopeless way. pray, is clara with you? for i have inquired several times and no letters; but, seriously, it would not in the least surprise me, if you have written to her from london, and let her know that you are without me, that she should have taken some such freak. the dormouse has hid the brooch; and, pray, why am i for ever and ever to be denied the sight of my case? have you got it in your own possession? or where is it? it would give me very great pleasure if you would send it me. i hope you have not already appropriated it, for if you have i shall think it un-pecksie of you, as maie was to give it you with her own hands on your birthday; but it is of little consequence, for i have no hope of seeing you on that day; but i am mistaken, for i have hope and certainty, for if you are not here on or before the d of august, i set off on the th, in early coach, so as to be with you in the evening of that dear day at least. to-morrow is the th of july. dearest, ought we not to have been together on that day? indeed we ought, my love, as i shall shed some tears to think we are not. do not be angry, dear love; your pecksie is a good girl, and is quite well now again, except a headache, when she waits so anxiously for her love's letters. dearest, best shelley, pray come to me; pray, pray do not stay away from me! this is delightful weather, and you better, we might have a delightful excursion to tintern abbey. my dear, dear love, i most earnestly, and with tearful eyes, beg that i may come to you if you do not like to leave the searches after a house. it is a long time to wait, even for an answer. to-morrow may bring you news, but i have no hope, for you only set off to look after one in the afternoon, and what can be done at that hour of the day? you cannot. they finally settled on a house at bishopsgate just outside windsor park, where they passed several months of tranquillity and comparative health; perhaps the most peacefully happy time that shelley had ever known or was ever to know. shadows he, too, had to haunt him, but he was young, and the reaction from the long-continued strain of anxiety, fear, discomfort, and ill-health was so strong that it is no wonder if he yielded himself up to its influence. the summer was warm and dry, and most of the time was passed out of doors. they visited the source of the thames, making the voyage in a wherry from windsor to cricklade. charles clairmont was of the party, and peacock also, who gives a humorous account of the expedition, and of the cure he effected of shelley's ailments by his prescription of "three mutton chops, well peppered." shelley was at this time a strict vegetarian. mary, peacock says, kept a diary of the excursion, which, however, has been lost. shelley's "stanzas in the churchyard of lechlade" were an enduring memento of the occasion. at bishopsgate, under the oak shades of windsor great park, he composed _alastor_, the first mature production of his genius, and at bishopsgate mary's son william was born, on th january . the list of books read during by shelley and mary is worth appending, as giving some idea of their wonderful mental activity and insatiable thirst for knowledge, and the singular sympathy which existed between them in these intellectual pursuits. list of books read in . mary. _those marked * shelley read also._ posthumous works. vols. sorrows of werter. don roderick. by southey. *gibbon's decline and fall vols. *gibbon's life and letters. st edition. vols. *lara. new arabian knights. vols. corinna. fall of the jesuits. rinaldo rinaldini. fontenelle's plurality of worlds. hermsprong. le diable boiteux. man as he is. rokeby. ovid's metamorphoses in latin. *wordsworth's poems. *spenser's fairy queen. *life of the phillips. *fox's history of james ii. the reflector. fleetwood. wieland. don carlos. *peter wilkins. rousseau's confessions. leonora: a poem. emile. *milton's paradise lost. *life of lady hamilton. de l'allemagne. by madame de staël. three vols, of barruet. *caliph vathek. nouvelle heloise. *kotzebue's account of his banishment to siberia. waverley. clarissa harlowe. robertson's history of america. *virgil. *tale of a tub. *milton's speech on unlicensed printing. *curse of kehama. *madoc. la bible expliquée. lives of abelard and heloise. *the new testament. *coleridge's poems. first vol. of système de la nature. castle of indolence. chatterton's poems. *paradise regained. don carlos. *lycidas. *st. leon. shakespeare's plays (part of which shelley read aloud). *burke's account of civil society. *excursion. pope's homer's illiad. *sallust. micromejas. *life of chaucer. canterbury tales. peruvian letters. voyages round the world. plutarch's lives. *two vols, of gibbon. ormond. hugh trevor. *labaume's history of the russian war. lewis's tales. castle of udolpho. guy mannering. *charles xii by voltaire. tales of the east. shelley. pastor fido. orlando furioso. livy's history. seneca's works. tasso's gerusalemme liberata. tasso's aminta. two vols. of plutarch in italian. some of the plays of euripides. seneca's tragedies. reveries of rousseau. hesoid. novum organum. alfieri's tragedies. theocritus. ossian. herodotus. thucydides. homer. locke on the human understanding. conspiration de rienzi. history of arianism. ockley's history of the saracens. madame de staël sur la literature. these months of rest were needed to fit them for the year of shocks, of blows, of conflicting emotions which was to follow. as usual, the first disturbing cause was clara clairmont. early in she was in town, possibly with her brother charles, with whom she kept up correspondence, and with whom (thanks to funds provided by shelley) she had in the autumn been travelling, or paying visits. she now started one of her "wild projects in the clairmont style," which brought as its consequence the overshadowing of her whole life. she thought she would like to go on the stage, and she applied to lord byron, then connected with the management of drury lane theatre, for some theatrical employment. the fascination of byron's poetry, joined to his very shady social reputation, surrounded him with a kind of romantic mystery highly interesting to a wayward, audacious young spirit, attracted by anything that excited its curiosity. clara never went on the stage. but she became byron's mistress. their connection lasted but a short time. byron quickly tired of her, and when importuned with her or her affairs, soon came to look on her with positive antipathy. nothing in clara's letters to him[ ] goes to prove that she was very deeply in love with him. the episode was an excitement and an adventure: one, to him, of the most trivial nature, but fraught with tragic indirect results to her, and, through her, to the shelleys. they, although they knew of her acquaintance with byron, were in complete and unsuspecting ignorance of its intimate nature. it might have been imagined that clara would confide in them, and would even rejoice in doing so. but she had, on the contrary, a positive horror and dread of their finding out anything about her secret. she told byron who mary was, one evening when she knew they were to meet, but implored him beforehand to talk only on general subjects, and, if possible, not even to mention her name. this introduction probably took place in march, when shelley and mary were, for a short time, staying up in town. shelley was occupied in transacting business, which had reference, as usual, to godwin's affairs. a suit in chancery was proceeding, to enable him to sell, to his father, the reversion of a portion of his estates. short of obtaining this permission, he could not assist godwin to the full extent demanded and expected by this latter, who chose to say, and was encouraged by his man of business to think that, if shelley did not get the money, it was owing to slackness of effort or inclination on his part. the suit was, however, finally decided against shelley. the correspondence between him and godwin was painful in the highest degree, and must have embittered mary's existence. godwin, while leaving no stone unturned to get as much of shelley's money as possible, and while exerting himself with feverish activity to control and direct to his own advantage the legal negotiations for disposal of part of the shelley estates, yet declined personal communication with shelley, and wrote to him in insulting terms, carrying sophistry so far as to assert that his dignity (save the mark!) would be compromised, not by taking shelley's money, but by taking it in the form of a cheque made out in his, godwin's, own name. small wonder if shelley was wounded and indignant. more than any one else, godwin had taught and encouraged him to despise what he would have called prejudice. "in my judgment," wrote shelley, "neither i, nor your daughter, nor her offspring, ought to receive the treatment which we encounter on every side. it has perpetually appeared to me to have been your especial duty to see that, so far as mankind value your good opinion, we were dealt justly by, and that a young family, innocent, and benevolent, and united should not be confounded with prostitutes and seducers. my astonishment--and i will confess, when i have been treated with most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation--has been extreme, that, knowing as you do my nature, any consideration should have prevailed on you to be thus harsh and cruel. i lamented also over my ruined hopes, of all that your genius once taught me to expect from your virtue, when i found that for yourself, your family, and your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort. do not talk of _forgiveness_ again to me, for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the human form, when i think of what i, their benefactor and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from all mankind." that other, ordinary, people should resent his avowed opposition to conventional morality was, even to shelley, less of an enigma than that godwin, from whom he expected support, should turn against him. yet he never could clearly realise the aspect which his relations with mary bore to the world, who merely saw in him a married man who had deserted his wife and eloped with a girl of sixteen. he thought people should understand all he knew, and credit him with all he did not tell them; that they should sympathise and fraternise with him, and honour mary the more, not the less, for what she had done and dared. instead of this, the world accepted his family's estimate of its unfortunate eldest son, and cut him. it is no wonder that, as peacock puts it, "the spirit of restlessness came over him again," and drove him abroad once more. his first intention was to settle with mary and their infant child in some remote region of scotland or northern england. but he was at all times delicate, and he longed for balmy air and sunny skies. to these motives were added clara's wishes, and, as she herself states, her pressing solicitations. byron, she knew, was going to geneva, and she persuaded the shelleys to go there also, in the hope and intention of meeting him. shelley had read and admired several of byron's poems, and the prospect of possible companionship with a kindred mind was now and at all times supremely attractive to him. he had made repeated, but fruitless efforts to get a personal interview with godwin, in the hope, probably, of coming to some definite understanding as to his hopelessly involved and intricate affairs. godwin went off to scotland on literary business and was absent all april. before he returned shelley, mary, and clara had started for switzerland. the shelleys were still ignorant and unsuspecting of the intrigue between byron and clara. byron, knowing of clara's wish to follow him to geneva, enjoined her on no account to come alone or without protection, as he knew she was capable of doing; hence her determinate wish that the shelleys should come. she wrote to byron from paris to tell him that she was so far on her way, accompanied by "the whole tribe of otaheite philosophers," as she styles her friends and escort. just before sailing from dover shelley wrote to godwin, who was still in scotland, telling him finally of the unsuccessful issue to his chancery suit, of his doubtful and limited prospects of income or of ability to pay more than £ for godwin, and that only some months hence. he referred again to his painful position in england, and his present determination to remain abroad,--perhaps for ever,--with the exception of a possible, solitary, visit to london, should business make this inevitable. he touched on his old obligations to godwin, assuring him of his continued respect and admiration in spite of the painful past, and of his regret for any too vehement words he might have used. it is unfortunate for me that the part of your character which is least excellent should have been met by my convictions of what was right to do. but i have been too indignant, i have been unjust to you--forgive me--burn those letters which contain the records of my violence, and believe that however what you erroneously call fame and honour separate us, i shall always feel towards you as the most affectionate of friends. the travellers reached geneva by the middle of may; their arrival preceding that of byron by several days. a letter written by mary shelley from their first resting-place, the hôtel de sécheron, the descriptive portions of which were afterwards published by her, with the _journal of a six weeks tour_, gives a graphic account of their journey and their first impressions of geneva. hÃ�tel de sÃ�cheron, geneva, _ th may _. we arrived at paris on the th of this month, and were detained two days for the purpose of obtaining the various signatures necessary to our passports, the french government having become much more circumspect since the escape of lavalette. we had no letters of introduction, or any friend in that city, and were therefore confined to our hotel, where we were obliged to hire apartments for the week, although, when we first arrived, we expected to be detained one night only; for in paris there are no houses where you can be accommodated with apartments by the day. the manners of the french are interesting, although less attractive, at least to englishmen, than before the last invasion of the allies; the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself. nor is it wonderful that they should regard the subjects of a government which fills their country with hostile garrisons, and sustains a detested dynasty on the throne, with an acrimony and indignation of which that government alone is the proper object. this feeling is honourable to the french, and encouraging to all those of every nation in europe who have a fellow-feeling with the oppressed, and who cherish an unconquerable hope that the cause of liberty must at length prevail. our route after paris as far as troyes lay through the same uninteresting tract of country which we had traversed on foot nearly two years before, but on quitting troyes we left the road leading to neufchâtel, to follow that which was to conduct us to geneva. we entered dijon on the third evening after our departure from paris, and passing through dôle, arrived at poligny. this town is built at the foot of jura, which rises abruptly from a plain of vast extent. the rocks of the mountain overhang the houses. some difficulty in procuring horses detained us here until the evening closed in, when we proceeded by the light of a stormy moon to champagnolles, a little village situated in the depth of the mountains. the road was serpentine and exceedingly steep, and was overhung on one side by half-distinguished precipices, whilst the other was a gulf, filled by the darkness of the driving clouds. the dashing of the invisible streams announced to us that we had quitted the plains of france, as we slowly ascended amidst a violent storm of wind and rain, to champagnolles, where we arrived at twelve o'clock the fourth night after our departure from paris. the next morning we proceeded, still ascending among the ravines and valleys of the mountain. the scenery perpetually grows more wonderful and sublime; pine forests of impenetrable thickness and untrodden, nay, inaccessible expanse spread on every side. sometimes the dark woods descending follow the route into the valleys, the distorted trees struggling with knotted roots between the most barren clefts; sometimes the road winds high into the regions of frost, and then the forests become scattered, and the branches of the trees are loaded with snow, and half of the enormous pines themselves buried in the wavy drifts. the spring, as the inhabitants informed us, was unusually late, and indeed the cold was excessive; as we ascended the mountains the same clouds which rained on us in the valleys poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast. the sun occasionally shone through these showers, and illuminated the magnificent ravines of the mountains, whose gigantic pines were, some laden with snow, some wreathed round by the lines of scattered and lingering vapour; others darting their spires into the sunny sky, brilliantly clear and azure. as the evening advanced, and we ascended higher, the snow, which we had beheld whitening the overhanging rocks, now encroached upon our road, and it snowed fast as we entered the village of les rousses, where we were threatened by the apparent necessity of passing the night in a bad inn and dirty beds. for, from that place there are two roads to geneva; one by nion, in the swiss territory, where the mountain route is shorter and comparatively easy at that time of the year, when the road is for several leagues covered with snow of an enormous depth; the other road lay through gex, and was too circuitous and dangerous to be attempted at so late an hour in the day. our passport, however, was for gex, and we were told that we could not change its destination; but all these police laws, so severe in themselves, are to be softened by bribery, and this difficulty was at length overcome. we hired four horses, and ten men to support the carriage, and departed from les rousses at six in the evening, when the sun had already far descended, and the snow pelting against the windows of our carriage assisted the coming darkness to deprive us of the view of the lake of geneva and the far-distant alps. the prospect around, however, was sufficiently sublime to command our attention--never was scene more awfully desolate. the trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road; no river nor rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime. the natural silence of that uninhabited desert contrasted strangely with the voices of the men who conducted us, who, with animated tones and gestures, called to one another in a _patois_ composed of french and italian, creating disturbance where, but for them, there was none. to what a different scene are we now arrived! to the warm sunshine, and to the humming of sun-loving insects. from the windows of our hotel we see the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams. the opposite shore is sloping and covered with vines, which, however, do not so early in the season add to the beauty of the prospect. gentlemen's seats are scattered over these banks, behind which rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of its snowy alps, the majestic mont blanc, highest and queen of all. such is the view reflected by the lake; it is a bright summer scene without any of that sacred solitude and deep seclusion that delighted us at lucerne. we have not yet found out any very agreeable walks, but you know our attachment to water excursions. we have hired a boat, and every evening, at about six o'clock, we sail on the lake, which is delightful, whether we glide over a glassy surface or are speeded along by a strong wind. the waves of this lake never afflict me with that sickness that deprives me of all enjoyment in a sea-voyage; on the contrary, the tossing of our boat raises my spirits and inspires me with unusual hilarity. twilight here is of short duration, but we at present enjoy the benefit of an increasing moon, and seldom return until ten o'clock, when, as we approach the shore, we are saluted by the delightful scent of flowers and new-mown grass, and the chirp of the grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds. we do not enter into society here, yet our time passes swiftly and delightfully. we read latin and italian during the heats of noon, and when the sun declines we walk in the garden of the hotel, looking at the rabbits, relieving fallen cockchafers, and watching the motions of a myriad of lizards, who inhabit a southern wall of the garden. you know that we have just escaped from the gloom of winter and of london; and coming to this delightful spot during this divine weather, i feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig i fly to, so that i may try my new-found wings. a more experienced bird may be more difficult in its choice of a bower; but, in my present temper of mind, the budding flowers, the fresh grass of spring, and the happy creatures about me that live and enjoy these pleasures, are quite enough to afford me exquisite delight, even though clouds should shut out mont blanc from my sight. adieu! m. s. on the th of may byron, accompanied by his young italian physician, polidori, and attended by three men-servants, arrived at the hôtel de sécheron. it was now that he and shelley became for the first time personally acquainted; an acquaintance which, though it never did and never could ripen quite into friendship, developed with time and circumstances into an association more or less familiar which lasted all shelley's life. after the arrival of the english milord and his retinue, the hotel quarters probably became less quiet and comfortable, and before june the shelleys, with clare[ ] (who, while her secret remained a secret, must have found it inexpedient to live under the same roof with byron) moved to a cottage on the other side of the lake, near coligny; known as maison chapuis, but sometimes called campagne mont alègre. campagne chapuis, near coligny, _ st june_. you will perceive from my date that we have changed our residence since my last letter. we now inhabit a little cottage on the opposite shore of the lake, and have exchanged the view of mont blanc and her snowy _aiguilles_ for the dark frowning jura, behind whose range we every evening see the sun sink, and darkness approaches our valley from behind the alps, which are then tinged by that glowing rose-like hue which is observed in england to attend on the clouds of an autumnal sky when daylight is almost gone. the lake is at our feet, and a little harbour contains our boat, in which we still enjoy our evening excursions on the water. unfortunately we do not now enjoy those brilliant skies that hailed us on our first arrival to this country. an almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house; but when the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in england. the thunderstorms that visit us are grander and more terrific than i have ever seen before. we watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging clouds, while perhaps the sun is shining cheerily upon us. one night we _enjoyed_ a finer storm than i had ever before beheld. the lake was lit up, the pines on jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness. but while i still dwell on the country around geneva, you will expect me to say something of the town itself; there is nothing, however, in it that can repay you for the trouble of walking over its rough stones. the houses are high, the streets narrow, many of them on the ascent, and no public building of any beauty to attract your eye, or any architecture to gratify your taste. the town is surrounded by a wall, the three gates of which are shut exactly at ten o'clock, when no bribery (as in france) can open them. to the south of the town is the promenade of the genevese, a grassy plain planted with a few trees, and called plainpalais. here a small obelisk is erected to the glory of rousseau, and here (such is the mutability of human life) the magistrates, the successors of those who exiled him from his native country, were shot by the populace during that revolution which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which, notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced enduring benefits to mankind, which not all the chicanery of statesmen, nor even the great conspiracy of kings, can entirely render vain. from respect to the memory of their predecessors, none of the present magistrates ever walk in plainpalais. another sunday recreation for the citizens is an excursion to the top of mont salère. this hill is within a league of the town, and rises perpendicularly from the cultivated plain. it is ascended on the other side, and i should judge from its situation that your toil is rewarded by a delightful view of the course of the rhone and arne, and of the shores of the lake. we have not yet visited it. there is more equality of classes here than in england. this occasions a greater freedom and refinement of manners among the lower orders than we meet with in our own country. i fancy the haughty english ladies are greatly disgusted with this consequence of republican institutions, for the genevese servants complain very much of their _scolding_, an exercise of the tongue, i believe, perfectly unknown here. the peasants of switzerland may not however emulate the vivacity and grace of the french. they are more cleanly, but they are slow and inapt. i know a girl of twenty who, although she had lived all her life among vineyards, could not inform me during what month the vintage took place, and i discovered she was utterly ignorant of the order in which the months succeed one another. she would not have been surprised if i had talked of the burning sun and delicious fruits of december, or of the frosts of july. yet she is by no means deficient in understanding. the genevese are also much inclined to puritanism. it is true that from habit they dance on a sunday, but as soon as the french government was abolished in the town, the magistrates ordered the theatre to be closed, and measures were taken to pull down the building. we have latterly enjoyed fine weather, and nothing is more pleasant than to listen to the evening song of the wine-dressers. they are all women, and most of them have harmonious although masculine voices. the theme of their ballads consists of shepherds, love, flocks, and the sons of kings who fall in love with beautiful shepherdesses. their tunes are monotonous, but it is sweet to hear them in the stillness of evening, while we are enjoying the sight of the setting sun, either from the hill behind our house or from the lake. such are our pleasures here, which would be greatly increased if the season had been more favourable, for they chiefly consist in such enjoyments as sunshine and gentle breezes bestow. we have not yet made any excursion in the environs of the town, but we have planned several, when you shall again hear of us; and we will endeavour, by the magic of words, to transport the ethereal part of you to the neighbourhood of the alps, and mountain streams, and forests, which, while they clothe the former, darken the latter with their vast shadows.--adieu! m. less than a fortnight after this byron also left the hotel, annoyed beyond endurance by the unbounded curiosity of which he was the object. he established himself at the villa diodati, on the hill above the shelleys' cottage, from which it was separated by a vineyard. both he and shelley were devoted to boating, and passed much time on the water, on one occasion narrowly escaping being drowned. visits from one house to the other were of daily occurrence. the evenings were generally spent at diodati, when the whole party would sit up into the small hours of the morning, discussing all possible and impossible things in earth and heaven. in temperament shelley and byron were indeed radically opposed to each other, but the intellectual intercourse of two men, alike condemned to much isolation from their kind by their gifts, their dispositions, and their misfortunes, could not but be a source of enjoyment to each. despite his deep grain of sarcastic egotism, byron did justice to shelley's sincerity, simplicity, and purity of nature, and appreciated at their just value his mental powers and literary accomplishments. on the other hand, shelley's admiration of byron's genius was simply unbounded, while he apprehended the mixture of gold and clay in byron's disposition with singular acuteness. his was the "pure mind that penetrateth heaven and hell." but at geneva the two men were only finding each other out, and, to shelley at least, any pain arising from difference of feeling or opinion was outweighed by the intense pleasure and refreshment of intellectual comradeship. naturally fond of society, and indeed requiring its stimulus to elicit her best powers, mary yet took a passive rather than an active share in these _symposia_. looking back on them many years afterwards she wrote: "since incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of diodati, they were, as it were, entirely _tête-à-tête_ between my shelley and albè."[ ] but she was a keen, eager listener. nothing escaped her observation, and none of this time was ever obliterated from her memory. to the intellectual ferment, so to speak, of the diodati evenings, working with the new experiences and thoughts of the past two years, is due the conception of the story by which, as a writer, she is best remembered, the ghastly but powerful allegorical romance of _frankenstein_. in her introduction to a late edition of this work (part of which has already been quoted here) mary shelley has herself told the history of its origin. in the summer of we visited switzerland, and became the neighbours of lord byron. at first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores, and lord byron, who was writing the third canto of _childe harold_, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. these, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him. but it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the german into french, fell into our hands. there was the history of the inconstant lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. there was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. his gigantic shadowy form, clothed, like the ghost in hamlet, in complete armour, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. the shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk. i have not seen these stories since then, but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if i had read them yesterday. "we will each write a ghost story," said byron; and his proposition was acceded to. there were four of us. the noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of mazeppa. shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. poor polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole--what to see i forget--something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned tom of coventry he did not know what to do with her, and he was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. the illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their ungrateful task. i busied myself to _think of a story_,--a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. one that would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart. if i did not accomplish these things my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. i thought and wondered--vainly. i felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull nothing replies to our anxious invocations. "_have you thought of a story?_" i was asked each morning, and each morning i was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. everything must have a beginning, to speak in sanchean phrase: and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. the hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. in all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of columbus and his egg. invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it. many and long were the conversations between lord byron and shelley, to which i was a devout but nearly silent listener. during one of these various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and, among others, the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. they talked of the experiments of dr. darwin (i speak not of what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. not thus, after all, would life be given. perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. when i placed my head upon my pillow i did not sleep, nor could i be said to think. my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. i saw--with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,--i saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together--i saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. his success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horrorstricken. he would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. he sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. i opened mine in terror. the idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and i wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. i see them still; the very room, the dark _parquet_, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense i had that the glassy lake and white high alps were beyond. i could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. i must try to think of something else. i recurred to my ghost story--my tiresome unlucky ghost story. o! if i could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as i myself had been frightened that night! swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "i have found it! what terrified me will terrify others; and i need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow." on the morrow i announced that i had _thought of a story_. i began that day with the words, _it was on a dreary night of november_, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream. at first i thought of but a few pages--of a short tale; but shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. i certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet, but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world. from this declaration i must except the preface. as far as i can recollect, it was entirely written by him. every one now knows the story of the "modern prometheus,"--the student who, having devoted himself to the search for the principle of life, discovers it, manufactures an imitation of a human being, endows it with vitality, and having thus encroached on divine prerogative, finds himself the slave of his own creature, for he has set in motion a force beyond his power to control or annihilate. aghast at the actual and possible consequences of his own achievement, he recoils from carrying it out to its ultimate end, and stops short of doing what is necessary to render this force independent. the being has, indeed, the perception and desire of goodness; but is, by the circumstances of its abnormal existence, delivered over to evil, and frankenstein, and all whom he loves, fall victims to its vindictive malice. surely no girl, before or since, has imagined, and carried out to its pitiless conclusion so grim an idea. mary began her rough sketch of this story during the absence of shelley and byron on a voyage round the lake of geneva; the memorable excursion during which byron wrote the _prisoner of chillon_ and great part of the third canto of _childe harold_, and shelley conceived the idea of that "hymn to intellectual beauty," which may be called his confession of faith. when they returned they found mary hard at work on the fantastic speculation which possessed her mind and exerted over it a fascination and a power of excitement beyond that of the sublime external nature which inspired the two poets. when, in july, she set off with shelley and clare on a short tour to the valley of chamounix, she took her ms. with her. they visited the mer de glace, and the source of the arveiron. the magnificent scenery which inspired shelley with his poem on "mont blanc," and is described by mary in the extracts from her journal which follow, served her as a fitting background for the most preternatural portions of her romance. _tuesday, july _ (chamounix).--in the morning, after breakfast, we mount our mules to see the source of the arveiron. when we had gone about three parts of the way, we descended and continued our route on foot, over loose stones, many of which were an enormous size. we came to the source, which lies (like a stage) surrounded on the three sides by mountains and glaciers. we sat on a rock, which formed the fourth, gazing on the scene before us. an immense glacier was on our left, which continually rolled stones to its foot. it is very dangerous to be directly under this. our guide told us a story of two hollanders who went, without any guide, into a cavern of the glacier, and fired a pistol there, which drew down a large piece on them. we see several avalanches, some very small, others of great magnitude, which roared and smoked, overwhelming everything as it passed along, and precipitating great pieces of ice into the valley below. this glacier is increasing every day a foot, closing up the valley. we drink some water of the arveiron and return. after dinner think it will rain, and shelley goes alone to the glacier of boison. i stay at home. read several tales of voltaire. in the evening i copy shelley's letter to peacock. _wednesday, july ._--to-day is rainy; therefore we cannot go to col de balme. about the weather appears clearing up. shelley and i begin our journey to montanvert. nothing can be more desolate than the ascent of this mountain; the trees in many places having been torn away by avalanches, and some half leaning over others, intermingled with stones, present the appearance of vast and dreadful desolation. it began to rain almost as soon as we left our inn. when we had mounted considerably we turned to look on the scene. a dense white mist covered the vale, and tops of scattered pines peeping above were the only objects that presented themselves. the rain continued in torrents. we were wetted to the skin; so that, when we had ascended halfway, we resolved to turn back. as we descended, shelley went before, and, tripping up, fell upon his knee. this added to the weakness occasioned by a blow on his ascent; he fainted, and was for some minutes incapacitated from continuing his route. we arrived wet to the skin. i read _nouvelles nouvelles_, and write my story. shelley writes part of letter. * * * * * _saturday, july ._--it is a most beautiful day, without a cloud. we set off at . the day is hot, yet there is a fine breeze. we pass by the great waterfall, which presents an aspect of singular beauty. the wind carries it away from the rock, and on towards the north, and the fine spray into which it is entirely dissolved passes before the mountain like a mist. the other cascade has very little water, and is consequently not so beautiful as before. the evening of the day is calm and beautiful. evening is the only time i enjoy travelling. the horses went fast, and the plain opened before us. we saw jura and the lake like old friends. i longed to see my pretty babe. at , after much inquiring and stupidity, we find the road, and alight at diodati. we converse with lord byron till , and then go down to chapuis, kiss our babe, and go to bed. circumstances had modified shelley's previous intention of remaining permanently abroad, and the end of august found him moving homeward. the following extracts from mary's diary give a sketch of their life during the few weeks preceding their return to england. _sunday, july _ (montalègre).--i read voltaire's _romans_. shelley reads lucretius, and talks with clare. after dinner he goes out in the boat with lord byron, and we all go up to diodati in the evening. this is the second anniversary since shelley's and my union. _monday, july ._--write; read voltaire and quintus curtius. a rainy day, with thunder and lightning. shelley finishes lucretius, and reads pliny's _letters_. _tuesday, july ._--read quintus curtius. shelley read pliny's _letters_. after dinner we go up to diodati, and stay the evening. _thursday, august ._--make a balloon for shelley, after which he goes up to diodati, to dine and spend the evening. read twelve pages of curtius. write, and read the _reveries of rousseau_. shelley reads pliny's _letters_. _friday, august ._--i go to the town with shelley, to buy a telescope for his birthday present. in the evening lord byron and he go out in the boat, and, after their return, shelley and clare go up to diodati; i do not, for lord byron did not seem to wish it. shelley returns with a letter from longdill, which requires his return to england. this puts us in bad spirits. i read _rêveries_ and _adèle et théodore de madame de genlis_, and shelley reads pliny's _letters_. _saturday, august ._--finish the first volume of _adèle_, and write. after dinner write to fanny, and go up to diodati, where i read the _life of madame du deffand_. we come down early and talk of our plans. shelley reads pliny's _letters_, and writes letters. _sunday, august ._--shelley's birthday. write; read _tableau de famille_. go out with shelley in the boat, and read to him the fourth book of virgil. after dinner we go up to diodati, but return soon. i read curtius with shelley, and finish the first volume, after which we go out in the boat to set up the balloon, but there is too much wind; we set it up from the land, but it takes fire as soon as it is up. i finish the _rêveries of rousseau_. shelley reads and finishes pliny's _letters_, and begins the _panegyric of trajan_. _wednesday, august ._--write, and read ten pages of curtius. lord byron and shelley go out in the boat. i translate in the evening, and afterwards go up to diodati. shelley reads tacitus. _friday, august ._--write and translate; finish _adèle_, and read a little curtius. shelley goes out in the boat with lord byron in the morning and in the evening, and reads tacitus. about o'clock we go up to diodati. we receive a long letter from fanny. fanny to mary. london, _ th july _. my dear mary--i have just received yours, which gave me great pleasure, though not quite so satisfactory a one as i could have wished. i plead guilty to the charge of having written in some degree in an ill humour; but if you knew how i am harassed by a variety of trying circumstances, i am sure you would feel for me. besides other plagues, i was oppressed with the most violent cold in my head when i last wrote you that i ever had in my life. i will now, however, endeavour to give as much information from england as i am capable of giving, mixed up with as little spleen as possible. i have received jane's letter, which was a very dear and a very sweet one, and i should have answered it but for the dreadful state of mind i generally labour under, and which i in vain endeavour to get rid of. from your and jane's description of the weather in switzerland, it has produced more mischief abroad than here. our rain has been as constant as yours, for it rains every day, but it has not been accompanied by violent storms. all accounts from the country say that the corn has not yet suffered, but that it is yet perfectly green; but i fear that the sun will not come this year to ripen it. as yet we have had fires almost constantly, and have just got a few strawberries. you ask for particulars of the state of england. i do not understand the causes for the distress which i see, and hear dreadful accounts of, every day; but i know that they really exist. papa, i believe, does not think much, or does not inquire, on these subjects, for i never can get him to give me any information. from mr. booth i got the clearest account, which has been confirmed by others since. he says that it is the "peace" that has brought all this calamity upon us; that during the war the whole continent were employed in fighting and defending their country from the incursions of foreign armies; that england alone was free to manufacture in peace; that our manufactories, in consequence, employed several millions, and at higher wages, than were wanted for our own consumption. now peace is come, foreign ports are shut, and millions of our fellow-creatures left to starve. he also says that we have no need to manufacture for ourselves--that we have enough of the various articles of our manufacture to last for seven years--and that the going on is only increasing the evil. they say that in the counties of staffordshire and shropshire there are , men out of employment, and without the means of getting any. a few weeks since there were several parties of colliers, who came as far as st. albans and oxford, dragging coals in immense waggons, without horses, to the prince regent at carlton house; one of these waggons was said to be conducted by a hundred colliers. the ministers, however, thought proper, when these men had got to the distance from london of st. albans, to send magistrates to them, who paid them handsomely for their coals, and gave them money besides, telling them that coming to london would only create disturbance and riot, without relieving their misery; they therefore turned back, and the coals were given away to the poor people of the neighbourhood where they were met. this may give you some idea of the misery suffered. at glasgow, the state of wretchedness is worse than anywhere else. houses that formerly employed two or three hundred men now only employ three or four individuals. there have been riots of a very serious nature in the inland counties, arising from the same causes. this, joined to this melancholy season, has given us all very serious alarm, and helped to make me write so dismally. they talk of a change of ministers; but this can effect no good; it is a change of the whole system of things that is wanted. mr. owen, however, tells us to cheer up, for that in two years we shall feel the good effect of his plans; he is quite certain that they will succeed. i have no doubt that he will do a great deal of good; but how he can expect to make the rich give up their possessions, and live in a state of equality, is too romantic to be believed. i wish i could send you his address to the people of new lanark, on the st of january , on the opening of the institution for the formation of character. he dedicates it "to those who have no private ends to accomplish, who are honestly in search of truth for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of society, and who have the firmness to follow the truth, wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the pursuit by the _prepossessions or prejudices of any part of mankind_." this dedication will give you some idea of what sort of an address it is. this address was delivered on a sunday evening, in a place set apart for the purposes of religion, and brought hundreds of persons from the regular clergymen to hear his profane address,--against all religions, governments, and all sorts of aristocracy,--which, he says, was received with the greatest attention and highly approved. the outline of his plan is this: "that no human being shall work more than two or three hours every day; that they shall be all equal; that no one shall dress but after the plainest and simplest manner; that they be allowed to follow any religion, as they please; and that their [studies] shall be mechanics and chemistry." i hate and am sick at heart at the misery i see my fellow-beings suffering, but i own i should not like to live to see the extinction of all genius, talent, and elevated generous feeling in great britain, which i conceive to be the natural consequence of mr. owen's plan. i am not either wise enough, philosophical enough, nor historian enough, to say what will make man plain and simple in manners and mode of life, and at the same time a poet, a painter, and a philosopher; but this i know, that i had rather live with the genevese, as you and jane describe, than live in london, with the most brilliant beings that exist, in its present state of vice and misery. so much for mr. owen, who is, indeed, a very great and good man. he told me the other day that he wished our mother were living, as he had never before met with a person who thought so exactly as he did, or who would have so warmly and zealously entered into his plans. indeed, there is nothing very promising in a return to england at least for some time to come, for it is better to witness misery in a foreign country than one's own, unless you have the means of relieving it. i wish i could send you the books you ask for. i should have sent them, if longdill had not said he was not sending--that he expected shelley in england. i shall send again immediately, and will then send you _christabel_ and the "poet's" _poems_. were i not a dependent being in every sense of the word, but most particularly in money, i would send you other things, which perhaps you would be glad of. i am much more interested in lord byron since i have read all his poems. when you left england i had only read _childe harold_ and his smaller poems. the pleasure he has excited in me, and gratitude i owe him for having cheered several gloomy hours, makes me wish for a more finished portrait, both of his _mind_ and _countenance_. from _childe harold_ i gained a very ill impression of him, because i conceived it was _himself_,--notwithstanding the pains he took to tell us it was an imaginary being. the _giaour_, _lara_, and the _corsair_ make me justly style him a poet. do in your next oblige me by telling me the minutest particulars of him, for it is from the _small things_ that you learn most of character. is his face as fine as in your portrait of him, or is it more like the other portrait of him? tell me also if he has a pleasing voice, for that has a great charm with me. does he come into your house in a careless, friendly, dropping-in manner? i wish to know, though not from idle curiosity, whether he was capable of acting in the manner that the london scandal-mongers say he did? you must by this time know if he is a profligate in principle--a man who, like curran, gives himself unbounded liberty in all sorts of profligacy. i cannot think, from his writings, that he can be such a _detestable being_. do answer me these questions, for where i love the poet i should like to respect the man. shelley's boat excursion with him must have been very delightful. i think lord byron never writes so well as when he writes descriptions of water scenes; for instance, the beginning of the _giaour_. there is a fine expressive line in _childe harold_: "blow, swiftly blow, thou keen compelling gale," etc. there could have been no difference of sentiment in this divine excursion; they were both poets, equally alive to the charms of nature and the eloquent writing of rousseau. i long very much to read the poem the "poet" has written on the spot where julie was drowned. when will they come to england? say that you have a friend who has few pleasures, and is very impatient to read the poems written at geneva. if they are not to be published, may i see them in manuscript? i am angry with shelley for not writing himself. it is impossible to tell the good that poets do their fellow-creatures, at least those that can feel. whilst i read i am a poet. i am inspired with good feelings--feelings that create perhaps a more permanent good in me than all the everyday preachments in the world; it counteracts the dross which one gives on the everyday concerns of life, and tells us there is something yet in the world to aspire to--something by which succeeding ages may be made happy and perhaps better. if shelley cannot accomplish any other good, he can this divine one. laugh at me, but do not be angry with me, for taking up your time with my nonsense. i have sent again to longdill, and he has returned the same answer as before. i can [not], therefore, send you _christabel_. lamb says it ought never to have been published; that no one understands it; and _kubla khan_ (which is the poem he made in his sleep) is nonsense. coleridge is living at highgate; he is living with an apothecary, to whom he pays £ a week for board, lodging, and medical advice. the apothecary is to take care that he does not take either opium or spirituous liquors. coleridge, however, was tempted, and wrote to a chemist he knew in london to send a bottle of laudanum to mr. murray's in albemarle street, to be enclosed in a parcel of books to him; his landlord, however, felt the parcel outside, and discovered the fatal bottle. mr. morgan told me the other day that coleridge improved in health under the care of the apothecary, and was writing fast a continuation of _christabel_. you ask me if mr. booth mentioned isabel's having received a letter from you. he never mentioned your name to me, nor i to him; but he told mamma that you had written a letter to her from calais. he is gone back, and promises to bring isabel next year. he has given us a volume of his _poetry_--_true, genuine poetry_--not such as coleridge's or wordsworth's, but miss seward's and dr. darwin's-- dying swains to sighing delias. you ask about old friends; we have none, and see none. poor marshal is in a bad way; we see very little of him. mrs. kenny is going immediately to live near orleans, which is better for her than living in london, afraid of her creditors. the lambs have been spending a month in the neighbourhood of clifton and bristol; they were highly delighted with clifton. sheridan is dead. papa was very much grieved at his death. william and he went to his funeral. he was buried in the poets' corner of westminster abbey, attended by all the high people. papa has visited his grave many times since. i am too young to remember his speeches in parliament. i never admired his style of play-writing. i cannot, therefore, sympathise in the elegant tributes to his memory which have been paid by all parties. those things which i have heard from all parties of his drunkenness i cannot admire. we have had one great pleasure since your departure, in viewing a fine collection of the italian masters at the british institution. two of the cartoons are there. paul preaching at athens is the finest picture i ever beheld.... i am going again to see this exhibition next week, before it closes, when i shall be better able to tell you which i most admire of raphael, titian, leonardo da vinci, domenichino, claude, s. rosa, poussin, murillo, etc., and all of which cannot be too much examined. i only wish i could have gone many times. charles's letter has not yet arrived. do give me every account of him when you next hear from him. i think it is of great consequence the mode of life he now pursues, as it will most likely decide his future good or ill doing. you ask what i mean by "plans with mr. blood?" i meant a residence in ireland. however, i will not plague you with them till i understand them myself. my aunt everina will be in london next week, when my future fate will be decided. i shall then give you a full and clear account of what my unhappy life is to be spent in, etc. i left it to the end of my letter to call your attention most seriously to what i said in my last letter respecting papa's affairs. they have now a much more serious and threatening aspect than when i last wrote to you. you perhaps think that papa has gained a large sum by his novel engagement, which is not the case. he could make no other engagement with constable than that they should share the profits equally between them, which, if the novel is successful, is an advantageous bargain. papa, however, prevailed upon him to advance £ , to be deducted hereafter out of the part he is to receive; and if two volumes of the novel are not forthcoming on the st of january , constable has a promissory note to come upon papa for the £ . this £ i told you was appropriated to davidson and hamilton, who had lent him £ on his _caleb williams_ last year; so that you perceive he has as yet gained nothing on his novel, and all depends upon his future exertions. he has been very unwell and very uneasy in his mind for the last week, unable to write; and it was not till this day i discovered the cause, which has given me great uneasiness. you seem to have forgotten kingdon's £ to be paid at the end of june. he has had a great deal of plague and uneasiness about it, and has at last been obliged to give kingdon his promissory note for £ , payable on demand, so that every hour is not safe. kingdon is no friend, and the money government money, and it cannot be expected he will show papa any mercy. i dread the effect on his health. he cannot sleep at night, and is indeed very unwell. this he concealed from mamma and myself until this day. taylor of norwich has also come upon him again; he says, owing to the distress of the country, he must have the money for his children; but i do not fear him like kingdon. shelley said in his letter, some weeks ago, that the £ should come the end of june. papa, therefore, acted upon that promise. from your last letter i perceive you think i colour my statements. i assure you i am most anxious, when i mention these unfortunate affairs, to speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, as it is. i think it my duty to tell you the real state of the case, for i know you deceive yourself about things. if papa could go on with his novel in good spirits, i think it would perhaps be his very best. he said the other day that he was writing upon a subject no one had ever written upon before, and that it would require great exertion to make it what he wished. give my love to jane; thank her for her letter. i will write to her next week, though i consider this long tiresome one as addressed to you all. give my love also to shelley; tell him, if he goes any more excursions, nothing will give me more pleasure than a description of them. tell him i like your [____][ ] tour best, though i should like to visit _venice_ and _naples_. kiss dear william for me; i sometimes consider him as my child, and look forward to the time of my old age and his manhood. do you dip him in the lake? i am much afraid you will find this letter much too long; if it affords you any pleasure, oblige me by a long one in return, but write small, for mamma complains of the postage of a double letter. i pay the full postage of all the letters i send, and you know i have not a _sous_ of my own. mamma is much better, though not without rheumatism. william is better than he ever was in his life. i am not well; my mind always keeps my body in a fever; but never mind me. do entreat j. to attend to her eyes. adieu, my dear sister. let me entreat you to consider seriously all that i have said concerning your father.--yours, very affectionately, fanny. _journal, saturday, august ._--write to fanny. shelley writes to charles. we then go to town to buy books and a watch for fanny. read curtius after my return; translate. in the evening shelley and lord byron go out in the boat. translate, and when they return go up to diodati. shelley reads tacitus. a writ of arrest comes from polidori, for having "cassé ses lunettes et fait tomber son chapeau" of the apothecary who sells bad magnesia. * * * * * _monday, august ._--write my story and translate. shelley goes to the town, and afterwards goes out in the boat with lord byron. after dinner i go out a little in the boat, and then shelley goes up to diodati. i translate in the evening, and read _le vieux de la montagne_, and write. shelley, in coming down, is attacked by a dog, which delays him; we send up for him, and lord byron comes down; in the meantime shelley returns. _wednesday, august ._--read _le vieux de la montagne_; translate. shelley reads tacitus, and goes out with lord byron before and after dinner. lewis[ ] comes to diodati. shelley goes up there, and clare goes up to copy. remain at home, and read _le vieux de la montagne_. * * * * * _friday, august ._--write, and read a little of curtius; translate; read _walther_ and some of _rienzi_. lord byron goes with lewis to ferney. shelley writes, and reads tacitus. _saturday, august ._--write, and finish _walther_. in the evening i go out in the boat with shelley, and he afterwards goes up to diodati. began one of madame de genlis's novels. shelley finishes tacitus. polidori comes down. little babe is not well. _sunday, august ._--talk with shelley, and write; read curtius. shelley reads plutarch in greek. lord byron comes down, and stays here an hour. i read a novel in the evening. shelley goes up to diodati, and monk lewis. * * * * * _tuesday, august ._--read curtius; write; read _herman d'unna_. lord byron comes down after dinner, and remains with us until dark. shelley spends the rest of the evening at diodati. he reads plutarch. _wednesday, august ._--shelley and i talk about my story. finish _herman d'unna_ and write. shelley reads milton. after dinner lord byron comes down, and clare and shelley go up to diodati. read _rienzi_. _friday, august ._--shelley goes up to diodati, and then in the boat with lord byron, who has heard bad news of lady byron, and is in bad spirits concerning it.... letters arrive from peacock and charles. shelley reads milton. _saturday, august ._--write. shelley goes to geneva. read. lord byron and shelley sit on the wall before dinner. after i talk with shelley, and then lord byron comes down and spends an hour here. shelley and he go up together. * * * * * _monday, august ._--hobhouse and scroop davis come to diodati. shelley spends the evening there, and reads _germania_. several books arrive, among others coleridge's _christabel_, which shelley reads aloud to me before going to bed. * * * * * _wednesday, august ._--packing. shelley goes to town. work. polidori comes down, and afterwards lord byron. after dinner we go upon the water; pack; and shelley goes up to diodati. shelley reads _histoire de la révolution par rabault_. _thursday, august ._--we depart from geneva at in the morning. they travelled to havre _viâ_ dijon, auxerre, and villeneuve; allowing only a few hours for visiting the palaces of fontainebleau and versailles, and the cathedral of rouen. from havre they sailed to portsmouth, where, for a short time, they separated. shelley went to stay with peacock, who was living at great marlow, and had been looking about there for a house to suit his friends. mary and clare proceeded to bath, where they were to spend the next few months. _journal, tuesday, september ._--arrive at bath about . dine, and spend the evening in looking for lodgings. read mrs. robinson's _valcenga_. _wednesday, september ._--look for lodgings; take some, and settle ourselves. read the first volume of _the antiquary_, and work. chapter ix september -february trouble had, for some time past, been gathering in heavy clouds. godwin's affairs were in worse plight than ever, and the shelleys, go where they might, were never suffered to forget them. fanny constituted herself his special pleader, and made it evident that she found it hard to believe shelley could not, if he chose, get more money than he did for mary's father. her long letters, bearing witness in every line to her great natural intelligence and sensibility, excite the deepest pity for her, and not a little, it must be added, for those to whom they were addressed. the poor girl's life was, indeed, a hard one, and of all her trials perhaps the most insurmountable was that inherited melancholy of the wollstonecraft temperament which permitted her no illusions, no moments, even, of respite from care in unreasoning gaiety such as are incidental to most young and healthy natures. nor, although she won every one's respect and most people's liking, had she the inborn gift of inspiring devotion or arousing enthusiasm. she was one of those who give all and take nothing. the people she loved all cared for others more than they did for her, or cared only for themselves. full of warmth and affection and ideal aspirations; sympathetically responsive to every poem, every work of art appealing to imagination, she was condemned by her temperament and the surroundings of her life to idealise nothing, and to look at all objects as they presented themselves to her, in the light of the very commonest day. less pressing than godwin, but still another disturbing cause, was charles clairmont, who was travelling abroad in search, partly of health, partly of occupation; had found the former, but not the latter, and, of course, looked to shelley as the magician who was to realise all his plans for him. of his discursive letters, which are immensely long, in a style of florid eloquence, only a few specimen extracts can find room here. one, received by shelley and mary at geneva, openly confesses that, though it was a year since he had left england, he had abstained, as yet, from writing to skinner street, being as unsettled as ever, and having had nothing to speak of but his pleasures;--having in short been going on "just like a butterfly,--though still as a butterfly of the best intentions." he proceeds to describe the country, his manner of living there, his health,--he details his symptoms, and sets forth at length the various projects he might entertain, and the marvellous cheapness of one and all of them, if only he could afford to have any projects at all. he enumerates items of expenditure connected with one of his schemes, and concludes thus-- i lay this proposal before you, without knowing anything of your finances, which, i fear, cannot be in too flourishing a situation. you will, i trust, consider of the thing, and treat it as frankly as it has been offered. i know you too well not to know you would do for me all in your power. have the goodness to write to me as instantly as possible. and shelley did write,--so says the journal. last not least, there was clare. at what point of all this time did her secret become known to shelley and mary? no document as yet has seen the light which informs us of this. perhaps some day it may. unfortunately for biographers and for readers of biography, mary's journal is almost devoid of personal gossip, or indeed of personalities of any kind. her diary is a record of outward facts, and, occasionally, of intellectual impressions; no intimate history and no one else's affairs are confided to it. no change of tone is perceptible anywhere. all that can be asserted is that they knew nothing of it when they went to geneva. in the absence of absolute proof to the contrary it is impossible to believe that they were not aware of it when they came back. clare was an expecting mother. for four months they had all been in daily intercourse with byron, who never was or could be reticent, and who was not restrained either by delicacy or consideration for others from saying what he chose. but when and how the whole affair was divulged and what its effect was on shelley and mary remains a mystery. from this time, however, clare resumed her place as a member of their household. it cannot have been a matter of satisfaction to mary: domestic life was more congenial without clare's presence than with it, but now that there was a true reason for her taking shelter with them, mary's native nobility of heart was equal to the occasion, and she gave help, support, and confidence, ungrudgingly and without stint. never in her journal, and only once in her letters does any expression of discontent appear. they settled down together in their lodgings at bath, but on the th of september mary set out to join shelley at marlow for a few days, leaving clara in charge of little willy and the swiss nurse elise. on the th both were back at bath, where they resumed their quiet, regular way of life, resting and reading. but this apparent peace was not to be long unbroken. letters from fanny followed each other in quick succession, breathing nothing but painful, perpetual anxiety. fanny to mary. _ th september ._ my dear mary--i received your letter last saturday, which rejoiced my heart. i cannot help envying your calm, contented disposition, and the calm philosophical habits of life which pursue you, or rather which you pursue everywhere. i allude to your description of the manner in which you pass your days at bath, when most women would hardly have recovered from the fatigues of such a journey as you had been taking. i am delighted to hear such pleasing accounts of your william; i should like to see him, dear fellow; the change of air does him infinite good, no doubt. i am very glad you have got jane a pianoforte; if anything can do her good and restore her to industry, it is music. i think i gave her all the music here; however, i will look again for what i can find. i am angry with shelley for not giving me an account of his health. all that i saw of him gave me great uneasiness about him, and as i see him but seldom, i am much more alarmed perhaps than you, who are constantly with him. i hope that it is only the london air which does not agree with him, and that he is now much better; however, it would have been kind to have said so. aunt everina and mrs. bishop left london two days ago. it pained me very much to find that they have entirely lost their little income from primrose street, which is very hard upon them at their age. did shelley tell you a singular story about mrs. b. having received an annuity which will make up in part for her loss? poor papa is going on with his novel, though i am sure it is very fatiguing to him, though he will not allow it; he is not able to study as much as formerly without injuring himself; this, joined to the plagues of his affairs, which he fears will never be closed, make me very anxious for him. the name of his novel is _mandeville, or a tale of the seventeenth century_. i think, however, you had better not mention the name to any one, as he wishes it not to be announced at present. tell shelley, as soon as he knows certainly about longdill, to write, that he may be eased on that score, for it is a great weight on his spirits at present. mr. owen is come to town to prepare for the meeting of parliament. there never was so devoted a being as he is; and it certainly must end in his doing a great deal of good, though not the good he talks of. have you heard from charles? he has never given us a single line. i am afraid he is doing very ill, and has the conscience not to write a parcel of lies. beg the favour of shelley, to copy for me his poem on the scenes at the foot of mont blanc, and tell him or remind him of a letter which you said he had written on these scenes; you cannot think what a treasure they would be to me; remember you promised them to me when you returned to england. have you heard from lord byron since he visited those sublime scenes? i have had great pleasure since i saw shelley in going over a fine gallery of pictures of the old masters at dulwich. there was a st. sebastian by guido, the finest picture i ever saw; there were also the finest specimens of murillo, the great spanish painter, to be found in england, and two very fine titians. but the works of art are not to be compared to the works of nature, and i am never satisfied. it is only poets that are eternal benefactors of their fellow-creatures, and the real ones never fail of giving us the highest degree of pleasure we are capable of; they are, in my opinion, nature and art united, and as such never fading. do write to me immediately, and tell me you have got a house, and answer those questions i asked you at the beginning of this letter. give my love to shelley, and kiss william for me. your affectionate sister, fanny. when shelley sold to his father the reversion of a part of his inheritance, he had promised to godwin a sum of £ , which he had hoped to save from the money thus obtained. owing to certain conditions attached to the transaction by sir timothy shelley, this proved to be impossible. the utmost shelley could do, and that only by leaving himself almost without resources, was to send something over £ ; a bitter disappointment to godwin, who had given a bill for the full amount. shelley had perhaps been led by his hopes, and his desire to serve godwin, to speak in too sanguine a tone as to his prospect of obtaining the money, and the letter announcing his failure came, fanny wrote, "like a thunderclap." in her disappointment she taxed shelley with want of frankness, and shelley and mary both with an apparent wish to avoid the subject of godwin's affairs. "you know," she writes, "the peculiar temperature of papa's mind (if i may so express myself); you know he cannot write when pecuniary circumstances overwhelm him; you know that it is of the utmost consequence, for _his own_ and the _world's sake_ that he should finish his novel; and is it not your and shelley's duty to consider these things, and to endeavour to prevent, as far as lies in your power, giving him unnecessary pain and anxiety?" to the shelleys, who had strained every nerve to obtain this money, unmindful of the insulting manner in which such assistance was demanded and received by godwin, these appeals to their sense of duty must have been exasperating. nor were matters mended by hearing of sundry scandalous reports abroad concerning themselves--reports sedulously gathered by mrs. godwin, and of which fanny thought it her duty to inform them, so as to put them on their guard. they, on their part, were indignant, especially with mrs. godwin, who had evidently, they surmised, gone out of her way to collect this false information, and had helped rather than hindered its circulation; and they expressed themselves to this effect. fanny stoutly defended her stepmother against these attacks. mamma and i are not great friends, but, always alive to her virtues, i am anxious to defend her from a charge so foreign to her character.... i told shelley these (scandalous reports), and i still think they originated with your servants and harriet, whom i know has been very industrious in spreading false reports about you. i at the same time advised shelley always to keep french servants, and he then seemed to think it a good plan. you are very careless, and are for ever leaving your letters about. english servants like nothing so much as scandal and gossip; but this you know as well as i, and this is the origin of the stories that are told. and this you choose to father on mamma, who (whatever she chooses to say in a passion to me alone) is the woman the most incapable of such low conduct. i do not say that her inferences are always the most just or the most amiable, but they are always confined to myself and papa. depend upon it you are perfectly safe as long as you keep your french servant with you.... i have now to entreat you, shelley, to tell papa exactly what you can and what you cannot do, for he does not seem to know what you mean in your letter. i know that you are most anxious to do everything in your power to complete your engagement to him, and to do anything that will not ruin yourself to save him; but he is not convinced of this, and i think it essential to his peace that he should be convinced of this. i do not on any account wish you to give him false hopes. forgive me if i have expressed myself unkindly. my heart is warm in your cause, and i am _anxious, most anxious_, that papa should feel for you as i do, both for your own and his sake.... all that i have said about mamma proceeds from the hatred i have of talking and petty scandal, which, though trifling in itself, often does superior persons much injury, though it cannot proceed from any but vulgar souls in the first instance. this letter was crossed by shelley's, enclosing more than £ --insufficient, however, to meet the situation or to raise the heavy veil of gloom which had settled on skinner street. fanny could bear it no longer. despairing gloom from godwin, whom she loved, and who in his gloom was no philosopher; sordid, nagging, angry gloom from "mamma," who, clearly enough, did not scruple to remind the poor girl that she had been a charge and a burden to the household (this may have been one of the things she only "chose to say in a passion, to fanny alone"); her sisters gone, and neither of them in complete sympathy with her; no friends to cheer or divert her thoughts! a plan had been under consideration for her residing with her relatives in ireland, and the last drop of bitterness was the refusal of her aunt, everina wollstonecraft, to have her. what was left for her? much, if she could have believed it, and have nerved herself to patience. but she was broken down and blinded by the strain of over endurance. on the th of october she disappeared from home. shelley and mary in bath suspected nothing of the impending crisis. the journal for that week is as follows-- _saturday, october _ (mary).--read clarendon and curtius; walk with shelley. shelley reads tasso. _sunday, october _ (shelley).--on this day mary put her head through the door and said, "come and look; here's a cat eating roses; she'll turn into a woman; when beasts eat these roses they turn into men and women." (mary).--read clarendon all day; finish the eleventh book. shelley reads tasso. _monday, october ._--read curtius and clarendon; write. shelley reads _don quixote_ aloud in the evening. _tuesday, october ._--letter from fanny (this letter has not been preserved). drawing lesson. walk out with shelley to the south parade; read clarendon, and draw. in the evening work, and shelley reads _don quixote_; afterwards read _memoirs of the princess of bareith_ aloud. _wednesday, october ._--read curtius; finish the _memoirs_; draw. in the evening a very alarming letter comes from fanny. shelley goes immediately to bristol; we sit up for him till in the morning, when he returns, but brings no particular news. _thursday, october ._--shelley goes again to bristol, and obtains more certain trace. work and read. he returns at o'clock. _friday, october ._--he sets off to swansea. work and read. _saturday, october ._--he returns with the worst account. a miserable day. two letters from papa. buy mourning, and work in the evening. from bristol fanny had written not only to the shelleys, but to the godwins, accounting for her disappearance, and adding, "i depart immediately to the spot from which i hope never to remove." during the ensuing night, at the mackworth arms inn, swansea, she traced the following words-- i have long determined that the best thing i could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. perhaps to hear of my death may give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as.... this note and a laudanum bottle were beside her when, next morning, she was found lying dead. the persons for whose sake it was--so she had persuaded herself--that she committed this act were reduced to a wretched condition by the blow. shelley's health was shattered; mary profoundly miserable; clare, although by her own avowal feeling less affection for fanny than might have been expected, was shocked by the dreadful manner of her death, and infected by the contagion of the general gloom. she was not far from her confinement, and had reasons enough of her own for any amount of depression. godwin was deeply afflicted; to him fanny was a great and material loss, and the last remaining link with a happy past. as usual, public comment was the thing of all others from which he shrank most, and in the midst of his first sorrow his chief anxiety was to hide or disguise the painful story from the world. in writing (for the first time) to mary he says-- do not expose us to those idle questions which, to a mind in anguish, is one of the severest of all trials. we are at this moment in doubt whether, during the first shock, we shall not say that she is gone to ireland to her aunt, a thing that had been in contemplation. do not take from us the power to exercise our own discretion. you shall hear again to-morrow. what i have most of all in horror is the public papers, and i thank you for your caution, as it may act on this. we have so conducted ourselves that not one person in our home has the smallest apprehension of the truth. our feelings are less tumultuous than deep. god only knows what they may become. charles clairmont was not informed at all of fanny's death; a letter from him a year later contains a message to her. mrs. godwin busied herself with putting the blame on shelley. four years later she informed mrs. gisborne that the three girls had been simultaneously in love with shelley, and that fanny's death was due to jealousy of mary! this shows that the shelleys' instinct did not much mislead them when they held mary's stepmother responsible for the authorship and diffusion of many of those slanders which for years were to affect their happiness and peace. any reader of fanny's letters can judge how far mrs. godwin's allegation is borne out by actual facts; and to any one knowing aught of women and women's lives these letters afford clue enough to the situation and the story, and further explanation is superfluous. fanny was fond of shelley, fond enough even to forgive him for the trouble he had brought on their home, but her part was throughout that of a long-suffering sister, one, too, to whose lot it always fell to say all the disagreeable things that had to be said--a truly ungrateful task. her loyalty to the godwins, though it could not entirely divide her from the shelleys, could and did prevent any intimacy of friendship with them. her enlightened, liberal mind, and her generous, loving heart had won shelley's recognition and his affection, and in a moment a veil was torn from his eyes, revealing to him unsuspected depths of suffering, sacrifice, and heroism--now it was too late. how much more they might have done for fanny had they understood what she endured! there was he, shelley, offering sympathy and help to the oppressed and the miserable all the world over, and here,--here under his very eyes, this tragic romance was acted out to the death. her voice did quiver as we parted, yet knew i not that heart was broken from which it came,--and i departed, heeding not the words then spoken-- misery, ah! misery! this world is all too wide for thee. if the echo of those lines reached fanny in the world of shadows, it may have calmed the restless spirit with the knowledge that she had not lived for nothing after all. during the next two months another tragedy was silently advancing towards its final catastrophe. shelley was anxious for intelligence of harriet and her children; she had, however, disappeared, and he could discover no clue to her whereabouts. mr. peacock, who, during june, had been in communication with her on money matters, had now, apparently, lost sight of her. the worry of godwin's money-matters and the fearful shock of fanny's self-sought death, followed as it was by collapse of his own health and nerves, probably withdrew shelley's thoughts from the subject for a time. in november, however, he wrote to hookham, thinking that he, to whom harriet had once written to discover shelley's whereabouts, might now know or have the means of finding out where she was living. no answer came, however, to these inquiries for some weeks, during which shelley, mary, and clare lived in their seclusion, reading lucian and horace, shakespeare, gibbon, and locke; in occasional correspondence with skinner street, through mrs. godwin, who was now trying what she could do to obtain money loans (probably raised on shelley's prospects), requisite, not only to save godwin from bankruptcy, but to repay shelley a small fraction of what he had given and lent, and without which he was unable to pay his own way. the plan for settling at marlow was still pending, and on the th of december shelley went there again to stay with mr. peacock and his mother, and to look about for a residence to suit him. mary during his absence was somewhat tormented by anxiety for his fragile health; fearful, too, lest in his impulsive way he should fall in love with the first pretty place he saw, and burden himself with some unsuitable house, in the idea of settling there "for ever," clare and all. to that last plan she probably foresaw the objections more clearly than shelley did. but her cheery letters are girlish and playful. _ th december ._ sweet elf--i got up very late this morning, so that i could not attend mr. west. i don't know any more. good-night. new bond street, bath, _ th december _. sweet elf--i was awakened this morning by my pretty babe, and was dressed time enough to take my lesson from mr. west, and (thank god) finished that tedious ugly picture i have been so long about. i have also finished the fourth chapter of _frankenstein_, which is a very long one, and i think you would like it. and where are you? and what are you doing? my blessed love. i hope and trust that, for my sake, you did not go outside this wretched day, while the wind howls and the clouds seem to threaten rain. and what did my love think of as he rode along--did he think about our home, our babe, and his poor pecksie? but i am sure you did, and thought of them all with joy and hope. but in the choice of a residence, dear shelley, pray be not too quick or attach yourself too much to one spot. ah! were you indeed a winged elf, and could soar over mountains and seas, and could pounce on the little spot. a house with a lawn, a river or lake, noble trees, and divine mountains, that should be our little mouse-hole to retire to. but never mind this; give me a garden, and _absentia_ claire, and i will thank my love for many favours. if you, my love, go to london, you will perhaps try to procure a good livy, for i wish very much to read it. i must be more industrious, especially in learning latin, which i neglected shamefully last summer at intervals, and those periods of not reading at all put me back very far. the _morning chronicle_, as you will see, does not make much of the riots, which they say are entirely quelled, and you would be almost inclined to say, "out of the mountain comes forth a mouse," although, i daresay, poor mrs. platt does not think so. the blue eyes of your sweet boy are staring at me while i write this; he is a dear child, and you love him tenderly, although i fancy that your affection will increase when he has a nursery to himself, and only comes to you just dressed and in good humour; besides when that comes to pass he will be a wise little man, for he improves in mind rapidly. tell me, shall you be happy to have another little squaller? you will look grave on this, but i do not mean anything. leigh hunt has not written. i would advise a letter addressed to him at the _examiner_ office, if there is no answer to-morrow. he may not be at the vale of health, for it is odd that he does not acknowledge the receipt of so large a sum. there have been no letters of any kind to-day. now, my dear, when shall i see you? do not be very long away; take care of yourself and take a house. i have a great fear that bad weather will set in. my airy elf, how unlucky you are! i shall write to mrs. godwin to-morrow; but let me know what you hear from hayward and papa, as i am greatly interested in those affairs. adieu, sweetest; love me tenderly, and think of me with affection when anything pleases you greatly.--your affectionate girl mary. i have not asked clare, but i dare say she would send her love, although i dare say she would scold you well if you were here. compliments and remembrances to dame peacock and son, but do not let them see this. sweet, adieu! percy b. shelley, esq., great marlow, bucks. on th december the journal records-- letter from shelley; he has gone to visit leigh hunt. this was the beginning of a lifelong intimacy. on the th shelley returned to bath, and on the very next day a letter from hookham informed him that on the th harriet's body had been taken out of the serpentine. she had disappeared three weeks before that time from the house where she was living. an inquest had been held at which her name was given as harriet smith; little or no information about her was given to the jury, who returned a verdict of "found drowned." life and its complications had proved too much for the poor silly woman, and she took the only means of escape she saw open to her. her piteous story was sufficiently told by the fact that when she drowned herself she was not far from her confinement. but it would seem from subsequent evidence that harsh treatment on the part of her relatives was what finally drove her to despair. she had lived a fast life, but had been, nominally at any rate, under her father's protection until a comparatively short time before her disappearance, when some act or occurrence caused her to be driven from his house. from that moment she sank lower and lower, until at last, deserted by one--said to be a groom--to whom she had looked for protection, she killed herself. it is asserted that she had had, all her life, an avowed proclivity to suicide. she had been fond, in young and happy days, of talking jocosely about it, as silly girls often do; discoursing of "some scheme of self-destruction as coolly as another lady would arrange a visit to an exhibition or a theatre."[ ] but it is a wide dreary waste that lies between such an idea and the grim reality,--and poor harriet had traversed it. shelley's first thought on receiving the fatal news was of his children. his sensations were those of horror, not of remorse. he never spoke or thought of harriet with harshness, rather with infinite pity, but he never regarded her save in the light of one who had wronged him and failed him,--whom he had left, indeed, but had forgiven, and had tried to save from the worst consequences of her own acts. her dreadful death was a shock to him of which he said (to byron) that he knew not how he had survived it; and he regarded her father and sister as guilty of her blood. but fanny's death caused him acuter anguish than harriet's did. as for mary, she regarded the whole westbrook family as the source of grief and shame to shelley. harriet she only knew for a frivolous, heartless, faithless girl, whom she had never had the faintest cause to respect, hardly even to pity. poor harriet was indeed deserving of profound commiseration, and no one could have known and felt this more than mary would have done, in later years. but she heard one side of the case only, and that one the side on which her own strongest feelings were engaged. she was only nineteen, with an exalted ideal of womanly devotion; and at nineteen we may sternly judge what later on we may condemn indeed, but with a depth of pity quite beyond the power of its object to fathom or comprehend. no comment whatever on the occurrence appears in her journal. she threw herself ardently into shelley's eagerness to get possession of his elder children; ready, for his sake, to love them as her own. it could not but occur to her that her own position was altered by this event, and that nothing now stood between her and her legal marriage to shelley and acknowledgment as his wife. so completely, however, did they regard themselves as united for all time by indissoluble ties that she thought of the change chiefly as it affected other people. mary to shelley. bath, _ th december _. my beloved friend--i waited with the greatest anxiety for your letter. you are well, and that assurance has restored some peace to me. how very happy shall i be to possess those darling treasures that are yours. i do not exactly understand what chancery has to do in this, and wait with impatience for to-morrow, when i shall hear whether they are with you; and then what will you do with them? my heart says, bring them instantly here; but i submit to your prudence. you do not mention godwin. when i receive your letter to-morrow i shall write to mrs. godwin. i hope, yet i fear, that he will show on this occasion some disinterestedness. poor, dear fanny, if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved, for my house would then have been a proper asylum for her. ah! my best love, to you do i owe every joy, every perfection that i may enjoy or boast of. love me, sweet, for ever. i hardly know what i mean, i am so much agitated. clare has a very bad cough, but i think she is better to-day. mr. carn talks of bleeding if she does not recover quickly, but she is positively resolved not to submit to that. she sends her love. my sweet love, deliver some message from me to your kind friends at hampstead; tell mrs. hunt that i am extremely obliged to her for the little profile she was so kind as to send me, and thank mr. hunt for his friendly message which i did not hear. these westbrooks! but they have nothing to do with your sweet babes; they are yours, and i do not see the pretence for a suit; but to-morrow i shall know all. your box arrived to-day. i shall send soon to the upholsterer, for now i long more than ever that our house should be quickly ready for the reception of those dear children whom i love so tenderly. then there will be a sweet brother and sister for my william, who will lose his pre-eminence as eldest, and be helped third at table, as clare is continually reminding him. come down to me, sweetest, as soon as you can, for i long to see you and embrace. as to the event you allude to, be governed by your friends and prudence as to when it ought to take place, but it must be in london. clare has just looked in; she begs you not to stay away long, to be more explicit in your letters, and sends her love. you tell me to write a long letter, and i would, but that my ideas wander and my hand trembles. come back to reassure me, my shelley, and bring with you your darling ianthe and charles. thank your kind friends. i long to hear about godwin.--your affectionate mary. have you called on hogg? i would hardly advise you. remember me, sweet, in your sorrows as well as your pleasures; they will, i trust, soften the one and heighten the other feeling. adieu. to percy bysshe shelley, gray's inn square, london. no time was lost in putting things on their legal footing. shelley took mary up to town, where the marriage ceremony took place at st. mildred's church, broad street, in presence of godwin and mrs. godwin. on the previous day he had seen his daughter for the first time since her flight from his house two and a half years before. both must have felt a strange emotion which, probably, neither of them allowed to appear. mary for a fortnight left a blank in her journal. on her return to clifton she thus shortly chronicled her days-- i have omitted writing my journal for some time. shelley goes to london and returns; i go with him; spend the time between leigh hunt's and godwin's. a marriage takes place on the th of december . draw; read lord chesterfield and locke. godwin's relief and satisfaction were great indeed. his letter to his brother in the country, announcing his daughter's recent marriage with a baronet's eldest son, can only be compared for adroit manipulation of facts with a later letter to mr. baxter of dundee, in which he tells of poor fanny's having been attacked in wales by an inflammatory fever "which carried her off." he now surpassed himself "in polished and cautious attentions" both to shelley and mary, and appeared to wish to compensate in every way for the red-hot, righteous indignation which, owing to wounded pride rather than to offended moral sense, he had thought it his duty to exhibit in the past. shelley's heart yearned towards his two poor little children by harriet, and to get possession of them was now his feverish anxiety. on this business he was obliged, within a week of his return to bath, to go up again to london. during his absence, on the th of january, clare's little girl, byron's daughter, was born. "four days of idleness," are mary's only allusion to this event. it was communicated to the absent father by shelley, in a long letter from london. he quite simply assumes the event to be an occasion of great rejoicing to all concerned, and expects byron to feel the same. the infant, who afterwards developed into a singularly fascinating and lovely child, was described in enthusiastic terms by mary as unusually beautiful and intelligent, even at this early stage. their first name for her was alba, or "the dawn"; a reminiscence of byron's nickname, "albé." most of this month of january, while mary had clare and the infant to look after, was of necessity spent by shelley in london. harriet's father, mr. westbrook, and his daughter eliza had filed an appeal to the court of chancery, praying that her children might be placed in the custody of guardians to be appointed by the court, and not in that of their father. on th january, poor little william's first birthday, the case was heard before lord chancellor eldon. mary, expecting that the decision would be known at once, waited in painful suspense to hear the result. _journal, friday, january ._--my little william's birthday. how many changes have occurred during this little year; may the ensuing one be more peaceful, and my william's star be a fortunate one to rule the decision of this day. alas! i fear it will be put off, and the influence of the star pass away. read the _arcadia_ and _amadis_; walk with my sweet babe. her fears were realised, for two months were to elapse ere judgment was pronounced. _saturday, january ._--an unhappy day. i receive bad news and determine to go up to london. read the _arcadia_ and _amadis_. letter from mrs. godwin and william. accordingly, next day, mary went up to join her husband in town, and notes in her diary that she was met at the inn by mrs. godwin and william. well might shelley say of the ceremony that it was "magical in its effects." as it turned out, this was her final departure from bath: she never returned there. on her arrival in london she was warmly welcomed by shelley's new friends, the leigh hunts, at whose house most of her time was spent, and whose genial, social circle was most refreshing to her. the house at marlow had been taken, and was now being prepared for her reception. little william and his nurse, escorted by clare, joined her at the hunts on the th of february, but clare herself stayed elsewhere. at the end of the month they all departed for their new home, and were established there early in march. chapter x march -march the shelleys' new abode, although situated in a lovely part of the country, was cold and cheerless, and, at that bleak time of year, must have appeared at its worst. albion house stood (and, though subdivided and much altered in appearance, still stands) in what is now the main street of great marlow, and at a considerable distance from the river. at the back the garden-plot rises gradually from the level of the house, terminating in a kind of artificial mound, overshadowed by a spreading cedar; a delightfully shady lounge in summer, but shutting off sky and sunshine from the house. there are two large, low, old-fashioned rooms; one on the ground floor, somewhat like a farmhouse kitchen; the other above it; both facing towards the garden. in one of these shelley fitted up a library, little thinking that the dwelling, which he had rashly taken on a more than twenty years' lease, would be his home for only a year. the rest of the house accommodated mary, clare, the children and servants, and left plenty of room for visitors. shelley was hospitality itself, and though he never was in greater trouble for money than during this year, he entertained a constant succession of guests. first among these was godwin; next, and most frequent, the genial but needy leigh hunt, with all his family. with mary, as with shelley, he had quickly established himself on a footing of easy, affectionate friendliness, as may be inferred from mary's letter, written to him during her first days at marlow. marlow, _ o'clock, th march _. my dear hunt--although you mistook me in thinking i wished you to write about politics in your letters to me--as such a thought was very far from me,--yet i cannot help mentioning your last week's _examiner_, as its boldness gave me extreme pleasure. i am very glad to find that you wrote the leading article, which i had doubted, as there was no significant hand. but though i speak of this, do not fear that you will be teased by _me_ on these subjects when we enjoy your company at marlow. when there, you shall never be serious when you wish to be merry, and have as many nuts to crack as there are words in the petitions to parliament for reform--a tremendous promise. have you never felt in your succession of nervous feelings one single disagreeable truism gain a painful possession of your mind and keep it for some months? a year ago, i remember, my private hours were all made bitter by reflections on the certainty of death, and now the flight of time has the same power over me. everything passes, and one is hardly conscious of enjoying the present until it becomes the past. i was reading the other day the letters of gibbon. he entreats lord sheffield to come with all his family to visit him at lausanne, and dwells on the pleasure such a visit will occasion. there is a little gap in the date of his letters, and then he complains that this solitude is made more irksome by their having been there and departed. so will it be with us in a few months when you will all have left marlow. but i will not indulge this gloomy feeling. the sun shines brightly, and we shall be very happy in our garden this summer.--affectionately yours, marina. not only did shelley keep open house for his friends; his kindliness and benevolence to the distressed poor in marlow and the surrounding country was unbounded. nor was he content to give money relief; he visited the cottagers; and made himself personally acquainted with them, their needs, and their sufferings. in all these labours of love and charity he was heartily and constantly seconded by mary. no more alone through the world's wilderness, although (he) trod the paths of high intent, (he) journeyed now.[ ] from the time of her union with him mary had been his consoler, his cherished love, all the dearer to him for the thought that she was dependent on him and only on him for comfort and support, and enlightenment of mind; but yet she was a child,--a clever child,--sedate and thoughtful beyond her years, and full of true womanly devotion,--but still one whose first and only acquaintance with the world had been made by coming violently into collision with it, a dangerous experience, and hardening, especially if prolonged. from the time of her marriage a maturer, mellower tone is perceptible throughout her letters and writings, as though, the unnatural strain removed, and, above all, intercourse with her father restored, she glided naturally and imperceptibly into the place nature intended her to fill, as responsible woman and wife, with social as well as domestic duties to fulfil. the suffering of the past two or three years had left her wiser if also sadder than before; already she was beginning to look on life with a calm liberal judgment of one who knew both sides of many questions, yet still her mind retained the simplicity and her spirit much of the buoyancy of youth. the unquenchable spring of love and enthusiasm in shelley's breast, though it led him into errors and brought him grief and disillusionment, was a talisman that saved him from byronic sarcasm, from the bitterness of recoil and the death of stagnation. he suffered from reaction, as all such natures must suffer, but mary was by his side to steady and balance and support him, and to bring to him for his consolation the balm she had herself received from him. well might he write-- now has descended a serener hour, and, with inconstant fortune, friends return; though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power which says: let scorn be not repaid with scorn.[ ] and consolation and support were sorely needed. in march lord chancellor eldon pronounced the judgment by which he was deprived, on moral and religious grounds, of the custody of his two elder children. how bitterly he felt, how keenly he resented, this decree all the world knows. the paper which he drew up during this celebrated case, in which he declared, as far as he chose to declare them, his sentiments with regard to his separation from harriet and his union with mary, is the nearest approach to self-vindication shelley ever made. but the decision of the court cast a slur on his name, and on that of his second wife. the final arrangements about the children dragged on for many months. they were eventually given over to the guardianship of a clergyman, a stranger to their father, who had to set aside £ a year of his income for their maintenance in exile. meanwhile godwin's exactions were incessant, and his demands, sometimes impossible to grant, were harder than ever to deal with now that they were couched in terms of friendship, almost of affection. on th march we find shelley writing to him-- it gives me pain that i cannot send you the whole of what you want. i enclose a cheque to within a few pounds of my possessions. on d march (godwin has been begging again, but this time in behalf of his old assistant and amanuensis, marshall)-- marshall's proposal is one in which, however reluctantly, i must refuse to engage. it is that i should grant bills to the amount of his debts, which are to expire in thirty months. on th april godwin writes on his own behalf-- the fact is i owe £ on a similar score, beyond the £ that i owed in the middle of ; and without clearing this, my mind will never be perfectly free for intellectual occupations. if this were done, i am in hopes that the produce of _mandeville_, and the sensible improvement in the commercial transactions of skinner street would make me a free man, perhaps, for the rest of my life.... my life wears away in lingering sorrow at the endless delays that attend on this affair.... once every two or three months i throw myself prostrate beneath the feet of taylor of norwich, and my other discounting friends, protesting that this is absolutely for the last time. shall this ever have an end? shall i ever be my own man again? one can imagine how such a letter would work on his daughter's feelings. nor was charles clairmont backward about putting in his claims, although his modest little requests require, like gems, to be extracted carefully from the discursive raptures, the eloquent flights of fancy and poetic description in which they are embedded. in january he had written from bagnères de bigorre, where he was "acquiring the language"-- sometimes i hardly dare believe, situated as i am, that i ought for a moment to nourish the feelings of which i am now going to talk to you; at other times i am so thoroughly convinced of their infinite utility with regard to the moral existence of a being with strong sensations, or at all events with regard to mine, that i fly to this subject as to a tranquillising medicine, which has the power of so arranging and calming every violent and illicit sensation of the soul as to spread over the frame a deep and delightful contentment, for such is the effect produced upon me by a contemplation of the perfect state of existence, the perfect state of social domestic happiness which i propose to myself. my life has hitherto been a tissue of irregularity, which i assure you i am little content to reflect upon.... i have been always neglectful of one of the most precious possessions which a young man can hold--of my character.... you will now see the object of this letter.... i desire strongly to marry, and to devote myself to the temperate, rational duties of human life.... i see, i confess, some objections to this step.... i am not forgetful of what i owe to godwin and my mother, but we are in a manner entirely separated.... it is true my feelings towards my mother are cold and inactive, but my attachment and respect for godwin are unalterable, and will remain so to the last moment of my existence.... the news of his death would be to me a stroke of the severest affliction; that of my own mother would be no more than the sorrow occasioned by the loss of a common acquaintance. ... unless every obstacle on the part of the object of my affection were laid aside, you may suppose i should not speak so decisively. she is perfectly acquainted with every circumstance respecting me, and we feel that we love and are suited to each other; we feel that we should be exquisitely happy in being devoted to each other. ... i feel that i could not offer myself to the family without assuring them of my capability of commanding an annual sufficiency to support a little _ménage_--that is to say, as near as i can obtain information, francs, or about £ .... do i dream, my dear shelley, when a gleam of gay hope gives me reason to doubt of the possibility of my scheme?... pray lose no time in writing to me, and be as explicit as possible. the following extract is from a letter to mary, written in august (the matrimonial scheme is now quite forgotten)-- i will begin by telling you that i received £ some days ago, minus the expenses.... i also received your letter, but not till after the money.... i am most extremely vexed that shelley will not oblige me with a single word. it is now nearly six months that i have expected from him a letter about my future plans. do, my dear mary, persuade him to talk with you about them; and if he always persists in remaining silent, i beg you will write for him, and ask him what he would be inclined to approve.... had i a little fortune of £ or £ a year, nothing should ever tempt me to make an effort to increase this golden sufficiency.... respecting money matters.... i still owe (on the score of my _pension_) nearly £ , this is all my debt here. another month will accumulate before i can receive your answer, and you will judge of what will be necessary to me on the road, to whatever place i may be destined. i cannot spend less than s. d. per day. if papa's novel is finished before you write, i wish to god you would send it. i am now absolutely without money, but i have no occasion for any, except for washing and postage, and for such little necessaries i find no difficulty in borrowing a small sum. if i knew mamma's address, i should certainly write to her in france. i have no heart to write to skinner street, for they will not answer my letters. perhaps, now that this haughty woman is absent, i should obtain a letter. i think i shall make an effort with fanny. as for clare, she has entirely forgotten that she has a brother in the world.... tell me if godwin has been to visit you at marlow; if you see fanny often; and all about the two williams. what is shelley writing? shelley, when this letter arrived, was writing _the revolt of islam_. to this poem, in spite of duns, sponges, and law's delays, his thoughts and time were consecrated during his first six months at marlow; in spite, too, of his constant succession of guests; but society with him was not always a hindrance to poetic creation or intellectual work. indeed, a congenial presence afforded him a kind of relief, a half-unconscious stimulus which yet was no serious interruption to thought, for it was powerless to recall him from his abstraction. mary's life at marlow was very different from what it had been at bishopsgate and bath. her duties as house-mistress and hostess as well as shelley's companion and helpmeet left her not much time for reverie. but her regular habits of study and writing stood her in good stead. _frankenstein_ was completed and corrected before the end of may. it was offered to murray, who, however, declined it, and was eventually published by lackington. the negotiations with publishers calling her up to town, she paid a visit to skinner street. shelley accompanied her, but was obliged to return to marlow almost immediately, and as mrs. godwin also appears to have been absent, mary stayed alone with her father in her old home. to him this was a pleasure. "such a visit," he had written to shelley, "will tend to bring back years that are passed, and make me young again. it will also operate to render us more familiar and intimate, meeting in this snug and quiet house, for such it appears to me, though i daresay you will lift up your hands, and wonder i can give it that appellation." to mary every room in the house must have been fraught with unspeakable associations. alone with the memories of those who were gone, of others who were alienated; conscious of the complete change in herself and transference of her sphere of sympathy, she must have felt, when shelley left her, like a solitary wanderer in a land of shadows. "i am very well here," she wrote, "but so intolerably restless that it is painful to sit still for five minutes. pray write. i hear so little from marlow that i can hardly believe that you and willman live there." another train of mingled recollections was awakened by the fact of her chancing, one evening, to read through that third canto of _childe harold_ which byron had written during their summer in switzerland together. do you remember, shelley, when you first read it to me one evening after returning from diodati. the lake was before us, and the mighty jura. that time is past, and this will also pass, when i may weep to read these words.... death will at length come, and in the last moment all will be a dream. what mary felt was crystallised into expression by shelley, not many months later-- the stream we gazed on then, rolled by, its waves are unreturning; but we yet stand in a lone land, like tombs to mark the memory of hopes and fears, which fade and flee in the light of life's dim morning. on the last day of may, mary returned to marlow, where the hunts were making a long stay. externally life went quietly on. the summer was hot and beautiful, and they passed whole days in their boat or their garden, or in the woods. their studies, as usual, were unremitting. mary applied herself to the works of tacitus, buffon, rousseau, and gibbon. shelley's reading at this time was principally greek: homer, Ã�schylus, and plato. his poem was approaching completion. mary, now that _frankenstein_ was off her hands, busied herself in writing out the journal of their first travels. it was published, in december, as _journal of a six weeks' tour_, together with the descriptive letters from geneva of . but her peace and shelley's was threatened by an undercurrent of ominous disturbance which gained force every day. byron remained abroad. but clare and clare's baby remained with the shelleys. at bath she had passed as "mrs." clairmont, but now resumed her former style, while alba was said to be the daughter of a friend in london, sent for her health into the country. as time, however, went by, and the infant still formed one of the marlow household, curiosity, never long dormant, became aroused. whose was this child? and if, as officious gossip was not slow to suggest, it was clare's, then who was its father? as month after month passed without bringing any solution of this problem, the vilest reports arose concerning the supposed relations of the inhabitants of albion house--false rumours that embittered the lives of alba's generous protectors, but to which shelley's unconventionality and unorthodox opinions, and the stigma attached to his name by the chancery decree, gave a certain colour of probability, and which in part, though indirectly, conduced to his leaving england again,--as it proved, for ever. again and again did he write to byron, pointing out with great gentleness and delicacy, but still in the plainest terms, the false situation in which they were placed with regard to friends and even to servants by their effort to keep clare's secret; suggesting, almost entreating, that, if no permanent decision could be arrived at, some temporary arrangement should at least be made for alba's boarding elsewhere. byron, at this time plunged in dissipation at venice, shelved or avoided the subject as long as he could. clare was friendless and penniless, and her chances of ever earning an honest living depended on her power of keeping up appearances and preserving her character before the world. but the child was a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, and engaging creature, and its mother, impulsive, uncontrolled, and reckless, was at no trouble to conceal her devotion to it, regardless of consequences, and of the fact that these consequences had to be endured by others. those who had forfeited the world's kindness seemed, as such, to be the natural _protégés_ of shelley; and even mary, who, not long before, had summed up all her earthly wishes in two items,--"a garden, _et absentia claire_,"--stood by her now in spite of all. but their letters make it perfectly evident that they were fully alive to the danger that threatened them, and that, though they willingly harboured the child until some safe and fitting asylum should be found for it, they had never contemplated its residing permanently with them. to mary shelley this state of things brought one bitter personal grief and disappointment in the loss of her earliest friend, isabel or isobel baxter, now married to mr. david booth, late brewer and subsequently schoolmaster at newburgh-on-tay, a man of shrewd and keen intellect, an immense local reputation for learning, and an estimation of his own gifts second to that of none of his admirers. the baxters, as has already been said, were people of independent mind, of broad and liberal views; full of reverence and admiration for the philosophical writings of godwin. mary, in her extreme youth and inexperience, had quite expected that isabel would have upheld her action when she first left her father's house with shelley. in that she was disappointed, as was, after all, not surprising. now, however, her friend, whose heart must have been with her all along, would surely feel justified in following that heart's dictates, and would return to the familiar, affectionate friendship which survives so many differences of opinion. and her hope received an encouragement when, in august, mr. baxter, isabel's father, accepted an invitation to stay at marlow. he arrived on the st of september, full of doubts as to what sort of place he was coming to,--apprehensions which, after a very short intercourse with shelley, were changed into surprise and delight. but his visit was cut short by the birth, on the very next day, of mary's little girl, clara. he found it expedient to depart for a time, but returned later in the month for a longer stay. this second visit more than confirmed his first impression, and he wrote to his daughter in warm, nay, enthusiastic praise of shelley, against whom isabel was, not unnaturally, much prejudiced, so much so, it seems, as to blind her even to the merits of his writings. after a warm panegyric of shelley as a being of rare genius and talent, of truly republican frugality and plainness of manners, and of a soundness of principle and delicacy of moral tact that might put to shame (if shame they had) many of his detractors,--and withal so amiable that you have only to be half an hour in his company to convince you that there is not an atom of malevolence in his whole composition. mr. baxter proceeds-- is there any wonder that i should become attached to such a man, holding out the hand of kindness and friendship towards me? certainly not. your praise of his book[ ] put me in mind of what pope says of addison-- damn with faint praise; assent with civil leer, and, without sneering, others teach to sneer. [you say] "some parts appear to be well written, but the arguments appear to me to be neither new nor very well managed." after hume such a publication is quite puerile! as to the arguments not being new, it would be a wonder indeed if any new arguments could be adduced in a controversy which has been carried on almost since ever letters were known. as to their not being well managed, i should be happy if you would condescend on the particular instances of their being ill managed; it was the first of shelley's works i had read. i read it with the notion that it _could_ only contain silly, crude, undigested and puerile remarks on a worn-out subject; and yet i was unable to discover any of that want of management which you complain of; but, god help me, i thought i saw in it everything that was opposite. as to its being puerile to write on such a subject after david hume, i by no means think that he has exhausted the subject. i think rather that he has only proposed it--thrown it out, as it were, for a matter of discussion to others who might come after him, and write in a less bigoted, more liberal, and more enlightened age than the one he lived in. think only how many great men's labours we should decree to be puerile if we were to hold everything puerile that has been written on this subject since the days of hume! indeed, my dear, the remark altogether savours more of the envy and illiberality of one jealous of his talents than the frankness and candour characteristic of my isobel. think, my dear, think for a moment what you would have said of this work had it come from robert,[ ] who is as old as shelley was when he wrote it, or had it come from me, or even from----o! i must not say david:[ ] he, to be sure, is far above any such puerility. her father's letter made isabel waver, but in vain. it had no effect on mr. booth, who had been at the trouble of collecting and believing all the scandals about alba, or "miss auburn," as she seems to have been called. he was not one to be biassed by personal feelings or beguiled by fair appearances, in the face of stubborn, unaccountable facts. he preferred to take the facts and draw his own inference--an inference which apparently seemed to him no improbable one. for a long time nothing decisive was said or done, but while the fate of her early friendship hung in the balances, mary's anxiety for some settlement about alba became almost intolerable to her, weighing on her spirits, and helping, with other depressing causes, to retard her restoration to health. on the th of september she summed up in her journal the heads of the seventeen days after clara's birth during which she had written nothing. i am confined tuesday, d. read _rhoda_, pastor's _fireside_, _missionary_, _wild irish girl_, _the anaconda_, _glenarvon_, first volume of percy's _northern antiquities_. bargain with lackington concerning _frankenstein_. letter from albé (byron). an unamiable letter from godwin about mrs. godwin's visits. mr. baxter returns to town. thursday, th, shelley writes his poem; his health declines. friday, th, hunts arrive. as the autumn advanced it became evident that the sunless house at marlow was exceedingly cold, and far too dreary a winter residence to be desirable for one of shelley's feeble constitution, or even for mary and her infant children. shelley's health grew worse and worse. his poem was finished and dedicated to mary in the beautiful lines beginning-- so now my summer-task is ended, mary, and i return to thee, mine own heart's home; as to his queen some victor knight of faëry, earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome; nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become a star among the stars of mortal night, if it indeed may cleave its natal gloom, its doubtful promise thus i would unite with thy beloved name, thou child of love and light. but the reaction from the "agony and bloody sweat of intellectual travail," the troubles and griefs of the past year, and the ceaseless worry about money, all told injuriously on his physical state. he had to be constantly away from his home, up in town, on business; and his thoughts turned longingly again towards italy. byron had signified his consent to receive and provide for his daughter, subject to certain stringent conditions, chief among which was the child's complete separation from its mother, from the time it passed into his keeping. in writing to him on th september, shelley adverts to his own wish to winter at pisa, and the possibility in this case of his being himself alba's escort to italy. "now, dearest, let me talk to you," he writes to mary. "i think we ought to go to italy. i think my health might receive a renovation there, for want of which perhaps i should never entirely overcome that state of diseased action which is so painful to my beloved. i think alba ought to be with her father. this is a thing of incredible importance to the happiness, perhaps, of many human beings. it might be managed without our going there. yes; but not without an expense which would, in fact, suffice to settle us comfortably in a spot where i might be regaining that health which you consider so valuable. it is valuable to you, my own dearest. i see too plainly that you will never be quite happy till i am well. of myself i do not speak, for i feel only for you." he goes on to discuss the practicability of the plan from the financial point of view, calculating what sum they may hope to get by the sale of their lease and furniture, and how much he may be able to borrow, either from his kind friend horace smith, or from money-lenders on _post obits_, a ruinous process to which he was, all his life, forced to resort. poor mary in the chilly house at marlow, with her three-weeks-old baby, her strength far from re-established, and her house full of guests, who made themselves quite at home, was not likely to take the most sanguine view of affairs. _ th september ._ you tell me, dearest, to write you long letters, but i do not know whether i can to-day, as i am rather tired. my spirits, however, are much better than they were, and perhaps your absence is the cause. ah! my love! you cannot guess how wretched it was to see your languor and increasing illness. i now say to myself, perhaps he is better; but then i watched you every moment, and every moment was full of pain both to you and to me. write, my love, a long account of what lawrence says; i shall be very anxious until i hear. i do not see a great deal of our guests; they rise late, and walk all the morning. this is something like a contrary fit of hunt's, for i meant to walk to-day, and said so; but they left me, and i hardly wish to take my first walk by myself; however, i must to-morrow, if he still shows the same want of _tact_. peacock dines here every day, _uninvited_, to drink his bottle. i have not seen him; he morally disgusts me; and marianne says that he is very ill-tempered. i was much pained last night to hear from mr. baxter that mr. booth is ill-tempered and jealous towards isabel; and mr. baxter thinks she half regrets her marriage; so she is to be another victim of that ceremony. mr. baxter is not at all pleased with his son-in-law; but we can talk of that when we meet. ... a letter came from godwin to-day, very short. you will see him; tell me how he is. you are loaded with business, the event of most of which i am anxious to learn, and none so much as whether you can do anything for my father. marlow, _ th september _. you tell me to decide between italy and the sea. i think, dearest, if--what you do not seem to doubt, but which i do, a little--our finances are in sufficiently good a state to bear the expense of the journey, our inclination ought to decide. i feel some reluctance at quitting our present settled state, but as we _must_ leave marlow, i do not know that stopping short on this side the channel would be pleasanter to me than crossing it. at any rate, my love, do not let us encumber ourselves with a lease again.... by the bye, talking of authorship, do get a sketch of godwin's plan from him. i do not think that i ought to get out of the habit of writing, and i think that the thing he talked of would just suit me. i am glad to hear that godwin is well.... as to mrs. godwin, something very analogous to disgust arises whenever i mention her. that last accusation of godwin's[ ] adds bitterness to every feeling i ever felt against her.... mr. baxter thinks that mr. booth keeps isabel from writing to me. he has written to her to-day warmly in praise of us both, and telling her by all means not to let the acquaintance cool, and that in such a case her loss would be much greater than mine. he has taken a prodigious fancy to us, and is continually talking of and praising "queen mab," which he vows is the best poem of modern days. marlow, _ th september _. dearest love--clare arrived yesterday night, and whether it might be that she was in a croaking humour (in ill spirits she certainly was), or whether she represented things as they really were, i know not, but certainly affairs did not seem to wear a very good face. she talks of harriet's debts to a large amount, and something about longdill's having undertaken for them, so that they must be paid. she mentioned also that you were entering into a _post obit_ transaction. now this requires our serious consideration on one account. these things (_post obits_), as you well know, are affairs of wonderful length; and if you must complete one before you settle on going to italy, alba's departure ought certainly not to be delayed.... you have not mentioned yet to godwin your thoughts of italy; but if you determine soon, i would have you do it, as these things are always better to be talked of some days before they take place. i took my first walk to-day. what a dreadfully cold place this house is! i was shivering over a fire, and the garden looked cold and dismal; but as soon as i got into the road, i found, to my infinite surprise, that the sun was shining, and the air warm and delightful.... i will now tell you something that will make you laugh, if you are not too teased and ill to laugh at anything. ah! dearest, is it so? you know now how melancholy it makes me sometimes to think how ill and comfortless you may be, and i so far away from you. but to my story. in elise's last letter to her _chere amie_, clare put in that madame clairmont was very ill, so that her life was in danger, and added, in elise's person, that she (elise) was somewhat shocked to perceive that mademoiselle clairmont's gaiety was not abated by the _douloureuse_ situation of her amiable sister. jenny replies-- "mon amie, avec quel chagrin j'apprends la maladie de cette jolie et aimable madame clairmont; pauvre chère dame, comme je la plains. sans doute elle aime tendrement son mari, et en être séparée pour toujours--en avoir la certitude elle sentir--quelle cruelle chose; qu'il doit être un méchant homme pour quitter sa femme. je ne sais ce qu'il y a, mais cette jeune et jolie femme me tient singulièrement au coeur; je l'avoue que je n'aime point mademoiselle sa soeur. comment! avoir à craindre pour les jours d'une si charmante soeur, et n'en pas perdre un grain de gaîté; elle me met en colere." here is a noble resentment thrown away! really i think this _mystification_ of clare's a little wicked, although laughable. i am just now surrounded by babes. alba is scratching and crowing, william is amusing himself with wrapping a shawl round him, and miss clara staring at the fire.... adieu, dearest love. i want to say again, that you may fully answer me, how very, _very_ anxious i am to know the whole extent of your present difficulties and pursuits; and remember also that if this _post obit_ is to be a long business, alba must go before it is finished. willy is just going to bed. when i ask him where you are, he makes me a long speech that i do not understand. but i know my own one, that you are away, and i wish that you were with me. come soon, my own only love.--your affectionate girl, m. w. s. _p.s._--what of _frankenstein_? and your own poem--have you fixed on a name? give my love to godwin when mrs. godwin is not by, or you must give it her, and i do not love her. _ th october ._ ... how happy i shall be, my own dear love, to see you again. your last was so very, very short a visit; and after you were gone i thought of so many things i had to say to you, and had no time to say. come tuesday, dearest, and let us enjoy some of each other's company; come and see your sweet babes and the little commodore;[ ] she is lively and an uncommonly interesting child. i never see her without thinking of the expressions in my mother's letters concerning fanny. if a mother's eyes were not partial, she seemed like this alba. she mentions her intelligent eyes and great vivacity; but this is a melancholy subject. but shelley's enforced absences became more and more frequent; brief visits to his home were all that he could snatch. as the desire to escape grew stronger, the fair prospect only seemed to recede. new complications appeared in the shape of harriet's creditors, who pressed hard on shelley for a settlement of their hitherto unknown and unsuspected claims. so perilous with regard to them was his position that mary herself was fain to caution him to stay away and out of sight for fear of arrest. it was almost more than she could do to keep up the mask of cheerfulness, yet her letters of counsel and encouragement were her husband's mainstay. "dearest and best of living beings," he wrote in october, "how much do your letters console me when i am away from you. your letter to-day gave me the greatest delight; so soothing, so powerful and quiet are your expressions, that it is almost like folding you to my heart.... my own mary, would it not be better for you to come to london at once? i think we could quite as easily do something with the house if you were in london--that is to say, all of you--as in the country." the next two letters were written in much depression. she could not get up her strength; she dared not indulge in the hope of going abroad, for she realised, as shelley could not do, how little money they would have and how much they already owed. their income, and more, went in supporting and paying for other people, and left them nothing to live on! clare was unsettled, unhappy, and petulant. godwin, ignorant like the rest of the world of her story and her present situation, unaware of shelley's proposed move, and certain to oppose it with the energy of despair when he heard of it, was an impending visitor. _ th october ._ so you do not come to-night love, nor any night; you are always away, and this absence is long and becomes each day more dreary. poor curran! so he is dead, and a sod on his breast, as four years ago i heard him prophesy would be the case within that year. nothing is done, you say in your letter, and indeed i do not expect anything will be done these many months. this, if you continued well, would not give me so much pain, except on alba's account. if she were with her father, i could wait patiently, but the thought of what may come "between the cup and the lip"--between now and her arrival at venice--is a heavy burthen on my soul. he may change his mind, or go to greece, or to the devil; and then what happens? my dearest shelley, be not, i entreat you, too self-negligent; yet what can you do? if you were here, you might retort that question upon me; but when i write to you i indulge false hopes of some miraculous answer springing up in the interval. does not longdill[ ] treat you ill? he makes out long bills and does nothing. you say nothing of the late arrest, and what may be the consequences, and may they not detain you? and may you not be detained many months? for godwin must not be left unprovided. all these things make me run over the months, and know not where to put my finger and say--during this year your italian journey shall commence. yet when i say that it is on alba's account that i am anxious, this is only when you are away, and with too much faith i believe you to be well. when i see you, drooping and languid, in pain, and unable to enjoy life, then on your account i ardently wish for bright skies and italian sun. you will have received, i hope, the manuscript that i sent yesterday in a parcel to hookham. i am glad to hear that the printing goes on well; bring down all that you can with you. if we were free and had no anxiety, what delight would godwin's visit give me; as it is, i fear that it will make me dreadfully miserable. cannot you come with him? by the way you write i hardly expect you this week, but is it really so? i think alba's remaining here exceedingly dangerous, yet i do not see what is to be done. your babes are well. clara already replies to her nurse's caresses by smiles, and willy kisses her with great tenderness.--your affectionate mary. _p.s._--i wish you would purchase a gown for milly,[ ] with a little note with it from marianne,[ ] that it may appear to come from her. you can get one, i should think, for s. or s.; but it must be _stout_; such a kind of one as we gave to the servant at bath. willy has just said good-night to me; he kisses the paper and says good-night to you. clara is asleep. marlow, _saturday, th october _. mr. wright has called here to-day, my dearest shelley, and wished to see you. i can hardly have any doubt that his business is of the same nature as that which made him call last week. you will judge, but it appears to me that an arrest on monday will follow your arrival on sunday. my love, you ought not to come down. a long, long week has passed, and when at length i am allowed to expect you, i am obliged to tell you not to come. this is very cruel. you may easily judge that i am not happy; my spirits sink during this continued absence. godwin, too, will come down; he will talk as if we meant to stay here; and i must--must i?--tell fifty prevarications or direct _lies_. when i thought that you would be here also, i knew that your presence would lead to general conversation; but clare will absent herself. we shall be alone, and he will talk of your private affairs. i am sure that i shall never be able to support it. and when is this to end? italy appears to me farther off than ever, and the idea of it never enters my mind but godwin enters also, and makes it lie heavy at my heart. had you not better speak? you might relieve me from a heavy burden. surely he cannot be blind to the many heavy reasons that urge us. your health, the indispensable one, if every other were away. i assure you that if my father said, "yes, you must go; do what you can for me; i know that you will do all you can;" i should, far from writing so melancholy a letter, prepare everything with a light heart; arrange our affairs here; and come up to town, to await patiently the effect of your efforts. i know not whether it is early habit or affection, but the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood. i shall not see you to-morrow. god knows when i shall see you! clare is for ever wearying with her idle and childish complaints. can you not send me some consolation?--ever your affectionate mary. the fears of an arrest were not realised. early in november shelley came for three days to marlow, after which mary went up to stay with him in london. during this fortnight's visit the question of renewed intercourse with isabel booth was practically decided, and decided against mary. she had written on the th of november to mr. baxter inviting christy to come on a visit. subsequently a plan was started for isabel booth's accompanying the shelleys in their italian trip,--they little dreaming that when they left england it would be for the last time. apparently mr. baxter made some effort to bring mr. booth round to his way of thinking. the two passed an evening with the shelleys at their lodgings. but it availed nothing, and in the end poor mr. baxter was driven himself to write to shelley, breaking off the acquaintance. the letter was written much against the grain, and contrary to the convictions of the writer, who seems to have been much put to it to account for his action, the true grounds for which he could not bring himself to give. shelley, however, was not slow to divine the real instigator in the affair, and wrote back a letter which, by its temperance, simplicity, and dignity, must have pricked baxter to the heart. mary added a playful postscript, showing that she still clung to hope-- my dear sir--you see i prophesied well three months ago, when you were here. i then said that i was sure mr. booth was averse to our intercourse, and would find some means to break it off. i wish i had you by the fire here in my little study, and it might be "double, double, toil and trouble," but i could quickly convince you that your girls are not below me in station, and that, in fact, i am the fittest companion for them in the world, but i postpone the argument until i see you, for i know (pardon me) that _viva voce_ is all in all with you. two or three times more mary wrote to isabel, but the correspondence dropped and the friends met no more for many years. the preparations for their migration extended over two or three months more. during january shelley suffered much from the renewal of an attack of ophthalmia, originally caught while visiting the poor people at marlow. the house there was finally sold, and on the th of february they quitted it and went up to london. their final departure from england did not take place until march. they made the most of their time of waiting, seeing as much of their friends and of objects of interest as circumstances allowed. _journal, thursday, february _ (mary).--go to the indian library and the panorama of rome. on friday, th, spend the morning at the british museum looking at the elgin marbles. on saturday, th, go to hunt's. clare and shelley go to the opera. on sunday, th, mr. bransen, peacock, and hogg dine with us. _wednesday, february ._--spend the day at hunt's. on thursday, th, dine at horace smith's, and copy shelley's eclogue. on friday, th, copy shelley's critique on _rhododaphne_. go to the apollonicon with shelley. on saturday, st, copy shelley's critique, and go to the opera in the evening. spend sunday at hunt's. on monday, d february, finish copying shelley's critique, and go to the play in the evening--_the bride of abydos_. on tuesday go to the opera--_figaro_. on wednesday hunt dines with us. shelley is not well. _sunday, march ._--read montaigne. spend the evening at hunt's. on monday, d, shelley calls on mr. baxter. isabel booth is arrived, but neither comes nor sends. go to the play in the evening with hunt and marianne, and see a new comedy damned. on thursday, th, papa calls, and clare visits mrs. godwin. on sunday, th, we dine at hunt's, and meet mr. novello. music. _monday, march ._--christening the children. this was doubtless a measure of precaution, lest the omission of any such ceremony might in some future time operate as a civil disadvantage towards the children. they received the names of william, clara everina, and clara allegra. _tuesday, march ._--packing. hunt and marianne spend the day with us. mary lamb calls. papa in the evening. our adieus. _wednesday, march ._--travel to dover. _thursday, march ._--france. discussion of whether we should cross. our passage is rough; a sick lady is frightened and says the lord's prayer. we arrive at calais for the third time. mary little thought how long it would be before she saw the english shores again, nor that, when she returned, it would be alone. chapter xi march -june the external events of the four italian years have been repeatedly told and profusely commented on by shelley's various biographers. summed up, they are the history of a long strife between the intellectual and creative stimulus of lovely scenes and immortal works of art on the one hand, and the wearing friction of vexatious outward events and crushing afflictions on the other. for shelley they were a period of rapid, of exotic, mental growth and development, interspersed with intervals of exhaustion and depression, of restlessness, or unnatural calm. for mary they were years of courageous effort, of heroic resistance to overpowering odds. she endured, and she overcame; but some victories are obtained at such cost as to be at the time scarcely distinguishable from defeats, and the story of hers survives in no one act or work of her own, but in the _cenci_, _prometheus unbound_, _epipsychidion_, and _adonais_. the travellers proceeded, _viâ_ lyons and chambéry, to milan, whence shelley and mary made an expedition to como in search of a house. after looking at several,--one "beautifully situated, but too small," another "out of repair, with an excellent garden, but full of serpents," a third which seemed promising, but which they failed to get,--they appear to have given up the scheme altogether, and to have returned to milan. for the next week they were in frequent correspondence with byron on the subject of allegra. this had to be carried on entirely by shelley, as byron refused all communication with clare, and undertook to provide for his child on the sole condition that, from the day it left her, its mother entirely relinquished it, and never saw it again. this appeared to shelley cruelly and needlessly harsh. his own paternal heart was still bleeding from fresh wounds, and although, as he again pointed out, his interest in the matter was entirely on the opposite side to clare's, he pleaded her cause with earnestness. he did not touch on the question of byron's attitude towards clare herself, he contended only for the mother and child, in letters as remarkable for their simple good sense as for their perfect delicacy and courtesy of expression, and every line of which is inspired with the unselfish ardour of a heart full of love. poor clare herself was dreadfully unhappy. any illusion she may ever have had about byron had long been over, but she had possibly not realised before coming to italy the perfect horror he had of seeing her; an event, as he told his friends the hoppners, which would make it necessary for him instantly to quit venice. the reports about his present mode of life, which, even at milan did not fail to reach them, were, to say the least, not encouraging; and from a later letter of shelley's it would seem that he warned clare now, at the last minute, to pause and reflect before she sent allegra away to such a father. she, however, was determined that till seven years old, at least, the child should be with one or other of its parents, and byron would only consent to be that one on condition that it grew up in ignorance of its mother. it appears to have been assumed by all parties that, in refusing to hand allegra altogether over to her father, they would be sacrificing for her the prospect of a brilliant position and fortune. even supposing that this had been so, it is impossible to think that such a consideration would have weighed, at any rate with the shelleys, but for the impossibility of keeping clare's secret if allegra remained with them, and the constant danger of worse scandal to which her unexplained presence must expose them. clare, distracted with grief as she was, yet dreaded discovery acutely, and firmly believed she was acting for allegra's best interests in parting from her. it ended in the little girl's being sent to venice on the th of april in the care of elise, the swiss nurse, with whom mary shelley, for allegra's sake, consented to part, though she valued her very much, but who, not long afterwards, returned to her. as soon as they had gone, the shelleys and clare left milan; and travelling leisurely through parma, modena, bologna, and pisa (where a letter from elise reached them), they arrived on the th of may at leghorn. here they made the acquaintance of mr. and mrs. gisborne. the lady, formerly mrs. reveley, had been an intimate friend of mary wollstonecraft's (when mary godwin), and had been so warmly admired by godwin before his first marriage as to arouse some jealousy in mr. reveley. indeed, his admiration had been returned by so warm a feeling of friendship on her part that godwin was frankly surprised when on his pressing her, shortly after her widowhood, to become his second wife, she refused him point blank, nor, by all his eloquence, was to be persuaded to change her mind. a beautiful girl, and highly accomplished, she had married very young, and had one son of her first marriage, henry reveley, a young civil engineer, who was now living in italy with her and her second husband. this mr. gisborne struck mary as being the reverse of intelligent, and is described in shelley's letters in most uncomplimentary terms. his appearance cannot certainly have been in his favour, but that there must have been more in him than met the eye seems also beyond a doubt, as, at a later time, shelley addressed to him some of his most interesting and most intimate letters. to mrs. gisborne they bore a letter of introduction from godwin, and it was not long before her acquaintance with mrs. shelley ripened into friendship. "reserved, yet with easy manners;" so mary described her at their first meeting. on the next day the two had a long conversation about mary's father and mother. of her mother, indeed, mary learned more from mrs. gisborne than from any one else. she wrote her father an immediate account of these first interviews, and his answer is unusually demonstrative in expression. i received last friday a delightful letter from you. i was extremely gratified by your account of mrs. gisborne. i have not seen her, i believe, these twenty years; i think not since she was mrs. gisborne; and yet by your description she is still a delightful woman. how inexpressibly pleasing it is to call back the recollection of years long past, and especially when the recollection belongs to a person in whom one deeply interested oneself, as i did in mrs. reveley. i can hardly hope for so great a pleasure as it would be to me to see her again. at the bagni di lucca, where they settled themselves for a time, mary heard from her father of the review of _frankenstein_ in the _quarterly_. peacock had reported it to be unfavourable, so it was probably a relief to find that the reviewers "did not pretend to find anything blasphemous in the story." they say that the _gentleman_ who has written the book is a _man of talents_, but that he employs his powers in a way disagreeable to them. all this, however, tended to keep mary's old ardour alive. she never was more strongly impelled to write than at this time; she felt her powers fresh and strong within her; all she wanted was some motive, some suggestion to guide her in the choice of a subject. while at leghorn shelley had come upon a manuscript account, which mary transcribed, of that terrible story of the _cenci_ afterwards dramatised by himself. his first idea was that mary should take it for the subject of a play. he was convinced that she had dramatic talent as a writer, and that he had none; two erroneous conclusions, as the sequel showed. but such an assurance from such a source could not but be flattering to mary's ambition, and stimulating to her innate love of literary work. during all the early part of their time in italy their thoughts were busy with some subject for mary's tragedy. one proposed and strongly urged by shelley was _charles the first_. it was partially carried out by himself before his death, and perhaps occurred to him now in connection with a suggestion of godwin's for a book very different in scope and character, and far better suited to mary's genius than the drama. it would have been a series of _lives of the commonwealth's men_; "our calumniated republicans," as shelley calls them. she was immensely attracted by the idea, but was forced to abandon it at the time, for lack of the necessary books of reference. but shelley, who believed her powers to be of the highest order, was as eager as she herself could be for her to undertake original work of some kind, and was constantly inciting her to effort in this direction. more than two months were spent at the bagni di lucca--reading, writing, riding, and enjoying to the full the balmy italian skies. shelley, in whom the creative mood was more or less dormant, and who "despaired of providing anything original," translated the _symposium_ of plato, partly as an exercise, partly to "give mary some idea of the manners and feelings of the athenians, so different on many subjects from that of any other community that ever existed." together they studied italian, and shelley reported mary's progress to her father. mary has just finished ariosto with me, and indeed has attained a very competent knowledge of italian. she is now reading livy. she also transcribed his translation of the _symposium_, and his eclogue _rosalind and helen_, which, begun at marlow, had been thrown aside till she found it and persuaded him to complete it. meanwhile clare hungered and thirsted for a sight of allegra, of whom she heard occasionally from elise, and who was not now under byron's roof, but living, by his permission, with mrs. hoppner, wife of the british consul at venice, who had volunteered to take temporary charge of her. her distress moved shelley to so much commiseration that he resolved or consented to do what must have been supremely disagreeable to him. he went himself to venice, hoping by a personal interview to modify in some degree byron's inexorable resolution. clare accompanied him, unknown, of course, to byron. they started on the th of august. on that day mary wrote the following letter to miss gisborne-- mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. bagni di lucca, _ th august _. my dear madam--it gave me great pleasure to receive your letter after so long a silence, when i had begun to conjecture a thousand reasons for it, and among others illness, in which i was half right. indeed, i am much concerned to hear of mr. r.'s attacks, and sincerely hope that nothing will retard his speedy recovery. his illness gives me a slight hope that you might now be induced to come to the baths, if it were even to try the effect of the hot baths. you would find the weather cool; for we already feel in this part of the world that the year is declining, by the cold mornings and evenings. i have another selfish reason to wish that you would come, which i have a great mind not to mention, yet i will not omit it, as it might induce you. shelley and clare are gone; they went to-day to venice on important business; and i am left to take care of the house. now, if all of you, or any of you, would come and cheer my solitude, it would be exceedingly kind. i daresay you would find many of your friends here; among the rest there is the signora felichi, whom i believe you knew at pisa. shelley and i have ridden almost every evening. clare did the same at first, but she has been unlucky, and once fell from her horse, and hurt her knee so as to knock her up for some time. it is the fashion here for all the english to ride, and it is very pleasant on these fine evenings, when we set out at sunset and are lighted home by venus, jupiter, and diana, who kindly lend us their light after the sleepy apollo is gone to bed. the road which we frequent is raised somewhat above, and overlooks the river, affording some very fine points of view amongst these woody mountains. still, we know no one; we speak to one or two people at the casino, and that is all; we live in our studious way, going on with tasso, whom i like, but who, now i have read more than half his poem, i do not know that i like half so well as ariosto. shelley translated the _symposium_ in ten days. it is a most beautiful piece of writing. i think you will be delighted with it. it is true that in many particulars it shocks our present manners; but no one can be a reader of the works of antiquity unless they can transport themselves from these to other times, and judge, not by our, but their morality. shelley is tolerably well in health; the hot weather has done him good. we have been in high debate--nor have we come to any conclusion--concerning the land or sea journey to naples. we have been thinking that when we want to go, although the equinox will be past, yet the equinoctial winds will hardly have spent themselves; and i cannot express to you how i fear a storm at sea with two such young children as william and clara. do you know the periods when the mediterranean is troubled, and when the wintry halcyon days come? however, it may be we shall see you before we proceed southward. we have been reading eustace's _tour through italy_; i do not wonder the italians reprinted it. among other select specimens of his way of thinking, he says that the romans did not derive their arts and learning from the greeks; that italian ladies are chaste, and the lazzaroni honest and industrious; and that, as to assassination and highway robbery in italy, it is all a calumny--no such things were ever heard of. italy was the garden of eden, and all the italians adams and eves, until the blasts of hell (_i.e._ the french--for by that polite name he designates them) came. by the bye, an italian servant stabbed an english one here--it was thought dangerously at first, but the man is doing better. i have scribbled a long letter, and i daresay you have long wished to be at the end of it. well, now you are; so my dear mrs. gisborne, with best remembrances, yours, obliged and affectionately, mary w. shelley. from florence, where he arrived on the th, shelley wrote to mary, telling her that clare had changed her intention of going in person to venice, and had decided on the more politic course of remaining herself at fusina or padua, while shelley went on to see byron. "well, my dearest mary," he went on, "are you very lonely? tell me truth, my sweetest, do you ever cry? i shall hear from you once at venice and once on my return here. if you love me, you will keep up your spirits; and at all events tell me truth about it, for i assure you i am not of a disposition to be flattered by your sorrow, though i should be by your cheerfulness, and above all by seeing such fruits of my absence as was produced when i was at geneva." it was during shelley's absence with byron on their voyage round the lake of geneva that mary had begun to write _frankenstein_. but on the day when she received this letter she was very uneasy about her little girl, who was seriously unwell from the heat. on writing to shelley she told him of this; and, from his answer, one may infer that she had suggested the advisability of taking the child to venice for medical advice. padua, mezzogiorno. my best mary--i found at mount selica a favourable opportunity for going to venice, when i shall try to make some arrangement for you and little ca to come for some days, and shall meet you, if i do not write anything in the meantime, at padua on thursday morning. clare says she is obliged to come to see the medico, whom we missed this morning, and who has appointed as the only hour at which he can be at leisure, o'clock in the morning. you must, therefore, arrange matters so that you should come to the stella d'oro a little before that hour, a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at half-past in the morning. you will by this means arrive at venice very early in the day, and avoid the heat, which might be bad for the babe, and take the time when she would at least sleep great part of the time. clare will return with the return carriage, and i shall meet you, or send to you, at padua. meanwhile, remember _charles the first_, and do you be prepared to bring at least some of _mirra_ translated; bring the book also with you, and the sheets of _prometheus unbound_, which you will find numbered from to on the table of the pavilion. my poor little clara; how is she to-day? indeed, i am somewhat uneasy about her; and though i feel secure there is no danger, it would be very comfortable to have some reasonable person's opinion about her. the medico at padua is certainly a man in great practice; but i confess he does not satisfy me. am i not like a wild swan, to be gone so suddenly? but, in fact, to set off alone to venice required an exertion. i felt myself capable of making it, and i knew that you desired it.... adieu, my dearest love. remember, remember _charles the first_ and _mirra_. i have been already imagining how you will conduct some scenes. the second volume of _st. leon_ begins with this proud and true sentiment-- "there is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute." shakespeare was only a human being. adieu till thursday.--your ever affectionate, p. b. s. his next letter, however, announced yet another revolution in clare's plans. her heart failed her at the idea of remaining to endure her suspense all alone in a strange place; and so, braving the possible consequences of byron's discovering her move before he was informed of it, she went on with shelley to venice, and, the morning after their arrival, proceeded to mr. hoppner's house. here she was kindly welcomed by him and his wife, a pretty swiss woman, with a sympathetic motherly heart, who knew all about her and allegra. they insisted, too, on shelley's staying with them, and he was nothing loth to accept the offer, for byron's circle would not have suited him at all. he was pleased with his hostess, something in whose appearance reminded him of mary. "she has hazel eyes and sweet looks, rather maryish," he wrote. and in another letter he described her as so good, so beautiful, so angelically mild that, were she wise too, she would be quite a mary. but she is not very accomplished. her eyes are like a reflection of yours; her manners are like yours when you know and like a person. he could enjoy no pleasure without longing for mary to share it, and from the moment he reached venice he was planning impatiently for her to follow him, to experience with him the strange emotions aroused by the first sight of the wonderful city, and to make acquaintance with his new friends. he lost no time in calling on byron, who gave him a very friendly reception. shelley's intention on leaving lucca was to go with his family to florence, and the plan he urged on byron was that allegra should come to spend some time there with her mother. to this byron objected, as likely to raise comment, and as a reopening of the whole question. he was, however, in an affable mood, and not indisposed to meet shelley halfway. he had heard of clare's being at padua, but nothing of her subsequent change of plan; and, assuming that the whole party were staying there, he offered to send allegra as far as that, on a week's visit. finding that things were not as he supposed, and that mrs. shelley was likely to come presently to venice, he proposed to lend them for some time a villa which he rented at este, and to let allegra stay with them. the offer was promptly and gratefully accepted by shelley. the fact of clare's presence in venice had, perforce, to be kept dark; for that there was no help; the great thing was to get her and allegra away as soon as possible. he sent directions to mary to pack up at once and travel with the least possible delay to este. there he would meet her with clare, allegra, and elise, who were to be established, with mary's little ones, at byron's villa, casa cappucini, while she and he proceeded to venice. when the letter came, mary had the gisbornes staying with her on a visit. for that reason, and on account of little clara's indisposition, the summons to depart so suddenly can hardly have been welcome; she obeyed it, however, and left the bagni di lucca on the st of august. owing to delays about the passport, her journey took rather longer than they had expected. the intense heat of the weather, added to the fatigue of travelling and probably change of diet, seriously affected the poor baby, who, by the time they got to este on th september, was dangerously ill. shelley, who had been waiting for them impatiently, was also far from well, and their visit to venice had to be deferred for more than a fortnight, during which mary had time to hear enough of venetian society to horrify and disgust her. _journal, saturday, september ._--arrive at este. poor clara is dangerously ill. shelley is very unwell, from taking poison in italian cakes. he writes his drama of _prometheus_. read seven cantos of dante. begin to translate _a cajo graccho_ of monti, and _measure for measure_. _wednesday, september ._--read the _filippo_ of alfieri. shelley and clare go to padua. he is very ill from the effects of his poison. to mrs. gisborne she wrote as follows-- _september ._ my dear mrs. gisborne--i hasten to write to you to say that we have arrived safe, and yet i can hardly call it safe, since the fatigue has given my poor _ca_ an attack of dysentery; and although she is now somewhat recovered from that disorder, she is still in a frightful state of weakness and fever, and is reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again. the physician of este is a stupid fellow; but there is one come from padua, and who appears clever; so i hope under his care she will soon get well, although we are still in great anxiety concerning her. i found mr. shelley very anxious for our non-arrival, for, besides other delays, we were detained a whole day at florence for a signature to our passport. the house at este is exceedingly pleasant, with a large garden and quantities of excellent fruit. i have not yet been to venice, and know not when i shall, since it depends upon the state of clara's health. i hope mr. reveley is quite recovered from his illness, and i am sure the baths did him a great deal of good. so now i suppose all your talk is how you will get to england. shelley agrees with me that you could live very well for your £ per annum in marlow or some such town; and i am sure you would be much happier than in italy. how all the english dislike it! the hoppners speak with the greatest acrimony of the italians, and mr. hoppner says that he was actually driven from italian society by the young men continually asking him for money. everything is saleable in venice, even the wives of the gentry, if you pay well. it appears indeed a most frightful system of society. well! when shall we see you again? soon, i daresay. i am so much hurried that you will be kind enough to excuse the abruptness of this letter. i will write soon again, and in the meantime write to me. shelley and clare desire the kindest remembrances.--my dear mrs. gisborne, affectionately yours, mary w. s. casa capuccini, este. send our letters to this direction. no more of the journal was written till the th, and in the meantime great trouble had fallen on the writers. shelley was impatient for clara to be within reach of better medical advice, and anxious to get mary to venice. he went forward himself on the d, returning next day as far as padua to meet mary and clara, with clare, who, however, only came over to padua to see the medico. the baby was very ill, and was getting worse every hour, but they judged it best to press on. in their hurry they had forgotten their passport, and had some difficulty in getting past the _dogana_ in consequence. shelley's impetuosity carried all obstacles before it, and the soldiers on duty had to give way. on reaching venice mary went straight with her sick child to the inn, while shelley hurried for the doctor. it was too late. when he got back (without the medical man) he found mary well-nigh beside herself with distress. another doctor had already been summoned, but little clara was dying, and in an hour all was over. this blow reduced mary to "a kind of despair";--the expression is shelley's. mr. hoppner, on hearing what had happened, insisted on taking them away at once from the inn to his house. four days she spent in venice after that, the first of which was a blank; of the second she merely records-- an idle day. go to the lido and see albé there. after that she roused herself. there was shelley to be comforted and supported, there was byron to be interviewed. one of her objects in coming had been to try and persuade him after all to let allegra stay. so she nerved herself to pay this visit, and to go about and see something of venice with shelley. _sunday, september ._--read fourth canto of _childe harold_. it rains. go to the doge's palace, ponte dei sospiri, etc. go to the academy with mr. and mrs. hoppner, and see some fine pictures. call at lord byron's and see the _farmaretta_. _monday, september ._--go with mrs. hoppner and cavaliere mengaldo to the library. shopping. in the evening lord byron calls. _tuesday, september ._--leave venice, and arrive at este at night. clare is gone with the children to padua. _wednesday, september ._--the chicks return. transcribe _mazeppa_. go to the opera in the evening. a quiet, sad fortnight at este followed. an idle one it was not, for shelley not only wrote _julian and maddalo_, but worked on portions of his drama of _prometheus unbound_, the idea of which had haunted him ever since he came to italy. clare, for the time, was happy with her child. mary read several plays of shakespeare and the lives of alfieri and tasso in italian. on the th of october she arrived once more at venice with shelley. she passed the greater part of her time there with the hoppners, who were exceedingly friendly. shelley visited byron several times, probably trying to get an extension of leave for allegra. in this, however, he must have failed, as on the th he went to este to fetch her, returning with her on the th. having restored the poor little girl to the hoppners' care, he and mary went once more to este, but this time only to prepare for departure. on the th of november the whole party, including elise (who was not retained for allegra's service), left the villa capuccini and travelled by slow stages to rome. no further allusion to her recent bereavement is to be found in mary's journal. she attempted to behave like the stoic her father had wished her to be.[ ] she had written to him of her affliction, and received the following answer from the philosopher-- skinner street, _ th october _. my dear mary--i sincerely sympathise with you in the affliction which forms the subject of your letter, and which i may consider as the first severe trial of your constancy and the firmness of your temper that has occurred to you in the course of your life; you should, however, recollect that it is only persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a pusillanimous disposition, that sink long under a calamity of this nature. i assure you such a recollection will be of great use to you. we seldom indulge long in depression and mourning except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it, and that it does us honour. such a homily, at such a time, must have made mary feel like a person of a very ordinary sort indeed. but she strove, only too hard, to carry out her father's principles; for, by doing violence to her sensitive nature, she might crush but could not kill it. the passionate impulses of her mother were curiously mated in her with her father's reflective temperament; and the noble courage which she inherited from mary wollstonecraft went hand in hand with somewhat of godwin's constitutional shrinking from any manifestation of emotion. and the effect of determinate, excessive self-restraint on a heart like hers was to render the crushed feelings morbid in their acuteness, and to throw on her spirits a load of endurance which was borne, indeed, but at ruinous cost, and operated largely, among other causes, to make her seem cold when she was really suffering. at such times it was not altogether well for her that she was shelley's companion. for, when his health and spirits were good, he craved and demanded companionship,--personal, intellectual, playful,--companionship of all sorts; but when they ebbed, when his vitality was low, when the simultaneous exaltation of conception and labour of realisation--a tremendous expenditure of force--was over, and left him shattered, shaken, surprised at himself like one who in a dream falls from a height and awakens with the shock,--tired, and yet dull,--then the one panacea for him was animal spirits in some congenial acquaintance; whether a friend or a previous stranger mattered little, provided the personality was congenial and the spirits buoyant. mary did her best, bravely and nobly. but the loss of a child was one thing to shelley, another thing to her. she strove to overcome the low spirits from which she suffered. but endurance, though more heroic than spontaneous cheerfulness, is not to be compared with it in its benign effect on other people; nay, it may even have a depressing effect when a yielding to emotion "of the ordinary sort" may not. all these truths, however, do not become evident at once; like other life-experience they have to be spelled out by slow and painful degrees. to seek for respite from grief or care in intellectual culture and the acquisition of knowledge was instinctive and habitual both in shelley and in mary. they visited ferrara and bologna, then travelled by a winding road among the apennines to terni, where they saw the celebrated waterfall-- it put me in mind of sappho leaping from a rock, and her form vanishing as in the shape of a swan in the distance. _friday, november ._--we travel all day the campagna di roma--a perfect solitude, yet picturesque, and relieved by shady dells. we see an immense hawk sailing in the air for prey. enter rome. a rainy evening. doganas and cheating innkeepers. we at length get settled in a comfortable hotel. after one week in rome, during which they visited as many of the wonders of the eternal city as the time allowed, they journeyed on to naples, reading montaigne by the way. at naples they remained for three months. of their life there mary's journal gives no account; she confines herself almost entirely to noting down the books they read, and one or two excursions. they lived in very great seclusion, greater than was good for them, but shelley suffered much from ill-health, and not a little from its treatment by an unskilful physician. they read incessantly,--livy, dante, sismondi, winkelmann, the georgics and plutarch's _lives_, _gil blas_, and _corinne_. they left no beautiful or interesting scene unvisited; they ascended vesuvius, and made excursions to pompeii, herculaneum, and paestum. on the th of december mary records-- go on the sea with shelley. visit capo miseno, the elysian fields, avernus, solfatara. the bay of baiae is beautiful, but we are disappointed by the various places we visit. the impression of the scene, however, remained after the temporary disappointment had been forgotten, and she sketched it from memory many years later in the fanciful introduction to her romance of _the last man_, the story of which purports to be a tale deciphered from sibylline leaves, picked up in the caverns. shelley, however, suffered from extreme depression, which, out of solicitous consideration for mary, he disguised as much as possible under a mask of cheerfulness, insomuch that she never fully realised what he endured at this time until she read the mournful poems written at naples, after he who wrote them had passed for ever out of sight. she blamed herself then for what seemed to her her blindness,--for having perhaps let slip opportunities of cheering him which she would have sold her soul to recall when it was too late. that _he_, at the time, felt in her no such want of sympathy or help is shown by his concluding words in the advertisement of _rosalind and helen_, and _lines written among the euganean hills_, dated naples, th december, where he says of certain lines "which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains," that, if they were not erased, it was "at the request of a dear friend, with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness." much of this sadness was due to physical suffering, but external causes of anxiety and vexation were not wanting. one was the discovery of grave misconduct on the part of their italian servant, paolo. an engagement had been talked of between him and the swiss nurse elise, but the shelleys, who thought highly of elise and by no means highly of paolo, tried to dissuade her from the idea. an illness of elise's revealed the fact that an illicit connection had been formed. the shelleys, greatly distressed, took the view that it would not do to throw elise on the world without in some degree binding paolo to do his duty towards her, and they had them married. how far this step was well-judged may be a matter of opinion. elise was already a mother when she entered the shelleys service. whether a woman already a mother was likely to do better for being bound for life to a man whom they "knew to be a rascal" may reasonably be doubted even by those who hold the marriage-tie, as such, in higher honour than the shelleys did. but whether the action was mistaken or not, it was prompted by the sincerest solicitude for elise's welfare, a solicitude to be repaid, at no distant date, by the basest ingratitude. meanwhile mary lost her nurse, and, it may be assumed, a valuable one; for any one who studies the history of this and the preceding years must see all three of the poor doomed children throve as long as elise was in charge of them. clare was ailing, and anxious too; how could it be otherwise? just before allegra's third birthday, mary received a letter from mrs. hoppner which was anything but reassuring. it gave an unsatisfactory account of the child, who did not thrive in the climate of venice, and a still more unsatisfactory account of byron. il faut espérer qu'elle se changera pour son mieux quand il ne sera plus si froid; mais je crois toujours que c'est très malheureux que miss clairmont oblige cette enfant de vivre à venise, dont le climat est nuisible en tout au physique de la petite, et vraîment, pour ce que fera son père, je le trouve un peu triste d'y sacrifier l'enfant. my lord continue de vivre dans une débauche affreuse qui tôt ou tard le menera a sà ruine.... quant à moi, je voudrois faire tout ce qui est en mon pouvoir pour cette enfant, que je voudrois bien volontiers rendre aussi heureuse que possible le temps qu'elle restera avec nous; car je crains qu'après elle devra toujours vivre avec des étrangers, indifferents à son sort. my lord bien certainement ne la rendra jamais plus à sa mère; ainsi il n'y a rien de bon à espérer pour cette chère petite. this letter, if she saw it, may well have made clare curse the day when she let allegra go. still, after they returned to rome at the beginning of march, a brighter time set in. _journal, friday, march ._--after passing over the beautiful hills of albano, and traversing the campagna, we arrive at the holy city again, and see the coliseum again. all that athens ever brought forth wise, all that afric ever brought forth strange, all that which asia ever had of prize, was here to see. oh, marvellous great change! rome living was the world's sole ornament; and dead, is now the world's sole monument. _sunday, march ._--move to our lodgings. a rainy day. visit the coliseum. read the bible. _monday, march ._--visit the museum of the vatican. read the bible. _tuesday, march ._--shelley and i go to the villa borghese. drive about rome. visit the pantheon. visit it again by moonlight, and see the yellow rays fall through the roof upon the floor of the temple. visit the coliseum. _wednesday, march ._--visit the capitol, and see the most divine statues. not one of the party but was revived and invigorated by the beauty and overpowering interest of the surrounding scenes, and the delight of a lovely italian spring. to shelley it was life itself. "the charm of the roman climate," says mrs. shelley, "helped to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn before. and as he wandered among the ruins, made one with nature in their decay, or gazed on the praxitelean shapes that throng the vatican, the capitol, and the palaces of rome, his soul imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself." the visionary drama of _prometheus unbound_, which had haunted, yet eluded him so long, suddenly took life and shape, and stood before him, a vivid reality. during his first month at rome he completed it in its original three-act form. the fourth act was an afterthought, and was added at a later date. for a short, enchanted time--his health renewed, the deadening years forgotten, his susceptibilities sharpened, not paralysed, by recent grief--he gave himself up to the vision of the realisation of his life-dream; the disappearance of evil from the earth. "he believed," wrote mary shelley, "that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none.... that man should be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation was the cardinal point of his system. and the subject he loved best to dwell on, was the image of one warring with the evil principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity. a victim full of fortitude and hope, and the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of good." "this poem," he himself says, "was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the baths of caracalla, among the flowers, glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. the bright blue sky of rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama."[ ] and while he wrought and wove the radiant web of his poem, mary, excited to greatest enthusiasm by the treasures of sculpture at rome, and infected by the atmosphere of art around her, took up again her favourite pursuit of drawing, which she had discontinued since going to marlow, and worked at it many hours a day, sometimes all day. she was writing, too; a thoroughly congenial occupation, at once soothing and stimulating to her. she studied the bible, with the keen fresh interest of one who comes new to it, and she read livy and montaigne. little william was thriving, and growing more interesting every day. his beauty and promise and angelic sweetness made him the pet and darling of all who knew him, while to his parents he was a perpetual source of ever fresh and increasing delight. and his mother looked forward to the birth in autumn of another little one who might, in some measure, fill the place of her lost clara. clare, who, also, was in better health, was not behindhand in energy or industry. music was her favourite pursuit; she took singing-lessons from a good master and worked hard. they led a somewhat less secluded life than at naples, and at the house of signora dionizi, a roman painter and authoress (described by mary shelley as "very old, very miserly, and very mean"), mary and clare, at any rate, saw a little of italian society. for this, however, shelley did not care, nor was he attracted by any of the few english with whom he came in contact. yet he felt his solitude. in april, when the strain of his work was over, his spirits drooped, as usual; and he longed then for some _congenial distraction_, some human help to bear the burden of life till the moment of weakness should have passed. but the fount of inspiration, the source of temporary elation and strength, had not been exhausted by _prometheus_. on the d of april mary notes-- visit the palazzo corunna, and see the picture of beatrice cenci. the interest in the old idea was revived in him; he became engrossed in the subject, and soon after his "lyrical drama" was done, he transferred himself to this other, completely different work. there was no talk, now, of passing it on to mary, and indeed she may well have recoiled from the unmitigated horrors of the tale. but, though he dealt with it himself, shelley still felt on unfamiliar ground, and, as he proceeded, he submitted what he wrote to mary for her judgment and criticism; the only occasion on which he consulted her about any work of his during its progress towards completion. late in april they made the acquaintance of one english (or rather, irish) lady, who will always be gratefully remembered in connection with the shelleys. this was miss curran, a daughter of the late irish orator, who had been a friend of godwin's, and to whose death mary refers in one of her letters from marlow.[ ] mary may, perhaps, have met her in skinner street; in any case, the old association was one link between them, and another was afforded by similarity in their present interests and occupations. mary was very keen about her drawing and painting. miss curran had taste, and some skill, and was vigorously prosecuting her art-studies in rome. portrait painting was her especial line, and each of the shelley party, at different times, sat to her; so that during the month of may they met almost daily, and became well acquainted. this new interest, together with the unwillingness to bring to an end a time at once so peaceful and so fruitful, caused them once and again to postpone their departure, originally fixed for the beginning of may. they stayed on longer than it is safe for english people to remain in rome. ah! why could no presentiment warn them of impending calamity? could they, like the scottish witch in the ballad, have seen the fatal winding-sheet creeping and clinging ever higher and higher round the wraith of their doomed child, they would have fled from the face of death. but they had no such foreboding. not a fortnight after his portrait had been taken by miss curran, william showed signs of illness. how it was that, knowing him to be so delicate,--having learned by bitterest experience the danger of southern heat to an english-born infant,--having, as early as april, suspected the roman air of causing "weakness and depression, and even fever" to shelley himself, how, after all this, they risked staying in rome through may is hard to imagine. they were to pay for their delay with the best part of their lives. william sickened on the th, but had so far recovered by the th that his parents, though they saw they ought to leave rome as soon as he was fit to travel, were in no immediate anxiety about him, and were making their summer plans quite in a leisurely way; mary writing to ask mrs. gisborne to help them with some domestic arrangements, begging her to inquire about houses at lucca or the baths of pisa, and to engage a servant for her. the journal for this and the following days runs-- _sunday, may ._--read livy, and _persiles and sigismunda_. draw. spend the evening at miss curran's. _monday, may ._--read livy, and _persiles and sigismunda_. draw. walk in the evening. _tuesday, june ._--drawing lesson. read livy. walk by the tiber. spend the evening with miss curran. _wednesday, june ._--see mr. vogel's pictures. william becomes very ill in the evening. _thursday, june ._--william is very ill, but gets better towards the evening. miss curran calls. mary took this opportunity of begging her friend to write for her to mrs. gisborne, telling her of the inevitable delay in their journey. rome, _thursday, d june _. dear mrs. gisborne--mary tells me to write for her, for she is very unwell, and also afflicted. our poor little william is at present very ill, and it will be impossible to quit rome so soon as we intended. she begs you, therefore, to forward the letters here, and still to look for a servant for her, as she certainly intends coming to pisa. she will write to you a day or two before we set out. william has a complaint of the stomach; but fortunately he is attended by mr. bell, who is reckoned even in london one of the first english surgeons. i know you will be glad to hear that both mary and mr. shelley would be well in health were it not for the dreadful anxiety they now suffer. emelia curran. two days after, mary herself wrote a few lines to mrs. gisborne. _ th june ._ william is in the greatest danger. we do not quite despair, yet we have the least possible reason to hope. i will write as soon as any change takes place. the misery of these hours is beyond calculation. the hopes of my life are bound up in him.--ever yours affectionately, m. w. s. i am well, and so is shelley, although he is more exhausted by watching than i am. william is in a high fever. sixty death-like hours did shelley watch, without closing his eyes. clare, her own troubles forgotten in this moment of mortal suspense, was a devoted nurse. as for mary, her very life ebbed with william's, but as yet she bore up. there was no real hope from the first moment of the attack, but the poor child made a hard struggle for life. two more days and nights of anguish and terror and deadly sinking of heart,--and then, in the blank page following _june _, the last date entered in the diary, are the words-- the journal ends here.--p. b. s. on monday, the th of june, at noonday, william died. chapter xii june -september it was not fifteen months since they had all left england; shelley and mary with the sweet, blue-eyed "willmouse," and the pretty baby, clara, so like her father; clare and the "bluff, bright-eyed little commodore," allegra; the swiss nurse and english nursemaid; a large and lively party, in spite of cares and anxieties and sorrows to come. in one short, spiritless paragraph mary, on the th of august, summed up such history as there was of the sad two months following on the blow which had left her childless. _journal, wednesday, august , , leghorn_ (mary).--i begin my journal on shelley's birthday. we have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, i might be happy; but to have won and then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering. since i left home i have read several books of livy, _clarissa harlowe_, the _spectator_, a few novels, and am now reading the bible, and lucan's _pharsalia_, and dante. shelley is to-day twenty-seven years of age. write; read lucan and the bible. shelley writes the _cenci_, and reads plutarch's _lives_. the gisbornes call in the evening. shelley reads _paradise lost_ to me. read two cantos of the _purgatorio_. three days after william's death, shelley, mary, and clare had left rome for leghorn. once more they were alone together--how different now from the three heedless young things who, just five years before, had set out to walk through france with a donkey! shelley, then, a creature of feelings and theories, full of unbalanced impulses, vague aspirations and undeveloped powers; inexperienced in everything but uncomprehended pain and the dim consciousness of half-realised mistakes. mary, the fair, quiet, thoughtful girl, earnest and impassioned, calm and resolute, as ignorant of practical life as precocious in intellect; with all her mind worshipping the same high ideals as shelley's, and with all her heart worshipping him as the incarnation of them. clare her very opposite; excitable and enthusiastic, demonstrative and capricious, clever, but silly; with a mind in which a smattering of speculative philosophy, picked up in godwin's house, contended for the mastery with such social wisdom as she had picked up in a boarding school. both of them mere children in years. now poor clare was older without being much wiser, saddened yet not sobered; suffering bitterly from her ambiguous position, yet unable or unwilling to put an end to it; the worse by her one great error, which had brought her to dire grief; the better by one great affection--for her child,--the source of much sorrow, it is true, but also of truest joy of self-devotion, and the only instrument of such discipline that ever she had. shelley had found what he wanted, the faithful heart which to his own afforded peace and stability and the balance which, then, he so much needed; a kindred mind, worthy of the best his had to give; knowing and expecting that best, too, and satisfied with nothing short of it. and his best had responded. in these few years he had realised powers the extent of which could not have been foretold, and which might, without that steady sympathy and support, have remained unfulfilled possibilities for ever. in spite of the far-reaching consequences of his errors, in spite of torturing memories, in spite of ill-health, anxiety, poverty, vexation, and strife, the shelley of _queen mab_ had become the shelley of _prometheus unbound_ and the _cenci_. of this development he himself was conscious enough. in so far as he was known to his contemporaries, it was only by his so-called atheistic opinions, and his departures theoretical and actual, from conventional social morality; and even these owed their notoriety, not to his genius, but to the fact that they were such strange vagaries in the heir to a baronetcy. in his new life he had, indeed, known the deepest grief as well as the purest love, but those griefs which are memorial shrines of love did not paralyse him. they were rather among the influences which elicited the utmost possibilities of his nature; his lost children, as lovely ideals, were only half lost to him. but with mary it was otherwise. her occupation was gone. when after the death of her first poor little baby, she wrote: "whenever i am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point--that i was a mother, and am so no longer;" a new sense was dawning in her which never had waned, and which, since william's birth, had asserted itself as the key to her nature. she had known very little of the realities of life when she left her father's house with shelley, and he, her first reality, belonged in many ways more to the ideal than to the real world. but for her children, her association with him, while immeasurably expanding her mental powers, might have tended to develop these at the expense of her emotional nature, and to starve or to stifle her human sympathies. in her children she found the link which united her ideal love with the universal heart of mankind, and it was as a mother that she learned the sweet charities of human nature. this maternal love deepened her feelings towards her own father, it gave her sympathy with clare and helped towards patience with her, it saved her from overmuch literary abstraction, and prevented her from pining when shelley was buried in dreams or engrossed in work, and she loved these children with the unconscious passionate gratitude of a reserved nature towards anything that constrains from it the natural expression of that fund of tenderness and devotion so often hidden away under a perversely undemonstrative manner. now, in one short year, all this was gone, and she sank under the blow of william's loss. she could not even find comfort in the thought of the baby to be born in autumn, for, after the repeated rending asunder of beloved ties, she looked forward to new ones with fear and trembling, rather than with hope. the physical reaction after the strain of long suspense and watching had told seriously on her health, never strong at these times; the efforts she had made at naples were no longer possible to her. even clare with all her misery was, in one sense, better off than she, for allegra _lived_. she tried to rise above her affliction, but her care for everything was gone; the whole world seemed dull and indifferent. poor shelley, only too liable to depression at all times, and suffering bitterly himself from the loss of his beloved child, tried to keep up his spirits for mary's sake. thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair, where, for thine own sake, i cannot follow thee. perhaps the effort he thus made for her sake had a bracing effect on himself, but the old mary seemed gone,--lost,--and even he was powerless to bring her back; she could not follow him; any approach of seeming forgetfulness in others increased her depression and gloom. the letter to miss curran, which follows, was written within three weeks of william's death. leghorn, _ th june _. my dear miss curran--i wrote to you twice on our journey, and again from this place, but i found the other day that shelley had forgotten to send the letter; and i have been so unwell with a cold these last two or three days that i have not been able to write. we have taken an airy house here, in the vicinity of leghorn, for three months, and we have not found it yet too hot. the country around us is pretty, so that i daresay we shall do very well. i am going to write another stupid letter to you, yet what can i do? i no sooner take up my pen than my thoughts run away with me, and i cannot guide it except about _one_ subject, and that i must avoid. so i entreat you to join this to your many other kindnesses, and to excuse me. i have received the two letters forwarded from rome. my father's lawsuit is put off until july. it will never be terminated. i hear that you have quitted the pestilential air of rome, and have gained a little health in the country. pray let us hear from you, for both shelley and i are very anxious--more than i can express--to know how you are. let us hear also, if you please, anything you may have done about the tomb, near which i shall lie one day, and care not, for my own sake, how soon. i never shall recover that blow; i feel it more than at rome; the thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest to me. you see i told you that i could only write to you on one subject; how can i, since, do all i can (and i endeavour very sincerely) i can think of no other, so i will leave off. shelley is tolerably well, and desires his kindest remembrances.--most affectionately yours, mary w. shelley. their sympathetic friend, leigh hunt, grieved at the tone of her letters and at shelley's account of her, tried to convey to her a little kindly advice and encouragement. york buildings, new road. _july ._ my dear mary--i was just about to write to you, as you will see by my letter to shelley, when i received yours. i need not say how it grieves me to see you so dispirited. not that i wonder at it under such sufferings; but i know, at least i have often suspected, that you have a tendency, partly constitutional perhaps, and partly owing to the turn of your philosophy, to look over-intensely at the dark side of human things; and they must present double dreariness through such tears as you are now shedding. pray consent to take care of your health, as the ground of comfort; and cultivate your laurels on the strength of it. i wish you would strike your pen into some more genial subject (more obviously so than your last), and bring up a fountain of gentle tears for us. that exquisite passage about the cottagers shows what you could do.[ ] mary received his counsels submissively, and would have carried them out if she could. but her nervous prostration was beyond her own power to cure or remove, and it was hard for others and impossible for herself to know how far her dejected state was due to mental and how far to physical causes. shelley was not, and dared not be, idle. he worked at his tragedy and finished it; many of the fragments, too, belong to this time. they are the speech of pain, but those who can teach in song what they learn in suffering have much, very much to be thankful for. mary persisted in study; she even tried to write. but the spring of invention was low. she exerted herself to send to mrs. hunt an account of their present life and surroundings. leghorn, _ th august _. my dear marianne--we are very dull at leghorn, and i can therefore write nothing to amuse you. we live in a little country house at the end of a green lane, surrounded by a _podere_. these _poderi_ are just the things hunt would like. they are like our kitchen-gardens, with the difference only that the beautiful fertility of the country gives them. a large bed of cabbages is very unpicturesque in england, but here the furrows are alternated with rows of grapes festooned on their supporters, and the hedges are of myrtle, which have just ceased to flower; their flower has the sweetest faint smell in the world, like some delicious spice. green grassy walks lead you through the vines. the people are always busy, and it is pleasant to see three or four of them transform in one day a bed of indian corn to one of celery. they work this hot weather in their shirts, or smock-frocks (but their breasts are bare), their brown legs nearly the colour, only with a rich tinge of red in it, of the earth they turn up. they sing, not very melodiously, but very loud, rossini's music, "mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò," and they are accompanied by the _cicala_, a kind of little beetle, that makes a noise with its tail as loud as johnny can sing; they live on trees; and three or four together are enough to deafen you. it is to the _cicala_ that anacreon has addressed an ode which they call "to a grasshopper" in the english translations. well, here we live. i never am in good spirits--often in very bad; and hunt's portrait has already seen me shed so many tears that, if it had his heart as well as his eyes, he would weep too in pity. but no more of this, or a tear will come now, and there is no use for that. by the bye, a hint hunt gave about portraits. the italian painters are very bad; they might make a nose like shelley's, and perhaps a mouth, but i doubt it; but there would be no expression about it. they have no notion of anything except copying again and again their old masters; and somehow mere copying, however divine the original, does a great deal more harm than good. shelley has written a good deal, and i have done very little since i have been in italy. i have had so much to see, and so many vexations, independently of those which god has kindly sent to wean me from the world if i were too fond of it. shelley has not had good health by any means, and, when getting better, fate has ever contrived something to pull him back. he never was better than the last month of his stay in rome, except the last week--then he watched sixty miserable death-like hours without closing his eyes; and you may think what good that did him. we see the _examiners_ regularly now, four together, just two months after the publication of the last. these are very delightful to us. i have a word to say to hunt of what he says concerning italian dancing. the italians dance very badly. they dress for their dances in the ugliest manner; the men in little doublets, with a hat and feather; they are very stiff; nothing but their legs move; and they twirl and jump with as little grace as may be. it is not for their dancing, but their pantomime, that the italians are famous. you remember what we told you of the ballet of _othello_. they tell a story by action, so that words appear perfectly superfluous things for them. in that they are graceful, agile, impressive, and very affecting; so that i delight in nothing so much as a deep tragic ballet. but the dancing, unless, as they sometimes do, they dance as common people (for instance, the dance of joy of the venetian citizens on the return of othello), is very bad indeed. i am very much obliged to you for all your kind offers and wishes. hunt would do shelley a great deal of good, but that we may not think of; his spirits are tolerably good. but you do not tell me how you get on; how bessy is, and where she is. remember me to her. clare is learning thorough bass and singing. we pay four crowns a month for her master, lessons three times a week; cheap work this, is it not? at rome we paid three shillings a lesson and the master stayed two hours. the one we have now is the best in leghorn. i write in the morning, read latin till , when we dine; then i read some english book, and two cantos of dante with shelley. in the evening our friends the gisbornes come, so we are not perfectly alone. i like mrs. gisborne very much indeed, but her husband is most dreadfully dull; and as he is always with her, we have not so much pleasure in her company as we otherwise should.... the neighbourhood of mrs. gisborne, "charming from her frank and affectionate nature," and full of intellectual sympathy with the shelleys, was a boon indeed at this melancholy time. through her shelley was led to the study of spanish, and the appearance on the scene of charles clairmont, who had just passed a year in spain, was an additional stimulus in this direction. together they read several of calderon's plays, from which shelley derived the greatest delight, and which enabled him for a time to forget everyday life and its troubles. another diversion to his thoughts was the scheme of a steamboat which should ply between leghorn and marseilles, to be constructed by henry reveley, mainly at shelley's expense. he was elated at promoting a project which he conceived to be of great public usefulness and importance, and happy at being able to do a friend a good turn. he followed every stage of the steamer's construction with keen interest, and was much disappointed when the idea was given up, as, after some months, it was; not, however, until much time, labour, and money had been expended on it. mary, though she endeavoured to fill the blanks in her existence by assiduous reading, could not escape care. clare was in perpetual thirst for news of her allegra, and godwin spared them none of his usual complaints. he, too, was much concerned at the depressed tone of mary's letters, which seemed to him quite disproportionate to the occasion, and thought it his duty to convince her, by reasoning, that she was not so unhappy as she thought herself to be. skinner street, _ th september _. my dear mary--your letter of th august is very grievous to me, inasmuch as you represent me as increasing the degree of your uneasiness and depression. you must, however, allow me the privilege of a father and a philosopher in expostulating with you on this depression. i cannot but consider it as lowering your character in a memorable degree, and putting you quite among the commonalty and mob of your sex, when i had thought i saw in you symptoms entitling you to be ranked among those noble spirits that do honour to our nature. what a falling off is here! how bitterly is so inglorious a change to be deplored! what is it you want that you have not? you have the husband of your choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual attainments, whatever i and some other persons may think of his morality, and the defects under this last head, if they be not (as you seem to think) imaginary, at least do not operate as towards you. you have all the goods of fortune, all the means of being useful to others, and shining in your proper sphere. but you have lost a child: and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, and all that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of two years old is dead. the human species may be divided into two great classes: those who lean on others for support, and those who are qualified to support. of these last, some have one, some five, and some ten talents. some can support a husband, a child, a small but respectable circle of friends and dependents, and some can support a world, contributing by their energies to advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility. the former class sit with their arms crossed, a prey to apathy and languor, of no use to any earthly creature, and ready to fall from their stools if some kind soul, who might compassionate, but who cannot respect them, did not come from moment to moment and endeavour to set them up again. you were formed by nature to belong to the best of these classes, but you seem to be shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst. above all things, i entreat you, do not put the miserable delusion on yourself, to think there is something fine, and beautiful, and delicate, in giving yourself up, and agreeing to be nothing. remember too, though at first your nearest connections may pity you in this state, yet that when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill humour, and regardless of the happiness of every one else, they will finally cease to love you, and scarcely learn to endure you. the other parts of your letter afford me much satisfaction. depend upon it, there is no maxim more true or more important than this; frankness of communication takes off bitterness. true philosophy invites all communication, and withholds none. such a letter tended rather to check frankness of communication than to bind up a broken heart. poor mary's feelings appear in her letter to miss curran, with whom she was in correspondence about a monumental stone for the tomb in rome. the most pressing entreaties on my part, as well as clare's, cannot draw a single line from venice. it is now six months since we have heard, even in an indirect manner, from there. god knows what has happened, or what has not! i suppose shelley must go to see what has become of the little thing; yet how or when i know not, for he has never recovered from his fatigue at rome, and continually frightens me by the approaches of a dysentery. besides, we must remove. my lying-in and winter are coming on, so we are wound up in an inextricable dilemma. this is very hard upon us; and i have no consolation in any quarter, for my misfortune has not altered the tone of my father's letters, so that i gain care every day. and can you wonder that my spirits suffer terribly? that time is a weight to me? and i see no end to this. well, to talk of something more interesting, shelley has finished his tragedy, and it is sent to london to be presented to the managers. it is still a _deep secret_, and only one person, peacock (who presents it), knows anything about it in england. with shelley's public and private enemies, it would certainly fall if known to be his; his sister-in-law alone would hire enough people to damn it. it is written with great care, and we are in hopes that its story is sufficiently polished not to shock the audience. we shall see. continue to direct to us at leghorn, for if we should be gone, they will be faithfully forwarded to us. and when you return to rome just have the kindness to inquire if there should be any stray letter for us at the post-office. i hope the country air will do you real good. you must take care of yourself. remember that one day you will return to england, and that you may be happier there.--affectionately yours, m. w. s. at the end of september they removed to florence, where they had engaged pleasant lodgings for six months. the time of mary's confinement was now approaching, an event, in shelley's words, "more likely than any other to retrieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression." they travelled by short, easy stages; stopping for a day at pisa to pay a visit to a lady with whom from this time their intercourse was frequent and familiar. this was lady mountcashel, who had, when a young girl, been mary wollstonecraft's pupil, and between whom and her teacher so warm an attachment had existed as to arouse the jealousy and dislike of her mother, lady kingsborough. she had long since been separated from lord mountcashel, and lived in italy with a mr. tighe and their two daughters, laura and nerina. as lady mountcashel she had entertained godwin at her house during his visit to ireland after his first wife's death. she is described by him as a remarkable person, "a republican and a democrat in all their sternness, yet with no ordinary portion either of understanding or good nature." in dress and appearance she was somewhat singular, and had that disregard for public opinion on such matters which is habitually implied in the much abused term "strong-minded." in this respect she had now considerably toned down. her views on the relations of the sexes were those of william godwin, and she had put them into practice. but she and the gentleman with whom she lived in permanent, though irregular, union had succeeded in constraining, by their otherwise exemplary life, the general respect and esteem. they were known as "mr. and mrs. mason," and had so far lived down criticism that their actual position had come to be ignored or forgotten by those around them. mr. tighe, or "tatty," as he was familiarly called by his few intimates, was of a retiring disposition, a lover of books and of solitude. mrs. mason was as remarkable for her strong practical common sense as for her talents and cultivation and the liberality of her views. she had a considerable knowledge of the world, and was looked up to as a model of good breeding, and an oracle on matters of deportment and propriety. she had kept up correspondence with godwin, and her acquaintance with the shelleys was half made before she saw them. she conceived an immediate affection for mary, as well for her own as for her mother's sake, and was to prove a constant and valuable friend, not to her only, but to shelley, and most especially to clare. after a week in florence, mary's journal was resumed. _saturday, october ._--arrive at florence. read massinger. shelley begins clarendon; reads massinger, and plato's _republic_. clare has her first singing lesson on saturday. go to the opera and see a beautiful ballet _monday, october ._--read horace; work. go to the gallery. shelley finishes the first volume of clarendon. read the _little thief_. _wednesday, october ._--finish the first book of horace's odes. work, walk, read, etc. on saturday letters are sent to england. on tuesday one to venice. shelley visits the galleries. reads spenser and clarendon aloud. _thursday, october ._--work; read; copy _peter bell_. monday night a great fright with charles clairmont. shelley reads clarendon aloud and _plato's republic_. walk. on thursday the protest from the bankers. shelley writes to them, and to peacock, longdill, and h. smith. _tuesday, november ._--read madame de sevigné. bad news from london. shelley reads clarendon aloud, and plato. he writes to papa. on the th of november a son was born to the shelleys, and brought the first true balm of consolation to his poor mother's heart. "you may imagine," wrote shelley to leigh hunt, "that this is a great relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes.... poor mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months." the child was healthy and pretty, and very like william. neither mary's strength nor her spirits were altogether re-established for some time, but the birth of "percy florence" was, none the less, the beginning of a new life for her. she turned, with the renewed energy of hope, to her literary work and studies. one of her first tasks was to transcribe the just written fourth act of _prometheus unbound_. she had work of her own on hand too; a historical novel, _castruccio, prince of lucca_ (afterwards published as _valperga_), a laborious but very congenial task, which occupied her for many months. and indeed all the solace of new and tender ties, all the animating interest of intellectual pursuits, was sorely needed to counteract the wearing effect of harassing cares and threatening calamities. godwin was now being pressed for the accumulated unpaid house-rent of many years; so many that, when the call came, it was unexpected by him, and he challenged its justice. he had engaged in a law-suit on the matter, which he eventually lost. the only point which appeared to admit of no reasonable doubt was that shelley would shortly be called upon to find a large sum of money for him, and this at a time when he was himself in unexpected pecuniary straits, owing to the non-arrival of his own remittances from england--a circumstance rendered doubly vexatious by the fact that a large portion of the money was pledged to henry reveley for the furtherance of his steamboat. a draft for £ , destined for this purpose, was returned, protested by shelley's bankers. and though the money was ultimately recovered, its temporary loss caused no small alarm. meanwhile every mail brought letters from godwin of the most harrowing nature; the philosophy which he inculcated in a case of bereavement was null and void where impending bankruptcy was concerned. he well knew how to work on his daughter's feelings, and he did not spare her. poor shelley was at his wits' end. "mary is well," he wrote (in december) to the gisbornes; "but for this affair in london i think her spirits would be good. what shall i, what can i, what ought i to do? you cannot picture to yourself my perplexity." it appeared not unlikely that he might even have to go to england, a journey for which his present state of health quite unfitted him, and which he could not but be conscious would be no permanent remedy, but only a temporary alleviation, of godwin's thoroughly unsound circumstances. mary, in her grief for her father, began to think that the best thing for him might be to leave england altogether and settle abroad; an idea from which mrs. mason, with her strong sagacity, earnestly dissuaded her. her views on the point were expressed in a letter to shelley mary had written asking her if she could give charles clairmont any introductions at vienna, where he had now gone to seek his fortune as a teacher of languages; and also begging for such assistance as she might be able to lend in the matter of obtaining access to historical documents or other ms. bearing on the subjects of mary's projected novel. mrs. mason to shelley. my dear sir--i deferred answering your letter till this post in hopes of being able to send some recommendations for your friend at vienna, in which i have been disappointed; and i have now also a letter from my dear mary; so i will answer both together. it gives me great pleasure to hear such a good account of the little boy and his mother.... i am sorry to perceive that your visit to pisa will be so much retarded; but i admire mary's courage and industry. i sincerely regret that it is not in my power to be of service to her in this undertaking.... all i can say is, that when you have got all you can there (where i suppose the manuscript documents are chiefly to be found) and that you come to this place, i have scarcely any doubt of being able to obtain for you many books on the subject which interests you. probably everything in print which relates to it is as easy to be had here as at florence.... i am very sorry indeed to think that mr. godwin's affairs are in such a bad way, and think he would be much happier if he had nothing to do with trade; but i am afraid he would not be comfortable out of england. you who are young do not mind the thousand little wants that men of his age are not habituated to; and i, who have been so many years a vagabond on the face of the earth, have long since forgotten them; but i have seen people of my age much discomposed at the absence of long-accustomed trifles; and though philosophy supports in great matters, it seldom vanquishes the small everydayisms of life. i say this that mary may not urge her father too much to leave england. it may sound odd, but i can't help thinking that mrs. godwin would enjoy a tour in foreign countries more than he would. the physical inferiority of women sometimes teaches them to support or overlook little inconveniences better than men. * * * * * "i am very sorry," she writes to mary in another letter, "to find you still suffer from low spirits. i was in hopes the little boy would have been the best remedy for that. words of consolation are but empty sounds, for to time alone it belongs to wear out the tears of affliction. however, a woman who gives milk should make every exertion to be cheerful on account of the child she nourishes." whether the plan for godwin's expatriation was ever seriously proposed to him or not, it was, at any rate, never carried out. but none the less for this did the shelleys live in the shadow of his gloom, which co-operated with their own pecuniary strait, previously alluded to, and with the nipping effects of an unwontedly severe winter, to make life still difficult and dreary for them. "shelley calderonised on the late weather," wrote mary to mrs. gisborne; "he called it an epic of rain with an episode of frost, and a few similes concerning fine weather. we have heard from england, although not from the bankers; but peacock's letter renders the affair darker than ever. ah! my dear friend, you, in your slow and sure way of proceeding, ought hardly to have united yourself to our eccentric star. i am afraid that you will repent it, and it grieves us both more than you can imagine that all should have gone so ill; but i think we may rest assured that this is delay, and not loss; it can be nothing else. i write in haste--a carriage at the door to take me out, and _percy_ asleep on my knee. adieu. charles is at vienna by this time."... they had intended remaining six months at florence, but the place suited shelley so ill that they took advantage of the first favourable change in the weather, at the end of january, to remove to pisa, where the climate was milder, and where they now had pleasant friends in the masons at "casa silva." they wished, too, to consult the celebrated italian surgeon, vaccà, on the subject of shelley's health. vaccà's advice took the shape of an earnest exhortation to him to abstain from drugs and remedies, to live a healthy life, and to leave his complaint, as far as possible, to nature. and, though he continued liable to attacks of pain and illness, and on one occasion had a severe nervous attack, the climate of pisa proved in the end more suitable to him than any other, and for more than two years he remained there or in the immediate neighbourhood. he and mary were never more industrious than at this time; reading extensively, and working together on a translation of spinoza they had begun at florence, and which occupied them, at intervals, for many months. little percy, a most healthy and satisfactory infant, had in march an attack of measles, but so slight as to cause no anxiety. once, however, during the summer they had a fright about him, when an unusually alarming letter from her father upset mary so much as to cause in her nursling, through her, symptoms of an illness similar to that which had destroyed little clara. on this occasion she authorised shelley, at his earnest request, to intercept future letters of the kind, an authority of which he had to avail himself at no distant date, telling godwin that his domestic peace, mary's health and happiness, and his child's life, could no longer be entirely at his mercy. no wonder that his own nervous ailments kept their hold of him. and to make matters better for him and for mary, paolo, the rascally italian servant whom they had dismissed at naples, now concocted a plot for extorting money from shelley by accusing him of frightful crimes. legal aid had to be called in to silence him. to this end they employed an attorney of leghorn, named del rosso, and, for convenience of communication, they occupied for a few weeks casa ricci, the gisbornes' house there, the owners being absent in england. shelley made henry reveley's workshop his study. hence he addressed his poetical "letter to maria gisborne," and here too it was that "on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies (they) heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems."[ ] if external surroundings could have made them happy they might have been so now, but shelley, though in better health, was very nervous. paolo's scandal and the legal affair embittered his life, to an extent difficult indeed to estimate, for it is certain that for some one else's sake, though _whose_ sake has never transpired, he had accepted when at naples responsibilities at once delicate and compromising. paolo had knowledge of the matter, and used this knowledge partly to revenge himself on shelley for dismissing him from his service, partly to try and extort money from him by intimidation. the shelleys hoped they had "crushed him" with del rosso's help, but they could not be certain, because, as mary wrote to miss curran, they "could only guess at his accomplices." with shelley in a state of extreme nervous irritability, with mary deprived of repose by her anguish on her father's account and her feverish anxiety to help him, with clare unsettled and miserable about allegra, venting her misery by writing to byron letters unreasonable and provoking, though excusable, and then regretting having sent them, they were not likely to be the most cheerful or harmonious of trios. the weather became intolerably hot by the end of august, and they migrated to casa prinni, at the baths of s. giuliano di pisa. the beauty of this place, and the delightful climate, refreshed and invigorated them all. they spent two or three days in seeing lucca and the country around, when shelley wrote the _witch of atlas_. exquisite poem as it is, it was, in mary's mood of the moment, a disappointment to her. ever since the _cenci_ she had been strongly impressed with the conviction that if he could but write on subjects of universal _human_ interest, instead of indulging in those airy creations of fancy which demand in the reader a sympathetic, but rare, quality of imagination, he would put himself more in touch with his contemporaries, who so greatly misunderstood him, and that, once he had elicited a responsive feeling in other men, this would be a source of profound happiness and of fresh and healthy inspiration to himself. "i still think i was right," she says, woman-like, in the _notes to the poems of _, written long after shelley's death. so from one point of view she undoubtedly was, but there are some things which cannot be constrained. shelley was shelley, and at the moment when he was moved to write a poem like the _witch of atlas_, it was useless to wish that it had been something quite different. his next poem was to be inspired by a human subject, and perhaps then poor mary would have preferred a second witch of atlas. chapter xiii september -august the baths were of great use to shelley in allaying his nervous irritability. such an improvement in him could not be without a corresponding beneficial effect on mary. in the study of greek, which she had begun with him at leghorn, she found a new and wellnigh inexhaustible fund of intellectual pleasure. their life, though very quiet, was somewhat more varied than it had been at leghorn, partly owing to their being within easy reach of pisa and of their friends at casa silva. the gisbornes had returned from england, and, during a short absence of clare's, mary tried, but ineffectually, to persuade mrs. gisborne to come and occupy her room for a time. some circumstance had arisen which led shortly after to a misunderstanding between the two families, soon over, but painful while it lasted. it was probably connected with the abandonment of the projected steamboat; henry reveley, while in england, having changed his mind and reconsidered his future plans. in october a curiously wet season set in. _journal, wednesday, october ._--rain till o'clock. at sunset the arch of cloud over the west clears away; a few black islands float in the serene; the moon rises; the clouds spot the sky, but the depth of heaven is clear. the nights are uncommonly warm. write. shelley reads _hyperion_ aloud. read greek. my thoughts arise and fade in solitude; the verse that would invest them melts away like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day. how beautiful they were, how firm they stood, flecking the starry sky like woven pearl. _friday, october ._--shelley goes to florence. write. read greek. wind n.w., but more cloudy than yesterday, yet sometimes the sun shines out; the wind high. read villani. _saturday, october ._--rain in the night and morning; very cloudy; not an air stirring; the leaves of the trees quite still. after a showery morning it clears up somewhat, and the sun shines. read villani, and ride to pisa. _sunday, october ._--rainy night and rainy morning; as bad weather as is possible in italy. a little patience and we shall have st. martin's summer. at sunset the arch of clear sky appears where it sets, becoming larger and larger, until at o'clock the dark clouds are alone over monte nero; venus shines bright in the clear azure, and the trunks of the trees are tinged with the silvery light of the rising moon. write, and read villani. shelley returns with medwin. read _sismondi_. of tom medwin, shelley's cousin and great admirer, who now for the first time appeared on the scene, they were to see, if anything, more than they wished. he was a lieutenant on half-pay, late of the th dragoons; much addicted to literature, and with no mean opinion of his own powers in that line. _journal, tuesday, october ._--rainy night and morning; it does not rain in the afternoon. shelley and medwin go to pisa. walk; write. _wednesday, october ._--rain all night. the banks of the serchio break, and by dark all the baths are overflowed. water four feet deep in our house. "the weather fine." this flood brought their stay at the baths to a sudden end. as soon as they could get lodgings they returned to pisa. here, not long after, medwin fell ill, and was six weeks invalided in their house. they showed him the greatest kindness; shelley nursing him like a brother. his society was, for a time, a tolerably pleasant change; he knew spanish, and read with shelley a great deal in that language, but he had no depth or breadth of mind, and his literary vanity and egotism made him at last what mary shelley described as a _seccatura_, for which the nearest english equivalent is, a bore. _journal, sunday, november ._--percy's birthday. a divine day; sunny and cloudless; somewhat cold in the evening. it would be pleasant enough living in pisa if one had a carriage and could escape from one's house to the country without mingling with the inhabitants, but the pisans and the scolari, in short, the whole population, are such that it would sound strange to an english person if i attempted to express what i feel concerning them--crawling and crab-like through their sapping streets. read _corinne_. write. _monday, november ._--finish _corinne_. write. my eyes keep me from all study; this is very provoking. _tuesday, november ._--write. read homer, targione, and spanish. a rainy day. shelley reads calderon. _thursday, november ._--write. read greek and spanish. medwin ill. play at chess. _friday, november ._--read greek, villani, and spanish with m.... pacchiani in the evening. a rainy and cloudy day. _friday, december ._--read greek, _don quixote_, calderon, and villani. pacchiani comes in the evening. visit la viviani. walk. sgricci is introduced. go to a _funzione_ on the death of a student. _saturday, december ._--write an italian letter to hunt. read _oedipus_, _don quixote_, and calderon. pacchiani and a greek prince call--prince mavrocordato. in these few entries occur four new and remarkable names. pacchiani, who had been, if he was not still, a university professor, but who was none the less an adventurer and an impostor; in orders, moreover, which only served as a cloak for his hypocrisy; clever withal, and eloquent; well knowing where, and how, to ingratiate himself. he amused, but did not please the shelleys. he was, however, one of those people who know everybody, and through him they made several acquaintances; among them the celebrated improvisatore, sgricci, and the young greek statesman and patriot, prince alexander mavrocordato. with the improvisations of sgricci, his eloquence, his _entrain_, both mary and clare were fairly carried away with excitement. older, experienced folk looked with a more critical eye on his performances, but to these english girls the exhibition was an absolute novelty, and seemed inspired. sgricci was during this winter a frequent visitor at "casa galetti." prince mavrocordato proved deeply interesting, both to mary and shelley. he "was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of his country which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen," and in the revolution which, shortly afterwards, broke out there, he was to play an important part, as one of the foremost of modern greek statesmen. to him, at a somewhat later date, was dedicated shelley's lyrical drama of _hellas_; "as an imperfect token of admiration, sympathy, and friendship." this new acquaintance came to mary just when her interest in the greek language and literature was most keen. before long the prince had volunteered to help her in her studies, and came often to give her greek lessons, receiving instruction in english in return. "do you not envy my luck," she wrote to mrs. gisborne, "that having begun greek, an amiable, young, agreeable, and learned greek prince comes every morning to give me a lesson of an hour and a half. this is the result of an acquaintance with pacchiani. so you see, even the devil has his use." the acquaintance with pacchiani had already had another and a yet more memorable result, which affected mary none the less that it did so indirectly. through him they had come to know emilia viviani, the noble and beautiful italian girl, immured by her father in a convent at pisa until such time as a husband could be found for her who would take a wife without a dowry. shelley's acquaintance with emilia was an episode, which at one time looked like an era, in his existence. an era in his poetry it undoubtedly was, since it is to her that the _epipsychidion_ is addressed. mary and clare were the first to see the lovely captive, and were struck with astonishment and admiration. but on shelley the impression she made was overwhelming, and took possession of his whole nature. her extraordinary beauty and grace, her powers of mind and conversation, warmed by that glow of genius so exclusively southern, another variety of which had captivated them all in sgricci, and which to northern minds seems something phenomenal and inspired,--these were enough to subdue any man, and, when added to the halo of interest shed around her by her misfortunes and her misery, made her, to shelley, irresistible. all his sentiments, when aroused, were passions; he pitied, he sympathised, he admired and venerated passionately; he scorned, hated, and condemned passionately too. but he never was swayed by any love that did not excite his imagination: his attachments were ever in proportion to the power of idealisation evoked in him by their objects. and never, surely, was there a subject for idealisation like emilia; the spirit of intellectual beauty in the form of a goddess; the captive maiden waiting for her deliverer; the perfect embodiment of immortal truth and loveliness, held in chains by the powers of cruelty, tyranny, and hypocrisy. she was no goddess, poor emilia, as indeed he soon found out; only a lovely young creature of vivid intelligence and a temperament in which italian ardour was mingled with italian subtlety; every germ of sentiment magnified and intensified in outward effect by fervour of manner and natural eloquence; the very reverse of human nature in the north, where depth of feeling is apt to be in proportion to its inveterate dislike of discovery, where warmth can rarely shake off self-consciousness, and where many of the best men and women are so much afraid of seeming a whit better than they really are, that they take pains to appear worse. rightly balanced, the whole sum of emilia's gifts and graces would have weighed little against mary's nobleness of heart and unselfish devotion; her talents might not even have borne serious comparison with clare's vivacious intellect. but to shelley, haunted by a vision of perfection, and ever apt to recognise in a mortal image "the likeness of that which is, perhaps, eternal,"[ ] she seemed a revelation, and, like all revelations, supreme, unique, superseding for the time every other possibility. it was a brief madness, a trance of inspiration, and its duration was counted only by days. they met for the first time early in december. by the th she was corresponding with him as her _diletto fratello_. before the month was over _epipsychidion_ had been written. before the middle of january he could write of her-- my conception of emilia's talents augments every day. her moral nature is fine, but not above circumstances; yet i think her tender and true, which is always something. how many are only one of these things at a time!... there is no reason that you should fear any admixture of that which you call _love_.... this was written to clare. she had very quickly become intimate and confidential with emilia, and estimated her to a nicety at her real worth, admiring her without idealising her or caring to do so. she knew shelley pretty intimately too, and, being personally unconcerned in the matter, could afford at once to be sympathetic and to speak her mind fearlessly; the consequence being that shelley was unconstrained in communication with her. that _mary_ should be his most sympathetic confidant at this juncture was not in the nature of things. she, too, had begun by idealising emilia, but her affection and enthusiastic admiration were soon outdone and might well have been quenched by shelley's rapt devotion. she did not misunderstand him, she knew him too well for that, but the better she understood him the less it was possible for her to feel with him; nor could it have been otherwise unless she had been really as cold as she sometimes appeared. loyal herself, she never doubted shelley's loyalty, but she suffered, though she did not choose to show it: her love, like a woman's,--perhaps even more than most women's--was exclusive; shelley's, like a man's,--like many of the best of men's,--inclusive. she did not allow her feelings to interfere with her actions. she continued to show all possible sympathy and kindness to emilia, who in return would style her her dearest, loveliest friend and sister. no wonder, however, if at times mary could not quite overcome a slight constraint of manner, or if this was increased when her dearest sister, with sweet unconsciousness, would openly probe the wound her pride would fain have hidden from herself; when emilia, for instance, wrote to shelley-- mary does not write to me. is it possible that she loves me less than the others do? i should indeed be inconsolable at that. or to be informed in a letter to herself that this constraint of manner had been talked over by emilia with shelley, who had assured her that mary's apparent coldness was only "the ash which covered an affectionate heart." he was right, indeed, and his words were the faithful echo of his own true heart. he might have added, of himself, that his transient enthusiasms resembled the soaring blaze of sparks struck by a hammer from a glowing mass of molten metal. but, in everyday prose, the situation was a trying one for mary, and surely no wife of two and twenty could have met it more bravely and simply than she did. "it is grievous," she wrote to leigh hunt, "to see this beautiful girl wearing out the best years of her life in an odious convent, where both mind and body are sick from want of the appropriate exercise for each. i think she has great talent, if not genius; or if not an internal fountain, how could she have acquired the mastery she has of her own language, which she writes so beautifully, or those ideas which lift her so far above the rest of the italians? she has not studied much, and now, hopeless from a five years' confinement, everything disgusts her, and she looks with hatred and distaste even on the alleviations of her situation. her only hope is in a marriage which her parents tell her is concluded, although she has never seen the person intended for her. nor do i think the change of situation will be much for the better, for he is a younger brother, and will live in the house with his mother, who they say is _molto seccante_. yet she may then have the free use of her limbs; she may then be able to walk out among the fields, vineyards, and woods of her country, and see the mountains and the sky, and not as now, a dozen steps to the right, and then back to the left another dozen, which is the longest walk her convent garden affords, and that, you may be sure, she is very seldom tempted to take." by the middle of february shelley was sending his poem for publication, speaking of it as the production of "a part of himself already dead." he continued, however, to take an almost painful interest in emilia's fate; she, poor girl, though not the sublime creature he had thought her, was infinitely to be pitied. before their acquaintance ended, she was turning it to practical account, after the fashion of most of shelley's friends, by begging for and obtaining considerable sums of money. if mary then indulged in a little retrospective sarcasm to her friend, mrs. gisborne, it is hardly wonderful. indeed, later allusions are not wanting to show that this time was felt by her to be one of annoyance and bitterness. two circumstances were in her favour. she was well, and, therefore, physically able to look at things in their true light; and, during a great part of the time, clare was away. in the previous october, during their stay at the baths, she had at last resolved on trying to make out some sort of life for herself, and had taken a situation as governess in a florentine family. she had come back to the shelleys for the month of december (when it was that she became acquainted with emilia vivani), but had returned to florence at christmas. she had been persuaded to this step by the judicious mrs. mason, who had soon perceived the strained relations existing between mary and clare, and had seen, too, that the disunion was only the natural and inevitable result of circumstances. it was not only that the two girls were of opposite and jarring temperament; there was also the fact that half the suspicious mistrust with shelley was regarded by those who did not personally know him, and the shadow of which rested on mary too, was caused by clare's continued presence among them. as things were now, it might have passed without remark, but for the scandalous reports which dated back to the marlow days, and which had recently been revived by the slanders of paolo, although the extent of these slanders had not yet transpired. shelley had been alive enough to the danger at one time, but had now got accustomed and indifferent to it. he had a great affection and a great compassion for clare; her vivacity enlivened him; he said himself that he liked her although she teased him, and he certainly missed her teasing when she was away. but mary, to whom clare's perpetual society was neither a solace nor a change, and who, as the mother of children, could no longer look at things from a purely egotistic point of view, must have felt it positively unjust and wrong to allow their father's reputation to be sacrificed--to say nothing of her own--to what was in no wise a necessity. shelley loved solitude--a mitigated solitude that is;--he certainly did not pine for general society. yet many of his letters bear unmistakable evidence to the pain and resentment he felt at being universally shunned by his own countrymen, as if he were an enemy of the human race. but mary, a woman, and only twenty-two, must have been self-sufficient indeed if, with all her mental resources, she had not required the renovation of change and contrast and varied intercourse, to keep her mind and spirit fresh and bright, and to fit her for being a companion and a resource to shelley. that she and he were condemned to protracted isolation was partly due to clare, and when mary was weak and dejected, her consciousness of this became painful, and her feeling towards the sprightly, restless miss clairmont was touched with positive antipathy. shelley, considering clare the weaker party, supported her, in the main, and certainly showed no desire to have her away. he might have seen that to impose her presence on mary in such circumstances was, in fact, as great a piece of tyranny as he had suffered from when eliza westbrook was imposed on him. but of this he was, and he remained, perfectly unconscious. clare ought to have retired from the field, but her dependent condition, and her wretched anxiety about allegra, were her excuse for clinging to the only friends she had. all this was evident to mrs. mason, and it was soon shown that she had judged rightly, as the relations between mary and clare became cordial and natural once they were relieved from the intolerable friction of daily companionship. during this time of excitement and unrest one new acquaintance had, however, begun, which circumstances were to develop into a close and intimate companionship. in january there had arrived at pisa a young couple of the name of williams; mainly attracted by the desire to see and to know shelley, of whose gifts and virtues and sufferings they had heard much from tom medwin, their neighbour in switzerland the year before. lieutenant edward elliker williams had been, first, in the navy, then in the army; had met his wife in india, and, returning with her to england, had sold his commission and retired on half-pay. he was young, of a frank straightforward disposition and most amiable temper, modest and unpretentious, with some literary taste, and no strong prejudices. jane williams was young and pretty, gentle and graceful, neither very cultivated nor particularly clever, but with a comfortable absence of angles in her disposition, and an abundance of that feminine tact which prevents intellectual shortcomings from being painfully felt, and which is, in its way, a manifestation of genius. not an uncommon type of woman, but quite new in the shelleys' experience. at first they thought her rather wanting in animation, and shelley was conscious of her lack of literary refinement, but these were more and more compensated for, as time went on, by her natural grace and her taste for music. "ned" was something of an artist, and mary shelley sat more than once to him for her portrait. there was, in short, no lack of subjects in common, and the two young couples found a mutual pleasure in each other's society which increased in measure as they became better acquainted. in march poor clare received with bitter grief the intelligence that her child had been placed by byron in a convent, at bagnacavallo, not far from ravenna, where he now lived. under the sway of the countess guiccioli, whose father and brother were domesticated in his house, he was leading what, in comparison with his venetian existence, was a life of respectability and virtue. his action with regard to allegra was considered by the shelleys as, probably, inevitable in the circumstances, but to clare it was a terrible blow. she felt more hopelessly separated from her child than ever, and she had seen enough of italian convent education and its results to convince her that it meant moral and intellectual degradation and death. her despairing representations to this effect were, of course, unanswered by byron, who contented himself with a mephistophelian sneer in showing her letter to the hoppners. with the true "malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison, transforming all they touch to the malignity of their own natures,"[ ] he had no hesitation in giving credit to the reports about clare's life in the shelleys' family, nor in openly implying his own belief in their probable truth. but for this, and for one great alarm caused by the sudden and unaccountable stoppage of shelley's income (through a mistake which happily was discovered and speedily rectified by his good friend, horace smith), the spring was, for mary, peaceful and bright. she was assiduous in her greek studies, and keenly interested in the contemporary european politics of that stirring time; as full of sympathy as shelley himself could be with the numerous insurrectionary outbreaks in favour of liberty. and when the revolution in greece broke out, and one bright april morning prince mavrocordato rushed in to announce to her the proclamation of prince hypsilantes, her elation and joy almost equalled his own. in companionship with the williams', aided and abetted by henry reveley, shelley's old passion for boating revived. in the little ten-foot long boat procured for him for a few pauls, and then fitted up by mr. reveley, they performed many a voyage, on the arno, on the canal between pisa and leghorn, and even on the sea. their first trip was marked by an accident--williams contriving to overturn the boat. nothing daunted, shelley declared next day that his ducking had added fire to, instead of quenching, the nautical ardour which produced it, and that he considered it a good omen to any enterprise that it began in evil, as making it more likely that it would end in good. all these events are touched on in the few specimen extracts from mary's journal and letters which follow-- _wednesday, january ._--read greek. call on emilia viviani. shelley reads the _vita nuova_ aloud to me in the evening. _friday, february ._--read greek. write. emilia viviani walks out with shelley. the opera, with the williams' (_il matrimonio segreto_). _tuesday, february ._--read greek. sit to williams. call on emilia viviani. prince mavrocordato in the evening. a long metaphysical argument. _wednesday, february ._--read greek. sit to williams. in the evening the williams', prince mavrocordato, and mr. taafe. _monday, february ._--read greek (no lesson). finish the _vita nuova_. in the afternoon call on emilia viviani. walk. mr. taafe calls. _thursday, february ._--read greek. the williams to dine with us. walk with them. il diavolo pacchiani calls. shelley reads "the ancient mariner" aloud. _saturday, march ._--read greek (no lesson). walk with the williams'. read horace with shelley in the evening. a delightful day. _sunday, march ._--read greek. write letters. the williams' to dine with us. walk with them. williams relates his history. they spend the evening with us, with prince mavrocordato and mr. taafe. _thursday, march ._--read greek (no lesson). call on emilia viviani. e. williams calls. shelley reads _the case is altered_ of ben jonson aloud in the evening. a mizzling day and rainy night.... march winds and rains are begun, the last puff of winter's breath,--the eldest tears of a coming spring; she ever comes in weeping and goes out smiling. _monday, march ._--read greek (no lesson). finish the _defence of poetry_. copy for shelley; he reads to me the _tale of a tub_. a delightful day after a misty morning. _wednesday, march ._--read greek (no lesson). copy for shelley. walk with williams. prince mavrocordato in the evening. i have an interesting conversation with him concerning greece. the second bulletin of the austrians published. a sirocco, but a pleasant evening, _friday, march ._--read greek. copy for shelley. walk with williams. mrs. williams confined. news of the revolution of piedmont, and the taking of the citadel of candia by the greeks. a beautiful day, but not hot. _sunday, march ._--read greek. copy for shelley. a sirocco and mizzle. bad news from naples. walk with williams. prince mavrocordato in the evening. _monday, march ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato. finish the _antigone_. a mizzling day. spend the evening at the williams'. _wednesday, march ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato. call on emilia viviani. walk with williams. mr. taafe in the evening. a fine day, though changeful as to clouds and wind. the state of massa declares the constitution. the piedmontese troops are at sarzana. _sunday, april ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato calls with news about greece. he is as gay as a caged eagle just free. call on emilia viviani. walk with williams; he spends the evening with us. _monday, april ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato calls with the proclamation of ipsilanti. write to him. ride with shelley into the cascini. a divine day, with a north-west wind. the theatre in the evening. tachinardi. _wednesday, april ._--read greek, and _osservatore fiorentino_. a letter that overturns us.[ ] walk with shelley. in the evening williams and alex. mavrocordato. _friday, april ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato calls. _osservatore fiorentino_. walk with the williams'. shelley at casa silva in the evening. an explanation of our difficulty. _monday, april ._--write. targioni. read greek. mrs. williams to dinner. in the evening mr. taafe. a wet morning: in the afternoon a fierce maestrale. shelley, williams, and henry reveley try to come up the canal to pisa; miss their way, are capsized, and sleep at a contadino's. _tuesday, april ._--read greek. alex. mavrocordato. hume. villani. walk with the williams'. alex. m. calls in the evening, with good news from greece. the morea free. they now migrated once more to the beautiful neighbourhood of the baths of san giuliano di pisa; the williams' established themselves at pugnano, only four miles off: the canal fed by the serchio ran between the two places, and the little boat was in constant requisition. our boat is asleep on serchio's stream, its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream, the helm sways idly, hither and thither; dominic, the boatman, has brought the mast, and the oars, and the sails; but 'tis sleeping fast, like a beast, unconscious of its tether.[ ] the canal which, fed by the serchio, was, though an artificial, a full and picturesque stream, making its way under verdant banks, sheltered by trees that dipped their boughs into the murmuring waters. by day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the _cicale_, at noonday, kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening. it was a pleasant summer, bright in all but shelley's health and inconstant spirits; yet he enjoyed himself greatly, and became more and more attached to the part of the country where chance appeared to cast us. sometimes he projected taking a farm, situated on the height of one of the near hills, surrounded by chestnut and pine woods and overlooking a wide extent of country; or of settling still further in the maritime apennines, at massa. several of his slighter and unfinished poems were inspired by these scenes, and by the companions around us. it is the nature of that poetry, however, which overflows from the soul, oftener to express sorrow and regret than joy; for it is when oppressed by the weight of life and away from those he loves, that the poet has recourse to the solace of expression in verse.[ ] _journal, thursday, may ._--read villani. go out in boat; call on emilia viviani. walk with shelley. in the evening alex. mavrocordato, henry reveley, dancelli, and mr. taafe. _friday, may ._--read greek. (alex. m.) read villani. shelley goes to leghorn by sea with henry reveley. _tuesday, may ._--packing. read greek (alex. mavrocordato). shelley goes to leghorn. in the evening walk with alex. m. to pugnano. see the williams; return to the baths. shelley and henry reveley come. the weather quite april; rain and sunshine, and by no means warm. _saturday, june ._--abominably cold weather--rain, wind, and cloud--quite an italian november or a scotch may. shelley and williams go to leghorn. write. read and finish malthus. begin the answer.[ ] jane (williams) spends the day here, and edward returns in the evening. read greek. _sunday, june ._--write. read the _answer to malthus_. finish it. shelley at leghorn. _monday, june ._--little babe not well. shelley returns. the williams call. read old plays. vaccà calls. _tuesday, june ._--babe well. write. read greek. shelley not well. mr. taafe and granger dine with us. walk with shelley. vaccà calls. alex. mavrocordato sails. _thursday, june ._--write. read greek. read mackenzie's works. go to pugnano in the boat. the warmest day this month. fireflies in the evening. they were near enough to pisa to go over there from time to time to see emilia and other friends, and for prince mavrocordato to come frequently and give them the latest political news: the greek lessons had been voluntarily abjured by mary when it seemed probable that the prince might be summoned at any moment to play an active part in the affairs of his country, as actually happened in june. shelley was still tormented by the pain in his side, but his health and spirits were insensibly improving, as he himself afterwards admitted. he was occupied in writing _hellas_; his elegy on keats's death, _adonais_ also belongs to this time. ned williams, infected by the surrounding atmosphere of literature, had tried his 'prentice hand on a drama. in the words of his own journal-- went in the summer to pugnano--passed the first three months in writing a play entitled _the promise, or a year, a month, and a day_. s. tells me if they accept it he has great hopes of its success before an audience, and his hopes always enliven mine. mary was straining every nerve to finish _valperga_, in the hope of being able to send it to england by the gisbornes, who were preparing to leave italy,--a hope, however, which was not fulfilled. mary to mrs. gisborne. baths of s. giuliano, _ th june _. my dear mrs. gisborne--well, how do you get on? mr. gisborne says nothing of that in the note which he wrote yesterday, and it is that in which i am most interested. i pity you exceedingly in all the disagreeable details to which you are obliged to sacrifice your time and attention. i can conceive no employment more tedious; but now i hope it is nearly over, and that as the fruit of its conclusion you will soon come to see us. shelley is far from well; he suffers from his side and nervous irritation. the day on which he returned from leghorn he found little percy ill of a fever produced by teething. he got well the next day, but it was so strong while it lasted that it frightened us greatly. you know how much reason we have to fear the deceitful appearance of perfect health. you see that this, your last summer in italy, is manufactured on purpose to accustom you to the english seasons. it is warmer now, but we still enjoy the delight of cloudy skies. the "creator" has not yet made himself heard. i get on with my occupation, and hope to finish the rough transcript this month. i shall then give about a month to corrections, and then i shall transcribe it. it has indeed been a child of mighty slow growth since i first thought of it in our library at marlow. i then wanted the body in which i might embody my spirit. the materials for this i found at naples, but i wanted other books. nor did i begin it till a year afterwards at pisa; it was again suspended during our stay at your house, and continued again at the baths. all the winter i did not touch it, but now it is in a state of great forwardness, since i am at page of the third volume. it has indeed been a work of some labour, since i have read and consulted a great many books. i shall be very glad to read the first volume to you, that you may give me your opinion as to the conduct and interest of the story. june is now at its last gasp. you talked of going in august, i hope therefore that we may soon expect you. have you heard anything concerning the inhabitants of skinner street? it is now many months since i received a letter, and i begin to grow alarmed. adieu.--ever sincerely yours, mary w. s. on the th of july the gisbornes came to pay their friends a short farewell visit; on the th they started for england; shelley going with them as far as florence, where he and mary thought again of settling for the winter, and where he wished to make inquiries about houses. during his few days' absence the williams' were almost constantly with mary. edward williams was busy painting a portrait of her in miniature, intended by her as a surprise for shelley on his birthday, the th of august. but when that day arrived shelley was unavoidably absent. on his return to the baths he had found a letter from lord byron, with a pressing invitation to visit him at ravenna, whence byron was on the point of departing to join countess guiccioli and her family, who had been exiled from the roman states for carbonarism, and who, for the present, had taken refuge at florence. shelley's thoughts turned at once, as they could not but do, to poor little allegra, in her convent of bagnacavallo. what was to become of her? where would or could she be sent? or was she to be conveniently forgotten and left behind? he was off next day, the d; paid a flying visit to clare, who was staying for her health at leghorn, and arrived at ravenna on the th. the miniature was finished and ready for him on his birthday. mary, alone on that anniversary, was fain to look back over the past eventful seven years,--their joys, their sorrows, their many changes. not long before, she had said, in a letter to clare, "one is not gay, at least i am not, but peaceful, and at peace with all the world." the same tone characterises the entry in her journal for th august. shelley's birthday. seven years are now gone; what changes! what a life! we now appear tranquil, yet who knows what wind----but i will not prognosticate evil; we have had enough of it. when shelley came to italy i said, all is well, if it were permanent; it was more passing than an italian twilight. i now say the same. may it be a polar day, yet that, too, has an end. chapter xiv august-november from bologna shelley wrote to mary an amusing account of his journey, so far. but this letter was speedily followed by another, written within a few hours of his arrival at ravenna; a letter, this second one, to make mary's blood run cold, although it is expressed with all the calmness and temperance that shelley could command. ravenna, _ th august _. my dearest mary--i arrived last night at o'clock, and sate up talking with lord byron until this morning. i then went to sleep, and now awake at , and having despatched my breakfast as quick as possible, mean to devote the interval until , when the post departs, to you. lord byron is very well, and was delighted to see me. he has, in fact, completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led at venice. he has a permanent sort of _liaison_ with contessa guiccioli, who is now at florence, and seems from her letters to be a very amiable woman. she is waiting there until something shall be decided as to their emigration to switzerland or stay in italy, which is yet undetermined on either side. she was compelled to escape from the papal territory in great haste, as measures had already been taken to place her in a convent, where she would have been unrelentingly confined for life. the oppression of the marriage contract, as existing in the laws and opinions of italy, though less frequently exercised, is far severer than that of england. i tremble to think of what poor emilia is destined to. lord byron had almost destroyed himself in venice; his state of debility was such that he was unable to digest any food; he was consumed by hectic fever, and would speedily have perished, but for this attachment, which has reclaimed him from the excesses into which he threw himself, from carelessness rather than taste. poor fellow! he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature. he has given me a number of the most interesting details on the former subject, but we will not speak of them in a letter. fletcher is here, and as if, like a shadow, he waxed and waned with the substance of his master, fletcher also has recovered his good looks, and from amidst the unseasonable gray hairs a fresh harvest of flaxen locks has put forth. we talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, and i think more than ever. he affects to patronise a system of criticism fit for the production of mediocrity, and, although all his fine poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet i recognise the pernicious effects of it in the _doge of venice_, and it will cramp and limit his future efforts, however great they may be, unless he gets rid of it. i have read only parts of it, or rather, he himself read them to me, and gave me the plan of the whole. allegra, he says, is grown very beautiful, but he complains that her temper is violent and imperious. he has no intention of leaving her in italy; indeed, the thing is too improper in itself not to carry condemnation along with it. contessa guiccioli, he says, is very fond of her; indeed, i cannot see why she should not take care of it, if she is to live as his ostensible mistress. all this i shall know more of soon. lord byron has also told me of a circumstance that shocks me exceedingly, because it exhibits a degree of desperate and wicked malice, for which i am at a loss to account. when i hear such things my patience and my philosophy are put to a severe proof, whilst i refrain from seeking out some obscure hiding-place, where the countenance of man may never meet me more. it seems that _elise_, actuated either by some inconceivable malice for our dismissing her, or bribed by my enemies, has persuaded the hoppners of a story so monstrous and incredible that they must have been prone to believe any evil to have believed such assertions upon such evidence. mr. hoppner wrote to lord byron to state this story as the reason why he declined any further communications with us, and why he advised him to do the same. elise says that claire was my mistress; that is very well, and so far there is nothing new; all the world has heard so much, and people may believe or not believe as they think good. she then proceeds further to say that claire was with child by me; that i gave her the most violent medicine to procure abortion; that this not succeeding she was brought to bed, and that i immediately tore the child from her and sent it to the foundling hospital,--i quote mr. hoppner's words,--and this is stated to have taken place in the winter after we left este. in addition, she says that both claire and i treated you in the most shameful manner; that i neglected and beat you, and that claire never let a day pass without offering you insults of the most violent kind, in which she was abetted by me. as to what reviews and the world say, i do not care a jot, but when persons who have known me are capable of conceiving of me--not that i have fallen into a great error, as would have been the living with claire as my mistress--but that i have committed such unutterable crimes as destroying or abandoning a child, and that my own! imagine my despair of good! imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men! _you_ should write to the hoppners a letter refuting the charge, in case you believe and know, and can prove that it is false, stating the grounds and proof of your belief. i need not dictate what you should say, nor, i hope, inspire you with warmth to rebut a charge which you only can effectually rebut. if you will send the letter to me here, i will forward it to the hoppners. lord byron is not up. i do not know the hoppners' address, and i am anxious not to lose a post. p. b. s. mary's feelings on the perusal of this letter may be faintly imagined by those who read it now, and who know what manner of woman she actually was. they are expressed, as far as they could be expressed, in the letter which, in accordance with shelley's desire, and while still smarting under the first shock of grief and profound indignation, she wrote off to mrs. hoppner, and enclosed in a note to shelley himself. mary to shelley. my dear shelley--shocked beyond all measure as i was, i instantly wrote the enclosed. if the task be not too dreadful, pray copy it for me; i cannot. read that part of your letter that contains the accusation. i tried, but i could not write it. i think i could as soon have died. i send also elise's last letter: enclose it or not, as you think best. i wrote to you with far different feelings last night, beloved friend, our barque is indeed "tempest tost," but love me as you have ever done, and god preserve my child to me, and our enemies shall not be too much for us. consider well if florence be a fit residence for us. i love, i own, to face danger, but i would not be imprudent. pray get my letter to mrs. hoppner copied for a thousand reasons. adieu, dearest! take care of yourself--all yet is well. the shock for me is over, and i now despise the slander; but it must not pass uncontradicted. i sincerely thank lord byron for his kind unbelief.--affectionately yours, m. w. s. do not think me imprudent in mentioning e.'s[ ] illness at naples. it is well to meet facts. they are as cunning as wicked. i have read over my letter; it is written in haste, but it were as well that the first burst of feeling should be expressed. pisa, _ th august _. my dear mrs. hoppner--after a silence of nearly two years i address you again, and most bitterly do i regret the occasion on which i now write. pardon me that i do not write in french; you understand english well, and i am too much impressed to shackle myself in a foreign language; even in my own my thoughts far outrun my pen, so that i can hardly form the letters. i write to defend him to whom i have the happiness to be united, whom i love and esteem beyond all living creatures, from the foulest calumnies; and to you i write this, who were so kind, and to mr. hoppner, to both of whom i indulged the pleasing idea that i have every reason to feel gratitude. this is indeed a painful task. shelley is at present on a visit to lord byron at ravenna, and i received a letter from him to-day, containing accounts that make my hand tremble so much that i can hardly hold the pen. it tells me that elise wrote to you, relating the most hideous stories against him, and that you have believed them. before i speak of these falsehoods, permit me to say a few words concerning this miserable girl. you well know that she formed an attachment with paolo when we proceeded to rome, and at naples their marriage was talked of. we all tried to dissuade her; we knew paolo to be a rascal, and we thought so well of her. an accident led me to the knowledge that without marrying they had formed a connection. she was ill; we sent for a doctor, who said there was danger of a miscarriage, i would not throw the girl on the world without in some degree binding her to this man. we had them married at sir r. a. court's. she left us, turned catholic at rome, married him, and then went to florence. after the disastrous death of my child we came to tuscany. we have seen little of them, but we have had knowledge that paolo has formed a scheme of extorting money from shelley by false accusations. he has written him threatening letters, saying that he would be the ruin of him, etc. we placed them in the hands of a celebrated lawyer here, who has done what he can to silence him. elise has never interfered in this, and indeed the other day i received a letter from her, entreating, with great professions of love, that i would send her money. i took no notice of this, but although i know her to be in evil hands, i would not believe that she was wicked enough to join in his plans without proof. and now i come to her accusations, and i must indeed summon all my courage whilst i transcribe them, for tears will force their way, and how can it be otherwise? you know shelley, you saw his face, and could you believe them? believe them only on the testimony of a girl whom you despised? i had hoped that such a thing was impossible, and that although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man propagated, none who had ever seen my husband could for a moment credit them. he says claire was shelley's mistress, that--upon my word i solemnly assure you that i cannot write the words. i send you a part of shelley's letter that you may see what i am now about to refute, but i had rather die than copy anything so vilely, so wickedly false, so beyond all imagination fiendish. but that you should believe it! that my beloved shelley should stand thus slandered in your minds--he, the gentlest and most humane of creatures--is more painful to me, oh! far more painful than words can express. need i say that the union between my husband and myself has ever been undisturbed? love caused our first imprudence--love, which, improved by esteem, a perfect trust one in the other, a confidence and affection which, visited as we have been by severe calamities (have we not lost two children?), has increased daily and knows no bounds. i will add that claire has been separated from us for about a year. she lives with a respectable german family at florence. the reasons for this were obvious: her connection with us made her manifest as the miss clairmont, the mother of allegra; besides we live much alone, she enters much into society there, and, solely occupied with the idea of the welfare of her child, she wished to appear such that she may not be thought in after times to be unworthy of fulfilling the maternal duties. you ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. if his generosity and knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have occasioned her. those who know me well believe my simple word--it is not long ago that my father said in a letter to me that he had never known me utter a falsehood,--but you, easy as you have been to credit evil, who may be more deaf to truth--to you i swear by all that i hold sacred upon heaven and earth, by a vow which i should die to write if i affirmed a falsehood,--i swear by the life of my child, by my blessed, beloved child, that i know the accusations to be false. but i have said enough to convince you, and are you not convinced? are not my words the words of truth? repair, i conjure you, the evil you have done by retracting your confidence in one so vile as elise, and by writing to me that you now reject as false every circumstance of her infamous tale. you were kind to us, and i will never forget it; now i require justice. you must believe me, and do me, i solemnly entreat you, the justice to confess you do so. mary w. shelley. i send this letter to shelley at ravenna, that he may see it, for although i ought, the subject is too odious to me to copy it. i wish also that lord byron should see it; he gave no credit to the tale, but it is as well that he should see how entirely fabulous it is. shelley, meanwhile, never far from her in thought, and knowing only too well how acutely she would suffer from all this, was writing to her again. shelley to mary. my dearest mary--i wrote to you yesterday, and i begin another letter to-day without knowing exactly when i can send it, as i am told the post only goes once a week. i daresay the subject of the latter half of my letter gave you pain, but it was necessary to look the affair in the face, and the only satisfactory answer to the calumny must be given by you, and could be given by you alone. this is evidently the source of the violent denunciations of the _literary gazette_, in themselves contemptible enough, and only to be regarded as effects which show us their cause, which, until we put off our mortal nature, we never despise--that is, the belief of persons who have known and seen you that you are guilty of crimes. a certain degree and a certain kind of infamy is to be borne, and, in fact, is the best compliment which an exalted nature can receive from a filthy world, of which it is its hell to be a part, but this sort of thing exceeds the measure, and even if it were only for the sake of our dear percy, i would take some pains to suppress it. in fact it shall be suppressed, even if i am driven to the disagreeable necessity of prosecuting him before the tuscan tribunals.... * * * * * write to me at florence, where i shall remain a day at least, and send me letters, or news of letters. how is my little darling? and how are you, and how do you get on with your book? be severe in your corrections, and expect severity from me, your sincere admirer. i flatter myself you have composed something unequalled in its kind, and that, not content with the honours of your birth and your hereditary aristocracy, you will add still higher renown to your name. expect me at the end of my appointed time. i do not think i shall be detained. is claire with you? or is she coming? have you heard anything of my poor emilia, from whom i got a letter the day of my departure, saying that her marriage was deferred for a very short time, on account of the illness of her sposo? how are the williams', and williams especially? give my very kindest love to them. lord byron has here splendid apartments in the house of his mistress's husband, who is one of the richest men in italy. _she_ is divorced, with an allowance of crowns a year--a miserable pittance from a man who has , a year. here are two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom (except the horses) walk about the house like the masters of it. tita, the venetian, is here, and operates as my valet; a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, and who has stabbed two or three people, and is one of the most good-natured-looking fellows i ever saw. we have good rumours of the greeks here, and a russian war. i hardly wish the russians to take any part in it. my maxim is with Ã�schylus: [greek: to dyssebes--meta men pleiona tiktei, sphetera d'eikota genna]. * * * * * there is a greek exercise for you. how should slaves produce anything but tyranny, even as the seed produces the plant? adieu, dear mary.--yours affectionately, s. at ravenna there was only a weekly post. shelley had to wait a long time for mary's answer, and before it could reach him he was writing to her yet a third time. his mind was now full of allegra. she was not to be left alone in italy. shelley, enlightened by emilia viviani, had been able to give byron, on the subject of convents, such information as to "shake his faith in the purity of these receptacles." but no conclusions of any sort had been arrived at as to her future; and shelley entreated mary to rack her brains, to inquire of all her friends, to leave no stone unturned, if by any possibility she could find some fitting asylum, some safe home for the lovely child. he had been to see the little girl at her convent, and all readers of his letters know the description of the fairy creature, who, with her "contemplative seriousness, mixed with excessive vivacity, seemed a thing of a higher and a finer order" than the children around her; happy and well cared for, as far as he could judge; pale, but lovelier and livelier than ever, and full of childish glee and fun. at this point of his letter mary's budget arrived, and shelley continued as follows-- ravenna, _thursday_. i have received your letter with that to mrs. hoppner. i do not wonder, my dearest friend, that you should have been moved. i was at first, but speedily regained the indifference which the opinion of anything or anybody, except our own consciousness, amply merits, and day by day shall more receive from me. i have not recopied your letter, such a measure would destroy its authenticity, but have given it to lord byron, who has engaged to send it with his own comments to the hoppners. people do not hesitate, it seems, to make themselves panders and accomplices to slander, for the hoppners had exacted from lord byron that these accusations should be concealed from _me_: lord byron is not a man to keep a secret, good or bad, but in openly confessing that he has not done so he must observe a certain delicacy, and therefore wished to send the letter himself, and, indeed, this adds weight to your representations. have you seen the article in the _literary gazette_ on me? they evidently allude to some story of this kind. however cautious the hoppners have been in preventing the calumniated person from asserting his justification, you know too much of the world not to be certain that this was the utmost limit of their caution. so much for nothing. lord byron is immediately coming to pisa. he will set off the moment i can get him a house. who would have imagined this?... what think you of remaining at pisa? the williams' would probably be induced to stay there if we did; hunt would certainly stay, at least this winter, near us, should he emigrate at all; lord byron and his italian friends would remain quietly there; and lord byron has certainly a very great regard for us. the regard of such a man is worth some of the tribute we must pay to the base passions of humanity in any intercourse with those within their circle; he is better worth it than those on whom we bestow it from mere custom. the masons are there, and, as far as solid affairs are concerned, are my friends. i allow this is an argument for florence. mrs. mason's perversity is very annoying to me, especially as mr. tighe is seriously my friend. this circumstance makes me averse from that intimate continuation of intercourse which, once having begun, i can no longer avoid. at pisa i need not distil my water, if i _can_ distil it anywhere. last winter i suffered less from my painful disorder than the winter i spent in florence. the arguments for florence you know, and they are very weighty; judge (_i know you like the job_) which scale is overbalanced. my greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. i would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. i would read no reviews and talk with no authors. if i dared trust my imagination, it would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions besides yourself whom i should desire. but to this i would not listen. where two or three are gathered together the devil is among them, and good far more than evil impulses, love far more than hatred, has been to me, except as you have been its object, the source of all sorts of mischief. so on this plan i would be _alone_, and would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, should be kept fit for no baser object. but this it does not appear that we shall do. the other side of the alternative (for a medium ought not to be adopted) is to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in feelings, and to connect ourselves with the interests of that society. our roots never struck so deeply as at pisa, and the transplanted tree flourishes not. people who lead the lives which we led until last winter are like a family of wahabee arabs pitching their tent in the midst of london. we must do one thing or the other,--for yourself, for our child, for our existence. the calumnies, the sources of which are probably deeper than we perceive, have ultimately for object the depriving us of the means of security and subsistence. you will easily perceive the gradations by which calumny proceeds to pretext, pretext to persecution, and persecution to the ban of fire and water. it is for this, and not because this or that fool, or the whole court of fools, curse and rail, that calumny is worth refuting or chastising. p. b. s. "so much for nothing," indeed. when byron made himself responsible for mary's letter, it was, probably, without any definite intention of withholding it from those to whom it was addressed. he may well have wished to add to this glowing denial of his own insinuations some palliating personal explanation. when, in the previous march, clare had protested against an italian convent education for allegra, he had sent her letter to the hoppners with a sneer at the "excellent grace" with which these representations came from a woman of the writer's character and present way of life. and yet he knew shelley,--knew him as the hoppners could not do; he knew what shelley had done for him, for clare, and allegra; and to how much slander and misrepresentation he had voluntarily submitted that they might go scot-free. byron was,--and he knew it,--the last person who should have accepted or allowed others to accept this fresh scandal without proof and without inquiry. he was ashamed of the part he had played, and reluctant to confess to the hoppners that he had been wrong, and that his words, as often happened, had been far in advance of his knowledge or his solid convictions; but his intentions were to do the best he could. and, satisfying himself with good intentions, he put off the unwelcome day until the occasion was past, and till, finally, the friend whose honour had been entrusted to his keeping was beyond his power to help or to harm. shelley was dead; and how then explain to the hoppners why the letter had not been sent before? it was "not worth while," probably, to revive the subject in order to vindicate a mere memory, nor yet to remove an unjust and cruel stigma from the character of those who survived. however it may have been, one thing is undoubted. mary shelley never received any answer to her letter of protest, which, after byron's death, was found safe among his papers. one more note shelley sent to mary from ravenna on the subject of the promised portrait. it would not seem that the miniature was actually despatched now, but as his return was so long delayed, the birthday plot had to be divulged. ravenna, _tuesday, th august _. my dearest love--i accept your kind present of your picture, and wish you would get it prettily framed for me. i will wear, for your sake, upon my heart this image which is ever present to my mind. i have only two minutes to write; the post is just setting off. i shall leave the place on thursday or friday morning. you would forgive me for my longer stay if you knew the fighting i have had to make it so short. i need not say where my own feelings impel me. it still remains fixed that lord byron should come to tuscany, and, if possible, pisa; but more of that to-morrow.--your faithful and affectionate s. the foregoing painful episode was enough to fill mary's mind during the fortnight she was alone. it was well for her that she was within easy reach of cheerful friends, yet, even as it was, she could not altogether escape from bitter thoughts. clare was at leghorn, and had to be told of everything. mary could not but think of the relief it would be to them all if she were to marry; a remote possibility to which she probably alludes in the following letter, written at this time to miss curran-- mary shelley to miss curran. san giuliano, _ th august_. my dear miss curran--it gives me great pain to hear of your ill-health. will this hot summer conduce to a better state or not? i hope anxiously, when i hear from you again, to learn that you are better, having recovered from your weakness, and that you have no return of your disorder. i should have answered your letter before, but we have been in the confusion of moving. we are now settled in an agreeable house at the baths of san giuliano, about four miles from pisa, under the shadow of mountains, and with delightful scenery within a walk. we go on in our old manner, with no change. i have had many changes for the worse; one might be for the better, but that is nearly impossible. our child is well and thriving, which is a great comfort, and the italian sky gives shelley health, which is to him a rare and substantial enjoyment. i did [not] receive the letter you mention to have written in march, and you also have missed one of our letters in which shelley acknowledged the receipt of the drawings you mention, and requested that the largest pyramid might be erected if they could case it with white marble for £ . however, the whole had better stand as i mentioned in my last; for, without the most rigorous inspection, great cheating would take place, and no female could detect them. when we visit rome, we can do that which we wish. many thanks for your kindness, which has been very great. i would send you on the books i mentioned, but we live out of the world, and i know of no conveyance. mr. purniance says that he sent the life of your father by sea to rome, directed to you; so, doubtless, it is in the custom-house there. how enraged all our mighty rulers are at the quiet revolutions which have taken place; it is said that some one said to the grand duke here: "ma richiedono una constituzione qui?" "ebene, la darò subito" was the reply; but he is not his own master, and austria would take care that that should not be the case; they say austrian troops are coming here, and the tuscan ones will be sent to germany. we take in _galignani_, and would send them to you if you liked. i do not know what the expense would be, but i should think slight. if you recommence painting, do not forget beatrice. i wish very much for a copy of that; you would oblige us greatly by making one. pray let me hear of your health. god knows when we shall be in rome; circumstances must direct, and they dance about like will-o'-the-wisps, enticing and then deserting us. we must take care not to be left in a bog. adieu, take care of yourself. believe in shelley's sincere wishes for your health, and in kind remembrances, and in my being ever sincerely yours, m. w. shelley. clare desires (not remembrances, if they are not pleasant), however she sends a proper message, and says she would be obliged to you, if you let her have her picture, if you could find a mode of conveying it.... do you know we lose many letters, having spies (not government ones) about us in plenty; they made a desperate push to do us a desperate mischief lately, but succeeded no further than to blacken us among the english; so if you receive a fresh batch (or green bag) of scandal against us, i assure you it is all a _lie_. poor souls! we live innocently, as you well know; if we did not, ten to one god would take pity on us, and we should not be so unfortunate. shelley's absence, though eventful, was, after all, a short one. in about a fortnight he was back again at the bagni, and for a few weeks life was quiet. on the th of september mary records-- picnic on the pugnano mountains; music in the evening. sleep there. on another occasion, wishing to find some tolerably cool seaside place where they might spend the next summer, they went,--the shelleys and clare,--on a two or three days' expedition of discovery to spezzia, and were enchanted with the beauty of the bay. clare had, shortly after, to return to her situation at florence, but the shelleys decided to winter at pisa. they took a top flat in the "tre palazzi di chiesa," on the lung' arno, and spent part of october in furnishing it. they took possession about the th; the williams' coming, not many days later, to occupy a lower flat in the same house. at lord byron's request, the shelleys had taken for him casa lanfranchi, the finest palace in the lung' arno, just opposite the house where they themselves were established. this close juxtaposition of abodes was likely to prove somewhat inconvenient, in case of clare's occasional presence at tre palazzi. her first visit, however, to which the following characteristic letter refers, was to the masons at casa silva, and it came to an end just before byron's arrival in pisa. clare had been staying with the williams' at pugnano. clare to mary. my dear mary--i arrived last night--won't you come and see me to-day? the williams' wish you to forward them mr. webb's answer, if possible, to reach them by o'clock afternoon to-day. if mr. webb says yes (you will open his note), send dominico with it to them, and he passing by the baths must order pancani to be at pugnano by o'clock in the afternoon. if there comes no letter from mr. webb, they will equally come to you, and i wish you could also in that case contrive to get pancani ordered for them, for we forgot to arrange how that could be done; if not, they will be there expecting, and perhaps get involved for the next month. i wish you to be so good as to send me immediately my large box and the clothes from the busati, indeed all that you have of mine, for i must arrange my boxes to get them _bollate_ immediately. don't delay, and my band-box too. if you could of your great bounty give me a sponge, i should be infinitely obliged to you. then, when it is dark, and the williams' arrived, will you ask mr. williams to be so good as to come and knock at casa silva, and i will return to spend the evening with you? shelley won't do to fetch me, because he looks singular in the streets. but i wish he would come now to give me some money, as i want to write to livorno and arrange everything. later will be inconvenient for me. kiss the chick for me, and believe me, yours affectionately, clare. _journal._--all october is left out, it seems.--we are at the baths, occupied with furnishing our house, copying my novel, etc. etc. mary's intention was to devote any profits which might proceed from this work to the relief of her father's necessities, and the hope of being able to help him had stimulated her industry and energy while it eased her heart. she aimed at selling the copyright for £ , and shelley opened negotiations to this effect with ollier the publisher. his letter on the subject bears such striking testimony to the estimate he had formed of mary's powers, and gives, besides, so complete a sketch of the novel itself, that it cannot be omitted here. shelley to mr. ollier. pisa, _ th september _. dear sir--it will give me great pleasure if i can arrange the affair of mrs. shelley's novel with you to her and your satisfaction. she has a specific purpose in the sum which she instructed me to require, and, although this purpose could not be answered without ready money, yet i should find means to answer her wishes in that point if you could make it convenient to pay one-third at christmas, and give bills for the other two-thirds at twelve and eighteen months. it would give me peculiar satisfaction that you, rather than any other person, should be the publisher of this work; it is the product of no slight labour, and i flatter myself, of no common talent, i doubt not it will give no less credit than it will receive from your names. i trust you know me too well to believe that my judgment deliberately given in testimony of the value of any production is influenced by motives of interest or partiality. the romance is called _castruccio, prince of lucca_, and is founded, not upon the novel of machiavelli under that name, which substitutes a childish fiction for the far more romantic truth of history, but upon the actual story of his life. he was a person who, from an exile and an adventurer, after having served in the wars of england and flanders in the reign of our edward the second, returned to his native city, and liberating it from its tyrants, became himself its tyrant, and died in the full splendour of his dominion, which he had extended over the half of tuscany. he was a little napoleon, and with a dukedom instead of an empire for his theatre, brought upon the same all the passions and errors of his antitype. the chief interest of the romance rests upon euthanasia, his betrothed bride, whose love for him is only equalled by her enthusiasm for the liberty of the republic of florence, which is in some sort her country, and for that of italy, to which castruccio is a devoted enemy, being an ally of the party of the emperor. this character is a masterpiece; and the keystone of the drama, which is built up with admirable art, is the conflict between these passions and these principles. euthanasia, the last survivor of a noble house, is a feudal countess, and her castle is the scene of the exhibition of the knightly manners of the time. the character of beatrice, the prophetess, can only be done justice to in the very language of the author. i know nothing in walter scott's novels which at all approaches to the beauty and the sublimity of this--creation, i may say, for it is perfectly original; and, although founded upon the ideas and manners of the age which is represented, is wholly without a similitude in any fiction i ever read. beatrice is in love with castruccio, and dies; for the romance, although interspersed with much lighter matter, is deeply tragic, and the shades darken and gather as the catastrophe approaches. all the manners, customs of the age, are introduced; the superstitions, the heresies, and the religious persecutions are displayed; the minutest circumstance of italian manners in that age is not omitted; and the whole seems to me to constitute a living and moving picture of an age almost forgotten. the author visited the scenery which she describes in person; and one or two of the inferior characters are drawn from her own observation of the italians, for the national character shows itself still in certain instances under the same forms as it wore in the time of dante. the novel consists, as i told you before, of three volumes, each at least equal to one of the _tales of my landlord_, and they will be very soon ready to be sent. no arrangement, however, was come to at this time, and early in january mary wrote to her father, offering the work to him, and asking him, if he accepted it, to make a bargain concerning it with a publisher. godwin accepted the offer, and undertook the responsibility, in a letter from which the following is an extract-- _ st january ._ i am much gratified by your letter of the th, which reached me on saturday last; it is truly generous of you to desire that i would make use of the produce of your novel. but what can i say to it? it is against the course of nature, unless, indeed, you were actually in possession of a fortune. * * * * * i said in the preface to _mandeville_ there were two or three works further that i should be glad to finish before i died. if i make use of the money from you in the way you suggest, that may enable me to complete my present work. the ms. was, accordingly, despatched to england, but was not published till many months later. _valperga_ (as it was afterwards called) was a book of much power and more promise; very remarkable when the author's age is taken into consideration. apart from local colouring, the interest of the tale turns on the development of the character--naturally powerful and disposed to good, but spoilt by popularity and success, and unguided by principle--of castruccio himself; and on the contrast between him and euthanasia, the noble and beautiful woman who sacrifices her possessions, her hopes, and her affections to the cause of fidelity and patriotism. beatrice, the prophetess, is one of those gifted but fated souls, who, under the persuasion that they are supernaturally inspired, mistake the ordinary impulses of human nature for divine commands, and, finding their mistake, yet encourage themselves in what they know to be delusion till the end,--a tragic end. there are some remarkable descriptive passages, especially one where the wandering beatrice comes suddenly upon a house in a dreary landscape which she knows, although she has never seen it before except in a haunting dream; every detail of it is horribly familiar, and she is paralysed by the sense of imminent calamity, which, in fact, bursts upon her directly afterwards. euthanasia dies at sea, and the account of the running down and wreck of her ship is a curious, almost prophetic, foreshadowing of the calamity by which, all too soon, shelley was to lose his life. the wind changed to a more northerly direction during the night, and the land-breeze of the morning filled their sails, so that, although slowly, they dropt down southward. about noon they met a pisan vessel, who bade them beware of a genoese squadron, which was cruising off corsica; so they bore in nearer to the shore. at sunset that day a fierce sirocco arose, accompanied by thunder and lightning, such as is seldom seen during the winter season. presently they saw huge dark columns descending from heaven, and meeting the sea, which boiled beneath; they were borne on by the storm, and scattered by the wind. the rain came down in sheets, and the hail clattered, as it fell to its grave in the ocean; the ocean was lashed into such waves that, many miles inland, during the pauses of the wind, the hoarse and constant murmurs of the far-off sea made the well-housed landsman mutter one more prayer for those exposed to its fury. such was the storm, as it was seen from shore. nothing more was ever known of the sicilian vessel which bore euthanasia. it never reached its destined port, nor were any of those on board ever after seen. the sentinels who watched near vado, a town on the sea-beach of the maremma, found on the following day that the waves had washed on shore some of the wrecks of a vessel; they picked up a few planks and a broken mast, round which, tangled with some of its cordage, was a white silk handkerchief, such a one as had bound the tresses of euthanasia the night that she had embarked; and in its knot were a few golden hairs. * * * * * to follow the fate of mary's novel, it has been necessary somewhat to anticipate the history, which is resumed in the next chapter, with the journal and letters of the latter part of . chapter xv november -april _journal, thursday, november ._--go to florence. copy. ride with the guiccioli. albé arrives. _sunday, november ._--the williams' arrive. copy. call on the guiccioli. _thursday, november ._--copy. read _caleb williams_ to jane. ride with the guiccioli. shelley goes on translating spinoza with edward. medwin arrives. taafe calls. argyropulo calls. good news from the greeks. _tuesday, november ._--ride with the guiccioli. suffer much with rheumatism in my head. _wednesday, november ._--i mark this day because i begin my greek again, and that is a study that ever delights me. i do not feel the bore of it, as in learning another language, although it be so difficult, it so richly repays one; yet i read little, for i am not well. shelley and the williams go to leghorn; they dine with us afterwards with medwin. write to clare. _thursday, november ._--correct the novel. read a little greek. not well. ride with the guiccioli. the count pietro (gamba) in the evening. mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. pisa, _ th november _. my dear mrs. gisborne--although having much to do be a bad excuse for not writing to you, yet you must in some sort admit this plea on my part. here we are in pisa, having furnished very nice apartments for ourselves, and what is more, paid for the furniture out of the fruits of two years' economy, we are at the top of the tre palazzi di chiesa. i daresay you know the house, next door to la scoto's house on the north side of lung' arno; but the rooms we inhabit are south, and look over the whole country towards the sea, so that we are entirely out of the bustle and disagreeable _puzzi_, etc., of the town, and hardly know that we are so enveloped until we descend into the street. the williams' have been less lucky, though they have followed our example in furnishing their own house, but, renting it of mr. webb, they have been treated scurvily. so here we live, lord byron just opposite to us in casa lanfranchi (the late signora felichi's house). so pisa, you see, has become a little nest of singing birds. you will be both surprised and delighted at the work just about to be published by him; his _cain_, which is in the highest style of imaginative poetry. it made a great impression upon me, and appears almost a revelation, from its power and beauty. shelley rides with him; i, of course, see little of him. the lady _whom he serves_ is a nice pretty girl without pretensions, good hearted and amiable; her relations were banished romagna for carbonarism. what do you know of hunt? about two months ago he wrote to say that on st october he should quit england, and we have heard nothing more of him in any way; i expect some day he and six children will drop in from the clouds, trusting that god will temper the wind to the shorn lamb. pray when you write, tell us everything you know concerning him. do you get any intelligence of the greeks? our worthy countrymen take part against them in every possible way, yet such is the spirit of freedom, and such the hatred of these poor people for their oppressors, that i have the warmest hopes--[greek: mantis eim' esthlôn agônôn]. mavrocordato is there, justly revered for the sacrifice he has made of his whole fortune to the cause, and besides for his firmness and talents. if greece be free, shelley and i have vowed to go, perhaps to settle there, in one of those beautiful islands where earth, ocean, and sky form the paradise. you will, i hope, tell us all the news of our friends when you write. i see no one that you know. we live in our usual retired way, with few friends and no acquaintances. clare is returned to her usual residence, and our tranquillity is unbroken in upon, except by those winds, sirocco or tramontana, which now and then will sweep over the ocean of one's mind and disturb or cloud its surface. since this must be a double letter, i save myself the trouble of copying the enclosed, which was a part of a letter written to you a month ago, but which i did not send. will you attend to my requests? every day increases my anxiety concerning the desk. do have the goodness to pack it off as soon as you can. shelley was at your hive yesterday; it is as dirty and busy as ever, so people live in the same narrow circle of space and thought, while time goes on, not as a racehorse, but a "six inside dilly," and puts them down softly at their journey's end; while they have slept and ate, and _ecco tutto_. with this piece of morality, dear mrs. gisborne, i end. shelley begs every remembrance of his to be joined with mine to mr. gisborne and henry.--ever yours, mary w. s. and now, my dear mrs. gisborne, i have a great favour to ask of you. ollier writes to say that he has placed our two desks in the hands of a merchant of the city, and that they are to come--god knows when! now, as we sent for them two years ago, and are tired of waiting, will you do us the favour to get them out of his hands, and to send them without delay? if they can be sent without being opened, send them _in statu quo_; if they must be opened, do not send the smallest but get a key (being a patent lock a key will cost half a guinea) made for the largest and send it, and return the other to peacock. if you send the desk, will you send with it the following things?--a few copies of all shelley's works, particularly of the second edition of the _cenci_, my mother's posthumous works, and _letters from norway_ from peacock, if you can, but do not delay the box for them. _journal, sunday, december ._--read the _history of shipwrecks_. read herodotus with shelley. ride with la guiccioli. pietro and her in the evening. _monday, december ._--write letters. read herodotus with shelley. finish _caleb williams_ to jane. taafe calls. he says that his turk is a very moral man, for that when he began a scandalous story he interrupted him immediately, saying, "ah! we must never speak thus of our neighbours!" taafe would do well to take the hint. _thursday, december ._--read homer. walk with williams. spend the evening with them. call on t. guiccioli with jane, while taafe amuses shelley and edward. read tacitus. a dismal day. _friday, december ._--letter from hunt and bessy. walk with shelley. buy furniture for them, etc. walk with edward and jane to the garden, and return with t. guiccioli in the carriage. edward reads the _shipwreck of the wager_ to us in the evening. _saturday, december ._--get up late and talk with shelley. the williams and medwin to dinner. walk with edward and jane in the garden. return with t. guiccioli. t. g. and pietro in the evening. write to clare. read tacitus. _sunday, december ._--go to church at dr. nott's. walk with edward and jane in the garden. in the evening first pietro and teresa, afterwards go to the williams'. _monday, december ._--out shopping. walk with the williams and t. guiccioli to the garden. medwin at tea. afterwards we are alone, and after reading a little herodotus, shelley reads chaucer's _flower and the leaf_, and then chaucer's _dream_ to me. a divine, cold, tramontana day. _monday, january ._--read _emile_. call on t. guiccioli and see lord byron. trelawny arrives. edward john trelawny, whose subsequent history was to be closely bound up with that of shelley and of mrs. shelley, was of good cornish family, and had led a wandering life, full of romantic adventure. he had become acquainted with williams and medwin in switzerland a year before, since which he had been in paris and london. tired of a town life and of society, and in order to "maintain the just equilibrium between the body and the brain," he had determined to pass the next winter hunting and shooting in the wilds of the maremma, with a captain roberts and lieutenant williams. for the exercise of his brain, he proposed passing the summer with shelley and byron, boating in the mediterranean, as he had heard that they proposed doing. neither of the poets were as yet personally known to him, but he had lost no time in seeking their acquaintance. on the very evening of his arrival in pisa he repaired to the tre palazzi, where, in the williams' room, he first saw shelley, and was struck speechless with astonishment. was it possible this mild-looking beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world? excommunicated by the fathers of the church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim lord chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a satanic school? i could not believe it; it must be a hoax. but presently, when shelley was led to talk on a theme that interested him--the works of calderon,--his marvellous powers of mind and command of language held trelawny spell-bound: "after this touch of his quality," he says, "i no longer doubted his identity." mrs. shelley appeared soon after, and the visitor looked with lively curiosity at the daughter of william godwin and mary wollstonecraft. such a rare pedigree of genius was enough to interest me in her, irrespective of her own merits as an authoress. the most striking feature in her face was her calm, gray eyes; she was rather under the english standard of woman's height, very fair and light-haired; witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude; like shelley, though in a minor degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old writers. neither of them used obsolete or foreign words. this command of our language struck me the more as contrasted with the scanty vocabulary used by ladies in society, in which a score of poor hackneyed phrases suffice to express all that is felt or considered proper to reveal.[ ] mary's impressions of the new-comer may be gathered from her journal and her subsequent letter to mrs. gisborne. _journal, saturday, january ._--copy. walk with jane. the opera in the evening. trelawny is extravagant--_un giovane stravagante_,--partly natural, and partly, perhaps, put on, but it suits him well, and if his abrupt but not unpolished manners be assumed, they are nevertheless in unison with his moorish face (for he looks oriental yet not asiatic), his dark hair, his herculean form; and then there is an air of extreme good nature which pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good. he tells strange stories of himself, horrific ones, so that they harrow one up, while with his emphatic but unmodulated voice, his simple yet strong language, he pourtrays the most frightful situations; then all these adventures took place between the ages of thirteen and twenty. i believe them now i see the man, and, tired with the everyday sleepiness of human intercourse, i am glad to meet with one who, among other valuable qualities, has the rare merit of interesting my imagination. the _crew_ and medwin dine with us. _sunday, january ._--read homer. walk. dine at the williams'. the opera in the evening. ride with t. guiccioli. _monday, january ._--the williams breakfast with us. go down bocca d'arno in the boat with shelley and jane. edward and e. trelawny meet us there; return in the gig; they dine with us; very tired. _tuesday, january ._--read homer and tacitus. ride with t. guiccioli. e. trelawny and medwin to dinner. the baron lutzerode in the evening. but as the torrent widens towards the ocean, we ponder deeply on each past emotion. read the first volume of the _pirate_. _sunday, february ._--read homer. walk to the garden with jane. return with medwin to dinner. trelawny in the evening. a wild day and night, some clouds in the sky in the morning, but they clear away. a north wind. _monday, february ._--breakfast with the williams'. edward, jane, and trelawny go to leghorn. walk with jane. southey's letter concerning lord byron. write to clare. in the evening the gambas and taafe. _thursday, february ._--read homer, tacitus, and _emile_. shelley and edward depart for la spezzia. walk with jane, and to the opera with her in the evening. with e. trelawny afterwards to mrs. beauclerc's ball. during a long, long evening in mixed society how often do one's sensations change, and, swiftly as the west wind drives the shadows of clouds across the sunny hill or the waving corn, so swift do sensations pass, painting--yet, oh! not disfiguring--the serenity of the mind. it is then that life seems to weigh itself, and hosts of memories and imaginations, thrown into one scale, make the other kick the beam. you remember what you have felt, what you have dreamt; yet you dwell on the shadowy side, and lost hopes and death, such as you have seen it, seem to cover all things with a funeral pall. the time that was, is, and will be, presses upon you, and, standing the centre of a moving circle, you "slide giddily as the world reels." you look to heaven, and would demand of the everlasting stars that the thoughts and passions which are your life may be as ever-living as they. you would demand of the blue empyrean that your mind might be as clear as it, and that the tears which gather in your eyes might be the shower that would drain from its profoundest depths the springs of weakness and sorrow. but where are the stars? where the blue empyrean? a ceiling clouds that, and a thousand swift consuming lights supply the place of the eternal ones of heaven. the enthusiast suppresses her tears, crushes her opening thoughts, and.... but all is changed; some word, some look excite the lagging blood, laughter dances in the eyes, and the spirits rise proportionably high. the queen is all for revels, her light heart, unladen from the heaviness of state, bestows itself upon delightfulness. _friday, february ._--sometimes i awaken from my visionary monotony, and my thoughts flow until, as it is exquisite pain to stop the flowing of the blood, so is it painful to check expression and make the overflowing mind return to its usual channel. i feel a kind of tenderness to those, whoever they may be (even though strangers), who awaken the train and touch a chord so full of harmony and thrilling music, when i would tear the veil from this strange world, and pierce with eagle eyes beyond the sun; when every idea, strange and changeful, is another step in the ladder by which i would climb.... read _emile_. jane dines with me, walk with her. e. trelawny and jane in the evening. trelawny tells us a number of amusing stories of his early life. read third canto of _l'inferno_. they say that providence is shown by the extraction that may be ever made of good from evil, that we draw our virtues from our faults. so i am to thank god for making me weak. i might say, "thy will be done," but i cannot applaud the permitter of self-degradation, though dignity and superior wisdom arise from its bitter and burning ashes. _saturday, february ._--read _emile_. walk with jane, and ride with t. guiccioli. dine with jane. taafe and t. medwin call. i retire with e. trelawny, who amuses me as usual by the endless variety of his adventures and conversation. mary to mrs. gisborne. pisa, _ th february _. my dear mrs. gisborne--not having heard from you, i am anxious about my desk. it would have been a great convenience to me if i could have received it at the beginning of the winter, but now i should like it as soon as possible. i hope that it is out of ollier's hands. i have before said what i would have done with it. if both desks can be sent without being opened, let them be sent; if not, give the small one back to peacock. get a key made for the larger, and send it, i entreat you, by the very next vessel. this key will cost half a guinea, and ollier will not give you the money, but give me credit for it, i entreat you. i pray now let me have the desk as soon as possible. shelley is now gone to spezzia to get houses for our colony for the summer. it will be a large one, too large, i am afraid, for unity; yet i hope not. there will be lord byron, who will have a large and beautiful boat built on purpose by some english navy officers at genoa. there will be the countess guiccioli and her brother; the williams', whom you know; trelawny, a kind of half-arab englishman, whose life has been as changeful as that of anastasius, and who recounts the adventures as eloquently and as well as the imagined greek. he is clever; for his moral qualities i am yet in the dark; he is a strange web which i am endeavouring to unravel. i would fain learn if generosity is united to impetuousness, probity of spirit to his assumption of singularity and independence. he is feet high, raven black hair, which curls thickly and shortly, like a moor's, dark gray expressive eyes, overhanging brows, upturned lips, and a smile which expresses good nature and kindheartedness. his shoulders are high, like an oriental's, his voice is monotonous, yet emphatic, and his language, as he relates the events of his life, energetic and simple, whether the tale be one of blood and horror, or of irresistible comedy. his company is delightful, for he excites me to think, and if any evil shade the intercourse, that time will unveil--the sun will rise or night darken all. there will be, besides, a captain roberts, whom i do not know, a very rough subject, i fancy,--a famous angler, etc. we are to have a small boat, and now that those first divine spring days are come (you know them well), the sky clear, the sun hot, the hedges budding, we sitting without a fire and the windows open, i begin to long for the sparkling waves, the olive-coloured hills and vine-shaded pergolas of spezzia. however, it would be madness to go yet. yet as _ceppo_ was bad, we hope for a good _pasqua_, and if april prove fine, we shall fly with the swallows. the opera here has been detestable. the english sinclair is the _primo tenore_, and acquits himself excellently, but the italians, after the first, have enviously selected such operas as give him little or nothing to do. we have english here, and some english balls and parties, to which i (_mirabile dictu_) go sometimes. we have taafe, who bores us out of our senses when he comes, telling a young lady that her eyes shed flowers--why therefore should he send her any? i have sent my novel to papa. i long to hear some news of it, as, with an author's vanity, i want to see it in print, and hear the praises of my friends. i should like, as i said when you went away, a copy of _matilda_. it might come out with the desk. i hope as the town fills to hear better news of your plans, we long to hear from you. what does henry do? how many times has he been in love?--ever yours, m. w. s. shelley would like to see the review of the _prometheus_ in the _quarterly_. _thursday, february ._--read homer and _anastasius_. walk with the williams' in the evening.... "nothing of us but what must suffer a sea-change." this entry marks the day to which mary referred in a letter written more than a year later, where she says-- a year ago trelawny came one afternoon in high spirits with news concerning the building of the boat, saying, "oh! we must all embark, all live aboard; we will all 'suffer a sea-change.'" and dearest shelley was delighted with the quotation, saying that he would have it for the motto for his boat. little did they think, in their lightness of spirit, that in another year the motto of the boat would serve for the inscription on shelley's tomb. _journal, monday, february ._--read homer. walk with the williams'. jane, trelawny, and medwin in the evening.[ ] _monday, february ._--what a mart this world is? feelings, sentiments,--more invaluable than gold or precious stones is the coin, and what is bought? contempt, discontent, and disappointment, unless, indeed, the mind be loaded with drearier memories. and what say the worldly to this? use spartan coin, pay away iron and lead alone, and store up your precious metal. but alas! from nothing, nothing comes, or, as all things seem to degenerate, give lead and you will receive clay,--the most contemptible of all lives is where you live in the world, and none of your passions or affections are brought into action. i am convinced i could not live thus, and as sterne says that in solitude he would worship a tree, so in the world i should attach myself to those who bore the semblance of those qualities which i admire. but it is not this that i want; let me love the trees, the skies, and the ocean, and that all-encompassing spirit of which i may soon become a part,--let me in my fellow-creature love that which is, and not fix my affection on a fair form endued with imaginary attributes; where goodness, kindness, and talent are, let me love and admire them at their just rate, neither adorning nor diminishing, and above all, let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind; carry the torch of self-knowledge into its dimmest recesses; but too happy if i dislodge any evil spirit, or enshrine a new deity in some hitherto uninhabited nook. read _wrongs of women_ and homer. clare departs. walk with jane and ride with t. guiccioli. t. g. dines with us. _thursday, february ._--take leave of the argyropolis. walk with shelley. ride with t. guiccioli. read letters. spend the evening at the williams'. trelawny there. _friday, march ._--an embassy. walk. my first greek lesson. walk with edward. in the evening work. _sunday, march ._--a note to, and a visit from, dr. nott. go to church. walk. the williams' and trelawny to dinner. mary's experiments in the way of church-going, so new a thing in her experience, and so little in accordance with shelley's habits of thought and action, excited some surprise and comment. hogg, shelley's early friend, who heard of it from mrs. gisborne, now in england, was especially shocked. in a letter to mary, mrs. gisborne remarked, "your friend hogg is _molto scandalizzato_ to hear of your weekly visits to the _piano di sotto_" (the services were held on the ground floor of the tre palazzi). the same letter asks for news of emilia viviani. mrs. gisborne had heard that she was married, and feared she had been sacrificed to a man whom she describes as "that insipid, sickening italian mortal, danieli the lawyer." she proceeds to say-- we invited varley one evening to meet hogg, who was curious to see a man really believing in astrology in the nineteenth century. varley, as usual, was not sparing of his predictions. we talked of shelley without mentioning his name; varley was curious, and being informed by hogg of his exact age, but describing his person as short and corpulent, and himself as a _bon vivant_, varley amused us with the following remarks: "your friend suffered from ill-fortune in may or june . vexatious affairs on the d and th of june, or perhaps latter end of may . the following year, disturbance about a lady. again, last april, at at night, or at noon, disturbance about a bouncing stout lady, and others. at six years of age, noticed by ladies and gentlemen for learning. in july , beginning of charges made against him. in september , at noon, or dusk, very violent charges. scrape at fourteen years of age. eternal warfare against parents and public opinion, and a great blow-up every seven years till death," etc. etc. _is all this true?_ not a little amused, mary answered her friend as follows-- pisa, _ th march _. my dear mrs. gisborne--i am very sorry that you have so much trouble with my commissions, and vainly, too! _ma che vuole?_ ollier will not give you the money, and we are, to tell you the truth, too poor at present to send you a cheque upon our banker; two or three circumstances having caused that climax of all human ills, the inflammation of our weekly bills. but far more than that, we have not touched a quattrino of our christmas quarter, since debts in england and other calls swallowed it entirely up. for the present, therefore, we must dispense with those things i asked you for. as for the desk, we received last post from ollier (without a line) the bill of lading that he talks of, and, _si dio vuole_, we shall receive it safe; the vessel in which they were shipped is not yet arrived. the worst of keeping on with ollier (though it is the best, i believe, after all) is that you will never be able to make anything of his accounts, until you can compare the number of copies in hand with his account of their sale. as for my novel, i shipped it off long ago to my father, telling him to make the best of it; and by the way in which he answered my letter, i fancy he thinks he can make something of it. this is much better than ollier, for i should never have got a penny from him; and, moreover, he is a very bad bookseller to publish with--_ma basta poi_, with all these _seccaturas_. poor dear hunt, you will have heard by this time of the disastrous conclusion of his third embarkment; he is to try a third time in april, and if he does not succeed then, we must say that the sea is _un vero precipizio_, and let him try land. by the bye, why not consult varley on the result? i have tried the _sors homeri_ and the _sors virgilii_; the first says (i will write this greek better, but i thought that mr. gisborne could read the romaic writing, and i now quite forget what it was)-- [greek: Ã�lômên, teiôs moi adelpheon allos epephnen. hôs d'opot' iasiôni euplokamos dêmêtêr. dourateon megan hippon, hoth' heiato pantes aristoi.] which first seems to say that he will come, though his brother may be prosecuted for a libel. of the second, i can make neither head nor tail; and the third is as oracularly obscure as one could wish, for who these great people are who sat in a wooden horse, _chi lo sa_? virgil, except the first line, which is unfavourable, is as enigmatical as homer-- fulgores nunc horrificos, sonitumque, metumque tum leves calamos, et rasæ hastilia virgæ connexosque angues, ipsamque in pectore divæ. but to speak of predictions or anteductions, some of varley's are curious enough: "ill-fortune in may or june ." no; it was then that he arranged his income; there was no ill except health, _al solito_, at that time. the particular days of the d and th of june were not ill, but the whole time was disastrous. it was then we were alarmed by paolo's attack and disturbance. about a lady in the winter of last year, enough, god knows! nothing particular about a fat bouncing lady at at night: and indeed things got more quiet in april. in july shelley was only seven years of age. "a great blow-up every seven years." shelley is not at home; when he returns i will ask him what happened when he was fourteen. in his twenty-second year we made our _scappatura_; at twenty-eight and twenty-nine, a good deal of discomfort on a certain point, but it hardly amounted to a blow-up. pray ask varley also about me. so hogg is shocked that, for good neighbourhood's sake, i visited the _piano di sotto_; let him reassure himself, since instead of a weekly, it was only a monthly visit; in fact, after going three times i stayed away until i heard he was going away. he preached against atheism, and, they said, against shelley. as he invited me himself to come, this appeared to me very impertinent; so i wrote to him, to ask him whether he intended any personal allusion, but he denied the charge most entirely. this affair, as you may guess, among the english at pisa made a great noise; the gossip here is of course out of all bounds, and some people have given them something to talk about. i have seen little of it all; but that which i have seen makes me long most eagerly for some sea-girt isle, where with shelley, my babe, and books and horses, we may give the rest to the winds; this we shall not have for the present. shelley is entangled with lord byron, who is in a terrible fright lest he should desert him. we shall have boats, and go somewhere on the sea-coast, where, i daresay, we shall spend our time agreeably enough, for i like the williams' exceedingly, though there my list begins and ends. emilia married biondi; we hear that she leads him and his mother (to use a vulgarism) a devil of a life. the conclusion of our friendship (_a la italiana_) puts me in mind of a nursery rhyme, which runs thus-- as i was going down cranbourne lane, cranbourne lane was dirty, and there i met a pretty maid, who dropt to me a curtsey; i gave her cakes, i gave her wine, i gave her sugar-candy, but oh! the little naughty girl, she asked me for some brandy. now turn "cranbourne lane" into pisan acquaintances, which i am sure are dirty enough, and "brandy" into that wherewithal to buy brandy (and that no small sum _però_), and you have the whole story of shelley's italian platonics. we now know, indeed, few of those whom we knew last year. pacchiani is at prato; mavrocordato in greece; the argyropolis in florence; and so the world slides. taafe is still here--the butt of lord byron's quizzing, and the poet laureate of pisa. on the occasion of a young lady's birthday he wrote-- eyes that shed a thousand flowers! why should flowers be sent to you? sweetest flowers of heavenly bowers, love and friendship, are what are due. * * * * * after some divine _italian_ weather, we are now enjoying some fine english weather; _cioè_, it does not rain, but not a ray can pierce the web aloft.--most truly yours, mary w. s. mary shelley to mrs. hunt. _ th march ._ my dearest marianne--i hope that this letter will find you quite well, recovering from your severe attack, and looking towards your haven italy with best hopes. i do indeed believe that you will find a relief here from your many english cares, and that the winds which waft you will sing the requiem to all your ills. it was indeed unfortunate that you encountered such weather on the very threshold of your journey, and as the wind howled through the long night, how often did i think of you! at length it seemed as if we should never, never meet; but i will not give way to such a presentiment. we enjoy here divine weather. the sun hot, too hot, with a freshness and clearness in the breeze that bears with it all the delights of spring. the hedges are budding, and you should see me and my friend mrs. williams poking about for violets by the sides of dry ditches; she being herself-- a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye. yesterday a countryman seeing our dilemma, since the ditch was not quite dry, insisted on gathering them for us, and when we resisted, saying that we had no _quattrini_ (_i.e._ farthings, being the generic name for all money), he indignantly exclaimed, _oh! se lo faccio per interesse!_ how i wish you were with us in our rambles! our good cavaliers flock together, and as they do not like _fetching a walk with the absurd womankind_, jane (_i.e._ mrs. williams) and i are off together, and talk morality and pluck violets by the way. i look forward to many duets with this lady and hunt. she has a very pretty voice, and a taste and ear for music which is almost miraculous. the harp is her favourite instrument; but we have none, and a very bad piano; however, as it is, we pass very pleasant evenings, though i can hardly bear to hear her sing "donne l'amore"; it transports me so entirely back to your little parlour at hampstead--and i see the piano, the bookcase, the prints, the casts--and hear mary's _far-ha-ha-a_! we are in great uncertainty as to where we shall spend the summer. there is a beautiful bay about fifty miles off, and as we have resolved on the sea, shelley bought a boat. we wished very much to go there; perhaps we shall still, but as yet we can find but one house; but as we are a colony "which moves altogether or not at all," we have not yet made up our minds. the apartments which we have prepared for you in lord byron's house will be very warm for the summer; and indeed for the two hottest months i should think that you had better go into the country. villas about here are tolerably cheap, and they are perfect paradises. perhaps, as it was with me, italy will not strike you as so divine at first; but each day it becomes dearer and more delightful; the sun, the flowers, the air, all is more sweet and more balmy than in the _ultima thule_ that you inhabit. m. w. s. the journal for the next few weeks has nothing eventful to record. the preceding letter to mrs. hunt gives a simple and pleasing picture of their daily life. perhaps mary had never been quite so happy before; she wrote to the hunts that she thought she grew younger. both she and shelley were occasionally ailing, and shelley's letters show that his spirits suffered depression at times, still, in this respect as well as in health, he was better than he had been in any former spring. the proximity of byron and his circle was not, however, favourable to inspiration or to literary composition. byron's temperament acted as a damper to enthusiasm in others, and shelley, though his estimate of byron's genius was very high, was perpetually jarred and crossed by his worldliness and his moral shallowness and vulgarity. he invariably, acted, however, as byron's true and disinterested friend; and byron was fully aware of the value of his friendship and of his literary help and criticism. trelawny, to whom byron had taken kindly enough, estimated the difference in the moral worth of the two poets with singular justice. "i believed in many things then, and believe in some now," he wrote, more than five and thirty years afterwards: "i could not sympathise with byron, who believed in nothing." his friendship for byron, nevertheless, was to be loyal and lasting. but his favourite resort in these pisan days was the "hospitable and cheerful abode of the shelleys." "there," he says, "i found those sympathies and sentiments which the pilgrim denounced as illusions, believed in as the only realities." at byron's social gatherings--riding-parties or dinner-parties--he made a point of getting shelley if he could; and shelley was very compliant, although the society of which byron was the nucleus was neither congenial nor interesting to him, and he always took the first good opportunity of escaping. daily intercourse of this kind tended gradually to estrange rather than unite the two poets: by accentuating differences it brought into evidence that gulf between their natures which, in spite of the one touch of kinship that certainly existed, was equally impassable by one and by the other. besides, the subject of clare and allegra, never far below the surface, would occasionally come up, and this was a sore point on both sides. as has already been said, byron appreciated shelley, though he did not sympathise with him. in after days he bore public testimony to the purity and unselfishness of shelley's character and to the upright and disinterested motives which actuated him in all he did. but his respect for shelley was not so strong as his antipathy to clare, and shelley's feeling towards her was regarded by him with a cynical sneer which he had no care to hide, and of which its object could not always be unconscious. it is not wonderful that at times there swept across shelley's mind, like a black cloud, the conviction that neither a sense of honour nor justice restrained byron from the basest insinuations. and then again this suspicion would pass away as too dreadful to be entertained. meanwhile clare, in the pursuit of her newly-adopted profession, was thinking of going to vienna, and she longed for a sight of her child first. she had been unusually long, or she fancied so, without news of allegra, and she was growing desperately anxious,--with only too good cause, as the event showed. she wrote to byron, entreating him to arrange for a visit or an interview. byron took no notice of her letters. the shelleys dared not annoy him unnecessarily on the subject, as he had been heard to threaten if they did so to immure allegra in some secret convent where no one could get at her or even hear of her. clare, working herself up into a state of half-frenzied excitement, sent them letter after letter, suggesting and urging wild plans (which shelley was to realise) for carrying off the child by armed force; indeed, one of her schemes seems to have been to take advantage of the projected interview, if granted, for putting this design into execution. some such proposed breach of faith must have been the occasion of shelley's answering her-- i know not what to think of the state of your mind, or what to fear for you. your late plan about allegra seems to me in its present form pregnant with irremediable infamy to all the actors in it except yourself. he did not think that in her present excited mental condition she was fit to go to vienna, and he entreated her to postpone the idea. his advice, often repeated in different words, was, that she should not lose herself in distant and uncertain plans, but "systematise and simplify" her motions, at least for the present, and, if she felt in the least disposed, that she should come and stay with them-- if you like, come and look for houses with me in our boat; it might distract your mind. he and mary had resolved to quit pisa as soon as the weather made it desirable to do so; but their plans and their anxieties were alike suspended by a temporary excitement of which mary's account is given in the following letter-- mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. pisa, _ th april _. my dear mrs. gisborne--not many days after i had written to you concerning the fate which ever pursues us at spring-tide, a circumstance happened which showed that we were not forgotten this year. although, indeed, now that it is all over, i begin to fear that the king of gods and men will not consider it a sufficiently heavy visitation, although for a time it threatened to be frightful enough. two sundays ago, lord byron, shelley, trelawny, captain hay, count gamba, and taafe were returning from their usual evening ride, when, near the porta della piazza, they were passed by a soldier who galloped through the midst of them knocking up against taafe. this nice little gentleman exclaimed, "shall we endure this man's insolence?" lord byron replied, "no! we will bring him to an account," and shelley (whose blood always boils at any insolence offered by a soldier) added, "as you please!" so they put spurs to their horses (_i.e._ all but taafe, who remained quietly behind), followed and stopped the man, and, fancying that he was an officer, demanded his name and address, and gave their cards. the man who, i believe, was half drunk, replied only by all the oaths and abuse in which the italian language is so rich. he ended by saying, "if i liked i could draw my sabre and cut you all to pieces, but as it is, i only arrest you," and he called out to the guards at the gate _arrestategli_. lord byron laughed at this, and saying _arrestateci pure_, gave spurs to his horse and rode towards the gate, followed by the rest. lord byron and gamba passed, but before the others could, the soldier got under the gateway, called on the guard to stop them, and drawing his sabre, began to cut at them. it happened that i and the countess guiccioli were in a carriage close behind and saw it all, and you may guess how frightened we were when we saw our cavaliers cut at, they being totally unarmed. their only safety was, that the field of battle being so confined, they got close under the man, and were able to arrest his arm. captain hay was, however, wounded in his face, and shelley thrown from his horse. i cannot tell you how it all ended, but after cutting and slashing a little, the man sheathed his sword and rode on, while the others got from their horses to assist poor hay, who was faint from loss of blood. lord byron, when he had passed the gate, rode to his own house, got a sword-stick from one of his servants, and was returning to the gate, lung' arno, when he met this man, who held out his hand saying, _siete contento?_ lord byron replied, "no! i must know your name, that i may require satisfaction of you." the soldier said, _il mio nome è masi, sono sargente maggiore_, etc. etc. while they were talking, a servant of lord byron's came and took hold of the bridle of the sergeant's horse. lord byron ordered him to let it go, and immediately the man put his horse to a gallop, but, passing casa lanfranchi, one of lord byron's servants thought that he had killed his master and was running away; determining that he should not go scot-free, he ran at him with a pitchfork and wounded him. the man rode on a few paces, cried out, _sono ammazzato_, and fell, was carried to the hospital, the misericordia bell ringing. we were all assembled at casa lanfranchi, nursing our wounded man, and poor teresa, from the excess of her fright, was worse than any, when what was our consternation when we heard that the man's wound was considered mortal! luckily none but ourselves knew who had given the wound; it was said by the wise pisani, to have been one of lord byron's servants, set on by his padrone, and they pitched upon a poor fellow merely because _aveva lo sguardo fiero, quanto un assassino_. for some days masi continued in great danger, but he is now recovering. as long as it was thought he would die, the government did nothing; but now that he is nearly well, they have imprisoned two men, one of lord byron's servants (the one with the _sguardo fiero_), and the other a servant of teresa's, who was behind our carriage, both perfectly innocent, but they have been kept _in segreto_ these ten days, and god knows when they will be let out. what think you of this? will it serve for our spring adventure? it is blown over now, it is true, but our fate has, in general, been in common with dame nature, and march winds and april showers have brought forth may flowers. you have no notion what a ridiculous figure taafe cut in all this--he kept far behind during the danger, but the next day he wished to take all the honour to himself, vowed that all pisa talked of him alone, and coming to lord byron said, "my lord, if you do not dare ride out to-day, i will alone." but the next day he again changed, he was afraid of being turned out of tuscany, or of being obliged to fight with one of the officers of the sergeant's regiment, of neither of which things there was the slightest danger, so he wrote a declaration to the governor to say that he had nothing to do with it; so embroiling himself with lord byron, he got between scylla and charybdis, from which he has not yet extricated himself; for ourselves, we do not fear any ulterior consequences. _ th april._ we received _hellas_ to-day, and the bill of lading. shelley is well pleased with the former, though there are some mistakes. the only danger would arise from the vengeance of masi, but the moment he is able to move, he is to be removed to another town; he is a _pessimo soggetto_, being the crony of soldaini, rosselmini, and augustini, pisan names of evil fame, which, perhaps, you may remember. there is only one consolation in all this, that if it be our fate to suffer, it is more agreeable, and more safe to suffer in company with five or six than alone. well! after telling you this long story, i must relate our other news. and first, the greek ali pashaw is dead, and his head sent to constantinople; the reception of it was celebrated there by the massacre of four thousand greeks. the latter, however, get on. the turkish fleet of sail of the line-of-war vessels, and transports, endeavoured to surprise the greek fleet in its winter quarters; finding them prepared, they bore away for lante, and pursued by the greeks, took refuge in the bay of naupacto. here they first blockaded them, and obtained a complete victory. all the soldiers on board the transports, in endeavouring to land, were cut to pieces, and the fleet taken or destroyed. i heard something about hellenists which greatly pleased me. when any one asks of the peasants of the morea what news there is, and if they have had any victory, they reply: "i do not know, but for us it is [greek: ê tan, ê epi tas]," being their doric pronunciation of [greek: ê tan, ê epi tês], the speech of the spartan mother, on presenting his shield to her son; "with this or on this." i wish, my dear mrs. gisborne, that you would send the first part of this letter, addressed to mr. w. godwin at nash's, esq., dover street. i wish him to have an account of the fray, and you will thus save me the trouble of writing it over again, for what with writing and talking about it, i am quite tired. in a late letter of mine to my father, i requested him to send you _matilda_. i hope that he has complied with my desire, and, in that case, that you will get it copied and send it to me by the first opportunity, perhaps by hunt, if he comes at all. i do not mention commissions to you, for although wishing much for the things about which i wrote [we have], for the present, no money to spare. we wish very much to hear from you again, and to hear if there are any hopes of your getting on in your plans, what henry is doing, and how you continue to like england. the months of february and march were with us as hot as an english june. in the first days of april we have had some very cold weather; so that we are obliged to light fires again. shelley has been much better in health this winter than any other since i have known him, pisa certainly agrees with him exceedingly well, which is its only merit, in my eyes. i wish fate had bound us to naples instead. percy is quite well; he begins to talk, italian only now, and to call things _bello_ and _buono_, but the droll thing is, that he is right about the genders. a silk _vestito_ is _bello_, but a new _frusta_ is _bella_. he is a fine boy, full of life, and very pretty. williams is very well, and they are getting on very well. mrs. williams is a miracle of economy, and, as mrs. godwin used to call it, makes both ends meet with great comfort to herself and others. medwin is gone to rome; we have heaps of the gossip of a petty town this winter, being just in the _coterie_ where it was all carried on; but now _grazie a messer domenedio_, the english are almost all gone, and we, being left alone, all subjects of discord and clacking cease. you may conceive what a _bisbiglio_ our adventure made. the pisans were all enraged because the _maledetti inglesi_ were not punished; yet when the gentlemen returned from their ride the following day (busy fate) an immense crowd was assembled before casa lanfranchi, and they all took off their hats to them. adieu. _state bene e felice._ best remembrances to mr. gisborne, and compliments to henry, who will remember hay as one of the maremma hunters; he is a friend of lord byron's.--yours ever truly, mary w. s. this affair, and the consequent inquiry and examination of witnesses in connection with it took up several days, on one of which mary and countess guiccioli were under examination for five hours. in the meantime byron decided to go to leghorn for his summer boating; whereupon shelley wrote and definitively proposed to clare that she should accompany his party to spezzia, promising her quiet and privacy, and immunity from annoyance, while she bided her time with regard to allegra. clare accepted the offer, and joined them at pisa on the th of april in the expectation of starting very shortly. it turned out, however, that no suitable houses were, after all, to be had on the coast. this was an unexpected disappointment, and on the d she and the williams' went off to spezzia for another search. they were hardly on their way when letters were received by shelley and mary with the grievous news that allegra had died of typhus fever in the convent of bagnacavallo. chapter xvi april-july "evil news. not well." these few words are mary's record of this frightful blow. she was again in delicate health, suffering from the same depressing symptoms as before percy's birth, and for a like reason. no wonder she was made downright ill by the shock, and by the sickening apprehension of the scene to follow when clare should hear the news. on the next day but one--the th of april--the travellers returned. williams says, in his diary for that day-- meet s., his face bespoke his feelings. c.'s child was dead, and he had the office to break it to her, or rather not to do so; but, fearful of the news reaching her ears, to remove her instantly from this place. shelley could not tell clare at once. not while they were in pisa, and with byron close by. one, unfurnished, house was to be had, the casa magni, in the bay of lerici. thither, on the chance of getting it, they must go, and instantly. mary's indisposition must be ignored; she must undertake the negotiations for the house. within twenty-four hours she was off to spezzia, with clare and little percy, escorted by trelawny; poor clare quite unconscious of the burden on her friends' minds. shelley remained behind another day, to pack up the necessary furniture; but, on the th, he with the whole williams family left pisa for lerici. thence, while waiting for the furniture to arrive by sea, he wrote to mary at spezzia. shelley to mary. lerici, _sunday, th april _. dearest mary--i am this moment arrived at lerici, where i am necessarily detained, waiting the furniture, which left pisa last night at midnight, and as the sea has been calm and the wind fair, i may expect them every moment. it would not do to leave affairs here in an _impiccio_, great as is my anxiety to see you. how are you, my best love? how have you sustained the trials of the journey? answer me this question, and how my little babe and clare are. now to business-- is the magni house taken? if not, pray occupy yourself instantly in finishing the affair, even if you are obliged to go to sarzana, and send a messenger to me to tell me of your success. i, of course, cannot leave lerici, to which port the boats (for we were obliged to take two) are directed. but _you_ can come over in the same boat that brings you this letter, and return in the evening. i hear that trelawny is still with you. tell clare that, as i must probably in a few days return to pisa for the affair of the lawsuit, i have brought her box with me, thinking she might be in want of some of its contents. i ought to say that i do not think there is accommodation for you all at this inn; and that, even if there were, you would be better off at spezzia; but if the magni house is taken, then there is no possible reason why you should not take a row over in the boat that will bring this; but do not keep the men long. i am anxious to hear from you on every account.--ever yours, s. mary's answer was that she had concluded for casa magni, but that no other house was to be had in all that neighbourhood. it was in a neglected condition, and not very roomy or convenient; but, such as it was, it had to accommodate the williams', as well as the shelleys, and clare. considerable difficulty was experienced by shelley in obtaining leave for the landing of the furniture; this obstacle got over, they at last took possession. edward williams' journal. _wednesday, may ._--cloudy, with rain. came to casa magni after breakfast, the shelleys having contrived to give us rooms. without them, heaven knows what we should have done. employed all day putting the things away. all comfortably settled by . passed the evening in talking over our folly and our troubles. the worst trouble, however, was still impending. finding how crowded and uncomfortable they were likely to be, clare, after a day or two, decided that it was best for herself and for every one that she should return to florence, and announced her intention accordingly. compelled by the circumstances, shelley then disclosed to her the true state of the case. her grief was excessive, but was, after the first, succeeded by a calmness unusual in her and surprising to her friends; a reaction from the fever of suspense and torment in which she had lived for weeks past, and which were even a harder strain on her powers of endurance than the truth, grievous though that was, putting an end to all hope as well as to all fear. for the present she remained at the villa magni. the ground floor of this habitation was appropriated, as is often done in italy, for stowing the implements and produce of the land, as rent is paid in kind there. in the autumn you find casks of wine, jars of oil, tools, wood, occasionally carts, and, near the sea, boats and fishing-nets. over this floor were a large saloon and four bedrooms (which had once been whitewashed), and nothing more; there was an out-building for cooking, and a place for the servants to eat and sleep in. the williams had one room, and shelley and his wife occupied two more, facing each other.[ ] facing the sea, and almost over it, a verandah or open terrace ran the whole length of the building; it was over the projecting ground floor, and level with the inhabited story. the surrounding scenery was magnificent, but wild to the last degree, and there was something unearthly in the perpetual moaning and howling of winds and waves. poor mary now began to feel the ill effects of her enforced over-exertions. she became very unwell, suffering from utter prostration of strength and from hysterical affections. rest, quiet, and freedom from worry were essential to her condition, but none of these could she have, nor even sleep at night. the absence of comfort and privacy, added to the great difficulty of housekeeping, and the melancholy with which clare's misfortune had infected the whole party, were all very unfavourable to her. after staying for three weeks, clare returned for a short visit to florence. shelley's letters to her during her absence afford occasional glimpses, from which it is easy to infer more, into the state of affairs at casa magni. mrs. williams was "by no means acquiescent in the present system of things." the plan of having all possessions in common does not work well in the kitchen; the respective servants of the two families were always quarrelling and taking each other's things. jane, who was a good housekeeper, had the defects of her qualities, and "pined for her own house and saucepans." "it is a pity," remarks shelley, "that any one so pretty and amiable should be so selfish." not that these matters troubled him much. such little "squalls" gave way to calm, "in accustomed vicissitude" (to use his own words); and mrs. williams had far too much tact to dwell on domestic worries to him. his own nerves were for a time shaken and unstrung, but he recovered, and, after the first, was unusually well. he was in love with the wild, beautiful place, and with the life at sea; for to his boat he escaped whenever any little breezes ruffled the surface of domestic life so that its mirror no longer reflected his own unwontedly bright spirits. at first he and williams had only the small flat-bottomed boat in which they had navigated the arno and serchio, but in a fortnight there arrived the little schooner which captain roberts had built for shelley at genoa, and then their content was perfect. for mary no such escape from care and discomfort was open; she was too weak to go about much, and it is no wonder that, after the williams' installation, she merely chronicles, "the rest of may a blank." williams' diary partly fills this blank; and it is so graphic in its exceeding simplicity that, though it has been printed before, portions may well be included here. extracts from williams' diary. _thursday, may ._--cloudy, with intervals of rain. went out with shelley in the boat--fish on the rocks--bad sport. went in the evening after some wild ducks--saw nothing but sublime scenery, to which the grandeur of a storm greatly contributed. _friday, may ._--fine. the captain of the port despatched a vessel for shelley's boat. went to lerici with s., being obliged to market there; the servant having returned from sarzana without being able to procure anything. _sunday, may ._--fine. kept awake the whole night by a heavy swell, which made a noise on the beach like the discharge of heavy artillery. tried with shelley to launch the small flat-bottomed boat through the surf; we succeeded in pushing it through, but shipped a sea on attempting to land. walk to lerici along the beach, by a winding path on the mountain's side. delightful evening,--the scenery most sublime. _monday, may ._--fine. some heavy drops of rain fell to-day, without a cloud being visible. made a sketch of the western side of the bay. read a little. walked with jane up the mountain. after tea walking with shelley on the terrace, and observing the effect of moonshine on the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short, he grasped me violently by the arm, and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet. observing him sensibly affected, i demanded of him if he were in pain. but he only answered by saying, "there it is again--there"! he recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child (allegra) rise from the sea, and clap its hands as in joy, smiling at him. this was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely to awaken him from, so forcibly had the vision operated on his mind. our conversation, which had been at first rather melancholy, led to this; and my confirming his sensations, by confessing that i had felt the same, gave greater activity to his ever-wandering and lively imagination. _sunday, may ._--cloudy and threatening weather. wrote during the morning. mr. maglian called after dinner, and, while walking with him on the terrace, we discovered a strange sail coming round the point of porto venere, which proved at length to be shelley's boat. she had left genoa on thursday, but had been driven back by prevailing bad winds, a mr. heslop and two english seamen brought her round, and they speak most highly of her performances. she does, indeed, excite my surprise and admiration. shelley and i walked to lerici, and made a stretch off the land to try her, and i find she fetches whatever she looks at. in short, we have now a perfect plaything for the summer. _monday, may ._--rain during night in torrents--a heavy gale of wind from s.w., and a surf running heavier than ever; at gale unabated, violent squalls.... ... in the evening an electric arch forming in the clouds announces a heavy thunderstorm, if the wind lulls. distant thunder--gale increases--a circle of foam surrounds the bay--dark, evening, and tempestuous, with flashes of lightning at intervals, which give us no hope of better weather. the learned in these things say, that it generally lasts three days when once it commences as this has done. we all feel as if we were on board ship--and the roaring of the sea brings this idea to us even in our beds. _wednesday, may ._--fine and fresh breeze in puffs from the land. jane and mary consent to take a sail. run down to porto venere and beat back at o'clock. the boat sailed like a witch. after the late gale, the water is covered with purple nautili, or as the sailors call them, portuguese men-of-war. after dinner jane accompanied us to the point of the magra; and the boat beat back in wonderful style. _wednesday, may ._--fine, after a threatening night. after breakfast shelley and i amused ourselves with trying to make a boat of canvas and reeds, as light and as small as possible. she is to be - / feet long, and - / broad.... _wednesday, june ._--launched the little boat, which answered our wishes and expectations. she is lbs. english weight, and stows easily on board. sailed in the evening, but were becalmed in the offing, and left there with a long ground swell, which made jane little better than dead. hoisted out our little boat and brought her on shore. her landing attended by the whole village. _thursday, june ._--fine. at saw a vessel between the straits of porto venere, like a man-of-war brig. she proved to be the _bolivar_, with roberts and trelawny on board, who are taking her round to livorno. on meeting them we were saluted by six guns. sailed together to try the vessels--in speed no chance with her, but i think we keep as good a wind. she is the most beautiful craft i ever saw, and will do more for her size. she costs lord byron £ clear off and ready for sea, with provisions and conveniences of every kind. in the midst of this happy life one anxiety there was, however, which pursued shelley everywhere; and neither on shore nor at sea could he escape from it,--that of godwin's imminent ruin. the first of the letters which follow had reached mary while still at pisa. the next letter, and that of mrs. godwin were, at shelley's request, intercepted by mrs. mason and sent to him. he could not and would not show them to mary, and wrote at last to mrs. godwin, to try and put a stop to them. godwin to mary. skinner street, _ th april _. my dearest mary--the die, so far as i am concerned, seems now to be cast, and all that remains is that i should entreat you to forget that you have a father in existence. why should your prime of youthful vigour be tarnished and made wretched by what relates to me? i have lived to the full age of man in as much comfort as can reasonably be expected to fall to the lot of a human being. what signifies what becomes of the few wretched years that remain? for the same reason, i think i ought for the future to drop writing to you. it is impossible that my letters can give you anything but unmingled pain. a few weeks more, and the formalities which still restrain the successful claimant will be over, and my prospects of tranquillity must, as i believe, be eternally closed.--farewell, william godwin. godwin to mary. skinner street, _ d may _. dear mary--i wrote to you a fortnight ago, and professed my intention of not writing again. i certainly will not write when the result shall be to give pure, unmitigated pain. it is the questionable shape of what i have to communicate that still thrusts the pen into my hand. this day we are compelled, by summary process, to leave the house we live in, and to hide our heads in whatever alley will receive us. if we can compound with our creditor, and he seems not unwilling to accept £ (i have talked with him on the subject), we may emerge again. our business, if freed from this intolerable burthen, is more than ever worth keeping. but all this would, perhaps, have failed in inducing me to resume the pen, but for _one extraordinary accident_. wednesday, st may, was the day when the last legal step was taken against me; and wednesday morning, a few hours before this catastrophe, willats, the man who, three or four years before, lent shelley £ at two for one, called on me to ask whether shelley wanted any more money on the same terms. what does this mean? in the contemplation of such a coincidence, i could almost grow superstitious. but, alas! i fear--i fear--i am a drowning man, catching at a straw.--ever most affectionately, your father, william godwin. please to direct your letters, till you hear further, to the care of mr. monro, no. skinner street. mrs. mason to shelley. _may ._ i send you in return for godwin's letter one still worse, because i think it has more the appearance of truth. i was desired to convey it to mary, but that i should not think right. at the same time, i don't well know how you can conceal all this affair from her; they really seem to want assistance at present, for their being turned out of the house is a serious evil. i rejoice in your good health, to which i have no doubt the boat and the williams' much contribute, and wish there may be no prospect of its being disturbed. mary ought to know what is said of the novel, and how can she know that without all the rest? you will contrive what is best. in the part of the letter which i do send, she (mrs. godwin) adds, that at this moment mr. godwin does not offer the novel to any bookseller, lest his actual situation might make it be supposed that it would be sold cheap. mrs. godwin also wishes to correspond directly with mrs. shelley, but this i shall not permit; she says godwin's health is much the worse for all this affair. i was astonished at seeing clare walk in on tuesday evening, and i have not a spare bed now in the house, the children having outgrown theirs, and been obliged to occupy that which i had formerly; she proposed going to an inn, but preferred sleeping on a sofa, where i made her as comfortable as i could, which is but little so; however, she is satisfied. i rejoice to see that she has not suffered so much as you expected, and understand now her former feelings better than at first. when there is nothing to hope or fear, it is natural to be calm. i wish she had some determined project, but her plans seem as unsettled as ever, and she does not see half the reasons for separating herself from your society that really exist. i regret to perceive her great repugnance to paris, which i believe to be the place best adapted to her. if she had but the temptation of good letters of introduction!--but i have no means of obtaining them for her--she intends, i believe, to go to florence to-morrow, and to return to your habitation in a week, but talks of not staying the whole summer. i regret the loss of mary's good health and spirits, but hope it is only the consequence of her present situation, and, therefore, merely temporary, but i dread clare's being in the same house for a month or two, and wish the williams' were half a mile from you. i must write a few lines to mary, but will say nothing of having heard from mrs. godwin; you will tell her what you think right, but you know my opinion, that things which cannot be concealed are better told at once. i should suppose a bankruptcy would be best, but the godwins do not seem to think so. if all the world valued obscure tranquillity as much as i do, it would be a happier, though possibly much duller, world than it is, but the loss of wealth is quite an epidemic disease in england, and it disturbs their rest more than the[ ] ... i should have a thousand things to say, but that i have a thousand other things to do, and you give me hope of conversing with you before long.--ever yours very sincerely, m. m. shelley to mrs. godwin. lerici, _ th may _. dear madam--mrs. mason has sent me an extract from your last letter to show to mary, and i have received that of mr. godwin, in which he mentions your having left skinner street. in mary's present state of health and spirits, much caution is requisite with regard to communications which must agitate her in the highest degree, and the object of my present letter is simply to inform you that i thought it right to exercise this caution on the present occasion. mary is at present about three months advanced in pregnancy, and the irritability and languor which accompany this state are always distressing, and sometimes alarming. i do not know even how soon i can permit her to receive such communications, or even how soon you or mr. godwin would wish they should be conveyed to her, if you could have any idea of the effect. do not, however, let me be misunderstood. it is not my intention or my wish that the circumstances in which your family is involved should be concealed from her; but that the detail of them should be suspended until they assume a more prosperous character, or at least till letters addressed to her or intended for her perusal on that subject should not convey a supposition that she could do more than she does, thus exasperating the sympathy which she already feels too intensely for her father's distress, which she would sacrifice all she possesses to remedy, but the remedy of which is beyond her power. she imagined that her novel might be turned to immediate advantage for him. i am greatly interested in the fate of this production, which appears to me to possess a high degree of merit, and i regret that it is not mr. godwin's intention to publish it immediately. i am sure that mary would be delighted to amend anything that her father thought imperfect in it, though i confess that if his objection relates to the character of beatrice, _i_ shall lament the deference which would be shown by the sacrifice of any portion of it to feelings and ideas which are but for a day. i wish mr. godwin would write to her on that subject; he might advert to the letter (for it is only the last one) which i have suppressed, or not, as he thought proper. i have written to mr. smith to solicit the loan of £ , which, if i can obtain in that manner, is very much at mr. godwin's service. the views which i now entertain of my affairs forbid me to enter into any further reversionary transactions; nor do i think mr. godwin would be a gainer by the contrary determination; as it would be next to impossible to effectuate any such bargain at this distance, nor could i burthen my income, which is only sufficient to meet its various claims, and the system of life in which it seems necessary i should live. we hear you hear jane's (clare's) news from mrs. mason. since the late melancholy event she has become far more tranquil; nor should i have anything to desire with regard to her, did not the uncertainty of my own life and prospects render it prudent for her to attempt to establish some sort of independence as a security against an event which would deprive her of that which she at present enjoys. she is well in health, and usually resides at florence, where she has formed a little society for herself among the italians, with whom she is a great favourite. she was here for a week or two; and although she has at present returned to florence, we expect her on a visit to us for the summer months. in the winter, unless some of her various plans succeed, for she may be called _la fille aux mille projets_, she will return to florence. mr. godwin may depend upon receiving immediate notice of the result of my application to mr. smith. i hope soon to have an account of your situation and prospects, and remain, dear madam, yours very sincerely, p. b. shelley. mrs. godwin. we will speak another time, of what is deeply interesting both to mary and to myself, of my dear william. the knowledge of all this on shelley's mind,--the consciousness that he was hiding it from mary, and that she was probably more than half aware of his doing so, gave him a feeling of constraint in his daily intercourse with her. to talk with her, even about her father, was difficult, for he could neither help nor hide his feeling of irritation and indignation at the way in which godwin persecuted his daughter after the efforts she had made in his behalf, and for which he had hardly thanked her. it would have to come, the explanation; but for the present, as shelley wrote to clare, he was content to put off the evil day. towards the end of the month mary's health had somewhat improved, and the letter she then wrote to mrs. gisborne gives a connected account of all the past incidents. mary shelley to mrs. gisborne. casa magni, presso a lerici, _ d june _. my dear mrs. gisborne--we received a letter from mr. gisborne the other day, which promised one from you. it is not yet come, and although i think that you are two or three in my debt, yet i am good enough to write to you again, and thus to increase your debt. nor will i allow you, with one letter, to take advantage of the insolvent act, and thus to free yourself from all claims at once. when i last wrote, i said that i hoped our spring visitation had come and was gone, but this year we were not quit so easily. however, before i mention anything else, i will finish the story of the _zuffa_ as far as it is yet gone. i think that in my last i left the sergeant recovering; one of lord byron's and one of the guiccioli's servants in prison on suspicion, though both were innocent. the judge or advocate, called a cancelliere, sent from florence to determine the affair, dislikes the pisans, and, having _poca paga_, expected a present from milordo, and so favoured our part of the affair, was very civil, and came to our houses to take depositions against the law. for the sake of the lesson, hogg should have been there to learn to cross-question. the cancelliere, a talkative buffoon of a florentine, with "mille scuse per l'incomodo," asked, "dove fu lei la sera del marzo? andai a spasso in carozza, fuori della porta della piaggia." a little clerk, seated beside him, with a great pile of papers before him, now dipped his pen in his ink-horn, and looked expectant, while the cancelliere, turning his eyes up to the ceiling, repeated, "io fui a spasso," etc. this scene lasted two, four, six, hours, as it happened. in the space of two months the depositions of fifteen people were taken, and finding tita (lord byron's servant) perfectly innocent, the cancelliere ordered him to be liberated, but the pisan police took fright at his beard. they called him "il barbone," and, although it was declared that on his exit from prison he should be shaved, they could not tranquillise their mighty minds, but banished him. we, in the meantime, were come to this place, so he has taken refuge with us. he is an excellent fellow, faithful, courageous, and daring. how could it happen that the pisans should be frightened at such a _mirabile mostro_ of an italian, especially as the day he was let out of _segreto_, and was a _largee_ in prison, he gave a feast to all his fellow-prisoners, hiring chandeliers and plate! but poor antonio, the guiccioli's servant, the meekest-hearted fellow in the world, is kept in _segreto_; not found guilty, but punished as such,--_e chi sa_ when he will be let out?--so rests the affair. about a month ago clare came to visit us at pisa, and went with the williams' to find a house in the gulf of spezzia, when, during her absence, the disastrous news came of the death of allegra. she died of a typhus fever, which had been raging in the romagna; but no one wrote to say it was there. she had no friends except the nuns of the convent, who were kind to her, i believe; but you know italians. if half of the convent had died of the plague, they would never have written to have had her removed, and so the poor child fell a sacrifice. lord byron felt the loss at first bitterly; he also felt remorse, for he felt that he had acted against everybody's counsels and wishes, and death had stamped with truth the many and often-urged prophecies of clare, that the air of the romagna, joined to the ignorance of the italians, would prove fatal to her. shelley wished to conceal the fatal news from her as long as possible, so when she returned from spezzia he resolved to remove thither without delay, with so little delay that he packed me off with clare and percy the very next day. she wished to return to florence, but he persuaded her to accompany me; the next day he packed up our goods and chattels, for a furnished house was not to be found in this part of the world, and, like a torrent hurrying everything in its course, he persuaded the williams' to do the same. they came here; but one house was to be found for us all; it is beautifully situated on the sea-shore, under the woody hills,--but such a place as this is! the poverty of the people is beyond anything, yet they do not appear unhappy, but go on in dirty content, or contented dirt, while we find it hard work to purvey miles around for a few eatables. we were in wretched discomfort at first, but now are in a kind of disorderly order, living from day to day as we can. after the first day or two clare insisted on returning to florence, so shelley was obliged to disclose the truth. you may judge of what was her first burst of grief and despair; however she reconciled herself to her fate sooner than we expected; and although, of course, until she form new ties, she will always grieve, yet she is now tranquil--more tranquil than when prophesying her disaster; she was for ever forming plans for getting her child from a place she judged but too truly would be fatal to her. she has now returned to florence, and i do not know whether she will join us again. our colony is much smaller than we expected, which we consider a benefit. lord byron remains with his train at montenero. trelawny is to be the commander of his vessel, and of course will be at leghorn. he is at present at genoa, awaiting the finishing of this boat. shelley's boat is a beautiful creature; henry would admire her greatly; though only feet by feet she is a perfect little ship, and looks twice her size. she had one fault, she was to have been built in partnership with williams and trelawny. trelawny chose the name of the _don juan_, and we acceded; but when shelley took her entirely on himself we changed the name to the _ariel_. lord byron chose to take fire at this, and determined that she should be called after the poem; wrote to roberts to have the name painted on the mainsail, and she arrived thus disfigured. for days and nights, full twenty-one, did shelley and edward ponder on her anabaptism, and the washing out the primeval stain. turpentine, spirits of wine, buccata, all were tried, and it became dappled and no more. at length the piece had to be taken out and reefs put, so that the sail does not look worse. i do not know what lord byron will say, but lord and poet as he is, he could not be allowed to make a coal barge of our boat. as only one house was to be found habitable in this gulf, the williams' have taken up their abode with us, and their servants and mine quarrel like cats and dogs; and besides, you may imagine how ill a large family agrees with my laziness, when accounts and domestic concerns come to be talked of. _ma pazienza._ after all the place does not suit me; the people are _rozzi_, and speak a detestable dialect, and yet it is better than any other italian sea-shore north of naples. the air is excellent, and you may guess how much better we like it than leghorn, when, besides, we should have been involved in english society--a thing we longed to get rid of at pisa. mr. gisborne talks of your going to a distant country; pray write to me in time before this takes place, as i want a box from england first, but cannot now exactly name its contents. i am sorry to hear you do not get on, but perhaps henry will, and make up for all. percy is well, and shelley singularly so; this incessant boating does him a great deal of good. i have been very unwell for some time past, but am better now. i have not even heard of the arrival of my novel; but i suppose for his own sake, papa will dispose of it to the best advantage. if you see it advertised, pray tell me, also its publisher, etc. we have heard from hunt the day he was to sail, and anxiously and daily now await his arrival. shelley will go over to leghorn to him, and i also, if i can so manage it. we shall be at pisa next winter, i believe, fate so decrees. of course you have heard that the lawsuit went against my father. this was the summit and crown of our spring misfortunes, but he writes in so few words, and in such a manner, that any information that i could get, through any one, would be a great benefit to me. adieu. pray write now, and at length. remember both shelley and me to hogg. did you get _matilda_ from papa?--yours ever, mary w. shelley. continue to direct to pisa. clare returned to the casa magni on the th of july. the weather had now become intensely hot, and mary was again prostrated by it. alarming symptoms appeared, and after a wretched week of ill health, these came to a crisis in a dangerous miscarriage. she was destitute of medical aid or appliances, and, weakened as she already was, they feared for her life. she had lain ill for several hours before some ice could be procured, and shelley then took upon himself the responsibility of its immediate use; the event proved him right; and when at last a doctor came, he found her doing well. her strength, however, was reduced to the lowest ebb; her spirits also; and within a week of this misfortune her recovery was retarded by a dreadful nervous shock she received through shelley's walking in his sleep.[ ] while mary was enduring a time of physical and mental suffering beyond what can be told, and such as no man can wholly understand, shelley, for his part, was enjoying unwonted health and good spirits. and such creatures are we all that unwonted health in ourself is even a stronger power for happiness than is the sickness of another for depression. he was sorry for mary's gloom, but he could not lighten it, and he was persistently content in spite of it. this has led to the supposition that there was, at this time, a serious want of sympathy between shelley and mary. his only want, he said in an often-quoted letter, was the presence of those who could feel, and understand him, and he added, "whether from proximity, and the continuity of domestic intercourse, mary does not." it would have been almost miraculous had it been otherwise. perhaps nothing in the world is harder than for a person suffering from exhausting illness, and from the extreme of nervous and mental depression, to enter into the mood of temporary elation of another person whose spirits, as a rule, are uneven, and in need of constant support from others. but the context of this very letter of shelley's shows clearly enough that he meant nothing desperate, no shipwreck of the heart; for, as the people who could "feel, and understand him," he instances his correspondents, mr. and mrs. gisborne, saying that his satisfaction would be complete if only _they_ were of the party; although, were his wishes not limited by his hopes, hogg would also be included. he would have liked a little intellectual stimulus and comradeship. as it was, he was well satisfied with an intercourse of which "words were not the instruments." i like jane more and more, and i find williams the most amiable of companions. jane's guitar and her sweet singing were a new and perpetual delight to him, and she herself supplied him with just as much suggestion of an unrealised ideal as was necessary to keep his imagination alive. she, on her side, understood him and knew how to manage him perfectly; as a great man may be understood by a clever woman who is so far from having an intellectual comprehension of him that she is not distressed by the consciousness of its imperfection or its absence, but succeeds by dint of delicate social intuition, guided by just so much sense of humour as saves her from exaggeration, or from blunders; and who understands her great man on his human side so much better than the poor creature understands himself, as to wind him at will, easily, gracefully, and insensibly, round her little finger. and so, without sacrificing a moment's peace of mind, jane williams won over shelley an ascendency which was pleasing to both and convenient to every one. no better instance could be given of her method than the well-known episode of his sudden proposal to her to overturn the boat, and, together, to "solve the great mystery"; inimitably told by trelawny. and so the month of june sped away. "i have a boat here," wrote shelley to john gisborne, ... "it cost me £ , and reduced me to some difficulty in point of money. however, it is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. williams is captain, and we glide along this delightful bay, in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that i could say with faust to the present moment, 'remain; thou art so beautiful.'" and now, like faust, having said this, like faust's, his hour had come. he heard from genoa of the leigh hunts' arrival, so far, on their journey, and wrote at once to hunt a letter of warmest welcome to italy, promising to start for leghorn the instant he should hear of the hunts' vessel having sailed for that port. poor mary, who sends you a thousand loves, has been seriously ill, having suffered a most debilitating miscarriage. she is still too unwell to rise from the sofa, and must take great care of herself for some time, or she would come with us to leghorn. lord byron is in _villegiatura_ near leghorn, and you will meet besides with a mr. trelawny, a wild, but kind-hearted seaman. the hunts sailed; and, on the st of july, shelley and williams, with charles vivian, the sailor-lad who looked after their boat, started in the _ariel_ for leghorn, where they arrived safely. thence shelley, with leigh hunt, proceeded to pisa. it had not been their intention to stay long, but shelley found much to detain him. matters with respect to byron and the projected magazine wore a most unsatisfactory appearance; byron's eagerness had cooled, and his reception of the hunts was chilling in the extreme. poor mrs. hunt was very seriously ill, and the letter which mary received from her husband was mainly to explain his prolonged absence. she had let him go from her side with the greatest unwillingness; she was haunted by the gloomiest forebodings and a sense of unexplained misery which they all ascribed to her illness, and her letters were written in a tone of depression which made shelley anxious on her account, and edward williams on that of his wife, who, he feared, might be unhappy during his absence from her. but jane wrote brightly, and gave an improved account of mary. shelley to mary. pisa, _ th july _. my dearest mary--i have received both your letters, and shall attend to the instructions they convey. i did not think of buying the _bolivar_; lord byron wishes to sell her, but i imagine would prefer ready money. i have as yet made no inquiries about houses near pugnano--i have had no moment of time to spare from hunt's affairs. i am detained unwillingly here, and you will probably see williams in the boat before me, but that will be decided to-morrow. things are in the worst possible situation with respect to poor hunt. i find marianne in a desperate state of health, and on our arrival at pisa sent for vaccà. he decides that her case is hopeless, and, although it will be lingering, must end fatally. this decision he thought proper to communicate to hunt, indicating at the same time with great judgment and precision the treatment necessary to be observed for availing himself of the chance of his being deceived. this intelligence has extinguished the last spark of poor hunt's spirits, low enough before. the children are well and much improved. lord byron is at this moment on the point of leaving tuscany. the gambas have been exiled, and he declares his intention of following their fortunes. his first idea was to sail to america, which was changed to switzerland, then to genoa, and last to lucca. everybody is in despair, and everything in confusion. trelawny was on the point of sailing to genoa for the purpose of transporting the _bolivar_ overland to the lake of geneva, and had already whispered in my ear his desire that i should not influence lord byron against this terrestrial navigation. he next received _orders_ to weigh anchor and set sail for lerici. he is now without instructions, moody and disappointed. but it is the worse for poor hunt, unless the present storm should blow over. he places his whole dependence upon the scheme of the journal, for which every arrangement has been made. lord byron must, of course, furnish the requisite funds at present, as i cannot; but he seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and arrangements due to such a situation as hunt's. these, in spite of delicacy, i must procure; he offers him the copyright of the _vision of judgment_ for the first number. this offer, if sincere, is _more_ than enough to set up the journal, and, if sincere, will set everything right. how are you, my best mary? write especially how is your health, and how your spirits are, and whether you are not more reconciled to staying at lerici, at least during the summer. you have no idea how i am hurried and occupied; i have not a moment's leisure, but will write by next post. ever, dearest mary, yours affectionately, s. i have found the translation of the _symposium_. shelley to jane williams. pisa, _ th july _. you will probably see williams before i can disentangle myself from the affairs with which i am now surrounded. i return to leghorn to-night, and shall urge him to sail with the first fair wind without expecting me. i have thus the pleasure of contributing to your happiness when deprived of every other, and of leaving you no other subject of regret but the absence of one scarcely worth regretting. i fear you are solitary and melancholy at the villa magni, and, in the intervals of the greater and more serious distress in which i am compelled to sympathise here, i figure to myself the countenance which has been the source of such consolation to me, shadowed by a veil of sorrow. how soon those hours passed, and how slowly they return, to pass so soon again, and perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately, so happily! adieu, my dearest friend. i only write these lines for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes. mary will tell you all the news. s. from jane williams to shelley. _ th july._ my dearest friend--your few melancholy lines have indeed cast your own visionary veil over a countenance that was animated with the hope of seeing you return with far different tidings. we heard yesterday that you had left leghorn in company with the _bolivar_, and would assuredly be here in the morning at o'clock; therefore i got up, and from the terrace saw (or i dreamt it) the _bolivar_ opposite in the offing. she hoisted more sail, and went through the straits. what can this mean? hope and uncertainty have made such a chaos in my mind that i know not what to think. my own neddino does not deign to lighten my darkness by a single word. surely i shall see him to-night. perhaps, too, you are with him. well, _pazienza_! mary, i am happy to tell you, goes on well; she talks of going to pisa, and indeed your poor friends seem to require all her assistance. for me, alas! i can only offer sympathy, and my fervent wishes that a brighter cloud may soon dispel the present gloom. i hope much from the air of pisa for mrs. hunt. lord b.'s departure gives me pleasure, for whatever may be the present difficulties and disappointments, they are small to what you would have suffered had he remained with you. this i say in the spirit of prophecy, so gather consolation from it. i have only time left to scrawl you a hasty adieu, and am affectionately yours, j. w. why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the past? are you going to join your friend plato, or do you expect i shall do so soon? _buona notte._ mary was slowly getting better, and hoping to feel brighter by the time shelley came back. on the th of july she wrote a few lines in her journal, summing up the month during which she had left it untouched. _sunday, july ._--i am ill most of this time. ill, and then convalescent. roberts and trelawny arrive with the _bolivar_. on monday, th june, trelawny goes on to leghorn with her. roberts remains here until st july, when the hunts being arrived, shelley goes in the boat with him and edward to leghorn. they are still there. read _jacopo ortis_, second volume of _geographica fisica_, etc. etc. next day, monday the th, when the voyagers were expected to return, it was so stormy all day at lerici that their having sailed was considered out of the question, and their non-arrival excited no surprise in mary or jane. so many possibilities and probabilities might detain them at leghorn or pisa, that their wives did not get anxious for three or four days; and even then what the two women dreaded was not calamity at sea, but illness or disagreeable business on shore. on thursday, however, getting no letters, they did become uneasy, and, but for the rough weather, jane williams would have started in a row-boat for leghorn. on friday they watched with feverish anxiety for the post; there was but one letter, and it turned them to stone. it was to shelley, from leigh hunt, begging him to write and say how he had got home in the bad weather of the previous monday. and then it dawned upon them--a dawn of darkness. there was no news; there would be no news any more. one minute had untied the knot, and solved the great mystery. the _ariel_ had gone down in the storm, with all hands on board. and for four days past, though they had not known it, mary shelley and jane williams had been widows. end of vol. i _printed, by_ r. & r. clark, _edinburgh_. footnotes: [ ] "address to the irish people." [ ] possibly this may refer to count schlaberndorf, an expatriated prussian subject, who was imprisoned in paris during the reign of terror, and escaped, but subsequently returned, and lived there in retirement, almost in concealment. he was a cynic, an eccentric, yet a patriot withal. he was divorced from his wife, and shelley had probably got hold of a wrong version of his story. [ ] byron. [ ] _ibid._ [ ] thy dewy looks sink in my breast; thy gentle words stir poison there; thou hast disturbed the only rest that was the portion of despair! subdued to duty's hard control, i could have borne my wayward lot: the chains that bind this ruined soul had cankered then, but crushed it not. [ ] see his letter to baxter, quoted before. [ ] _journal of a six weeks' tour._ [ ] _journal of a six weeks' tour._ [ ] _journal of a six weeks' tour._ [ ] the bailiffs. [ ] she was staying temporarily at skinner street. [ ] referring to fanny's letter, enclosed. [ ] peacock's mother. [ ] a friend of harriet shelley's. [ ] it is presumed that these were for clara, in answer to an advertisement for a situation as companion. [ ] godwin's friend and amanuensis. [ ] which, unfortunately, may not be published. [ ] from this time miss clairmont is always mentioned as clare, or claire, except by the godwins, who adhered to the original "jane." [ ] byron. [ ] word obliterated. [ ] matthew gregory lewis, known as "monk" lewis. [ ] hogg. [ ] _revolt of islam_, dedication. [ ] _revolt of islam_, dedication. [ ] the work referred to would seem to be shelley's oxford pamphlet. [ ] baxter's son. [ ] mr. booth. [ ] what this accusation was does not appear. [ ] alba. [ ] shelley's solicitor. [ ] the nursemaid. [ ] mrs. hunt. [ ] see godwin's letter to baxter, chap. iii. [ ] preface to _prometheus unbound_. [ ] page . [ ] in _frankenstein_. [ ] _notes to shelley's poems_, by mrs. shelley. [ ] letter to mr. gisborne, of june , . [ ] letter of shelley's to mr. gisborne. (the passage, in the original, has no personal reference to byron.) [ ] announcing the stoppage of shelley's income. [ ] "the boat on the serchio." [ ] _notes to shelley's poems_, by mary shelley. [ ] godwin's _answer to malthus_. [ ] this initial has been printed _c._ mrs. shelley's letter leaves no doubt that elise's is the illness referred to. [ ] trelawny's "recollections." [ ] williams' journal for this last day runs-- _february ._--jane unwell. s. turns physician. called on lord b., who talks of getting up _othello_. laid a wager with s. that lord b. quits italy before six months. jane put on a hindostanee dress and passed the evening with mary, who had also the turkish costume. [ ] trelawny's "recollections." [ ] word illegible. [ ] recounted at length in a subsequent letter, to be quoted later on. _at all booksellers._ word portraits of famous writers. edited by mabel e. wotton. in large crown vo. s. d. '"the world has always been fond of personal details respecting men who have been celebrated." these were the words of lord beaconsfield, and with them he prefixed his description of the personal appearance of isaac d'israeli.... the above work contains an account of the face, figure, dress, voice, and manner of our best known writers, ranging from geoffrey chaucer to mrs. henry wood--drawn in all cases, when it is possible, by their contemporaries. british writers only are named, and amongst them no living author.'--from the preface. contents. joseph addison. harrison ainsworth. jane austen. francis, lord bacon. joanna baillie. benjamin, lord beaconsfield. jeremy bentham. richard bentley. james boswell. charlotte brontë. henry, lord brougham. elizabeth barrett browning. john bunyan. edmund burke. robert burns. samuel butler. george, lord byron. thomas campbell. thomas carlyle. thomas chatterton. geoffrey chaucer. philip, lord chesterfield. william cobbett. hartley coleridge. samuel taylor coleridge. william collins. william cowper george crabbe. daniel de foe. charles dickens. isaac d'israeli. john dryden. mary anne evans (george eliot). henry fielding. john gay. edward gibbon. william godwin. oliver goldsmith. david gray. thomas gray. henry hallam. william hazlitt. felicia hemans. james hogg. thomas hood. theodore hook. david hume. leigh hunt. elizabeth inchbald. francis, lord jeffrey. douglas jerrold. samuel johnson. ben jonson. john keats. john keble. charles kingsley. charles lamb. letitia elizabeth landon. walter savage landor. charles lever. matthew gregory lewis. john gibson lockhart. sir richard lovelace. edward, lord lytton. thomas babington macaulay. william maginn. francis mahony (father prout). frederick marryat. harriet martineau. frederick denison maurice. john milton. mary russell mitford. lady mary wortley montagu. thomas moore. hannah more. sir thomas more. caroline norton. thomas otway. samuel pepys. alexander pope. bryan waller procter. thomas de quincey. ann radcliffe. sir walter raleigh. charles reade. samuel richardson. samuel rogers. dante gabriel rossetti. richard savage. sir walter scott. william shakespeare. mary wollstonecraft shelley. percy bysshe shelley. richard brinsley sheridan. sir philip sidney. horace smith. sydney smith. tobias smollett. robert southey. edmund spenser. arthur penrhyn stanley. sir richard steele. laurence sterne. sir john suckling. jonathan swift. william makepeace thackeray. james thomson. anthony trollope. edmund waller. horace walpole. izaac walton. john wilson. ellen wood (mrs. henry wood). william wordsworth. sir henry wotton. richard bentley & son, new burlington street, publishers in ordinary to her majesty the queen. proofreading team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net this file was produced from images generously made available by the internet archive/european libraries mary lamb by mrs. gilchrist _eminent women series_ edited by john h. ingram london: w. h. allen & co., waterloo place. s.w. . preface. i am indebted to mrs. henry watson, a granddaughter of mr. gillman, for one or two interesting reminiscences, and for a hitherto unpublished "notelet" by lamb (p. ), together with an omitted paragraph from a published letter (p. ), which confirms what other letters also show,--that the temporary estrangement between lamb and coleridge was mainly due to the influence of the morbid condition of mind of their common friend, charles lloyd. my thanks are also due to mr. potts for some bibliographic details respecting the various editions of the _tales from shakespeare_. reprinted here, for the first time, is a little essay on _needle-work_ (regarded from an industrial, not an "art" point of view), by mary lamb (p. ), unearthed from an obscure and long-deceased periodical--_the british lady's magazine_--for which i have to thank mr. edward solly, f.r.s. the reader will find, also, the only letter that has been preserved from coleridge to lamb, who destroyed all the rest in a moment of depression (pp. - ). this letter is given, without exact date or name of the person to whom it was addressed, in gillman's unfinished _life of coleridge_, as having been written "to a friend in great anguish of mind on the sudden death of his mother," and has, i believe, never before been identified. but the internal evidence that it was to lamb is decisive. in taking mary as the central figure in the following narrative, woven mainly from her own and her brother's letters and writings, it is to that least explored time, from to --before they had made the acquaintance of judge talfourd, proctor, patmore, de quincey, and other friends, who have left written memorials of them--that we are brought nearest; the period, that is, of charles' youth and early manhood. for mary was the elder by ten years; and there is but little to tell of the last twenty of her eighty-three years of life, when the burthen of age was added to that of her sad malady. the burial-register of st. andrew's, holborn, in which church-yard lamb's father, mother and aunt hetty were buried, shows that the father survived his wife's tragic death nearly three years instead of only a few months as talfourd, and others following him, have supposed. it is a date of some interest because not till then did brother and sister begin together their life of "double singleness" and entire mutual devotion. also, in sifting the letters for facts and dates, i find that lamb lived in chapel street, pentonville not, as talfourd and proctor thought, a few months, but three years, removing thither almost immediately after the mother's death. it is a trifle, yet not without interest to the lovers of lamb, for these were the years in which he met in his daily walks, and loved but never accosted, the beautiful quakeress "hester," whose memory is enshrined in the poem beginning "when maidens such as hester die." anne gilchrist. keats corner, hampstead. contents. chapter i. page parentage and childhood. chapter ii. birth of charles.--coleridge.--domestic toils and trials.--their tragic culmination.--letters to and from coleridge. chapter iii. death of aunt hetty.--mary removed from the asylum.--charles lloyd.--a visit to nether stowey, and introduction to wordsworth and his sister.--anniversary of the mother's death.--mary ill again.--estrangement between lamb and coleridge.--speedy reconcilement. chapter iv. death of the father.--mary comes home to live.--a removal.--first verses.--a literary tea-party.--another move.--friends increase. chapter v. personal appearance and manners.--health.--influence of mary's illnesses upon her brother. chapter vi. visit to coleridge at greta hall.--wordsworth and his sister in london.--letters to miss stoddart.--coleridge goes to malta.--letter to dorothy wordsworth on the death of her brother john. chapter vii. mary in the asylum again.--lamb's letter with a poem of hers.--her slow recovery.--letters to sarah stoddart.--the _tales from shakespeare_ begun.--hazlitt's portrait of lamb.--sarah's lovers.--the farce of _mr. h._ chapter viii. the _tales from shakespeare_.--letters to sarah stoddart. chapter ix. correspondence with sarah stoddart.--hazlitt.--a courtship and wedding at which mary is bridesmaid. chapter x. _mrs. leicester's school_.--a removal.--_poetry for children._ chapter xi. the hazlitts again.--letters to mrs. hazlitt.--two visits to winterslow.--mr. dawe, r.a.--birth of hazlitt's son.--death of holcroft. chapter xii. an essay on needle-work. chapter xiii. letters to miss betham and her little sister.--to wordsworth. --manning's return.--coleridge goes to highgate.--letter to miss hutchinson on mary's state.--removal to russell street.--mary's letter to dorothy wordsworth.--lodgings at dalston.--death of john lamb and captain burney. chapter xiv. hazlitt's divorce.--emma isola.--mrs. cowden clarke's _recollections_ of mary.--the visit to france.--removal to colebrook cottage.--a dialogue of reminiscences. chapter xv. lamb's ill-health.--retirement from the india house, and subsequent illness.--letter from mary to lady stoddart.--colebrook cottage quitted.--mary's constant attacks.--a home given up.--board with the westwoods.--death of hazlitt.--removal to edmonton.--marriage of emma isola.--mary's sudden recovery.--ill again.--death of coleridge.--death of charles.--mary's last days and death. chapter i. parentage and childhood. - .--Æt. - . the story of mary lamb's life is mainly the story of a brother and sister's love; of how it sustained them under the shock of a terrible calamity and made beautiful and even happy a life which must else have sunk into desolation and despair. it is a record, too, of many friendships. round the biographer of mary as of charles, the blended stream of whose lives cannot be divided into two distinct currents, there gathers a throng of faces--radiant immortal faces some, many homely every-day faces, a few almost grotesque--whom he can no more shut out of his pages, if he would give a faithful picture of life and character, than charles or mary could have shut their humanity-loving hearts or hospitable doors against them. first comes coleridge, earliest and best beloved friend of all, to whom mary was "a most dear heart's sister"; wordsworth and his sister dorothy; southey; hazlitt who, quarrel with whom he might, could not effectually quarrel with the lambs; his wife, also, without whom mary would have been a comparatively silent figure to us, a presence rather than a voice. but all kinds were welcome so there were but character; the more variety the better. "i am made up of queer points," wrote lamb, "and i want so many answering needles." and of both brother and sister it may be said that their likes wore as well as most people's loves. mary anne lamb was born in crown office row, inner temple, on the rd of december --year of hogarth's death. she was the third, as charles was the youngest, of seven children all of whom died in infancy save these two and an elder brother john, her senior by two years. one little sister elizabeth, who came when mary was four years old, lived long enough to imprint an image on the child's memory which, helped by a few relics, remained for life. "the little cap with white satin ribbon grown yellow with long keeping and a lock of light hair," wrote mary when she was near sixty, "always brought her pretty fair face to my view so that to this day i seem to have a perfect recollection of her features." the family of the lambs came originally from stamford in lincolnshire, as charles himself once told a correspondent. nothing else is known of mary's ancestry; nor yet even the birth-place or earliest circumstances of john lamb the father. if, however, we may accept on mr. cowden clarke's authority, corroborated by internal evidence, the little story of _susan yates_, contributed by charles to _mrs. leicester's school_, as embodying some of his father's earliest recollections, he was born of parents "in no very affluent circumstances" in a lonely part of the fen country, seven miles from the nearest church an occasional visit to which, "just to see how _goodness thrived_," was a feat to be remembered, such bad and dangerous walking was it in the fens in those days, "a mile as good as four." what is quite certain is that while john lamb was still a child his family removed to lincoln, with means so straitened that he was sent to service in london. whether his father were dead or, sadder still, in a lunatic asylum--since we are told with emphasis that the hereditary seeds of madness in the lamb family came from the father's side--it is beyond doubt that misfortune of some kind must have been the cause of the child's being sent thus prematurely to earn his bread in service. his subsequently becoming a barrister's clerk seems to indicate that his early nurture and education had been of a gentler kind than this rough thrusting out into the world of a mere child would otherwise imply: in confirmation of which it is to be noted that afterwards, in the dark crisis of family misfortune, an "old gentlewoman of fortune" appears on the scene as a relative. in spite of early struggles john lamb grew up a merry cheerful man. a merrier man, a man more apt to frame matter for mirth, mad jokes and antics for a christmas-eve, making life social and the laggard time to move on nimbly, never yet did cheer the little circle of domestic friends. inflexibly honest and upright too, with a dash of chivalry in his nature; who is not familiar with his portrait as "lovel" in _the benchers of the inner temple_? elizabeth his wife, a native of ware, whose maiden name was field, was many years younger than himself. she was a handsome, dignified-looking woman; like her husband fond of pleasure; a good and affectionate mother, also, in the main, yet lacking insight into the characters of her children--into mary's at any rate, towards whom she never manifested that maternal tenderness which makes the heart wise whatever the head may be. mary, a shy, sensitive, nervous, affectionate child, who early showed signs of a liability to brain disorder, above all things needed tender and judicious care. "her mother loved her," wrote charles in after years, "as she loved us all, with a mother's love; but in opinion, in feeling and sentiment and disposition bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter that she never understood her right--never could believe how much _she_ loved her--but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection too frequently with coldness and repulse. still she was a good mother. god forbid i should think of her but most respectfully, most affectionately. yet she would always love my brother above mary, who was not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which mary had a right to claim." john, the eldest, a handsome, lively, active boy, was just what his good looks and his being the favourite were likely to make of a not very happily endowed nature. "dear little selfish craving john" he was in childhood, and dear big selfish john he remained in manhood; treated with tender indulgence by his brother and sister who cheerfully exonerated him from taking up any share of the burthen of sorrow and privation which became the portion of his family by the time he was grown up and prosperously afloat. a maiden aunt, a worthy but uncanny old soul whose odd silent ways and odder witch-like mutterings and mumblings coupled with a wild look in her eyes as she peered out from under her spectacles, made her an object of dread rather than love to mary as afterwards to charles in whom she garnered up her heart, completed the family group but did not add to its harmony for she and her sister-in-law ill agreed. they were in "their different ways," wrote mary, looking back on childhood from middle-life, "the best creatures in the world; but they set out wrong at first. they made each other miserable for full twenty years of their lives. my mother was a perfect gentlewoman; my aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be; so that my dear mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart), used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing attention and politeness to gain her affection. the old woman could not return this in kind and did not know what to make of it--thought it all deceit, and used to hate my mother with a bitter hatred; which, of course, was soon returned with interest. a little frankness and looking into each other's characters at first would have spared all this, and they would have lived as they died, fond of each other for the last ten years of their lives. when we grew up and harmonised them a little, they sincerely loved each other." in these early days mary's was a comfortable though a very modest home; a place of "snug fire-sides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home"; a wholesome soil to be planted in which permitted no helplessness in the practical details of domestic life; above poverty in the actual though not in the conventional sense of the word. such book-learning as fell to her lot was obtained at a day-school in fetter lane, holborn, where, notwithstanding the inscription over the door, "mr. william bird, teacher of mathematics and languages," reading in the mother-tongue, writing and "ciphering" were all that was learned. the school-room looked into a dingy, discoloured garden, in the passage leading from fetter lane into bartlett's buildings; and there boys were taught in the morning and their sisters in the afternoon by "a gentle usher" named starkey, whose subsequent misfortunes have rescued him and mary's school-days from oblivion. for, having in his old age drifted into an almshouse at newcastle, the tale of his wanderings and his woes found its way into print and finally into hone's _every day book_, where, meeting the eyes of charles and mary lamb, it awakened in both old memories which took shape in the sketch called _captain starkey_. "poor starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predict any particular age in the object. you can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. this antique caste always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. my sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive mr. thomas ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was at mr. bird's school. old age and poverty, a life-long poverty she thinks, could at no time have effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and careworn. from her recollections of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a halfpenny. 'if any of the girls,' she says, 'who were my school-fellows should be reading through their aged spectacles tidings from the dead of their youthful friend starkey, they will feel a pang as i do at having teased his gentle spirit.' "they were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence necessary; and, however old age and a long state of beggary seems to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative, for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, 'ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you.' once he was missing for a day or two; he had run away. a little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back--it was his father, and he did no business in the school that day but sat moping in a corner with his hands before his face; the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of the day forbore to annoy him. "'i had been there but a few months,' adds she, 'when starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound secret, that the tragedy of cato was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation.' that starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors she remembers; and, but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. as it was he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct repeating the text during the whole performance. she describes her recollection of the caste of characters even now with a relish:--martia, by the handsome edgar hickman, who afterwards went to africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; lucia, by master walker, whose sister was her particular friend; cato, by john hunter, a masterly declaimer but a plain boy, and shorter by a head than his two sons in the scene, &c. in conclusion, starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. he might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that he became a captain--a by-word--and lived and died a broken bulrush." but the chief and best part of mary's education was due to the fact that her father's employer, mr. salt, had a good library "into which she was tumbled early" and suffered to "browse there without much selection or prohibition." a little selection, however, would have made the pasturage all the wholesomer to a child of mary's sensitive brooding nature; for the witch-stories and cruel tales of the sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her brother did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited; as may be inferred from a subsequent adventure. when tripping to and from school or playing in the temple gardens mary must sometimes, though we have no record of the fact, have set eyes on oliver goldsmith: for the first ten years of her life were the last of his; spent, though with frequent sojourns elsewhere, in the temple. and in the temple churchyard he was buried, just ten months before the birth of charles. the london born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous, healthful life in the country, for her mother had hospitable relatives in her native county, pleasant hertfordshire. specially was there a great-aunt married to a substantial yeoman named gladman living at mackery end within a gentle walk of wheathampstead, the visits to whom remained in mary's memory as the most delightful recollections of her childhood. in after life she embodied them, mingling fiction with fact, in a story called _louisa manners or the farm house_ where she tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little four-year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst of fields quite full of bright shining yellow flowers with sheep and young lambs feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard, the thresher in the barn with his terrifying flail and black beard, the collecting of eggs and searching for scarce violets ("if we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were"); of the hay-making and the sheep-shearing, the great wood fires and the farm-house suppers. this will recall to the reader elia's _mackery end_; how, forty years afterwards, brother and sister revisited the old farm-house one day in the midst of june and how bridget (so he always called mary in print) "remembered her old acquaintance again; some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. at first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her affections, and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown), with a breathless impatience of recognition which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. but bridget in some things is behind her years." "... the only thing left was to get into the house, and that was a difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable, for i am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of welcome.... to have seen bridget and her,--it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins! there was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature answering to her mind in this farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace...." to return to the days of childhood, mary also paid visits to her maternal grandmother field, housekeeper to the plumers at their stately but forsaken mansion of blakesware; but here the pleasure was mingled with a kind of weird solemnity. mary has left on record her experiences in a tale which forms a sort of pendant to _blakesmoor in h----shire_ by elia. her story is called _margaret green, the young mahometan_, also from _mrs. leicester's school_ and, apart from a slight framework of invention ("mrs. beresford," her grandmother, being represented as the owner instead of housekeeper of the mansion), is minutely autobiographical. "every morning when she (mrs. beresford) saw me she used to nod her head very kindly and say 'how do you do, little margaret?' but i do not recollect that she ever spoke to me during the remainder of the day, except indeed after i had read the psalms and the chapters which was my daily task; then she used constantly to observe that i improved in my reading and frequently added, 'i never heard a child read so distinctly.' when my daily portion of reading was over i had a taste of needle-work, which generally lasted half an hour. i was not allowed to pass more time in reading or work, because my eyes were very weak, for which reason i was always set to read in the large-print family bible. i was very fond of reading, and when i could, unobserved, steal a few minutes as they were intent on their work, i used to delight to read in the historical part of the bible; but this, because of my eyes, was a forbidden pleasure, and the bible being never removed out of the room, it was only for a short time together that i dared softly to lift up the leaves and peep into it. as i was permitted to walk in the garden or wander about the house whenever i pleased, i used to leave the parlour for hours together, and make out my own solitary amusement as well as i could. my first visit was always to a very large hall, which, from being paved with marble, was called the marble hall. the heads of the twelve cæsars were hung round the hall. every day i mounted on the chairs to look at them and to read the inscriptions underneath, till i became perfectly familiar with their names and features. hogarth's prints were below the cæsars. i was very fond of looking at them and endeavouring to make out their meaning. an old broken battledore and some shuttle-cocks with most of the feathers missing were on a marble slab in one corner of the hall, which constantly reminded me that there had once been younger inhabitants here than the old lady and her grey-headed servants. in another corner stood a marble figure of a satyr; every day i laid my hand on his shoulder to feel how cold he was. this hall opened into a room full of family portraits. they were all in dresses of former times; some were old men and women, and some were children. i used to long to have a fairy's power to call the children down from their frames to play with me. one little girl in particular, who hung by the side of the glass door which opened into the garden, i often invited to walk there with me; but she still kept her station, one arm round a little lamb's neck and in her hand a large bunch of roses. from this room i usually proceeded to the garden. when i was weary of the garden i wandered over the rest of the house. the best suite of rooms i never saw by any other light than what glimmered through the tops of the window-shutters, which, however, served to show the carved chimney-pieces and the curious old ornaments about the rooms; but the worked furniture and carpets of which i heard such constant praises i could have but an imperfect sight of, peeping under the covers which were kept over them by the dim light; for i constantly lifted up a corner of the envious cloth that hid these highly praised rareties from my view. "the bedrooms were also regularly explored by me, as well to admire the antique furniture as for the sake of contemplating the tapestry hangings which were full of bible history. the subject of the one which chiefly attracted my attention was hagar and her son ishmael. every day i admired the beauty of the youth, and pitied the forlorn state of him and his mother in the wilderness. at the end of the gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened was one door which, having often in vain attempted to open, i concluded to be locked; and finding myself shut out, i was very desirous of seeing what it contained and, though still foiled in the attempt, i every day endeavoured to turn the lock, which, whether by constantly trying i loosened, being probably a very old one, or that the door was not locked but fastened tight by time, i know not; to my great joy, as i was one day trying the lock as usual, it gave way, and i found myself in this so long desired room. "it proved to be a very large library. this was indeed a precious discovery. i looked round on the books with the greatest delight: i thought i would read them every one. i now forsook all my favourite haunts and passed all my time here. i took down first one book, then another. if you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library, you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking down books in the constant hope of finding an entertaining book among them; yet, after many days, meeting with nothing but disappointment, it became less pleasant. all the books within my reach were folios of the gravest cast. i could understand very little that i read in them, and the old dark print and the length of the lines made my eyes ache. "when i had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, i perceived a volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. i opened it; it was a charming print, the letters were almost as large as the type of the family bible. in the first page i looked into i saw the name of my favourite ishmael, whose face i knew so well from the tapestry, and whose history i had often read in the bible. i sat myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness. the title of it was _mahometanism explained_.... a great many of the leaves were torn out, but enough remained to make me imagine that ishmael was the true son of abraham. i read here that the true descendants of abraham were known by a light which streamed from the middle of their foreheads. it said that ishmael's father and mother first saw this light streaming from his forehead as he was lying asleep in the cradle. i was very sorry so many of the leaves were torn out, for it was as entertaining as a fairy tale. i used to read the history of ishmael and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then read his history again. when i had almost learned the history of ishmael by heart, i read the rest of the book, and then i came to the history of mahomet who was there said to be the last descendant of abraham. "if ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must mahomet? his history was full of nothing but wonders from the beginning to the end. the book said that those who believed all the wonderful stories which were related of mahomet were called mahometans and true believers; i concluded that i must be a mahometan, for i believed every word i read. "at length i met with something which i also believed, though i trembled as i read it. this was, that after we are dead we are to pass over a narrow bridge which crosses a bottomless gulf. the bridge was described to be no wider than a silken thread, and it is said that all who were not mahometans would slip on one side of this bridge and drop into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom. i considered myself as a mahometan, yet i was perfectly giddy whenever i thought of passing over this bridge. one day, seeing the old lady totter across the room, a sudden terror seized me for i thought how would she ever be able to get over the bridge? then, too, it was that i first recollected that my mother would also be in imminent danger; for i imagined she had never heard the name of mahomet, because i foolishly conjectured this book had been locked up for ages in the library and was utterly unknown to the rest of the world. "all my desire was now to tell them the discovery i had made; for, i thought, when they knew of the existence of _mahometanism explained_ they would read it and become mahometans to ensure themselves a safe passage over the silken bridge. but it wanted more courage than i possessed to break the matter to my intended converts; i must acknowledge that i had been reading without leave; and the habit of never speaking or being spoken to considerably increased the difficulty. "my anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. i was so ill that my mother thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. in the middle of the night i could not resist the strong desire i felt to tell her what preyed so much on my mind. "i awoke her out of a sound sleep and begged she would be so kind as to be a mahometan. she was very much alarmed, for she thought i was delirious, which i believe i was; for i tried to explain the reason of my request, but it was in such an incoherent manner that she could not at all comprehend what i was talking about. the next day a physician was sent for and he discovered, by several questions that he put to me, that i had read myself into a fever. he gave me medicines and ordered me to be kept very quiet and said he hoped in a few days i should be very well; but as it was a new case to him, he never having attended a little mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he had removed the fever he would, with my mother's permission, take me home with him to study this extraordinary case at his leisure; and added that he could then hold a consultation with his wife who was often very useful to him in prescribing remedies for the maladies of his younger patients." in the sequel, this sensible and kindly doctor takes his little patient home, and restores her by giving her child-like wholesome pleasures and rational sympathy. i fear that this only shadowed forth the wise tenderness with which mary lamb would have treated such a child rather than what befell herself; and that with the cruelty of ignorance mary's mother and grandmother suffered her young spirit to do battle still, in silence and inward solitariness, with the phantoms imagination conjured up in her too-sensitive brain. "polly, what are those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?" was worthy mrs. field's way of endeavouring to win the confidence of the thoughtful suffering child. the words in the story, "my mother almost wholly discontinued talking to me," "i scarcely ever heard a word addressed to me from morning to night" have a ring of truth, of bitter experience in them, which makes the heart ache. yet it was no result of sullenness on either side, least of all did it breed any ill-feeling on mary's. it was simple stupidity, lack of insight or sympathy in the elders; and on hers was repaid by the sweetest affection and, in after years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which, carried at last far beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of her life. grandmother field was a fine old character, however, as the reader of _elia_ well knows. she had a mounting spirit, one that entertained scorn of base action, deed dishonourable or aught unseemly. like her daughter, mrs. lamb, she had been a handsome stately woman in her prime and when bent with age and pain, for she suffered from a cruel malady, cheerful patience and fortitude gave her dignity of another and a higher kind. but, like her daughter, she seems to have been wanting in those finer elements of tenderness and sympathy which were of vital consequence in the rearing up of a child smitten like mary with a hereditary tendency to madness. chapter ii. birth of charles.--coleridge.--domestic toils and trials.--their tragic culmination.--letters to and from coleridge. - .--Æt. - . on the th of february arrived a new member into the household group in crown office row--charles, the child of his father's old age, the "weakly but very pretty babe," who was to prove their strong support. and now mary was no longer a lonely girl. she was just old enough to be trusted to nurse and tend the baby and she became a mother to it. in after life she spoke of the comfort, the wholesome curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which this devotion to charles in his infancy brought with it. and as he grew older rich was her reward; for he repaid the debt with a love half filial, half fraternal, than which no human tie was ever stronger or more sublimely adequate to the strain of a terrible emergency. as his young mind unfolded he found in her intelligence and love the same genial fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. it was with his little hand in hers that he first trod the temple gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tombstones in the old burying-ground and wondered, finding only lists of the virtues "where all the naughty people were buried?" like mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood "and gave themselves little trouble about him," which also tended to draw brother and sister closer together. there are no other records of mary's girlhood than such as may be gathered from the story of her brother's early life; of how when he was five and she was fifteen she came near to losing him from small-pox, aunt hetty grieving over him "the only thing in the world she loved" as she was wont to say, with a mother's tears. and how, three years later (in ), she had to give up his daily companionship and see him, now grown a handsome boy with "crisply curling black hair, clear brown complexion, aquiline, slightly jewish cast of features, winning smile, and glittering, restless eyes," equipped as a christ's hospital boy and, with aunt hetty, to ... peruse him round and round, and hardly know him in his yellow coats, red leathern belt and gown of russet blue. coleridge was already a blue coat boy but older and too high above charles in the school for comradeship then. to lamb, with home close at hand, it was a happy time; but coleridge, homeless and friendless in the great city, had no mitigations of the rough spartan discipline which prevailed; and the weekly whole holidays when, turned adrift in the streets from morn till night, he had nothing but a crust of bread in his pockets and no resource but to beguile the pangs of hunger in summer with hours of bathing in the new river and in winter with furtive hanging round book-stalls wrought permanent harm to his fine-strung organisation. nor did the gentleness of his disposition, or the brilliancy of his powers, save him from the birch-loving brutalities of old boyer, who was wont to add an extra stripe "because he was so ugly." in the lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as mary was grown up, for her father's faculties and her mother's health failed early; and when, in his fifteenth year, charles left christ's hospital it was already needful for him to take up the burthens of a man on his young shoulders; and for mary not only to make head against sickness, helplessness, old age with its attendant exigencies but to add to the now straitened means by taking in millinery work. for eleven years, as she has told us, she maintained herself by the needle; from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, that is. it was not in poor old aunt hetty's nature to be helpful either. "she was from morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises.... the only secular employment i remember to have seen her engaged in was the splitting of french beans and dropping them into a basin of fair water," says elia. happily, a clerkship in the south sea house, where his brother already was, enabled charles to maintain his parents and a better post in the india house was obtained two years afterwards. nor were there wanting snatches of pleasant holiday sometimes shared by mary. of one, a visit to the sea, there is a beautiful reminiscence in _the old margate hoy_, written more than thirty years afterwards. "it was our first sea-side experiment," he says, "and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. we had neither of us seen the sea" (he was fifteen and mary twenty-six), "and we had never been from home so long together in company." the disappointment they both felt at the first sight of the sea he explains with one of his subtle and profound suggestions. "is it not" ... says he, "that we had expected to behold (absurdly i grant, but by the law of imagination inevitably) not a definite object compassable by the eye, but _all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth_? whereas the eye can but take in a 'slip of salt water.'" the whole passage is one of elia's finest. then coleridge too, who had remained two years longer at christ's hospital than lamb and after he went up to cambridge in continued to pay frequent visits to london, spent many a glorious evening, not only those memorable ones with charles in the parlour of the "salutation and cat," but in his home; and was not slow to discover mary's fine qualities and to take her into his brotherly heart as a little poem, written so early as , to cheer his friend during a serious illness of hers testifies:-- cheerily, dear charles! thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year such warm presages feel i of high hope. for not uninterested the dear maid i've viewed--her soul affectionate yet wise, her polished wit as mild as lambent glories that play around a sainted infant's head. the year witnessed changes for all. the father, now wholly in his dotage, was pensioned off by mr. salt and the family had to exchange their old home in the temple for straitened lodgings in little queen street, holborn (the site of which and of the adjoining houses is now occupied by trinity church). coleridge, too, had left cambridge and was at bristol, drawn thither by his newly formed friendship with southey, lecturing, writing, dreaming of his ideal pantisocracy on the banks of the susquehannah and love-making. the love-making ended in marriage the autumn of that same year. meanwhile lamb, too, was first tasting the joys and sorrows of love. alice w---- lingers but as a shadow in the records of his life: the passion, however, was real enough and took deep hold of him, conspiring with the cares and trials of home life unrelieved now by the solace of coleridge's society to give a fatal stimulus to the germs of brain-disease, which were part of the family heritage and for six weeks he was in a mad-house. "in your absence," he tells his friend afterwards, "the tide of melancholy rushed in, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason." who can doubt the memory of this attack strengthened the bond of sympathy between mary and himself and gave him a fellow-feeling for her no amount of affection alone could have realised? as in her case, too, the disorder took the form of a great heightening and intensifying of the imaginative faculty. "i look back on it, at times," wrote he after his recovery, "with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted i had many many hours of pure happiness. dream not, coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy, till you have gone mad.... the sonnet i send you has small merit as poetry, but you will be curious to read it when i tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals:-- to my sister. if from my lips some angry accents fell, peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 'twas but the error of a sickly mind and troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, and waters clear of reason; and for me let this my verse the poor atonement be-- my verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined too highly, and with a partial eye to see no blemish. thou to me didst ever show kindest affection; and would oft-times lend an ear to the desponding love-sick lay, weeping my sorrows with me, who repay but ill the mighty debt of love i owe, mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. no sooner was charles restored to himself than the elder brother john met with a serious accident; and though whilst in health he had carried himself and his earnings to more comfortable quarters, he did not now fail to return and be nursed with anxious solicitude by his brother and sister. this was the last ounce. mary, worn out with years of nightly as well as daily attendance upon her mother who was now wholly deprived of the use of her limbs, and harassed by a close application to needle-work to help her in which she had been obliged to take a young apprentice, was at last strained beyond the utmost pitch of physical endurance, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery." about the middle of september, she being then thirty-two years old, her family observed some symptoms of insanity in her which had so much increased by the st that her brother early in the morning went to dr. pitcairn who unhappily was out. on the afternoon of that day, seized with a sudden attack of frenzy, she snatched a knife from the table and pursued the young apprentice round the room when her mother interposing received a fatal stab and died instantly. mary was totally unconscious of what she had done, aunt hetty fainted with terror, the father was too feeble in mind for any but a confused and transient impression; it was charles alone who confronted all the anguish and horror of the scene. with the stern brevity of deep emotion he wrote to coleridge five days afterwards:-- "my poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. i was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. she is at present in a mad-house, from whence i fear she must be moved to a hospital. god has preserved to me my senses; i eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, i believe, very sound. my poor father was slightly wounded, and i am left to take care of him and my aunt. mr. norris of the blue coat school has been very kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank god, i am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. with me 'the former things are passed away,' and i have something more to do than to feel. god almighty have us all in his keeping! mention nothing of poetry. i have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind.... your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. you look after your family; i have my reason and strength left to take care of mine. i charge you, don't think of coming to see me. write. i will not see you if you come. god almighty love you and all of us!" coleridge responded to this appeal for sympathy and comfort by the following,--the only letter of his to lamb which has been preserved:-- "your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. it rushed upon me and stupified my feelings. you bid me write you a religious letter; i am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms like these that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit to the guidance of faith. and surely it is a matter of joy that your faith in jesus has been preserved; the comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. but as you are a christian, in the name of that saviour who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, i conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his god and your god,' the god of mercies and father of all comfort. your poor father is, i hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of divine providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. it is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of god manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels. "as to what regards yourself, i approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. i look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to god; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without, in some measure, imitating christ. and they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and, bowed down and crushed under foot, cry, in fulness of faith, 'father, thy will be done.' "i wish above measure to have you for a little while here; no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings; you shall be quiet, that your spirit may be healed. i see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. if this be not the case, i charge you write me that you will come. "i charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair; you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal partaker of the divine nature. i charge you, if by any means it be possible, come to me." how the storm was weathered, with what mingled fortitude and sweetness lamb sustained the wrecked household and rescued his sister, when reason returned, from the living death of perpetual confinement in a mad-house must be read in the answer to coleridge:-- "your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. it will be a comfort to you, i know, to know that our prospects are somewhat brighter. my poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the almighty's judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder. i have seen her. i found her this morning, calm and serene; far, very far from an indecent forgetful serenity. she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happened. indeed, from the beginning--frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed--i had confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle, to look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. god be praised, coleridge! wonderful as it is to tell, i have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, i preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference; a tranquillity not of despair. is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious principle that most supported me? i allow much to other favourable circumstances. i felt that i had something else to do than to regret. on that first evening my aunt was lying insensible--to all appearance like one dying; my father, with his poor forehead plaistered over from a wound he had received from a daughter, dearly loved by him and who loved him no less dearly; my mother a dead and murdered corpse in the next room; yet was i wonderfully supported. i closed not my eyes in sleep that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. i have lost no sleep since. i had been long used not to rest in things of sense; had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with the 'ignorant present time,' and this kept me up. i had the whole weight of the family thrown on me; for my brother, little disposed (i speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties, and i was left alone. one little incident may serve to make you understand my way of managing my mind. within a day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. as i sat down a feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor mary got for me, and can i partake of it now when she is far away? a thought occurred and relieved me: if i give in to this way of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an object in our rooms that will not awaken the keenest griefs. i must rise above such weaknesses. i hope this was not want of true feeling. i did not let this carry me, though, too far. on the very second day (i date from the day of horrors) as is usual in such cases there were a matter of twenty people, i do think, supping in our room; they prevailed on me to eat _with them_ (for to eat i never refused). they were all making merry in the room! some had come from friendship, some from busy curiosity and some from interest. i was going to partake with them when my recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room--the very next room; a mother who, through life, wished nothing but her children's welfare. indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon my mind. in an agony of emotion i found my way mechanically to the adjoining room and fell on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of heaven and sometimes of her for forgetting her so soon. tranquillity returned and it was the only violent emotion that mastered me. i think it did me good. "i mention these things because i hate concealment and love to give a faithful journal of what passes within me. our friends have been very good. sam le grice [an old schoolfellow well known to the readers of lamb], who was then in town, was with me the first three or four days and was as a brother to me; gave up every hour of his time, to the very hurting of his health and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my poor father, talked with him, read to him, played at cribbage with him (for so short is the old man's recollection that he was playing at cards as though nothing had happened while the coroner's inquest was sitting over the way!). samuel wept tenderly when he went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on his loitering so long in town and he was forced to go. mr. norris of christ's hospital has been as a father to me; mrs. norris as a mother; though we had few claims on them. a gentleman, brother to my godmother, from whom we never had right or reason to expect any such assistance, sent my father twenty pounds; and to crown all these god's blessings to our family at such a time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and aunt, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make her comfortable for the short remainder of her days. my aunt is recovered and as well as ever and highly pleased at the thought of going, and has generously given up the interest of her little money (which was formerly paid my father for her board) wholly and solely to my sister's use. reckoning this we have, daddy and i, for our two selves and an old maid-servant to look after him when i am out which will be necessary, £ (or £ rather) a year, out of which we can spare £ or £ , at least, for mary while she stays at islington where she must and shall stay during her father's life, for his and her comfort. i know john will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital. the good lady of the mad-house and her daughter, an elegant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her and are taken with her amazingly; and i know, from her own mouth, she loves them and longs to be with them as much. poor thing, they say she was but the other morning saying she knew she must go to bethlem for life; that one of her brothers would have it so, but the other would wish it not, but be obliged to go with the stream; that she had often, as she passed bethlem, thought it likely 'here it may be my fate to end my days,' conscious of a certain flightiness in her poor head often-times and mindful of more than one severe illness of that nature before. a legacy of £ which my father will have at christmas and this £ i mentioned before with what is in the house will much more than set us clear. if my father, an old servant-maid and i can't live and live comfortably on £ or £ a year, we ought to burn by slow fires, and i almost would that mary might not go into an hospital. let me not leave one unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. since this has happened he has been very kind and brotherly; but i fear for his mind: he has taken his ease in the world and is not fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has he much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way and i know his language is already, 'charles you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,' &c. &c, and in that style of talking. but you, a necessarian, can respect a difference of mind and love what is amiable in a character not perfect. he has been very good but i fear for his mind. thank god i can unconnect myself with him and shall manage all my father's moneys in future myself if i take charge of daddy, which poor john has not even hinted a wish at any future time even to share with me. the lady at this mad-house assures me that i may dismiss immediately both doctor and apothecary, retaining occasionally a composing draught or so for a while; and there is a less expensive establishment in her house, where she will only not have a room and nurse to herself for £ or guineas a year--the outside would be £ . you know by economy how much more even i shall be able to spare for her comforts. she will, i fancy, if she stays, make one of the family rather than of the patients; and the old and young ladies i like exceedingly and she loves them dearly; and they, as the saying is, take to her very extraordinarily if it is extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. of all the people i ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness. i will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for i understand her thoroughly; and, if i mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found (i speak not with sufficient humility, i fear), but humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, i trust, uniformly great and amiable...." the depth and tenderness of mary's but half requited love for her mother and the long years of daily and nightly devotion to her which had borne witness to it and been the immediate cause of the catastrophe, took the sting out of her grief and gave her an unfaltering sense of innocence. they even shed round her a peaceful atmosphere which veiled from her mind's eye the dread scene in all its naked horror, as it would seem from lamb's next letter:-- "mary continues serene and cheerful. i have not by me a little letter she wrote to me; for though i see her almost every day yet we delight to write to one another, for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the people of the house. i have not the letter by me but will quote from memory what she wrote in it: 'i have no bad, terrifying dreams. at midnight, when i happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people around me, i have no fear. the spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the almighty has given me. i shall see her again in heaven; she will then understand me better. my grandmother, too, will understand me better, and will then say no more as she used to do, 'polly, what are those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking of always?'" and again, in another of her little letters, not itself preserved, but which charles translated "almost literally," he tells us, into verse, she said:-- thou and i, dear friend, with filial recognition sweet, shall know one day the face of our dear mother in heaven; and her remembered looks of love shall greet with answering looks of love, her placid smiles meet with a smile as placid, and her hand with drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse. and after speaking, in words already quoted, of how his mother "had never understood mary right," lamb continues:-- "every act of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and i speak true when i say to the hurting of her health, and most probably in great part to the derangement of her senses), through a long course of infirmities and sickness, she could show her she ever did." "i will, some day as i promised, enlarge to you upon my sister's excellences; 'twill seem like exaggeration, but i will do it." although mary's recovery had been rapid, to be permitted to return home was, for the present, out of the question; so cheered by constant intercourse with charles she set herself, with characteristic sweetness, to make the best of life in a private lunatic asylum. "i have satisfaction," charles tells his unfailing sympathiser coleridge, "in being able to bid you rejoice with me in my sister's continued reason and composedness of mind. let us both be thankful for it. i continue to visit her very frequently and the people of the house are vastly indulgent to her. she is likely to be as comfortably situated in all respects as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. they love her and she loves them and makes herself very useful to them. benevolence sets out on her journey with a good heart and puts a good face on it, but is apt to limp and grow feeble unless she calls in the aid of self-interest by way of crutch. in mary's case, as far as respects those she is with, 'tis well that these principles are so likely to co-operate. i am rather at a loss sometimes for books for her, our reading is somewhat confined and we have nearly exhausted our london library. she has her hands too full of work to read much, but a little she must read for reading was her daily bread." so wore away the remaining months of this dark year. perhaps they were loneliest and saddest for charles. there was no one now to share with him the care of his old father; and second childhood draws unsparingly on the debt of filial affection and gratitude. cheerfully and ungrudgingly did he pay it. his chief solace was the correspondence with coleridge; and, as his spirits recovered their tone, the mutual discussion of the poems which the two friends were about to publish conjointly with some of charles lloyd's, was resumed. the little volume was to be issued by cottle of bristol, early in the coming year, ; and lamb was desirous to seize the occasion of giving his sister an unlooked-for pleasure and of consecrating his verses by a renouncement and a dedication. "i have a dedication in my head," he writes, "for my few things, which i want to know if you approve of and can insert. i mean to inscribe them to my sister. it will be unexpected, and it will give her pleasure; or do you think it will look whimsical at all? as i have not spoken to her about it, i can easily reject the idea. but there is a monotony in the affections which people living together, or, as we do now, very frequently seeing each other, are apt to get into; a sort of indifference in the expression of kindness for each other, which demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the trickery of surprise. the title page to stand thus:-- poems by charles lamb, of the india house. motto:-- this beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor i no way to flatter but my fondness, in the best language my true tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, i sued and served. long did i love this lady.--massinger. the dedication:-- the few following poems, creatures of the fancy and the feeling, in life's more vacant hours, produced, for the most part, by love in idleness, are, with all a brother's fondness, inscribed to mary anne lamb, the author's best friend and sister. "this is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which i take my leave of a passion which has reigned so royally, so long, within me. thus, with its trappings of laureateship, i fling it off, pleased and satisfied with myself that the weakness troubles me no longer. i am wedded, coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father. oh, my friend! i think, sometimes, could i recall the days that are past, which among them should i choose? not those merrier days, not the pleasant days of hope, not those wanderings with a fair-haired maid which i have so often and so feelingly regretted, but the days, coleridge, of a _mother's_ fondness for her _school-boy_. what would i give to call her back to earth for _one_ day!--on my knees to ask her pardon for all those little asperities of temper which, from time to time, have given her gentle spirit pain!--and the day, my friend, i trust will come. there will be 'time enough' for kind offices of love, if heaven's 'eternal year' be ours. hereafter, her meek spirit shall not reproach me. oh! my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think himself released from the kind 'charities' of relationship: these shall give him peace at the last; these are the best foundation for every species of benevolence. i rejoice to hear by certain channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with all your relations. 'tis the most kindly and natural species of love, and we have all the associated train of early feelings to secure its strength and perpetuity." chapter iii. death of aunt hetty.--mary removed from the asylum.--charles lloyd.--a visit to nether stowey, and introduction to wordsworth and his sister.--anniversary of the mother's death.--mary ill again.--estrangement between lamb and coleridge.--speedy reconcilement. - .--Æt. - . aunt hetty did not find her expectations of a comfortable home realised under the roof of the wealthy gentlewoman, who proved herself a typical rich relation and wrote to charles at the beginning of the new year that she found her aged cousin indolent and mulish, "and that her attachment to us" (he is telling coleridge the tale, to whom he could unburthen his heart on all subjects, sure of sympathy) "is so strong that she can never be happy apart. the lady with delicate irony remarks that if i am not an hypocrite i shall rejoice to receive her again; and that it will be a means of making me more fond of home to have so dear a friend to come home to! the fact is, she is jealous of my aunt's bestowing any kind recollections on us while she enjoys the patronage of her roof. she says she finds it inconsistent with her own 'ease and tranquillity' to keep her any longer; and, in fine, summons me to fetch her home. now, much as i should rejoice to transplant the poor old creature from the chilling air of such patronage, yet i know how straitened we are already, how unable already to answer any demand which sickness or any extraordinary expense may make. i know this; and all unused as i am to struggle with perplexities, i am somewhat nonplussed, to say no worse." hetty lamb found a refuge and a welcome in the old humble home again. but she returned only to die; and mary was not there to nurse her. she was still in the asylum at islington; and was indeed herself at this time recovering from an attack of scarlet fever, or something akin to it. early in january lamb wrote to coleridge:--"you and sara are very good to think so kindly and so favourably of poor mary. i would to god all did so too. but i very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father's lifetime. it is very hard upon her, but our circumstances are peculiar and we must submit to them. god be praised she is so well as she is. she bears her situation as one who has no right to complain. my poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest goodest creature to me when i was at school, who used to toddle there to bring me good things when i, school-boy like, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old grammar school and open her apron and bring out her basin with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me,--the good old creature is now lying on her death-bed. i cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. to the shock she received on that our evil day from which she never completely recovered, i impute her illness. she says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me, i was always her favourite." she lingered a month, and then went to occupy "... the same grave bed where the dead mother lies. oh, my dear mother! oh, thou dear dead saint! where's now that placid face, where oft hath sat a mother's smile to think her son should thrive in this bad world when she was dead and gone; and where a tear hath sat (take shame, o son!) when that same child has proved himself unkind. one parent yet is left--a wretched thing, a sad survivor of his buried wife, a palsy-smitten childish old, old man, a semblance most forlorn of what he was." "i own i am thankful that the good creature has ended her days of suffering and infirmity," says lamb to coleridge. "good god! who could have foreseen all this but four months back! i had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old woman.... but she was a mere skeleton before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave than one fresh dead." "i thank you; from my heart, i thank you," charles again wrote to coleridge, "for your solicitude about my sister. she is quite well, but must not, i fear, come to live with us yet a good while. in the first place, because it would hurt her and hurt my father for them to be together; secondly, from a regard to the world's good report; for i fear tongues will be busy whenever that event takes place. some have hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she should be in perpetual confinement. what she hath done to deserve, or the necessity of such an hardship i see not; do you?" at length lamb determined to grapple, on mary's behalf, with the difficulties and embarrassments of the situation. "painful doubts were suggested," says talfourd, "by the authorities of the parish where the terrible occurrence happened, whether they were not bound to institute proceedings which must have placed her for life at the disposition of the crown, especially as no medical assurance could be given against the probable recurrence of dangerous frenzy. but charles came to her deliverance; he satisfied all the parties who had power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life; and he kept his word. whether any communication with the home secretary occurred before her release i have been unable to ascertain. it was the impression of mr. lloyd, from whom my own knowledge of the circumstances, which the letters do not contain was derived, that a communication took place, on which a similar pledge was given. at all events the result was that she left the asylum and took up her abode," not with her brother yet, but in lodgings near him and her father. he writes to coleridge, april th, : "lloyd may have told you about my sister.... if not, i have taken her out of her confinement, and taken a room for her at hackney, and spend my sundays, holidays, &c., with her. she boards herself. in a little half year's illness and in such an illness, of such a nature and of such consequences, to get her out into the world again, with a prospect of her never being so ill again, this is to be ranked not among the common blessings of providence. may that merciful god make tender my heart and make me as thankful as, in my distress, i was earnest in my prayers. congratulate me on an ever-present and never alienable friend like her, and do, do insert, if you have not _lost_, my dedication [to mary]. it will have lost half its value by coming so late." and of another sonnet to her, which he desires to have inserted, he says: "i wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor mary." two events which brightened this sad year must not be passed over though mary, the sharer of all her brother's joys and sorrows, had but an indirect participation in them. just when he was most lonely and desolate at the close of the fatal year he had written to coleridge: "i can only converse with you by letter, and with the dead in their books. my sister, indeed, is all i can wish in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge from the self-same sources, our communication with the scenes of the world alike narrow. never having kept separate company or any 'company' _together_--never having read separate books and few books _together_, what knowledge have we to convey to each other? in our little range of duties and connections how few sentiments can take place without friends, with few books, with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit! we need some support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. you talk very wisely and be not sparing of _your advice_; continue to remember us and to show us you do remember; we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and yours. all i can add to your happiness will be sympathy; you can add to mine _more_, you can teach me wisdom." quite suddenly, at the beginning of the new year, there came to break this solitude charles lloyd, whose poems were to company lamb's own and coleridge's in the forthcoming volume: a young man of quaker family who was living in close fellowship with that group of poets down in somersetshire towards whom lamb's eyes and heart were wistfully turned as afterwards were to be those of all lovers of literature. how deeply he was moved by this spontaneous seeking for his friendship on lloyd's part, let a few lines from one of those early poems which, in their earnest simplicity and sincerity, are precious autobiographic fragments tell:-- alone, obscure, without a friend, a cheerless, solitary thing, why seeks my lloyd the stranger out? what offering can the stranger bring of social scenes, home-bred delights, that him in aught compensate may for stowey's pleasant winter nights, for loves and friendships far away? * * * * * for this a gleam of random joy, hath flush'd my unaccustom'd cheek, and with an o'ercharged bursting heart i feel the thanks i cannot speak. o sweet are all the muses' lays, and sweet the charm of matin bird-- 'twas long since these estranged ears the sweeter voice of friend had heard. the next was a yet brighter gleam--a fortnight with coleridge at nether stowey and an introduction to wordsworth and his sister dorothy, forerunner of a life-long friendship in which mary was soon to share. the visit took place in the july of this same year . the prospect of it had dangled tantalizingly before charles' eyes for a year or more; and now at last his chiefs at the india house were propitious and he wrote: "may i, can i, shall i come so soon?... i long, i yearn, with all the longings of a child do i desire to see you, to come among you, to see the young philosopher [hartley, the poet's first child] to thank sara for her last year's invitation in person, to read your tragedy, to read over together our little book, to breathe fresh air, to revive in me vivid images of '_salutation scenery_.' there is a sort of sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip out of my mind and memory.... here i will leave off, for i dislike to fill up this paper (which involves a question so connected with my heart and soul) with meaner matter, or subjects to me less interesting. i can talk as i can think, nothing else." seldom has fate been kind enough to bring together, in those years of early manhood when friendships strike their deepest roots, just the very men who could give the best help, the warmest encouragement to each other's genius, whilst they were girding themselves for that warfare with the ignorance and dulness of the public which every original man has to wage for a longer or shorter time. wordsworth was twenty-seven, coleridge twenty-five, lamb twenty-two. for wordsworth was to come the longest, stiffest battle--fought, however, from the vantage ground of pecuniary independence, thanks to his simple frugal habits and to a few strokes of good fortune. his aspect in age is familiar to the readers of this generation, but less so the wordsworth of the days when the _lyrical ballads_ were just taking final shape. there was already a severe worn pressure of thought about the temples of his high yet somewhat narrow forehead and 'his eyes were fires, half smouldering, half burning, inspired, supernatural, with a fixed acrid gaze' as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance. 'his cheeks were furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face.' dressed in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons, adds hazlitt, who first saw him a few months later, he had something of a roll and lounge in his gait not unlike his own peter bell. he talked freely and naturally, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation and a strong tincture of the northern burr, and when he recited one of his poems his voice lingered on the ear "like the roll of spent thunder." but who could dazzle and win like coleridge? who could travel so far and wide through all the realms of thought and imagination, and pour out the riches he brought back in such free, full, melodious speech with that spontaneous "utterancy of heart and soul," which was his unique gift, in a voice whose tones were so sweet, ear and soul were alike ravished? for him the fight was not so much with the public which, orpheus that he was, he could so easily have led captive, as with the flesh--weak health, a nerveless languor, a feeble will that never could combine and concentrate his forces for any sustained or methodical effort. dorothy wordsworth has described him as he looked in these days: "at first i thought him very plain--that is, for about three minutes--he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing, half-curling, rough black hair (in both these respects a contrast to wordsworth, who had, in his youth, beautiful teeth and light brown hair); but if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. his eye is large and full and not very dark, but grey, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than i ever witnessed. he has fine dark eye-brows and an overhanging forehead." this was the very year that produced _the ancient mariner_, the first part of _christabel_, and _kubla khan_. to charles lamb the change from his restricted over-shadowed life in london--all day at a clerk's desk and in the evening a return to the pentonville lodging with no other inmate than his poor old father, sundays and holidays only spent with his sister--to such companionship amid such scenes, almost dazed him, like stepping from a darkened room into the brilliant sunshine. before he went he had written:--"i see nobody. i sit and read, or walk alone and hear nothing. i am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family (who, i am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day), i see no face that brightens up at my approach. my friends are at a distance. worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are unfamiliar to me, though i occasionally indulge in them. still i feel a calm not unlike content. i fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-flowing serenity and peace. if i come to stowey, what conversation can i furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy, those delightful treasures of wisdom, which i know he will open to me? but it is better to give than to receive; and i was a very patient hearer and docile scholar in our winter evening meetings at mr. may's, was i not coleridge? what i have owed to thee my heart can ne'er forget." perhaps his friends, even coleridge who knew him so well, realised as little as himself what was the true mental stature of the "gentle-hearted", and "wild-eyed boy" as they called him; whose opportunities and experience, save in the matter of strange calamity, had been so narrow compared to their own. the keen edge of his discernment as a critic, quick and piercing as those quick, piercing, restless eyes of his, they knew and prized yet could hardly, perhaps, divine that there were qualities in him which would freight his prose for a long voyage down the stream of time. but already they knew that within that small spare frame, "thin and wiry as an arab of the desert," there beat a heroic heart, fit to meet the stern and painful exigencies of his lot; and that his love for his sister was of the same fibre as conscience--"a supreme embracer of consequences." dorothy wordsworth was just such a friend and comrade to the poet as mary was to charles, sharing his passionate devotion to nature as mary shared her brother's loves, whether for men or books or for the stir and throng of life in the great city. alike were these two women in being as de quincey said of dorothy "the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the quickest and readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with the realities of life, or the larger realities of the poets." but unlike in temperament; dorothy ardent, fiery, trembling with eager impetuosity that embarrassed her utterance; mary gentle, silent, or deliberate in speech. in after life, there was another sad similarity for dorothy's reason, too, was in the end over-clouded. coleridge has described her as she then was: "she is a woman indeed," said he, "in mind, i mean, and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her manners are simple, ardent, and impressive. in every motion her innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say 'guilt was a thing impossible with her.' her information various, her eye watchful in minute observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer." an accident had lamed coleridge the very morning after lamb's arrival, so that he was unable to share his friends' walks. he turned his imprisonment to golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us, as in a still lake, the beauty of the quantock hills and vales where they were roaming, the scenes amid which these great and happy days of youth and poetry and friendship were passed. it is the very poem in the margin of which, eight and thirty years afterwards, coleridge on his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for charles and mary lamb. this lime-tree bower my prison. well, they are gone, and here must i remain, this lime-tree bower my prison! i have lost beauties and feelings such as would have been most sweet to my remembrance even when age had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! they, meanwhile, friends whom i never more may meet again on springy heath, along the hill-top edge wander in gladness and wind down, perchance, to that still roaring dell of which i told; the roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, and only speckled by the mid-day sun; where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock flings arching like a bridge;--that branchless ash, unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds, that all at once (a most fantastic sight!) still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge of the blue clay-stone. now, my friends emerge beneath the wide wide heaven--and view again the many-steepled tract magnificent of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea, with some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up the slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles of purple shadow! yes! they wander on in gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, my gentle-hearted charles! for thou hast pined and hungered after nature, many a year, in the great city pent, winning thy way with sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain and strange calamity! ah! slowly sink behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn ye clouds! live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! and kindle, thou blue ocean! so my friend, struck with deep joy may stand, as i have stood, silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round on the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem less gross than bodily; and of such hues as veil the almighty spirit, when yet he makes spirits perceive his presence.... * * * * * on lamb's return, he wrote in the same modest vein as before-- "i am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you or so subsided into my wonted uniformity of feeling as to sit calmly down to think of you and write.... is the patriot [thelwall] come? are wordsworth and his sister gone yet? i was looking out for john thelwall all the way from bridgewater and had i met him i think it would have moved me almost to tears. you will oblige me, too, by sending me my great-coat which i left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at parting. is it not ridiculous that i sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly behind! at present i have none; so send it me by a stowey waggon if there be such a thing, directing it for c. l., no. , chapel street, pentonville, near london. but above all, _that inscription_ [of wordsworth's]. it will recall to me the tones of all your voices, and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. i could not talk much while i was with you but my silence was not sullenness nor i hope from any bad motive; but in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. i know i behaved myself, particularly at tom poole's and at cruikshank's most like a sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me. it was kind in you all to endure me as you did. "are you and your dear sara--to me also very dear because very kind--agreed yet about the management of little hartley? and how go on the little rogue's teeth?" the mention of his address in the foregoing letter, shows that lamb and his father had already quitted little queen street. it is probable that they did so, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy; to escape, not only from the painful associations of the spot but also from the cruel curiosity which its terrible notoriety must have drawn upon them. the season was coming round which could not but renew his and mary's grief and anguish in the recollection of that "day of horrors." "friday next, coleridge," he writes, "is the day (september nd) on which my mother died;" and in the letter is enclosed that beautiful and affecting poem beginning:-- alas! how am i changed? where be the tears, the sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath, and all the dull desertions of the heart, with which i hung o'er my dead mother's corse? where be the blest subsidings of the storm within? the sweet resignedness of hope drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love in which i bowed me to my father's will? * * * * * mary's was a silent grief. but those few casual pathetic words written years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow,--"my dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." she continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year. on the th december charles wrote in bad spirits,--"my teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for sympathy.... my sister is pretty well, thank god. we think of you very often. god bless you. continue to be my correspondent, and i will strive to fancy that this world is _not_ 'all barrenness.'" but by christmas day she was once more in the asylum. in sad solitude he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love:-- i am a widow'd thing now thou art gone! now thou art gone, my own familiar friend, companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor! alas! that honour'd mind whose sweet reproof and meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'd the unfilial harshness of my foolish speech, and made me loving to my parents old (why is this so, ah god! why is this so?) that honour'd mind become a fearful blank, her senses lock'd up, and herself kept out from human sight or converse, while so many of the foolish sort are left to roam at large, doing all acts of folly and sin and shame? thy paths are mystery! yet i will not think sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live in quietness and die so, fearing god. or if _not_, and these false suggestions be a fit of the weak nature, loth to part with what it loved so long and held so dear; if thou art to be taken and i left (more sinning, yet unpunish'd save in thee,) it is the will of god, and we are clay in the potter's hand; and at the worst are made from absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace, till his most righteous purpose wrought in us, our purified spirits find their perfect rest. to add to these sorrows coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent as a correspondent. so early as april lamb had written, after affectionate enquiries for hartley "the minute philosopher" and hartley's mother,--"coleridge, i am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. you are all very dear and precious to me. do what you will, coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. i cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. i have but two or three people in the world to whom i am more than indifferent and i can't afford to whistle them off to the winds." and again, three months after his return from stowey, he wrote sorrowfully almost plaintively, remonstrating for lloyd's sake and his own:-- "you use lloyd very ill, never writing to him. i tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. he deserves more tenderness from you. for myself, i must spoil a little passage of beaumont and fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings: i am prouder that i was once your friend, tho' now forgot, than to have had another true to me. if you don't write to me now, as i told lloyd, i shall get angry and call you hard names--'manchineel'" (alluding to a passage in a poem of coleridge's, where he compares a false friend to the treacherous manchineel tree[ ] which mingles its own venom with the rain and poisons him who rests beneath its shade) "and i don't know what else. i wish you would send me my great-coat. the snow and the rain season is at hand and i have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off and that is transitory. when time drives flocks from field to fold, when ways grow foul and blood gets cold, i shall remember where i left my coat. meet emblem wilt thou be, old winter, of a friend's neglect--cold, cold, cold!" but this fresh stroke of adversity, sweeping away the fond hope charles had begun to cherish that "mary would never be so ill again," roused his friend's sometimes torpid but deep and enduring affection for him into action. "you have writ me many kind letters, and i have answered none of them," says lamb, on the th of january . "i don't deserve your attentions. an unnatural indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes or i should have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. these last afflictions, coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. they found me unprepared.... i have been very querulous, impatient under the rod--full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. i had well-nigh quarrelled with charles lloyd; and for no other reason, i believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. the truth is i thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent. he continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me _from_ the consideration of my poor dear mary's situation rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. i wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which in times past, i knew, had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. he was hurt that i was not more constantly with him; but he was living with white (jem white, an old school-fellow, author of _falstaff's letters_), a man to whom i had never been accustomed to impart my _dearest feelings_ though, from long habits of friendliness and many a social and good quality, i loved him very much. i met company there sometimes, indiscriminate company. any society almost, when i am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. i seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly when alone. all these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. i became, as he complained, 'jaundiced' towards him ... but he has forgiven me; and his smile, i hope, will draw all such humours from me. i am recovering, god be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness; but i want more religion.... mary is recovering; but i see no opening yet of a situation for her. your invitation went to my very heart; but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of mary's being with you. i consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. i think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be with duller fancies and cooler intellects. i know a young man of this description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other." but the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly by a kind of intellectual arrogance whereof coleridge afterwards accused himself (he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life) which, in spite of lamb's generous and unbounded admiration for his friend, did at last both irritate and hurt him; still more by the influence of lloyd who, himself slighted as he fancied, and full of a morbid sensitiveness "bordering on derangement," sometimes indeed overleaping that border, worked upon lamb's soreness of feeling till a brief estrangement ensued. lamb had not yet learned to be on his guard with lloyd. years afterwards he wrote of him to coleridge: "he is a sad tattler; but this is under the rose. twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me quite, whom i have been regretting, but never could regain since. he almost alienated you also from me or me from you, i don't know which: but that breach is closed. the 'dreary sea' is filled up. he has lately been at work 'telling again,' as they call it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend but) an intimate acquaintance. i suspect, also, he saps manning's faith in me who am to manning more than an acquaintance." the breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. but coleridge went away to germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was meanwhile suspended. when it was resumed lamb was, in some respects, an altered man; he was passing from youth to maturity, enlarging the circle of his acquaintance and entering on more or less continuous literary work; whilst, on the other hand, the weaknesses which accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend were becoming but too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment lessened lamb's affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather an added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a more humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse. "bless you, old sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the corruption i was capable of knowing," says he to the poet-philosopher by-and-by. and the weak side of his friend's style, too, received an occasional sly thrust; as for instance when on forwarding him some books he writes in "i detained _statius_ wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. _statius_ they tell me is turgid." footnote : _hippomane mancinella_, one of the _euphorbiaceæ_, a native of south america. chapter iv. death of the father.--mary comes home to live.--a removal.--first verses.--a literary tea-party.--another move.--friends increase. - .--Æt. - . the feeble flame of life in lamb's father flickered on for two years and a half after his wife's death. he was laid to rest at last beside her and his sister hetty in the churchyard of st. andrew's, holborn (now swept away in the building of the holborn viaduct), on the th of april , and mary came home once more. there is no mention of either fact in lamb's letters; for coleridge was away in germany; and with southey, who was almost the sole correspondent of this year, the tie was purely intellectual and never even in that kind a close one. a significant allusion to mary there is, however, in a letter to him dated may : "mary was never in better health or spirits than now." but neither the happiness of sharing charles's home again nor anything else could save her from the constant recurrence of her malady; nor, in these early days, from the painful notoriety of what had befallen her; and they were soon regarded as unwelcome inmates in the chapel street lodgings. early in be tells coleridge: "soon after i wrote to you last an offer was made me by gutch (you must remember him at christ's) to come and lodge with him at his house in southampton buildings, chancery lane. this was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings _in our case_ as you must perceive. as gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, i certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. i have got three rooms (including servant) under £ a year. here i soon found myself at home, and here, in six weeks after, mary was well enough to join me. so we are once more settled. i am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future interruptions; but i am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can, between the acts of our distressful drama. i have passed two days at oxford, on a visit, which i have long put off, to gutch's family. the sight of the bodleian library and, above all, a fine bust of bishop taylor at all souls' were particularly gratifying to me. unluckily it was not a family where i could take mary with me, and i am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasure i take without _her_. she never goes anywhere." and to manning: "it is a great object to me to live in town." [pentonville then too much of a gossiping country suburb!] "we can be nowhere private except in the midst of london." by the summer mary was not only quite well but making a first essay in verse--the theme, a playful mockery of her brother's boyish love for a pictured beauty at blakesware described in his essay,--"that beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the bright yellow h----shire hair, and eye of watchet hue--so like my alice! i am persuaded she was a true elia--mildred elia, i take it. from her and from my passion for her--for i first learned love from a picture--bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines which thou mayest see if haply thou hast never seen them, reader, in the margin. but my mildred grew not old like the imaginary helen." with brotherly pride he sends them to coleridge: "how do you like this little epigram? it is not my writing, nor had i any finger in it. if you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, i shall be tempted to name the author to you. i will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt:-- helen. high-born helen, round your dwelling these twenty years i've paced in vain; haughty beauty, thy lover's duty hath been to glory in his pain. high-born helen, proudly telling stories of thy cold disdain; i starve, i die, now you comply, and i no longer can complain. these twenty years i've lived on tears, dwelling forever on a frown; on sighs i've fed, your scorn my bread; i perish now you kind are grown. can i who loved my beloved, but for the scorn "was in her eye"; can i be moved for my beloved, when she "returns me sigh for sigh"? in stately pride, by my bed-side high-born helen's portrait's hung; deaf to my praise, my mournful lays are nightly to the portrait sung. to that i weep, nor ever sleep, complaining all night long to her. _helen grown old, no longer cold. said_, "you to all men i prefer." lamb inserted this and another by mary, a serious and tender little poem, the _dialogue between a mother and child_ beginning o lady, lay your costly robes aside, no longer may you glory in your pride, in the first collected edition of his works. mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of this year in the coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary tea-party, not in the character of lions but only as friends of a lion--coleridge--who had already become, in his frequent visits to town, the prey of some third-rate admiring literary ladies, notably of a certain miss wesley (niece of john wesley) and of her friend miss benger, authoress of a _life of tobin_, &c. "you blame us for giving your direction to miss wesley," says the letter; "the woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that she would _once_ write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. you read us a dismal homily upon 'realities.' we know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what are realities. you, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth or grasp in them. miss wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. you encouraged that mopsey miss wesley to dance after you in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical anthology. we have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you, but there are more burs in the wind. i came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, i am sure, of the author but _hunger_ about me; and whom found i closeted with mary but a friend of this miss wesley, one miss benjay or benje ... i just came in time enough, i believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. it seems she is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us with. but i forgive you. 'the rogue has given me potions to make me love him.' well, go she would not nor step a step over our threshold till we had promised to come to drink tea with her next night. i had never seen her before and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. we went, however, not to be impolite. her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in east street. tea and coffee and macaroons--a kind of cake--much love. we sat down. presently miss benjay broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from _d'israeli_, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. she begged to know my opinion. i attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. she immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and turning round to mary, put some question to her in french, possibly having heard that neither mary nor i understood french. the explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. she then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and concluded with asserting that the saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in germany. from thence she passed into the subject of poetry where i, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped i might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. but i was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since dr. johnson's time. it seems the doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his critical strictures in his _lives of the poets_. i here ventured to question the fact and was beginning to appeal to _names_ but i was assured 'it was certainly the case.' then we discussed miss more's [hannah] book on education, which i had never read. it seems dr. gregory, another of miss benjay's friends, had found fault with one of miss more's metaphors. miss more has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of miss benjay not without success. it seems the doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor which he reprobates, against the authority of shakspeare himself. we next discussed the question whether pope was a poet? i find dr. gregory is of opinion he was not, though miss seward does not at all concur with him in this. we then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of pizarro and miss benjay or benje advised mary to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them _verbatim_), which we declined. it being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted with a promise to go again next week and meet the miss porters who, it seems, have heard much of mr. coleridge and wish to see _us_ because we are _his_ friends. i have been preparing for the occasion. i crowd cotton in my ears. i read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and i hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure. "... take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if woodfall himself did them. pray send us word of mrs. coleridge and little david hartley, your little reality. farewell, dear substance. take no umbrage at anything i have written. "i am, and will be, "yours ever in sober sadness, "land of shadows, c. lamb. _umbra._ "shadow month th or th, . "write your german as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. you know i am _homo unius linguæ_: in english--illiterate, a dunce, a ninny." * * * * * mr. gutch seems to have soon repented him of his friendly deed:-- "i am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable at our lady's next feast," writes lamb to manning. "i have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms which look out (when you stand a-tip-toe) over the thames and surrey hills.... my bed faces the river so as by perking up on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck i can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the king's bench walk as i lie in my bed ... casement windows with small panes to look more like a cottage.... there i shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as i desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind, for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levée, i have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em) since i have resided in town. like the country mouse that had tasted a little of urbane manners, i long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps." these rooms were at no. , mitre court buildings, and here lamb and his sister lived for nine years. but far from "nibbling his own cheese" by himself, there for nine years he and mary gathered round their hearth and homely, hospitable supper-table with its bread and cheese in these early days and by-and-by its round of beef or "winter hand of pork," an ever lengthening succession of friends, cronies and acquaintance. there came manning with his "fine, sceptical, dogmatical face"; and george dyer, with his head full of innutritious learning and his heart of the milk of kindness. and godwin the man of strange contrasts, a bold thinker yet ignorant as a child of human nature and weakly vain; with such a "noisy fame," for a time, as if he were "briareus centimanus or a tityus tall enough to pull jupiter from his heavens," and then soon forgotten, or remembered only to be denounced; for a year the loving husband of one of the sweetest and noblest of women and after her death led captive by the coarse flatteries and vulgar pretensions of one of the commonest. "is it possible that i behold the immortal godwin?" said, from a neighbouring balcony, she who in a few months became his second wife and in a few more had alienated some of his oldest friends and earned the cordial dislike of all, even of lamb. "i will be buried with this inscription over me, 'here lies c. l., the woman-hater,' i mean that hated one woman; for the rest, god bless 'em," was his whimsical way of venting his feelings towards her; and shelley experienced the like though he expressed them less pungently. then there was holcroft who had fought his way up from grimmest poverty, misery and ignorance to the position of an accomplished literary man; and fine old captain burney who had been taught his accidence by eugene aram and had sailed round the world with captain cook. and his son, 'noisy martin' with the 'spotless soul,' for forty years boy and man, mary's favourite; and phillips of the marines who was with captain cook at his death and shot the savage that killed him; and rickman "the finest fellow to drop in a' nights," southey's great friend, though he 'never read his poetry,' as lamb tells; staunch crabb robinson; fanny kelly, with her "divine plain face" who died but the other day at the age of ninety odd; and mr. dawe, r.a., a figure of nature's own purest comedy. all these and many more frequented the home of charles and mary lamb in these years and live in their letters. chapter v. personal appearance and manners.--health.--influence of mary's illnesses upon her brother. no description of mary lamb's person in youth is to be found; but hers was a kind of face which time treats gently, adding with one hand while he takes away with the other; compensating by deepened traces of thought and kindliness the loss of youthful freshness. like her brother, her features were well formed. "her face was pale and somewhat square, very placid, with grey, intelligent eyes" says proctor who first saw her when she was about fifty-three. "eyes brown, soft and penetrating" says another friend, mrs. cowden clarke, confirming the observation that it is difficult to judge of the colour of expressive eyes. she, too, lays stress upon the strong resemblance to charles and especially on a smile like his, "winning in the extreme." de quincey speaks of her as "that madonna-like lady." the only original portrait of her in existence, i believe, is that by the late mr. cary (son of lamb's old friend), now in the possession of mr. edward hughes, and engraved in the _memoir_ of lamb by barry cornwall; also in _scribner's magazine_ for march where it is accompanied by a letter from mr. cary which states that it was painted in when mary was seventy. she stands a little behind her brother, resting one hand on him and one on the back of his chair. there is a characteristic sweetness in her attitude and the countenance is full of goodness and intelligence; whilst the finer modelling of charles' features and the intellectual beauty of his head are rendered with considerable success,--crabb robinson's strictures notwithstanding who, it appears, saw not the original, but a poor copy of the figure of charles. it was from cary's picture that mr. armitage, r.a. executed the portraits of the lambs in the large fresco on the walls of university college hall. among its many groups (of which crabb robinson, who commissioned the fresco, is the central figure), that containing the lambs includes also wordsworth, coleridge, blake, and southey, by an unfortunate clause in the deed of gift the fresco, which is painted in monochrome, is forbidden to be cleaned, even with bread-crumb; it is therefore already very dingy. in stature, mary was under the middle size and her bodily frame was strong. she could walk fifteen miles with ease; her brother speaks of their having walked thirty miles together and, even at sixty years of age, she was capable of twelve miles "most days." regardless of weather, too, as leigh hunt pleasantly tells in his _familiar epistle in verse_ to lamb:-- you'll guess why i can't see the snow-covered streets, without thinking of you and your visiting feats, when you call to remembrance how you and one more, when i wanted it most, used to knock at my door; for when the sad winds told us rain would come down, or when snow upon snow fairly clogg'd up the town, and dun-yellow fogs brooded over its white, so that scarcely a being was seen towards night, then--then said the lady yclept near and dear: now, mind what i tell you--the lambs will be here. so i poked up the flame, and she got out the tea, and down we both sat as prepared as could be; and then, sure as fate came the knock of you two, then the lanthorn, the laugh, and the "well, how d'ye do?" mary's manners were easy, quiet, unpretending; to her brother gentle and tender always, says mrs. cowden-clarke. she had often an upward look of peculiar meaning when directed towards him, as though to give him an assurance that all was well with her; and away of repeating his words assentingly when he spoke to her. "he once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, 'you must die first, mary.' she nodded with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, 'yes, i must die first, charles,'" when they were in company together her eyes followed him everywhere; and even when he was talking at the other end of the room, she would supply some word he wanted. 'her voice was soft and persuasive, with at times a certain catch, a kind of emotional stress in breathing, which gave a charm to her reading of poetry and a captivating earnestness to her mode of speech when addressing those she liked. it was a slight check that had an eager yearning effect in her voice, creating a softened resemblance to her brother's stammer'--that "pleasant little stammer," as barry cornwall called it, "just enough to prevent his making speeches; just enough to make you listen eagerly for his words." like him, too, she took snuff. "she had a small, white, delicately-formed hand; and as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed yet another link of association between the brother and sister as they sat together over their favourite books." mary's dress was always plain and neat; not changing much with changing fashions; yet, with no unfeminine affectation of complete indifference. "i do dearly love worked muslin," says she, in one of her letters and the "manning silks" were worn with no little satisfaction. as she advanced in years she usually wore black stuff or silk; or, on great occasions, a "dove-coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom," with a cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, a deep-frilled border, and a bow on the top. mary's severe nurture, though undoubtedly it bore with too heavy a strain on her physical and mental constitution, fitted her morally and practically for the task which she and her brother fulfilled to admiration--that of making an income which, for two-thirds of their joint lives, could not have exceeded two or three hundreds a year, suffice for the heavy expense of her yearly illnesses, for an open-handed hospitality and for the wherewithal to help a friend in need, not to speak of their extensive acquaintance among "the great race of borrowers." he was, says de quincey, "_princely_--nothing short of that in his beneficence.... never anyone have i known in this world upon whom for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this comparatively poor charles lamb." there was a certain old-world fashion in mary's speech corresponding to her appearance, which was quaint and pleasant; "yet she was oftener a listener than a speaker, and beneath her sparing talk and retiring manner few would have suspected the ample information and large intelligence that lay concealed." but for her portrait sweetly touched in with subtle tender strokes, such as he who knew and loved her best could alone give, we must turn to elia's _mackery end:_--"... i have obligations to bridget extending beyond the period of memory. we house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness, with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that i, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. we agree pretty well in our tastes and habits, yet so as 'with a difference.' we are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations. our sympathies are rather understood than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that i was altered. we are both great readers, in different directions. while i am hanging over, for the thousandth time, some passage in old burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our common reading table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. narrative teases me. i have little concern in the progress of events. she must have a story--well, ill, or indifferently told--so there be life stirring in it and plenty of good or evil accidents. the fluctuations of fortune in fiction--and almost in real life--have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. out-of-the-way humours and opinions--heads with some diverting twist in them--the oddities of authorship, please me most. my cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. she holds nature more clever.... we are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and i have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this: that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out that i was in the right and my cousin in the wrong. but where we have differed upon moral points, upon something proper to be done or let alone, whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction i set out with, i am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. i must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for bridget does not like to be told of her faults. she hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company; at which times she will answer _yes_ or _no_ to a question without fully understanding its purport, which is provoking and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. when the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably.... "in seasons of distress she is the truest comforter, but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities which do not call out the _will_ to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. if she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. she is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but best when she goes a journey with you." "little could anyone observing miss lamb in the habitual serenity of her demeanour," writes talfourd, "guess the calamity in which she had partaken, or the malady which frightfully chequered her life. from mr. lloyd who, although saddened by impending delusion, was always found accurate in his recollection of long past events and conversations, i learned that she had described herself, on her recovery from the fatal attack, as having experienced while it was subsiding such a conviction that she was absolved in heaven from all taint of the deed in which she had been the agent--such an assurance that it was a dispensation of providence for good, though so terrible--such a sense that her mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision--that she was not sorely afflicted by the recollection. it was as if the old greek notion of the necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else polluted though guiltless, to pass through a religious purification, had, in her case, been happily accomplished; so that not only was she without remorse, but without other sorrow than attends on the death of an infirm parent in a good old age. she never shrank from alluding to her mother when any topic connected with her own youth made such a reference, in ordinary respects, natural; but spoke of her as though no fearful remembrance was associated with the image; so that some of her most intimate friends who knew of the disaster believed that she had never become aware of her own share in its horrors. it is still more singular that in the wanderings of her insanity, amidst all the vast throngs of imagery she presented of her early days, this picture never recurred or, if ever it did, not associated with shapes of terror." perhaps this was not so surprising as at first sight it appears; for the deed was done in a state of frenzy, in which the brain could no more have received a definite impression of the scene than waves lashed by storm can reflect an image. her knowledge of the facts was never coloured by consciousness but came to her from without "as a tale that is told." the statement, also, that mary could always speak calmly of her mother, seems to require some qualification. emma isola, lamb's adopted daughter, afterwards mrs. moxon, once asked her, ignorant of the facts, why she never spoke of her mother and was answered only with a cry of distress; probably the question coming abruptly and from a child confronted her in a new, sudden and peculiarly painful way with the tragedy of her youth. "miss lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness of her disposition, the clearness of her understanding, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and words," continues talfourd, "even if these qualities had not been presented in marvellous contrast with the distractions under which she suffered for weeks, latterly for months in every year. there was no tinge of insanity discernible in her manner to the most observant eye; not even in those distressful periods when the premonitory symptoms had apprised her of its approach, and she was making preparations for seclusion." this, too, must be taken with some qualification. in a letter from coleridge to matilda betham, he mentions that mary had been to call on the godwins "and that her manner of conversation had greatly alarmed them (dear excellent creature! such is the restraining power of her love for charles lamb over her mind, that he is always the last person in whose presence any alienation of her understanding betrays itself); that she talked far more, and with more agitation concerning me than about g. burnet [the too abrupt mention of whose death had upset her; he was an old friend and one of the original pantisocratic group] and told mrs. godwin that she herself had written to william wordsworth exhorting him to come to town immediately, for that my mind was seriously unhinged." to resume. "her character," wrote talfourd, "in all its essential sweetness, was like her brother's; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene, she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him and to protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity from the depths of which she rose so often unruffled to his side. to a friend in any difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers. hazlitt used to say that he never met with a woman who could reason and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable--the sole exception being mary lamb. she did not wish, however, to be made an exception, to the general disparagement of her sex; for in all her thoughts and feelings she was most womanly--keeping under even undue subordination to her notion of a woman's province, an intellect of rare excellence which flashed out when the restraints of gentle habit and humble manner were withdrawn by the terrible force of disease. though her conversation in sanity was never marked by smartness or repartee, seldom rising beyond that of a sensible quiet gentlewoman appreciating and enjoying the talents of her friends, it was otherwise in her madness. lamb in his letter to miss fryer announcing his determination to be entirely with her, speaks of her pouring out memories of all the events and persons of her younger days; but he does not mention what i am able from repeated experiences to add, that her ramblings often sparkled with brilliant description and shattered beauty. she would fancy herself in the days of queen anne or george the first; and describe the brocaded dames and courtly manners as though she had been bred among them, in the best style of the old comedy. it was all broken and disjointed, so that the hearer could remember little of her discourse; but the fragments were like the jewelled speeches of congreve, only shaken from their settings. there was sometimes even a vein of crazy logic running through them, associating things essentially most dissimilar, but connecting them by a verbal association in strange order. as a mere physical instance of deranged intellect, her condition was, i believe, extraordinary; it was as if the finest elements of the mind had been shaken into fantastic combinations, like those of a kaleidoscope." the immediate cause of her attacks would generally seem to have been excitement or over-fatigue causing, in the first instance, loss of sleep, a feverish restlessness and ending in the complete overthrow of reason. "her relapses," says proctor, "were not dependent on the seasons; they came in hot summer and with the freezing winters. the only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. if any exciting talk occurred charles had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. if any stupor or extraordinary silence was observed then he had to rouse her instantly. he has been seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for a moment on her headdress, in order to startle her into recollection." once the sudden announcement of the marriage of a young friend--whose welfare she had at heart--restored her, in a moment, after a protracted illness, "as if by an electrical stroke, to the entire possession of her senses." but if no precautions availed to remove the premonitory symptom, then would mary "as gently as possible prepare her brother for the duty he must perform; and thus, unless he could stave off the terrible separation till sunday, oblige him to ask leave of absence from the office, as if for a day's pleasure--a bitter mockery! on one occasion mr. charles lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little foot-path in hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly and found, on joining them, that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum." holiday trips were almost always followed by a seizure; and never did mary set out on one but with her own hands she packed a strait-waistcoat. the attacks were commonly followed by a period of extreme depression, a sense of being shattered, and by a painful loss of self-reliance. these were but temporary states, however. mary's habitual frame of mind was, as talfourd says, serene and capable of placid enjoyment. in her letters to sarah stoddart there are some affecting and probably unique disclosures of how one who is suffering from madness feels; and what, taught by her own experience, mary regarded as the most important points in the management of the insane. in reference to her friend's mother who was thus afflicted, she writes:-- "do not, i conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. i speak _from experience_ and from the opportunity i have had of much observation in such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind does under the real evil of poverty, the perception of having done wrong, or of any such thing that runs in their heads. "think as little as you can, and let your whole care be to be certain that she is treated with _tenderness_. i lay a stress upon this because it is a thing of which people in her state are uncommonly susceptible, and which hardly anyone is at all aware of; a hired nurse _never_, even though in all other respects they are good kind of people. i do not think your own presence necessary, unless she _takes to you very much_, except for the purpose of seeing with your own eyes that she is very kindly treated. "i do long to see you! god bless and comfort you." and again, a few weeks later:-- "after a very feverish night i writ a letter to you and i have been distressed about it ever since. that which gives me most concern is the way in which i talked about your mother's illness, and which i have since feared you might construe into my having a doubt of your showing her proper attention without my impertinent interference. god knows, nothing of this kind was ever in my thoughts, but i have entered very deeply into your affliction with regard to your mother; and while i was writing, the many poor souls in the kind of desponding way she is whom i have seen came fresh into my mind, and all the mismanagement with which i have seen them treated was strong in my mind, and i wrote under a forcible impulse which i could not at the time resist, but i have fretted so much about it since that i think it is the last time i will ever let my pen run away with me. "your kind heart will, i know, even if you have been a little displeased, forgive me when i assure you my spirits have been so much hurt by my last illness, that, at times, i hardly know what i do. i do not mean to alarm you about myself, or to plead an excuse; but i am very much otherwise than you have always known me. i do not think anyone perceives me altered, but i have lost all self-confidence in my own actions, and one cause of my low spirits is that i never feel satisfied with anything i do--a perception of not being in a sane state perpetually haunts me. i am ashamed to confess this weakness to you; which, as i am so sensible of, i ought to strive to conquer. but i tell you, that you may excuse any part of my letter that has given offence; for your not answering it, when you are such a punctual correspondent, has made me very uneasy. "write immediately, my dear sarah, but do not notice this letter, nor do not mention anything i said relative to your poor mother. your handwriting will convince me you are friends with me; and if charles, who must see my letter, was to know i had first written foolishly and then fretted about the event of my folly, he would both ways be angry with me. "i would desire you to direct to me at home, but your hand is so well known to charles that that would not do. therefore, take no notice of my megrims till we meet, which i most ardently long to do. an hour spent in your company would be a cordial to my drooping heart. "write, i beg, by the return of post; and as i am very anxious to hear whether you are, as i fear, dissatisfied with me, you shall, if you please, direct my letter to nurse. i do not mean to continue a secret correspondence, but you must oblige me with this one letter. in future i will always show my letters before they go, which will be a proper check upon my wayward pen." but it was upon her brother that the burthen lay heaviest. it was on his brain that the cruel image of the mother's death-scene was burnt in, and that the grief and loneliness consequent on mary's ever recurring attacks pressed sorest. "his anxiety for her health, even in his most convivial moments, was unceasing. if, in company, he perceived she looked languid, he would repeatedly ask her, 'mary, does your head ache?' don't you feel unwell? and would be satisfied by none of her gentle assurances that his fears were groundless. he was always fearful of her sensibilities being too deeply engaged and if, in her presence, any painful accident or history was discussed, he would turn the conversation with some desperate joke." miss betham related to talfourd that, once when she was speaking to miss lamb of her brother and in her earnestness mary had laid her hand kindly on the eulogist's shoulder, he came up hastily and interrupted them saying, 'come, come, we must not talk sentimentally' and took up the conversation in his gayest strain. the constant anxiety, the forebodings, the unremitting watchful scrutiny of his sister's state, produced a nervous tension and irritability that pervaded his whole life and manifested themselves in many different ways. "when she discovers symptoms of approaching illness," he once wrote to dorothy wordsworth, "it is not easy to say what is best to do. being by ourselves is bad, and going out is bad. i get so irritable and wretched with fear, that i constantly hasten on the disorder. you cannot conceive the misery of such a foresight. i am sure that for the week before she left me i was little better than light-headed. i now am calm, but sadly, taken down and flat." well might he say, "my waking life has much of the confusion, the trouble and obscure perplexity of an ill dream." for he, too, had to wrestle in his own person with the same foe, the same hereditary tendency; though, after one overthrow of reason in his youth, he wrestled successfully. but the frequent allusions in his letters, especially in later years, to attacks of nervous fever, sleeplessness, and depression "black as a smith's beard, vulcanic, stygian" show how near to the brink he was sometimes dragged. "you do not know how sore and weak a brain i have, or you would allow for many things which you set down to whim," he wrote to godwin. and again, when there had been some coolness between them: "... did the black hypochondria never gripe _thy_ heart till thou hast taken a friend for an enemy? the foul fiend, flibbertigibbet leads me over four-inched bridges to course my own shadow for a traitor...." "yet, nervous, tremulous as he seemed," writes talfourd, 'so slight of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune, when the dismal emergencies which chequered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigour as if he were strung with herculean sinews.' 'such fortitude in his manners, and such a ravage of suffering in his countenance did he display,' said coleridge, 'as went to the hearts of his friends,' it was rather by the violence of the reaction that a keen observer might have estimated the extent of these sufferings; by that 'escape from the pressure of agony, into a fantastic,' sometimes almost a demoniac 'mirth which made lamb a problem to strangers while it endeared him thousandfold to those who really knew him.' the child of impulse ever to appear and yet through duty's path strictly to steer, o lamb, thou art a mystery to me! thou art so prudent, and so mad with wildness-- wrote charles lloyd. sweet and strong must have been the nature upon which the crush of so severe a destiny produced no soreness, no bitterness, no violence but only the rebound of a wild fantastic gaiety. in his writings not only is there an entire absence of the morbid, the querulous, i can find but one expression that breathes of what his sombre experiences were. it is in that most masterly of all his criticisms (unless it be the one on _lear_), the _genius and character of hogarth_, where, in the sublime description of the bedlam scene in the _rake's progress_, he tells of "the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness." in one apparent way only did the calamity which overshadowed his life, exert an influence on his genius. it turned him, as talfourd finely suggests, "to seek a kindred interest in the sterner stuff of old tragedy--to catastrophes more fearful even than his own--to the aspects of pale passion, to shapes of heroic daring and more heroic suffering, to the agonising contests of opposing affections and the victories of the soul over calamity and death which the old english drama discloses, and in the contemplation of which he saw his own suffering nature at once mirrored and exalted." in short, no man ever stood more nobly the test of life-long affliction: 'a deep distress had harmonised his soul.' only on one point did the stress of his difficult lot find him vulnerable, one flaw bring to light--a tendency to counteract his depression and take the edge off his poignant anxieties by a too free use of stimulants. the manners of his day, the custom of producing wine and strong drinks on every possible occasion, bore hard on such a craving and fostered a man's weakness. but lamb maintained to the end a good standing fight with the enemy and, if not wholly victorious, still less was he wholly defeated. so much on account of certain home anxieties to which mary's letters to sarah stoddart make undisguised allusion. chapter vi. visit to coleridge at greta hall.--wordsworth and his sister in london.--letters to miss stoddart.--coleridge goes to malta.--letter to dorothy wordsworth on the death of her brother john. - .--Æt. - . in the summer of , when holiday time came round charles was seized with 'a strong desire of visiting remote regions;' and after some whimsical deliberations his final resolve was to go with mary to see coleridge at the lakes. "i set out with mary to keswick," he tells manning, "without giving any notice to coleridge [who was now living at greta hall, soon to become southey's home for the rest of his life] for my time being precious did not admit of it. we got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple, &c. we thought we had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never came again while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. such an impression i never received from objects of sight before nor do i suppose i ever can again. glorious creatures, fine old fellows, skiddaw, &c., i shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study which is a large antique, ill-shaped room with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church; shelves of scattered folios, an Æolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. and all looking out upon the last fading view of skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. what a night!" the poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had died in infancy), derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little fellow not quite two years old, with whom charles and mary were delighted. a merry sprite he was, in a yellow frock which obtained for him the nick-name of stumpy canary, who loved to race from kitchen to parlour and from parlour to kitchen just putting in his head at the door with roguish smile to catch notice, then off again, shaking his little sides with laughter. he fairly won their hearts and long after figures in their letters as pi-pos pot-pos, his own way of pronouncing striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out triumphantly in his picture book. hartley, now six, was a prematurely grave and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told by crabb robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into "the metaphysic well without a bottom"; for once when asked something about himself and called by name he said, "which hartley?" "why, is there more than one hartley?" "yes, there's a deal of hartleys; there's picture hartley [hazlitt had painted his portrait] and shadow hartley and there's echo hartley and there's catch-me-fast hartley," seizing his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said his father, that "he had begun to reflect on what kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and that these should yet be one!" three delightful weeks they stayed. "so we have seen," continues lamb to manning, "keswick, grasmere, ambleside, ulswater (where the clarksons live), and a place at the other end of ulswater; i forget the name [patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of helvellyn. we have clambered up to the top of skiddaw and i have waded up the bed of lodore. mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy; and then scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! it was a day that will stand out like a mountain, i am sure, in my life." wordsworth was away at calais but the lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage with the clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she "one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed"); saw lloyd again but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home very pleasantly: mary a good deal fatigued, finding the difference between going to a place and coming from it, but not otherwise the worse. "lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship," says lamb, soon after his return, "all about himself and sophia and love and cant which i have not answered. i have not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony." they found the wordsworths (the poet and his sister, that is, for he was not yet married though just about to be) lodging near their own quarters, saw much of them, pioneered them through bartlemy fair; and now, on mary's part, was formed that intimacy with dorothy which led to her being their constant visitor and sometimes their house-guest when she was in london. as great a contrast in most respects, to dorothy wordsworth as the whole range of womankind could have furnished was mary's other friend and correspondent, sarah stoddart, afterwards mrs. hazlitt. sarah was the only daughter of a retired lieutenant in the navy, a scotchman who had settled down on a little property at winterslow near salisbury which she ultimately inherited. she was a young lady with a business-like determination to marry and with many suitors; but, far from following the old injunction to be off with the old love before being on with the new, she always cautiously kept the old love dangling till she was quite sure the new was the more eligible. mary's letters to her have happily been preserved and published by miss stoddart's grandson, mr. w. carew hazlitt, in his _mary and charles lamb_. the first, dated september , , was written after miss stoddart had been staying with the lambs and when a decision had been arrived at that she should accompany her only brother, dr. stoddart, to malta where he had just been appointed king's advocate. mary's spelling and here and there even a little slip in the matter of grammar have been retained as seeming part of the individuality of the letters:-- "i returned from my visit yesterday and was very much pleased to find your letter; for i have been very anxious to hear how you are going on. i could hardly help expecting to see you when i came in; yet though i should have rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, i believe it was better as it was, upon the whole; and all things considered, it is certainly better you should go to malta. the terms you are upon with your lover [a mr. turner to whom she was engaged] does (as you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me; however, as i cannot enter into your feelings i certainly can have nothing to say to it, only that i sincerely wish you happy in your own way however odd that way may appear to me to be. i would begin now to advise you to drop all correspondence with william [not william hazlitt but an earlier admirer]; but, as i said before, as i cannot enter into your feelings and views of things, _your ways not being my ways_, why should i tell you what i would do in your situation? so, child, take thy own ways and god prosper thee in them! "one thing my advising spirit must say; use as little secresy as possible, make a friend of your sister-in-law; you know i was not struck with her at first sight but, upon your account, i have watched and marked her very attentively and while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen we had a serious conversation. from the frankness of her manner i am convinced she is a person i could make a friend of; why should not you? we talked freely about you; she seems to have a just notion of your character and will be fond of you if you will let her." after instancing the misunderstandings between her own mother and aunt already quoted, mary continues:-- "my aunt and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister yet, in some degree, theirs is the secret history, i believe, of all sisters-in-law and you will smile when i tell you i think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother's wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example i have just given you and partly from a knack i know i have of looking into people's real characters and never expecting them to act out of it--never expecting another to do as i would in the same case. when you leave your mother and say if you never see her again you shall feel no remorse and when you make a _jewish_ bargain with your _lover_, all this gives me no offence because it is your nature and your temper and i do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you are. i love you for the good that is in you and look for no change. "_but_ certainly you ought to struggle with the evil that does most easily beset you--a total want of politeness in behaviour, i would say modesty of behaviour but that i should not convey to you my idea of the word modesty; for i certainly do not mean that you want _real modesty_ and what is usually called false or mock modesty i certainly do not wish you to possess; yet i trust you know what i mean well enough. _secresy_, though you appear all frankness, is certainly a grand failing of yours; it is likewise your _brother's_ and, therefore, a family failing. by secresy i mean you both want the habit of telling each other, at the moment, everything that happens, where you go and what you do--that free communication of letters and opinions just as they arrive as charles and i do--and which is, after all, the only ground-work of friendship. your brother, i will answer for it, will never tell his wife or his sister all that is in his mind; he will receive letters and not [mention it]. this is a fault mrs. stoddart can never [tell him of] but she can and will feel it though on the whole and in every other respect she is happy with him. begin, for god's sake, at the first and tell her everything that passes. at first she may hear you with indifference, but in time this will gain her affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no matter if she does not show hers). it is a pleasant thing for a friend to put into one's hand a letter just fresh from the post. i would even say, begin with showing her this but that it is freely written and loosely and some apology ought to be made for it which i know not how to make, for i must write freely or not at all. "if you do this she will tell your brother, you will say; and what then, quotha? it will beget a freer communication amongst you which is a thing devoutly to be wished. "god bless you and grant you may preserve your integrity and remain unmarried and penniless, and make william a good and a happy wife." no wonder mary's friendships were so stable and so various with this knack of hers of looking into another's real character and never expecting him or her to act out of it or to do as she would in the same case; taking no offence, looking for no change and asking for no other explanation than that it was her friend's nature. it is an epitome of social wisdom and of generous sentiment. coleridge had long been in bad health and worse spirits; and what he had first ignorantly used as a remedy was now become his tyrant--opium; for a time the curse of his life and the blight of his splendid powers. sometimes-- adown lethean streams his spirit drifted; sometimes he was stranded "in a howling wilderness of ghastly dreams" waking and sleeping, followed by deadly languors which opium caused and cured and caused again, driving him round in an accursed circle. he came up to london at the beginning of , was much with the lambs if not actually their guest, and finally decided to try change and join his friend dr. stoddart in malta where he landed april th. mary, full of earnest and affectionate solicitude, sent a letter by him to sarah stoddart who had already arrived, bespeaking a warm and indulgent welcome for her suffering friend:-- "i will just write a few hasty lines to say coleridge is setting off sooner than we expected and i every moment expect him to call in one of his great hurrys for this. we rejoiced with exceeding great joy to hear of your safe arrival. i hope your brother will return home in a few years a very rich man. seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty beginning. "i envy your brother the pleasure of seeing coleridge drop in unexpectedly upon him; we talk--but it is but wild and idle talk--of following him. he is to get my brother some snug little place of a thousand a year and we are to leave all and come and live among ye. what a pretty dream. "coleridge is very ill. i dread the thoughts of his long voyage. write as soon as he arrives whether _he_ does or not, and tell me how he is.... "he has got letters of recommendation to governor ball and god knows who; and he will talk and talk and be universally admired. but i wish to write for him a _letter of recommendation_ to mrs. stoddart and to yourself to take upon ye, on his first arrival, to be kind affectionate nurses; and mind, now, that you perform this duty faithfully and write me a good account of yourself. behave to him as you would to me or to charles if we came sick and unhappy to you. "i have no news to send you; coleridge will tell you how we are going on. charles has lost the newspaper [an engagement on the _morning post_, which coleridge had procured for him] but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits since this has happened; and i hope, when i write next, i shall be able to tell you charles has begun something which will produce a little money for it is not well to be _very poor_ which we certainly are at this present writing. "i sit writing here and thinking almost you will see it to-morrow; and what a long, long time it will be ere you receive this. when i saw your letter i fancy'd you were even just then in the first bustle of a new reception, every moment seeing new faces and staring at new objects when, at that time, everything had become familiar to you; and the strangers, your new dancing partners, had perhaps become gossiping fireside friends. you tell me of your gay, splendid doings; tell me, likewise, what manner of home-life you lead. is a quiet evening in a maltese drawing-room as pleasant as those we have passed in mitre court and bell yard? tell me all about it, everything pleasant and everything unpleasant that befalls you. "i want you to say a great deal about yourself. _are you happy? and do you not repent going out?_ i wish i could see you for one hour only. "remember me affectionately to your sister and brother, and tell me when you write if mrs. stoddart likes malta and how the climate agrees with her and with thee. "we heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the tale. "how did the pearls and the fine court finery bear the fatigues of the voyage and how often have they been worn and admired? "rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. satisfy him in that little particular when you write. "the fenwicks send their love and mrs. reynolds her love and the little old lady her best respects. "mrs. jeffries, who i see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes and when she heard you was taken prisoner, lord! how frightened she was. she has heard, she tells me, that mr. stoddart is to have a pension of two thousand a year whenever he chooses to return to england. "god bless you and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses." mrs. reynolds was another 'little old lady,' a familiar figure at the lambs' table. she had once been charles's schoolmistress; had made an unfortunate marriage and would have gone under in the social stream but for his kindly hand. out of their slender means he allowed her thirty pounds a year. she tickled hood's fancy when he too became a frequent guest there; and he has described her as formal, fair and flaxen-wigged like an elderly wax doll, speaking as if by an artificial apparatus, through some defect in the palate and with a slight limp and a twist occasioned by running too precipitately down greenwich hill in her youth! she remembered goldsmith who had once lent her his _deserted village_. in those days of universal warfare and privateering it was an anxious matter to have a friend tossing in the bay of biscay, gales and storms apart; so that tidings from sarah had been eagerly watched for:-- "your letter," writes mary, "which contained the news of coleridge's arrival was a most welcome one; for we had begun to entertain very unpleasant apprehensions for his safety; and your kind reception of the forlorn wanderer gave me the greatest pleasure and i thank you for it in my own and my brother's name. i shall depend upon you for hearing of his welfare for he does not write himself; but as long as we know he is safe and in such kind friends' hands we do not mind. your letters, my dear sarah, are to me very, very precious ones. they are the kindest, best, most natural ones i ever received. the one containing the news of the arrival of coleridge is, perhaps, the best i ever saw; and your old friend charles is of my opinion. we sent it off to mrs. coleridge and the wordsworths--as well because we thought it our duty to give them the first notice we had of our dear friend's safety as that we were proud of showing our sarah's pretty letter. "the letters we received a few days after from you and your brother were far less welcome ones. i rejoiced to hear your sister is well but i grieved for the loss of the dear baby and i am sorry to find your brother is not so successful as he expected to be; and yet i am almost tempted to wish his ill-fortune may send him over to us again. he has a friend, i understand, who is now at the head of the admiralty; why may he not return and make a fortune here? "i cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in the fortune-making way. if you regret it, so do i. but i hope to see you a comfortable english wife; and the forsaken, forgotten william, of english-partridge memory i have still a hankering after. however, i thank you for your frank communication and i beg you will continue it in future; and if i do not agree with a good grace to your having a maltese husband, i will wish you happy, provided you make it a part of your marriage articles that your husband shall allow you to come over sea and make me one visit; else may neglect and overlookedness be your portion while you stay there. "i would condole with you when the misfortune has befallen your poor leg; but such is the blessed distance we are at from each other that i hope, before you receive this, you have forgot it ever happened. "our compliments to the high ton at the maltese court. your brother is so profuse of them to me that, being, as you know, so unused to them, they perplex me sadly; in future i beg they may be discontinued. they always remind me of the free, and i believe very improper letter i wrote to you while you were at the isle of wight [that already given advising frankness]. the more kindly you and your brother and sister took the impertinent advice contained in it the more certain i feel that it was unnecessary and, therefore, highly improper. do not let your brother compliment me into the memory of it again. "my brother has had a letter from your mother which has distressed him sadly--about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. your silly brother, it seems, has informed your mother (i did not think your brother could have been so silly) that charles had grumbled at paying the said postage. the fact was just at that time we were very poor having lost the _morning post_ and we were beginning to practise a strict economy. my brother, who never makes up his mind whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at all times a strange mixture of both" [rigid in those small economies which enabled him to be not only just but generous on small means]. "of this failing the even economy of your correct brother's temper makes him an ill judge. the miserly part of charles, at that time smarting under his recent loss, then happened to reign triumphant; and he would not write or let me write so often as he wished because the postage cost two and fourpence. then came two or three of your poor mother's letters nearly together; and the two and fourpences he wished but grudged to pay for his own he was forced to pay for hers. in this dismal distress he applied to fenwick to get his friend motley to send them free from portsmouth. this mr. fenwick could have done for half a word's speaking; but this he did not do! then charles foolishly and unthinkingly complained to your brother in a half-serious, half-joking way; and your brother has wickedly and with malice aforethought told your mother. o fye upon him! what will your mother think of us? "i, too, feel my share of blame in this vexatious business; for i saw the unlucky paragraph in my brother's letter; and i had a kind of foreboding that it would come to your mother's ears--although i had a higher idea of your brother's good sense than i find he deserved. by entreaties and prayer i might have prevailed on my brother to say nothing about it. but i make a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. it always appears to me to be a vexatious kind of tyranny that women have no business to exercise over men, which, merely because _they having a better judgment_, they have power to do. let _men_ alone and at last we find they come round to the right way which _we_, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. but better, far better that we should let them often do wrong than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows. "charles is sadly fretted now, i know, at what to say to your mother. i have made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to re-instate us in your mother's good graces. say to her it was a jest misunderstood; tell her charles lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for but that he is, now and then, a trifle whimsical or so. i do not ask your brother to do this for i am offended with him for the mischief he has made. "i feel that i have too lightly passed over the interesting account you sent me of your late disappointment. it was not because i did not feel and completely enter into the affair with you. you surprise and please me with the frank and generous way in which you deal with your lovers, taking a refusal from their so prudential hearts with a better grace and more good humour than other women accept a suitor's service. continue this open artless conduct and i trust you will at last find some man who has sense enough to know you are well worth risking a peaceable life of poverty for. i shall yet live to see you a poor but happy english wife. "remember me most affectionately to coleridge, and i thank you again and again for all your kindness to him. to dear mrs. stoddart and your brother i beg my best love; and to you all i wish health and happiness and a _soon_ return to old england. "i have sent to mr. burrel's for your kind present, but unfortunately he is not in town. i am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs and i thank you for them not as a present, for i do not love presents, but as a remembrance of your old friend. farewell. "i am, my best sarah, "your most affectionate friend, "mary lamb." "good wishes and all proper remembrances from old nurse, mrs. jeffries, mrs. reynolds, mrs. rickman, &c. long live queen hoop-oop-oop-oo and all the old merry phantoms." sarah stoddart returned to england before the year was out. coleridge remained in malta, filling temporarily, at the request of sir alexander ball, governor of the island, the post of public secretary till the end of september, when his friends lost track of him altogether for nearly a year; during which he visited paris, wandered through italy, sicily, cairo, and saw vesuvius in december when "the air was so consolidated with a massy cloud-curtain that it appeared like a mountain in basso-relievo in an interminable wall of some pantheon"; and after narrowly escaping imprisonment at the hands of napoleon, suddenly reappeared amongst his friends in the autumn of . to the wordsworths, brother and sister and young wife, for the three were one in heart, this year of had been one of overwhelming sorrow. their brother john, the brave and able ship's captain who yet loved "all quiet things" as dearly as william "although he loved more silently," and was wont to carry that beloved brother's poems to sea and con them to the music of the winds and waves; whose cherished scheme, so near fulfilment, it was to realise enough to settle in a cottage at grasmere and devote his earnings to the poet's use so that he might pursue his way unharassed by a thought of money,--this brother was shipwrecked on the bill of portland just as he was starting, and whilst the ship was yet in the pilot's hands, on what was to have been, in how different a sense, his last voyage. six weeks beneath the moving sea he lay in slumber quietly; unforced by wind or wave to quit the ship for which he died (all claims of duty satisfied); and there they found him at her side, and bore him to the grave. after waiting awhile in silence before a grief of such magnitude mary wrote to dorothy wordsworth. she speaks as one acquainted with a life-long sorrow yet who has learned to find its companionship not bitter:-- "i thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till i saw your own handwriting i could not persuade myself that i should do well to write to you though i have often attempted it; but i always left off dissatisfied with what i had written, and feeling that i was doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. i wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but i felt that it was improper and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. that you would see every object with and through your lost brother and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you i felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this i didn't dare tell you so; but i send you some poor lines which i wrote under this conviction of mind and before i heard coleridge was returning home. i will transcribe them now, before i finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then for i know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be borrowed: but i had no better way of expressing my thoughts and i never have the power of altering or amending anything i have once laid aside with dissatisfaction:-- why is he wandering on the sea? coleridge should now with wordsworth be. by slow degrees he'd steal away their woe and gently bring a ray (so happily he'd time relief) of comfort from their very grief. he'd tell them that their brother dead, when years have passed o'er their head, will be remembered with such holy, true, and perfect melancholy, that ever this lost brother john will be their heart's companion. his voice they'll always hear, his face they'll always see: there's nought in life so sweet as such a memory. thus for a moment are we permitted to see that, next to love for her brother, the memory of her dead mother and friendship for coleridge were the deep and sacred influences of mary's life. chapter vii. mary in the asylum again.--lamb's letter with a poem of hers.--her slow recovery.--letters to sarah stoddart.--the _tales from shakespeare_ begun.--hazlitt's portrait of lamb.--sarah's lovers.--the farce of _mr. h._ - .--Æt. - . the letter to miss wordsworth called forth a response; but, alas! mary was in sad exile when it arrived and charles, with a heart full of grief, wrote for her:-- " th june . "your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better); but poor mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. she has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses and is at present _from home_. last monday week was the day she left me and i hope i may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. i am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her indisposition.... i have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but i cannot always feel so. meantime she is dead to me, and i miss a prop. all my strength is gone, and i am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. i dare not think lest i should think wrong, so used am i to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. to say all that i know of her would be more than i think anybody could believe or even understand; and when i hope to have her well again with me it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for i can conceal nothing that i do from her. she is older and wiser and better than i, and all my wretched imperfections i cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. she would share life and death, heaven and hell with me. she lives but for me; and i know i have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. but even in this upbraiding of myself i am offending against her for i know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade.... "i cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor mary made upon a picture (a 'holy family') which we saw at an auction only one week before she left home. she was then beginning to show signs of ill-boding. they are sweet lines, and upon a sweet picture; but i send them only as the last memorial of her:-- virgin and child, l. da vinci. maternal lady, with thy virgin grace, heaven-born thy jesus seemeth sure, and thou a virgin pure. lady most perfect, when thy angel face men look upon, they wish to be a catholic, madonna fair, to worship thee. "you had her lines about the 'lady blanch.' you have not had some which she wrote upon a copy of a girl from titian which i had hung up where that print of blanch and the abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures from l. da vinci) had hung in our room. 'tis light and pretty:-- who art thou, fair one, who usurp'st the place of blanch, the lady of the matchless grace? come, fair and pretty tell to me who in thy life-time thou might'st be? thou pretty art and fair, but with the lady blanch thou never must compare. no need for blanch her history to tell, whoever saw her face, they there did read it well; but when i look on thee, i only know there lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago. "this is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves and to advert so little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you all. but my own cares press pretty close upon me and you can make allowances. that you may go on gathering strength and peace is my next wish to mary's recovery. "i had almost forgot your repeated invitation. supposing that mary will be well and able there is another _ability_ which you may guess at which i cannot promise myself. in prudence we ought not to come. this illness will make it still more prudential to wait. it is not a balance of this way of spending our money against another way but an absolute question of whether we shall stop now or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand which my wise conduct has already encroached upon one half." pity it is that the little poem on the 'lady blanch' should have perished, as i fear it has, if it contained as 'sweet lines' as the foregoing. little more than a month after this (july ), charles writes cheerfully to manning:-- "my old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence and will shortly resume the power of the keys, so i shan't be cheated of my tea and liquors. wind in the west which promotes tranquillity. have leisure now to anticipate seeing thee again. have been taking leave [it was a very short leave] of tobacco in a rhyming address. had thought _that vein_ had long since closed up. find i can rhyme and reason too. think of studying mathematics to restrain the fire of my genius which george dyer recommends. have frequent bleedings at the nose which shows plethoric. maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of wonders. got incredibly sober and regular; shave oftener and hum a tune to signify cheerfulness and gallantry. "suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and stout. will not refuse nature who has done such things for me! "nurse! don't call me unless mr. manning comes.--what! the gentleman in spectacles?--yes. _dormit_. c. l. "saturday, hot noon." but although mary was sufficiently recovered to return home at the end of the summer she continued much shaken by the severity of this attack and so also did her brother all through the autumn; as the following letters to sarah stoddart and still more one already quoted (pp. - ) show:-- "september . "certainly you are the best letter-writer (besides writing the best hand) in the world. i have just been reading over again your two long letters and i perceive they make me very envious. i have taken a bran new pen and put on my _spectacles_ and am peering with all my might to see the lines in the paper which the sight of your even lines had well-nigh tempted me to rule; and i have moreover taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary to clear my head which feels more cloudy than common this fine cheerful morning. "all i can gather from your clear and, i have no doubt, faithful history of maltese politics is that the good doctor, though a firm friend, an excellent fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright advocate and, in short, all that they say upon tombstones (for i do not recollect that they celebrate any fraternal virtues there)--yet is he but a _moody_ brother; that your sister-in-law is pretty much like what all sisters-in-law have been since the first happy invention of the marriage state; that friend coleridge has undergone no alteration by crossing the atlantic [geography was evidently no part of captain starkey's curriculum] for his friendliness to you as well as the oddities you mention are just what one ought to look for from him; and that you, my dear sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to flourish in a little proud garrison town as i did shrewdly suspect you were before you went there. "if i possibly can i will prevail upon charles to write to your brother by the conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell i almost fear the fortnight will slip away before i can get him in the right vein. indeed, it has been sad and heavy times with us lately. when i am pretty well his low spirits throw me back again; and when he begins to get a little cheerful then i do the same kind office for him. i heartily wish for the arrival of coleridge; a few such evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up and set us going again. "do not say anything when you write of our low spirits; it will vex charles. you would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces and saying 'how do you do?' and 'how do you do?' and then we fall a crying and say we will be better on the morrow. he says we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum-boil which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort. "i rejoice to hear of your mother's amendment; when you can leave her with any satisfaction to yourself--which, as her sister, i think i understand by your letter, is with her, i hope you may soon be able to do--let me know upon what plan you mean to come to town. your brother proposed your being six months in town and six with your mother; but he did not then know of your poor mother's illness. by his desire i enquired for a respectable family for you to board with and from captain burney i heard of one i thought would suit you at that time. he particularly desires i would not think of your being with us, not thinking, i conjecture, the house of a single man _respectable_ enough. your brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over you, to be the inspector of all your actions and to direct and govern you with a stern voice and a high hand; to be, in short, a very elder brother over you. does the hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you long to come to london? i am making all the proper enquiries, against the time, of the newest and most approved modes (being myself mainly ignorant in these points) of etiquette and nicely correct maidenly manners. "but to speak seriously. i mean, when we meet, that we will lay our heads together and consult and contrive the best way of making the best girl in the world the fine lady her brother wishes to see her and believe me, sarah, it is not so difficult a matter as one is apt to imagine. i have observed many a demure lady who passes muster admirably well who, i think, we could easily learn to imitate in a week or two. we will talk of these things when we meet. in the meantime i give you free leave to be happy and merry at salisbury in any way you can. has the partridge season opened any communication between you and william? as i allow you to be imprudent till i see you, i shall expect to hear you have invited him to taste his own birds. have you scratched him out of your will yet? rickman is married and that is all the news i have to send you. i seem, upon looking over my letter again, to have written too lightly of your distresses at malta; but, however i may have written, believe me i enter very feelingly into all your troubles. i love you and i love your brother; and between you, both of whom, i think, have been to blame, i know not what to say--only this i say,--try to think as little as possible of past miscarriages; it was perhaps so ordered by providence that you might return home to be a comfort to your mother." no long holiday trip was to be ventured on while mary continued thus shaken and depressed. "we have been two tiny excursions this summer, for three or four days each, to a place near harrow and to egham where cooper's hill is and that is the total history of our rustication this year", charles tells wordsworth. in october mary gives a slightly better account of herself:-- "i have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always brought your troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that i have been obliged to leave off and make charles write for me. i am resolved now, however few lines i write, this shall go; for i know, my kind friend, you will like once more to see my own handwriting. "i have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that i begin almost to feel myself once more a living creature and to hope for happier times; and in that hope i include the prospect of once more seeing my dear sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. how did i wish for your presence to cheer my drooping heart when i returned home from banishment. "is your being with or near your poor dear mother necessary to her comfort? does she take any notice of you? and is there any prospect of her recovery? how i grieve for her, for you.... "i went to the admiralty, about your mother's pension; from thence i was directed to an office in lincoln's inn.... they informed me it could not be paid to any person but mr. wray without a letter of attorney.... do not let us neglect this business and make use of me in any way you can. "i have much to thank you and your kind brother for. i kept the dark silk, as you may suppose. you have made me very fine; the brooch is very beautiful. mrs. jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your present; she desires all manner of thanks and good wishes. your maid's sister has gone to live a few miles from town. charles, however, found her out and gave her the handkerchief. "i want to know if you have seen william and if there is any prospect in future there. all you said in your letter from portsmouth that related to him was so burnt in the fumigating that we could only make out that it was unfavourable but not the particulars; tell us again how you go on or if you have seen him. i conceit affairs will somehow be made up between you at last. "i want to know how your brother goes on. is he likely to make a very good fortune and in how long a time? and how is he in the way of home comforts--i mean is he very happy with mrs. stoddart? this was a question i could not ask while you were there and perhaps is not a fair one now; but i want to know how you all went on and, in short, twenty little foolish questions that one ought, perhaps, rather to ask when we meet than to write about. but do make me a little acquainted with the inside of the good doctor's house and what passes therein. "was coleridge often with you? or did your brother and col. argue long arguments till between the two great argue-ers there grew a little coolness; or perchance the mighty friendship between coleridge and your sovereign governor, sir alexander ball, might create a kind of jealousy; for we fancy something of a coolness did exist from the little mention of c. ever made in your brother's letters. "write us, my good girl, a long gossiping letter answering all these foolish questions--and tell me any silly thing you can recollect--any, the least particular, will be interesting to us and we will never tell tales out of school; but we used to wonder and wonder how you all went on; and when you was coming home we said 'now we shall hear all from sarah.' "god bless you, my dear friend.... if you have sent charles any commissions he has not executed write me word--he says he has lost or mislaid a letter desiring him to inquire about a wig. write two letters--one of business and pensions and one all about sarah stoddart and malta. "we have got a picture of charles; do you think your brother would like to have it? if you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?" mary's interest in her friend and her friend's affairs is so hearty one cannot choose but share it and would gladly see what "the best letter-writer in the world" had to tell of coleridge and stoddart and the long arguments and little jealousies; and whether 'william' had continued to dangle on, spite of distance and discouragement; and even to learn that the old lady received her pension and her wig in safety. but curiosity must remain unsatisfied for none of miss stoddart's letters have been preserved. "the picture of charles" was, we may feel pretty sure, one which william hazlitt painted this year of lamb 'in the costume of a venetian senator.' it is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting portrait. lamb was just thirty; and it gives, on the whole, a striking impression of the nobility and beauty of form and feature which characterised his head and partly realises proctor's description--"a countenance so full of sensibility that it came upon you like a new thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards"; though the subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the mouth are not fully rendered. compared with the drawing by hancock, done when lamb was twenty-three, engraved in cottle's _early recollections of coleridge_, each may be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect,--hancock's being in profile, hazlitt's (of which there is a good lithograph in barry cornwall's _memoir_) nearly full face. the print from it prefixed to fitzgerald's _lamb_ is almost unrecognisable. it was the last time hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it comes as a pleasant surprise--an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as a painter; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship. it was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between lamb and hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and life-long. hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother john, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the godwin circle much frequented by the lambs. "it is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present," mary had lately written. this it was which spurred her on to undertake her first literary venture, the _tales from shakespeare_. the nature of the malady from which she suffered made continuous mental exertion distressing and probably injurious; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished, regardless of time and change. the first hint of any such scheme occurs in a letter to sarah stoddart dated april , , written the very day she had left the lambs:-- "i have heard that coleridge was lately going through sicily to rome with a party; but that, being unwell, he returned back to naples. we think there is some mistake in this account and that his intended journey to rome was in his former jaunt to naples. if you know that at that time he had any such intention will you write instantly? for i do not know whether i ought to write to mrs. coleridge or not. "i am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that i will write you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they occur. this day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. it is not a birthday, nor a new year's day, nor a leave-off smoking day; but it is about an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor phoenix, in the salisbury stage and charles has just left me to go to his lodgings [a room to work in free from the distraction of constant visitors just hired experimentally] and i am holding a solitary consultation with myself as to how i shall employ myself. "writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring and vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time, aches with the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea of i cannot tell what-about-notion that i have not made you half so comfortable as i ought to have done and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on your return home. then i think i will make my new gown; and now i consider the white petticoat will be better candle-light work; and then i look at the fire and think if the irons was but down i would iron my gowns--you having put me out of conceit of mangling. "so much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours. returning home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you, as you know is our usual custom. we agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been what you yourself discovered, _not at all in our way_; and although, if the postmaster should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great compliment yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs, will understand and value it as well as what we likewise asserted that since you have been with us you have done but one foolish thing, _vide_ pinckhorn (excuse my bad latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what i intend). we praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our whimsies and, to use a phrase of coleridge, _understood us_. we had, in short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the want of respect you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of action, you know what i mean, which--though it only broke out in the acceptance of the old justice's book and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct while you were here--yet is it so native a feeling in your mind that you will do whatever the present moment prompts you to do, that i wish you would take that one slight offence seriously to heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. then, mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be!!! "you are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have i the sense of your absence so strong upon me that i was really thinking what news i had to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. truly nothing, except that martin burney met us in lincoln's inn fields and borrowed fourpence, of the repayment of which sum i will send you due notice. "_friday._--last night i told charles of your matrimonial overtures from mr. white and of the cause of that business being at a _standstill_. your generous conduct in acquainting mr. white with the vexatious affair at malta highly pleased him. he entirely approves of it. you would be quite comforted to hear what he said on the subject. "he wishes you success; and when coleridge comes will consult with him about what is best to be done. but i charge you be most strictly cautious how you proceed yourself. do not give mr. w. any reason to think you indiscreet; let him return of his own accord and keep the probability of his doing so full in your mind; so, i mean, as to regulate your whole conduct by that expectation. do not allow yourself to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with william nor do any other silly thing of that kind; for you may depend upon it he will be a kind of spy upon you and, if he observes nothing that he disapproves of you will certainly hear of him again in time. "charles is gone to finish the farce [_mr. h._] and i am to hear it read this night. i am so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how i shall like it that i do not know what i am doing. i need not tell you so for before i send this i shall be able to tell you all about it. if i think it will amuse you i will send you a copy. _the bed was very cold last night._ "i have received your letter and am happy to hear that your mother has been so well in your absence, which i wish had been prolonged a little, for you have been wanted to copy out the farce, in the writing of which i made many an unlucky blunder. "the said farce i carried (after many consultations of who was the most proper person to perform so important an office) to wroughton, the manager of drury lane. he was very civil to me; said it did not depend upon himself, but that he would put it into the proprietor's hands, and that we should certainly have an answer from them. "i have been unable to finish this sheet before, for charles has taken a week's holliday from his lodging to rest himself after his labour, and we have talked of nothing but the farce night and day; but yesterday i carried it to wroughton, and since it has been out of the way our minds have been a little easier. i wish you had been with us to have given your opinion. i have half a mind to scribble another copy and send it you. i like it very much, and cannot help having great hopes of its success. "i would say i was very sorry for the death of mr. white's father, but not knowing the good old gentleman, i cannot help being as well satisfied that he is gone, for his son will feel rather lonely, and so, perhaps, he may chance to visit again winterslow. you so well describe your brother's grave lecturing letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. i would fain re-write it, leaving out my '_sage advice_'; but if i begin another letter something may fall out to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well as you can; it shall be the last i ever send you. "it is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty irksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and friendly remembrances. "i have heard a vague report from the dawes (the pleasant-looking young lady we called upon was miss dawe) that coleridge returned back to naples; they are to make further inquiries and let me know the particulars. we have seen little or nothing of manning since you went. your friend george burnett calls as usual for charles _to point out something for him_. i miss you sadly, and but for the fidget i have been in about the farce, i should have missed you still more. i am sorry you cannot get your money; continue to tell us all your perplexities, and do not mind being called widow blackacre. "say all in your mind about your _lover_; now charles knows of it, he will be as anxious to hear as me. all the time we can spare from talking of the characters and plot of the farce, we talk of you. i have got a fresh bottle of brandy to-day; if you were here you should have a glass, _three parts brandy_, so you should. i bought a pound of bacon to-day, not so good as yours. i wish the little caps were finished. i am glad the medicines and the cordials bore the fatigue of their journey so well. i promise you i will write often, and _not mind the postage_. god bless you. charles does _not_ send his love because he is not here. _write as often as ever you can._ do not work too hard." there is a little anecdote of sarah stoddart, told by her grandson, which helps to mitigate our astonishment at mary's too hospitable suggestion in regard to the brandy. lieutenant stoddart would sometimes, while sipping his grog, say to his children, "john, will you have some?" "no thank you, father." "sarah, will you?" "yes, please, father." "not," adds mr. hazlitt, "that she ever indulged to excess; but she was that sort of woman." very far, certainly, from "the perfect little gentlewoman" mary hoped one day to see her; but friendly, not without brains, with a kindly heart, and her worst qualities such, surely, as spread themselves freely on the surface, but strike no deep or poisonous roots. "do not mind being called widow blackacre," says mary, alluding to one of the characters in wycherley's _plain dealer_. it certainly was not gratifying to be likened to that "perverse, bustling, masculine, pettifogging, and litigious" lady, albeit macaulay speaks of her as wycherley's happiest creation. when hazlitt returned to wem, lamb sent him his first letter full of friendly gossip:-- "... we miss you, as we foretold we should. one or two things have happened which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication, but which, seated about our fireside at night (the winter hands of pork have begun), gesture and emphasis might have talked into some importance. something about rickman's wife, for instance; how tall she is, and that she visits pranked up like a queen of the may with green streamers; a good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor. something, too, about monkey [louisa martin], which can't so well be written; how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers and was obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register, where it was proved to be only twelve, and an edict issued that it should not give itself airs yet this four years; and how it got leave to be called miss by grace. these, and such like hows were in my head to tell you, but who can write? also how manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy, and seems to have something in his head which he don't impart. then, how i am going to leave off smoking.... you disappoint me in passing over in absolute silence the blenheim leonardo. didn't you see it? excuse a lover's curiosity. i have seen no pictures of note since, except mr. dawe's gallery. it is curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their way. for instance, milton and mr. dawe. mr. d. has chosen to illustrate the story of samson exactly in the point of view in which milton has been most happy; the interview between the jewish hero, blind and captive, and dalilah. milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horsehair or porcupine's bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs 'which of a nation armed contained the strength.' i don't remember he _says_ black; but could milton imagine them to be yellow? do you? mr. dawe, with striking originality of conception, has crowned him with a thin yellow wig; in colour precisely like dyson's, in curl and quantity resembling mrs. professor's (godwin's wife); his limbs rather stout, about such a man as my brother or rickman, but no atlas, nor hercules, nor yet so long as dubois, the clown of sadler's wells. this was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact; for doubtless god could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple with a golden tress, as soon as with all the cables of the british navy.... "wasn't you sorry for lord nelson? i have followed him in fancy ever since i saw him in pall mall (i was prejudiced against him before), looking just as a hero should look, and i have been very much cut about it indeed. he was the only pretence of a great man we had. nobody is left of any name at all. his secretary died by his side. i imagined him a mr. scott, to be the man you met at hume's, but i learn from mrs. hume it is not the same.... what other news is there, mary? what puns have i made in the last fortnight? you never remember them. you have no relish for the comic. 'oh, tell hazlitt not to forget to send the _american farmer_. i daresay it's not as good as he fancies; but a book's a book.'..." mary was no exclusive lover of her brother's old folios, his "ragged veterans" and "midnight darlings," but a miscellaneous reader with a decided leaning to modern tales and adventures--to "a story, well, ill, or indifferently told, so there be life stirring in it," as elia has told. it may be worth noting here that the mr. scott mentioned above, who was not the secretary killed by nelson's side, was his chaplain and, though not killed, he received a wound in the skull of so curious a nature as to cause occasionally a sudden suspension of memory. in the midst of a sentence he would stop abruptly, losing, apparently, all mental consciousness; and after a lapse of time, would resume at the very word with which he had left off, wholly unaware of any breach of continuity; as one who knew him has often related to me. chapter viii. the _tales from shakespeare_.--letters to sarah stoddart. .--Æt. . once begun, the _tales from shakespeare_ were worked at with spirit and rapidity. by may th charles writes to manning:-- "[mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you should know what they are. she is doing for godwin's bookseller twenty of shakespeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. six are already done by her; to wit, _the tempest_, _a winter's tale_, _midsummer night's dream_, _much ado about nothing_, _the two gentlemen of verona_, and _cymbeline_. the _merchant of venice_ is in forwardness. i have done _othello_ and _macbeth_, and mean to do all the tragedies. i think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. it is to bring in sixty guineas. mary has done them capitally i think you'd think." "godwin's bookseller" was really godwin himself, who at his wife's urgent entreaty had just started a "magazine" of children's books in hanway street, hoping thus to add to his precarious earnings as an author. his own name was in such ill odour with the orthodox that he used his foreman's--thomas hodgkins--over the shop door and on the title pages, whilst the juvenile books which he himself wrote were published under the name of baldwin. when the business was removed to skinner street it was carried on in his wife's name. "my tales are to be published in separate storybooks," mary tells sarah stoddart. "i mean in single stories, like the children's little shilling books. i cannot send you them in manuscript, because they are all in the godwins' hands; but one will be published very soon, and then you shall have it _all in print_. i go on very well, and have no doubt but i shall always be able to hit upon some such kind of job to keep going on. i think i shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest calculation; but as i have not yet seen any money of my own earning, for we do not expect to be paid till christmas, i do not feel the good fortune that has so unexpectedly befallen me half so much as i ought to do. but another year no doubt i shall perceive it.... charles has written _macbeth_, _othello_, _king lear_, and has begun _hamlet_; you would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like hermia and helena in the _midsummer night's dream_; or rather, like an old literary darby and joan, i taking snuff and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it. "if i tell you that you widow blackacre-ise you must tell me i _tale_-ise, for my tales seem to be all the subject matter i write about; and when you see them you will think them poor little baby-stories to make such a talk about." and a month later she says:--"the reason i have not written so long is that i worked and worked in hopes to get through my task before the holidays began; but at last i was not able, for charles was forced to get them now, or he could not have had any at all; and having picked out the best stories first these latter ones take more time, being more perplext and unmanageable. i have finished one to-day, which teazed me more than all the rest put together. they sometimes plague me as bad as your _lovers_ do you. how do you go on, and how many new ones have you had lately?" "mary is just stuck fast in _all's well that ends well_," writes charles. "she complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys' clothes. she begins to think shakespeare must have wanted imagination! i, to encourage her (for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatter her with telling how well such and such a play is done. but she is stuck fast, and i have been obliged to promise to assist her." at last mary, in a postscript to her letter to sarah, adds: "i am in good spirits just at this present time, for charles has been reading over the _tale_ i told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best. you must not mind the many wretchedly dull letters i have sent you; for, indeed, i cannot help it; my mind is always so wretchedly _dry_ after poring over my work all day. but it will soon be over. i am cooking a shoulder of lamb (hazlitt dines with us), it will be ready at o'clock if you can pop in and eat a bit with us." mary took a very modest estimate of her own achievement; but time has tested it, and passed it on to generation after generation of children, and the last makes it as welcome as the first. hardly a year passes but a new edition is absorbed; and not by children only, but by the young generally, for no better introduction to the study of shakspeare can be desired. of the twenty plays included in the two small volumes which were issued in january , fourteen, _the tempest_, _a midsummer night's dream_, _a winter's tale_, _much ado about nothing_, _as you like it_, _the two gentlemen of verona_, _the merchant of venice_, _cymbeline_, _all's well that ends well_, _the taming of the shrew_, _the comedy of errors_, _measure for measure_, _twelfth night_, and _pericles, prince of tyre_, were by mary; and the remaining six, the great tragedies, by charles. her share was the more difficult and the less grateful, not only on account of the more "perplext and unmanageable" plots of the comedies, but also of the sacrifices entailed in converting witty dialogue into brief narrative. but she "constantly evinces a rare shrewdness and tact in her incidental criticisms, which show her to have been, in her way, as keen an observer of human nature as her brother," says mr. ainger in his preface to the _golden treasury_ edition of the _tales_. "she" had "not lived so much among the wits and humorists of her day without learning some truths which helped her to interpret the two chief characters of _much ado about nothing_; for instance: 'the hint beatrice gave benedict that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but there is nothing that great wits so much dread as the imputation of buffoonery, because the charge comes sometimes a little too near the truth; therefore benedict perfectly hated beatrice when she called him the prince's jester.' very profound, too, is the casual remark upon the conduct of claudio and his friends when the character of hero is suddenly blasted--conduct which has often perplexed older readers for its heartlessness and insane credulity: 'the prince and claudio left the church without staying to see if hero would recover, or at all regarding the distress into which they had thrown leonato, so _hard-hearted had their anger made them_." if one must hunt for a flaw to show critical discernment, it is a pity that in _pericles_, otherwise so successfully handled, with judicious ignoring of what is manifestly not shakespeare's, a beautiful passage is marred by the omission of a word that is the very heart of the simile:-- see how she 'gins to blow into life's flower again, says cerimon, as the seemingly dead thaisa revives. "see, she begins to blow into life again," mary has it. the _tales_ appeared first in eight sixpenny numbers; but were soon collected in two small volumes "embellished," or, as it turned out, disfigured by twenty copper-plate illustrations, of which as of other attendant vexations lamb complains in a letter to wordsworth, dated jan. , :-- "we have booked off from the 'swan and two necks,' lad lane, this day (per coach), the _tales from shakespeare_. you will forgive the plates, when i tell you they were left to the direction of godwin, who left the choice of subjects to the bad baby [mrs. godwin], who from mischief (i suppose) has chosen one from d----d beastly vulgarity (vide _merch. venice_), when no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it; to another has given a name which exists not in the tale, nic bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this i suspect _his_ hand, for i guess her reading does not reach far enough to know bottom's christian name; and one of hamlet and grave-digging, a scene which is not hinted at in the story, and you might as well have put king canute the great reproving his courtiers. the rest are giants and giantesses. suffice it to save our taste and damn our folly, that we left all to a friend, w. g. who, in the first place, cheated me by putting a name to them which i did not mean, but do not repent, and then wrote a puff about their _simplicity_, &c. to go with the advertisement as in my name! enough of this egregious dupery. i will try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the stories, and tell you that i am answerable for _lear_, _macbeth_, _timon_, _romeo_, _hamlet_, _othello_, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and all of the spelling. the rest is my sister's. we think _pericles_ of hers the best, and _othello_ of mine; but i hope all have some good. _as you like it_, we like least. so much, only begging you to tear out the cuts and give them to johnny as 'mrs. godwin's fancy'!!" "i had almost forgot, my part of the preface begins in the middle of a sentence, in last but one page, after a colon, thus-- :--which if they be happily so done, &c. the former part hath a more feminine turn, and does hold me up something as an instructor to young ladies; but upon my modesty's honour i wrote it not. "godwin told my sister that the 'baby' chose the subjects: a fact in taste." mary's preface sets forth her aim and her difficulties with characteristic good sense and simplicity. i have marked with a bracket the point at which, quite tired and out of breath, as it were, at the end of her labours, she put the pen into her brother's hand that he might finish with a few decisive touches what remained to be said of their joint undertaking:-- preface. the following tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of shakspeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful english tongue in which he wrote; therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided. in those tales which have been taken from the tragedies, as my young readers will perceive when they come to see the source from which these stories are derived, shakespeare's own words, with little alteration, recur very frequently in the narrative as well as in the dialogue; but in those made from the comedies i found myself scarcely ever able to turn his words into the narrative form; therefore i fear in them i have made use of dialogue too frequently for young people not used to the dramatic form of writing. but this fault--if it be, as i fear, a fault--has been caused by my earnest wish to give as much of shakespeare's own words as possible; and if the "_he said_" and "_she said_," the question and the reply, should sometimes seem tedious to their young ears, they must pardon it, because it was the only way i knew of in which i could give them a few hints and little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when they come to the rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted, pretending to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of shakespeare's matchless image. faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places where his blank-verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still, his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty. i have wished to make these tales easy reading for very young children. to the utmost of my ability i have constantly kept this in my mind; but the subjects of most of them made this a very difficult task. it was no easy matter to give the histories of men and women in terms familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind. for young ladies, too, it has been my intention chiefly to write, because boys are generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently having the best scenes of shakespeare by heart before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and therefore, instead of recommending these tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, i must rather beg their kind assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand; and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them--carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister's ear--some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken. and i trust they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages, they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments, which, if they be fortunately so done as to prove delightful to any of you, my young readers, i hope will have no worse effect upon you than to make you wish yourselves a little older, that you may be allowed to read the plays at full length: such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational. when time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into your hands, you will discover in such of them as are here abridged--not to mention almost as many more which are left untouched--many surprising events and turns of fortune, which for their infinite variety could not be contained in this little book, besides a world of sprightly and cheerful characters, both men and women, the humour of which i was fearful of losing if i attempted to reduce the length of them. what these tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it is my wish that the true plays of shakespeare may prove to you in older years--enrichers of the fancy, strengthened of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity; for of examples teaching these virtues, his pages are full. * * * * * if the "bad baby" chose the subjects, a stripling who was afterwards to make his mark in art executed them; a young irishman, son of a leather-breeches maker, mulready by name, whom godwin and also harris, newberry's successor, were at this time endeavouring to help in his twofold struggle to earn a livelihood and obtain some training in art (which he did chiefly in the studio of banks the sculptor). some of his early illustrations to the rhymed satirical fables just then in vogue, such as _the butterfly's ball_ and the _peacock at home_, show humour as well as decisive artistic promise. but the young designer seems to have collapsed altogether under the weight of shakespeare's creations; and whoever looks at the goggle-eyed ogre of the pantomime species called othello, as well as at the plates lamb specifies, will not wonder at his disgust. curiously enough they have been attributed to blake; those in the edition of , that is, which are identical with those of and ; and as such figure in booksellers' catalogues, with a correspondingly high price attached to the volumes, notwithstanding the testimony to the contrary of mr. sheepshanks, given in stephen's _masterpieces of mulready_. engraved by blake they may have been, and hence may have here and there traces of blake-like feeling and character; for though he was fifty at the time these were executed, he still and always had to win his bread more often by rendering with his graver the immature or brainless conceptions of others, than by realising those of his own teeming and powerful imagination. the success of the _tales_ was decisive and immediate. new editions were called for in , , and ; but in concession, no doubt, to lamb's earnest remonstrances, only a certain portion of each contained the obnoxious plates; the rest were issued with "merely a beautiful head of our immortal dramatist from a much-admired painting by zoust," as godwin's advertisement put it. subsequently an edition, with designs by harvey, remained long in favour, and was reprinted many times. in , robert, brother of the more famous george cruickshank, illustrated the book, and there was prefixed a memoir of lamb by j. w. dalby, a friend of leigh hunt and contributor to the _london journal_. the _golden treasury_ edition, already spoken of, has a dainty little frontispiece by du maurier, with which lamb would certainly have found no fault. no sooner were the _tales_ out of hand than mary began a fresh task, as charles tells manning in a letter written at the end of the year ( ), wherein also is a glimpse of our friend mr. dawe not to be here omitted: "mr. dawe is turned author; he has been in such a way lately--dawe the painter, i mean--he sits and stands about at holcroft's and says nothing; then sighs and leans his head on his hand. i took him to be in love; but it seems he was only meditating a work, _the life of morland_. the young man is not used to composition." chapter ix. correspondence with sarah stoddart.--hazlitt.--a courtship and wedding at which mary is bridesmaid. - .--Æt. - . to return to domestic affairs, as faithfully reported to sarah by mary whilst the _tales_ were in progress:-- "may , . "no intention of forfeiting my promise, but want of time has prevented me from continuing my _journal_. you seem pleased with the long stupid one i sent, and, therefore, i shall certainly continue to write at every opportunity. the reason why i have not had any time to spare is because charles has given himself some hollidays after the hard labour of finishing his farce; and, therefore, i have had none of the evening leisure i promised myself. next week he promises to go to work again. i wish he may happen to hit upon some new plan to his mind for another farce [_mr. h._ was accepted, but not yet brought out]. when once begun, i do not fear his perseverance, but the hollidays he has allowed himself i fear will unsettle him. i look forward to next week with the same kind of anxiety i did to the new lodging. we have had, as you know, so many teazing anxieties of late, that i have got a kind of habit of foreboding that we shall never be comfortable, and that he will never settle to work, which i know is wrong, and which i will try with all my might to overcome; for certainly if i could but see things as they really are, our prospects are considerably improved since the memorable day of mrs. fenwick's last visit. i have heard nothing of that good lady or of the fells since you left us. "we have been visiting a little to norris's, godwin's, and last night we did not come home from captain burney's till two o'clock; the _saturday night_ was changed to friday, because rickman could not be there to-night. we had the best _tea things_, and the litter all cleared away, and everything as handsome as possible, mrs. rickman being of the party. mrs. rickman is much increased in size since we saw her last, and the alteration in her strait shape wonderfully improves her. phillips was there, and charles had a long batch of cribbage with him, and upon the whole we had the most chearful evening i have known there a long time. to-morrow we dine at holcroft's. these things rather fatigue me; but i look for a quiet week next week, and hope for better times. we have had mrs. brooks and all the martins, and we have likewise been there, so that i seem to have been in a continual bustle lately. i do not think charles cares so much for the martins as he did, which is a fact you will be glad to hear, though you must not name them when you write; always remember when i tell you anything about them, not to mention their names in return. "we have had a letter from your brother by the same mail as yours i suppose; he says he does not mean to return till summer, and that is all he says about himself; his letter being entirely filled with a long story about lord nelson--but nothing more than what the papers have been full of--such as his last words, &c. why does he tease you with so much _good advice_; is it merely to fill up his letters, as he filled ours with lord nelson's exploits? or has any new thing come out against you? has he discovered mr. curse-a-rat's correspondence? i hope you will not write to that _news-sending_ gentleman any more. i promised never more to give my _advice_, but one may be allowed to _hope_ a little; and i also hope you will have something to tell me soon about mr. white. have you seen him yet? i am sorry to hear your mother is not better, but i am in a hoping humour just now, and i cannot help hoping that we shall all see happier days. the bells are just now ringing for the taking of the _cape of good hope_. "i have written to mrs. coleridge to tell her that her husband is at naples. your brother slightly named his being there, but he did not say that he had heard from him himself. charles is very busy at the office; he will be kept there to-day till seven or eight o'clock; and he came home very _smoky and drinky_ last night, so that i am afraid a hard day's work will not agree very well with him. "o dear! what shall i say next? why, this i will say next, that i wish you was with me; i have been eating a mutton chop all alone, and i have just been looking in the pint porter-pot which i find quite empty, and yet i am still very dry. if you was with me, we would have a glass of brandy and water; but it is quite impossible to drink brandy and water by one's-self; therefore, i must wait with patience till the kettle boils. i hate to drink tea alone, it is worse than dining alone. we have got a fresh cargo of biscuits from captain burney's. i have---- "may .--here i was interrupted, and a long, tedious interval has intervened, during which i have had neither time nor inclination to write a word. the lodging, that pride of your heart and mine, is given up, and _here he is again_--charles, i mean--as unsettled and undetermined as ever. when he went to the poor lodging after the holidays i told you he had taken, he could not endure the solitariness of them, and i had no rest for the sole of my foot till i promised to believe his solemn protestations that he could and would write as well at home as there. do you believe this? "i have no power over charles; he will do what he will do. but i ought to have some little influence over myself; and, therefore, i am most manfully resolving to turn over a new leaf with my own mind. your visit, though not a very comfortable one to yourself, has been of great use to me. i set you up in my fancy as a kind of _thing_ that takes an interest in my concerns; and i hear you talking to me, and arguing the matter very learnedly when i give way to despondency. you shall hear a good account of me and the progress i make in altering my fretful temper to a calm and quiet one. it is but once being thorowly convinced one is wrong, to make one resolve to do so no more; and i know my dismal faces have been almost as great a drawback upon charles's comfort, as his feverish, teazing ways have been upon mine. our love for each other has been the torment of our lives hitherto. i am most seriously intending to bend the whole force of my mind to counteract this, and i think i see some prospect of success. "of charles ever bringing any work to pass at home, i am very doubtful; and of the farce succeeding, i have little or no hope; but if i could once get into the way of being chearful myself, i should see an easy remedy in leaving town and living cheaply, almost wholly alone; but till i do find we really are comfortable alone, and by ourselves, it seems a dangerous experiment. we shall certainly stay where we are till after next christmas; and in the meantime, as i told you before, all my whole thoughts shall be to _change_ myself into just such a chearful soul as you would be in a lone house, with no companion but your brother, if you had nothing to vex you; nor no means of wandering after _curse-a-rats_. do write soon; though i write all about myself, i am thinking all the while of you, and i am uneasy at the length of time it seems since i heard from you. your mother and mr. white is running continually in my head; and this _second winter_ makes me think how cold, damp, and forlorn your solitary house will feel to you. i would your feet were perched up again on our fender." ... if ever a woman knew how to keep on the right side of that line which, in the close companionship of daily life is so hard to find, the line that separates an honest faithful friend from "a torment of a monitor," and could divine when and how to lend a man a helping hand against his own foibles, and when to forbear and wait patiently, that woman was mary lamb. times were changed indeed since lamb could speak of himself as "alone, obscure, without a friend." now friends and acquaintance thronged round him, till rest and quiet were almost banished from his fire-side; and though they were banished for the most part by social pleasures he dearly loved--hearty, simple, intellectual pleasures--the best of talk, with no ceremony and the least of expense, yet they had to be paid for by mary and himself in fevered nerves, in sleep curtailed and endless interruptions to work. there were, besides, "social harpies who preyed on him for his liquors," whom he lacked firmness to shake off, in spite of those "dismal faces" consequent in mary, of which she penitently accuses herself. apart from external distractions, the effort to write, especially any sort of task work, was often so painful to his irritable nerves that, as he said, it almost "teazed him into a fever," whilst mary's anxious love and close sympathy made his distress her own. there is a letter to godwin deprecating any appearance of unfriendliness in having failed to review his _life of chaucer_, containing a passage on this subject, which the lover of lamb's writings and character (and who is one must needs be the other) will ponder with peculiar interest:-- "you, by long habits of composition, and a greater command over your own powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which i (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose. any work which i take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to torment, _e.g._ when i have undertaken, as three or four times i have, a schoolboy copy of verses for merchant taylors' boys at a guinea a copy, i have fretted over them in perfect inability to do them, and have made my sister wretched with my wretchedness for a week together. as to reviewing, in particular, my head is so whimsical a head that i cannot, after reading another man's book, let it have been never so pleasing, give any account of it in any methodical way. i cannot follow his train. something like this you must have perceived of me in conversation. ten thousand times i have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember, in any comprehensive way, what i read. i can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle at _parts,_ but i cannot grasp a whole. this infirmity may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find any story.... if i bring you a crude, wretched paper on sunday, you must burn it and forgive me; if it proves anything better than i predict, may it be a peace-offering of sweet incense between us." the two friends whose society was always soothing, were far away now. coleridge, who could always 'wind them up and set them going again,' as mary said, was still wandering they knew not where on the continent, and manning had, at last, carried out a long-cherished scheme and gone to china for four years which, however, stretched to twelve, as lamb prophesied it would. "i didn't know what your going was till i shook a last fist with you," says lamb, "and then 'twas just like having shaken hands with a wretch on the fatal scaffold, for when you are down the ladder you never can stretch out to him again. mary says you are dead, and there's nothing to do but to leave it to time to do for us in the end what it always does for those who mourn for people in such a case: but she'll see by your letter you are not quite dead. a little kicking and agony, and then--martin burney _took me out_ a walking that evening, and we talked of manning, and then i came home and smoked for you; and at twelve o'clock came home mary and monkey louisa from the play, and there was more talk and more smoking, and they all seemed first-rate characters because they knew a certain person. but what's the use of talking about 'em? by the time you'll have made your escape from the kalmucks, you'll have stayed so long i shall never be able to bring to your mind who mary was, who will have died about a year before, nor who the holcrofts were. me, perhaps, you will mistake for phillips, or confound me with mr. dawe, because you saw us together. mary, whom you seem to remember yet, is not quite easy that she had not a formal parting from you. i wish it had so happened. but you must bring her a token, a shawl or something, and remember a sprightly little mandarin for our mantel-piece as a companion to the child i am going to purchase at the museum.... o manning, i am serious to sinking almost, when i think that all those evenings which you have made so pleasant are gone perhaps for ever.... i will nurse the remembrance of your steadiness and quiet which used to infuse something like itself into our nervous minds. mary used to call you our ventilator." mary's next letters to miss stoddart continue to fulfil her promise of writing a kind of journal:-- "june nd. "you say truly that i have sent you too many make-believe letters. i do not mean to serve you so again if i can help it. i have been very ill for some days past with the tooth-ache. yesterday i had it drawn, and i feel myself greatly relieved, but far from being easy, for my head and my jaws still ache; and being unable to do any business, i would wish to write you a long letter to atone for my former offences; but i feel so languid that i fear wishing is all i can do. "i am sorry you are so worried with business, and i am still more sorry for your sprained ancle. you ought not to walk upon it. what is the matter between you and your good-natured maid you used to boast of? and what the devil is the matter with your aunt? you say she is discontented. you must bear with them as well as you can, for doubtless it is your poor mother's teazing that puts you all out of sorts. i pity you from my heart. "we cannot come to see you this summer, nor do i think it advisable to come and incommode you when you for the same expense could come to us. whenever you feel yourself disposed to run away from your troubles, come to us again. i wish it was not such a long, expensive journey, and then you could run backwards and forwards every month or two. i am very sorry you still hear nothing from mr. white. i am afraid that is all at an end. what do you intend to do about mr. turner?... william hazlitt, the brother of him you know, is in town. i believe you have heard us say we like him. he came in good time, for the loss of manning made charles very dull, and he likes hazlitt better than anybody, except manning. my tooth-ache has moped charles to death; you know how he hates to see people ill.... "when i write again, you will hear tidings of the farce, for charles is to go in a few days to the managers to inquire about it. but that must now be a next year's business too, even if it does succeed, so it's all looking forward and no prospect of present gain. but that's better than no hopes at all, either for present or future times.... charles smokes still, and will smoke to the end of the chapter. martin [burney] has just been here. my _tales_ (_again_) and charles' farce have made the boy mad to turn author, and he has made the _winter's tale_ into a story; but what charles says of himself is really true of martin, for he can _make nothing at all of it_, and i have been talking very eloquently this morning to convince him that nobody can write farces, &c. under thirty years of age; and so, i suppose, he will go home and new-model his farce. "what is mr. turner, and what is likely to come of him? and how do you like him? and what do you intend to do about it? i almost wish you to remain single till your mother dies, and then come and live with us, and we would either get you a husband, or teach you how to live comfortably without. i think i should like to have you always, to the end of our lives, living with us; and i do not know any reason why that should not be, except for the great fancy you seem to have for marrying, which after all is but a hazardous kind of affair; but, however, do as you like; every man knows best what pleases himself best. "i have known many single men i should have liked in my life (_if it had suited them_) for a husband; but very few husbands have i ever wished was mine, which is rather against the state in general; but one never is disposed to envy wives their good husbands. so much for marrying--but, however, get married if you can. "i say we shall not come and see you, and i feel sure we shall not; but if some sudden freak was to come into our wayward heads, could you at all manage? your mother we should not mind, but i think still it would be so vastly inconvenient. i am certain we shall not come, and yet _you_ may tell me when you write if it would be horribly inconvenient if we did; and do not tell me any lies, but say truly whether you would rather we did or not. "god bless you, my dearest sarah! i wish for your sake i could have written a very amusing letter; but do not scold, for my head aches sadly. don't mind my head-ache, for before you get this it will be well, being only from the pains of my jaws and teeth. farewell." "july nd. "charles and hazlitt are going to sadler's wells, and i am amusing myself in their absence with reading a manuscript of hazlitt's, but have laid it down to write a few lines to tell you how we are going on. charles has begged a month's hollidays, of which this is the first day, and they are all to be spent at home. we thank you for your kind invitations, and were half-inclined to come down to you; but after mature deliberation, and many wise consultations--such as you know we often hold--we came to the resolution of staying quietly at home, and during the hollidays we are both of us to set stoutly to work and finish the tales. we thought if we went anywhere and left them undone, they would lay upon our minds, and that when we returned we should feel unsettled, and our money all spent besides; and next summer we are to be very rich, and then we can afford a long journey somewhere; i will not say to salisbury, because i really think it is better for you to come to us. but of that we will talk another time. "the best news i have to send you is that the farce is accepted; that is to say, the manager has written to say it shall be brought out when an opportunity serves. i hope that it may come out by next christmas. you must come and see it the first night; for if it succeeds it will be a great pleasure to you, and if it should not we shall want your consolation; so you must come. "i shall soon have done my work, and know not what to begin next. now, will you set your brains to work and invent a story, either for a short child's story, or a long one that would make a kind of novel, or a story that would make a play. charles wants me to write a play, but i am not over-anxious to set about it. but, seriously, will you draw me out a sketch of a story, either from memory of anything you have read, or from your own invention, and i will fill it up in some way or other.... "i met mrs. fenwick at mrs. holcroft's the other day. she looked placid and smiling, but i was so disconcerted that i hardly knew how to sit upon my chair. she invited us to come and see her, but we did not invite her in return, and nothing at all was said in an explanatory sort, so that matter rests for the present." [perhaps the little imbroglio was the result of some effort on mary's part to diminish the frequency of the undesirable mr. fenwick's visits. he was a good-for-nothing; but his wife's name deserves to be remembered because she nursed mary wollstonecraft tenderly and devotedly in her last illness.] "i am sorry you are altogether so uncomfortable; i shall be glad to hear you are settled at salisbury: that must be better than living in a lone house companionless, as you are. i wish you could afford to bring your mother up to london, but that is quite impossible. mrs. wordsworth is brought to bed, and i ought to write to miss wordsworth and thank her for the information, but i suppose i shall defer it till another child is coming. i do so hate writing letters. i wish all my friends would come and live in town. it is not my dislike to writing letters that prevents my writing to you, but sheer want of time, i assure you, because you care not how stupidly i write so as you do but hear at the time what we are about. "let me hear from you soon, and do let me hear some good news, and don't let me hear of your walking with sprained ancles again; no business is an excuse for making yourself lame. "i hope your poor mother is better, and aunty and maid jog on pretty well; remember me to them all in due form and order. charles's love and our best wishes that all your little busy affairs may come to a prosperous conclusion." "friday evening. "they (hazlitt and charles) came home from sadler's wells so dismal and dreary dull on friday evening, that i gave them both a good scolding, _quite a setting to rights_; and i think it has done some good, for charles has been very chearful ever since. i begin to hope the _home hollidays_ will go on very well. write directly, for i am uneasy about your _lovers_; i wish something was settled. god bless you." ... sarah's lovers continued a source of lively if 'uneasy' interest to mary. the enterprising young lady had now another string to her bow; indeed, matters this time went so far that the question of settlements was raised and mary wrote a letter in which her "advising spirit" shows itself as wise as it was unobtrusive, as candid as it was tolerant. dr. stoddart clearly estimated her judgment and tact, after his fashion, as highly as coleridge and wordsworth did after theirs. mary wrote:-- "october . "i thank you a thousand times for the beautiful work you have sent me. i received the parcel from a strange gentleman yesterday. i like the patterns very much. you have quite set me up in finery; but you should have sent the silk handkerchief too; will you make a parcel of that and send it by the salisbury coach? i should like to have it in a few days, because we have not yet been to mr. babb's, and that handkerchief would suit this time of year nicely. i have received a long letter from your brother on the subject of your intended marriage. i have no doubt but you also have one on this business, therefore it is needless to repeat what he says. i am well pleased to find that, upon the whole, he does not seem to see it in an unfavourable light. he says that if mr. dowling is a worthy man he shall have no objection to become the brother of a farmer; and he makes an odd request to me, that i shall set out to salisbury to look at and examine into the merits of the said mr. d., and speaks very confidently as if you would abide by my determination. a pretty sort of an office truly! shall i come? the objections he starts are only such as you and i have already talked over--such as the difference in age, education, habits of life, &c. "you have gone too far in this affair for any interference to be at all desirable; and if you had not, i really do not know what my wishes would be. when you bring mr. dowling at christmas, i suppose it will be quite time enough for me to sit in judgment upon him; but my examination will not be a very severe one. if you fancy a very young man, and he likes an elderly gentlewoman, if he likes a learned and accomplished lady, and you like a not very learned youth, who may need a little polishing, which probably he will never acquire; it is all very well, and god bless you both together, and may you be both very long in the same mind! "i am to assist you too, your brother says, in drawing up the marriage settlements, another thankful office! i am not, it seems, to suffer you to keep too much money in your own power, and yet i am to take care of you in case of bankruptcy; and i am to recommend to you, for the better management of this point, the serious perusal of _jeremy taylor_, his opinion on the marriage state, especially his advice against _separate interests_ in that happy state; and i am also to tell you how desirable it is that the husband should have the entire direction of all money concerns, except, as your good brother adds, in the case of his own family, when the money, he observes, is very properly deposited in mrs. stoddart's hands, she being better suited to enjoy such a trust than any other woman, and therefore it is fit that the general rule should not be extended to her. "we will talk over these things when you come to town; and as to settlements, which are matters of which i--i never having had a penny in my own disposal--never in my life thought of; and if i had been blessed with a good fortune, and that marvellous blessing to boot, a good husband, i verily believe i should have crammed it all uncounted into his pocket. but thou hast a cooler head of thine own, and i daresay will do exactly what is expedient and proper; but your brother's opinion seems somewhat like mr. barwis's, and i daresay you will take it into due consideration; yet, perhaps, an offer of your own money to take a farm may make _uncle_ do less for his nephew, and in that case mr. d. might be a loser by your generosity. weigh all these things well, and if you can so contrive it, let your brother _settle_ the _settlements_ himself when he returns, which will most probably be long before you want them. "you are settled, it seems, in the very house which your brother most dislikes. if you find this house very inconvenient, get out of it as fast as you can, for your brother says he sent you the fifty pounds to make you comfortable; and by the general tone of his letter i am sure he wishes to make you easy in money matters; therefore, why straiten yourself to pay the debt you owe him, which i am well assured he never means to take? thank you for the letter, and for the picture of pretty little chubby nephew john. i have been busy making waiskoats and plotting new work to succeed the _tales_; as yet i have not hit upon anything to my mind. "charles took an emendated copy of his farce to mr. wroughton, the manager, yesterday. mr. wroughton was very friendly to him, and expressed high approbation of the farce; but there are two, he tells him, to come out before it; yet he gave him hopes that it will come out this season; but i am afraid you will not see it by christmas. it will do for another jaunt for you in the spring. we are pretty well and in fresh spirits about this farce. charles has been very good lately in the matter of _smoking_. "when you come bring the gown you wish to sell, mrs. coleridge will be in town then, and if she happens not to fancy it, perhaps some other person may. "coleridge, i believe, is gone home, he left us with that design; but we have not heard from him this fortnight.... "my respects to coridon, mother, and aunty. farewell. my best wishes are with you. "when i saw what a prodigious quantity of work you had put into the finery, i was quite ashamed of my unreasonable request. i will never serve you so again, but i do dearly love worked muslin." so coleridge was come back at last. "he is going to turn lecturer, on taste, at the royal institution," charles tells manning. and the farce came out and failed. "we are pretty stout about it," he says to wordsworth; "but, after all, we had rather it had succeeded. you will see the prologue in most of the morning papers. it was received with such shouts as i never witnessed to a prologue. it was attempted to be encored. how hard!--a thing i merely did as a task, because it was wanted, and set no great store by; and _mr. h._!! the number of friends we had in the house, my brother and i being in public offices, was astonishing, but they yielded at length to a few hisses. a hundred hisses! (d--n the word, i write it like kisses--how different!) a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. the former come more directly from the heart. well 'tis withdrawn and there is an end. better luck to us." sarah's visit came to pass, and proved an eventful one to her. for at the lambs she now saw frequently their new friend, quite another william than he of "english partridge memory," william hazlitt; and the intercourse between them soon drifted into a queer kind of courtship, and finally the courtship into marriage. mary's next letters give piquant glimpses of the wayward course of their love-making. if her sympathies had been ready and unfailing in the case of the unknown lovers, messrs. white, dowling, turner, and mysterious _curse-a-rat_, this was an affair of deep and heartfelt interest:-- "oct. . "i am two letters in your debt, but it has not been so much from idleness, as a wish to see how your comical love affair would turn out. you know i make a pretence not to interfere, but like all old maids i feel a mighty solicitude about the event of love stories. i learn from the lover that he has not been so remiss in his duty as you supposed. his effusion, and your complaints of his inconstancy, crossed each other on the road. he tells me his was a very strange letter, and that probably it has affronted you. that it was a strange letter i can readily believe; but that you were affronted by a strange letter is not so easy for me to conceive, that not being your way of taking things. but, however it may be, let some answer come either to him or else to me, showing cause why you do not answer him. and pray, by all means, preserve the said letter, that i may one day have the pleasure of seeing how mr. hazlitt treats of love. "i was at your brother's on thursday. mrs. stoddart tells me she has not written, because she does not like to put you to the expense of postage. they are very well. little missy thrives amazingly. mrs. stoddart conjectures she is in the family-way again, and those kind of conjectures generally prove too true. your other sister-in-law, mrs. hazlitt, was brought to bed last week of a boy, so that you are likely to have plenty of nephews and nieces. yesterday evening we were at rickman's, and who should we find there but hazlitt; though if you do not know it was his first invitation there, it will not surprise you as much as it did us. we were very much pleased, because we dearly love our friends to be respected by our friends. the most remarkable events of the evening were, that we had a very fine pine apple, that mr. phillips, mr. lamb, and mr. hazlitt played at cribbage in the most polite and gentlemanly manner possible, and that i won two rubbers at whist. "i am glad aunty left you some business to do. our compliments to her and to your mother. is it as cold at winterslow as it is here? how do the lions go on? i am better, and charles is tolerably well. godwin's new tragedy [antonio] will probably be damned the latter end of next week [which it was]. charles has written the prologue. prologues and epilogues will be his death. if you know the extent of mrs. reynolds' poverty, you will be glad to hear mr. norris has got ten pounds a year for her from the temple society. she will be able to make out pretty well now. "farewell. determine as wisely as you can in regard to hazlitt, and if your determination is to have him, heaven send you many happy years together. if i am not mistaken i have concluded letters on the corydon courtship with this same wish. i hope it is not ominous of change; for, if i were sure you would not be quite starved to death nor beaten to a mummy, i should like to see hazlitt and you come together if (as charles observes) it were only for the joke's sake. write instantly to me." "dec. . "i have deferred answering your last letter in hopes of being able to give you some intelligence that might be useful to you; for i every day expected that hazlitt or you would communicate the affair to your brother; but as the doctor is silent upon the subject, i conclude he knows nothing of the matter. you desire my advice, and therefore i tell you i think you ought to tell your brother as soon as possible; for, at present, he is on very friendly visiting terms with hazlitt and, if he is not offended by too long concealment, will do everything in his power to serve you. if you chuse that i should tell him i will; but i think it would come better from you. if you can persuade hazlitt to mention it, that would be still better; for i know your brother would be unwilling to give credit to you, because you deceived yourself in regard to corydon. hazlitt, i know, is shy of speaking first; but i think it of such great importance to you to have your brother friendly in the business that, if you can overcome his reluctance, it would be a great point gained. for you must begin the world with ready money--at least an hundred pounds; for if you once go into furnished lodgings, you will never be able to lay by money to buy furniture. if you obtain your brother's approbation he might assist you, either by lending or otherwise. i have a great opinion of his generosity, where he thinks it would be useful. "hazlitt's brother is mightily pleased with the match, but he says you must have furniture, and be clear in the world at first setting out, or you will be always behind-hand. he also said he would give you what furniture he could spare. i am afraid you can bring but few things away from your own house. what a pity that you have laid out so much money on your cottage, that money would just have done. i most heartily congratulate you on having so well got over your first difficulties; and now that it is quite settled, let us have no more fears. i now mean not only to hope and wish but to persuade myself that you will be very happy together. endeavour to keep your mind as easy as you can. you ought to begin the world with a good stock of health and spirits; it is quite as necessary as ready money at first setting out. do not teize yourself about coming to town. when your brother learns how things are going on, we shall consult him about meetings and so forth; but at present, any hasty step of that kind would not answer, i know. if hazlitt were to go down to salisbury, or you were to come up here without consulting your brother, you know it would never do. charles is just come into dinner: he desires his love and best wishes." perhaps the reader will, like mary, be curious to see one of the lover's letters in this "comical love affair." fortunately one, the very one, it seems, which sarah's crossed and was preserved at mary's particular request, is given in the hazlitt _memoirs_ and runs thus:-- "my dear love, "above a week has passed and i have received no letter--not one of those letters 'in which i live or have no life at all.' what is become of you? are you married, hearing that i was dead (for so it has been reported)? or are you gone into a nunnery? or are you fallen in love with some of the amorous heroes of boccaccio? which of them is it? is it chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a lover, and learned to spell by the force of beauty? or with lorenzo the lover of isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does me), who was a merchant's clerk? or with federigo alberigi, an honest gentleman who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he had left of getting a dinner for himself? this last is the man; and i am the more persuaded of it because i think i won your good liking myself by giving you an entertainment--of sausages, when i had no money to buy them with. nay now, never deny it! did not i ask your consent that very night after, and did you not give it? well, i should be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants if i did not know that a living dog is better than a dead lion; though now i think of it boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers; it is his women who are so delicious. i almost wish i had lived in those times and had been a little _more amiable_. now if a woman had written the book, it would not have had this effect upon me: the men would have been heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all. isn't there some truth in that? talking of departed loves, i met my old flame the other day in the street. i did dream of her _one_ night since, and only one: every other night i have had the same dream i have had for these two months past. now if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you. "_thursday morning_.--the book is come. when i saw it i thought that you had sent it back in a huff, tired out by my sauciness and _coldness_ and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes, or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some fresh-looking rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised and pleased i was to find them all done. i liked your note as well or better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue as you ought to write after the _provocation_ you had received. i would not give a pin for a girl 'whose cheeks never tingle,' nor for myself if i could not make them tingle sometimes. now though i am always writing to you about 'lips and noses' and such sort of stuff, yet as i sit by my fireside (which i generally do eight or ten hours a day) i oftener think of you in a serious sober light. for indeed i never love you so well as when i think of sitting down with you to dinner on a boiled scrag of mutton and hot potatoes. you please my fancy more then than when i think of you in ----; no, you would never forgive me if i were to finish the sentence. now i think of it, what do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? but it does not much matter! i wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing will be better than 'the same air and look with which at first my heart was took.' but now to business. i mean soon to call upon your brother _in form_, namely, as soon as i get quite well, which i hope to do in about another _fortnight_; and then i hope you will come up by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you, for i long mightily to be in your ladyship's presence to vindicate my character. i think you had better sell the small house, i mean that at £ s., and i will borrow £ , so that we shall set off merrily in spite of all the prudence of edinburgh. "good-bye, little dear!" poor sarah! that "want of a certain dignity of action," nay, of a due "respect for herself," which mary lamented in her, had been discovered but too quickly by her lover and reflected back, as it was sure to be, in his attitude towards her. charles, also, as an interested and amused spectator of the unique love-affair, reports progress to manning in a letter of feb. th, :-- "mary is very thankful for your remembrance of her; and with the least suspicion of mercenariness, as the silk, the _symbolum materiale_ of your friendship, has not yet appeared. i think horace says somewhere _nox longa_. i would not impute negligence or unhandsome delays to a person whom you have honoured with your confidence; but i have not heard of the silk or of mr. knox save by your letter. may be he expects the first advances! or it may be that he has not succeeded in getting the article on shore, for it is among the _res prohibitæ et non nisi smuggle-ationis viâ fruendæ_. but so it is, in the friendships between _wicked men_ the very expressions of their good-will cannot but be sinful. a treaty of marriage is on foot between william hazlitt and miss stoddart. something about settlements only retards it. she has somewhere about £ a year, to be £ when her mother dies. he has no settlement except what he can claim from the parish. _pauper est tamen, sed amat._ the thing is therefore in abeyance. but there is love a-both sides." in the same month mary wrote sarah a letter showing she was alive to the fact that a courtship which appeared to on-lookers, if not to the lover himself, much in the light of a good joke, was not altogether a re-assuring commencement of so serious an affair as marriage. she had her misgivings, and no wonder, as to how far the easy-going, comfort-loving, matter-of-fact sarah, was fit for the difficult happiness of life-long companionship with a man of ardent genius and morbid, splenetic temperament, to whom ideas were meat drink and clothing, while the tangible entities bearing those names were likely to be precariously supplied. still mary liked both the lovers so well she could not choose but that hope should preponderate over fear. meeting as they did by the lambs' fireside, each saw the other to the best advantage. for, in the glow of mary's sympathy and faith and the fine stimulating atmosphere of charles' genius, hazlitt's shyness had first melted away; his thoughts had broken the spell of self-distrust that kept them pent in uneasy silence and had learned to flow forth in a strong and brilliant current, whilst the lowering frown which so often clouded his handsome, eager face was wont to clear off. there, too, sarah's unaffected good sense and hearty, friendly nature had free play, and perhaps mary's friendship even reflected on her a tinge of the ideal to veil the coarser side of her character:-- "i have sent your letter and drawing" [of middleton cottage, winterslow, where sarah was living], mary writes, "off to wem [hazlitt's father's in shropshire], where i conjecture hazlitt is. he left town on saturday afternoon without telling us where he was going. he seemed very impatient at not hearing from you. he was very ill, and i suppose is gone home to his father's to be nursed. i find hazlitt has mentioned to you the intention which we had of asking you up to town, which we were bent on doing; but, having named it since to your brother, the doctor expressed a strong desire that you should not come to town to be at any other house but his own, for he said it would have a very strange appearance. his wife's father is coming to be with them till near the end of april, after which time he shall have full room for you. and if you are to be married he wishes that you should be married with all the proper decorums _from his house_. now though we should be most willing to run any hazards of disobliging him if there were no other means of your and hazlitt's meeting, yet as he seems so friendly to the match it would not be worth while to alienate him from you and ourselves too, for the slight accommodation which the difference of a few weeks would make; provided always, and be it understood, that if you and h. make up your minds to be married before the time in which you can be at your brother's, our house stands open and most ready at a moment's notice to receive you. only we would not quarrel unnecessarily with your brother. let there be a clear necessity shown and we will quarrel with anybody's brother. "now, though i have written to the above effect, i hope you will not conceive but that both my brother and i had looked forward to your coming with unmixed pleasure, and are really disappointed at your brother's declaration; for, next to the pleasure of being married, is the pleasure of making or helping marriages forward. "we wish to hear from you that you do not take our seeming change of purpose in ill part, for it is but seeming on our part, for it was my brother's suggestion, by him first mentioned to hazlitt, and cordially approved by me; but your brother has set his face against it, and it is better to take him along with us in our plans, if he will good-naturedly go along with us, than not. "the reason i have not written lately has been that i thought it better to leave you all to the workings of your own minds in this momentous affair, in which the inclinations of a bystander have a right to form a wish, but not to give a vote. "being, with the help of wide lines, at the end of my last page, i conclude with our kind wishes and prayers for the best." the wedding day was fixed, and mary was to be bridesmaid. "do not be angry that i have not written to you," she says. "i have promised your brother to be at your wedding, and that favour you must accept as an atonement for my offences. you have been in no want of correspondence lately, and i wished to leave you both to your own inventions. "the border you are working for me i prize at a very high rate, because i consider it as the last work you can do for me, the time so fast approaching that you must no longer work for your friends. yet my old fault of giving away presents has not left me, and i am desirous of even giving away this your last gift. i had intended to have given it away without your knowledge, but i have intrusted my secret to hazlitt and i suppose it will not remain a secret long, so i condescend to consult you. "it is to miss hazlitt to whose superior claim i wish to give up my right to this precious worked border. her brother william is her great favourite and she would be pleased to possess his bride's last work. are you not to give the fellow border to one sister-in-law, and therefore has she not a just claim to it? i never heard, in the annals of weddings (since the days of nausicaa, and she only washed her old gowns for that purpose) that the brides ever furnished the apparel of their maids. besides i can be completely clad in your work without it; for the spotted muslin will serve both for cap and hat (_nota bene_, my hat is the same as yours), and the gown you sprigged for me has never been made up, therefore i can wear that--or, if you like better, i will make up a new silk which manning has sent me from china. manning would like to hear i wore it for the first time at your wedding. it is a very pretty light colour, but there is an objection (besides not being your work, and that is a very serious objection), and that is, mrs. hazlitt tells me that all winterslow would be in an uproar if the bridesmaid was to be dressed in anything but white, and although it is a very light colour, i confess we cannot call it white, being a sort of dead-whiteish bloom colour. then silk, perhaps, in a morning is not so proper, though the occasion, so joyful, might justify a full dress. determine for me in this perplexity between the sprig and the china-manning silk. but do not contradict my whim about miss hazlitt having the border, for i have set my heart upon the matter. if you agree with me in this, i shall think you have forgiven me for giving away your pin--that was a _mad_ trick; but i had many obligations and no money. i repent me of the deed, wishing i had it now to send to miss h. with the border; and i cannot, will not give her the doctor's pin, for having never had any presents from gentlemen in my young days, i highly prize all they now give me, thinking my latter days are better than my former. "you must send this same border in your own name to miss hazlitt, which will save me the disgrace of giving away your gift, and make it amount merely to a civil refusal. "i shall have no present to give you on your marriage, nor do i expect i shall be rich enough to give anything to baby at the first christening; but at the second or third child's, i hope to have a coral or so to spare out of my own earnings. do not ask me to be godmother, for i have an objection to that; but there is, i believe, no serious duties attaching to a bridesmaid, therefore i come with a willing mind, bringing nothing with me but many wishes, and not a few hopes, and a very little fear of happy years to come." if, as may be hoped, the final decision was in favour of the 'dead-whiteish-bloom-china-manning' silk the winterslow folk were spared all painful emotions on the subject, as the wedding took place at st. andrew's, holborn (may-day morning, ), dr. and mrs. stoddart and charles and mary lamb the chief, perhaps the only guests. the comedy of the courtship merging into the solemnity of marriage was the very occasion to put lamb into one of his wildest moods; "i had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony," he confessed to southey afterwards. "anything awful makes me laugh. i misbehaved once at a funeral. yet can i read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. the realities of life only seem the mockeries." chapter x. _mrs. leicester's school_.--a removal.--_poetry for children_. - .--Æt. - . the _tales from shakespeare_ were no sooner finished than mary began, as her letters show, to cast about for some new scheme which should realise an equally felicitous and profitable result. this time she drew upon her own invention: and in about a year a little volume of tales for children was written, called _mrs. leicester's school_, to which charles also contributed. the stories, ten in number, seven by mary and three by her brother, are strung on a connecting thread by means of an introductory dedication to the young ladies at amwell school, who are supposed to beguile the dreariness of the first evening at a new school by each telling the story of her own life, at the suggestion of a friendly governess who constitutes herself their "historiographer." there is little or no invention in these tales; but a "tenderness of feeling and a delicacy of taste"--the praise is coleridge's--which lift them quite above the ordinary level of children's stories. and in no way are these qualities shown more than in the treatment of the lights and shades--the failings and the virtues--of the little folk, which appear in due and natural proportion; but the faults are treated in a kindly, indulgent spirit, not spitefully enhanced as foils to shining virtue, after the manner of some even of the best writers for children. there are no unlovely impersonations of naughtiness pure and simple, nor any equally unloveable patterns of priggish perfection. but the sweetest touches are in the portrayal of the attitude of a very young mind towards death, affecting from its very incapacity for grief, or indeed for any kind of realisation, as in this story of _elizabeth villiers_ for instance:-- "the first thing i can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet from the letters on a tombstone that stood at the head of my mother's grave. i used to tap at my father's study door: i think i now hear him say, 'who is there? what do you want, little girl?' 'go and see mamma. go and learn pretty letters.' many times in the day would my father lay aside his books and his papers to lead me to this spot, and make me point to the letters, and then set me to spell syllables and words: in this manner, the epitaph on my mother's tomb being my primer and my spelling-book, i learned to read. "i was one day sitting on a step placed across the churchyard stile, when a gentleman passing by heard me distinctly repeat the letters which formed my mother's name and then say _elizabeth villiers_ with a firm tone as if i had performed some great matter. this gentleman was my uncle james, my mother's brother: he was a lieutenant in the navy, and had left england a few weeks after the marriage of my father and mother, and now returned home from a long sea-voyage, he was coming to visit my mother--no tidings of her decease having reached him, though she had been dead more than a twelvemonth. "when my uncle saw me sitting on the stile, and heard me pronounce my mother's name, he looked earnestly in my face and began to fancy a resemblance to his sister, and to think i might be her child. i was too intent on my employment to notice him, and went spelling on. 'who has taught you to spell so prettily, my little maid?' said my uncle. 'mamma,' i replied; for i had an idea that the words on the tombstone were somehow a part of mamma, and that she had taught me. 'and who is mamma?' asked my uncle. 'elizabeth villiers,' i replied; and then my uncle called me his dear little niece and said he would go with me to mamma: he took hold of my hand intending to lead me home, delighted that he had found out who i was, because he imagined it would be such a pleasant surprise to his sister to see her little daughter bringing home her long-lost sailor uncle. "i agreed to take him to mamma, but we had a dispute about the way thither. my uncle was for going along the road which led directly up to our house: i pointed to the churchyard and said that was the way to mamma. though impatient of any delay he was not willing to contest the point with his new relation; therefore he lifted me over the stile, and was then going to take me along the path to a gate he knew was at the end of our garden; but no, i would not go that way neither: letting go his hand i said, 'you do not know the way--i will show you'; and making what haste i could among the long grass and thistles, and jumping over the low graves, he said, as he followed what he called my _wayward steps_-- "'what a positive little soul this niece of mine is! i knew the way to your mother's house before you were born, child.' at last i stopped at my mother's grave, and pointing to the tombstone said 'here is mamma!' in a voice of exultation as if i had now convinced him i knew the way best. i looked up in his face to see him acknowledge his mistake; but oh! what a face of sorrow did i see! i was so frightened that i have but an imperfect recollection of what followed. i remember i pulled his coat, and cried 'sir! sir!' and tried to move him. i knew not what to do. my mind was in a strange confusion; i thought i had done something wrong in bringing the gentleman to mamma to make him cry so sadly, but what it was i could not tell. this grave had always been a scene of delight to me. in the house my father would often be weary of my prattle and send me from him; but here he was all my own. i might say anything and be as frolicsome as i pleased here; all was cheerfulness and good humour in our visits to mamma, as we called it. my father would tell me how quietly mamma slept there, and that he and his little betsy would one day sleep beside mamma in that grave; and when i went to bed, as i laid my little head on the pillow i used to wish i was sleeping in the grave with my papa and mamma, and in my childish dreams i used to fancy myself there; and it was a place within the ground, all smooth and soft and green. i never made out any figure of mamma, but still it was the tombstone and papa and the smooth green grass, and my head resting on the elbow of my father.".... in the story called _the father's wedding day_, the same strain of feeling is developed in a somewhat different way, but with a like truth. landor praised it with such genial yet whimsical extravagance as almost defeats itself, in a letter to crabb robinson written in :--"it is now several days since i read the book you recommended to me, _mrs. leicester's school_, and i feel as if i owed you a debt in deferring to thank you for many hours of exquisite delight. never have i read anything in prose so many times over within so short a space of time as _the father's wedding day_. most people, i understand, prefer the first tale--in truth a very admirable one--but others could have written it. show me the man or woman, modern or ancient, who could have written this one sentence: 'when i was dressed in my new frock, i wished poor mamma was alive, to see how fine i was on papa's wedding day; and i ran to my favorite station at her bedroom door.' how natural in a little girl is this incongruity--this impossibility! richardson would have given his clarissa and rousseau his heloïse to have imagined it. a fresh source of the pathetic bursts out before us, and not a bitter one. if your germans can show us anything comparable to what i have transcribed, i would almost undergo a year's gurgle of their language for it. the story is admirable throughout--incomparable, inimitable." the second tale,--_louisa manners, or the farm house_, has already been spoken of (p. ); for in louisa's pretty prattle we have a reminiscence of mary's happiest childish days among "the brutons and the gladmans" in hertfordshire; and in _margaret green, or the young mahometan_ (pp. - ), of her more sombre experiences with grandmother field at blakesware. the tales contributed by charles lamb are _maria howe, or the effect of witch stories_, which contains a weird and wonderful portrait of aunt hetty; _susan yates, or first going to church_ (see pp. - ), and _arabella hardy, or the sea voyage_. it may be worth noting that mary signs her little prelude, the _dedication to the young ladies_, with the initials of her boy-favourite martin burney; a pretty indication of affection for him. many years after the appearance of _mrs. leicester's school_, coleridge said to allsop: "it at once soothes and amuses me to think--nay, to know--that the time will come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, mary lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent english literature; and i cannot help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses, novels, romances, poems, histories, and dense political economy quartos which, compared with _mrs. leicester's school_, will be remembered as often and prized as highly as wilkie's and glover's _epics_ and lord bolingbroke's _philosophics_ compared with _robinson crusoe_." but a not unimportant question is--what have the little folk thought? the answer is incontrovertible. the first edition sold out immediately, and four more were called for in the course of five years. it has continued in fair demand ever since; though there have not been anything like so many recent reprints as of the _tales from shakespeare_. it is one of those children's books which to re-open in after life is like revisiting some sunny old garden, some favourite haunt of childhood where every nook and cranny seems familiar, and calls up a thousand pleasant memories. _mrs. leicester's school_ was published at godwin's juvenile library, skinner street, christmas ; and, stimulated by its immediate success and by godwin's encouragement, mary once more set to work, this time to try her hand in verse. but, meanwhile, came the domestic upset of a removal, nay of two. the landlord of the rooms in mitre court building wanted them for himself, and so the lambs had to quit. march , , charles writes to manning: "while i think on it let me tell you we are moved. don't come any more to mitre court buildings. we are at southampton buildings, chancery lane, and shall be here till about the end of may; then we remove to no. , inner temple lane, where i mean to live and die; for i have such a horror of moving that i would not take a benefice from the king if i was not indulged with non-residence. what a dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word 'moving.' such a heap of little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart: old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women who preside on these occasions will not leave behind if it was to save your soul. they'd keep the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken matches to show their economy. then you can find nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings. you must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without soap, go about in dirty gaiters. were i diogenes i would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret." the unwonted stress of continuous literary work and the turmoil and fatigue of a double removal produced the effect that might have been anticipated on mary. in june ( ) lamb wrote to coleridge of his change "to more commodious quarters. i have two rooms on the third floor," he continues, "and five rooms above, with an inner staircase to myself, new painted and all for £ a year! i came into them on saturday week; and on monday following mary was taken ill with the fatigue of moving; and affected i believe by the novelty of the house, she could not sleep, and i am left alone with a maid quite a stranger to me, and she has a month or two's sad distraction to go through. what sad large pieces it cuts out of life!--out of _her_ life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live together. i am weaker, and bear it worse than i ever did. but i hope we shall be comfortable by-and-by. the rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards into hare court where there is a pump always going. just now it is dry. hare court trees come in at the window, so that 'tis like living in a garden. i try to persuade myself it is much pleasanter than mitre court; but alas! the household gods are slow to come in a new mansion. they are in their infancy to me; i do not feel them yet; no hearth has blazed to them yet. how i hate and dread new places!... let me hear from some of you, for i am desolate. i shall have to send you, in a week or two, two volumes of juvenile poetry done by mary and me within the last six months, and that tale in prose which wordsworth so much liked, which was published at christmas with nine others by us, and has reached a second edition. there's for you! we have almost worked ourselves out of child's work, and i don't know what to do.... our little poems are but humble, but they have no name. you must read them, remembering they were task work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old bachelor and an old maid. many parents would not have found so many." lamb left his friends to guess which were his and which mary's. were it a question of their prose the task were easy. the brother's "witty delicacy" of style, the gentle irony under which was hid his deep wisdom, the frolicsome, fantastic humours that often veiled his tenderness, are individual, unique. but in verse, and especially in a little volume of "task-work," those fragments of mary's which he quotes in his letters show them to have been more similar and equal. it is certain only that _the three friends_, _queen oriana's dream_, and the lines _to a river in which a child was drowned_ were his, and that his total share was "one-third in quantity of the whole." also that _the two boys_ (reprinted by lamb in his _detached thoughts on books and reading_), _david in the cave of adullam_, and _the first tooth_ are certainly mary's. through all there breathes a sweet and wise spirit; but sometimes, and no doubt on mary's part, the desire to enforce a moral is too obtrusive, and the teaching too direct, though always it is of a high and generous kind; never pragmatic and pharisaic after the manner of dr. watts. that difficult art of artlessness and perfect simplicity, as in blake's _songs of innocence_, which a child's mind demands and a mature mind loves, is rarely attained. yet i think _the beasts in the tower_, _crumbs to the birds_, _motes in the sunbeam_, _the coffee slips_, _the broken doll_, _the books and the sparrow_, _blindness_, _the two boys_, and others not a few, must have been favourites in many a nursery. _the text_, in which a self-satisfied little gentleman who listens to and remembers all the sermon is contrasted, much to his disadvantage, with his sister who did not hear a word, because her heart was full of affectionate longing to make up a quarrel they had had outside the church-door,--is very pretty in a moral, if not in a musical point of view. this and the three examples which i subjoin were certainly mary's. the lullaby calls up a picture of her as a sad child nursing her little charles, though he was no orphan: nursing. o hush, my little baby brother; sleep, my little baby brother; sleep, my love, upon my knee. what though, dear child, we've lost our mother; that can never trouble thee. you are but ten weeks old to-morrow: what can _you_ know of our loss? the house is full enough of sorrow, little baby, don't be cross. peace! cry not so, my dearest love; hush, my baby-bird, lie still; he's quiet now, he does not move, fast asleep is little will. my only solace, only joy, since the sad day i lost my mother, is nursing her own willy boy, my little orphan brother. the gentle raillery of the next seems equally characteristic of mary:-- feigned courage. horatio, of ideal courage vain, was flourishing in air his father's cane, and, as the fumes of valour swelled his pate, now thought himself _this_ hero, and now _that_: "and now," he cried, "i will achilles be, my sword i brandish; see, the trojans flee. now i'll be hector, when his angry blade a lane through heaps of slaughtered grecians made! and now, by deeds still braver, i'll evince i am no less than edward the black prince: give way, ye coward french."--as thus he spoke, and aimed in fancy a sufficient stroke to fix the fate of cressy or poictiers (the muse relates the hero's fate with tears); he struck his milk-white hand against a nail, sees his own blood, and feels his courage fail. ah! where is now that boasted valour flown, that in the tented field so late was shown? achilles weeps, great hector hangs the head, and the black prince goes whimpering to bed! the last is so pretty a little song it deserves to be fitted with an appropriate melody:-- crumbs to the birds. a bird appears a thoughtless thing, he's ever living on the wing, and keeps up such a carolling, that little else to do but sing a man would guess had he. no doubt he has his little cares, and very hard he often fares, the which so patiently he bears, that, listening to those cheerful airs, who knows but he may be in want of his next meal of seeds? i think for _that_ his sweet song pleads. if so, his pretty art succeeds, i'll scatter there among the weeds all the small crumbs i see. _poetry for children, entirely original, by the author of mrs. leicester's school_, as the title-page runs, was published in the summer of , and the whole of the first edition sold off rapidly; but instead of being reprinted entire, selections from it only--twenty-six out of the eighty-four pieces--were incorporated by a schoolmaster of the name of mylius in two books called _the first book of poetry_ and _the poetical class book_, issued from the same juvenile library in . these went through many editions, but ultimately dropped quite out of sight, as the original work had already done. writing to bernard barton in lamb says: "one likes to have one copy of everything one does. i neglected to keep one of _poetry for children_, the joint production of mary and me, and it is not to be had for love or money." fifty years later such specimens of these poems as could be gathered from the mylius collections and from lamb's own works, were republished by mr. w. carew hazlitt and also by richard herne shepherd; when, at last in , there came to hand from australia a copy of the original edition: it had been purchased at a sale of books and furniture at plymouth in and thence carried to adelaide. it was reprinted entire by mr. shepherd (chatto and windus, ), with a preface from which the foregoing details have been gathered. a new england publisher early descried the worth of the _poetry for children_; for it was reprinted in boston--eighty-one pieces, at least, out of the eighty-four--in . a copy of this american edition also has recently come to light. this was mary's last literary undertaking in book form; but there is reason to think she wrote occasional articles for periodicals for some years longer. one such, at any rate, on _needle-work_, written in , is mentioned by crabb robinson, of which more hereafter. chapter xi. the hazlitts again.--letters to mrs. hazlitt, and two visits to winterslow.--birth of hazlitt's son. - .--Æt. - . hazlitt and his bride had, for the present, settled down in sarah's cottage at winterslow; so mary continued to send them every now and then a pretty budget of gossip:-- "dec. , . "i hear of you from your brother, but you do not write yourself, nor does hazlitt. i beg that one or both of you will amend this fault as speedily as possible, for i am very anxious to hear of your health.... you cannot think how very much we miss you and h. of a wednesday evening. all the glory of the night, i may say, is at an end. phillips makes his jokes, and there is none to applaud him; rickman argues, and there is no one to oppose him. the worst miss of all to me is that, when we are in the dismals, there is now no hope of relief from any quarter whatsoever. hazlitt was most brilliant, most ornamental as a wednesday-man; but he was a more useful one on common days, when he dropt in after a quarrel or a fit of the glooms. the sheffington is quite out now, my brother having got drunk with claret and tom sheridan. this visit and the occasion of it is a profound secret, and therefore i tell it to nobody but you and mrs. reynolds. through the medium of wroughton, there came an invitation and proposal from t. s. that c. l. should write some scenes in a speaking pantomime, the other parts of which tom now, and his father formerly, have manufactured between them. so, in the christmas holidays, my brother and his two great associates, we expect, will be all three damned together, that is, i mean, if charles' share, which is done and sent in, is accepted. "i left this unfinished yesterday in the hope that my brother would have done it for me; his reason for refusing me was 'no exquisite reason'; for it was because he must write a letter to manning in three or four weeks, and therefore he could not be always writing letters, he said. i wanted him to tell your husband about a great work which godwin is going to publish, [an _essay on sepulchres_] to enlighten the world once more, and i shall not be able to make out what it is. he (godwin) took his usual walk one evening, a fortnight since, to the end of hatton garden and back again. during that walk a thought came into his mind which he instantly set down and improved upon till he brought it, in seven or eight days, into the compass of a reasonable sized pamphlet. to propose a subscription to all well-disposed people to raise a certain sum of money, to be expended in the care of a cheap monument for the former and the future great dead men--the monument to be a white cross with a wooden slab at the end, telling their names and qualifications. this wooden slab and white cross to be perpetuated to the end of time. to survive the fall of empires and the destruction of cities by means of a map which was, in case of an insurrection among the people, or any other cause by which a city or country may be destroyed, to be carefully preserved, and then when things got again into their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-makers were to go to work again and set them in their former places. this, as nearly as i can tell you, is the sum and substance of it; but it is written remarkably well, in his very best manner, for the proposal (which seems to me very like throwing salt on a sparrow's tail to catch him) occupies but half a page, which is followed by very fine writing on the benefits he conjectures would follow if it were done. very excellent thoughts on death and on our feelings concerning dead friends and the advantages an old country has over a new one, even in the slender memorials we have of great men who once flourished. "charles is come home and wants his dinner, and so the dead men must be no more thought on. tell us how you go on and how you like winterslow and winter evenings. noales (knowles) has not got back again, but he is in better spirits. john hazlitt was here on wednesday, very sober. our love to hazlitt. "there came this morning a printed prospectus from s. t. coleridge, grasmere, of a weekly paper to be called _the friend_--a flaming prospectus--i have no time to give the heads of it--to commence first saturday in january. there came also a notice of a turkey from mr. clarkson, which i am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than i am of coleridge's prophecy." a few weeks after the date of this letter sarah had a little son. he lived but six months; just long enough for his father's restless, dissatisfied heart to taste for once the sweetness of a tie unalloyed with any bitterness, and the memory of it never faded out. there is a pathetic allusion in one of his latest essays to a visit to the neglected spot where the baby was laid, and where still "as the nettles wave in a corner of the churchyard over his little grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me and ease the tightness at my breast." in march of this year, too, died one of the most conspicuous members of lamb's circle, thomas holcroft; dear to godwin, but not, perhaps, a great favourite with the lambs. he was too dogmatic and disputatious,--a man who would pull you up at every turn for a definition, which, as coleridge said, was like setting up perpetual turnpikes along the road to truth. hazlitt undertook to write his life. the visit to winterslow which had been so often talked of before sarah's marriage was again under discussion and, on june nd, mary, full of thoughtful consideration for her hosts that were to be, writes jointly with martin burney:-- "'you may write to hazlitt that i will _certainly_ go to winterslow, as my father has agreed to give me £ to bear my expences, and has given leave that i may stop till that is spent, leaving enough to defray my carriage on th july.' "so far martin has written, and further than that i can give you no intelligence, for i do not yet know phillips' intentions; nor can i tell you the exact time when we can come; nor can i positively say we shall come at all; for we have scruples of conscience about there being so many of us. martin says if you can borrow a blanket or two he can sleep on the floor without either bed or mattress, which would save his expenses at the hut; for if phillips breakfasts there he must do so too, which would swallow up all his money. and he and i have calculated that if he has no inn expenses he may as well spare that money to give you for a part of his roast beef. we can spare you also just five pounds. you are not to say this to hazlitt, lest his delicacy should be alarmed; but i tell you what martin and i have planned that if you happed to be empty-pursed at this time, you may think it as well to make him up a bed in the best kitchen. i think it very probable that phillips will come, and if you do not like such a crowd of us, for they both talk of staying a whole month, tell me so, and we will put off our visit till next summer. "thank you very much for the good work you have done for me. mrs. stoddart also thanks you for the gloves. how often must i tell you never to do any needle-work for anybody but me?... "i cannot write any more, for we have got a noble life of lord nelson, lent us for a short time by my poor relation the bookbinder, and i want to read as much of it as i can." the death of the baby and one of mary's severe attacks of illness combined to postpone the visit till autumn; but, when it did come to pass, it completely restored her, and left lasting remembrance of its pleasures both with hosts and guests. charles tells coleridge (oct. ): "the journey has been of infinite service to mary. we have had nothing but sunshiny days, and daily walks from eight to twenty miles a day. have seen wilton, salisbury, stonehenge, &c. her illness lasted just six weeks; it left her weak, but the country has made us whole." and mary herself wrote to sarah (nov. ): "the dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month we spent with you is remembered by me with such regret that i feel quite discontented and winterslow-sick. i assure you i never passed such a pleasant time in the country in my life, both in the house and out of it, the card-playing quarrels, and a few gaspings for breath after your swift footsteps up the high hills excepted, and those drawbacks are not unpleasant in the recollection. we have got some salt butter to make our toast seem like yours, and we have tried to eat meat suppers, but that would not do, for we left our appetites behind us; and the dry loaf which offended you now comes in at night unaccompanied; but sorry i am to add, it is soon followed by the pipe and the gin-bottle. we smoked the very first night of our arrival. "great news! i have just been interrupted by mr. dawe, who comes to tell me he was yesterday elected an academician. he said none of his own friends voted for him; he got it by strangers who were pleased with his picture of mrs. white. charles says he does not believe northcote ever voted for the admission of any one. though a very cold day, dawe was in a prodigious sweat for joy at his good fortune. "more great news! my beautiful green curtains were put up yesterday, and all the doors listed with green baize, and four new boards put to the coal-hole, and fastening hasps put to the window, and my died manning silk cut out. "yesterday was an eventful day, for yesterday, too, martin burney was to be examined by lord eldon, previous to his being admitted as an attorney; but he has not been here yet to announce his success. "i carried the baby-caps to mrs. john hazlitt. she was much pleased and vastly thankful. mr. h. got fifty-four guineas at rochester, and has now several pictures in hand. "i am going to tell you a secret, for ---- says she would be sorry to have it talked of. one night ---- came home from the ale-house, bringing with him a great rough, ill-looking fellow, whom he introduced to ---- as mr. brown, a gentleman he had hired as a mad-keeper to take care of him at forty pounds a year, being ten pounds under the usual price for keepers, which sum mr. brown had agreed to remit out of pure friendship. it was with great difficulty and by threatening to call in the aid of a watchman and constables that ---- could prevail on mr. brown to leave the house. "we had a good chearful meeting on wednesday; much talk of winterslow, its woods and its nice sunflowers. i did not so much like phillips at winterslow as i now like him for having been with us at winterslow. we roasted the last of his 'beach of oily nut prolific' on friday at the captain's. nurse is now established in paradise, _alias_ the incurable ward of westminster hospital. i have seen her sitting in most superb state, surrounded by her seven incurable companions. they call each other ladies. nurse looks as if she would be considered as the first lady in the ward; only one seemed like to rival her in dignity. "a man in the india house has resigned, by which charles will get twenty pounds a year, and white has prevailed upon him to write some more lottery puffs. if that ends in smoke, the twenty pounds is a sure card, and has made us very joyful. i continue very well and return you my sincere thanks for my good health and improved looks, which have almost made mrs. godwin die with envy; she longs to come to winterslow as much as the spiteful elder sister did to go to the well for a gift to spit diamonds. "jane and i have agreed to boil a round of beef for your suppers when you come to town again. she, jane, broke two of the hogarth glasses while we were away; whereat i made a great noise. "farewell. love to william, and charles' love and good wishes for the speedy arrival of the life of holcroft and the bearer thereof. charles told mrs. godwin hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great haste the next morning to ask me if it were true." hazlitt, too, remembered to the end of his life those golden autumn days; "lamb among the villagers like the most capricious poet ovid among the goths;" the evening walks with him and mary to look at 'the claude lorraine skies melting from azure into purple and gold, and to gather mushrooms that sprung up at our feet to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.' when lamb called to congratulate mr. dawe on his good fortune his housekeeper seemed embarrassed, owned that her master was alone, but ushered in the visitor with reluctance. for why? "at his easel stood d. with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side--a live goose. under the rose he informed me that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for vauxhall, against an expected visit of the allied sovereigns. i smiled at an engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never one of d.'s foibles. my eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. the volga, the don, the dnieper were there, or their representative river gods, and father thames clubbed urns with the vistula. glory with her dazzling eagle was not absent, nor fame nor victory. the shade of rubens might have evoked the mighty allegories. but what was the goose? he was evidently sitting for a something. d. at last informed me that he could not introduce the royal thames without his _swans_. that he had inquired the price of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he had bargained with the poulterer for the _next thing to it_, adding significantly that it would do to roast after it had served its turn to paint swans by." (lamb's _recollections of a royal academician_.) the following year the visit to winterslow was repeated, but not with the same happy results. in a letter written during his stay to mr. basil montague charles says: "my head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the coach that i shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before i go home. i must devote myself to imbecility; i must be gloriously useless while i stay here. the city of salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. the bank has stopped payment, and everybody in the town kept money at it or has got some of its notes. some have lost all they had in the world. it is the next thing to seeing a city with the plague within its walls; and i do suppose it to be the unhappiest county in england this, where i am making holiday. we purpose setting out for oxford tuesday fortnight, and coming thereby home. but no more night-travelling; my head is sore (understand it of the inside) with that deduction from my natural rest which i suffered coming down. neither mary nor i can spare a morsel of our rest, it is incumbent on us to be misers of it." the visit to oxford was paid, hazlitt accompanying them and much enhancing the enjoyment of it, especially of a visit to the picture gallery at blenheim. "but our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for one of us," he tells hazlitt on his return. "my sister got home very well (i was very ill on the journey) and continued so till monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now absent from home. i think i shall be mad if i take any more journeys with two experiences against it. i have lost all wish for sights." it was a long attack; at the end of october mary was still "very weak and low-spirited," and there were domestic misadventures not calculated to improve matters. "we are in a pickle," says charles to wordsworth. "mary, from her affectation of physiognomy, has hired a stupid, big, country wench, who looked honest as she thought, and has been doing her work some days, but without eating; and now it comes out that she was ill when she came, with lifting her mother about (who is now with god) when she was dying, and with riding up from norfolk four days and nights in the waggon, and now she lies in her bed a dead weight upon our humanity, incapable of getting up, refusing to go to an hospital, having nobody in town but a poor asthmatic uncle, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. oh for the little wheelbarrow which trundled the hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different professions of mankind! here's her uncle just crawled up, he is far liker death than she. in this perplexity such topics as spanish papers and monkhouses sink into insignificance. what shall we do?" the perplexity seems to have cleared itself up somehow speedily, for in a week's time mary herself wrote to mrs. hazlitt, not very cheerfully, but with no allusion to this particular disaster:-- "nov. , . "i have taken a large sheet of paper, as if i were going to write a long letter; but that is by no means my intention, for i have only time to write three lines to notify what i ought to have done the moment i received your welcome letter; namely, that i shall be very much joyed to see you. every morning lately i have been expecting to see you drop in, even before your letter came; and i have been setting my wits to work to think how to make you as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will admit. i must work while you are here, and i have been slaving very hard to get through with something before you come, that i may be quite in the way of it, and not teize you with complaints all day that i do not know what to do. "i am very sorry to hear of your mischance. mrs. rickman has just buried her youngest child. i am glad i am an old maid, for you see there is nothing but misfortunes in the marriage state. charles was drunk last night, and drunk the night before; which night before was at godwin's, where we went, at a short summons from mr. g., to play a solitary rubber, which was interrupted by the entrance of mr. and little mrs. liston; and after them came henry robinson, who is now domesticated at mr. godwin's fireside, and likely to become a formidable rival to tommy turner. we finished there at twelve o'clock, charles and liston brim full of gin and water and snuff, after which henry robinson spent a long evening by our fireside at home, and there was much gin and water drunk, albeit only one of the party partook of it, and h. r. professed himself highly indebted to charles for the useful information he gave him on sundry matters of taste and imagination, even after charles could not speak plain for tipsiness. but still he swallowed the flattery and the spirits as savourily as robinson did his cold water. "last night was to be a night, but it was not. there was a certain son of one of martin's employers, one young mr. blake, to do whom honour mrs. burney brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of champaine, long kept in her secret hoard; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for mrs. rickman, came out; and charles partook liberally of all these beverages, while mr. young blake and mr. ireton talked of high matters, such as the merits of the whip club, and the merits of red and white champaine. do i spell that last word right? rickman was not there, so ireton had it all his own way. "the alternating wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly days, and i do not know how we shall make it up to you, but i will contrive the best i can. phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of mrs reynolds. once more she hears the well-loved sounds of 'how do you do, mrs. reynolds? and how does miss chambers do?' "i have spun out my three lines amazingly; now for family news. your brother's little twins are not dead, but mrs. john hazlitt and her baby may be for anything i know to the contrary, for i have not been there for a prodigious long time. mrs. holcroft still goes about from nicholson to tuthill, and tuthill to godwin, and from godwin to nicholson, to consult on the publication or no publication of the life of the good man, her husband. it is called _the life everlasting_. how does that same life go on in your parts? goodbye, god bless you. i shall be glad to see you when you come this way. "i am going in great haste to see mrs. clarkson, for i must get back to dinner, which i have hardly time to do. i wish that dear, good, amiable woman would go out of town. i thought she was clean gone, and yesterday there was a consultation of physicians held at her house to see if they could keep her among them here a few weeks longer." the concluding volumes of this same _life everlasting_ remained unprinted somewhere in a damp hamper, mr. carew hazlitt tells us: for, in truth, the admirable fragment of autobiography holcroft dictated on his death-bed contained the cream of the matter, and was all the public cared to listen to. mary continuing "in a feeble and tottering condition," charles found it needful to make a decisive stand on her behalf against the exhaustion and excitement of incessant company, and especially against the disturbed rest, which resulted from sharing her room with a guest. "nov. , . "mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her," he wrote to hazlitt, "as ill as she can be to remain at home. but she is a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen. she drinks nothing but water, and never goes out; she does not even go to the captain's. her indisposition has been ever since that night you left town, the night miss wordsworth came. her coming, and that d----d mrs. godwin coming and staying so late that night so overset her that she lay broad awake all that night, and it was by a miracle that she escaped a very bad illness, which i thoroughly expected. i have made up my mind that she shall never have any one in the house again with her, and that no one shall sleep with her, not even for a night; for it is a very serious thing to be always living with a kind of fever upon her, and therefore i am sure you will take it in good part if i say that if mrs. hazlitt comes to town at any time, however glad we shall be to see her in the day-time, i cannot ask her to spend a night under our roof. some decision we must come to; for the harassing fever that we have both been in, owing to miss wordsworth's coming, is not to be borne, and i would rather be dead than so alive. however, owing to a regimen and medicines which tuthill has given her, who very kindly volunteered the care of her, she is a great deal quieter, though too much harassed by company, who cannot or will not see how late hours and society teaze her." the next letter to sarah is a cheerful one, as the occasion demanded. it is also the last to her that has been preserved, probably the last that was written; for, a few months later, hazlitt fairly launched himself on a literary career in london, and took up his abode next door to jeremy bentham, at york street, westminster,--once milton's house. "oct. , . "i have been a long time anxiously expecting the happy news that i have just received. i address you because, as the letter has been lying some days at the india house, i hope you are able to sit up and read my congratulations on the little live boy you have been so many years wishing for. as we old women say, 'may he live to be a great comfort to you!' i never knew an event of the kind that gave me so much pleasure as the little long-looked-for-come-at-last's arrival; and i rejoice to hear his honour has begun to suck. the word was not distinctly written, and i was a long time making out the solemn fact. i hope to hear from you soon, for i am anxious to know if your nursing labours are attended with any difficulties. i wish you a happy _getting-up_ and a merry christening! "charles sends his love; perhaps, though, he will write a scrap to hazlitt at the end. he is now looking over me. he is always in my way, for he has had a month's holiday at home. but i am happy to say they end on monday, when mine begin, for i am going to pass a week at richmond with mrs. burney. she has been dying, but she went to the isle of wight and recovered once more, and she is finishing her recovery at richmond. when there, i mean to read novels and play at piquet all day long." "my blessing and heaven's be upon him," added charles, "and make him like his father, with something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then all the men and women must love him."... chapter xii. an essay on needle-work. .--Æt. . towards the end of crabb robinson called on mary lamb and found her suffering from great fatigue after writing an article on needle-work for the _british lady's magazine_, which was just about to start on a higher basis than its predecessors. it undertook to provide something better than the usual fashion plates, silly tales and sillier verses then generally thought suitable for women; and, to judge by the early numbers, the editor kept the promise of his introductory address and deserved a longer lease of life for his magazine than it obtained. mary's little essay appeared in the number for april ; and is on many accounts interesting. it contains several autobiographic touches; it is the only known instance in which she has addressed herself to full-grown readers, and it is sagacious and far-seeing. for mary does not treat of needle-work as an art, but as a factor in social life. she pleads both for the sake of the bodily welfare of the many thousands of women who have to earn their bread by it, and of the mental well-being of those who have not so to do, that it should be regarded, like any other mechanical art, as a thing to be done for hire; and that what a woman _does_ work at should be real work, something, that is, which yields a return either of mental or of pecuniary profit. she also exposes the fallacy of the time-honoured maxim "a penny saved is a penny earned," by the ruthless logic of experience. but the reader shall judge for himself; the _magazine_ has become so rare a book that i will here subjoin the little essay in full:-- on needle-work. mr. editor, "in early life i passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a livelihood. will you allow me to address your readers, among whom might perhaps be found some of the kind patronesses of my former humble labours, on a subject widely connected with female life--the state of needle-work in this country. "to lighten the heavy burthen which many ladies impose upon themselves is one object which i have in view; but, i confess, my strongest motive is to excite attention towards the industrious sisterhood to which i once belonged. "from books i have been informed of the fact upon which _the british lady's magazine_ chiefly founds its pretensions; namely, that women have, of late, been rapidly advancing in intellectual improvement. much may have been gained in this way, indirectly, for that class of females for whom i wish to plead. needle-work and intellectual improvement are naturally in a state of warfare. but i am afraid the root of the evil has not, as yet, been struck at. work-women of every description were never in so much distress for want of employment. "among the present circle of my acquaintance i am proud to rank many that may truly be called respectable; nor do the female part of them in their mental attainments at all disprove the prevailing opinion of that intellectual progression which you have taken as the basis of your work; yet i affirm that i know not a single family where there is not some essential drawback to its comfort which may be traced to needle-work _done at home_, as the phrase is for all needle-work performed in a family by some of its own members, and for which no remuneration in money is received or expected. "in money alone, did i say? i would appeal to all the fair votaries of voluntary housewifery whether, in the matter of conscience, any one of them ever thought she had done as much needle-work as she ought to have done. even fancy-work, the fairest of the tribe! how delightful the arrangement of her materials! the fixing upon her happiest pattern, how pleasing an anxiety! how cheerful the commencement of the labour she enjoys! but that lady must be a true lover of the art, and so industrious a pursuer of a predetermined purpose, that it were pity her energy should not have been directed to some wiser end, who can affirm she neither feels weariness during the execution of a fancy piece, nor takes more time than she had calculated for the performance. "is it too bold an attempt to persuade your readers that it would prove an incalculable addition to general happiness and the domestic comfort of both sexes, if needle-work were never practised but for a remuneration in money? as nearly, however, as this desirable thing can be effected, so much more nearly will woman be upon an equality with men as far as respects the mere enjoyment of life. as far as that goes, i believe it is every woman's opinion that the condition of men is far superior to her own. "'they can do what they like,' we say. do not these words generally mean they have time to seek out whatever amusements suit their tastes? we dare not tell them we have no time to do this; for if they should ask in what manner we dispose of our time we should blush to enter upon a detail of the minutiæ which compose the sum of a woman's daily employment. nay, many a lady who allows not herself one quarter of an hour's positive leisure during her waking hours, considers her own husband as the most industrious of men if he steadily pursue his occupation till the hour of dinner, and will be perpetually lamenting her own idleness. "_real business_ and _real leisure_ make up the portions of men's time:--two sources of happiness which we certainly partake of in a very inferior degree. to the execution of employments in which the faculties of the body or mind are called into busy action there must be a consoling importance attached, which feminine duties (that generic term for all our business) cannot aspire to. "in the most meritorious discharges of those duties the highest praise we can aim at is to be accounted the helpmates of _man_; who, in return for all he does for us, expects, and justly expects, us to do all in our power to soften and sweeten life. "in how many ways is a good woman employed in thought or action through the day that her _good man_ may be enabled to feel his leisure hours _real_, _substantial holiday_ and perfect respite from the cares of business! not the least part to be done to accomplish this end is to fit herself to become a conversational companion; that is to say, she has to study and understand the subjects on which he loves to talk. this part of our duty, if strictly performed, will be found by far our hardest part. the disadvantages we labour under from an education differing from a manly one make the hours in which we _sit and do nothing_ in men's company too often anything but a relaxation; although as to pleasure and instruction time so passed may be esteemed more or less delightful. "to make a man's home so desirable a place as to preclude his having a wish to pass his leisure hours at any fireside in preference to his own, i should humbly take to be the sum and substance of woman's domestic ambition. i would appeal to our british ladies, who are generally allowed to be the most jealous and successful of all women in the pursuit of this object, i would appeal to them who have been most successful in the performance of this laudable service, in behalf of father, son, husband or brother, whether an anxious desire to perform this duty well is not attended with enough of _mental_ exertion, at least, to incline them to the opinion that women may be more properly ranked among the contributors to than the partakers of the undisturbed relaxation of men. "if a family be so well ordered that the master is never called in to its direction, and yet he perceives comfort and economy well attended to, the mistress of that family (especially if children form a part of it), has, i apprehend, as large a share of womanly employment as ought to satisfy her own sense of duty; even though the needle-book and thread-case were quite laid aside, and she cheerfully contributed her part to the slender gains of the corset-maker, the milliner, the dress-maker, the plain worker, the embroidress and all the numerous classifications of females supporting themselves by _needle-work_, that great staple commodity which is alone appropriated to the self-supporting part of our sex. "much has been said and written on the subject of men engrossing to themselves every occupation and calling. after many years of observation and reflection i am obliged to acquiesce in the notion that it cannot well be ordered otherwise. "if, at the birth of girls, it were possible to foresee in what cases it would be their fortune to pass a single life, we should soon find trades wrested from their present occupiers and transferred to the exclusive possession of our sex. the whole mechanical business of copying writings in the law department, for instance, might very soon be transferred with advantage to the poorer sort of women, who, with very little teaching, would soon beat their rivals of the other sex in facility and neatness. the parents of female children who were known to be destined from their birth to maintain themselves through the whole course of their lives with like certainty as their sons are, would feel it a duty incumbent on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even the bodily constitutions, of their girls so circumstanced, by an education which, without affronting the preconceived habits of society, might enable them to follow some occupation now considered above the capacity, or too robust for the constitution of our sex. plenty of resources would then lie open for single women to obtain an independent livelihood, when every parent would be upon the alert to encroach upon some employment, now engrossed by men, for such of their daughters as would then be exactly in the same predicament as their sons now are. who, for instance, would lay by money to set up his sons in trade, give premiums and in part maintain them through a long apprenticeship; or, which men of moderate incomes frequently do, strain every nerve in order to bring them up to a learned profession; if it were in a very high degree probable that, by the time they were twenty years of age, they would be taken from this trade or profession, and maintained during the remainder of their lives by the _person whom they should marry_. yet this is precisely the situation in which every parent whose income does not very much exceed the moderate, is placed with respect to his daughters. "even where boys have gone through a laborious education, superinducing habits of steady attention accompanied with the entire conviction that the business which they learn is to be the source of their future distinction, may it not be affirmed that the persevering industry required to accomplish this desirable end causes many a hard struggle in the minds of young men, even of the most hopeful disposition? what, then, must be the disadvantages under which a very young woman is placed who is required to learn a trade, from which she can never expect to reap any profit, but at the expense of losing that place in society to the possession of which she may reasonably look forward, inasmuch as it is by far the most _common lot_, namely, the condition of a _happy_ english wife? "as i desire to offer nothing to the consideration of your readers but what, at least as far as my own observation goes, i consider as truths confirmed by experience, i will only say that, were i to follow the bent of my own speculative opinion, i should be inclined to persuade every female over whom i hoped to have any influence to contribute all the assistance in her power to those of her own sex who may need it, in the employments they at present occupy, rather than to force them into situations now filled wholly by men. with the mere exception of the profits which they have a right to derive by their needle, i would take nothing from the industry of man which he already possesses. "'a penny saved is a penny earned,' is a maxim not true unless the penny be saved in the same time in which it might have been earned. i, who have known what it is to work for _money earned_, have since had much experience in working for _money saved_; and i consider, from the closest calculation i can make, that a _penny saved_ in that way bears about a true proportion to a _farthing earned_. i am no advocate for women who do not depend on themselves for subsistence, proposing to themselves to _earn money_. my reasons for thinking it not advisable are too numerous to state--reasons deduced from authentic facts and strict observations on domestic life in its various shades of comfort. but if the females of a family _nominally_ supported by the other sex find it necessary to add something to the common stock, why not endeavour to do something by which they may produce money _in its true shape_? "it would be an excellent plan, attended with very little trouble, to calculate every evening how much money has been saved by needle-work _done in the family_, and compare the result with the daily portion of the yearly income. nor would it be amiss to make a memorandum of the time passed in this way, adding also a guess as to what share it has taken up in the thoughts and conversation. this would be an easy mode of forming a true notion and getting at the exact worth of this species of _home_ industry, and perhaps might place it in a different light from any in which it has hitherto been the fashion to consider it. "needle-work taken up as an amusement may not be altogether unamusing. we are all pretty good judges of what entertains ourselves, but it is not so easy to pronounce upon what may contribute to the entertainment of others. at all events, let us not confuse the motives of economy with those of simple pastime. if _saving_ be no object, and long habit have rendered needle-work so delightful an avocation that we cannot think of relinquishing it, there are the good old contrivances in which our grand-dames were wont to beguile and lose their time--knitting, knotting netting, carpet-work, and the like ingenious pursuits--those so often praised but tedious works which are so long in the operation that purchasing the labour has seldom been thought good economy. yet, by a certain fascination, they have been found to chain down the great to a self-imposed slavery, from which they considerately or haughtily excused the needy. these may be esteemed lawful and lady-like amusements. but, if those works more usually denominated useful yield greater satisfaction, it might be a laudable scruple of conscience, and no bad test to herself of her own motive, if a lady who had no absolute need were to give the money so saved to poor needle-women belonging to those branches of employment from which she has borrowed these shares of pleasurable labour. sempronia." had mary lived now she would, perhaps, have spoken a wiser word than has yet been uttered on the urgent question of how best to develop, strengthen, give free and fair scope to that large part of a woman's nature and field of action which are the same in kind as man's, without detriment to the remaining qualities and duties peculiar to her as woman. she told crabb robinson that "writing was a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt; and that she had been learning latin merely to assist her in acquiring a correct style." but there is no trace of feebleness or confusion in her manner of grasping a subject; no want of latin, nor of anything else to improve her excellent style. she did enough to show that had her brain not been devastated for weeks and latterly for months in every year by an access of madness, she would have left, besides her tales for children, some permanent addition to literature, or given a recognisable impetus to thought. as it was, mary relinquished all attempt at literary work when an increase in charles' income released her from the duty of earning; and as her attacks became longer and more frequent her "fingers grew nervously averse" even to letter-writing. chapter xiii. letters to miss betham and her little sister.--to wordsworth.--manning's return.--coleridge goes to highgate.--letter to miss hutchinson on mary's state.--removal to russell street.--mary's letter to dorothy wordsworth.--lodgings at dalston.--death of john lamb and captain burney. - .--Æt. - . in a letter to southey, dated may th, , lamb says: "have you seen matilda betham's _lay of marie_? i think it very delicately pretty as to sentiment, &c." matilda, the daughter of a country clergyman of ancient lineage (author of learned and laborious _genealogical tables_, &c. &c.), was a lady of many talents and ambitions; especially of the laudable one, not so common in those days, to lighten the burthen of a large family of brothers and sisters by earning her own living. she went up to london, taught herself miniature painting, exhibited at somerset house, gave shakespeare readings, wrote a _biographical dictionary of celebrated women_, contributed verses to the magazines; and, last not least, by her genuine love of knowledge, and her warm and kindly heart, won the cordial liking of many men of genius, notably of coleridge, southey, and the lambs. when this same _lay of marie_ was on the stocks, mary took an earnest interest in its success, as the following letter prettily testifies:-- "my brother and myself return you a thousand thanks for your kind communication. we have read your poem many times over with increased interest, and very much wish to see you to tell you how highly we have been pleased with it. may we beg one favour? i keep the manuscript, in the hope that you will grant it. it is that either now, or when the whole poem is completed, you will read it over with us. when i say with _us_, of course i mean charles. i know that you have many judicious friends, but i have so often known my brother spy out errors in a manuscript which has passed through many judicious hands, that i shall not be easy if you do not permit him to look yours carefully through with you; and also you _must_ allow him to correct the press for you. if i knew where to find you i would call upon you. should you feel nervous at the idea of meeting charles in the capacity of a _severe censor_, give me a line, and i will come to you anywhere and convince you in five minutes that he is even timid, stammers, and can scarcely speak for modesty and fear of giving pain when he finds himself placed in that kind of office. shall i appoint a time to see you here when he is from home? i will send him out any time you will name; indeed i am always naturally alone till four o'clock. if you are nervous about coming, remember i am equally so about the liberty i have taken, and shall be till we meet and laugh off our mutual fears." "i return you by a careful hand the mss.," wrote charles. "did i not ever love your verses? the domestic half will be a sweet heirloom to have in the family. 'tis fragrant with cordiality. what friends you must have had, or dreamed of having! and what a widow's cruse of heartiness you have doled among them!" but as to the correction of the press, that proved a rash suggestion on mary's part; for the task came at an untoward time, and charles had to write a whimsical-repentant letter, which must have gone far to atone for his shortcoming:-- "all this while i have been tormenting myself with the thought of having been ungracious to you, and you have been all the while accusing yourself. let us absolve one another and be quiet. my head is in such a state from incapacity for business, that i certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. i hardly know how i can go on. i have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. no one can tell how ill i am, because it does not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull, deep and invisible. i wish i was leprous, and black-jaundiced skin-over, or that all was as well within as my cursed looks. you must not think me worse than i am. i am determined not to be overset, but to give up business rather, and get 'em to allow me a trifle for services past. oh, that i had been a shoemaker, or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune. oh, darling laziness! heaven of epicurus! saint's everlasting rest! that i could drink vast potations of thee through unmeasured eternity. _otium cum vel sine dignitate._ scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of _repose_. i stand not upon the _dignified sort_. accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce, business. inventions of that old original busy-body, brain-working satan--sabbathless, restless satan. a curse relieves; do you ever try it? a strange letter to write to a lady, but more honeyed sentences will not distil. i dare not ask who revises in my stead. i have drawn you into a scrape, and am ashamed, but i know no remedy. my unwellness must be my apology. god bless you (tho' he curse the india house and fire it _to the ground_), and may no unkind error creep into _marie_. may all its readers like it as well as i do, and everybody about you like its kind author no worse! why the devil am i never to have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts in verse or prose again? why must i write of tea and drugs, and price goods and bales of indigo? farewell...." miss betham possessed the further merit of having a charming little sister, for such she must surely have been to be the cause and the recipient of such a letter as the following from mary. barbara betham was then fourteen years old:-- "november , . "it is very long since i have met with such an agreeable surprise as the sight of your letter, my kind kind young friend, afforded me. such a nice letter as it is too; and what a pretty hand you write! i congratulate you on this attainment with great pleasure, because i have so often felt the disadvantage of my own wretched handwriting. you wish for london news. i rely upon your sister ann for gratifying you in this respect, yet i have been endeavouring to recollect whom you might have seen here, and what may have happened to them since, and this effort has only brought the image of little barbara betham, unconnected with any other person, so strongly before my eyes, that i seem as if i had no other subject to write upon. now i think i see you with your feet propped upon the fender, your two hands spread out upon your knees--an attitude you always chose when we were in familiar confidential conversation together--telling me long stories of your own home, where now you say you are 'moping on with the same thing every day,' and which then presented nothing but pleasant recollections to your mind. how well i remember your quiet, steady face bent over your book. one day, conscience-stricken at having wasted so much of your precious time in reading, and feeling yourself, as you prettily said, 'quite useless to me,' you went to my drawers and hunted out some unhemmed pocket-handkerchiefs, and by no means could i prevail upon you to resume your story-books till you had hemmed them all. i remember, too, your teaching my little maid to read, your sitting with her a whole evening to console her for the death of her sister, and that she, in her turn, endeavoured to become a comforter to you, the next evening, when you wept at the sight of mrs. holcroft, from whose school you had recently eloped because you were not partial to sitting in the stocks. those tears, and a few you dropped when my brother teased you about your supposed fondness for an apple-dumpling, were the only interruptions to the calm contentedness of your unclouded brow. "we still remain the same as you left us, neither taller, nor wiser, or perceptibly older; but three years must have made a great alteration in you. how very much, dear barbara, i should like to see you! "we still live in temple lane, but i am now sitting in a room you never saw. soon after you left us we were distressed by the cries of a cat, which seemed to proceed from the garrets adjoining to ours, and only separated from ours by a locked door on the farther side of my brother's bed-room, which you know was the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs. we had the lock forced, and let poor puss out from behind a panel of the wainscot, and she lived with us from that time, for we were in gratitude bound to keep her, as she had introduced us to four untenanted, unowned rooms, and by degrees we have taken possession of these unclaimed apartments, first putting up lines to dry our clothes, then moving my brother's bed into one of these more commodious than his own rooms; and last winter, my brother being unable to pursue a work he had begun, owing to the kind interruptions of friends who were more at leisure than himself, i persuaded him that he might write at ease in one of these rooms, as he could not then hear the door-knock, or hear himself denied to be at home, which was sure to make him call out and convict the poor maid in a fib. here, i said, he might be, almost really not at home. so i put in an old grate, and made him a fire in the largest of these garrets, and carried in his own table and one chair, and bid him write away and consider himself as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of salisbury plain, or any other wide, unfrequented place where he could expect few visitors to break in upon his solitude. i left him quite delighted with his new acquisition, but in a few hours he came down again, with a sadly dismal face. he could do nothing, he said, with those bare white-washed walls before his eyes. he could not write in that dull unfurnished prison! "the next day, before he came home from his office, i had gathered up various bits of old carpeting to cover the floor; and to a little break the blank look of the bare walls i hung up a few old prints that used to ornament the kitchen; and after dinner, with great boast of what improvement i had made, i took charles once more into his new study. a week of busy labours followed, in which i think you would not have disliked to be our assistant. my brother and i almost covered the walls with prints, for which purpose he cut out every print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask my leave to strip a fresh poor author, which he might not do, you know, without my permission, as i am elder sister. there was such pasting, such consultation upon these portraits, and where the series of pictures from ovid, milton, and shakspeare would show to most advantage, and in what obscure corners authors of humble rank should be allowed to tell their stories. all the books gave up their stores but one, a translation from ariosto, a delicious set of four and twenty prints, and for which i had marked out a conspicuous place; when lo, we found at the moment the scissors were going to work, that a part of the poem was printed at the back of every picture! what a cruel disappointment! to conclude this long story about nothing, the poor despised garret is now called the print room, and is become our most familiar sitting-room.... the lions still live in exeter change. returning home through the strand, i often hear them roar about twelve o'clock at night. i never hear them without thinking of you, because you seemed so pleased with the sight of them, and said your young companions would stare when you told them you had seen a lion. "and now, my dear barbara, farewell. i have not written such a long letter a long time, but i am very sorry i had nothing amusing to write about. wishing you may pass happily through the rest of your schooldays and every future day of your life, "i remain, "your affectionate friend, "m. lamb. "my brother sends his love to you. you say you are not so tall as louisa--you must be; you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family" ["the measureless bethams," lamb called them]. "now you have begun i shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from you again. i shall always receive a letter from you with very great delight." the next is a joint letter to wordsworth, in acknowledgment of an early copy of _the excursion_, in which charles holds the pen and is the chief spokesman; but mary puts in a judicious touch of her own:-- "august th, . "i cannot tell you how pleased i was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world, too! i have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before i wrote to thank you, but mr. burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it; but we expect restitution in a day or two. it is the noblest conversational poem i ever read--a day in heaven. the part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the tales of the churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren born out of due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind man; the jacobite and the hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were all new to me too. my having known the story of margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when i first saw you at stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. i don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. that gorgeous sunset is famous; i think it must have been the identical one we saw on salisbury plain five years ago, that drew phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from the rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor i had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophet saw them in that sunset--the wheel, the potter's clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the four-fold visaged head, the throne and him that sat thereon." [it was a mist glorified by sunshine, not a sunset, which the poet had described, as lamb afterwards discovered.] "one feeling i was particularly struck with, as what i recognised so very lately at harrow church on entering it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words; but i am feeling that which i cannot express. reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument in harrow church. do you know it? with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as salisbury spire itself almost. "i shall select a day or two, very shortly, when i am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which i feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock-book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. there is a great deal of noble matter about mountain-scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor londoner or south-countryman entirely, though mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. she almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her. "c. lamb and sister." manning, who had latterly been "tarrying on the skirts of creation" in far thibet and tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last, in , appeared once more on the horizon at the "half-way house" of canton, to which place lamb hazarded a letter,--a most incomparable "lying letter," and another to confess the cheat to st. helena:--"have you recovered the breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an emperor of france was living in st. helena? what an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of plinlimmon.... mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to wear when you come. i am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. this very night i am going to _leave off tobacco_! surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. the soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain." manning brought with him on his return much material for compiling a chinese dictionary; which purpose, however, remained unfulfilled. he left no other memorial of himself than his friendship with lamb. "you see but his husk or shrine. he discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave the world without anyone hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is," said lamb of him. henceforth their intercourse was chiefly personal. coleridge also, who of late had been almost as much lost to his friends as if he too were in tartary or thibet, though now and then "like a re-appearing star" standing up before them when least expected, was at the beginning of april once more in london, endeavouring to get his tragedy of _remorse_ accepted at covent garden. "nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed c. to take up his abode at a chemist's laboratory in norfolk street," writes lamb to wordsworth. "she might as well as have sent a _helluo liborum_ for cure to the vatican. he has done pretty well as yet. tell miss hutchinson my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while c. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; god bless him!" but coleridge was more in earnest than lamb supposed in his determination to break through his thraldom to opium. either way, he himself believed that death was imminent: to go on was deadly, and a physician of eminence had told him that to abstain altogether would, probably, be equally fatal. he therefore found a medical man willing to undertake the care of him: to exercise absolute surveillance for a time and watch the results. it is an affecting letter in which he commits himself into mr. gillman's hands:--"you will never _hear_ anything but truth from me, prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed i dare not promise that i should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one.... for the first week i must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. the stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when i am alone the horrors i have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. if (as i feel for the _first time_ a soothing confidence it will prove) i should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend i have (and thank god! in spite of this wretched vice i have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence." that confidence was justified, those thanks well earned. in the middle of april coleridge took up his abode with the gillmans at no. the grove, at highgate, and found there a serene haven in which he anchored for the rest of life; freeing himself by slow degrees from the opium bondage, though too shattered in frame ever to recover sound health; too far spent, morally and mentally, by the long struggles and abasements he had gone through to renew the splendours of his youth. that "shaping spirit of imagination" with which nature had endowed him drooped languidly, save in fitful moments of fervid talk; that "fertile, subtle, expansive understanding" could not fasten with the long-sustained intensity needful to grapple victoriously with the great problems that filled his mind. the look of "timid earnestness" which carlyle noted in his eyes expressed a mental attitude--a mixture of boldness and fear, a desire to seek truth at all hazards, yet also to drag authority with him, as a safe and comfortable prop to rest on. but his eloquence had lost none of its richness and charm, his voice none of its sweetness. "his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory, an archangel a little damaged," says lamb to wordsworth. "he is absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. 'tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet." besides the renewed proximity of these two oldest and dearest of friends, two new ones, both very young, both future biographers of lamb, were in these years added to the number of his intimates,--talfourd in , proctor in . leigh hunt had become one probably as early as ; crabb robinson in ; thomas hood, who stood in the front rank of his younger friends, and bernard barton, the quaker poet, lamb's chief correspondent during the last ten years of his life, not until - . the years did not pass without each bringing a recurrence of one, sometimes of two severe attacks of mary's disorder. in the autumn of charles repeats again the sad story to miss hutchinson:-- "i am forced to be the replier to your letter, for mary has been ill and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. she has left me very lonely and very miserable. i stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. i look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as i can. she has begun to show some favourable symptoms. the return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' interval. i am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the e. i. house was partly the cause of her illness; but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. it cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time we shall have to live together. i don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had no partial separations. but i won't talk of death. i will imagine us immortal or forget that we are otherwise. by god's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at drury lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. then we forget we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,--'the wind is tempered to the shorn lambs.' poor c. lloyd" [he was suffering from the same dread malady], "poor priscilla! i feel i hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me and involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfortunes. but i feel all i can--all the kindness i can towards you all." more and more sought by an enlarging circle of friends, chambers in the temple offered facilities for the dropping in of acquaintance upon the lambs at all hours of the day and night, which, social as they were, was harassing, wearing and, to mary, very injurious. this it was, doubtless, which induced them to take the step announced by her in the following letter to dorothy wordsworth:-- "november , . "your kind letter has given us very great pleasure; the sight of your handwriting was a most welcome surprise to us. we have heard good tidings of you by all our friends who were so fortunate as to visit you this summer, and rejoice to see it confirmed by yourself. you have quite the advantage in volunteering a letter; there is no merit in replying to so welcome a stranger. "we have left the temple. i think you will be sorry to hear this. i know i have never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at rydal mount, as when i could connect the idea of you with your own grasmere cottage. our rooms were dirty and out of repair, and the inconveniences of living in chambers became every year more irksome, and so, at last, we mustered up resolution enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us, and here we are, living at a brazier's shop, no. , in russell street, covent garden, a place all alive with noise and bustle; drury lane theatre in sight from our front, and covent garden from our back windows. the hubbub of the carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least; strange that it does not, for it is quite tremendous. i quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. it is the oddest scene to look down upon; i am sure you would be amused with it. it is well i am in a cheerful place, or i should have many misgivings about leaving the temple. i look forward with great pleasure to the prospect of seeing my good friend, miss hutchinson. i wish rydal mount, with all its inhabitants enclosed, were to be transplanted with her, and to remain stationary in the midst of covent garden. i passed through the street lately where mr. and mrs. wordsworth lodged; several fine new houses, which were then just rising out of the ground, are quite finished, and a noble entrance made that way into portland place. i am very sorry for mr. de quincey. what a blunder the poor man made when he took up his dwelling among the mountains! i long to see my friend pypos. coleridge is still at little hampton with mrs. gillman; he has been so ill as to be confined to his room almost the whole time he has been there. "charles has had all his hogarths bound in a book; they were sent home yesterday, and now that i have them altogether, and perceive the advantage of peeping close at them through my spectacles, i am reconciled to the loss of their hanging round the room, which has been a great mortification to me. in vain i tried to console myself with looking at our new chairs and carpets, for we have got new chairs and carpets covering all over our two sitting rooms; i missed my old friends, and could not be comforted. then i would resolve to learn to look out of the window, a habit i never could attain in my life, and i have given it up as a thing quite impracticable--yet, when i was at brighton last summer, the first week i never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book: i had not seen the sea for sixteen years. mrs. morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while charles and i played truants and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains, and _almost as good as_ westmoreland scenery. certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks, which few of the brighton visitors have ever dreamed of--for, like as is the case in the neighbourhood of london, after the first two or three miles we are sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude. i hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail; you say you can walk fifteen miles with ease; that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all mrs. morgan could accomplish. god bless you and yours. love to all and each one." in the spring of the lambs took lodgings at stoke newington without, however, giving up the russell street home,--for the sake of rest and quiet; the change from the temple to covent garden not having proved much of a success in that respect, and the need grown serious. even lamb's mornings at the office and his walk thence were besieged by officious acquaintance: then, as he tells wordsworth, "up i go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. knock at the door; in comes mr. hazlitt, or mr. burney, or morgan demi gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. o the pleasure of eating alone! eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. but in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that i should open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns into a stone when any one dines with me if i have not wine. wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(god bless 'em! i love some of 'em dearly)--and with the hatred a still greater aversion to their going away. bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on if they go before bed-time. come never, i would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go!... evening company i should always like had i any mornings, but i am saturated with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as i should covet to be in company; but i assure you that is a wonderful week in which i can get two or one to myself. i am never c. l., but always c. l. & co. he who thought it not good for man to be alone preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! i forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me."... it was during the russell street days that the lambs made the acquaintance of vincent novello. he had a little daughter, mary victoria, afterwards mrs. cowden-clarke, whose heart mary won, leaving many sweet and happy impressions of herself graven there, which eventually took shape in her _recollections of writers_. mrs. novello had lost a baby in the spring of , and from the quiet of stoke newington mary wrote her a sweet letter of condolence:-- "spring, . "since we heard of your sad sorrow, you have been perpetually in our thoughts; therefore you may well imagine how welcome your kind remembrance of us must be. i know not how to thank you for it. you bid me write a long letter; but my mind is so possessed with the idea that you must be occupied with one only thought, that all trivial matters seem impertinent. i have just been reading again mr. hunt's delicious essay [_deaths of little children_], which, i am sure, must have come so home to your hearts. i shall always love him for it. i feel that it is all that one can think, but which no one but he could have done so prettily. may he lose the memory of his own babies in seeing them all grow old around him. together with the recollection of your dear baby the image of a little sister i once had comes as fresh into my mind as if i had seen her lately.... i long to see you, and i hope to do so on tuesday or wednesday in next week. percy street! i love to write the word. what comfortable ideas it brings with it! we have been pleasing ourselves, ever since we heard this unexpected piece of good news, with the anticipation of frequent drop-in visits and all the social comfort of what seems almost next-door neighbourhood. "our solitary confinement has answered its purpose even better than i expected. it is so many years since i have been out of town in the spring that i scarcely knew of the existence of such a season. i see, every day, some new flower peeping out of the ground, and watch its growth; so that i have a sort of intimate friendship with each. i know the effect of every change of weather upon them--have learned all their names, the duration of their lives, and the whole progress of their domestic economy. my landlady, a nice, active old soul that wants but one year of eighty, and her daughter, a rather aged young gentlewoman, are the only labourers in a pretty large garden; for it is a double house, and two long strips of ground are laid into one, well stored with fruit trees, which will be in full blossom the week after i am gone, and flowers, as many as can be crammed in, of all sorts and kinds. but flowers are flowers still; and i must confess i would rather live in russell street all my life, and never set my foot but on the london pavement, than be doomed always to enjoy the silent pleasures i now do. we go to bed at ten o'clock. late hours are life-shortening things, but i would rather run all risks, and sit every night--at some places i could name--wishing in vain at eleven o'clock for the entrance of the supper tray, than be always up and alive at eight o'clock breakfast as i am here. we have a scheme to reconcile these things. we have an offer of a very low-rented lodging a mile nearer town than this. our notion is to divide our time in alternate weeks between quiet rest and dear london weariness. we give an answer to-morrow; but what that will be at this present writing i am unable to say. in the present state of our undecided opinion, a very heavy rain that is now falling may turn the scale.... dear rain, do go away, and let us have a fine chearful sunset to argue the matter fairly in. my brother walked seventeen miles yesterday before dinner. and, notwithstanding his long walk to and from the office, we walk every evening; but i by no means perform in this way so well as i used to do. a twelve mile walk, one hot sunday morning, made my feet blister, and they are hardly well now...." "a fine cheerful sunset" did smile, it seems, upon the project of permanent country lodgings; for during the next three years the lambs continued to alternate between "dear london weariness" in russell street, and rest and quiet work at dalston. years they were which produced nearly all the most delightful of the _essays of elia_. the year closed gloomily;--"i stepped into the lambs' cottage at dalston," writes crabb robinson in his diary, nov. ; "mary pale and thin, just recovered from one of her attacks. they have lost their brother john, and feel the loss." and the very same week died fine old captain burney. he had been made admiral but a fortnight before his death. these gaps among the old familiar faces struck chill to their hearts. in a letter to wordsworth of the following spring lamb says: "we are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which i think i may date from poor john's loss, and another accident or two at the same time that have made me almost bury myself at dalston, where yet i see more faces than i could wish. deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. two or three have died within the last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. one sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. it won't do for another. every departure destroys a class of sympathies. there's captain burney gone! what fun has whist now? what matters it what you lead if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? one never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone, almost, you would care to share the intelligence. thus one distributes oneself about, and now for so many parts of me i have lost the market." it was while john's death was yet recent that lamb wrote some tender recollections of him (fact and fiction blended according to elia's wont) in _dream children, a reverie_, telling how handsome and spirited he had been in his youth, "and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and how i bore his death, as i thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though i did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as i think he would have done if i had died, yet i missed him all day long and knew not till then how much i had loved him. i missed his kindness and i missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled sometimes) rather than not have him again." chapter xiv. hazlitt's divorce.--emma isola.--mrs. cowden clarke's _recollections_ of mary.--the visit to france.--removal to colebrook cottage.--a dialogue of reminiscences. - .--Æt. - . for some years matters had not gone smoothly between sarah hazlitt and her husband. he was hard to live with, and she seems to have given up the attempt to make the best of things, and to have sunk into a kind of apathy in which even the duties of a housewife were ill-performed; but his chief complaint was that "she despised him and his abilities." in this hazlitt was, probably, unjust to sarah; for she was neither stupid nor unamiable. from onwards he had absented himself from home continually, living either at the huts, a small inn on the edge of salisbury plain, or in london lodgings. but in this year of his unhappy passion for sarah walker brought about a crisis; and what had been only a negative kind of evil became unendurable. he prevailed upon sarah to consent to a divorce. it was obtained, in edinburgh, by mrs. hazlitt taking what, in scotch law, is called "the oath of calumny" which,--the suit being undefended,--entitled her to a dissolution of the marriage tie. they then returned singly to winterslow, he to the huts and she to her cottage. if they married with but little love, they seem to have parted without any hate. one tie remained--the strong affection each had for their son, who was sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. hazlitt's wholly unrequited passion for sarah walker soon burned itself to ashes; and in two years time he tried another experiment in marriage which was even less successful than the first; for his bride, like milton's, declined to return home with him after the wedding tour, and he saw her face no more. but, unlike milton, he was little discomposed at the circumstance. sarah, grown a wiser if not a more dignified woman, did not renew the scheming ways of her youth. she continued to stand high in the esteem of hazlitt's mother and sister, and often stayed with them. the lambs abated none of their old cordiality; mary wrote few letters now, but charles sent her a friendly one sometimes. it was to her he gave the first account of absent-minded george dyer's feat of walking straight into the new river, in broad daylight, on leaving their door in colebrook row. towards hazlitt, also, their friendship seemed substantially unchanged let him be as splenetic and wayward as he might. "we cannot afford to cast off our friends because they are not all we could wish," said mary lamb once when he had written some criticisms on wordsworth and coleridge, in which glowing admiration was mixed with savage ridicule in such a way that, as lamb said, it was "like saluting a man,--'sir, you are the greatest man i ever saw,' and then pulling him by the nose." but it needed only for hazlitt himself to be traduced and vilified, as he so often was, by the political adversaries and critics of those days, for lamb to rally to his side and fearlessly pronounce him to be, "in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing." as a set-off against the already mentioned sorrows of this time, a new element of cheerfulness was introduced into the lamb household; for it was in the course of the summer of that, during a visit to cambridge, they first saw emma isola, a little orphan child of whom they soon grew so fond that eventually she became their adopted daughter, their solace and comfort. to mary especially was this a happy incident. "for," says mrs. cowden clarke in the _recollections_ already alluded to, "she had a most tender sympathy with the young,"--as the readers of _mrs. leicester's school_ will hardly need telling. "she was encouraging and affectionate towards them, and won them to regard her with a familiarity and fondness rarely felt by them for grown people who are not their relations. she threw herself so entirely into their way of thinking and contrived to take an estimate of things so completely from _their_ point of view, that she made them rejoice to have her for their co-mate in affairs that interested them. while thus lending herself to their notions she, with a judiciousness peculiar to her, imbued her words with the wisdom and experience that belonged to her maturer years; so that while she seemed but the listening, concurring friend, she was also the helping, guiding friend. her monitions never took the form of reproof, but were always dropped in with the air of agreed propositions, as if they grew out of the subject in question, and presented themselves as matters of course to both her young companions and herself." the following is a life-like picture, from the same hand, of mary among the children she gathered round her in these russell street days,--hazlitt's little son william, victoria novello (mrs. clarke herself), and emma isola. victoria used "to come to her on certain mornings, when miss lamb promised to hear her repeat her latin grammar, and hear her read poetry with the due musically rhythmical intonation. even now the breathing murmur of the voice in which mary lamb gave low but melodious utterance to those opening lines of the _paradise lost_:-- of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe,-- sounding full and rounded and harmonious, though so subdued in tone, rings clear and distinct in the memory of her who heard the reader. the echo of that gentle voice vibrates, through the lapse of many a revolving year, true and unbroken in the heart where the low-breathed sound first awoke response, teaching together with the fine appreciation of verse music the finer love of intellect conjoined with goodness and kindness.... "one morning, just as victoria was about to repeat her allotted task, in rushed a young boy who, like herself, enjoyed the privilege of miss lamb's instruction in the latin language. his mode of entrance--hasty and abrupt--sufficiently denoted his eagerness to have his lesson heard at once and done with, that he might be gone again; accordingly miss lamb, asking victoria to give up her turn, desired the youth--hazlitt's son--to repeat his pages of grammar first. off he set, rattled through the first conjugation post-haste; darted through the second without drawing breath; and so on right through in no time. the rapidity, the volubility, the triumphant slap-dash of the feat perfectly dazzled the imagination of poor victoria, who stood admiring by, an amazed witness of the boy's proficiency. she herself, a quiet plodding little girl, had only by dint of diligent study and patient, persevering poring been able to achieve a slow learning and as slow a repetition of her lessons. this brilliant, off-hand method of despatching the latin grammar was a glory she had never dreamed of. her ambition was fired, and the next time she presented herself book in hand before miss lamb, she had no sooner delivered it into her hearer's than she attempted to scour through her verb at the same rattling pace which had so excited her admiration. scarce a moment and her stumbling scamper was checked. 'stay, stay! how's this? what are you about, little vicky?' asked the laughing voice of mary lamb. 'oh, i see. well, go on; but gently, gently; no need of hurry.' she heard to an end and then said, 'i see what we have been doing--trying to be as quick and clever as william, fancying it vastly grand to get on at a great rate as he does. but there's this difference: it's natural in him while it's imitation in you. now, far better go on in your old staid way--which is your own way--than try to take up a way that may become him, but can never become you, even were you to succeed in acquiring it. we'll each of us keep to our own natural ways, and then we shall be sure to do our best.'" and when victoria and emma isola met there, mary entered into their girlish friendship, let them have their gossip out in her own room if tired of the restraint of grown-up company and once, before emma's return to school, took them to dulwich and gave them "a charming little dinner of roast fowl and custard pudding." ... "pleasant above all," says the surviving guest and narrator, "is the memory of the cordial voice which said in a way to put the little party at its fullest ease, 'now, remember, we all pick our bones. it isn't considered vulgar here to pick bones.' "once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unexpectedly upon her and her brother," continues mrs. clarke, "just as they were sitting down to their plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank hospitality she pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small joint into five equal portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so truly her own, 'there's a chop apiece for us, and we can make up with bread and cheese if we want more.'" the more serious demands upon her sympathy and judgment made, after childhood was left behind, by the young, whether man or woman, she met with no less tenderness, tact, and wisdom. once, for instance, when she thought she perceived symptoms of an unexplained dejection in her young friend victoria, "how gentle was her sedate mode of reasoning the matter, after delicately touching upon the subject and endeavouring to draw forth its avowal! more as if mutually discussing and consulting than as if questioning, she endeavoured to ascertain whether uncertainties or scruples of faith had arisen in the young girl's mind and had caused her preoccupied abstracted manner. if it were any such source of disturbance, how wisely and feelingly she suggested reading, reflecting, weighing; if but a less deeply-seated depression, how sensibly she advised adopting some object to rouse energy and interest! she pointed out the efficacy of studying a language (she herself at upwards of fifty years of age began the acquirement of french and italian) as a remedial measure, and advised victoria to devote herself to a younger brother she had, in the same way that she had attended to her own brother charles in his infancy, as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure." allsop, coleridge's friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a young man overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his prospects, he found charles and mary lamb not wanting in the hour of need. "i have a clear recollection," says he, "of miss lamb's addressing me in a tone which acted at once as a solace and support, and after as a stimulus, to which i owe more perhaps than to the more extended arguments of all others." on the whole mary was a silent woman. it was her forte rather to enable others to talk their best by the charm of an earnest, speaking countenance and a responsive manner; and there are but few instances in which any of her words have been preserved. in that memorable conversation at lamb's table on "persons one would like to have seen," reported by hazlitt, when it was a question of women, "i should like vastly to have seen ninon de l'enclos," said mary. when queen caroline's trial was pending and her character and conduct the topic in every mouth, mary said she did not see that it made much difference whether the queen was what they called guilty or not--meaning, probably, that the stream was so plainly muddy at the fountain-head it was idle to enquire what ill places it had passed through in its course. or else, perhaps, that, either way, the king's conduct was equally odious. the last observation of hers i can find recorded, is at first sight, unlike herself:--"how stupid old people are!" it was that unimaginative incapacity to sympathise with the young, so alien to her own nature, no doubt, which provoked the remark. of her readiness to help all that came within her reach there is a side-glimpse in some letters of lamb's,--the latest to see the light,--which come, as other interesting contributions to the knowledge of lamb's writings have done (notably those of the late mr. babson), from over the atlantic. in _the century_ magazine for september are seven letters to john howard payne, an american playwright, whom lamb was endeavouring to help in his but partially successful struggle to earn a livelihood by means of adaptations for the stage in london and paris. mrs. cowden-clarke speaks of this mr. payne as the acquaintance whom mary lamb, "ever thoughtful to procure a pleasure for young people," had asked to call and see the little victoria, then at school at boulogne, on his way to paris. he proved a good friend to mary herself during that trip to france which, with a courage amounting to rashness, she and charles undertook in the summer of . "i went to call on the lambs to take leave, they setting out for france next morning," writes crabb robinson in his diary, june th. "i gave miss lamb a letter for miss williams, to whom i sent a copy of _mrs. leicester's school_. the lambs have a frenchman as their companion and miss lamb's nurse, in case she should be ill. lamb was in high spirits; his sister rather nervous." the privation of sleep entailed in such a journey combined with the excitement, produced its inevitable result and mary was taken with one of her severest attacks in the _diligence_ on the way to amiens. there, happily, they seem to have found mr. payne, who assisted charles to make the necessary arrangements for her remaining under proper care till the return of reason, and then he went on to paris, where he stayed with the kennys, who thought him dull and out of sorts, as well he might be. two months afterwards we hear of mary as being in paris. charles, his holiday over, had been obliged to return to england. "mary lamb has begged me to give her a day or two," says crabb robinson. "she comes to paris this evening, and stays here a week. her only male friend is a mr. payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attentions to charles. he is the author of _brutus_, and has a good face." it was in the following year that most of the letters to mr. payne, published in the _century_, were written. they disclose mary and her brother zealous to repay one good turn with another by watching the success of his dramatic efforts and endeavouring to negociate favourably for him with actors and managers. "_ali pacha_ will do. i sent my sister the first night, not having been able to go myself, and her report of its effect was most favourable.... my love to my little wife at versailles, and to her dear mother.... i have no mornings (my day begins at p.m.) to transact business in, or talents for it, so i employ mary, who has seen robertson, who says that the piece which is to be operafied was sent to you six weeks since, &c. &c. mary says you must write more _showable_ letters about these matters, for with all our trouble of crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn to th' other, and folding down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious epithet into a corner, she can hardly communicate their contents without offence. what, man, put less gall in your ink, or write me a biting tragedy!"... the piece which was sent to mr. payne in paris to be "operafied" was probably _clari, the maid of milan_. bishop wrote or adapted the music: it still keeps possession of the stage and contains "home sweet home," which plaintive, well-worn ditty earned for its writer among his friends the title of the "homeless poet of home." he ended his days as american consul at tunis. this year's holiday ( ), spent at hastings, was one of unalloyed pleasure and refreshment. "i have given up my soul to walking," lamb writes. "there are spots, inland bays, &c., which realise the notions of juan fernandez. the best thing i lit upon, by accident, was a small country church (by whom or when built unknown), standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages diverging from it through beautiful woods to so many farm-houses. there it stands, like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of, nothing but birds for its congregation; or, like a hermit's oratory (the hermit dead), or a mausoleum; its effect singularly impressive, like a church found in a desert isle to startle crusoe with a home image.... i am a long time reconciling to town after one of these excursions. home is become strange, and will remain so yet awhile; home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always resents absence; i know its cordial looks will return, but they are slow in clearing up." the "cordial looks," however, of the russell street home never did return. the plan of the double lodgings, there and at dalston, was a device of double discomforts; the more so as "at my town lodgings," he afterwards confesses to bernard barton, "the mistress was always quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication the whole family were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one, a most beautiful girl, lamed for life), father beating sons and daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him fairly down, a scene i never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by the unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, though my morals could not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the issue the house was quieter for a day or so than i had ever known." it was time, indeed, for brother and sister to have a house of their own over their heads, means now amply sufficing. a few weeks after their return lamb took colebrook cottage, at islington. it was detached, faced the new river, had six good rooms, and a spacious garden behind. "you enter without passage," he writes, "into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books, and above is a lightsome drawing-room, full of choice prints. i feel like a great lord, never having had a house before." a new acquaintance, a man much after lamb's heart, at whose table he and mary were, in the closing years of his life, more frequent guests than at any other--"mr. carey, the dante man"--was added to their list this year. "he is a model of a country parson, lean (as a curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of church dogmas, quite a different man from southey," says lamb of him. "quite a different man from southey" had a peculiar sting in it at this moment, for southey had just struck a blow at _elia_ in the _quarterly_, as unjust in purport as it was odious in manner,--detraction in the guise of praise. lamb answered him this very autumn in the _london magazine_: a noble answer it is, which seems to have awakened something like compunction in southey's exemplary but pharisaic soul. at all events he made overtures for a reconciliation, which so touched lamb's generous heart, he was instantly ready to take blame upon himself for having written the letter. "i shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister, though innocent, still more so," he says, "for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. my guardian angel was absent at that time." by which token we know that mary did not escape the usual sad effects of change and fatigue in the removal to colebrook cottage. means were easy, home comfortable now; but many a wistful backward glance did brother and sister cast to the days of early struggle, with their fuller life, keener pleasures, and better health. it was not long after they were settled in colebrook cottage that they opened their hearts on this theme in that beautiful essay by elia called _old china_--wordsworth's favourite,--in which charles, for once, made himself mary's--or as he calls her cousin bridget's--mouthpiece. whilst sipping tea out of "a set of extraordinary blue china, a recent purchase,"... writes elia, "i could not help remarking how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years that we could afford to please the eye, sometimes, with trifles of this sort; when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brow of my companion;--i am quick at detecting these summer clouds in bridget. "'i wish the good old times would come again,' she said; 'when we were not quite so rich. i do not mean that i want to be poor; but there was a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which i am sure we were a great deal happier. a purchase is but a purchase now that you have money enough and to spare. formerly it used to be a triumph. when we coveted a cheap luxury (and o how much ado i had to get you to consent in those times!), we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the _for_ and _against_, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon that should be an equivalent. a thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. "'do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio beaumont and fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from barker's in covent garden? do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the saturday night, when you set off from islington, fearing you should be too late,--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures,--and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome,--and when you presented it to me,--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_, you called it),--and while i was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak,--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn suit, your old corbeau, for four or five weeks longer than you should have done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or sixteen shillings, was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which you had lavished on the old folio? now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but i do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now. "'when you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after lionardo which we christened the "lady blanch," when you looked at the purchase and thought of the money, and thought of the money and looked again at the picture--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? now you have nothing to do but to walk into colnaghi's and buy a wilderness of lionardos. yet, do you? "'then do you remember our pleasant walks to enfield, and potter's bar, and waltham when we had a holiday--holidays and all other fun are gone now we are rich--and the little hand-basket in which i used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad,--and how you would pry about at noontide for some decent house where we might go in and produce our store--only paying for the ale that you must call for--and speculated upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth, and wish for such another honest hostess as izaak walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the lea when he went a-fishing--and sometimes they would prove obliging enough and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us--but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging piscator his trout hall? now, when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we _ride_ part of the way, and go into a fine inn and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense--which after all never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage and a precarious welcome. "'you are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. do you remember where it was we used to sit when we saw the battle of hexham, and the surrender of calais, and bannister and mrs. bland in the children in the wood,--when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery, where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me, and more strongly i felt obligation to you for having brought me--and the pleasure was the better for a little shame--and when the curtain drew up what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with rosalind in arden or with viola at the court of illyria? you used to say that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially,--that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going,--that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was impossible for them to fill up. with such reflections we consoled our pride then--and i appeal to you whether as a woman i met generally with less attention and accommodation than i have done since in more expensive situations in the house? the getting in, indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient stair-cases was bad enough--but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages--and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play afterwards! now we can only pay our money and walk in. you cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. i am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then--but sight and all i think is gone with our poverty. "'there was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite common--in the first dish of peas while they were yet dear--to have them for a nice supper, a treat. what treat can we have now? if we were to treat ourselves now--that is to have dainties a little above our means--it would be selfish and wicked. it is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what i call a treat--when two people living together as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury which both like, while each apologises and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. i see no harm in people making much of themselves in that sense of the word. it may give them a hint how to make much of others. but now--what i mean by the word--we never do make much of ourselves. none but the poor can do it. i do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons, as we were, just above poverty. "'i know what you were going to say--that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet,--and much ado we used to have every thirty-first night of december to account for our exceedings--many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so much--or that we had not spent so much--or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year--and still we found our slender capital decreasing; but then, betwixt ways and projects and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge and doing without that for the future--and the hope that youth brings and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with "lusty brimmers" (as you used to quote it out of _hearty, cheerful mr. cotton_, as you called him) we used to "welcome in the coming guest." now we have no reckonings at all at the end of the old year--no flattering promises about the new year doing better for us.' "bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, i am careful how i interrupt it. i could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor--hundred pounds a year. 'it is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. i am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. that we had much to struggle with as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. it strengthened and knit our compact closer. we could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. the resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten--with us are long since passed away. competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but i fear the best that is to be had. we must ride where we formerly walked; live better and lie softer--and we shall be wise to do so--than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. yet could those days return--could you and i once more walk our thirty miles a day,--could bannister and mrs. bland again be young, and you and i be young again to see them,--could the good old one-shilling gallery days return--they are dreams, my cousin, now--but could you and i at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa, be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about and squeezed and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers,--could i once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious '_thank god we are safe_,' which always followed when the topmost stair conquered let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us--i know not the fathom-line that ever touched a descent so deep as i would be willing to bury more wealth in than croesus had, or the great jew r. is supposed to have, to purchase it."... these fire-side confidences between brother and sister bring back, in all the warmth and fulness of life, that past mid which the biographer has been groping and listening to echoes. chapter xv. lamb's ill-health.--retirement from the india house, and subsequent illness.--letter from mary to lady stoddart.--colebrook cottage left.--mary's constant attacks.--home given up.--board with the westwoods.--death of hazlitt.--removal to edmonton.--marriage of emma isola.--mary's sudden recovery.--ill again.--death of coleridge.--death of charles.--mary's last days and death. - .--Æt. - . the year was one of the best mary ever enjoyed. alas! it was not the precursor of others like it, but rather a farewell gleam before the clouds gathered up thicker and thicker till the light of reason was permanently obscured. in november charles wrote to miss hutchinson: "we had promised our dear friends the monkhouses" [relatives of mrs. wordsworth]--"promised ourselves, rather--a visit to them at ramsgate; but i thought it best, and mary seemed to have it at heart too, not to go far from home these last holidays. it is connected with a sense of unsettlement, and secretly i know she hoped that such abstinence would be friendly to her health. she certainly has escaped her sad yearly visitation, whether in consequence of it, or of faith in it, and we have to be thankful for a good , to get such a notion in our heads may go a great way another year. not that we quite confined ourselves; but, assuming islington to be head-quarters, we made timid flights to ware, watford, &c., to try how trouts tasted, for a night out or so, not long enough to make the sense of change oppressive, but sufficient to scour the rust of home." with lamb it was quite otherwise. the letters of this year show that health and spirits were flagging sorely. he had, ever since , been working at high pressure; producing in steady, rapid succession, his matchless _essays_ in the _london magazine_, and this at the end of a long day's office work. his delicate, nervous organisation could not fail to suffer from the continued strain; not to mention the ever present and more terrible one of his sister's health. at last his looks attracted the notice of one of his chiefs, and it was intimated that a resignation might be accepted; as it was after some anxious delays; and a provision for mary, if she survived, was guaranteed in addition to his comfortable pension. the sense of freedom was almost overwhelming. "mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us," he writes. "leigh hunt and montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock of their emancipation much as i feel mine. but it hurt their frames; i eat, drink, and sleep as sound as ever." a reaction did come, however. lamb continued pretty well through the spring, but in the summer he was prostrated by a severe attack of nervous fever. in july he wrote to bernard barton: "my nervous attack has so unfitted me that i have not courage to sit down to a letter. my poor pittance in the _london_ you will see is drawn from my sickness" (_the convalescent_, which appeared july ). one more glimpse of mary in a letter from her own hand. again the whole summer was being spent in lodgings at enfield, whence mary wrote to congratulate her old friend mrs., now lady, stoddart--her husband having become chief justice of malta--on the marriage of a daughter:-- "august , . "my dear lady-friend,--my brother called at our empty cottage [colebrook] yesterday, and found the cards of your son, and his friend mr. hine, under the door; which has brought to my mind that i am in danger of losing this post, as i did the last, being at that time in a confused state of mind--for at that time we were talking of leaving, and persuading ourselves that we were intending to leave town and all our friends, and sit down for ever, solitary and forgotten here.... here we are, and we have locked up our house, and left it to take care of itself; but, at present, we do not design to extend our rural life beyond michaelmas. your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the good news contained in it was already known to me. accept my warmest congratulations, though they come a little of the latest. in my next i may probably have to hail you grand-mama, or to felicitate you on the nuptials of pretty mary who, whatever the beaux of malta may think of her, i can only remember her round shining face, and her 'o william! dear william!' when we visited her the other day at school. present my love and best wishes--a long and happy married life to dear isabella--i love to call her isabella; but in truth, having left your other letter in town, i recollect no other name she has. the same love and the same wishes--_in futuro_--to my friend mary. tell her that her 'dear william' grows taller, and improves in manly looks and man-like behaviour every time i see him. what is henry about? and what should one wish for him? if he be in search of a wife, i will send him out emma isola. "you remember emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball? she is now with us; and i am moving heaven and earth, that is to say, i am pressing the matter upon all the very few friends i have that are likely to assist me in such a case, to get her into a family as governess; and charles and i do little else here than teach her something or other all day long. "we are striving to put enough latin into her to enable her to begin to teach it to young learners. so much for emma--for you are so fearfully far away that i fear it is useless to implore your patronage for her.... "i expect a pacquet of manuscript from you. you promised me the office of negociating with booksellers and so forth for your next work." [lady stoddart published several tales under the name of blackford.] "is it in good forwardness? or do you grow rich and indolent now? it is not surprising that your maltese story should find its way into malta; but i was highly pleased with the idea of your pleasant surprise at the sight of it. i took a large sheet of paper, in order to leave charles room to add something more worth reading than my poor mite. may we all meet again once more." it was to escape the "dear weariness" of incessant friendly visitors, which they were now less than ever able to bear, that they had taken refuge in the enfield lodging. "we have been here near three months, and shall stay two more if people will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village," lamb writes to bernard barton in august. at the end of that time they decided to return to colebrook cottage no more, but to take a house at enfield. the actual process of taking it was witnessed by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose memory it left a lively picture. "leaning idly out of a window, i saw a group of three issuing from the 'gambogy-looking' cottage close at hand,--a slim, middle-aged man, in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog (hood's immortal 'dash'), holding a board with 'this house to let' on it in his jaws. lamb was on his way back to the house-agent, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises. "i soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours," continues the writer of this pleasant reminiscence--mr. westwood, in _notes and queries_, vol. x.--"who let me loose in his library.... my heart yearns even now to those old books. their faces seem all familiar to me, even their patches and blotches--the work of a wizened old cobbler hard by--for little wotted lamb of roger parkes and charles lewises. a cobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the restoration the better.... when any notable visitors made their appearance at the cottage, mary lamb's benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to summon me out, and i was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of their sitting-room, half hid in some great man's shadow. "of the discourse of these _dii majores_ i have no recollection now; but the faces of some of them i can still partially recall. hazlitt's face, for instance, keen and aggressive, with eyes that flashed out epigram. tom hood's, a methodist parson's face, not a ripple breaking the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a pun, and every pun roused roars of laughter. leigh hunt's, parcel genial, parcel democratic, with as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from mount hybla. miss kelly [the little barbara s. of _elia_], plain but engaging, the most unprofessional of actresses and unspoiled of women; the bloom of the child on her cheek undefaced by the rouge, to speak in metaphors. she was one of the most dearly welcome of lamb's guests. wordsworth's, farmerish and respectable, but with something of the great poet occasionally breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes...." mary did not escape her usual seizure. "you will understand my silence," writes lamb to his quaker friend, "when i tell you that my sister, on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at enfield, was surprised with an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of her society, though not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. i see her, but it does her no good. but for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable house, with everything most compact and desirable. colebrook is a wilderness. the books, prints, &c. are come here, and the new river came down with us. the familiar prints, the busts, the milton, seem scarce to have changed their rooms. one of her last observations was, 'how frightfully like this is to our room at islington,'--our upstair room she meant. we have tried quiet here for four months, and i will answer for the comfort of it enduring." and again, later: "i have scarce spirits to write. nine weeks are completed, and mary does not get any better. it is perfectly exhausting. enfield and everything is very gloomy. but for long experience, i should fear her ever getting well." she did get "pretty well and comfortable again" before the year was quite out, but it did not last long. times grew sadder and sadder for the faithful brother. there are two long, oft-quoted letters to bernard barton, written in july , which who has ever read without a pang? "my sister is again taken ill," he says, "and i am obliged to remove her out of the house for many weeks, i fear, before i can hope to have her again. i have been very desolate indeed. my loneliness is a little abated by our young friend emma having just come here for her holidays, and a school-fellow of hers that was with her. still the house is not the same, though she is the same. mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect of seeing her at this time; and with all their company, the house feels at times a frightful solitude.... but town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was.... i was frightfully convinced of this as i passed houses and places--empty caskets now. i have ceased to care almost about anybody. the bodies i cared for are in graves or dispersed.... less than a month i hope will bring home mary. she is at fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when i should come again. but the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of picquet again. but 'tis a tedious cut out of a life of fifty-four to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. and, to make me more alone, our ill-tempered maid is gone [becky] who, with all her airs, was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days. the young thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing; and i have no one here to talk over old matters with. scolding and quarrelling have something of familiarity and a community of interest; they imply acquaintance; they are of resentment which is of the family of dearness. well, i shall write merrier anon. 'tis the present copy of my countenance i send, and to complain is a little to alleviate. may you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let you, and think that you are not quite alone as i am." to the friends who came to see him he made no complaints, nor showed a sad countenance; but it was hard that he might not relieve his drear solitude by the sights and sounds of beloved london. "o never let the lying poets be believed," he writes to wordsworth, "who 'tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets; or think they mean it not of a country village. in the ruins of palmyra i could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the seven sleepers; but to have a little teazing image of a town about one; country folks that do not look like country folks; shops two yards square; half-a-dozen apples and two penn'orth of over-looked ginger-bread for the lofty fruiterers of oxford street; and for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's valentine.... the very blackguards here are degenerate; the topping gentry, stock-brokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet or let you go about whistling or gaping, too few to be the fine, indifferent pageants of fleet street.... a garden was the primitive prison till man, with promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. thence followed babylon, nineveh, venice, london, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, satires, epigrams, puns,--these all came in on the town part and the thither side of innocence...." in the same letter he announces that they have been obliged to give up home altogether, and have "taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called house-keeping, and settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the baucis and baucida of dull enfield. here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her scolded. scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant. we are fed, we know not how; quietists, confiding ravens.... mary must squeeze out a line _propria manu_, but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter-writing for a long interval. 'twill please you all to hear that, though i fret like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some time past. she is absolutely three years and a half younger since we adopted this boarding plan!... under this roof i ought now to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition, more delightful, tells me i might yet be a londoner! well, if ever we do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. clothed we came into enfield, and naked we must go out of it. i would live in london shirtless, bookless." now that mary was recovered they did venture to try once more the experiment of london lodgings at southampton buildings, holborn, where hazlitt had often stayed. but the result was worse even than could have been anticipated. may , , lamb writes: "i have brought my sister to enfield, being sure she had no hope of recovery in london. her state of mind is deplorable beyond any example. i almost fear whether she has strength, at her time of life, ever to get out of it. here she must be nursed and neither see nor hear of anything in the world out of her sick chamber. the mere hearing that southey had called at our lodgings totally upset her. pray see him or hear of him at mr. rickman's and excuse my not writing to him. i dare not write or receive a letter in her presence." another old friend, the one whom, next to coleridge, wordsworth and manning, lamb valued most, died this year. hazlitt's strength had been for some time declining; and during the summer of he lay at his lodgings, frith street, soho, languishing in what was to prove his death illness, though he was but fifty-two; his mind clear and active as ever, looking back, as he said, upon his past life which 'seemed as if he had slept it out in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where he had fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet or the noises of the throng below.' 'i have had a happy life,' were his last words. unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to humanity in the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or beautiful, or powerful in literature, in art, in heroic achievement. his ideas, as he said of himself, were "of so sinewy a character that they were in the nature of realities" to him. lamb was by his death-bed that th of september. godwin still lived, but there seems to have been little intercourse between the old friends. manning was often away travelling on the continent. martin burney maintained his place 'on the top scale of the lambs' friendship ladder, on which an angel or two were still climbing, and some, alas! descending,' and oftenest enlivened the solitude of enfield. he "is as good and as odd as ever," writes charles to mrs. hazlitt. "we had a dispute about the word 'heir,' which i contended was pronounced like 'air.' he said that might be in common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the 'heir-at-law,' a comedy, but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration and to say _hayer_; he thought it might even vitiate a cause if a counsel pronounced it otherwise. in conclusion he 'would consult serjeant wilde'--who gave it against him. sometimes he falleth into the water; sometimes into the fire. he came down here and insisted on reading virgil's 'eneid' all through with me (which he did), because a counsel must know latin. another time he read out all the gospel of st. john, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. a third time he would carve a fowl, which he did very ill-favouredly, because 'we did not know how indispensable it was for a barrister to do all those things well. those little things were of more consequence than we supposed.' so he goes on, harassing about the way to prosperity and losing it; with a long head, but somewhat a wrong one--harum-scarum. why does not his guardian angel look to him? he deserves one; may-be he has tired him out." a cheerful glimpse of the brother and sister occurs now and then in the diary of their old friend, crabb robinson, in these days when the dark times were so long and the bright intervals so short and far between. march he writes:--"i walked to enfield and found the lambs in excellent state,--not in high health, but, what is far better, quiet and cheerful. i had a very pleasant evening at whist. lamb was very chatty and altogether as i could wish." and again in july, "... reached lamb at the lucky moment before tea. after tea lamb and i took a pleasant walk together. he was in excellent health and tolerable spirits, and was to-night quite eloquent in praise of miss isola. he says she is the most sensible girl and the best female talker he knows ... he is teaching her italian without knowing the language himself." two months later the same friend took walter savage landor to pay them a visit. "we had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it was enough to make landor express himself delighted with the person of mary lamb and pleased with the conversation of charles lamb, though i thought him by no means at his ease, and miss lamb was quite silent." scarcely ever did charles leave home for many hours together when mary was there to brighten it; not even for the temptation of seeing the wordsworths or coleridge. "i want to see the wordsworths," he writes, "but i do not much like to be all night away. it is dull enough to be here together, but it is duller to leave mary; in short, it is painful"; and to coleridge, who had been hurt by the long interval since he had seen them, lamb writes:--"not an unkind thought has passed in my brain about you; but i have been wofully neglectful of you.... old loves to and hope of kind looks from the gillmans when i come. if ever you thought an offence, much more wrote it against me, it must have been in the times of noah and the great waters swept it away. mary's most kind love, and may be a wrong prophet of your bodings! here she is crying for mere love over your letter. i wring out less but not sincerer showers." the spring of brought to charles and mary only the return of dark days. lamb writes to wordsworth:-- "your letter, save in what respects your dear sister's health, cheered me in my new solitude. mary is ill again. her illnesses encroach yearly. the last was three months followed by two of depression most dreadful. i look back upon her earlier attacks with longing: nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration,--shocking as they were then to me. in short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. with such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me and be fluttered with continual removals; so i am come to live with her at a mr. walden's and his wife [at edmonton], who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only. they have had the care of her before. i see little of her: alas! i too often hear her. _sunt lachrymæ rerum!_ and you and i must bear it. "to lay a little more load on it, a circumstance has happened (_cujus pars magna fui_), and which at another crisis i should have more rejoiced in. i am about to lose my old and only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the 'youth of our house,'--emma isola. i have her here now for a little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make short visits--be no more an inmate. with my perfect approval and more than concurrence she is to be wedded to moxon at the end of august. so 'perish the roses and the flowers!'--how is it? "now to the brighter side. i am emancipated from the westwoods and i am with attentive people and younger. i am three or four miles nearer the great city; coaches half price less and going always, of which i will avail myself. i have few friends left there, one or two, though, most beloved. but london streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.... i am feeble but cheerful in this my genial hot weather. walked sixteen miles yesterday. i can't read much in summer-time." there was no sense of being "pulled up by the roots" now in these removals. lamb had and could have no home since she who had been its chief pride was in perpetual banishment from him and from herself. the following notelet which talfourd, in his abundance, probably did not think worth publishing, at any rate shows with mournful significance how bitter were his recollections of enfield, to which they had gone full of hope. it was written to mr. gillman's eldest son, a young clergyman, desirous of the incumbency of enfield:-- "by a strange occurrence we have quitted enfield _for ever!_ oh! the happy eternity! who is vicar or lecturer for that detestable place concerns us not. but asbury, surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to get you a mover and seconder, and you may use my name freely to him. except him and dr. creswell, i have no respectable acquaintance in the dreary village. at least my friends are all in the _public_ line, and it might not suit to have it moved at a special vestry by john gage at the crown and horseshoe, licensed victualler, and seconded by joseph horner of the green dragon, ditto, that the rev. j. g. is a fit person to be lecturer, &c. "my dear james, i wish you all success, but am too full of my own emancipation almost to congratulate anyone else." miss isola's wedding-day came, and still mary's mind was under eclipse; but the announcement of the actual event restored her as by magic; and here is her own letter of congratulation to the bride and bridegroom,--the last from her hand:-- "my dear emma and edward moxon, "accept my sincere congratulations and imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into good, set words. the dreary blank of _unanswered questions_ which i ventured to ask in vain, was cleared up on the wedding-day by mrs. w. taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance, begging leave to drink mr. and mrs. moxon's health. it restored me from that moment, as if by an electric shock, to the entire possession of my senses. i never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as i do now. i feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes and all care from my heart." to which beautiful last words charles adds:-- "dears again--your letter interrupted a seventeenth game at picquet which _we_ were having after walking to wright's and purchasing shoes. we pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. we attack tasso soon. never was such a calm or such a recovery. 'tis her own words undictated." not tasso only was attacked, but even dante. "you will be amused to hear," he tells carey, "that my sister and i have, with the aid of emma, scrambled through the _inferno_ by the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation. i think we scarce left anything un-made-out. but our partner has left us and we have not yet resumed. mary's chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to you." the year , the last of lamb's life, opened gloomily. early in february was written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his utterances concerning mary. with the exception of a brief, mournful allusion to her in his latest letter to wordsworth these were his last written words about her, and they breathe the same tenderness and unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long struggle and endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. the letter is to miss fryer, an old school-fellow of emma isola:--"your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at dover street [the moxons]. i see them pretty often. in one word, be less uneasy about me; i bear my privations very well; i am not in the depths of desolation as heretofore. your admonitions are not lost upon me. your kindness has sunk into my heart. have faith in me! it is no new thing for me to be left to my sister. when she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone over it. i could be nowhere happier than under the same roof with her. her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may so call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of names and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. what took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally live again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain, with the vividness of real presence. for twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the waldens, as a dream, sense and nonsense, truth and errors huddled together, a medley between inspiration and possession. what things we are! i know you will bear with me talking of things. it seems to ease me, for i have nobody to tell these things to now...." a week later was written that last little letter to wordsworth (the reader will recognize louisa martin--monkey--so prettily described in lamb's first letter to hazlitt):--"i write from a house of mourning. the oldest and best friends i have left are in trouble. a branch of them (and they of the best stock of god's creatures, i believe) is establishing a school at carlisle. her name is louisa martin. for thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour i would stake my soul. oh! if you could recommend her, how would i love you--if i could love you better! pray, pray recommend her. she is as good a human creature--next to my sister, perhaps, the most exemplary female i ever knew. moxon tells me you would like a letter from me; you shall have one. _this_ i cannot mingle up with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from c. lamb. poor mary is ill again, after a short, lucid interval of four or five months. in short, i may call her half dead to me. good you are to me. yours, with fervour of friendship, for ever." the dearest friend of all, coleridge, long in declining health--the "hooded eagle, flagging wearily," was lying this spring and summer in his last painful illness--heart disease chiefly, but complicated with other sources of suffering--borne with heroic patience. thoughts of his youth came to him, he said, 'like breezes from the spice islands;' and under the title of that poem written in the glorious nether stowey days when charles was his guest,--_this lime-tree bower my prison_,--he wrote a little while before he died:-- charles and mary lamb, dear to my heart, yea, as it were _my heart_. s. t. c. Æt. , . ---- years! he drew his last breath on the th of july. at first lamb seemed wholly unable to grasp the fact that he was gone. "coleridge is dead!" he murmured continually, as if to convince himself. he 'grieved that he could not grieve.' "but since," he wrote in that beautiful memorial of his friend--the last fragment shaped by his hand--"but since, i feel how great a part of me he was. his great and dear spirit haunts me.... he was my fifty-year old friend without a dissension. never saw i his likeness, nor probably the world can see it again. i seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. i love the faithful gillman's more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. what was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel." a month after this was written charles lamb followed his friend. a seemingly slight accident, a fall which wounded his face, brought on erysipelas, and he sank rapidly, dying the th december . for once, mary's affliction befriended her. though her mind was not wholly obscured at the time, for she was able to show the spot in edmonton churchyard where her brother had wished to be buried, yet it was so far deadened that she was unable to comprehend what had befallen her; and thus she remained for nearly a year. none thought of mary with tenderer sympathy than landor, or strove with more sincerity to offer "consolation to the finest genius that ever descended on the heart of woman," as he fervently described her. "when i first heard of the loss that all his friends, and many that never were his friends, sustained in him," he wrote to crabb robinson, "no thought took possession of my mind except the anguish of his sister. that very night, before i closed my eyes, i composed this:-- to the sister of charles lamb. comfort thee, o thou mourner! yet awhile again shall elia's smile refresh thy heart, whose heart can ache no more. what is it we deplore? he leaves behind him, freed from grief and years, far worthier things than tears, the love of friends without a single foe; unequalled lot below! his gentle soul, his genius, these are thine; shalt thou for these repine? he may have left the lowly walks of men; left them he has: what then? are not his footsteps followed by the eyes of all the good and wise? though the warm day is over, yet they seek upon the lofty peak of his pure mind, the roseate light that glows o'er death's perennial snows. behold him! from the spirits of the blest he speaks: he bids thee rest. about a month after her brother's death, their faithful old friend, crabb robinson, went to see mary. "she was neither violent nor unhappy," he wrote in his diary, "nor was she entirely without sense. she was, however, out of her mind, as the expression is, but she could combine ideas, though imperfectly. on my going into the room where she was sitting with mr. walden, she exclaimed, with great vivacity, 'oh! here's _crabby_.' she gave me her hand with great cordiality, and said, 'now this is very kind--not merely good-natured, but very, very kind to come and see me in my affliction.' and then she ran on about the unhappy, insane family of my old friend ----. her mind seemed to turn to subjects connected with insanity as well as to her brother's death. she spoke of charles, of his birth, and said that he was a weakly but very pretty child." in a year's time she was herself once more; calm, even cheerful; able, now and then, to meet old friends at the moxons'. she refused to leave edmonton. "_he_ was there asleep in the old churchyard, beneath the turf near which they had stood together, and had selected for a resting-place; to this spot she used, when well, to stroll out mournfully in the evening, and to this spot she would contrive to lead any friend who came in summer evenings to drink tea, and went out with her afterwards for a walk." out of very love she was content to be the one left alone; and found a truth in wordsworth's beautiful saying, that "a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation, in course of time, springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkle the turf." lucid intervals continued, for a few years longer, to alternate with ever-lengthening periods of darkness. that mysterious brain was not even yet wholly wrecked by the eighty years of storms that had broken over it. even when the mind seemed gone the heart kept some of its fine instincts. she learned to bear her solitude very patiently, and was gentle and kind always. towards her friends persuaded her to remove to alpha road, st. john's wood, that she might be nearer to them. thirteen years she survived her brother, and then was laid in the same grave with him at edmonton, may th, ; a scanty remnant of the old friends gathering round,--"martin burney refusing to be comforted." coleridge looked upon lamb "as one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything." or, as he himself once, with infinite sweetness, put it, "poor elia does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being. he stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful indeed for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." of mary it may be said that she hoped all things and feared nothing,--wisest, noblest attitude of the human soul toward the unknown. list of authorities. _life, letters, and writings of charles lamb._ _edited by percy fitzgerald, m.a., f.s.a._ . _the works of charles lamb._ _edited by charles kent_ [in which, for the first time, the dates and original mode of publication were affixed to the essays, &c.]. . _poetry for children, by charles and mary lamb._ _edited by richard herne shepherd._ . _mrs. leicester's school, by charles and mary lamb._ _tales from shakespeare, by charles and mary lamb._ . _final memorials of charles lamb, by talfourd._ . _charles lamb: a memoir, by barry cornwall._ . _mary and charles lamb, by w. carew hazlitt._ . _my friends and acquaintance, by p. g. patmore._ . _letters, conversations, and recollections of coleridge, by thomas allsop._ third edition. . _early recollections of coleridge, by j. cottle._ . _biographia literaria, by coleridge._ second edition. . _life of coleridge, by gillman._ vol. i. . _memoirs and letters of sara coleridge._ _edited by her daughter._ . _life of wordsworth, by rev. dr. c. wordsworth._ . _a chronological list of the writings of hazlitt and leigh hunt, preceded by an essay on lamb, and list of his works, by alex. ireland; printed for private circulation._ (the copy used contains many ms. additions by the author.) . _recollections of writers, by charles and mary cowden clarke._ . _six life studies of famous women, by m. betham edwards._ . _diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of henry crabb-robinson._ _edited by dr. sadler._ . _memoir of william hazlitt, by w. carew hazlitt._ . _spirit of the age._ & _table talk._ by _hazlitt._ , . _autobiographical sketches._ & _lakes and lake poets._ by _de quincey._ . _william godwin, his friends and contemporaries, by kegan paul._ . london printed by w. h. allen and co., waterloo place. transcriber's note: contemporary spellings, old word forms, and punctuation rules have been retained, even when inconsistent. the list of authorities has been moved to the end of the volume. transcriber's note: portraits have been moved from the middle of the chapter to the beginning of the same. footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the closest paragraph break. obvious errors have been silently corrected. notable women authors of the day. printed at the university press, and published by david bryce and son, glasgow. london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. notable women authors. notable women authors of the day _biographical sketches_ by helen c. black with portraits glasgow david bryce and son to my beloved and only daughter. these sketches originally appeared as a series in the "lady's pictorial" and are republished with the editor's kind permission. they are now revised, enlarged and brought up to date. helen c. black contents. _from photographs by_ page _mrs. lynn linton_, barrauds ltd., london, _mrs. riddell_, c. vandyk, s. kensington, _mrs. l. b. walford_, barrauds ltd., london, _rhoda broughton_, barrauds ltd., london, _john strange winter_, barrauds ltd., london, (_mrs. arthur stannard._) _mrs. alexander_, elliott & fry, london, _helen mathers_, walery, london, _florence marryat_, london stereoscopic co. ltd., _mrs. lovett cameron_, mayall & co. ltd., london, _mrs. hungerford_, guy & co., cork, _matilda betham edwards_, barrauds ltd., london, _edna lyall_, g. churchill, eastbourne, _rosa nouchette carey_, s. j. poole & co., putney, _adeline sergeant_, h. s. mendelssohn, london, _mrs. edward kennard_, speight, market harboro, _jessie fothergill_, warwick brookes, m'chester, _lady duffus hardy_, j. russell & sons, london, _iza duffus hardy_, j. russell & sons, london, _may crommelin_, j. thomson, london, _mrs. houstoun_, _mrs. alex. fraser_, w. & a. h. fry, brighton, _honourable mrs. henry chetwynd_, maull & fox, london, _jean middlemass_, t. fall, baker st., london, w. _augusta de grasse stevens_, vernon kaye, london, _mrs. leith adams_, j. h. blomfield, hastings, _jean ingelow_, barrauds ltd., london, notable women authors. [illustration: e. lynn linton] mrs. lynn linton. a blue sky and a bright sun belie the typical foggy month of november, and while entering the elevator which glides rapidly and smoothly to the eighth floor of the gigantic pile of buildings once cynically termed "hankey's folly"--now queen anne's mansions--you feel justified in anticipating a glorious view over the great city. you step out into a corridor where are arranged a stand of grenades with a couple of hydrants, backed by printed directions for their use, and are shown into the library of the distinguished author; but ere there is time to look around, the door opens, and mrs. lynn linton enters. her personality may be described thus: tall, upright, and stately in appearance, the keen, but kindly bright blue eyes smiling through the gold-rimmed glasses which she always wears. she is clad in a suitable black dress, trimmed with jet, a white lace cap partially covers the thick grey hair, which escapes in a tiny natural curl or two on each side of the smooth, intellectual forehead. the eyebrows--far apart--are straight and level, but shaded off so delicately that they impart a look of benignity and softness to the aristocratic nose, while the curves of the well-cut lips indicate straightforwardness, sincerity of disposition, and power. can it be possible that you had felt a momentary trepidation before meeting the gifted woman for whose genius you have ever entertained the greatest reverence? but mrs. lynn linton will have none of it! her kind and friendly greeting puts you at once at ease. she says that she has an hour or two to spare, that her work is well on, and that there is no immediate fear of her being disturbed by an emissary from the printers, so you settle down to have a good talk, and to learn from your hostess some particulars of her early life, and her subsequent eventful career. mrs. lynn linton was born at keswick; her father being the vicar of crosthwaite, cumberland. when only five months old, her mother (a daughter of dr. goodenough, bishop of carlisle) died, leaving a family of twelve children. she was brought up plainly and frugally, with no particular advantages of education; nevertheless, at an early age she developed a strong taste for reading and a thirst for knowledge. casting aside her childish story books, she dived into such ancient literature and chronicles as she found on her father's book-shelves, and at the age of eleven determined to train herself to be a writer. about this time she became keenly interested in polish affairs, in which her favourite brother took an active part. in those days there were not the same facilities for procuring books as in later years, but the young child-student managed to overcome all obstacles, and educated herself, mastering french, german, and italian. the one aim and end to which her ambition was directed buoyed her up through early years of what were somewhat rough times to the shy, nervous, short-sighted girl, who always seemed in everyone's way. to this repression and self-training may be attributed the independence of thought, the thoroughness, the originality of idea, as well as the deep sympathy with young and struggling authors which are mrs. lynn linton's prevailing characteristics. one of her earliest recollections is of the poet southey, and that to this day she can recall to mind his peculiar face, his dark eyes, full of fire, his eagle nose, and thin figure. she wrote her first novel, "azeth, the egyptian," when she came to london, at the age of twenty-three, and from that day to this has supported herself entirely by her pen; but she says that this "first book" gave her a whole year's hard work to write, and she thinks it is now probably "unreadable." for her second, "amymone," she will ever have the tenderest memories, and the blue eyes kindle when she remarks that it was the means of bringing her into contact with walter savage landor, and securing for her his lasting sympathy and friendship. she says he was her literary father, her guide, philosopher, and friend, and that one of her dearest treasures is a large packet of letters from the poet, beginning "my dear daughter," and signed "father" only, or "your affectionate father," as well as those verses which he addressed to her, ending with the line, "pure heart, and lofty soul, eliza lynn." between the production of "realities: a tale," in , and "witch stories," there was a gap of ten years, which the young writer devoted principally to journalism. she was, indeed, the first of women journalists. she contributed to several of the daily papers and magazines. presently a series of pungent and clever essays began in the _saturday review_, which increased its fame, and took the world by storm. "the girl of the period," "the shrieking sisterhood," "paying one's shot," "mature sirens," have now passed into proverbs. they made a famous topic of conversation at dinner-tables, and proved a decided hit. for many years a certain lady of rank had the credit of the series, until at last, after many futile efforts, mrs. lynn linton was allowed to collect her own papers and publish them under her own name. "i never mind how much i slash," says mrs. lynn linton, "because i always feel i am not slashing at a personality, but at a type. thackeray never drew becky sharp from one individual; we all know a becky sharp." in the young writer married mr. linton, the well-known wood engraver, and in began again the interrupted series of fifteen novels, amongst which were "under which lord?" "patricia kemball," "the true story of joshua davidson," "lizzie lorton of greyrigg," "sowing the wind," "the atonement of leam dundas," "the world well lost," "the rebel of the family," "my love," "paston carew, miser and millionaire," "jane stewart," "through the long night," and "christopher kirkland." this last is deeply interesting, as a history of the author herself, her theories, philosophy, and religious opinions. the writing table in the cosy library--or as mrs. lynn linton often calls it, "the workroom"--is placed slantways to catch the best light, and commands a beautiful view from the windows, full south over the surrey hills. the cut-glass inkstand has been in constant use for over fifty years. papers, reviews, and books of reference are tidily heaped up; the table is full, but in perfect order; commenting on this to your hostess, she says it is "part of her nature, she could find anything in the dark." she is altogether a believer in method, regularity, and punctuality, which last quality gained for her from charles dickens the remark that she was "good for anything, and thoroughly reliable." opening a well-worn "dictionary of greek and roman antiquities" lying on a side-table close at hand, mrs. lynn linton remarks it was bought with nearly her first earnings, and that she has by degrees purchased nearly all the books, which seem to occupy every available recess. the two deep cases opposite are filled with treasures of literature, and the tall revolving bookstand contains chiefly her collection of favourite poets--landor, arnold, swinburne. a persian carpet of subdued tints covers the floor; on a large round table, over which hangs a lamp of graceful design, is heaped, with extreme precision, a mass of journals, magazines, and periodicals; not a paper is awry. the great accumulation of literature has indeed necessitated the fitting up of two tall, narrow recesses at the other end of the room, each neatly hidden by a long tapestry curtain. a tender light comes into mrs. lynn linton's face as she points out three photographs hanging on the wall. the first is of her beloved brother, "without fear or favour," who died of a broken heart after the death of an adored wife; the second is of her "father" landor; and the third is of mr. linton--"brother, father, husband," she says, with infinite tenderness for the memory of all three. asking to be allowed to see the famous view from the drawing-room, which it is said "looks over st. james's park and carlton terrace, and embraces the whole of the park from buckingham palace to the horse guards," "_did_ embrace it," amends mrs. linton, mournfully, "but come and see." she leads the way to the opposite side of the flat, into a rather long drawing-room, the windows of which look due south over the uninterrupted view one might reasonably have expected to see. alas! a tall and ugly erection of bricks and mortar has sprang up to the left, obscuring a portion of the prospect. "they have given me only a vista," says mrs. lynn linton, "where i once had a view." what is left, however, is very fine, and from the great height above ground the people look like pigmies dotted about. queen caroline once talked of shutting up this lovely park, and converting it into a noble garden for the palace. she consulted walpole as to the probable cost; the witty minister replied, "only three crowns, your majesty," and the idea was abandoned. there is a peculiarly long, narrow frame hanging on the opposite side of the wall, and as mrs. lynn linton permits an inspection of everything, you examine it carefully, while she explains the subject. it is nearly four yards long, and represents the parthenon frieze--the panathenaic procession--and the fight of the amazons and athenians, reduced and restored by john herring. as the slate matrix was broken, it is now extremely valuable. it is in plaster of paris, mounted on red, and is the property of mr. linton, who has bequeathed it to the national gallery in america. the small statuette of "margaret," modelled by geefs, is another and very rare gem. mrs. lynn linton is also the possessor of a quaint grey vase, a relic of the great exhibition of . on one little table, covered with an oriental cloth, crowded with favourite photographs, the portrait of a graceful, pretty girl occupies a prominent place. "that is my beatrice, my bee, my dear adopted daughter," she says, "dear as if she were my own; and these," pointing to two large framed pictures, "are both likenesses of my friend mr. fuller, a nephew of sir arthur helps. we first became friends through correspondence. he sent me his book, 'culmshire folk.' his wife invited me to ireland last year, and the result was my first and last political work about that country." you ask mrs. lynn linton to tell you about some of the celebrated people whom she has met. after musing awhile, she mentions captain maconochie (the convicts' friend), sir charles babbage, kinglake, miss jane porter, mrs. milner gibson--"she was my social godmother; but these all belonged to a past generation. in later years i was more or less on intimate terms with harrison ainsworth, george eliot, sir henry layard, sir henry rawlinson, tom taylor, thackeray, dickens, yates, wilkie collins, swinburne, sir roderick murchison, rider haggard, dr. elliotson, and william spottiswoode, late president of the royal society. _he_ was a prince among men, and i loved and reverenced his noble character." unlike many literary women, mrs. lynn linton is a great adept with her needle. the beautiful silk embroideries--of which she is very proud--cushions, chair seats, and the handsome fire-screen are all the work of her skilful fingers, and made from her own designs. the big green frog and the swallows hanging on the left are a present from mr. oswald crawfurd, the famous consul at oporto. the tunis plates and various photographs indicate that your hostess has made sundry journeys abroad, and travelled in many foreign lands where she has picked up a few picturesque "bits" as mementos of the places which she visited; but she says her most cherished possession is the gold cinquecento basket standing yonder, the gift of walter savage landor. yet more books! each recess in the opposite wall is well filled, also the low dwarf bookcase under the large mirror, and another under the herring "slate." you are curious to know if mrs. lynn linton reads and is influenced by criticisms on her works? she says she has never striven for popularity, and has boldly put forth her opinions, without caring for the consequences. she was once called "selfish." _selfish!_ have you not known, and been told by a score of young authors, that they owe their success and a deep debt of gratitude to her! in despair, one after another has taken to her an article, a story, a three-volume novel, a play; what not? with patience she would pore over a crabbed manuscript, word by word, suggesting, correcting, improving, advising. she has a large number of young friends, who confide all their troubles, hopes, and wishes to her, with the certainty of absolute sympathy and wise counsel. far from being stern or severe, as some of her books might lead one to think, she is bubbling over with the milk of human kindness, and her chief desire is to be of use or help to some one. the tender, motherly manner casts its spell over you too, and you find yourself presently pouring out confidences as if she were an old acquaintance. mrs. lynn linton generally enjoys the best of health. she keeps early hours, works in the morning, takes plenty of exercise, and "plain living" keeps the _mens sana in corpore sano_ for "high thinking." although in her sixth decade, she possesses a splendid physique, of which she is pardonably proud. she says she finds residing in her exalted flat far preferable to a house. there she is out of the reach of burglars and beggars; she lives at less expense, combined with incomparably more comfort; whilst the servants of the gigantic establishment all respect her, and "ellen," who has been there for eleven years, she calls her "child," and looks upon her as a personal friend. but the clock strikes. you have been unconscionable. the time has sped so rapidly that the promised hour has doubled itself. you say good-bye, and as mrs. lynn linton kindly asks you to come again on her "saturdays, to one, or to all," you look down on the small white hand which holds yours, and notice the long slender fingers. the memory of its hearty clasp remains on your mind as you are conveyed down the eight stories of queen anne's mansions, and so, into the street, where you become one of the aforenamed "pigmies." [illustration: charlotte eliza riddell] mrs. riddell. the sleepy little village of upper halliford, middlesex, has one peculiar charm. though within ten minutes' walk of walton bridge, it lies quite off the main line of traffic, and is consequently free from the visits of cockney tourists, affording in this, as in many other respects, a striking contrast to lower halliford, which, situated on a lovely reach of the thames, welcomes annually thousands of visitors. there the inevitable steam-launch cuts its swift way through the water; there boating-men, clad in all the colours of the rainbow, are to be met with, on or after good friday, when the "season" begins; there persistent fishermen, seated in punts warily moored, angle day after day, and all day long, for the bream, roach, and gudgeon, to be found in such abundance; there furnished houses let at high rents; willows dip their branches in the river, and from thence the trees of oatlands show well on the upland on the opposite sides of the glistening thames. it was between lower halliford and walton bridge--half of which is in surrey and half in middlesex--that, at a point called the coway stakes, julius cæsar is believed to have crossed the river. the name "coway stakes" originated in the fact that there cassivelaunus fortified the banks, and filled the river with sharp-pointed stakes to prevent the enemy from crossing the stream, but notwithstanding these precautions the roman leader and his legions accomplished their purpose, and, a little way above where the ship hotel (so well known to boating-men), now stands, a terrible battle was fought in the year b.c. between the britons and romans. several relics have been dug up about this part of the thames, also a number of the stakes taken from the bed of the river, black with age, but still sound. any one who cares to walk on to walton should make a point of visiting the old church of st. mary--an edifice of great antiquity--in order to see a curious relic, dated , a scold's bit, or bridle, bearing the following inscription:-- "chester to walton sends a bridle to curb women's tongues that talk too idle." upper halliford, unlike lower halliford, or walton, has nothing to show in the way of beauty or relic. it boasts no history, it has no legend, or old church, or historic mansion. it is only a quaint little hamlet, which might be a hundred miles from the bustle and roar of london; there, however, the famous author of "george geith of fen court" has for the last seven years made her home, where she lives in absolute seclusion. her little cottage stands slightly back from the high road. it is built flush with the ground, and covered with trellis-work, which in summer time is concealed by clustering white roses and clematis. the porch is in the centre, and the rooms on each side have broad bay windows. there is a large field in front, and so many evergreens about the cottage, that, when snow comes, the place looks like a winter "transformation scene." a great, old-fashioned garden stretches far out at the back, and it was chiefly the tranquillity and privacy of this delightful garden, with its grand old hedge of holly, now bright with red berries, which attracted mrs. riddell, and decided her to settle down, away from the world, after long and fierce buffeting with the stormy seas of sorrow, disappointment, losses, and bereavement, of which she has had so large a share. the gentle, quiet face tells its tale of early struggles, heavy burdens, severe trials; yet time has not laid its ruthless hand over-harshly on the author. not a silver hair is visible on the soft, brown hair, which is simply rolled into a neat coil, high on the back of her head, and fastened by a large tortoise-shell comb. the deep grey eyes are undimmed, and wear a look of peace and resignation, nobly won; while "ever and anon of griefs subdued, there comes a token" which recalls the past. but mrs. riddell can smile sweetly, and when she smiles, two--yes two--absolutely girlish dimples light up the expressive countenance. she is tall, has a good carriage, and is dressed in black; she has worn no colours for over ten years. the little room is very simply but prettily furnished. it is lighted by one bay window reaching to the ground in front, and a glass door at the side. soft, white rugs lie here and there on the dark red carpet, and an old-fashioned bookcase contains the works of her favourite authors. there are no particular curiosities or decorations to be seen, save one valuable bit of old dresden china, two or three plates of ancient crown derby, together with a couple of quaint delhi-work salvers, and a few pictures hanging on the walls. of these last, two are particularly attractive. one is the head of a christ crowned with thorns, beautifully painted on copper; the other, over the fire place, represents the castle of carrigfergus, which, though built nearly a thousand years ago, is still strong enough to hold a troop of soldiers. mrs. riddell was born in ireland, at the barn, carrigfergus. she was the youngest daughter of mr. james cowan, who held the post of high sheriff for the county of that town. "yes, i am from the north--the black north," says your hostess in a low, soft voice. "my grandfather was in the navy, and my great-grandfather fought at culloden, so i may fairly claim to be english, scotch, and irish. my mother, ellen kilshaw, was a beautiful, graceful, and accomplished english woman. on most subjects people have two opinions, but i never heard a second opinion about my mother. even amongst those who only knew her in later life, when stricken with disease, and changed by long years of sorrow, she stands out a distinct personality, as one of those possessed of the manners, appearance, and ideas, that we associate with the highest bred women of the past!" "and she was good as she was beautiful. i wish you could hear how rich and poor who knew her in the old time at the barn still speak of her. as for me, while i speak, the grief of her death seems sharp and present as on that sixteenth of december when she left me." last autumn, after a lapse of twenty-five years, mrs. riddell revisited her native place. "such of our old friends as were left," she says, "i found as kind as ever." it must have been sad, yet sweet, for the author to recall the old reminiscences of her girlish home as she saw once more the pretty bungalow-like house, with its gardens, hot-houses, and vineries, and to visit again the spot where, at the age of fifteen, she remembers writing her first story. "it was on a bright moonlight night," she says--"i can see it now flooding the gardens--that i began it, and i wrote week after week, never ceasing until it was finished. need i add it was never published?" she goes on eloquently to tell you of yet further recollections of the old house, the memory of her father's lingering illness, and the low, sweet tones of her mother's voice as she read aloud to him for hours together. "from my father," says mrs. riddell, "i think i got the few brains i possess. undoubtedly he was a very clever man, but _i_ never knew him at his best, for as far as my memory goes back he was always more or less a sufferer, blessed with the most tender and devoted wife man ever had." on her father's death, the property passed into other hands, and with but a small jointure the broken-hearted widow and her daughter left their old home. they lived afterwards, for a while, in the charming village of dundonald in the county down, where the young author subsequently laid the scene of her novel, "berna boyle," and then, after a good deal of meditation, they decided to come to london. in later years she wrote three other irish stories, "the earl's promise," "the nun's curse," and "maxwell drewitt," which last contains an exciting account of an election at connemara. "i have often wished," says mrs. riddell "we never had so decided, yet in that case, i do not think i ever should have achieved the smallest success, and even before we left, with bitter tears, a place where we had the kindest friends, and knew much happiness, my mother's death was--though neither of us then knew the fact--a certainty. the illness of which she died had then taken hold of her. she had always a great horror of pain mental and physical; she was keenly sensitive, and mercifully before the agonising period of her complaint arrived, the nerves of sensation were paralysed; first or last, she never lost a night's sleep the whole of the ten weeks, during which i fought with death for her, and--was beaten." mrs. riddell's first impressions of london are well worth recording. coming as strangers to a strange land, throughout the length and breadth of the great metropolis, she says, "we did not know a single creature! during the first fortnight, indeed, i really thought i should break my heart. i had never taken kindly to new places, and, remembering the sweet hamlet and the loving friends left behind, london seemed to me horrible! i could not eat; i could not sleep; i could only walk over the 'stony-hearted streets' and offer my manuscripts to publisher after publisher, who unanimously declined them." the desolation of her spirit can be more easily imagined than described. conceive the situation of the young girl, burning to earn a living by her pen, knowing that it was within her to do so, yet unacquainted with a single literary or other person; friendless, unknown, with an invalid mother, and terribly insufficient means! and when, at last, she sold a story, called "moors and fens," that beloved mother had passed away; and your eyes moisten as the daughter mentions the touching and filial use to which her first twenty pounds were applied. but mrs. riddell has something pleasant to say for those who declined her mss., and it must be related in her own words: "looking back i _must_ say, as a rule, they were all very kind to me. i was too ignorant and heartsore to understand how gracious they were to my simplicity, even more than to my youth. yet i shall never forget how charming mr. george bentley's manner seemed the first day i saw him. his father--the kindest, most impulsive, most sympathetic of men--was alive then, and for many a year afterwards; but it so happened that mr. george bentley was the partner whom i saw, and," she adds smiling, and naïvely, "though he, like everyone else, refused my work, still i left his office not unhappy, but thinking much more about how courteous and nice he was than of how entirely the wrong person in the wrong place i seemed to be. ere long, with some publishers i became quite on friendly terms, and i have now known three generations of the bentleys." after a short silence mrs. riddell resumes the subject, saying, "i must name also mr. charles skeet, of king william street, who was good enough to keep my mother supplied with books. long as it is since he retired from business, our friendship remained unbroken until his death. he was most kind to me always. he published 'the rich husband,' 'too much alone,' 'the world and the church,' and 'alaric spencer.'" "i could always, when the day was frightfully cold--and _what_ a winter that was when i first came to london--turn into mr. newby's snug and warm office in welbeck street, and have a talk with him and his 'woman of business.' i am glad to mention her name--miss springett. she was a lady, always kind, nice, and capable; she remained with him till her death, i believe. everyone was good to me in those days; but, indeed, i have received, all my life through, an enormous amount of kindness, and have not a word to say against a world which has treated me far better than i deserved." a year after the death of her mother the young author married. mr. riddell belonged to an old staffordshire family, a branch of the scotch riddells, of long descent and gentle blood. "courageous and hopeful, gifted with indomitable energy," says his widow, "endowed with marvellous persistence and perseverance; modestly conscious of talents which ought to have made their mark, he, when a mere lad, began his long quest after fortune, one single favour from whom he was never destined to receive." gifted with much inventive genius, mr. riddell was also possessed of considerable general knowledge, and was deeply versed in literature, medicine, science, and mathematics. to him his wife turned for all the information she needed in her novels; the chemistry in "too much alone," the engineering in "city and suburb." he supplied all the business details in "george geith," and "the race for wealth"; while in "mortomley's estate" mrs. riddell says she has "but told the simple story of what, when in ill-health and broken in spirit, he had to encounter before ruin, total and complete, overtook him." too early in youth overweighted with a heavy burden, under which a strong man might have found it hard to stagger, she declares that, "in spite of harassing trouble and continuous misfortune, their twenty-three years of married life were happy as few lives are, simply by reason of his sweet, patient temper, and his child-like faith." suddenly and unexpectedly, the end came, and the crowning sorrow of a much-tried life was laid upon the devoted wife when death claimed her gifted husband. over that grief a veil must be drawn. suffice it to say that it is a sorrow which will ever be keen in her remembrance "until the day break and the shadows flee away." "i never remember the time," mrs. riddell says, "when i did not compose. before i was old enough to hold a pen i used to get my mother to write down my childish ideas, and a friend remarked to me quite lately that she distinctly remembers my being discouraged in the habit, as it was feared i might be led into telling untruths. in my very early days i read everything i could lay hands on, the koran included, when about eight years old. i thought it most interesting." mrs. riddell describes the way in which the situations and characters of her books are often suggested. she observes everything almost unconsciously; but if asked, directly after, her impressions, she could scarcely describe them. later on, perhaps, when between the border-land of sleep and waking, scenes, words, people whom she has noticed seem to be photographed on the brain; sentences form themselves, and in the morning she is able to reproduce them at length. the intimate knowledge of the city possessed by this novelist is the result of personal experience. whilst on her once fruitless expeditions to publishers she learnt every short cut, every alley and lane by heart. little as she relished these excursions at the time, they laid the foundation for many a scene afterwards so faithfully depicted in "george geith," "city and suburb" (in which most of the poetry was quoted from the works of her young sister-in-law, a genius who died at the age of nineteen), "daisies and buttercups," "the struggle for fame," "mitre court," "my first love, and my last love," "the earl's promise," and also that entrancing book, "the senior partner," in which the old scotch merchant, m'cullagh, "plain auld rab," worthy but saving old gentleman, is a distinct creation. "in all the old city churches and graveyards, such, indeed, as are left," mrs. riddell says, sorrowfully, "you could take no better guide than myself; but, alas! many of the old landmarks are now pulled down to make room for the ever increasing business of the great metropolis." "austin friars" described her first home after her marriage, when, without much practical knowledge of business, she was greatly impressed by the lives of business men. this old house is now a thing of the past, and the cannon street railway runs over the place where it once stood. the author's latest work--a story of seaside life, and her twenty-ninth novel--is called "grays point," and will be brought out in three volumes in the coming year. she lately was invited to write an article for _the lady of the house_, a new journal which appeared in dublin last year, and this is the first time that she has ever written a line for an irish paper. of her own books, mrs. riddell says that she prefers "the mystery in palace gardens" and "too much alone." the latter she considers made her name, though the first edition was only a short one, and but four copies were sent out for review. "a mad tour, or a journey undertaken in an insane moment through central europe on foot," in one volume, is a recent work, and describes accurately her own experiences in company with a young friend. it gives a bright and amusing account of their misadventures. mrs. riddell's latest published novel in three volumes, "the head of the firm," fully bears out the high literary reputation of the author of "george geith." carefully and conscientiously worked out, each character is drawn with an unerring hand, and sustains its interest to the final page, whilst here and there are not wanting those touches of humour which have always distinguished her works. after a snug luncheon in the comfortable dining-room, in which, by the way, unexpected little steps and deep cupboards seem to be built promiscuously--as, indeed, they are throughout the cottage--your hostess takes you round the garden, which is well worth seeing, mid-winter though it be. she points out the great height of the holly hedge, and laments that she has been obliged to have twelve feet cut off the top. notwithstanding, it is still twenty feet high. the japonica is the admiration of passers-by in the early spring, being then covered with a mass of scarlet flowers. the apricot tree is sadly in want of root pruning, but, as she says, "i cannot persuade the old gardener to do it, and as i am never equal to arguing, i let him take his own way." there is an extraordinary plant which you have never seen before; its flowers are green, and mrs. riddell says that she never saw one like it except in her old home. the huge weeping ash, although now bereft of leaves, is a great feature, and the high box borders divide large squares of ground, wherein good old bushes of lavender, rue and lad's love grow profusely. your hostess points out the adjoining cottage, the home of her old gardener, aged eighty, and remarks that another old man who preceded him begged from a neighbour enough elm to make him a coffin. it was given to him, and the hitherto unnecessary article made. he kept the gruesome object for some time, but finding it took up too much room in his small abode, he altered it into a cupboard. a turn round the last walk leads to the poultry-yard, which is a great delight to mrs. riddell. she has several fine breeds of fowls and geese, amongst which last are two handsome but noisy specimens from japan. one little peculiarity of interest must be noticed. the wall which supports the granary steps is pierced by two holes for dog kennels, an arrangement of great antiquity. mrs. riddell loves walking. the church she attends lies rather more than two miles away towards laleham, which place arnold left with so much regret, and where matthew arnold is buried. she speaks of littleton in the neighbourhood as being the village she described in "for dick's sake," and says, laughing, "it has stood still for over two hundred years. there is no resident rector or squire, or doctor, or lawyer, or publican, or farrier, but it is a sweetly peaceful spot, and the woods in primrose time are a sight to behold, whilst at sunbury," she adds, "to show you how little change may take place, in one hundred years there have been only two vicars, and one of them is alive now!" but it is getting dark, and tea is ordered as a preparation for your cold journey; whilst sipping it, she says that as you are so much interested in her own early "struggle for fame," she will mention one more anecdote _à propos_ of mr. newby, as it is amusing, and she relates it thus: "in those early days he--mr. newby--was good enough to take a book of mine. of course he only knew me by my maiden name, because after my mother's death welbeck street lay quite out of my way, and i fear i ungratefully forgot the cheerful fire, and the talks about authors, which were once so pleasant. "for this reason he knew nothing of my doings. the years came and the years went, till after the crash came in our affairs; when i was looking about me for every five-pound note i could get, i bethought me of this and another old book, which i can never sufficiently regret republishing. well, i found i could sell both of them, and forthwith repaired, after all that time, to mr. newby's, where nothing looked much changed, and no one seemed much older, except myself, who had lived many lives in the interval. "of course both mr. newby and miss springett had a vague memory of me, when i reminded the former that he had published 'zuriel's grandchild.' what i wanted was a copy of the book. he feared he had not one, but promised to ascertain. i can see them both now in that warm, comfortable back room, into which, as a girl, i had often gone shivering. "he took a seat on one side of a large table, she on the other. i sat facing mr. newby--a most anxious woman, yet amused. "'have you,' he said delicately, 'gone on at all with literature?' "'oh, yes,' i answered. "'have you--published anything?' with great caution, so as not to hurt my feelings. "'several books,' i replied. "'indeed!!!' _amazed_. 'might i ask the names?'--tentatively. "'well, amongst others, "george geith."' "a dead silence ensued, during which i had the comfort of feeling that they both felt sure i was saying what was not true. i sat quite quiet, and so did they. if i had not been so burdened with care i must have laughed out loud. as it happened, i comported myself, as i have often done since, in many difficult and humorous positions, with decent gravity, and then this came from mr. newby, the while the ribbons on miss springett's cap were tremulous: "'_if_--you _really_ wrote "george geith," _then_ indeed you have achieved a success!'" and so you part; with loving tender sympathy. though the morn of this distinguished woman's life has been so clouded, the noon so stormy, the noble, self-reliant spirit has battled through it bravely and patiently, and you leave her with the inwardly-breathed prayer that "at evening time there shall come light!" [illustration: l. b. walford] mrs. l. b. walford. a thick fog obscures the whole of london. you grope your way through liverpool street station with considerable risk, now colliding with a truck full of luggage, anon canoning against an angry passenger. not a yard can be seen in advance, more by good luck than good guiding the right train is somehow found, and, half an hour later, it is delightful to find the enemy is left behind, and that there is once more cheerful daylight. the sun at first looks like a sullen ball of fire, but presently, shaking off, as it were, the heavy clouds, he begins to shine out brightly, as, after a drive of something under a mile from the station, the carriage turns into the old-fashioned lodge gates of wrought iron on the left. a long road between two low wire fencings, running nearly straight through the park, which is dotted about with clumps of trees and spinneys, suddenly rounds into a wide space in front of the house, and breaks off into one of those quaint old rights-of-way which are so common in this part of essex. cranbrooke hall is a substantial red-brick, many-windowed building, dating nearly two centuries back, but it has been greatly added to and improved during recent years. the lofty, spacious entrance-hall, laid down with parquet, branches out into five reception rooms, opening one into another, all facing south, and overlooking some seven-hundred-and-fifty feet of lawn, bordered by a lake formed of clear, running water, the overflow of a spring which is a hundred-and-fifty feet deep, and has never yet been known to run dry. this is, in its turn, bounded by a shrubbery, which leads round to one of the principal features of the cranbrooke gardens, the "lovers' walk," an ivy colonnade, carpeted with thick, soft moss. passing through the ante-room, a door opens on the left, and the picture which presents itself to the eye is a thoroughly domestic one. a huge fire, heaped with acacia logs, blazes brightly in the low deep grate, flanked with brass dogs; tall standard lamps shed a soft light over a merry family group; a silver urn stands on the cosy five o'clock tea table, where a young, fair girl presides. a few guests are present, and two younger daughters of the house are flitting in and out with plates of scotch scones, cakes, and muffins. the three nursery little ones have come down to say good-night; the youngest, a fair-haired, blue-eyed little maiden of four years, is nestling on her mother's lap. rising from amidst them, mrs. walford comes forward to welcome you. she wears a pretty steel-blue tea-gown, richly embroidered in silks by her own hand; for your hostess loves needlework, and looks on it as a great resource for a weary brain. she has a clear, fair complexion, dark brown hair, and laughing grey-blue eyes; and the bright, sunny smile, which in childhood gained for her the pet name of "the laughing girl," lights up her expressive countenance, and just reveals two rows of white, even teeth. she gives you the impression of being a thoroughly happy, contented, and sweet-tempered woman, and her subsequent conversation assures you that your judgment has been correct. mrs. walford is of scottish birth. her father was the second son of sir james colquhoun, the tenth baronet of luss, to whom burke wrote on one occasion that he was "_the_ baronet of scotland, just as sir william watkin wynn was _the_ baronet of wales." for seven hundred years the colquhouns of luss have held the same lands, and, unlike those of many other ancient families, they are still in as flourishing, or, rather, more flourishing condition, than they have ever been. the sir james colquhoun who--with four of his keepers and a ghillie boy--was drowned in loch lomond, nearly seventeen years ago, was a widower with an only son, the present baronet. mrs. walford's mother was the daughter of mr. fuller-maitland of stanstead, essex. whilst the other visitors are leaving, the opportunity arises of examining the room more minutely. the polished oak floor is covered here and there with persian carpets; near the door is a lovely dutch marqueterie bureau, a husband's gift to a busy wife, and at which most of her well-known novels were written. mrs. walford says they "furnished their home as a jackdaw does his nest, stick by stick. from many an old farm-house and wayside inn they collected piece after piece, handsome old oak cabinets, chests and chairs, scarcely a single article having passed through the dealers' hands," indeed, you shrewdly suspect that the large carved settle whereon you are seated has been part of some despoiled church or sacred edifice. on a table yonder stands a miniature set of china under glass, "jane eyre's own doll's tea service," by which mrs. walford sets great store, as she became possessed of it when visiting the house of charlotte brontë. the dainty, antique spinning-wheel known as "lady helen's wheel" (it belonged to an ancient dame of the colquhoun family) is so old that the woodwork has begun to crumble away; but a more modern specimen opposite, covered with a cloud of flax, is often used by your hostess's own nimble fingers. the relic she treasures above all, however, is a gold "mazer," inherited by mr. walford through a long line of ancestors. this is a real curiosity, there being but few of these "mazers" now left in england. the little "silver table" holds many a prized bit of old highland silver, including one which was picked up on the field of bannockburn. big bowls of oriental china are filled with _pot-pourri_, which gives out a delicious fragrance. this, mrs. walford adds to afresh every year from an old recipe. her children laughingly declare that "whenever they go out to gather flowers for the tables, mother, with a pair of scissors in hand, has snipped off all the finest roses and quietly slipped them into her pocket." mrs. walford has inherited her literary tastes. her father's well-known book, "the moor and the loch," now in its eighth edition, and full of spirited engravings, is considered as a classic amongst sportsmen; and who has not read and laughed over, in by-gone days, "holiday house," and other delightful stories, by her grand-aunt, catherine sinclair, daughter of sir john sinclair of ulbster, himself one of the most distinguished men of his day? in spite of catherine sinclair and her sister being authors (the latter was known as the "good" lady colquhoun, and the writer of many religious books for the scottish poor), so little was literary reputation then thought of by some members of the family that, when sir walter scott appeared at rossdhu to take notes for "rob roy," he was shown round _by the butler_, and never forgave the affront. in consequence he never mentioned the colquhouns in that great romance or in the "lady of the lake." speaking of rossdhu, you tell your hostess that you have been taken over those ancestral halls and round the great picture galleries, and had noticed with much surprise that there was no portrait of her to be seen. this omission may however some day be repaired. mrs. walford remarks that it was not until after her marriage that she took seriously to novel writing. whilst yet in her teens she was wont to steal out into the shrubbery with paper and pencil and write short stories, one of which was called "macgregor, our chieftain," but as she burnt these early effusions as fast as they were written, nothing remains of macgregor's adventures. in delicacy of health prevented her pursuing the active out-of-door life which she had always enjoyed; so, as the necessity arose for finding vent for her energy, the young author spent a long period of bodily rest in mental activity, its first fruits being "mr. smith: a part of his life." this character was drawn from life; even the name was the same, and he was found dead as described in the book. she sent the ms. anonymously to mr. john blackwood, the late distinguished editor of _blackwood_, who--much struck with its promise--at once accepted and published it. brought up from her childhood in the stately homes of her own people, now in scotland, now in england, and reared in the atmosphere of healthy country life, mrs. walford has been enabled to write with the frankness and accuracy which make her books so thoroughly characteristic and enjoyable. _a propos_ of "mr. smith," an amusing anecdote is told. the queen had had the story read to her twice, and, being much interested in it, expressed a wish to see the author. she was presented on her marriage by the duchess of roxburghe, who on the occasion happened to take the place of the mistress of the robes, absent from indisposition. it is said that as the young novelist made her curtsey before the royal presence, the duchess softly breathed into her majesty's ear the words, "mr. smith." a series of short stories soon followed this first success and appeared in _blackwood_, beginning with "nan, a summer scene," and under this name they have since been collected and published in one volume. "pauline" next ran through the same magazine as a serial; "cousins" was written in ; "troublesome daughters" followed in the ensuing year. "the baby's grandmother," which is perhaps the most popular of all, was written in . then came "a stiff-necked generation," "a mere child," "a sage of sixteen," "the havoc of a smile" "the mischief of monies." the latter book is more on the lines of "mr. smith" than any of mrs. walford's recent works of fiction, and proved a great success in _longman's magazine_. then came "a pinch of experience," and later on, she wrote a series of biographical studies on "famous authoresses of bygone days," for _far and near_, an american magazine. this is coming out as a christmas gift or prize book. a little volume of christmas tales illustrated by t. pym (mrs. levett) is shortly to appear, and will be called "for grown-up children," being stories _about_ children _for_ grown-up people. besides this, she is a constant contributor to the _st. james's gazette_. she also writes a weekly letter for the american _critic_ on literary subjects; one called an "epidemic of smartness" made a special sensation; and she has, in addition, stories in two christmas numbers, _the queen_ and _atalanta_. one great aim of this author has ever been to make herself thoroughly acquainted with all the details of her subject. so particular is she to ensure absolute accuracy, that every item of military life is submitted to one or other of her soldier brothers (two of these were respectively in the th dragoon guards and the nd black watch), and every detail of sport to her father; indeed, so well up was she in the latter, that a reviewer of "mr. smith"--when the sex of the author was yet unknown--caustically observed, that the writer was "more up in woodcock shooting than in religion!" the young author not having yet learnt to verify a quotation, even from holy writ. an ardent lover of the old scottish kirk, mrs. walford says that she "would go any distance to hear a good, long sermon from some of its divines." she is an indefatigable walker, and has traversed on foot twenty-three miles, from arrochar to inveraray--"from milestone to milestone" she is careful to add, knowing what scotch and welsh miles are supposed to be. she is extremely fond of poetry, and has a good collection of her chief favourites, whilst she keeps habitually on her own table copies of tennyson, jean ingelow, and coventry patmore's work. in earlier days your hostess gave much of her time to water-colour drawing, but her children have claimed for the decoration of their schoolroom all her pictures, the majority of which, they proudly remark, were "exhibited and hung on the line in the r.a. of edinburgh." mrs. walford is just saying that she was married at st. john's, edinburgh, when the door opens and in comes the bridegroom on that occasion. he is a native of another part of essex, in which county his forefathers have held lands for several centuries, his grandfather having been high sheriff in the famous "waterloo year." he is a magistrate for the part in which he now lives, and, amidst the claims of a busy life, he finds time to sit on the bench perhaps oftener than do many of his less occupied colleagues. looking at the noble, genial face, you secretly wonder if he can ever find it in his heart to pass severe sentences on offenders. he is extremely popular, has made a distinct mark for himself in his own circle, and it is his wife's pride to recognise that he will never be known as "mrs. walford's husband." an hour later you are taken into the dining-room, through the ante-room, in the latter, a table near the great bay windows is filled with all the newest books and magazines; these are regularly changed and brought up to date by mrs. walford, and are a constant source of attraction to visitors. on your left at dinner sits your host's elder son, "desborough," a fine manly young fellow, just of age; he is full of intelligence, and possesses great powers of observation. he is delightfully entertaining throughout the meal, and asking him about the pictures, which literally cover the walls, he explains that they are a complete collection of boydell's fine old shakespearian engravings, and, he adds modestly, these, and all the many etchings and pictures in the house, were framed by his father. it is quite apparent in this happy home that there is perfect love and sympathy between the parents and the children. the children are as proud of their good, distinguished-looking father as they are of their pretty, gifted mother; the elder ones are keenly interested in her books, and look out eagerly for the new copies, each confiscating one for his or her own room. mr. and mrs. walford have ever been in touch with each individual member of their family. the children have never been put aside for her work, and they are constantly with their mother. they have all inherited her talent for drawing, and many of them bid fair to be no mean proficients in the art. on the following morning your hostess announces that she has "given herself a holiday," and she proposes to take you out for a turn. the season is late and, though within but a very few weeks of christmas, the sun is shining brightly over the grounds and the air is pleasantly warm. what was once said of a famous lawn at oxford may well be applied to cranbrooke hall. a stranger inquired of a solemn old gardener what was done to keep it so fine and smooth? "well, sir," was the reply, with the utmost gravity and good faith, "first we sows the seed, and then we rolls it and we mows it for three hundred years." skating will soon be largely indulged in on the glittering lake, and many merry moonlight parties are looked forward to during the coming severe weather, which is predicted by the great holly trees covered with red berries. after a stroll round the pleasant demesne, and a peep into the vineries, in which is the old black hamburg vine, sister of the famous one at hampton court, you return through the billiard-room into the camellia house, which, a little later on will be a mass of bloom, sometimes as many as two thousand being in flower at a time, in every variety of colour. the billiard table is decorated at the sides with groops of hand-painted flowers, exquisitely designed, and the cues are arranged in a round oak niche, which you feel sure once contained the image of a saint in some old cathedral. just above the seat backs, and extending all round the room, is a perfect picture gallery of friends' photographs, placed closely side by side, and above these there is a wealth of engravings and etchings which would take days to examine. mrs. walford has had three old-fashioned predecessors in the paths of literature in her own neighbourhood, namely, thomas day, who, exactly a hundred years ago, wrote "sandford and merton," at the little village of aybridge, within half a dozen miles of cranbrooke; anne and jane taylor, whose "original poems" were, according to sir walter scott, "known to four continents." before leaving, you ask to see your hostess's own special portrait gallery of her seven children. first comes "desborough," then the eldest daughter, in her _débutante's_ drawing-room dress of last season; next, two young girls yet in the schoolroom, standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet, and then the three "nursery" children, one of whom is taken in her mother's arms. lastly, you are shown a faded portrait of the famous author herself, taken at the age of fourteen, and called "a yellow-haired lassie," and, in the bright, radiant smile, you recognise the appropriateness of her childish cognomen of "the laughing girl." [illustration: rhoda broughton] rhoda broughton. the ancient and historic village of richmond is too well known to need much description. it is thronged with kingly memories. entering the old park by kew bridge, you drive past the large and beautiful royal gardens, extending along the banks of the thames to richmond, which were cultivated under the immediate superintendence of king george iii. the old manor garden became crown property in the reign of edward i., when it was known as shene, and was converted into a palace by edward iii.; but, being destroyed by fire in , it was rebuilt with great splendour by henry vii., who changed the name to richmond, after his title of earl of richmond, ere he ascended the throne. here was philip i. of spain right regally entertained. here was the princess elizabeth shut up by her sister mary, and here occasionally resided charles i. on the right stands the observatory, built by sir william chambers two centuries ago. when the road turns into the new park south of richmond, the coachman points out the massive brick wall encompassing the eight miles of its circumference, and remarks that in the reign of george ii. an attempt was made to exclude the public, which was frustrated however by an enterprising inhabitant, who, pluckily going to law, recovered the right of way, and thus secured the everlasting gratitude of later generations. it is for this picturesque and attractive place miss rhoda broughton has deserted her quiet little home at oxford, where she had lived for twelve years. on the high ground overlooking the terrace gardens, she and her sister, mrs. newcome, have established themselves in the quiet and peace they both love, in a comfortable house, standing back from the road, which commands an extensive view of the river, winding serpent-like through a forest of trees. ushered upstairs into the drawing-room, where the author receives you with much cordiality, the first thing which strikes you is the sweet rich voice in which her welcome is uttered. standing facing the setting sun, with its golden light reflected on her, you observe that she is above the middle height, and graceful in figure; the hair, rolled back from the low broad strong-looking forehead, is becomingly tinged with grey over the right temple, harmonizing well with the darker shades on the neat, well-shaped head. the mouth and chin indicate firmness and resolution. in repose, the expression might almost be called sad, but as she speaks, the frankness in the grey eyes, set well apart, at once dispels the idea, and the pleasant musical laugh betrays the vein of fun and wit--entirely of an original kind--which runs through her books. she is dressed in some fabric of dark green, with velvet sleeves and bodice; the latter relieved at the upper part with a paler shade of embroidered vest. the windows open on to a broad trellised verandah, which runs the whole length of the house; and, stepping out to it, miss broughton bids you look at the exquisite view. it is a lovely day in latest autumn, the trees, turned to every shade of gold, copper, and brown, are shedding their leaves profusely. the sinking sun is leaving the sky deeply tinged with waves of pink and purple, and the river looks like a silver stream, with here and there a tinge of reflected colour, unbroken by a single boat. the air is pure and still, with a faint suspicion of a coming frost. for a few moments you both stand in rapt silence admiring the beautiful prospect, yet sighing to think that the winter is so near at hand; then your hostess leads the way back into the drawing-room, where tea is served, and as you settle comfortably in a luxurious couch covered with tapestry of the first empire, and sip the fragrant beverage out of a cup of old spode, the eye travels round the quiet restful room, and notices the many little knick-knacks that fill it. on the right stands an antique writing table, with pigeon-hole drawers, and old blue china grouped over the top. the two ancient oak cabinets are covered with pretty "bits"; growing in a cunningly-concealed basket is an immense pyramid of ferns and palms, which are miss broughton's particular delight. on the little plush-covered table by the side of a delicately wrought iron italian stand--whereof the copper bowl is filled with autumnal flowers--lies a business-like work-bag, filled to overflowing, which gives a home-like look to the room and indicates that it is useful as well as ornamental. on asking miss broughton for a peep into her sanctuary, she smiles indulgently, and begs you to descend. the white-painted fresh-looking staircase is partially covered with persian carpet of warm colour, and, throughout, the dado is composed of indian matting, above which hang many engravings and photographs. the large black-and-white lozenge-shape tiles give the hall an indescribably bright appearance, which here and there the long indian rugs subdue, yet throw up into relief. you enter the room sacred to the gifted authoress, and look round. where are the manuscripts, the "copy," the "proofs," which might reasonably have been expected? there is no indication of her work on the old oak knee-hole writing-table beyond a single blank sheet of paper reposing on a large wooden portfolio, exquisitely painted on both sides by her friend mrs. andrew spottiswoode at dresden. a solitary penholder lies on a china inkstand, flanked by a pair of large green jars from hyères. she half guesses your look of interrogation, and remarks that she is "resting" awhile, now that her latest book "alas!" is published, before launching another, entitled "mrs. bligh." _elle recule pour mieux sauter_, but at the present moment, as she kindly causes it to be understood that no encroachment is being made on her valuable time, you do not hesitate to ask for some details of her literary life. rhoda broughton was born at segrwyd hall, denbighshire. her father was a clergyman, and held the family living in cheshire, where her childish days were passed, varied by visits to her grandfather, sir henry broughton, at broughton hall, staffordshire. her father was a student, and himself grounded her in shakespeare and the english classics, and imparted also the rudiments of latin and greek. she was brought up strictly, and the hours of study were long, but made interesting by her scholarly instructor. asking miss broughton if her father had been an author, she replies, "only of his sermons, and i do not believe any of my relations wrote a line in their lives." it is a surprise to hear that her great gifts, her originality of style, her wonderful descriptions of scenery, her subtle humour, are not hereditary. keenly interested, you ask her how then the idea of writing occurred to her. she says she remembers a certain wet sunday afternoon when she was about twenty-two; she was distinctly bored by a stupid book which she was trying to read, when "the spirit moved her to write." it was on the leaves of an old copy-book lying at hand that she delivered her soul of the ideas which poured in on her brain. day after day, night after night, she wrote swiftly and in secret, until at the end of six weeks she found a vast heap of manuscript accumulated, to which she gave the title of "not wisely, but too well." miss broughton kept it by her until january, , when she crossed over to ireland on a visit to her uncle-in-law, mr. joseph sheridan le fanu, then editor of the _dublin university magazine_; she selected two chapters at random and read them aloud to him. he at once prognosticated the success of the book; accepted it as a serial, and later on, suggested to mr. bentley that he should bring it out in three volume form. here, however, a check occurred. the reader pronounced so unfavourably of its merits, that mr. bentley held off. but the inspiration, once set in motion, could not be stopped, and soon found vent in a new work, "cometh up as a flower." this was well received. a couple of columns of favourable criticism in the _times_, and various eulogistic notices in other papers, soon caused it to become such a marked success that mr. bentley reconsidered the matter. his deliberation happily ended in the purchase of "not wisely, but too well" from tinsley, so that the two books were actually brought out in the same year. the home of miss broughton's ancestors, broughton hall, built in the reign of one of the old tudors, is so well depicted in "cometh up as a flower," that none who have read the book and seen the place can fail to observe the absolute truthfulness of the description. _a propos_ of this novel, miss broughton tells an amusing anecdote:--"it was claimed by other people," she says; "a lady told an acquaintance of mine that her son had written it, which diverted me much." the fame of these books went far afield. some years ago a graceful tribute was paid to the author. captain markham, of h.m. ship _alert_, begged to be introduced, and told her that in a remote arctic region they had by common consent christened an icebound mountain, "mount rhoda," in grateful acknowledgment of the pleasure which her books had given the officers of the ship on their perilous voyage. "temple bar" secured her next two novels, "red as a rose is she" and "goodbye, sweetheart." about once in two years miss broughton delights the world with a new book. "nancy," "twilight stories," "joan," "second thoughts," "dr. cupid," "belinda," followed at about these intervals, but her latest work, "alas!" must take a high stand, if only for her faithful delineation of life in florence, her intimate knowledge of all things artistic, her scenes laid in algeria, which place she visited last year, and her vivid and graphic descriptions of those lovely countries, which are an education in themselves. and the humorous touches! how much everyone sympathises with the meek, but excellent "amelia," whom no one thoroughly appreciates until after her death. uneducated in art, she appeals pitifully in the following words to her lover, who finds out her worth too late. "and now, where shall we go? that is the next thing--not to any gallery or church, i think, if you don't mind. i say such stupid things about art, and the more i try the stupider they are; let us go somewhere into the country. i can understand the country, i am not afraid of saying stupid things about it." you tell her later of an observation made to you quite lately by her sister author, miss braddon, ever keenly appreciative of the gifts of another, on reading a striking description in "alas" of the sea after a storm, which runs thus:--"a sea even more wonderful than radiant; no servile copy of the sky and clouds to-day, but with astonishing colours of its own; a faint yet glorious green for a part of its watery breadth; then what our poverty compels us to call blue; and then a great tablecloth of inky purple, which looks so solid, that the tiny white boats which are crossing it seem to be sailing on dry land." miss braddon remarked, "rhoda broughton is a genius and a prose poet." your hostess is charmed with the kindly speech. no solitary copy can be seen, in the well-filled book-cases, of the author's works. she says that she sells them out and out at once, and then has "done with them"; but, "come," she adds, "we have talked long enough about my books; let me show you a few of my treasures," and she points out a small sketch by hamilton aidé, two busts of lord wolseley and mr. carlyle, presented to her by sir edgar boehm; presentation copies from matthew arnold, lord lytton, henry james, andrew lang, etc., etc., and an ornamental plate rack, by which she sets great store, from adelaide kemble (mrs. sartoris); a very ancient engraving of titian's "danaë" hangs over the mantelpiece opposite three lovely photographs of "garrick between tragedy and comedy." the floor of this delightful room is covered with peacock-blue felt and a few rugs of eastern manufacture; a small aviary of birds stands by the window, which is open, for your hostess is a "great believer in plenty of fresh air and a good fire." ere taking leave, you ask if the two fine pugs basking on the rugs are especial pets. "yes," says miss broughton, "but," mournfully, "they are a degenerate race; and not the dear dog heroes of my books. _they_ are all dead and gone!" [illustration: h. e. v. stannard] mrs. arthur stannard ("john strange winter"). emerging from the earl's court station, where once stood the old manor house of the de veres, and glancing at the noble row of buildings across the road, which until quite lately was the site of a _maison de santé_, it seems impossible to realise that it was at the end of the last century a miniature private zoological garden. yet here the great anatomist and surgeon, john hunter, kept a collection of rare and foreign animals; here, too, was the kitchen and the great cauldron in which he performed the gruesome operation of boiling down the giant o'brien, whose skeleton can be seen in the museum of the college of surgeons. it is to be hoped that the ghost of the big irishman was safely laid when the work of destruction was carried on! turning to the left, you go down trebovir road, past the great red-stepped house of the well-known and successful "crammer" and army coach, captain pinhey, which leads out into nevern square. perhaps in nothing more than in the present style of building does the growing artistic spirit of the day assert itself. although the houses are not erected with the solid masonry of other days, which seemed to defy the hand of time, they rejoice in more picturesque effects, and certainly the handsome, spacious nevern-square, with its large gardens, its three well-kept tennis courts, and its fine red-brick dwellings, is a striking instance of the fact. it is barely a decade and a half of years since this site was occupied by large nursery gardens, through which a winding country lane lead to st. mathias' church yonder; now it is surrounded by stately mansions, broad roads, and pleasant gardens. on the south-side a ruddy gleam of fire-light through the red window-blinds marks the residence of the popular author, john strange winter. passing through the outer and inner entrance doors, with mounted antlers, and swiss carvings hung between them, you reach the long, narrow hall, where the tesselated black-and-white paving is covered for the most part with heavy wilton carpets; the rich, deep-red walls are profusely decorated with quaint old prints, whose sombreness is relieved by nankin and spode china. a later inspection shows these to include some choice engravings by morland, a few miniatures, and a group of family silhouettes. ("had we any more black relations?" mrs. stannard, when a child, once asked her mother on being told which members of her family they portrayed.) entering the dining-room on the right, your hostess is discovered, deeply engaged in dressing dolls for an approaching juvenile festivity, when each little guest is to receive some gift. clouds of filmy muslin, embroidery, lace, and silk lie before her, and several of those already attired repose in a row on the sofa. she extends a firm, white hand in cordial greeting, and as there is only one more doll to complete the set, you settle down beside her to watch the process, and notice the deft and nimble fingers, as they swiftly run up a flounce or adjust a tiny trimming. she is dressed in a black and grey tea-gown, which looks like fine tapestry, with grey satin sleeves, panels, and front. mrs. arthur stannard is a tall, handsome young woman. she has fine, dark brown eyes, which sparkle with intellect and humour, level eyebrows, and dark hair curling over her low forehead, and well-shaped head; she has a pretty but firm little mouth, and clear-cut chin, indicative of strength of will. her face has settled somewhat into gravity as she pursues her occupation, for she has put into this apparently trivial matter, just as she does in greater things, her very best efforts with that thoroughness which characterises her; but as she suddenly looks up, and catches you intently watching her, she smiles a sweet, bright smile, and laughs a low, rippling laugh, as she seems to guess exactly what are your thoughts. "it is for the children," she says softly, and in those few words she betrays at once the sympathy of her nature, that sympathy with these little ones which has caused the children of her pen to live so vividly in the hearts of her readers. it is a large, lofty room, pale green in colour, with carved oak dado. a bright, clear fire blazing in the wide, tiled hearth makes the heavy, polished brass fender and "dogs" glisten like gold. on the high, black, carved "chimney shelf," as mrs. stannard calls it, stand three valuable old blue jars, and the low, broad overmantel is composed of genuine dutch tiles, three hundred years in age, framed in wood. over this is grouped a collection of ancient blue delft; the walls are hung with a few good proof engravings; at night the room is amply lighted by the huge hanging, crimson-shaded lamp, which casts a soft, becoming glow over every corner; the floor is covered with a thick axminster carpet of subdued colouring, and with the exception of a handsome old carved oak dower-chest and grandfather clock, with loud and sonorous strike, which both date back into the last century, the rest of the furniture is mahogany; pieces picked up here and there, restored, modernised, and chosen with an eye to effect as well as to comfort. mrs. stannard is the only daughter of the late rev. henry vaughan palmer, rector of st. margaret's, york. for some time mr. palmer had been an officer in the royal artillery before his convictions led him to lay down his sword and enter the church militant; he had come of several generations of soldiers, and to the last day of his life found his greatest pleasure in the society of military men; this perhaps accounts for mrs. stannard's almost instinctive knowledge of army men and army ways. asking her if, when a child, she loved books, and gave promise of her brilliant gift, she says, smiling, "well, as regards my lessons, most emphatically no! i was a restless, impatient sort of child, who tired of everything before it was half done. i think, like all very enthusiastic people, that i was never as happy as with books, that is to say, novels. i was just eleven when i went to my first school, but i had read thackeray, dickens, charles reade, and whyte melville up to date, besides many others, and i was never restricted in my reading; i never remember in my life my father or mother telling me not to read any particular book, and," speaking very impressively, "i am all the better for it. years afterwards, when my father died--i was twenty-one then--i felt that the few stories i had written and sold up to that time, were but child's play. then i began to work in real earnest, studying certain authors that i might clearly realise the difference of their method and style." but the thought at once arises, that the touching and simple pathos of her style is entirely original, and born of no earthly model. and then, as ofttime happens when two women are sitting together in friendly converse, a word is dropped about her married life. ah! here, though much could be said, in deference to your hostess's wishes the pen must be stayed. all who know mr. and mrs. stannard know how complete and perfect is their union. mr. stannard is a civil engineer, and at one time served under the late general gordon. he is very pardonably proud of his clever wife, and efficiently transacts all her business arrangements, the two--so perfect an one--working, as it were, hand in hand. her _nom de guerre_, "john strange winter," was adopted by the advice of the publishers of her first books, because they thought it wiser that works so military as "cavalry life" and "regimental legends" should be assumed by the world to be written by a man, and that they would stand a better chance of mercy at the hands of the critics than if they went forth as the acknowledged writing of a woman, and for a time it was so assumed; but when "booties' baby" made such a success, and people wanted to know who the author was, and where he lived, it soon became known that "he" was a woman, although, as she did not add her name to the title-page, it was a good while before it was generally believed. it may here be remarked that mrs. stannard holds very strongly the opinion that there should be "no sex in art," and whilst never desiring to conceal her identity, deprecates the idea of receiving indulgence or blame on the ground of her work being that of a woman, as both unjust and absurd. in private life she carries out her ideas on this point so effectually that few acquaintances would gather from her conversation (unless it were necessary to "talk shop") that she was a literary woman at all, as, except to a fellow worker, she would rather talk on any subject under the sun than literature. "the author to whom," according to ruskin, "we owe the most finished and faithful rendering ever yet given of the character of the british soldier" can portray, too, in a wonderful degree the beauty of child-life. of modern creations there can be none better known to the public, or which have excited more sympathy, than "mignon" and "houp-là." correct in detail, as those can prove who were in india at the time of the terrible mutiny of , she might have written "a siege baby" on the spot had it not been that she was only born on the thirteenth of january in the previous year, and at that time was an infant in arms. fertile in imagination, acute in observation, sprightly and wholesome in style, there is a freshness and life in her books which charm alike old and young, rich and poor, at home and abroad; and that her popularity is fully maintained is testified by the gratifying fact that a late story, "he went for a soldier," one of the slightest of her efforts, had a larger sale during the first month after publication than any previous work from her pen in the same period. one practical result of this book must be mentioned. the scene is laid at doverscourt, a few miles from mr. and mrs. stannard's pretty summer home at wix. she had been greatly distressed, when visiting that seaside place, by the sight of the overloaded hackney-carriages, with their poor, broken-down horses. immediately after her indignant comments on this fact in her story, bye-laws were passed bringing these vehicles under effective police supervision. besides those already named, amongst some two or three and twenty novels, which are all so well known as not to need description--for are they not to be found in every library and on every railway bookstall in the united kingdom?--"beautiful jim," "harvest," "dinna forget," and a most pathetic story called "my poor dick," remain fixed on the memory. this last is perhaps the author's own favourite. "booties' baby," as all the play-going world knows, was dramatised and brought out four years ago at the globe theatre in london. it has been on tour ever since, and there seems no intention of terminating its long run, dates having been booked far into the year. a late story, entitled "the other man's wife," has been running in a serial in various newspapers, and is now issued in two-volume form. one great element in the author's success and world-wide literary reputation is undoubtedly to be found in her creations of the children of her military heroes, alike among the officers' quarters and those "on the strength." she has the happy knack of depicting them at once simple, natural, and lovable. "i never begin a novel," says mrs. stannard, "until i have got a certain scene in my mind. i cannot write any kind of story without having one dramatic scene clearly before me; when i have got it, i work up to that; then the story arranges itself. but this is only the germ, the first conception of the tale. as i write one thread after another spins itself out, to be taken up afterwards to form a consecutive, concise whole. sometimes i lose my original story altogether, but never any dramatic situation towards which i am working, and the end is often quite different to what i had intended. when this happens i very seldom try to fight against fate. i think all stories ought more or less to write themselves, and it seems to me that this must make a tale more like real life than if it were all carefully mapped out beforehand, and then simply padded up to some requisite length." by this time the last doll is finished and added to the row on the sofa. they all look as if they had been turned out of a first-class milliners' establishment. mrs. stannard suggests a move to her study, and leads the way up the wide staircase, the handrail of which is protected by a broad and heavy brass guard, put there for the sake of the little children of the house. a broad settee on the wide conservatory landing invites you to rest awhile and look at all the odds and ends which your hostess says are so precious to her. here are two handsome chippendale chairs picked up in essex, many photographs of the house at wix, a dozen pieces of lancashire delph porcelain, made specially as a wedding present for mrs. stannard's grandmother in , some staffordshire hunting jugs, and some quaint little figures, "all rubbish," she says, smiling, "but precious to me." there is, however, a spode dinner service in blue which is emphatically not rubbish, and a set of oriental dishes, blue and red, which are very effective. the landing is richly carpeted; the windows and the doors of the conservatory are all of stained glass, while above hangs an old empire lamp of beautiful design filled in with small cathedral glass. the first door on the left leads into the author's study. it is a charming room, small but lofty, with pale blue walls hung with many little pictures, plates, old looking-glasses, and chenille curtains of terra-cotta and pale blue softly blended. a pretty inlaid bookcase stands opposite the window, filled with a few well-selected books. the horseshoe hanging yonder was cast in the balaclava charge. she has indeed a goodly collection of these, and owns to a weakness to them, declaring that her first great success was achieved on the day that she picked one up at harrogate. there must be many hundreds of photographs scattered about in this room, and it would be a day's occupation to look through them all; but each has its own interest for her, and most of them are of people well known in the literary, scientific, artistic, and fashionable world. "i never sit here," she says. "it is my work-room, pure and simple. sometimes my husband comes up, and then i read to him all my newly-written stuff, but this i do every day." the next door opens into the drawing-room, where there is a rich harmony in the details of the decoration and furniture, which suggests the presence of good and cultivated taste, combined with a general sense of luxury and comfort. the entire colouring is blended, from old gold to terra-cotta, from indian red to golden brown. on the left stands a cabinet crowded with choicest bits of china, in the middle of which is placed the bouquet, carefully preserved, presented to the author by mr. ruskin on her birthday. a lovely dutch marqueterie table contains a goodly collection of antique silver, and among the pictures on the walls are a painting by lawrence phillips, batley's etching of irving and ellen terry, also one of mrs. stannard, and a series of all the original and clever pen-and-ink sketches in "bootles' children," by bernard partridge, drawn as illustrations to the story in the _lady's pictorial_. after lingering long over afternoon tea, you express a wish to see the children before they sleep. mrs. stannard leads the way first to a room next her own, which is occupied by a fair little maiden, seven years of age, with grey-blue eyes, sunny hair, and a wild-rose complexion, who asks you to "go and see the twins." accordingly their mother takes you on to a large night-nursery, where the two little ones, boy and girl, are being prepared for bed. they are just turned four, and are called eliot and violet mignon, after two of the characters in mrs. stannard's books. they are perfectly friendly, and as you bend to kiss the baby girl last, she looks reproachfully out of her great dark eyes, and sternly commands you to "kiss gertie, too." (gertie is the under nurse.) this raises a hearty laugh, under cover of which you hastily retreat. above all things, mrs. stannard is a thoroughly domestic woman. popular in society, constantly entertaining with great hospitality, she yet contrives to attend to every detail of her large household, which consequently goes like clockwork. she writes for about two hours every morning, and keeps a neat record book, in which she duly enters the number of pages written each day. presently mr. stannard comes in, and soon suggests an adjournment to his study downstairs, a snug, business-like room, half filled with despatch-boxes, books, and mss. on a table stands a large folio-like volume, which is mrs. stannard's visiting book, containing many hundreds of names. she looks ruefully at a clip containing some sixty unanswered letters, and candidly confesses that she finds considerable difficulty with her private correspondence and her calls, both of which accumulate faster than she can respond to; though, as she says, her many friends are very indulgent to her on those scores, and are "quite willing to make allowance for a poor woman who has the bulk of her literary work cut out for a year or two in advance, three little children, and a houseful of servants to manage; but, happily," she adds, "good servants. i have been so lucky in that way." just now, indeed, she claims especial indulgence in respect to social observances, for, as though so busy a life were not enough to exhaust her energies, early in she added a new burden to her indefatigable pen, by starting a penny weekly magazine under the title of _golden gates_, subsequently altered to _winter's weekly_ in deference to the opinion of those who objected to the somewhat religious sound of the former name. the little paper was the first weekly periodical that was ever exclusively owned, edited, and published by a popular novelist, and its fortunes have been watched with vivid interest by all who know how treacherous and adventuresome are such enterprises. the fresh, frank individuality of _winter's weekly_ has, however, made friends for the journal wherever it has gone, and if john strange winter can keep it at its present point of unconventional interest, it may consolidate into a valuable property. already it seems to have suggested the publication of new journals on similar lines, though no other woman novelist has yet had the courage to follow suit. later works of this favourite writer are "mere luck," "my geoff," "lumley, the painter," also a powerful and pathetic novel, in two volumes, entitled "only human." her last is a story called "a soldier's children," which she has given for the benefit of the victoria hospital for children, chelsea. but with all this accumulation of business, these domestic cares, and social claims, somehow mrs. stannard never seems in a hurry. the kind and hospitable young couple are always ready to do an act of kindness, and to welcome with help and counsel a new aspirant to fame in the thorny paths of literature. small wonder that they are so much sought after in society, and so heartily welcomed wherever they go--and one is seldom seen without the other. you go on your way with every hearty good wish that each year may bring them ever-increasing prosperity and success, for in such union there is strength. [illustration: annie hector] mrs. alexander. about three miles north-west of st. paul's lies a comparatively new suburb of the great metropolis, which but forty years ago was described as "a hamlet in the parish of marylebone," and through which passes the grand junction canal, almost reaching to kilburn. london, with her ever-grasping clutch, has seized on the vast tract of ground, which erstwhile grew potatoes and cabbages for the multitude, and, abolishing the nursery and market-gardens, has transformed them into broad streets, of which one of the longest is portsdown-road. not altogether inartistic is the row of substantially built houses where mrs. alexander hector has been for some years located. it is far enough away to enable the popular authoress to pursue her literary vocation in peace and quiet, yet sufficiently near to keep her in touch with the busy world of literature and art, wherein she is deservedly so great a favourite. the blue fan, serving as a screen for the window, is a sort of land-mark distinguishing the house from its fellows. you are shown into the library, where mrs. alexander is seated at a handsome oak writing-table, busily engaged in finishing the last words of a chapter in her new story. she looks up with a smile of welcome, and is about to discontinue her occupation; but you hastily beg her to go on with her work, which will give you time to look around; and as she complies with the request, she says pleasantly, "well, then, just for three minutes only." your glance lights again on the gentle author herself, and you watch the pen gliding easily over the page, which rests on a diminutive shred of well-worn blotting-paper. the face is fair and smooth, the hair, slightly grey, is simply parted back from the forehead, and the three-quarter profile, which presents itself to your gaze, is straight and well-cut. she wears a little white cap, and a long black gown, trimmed with jet, and close by her side lies an enormous persian tabby cat of great age. the study is divided from the adjoining room by heavy curtains drawn aside and a japanese screen. it is all perfectly simple and unpretending, but the rooms are thoroughly comfortable and home-like. the chapter being finished, your hostess rises, declares herself entirely at your service, and mentions that she is now engaged on a new three volume novel, which is to come out early next year in america, and is as yet unnamed. mrs. alexander was born in ireland, though no touch of accent can be detected. she never left that country until after her nineteenth birthday. her father belonged to an old squirearchal family, the frenches of roscommon. he was a keen sportsman, and a member of the famous kildare hunt. the few old pictures which hang on the wall are all family portraits. one represents a paternal ancestor, lord annaly, painted in his peer's robes. he was one of the gore family, of whom no less than nine members sat at the same time in parliament shortly before the union. another picture of a comfortable-looking old gentleman in a powdered wig is the portrait of a high legal dignitary, well known in his day as theobald wolfe, a great-uncle of mrs. alexander. a third is a seventeenth-century portrait of colonel dominic french, who looks manly and resolute, in spite of his yellow satin coat, flowing wig, and lace cravat, drawn through his buttonhole. this gentleman was the first protestant of the family, and is credited with having given up his faith for love of his wife, who simpers beside him in an alarmingly _décolletée_ blue dress, suggestive of the courtly style in the time of the merry monarch. her husband, with the ardour of a convert--or a pervert--raised a regiment of dragoons among his tenantry, and fought on the winning side at the battle of the boyne. mrs. alexander remarks that her "kinsfolk and acquaintance in early life, were, if not illiterate, certainly unliterary." "i always loved books," she adds, "and was fortunate, when a very young girl, barely out of the schoolroom, in winning the favour of a dear old blind scotchman, whose wife was a family friend. he was a profound thinker, and an earnest student before he lost his sight. my happiest and most profitable hours were spent in reading aloud to him books, no doubt a good deal beyond my grasp, but which, thanks to his kind and patient explanations, proved the most valuable part of my very irregular education. in reading the newspapers to him, i also gathered some idea of politics, probably very vague ideas, but so liberal in their tendency that my relatives, who were 'bitter protestants' and the highest of high tories, looked on me, if not as a 'black sheep,' certainly as a 'lost mutton.' the tendency has remained with me, though my consciousness of the many-sided immensity of the subject, has kept me from forming any decided opinions." the only bits of ancestry she values, mrs. alexander says, are her descent from jeremy taylor, the celebrated bishop of down and connor, and the near cousinship of her grandmother to lord kilwarden, who was the first victim in emmet's rising; that high-minded judge, whose last words, as he yielded up his life to the cruel pikes of his assailants, were, "let them have a fair trial." the above-mentioned jeremy taylor, and the rev. charles wolfe--whose well-known poem, "the burial of sir john moore," was so greatly appreciated by lord byron--were the only literary members of the family on her father's side; on her mother's, she can claim kindred with edmund malone, the well-known annotator of shakespeare. on leaving ireland, mrs. alexander, with her parents, travelled a good deal, both at home and abroad, occasionally sojourning in london, where, while still young, she began to write. her first attempts were made in the _family herald_ and _household words_, beginning with a sketch called "billeted in boulogne." this is an account of their own personal experience, when they endured the inconvenience of having french soldiers quartered on them. it was about this time that she was introduced to mrs. lynn linton, by the late adelaide proctor, with whose family she was on terms of some intimacy, and with whose charming grandmother, the once well-known and admired mrs. basil montague, she was a prime favourite. from this introduction arose the long, close friendship with the brilliant author of "joshua davidson," which mrs. alexander values so highly, and of which she is so justly proud. in she married mr. hector, and wrote no more until she became a widow. mr. hector was a great explorer and traveller. he had been a member of landor's expedition to seek the sources of the niger, and immediately after his return to england he joined general chesney in his attempt to steam down the euphrates to the persian gulf. he was also with layard during his discoveries in nineveh, and spent many years in turkish arabia. a man of great enterprise and ability, he was the pioneer of commerce, and was the first who sent from london a ship and cargo direct to the persian gulf, thereby opening up the trade between the two countries. it was after her husband's long illness, which terminated fatally, that mrs. alexander again turned her thoughts to literature, to seek distraction from her bereavement. it was then she wrote "the wooing o't." the book was a great success; it ran first through the pages of _temple bar_; it was then published in three volumes, passed through many editions, and has a world-wide reputation. "i always write leisurely," says mrs. alexander; "i never will hurry, or write against time. no, i have not much method," she answers, in reply to your question, "nor am i quite without it. my stories are generally suggested to me by some trait of character or disposition, which i have adapted rather than produced. my people are rarely portraits, they are rather mosaics; and, i _must_ say, i am exceedingly shy of dealing with my men. women i _do_ understand. character to me is all-important. if i can but place the workings of heart and mind before my readers, the incidents which put them in motion are of small importance comparatively. of course, a strong, clear, logical plot is a treasure not to be found every day! i am not a rapid writer; i like to live with my characters, to get thoroughly acquainted with them; and i am always sorry to part with the companions who have brought me many a pleasant hour of oblivion--oblivion from the carking cares that crowd outside my study door." there is one point on which you would fain differ from the author. an intimate knowledge of her books convinces you that her power of dealing with her "men" is very great, and that her habits of observation have stood her in good stead, whilst depicting with ready wit and considerable skill the characters of her heroes. as you follow step by step the career of the fascinating trafford, in "the wooing o't," and watch the workings of his mind, the struggles between his natural cynicism and pride, and his love for the humbly-born but high-souled little heroine maggie; his graceful rejection of the hand and fortune of the proud heiress, and the final triumph of love over pedigree, you can with truth echo the author's words, and feel that you too are "sorry to part" with him and his wife, and would gladly welcome a sequel to their histories. mrs. alexander observes that there _is_ one character in that book drawn from life, but adds, with a laugh, she "will not tell you which it is." you have, however, a suspicion of your own. "her dearest foe" was the author's next work. it is constructed on entirely different lines, but it is equally absorbing. the varied fortunes of the brave heroine of the "berlin bazaar," of the masterful sir hugh galbraith, and the faithful cousin tom, keep up an engrossing interest from the first line to the last. her husband's christian name being alexander, she elected to write under that appellation, fearing that her first book might be a failure. having begun with it, she has ever since kept the same _nom de plume_, and she remarks, "it does just as well as any other." the great success which attended these two books justified mrs. alexander's further efforts. "maid, wife, or widow," a clever little story, is an "episode of the ' war in germany"; "which shall it be?" "look before you leap," and "ralph wilton's weird" were brought out during the next few years. they were all favourably reviewed, and many of them passed into several editions. these were followed at intervals by "second life," "at bay," "a life interest," "the admiral's ward," "by woman's wit." mrs. alexander wrote "the freres" during a long residence in germany, whither she went for the education of her children. the fact that she was on intimate terms with many of the good old german families enabled her to write graphically from her personal knowledge of the country. in "the executors" mrs. alexander broke new ground. the life-like delineation of karapet is drawn from her own observation and experience of syrian christians, but the incidents are, of course, imaginary. "blind fate," "a woman's heart," "mammon," "the snare of the fowler," followed in due course, also some clever little shilling stories. the author's latest published work in three volumes is called "for his sake," a pleasant and interesting novel, well worthy of the writer of "the wooing o't." mrs. alexander's great ambition originally was to write a play; indeed, her first few stories were planned with that object in view, but she soon abandoned the idea, and says she "turned them into novels instead." that there was some dramatic power in a few of her earlier efforts is evident, as she was applied to for permission to dramatise "her dearest foe" and "by woman's wit." "though," she adds, "it seems to me that the latter is not suited to the stage." mrs. alexander writes best in england. she says that london "inspires her." she holds strong views upon education, and maintains that girls, as well as boys, should be trained to follow some definite line in life. she would have any special talent, whereby its possessor could, if necessary, earn her own living cultivated to the utmost; and, consistently following out her principles, she has sent her youngest daughter, who has a decided genius for painting, to work in one of the best-known studios in paris, where she takes a fairly good place, and by her diligence and ardour for her art at least deserves success. another daughter fulfils the onerous task of being "mother's right hand." but she has yet a third, who has found a happy career in the bonds of wedlock, and has made her home at versailles. she is now on a visit to her mother, and whilst you are conversing, the door opens, the young wife comes in with a lovely infant in her arms, and the "first grandchild" is introduced with pride. he is a perfect cherub, and makes friends instantly. asking mrs. alexander about her early friends in literature, she mentions with grateful warmth the name of mrs. s. c. hall, "whose ready kindness never failed." "to her," she says, "i owe the most valuable introduction i ever had. it was to the late mr. w. h. wills, editor of _household words_. to his advice and encouragement i am deeply indebted. his skill and discrimination as an editor were most remarkable, whilst his knowledge and wide experience were always placed generously at the service of the young and earnest wanderer in the paths of literature, numbers of whom have had reason to bless the day when they first knew harry wills." mrs. alexander is pre-eminently a lovable woman. in the large society where she is so well known, and so much respected, to mention her name is to draw forth affectionate encomiums on all sides. you venture to make some allusion to this fact; a faint smile comes over the placid countenance, as she says inquiringly, "yes? i believe i have made many friends. you see, i never rub people the wrong way if i can help it, and i think i have some correct ideas respecting the true value of trifles. yet i believe i have a backbone; at least i hope so, for mere softness and compliance will not bear the friction of life." [illustration: helen reeves] helen mathers. (mrs. reeves.) although it is but two o'clock in the afternoon, the streets are black as night. with the delightful variety of an english climate, the temperature has suddenly fallen, and a rapid thaw has set in, converting the heavy fall of snow, which but two days before threatened to cover the whole of london, into a slough of mud. it is a pleasant change to turn from these outer discomforts into the warm and well-lighted house which mrs. reeves has made so bright and comfortable. you have judiciously managed to arrive five minutes earlier than the hour appointed, in the hope of being able to make a few mental notes before helen mathers comes in, and your perspicacity is rewarded, for a bird's-eye glance around assures you that she possesses a refined and artistic taste, which is displayed in the general arrangement of the room. lighted from above by a glass dome, another room is visible and again a glimpse of a third beyond. the quaint originality of their shape and build suggests the idea, of what indeed is the fact, that the house was built more than a century and a half ago. the first room is very long, and its soft axminster carpet of amber colour shaded up to brown gives the key-note to the decorations, which from the heavily embossed gold leather paper on the walls to the orange-coloured indian scarves that drape the exquisite white overmantels (now wreathed with long sprays of ivy, grasses, and red leaves), would delight the heart of a sun-worshipper as helen mathers declares herself to be. as she now comes in, she seems to bring an additional sense of the fitness of things. she carries a big basket of china tea-roses, which she has just received from a friend in the country, and the long white cachemire and silk tea-gown which she wears looks thoroughly appropriate, despite the inclement season. it is her favourite colour for house wear in summer or winter, and certainly nothing could be more becoming to her soft, creamy complexion, and the natural tints of the thick, bright copper-coloured hair, which, curling over her brow, is twisted loosely into a great knot, lying low on the back of her head. the conversation turning upon the peculiar structure of the rooms, mrs. reeves proposes to take you into the one innermost which is truly a curiosity. a very old cathedral glass partition opens on to a square and lofty room, used as an inner hall, with great velvet shields of china and brasses on its gold leather walls, and quaint old oak chairs, cabinets, and high old-fashioned clock. a portrait in sepia of mrs. reeves, done by alfred ward, hangs over a paneled door on the left. it was to this picture that mr. frederick locker wrote the following lines:-- "not mine to praise your eyes and wit, although your portrait here i view, so what i may not say to you i've said to it." opposite is a very wide, high door that opens into the oak-panelled room, which may well have been a banqueting hall of the last century. it is lighted from above, and each pane of glass has in its centre, in vivid colours, the initials of the royal personage who, if the coats of arms abounding everywhere are to be trusted, may have occupied this room over a hundred years ago. by the way, the harp is absent from these armorial bearings. one entire side of the room is filled by a vast mirror, set in a magnificently carved oak frame, and supported on either side by colossal winged female figures, that are matched (and in the glass reflected) by the caryatides who appear to hold up the massive carvings above the door, which is itself covered entirely by superb carvings of beast and bird, and laughing boys playing at bacchus with great clusters of grapes. round this unique room runs an oak paneling of about five feet in height, surmounted by a ledge, now decorated with trails of ivy, and above the oak cupboards are panels representing a boar hunt, and worth, it is said, a fabulous sum. but the glory of the room is the mantelpiece, reaching to the roof. it was probably once an altar piece, as the centre panel represents the crucifixion. two busts--one of queen elizabeth, the other of the earl of leicester--frown down on you from a great height, and do not please you half as well as a bronze venus of milo below. the hearth itself (of an incredibly old pattern, with heavy iron fender, which suggests a prison) has on either side two odd-looking figures, that are supposed to represent joan of arc and her keeper. he carries a knotted whip in one hand, and seems to look ferociously on poor joan in her half-manly, half-feminine garb. "i am very fond of these two," says mrs. reeves, looking affectionately at them, "and often dust their faces, but i am not at all fond of sitting in this room. i much prefer my sunny quarters upstairs, and these high carved oak chairs are uncomfortable to sit in, especially at dinner!" but pleasant as it is, there is other business on hand, and you cannot linger over these beautiful antiquities; the afternoon is wearing on, and mrs. reeves leads the way to the drawing-rooms, which are also oddly shaped, and open one out of the other, like those downstairs; but those rooms are very different to look upon, and are, in your hostess's opinion, "much more cheery." you can step from the long windows on to a flower-filled balcony that looks up and down grosvenor street. the hangings of the first room are of yellow satin, of the second room pink; the furniture is merely of basket work, but made beautiful and comfortable by many soft cushions; and a long glass set in a frame of white woodwork, its low shelf covered with rare old yellow china and flowers, reflects the gold and cream leather walls, and the overmantel crammed with a lovely litter of china, pictures, and odds and ends, in the centre of which is a horseshoe. "picked up by my boy, phil," says mrs. reeves, as you examine it, "and we always say it has brought us luck." but when you ask to see her writing-room--for there is not a sign of pen, ink, and paper to be seen on a modest white escritoire behind the door--she shakes her head and laughs. "i have no writing-room and no particular table," she says, "indeed i can't say in the least how my books get written. i jot down anything that i especially observe, or think of, on a bit of paper, and when i have a great many pieces i sort them out, and usually pin them together in some sort of a sequence. at home, where i had an immense room to write in over the library, the boys used to say no one must speak to me if my 'authoress lock' were standing up over my forehead, but if i ever display it nowadays, nobody," she adds, ruefully, "is deterred by it! often, just as i have settled down to do a good morning's work, and have perhaps finished a page, someone comes in and puts letters or account books on it, or my boy phil rushes up and lays his air gun or his banjo on the table, or my husband brings in some little commission or a heap of notes to be answered for him. i always tell them," laughing, "that everyone combines to put out of sight the story which is being written, and often it is not touched again for a week; but my composition, when really begun, is very rapid, and my ideas seem to run out of my pen. at my old home they used to say i wrote the things that they thought, which was a good, lazy way of getting out of it." this leads to the subject of her "old home," and mrs. reeves imparts some interesting details of her youthful days. she was born at misterton, somersetshire, in the house described in "comin' thro' the rye," and she has always most passionately loved it. mrs. reeves was one of twelve children, who spent the greater part of their time in outdoor sports and amusements, in which the girls were almost as proficient as the boys. their father was a great martinet, and never permitted any encroachment on the regular lesson hours with their governess. "when i was only eight years old," says your hostess, "our grandmamma buckingham (after whom i take my second christian name) sent us a biography of famous persons, arranged alphabetically. i looked down the list to see if a mathers were amongst them. it was not, and i took a pencil, and made a bracket, writing in my name, helen mathers, novelist; so the ruling idea must have been in me early." the colour of her hair was helen mathers's greatest trouble in her childhood. it was a rich red, and in the familiar home circle she was called "carrots," to her great annoyance, until she was sixteen. she says:--"it gave me such genuine distress that before i was nine years old, i had written a story depicting the sufferings of a red-haired girl who wanted to marry a man who was in love with her golden-haired sister. i inscribed this in an old pocket-book, looking out the names and places in the _times_ each day, and afterwards, in agonies of shyness, i read it aloud to the assembled family, who received it with shouts of mirth!" at the age of thirteen, she was sent to chantry school, and, unfortunately for her, she was placed at once in the first class, consisting of girls many years older than herself. always ardent and ambitious, she worked so hard that quite suddenly her health broke down, and she became deaf--an affliction which has partially remained to this day. no doubt this trouble drove her more into herself, and helped her to concentrate her thoughts on literature. she wrote and wrote incessantly for pure love of it, and before she was sixteen had completed, her poem, "the token of the silver lily." this she gave to a friend of her family who was acquainted with dante gabriel rossetti. the great man read it, and sent her a message to the effect that, if she persevered, she bid fair at some future day to succeed. this highly delighted the girl, who was always working while the others played in the beautiful place to which her parents had removed when they left misterton. this later home is described as "penroses" in her late novel, "adieu!" which previously ran as a serial in a monthly magazine. her first appearance in print is thus described:--"it was hay-making time, and everybody, boys and girls, children, servants, and all, were down in the hayfield, when someone brought me a shabby little halfpenny wrapper with the magic word 'jersey' at the top. i gave a sort of whoop, and fled down the lawn and across the orchards, and into the bosom of my family like one possessed. 'boys, girls!' i cried; 'it's _accepted_--it's here in _print_! look at it!' and never did a prouder heart beat than the heart under my white frock that day for my first-born bantling of the pen. i had been yachting with my brother-in-law, mr. hamborough, a short time previously, with this result, that i wrote a sketch of him and his wife and the place, and, signing it 'n.'--short for 'nell'--i took counsel with mr. george augustus sala, whom i did not know in those days, but who was very kind in replying to me, and he despatched it to _belgravia_. when it _did_ appear jersey was very angry, and declared it was libelled, and i should not have ventured to go over there again for a long while!" about three years later she produced her first novel, "comin' thro' the rye." it proved a great success, and was rapidly translated into many languages; indeed, a copy in sanscrit was sent to her. this work was written unknown to her family. "my poor father," says mrs. reeves, sadly, "i got him into the story, and though i did not mean to be unkind or disrespectful, i could not get him out again. i hardly drew a free breath for months afterwards, fearing someone would tell him i had written it, and that he would be grievously offended; but i was young and foolish, too young a great deal i often think to succeed, but it makes me feel a sort of methuselah now." a story is told that many years ago a very youthful writer supplemented a story of her own with several pages of this book, and wrote to messrs. tillotson, saying she had written the twin novel to "comin' thro' the rye," and would they buy it? the publishers told mrs. reeves of this application. she was much amused, and in high good humour wrote back to say that she had always understood twins appeared about the same time, and that she had never heard before of one arriving seven years after the other. in helen mathers married mr. henry reeves, the well-known surgeon and specialist on orthopædics. he has been on the staff of the london hospital for nearly twenty years, and he, too, is an author, but his works bear more stupendous and alarming names than those of his wife, such as "human morphology," "bodily deformities"--sad, significant title! but not only as the skilful surgeon, the renowned specialist, the student, and author, is henry reeves known. there is another section of the world--amongst the poor and suffering, the over-worked clerk, the underpaid governess, the struggling artist, where his name like many another in his noble profession, is loved and revered, and where the word "fee" is never heard of, and the "left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth." did you not know all this from personal experience, it is almost to be read in the kind, benevolent face. his wife says, laughing, that "he is so unselfish, he never thinks of himself, and i have always to be looking after him to see that he gets even a meal in peace"; and she adds, in a low and tender tone, "but he is the kindest and best of husbands." they have but one child--"phil"--a bright, handsome boy of fourteen. he is the idol of their hearts, and like quicksilver in his brightness. his mother says when he was only three, he was found sitting at her desk, wielding a pen with great vigour, and throwing much ink about, as he dipped his golden curls in the blots he was making. "what are you doing?" his mother asked. "writing ''tory of a sin,'" he said, with great dignity; and now that he is older he composes with great rapidity. "he is at school now," says mrs. reeves, "and the house is like a tomb without him. if it were not for my needlework (my especial vanity) i could not get through the long weeks between his holidays. children, flowers, needlework--these are my chief delights; and as i often have to do without the first two, my needle is often a great comfort to me." shortly after her marriage, mrs. reeves again took up her pen, and during the next few years she wrote several novels and novelettes, selecting peculiarly attractive titles. amongst these books are "cherry ripe," "as he comes up the stair," "the story of a sin," "the land of the leal," "my lady greensleeves," "eyre's acquittal," etc., etc. referring to a character in the last of these, you ask to see the book; but there is not a single volume visible; they are all conspicuous by their absence. mrs. reeves remarks that she "has done nothing to speak of lately, feeling she has had nothing to say." some months ago the inclination to begin a new story came back to her, and she set diligently to work while it lasted. a great catastrophe occurred. the first volume was finished when, having occasion to go on other business to her publisher, she had the manuscript put into the hansom which was to convey her to his office. after a long conversation, she suddenly remembered that the parcel had been left in the cab, and from that day to this she has never recovered it. at the time she did not take the matter seriously, feeling sure the precious packet would be found at scotland yard; but, though rewards were offered and handbills circulated by the thousand, all was of no avail. mrs. reeves adds, "the press most kindly assisted me in every possible way. either the cabman threw it away, in total ignorance of its value, and then was afraid to come forward and confess it, or some dishonest person who next got into the cab may have sold, or used the story, in america probably, or elsewhere. _nous verrons!_ i have written it over again. it took me a few weeks only, without notes, without a scrap of anything to help me, save my memory, and never in my life did i sit down to a harder task." the author is very modest in her own opinion of this last book, and adds ruefully, "i feel miserable over it, but i never _am_ at all satisfied with my work, and when i sent it to my publishers, i told them that they had much better put it into the fire--it fell so entirely short of what i had intended." they however, happily took quite a different view of its merits, and the novel will shortly be brought out in three volumes. helen mathers is a great needlewoman. not only are the long satin curtains, the pillows, cushions, and dainty lamp shades all made by her own hands; but she can cut out and sew any article of feminine apparel. she has, indeed, a very pretty taste in dress, and many of her friends are in the habit of consulting her in that line--from the designing of their smartest gowns to the little economies of "doing up the old ones to look like new." "and yet," says mrs. reeves plaintively, "people call me extravagant. why! i have not even got a fashionable dressmaker. all my makings and mendings and turnings are done at home by a clever little workwoman, under my own superintendance, and i am most careful and economical. when a child, i was never taught the value of money, but i learnt it later by experience, and experience, after all, is the best teacher. i look upon myself as a sort of 'aunt sally,' at whom fate is always having a 'shy,' chipping off a bit here, and a bit there, but never really knocking me off my perch." a great solid silver donkey with panniers which must hold a pint of ink, stands on a table close to an oval venetian glass framed in gold and silver. mrs. reeves observes that though she has no writing-table, that is her especial ink-stand, which is carried about from room to room. it was given to her when very young, and, she laughingly adds, "you can imagine all the complimentary remarks the boys at home made to me about it." she goes on to say, "i always loved a good laugh, even though it were against myself. we were such a happy united family in the big old house. we are all scattered now," she remarks sadly; "some are dead, some are abroad, and one sister, who married a son of dr. russell, of _times_ renown, is in china with her husband." mrs. reeves is essentially a domestic woman. she cares comparatively but little for society, and is never as happy as when at home, with her husband sitting on the other side of the fire-place, like "darby and joan." she is excellent company, and a brilliant conversationalist. she possesses that good gift, a low, sweet voice, which glides on from topic to topic--now gay, with flashes of wit and mirth, now subdued to gravity or pathos. albeit, she is a good listener, and has the happy knack of drawing out talk. yet, though constantly conversing on people and social matters, not one unkindly word or suspicion of scandal escapes her lips. she has a good word to say for all, and speaks with affectionate gratitude of many. she prefers the company of woman, and says that her best friends have been those of her own sex. but the charm of her society has beguiled you into a long visit, and whilst bidding her good-bye the feeling arises that if a friend in need were wanted, a friend indeed would be found in "helen mathers." [illustration: florence marryat] florence marryat. battling with a fierce snowstorm, and a keen east wind, which drives the flakes straight into your face like repeated stings of a small sharp whip, a welcome shelter is presently found in florence marryat's pretty, picturesque little house in st. andrew's road, west kensington. two bright red pots filled with evergreens mark the house, which is built in the elizabethan style of architecture, with a covered verandah running along the upper part. by a strange coincidence, the famous author has settled down within a stone's throw of the place where her distinguished father--the late captain marryat, r.n.--once lived. until three months ago, there stood in the fulham palace road, a large, handsome building enclosed in ten acres of ground, which was first called "brandenburg villa," and was inhabited by the celebrated singer madame sontag. it next fell into the hands of the duke of sussex, who changed its name to sussex house, and finally sold it to his equerry captain marryat, who exchanged it with mrs. alexander copeland for the manor of langham, in norfolk, where he died. for some years past sussex house has been in chancery, but now it is pulled down; the land is sold out in building plots, and the pleasure grounds will be turned into the usual streets and rows of houses for the needs of the ever-increasing population. the study--or as florence marryat calls it, her "literary workshop"--is very small, but so well arranged that it seems a sort of _multum in parvo_, everything a writer can want being at hand. it has a look of thorough snugness and comfort. the large and well-worn writing table is loaded with books of reference and a vast heap of tidily-arranged manuscript, betokening the fact that yet another new novel is under weigh. a massive brass inkstand, bright as gold, is flanked on each side by a fierce-looking dragon. two of the walls are lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, filled with books which must number many hundreds of volumes. over the fireplace hangs an old-fashioned round mirror set in a dull yellow frame, mounted on plush, around whose broad margin is displayed a variety of china plates, picked up in the many foreign countries which miss marryat has visited, and the effect is particularly good. the room is lighted at the further corner by glass doors opening into an aviary and conservatory, which is bright with many red-berried winter plants; this little glass-house opens on to the big kennels where miss marryat's canine pets are made so comfortable. but the door opens. enters your hostess with two ringdoves perched familiarly on her shoulder. she is tall in stature, erect in carriage, fair in complexion: she has large blue eyes--set well apart--straight, well-formed eyebrows, and an abundance of soft, fair fluffy hair. she is dressed very simply in a long black tea-gown with watteau pleat, very plainly made, but perfect in cut and fit, and looking quite unstudied in its becoming graceful simplicity. florence marryat is the youngest of the eleven children of the late well-known author, captain marryat, r.n., c.b., f.r.s. her mother, who died at the good old age of ninety--in full possession of all her faculties--was a daughter of sir stephen shairp, of houston, linlithgow, who was for many years h.b.m. consul-general and _chargé d'affaires_ at the court of russia. one side of the little study is dedicated to the relics of her father, and in the centre hangs his portrait, surrounded by trophies and memories. the picture is painted by the sculptor behnes, in water-colours, and represents a tall, fair, slight, though muscular-looking man leaning against the mast of his ship, _ariadne_, dressed in the full uniform of those days, a long-tailed coat, white duck trousers, and cocked hat held under his arm. two smaller pictures of him are pen-and-ink drawings by count d'orsay and sir edward belcher respectively. entering the service at a very early age, and in troublous times, captain marryat gained rapid promotion, and had been in no less than fifty-nine naval engagements before he was twenty-one, and with the single exception of lord nelson he was the youngest post captain ever known, having indeed attained that rank at the age of twenty-four. after the first burmese war, in which he took so distinguished a part, he was offered a baronetcy as a reward for his services, but refused it, choosing instead a crest and arms to commemorate the circumstance, with the stipulation that the arms should be such as his daughters might carry. this was accordingly done, and at the present moment there are only eleven women in england who possess the same right, of which number miss marryat and her sisters make five. the crest, with arms (a fleur-de-lis and a burmese boat with sixteen rowers on an azure ground, with three bars argent and three bars sable) is framed, and hangs close to what she calls her "marryat museum." just below the portrait is an oval ebony frame containing an etching of a beaver done on a piece of ship's copper by her father, a morocco case close by holds all his medals, which were bequeathed to her, including the legion of honour bestowed on him by the emperor napoleon, and the picture of the dead emperor, sketched by the gallant sailor, and published by colnaghi, which is considered the best portrait of him ever taken. his daughter remarks:--"it was always said of my father that he ever displayed to perfection that courage, energy, and presence of mind which were natural to his lion-hearted character. unlike the veteran who 'shouldered his crutch to show how fields were won,' he never voluntarily referred to exploits of which any man might have been proud. he was content to _do_, and know that he had _done_, and left to others the pride which he might justly have felt for himself." independent of his nautical career, captain marryat had other great talents. his writings will never be forgotten, from "peter simple" and "midshipman easy" down to "masterman ready," the much-beloved books of children. his "code of signals" is so celebrated that reference must just be made to it. shortly before he was elected a fellow of the royal society, he invented and brought to perfection the code which was at once adopted in the merchant service, and is now generally used by the british and french navies, in india, at the cape of good hope, and other english settlements, and by the mercantile marine of north america. it is also published in the dutch and italian languages, and, by an order of the french government, no merchant vessel can be insured without these signals being on board. rising, miss marryat puts the original work into your hands, and you observe, with something like awe, that it is all written in the deceased sailor's own hand; the penmanship is like copper-plate, the flags and signals are painted, and each page is neatly indexed. needless to say, it is regarded as a priceless treasure by his daughter. born of such a gifted father, it is small wonder that the child should have inherited brilliant talents. she was never sent to school, but was taught under a succession of governesses. "on looking back," she says with compunction, "i regret to remember that i treated them all very badly, for i was a downright troublesome child. i was an omnivorous reader, and as no restriction was placed on my choice of books, i read everything i could find, lying for hours full length on the rug, face downwards, arms propping up my head, with fingers in ears to shut out every disturbing sound, the while perpetually summoned to come to my lessons. i may be said to have educated myself, and probably i got more real learning out of this mode of procedure than if i had gone through the regular routine of the schoolroom, with the cut-and-dried conventional system of the education of that day." florence marryat has been twice married: first at the age of sixteen to captain ross church, of the madras staff corps, and secondly to colonel francis lean of the royal marines. by the first marriage she had eight children, of whom six survive. the first three-volume novel she published was called "love's conflict." it was written under sad circumstances. her children were ill of scarlet fever; most of the servants, terror-stricken, had deserted her, and it was in the intervals of nursing these little ones that, to divert her sad thoughts, she took to her pen. from that time she wrote steadily and rapidly, and up to the present date she has actually turned out fifty-seven novels besides an enormous quantity of journalistic work, about one hundred short stories, and numerous essays, poems, and recitations. she says of herself, that from earliest youth she had always determined on being a novelist, and at the age of ten she wrote a story for the amusement of her playfellows, and illustrated it with her own pen-and-ink sketches (for be it known, the accomplished author has likewise inherited this talent from her father, and to this day she will decorate many a letter to her favourite friends with funny and clever little illustrations and caricatures). but she wisely formed the determination that she would never publish anything until her judgment was more matured, so as to ensure success, that she "would study people, nature, nature's ways, and character, and then she would let the world know what she thought"; and in this piece of self-denial she has shown extreme wisdom, and reaped her reward in the long record of successes that she has scored and the large fortune she has made, but which, alas! she no longer possesses. "others have spent it for me," she says plaintively; but she adds generously, "and i do not grudge it to them." part of it enabled her, at any rate, to give each and all of her children a thoroughly good education, and she is proud to think that they owe it all to her own hard work. miss marryat is always especially flattered to hear that her novels are favourites with women, and she had a gratifying proof of this when visiting canada in . she was waited on by a deputation of ladies, armed with bouquets and presents, to thank her for having written that charming story called "my own child." "gup," which had an extensive sale, is entirely an anglo-indian book, not so much of a novel as a collection of character sketches and tales, which her powers of observation enabled her to form out of the life in indian stations. for the benefit of the uninitiated, the word "gup" shall be translated from hindustanee into english: "gossip." "woman against woman," "veronique," "petronel," "nelly brooke," "fighting the air," were amongst the earliest of the eighteen novels that she brought out in the first eleven years of her literary career. these, together with her "girls of feversham," have been republished in germany and america, and translated into russian, german, swedish, and french. miss marryat says: "i never sit down deliberately to compose or think out a plot. the most ordinary remark or anecdote may supply the motive, and the rest comes by itself. sometimes i have as many as a dozen plots, in different stages of completion, floating in my brain. they appear to me like a set of houses, the first of which is fully furnished; the second finished, but empty; the third in course of building; till the furthest in the distance is nothing but an outline. as soon as one is complete, i feel i _must_ write it down; but i never think of the one i am writing, always of the next one that is to be, and sometimes of three or four at a time, till i drive them forcibly away. i never feel at home with a plot till i have settled the names of the characters to my satisfaction. as soon as i have done that they become sentient beings in my eyes, and seem to dictate what i shall write. i lose myself so completely whilst writing, that i have no idea, till i take it up to correct, what i have written." judging by the great heap of mss. alluded to on her writing-table, there seems but little for the writer to correct. at your request, she hands you half a dozen pages, and you notice but three alterations amongst them; the facile pen, the medium of her thoughts, seems to have known exactly what it had to write. the novel is called "how like a woman," and will shortly make its appearance. her latest published works are "on circumstantial evidence," "a scarlet sin," "mount eden," "blindfold," "brave heart and true," "the risen dead," "there is no death," and "the nobler sex." with respect to miss marryat's book, "there is no death," many people have pronounced it to be, not only the most remarkable book that she has ever written, but the most remarkable publication of the time. to the public it is so full of marvels as to appear almost incredible, but to her friends, who know that everything related there happened, under the author's eyes, it is more wonderful still. the amount of correspondence that she has received on the subject ever since the book appeared in june, , is incalculable. even to this date she has seven or eight letters daily, all containing the same demand, "tell us how we can see our dead." this book has done more to convince many people of the truth of spiritualism than any yet written. florence marryat numbers her converts by the hundred and they are all gathered from educated people; men of letters and of science have written to her from every part of the world, and many clergymen have succumbed to her courageous assertions. it is curious and interesting to know that miss marryat's experiences are not only those of the past, but that she passes through just as wonderful things every day of her life, and the spirit world is quite as familiar to her as the natural one, and far more interesting. whether her readers sympathise with her or not, or whether they believe that she really saw and heard all the marvels related in "there is no death," the book must remain as a remarkable record of the experiences of a woman whose friends know her to be incapable of telling a lie and especially on a subject which she holds to be sacred. "i really do not care much," says miss marryat with a smile, "if my readers believe me or not. if they do not it is their loss, not mine. i have done what i considered to be my duty in trying to convince the world of what _i_ know to be true, and to which i shall continue to testify as long as i have breath." "tom tiddler's ground" is the history of her own adventures while in america. many of her books have been dramatised, and at one time nine of these plays were running simultaneously in the provinces. she says, "the most successful of my works are transcripts of my own experience. i have been accused of caricaturing my acquaintances, but it is untrue. the majority of them are not worth the trouble, and it is far easier for me to draw a picture from my own imagination, than to endure the society of a disagreeable person for the sake of copying him or her." but miss marryat's talents are versatile. after a long illness when her physicians recommended rest from literature, believing an entire change of occupation would be the best tonic for her, she went upon the stage--a pursuit which she had always dearly loved--and possessing a fine voice, and great musical gifts, with considerable dramatic power, she has been successful, both as an actress and an entertainer. she wrote a play called "her world against a lie" (from her own novel), which was produced at the prince of wales' theatre, and in which she played the chief comedy part, mrs. hephzibah horton, with so much skill and _aplomb_, that the _era_, _figaro_, _morning post_, and other papers, criticised her performances most favourably. she also wrote "miss chester" and "charmyon" in conjunction with sir charles young. she was engaged for the opening of the prince of wales's (then the princes') theatre when she played "queen altemire" in _the palace of truth_. she has toured with d'oyly carte's _patience_ companies, with george grossmith in _entre nous_, and finally with her own company in _the golden goblet_ (written by her son frank). altogether miss marryat has pursued her dramatic life for fifteen years, and has given hundreds of recitations and musical entertainments which she has written for herself. one of these last, called "love letters," she has taken through the provinces three times, and once through america. it lasts two hours; she accompanies herself on the piano, and the music was written by george grossmith. another is a comic lecture entitled, "women of the future ( ); or, what shall we do with our men?" she has also made many tours throughout the united kingdom, giving recitals and readings from her father's works, and other pieces by albery and grossmith. for the last seven years miss marryat has never looked at a criticism on her books. she says her publishers are her best friends, and their purses are her assessors, and she is quite satisfied with the result. she has an intense love of animals, and asks if you would object to the presence of her dogs, as this is the hour for their admittance. on the contrary, it is what you have been longing for, and two magnificent bulldogs of long pedigree are let in. ferocious as is their appearance, their manners are perfect, and their great brown eyes seem human in their intelligence as each comes up to make acquaintance. meantime the two doves have gone peacefully to sleep, each perched on a brass dragon, and the dogs eye them respectfully, as if they were all members of "a happy family." a neat little maid comes in with a tea-tray, but ere she is permitted to lay the prettily embroidered cloth, miss marryat directs attention to the table, which is a curiosity. it is a small round table, made from the oak planks of the quarter deck of h.m.s. _ariadne_. this was sent to her by a gentleman who never saw her, with a letter saying that she would prize the wood over which her father's feet had so often trod. it bears in the centre a brass inscription, as follows:--"made from the timbers of h.m.s. ariadne, commanded by captain marryat, r.n., c.b., ." miss marryat, probably wishing to pay you a peculiar honour, pushes forward her own special revolving writing chair; but no, you had surreptitiously tried it whilst waiting for her, and unhesitatingly pronounce it to be the most uncomfortable piece of furniture ever made. it is constructed of wood, is highly polished, and has a hard seat, hard elbow rests, and a hard unyielding back. she laughs heartily, and declares she will hear no word against her "old arm-chair"; she says she has got used to it; it has been, like herself, a great traveller; she has written in it for twenty years, and it is a particular favourite. miss marryat wears a diamond ring, which has a peculiar history, and is very old. during the first burmese war in which her father was engaged, the natives were in the habit of making little slits in their skin, and inserting therein any particular stone of value they wished to conceal. one of these men was taken prisoner, and on being searched, or felt over--for there was not much clothing to search--a small hard lump was found on his leg, which at once revealed the presence of some valuable. a slight incision produced a diamond, which was confiscated, set, and presented by the good old sailor to his sister-in-law, mrs. horace marryat, whose only son, colonel fitzroy marryat, gave it to his cousin, the author. she takes you into the adjoining room to see two oil-paintings of wrecks, _chef d'oeuvres_ of the great flemish seascape painter, louis boeckhaussen, and valued at a high figure. there is a story attached to these also. they belonged originally to the marryat collection at wimbledon house, and were given to her brother frederick by his grandmother on his being promoted to be first lieutenant of the _sphynx_, and were hanging in his cabin when that ship was wrecked off the needles, isle of wight. they remained fourteen days under water, and when rescued were sent to a plymouth dealer to be cleaned. lieutenant marryat, for his bravery on that occasion, was immediately appointed to the _sphynx's_ twin vessel, the ill-fated _avenger_, who went down with souls on the sorelli rocks. after this catastrophe, the dealer sent the paintings to the young officer's mother, saying it was by his instructions, and that he had refused to take them to sea again, as he declared that they were "much too good to go overboard." miss marryat also possesses a painting by cawno, from "japhet in search of a father," which was left to her by the will of the late mr. richard bently, the publisher, and this she prizes highly. she has several presentation pens, one of porcupine quill and silver, with which her father wrote his last five novels; another of ivory, coral, and gold, inscribed with her name and presented by messrs. macniven and cameron; a third of silver, and a fourth of gold and ivory, given by admirers of her writings; fifthly, and the one she values most and chiefly uses, a penholder of solid gold with amethysts, which belonged to an american ancestress of the family, for miss marryat's paternal grandmother was a boston belle. this was a tribute from her american relations when she crossed the atlantic, with the words that she was "the most worthy member to retain it." a noise of barking and scratching at the door is heard outside. florence marryat opens it, and many tiny, rough, prize terriers rush in. she laughs at your exclamation of surprise at the number of her dog friends and answers, "they are not all kept entirely for amusement. i sell the puppies, and they fetch large prices. it is quite the fashion to be in trade now-a-days, you know. one lady runs a boarding-house, another, her emporium for furniture, a third, her bonnet shop, a fourth, her dress-making establishment, so why not i, my kennels? i love dogs better than bonnets, or chairs, or people, and so i derive pleasure as well as profit from my particular fancy, and i should be lonely without these pets." but, as though talking of old reminiscences had changed her mood from gay to grave, she asks you to look at a few very special treasures in her writing room. "i call this my room of home memories," she says with exceeding softness and pathos. "there are my children's pictures; those," pointing to a small shelf, "are my best friend's books." "_here_ are portraits of all whom i love best, my living, and my dead!" [illustration: emily lovett cameron] mrs. lovett cameron. nestling between knightsbridge on the north, and brompton road on the south, lies a quiet, old-fashioned square, which the organ-grinder and brass band are no longer permitted to disturb. everything is so still that it is difficult to realise that it is within a few minutes' walk from a busy, noisy thoroughfare. so near and yet so far from london's "madding crowd." in summer time when the ancient trees, which are said never to have been disturbed for generations, are in full leaf, the little square might indeed be a slice out of the country itself; and even now, with bare and leafless branches, it presents a peaceful, rural appearance, for the hoar frost has covered every bough and shrub with a million of glittering particles, which sparkle like diamonds in the wintry sunshine. in the centre of the north side of montpelier square is mrs. lovett cameron's home, a cheerful-looking little house, gay with window boxes, and fleecy muslin curtains draped with bright coloured ribbons. an application at the brass horseshoe knocker is promptly responded to, and you are admitted into the hall and vociferously greeted by "nancy," a handsome fox-terrier, the pet of the house, a treasure-trove from the dogs' home. the first object which attracts the eye, and, as it were, overshadows you, is the head of a gigantic indian buffalo, so sleek and life-like in appearance, with its huge horns, that you involuntarily shudder to think what a formidable opponent the savage monster must have proved in the flesh ere he became the trophy of that gallant sportsman, the late hector cameron. ascending the staircase, the walls of which are hung with a series of colonel crealock's spirited hunting sketches, you are ushered into the drawing-room, which is divided midway by a carved white wood archway of moorish design. large palms, tall arum lilies, and graceful ferns, are grouped here and there about the room; no sound is heard save the song of caged birds. the oriental bowls and jars are filled with great double chrysanthemums of golden brown, and other winter flowers; but a light step approaches; the door softly opens, and the author enters: seeing her framed in the doorway, clad in the soft folds of a simply-made violet velvet tea-gown, the first glance conveys to the mind an immediate impression that she is in thorough harmony with her surroundings. mrs. lovett cameron is a fair, slight woman, a little below the middle height; her large blue eyes have a very thoughtful, gentle expression; her broad low brow is crowned with bright chestnut coloured hair. her habitually serious look changes, however, when having settled you into a corner of the couch, with a cup of steaming coffee, she enters into friendly conversation. meanwhile you cast furtive glances around the room. a bright fire blazes cheerfully on the blue and brown tiled hearth. the carved white mantelpiece, with side recesses, is covered with delicate specimens of old dresden china, and surmounted by a broad shelf, on which stand five exquisite antique japanese jars, the _bleu poudré_ and deep crimson being thrown into relief by the soft tints of the "buttercup" coloured wall paper. amongst the pictures which adorn the walls is a portrait, after sir godfrey kneller, of sir edmund verney, an ancestor of the family, bearing the inscription "standard bearer to charles i., who lost his life in the battle of edghill." the original painting is at liscombe, buckinghamshire, a property which still belongs to the lovett family. further on is a lovely copy of the madonna caracci, in the dresden gallery. several pieces of valuable old blue china, quaint bits of oriental flat figures, together with a plate or two of old dutch ware decorate the walls, and an ancient convex mirror of great antiquity. two antique corner cupboards (dutch) with flat glass doors disclose many little treasures of enamel, old worcester and nankin, which mrs. cameron says that she prizes as much from association as for their own intrinsic value. an italian cabinet inlaid with ebony and ivory occupies one side of the wall, and, unlocking its doors, she takes out some priceless scraps of old lace of cobweb-looking fabric, which she inherited from a maternal ancestress, together with a few pieces of the queen anne silver which are scattered on the tiny marqueterie table yonder. amongst these there is a richly-chased tankard, on which is the inscription, "oration prize adjudged to verney lovett, of trinity college, cambridge, in the year ." there is an amusing story told of another of mrs. cameron's ancestresses. she was a huguenot, a mademoiselle de bosquet, and, at the time of the persecution of the french protestants, when only a little girl, she was packed up in a basket, smuggled out of france and sent over to england to ensure her safety. the long, dwarf bookcase on the right is filled with literary treasures, inherited from the "oration prize" winner. mrs. cameron takes out several, and mentions that they are valuable editions of "montaigne," "chesterfield's letters," the "tattler," the "spectator," etc., but the gem of the collection, and one that she greatly values, is a complete set of the poems of edmund waller, dated , in good preservation, each poem headed with engravings by vertue, chiefly portraits of the stuart family. the bookcase opposite contains several presentation copies from brother and sister writers. amongst them you look in vain for the author's own works, but she says that they shall all be seen presently in her own study below, and as she leads the way thither, past the conservatory, you pause to admire the picturesque grouping of the flowers and palms, some so high that the cages of the feathered songsters are half concealed. your hostess remarks that she "delights in flowers, and is always lucky with them." turning to the right, she opens the door of her cosy little writing-room. the dark red walls, with a frieze of large japanese flowers, are hung with etchings, photographs, and pictures, all of which have their own story. here is a complete series of aitken's "first point to point race"; there portraits of the "prize fox-terriers of england," presented to her by the late sir john reid. also sundry winners of the derby, and many a pet dog and horse. mrs. cameron points out her husband's favourite hunter, "roscommon," and his wonderful pony, "tommy dod," who "jumped like a cat," and carried him for many seasons in leicestershire, and who, with his master, was often mentioned with honour in _baily's magazine_. a few sketches of the thames indicate her favourite resort for leisure hours, many summer days and autumn holidays being spent on the river, in quiet nooks and corners, where, under the able tuition of her barrister brother, norman pearson, late of balliol, and coach of the "kingston eight," mrs. lovett cameron has achieved considerable dexterity in sculling and canoeing. antlers and deers' heads, ranged high near the ceiling, testify further to the sporting proclivities of the family. over a quaint little corner cupboard a big stuffed hawk looks down with an absurdly wise expression. a high, three-cornered, and somewhat ascetic-looking chair is pushed aside from a proportionately high and business-like writing table--a handsome old english piece of furniture, which is loaded with manuscript and books of reference, denoting the occupation in which mrs. cameron was probably engaged when summoned to receive you, and you hastily begin a word of apology; but she turns it aside and observes that she was "quite glad to be interrupted, as she had been working beyond her usual hour." over the table hangs a venerable canary, _ætat_. fourteen, who has learnt to be mute in business hours. opposite the window stands a large antique chippendale bookcase with glass doors, filled with hooks of history, travel, biography, english poets, and old dramatists. one shelf is reserved for another purpose, and here can be read the names of fourteen three-volume novels, well known to the world, written by mrs. lovett cameron. her husband has had them all bound alike in russian leather, and looks on them as his own especial property. this shelf is now nearly full, and mrs. cameron remarks laughingly that "by rights she ought to die when it _is_ full, as there will be no room for any more in the cupboard." of these novels, the first, "juliet's guardian," made its bow to the public in , having previously appeared in the pages of _belgravia_, "jack's secret" ran as a serial through the same magazine, having been applied for, when _belgravia_ changed hands, by the present owner "to bring him luck." taking out one after another of these daintily-bound volumes--"deceivers ever," "vera nevill," "pure gold," "a north country maid," "a dead past," "in a grass country," "a devout lover," "this wicked world," "worth winning," "the cost of a lie," "neck or nothing," and other short stories--you see that most of them have passed through several editions, and in "in a grass country," "ninth edition," proving the special popularity of that particular book, which chiefly made mrs. lovett cameron's literary reputation. her latest additions to these entertaining works of fiction are "a lost wife," "weak woman," and "a daughter's heart." it is always deeply interesting to hear about the early days of such a well-known writer. explaining to mrs. cameron that not only in europe, but also in the colonies where her books are as largely circulated, that she has many friends and admirers who will love to hear all about her first literary efforts, she kindly consents to gratify you, and says, that "to begin at the beginning," she was sent at the early age of six to paris, to acquire the language; she was placed in the family of the late m. nizard, an academician, and a man of some literary repute, who later on became a member of the senate. she has a vivid recollection of the house--since demolished--surrounded by a large garden in the rue de conscelles, where her childish days were spent. amongst such surroundings, it was natural that the girl should become imbued with a love of reading, which, though carefully guided, was stimulated to the utmost, and when, later on, after some further years at a school in england, she returned home, she found herself in constant disgrace, because she was always reading and hated needlework. as her mother and sister were enthusiastic in this feminine accomplishment, and were constantly engrossed in the embroidering of church altar-cloths and linen, they were inclined to look on books as an excuse for idleness. it was at this time that the young girl-student secretly wrote several short stories, and, although very shy of these efforts, she one day confided to her elder sister that she "felt certain she could write a novel." with the honest candour of a family circle towards each other, she was promptly extinguished with the remark, "that is nonsense. if you had any talent for writing, it would have shown itself before this." thus discouraged, she laid aside the idea, and never resumed it until after her marriage, when the talent which had lain dormant could no longer be hidden. the story of the launching of her first novel is most interesting, as showing the courage and perseverance of the young author. she had no acquaintance with a single member of the literary profession--no interest with any editor or publisher; nevertheless, on the completion of "juliet's guardian," she took up, by chance, the nearest book at hand; reading therein the names of chatto and windus, she then and there packed up her ms., and without any introduction, but with many qualms, made her way to their office. she was courteously received, and informed that she might leave it, and after a brief period of anxious waiting, the good news came that it was accepted. shortly after, it was brought out, and the young author's first step to fame was accomplished. rising to replace this volume, you inadvertently press against a panel in the lower cupboard, which falling open, dislodges a large and somewhat discoloured roll of newspapers, and hastening to gather them up with a murmured word of regret for the accident, mrs. cameron remarks with a laugh that they are copies of a paper, the _city advertiser_, which she and her two brothers started, and actually kept going for six months, the three meeting once a week to carry it on. it was a source of endless amusement to them, until the scattering of the family caused it to die a natural death. the easel yonder holds a large framed photograph of the head of an apollo, discovered when digging under the streets of athens; and opposite stands a portfolio full of sketches and maps, descriptive of the route taken by her brother-in-law, commander lovett cameron, the well-known african traveller, who nearly seventeen years ago went on foot across africa with a small party of friends, but, alas! came back alone. he was the only survivor of the intrepid band, the rest all succumbed to the perils of the expedition. he it was who surveyed the southern portion of lake tanganyika, proving it to be a lake, and discovered the river lukuga, which is the outlet thereof. pursuing his travels further, he also proved lualaba and congo to be one river, and later discovered lake kassali and the sources of the zambesi. but whilst following out the route on a well-worn map, and listening to these interesting details, youthful voices are heard outside, which recall the fact that it is the first day of the holidays, and a tap at the door is followed by the entrance of mrs. cameron's two fine, bright boys, accompanied by their father. the elder lad, "verney" is at winchester, the "school for scholars," and he has already evinced a distinct talent for composition, combined with a fund of humour, which has found vent in one or two clever, though childish stories, which betoken the probability that he has inherited his mother's gift of writing, but the younger boy, "hector," bravely tells you he "likes play better than lessons, and he means to go abroad and shoot elephants." as he is, however, only twelve years old his parents feel no immediate anxiety on _that_ score. mrs. lovett cameron seldom writes after two o'clock. she uses a pen placed in a funny little stump of a broken mother-of-pearl holder, and, handing it to you, she says, "i have a superstition about it. every one of my novels has been mainly written with it, and i often say that if i use another penholder, i write badly. i have told my husband to put it into my coffin." she is a capital woman of business, and remarks that she "bought all her experience for herself." those who do not know mrs. cameron well, think that she is cold and proud. truly, she does not wear her heart on her sleeve; but not to all is revealed the true nature of the woman. do you go to consult her on a tiresome bit of business, to take a tale of deserving charity, to confide a personal grief? though in the midst of writing a sentence, the busy pen is thrown aside, as she straightens the tangled web, opens her purse to the pitiful story, or, with tender sympathy, enters into the sorrow. the good old "grandfather" clock in the corner is a very ancient and much-treasured relic; its hands, however, mark that it is time to go; but mrs. lovett cameron asks you to "stay a moment." she runs lightly upstairs and returns with a bunch of the gold and brown chrysanthemums, which she puts into your hands; then, casting a last look at the fierce buffalo, you pass out into the quiet little square, and in less than five minutes find yourself again in the noisy region of cabs and omnibuses. [illustration: m hungerford] mrs. hungerford. it is well worth encountering the perils of the sea, even in the middle of winter, and in the teeth of a north-east wind, if only to experience the absolute comfort and ease with which, in these space-annihilating days, the once-dreaded journey from england to the emerald isle can be made. you have resolved to accept a hospitable invitation from mrs. hungerford, the well-known author of "molly bawn," etc., to visit her at her lovely home, st. brenda's, bandon, co. cork, where a "hearty irish welcome" is promised, and though circumstances prevent your availing yourself of the "month's holiday" so kindly offered, and limit an absence from home to but four days, it is delightful to find that, travelling by the best of all possible routes--the irish mail--it is to be accomplished easily and without any fatiguing haste. having given due notice of your intentions, you arrive at euston just in time for the . a.m. express, and find that by the kindness of the station-master a compartment is reserved, and every arrangement, including an excellent meal, is made for your comfort. the carriages are lighted by electricity, and run so smoothly that it is possible to get a couple of hours' good sleep, which the very early start has made so desirable. on reaching holyhead at . p.m. to the minute, you are met by the courteous and attentive marine superintendent, captain cay, r.n., who takes you straight on board the _ireland_, the newest addition to the fleet of fine ships, owned by the city of dublin steam packet company. she is a magnificent vessel, feet long, feet in beam, , tons, and , horse-power; her fine, broad bridge, handsome deck-houses, and brass work glisten in the bright sunlight. she carries electric light; and the many airy private cabins indicate that, though built for speed, the comfort of her passengers has been a matter of much consideration. she is well captained, well officered, well manned, and well navigated. the good-looking, weather-beaten captain kendall is indeed the commodore of the company, and has made the passage for nearly thirty years. there is an unusually large number of passengers to-day, for it is the first week of the accelerated speed, and it is amusing to notice the rapidity with which the mails are shipped, on men's backs, which plan is found quicker than any appliance. captain cay remarks that it is no uncommon thing to ship seven hundred sacks on foreign mail days; he says, too, that never since these vessels were started has there been a single accident to life or limb. but the last bag is on board, steam is up, and away goes the ship past the south stack lighthouse, built on an island under precipitous cliffs, from which a gun is fired when foggy, and in about an hour the irish coast becomes visible, howth and bray head. the sea gets pretty rough, but luckily does not interfere with your excellent appetite for the first-class refreshments supplied. the swift-revolving paddles churn the big waves into a thick foam as the good ship _ireland_ ploughs her way through at the rate of twenty knots an hour, "making good weather of it," and actually accomplishes the voyage in three hours and fifteen minutes--one of the shortest runs on record. the punctuality with which these mail packets make the passage in all weathers is indeed truly wonderful--a fact which is experienced a few days later on the return journey. kingstown is reached at . p.m. (irish time), where the mail train is waiting to convey passengers by the new loop line that runs in a curve right through "dear dirty dublin," as it is popularly called, to kingsbridge, and so on to cork, where you put up for the night at the imperial hotel. another bright sunshiny morning opens, and shows old cork at her best. cork! the old city of father prout's poem, "the bells of shandon," which begins thus:-- with deep affection and recollection i often think of shandon bells, whose sounds so wild would in days of childhood fling round my cradle their magic spells, on this i ponder where'er i wander, and thus grow fonder, sweet cork, of thee; with the bells of shandon that sound so grand on, etc., etc. the river lee runs through the handsome little city, and has often been favourably compared with the rhine. but bandon must be reached, which is easily managed in an hour by rail, and there you are met by your host with a neat dog-cart, and good grey mare; being in light marching order, your kit is quickly stowed away by a smart-looking groom, and soon you find yourself tearing along at a spanking pace through the "most protestant" town of bandon, where mr. hungerford pulls up for a moment to point out the spot where once the old gates stood, whereon was written the legend, "let no papist enter here." years after, a priest in the dead of night added to it. he wrote:-- whoever wrote this, wrote it _well_, the same is written on the gates of _hell_. then up the hill past ballymoden church, in through the gates of castle bernard, past lord bandon's beautiful old castle covered with exquisite ivy, out through a second gate, over the railway, a drive of twenty minutes in all, and so up to the gates of st. brenda's. a private road of about half a mile long, hedged on either side by privet and hawthorn and golden furze, leads to the avenue proper, the entrance gate of which is flanked by two handsome deodars. it takes a few minutes more to arrive at a large, square, ivy-clad house, and ere there is time to take in an idea of its gardens and surroundings, the great hall door is flung open, a little form trips down the stone steps, and almost before the horse has come to a standstill, mrs. hungerford gives you indeed the "hearty irish welcome" she promised. it is now about four o'clock, and the day is growing dark. your hostess draws you in hastily out of the cold, into a spacious hall lighted by a hanging eastern lamp, and by two other lamps let into the wide circular staircase at the lower end of it. the drawing-room door is open, and a stream of ruddy light from half-a-dozen crimson shaded lamps, rushing out, seems to welcome you too. it is a large, handsome room, very lofty, and charmingly furnished, with a persian carpet, tiny tables, low lounging chairs, innumerable knick-knacks of all kinds, ferns, winter flowers of every sort, screens and palms. a great fire of pine-logs is roaring up the chimney. the piano is draped with bokhara plush, and everywhere the latest magazines, novels, and papers are scattered. mrs. hungerford is a very tiny woman, but slight and well-proportioned. her large hazel eyes, sparkling with fun and merriment, are shaded by thick, curly lashes. she has a small, determined mouth, and the chin slightly upturned, gives a _piquante_ expression to the intelligent face--so bright and vivacious. her hair is of a fair-brown colour, a little lighter than her eyelashes, and is piled up high on the top of her head, breaking away into natural curls over her brow. she is clad in an exquisite tea-gown of dark blue plush, with a soft, hanging, loose front of a lighter shade of silk. some old lace ruffles finish off the wrists and throat, and she wears a pair of little high-heeled _louis quinze_ shoes, which display her small and pretty feet. she looks the embodiment of good temper, merry wit, and _espièglerie_. it is difficult to realize that she is the mother of the six children who are grouped in the background. one lovely little fairy, "vera," aged three and a half, runs clinging up to her skirts, and peeps out shyly. her delicate colouring suggests a bit of dainty dresden china. later on, you discover that this is actually the pet name by which she is known, being indeed quite famous here as a small beauty. "master tom," a splendid roly-poly fellow, aged sixteen months, is playing with a heap of toys on the rug near the fire and is carefully watched over by a young brother of five. the three other girls are charming little maidens. the eldest, though but in her early teens, is intellectual and studious; the second has a decided talent for painting, whilst the third, says her mother, laughing, "is a consummate idler, but witty and clever." by and bye your hostess takes you into what she calls her "den," for a long, undisturbed chat, and this room also bears the stamp of her taste and love of study. a big log fire burns merrily here, too, in the huge grate, and lights up a splendid old oak cabinet, reaching from floor to ceiling, which, with four more bookcases, seems literally crammed with dictionaries, books of reference, novels, and other light literature; but the picturesque is not wanting, and there are plenty of other decorations, such as paintings, flowers, and valuable old china to be seen. here the clever little author passes three hours every morning. she is, as usual, over-full of work, sells as fast as she can write, and has at the present time more commissions than she can get through during the next few years. everything is very orderly--each big or little bundle of mss. is neatly tied together and duly labelled. she opens one drawer of a great knee-hole writing table, which discloses hundreds of half sheets of paper. "yes," she says, with a laugh; "i scribble my notes on these: they are the backs of my friends' letters; how astonished many of them would be if they knew that the last half sheet they write me becomes on the spot a medium for the latest full-blown accounts of a murder, or a laugh, or a swindle, perhaps, more frequently, a flirtation! i am a bad sleeper," she adds, "i think my brain is too active, for i always plan out my best scenes at night, and write them out in the morning without any trouble." she finds, too, that driving has a curious effect upon her; the action of the air seems to stimulate her. she dislikes talking, or being talked to, when driving, but loves to think, and to watch the lovely variations of the world around her, and often comes home filled with fresh ideas, scenes, and conversations, which she scribbles down without even waiting to throw off her furs. asking her how she goes to work about her plot, she answers with a reproachful little laugh--"that is unkind! you know i never _have_ a plot really, not the _bonâ fide_ plot one looks for in a novel. an idea comes to me, or i to it," she says, airily, "a scene--a situation--a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint i begin to build," but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? "indeed, no," she replies; "it has frequently happened to me that i have written the last chapter first, and so, as it were, worked backwards." "phyllis" was the young author's first work. it was written before she was nineteen, and was read by mr. james payn, who accepted it for messrs. smith and elder. mrs. hungerford is the daughter of the late rev. canon hamilton, rector and vicar choral of st. faughnan's cathedral in ross carberry, co. cork, one of the oldest churches in ireland. her grandfather was john hamilton, of vesington, dunboyne, a property thirteen miles out of dublin. the family is very old, very distinguished, and came over from scotland to ireland in the reign of james i. most of her family are in the army; but of literary talent, she remarks, it has but little to boast. her principal works are "phyllis," "molly bawn," "mrs. geoffrey," "portia," "rossmoyne," "undercurrents," "a life's remorse," "a born coquette," "a conquering heroine." she has written up to this time thirty-two novels, besides uncountable articles for home and american papers. in the latter country she enjoys an enormous popularity, and everything she writes is rapidly printed off. first sheets of the novels in hand are bought from her for american publications, months before there is any chance of their being completed. in australia, too, her books are eagerly looked for, whilst every story she has ever written can be found in the tauchnitz series. she began to write when very young, at school taking always the prize in composition. as a mere child she could always keep other children spellbound whilst telling them fairy stories of her own invention. "i remember," she says, turning round with a laugh, "when i was about ten years old, writing a ghost story which so frightened myself, that when i went to bed that night, i couldn't sleep till i had tucked my head under the bedclothes. this," she adds, "i have always considered my _chef d'oeuvre_, as i don't believe i have ever succeeded in frightening anyone ever since." at eighteen she gave herself up seriously, or rather, gaily, to literary work. all her books teem with wit and humour. one of her last creations, the delightful old butler, murphy, in "a born coquette," is equal to anything ever written by her compatriot, charles lever. not that she has devoted herself entirely to mirth-moving situations. the delicacy of her love scenes, the lightness of touch that distinguishes her numerous flirtations can only be equalled by the pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. her descriptions of scenery are specially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. she is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, "no nice girl would allow her mother to read." mrs. hungerford married first when very young, but her husband died in less than six years, leaving her with three little girls. in she married mr. henry hungerford. he also is irish, and his father's place, cahirmore, of about eleven thousand acres, lies nearly twenty miles to the west of bandon. "it may interest you," she says, "to hear that my husband was at the same school as mr. rider haggard. i remember when we were all much younger than we are now, the two boys came over for their holidays to cahirmore, and one day in my old home 'milleen' we all went down to the kitchen to cast bullets. we little thought then that the quiet, shy schoolboy, was destined to be the author of 'king solomon's mines.'" nothing less than a genius is mrs. hungerford at gardening. her dress protected by a pretty holland apron, her hands encased in brown leather gloves, she digs and delves. followed by many children, each armed with one of "mother's own" implements--for she has her own little spade and hoe, and rake, and trowel, and fork--she plants her own seeds, and pricks her own seedlings, prunes, grafts, and watches with the deepest eagerness to see them grow. in springtime, her interest is alike divided between the opening buds of her daffodils, and the breaking of the eggs of the first little chickens, for she has a fine poultry yard too, and is very successful in her management of it. she is full of vitality, and is the pivot on which every member of the house turns. blessed with an adoring husband, and healthy, handsome, obedient children, who come to her for everything and tell her anything, her life seems idyllic. "now and then," she remarks laughing, "i really have great difficulty in securing two quiet hours for my work"; but everything is done in such method and order, the writing included, there is little wonder that so much is got through. it is a full, happy, complete life. "i think," she adds, "my one great dread and anxiety is a review. i never yet have got over my terror of it, and as each one arrives, i tremble and quake afresh ere reading." "april's lady" is one of the author's lately published works. it is in three volumes, and ran previously as a serial in _belgravia_. "lady patty," a society sketch drawn from life, had a most favourable reception from the critics and public alike, but in her last novel, very cleverly entitled "nor wife, nor maid," mrs. hungerford is to be seen, or rather read, at her best. this charming book, so full of pathos, so replete with tenderness, ran into a second edition in about ten days. in it the author has taken somewhat of a departure from her usual lively style. here she has indeed given "sorrow words." the third volume is so especially powerful and dramatic, that it keeps the attention chained. the description indeed of poor mary's grief and despair are hardly to be outdone. the plot contains a delicate situation, most delicately worked out. not a word or suspicion of a word jars upon the reader. it is not however all gloom. there is in it a second pair of lovers who help to lift the clouds, and bring a smile to the lips of the reader. mrs. hungerford does not often leave her pretty irish home. what with her incessant literary work, her manifold domestic occupations, and the cares of her large family, she can seldom be induced to quit what she calls, "an out and out country life," even to pay visits to her english friends. mr. hungerford unhesitatingly declares that everything in the house seems wrong, and there is a howl of dismay from the children when the presiding genius even suggests a few days' leave of absence. last year, however, she determined to go over to london at the pressing invitation of a friend, in order to make the acquaintance of some of her distinguished brothers and sisters of the pen, and she speaks of how thoroughly she enjoyed that visit, with an eager delight. "everyone was so kind," she says, "so flattering, far, far too flattering. they all seemed to have some pretty thing to say to me. i have felt a little spoilt ever since. however, i am going to try what a little more flattery will do for me, so mr. hungerford and i hope to accept, next spring, a second invitation from the same friend, who wants us to go to a large ball she is going to give some time in may for some charitable institution--a cottage hospital i believe; but come," she adds, suddenly springing up, "we have spent quite too much time over my stupid self. come back to the drawing-room and the chicks, i am sure they must be wondering where we are, and the tea and the cakes are growing cold." at this moment the door opens, and her husband, gun in hand, with muddy boots and gaiters, nods to you from the threshold; he says he dare not enter the "den" in this state, and hurries up to change before joining the tea table. "he is a great athlete," says his wife, "good at cricket, football, and hockey, and equally fond of shooting, fishing, and riding." that he is a capital whip, you have already found out. in the morning you see from the library window a flower garden and shrubbery, with rose trees galore, and after breakfast a stroll round the place is proposed. a brisk walk down the avenue first, and then back to the beech trees standing on the lawn, which slopes away from the house down to a river running at the bottom of a deep valley, up the long gravelled walk by the hall door, and you turn into a handsome walled kitchen garden, where fruit trees abound--apple and pear trees laden with fruit, a quarter of an acre of strawberry beds, and currant and raspberry bushes in plenty. but time and tide, trains and steamers, wait for no man, or woman either. a few hours later you regretfully bid adieu to the charming little author, and watch her until the bend of the road hides her from your sight. mr. hungerford sees you through the first stage of the journey, which is all accomplished satisfactorily, and you reach home to find that whilst you have been luxuriating in fresh sea and country air, london has been wrapped in four days of gloom and darkness. [illustration: m betham-edwards] matilda betham-edwards. a winding road from the top of the old-fashioned high street of hastings leads to high wickham, where, on an elevation of some hundred feet above the level of the main road on the east hill stands a cottage, which is the abode of a learned and accomplished author, miss betham-edwards. the quaint little "villa julia," as she has named it after a friend, is the first of a terrace of picturesque and irregularly-built houses. a tortuous path winds up the steep ascent, and on reaching the summit, one of the finest views in southern england is obtained. the vast panorama embraces sea, woodland, streets, and roads, the umbrageous old london coach-road, above, the grassy slopes reaching to the west and castle hills. far beyond may be seen the crumbling ruins of the conqueror's stronghold (alas! this historic spot is now defaced by an odiously vulgar and disfiguring "lift!"), and further still, the noble headland of beachy head and broad expanse of sea, on which the rays of sunshine glitter brightly. between the east and west hills, a green environment, lies nestled the town, with its fine old churches of all saints' and st. clement's. on a clear day, such as the present, no view can be more exhilarating, and the ridge on which miss betham-edwards's cottage stands is lifted high above the noise of the road below. behind stretch the gorse-covered downs leading to fairlight, from whence may be seen the coast of france, forty miles off, as the crow flies. close under the author's windows are hawthorn trees made merry by robins all through the winter, and at the back of the house may be heard the cuckoo, the thrush, and the blackbird, as in the heart of the country. truly, it is a unique spot, inviting to repose and inspiring cheerfulness of mind. the interior of the villa julia is in thorough keeping with the exterior. the little study which commands this glorious view is upstairs. it is a charming room, simplicity itself, yet gives evidence of taste and culture. there is nothing here to offend the eye, and no suggestion of the art-decorator, but it is all just an expression of its occupant's taste and character. "i have a fancy," says miss betham-edwards, "to have different shades of gold-colour running through everything. it is an effective background for the pictures and pottery"; accordingly, the handsome morocco carpet, bought by herself in the bazaar at algiers, is of warm hue. the furniture and wall-paper have the prevailing delicate tints; an arched recess on each side of the fireplace displays lovely specimens of brilliant pottery from athens and constantinople, with many shelves below, filled with volumes in various foreign languages. on the mantelshelf stand statuettes of goethe and schiller, remembrances of weimar; the walls are hung with water-colour sketches by mdme. bodichen and many french artists. long low dwarf bookcases fill two sides of the room, the top shelves of which are lavishly adorned with more pottery from germany, italy, spain, and switzerland, the whole collected by the author on her foreign travels. her choice little library contains first and foremost the great books of the world, and, besides these, a representative selection of modern literature. "it is in a small compass," she remarks, "but i keep it for myself, eliminating and giving away useless volumes which creep in." on a neatly arranged writing table stand a stationery-case and a french schoolboy's desk, which is rather an ornamental contrivance of _papier-maché_. "i invariably use it," says miss edwards, "it is a most convenient thing, and has such a good slope. when one is worn out i buy another. i do not like things about me when i write; i keep a clear table, and mss. in the next room. i rise early, and work for five hours every morning absolutely undisturbed: my maid does not even bring me a telegram." from the window just below on the left can be seen the house of one of miss betham-edwards's _confrères_, mr. coventry patmore, the poet. a little further on is the picturesque villa which dr. elizabeth blackwell (the first woman doctor) inhabits. "as remarkable and good a woman as ever lived," she adds. "i do not go much into society, for i find the winter is the best time for writing. i lead a completely retired literary life, but i have a few kindred spirits around me, and i occasionally hold little receptions when we all meet." in person miss betham-edwards is about the medium height, middle-aged, and slender in figure. she is fair in complexion; has hazel eyes, and a mass of thick, dark hair, grey over the temples, and worn in a twist at the back, the ends dispersed neatly round a small and compact head. she is wearing black for the present, being in mourning, but is fond of warm, cheerful colours for habitual use. "but, indeed," she says, smiling, "i have not much time to think of dress, and i was greatly amused by the remark of a former old landlady who, anxious that i should look my best at some social gathering, remarked austerely to me, 'really, madam, you do not dress according to your talents!' upon which i replied 'my good woman, if all folks dressed according to their talents, two-thirds, i fear, would go but scantily clothed.'" matilda barbara betham-edwards is a countrywoman of crabbe, r. bloomfield, constable, gainsborough, and arthur young. she was born at westerfield, suffolk, and in the fine old elizabethan manor house of westerfield, ipswich, her childhood and girlhood were spent. there was literature in her family on the maternal side, three bethams having honourably distinguished themselves, viz., her grandfather, the rev. w. betham, the compiler of the "genealogical tables of the sovereigns of the world"; her uncle, sir w. betham, ulster king of arms, the learned and ingenious author of "etruria celtica," "the gael and the cymri," etc.; and lastly, her aunt and godmother, matilda betham, the author of "a biographical dictionary of celebrated women," and other works, and the intimate friend of charles and mary lamb, southey, and coleridge. from the paternal side miss betham-edwards inherited whatever mother-wit and humour she displays; her father, for whose memory she entertains the deepest affection, was like arthur young, an agriculturist, and possessed a genuine vein of native humour. left motherless at a very early age, she may be called self-educated, her teachers being plenty of the best books, and with her first story-book arose the desire and fixed intention to become herself a story-teller. in these early days among the cowslip meadows and bean fields of westerfield, books were the young girl's constant companions, although she had the happiness of having brothers and sisters. by the time she was twelve, she had read through shakespeare, walter scott, "don quixote," "the spectator," "the arabian nights," johnson's "lives of the poets"; then, _inter alia_, milton was an early favourite. as she grew up, the young student held aloof from the dances and other amusements of her sisters, writing, whilst yet in her teens, her first published romance, "the white house by the sea," a little story which has had a long life, for it has lately been re-issued and numerous "picture-board" editions have appeared. amongst new editions, cheaper and revised, are those of "disarmed," "the parting of the ways," and "pearls." by request, some penny stories will shortly appear from her pen. "john and i" and "dr. jacob" were the result of residences in germany, the former giving a picture of south german life, and dates from this period, and the latter being founded on fact. "on arriving at frankfort," says miss betham-edwards, "to spend some time in an anglo-german family, my host (the dr. paulus of 'dr. jacob'), almost the first thing, asked of me, 'have you heard the story of dr. j---- which has just scandalized this town?' he then narrated in vivid language the strange career which forms the _motif_ of the work." that novel too has had a long existence. it was re-issued again lately, the first edition having appeared many years ago. the personages were mostly taken from life, "a fact i may aver now," she says, "most, alas! having vanished from the earthly stage." on the breaking up of her suffolk home, the author travelled in france, spain, and algeria with the late madame bodichen--the philanthropist, and friend of cobden, george eliot, dante rossetti, dr. elizabeth blackwell, and herbert spencer--herself a charming artist, and writer of no mean power, but best known, perhaps, as the co-foundress with miss emily davis of girton college. "to the husband of this noble woman," she continues, "i acknowledge myself hardly less indebted, for to dr. bodichen i owe my keen interest in france and french history, past and present, and i may say, indirectly, my vast circle of french friends and acquaintances, the result of which has been several works on french rural life, and the greatest happiness and interest to myself." "kitty," which was first published in in three volumes, later on, in one volume, and which is, perhaps, the most popular of miss betham-edwards's stories, belongs to this period. in bishop thirlwall's "letters to a friend" occurs the following from the late lord houghton: "'kitty' is the best novel i have ever read." a compliment the author valued hardly less came from a very different quarter. messrs moody and sankey, the american revivalists, wrote to her, and asked if she could not write for their organ a story on the lines of "kitty," but with a distinctly evangelical bias. the request was regretfully refused. each character in this original and delightful book is drawn to perfection and sustained to the end, which comes all too soon. the genuine novel-lover, indeed, feels somewhat cheated, for did not the author almost promise in the last page a sequel? a new edition has just been published. "kitty" was followed by the "sylvestres," which first ran through _good words_ as a serial. socialistic ideas were not so much in evidence then as now, and many subscribers to this excellent family journal gave it up, frightened by views which are at the present moment common property. no story, nevertheless, has brought miss betham-edwards more flattering testimony than this; especially grateful letters from working men pleased a writer whose own views, political, social, and theological, have ever been with the party of progress. the books already mentioned are, without doubt, her most important novels, though some simple domestic stories, "bridget" for instance, "lisabee's love story," "the wild flower of ravenswood," "felicia," and "brother gabriel," are generally liked; whilst in america several later works, "disarmed," and particularly the two german idylls, "exchange no robbery" and "love and mirage" (which last novel originally appeared as a serial in _harper's weekly magazine_ in america), have found much favour. of this novel, indeed, miss betham-edwards received a gratifying compliment from mr. john morley, who wrote to her, saying: "'love and mirage' is very graceful, pretty, interesting, and pathetic. i have read it with real pleasure." it has twice been translated into german. of later years many editions have been reproduced in one volume form. another american favourite is the french idyllic story, "half-way," now re-issued in one volume. in miss betham-edwards received a signal honour at the hands of the french government, viz., the last dignity of "_officier de l'instruction publique de france_." she is the only english woman who enjoys this distinction, given as a recognition of her numerous studies of rural france. her last and most important work in this field is in one volume, "france of to-day," written by request and published simultaneously in london, leipzig, and new york. in fiction her most recent contributions are "the romance of a french parsonage" in two volumes, "two aunts and a nephew" in one volume, and a collection of stories, entitled "a dream of millions." of this the late lamented amelia b. edwards wrote to her cousin: "it is worthy of balzac." miss betham-edwards has devoted herself entirely to literature, and is an excellent linguist. "i have been again and again entreated," she says, "to take part in philanthropy, public work, to accept a place on the school board, etc., but have stoutly resisted. a worthy following of literature implies nothing less than the devotion of a life-time. literary laziness and literary 'liebig,' _i.e._, second-hand knowledge or cramming, i have ever held in disesteem. if i want to read a book i master the language in which it is written. if i want to understand a subject i do not go to a review or a cyclopædia for a digest, but to the longest, completest, most comprehensive work to be had thereon. in odd moments i have attained sufficient latin and greek to enjoy tacitus and plato in the original. french, german, spanish, and italian i consider the necessary, i should say the obligatory, equipments of a literary calling. it seems to me that an ordinarily long life admits of reading the choicest works of the chief european literatures in the original, and how much do they lose in translation!" an early afternoon tea is served in the snug little dining-room below, in which stands a magnificent inlaid spanish oak chest, occupying nearly the whole side of the wall. this is a treasure heirloom, and is dated , the time of charles i.'s accession to the throne. two quaint old prints of ipswich and bury st. edmunds are also old family relics. on the table is a german bowl from ilmennau--goethe's favourite resort--filled with lovely purple and white anemones, which have just arrived from cannes, and in other little foreign vases are early primroses and violets, for hastings has enjoyed a long continuance of bright sunshine and mild weather. whilst at tea, the conversation turns on music, celebrated people whom your hostess has met, and many social subjects. miss betham-edwards says, "music has ever been one of my recreations, the piano being a friend, a necessity of existence, but, of course, a busy author has not much time for pianoforte playing. _vidi tantum!_ i have known and heard the great liszt. i have also spent a week under the same roof as george eliot and g. h. lewes. i have watched the great french artist, daubigny, paint a flotilla of fishing boats from a window at hastings. i have heard gambetta deliver an oration, victor hugo read a speech, the grandson of goethe talk of _den grossvater_ in the great poet's house at weimar. browning, too, i used to meet at george eliot's and lord houghton's breakfast parties. tourgenieff, herbert spencer, and how many other distinguished men i have met! it is such recollections as these that brace one up to do, or strive to do, one's best, to contribute one's mite to the golden store-house of our national literature, with no thought of money or fame!" miss betham-edwards is a first cousin of the late miss amelia blandford edwards, the distinguished egyptologist, and author of "barbara's history," etc. the author of "kitty" is a nonconformist, and holds advanced opinions. she is an ardent disciple of herbert spencer, a keen antagonist of vivisection, and has written on the subject, the only social topic, indeed, which ever occupies her pen. she divides her time between her cottage residence on the hills above hastings and her beloved france, where she has as many dear friends as in england. of her own works, the author's favourite characters are the humorous ones. the rev. dr. bacchus in "next of kin," anne brindle in "half-way," polly cornford in "kitty" ("where on earth," lord houghton asked her, "did you get the original of that delightful woman!"), and fräulein fink in "dr. jacob," a study from life. as works of imagination, perhaps "love and mirage" and "forestalled" are, in her estimation, the best. "the parting of the ways," "for one and the world," are also among a long list of miss betham-edwards's works. she has written a great many short stories, whilst four charming volumes of travel must not be omitted; they are entitled "the roof of france," "a winter with the swallows," "through spain to the sahara," and "holidays in eastern france." these journeys are all described with much brightness, reality, and graphic word-painting, and betoken so thorough a knowledge of the scenes and people that they form most pleasant and instructive reading. many of the works above mentioned have been translated into french--"kitty" has just gone into its second edition in that language--german, and norwegian, and all are published in tauchnitz. "i am always glad," remarks the author, "to hear of cheap editions. i should like to see good books brought out at a penny. i have had various publishers, and never quarrelled with any of them. i know mr. george bentley well. he is a man of great literary culture, and is always kindness itself to me. the late mr. blackett, too, was a great friend." miss betham-edwards holds such decided and sensible views on one of the great questions of the day that they shall be given in her own words. "i consider," she says emphatically, "cremation to be an absolute duty towards those to come, and support it on hygienic and rationalistic grounds. each individual should do his or her best to promote it." the conversation of this sympathetic and intellectual woman is so fascinating that you are loath to leave without hearing somewhat of her own principal reading. expressing the wish to her, she smiles pleasantly, and says: "my favourite english novels are 'villette' and 'the scarlet letter,' both perfect to my thinking, and consummate as stories and works of art. in german, my favourite novelist is paul heyse. george sand i regard as the greatest novelist of the age. george eliot's sombre realism repels me, whilst i fully admit her enormous power. 'don quixote' in spanish, with some other favourite works, i read over and over again, lessing's 'nathan the wise,' schiller's 'Ã�sthetic letters,' these, and some of goethe's smaller works i re-read regularly every year; they are necessary mental pabulum. spinoza is also a favourite, second only to plato. of contemporary writers, spencer, harrison, morley, and renan stand first in my opinion; whilst of the living novelists i can only say that i endeavour to appreciate all. for the stories of the late mrs. ewing i entertain the highest admiration; also i delight in the graceful author of 'the atelier du lys.' tolstoi, ibsen, zola, and that school, i find repulsive in the extreme. imaginative literature should, above all things, delight. with the sadness inherent in life should be mingled a hopeful note, a touch of poetry, a glimpse of the beautiful and of the ideal." miss betham-edwards has one faithful and cherished companion, who always accompanies her in her walks, and who sits quietly beside her when she writes. this is a white pomeranian dog, very intelligent and affectionate, who will certainly never be lost while he wears his present "necklace," bearing the following inscription:-- my name is muff, that's short enough; my home's villa julia, that's slightly peculiar; on the east side you'll find it, with fairlight behind it; my missus is a poet, by this you should know it. ere the train leaves there is a good hour to spare; so, taking leave of the gifted author, you employ the time in sauntering about the town, and first go to see the fine church of st. mary star-of-the-sea, founded by mr. coventry patmore; also some ancient buildings of quaint architecture, in which the notorious titus oates is said to have lived. the albert memorial is the most prominent object in the town, occupying a central position at the junction of six roads, and close by are the renowned breach's oyster rooms, where the temptation to taste the whitstable bivalve in the fresh white-tiled shop is not to be resisted; but whilst there the great clock on the memorial warns you to be up and away. there is much food for meditation on the return journey to town; and on reflecting over all that miss betham-edwards has learnt and achieved, the poet's lines involuntarily suggest themselves: "and still the wonder grew, that one small head should carry all 'she' knew." [illustration: ada ellen bayly, "edna lyall"] edna lyall. to the befogged londoner there is perhaps no greater treat than to escape for forty-eight hours to the seaside even in the depths of winter, and whilst spinning along by the london, brighton, and south coast express, there is a pleasurable sense of excitement in the feeling that you are going to breathe the fresh sea air of eastbourne untainted by smuts and smoke. "the empress of watering-places," as a well-known journalist has named it, is now seen in its best aspect. it presents quite a different phase in august and september, when the residents, almost to a man, desert the town, having previously with great prudence let their houses at a high figure, and the place is given over to the holiday-makers, nigger minstrels, braying bands, and itinerant beach preachers. now its genial, pleasant society is in full swing, and merry golf parties are the order of the day. few places have increased with more rapid growth during the last fifteen or twenty years, or become more popular as a residence than eastbourne, partly owing to the excellent train service, partly to the well-organised supervision over every detail in the whole town, and again probably more to the bright, healthy atmosphere, which registers three hundred days of sunshine as against sixty-nine in london. in one of the prettiest roads in this pleasant seaside town stands--a little way back from the red-and-black tiled pavement--a large brown creeper-covered house with red tiled roof built in the gothic style of architecture. though it has only been constructed during late years, the gables and points give it an old-fashioned and picturesque look, but beauty and variety of style are studied at eastbourne, and each house is apparently designed with a view to artistic effect. college road is bordered on either side by sussex elms. the approach is by gates right and left which open into a garden filled with shrubs. on seeking admittance you are taken up to a bright, cheerful room which faces the west, and has all the outward and visible signs of being devoted to literary and artistic pursuits. as the young author, edna lyall, rises from the typewriter in the corner opposite the door, with kindly greeting, you are at once struck with her extremely youthful appearance. she is about the medium height, pale in complexion, with dark hair rolled back from a broad forehead which betokens a strongly intellectual and logical cast of mind. she has well-defined, arched eyebrows, and very dark blue eyes, which light up softly as she speaks. her manner is gentle and sympathetic, and her voice is sweet in tone. she wears a simply-made gown of olive-green material, relieved with embroidery of a lighter colour. the room seems exactly what one would expect on only looking at her. it is the room of a student who prefers books to society, and every part of it bears evidence of the simplicity, refinement, and quiet comfort of her tastes. it is square and low, with a broad cottage window, commanding a lovely view over the downs, which have somewhat of an alpine look, the high hills in the distance, and the furthermost broad belt of trees in the grounds of compton place are tipped with snow, as also are those in the foreground, belonging to some private gardens. the whole scene, now flooded in sunshine, is a constant delight to edna lyall, who says that she "rejoices in the knowledge that it can never be built out." over the window hangs a wrought-iron scroll-work fern basket, which looks like italian manufacture, but is in reality made by the boys of st. john's, bethnal green industry, developed by miss bromby. under this is a broad, low shelf, covered with terra-cotta cloth, which is the repository of many little treasures. the floor is covered with indian matting, strewn about with a few brightly-coloured indian and persian rugs; and in the centre is a comfortable couch with a guitar lying on it. the pretty american walnut-wood writing-table against the wall on the right has a raised desk and little cupboards with glass doors, which reveal many good bits of china. on the further side is a handsome revolving table filled with books, and in the corner stands an old grandfather clock of the seventeenth century. there is a neat arrangement for hiding manuscripts out of sight, a tall piece of furniture with little narrow drawers, also a piano opposite, and a variety of quaintly-shaped chairs; but the feature of the room is a large ornamental book-case on the left, filled with a hundred or so of standard volumes. on the mantelshelf, amongst odds and ends of china, stand some favourite portraits, and the author particularly calls attention to a photograph of her great friend, mrs. mary davies, whom she describes as "a woman of most beautiful character." another is of captain burges, r.n., who was killed at camperdowne, a third is a platinotype head of george macdonald, a fourth is of frederick denison maurice, the theologian, the others represent some of her principal heroes, sir walter scott, algernon sydney, john hampden, and mr. gladstone. there are many good pictures on the walls, a few pretty landscapes in water-colours, a fine photograph of sant's "soul's awakening," and an irish trout stream in oils; two are especially attractive, the large and beautifully-executed photograph over the fireplace of hoffman's "the child christ in the temple," and "the grotto of posilipo," the grotto described by edna lyall in her novel, "the knight errant." ada ellen bayly (edna lyall) was born and educated at brighton. her father, mr. robert bayly, barrister-at-law, of the inner temple, died when she was eleven, and three years later she lost her mother. always a thoughtful, studious child, at the age of ten she had already written some short stories, which were read and thought promising by her parents, who, however, wisely made her understand that story-writing must stand second to her own training. from that time forward she was always preparing for her future profession. after losing both her parents the young girl made her home with a sister, who had married canon crowfoot, of lincoln. it was shortly after leaving school that she wrote her first book, "won by waiting," a story of home life in france and england. it is a charming story, simple in sketch and style, with some clever bits of character-painting, in which, as her later books show, she excels. there is a peculiar interest in her second novel, "donovan." this work was written at intervals during three years. "when beginning it," says the young author, "i had very little notion of what i had undertaken. sometimes i wrote easily; sometimes i was at a standstill." but the reason is easily explained. it was about that time that she began to experience a great mental conflict. profoundly religious by nature, she entered deeply into the theological questions of the day, and though the struggle was deep and painful, she never rested until her mind was satisfied. "no one can regret," says edna lyall, "having been forced to face the problems which 'donovan' had to face, and i am very thankful to have had that struggle. i wished to draw the picture of a perfectly isolated man and his gradual awakening. he had, of course, to begin by professing himself an atheist and a misanthrope; but very soon he begins to love a child, then a dog, then a woman. by these means he comes to realize his selfishness, and to detest it; he begins to love humanity, to pity and help his worst enemy, and finally to 'love the highest' when he sees it. someone made me laugh the other day by saying that 'it was stated on the best authority that edna lyall had cried most bitterly at the thought of having written "donovan" and "we two," and would give anything to recall them.' i can only tell you that all that makes life worth living came to me through writing those books. so much for gossip! the struggle is one which we have each to go through. we must think it all out for ourselves," she goes on to say softly, whilst a bright, glad smile illumines her face; for light and peace have come to her, and she describes herself as having surmounted the storm, and achieved the haven of rest and happiness in her belief. "won by waiting" and "donovan" had, according to the author, "fallen flat." in she introduced "we two" to the world. this book, which is a distinct story, is yet in a sense a continuation of the former, and was the outcome of all that she had lived through in the preceding years. it was so well reviewed in all the leading journals, and became so much talked about, that people began to ask for "donovan" so extensively, that it took a new lease of life, and was soon as popular as or more so than its sequel. these two works were brought out by messrs. hurst and blackett. in september, , edna lyall came to eastbourne, and established herself with her sister, mrs. jameson, whose husband, the rev. hampden jameson, is attached to the handsome church, st. saviour's, standing close by, and she is herself a member of the congregation. soon after her arrival a new book was begun; this is a historical novel, and the author gives an interesting account of the facts which suggested the work. "shortly after i had finished 'we two,'" she says, "i happened to visit an uncle and aunt of mine, whose charming old house in suffolk--badmondisfield hall--was connected with some of the happiest days of my very happy childhood. the place had always been an ideal place for dream stories and old-world plays. i knew every nook of the quaint old hall and garden and park, and now the spell laid hold of me again, and the characters of hugo and randolph, with whom i had had such delightful imaginary games in old days, started into life once more. one morning, pacing to and fro beside the bowling-green between the house and the moat, the thought flashed into my mind that the time of the rye house plot would best develop the character of my hero--a naturally yielding and submissive boy, whose will was held in bondage by the stronger will of his elder brother. little by little the outline of the story shaped itself in my mind. every history of england to be found in the ancient bookcases was pulled down, old papers relating to the old house and its owners looked through, old pictures studied, and the possibility of hugo's escapade in the musician's gallery at the end of the dining-hall tested by an inch tape and elaborate calculations." on leaving suffolk, edna lyall went up to london to study the reign of charles ii in the reading-room of the british museum. the story was published in under the title of "in the golden days"--"a title which," she says, "some people fancied i had meant seriously, but which, of course, referred to the first line of the 'vicar of bray.'" in this work are undoubtedly some of the finest characters of edna lyall's creation. the chapter headed "the seventh of december" contains a most touching account of the patriot algernon sydney's death. whilst still engaged on this book the author spent many weeks yachting in the mediterranean, and during one visit to naples and its neighbourhood used some of the experience she had gained during former visits to italy to begin and think out the plot of "knight-errant." "the motive of that book," she remarks, "is, i think, so distinctly expressed that i need not say much about it. the motto i chose for the title-page shows that in its central idea--reconciliation--it is the completion of 'donovan' and 'we two,' though, naturally, as a story of stage life, it is quite unlike them in plot and surroundings. i dislike 'novels with a purpose' as much as any one," she adds, "but at the same time it seems to me that each book must have its particular _motive_." "knight-errant" is a book of thrilling adventure and absorbing interest; the account of the attack on the hero, carlo, in the grotto of posilipo, is so powerfully drawn that it keeps the reader in breathless suspense. norway, too, is one of her favourite haunts, and in the land of the mountain and the fjord she is quite at home. intensely fond of nature, she has depicted, in her latest three-volume novel (hurst and blackett), "a hardy norseman," in most realistic language, the exquisite scenery that she witnessed during some of her long, solitary carriole drives. she spent many very happy days with her friends, presten kielland (brother of the well-known norwegian author, alexander kielland) and his charming wife and children. "he and his eldest daughter," says the young author, "are excellent english scholars, and i owe to them an introduction to norwegian life which as a mere tourist i could never have gained." none who read edna lyall's books can fail to be struck by her tender and vivid word-painting of animals (the faithful dog, "waif," is familiar to all) and of little children, but here she can draw from the life, as there are eight little nephews and nieces downstairs whom she adores, and with whom she is a great favourite. but the mid-day sun is high in the heavens, and your hostess proposes to take you for a stroll round the grand extension parade below the wish tower, and as you walk she beguiles the time with pleasant conversation on personal incidents. referring to a little sketch published in the form of a shilling book by messrs. longmans in , called the "autobiography of a slander," "ah!" she says smiling, "that _was_ written 'with a purpose,' and was suggested by a very disagreeable incident. on returning from one of our delightful norwegian tours, i was greeted on every side by a persistent report that had been set afloat to the effect that i was in a lunatic asylum! we found out at this time that an impostor had been going about announcing that she was 'edna lyall,' and that in ceylon, and during her voyage home, she had deceived many people. the only possible explanation of the lunatic asylum slander seems to be that this woman was in reality mad. but the episode was decidedly unpleasant, and set me thinking on the birth and growth of such monstrously untrue reports. during the autumn of i wrote the little story, taking different types of gossip for each stage in the slander's growth and baleful power--the gossip of small dull towns, of country life, of cathedral precincts, of london clubs, and the gossip of members of my own profession in search of 'copy.'" by this time you have reached a spot called by the inhabitants mentone. the broad tiled walk is sheltered by the great cliff, behind which is a steep embankment prettily planted with shrubs, and traversed here and there by steep little zigzag paths running upwards to the heights, whilst before you rises the grand outline of beachy head. the sky is brilliantly blue as far as eye can reach all around. the sun (which you had not seen in town for six weeks) is shining brightly, casting its radiance on the calm sea, the little wavelets are gently breaking over the pebbles below, and the fresh, pure air is most exhilarating. a few invalids in bath chairs are being drawn slowly along, and all the beauty and fashion of eastbourne are out enjoying a sun-bath. amongst the _habitués_ you recognize many well-known faces. that tall, graceful, madonna-like woman, with her fair young daughter, surrounded by a group of friends, is mrs. royston-pigott, widow of the eminent scientist. the handsome soldierly man with the benevolent face is general buchanan, of cavalry renown, and close to him strolls his youngest daughter, radiant in the beauty of youth. edna lyall observes that mr. balfour is occasionally to be seen on the links enjoying a game of golf. everyone seems revelling in the warmth of this january sunshine, but time presses, and you may not linger. if aught could compensate for turning away from such a scene, it is the charm of your hostess's conversation, as she walks with you and speaks of her favourite poets--tennyson, mrs. browning, and whittier, whilst she declares her favourite characters in prose fiction are "jeanie deans" and thackeray's "esmond." asking her which are her special pets in her own books, she says laughing, "as anthony trollope said when asked a similar question, 'i like them all,' but perhaps carlo the best, so far. you asked me just now, when we were interrupted, how my books succeeded. 'won by waiting' had a very small sale. it was favourably reviewed in several papers, and cut into mincemeat by a very clever weekly journal, so wittily, that even a youthful author could only laugh! then it 'joined the majority.' 'donovan,' in spite of many excellent reviews, shared the same fate; only copies sold, then he, too, sank into oblivion temporarily. it was a hard time, and i could not resist weaving some of my memories of those literary struggles into my latest story--a little sketch called 'derrick vaughan, novelist,' published first in _murray's magazine_, later, in one volume form, by methuen. since may, , i have been unable to write at all, owing to my long attack of rheumatism and fever, but now that i am growing strong, i hope to set to work again"; and as you bid adieu to this gifted and interesting woman, you heartily re-echo the wish. _sic transit gloria mundi._ a couple of hours later the train has borne you swiftly from the glorious sunlight and sea into the persistent gloom and obscurity of london. the speed slackens, you glide into the station, your brief holiday is at an end. [illustration: rosa nouchette carey] rosa nouchette carey. although a sad change has come over the ancient and historic village of putney, and it has lost much of its quaint and picturesque environment since the destruction of the toll-house and the dear old bridge of , with its score of narrow openings--at once the delight of artists and the curse of bargees--there is still a bit left which has escaped the hands of the philistines. unique and fair is the view from the magnificent, though aggressively modern, granite structure which now spans the river; and how many memories of the past are aroused! the grey old church of st. mary's, putney, and the massive tower of all saints, fulham, flank either end. this latter edifice, originally built as a chapel of ease to wimbledon, is of great antiquity, and has been twice rebuilt, once in the reign of henry vii. and again in , when the grand old tower, which gives such a prominent feature to the landscape, was restored. on one side is the fine terrace of lofty houses known as the cedars, with their wide breezy gardens overlooking the river, so short a time since the scene of many pleasant garden parties, when a well-known and popular author occupied one of these houses. now, alas! they are all empty and deserted; cranes and stones and heaps of rubbish have transformed their time-honoured lawns into desolation. no scheme of utilization seems to suggest itself, and meanwhile the noble site is unused, and these handsome tenements are rapidly solving the question, and, abandoned to all the ravages of time, are dropping into obtrusive decay. on the other side of the bridge there is a glimpse of the shady grounds of fulham palace, the leafy foliage of the bishop's moat and avenue, and a view of a lovely line of trees on the shore skirting the grounds of old ranelagh--now given up to the building fiend--and hurlingham, while the broad silvery river itself, and its slow-moving barges and boats with brown and red sails, give life and colouring to the scene. at night, when the lights only of unlovely hammersmith are gleaming across the water, the effect is decidedly picturesque. in a second the mind involuntarily travels back a few centuries, and pictures to itself the appearance of this same spot when the army under cromwell made it their head quarters, while the king was a prisoner in hampton court; when forts were standing on each side, and a bridge of boats was constructed across the river, by order of the earl of essex, during the civil war, on the retreat of the royalists after the battle of brentford. but the imaginary panorama fades, and your thoughts return to the present age as you drive a few hundred yards further on, and reach the top of a long terrace of small but artistically built red-brick elizabethan houses, where in one which is semi-detached, the well-known writer, miss rosa nouchette carey, has made her home with her eldest widowed sister and her family. the author meets you at the threshold of her study at the top of the staircase, and takes you into what she calls her "snuggery," a simple, but tastefully furnished room, looking out into a large garden, where birds of all sorts are encouraged to come; a thrush sings melodiously, and is among many singing birds a daily visitor. an oak knee-hole writing-table, with raised blotting-pad, stands in the corner by the window, and on it is a vase full of bright scarlet geraniums and ferns. everything is arranged with great neatness, and each spot seems to have its use. little and big lounging chairs, a low spring couch, one or two small tables, a bookcase filled with well-bound books, and a cabinet covered with photographs and pretty little odds and ends of china, all combine to make a cheerful, comfortable, and attractive whole. a cage is on the floor, and perched on the top is a beautiful cockateel, or australian joey bird, of the parrot type, with grey top-knot, yellow tuft and pink feathers on the sides of the head, which give it the odd appearance of a fine healthy colour on the cheeks. this intelligent bird is a great pet of your hostess, and walks up and downstairs in answer to her call. miss rosa nouchette carey is tall, slender, and erect in carriage. she has large blue-grey eyes with long lashes, and her soft dark hair, in which a silver thread may be seen here and there, is parted smoothly over her brow, and plaited neatly round her head. she wears a black dress with brocaded velvet sleeves, and is cordial and peculiarly gentle in manner. "we have lived here six years," she says, in a low, tuneful voice; "but putney is getting quite spoilt. they have pulled down and built over the grand old jacobin house, which stood close by in the richmond road, with its seven drawing-rooms, subterranean passages, and lovely gardens which were a joy to us, also fairfax house, with its pleasant garden and its fine old trees." there are other, not a few, historical recollections of putney. queen elizabeth used often to stay at the house of mr. lacy, the clothier, who also entertained charles i. it was the birthplace of edward gibbon, author of "the decline and fall of the roman empire"; of thomas cromwell, who was made earl of essex by henry viii.; and of nicholas west, bishop of ely, who originally erected the small chantry chapel in the old church near the bridge; but though this has been removed from the east end of the south aisle to the east end of the north side, the old style has been carefully preserved. many eminent people have lived here. mary wollstonecraft godwin, widow of shelley, had her residence at the white house by the river; leigh hunt lived and died in the high street. among others, theodore hook, douglas jerrold, henry fuseli, the painter; toland, the friend of leibnitz; james macpherson; and last, but not least, mrs. siddons. putney also witnessed the death of william pitt, earl of chatham. rosa nouchette carey was born in london, near old bow church, but she has only vague memories of the house and place. she was the youngest but one of a large family of five sisters and two brothers. her father was a ship-broker, and afterwards had vessels of his own. he was a man of singularly amiable character, and his integrity and many virtues made him universally beloved and respected. her childhood was passed at hackney in the old house at tryons place, where many happy days were spent in the room called the green-room, overlooking a large old-fashioned garden well filled with shady trees. "it was a simple, happy, uneventful life," says miss carey. "being a delicate child, my education was somewhat desultory. my youngest sister and i were left a good deal alone, and i remember that my chief amusement, besides our regular childish romps, was to select favourite characters from history or fiction, and to try and personify them. i was always the originator of our games, but my sister invariably followed my lead. i used to write little plays which we acted. i began a magazine, and wrote several pieces of poetry, of the most foolish description probably," she adds, smiling, "for i am sure i could not write a line now to save my life! my greatest pleasure was to relate stories to this same sister over our needlework or under the shade of the old trees." in this way the whole of "nellie's memories" was told verbally, when still in her teens, and was only written down seven years afterwards. "my mother was a strict disciplinarian and was very clever and practical," she continues. "as a girl i was singularly dreamy, and spent all my leisure time in reading and writing poetry; feeling the impossibility of combining my favourite pursuits with a useful, domestic life, and discouraged by my failures in this respect, i made a deliberate and, as it afterwards proved, a fruitless attempt to quench the longing to write, while at the same time i endeavoured to be more like other girls, but this unnatural repression of a strong instinct could not last, and after some years i gave it up. i am not aware that my mother knew of this strange conflict, but she was the first to rejoice at my literary success. my literary taste is not inherited, except in one solitary case, my father's cousin, christopher riethmüller, author of "teuton," "legends of the early church," "the adventures of neville brooke," and "aldersleigh." later on the family moved to south hampstead, where rosa carey's schooldays began, and it was whilst at school that she formed an enthusiastic friendship with mathilde blind, afterwards the clever translator of marie bashkirtseff's journal, and author of "the descent of man," and other works. this friendship, which was a source of great interest to both girls, was only interrupted by a divergence of their religious opinions. mathilde blind was brought up in the most advanced school of modern freethought, but rosa carey, adhering to the simple faith of her childhood, could not follow her there, and the friends drifted apart, sorrowfully, but with warm affection on each side. the next change in her life was the death of her father, after which terrible bereavement the widowed mother and three daughters lived together, but the gradual breaking-up of the once large family had set in. after their mother's death, the youngest daughter's convictions led her to embrace a conventual life, and she entered the anglican sisterhood of st. thomas of canterbury. the death of their mother occurred on the same day which three years before had witnessed their father's end. after this sad event miss rosa carey says her real vocation in life seemed to spring up, and she and her remaining home sister went to croydon to superintend their widowed brother's household. three years later the circle was again narrowed. her sister married the rev. canon simpson, vicar of kirkby stephen, westmoreland, on the valley of the eden, a most lovely spot, where the author for eleven years regularly paid an annual visit, and where she laid the scenes depicted in vivid and eloquent words in her novel "heriot's choice." rising, she points out four pictures, reminiscences of westmoreland, which hang over her writing-table. one is a view of great beauty, a second the exterior of the church, a third is the handsome interior, which looks more like a cathedral with its massive pillars and groined roof, and the fourth represents the vicarage. her brother's death soon left the orphan nieces and nephew to her sole care. "the charge somewhat tied my hands," said miss carey, "and prevented the pursuing of my literary labours as fully as i could have otherwise done. interrupted by cares of house and family, the writing was but fitfully carried on. six years after, however, circumstances tended to break up that home. three of my charges are married, and one of my nephews is a master at uppingham. these six years have been my first leisure for real work." the launching of "nellie's memories" threatened at first to cause the young writer some disappointment. quite unacquainted with any publishers, and without any previous introductions, she took the mss. to mr. tinsley, who at first declined to read it. some months later she consulted mrs. westerton, of westerton's library, who good-naturedly undertook to induce him to do so. "i am glad to name her," says miss carey. "i shall always remember her with gratitude, for, on hearing that the reader's opinion was highly favourable, she hurriedly drove from some wedding festivity to bring me the good news. i can even recall to mind the dress that she wore on the occasion." not to many girl-authors is it given that her first novel shall bring her name and fame, but this simple, domestic story of english home-life speedily became a great favourite. though free from any mystery or dramatic incidents, the individuality of the characters, the pure wholesome tone, and the interest which is kept up to the end, caused this charming story to be widely known and to be re-issued in many editions up to the present date. the next venture was "wee wifie," which miss carey pronounces to have been a failure; but as that work has been quite lately demanded by the public, it is possible that she may have taken too modest a view of its merits. on being applied to for permission to bring it out again, she at first refused, thinking that it would not add to her literary reputation; but subsequently, however, she rewrote and lengthened it, though without altering the plot, and it has passed into a new edition. her next five novels--entitled respectively "barbara heathcote's trial," "robert ord's atonement," "wooed and married," "heriot's choice," and "queenie's whim"--came out at intervals of two years between each other, and were followed by "mary st. john." then came a delightful book called "not like other girls," which was a great success. this is a spirited and amusing story of a widowed mother and her three plucky girls, who, in the days of their prosperity, were sensibly brought up to make their own frocks, and who, when plunged into poverty, turned this excellent talent to such good account that they set up in business as dressmakers, being employed alike by the squiress at the hall and by the village butcher's wife, and there is as much of quiet humour described in their interview with this worthy dame, and their attempts to tone down her somewhat florid taste, as there is in the discussions and opinions of the neighbours and friends of the family about the venture of these wise and practical girls. since miss carey came to putney she has brought out "lover or friend," "only the governess," "the search for basil lyndhurst," and "sir godfrey's grand-daughters." she is also on the staff of the _girl's own paper_, and, whenever she has time, sends short stories, which run as serials for six months in that journal before being issued in single volume form. four of these tales have already appeared. it is quite obvious to the readers of miss carey's works that she is fond of young people--she has, indeed, at the present time a regularly established class for young girls and servants over fifteen years of age, which had already been formed in connection with the fulham sunday school, in which she takes a great interest--and that the distinctive characteristic throughout all her books is a tendency to elevate to lofty aspirations, to noble ideas, and to purity of thought. with great descriptive power, considerable and often quiet fun, there is a delicacy and tenderness, a knowledge and strength of purpose, combined with so much fertility of resource and originality that the interest never flags, and the sensation, on putting down any of her works, is that of having dwelt in a thoroughly healthy atmosphere. "heriot's choice" was originally written for miss charlotte yonge, and was brought out as a serial in the _monthly packet_ before being issued in three-volume form, but all rosa nouchette carey's books are published by messrs. bentley. "my ambition has ever been," says the gentle author, "to try to do good and not harm by my works, and to write books which any mother can give a girl to read. i do not exactly form plots, i think of one character and circle round that. of course, i like to meditate well on my characters before beginning to write, and i live so entirely in and with them when writing that i feel restless, and experience a sense of loss and blank when a book is finished, and i have to wait until another grows in my mind. i have sometimes rather regretted a tone of sadness running through some of my earlier stories, but they were tinged with many years of sorrow. now i can write more cheerfully. like many authors, i only work from breakfast to luncheon, sometimes at the table, more often with my blotting-pad on my knee before the fire, and i cannot do without plenty of air and exercise, and often walk round putney heath. more than twenty years ago i was introduced to mrs. henry wood, who used often to come down to the old jacobin house, of which i spoke just now. our acquaintance ripened into an intimacy which only ended with her life. she was very quiet, interesting, and unlike anyone else, but no one ever filled the niche left by her death. some of my favourite books are 'amiel's journal,' currer bell's works, george eliot's, and biographies; also psychological works, the study of mind and character, whilst in poetry i prefer jean ingelow and mrs. browning." the long-standing friendship with helen marion burnside--the well-known writer of many clever tales for children, booklets, verses, and songs--began when they were in their early womanhood. eighteen years ago miss burnside became an inmate of miss carey's house, and ever since they have shared the same home, living in pleasant harmony and affection. presently comes an invitation to join the family five o'clock tea-table. glass doors in the drawing-room lead into the conservatory, whence issues the soft cooing of ring-doves. the pretty marqueterie cabinets disclose a set of indian carved ivory chessmen and many quaint bits of china, whilst on a sofa, in solitary state, sits a knowing-looking little tame squirrel with a blue ribbon round its neck. after tea, on the arrival of some visitors, you are so lucky as to get a few minutes' private conversation with miss burnside, and you learn a few facts concerning your hostess that could never have been gleaned from one of such reticence and modesty as she. "i do not think," says helen marion burnside, "that i have known any author who has to make her writing--the real work of her life--so secondary a matter as has rosa carey. she has so consistently _lived_ her religion, so to speak, that family duty and devotion to its many members have always come first. she never hesitates for a moment to give up the most important professional work if she can do anything in the way of nursing or comforting any of them, and she is _the_ one to whom each of the family turns in any crisis of life. having had so much of this, and rather weak health to struggle against, it is the greatest wonder to me that she has been able to write as many books as she has done, and in so bright a spirit as many are written. of course, real womanly woman's work _is_ the highest work, but i think few writers put it so entirely above the professional work as she does. i have often been surprised at her surprise when some little incident has brought her public value home to her. even now she does not in the least realize that she has her place in the literary world as other contemporary authors have. it is really quite singular and amusing to come across such a simple-minded 'celebrity.' i wonder if you found it out for yourself," she adds quaintly. certainly no better words could be found to describe the sympathetic, gifted, and lofty-souled rosa nouchette carey. [illustration: adeline sergeant] adeline sergeant. despite the proverb that "comparisons are odious," there is a great fascination to those who love to explore the old quarters of london, and to hunt up the records of people who have lived and died there, leaving their mark whether for good or evil, and then to note the difference that a hundred or so of years have made in its buildings and inhabitants. take old bloomsbury for instance--by no means an uninteresting stroll--described by evelyn in as "a little towne with good aire." pope alludes to this once fashionable locality thus:-- "in palace yard at nine, you'll find me there, at ten for certain, sir, in bloomsbury square." according to timbs, in his interesting work on london, this "little towne" was the site of the grand old domesbury manor, where the kings of england in ancient days had their stables. yonder great corner house was built by isaac ware, editor of _palladio_, originally a chimney-sweep, of whom it was said, that "his skin was so ingrained with soot, that to his dying day he bore the marks of his early calling." by the way, that particular trade would appear to have been extremely lucrative in those days, as it is well known and authenticated that two great squares--not a hundred miles away--were entirely built by one david porter, "who held the appointment of chimney-sweep to the village of marylebone." a few hundred yards further on to the north-west, and you reach the quiet thoroughfare of chenies street, which connects gower street and tottenham court road, and here, indeed, a transformation has taken place. where are the solid, but dull, old, grey houses which erstwhile stood on this spot? within the last few years they have all been swept away, and the street is vastly improved by the imposing block of red-brick mansions which has been erected, and which bears outside a brass plate, inscribed "ladies' residential chambers." a long-felt want is here supplied. in an age when hundreds of women of culture and of position are earning their living, and whose respective occupations require that they should dwell in the metropolis, a necessity has arisen for independent quarters, such as never can be procured in the ordinary lodgings or boarding-house, where, without being burdened with the cares of house-keeping, the maximum of comfort and privacy with the minimum of domestic worry can be obtained. all this is amply provided for within these walls. touching an electric button without, the door is opened by the porter--the only man in the house--who wears on his breast the alma, balaklava, inkerman, and sebastopol medals, you enter a spacious hall, which opens on all sides into a number of self-contained flats. in the centre is a vast well staircase running up to the top of the building. on the present occasion business takes you only to the first floor, where, rounding the great corridor, are separate little vestibules, each containing a complete suite of rooms, and miss adeline sergeant's chambers are reached. they are so exquisitely arranged, and display so much artistic taste and refinement, that a few words must be said in description of them. the outer door is covered inside with a striped moorish _portière_, and leads into a little hall faced by the study, and opening into the drawing-room on the right. the blue and white walls, on which hang half-a-dozen pictures, are of conventional floral design, relieved by cream-coloured mouldings, which throw up the rich oriental draperies of the couch and japanese screen near the door. the floor is laid down with peacock-blue felt and a few persian rugs of subdued tints, whilst a white siberian wolf, mounted on a fine black bearskin forms the rug. the broad bay windows are hung with soft cream-coloured muslin and guipure curtains, peeping out from the folds of oatmeal cloth hangings of the same shade of blue. three dwarf bookcases are fitted into recesses, and are well filled with all the books necessary to a woman of letters. a clear fire blazes and sparkles in the tiled hearth, and throws out a ruddy glow over the bright brasses. the fireplace is draped with wine-coloured brocaded velvet curtains; the mantelshelf is high, and the long oblong mirror, in plain black narrow frame, is raised just sufficiently to show off the beautiful oriental china, benares brass vases, and indian jars standing thereon. over it hangs a single plaque, framed in dark oak, copied by miss f. robertson, in _violet de fer_ on china, from the original engraving of "enid, a saxon maiden." there are flowers everywhere--pots of lilies of the valley, ferns and palms, alike on the little hexagonal ebonised table in the windows and the small cabinet, whilst cut daffodils and anemones are grouped in vases in other parts of the room. the great arabian brass salver, with its mystic scrolls and ebonised stand, forms a suitable tea-table alongside the comfortable american rocking-chair. the copper-coloured brocaded silk gown, with a tinge of red, which adeline sergeant wears, with leaves of darker and flowers of lighter pattern woven in, is in unison with the prevailing tints by which she is surrounded. a black fur boa is carelessly thrown round her shoulders, she is rather below the middle height, dark grey eyes, with a mischievous twinkle in them, can be discerned behind the _pince-nez_ which she habitually wears, her good colouring betokens a healthy constitution her extremely thick hair, lightly touched with grey, is loosely rolled back from her forehead, she has a merry, bright smile, and laughs with silvery sweetness on being told you had nervously expected, from her pictures, to see a strong-minded, austere-looking woman; but until a sun-portrait can produce rich colouring, earnestness of purpose, combined with an ever-changing, laughing expression, she will appear to those who have only seen her photograph as being somewhat severe and stern. adeline sergeant was born at ashbourne, in derbyshire. her father belonged to an old lincolnshire family who had lived since the sixteenth century, at least, on the same ground, and had inhabited for many years a long, low, rambling house, of which he used to delight to tell her stories. when yet but a child she went with her parents to selby, easingwold, weston-super-mare, worcester, and rochester, where, when she was nineteen years of age, her father died, and their wanderings practically ended. "my mother was a quiet, delicate, refined, sensitive woman," says miss sergeant, while a look of sadness comes over her face. "she spent most of her spare time in writing, and from her, i suppose, i inherit some of my taste for writing, though it comes from my father's side too, for a cousin of mine is a literary man, and several of my relations dabbled a little in literature. my mother wrote verses and religious stories chiefly; she had a very high ideal of style, and one of my earliest and latest recollections of her is seeing her covering scraps of paper with her peculiarly beautiful handwriting in pencil, and afterwards copying them most carefully in ink at her desk. she had a long illness; she died of consumption, after eight years of confirmed invalidism and gradually wasting away. i remember it now as a remarkable fact that i never knew her to complain or to have anything but the sweetest, brightest smile. her sense of the ridiculous was acute to the very last, and she was always ready to enjoy a good story. her appreciation of literature was very great, and it was from her that i learned to enjoy browning as well as the older masters of verse. after my father's death we removed to the suburbs of london, and my mother died fifteen months later. we were united heart and soul, and her death was the greatest sorrow of my life, especially as i had been much separated from her by school and college life, and had been promised that i should live at home and care for her when my elder sister married, but my mother died four months before the wedding, and that dream--hers as well as mine, i think--was never realized." adeline sergeant began to write at the very youthful age of eight. her first published verses appeared when she was but thirteen, and a volume of verse when she was sixteen years of age. "it always seems to me," she continues, "that i owe a great deal to the influences of the free country life of my early childhood when we lived at eastington, near stonehouse, for two years. i believe that modern teachers would say that i wasted my time, for i went to no school then, but 'did lessons' with my mother in a desultory fashion." rambling for hours in the fields and lanes by herself, sometimes with a book and sometimes without, the young author used conscientiously to set herself her own tasks; she wrote innumerable stories, had no playfellows, and no children's books, but she had the run of her father's library. here she read shakespeare until she knew him by heart; next to shakespeare her favourite book was addison's "spectator"; after these came byron, mrs. hemans, and many earlier poets, prior, gay, dryden, etc. here, from the age of eleven to fifteen, she also studied theological writers like chalmers, butler, and jeremy taylor; whilst a set of encyclopædias, in twenty-two volumes, gave her many happy hours. it is no wonder that adeline sergeant declares this to have been one of the most fructifying periods of her life, and that her impressions of landscape, cloud scenery, effects of light, shade, sound, etc., are still coloured by her remembrances of that time. "i think," she observes, smiling, "that this was better bracing for the mind than the indiscriminate devouring of story-books, which is characteristic of young folks nowadays. but i must also add that at weston, our next place of residence, i simply gorged myself on novels of all sorts, as i had the command of every circulating library in the place, and no control was ever exercised over my reading." at sixteen miss sergeant went to laleham, miss pipe's well-known school at clapham; and at eighteen to queen's college, harley street, where she held a scholarship for some time. the death of her sister two years after her marriage left the young girl very much alone in the world. for some years she lived with very dear and kind friends, whose two daughters she had some share in teaching. having much time free, she went on with her literary work, which had been suspended for a long while after her bereavements, when she had no heart to write anything. after leaving college, adeline sergeant devoted herself entirely to study for the cambridge and other examinations. after taking her first class honours certificate in the women's examination, she gave up her time to teaching, writing, and parochial work of all sorts; she played the organ in church, held sunday and week-day classes for village children, trained the choir, and so on. a temporary failure in health made a winter in egypt a real boon to her about that time, and it was on her return that she gave herself up more to literary work. "i was not at all successful at first," says miss sergeant in a cheerful tone of voice. "my first novel has never seen the light to this day. my second was also refused, but has since been re-written and re-issued, under the name of 'seventy times seven.' i wrote little stories for little magazines, and a child's book or two. but i had no success for many years. in i competed for a prize of £ offered by the dundee _people's friend_ for a story, and gained it, to my great delight. i have kept up my connection with this paper ever since, and am always grateful to the editor for the help he gave me at a critical time. this story was 'jacobi's wife.' when i heard the good news i was in egypt, where i was spending a winter at the invitation of my friends, professor and mrs. sheldon amos. on my return i wrote 'beyond recall,' which embodies my impressions of egyptian life. i went on writing for the next two years, and doing other work as well, but in i made up my mind to throw myself entirely into literature." miss sergeant's next step was to write and consult the kindly dundee editor on this subject, and in return she received a proposition from the proprietors that she should go to live in dundee and do certain specified literary work for them. she did so, and counts it as one of the most fortunate occurrences of her life, as she made many friends and led a pleasant and healthful life, first at newport, in fife, and then in dundee. two years later, however, it seemed better to her to return to london, though without severing her connection with dundee. since adeline sergeant has lived more or less in london, although she spends a good deal of time at the seaside, in the country, and in scotland, or in visiting at friends' country houses in different parts of england. besides the works already named, adeline sergeant has produced several highly interesting novels, notably, "an open foe," "no saint," "esther denison," and "name and fame"--this last was written in collaboration with a. s. ewing lester--"little miss colwyn," "a life sentence," "roy's repentance," "under false pretences." her later works are "caspar brooke's daughter," "an east london mystery," and "sir anthony." "esther denison" and "no saint" are, perhaps, the author's own favourites, although she frankly says that she thinks that they have not found as much favour with the public as some of her more "sensational" stories, though the critics generally liked them better, and, indeed, compared them with george eliot and some of mrs. oliphant's works. both these books contain many transcripts from her own personal experiences. "esther denison" is, indeed, largely autobiographical. it is evident that miss sergeant has put her whole heart in this story. a somewhat caustic wit is pleasantly relieved by the earnest tone which runs through it. without being a theological novel, the description of the struggles of the high-souled but sympathetic heroine is powerfully and faithfully drawn. many of these books contain strong dramatic incidents; they are all full of interest, and are characterized by the exceeding good taste and the excellent english in which they are written. they are all popular in america, where they are published by messrs. lowell & son. "i have sometimes been misunderstood by critics," miss sergeant observes, "on account of the absence of any _data_ to my books. having disposed some years ago of many of the copyrights, i see them issued as if they were freshly written, which is not always the case. a weekly reviewer expressed great surprise at the publication of 'jacobi's wife' _after_ 'no saint.' as a matter of fact it had been written and sold some years earlier. my own works seem to me to fall into two classes: the one, of incident, when i simply try to tell an interesting story--a perfectly legitimate aim in art, i believe--and the other, of character, with the minimum of story. i like to analyze a character 'to death,' so to speak, and i look on my stories of this sort as the best i have written." of one of adeline sergeant's late novels, "an east london mystery," no single word of the plot shall be hinted at, nor shall the intending reader's interest be discounted beforehand. suffice it to say that from the first page to the last it is full of deeply-absorbing matter. each character is drawn with a masterly touch, and is admirably sustained throughout; it may be safely predicted that when taken up it will scarcely be laid down until the last leaf be turned. a peculiar interest is attached to a book which has lately come prominently before the public, and which has created much sensation, called "the story of a penitent soul" (bentley & son), to which adeline sergeant's name was not affixed, but of which she now acknowledges herself to be the author. it deals with a sad subject handled in a powerful but most delicate manner, and is quite a new departure from her former works. for some time the critics, whilst mostly praising it warmly and at once recognizing that it was written by no ''prentice hand,' were somewhat puzzled as to the authorship. gradually the secret leaked out, and miss sergeant relates in a few eloquent words her reasons for the concealment of her identity with the story. "every now and then," she says, "i feel the necessity of escaping from the trammels imposed by publishers, editors, and the supposed taste of the public. i want to say my own say, to express what i really mean and feel, to deliver my soul. then i like to go away 'into the wilderness' and write for myself, not for the public, without caring whether anybody reads and understands what i write, or whether it is published or not. that is how and why i wrote 'the story of a penitent soul.' it was written because it _had_ to be written; it wrote itself, so to speak. work done in this way is the only work that seems worth doing and is in itself a joy, but it cannot be done at will, or every day." novel-making, however, does not absorb all this industrious author's time. she is an ardent novel reader in three languages. her favourite writers in english are thackeray, george eliot, and meredith. as she reads french authors more for style than for subject she is not afraid to avow that she greatly admires daudet, pierre loti, flaubert, and georges sand; the russian novelists tolstoi, dostorievski, and tourguénieff are also much to her liking, and she reads american modern writers such as howell, henry james, and egbert craddock, with pleasure. "but i read other things besides novels," she says. "even as a child i was always of a metaphysical turn, and my delight in books of that sort is so great that i hardly dare touch them when i am trying to write fiction. they fascinate and paralyse me. economics and some kinds of theological speculation are also a favourite study." her love for economics and the discussion of social problems has led adeline sergeant to join the fabian society, in which she takes great interest. her religious tendencies are all in the direction of what is called "broad church," and she is an ardent believer in women's suffrage. she is a member of the committee of the somerville club for women, and is on two sub-committees. she is the co-secretary for the recreative evening schools association in st. pancras district, and an evening school manager for north and south st. pancras. "i must say that i have a great deal too much to do," she adds, "and i cannot get through half as much business as i ought. i have a rather large circle of friends, and i find it difficult to keep up with my social duties. i generally write all the morning, but i like to write and can write all day. at st. andrews, for instance, where i have just spent two months, i wrote and read for quite nine or ten hours every day. one cannot do that in london." as a recreation miss sergeant prefers music to any other, and, indeed, used to play a good deal once, but has now no time to keep up any pretence at _technique_. the same reason has caused her to discard her old pastime of pen-and-ink drawing, of which she is passionately fond, but which she found to be rather too trying to the eyes to be pursued with advantage. "i have done some elaborate embroidery in my time," she says, "but now i never use my needle for amusement; only for necessity. any sort of philanthropic work that i undertake is purely secular. i love foreign travel, though i have not gone abroad very lately. i have been in holland, belgium, germany, italy, and france, besides in egypt. switzerland i reserve for a future occasion. it may interest you to hear my unknown american readers every now and then send me kind letters, with requests for autographs or photographs, and that this last likeness, which misled you to think me 'severe and stern,' was taken chiefly in order to be reproduced for the benefit of american as well as english readers. i wonder if it will have the same effect on them," she adds, laughing. the little study beyond must be visited, and here are miss adeline sergeant's _secretaire_ and library. it contains a fairly good collection of english authors, and much french literature; but she has moved about so constantly from place to place, that she has been unable to collect as many books as she would have liked. the great broad couch by the window is a comfortable lounge for a weary writer, and the rest of the furniture is all snug and suitable. miss sergeant imparts some interesting information about this unique establishment, which was founded for gentlewomen only, of different occupations. the number of rooms in each flat varies from two to four or five, according to requirements. the whole concern is conducted entirely upon the principles of a gentleman's club, with the great advantage that the tenants can be as much at home and enjoy as absolute a privacy as they desire. the _cuisine_ and all domestic details are under the management of an experienced housekeeper. breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners are served in the great club-room below during stated hours, each allowing a good margin for the convenience of the members, whilst an adjoining room is reserved for their private parties. this is a gala day at the "ladies' residential chambers." there is a large afternoon "at home," which is an annual entertainment. each lady has sent cards to her friends and the guests are beginning to flock in. the coloured-tiled corridors and window-ledges are gaily decorated with palms, ferns, and flowers. a hospitable custom prevails. wherever a hall-door is found open it is a signal that visitors to the other residents are permitted to enter and look round the rooms. should any lady be unable to receive she "sports her oak." ample refreshments are provided in the club-room, and as many doors are invitingly thrown open, you take advantage of the implied permission, and are kindly received by each hostess. there are members of many professions within these walls. two sets of chambers are occupied by practising medical women, a third by a busy journalist, a fourth by an artist, a fifth by a young musician, a sixth by a fair and gentle girl, who modestly tells you that she is a high-school mistress, and, with kindling eyes, adds, "there is a glorious independence in earning one's own bread." there is a happy _camaraderie_ prevailing in this big hive of scholarly, industrious women. such things as quarrels or petty jealousies are unknown, and when it is stated that these mansions have only been built for four years, and that all the twenty-two sets of chambers which they contain are inhabited, it will be readily understood how much the comfort and freedom of this cheerful club life is appreciated. but the three or four hundred guests are dispersing, and you take leave of miss adeline sergeant, with a sense of gratitude for an entirely novel and interesting entertainment. [illustration: mary e. kennard] mrs. edward kennard. there is great wailing and lamentation at market harboro'. king frost holds the ground in an iron grip. fresh snow falling almost daily spreads yet another and another layer, and all is encrusted hard and fast, but far around it sparkles like a sea of diamonds, emitting the colours of a rainbow in the radiant sunshine. horses are eating their heads off and are ready to jump out of their skins; hounds are getting fat and lazy; the majority of the sportsmen have long ago taken themselves off to london, monte carlo, and elsewhere, and the few who remain spend their days in skating, toboganning, and curling. while the barometer averages nightly ten to twenty degrees of frost, perhaps the most favourable moment has arrived to find one's hunting friends freed from the daily labour they so cheerfully undergo for the sake of sport. as in ordinary weather a protracted hunt with mr. fernie's hounds, or a long day with the pytchley, would at this season have kept mrs. edward kennard to a late hour in the saddle, you gladly seize the opportunity afforded, and accept a kind invitation to visit her at "the barn." a two-hours' run from st. pancras to leicestershire, with a change at kettering, lands you at market harboro' station, where a neat brougham, drawn by a pair of handsome brown horses (with no bearing reins), waits to convey you to mr. edward kennard's hunting box, which stands back between two fields of ridge and furrow in the main road from kettering to market harboro'. a straight avenue, bordered on either side by lime and fir trees, breaks into a circular grass front, where the drive divides, the right road leading to a substantial, comfortable-looking red-brick house, with sloping roof, tall gable over the entrance-hall, and sides picturesquely covered with ivy, whilst the left turns to the stables (that essential part of a sporting establishment), which, with the kitchen gardens and paddocks, are in the rear. in usual circumstances a fine vista of undulating pasture, and extensive views of the happy hunting-fields of northamptonshire and leicestershire, can be seen, in which are several historical fox-coverts; but now, in the snow-bound condition of the earth, everything is white, save for the line of dark intersecting hedgerows, and the delicate tracery of leafless trees standing in black silhouette against the sky. as the afternoon advances, a grey haze creeps over the far-famed harboro' vale, shrouding alike "bullfinches" and "double-oxers," into which sinks a golden sun behind a bank of crimson and purple clouds. but the carriage stops. the broad stone steps lead into the entrance hall, where, facing you, stands a black, long-haired, stuffed sloth bear, hugging the sticks and umbrellas, and an oak case, full of english game-birds. glass doors open into the broad, lofty, central hall, giving outlet to numerous rooms, which are all draped with heavy _portières_ on each side. the first to the right opens, and mrs. edward kennard comes out to bid you welcome to "the barn," and leads the way into the drawing-room, which is bright with a huge, blazing fire and tall lamps. she is above the middle height, and her slight, well-built figure shows to as much advantage in the neatly-fitting brown homespun costume as it does in her well-cut "busvine" habit. she has a small head, well set on, with dark hair curling over her brow, and dark eyes which, owing to her being short-sighted, have somewhat of a searching expression as she looks at you, and the kindest of smiles. a woman of peculiar grace, gentleness, and refinement, her pluck and skill which are so prominent in the chase and lead her to delight in all field sports, in no way detract from her womanly characteristics in the home circle and other relations in life. mrs. edward kennard is the second daughter and fourth child of a well-known public man, mr. samuel laing, late member for the counties of orkney and shetland, and formerly finance minister of india. "i believe," says your hostess, as you sit at tea, "that i took to scribbling principally through finding time hang heavy on my hands and seeking occupation. i fancy that any small love of literature which i may possess is hereditary, since my father, who is now chairman of the brighton railway, has written several important works, notably, "modern science and modern thoughts," "problems of the future," etc., whilst my grandfather, mr. s. laing, was also well known as an author in his day, and wrote a famous book of norwegian travel, still considered one of the best extant. in the schoolroom (we lived at hordle, hants, then) i was regarded as the dunce, and my childish recollections are always embittered by thoughts of scoldings, punishments, and admonitions from our various governesses. at the age of fifteen the young girl was sent to a private establishment at st. germains, when, under a different system of tuition, she began to take an interest in her studies, and to work in earnest. two or three years later she returned to england, and shortly after married mr. edward kennard, deputy-lieutenant and magistrate for the counties of monmouthshire and northamptonshire, son of the late mr. r. w. kennard, m.p. he, too, has literary as well as sporting tastes, and is the author of "fishing in strange waters" and "sixty days in america," besides being a contributor to the _illustrated london news_, _graphic_, and _the chase_. he is also an artist, and every part of the house is decorated with his clever, spirited sketches in oils and water-colours. mrs. edward kennard's first literary efforts were a series of short stories, which she wrote for her two boys. these were afterwards collected and published in one volume called "twilight tales." subsequently, when the little fellows had to be sent to school, and she describes herself as "having felt lost without them," during a long period of indifferent health, she turned her attention to authorship. her first novel, "the right sort," was produced in , and was followed by "straight as a die," "twilight tales," and "killed in the open." next came "the girl in the brown habit," "a real good thing," "a glorious gallop," "a crack county," "our friends in the hunting field," "matron or maid," etc., etc. these are all sporting novels, as most of their names indicate, and contain the graphic account of many a stirring and exciting run depicted with the vividness and fidelity born of accurate knowledge of hounds, horses, and huntsmen, and long experience in the field. all these works are very popular at home and in the colonies, and most of them have passed into many editions. "landing a prize" is the result of several seasons spent in norway on the sandem, stryn, etne, aurland, gule, förde, and aäro rivers. this book relates to quite another kind of sport, for the author who can so successfully negotiate a real leicestershire flyer--a high blackthorn fence with a ditch on either side of it--with such ease and grace, and has ridden first flight in this county and in northamptonshire since her marriage, is equally at home in salmon-fishing, and last year, with considerable dexterity and skill, wielded her seventeen-foot rod of split cane to such good purpose that she landed a thirty-six pounder, a feat of which her husband and sons are justly proud; but you must go to mr. kennard to get details of his wife's prowess, for she says, modestly, "it is so very difficult to say anything much of oneself. i like hunting, of course, but look upon it purely as an agreeable physical amusement, and not the _one_ business of life, as it is considered in this neighbourhood, a thing to which all other interests must be sacrificed. marrying very young, it has since been my fate to reside in a hunting county, and therefore i have had few opportunities for gratifying my love for travel and seeing fresh scenes. for the last few years, however, we have spent our summers in norway, and i have become almost as fond of salmon-fishing as of riding." the scene of the author's late work is laid in germany, and in "a homburg beauty" she gives a vigorous narrative of a steeplechase which she witnessed in that place. the last two novels she produced are entitled "that pretty little horse-breaker," and "wedded to sport." mrs. edward kennard is as clever with her needle as is her husband with his paint-brush, and many are the evidences of her capacity in this feminine accomplishment in the room. the curtains, cornices, mantel-cloths, together with several screens and cushions--even the window blinds--are all exquisitely embroidered by her industrious fingers. there are many priceless pieces of very old japanese bronze, china, and ancient lacquer work scattered about the room. on one table is a perfect model in soapstone of an indian burying-ground, and above the dado is a narrow terry velvet ledge on which are strewn lovely bits of japanese ivories and other ornaments. the walls are hung with water-colour paintings of scenes in egypt, by mr. kennard, and the whole room looks cosy and comfortable in the slow of warm firelight and coloured lamp-shades. an hour or so later you are all sitting at a large round dinner-table, which is artistically decorated with quaint dried sea-weeds and shells of delicate tints and shades, grouped on an arrangement of "liberty" silks, and the effect is as original as it is pretty. there are only the family party present: your kind, genial hosts and their two sons--lionel, a handsome young militia officer reading for a cavalry commission; and malcolm, a naval cadet, who has just passed out of the _britannia_ with eight months' sea time. both are promising youngsters, the pride and joy of their parents, and either can hold his own against the "grown-ups" in the hunting field. the silver bowl yonder is a prize gained by "rainbow" and "ransom," two fox-hound puppies walked by mr. kennard; and a large painting hanging opposite attracting your attention, mrs. kennard explains that it was executed by bassieti, and was exhibited amongst the old masters at burlington house, and that the original study was purchased out of the hamilton collection by the national gallery, where it now hangs. dinner over, an adjournment to the billiard-room is proposed. the walls are hung with trophies of sport, a forest of stags' horns, including wild fallow, wapiti, red-deer, chamois, and roebuck. your eye is first caught by the monster salmon, painted on canvas and stretched over the model of the great fish on the spot where mrs. kennard landed it, and above it hangs a picture of the scene at tower sloholen where the feat was accomplished. the principal painting in this room is of the author on "rhoda," long since defunct, a celebrated mare by zouave, who carried her several seasons without a fall. near this is lionel when a child, on his first pony, "judy," who is still alive, and spending a happy old age in the paddock. this pony and the handsome fox-terrier following his mistress round the room, both figure in "twilight tales." but old "skylark" must not be forgotten, and here hangs his portrait, representing his wonderful jump--owner up--over water, a distance of twenty-eight feet from take-off to land. a curious object lies on the side table, a british officer's sword, with crest, monogram, queen's crown, and v.r. on it, which has been turned into a barbaric weapon, and is encased in a rude leather scabbard with silk tassels. on the mantelpiece stands a great bronze six-armed monster, with open mouth, and on a lighted match being secretly applied behind its back to a tiny gas tube within, you turn round to find a long thin flame issuing therefrom, at which the gentlemen light their cigars. below this is a border, beautifully embroidered in silks by mrs. kennard, representing hounds in full chase after a fox. a pleasant game of billiards finishes the evening. on the morrow mr. kennard suggests a further inspection of other interesting parts of the house, and promises that at noon, when the horses are dressed, his wife shall act as cicerone, and do the honours of the stables. accordingly, first mrs. edward kennard's summer study is visited. it lies between the dining and drawing rooms, and looks bright and cheerful, with its amply-filled bookcases, comfortable lounging-chairs, and little tables. the writing-table stands in front of the window, from whence there is a fine view, which in summer inspires the author to write some of her happy bits of scenery; but the peculiarity of this room is the extraordinarily large collection of china ranged in tiers round the walls. it is, indeed, a complete dinner service of fifteen dozen plates, designed and painted by mr. kennard, and brought out by mortlock, and is quite unique. on the other side of the hall is a glass case containing a splendid silver-grey fox, stuffed, and carrying a dead pheasant in its mouth. this was a tame fox, reared from a cub. just at the foot of the great open staircase is the weighing chair and book recording the weights of all the hunting people in these parts. the broad, lofty staircase walls are laden with an _olla podrida_ of curiosities, notably some barbaric necklaces and armlets studded with uncut gems, and several full-dress suits of arab and nubian ladies, made of grasses and strips of leather, which on breezy days might be considered somewhat too scanty to please the british matron. there are fine old paintings here by albert bierstadt, maes, and van der helst, and higher up hangs a more modern one of a hunt in the early days of the author's married life, when dogs supplied the place of children. amongst a museum of stuffed crocodiles, catamarans, a parrot fish from the dead sea, sundry egyptian warlike implements, musical instruments, and mediæval deities painted on glass, there hangs a solitary broken stirrup leather which has a story. it is the one by which the famous horsewoman was dragged at a gallop over a ridge-and-furrow field, breaking her arm in two places, the horse she rode failing to jump a stiff stile out of a wood. this, and another bad fall--when she was lost to sight in a ditch beneath the heavy body of a fifteen-stone weight-carrier--mr. kennard declares to be the two worst accidents he ever witnessed in the hunting-field, "but," he adds, "they have in no way shaken her nerve." there is just time before keeping tryst with your hostess to peep into her second writing room, formerly the nursery, but now devoted to literature and fine art. from the window, which looks out to the south-east, can be seen the rifle range and tobogganing ground. the next is the large photographing room (in which art the whole family are deeply interested), but noticing a negative plate lying buried under two inches of ice in a dish, you prudently and promptly beat a retreat, though not before noticing the lovely effect of the hoar-frost on the deep ruby-coloured windows lighted up by the sun. noon strikes, and descending the staircase you find your hostess in the hall (both her hands are full of lumps of sugar for her pets), and _en passant_ pause to examine a splendid old italian cassonè over seven feet long, supported on two animated-looking griffins. this is one of the finest sixteenth century walnutwood carvings, or rather sculptures in high relief, in europe, and is complete and uninjured. the long passage at the back of the lower rooms of the great house opens out into a large square red-brick courtyard, with coach-house, forge, and two stables on the right and left, where the good stud-groom butlin is waiting. this faithful and trusted retainer is greatly valued by his employers. he has been in their service for a great many years, adores his horses, and is as proud of mrs. kennard's riding as are her husband and boys. he opens the door on the left, where there are four stalls and two loose boxes, in which stand "roulette," a fine bay mare; "bridget," a dun pony who goes in harness, and carries the younger boy to hounds; "leicester" and "blackfox," who are both harness horses and hunters. the magnificent black-brown animal yonder is "quickstep," a gift from mrs. kennard's father; she says, "he does not know what it is to refuse or turn his head, and is one of the boldest and freest horses that ever crossed leicestershire. i rode him twenty-seven times last season, and he never had a filled leg." in the stable on the right you find "diana," a handsome bay mare with black points, standing . , and "grayling," both fine bold fencers; "grasshopper," and "magic," a bay mare by "berserker," and a marvellous hunter. lastly, "bobbie," by "forerunner," who is a great pet, and inherits his natural jumping qualities from his dam, rhoda. out of this fine collection "bobbie" and "quickstep" are mrs. kennard's favourite mounts, though she often rides most of the others. but you are particularly enjoined to see old "skylark," who occupies a summering box in the smaller yard. this grand old hunter, though twenty years old, can still hold his own after hounds, indeed, butlin observes that "there is not a horse in the country who can jump or gallop against him for a four mile run." returning by the side of the field, he points out old "judy," and a promising filly, "rosie," who come trotting up to their mistress, in anticipation of their daily sugar. there is a large and merry party of frozen-out fox-hunters at luncheon, after which everyone goes off to the tobogganing ground. mrs. edward kennard is to the fore here too. she seats herself daintily in the little vehicle, and glides down the great hill swiftly and gracefully, though many of the party get an awkward spill, or land ignominiously in a hedge full of twigs. by and by comes the news that a thaw is imminent, which sends up all the spirits of the hunting community delightfully, and great are the preparations and arrangements. if this state of things continue, ere many days have elapsed the brave and fearless writer will once more be in the saddle doing three, and occasionally four, days a week, mounted alternately on her good little "bobbie" or the equally gallant "quickstep." then, although skating and curling may have kept the sportsmen and women, who did not forsake market harboro', fairly amused, there will be great jubilation, and once more the delights of the chase will come as a fresh sensation after a stoppage of so many weeks. before long the shires will again be in their glory, hounds will race over the purified pastures, foxes will run straight and true, in that best of all hunting months february, and it is just possible that the end of the season may yet atone for the disappointments, inaction, and last, but not least, the expense which for so long characterised it, and to the "music of hound and ring of horn" you leave the gentle and clever author. [illustration: jessie fothergill] jessie fothergill.[ ] [ ] since the serial publication of these sketches the death of the gifted writer has taken place. with a vivid recollection of the comforts enjoyed on a recent trip to ireland to visit mrs. hungerford, you again trust yourself to the tender mercies of the london and north-western line with the intention of calling on miss jessie fothergill, author of "the first violin," etc., in her own home. starting at . a.m. from euston, and having prudently taken another of the young writer's works, "kith and kin," to beguile the time during the long journey, you arrive punctually at . p.m. at the busy, bustling town of manchester, having found that with the fascinating novel, combined with the smoothly-running and comfortable carriages and a good luncheon basket, four hours have passed like one; so deeply absorbing is the story that you have lost all count of time, and utterly neglected to notice the scenery through which you have been so rapidly carried. proposing, however, to repair this omission on the return journey, you select a tidy hansom, with a good-looking bay horse and an intelligent-faced jehu, desiring him to point out the principal objects of interest to be seen. having an hour to spare, there is time to make a _détour_, and drive round the exterior of the great cheetham hospital, which, with its college and library, are famous relics of old manchester, and are in the immediate neighbourhood of the cathedral, and in a moment you seem to be transported from the bustle and roar of life into the quiet and peace of the old world cloisters. presently, driving past st. peter's church, the open door invites a peep at the famous painting of the "descent from the cross," by annibal carracci, which adorns the altar, and, finally, passing on the left owens college, the principal branch of the victoria university, the cab pulls up at miss fothergill's door. it is a quiet street lying off oxford-street, one of the main thoroughfares of manchester; and the house, one of a modest little row, is small and ordinary. the rooms are larger than might have been expected from its exterior, notably miss fothergill's own "den," as she calls the place where she spends nearly all her time. it is upstairs, and has two windows facing south; between them stands a large writing table, from which the author rises to welcome you. it is literally covered with papers and manuscripts. "you think it looks extremely untidy," she says with a bright smile, after the first greetings are over. "it is not untidy for me, because i can put my hand on everything that i want. i am much cramped for space, too, in which to arrange my books as i would have them. i have a great many more than these, and they are scattered about in different other rooms in the house, which is only my temporary home, and everything is in disorder now, as i am on the eve of departure for sunnier climes." the furniture is arranged with the greatest simplicity, but it is all very comfortable; there are several easy chairs, a good resting couch, and plenty of tables, heaped up with the books, papers, and magazines of her daily reading. over the fireplace is a large and very good autotype of leonardo da vinci's "monna lisa," with her mysterious smile and exquisite hands. there are likewise many photographs of rome, and the art treasures of rome. on another wall are two of melozzo da forti's angels, after those in the sagrestia dei canonici at st. peter's, rome, and a drawing of watts' "love and death," made by a friend. "it is all extremely simple and rather shabby," miss fothergill remarks placidly, "but it suits me. i rarely enter the downstair rooms except at the stated hour for meals, and, though i detest the dirt and gloom of manchester, and am always ill in this climate, yet for luxury i do not care. sumptuous rooms, gorgeous furniture, and an accumulation of 'the pride of life' and 'the lust of the eye' would simply oppress me, and make me feel very uncomfortable." it is only fair to remark that on this occasion manchester has put on a bright and smiling appearance. though the fogs and rain can be as persistent as they are in london, the latter indeed much more frequent, the sun to-day shines brilliantly over the great city, and "dirt and gloom" are conspicuous by their absence. in person the author is moderately tall and slight in figure. she is pale and delicate-looking, with dark brown curly hair brushed back from her forehead, and fine grey eyes, which have a sparkle of mirth in them, and indicate a keen sense of humour. "i have a keen sense of fun," she replies in answer to your remark, "and see the ridiculous side of things, if they have one. it is a blessed assistance in wending one's way through life. my mother and all her family possessed it, and we inherit it from her." she wears a soft black dress, trimmed with lace and jet embroidery, and she is so youthful in her appearance that she looks like a mere girl. jessie fothergill was born at cheetham hall, manchester, and is of mixed lancashire and yorkshire descent. her father came of an old yorkshire yeoman and quaker family, whose original home--still standing--was a lonely house called tarn house, in a lonely dale--ravenstonedale, westmoreland. from there, in , the family, having joined the society of friends, removed to a farmhouse, which some member of it built for himself in wensleydale, yorkshire, a district which until lately has been quite remote and little known, but which is now beginning to be sadly spoiled by the number of visitors from afar, who have found it out, and who are corrupting the primitive simplicity of the inhabitants of the dale. this old-world farmstead was called carr end. it is still in existence, but has passed out of the possession of its former owners. "my father spent his childhood there," says miss fothergill, "and used to keep us entranced, as children, living in a stiff manchester suburb, with accounts of the things to be seen and done there--of the wild moors, the running waterfalls, the little lake of semirwater hard by filled with fish, haunted by birds to us unknown, and bordered by grass and flowers, pleasant woods and rough boulders. i never saw it till i was a grown woman, and, standing in the old-fashioned garden with the remembrance of my dead father in my heart, i formed the intention of making it the scene of a story, and did so." but ere she has finished speaking you recognize the whole description in the volume of "kith and kin" which you had been reading in the train. miss fothergill's father spent his early manhood in rochdale, learning the ins and outs of the cotton trade, the great lancashire industry, settling with a friend as his partner in business in manchester. he was a quaker, and on marrying her mother, who was a member of the church of england, he was turned out of the society of friends for choosing a wife outside the pale of that body. his nonconformist blood is strong in all his children, and not one of them now belongs to the established church. mrs. fothergill was the daughter of a medical man at burnley, in north-east lancashire, another busy, grimy, manufacturing town. "i, however," says your young hostess, "knew very little of these northern towns, or the characteristics of their people, the love of which afterwards became part of my life, for, though my father's business was in manchester, our home was at bowdon, a popular suburb some eight or ten miles on the cheshire side of the great city, and as utterly different from its northern outskirts and surroundings as if it belonged to another world." misfortune soon brought the young girl in contact with other scenes. when she was a mere child at school, and all her brothers and sisters very young, her father died. much reduced in circumstances, the family went to live (because it appeared best, most suitable, and convenient) at an out-of-the-way house appertaining to a cotton mill, in an out-of-the-way part of lancashire, in which her father and his partner had had a business interest. "there must have been something of the artist," continues jessie fothergill, "and something also of the vagabond in me, for i quite well remember going home to this place for the first christmas holidays after my father's death and being enchanted and delighted--despite the sorrow that overshadowed us--with the rough roads, the wild sweeping moors and fells, the dark stone walls, the strange, uncouth people, the out-of-the-worldness of it all. and the better i knew it the more i loved it, in its winter bleakness and its tempered but delightful summer warmth. i loved its gloom, its grey skies and green fields, the energy and the desperate earnestness of the people, who lived and worked there. i photographed this place minutely under the name of homerton in a novel called 'healey.' here i passed a good many years after that turning-point in a 'young lady's' career--leaving school. alas! there was little of the 'young lady' about me. i hated company, except exactly that in which i felt myself at home. i loved books, and read all that i could get hold of, and have had many a rebuke for 'poring over those books' instead of qualifying myself as a useful member of society. almost better, i loved my wild rambles over the moors, along the rough roads, into every nook and corner of what would have been a beautiful vale--the tadmorden valley--if man had but left it as god had made it. but i liked the life that was around me too, the routine of the great cotton and flannel mills, the odd habits, the queer sayings and doings of the workpeople. it was only when compassionate friends or relations, wishing to be kind and to introduce me to the world, insisted upon appearing in carriages, presenting me with ball-dresses, and taking me to entertainments that i was unhappy. i wove romances, wrote them down, in an attic at the top of the house, dreamed dreams, and lived, i can conscientiously say, far more intensely in the lives and loves of my imaginary characters, than even in the ambition of some day having name and fame." both of jessie fothergill's two first books "healey" and "aldyth," according to her own account "fell flat and dead to the ground." nothing daunted, however, by their failure, she paused for a while before writing anything more. soon after their publication, she paid two visits to the continent as the guest of friends, delighting much in all the new and wonderful things she saw. but the real enjoyment of foreign life came on a subsequent journey, when, with a sister and two young friends, she found herself established in a german boarding-house at dusseldorf, on the rhine, utterly without any of the luxurious hotels, drives, dinners, or any correct sight-seeing which she had enjoyed on her former visits, but with a thousand interests brought by the opening of a new life, the wonderful discovery of german music, the actual hearing of all the delightful things she had previously only heard of, which naturally inspired her imagination and fancy. at dusseldorf she began to write "the first violin," weaving into the scenes which passed every day before her eyes a series of imaginary adventures of imaginary beings. it was written "in spasms," she says--often altered, again completely changed in plot and incident several times, and it was not actually finished for a very long time after it was begun. during the fifteen months spent at dusseldorf she took every opportunity of studying the german language and life, and at the expiration of that time she went back to england--"to the house at the end of the world," she says, smiling; "and soon after my return i took a secretaryship, my heart in my books, making several efforts to get some enterprising publisher to take 'the first violin.' i went to the firm who had brought out my two first unlucky efforts, but they kindly and parentally advised me, for the sake of whatever literary reputation i might have obtained, not to publish the novel i submitted to them. much nettled at this, i replied, somewhat petulantly, that i acknowledged their right to refuse it, but not to advise me in the matter, and i _would_ publish it. next i took it to another firm who made it a rule never to bring out any novels except those of some promise. if it were possible to grant the premises of my story, the action itself was consistent enough, but it was up in the clouds and (though so elevated) was below their mark. finally mr. bentley took pity on it, and brought it out in three-volume form, first running it through the pages of _temple bar_. since that time i have not experienced any difficulty in disposing of my wares, though continuous and severe ill-health has been a constant restraint on their rapid production, and has also kept me quiet and obliged me to seek rest and avoid excitement at the expense of many an acquaintance and many a pleasure i should have been glad to enjoy." on looking back, jessie fothergill cannot remember anything which caused her to write beyond the desire to do it. her first attempts began when she was a mere child. passionately fond of fairy tales, or any other, good, bad, or indifferent, she read them all, literally living in them when doing so. then at school she used to instigate the other girls to write stories, because she wished to do so herself. she would tell them marvellous romances, which she had either read or invented. her talent for writing fiction cannot be called hereditary, since the only family literary productions of which she is aware are a volume or two of sermons preached by some fothergill who was a friend, a missionary, and a man of note in his time. "then, long ago," says the author, "there was a celebrated dr. john fothergill in london. i came across his name in one of the volumes of horace walpole's letters. he not only made a fortune, but wrote books--purely professional ones, i imagine. my father's people were brought up narrowly as regards literature and accomplishments, as was the fashion in his sect in that day, but he himself was an insatiable devourer of novels and poetry, and introduced me to the works of dickens and walter scott, exacting a promise that i should not read more than three chapters of any given book in one day, a promise which was faithfully kept, but with great agony of mind." jessie fothergill forms her plots as follows: she imagines some given situation, and works round it, as it were, till she gets the story, all the characters except the two or three principal ones coming gradually. next she writes them out, first in a rough draft, the end of which often contradicts the beginning, but she knows what she means by that time. then it is all copied out and arranged, as she has settled it clearly in her mind. she is quick in composing, but slow in deciding which course the story shall take, as all the people are very real to her, and sometimes unkindly refuse to be disposed of according to her original intentions. "i write much more slowly," says miss fothergill, "and much less frequently now that my health is so indifferent. as a child i learnt very quickly, and sometimes forgot equally quickly, but never anything that really interested me. i remember winning one prize only at a very early age, and choosing the most brightly bound of the books from which i had to select. it has always been my great regret that i did not receive a classical education. if i had, i would have turned it to some purpose; but when i was a child, music, for which i had absolutely no gift, was drummed into me, and a little french, german and italian i have learnt for myself since." "the lasses of leverhouse" was her third book, but "the first violin" scored her first success. it went through several editions, and was followed by "probation," "kith and kin," "the wellfields," "borderland," "peril," and "from moor isles." most of these passed first through _temple bar_ before being issued in book form, and each has been warmly welcomed and favourably reviewed. some have appeared in indian and australian journals, and nearly all her works are to be found in the _tauchnitz_ edition. "a march in the ranks" is the author's latest book. besides these, she has written numerous short stories, among them, "made or marred," "one of three," and a great many articles and essays for newspapers and magazines. full of interest and incident, carefully and conscientiously worked out, there is one prevailing characteristic running through all miss fothergill's novels. she is thoroughly straightforward and honest. hating shams of all kinds, she pictures what seem to be things that happen, with due license for arranging the circumstances and catastrophes artistically and dramatically. "the first violin" is a book for all time; "probation," "kith and kin," "peril" and "the wellfields," are decidedly nineteenth century stories, as many of the interesting questions of the day appear in them, and it is evident that the said questions occupied the gifted writer's mind not a little. "i have absolutely no sympathy," she says, "with what is often called realism now, the apotheosis of all that is ugly in man's life, feelings, and career, told in a minute, laborious way, and put forth as if it were a discovery. life is as full of romance as italy is full of roses. it is as full of prose as lancashire is full of factory chimneys. i have always tried to be impartial in my writings, and to let the pendulum swing from good to bad, from bad to good; that has been my aim when i could detach myself enough from my characters." here miss fothergill draws off a seal ring which she long ago had engraved with the motto she chose to guide her through life. "good fight, good rest," she adds. "it embodies all i have of religious creed. it means a good deal when you come to think of it." miss fothergill is a great reader. she delights especially in ruskin, darwin, georges sand, and george eliot's works, which she says have solaced many an hour of pain and illness. in lighter literature she prefers some of anthony trollope's novels, and considers mrs. gaskell's "sylvia's lovers" one of the masterpieces of english fiction, and "wuthering heights" as absolutely unique and unapproachable. herbert spencer and freeman are great favourites, whilst in poetry browning stands first of all in her affections, and next to him, morris, goethe, and bits of walt whitman. of her own works she remarks modestly, "it seems to me that i have not much to say of them. what little i have done has been done entirely by my own efforts, unassisted by friends at court, or favour of any kind. it has been a regret that owing to my having never lived in london i have not mixed more with scientific or literary people, and that i only know them through their books." the author having studied her "lewis' topographical dictionary" to such good purpose, is thoroughly conversant with her own native city, and its doings past and present, she has therefore much interesting information to impart about its ancient history, the sources of its wealth, and the origin of the place, which is so remarkable for the importance of its manufactures and the great extent of its trade. manchester may be traced back to a very remote period of antiquity. it was once distinguished as a principal station of the druid priests, and was for four centuries occupied by the romans, being amply provided with everything requisite for the subsistence and accommodation of the garrison established in it. it was as long ago as that the manufacture of "manchester cottons" was introduced, and the material was in reality a kind of woollen cloth made from the fleece in an unprepared state. in that period flemish artisans settled in the town, where, finding so many natural advantages, they laid the foundations of the trade and brought the woollen manufacture to a great degree of perfection. nor is the industrious city without later historical reminiscences. in prince charles edward visited manchester, where he was hospitably entertained for several weeks at ancoat's hall, the house of sir edward moseley, bart., returning the following year at the head of an army of men, when he took up his quarters at the house of mr. dickenson in market place. in christian, king of denmark, lodged with his suite at the ancient bull inn. early in the present century the archdukes john and lewis of austria, accompanied by a retinue of scientific men, spent some time in the place, and in the late emperor of russia, then the grand duke nicholas, visited manchester to inspect the aqueducts and excavations at worsley, and was escorted all over the principal factories. but the shades of evening draw on; london must be reached to-night, and having likewise been "hospitably entertained," you bid jessie fothergill good-bye, with an earnest hope that under southern skies, and in warmer latitudes, she may soon regain her lost health and strength. [illustration: mary hardy] lady duffus hardy. iza duffus hardy. at the uppermost end of the long portsdown road, which stretches from near st. saviour's church away up to carlton road, and runs almost parallel with maida vale, there stands a large and lofty block of flats known as portsdown mansions. in one of these, a cosy suite of rooms on the parlour floor, arranged so as to form a complete maisonette, an industrious mother, lady duffus hardy, and her only child, iza, tread hand in hand along the paths of literature. whilst mounting the broad stone steps which lead to the entrance door, and ere pressing the electric bell, a fierce barking is heard within, but it is only the big good-natured black dog "sam," keeping faithful watch over his mistresses. the hall door opens, and displays a half-bred pointer whose well-groomed, satin-like coat gives evidence of the care and attention lavished upon him. he is a great pet, and is generally known as the "household treasure" or "family joy." he inspects you, is apparently satisfied with his scrutiny, wags his tail, and solemnly precedes you into the pleasant home-like drawing-room, where he first keeps a furtive eye on you as you glance around, and presently, in the most comical way, brings up his favourite playmate, an equally jet-black cat, to be stroked and petted, and then departs as if to fetch his mistress. it is all very bright and cheerful: a fair-sized, lofty room, the prevailing tints of pale sage green, with heavy damask curtains, which do not, however, exclude the brilliant glow of sunlight streaming in through an unusually broad window, for lady duffus hardy likes plenty of light, and wisely maintains that people, like plants, thrive best in sunshine. she certainly justifies her belief. the door opens, and, duly escorted by "sam," a tall, portly gentlewoman of commanding and dignified presence, with cordial and hearty manner, enters. her gown of violet velvet harmonizes well with her nearly white hair, which contrasts so favourably with her dark eyebrows and brown eyes. these last have a sparkle of merriment and fun in them, for lady hardy is of that pleasant and genial disposition, which loves to look on the best side of people and things, and she is consequently popular with old and young alike. she tells you that she is a londoner _pur et simple_; that she was born in fitzroy square, when that part of town was in its zenith, and was a favourite locality for great artists, sir w. ross, r.a., the celebrated miniature painter, and sir charles eastlake, late president of the royal academy, being among their number. with the exception of a few years spent at addlestone, where her daughter was born, lady hardy has passed all her life in london, residing for many years in the pretty house, standing in the midst of a large and well-wooded garden in st. john's wood, where she used to give delightful saturday evening parties, which are still pleasantly remembered by her friends.[ ] [ ] since the serial publication of these sketches the death of the much beloved and respected writer has taken place. lady hardy was an only child. her father, mr. t. c. mcdowell, died five months before her birth, at the untimely age of twenty-six, when on the threshold of a promising career, and her early-widowed mother, resolving that she should never be sent to school, had her educated entirely at home under her own eye, and only parted with her on her marriage with mr., afterwards sir thomas duffus hardy, d.c.l., deputy keeper of her majesty's records (first at the tower and later at the rolls house), who died in . "rarely," says lady hardy, "has there been a man at once so learned and so good." whilst wading in the deep fields of historic research, he did not disdain some of the lighter portions of literature; indeed, the prefaces to many of his historical collections were written in such an entertaining and pleasant vein, that they by themselves would make delightful essays in any magazine of the present day. with all his laborious occupation--for which he used to declare the year was so short that he must make it into fourteen months by stealing the balance out of the night--sir thomas duffus hardy maintained that the busiest people have ever the most leisure, and he always had time to spare to enjoy the society of his friends. it may be truly said of him that seldom did twenty-four hours pass without his showing some act of kindness to one or other of them. this sympathetic and amiable trait of character has caused his name to be remembered with lasting affection and respect, not only by the erudite scholar, but among his personal friends. though always fond of writing, lady hardy did not actually set to work seriously at story-making until after her marriage. then, living in an atmosphere of literature, she began to occupy her leisure hours with her pen, and, having taken much trouble to collect her materials, she wrote "two catherines" (macmillan) and "paul wynter's sacrifice," which went well, and was soon translated into french. this success encouraged her to write "lizzie," "madge," "beryl fortescue," and "a hero's work," all of which were published in three volumes by messrs. hurst and blackett. "daisy nicholl" was brought out first by sampson low and co., and then in america, where it was received with much favour, and had a large sale. her latest novel, "a dangerous experiment" (mr. f. v. white), came out in . during the last two or three years lady hardy has written many short stories for high-class magazines and christmas numbers, which are all bright in dialogue and vigorous in design. full of indomitable energy, the author has lately turned her attention to journalism, and is writing a series of articles on social subjects, "which interest me so deeply," she says, laughing, "that i sometimes think of leaving novel-making entirely to iza." two of these papers recall themselves particularly to mind at the moment as possessing singular merit--one called "the morality of mercy" and the other "free pardon." the former was quoted and much complimented in mr. donald nichol's book, "man's revenge," an interesting work on the reform of administration of the criminal law, a subject in which lady hardy and her daughter take a keen interest. at this juncture miss iza duffus hardy comes into the room. she is dressed in a flowered "liberty" silk tea-gown, with black facings. she bears a striking likeness to her late distinguished father. she, too, is tall, but slight and fragile-looking, pale in complexion, with soft hazel eyes, and brown hair worn in coils round her head. whilst she does the honours of the tea-tray, you have leisure to look around. lady hardy's chippendale writing-table stands in the window, and her ink-stand is a beautiful bronze model of titian's own, and was sent to her from venice. there is a carved venetian bracket on each side of the fireplace; on one stands some fancy glass work, and on the other a lovely cyprus vase, a perfect _replica_ of the third century model. the richly-carved jar, flanked on either side by terra-cotta statuettes, is handsome in itself and is treasured because it was a gift from the late mr. s. c. hall, who, together with his wife, was an intimate and valued friend of your hostesses. yonder, on a cabinet, is a large bust of clytie, also in terra-cotta. amongst the pictures are, notably, a little gem in oils by ernest parton, and a fine water-colour drawing of durham by mr. w. h. brewer. the bookcase is filled with autograph copies by many of their friends, principally julian hawthorne, the late mr. hepworth dixon, mr. and mrs. s. c. hall, mr. p. b. marston, and mr. cordy jeaffreson. it also contains a goodly collection of lady and miss hardy's favourite poets which are evidently often used. there are volumes of rossetti, browning, morris, swinburne, and some by philip bourke marston, the blind poet, son of dr. westland marston. over the couch is spread a large patchwork coverlet, which was made and embroidered by miss hardy, who is as much at home with the needle as with the pen. a year after their bereavement, the mother and daughter having long entertained a desire to visit america, determined to make a trip across the atlantic in . after passing several pleasant weeks in canada, enjoying delightful glimpses of the social life in ottawa and toronto, they visited niagara falls, stayed awhile in new york, and then travelled over the rocky mountains to san francisco, "where," says miss hardy, "we spent a thoroughly pleasant winter, and received so much genuine kindness and hospitality that it has endeared the name of the country to us ever since," and she goes on to tell you that, amongst many acts of courtesy shown to them--the courtesy which is so freely displayed to women travelling alone in america--there was one from a fellow-traveller, who did not even know their name, until by chance it transpired, when the discovery was made that he had been intimately acquainted in his youth with sir thomas hardy, who had given him his first start in life forty years before, and of whose letters he possessed a large packet. on their return journey they visited boston, where they made the acquaintance of oliver wendell holmes, and spent a delightful day with the poet longfellow at his country residence at nahant. in the following spring lady and miss duffus hardy returned home, but a year later the restless spirit of travel again took hold of them, and they decided to make a second tour in america, this time embracing the southern states, and visiting the chief cities of virginia, south carolina, georgia, and florida, on their way to new orleans, where they met general beauregard, the renowned confederate leader, whose thrilling reminiscences of the great struggle of - miss hardy says they can "never forget, any more than they can forget his unfailing kindness and attention." the experiences of all these expeditions were embodied by lady hardy in her books "through cities and prairie lands," and "down south," both of which were successful and well received. [illustration: iza duffus hardy] inheriting talent from both parents, and reared among literary surroundings, iza duffus hardy naturally turned to writing at a very early age. before she was fifteen she had planned and begun a novel. always of a retiring and studious nature, she describes her lessons as having been no trouble to her, and her greatest punishment would have been to deprive her of them. being an only and delicate child, her parents did not like her to be much away from home, so she was only sent to school for about two years, receiving all the rest of her education at home. "but i think," says miss hardy, "that i learned more from my father than from all my teachers put together." her choice of reading was carefully guided, and an early determination was made that before all things she would be thorough and conscientious in her work. her two first novels, "not easily jealous" and "glencairn," were followed in rapid succession by "a broken faith," "only a love story," and "love, honour, and obey." these two last were originally brought out by hurst and blackett, but have been since published by mr. f. v. white in a single volume. then came a short rest, after which the young author wrote "the girl he did not marry," of which messrs. hutchinson are about to produce a new edition in their "popular series." then the first journey to san francisco gave miss hardy fresh ground to break, and suggested the leading ideas of the incidents and graphic description of the life in the beautiful californian valleys, so charmingly depicted in "hearts and diamonds" and "the love that he passed by" (f. v. white). "the nucleus of this plot," says iza duffus hardy, "was a story told to me by a fellow-passenger on the cars, who had been governor of the gaol at the time of the attack by the vigilantes. i connected that with certain incidents in a celebrated murder trial which was going on about that time, and built up all the rest of the story around those scenes." "love in idleness" is a picture drawn from the life, of a winter spent among the orange groves of south florida, a happy and peaceful time of which lady hardy and her daughter speak most enthusiastically, and declare to have been quite idyllic, the days gliding away in dream-like fashion, boating on the lakes, driving through the open woods of the rolling pine lands, and lounging on the piazzas, enjoying the exquisite effects of the morning sunshine, the sunset hazes, or the glorious tropical moonlight. besides these books, iza duffus hardy has also embodied her american experiences in two interesting volumes, "oranges and alligators" (ward and downey) and "between two oceans." the former in particular made such a decided hit that the first edition was exhausted in two or three weeks. this work, widely noticed and quoted, was strongly recommended by many papers to the attention of parents about to send their sons abroad, as giving a fair and true picture, showing both sides of life in florida. asking miss hardy for a peep at her study, she leads the way to a comfortable little room at the back of the house, which she calls her "cabin." here she works from a.m. to p.m. daily, though she confesses to taking occasionally an extra hour or two late in the afternoon, and, the conversation turning on plots, she tells you how she constructs her own. "i always," she observes, "have the story completely planned out before i begin to write it. i often alter details as i go on, but never depart from the main lines. my usual way of making a plot is to build up on and around the principal situation. i get the picture of the strongest scene--the crisis of the story--well into my mind. i see that this situation necessitates a certain group of characters standing in given situations towards each other. then i let these characters speak for themselves in my mind, and if they do not individualize themselves, i never feel that i can portray them satisfactorily. having got the characters formed, and the foundation of the story laid, i build up the superstructure just as an artist would first get in the outline of his central group in the foreground, and then sketch out the background and the details." miss hardy's later work, "a new othello," ran first as a serial through _london society_, and was afterwards published by mr. f. v. white in three volumes. it deals largely with hypnotism, and not only to those readers who are interested in this subject, but also to the genuine fiction-lover, it is evident that she has handled the matter in a masterly and skilful style, and has put excellent work into it. before beginning this book she fully read up the details of hypnotism, studying all the accounts of dr. charcot's experiments, whilst dr. morton, of new york, personally related to her the interesting episodes from his own experience, which are so ably worked into the story. the author is also an occasional contributor of a biographical article, or a fugitive poem, or a short sketch, to various magazines, and she has just finished another book, called "woman's loyalty," now running through the pages of _belgravia_, which she says has been somewhat delayed, owing to a sharp attack of inflammation of the eyes, from which she has now happily recovered. and so the busy days glide on, in peaceful contentment; not that these interesting, amiable gentlewomen shut themselves from society. on the contrary, their receptions are crowded with friends well known in the world of fashion, of literature, and of art. work alternates with many social pleasures and amusements. both being worshippers of music and the drama, concerts and theatres are an endless source of enjoyment to them. perhaps one secret of their popularity may lie in the fact that they always have a good word to say of everyone, and it is well known to their many friends that they may rely as confidently upon their loyalty as upon their sympathy. over the well-filled bookstand in the dining-room hangs the picture of lady duffus hardy, taken in her early married life. except that the figure is slender and the hair dark, the likeness is still excellent. on one side of this painting there is a large-sized engraving of a portrait of admiral sir thomas hardy, of the blue squadron, painted in , and on the other is a portrait of the late lord romilly, whose memory is treasured by your hostess as that of a kind and valued friend. the cuckoo clock opposite used to hang in philip bourke marston's study, and was bequeathed to miss hardy, together with some other souvenirs, in memory of their life-long friendship. a photograph of mr. henry irving occupies a prominent place, and leads lady hardy to speak of the theatre. "i am very fond of the drama," she remarks, "and though i can thoroughly enjoy a good melodrama once in a way, yet i prefer plays of a more serious kind. i am a great admirer of mr. irving. few actors, in my opinion, excel as he does both in tragedy and comedy. i think that the most intellectual treat i ever had was in witnessing the performances of _othello_ when henry irving and edwin booth alternated the characters of iago and othello. irving's iago struck me as a subtle and masterly study. salvini, too, realised most thoroughly my conception of othello. he is indeed the ideal moor of venice. in new york we used to enjoy immensely the classic plays which are too seldom seen in london, such as _coriolanus_, _julius cæsar_, and _virginius_." a visit to the theatre is in contemplation this evening; so, having been beguiled into making an unusually long but most enjoyable visit, you take leave of lady and miss duffus hardy, with sympathetic admiration for the happy home life in which daily work is sweetened by harmony and affection. as miss hardy quoted the noble utterance, "justice is the bed rock of all the virtues," you cannot help feeling that here are two women who at least endeavour to act up to their ideal. [illustration: may crommelin] may crommelin. the story of may crommelin's life may be said to be divided into three parts. first, the period of her childish and girlish days in ireland; next, that, when after the beginning of irish land troubles, her family were enforced absentees, and suffering from anxieties and prolonged illness; and thirdly, during the last four years, when her london life began. the following is a brief account of her first home:-- on the east coast of ireland there lies a long narrow neck of land, which, jutting out at the entrance to belfast lough, curves down by the coast of down, and is called the ards. midway in it, where for an irish mile "and a bit" the ground slopes upward from the shore, a tower rising just above the woods is a landmark for ships at sea. this is carrowdore castle, the home of the late mr. de la cherois-crommelin, where may crommelin (his second daughter and one of a large family) was reared. the house, now belonging to her only brother, looks away at a dark blue belt of irish sea, across which on clear days after thunderstorms the scotch coast and even houses are visible. ailsa craig has the appearance of a haycock on the northern horizon, and lying more southward the isle of man seems but a blurred mass. behind is the salt backwater of strangford lough, and this arm of sea keeps the temperature so moist that snow rarely lies long, and the humid nature of the soil causes the garden of carrowdore facing south to luxuriate in giant tree-myrtles, sweet verbenas, and even hot-house flowers growing out of doors. it is somewhat lonely in winter when the wind blows over the bare low hills that have caused the ards to be compared to "a basket of eggs," but pleasant in summer and picturesque when its environing woods are green, when the corncrakes call from the meadows on june evenings, and the orange drums beat along the lanes. such was may de la cherois-crommelin's early home. her present abode is a pretty flat near victoria street. it seems quite appropriate that a well-filled bookcase should be the first thing that greets the eye as the hall door opens and admits you into a long carpeted passage, lined with a high dado of blue-and-white indian matting, above which, on art paper of the same colours, hang several framed photographs, reminiscences of the rhine, nuremberg, and the engadine. a little way down on the left is miss crommelin's writing-room, which is laid down with indian matting, and contains an unusually large, workmanlike-looking writing-table, replete with little drawers, big drawers, and raised desk. the principal feature of this room is a carved oak fireplace, reaching nearly to the ceiling, and which is quite original in design and execution. there is a handsome old oak dower chest standing near the window, here an antique "ball-and-claw" footed table, and there a few good chippendale chairs. but whilst you are taking a brief scrutiny around, miss crommelin enters. it is very easy to describe her. she is certainly above the middle height, but looks taller than she really is by reason of her absolutely faultless figure. it is exquisitely moulded, and every movement is graceful. the good-shaped head and slender neck are well set on her shoulders, fair chestnut-coloured hair curls over a low, wide brow. the eyes, large and of the real irish grey, are fringed with long lashes, she has a straight nose, and the expression of mouth and chin is that of dignity and repose. her manner is peculiarly gentle and sweet, and her voice is pleasant to the ear. the long, dark blue velvet tea-gown that she wears, with its paler blue satin front folded in at the shapely waist, becomes her well, and harmonises with the artistic decorations of her pretty little drawing-room into which she has taken you. the curtains are made of some art blue fabric, the walls are pale yellow with a lighter frieze above, and are encrusted with memories of the last three or four years, when the author first set up housekeeping in london. all the woodwork is of dark walnut, as are the overmantel and _étagère_, the doors are panelled with japanese raised paper, a long carved bracket has an excellent background of choice photographs, and there is a delightful little "cosy corner," draped with dark terra-cotta and blue tapestry, over which is a carved rail and shelf filled with odds and ends of china, pet bits of blue dutch delft, and quaint little old brasses and bronzes from munich and florence. there is an innocenza framed in box-wood, and on the small tables yonder are some little carved wooden _stovi_ such as are used in holland, an old-fashioned brass lucernina, and many more little souvenirs, all of which she has gathered together on foreign excursions. amongst the pictures there is one which miss crommelin particularly values--it is a large and beautiful etching of joan of arc, by rajon, who presented it to her shortly before his death, with an inscription in his own handwriting. some photographs of carrowdore on the table close by lead you to ask her for some particulars of her people. "mr. smiles remarked to me," she says, "'yours is a historical name' (he has written about us in his 'huguenots'). i will try to think about some little family incidents, though i am afraid that to talk about my family will rather bore you, but i can briefly tell you the first that we know of them is in the archives of ghent. in the count of flanders concluded an 'accord' between the abbot of st. pierre de gand and walter crommelin concerning the domain of testress. in , one heinderic crommelin was three times burgomaster of der kuere, near ghent. i have been told it is strange that simple burghers had a surname in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries." later on came those terrible times of the persecutions in the netherlands, when women were buried alive, and men were burned at the stake for their faith. the crommelins fled to france, and a pious ancestor of that day wrote the history of their adventures, which record is preserved in the british museum. it begins, "_au nom de dieu. armand crommelin et sa femme vivoient dans le seizième siécle, dans un tems de troubles, de guerres, de persécutions cruelles, etc._" this was their first flight. in france they prospered exceedingly by special favour of henri iv., until came the edict of nantes. but acting on the old huguenot motto, "mieux vaut quitter patrie que foi," they chose exile rather than renounce their religion. this time, one brother escaped with difficulty to holland, where his descendants still reside, but another, louis crommelin, offered his sword to william of orange, crossed with him to england, and finally settled in the north of ireland, where he brought huguenot weavers and taught the linen trade, which is one of the greatest sources of ulster's commercial prosperity. to this day his name is honoured as a benefactor, and he received a royal grant from william iii., which founded anew the fortunes of his family. the de la cherois, who were of a noble family in champagne, also fled with difficulty from france. they and the crommelins were closely connected by marriage, and also married into other families of the little huguenot colony in ulster. "perhaps this keeping to themselves preserved their foreign characteristics longer and their faith stronger," says your hostess. "then one ancestress--we have her picture at home, taken in a flowing white gown, and piled-up curls--married the last earl of mount alexander. at her death she left the present county down estate to my great-grandfather. he first, i think, took unto himself a wife of the daughters of heth. she was a beautiful miss dobbs, of the family now living at castle dobbs in county antrim. i must show you a photograph of her portrait. would it not make a lovely fancy dress?--the grey gown with puffed sleeves and neck-ruffle, and wide riding-hat and feathers. then my grandfather married the honourable elizabeth de moleyns, lord ventry's daughter. you see her picture is scanty skirted, with the waist under the arms. my grandfather must have been rather too splendid in his ideas. some of these were for improving the country generally, as well as his own estate, but he lost many thousands in trying to carry them into practice. i must tell you that an ancestress, judith de la cherois, escaped from france with her sister by riding at night across the country, their jewels sewn in their dresses. she lived to be , and was quite strong to the last, and though she lived fifty years in ireland she could never speak english, which she said, with vexation, was because people laughed rudely at her first attempts. if it be true that the girl is mother to the woman (to change the proverb), then may crommelin still retains some characteristics of her childhood. a shy child, sensitive to an intense degree, and shrinking from the observation of strangers, her great delight when small was to be allowed to run almost wild about the woods and fields with her little brothers and sisters, and to visit all the tenant-farmers' houses, where the children from the castle were always warmly welcomed, and regaled with tea, and oatmeal or potato cakes, in the parlour. in these later years she still retains the intense love of nature that she had then, and her descriptions of scenery have ever been praised as word-painting of rare fidelity. taking in her impressions early she produced them later in a book called "orange lily," which proved how well she knew the peasant life of ulster, a work which was declared by good judges to be absolutely faithful, while she herself was proud to find the farmers on her father's estates in down and antrim had copies of the book sent home from america, where it could be bought cheap, and where the many immigrants from the "ould country" welcomed it. at five years of age she could read fluently, and thenceforth through childhood she read so ardently that, having then defective vision, though unfortunately it was unnoticed, it probably contributed to a delicacy of eyesight that still troubles her. all the children used to improvise, and from seven years old there hardly ever was a time when may and her elder sister had not a story, written on their copybook paper, stuffed into their pockets to read to each other at night. the girls did not go to school, but were educated by foreign governesses, and miss crommelin has not forgotten the miseries she and her sister went through under the tuition of one whom she calls "that charming fiend," and there is somewhat of indignation in her gentle voice as she recalls her experiences. "i believe," she says, "that one's character is greatly influenced for life by the events of one's childhood. mine was. a boy may be made or marred at his public school, a girl likewise looks back to her governess as the mistress of her mind and manners. we had one for three or four years who was so plausible that i am not surprised in later years, our mother used to say with regretful bewilderment she could not understand how it was that she never knew our sufferings. ulster was gay in those days, and our parents were often absent on visits of a week or so, all through the winter. our mother was highly accomplished, and we were always anxious to be praised by her for progress in the schoolroom. our tormentor devised a punishment for us when she was offended (and she seemed to hate us because we were children) of not correcting our lessons. for weeks we blundered at the piano or brought her our french exercises--returned with a sneer--while swallowing our indignant tears, knowing well how our dulness and inattention would be complained of on our parents' return. she poisoned our innocent pleasures, and i can still remember how our hearts stood still at that catlike footstep, but," miss crommelin adds, with a laugh, "i put her into one of my books, 'my love, she's but a lassie,' under the guise of a cruel stepmother!" a curious incident happened to this smiling hypocrite. the servants execrated her, and one day in the nursery, when the poor little girls had whispered some new woe into the ears of two or three of the warm-hearted maids, one of them exclaimed, slowly and solemnly, the while pointing out of the window to the enemy standing below: "madam mosel, i wish you an illness that may lay you on your back for months!" soon afterwards the malediction was fulfilled. the governess became ailing, took to the sofa for weeks, and was obliged to leave. both servants and children were much awed, and quite convinced that it was a "judgment." next came a kindly german, who found the children eager to be taught, and she was not loath to gratify them, but rather beyond their expectations. "i remember," says miss crommelin, "after a long morning and afternoon's spell of lessons, her idea of a winter evening's recreation was for my sister and self to read aloud 'schiller's thirty years' war.' meanwhile, the wind would be howling 'in turret and tree,' making such goblin music as i have never heard elsewhere. we were happy for two years under this good woman." when about sixteen years of age, may and her sister began secretly to contribute to a paper which kindly offered to print beginners' tales on payment of half-a-crown. alas! that bubble burst, as many a youthful writer has found out for herself. reared in the very heart of the country, and growing up with little or no society of other young people, the children were warmly attached to each other. may crommelin describes her elder sister as clever, ardent, with flashes of genius; but never, unfortunately, finishing any tales, and exercising much of the same sort of influence over her as emily brontë over her sister charlotte. by and by, when schoolroom days ended, came the usual gaieties of a young girl introduced into irish county society, much livelier then than during later years. there were the usual three-days' visits to the country houses of down and antrim through the autumn, when pheasants were to be shot; or merry house-parties met by day at hunt races and steeplechases, and filled roomy carriages at night to drive courageously many miles to a ball. the canny northern farmers allowed no foxes to be reared, but still there was a good deal of sport to be had with the little pack of ards harriers, of which mr. crommelin was master, and the long, cold springs were sometimes broken by a season or two in dublin. her first introduction to county society inspired may crommelin to write "queenie." she did this secretly, and about that time she went over to england on a visit to a kind uncle and aunt, to whom she was much attached. alone with them, she confided the secret of her literary venture, and coaxed her uncle to take her mss. to a publisher whose name caught her eye. this he did, but declined to give the name of the young author. she waited in breathless expectation, and "thought it strange that a whole week elapsed before their reply came." it arrived on a sunday morning--unluckily--because it was a good and wise custom of the house, that no business letters should be opened on that day. it was accordingly placed in a locked cabinet with glass doors, where she could at least gratify herself by looking at the address, and never was a letter more tantalizing. the next morning, however, her hopes were rewarded by the joyful news of the publishers' acceptance, with a substantial sum of money down and a promise of so much more if the edition sold out, which it did. on returning home she in great trepidation told her father. he was somewhat of a disciplinarian, and had rigid ideas on feminine dependence and subordination, and though he did not actually forbid her writing, he never encouraged it. thenceforth she wrote steadily in her own room, sending her mss. to the same publishers, who had promised to take all the future works she would send them, whilst another offered to reprint in the same way cheaper editions. "black abbey" also followed; but shortly before miss crommelin wrote "a jewel of a girl," which was the result of a visit to holland, the head of the crommelin family settled there wrote and asked his distant kinsman to renew the acquaintance dropped for so many years. this laid the foundation of future friendship and other mutual visits, though such little breaks were few and far between, from the island bounded by "the melancholy ocean." as yet may crommelin's longings from childhood had been unfulfilled. she desired to travel, to see new scenes, to become acquainted with literary-helpers, critics, or advisers. of these she knew not one, excepting that lord dufferin, on his rare visits at clandeboye, had always a cheering word of encouragement for his young neighbour. the late amelia b. edwards, too, a friend of some relatives in england, sent her some letters of most gratefully received advice, and the rev. dr. allon, editor of the _british quarterly review_, having once, by chance, met the young writer for two hours when he was on a visit to ireland, became an occasional kind correspondent and a lasting friend. others there were none during these years. but dark days were coming. what seemed apparently trifling accidents, through horses, led to bad results. first of all, mr. crommelin had a fall when out hunting, the effects of which prevented his following for ever after his favourite sports, and his health declined. then a carriage accident was the beginning of his wife's later always increasing illness. their eldest daughter had not been strong, when she, too, met with a mischance. her horse ran away with her, and she experienced a shock from which she never wholly recovered. the irish land troubles had begun; no rents were to be expected for two years; servants and horses had to be reduced. so, like other neighbours, they resolved to be absentees for a while in a milder climate, rather than endure the loneliness of the country, far from town or doctors, and they removed to devonshire for two years, during which time may's eldest sister died after a summer at dartmoor. meantime the young author was not idle. she wrote "miss daisy dimity," "in the west countree," and "joy." these two last are both full of lovely descriptions of moorland scenery and air, and heather scent. then mrs. crommelin became rapidly worse. she could not bear the journey to ireland, so they moved to clifton, where, after a long period of suffering, she passed away, followed a year later by her husband. these years of hopeless illness were a terrible strain on the family; nevertheless, during the intervals of watching and nursing, miss crommelin wrote "brown eyes," a remembrance of holland, which little work was an immense favourite; also a sketch called "a visit to a dutch country house," and this was translated into several dutch papers. then came "goblin gold" in one volume, and "love, the pilgrim," begun before her father's death, and finished under the difficulties of temporary homelessness. left thus free to choose an abode on her brother's returning to take possession of his irish home, may crommelin at once resolved to come to london, and established herself in her present home in the cosy little flat. she describes this as "by far the happiest period of her life." surrounded by the literary and artistic society she had always wished for, a favourite with all, enjoying also the companionship of a sister, and having opportunities for travelling when it suits her, she declares herself quite contented. since coming to london she has written a charming and spirited novel, "violet vivian, m.f.h.," of which she supplied the leading idea of the tale and two-thirds of the story, the more sporting part excepted; also "the freaks of lady fortune." "dead men's dollars" is the strange but true story of a wreck on the coast opposite her old home. next came "cross roads," and "midge," considered by many as her best book. later "mr. and mrs. herries," a sweet and pathetic story, and lastly "for the sake of the family." to the readers of may crommelin's novels it is quite apparent that the idea of duty is the keynote. whilst all her works are remarkable for their refinement and purity of thought and style, she almost unconsciously makes her heroes and heroines (though they are no namby-pamby creations) struggle through life doing the duty nearest to hand, however disagreeable the consequences or doubtful the reward. she holds thoreau's maxim that to _be_ good is better than to try and _do_ good; indeed, the first and greater proposition includes the latter, and from her youth up she has loved and taken for her motto the lines of tennyson:-- "and because right is right, to follow right were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." [illustration: m houstoun] mrs. houstoun.[ ] [ ] since the serial publication of these sketches, the death of the venerable writer has taken place. one particular monday, near christmas, will long be remembered as being perhaps the most terrible day hitherto experienced in an abnormally severe winter. the heavy pall of dense fog which has settled over london has disorganized the traffic and caused innumerable accidents. great banks of snow are piled up high at the sides of the roads, a partial thaw has been succeeded by a renewed severe frost, making the pavements like ice, and causing locomotion to become as dangerous as it is detestable. arriving at victoria district station early in the afternoon, with the intention of paying a visit to the veteran novelist, mrs. houston, in gloucester street, you find yourself in cimmerian darkness, uncertain whether to turn to north or south, to east or west. a small boy passes by, from whom you inquire the way, and he promptly offers his escort thither in safety. he is as good as his word, and after a quarter of an hour's walk you arrive at your destination. thankfully presenting him with a gratuity, and expressing surprise at his finding the road with such unerring footsteps, the child replies in a cheerful voice, "i live close by here. i have been blind from my birth; darkness and light are both alike to me"; and he goes off whistling merrily. the septuagenarian author is upstairs in the drawing-room, lying on a long, low, comfortable spring couch, from which, alas! she is unable to move, some affection of the muscles having caused a complete uselessness of the lower limbs. she is bright and cheerful, notwithstanding; serene and patient. her intellect is undimmed, her memory is perfect, her conversation is delightful, and her dress is suitable and picturesque. she wears a black velvet gown, which is relieved by a full frill of old lace gathered up round the wrists and throat, a crimson silk shawl on her shoulders, and a lace cap with a roll round it of the same coloured ribbon. her hair, for which she was famous in her childhood, is still soft and abundant, and only changed from "the great ruddy mane of her youth," as she calls it, to the subdued brown and grey tints of her present age. her eyes, of grey-blue, are bright, and light up with keen intelligence as she converses, and her voice is low and sweet. she is _grande dame_ to the tips of her fingers, and the small, aristocratic-looking hands are white and well-shaped. with an old-world courtesy of manner she combines a juvenility of thought, and being a great reader, she is as well up in the literature of the day as she is in the records of the past. a brilliant _raconteuse_, mrs. houston possesses a fund of anecdote, as original as it is interesting. on each side of her couch stands within her easy reach a little table, containing her favourite authors and some writing materials, and her caligraphy is particularly neat, small, and legible. a broad verandah runs along the front of the house; in summer it is her particular care, as she superintends the training of the creepers over the wide arches, and also the arrangement of a small conservatory, which can be seen through the heavy oriental _portières_ which divide the two rooms. there, a fine plumbago creeper, with several australian plants and ferns flourish, which give it quite a tropical appearance. there is a great variety of old dresden china on the mantelpieces; a japanese screen stands near the further door. the book-cases in both rooms are well filled, and so is the large round table at the side yonder; they are kept in such method and order that mrs. houstoun has only to order "the eighth book on the top of the shelf at the right," or "the tenth book on the lower shelf at the left," to ensure her getting the needed volume. she calls attention to her pictures, which are mostly of considerable value. over the piano hangs, in a florentine frame, sasso's copy of the madonna del grand duca, a painting by schlinglandt, which is remarkable for its extraordinary attention to detail, and others by vander menlen and zucarilli. a vacant space on the wall has lately been occupied by one of bonnington's best seascapes, which she has kindly lent for exhibition. mrs. houstoun is the daughter of the late edward jessé, the distinguished naturalist. the family is of french extraction. he was the representative of a younger and protestant branch of the _barons of jesse levas_, one of the oldest families in languedoc, who emigrated after the revocation of the edict of nantes to england, and bought an estate in the county of wilts, but when they became english country gentlemen they dropped, like sensible people, not only the distinctive _de_, but the accent on the final _e_, which marked their gallic origin. her grandfather was the rev. william jesse, incumbent of the then only episcopalian church of west bromwich, staffordshire. "i have no very distinct personal recollection of him," she observes, "but i have reason to believe that his value, both as a good man and a learned divine, was duly recognized. bishop horne, author of 'commentaries on the psalms,' was at one time his curate." in , mr. jesse (then twenty years of age) was chosen by lord dartmouth to be his private secretary, and four years later, through his influential chief, he obtained an appointment in the royal household. the duties which his post as "gentleman of the ewry" entailed were of the slightest, consisting merely of an attendance in full court dress on great state occasions, to present on bended knee a golden ewer filled with rose-water to the sovereign. the royal fingers were dipped into it and dried on a fine damask napkin, which the "gentleman" carried on his arm. for this occasional service the yearly pay was three hundred pounds, together with "perquisites"; but though the absurd and useless office was long since done away with, whilst it existed its influence over mr. jesse's prospects in life was very considerable, as it enabled him to marry the beautiful daughter of sir john morris, a wealthy welsh baronet. mrs. houstoun's childish days were spent first at a house in the prettiest quarter of richmond park, and later on at a cottage close to bushey park. "those were the days before the then duke of clarence became king, and the sailor-prince showed himself to be one of the most good-natured of men," says mrs. houstoun. "he often joined my father and me in our rides about the park, and on one occasion he inquired of my father concerning the future of his only son." "what are you going to do with him?" asked h.r.h. "well, sir," was the reply, "he has been ten years at eton, a rather expensive education, so i entered him yesterday at brazenose----" "going to make a parson of him, eh? got any interest in the church?" "none whatever, sir, but----" "might as well cut his throat," said the duke. "why not put him into the admiralty? i'll see he gets a clerkship." the royal promise was faithfully kept. young john heneage jesse got his appointment almost immediately, and worked his way up the different grades, always standing high in the opinion of his chiefs, until after a long period of service, he finally retired on a pension, and is well known in the literary world as the author of "the court of england under the stuarts and houses of hanover," and sundry historical memoirs. reverting to these long bygone days, your hostess says she can remember the famous philanthropist, william wilberforce, in whose unflagging efforts to effect the freedom of the west indian negroes, her aunt, mrs. townsend, was so zealous and able a coadjutrix; she recollects to this day the childish grudge she felt against them both, when after the visit of the great emancipator all cakes and puddings were strictly _tabooed_, as they contained west india sugar, and therefore to eat them was a sin. living close to the home of her father's old friend, john wilson croker, she became acquainted with many world-famed and literary men; amongst them she mentions theodore hook, sir william follett, the poet moore, sir francis chantrey, and sir thomas lawrence, subsequently samuel rogers, mr. darwin, wordsworth, the gifted mrs. norton, and james smith, the most popular and brilliant of the authors of "rejected addresses." at the early age of sixteen she became engaged, and shortly after married lionel fraser, whose father died when he was minister plenipotentiary at dresden, but in less than a year she became a widow. mr. fraser, just before leaving cambridge, had met with an accident. in a trial of strength, an under-graduate threw him over his shoulder: the lad fell on his head, and was taken up for dead, but after a while recovered, and was to all appearance the same as before; but the hidden evil had been slowly though surely working, and the rupture of a small vessel in the brain brought to a sudden close the young life of so much promise. inconsolable, the young widow returned to her father's house, where she lived in close seclusion for nearly four years, and then became engaged to captain houstoun, of the th hussars, second son of general sir william houstoun, bart. his son george, who succeeded him, added the name of boswall on marrying an heiress. _a propos_ of that engagement, mrs. houstoun has an amusing story to tell. "another of the friends," she says, "to whom we were indebted for many pleasant hours, was that courtly hanoverian soldier baron knesbeck, equerry to the duke of cambridge. we were riding on wimbledon common, and i was mounted on the second charger of my betrothed, when the old duke, on his stout bay, joined our party; my engagement had not at that time been announced, and i therefore parried, as best i could, the duke's questions as to the horse and its owner. at last, however, the climax came, for with a wink of his eye, more suggestive than regal, his royal highness put the following leading question as we rode slowly on: 'sweetheart, hey?' there was no resisting this point-blank query, and the soft impeachment had to be owned at last." after her second marriage mrs. houstoun and her husband lived for a year in their yacht "dolphin," during which time they visited texas and the gulf of mexico. later on they spent two winters at new orleans before slavery was abolished. then came a tour on the continent, where they travelled from paris to naples in their own britska, taking four horses and two english postillions. when they stayed for any length of time at any place, the horses were saddled, and they would ride forty or fifty miles a day, revolvers in saddle pockets, into the wildest parts of the country. after a roving and adventurous time, escaping hairbreadth dangers, for mrs. houstoun says her husband was "as bold as a buccaneer," they returned home, where captain houstoun, after trying various places, finally took on a long lease dhulough lodge, about one hundred square miles of ground in the west of ireland, and there for twenty years she found her lot cast. in sheer weariness of spirit she took to her pen. as a girl she had always been accustomed to correct her father's proofs, and had written some short stories and poems, but she then wrote her first novel, "recommended to mercy." it was so well reviewed in the _times_ that, encouraged by her success, mrs. houstoun followed it with "sink or swim," "taken upon trust," "first in the field," "a cruel wrong," "records of a stormy life," and "zoe's brand," which last book m. boisse, editor of the _revue contemporaine_, asked permission to translate into french, but by some omission his application was never answered, and the project fell through. some time later she wrote "twenty years in the wild west" and several other novels, and she has lately finished a new story in two volumes, entitled "how she loved him," published by mr. f. v. white, of whom she remarks with warmth, "he stands high amongst the publishers i have known for liberality and honour, and is one of my best and kindest friends." "amongst other books," says mrs. houstoun, "i look back with thankfulness to my novelette, entitled 'only a woman's life,' the writing of which was successful in obtaining the release, after twelve years of convict life, of an innocent woman, who had been originally condemned to death on circumstantial evidence for the murder of her child. of the death sentence i was so happy, at the eleventh hour, as to obtain a commutation." but it is difficult to get the lonely old lady to talk much of her books, and though her memory is perfect in everything else, both past and present, she declares that she has forgotten even the names of some of her own works. she infinitely prefers to speak about those of her friends. she is devoted to whittier's poems, and to pope, and can quote passages at great length from this great favourite; whilst among modern novelists she prefers mrs. riddell and the late george lawrence, though she says, laughing, she fears that this last shows a somewhat bohemian taste. "i am sure i was born to be a landscape gardener," remarks mrs. houstoun. "that was my real vocation in life. if you had but seen our home amongst the connaught mountains when i first saw it! the 'wild bog,' as the natives call the soil, reached to my very doors and windows. a wilderness of moist earth-bog myrtle and stunted heather alone met the eye, very discouraging to such a lover of dainty well-kept gardens and flowers as i am. towering above and beyond our roughly-built house was a mountain called glenumra, over , feet in height, whilst in front was muelhrae, or king of the irish mountains (as it is the loftiest), and a part of it effectually concealed from us all the glories of the setting sun. the humid nature of the soil was favourable to the growth of plants. i designed and laid out large gardens, and had only to insert a few feet or inches, as the case might be, of laurel, fuchsia, veronica, or hydrangia into the ground, and the slips took root, grew and flourished. long before we left there were fuchsias thirty feet high; the veronicas, over six feet, blossomed in november. then i built a stove-house and conservatory, where my exotic fernery was my great delight, and i spent much of my time there. all the money i earned by my writings i spent on my ferns and plants." but the damp of the climate, the constant sitting up at night with their poor sick dependents, at whose beck and call she was ever ready, and the impossibility of procuring any medical attendance, laid the seeds of a severe neuralgic affection of the joints, from which she has never recovered, and a terrible fall resulted in a hopeless injury to both knees. she says that during her twenty years' residence in that distressful country she never knew the blessing of really good health. mrs. houstoun is extremely hospitable and sociable in disposition. one of her chief regrets in being so completely laid by is that she is no longer able to give the pleasant little weekly dinners of eight in which she used to delight. she enjoys nothing more than visits from her friends, who are always glad to come in and sit with her and listen to her amusing and interesting conversation. she is a great politician and an extreme liberal, "though," she adds, "not a gladstonian." at the present moment she is deeply absorbed in the stanley controversy, and, as she is a cousin of the late major barttelot, and was much attached to him, she naturally remarks that she "never knew anything but good of him." but though this venerable lady is unable to entertain her friends in her former manner, she does not forget the poor and suffering. she gives little teas and suppers to aged men and women, whose sad cases have from time to time been recommended to her, at which charitable gatherings, with doors rigidly shut to exclude the smell of the poor old men's tobacco smoke, she allows them to indulge in the luxury of a pipe. though enduring constant pain and many long sleepless nights, she avows that she is never dull or miserable. no word of complaint or murmur passes her lips at her crippled condition. on the contrary, she expresses the deepest content and thankfulness for her many comforts and blessings, amongst which, she remarks, are her three maids, all sisters, who are as devoted to her as if they had been born in her service. they carry her up and down stairs, and wait on her, hand and foot, with tender care. "and only think," she concludes cheerfully and with a smile, "what a mercy it is that i retain my memory so well, and that my mind is so clear, whilst i lie here useless!" "nay, not useless," is your reply, as you rise to leave, "they also serve who only stand and wait." [illustration: mrs. alexander fraser] mrs. alexander fraser. a rapid run of about an hour and a half in duration from victoria, with just a change of carriages at three bridges, but no delay, and you are set down one bright, fresh morning at the pretty and picturesque station of faygate, sussex, which presents a curiously countrified and even primitive aspect, considering the many large properties and cottages that lie in its close vicinity. a well turned-out little carriage and pair of handsome, high-stepping chestnuts has been sent to convey you to carylls, the lovely home of mrs. alexander fraser of durris. the whole place is bathed in sunshine, and the air, though somewhat frosty, is wonderfully exhilarating, as you are carried swiftly along a good winding road, with trees on either side, the branches meeting overhead. here and there, as the horses go more slowly up a gentle acclivity, you turn round to reconnoitre a little, and find that there is a charming view behind. on the left, leith hill, with a tower crowning it, rises up in purple tints against the horizon. on the right lies a lovely view of undulating country, broad green fields, trim hedges, brown brakes and hollows, with a background of luxuriant wood. after a short drive, the carriage turns into a gate flanked by two high turreted walls, and a neat little lodge with diamond-paned windows, peeping out of a mass of ivy, stands just within. leaving it on the left, you go up a wide gravelled drive through an avenue of poplars; the lawns, which are undulating, and cover about three acres of ground, are laid out with low terraced walls, over which in summer time the roses trail in rich profusion, and edged with a row of weeping ash and elm trees, they lie on both sides right up to the entrance of a big red brick house, lavishly covered with ivy, wisteria, and roses, with quaint gables and many-shaped chimneys, which is altogether most picturesque. a large conservatory unites the right and left wings, and once within this conservatory it is difficult to realize that it is still winter. heated to a pleasant temperature, full of bright and rare bloom, the gentle breath of sweet-scented gardenias and tuberoses pervading the atmosphere, cages of many-coloured foreign birds, a gleam of moorish lamps against the greenery overhead, comfortable lounges, wickerwork tables, turkish rugs strewn on the tesselated floor--all combine to make it a delightful place in which to while away the time, with book or work, in friendly converse, or perhaps in solitary day dreaming. at the present moment it is passed in friendly converse. mrs. alexander fraser has received you with much cordiality, and whilst lingering amongst the flowers and the ferns, the talk drifts away to india, america, and the continent of europe, where she tells you the earlier part of her life was spent, and that for many years past her home has been at carylls. she is fair and rather pale, her eyes are brown, and have a slight droop of the lids, which gives them a soft expression. the profile is just a trifle aquiline, is delicate in form, and the mouth and chin are well cut. her hair--a little lighter in colour than the eyes, is worn in a loose, curly roll over her brow, and a thick coil on the nape of her neck. she is attired in a most becoming and well-fitting gown of black velvet and grey fur, and her manner is frank and informal. carylls is a very old place; a part of it, indeed, was built in , but so well have all the additions and improvements of later years been carried out that the two form a truly artistic whole. originally belonging to the well-known roman catholic family of caryll, it is mentioned in pope's poems, several of which he wrote under the old oak trees, and it is considered quite one of the show-places of this part of sussex. mrs. fraser says that it suits her in every way. the air is splendid, the society is good, and she is not far enough away from town to feel out of the world. the conservatory glass door opens into a very large and lofty drawing-room with oak ceilings and great bay windows. it looks more like a foreign than an english room. an immense indian carpet is spread over the floor, the sea-green walls are hung with many mirrors in black and gold frames, several lovely old cabinets, and plenty of dresden, sèvres, chelsea, and capo de monti, are to be seen everywhere. two superb silver _repoussé_-work lucknow bowls are especially attractive; one, containing a many-leafed palm, stands on the grand piano, and in its fellow is a large fern, the delicate fronds drooping over a beautiful alabaster "magdalen" close by. "i admire these more than anything else in the room," says mrs. fraser, pointing to some photographs on an inlaid iron table. "these two are my sons, both of them very good-looking, as you see," she continues, smiling with very pardonable pride as she places the pictures in your hand. and truly she has a good right to feel proud of these handsome, noble-looking young men, one of whom is in the uniform of the gordon highlanders. here, too, is a portrait of the prince of wales, with his autograph below, presented by his royal highness to general fraser, which is a much-valued gift, and the others are pictures of different indian viceroys and their wives, all given by themselves, lord and lady dufferin, lord and lady lytton, the latter in a frame designed by himself, which is quite a work of art, with a coronet in blue-and-white enamel. an hour is passed very pleasantly amongst the many curiosities which mrs. fraser has brought chiefly from foreign lands. the room is, in fact, quite a small museum. going back through the conservatory into the other wing of the house, an open door gives a peep of the dining-room in passing. it is a good-sized room, with oak ceiling, crimson walls, and a quantity of carved oak furniture. but mrs. fraser's own particular favourite is just beyond--she calls it her tea-room, not her study. "not very large," she says, "but always bright and cheerful, and the view is so lovely from this window. that wood was gorgeous in its autumnal tints, and on a very clear morning leith hill looks as if it were close to us. my rose garden is just to the right here. i wish it was summer, that you might see it in all its glory." and the view is lovely now, as the sun peeps in and out amongst the great trees, which stand in clumps, with rustic seats beneath them. after admiring it for a while, you turn round to have a survey of the room, and certainly endorse mrs. fraser's opinion. it has an oak ceiling, like the other reception rooms, and pale-green walls, that show off to advantage a number of oil paintings framed in dark crimson velvet and gold. two are especially fine, "the golden horn," and "morning on the dutch rivers," by an artist of some note, fryar; and you fall in love with two exquisite little bits of brittany, by gregory. a large mirror in an elaborately carved frame surmounts the mantel-piece, which is laden with satsuma ware and other japanese, chinese, and indian curios. an old french marqueterie cabinet full of books stand in a recess _vis-à-vis_ to a handsomely inlaid writing bureau with a silver basket of hothouse flowers on it. mrs. fraser here calls attention to a number of silver vases, loving cups, hunting flasks, gongs, etc., all of which are prizes won by her sons' ponies and fox-terriers. these lie so perilously near the window as to suggest a remark to the effect that they might be stolen, but mrs. fraser declares that the people are wonderfully honest down in these parts of the country, and that no burglary has been heard of for thirty years or more. later on, whilst being regaled with all sorts of cakes and hothouse grapes, the conversation turns on literary matters. "i have no particular writing-room," says your hostess, "i generally write in the evening after dinner, with my people chattering all the time, but i am too much accustomed to that to be disturbed by it. my first essays in fiction were magazine stories. i suppose i have written over four-score of these, and they always seemed to find a good deal of favour with the leading provincial journals. i sold a story called 'manoeuvring' for a very nice little sum to a french editor for translation into _l'etoile_, and i was very much pleased when i got a requisition for a tale from the _lady's magazine_ in philadelphia, but of later years i have written about five-and-twenty three-volume novels. the first of these was called 'faithless.' the next two: 'denison's wife,' and 'not while she lives.' after that 'her plighted troth,' 'a maddening blow,' 'a thing of beauty,' and 'a fatal passion' came out. these are names which recur to me at the moment out of all that i have written. i like the last best, and next to it 'a leader of society,' and 'the match of the season,' perhaps because i took the heroes and heroines from real life. more recently mr. f. v. white has brought out my books, and they have all more or less been excellently noticed, especially 'daughters of belgravia,' 'the last drawing room,' and 'the new duchess,' all of which have gone into two or three editions. occasionally i send a piece of poetry to the magazines, and it generally gets a little _kudos_ from the press, and some little time ago i wrote a sacred song called 'calvary's cross,' which gained much popularity; a copy of it was very graciously accepted by the queen." the latest of all is "a modern bridegroom." mrs. fraser observes that she has often been asked what is her "method" in writing, and that on one occasion she received a letter from a clergyman in nottingham, begging her to "describe it exactly." "i laughed when the letter came," she continues, "and i am ashamed to say i never answered it, because i have no method. i simply write straight on, and never copy my mss., and pity the poor printers who have to decipher my hieroglyphics. i am very fond of recitations, too, and some years ago i studied elocution under mrs. stirling. once, in her unavoidable absence, i recited two of her pieces before a large audience in st. george's hall. i felt horribly nervous, but i suppose i did the "pathos" pretty well, for i noticed a good many people crying, and was much pleased to see them do so! i have recited several times in america also, but now i never exert myself beyond writing a novel or a short story just when i feel inclined for it." after tea mrs. fraser proposes a stroll through the grounds. "it is very cold, but dry," she says, "so we might venture; but first come into the billiard-room, which is our usual postprandial resort." passing through the hall and another conservatory, with vines thickly intersecting overhead, and full of splendid specimens of maidenhair ferns, with the vivid scarlet of geraniums between them, she takes you into a large and lofty room, panelled in oak. at the further end a flight of oaken steps leads up to a sort of daïs, from which the game can be well surveyed. the furniture is all of carved oak and crimson velvet, with the exception of two great easy chairs, whose backs and arms and legs are composed of buffalo horns, beautifully polished and mounted. these were sent to her from russia, and are the admiration of the neighbourhood. all round the walls hang pictures of the celebrated american trotting horses, whose performances in central park, new york, were a daily delight to mrs. fraser. a tall bookcase, carved quaintly, stands in a recess, but she tells you not to expect to see any of her own novels in it, as she invariably gives them all away, except one copy of each, which her mother, who lives with her, always confiscates, and values as her dearest possessions. this lady must have been one of the loveliest of women in her youth, and she is still wonderfully handsome and young-looking. mrs. alexander fraser comes of a good old stock. her grandmother was a sister of sir wolstan dixie, descended from the sir wolstan dixie who settled at bosworth, leicestershire, in the time of queen elizabeth. on her mother's side she is related to the ancient house of dunboyne, dating as far back as sir thomas butler, or le botelier, in the reign of edward ii.; and she is a connection of william makepeace thackeray. of this she declares herself to be "most proud," and adds:--"i consider his 'becky sharp' is one of the most able studies of character that was ever written. how much i should delight in his power of reading character, though perhaps he took somewhat too caustic a view of it occasionally!" a stand close by contains the whole set of mrs. lovett cameron's novels--"i enjoy her writing so much," says your hostess. "when i was younger i was _fanatica_ on ouida; but though i still admire her marvellous command of language, especially in description of scenery, i have grown too sober and prosaic and practical in my ideas and views of life to appreciate her works as i used to do." losing her father at a very early age, when only fifteen, mrs. fraser went to india, after spending two years at a school in paris, and at the age of sixteen she married captain, now general alexander fraser, c.b., sometime member of council, for many years secretary to the government of india, and only surviving brother of the late bishop of manchester. she describes her life in india in glowing colours. "i liked india immensely," she remarks. "most women do, i fancy. they are so hospitable out there, and there is so much fun and 'go' in the society. besides," she adds, laughing, "one has so much attention that one feels in a delightfully chronic state of self-complacency!" a door at the further end leads through the fernery to the western side of carylls, which is perhaps the prettiest part of the place. it is curiously decorated with sussex tiles, and has an ivy-clad gable and long window in stained cathedral glass. turning to the right, your hostess takes you round a tastefully-laid-out rosery, at the extremity of which is a glasshouse over a hundred feet in length, which is full of peach, apricot, nectarine, and other big trees. emerging at the other door, you find yourself in a great double garden with an archway between, and the whole is enclosed within high walls covered with fruit-trees. here are vineries and hot-houses, all in most exquisite order, for this is mrs. fraser's particular hobby. the day is so clear that the view all around is seen to perfection, extending to the surrey hills, and dotted here and there with a few white houses shown up against the dark green of the masses of firs which seem to abound in these parts. expressing a wish to see the stables, mrs. fraser leads the way thither through the courtyard. four good-looking horses stand in the stalls, and as she opens a small square window near, the black velvety muzzle of the sweetest little pony rubs against her shoulder, whilst he eagerly devours the carrot she has brought for him. "i drive this little fellow myself," she says. "i had a pair of them, 'blink' and 'wink,' but poor 'wink' has gone over to the majority, i grieve to say." a little further on are some picturesque kennels, and the inmates greet their mistress vociferously. these are the fox-terriers who won the prizes in the drawing-room. they are animals of long pedigree and long price, and are pretty well known at all the shows in england. "they are not only ornamental but useful," says your hostess. "some are loose at night, and i pity the individual who approaches them." whilst leisurely rambling here and there, you stroll up to some broad stone steps (overshadowed by oaks, and with pillars on either side surmounted by large vases of flowering berberis) that lead past an upper lawn enclosed by a shrubbery, in which syringas and _gloire de dijon_ roses hold prominent places. "these two tennis courts are in constant use in summer time," observes mrs. fraser, "but i really am a bit of a recluse, eschewing society as much as possible, though i thoroughly enjoy a quiet tea with my favourite neighbours. when i lived in town," she adds, "i had a charming house in clarges-street, and used to like my wednesday afternoons, when a number of diplomats generally looked in, and there used to be a babel of languages going on, but long residence in the country makes one grow daily more of a stay-at-home, and i have so much to do that i never find the day too long." close by on the lawn lies a carefully-kept grassy mound. this is the grave of three favourite dogs, and a much deplored grey parrot. one of these dogs was a schipperke, the breed kept by the bargemen of belgium to guard their goods and chattels. "he was a real beauty," says your hostess, sadly, "and he travelled with me all over the continent, then across the atlantic, and back again. i think one really grows to care for a dog or a horse as much as for a human creature, and this pet was almost human in his intelligence." mrs. alexander fraser is warmly attached to her beautiful home, and takes the keenest interest in the improvements. she brought the design of the low double walls from the park at brussels, and herself superintended their building, as also the re-arrangement of the lawns. she rarely goes to town, and then only on a flying visit just to see her lawyers, or her publishers, "all the while longing to get home again," she says. she promises herself, however, to go up to stay with some friends in the season, in order to do the opera and theatres, confessing that she dearly loves a good drama. "something that makes me weep copiously," she adds, laughing. "i dislike comic pieces." after a stroll round the lawns to watch the glories of the setting sun, you return towards the house, passing by a piece of water enclosed by low walls, fringed all round with large weeping willows, and enter through a heated conservatory on the eastern side, not yet visited. here is a wealth of tea roses in every shade of colour. mrs. fraser ungrudgingly cuts a handful of the choicest buds, and gives them to you, a welcome present indeed at this season. "flowers," she says, "are a passion with me. i like to have them everywhere, and always have a big bunch on my table when i write." the eastern side door leads into a little room containing many oriental treasures, notably a carved screen of sweet-smelling sandal-wood, a curious "neckbreaker" used by indian dacoits, and some rare ivory and enamels. conspicuous among them there stands a small inlaid table, and on it lies an evidently cherished volume, "the life of bishop fraser," together with a photograph of him, in a costly frame. "he was my best friend," says mrs. alexander fraser, in a low tone and with much pathos; "and my _beau idéal_ of a man both personally and mentally. i felt his loss from my heart, and i am sure that thousands have done the same." but the carriage is announced, and mrs. alexander fraser gives a whispered order to the butler, which results in a basket of large, purple hothouse grapes being brought, "to cheer you on your way back," she says. during the drive to the station she hospitably invites you to "come again when the strawberries are ripe and the roses are in bloom." [illustration: julia b. chetwynd] the hon. mrs. henry chetwynd. there is an old house in a quiet old-world street leading out of hans place, called walton place, where the emperor napoleon iii. used to live after he left king street, st. james's, and which was the scene of some of his famous political dinner-parties. this house, which is back to back with jane austen's home in london, once stood in its own gardens, but the ground was too valuable to spare for the picturesque, and it has long since been turned into a row of neat dwelling-places. standing well back from the noisy thoroughfare and the incessant roar of traffic in the brompton road, there is a sense of peace and quiet about it externally which prepares you to find that within it is a home of talent, of refinement, of domestic harmony and affection. whilst ascending the stairs a fresh, sweet soprano voice is heard, giving thrilling expression to tosti's lovely song, "love ties." on being shown into a fair-sized double drawing-room, your first impression leads to the belief that there are some good old bits of carved oak furniture to be studied, but there is more to learn about that presently. mrs. chetwynd is busily engaged in finishing a large coverlet of art needlework, which she puts aside as she rises to greet you with much grace and cordiality. she is very fair in complexion, with large blue eyes and softly shaded eyebrows. the hair, parted smoothly on a broad forehead, is gathered up at the back, and brought round the head in a plait, worn in coronet shape in front. she is dressed in black with a scarf of old black lace knotted becomingly round her throat, and a bunch of violets nestles in the folds. she has an air of high breeding, combined with an irresistibly sweet and pleasant manner. the musician is mrs. chetwynd's youngest daughter, and you cannot resist the temptation to beg her to indulge you with yet another verse of the song. she good-naturedly complies, rendering the melody with much skill and pathos. on your thanking and complimenting her, she tells you that she is a pupil of madame bonner, and has never had any other teacher, and truly she does credit to her instructress. there is an artistic simplicity about these bright, cheerful rooms which is very fascinating. the walls are hung with gold-coloured paper, copied from a pattern at hampton court, and taken from an italian palace. carpets of electric-blue colour cover the floors, and tapestry curtains of the same shade, with inner ones of cream-coloured guipure, shade the windows; close to your hostess's chair there is an enormous moorish brass tray mounted on a moorshebar stand. this was sent home by a dear absent naval son for his mother's afternoon tea-service, but as it is so heavy that it would require two servants to carry it, mrs. chetwynd has turned it into a most appropriate work-table. large plants of the "sacred lily of japan" are flowering beautifully yonder, a big japanese screen stands near the door, armchairs of every shape and degree of comfort, together with a broad couch, are placed apparently exactly where they ought to be; nearly everything else in the room has a story, and now the secret of the old oak furniture is learned. you could have declared it was a production of the seventeenth century. the material is of cypress wood, and miss katherine chetwynd is now carving some oak, which was a gift, and which is old, very old, inasmuch as it was taken out of the thames, at blackwall, and formed part of the planks and stakes driven in there to keep out the spanish armada. it is black with age, but still sound. it would appear to be a curious present for three young girls, but mrs. chetwynd's daughters have a genius for wood-carving; collecting old designs, they actually made the fire-place entirely by themselves, with its rich, broad pattern on each side, the rose and the shamrock for their father, and the thistle entwined in compliment to their scottish mother, and with the help of their brother they even fitted and placed it without the aid of a carpenter. several tables, too, carved in a variety of designs, are the manufacture of their clever fingers, and their talents do not end here, for on one of these tables you recognize a life-size portrait, in red crayons, of the fair young musician herself, executed with masterly and skilful touch by her elder sister. the painted panels of the outer and inner doors as also of those which divide the rooms, are the work of these young artists, in thoroughly correct japanese style, the rising sun, the storks, and the tall flowers in raised gilt, being all perfectly orthodox. this talent is inherited from their mother, for every picture on the walls is from her own brush. on the right hangs her large painting from siegert's "liebesdienst," in the hamburg gallery, and she was very proud of obtaining permission to copy it, as it was then only the second copy allowed. on one side of the fireplace there is her portrait in oils of the beautiful miss bosville, afterwards lady macdonald of the isles, mrs. chetwynd's great-grandmother; on the other "the holy margaret," copied in the dresden gallery, a madonna after rotari, and a cherub after rubens, in all of which pictures it is easy to see that she excels in flesh tints, and has a fine eye for colour. mrs. chetwynd is the daughter of the late mr. davidson of tulloch, by his first wife, the hon. elizabeth macdonald, one of the lovely daughters of the late lord macdonald of the isles. mr. davidson inherited, besides the family place, tulloch castle, the deer forest of inchbae, and many thousands of acres on the west coast, which he sold to sir john fowler, mr. banks, and others. he was first in the grenadier guards, then member for the county, and, finally, lord-lieutenant of ross-shire. he was noted for his handsome person and his great kindness to everyone around him; a most popular landlord, he possessed a great charm of manner, and was much in advance of his day, especially in the matter of education. though he was the best and kindest of fathers, he was strict in discipline. his daughters were made to learn latin and mathematics, and, besides a resident english and foreign governess, the village schoolmaster came to teach them history and geography every evening. "it was impossible," says mrs. chetwynd, "to have had a happier childhood than ours, particularly up to the time of my mother's death. though i think that education was perhaps a little overdone, we had a great deal of exercise on horseback and on foot to counteract it. we were made to keep very early hours, to be in the schoolroom at six o'clock every morning in summer and seven in winter. the piper's walking up and down playing in front of the old place at eight o'clock was the signal for our breakfast, of which we had great need, having previously studied for two hours. we then worked hard at our books till noon, when my mother always appeared at the schoolroom door with peaches, grapes, or something good in her hand; then we rode for two hours in all weathers, dined at two o'clock, worked till four, out again till six, then tea, preparation, and to bed." it is probably just the regularity, order, and method of the happy, healthy country life of her girlhood, and the constant out-of-door exercise, which have preserved mrs. chetwynd's constitution so excellently, that until four years ago, when she met with a severe accident at rugby station--from which she has never quite recovered--she could walk long distances, and go out at night afterwards without feeling any fatigue. "the walks and rides," she continues, "that we were accustomed to take in the elastic highland air, sound wonderful to those who have not experienced the ease with which one can walk there. we, as girls, would tramp seven miles to a luncheon party, join in any expedition, and return the whole way on foot easily. we have often ridden twenty-five miles, (sending other horses on early, and changing halfway), gone out with the friends with whom we spent the afternoon, and ridden home in time to dance at a gillies' ball." another great excitement in their youth was the acting of french and italian plays, which were adapted for their own capacities from _molière_, _goldoni_, etc., by the foreign governess, enjoying thoroughly the applause, the dressing-up and the arranging of the costumes, which were made in strict keeping. "but what we did not enjoy," adds your hostess, smiling, "was the trouble of our long and thick hair, which as often as not was powdered for these juvenile performances, and i can remember to this day how unmercifully our cross french maid used to pull and tug at it next morning." the autumn holidays were often spent up at the west coast place or on the continent. the former was, however, the favourite holiday resort of these happy, hardy young people, where they boated, fished, and bathed to their hearts' content, often going off to one of the many islands on the coast, taking books, work, and provisions; then, sending away the boat, they would spend half the bright, warm days swimming about in the sea. when these vacations were spent abroad the opportunity was seized to give them the best masters to be found; "and, though we enjoyed foreign life very much," says mrs. chetwynd, "we always felt we were being cheated out of our holidays. in later years my uncle, general macdonald (known as jim macdonald) lived at the ranger's lodge in hyde park, and going there was always a great pleasure. he was so clever and entertaining, never too busy to enter into anything affecting his family, so overflowing with wit of the best kind, that he made one see the amusing side of the most commonplace things." the excellent education she received, the beautiful scenery in which she was reared, the clever people (george eliot among them) with whom she was brought in contact--all conspired to expand the young girl's mind, and to pave the way for her subsequent career as a novelist. she describes their charming supper-parties at st. andrews which were constantly joined by such learned men as principal tulloch, professors aytoun and ferrier, and sir david brewster, who used to talk to her in the most fascinating manner about astronomy and other science, as "being an education in itself." thackeray, too, gave her the greatest encouragement, and showed her much kindness. but the girlish days were coming to a close. in february, , she married lieutenant, now post-captain, the hon. henry chetwynd, brother of viscount chetwynd, by whom she has a family of four sons and three daughters. her first literary effort was a play, written at the early age of twelve, in which she acted with her brothers and sisters. it was really a wonderful production for so young a child, and a few years later she wrote several society verses, which were printed, and read with much amusement by her father, to whom, however, she had not the courage to disclose the secret of their authorship. for some years after her marriage captain chetwynd held some appointments enabling her to be constantly with him, but when the dreaded moment for separation came, and he was ordered on foreign service, first to the west indies, and then to mexico, mrs. chetwynd felt the solitude of the long evenings to be so oppressive after the little ones were gone to bed, that for distraction she took to her pen and wrote her first novel, called "three hundred a year." it had a good sale, though on looking back on it now the author pronounces it to have been "excessively silly." encouraged by this success, she wrote "mademoiselle d'estanville," which was translated into french, and had a good run. then came "janie" and "life in a german village," which passed into several editions. "bees and butterflies" came out first in the _pictorial world_ before being published in three volumes. this book the author considers to have been the most successful, financially, though "sara" is her own favourite, and was the result of a long study. the story is founded on fact, and the incidents relating to the discovery of south end smugglers were drawn from the life, mrs. chetwynd having been a witness to the scene when the great cask, supposed to contain wine, was opened, and found full of white satin shoes, valuable lace, and other contraband articles. scenes, too, in the highlands are well depicted in this book, whilst the sketch of sara is carefully worked out, from her first introduction as the "dethroned princess" in all her ignorance and absorption in her supposed "gift of poetry," to the final page when, after many vicissitudes of fortune, her soul is awakened by the love of a good man, and her really fine and noble character is fully developed. other books written by mrs. chetwynd are entitled "a march violet," "the dutch cousin," and "lady honoria's nieces," but though want of space prevents much comment on them, they can confidently be recommended as most pleasant reading, and all are characterized by the kindly nature, the refinement, and the noble spirit of this distinguished gentlewoman's mind. she modestly says of her works, "when i think of the great competition nowadays, i am surprised that they have held their own at all, and directly a new book is out, i always feel that i should like to recall it. i have sold the copyright of most of my stories, but some are still in my own hands, and i have long since handed over all my literary business affairs to mr. a. p. watt, which i have found a perfectly satisfactory arrangement." the author was considerably amused a few days ago on hearing that a former old servant takes in _bow bells_ regularly in order to read her late mistress's novels, which have been reproduced and are now coming out weekly in that periodical. her two last books are called "criss-cross lovers" and "a brilliant woman." on asking mrs. chetwynd about her plots and taste in literature, she says: "i generally build up characters from my own experiences, a bit here, and a trait there, but i do not deliberately set to work to take pictures of people. i think that most persons have some particular characteristic that comes out in everything they do, and to create is better than to copy. my favourite novels are written by the gerards, and by mrs. l. b. walford--i find all hers charming. besides these, i admire george meredith's books more than any others, the one drawback being that when i have re-read one of his i cannot interest myself in anything else for a long time. i delight in history, too, history of all nations. things which really happened absorb me intensely. i remember when a child i had curious punishments; for being untidy i had twenty lines of _henriade_ to learn by heart, or a french fable. as i could repeat the _henriade_ from beginning to end, i must have been untidy pretty often. the english governess for punishment used to make me read twenty pages of alison's "history of europe" aloud in the play-hours, a fact which i once told the learned historian, and it amused him greatly. the historical punishment, however, has not deprived me of my love for history. my favourite poets are wordsworth, tennyson, shelley, and burns. i am a great needlewoman, too, and when i am ruffled by anything i take refuge in sewing a plain seam. this coverlet is from a munich pattern, and i have finished it for my sister, mrs. carnegy of lour, who began it; the tablecover is for my other sister, mrs. craigie-halkett of cramond." it is through one of her daughters that you learn of mrs. chetwynd's great musical gifts. she was a pupil of garcia, had a beautiful voice, and used to sing at many amateur concerts. she still keeps up her pianoforte playing, for which she won a gold medal, and will improvise on the piano by the hour together. her husband and children are very proud of her performances. she has lately invented a fire-escape, which is approved of by experts and engineers, and of which more will soon be heard. after tea, at which the party is joined by a beautiful thoroughbred dachshund called freda, you are taken down into the dining-room, and, in passing, just peep into a little room on the stairs, which your hostess calls her "girls' workshop," where all the wood-carving is carried on. there is a little point of interest in the dining-room which must be noticed as betokening the versatile gifts of this accomplished family. a friend had sent them a roll of paper from japan, but, as it was found insufficient to cover the whole of the walls, mrs. chetwynd and her daughters put their heads together to consult as to how the balance required could be eked out. the result was, that they first distempered the uncovered part of the wall to the exact shade of the colour, and then painted it in such close imitation of the japanese pattern, even to the native mark, that it is quite impossible to discover which is the original and which the imitation. among the many books is a copy of "freytag's reminiscences," translated by mrs. chetwynd's second daughter, and considered by good judges to be one of the best translations from the german that has appeared for a long time. there is a picture of that grand old highlander, mr. davidson of tulloch, taken in the days when he, with your hostess's uncle, cluny macpherson, fox maule, afterwards earl of dalhousie, and the duke of abercorn, danced the first reel that the queen ever saw in scotland at taymouth. by the way, mrs. chetwynd herself was a great performer in that line in her youth, and at some juvenile festivity she and another young highland friend danced the reel before the late prince consort. but you had forgotten thoroughly to inspect the picture of tulloch castle, so mrs. chetwynd sends for it. "i am sure," she says, "that my old home is the loveliest place in the world. part of it is very old, and it has been (through the female line) in our family since ." it has an old keep, and what was once the dungeon is now a wine cellar. the house stands very high up, though almost at the foot of ben wyvis, and over the park you see the far-famed strathpeffer, framed in the distance by the west coast hills. on the other side, also over the well-wooded park, are the cromarty frith, and dingwall nestling at its bend. the gardens are very large, and a good many acres are now not kept up. the approach to the front door is under a very old archway; and though a great part of the place was destroyed by fire some years ago, the walls, some of which are six feet thick, are intact. facing the south, it catches all the sunshine, and as the hills rise behind it everything is sheltered from the colder winds, and flowers and shrubs grow most luxuriantly. some scarlet rhododendrons of great height blossom in the winter out of doors. the place is now in the possession of mrs. chetwynd's nephew. your hostess recalls one little incident which she says was "an event in our lives. my father and cluny macpherson received the queen on the occasion of her visit to badenoch. she went to ardverikie, then rented from cluny by the duke of abercorn. my father took forty gillies with him, cluny had as many more, and they met her majesty on the edge of the property, and escorted her in true highland fashion. ardverikie was afterwards sold by cluny to sir john ramsden. the queen went to cluny castle, and examined the many relics of 'prince charlie' kept there with an interest which pleased all the family much. some of the sisters were there with my father." you are rising regretfully to leave, when the door opens, and captain chetwynd comes in. this fine old sailor greets you in the same genial manner which characterises the rest of the family. he is the chief inspector of the royal national life-boat institution. he is a great organiser, is deeply interested in his work, and his wife delights to think that his talents are now turned to saving, not to destroying life. she had previously confided to you, that not only is he one of the cleverest and best of men, but also one of the most straightforward and appreciative. the good, benevolent face carries its own testimony to the fact. a more happy, united family it would be impossible to find; mutual love and confidence reign supreme; when cares and anxieties come, as to whom do they not? they are shared by all, and thus is the burden lightened. [illustration: jean middlemass] jean middlemass. among the many quiet, shady nooks and corners to be found in the "busy, toiling, but ever pleasure-loving metropolis," where, if a student desire, she can be in the world, and yet out of its distracting roar, brompton square can claim to be one; not that it is really a "square" at all, but merely two long rows of houses, connected at the further end by a semi-circle composed of three or four larger houses. the gardens which separate the two lines of old-fashioned, solidly built dwellings, are thickly planted with shrubs and grand old trees, that in summer time quite shut out any view of the opposite neighbours, and ensure a delightful privacy, whilst the twittering of birds, and the cawing of the rooks, who have built their nests therein, undisturbed for many generations, would almost cheat a stranger into the belief that it is a bit out of a country village. alas! for the poor little buds which had struggled feebly into life before the devastating blizzard! they were all untimely nipped. spring has lingered so long in the "lap of winter," that the summer greenery is somewhat backward, yet, at last, the green shoots which have slept "through the long night" are beginning to burst out into strength, and the gummy, swelling buds of the great lilacs within the railings are coming out, and are already casting a delicious perfume around the peaceful and old-world enclosure. nearly every house in brompton square is associated with the names of men and women who have left their mark in the history of london, chiefly of those who belonged to the theatrical and musical professions. on yonder side mr. john baldwin buckstone, the well-known author-actor, entertained merry parties of wits. a few doors further on stands the house which mr. edward fitzwilliam--famous in his day as a musical composer--inhabited. spagnoletti, the leader of the italian opera orchestra, lived on the opposite side, and was succeeded in his tenancy by a famous and accomplished actress of those days, mrs. chatterly. mr. james vining, a much respected actor, owned the house which was afterwards occupied by the late mr. shirley brooks. george colman, the younger, lived and died there. mr. william farren, the elder, occupied one house, and owned another, which was the residence of mr. payne collier, who, as croker says in his interesting "walk from london to fulham," gave to the public several editions of shakespeare, and who was long distinguished by his profound knowledge of dramatic literature and history, and his extensive acquaintance with the early poetry of england. in contradistinction to these more amusing personages, there lived in a house on the east side a man of solid and profound learning, sir john stoddard, who, within these walls, wrote at the age of eighty-five, a polyglot grammar, which was much in use at schools of that period. in addition to these world-known and histrionic names may be added those of the late mr. yates, mr. john reeve, mr. robson, mr. liston, the comedian, and mr. henry luttrell, termed by lord byron "the great london wit," once well known in the circles of literature, the author of many epigrams, and of a volume of poetry. these have all been residents in brompton square, whilst, in later years, mr. and mrs. keeley inhabited a house on the south side, and mr. and mrs. chippendale lived a few doors further on. what could be more appropriate than that miss jean middlemass, author of "dandy," "patty's partner," "a girl in a thousand," and many other bright and interesting stories, should take up her abode in this time-honoured locality, so full of literary and dramatic associations? she has settled herself in one of the larger houses in the bend of the semi-circle at the top, which was erstwhile the dwelling-place of mr. alfred wigan. a spacious hall opens into two good-sized and lofty rooms, which are divided by massive doors, folded back, and draped with heavy moorish curtains of subdued colouring. it is all so old-fashioned as to be in thorough keeping with the exterior; but though old-fashioned, the comfortable rooms are by no means dull or gloomy. a flood of sunshine steals in through the long, high windows, lighting up the crimson coverings of the furniture, and casting a bright ray on the picture of a head of rembrandt, by himself, which is set in a handsomely-carved oak frame of great antiquity over the mantelshelf, on which stand three old and valuable spode jars. on one side hangs a painting by bowden of a lovely child, the son of frederick reynolds, the dramatic writer, and near it is one of rivière's elaborately finished and exquisite miniatures of the author's mother taken in her youth. there are some choice bits of dresden on a carved corner bracket, and scattered about here and there are several japanese and chinese curiosities, which have just been sent to miss middlemass from the east, including a magnificently carved junk, correct in every minute detail. surely the very smallest writing-table at which author ever sat belongs to jean middlemass; but that, too, was a present, and was originally made tall enough for her to write at while standing, but as that position was found to be quite too fatiguing it has been cut down to suit her present requirements. there is a beautiful old oak mounted carving on the wall--so old that she "can remember nothing about it or its subject," she says, "beyond the fact that we always seem to have possessed it, and it has been greatly admired." above it some delightfully quaint old china is arranged in a half circle; on either side hang four antique engravings of great value, classical subjects from boucher, the french artist's paintings. but the picture which she prizes more than all is a life-size portrait in oils, the last work that was ever finished by the artist jackson. it represents the author's grandfather. he held an appointment in the treasury, and was the one member of the family who had any connection with literature, being intimately acquainted in his youth with sir joseph banks, mdme. de stael, lady blessington, and other people of letters. there is a look in miss middlemass which proclaims the relationship. she is above the middle height, very upright, with a good figure, fair complexion, grey curly hair, and keen, bright-blue, short-sighted eyes. she is dressed in black, relieved by a little rose-coloured ribbon round the wrists and throat, tied in a bow on one side. she is sprightly and merry in nature, full of pleasant conversation, and genial in manner. jean middlemass is scottish by descent. she was born in one of the pleasant terraces surrounding regent's park. naturally a clever, intelligent girl, she began to write at a very early age, and, to encourage her in this taste, when yet quite a small child her father started a magazine for private circulation only, to which she, her brothers, and several other harrow boys used to contribute scraps and stories, aided by pieces from a few older persons to encourage the juveniles. she describes herself as having been quick at learning by heart, quick in everything, and fond of study. plays were her chief delight, and at eight years old she had read and could repeat pages of shakespeare, often astonishing her parents by apt quotations given with considerable dramatic power. her youthful enthusiasm in this direction soon, however, received a check, for on one occasion, being rebuked by her mother for some trifling fault, and told how much better people would think of her if she behaved well, she pathetically replied--coolly substituting a word at the end of the first line which she considered more suitable:-- amen; and make me die a good old age! that is the butt-end of a mother's blessing; i marvel that her grace did leave it out. for this piece of childish and precocious impertinence, as it was deemed, she was punished by the prompt confiscation of her beloved shakespeare, whereat she wept copiously. "i was kept hard at my lessons," says miss middlemass; "no expense or pains were spared to educate me well, and i enjoyed them. my father was a great student, and himself instructed me in latin and the rudiments of greek. i used to attend m. roche's french classes, and constant residence abroad has enabled me to speak french and german as fluently as english. music i disliked from the first, and when a tiny child, if my mother were singing, i used to cry out, 'speak it, speak it!' i do not care for music to this day, and rejoice in the exceeding thickness of the old walls of this house, which causes even the sound of neighbouring pianos to be quite undisturbing. history and biographies were always favourite studies, and i prefer reading french to english. for some years i wrote in a desultory sort of fashion, and it was not until after my mother's death, about fourteen years ago, that feeling lonely--for my four brothers all died young--i adopted writing as a profession." at the age of eighteen, being emancipated from the school-room, miss jean middlemass was brought out, made her _début_ at an early drawing room, and enjoyed the gaieties of two london seasons, but after the death of her father the family moved to brighton, where, later on, her inherent talent for acting asserted itself; she studied recitation and elocution, and constantly took part in amateur theatricals, sometimes playing in as many as four parts in one evening at the royal pavilion, coached by mrs. stirling. on one occasion she recited "lady macbeth" before a full audience at the dome, and she was always in great request at private parties, where she used to arrange and take part in tableaux, charades, proverbs, and such like entertainments. miss middlemass never acted in a theatre, though she may have had a strong desire to do so, and she smilingly confesses to being perhaps a little of the bohemian at heart, inasmuch as she dislikes formalities and conventionalities, and loves freedom of action. she has played esther in _caste_, pauline in _delicate ground_, lady aubrey glenmorris in _school for coquettes_, lady constance in a scene from _king john_, besides others too numerous to mention. her most successful recitations have been selections from the works of dante rossetti, and tennyson, hamilton aidé's "lost and found," and hood's "dream of eugene aram"; also scenes from plays--beatrice in _much ado about nothing_, and pauline in the _lady of lyons_. her memory being excellent, her _répertoire_ was very large, and, according to those who witnessed her performances, her histrionic powers entitled her to a prominent position in the thespian temple of fame, for in all that she undertook, whether in acting or reciting, she worked with indomitable energy, exhibiting the conceptions of a discriminating and educated mind, marked by the influence of a rich and cultivated taste. "after a few years," says miss middlemass, "i began to publish some of my stories, and as the love of writing grew upon me more and more, i found i could not write and act too, so as the histrionic amusements were gradually abolished, i turned my attention more exclusively to my pen, and wrote my first novel, 'lil.' my mother used to like my stories when they were out, though she never enjoyed them whilst in process of being written. i generally make out a vague plot of half a page, then draw it out into chapters, and arrange the characters. i prefer writing stories of middle or low class life, i don't know why; it came to me, and i often pick up ideas of the lower london life from standing about here and there to listen. i compose and write very quickly, going over it all several times; and i have never had much help, but have just struggled on through it alone. at night, when i go to bed, i work out all the thoughts and ideas which have suggested themselves during the day; often going to sleep in the middle of it, but in the morning it all comes back to me, and i write it out readily and rapidly." "lil," which is well calculated to keep alive the interest of the reader, and has, moreover, the merit of being animated in dialogue, was soon followed by "wild george," in which the beautiful but dangerous french adventuress and her faithful old soldier servant play so prominent a part. next came "baiting the trap," "mr. dorillon," "touch and go," succeeded by "sealed by a kiss" and "innocence at play." in all these works there is much insight into human nature, and the french scenes are particularly bright and life-like, betokening the author's intimate knowledge of foreign cities. "four-in-hand" was the sporting title of a volume of short stories. "sackcloth and broadcloth" contains some capital sketches of clerical life and its surroundings, about which miss middlemass has had considerable experience. perhaps up to that date she scored her greatest success with "dandy," written in ; of this book the critics and the public were unanimous in their applause. penetrating into the haunts of the poorest section of humanity in order to depict naturally and truthfully the scenes so touchingly described therein, she gained an unusual insight into their words and ways, their occasionally high, their too often low standard of morality. "patty's partner" is a delightful and interesting tale of the porcelain manufacture works in the west of england, where miss middlemass is as much at home as she is in the scenes in "dandy." it is full of humour and clever writing. among other of the author's works may be mentioned "poisoned arrows," "by fair means," "the loadstone of love," and "nelly jocelyn, widow." a three-volume story published lately, entitled "two false moves," contains some powerful pieces of writing, and the characters of derek home, ruth churchill, and the rev. john eagle are drawn to the life. her last work in one volume is entitled "how i became eminent." in poetry miss middlemass does not as much incline to modern writers as to the ancient classics in which she was so early instructed. in politics she is a strong conservative. until the last year or two she was, as may be supposed, a frequent visitor at the theatre, but being, unfortunately, so short-sighted, the necessity for using strong glasses temporarily strained her eyes, so that pleasure is partially laid aside for the present. miss middlemass is, as usual, full of literary engagements. a new novel is being meditated, though it may not actually be begun; several short stories are in requisition, and one appeared in an early number of john strange winter's weekly paper. among other enjoyments, jean middlemass delights in travelling; "not in the sea part of it," she adds, smiling; "i am an especially bad sailor, and do not like being on the water. i always take the shortest sea-routes." she has made many journeys on the continent, and in former days lived for a year in paris. she knows her paris well, and loves it so dearly that she has often felt that she would like to make her home in that gay and festive capital. she is equally familiar with brussels, and has been a good deal in germany, but only on the rhine, passing some time at wiesbaden, and paying what she describes as a "delightful visit to the old city of nuremberg." "i keep on my quarters in town," continues your hostess, "principally as a _pied-à-terre_. the severity of the long winter, then the sudden change of spring for a few days in february, following those dreadful fogs and frosts, and then the terrible gales and east winds, were all most trying, and i am again contemplating a trip abroad to more seasonable climates; first, a short tour in holland, then on to paris for a few weeks, and later, into north italy, perhaps on to venice, if the weather then be not too hot." the brightness and vivacity of foreign life suit well miss jean middlemass's happy disposition and sunny nature. blessed with good spirits, full of clever anecdote and harmless repartee, with great conversational power, her prevailing characteristic is an utter absence of selfishness and affectation. she has a soft, merry laugh, and a kind, warm heart. with this good gift, it is almost needless to say that she goes through life making no enemies, and many friends. in her ready wit there is no sting. before all things scandal and backbiting are an abomination to her; it has been truly quoted of this talented and amiable woman, as it has been said of many great and famous persons, "though knowledge is power, yet those who possess it are indulgent to weaker intellects, and become as one of them in sociability and friendship." [illustration: a. de grasse stevens] augusta de grasse stevens. among the younger american authors who have made their mark on the literature of the day, augusta de grasse stevens takes a high stand. highly educated and deeply read, as well versed in the political and civil history of her own country as in that of the land of her adoption, her mind expanded by much continental travel, and inheriting the talents of her brilliantly gifted parents, it is no wonder that she should have attained the depth of thought, the originality of idea, and the fluency of expression which characterise her writings. the young author, who is _petite_ in stature, and slight in figure, with grey-blue eyes and brown hair, was born in albany, on the hudson river, the capital city of new york, a quaint old dutch town that bears to this day many marked peculiarities of its rich founders, whose manor lands, granted by royal patent, stretched far and wide along the river banks. her father was the hon. samuel stevens, one of the most brilliant lawyers the american bar has ever produced; his opinions are still quoted in legal matters on both sides of the ocean. he was a man of the keenest intellect, and most wonderful memory; a power wherever he appeared, and one who had the reputation of never losing a case. the courtesy title was bestowed upon him by the state legislature in recognition of his great services to that body. he was the life-long friend of such men as chancellor walworth, henry clay the statesman, and daniel webster, who declared that "in his opinion mr. stevens as a lawyer stood first in the united states, and that as a colleague he welcomed him in every case, but as an opponent he hoped each case would be the last." from mr. stevens' conduct of so many cases, involving important inventions, he has been called unanimously "the founder of american patent law." "mr. phelps, the late u.s. minister, has often told me," says miss stevens, "that he, as a young man, used to travel miles to hear my father argue a case, such a lesson was it in eloquence and profound legal knowledge, and he retained as one of his happiest memories the remembrance of certain interviews he had had with him in which he learned more from my father than in hours of study and private research. my paternal grandmother was of french birth and lineage. she was mdlle. marie de grasse, the daughter of pierre de grasse, who was a brother of the famous admiral comte de grasse, the intimate friend of la fayette, whose patriotism, like his own, was devoted to the american cause. her parents left france in the seventeenth century, and established themselves in a country home not far from albany. my grandmother was very beautiful, and retained her beauty to an advanced age, and it is from her we take the name of de grasse. my great-grandfather was an ardent patriot, and i have often heard my aunt say, that stored away in the attic of their house were trunks full of 'national paper bonds,' not worth the paper on which they were printed, but which represented the sums that he had advanced to the american government during the war of independence, and which afterwards they were unable to redeem. my father married rather late in life, my mother being only a girl of eighteen at the time. she was very charming in manner and appearance and highly educated." on the maternal side, miss de grasse stevens can trace her descent back without a break to that brave simon de warde who fought with the conqueror and who fell at hastings, and whose name is engraved on the battle abbey roll, among those for whom "prayer perpetual is to be offered up" within the abbey walls. the wards emigrated to america some time in the year , and settled in new england. they were staunch puritans and patriots, and begrudged neither life, nor money, nor substance to the cause. general artemas ward, one of washington's chief generals, early distinguished himself in the service, and he was but one in a long line of similar instances. it was while walking through an old churchyard in connecticut that the late samuel brown, coming upon general artemas ward's tomb-stone, first saw the name that he afterwards adopted and made world-famous in a far different fashion. miss stevens can remember well her great-grandfather ward, though she was only a child when he died. he was a typical gentleman of the old school, and wore to the day of his death his hair tied in a _queue_, the knee breeches, silk stockings, low shoes with gold buckles, fine cambric frill, and neckerchief of his time. her childish recollections are full of pictures of him, and she can shut her eyes and recall without effort the long, sunny drawing-room, so still, and full of a certain awe, the trees outside bending in the summer wind, the warm crimson hangings at the wide windows, the fire on the open hearth, burning there all the year round, and the great arm-chair drawn close within its rays, in which was seated the dignified figure of her great-grandfather, dr. levi ward, his beautiful clean-shaven face, slightly stern when in repose, breaking into a kindly smile at the first sound of his daughter's voice. by his side on a little table lay the great bible, always open, which he knew literally by heart, and from which, when the blindness of old age came upon him, he could repeat chapter after chapter with unfailing accuracy. "my great-grandmother, his wife, i cannot remember," says miss stevens, "but she, too, was a remarkably handsome woman, and one who throughout her whole life held a distinguished position in society as well as being a leader in all philanthropic and charitable undertakings. their beautiful home, grove place, rochester, new york, was the perfection of a country seat, and about it cluster many tender memories and associations. their daughter married my grandfather, mr. silas smith, whose daughter in turn became my father's wife, and went with him to his home in albany, where she soon won for herself a position of much responsibility, and became, puny as she was, a recognised power in all social matters. my father died when i was very young, and my earliest recollections do not date beyond his death. my mother, a young widow, returned with her little family to her father's home, woodside, just out of rochester, and with that dear and beautiful home all my happiest, fondest memories are knit up indissolubly. woodside was a typical home; a large and spacious mansion set in the midst of acres of park land, gardens, and meadows. i think there never was just such a home! everything that refinement, cultivation, and wealth could procure surrounded us, yet all was distributed and governed with so just and wise a hand that luxurious ostentation and wastefulness were never known amongst us. here i grew from babyhood to girlhood, and to the fond remembrance and recollection of life there my thoughts turn always when i speak or think of--_home_." the young american author describes her mother and her system of education in touching and eloquent words. her mother, she says, was possessed of one of those rare, unselfish natures to whom personal grief was unknown. even in her early widowhood her first thought was for her children, and to their care and education she devoted herself unsparingly. possessing a gifted mind and great personal attractions, a voice of unusual sweetness and power, and a heart that literally did not know the meaning of the word self, she called forth in everyone with whom she came in contact the greatest admiration and affection. "her children loved her passionately," says miss stevens. "how well i can remember when i was but a tiny mite of five, how she would gather us all around her in the grey winter afternoons, and with me nestled close at her knee, read to us by the hour together, but not fairy tales or story books. she went straight to the big heart of shakespeare, of longfellow, of tennyson, of thackeray, of dickens, and opening the treasure-houses of their genius, read them to us with only such explanations and changes as necessity required to meet the status of her youthful audience. i cannot remember the time when shakespeare was unknown to me, or when the poet laureate, and campbell, and dickens, were not dear, familiar friends. out of this galaxy of riches, _the tempest_, _midsummer night's dream_, _hiawatha_, and _dombey and son_, stand out clearest in my mind. then she would sing to us, play to us, and so we became familiar with mendelssohn, mozart, schubert, and with all the plaintive, old english ballads and scotch border songs; and in the morning hours, while she was busy with a large correspondence and literary work, my dear grandmother taught us, my sister and me, to sew, cut out, and knit, inculcating meantime many a goodly lesson in charity, kindliness, and thoughtfulness for others. to my dear mother, indeed, i owe all that i am. she is gone from me now, but to her clear mind, wise criticism, and sound judgment is due whatever literary reputation i may have earned. i wrote for her, _she_ was my public!" this beloved home was ever one of open hospitality, and to it came at all times guests of every kind. here, miss stevens tells you, her grandfather had welcomed talleyrand and louis napoleon, and here in later days gathered many a company of literary giants whose names are now household words. after six years of widowhood her mother married the late mr. john fowler butterworth, a man who was universally beloved and respected, of high position, wealth, and great personal attractions. "we all went with them to the new home in new york," adds miss stevens. "he was the only father i have ever known, and i loved him most tenderly." from this time the family spent much of their time on the continent of europe. miss stevens and her sister were educated in paris, having for their instructress a very charming and capable woman, who had been _gouvernante_ to the orleans princesses. it was their habit to spend at least three months of every year abroad, and in this way the young girl saw much more of foreign countries than her own. italy, switzerland, france, germany, the tyrol, each were visited in turn, and such was the method of their travelling that every country and town were indelibly and individually impressed upon her memory. rome, florence, geneva, verona, turin, munich, innspruck, each one and all are to her bright with particular associations. after her stepfather's death miss stevens and her mother settled permanently in london, where they had many friends and many family ties, her sister having married and made her home in england. the young author's first literary efforts were begun at a very early age. "i can scarcely," she says, "remember a time when i did not scribble. my first attempt was a sermon on the text 'god is love,' and i distinctly recollect how and where i wrote it, crouched behind a long swinging glass in my mother's bed-room, printing it off in capital letters--writing being then far beyond my attainments--and getting very hot and flushed in the effort." her next attempt was a decided advance. her sister and two cousins had established a small home newspaper, called the _dorcas gazette_, price one halfpenny, circulation strictly private and confidential, its end and aim being the helping of the "dorcas society," a body formed to make clothes for the poor. the circulation amounted to six copies a week, each of which had to be written out in fair round hand on two sheets of foolscap paper. to this ambitious venture she was invited to contribute, and for two years was writer in chief, furnishing serials, short stories, and anecdotes, her sister doing the political and poetical parts. "i have still," says miss stevens, smiling, "one or two of those old 'gazettes,' time-stained and yellow; i look on them with the utmost respect, and feel that for harrowing plot and thrilling adventure, my 'serial' in five chapters, called 'blonde and brunette,' beats the record of any of my subsequent work!" her first book, written when she was seventeen, was a small novelette called "distance." it was published by appleton, of new york, and was well received and reviewed. on coming to london, miss de grasse stevens was asked by the proprietor of the principal american journal, the _new york times_, to prepare for them a series of articles upon english art and artists, and for ten years she filled the position of special art critic to that paper, her letters upon london artists and their studios being the first of the kind ever written, while her account--a two-column article--of the private view and pictures at the royal academy, which appeared in the morning edition in new york the next day, was the first "art-cable" sent across the wires. her first short story, written long ago, appeared in _harper's magazine_. she wrote it secretly, and sent it off furtively. it was called "auf wiedersehn," and was subsequently translated into german, and reprinted in many english papers. "after sending it off," she relates, "i waited in sickening suspense for ten long days, and when at last a letter came bearing the well-known franklin-square stamp, i dared not open it. when i did i fell upon the floor and cried bitterly from bewildering joy! it contained a satisfactory cheque, and a request for 'more matter of the same sort.' from that moment the spell of literature held me as in a vice. i have never known a moment of purer, more unalloyed joy than that, and to it i owe my perseverance in the 'thorny path.'" miss de grasse stevens's first three-volume novel was called "old boston." it was originally published by sampson low & co., and has since been brought out in one volume edition. its reception was more than flattering, and the reviews upon it were such as a much older and more experienced writer might be pleased to win. the story is partly historical, and is founded on the events just preceding the siege of boston and the declaration of american independence. keenly attracted beyond aught else by history, especially by the history of her own country, in which there is stored away such treasures of romance, of reality, of poetry, and of pathetic prose--the young american writer has, in this delightful romance of a hundred years ago, given clear evidence of her thorough knowledge of her subject; each character is strongly individualised; true pathos and purity of style mark every page; you are carried back a century, yet can feel with unflagging interest that the persons described are living fellow-creatures. the descriptive writing is artistically fine, the love story is tenderly and pathetically told, whilst the whole betokens careful study and research. this book gained for miss de grasse stevens countless kind and flattering letters from old and, as yet, unknown friends. "some of my dearest and most trusty friendships," she says, "i owe to it; first and foremost in which was that of the late mr. kinglake. i had known his family in taunton for some time, but to 'old boston' i owed the friendship of the author, which ended not with his death, for i am certain such friendships are eternal." she contemplates some day writing a sequel to this book, bringing the history part of it down to the famous battle of valley forge and the bombardment and surrender of new york. the author's next work, "weighed in the balance," was a short story written for mr. w. stevens's _magazine of fiction_, and was of the sensational school. over a hundred thousand copies were sold, and for this, too, she received so much praise and so many letters that she declares herself to have been "greatly surprised"; among them were two which she prized highly, one from the late earl granville and the other from the late earl spencer, who both wrote that the scenes being laid at deal, the book was particularly interesting to them, especially the parts relating to the goodwin sands, and the historic, but decayed old town of sandwich. this book was followed by one that caused a good deal of stir--a historical monograph called "the lost dauphin," in which the writer took up the mysterious fate of little louis xvii., and advanced the theory that he did not die in the temple but was stolen from there and carried to america, where he was deposited with the indian tribe of the iroquois and was eventually taken east, educated and trained as a missionary under the name of ealeazer williams. the book is illustrated by three portrait engravings. it called forth a storm of controversy and a great number of reviews amongst all the leading journals, the majority of which frankly accepted her hypothesis. innumerable letters poured in from all sorts and conditions of people, mostly scholars and men interested in out-of-the-way questions. the late mr. kinglake was particularly keen on it, and miss stevens has a large packet of highly prized letters from him, devoted to the discussion of the theory that she had advanced and in which he thoroughly believed. this, from so great a scholar as the author of "eöthen" and "the crimea," was praise worth having. the late robert browning was another _litterateur_ who wrote in commendation of the book, as did mrs. gladstone, henry james, mr. russell lowell, miss sewell, mr. phelps, and many others. "miss hildreth" is the name of miss de grasse stevens's next three-volume novel, which, following as it did closely after the sensation made by "the lost dauphin," attracted great attention both in france and england. the scenes are laid in st. petersburg and new york, amidst the society with which she was most familiar. the plot is original, the story is conspicuous by the ability with which it is written, and proves how thoroughly and conscientiously she studies the subject that she has on hand. very powerfully drawn is the account of the fortress prison of petropavosk, the descriptions of scenery show how entirely the author is in touch with nature in her every aspect, while the scene of the trial betrays the logical mind and power of argument which she has inherited from her distinguished father. "miss hildreth" is moreover from "start to finish" deeply interesting and exciting, and displays the same experienced pen and graceful language, free from any exaggeration or straining after effect that is so conspicuous in "old boston." mr. gladstone, in his letter to her about "miss hildreth," after expressing his deep interest in its _motif_, writes, "i thank you very much for the work you have been so good as to send me. both your kindness and the subjects to which it refers, make me very desirous to lose no time in beginning it." the young author has just finished a new novel in one volume, called "the sensation of a season," which will shortly be published, and is completing another to be called "a romantic inheritance." the former work is absolutely different in style, and deals chiefly with american society in london. besides fiction, miss stevens writes several weekly articles for american syndicates, and is a contributor to a south african magazine on more abstruse subjects. she has written, on and off, special articles, by request, for the _saturday review_ since , notably among these, papers on "old american customs," and on "the position of needlewomen in london," bearing upon the work depôt established in cartwright street, westminster, by the hon. mrs. william lowther and miss burke; also an amusing account of "christmas in america fifty years ago," in the christmas number of a weekly paper, and she has for a long time been a regular writer on the _argosy_ staff. mention must not be omitted of a particular article called "the beautiful madame grand, princesse de talleyrand," for which mr. cassell sent specially to versailles to copy the portrait in the grand gallery for the frontispiece of the magazine. this was followed by a series of illustrated biographical sketches in the _lady's pictorial_--"american ladies at home in london." when engaged on a novel miss stevens puts no pen to paper. "i think it all out in my head," she says, "before writing a word, chiefly when travelling; the movement of the train has a peculiar fascination for me. i make no notes. when it is all complete in my brain, i write straight away with no effort of memory." but with all her increasing literary work, miss de grasse stevens finds time for a little recreation in exercising her talents for modelling and painting. in both of these arts she is no mean proficient. the gift is inherited from her lamented mother, who painted much for the royal family, and who counted among her personal friends h.r.h. princess louise, marchioness of lorne. sir frederick leighton, another valued friend, used to say that her power of colouring was especially wonderful. the young author is a very early riser, and is up and out of doors every morning before seven. she writes from ten till three, and divides her time between her sister's beautiful country home in kent and the pretty little house at west kensington, where she stays with a dear aunt and uncle, dr. hand smith, well known in the scientific world of london for his discovery of the endolithic process, about which the late sir edgar boehm was so enthusiastic an admirer. this little abode may be briefly described as distinctly artistic. the rooms are olive-green in colour, and contain several cherished reminiscences of her mother. the great "alexandre" american walnut-wood organ--both reed and wind--reaching to the ceiling, is quite unique. on a draped easel stands a large mounted plaque of gorgeous florida poinsettias, painted by her mother in a method discovered by herself, a _replica_ of the design she furnished to the queen. another, almost as beautiful, of different-coloured pansies, by the same beloved hand, adorns the mantelshelf. many well-used volumes of tennyson, browning, whittier, thackeray, and of mrs. lynn linton fill the bookshelves. "i delight in mrs. lynn linton's books and papers," says your hostess; "i call her the modern crusader, and read everything that she writes with much pleasure." among these works you notice an "in memoriam" monograph by miss stevens of william kinglake, illustrated with his portrait, and a picture of his home, wilton house, taunton, both of which he gave to her. there are a few good pictures on the walls: two of morland's are especially attractive, _lunette_ in shape, first proofs before letters engraved by nutter. yonder hang a couple of paintings of her sister's kentish home, an old red-brick elizabethan building, with the peculiar white facings and low white door belonging especially to the tudor days, surrounded by park lands, lawns, and very old fruit orchards, which are at this season bright with yellow daffodils. tradition assigns to it a veritable ghost, whose uneasy spirit walks every all saints' eve! a packet of letters from great men lies on a little table near. from them miss stevens selects some from gladstone, kinglake, and irving. this last was written on the appearance of her papers in the leading boston and new york journals on the subject of "macbeth." she has new and pleasant work now on hand as art editor of the _novel review_, in which her late biographical monograph upon "john oliver hobbes" elicited more than ordinary comment from the general press; also a fresh and important post in connection with a smart new york society journal. "i particularly like the prospect opened out in this new field of journalism," remarks miss de grasse stevens quietly, "as it gives me greater freedom of subject as well as of treatment. i am delighted, too," she adds, smiling, "with the mere thought of grappling with any little difficulties that may arise on the subject." and to these "little difficulties" you leave the bright young american writer, feeling sure that her clever brain will guide her able pen to solve them aright. [illustration: bertha leith-adams] mrs. leith adams (mrs. laffan). it is a lovely day in early springtime. a gentle south-west wind is just stirring the meadows, and the young birds are chirping gaily in the hedgerows which are beginning to put forth their tiny buds. all nature seems awake and smiling; truly a fitting morn on which to visit stratford-on-avon, the place so fraught with memories of the immortal bard. you have been so fortunate as to make the long journey from london in the company of the well-known and popular captain gerard, late of the rd welsh fusiliers, and as he has been for some years a resident in these parts, he has given you the _carte du pays_ and much useful and interesting information. the town of stratford-on-avon is beautifully situated on the south-west border of warwickshire on a gentle eminence rising from the bank of the avon. as the train glides into the station, mrs. leith adams is seen standing on the platform. she has come to meet you, accompanied by many dogs, who insist on jumping into the carriage as an escort home. on leaving the station the road runs past the hospital, down the wonderfully broad high-street of the town with its venerable houses on either side, and as the beautiful old porch of the guild chapel (of which mr. laffan is incumbent) comes into view, the pony turns down chapel-lane and draws up at the school house. entering the porch into the hall you face the head master's study on the left, a charming room and evidently the haunt of a scholar. the next room on the same floor has two french windows opening on to the garden. in a nook by one of these windows mrs. leith adams does her writing with the shades of george eliot looking down on her, and a fine photograph of her youngest son now in australia. wandering about the grounds into which these windows look are six beautiful peacocks, a comical cockatoo, a seagull, so tame that it comes up when called, two white broken-haired terriers, and a wise-looking pug. on the left stands a tree with cocoanuts tied upon it, where countless blue-eyed tits congregate all day long. the wide winding staircase leads up to the drawing-room, where you find yourself among shades of olive green, and a roving glance is caught by two magnificent old china jars, standing on either side of the fire-place, once full of unguents belonging to the knights of st. john of jerusalem, and found in the vaults under the palace at malta. the side window looks across the school gardens to the memorial theatre, a fine domed building on the banks of the river, and the three windows in the front look over new place gardens where lie the foundations of the house where shakespeare died, and where in henrietta maria, queen of charles i., was hospitably received and entertained for three days by shakespeare's daughter. it was as the wife of the late surgeon-general a. leith adams, f.r.s., ll.d., m.d., that the author of "aunt hepsy's foundling" (by which story the name of mrs. leith adams is best known to the public) entered on her career as a novelist. having been much struck during a visit to scotland by the character and personality of a venerable minister of the presbyterian church, she resolved to attempt to make him the centrepiece of a short story. of this resolve the result was "keane malcombe's pupil," since republished under the title of "mabel meredith's love story." her first essay in fiction met with instant success. without any previous acquaintance with, or introduction to, the present mr. charles dickens, the author offered her ms. to _all the year round_. it was at once accepted and published in the year , from which time up to the present mrs. leith adams has been continuously a member of mr. dickens's staff. a more ambitious effort followed in the year when "winstowe," her first three-volume novel, was brought out. it bore marks of great inexperience, but had a certain limited sale in england and a wider one in america. in the following year "madelon lemoine" was issued, a book which has made its way steadily among a section of the community, and is looked upon by many critics as the foremost among the author's earlier works; but it was not until the publication of "aunt hepsy's foundling" that her name came prominently before the public. a remarkable notice in a leading journal resulted in a second edition being promptly called for. this has been followed by two other editions, each in one volume, also one in america and one in germany. in writing this book mrs. leith adams was inspired by the recollections of life in new brunswick, in which country she had spent nearly five years with her husband's regiment--the st battalion "cheshire." the novelty of the scene and the freshness of its treatment secured for the work a prompt success, and it was spoken of by a weekly review as "an almost perfect novel of its kind." the author has enjoyed very exceptional advantages as preparation for a literary career. married at an early age, when the impression of a girl's life are peculiarly vivid, she was but six months in ireland with the "cheshire" when that regiment was ordered on foreign service. her presentation at the irish vice-regal court, over which the scholarly lord carlisle then held sway, the brilliant festivities at the castle, _réunions_ at the house of sir henry and lady marsh, where she met all the men of letters in dublin, the happy _camaraderie_ of regimental life; all these things, so new to her, passed like a flash, and were exchanged for the troopship, and ultimately for lands and societies strangely differing the one from the other. the sunshine, orange groves, and military pomp and glitter of life in malta were succeeded by the sound of the sleigh bells over the snow, the wonders of the sudden springtime, and the gorgeous "fall" of new brunswick, and, after nine years' wandering, the beautiful coast scenery of guernsey; then once again the delights of soldiering in ireland, this time in the south, where the lovely climate, devoted friends, and the charm of being near home once more, have, as your hostess expresses it, "all made the memories of those days most dear to me." mrs. leith adams did not begin to write whilst still a very young woman. she says of herself that although the idea may have been in her mind, she wished to wait until she had great stores of experience and observation upon which to draw. some of these experiences have been of an intense and exceptional character. during the great cholera epidemic which visited the island of malta in --after sending home to england her only little child for safety--she devoted herself to the care of the sick and dying in her husband's regiment, in company with a band of soldiers' wives, who gladly and fearlessly gave themselves to the good work. many of her experiences during this awful time are to be found in the pages of "madelon lemoine," but in one instance (not there alluded to) it may be said that mrs. leith adams ran extraordinary and perilous risk, such as rendered her entire immunity from harm little short of miraculous, whilst she also had the satisfaction of seeing the woman whom she was attending gradually recover from the fell disease that so seldom spares the victim that it has once attacked. after twenty-five years' service with the old regiment, dr. leith adams obtained a staff appointment connected with the recruiting department at the horse guards, and this brought himself and his wife to london, where they continued to reside for some years. it was during this period that her literary career began. at the time of her husband's death she was under an agreement to supply a serial story to a leading magazine, in fact she had one, and only one, chapter written towards that weekly instalment of "copy" necessary during such a process, "but," she says, "i shall ever remember with the deepest gratitude, the prompt generosity with which the editor, on hearing of my bereavement and of my subsequent illness, made arrangements to give me time." as soon as she was able to resume her pen, mrs. leith adams completed and published "geoffrey stirling," first in the pages of _all the year round_, and then in three-volume form. this story has had its share of popularity, and a "picture-board" edition of it has been issued lately. "amongst the many other advantages i enjoyed," she remarks, "i rank by no means least the society of the many eminent and scientific men that my husband's tastes and attainments opened to me. i can look back upon gatherings round the hospitable board of sir joseph and lady hooker at the royal society gardens, which included such men as the late william spottiswoode, p.r.s., professor huxley, professor flower, and of foreign _savans_ not a few, occasions on which i would gladly have found myself possessed of not two ears alone, but twenty, and when to listen to the conversation of the charmed circle was indeed a liberal education. at the _soirées_ of the royal society i used to delight in meeting all the talent of this and many another country, and i hold the very strongest opinions as to the unspeakable advantage that it is to a woman to listen to highly gifted and deeply learned men discussing questions and knowledge of the greatest and most vital importance." in the autumn of , mrs. leith adams married, _en secondes noces_, the rev. r. s. de courcy laffan, m.a., eldest son of the late lieut.-general sir robert michael laffan, k.c.m.g., r.e., governor of the bermudas. mr. laffan is head-master of king edward vi. school at stratford-on-avon, the school at which shakespeare received his early education. he is a refined scholar, a most able preacher, and on his staff are men of high university degrees and much culture, so that, as mrs. laffan, the author's lines are still cast among intellectual surroundings. she has thrown herself into the interests of school-life as earnestly as she did into that of a regiment, and of social life in london, and amidst all the claims of her literary work contrives to find time to give the most minute care to the health, comfort, and happiness of the boys under her husband's roof. it is impossible to see her in their midst, whether they be tall striplings preparing to become defenders of their country or little fellows in sailor suits just introduced to the surroundings of school, with its pleasures and its trials, without recognising, as they cluster about her in their own sitting-rooms, or in her drawing-room, that she has completely won their hearts and that her influence among them is one of the factors in the rapidly increasing success of the school. at the annual speech day, mrs. laffan personally designs all the costumes of the play, shakesperean or otherwise, and on the last occasion of this kind wrote the play for the junior boys and composed the music incidental to it. one of the later novels by mrs. leith adams (who prefers to retain her former name in her literary capacity) is "louis draycott," in which the reader will find many traces of the influence of school life, and the study of the characteristics of boys. "no one but a woman could have filled in these tiny canvases," remarked a critic; "nor are evidences wanting of her being surrounded by the classic traditions of stratford-on-avon. thoroughly imbued with shakespeare, she has judiciously, to a certain extent allowed him to influence her diction, but never obtrusively." it is only natural that the author should miss in her country home the literary, musical, and artistic society of london, where she has so many friends, but she has made acquaintances too in warwickshire, where she has the privilege of meeting men and women eminent in the world of letters. stratford-on-avon is of itself a shrine to which so many distinguished pilgrims, especially americans, are drawn, that charming, unexpected meetings often take place and friendships are cemented when she takes her many visitors to see the interesting places in the town. "bonnie kate, a story from a woman's point of view," was the writer's next work. it had a successful career, and was followed by "a garrison romance," wherein military reminiscences figure largely and many characters are sketched from life. a story in the same line, entitled "colour-sergeant no. company," is shortly to appear, also a novel in three volumes called "the peyton romance." a late small volume, "the cruise of the tomahawk," was written by mrs. leith adams in collaboration with her husband and a friend; the poems with which it is interspersed and the small illustrations are from the pen of mr. laffan. at the church congress held at cardiff in she read a paper upon "fiction viewed in relation to christianity," and she says that she has some intention of giving a lecture during the present year on the subject of "literature as a profession for women." as regards her mode of work, she remarks: "the plots which i find the easiest to work out are those which have been thought over the longest: the word 'long' here stands for a great deal. the plot and characters of 'bonnie kate' have been under consideration, and the subject of the accumulation of constant notes for the last eight years, dating from a visit to a yorkshire farmstead for the express purpose of obtaining the colouring and atmosphere necessary to the delineation of 'low cross farm.'" of mrs. leith adams' minor works, it may be said that "my land of beulah" has had a quite exceptional popularity, and "cosmo gordon," with its delightful self-made man, mr. japp, has had its full share of admirers. "mathilde's love story," published two years ago in the spring number of _all the year round_, is a memory of guernsey, and "georgie's wooer" is a reminiscence of life in the south of ireland. mrs. leith adams is an ardent musician and accomplished pianist, and as there are several good violinists among the masters and boys of shakespeare's school, concerted music is often the order of the day, more especially at her thursday afternoon "at homes." there is a long gap between the publication of "geoffrey stirling" and that of "louis draycott," but various causes combined to make this so. further very heavy bereavements, variable health, anxiety as to the health of her son (mr. francis lauderdale adams, now well known as poet and journalist in australia), the necessity for his leaving england, the same long anxiety with the same results in the case of her younger son--a most promising boy, whose health broke down just when his prospects seemed brightest: all these causes militated for some years against continuous mental effort. the pen is now, however, once more resumed, and no doubt a group of what may be called "later novels" will be the result. in addition to the high value she places upon long consideration of a projected novel, mrs. leith adams holds that to write well, you must read well. she is convinced that the style and tone of what people read thoughtfully, sensibly affects their own diction. "i am," she observes, "a devoted admirer of mrs. carlyle, and have read again and again those thrilling letters in which all a woman's innermost life and sorrows, and heart story are laid bare. i am of opinion that had jane welsh carlyle seen fit to make literature a profession, that she would have taken rank second only to that apostle of female culture and ambitions, george eliot. shakespeare, browning, tennyson, and all biographies of great men, are the reading that i love best. carlyle himself only comes second to his wife in my estimation, and at the feet of charles dickens i worshipped in my girlhood. (this influence is distinctly traceable in much of her work.) mrs. gaskell, miss austen, charlotte brontë's 'jane eyre,' and many of miss broughton's works, george meredith, baring gould, and, above all, george eliot--these among english fiction are my favourites, whilst in french, dumas' _chevalier de la maison rouge_, and many of octave feuillet's are my companions. if i like a book i read it again and again; if i like a play i go to see it again and again. it is like learning to know more and more of one whom you love." like most writers, mrs. leith adams has had some strange and funny experiences in letters from people unknown and never to be known, and in the calm impertinences--probably not intended--of people absolutely ignorant of literary knowledge, as for instance when a peculiarly _banale_ woman remarked to her, "i'm sure i could write novels quite as well as you _if i were not so weak in the wrist_," which was assuredly locating the mental faculties rather low down; and another, a perfect stranger, who called upon her in london and said with startling candour, "i want to make some money, i'm going to write a novel. _how do you begin?_" later on, a visit to the schools is suggested, and, escorted by your hosts, you make a tour round these interesting premises. the schools, the chapel, and the vicarage house form three sides of a quaint old-world quadrangle, in which it is easy to forget for a moment the nineteenth century, and to dream oneself back into the middle ages. the guild chapel, one of the most interesting buildings in stratford, was founded by the brethren of the guild of the holy cross. the chancel dates from the thirteenth century, but the nave is of more recent construction. the next building bears an inscription, "king edward vi. school," though its real founder was thomas jolyffe, one of the priests of the guild, who built the old latin schoolroom in . the unpretending exterior scarcely prepares you for the quaint beauty of the interior. on entering you find yourself in a long panelled room, which is the old guild hall, where the earl of worcester's players gave their representations in shakespeare's day. on the same floor is a class room called the armoury with jacobean panelling, and a fresco of the arms of the kings of england. a narrow staircase leads to a little room on the left, where a few years ago several th century mss. were discovered. then comes the council chamber with its splendid oak roof and jacobean table, and on the wall there are two curious frescoes of roses painted in to commemorate the termination for ever of the terrible wars of the roses. next to it is the mathematical room, but it is on leaving that, and entering the old latin room, that you feel impressed with the great antiquity and beauty of the building. the roof is one of the finest specimens of the open roof in the country. it was in this and the adjoining room that the poet received his education, and from it the desk which tradition assigns to him was taken. it now stands in the museum at the birthplace, which place you are duly taken to visit and also the church of holy trinity, where at the entrance to the altar, on a slab covering the ashes of the poet, is an inscription written by himself, together with his bust painted into a strict likeness, even to the complexion, the colour of the hair and eyes, and you leave all these interesting relics with a strong conviction that no better cicerone could be found than mr. and mrs. laffan to do the honours of the ancient and historic buildings of shakespeare's school and the "sacred places of stratford-on-avon"-- "where sleep the illustrious dead, where lies the dust of him whose fame immortal liveth still and will live evermore." [illustration: jean ingleow] jean ingelow. "talent does what it may; genius, what it must." to no one could the definition apply more appropriately than to the well-known and gifted poetess, jean ingelow. she came into the world full-blown; she was a poet in mind from infancy; she was born just as she is now, without improvement, without deterioration. from her babyhood, when she could but just lisp her childish hymns, she was always distressed if the rhyme were not perfect, and as she was too young to substitute another word with the same meaning, she used simply to make a word which was an echo of the first, quite oblivious of the meaning. every trifling incident, a ray of sunlight, a flower, a singing bird, a lovely view--all inspired her with a theme for expression, and she had a joy in so expressing herself. jean ingelow was born near boston, lincolnshire. she was one of a large family of brothers and sisters; she was never sent to school, and was brought up entirely at home, partly by teachers of whom she regrets to say she was too much inclined to make game, but more by her mother, who, being a very clever woman of a poetical turn of mind, mainly educated her numerous family herself. her father was a banker at suffolk, a man of great culture and ability. "it was a happy, bright, joyous childhood," says miss ingelow; "there was an originality about us, some of my brothers and sisters were remarkably clever, but all were droll, full of mirth, and could caricature well. we each had a most keen sense of the ridiculous. two of the boys used to go to a clergyman near for instruction, where there was a small printing machine. we got up a little periodical of our own and used all to write in it, my brothers' schoolfellows setting up the type. it was but the other day one of these old schoolfellows dined with us, and reminded me that he had put my first poems into type." many of these verses are still in existence, but the girl-poet had yet another place, and an entirely original one, where in secret she gave expression to her muse. in a large upper room where she slept, the windows were furnished with old-fashioned folding shutters, the backs of which were neatly "flatted," and formed an excellent substitute for slate or paper. "they were so convenient," she remarks, smiling. "i used to amuse myself much in this way. i opened the shutters and wrote verses and songs on them, and then folded them in. no one ever saw them until one day when my mother came in and found them, to her great surprise." many of these songs, too, were transmitted to paper and were preserved. whilst on a visit to some friends in essex, jean ingelow and some young companions wrote a number of short stories and sent them for fun to a periodical called _the youth's magazine_. she signed her contributions "orris," and was delighted when she received an intimation that they were accepted and that the editor "would be glad to get more of them." meantime, she went on accumulating a goodly store of poems, songs, and verses; many were burnt and others directly they were written were carefully hidden away in old manuscript books, but the day was fast approaching when they were to see the light. in the affectionate give and take of a witty, united, and cultured family, her brothers and sisters used to laugh merrily at her efforts and often parodied good-naturedly her poems, though secretly they were proud of them. the method of bringing out this book, which was her first great success and was destined shortly to become so famous, was very curious. a brother wishing to give her pleasure offered to contribute to have her mss. printed. this was done, and the next move was to take them to a publisher, mr. longman. "my mother and i went together," says miss ingelow; "she consented to allow my name to appear; we were all rather flustered and excited over it, it seemed altogether so ridiculous." very far from "ridiculous," however, was the result. mr. longman at first looked doubtful, but soon recognising the merits of the work, took up the matter warmly, with the excellent effect that in the first year four editions of a thousand copies each were sold and the young poet's fame was secured. the book bore the simple and unpretending title, "poems, by jean ingelow." "it was a long time before i could make up my mind if i liked it or not," says the author. "i could not help writing, it is true, but it seemed to make me unlike other people; being one of so many and being supposed to be sensible, and to behave on the whole like other people, and trying to do so, and delighting in the companionship of my own family more than in any other, i am not at all sure that i was pleased when i was suddenly called a poet, because that is a circumstance more than most others which sets one apart, but they were all so joyous and made much fun over it." this first volume of poems has been re-published and yet again and again, until up to the present time it has reached its twenty-sixth edition, in different forms and sizes. one of these was brought out as an _édition de luxe_, and is profusely illustrated. jean ingelow's poetry is too well known and widely read to need much comment. in this remarkable volume, probably the most quoted and best recollected verses are to be found under the title of "divided," "song of seven," "supper at the mill," "looking over a gate at a mill," "the wedding song," "honours," "the high tide on the coast of lincolnshire," "brothers and a sermon," "requiescat in pace," "the star's monument," yet when this is said, you turn to another and yet another, and would fain name the last read the best. where all are sweet, sound, and healthy; where all are full of feeling, bright with suggestions, and thoroughly understandable, how hard it is to choose! and who has not read and heard over and over again that exquisite song which has been set to music no less than thirteen times, "when sparrows build"? also, "sailing beyond seas," with the beauteous refrain:-- o fair dove! o fond dove! and dove with the white breast, let me alone, the dream is my own, and my heart is full of rest. to the most superficial reader the tender and real humanity of these entirely original poems is evident, while to the student who goes further into the fascinating work, deeper treasures are discovered; you realise more and more her own personality, her own distinctive style, and get many a glimpse of the pure heart and lofty aspiration of the gifted singer. but to return to the original issue of this first published book. in consequence of its success, mr. strahan made an immediate application for any other work by the same pen; accordingly jean ingelow's early short tales, signed "orris," were collected and published under the title of "stories told to a child." this, too, went through many editions, one of which was illustrated by millais and other eminent artists. a further request for longer stories resulted in the production of a volume called, "studies for stories." these delightful sketches, professedly written for young girls, soon attracted children of much older growth. while simple in construction and devoid of plot, they are full of wit and humour, of gentle satire and fidelity to nature. they are prose poems, written in faultless style and are truthful word-paintings of real everyday life. jean ingelow has ever been a voluminous writer, but only an odd volume or so of her own works is to be found in her house. she "gives them away, indeed, scarcely knows what becomes of them," she says. among many other of her books is one called "a story of doom, and other poems," which has likewise passed into many editions. here stand out pre-eminently "the dreams that come true," "songs on the voices of birds," "songs of the night watches," "gladys and her island," ("an imperfect fable with a doubtful moral,") "lawrance," and "contrasted songs." "a story of doom" may be called an epic. it deals with the closing days of the antediluvian world, while its chief figures are noah, japhet, amarant the slave, the impious giants, and the arch-fiend. her portraiture of these persons, natural and supernatural, is very powerful and impressive. "lawrance" is unquestionably an idyll worthy to be ranked with "enoch arden." told, at once, with much dramatic power and touching simplicity, there is a fresh, pure atmosphere about it which makes it intensely natural and sympathetic. one of the poems in a third volume, republished four or five years ago, is called "echo and the ferry," which is a great favourite and is constantly chosen for recitation. in the "song for the night of christ's resurrection," breathes the deeply devotional and sincerely religious spirit of the author who was brought up by strictly evangelical parents, yet is there no trace of narrowness or bigotry in jean ingelow or her writings. she is large-hearted, single-minded, and tolerant in all matters. "it may seem strange to say so," observes your gentle hostess, whilst a smile illuminates the speaking countenance; "but i have never been inside a theatre in my life. i always say on such occasions, that although our parents never took us, and i never go myself out of habit and affectionate respect for their memory, i do not wish to give an opinion or to say that others are wrong to go. we must each act according to our own convictions, and must ever use all tolerance towards those who differ from us. we had many pleasures and advantages. there was no dulness or gloom about our home, and everything seemed to give occasion for mirth. we had many trips abroad too, indeed, we spent most winters on the continent. i made an excursion with a brother who was an ecclesiastical architect, and in this way i visited every cathedral in france. heidelberg is very picturesque, and suggested many poetical ideas, but all travelling enlarges one's mind and is an education." one event which caused the keenest amusement to these happy young people, all blessed with excellent spirits, sparkling wit, and general enjoyment of everything, occurred when a pretty, kindly, appreciative notice appeared in some paper of a person called by her name. there was hardly a single item in it that was really true, even to the description of her birthplace, which was described vaguely as being stationed on the sea-beach and flanked by two lighthouses, "between which the lonely child might have been seen to wander for hours together nursing her poetic dreams, dragging the long trails of seaweed after her, and listening to the voice of the waves." this supposititious little biography was productive of the greatest merriment to her brothers and sisters. the first impulse was to answer it, to disclaim the solitary wanderings and poetic dreams, and to describe the place correctly; but although urged by friends to do this, jean ingelow on reflection decided to let it pass, and in the end the laughter died out. "to a poetic nature," she remarks, "expression is a necessity, but once expressed, the thought and feeling that inspired it may often be forgotten. i am sure that i could not repeat one of my own poems from beginning to end just as i wrote it. i have a distinct theory too, that one is not taught, one is born to it. i was never able to make a great effort in my life, but what i can do at all, i can do at once, and having thought a good deal on any subject i know very little more than i did at first. things come to me without striving, besides i am quite unromantic. i never wrote in a hurry. we might all be laughing and talking together, yet if i went up to my room and sat alone, i could at once write in a most sad and melancholy strain. i was not studious as a child, though i remember a great epoch in my life was reading 'the pilgrim's progress,' when i was seven years old, and i was perfectly well able to perceive the deep imaginative powers of it, but i always wanted to study what was not in books." but if jean ingelow's books are sold by thousands in england, they are sold by tens of thousands in america. her publishers there for many years used to send her a handsome royalty on their sales; some years ago, however, five other american publishers brought out her poetical works simultaneously, since which time she has received nothing! she is probably the first woman-poet who has met with not only world-wide popularity, but who might if it had been needful, have lived very well by the proceeds of her verse alone. a few years ago messrs. longman brought out, by request, a new edition of her books. altogether, she declares herself to "have been a very fortunate woman, and almost always happy in her publishers, too." in later years jean ingelow has written many prose works of fiction, notably "off the skelligs," "fated to be free," "don john," "sarah de berenger," "mopsa, the fairy," "john jerome," etc. "off the skelligs" was the first novel by the author whose name had hitherto been almost exclusively associated with verse, and it was received with more than ordinary interest. the book teems with incident; the poetic vein may be traced in the realistic pictures of child life, in the description of the lovely scenery depicted in the yachting trip, and in the graphic and stirring account of the burning ship and rescue of its passengers. "fated to be free" is a sequel to the previous work. the book opens with a powerful description of an old manor house and family over whose head hangs the mysterious blight of some unknown misfortune, which is cleverly indicated rather than described, and though tragical in the main, the sorrow is not allowed to overshadow the story too heavily, for here and there humour and wit sparkle out, while the whole betrays the writer's deep intuitive knowledge of human hearts and human lives. "mopsa, the fairy" has been called "a poem in prose, for the use of children," and a better name for it could not be found. it is, as the title implies, a tale of fairyland in its brightest aspect, and is told with the purity of conception and the excellence of execution which characterise the gifted author's writings. a few words must be said in description of the pretty house in kensington where miss ingelow lives with her brother, and into which, some thirteen years ago, they removed from upper kensington to be further out and away from so much building. since this removal she says, "three cities have sprung up around them!" the handsome square detached house stands back in a fine, broad road, with carriage drive and garden in front filled with shrubs, and half a dozen chestnut and almond trees, which in this bright spring weather are bursting out into leaf and flower. broad stone steps lead up to the hall door, which is in the middle of the house. the entrance hall--where hangs a portrait of the author's maternal great-grandfather, the primus of scotland, _i.e._, bishop of aberdeen--opens into a spacious, old-fashioned drawing-room of italian style on the right. large and lofty is this bright, cheerful room. a harp, on which miss ingelow and her mother before her played right well, stands in one corner. there is a grand pianoforte opposite, for she was a good musician, and had a remarkably fine voice in earlier years. on the round table in the deep bay windows in front are many books, various specimens of tangiers pottery, and some tall plants of arum lilies in flower. the great glass doors draped with curtains at the further end, open into a large conservatory where miss ingelow often sits in summer. it is laid down with matting and rugs, and standing here and there are flowering plants and two fine araucarias. the verandah steps on the left lead into a large and well-kept garden with bright green lawn, at the end of which through the trees may be discerned a large stretch of green-houses, and a view beyond of the great trees in the grounds of holland park. on the corresponding side of the house at the back is the billiard-room, which is mr. ingelow's study, leading into an ante-room, and in the front is the dining-room, where the author's literary labours are carried on. "i write in a commonplace, prosaic manner," she says; "i am afraid i am rather idle, for i only work during two or three of the morning hours, with my papers spread all about the table." over the fireplace hangs a painting on ivory of her father, and above it a portrait of her mother, taken in her early married life. this portrait, together with one of the poet herself when an infant, is in pastels, and they were originally done as door panels for her father's room; the colouring is yet unfaded. the conversation turning upon memory--for jean ingelow holds pronounced theories on this subject--she leads the way back to the conservatory and points out the picture of her grandfather's house, called ingelow house after her, with which her very earliest recollections are associated, and her memory dates back to when she was but seventeen months old! she says that "friends smile at this and think that she is romancing, but if people made attempts to recollect their very early days, certain visions which have passed into the background for many years would rise again with a distinctness which would make it impossible to mistake them for inventions, and also make it certain that the records of this life are not annihilated, but only covered." she took some trouble to collect facts as to "first recollections" of many people, and found that two at least could remember events which were proved to have happened at the age of eighteen and twenty-two months respectively. in further support of this theory she relates an amusing and curious incident of dormant memory in early childhood which actually happened in her own family. miss ingelow's mother went on a visit to her own father, who lived in london, accompanied by her infant son aged eleven months and his nurse. one day the nurse brought the baby into his mother's room and put him on the floor, which was carpeted all over, where he crept about and amused himself whilst she dressed her mistress. when the toilet was completed, a certain ring which mrs. ingelow generally wore was missing. search was made but it was never found and shortly after the visit ended, and the matter was almost forgotten. mother and child again went on the same visit exactly a year later, accompanied by the same nurse, who took the boy into the same room. his mother saw him look around him, and deliberately walk up to one corner, turn back a bit of the carpet and produce the ring. he never gave any account of it nor did he seem to remember it later; he had probably found it on the floor and hidden it for safety--it could hardly have been for mischief--and had forgotten all about it until he saw the place again, as he was too young when the ring was missed to understand what the talk and search about it meant. "he was by no means a precocious child," adds miss ingelow, "nor did he show later any remarkable qualities in his powers of learning or remembering lessons." she lost her mother thirteen years ago, and her father passed away before the publication of her first book of poetry--the book of which he would have been so proud. "it was a joy to me," says the poetess, "when i found that people began to read my verses, and i can never forget too my pleasure when first introduced to mr. ruskin and he asked my mother and me to luncheon at his house. of course, i was far too modest to be willing to talk to him, especially in my mother's presence; but after luncheon i got away from them, leaving them in high discourse, and surreptitiously stole down to look at a bush of roses which were very much to my mind. mr. ruskin presently came up to me, and entered into a charming conversation. he gathered some of the flowers and gave them to me--i kept them for a long time--then we walked round a meadow close at hand which was just fit for the scythe, and afterwards he took me to see a number of the curiosities that he had collected. we soon became loving friends and his friendship has been one of the great pleasures of my life. sir arthur helps, too, was for many years a dear friend." miss ingelow is, as may be supposed, a great reader, though she observes, "that few people take as long a time in reading a book as she does." her preference is for works of a religious tone, chiefly those of eminent divines. "i do not want to use the word 'fastidious,'" she adds, "but perhaps i am more _bornée_ than most people in my taste in literature. even some of sir walter scott's and many of thackeray's novels i cannot read, but i am fond of 'vanity fair,' and dickens, and delight in several of shakespeare's masterpieces, reading them over and over again." she is "resting" for a while now. the poetic vein, she says, is not strongly upon her for the moment, but it invariably returns. meantime it is to be hoped that the day may not be far distant when the public will rejoice to welcome yet more sweet strains from the pen of the great and gifted poet. * * * * * the pleasant task of writing these simple biographical sketches of writers of the day is at an end. with those who were previously friends the friendship has been deepened, the few who were as yet strangers have become friends. in thankfully acknowledging the great kindness and cordiality shown by all, it must be added, that in future days no remembrances can be happier than the delightful hours spent with the "notable women authors." for a few brief mentions of historical facts in one or two of these sketches the writer is indebted to "lewis' topographical dictionary." glasgow: printed at the university press by robert maclerose. * * * * * size in. by ½ in. in cloth, s. d. the tourist's library. handy for the pocket. 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"the book may safely be recommended as one of the best, plainest, and most trustworthy on the important subject of which it treats."--_leeds times._ "mothers ought to feel thankful for a book which in plain yet delicate terms may be applied to for guidance and advice in times of extremity."--_dundee courier._ "full of most valuable information about matters peculiarly interesting to women of all ages."--_bristol times and mirror._ "dr. bell in plainest terms points out all ailments peculiar to women, and gives practical hints that are of immense value. the work is performed with a rare delicacy, and might find its way into the hands of the most refined and sensitive lady in the land."--_dumbarton herald._ "dr. bell has here very lucidly placed within the reach of every woman the means by which she can be informed upon what so intimately concerns herself, viz., her health. the excellent advice contained in it will prove to be an inestimable boon to all womankind."--_perthshire advertiser._ smallest complete pocket edition shakespeare's dramatic works and poems. [illustration] with glossary, life, and index to familiar quotations. forty line block reproductions of westall and others' well-known engravings. eight volumes, crown mo, in a suitable cloth case, s. d. in french morocco and lidless french morocco case, with spring lock, £ s. morocco case, £ s. d. russia case, £ s. d. new red line illustrated pocket edition of shakespeare's dramatic works and poems. carefully collated with the best texts; with life of the poet; index to common quotations from his works; and a full glossary, the words having the references to the plays or poems, thus forming a convenient index to the passages in which they occur. by j. talfourd blair. illustrated with forty reproductions of the well-known engravings of westall and others. eight volumes, royal mo. in cloth box, s. d. french morocco, and french morocco patent spring lock case, s. 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"dr. masson has made his selection from bacon's writings well, and has written sensible and judicial sketch of his life and character."--_london quarterly._ glasgow: david bryce & son. distributed proofreaders [transcriber's note: footnotes have been numbered and relocated to the end of the chapter in which they occur. they are marked by [ ], [ ], etc.] the life and letters of elizabeth prentiss author of _stepping heavenward_ by george l. prentiss this memoir was undertaken at the request of many of mrs. prentiss' old and most trusted friends, who felt that the story of her life should be given to the public. much of it is in the nature of an autobiography. her letters, which with extracts from her journals form the larger portion of its contents, begin when she was in her twentieth year, and continue almost to her last hour. they are full of details respecting herself, her home, her friends, and the books she wrote. a simple narrative, interspersed with personal reminiscences, and varied by a sketch of her father, and passing notices of others, who exerted a moulding influence upon her character, completes the story. a picture is thus presented of the life she lived and its changing scenes, both on the natural and the spiritual side. while the work may fail to interest some readers, the hope is cherished that, like stepping heavenward, it will be welcomed into christian homes and prove a blessing to many hearts; thus realising the desire expressed in one of her last letters: _much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and i wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls._ g. l. p. kauinfels, september , . contents. chapter i. the child and the girl. - . i. birth-place and ancestry. the payson family. seth payson. edward payson. his mother. a sketch of his life and character. the fervor of his piety. despondent moods, and their causes. his bright, natural traits. how he prayed and preached. conversational gift. love to christ. triumphant death. ii. birth and childhood of elizabeth payson. early traits. devotion to her father. his influence upon her. letters to her sister. removal to new york. reminiscences of the payson family. iii. recollections of elizabeth's girlhood by an early friend and schoolmate. her own picture of herself before her father's death. favorite resorts. why god permits so much suffering. literary tastes. letters. "what are little babies for?" opens a school. religious interest. iv. the dominant type of religious life and thought in new england in the first half of this century. literary influences. letter of cyrus hamlin. a strange coincidence. chapter ii. the new life in christ. - . i. a memorable experience. letters to her cousin. goes to richmond as a teacher. mr. persico's school. letters. ii. her character as a teacher. letters. incidents of school life. religious struggles, aims, and hope. oppressive heat and weariness. iii. extracts from her richmond journal. chapter iii. passing from girlhood into womanhood. - . i. at home again. marriage of her sister. ill-health. letters. spiritual aspiration and conflict. perfectionism. "very, very happy." work for christ what makes life attractive. passages from her journal. a point of difficulty. ii. returns to richmond. trials there. letters. illness. school experiences. "to the year ." glimpses of her daily life. why her scholars love her so. homesick. a black wedding. what a wife should be. "a presentiment." notes from her diary. iii. her views of love and courtship. visit of her sister and child. letters. sickness and death of friends. ill-health. undergoes a surgical operation. her fortitude. study of german. fenelon. chapter iv. the young wife and mother. - . i. marriage and settlement in new bedford. reminiscences. letters. birth of her first child. death of her mother-in-law. letters. ii. birth of a son. death of her mother. her grief. letters. eddy's illness and her own cares. a family gathering at newburyport. extracts from eddy's journal. iii. further extracts from eddy's journal. ill-health. visit to newark. death of her brother-in-law, s. s. prentiss. his character. removal to newark. letters. chapter v. in the school of suffering. - . i. removal to new york, and first summer there. letters. loss of sleep and anxiety about eddy. extracts from eddy's journal, describing his last illness and death. lines entitled, "to my dying eddy.". ii. birth of her third child. reminiscences of a sabbath evening talk. story of the baby's sudden illness and death. summer of . lines entitled, "my nursery." iii. summer at white lake. sudden death of her cousin, miss shipman. quarantined. _little susy's six birthdays_. how she wrote it. _the flower of the family_. her motive in writing it. letter of sympathy to a bereaved mother. a summer at the seaside. _henry and bessie._ iv. a memorable year. lines on the anniversary of eddy's death. extracts from her journal. _little susy's six teachers_. the teachers' meeting. a new york waif. summer in the country. letters. _little susy's little servants_. extracts from her journal. "alone with god." v. ready for new trials. dangerous illness. extracts from her journal. visit to greenwood. sabbath meditations. birth of another son. her husband resigns his pastoral charge. voyage to europe. chapter vi. in retreat among the alps. - . i. life abroad. letters about the voyage, and the journey from havre to switzerland. chateau d'oex. letters from there. the châlet rosat. the free church of the canton de vaud. pastor panchàud. ii. montreux. the swiss autumn. castle of chillon. death and sorrow of friends at home. twilight talks. spring flowers. iii. the campagne genevrier. vevay. beauty of the region. birth of a son. visit from professor smith. excursion to chamouni. whooping-cough and scarlet-fever among the children. doctor curchod. letters. iv. paris. sight-seeing. a sick friend. london and its environs. the queen and prince albert. the isle of wight. homeward. chapter vii. the struggle with ill-health. - . i. at home again in new york. the church of the covenant. increasing ill-health. the summer of . death of louisa payson hopkins. extracts from her journal. summer of . letters. despondency. ii. another care-worn summer. letters from williamstown and rockaway. hymn on laying the corner-stone of the church of the covenant. iii. happiness in her children. the summer of . letters from hunter. affliction among friends. iv. death of president lincoln. dedication of the church of the covenant. growing insomnia. resolves to try the water-cure. its beneficial effects. summer at newburgh. reminiscences of an excursion to palz point. death of her husband's mother. funeral of her nephew, edward payson hopkins. chapter viii. the pastor's wife and daughter of consolation. - . i. happiness as a pastor's wife. visits to newport and williamstown. letters. the great portland fire. first summer at dorset. the new parsonage occupied. second summer at dorset. _little lou's sayings and doings_. project of a cottage. letters. _the little preacher_. illness and death of mrs. edward payson and of little francis. ii. last visit from mrs. stearns. visits to old friends at newport and rochester. letters. goes to dorset. _fred and maria and me_. letters. iii. return to town. death of an old friend. letters and notes of love and sympathy. an old ladies' party. scenes of trouble and dying beds. fifty years old. letters. chapter ix. stepping heavenward. . i. death of mrs. stearns. her character. dangerous illness of prof. smith. death at the parsonage. letters. a visit to vassar college. letters. getting ready for the general assembly. "gates ajar". ii. how she earned her sleep. writing for young converts about speaking the truth. meeting of the general assembly in the church of the covenant. reunion, d.d.'s, and strawberry short-cake. "enacting the tiger." getting ready for dorset. letters. iii. the new home in dorset. what it became to her. letters from there. iv. return to town. domestic changes. letters. "my heart sides with god in everything." visiting among the poor. "conflict isn't sin." publication of _stepping heavenward_. her misgivings about it. how it was received. reminiscences by miss e. a. warner. letters. the rev. wheelock craig. v. recollections by mrs. henry b. smith chapter x. on the mount. . i. a happy year. madame guyon. what sweetens the cup of earthly trials and the cup of earthly joy. death of mrs. julia b. cady. her usefulness. sickness and death of other friends. "my cup runneth over." letters. "more love to thee, o christ". ii. her silver wedding. "_i have lived, i have loved_." no joy can put her out of sympathy with the trials of friends. a glance backward. last interview with a dying friend. more love and more likeness to christ. funeral of a little baby. letters to christian friends. iii. lines on going to dorset. a cloud over her. faber's life. loving friends for one's own sake and loving them for christ's sake. the bible and the christian life. dorset society and occupations. counsels to a young friend in trouble. "don't stop praying for your life!" cure for the heart-sickness caused by the sight of human imperfections. fenelon's teaching about humiliation and being patient with ourselves. iv. _the story lizzie told_. country and city. the law of christian progress. letters to a friend bereft of three children. sudden death of another friend. "go on; step faster." fenelon and his influence upon her religious life. lines on her indebtedness to him. chapter xi. in her home. i. home-life in new york. ii. home-life in dorset. iii. further glimpses of her dorset life. chapter xii. the trial of faith. - . i. two years of suffering. its nature and causes. spiritual conflicts. ill-health. faith a gift to be won by prayer. death-bed of dr. skinner. visit to philadelphia. "daily food." how to read the bible so as to love it more. letters of sympathy and counsel. "prayer for holiness brings suffering." perils of human friendship. ii. her husband called to chicago. lines on going to dorset. letters to young friends on the christian life. narrow escape from death. feeling on returning to town. her "praying circle." the chicago fire. the true art of living. god our only safe teacher. an easily-besetting sin. counsels to young friends. letters. iii. "holiness and usefulness go hand-in-hand." no two souls dealt with exactly alike. visits to a stricken home. another side of her life. visit to a hospital. christian friendship. letters to a bereaved mother. submission not inconsistent with suffering. thoughts at the funeral of a little "wee davie." assurance of faith. funeral of prof. hopkins. his character. iv. christian parents to expect piety in their children. perfection. "people make too much parade of their troubles." "higher life" doctrines. letter to mrs. washburn. last visit to williamstown. chapter xiii. peaceable fruit. - . i. effect of spiritual conflict upon her religious life. overflowing affections. her husband called to union theological seminary. baptism of suffering. the character of her friendships. no perfect life. prayer. "only god can satisfy a woman." why human friendship is a snare. letters. ii. goes to dorset. christian example. at work among her flowers. dangerous illness. her feeling about dying. death an "invitation" from christ. "the under-current bears _home_." "more love, more love!" a trait of character. special mercies. what makes a sweet home. letters. iii. change of home and life in new york. a book about robbie. her sympathy with young people. "i have in me two different natures." what dr. de witt said at the grave of his wife. the way to meet little trials. faults in prayer-meetings. how special theories of the christian life are formed. sudden illness of prof. smith. publication of _golden hours_. how it was received. iv. incidents of the year . starts a bible-reading in dorset. begins to take lessons in painting. a letter from her teacher. publication of _urbane and his friends_. design of the work. her views of the christian life. the mystics. the indwelling christ. an allegory. chapter xiv. work and play. - . i. a bible-reading in new york. her painting. "grace for grace." death of a young friend. the summer at dorset. bible-readings there. encompassed with kindred. typhoid fever in the house. watching and waiting. the return to town. a day of family rejoicing. life a "battle-field." ii. the moody and sankey meetings. her interest in them. mr. moody. publication of _griselda_. goes to the centennial. at dorset again. her bible-readings. a moody-meeting convert. visit to montreal. publication of _the home at greylock_. her theory of a happy home. marrying for love. her sympathy with young mothers. letters. iii. the year . death of her cousin, the rev. charles h. payson. last illness and death of prof. smith. "let us take our lot in life just as it comes." adorning one's home. how much time shall be given to it? god's delight in his beautiful creations. death of dr. buck. visiting the sick and bereaved. an ill-turn. goes to dorset. the strangeness of life. kauinfels. the bible-reading. letters. iv. return to town. recollections of this period. "ordinary" christians and spiritual conflict. a tired sunday evening. "we may make an idol of our joy." publication of _pemaquid_. kezia millet. chapter xv. forever with the lord. . i. enters upon her last year on earth. a letter about the home at greylock. her motive in writing books. visit to the aquarium. about "worry." her painting. saturday afternoons with her. what she was to her friends. resemblance to madame de broglie. recollections of a visit to east river. a picture of her by an old friend. goes to dorset. second advent doctrine. last letters. ii. little incidents and details of her last days on earth. last visit to the woods. sudden illness. last bible-reading. last drive to hager brook. reminiscence of a last interview. closing scenes. death. the burial. appendix chapter i. the child and the girl. - . i. birth-place and ancestry. seth payson. edward payson. his mother. a sketch of his life and character. the fervor of his piety. despondent moods and their cause. bright, natural traits. how he prayed and preached. conversational gift. love to christ. triumphant death. mrs. prentiss was fortunate in the place of her birth. she first saw the light at portland, maine. maine was then a district of massachusetts, and portland was its chief town and seaport, distinguished for beauty of situation, enterprise, intelligence, social refinement and all the best qualities of new england character. not a few of the early settlers had come from cape cod and other parts of the old bay state, and the blood of the pilgrim fathers ran in their veins. among its leading citizens at that time were such men as stephen longfellow, simon greenleaf, prentiss mellen, samuel fessenden, ichabod nichols, edward payson, and asa cummings; men eminent for private and public virtue, and some of whom were destined to become still more widely known, by their own growing influence, or by the genius of their children. but while favored in the place of her birth, mrs. prentiss was more highly favored still in her parentage. for more than half a century the name of her father has been a household word among the churches not of new england only, but throughout the land and even beyond the sea. it is among the most beloved and honored in the annals of american piety. [ ] he belonged to a very old puritan stock, and to a family noted during two centuries for the number of ministers of the gospel who have sprung from it. the first in the line of his ancestry in this country was edward, who came over in the brig hopewell, william burdeck, master, in - , and settled in the town of roxbury. he was a native of nasing, essex co., england. among his fellow-passengers in the hopewell was mary eliot, then a young girl, sister of john eliot, the illustrious "apostle to the indians." some years later she became his wife. their youngest son, samuel, was father of the rev. phillips payson, who was born at dorchester, massachusetts, , and settled at walpole, in the same state, in . he had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of harvard college. the youngest of these, the rev. seth payson, d.d., mrs. prentiss' grandfather, was born september , , was ordained and settled at rindge, new hampshire, december , , and died there, after a pastorate of thirty-seven years, february , . his wife was grata payson, of pomfret, conn. he was a man widely known in his day and of much weight in the community, not only in his own profession but in civil life, also, having several times filled the office of state senator. when in a plan was formed to remove williams college to a more central location, and several towns competed for the honor, dr. payson was associated with chancellor kent of new york, and governor john cotton smith of connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. he is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and faithful minister of christ. [ ] edward, the eldest son of seth and grata payson, was born at rindge, july , . his mother was noted for her piety, her womanly discretion, and her personal and mental graces. edward was her first-born, and from his infancy to the last year of his life she lavished upon him her love and her prayers. the relation between them was very beautiful. his letters to her are models of filial devotion, and her letters to him are full of tenderness, good sense, and pious wisdom. he inherited some of her most striking traits, and through him they passed on to his youngest daughter, who often said that she owed her passion for the use of the pen and her fondness for rhyming to her grandmother grata. [ ] edward payson was in all respects a highly-gifted man. his genius was as marked as his piety. there is a charm about his name and the story of his life, that is not likely soon to pass away. he belonged to a class of men who seem to be chosen of heaven to illustrate the sublime possibilities of christian attainment--men of seraphic fervor of devotion, and whose one overmastering passion is to win souls for christ and to become wholly like him themselves. into this goodly fellowship he was early initiated. there is something startling in the depth and intensity of his religious emotions, as recorded in his journal and letters. nor is it to be denied that they are often marred by a very morbid element. like david brainerd, the missionary saint of new england, to whom in certain features of his character he bore no little resemblance, edward payson was of a melancholy temperament and subject, therefore, to sudden and sharp alternations of feeling. while he had great capacity for enjoyment, his capacity for suffering was equally great. nor were these native traits suppressed, or always overruled, by his religious faith; on the contrary, they affected and modified his whole christian life. in its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive "frames," and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his saviour. and almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. it was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. the close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now. many things were ascribed to satanic influence which should have been ascribed rather to unstrung nerves and loss of sleep, or to a violation of the laws of health. [ ] the disturbing influence of nervous and other bodily or mental disorders upon religious experience deserves a fuller discussion than it has yet received. it is a subject which both modern science and modern thought, if guided by christian wisdom, might help greatly to elucidate. the morbid and melancholy element, however, was only a painful incident of his character. it tinged his life with a vein of deep sadness and led to undue severity of self-discipline; but it did not seriously impair the strength and beauty of his christian manhood. it rather served to bring them into fuller relief, and even to render more striking those bright natural traits--the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift--which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike. it served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse, especially with members of his flock tried and tempted like as he was. he had learned how to counsel and comfort them by the things which he also had suffered. he may have been too exacting and harsh in dealing with himself; but in dealing with other souls nothing could exceed the gentleness, wisdom, and soothing influence of his ministrations. as a preacher he was the impersonation of simple, earnest, and impassioned utterance. although not an orator in the ordinary sense of the term, he touched the hearts of his hearers with a power beyond the reach of any oratory. some of his printed sermons are models in their kind; that _e.g._ on "sins estimated by the light of heaven," and that addressed to seamen. his theology was a mild type of the old new england calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors--such as thomas à kempis, and fenelon, the puritan divines of the seventeenth century, john newton and richard cecil--and on the other, by his own profound experience and seraphic love. of his theology, his preaching and his piety alike, christ was the living centre. his expressions of personal love to the saviour are surpassed by nothing in the writings of the old mystics. here is a passage from a letter to his mother, written while he was still a young pastor: i have sometimes heard of spells and charms to excite love, and have wished for them, when a boy, that i might cause others to love me. but how much do i now wish for some charm which should lead men to love the saviour!... could i paint a true likeness of him, methinks i should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever. it would be heaven enough to hear him praised and adored. but i can not paint him; i can not describe him; i can not make others love him; nay, i can not love him a thousandth part so much as i ought myself. o, for an angel's tongue! o, for the tongues of ten thousand angels, to sound his praises. he had a remarkable familiarity with the word of god and his mind seemed surcharged with its power. "you could not, in conversation, mention a passage of scripture to him but you found his soul in harmony with it--the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of meaning which a sentence from the word of god presented to his mind." [ ] he was wonderfully gifted in prayer. here all his intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection. when he said, "let us pray," a divine influence seemed to rest upon all present. his prayers were not mere pious mental exercises, they were devout inspirations. no one can form an adequate conception of what dr. payson was from any of the productions of his pen. admirable as his written sermons are, his extempore prayers and the gushings of his heart in familiar talk were altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote. it was my custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth. his prayers always took my spirit into the immediate presence of christ, amid the glories of the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and comparatively misty earth was almost painful. at every prayer i heard him offer, during the seven years in which he was my spiritual guide, i never ceased to feel new astonishment, at the wonderful variety and depth and richness and even novelty of feeling and expression which were poured forth. this was a feeling with which every hearer sympathised, and it is a fact well-known, that christians trained under his influence were generally remarkable for their devotional habits. [ ] dr. payson possessed rare conversational powers and loved to wield them in the service of his master. when in a genial mood--and the mild excitement of social intercourse generally put him in such a mood--his familiar talk was equally delightful and instructive. he was, in truth, an improvisatore. quick perception, an almost intuitive insight into character, an inexhaustible fund of fresh, original thought and incident, the happiest illustrations, and a memory that never faltered in recalling what he had once read or seen, easy self-control, and ardent sympathies, all conspired to give him this preeminence. without effort or any appearance of incongruity he could in turn be grave and gay, playful and serious. this came of the utter sincerity and genuineness of his character. there was nothing artificial about him; nature and grace had full play and, so to say, constantly ran into each other. a keen observer, who knew him well, both in private and in public, testifies: "his facetiousness indeed was ever a near neighbor to his piety, if it was not a part of it; and his most cheerful conversations, so far from putting his mind out of tune for acts of religious worship, seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [ ] this coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes co-exist in a great poet. the same qualities that rendered him such a master of conversation, lent a potent charm to his familiar religious talks in the prayer-meeting, at the fireside, or in the social circle. always eager to speak for his master, he knew how to do it with a wise skill and a tenderness of feeling that disarmed prejudice and sometimes won the most determined foe. even in administering reproof or rebuke there was the happiest union of tact and gentleness. "what makes you blush so?" said a reckless fellow in the stage, to a plain country girl, who was receiving the mail-bag at a post office from the hand of the driver. "what makes you blush so, my dear?" "perhaps," said dr. payson, who sat near him and was unobserved till now, "perhaps it is because some one spoke rudely to her when the stage was along here the last time." edward payson was graduated at harvard college in the class of . in the autumn of that year he took charge of an academy then recently established in portland. resigning this position in , he returned home and devoted himself to the study of divinity under his father's care. he was licensed to preach in may, , and a few months later received a unanimous call to portland, where he was ordained in december of the same year. on the th of may, , he was married to ann louisa shipman, of new haven, conn. an extract from a manly letter to miss shipman, written a few weeks after their engagement, will show the spirit which inspired him both as a lover and a husband: when i wrote my first letter after my late visit, i felt almost angry with you and quite so with myself. and why angry with you? because i began to fear you would prove a dangerous rival to my lord and master, and draw away my heart from his service. my louisa, should this be the case, i should certainly hate you. i am christ's; i must be christ's; he has purchased me dearly, and i should hate the mother who bore me, if she proved even the _innocent_ occasion of drawing me from him. i feared that you would do this. for a little time the conflict of my feelings was dreadful beyond description. for a few moments i wished i had never seen you. had you been a right hand, or a right eye, had you been the life-blood in my veins (and you are dear to me as either) i must have given you up, had i continued to feel as i did. but blessed be god, he has shown me my weakness only to strengthen me. i now feel very differently. i still love you dearly as ever, but my love leads me _to_ christ and not _from_ him. dr. payson received repeated invitations to important churches in boston and new york, but declining them all, continued in the portland pastorate until his death, which occurred october , , in the forty-fifth year of his age. the closing months of his life were rendered memorable by an extraordinary triumph of christian faith and patience, as well as of the power of mind over matter. his bodily suffering and agonies were indescribable, but, like one of the old martyrs in the midst of the flames, he seemed to forget them all in the greatness of his spiritual joy. in a letter written shortly after his death, mrs. payson gives a touching account of the tender and thoughtful concern for her happiness which marked his last illness. knowing, for example, that she would be compelled to part with her house, he was anxious to have a smaller one purchased and occupied at once, so that his presence in it for a little while might make it seem more home-like to her and to her children after he was gone. "to tell you (she adds) what he was the last six memorable weeks would be altogether beyond my skill. all who beheld him called his countenance angelic." she then repeats some of his farewell words to her. begging that, she would "not dwell upon his poor, shattered frame, but follow his blessed spirit to the realms of glory," he burst forth into an exultant song of delight, as if already he saw the king in his beauty! the well-known letter to his sister eliza, dated a few weeks before his departure, breathes the same spirit. here is an extract from it: were i to adopt the figurative language of bunyan, i might date this letter from the land of beulah, of which i have been for some weeks a happy inhabitant. the celestial city is full in my view. its glories beam upon me, its breezes fan me, its odors are wafted to me, its sounds strike upon my ear, and its spirit is breathed into my heart. nothing separates me from it but the river of death, which now appears but as an insignificant rill, that may be crossed at a single step, whenever god shall give permission. the sun of righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as he approached, and now he fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which i seem to float like an insect in the beams of the sun, exulting yet almost trembling while i gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why god should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm. a single heart and a single tongue seem altogether inadequate to my wants; i want a whole heart for every separate emotion, and a whole tongue to express that emotion. but why do i speak thus of myself and my feelings? why not speak only of our god and redeemer? it is because i know not what to say--when i would speak of them my words are all swallowed up. and thus, gazing already upon the beatific vision, he passed on into glory. what is written concerning his lord and master might with almost literal truth have been inscribed over his grave: _the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up._ * * * * * ii. birth and childhood of elizabeth payson. early traits. devotion to her father. his influence upon her. letters to her sister. removal to new york. reminiscences of the payson family. elizabeth payson was born "about three o'clock"--so her father records it--on tuesday afternoon, october , . she was the fifth of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. all good influences seem to have encircled her natal hour. in a letter to his mother, dated october , dr payson enumerates six special mercies, by which the happy event had been crowned. one of them was the gratification of the mother's "wish for a daughter rather than a son." another was god's goodness to him in sparing both the mother and the child in spite of his fear that he should lose them. this fear, strangely enough, was occasioned by the unusual religious peace and comfort which he had been enjoying. he had a presentiment that in this way god was forearming him for some extraordinary trial; and the loss of his wife seemed to him most likely to be that trial. "god has been so gracious to me in spiritual things, that i thought he was preparing me for louisa's death. indeed it may be so still, and if so his will be done. let him take all--and if he leaves us himself we still have all and abound." the next day he writes: still god is kind to us. louisa and the babe continue as well as we could desire. truly, my cup runs over with blessings. i can still scarcely help thinking that god is preparing me for some severe trial; but if he will grant me his presence as he does now, no trial can seem severe. oh, could i now drop the body, i would stand and cry to all eternity without being weary: god is holy, god is just, god is good; god is wise and faithful and true. either of his perfections alone is sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. could i sing upon paper i should break forth into singing, for day and night i can do nothing but sing "let the saints be joyful," etc., etc. but i must close. i can not send so much love and thankfulness to my parents as they deserve. my present happiness, all my happiness i ascribe under god to them and their prayers. surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to be born into! the notices of elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies. "until i was three years old mother says i was a little angel," she once wrote to a friend. her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "i never knew what it was to feel well," she wrote in . severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy. she had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land or sea. the ships and wharves not far from her father's house, the observatory and fort on the hill overlooking casco bay, the white mountains far away in the distance, deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and the ancient burying-ground--these and other familiar objects of "the dear old town," commemorated by longfellow in his poem entitled "my lost youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she went, to the end of her days. in her movements she was light-footed, venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. her whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a diamond. whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and did as for her life. allusion has been made to the intensity of her sympathies. the sight or tale of suffering would set her in a tremor of excitement; and in her eagerness to give relief she seemed ready for any sacrifice, however great. this trait arrested the observant eye of her father, and he expressed to mrs. payson his fear lest it might some day prove a real misfortune to the child. "she will be in danger of marrying a blind man, or a helpless cripple, out of pure sympathy," he once said. but by far the strongest of all the impressions of her childhood related to her father. his presence was to her the happiest spot on earth, and any special expression of his affection would throw her into an ecstasy of delight. when he was away she pined for his return. "the children all send a great deal of love, and elizabeth says, do tell papa to come home," wrote her mother to him, when she was six years old. her recollections of her father were singularly vivid. she could describe minutely his domestic habits, how he looked and talked as he sat by the fireside or at the table, his delight in and skillful use of carpenters' tools, his ingenious devices for amusing her and diverting his own weariness as he lay sick in bed, _e.g._, tearing up sheets of white paper into tiny bits, and then letting her pour them out of the window to "make believe it snowed," or counting all the bristles in a clothes-brush, and then as she came in from school, holding it up and bidding her guess their number--his coolness and efficiency in the wild excitements of a conflagration, the calm deliberation with which he walked past the horror-stricken lookers on and cut the rope by which a suicide was suspended; these and other incidents she would recall a third of a century after his death, as if she had just heard of or just witnessed them. to her child's imagination his memory seemed to be invested with the triple halo of father, hero, and saint. a little picture of him was always near her. she never mentioned his name without tender affection and reverence. nor is this at all strange. she was almost nine years old when he died; and his influence, during these years, penetrated to her inmost being. she once said that of her father's virtues one only--punctuality--had descended to her. but here she was surely wrong. not only did she owe to him some of the most striking peculiarities of her physical and mental constitution, but her piety itself, if not inherited, was largely inspired and shaped by his. in the whole tone and expression of her earlier religious life, at least, one sees him clearly reflected. his devotional habits, in particular, left upon her an indelible impression. once, when four or five years old, rushing by mistake into his room, she found him prostrate upon his face--completely lost in prayer. a short time before her death, speaking of this scene to a friend, she remarked that the remembrance of it had influenced her ever since. what somebody said of sara coleridge might indeed have been said with no less truth of elizabeth payson: "her father had looked down into her eyes and left in them the light of his own." the only records of her childhood from her own pen consist of the following letters, written to her sister, while the latter was passing a year in boston. she was then nine years old. portland, _may , ._ my dear sister:--i thank you for writing to such a little girl as i am, when you have so little time. i was going to study a little catechism which miss martin has got, but she said i could not learn it. i want to learn it. i do not like to stay so long at school. we have to write composition by dictation, as miss martin calls it. she reads to us out of a book a sentence at a time. we write it and then we write it again on our slates, because we do not always get the whole; then we write it on a piece of paper. miss martin says i may say my sunday-school [lesson] there. mr. mitchell has had a great many new books. i have been sick. doctor cummings has been here and says e. is better and he thinks he will not have a fever.... g. goes to school to miss libby, and h. goes to master jackson. h. sends his love. good-bye. your affectionate sister, e. payson, _september , ._ my dear sister:--i think you were very kind to write to me, when you have so little time. i began to go to mrs. petrie's school a week ago yesterday. i stay at home mondays in the morning to assist in taking care of charles or such little things as i can do. g. goes with me. when mother put charles and him to bed, as soon as she had done praying with them, g. said, mother, will this world be all burnt up when we are dead? she said, yes, my dear, it will. what, and all the dishes too? will they melt like lead? and will the ground be burnt up too? o what a nasty fire it will make. i saw the northern lights last night. i sleep in a very large pleasant room in the bed with mother.... i have a very pleasant room for my baby-house over the porch which has two windows and a fireplace in it, and a little cupboard too. e. wood and i are as intimate as ever. i suppose you know that mr. wood is building him a brick house. mrs. merril's little baby is dead. it was buried yesterday afternoon. mr. mussey lives across the street from us. he has a great many elm trees in his front yard. his house is three stories high and the trees reach to the top. we have heard two or three times from e. since he went away. yesterday all the sabbath-schools walked in a procession and then went to our meeting-house and mr. william cutter addressed them. i am your affectionate sister, e. payson. her feeble constitution exposed her to severe attacks of disease, and in may, , she was brought to the verge of the grave by a violent fever. her mother was deeply moved by this event, and while recording in her journal god's goodness in sparing elizabeth, wonders whether it is to the end that she may one day devote herself to her saviour and do something for the "honor of religion." in the latter part of mrs. payson removed to new york, where her eldest daughter opened a school for girls. it was during this residence in new york that elizabeth, at the age of twelve years, made a public confession of christ and came to the lord's table for the first time. she was received into the bleecker street--now the fourth avenue--presbyterian church, then under the pastoral care of the rev. erskine mason, d.d., may , . toward the close of the same year the family returned to portland. in a letter addressed to her husband, one of mrs. prentiss' oldest friends now living, miss julia d. willis, has furnished the following reminiscences of her early years. while they confirm what has been said about her childhood, they are especially valuable for the glimpses they give of her father and mother and sister. the willis and payson families were very intimate and warmly attached to each other. mr. nathaniel willis, the father of n. p. willis the poet, was well known in connection with "the boston recorder," of which he was for many years the conductor and proprietor. both mr. and mrs. willis cherished the most affectionate veneration for the memory of dr. payson. so long as she lived their house was a home to mrs. payson and her daughters, whenever they visited boston. as a preacher dr. payson could not fail to make a strong impression even on a child. years ago in new york i once told mrs. prentiss, who was too young, at her father's death, to remember him well in the pulpit, that the only public speaker who ever reminded me of him, was edwin booth in hamlet. i surprised, and, i am afraid, a little shocked her, but it was quite true. the slender figure, the dark, brilliant eyes, the deep earnestness of tone, the rapid utterance combined with perfect distinctness of enunciation, in spite of surroundings the best calculated to repel such an association, recalled him vividly to my memory. my father's connection with the religious press after his removal from portland to boston, brought many clergymen to our house, who often, in the kindness of their hearts, requited hospitality by religious conversation with the children, not church members, and presumably, therefore, impenitent. i did not always appreciate this kindness as it deserved, and often exercised considerable ingenuity to avoid being alone with them. in dr. payson's case, i soon learned, on the contrary, to seek such occasions. i was sure that before long he would look up from his book, or his manuscript, and have something pleasant or playful to say to me. his general conversation, however, was oftener on religious than on any other subjects, but it was so evidently from the fullness of his heart, and his vivid imagination afforded him such a wealth of illustration, that it was delightful even to an "impenitent" child. years afterward when i read in his memoir of his desponding temperament, of his seasons of gloom, of the sense of sin under which he was bowed down, it seemed impossible to me that it could be _my_ dr. payson. i visited portland and was an inmate of his family, at the commencement of the illness that finally proved fatal. he was not confined to his bed, or to his room, but he was forbidden, indeed unable, to preach, unable to write or study; he could only read and think. still he did not shut himself up in his study with his sad thoughts. i remember him as usually seated with his book by the side of the fire, surrounded by his family, as if he would enjoy their society as long as possible, and the children's play was never hushed on his account. nor did he forget the young visitor. when the elder daughter, to whom my visit was made, was at school, he would care for my entertainment by telling a story, or propounding a riddle, or providing an entertaining book to beguile the time till louisa's return. among the group in that cheerful room, i remember lizzy well, a beautiful child, slender, dark-eyed, light-footed, very quiet, evidently observant, but saying little, affectionate, yet not demonstrative. one evening during my visit, mrs. payson not being quite well, the elders had retired early, leaving louisa and myself by the side of the fire, she preparing her school lesson and i occupied in reading. the lesson finished, louisa proposed retiring, but i was too much interested in my book to leave it and promised to follow soon. she left me rather reluctantly, and i read on, too much absorbed in my book to notice the time, till near midnight, when i was startled by hearing dr. payson's step upon the stairs. i expected the reproof which i certainly deserved, but though evidently surprised at seeing me, he merely said, "you here? you must be cold. why did you let the fire go out?" bringing in some wood he soon rekindled it, and began to talk to me of the book i was reading, which was one of walter scott's poems. he then spoke of a poem which he had been reading that day, southey's "curse of kehama." he related to me with perfect clearness the long and rather involved story, with that wonderful memory of his, never once forgetting or confusing the strange oriental names, and repeating word for word the curse: i charm thy life, from the weapons of strife, from stone and from wood, from fire and from flood, from the serpent's tooth, and the beasts of blood, from sickness i charm thee, and time shall not harm thee, etc., etc. i listened, intent, fascinated, forgot to ask why he was there instead of in his bed, forgot that it was midnight instead of mid-day. it was not till on bidding me good night he added, "i hope you will have a better night than i shall," that it occurred to me that he must be suffering. the next day i learned from his wife that when unable to sleep on account of his racking cough, he often left his bed at night, the cough being more endurable when in a sitting posture. i never saw dr. payson after that visit, nor for several years any of the family, except louisa, who spent a year with us while attending school in boston to fit herself as a teacher to aid in the support of her younger brothers and sister. when i was next with them, louisa was already at the head of a school in which her young sister was the brightest pupil, and to the profits of which she laid no personal claim, all going untouched into the family purse. several young girls, louisa's pupils, had been received as boarders in the family, and occasionally a clergyman was added to the number. it was during this visit that i first learned to appreciate mrs. payson. now that she stood alone at the head of the household, either her fine qualities were in bolder relief, or i being older, was better able to estimate them. the singular vivacity of her intellect made her a delightful companion. then her youth had been passed in the literary circles of new haven and andover, and she had much to tell of distinguished people known to me only by reputation. i admired her firm yet gentle rule, so skilfully adapted to the varying natures under her charge; her conscientious study of that homely virtue economy, so distasteful to one of her naturally lavish temper, always ready to give to those in need to an extent which called forth constant remonstrances from more prudent friends; her alacrity also in all household labors, which the more excited my wonder, knowing the little opportunity she could have had to practise them amid the wealth of her father's house before the embargo, which later wrecked his fortune with those of so many other new england merchants. she was, indeed, of a most noble nature, hating all meanness and injustice, and full of helpful kindness and sympathy. no woman ever had warmer or more devoted friends. both at this time and in subsequent visits, as she advanced from childhood to girlhood, i remember lizzy well; although my attention was chiefly absorbed by the elder sister of my own age, my principal companion when present, and correspondent when absent. the two sisters were strongly contrasted. louisa, as a child, was afflicted with a sensitive, almost morbid shyness and reserve, and an incapacity for enjoying the society of other children whose tastes were uncongenial with her own. the shyness passed with her childhood, but the sensitiveness and exclusiveness never quite left her. her love of books was a passion, and she would resent an unfair criticism of a favorite author as warmly as if it were an attack on a personal friend. to lizzy, on the contrary, a friend was a book which she loved to read. human nature was her favorite study. there seemed to be no one in whom she could not find something to interest her, none with whom there was not some point of sympathy. combined with this wide and genial sympathy was another quality which helped to endear her to her companions, viz., an entire absence of all attempt to show her best side, or put the best face on anything that concerned her. an ingenuous frankness about herself and her affairs--even about her little weaknesses--was one of her most striking traits. no one, indeed, could know her without learning to love her dearly. yet if i should say that in my visits to portland, lizzy always appeared to me pre-eminently the life and charm of the household, it would not be exactly true, though she would have been so of almost any other household. the payson family was a delightful one to visit, all were so bright, and in the contest of wits that took place often between lizzy and her merry brothers, it was sometimes hard to tell which bore off the palm. i do not know that i ever thought of her at that time as an author. if anybody had predicted to me that one of that group would be the writer of books, which would not only have a wide circulation at home, but be translated into foreign languages, i should certainly have selected louisa, and i think most persons who knew them would have done the same. the elder sister's passion for books, her great powers of acquisition, the range of her attainments--embracing not only modern languages and their literature, but latin, greek and hebrew--her ability to maintain discussions on german metaphysics and theology with learned professors, all seemed to point her out as the one likely to achieve distinction in the literary world. i do not remember whether it was lizzy's early contributions to "the youth's companion," showing already the germ of the creative power in her, or her letters to her sister, which first suggested to me that the pleasure her friends found in her conversation might yet be enjoyed by those who would never see her. louisa had given up her school for the more congenial employment of contributing to magazines and reviews and of writing children's books. and as the greater literary resources of boston drew her thither, she was often for months a welcome guest at our house, where she first met professor hopkins of williamstown, and whom she afterward married. the letters which lizzy wrote to her at those times were never allowed to be the monopoly of one person; we all claimed a right to read them. the ease with which in these she seemed to talk with her pen, the mingled pathos and humor with which she would relate all the little joys and sorrows of daily life, leaving her readers between a smile and a tear, showed the same characteristics which afterward made her published writings so much more generally attractive than the graver ones of her elder sister. but louisa's failing health soon after her marriage, and the long years of suffering which followed, prevented her ever doing justice to the expectations her friends had formed for her. the occasion of my next visit to portland was a letter from mrs. payson to my mother, who was her constant correspondent, in which she spoke sadly of an indisposition she feared was the precursor of serious illness, but which chiefly troubled her on account of lizzy's distress that her school prevented her being constantly with her mother. an offer on my part to come and take her place, in her hours of necessary absence, was at once accepted. mrs. payson's illness proved less serious than had been feared, and once more i passed several pleasant weeks in that house; but the pleasantest hours of the day were those in which lizzy, returning from school, sat down at her mother's bedside and amused her with her talk about her pupils, their various characters and the progress they had made in their studies, or related little incidents of the school-room--with her usual frankness not omitting those which revealed some fault, or what she considered such, on her part, especially her impulsiveness that led her often to say things she afterward regretted. as an example, one of her pupils was reading french to her and coming to the expression mon dieu! so common in french narratives, had pronounced it so badly that lizzy exclaimed, "mon doo? he would not know himself what you meant!" the laugh which it was impossible to repress, did not diminish her compunction at what she feared her pupils would regard as irreverence on her part. i believe i always cherished sufficient affection for my teachers, and yet i was not a little astonished on accompanying lizzy to school one day, to see as we turned the corner of a street a rush of girls with unbonneted heads, to greet their young teacher for whom they had been watching, and escort her to her throne in the school-room, and evidently in their hearts. for a year or two after this visit i have no recollection of her, or indeed of any of the payson family. death, meanwhile, had been busy in my own home, and my memory is a blank for anything beyond that sad circle. since that date you have known her better than i. i wish that these recollections of a time when i knew her better than you, were not so meagre. if we were not thousands of miles apart, and i could talk with you, instead of writing to you, perhaps they would not appear quite so unsatisfying. yet, trivial as they are, i send them, in the persuasion that any trifle that concerned her or hers is of interest to you. geneva, switzerland, _feb. , ._ * * * * * iii. recollections of elizabeth's girlhood by an early friend and schoolmate. her own picture of herself before her father's death. favorite resorts. why god permits so much suffering. literary tastes. letters. "what are little babies for?" opens a school. religious interest. it is to be regretted that the letters referred to by miss willis, and indeed nearly all of elizabeth's family letters, written before she left her mother's roof, have disappeared. but the following recollections by mrs. m. c. h. clark, of portland, will in part supply their place and serve to fill up the outline, already given, of the first twenty years of her life. in the volume of sketches entitled, "only a dandelion," you will find, in the story of anna and emily, some very pleasing incidents relating to the early life of dear elizabeth. anna was lizzy wood, her earliest playmate and friend. miss wood was a sweet girl, the only sister of dr. william wood, of portland. she died at an early age. emily was mrs. prentiss herself. i remember her once telling me about the visit at "aunt w.'s," and believe that nearly all the details of the story are founded in fact. it is her own picture of herself as a little girl, drawn to the life. several traits of the character of emily, as given in the sketch, are on this account worthy of special note. one is her very intense desire not only to be loved, but to be loved _alone_, or much more than any one else; and to be assured of it "over and over again." when anna returned from her journey, she brought the same presents to susan morton as to emily. on discovering this fact emily was greatly distressed. "i thought you would be so glad to get all these things!" said anna. "and so i am," said emily, "i only want you to love me better than any other little girl, because i love you better." "well, and so i do," returned anna; "i love you ten times as well as i love susan morton." this satisfied emily, and "for many days her restless little heart was as quiet and happy as a lamb's." another trait is brought out in the incident that occurred on her returning home from anna's. she had written, or rather scratched, the word "anna," over one whole side of her room, while odd lines of what purported to be poetry filled the other. but this was not all. her sister produced the beautiful bible which had been given emily by her aunt lucy, on her seventh birthday, and showed her father how all its blank leaves were covered with annas. her father took the book with reverence, and emily understood and felt the seriousness with which he examined her idle scrawls. it was a look that would have risen up before her and made her stay her hand, should she ever again in her life-long have been tempted thus to misuse the word of god; just as the angel stood before balaam in the narrow path he was struggling to push through. but emily never again was thus tempted; and ever after her bible was sacredly kept free from "blot, or wrinkle, or any such thing." her father now took her with him to his study, and gave her a great many pieces of paper, some large and some small, on which he told her with a smile, she could write anna's name to her heart's content. emily felt very grateful; this little kindness on her father's part did her more good than a month's lecture could have done, and made her resolve never to do anything that could possibly grieve him again. she went away to her own little baby-house and wrote on one of the bits of paper, some verses, in which she said she had the best father in the world. when they were done, she read them over once or twice, and admired them exceedingly; after which, with a very mysterious air, she went and threw them into the kitchen fire. this incident, so prettily related, illustrates the intensity of her friendships, shows that she had begun to write verses when a mere child, and gives a very pleasant glimpse of her father and of her devotion to him. my intimate acquaintance with her commenced in , when we were members of miss tyler's sabbath-school class. miss tyler was a daughter of rev. dr. bennett tyler, her father's successor. she was greatly pleased when i told her i was going to attend her sister's school, which was opened in the spring of , on the corner of middle and lime streets. my seat was next to hers and we were placed in the same classes. our homes were near each other on franklin street, and we always walked back and forth together. she was at this time a prolific writer of notes. sometimes she would meet me on monday morning with not less than four, written since we had parted on saturday afternoon. she used to complain now and then, that i wrote her only one to four or five of hers to me. in the pleasant summer afternoons we loved to take long walks together. one was down by the shore behind the eastern promenade. here we would find a sheltered nook, and with our backs to the world and our faces toward the islands and the ocean, would sit in "rapt enjoyment" of the scene, speaking scarcely a word, until one or the other exclaimed with a long-drawn sigh: "well, it is time for us to go home." another of our places of resort was the old cemetery on congress street, which in those days was very retired. our favorite spot here was the summit of a tomb, which stood on the highest point in the grounds. it was the old style of tomb--a broad marble slab, supported by six small stone pillars on a stone foundation, and surrounded by two steps raised above the soil. it was a very quiet retreat. we could hear the distant hum of the city and at the same time enjoy a view of the water and shipping, as the land sloped down toward the harbor. i remember well that one dark spring day, as we sat there cuddled up under the broad slab, lizzy gave me an account of a book she had just been reading. it was the memoir of miss susanna anthony, by old dr. hopkins, of newport. she told me what a good and holy woman miss anthony was, how much she suffered and how beautifully she bore her sufferings. my sympathy was strongly excited and i exclaimed, "i do not see how it is _right_ for god, who can control all things, to permit such suffering!" lizzy replied very sweetly, "well, carrie, we can't understand it, but i have been thinking that this _might_ be god's way of preparing his children for very high degrees of service on earth, or happiness in heaven." i was deeply impressed with this remark; somehow it seemed to _stand by me_, and i think it was a corner-stone of her faith. this summer--that of --her mother fitted up for her exclusive use a small room called the "blue room," where she had all her books and treasures--among them a writing desk which had been her father's. here all her leisure hours were spent. it was my privilege to be admitted to this sanctuary, and many pleasant hours we passed together there. i think elizabeth was always religious. she knew a great deal then about the bible and often talked with me of divine things. she seemed to feel a deep interest in my spiritual welfare. she loved to share with me her favorite books. to her i was indebted for my acquaintance with george herbert, and with wordsworth. she induced me to read "owen on the d psalm," and flavel's "fountain of life." in we both began to attend the free street seminary, of which the rev. solomon adams was then principal. her sister had become assistant teacher with him. our desks adjoined each other and we were together a great deal. she was an admirable scholar, very studious, prompt and ready at recitation. her influence and example, added to her friendship and sympathy, were invaluable to me at this period. one day, about this time, she told me of her engagement with mr. willis, to become a contributor to "the youth's companion." this paper was one of the first, if not the first, of its class published in this country, and had a wide circulation among the children throughout new england. most of the pieces in "only a dandelion," first appeared, i think, in the "youth's companion," among the rest several in verse. they are written in a sprightly style, are full of bright fancies as well as sound feeling and excellent sense, and foretoken plainly the author of the 'susy' books. in lizzy went to ipswich and spent the summer in the school there. it was then under the care of miss grant, and was the most noted institution of its kind in new england. a year or two later, mr. n. p. willis returned from europe, and with his english bride made a short visit at mrs. payson's. miss payson talked with him of elizabeth's taste for writing poetry and showed him some of her pieces. he praised and encouraged her warmly, and this was, i think, one of the influences that strengthened her in the purpose to become an author. upon my telling her one day how much i liked a certain sunday-school book i had just read, she smilingly asked, "what would you think if some day i should write a book as good as that?" i saw a good deal of her home life at this time. it was full of filial and sisterly love and devotion. amidst the household cares by which her mother was often weighed down and worried, she was an ever-near friend and sympathizer. to her brothers, too, she endeared herself exceedingly by her helpful, cheery ways and the strong vein of fun and mirthfulness which ran through her daily life. in the spring of mrs. payson sold her house on franklin street and rented one in the upper part of the city. lizzy used to call it "the pumpkin house," because it was old and ugly; but its situation and the opportunity to indulge her rural tastes made amends for all its defects. in a letter to her friend miss e. t. of brooklyn, n. y., dated may , , she thus refers to it: since your last letter arrived we have left our pleasant home for an old yellow one above john neal's. now don't imagine it to be a delicate straw-color, neither the smiling hue of the early dandelion. no, it once shone forth in all the glories of a deep pumpkin; but time's "effacing fingers" have sadly marred its beauty. mr. neal's aunt ruth, a quiet old quakeress, occupies a part of it and we paysons bestow ourselves in the remainder. this comes to you from its great garret. here i sit every night till after dark as merry as a grig. "the mind is its own place." with all the inconveniences of the house i would not exchange it at present for any other in the city. the situation is perfectly delightful. casco bay and part of deering's oaks lie in full view. [ ] the oaks are within a few minutes' walk. back-cove is seen beyond, and rising far above the _blue_ white mountains. the arsenal stares us in the face, if we look out the end windows and the westbrook meeting-house is nearer than mr. vail's by a quarter of a mile. i never believed there was anything half so fine in this region. i think nothing of walking anywhere now. one day, after various domestic duties, i worked in my tiny garden four hours, and in the afternoon a party of girls came up for me to go with them to bramhall's hill. we walked from three till half past six, came back and ate a hasty, with some of us a _furious_ supper, and then all paraded down to second parish to singing-school. i expect to live out in the air most of the summer. i mean to have as pleasant a one as possible, because we shall never live so near the oaks and other pretty places another summer. if you were not so timid i should wish you were here to run about with me, but who ever heard of e. t. _running_? now, ellen, i never was _meant_ to be dignified and sometimes--yea, often--i run, skip, hop, and _once_ i did climb over a fence! very unladylike, i know, but i am not a lady. in the fall of mrs. payson moved again. the incident deserves mention, as it brought lizzy into daily intercourse with the rev. mr. french and his wife. mr. french was rector of the episcopal church in portland, and afterward professor and chaplain at west point. he was a man of fine literary culture and mrs. french was a very attractive woman. in a letter dated "night before thanksgiving," and addressed to the early friend already mentioned, lizzy refers to this removal and also gives a glimpse of her active home life: i have been busy all day and am so tired i can scarcely hold a pen. amidst the beating of eggs, the pounding of spices, the furious rolling of pastry of all degrees of shortness, the filling of pies with pumpkins, mince-meat, apples, and the like, the stoning of raisins and washing of currants, the beating and baking of cake, and all the other _ings_, (in all of which i have had my share) thoughts of your ladyship have somehow squeezed themselves in. we have really bidden adieu to "pumpkin place," as mrs. willis calls it, and established ourselves in a house formerly occupied by old parson smith--and very snug and comfortable we are, i assure you. in the midst of our "moving," after i had packed and stowed and lifted, and been elbowed by all the sharp corners in the house, and had my hands all torn and scratched, i spied the new "knickerbocker" 'mid a heap of rubbish and was tempted to peep into it. lo and behold, the first thing that met my eye was the lament of the last peach. [ ] i didn't care to read more and forthwith returned to fitting of carpets and arranging tables and chairs and bureaus--but all the while meditating how i should be revenged upon you. as to ----'s request i am sorry to answer nay; for i feel it would be the greatest presumption in me to think of writing for a magazine like that. i do not wish to publish anything, anywhere, though it would be quite as wise as to entrust my scraps to _your_ care. my mother often urges me to send little things which she happens to fancy, to this and that periodical. without her interference nothing of mine would ever have found its way into print. but mammas look with rose-colored spectacles on the actions and performances of their offspring. have you laughed over the pickwick papers? we have almost laughed ourselves to death over them. i have not seen lizzy d. for a long time, but hear she is getting along rapidly. if i could go to school two years more, i should be glad, but of course that is out of the question.... it is easier for you to write often than it is for me. you have not three tearing, growing brothers to mend and make for. i am become quite expert in the arts of patching and darning. i am going to get some pies and cake and raisins and other goodies to send to our girl's sick brother. if i had not so dear and happy a home, i should envy you yours. you say you do not remember whether i love music or not. i love it extravagantly _sometimes_--but have not the knowledge to enjoy scientific performances. the simple melody of a single voice is my delight. mrs. french, the episcopal minister's wife, who is a great friend of ours and lives next door (so near that she and sister talk together out of their windows), has a baby two days old with black curly hair and black eyes, and i shall have a nice time with it this winter. do you love babies? the question with which this letter closes, suggests one of lizzy's most striking and loveliest traits. she had a perfect passion for babies, and reveled in tending, kissing, and playing with them. here are some pretty lines in one of her girlish contributions to "the youth's companion," which express her feeling about them: what are little babies for? say! say! say! are they good-for-nothing things? nay! nay! nay! can they speak a single word? say! say! say! can they help their mothers sew? nay! nay! nay! can they walk upon their feet? say! say! say! can they even hold themselves? nay! nay! nay! what are little babies for? say! say! say! are they made for us to love? _yea_! yea!! yea!!! in the fall of mrs. payson purchased a house in cumberland street, which continued to be her residence until the family was broken up. you remember the charming little room lizzy had fitted up over the hall in this house, how nicely she kept it, and how happy she was in it. one of the windows looked out on a little flower garden and at the close of the long summer days the sunset could be enjoyed from the west window. she had had some fine books given her, which, added to the previous store, made a somewhat rare collection for a young girl in those days. about this time, having been relieved of her part of domestic service by the coming into the family of a young relative--whose devotion to her was unbounded--she opened in the house a school for little girls. it consisted at first of perhaps eight or ten, but their number increased until the house could scarcely hold them. she was a born teacher and her young pupils fairly idolized her. [ ] in this year, too, she took a class in the sabbath-school composed of nearly the same group who surrounded her on the week-days, and they remained under her care as long as she lived in portland. the rev. mr. vail having retired from the pastorate of the second parish in the autumn of , cyrus hamlin, just from the theological seminary at bangor, became the stated supply for some months. his preaching attracted the young people and during the winter and spring there was much interest in all the congregational churches. following the example of the other pastors, mr. hamlin invited persons seriously disposed to meet him for religious conversation. elizabeth besought me, with all possible earnestness and affection, to "go to mr. hamlin's meeting." one day she came to see me a short time before the hour, saying that i was ever on her mind and in her prayers, that she had talked with mr. hamlin about me, nor would she leave me until i had promised to attend the meeting. i did so; and from that time we were united in the strong bonds of christian love and sympathy. what a spiritual helper she was to me in those days! what precious notes i was all the time receiving from her! the memory of her tender, faithful friendship is still fresh and delightful, after the lapse of more than forty years. [ ] in the summer of the rev. jonathan b. condit, d.d., was called from his chair in amherst college and installed pastor of our church. he was a man of very graceful and winning manners and wonderfully magnetic. he at once became almost an object of worship with the enthusiastic young people. the services of the sabbath and the weekly meetings were delightful. the young ladies had a praying circle which met every saturday afternoon, full of life and sunshine. indeed, the exclusive interest of the season was religious; our reading and conversation were religious; well-nigh the sole subject of thought was learning something new of our saviour and his blessed service. all lizzy's friends and several of her own family were rejoicing in hope. and she herself was radiant with joy. for a little while it seemed almost as if the shadows in the christian path had fled away, and the crosses vanished out of sight. the winter and spring of witnessed another period of general religious interest in portland. large numbers were gathered into the churches. lizzy was greatly impressed by the work, her own christian life was deepened and widened, she was blessed in guiding several members of her beloved sunday-school class to the saviour, and was thus prepared, also, for the sharp trial awaiting her in the autumn of the same year, when she left her home and mother for a long absence in richmond. from her earliest years she was in the habit of keeping a journal, and she must have filled several volumes. i wonder that she did not preserve them as mementos of her childhood and youth. perhaps because her afterlife was so happy that she never needed to refer to such reminiscences of days gone by. i have thus given you, in a very informal manner, some recollections of her earlier years. i have been astonished to find how vividly i recalled scenes, events and conversations so long past. i was startled and shocked when the news came of her sudden death. but i can not feel that she was called to her rest too soon. she seemed to me singularly happy in all the relations of life; and then as an author, hers was an exceptional case of full appreciation and success. i have ever regarded her as "favored among women"--blessed in doing her master's will and testifying for him, blessed in her home, in her friends, and in her work, and blessed in her death. portland, _december , ._ * * * * * iv. the dominant type of religious life and thought in new england in the first half of this century. literary influences. letter of cyrus hamlin. a strange coincidence. a brief notice of the general type of religious life and thought, which prevailed at this time in new england, will throw light upon both the preceding and following pages. elizabeth's early christian character, although largely shaped by that of her father, was also, like his, vitally affected by the religious spirit and methods then dominant. several distinct elements entered into the piety of new england at that period, ( .) there was, first of all, the old puritan element which the pilgrim fathers and their immediate successors brought with them from the mother-country, and which had been nourished by the writings of the great puritan divines of the seventeenth century--such as baxter, howe, bunyan, owen, matthew henry, and flavel--by the "imitation of christ," and bishop taylor's "holy living and dying," and by such writers as doddridge, watts, and jonathan edwards of the last century. this lay at the foundation of the whole structure, giving it strength, solidity, earnestness, and power. ( .) but it was modified by the so-called evangelical element, which marked large sections of the church of england and most of the dissenting bodies in great britain during the last half of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century. the writings of john newton, richard cecil, hannah more, thomas scott, cowper, wilberforce, leigh richmond, john foster, andrew fuller, and robert hall--not to mention others--were widely circulated in new england and had great influence in its pulpits and its christian homes. their admirable spirit infused itself into thousands of lives, and helped in many ways to improve the general tone both of theological and devotional sentiment. ( .) but another element still was the new evangelistic spirit, which inaugurated and still informs those great movements of christian benevolence, both at home and abroad, that are the glory of the age. dr. payson's ministry began just before the formation of the american board of commissioners for foreign missions, and before his death mission-work had come to be regarded as quite essential to the piety and prosperity of the church. the lives of david brainerd, henry martyn, harriet newell, and others like them, were household books. ( .) nor should the "revival" element be omitted in enumerating the forces that then shaped the piety and religious thought of new england. the growth of the church and the advancement of the cause of christ were regarded as inseparable from this influence. a revival was the constant object of prayer and effort on the part of earnest pastors and of the more devout among the people. far more stress was laid upon special seasons and measures of spiritual interest and activity than now--less upon christian nurture as a means of grace, and upon the steady, normal development of church life. many of the most eminent, devoted, and useful servants of christ, whose names, during the last half century, have adorned the annals of american faith and zeal, owed their conversion, or, if not their conversion, some of their noblest and strongest christian impulses, to "revivals of religion." ( .) to all these should perhaps, be added another element--namely, that of the new spirit of reform and the new ethical tone, which, during the third and fourth decades of this century especially, wrought with such power in new england. of this influence and of the philanthropic idea that inspired it, dr. channing may be regarded as the most eminent representative. it brought to the front the humanity and moral teaching of christ, as at once the pattern and rule of all true progress, whether individual or social; and it was widely felt, even where it was not distinctly recognised or understood. whatever errors or imperfections may have belonged to it, this influence did much to soften the dogmatism of opinion, to arouse a more generous, catholic type of sentiment, to show that the piety of the new testament is a principle of universal love to man, as well as of love to god, and to emphasise the sovereign claims of personal virtue and social justice. these truths, to be sure, were not new; but in the great moral-reform movements and conflicts--to a certain extent even in theological discussions--that marked the times, they were asserted and applied with extraordinary clearness and energy of conviction; and, as the event has proved, they were harbingers of a new era of christian thought, culture and conduct, both in private and public life. such were some of the religious influences which surrounded mrs. prentiss during the first twenty years of her life, and which helped to form her character. she was also strongly affected, especially while passing from girlhood into early womanhood, by the literary influences of the day. poetry and fiction were her delight. she was very fond of wordsworth, tennyson, and longfellow; while the successive volumes of dickens were read by her with the utmost avidity. mrs. payson's house was a good deal visited by scholars and men of culture. her eldest daughter had already become somewhat widely known by her writings. in the extent, variety and character of her attainments she was, in truth, a marvel. indeed, she quite overshadowed the younger sister by her learning and her highly intellectual conversation. and yet elizabeth also attracted no little attention from some who had been first drawn to the house by their friendship for louisa. [ ] among her warmest admirers was mr. john neal, then well known as a man of letters; he predicted for her a bright career as an author. still, it was her personal character that most interested the visitors at her mother's house. this may be illustrated by an extract from a letter of mr. hamlin to a friend of the family in new york, written in april, , while he was their temporary pastor. mr. hamlin has since become known throughout the christian world by his remarkable career as a missionary in turkey, and as organiser of robert college. a few months after the letter was written he set sail for constantinople, accompanied by his wife, whose early death was the cause of so much grief among all who knew her. [ ] i should like to write a long letter about dear elizabeth. i have seen her more since louisa left and i love her more. she has a peculiar charm for me. i think she has a quick and excellent judgment, refined sensibilities, and an _instinctive_ perception of what is fit and proper.... it seems to me there is a great deal of purity--of the _spirituelle_--about her feelings. but i can not tell you exactly what it is that makes me think so highly of her. it is a nameless something resulting from her whole self, from her sweet face and mouth, her eye full of love and soul, her form and motion. i do not think she likes me much, i have paid so much attention to louisa and so little to herself. yet she is not one of those who _claim_ attention, but rather shrinks from it. she may have faults of which i have no knowledge. but i am charmed with everything i have seen of her. how strange are the chance coincidences of human life! in another letter to the same friend in new york, in which mr. hamlin refers in a similar manner to elizabeth, occur these words: in a few weeks i hope to be in dorset, among the green mountains, where my thoughts and feelings have their centre above all places on this earth. i wish you could be present at my wedding there on the third of september. how little did he dream, when penning these words, or did his friend dream while reading them, that, after the lapse of more than forty years, the "dear elizabeth" would find her grave near by the old parsonage in which that wedding was to be celebrated, while the dust of the lovely daughter of dorset would be sleeping on the distant shores of the bosphorus! [ ] for many years after the publication of his memoir, it was so often given to children at their baptism that at one time those who bore it, in and out of new england, were to be numbered by hundreds, if not thousands. "i once saw the deaths of _three_ little edward paysons in one paper," wrote mrs. prentiss in . [ ] he was the author of a curious work entitled, "proofs of the real existence, and dangerous tendency, of illuminism." charlestown, . by "illuminism" he means an organised attempt, or conspiracy, to undermine the foundations of christian society and establish upon its ruins the system of atheism. [ ] "i spent part of last evening reading over some old letters of my grandmother's and never realised before what a remarkable woman she was both as to piety and talent."--_from a letter of mrs. prentiss, written in ._ [ ] in a letter to his mother,--written when elizabeth was three years old, he says: "e. has a terrible abscess, which we feared would prove too much for her slender constitution. we were almost worn out with watching; and, just as she began to mend, i was seized with a violent ague in my face, which gave me incessant anguish for six days and nights together, and deprived me almost entirely of sleep. three nights i did not close my eyes. when well nigh distracted with pain and loss of sleep, satan was let loose upon me, to buffet me, and i verily thought would have driven me to desperation and madness." [ ] the late president wayland. [ ] prof. calvin e. stowe, d.d. [ ] the late rev. absalom peters, d.d. [ ] i can see the breezy dome of groves, the shadows of deering's woods; and the friendships old and the early loves come back with a sabbath sound, as of doves in quiet neighborhoods. and the verse of that sweet old song, it flutters and murmurs still: "a boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." --longfellow's _my lost youth._ [ ] "the lament of the last peach" had been written by her a year before when in brooklyn, and her friend's brother had sent it to "the knickerbocker," the popular magazine of that day. here it is: lament of the last peach. in solemn silence here i live, a lone, deserted peach; so high that none but birds and winds my quiet bough can reach. and mournfully, and hopelessly, i think upon the past; upon my dear departed friends, and i, the last--the last. my friends! oh, daily one by one i've seen them drop away; unheeding all the tears and prayers that vainly bade them stay. and here i hang alone, alone-- while life is fleeing fast; and sadly sigh that i am left the last, the last, the last. farewell, then, thou my little world my home upon the tree, a sweet retreat, a quiet home thou mayst no longer be; the willow trees stand weeping nigh, the sky is overcast, the autumn winds moan sadly by, and say, the last--the last! [ ] "dear lizzy is in her little school. her pupils love her dearly. she will have about thirty in the summer."--_letter of mrs. payson, march , _. [ ] three years later elizabeth thus referred to this period in the life of her friend:--"during the time in which she was seeking the saviour with all her heart, i was much with her and had an opportunity to see every variety of feeling as she daily set the whole before me. the affection thus acquired is, i believe, never lost. if i live forever, i shall not lose the impressions which i then received--the deep anxiety i felt lest she should finally come short of salvation, and then the happiness of having her lost in contemplation of the character of him whom she had so often declared it impossible to love." [ ] old friends of her father also became much interested in her. among them was simon greenleaf, the eminent writer on the law of evidence, and judge story's successor at harvard. on removing to cambridge, in , he gave her with his autograph a little volume entitled, "hours for heaven; a small but choice selection of prayers, from eminent divines of the church of england," which long continued to be one of her books of devotion. [ ] see the touching memorial of her, "light on the dark river," prepared by her early friend, mrs. lawrence. chapter ii. the new life in christ. - . i. a memorable experience. letters to her cousin. goes to richmond as a teacher. mr. persico's school. letters. miss payson was now in her twenty-first year, a period which she always looked back to as a turning-point in her spiritual history. the domestic influences that encompassed her childhood, her early associations, and the books of devotion which she read, all conspired to imbue her with an earnest sense of divine things, and while yet a young girl, as we have seen, she publicly devoted herself to the service of her god and saviour. for several years her piety, if marked by no special features, was still regarded by her young friends, and by all who knew her, as of a decided character. but during the general religious interest in the winter of - , even while absorbed in solicitude for others, she began herself to question its reality. "for some months i had no hope that i was a christian, and _pride_ made me go on just as if i felt myself perfectly safe. nothing could at that time have made me willing to have any eye a witness to my daily struggles." and yet she "often longed for the sympathy and assistance of christian friends," and to her unwillingness to confide in them she afterwards attributed much of the suffering that followed. "i do not know exactly how i passed out of that season, but my school commenced in april, and i became so interested in it that i had less time to think of and to watch myself. the next winter most of my scholars were deeply impressed by divine things, and, of course, i could not look on without having my own heart touched. it was my privilege to spend many delightful weeks in watching the progress of minds earnestly seeking the way of life and early consecrating themselves to their saviour." [ ] but after a while a severe reaction set in and in the course of the summer she became careless in her religious habits, shrank from the lord's table as a "place of absolute torture," and while spending a fortnight in boston in the fall, entirely omitted all exercises of private devotion. she had now reached a crisis which was to decide her course for life. during the winter of - , she passed through very deep and harrowing exercises of soul. her spiritual nature was shaken to its foundation, and she could say with the psalmist, _out of the depths have i cried unto thee, o lord._ for several months she was in a state similar to that which the old divines depict so vividly as being "under conviction." her sense of sin, and of her own unworthiness in the sight of god, grew more and more intense and oppressive. at times she abandoned all hope, accused herself of having played the hypocrite, and fancied she was given over to hardness of heart. at length she sought counsel of her pastor and confided to him her trouble, but he "did not know exactly what to do with me." in the midst of her distress, and as its effect, no doubt, she was taken ill and confined to her room, where in solitude she passed several weeks seeking rest and finding none. "sometimes i tried to pray, but this only increased my distress and made me cry out for annihilation to free me from the agony which seemed insupportable." with a single interval of comparative indifference, this state of mind continued for nearly four months. she thus describes it: it was in vain that i sought the lord in any of the lofty pathways through which my heart wished to go. at last i found it impossible to carry on the struggle any longer alone. i would gladly have put myself at the feet of a little child, if by so doing i could have found peace. i felt so guilty and the character of god appeared so perfect in its purity and holiness, that i knew not which way to turn. the sin which distressed me most of all was the rejection of the saviour. this haunted me constantly and made me fly first to one thing and then another, in the hope of finding somewhere the peace which i would not accept from him. it was at this time that i kept reading over the first twelve chapters of doddridge's "rise and progress,"--the rest of the book i abhorred. so great was my agony that i can only wonder at the goodness of him who held my life in his hands, and would not permit me in the height of my despair to throw myself away. it was in this height of despair that thoughts of the infinite grace and love of christ, which she says she had hitherto repelled, began to irradiate her soul. a sermon on his ability to save "unto the uttermost" deeply affected her. [ ] "while listening to it my weary spirit _rested_ itself, and i thought, 'surely it can not be wrong to think of the saviour, although he is not mine.' with this conclusion i gave myself up to admire, to love and to praise him, to wonder why i had never done so before, and to hope that all the great congregation around me were joining with me in acknowledging him to be chief among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely." on going home she could at first scarcely believe in her own identity, the feeling of peace and love to god and to all the world was so unlike the turbulent emotions that had long agitated her soul. "from this time my mind went slowly onward, examining the way step by step, trembling and afraid, yet filled with a calm contentment which made all the dealings of god with me appear just right. i know myself to be perfectly helpless. i can not promise to do or to be anything; but i do want to put everything else aside, and to devote myself entirely to the service of christ." her account of this memorable experience is dated august , . "while writing it," she adds, "i have often laid aside my pen, to sit and think over in silent wonder the way in which the lord has led me." how in later years she regarded certain features of this experience, is not fully known. the record passed at once out of her hands, and until after her death was never seen by anyone, excepting the friend for whose eye it was written. many of its details had, probably, faded entirely from her memory. it can not be doubted, however, that she would have judged her previous state much less severely, would hardly have charged it with hypocrisy, or denied that the saviour had been graciously leading her, and that she had some real love to him, before as well as after this crisis. so much may be inferred from the record itself and from the narrative in the preceding chapter. her tender interest in the spiritual welfare of her friends and pupils, the high tone of religious sentiment that marks her early writings, the books she delighted in, her filial devotion, the absolute sincerity of her character, all forbid any other conclusion. [ ] the indications, too, are very plain that her morbidly-sensitive, melancholy temperament had much to do with this experience. her account of it shows, also, that her mind was unhappily affected by certain false notions of the christian life and ordinances then, and still, more or less prevalent--notions based upon a too narrow and legal conception of the gospel. hence, her shrinking from the lord's table as a place of "torture," instead of regarding it in its true character, as instituted on purpose to feed hungry souls, like her own, with bread from heaven. but for all that, the experience was a blessed reality and, as these pages will attest, wrought a lasting change in her religious life. no doubt the spirit of god was leading her through all its dark and terrible mazes. it virtually ended a conflict which the intensely proud elements of her nature rendered inevitable, if she was to become a true heroine of faith--the conflict between her master's will and her own. her master conquered, and henceforth to her dying hour his will was the sovereign law of her existence, and its sweetest joy also. the following extracts from letters to her cousin, george e. shipman, of new york, now widely known as the founder of a foundling home at chicago, will throw additional light upon her state of mind at this period. mr. shipman was the friend to whom the account of her experience already mentioned was addressed. he had just spent several weeks in portland, and to his christian sympathy, kindness, and counsels while there and during the two following years, she felt herself very deeply indebted. [ ] portland, _august , ._ i am always wondering if any body in the world is the better off for my being in it. and so if i was of any comfort to you, i am very glad of it. i do want, i confess, the privilege of offering you sometimes the wine and oil of consolation, and if i do it in such a way as to cause pain with my unskilful hand, why, you must forgive me.... mr. ---- talked to me as if he imagined me a blue-stocking. just because my sister wears spectacles, folks take it for granted that i also am literary. _aug. th._--you ask if i find it easy to engage in religious meditation, referring in particular to that on our final rest. this is another of my trials. i can not meditate upon anything, except indeed it be something quite the opposite of what i wish to occupy my mind. you know that some christians are able in their solitary walks and rides to hold, all the time, communion with god. i can very seldom do this. yesterday i was obliged to take a long walk alone, and it was made very delightful in this way; so that i quite forgot that i was alone.... i am beginning to feel, that i have enough to do without looking out for a great, wide place in which to work, and to appreciate the simple lines: "the trivial round, the common task, would furnish all we ought to ask; room to deny ourselves; a road to bring us daily nearer god." those words "daily nearer god" have an inexpressible charm for me. i long for such nearness to him that all other objects shall fade into comparative insignificance,--so that to have a thought, a wish, a pleasure apart from him shall be impossible. _sept. th._--at sabbath-school this morning, while talking with my scholars about the lord jesus, my heart, which is often so cold and so stupid, seemed completely melted within me, with such a view of his wonderful, wonderful love for sinners, that i almost believed i had never felt it till then. such a blessing is worth toiling and wrestling for a whole life. if a glimpse of our saviour here upon earth can be so refreshing, so delightful, what will it be in heaven! _sept. th._--i have been reading to-day some passages from nevins' "practical thoughts." [ ] perhaps you have seen them; if so, do you remember two articles headed, "i must pray more," and "i must pray differently"? they interested me much because in some measure they express my own feelings. i have less and less confidence in _frames_, as they are called. i am glad that you think it better to have a few books and to read them over and over, for my own inclination leads me to that. one gets attached to them as to christian friends. do not hesitate to direct me over and over again, to go with difficulties and temptations and sin to the saviour. i love to be led there and _left_ there. sometimes when the exceeding "sinfulness of sin" becomes painfully apparent, there is nothing else for the soul to do but to lie in the dust before god, without a word of excuse, and that feeling of abasement in his sight is worth more than all the pleasures in the world.... you will believe me if i own myself tired, when i tell you that i made fourteen calls this afternoon. but even the unpleasant business of call-making has had one comfort. some of the friends of whom i took leave, spoke so tenderly of him whose name is so precious to his children that my heart warmed towards them instantly, and i thought it worth while to have parting hours, sad though they may be, if with them came so naturally thoughts of the saviour. besides, i have been thinking since i came home, that if i did not love him, it could not be so refreshing to hear unexpectedly of him.... i did not know that mother had anything to do with your father's conversion, and when i mentioned it to her she seemed much surprised and said she did not know it herself. pray tell me more of it, will you? i have felt that if, in the course of my life, i should be the means of leading one soul to the saviour, it would be worth staying in this world for no matter how many years. did you ever read miss taylor's "display"? sister says the character of emily there is like mine. i think so myself save in the best point. we come now to an important change in her outward life. she had accepted an invitation to become a teacher in mr. persico's school at richmond, virginia. mr. persico was an italian, a brother of the sculptor of that name, a number of whose works are seen at washington. he early became interested in our institutions, and as soon as he was able, came to this country and settled in philadelphia as an artist. he married a lady of that city, and afterward on account of her health went to richmond, where he opened a boarding and day school for girls. there were four separate departments, one of which was under the sole care of miss payson. her letters to her family, written at this time, have all been lost, but a full record of the larger portion of her richmond life is preserved in letters to her cousin, mr. shipman. the following extracts from these letters show with what zeal she devoted herself to her new calling and how absorbed her heart was still in the things of god. they also throw light upon some marked features of her character. boston, _september ._ i had, after leaving home, an attack of that terrible pain, of which i have told you, and believed myself very near death. it became a serious question whether, if god should so please, i could feel willing to die there alone, for i was among entire strangers. i never enjoyed more of his presence than that night when, sick and sad and full of pain, i felt it sweet to put myself in his hands to be disposed of in his own way. the attack referred to in this letter resembled _angina pectoris_, a disease to which for many years she was led to consider herself liable. whatever it may have been, its effect was excruciating. "mother was telling me the other day," she wrote to a friend, "that in her long life she had never seen an individual suffer more severe bodily pain than she had often tried to relieve in me. i remember scores of such hours of real agony." in the present instance the attack was doubtless brought on, in part at least, by mental agitation. "no words," she wrote a few months later, "can describe the anguish of my mind the night i left home; it seemed to me that all the agony i had ever passed through was condensed into a small space, and i certainly believe that i should die, if left to a higher degree of such pain." richmond, _september , ._ about twelve o'clock, when it was as dark as pitch, we were all ordered to prepare for a short walk. in single file then out we went. it seems that a bridge had been burned lately, and so we were all to go round on foot to another train of cars. there were dozens of bright, crackling bonfires lighted at short intervals all along, and as we wound down narrow, steep and rocky pathways, then up steps which had been rudely cut out in the side of the elevated ground, and as far as we could see before us could watch the long line of moving figures in all varieties of form and color, my spirits rose to the very tiptop of enjoyment. i wished you could have a picture of the whole scene, which, though one of real life, was to me at least exceedingly beautiful. we reached richmond at one o'clock. mr. persico was waiting for us and received us cordially.... when i awoke at eight o'clock, i felt forlorn enough. imagine, if you can, the room in which i opened my eyes. it is in the attic, is very low and has two windows. my first thought was, "i never can be happy in this miserable hole;" but in a second this wicked feeling took flight, and i reproached myself for my ingratitude to him who had preserved me through all my journey, had made much of it so delightful and profitable, and who still promised to be with me. _oct. ._--i will try to give you some account of our doings, although we are not fully settled. we have risen at six so far, but intend to be up by five if we can wake. as soon as we are dressed i take my bible out into the entry, where is a window and a quiet corner, and read and think until louisa [ ] is ready to give me our room and take my place. at nine we go into school, where miss lord [ ] reads a prayer, and from that hour until twelve we are engaged with our respective classes. at twelve we have a recess of thirty minutes. this over, we return again to school, where we stay until three, when we are to dine. all day saturday we are free. this time we are to have monday, too, as a special holiday, because of a great whig convention which is turning the city upside-down. there is one pleasant thing, pleasant to me at least, of which i want to tell you. as mr. persico is not a religious man, i supposed we should have no blessing at the table, and was afraid i should get into the habit of failing to acknowledge god there. but i was much affected when, on going to dine the first day i came, he stood leaning silently and reverentially over his chair, as if to allow all of us time for that quiet lifting up of the heart which is ever acceptable in the sight of god. it is very impressive. miss lord reads prayers at night, and when mrs. persico comes home we are to have singing.... that passage in the th psalm, of which you speak, is indeed delightful. i will tell you what were some of my meditations on it. i thought to myself that if god continued his faithfulness toward me, i shall have afflictions such as i now know nothing more of than the name, for i need them constantly. i have trembled ever since i came here at the host of new difficulties to which i am exposed. surely i did again and again ask god to decide the question for me as to whether i should leave home or not, and believed that he _had_ chosen for me. it certainly was against my own inclinations.... _oct. th._--this morning i had a new scholar, a pale, thin little girl who stammers, and when i spoke to her, and she was obliged to answer, the color spread over her face and neck as if she suffered the utmost mortification. i was glad when recess came, to draw her close to my side and to tell her that i had a friend afflicted in the same way, and that consequently, i should know how to understand and pity her. she held my hand fast in hers and the tears came stealing down one after another, as she leaned confidingly upon my shoulder, and i could not help crying too, with mingled feelings of gratitude and sorrow. certainly it will be delightful to soothe and to console this poor little thing.... you do not like poetry and i have spent the best part of my life in reading or trying to write it. n. p. willis told me some years ago, that if my husband had a soul, he would love me for the poetical in me, and advised me to save it for him. _oct. th._--sometimes when i feel almost sure that the saviour has accepted and forgiven me and that i _belong to him_, i can only walk my room repeating over and over again, _how wonderful_! and then when my mind strives to take in this love of christ, it seems to struggle in vain with its own littleness and falls back weary and exhausted, to _wonder_ again at the heights and depths which surpass its comprehension.... if there is a spark of love in my heart for anybody, it is for this dear brother of mine, and the desire to have his education thorough and complete has grown with my growth. you, who are not a sister, can not understand the feelings with which i regard him, but they are such as to call forth unbounded love and gratitude toward those who show kindness to him. _nov. d._--i have always felt a peculiar love for the passage that describes the walk to emmaus. i have tried to analyse the feeling of pleasure which it invariably sheds over my heart when dwelling upon it, especially upon the words, "jesus himself drew near and went with them," and these, "he made as though he would go further," but yielded to their urgent, "abide with us." ... this is one of the comforts of the christian; god understands him fully whether he can explain his troubles or not. sometimes i think all of a sudden that i do not love the saviour at all, and am ready to believe that all my pretended anxiety to serve him has been but a matter of feeling and not of principle; but of late i have been less disturbed by this imagination, as i find it extends to earthly friends who are dear to me as my own soul. i thought once yesterday that i didn't love anybody in the world and was perfectly wretched in consequence. _nov. th._--the more i try to understand myself, the more i am puzzled. that i am a mixture of contradictions is the opinion i have long had of myself. i call it a compound of sincerity and reserve. unless you see just what i mean in your own consciousness, i doubt whether i can explain it in words. with me it is both an open and a shut heart--open when and where and as far as i please, and shut as tight as a vise in the same way. i was probably born with this same mixture of frankness and reserve, having inherited the one from my mother and the other from my father.... i have often thought that, humanly speaking, it would be a strange, and surely a very sad thing if we none of us inherit any of our father's piety; for when he prayed for his children it was, undoubtedly, that we might be very peculiarly the lord's. h. was to be the missionary; but if he can not go himself, and is prospered in business, i hope he will be able to help send others. i have been frightened, of late, in thinking how little good i am doing in the world. and yet i believe that those who love to do good always find opportunities enough, wherever they are. whether i shall do any here, i dare not try to guess. _dec. d._--how i thank you for the interest you take in my bible class. they are so attentive to every word i say that it makes me deeply feel the importance of seeking each of those words from the holy spirit. many of them had not even a bible of their own until now, nor were they in the habit of reading it at all. among others there are two grand-daughters of patrick henry. i wish i could give you a picture of them, as they sit on sabbath evening around the table with their eyes fixed so eagerly on my face, that if i did not feel that the lord jesus was present, i should be overwhelmed with confusion at my unworthiness.... mr. persico is a queer man. last sabbath miss l. asked him if he had been to church. "oui, mlle.," said he; "_vous_ étiez à l'église de l'homme--_moi_, j'étais à l'église de dieu--dans les bois." there is the bell for prayers; it is an hour since i began to write, but i have spent a great part of it with my eyes shut because i happened to feel more like meditating than writing, if you know what sort of a feeling that is. oh, that we might be enabled to go onward day by day--and _upward too_. i have been making violent efforts for years to become meek and lowly in heart. at present i do hope that i am less irritable than i used to be. it was no small comfort to me when sister was home last summer, to learn from her that i had succeeded somewhat in my efforts. but though i have not often the last year been guilty of "harsh speeches," i have felt my pride tugging with all its might to kindle a great fire when some unexpected trial has caught me off my guard. i am persuaded that real meekness dwells deep within the heart and that it is only to be gained by communion with our blessed saviour, who when he was reviled, reviled not again. _sabbath evening, th._--i wanted to write last evening but had a worse pain in my side and left arm than i have had since i came here. while it lasted, which was an hour and a half, i had such pleasant thoughts for companions as would make any pain endurable. i was asking myself if, supposing god should please suddenly to take me away in the midst of life, whether i should feel willing and glad to go, and oh, it did seem _delightful_ to think of it, and to feel sure that, sooner or later, the summons will come. those pieces which you marked in the "observer" i have read and like them exceedingly, especially those about growth in grace.... you speak of the goodness of god to me in granting me so much of his presence, while i am here away from all earthly friends. indeed i want to be able to praise him as i never yet have done, and i don't know where to begin. i have felt more pain in this separation from home on mother's account than any other, as i feel that she needs me at home to comfort and to love her. since she lost her best earthly friend i have been her constant companion. i once had a secret desire for a missionary life, if god should see fit to prepare me for it, but when i spoke of it to mother she was so utterly overcome at its bare mention that i instantly promised i would _never_ for any inducement leave or forsake her. i want you to pray for me that if poor mother's right hand is made forever useless, [ ] i may after this year be a right hand for her, and be enabled to make up somewhat to her for the loss of it by affection and tenderness and sympathy.... i don't remember feeling any way in particular, when i first began to "write for the press," as you call it. i never could realise that more than half a dozen people would read my pieces. besides, i have no desire of the sort you express, for fame. i care a great deal too much for the approbation of those i love and respect, but not a fig for that of those i don't like or don't know. * * * * * ii. her character as a teacher. letters. incidents of school-life. religious struggles, aims, and hopes. oppressive heat and weariness. miss payson had been in richmond but a short time before she became greatly endeared to mr. and mrs. persico, and to the whole school. she had a rare natural gift for teaching. fond of study herself, she knew how to inspire her pupils with the same feeling. her method was excellent. it aimed not merely to impart knowledge but to elicit latent powers, and to remove difficulties out of the way. while decided and thorough, it was also very gentle, helpful, and sympathetic. she had a quick perception of mental diversities, saw as by intuition the weak and the strong points of individual character, and was skillful in adapting her influence, as well as her instructions, to the peculiarities of every one under her care. the girls in her own special department almost idolised her. the parents also of some of them, who belonged to richmond and its vicinity, seeing what she was doing for their daughters, sought her acquaintance and showed her the most grateful affection. although her school labors were exacting, she carried on a large correspondence, spent a good deal of time in her favorite religious reading, and together with miss susan lord, the senior teacher and an old portland friend, pursued a course of study in french and italian. at the table mr. persico spoke french, and in this way she was enabled to perfect herself in the practice of that language. of her spiritual history and of incidents of her school life during the new year, some extracts from letters to her cousin will give her own account. richmond, _january , ._ if i tell you that i am going to take under my especial care and protection one of the family--a little girl of eleven years whom nobody can manage at all, you may wonder why. i found on my plate at dinner a note from mrs. persico saying that if i wanted an opportunity of doing good, here was one; that if nannie could sleep in my room, etc., it might be of great benefit to her. the only reason why i hesitated was the fear that she might be in the way of our best hours. but i have thought all along that i was living too much at my ease, and wanted a place in which to deny myself for the sake of the one who yielded up every comfort for my sake. nannie has a fine character but has been mismanaged at home, and since coming here. she often comes and puts her arms around me and says, "there is _one_ in this house who loves me, i do _know_." i receive her as a trust from god, with earnest prayer to him that we may be enabled to be of use to her. from morning to night she is found fault with, and this is spoiling her temper and teaching her to be deceitful.... i have been reading lately the memoir of martyn. i have, of course, read it more than once before, but everything appears to me now in such a different light. i rejoice that i have been led to read the book just now. it has put within me new and peculiar desires to live wholly for the glory of god. _jan. th._--i understand the feeling about wishing one's self a dog, or an animal without a soul. i have sat and watched a little kitten frisking about in the sunshine till i could hardly help killing it in my envy--but oh, how different it is now! i have felt lately that perhaps god has something for me to do in the world. i am satisfied, indeed, that in calling me nearer to himself he has intended to prepare me for his service. where that is to be is no concern of mine as yet. i only wish to belong to him and wait for his will, whatever it may be. _jan. th_.--i used to go through with prayer merely as a duty, but now i look forward to the regular time for it, and hail opportunities for special seasons with such delight as i once knew nothing of. sometimes my heart feels ready to break for the longing it hath for a nearer approach to the lord jesus than i can obtain without the use of words, and there is not a corner of the house which i can have to myself. i think sometimes that i should be thankful for the meanest place in the universe. you ask if i ever dream of seeing the lord. no--i never did, neither should i think it desirable; but a few days ago, when i woke, i had fresh in my remembrance some precious words which, as i had been dreaming, he had spoken to me. it left an indescribable feeling of love and peace on my mind. i seemed in my dream to be very near him, and that he was encouraging me to ask of him all the things of which i felt the need. _jan. th_.--i did not mean to write so much about myself, for when i took out my letter i was thinking of things and beings far above this world. i was thinking of the hour when the christian first enters into the joy of his lord, when the first note of the "new song" is borne to his ear, and the first view of the lamb of god is granted to his eye. it seems to me as if the bliss of that one minute would fully compensate for all the toils and struggles he must go through here; and then to remember the ages of happiness that begin at that point! oh, if the unseen presence of jesus can make the heart to sing for joy in the midst of its sorrow and sin here, what will it be to dwell with him forever! my bible class, which consists now of eighteen, is every week more dear to me. i am glad that you think poor nannie well off. she has an inquiring mind, and though before coming here she had received no religious instruction and had not even a bible, she is now constantly asking me questions which prove her to be a first-rate thinker and reasoner. she went to the theatre last night and came home quite disgusted, saying to herself, "i shouldn't like to die in the midst of such gayeties as these." she urged me to tell her if i thought it wrong for her to go, but i would not, because i did not want her to stay away for my sake. i want her to settle the question fairly in her own mind and to be guided by her own conscience rather than mine. she is so grateful and happy that, if the sacrifice had been greater, we should be glad that we had made it. and then if we can do her any good, how much reason we shall have to thank god for having placed her here! _feb. th._--my thoughts of serious things should, perhaps, be called prayers, rather than anything else. i have constant need of looking up to god for help, so utterly weak and ignorant am i and so dependent upon him. sometimes in my walks, especially those of the early morning, i take a verse from the "daily food" to think upon; at others, if my mind is where i want it should be, everything seems to speak and suggest thoughts of my heavenly father, and when it is otherwise i feel as if that time had been wasted. this is not "keeping the mind on the stretch," and is delightfully refreshing. all i wish is that i were always thus favored. as to a hasty temper, i know that anybody who ever lived with me, until within the last two or three years, could tell you of many instances of outbreaking passion. i am ashamed to say how recently the last real tempest occurred, but i will not spare myself. it was in the spring of , and i did not eat anything for so long that i was ill in bed and barely escaped a fever. mother nursed me so tenderly that, though she forgave me, i _never_ shall forgive myself. since then i should not wish you to suppose that i have been perfectly amiable, but for the last year i think i have been enabled in a measure to control my temper, but of that you know more than i do, as you had a fair specimen of what i am when with us last summer. it has often been a source of encouragement to me that everybody said i was gentle and amiable till my father's death, when i was nine years old.... while reading to-night that chapter in mark, where it speaks of jesus as walking on the sea, i was interested in thinking how frequently such scenes occur in our spiritual passage over the sea which is finally to land us on the shores of the home for which we long. "while they were toiling in rowing," jesus went to them upon the water and "would have passed by" till he heard their cries, and then he manifested himself unto them saying, _"it is i."_ and when he came to them, the wind ceased and they "wondered." surely we have often found in our toiling that jesus was passing by and ready at the first trembling fear to speak the word of love and of consolation and to give us the needed help, and then to leave us _wondering_ indeed at the infinite tenderness and kindness so unexpectedly vouchsafed for our relief. _feb. th_--i do not think we should make our enjoyment of religion the greatest end of our struggle against sin. i never once had such an idea. i think we should fight against sin simply because it is something hateful to god, because it is something so utterly unlike the spirit of christ, whom it is our privilege to strive to imitate in all things. on all points connected with the love i wish to give my saviour, and the service i am to render him, i feel that i want teaching and am glad to obtain assistance from any source. i hardly know how to answer your question. i do not have that constant sense of the saviour's presence which i had here for a long time, neither do i feel that i love him as i thought i did, but it is not always best to judge of ourselves by our feelings, but by the general principle and guiding desire of the mind. i do think that my prevailing aim is to do the will of god and to glorify him in everything. of this i have thought a great deal of late. i have not a very extensive sphere of action, but i want my conduct, my every word and look and motion, to be fully under the influence of this desire for the honor of god. you can have no idea of the constant observation to which i am exposed here. _feb. st._--i spent three hours this afternoon in taking care of a little black child (belonging to the house), who is very ill, and as i am not much used to such things, it excited and worried me into a violent nervous headache. i finished brainerd's life this afternoon, amid many doubts as to whether i ever loved the lord at all, so different is my piety from that of this blessed and holy man. the book has been a favorite with me for years, but i never felt the influence of his life as i have while reading it of late. she alludes repeatedly in her correspondence to the delight which she found on the sabbath in listening to that eminent preacher and divine, the rev. dr. wm. s. plumer, who was then settled in richmond. in a letter to her cousin she writes: i have become much attached to him; he seems more than half in heaven, and every word is full of solemnity and feeling, as if he had just held near intercourse with god. i wish that you could have listened with me to his sermons to-day. they have been, i think, blessed messages from god to my soul. all her letters at this time glow with religious fervor. "how wonderful is our divine master!" she seemed to be always saying to herself. "it has become so delightful to me to speak of his love, of his holiness, of his purity, that when i try to write to those who know him not, i hardly know what is worthy of even a mention, if he is to be forgotten." and several years afterwards she refers to this period as a time when she "shrank from everything that in the slightest degree interrupted her consciousness of god." the following letter to a friend, whose name will often recur in these pages, well illustrates her state of mind during the entire winter. _to miss anna s. prentiss. richmond, feb , ._ your very welcome letter, my dear anna, arrived this afternoon, and, as my labors for the week are over, i am glad of a quiet hour in which to thank you for it. i do not thank you simply because you have so soon answered my letter, but because you have told me what no one else could do so well about your own very dear self. when i wrote you i doubted very much whether i might even allude to the subject of religion, although i wished to do so, since that almost exclusively has occupied my mind during the last year. i saw you in the midst of temptations to which i have ever been a stranger, but which i conceived to be decidedly unfavorable to growth in any of the graces which make up christian character. it was not without hesitation that i ventured to yield to the promptings of my heart, and to refer to the only things which have at present much interest for it. i can not tell you how i do rejoice that you have been led to come out thus upon the lord's side, and to consecrate yourself to his service. my own views and feelings have within the last year undergone such an entire change, that i have wished i could take now some such stand in the presence of all who have known me in days past, as this which you have taken. my first and only wish is henceforth to live but for him, who has graciously drawn my wandering affections to himself.... you speak of the faintness of your heart--but "they who wait upon the lord shall renew their strength," and i do believe the truth of these precious words; not only because they are those of god, but also because my own experience adds happy witness to them. i have lived many years with only just enough of hope to keep me from actual despair. the least breath was sufficient to scatter it all and to leave me, fearful and afraid, to go over and over again the same ground; thus allowing neither time nor strength for progress in the christian course. i trust that you will not go through years of such unnecessary darkness and despondency. there is certainly enough in our saviour, if we only open our eyes that we may see it, to solve every doubt and satisfy every longing of the heart; and he is willing to give it in full measure. when i contemplate the character of the lord jesus, i am filled with wonder which i can not express, and with unutterable desires to yield myself and my all to his hand, to be dealt with in his own way; and his way is a blessed one, so that it is delightful to resign body and soul and spirit to him, without a will opposed to his, without a care but to love him more, without a sorrow which his love can not sanctify or remove. in following after him faithfully and steadfastly, the feeblest hopes may be strengthened; and i trust that you will find in your own happy experience that "joy and peace" go hand in hand with love--so that in proportion to your devotion to the saviour will be the blessedness of your life. when i begin i hardly know where to stop, and now i find myself almost at the end of my sheet before i have begun to say what i wish. this will only assure you that i love you a thousand times better than i did when i did not know that your heart was filled with hopes and affections like my own, and that i earnestly desire, if providence permits us to enjoy intercourse in this or in any other way, we may never lose sight of the one great truth that we are _not our own._ i pray you sometimes remember me at the throne of grace. the more i see of the saviour, the more i feel my own weakness and helplessness and my need of his constant presence, and i can not help asking assistance from all those who love him.... oh, how sorry i am that i have come to the end! i wish i had any faculty for expressing affection, so that i might tell you how much i love and how often i think of you. her cousin having gone abroad, a break in the correspondence with him occurred about this time and continued for several months. in a letter to her friend, miss thurston, dated april st, she thus refers to her school: there are six of us teachers, five of them born in maine--which is rather funny, as that is considered by most of the folks here as the place where the world comes to an end. although the south lifts up its wings and crows over the north, it is glad enough to get its teachers there, and ministers too, and treats them very well when it gets them, into the bargain. we have in the school about one hundred and twenty-five pupils of all ages. i never knew till i came here the influence which early religious education exerts upon the whole future age. there is such a wonderful difference between most of these young people and those in the north, that you might almost believe them another race of beings. mrs. persico is beautiful, intelligent, interesting, and pious. mr. persico is just as much like john neal as difference of education and of circumstances can permit. mr. n.'s strong sense of justice, his enthusiasm, his fun and wit, his independence and self-esteem, his tastes, too, as far as i know them, all exist in like degree in mr. persico. the early spring, with its profusion of flowers of every hue, so far in advance of the spring in her native state, gave her the utmost pleasure; but as the summer approached, her health began to suffer. the heat was very intense, and hot weather always affected her unhappily. "i feel," she wrote, "as if i were in an oven with hot melted lead poured over my brain." her old trouble, too--"organic disease of the heart" it was now suspected to be--caused her much discomfort. "while writing," she says in one of her letters, "i am suffering excruciating pain; i can't call it anything else." her physical condition naturally affected more or less her religious feelings. under date of july th, she writes: the word _conflict_ expresses better than any other my general state from day to day. i have seemed of late like a straw floating upon the surface of a great ocean, blown hither and thither by every wind, and tossed from wave to wave without the rest of a moment. it was a mistake of mine to imagine that god ever intended man to rest in this world. i see that it is right and wise in him to appoint it otherwise.... while suffering from my saviour's absence, nothing interests me. but i was somewhat encouraged by reading in my father's memoir, and in reflecting that he passed through far greater spiritual conflicts than will probably ever be mine.... i see now that it is not always best for us to have the light of god's countenance. do not spend your time and strength in asking for me that blessing, but this--that i may be transformed into the image of christ in his own time, in his own way. early in august she left richmond and flew homeward like a bird to its nest. * * * * * iii. extracts from her richmond journal. were her letters to her cousin the only record of miss payson's richmond life, one might infer that they give a complete picture of it; for they were written in the freedom and confidence of christian friendship, with no thought that a third eye would ever see them. but it had another and hidden side, of which her letters contain only a partial record. her early habit of keeping a journal has been already referred to. she kept one at richmond, and was prevented several years later from destroying it, as she had destroyed others, by the entreaty of the only person who ever saw it. this journal depicts many of her most secret thoughts and feelings, both earthward and heavenward. some passages in it are of too personal a nature for publication, but the following extracts seem fairly entitled to a place here, as they bring out several features of her character with sunlike clearness, and so will help to a better understanding of the ensuing narrative: richmond, _october , ._ how funny it seems here! everything is so different from home! i foresee that i shan't live nearly a year under these new influences without changing my old self into something else. heaven forbid that i should grow old because people treat me as if i were grown up! i hate old young folks. well! whoever should see me and my scholars would be at a loss to know wherein consists the difference between them and me. i am only a little girl after all, and yet folks do treat me as if i were as old and as wise as methusaleh. and mr. persico says, "oui, madame." oh! oh! oh! it makes me feel so ashamed when these tall girls, these damsels whose hearts are developed as mine won't be these half dozen years (to say nothing of their minds), ask me if they may go to bed, if they may walk, if they may go to mr. so-and-so's, and miss such-a-one's to buy--a stick of candy for aught i know. oh, oh, oh! i shall have to take airs upon myself. i shall have to leave off little words and use big ones. i shall have to leave off sitting curled up on my feet, turkey-fashion. i shall have to make wise speeches (but a word in your ear, miss--i _won't_). _oct. th_--this richmond is a queer sort of a place and i should be as miserable in it as a fish out of water, only there is sunshine enough in my heart to make any old hole bright. in the first place, this dowdy chamber is in one view a perfect den--no carpet, whitewashed walls, loose windows that have the shaking palsy, fire-red hearth, blue paint instead of white, or rather a suspicion that there was once some blue paint here. but what do i care? i'm as merry as a grig from morning till night. the little witches down-stairs love me dearly, everybody is kind, and--and--and--when everybody is locked out and i am locked into this same room, this low attic, there's not a king on the earth so rich, so happy as i! here is my little pet desk, here are my books, my papers. i can write and read and study and moralise, i don't pretend to say _think_--and then besides, every morning and every night, within these four walls, heaven itself refuses not to enter in and dwell--and i may grow better and better and happier and happier in blessedness with which nothing may intermeddle. mr. persico is a man by himself, and quite interesting to me in one way, that is, in giving me something to puzzle out. i like him for his exquisite taste in the picture line and for having adorned his rooms with such fine ones--at least they're fine to my inexperienced eye; for when i'm in the mood, i can go and sit and dream as it seemeth me good over them, and as i dream, won't good thoughts come into my heart? as to mrs. p., i hereby return my thanks to nature for making her so beautiful. she has a face and figure to fall in love with. k. has also a fine face and a delicate little figure. miss ---- i shall avoid as far as i can do so. i do not think her opinions and feelings would do me any good. she has a fine mind and likes to cultivate it, and for that i respect her, but she has nothing natural and girlish in her, and i am persuaded, never had. she hates little children; says she hates to hear them laugh, thinks them little fools. why, how odd all this is to me! i could as soon hate the angels in heaven and hate to hear them sing. that, to be sure, is my way, and the other way is hers--but somehow it doesn't seem good-hearted to be so very, very superior to children as to shun the little loving beautiful creatures. i don't believe i ever shall grow up! but, miss ----, i don't want to do you injustice, and i'm much obliged to you for all the flattering things you've said about me, and if you like my eyes and think there is congeniality of feeling between us, why, i thank you. but oh, don't teach me that the wisdom of the world consisteth in forswearing the simple beauties with which life is full. don't make me fear my own happy girlhood by talking to me about love--oh, don't! _dec. ._--i wonder if all the girls in the world are just alike? seems to me they might be so sweet and lovable if they'd leave off chattering forever and ever about lovers.... if mothers would keep their little unfledged birds under their own wings, wouldn't they make better mother- birds? now some girls down-stairs, who ought to be thinking about all the beautiful things in life but just lovers, are reading novels, love-stories and poetry, till they can't care for anything else.... now, lizzy payson, where's the use of fretting so? go right to work reading leighton and you'll forget that all the world isn't as wise as you think you are, you little vain thing, you! alas and alas, but this is such a nice world, and the girls don't know it! _dec. ._--what a pleasant walk i had this morning on ambler's hill. the sun rose while i was there and i was so happy! the little valley, clothed with white houses and completely encircled by hills, reminded me of the verse about the mountains round about jerusalem. nobody was awake so early and i had all the great hill to myself, and it was so beautiful that i could have thrown myself down and kissed the earth itself. oh, sweet and good and loving mother nature! i choose you for my own. i will be your little lady-love. i will hunt you out whenever you hide, and you shall comfort me when i am sad, and laugh with me when i'm merry, and take me by the hand and lead me onward and upward till the image of the heavenly forceth out that of the earthly from my whole heart and soul. oh, how i prayed for a holy heart on that hillside and how sure i am that i shall grow better! and what companionable thoughts i've had all day for that blessed walk! _ th._--my life is a nice little life just now, as regular as clockwork. we walk and we keep school, and our scholars kiss and love us, and we kiss and love them, and we read lamartine and i worship leighton, good, wise, holy leighton, and we discourse about everything together and dispute and argue and argue and dispute, and i'm quite happy, so i am! as to lamartine, he's no great things, as i know of, but i want to keep up my knowledge of french and so we read twenty pages a day. and as to our discourses, my fidgety, moralising sort of mind wants to compare its doctrines with those of other people, though it's as stiff as a poker in its own opinions. you're a very consistent little girl! you call yourself a child, are afraid to open your mouth before folks, and yet you're as obstinate and proud as a little man, daring to think for yourself and act accordingly at the risk of being called odd and incomprehensible. i don't care, though! run on and break your neck if you will. you're nothing especial after all. _ th._--to-night, in unrolling a bundle of work i found a little note therein from mother. whew, how i kissed it! i thought i should fly out of my senses, i was so glad. but i can't fly now-a-days, i'm growing so unetherial. why, i take up a lot of room in the world and my frocks won't hold me. that's because my heart is so quiet, lying as still as a mouse, after all its tossings about and trying to be happy in the things of this life. oh, i am so happy now in the _other_ life! but as for telling other people so--as for talking religion--i don't see how i _can._ it doesn't come natural. is it because i am proud? but i pray to be so holy, so truly a christian, that my _life_ shall speak and gently persuade all who see me to look for the hidden spring of my perpetual happiness and quietness. the only question is: do i live so? i'm afraid i make religion seem too grave a thing to my watching maidens down-stairs; but, oh, i'm afraid to rush into _their_ pleasures. _ th._-- ... i've been "our lizzy" all my life and have not had to display my own private feelings and opinions before folks, but have sat still and listened and mused and lived within myself, and shut myself up in my corner of the house and speculated on life and the things thereof till i've got a set of notions of my own which don't _fit into_ the notions of anybody i know. i don't open myself to anybody on earth; i can not; there is a world of something in me which is not known to those about me and perhaps never will be; but sometimes i think it would be _delicious_ to love a mind like mine in some things, only better, wiser, nobler. i do not quite understand life. people don't live as they were made to live, i'm sure ... i want _soul._ i want the gracious, glad spirit that finds the good and the beautiful in everything, joined to the manly, exalted intellect--rare unions, i am sure, yet possible ones. little girl! do you suppose such a soul would find anything in yours to satisfy it? no--no--no--i do not. i know i am a poor little goose which ought to be content with some equally poor little gander, but i _won't._ i'll never give up one inch of these the demands of my reason and of my heart for all the truths you tell me about myself--never! but descend from your elevation, oh speculating child of mortality, and go down to school. oh, no, no school for a week, and i guess i'll spend the week in fancies and follies. it won't hurt me. i've done it before and got back to the world as satisfied as ever, indeed i have. _jan. , l._--we've been busy all the week getting our presents ready for the servants, and a nice time i've had this morning, seeing them show their ivory thereat. james made a little speech, the amount of which was, he hoped i wouldn't get married till i'd "done been" here two or three years, because my face was so pleasant it was good to look at it! i was as proud as lucifer at this compliment, and shall certainly look pleasant all day to-day, if i never did before. monsieur and the rest wished me, i won't say how many, good wishes, rushing at me as i went in to breakfast--and milly privately informed lucy that she liked miss payson "a heap" better than she did any body else, and then came and begged me to buy her! i buy her! heaven bless the poor little girl. i had some presents and affectionate notes from different members of the family and from my scholars--also letters from sister and ned, which delighted me infinitely more than i'm going to tell _you_, old journal. took tea at mr. p.'s and mrs. p. laughed at her husband because he had once an idea of going to new england to get my little ladyship to wife (for the sake of my father, of course). mr. p. blushed like a boy and fidgeted terribly, but i didn't care a snap--i am not old enough to be wife to anybody, and i'm not going to mind if people do joke with me about it. i've had better things to think of on this new year's day--good, heavenward thoughts and prayers and hopes, and if i do not become more and more transformed into the divine, then are prayers and hopes things of nought. oh, how dissatisfied i am with myself. how i long to be like unto him into whose image i shall one day be changed when i see him as he is! i believe nobody understands me on religious points, for i can not, and, it seems to me, _need_ not parade my private feelings before the world. cousin g., god bless him! knows enough, and yet my letters to him do not tell the hundredth part of that which these four walls might tell, if they would. i do not know that i am not wrong, but i do dislike the present style of talking on religious subjects. let people pray--earnestly, fervently, not simply morning and night, but the _whole day long_, making their lives one continued prayer; but, oh, don't let them tell others of, or let others know _half_ how much of communion with heaven is known to their own hearts. is it not true that those who talk most, go most to meetings, run hither and thither to all sorts of societies and all sorts of readings--is it not true that such people would not find peace and contentment--yes, blessedness of blessedness--in solitary hours when to the searcher of hearts alone are known their aspirations and their love? i do not know, i am puzzled; but i may say here, where nobody will ever see it, what i _do_ think, and i say it to my own heart as well as over the hearts of others--there is not enough of real, true communion with god, not enough nearness to him, not enough heart-searching before him; and too much parade and bustle and noise in doing his work on earth. oh, i do not know exactly what i mean--but since i have heard so many apparently christian people own that of this sense of nearness to god they know absolutely nothing--that they pray because it is their habit without the least expectation of meeting the great yet loving father in their closets--since i have heard this i am troubled and perplexed. why, is it not indeed true that the christian believer, god's own adopted, chosen, beloved child, may speak face to face with his father, humbly, reverently, yet as a man talketh with his friend? is it not true? do not i _know_ that it is so? oh, i sometimes want the wisdom of an angel that i may not be thus disturbed and wearied. _ th._--now either miss ----'s religion is wrong and mine right, or else it's just the other way. i wrote some verses, funny ones, and sent her to-day, and she returned for answer that verse in proverbs about vinegar on nitre, and seemed distressed that i ever had such worldly and funny thoughts. i told her i should like her better if she ever had any but solemn ones, whence we rushed into a discussion about proprieties and i maintained that a mind was not in a state of religious health, if it could not _safely_ indulge in thoughts funny as funny could be. she shook her head and looked as glum as she could, and i'm really sorry that i vexed her righteous soul, though i'm sure i feel funny ever so much of the time, can not help saying funny things and cutting up capers now and then. i'll take care not to marry a glum man, anyhow; not that i want my future lord and master to be a teller of stories, a wit, or a particularly funny man--but he shan't wear a long face and make me wear a long one, though he may be as pious as the day is long and _must_ be, what's more. oh, my! i don't think i was so very naughty. i saw miss ---- laughing privately at these same verses, and she rushed in to mrs. p. and read them to her, and then copied them for her aunt and paid twenty-five cents postage on the letter. i should like to know how she dared waste so much time in unholy employments! as i was saying, and am always thinking, it's rather queer that people are so oddly different in their ideas of religion. heaven forbid i should trifle with serious and holy thoughts of my head and heart--but if my religion is worth a straw, such verse-writing will not disturb it. _january th_.--i wonder what's got into me to-day--i feel cross, without the least bit of reason for so feeling. i guess i'm not well, for i'm sure i've felt like one great long sunbeam, i don't know how many months, and it doesn't come natural to be fretful. _ th_.--i knew i wasn't well yesterday and to-day am half sick. we got through breakfast at twenty minutes to eleven, and as i was up at seven, i got kind o' hungry and out of sorts. this afternoon went to church and heard one of dr. e.'s argumentative sermons. but there's something in those prayer-book prayers, certainly, if men won't or can't put any grace into their sermons. i wish i had a perfect ideal sunday in my head or heart, or both. if i'm _very_ good i'm tired at night, and if i'm bad my conscience smites me--so any way i'm not very happy just now and i'm sick and mean to go to bed and so! _ th_.--had a talk with nannie. she has a thoughtful mind and who knows but we may do her some good. i love to have her here, and for once in my life like to feel a little bit--just the least bit--_old_; that is, old enough to give a little sage advice to the poor thing, when she asks it. she says she won't read any more novels and will read the bible and dear knows what else she said about finding an angel for me to marry, which heaven forbid she should do, since i'm too fond of being a little mite naughty, to desire anything of that sort. after she was in bed she began to say her prayers most vehemently and among other things, prayed for miss payson. i had the strangest sensation, and yet an almost heavenly one, if i may say so. may it please heaven to listen to her prayer for me, and mine for her, dear child. but suppose i do her no good while she lives so under my wing? _ th._--up early--walked and read leighton. mr. p. amused us at dinner by giving a funny account in his funny way, of a mistake of e.---- h.----'s. she asked me the french for _as_. "aussi" quoth i. thereupon she tucked a great o. c. into her exercise and took it to him and they jabbered and sputtered over it, and she insisted that miss payson said so and he put his face right into hers and said, "will you try to prove that miss payson is a fool, you little goose?" and at last miss a. understood and explained. read leighton after school and thirty-two pages of lamartine--then mr. p. called--then miss ---- teased me to love her and kept me in her paws till the bell rang for tea. why can't i like her? i should be so ashamed if i should find out after all that she is as good as she _seems_, but i never did get cheated yet when i trusted my own mother wits, my instinct, or whatever it is by which i know folks--and she is found wanting by this something. _ th_.--mrs. persico has comforted me to-day. she says mr. t. came to mr. p. with tears in his eyes (could such a man shed tears?) and told him that i should be the salvation of his child--that she was already the happiest and most altered creature, and begged him to tell me so. i was ashamed and happy too--but i think mr. p. should have told him that if good has been done to nannie, it is _as_ much--to say the least--owing to louisa as to me. l. always joins me in everything i do and say for her, and i would not have even an accident deprive her of her just reward for anything. nannie sat on the floor to-night in her night-gown, thinking. at last she said, "miss payson?" "well, little witch?" "you wouldn't care much if you should die to-night, should you?" "no, i think not." "nor i," said she. "why, do you think you should be better off than you are here?" "yes, in heaven," said she. "why how do you know you'll go to heaven?" she looked at me seriously and said, "oh, i don't know--i don't know--i don't think i should like to go to the other place." we had then a long talk with her and it seems she's a regular little believer in purgatory--but i wouldn't dispute with her. i guess there's a way of getting at her heart better than that.... why is it that i have such a sensitiveness on religious points, such a dread of having my own private aims and emotions known by those about me? is it right? i should like to be just what the christian ought to be in these relations. miss ---- expects me to make speeches to her, but i _can not_. if i thought i knew ever so much, i could not, and she annoys me so. oh, i wish it didn't hurt my soul so to touch it! it's just like a butterfly's wing--people can't help tearing off the very invisible _down_ so to speak, for which they take a fancy to it, if they get it between fingers and thumb, and so i have to suffer for their curiosity's sake. am i bound to reveal my heart-life to everybody who asks? must i not believe that the heavenly love may, in one sense, be _hidden_ from outward eye and outward touch? or am i wrong? _feb. , l._--rose later than usual--cold, dull, rainy morning. read in life of wilberforce. defended nannie with more valor than discretion. this evening the storm departed and the moonlight was more beautiful than ever; and i was so sad and so happy, and the life beyond and above seemed so beautiful. oh, how i have longed to-day for heaven within my own soul! there has been much unspoken prayer in my heart to-night. i don't know what i should do if i could have my room all to myself--and not have people know it if even a good thought comes into my mind. i shall be happy in heaven, i know i shall--for even here prayer and praise are so infinitely more delightful than anything else. _ d._--woke with headache, got through school as best i could, then came and curled myself up in a ball in the easy-chair and didn't move till nine, when i crept down to say good-bye to poor mrs. persico. miss l. and miss j. received me in their room so tenderly and affectionately that i was ashamed. what makes them love me? i am sure i should not think they could. _ th._--i wonder who folks think i am, and what they think? sally r---- sent me up her book of autographs with a request that i would add mine. i looked it over and found very great names, and did not know whether to laugh or cry at her funny request, which i couldn't have made up my mouth to grant. how queer it seems to me that people won't let me be a little girl and will act as if i were an old maid or matron of ninety-nine! poor mr. persico is terribly unhappy and walks up and down perpetually with _such_ a step. _ th._-- ... i am sure that in these little things god's hand is just as clearly to be seen as in his wonderful works of power, and tried to make miss ---- see this, but she either couldn't or wouldn't. it seems to me that god is my father, my own father, and it is so natural to turn right to him, every minute almost, with either thank-offerings or petitions, that i never once stop to ask if such and such a matter is sufficiently great for his notice. miss ---- seemed quite astonished when i said so. _ th._-- ... i've been instituting an inquiry into myself to-day and have been worthily occupied in comparing myself to an onion, though in view of the fragrance of that highly useful vegetable, i hope the comparison won't go on all fours but i have as many natures as an onion has--what d'ye call 'em--coats? first the outside skin or nature--kind o' tough and ugly; _any_body may see that and welcome. then comes my next nature--a little softer--a little more removed from curious eyes; then my inner one--myself--that 'ere little round ball which nobody ever did or ever will see the whole of--at least, s'pose not. now most people see only the outer rind--a brown, red, yellow, tough skin and that's all; but i _think_ there's something inside that's better and more truly an onion than might at first be guessed. and so i'm an onion and that's the end. _ th._--mrs. p.'s birthday, in honor of which cake and wine. mr. p. was angry with us because we took no wine. if he had asked me civilly to drink his wife's health, i should probably have done so, but i am not to be _frightened_ into anything. i made a funny speech and got him out of his bearish mood, and then we all proceeded to the portico to see if the new president had arrived--by which means we obtained a satisfactory view of two cows, three geese, one big boy in a white apron and one small one in a blue apron, three darkies of feminine gender and one old horse; but harrison himself we saw not. mr. persico says it's tyler's luck to get into office by the death of his superior, and declares harrison must infallibly die to secure john tyler's fate. it's to be hoped this won't be the case. [ ] _march th._--miss l. read to us to-day some sprightly and amusing little notes written her years ago by a friend with whom she still corresponds. i was struck with the contrast between these youthful and light-hearted fragments and her present letters, now that she is a wife and mother. i wonder if there is always this difference between the girl and woman? if so, heaven forbid i should ever cease to be a child! _ th._--headache--nannie sick; held her in my arms two or three hours; had a great fuss with her about taking her medicine, but at last out came my word _must_, and the little witch knew it meant all it said and down went the oil in a jiffy, while i stood by laughing at myself for my pretension of dignity. the poor child couldn't go to sleep till she had thanked me over and over for making her mind and for taking care of her, and wouldn't let go my hand, so i had to sit up until very late--and then i was sick and sad and restless, for i couldn't have my room to myself and the day didn't seem finished without it. it is a perfect mystery to me how folks get along with so little praying. their hearts must be better than mine, or something. what is it? but if god sees that the desire of my whole heart is to-night--has been all day--towards himself, will he not know this as prayer, answer it as such? yes, prayer is certainly something more than bending of the knees and earnest words, and i do believe that goodness and mercy will descend upon me, though with my lips i ask not. _ th._--had a long talk with mr. persico about my style of governing. he seemed interested in what i had to say about appeals to the conscience, but said my _youthful enthusiasm_ would get cooled down when i knew more of the world. i told him, very pertly, that i hoped i should never know the world then. he laughed and asked, "you expect to make out of these stupid children such characters, such hearts as yours?" "no--but better ones." he shook his head and said i had put him into good humor. i don't know what he meant. i've been acting like sancho to-day--rushing up stairs two at a time, frisking about, catching up miss j---- in all her maiden dignity and tossing her right into the midst of our bed. who's going to be "schoolma'am" out of school? not i! i mean to be just as funny as i please, and what's more i'll make miss ---- funny, too,--that i will! she'd have so much more health--christian health, i mean--if she would leave off trying to get to heaven in such a dreadful bad "way." i can't think _religion_ makes such a long, gloomy face. it must be that she is wrong, or else i am. i wonder which? why it's all sunshine to me--and all clouds to her! poor miss ----, you might be so happy! _april th._--holiday. we all took a long walk, which i enjoyed highly. i was in a half moralising mood all the way, wanted to be by myself very much. we talked more than usual about home and i grew so sad. oh, i wonder if anybody loves me as _i love_! i wonder! i long for mother, and if i could just see her and know that she is happy and that she will be well again! it is really a curious question with me, whether provided i ever fall in love (for i'll _fall_ in love, else not go in at all) i shall leave off loving mother best of anybody in the world? i suppose i shall be in love sometime or other, but that's nothing to do with me now nor i with it. i've got my hands full to take care of my naughty little self. _ th._--mrs. persico got home to-night [ ] and what a meeting we had! what rejoicing! how beautiful she looked as she sat in her low chair, and we stood and knelt in a happy circle about her! a queen--an angel--could not have received love and homage with a sweeter grace. sue irvine cried an hour for joy and i wished i were one of the crying sort, for i'm sure i was glad enough to do almost anything. beautiful woman! we sang to her the welcome home, miss f. singing as much with her eyes as with her voice, and mr. and mrs. persico both cried, he like a little child. oh, that such evenings as this came oftener in one's life! all that was beautiful and good in each of our hidden natures came dancing out to greet her at her coming, and all petty jealousies were so quieted and--why, what a rhapsody i'm writing! and to-morrow, our good better natures tucked away, dear knows where, we shall descend with business-like airs to breakfast, wish each other good morning, pretend that we haven't any hearts. oh, is this life! i won't believe it. our good genius has come back to us; now all things will again go on smoothly; once more i can be a little girl and frolic up here instead of playing miss dignity down-stairs. _may th._--this evening i passed unavoidably through miss ----'s room. she was reading byron as usual and looked so wretched and restless, that i could not help yielding to a loving impulse and putting my hand on hers and asking why she was so sad. she told me. it was just what i supposed. she is trying to be happy, and can not find out how; reads byron and gets sickly views of life; sits up late dreaming about love and lovers; then, too tired to pray or think good thoughts, tosses herself down upon her bed and wishes herself dead. she did not tell me this, to be sure, but i gathered it from her story. i alluded to her religious history and present hopes. she said she did not think continued acts of faith in christ necessary; she had believed on him once, and now he would save her whatever she did; and she was not going to torment herself trying to live so very holy a life, since, after all, she should get to heaven just as well through him as if she had been particularly good (as she termed it). i don't know whether a good or a bad spirit moved me at that minute, but i forgot that i was a mere child in religious knowledge, and talked about _my_ doctrine and made it a very beautiful one to my mind, though i don't think she thought it so. oh, for what would i give up the happiness of praying for a holy heart--of striving, struggling for it! yes, it is indeed true that we are to be saved simply, only, apart from our own goodness, through the love of christ. but who can believe himself thus chosen of god--who can think of and hold communion with infinite holiness, and not long for the divine image in his own soul? it is a mystery to me--these strange doctrines. is not the fruit of love aspiration after the holy? is not the act of the new-born soul, when it passes from death unto life, that of desire for assimilation to and oneness with him who is its all in all? how can love and faith be _one act_ and then cease? i dare not believe--i would not for a universe believe--that my very sense of safety in the love of christ is not to be just the sense that shall bind me in grateful self-renunciation wholly to his service. let me be _sure_ of final rest in heaven--sure that at this moment i am really god's own adopted child; and i believe my prayers, my repentings, my weariness of sin, would be just what they now are; nay, more deep, more abundant. oh, it is _because_ i believe--fully believe that i shall be saved through christ--that i want to be like him here upon earth it is because i do not fear final misery that i shrink from sin and defilement here. oh, that i could put into that poor bewildered heart of hers just the sweet repose upon the ever present saviour which he has given unto me! the quietness with which my whole soul rests upon him is such blessed quietness! i shall not soon forget this strange evening. [ ] she refers to this, doubtless, in a note to mr. hamlin, dated march , . mr. h. was then in constantinople. "it seems as if a letter to go so far ought to be a good one, so i am afraid to write to you. but we '_think to you_' every day, and hope you think of us sometimes. i have been so happy all winter that i have some happiness to spare, and if you need any you shall have as much as you want." [ ] the sermon was preached by her pastor, the rev. dr. condit, april th. [ ] there is one thing i recall as showing the very early religious tendency of lizzy's mind. it was a little prayer meeting which she held with a few little friends, as long ago as her sister kept school in the large parlor of the house on middle street, before the death of her father. it assembled at odd hours and in odd places. i also remember her interest in the spiritual welfare of her young companions, after the return of the family from their sojourn in new york. she showed this by accompanying some of us, in the way of encouragement, to dr. tyler's inquiry-meeting. then during the special religious interest of , she felt still more deeply and entered heartily into the rejoicing of those of us who at that time found "peace in believing." the next year i accompanied my elder sister susan to richmond, and during my absence she gave up her christian hope and passed through a season of great darkness and despondency, emerging, however, into the light upon a higher plane of religious experience and enjoyment. she sometimes thought this the very beginning of the life of faith in her soul. but as i used to say to her when the next year we were together at richmond, it seemed to me quite impossible that any one who had not already received the grace of god, could have felt what she had felt and expressed. i do not doubt in the least that for years she had been a true follower of christ.--_letter from miss ann louisa p. lord, dated portland, december , _. [ ] it may be proper to say here, that while but few of her letters are given entire, it has not been deemed needful specially to indicate all the omissions. in some instances, also, where two letters, or passages of letters, relate to the same subject, they have been combined. [ ] an excellent little work by rev. william nevins, d.d. dr. nevins was pastor of the first presbyterian church in baltimore, where he died in , at the age of thirty-seven. he was one of the best preachers and most popular religious writers of his day. [ ] miss ann louisa p. lord. [ ] miss susan lord. [ ] referring to a serious accident, by which her mother was for some time deprived of the use of her right hand. [ ] but, singularly enough, it was. president harrison died april , , just a month after his inauguration, and mr. tyler succeeded him. [ ] from philadelphia, where she had undergone a surgical operation. chapter iii. passing from girlhood into womanhood. - . i. at home again. marriage of her sister. ill-health. letters. spiritual aspiration and conflict. perfectionism. "very, very happy." work for christ what makes life attractive. passages from her journal. a point of difficulty. not long after elizabeth's return from richmond, her sister was married to the rev. albert hopkins, professor in williams college. the wedding had been delayed for her coming. "i would rather wait six years than not have you present," her sister wrote. this event brought her into intimate relations with a remarkable man; a man much beloved in his day, and whose name will often reappear in these pages. the next two or three months showed that her richmond life, although so full of happy experiences, had yet drawn heavily upon her strength. they were marked by severe nervous excitement and fits of depression. this, however, passed away and she settled down again into a busy home life. but it was no longer the home life of the past. the year of absence had left a profound impression upon her character. her mind and heart had undergone a rapid development. she was only twenty-two on her return, and had still all the fresh, artless simplicity of a young girl, but there was joined to it now the maturity of womanhood. of the rest of the year a record is preserved in letters to her cousin. these letters give many little details respecting her daily tasks and the life she led in the family and in the world; but they are chiefly interesting for the light they shed upon her progress heavenward. her whole soul was still absorbed in divine things. at times her delight in them was sweet and undisturbed; then again, she found herself tossed to and fro upon the waves of spiritual conflict. perfectionism was just then much discussed, and the question troubled her not a little, as it did again thirty years later. but whether agitated or at rest, her thoughts all centered in christ, and her constant prayer was for more love to him. portland, _sept. , ._ the lord jesus is indeed dear to me. i can not doubt it. his name is exceedingly precious. oh, help me, my dear cousin, to love him more, to attain his image, to live only for him! i blush and am ashamed when i consider how inadequate are the returns i am making him; yet i can praise him for all that is past and trust him for all that is to come. i can not tell you how delightful prayer is. i feel that in it i have communion with god--that he is here--that he is mine and that i am his. i long to make progress every day, each minute seems precious, and i constantly tremble lest i should lose one in returning, instead of pressing forward with all my strength. no, not _my_ strength, for i have none, but with all which the lord gives me. how can i thank you enough that you pray for me! _sept. th._--i am all the time so nervous that life would be insupportable if i had not the comfort of comforts to rejoice in. i often think mother would not trust me to carry the dishes to the closet, if she knew how strong an effort i have to make to avoid dashing them all to pieces. when i am at the head of the stairs i can hardly help throwing myself down, and i believe it a greater degree of just such a state as this which induces the suicide to put an end to his existence. it was never so bad with me before. do you know anything of such a feeling as this? to-night, for instance, my head began to feel all at once as if it were enlarging till at last it seemed to fill the room, and i thought it large enough to carry away the house. then every object of which i thought enlarged in proportion. when this goes off the sense of the contraction is equally singular. my head felt about the size of a pin's head; our church and everybody in it appeared about the bigness of a cup, etc. these strange sensations terminate invariably with one still more singular and particularly pleasant. i can not describe it--it is a sense of smoothness and a little of dizziness. if you never had such feelings this will be all nonsense to you, but if you have and can explain them to me, why i shall be indeed thankful. i have been subject to them ever since i can remember. i never met with a physician yet who seemed to know what is the matter with me, or to care a fig whether i got well or not. all they do is to roll up their eyes and shake their heads and say, "oh!" ... as to the wedding, we had a regular fuss, so that i hardly knew whether i was in the body or out of it. the professor was here only two days. he is very eminently holy, his friends say, and from what i saw of him, i should think it true. this was the point which interested sister in him. as soon as the wedding was over my spirits departed and fled. it is true enough that "marriage involves one union, but _many separations_." _oct. th._--we had a most precious sermon this afternoon from the baptist minister on the words, "christ is all and in all." i longed to have you hear the saviour thus dwelt upon. i did not know how full the apostles were of his praise--how constantly they dwelt upon him, till it was spread before me thus in one delightful view. oh, may he become our all--our beginning and our ending--our first and our last! i do love to hear him thus honored and adored. let us, dear cousin, look at our saviour more. let us never allow aught to come between our hearts and our god. speak to me as to your own soul, urging me onward, and if you do not see the fruits of your faithfulness here, may you see when sowing is turned to reaping. _oct. th._--i must call upon you to rejoice with me that i have to-day got back my old sunday-school class. i wondered at their being so earnest about having me again, yet i trust that god has given me this hold upon their affections for some good purpose.... i do not know exactly how to discriminate between the suggestions of satan and those of my own heart, but for a week past, even while my inclinations and my will were set upon christ, something followed me in my down-sittings and my uprisings, urging me to hate the lord jesus; asking if his strict requirements were not too strait to be endured; and it has grieved me deeply that such a thought could find its way into my mind. "i have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not" is my last refuge. how graciously did jesus provide a separate consolation for each difficulty which he foresaw could meet his disciples on their way. _nov. th._--mother has been sick. the doctor feared inflammation of the brain; but she is better now. i have had my first experience as a nurse, and dr. mighels says i am a good one. whenever i think of god's wonderful, _wonderful_ goodness to me and of my own sinfulness, i want to find a place low at the foot of the cross where i may cover my face in the dust, and yet go on praising him. you do not know how all things have been made new to me within less than two years. still, i struggle fiercely every hour of my life. for instance, my desire to be much beloved by those dear to me, is a source of constant grief. some weeks ago, a person, who probably did not know this, told me that i was remarkably lovable and that everybody said so. i was so foolish, so wicked, as to be more pleased by this than i dare to tell--but enough so to give me after-hours of bitter sorrow. sometimes it seems to me that i grow prouder every day, and i wanted to ask mother if she did not think so; but i thought perhaps god is showing me my pride as i had never seen it that i may wage war against this, his enemy and mine. i do not believe anybody else has such an evil nature as i. but let us never rest till we are satisfied with being counted as nothing, that our saviour may be all in all. it seems no small portion of the joy i long for in heaven, to be thus self-forgetful in love to christ. how strange that we do not now supremely love him. how i do long to live with those who praise him. i long to have every christian with whom i meet speak of him with love and exalt him. [ ] _nov. th._--i have been very unwell and low-spirited. the cause of this, folks seem to agree, was over-exertion during mother's sickness. to tell the truth, i was so anxious about her that i did not try to save my strength at all, and excitement kept me up, so that i was not conscious of any special fatigue till all was over and the reaction came, when i just went into a dead-and-alive state and had the "blues" outrageously. it seemed as if i could do nothing but fold my hands and cry. sister is coming home this winter. i would like you to see this letter of hers. she is as nearly a perfectionist now as your father is. she begs me to read the new testament and to pray for a knowledge of the truth. and so i have for a year and a half, and this is what i learn thereby: "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked"--at least such i find mine to be. to be sure, that i am not perfect is no proof that i may not become so; however, i feel most sympathy with those who, like martyn, brainerd, and my father, had to _fight_ their way through. yet her remarks threw my mind into great confusion at first and i knew not what to do; thereupon i went at once with my difficulties to the lord and tried to _seek the truth_, whatever it might be, from him. it seems to me that i am safe while in his hands, and that if those things are essential, he will not withhold them from me. truly, if there is a royal road to holiness, and if in one moment of time sin may be crushed and forever slain, i of all others should know it; for at present the way is thronged with difficulties. [ ] it seems to me that i am made of wants"--i need everything. at the same time, how great is the goodness of god to me! i long to have my heart so filled with the one single image of my redeemer, that it shall ever flow in spontaneous adoration. such a saviour! i am pained to the very depths of my soul because i love him so little.... if i am only purified and made entirely the lord's, let him take his own course and make the refining process ever so painful. "when the shore is won at last, who will count the billows past?" _dec. th._--do you remember what father said about losing his will when near the close of his life? that remark has always made the subject of a _lost will_ interesting to me. there is another place where he wishes he had known this blessedness twenty years before. [ ] _dec. th._--"i am very, very happy; and yet it is hardly a happiness which i can describe. you know what it is to rejoice in the sweet consciousness that there is a saviour--a near and a present saviour; and thus am i now rejoicing; grateful to him for his holy nature, for his power over me, for his dealings with me, for a thousand things which i can only try to express to him. oh, how excellent above all treasures does he now appear! one minute of nearness to the lord jesus contains more of delight than years spent in intercourse with any earthly friend. i could not but own to-night that god can make me happy without a right hand or a right eye. lord, make me thine, and i will cheerfully give thee all. _dec. d._--"as to my italian and tasso, i am ashamed to tell you how slow i have been. between company and housework and sewing i have my hands about full, and precious little time for reading and study. still, i feel that i live a life of too much ease. i should love to spend the rest of my existence in the actual service of the lord, without a question as to its ease and comfort. reading brainerd this afternoon made me long for his loose hold on earthly things. i do not know how to attain to such a spirit. is it by prayer alone and the consequent sense of the worth of divine things that this deadness to the world is to be gained--or, by giving up, casting away the treasures which withdraw the heart or have a tendency to withdraw it from god? this is quite an interesting question to me now, and i should really like it settled. the thought of living apart from god is more dreadful than any affliction i can think of. here are some passages from two leaves of her journal which escaped the flames. they touch upon another side of her life at this period. _december , l._--"i went to the sewing-circle this afternoon and had such a stupid time! enough gossip and nonsense was talked to make one sick, and i'm sure it wasn't the fault of my head that my hair didn't stand on end. now my mother is a very sensible mother, but when she urges me into company and exhorts me to be more social, she runs the risk of having me become as silly as the rest of 'em. she fears i may be harmed by reading, studying and staying with her, but heaven forbid i should find things in books worse than things out of them. i can't think the girls are the silly creatures they make themselves appear. they want an aim in life, some worthy _object;_ give them that, and the good and excellent which, i am sure, lies hidden in their nature, will develop itself at once. when the young men rushed in and the girls began looking unutterable things, i rushed out and came home. i can't and won't talk nonsense and flirt with those boys! oh, what is it i do want? somebody who feels as i feel and thinks as i think; but where shall i find the somebody? _ th._--"frolicked with g., rushed up stairs with a glass-lamp in my hand, went full tilt against the door, smashed the lamp, got the oil on my dress, on two carpets, besides spattering the wall. first consequence, a horrible smell of lamp-oil; second, great quakings, shakings, and wonderings what my ma would say when she came home; third, ablutions, groanings, ironings; fourth, a story for the companion long enough to pay for that 'ere old lamp. letting alone that, i've been a very good girl to-day; studied, made a call, went to see h. r. with books, cakes, apples, and what's more, my precious tongue wherewith i discoursed to her. _ th._--"busy all day. carried a basket full of "wittles" to old ma'am burns, heard an original account of the deluge from the poor woman, wished i was as near heaven as she seems to be, studied, sewed, taught t. and e., tried to be a good girl and didn't have the blues once. _ th._--"spent most of the afternoon with lucy, who is sick. she held my hand in hers and kissed it over and over, and expressed so much love and gratitude and interest in the sunday-school that i felt ashamed. _ th_--helped mother bake all the morning, studied in the afternoon, got into a frolic, and went out after dark with g. to shovel snow, and then paddled down to l----'s with a christmas-pudding, whereby i got a real backache, legache, neckache, and all-overache, which is just good enough for me. i was in the funniest state of mind this afternoon! i guess anybody, who had seen me, would have thought so! _ th, saturday._--got up early and ran down to sally johnson's with a big pudding, consequence whereof a horrible pain in my side. i don't care, though. i do love to carry puddings to good old grannies. _jan. , ._--began the new year by going to see lucy, fainting, tumbling down flat on the floor and scaring everybody half out of their wits. i don't think people ought to like me, on the whole, but when they do, aint i glad? i wonder if perfectly honest-hearted people want to be loved better than they deserve, as in one sense i, with yet a pretty honest heart, do? i wonder how other folks think, feel inside? wish i knew! most of the year was passed at home in household duties, in study, and in trying to do good. never had she been busier, or more helpful to her mother; and never more interested in the things of god. it was a year of genuine spiritual growth and also of sharp discipline. the true ideal of the christian life revealed itself to her more and more distinctly, while at the same time she had opportunity both to learn and to practise some of its hardest lessons. a few extracts from letters to her cousin will give an inkling of its character. _march , ._--sometimes i have thought my desire to live for my saviour and to labor for him had increased. it certainly seems wonderful to me now that i could ever have wished to die, as i used to do, _when i had done nothing for god_. the way of life which appears most attractive, is that spent in persevering and unwearying toil for him. there was a warmth and a fervency to my religious feelings the first year after my true hope which i do not find now and often sigh for; but i think my mind is more seriously determined for god than it was then, and that my principles are more fixed. still i am less than the least of all.... i have read not quite five cantos of tasso. you will think me rather indolent, but i have had a great deal to do, which has hindered study and reading. _may d_--the christian life was never dearer to me than it is now, but it throngs with daily increasing difficulties. you, who have become a believer in perfection, may say that this conflict is not essential, and indeed i have been so weary, of late, of struggling that i am almost ready to fly to the doctrine myself. i have certainly been made more willing to seek knowledge on this point from the holy spirit. _sept. th_--you speak of indulging unusually, of late, in your natural vivacity and finding it prejudicial. here is a point on which i am completely bewildered. i find that if for a month or two i steadily set myself to the unwearied pursuit of spirituality of mind and entire weanedness from the world, a sad reaction _will_ follow. my efforts slightly relax, i indulge in mirthful or worldly (in the sense of not religious) conversation, delight in it, and find my health and spirits better for it. but then my spiritual appetites at once become less keen, and from conversation i go to reading, from reading to writing, and then comes the question: am i not going back?--and i turn from all to follow hard after the lord. is this a part of our poor humanity, above which we can not rise? this is a hard world to live in; and it will prove a trying one to me or i shall love it dearly. i have had temptations during the last six months on points where i thought i stood so safely that there was no danger of a fall. perhaps it is good for us to be allowed to go to certain lengths, that we may see what wonderful supplies of grace our lord gives us every hour of our lives. _october st_--i have had two or three singular hours of excitement since i left writing to you last evening. if you were here i should be glad to read you a late passage in my history which has come to its crisis and is over with--thanks to him, who so wonderfully guides me by his counsel. if i ever saw the hand of god distinctly held forth for my help, i have seen it here, coming in the right time, in the right way, _all_ right. * * * * * ii. returns to richmond. trials there. letters. illness. school experiences. "to the year ." glimpses of her daily life. why her scholars love her so. homesick. a black wedding. what a wife should be. "a presentiment." notes from her diary. in november of this year, at the urgent solicitation of mr. persico, miss payson returned to richmond, and again became a teacher in his school. but everything was now changed, and that for the worse. mr. persico, no longer under the influence of his wife, who had fallen a prey to cruel disease, lost heart, fell heavily in debt, and became at length hopelessly insolvent. later, he is said to have been lost at sea on his way to italy. the whole period of miss payson's second residence in richmond was one of sharp trial and disappointment. but it brought out in a very vivid manner her disinterestedness and the generous warmth of her sympathies. at the peril of her health she remained far into the summer of , faithfully performing her duties, although, as she well knew, it was doubtful if she would receive any compensation for her services. as a matter of fact, only a pittance of her salary was ever paid. of this second residence in richmond no other record is needed than a few extracts from letters written to a beloved friend who was passing the winter at the south, and whose name has already been mentioned. a sentence in the first of these letters deserves to be noted as affording a key to one side of her character, namely: "the depressing sense of inferiority which was born with me." all her earlier years were shadowed by this morbid feeling; nor was she ever quite free from its influence. it was, probably, at once a cause and an effect of the sensitive shyness that clung to her to the last. perhaps, too, it grew in part out of her irrepressible craving for love, coupled with utter incredulity about herself possessing the qualities which rendered her so lovable. "it is one of the faults of my character," she wrote, "to fancy that nobody cares for me." when, dear anna, i had taken my last look at the last familiar face in portland (i fancy you know whose face it was) i became quite as melancholy as i ever desire to be, even on the principle that "by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better." i dare say you never had a chance to feel, and therefore will not be able to understand, the depressing sense of inferiority which was born with me, which grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength, and which, though somewhat repressed of late years, gets the mastery very frequently and makes me believe myself the most unlovable of beings. it was with this feeling that i left home and journeyed hither, wondering why i was made, and if anybody on earth will ever be a bit the happier for it, and whether i shall ever learn where to put myself in the scale of being. this is not humility, please take notice--for humility is contented, i think, with such things as it hath. _to miss anna s. prentiss. richmond, nov. , _ when i reached richmond last night, tired and dusty and stupefied, i felt a good deal like crawling away into some cranny and staying there the rest of my life; but this morning, when i had remembered mother's existence and yours and that of some one or two others, i felt more disposed to write than anything else. your note was a great comfort to me during two and a half hours at portsmouth, and while on my journey. i thought pages to you in reply. how i should love to have you here in richmond, even if i could only see you once a month, or _know_ only that you were here and never see you! with many most kind friends about me, i still shall feel very keenly the separation from you. there is nobody here to whom i can speak confidingly, and my hidden spirit will have to sit with folded wings for eight months to come. to whom shall i talk about you, pray? on the way hither i fell in love with a little girl who also fell in love with me, and as i sat with her over our lonely fire at philadelphia and in washington, i could not help speaking of you now and then, till at last she suddenly looked up and asked me if you hadn't a brother, which question effectually shut my mouth. in a religious point of view i am sadly off here. there is a different atmosphere in the house from what there used to be, and i look forward with some anxiety to the future. the "little girl" referred to received soon after a letter from miss payson. in enclosing it to a friend, more than thirty-seven years later, she wrote: "i cried bitterly when she left us for richmond. she was out and out good and true. when my father was taking leave of us, the last night in washington, she proposed that as we had enjoyed so much together, we should not separate without a prayer of thanks and blessing-seeking, a proposal to which my father most heartily responded." here is an extract from the letter: when i look over my school-room i am frequently reminded of you, for my thirty-six pupils are, most of them, about your age. i have some very lovable girls under my wing. i should be too happy if there were no "unruly members" among these good and gentle ones; but in the little world where i shall spend the greater part of the next eight months, as well as in the great and busy one, which as yet neither you or i know much about, i fancy there are mixtures of "the just and the unjust," of "the evil and the good." we have a very pleasant family this year. the youngest (for i omit the black baby in the kitchen) we call lily. she is my pet and plaything, and is quite as affectionate as you are. then comes a damsel named beatrice, who has taken me upon _trust_ just as you did. you may be thankful that your parents are not like hers, for she is to be educated _for the world_; music, french and italian crowd almost everything else out of place, and as for religious influences, she is under them here for the first time. how thankful i feel when i see such cases as this, that god gave me pious parents, who taught me from my very birth, that his fear is the _beginning_ of wisdom! my room-mate we call kate. she is pious, intelligent, and very warm-hearted, and i love her dearly. she is an orphan--mrs. persico's daughter ... i am rather affectionate by nature, if not in practice, and though i know that nearness to the friend, whom i hope i have chosen, could make me happy in any circumstances, i do not pretend to be above the desire for earthly friends, provided he sees fit to give them to me. i believe my father used to say that we could not love them too much, if we only gave him the first place in our hearts. let us earnestly seek to make him our all in all. it is delightful, in the midst of adversities and trials, to be able to say "there is none upon earth that i desire besides thee," but it requires more grace, i think, to be able to use such language when the world is bright about us. you have known little of sorrow as yet, but if you have given your whole, undivided heart to god, you will not need affliction, or to have your life made so desolate that "weariness must toss you to his breast." there is a bright side to religion, and i love to see christians walking in the sunshine. i trust you have found this out for yourself, and that your hope in christ makes you happy in the life that now is, as well as gives you promise of blessedness in that which is to come. before she had been long in richmond she was seized with an illness which caused her many painful, wearisome days and nights. referring to this illness, in a letter to miss prentiss, she writes: it is dull music being sick away from one's mother, but i have a knack at submitting myself to my fate; so my spirit was a contented one, and i was not for a moment unhappy, except for the trouble which i gave those who had to nurse me. i thought of you, at least two-thirds of the time. as my little pet, lily l., said to me last night, when she had very nearly squeezed the breath out of my body, "i love you a great deal harder than i hug you"; so i say to you--i love you harder than i tell, or can tell you. a happy new-year to you, dear anna. how much and how little in those few old words! consider yourself kissed and good-night. the "new year" was destined to be a very eventful one alike to her friend and to herself. she seemed to have a presentiment of it, at least in her own case, as some lines written on a blank leaf of her almanac for that year attest: with mingling hope and trust and fear i bid thee welcome, untried year; the paths before me pause to view; which shall i shun and which pursue? i read my fate with serious eye; i see dear hopes and treasures fly, behold thee on thy opening wing now grief, now joy, now sorrow bring. god grant me grace my course to run with one blest prayer--_his_ will be done. a little journal kept by her during the following months gives bright glimpses of her daily life. the entries are very brief, but they show that while devoted to the school, she also spent a good deal of time among her books, kept up a lively correspondence with absent friends, and contributed her full share to the entertainment of the household by "holding soirees" in her room, "reading to the girls," writing stories for them, and helping to "play goose" and other games. _to miss anna s. prentiss, richmond, feb. , ._ thanks to the father of his country for choosing to be born in virginia! for it gives us a holiday, and i can write to you, dearest of annas. you don't know how delighted i was to get your long-watched-for letter. you very kindly express the wish that you could bear some of my school drudgery with me. i would not give you that, but you should have love from some of these warm-hearted damsels, which would make you happy even in the midst of toil and vexation. i can't think what makes my scholars love me so. i'm sure it is a gift for which i should be grateful, as coming from the same source with all the other blessings which are about me. i believe my way of governing is a more fatiguing one than that of scolding, fretting, and punishing. there is a little bit of a tie between each of these hearts and mine--and the least mistake on my part severs it forever; so i have to be exceedingly careful what i do and say. this keeps me in a constant state of excitement and makes my pulse fly rather faster than, as a pulse arrived at years of discretion, it ought to do. i come out of school so happy, though half tired to death, wishing i were better, and hoping i shall become so; for the more my scholars love me, the more i am ashamed that i am not the pink of perfection they seem to fancy me. _evening._--i have just come up here to my lonely room (which, if i hadn't the happiest kind of a heart in the world, would look right gloomy) and have read for the third time your dear, good letter, and all i wish is that i could tell you how i love you, and how angry i am with myself that i did not know and love you sooner. it seems so odd that we should have been born and "raised" so near each other and yet apart. you say you are a believer in destiny. so am i--particularly in affairs of the heart; and i hope that we are made friends now for something more than the satisfaction which we find in loving. i am in danger of forgetting that i am to stay in this world only a little while and then _go home._ will you help me to bear it in mind?... how must the "pilgrim's progress" interest a mind that has never learned the whole book by rote in childhood. i have often wished i could read it as a first-told tale, and so i wish about the xiv. of john and some other chapters in the bible. your incidental mention that you have family prayers every evening produced a thousand strange sensations in my mind. i hardly know why. did i ever tell you how i love and admire the new bishop johns? and how if i _am_ a "good presbyterian," as they say here, i go to hear him whenever and wherever he preaches. i don't think him a _great_ man, but he has that sincerity and truthfulness of manner which win your love at once. [ ] ... what nice times you must have studying german! i dreamed the night i read your account of it that i was with you, and that you said i was as stupid as an owl. i have the queerest mind somehow. it won't work like those of other people, but goes the farthest way round when it wants to go home, and i never could do anything with it but just let it have its own way, and live the longer. they are having a nice time down in the parlor worshipping miss ford, the light and sunshine of the house, who leaves to-morrow for natchez, and i am going down to help them. so, good-night. _to the same. april ._ since i wrote you last we have all had a good deal to put our patience and philosophy and faith to the test, and i must own that i have been for some weeks about as uncomfortable as mortal damsel could be. everything went wrong with mr. persico, and his gloom extended to all of us. i never spent such melancholy weeks in my life, and became so homesick that i could hardly drag myself into school. in the midst of it, however, i made fun for the rest, as i believe i should do in a dungeon; and now it is all over, i look back and laugh still. we had a black wedding--a very black one--in my schoolroom the other night; our cook having decided to take to herself a lord and master. it was the funniest affair i ever saw. such comical dresses! such heaps of cake, wine, coffee, and candy! such kissings and huggings! the man who performed the ceremony prayed that they might _obey each other,_ wherein i think he showed his originality and good sense, too. then he held a book upside down and pretended to read, dear knows what! but the professor--that is to say, mrs. p.--laughed so loud when he said, "will you take this _wo-_man to be your wedded _husband_" that we all joined in full chorus, whereupon the poor priest (who was only the sexton of st. james') was so confused that he married them over twice. i never saw a couple in their station in life provided with a tenth part of the luxuries with which they abounded. we worked all day saturday in the kitchen, making and icing cake for them, and a nice frolic we had of it, too. do you love babies? we have a black one in the lot whom i pet for want of something on which to expend my love. when i find anything that will interest the whole family, i read it aloud for general edification. the girls persuaded me into writing a story to read to them, and locked me into my room till it was done. it was the first love-story i ever wrote, for hitherto i have not known enough about such things to be able to do it. this reminds me that you asked if i intend forgetting you after i am married. i have no sort of idea what i shall do, provided i ever marry. but if i ever fall in love i dare say i shall do it so madly and absorbingly as to become, in a measure and for a season, forgetful of everything and everybody else. still, though i hate professions, i don't see how i can ever cease to love you, whatever else i forget or neglect. there is a restlessness in my affection for you that i don't understand--a half wish to avoid enjoyment now, that i may in some future time share it with you. and yet i have a presentiment that we may have sympathy in trials of which i now know nothing. i am ashamed of myself, of late, that these subjects of love and matrimony find a place in my thoughts which i never have been in the habit of giving them, but people here talk of little else and i am borne on with the current. i think that to give happiness in married life a woman should possess oceans of self-sacrificing love and i, for one, haven't half of that self-forgetting spirit which i think essential. i am glad you like the "christian year," and i see you are quite an episcopalian. well, if you are like the good old english divines, nobody can find fault with your choice. mr. persico was brought up a catholic but professes to be a nothingarian now. for myself, this only i know that i earnestly wish all the tendencies of my heart to be heavenward, and i believe that the sincere inquirer after truth will be guided by the infinite mind. and so on that faith i venture myself and feel safe as a child may feel, who holds his father's hand. life seems full of mysteries to me of late--and i am tempted to strange thoughtfulness in the midst of its gayest scenes. how true was the "presentiment" described in this letter, will appear in her correspondence with the same friend more than a quarter of a century later. _to anna s. prentiss, richmond, june , _ i believe you and i were intended to know each other better i have found a certain something in you that i have been wanting all my life. while i wish you to know me just as i am, faults and all, i can t bear to think of ever seeing anything but the good and the beautiful in your character, dear anna, and i believe my heart would break outright should i find you to be otherwise than just that which i imagine you are. i don't know why i am saying this; but i have learned more of the world during the last year than in any previous half dozen of my life, and the result is dissatisfaction and alarm at the things i see about me. i wish i could always live, as i have hitherto done, under the shelter of my mother's wing.... i ought to ask your pardon for writing in this horrid style, but i was born to do things by steam, i believe, and can't do them moderately. as i write to, so i love you, dear anna, with all my interests and energies tending to that one point. i was amused the other day with a young lady who came and sat on my bed when i was sick (for i am just getting well from a quite serious illness), and after some half dozen sighs, wished she were anna prentiss that she might be loved as intensely as she desired. this is a roundabout way of saying how very dear you are to me. what chatter-boxes girls are! i wonder how many times i've stopped to say "my dear, don't talk so much--for i am writing in school." _june th_--mr. ---- brought "the home" to me and i have laughed and cried over it to my heart's content. out of pure self-love, because they said she was like me, i liked poor petra with the big nose, best of the bunch--though, to be sure, they liken me to somebody or other in every book we read till i begin to think myself quite a bundle of contradictions. i have a thousand and one things to say to you, but i wonder if as soon as i see you i shall straightway turn into a poker, and play the stiffy, as i always do when i have been separated from my friends. i am writing in a little bit of a den which, by a new arrangement, i have all to myself. what if there's no table here and i have to write upon the bureau, sitting on one foot in a chair and stretching upwards to reach my paper like a monkey? what do i care? i am writing to _you_, and your spirit, invoked when i took possession of the premises, comes here sometimes just between daylight and dark, and talks to me till i am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. oh! anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. not that i expect you to be perfect--for i shouldn't love you if you were immaculate--but pure in aim and intention and desire, which i believe you to be. _ th._--do you want to know what mischief i've just been at? there lay poor miss ----, alias "weaky" as we call her, taking her siesta in the most innocent manner imaginable, with a babe-in-the-wood kind of air, which proved so highly attractive that i could do no less than pick her up in my arms and pop her (i don't know _but_ it was _head_ first), right into the bathing-tub which happened to be filled with fresh cold water. poor, good little weaky! there she sits shaking and shivering and laughing with such perfect sweet humor, that i am positively taking a vow never to do so again. well, i had something quite sentimental to say to you when i began writing, but as the spirit moved me to the above perpetration of nonsense, i've nothing left in me but fun, and for that you've no relish, have you? i made out to cry yesterday and thereby have so refreshed my soul as to be in the best possible humor just now. the why and wherefore of my tears, which by the way i don't shed once in an age, was briefly the withdrawal from school of one of my scholars, one who had so attached herself to me as to have become almost a part of myself, and whom i had taught to love you, dear anna, that i might have the exquisite satisfaction of talking about you every day--a sort of sweet interlude between grammar and arithmetic which made the dull hours of school grow harmonious. she had a presentiment that her life was to close with our school session, from which i couldn't move her even when her health was good, and she says that she prays every day, not that her life may be lengthened, but that she may die before i am gone. i am superstitious enough to feel that the prayer may have its answer, now that i see her drooping and fading away without perceptible disease. the only time i ever witnessed the rite of confirmation was when the hands of the good bishop rested upon her head, and no wonder if i have half taken up arms in defense of this "laying-on of hands," out of the abundance of my heart if not from the wisdom of my head. well, i've lost my mirthful mood, speaking of her, and don't know when it will come again. i have taken it into my head that you will visit niagara on your way home from the south and have half a mind to go there myself. did your brother bring home the poems of r. m. milnes? i half hope that he did not, since i want to see you enjoy them for the first time, particularly a certain "household brownie" story, with which i fell in love when president woods sent us the volume. here follow a few entries in her diary: _may ._---holiday. into the country all of us, white, black, and gray. sue empie devoted herself to me like a lover and so did sue lewis, so i was not at a loss for society. my girls made a bower, wherein i was ensconced and obliged to tell stories to about forty listeners till my tongue ached. _july th._--left richmond. _aug. nd._--left reading for philadelphia. _ th._--williamstown and saw mother, sister and baby. _ th._--president hopkins' splendid address before the alumni--also that of dr. robbins. _ th._--left williamstown and reached nonantum house at night. saw aunt willis, julia, sarah, ellen, etc. _ nd._--came home, oh so very happy! dear, good home! _ rd._--callers all day, the second of whom was mr. p. there have been nineteen people here and i'm tired! _ th._--what _didn't_ i hear from anna p. to-day! _ st._--rode with anna p. to saccarappa to see rev. mr. and mrs. h. b. smith--took tea at the p.s and went with them to the preparatory lecture. i do nothing but go about from place to place. _sept. st._--just as cold as cold could be all day. spent evening at mrs. b.'s, talking with neal dow. _ th._--cold and blowy and disagreeable. went to see carrie h. came home and found mr. p. here; he stayed to tea--read us some interesting things--told us about mary and william howitt. _ th._--our church was re-opened to-day. mr. dwight preached in the morning and mr. chickering in the afternoon. september th she marked with a white stone and kept ever after as one of the chief festal days of her life, but of the reason why there is here no record. the diary for the rest of the year is blank with the exception of a single leaf which contains these sentences: "celle qui a besoin d'admirer ce qu'elle aime, celle, don't le jugement est pénétrant, bien que son imagination exaltée, il n'y a pour elle qu'un objet dans l'univers." "celui qu'on aime, est le vengeur des fautes qu'on a commis sur cette terre; la divinité lui prête son pouvoir." mad. de stael. * * * * * iii. her views of love and courtship. visit of her sister and child. letters. sickness and death of friends. ill-health. undergoes a surgical operation. her fortitude. study of german. fenelon. the records of the next year and a half are very abundant, in the form of notes, letters, verses and journals; but they are mostly of too private a character to furnish materials for this narrative, belonging to what she called "the deep story of my heart." they breathe the sweetness and sparkle with the morning dew of the affections; and while some of them are full of fun and playful humor, others glow with all the impassioned earnestness of her nature, and others still with deep religious feeling. she wrote: my heart seems to me somewhat like a very full church at the close of the services--the great congregation of my affections trying to find their way out and crowding and hindering each other in the general rush for the door. don't you see them--the young ones scampering first down the aisle, and the old and grave and stately ones coming with proud dignity after them?... i feel now that "dans les mystères de notre nature aimer, _encore aimer,_ est ce qui nous est resté de notre heritage céleste," and oh, how i thank god for my blessed portion of this celestial endowment! love in a word was to her, after religion, the holiest and most wonderful reality of life; and in the presence of its mysteries she was--to use her own comparison--"like a child standing upon the seashore, watching for the onward rush of the waves, venturing himself close to the water's edge, holding his breath and wooing their approach, and then, as they come dashing in, retreating with laughter and mock fear, only to return to tempt them anew." her only solicitude was lest the new interest should draw her heart away from him who had been its chief joy. in a letter to her cousin, she touches on this point: you know how by circumstances my affections have been repressed, and now, having found _liberty to love,_ i am tempted to seek my heaven in so loving. but, my dear cousin, there is nothing worth having apart from god; i feel this every day more and more and the fear of satisfying myself with something short of him--this is my only anxiety. this drives me to the throne of his grace and makes me refuse to be left one moment to myself. i believe i desire first of all to love god supremely and to do something for him, if he spares my life. early in december her sister, mrs. hopkins, with an infant boy, came to portland and passed a part of the winter under the maternal roof. the arrival of this boy--her mother's first grandchild--was an event in the family history. here is her own picture of the scene: it was a cold evening, and grandmamma, who had been sitting by the fire, knitting and reading, had at last let her book fall from her lap, and had dropped to sleep in her chair. the four uncles sat around the table, two of them playing chess, and two looking on, while aunt fanny, with her cat on her knees, studied german a little, looked at the clock very often, and started at every noise. "i have said, all along, that they wouldn't come," she cried at last. "the clock has just struck nine, and i am not going to expect them any longer. i _knew_ herbert would not let laura undertake such a journey in the depth of winter; or, at any rate, that laura's courage would tail at the last moment." she had hardly uttered these words, when there was a ring at the doorbell, then a stamping of feet on the mat, to shake off the snow, and in they came, lou, and lou's papa, and lou's mamma, bringing ever so much fresh, cold air with them. grandmamma woke up, and rose to meet them with steps as lively as if she were a young girl; aunt fanny tossed the cat from her lap, and seized the bundle that held the baby; the four uncles crowded about her, eager to get the first peep at the little wonder. there was such a laughing, and such a tumult, that poor lou, coming out of the dark night into the bright room, and seeing so many strange faces, did not know what to think. when his cloaks and shawls and capes were at last pulled off by his auntie's eager hands, there came into view a serious little face, a pair of bright eyes, and a head as smooth as ivory, on which there was not a single hair. his sleeves were looped up with corals, and showed his plump white arms, and he sat up very straight, and took a good look at everybody. "what a perfect little beauty!" "what _splendid_ eyes!" "what a lovely skin!" "he's the perfect image of his father!" "he's _exactly_ like his mother!" "what a dear little nose!" "what fat little hands, full of dimples!" "let _me_ take him!" "come to his own grandmamma!" "let his uncle toss him--so he will!" "what does he eat?" "is he tired?" "now, _fanny!_ you've had him ever since he came; he wants to come to me; i know he does!" these, and nobody knows how many more exclamations of the sort, greeted the ears of the little stranger, and were received by him with unruffled gravity. "aunt fanny" devoted herself during the following weeks to the care of her little nephew. her letters written at the time--some of them with him in her arms--are full of his pretty ways; and when, more than a score of years later, he had given his young life to his country and was sleeping in a soldier's grave, his "sayings and doings" formed the subject of one of her most attractive juvenile books. a few extracts from her letters will give glimpses of her state of mind during this winter, and show also how the thoughtful spirit, which from the first tempered the excitements of her new experience, was deepened by the loss of very dear friends. portland, _december , ._ last evening i spent at mrs. h.----'s with abby and a crowd of other people. john neal told me i had a great bump of love of approbation, and conscientiousness very large, and self-esteem hardly any; and that he hoped whoever had most influence over me would remedy that evil. he then went on to pay me the most extravagant compliments, and said i could become distinguished in any way i pleased. thinks i to myself, "i should like to be the best little wife in the world, and that's the height of my ambition." don't imagine now that i believe all he says, for he has been saying just such things to me since i was a dozen years old, and i don't see as i am any great things yet. do you? _jan. d, ._--sister is still here and will stay with us a month or two yet. her husband has gone home to preach and pray himself into contentment without her. though he was here only a week, his quiet christian excellence made us all long to grow better. it is always the case when he comes, though he rather lives than talks his religion. i never saw, as far as piety is concerned, a more perfect specimen of a man in his every-day life. do you pray for me every night and every morning? don't forget how i comfort myself with thinking that you every day ask for me those graces of the spirit which i so long for. indeed, i have had lately such heavenward yearnings!... why do you ask _if_ i pray for you, as if i could love you and _help_ praying for you continually and always. i have no light sense of the holiness a christian minister should possess. i half wish there were no veil upon my heart on this point, that you might see how, from the very first hour of your return from abroad, my interest in you went hand-in-hand with this _looking upward_. _jan. d._--we have all been saddened by the repeated trials with which our friends the willises are visited this winter. mrs. willis is still very ill, and there is no hope of her recovery; and ellen, the pet of the whole household--the always happy, loving, beautiful young thing--who had been full of delight in the hope of becoming a mother, lies now at the point of death; having lost her infant, and with it her bright anticipations. for fourteen years there had not been a physician in their house, and you may imagine how they are all now taken, as it were, by surprise by the first break death has threatened to make in their peculiarly happy circle. our love for all the family has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength, and what touches them we all feel. _feb. th._--how is it that people who have no refuge in god live through the loss of those they love? i am very sad this morning, and almost wish i had never loved you or anybody. last night we heard of the death of julia willis' sister, and this morning learn that a dear little girl in whom we all were much interested, and whom i saw on saturday only slightly unwell, is taken away from her parents, who have no manner of consolation in losing this only child. there is a great cloud throughout our house, and we hardly know what to do with ourselves. when i met mother and sister yesterday on my return from your house, i saw that something was the matter of which they hesitated to tell me; and of whom should i naturally think but of you--you in whom my life is bound up; and, when mother finally came to put her arms around me, i suffered for the moment that intensity of anguish which i should feel in knowing that something dreadful had befallen you. she told me, however, of poor ellen's death, and i was so lost in recovering you again that i cared for nothing else all the evening, and until this morning had scarcely thought of the aching, aching hearts she has left behind. her poor young husband, who loved her so tenderly, is half-distracted. oh, i have blessed god to-day that until he had given me a sure and certain hold upon himself, he had not suffered me to love as i love now! it is a mystery which i can not understand, how the heart can live on through the moment which rends it asunder from that of which it has become a part, except by hiding itself in god. i have felt ellen's death the more, because she and her husband were associated in my mind with you. i hardly know how or why; but she told me much of the history of her heart when i saw her last summer on my way home from richmond, at the same time that she spoke much of you. she had seen you at our house before you went abroad, and seemed to have a sort of presentiment that we should love each other. but i ought to beg you to forgive me for sending you this gloomy page; yet i was restless and wanted to tell you the thoughts that have been in my heart towards you to-day--the serious and saddened love with which i love you, when i think of you as one whom god may take from me at any moment. i do not know that it is unwise to look this truth in the face sometimes--for if ever there was heart tempted to idolatry, to giving itself up fully, utterly, with perfect abandonment of every other hope and interest, to an earthly love, so is mine tempted now. _feb. th._--mother is going to boston with sister on saturday, provided i am well enough (which i mean to be), as mrs. willis has expressed a strong wish to see her once more. we heard from them yesterday again. poor ellen's coffin was placed just where she stood as a bride, less than eight months ago, and her little infant rested on her breast. there is rarely a death so universally mourned as hers; she was the most winning and attractive young creature i ever saw. _feb. st._--are you in earnest? are you in earnest? are you really coming home in march? i am afraid to believe, afraid to doubt it. i am crying and laughing and writing all at once. you would not tell me so unless you _really were coming_, i know ... and you are coming home! (how madly my heart is beating! lie still, will you?) i almost feel that you are here and that you look over my shoulder and read while i write. are you sure that you will come? oh, don't repent and send me another letter to say that you will wait till it is pleasanter weather; it is pleasant now. i walked out this morning, and the air was a spring air, and gentlemen go through the streets with their cloaks hanging over their arms, and there is a constant plashing against the windows, of water dripping down from the melting snow; yes, i verily believe that it is warm, and that the birds will sing soon--i do, upon my word ... i wouldn't have the doctor come and feel my pulse this afternoon for anything. he would prescribe fever powders or fever drops, or something of the sort, and bleed me and send me to bed, or to the insane hospital; i don't know which. i could cry, sing, dance, laugh, all at once. oh, that i knew exactly when you will be here--the day, the hour, the minute, that i might know to just what point to govern my impatient heart--for it would be a pity to punish the poor little thing too severely. i have been reading to-day something which delighted me very much; do you remember a little poem of goethe's, in which an imprisoned count sings about the flower he loves best, and the rose, the lily, the pink, and the violet, each in turn fancy themselves the objects of his love. [ ] you see i put you in the place of the prisoner at the outset, and i was to be the flower of his love, whatever it might be. well, it was the "forget-me-not." if there were a flower called the "always-loving," maybe i might find out to what order and class i belong. dear me; there's the old clock striking twelve, and i verily meant to go to bed at ten, so as to sleep away as much of the time as possible before your coming, but i fell into a fit of loving meditation, and forgot everything else. you should have seen me pour out tea to-night! why, the first thing i knew, i had poured it all out into my own cup till it ran over, and half filled the waiter, which is the first time i ever did such a ridiculous thing in my life. but, dearest, i bid you good night, praying you may have sweet dreams and an inward prompting to write me a long, long, blessed letter, such as shall make me dance about the house and sing. _feb. d._--oh, i am frightened at myself, i am so happy! it seems as if even this whole folio would not in the least convey to you the gladness with which my heart is dancing and singing and making merry. the doctor seems quite satisfied with my shoulder, and says "_it's first-rate;_" so set your heart at rest on that point. i hope there'll be nobody within two miles of our meeting. suppose you stop in some out of the way place just out of town, and let me trot out there to see you? oh, are you really coming? _to g, e. s. march , ._ i must write a few lines to tell you, my dear cousin, that i am thinking of and praying for you on your birthday. i have but one request to offer either for you or for myself, and that is for more love to our redeemer. i bless god that i have no other want.... i do not know why it is, but i never have thought so much of death and of the certainty that i, sooner or later, must die, as within a few months past. i am not exactly superstitious, but this daily and hourly half-presentiment that my life will not be a long one, is singularly subduing, and seems to lay a restraining hand upon future plans. i am not sorry, whatever may be the event, that it is so. i dread clinging to this world and seeking my rest in it. i am not afraid to die, or afraid that anything i love may be taken from me; i only have this serious and thoughtful sense of death upon my mind. you know how we have loved the willis family, and can imagine how we felt the death of their youngest daughter, who was dear to everybody. and mrs. willis is, probably, not living. this has added to my previous feeling on the subject, which was, perhaps, first occasioned by the sudden and terrible loss of my poor friend, mr. thatcher, a year ago this month. [ ] god forbid i should ever forget the lessons he saw i needed, and dare to feel that there is a thing upon earth which death may not touch. oh, in how many ways he has sought to win my whole heart for his own! _march d._--i was interrupted last night by the arrival of g. l. p., after his four months' absence in mississippi, improved in health, and in looks, and in spirits, and quite as glad to see me, i believe, as even you, in your goodness of heart, say my lover ought to be. but i will tell you the truth, my dear cousin, i am _afraid_ of love. there is no other medium, save that of the happiness of loving and being loved, by which my affections could be effectually turned from divine to earthly things. am i not then on dangerous ground? yet god mercifully shows me that it is so, and when i think how he has saved me hitherto through sharp temptations, it seems wicked, distrust of him, not to feel that he will save me through those to come. i know now there are some of the great lessons of life yet to be learned; i believe i must _suffer_ as long as i have an earthly existence. will not then god make that suffering but as a blessed reprover to bring me nearer himself? i hope so. during the winter her health had become so much impaired, that great anxiety was felt as to the issue. in a letter to her friend, miss ellen thurston, dated april , , she writes: you remember, perhaps, that on the afternoon you were so good as to come and spend with me, i was making a fuss about a little thing on my shoulder. well, i had at last to have it removed, and though the operation was not in itself very painful, its effects on my whole nervous system have been most powerful. i have lost all regular habits of sleep--for a week i do not know that i slept two hours--and am ready to fly into a fit at the bare thought of sitting still long enough to write a common letter. i have, however, the consolation of being pitied and consoled with, as there's something in the idea of cutting at the flesh which touches the heart, a thousand times more than some severer sufferings would do. i am getting quite thin and weak upon it, and i believe mother firmly expects me to shrink into nothing, though i am a pretty bouncing girl still. owing to some mishap the healing process was entirely thwarted, and after a very trying summer, the operation had to be repeated. this time it was performed by that eminent surgeon and admirable christian man, dr. john c. warren of boston, assisted by his son, dr. j. m. w. dr. warren told miss payson's friend, who had accompanied an invalid sister to new york, that he thought it would require "about five minutes;" but it proved to be much more serious than he had anticipated. miss willis, in her letter from geneva already quoted, thus refers to it: my next meeting with lizzy revealed a striking trait of her character, which hitherto i had had no opportunity of observing--her wonderful fortitude under suffering. i was at the seashore with my sister and family when, her little child being taken suddenly very ill in the night, i went up to boston by an early train to bring down as soon as possible our family physician. on arriving at his house i was disappointed at being told that he could not come at once, being engaged to perform an operation that morning. while waiting for the return train, i called at my father's office and was surprised to hear that lizzy was the patient. a painful tumor had developed itself on the back of her neck, and she had come up with her mother to boston to consult dr. warren, who had advised its immediate removal. i went at once to see her. she greeted me with even more than her usual warmth and after stating in a few words the object of her coming to boston and that she was expecting the doctors every moment, she added: "you will stay with me, i am sure. mother insists on being present, but she can not bear it. she will be sure to faint. if you will promise to stay, i can persuade her to remain in the next room." seeing the distress in my face at the request, she said, "i will be very good. you will have nothing to do but sit in the room, to satisfy mother." it was impossible to refuse and i remained. there was no chloroform then to give blessed unconsciousness of suffering and every pang had to be endured, but she more than kept her promise to "be good." not a sound or a movement betrayed suffering. she spoke only once. after the knife was laid aside and the threaded needle was passed through the quivering flesh to draw the gaping edges of the wound together, she asked, after the first stitch had been completed, in a low, almost calm tone, with only a slight tremulousness, how many more were to be taken. when the operation was over, and the surgeons were preparing to depart, she questioned them minutely as to the mark which would be left after healing. i was surprised that she could think of it at such a moment, knowing how little value she had always set on her personal appearance, but her mother explained it afterward by referring to her betrothal to you, and the fear that you would find the scar disfiguring. [ ] in a letter to mrs. stearns, [ ] she herself writes, sept. : i had no idea of the suffering which awaited me. i thought i should get off as i did the first time. but i have a great deal to be thankful for. on wednesday, to my infinite surprise and gladness, george pounced down upon me from new york, having been quite cut to the heart by the account mother gave him. everybody is so kind, and i have had so many letters, and seen so many sympathising faces, and "dear lizzy" sounds so sweet to my insatiable ears; and yet--and yet--i would rather die than live through the forty-eight hours again which began on monday morning. somebody must have prayed for me, or i never should have got through. an extract from another of her letters, dated portland, september th, belongs here: i must tell you, too, about dr. warren (the old one). when mother asked him concerning the amount he was to receive from her for his professional services, he smiled and said: "i shall not charge _you_ much, and as for miss payson, when she is married and rich, she may pay me and welcome--but not till then." i told him i never expected to be rich, and he replied, with what mother thought an air of contentment that said he knew all about it: "well, we can be happy without riches," and such a good, happy smile shone all over his face as i have seldom been so fortunate as to see in an old man. as for the young one, he seemed as glad when i was dressed on sunday with a clean frock and no shawl, as if it were really a matter of consequence to him to see his patients looking comfortable and well. i am getting along finely; there is only one spot on my shoulder which is troublesome, and they ordered me on a very strict diet for that--so i am half-starved this blessed minute. we went to newburyport on monday, and stayed there with anna till yesterday afternoon. i think the motion of the cars hurt me somewhat, but by the time you get here i do hope i shall be quite well. _evening_.-- ... i have had such happy thoughts and prayers to-night! you should certainly have knelt with me in my little room, where, for the first time a year ago this evening, i asked god to bless _us_; and you too, perhaps, then began first to pray for me. oh, what a wonderful time it was!... i hope you have prayed for me to-day--i don't mean as you always do, but with new prayers wherewith to begin the new year. god bless you and love you! but this period was also one of large mental growth. it was marked especially by two events that had a shaping influence upon both her intellectual and religious character. one was the study of german. she was acquainted already with french and italian; she now devoted her leisure hours to the language and works of schiller and goethe. these opened to her a new world of thought and beauty. her correspondence contains frequent allusions to the progress of her german reading. here is one in a letter to her cousin: i have read george herbert a good deal this winter. i have also read several of schiller's plays--william tell and don carlos among the rest--and got a great deal more excited over them than i have over anything for a long while. george has a large german library, but i don't suppose i shall be much the wiser for it, unless i turn to studying theology. did you read in goethe's wilhelm meister, the "bekenntnisse einer schönen seele"? i do think it did my soul good when i read it last july. the account she gives of her religious history reminded me of mine in some points very strongly. the other incident was her introduction to the writings of fenelon--an author whom, in later years, she came to regard as an oracle of spiritual wisdom. in the letter just quoted, she writes: "i am reading fenelon's 'maximes des saints,' and many of his ideas please me exceedingly. some of his 'lettres spirituelles' are delicious--so heavenly, so child-like in their spirit." [ ] [ ] _jan, , ._--i used never to confide my religious feelings to any one in the world. i went on my toilsome, comfortless way quite by myself. but when at the end of this long, gloomy way, i saw and knew and rejoiced in christ, then i forgot myself and my pride and my reserve, and was glad if a little child would hear me say "i love him!"--glad if the most ignorant, the most hitherto despised, would speak of him. [ ] later she writes: "i have had a long talk with sister to-day about leighton. she claims him, as all the perfectionists do, as one of their number; though, by the way, in the common acceptation of the word, she is not a perfectionist herself, but only on the boundary-line of the enchanted ground. i am completely puzzled when i think on such subjects. i doubt if sister is right, yet know not where she is wrong. she does not obtrude her peculiar opinions on any one, and i began the conversation this afternoon myself." [ ] "oh, what a blessed thing it is to lose one's will! since i have lost my will i have found happiness. there can be no such thing as disappointment to me, for i have no desires but that god's will may be accomplished." "christians might avoid much trouble if they would only believe what they profess, viz.: that god is able to make them happy without anything but himself. they imagine that if such a dear friend were to die, or such and such blessings to be removed, they should be miserable; whereas god can make them a thousand times happier without them. to mention my own case: god has been depriving me of one blessing after another; but as every one was removed, he has come in and filled up its place; and now, when i am a cripple and not able to move, i am happier than ever i was in my life before or ever expected to be; and if i had believed this twenty years ago, i might have been spared much anxiety." [ ] the right rev. john johns, bishop of the protestant episcopal church of virginia, was a man of apostolic simplicity and zeal, and universally beloved. an almost ideal friendship existed between him and dr. charles hodge, of princeton. _dear, blessed, old john,_ dr. h. called him when he was seventy-nine years old. see life of dr. hodge, pp. - . bishop johns died in . [ ] das blümlein wunderschön. _lied des gefangenen grafen_, is the title of the poem. goethe's samtliche werke. vol. i., p. . [ ] see appendix a, p. . [ ] the horrible operation is over, heaven be praised! it was far more horrible than we had anticipated. they were _an hour and a quarter_, before all was done. i was very brave at first and wouldn't leave the room, but i found myself so faint that i feared falling and had to go. lizzy behaved like a heroine indeed, so that even the doctors admired her fortitude. she never spoke, but was deadly faint, so that they were obliged to lay her down that the dreadful wound might bleed; then there was an artery to be taken up and tied; then six stitches to be taken with a great big needle. most providentially dear julia willis came in about ten minutes before the doctors and though she was greatly distressed, she never faints, and staid till lizzy was laid in bed.... she was just like a marble statue, but even more beautiful, while the blood stained her shoulders and bosom. you couldn't have looked on such suffering without fainting, man that you are.--_from a letter of mrs. payson, dated boston, sept. , ._ [ ] her friend, miss prentiss, had been married, in the previous autumn, to the rev. jonathan f. stearns, of newburyport. [ ] "explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure" is the full title of the famous little work first named. it appeared in january, . if measured by the storm it raised in france and at rome, or by the attention it attracted throughout europe, its publication may be said to have been one of the most important theological events of that day. the eloquence of bossuet and the power of louis xiv. were together exerted to the utmost in order to brand its illustrious author as a heretical quietist; and, through their almost frantic efforts, it was at last condemned in a papal brief. but, for all that, the little work is full of the noblest christian sentiments. it pushes the doctrine of pure love, perhaps, to a perilous extreme, but still an extreme that leans to the side of the highest virtue. after its condemnation the pope, innocent xii., wrote to the french prelates, who had been most prominent in denouncing fenelon: _peccavit excessu amoris divini, sed vos peccastis defectu amoris proximi_--i.e., "he has erred by too much love of god, but ye have erred by too little love of your neighbor." chapter iv. the young wife and mother. - . i. marriage and settlement in new bedford. reminiscences. letters. birth of her first child. death of her sister-in-law. letters. on the th of april, , miss payson was married to the rev. george lewis prentiss, then just ordained as pastor of the south trinitarian church in new bedford, mass. here she passed the next five and a half years; years rendered memorable by precious friendships formed in them, by the birth of two of her children, by the death of her mother, and by other deep joys and sorrows. new bedford was then known, the world over, as the most important centre of the whale-fishery. in quest of the leviathans of the deep its ships traversed all seas, from the tumbling icebergs of the arctic ocean to the southern pacific. but it was also known nearer home for the fine social qualities of its people. many of the original settlers of the town were quakers, and its character had been largely shaped by their friendly influence. husbands and wives, whether young or old, called each other everywhere by their christian names, and a charming simplicity marked the daily intercourse of life. into this attractive society mrs. prentiss was at once welcomed. the arnold family in particular--a family representing alike the friendly spirit, the refinement and taste, the wealth, and the generous hospitality of the place--here deserve mention. their kindness was unwearied; flowers and fruit came often from their splendid garden and greenhouses; and, in various other ways, they contributed from the moment of her coming to render new bedford a pleasant home to her. but it was in her husband's parish that she found her chief interest and joy. his people at first welcomed her in the warmest manner on her sainted father's account, but they soon learned to love her for her own sake. she early began to manifest among them that wonderful sympathy, which made her presence like sunshine in sick rooms and in the house of mourning, and, in later years, endeared her through her writings to so many hearts. while her natural shyness and reserve caused her to shrink from everything like publicity, and even from that leadership in the more private activities of the church which properly belonged to her sex and station, any kind of trouble instantly aroused and called into play all her energies. the sickness and death of little children wrought upon her with singular power; and, in ministering aid and comfort to bereaved mothers, she seemed like one specially anointed of the lord for this gentle office. now, after the lapse of more than a third of a century, there are those in new bedford and its vicinity who bless her memory, as they recall scenes of sharp affliction cheered by her presence and her loving sympathy. the following reminiscences by one of her new bedford friends, written not long after her death, belong here: oh, that i had the pen of a ready writer! how gladly would i depict her just as she came to new bedford, a youthful bride and our pastor's wife, more than a third of a century ago! my remembrances of her are still fresh and delightful; but they have been for so many years _silent_ memories that i feel quite unable fully to express them. and yet i will try to give you a few simple details. several things strike me as i recall her in those days. our early experiences in the struggle of life had been somewhat similar and this drew us near to each other. she was naturally very shy and in the presence of strangers, or of uncongenial persons, her reserve was almost painful; but with her friends--especially those of her own sex--all this vanished and she was full of animated talk. her conversation abounded in bright, pointed sayings, in fine little touches of humor, in amusing anecdotes and incidents of her own experience, which she related with astonishing ease and fluency, sometimes also in downright girlish fun and drollery; and all was rendered doubly attractive by her low, sweet woman's voice and her merry, fitful laugh. yet these things were but the sparkle of a very deep and serious nature. even then her religious character was to me wonderful. she seemed always to know just what was prompting her, whether, nature or grace; and her perception of the workings of the two principles was like an instinct. while i, though cherishing a christian hope, was still struggling in bondage under the law, she appeared to enjoy to the full the glorious liberty of the children of god. and when i would say to her that i was constantly doing that which i ought not and leaving undone so much that i ought to do, she would try to comfort me and to encourage me to exercise more faith by responding, "oh, you don't know what a great sinner i am; but christ's love is greater still." there was a helpful, assuring, sunshiny influence about her piety which i have rarely seen or felt in any other human being. and almost daily, during all the years of separation, i have been conscious of this influence in my own life. i remember her as very retiring in company, even among our own people. but if there were children present, she would gather them about her and hold them spell-bound by her talk. oh, she was a marvellous storyteller! how often have i seen her in the midst of a little group, who, all eyes and ears, gazed into her face and eagerly swallowed every word, while she, intent on amusing them, seemed quite unconscious that anybody else was in the room. mr. h---- used to say, "how i envy those children and wish i were one of them!" mrs. prentiss received much attention from persons outside of our congregation, and who, from their position and wealth, were pretty exclusive in their habits. but they could not resist the attraction of her rare gifts and accomplishments. new bedford at that time, as you know, had a good deal of intellectual and social culture. this was particularly the case among the unitarians, whose minister, when you came to us, was that excellent and very superior man, the rev. ephraim peabody, d.d., afterwards of king's chapel in boston. one of the leading families of his flock was the "arnold family," whose garden and grounds were then among the finest in the state and at whose house such men as richard h. dana, the poet, the late professor agassiz, and others eminent for their literary and scientific attainments, were often to be seen. this whole family were warmly attached to mrs. prentiss, and after you left new bedford, often referred to their acquaintance with her in the most affectionate manner. and i believe mr. arnold and his daughter used to visit you in new york. the father, mother, daughter, and aunt are all gone. and what a change have all these vanished years wrought in the south trinitarian society! i can think of only six families then worshipping there, that are worshipping there now. but so long as a single one remains, the memory of mrs. prentiss will still be precious in the old church. the story of the new bedford years may be told, with slight additions here and there, by mrs. prentiss' own pen. most of her letters to her own family are lost; but the letters to her husband, when occasionally separated from her, and others to old friends, have been preserved and afford an almost continuous narrative of this period. a few extracts from some of those written in , will show in what temper of mind she entered upon her new life. the first is dated portland, january both, just after mr. prentiss received the call to new bedford: i have wished all along, beyond anything else, not so much that we might have a pleasant home, pleasant scenery and circumstances, good society and the like, as that we might have good, holy influences about us, and god's grace and love within us. and for you, dear george, i did not so much desire the intellectual and other attractions, about which we have talked sometimes, as a dwelling-place among those whom you might train heavenward or who would not be a hindrance in your journey thither. through this whole affair i know i have thought infinitely more of you than of myself. and if you are happy at the north pole shan't i be happy there too? i shall be heartily thankful to see you a pastor with a people to love you. only i shall be jealous of them. to her friend, miss thurston, she writes from new bedford, april th: i thank you with all my heart for your letter and for the very pretty gift, which i suppose to be the work of your own hands. i can not tell you how inexpressibly dear to me are all the expressions of affection i have received and am receiving from old friends. we have been here ten days, and very happy days they have been to me, notwithstanding i have had to see so many strange faces and to talk to so many new people. and both my sister and anna tell me that the first months of married life are succeeded by far happier ones still; so i shall go on my way rejoicing. as to what your brother says about disappointment, nobody believes his doctrine better than i do; but life is as full of blessings as it is of disappointments, i conceive, and if we only know how, we may often, out of mere _will_, get the former instead of the latter. i have had some experience of the "conflict and dismay" of this present evil world; but then i have also had some of its smiles. neither of these ever made me angry with this life, or in love with it. i believe i am pretty cool and philosophical, but it won't do for me at this early day to be boasting of what is in me. i shall have to wait till circumstances bring it out. i can only answer for the past and the present--the one having been blessed and gladdened and the other _being_ made happy and cheerful by lover and husband. i'll tell you truly, as i promised to do, if my heart sings another tune on the th of april, . i only hope i shall enter soberly and thankfully on my new life, expecting sunshine and rain, drought and plenty, heat and cold--and adapting myself to alternations contentedly--but who knows? we are boarding at a hotel, which is not over pleasant. however, we have two good rooms and have home things about us. i like to sit at work while mr. prentiss writes his sermons and he likes to have me--so, for the present, a study can be dispensed with. in a few weeks we hope to get to housekeeping. i like new bedford very much. to her husband she writes, june : i can not help writing you again, though i did send you a letter last night. it is a very pleasant morning, and i think of you all the time and love you with the happiest tears in my eyes. i have just been making some nice crispy gingerbread to send mrs. h----, as she has no appetite, and i thought anything from home would taste good to her. i hope this will please you. mother called with me to see her yesterday. she looks very ill. i have no idea she will ever get well. we had a nice time at the garden last night. mr. and miss arnold came out and walked with us nearly an hour, though tea was waiting for them, and miss a. was very particularly attentive to me (for your dear sake!), and gave me flowers, beautiful ones, and spoke with much interest of your sermons. oh, i am ready to jump for joy, when i think of seeing you home again. do please be glad as i am. i suppose your mother wants you too; but then she can't love you as i do--i'm sure she can't--with all the children among whom she has to divide her heart. give my best love to her and abby. how i wish i were in portland, helping you pack your books. but i can't write any more as we are going to mrs. gibbs' to tea. mother is reading hamlet in her room. she is enjoying herself very much. mrs. gibbs, whose name occurs in this letter, was one of those inestimable friends, who fulfill the office of mother, as it were, to the young minister's wife. she was tenderly attached to mrs. prentiss and her loving-kindness, which was new every morning and fresh every evening, ceased only with her life. her husband, the late capt. robert gibbs, was like her in unwearied devotion to both the pastor and the pastor's wife. the summer was passed in getting settled in her new home, and receiving visits from old friends. early in the autumn she spent several weeks in portland. after her return, nov. , she writes to miss thurston: i was in portland after you had left, and got quite rested and recruited after my summer's fatigue, so that i came home with health and strength, if not to lay my hand to the plough, to apply it to the broom-handle and other articles of domestic warfare. just what i expected would befall me has happened. i have got immersed in the whirlpool of petty cares and concerns which swallow up so many other and higher interests, and talk as anxiously about good "help" and bad, as the rest of 'em do. i sometimes feel really ashamed of myself to see how virtuously i fancy i am spending my time, if in the kitchen, and how it seems to be wasted if i venture to take up a book. i take it that wives who have no love and enthusiasm for their husbands are more to be pitied than blamed if they settle down into mere cooks and good managers.... we have had right pleasant times since coming home; never pleasanter than when, for a day or two, i was without "help," and my husband ground coffee and drew water for me, and thought everything i made tasted good. one of the deacons of our church--a very old man--prays for me once a week at meeting, especially that my husband and i may be "mutual comforts and enjoyments of each other," which makes us laugh a little in our sleeves, even while we say amen in our hearts. we have been reading aloud mary howitt's "author's daughter," which is a very good story indeed--don't ask me if i have read anything else. my mind has become a complete mummy, and therefore incapable of either receiving or originating a new idea. i did wade through a sea of words, and nonsense on my way home in the shape of two works of prof. wilson--"the foresters" and "margaret lindsay"--which i fancy he wrote before he was out of his mother's arms or soon after leaving them. the girls in portland are marrying off like all possessed. it reminds me of a shovel full of popcorn, which the more you watch it the more it won't pop, till at last it all goes racketing off at once, pop, pop, pop; without your having time to say jack robinson between. my position as wife of a minister secures for me many affectionate attentions, and opens to me many little channels of happiness, which conspire to make me feel contented and at home here. i do not know how a stranger would find new bedford people, but i am inclined to think society is hard to get into, though its heart is warm when you once do get in. we are very pleasantly situated, and our married life has been abundantly blessed. i doubt if we could fail to be contented anywhere if we had each other to love and care for. we went to hear templeton sing last night. i was perfectly charmed with his hunting song and with some others, and better judges than i were equally delighted. i had a letter from abby last week. she is in vicksburg and in fine spirits, and fast returning health. her letters during glow with the sunshine of domestic peace and joy. in its earlier months her health was unusually good and she depicts her happiness as something "wonderful." all the day long her heart, she says, was "running over" with a love and delight she could not begin to express. but her letters also show that already she was having foretastes of that baptism of suffering, which was to fit her for doing her master's work. in january she revisited portland, where she had the pleasure of meeting prof, and mrs. hopkins with their little boy, and of passing several weeks in the society of her own and her husband's family. but portland had now lost for her much of its attraction. "i've seen all the folks," she wrote, "and we've said about all we've got to say to each other, and though i love to be at home, of course, it is not the home it used to be before you had made such another dear, dear home for me. oh, do you miss me? do you feel a _little bit_ sorry you let me leave you? do say, yes.... but i can't write, i am so happy! i am so glad i am going home!" early in december her first child was born. writing a few weeks later to mrs. stearns, she thus refers to this event: what a world of new sensations and emotions come with the first child! i was quite unprepared for the rush of strange feelings--still more so for the saddening and chastening effect. why should the world seem more than ever empty when one has just gained the treasure of a living and darling child? the saddening effect in her own case was owing in part, no doubt, to anxiety occasioned by the fatal illness of her husband's eldest sister, to whom she was tenderly attached. the following letter was written under the pressure of this anxiety: _to miss thurston, new bedford, jan. , _ i dare say the idea of _lizzy payson_ with a _baby_ seems quite funny to you, as it does to many of the portland girls; but i assure you it doesn't seem in the least funny to me, but as natural as life and i may add, as wonderful, almost. she is a nice little plump creature, with a fine head of dark hair which i take some comfort in brushing round a quill to make it curl, and a pair of intelligent eyes, either black or blue, nobody knows which. i find the care of her very wearing, and have cried ever so many times from fatigue and anxiety, but now i am getting a little better and she pays me for all i do. she is a sweet, good little thing, her chief fault being a tendency to dissipation and sitting up late o' nights. the ladies of our church have made her a beautiful little wardrobe, fortunately for me. i had a lot of company all summer; my sister, her husband and boy, mr. stearns and anna, mother prentiss, julia willis, etc. i had also my last visit from abby, whom i little thought then i should never see again. our happiness in our little one has been checked by our constant anxiety with regard to abby's health, and it is very hard now for me to give up one who has become in every sense a sister, and not even to have the privilege of bidding her farewell. george went down about a week since and will remain till all is over. i do not even know that while i write she is yet living. she had only one wish remaining and that was to see george, and she was quite herself the day of his arrival, as also the day following, and able to say all she desired. since then she has been rather unconscious of what was passing, and i fervently trust that by this time her sufferings are over and that she is where she longed and prayed to be. [ ] you can have no idea how alike are the emotions occasioned by a birth and a death in the family. they seem equally solemn to me and i am full of wonder at the mysterious new world into which i have been thrown. i used to think that the change i saw in young, giddy girls when they became mothers, was owing to suffering and care wearing upon the spirits, but i see now that its true source lies far deeper. my brother h. has been married a couple of months, so i have one sister more. i shall be glad when they are all married. some sisters seem to feel that their brothers are lost to them on their marriage, but if i may judge by my husband, there is fully as much gain as loss. i am sure no son or brother could be more devoted to mother and sisters than he is. of course the baby is his perfect comfort and delight; but i need not enlarge on this point, as i suppose you have seen papas with their first babies. a great sucking of a very small thumb admonishes me that the little lady in the crib meditates crying for supper, so i must hurry off my letter. abby lewis prentiss died on saturday, january , , at the age of thirty-two. long and wearisome sufferings, such as usually attend pulmonary disease, preceded the final struggle. it was toward the close of a stormy winter's day, that she gently fell asleep. a little while before she had imagined herself in a "very beautiful region" which her tongue in vain attempted to describe, surrounded by those she loved. among her last half-conscious utterances was the name of her brother seargent. the next morning witnessed a scene of such wondrous splendor and loveliness as made the presence of death seem almost incredible. the snow-fall and mist and gloom had ceased; and as the sun rose, clear and resplendent, every visible object--the earth, trees, houses--shone as if enameled with gold and pearls and precious stones. it was the lord's day; and well did the aspect of nature symbolise the glory of him, who is the resurrection and the life. on receiving the news of his sister's death, her brother seargent, writing to his mother, thus depicted her character: my heart bleeds to the core, as i sit down to mingle my tears with yours, my dear, beloved mother. i can not realise that it is all over; that i shall never again, in this world, see our dear, dear abby. gladly would i have given my own life to preserve hers. but we have consolation, even in our extreme grief; for she was so good that we know she is now in heaven, and freed from all care, unless it be that her affectionate heart is still troubled for us, whom she loved so well. we can dwell with satisfaction, after we have overcome the first sharpness of our grief, upon her angel-like qualities, which made her, long before she died, fit for the heaven where she now is.... you have lost the purest, noblest, and best of daughters; i, a sister, who never to my knowledge did a selfish act or uttered a selfish thought. with the exception of yourself, dear mother, she was, of all our family circle, the best prepared to enter her father's house. some extracts from letters written at this time, will show the tenderness of mrs. prentiss' sisterly love and sympathy, and give a glimpse also of her thoughts and occupations as a young mother. _to mrs. stearns, new bedford, feb. , _ if i loved you less, my dear anna, i could write you twenty letters where i now can hardly get courage to undertake one. how very dearly i do love you i never knew, till it rushed upon my mind that we might sometime lose you as we have lost dear abby. how mysteriously your and mary's and my baby are given us just at this very time, when our hearts are so sore that we are almost afraid to expose them to new sufferings by taking in new objects of affection! but it does seem to me a great mercy that, trying as it is in many respects, these births and this death come almost hand in hand. surely we three young mothers have learned lessons of life that must influence us forever in relation to these little ones! i have been like one in the midst of a great cloud, since the birth of our baby, entirely unconscious how much i love her; but i am just beginning to take comfort in and feel sensible affection for her. i long to show the dear little good creature to you. but i can hardly give up my long-cherished plans and hopes in regard to abby's seeing and loving our first child. almost as much as i depended on the sympathy and affection of my own mother in relation to this baby, i was depending on abby's. but i rejoice that she is where she is, and would not have her back again in this world of sin and conflict and labor, for a thousand times the comfort her presence could give. but you don't know how i dread going home next summer and not finding her there! it was a great mercy that you could go down again, dear anna. and indeed there are manifold mercies in this affliction--how many we may never know, till we get home to heaven ourselves and find, perhaps, that this was one of the invisible powers that helped us on our way thither. i had a sweet little note from your mother to-day. i would give anything if i could go right home, and make her adopt me as her daughter by a new adoption, and be a real blessing and comfort to her in this lonely, dark time. eddy hopkins calls my baby _his_. how children want to use the possessive case in regard to every object of interest! i find the blanket that mrs. gibbs knit for me so infinitely preferable, from its elasticity, to common flannel, that i could not help knitting one for you. if i say that i have thought as many affectionate thoughts to you, while knitting it, as it contains stitches, i fancy i speak nothing but truth and soberness--for i love you now with the love i have returned on my heart from abby, who no longer is in want of earthly friends. dear little baby thought i was knitting for her special pleasure, for her bright eyes would always follow the needles as she lay upon my lap, and she would smile now and then as if thanking me for my trouble. the ladies have given her an elegant cloak, and miss arnold has just sent her a little white satin bonnet that was made in england, and is quite unlike anything i ever saw. only to think, i walked down to church last sunday and heard george preach once more! _march d._--we could with difficulty, and by taking turns, get through reading your letter--not only because you so accurately describe our own feelings in regard to dear abby, but because we feel so keenly for you. i often detect myself thinking, "now i will sit down and write abby a nice long letter"; or imagining how she will act when we go home with our baby; and as you say, i dream about her almost every night. i used always to dream of her as suffering and dying, but now i see her just as she was when well, and hear her advising this and suggesting that, just as i did when she was here last summer. life seems so different now from what it did! it seems to me that my _youth_ has been touched by abby's death, and that i can never be so cheerful and light-hearted as i have been. but, dear anna, though i doubt not this is still more the case with you, and that you see far deeper into the realities of life than i do, we have both the consolations that are to be found in christ--and these will remain to us when the buoyancy and the youthful spirit have gone from our hearts. _march th._ ... i had been reading a marriage sermon to george from "martyria," and we were having a nice _conjugal_ talk just as your little stranger was coming into the world. g. is so hurried and driven that he can not get a moment in which to write. he has a funeral this afternoon, that of mrs. h., a lady whom he has visited for two years, and a part, if not all, of that time once a week. i have made several calls since i wrote you last--two of them to see babies, one of whom took the shine quite off of mine with his great blue-black eyes and eyelashes that lay halfway down his cheeks. the latter part of april she visited portland; while there she wrote to her husband, april : just as i had the baby to sleep and this letter dated, i was called down to see dr. and mrs. dwight and their little willie. the baby woke before they had finished their call, and behaved as prettily and looked as bright and lovely as heart could wish. dr. dwight held her a long time and kissed her heartily. [ ] i got your letter soon after dinner, and from the haste and the _je ne sais quoi_ with which it was written, i feared you were not well. alas, i am full of love and fear. how came you to _walk_ to dartmouth to preach? wasn't it by far too long a walk to take in one day? i heard dr. carruthers on sunday afternoon. he made the finest allusion to my father i ever heard and mother thought of it as i did. to-day i have had a good many callers--among the rest deacon lincoln. [ ] when he saw the baby he said, "oh, what a homely creature. do tell if the new bedford babies are so ugly?" mrs. s., thinking him in earnest, rose up in high dudgeon and said, "why, we think her beautiful, deacon lincoln." "well, i don't wonder," said he. i expect she will get measles and everything else, for _lots_ of children come to see her and eat her up. mother, baby and i spend to-morrow at your mother's. do up a lot of sleeping and grow fat, pray do! and oh, love me and think i am a darling little wife, and write me loving words in your next letter. _wednesday_.--we have a fine day for going up to your mother's. and the baby is bright as a button and full of fun. aren't you glad? _to mrs. stearns, portland, may , _ we have just been having a little quiet saturday evening talk about dear abby, as we sat here before the lighting of the lamps, and i dare say i was not the only one who wished you here too. i came up here from my mother's on monday morning and have had a delightful week. i can not begin to tell you how glad i am that we are going to make you a little visit on our way home. i do so want to see you and your children, and show you our darling little baby that i can hardly wait till the time comes. i suppose you have got your little folks off to bed, and so if you will take a peep into the parlor here you will see how we are all occupied--mother in her rocking-chair, with her "specs" on, studying my dewees on children; george toe to toe with her, reading some old german book, and lina [ ] curled upon the sofa, asleep i fancy, while i sit in the corner and write you from dear abby's desk with her pen. mercy and sophia watch over the cradle in the dining-room, where mother's fifteenth grandchild reposes, unconscious of the honor of sleeping where honorables, reverends, and reverendesses have slumbered before her. how strange it seems that _my_ baby is one of this family--bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh! i need not say how i miss dear abby, for you will see at once that that which was months ago a reality to you, has just become such to me. it pains me to my heart's core to hear how she suffered. dear, dear abby! how i did love her, and how thankful i am for her example to imitate and her excellencies to rejoice in! your uncle james lewis [ ] spent last night here, and this morning he prayed a delightful prayer, which really softened my whole soul. i do not know when i have had my own wants so fervently expressed, or been more edified at family worship, and his allusion to abby was very touching. the following extracts from letters written to her husband, while he was absent in maine, may be thought by some to go a little too much into the trifling details of daily life and feeling, but do not such details after all form no small part of the moral warp and woof of human experience? _to her husband new bedford, august th_. i heard this morning that old mrs. kendrick was threatened with typhus fever, and went down soon after breakfast to see how she did, and, as i found mrs. henrietta had watched with her and was looking all worn out, i begged her to let me have her baby this afternoon, that she might have a chance to rest; so, after dinner, sophia went down and got her. at first she set up a lamentable scream, but we huddled on her cloak and put her with our baby into the carriage and gave them a ride. she is a _proper_ heavy baby, and my legs ache well with trotting round the streets after the carriage. think of me as often as you can and pray for me, and i will think of you and pray for you all the time. _tuesday evening_.--you see i am writing you a sort of little journal, as you say you like to know all i do while you are away. our sweet baby makes your absence far less intolerable than it used to be before she came to comfort me.... i have felt all soul and as if i had no body, ever since your precious letter came this morning. i have so pleased myself with imagining how funny and nice it would be if i could creep in unperceived by you, and hear your oration! i long to know how you got through, and what mr. stearns and mr. smith thought of it. i always pray for you more when you are away than i do when you are at home, because i know you are interrupted and hindered about your devotions more or less when journeying. i have had callers a great part of to-day, among them mrs. leonard, mrs. gen. thompson, mrs. randall, and capt. clark. [ ] capt. c. asked for nobody but the baby. the little creature almost sprang into his arms. he was much gratified and held her a long while, kissing and caressing her. i think it was pretty work for you to go to reading your oration to your mother and old mrs. coe, when you hadn't read it to me. i felt a terrible pang of jealousy when i came to that in your letter. i am going now to call on miss arnold. _friday, sept, d._--yesterday forenoon i was _perfectly wretched_. it came over me, as things will in spite of us, "suppose he didn't get safely to brunswick!" and for several hours i could not shake it off. it had all the power of reality, and made me so faint that i could do nothing and fairly had to go to bed. i suppose it was very silly, and if i had not tried in every way to rise above it might have been even wicked, but it frightened me to find how much i am under the power of mere feeling and fancy. but do not laugh at me. sometimes i say to myself, "what madness to love any human being so intensely! what would become of you if he were snatched from you?" and then i think that though god justly denies us comfort and support for the future, and bids us lean upon him _now_ and trust him for the rest, he can give us strength for the endurance of his most terrible chastisements when their hour comes. _saturday._--i am a mere baby when i think of your getting sick in this time of almost universal sickness and sorrow and death.... yesterday mrs. gibbs and mrs. leonard took me, with sophia and baby, to the cemetery, and on a long ride of three hours--all of which was delightful. in the afternoon baby had an ill-turn which alarmed me excessively, because so many children are sick, but i gave her medicine and think she will soon be well again. mrs. gibbs and mrs. randall and others sent me yesterday a dozen large peaches, two melons, a lot of shell-beans and tomatoes, a dish of blackberries and some fried corn-cakes--not an atom of the whole of which shall i touch, taste, handle, or smell; so you need not fear my killing myself. mrs. capt. delano, where the rev. mr. brock from england stayed, has just lost two children after a few days' illness. they were buried in one coffin. old gideon howland, the richest man here, is also dead. the papers are full of deaths. our dear baby is nine months old to-day, and may god, if he _sees best_, spare her to us as many more; and if he does not, i feel as if i could give her up to him--but we don't know what we can do till the time comes. i hear her sweet little voice down stairs and it sounds happy, so i guess she feels pretty comfortable. _sabbath evening._--the baby is better, and i dare say it is my imagination that says she looks pale and puny. she is now asleep in your study, where too i am sitting in your chair. i came down as soon as i could this morning, and have stayed here all day. it is so quiet and pleasant among your books and papers, and it was so dull up-stairs! i thought before your letter came, while standing over the green, grassy graves of lizzie read, mary rodman, and mrs. cadwell, [ ] how i should love to have dear abby in such a green, sweet spot, where we could sometimes go together to talk of her. i must own i should like to be buried under grass and trees, rather than cold stone and heavy marble. should not you? * * * * * ii. birth of a son. death of her mother. her grief. letters. eddy's illness and her own cares. a family gathering at newburyport. extracts from eddy's journal. passing over another year, which was marked by no incidents requiring special mention, we come again to a birth and a death in close conjunction. on the d of october, , her second child, edward payson, was born. on the th of november, her mother died. of the life of this child she herself has left a minute record, portions of which will be given later. in a letter to his sister, dated new bedford, november st, her husband thus refers to her mother's departure: we have just received the sad intelligence of mother payson's death. she passed away very peacefully, as if going to sleep, at half-past five on friday afternoon. dear lizzy was at first quite overwhelmed, as i knew she would be--for her attachment to her mother was uncommonly tender and devoted; but she is now perfectly tranquil and will soon, i trust, be able to think of her irreparable loss with a melancholy pleasure even. there is much in the case that is peculiarly fitted to produce a cheerful resignation. mrs. payson has been a severe sufferer; and since the breaking up of her home in portland, she has felt, i think, an increasing detachment from the world. i was exceedingly struck with this during her visit here last winter. she seemed to me to be fast ripening for heaven. it is such a comfort to us that she was able to _name_ our little boy! [ ] mrs. payson died in the th year of her age. she was a woman of most attractive and admirable qualities, full of cheerful life and energy, and a whole-hearted disciple of jesus. a few extracts from mrs. prentiss' letters will show how deeply she felt her loss. to her youngest brother she writes: how gladly i would go, if i could, to see you all, and talk over with you the thousand things that are filling our minds and hearts! we can not drain this bitter cup at one draught and then go on our way as though it had never been. the loss of a mother is never made up or atoned for; and ours was such a mother; so peculiar in her devotion and tenderness and sympathy! i can not mourn that her sorrowful pilgrimage is over, can not think for a moment of wishing she were still on earth, weeping and praying and suffering--but for myself and for you and for all i mourn with hourly tears. she has sacrificed herself for us. to her friend, miss lord, she writes, jan. : it seems to me that every day and hour i miss my dear mother more and more, and i feel more and more painfully how much she suffered during her last years and months. dear louise, i thought i knew that she could not live long, but i never realised it, and even now i keep trying to hope that she has not really gone. just in this very spot where i now sit writing, my dear mother's great easy-chair used to sit, and here, only a year ago, she was praying for and loving me. o, if i had only _known_ she was dying then, and could have talked with her about heaven till it had grown to seeming like a home to which she was going, and whither i should follow her sooner or later! but it is all over and i would not have her here again, if the shadow of a wish could restore her to us. i only earnestly long to be fitting, day by day, to meet her again in heaven. god has mingled many great mercies with this affliction, and i do not know that i ever in my life so felt the delight of praying to and thanking him. when i begin to pray i have so much to thank him for, that i hardly know how to stop. i have always thought i would not for the universe be left unchastised--and now i feel the smart, i still can say so. lotty's visit was a great comfort and service to me, but i was very selfish in talking to her so much about my own loss, while she was so great a sufferer under hers. since she left my little boy has been worse than ever and pined away last week very rapidly. you can form no idea, by any description of his sufferings, of what the dear little creature has undergone since his birth. i feel a perfect longing to see portland and mother's many dear friends there, especially your mother and a few like her. i am very tired as i have written a great part of this with baby in my lap--so i can write no more. _to mrs. stearns, feb. , ._ dear little eddy has found life altogether unkind thus far, and i have had many hours of heartache on his account but i hope he may weather the storm and come out safely yet. the doctor examined him all over yesterday, particularly his head, and said he could not make him out a _sick_ child, but that he thought his want of flesh owing partly to his sufferings but more to the great loss of sleep occasioned by his sufferings. instead of sleeping twelve hours out of the twenty-four, he sleeps but about seven and that by means of laudanum. isn't it a mercy that i have been able to bear so well the fatigue and care and anxiety of these four hard months? i feel that i have nothing to complain of, and a _great deal_ to be thankful for. on the whole, notwithstanding my grief about my dear mother's loss, and my perplexity and distress about baby, i have had as much real happiness this winter as it is possible for one to glean in such unfavorable circumstances. _by far_ the greatest trial i have to contend with, is that of losing all power to control my time. a little room all of my own, and a regular hour, morning and night, all of my own would enable me, i think, to say, "_now_ let life do its worst!" i am no stranger, i assure you, to the misgivings you describe in your last letter; i think them the result of the _wish_ without the _will_ to be holy. we pray for sanctification and then are afraid god will sanctify us by stripping us of our idols and feel distressed lest we can not have them and him too. reading the life of madame guyon gave me great pain and anxiety, i remember. i thought that if such spiritual darkness and trial as she was in for many years, was a necessary attendant on eminent piety, i could not summon courage to try to live such a life. of all the anguish in the world there is nothing like this--the sense of god, without the sense of nearness to him. i wish you would always "think aloud" when you write to me. i long to see you and the children and mr. s., and so does george. poor g. has had a very hard time of it ever since little eddy's birth--so much care and worry and sleeplessness and labor, and how he is ever to get any rest i don't see. these are the times that try our souls. let nobody condole with me about our _bodies_. it is the struggle to be patient and gentle and cheerful, when pressed down and worn upon and distracted, that costs us so much. i think when i have had all my children, if there is anything left of me, i shall write about the "battle of life" more eloquently than dickens has done. i had a pleasant dream about mother and abby the other night. they came together to see me and both seemed so well and so happy! i feel _perfectly happy_ now, that my dear mother has gone home. _to the same, may , ._ i used to think it hard to be sick when i had dear mother hanging over me, doing all she could for my relief, but it is harder to be denied the poor comfort of being let alone and to have to drag one's self out of bed to take care of a baby. mr. stearns must know how to pity me, for my real sick headaches are very like his, and when racked with pain, dizzy, faint and exhausted with suffering, starvation and sleeplessness, it is terrible to have to walk the room with a crying child! i thought as i lay, worn out even to childishness, obliged for the baby's sake to have a bright sunlight streaming into the chamber, and to keep my eyes and ears on the alert for the same cause, how still we used to think the house must be left when my father had these headaches and how mother busied herself all day long about him, and how nice his little plate of hot steak used to look, as he sat up to eat it when the sickness had gone--and how i am suffering here all alone with nobody to give me even a look of encouragement. george was out of town on my sickest day. when he was at home he did everything in the world he could do to keep the children still, but here they must be and i must direct about every trifle and have them on the bed with me. i am getting desperate and feel disposed to run furiously in the traces till i drop dead on the way. don't think me very wicked for saying so. i am jaded in soul and body and hardly know what i do want. if t. comes, george, at all events, will get relief and that will take a burden from my mind.... i want lina to come this summer. there is a splendid swing on iron hooks under a tree, at the house we are going to move into. won't that be nice for jeanie and mary's other children, if they come? i wish i had a little fortune, not for myself but to gather my "folks" together with. i shall not write you, my dear, another complaining letter; do excuse this. this letter shows the extremity of her trouble; but it is a picture, merely. the reality was something beyond description; only young mothers, who know it by experience, can understand its full meaning. now, however, the storm for a while abated. the young relative, whose loving devotion had ministered to the comfort of her dying mother, came to her own relief and passed the next six months at new bedford, helping take care of eddy. in the course of the spring, too, his worst symptoms disappeared and hope took the place of fear and despondency. referring to this period, his mother writes in eddy's journal: on the saturday succeeding his birth, we heard of my dear mother's serious illness, and, when he was about three weeks old, of her death. we were not surprised that his health suffered from the shock it thus received. he began at once to be affected with distressing colic, which gave him no rest day or night. his father used to call him a "little martyr," and such indeed he was for many long, tedious months. on the th of february, the doctor came and spent two hours in carefully investigating his case. he said it was a most trying condition of things, and he would gladly do something to relieve me, as he thought i had been through "enough to _kill ten men_." ... when eddy was about eight months old, the doctor determined to discontinue the use of opiates. he was now a fine, healthy baby, bright-eyed and beautiful, and his colic was reducing itself to certain seasons on each day, instead of occupying the whole day and night as heretofore. we went through fire and water almost in trying to procure for him natural sleep. we swung him in blankets, wheeled him in little carts, walked the room with him by the hour, etc., etc., but it was wonderful how little sleep he obtained after all. he always looked wide awake and as if he did not _need_ sleep. his eyes had gradually become black, and when, after a day of fatigue and care with him he would at last close them, and we would flatter ourselves that now we too should snatch a little rest, we would see them shining upon us in the most amusing manner with an expression of content and even merriment. about this time he was baptized. i well remember how in his father's study, and before taking him to church, we gave him to god. he was very good while his papa was performing the ceremony, and looked so bright and so well, that many who had never seen him in his state of feebleness, found it hard to believe he had been aught save a vigorous and healthy child. my own health was now so broken down by long sleeplessness and fatigue, that it became necessary for me to leave home for a season. dr. mayhew promised to run in _every day_ to see that all went well with eddy. his auntie was more than willing to take this care upon herself, and many of our neighbors offered to go often to see him, promising to do everything for his safety and comfort if i would only go. not aware how miserable a state i was in, i resolved to be absent only one week, but was away for a whole month. a part of the month, with her husband and little daughter, she passed at newburyport. his brother, s. s. prentiss--whose name was then renowned all over the land as an orator and patriot--had come north for the last time, bringing his wife and children with him. it was a never-to-be-forgotten family gathering under the aged mother's roof. on my return (she continues in eddy's journal) i found him looking finely. he had had an ill-turn owing to teething which they had kept from me, but had recovered from it and looked really beautiful. his father and uncle s. s. had been to see him once during our vacation, and we were now expecting them again with his aunt mary and her three children and his grandmother. we depended a great deal on seeing eddy and una together, as she was his _twin_ cousin and only a few hours older than he. but on the very evening of their arrival he was taken sick, and, although they all saw him that night looking like himself, by the next morning he had changed sadly. he grew ill and lost flesh and strength very fast, and no remedies seemed to have the least effect on his disorder, which was one induced by teething.... for myself i did not believe anything could now save my precious baby, and had given him to god so unreservedly, that i was not conscious of even a wish for his life.... when at last we saw evident tokens of returning health and strength, we felt that we received him a second time as from the grave. to me he never seemed the same child. my darling eddy was lost to me and another--_and yet the same_--filled his place. i often said afterward that a little stranger was running about my nursery, not mine, but god's. indeed, i can't describe the peculiar feelings with which i always regarded him after this sickness, nor how the thought constantly met me, "he is not mine; he is god's." every night i used to thank him for sparing him to me one day longer; thus truly enjoying him _a day at a time_. an extract from a letter to miss lord, written on the anniversary of her mother's death, will close the account of this year. if i were in portland now, i should go right down to see you. i feel just like having a dear, old-fashioned talk with you. i was thinking how many times death had entered that old richmond circle of which you and i once formed a part; mrs. persico, susan, charlotte ford, kate kennedy, and now our own dearest lotty, all gone. i can not tell you how much i miss and grieve for lotty. [ ] i can not be thankful enough that i went to portland in the summer and had that last week with her, nor for her most precious visit here last winter. whenever you think of any little thing she said, i want you to write it down for me, no matter whether it seems worth writing or not. i know by experience how precious such things are. this is a sad day to me. indeed, all of this month has been so, recalling as it has done, all i was suffering at this time last year, and all my dear mother was then suffering. i can hardly realise that she has been in heaven a whole year, and that i feel her loss as vividly as if it were but yesterday--indeed, more so. i do not feel that this affliction has done me the good that it ought to have done and that i hoped it would. as far as i have any excuse it lies in my miserable health. i want so much to be more of a christian; to live a life of constant devotion. do tell me, when you write, if you have such troubled thoughts, and such difficulty in being steadfast and unmovable? oh, how i sigh for the sort of life i led in richmond, and which was more or less the life of the succeeding years at home! my husband tries to persuade me that the difference is more in my way of life, and that then being my time for contemplation, now is my time for action. but i know, myself, that i have lost ground. you must bear me in mind when you pray, my dear louise, for i never had so much need of praying nor so little time or strength for it. * * * * * iii. further extracts from eddy's journal. ill-health. visit to newark. death of her brother-in-law, s. s. prentiss. his character. removal to newark. letters. the record of the new year opens with this entry in eddy's journal: _january, ._--eddy is now fourteen months old, has six teeth, and walks well, but with timidity. he is, at times, really beautiful. he is very affectionate, and will run to meet me, throw his little arms round my neck and keep pat-pat-patting me, with delight. miss arnold sent him, at new year's, a pretty ball, with which he is highly pleased. he rolls it about by knocking it with a stick, and will shout for joy when he sees it moving. he is _crazy_ to give everybody something, and when he is brought down to prayers, hurries to get the bible for his father, his little face all smiles and exultation, and his body in a quiver with emotion. he is like lightning in all his movements, and is never still for an instant. it is worth a good deal to see his face, it is so _brimful_ of life and sunshine and gladness. her letters, written during the winter and spring, show how in the midst of bodily suffering, depression, and sorrow her views of life were changing and her faith in god growing stronger. three of her brothers were now in california, seeking their fortunes in the newly-discovered gold mines. to one of them she writes, march th: i was delighted yesterday by the reception of your letter. i do not wonder that lotty's death affected you as it did--but however sharp the instruments by which these lessons come to us, they are full of good when they do come. as i look back to the time when i did not know what death was doing and could do, i seem to myself like a child who has not yet been to school. the deaths of our dear mother and of lotty have taken fast hold of me. life is _entirely changed_. i do not say this in a melancholy or repining temper, for i would not have life appear otherwise than in its true light. all my sickly, wicked disgust with it has been put to the blush and driven away. i see now that to live for god, whether one is allowed ability to be actively useful or not, is a great thing, and that it is a wonderful mercy to be allowed to live and suffer even, if thereby one can glorify him. i desire to live if it is god's will, though i confess heaven looks most attractive when either sin, sorrow, or sickness weary me. but i must not go on at this rate, for i could not in writing begin to tell you how different everything looks as i advance into a knowledge of life and see its awful sorrows and sufferings and changes and know that i am subject to all its laws, soon to take my turn in its mysterious close. my dear brother, let us learn by heart the lessons we are learning, and go in their strength and wisdom all our days.... our children are well. eddy has gone to be weighed (he weighed twenty-four pounds). he is a fine little fellow. i have his nurse still, and ought to be in excellent health, but am a nervous old thing, as skinny and bony as i can be. i can think of nothing but birds' claws when i look at my hands. but i have so much to be thankful for in my dear husband and my sweet little children, and love all of you so dearly, that i believe i am as rich as if i had the flesh and strength of a giant. i am going this week to hear miss arnold read a manuscript novel. this will give spice to my life. warmest love to you all. again, may th, she writes: it would be a great pleasure to me to keep a journal for you if i were well enough, but i am not. i have my sick headache now once a week, and it makes me really ill for about three days. towards night of the third day i begin to brighten up and to eat a morsel, but hardly recover my strength before i have another pull-down, just as i had got to this point the door-bell rang, and lo! a beautiful may-basket hanging on the latch for "annie," full of pretty and good things. i can hardly wait till morning to see how her eyes will shine and her little feet fly when she sees it. george has been greatly distressed about s. s., and has, i think, very little, if any, hope that he will recover. dr. tappan [ ] spent tuesday night here. we had a really delightful visit from him. he spoke highly of your classmate, craig, who is just going to be married. he told us a number of pleasant anecdotes about father. eddy has got big enough to walk in the street. he looks like a little picture, with his great forehead and bright eyes. he is in every way as large as most children are at two years. his supreme delight is to tease a. by making believe strike her or in some other real boy's hateful way. she and he play together on the grass-plat, and i feel quite matronly as i sit watching them with their balls and wheel-barrows and whatnots. this little scamp has, i fear, broken my constitution to pieces. it makes me crawl all over when i think of you three fagging all day at such dull and unprofitable labor. but i am sure providence will do what is really best for you all. we think and talk of and pray for you every day and more than once a day, and, in all my ill-health and sufferings, the remembrance of you is pleasant and in great measure refreshing. i depend more upon hearing from you all than i can describe. what an unconquerable thing family affection is! she thus writes, may th, to her old portland friend, miss lord: i have written very few letters and not a line of anything else the past winter, owing to the confusion my mind is in most of the time from distress in my head. three days out of every seven i am as sick as i well can be--the rest of the time languid, feeble, and exhausted by frequent faint turns, so that i can't do the smallest thing in my family. i hardly know what it is so much as to put a clean apron on to one of my children. to me this is a constant pain and weariness; for our expense in the way of servants is greater than we can afford and everything is going to destruction under my face and eyes, while i dare not lift a finger to remedy it. i live in constant alternations of hope and despondency about my health. whenever i feel a little better, as i do to-day, i am sanguine and cheerful, but the next ill-turn depresses me exceedingly. i don't think there is any special danger of my dying, but there is a good deal of my getting run down beyond the power of recovery, and of dragging out that useless existence of which i have a perfect horror. but i would not have you think i am not happy; for i can truly say that i _am_, most of the time, as happy as i believe one can be in this world. all my trials and sufferings shut me up to the one great source of peace, and i know there has been need of every one of them. i have not yet made my plans for the summer. our doctor urges me to go away from the children and from the salt water, but i do not believe it would do me a bit of good. i want you to see my dear little boy. he is now nineteen months old and as fat and well as can be. he is a beautiful little fellow, we think, and very interesting. he is as gallant to a. as you please, and runs to get a cushion for her when their supper is carried in, and won't eat a morsel himself till he sees her nicely fixed. george has gone to boston, and i am lonely enough. i would write another sheet if i dared, but i don't dare. what she here says of her happiness, amidst the trials of the previous winter, is repeated a little later in a letter to her husband: i can truly say i have not spent a happier winter since our marriage, in spite of all my sickness. it seems to me i can never recover my spirits and be as i have been in my best days, but what i lose in one way perhaps i shall gain in another. just think how my ambition has been crushed at every point by my ill-health, and even the ambition to be useful and a comfort to those about me trampled underfoot, to teach me what i could not have learned in any other school! in the month of june she went on a visit to newark, new jersey, where her husband's mother and sister now resided; dr. stearns having in the fall of accepted a call to the first presbyterian church in that city. while she was in newark news came of the dangerous illness, and, soon after, of the death at natchez of her brother-in-law, mr. s. s. prentiss. the event was a great shock to her, and she knew that it would be a crushing blow to her husband. her letters to him, written at this time, are full of the tender love and sympathy that infuse solace into sorrow-stricken hearts. here is an extract from one of them, dated july th: i can't tell you how it grieves and distresses me to have had this long-dreaded affliction come upon you when you were alone. though i could do so little to comfort you, it seems as if i _must_ be near you.... but i know i am doing right in staying here--doing as you would tell me to do, if i could have your direct wish, and you don't know how thankful i am that it has pleased god to let me be with dear mother at a time when she so needed constant affection and sympathy. yes there are wonderful mercies with this heavy affliction, and we all see and feel them. poor mother has borne all the dreadful suspense and then the second blow of to-day far better than any of us dared to hope, but she weeps incessantly. anna is with her all she can possibly be, and mr. stearns is an angel of mercy. i have prayed for you a great deal this week, and i know god is with you, comforts you, and will enable you to bear this great sorrow. and yet i can't help feeling that i want to comfort you myself. oh, may we all reap its blessed fruits as long as we live! let us withdraw a while from everything else, that we may press nearer to god. we were in a state of terrible suspense all day tuesday, all day wednesday, and until noon to-day; starting at every footfall, expecting telegraphic intelligence either from you or from the south, and deplorably ignorant of seargent's alarming condition, notwithstanding all the warning we had had. with one consent we had put far off the evil day.... and now i must bid you good-night, my dearest husband, praying that you may be the beloved of the lord and rest in safety by him. the early years of mrs. prentiss' married life were in various ways closely connected with that of this lamented brother; so much so that he may be said to have formed one of the most potent, as well as one of the sunniest, influences in her own domestic history. not only was he very highly gifted, intellectually, and widely known as a great orator, but he was also a man of extraordinary personal attractions, endeared to all his friends by the sweetness of his disposition, by his winning ways, his wit, his playful humor, his courage, his boundless generosity, his fraternal and filial devotion, and by the charm of his conversation. his death at the early age of forty-one called forth expressions of profound sorrow and regret from the first men of the nation. after the lapse of nearly a third of a century his memory is still fresh and bright in the hearts of all, who once knew and loved him. [ ] notwithstanding the shock of this great affliction, mrs. prentiss returned to new bedford much refreshed in body and mind. in a letter to her friend miss lord, dated september th, she writes: i spent six most profitable weeks at newark; went out very little, saw very few people, and had the quiet and retirement i had long hungered and thirsted for. since i have had children my life has been so distracted with care and sickness that i have sometimes felt like giving up in despair, but this six weeks' rest gave me fresh courage to start anew. i have got some delightful books--manning's sermons. [ ] they are (letting the high-churchism go) most delightful; i think susan would have feasted on them. but she is feasting on angels' food and has need of none of these things. in october of this year mrs. prentiss bade adieu to new bedford, never to revisit it, and removed to newark; her husband having become associate pastor of the second presbyterian church in that place. in the spring of the following year he accepted a call to the mercer street presbyterian church in new york, and that city became her home the rest of her days. although she tarried so short a time in newark, she received much kindness and formed warm friendships while there. she continued to suffer much, however, from ill-health and almost entirely suspended her correspondence. a few letters to new bedford friends are all that relate to this period. in one to mrs. j. p. allen, dated november d, she thus refers to an accident, which came near proving fatal: yesterday we went down to new york to hear jenny lind; a pleasure to remember for the rest of one's life. if anything, she surpassed our expectations. in coming home a slight accident to the cars obliged us to walk about a mile, and i must needs fall into a hole in the bridge which we were crossing, and bruise and scrape one knee quite badly. the wonder is that i did not go into the river, as it was a large hole, and pitch dark. i think if i had been walking with mr. prentiss i should not only have gone in myself, but pulled him in too; but i had the arm of a stronger man, who held me up till i could extricate myself. you can't think how i miss you, nor how often i wish you could run in and sit with me, as you used to do. i have always loved you, and shall remember you and yours with the utmost interest. we had a pleasant call the other day from captain gibbs. seeing him made me homesick enough. i could hardly keep from crying all the time he stayed. it seems to us both as if we had been gone from new bedford more months than we have days. mr. prentiss said yesterday that he should expect if he went back directly, to see the boys and girls grown up and married. _to mrs. reuben nye, newark, feb , ._ mr. prentiss and mr. poor have just taken annie and eddy out to walk, and i have been moping over the fire and thinking of new bedford friends, and wishing one or more would "happen in." i am just now getting over a severe attack of rheumatism, which on leaving my back intrenched itself in mr. p.'s shoulder. i dislike this climate and am very suspicious of it. everybody has a horrible cold, or the rheumatism, or fever and ague. mr. prentiss says if i get the latter, he shall be off for new england in a twinkling. i think he is as well as can be expected while the death of his brother continues so fresh in his remembrance. all the old cheerfulness, which used to sustain me amid sickness and trouble, has gone from him. but god has ordered the iron to enter his soul, and it is not for me to resist that will. our children are well. we have had much comfort in them both this winter. mother prentiss is renewing her youth, it is so pleasant to her to have us all near her. (eddy and a. are hovering about me, making such a noise that i can hardly write. eddy says, "when i was tired, _poor_ tarried me.") mr. poor carries all before him. [ ] he is _very_ popular throughout the city, and i believe mrs. p. is much admired by their people. mr. prentiss is preaching every sabbath evening, as dr. condit is able to preach every morning now. i feel as much at home as i possibly could anywhere in the same time, but instead of mourning less for my new bedford friends, i mourn more and more every day. to mrs. allen she writes, feb. : i know all about those depressed moods, when it costs one as much to smile, or to give a pleasant answer, as it would at other times to make a world. what a change it will be to us poor sickly, feeble, discouraged ones, when we find ourselves where there is neither pain or lassitude or fatigue of the body, or sorrow or care or despondency of the mind! i miss you more and more. people here are kind and excellent and friendly, but i can not make them, as yet, fill the places of the familiar faces i have left in new bedford. i am all the time walking through our neighborhood, dropping into deacon barker's or your house, or welcoming some of you into our old house on the corner. eddy is pretty well. he is a sweet little boy, gentle and docile. he learns to talk very fast, and is crazy to learn hymns. he says, "tinkle, tinkle _leetleeverybody_, and give 'tatoes to beggar boys." mother prentiss seems to _thrive_ on having us all about her. she lives so far off that i see her seldom, but mr. p. goes every day, except sundays, when he can't go--rain or shine, tired or not tired, convenient or not convenient. since my mother's death he has felt that he must do quickly whatever he has to do for his own. [ ] "i found dear abby still alive and rejoiced beyond expression to see me. she had had a very feeble night, but brightened up towards noon and when i arrived seemed entirely like her old self, smiling sweetly and exclaiming, "this is the last blessing i desired! oh, how good the lord is, isn't he?" it was very delightful. the doctor has just been in and he says she may go any instant, and yet may live a day or two. mother is wonderfully calm and happy, and the house seems like the very gate of heaven.... i so wish you could have seen abby's smile when i entered her room. and then she inquired so affectionately for you and baby: "now tell me everything about them." she longs and prays to be gone. there is something perfectly childlike about her expressions and feelings, especially toward mother. she can't bear to have her leave the room and holds her hand a good deal of the time. she sends ever so much love."-- _extract from a letter, dated portland, january , ._ [ ] the late rev. william t. dwight, d.d., pastor of the third church in portland. he was a son of president dwight, an accomplished man, a noble christian citizen, and one of the ablest preachers of his day. for many years his house almost adjoined mrs. payson's, and both he and mrs. dwight were among her most cherished friends. [ ] a devoted friend of her father's, one of his deacons, and a genial, warm-hearted, good man. [ ] a niece of her husband, a lovely child, who died a few years later in georgia. [ ] rev. james lewis, a venerated elder and local preacher of the methodist episcopal church, then nearly eighty years of age. he died in , universally beloved and lamented. he entered upon his work in . during most of those fifty-five years he was wont to preach every sabbath, often three times, rarely losing an appointment by sickness, and still more rarely by storms in summer or winter. he lived in gorham, maine, and his labors were pretty equally divided among all the towns within fifteen miles round. his rides out and back, often over the roughest roads or through heavy snows, averaged, probably, from fifteen to twenty miles. it was estimated that he had officiated at not less than , funerals, sometimes riding for the purpose forty miles. his funeral and camp-meeting sermons included, he could not have preached less than from , to , times. he never received a dollar of compensation for his ministerial services. though a hard-working farmer, his hospitality to his itinerant brethren was unbounded. in several towns of cumberland and adjoining counties, he was the revered patriarch, as half a century earlier he had been the youthful pioneer of methodism. when he departed to be with christ, there was no better man in all the state to follow after him. [ ] one of a number of old whaling captains in her husband's congregation, in whom she was interested greatly. they belonged to a class of men _sui generis_--men who had traversed all oceans, had visited many lands, and were as remarkable for their jovial large-hearted, social qualities, when at home, as for their indomitable energy, yankee push, and adventurous seamanship, when hunting the monsters of the deep on the other side of the globe. [ ] two bright girls and a young mother, who had died not long before. [ ] her sickness lasted six weeks, dating from the day of her being entirely confined to bed. her life was prolonged much beyond what her physicians or any one else who saw her, had believed possible. during the last week her sufferings were less, and she lay quiet part of the time. friday morning she had an attack of faintness, in the course of which she remarked "i am dying." she recovered and before noon sank into a somnolent state from which she never awoke. her breathing became softer and fainter till it ceased at half-past five in the afternoon. oh, what a transition was that! from pain and weariness and woe to the world of light! to the presence of the saviour! to unclouded bliss! i felt, and so i believe did all assembled round her bed, that it was time for exultation rather than grief. we could not think of ourselves, so absorbed were we in contemplation of her happiness. she was able to say scarcely anything during her sickness, and left not a single message for the absent children, or directions to those who were present. her extreme weakness, and the distressing effect of every attempt to speak, made her abandon all such attempts except in answer to questions. but the tenor of her replies to all inquiries was uniform, expressing entire acquiescence in the will of god, confidence in him through christ, and a desire to depart as soon as he should permit. tranquillity and peace, unclouded by a single doubt or fear, seem to have filled her mind. there were several reasons which led us to decide that the interment should take place here; but on the following saturday a gentleman arrived from portland, sent by the second parish to remove the remains to that place, if we made no objection. as we made none, the body was disinterred and taken to p., my brother g. accompanying it. so that her mortal remains now rest with those of my dear father.--_letter from mrs. hopkins to her aunt in new haven, dated williamstown, dec. , ._ [ ] the wife of her brother, mr. henry m. payson. [ ] the rev. benjamin tappan, d.d., an old friend of her father's and one of the patriarchs of the maine churches. [ ] see appendix b, p. , for a brief sketch of his life. [ ] sermons by henry edward manning, archdeacon of chichester (now cardinal manning), st, d, and d series. [ ] the rev. d. w. poor, d.d., now of philadelphia. he had been settled at fair haven, near new bedford, and was then a pastor in newark. chapter v. in the school of suffering. - . i. removal to new york and first summer there. letters. loss of sleep and anxiety about eddy. extracts from eddy's journal, describing his last illness and death. lines entitled "to my dying eddy." mrs. prentiss' removal to new york was an important link in the chain of outward events which prepared her for her special life-work. it introduced her at once into a circle unsurpassed, perhaps, by any other in the country, for its intelligence, its domestic and social virtues, and its earnest christian spirit. the mercer street presbyterian church contained at that time many members whose names were known and honored the world over, in the spheres of business, professional life, literature, philanthropy, and religion; and among its homes were some that seemed to have attained almost the perfection of beauty. in these homes the new pastor's wife soon became an object of tender love and devotion. here she found herself surrounded by all congenial influences. her mind and heart alike were refreshed and stimulated in the healthiest manner. and to add to her joy, several dear old friends lived near her and sat in adjoining pews on the sabbath. but happy as were the auspices that welcomed her to new york, the experience of the past two years had taught her not to expect too much from any outward conditions. she entered, therefore, upon this new period of her life in a very sober mood. nor had many months elapsed before she began to hear premonitory murmurs of an incoming sea of trouble. most of the summer of she remained in town with the children. an extract from a letter to her youngest brother, dated august , will show how she whiled away many a weary hour: it has been very hot this summer; our house is large and cool, and above all, i have a nice bathing-room opening out of my chamber, with hot and cold water and a shower-bath, which is a world of comfort. we spent part of last week at rockaway, l. i., visiting a friend. [ ] i nearly froze to death, but george and the children were much benefited. i have improved fast in health since we came here. yesterday i walked two and a half miles with george, and a year ago at this time i could not walk a quarter of a mile without being sick after it for some days. when i feel miserably i just put on my bonnet and get into an omnibus and go rattlety-bang down town; the air and the shaking and the jolting and the sight-seeing make me feel better and so i get along. if i could safely leave my children i should go with george. he hates to go alone and surely i hate to be left alone; in fact instead of liking each other's society less and less, we every day get more and more dependent on each other, and take separation harder and harder. our children are well. to her husband, who had gone to visit an old friend, at harpswell, on the coast of maine, she writes a few days later: on saturday very early professor smith called with the house of seven gables. i read about half of it in the evening. one sees the hand of the _artist_ as clearly in such a work as in painting, and the hand of a skilful one, too. i have read many books with more interest, but never one in which i was so diverted from the story to a study of the author himself. so far there is nothing exciting in it. i don't know who supplied the pulpit on sunday morning. the sermon was to young men, which was not so appropriate as it might have been, considering there were no young men present, unless i except our eddy and other sprigs of humanity of his age. i suppose you will wonder what in the world i let eddy go for. well, i took a fancy to let margaret try him, as nobody would know him in the gallery and he coaxed so prettily to go. he was highly excited at the permission, and as i was putting on his sacque, i directed margaret to take it off if he fell asleep. "ho! i shan't go to sleep," quoth he; "christ doesn't have rocking-chairs in his house." he set off in high spirits, and during the long prayer i heard him laugh loud; soon after i heard a rattling as of a parasol and eddy saying, "there it is!" by which time margaret, finding he was going to begin a regular frolic, sagely took him out. _august th_--the five girls from brooklyn all spent yesterday here. they had a regular frolic towards night, bathing and shower-bathing. afterwards we all went on top of the house. it was very pleasant up there. i took the children to barnum's museum, as i proposed doing. they were delighted, particularly with the "happy family," which consisted of cats, rats, birds, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, etc., etc., dwelling together in unity. i observed that though the cats forbore to lay a paw upon the rats and mice about them, they yet took a melancholy pleasure in _looking_ at these dainty morsels, from which nothing could persuade them to turn off their eyes. i am glad that you got away from new bedford alive and that you did not stay longer, but hearing about our friends there made me quite long to see them myself. do have just the best time in the world at harpswell, and don't let the rev. elijah drown you for the sake of catching your mantle as you go down. i dare not tell you how much i miss you, lest you should think i do not rejoice in your having this vacation. may god bless and keep you. during the autumn she suffered much again from feeble health and incessant loss of sleep. "i have often thought," she wrote to a friend, "that while so stupefied by sickness i should not be glad to see my own mother if i had to speak to her." but neither sick days nor sleepless nights could quench the brightness of her spirit or wholly spoil her enjoyment of life. a little diary which she kept contains many gleams of sunshine, recording pleasant visits from old friends, happy hours and walks with the children, excursions to newark, and how "amazingly" she "enjoyed the boys" (her brothers) on their return from the pursuit of golden dreams in california. in the month of november the diary shows that her watchful eye observed in eddy signs of disease, which filled her with anxiety. before the close of the year her worst fears began to be realised. she wrote, dec. : "i am under a constant pressure of anxiety about eddy. how little we know what the new year will bring forth." early in january, , his symptoms assumed a fatal type, and on the th of the same month the beautiful boy was released from his sufferings, and found rest in the kingdom of heaven, that sweet home of the little children. a few extracts from eddy's journal will tell the story of his last days: on the th of december the rev. mr. poor was here. on hearing of it, eddy said he wanted to see him. as he took now so little interest in anything that would cost him an effort, i was surprised, but told annie to lead him down to the parlor; on reaching it they found mr. poor not there, and they then went up to the study. i heard their father's joyous greeting as he opened his door for them, and how he welcomed eddy, in particular, with a perfect shower of kisses and caresses. this was the last time the dear child's own feet ever took him there; but his father afterwards frequently carried him up in his arms and amused him with pictures, especially with what eddy called the "bear books." [ ] one morning ellen told him she was going to make a little pie for his dinner, but on his next appearance in the kitchen told him she had let it burn all up in the oven, and that she felt _dreadfully_ about it. "never mind, ellie," said he, "mamma does not like to have me eat pie; but when i _get well_ i shall have as many as i want." on the th of december mr. stearns and anna were here. i was out with the latter most of the day; on my return eddy came to me with a little flag which his uncle had given him, and after they had left us he ran up and down with it, and as my eye followed him, i thought he looked happier and brighter and more like himself than i had seen him for a long time. he kept saying, "mr. stearns gave me this flag!" and then would correct himself and say, "i mean my _uncle_ stearns." on this night he hung up his bag for his presents, and after going to bed, surveyed it with a chuckle of pleasure peculiar to him, and finally fell asleep in this happy mood. i took great delight in arranging his and a.'s presents, and getting them safely into their bags. he enjoyed christmas as much as i had reason to expect he would, in his state of health, and was busy among his new playthings all day. he had taken a fancy within a few weeks to kneel at family prayers with me at my chair, and would throw one little arm round my neck, while with the other hand he so prettily and seriously covered his eyes. as their heads touched my face as they knelt, i observed that eddy's felt hot when compared with a.'s; just enough so to increase my uneasiness. on entering the nursery on new year's morning, i was struck with his appearance as he lay in bed; his face being spotted all over. on asking margaret about it, she said he had been crying, and that this occasioned the spots. this did not seem probable to me, for i had never seen anything of this kind on his face before. how little i knew that these were the last tears my darling would ever shed. on sunday morning, january , not being able to come himself, dr. buck sent dr. watson in his place. i told dr. w. that i thought eddy had water on the brain; he said it was not so, and ordered nothing but a warm bath. on thursday, january , while margaret was at dinner, i knelt by the side of the cradle, rocking it very gently, and he asked me to tell him a story. i asked what about, and he said, "a little boy," on which i said something like this: mamma knows a dear little boy who was very sick. his head ached and he felt sick all over. god said, i must let that little lamb come into my fold; then his head will never ache again, and he will be a very happy little lamb. i used the words little lamb because he was so fond of them. often he would run to his nurse with his face full of animation and say, "marget! mamma says i am her little lamb!" while i was telling him this story his eyes were fixed intelligently on my face. i then said, "would you like to know the name of this boy?" with eagerness he said, "yes, yes, mamma!" taking his dear little hand in mine, and kissing it, i said, "it was eddy." just then his nurse came in and his attention was diverted, so i said no more. on sunday, january , at noon, while they were all at dinner, i was left alone with my darling for a few moments, and could not help kissing his unconscious lips. to my utter amazement he looked up and plainly recognised me and warmly returned my kiss. then he said feebly, but distinctly twice, "i want some meat and potato." i do not think i should have been more delighted if he had risen from the dead, once more to recognise me. oh, it was _such_ a comfort to have one more kiss, and to be able to gratify one more wish! on friday, january th, his little weary sighs became more profound, and, as the day advanced, more like groans; but appeared to indicate extreme fatigue, rather than severe pain. towards night his breathing became quick and laborious, and between seven and eight slight spasms agitated his little feeble frame. he uttered cries of distress for a few minutes, when they ceased, and his loving and gentle spirit ascended to that world where thousands of holy children and the blessed company of angels and our blessed lord jesus, i doubt not, joyfully welcomed him. now we were able to say, _it is well with the child!_ "oh," said the gardener, as he passed down the garden-walk, "who plucked that flower? who gathered that plant?" his fellow-servants answered, "the master!" and the gardener held his peace. the feelings of the mother's heart on friday found vent in some lines entitled _to my dying eddy; january th_. here are two stanzas: blest child! dear child! for thee is jesus calling; and of our household thee--and only thee! oh, hasten hence! to his embraces hasten! sweet shall thy rest and safe thy shelter be. thou who unguarded ne'er hast left our threshold, alone must venture now an unknown way; yet, fear not! footprints of an infant holy lie on thy path. thou canst not go astray. in a letter to her friend mrs. allen, of new bedford, dated january , she writes: during our dear little eddy's illness we were surrounded with kind friends, and many prayers were offered for us and for him. nothing that could alleviate our affliction was left undone or unthought of, and we feel that it would be most unchristian and ungrateful in us to even wonder at that divine will which has bereaved us of our only boy--the light and sunshine of our household. we miss him _sadly_. i need not explain to you, who know all about it, _how_ sadly; but we rejoice that he has got away from this troublous life, and that we have had the privilege of giving so dear a child to god. when he was well he was one of the happiest creatures i ever saw, and i am sure he is well now, and that he is as happy as his joyous nature makes him susceptible of becoming. god has been most merciful to us in this affliction, and, if a bereaved, we are still a _happy_ household and full of thanksgiving. give my love to both the children and tell them they must not forget us, and when they think and talk of their dear brother and sisters in heaven, they must sometimes think of the little eddy who is there too. * * * * * ii. birth of her third child. reminiscence of a sabbath-evening talk. story of the baby's sudden illness and death. summer of . lines entitled "my nursery." the shock of eddy's death proved almost too much for mrs. prentiss' enfeebled frame. she bore it, however, with sweet submission, and on the th of the following april her sorrow was changed to joy, and eddy's empty place filled, as she thought, by the birth of elizabeth, her third child, a picture of infantine health and beauty. but, although the child seemed perfectly well, the mother herself was brought to the verge of the grave. for a week or two her life wavered in the balance, and she was quite in the mood to follow eddy to the better country. her husband, recording a "long and most interesting conversation" with her on sabbath evening, may d, speaks of the "depth and tenderness of her religious feelings, of her sense of sin and of the grace and glory of the saviour," and then adds, "her old richmond exercises seem of late to have returned with their former strength and beauty increased many-fold." on the th of may she was able to write in pencil these lines to her sister, mrs. hopkins: i little thought that i should ever write to you again, but i have been brought through a great deal, and now have reason to expect to get well. i never knew how much i loved you till i gave up all hope of ever seeing you again, and i have not strength yet to tell you all about it. poor george has suffered much. i hope all will be blessed to him and to me. i am still confined to bed. the doctor thinks there may be an abscess near the hip-joint, and, till that is cured, i can neither lie straight in bed or stand on my feet or ride out. everybody is kind. our cup has run over. it is a sore trial not to be allowed to nurse baby. she is kept in another room. i only see her once a day. she begins to smile, and is very bright-eyed. i hope your journey will do you good. if you can, do write a few lines--not more. but, good-by. hardly had she penned these lines, when, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, another stunning blow fell upon her. on the th of may, after an illness of a few hours, bessie, too, was folded forever in the arms of the good shepherd. here is the mother's own story of her loss: our darling eddy died on the th of january. the baby he had so often spoken of was born on the th of april. i was too feeble to have any care of her. never had her in my arms but twice; once the day before she died and once while she was dying. i never saw her little feet. she was a beautiful little creature, with a great quantity of dark hair and very dark blue eyes. the nurse had to keep her in another room on account of my illness. when she was a month old she brought her to me one afternoon. "this child is perfectly beautiful," said she; "to-morrow i mean to dress her up and have her likeness taken." i asked her to get me up in bed and let me take her a minute. she objected, and i urged her a good deal, till at last she consented. the moment i took her i was struck by her unearthly, absolutely angelic expression; and, not having strength enough to help it, burst out crying bitterly, and cried all the afternoon while i was struggling to give her up. her father was at newark. when he came home at dark i told him i was sure that baby was going to die. he laughed at me, said my weak health made me fancy it, and asked the nurse if the child was not well. she said she was--perfectly well. my presentiment remained, however, in full force, and the first thing next morning i asked margaret to go and see how baby was. she came back, saying, "she is very well. she lies there on the bed scolding to herself." i cried out to have her instantly brought to me. m. refused, saying the nurse would be displeased. but my anxieties were excited by the use of the word "scolding," as i knew no baby a month old did anything of that sort, and insisted on its being brought to me. the instant i touched it i felt its head to be of a burning heat, and sent for the nurse at once. when she came, i said, "this child is _very sick_." "yes," she said, "but i wanted you to have your breakfast first. at one o'clock in the night i found a little swelling. i do not know what it is, but the child is certainly very sick." on examination i knew it was erysipelas. "don't say that," said the nurse, and burst into tears. i made them get me up and partly dress me, as i was so excited i could not stay in bed. dr. buck came at ten o'clock; he expressed no anxiety, but prescribed for her and george went out to get what he ordered. the nurse brought her to me at eleven o'clock and begged me to observe that the spot had turned black. i knew at once that this was fearful, fatal disease, and entreated george to go and tell the doctor. he went to please me, though he saw no need of it, and gave the wrong message to the doctor, to the effect that the swelling was increasing, to which the doctor replied that it naturally would do so. the little creature, whose moans margaret had termed scolding, now was heard all over that floor; every breath a moan that tore my heart in pieces. i begged to have her brought to me but the nurse sent word she was too sick to be moved. i then begged the nurse to come and tell me exactly what she thought of her, but she said she could not leave her. i then crawled on my hands and knees into the room, being unable then and for a long time after to bear my own weight. what a scene our nursery presented! everything upset and tossed about, medicines here and there on the floor, a fire like a fiery furnace, and miss h. sitting hopelessly and with falling tears with the baby on a pillow in her lap--all its boasted beauty gone forever. the sight was appalling and its moans heart-rending. george came and got me back to my sofa and said he felt as if he should jump out of the window every time he heard that dreadful sound. he had to go out and made me promise not to try to go to the nursery till his return. i foolishly promised. mrs. white [ ] called, and i told her i was going to lose my baby; she was very kind and went in to see it but i believe expressed no opinion as to its state. but she repeated an expression which i repeated to myself many times that day, and have repeated thousands of times since--"_god never makes a mistake_." margaret went soon after she left to see how the poor little creature was, and did not come back. hour after hour passed and no one came. i lay racked with cruel torture, bitterly regretting my promise to george, listening to those moans till i was nearly wild. then in a frenzy of despair i pulled myself over to my bureau, where i had arranged the dainty little garments my darling was to wear, and which i had promised myself so much pleasure in seeing her wear. i took out everything she would need for her burial, with a sort of wild pleasure in doing for her one little service, where i had hoped before to render so many. she it was whom we expected to fill our lost eddy's vacant place; we thought we had _had_ our sorrow and that now our joy had come. as i lay back exhausted, with these garments on my breast, louisa shipman [ ] opened the door. one glance at my piteous face, for oh, how glad i was to see her! made her burst into tears before she knew what she was crying for. "oh, go bring me news from my poor dying baby!" i almost screamed, as she approached me. "and see, here are her grave-clothes." "oh, lizzy, have you gone crazy?" cried she, with a fresh burst of tears. i besought her to go, told her how my promise bound me, made her listen to those terrible sounds which two doors could not shut out. as she left the room she met dr. b. and they went to the nursery together. she soon came back, quiet and composed, but very sorrowful. "yes, she is dying," said she, "the doctor says so; she will not live an hour." ... at last we heard the sound of george's key. louise ran to call him. i crawled once more to the nursery, and snatched my baby in fierce triumph from the nurse. at least once i would hold my child, and nobody should prevent me. george, pale as death, baptized her as i held her in my trembling arms; there were a few more of those terrible, never-to-be-forgotten sounds, and at seven o'clock we were once more left with only one child. a short, sharp conflict, and our baby was gone. dr. b. came in later and said the whole thing was to him like a thunderclap--as it was to her poor father. to me it followed closely on the presentiment that in some measure prepared me for it. here i sit with empty hands. i have had the little coffin in my arms, but my baby's face could not be seen, so rudely had death marred it. empty hands, empty hands, a worn-out, exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has had for me so many sharp experiences. god help me, my baby, my baby! god help me, my little lost eddy! but although the death of these two children tore with anguish the mother's heart, she made no show of grief, and to the eye of the world her life soon appeared to move on as aforetime. never again, however, was it exactly the same life. she had entered into the fellowship of christ's sufferings, and the new experience wrought a great change in her whole being. a part of the summer and the early autumn of were passed among kind friends at newport, in portland, and at the ocean house on cape elizabeth. she returned much refreshed, and gave herself up cheerfully to her accustomed duties. but a cloud rested still upon her home, and at times the old grief came back again with renewed poignancy. here are a few lines expressive of her feelings. they were written in pencil on a little scrap of paper: my nursery. . i thought that prattling boys and girls would fill this empty room; that my rich heart would gather flowers from childhood's opening bloom. one child and two green graves are mine, this is god's gift to me; a bleeding, fainting, broken heart-- this is my gift to thee. * * * * * iii. summer at white lake. sudden death of her cousin, miss shipman. quarantined. _little susy's six birthdays._ how she wrote it. _the flower of the family._ her motive in writing it. letter of sympathy to a bereaved mother. a summer at the seaside. _henry and bessie._ the year was passed quietly and in better health. in the early summer she made a delightful visit at the island, near west point, the home of the author of "the wide, wide world." she was warmly attached to miss warner and her sister, and hardly less so to their father and aunt, whose presence then adorned that pleasant home with so much light and sweetness. early in august she went with her husband and child to white lake, sullivan co., n. y., where, in company with several families from the mercer street church, she spent six weeks in breathing the pure country air, and in healthful outdoor exercise. [ ] about the middle of october she was greatly distressed by the sudden death of the young cousin, already mentioned, who was staying with her during her husband's absence on a visit to new bedford. miss shipman was a bright, attractive girl, and enthusiastic in her devotion to mrs. prentiss. the latter, in a letter to her husband, dated saturday morning, october th, , writes: i imagine you enjoying this fine morning, and can't rejoice enough, that you are having such weather. a. is bright and well and is playing in her baby-house and singing. louise is still quite sick, and i see no prospect of her not remaining so for some time. the morning after you left i thought to be sure she had the small-pox. the doctor, however, calls it a rash. it makes her look dreadfully and feel dreadfully. she gets hardly a moment of sleep and takes next to no nourishment. arrowroot is all the doctor allows. he comes twice a day and seems _very_ kind and full of compassion. she crawled down this morning to the nursery, and seems to be asleep now. mrs. bull very kindly offered to come and do anything if louise should need it, but i do not think she will be sick enough for that. i feel well and able to do all that is necessary. the last proof-sheets came last night, so that job is off my hands. [ ] and now, darling, i can't tell you how i miss you. i never missed you more in my life, if as much. i hope you are having a nice visit. give my love to capt. and mrs. gibbs and all our friends. your most loving little wife. on the following wednesday, october th, she writes to her husband's mother: you will be shocked to hear that louisa shipman died on sunday night and was buried yesterday. her disease was spotted fever of the most malignant character, and raged with great fury. she dropped away most unexpectedly to us, before i had known five minutes that she was in danger, and i came near being entirely alone with her. dr. m. happened to be here and also her mother-in-law; but i had been alone in the house with her all day. it is a dreadful shock to us all, and i feel perfectly stupefied. george got home in time for the funeral, but dr. skinner performed the services. anna will go home to-morrow and tell you all about it. she and mr. s. slept away, as the upper part of the house is airing; and to-night they will sleep at prof. smith's. the case was even more fearful than she supposed while writing this letter. upon her describing it to dr. buck, who called a few hours later, he exclaimed, "why, it was malignant small-pox! you must all be vaccinated instantly and have the bedding and house disinfected." this was done; but it was too late. her little daughter had the disease, though in a mild form; and one of her brothers, who was passing the autumn with her, had it so severely as barely to escape with his life. she herself became a nurse to them both, and passed the next two months quarantined within her own walls. to her husband's mother she wrote: i am not allowed to see _anyone_--am very lonesome, and hope anna will write and tell me every little thing about you all. the scenes i have lately passed through make me tremble when i think what a fatal malady lurks in every corner of our house. and speaking after the manner of men, does it not seem almost incredible that this child, watched from her birth like _the apple of our eyes_, should yet fall into the jaws of this loathsome disease? i see more and more that parents _must_ leave their children to providence. in the early part of this year mrs. prentiss wrote _little susy's six birthdays_, the book that has given so much delight to tens of thousands of little children, wherever the english tongue is spoken. like most of her books, it was an inspiration and was composed with the utmost rapidity. she read the different chapters, as they were written, to her husband, child and brother, who all with one voice expressed their admiration. in about ten days the work was finished. the manuscript was in a clear, delicate hand and without an erasure. upon its publication it was at once recognised as a production of real genius, inimitable in its kind, and neither the popular verdict nor the verdict of the children as to its merits has ever changed. mrs. prentiss, as has been stated already, began to write for the press at an early age. but from the time of her going to richmond till --a period of thirteen years--her pen was well nigh idle, except in the way of correspondence. when, therefore, she gave herself again to literary labor, it was with a largely increased fund of knowledge and experience upon which to draw. these thirteen years had taught her rich lessons, both in literature and in life. they had been especially fruitful in revealing to her the heart of childhood and quickening her sympathy with its joys and sorrows. and all these lessons prepared her to write little susy's six birthdays and the other susy books. the year was marked by the birth of her fourth child, and by the publication of _the flower of the family._ this work was received with great favor both at home and abroad. it was soon translated into french under the title, _la fleur de la famille,_ and later into german under the title, _die perle der familie_. in both languages it received the warmest praise. in a letter to her friend mrs. clark, of portland, she thus refers to this book: i long to have it doing good. i never had such desires about anything in my life; and i never sat down to write without first praying that i might not be suffered to write anything that would do harm, and that, on the contrary, i might be taught to say what would do good. and it has been a great comfort to me that every word of praise i ever have received from others concerning it has been "it will do good," and this i have had from so many sources that amid much trial and sickness ever since its publication, i have had rays of sunshine creeping in now and then to cheer and sustain me. to the same friend, just bereft of her two children, she writes a few months later: is it possible, is it possible that you are made childless? i feel distressed for you, my dear friend; i long to fly to you and weep with you; it seems as if i _must_ say or do something to comfort you. but god only can help you now, and how thankful i am for a throne of grace and power where i can commend you, again and again, to him who doeth all things well. i never realise my own affliction in the loss of my children as i do when death enters the house of a friend. then i feel that _i can't have it so._ but why should i think i know better than my divine master what is good for me, or good for those i love! dear carrie,'! trust that in this hour of sorrow you have with you that presence, before which alone sorrow and sighing flee away. _god_ is left; _christ_ is left; sickness, accident, death can not touch you here. is not this a blissful thought?... as i sit at my desk my eye is attracted by the row of books before me, and what a comment on life are their very titles: "songs in the night," "light on little graves," "the night of weeping," "the death of little children," "the folded lamb," "the broken bud," these have strayed one by one into my small enclosure, to speak peradventure a word in season unto my weariness. and yet, dear carrie, this is not all of life. you and i have tasted some of its highest joys, as well as its deepest sorrows, and it has in reserve for us only just what is best for us. may sorrow bring us both nearer to christ! i can almost fancy my little eddy has taken your little maymee by the hand and led her to the bosom of jesus. how strange our children, our own little infants, have seen him in his glory, whom we are only yet longing for and struggling towards! if it will not frighten you to own a unitarian book, there is one called "christian consolation" by rev. a. p. peabody, that i think you would find very profitable. i see nothing, or next to nothing, unitarian in it, while it is _full_ of rich, holy experience. one sermon on "contingent events and providence" touches your case exactly. no event of special importance marked the year . she spent the month of july among her friends in portland, and the next six weeks at the ocean house on cape elizabeth. this was one of her favorite places of rest. she never tired of watching the waves and their "multitudinous laughter," of listening to the roar of the breakers, or climbing the rocks and wandering along the shore in quest of shells and sea-grasses. in gathering and pressing the latter, she passed many a happy hour. in august of this year appeared one of her best children's books, _henry and bessie; or, what they did in the country._ * * * * * iv. a memorable year. lines on the anniversary of eddy's death. extracts from her journal. _little susy's six teachers._ the teachers' meeting. a new york waif. summer in the country. letters. _little susy's little servants._ extracts from her journal. "alone with god." the records of the year are singularly full and interesting. it was a year of poignant suffering, of sharp conflicts of soul, and of great peace and joy. its earlier months, especially, were shadowed by a dark cloud of anxiety and distress. and her feeble bodily state caused by care-worn days and sleepless nights, added to the trouble. old sorrows, too, came back again. on the th of january, the anniversary of eddy's death, she gave vent to her feelings in some pathetic verses, of which the following lines form a part: four years, four weary years, my child, four years ago to-night, with parting cry of anguish wild thy spirit took its flight; ah me! took its eternal flight. and in that hour of mortal strife i thought i felt the throe, the birth-pang of a grief, whose life must soothe my tearless woe, must soothe and ease me of my woe. yet folded far through all these years, folded from mortal eyes, lying alas "too deep for tears," unborn, unborn it lies, within my heart of heart it lies. my sinless child! upon thy knees before the master pray; methinks thy infant hands might seize and shed upon my way sweet peace; sweet peace upon my way. here follow some extracts from her journal. _jan d. ._--had no time to write on new year's day, as we had a host of callers. it was a very hard day, as i was quite unwell, and had at last to give up and go to bed. _ th_--am quite uneasy about baby, as it seems almost impossible she should long endure such severe pain and want of sleep. my life is a very anxious one. i feel every day more and more longing for my home in heaven. sometimes i fear it amounts almost to a sinful longing--for surely i ought to be willing to live or die, just as god pleases. _feb. st._--i have had no heart to make a record of what has befallen us since i last wrote. and yet i may, sometime, want to recall this experience, painful as it is. dear little baby had been improving in health, and on wednesday we went to dine at mrs. wainright's. we went at four. about eight, word came that she was ill. when i got home i found her insensible, with her eyes wide open, her breathing terrific, and her condition in every respect very alarming. just as dr. buck was coming in, she roused a little, but soon relapsed into the same state. he told us she was dying. i felt like a stone, _in a moment_ i seemed to give up my hold on her. she appeared no longer mine but god's. it is always so in such great emergencies. _then_, my will that struggles so about trifles, makes no effort. but as we sat hour after hour watching the alternations of color in her purple face and listening to that terrible gasping, rattling sound, i said to myself "a few more nights like this, and i do believe my body and soul would yield to such anguish." oh, why should i try to tell myself what a night it was. god knows, god only! how he has smitten me by means of this child, he well knows. she remained thus about twelve hours. twelve hours of martyrdom to me such as i never had known. then to our unspeakable amazement she roused up, nursed, and then fell into a sweet sleep of some hours. _sunday, feb. d._--the stupor, or whatever it is, in which that dreadful night has left me, is on me still. i have no more sense or feeling than a stone. i kneel down before god and do not say a word. i take up a book and read, but get hold of nothing. at church i felt afraid i should fall upon the people and tear them. i could wish no one to pity me or even know that i am smitten. it does seem to me that those who can sit down and cry, know nothing of misery. _feb. th_.--at last the ice melts and i can get near my god--my only comfort, my only joy, my all in all! this morning i was able to open my heart to him and to cast some of this burden on him, who alone _knows_ what it is.... i see that it is sweet to be a pilgrim and a stranger, and that it matters _very little_ what befalls me on the way to my blessed home. if god pleases to spare my child a little longer, i will be very thankful. may he take this season, when earthly comfort fails me, to turn me more than ever to himself. for some months i have enjoyed a _great deal_ in him. prayer has been very sweet and i have had some glimpses of joys indescribable. _ th._--she still lives. i know not what to think. one moment i think one thing and the next another. it is harder to submit to this suspense than to a real, decided blow. but i desire to leave it to my god. he knows all her history and all mine. he orders all these aggravating circumstances and i would not change them. my darling has not lived in vain. for eighteen months she has been the little rod used by my father for my chastisement and not, i think, quite in vain. oh my god! stay not thy hand till thou hast perfected that which concerneth me. send anything rather than unsanctified prosperity. _feb. th._--to help divert my mind from such incessant brooding over my sorrows, i am writing a new book. i had just begun it when baby's ill-turn arrested me. i trust it may do some little good; at least i would not dare to write it, if it _could_ do none. may god bless it! _feb. th._--wanted to go to the prayer-meeting but concluded to take a. to hear gough at the tabernacle. seeing such a crowd always makes me long to be in that happy crowd of saints and angels in heaven, and hearing children sing so sweetly made me pray for an entrance into the singing, praising multitude there. oh, when shall i be one of that blessed company who _sin_ not! my book is done; may god bless it to _one_ child at least--then it will not have been wasted time. the book referred to was _little susy's six teachers_. it was published in the spring, and at once took its place beside the _six birthdays_ in the hearts of the children; a place it still continues to hold. the six teachers are mrs. love, mr. pain, aunt patience, mr. ought, miss joy, and the angel faith. at the end of six years they hold a meeting and report to little susy's parents what they have been doing. the closing chapter, herewith quoted, gives an account of this meeting, and may serve as a specimen of the style and spirit of all the little susy books. "if mr. pain is to be at the meeting, i can't go," said miss joy. she stood on tip-toe before the glass, dressing herself in holiday clothes. "perhaps he would be willing to leave his rod behind him," said mrs. love. "i will ask him at all events." mr. pain thought he should not feel at home without his rod. he said he always liked to have it in his hands, whether he was to use it or not. miss joy was full of fun and mischief about this time, so she slipped up slyly behind mr. pain while he was talking and snatched away the rod before he could turn round. mrs. love smiled on seeing this little trick, and they all went down to the parlor and seated themselves with much gravity. little susy sat in the midst in her own low chair looking wide awake, you may depend. her papa and mamma sat on each side like two judges. mrs. love rocked herself in the rocking-chair in a contented, easy way; and aunt patience, who liked to do such things, helped miss joy to find the leaves of her report--which might have been rose-leaves, they were so small. mr. ought looked very good indeed, and the angel faith shone across the room like a sunbeam. "susy will be six years old to-morrow," said her papa. "you have all been teaching her ever since she was born. we will now listen to your reports and hear what you have taught her, and whether you have done her any good." they were all silent, but everybody looked at mrs. love as much as to say she should begin. mrs. love took out a little book with a sky-blue cover and began to read: "i have not done much for susy, but love her dearly; and i have not taught her much, but to love everybody. when she was a baby i tried to teach her to smile, but i don't think i could have taught her if miss joy had not helped me. and when she was sick, i was always sorry for her, and tried to comfort her." "you have done her a great deal of good," said susy's papa, "we will engage you to stay six years longer, should god spare her life." then mr. pain took up his book. it had a black cover, but the leaves were gilt-edged and the cover was spangled with stars. "i have punished susy a good many times," said mr. pain. "sometimes i slapped her with my hand; sometimes i struck her with my rod; sometimes i made her sick; but i never did any of these things because i was angry with her or liked to hurt her. i only came when mrs. love called me." "you have taught her excellent lessons," said susy's papa, "if it had not been for you she would be growing up disobedient and selfish. you may stay six years longer." then mr. pain made a low bow and said he was thinking of going away and sending his brother, mr. sorrow, and his sister, mrs. disappointment, to take his place." "oh, no!" cried susy's mamma, "not yet, not yet! susy is still so little!" then mr. pain said he would stay without a rod, as susy was now too old to be whipped. then miss joy took up her book with its rainbow cover and tried to read. but she laughed so heartily all the time, and her leaves kept flying out of her hands at such a rate, that it was not possible to understand what she was saying. it was all about clapping hands and running races, and picking flowers and having a good time. everybody laughed just because she laughed, and susy's papa could hardly keep his face grave long enough to say: "you have done more good than tongue can tell. you have made her just such a merry, happy, laughing little creature as i wanted her to be. you must certainly stay six years longer." then mr. ought drew forth his book. it had silver covers and its leaves were of the most delicate tissue. "i have taught little susy to be good," said he. "never to touch what is not hers; never to speak a word that is not true; never to have a thought she would not like the great and holy god to see. if i stay six years longer i can teach her a great deal more, for she begins now to understand my faintest whisper. she is such a little girl as i love to live with." then susy turned rosy-red with pleasure, and her papa and mamma got up and shook hands with mr. ought and begged him never, never to leave their darling child as long as she lived. it was now the turn of aunt patience. her book had covers wrought by her own hands in grave and gay colors well mingled together. "when i first came here," she said, "susy used to cry a great deal whenever she was hurt or punished. when she was sick she was very hard to please. when she sat down to learn to sew and to read and to write, she would break her thread in anger, or throw her book on the floor, or declare she never could learn. but now she has left off crying when she is hurt, and tries to bear the pain quietly. when she is sick she does not fret or complain, but takes her medicine without a word. when she is sewing she does not twitch her thread into knots, and when she is writing she writes slowly and carefully. i have rocked her to sleep a thousand times. i have been shut up in a closet with her again and again, and i hope i have done her some good and taught her some useful lessons." "indeed you have, aunt patience," said susy's papa, "but susy is not yet perfect. we shall need you six years longer." and now the little angel faith opened his golden book and began to read: "i have taught susy that there is another world besides this, and have told her that it is her real home, and what a beautiful and happy one it is. i have told her a great deal about jesus and the holy angels. i do not know much myself. i am not very old, but if i stay here six years longer i shall grow wiser and i will teach susy all i learn, and we will pray together every morning and every night, till at last she loves the lord jesus with all her heart and soul and mind and strength." then susy's papa and mamma looked at each other and smiled, and they both said: "oh, beautiful angel, never leave her!" and the angel answered: "i will stay with her as long as she lives, and will never leave her till i leave her at the very door of heaven." then the teachers began to put up their books, and susy's papa and mamma kissed her, and said: "we have had a great deal of comfort in our little daughter; and, with god's blessing, we shall see her grow up a loving, patient, and obedient child--full of joy and peace and rich in faith and good works." so they all bade each other good-night and went thankfully to bed. the next entry in the journal notes a trait of character, or rather of temperament, which often excited the wonder and also the anxiety of her friends. it caused her no little discomfort, but she could never withstand its power. _march st_.--i have been busy with a sewing fit and find the least interesting piece of work i can get hold of, as great a temptation as the most charming. for if its _charm_ does not absorb my time and thoughts, the eager haste to finish and get it out of the way, does. this is my life. i either am stupefied by ill-health or sorrow, so as to feel no interest in anything, or am _absorbed_ in whatever business, work or pleasure i have on hand. but neither anxiety about her child, household cares, or any work she had in hand, so absorbed her thoughts as to render her insensible to the sorrows and trials of others. on the contrary, they served rather to call forth and intensify her kindly sympathies. a single case will illustrate this. a poor little girl--one of those waifs of humanity in which a great city abounds--had been commended to her by a friend. in a letter to this friend, dated march , , she writes: that little girl came, petticoat and all; we gave her some breakfast, and i then went down with her to avenue a. on the way, she told me that you gave her some money. to my great sorrow we found, on reaching the school, that they could not take another one, as they were already overflowing. as we came out, i saw that the poor little soul was just ready to burst into tears, and said to her "now you're disappointed, i know!" whereupon she actually looked up into my face and _smiled_. you know i was afraid i never should make her smile, she looked so forlorn. i brought her home to get some books, as she said she could read, and she is to come again to-morrow. a lady to whom i told the whole story, sent me some stockings that would about go on to her big toe; however, they will be nice for her little sister. the weather has been so mild that i thought it would not be worth while to make her a cloak or anything of that sort; but next fall i shall see that she is comfortably clad, if she behaves as well as she did the day she was here. oh, dear! what a drop in the great bucket of new york misery, one such child is! yet somebody must look out for the drops, and i am only too thankful to seize on this one. in june she went, with the children, to westport, conn., where in rural quiet and seclusion she passed the next three months. here are some extracts from her letters, written from that place: westport, _june , ._ we had a most comfortable time getting here; both the children enjoyed the ride, and baby seemed unusually bright. judge betts was very attentive and kind to us. mrs. g. grows more and more pleasant every day. we have plenty of good food, but she worries because i do not eat more. you know i never was famous for eating meat, and country dinners are not tempting. you can't think how we enjoy seeing the poultry fed. there are a hundred and eighty hens and chickens, and you should see baby throw her little hand full of corn to them. we went strawberrying yesterday, all of us, and the way she was poked through bars and lifted over stone-walls would have amused you. she is already quite sunburnt; but i think she is looking sweetly. i find myself all the time peeping out of the window, thinking every step is yours, or that every wagon holds a letter for me. _to miss a. h. woolsey, westport, june ._ mr. p. enclosed your kind note in one of his own, after first reading it himself, if you ever heard of such a man. i had to laugh all alone while reading it, which was not a little provoking. we are having very nice times here indeed. breakfast at eight, dinner at half-past twelve, and tea at half-past six, giving us an afternoon of unprecedented length for such lounging, strawberrying or egg-hunting as happens to be on the carpet. the air is perfectly loaded with the fragrance of clover blossoms and fresh hay. i never saw such clover in my life; roses are nothing in comparison. i only want an old nag and a wagon, so as to drive a load of children about these lovely regions, and that i hope every moment to attain. to be sure, it would be amazingly convenient if i had a table, and didn't have to sit on the floor to write upon a trunk; but then one can't have everything, and i am almost too comfortable with what i have. a. is busy reading southey to her "children"; baby is off searching for eggs, and her felicity reached its height when she found an ambitious hen had laid two in her carriage, which little thought what it was coming to the country for. i think the dear child already looks better; she lives in the open air and enjoys everything. mrs. buck lives about half a mile below us, and we run back and forth many times a day. i have already caught the country fashion of rushing to the windows the moment a wheel or an opening gate is heard. i fancy everybody is bringing me a letter or else want to send one to the office, and the only way to do that is to scream at passers-by and ask them if they are going that way. if you hear that i am often seen driving a flock of geese down the road, or climbing stone walls, or creeping through bar fences, you needn't believe a word of it, for i am a pattern of propriety, and pride myself on my dignity. i hope, now you have begun so charmingly, that you will write again. you know what letters are in the country. _to her husband, westport, june ._ i wonder where you are this lovely morning? having a nice time somewhere, i do hope, for it is too fine a day to be lost. if you want to know where i am, why i'm sitting at the window writing on a trunk that i have just lifted into a chair, in order to make a table. for table there, is none in this room, and how am i to write a book without one? if ever i get down to the village, i hope to buy, beg, borrow or steal one, and until that time am putting off beginning my new little susy. [ ] that note from miss warner, by the by, spoke so enthusiastically of the six teachers that i felt compensated for the mortification of hearing -------- call it a "nice" book. you will be sorry to hear that i have no prospect of getting a horse. i am quite disappointed, as besides the pleasure of driving our children, i hoped to give mrs. buck and the boys a share in it. only to think of her bringing up from the city a beefsteak for baby, and proposing that the doctor should send a small piece for her every day! thank you, darling, for your proposal about the ocean house. i trust no such change will be needful. we are all comfortable now, the weather is delicious, and there are so many pretty walks about here, that i am only afraid i shall be too well off. everything about the country is charming to me, and i never get tired of it. the first few days nurse seemed a good deal out of sorts; but i must expect some such little vexations; of course, i can not have perfection, and for dear baby's sake i shall try to exercise all the prudence and forbearance i can. _sunday._--we went to church this morning and heard a most instructive and, i thought, superior sermon from mr. burr of weston, on progress in religious knowledge. he used the very illustration about the cavern and the point of light that you did. _july th._--we all drove to the beach on saturday. it was just the very day for such a trip, and baby was enchanted. she sat right down and began to gather stones and shells, as if she had the week before her. we were gone three hours and came home by way of the village, quite in the mood for supper. yesterday we had a pleasant service; mr. atkinson appears to be a truly devout, heavenly man to whom i felt my heart knit at the outset on this account, i am taking great delight in reading the memoir of miss allibone. [ ] how i wish i had a friend of so heavenly a temper! i fear my new little susy will come out at the little end of the horn. i am sure it won't be so good as the others. it is more than one quarter done. _july st._--what do you think i did this forenoon? why, i finished little susy and shall lay it aside for some days, when i shall read it over, correct, and pack it off out of the way. yes, i wish you would bring my german hymn book. i am so glad you liked the hymns i had marked! [ ] and do get well so as not to have to leave off preaching the gospel. my heart dies within me whenever i think of your leaving the ministry. every day i live, it appears to me that the office of a christian pastor and teacher is the best in the world. i shall not be able to write you a word to-morrow, as we are to go to greenfield hill to miss murray's, and you must take to-morrow's love to-night--if you think you can stand so much at once. god be with you and bless you. _july th._--baby and i have just been having a great frolic. she was so pleased with your message that she caught up your letter and kissed it, which i think very remarkable in a child who, i am sure, never saw such a thing done. a. seems well and happy, and is as good as i think we ought to expect. i see more and more every day, that if there ever _was_ such a thing as human perfection, it was as long ago as david's time when, as he says, he saw the "end" of it. how very kind the w.'s have been! _august d._--i got hold of dr. boardman's "bible in the family," at the bucks yesterday, and brought it home to read. i like it very much. there is a vein of humor running through it which, subdued as it is, must have awakened a good many smiles. he quotes some lines of coleridge, which i wonder i did not have as a motto for susy's teachers: love, hope and patience, these must be thy graces, and in thine own heart let them first _keep school_. _to miss mary b. shipman, westport, august ._ dr. buck, who has seen her twice since we came here, thinks baby wonderfully improved, and says every day she lives increases her chance of life. i have been exceedingly encouraged by all he has said, and feel a great load off my heart. last friday, on fifteen minutes' notice, i packed up and went _home_, taking nurse and biddies, of course. i was so restless and so perfectly _possessed_ to go to meet george, that i could not help it. we went in the six o'clock train, as it was after five when i was "taken" with the fit that started me off; got home in a soft rain, and to our great surprise and delight found g. there, he having got homesick at saratoga, and just rushed to new york on his way here. we had a great rejoicing together, you may depend, and i had a charming visit of nearly three days. we got back on monday night, rather tired, but none of us at all the worse for the expedition. mr. p. sits here reading the tribune, and a. is reading "fremont's life." she is as brown as an indian and about as wild. a few passages from her journal will also throw light upon this period: _june th._--i am finding this solitude and leisure very sweet and precious; god grant it may bear the rich and abundant fruit it ought to do! communion with him is such a blessing, here at home in my own room, and out in the silent woods and on the wayside. saturday, especially, i had a long walk full of blissful thoughts of him whom i do believe i love--oh, that i loved him better!--and in the evening mrs. buck came and we had some very sweet beginnings of what will, i trust, ripen into most profitable christian communion. my heart delights in the society of those who love him. yesterday i had a more near access to god in prayer than usual, so that during the whole service at church i could hardly repress tears of joy and gratitude. _july th._--i do trust god's blessed, blessed spirit is dealing faithfully with my soul--searching and sifting it, revealing it somewhat to itself and preparing it for the indwelling of christ. this i do heartily desire. oh, god! search me and know me, and show me my own guilty, poor, meagre soul, that i may turn from it, humbled and ashamed and penitent, to my blessed saviour. how very, very thankful i feel for this seclusion and leisure; this quiet room where i can seek my god and pray and praise, unseen by any human eye--and which sometimes seems like the very gate of heaven. _july d._--this is my dear little baby's birthday. i was not able to sleep last night at all, but at last got up and prayed specially for her. god has spared her two years; i can hardly believe it! precious years of discipline they have been, for which i do thank him. i have prayed much for her to-day, and with some faith, that if her life is spared it will be for his glory. how far rather would i let her go this moment, than grow up without loving him! precious little creature! _ th._--this has been one of the most oppressive days i ever knew. i went to church, however, and enjoyed all the services unusually. as we rode along and i saw the grain ripe for the harvest, i said to myself, "god gathers in _his_ harvest as soon as it is ripe, and if i devote myself to him and pray much and turn entirely from the world i shall ripen, and so the sooner get where i am _all the time_ yearning and longing to go!" i fear this was a merely selfish thought, but i do not know. this world seems less and less homelike every day i live. the more i pray and meditate on heaven and my saviour and saints who have crossed the flood, the stronger grows my desire to be bidden to depart hence and go up to that sinless, blessed abode. not that i forget my comforts, my mercies here; they are _manifold_; i know they are. but christ appears so precious; sin so dreadful! so dreadful! to-day i gave way to pride and irritation, and my agony on account of it outweighs weeks of merely earthly felicity. the idea of a christian as he should be, and the reality of most christians--particularly myself--why, it almost makes me shudder; my only comfort is, in heaven, i _can_ not sin! in heaven i shall see christ, and see him as he is, and praise and honor him as i never do and never shall do here. and yet i know my dear little ones need me, poor and imperfect a mother as i am; and i pray every hour to be made willing to wait for their sakes. for at the longest it will not be long. oh, i do believe it is the _sin_ i dread and not the suffering of life--but i know not; i may be deluded. my love to my master seems to me very shallow and contemptible. i am astonished that i love anything else. oh, that he would this moment come down into this room and tell me i never, never, shall grieve him again! some verses entitled "alone with god," belong here: into my closet fleeing, as the dove doth homeward flee, i haste away to ponder o'er thy love alone with thee! in the dim wood, by human ear unheard, joyous and free, lord! i adore thee, feasting on thy word, alone with thee! amid the busy city, thronged and gay, but one i see, tasting sweet peace, as unobserved i pray alone with thee! oh, sweetest life! life hid with christ in god! so making me at home, and by the wayside, and abroad, alone with thee! westport, _august , ._ * * * * * v. ready for new trials. dangerous illness. extracts from her journal. visit to greenwood. sabbath meditations. birth of another son. her husband resigns his pastoral charge. voyage to europe. the summer at westport was so beneficial to the baby and so full both of bodily and spiritual refreshment to herself, that on returning to town, she resumed her home tasks with unwonted ease and comfort. the next entry in her journal alludes to this: _november th_.--two months, and not a word in my journal! i have done far more with my needle and my feet than with my pen. one comes home from the country to a good many cares, and they are worldly cares, too, about eating and about wearing. i hope the worst of mine are over now and that i shall have more leisure. but no, i forget that now comes the dreaded, dreaded experience of weaning baby. but what then? i have had a good rest this fall. have slept unusually well; why, only think, some nights not waking once--and some nights only a few times; and then we have had no sickness; baby better--all better. now i ought to be willing to have the trials i need so much, seeing i have had such a rest. and heaven! heaven! let me rest on that precious word. heaven is at the end and god is there. early in march, , she was taken very ill and continued so until may. for some weeks her recovery seemed hardly possible. she felt assured her hour had come and was eager to go. all the yearnings of her heart, during many years, seemed on the point of being gratified. the next entry in her journal refers to this illness: _sunday, may th, ._--just reading over the last record how ashamed i felt of my faithlessness! to see dear baby so improved by the very change i dreaded, and to hear her pretty, cheerful prattle, and to find in her such a source of joy and comfort--what undeserved, what unlooked-for mercies! but like a physician who changes his remedies as he sees occasion, and who forbears using all his severe ones at once, my father first relieved me from my wearing care and pain about this dear child, and then put me under new discipline. it is now nearly six months since i have been in usual health, and eight weeks of great prostration and suffering have been teaching me many needed lessons. now, contrary to my hopes and expectations, i find myself almost well again. at first, having got my heart _set_ toward heaven and after fancying myself almost there, i felt disappointed to find its gates still shut against me. [ ] but god was very good to me and taught me to yield in this point to his wiser and better will; he made me, as far as i know, as peaceful in the prospect of living as joyful in the prospect of dying. heaven did, indeed, look very attractive when i thought myself so near it; i pictured myself as no longer a sinner but a blood-washed saint; i thought i shall soon see him whom my soul loveth, and see him as he is; i shall never wound, never grieve him again, and all my companions will be they who worship him and adore him. but not yet am i there! alas, not yet a saint! my soul is oppressed, now that health is returning, to find old habits of sin returning too, and this monster self usurping god's place, as of old, and pride and love of ease and all the infirmities of the flesh thick upon me. after being encompassed with mercies for two months, having every comfort this world could offer for my alleviation, i wonder at myself that i can be anything but a meek, docile child, profiting by the master's discipline, sensible of the tenderness that went hand-in-hand with every stroke, and walking softly before god and man! but i am indeed a wayward child and in need of many more stripes. may i be made willing and thankful to bear them. indeed, i do thank my dear master that he does not let me alone, and that he has let me suffer so much; it has been a rich experience, this long illness, and i do trust he will so sanctify it that i shall have cause to rejoice over it all the rest of my life. now may i return patiently to all the duties that lie in my sphere. may i not forget how momentous a thing death appeared when seen face to face, but be ever making ready for its approach. and may the glory of god be, as it never yet has been, my chief end. my love to him seems to me so very feeble and fluctuating. satan and self keep up a continual struggle to get the victory. but god is stronger than either. he must and will prevail, and at last, and in a time far better than any i can suggest, he will open those closed gates and let me enter in to go no more out, and then "i shall never, never sin." as might be inferred from this record, she was at this time in the sweetest mood, full of tenderness and love. the time of the singing of birds had now come, and all nature was clothed with that wondrous beauty and verdure which mark the transition from spring to summer. the drives, which she was now able to take into the country, on either side of the river, gave her the utmost delight. on the th of may--the day that has since become consecrated to the memory of the nation's heroic dead--she went, with her husband and eldest daughter, to visit and place flowers upon the graves of eddy and bessie. never is greenwood more lovely and impressive than at the moment when may is just passing into june. it is as if nature were in a transfiguration and the glory of the lord shone upon the graves of our beloved! mrs. prentiss made no record of this visit, but on the following day thus wrote in her journal: _may st._--another peaceful, pleasant sunday, whose only drawback has been the want of strength to get down on my knees and praise and pray to my saviour, as i long to do. for well as i am and astonishingly improved in every way, a very few minutes' use of my voice, even in a whisper, in prayer, exhausts me to such a degree that i am ready to faint. this seems so strange when i can go on talking to any extent--but then it is talking without emotion and in a desultory way. ah well! god knows best in what manner to let me live, and i desire to ask for nothing but a docile, acquiescent temper, whose only petition shall be, "what wilt thou have me to do?" not how can i get most enjoyment along the way. i can not believe if i am his child, that he will let anything hinder my progress in the divine life. it seems dreadful that i have gone on so slowly, and backward so many times--but then i have been thinking this is "to humble and to prove me, and to do me good in the latter end." ... i thank my god and saviour for every faint desire he gives me to see him as he is, and to be changed into his image, and for every struggle against sin he enables me to make. it is all of him. i do wish i loved him better! i do wish he were never out of my thoughts and that the aim to do his will swallowed up all other desires and strivings. satan whispers that will never be. but it shall be! one day--oh, longed-for, blessed, blissful day!--christ will become my all in all! yes, even mine! this is the last entry in her journal for more than a year; her letters, too, during the same period are very few. in august of , she was made glad by the birth of another son, her fifth child. her own health was now much better than it had been for a long time; but that of her husband had become so enfeebled that in april, , he resigned his pastoral charge and by the advice of his physician determined to go abroad, with his family, for a couple years; the munificent kindness of his people having furnished him with the means of doing so. the tender sympathy and support which she gave him in this hour of extreme weakness and trial, more than everything else, after the blessing of heaven, upheld his fainting spirits and helped to restore him at length to his chosen work. they set sail for the old world in the steamship arago, capt. lines, june th, amidst a cloud of friendly wishes and benedictions. [ ] the friend was mr. wm. g. bull, who had a summer cottage at rockaway. he was a leading member of the mercer street church and one of the best of men. the poor and unfortunate blessed him all the year round. to mrs. prentiss and her husband he was indefatigable in kindness. he died at an advanced age in . [ ] godman's "american natural history." [ ] mrs. norman white, mother of the rev. erskine n. white, d.d., of new york. [ ] her cousin, whose sudden death occurred under the same roof in october of the next year. [ ] "we were all weighed soon after coming here," she wrote, "and my ladyship weighed , which makes me out by far the leanest of the ladies here. when thirteen years old i weighed but pounds." [ ] referring to "little susy's six birthdays." [ ] _little susy's little servants._ [ ] a life bid with christ in god, being a memoir of susan allibone. by alfred lee, bishop of the protestant episcopal church in delaware. [ ] see appendix c, p. . [ ] many years afterward, speaking to a friend of this illness, she related the following incident. one day she lay, as was supposed, entirely unconscious and _in articulo mortis_. repeated but vain attempts had been made to administer a medicine ordered by the doctor to be used in case of extremity. her husband urged one more attempt still; it might possibly succeed. she heard distinctly every word that was spoken and instantly reasoned within herself, whether she should consent or refuse to swallow the medicine. fancying herself just entering the eternal city, she longed to refuse but decided it would be wrong and so consented to come back again to earth. chapter vi. in retreat among the alps. - . i. life abroad. letters about the voyage and the journey from havre to switzerland. chateau d'oex. letters from there. the châlet rosat. the free church of the canton de vaud. pastor panchaud. mrs. prentiss passed more than two years abroad, mostly in switzerland. they were years burdened with heavy cares, with ill-health and keen solicitude concerning her husband. but they were also years hallowed by signal mercies of providence, bright every now and then with floods of real sunshine, and sweetened by many domestic joys. although quite secluded from the world a large portion of the time, her solitude was cheered by the constant arrival of letters from home. during these years also she was first initiated into full communion with nature; and what exquisite pleasure she tasted in this new experience, her own pen will tell. indeed, this period affords little of interest except that which blossomed out of her domestic life, her friendships, and her love of nature. she travelled scarcely at all and caught only fugitive glimpses of society or of the treasures of european art. a few simple records, therefore, of her retired home-life and of the impressions made upon her by alpine scenery, as contained in her letters, must form the principal part of this chapter. her correspondence, while abroad, would make a large volume by itself; in selecting from it what follows, the aim has been to present, as far as possible, a continuous picture of her european sojourn, drawn by herself. were a faithful picture of its quiet yet varied scenes to be drawn by another hand, it would include features wholly omitted by her; features radiant with a light and beauty not of earth. it would reflect a sweet patience, a heroic fortitude, a tender sympathy, a faith in god and an upholding, comforting influence, which in sharp exigencies the christian wife and mother knows so well how to exercise, and which are inspired only by the lord jesus himself. the friend to whom the following letter was addressed years ago passed away from earth. but her name is still enshrined in many hearts. the story of her generous and affectionate kindness, as also that of her children, would fill a whole chapter. "you will never know how we have loved and honored you all, _straight through_" wrote mrs. prentiss to one of them, many years later. _to mrs. charles w. woolsey, havre, july , ._ how many times during our voyage we had occasion to think of and thank you and yours, a dozen sheets like this would fail to tell you. of all your kind arrangements for our comfort not one failed of its object. whether the chair or my sacque had most admirers i do not know, but i can't imagine how people ever get across the ocean without such consolations on the way. as to the grapes they kept perfectly to the last day and proved delicious; the box then became a convenient receptacle for the children's toys; while the cake-box has turned into a medicine-chest. we had not so pleasant a voyage as is usual at this season, it being cold and rainy and foggy much of the time. however, none of us suffered much from sea-sickness--mr. prentiss not in the least; his chief discomfort was from want of sleep. on the whole, we had a less dreary time than we anticipated, and perhaps the stupidity in which we were engulfed for two weeks was a wholesome refuge from the excitement of the month previous to our departure. we landed in a deluge of rain, and the only article in our possession that alarmed the officers of the custom house was _not_ the sewing-machine, which was hardly vouchsafed a look, but your cake-box. we were thankful to tumble pell-mell into a carriage, and soon to find ourselves in a comfortable room, before a blazing fire. we go round with a phrase-book and talk out of it, so if anybody ever asks you what sort of people the prentiss family are and what are our conversational powers, you may safely and veraciously answer, "they talk like a book." m. already asks the french names of almost everything and is very glad to know that "we have got at europe," and when asked how she likes france, declares, "me likes _that_." we go off to paris in the morning. i will let mr. prentiss tell his own story. meanwhile we send you everyone our warmest love and thanks. after a few days in paris the family hastened to chateau d'oex, where new york friends awaited them. chateau d'oex is a mountain valley in the canton of vaud, on the right bank of the sarine, twenty-two miles east of lausanne, and is one of the loveliest spots in switzerland. aside from its natural beauties, it has some historical interest. it was once the home of the counts of gruyere, and the ruins of their ancient chateau are still seen there. the free church of the village was at this time under the care of pastor panchaud, a favorite pupil and friend of vinet. he was a man of great simplicity and sweetness of character, an excellent preacher, and wholly devoted to his little flock. mrs. prentiss and her husband counted his society and ministrations a smile of heaven upon their sojourn in chateau d'oex. _to mrs. henry b. smith, chateau d'oex july , ._ our ride from havre to paris was charming. we had one of those luxurious cars, to us unknown, which is intended to hold only eight persons, but which has room for ten; the weather was perfect, and the scenery all the way very lovely and quite novel. a. and i kept mourning for you and m. to enjoy it with us, and both agreed that we would gladly see only half there was to see, and go half the distance we were going, if we could only share with you our pleasures of every kind. on reaching paris and the hotel we found we could not get pleasant rooms below the fifth story. they were directly opposite the garden of the tuileries, where birds were flying and singing, and it was hard to realise that we were in the midst of that great city. we went sight-seeing very little. a. and i strolled about here and there, did a little shopping, stared in at the shop windows, wished m. had this and you had that, and then strolled home and panted and toiled and groaned up our five flights, and wrote in our journals, or rested, or made believe study french. we went to the jardin des plantes in order to let the children see the zoological garden. we also drove through the bois de boulogne, and spent part of an evening in the garden of the palais royal, and watched the people drinking their tea and coffee, and having all sorts of good times. we found paris far more beautiful than we expected, and certainly as to cleanliness it puts new york ages behind. we were four days in coming from paris to this place. we went up the lake of geneva on one of the finest days that could be asked for, and then the real joy of our journey began; paris and all its splendors faded away at once and forever before these mountains, and as george had never visited geneva, or seen any of this scenery, my pleasure was doubled by his. imagine, if you can, how we felt when mt. blanc appeared in sight! we reached vevay just after sunset, and were soon established in neat rooms of quite novel fashion. the floors were of unpainted white wood, checked off with black walnut; the stairs were all of stone, the stove was of porcelain, and every article of furniture was odd. but we had not much time to spend in looking at things within doors, for the lake was in full view, and the mountain tops were roseate with the last rays of the setting sun, and the moon soon rose and added to the whole scene all it wanted to make us half believe ourselves in a pleasant dream. i often asked myself, "can this be i!" "and _if_ it be i, as i hope it be"-- early next morning, which was dear little m.'s birthday, we set off in grand style for chateau d'oex. we hired a monstrous voiture which had seats inside for four, and on top, with squeezing, seats for three, besides the driver's seat; had five black horses, and dashed forth in all our splendor, ten precious souls and all agog. i made a sandwich between mr. s. and george on top, and the "bonnes" and children were packed inside. this was our great day. the weather was indescribably beautiful; we felt ourselves approaching a place of rest and a welcome home; the scenery was magnificent, and already the mountain air was beginning to revive our exhausted souls and bodies. we sat all day hand in hand, literally "lost in wonder." with all i had heard ever since i was born about these mountains, i had not the faintest idea of their real grandeur and beauty. we arrived here just after sunset, and soon found ourselves among our friends. mrs. buck brought us up to our new home, which we reached on foot (as our voiture could not ascend so high) by a little winding path, by the side of which a little brook kept running along to make music for us. it is a regular swiss châlet, much like the little models you have seen, only of a darker brown, and on either side the mountains stand ranged, so that look where we will we are feasted to our utmost capacity. we have four small, but very neat, pretty rooms. our floors are of unpainted pine, as white and clean as possible. the room in which we spend our time, and where i am now writing, i must fully set before you.... our centre table has had a nice new red cover put on it to-day, with a vase of flowers; it holds all our books, and is the ornament of the room. in front of the sofa is a red rug on which we say our prayers. over it is a picture, and over g.'s table is another. out of the window you see first a pretty little flower garden, then the valley dotted with brown châlets, then the background of mountains. behind the house you go up a little winding path--and can go on forever without stopping if you choose--along the sides of which flowers such as we cultivate at home grow in profusion; you can't help picking them and throwing them away to snatch a new handful. the brook takes its rise on this side, and runs musically along as you ascend. yesterday we all went to church at nine and a half o'clock, and had our first experience of french preaching, and i was relieved to find myself understanding whole sentences here and there. and now i need not, i suppose, wind up by saying we are in a charming spot. all we want, as far as this world goes, is health and strength with which to enjoy all this beauty and all this sweet retirement, and these, i trust, it will give us in time. isabella "wears like gold." she is everything i hoped for, and from her there has not been even a _tone_ of discomfort since we left. but my back aches and my paper is full. we all send heaps of love to you all and long to hear. _august th._--we breakfast at eight on bread and honey, which is the universal swiss breakfast, dine at one, and have tea at seven. i usually sew and read and study all the forenoon. after dinner we take our alpen- stocks and go up behind the house--a bit of mountain-climbing which makes me realise that i am no longer a young girl. i get only so high, and then have to come back and lie down. george and annie beat me all to pieces with their exploits. i do not believe we could have found anywhere in the world a spot better adapted to our needs. how _you_ would enjoy it! i perfectly yearn to show you these mountains and all this green valley. the views i send will give you a very good idea of it, however. the smaller châlet in the print is ours. in a little summer house opposite isabella now sits at work on the sewing-machine. my best love to all three of your dear "chicks," and to your husband if "he's willin'." _to mrs. h.b. washburn, chateau d'oex, august , ._ ... we slipped off without any leave-taking, which i was not sorry for. i did not want to bid you good-bye. we had to say it far too often as it was, and, when we fairly set sail we had not an emotion left, but sank at once into a state of entire exhaustion and stupidity.... we thought paris very beautiful until we came in view of the lake of geneva, mt. blanc, and other handiworks of god, when straightway all its palaces and monuments and fountains faded into insignificance. i began to feel that it was wicked for a few of my friends, who were born to enjoy the land of lakes and mountains, not to be here enjoying it, and you were one of them, you may depend. however, whenever i have had any such pangs of regret in relation to you, i have consoled myself with the reflection that with your enthusiastic temperament, artist eye, and love of nature, you never would survive even a glimpse of switzerland; the land of william tell would be the death of you. when you are about eighty years old, have cooled down about ten degrees below zero, have got a little dim about the eyes, and a little stiff about the knees, it may possibly be safe for you to come and break yourself in gradually. i have not forgotten how you felt and what you did at the white mountains, you see. well, joking apart, we are in a spot that would just suit you in every respect. we are not in a street or a road or any of those abominations you like to shun, but our little châlet, hardly accessible save on foot, is just tucked down on the side of the gentle slope leading up the mountain. it is remote from all sights but those magnificent ones afforded by the range of mountains, the green rich valley, and the ever-varying sky and cloudland, and all sounds save that of a brook which runs hurrying down its rocky little channel and keeps us company when we want it. i ought, however, to add that my view of this particular valley is that of a novice. people say the scenery here is tame in comparison with what may be seen elsewhere; but look which way i will, from front windows or back windows, at home or abroad, i am as one at a continual feast; and what more can one ask? mr. prentiss feels that this secluded spot is just the place for him, and as it is a good point from which to make excursions on foot or otherwise, he and mr. stearns have already made several trips and seen splendid sights. how much we have to be grateful for! for my part, i would rather--far rather--have come here and stayed here blindfold, than not to have come with my dear husband. so all i have seen and am experiencing i regard as beauty and felicity _thrown in_. _to mrs. abigail prentiss, chateau d'oex, sept. , ._ i wish we had you, my dear mother, here among these mountains, for the cool, bracing air would help to build you up. both mr. stearns and george have come back from germany looking better than when they started on their trip two weeks ago. it has been very cold; the thermometer some mornings at eight o'clock standing at º, and the mountains being all covered with snow. we slept with a couple of bottles of hot water at our feet, and two blankets and a comforter of eiderdown over us, after going to bed early to get warm. my sewing-machine is a great comfort, and the peasants enjoy coming down from the mountains to see it. besides, i find something to do on it every day. i often wish i could set you down in the midst of the church to which we go every sunday, if only to show you how the people dress. a bonnet is hardly seen there; everybody wearing a black silk cap or a bloomer. _i_ wear a bloomer; a brown one trimmed with brown ribbon. an old lady sits in front of me who wears a white cap much after the fashion of yours, and on top of that is perked a monstrous bloomer trimmed with black gauze ribbon. her dress is linsey-woolsey, and for outside garment she wears a black silk half-handkerchief, as do all the rest. no light dress or ribbon is seen. i must tell you now something that amused a. and me very much yesterday at dinner. a french gentleman, who married a spanish lady four years ago, sits opposite us at the table, and he and his wife are quite fascinated with m., watch all her motions, and whisper together about all she does. yesterday they got to telling us that the lady had been married when only twelve years old to a gentleman of thirty-two, had two children, and was a grandmother, though not yet thirty-six years old. she said she carried her doll with her to her husband's house, and he made her learn a geography lesson every day till she was fourteen, when she had a baby of her own. i asked her if she loved her husband, and she said "oh, yes," only he was very grave and scolded her and shut her up when she wouldn't learn her lessons. she said that her own mother when thirty-six years old had fourteen children, all of whom are now living, twelve of them boys, and that the laws of spain allow the father of six sons to ask a favor for them of the king, but the father of twelve may ask a favor for each one; so every one of her brothers had an office under the government or was an officer in the army. i don't know when i have been more amused, for she, like all foreigners, was full of life and gesture, and showed us how she tore her hair and threw down her books when angry with her husband. the children are all bright and well. the first time we took the cars after landing, m. was greatly delighted. "now we're going to see grandma," she cried. mrs. buck got up a picnic for her, and had a treat of raspberries and sponge-cake--frosted. the cake had "m." on the top in red letters. baby is full of life and mischief. the day we landed he said "papa," and now he says "mamma." isabella [ ] is everything we could ask. she is trying to learn french, and a. hears her recite every night. george found some furnished rooms at montreux, which he has taken for six months from october, and we shall thus be keeping house. a. has just rushed in and snatched her french bible, as she is going to the evening service with some of the english family. you will soon hear all about us from mr. stearns. the following letter will show how little power either her own cares, or the charms of nature around her, had to quench her sympathy for friends in sorrow: _to miss a. h. woolsey, chateau d'oex, sept. , ._ we received your kind letter this morning. we had already had our sympathies excited in behalf of you all, by seeing a notice of the death of the dear little child in a paper lent to us by mrs. buck, and were most anxious to hear all the particulars you have been so good as to give us. this day, which fifteen years ago we marked with a white stone, and which we were to celebrate with all our hearts, has passed quite wearily and drearily. there is something indescribably sad in the details of the first bereavement which has fallen within the circle of those we love; perhaps, too, old sorrows of our own clamored for a hearing; and then, too, there was the conviction, "this is not all death will do while the ocean severs you from kindred and friends." we longed to speak to you many words of affectionate sympathy and christian cheer; but long before we can make them reach you, i trust you will have felt sure that you were at least remembered and prayed for. it is a comfort that no ocean separates us from him who has afflicted you. the loss to you each and all is very great, but to the mother of such a child it is beyond description. faith alone can bear her through it, but faith _can_. what a wonderful little creature the sweet ellie must have been! we were greatly touched by your account of her singing that beautiful hymn. it must have been divinely ordered that she should leave such a precious legacy behind her. and though her loveliness makes her loss the greater, the loss of an unlovely wayward child would surely be a heavier grief. i never know where to stop when i begin to talk about the death of a little one; but before i stop i want to ask you to tell mrs. h. one word from me, which will not surprise and will perhaps comfort her. it is this. neither his father nor myself would be willing to have god now bereave us of the rich experience of seven years ago, when our noble little boy was taken away. we have often said this to each other, and oftener said it to him, who if he took, also gave much. but after all, we can not _say_ much to comfort either mrs. h. or you. we can only truly, heartily and always sympathise with you.... mr. prentiss and mr. stearns have spent a fortnight in jaunting about; beginning at thun and ending at munich. they both came home looking fresher and better than when they left, but mr. p. is not at all well now, and will have his ups and downs, i suppose, for a long time to come.... we can step out at any moment into a beautiful path, and, turn which way we will, meet something charming. yesterday he came back for me, having found a new walk, and we took our sticks, and went to enjoy it together till we got, as it were, fairly locked in by the mountains, and could go no further. only to think of having such things as gorges and water-falls and roaring brooks, right at your back door! the seclusion of this whole region is, however, its great charm to us, and to tell the truth, the primitive simplicity of style of dress, etc., is quite as charming to me as its natural beauty. we took tea one night last week with the pastor of the free church; he lives in a house for which he pays thirty dollars a year, and we were quite touched and pleased with his style of living; white pine walls and floors, unpainted, and everything else to match. we took our tea at a pine table, and the drawing-room to which we retired from it, was a corner of the same room, where was a little mite of a sofa and a few books, and a cheerful lamp burning. all this time i have not answered your question about the fourth of july. we had great doings, i assure you. mr. p. made a speech, and ran up and down the saloon like a war horse. he was so excited and pale that i did not enjoy it much, thinking any instant he would faint and fall. mr. cleaveland was the orator of the day and acquitted himself very well, they all said. i was in my berth at the time of its delivery, saving myself for the dinner and toasts, and so did not hear it. the whole affair is to be printed. there was a great cry of "prentiss! prentiss!" after the "captain's dinner," and at last the poor man had to respond in a short speech to a toast to the ladies. i suppose you know that he considers all women as angels. mr. stearns left us on thursday to set his face homewards. * * * * * ii. montreux. the swiss autumn. castle of chillon. death and sorrow of friends at home. twilight talks. spring flowers. early in october the family removed to montreux, at the upper end of the lake of geneva, where the next six months were passed in what was then known as the maison des bains. montreux was at this time the centre of a group of pleasant villages, scattered along the shore of the lake, or lying back of it among the hills. one of these villages, clarens, was rendered famous in the last century by the pen of rousseau, and early in this by the pen of byron. the grave of vinet, the noble leader, and theologian of the free church of the canton of vaud, now renders the spot sacred to the christian scholar. montreux was then a favorite resort of invalids in quest of a milder climate. at many points it commands fine views of the lake, and the whole region abounds in picturesque scenery. the maison des bains is said to have long since disappeared; but in , it seemed to hang upon the side of the montreux hill and was one of the most noticeable features of the landscape, as seen from the passing steamer. _to mrs. henry b. smith, montreux, october , ._ your letter was a real comfort and i am so thankful to the man that invented letter-writing that i don't know what to do. we feast on everything we hear from home, however sick, or weak; it is a sort of sea-air appetite. your letters are not a thousandth part long enough, but if you wrote all the time i suppose they wouldn't be.... you see i am experimenting with two kinds of ink, hoping my letters may be more easy to read. george tried it the other day by writing me a little note, telling me first how he loved me in black ink and then how he loved me in blue, after which he tore it up; wasn't that a shame? anna writes that you seemed miserable the day she was at your house. the fact is, people of such restless mental activity as you and i, my dear, never need expect to be well long at a time--for, as soon as we get a little health we consume it just as children do candy. george and i are both able, however, to take long walks, and the other day we went to see the castle of chillon. i was much impressed with all i saw. under byron's name, which i saw on one of the columns, there were the initials "h. b. s."--"h. b. smith," says i. "you don't say so!" cries george, "where? let me see--oh, i don't think it can be his, for here are some more letters," which i knew all the time, but for all that h. b. s. _does_ stand for h. b. smith. there are ever so many charming walks about here and from some points the scenery is wonderfully picturesque. i never was in the country so late as to see the trees after a frost, and although the foliage here is less brilliant, it is said, than that of american forests, i find it hard to believe that there can be anything more beautiful than the wooded mountains covered with the softest tints of every shade and coloring interspersed with snowcapped peaks and bare, gray rocks. the glory has departed somewhat within two days, as we have had a little snow-storm, and the leaves have fallen sadly. we began to have a fire yesterday and to put on some of our winter clothing; yet roses bloom just outside our door, and mignonette, nasturtiums, and a variety of other flowers adorn every house. the swiss love for flowers is really beautiful. i wish you would let the children go to the hot-house which they pass on the way from school and get me some flower-seeds, as it will be pleasant to me to have the means of giving pleasure. i presume the gardener would be able to select a dozen or so of american varieties which would be a treasure here. i amuse myself with making flower-pictures, with which to enliven our parlor, and assure you that these works of art are remarkable specimens of genius. i do not know where the time goes, but i do not have half enough of it, or else do not understand the art of making the most of it. we have just subscribed to a library at a franc a month, and hope to read a little french.... i suppose z. will be a regular young lady by the time we come home, and that i shall be afraid of her, as i am of all young ladies. how nicely she and m. would look in the jaunty little hats they all wear here. i wonder if the fashion will stretch across the ocean? i dare say it will. never was there anything so becoming in the world. _to mrs. stearns, montreux, nov. , ._ we were glad to hear from your last letter that you are all so well, and especially to hear such good accounts of mr. stearns. it is a real comfort to us to find that his little trip has done him so much good. i was sorry to hear of the loss of that friend of the thurstons in the austria, for i heard ellen speak of her in the most rapturous manner. this world is full of mysteries. only to think of the shock george received when expecting to meet mr. butler in paris and perhaps spend several weeks with him there, he heard at geneva the news of his sudden death! [ ] he loved and honored mr. b. most warmly and truly. you will remember that the latter came abroad on account of the health of his daughter; her younger sister accompanied them, and they were all full of the brightest anticipations. but the same steamer which brought them over, carried home his remains on the next trip, and those two poor young girls are left in a strange land, afflicted and disappointed and alone. mr. butler died a most peaceful and happy death, and george was very glad to be in paris in time to comfort the young ladies, who were perfectly delighted to see him. he got back yesterday very much exhausted and has spent most of the day on the sofa. a. has a teacher who comes three times a week from vevay, and spends most of the day. she is a young lady of about twenty-five, well educated and accustomed to teaching, and has taken hold of a. with no little energy. she can not speak a word of english. tell your a. we can't get over it that the horses, dogs and cats here all understand french. i have been ever so busy fixing and fussing for winter, which has come upon us all in a rush. isabella has been bewitched for about a week, having got at last a letter from her beau, and every speck of work she has done on the sewing machine was either wrongside out or upside down. while george was gone i made up a lot of flower-pictures to adorn the walls of our parlor; he is walking about admiring them, and i wish you would drop in and help him. he had a real homesick fit to see you all to-day, feeling so tired after his journey; but seems brighter to-night, and promises faithfully to get well now, right off. _dec. th._--the death of sarah p. must have excited all your sympathies. the loss of a little child--and i shudder when i recall the pangs of such a loss!--can be nothing in comparison with such an affliction as this. i well remember what a bright young thing she was. her poor mother's grief and amazement must be all the greater for the fact of the perfect vigor and sound health which had, as it were, assured her of long life and happiness and usefulness. i had an inexpressible sadness upon me as soon as i heard that she was dangerously ill; often in such moments one bitterly realises that all this world's idols are likewise perishable. a.'s teacher gives lessons also in a family half an hour from vevay, who are going to germany to spend a year, and she gave such an account of the place, that george let her persuade him into going to see it, as the owner desired to rent it during his absence. he took a. with him, as i could not go. they came back in ecstasies, and have both set their hearts so on taking it that i should not at all wonder if that should be the end. we left some of our things at chateau d'oex, fully expecting to return there, but this vevay country seat with its cherry, apple and pear trees, its seclusion, its vicinity to reading-room and library, has quite disgusted george with the idea of spending another summer "en pension." the family entertained g. and a. very hospitably, gave them a lunch of bologna sausage, bread and butter, cake, wine and grapes, and above all, the little girls gave a. two little guinea pigs, which you may imagine filled her with delight. the whole affair was very agreeable to her, as she had not spoken to a child (save m.) since we came to montreux. _january d, ._--we read your letter, written at bedford, with no little interest and sympathy. while we could not but rejoice that one more saint had got safely and without a struggle home, we felt the exceeding disappointment you must have had in losing the last smile you came so near receiving. [ ] i think you had a sort of presentiment last winter what this one might bring forth, for i remember your saying it would probably be the last visit to you, and that you wanted to make it as pleasant as possible. and pleasant i do not doubt you and the whole household made it to her. still there always will be regrets and vain wishes after the death of one we love. what a pity that we can not be to our friends while they live all we wish we had been after they have gone! george and i feel an almost childish clinging to mother, while we hope and believe she will live to bless us if we ever return home. _jan. d._--we have been afflicted in the sudden death of our dear friend, mrs. wainwright. the news came upon us without preparation--for she was ill only a few days--and was a great shock to us. you and mother know what she was to us during the whole time of our acquaintance with her; i loved her most heartily. i can not get over the saddening impression which such deaths cause, by receiving new ones; our lives here are so quiet and uneventful, that we have full leisure to meditate on the breaches already made in our circle of friends at home, and to forebode many more such sorrowful tidings. mrs. wainwright was like a _mother_ to me, and i am too old to take up a new friend in her place. [ ] i do not know whether i mentioned the afflictions of my cousin h. they have been very great, and have excited my sympathies keenly. her first child died when eighteen months old, after a feeble, suffering life. then the second child, an amiable, loving creature--i almost see her now sitting up so straight with her morsel of knitting in her hands!--she was taken sick and died in five days. her sister, about eight years old, came near dying of grief; she neither played, ate or slept, and they wrote me that her wails of anguish were beyond description. just as she was getting a little over the first shock, the little boy, then about three years old, died suddenly of croup. poor h. is almost broken-hearted. i have felt dreadfully at being away when she was so afflicted; they had not been long enough in new york to have a minister of their own, and they all said, oh, if george and i had only been there! her letters during the rest of the winter are tinged with the sadness caused by these and other distressing afflictions among friends at home. her sympathies were kept under a constant strain. but her letters contain also many gleams of sunshine. although very quiet and secluded, and often troubled by torturing neuralgic pains, as well as by sudden shocks of grief, her life at montreux was not without its own peculiar joys. one of the greatest of these was to while away the twilight or evening hours in long talks with her husband about home and former days. distance, together with the strange alpine scenes about her, seemed to have the effect of a score of years in separating her from the past, and throwing over it a mystic veil of tenderness and grace. old times and old friends, when thus viewed from the beautiful shores of lake leman, appeared to the memory in a softened light and invested with something of that ideal loveliness which the grave itself imparts to the objects of our affections. many of these old friends, indeed, had passed through the grave--some, long before, some recently--and to talk of _them_ was sweet talk about the blessed home above, as well as the home beyond the ocean. another joy that helped to relieve the monotony and weariness of the montreux life, was in her children; especially as, on the approach of spring, she wandered with them over the hill-sides in quest of flowers; then her delight knew no bounds. in a letter to mrs. washburn, dated march , she writes: m. and g. catch a.'s and my enthusiasm, and come with their little hands full of dandelions, buttercups and daisies, and their hats full of primroses. even mr. prentiss conies in with his hands full of crocuses, purple and white, and lots of an extremely pretty flower, "la fille avant la mère," which he gathers on the mountains where i can not climb.... i often think of you and mrs. b----, when i revel among the beautiful profusion of flowers with which this country is adorned. so early as it is, the hills and fields are _covered_ with primroses, daisies, cowslips, violets, lilies, and i don't know what not; in five minutes we can gather a basketful. * * * * * iii. the campagne genevrier. vevay. beauty of the region. letters. birth of a son. visit from professor smith. excursion to chamouni. whooping-cough and scarlet-fever among the children. doctor curchod. letters. at the end of march the family removed to the campagne genevrier, about two miles back of vevay, in the direction of st. leger. at one point it overlooked the town and the lake, and commanded a fine view of the mountains of savoy and of the distant jura range. on the opposite shore of the lake is the village where lord byron passed some time in , and where he is said to have written the wonderful description of a thunder-storm, in the third canto of childe harold. at all events the very scene, so vividly depicted by him, was witnessed from genevrier. [ ] _to mrs. stearns, genevrier, april , _ your letter describing how nicely your party went off, followed us from montreux, to enliven us here in our new home. we only wish we could have been there. you need not have apologised for giving so many details, for it is just such little events of your daily life that we want to hear about. my mouth quite waters for a bit of the cake they sent you; i remember mrs. dr. j. and others used to send us big loaves which were delicious, and such as i never tasted out of newark. we came here last thursday in a great snow-storm, which was cheerless and cold enough after the warm weather we had had for so many weeks. i do not suppose more snow fell on any day through the winter, and we all shivered and lamented and huddled over the fire at a great rate. yet i have just been driven indoors by the heat of the sun, having begun to write at a little table just outside the house, and fires and snow have disappeared. george has gone to town with jules in the wagon to buy sugar, oil, oats, buttons, and i do not know what not, and is no doubt thinking of you all; for we do nothing but cry out how we wish you were here with us to enjoy this beautiful spot. we are entirely surrounded by mountains in the distance, and with green fields, vineyards, and cultivated grounds nearer home. how your children would delight in the flowers, the white doves, the seven little tiny guinea pigs, no bigger than your annie's hand shut up, and the ample, neat play-places all about us. i can't tell you how george and i enjoy seeing m. trotting about, so eager and so happy, and gathering up, as we hope, health and strength every hour! we find the house, on the whole, very convenient, and it is certainly as pleasant as can be; every room cheerful and every window commanding a view which is ravishing. _to mrs. smith, genevrier, april , ._ you will be surprised, i dare say, to hear that i am writing out of doors; i can hardly, myself, believe that it is possible to do so with comfort and safety at this season, but it is perfectly charming weather, neither cold or hot, and with a small shawl and my bloomer on, i am out a large part of the day. you would fly here in a balloon if you knew what a beautiful spot we are in. we are surrounded with magnificent views of both the lake and the mountains, and can not turn in any direction without being ravished. the house is pretty, and in most respects well and even handsomely furnished; damask curtains, a titian, a rembrandt, and a murillo in the parlor; the floors are waxed and carpetless, to be sure, but mrs. buck has given us lots of large pieces of carpeting such as are used in this country to cover the middle of the rooms, and these will make us comfortable next winter. but the winters here are so short that one hardly gets fixed to meet them, when they are over. we have quite a nice garden, from which we have already eaten lettuce, spinach, and parsley; our potatoes were planted a day or two ago, and our peas are just up. one corner of the house, unconnected with our part, is occupied by a farmer who rents part of the land; he is obliged to do our marketing, etc., and we get milk and cream from him. i wish the latter was as easy to digest as it is palatable and cheap. they beat it up here till it looks like pure white lather and eat it with sugar. the grounds about our house are very neat and we shall have oceans of flowers of all sorts; several kinds are in full bloom now. the wild flowers are so profuse, so beautiful and so various that a. and i are almost demented on the subject. from the windows i see first the wide, gravelled walk which runs round the house; then a little bit of a green lawn in which there is a little bit of a pond and a tiny _jet d'eau_ which falls agreeably on the ear; beyond this the land slopes gently upward till it is not land but bare, rugged mountain, here and there sprinkled with snow and interspersed with pine-trees. the sloping land is ploughed up and men and women are busy sowing and planting; too far off to disturb us with noise, but looking, the women at least, rather picturesque in their short blue dresses and straw hats. on the right hand the dent du midi is seen to great advantage; it is now covered with snow. the little village of st. leger lies off in the distance; you can just see its roofs and the quaint spire of a very old church; otherwise you see next to no houses, and the stillness is very sweet. _now_ won't you come? the children seem to enjoy their liberty greatly, and are running about all the time. they have each a little garden and i hope will live out of doors all summer. the state of her health during the next three months was a source of constant and severe suffering, but could not quench her joy in the wonders of nature around her. "my drives about this lovely place," she wrote in june, "have begun to give me an _immense_ amount of pleasure; indeed, my faculty for enjoyment is so great, that i sometimes think one day's felicity pays for weeks of misery, and that if it hadn't been for my poor health, i should have been _too_ happy here." nor did her suffering weaken in the least her sympathy with the troubles of her friends at home. while for the most part silent as to her own peculiar trials, her letters were full of cheering words about theirs. to one of these she wrote at this time: god has taken care that we should not enjoy so much of this world's comfort since we left home as to _rest_ in it. your letters are so sad, that i have fancied you perhaps overestimated our situation, feeling that you and your feeble husband were bearing the burden and heat of the day while we were standing idle. my dear ----, there are trials everywhere and in every sphere, and every heart knoweth its own bitterness, or else physical burdens are sent to take the place of mental depression. after all, it will not need more than _an hour_ in heaven to make us ashamed of our want of faith and courage here on earth. do cheer up, dear child, and "look aloft!" poor mr. ----! i know his work is hard and up the hill, but it will not be _lost_ work and can not last forever. it seems to me god might accept with special favor the services of those who "_toil_ in rowing." after all, it is not the _amount_ of work he regards, but the spirit with which it is done. early in july she was made glad by the birth of her sixth child--her "swiss boy," as she liked to call him. her gladness was not a little increased by a visit soon after from professor henry b. smith, of the union theological seminary. this visit was one of the memorable events of her life abroad. professor smith was not merely a great theologian and scholar; he was also a man of most attractive personal qualities. and, when unbending among friends from his exacting literary labors, the charm of his presence and conversation was perfect. his spirits ran high, and he entered with equal zest into the amusements of young or old. his laugh was as merry as that of the merriest girl; no boy took part more eagerly in any innocent sport; nobody could beat him in climbing a mountain. he was a keen observer, and his humor--sometimes very dry, sometimes fresh and bright as the early dew--rendered his companionship at once delightful and instructive. his learning and culture were so much a part of himself, that his most familiar talk abounded in the happiest touches about books and art and life. all his finest traits were in full play while he was at genevrier, and, when he left, his visit seemed like a pleasant dream. _to mrs. smith, genevrier, july th._ i am only too glad of the chance your husband gives me to write you another bit of a note. we are enjoying his visit amazingly. there are only two drawbacks to its felicity; one is that he won't stay all summer, and the other that you are not here. the children were enchanted with the presents he brought them. when i shall be on my feet and well and strong again time only can tell. a. has _devoted_ herself to me in the sweetest way. what she has been to me all winter and up to this time, tongue could not tell. my doctor is as kind as a brother. he was a perfect stranger to me, and was brought to my bedside when i was writhing in agony; but in ten minutes his tenderness and sympathy made me forget that he was a stranger, and, through that long night of distress and the long day that followed, he did _every_ thing that mortal could do to relieve and comfort me. he brought his wife up to see me the other day, and i begged her to tell him how grateful i felt. "he _is_ kind," she answered, "but then he _loves you so!_" (they both speak english.) i am so puffed up by his praises! i am sure i thought i groaned, but he says "pas une gemissement." _august th._--our two husbands have gone to lausanne for the day, taking a. with them. they seem to be having real nice times together, and if, as your husband says, "his old wife were here," his felicity and ours would be too great. they lounge about, talk, drink soda-water, and view the prospect. dr. buck came up from geneva on thursday and spent the night and part of friday with us, and it would have done you good to hear him and your husband laugh. he was quite enchanted with the place, and says we never shall want to go home. _august d._--your husband has given me leave to write you a little bit of a note out of my little bit of a heart on this little bit of paper. he and a. have just gone off to get some pretty grass for you. he will tell you when he gets home how he baptized his namesake on sunday. we have enjoyed his visit more than tongue can tell. george says _he_ has enjoyed it as much as he thought he should, and i am sure i have enjoyed it a great deal more, as i have been so much better in health than i expected. but how you must miss him! on the th of september--a faultless autumn day--she set out with her husband and eldest daughter for chamouni. it was her first excursion for pleasure since coming to switzerland. a visit to this great and marvelous handiwork of god is an event in the dullest life. in her case the experience was so full of delight, that it seemed almost to compensate for the cares and disappointments of the whole previous year. the plan was to return to genevrier and then pass on to the bernese oberland, but the visit to chamouni proved to be her last as well as her first pleasure excursion in switzerland. _to mrs. stearns, genevrier, october , ._ i have, been so absorbed with anxiety about the children since we got back from our journey, that i have not felt like writing you a description of it. george told you, i suppose, that the news awaiting us when we reached vevay was of the baby's having whooping-cough. it was a great shock to us, for the weather was dismally cold, and it did not seem as if the little thing could get safely through the disease at so unfavorable a time of year. then there were the other two to have it also. on friday last baby's cry had become a sad sort of wail, and he was so pale and weak, that i did not see how he was going to rally; but he is better to-day, so that i begin to take breath.... to go back to chamouni, it seems a mercy that we went when we did. we enjoyed the whole trip. we made the excursion to the mer de glace in a pouring rain, without injury to any of us, and were well repaid for our trouble by the novelty of the whole expedition and the extraordinary sights we saw. george intended taking us to the oberland if we found the children well on our return, but all hope of accomplishing another journey was destroyed when we found what different business was before us. it is a real disappointment, for the weather is now mild and very fine, just adapted to journeying, and so many things have conspired to confine me to this spot, that i have found it quite hard to be as patient and cheerful as i am sure i ought to be. alas and alas! what an insatiable thing human nature is! how it craves _every_ thing the world can offer, instead of contenting itself with what ought to content it. however, i shall soon get over my fidgets, and as to george, of course he is only disappointed for me and a., as he has visited the oberland, and was only going to give us pleasure. and, if i must choose between the two, i'd rather have the littlest baby in the world than see all the biggest mountains in it. we are thankful to hear that mother still continues to be so well. we long to see her, and i think a look at her or a smile from her would do george good like a medicine. _october th._--i went to church yesterday for the first time in ten months; we came out at half-past ten, so you see we have a tolerably long day before us when church is done. it is not at all like going to church at home; you not only find it painful to listen with such strict attention as the foreign tongue requires, but you miss the neat, well-ordered sanctuary, the picture of family life (for there are no little children present!) and the agreeable array of dress. the flapping, monstrous bloomers tire your eyes, and so do the grotesque, coarse clothes and the tokens of extreme poverty. i grow more and more patriotic every day, and am astonished at what i see and hear of life in europe. i snatched one afternoon when the baby was better than usual to go to villeneuve with george to call on mr. and mrs. h. and the sister of mrs. h., who is one of our mercer street young ladies. they were at the hotel byron, where you stayed. what a beautiful spot it is! mr. h. afterwards came and dined with us, and was so charmed with the place that he was tempted to take it when we leave; his wife, however, had set her heart on going home at that time, as she had left one child there. the vintage is going on here at genevrier to-day, and we are all invited to go and eat our fill. _to mrs. henry b. smith, genevrier, oct. , ._ you ask how i find time to make flower-pictures. why, i have been confined to the house a good deal by the baby's sickness, and could hardly set myself about anything else when i was not watching and worrying about him. when we got home from chamouni we found him with what proved to be a very serious disease in the case of so young a child. it has shaken his little frame nearly to pieces, leaving him after weeks of suffering not much bigger than a doll, and all eyes and bones. it was a pretty hard struggle for life, and i hardly know how he has weathered the storm. the idea of leaving our dear little swiss baby in a little swiss grave, instead of taking him home with us, was very distressing to me, and i can not help earnestly desiring that death may not assail us in this foreign land. our trip to chamouni was very pleasant and did me a deal of good. if i could have kept on the mule-riding and mountain-viewing a few weeks i should have got quite built up, but the children's coughs made it impossible to take any more journeys. mr. de palèzieux, our landlord, called monday to see if i would sell him my sewing-machine, as his wife was crazy to have one, and didn't feel as if she could wait to get one from new york. i told him i would, and all night could not sleep for teaching him how to use it--for his wife is in germany, and he had to learn for her. i invited him to come to dinner on wednesday and take his lessons. on tuesday george said he wanted me to make a pair of sleeves for mrs. tholuck before the machine went off, so i went to town to get the stuff, at three o'clock began the sleeves and worked like a lion for a little over two hours, when they were done, beautifully. this morning i made four collars, which i shall want for christmas presents, and a shirt for jules (our old hired man), who never had one made of linen, and will go off the handle when he gets it. so i am tolerably used up, and shall be almost glad to send away the tempter to-morrow, though i dare say i shall miss it. i wish you could look out of my window this minute, and see how beautiful the autumnal foliage is already beginning to look. but my poor old head, what shall i do with it! you ask about my health; i am as well as i can be without sleep. i have had only one really good night since the baby came, to say nothing of those before; some worse than others, to be sure; but all wakeful to a degree that tries my faith not a little. i don't see what is to hinder my going crazy one of these days. however, i won't if i can help it. george goes to germany this week. well, my dear, good-bye. _to mrs. stearns, dec. th._ george got home a fortnight ago, after his three weeks' absence; looking nicely, and more like himself than i have seen him in a long time. he had a most refreshing time in germany among his old friends. it does my heart good to see him so cheery and hopeful. i have just seen the three babies safely in bed, after no little scampering and carrying-on, and now am ready for a little chat with you and dear mother. george sits by me, piously reading "adam bede." i was disappointed in the "minister's wooing," which he brought from germany, and can not think mrs. stowe came up to herself this time, whatever the newspapers may say about it; and as for the plot, i don't see why she couldn't have let mary marry good old dr. hopkins, who was vastly more of a man than that harum-scarum james. as to "adam bede," i think it a wonderful book, beyond praise. i hope these literary observations will be blessed to you, my dear. mrs. tholuck sent me a very pretty worsted cape to wear about house, or under a cloak. we went to lausanne last wednesday (george, a. and i) to do a little shopping for christmas, and had quite a good time, only as life is always mingled in sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet, we had the melancholy experience of finding, when we got ready to come home, that jules had taken a drop too much, and was in a state of ineffable silliness, which made george prefer to drive himself. we begin now to think and talk about paris. we have been buying this afternoon some swiss châlets and other things, brought to the door by two women, and i had hard work to keep george from taking a bushel or two. he got leaf-cutters enough to stab all his friends to the heart. most of our lady friends will receive a salad-spoon and fork from one or the other of us. in fact, i have no doubt we shall be seized at the custom-house as merchants in disguise. well, i must bid you good night. the latter part of december her husband was requested to go to paris and take the temporary charge of the american chapel there. he decided to do so, with the understanding that she and the children should soon follow him. but scarcely had he left geneva, when first one and then another of the children was seized with scarlet fever. here are a few extracts from her letters on the subject: _dec. st._--jules had hardly gone to the office, when i became satisfied that g. had scarlet fever beyond a doubt, and therefore sent jeanette instantly to town to tell the doctor so, and to ask him to come up. he came, and said at once i was quite right.... as to our leaving here, he said decidedly that it _could_ not be under less than forty days. i can not tell you, my darling, how grieved i am for you to hear this news. now i know your first impulse will be to come home, and perhaps to renounce the chaplaincy, but i beg you to think twice--thrice before you decide to do so.... how one thing hurries on after another! but it is the universal cry, everywhere; everybody is groaning and travailing in pain together; and we shall doubtless learn, in eternity, that our lot was not peculiar, but that we had millions of unknown fellow-sufferers on the way. don't be too disappointed, but let us rather be thankful, that if our poor children must be sick, it was here and not in paris, and now, good night. betake yourself to your knees, when you have read this, and pray for us with all your might. jan. , .--the doctor has been here and says the other children must not meet g. till the end of this month, unless they are taken sick meantime. poor m. melted like a snow-flake in the fire, when she heard that; she begins to miss her little playmate, and keeps running to say things to him through the key-hole, and to serenade him with singing, accompanied with a rattling of knives. i see but one thing to be done; for you to stay and preach and me to stay and nurse, each in the place god has assigned us.... you must pray for me, that i may be patient and willing to have my coming to europe turn out a failure as far as my special enjoyment of it is concerned. there are better things than going to paris, being with you and hearing you preach; pray that i may have them in full measure. i can't bear to stop writing--good-bye, my dearest love! _jan. th_--if you could look in upon us this evening, you would be not a little surprised to see me writing in the corner of my room, close to the wash-stand where my lamp is placed; but you would see at a glance that the curtain of the bed is let down to shade our darling little m.'s eyes, as she lies close at my side. how sorry i am, as you can not see all this, to have to tell it to you! i have let her decide for me, and she wants dear papa to know that she is sick. oh, why need i add another care to those you already suffer on our account!... as to baby, we are disposed to think that _he has had the fever_. of course we do not know, but it is pleasant to hope the best.... and now, my precious darling, you see there is more praying work to do, as i hinted in my saturday's note when my heart was pretty heavy within me. i need not tell you what to ask for the dear child; but for me do pray that i may have no will of my own. all these trials and disappointments are so purely providential that it frightens me to think i may have much secret discontent about them, or may like to plan for myself in ways different from god's plans. yet in the midst of so much care and fatigue i hardly know how i do feel; i am like a feather blown here and there by an unexpected whirlwind and i suppose i ought not to expect much of myself. "though he slay me yet will i trust in him," i keep saying over and over to myself, and if you are going to write a new sermon this week, suppose you take that for your text. i have not had one regret that you went to paris, and as to your coming on, i do hope you will not think of it, unless you are sent for. you could do nothing and would be very lonely and uncomfortable. the doctor told me to tell you to stay where you were, and that you ought to rejoice that the children are not sick in paris. i do trust that in the end we shall come forth from this troublous time like gold from the furnace. so far i have been able to do all that was necessary and i trust i shall continue so. god bless you, and bring us to a happy meeting in his own good time! _to mrs. stearns, genevrier, jan. , ._ ... boiling over does one good of itself, and i am sure you feel the better for having done so. i do not know why _men_ seem to get along without such reliefs as women almost always seek in this way; whether there is less water in their kettles or whether their kettles are bigger than ours and boil with more safety. it is a comfort to believe that, whatever our troubles, in the end all will work together for our good. the new year has opened upon us here at genevrier pretty gloomily, as george has told you. you will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that m. is also quite sick, much sicker than g. she is one of those meek, precious little darlings whom it is painful to see suffer, and i have hardly known what i was about, or where i was, since she was taken down. my baby is deserted by us all; i have only seen him in _moments_ for three weeks. you can not think how lonely poor a. is; half the time she eats alone in the big solitary dining-room; nobody has any time to walk out with her, what few children she knew are afraid to come here or to have her come nigh them, and i feel as if i should fly, when i think of it--for she is not strong or well and her life here in switzerland has been a series of disappointments and anxieties. the only leisure moments i can snatch in the course of the twenty-four hours i have to spend in writing to george; but the last few evenings m. has slept, so that i could play a game of chess with her and try to cheer and brace her up against next day's dreariness. all her splendid dreams of getting off from this solitude to the life and stir of paris have been dissipated, but she has never uttered one word of complaint; i have not heard her say as much as "isn't it too bad!" and indeed we ought none of us to say so or to feel so, for the doctor assures me that for three such delicate children as he considers ours, to pass safely through whooping-dough and scarlet-fever, is a perfect wonder and that he is sure it is owing to the pure country air. and when i think how different a scene our house might present if our three little ones had been snatched away, as three or four even have been from other families, i am ashamed of myself that i dare to sigh, that i am lonely and friendless here, or that i have anything to complain of. it has been no small trial, however, to pass through such anxieties in so remote a place, with george gone; while on the other hand i have been most thankful that he has been spared all the details of the children's ailments, and permitted once more to feel himself about his master's business. providence most plainly called him to paris, and i trust he will stay there and get good till we can join him. but i feel uneasy about him, too, lest his anxiety about the children should hang as a dead weight on his not quite rested head and heart. at any rate, i shall be tolerably glad to see him again at the end of our two months' separation. how i should love to drop in on you to-night! doesn't it seem as if one _could_ if one tried hard enough! well, good night to you. _to mrs. smith, genevrier, jan. , ._ i believe george has written you about our private hospital. he had not been gone to paris forty-eight hours when g. was taken sick; that was a month ago, and i have only tasted the air twice in all that time. g. had the disease lightly. m., poor little darling, was much sicker than he was. it is a fortnight since she was taken and she hardly sits up at all; an older child would be in bed, but little ones never will give up if they can help it; i suppose it is because they can be held in the arms and rocked, and carried about. i have passed through some most anxious hours on account of m., and it seems little less than a miracle that she is still alive. the baby is well, and he is a nice little rosy fellow. it was a dreadful disappointment to us to be detained here instead of going to paris. i felt that i couldn't live longer in such entire solitude; and just then, lo and behold, george was whisked off and i was shut up closer than ever. it is a great comfort to me that he got off just when he did, and has had grace to stay away; on the other hand, i need not say how his absence has aggravated my cares, how solitary the season of anxiety has been, and how, at times, my faith and courage have been put to their utmost stretch. the whole thing has been so evidently ordered and planned by god that i have not dared to complain; but, my dear child, if you had come in now and then with a little of your strengthening talk, i can't deny i should have been most thankful. it has been pretty trying for george to hear such doleful accounts from home, but i hope the worst is over, and that we shall be the wiser and the better for this new lesson of life. dr. curchod's rule is the same as dr. buck's--forty days confinement to one room; so we have a month more to spend here. i am afraid i am writing a gloomy letter. if i am, you must try to excuse me and say, "poor child, she isn't well, and she hasn't had any good sleep lately, and she's tired, and i don't believe she _means_ to grumble." do so much for me, and i'll do as much for you sometime. i hear your husband has taken up a bible-class. it is perfectly shocking. does he _want_ to kill himself, or what ails him? the pleasantest remembrance we shall have of this place is his visit.... our doctor and his family stand out as bright lights in this picture; he has been like a brother in sympathy and kindness. we shall never forget it. god has been so good to you and to me in sparing our children when assailed by so fearful a disease, that we ought to love him better than we ever did. i do so want my weary solitude to bear that fruit. * * * * * iv. paris. sight-seeing. a sick friend. london and its environs. the queen and prince albert. the isle of wight. homeward. on the th of february the family gladly bade adieu to switzerland and set out for paris, arriving there on the morning of the d. mrs. prentiss was overjoyed to find herself once more in the world. on the d she wrote to mrs. smith: we have got here safe and sound with our little batch of invalids. they bore the journey very well and are heartily glad to get into the world again. i am chock-full of worldliness. all i think of is dress and fashion, and, on the whole, i don't know that you are worth writing to, as you were never in paris and don't know the modes, and have perhaps foolishly left off hoops and open sleeves. i long, however, to hear from you and your new babby, and will try to keep a small spot swept clear of finery in my heart of hearts, where you can sit down when you've a mind. our little fellow is getting to be a sweet-looking baby, with what his nurse calls a most "gracieuse" smile--if you can guess what kind of a smile that is. but he is getting teeth and is looking delicate and soft, and your hercules will knock him down, i know. but paris was far from fulfilling to her or to the children the bright anticipations with which it had been looked forward to from lonely genevrier. the weather could hardly have been worse; the house soon became another hospital; and sight-seeing was a task. friends, however, soon gathered about her, and by their hospitality and little kindnesses, relieved the tedium of the weary days. _to mrs. stearns, paris, march , ._ we pass many lonely hours in this big city, and often long for you and mr. stearns to drop in, or for a chance to run in to see dear mother. getting nearer home makes it attractive. it works in the natural life just as it does in the spiritual in that respect. the weather is _dreadful_ and has been for five months--scarcely one cheery day in that whole time. what with this and the children's ill-health, i should not wonder if we left paris as ignorant of its beauties as when we came. but i hope we shall not let that worry us too much, but rather be thankful that, bad as things are, they are not so bad as they might be. our sympathies are greatly excited now for the rev. mr. little, formerly of bangor, who is in paris--alone, friendless, and sick. if we could by any miraculous power stretch our scanty accommodations, we should certainly take him home and nurse him till his wife could be got here. you know, perhaps, that mrs. little is a daughter of dr. cornelius; and, when i recall the love and honor i was taught to feel towards him when i was a little girl, my heart quite yearns towards her, especially in this time of fearful anxiety about her husband. how insignificant my own trials look to me, when i think of the sorrow which is probably before her. _april th._--our patience is still tried by the cold, damp, and most unwholesome weather, which prevents the children from going to see anything. but we do not care so much for ourselves or for them as for poor mr. little, who is exceedingly feeble, chiefly confined to his room, and so forlorn in this strange, homeless land. while george was with him last evening, he had a bad fit of coughing, which resulted in the raising of a gill or so of blood. i know you will feel interested to hear about him, and will not wonder that our hearts are so full of sympathy for him and for his poor wife, that we can hardly talk of anything else. he expects her in about a week. what a coming to europe for her! how little those who stand on the shore to watch the departure of a foreign steamer, know what they do when they envy its passengers!... we buckled on our armor and began sight-seeing the other day, going to see the sainte chapelle and the galleries and museum of the louvre among the rest. the sainte chapelle is quite unlike anything i ever saw and delighted us extremely. as to the louvre, one needs several entire days to do justice to it, besides an amount of youthful enthusiasm and bodily strength which we do not possess; for, amid midnight watchings over our sick children and the like, the oil of gladness has about burnt out, and we find sight-seeing a weary task. _may th._--it does seem as if george's preaching was listened to with more and more serious attention, and it may be seen long after he has rested from his labors on earth, that he has done a good work here. we both are much interested in professor [ ] huntington's sermons, [ ] sent us by miss w. this is a great deal for me to say, because i do not like to read sermons. during the last three weeks, before mr. and mrs. little left, we accomplished very little. it was not that we did or could do so very much for them, but they had nobody to depend on but us, and george was constantly going back and forth trying to make them comfortable, arranging all their affairs, etc. she had a weary, anxious two weeks here, and now has set her face homewards, not knowing but mr. l. may sink before reaching america. it is a great comfort to us to have been able to soothe them somewhat as long as they stayed in paris. george says it was worth coming here for that alone. i say _we,_ but i _mean_ george, for what was done he did. the most i could do was to feel dreadfully for them. [ ] we are now to begin sight-seeing again, and do all we can as speedily as possible, for only two weeks remain. the children are now pretty well. the baby is at that dangerous age when they are forever getting upon their feet and tumbling over backward on their heads. m. is the oddest little soul. belle says she would rather go to a funeral than see all the shops in paris, and, when they are out, she can hardly keep her from following every such procession they meet. i asked her the last time they went out if she had had a nice walk. she said not very nice, as she had only seen _one_ pretty thing, and that was a police-officer taking a man to jail. the idea of going to england is very pleasant, and, if we only keep tolerably well, i think it will do us all good. what is dear mother doing about these times? i always think of her as sitting by the little work-table in her room, knitting and watching the children. give lots of love and kisses to her, and tell her we long to see her face to face. kiss all the children for us--i suppose they'll let _you_! boys and all--and you may do as much for mr. s. if you want to. good-bye. on the th of june the family left paris for london. a first visit to england-- that precious stone set in the silver sea-- is always an event full of interest to children of the new england puritans. the "sceptered isle" is still in a sense their mother-country, and a thousand ancestral ties attract them to its shores. there is no other spot on earth where so many lines of their history, domestic and public, meet. and in london, what familiar memories are for them associated with almost every old street and lane and building! the winter and spring of had been cold, wet and cheerless well-nigh beyond endurance; and the summer proved hardly less dreary. it rained nearly every day, sometimes all day and all night; the sun came out only at long intervals, and then often but for a moment; the atmosphere, much of the time, was like lead; the moon and stars seemed to have left the sky; even the english landscape, in spite of its matchless verdure and beauty, put on a forbidding aspect. all nature, indeed, was under a cloud. this, added to her frail health, made the summer a very trying one to mrs. prentiss, and yet it afforded her not a little real delight. some of her pleasantest days in europe were spent in england. the following extracts are from a little journal kept by her in london: _june th._--we went this morning to hear dr. hamilton, and were greatly edified by the sermon, which was on the text: "hitherto hath the lord helped us." in the afternoon we decided to go to westminster abbey. it began to rain soon after we got out, and we had a two miles' walk through the mud. the old abbey looked as much like its picture as it could, but pictures can not give a true idea of the grandeur of such a building. we were a little late, and every seat was full and many were standing, as we had to do through the whole service. the sermon struck me as a very ordinary affair, though it was delivered by a lord. but the music was so sweet, performed for aught i know by angel--for the choir was invisible--and we stood surrounded by such monuments and covered by such a roof, that we were not quite throwing away our time. albert b---- dined with us, and in the evening, with one accord, we went to hear dr. hamilton again. we had good seats and heard a most beautiful as well as edifying discourse on the first verses of the d psalm. some of the images were very fine, and the whole tone of the sermon was moderate, sensible, and serious. i use these words advisedly, for i had an impression that he was a flowery, popular man whom i should not relish. at the close of the service a little prayer-meeting of half an hour was held, and we came home satisfied with our first english sunday, feeling some of our restless cravings already quieted as only contact with god's own people could quiet them. _ th._--went to see the crystal palace. it proved a fine day, and we took m. with us. none of us felt quite well, but we enjoyed this new and beautiful scene for all that. it is a little fairy land. _ th._--went to westminster abbey, and spent some time there. on coming out we made a rapid, but quite amusing passage through several courts where we saw numerous great personages in stiff little gray wigs. to my untrained, irreverent eyes they all looked perfectly funny. george was greatly interested and edified. it has been raining and shining by turns all day, and is this evening very cold. _ th._--another of those days which the english so euphoniously term "_nasty_." not knowing what else to do with it, we set off in search of no. sermon lane, a house connected with a stereoscopic establishment in paris, which we reached after many evolutions and convolutions, and found it to be a wholesale concern only. pitying us for the trouble we had been at in seeking them, they let us have what views we wanted, but at higher prices than they sell them at paris. we then went to the tract house, and while selecting french and other tracts, a gentleman came and asked for a quantity of the "last hours of dr. payson." _ th._--went to the tower, and had a most interesting visit there. we were particularly struck by some spots shown us by one of the wardens, after the regular round had been gone through with, and the other visitors dispersed--namely, the cell where prisoners were confined with thumbscrews attached to elicit confession, and the floor where lady jane grey was imprisoned. we looked from the window where she saw her husband carried to execution, and a. was locked up in the room so as to be able to say she had been a prisoner in the tower. _ th._--heard dr. hamilton again. met dr. and mrs. adams of new york there, and had a most kind and cordial greeting from them. dr. a. introduced us to dr. hamilton. in the evening we went to hear dr. adams at dr. h.'s church, and came home quite proud of our countryman, who gave us a most excellent sermon. at the close of the service dr. h. invited us to take tea with him next week, and introduced us to his wife; a young, quiet little lady, looking as unlike most of us american parsonesses as possible, her parochial cares being, perhaps, less weighty than ours. _ th._--two things made this day open pleasantly. one was a decided attempt on the part of the sun to come out and shine. the second was dr. adams' dropping in and taking breakfast with us. we also got letters from home, and the news that mr. little had reached new york in safety. after lunch, george went off in glory to the house of commons, hinting that he might stay there till to-morrow morning, and begging for a night-key to let himself in. the rest of us went to the zoological garden, which is much more ample and interesting than the jardin des plantes. _ th._--yesterday it poured in torrents all day, so that going out was not possible. to-day we went out in the drops and between the drops, to do a little shopping in the way of razors, scissors, knives, needles, and such like sharp and pointed things. we stepped into nesbit's and took a view of little susy, who looked as usual, bought a few books, subscribed to a library, coveted our neighbor's property, and came home covered with mud and mire. _ d._--went out to barnet to call on miss bird. on reaching the station, we found miss b. awaiting us with phaeton and pony. we were driven over a pretty three miles route to "hurst cottage," where we were introduced to mrs. bird and a younger daughter, and i had a nice little lunch, together with pleasant chat about america in general and e. l. s. in particular. miss bird said she showed her likeness to a gentleman, who is a great physiognomist, and asked his opinion of her. he replied, "she is a genius, a poetess, a christian, and a true wife and mother." we then went up-stairs, and looked at miss b.'s little study, after which she took us to see the church in hadley, a very old building dating back to . it has been repaired and restored and is a beautiful little church. on leaving it miss bird came with us a part of the way to the station and we got home in good season for dinner. the weather, true to its rule, could not last fine, and so this evening it is raining again. [ ] _ th._--no rain all day! can it be true? george went in the morning to hear mr. binney, and a. and i to dr. hamilton's, who preached a very good sermon on a favorite text of mine, "i beseech thee show me thy glory." in the evening dr. patton, of new york, induced us to go with himself and wife to a meeting at a theatre three miles off. the rev. mr. graham preached. it was an interesting, but touching and saddening sight to look upon the congregation; to wonder why they came, and whether they would come again, and whether under those stolid and hardened faces there yet lay humanity. many came with babies in their arms, who made themselves very much at home; some were in dirty week-day clothes; "some in rags and some in jags." coming home we passed the spot where john rogers was burned, and that where in time of the plague dead bodies were thrown in frightful heaps into one grave. _ th._--we took tea at dr. hamilton's, where we had a very pleasant evening, meeting dr. and mrs. adams, as well as all dr. h.'s session. dr. h. strikes one most agreeably, and seems as genial and as full of life as a boy. _ th._--visited windsor castle with dr. adams and his party, ten of us in all. we drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. this was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. the young folks gathered leaves and flowers for their books. _ th._--last evening we had a nice time and a cup of tea with the adamses. to-day--another nasty day--they lunched with us, which broke up its gloom and we went with them to see sloan's museum, a most interesting collection. we all enjoyed its novelty as well as its beauty. she also records the pleasure with which she visited the national gallery, madame tussaud's collection, the british museum, richmond, the kew gardens, and bunhill fields burying-ground, and, in particular, the grave of "mr. john bunyan." not long before leaving london she attended a sunday evening service for the people in westminster abbey, which interested her deeply. it suggested--or rather was the original of--the scene in the story lizzie told: when we first got into that grand place, i was scared, and thought they would drive us poor folks out. but when i looked round, most everybody was poor too. at last i saw some of them get down on their knees, and some shut their eyes, and some took off their hats and held them over their faces. father couldn't, because he had me in his arms; and so i took it off, and held it for him. "what's it for?" says i. "hush," says father, "the parson's praying." when i showed it to god, the room seemed full of him. but that's a small room. the church is a million and a billion times as big, isn't it, ma'am? but when the minister prayed, that big church seemed just as full as it could hold. then, all of a sudden, they burst out a-singing. father showed me the card with large letters on it, and says he, "sing, lizzie, sing!" and so i did. it was the first time in my life. the hymn said, jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly, and i whispered to father, "is jesus god?" "yes, yes," said he, "sing, lizzie, sing!" after the praying and the singing, came the preaching, i heard every word. it was a beautiful story. it told how sorry jesus was for us when we did wrong, bad things, and how glad he was when we were good and happy. it said we must tell him all our troubles and all our joys, and feel sure that he knew just how to pity us, because he had been a poor man three and thirty years, on purpose to see how it seemed. the most stirring sight by far which she witnessed while in london, was a review of , volunteers by the queen in hyde park, on the d of june. she waited for it several hours, standing much of the time upon a camp-stool. as her majesty appeared, accompanied by prince albert, the curiosity of the immense crowd "rose to such a pitch that every conceivable method was resorted to, to catch a glimpse of the field. men climbed on each other's shoulders, gave 'fabulous prices' for chairs, boxes, and baskets, raised their wives and sweethearts high in the air, and so by degrees our view was quite obstructed." [ ] the scene did not, perhaps, in numbers or in the brilliant array of fashion, rank, and beauty surpass, nor in military pomp and circumstance did it equal, a grand review she had witnessed not long before in the champ de mars; but in other respects it was far more impressive. among the volunteers were thousands of young men in whose veins ran the best and most precious blood in england. and then to an american wife and mother, queen victoria was a million times more interesting than louis napoleon. she stood then, as happily she still stands, at the head of the christian womanhood of the world; and that in virtue not solely of her exalted position and influence, but of her rare personal and domestic virtues as well. she was then also at the very height of her felicity. how little she or any one else in that thronging multitude dreamed, that before the close of the coming year the form of the noble prince, who rode by her side wearing an aspect of such manly beauty and content, and who was so worthy to be her husband, would lie mouldering in the grave! [ ] about the middle of july mrs. prentiss with her husband and children left london for ventnor on the isle of wight, where, in spite of cold and rainy weather, she passed two happy months. with the exception of chateau d'oex, no place in europe had proved to her such a haven of rest. miss scott, the hostess, was kindness itself. the isle of wight in summer is a little paradise; and in the vicinity of ventnor are some of its loveliest scenes. her enjoyment was enhanced by the society of mr. and mrs. jacob abbott, who were then sojourning there. an excursion taken with mr. abbott was doubly attractive; for, as might be inferred from his books, he was one of the most genial and instructive of companions, whether for young or old. a pilgrimage to the home and grave of the dairyman's daughter and to the grave of "little jane," and a day and night at alum bay, were among the pleasantest incidents of the summer at ventnor. of the visit to "little jane's" grave she gives the following account in her journal: _aug. th._--to-day being unusually fine, we undertook our long-talked-of expedition to brading. on reaching the churchyard we asked a little boy who followed us in if he could point out "little jane's" grave; he said he could and led us at once to the spot. how little she dreamed that pilgrimages would be made to her grave! our pigmy guide next conducted us to the grave-stones, where her task was learned. "how old are you, little fellow?" i asked. "_getting an to five_," he replied. "and does everybody who comes here give you something?" "_some_ don't." "that's very naughty of them," i continued; "after all your trouble they ought to give you something." a shrewd smile was his answer, and george then gave him some pennies. "what do you do with your pennies?" i asked. "i puts them in my pocket." "and then what do you do?" "i saves them up." "and what then?" "my mother buys shoe's when i get enough. she is going to buy me some soon with _nails_ in them! these are dropping to pieces" (no such thing). "if that is the case," quoth george, "i think i must give you some more pennies." "thank you," said the boy. "do you see my sword?" george then asked him if he went to church and to sunday-school. "oh, yes, and there was an organ, and they learned to sing psalms." "and to love god?" asked george. "yes, yes," he answered, but not with much unction, and so we turned about and came home. _to mrs. stearns, ventnor, aug. , ._ as this is to be our last letter home, it ought to be a very brilliant one, but i am sure it won't; and when i look back over the past two years and think how many stupid ones i have written you, i feel almost ashamed of myself. but on the other hand i wonder i have written no duller ones, for our staying so long at a time in one place has given small chance for variety and description. it is raining and blowing at a rate that you, who are roasting at home, can hardly conceive; we agreed yesterday that if you were blindfolded and suddenly set down here and told to guess what season of the year it was, you would judge by your feelings and the wind roaring down the chimney, that it was december. however disagreeable this may be it is more invigorating than hot weather, and george and the children have all improved very much. george enjoys bathing and climbing the "downs" and the children are out nearly all day when it does not rain. you may remember that the twilight is late in england, and even the baby is often out till half-past eight or nine.... i just keep my head above water by having no cares or fatigue at night. i feel _dreadfully_ that i am so helpless a creature, but i believe god keeps me so for my mortification and improvement, and that i ought to be willing to lead this good-for-nothing life if he chooses. we have had the pleasure of meeting mr. and mrs. abbott here. they have gone now to spend the winter in paris. mrs. a. sent her love to you again and again, and i was very glad to meet her for your sake as well as her own, and to know mr. a. better than i did before, and it was very pleasant to george to chat with him. we walked together to see shanklin chine. a. went with us, and mr. abbott amused her so on the way that she came home quite dissatisfied with her stupid papa and mamma. we are talking of little else now but getting home, and it is a pity you could not take down the walls of our hidden souls and see the various wishes and feelings we have on the subject. i forgot to say how glad we were that you found george prentiss such a nice boy. [ ] i always loved him for abby's sake and he certainly was worthy of the affection she felt for him as the most engaging child i ever knew; he is a thorough prentiss still, it seems. what is he going to be? you must feel queer to have a boy in college; it is like a strange dream. our boys are two spunky little toads who need, or will need, all our energies to bring up. i have quite got my hand out, m. is so good--and hate to begin. but good-bye, with love to mother, mr. s. and the children. the family embarked at cowes on the magnificent steamship "adriatic," september th, and, after a rough voyage, reached new york on the th of the same month. old friends awaited their coming and welcomed them home again with open arms. it was a happy day for mrs. prentiss, and in the abundance of its joy she forgot the anxious and solitary months through which she had just been passing. she came back with four children instead of three; her husband was, partially at least, restored to health; and she breathed once more her native air. [ ] a most faithful servant, to whom mrs. p. was greatly attached. [ ] the hon. benjamin f. butler, of new york, was one of the most honored members of the mercer street church. he was known throughout the country as an eminent lawyer and patriotic citizen. in the circle of his friends he was admired and beloved for his singular purity of character, his scholarly tastes, the kindness of his heart, and all the other fine qualities that go to form the christian gentleman. during a portion of president jackson's administration mr. butler was attorney-general of the united states. he died in the sixty-third year of his age. [ ] referring to the death of dr. stearns' mother, mrs. abigail stearns, of bedford, mass. [ ] mrs. wainwright and her husband, the late eli wainwright, were members of the old mercer street presbyterian church, and both of them unwearied in their kindness to mrs. prentiss and her husband. [ ] "far along, from peak to peak, the rattling crags among, leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud, but every mountain now hath found a tongue, and jura answers, through her misty shroud, back to the joyous alps, which call to her aloud!" [ ] now bishop of the p. e. church of central new york. [ ] "christian believing and living." [ ] the rev. george b. little was born in castine, maine, december , . he was graduated at bowdoin college in . having studied theology at andover, he was ordained in pastor of the first congregational church in bangor, me. in he married sarah edwards, daughter of that admirable and whole-souled servant of christ, the rev. elias cornelius, d.d. in november, , mr. little was installed as pastor of the congregational church in west newton, mass. early in march, , he went abroad for his health, but returned home again in may, and died among his own people, july , . the last words he littered were, "i shall soon be with christ." mr. little was a man of superior gifts, full of scholarly enthusiasm, and devoted to his master's work. [ ] miss bird is known to the world by her remarkable books of travel in japan and elsewhere. [ ] an account of the volunteer review in hyde park is given in sir theodore martin's admirable life of the prince consort, vol. v., pp. - , am. ed. the prince himself, in responding to a toast the same evening, speaks of it as "a scene which will never fade from the memory of those who had the good fortune to be present." [ ] it is hardly possible to allude to the great affliction of this illustrious lady without thinking also of the persistent acts of womanly sympathy by which, during the anguish and suspense of the past two months, she has tried to minister comfort to the stricken wife of our suffering and now sainted president. certainly, the whole case is unique in the history of the world. by this most tender and christ-like sympathy, she has endeared herself in a wonderful manner to the heart of the american people. god bless queen victoria! they say with one voice.--_new york, september_ , . [ ] the eldest son of her brother-in-law, mr. s. s. prentiss, a youth of rare promise, and who had especially endeared himself to his aunt abby. he died of fever at tallahoma, tennessee, during the war. chapter vii the struggle with ill-health. - . i. at home again in new york. the church of the covenant. increasing ill-health. the summer of . death of louisa payson hopkins. extracts from her journal. summer of . letters. despondency. we come now to a new phase of mrs. prentiss' experience as a pastor's wife. before her husband resigned his new york charge, during the winter of - , the question of holding a service in the upper part of the city, with the view to another congregation, was earnestly discussed in the session and among the leading members of the church, but nothing then came of it. soon after his return from europe, however, the project was revived, and resulted at length in the formation of the church of the covenant. in consequence of the great civil war, which was then raging, the undertaking encountered difficulties so formidable, that nothing but extraordinary zeal, liberality, and wise counsel on the part of his friends and the friends of the movement could overcome them. for two or three years the new congregation held service in what was then called dodworth's studio building at the corner of fifth avenue and twenty-sixth street, but in it entered the chapel on thirty-fifth street, and in occupied the stately edifice on park avenue. in the manifold labors, trials, and discouragements connected with this work, mrs. prentiss shared with her husband; and, when finally crowned with the happiest success, it owed perhaps as much to her as to him. this brief statement seems needful in order to define and render clear her position, as a pastor's wife, during the next twelve years. after spending some weeks in newark and portland, she found herself once more in new york in a home of her own and surrounded by friends, both old and new. the records of the following four or five years are somewhat meagre and furnish few incidents of special significance. the war, with its terrible excitement and anxieties, absorbed all minds and left little spare time for thought or feeling about anything else. domestic and personal interests were entirely overshadowed by the one supreme interest of the hour--that of the imperiled national life. it was for mrs. prentiss a period also of almost continuous ill-health. the sleeplessness from which she had already suffered so much assumed more and more a chronic character, and, aggravated by other ailments and by the frequent illness of her younger children, so undermined her strength, that life became at times a heavy burden. she felt often that her days of usefulness were past. but the master had yet a great work for her to do, and-- in ways various, or, might i say, contrarious-- he was training her for it during these years of bodily infirmity and suffering. the summer of was passed at newport. in a letter to mrs. smith, dated july th, she writes: we find the cliff house delightful, within a few minutes' walk of the sea, which we have in full view from one of our windows. and we have no lack of society, for the bancrofts, miss aspinwall and her sister, as well as the skinners, are very friendly. but i am so careworn and out of sorts, that this beautiful ocean gives me little comfort. i seem to be all the time toting one child or another about, or giving somebody paregoric or rhubarb, or putting somebody to sleep, or scolding somebody for waking up papa, who is miserable, and his oration untouched. there, don't mind me; it's at the end of a churchless sunday, and i dare say i am "only peevis'," as the little boy said. but in a few weeks the children were well again and her own health so much improved, that she was able to indulge in surf-bathing, which she "enjoyed tremendously," and early in the fall the whole family returned to town greatly refreshed by the summer's rest. on the th of january, , her sister, mrs. hopkins, died. this event touched her deeply. she hurried off to williamstown, whence she wrote to her husband, who was unable to accompany her: if you had known that i should not get here till half-past nine last night, and that in an open sleigh from north adams, you would not have let me come. but so far i am none the worse for it; and, when i came in and found the professor and t. and eddy sitting here all alone and so forlorn in their unaccustomed leisure, i could not be thankful enough that a kind providence had allowed me to come. it is a very great gratification to them all, especially to the professor, and even more so than i had anticipated. in view of the danger of being blocked up by another snow-storm, i shall probably think it best to return by another route, which they all say is the best. i hope you and my precious children keep well. no picture of mrs. prentiss' life would be complete, in which her sister's influence was not distinctly visible. to this influence she owed the best part of her earlier intellectual training; and it did much to mould her whole character. mrs. hopkins was one of the most learned, as well as most gifted, women of her day; and had not ill-health early disabled her for literary labors, she might, perhaps, have won for herself an enduring name in the literature of the country. there were striking points of resemblance between her and sara coleridge; the same early intellectual bloom; the same rare union of feminine delicacy and sensibility with masculine strength and breadth of understanding; the same taste for the beautiful in poetry, in art, and in nature, joined to similar fondness for metaphysical studies; the same delight in books of devotion and in books of theology; and the same varied erudition. only one of them seems to have been an accomplished hebraist, but both were good latin and greek scholars; and both were familiar with italian, spanish, french, and german. even in sara coleridge's admiration and reverence for her father, mrs. hopkins was in full sympathy with her. she lacked, indeed, that poetic fancy which belonged to the author of "phantasmion;" nor did she possess her mental self-poise and firmness of will; but in other respects, even in physical organization and certain features of countenance, they were singularly alike. and they both died in the fiftieth year of their age. louisa payson was born at portland, february , . even as a child she was the object of tender interest to her father on account of her remarkable intellectual promise. he took the utmost pains to aid and encourage her in learning to study and to think. the impression he made upon her may be seen in the popular little volume entitled "the pastor's daughter," which consists largely of conversations with him, written out from memory after his death. she was then in her sixteenth year. the records of the next eight years, which were mostly spent in teaching, are very meagre; but a sort of literary journal, kept by her between and , shows something of her mental quality and character, as also of her course of reading. she was twenty-three years old when the journal opens. here are a few extracts from it: boston, nov. , . last evening i passed in company with mr. dana. [ ] i conversed with him only for a few moments about mr. alcott's school, and had not time to ask one of the ten thousand questions i wished to ask. i have been trying to analyse the feeling i have for men of genius, coleridge, wordsworth and dana, for example. i can understand why i feel for them unbounded admiration, reverence and affection, but i hardly know why there should be so much excitement--painful excitement--mingled with these emotions. next to possessing genius myself would be the pleasure of living with one who possessed it. _nov. th._--i have read to-day one canto of dante's inferno and eight or ten pages of cicero de amicitia. in this, as well as in de senectute which i have just finished, i am much interested. i confess i am not a little surprised to find how largely the moderns are indebted to the ancients; how many wise observations on life, and death, the soul, time, eternity, etc, have been repeated by the sages of every generation since the days of cicero. _jan. th, ._--i spent last evening with mr. dana, and the conversation was, of course, of great interest. we talked of some of the leading reviews of the day, and then of the character of our literature as connected with our political institutions. this led to a long discussion of the latter subject, but as the same views are expressed in mr. d.'s article on law, i shall pass it over. [ ] i differed from him in regard to the french comedies, especially those of moliere; however, he allowed that they contain genuine humor, but they are confined to the exhibition of _one_ ridiculous point in the character, instead of giving us the whole man as shakespeare does. _sept, d._--this morning i have had one of the periods of _insight,_ when the highest spiritual truths pertaining to the divine and human natures, become their own light and evidence, as well as the evidence of other truths. no speculations, no ridicule can shake my faith in that which i thus see and feel. i was particularly interested in thinking of the regeneration of the spirit and the part which faith, hope, and love, have in effecting it. _sab. d._--it seems to me that this truth alone, there is a god, is sufficient, rightly believed, to make every human being absolutely and perfectly happy. _jan. th, ._--wednesday evening attended mr. emerson's lecture on genius, of which i shall _attempt_ to say nothing except that it was most delightful. thursday morning mr. emerson [ ] called to see me and gave me a ticket for his course. afterwards mr. dana called. it seems to me that i have lived _backwards;_ in other words, the faculties of my mind which were earliest developed, were those which in other minds come last--reflection and solidity of judgment; while fancy and imagination, in so far as i have any at all, have followed. _sat. jan. th._--my occupations in the way of books at present, consist in reading "antigone," guizot's "history," lockhart's "scott," and _sundries._ i am also translating large extracts from claudius, with a view to writing an article about him, if the fates shall so will it. [ ] _thurs. jan. st._--mr. emerson's lecture last night was on comedy. he professed to enter on the subject with reluctance, as conscious of a deficiency in the organ of the ludicrous--a profession, however, that was not substantiated very well by the lecture itself, which convulsed the audience with laughter. he spoke in the commencement of the silent history written in the faces of an assembly, making them as interesting to a spectator as if their lives were written in their features. _ th._--i began yesterday schleiermacher's "christliche glaube"--a profound, learned, and difficult work, i am told--jouffroy's "philosophical writings," landor's "pericles and aspasia," and "the gurney papers." considering that i was already in the midst of several books, this is rather too much, but i could not help it; the books were lent me and must be read and returned speedily. i have been all the morning employed in writing an abstract of the report of the prison discipline society, and am wearied and stupefied. _jan. th, ._--went to mr. ripley's where i met dr. channing, and listened to a discussion of spinoza's religious opinions. this afternoon mr. d. came again; talked about the trinity and other theological points. this evening, heard prof. silliman. i have nearly finished fichte, and like him on the whole exceedingly, though i think he errs in placing the roots of the speculative in the practical reason. it seems to me that neither grows out of the other, but that they are coincident spheres. still, there is a truth, a great truth, in what he says. it is true that action is often the most effectual remedy against speculative doubts and perplexities. when you are in the dark about this or that point, ask what command does conscience impose upon me at this moment--obey it and you will find light. these extracts will suffice to show the quality and extent of her reading. what sort of fruit her reading and study bore may be seen by her articles on claudius and goethe, in the new york review. no abler discussion of the genius and writings of goethe had at that time appeared in this country; while the article on claudius was probably the first to make him known to american readers. during many of the later years of her life mrs. hopkins was a martyr to ill-health. the story of her sufferings, both physical and mental, as artlessly told in little diaries which she kept, is "wondrous pitiful;" no pen of fiction could equal its simple pathos. again and again, as she herself knew, she was on the very verge of insanity; nothing, probably, saving her from it but the devotion of her husband, who with untiring patience and a mother's tenderness ministered, in season and out of season, to her relief. often would he steal home from his beloved observatory, where he had been teaching his students how to watch the stars, and pass a sleepless night at her bedside, reading to her and by all sorts of gentle appliances trying to soothe her irritated nerves. and this devotion ran on, without variableness or shadow of turning, year after year, giving itself no rest until her eyes were closed in death. [ ] let us now resume our narrative. a portion of the summer of was passed by mrs. prentiss at newport. her season of rest was again invaded by severe illness among her children. under date of august d, she writes to mrs. smith: i can see that our landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks g. will not get well. sometimes, in awful moments, i think so too; but then i cheer up and get quite elated. last night as i lay awake, too weary to sleep, i heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw. i thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent. but after a time i found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than miss h. does from our house in new york. his fearful cough! oh, this war! this war! i never hated and revolted against it as i did then. i had heard some one say such a young man lay dying of consumption in this street, but till then was too absorbed with my own incessant cares to hear the cough, as the rest had done. i never realised how i felt about our country till i found the terror of losing, a link out of that little golden chain that encircles my sweetest joys, was a _kindred_ suffering. have the times ever looked so black as they do now? we seem to be drifting round without chart or pilot. two weeks later, august th, she writes to her cousin, miss shipman: g. is really up and about, looking thin and white, and feeling hungry and weak; but little h. has been sick with the same disease these ten days past. i got your letter and the little cat, for which g. and i thank you very much. i should think it would about kill you to cook all day even for our soldiers, but on the whole can not blame any one who wants to get killed in their service. i am impressed more and more with their claims upon us, who confront every danger and undergo every suffering, while we sit at home at our ease. however, the ease i have enjoyed during the last five weeks has not been of a very luxurious kind, and i have felt almost discouraged, as day after day of confinement and night after night of sleeplessness has pulled down my strength. but, what am i doing? complaining, instead of rejoicing that i am not left unchastised. after a careworn summer at newport, she went with the children to williamstown, where a month was passed with her brother-in-law, professor hopkins. the following letters relate to this visit: _to her husband, williamstown, sept. , ._ i am glad to find that you place reliance on the reports of our late victory, for i have been in great suspense, seeing only the world, which was throwing up its hat and declaring the war virtually ended. i have no faith in such premature assertions, of which we have had so many, but was most anxious to know your opinion. do not fail to keep me informed of what is going on. the children are all out of doors and enjoying themselves. the professor has gone on horseback to see about his buckwheat. he took me up there yesterday afternoon, and i crawled through forty fences (more or less) and got a vast amount of exercise, which did not result in any better sleep, however, than no exercise does. caro. h. read me yesterday a most interesting letter from her brother henry, describing the scene at bull run when he went there five days after the battle. it is very painful to find such mismanagement as he deplores. he gave a most touching account of a young fellow who lay mortally wounded, where he had lain uncared-for with his companions the five days, and whom they were obliged to decline removing, as they had only room for a portion of the hopeful cases. after beseeching mr. h. to see that he was removed, and entreating to know when and how he was ever to get home if they left him, he was told that it was not possible to make room for him in this train of ambulances. as mr. h. tore himself away, he heard him say, "here, lord, i give myself away; 'tis all that i can do." the torture of the wounded men in the ambulances was so frightful, that mr. h. gave each of them morphine enough to kill three well men. they "cried for it like dogs and licked my hands lest they should lose a drop," he adds. as a contrast to this letter, some of the new recruits came into the professor's grounds yesterday to get bouquets, and thought if _their_ folks had a "yard" so gayly decked with flowers they would feel set up. _to mrs. smith, williamstown, sept. , ._ i have been feeling languid, or lazy, ever since i came here, and for a few days past have been miserable; but i am better to-day. this place is perfectly lovely and grows upon me every day. but the professor is entirely absorbed in his loss. he does not know it, or else thinks he does not show it, for he makes no complaint, but it is in every tone and word and look. it is plain that louisa's ill-health, which might have weaned a selfish man from her, only endeared her to him; she was so entirely his object day and night, that he misses her and the _care_ of her, as a mother does her sick child. if we ride out he says, "here i often came with _her_;" if a bird sings, "that is a note she used to love;" if we see a flower, "that is one of the flowers she loved." he has an astonishing amount of journal manuscripts, and i think may in time prepare something from them.... isn't it frightful how cotton goods have run up! i gave twenty cents for a yard of silicia (is that the way to spell it?) and suppose everything else has rushed up too. i hope you are prepared to tell me exactly what to buy and instruct me in the way i should go. _to her husband, williamstown, sept. ._ i spent yesterday forenoon looking over louisa's papers and found an enormous mass of manuscript; journals, extract books, translations, and work enough planned and begun for many lifetimes. it was very depressing. one's only refuge is faith in god, and in the certainty that her lingering illness was more acceptable to him than years of active usefulness, and such extraordinary usefulness even as she was so fitted for. i read over some of my own letters written many, many years ago; and the sense this gave me of lost youth and vivacity and energy, was, for a time, most painful.... i have felt for a long while greatly discouraged and depressed, yes, weary of my life, because it seems to me that broken down and worn out as i am, and full of faults under which i groan, being burdened, i could not make you happy. but your last letter comforted me a good deal. i see little for us to do but what you suggest: to cheer each other up and wear out rather than rust out. it is more and more clear to me, that patience is our chief duty on earth, and that we can not rest here. i am anxious to know what you think of the president's proclamation. [ ] the professor likes it. he seems able to think of little but his loss. even when speaking in the most cheerful way, tears fill his eyes, and the other day putting a letter into my hands to read, he had to run out of the room. the letter stated that fifty young persons owed their conversion to louisa's books; it was written some years ago. his mother spent saturday here. she is very bright and cheerful and full of sly humor; he did everything to amuse her and she enjoyed her visit amazingly. i long to see you. letters are more and more unsatisfactory, delusive things. m. is going to have a "party" this afternoon, and is going to one this forenoon. the others are bright and busy as bees. good-bye. a tinge of sadness is perceptible in most of her letters during this year. her sister's death, the fearful state of the country, protracted sickness among her children, and her own frequent ill-turns and increasing sense of feebleness, all conspired to produce this effect. but in truth her heart was still as young as ever and a touch of sympathy, or an appeal to her love of nature, instantly made it manifest. an extract from a letter to miss anna warner, dated new york, december th, may serve as an instance: i wanted to write a book when the trunk came this afternoon; that is, a book full of thanks and exclamation marks. you could not have bought with money anything for my christmas present, that could give half the pleasure. i shut myself up in my little room up-stairs (i declare i don't believe you saw that room! did you?), and there i spread out my mosses and my twigs and my cones and my leaves and admired them till i had to go out and walk to compose myself. then the children came home and they all admired too, and among us we upset my big work-basket and my little work-basket, and didn't any of us care. my only fear is that with all you had to do you did too much for me. those little red moss cups are _too_ lovely! and as to all those leaves how i shall leaf out! g. asked me who sent me all those beautiful things. "miss warner," quoth i absently. "didn't miss anna send any of them?" he exclaimed. so you see you twain do not pass as one flesh here. i have read all the "books of blessing" [ ] save gertrude and her cat--but though i like them all very much, my favorite is still "the prince in disguise." if you come across a little book called "earnest," [ ] published by randolph, do read it. it is one of the few _real_ books and ought to do good. i have outdone myself in picture-frames since you left. i got a pair of nippers and some wire, which were of great use in the operation. i am now busy on mr. bull, for mr. prentiss' study. to one of her sisters-in-law she wrote, under the same date: i do not know as i ever was so discouraged about my health as i have been this fall. sometimes i think my constitution is quite broken down, and that i never shall be good for anything again. however, i do not worry one way or the other but try to be as patient as i can. i have been a good deal better for some days, and if you could see our house you would not believe a word about my not being well, and would know my saying so was all a sham. to tell the truth, it does look like a garden, and when i am sick i like to lie and look at what i did when i wasn't; my wreaths, and my crosses, and my vines, and my toadstools, and other fixins. yesterday i made a bonnet of which i am justly proud; to-morrow i expect to go into mosses and twigs, of which miss anna warner has just sent me a lot. she and her sister were here about a fortnight. they grow good so fast that there is no keeping track of them. does any body in portland take their paper? [ ] the children are all looking forward to christmas with great glee. it is a mercy there are any children to keep up one's spirits in these times. was there ever anything so dreadful as the way in which our army has just been driven back! [ ] but if we had had a brilliant victory perhaps the people would have clamored against the emancipation project, and anything is better than the perpetuation of slavery. our congregation is fuller than ever, but there is no chance of building even a chapel. shopping is pleasant business now-a-days, isn't it? we shall have to stop sewing and use pins. * * * * * ii. another care-worn summer. letters from williamstown and rockaway. hymn on laying the corner-stone of the church of the covenant. the records of are confined mostly to her letters written during the summer. in june she went again with the younger children to williamstown, where she remained a month. the family then proceeded to rockaway, long island, and spent the rest of the season there in a cottage, kindly placed at their disposal by mrs. william g. bull. they passed through new york barely in time to escape the terrible riots, which raged there with such fury in the early part of july. a few extracts from her letters belonging to this period follow: _to her husband, troy, june ._ i hope you'll not be frightened to get a letter mailed here; anyhow i can't resist the temptation to write, though standing up in a little newspaper office. we were routed up at half past five this morning by pounds and yells about taking the "northern railroad." on reaching troy the captain bid us hurry or we should lose the train, and we did hurry, though i pretty well foresaw our fate, and after a running walk of a quarter of a mile, we had the felicity of finding the train had left and that the next one would not start till twelve. the little darlings are bearing the disappointment sweetly. p.m.--after depositing my note in the post-office, we strolled about awhile and then came across to a hotel, where i ordered a lunch-dinner. we got through at twelve and marched to the station, expecting to start at once, when m. came running up to me declaring there was no train to williamstown till five o'clock. my heart fairly turned over; however, i did not believe it, but on making inquiries it proved to be only too true. for a minute i sat in silent despair. just then the landlord of the hotel drew nigh and said to me, "you don't look very healthy, mrs.; if you'll walk over to my house, i will give you a bedroom free of charge and you can lie down and rest awhile." over to his house we went, weary enough. after awhile, finding them all forlorn, i got a carriage and we drove out; on coming back i ordered some ice-cream, which built us all up amazingly. the children are now counting the minutes till five. one of the boys is perched on a wash-stand with his feet dangling down through the hole where the bowl should be; the other is eating crackers; the landlord is anxious i should take a glass of wine; and m. is everywhere at once, having nearly worn out my watch-pocket to see what time it was. _monday, june st._--it is now going on a fortnight since we left home. oh, if it were god's will, how i should love to get well, pay you back some of the debts i owe you, be a better mother to my children, write some more books, and make you love me so you wouldn't know what to do with yourself! just to see how it would seem to be well, and to show you what a splendid creature i could be, if once out of the harness! a modest little list you will say!... i said to myself, is it after all such a curse to suffer and to be a source of suffering to others? isn't it worth while to pay something for warm human sympathies and something for rich experience of god's love and wisdom? and i felt, that for you to have a radiant, cheerful, health-happy wife was not, perhaps, so good for you, as a minister of christ's gospel, as to have the poor feeble creature whose infirmities keep you anxious and off the top of the wave. saturday afternoon the professor took me off strawberrying again. can you believe that till this june i never went strawberrying in my life? i don't eat them, so the fun is in the picking. do you realise how kind the professor is to me? i am afraid i don't. he works very hard, too hard, i think; but perhaps he does it as a refuge from his loneliness. his heart seems still full of tenderness toward louisa. yesterday he took me aside and told me, with much emotion, that he dreamed the night before that she floated towards him with a leaf in her hand, on which she wrote the words "sabbath peacefulness." i love him much, but am afraid of him, as i am of all men--even of you; you need not laugh, i am. to mrs. smith she writes from rockaway, july th: we were glad to hear that you were safely settled at prout's neck, far from riots, if not from rumors thereof. we have as convenient and roomy and closetty a cottage as possible. we are within three minutes or so of the beach, and go back and forth, bathe, dig sand, and stare at the ocean according to our various ages and tastes. i really do not know how else we spend our time. i sew a little, and am going to sew more when my machine comes; read a little, doze a little, and eat a good deal. the butcher calls every morning, and so does the baker with excellent bread; twice a week clams call at thirty cents the hundred; we get milk, butter, and eggs without much trouble; and ice and various vegetables without any, as mrs. bull sends them to us every day, with sprinklings of fruit, pitchers of cream, herring and whatever is going. we either sit on the beach looking and listening to the waves, every evening, or we run in to mrs. bull's; or gather about our parlor-table reading. by ten we are all off to bed. george does nothing but race back and forth to new york on seminary business; he has gone now. i went with him the other day. the city looks pinched and wo-begone. we were caught in that tornado and nearly pulled to pieces. _ th._--you will be sorry to hear that our last summer's siege with dysentery bids fair to be repeated. yesterday, when the disease declared itself, i must own that for a few hours i felt about heart-broken. my own strength is next to nothing, and how to face such a calamity i knew not. ah, how much easier it is to pray daily, "oh, jesus christus, wachs in mir!" than to consent to, yea rejoice in, the terms of the grant! well, george went for the doctor. his quarters at this season are right opposite; he is a german and brother of the author auerbach. we brought g.'s cot into our room and george and i took care of him till three o'clock, when for the first time since we had children, i gave out and left the poor man to get along as nurse as he best could. i can tell you it comes hard on one's pride to resign one's office to a half-sick husband. i think i have let the boys play too hard in the sun. i long to have you see this pretty cottage and this beach. _aug. d._--the children are out of the doctor's hands and i do about nothing at all. i hope you are as lazy as i am. today i bathed, read the paper and finished john halifax. i wish i could write such a book! to miss gilman she writes, august th: we have the nicest of cottages, near the sea. i often think of you as i sit watching the waves rush in and the bathers rushing out. i have not yet thanked you for the hymns you sent me. the traveller's hymn sounds like george withers. mr. p. borrowed a volume of his poems which delights us both. i am glad you are asking your mother questions about your father. i am amazed at myself for not asking my dear mother many a score about my father, which no human being can answer now. i do not like to think of you all leaving new york. few families would be so missed and mourned. i can sympathise with you in regard to your present sunday "privileges." we have a long walk in glaring sunshine, sit on bare boards, live through the whole (or nearly the whole) prayer-book, and then listen, if we can, to a sermon three-quarters of an hour long, its length not being its chief fault. i am utterly unable to bear such fatigue, and spend my time chiefly at home, with some hope of more profit, at any rate. how true it is that our master's best treasures are kept in earthen vessels! humanly speaking, we should declare it to be for his glory to commit the preaching of his gospel to the best and wisest hands. but his ways are not as our ways.... i feel such a longing, when sunday conies, to spend it with good people, under the guidance of a heaven-taught man. a minister has such wonderful opportunity for doing good! it seems dreadful to see the opportunity more than wasted. the truth is, we all need, ministers and all, a closer walk with god. if a man comes down straight from the mount to speak to those who have just come from the same place, he must be in a state to edify and they to be edified. from new york she writes to miss shipman, october th: your letter came just as we started for poughkeepsie. the synod met there and i was invited to accompany george, and, quite contrary to my usual habits, i went. we had a nice time. i feel that you are in the best place in the world. next to dying and going home one's self, it must be sweet to accompany a christian friend down to the very banks of the river. isn't it strange that after such experiences we can ever again have a worldly thought, or ever lose the sense of the reality of divine things! but we are like little children--ever learning and ever forgetting. still, it is well to be learning, and i envy you your frequent visits to the house of mourning. you will miss your dear friend very much. i know how you love her. how many beloved ones you have already lost for a season!... don't set me to making brackets. i am as worldly now as i can be, and my head full of work on all sorts of things. i made two cornucopias of your pattern and filled them with grasses and autumn leaves, and they were magnificent. i got very large grasses in the rockaway marshes. the children are all well and as gay as larks. early in november the corner-stone of the church of the covenant was laid. she wrote the following hymn for the occasion: a temple, lord, we raise; let all its walls be praise to thee alone. draw nigh, o christ, we pray, to lead us on our way, and be thou, now and aye, our corner-stone. in humble faith arrayed, we these foundations laid in war's dark day. oppression's reign o'erthrown, sweet peace once more our own, do thou the topmost stone securely lay. and when each earth-built wall crumbling to dust shall fall, our work still own. be to each faithful heart that here hath wrought its part, what in thy church thou art-- the corner-stone. * * * * * iii. happiness in her children. the summer of . letters from hunter. affliction among friends. in the early part of she was more than usually afflicted with neuralgic troubles and that "horrid calamity," as she calls it, sleeplessness. "i know just how one feels when one can't eat or sleep or talk. i declare, a good deal of the time pulling words out of me is like pulling out teeth." still (she writes to a sister-in-law, jan. th), we are a happy family in spite of our ailments. i suffer a great deal and cause anxiety to my husband by it, but then i enjoy a great deal and so does he, and our younger children--to say nothing of a.--are sources of constant felicity. do not you miss the hearing little feet pattering round the house? it seems to me that the sound of my six little feet is the very pleasantest sound in the world. often when i lie in bed racked with pain and exhausted from want of food--for my digestive organs seem paralysed when i have neuralgia--hearing these little darlings about the house compensates for everything, and i am inexpressibly happy in the mere sense of possession. i hate to have them grow up and to lose my pets, or exchange them for big boys and girls. i suppose your boys are a great help to you and company too, but i feel for you that you have not also a couple of girls.... poor louisa! it is very painful to think what she suffered. her death was such a shock to me, i can hardly say why, that i have never been since what i was before. i suppose my nervous system was so shattered, that so unexpected a blow would naturally work unkindly. early in the following summer she was distressed by the sudden bereavement of dear friends and by the death of her nephew, who fell in one of the battles of the wilderness. in a letter to miss gilman, dated june th, she refers to this: your dear little flowers came in excellent condition, but at a moment when i could not possibly write to tell you so. the death of mrs. r. h. broke my heart. i only knew her by a sort of instinct, but i sorrowed in her mother's sorrow and in that of her sisters. death is a blessed thing to the one whom it leads to christ's kingdom and presence, but oh, how terrible for those it leaves fainting and weeping behind! we expect to go off for the summer on next thursday. we go to hunter, n. y., in the region of the catskills. my husband's mother has been with me during the last six weeks and has just gone home, and i have now to do up the last things in a great hurry. you may not know that my a. and m. s., and a number of other young people of their age, joined our church on last sunday. i can hardly realise my felicity. i seem to myself to have a new child. your sister may have told you of the loss of professor hopkins' son. he was the first grandchild in our family and his father's _all_. we may never hear what his fate was, but the suspense has been dreadful. her interest in the national struggle was intense and her conviction of its providential character unwavering. to a friend, who seemed to her a little lukewarm on the subject, she wrote at this time: for my part, i am sometimes afraid i shall die of joy if we ever gain a complete and final victory. you can call this spunk if you choose. but my spunk has got a backbone of its own and that is deep-seated conviction, that this is a holy war, and that god himself sanctions it. he spares nothing precious when he has a work to do. no life is too valuable for him to cut short, when any of his designs can be furthered by doing so. but i could talk a month and not have done, you wicked unbeliever. _to her husband, hunter, june , ._ this morning, after breakfast, i sallied out with six children to take a most charming walk, scramble, climb, etc. we put on our worst old duds, tuck up our skirts june , knee-high, and have a regular good time of it. if you were awake so early as eight o'clock--i don't believe you were! you might have seen us with a good spy-glass, and it would have made your righteous soul leap for joy to see how we capered and laughed, and what strawberries we picked, and how much of a child a. turned into. they all six "played run" till they had counted twelve and then they tumbled down and rolled in the grass, till i wondered what their bones were made of. i do not see that we could have found a better place for the children. what with the seven calves, the cows, the sheep, the two pet lambs, the dogs, hens, chickens, horses, etc., they are perfectly happy. just now they have been to see the butter made and to get a drink of buttermilk. we have lots of strawberries and cream, pot-cheese, johnny-cakes, and there are always eggs and milk at our service. from diplomatic motives i advise you not to say too much about hunter to people asking questions. it would entirely spoil its only great charm if a rush of silly city folks should scent it out. it is really a primitive place and that you can say. mr. coe preached an excellent sermon on sunday morning. _to mrs. smith, hunter, july , ._ i have just been off, all alone, foraging, and have come home bringing my sheaves with me: ground pine and red berries, with which i have made a beautiful wreath. i have also adorned the picture of gen. grant with festoons of evergreens, conjuring him the while not to disappoint our hopes, but to take richmond. alas! you may know, by this time, that he can't; but in lack of news since a week ago, i can but hope for the best. i've taken a pew and we contrive to squeeze into it in this wise: first a child, then a mother, then a child, then an annie, then a child, the little ones being stowed in the cracks left between us big ones. mr. r., the parson, looking fit to go straight into his grave, was up here to get a wagon as he was going for a load of chips. his wife was at home sick, without any servant, had churned three hours and the butter wouldn't come, and has a pew full of little ones. oh, my poor sisters in the ministry! my heart aches for them. mr. r. gave us a superior sermon last sunday.... i know next to nothing about what is going on in the world. but george writes that he feels decidedly pleased with the look of things. he has been carrying on like all possessed since i left, having company to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and finally went and had chi alpha all himself. _july th._--we went one day last week on a most delightful excursion, twenty-one of us in all. our drive was splendid and the scenery sublime; even we distinguished swiss travellers thought so! we came to one spot where ice always is found, cut out big pieces, ate it, drank it, threw it at each other and carried on with it generally. we had our dinner on the grass in the woods. we brought home a small cartload of natural brackets; some of them beautiful. _august st._--you have indeed had a "rich experience." [ ] we all read your letter with the deepest interest and feel that it would have been good to be there. your account of caro shows what force of character she possessed, as well as what god's grace can do and do quickly. this is not the first time he has ripened a soul into full christian maturity with almost miraculous rapidity. a veteran saint could not have laid down his armor and adjusted himself to meet death with more calmness than did this young disciple. i do not wonder her family were borne, for the time, above their sorrow, but alas! their bitter pangs of anguish are yet to meet them. her poor mother! how much she has suffered and has yet to suffer! all the more because she bears it so heroically. _to miss emily s. gilman, hunter, aug , ._ you must have wondered why i did not answer your letter and your book, for both of which i thank you. well, it has been such dry, warm weather, that i have not felt like writing; besides, for nurse i have only a little german girl fourteen years old, who never was out of new york before, and whom i have been so determined on spoiling that i couldn't bear to take her off from her play to mend, patch, darn, wash faces, necks, feet, etc., and unconsciously did every thing there was to do for the children and a little more besides. i like the little book very much. you have the greatest knack, you girls, of lighting on nice books and nice hymns. we are right in the midst of most charming walks. here is a grove and there is a brook; here is a creek, almost a river (big enough at any rate to get on to the map) and there a mountain. as to ferns and mosses for your poetical side, and as for raspberries and blackberries for your t'other side, time would fail me if i should begin to speak of them. i think a great deal of you and your sisters when off on foraging expeditions, and wish you were here notwithstanding you are mossy and ferny there. we have as yet made only one excursion. that was delightful and gave us our first true idea of the catskills. before mr. p. came i usually went off on my forenoon walk alone, unless the children trooped after, and came home a miniature birnam wood, with all sorts of things except creeping things and flying fowl. i have just finished reading to m. and a little girl near her age, a little french book you would like, called "augustin." i never met with a sweeter picture of a loving child anywhere. well, i may as well stop writing. remember me lovingly to all your dear household. to mrs. stearns she writes, sept. : how much faith and patience we poor invalids do need! the burden of life sits hard on our weary shoulders. i think the mountain air has agreed with our children better than the seaside has done, but george craves the ocean and the bathing. he spent this forenoon, as he has a good many others, in climbing the side of the mountain for exercise, views, and blackberries. i go with him sometimes. we had a few days' visit from prof. hopkins. he has heard confirmation of the rumors of poor eddy's death and burial. he means to go to ashland as soon as the state of the country makes it practicable, but has little hope of identifying e.'s remains. it is a great sorrow to him to _lose all he had_ in this horrible way, but he bears it with wonderful faith and patience, and says he never prayed for his son's life after he went into action. some letters received by him, give a pleasant idea of the christian stand e. took after entering the army. i believe this is lizzie p----'s wedding day. there is a beautiful rainbow smiling on it from our mountain home, and i hope a real one is glorifying hers. _to miss gilman, hunter, sept. ._ oh, i wish you were here on this glorious day! the foliage has begun to turn a little, and the mountains are in a state bordering on perfection. it is wicked for me stay in-doors even to write this, but it seems as if a letter from here would carry with it a savor of mountain air, and must do you more good than one from the city could. i wish i had thought sooner to ask you if you would like some of our mosses. i _thought_ i had seen mosses before, but found i had not. i will enclose some dried specimens. i thought, while i was in the woods this morning, that i never had thanked god half enough for making these lovely things and giving us tastes wherewith to enjoy them. you ask if i have spilled ink all down the side of this white house. yes, i have, wo be unto me. i was sick abed and got up to write to mr. p., not wanting him to know i was sick, and one of the children came in and i snatched him up in my lap to hug and kiss a little, and he, of course, hit the pen and upset the inkstand and burst out crying at my dismay. then might have been seen a headachy woman catching the apoplexy by leaning out of the window and scrubbing paint, sacrificing all her nice rags in the process, and dreadfully mortified into the bargain.... yesterday we were all caught in a pouring rain when several miles from home on the side of the mountain, blackberrying. we each took a child and came rolling and tearing down through the bushes and over stones, h.'s little legs flying as little legs rarely fly. we nearly died with laughing, and if i only knew how to draw, i could make you laugh by giving you a picture of the scene. you will judge from this that we are all great walkers; so we are. i take the children almost everywhere, and they walk miles every day. well, i will go now and get you some scraps of pressed mosses. * * * * * iv. the death of president lincoln. dedication of the church of the covenant. growing insomnia. resolves to try the water-cure. its beneficial effects. summer at newburgh. reminiscence of an excursion to paltz point. death of her husband's mother. funeral of her nephew, edward payson hopkins. two events rendered the month of april, , especially memorable to mrs. prentiss. one was the assassination of president lincoln on the evening of good friday. she had been very ill, and her husband, on learning the dreadful news from the morning paper, thought it advisable to keep it from her for a while; but one of the children, going into her chamber, burst into tears and thus betrayed the secret. her state of nervous prostration and her profound, affectionate admiration for mr. lincoln, made the blow the most stunning by far she ever received from any public calamity. it was such, no doubt, to tens of thousands; indeed, to the american people. no easter morning ever before dawned upon them amid such a cloud of horror, or found them so bowed down with grief. the younger generation can hardly conceive of the depth and intensity, or the strange, unnatural character, of the impression made upon the minds of old and young alike, by this most foul murder. [ ] the other event was of a very different character and filled her with great joy. it was the dedication, on the last sunday in april, of the new church edifice, whose growth she had watched with so much interest. in the spring of she was induced, by the entreaty of friends who had themselves tested his skill, to consult dr. schieferdecker, a noted hydropathist, and later to place herself under his care. in a letter to her cousin, miss shipman, she writes: "i want to tell you, but do not want you to mention it to anyone, that i have been to see dr. schieferdecker to know what he thought of my case. he says that i might go on dieting to the end of my days and not get well, but that his system could and would cure me, only it would take a _long_ time. i have not decided whether to try his process, but have no doubt he understands my disease." dr. schieferdecker had been a pupil and was an enthusiastic disciple of priesnitz. he had unbounded faith in the healing properties of water. he was very impulsive, opinionated, self-confident, and accustomed to speak contemptuously of the old medical science and those who practised it. but for all that, he possessed a remarkable sagacity in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic disease. mrs. prentiss went through the "cure" with indomitable patience and pluck, and was rewarded by the most beneficial results. her sleeplessness had become too deep-rooted to be overcome, but it was greatly mitigated and her general condition vastly improved. she never ceased to feel very grateful to dr. schieferdecker for the relief he had afforded her, and for teaching her how to manage herself; for after passing from under his care, she still continued to follow his directions. "no tongue can tell how much i am indebted to him," she wrote in . "i am like a ship that after poking along twenty years with a heavy load on board, at last gets into port, unloads, and springs to the surface." _to miss e. s. gilman, new york, feb. , ._ it is said to be an ill wind that blows nobody good, and as i am still idling about, doing absolutely nothing but receive visits from neuralgia, i have leisure to think of poor miss ----. i wrote to ask her if there was anything she wanted and could not get in her region; yesterday i received her letter, in which she mentions a book, but says "anything that is useful for body or mind" would be gratefully received. now i got the impression from that article in the independent, that she could take next to no nourishment. do you know what she _does_ take, and can you suggest, from what you know, anything she would like? what's the use of my being sick, if it isn't for her sake or that of some other suffering soul? i want, very much, to get some things together and send her; nobody knows who hasn't experienced it, how delightfully such things break in on the monotony of a sick-room. just yet i am not strong enough to do anything; my hands tremble so that i can hardly use even a pen; yet you need not think i am much amiss, for i go out every pleasant day, to ride, and some days can take quite a walk. the trouble is that when the pain returns, as it does several times a day, it knocks my strength out of me. i hope when all parts of my frame have been visited by this erratic sprite, it may find it worth while to beat a retreat. only to think, we are going to move to no. east twenty-seventh street, and you have all been and gone away! the rent is _enormous_, $ , having been just added to an already high price. our people have taken that matter in hand and no burden of it will come on us. i received your letter and am much obliged to you for writing to miss ----, for me; the reason i did not do it was, that it seemed like hurrying her up to thank me for the little drop of comfort i sent her. dear me! it's hard to be sick when people send you quails and jellies, and fresh eggs, and all such things--but to be sick and suffer for necessaries must be terrible. _to the same, new york, march , ._ i thank you for the details of miss ----'s case, as i wished to describe them to some friends. i sent her ten dollars yesterday for two of my friends. i also sent off a box by express, for the contents of which i had help. the things were such as i had persuaded her to mention; a new kind of farina, figs, two portfolios (of course she didn't ask for two, but i had one i thought she would, perhaps, like better than the one i bought), a few crackers, and several books. mr. p. added one of those beautiful large-print editions of the psalms which will, i think, be a comfort to her. i shall also send adelaide newton by-and-by; i thought she had her hands full of reading for the present, and the great thing is not to heap comforts on her all at once and then leave her to her fate, but keep up a stream of such little alleviations as can be provided. she said, she had poor accommodations for writing, so i greatly enjoyed fitting up the portfolio which was none the worse for wear, with paper and envelopes, a pencil with rubber at the end, a cunning little knife, some stamps, for which there was a small box, a few pens, etc. i know it will please you to hear of this, and as the money was furnished me for the purpose, you need not set it down to my credit. i meant to go to see your sister, but my head is still in such a weak state that though i go to walk nearly every day, i can not make calls. it is five weeks since i went to church, for the same reason. it is a part of god's discipline with me to keep me shut up a good deal more than the old adam in me fancies; but his way is _absolutely perfect_, and i hope i wouldn't change it in any particular, if i could. have you pusey's tract, "do all to the lord jesus"? if not, i must send it to you. it seems as if i had a lot of things i wanted to say, but after writing a little my hands and arms begin to tremble so that i can hardly write plainly. you never saw such a lazy life as i lead now-a-days; i can't do _any_ thing. i advise you to do what you have to do for christ _now_; by the time you are as old as i am perhaps you will have the will and not the power. well, good-bye till next time. the summer of this year was passed at newburgh in company with the misses butler--now mrs. kirkbride, of philadelphia, and mrs. booth, of liverpool--and the families of mr. william allen butler, mr. b. f. butler, and mr. john p. crosby, to all of whom mrs. prentiss was strongly attached. the late mr. daniel lord, the eminent lawyer, with a portion of his family, had also a cottage near by and was full of hospitable kindness. in spite of the exacting hydropathic treatment, she found constant refreshment and delight in the society of so many dear friends. "the only thing i have to complain of" she wrote, "is everybody being too good to me. how different it is being among friends to being among strangers!" in a letter to her husband, dated new york, sept. , , mr. william allen butler gives the following reminiscence of an excursion to paltz point and an evening at newburgh: from the date you, give in your note (to which i have just recurred) of our trip to paltz point, it seems that in writing you to-day i have unwittingly fallen on the anniversary of that pleasant excursion. without this reminder i could not have told the day or the year, but of the excursion itself i have always had a vivid and delightful recollection; and, if i am not mistaken, mrs. prentiss enjoyed it as fully as any one of the merry party. it was only on that jaunt and in our summer home at newburgh that i had the opportunity of knowing her readiness to enter into that kind of enjoyment, which depends upon the co-operation of every member of a circle for the entertainment of all. the elements of our group were well commingled, and the bright things evoked by their contact and friction were neither few nor far between. the game to which you allude of "inspiration" or "rhapsody" was a favorite. the evening at paltz point called out some clever sallies, of which i have no record or special recollection; but i know that then, as always, mrs. prentiss seemed to have at her pencil's point for instant use the wit and fancy so charmingly exhibited in her writings. she published somewhere an account of one of our inspired or rhapsodical evenings, but greatly to my regret failed to include in it her own contribution which was the best of all. i distinctly remember the time and scene--the september evening--the big, square sitting-room of the old seminary building in which you boarded--the bright faces whose radiance made up in part for the limitations of artificial light--the puzzled air which every one took on when presented with the list of unmanageable words, to be reproduced in their consecutive order in prose or verse composition within the next quarter or half hour--the stillness which supervened while the enforced "pleasures" of "poetic pains" or prose agony were being undergone--the sense of relief which supplemented the completion of the batch of extempore effusions--and the fun which their reading provoked. mrs. prentiss had contrived out of the odd and incoherent jumble of words a choice bit of poetic humor and pathos, which i never quite forgave her for omitting in the publication of the nonsense written by other hands. these trifles as they seemed at the time, and as in fact they were, become less insignificant in the retrospect, as we associate them with the whole character and being we instinctively love to place at the farthest remove from gloom or sadness, and as they rediscover to us in the distance the native vivacity and grace of which they were the chance expression. since that summer of , having lived away from new york, i saw little of mrs. prentiss, but i have a special remembrance of one little visit you made at our home in yonkers which she seemed very much to enjoy--saying of the reunion which made it so pleasant to the members of our family and all who happened to be together at the time, that it was "like heaven." [ ] during the summer of the sympathies of mrs. prentiss were much wrought upon by the sickness and death of her husband's mother, who entered into rest on the th of august, in the eighty-fourth year of her age. on the th of the previous january, she with the whole family had gone to newark to celebrate the eighty-third birthday of this aged saint. had they known it was to be the last, they could have wished nothing changed. it was a perfect winter's day, and the scene in the old parsonage was perfect too. there, surrounded by children and children's children, sat the venerable grandmother with a benignant smile upon her face and the peace of god in her heart. as she received in birthday gifts and kisses and congratulations their loving homage, the measure of her joy was full, and she seemed ready to say her _nunc dimittis_. she belonged to the number of those holy women of the old time who trusted in god and adorned themselves with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, and whose children to the latest generation rise up and call them blessed. in the course of this year her sympathies were also deeply touched by repeated visits from her brother-in-law, professor hopkins, on his way to and from virginia. allusion has been made already to the death of her nephew, lieutenant edward payson hopkins. he was killed in battle while gallantly leading a cavalry charge at ashland, in virginia, on the th of may, . in june of the following year his father went to ashland with the hope of recovering the body. five comrades had fallen with edward, and the negroes had buried them without coffins, side by side, in two trenches in a desolate swampy field and under a very shallow covering of earth. the place was readily discovered, but it was found impossible to identify the body. the disappointed father, almost broken-hearted, turned his weary steps homeward. when he reached williamstown his friends said, "he has grown ten years older since he went away." several months later he learned that there were means of identification which could not fail, even if the body had already turned to dust. accordingly he again visited ashland, attended this time by soldiers, a surgeon, and government officials. his search proved successful, and, to his joy, not only was the body identified, but, owing to the swampy nature of the ground, it was found to be in an almost complete state of preservation. there was something wonderfully impressive in the grave aspect and calm, gentle tone of the venerable man, as with his precious charge he passed through new york on his way home. in a letter to mrs. prentiss, dated january d, , he himself tells the story of the re-interment at williamstown: ... after stopping a minute at my door the wagon passed at once to the cemetery, and the remains were deposited in the tomb. this was on thursday. after consulting with my brother and his son (the chaplain) i determined to wait till the sabbath before the interment. accordingly, at o'clock--after the afternoon service--the remains of my dear boy were placed beside those of his mother. the services were simple, but solemn in a high degree. they were opened by an address from harry. prayer followed by rev. mr. noble, now supplying the desk here. he prefaced his prayer by saying that he never saw edward but once, when he preached at williamstown at a communion and saw him sitting beside me and partaking with me. singing then followed by the choir of which eddy was for a long time a member. the words were those striking lines of montgomery: go to the grave in all thy glorious prime, etc. after which the coffin was lowered to its place by young men who were friends of edward in his earlier years. the state of the elements was exceedingly favorable to the holding of such an exercise in the open air at a season generally so inclement. the night before there was every appearance of a heavy n. e. storm. but sabbath morning it was calm. as i went to church i noticed that the sun rested on the vermont mountains just north of us, though with a mellowed light as if a veil had been thrown over them. in the after part of the day the open sky had spread southward--so that the interment took place when the air was as mild and serene as spring, just as the last sun of the year was sinking towards the mountains. almost the entire congregation were present.... thus, dear sister, i have given you a brief account of the solemn but peaceful winding up of what has been to me a sharp and long trial, and i know to yourself and family also. in eternity we shall more clearly read the lesson which even now, in the light of opening scenes, we are beginning to interpret. [ ] richard h. dana, the poet. [ ] the article referred to appeared in the biblical repository and quarterly observer for january, . vol v., pp. - . it is entitled, "what form of law is best suited to the individual and social nature of man?" [ ] mr. ralph waldo emerson. [ ] the article appeared in the new york review for july, . [ ] some passages from the little diaries referred to, together with further extracts from her literary journal, will be found in appendix d, p. . [ ] the proclamation of emancipation. [ ] by anna warner. [ ] by her friend, mrs. frederick g. burnham. [ ] "the little corporal." [ ] at fredericksburg. [ ] referring to the sudden death of a young niece of mrs. s. [ ] this was written before the assassination of president garfield. [ ] the "rhapsody," referred to by mr. butler was preserved by a young lady of the party, and will be found in appendix e, p. . chapter viii. the pastor's wife and daughter of consolation. - . i. happiness as a pastor's wife. visits to newport and williamstown letters. the great portland fire. first summer at dorset. the new parsonage occupied. second summer at dorset. _little lou's sayings and doings_. project of a cottage. letters. _the little preacher_. illness and death of mrs. edward payson and of little francis. we now enter upon the most interesting and happiest period of mrs. prentiss's experience as a pastor's wife. the congregation of the church of the covenant had been slowly forming in "troublous times"; it was composed of congenial elements, being of one heart and one mind; some of the most cultivated families and family-circles in new york belonged to it; and mrs. prentiss was much beloved in them all. what a help-meet she was to her husband and with what zeal and delight she fulfilled her office, especially that of a daughter of consolation, among his people, will soon appear. how ignorant we often are, at the time, of the turning-points in our life! we inquire for a summer boarding-place and decide upon it without any thought beyond the few weeks for which it was engaged; and yet, perhaps, our whole earthly future or that of those most dear to us, is to be vitally affected by this seemingly trifling decision. so it happened to mrs. prentiss in . early in may her husband and his brother-in-law, dr. stearns, went, at a venture, to dorset, vt., and there secured rooms for their families during the summer. but little did either she, or they, dream that dorset was to be henceforth her summer home and her resting-place in death! [ ] the portland fire, to which reference is made in the following letters, occurred on the th of july, and consumed a large portion of the city. _to miss mary b. shipman, dorset, july , ._ never in my life did i live through such a spring and early summer as this! as to business and bustle, i mean. you must have given me up as a lost case! but i have thought of you every day and longed to hear how you were getting on, and whether you lived through that dreadful weather. annie went with the children to williamstown about the middle of june; i nearly killed myself with getting them ready to go and could see the flesh drop off my bones. george and i went to newport on what mrs. bronson called our "bridal trip," and stayed eleven days. mr. and mrs. mccurdy were kindness personified. we came home and preached on the first sunday in july, and then went to greenfield hill to spend the fourth with mrs. bronson. [ ] that nearly finished me, and then i went to williamstown on that hot friday and was quite finished on reaching there, to hear about the fire in portland. did you ever hear of anything so dreadful? i did not know for several days but h. and c. were burnt out of house and home; most of my other friends i knew were, and can there be any calamity like being left naked, hungry and homeless, everything gone forever.... but let no one say a word that has a roof over his head. all my father's sermons were burned, the house where most of us were born, his church, etc. fancy new haven stripped of its shade-trees, and you can form some idea of the loss of portland in that respect. well, i might go on talking forever, and not have said anything. [ ] the heat upset g. and we have been fighting off sickness for a week, i getting wild with loss of sleep. we are enchanted with dorset. we are so near the woods and mountains that we go every day and spend hours wandering about among them. if there is any difference, i think this place even more beautiful than williamstown; it suits us better as a summer retreat, from its great seclusion. i am, that is we are, mean enough to want to keep it as quiet and secluded as it is now, by not letting people know how nice it is; a very few fashionably dressed people would just spoil it for us. so keep our counsel, you dear child. a few days later she writes to mrs. smith, then in europe: on the sixth, a day of fearful heat, i went to williamstown, where i found all the children as well as possible, but heard the news of the portland fire which almost killed me. all my father's manuscripts are destroyed; we always meant to divide them among us and ought to have done it long ago. i heard of any number of injudicious babies as taking the inopportune day succeeding the fire to enter on the scene of desolation; all born in tents. i am sorry my children will never see my father's church, nor the house where i was born; but private griefs are nothing when compared with a calamity that is so appalling and that must send many a heart homeless and aching to the grave. i spent two weeks at williamstown, when george came for me, and the weather cooling off, we had a comfortable journey here. we are perfectly delighted with dorset; the sweet seclusion is most soothing, and the house is very pleasant. mr. and mrs. f. are intelligent, agreeable people, and do all they can to make us comfortable. the mountains are so near that i hear the crows cawing in the trees. we are making pretty things and pressing an unheard-of quantity of ferns. we go to the woods regularly every morning and stay the whole forenoon. in the afternoon we rest, read, write, etc.; sometimes we drive and always after tea george walks with me about two miles. i hope the war is not impeding your movements. i suppose you will call this a short letter, but i think it is as long as is good for you. all my dear nine pounds gained at newburgh have gone by the board. _august th._--i am sorry you had such hot weather in paris, but hope it passed off as our heat did. dr. hamlin's two youngest daughters have been here, and came to see me; they are both interesting girls, and the elder of the two really brilliant. they had never been here before, and were carried away with the beauties of their mother's birthplace. i wish you could see my room. every pretty thing grows here and has come to cheer and beautify it. the woods are everywhere, and as for the views, oh my child! however, i do not suppose anything short of mt. blanc will suit you now. in april, , the parsonage on thirty-fifth street was occupied. it had been built more especially for her sake, and was furnished by the generosity of her friends. her joy in entering it was completed by a "house-warming," at the close of which a passage of scripture was read by prof. smith, "all hail the power of jesus's name" sung, and then the blessing of heaven invoked upon the new home by that holy man of god, dr. thomas h. skinner. here she passed the next six years of her life. here she wrote the larger portion of "stepping heavenward." and here the cup of her domestic joy, and of joy in her god and saviour often ran over. here, too, some of her dearest christian friendships were formed and enjoyed. the summer of was passed at dorset. in less than a month of it she wrote one of her best children's books, _little lou's sayings and doings_; and much of the remainder was spent in discussing with her husband the project of building a cottage of their own. in a letter to her cousin, miss shipman, dated sept. , she writes: we have had our heads full all summer, of building a little cottage here. we are having a plan made, and have about fixed on a lot. we are rather tired of boarding; george hates it, and dorset suits us as well, i presume, as any village would. it is a lovely spot, and the people are as intelligent as in other parts of new england. the professor is disappointed at our choosing this rather than williamstown, but it would be no rest to us to go there. we have not decided to build; it may turn out too expensive; but we have taken lots of comfort in talking about it. we have been on several excursions, one of them to the top of equinox. it is a hard trip, fully six miles walking and climbing. i have amused myself with writing some little books of the susy sort: four in less than a month, a.'s sickness taking a good piece of time out of that period. they are to appear, or a part of them, in the riverside next winter, and then to be issued in book-form by hurd and houghton. this will a good deal more than furnish our cottage and what trees and shrubs we want, so that i feel justified in undertaking that expense. we had two weeks at newport before we came here, and mr. and mrs. mccurdy overwhelmed us with kindness, paying our traveling expenses, etc., and keeping up one steady stream of such favors the whole time. i never saw such people. how delightful it must be to be able to express such benevolence! well; you and i can be faithful in that which is least, at any rate. we have all had plenty to read all summer, and have sat out of doors and read a good deal. i am going now to carry a little wreath to a missionary's wife who is spending the summer here; a nice little woman; this will give me a three miles walk and about use up the rest of the forenoon. in the afternoon i have promised to go to the woods with the children, all of whom are as brown as indians. my room is all aflame with two great trees of maple; i never saw such a beautiful velvety color as they have. we have just had a very pleasant excursion to a mountain called haystack, and ate our dinner sitting round in the grass in view of a splendid prospect.... i have thus given you the history of our summer, as far as its history can be written. its ecstatic joys have not been wanting, nor its hours of shame and confusion of face; but these are things that can not be described. what a mystery life is, and how we go up and down, glad to-day and sorrowful to-morrow! i took real solid comfort thinking of you and praying for you this morning. i love you dearly and always shall. good-bye, dear child. the "four little books" afford a good illustration of the ease and rapidity with which she composed. when once she had fixed upon a subject, her pen almost flew over the paper. scarcely ever did she hesitate for a thought or for the right words to express it. her manuscript rarely showed an erasure or any change whatever. she generally wrote on a portfolio, holding it upon her knees. her pen seemed to be a veritable part of herself; and the instant it began to move, her face glowed with eager and pleasurable feeling. "a kitten (she wrote to a maiden friend) a kitten without a tail to play with, a mariner without a compass, a bird without wings, a woman without a husband (and fifty-five at that!) furnish faint images of the desolation of my heart without a pen." but although she wrote very fast, she never began to write without careful study and premeditation when her subject required it. about this time _the little preacher_ appeared. the scene of the story is laid in the black forest. before writing it she spent a good deal of time in the astor library, reading about peasant life in germany. in a letter from a literary friend this little work is thus referred to: i want to tell you what a german gentleman said to me the other day about your "little preacher." he was talking with me of german peasant life, and inquired if i had read your charming story. he was delighted to find i knew you, and exclaimed enthusiastically: "i wish i knew her! i would so like to thank her for her perfect picture. it is a miracle of genius," he added, "to be able thus to portray the life of a _foreign_ people." he is very intelligent, and so i know you will be pleased with his appreciation of your book. he said if he were not so poor, he would buy a whole edition of the "little preacher" to give to his friends. during the autumn of this year her sister-in-law, mrs. edward payson, died after a lingering, painful illness. the following letter, dated october , was written to her shortly before her departure: i have been so engrossed with sympathy for edward and your children, that i have but just begun to realise that you are about entering on a state of felicity which ought, for the time, to make me forget them. dear nelly, _i congratulate you with all my heart._ do not let the thought of what those who love you must suffer in your loss, diminish the peace and joy with which god now calls you to think only of himself and the home he has prepared for you. try to leave them to his kind, tender care. he loves them better than you do; he can be to them more than you have been; he will hear your prayers and all the prayers offered for them, and as one whom his mother comforteth, so will he comfort them. we, who shall be left here without you, can not conceive the joys on which you are to enter, but we know enough to go with you to the very gates of the city, longing to enter in with you to go no more out. all your tears will soon be wiped away; you will see the king in his beauty; you will see christ your redeemer and realise all he is and all he has done for you; and how many saints whom you have loved on earth will be standing ready to seize you by the hand and welcome you among them! as i think of these things my soul is in haste to be gone; i long to be set free from sin and self and to go to the fellowship of those who have done with them forever, and are perfect and entire, wanting nothing. dear nelly, i pray that you may have as easy a journey homeward as your father's love and compassion can make for you; but these sufferings at the worst can not last long, and they are only the messengers sent to loosen your last tie on earth, and conduct you to the sweetest rest. but i dare not write more lest i weary your poor worn frame with words. may the very god of peace be with you every moment, even unto the end, and keep your heart and mind stayed upon him! mrs. payson had been an intimate friend of her childhood, and was endeared to her by uncommon loveliness and excellence of character. the bereaved husband, with his little boy, passed a portion of the ensuing winter at the parsonage in new york. there was something about the child, a sweetness and a clinging, almost wild, devotion to his father, which, together with his motherless state, touched his aunt to the quick and called forth her tenderest love. many a page of stepping heavenward was written with this child in her arms; and perhaps that is one secret of its power. when, not very long afterwards, he went to his mother, mrs. prentiss wrote to the father: only this morning i was trying to invent some way of framing my little picture of francis, so as to see it every day before my eyes. and now this evening's mail brings your letter, and i am trying to believe what it says is true. if grief and pain could comfort you, you would be comforted; we all loved francis, and a. has always said he was too lovely to live. how are you going to bear this new blow? my heart aches as it asks the question, aches and trembles for you. but perhaps you loved him so, that you will come to be willing to have him in his dear mother's safe keeping; will bear your own pain in future because through your anguish your lamb is sheltered forever, to know no more pain, to suffer no more for lack of womanly care, and is already developing into the rare character which made him so precious to you. oh do try to rejoice for him while you can not but mourn for yourself. at the longest you will not have long to suffer; we are a short-lived race. but while i write i feel that i want some one to speak a comforting word to me; i too am bereaved in the death of this precious child, and my sympathy for you is in itself a pang. dear little lamb! i can not realise that i shall never see that sweet face again in this world; but i shall see it in heaven. god bless and comfort you, my dear afflicted brother. i dare not weary you with words which all seem a mockery; i can only assure you of my tenderest love and sympathy, and that we all feel with and for you as only those can who know what this child was to you. i am going to bed with an aching heart, praying that light may spring out of this darkness. give love from us all to ned and will. perhaps ned will kindly write me if you feel that you can not, and tell me all about the dear child's illness. * * * * * ii. last visit from mrs. stearns. visits to old friends at newport and rochester. letters. goes to dorset. _fred and maria and me_. letters. the life of a pastor's wife is passed in the midst of mingled gladness and sorrow. while somebody is always rejoicing, somebody, too, is always sick or dying, or else weeping. how often she goes with her husband from the wedding to the funeral, or hurries with him from the funeral to the wedding. and then, perhaps, in her own family circle the same process is repeated. the year was marked for mrs. prentiss in an unusual degree by the sorrowful experience. the latter part of may mrs. stearns, then suffering from an exhausting disease, came to new york and spent several weeks in hopes of finding some relief from change of scene. but her case grew more alarming; she passed the summer at cornwall on the hudson in great pain and feebleness, and was then carried home to lie down on her dying bed. _to mrs. stearns, newport, july , ._ we had a dreadful time getting here; i did not sleep a wink; there were , passengers on board, almost piled on each other, and such screaming of babies it would be hard to equal. there are lots of people here we know; ever so many stopped to speak to us after church. we are in the midst of a perfect world of show and glitter. but how many empty hearts drive up and down in this gay procession of wealth and fashion! i shall think of you a good deal to-day, as setting forth on your journey and reaching your new home. i do hope you will find it refreshing to go up the river, and that your rooms will be pleasant and airy. we shall be anxious to hear all about it. it is a constant lesson to be with mrs. mccurdy. i think she is a true christian in all her views of life and death. her sweet patience, cheerfulness and contentment are a continual reproof to me. here she is so lame that she can go nowhere--a lameness of over twenty years--restricted to the plainest food, liable to die at any moment, yet the very happiest, sunniest creature i ever saw. she says, with tears, that god has been _too good_ to her and given her too much; that she sometimes fears he does not love her because he gives her such prosperity. i reminded her of the four lovely children she had lost. "yes," she says, "but how many lovely ones i have left!" she says that the long hours she has to spend alone, on account of her physical infirmities, are never lonely or sad; she sings hymns and thinks over to herself all the pleasures she has enjoyed in the past, in her husband and children and devoted servants. she goes up to bed singing, and i hear her singing while she dresses. she said, the other day, that at her funeral she hoped the only services would be prayers and hymns of praise. i think this very remarkable from one who enjoys life as she does. [ ] _to the same, newport, july ._ george and i went to rochester, taking m. with us, last wednesday and got back friday night. we had one of those visits that make a mark in one's life; seeing mr. and mrs. leonard, and mrs. randall, and miss deborah, [ ] so fond of us, and all together we were stirred up as we rarely are, and refreshed beyond description. we rowed on mr. leonard's beautiful, nameless lake, fished, gathered water-lilies, ate black hamburg grapes and broiled chickens, and wished you had them in our place. mr. l.'s mother is a sweet, calm old lady, with whom i wanted to have a talk about christian perfection, in which she believes; but there was no time. it was a great rest to unbend the bow strung so high here at newport, where there is so much of receiving and paying visits. i have been reading a delightful french book, the history of a saintly catholic family of great talent and culture, six of whom, in the course of seven years, died the most beautiful, happy deaths. i am going to make an abstract of it, for i want everybody i love to get the cream of it. you would enjoy it; i do not know whether it has been translated. _to the same, dorset, july ._ here begins my first letter to you from your old room, whence i hope to write you regularly every week. that is the one only little thing i can do to show how truly and constantly i sympathise with you in your sore straits. it distresses me to hear how much you are suffering, and at the same time not to be near enough to speak a word of good cheer, or to do anything for your comfort. it grieves me to find how insecure my health is, for i had promised to myself to be your loving nurse, should any turn in your disease make it desirable. miss lyman boards here, but rooms at the sykes', and her friend miss warner is also here, but rooms out. miss w. is in delicate health, takes no tea or coffee, and is full of humor. we have run at and run upon each other, each trying to get the measure of the other, and shall probably end in becoming very good friends. it is a splendid day, and we feel perfectly at home, only missing you and finding it queer to be occupying your room. what a nice room it is! how i wish you were sitting here with me behind the shade of these maple trees, and that i could know from your own lips just how you are in body and mind. but i suppose the weary, aching body has the soul pretty well enchained. never mind, dear, it won't be so always; by and by the tables will be turned, and you will be the conqueror. i like to think that far less than a hundred years hence we shall all be free from the law of sin and death, and happier in one moment of our new existence, than through a whole life-time here. rest must and will come, sooner or later, to you and to me and to all of us, and it will be glorious. you may have seen a notice of the death of prof. hopkins' mother at the age of ninety-five. but for this terribly hot weather, i presume she might have lived to be one hundred. i shall not write you such a long letter again, as it will tire you, and if you would rather have two short ones a week, i will do that. let me know if i tire you. now good-bye, dear child; may god bless and keep you and give you all the faith and patience you need. _to miss mary b. shipman, dorset, aug. , ._ we spent rather more than two weeks at newport, taking two or three days to run to rochester, mass., to see some of our old new bedford friends. we had a charming time with them, as they took us up just where they left us nearly twenty years ago. oh, how our tongues did fly! we left newport for home on tuesday night about two weeks ago. i went on board and went to bed as well as usual, tossed and turned a few hours, grew faint and began to be sick, as i always am now if i lose my sleep; got out of bed and could not get back again, and so lay on the floor all the rest of the night without a pillow, or anything over me and nearly frozen. the boys were asleep, and anyhow it never crossed my mind to let them call george, who was in another state-room. he says that when he came in, in the morning, i looked as if i had been ill six months, and i am sure i felt so. imagine the family picture we presented driving from the boat all the way home, george rubbing me with cologne, a. fanning me, the rest crying! on saturday more dead than alive i started for this place, and by stopping at troy four or five hours, getting a room and a bed, i got here without much damage. our house is very pretty, and i suppose it will be done by next year. oh, how they do poke! george is so happy in watching it, and in working in his woods, that i am perfectly delighted that he has undertaken this project. it may add years to his life. imagine my surprise at receiving from scribner a check for one hundred and sixty-four dollars for six months of fred and maria and me. the little thing has done well, hasn't it? i feel now as if i should never write, any more; letter-writing is only talking and is an amusement, but book-writing looks formidable. excuse this horrid letter, and write and let me know how you are. meanwhile collect grasses, dip them in hot water, and sift flour over them. good-bye, dear. _fred and maria and me_ first appeared anonymously in the hours at home, in . it had been written several years before, and, without the knowledge of mrs. prentiss, was offered by a friend to whom she had lent the manuscript, to the atlantic monthly and to one or two other magazines, but they all declined it. she herself thus refers to it in a letter to mrs. smith, july : "i have just got hold of the hours at home. i read my article and was disgusted with it. my pride fell below zero, and i wish it would stay there." but the story attracted instant attention. "aunt avery" was especially admired, as depicting a very quaint and interesting type of new england religious character in the earlier half of the century. such men as the late dr. horace bushnell and dr. william adams were unstinted in their praise. in a letter to mrs. smith, dated a few months later, mrs. prentiss writes: "poor old aunt avery! she doesn't know what to make of it that folks make so much of her, and has to keep wiping her spectacles. i feel entirely indebted to you for this thing ever seeing the light." when published as a book, _fred and maria and me_ was received with great favor, and had a wide circulation. in a german translation appeared. [ ] although no attempt is made to reproduce the yankee idioms, much of the peculiar spirit and flavor of the original is preserved in this version. _to mrs. h. b. smith, dorset, august , ._ miss lyman says i have no idea of what miss w. really is; she looks as if she would drop to pieces, can not drive out, far less walk, and every word she speaks costs her an effort. miss lyman is not well either; and what with their health and mine, and a.'s, i see little of them. but what i do see is delightful, and i feel it to be a real privilege to get what scraps of their society i can. our house proves to be far prettier and more tasteful than i supposed. i am writing up lots of letters, and if i ever get well enough, shall try to begin on my katy once more. but since reading the récit d'une soeur, i am disgusted with myself and my writings. i ache to have you read it. miss lyman and miss warner send love to you. i do not like miss l.'s hacking cough, and she says she does not believe miss w. will live through the winter. among us we contrive to keep up a vast amount of laughter; so we shall probably live forever. _august th._--i have enjoyed miss lyman wonderfully, but want to get nearer to her. i see that she is one who does not find it easy to express her deepest and most sacred feelings. i read katy to her and miss w., as they were kind enough to propose i should, and they made some valuable suggestions to which i shall attend if i ever get to feeling able to begin to write again. i am as well as ever save in one respect, and that is my sleep; i do not sleep as i did before i left home, while i ought to sleep better, as i work several hours a day in the woods, in fact do almost literally nothing else.... but after all, we are having the nicest time in the world. i have not seen george so like himself for many years; he lives out of doors, pulls down fences, picks up brushwood, and keeps happy and well. i feel it a real mercy that his thoughts are agreeably occupied this summer, as otherwise he would be incessantly worried about anna. we work together a good deal; this morning i spoiled a new hatchet in cutting down milkweed where our kitchen garden is to be and we are literally raising our ebenezer, which we mean to conceal with vines in due season. george is just as proud of our woods as if he created every tree himself. the minute breakfast is over the boys dart down to the house like arrows from the bow, and there they are till dinner, after which there is another dart and it is as much as i can do to get them to bed; i wonder they don't sleep down there on the shavings. the fact is the whole prentiss family has got house on the brain. there, this old letter is done, and i am going to bed, all black and blue where i have tumbled down, and as tired as tired can be. _aug. th._--i made a fire in my woods yesterday, and another to-day, when i melted glue, and worked at my rustic basket, and felt extremely happy and amiable. _sept. th._--miss warner told me to-night that she thought my katy story commonplace at the beginning, but that she changed her mind afterward. of course i wrote a story about that marigold of g---- w----'s and i am dying to inflict it on you. then if you like it, hurrah! _to miss woolsey, dorset, aug. , ._ i was right glad to get your letter yesterday, and to learn a little of your whereabouts and whatabouts. you may imagine "him" as seated, spectacles on nose, reading the nation at one end of the table, and "her" as established at the other. this table is homely, but has a literary look, got up to give an air to our room; books and papers are artistically scattered over it; we have two bottles of ink apiece, and a box of stamps, a paper cutter and a pen-wiper between us. two inevitable vases containing ferns, grasses, buttercups, etc., remind us that we are in the country, and a "natural bracket" regales our august noses with an odor of its own. a can of peaches without any peaches in it, holds a specimen of lycopodium, and a marvelous lantern that folds up into nothing by day and grows big at night, brings up the rear. but the most wonderful article in this room is a bookcase made by "him," all himself, in which may be seen a big volume of fenelon, taylor's holy living and dying, the récit d'une soeur, which have you read? les soirées de saint petersbourg, prayers of the ages, a volume of goethe, aristotle's ethics and some other greek books; the life of mrs. fry, etc. etc. such a queer hodge-podge of books as we brought with us, and such a book-case! the first thing "he" ever made for "her" in his mortal life. our house isn't done, and what fun to watch it grow, to discuss its merits and demerits, to grab every check that comes in from magazine and elsewhere, and turn it into chairs and tables and beds and blankets! then for "them boys," what treasures in the way of bits of boards, and what feats of climbing and leaping! above all, think of "him" in an old banged-in hat, and "her" in a patched old gown, gathering brushwood in their woods, making it up into heaps, and warming themselves by the fires it is agoing for to make. "stick after stick did goody pull!" mr. p. is unusually well. his house is the apple of his eye, and he is renewing his youth. thus far the project has done him a world of good. _to mrs. stearns, dorset, september , ._ yesterday mr. f. and george drove somewhere to look at sand for mortar, and the horse took fright and wheeled round and pitched george out, bruising him in several places, but doing no serious harm. but i shudder when i think how the meaning might be taken out of everything in this world, for me, at least, by such an accident. he preached all day to-day; in the afternoon at rupert. i find my mission-school a good deal of a tax on time and strength, and it is discouraging business, too. one of the boys, fourteen years old, found the idea that god loved him so irresistibly ludicrous, that his face was a perfect study. i often think of you as these "active limbs of mine" take me over woods and fields, and remind myself that the supreme happiness of my father's life came to him when he called himself what you call yourself--a cripple. if it is not an expensive book, i think you had better buy a sister's story, of which i wrote to you, as it would be a nice sunday book to last some time; the catholicism you would not mind, and the cultivated, high-toned christian character you would enjoy. the boys complain, as george and i do, that the days are not half long enough. they have got their bedsteads and washstands done, and are now going to make couches for george and myself, and an indefinite number of other articles. _sept. th._--i am greatly relieved, my dear anna, to hear that you have got safely into your new home, and that you like it, and long to see you face to face. george has no doubt told you what a happy summer we have had. it has not been unmingled happiness--that is not to be found in this world--but in many ways it has been pleasant in spite of what infirmities of the flesh we carry with us everywhere, our anxiety about and sympathy with you, and the other cares and solicitudes that are inseparable from humanity. i had a great deal of comfort in seeing miss lyman while she was here, and in knowing her better, and now i am finding myself quite in love with her intimate friend, miss warner, who has been here all summer. a gentler, tenderer spirit can not exist. mrs. f.'s brother was here with his wife, some weeks ago, and they were summoned home to the death-bed of their last surviving child. mrs. f. read me a letter yesterday describing her last hours, which were really touching and beautiful, especially the distributing among her friends the various pretty things she had made for them during her illness, as parting gifts. i suppose this will be my last letter from dorset and from your old room. well, you and i have passed some happy hours under this roof. good-bye, dear, with love to each and all of your beloved ones. _to miss eliza a. warner, dorset, sept. , ._ i was so nearly frantic, my dear fanny, from want of sleep, that i could not feel anything. i was perfectly stupid, and all the way home from east dorset hardly spoke a word to my dear john, nor did he to me. [ ] the next day he said such lovely things to me that i hardly knew whether i was in the body or out of it, and then came your letter, as if to make my cup run over. i longed for you last night, and it is lucky for your frail body that can bear so little, that you were not in your little room at mrs. g.'s; but not at all lucky for your heart and soul. i hope god will bless us to each other. it is not enough that we find in our mutual affection something cheering and comforting. it must make us more perfectly his. what a wonderful thing it is that coming here entire strangers to each other, we part as if we had known each other half a century! i am not afraid that we shall get tired of each other. the great point of union is that we have gone to our saviour, hand in hand, on the supreme errand of life, and have not come away empty. all my meditations bring me back to that point; or, i should rather say, to him. i came here praying that in some way i might do something for him. the summer has gone, and i am grieved that i have not been, from its beginning to its end, so like him, so full of him, as to constrain everybody i met to love him too. isn't there such power in a holy life, and have not some lived such a life? i hardly know whether to rejoice most in my love for him, or to mourn over my meagre love; so i do both. when i think that i have a new friend, who will be indulgent to my imperfections, and is determined to find something in me to love, i am glad and thankful. but when, added to that, i know she will pray for me, and so help my poor soul heavenward, it does seem as if god had been too good to me. you can do it lying down or sitting up, or when you are among other friends. it is true, as you say, that i do not think much of "lying-down prayer" in my own case, but i have not a weak back and do not need such an attitude. and the praying we do by the wayside, in cars and steamboats, in streets and in crowds, perhaps keeps us more near to christ than long prayers in solitude could without the help of these little messengers, that hardly ever stop running to him and coming back with the grace every moment needs. you can put me into some of these silent petitions when you are too tired to pray for me otherwise. i have been writing this in my shawl and bonnet, expecting every instant to hear the bell toll for church, and now it is time to go. good-bye, dear, till by and by. well, i have been and come, and--wonder of wonders!--i have had a little tiny bit of a very much needed nap. mr. pratt gave us a really good sermon about living to christ, and i enjoyed the hymns. we have had a talk, my john and i, about death, and i asked him which of us had better go first, and, to my surprise, he said he thought _i_ should. i am sure that was noble and unselfish in him. but i am not going to have even a wish about it. god only knows which had better go first, and which stay and suffer. some of his children _must_ go into the furnace to testify that the son of god is there with them; i do not know why i should insist on not being one of them. sometimes i almost wish we were not building a house. it seems as if it might stand in the way, if it should happen i had a chance to go to heaven. i should almost feel mean to do that, and disappoint my husband who expects to see me so happy there. but oh, i do so long to be perfected myself, and to live among those whose one thought is christ, and who only speak to praise him! i like you to tell me, as you do in your east dorset letter, how you spend your time, etc. i have an insatiable curiosity about even the outer life of those i love; and of the inner one you can not say too much. good-bye. we shall have plenty of time in heaven to say all we have to say to each other. * * * * * iii. return to town. death of an old friend. letters and notes of love and sympathy. an old ladies' party. scenes of trouble and dying beds. fifty years old. letters. her return to town brought with it a multitude of cares. the following months drew heavily upon her strength and sympathies; but for all that they were laden with unwonted joy. the summer at dorset had been a very happy one. while there she had finished _stepping heavenward_ and on coming back to her city home, the cheery, loving spirit of the book seemed still to possess her whole being. katy's words at its close were evidently an expression of her own feelings: yes, i love everybody! that crowning joy has come to me at last. christ is in my soul; he is mine; i am as conscious of it as that my husband and children are mine; and his spirit flows forth from mine in the calm peace of a river, whose banks are green with grass, and glad with flowers. _to miss eliza a. warner, new york, oct. , _ this is the first moment since we reached home, in which i could write to you, but i have had you in my heart and in my thoughts as much as ever. we had a prosperous journey, but the ride to rupert was fearfully cold. i never remember being so cold, unless it was the night i reached williamstown, when i went to my dear sister's funeral.... i have told you this long story to try to give you a glimpse of the distracted life that meets us at our very threshold as we return home. and now i'm going to trot down to see miss lyman, whom i shall just take and hug, for i am so brimful of love to everybody that i must break somebody's bones, or burst. john preached _delightfully_ yesterday; i wanted you there to hear. but all my treasures are in earthen vessels; he seems all used up by his sunday and scarcely touched his breakfast. i don't see how his or my race can be very long, if we live in new york. all the more reason for running it well. and what a blessed, blessed life it is, at the worst! "central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation." good-bye, dear; consider yourself embraced by a hearty soul that heartily loves you, and that soul lives in e. p. on the th of october mr. charles h. leonard, an old and highly esteemed friend, died very suddenly at his summer home in rochester, mass. he was a man of sterling worth, generous, large-hearted, and endeared to mrs. prentiss and her husband by many acts of kindness. he was one of the founders of the church of the covenant and had also aided liberally in building its pleasant parsonage. _to miss eliza a. warner, new york, oct. , ._ i am reminded as i write my date, that i am fifty years old to-day. my john says it is no such thing, and that i am only thirty; but i begin to feel antiquated, dilapidated, and antediluvian, etc., etc. i write to let you know that we are going to rochester, mass., to attend the funeral of a dear friend there. it seems best for me to risk the wear and tear of the going and the coming, if i can thereby give even a little comfort to one who loves me dearly, and who is now left without a single relative in the world. for twenty-four years these have been faithful friends, loving us better every year, members of our church in new bedford, mercer street, and then here. they lived at rochester during the summer and we visited them there (you may remember my speaking of it) just before we went to dorset. mrs. leonard was then feeling very uneasy about her husband, but he got better and seemed about as usual, till last tuesday, when he was stricken down with paralysis and died on saturday. somebody said that spending so large a portion of my time as i do in scenes of sorrow, she wondered god did not give me more strength. but i think he knows just how much to give. i have been to newark twice since i wrote you. mrs. stearns is in a very suffering condition; i was appalled by the sight; appalled at the weakness of human nature (its physical weakness). but i got over that, and had a sweet glimpse at least of the _eternal_ felicity that is to be the end of what at longest is a brief period of suffering. i write her a little bit of a note every few days. i feel like a ball that now is tossed to sorrow and tossed back by sorrow to joy. for mixed in with every day's experience of suffering are such great, such unmerited mercies. two or three of the little notes follow: my dearest anna :-i long to be with you through the hours that are before you, and to help cheer and sustain you in the trial of faith and patience to which you are called. but unless you need me i will not go, lest i should be the one too many in your state of excitement and suspense. we all feel anxiety as to the result of the incision, but take comfort in casting our care upon god. may christ jesus, our dear saviour, who loves and pities you infinitely more than any of us do, be very near you in this season of suspense. i would gladly exchange positions with you if i might, and if it were best; but as i may not, and it is not best, because god wills otherwise, i earnestly commend you to his tender sympathy. if he means that you shall be restored to health, he will make you happy in living; if he means to call you home to himself, he will make you happy in dying. dear anna, stay yourself on him: he has strength enough to support you, when all other strength fails. remember, as lizzy smith said, you are "encompassed with prayers." _friday afternoon_, my dear anna :-i send you a "lullaby" for next sunday, which i met with at dorset, and hope it will speak a little word and sing a little song to you while the rest are at church. how i do wish i could see you every day! i feel restless with longing; but you are hardly able to take any comfort in a long visit and it is such a journey to make for-a short one! but, as i said the other day, if at any time you feel a little stronger and it would comfort you even a little bit to see me, i will drop everything and run right over. it seems hard to have you suffer so and do nothing for you. but don't be discouraged; pain can't last forever. "i know not the way i am going but well do i know my guide! with a childlike trust i give my hand, to the mighty friend at my side. the only thing that i say to him as he takes it, is, 'hold it fast. suffer me not to lose my way, and bring me home at last!'" my dear anna:-i feel such tender love and pity for you, but i know you are too sick to read more than a few words. "in the furnace god may prove thee, thence to bring thee forth more bright but can never cease to love thee: thou art precious in his sight!" your ever affectionate lizzy. _to mrs. lenard, friday, oct. , ._ we got home safely last evening before any of the children had gone to bed, and they all came running to meet us most joyfully. this morning i am restless and can not set about anything. it distresses me to think how little human friendship can do for such a sorrow as yours. when a sufferer is on the rack he cares little for what is said to him though he may feel grateful for sympathy. i found it hard to tear myself away from you so soon, but all i could do for you there i could do all along the way home and since i have got here: love you, be sorry for you, and constantly pray for you. i am sure that he who has so sorely afflicted you accepts the patience with which you bear the rod, and that when this first terrible amazement and bewilderment are over, and you can enter into communion and fellowship with him, you will find a joy in him that, hard as it is to the flesh to say so, transcends all the sweetest and best joys of human life. you will have nothing to do now but to fly to him. i have seen the time when i could hide myself in him as a little child hides in its mother's arms, and so have thousands of aching hearts. in all our afflictions he is afflicted. but i must not weary you with words. may god bless and keep you, and fully reveal himself unto you! _to miss. e. a. warner, new york, nov. , ._ i have been lying on the sofa in my room, half asleep, and feeling rather guilty at the lot of gas i was wasting, but too lazy or too tired to get up to turn it down. your little "spray" hangs right over the head of my bed, an it was it was slightly dilapidated by its journey hither, i have tucked in a bit of green fern with it to remind me that i was not always in the sere and yellow leaf, but had a spring-time once. to think of your going for to go and write verses to me in my old age! i have just been reading them over and think it was real good of you to up and say such nice things in such a nice way. i'd no idea you _could!_ we did not come home from rochester through boston; if we had done so i meant to go and see you. i made it up in many loving thoughts to you on our twelve hours' journey. poor mrs. l. met me with open arms, and i was thankful indeed that i went, though every word i said in the presence of her terrible grief, sounded flat and cold and dead. how little the tenderest love and sympathy can do, in such sorrows! she was so bewildered and appalled by her sudden bereavement, that it was almost a mockery to say a word; and yet i kept saying what i _know_ is true, that christ in the soul is better than any earthly joy. both mr. prentiss and myself feel the reaction which must inevitably follow such a strain. you ask if i look over the past on my birthdays. i suppose i used to do it and feel dreadfully at the pitiful review, but since i have had the children's to celebrate, i haven't thought much of mine. but this time, being fifty years old, did set me upon thinking, and i had so many mercies to recount and to thank god for, that i hardly felt pangs of any sort. i suppose he controls our moods in such seasons, and i have done trying to force myself into this or that train of thought. i am sure that a good deal of what used to seem like repentance and sorrow for sin on such occasions, was really nothing but wounded pride that wished it could appear better in its own eyes. god has been so good to me! i wish i could begin to realise how good! i think a great many thoughts to you that i can't put on paper. life seems teaching some new, or deepening the impression of some old, lesson, all the time. you think a. may have looked scornfully at your little "spray." well, she didn't; she said, "what's that funny little thing perched up there? well, it's pretty anyhow." among the rush of visitors to-day were miss haines and the w----s. i fell upon miss w. and told her about you, furiously; then we got upon miss lyman, and it did my very soul good to hear miss haines praise and magnify her. never shall i cease to be thankful for being with her at dorset, to say nothing, dear, of you! do you know that there are twelve cases of typhoid fever at vassar? and that miss lyman is not as well as she was? i feel greatly concerned about her, not to say troubled. i don't suppose i shall ever hear her pray. but i shall hear her and help her praise. i don't believe a word about there being different grades of saints in heaven. some people think it modest to say that they don't expect to get anywhere near so and so, they are so--etc., etc. but i expect to be mixed all up with the saints, and to take perfect delight in their testimony to my saviour. can you put up with this miserable letter? folks can't rush to newark and to rochester and agonise in every nerve at the sufferings of others, and be quite coherent. i have sense enough left to know that i love you dearly, and that i long to see you and to take sweet counsel with you once more. don't fail to give me the helping hand. the following was written to mrs. stearns on her silver-wedding day, nov. : my dearest anna: i have thought of you all day with the tenderest sympathy, knowing how you had looked forward to it, and what a contrast it offers to your bridal day twenty-five years ago. but i hope it has not been wholly sad. you have a rich past that can not be taken from you, and a richer future lies before you. for i can see, though through your tears you can not, that the son of god walks with you in this furnace of affliction, and that he is so sanctifying it to your soul, that ages hence you will look on this day as better, sweeter, than the day of your espousals. it is hard now to suffer, but after all, the _light_ affliction is nothing, and the _weight_ of glory is everything. you may not fully realise this or any other truth, in your enfeebled state, but truth remains the same whether we appreciate it or not; and so does christ. your despondency does not prove that he is not just as near to you as he is to those who see him more clearly; and it is better to be despondent than to be self-righteous. don't you see that in afflicting you he means to prove to you that he loves you, and that you love him? don't you remember that it is his son--not his enemy--that he scourgeth? the greatest saint on earth has got to reach heaven on the same terms as the greatest sinner; unworthy, unfit, good-for-nothing; but saved through grace. do cheer and comfort yourself with these thoughts, my dearest anna, and your sick-room will be the happiest room in your house, as i constantly pray it may be! your ever affectionate lizzy. _to miss e.a.w., new york, nov. , _ you ask how i sleep. i always sleep better at home than elsewhere; this is one great reason why we decided to have a home all the year round. i have to walk four or five miles a day, which takes a good deal of time, these short days, but there is no help for it. i do not think the time is lost when i am out of doors; i suppose christ may go with us, _does_ go with us, wherever we go. but i am too eager and vehement, too anxious to be working all the time. why, no, i don't think it _wrong_ to want to be at work provided god gives us strength for work; the great thing is not to repine when he disables us. i don't think, my dear, that you need trouble yourself about my dying at present; it is not at all likely that i shall. i feel as if i had got to be _tested_ yet; this sweet peace, of which i have so much, almost startles me. i keep asking myself whether it is not a stupendous delusion of satan and my own wicked heart. how i wish i could see you to-night! there is so much one does not like to put on paper that one would love to say. _thursday, p.m._--well, my lunch-party is over, and my sewing society is re-organised, and before i go forth to tea, let me finish and send off this epistle. we had the rev. mr. and mrs. washburn, of constantinople, dr. chickering, and prof, and mrs. smith; gave them cold turkey, cold ham, cold ice-cream and hot coffee; that was about all, for society in new york is just about reduced down to eating and drinking together, after which you go about your business. i am re-reading leighton on st peter; i wonder if you like it as much as my john and i do! i hope your murderous book goes on well; then you can take your rest next summer. now i must get ready for my long walk down and over to ninth st., to see a tiny little woman, and english at that. her prayer at our meeting yesterday moved us all to tears. _to miss eliza a. warner, new york, nov. , _ mr. prentiss complained yesterday that no letters came, an unheard-of event in our family history, and this morning found _twelve_ sticking in the top of the box; among them was yours, but i was just going off to my prayer-meeting, and had to put it into my pocket and let it go too. i am glad you sent me mrs. field's letter and poem; she is a genius, and writes beautifully. and how glad you must be to hear about your books. i can't imagine what better work you want than writing. in what other way could you reach so many minds and hearts? you must always send me such letters. before i forget it, let me tell you of a real thanksgiving present we have just had; three barrels of potatoes, some apples, some dried apples, cranberries, celery, canned corn, canned strawberries, and two big chickens. _after church, thursday._--i must indulge myself with going on with my letter, for after dinner i want to play with the children, and make this day mean something to them besides pies. for everybody spoke for pies this year (you know we almost never make such sinful things) and they all said ice-cream wouldn't do at all, so yesterday i made fourteen of these enormities, and mean to stuff them (the children, not the pies!) so that they won't want any more for a year. i want to tell you about some pretty coincidences; we went to church in a dismal rain, and mr. prentiss preached on the _beauty_ of holiness, and every time he said anything that made sunshine particularly appropriate, the sun came in in floods, then disappeared till the next occasion. for instance, he spoke of the sunshine of a happy home as so much brighter than that of the natural sun, and the whole church was instantly illuminated; then he said that if we had each come there with ten million sorrows, christ could give us light, when, lo, the church glowed again; and so on half-a-dozen times, till at last he quoted the verse _"and the lamb is the light thereof,"_ when a perfect blaze of effulgence made those mysterious, words almost startling. and then he wound up by describing the tyrolese custom on which mrs. field's poem is founded, which he had himself seen and enjoyed, and of which, it seems, he spoke at east dorset last summer at the sunday-school. [ ] i read the poem and letter to him the instant we got home, and he admired them both. it was a little singular that her poem and his sermon came to me at almost the identical moment, wasn't it? i must tell you about an old ladies' party given by mrs. cummings, wife of him who prepared my father's memoir. [ ] she had had a fortune left to her and was all the time doing good with it, and it entered her head to get up a very nice supper for twenty-six old ladies, the youngest of whom was seventy-five (the portland people rarely die till they're ninety or so). she sent carriages for all who couldn't walk, and when they all got together, the lady who described the scene to me, said it was indescribably beautiful, all congratulating each other that they were so far on in their pilgrimage and so near heaven! lovely, wasn't it? i wish i could spend the rest of my life with such people! then she spoke of mrs. c.'s face during the last six months of her life, when it had an expression so blest, so seraphic, that it was a delight to look upon it--and how she had all the members of the ladies' prayer-meeting come and kiss her good-bye after she was too weak to speak. and now the children have got together again, and i must go and stay with them till their bed-time, when, partly for the sake of the walk, partly because they asked us, we twain are going to see the smiths. i rather think, my dear, that if, as you say, you could see all my thoughts, you would drop me as you would a hot potato. you would see many good thoughts, i won't deny that, and some loving ones; but you would also see an abominable lot of elated, conceited, horrid ones; self-laudation even at good planned to do, and admired before done. but god can endure what no mortal eye could; he does not love us because we are so lovely, but because he always loves what he pities. i fall back upon this thought whenever i feel discouraged; i was going to say _sad_, but that isn't the word, for i never do feel sad except when i've been eating something i'd no business to! good-bye, dearie. _to the same, new york, dec. , ._ i think i must indulge myself, my dear, in writing to you to-night, it being really the only thing i want to do, unless it be to lie half asleep on the sofa. and that i can't do, for there's no sofa in the room! the cold weather has made it agreeable to have a fire in the dining-room grate, and this makes it a cheerful resort for the children, especially as the long table is very convenient for their books, map-drawing, etc. and wherever the rest are the mother must be; i suppose that is the law of a happy family, in the winter at least. the reason i am so tired to-night is that i have been unexpectedly to newark. i went, as soon as i could after breakfast, to market, and then on a walk of over two miles to prepare myself for our sewing-circle! i met our sexton as i was coming home, and asked him to see what ailed one of the drawers of my desk that wouldn't shut. we had a terrible time with it, and i had to take everything out, and turn my desk topsy-turvy, and your letters and all my other papers got raving distracted, and all mixed up with bits of sealing-wax, old pens, and dear knows what not, when down comes a. from the school-room, to say that mrs. stearns had sent for me to come right out, thinking she was dying. i knew nothing about the trains, always trusting to mr. prentiss about that, but in five minutes i was off, and on reaching the depot found i had lost a train by ten minutes, and that there wouldn't be another for an hour. then i had leisure to remember that mr. p. was to get home from dorset, that i had left no message for him, had hid away all the letters that had come in his absence, where he couldn't find them; that if it was necessary for me to stay at newark all night he would be dreadfully frightened, etc., etc. somehow i felt very blue, but at last concluded to get rid of a part of the time by hunting up some dinner at a restaurant. when i at last got to newark, i found that mrs. stearns' disease had suddenly developed several unfavorable symptoms. she had made up her mind that all hope was over, had taken leave of her family, and now wanted to bid me good-bye. she held my hands fast in both hers, begging me to talk. i spoke freely to her about her death; she pointed up once to an illumination i gave her last spring: simply to thy cross i cling. "that," she said, "is all i can do." i said all i could to comfort her, but i do not know whether god gave me the right word or not. on my return, as i got out of the stage near the corner of our street, whom should my weary eyes light on but my dear good man, just got home from dorset; how surprised and delighted we were to meet so unexpectedly! m. rushed to meet us, and afterward said to me, "i have three great reliefs; you have got home; papa has got home; and aunt anna is still alive." my children were never so lovely and loving as they are this winter; my home is almost too luxurious and happy; such things don't belong to this world. we have just heard of the death in switzerland of mr. prentiss' successor at new bedford, classmate of one of my brothers, and some one has sent a plaintive, sweet little dying song written at florence by him. now i am too fagged to say another word. _dec. th._--"i do not get _any_ time to write; each day brings its own special work that can't be done to-morrow; as to letters, i scratch them off at odd moments, when too tired to do anything else. what a resource they are! they do instead of crying for me. and how many i get every week that are loving and pleasant! what do you think of this? i hope it will make you laugh--a lady told me she never confessed her sins aloud (in prayer) lest satan should find out her weak points and tempt her more effectually! and i want to ask you if you ever offer to pray with people? i never do, and yet there are cases when nothing else seems to answer. oh, how many questions of duty come up every hour, and how many reasons we have every hour to be ashamed of ourselves! _monday morning._--it was a shame to write to you, when i was so tired that i could not write legibly, but my heart was full of love, and i longed to be near you. now monday has come, a lowering, forbidding day, yet all is sunshine in my soul, and i hope that may make my home light to my beloved ones, and even reach you, wherever you are. i am going to run out to see how mrs. stearns is. our plan is for me to make arrangements to stay with her, if i can be of any use or comfort. i literally love the house of mourning better than the house of feasting. all my long, long years of suffering and sorrow make sorrow-stricken homes homelike, and i can not but feel, because i know it from experience, that christ loves to be in such homes. so you may congratulate me, dear, if i may be permitted to go where he goes. i wish you could have heard yesterday's sermon about god's having as _characteristic, individual_ a love to each of us as we have to our friends. think of that, dear, when you remember how i loved you in mrs. g.'s little parlor! can you realise that your lord and saviour loves you infinitely more? i confess that such conceptions are hard to attain.... can't you do m---- s---- up in your next letter, and send her to me on approbation? instead of being satisfied that i've got you, i want her and everybody else who is really good, to fill up some of the empty rooms in my heart. this is a rambling, scrambling letter, but i don't care, and don't believe you do. well, good-bye; thank your stars that this bit of paper hasn't got any arms and can't hug you! _to mrs. leonard, new york, dec. , ._ there is half an hour before bed-time, and i have been thinking of and praying for you, till i feel that i _must_ write. i forgot to tell you, how the verses in my daily food, on the day of your dear husband's death, seem meant for you: "thou art my refuge and portion."--ps. cxliii. . 'tis god that lifts our comforts high, or sinks them in the grave; he gives, and blessed be his name! he takes but what he gave. the lord gave and the lord hath taken away.--job i. . i have had this little book thirty-three years, it has travelled with me wherever i have been, and it has been indeed my song in the house of my pilgrimage. this has been our communion sunday, and i have been very glad of the rest and peace it has afforded, for i have done little during the last ten days but fly from one scene of sorrow to another, from here to newark and from newark to brooklyn.... so i have alternated between the two dying beds; yesterday jennie p. went into a convulsion just as i entered the room, and did not fully come out of it for an hour and a half, when i had to come away in order to get home before pitch dark. what a terrible sight it is! they use chloroform, and that has a very marked effect, controlling all violence in a few seconds. whether the poor child came out of that attack alive i do not know; i had no doubt she was dying till just before i came away, when she appeared easier, though still unconscious. the family seem nearly frantic, and the sisters are so upset by witnessing these turns, that i shall feel that i must be there all i can. i am in cruel doubt which household to go to, but hope god will direct. mr. prentiss is a good deal withered and worn by his sister's state; he had never, by any means, ceased to hope, and he is much afflicted. she and jennie may live a week or more, or go at any moment. in my long hours of silent musing and prayer, as i go from place to place, i think often of you. i think one reason why we do not get all the love and faith we sigh for is that we try to force them to come to us, instead of realising that they must be god's free gifts, to be won by prayer.... and now mr. p. has come up-stairs rolled up in your afghan, and we have decided to go to both newark and brooklyn to-morrow, so i know i ought to go to bed. you must take this letter as a great proof of my love to you, though it does not say much, for i am bewildered by the scenes through which i am passing, and hardly fit therefore to write. what i do not say i truly feel, real, deep, constant sympathy with you in your sorrow and loneliness. may god bless you in it. [ ] dorset is situated in bennington county, about sixty miles from troy and twenty-five miles from rutland. its eastern portion lies in a deep-cut valley along the western slope of the green mountain range, on the line of the bennington and rutland railroad. its western part--the valley in which mrs. prentiss passed her summers--is separated from east dorset by mt. aeolus, owl's head, and a succession of maple-crested hills, all belonging to the taconic system of rocks, which contains the rich marble, slate, and limestone quarries of western vermont. in the north this range sweeps round toward the equinox range, enclosing the beautiful and fertile upland region called the hollow. dorset belonged to the so-called new hampshire grants, and was organised into a township shortly before the revolutionary war. its first settlers were largely from connecticut and massachusetts. they were a hardy, intelligent, liberty-loving race, and impressed upon the town a moral and religious character, which remains to this day. [ ] mrs. arthur bronson, of new york. a life of mrs. prentiss would scarcely be complete without a grateful mention of this devoted friend and true christian lady. she was the centre of a wide family circle, to all of whose members, both young and old, she was greatly endeared by the beauty and excellence of her character. she died shortly after mrs. prentiss. [ ] while supposing that her brothers had been burnt out and had, perhaps, lost everything, she wrote to her husband with characteristic generosity: "if they did not kill themselves working at the fire, they will kill themselves trying to get on their feet again. every cent i have i think should be given them. my father's church and everything associated with my youth, gone forever! i can't think of anything else." [ ] mrs. mccurdy died at her home in new york in december, . a few sentences from a brief address at the funeral by her old pastor will not be here out of place. "her natural character was one of the loveliest i have ever known. its leading traits were as simple and clear as daylight, while its cheering effect upon those who came under its influence was like that of sunshine. she was not only very happy herself--enjoying life to the last in her home and her friends--but she was gifted with a disposition and power to make others happy such as falls to the lot of only a select few of the race. her domestic and church ties brought her into relations of intimate acquaintance and friendship with some of the best men of her times. i will venture to mention two of them: her uncle, the late theodore frelinghuysen, one of the noblest men our country has produced, eminent alike as statesman, scholar, and christian philanthropist; and the sainted thomas h. skinner, her former pastor. her sick-room--if sick-room is the proper name--in which, during the last seventeen years, she passed so much of her time, was tinged with no sort of gloom; it seemed to have two doors, one of them opening into the world, through which her family and friends passed in and out, learning lessons of patience and love and sweet contentment: the other opening heavenward, and ever ajar to admit the messenger of her lord, in whatever watch he should come to summon her home. the place was like that upper chamber facing the sunrising, and whose name was _peace_, in which bunyan's pilgrim was lodged on the way to the celestial city. how many pleasant and hallowed memories lead back to that room!" [ ] old new bedford friends. [ ] fritz und maria und ich. von mrs. prentiss. deutsche autorisirte ausgabe. von marie morgenstern. itzchoe, . [ ] she gave me the pet-name of "fanny" because she did not like mine, and there was an old joke about "john."--e. a. w. [ ] the custom related to a pious salutation, with which two _friends_, or even _strangers_, greet each other, when meeting on the mountain highways and passes in certain districts of tyrol. _"gelobt sei jesu christ!"_ cries one; _"in ewigkeit, amen!"_ answers the other (_i.e._, "praised be jesus christ!" "for evermore, amen!") the following lines are from mrs. f.'s poem: "when the poor peasant, alpenstock in hand, toils up the steep, and finds a friend upon the dizzy height amid his sheep, "they do not greet each other as in our kind english way, ask not for health, nor wish in cheerful phrase prosperous day; "infinite thoughts alone spring up in that great solitude, nothing seems worthy or significant but heavenly good; "so in this reverent and sacred form their souls outpour,-- blessed be jesus christ's most holy name! 'for evermore!'" [ ] rev. asa cummings, d.d., of portland, for many years editor of the christian mirror; one of the weightiest, wisest and best men of his generation. chapter ix. stepping heavenward. . i. death of mrs. stearns. her character. dangerous illness of prof. smith. death at the parsonage. letters. a visit to vassar college. letters. getting ready for general assembly. "gates ajar." a little past three o'clock on saturday afternoon, january , , anna s. prentiss, wife of the rev. jonathan f. stearns, d.d., fell asleep in jesus. the preceding pages show what strong ties bound mrs. prentiss to this beloved sister. their friendship dated back thirty years; it was cemented by common joys and common sorrows in some of their deepest experiences of life; and it had been kept fresh and sweet by frequent intercourse and correspondence. mrs. stearns was a woman of uncommon attractions and energy of character. she impressed herself strongly upon all who came within the sphere of her influence; the hearts of her husband's people, as well as his own and those of her children, trusted in her; and the whole community where she dwelt mourned her loss. she had been especially endeared to her brother seargent, with whom she spent several winters in the south prior to her marriage. her influence over him, at a critical period of his life, was alike potent and happy; their relation to each other was, in truth, full of the elements of romance; and some of his letters to her are exquisite effusions of fraternal confidence and affection. [ ] her letters to him, beginning when she was a young girl and ending only with his life, would form a large volume. "you excel any one i know," he wrote to her, "in the kind and gentle art of letter-writing." in the midst of his early professional triumphs he writes: you do not know what obligations i am under to you; i owe all my success in this country to the fact of having so kind a mother and such sweet affectionate sisters as abby and yourself. it has been my only motive to exertion; without it i should long since have thrown myself away. even now, when, as is frequently the case, i feel perfectly reckless both of life and fortune, and look with contempt upon them both, the recollection that there are two or three hearts that beat for me with real affection, even though far away--comes over me as the music of david did over the dark spirit of saul. i still feel that i have something worth living for. for years her letters helped to cherish and deepen this feeling. he thus refers to one of them: i can not tell how much i thank you for it. i cried like a child while reading it, and even now the tears stand in my eyes, as i think of its expressions of affection, sympathy, and good sense.... i wish you were here now--oh, how i do wish it! but you will come next fall, won't you? and be to me the antelope whose feet shall bless with her light step my loneliness. but my candle burns low, and it is past the witching hour of night. whether sleeping or waking, god bless you and our dear mother, and all of you. good-night--good-night. my love loads this last line. to mrs. prentiss and her husband, the death of mrs. stearns was an irreparable loss. it took out of their life one of its greatest earthly blessings. the new year opened with another painful shock--the sudden and dangerous illness of her husband's bosom friend, henry boynton smith. prof. smith was to have made one of the addresses at the funeral of mrs. stearns; but instead of doing so, he was obliged to take to his bed, and, soon afterwards, to flee for his life beyond the sea. to this affliction the reader is indebted for the letters to mrs. smith, contained in this chapter. on the th of february another niece of her husband, a sweet child of seventeen, was brought to the parsonage very ill and died there before the close of the month. her letters will show how she was affected by these troubles. _to mrs. leonard, new york, jan. , ._ so many unanswered letters lie piled on my desk that i hardly know which to take up first, but my heart yearns over you, and i can not help writing you. no wonder you grow sadder as time passes and the beloved one comes not, and comes not. i wish i could help you bear your burden, but all i can do is to be sorry for you. the peaceable fruits of sorrow do not ripen at once; there is a long time of weariness and heaviness while this process is going on; but i do not, will not doubt, that you will taste these fruits, and find them very sweet. one of the hard things about bereavement is the physical prostration and listlessness which make it next to impossible to pray, and quite impossible to feel the least interest in anything. we must bear this as a part of the pain, believing that it will not last forever, for nothing but god's goodness does. how i wish you were near us, and that we could meet and talk and pray together over all that has saddened our lives, and made heaven such a blessed reality! there is not much to tell about the last hours of our dear sister. she had rallied a good deal, and they all thought she was getting well; but the day after christmas typhoid symptoms began to set in. i saw her on the monday following, found her greatly depressed, and did not stay long. on saturday morning, we got a dispatch we should have received early on new year's day, saying she was sinking. we hurried out, found her flushed and bright, but near her end, having no pulse at either wrist, and her hands and feet cold. she had had a distressing day and night, but now seemed perfectly easy; knew us, gave us a glad welcome, reminded me that i had promised to go with her to the end, and kissed us heartily. every time we went near her she gave us such a glad smile that it was hard to believe she was going so soon. she talked incessantly, with no signs of debility, but it was the restlessness of approaching death. at three in the afternoon they all came into the room, as they always did at that hour. she said a few things, and evidently began to lose her sight, for as lewis was about to leave the room, she said, "good-night, l.," and then to me, "why, lizzy dear, you are not going to stay all night?" i said, "oh yes, don't you know i promised to stay with a., who will be so lonely?" she looked pleased, but greatly surprised, her mind being so weak, and in a few seconds she laid her restless hands on her breast, her eyes became fixed, and the last gentle breaths began to come and go. "is the doctor here?" she asked. we told her no, and then mr. s. and the nurse, who were close each side of her, began to repeat a verse or two of scripture; then seeing she was apparently too far gone to hear, mr. s. leaned over and whispered, "my darling!" she made no response, on which he said, "she can make no response," and she said, "but i hear," gave one or two more gentle little breaths, and was gone. i forgot to say that after her eyes were fixed, hearing mr. s. groan, she _stopped dying_, turned and gave a parting look! i never saw an easier death, nor such a bright face up to the very last. one of the doctors coming in, in the morning, was apparently overcome by the extraordinary smile she gave him, for he turned away immediately without a word, and left the house. i staid, as they wished me to do, till monday night, when i came home quite used up. your sorrow, and the sorrow at brooklyn, and now this one, have come one after another until it seemed as if there was no end to it; such is life, and we must bear it patiently, knowing the end will be the more joyful for all that saddened the way. i shall always let you know if anything of special interest occurs in the church or among ourselves. after loving you so many years, i am not likely to forget you now. the addresses at mrs. s.'s funeral will probably be published, and we will send you a copy. mr. p. is bearing up bravely, but feels the listlessness of which i spoke, and finds sermonising hard work. he joins me in love to you. do write often. _to miss eliza a. warner, new york, feb. , ._ on coming home from church on sunday afternoon i found one of the brooklyn family waiting to tell us that another of the girls was very ill, that they were all worn out and nearly frantic, and asking if she might be brought here to be put under the care of some german doctor, as dr. smith had given her up. in the midst of my sorrow for the poor mother, i thought of myself. how could i, who had not been allowed to invite miss lyman here, undertake this terrible care? you know what a fearful disease it is--how many convulsions they have; but you don't know the harm it did me just seeing poor jennie p. in one. yesterday i tried hard to let god manage it, but i know i wished he would manage it so as to spare me; it takes so little to pull me down, and so little to destroy my health. but i wasn't in a good frame, couldn't write a percy for the observer, got a letter from some house down town, asking me to write them susy books, got a london daily news containing a nice notice of little lou, but nought consoled me. [ ] in fact, i dawdled so long over h.'s lessons, which i always hear after breakfast, that i had not my usual time to pray; and that, of itself, would spoil any day. after dinner came two of the prentiss sisters to say that dr. [horatio] smith said eva's one chance of getting well was to come here for change of air and scene--would i take her and her mother? of course i would. they then told me that dr. smith had said his brother's case was perfectly hopeless. this upset me. my feet turned into ice and my head into a ball of fire. as soon as they left, i had the spare room arranged, and then went out and walked till dark to cool off my head, but to so little purpose that i had a bad night; the news about prof. s. was so dreadful. mr. prentiss was appalled, too. i had to make this a day of rest--not daring to work after such a night. got up at seven or so, took my bath, rung the bell for prayers at twenty minutes of eight. after breakfast heard h.'s lessons, then read the th chapter of matthew; and mused long on christ's coming to minister--not to be ministered unto. prayed for poor mrs. smith and a good many weary souls, and felt a little bit better. then went down to randolph's at the request of a lady, who wanted him to sell some books she had got up for a benevolent object. he said he'd take twelve. then to the smiths, burdened with my sad secret. got home tired and depressed. tried to get to sleep and couldn't, tried to read and couldn't. at last they came with the sick girl, and one look at the poor, half- fainting child, and her mother's "nobody in the world but you would have let us come," made them welcome; and i have rejoiced ever since that _god let_ them come. one of the first things they said took my worst burden off my back; the whole story about prof. smith was a dream! can you conceive my relief? we had dinner. eva ate more than she had done for a long time. we had a long talk with her mother after dinner; then i went up to the sick-room and stayed an hour or so; then had a call; then ran out to carry a book to a widowed lady, that i hoped would comfort her; then home, and with eva till tea-time. then had some comfort in laying all these cares and interests in those loving arms that are always so ready to take them in. i enjoy praying in the morning best, however--perhaps because less tired; but sometimes i think it is owing to a sort of night-preparation for it; i mean, in the wakeful times of night and early morning. _wednesday, th_--while i was writing the above all the brooklyn prentisses went to bed, and we new york prentisses went to the sunday- school rooms next door to a church-gathering. there are three rooms that can be thrown together, and they were bright and fragrant with flowers, most of which the young men sent me afterwards, exquisite things. i had a precious talk with dr. abbot, one of whose feet, to say the least, is already on the topmost round. i only wish he was a woman. the church was open, and we all went in and listened to some fine music. coming out i said to a gentleman who approached me, "how is little baby?" "which little baby?" "why, the youngest." "oh, we haven't any baby." and lo! i had mistaken my man! imagine how _he_ felt and how _i_ felt! we got home at eleven p.m., and so ended my day of rest. i have things to say, but there is so much going on that i shall defraud you of them--aren't you glad? have you read the "gates ajar"? i have, with real pain. i do not think you will be so shocked at it as i am, but hope you don't like it. it is full of talent, but has next to no christ in it, and my heaven is full of him. i have finished faber. how queer he is with his 's and 's and 's and 's! i feel all done up into little sums in addition, and that's about all i know of myself--he's bewildered me so. there are fine things in it, and i took the liberty of making a wee cross against some of them, which you can rub out. miss l. sent me another of his books, which i am reading now--"all for jesus." _to mrs. henry b. smith, new york, march , _ we were gladdened early this morning by the arrival of your letter, and the good news it contained. i had a dreadful fright on the day you reached southampton. mr. moore sent up a cable dispatch announcing the fact, and as it came directed to both of us, and i supposed it to be from you, i thought some terrible thing had happened. i paraded down to m. with your letter, and she, at the same time, paraded up here with the one to her and the rest. so we got all the news there was, and longed for more. i hope the worst is now over. i have just got home from a visit of four days and nights to miss lyman. i enjoyed it exceedingly, and wish i could tell you all about it, but can't in a letter. she has turns of looking absolutely _aged_, and seems a good deal of the time in a perfect worry, i don't know what about. otherwise she is better than last summer. i never saw her when at work before, and perhaps she always appears so. we had two or three good rousing laughs, however, and that did us both good. i did not know she was so fond of flowers; she buys them and keeps loads of them about her parlors, library, and bedroom. what a world it is there! i only wish she was happier in her work, but perhaps if we could get behind the scenes, we should find all human workers have their sorrows and misgivings and faintings. according to her i had an "inquiry meeting" once or twice; believe it if you can and dare. it was certainly very pleasant to get into such an intelligent christian atmosphere, and on the whole i've got rather converted to vassar. i have been greatly delighted with a present of one of my father's cuff- buttons (which i well remember), and a lock of his hair.... i haven't got anything more to say. oh, mrs. ---- left that on her card here the other day, and we called on her this afternoon. what a jolly old lady she is! of course, anybody could believe in perfection who was as fat and well as she! _to mrs. leonard, new york, april , _ if i should send you a letter every time i send you a thought, you would be quite overwhelmed with them. now that mrs. s. has gone away, and some of my pressing cares are over, i miss you more than ever. we have had a good deal to sadden us this winter, beginning with your sorrow, which was also ours; and eva p.'s death, occurring as it did in our house, was a distressing one. she was here about a fortnight, and the first week came down to her meals, though she kept in her room the rest of the time. on tuesday night of the second week she was at the tea-table, and played a duet with a. after tea. soon after she was taken with distress for breath, and was never in bed again, but sat nearly double in a chair, with one of us supporting her head. it was agonizing suffering to witness, and the care of her was more laborious than anyone can conceive, who did not witness or participate in it. we had at last to have six on hand to relieve each other. she died on saturday, after four terrible days and nights. we knew she would die here when they first proposed her coming, but did not like to refuse her last desire, and are very glad we had the privilege of ministering to her last wants.... for you i desire but one thing--a full possession of christ. let us turn away our eyes from everything that does not directly exalt him in our affections; we are poor without him, no matter what our worldly advantages are; rich with him when stripped of all besides. still i know you are passing through deep waters, and at times must well nigh sink. but your loving saviour will not let you sink, and he never loved you so well as he does now. how often i long to fly to you in your lonely hours! but i can not, and so i turn these longings into prayers. i hope you pray for me, too. you could not give me anything i should value so much, and it is a great comfort to me to know that you love me. i care more to be loved than to be admired, don't you? i hope that by next winter you may feel that you can come and see us; i want to see you, not merely to write to you and get answers. i send you a picture of our nest at dorset. good-bye. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, april , _ i opened your letter in the street, and was at once confronted with a worldly-looking bit of silk! how _can_ you! why don't you follow my example and dress in sackcloth and ashes? i think however, if you _will_ be worldly you have done it very prettily, and on the whole don't know that it is any wickeder than i have been in translating a "dramatic poem" in five acts from the german, only you've got your dress done and i'm only half through my play; and there's no knowing how bad i shall get before i am through. i wonder if you are sitting by an open window, as i am, and roasting at that? i had a drive with a. and m. through the park yesterday, and saw stacks of hyacinths in bloom, and tulips and violets and dandelions; a willow-tree not far from my window has put on its tender green, and summer seems close at hand. i have been to an auction and got cheated, as i might have known i should; and the other day i had my pocket picked. as to "gates ajar," most people are enchanted with it; but miss lyman regards it as i do, and so do some other elect ladies. i have just written to see if she will come down and get a little rest, now the weather is so fine. mr. p. has gone to dorset to be gone all the week, and i am buying up what is to be bought, begrudging every cent! mean wretch that i am. i have looked through and read parts of "patience strong's outings"--an ugly title, and a transcendental style, but beautiful in conception, and taken off the stilts, in execution. i do not like the cant of unitarians any better than they like ours, but i like what is elevating in any sect. i have had a present of a lot of table-linen, towels, etc., for dorset, and feel a good deal like a young housekeeper. i wonder how soon you go back to northampton? how queer it must be to be able to float round! it is a pity you could not float to new york, and get a good hugging from this old woman. we expect ministers here in may at general assembly (i ought to have spelt it with a big g and a big a). my dear child, what makes you get blue? i don't much believe in any blue devils save those that live in the body and send sallies into the mind. perhaps i should, though, if i had not a husband and children to look after; how little one can judge for another! * * * * * ii. how she earned her sleep. writing for young converts about speaking the truth. meeting of the general assembly in the church of the covenant. reunion. d.d.s and strawberry short-cake. "enacting the tiger." getting ready for dorset. letters. this year was one of the busiest of her life; and it were hard to say which was busiest, her body or mind; her hand, heart, or brain. this relentless activity was caused in part by the increasing difficulty of obtaining sleep. incessant work seemed to be, in her case, a sort of substitute for natural rest and a solace for the loss of it. she alludes to this constant struggle with insomnia in a letter to miss warner, dated may th: if you knew the whole story you would not envy my power of driving about so much. you can lie down and sleep when you please; i must earn my sleep by hard work, which uses up so much time that i wonder i ever accomplish anything. i believe that god arranges our various burdens and fits them to our backs, and that he sets off a loss against a gain, so that while some seem more favored than others, the mere aspect deceives. i have to make it my steady object throughout each day, so to spend time and strength as to obtain sleep enough to carry me through the next; it is thus i have acquired the habit of taking a large amount of exercise, which keeps me out of doors when i am longing to be at work within. you say i seem to be always in a flood of joy; well, that too is _seems_. i think i know what joy in god means, though perhaps i only begin to know; but i am a weak creature; i fall into snares and get entangled--not nearly so often as i used to do, but still do get into them. i have a perfect horror of them; the thought of having anything come between god and my soul makes me so restless and uneasy that i hardly know which way to turn. i have been very much absorbed of late in various interests, and am sure they have contrived to occupy me too much; pressing cares do sometimes, and oh, how ashamed i am! do write for young inquirers, if your heart prompts you to do it. i don't know what to think of your suggestion that in writing for young converts i should impress it upon them to speak the truth. it seems to me just like telling them not to commit murder; and that would be absurd. do christians cheat and tell lies? i have a great aversion to writing about such things; if children are not trained _at home_ to be upright and full of integrity, it can't be that books can rectify that loss. you may reply that home-training is defective in thousands of cases; yes, that is true, but i have a feeling that truth and honesty must spring from a soil early prepared for them, and that a young person who is in the _habit_ of falsehood is not a christian and needs to go back to first principles. i can't endure subterfuges, misrepresentation, and the like; the whole foundation looks wrong when people indulge themselves in them, and to say to a christian, "i hope you are truthful," is to my mind as if i should say to him, "i hope you wash your face and hands every day." now if your observation says i am wrong, let's know; i am open to conviction. _to mrs. h. b. smith, new york, may , ._ it has just come to me that the true way to enjoy writing and to have you enjoy hearing, is to keep a sort of journal, where little things will have a chance to speak for themselves. we are now in the midst of general assembly. mr. stearns is here, and we have sprinklings of ministers to dine and to tea at all sorts of odd hours.... i can't help loving what is christlike in people, whether i like their natural characters or not; after all, what else is there in the world worth much love? my katy seems to be ploughing her way with more or less success, and making friends and foes. you, who helped me fashion her, would be interested in the letters i get from wives, showing that the want of demonstration in men is a wide-spread evil, under which women do groan being burdened. _entre nous_, mrs. dr. ---- is one, and i got a letter to-day from michigan to the same effect. we are having delightful weather for the meetings. yesterday morning dr. john hall preached in our church, and it was crammed full to overflowing.... lew. s. [ ] has decided to study theology. we are all glad. he and i have got quite acquainted of late and talk most learnedly together. did i tell you i have translated a german dramatic poem in five acts? miss anna nevins says i have done it extremely well. i don't know about that, but my whole soul got into it somehow, and i did not know whether i was in the body or out of it for two or three weeks. i wish i could do things decently and in order. there is to be a great party at apollo hall this evening for both assemblies. i am going and expect to get tired to death. _ th_--it was a brilliant scene at apollo hall. everybody was there, and the hall was finely adapted to the purpose of accommodating the , people present. the speeches were very poor. i went to the prayer-meeting this morning. the church was full, galleries and all, and the spirit was excellent. many men shed tears in speaking for reunion, and, from what mr. stearns reports of the meeting of the committee last night, union may be considered as good as restored. you will hear nothing else from me; it is all i hear talked about. _monday, l_.--hot as need be. dr. b., of brooklyn, dined with us; said he never ate strawberry short-cake before, and was reading katy. it is awful to think how many d.d.s are doing it (eating short-cake, i mean, of course!) hope the assembly will wind up to-night. _june _.--we are so glad you have got to la tour and find it so pleasant there, and that you have met dr. and mrs. guthrie, and that they have met you instead of the blowsy-towsy american women, who make one so ashamed of them. if i wasn't going to dorset, i should wish i were going where you are; but then, you see, i _am_ going to dorset!... i have been to the central park with mrs. ---, who talked in one steady stream all the way. i was sleepy and the carriage very noisy; and take it altogether, what a farce life is sometimes! the intercourse of human beings outsides touching outsides, the heart and soul lying to all intents and purposes as dead as a door-nail. do you ever feel mentally and spiritually alone in the world? perhaps everybody does. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, june , ._ i concluded you had gone and died and got buried without letting me know, when your letter reached me _via_ dorset. what possessed you to send it there when you knew, you naughty thing! that i was having general assembly, i can't imagine; but i suppose, being a congregationalist, you thought general assembly wasn't nothing, and that i could entertain squads of d.d.s for a fortnight more or less, just as well at dorset as i could here. my dear, read the papers and go in the way you should go, and behave yourself! as if ministers haven't worn streaks in the grass round the church, haven't (some of 'em) been here to dinner and eaten my strawberry short-cake and cottage puddings and praised my coffee and drank two cups apiece all round, and as if i hadn't been set up on end for those of 'em to look at who are reading katy, and as if going furiously to work, after they'd all gone, didn't use me up and send me "lopping" down on sofas, sighing like a what's-its-name. well, well; the ignorance of you country folks and the wisdom of us city folks! we hope to get to dorset by the th of this month; it depends upon how many interruptions i have and how many days i have to lie by. i can't imagine why i break down so, for i don't know when i've been so well as during this spring; but mr. p. and a. say i work like a tiger, and i s'pose i do without knowing it. i am so glad you had a pleasant sunday. no doubt you had more bodily strength with which to enjoy spiritual things. a weak body hinders prayer and praise when the heart would sing, if it were not in fetters that cramp and exhaust it. _monday_--to-day i have been enacting the tiger again, and worked furiously. a. half scolds and half entreats, but i can't help it; if i work i work, and so there it is. i have bought a dinner-set, and had a long visit from my old mary, who wept over and kissed me, and am going out to call on mrs. woolsey this evening. to-morrow a.'s scholars are to come and make an address to her and give her a picture. she is not to know it till they arrive. it is really cold after the very hot weather, and some are freezing and some have internal pains. i wish you could have seen me this forenoon at work in the attic--a mass of dust, feathers, and perplexity. i got hold of one of my john's innumerable trunks of papers, and found among them the mss. of several of my books laid up in lavender, which i pitched into the ash-barrel. i suppose he thinks i may distinguish myself some time, and that the discerning world will be after a scratch of my gifted pen! have you read "gates off the hinges"? the next thing will be, "there aint no gates." * * * * * iii. the new home in dorset. what it became to her. letters from there. a notable incident of this year was the entering upon housekeeping at dorset under her own roof. as is usual in such cases, the process was somewhat wearisome and trying, but the result was most happy. all the bright anticipations, with which the event had been so long looked forward to, were more than realised. for the next ten summers the dorset home was to her a sweet haven of rest from the agitations, cares, and turmoil of new york life. it seemed at the time a venturesome, almost a rash thing, to build it; but when she left it for her home above, the building of the house seemed to have been an inspiration of providence. while contributing greatly to her happiness, it probably added several years to her life. the four months which she passed each season at dorset were spent largely in the open air, and in such varied and pleasant exercise as exerted the most healthful, soothing influence upon both body and soul. it was just this fruit her husband hoped might, by the blessing of heaven, blossom out of the new home, and in later years he used often to say to her, that if the place should be of a sudden annihilated, he should still feel that it had paid for itself many times over. _to mrs. smith, dorset, july , ._ how many times during the last month i have been reminded of your saying you had lived through the agony of getting your house ready to rent. i can sum up all i have been through by saying that almost everything has turned out the reverse of what i expected. in the first place, i broke down just as we were to start to come here, and had to be left behind to pick up life enough to undertake the journey; then the car we chartered did not get here for a week, and nobody but a. had anything to wear, and all my flowers died for want of water. the car, too, was broken into and my idols of tin pans all taken, with some other things, and when it did arrive it was unpacked, and our goods brought here, in a regular deluge, the like of which has not been seen since the days of noah. for days everything was in dire confusion; but for all that our own home was delightful, and we had the most outrageous appetites you ever heard of. george is in ecstasies with his house, his land, his pig, and his horse.... i hope you are not sick and tired of all this rigmarole; it isn't in human nature to move into a house of its own and talk of anything else. i got a warm-hearted letter a few days ago from the city of milwaukee, from an unknown western sister, beginning, "whom not having seen i love," and going on to say that katy describes herself and her lot exactly, only she had no martha on hand. i get so many such testimonies. i am going to spare your eyes and brains by winding up this epistle and going to bed. i do not think your husband ought to come home till he has recovered his power of sleeping. i know how to pity him, if anybody does, and i know how loss of sleep cripples. good-night, dear child. "god bless me and my wife; you and your wife, us four and no more." _to mrs. leonard, dorset, august , ._ your last letter endeared you to me more than ever, and i have longed to answer it, but we have been in such a state of confusion that writing has been a task. the whole house has been painted inside and out since we entered it, and i dare say you know what endless uproar the flitting from room to room to accommodate painters, causes. we have just been admitted to our parlor, but it is in no order, and the dining-room is still piled with trunks. but the house is lovely, and we shall feel well repaid for the severe labor it has cost us, when it is done and we can settle down in it. i write to ask you to send me by express what numbers of stepping heavenward you have on hand. i would not give you the trouble to do this if i could get them in any other way, but i can not, as all back numbers are gone, and the copy i have has been borrowed and worn, so as to be illegible in many places. randolph is to publish the work and says he wants it soon. i am constantly receiving testimonies as to its usefulness, and hope it will do good to many who have not seen it in the advance. how i do long to see you! i think of you many times every day, and thank god that he enables you to glorify him in bearing your great sorrow. sometimes i feel as if i _must_ see mr. l.'s kind face once more, but i remind myself that by patiently waiting a little while, i shall see it and the faces of all the sainted ones who have gone before. next to faith in god comes patience; i see that more and more, and few possess enough of either to enable them to meet the day of bereavement without dismay. we are constantly getting letters from afflicted souls that can not see one ray of light, and keep reiterating, "i am not reconciled." how fearful it must be to kick thus against the pricks, already sharp enough! i believe fully with you that there is no happiness on earth, as there is none in heaven, to be compared with that of losing all things to possess christ. i look back to two points in my life as standing out from all the rest of it as seasons of peculiar joy, and they are the points where i was crushed under the weight of sorrow. how wonderful this is, how incomprehensible to those who have not learned christ! do write me oftener; you are very dear to me, and your letters always welcome. i love you for magnifying the lord in the midst of your distress; you could not get so into my heart in any other way. _to mrs. smith, dorset, august , ._ half of your chickens are safely here, well and bright, and settled i hope, for the summer. a., and m., who seems as joyous as a lark, are like siamese twins, with the advantage of untying at night and sleeping in different beds. i have not been well, and did not go to church to-day; but prof. robinson of rochester, n. y., preached a very superior sermon, george says. they have gone to our woods together. we took tea a few nights ago at the pratts, being invited to meet him and mrs. r. they asked many questions about you and your husband. we find the pratts charming neighbors in their way, modest, kind, and good. they take the advance, read katy, and like it. _aug. st_--as we have only had sixteen in our family of late, i have not had much to do. yesterday we made up a party to the quarry and had just got seated, twenty-nine in all, to eat a very nice dinner, when it began to rain in floods. each grabbed his plate, if he could, and rushed to a blacksmith's shop not far off; twenty or thirty workmen rushed there too, and there we were, cooped up in the dirt, to finish our meal as we best could. it soon stopped pouring and we had a delightful drive home. mr. b. f. b., with two of his boys, was with us. he is charmed with our house and its views. katy has made her last appearance in the advance, but i keep getting letters about her from all quarters, and the editors say they have had hundreds. [ ] h. has caught up with hal and they are exactly of a height, and i feel as if i had a dear little pair of twins. last sunday evening the three boys laid their heads in my lap together, all alike content. * * * * * iv. return to town. domestic changes. letters. "my heart sides with god in everything." visiting among the poor. "conflict isn't sin." publication of _stepping heavenward_. her misgivings about it. how it was received. reminiscences by miss eliza a. warner. letters. the rev. wheelock craig. early in october she returned to town and began to make ready for the departure of her eldest daughter to europe, where she was to pass the next year with the family of prof. smith. the younger children had thus far been taught by their sister, and her leaving home was fraught with no little trial both to them and to the mother. _to mrs. smith, new york, october ._ i can fully sympathise with the sad toss you are in about staying abroad another year, but we feel that there is no doubt you have decided wisely and well. but the bare mention of your settling down at vevay has driven us all wild. what hallucination could you have been laboring under? why, your husband would go off the handle in a week! to be sure it is beautiful for situation as mount zion itself, but one can't live on beauty; one must have life and action, and stimulus; in other words, human beings. they're all horrid (except you), but we can't do without 'em. what i went through at lonely genevrier! "oh solitude, where are the charms that sages have seen in thy face!" we took it for granted that you would settle in some german city, near old friends; it is true, they mayn't be all you want, but anything is better than nothing, and you would stagnate and moulder all away at vevay. what is there there? why, a lake and some mountains, and you can't spend a year staring at them. well, i dare say light will be let in upon you. i hope a. will behave herself; you must rule it over her with a rod of iron (as if you could!), and make her stand round. her going plunges us into a new world of care and anxiety and tribulation; we have thrust our children out into, or on to, the great ocean, and are about ready to sink with them. if i could sit down and cry, it would do me lots of good, but i can't. then how am i to spare my twin-boy, and my a. and my m.? who is to keep me well snubbed? who is to tell me what to wear? who is to keep darby and joan from settling down into two fearful old pokes? your husband suggests that "if i have a husband, etc." i have had one with a vengeance. he has worked like seventeen mad dogs all summer, and i have hardly laid eyes on him. when i have, it has been to fight with him; he would come in with a hoe or a rake or a spade in his hand, and find me with a broom, a shovel, or a pair of tongs in mine, and without a word we would pitch in and have an encounter. of all the aggravating creatures, hasn't he been aggravating! sometimes i thought he had run raving distracted, and sometimes i dare say, he thought i had gone melancholy mad. he persists to this day that the work did him good, and that he enjoyed his summer. well, maybe he did; i suppose he knows. how glad i am for you that you are to have the children go to you. it seems to be exactly the right thing. i hope to get a copy of katy to send by the girls, but can't think of anything else. as a. is to be where you are, you will probably be kept well posted in the doings of our family. i do hope she will not be a great addition to your cares, but have some misgivings as to the effect so long absence from home may have upon her. what a world this is for shiftings and siftings! _to g. s. p. october, ._ i always thought george mcdonald a little audacious, though i like him in the main. there is a fallacy in this cavil, you may depend. some years ago, when i was a little befogged by plausible talk, dr. skinner came to our house, got into one of his best moods, and preached a regular sermon on the glory of god, that set me all right again. i am not skilled in argument, but my heart sides with god in everything, and my conception of his character is such a beautiful one that i feel that he can not err. i do not like the expression, "he's aye thinking about his own glory" (i quote from memory); it belittles the real fact, and almost puts the supreme being on a level with us poor mortals. the more time we spend upon our knees, in real communion with god, the better we shall comprehend his wonderful nature, and how impossible it is to submit that nature to the rules by which we judge human beings. every turn in life brings me back to this--_more prayer_.... i shall go with much pleasure to see mrs. g. and may god give me some good word to say to her. i almost envy you your sphere of usefulness, but unless i give up mine, can not get fully into it. i want you to know that next to being with my saviour, i love to be with his sufferers; so that you can be sure to remember me, when you have any on your heart.... p. s. i have hunted up mrs. g. and had such an interesting talk with her that she has hardly been out of my mind since. it is a very unusual case, and the fact that her husband is a jew, and loves her with such real romance, is an obstacle in her way to christ. when you can get a little spare time i wish you would run in and let us talk her case over. i'm ever so glad that i'm growing old every day, and so becoming better fitted to be the dear and loving friend to young people i want to be. i wish we both loved our saviour better, and could do more for him. the days in which i do nothing specifically for him seem such meagre, such lost days. you seemed to think, the last time i saw you, that you were not so near him as you were last year. i think we can't always know our own state. it does not follow that a season of severe conflict is a sign of estrangement from god. perhaps we are never dearer to him than when we hate ourselves most, and fancy ourselves intolerable in his sight. _conflict isn't sin._ _to miss e. a. warner, new york, october , ._ i hear with great concern that miss lyman's health is so much worse, that she is about to leave vassar. is this true? i can not say i should be very sorry if i should hear she was going to be called up higher. it seems such a blessed thing to finish up one's work when the master says we may, and going to be with him. i can fully sympathise with the feeling that made mrs. graham say, as she closed her daughter's eyes, "i wish you joy, my darling!" but i should want to see her before she went; that would be next best to seeing her after she got back. if you meet with a dear little book called "the melody of the d psalm," do read it; it is by miss anna warner, and shows great knowledge of, and love for, the bible. in a few weeks i shall be able to send you a copy of stepping heavenward. we have been home rather more than a week and the house is all upside down, outwardly and inwardly. for a. sails for europe on the st with m. and hal smith, to be gone a year, and this involves sending the other children to school, and various trying changes of the sort. tossing my long sheltered lambs into the world has cost me inexpressible pain; only a mother can understand how much and why; and they, on their part, go into it shrinking and quivering in every nerve. to their father, as well as to me, this has been a time of sore trial, and we are doing our best to keep each other up amid the discouragements and temptations that confront us. for each new phase of life brings more or less of both. _stepping heavenward_ was published toward the end of october, having appeared already as a serial in the chicago advance. the first number of the serial was printed february , . the work was planned and the larger part of it composed during the winter and spring of - . referring more especially to this part of it, she once said to a friend: "every word of that book was a prayer, and seemed to come of itself. i never knew how it was written, for my heart and hands were full of something else." by "something else" she had in mind the care of little francis. the ensuing summer the manuscript was taken with her to dorset, carefully revised and finished before her return to the city. in revising it she had the advantage of suggestions made by her friends, miss warner and miss lyman, both of them christian ladies of the best culture and of rare good sense. notwithstanding the favor with which the work had been received as issued in the advance, mrs. prentiss had great misgiving about its success--a misgiving that had haunted her while engaged in writing it. but all doubt on the subject was soon dispelled: the response to "stepping heavenward" was instant and general. others of her books were enjoyed, praised, laughed over, but this one was taken by tired hands into secret places, pored over by eyes dim with tears, and its lessons prayed out at many a jabbok. it was one of those books which sorrowing, mary-like women read to each other, and which lured many a bustling martha from the fretting of her care-cumbered life to ponder the new lesson of rest in toil. it was one of those books of which people kept a lending copy, that they might enjoy the uninterrupted companionship of their own. the circulation of the book was very large. not to speak of the thousands which were sold here, it went through numerous editions in england. from england it passed into australia. it fell into the family of an afflicted swiss pastor, and the comfort which it brought to that stricken household led to its translation into french by one of the pastor's daughters. it passed through i know not how many editions in french. [ ] in germany it came into the hands of an invalid lady who begged the privilege of translating it. the first word of a favorite german hymn, "heavenward doth our journey tend; we are strangers here on earth," furnished the title for the german translation--"himmelan." it appeared just after the french war, and went as a comforter into scores of the homes which war had desolated, and frequent testimony came back to her of the deep interest excited by the book, and of the affectionate gratitude called out toward the author. she seemed to have inspired her translator, whose letters to her breathe the warmest affection and the most enthusiastic admiration. it would be easy to fill up the time that remains with grateful testimonies to the work of this book. from among a multitude i select only one: a manufacturer in a new england town, a stranger, wrote to her expressing his high appreciation of the book, and saying that he had four thousand persons in his employ, and a circulating library of six thousand volumes for their use, in which were two copies of "stepping heavenward." he adds, "i hear in every direction of the good it is doing, and a wealthy friend has written to me saying that she means to put a copy into the hand of every bride of her acquaintance." [ ] several chapters might be filled with letters received by mrs. prentiss, expressing the gratitude of the writers for the spiritual help and comfort _stepping heavenward_ had given them. these letters came from all parts of this country, from europe, and even from the ends of the earth; and they were written by persons belonging to every class in society. among them was one, written on coarse brown grocery paper, from a poor crippled boy in the interior of pennsylvania, which she especially prized. it led to a friendly correspondence that continued for several years. the book was read with equal delight by persons not only of all classes, but of all creeds also; by calvinists, arminians, high churchmen, evangelicals, unitarians, and roman catholics. [ ] it was, however, wholly unnoticed by most of the organs of literary opinion in this country; although abroad it attracted at once the attention of men and women well known in the world of letters, and was praised by them in the highest terms. [ ] miss eliza a. warner, in the following reminiscences, gives some interesting incidents in reference to _stepping heavenward_. that summer in dorset--the summer of --is one full of bright and pleasant memories which it is delightful to recall. i had heard much of mrs. prentiss from mutual friends, and been exceedingly interested in her books, so that when i found we were to be fellow-boarders for the summer i was greatly pleased; yet i felt a little shy at meeting one of whose superiority in many lines i had heard so much. how well i remember that bright morning in july on which we first met on our way to the breakfast-table! i can hear now the frank, cheery voice with which she greeted me, and see her large dark eyes, so full of animation and kindly interest, which a moment after sparkled with fun as she recalled an old joke familiar to my friends, and, it seemed, to her also. i was put at my ease at once, and from that moment onward felt the wonderful fascination of a manner so peculiarly her own; it was a frank, whole-souled, sincere manner, with a certain indescribable piquancy and sprightliness blending with the earnestness which made her very individual and very charming. for the next two months we were a good deal together. i think it was a very happy summer to her. you were building the house in dorset for a summer home, and the planning for this and watching its progress was a pleasant occupation. and she was such an enthusiastic lover of nature that the out-of-door life she led was a constant enjoyment. she would spend hours rambling in the woods, collecting ferns, mosses, trailing vines, and every lovely bit of blossom and greenery that met her eye--and nothing pretty escaped it--and there was always an added freshness and brightness in her face when she came home laden with these treasures, and eager to exhibit them. "oh, you don't go crazy over such things as i do," she would say as she held them up for our admiration. she filled her room with these woodland beauties, and pressed quantities of them to carry to her city home. in that beautiful valley among the green mountains, some of whose near summits rise to the height of three thousand feet, her enthusiasm for fine scenery had full scope. she would watch with delight the sunset glow as it spread and deepened along those mountain peaks, suffusing them with a glory which we likened to that of the new jerusalem; and as we sat and watched this glory slowly fade, tint by tint, into the gray twilight, her talk would be of heaven and holiness and christ. whatever she felt, she felt intensely, and she threw her whole heart and soul into all she said or did; this was one great secret of the power of her personal presence; she felt so keenly herself, she made others feel. those summer days were long and bright and beautiful, but none too long for her. she was one of the most industrious persons i have ever known, and her writing, reading and sewing, and the care of her children, over the formation of whose characters she watched closely and wisely, occupied every moment of her time, except when she was out of doors, trying by exercise in the open air to secure a good night's sleep; not an easy thing for her to do in those days. early in august we were joined by miss hannah lyman, of vassar college, a mutual friend and a most delightful addition to our little party. we knew mrs. prentiss spent a part of every day in writing, but she said nothing of the nature of her work. do you remember coming into the parlor one morning, where miss lyman and i were sitting by ourselves, and telling us that she was writing a story, but had become so discouraged she threatened to throw it aside as not worth finishing? "i like it myself," you added, "it really seems to me one of the best things she has ever written, and i am trying to get her to read it to you and see what you think of it." of course, both miss lyman and myself were eager to hear it, and promised to tell her frankly how we liked it. the next morning she came to our room with a little green box in her hand, saying, with her merry laugh, "now you've got to do penance for your sins, you two wicked women!" and, sitting down by the window, while we took our sewing, she began to read us in manuscript the work which was destined to touch and strengthen so many hearts--"which," to use the words of another, "has become a part of the soul-history of many thousands of christian women--young and old--at home and abroad." it was a rare treat to listen to it, with comments from her interspersed; some of them droll and witty, others full of profound religious feeling. now and then, as we queried if something was not improbable or unnatural, she would give us bits of history from her own experience or that of her friends, going to show that stranger things had occurred in real life. i need not say we insisted on its being finished, feeling sure it would do great good; though i must confess that i do not think either of us, much as we enjoyed it, was fully aware of its great merits. i was much impressed by her singleness of purpose; her one great desire so evidently being that her writings should help others to know and to love christ and his truth, that she thought little or nothing of her own reputation. she went on with her work, occasionally reading to us what she had added. in those days she always spoke of it as her "katy book," no other title having been given to it. but one morning she came to the breakfast-table with her face all lighted up. "i've got a name for my book," she exclaimed; "it came to me while i was lying awake last night. you know wordsworth's stepping westward? i am going to call it stepping heavenward--don't you like it? i do." we all felt it was exactly the right name, and she added, "i think i will put in wordsworth's poem as a preface." of the heart-communings on sacred things that made that summer so memorable to me i can not speak; and yet, more than anything else, these gave a distinctive character to our intercourse. her faith and love were so ardent and persuading, so much a part of herself, that no one could be with her without recognising their power over her life. she was interested in everything about her, without a particle of cant, full of playful humor and bright fancies; but the love of christ was the absorbing interest of her life--almost a passion, it might be called, so fervent and rapturous was her devotion to him, so great her longing for communion with him and for a more complete conformity to his perfect will. as i have said, all her emotions were intense and her religious affections had the same warmth and glow. believing in christ was to her not so much a duty as the deepest joy of her life, heightening all other joys, and she was not satisfied until her friends shared with her in this experience. she believed it to be attainable by all, founded on a complete submitting of the human to the divine will in all things, great and small. truly of her it might be said, if of any human being, "_she hath loved much_." _to mrs. smith, new york, nov. , ._ your arrangements at heidelberg seem to me to be as delightful as anything can be in a world where nothing is ideal. be sure to let a. bear her full share of the expense, and be a mother to her if you can. the gayest outside life has an undertone of sadness, and i do not doubt she will have hours of unrest which she will hardly know how to account for. i am afraid heidelberg will be rather narrow bounds for your husband, and hope he may decide to go to egypt in case his ear gets quite well. how fortunate that he is near a really good aurist. i am always nervous about ear-troubles. fancy your having to shout your love to him! in a letter written about two weeks ago, miss lyman says, "how am i? longing for a corner in which to stop trying to live, and lie down and die," and adds that she is now too feeble to travel. i suppose she is liable to break down at any moment, but i do hope she won't be left to go abroad. i judge from what you say of mr. h. that he is slipping off. i always look at people who are going to heaven with a sort of curiosity and envy; it is next best to seeing one who has just come thence. get all the good out of him you can; there is none too much saintliness on earth. i wonder how you spend your time? do, some time, write the history of one day; what you said to that funny cook, and what she said to you; what you thought and what you did; and what you didn't think and didn't did. _friday, th._--thanksgiving has come and gone beautifully. it was a perfect day as to weather. our congregation joined dr. murray's, and he gave us an excellent sermon. the four stearnses came in to dinner and seemed to enjoy it. i suppose you all celebrated the day in yankee fashion and got up those abominations--mince pies. when i told l. about ----'s fourth marriage, he said it reminded him of a place he had seen, where a man lay buried in the midst of a lot of women, the sole inscription on his gravestone being "our husband." mrs. ---- says the tiffs between my katy and her husband are exactly like those she had with hers, and mrs. ---- said very much the same thing--after hearing which, i gave up. tell a. i had a call yesterday from mrs. s----, who came to town to spend thanksgiving at her father's, and fell upon my neck and ate me up three several times. i tell you what it is, it's nice to have people love you, whether you deserve it or not, and this warm-hearted, enthusiastic creature really did me good. dr. skinner sent us an extraordinary book to read called "god's furnace." there is a good deal of egotism in it and self-consciousness, and a good deal of genuine christian experience. i read it through four times, and, when i carried it back and was discussing it with him, he said he had too. it seems almost incredible that a wholly sanctified character could publish such a book, made up as it is of the author's own letters and journal and most sacred joys and sorrows; but perhaps when i get sanctified i shall go to printing mine--it really seems to be a way they have. the hitchcocks sailed yesterday, and it must have cheered them to set forth on so very fine a day. give my love to everybody straight through from hal up to your husband and mr. h. _later_.--of course, my letters to a. are virtually to you, too, as far as you can be interested in the little details of which they are made up. randolph showed george a letter about katy, which he says beats anything we have heard yet, which is saying a good deal. one lady said earnest was _exactly_ like her husband, another that he was _painfully_ so; indeed, many sore hearts are making such confessions. so i begin to think there is even more sorrowfulness and unrest in the world than i thought there was. you would get sick unto death of the book if i should tell a quarter of what we hear about it, good and bad. it quite refreshed me to hear that a young lady wanted to punch me. craig's life is very touching. his delight in christ and in close fellowship with him is beautiful; but it is painful to see that dying man wandering about europe alone, when he ought to have been breathing out his life in the arms he loved so well. how did poor mrs. c. live through the week of suspense that followed the telegram announcing his illness? for one must love such a man very deeply, i think. well, he doesn't care now where he died or when, and he has gone where he belonged. i miss you all ever so much, and george keeps up one constant howl for your husband. it is a mystery to me what any of you find in my letters, they do seem so flat to me. what fun it would be if you would _all_ write me a round letter! i would write a rouser for it. lots of love. the rev. wheelock craig, whose life is referred to by mrs. prentiss in the preceding letter, was her husband's successor in the pastorate of the south trinitarian church, new bedford. [ ] * * * * * v. recollections by mrs. henry b. smith. the following recollections from the pen of mrs. smith may fitly close the present chapter: northampton, _january , _. my dear dr. prentiss:--i have been trying this beautiful snowy day, which shuts us in to our own thoughts, to recall some of my impressions of your dear wife, but i find it very difficult; there was such variety to her, and so much of her, and the things which were most characteristic are so hard to be described. i read "stepping heavenward" in ms. before we went to europe in . i remember she used to say that i was "katy's aunt," because we talked her over with so much interest. she sent me a copy to heidelberg, where i began at once translating it into german as my regular exercise. i was delighted to give my copy to mrs. prof. k. in leipsic, as _the_ american story which i was willing to have her translate into german, as she had asked for one. there is no need of telling you about the enthusiasm which the book created. women everywhere said, "it seems to be myself that i am reading about"; and the feeling that they, too, with all their imperfections, might be really stepping heavenward, was one great secret of its inspiration. one little incident may interest you. my niece, mrs. prof. emerson, was driving alone toward amherst, and took into her carriage a poor colored woman who was walking the same way. the woman soon said, "i have been thinking a good deal of you, mrs. e., and of your little children, and i have been reading a book which i thought you would like. it was something about walking towards heaven." "was it 'stepping heavenward'?" "yes, that was it." how naturally, modestly, almost indifferently, she received the tributes which poured in upon her! yet, though she cared little for praise, she cared much for love, and for the consciousness that she was a helper and comforter to others. on reading the book again this last summer, i was struck by seeing how true a transcript of herself, in more than one respect, was given in katy. "why can not i make a jacket for my baby without throwing into it the ardor of a soldier going into battle?" how ardently she threw herself into everything she did! in friendship and love and religion this outpouring of herself was most striking. her earlier books she always read or submitted to me in manuscript, and she showed so little self-interest in them, and i so much, that they seemed a sort of common property. i think that i had quite as much pleasure in their success and far more pride, than herself. the susy books i always considered quite as superior in their way as stepping heavenward. they are still peerless among books for little children. "henry and bessie," too, contains some of the most beautiful religious teaching ever written. "fred and maria and me" she used to talk about almost as if i had written it, for no other reason than that i liked it so much. my sister says that her daughter nettie read "little susy" through _twelve times_, getting up to read it before breakfast. she printed (before she could write) a little letter of thanks to your wife, who sent her the following pretty note in reply: new york, _january , ._ my dear "nettie":--what a nice little letter you wrote me! it pleased me very much. i shall keep it in my desk, and when i am an old woman, i shall buy a pair of spectacles, and sit down in the chimney-corner, and read it. when you learn to write with your own little fingers, i hope you will write me another letter. your friend, with love, aunt susan. she did nothing for effect, and made little or no effort merely to please; she was almost too careless of the impression which she made upon others, and, on this account, strangers sometimes thought her cold and unsympathetic. but touch her at the right point and the right moment, and there was no measure to her interest and warmth. she hated all pretense and display, and the slightest symptom of them in others shut her up and kept her grave and silent, and this, not from a severe or pharisaic spirit, but because the atmosphere was so foreign to her that she could not live in it. "i pity people that have any _sham_ about them when i am by," she said one day. "i am dreadfully afraid of young ladies," she said at another time. she could not adapt herself to the artificial and conventional. yet with young ladies who loved what she loved she was peculiarly free and playful and _forth-giving_, and such were among her dearest and most lovingly admiring friends. when we met, there were no preliminaries; she plunged at once into the subject which was interesting her, the book, the person, the case of sickness or trouble, the plan, the last shopping, the game, the garment, the new preparation for the table--in a way peculiarly her own. one could never be with her many minutes without hearing some bright fancy, some quick stroke of repartee, some ludicrous way of putting a thing. but whether she told of the grumbler who could find nothing to complain of in heaven except that "his halo didn't fit," or said in her quick way, when the plainness of a lady's dress was commended, "why, i didn't suppose that anybody could go _to heaven_ now-a-days without an overskirt," or wrote her sparkling impromptu rhymes for our children's games, her mirth was all in harmony with her earnest life. her quick perceptions, her droll comparisons, her readiness of expression, united with her rare and tender sympathies, made her the most fascinating of companions to both young and old. our little saturday tear, with our children, while our husbands were at chi alpha, were rare times. my children enjoyed "aunt lizzy" almost as much as i did. she was usually in her best mood at these times. when you and henry came in, on your return from chi alpha, you looked in upon, or, rather, you completed a happier circle than this impoverished earth can ever show us again. her acquisitions were so rapid, and she made so little show of them, that one might have doubted their thoroughness, who had no occasion to test them. her beautiful translation of griselda was a surprise to many. i remember her eager enthusiasm while translating it. the writing of her books was almost an inspiration, so rapid, without copying, almost without alteration, running on in her clear, pure style, with here and there a radiant sparkle above the full depths. it sometimes seemed as if she were interested only in those whom she knew she could benefit. if so, it was from her ever-present consciousness of a consecrated life. she constantly sought for ways of showing her love to christ, especially to his sick and suffering and sorrowing ones. life with her was peculiarly intense and earnest; she looked upon it more as a discipline and a hard path, and yet no one had a quicker or more admiring eye for the flowers by the wayside. i always thought that her great _forte_ was the study of character. she laid bare and dissected everybody, even her nearest friends and herself, to find what was in them; and what she found, reproduced in her books, was what gave them their peculiar charm of reality. the growth of the religious life in the heart was the one most interesting subject to her. i never could fully understand the deep sadness which was the groundwork of her nature. it certainly did not prevent the most intense enjoyment of her rich temporal and spiritual blessings, while it indicated depths which her friends did not fathom. it was partly constitutional, doubtless, and partly, i suppose, from her keener sensitiveness, her larger grasp, her stronger convictions, her more vivid vision, and more ardent desires. even the glowing, almost seraphic love of christ which was the chief characteristic of her later life was, in her words, "but longing and seeking." she was an exile yearning for her home, "stepping heavenward," and knowing better than the rest of us what it meant. these things come to me now, and yet how much i have omitted--her industry so varied and untiring, her generosity (so many gifts of former days are around me now), her interest in my children, her delight in flowers and colors and all beautiful things, her ready sympathy--but it is an almost inexhaustible subject. she comes vividly before me now, seated on the floor in her room, with her work around her, making something for such and such a person. what the void in your life must be those who knew most of her manifold, exalted, inspiring life can but imagine. "nay, hope may whisper with the dead by bending forward where they are; but memory, with a backward tread, communes with them afar! "the joys we lose are but forecast, and we shall find them all once more; we look behind us for the past, but, lo! 'tis all before!" [ ] see _memoir of s. s. prentiss_, edited by his brother, and published by charles scribner's sons. new edition. . [ ] the following is part of the notice in the london daily news: "we are, unfortunately, ignorant of _little susy's six birthdays_, but if that book be anything like as good as the charming volume before us by the same author, ycleped _little lou's sayings and doings_, it deserves an extraordinary popularity.... _little lou._ is one of the most natural stories in the world, and reads more like a mother's record of her child's sayings and doings than like a fictitious narrative. little lou, be it remarked, is a true baby throughout, instead of being a precocious little prig, as so many good children are in print. the child's love for his mother and his mother's love for him is described in the prettiest way possible." [ ] now professor of theology at bangor. [ ] the following is an extract from a letter of one of the editors of the advance, mr. j. b. t. marsh, dated chicago, august , :--"you will notice that the story is completed this week; i wish it could have continued six months longer. i have several times been on the point of writing you to express my own personal satisfaction--and more than satisfaction--in reading it, and to acquaint you with the great unanimity and _volume_ of praise of it, which has reached us from our readers. i do not think anything since the national era and 'uncle tom's cabin' times has been more heartily received by newspaper readers. i am sure it will have a great sale if rightly brought before the public. a publisher from london was in our office the other day, signifying a desire to make some arrangement to bring it out there. i have heard almost no unfavorable criticism of the story--nothing which you could make serviceable in its revision. i have heard dr. p. criticise ernest--of course the character and not your portrayal. for myself i consider the character a natural and consistent one. perhaps few men are found who are quite so blind to a wife's wants and yet so devoted, but--i don't know what the wives might say. we have had hundreds of letters of which the expression has been, 'we quarrel to see who shall have the first reading of the story.' i congratulate you most heartily upon its great success and the great good it has done and will yet do. i think if you should ever come west my wife would overturn almost any stone for the sake of welcoming you to the hospitality of our cottage on the lake michigan shore." [ ] _marchant vers le ciel_ is the title of the french translation. [ ] _memorial discourse_ by the rev. marvin r. vincent, d.d. [ ] the following is an extract from a letter, dated new orleans, and written after mrs. prentiss' death: "we called one day to see a poor dressmaker who was dying of consumption. she was an educated woman, a devout roman catholic, and a person whom we had long respected and esteemed for her integrity, her love of independence, and her extraordinary powers of endurance. her husband, a prosperous merchant, had died suddenly, and his affairs being mismanaged, she was obliged, although a constant invalid, to earn a support for many years by the most unremitting labor. we found her reading; 'stepping heavenward,' which she spoke of in the warmest terms. we told her about the authoress, of her suffering from ill-health, and of her recent death. she listened eagerly and asked questions which showed the deepest interest in the subject. soon after she left the city, and a few weeks later we heard of her death." [ ] one of them--said to have been an eminent german theologian--used this strong language respecting it: "schon manche gute, edle, segensreiche gabe ist uns aus nordamerika gekommen, aber wir stehen nicht au, diese als die beste zu bezeichnen unter allen, die uns von dort zu gesichte gekommen." [ ] see a memorial of the character, work, and closing days of rev. wheelock craig, new bedford. mr. craig was born in augusta, maine, july , . he entered bowdoin college in , and was graduated with honor in the class of . he then entered the theological seminary at bangor, where he graduated in . after preaching a couple of years at new castle, me., he accepted a call to new bedford, and was installed there december , . in he received a call to the chair of modern languages in bowdoin college, which he declined. after an earnest and faithful ministry of more than seventeen years, he went abroad for his health in may, . he visited ireland, england, scotland, and then passing over to the continent, travelled through belgium, holland, switzerland, and so southward as far as naples, where he arrived the last of september. here he was taken seriously ill, and advised to hasten back to switzerland. in great weakness he passed through rome, florence, turin, geneva, and reached neuchatel on the th of november in a state of utter exhaustion. there, encompassed by newly-made friends and tenderly cared for, he gently breathed his last on the th of november. two names, in particular, deserve to be gratefully mentioned in connection with mr. craig's last hours, viz.: that of his countryman, mr. w. c. cabot, and that of the rev. dr. godet, of neuchatel. of the former he said the day before his death: "he saw me coming from geneva a perfect stranger--lying sick, helpless, wretched, and miserable in the ears--and spoke to me, inquired who i was, and took care of me. anybody else would have gone by on the other side. he brought me to this hotel, and remained with me, and did everything for me; and, fearing that i might be ill some time, and uneasy about money matters, he sent me a letter of credit for two hundred pounds. such noble and generous conduct to an entire stranger was never heard of." to dr. godet he had a letter from prof. henry b. smith, of new york. but he needed no other introduction to that warm- hearted and eminent servant of god than his sad condition and his love to christ. "from the first quarter of an hour," wrote dr. godet to mrs. craig, "we were like two brothers who had known each other from infancy. he knew not a great deal of french, and i not more of english; but the lord was between him and me." "prof. godet and family are like the very angels of god," wrote mr. craig to his wife. his last days were filled with inexpressible joy in his god and saviour. shortly before his departure he said to dr. godet and the other friends who were by his bedside, "_there shall be no night there, but the lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall be their light._" mr. craig had a highly poetical nature, refined spiritual sensibilities, and a soul glowing with love to his master. he was also a vigorous and original thinker. some passages in his letters and journal are as racy and striking as anything in john newton or cecil. mrs. prentiss greatly enjoyed reading them to her friends. some of them she copied and had published in the association monthly. chapter x. on the mount. . i. a happy year. madame guyon. what sweetens the cup of earthly trials and the cup of earthly joy. death of mrs. julia b. cady. her usefulness. sickness and death of other friends. "my cup runneth over." letters. "more love to thee, o christ." in every earnest life there usually comes a time when it reaches its highest point, whether of power or of enjoyment; a time when it is in --the bright, consumate flower. the year formed such a period in the life of mrs. prentiss. none that went before, or that followed after, equalled it, as a whole, in rich, varied and happy experiences. it was full of the genial, loving spirit which inspired the little susy books and stepping heavenward; full, too, of the playful humor which runs through fred and maria and me; and full, also, of the intense, overflowing delight in her god and saviour that breathes in the golden hours. from its opening to its close she was--to borrow an expression from her richmond journal--"one great long sunbeam." everywhere, in her home, with her friends, by sick and dying beds, in the house of mourning, in the crowded street or among her flowers at dorset, she seemed to be attired with constant brightness. of course, there were not wanting hours of sadness and heart-sinking; nor was her consciousness of sin or her longing to be freed from it, perhaps, ever keener and more profound; but still the main current of her existence flowed on, untroubled, to the music of its own loving, grateful and adoring thoughts. often she would say that god was too good to her; that she was _satisfied_ and had nothing more to ask of life; her cup of domestic bliss ran over; and as to her religious joy, it was at times too much for her frail body, and she begged that it might be transferred to other souls. her letters give a vivid picture of her state of mind during this memorable year; and yet only a picture. the sweet reality was beyond the power of words. in the early part of this year the correspondence of madame guyon and fenelon fell into her hands, and was eagerly read by her. the perusal of this correspondence led, somewhat later, to a careful study of the select works, autobiography, and spiritual letters of madame guyon, thus forming an important incident in her religious history. heretofore she had known madame guyon chiefly through the life by prof. upham and the little treatise entitled a short and very easy method of prayer; and both seem rather to have repelled her. in she wrote to a friend: there is a book i would be glad to have you read, and which i think you would wish to own; 'thoughts on personal religion,' by goulburn. i never read a modern religious book that had in it so much, that really edified me. i take for granted you have thomas à kempis; on that and on fenelon i have feasted for years every day; i like strengthening food and whatever deals a blow at this monster self. madame guyon i do not understand. but now she began to feel, as so many earnest seekers after holiness had felt before her, the strong attraction of this remarkable woman. while never becoming to her what fenelon was, madame guyon for several years exerted a decided influence upon her views of the christian life; nor is there reason to think that this influence was not, on the whole, salutary. notwithstanding her grave errors and the extravagances which marred her career, madame guyon was no doubt one of the holiest, as she was certainly one of the most gifted, women of her own or any other age. [ ] _to mrs. j elliot condict, new york, jan. , ._ it has been a real disappointment not to see you. how quickly we learn to lean on earthly things! i am afraid i prize christian fellowship too much, and that i am behaving in a miserly way about all divine gifts, shutting myself up here in this room, which often seems like the gate of heaven, and luxuriating in it, instead of going about preaching the glad tidings to other souls. yet work for christ, when he gives it, is sweet, too, and if answering your note is the little tiny bit he offers me at this moment, how glad i am. though i am not, just now, in the furnace as you are, there is no knowing how soon i shall be, and i remember well enough how the furnace feels, to have deep sympathy with you in your trials. sympathy, but not regret; i can't make myself be very sorry for christ's disciples when he takes them in hand--he does it so tenderly, so wisely, so lovingly; and it can hardly be true, can it? that he is just as near and dear to me when my cup is as full of earthly blessings as it can hold, as he is to you whose cup he is emptying? i have always thought they knew and loved him best who knew him in his character of chastiser; but perhaps one never loses the memory of his revelations of himself in that form, and perhaps that tender memory saddens and hallows the day of prosperity. at any rate, you and i seem to be in full sympathy with each other; your empty cup isn't empty, and my full one would be bitter if love to christ did not sweeten it. it matters very little on what paths we are walking, since we find him in every one. how ashamed we shall be when we get to heaven, of our talk about our trials here! why don't we sing songs instead? we know how, for he has put the songs into our mouths. i think i know something about the land of beulah, but i don't quite _live_ in it yet; and yet what is this joy if it isn't beatitude, if it is not a foretaste of that which is to come? it isn't joy in what he has done for me, a sinner, but adoring joy for what he is, though i do not _begin to know_ what he is. it will take an eternity to learn that lesson. do you really mean to say that miss k. is going to pray for _me_? how delightful! i am _greedy_ for prayer; nobody is rich enough to give me anything i so long for; indeed when my husband begged me to tell him what i wanted at christmas, i couldn't think of a thing; but oh, what unutterable longing i have for more of christ. why should we not speak freely to each other of him? don't apologise for it again. the wonder is that we have the heart to speak of anything else. sometimes i am almost frightened at the expressions of love i pour out upon him, and wonder if i am really in earnest; if i really mean all i say. is it even so with you? it is not foolish, is it? perhaps he likes to hear our poor stammerings, when we can not get our emotions and our thoughts into words. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, jan. , ._ i find letters more and more unsatisfactory. how little i know of your real life, how little you know of mine! so much is going on all the time that i should run and tell you about if you lived here, but which it would take too long to write. i have very precious christian friends within six months, who take, or rather to whom i give, more time than i could or would spare for any ordinary friendship; one of them has spent four hours in my room with me at a time, and we had wonderful communings together. then two dear friends have died. one of the two, of whom you have heard me speak, was the most useful woman in our church; my husband and i both wept over her death. the other directed in dying that a copy of stepping heavenward should be given to each of her sunday scholars; a lifelong fear of death was taken away, and she declared it pleasanter and easier to die than to live; her last words, five minutes before she drew her last gentle breath, came with the upward, dying look, "wonderful love!" you can't think how sweet it is to be a pastor's wife; to feel the _right_ to sympathise with those who mourn, to fly to them at once, and join them in their prayers and tears. it would be pleasant to spend one's whole time among sufferers, and to keep testifying to them what christ can and will become to them, if they will only let him.... no, i never "dialed" or was transcendental. i don't think knowledge will come to us by intuition in heaven, though knowledge enough to get started there, will. but i don't much care how it will be. i know we shall learn christ there. i have read lately prof. phelps on the solitude of christ; it is a suggestive little book which i like much. have you ever read the life of mrs. hawkes? it is interesting because she records so many of cecil's wonderful remarks--such, e.g., as these: "a humble, kind silence often utters much." "to-morrow you and i shall walk together in a garden, when i hope to talk with you about everything but sadness." i am going to ask a favor of you, though i hate to put you to the trouble. in writing a telegram in great haste and sorrow, i accidentally used and cut into the lines you copied for me--sabbath hymn in sickness. it was a real loss, and if you ever feel a little stronger than usual, will you make me another copy? i so often want to comfort sick persons with it. i have half promised to write a serial for a magazine, the organ of the young men's christian association, though i know nothing of young men and hate to write serials. i wish i could hide in some hole. i get bright letters from a., who is having a very nice time. i write her every day; wretched letters, which she thinks delightful, fortunately. we have a quiet time this winter, but such nice things can't last, and i am afraid of this world anyhow. i know you pray for me, as i do for you and miss l. every day. i have a thousand things to say that i shall have to put off till i see you. good-bye, dearie. _to mrs. condict, sunday, march , ._ i have had some really sweet days, shut up with my dear little boy. he is better, and i am comparatively at leisure again, and so happy in meditating on the character of my saviour, and in the sense of his nearness, that i _ache_, and have had to beg him to give me no more, but to carry this joy to you and to miss k. and to two friends, who, languishing on dying beds, need it so much. [ ] if i could shed tears i should not have to tell you this, and indeed it is nothing new; but one must have vent in some way. and this reminds me to explain to you why to three dear christian friends i now and then send verses; they are my tears of joy or sorrow, and when i feel most deeply it is a relief to versify, and a pleasure to open my heart to those who feel as i do. i have been in print ever since i was sixteen years old, and admiration is an old story; i care very little for it; but i do crave and value sympathy with those who love christ. and it is such a new thing to open my heart thus! i have written any number of verses that no human being has ever seen, because they came from the very bottom of my heart. i wish i could put into words all the blessed thoughts i had last week about god's dear will: it was a week of such sweet content with the work he gave me to do; naturally i hate nursing, and losing the air makes me feel unwell; but what can't god do with us? i love, dearly, to have a _master_. i fancy that those who have strong wills, are the ones to enjoy god's sovereignty most. i wonder if you realise what a very happy creature i am? and how much _too good_ god is to me? i don't see how he can heap such mercies on a poor sinner; but that only shows how little i know him. but then, i am learning to know him, and shall go on doing it forever and ever; and so will you. i am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the rock of ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. is it not better to be thinking of the rock, not of the feet that stand upon it? it seems to me that we ought to be unconscious of ourselves, and that the nearer we get to christ, the more we shall be taken up with him. we shall be like a sick man who, after he gets well, forgets all the old symptoms he used to think so much of, and stops feeling his pulse, and just enjoys his health, only pointing out his _physician_ to all who are diseased. you will see that this is in answer to a portion of your letter, in which you say miss k. interprets to you certain experiences. if i am wrong i am willing to be set right; perhaps i have not said clearly what i meant to say. i certainly mean no _criticism_ on you or her, but am only thinking aloud and querying. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, march , ._ you ask if i revel in the pilgrim's progress. yes, i do. i think it an amazing book. it seems to me almost as much an inspiration as the bible itself. [ ] i am glad you liked that hymn. i write in verse whenever i am deeply stirred, because, though as full of tears as other people, i can not shed them. but i never showed any of these verses to any one, not even my husband, till this winter. but if i were more with you no doubt i should venture to let you run over some of them, at least those my dear husband has seen and likes. i have felt about hymns just as you say you do, as if i loved them more than the bible. but i have got over that; i prayed myself out of it, not loving hymns the less, but the bible more. i wonder if you sing; i can't remember; if you do, i will send you, sometime, a hymn to sing for my sake, called "more love to thee, o christ." only to think, our silver wedding comes next month, and a. and the smiths away! i have been interrupted by callers, and must have been in the parlor several hours. you can't think what a sweet, peaceful winter this has been, nor how good the children are. my cup has just run over, and at times i am too happy to be comfortable, if you know what that means; not having a strong body, i suppose you do. mrs. b. has been in a very critical state of late, but she is rallying, and i may, perhaps, have the privilege of seeing her again. i have had some precious times with her in her sick-room; last friday, a week ago, she prayed with me in the sweetest temper of mind, and came with me when i took leave, to the head of the stairs, full of love and smiles. _to a young friend, april , ._ i wish that hymn for the sick-room were mine, but it is not. i will enclose one that is, which my dear husband has kindly had printed; perhaps you will like to sing it to the tune of "nearer, my god, to thee." there is not much in it, but you can put everything into it as you make it your prayer. i can't help feeling that every soul i meet, of whom i can ask, what think you of christ? and get the glad answer, "he is the chiefest among ten thousand, _the one_ altogether lovely"--is a blessing as well as a comfort to mine; and whenever you can and do say it, you will become more dear to me. your god and saviour won you as an easy victory, but he had to fight for me. it seems to me now that he ought to have all there is of me--which, to be sure, isn't much--and i hope he is taking it. his ways with me have been perfectly beautiful and infinite in long-suffering and patience. _april th._--your note has reawakened a question i have often had occasion to ask myself before. why do my friends speak of my letters as giving more pleasure or profit than anything that goes to them from me in print? is human nature so selfish? must everybody have everything to himself? it might seem so at first blush, but i think there are two sides to this question. may it not be possible that god sends a message directly from _one_ heart to _another_ as he does not to the _many?_ does he not speak through the living voice and the pen that is that voice, as he does not do in the less unconstrained form of print? at any rate, i love to believe that he directs each word and look and tone; _inspires_ rather, i should say. i should like you to offer a special prayer for us on saturday. that day completes twenty-five years of married life to us, and, though it has its shades as well as its lights, i do not think i can do better for you than ask that you may have such years, "for who the backward scene hath scanned but blessed the father's guiding hand?" i can more truly thank him for his chastisements than for his worldly indulgences; the latter urge from, the former drive to him. i am saying a great thing in a feeble way, and you may multiply it by ten thousand, and it will still be weak. the hymn, "more love to thee, o christ," belongs, probably, as far back as the year . like most of her hymns, it is simply a prayer put into the form of verse. she wrote it so hastily that the last stanza was left incomplete, one line having been added in pencil when it was printed. she did not show it, not even to her husband, until many years after it was written; and she wondered not a little that, when published, it met with so much favor. * * * * * ii. her silver wedding. "_i have lived, i have loved_." no joy can put her out of sympathy with the trials of friends. a glance backward. last interview with a dying friend. more love and more likeness to christ. funeral of a little baby. letters to christian friends. if was the crowning year in mrs. prentiss' life, the th of april was that year's most precious jewel. as the time drew nigh, a glow of tender, grateful recollection suffused her countenance. her eyes are homes of silent prayer. she talked of the past, like one lost in wonder, while the light and beauty of the vanished years appeared still to rest upon her spirit. the day itself, which had been kept from the knowledge of most of her friends, was full of sweet content, rehearsing, as it were, all the days of her married life; and, at its close, the measure of her earthly joy seemed to be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. _to mrs. leonard, new york, april , - ._ do you know that it is just twenty-five years since we first met? how gladly would i spend the day of our silver wedding with you! you will see that i am near in spirit, at all events. my thoughts have been busy the past week with reviewing the years through which i have travelled, hand in hand, with my dear husband; years full of sin, full of suffering, full of joy; brimful of the loving-kindness and tender mercy that smote often and smote surely. your last letter only confirms what i already knew, but am never tired of hearing repeated, the faithfulness of god to those whom he afflicts. when we once find out what he is to an aching, empty heart, we want to make everybody see just what we see, and, until we try in vain, think we can. i had very peculiar feelings in relation to you when your dear husband was, for a time, parted from you. i knew god would never afflict you so, if he had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what he took. and what can we ask for that compares for one instant with "the almost constant felt presence of our saviour's sympathy and support"? our human nature would like to have the earthly and the divine friendship at once; but, if we must choose between the twain, surely you and i would choose christ without one moment's hesitation. i hope you mention my name every day to him as i do yours, as i _love_ to do. i enclose, and want you, when by yourself, to sing for my sake a little hymn that i am sure is the language of your heart. my dear husband had a few copies struck off to give friends. write soon and often. oh, that you lived here or at dorset. good-bye, with warmest love, now _twenty-five_ years old! _to mrs. condict, new york, april , ._ last saturday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of our marriage, and a very happy day to us both. my dear husband wrote me a letter that made me tremble, lest he should get such hold of me as no human being must have. i have a very curious feeling about life; a _satisfied_ one, and as if it could not possibly give me much more than i now have. _"i have lived, i have loved."_ [ ] people often say they have so much to live for; i can't feel so, though i am not only willing, but glad to live while my husband and children need me; and yet--and yet--to have this problem solved, and to be forever with the lord! i want to see you. i can no longer see my dear mrs. b.; she is too ill, and that makes me miss you the more. i hope that little ms. of mine did not task your sympathies; i don't want you to pity me, but to magnify him who took such pains with me, and is carrying on just such work in thousands of hearts and lives. what goodness! what condescension! the least we can do who have suffered much is to love much.... i have been studying the bible on the subject of giving personal testimony, and think it makes this a plain duty. there is nothing like the influence of one living soul on another. then why should we not naturally speak to everybody who will listen, of what fills our thoughts; our saviour, his beauty, his goodness, his faithfulness, his wisdom! i don't believe a full heart _can help_ running over. _to a young friend, april , ._ i was right sorry to lose your saturday's call. it was a happy day to me, but i can conceive of no enjoyment of any sort that would put me out of sympathy with the trials of friends: "old and young are bringing troubles, great and small, for me to hear; _i have often blessed by sorrows that drew other's grief so near."_ i thought i was saying a very ordinary thing when i spoke of thanking god for his long years of discipline, but very likely life did not look to me at your age as it does now. i was rather startled the other day, to find it written in german, in my own hand, "i can not say the will is there," referring to a hymn which says, "der will ist da, die kraft ist klein, doch wird dir nicht zuwider seyn." i suppose there was some great struggle going on when this foolish heart said that, just as if god did not _invariably_ do for us the very best that can be done. [ ] you speak of having your love to jesus intensified by interviews with me. it can hardly be otherwise, when those meet together who love him, and it is a rule that works both ways; acts and reacts. i should be thankful if no human being could ever meet me, even in a chance way, and not go away clasping him the closer, and if i could meet no one who did not so stir and move me. it is my constant prayer. i have such insatiable longings to know and love him better that i go about hungering and thirsting for the fellowship of those who feel so too; when i meet them i call them my "benedictions." next best to being with christ himself, i love to be with those who have his spirit and are yearning for more of his likeness. you speak of putting "deep and dark chasms between" yourself and christ. he lets us do this that we may learn our nothingness, our weakness, and turn, disgusted, from ourselves to him. may i venture to assure you that the "chasms" occur less and less frequently as one presses on, till finally they turn into "mountains of light." get and keep a will for god, and everything that will is ready for will come. this is about a tenth part of what i might say. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, april , ._ i wish i could describe to you my last interview with mrs. b. she had altered so in two weeks in which i had not seen her, that i should not have known her. she spoke with difficulty, but by getting close to her mouth i could hear all she said. she went back to the first time she met me, told me her heart then knitted itself to mine, and how she had loved me ever since, etc., etc. i then asked her if she had any parting counsel to give me: "no, not a word.".... some one came in and wet her lips, gave her a sprig of citronatis, and passed out. i crushed it and let her smell the bruised leaves, saying, "you are just like these crushed leaves." she smiled, and replied, "well, i haven't had one pain too many, not one. but the agony has been dreadful. i won't talk about that; i just want to see your sunny face." i asked if she was rejoicing in the hope of meeting lost friends and the saints in heaven. she said, with an expressive look, "oh, no, i haven't got so far as _that_. i have only got as far as christ." "for all that," i said, "you'll see my father and mother there." "why, so i shall," with another bright smile. but her lips were growing white with pain, and i came away. did i tell you it was our silver wedding-day on the th? we had a very happy day, and if i could see you i should like to tell you all about it. but it is too long a story to tell in writing. i don't see but i've had everything this life can give, and have a curious feeling as if i had got to a stopping-place. i heard yesterday that two of m.'s teachers had said they looked at her with perfect awe on account of her goodness. i really never knew her to do anything wrong. _to a young friend new york, may , ._ i could write forever on the subject of christian charity, but i must say that in the case you refer to, i think you accuse yourself unduly. we are not to part company with our common sense because we want to clasp hands with the love that thinketh no evil, and we can not help seeing that there are few, if any, on earth without beams in their eyes and foibles and sins in their lives. the fact that your friend repented and confessed his sin, entitled him to your forgiving love, but not to the ignoring of the fact that he was guilty.... temptations come sometimes in swarms, like bees, and running away does no good, and fighting only exasperates them. the only help must come from him who understands and can control the whole swarm. you ask for my prayers, and i ask for yours. i long ago formed the habit of praying at night individually, if possible, for all who had come to me through the day, or whom i had visited; but you contrive to get a much larger share than that. i love to think of your future holiness and usefulness as even in the very least linked to my prayers. oh, i ought to know how to pray a great deal better than i do, for forty years ago, save one, i this day publicly dedicated myself to christ. i write to you because i like to do so, recognising no difference between writing and talking. when no better work comes to me, i am glad to give the little pleasure i can, in notes and letters. he who knows how poor we are, how little we have to give, does not disdain even a note like this, since it is written in love to him and to one of his own dear ones. _may d._--your last letter was like a fragrant breath of country air, redolent of flowers, and all that makes rural scenes so sweet. but better still, it was fragrant with love to him who is the bond between us, in whose name and for whose sake we are friends. i wish i loved him better and were more like him; perhaps that is about as far as we get in this world, for no matter how far we advance, we are never satisfied; there is always something ahead; i doubt if any one ever said, even in a whisper and to himself, "now i love my saviour as much as a human soul can." you speak of my having given you "counsels." have i had the presumption to do that? two-thirds of the time i feel as if i wanted somebody to counsel me; the only thing i really know that you do not, is what it is to be beaten with persistent, ceaseless stripes, year after year, year after year, with scarcely breathing time between. i don't know whether this is most an argument against me, or for god; on the whole it is most for him, who was so good and kind as never to spare me for my writhing and groaning. truly as i value this discipline, i want you to give yourself to him so unreservedly that you will not need such sharp treatment. i am not going to keep writing and getting you in debt. all i ask is if you ever feel a little under the weather and want a specially loving or cheering word, to give me the chance to speak or write it. a chapter might be written about mrs. prentiss' love for little children, the enthusiasm with which she studied all their artless ways, her delight in their beauty, and the reverence with which she regarded the mystery of their infant being. her faith in their real, complete humanity, their susceptibility to spiritual influences, and, when called from earth, their blessed immortality in and through christ, was very vivid; and it was untroubled by any of those distressing doubts, or misgivings, that are engendered by the materialistic spirit and science of the age. contempt for them shocked her as an offence against the holy child jesus, their king and saviour. her very look and manner as she took a young infant, especially a sick or dying infant, in her arms and gave it a loving kiss, seemed to say: sweet baby, little as thou art, thou art a human whole; thou hast a little human heart, thou hast a deathless soul. [ ] the following letter to a christian mother, dated may th, will show her feeling on this subject: this morning we attended the funeral of a little baby, eight months old. my husband, in his remarks, said that though born and ever continuing to be a sufferer, it was never saddened by this fellowship with christ; and that he believed it was a partaker of his holiness, and glad through his indwelling, even though unconscious of it. during the last days of its life, after each paroxysm of coughing, it would look first at its mother, then at its father, for sympathy, and then look upward with a face radiant beyond description. i can't tell you how it touched me to think that i had in that baby a little christian _sister_--not merely redeemed, but sanctified from its birth--and i know it will touch and strengthen you to hear of it. i felt a reverence for that tiny, lifeless form, that i can not put into words. and, indeed, why should it be harder for god to enter into the soul of an infant than into our "unlikeliest" ones? ... i see more and more that if we have within us the mind of christ, we must bear the burden of other griefs than our own; he did not merely _pity_ suffering humanity; he _bore_ our griefs, and in all our afflictions he was afflicted. _to mrs. condict, june , ._ if you can get hold of the april number of the bibliotheca sacra, read an article in it called "psychology in the life, work and teachings of jesus." i think it very striking and very true. praying for dr. ---- this morning, i had such a peaceful feeling that he was safe. do you feel so about him? i had a very different experience about another man who has been to see me since i began this letter, and who said i was the first _happy_ person he ever met. may god lay that to his heart!... rummaging among dusty things in the attic this forenoon with great repugnance, i found such a beautiful letter from my husband, written for my solace in switzerland when he was in paris (he wrote me every day, sometimes twice a day, during the two months of our enforced separation) that even the drudgery of getting my hands soiled and my back broken was sweetened. that's the way god keeps on spoiling us; one good thing after another till we are ashamed. well, let us step onward, hand in hand. i wonder which of us will outrun the other and step in first? i am so glad i'm willing to live. in the course of this spring _the percys_ was published. the story first came out as a serial in the new york observer. it was translated into french under the title _la famille percy_. in a german version appeared under the title _die familie percy_. it was also republished in london. [ ] * * * * * iii. lines on going to dorset. a cloud over her. faber's life. loving friends for one's own sake and loving them for christ's sake. the bible and the christian life. dorset society and occupations. counsels to a young friend in trouble. "don't stop praying for your life!" cure for the heart-sickness caused by a sight of human imperfections. fenelon's teaching about humiliation and being patient with ourselves. the following lines, found among her papers after her death, show in what spirit she went to dorset: once more i change my home, once more begin life in this rural stillness and repose; but i have brought with me my heart of sin, and sin nor quiet nor cessation knows. ah, when i make the final, blessed change, i shall leave that behind, shall throw aside earth's soiled and soiling garments, and shall range through purer regions like a youthful bride. thrice welcome be that day! do thou, meanwhile, my soul, sit ready, unencumbered wait; the master bides thy coming, and his smile shall bid thee welcome at the golden gate. dorset, june , . _to mrs. condict, dorset, june , ._ i would love to have you here with me in this dear little den of mine and see the mountains from my window. my husband has gone back to town, and my only society is that of the children, so you would be most welcome if you should come in either smiling or sighing. i have had a cloud over me of late. do you know about mr. prentiss' appointment by general assembly to a professorship at chicago? his going would involve not only our tearing ourselves out of the heart of our beloved church, but of my losing you and miss k., and of our all losing this dear little home. of course, he does not want to go, and i am shocked at the thought of his leaving the ministry; but, on the other hand, there is a right and a wrong to the question, and we ought to want to do whatever god chooses. the thought of giving up this home makes me know better how to sympathise with you if you have to part with yours. i do think it is good for us to be emptied from vessel to vessel, and there is something awful in the thought of having our own way with leanness in the soul. i am greatly pained in reading faber's life and letters, at the shocking way in which he speaks of mary, calling her his mamma, and praying to her and to joseph, and nobody knows who not. it seems almost incredible that this is the man who wrote those beautiful strengthening hymns. it sets one to praying "hold thou me up and i shall be safe." ... i should have forgotten the lines of mine you quote if you had not copied them. god give to you and to me a thousandfold more of the spirit they breathe, and make us wholly, wholly his own! my repugnance to go to chicago makes me feel that perhaps that is just the wrench i need. well, good-bye; at the longest we have not long to stay in this sphere of discipline and correction. _to mr. g. s. p., dorset, july , ._ i had just come home from a delicious little tramp through our own woods when your letter came, and now, if you knew what was good for you, you would drop in and take tea and spend the evening with us. i should like you to see our house and our mountains, and our cup that runs over till we are ashamed. had i not known you wouldn't come i should have given you a chance, especially as my husband was gone and i was rather lonely; though to be sure he always writes me every day. on the way up here i was glad of time to think out certain things i had been waiting for leisure to attend to. one had some connection with you, as well as one or two other friends. i had long felt that there was a real, though subtle, difference between human--and, shall i say divine?--affection, but did not see just what it was. turning it over in my mind that day, it suddenly came to me as this. human friendship may be entirely selfish, giving only to receive in return, or may be partially so--yet still selfish. but the love that grows out of the love of christ, and that delights in his image wherever it is seen, claims no response; loves because it is its very nature to do so, because it can not help it, and this without regard to what its object gives. i dare not pretend that i have fully reached this state, but i have entered this land, and know that it is one to be desired as a home, an abiding place. i have thought painfully of the narrow quarters and the hot nights endured by so many in new york, during this unusually warm weather--especially of mrs. g. with three restless children in bed with her and her poor lonely heart. i can not but believe that christ has real purposes of mercy to her soul. i feel interested in mr. h.'s summer work in a hard field. in place of aversion to young men, i am beginning to realise how true work for christ one may do by praying persistently for them, especially those consecrated to the ministry of his gospel. i do hope christ will have the whole of you, and that you will have the whole of him. when you write, let me know how you like my beloved fenelon. still, you may not like him. some christians never get to feeding on these mystical writers, and get on without them. _to mrs. condict, dorset, july , ._ i was greatly struck with these words yesterday: "as for god his way is perfect"; think of reading the bible through four times in one year, and nobody knows how many times since, and never resting on these words. somehow they charmed me. and these words have been ringing in my ears, "earth looks so little and so low," while conscious that when i can get ferns and flowers, it does not look so "little" or so "low," as it does when i can't. my cook, who is a romanist, has been prevented from going to her own church seven miles off, by the weather, ever since we came here, and last sunday said she meant to go to ours. mr. p. preached on god's character as our physician, and she was delighted. i think it was hearing one of his little letters to the children that made her realise, that he was a christian man whom she might safely hear; at any rate, i feel greatly pleased and comforted that she could appreciate such a subject. i fear you are suffering from the weather; we never knew anything like it here. we do not suffer, but wake up every morning _bathed_ in a breeze that refreshes for the day; i mean we do not suffer while we keep still. i am astonished at god's goodness in giving us this place; not his goodness itself, but towards _us_. if mrs. brinsmade [ ] left much of such material as the extract you sent me, i wonder dr. b. did not write her memoir. the more i read of what christ said about faith, the more impressed i am. just now i am on the last chapters in the gospel of john, and feel as if i had never read them before. they are just wonderful. we have to read the bible to understand the christian life, and we must penetrate far into that life in order to understand the bible. how beautifully the one interprets the other! i want you to let me know, without telling her that i asked you, if miss k. could make me a visit if it were not for the expense? _to miss e. a. warner, dorset, july , ._ did you ever use a fountain pen? i have had one given me, and like it so much that i sent for one for my husband, and one for mr. pratt. when one wants to write in one's lap, or out of doors, it is delightful. mrs. field came over from east dorset on sunday to have her baby baptized. they had him there in the church through the whole morning service, and he was as quiet as any of us. the next day mrs. f. came down and spent the morning with me, sweeter, more thoughtful than ever, if changed at all. dr. and mrs. humphrey, of philadelphia, are passing the summer here at the tavern, and we spend most of our evenings there, or they come here. mrs. h. is a very superior woman, and though i was determined not to like her, because i have so many people on hand already, i found i could not help it. she is as furious about mosses and lichens and all such things as i am, and the other day took home a _bushel-basket_ of them. she is an earnest christian, and has passed through deep waters; i ought to have reversed the order of those clauses. excuse this rather hasty letter; i feared you might fancy your book lost. if you are alive, let me know it, also if you are dead. _to a young friend, dorset, aug. , ._ i dare not answer your letter, just received, in my own strength, but must pray over it long. it is a great thing to learn how far our doubts and despondencies are the direct result of physical causes, and another great thing is, when we can not trace any such connexion, to bear patiently and quietly what god _permits_, if he does not authorise. i have no more doubt that you love him, and that he loves you, than that i love him and that he loves me. you have been daily in my prayers. temptations and conflict are inseparable from the christian life; no strange thing has happened to you. let me comfort you with the assurance that you will be taught more and more by god's spirit how to resist; and that true strength and holy manhood will spring up from this painful soil. try to take heart; there is more than one foot-print on the sands of time to prove that "some forlorn and shipwrecked brother" has traversed them before you, and come off conqueror through the beloved. _don't stop praying for your life._ be as cold and emotionless as you please; god will accept your naked faith, when it has no glow or warmth in it; and in his own time the loving, glad heart will come back to you. i deeply feel for and with you, and have no doubt that a week among these mountains would do more towards uniting you to christ than a mile of letters would. you can't complain of any folly to which i could not plead guilty. i have put my saviour's patience to every possible test, and how i love him when i think what he will put up with. you ask if i "ever feel that religion is a sham"? no, never. i _know_ it is a reality. if you ask if i am ever staggered by the inconsistencies of professing christians, i say yes, i am often made heartsick by them; but heartsickness always makes me run to christ, and one good look at him pacifies me. this is in fact my panacea for every ill; and as to my own sinfulness, that would certainly overwhelm me if i spent much time in looking at it. but it is a monster whose face i do not love to see; i turn from its hideousness to the beauty of his face who sins not, and the sight of "yon lovely man" ravishes me. but at your age i did this only by fits and starts, and suffered as you do. so i know how to feel for you, and what to ask for you. god purposely sickens us of man and of self, that we may learn to "look long at jesus." and this brings me to what you say about fenelon's going too far, when he says we may judge of the depth of our humility by our delight in humiliation, etc. no, he does not go a bit too far. paul says, "i will _glory_ in my infirmities"--"i take _pleasure_ in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecution, in distresses for christ's sake; for when i am weak, then am i strong." i think this a great attainment; but that his disciples may reach it, though only through a humbling, painful process. then as to god's glory. we say, "man's chief end is to glorify god and enjoy him forever." now, can we enjoy him till we do glorify him? can we enjoy him while living for ourselves, while indulging in sin, while prayerless and cold and dead? does not god directly seek our highest happiness when he strips us of vainglory and self-love, embitters the poisonous draught of mere human felicity, and makes us fall down before him lost in the sense of his beauty and desirableness? the connexion between glorifying and enjoying him is, to my mind, perfect--one following as the _necessary sequence_ of the other; and facts bear me out in this. he who has let self go and lives only for the honor of god, is the free, the happy man. he is no longer a slave, but has the liberty of the sons of god; for "him who honors me, i will honor." satan has befogged you on this point. he dreads to see you ripen into a saintly, devoted, useful man. he hopes to overwhelm and ruin you. but he will not prevail. you have solemnly given yourself to the lord; you have chosen the work of winning and feeding souls as your life-work, and you can not, must not go back. these conflicts are the lot of those who are training to be the lord's true yoke-fellows. christ's sweetest consolations lie behind crosses, and he reserves his best things for those who have the courage to press forward, fighting for them. i entreat you to turn your eyes away from self, from man, and look to christ. let me assure you, as a fellow-traveller, that i have been on the road and know it well, and that by and by there won't be such a dust on it. you will meet with hindrances and trials, but will fight quietly through, and no human ear hear the din of battle, no human eye perceive fainting or halting or fall. may god bless you, and become to you an ever-present, joyful reality! indeed he will; only wait patiently. in glancing over this, i see that i have here and there repeated myself. do excuse it. i believe it is owing to the way the flies harass and distract me. _august th._--i feel truly grateful to god if i have been of any comfort to you. i know only too well the shock of seeing professors of even sinless perfection guilty of what i consider sinful sin, and my whole soul was so staggered that for some days i could not pray, but could only say, "o god, if there be any god, come to my rescue." ... but god loves better than he knows us, and foresaw every infidelity before he called us to himself. nothing in us takes him, therefore, by surprise. fenelon teaches what no other writer does--to be "patient with ourselves," and i think as you penetrate into the christian life, you will agree with him on every point as i do. _august th._--i have had a couple of rather sickish days since writing the above, but am all right again now. hot weather does not agree with me. i used to reproach myself for religious stupidity when not well, but see now that god is my kind father--not my hard taskmaster, expecting me to be full of life and zeal when physically exhausted. it takes long to learn such lessons. one has to penetrate deeply into the heart of christ to begin to know its tenderness and sympathy and forbearance. you can't imagine how miss k. has luxuriated in her visit, nor how good she thinks we all are. she holds views to which i can not quite respond, but i do not condemn or reject them. she is a modest, praying, devoted woman; not disposed to obtrude, much less to urge her opinions; full of christian charity and forbearance; and i am truly thankful that she prays for me and mine; in fact, she loves to pray so, that when she gets hold of a new case, she acts as one does who has found a treasure. i wish you were looking out with me on the beautiful array of mountains to be seen from every window of our house and breathing this delicious air. _september th._--we expect now to go home on friday next, though if i had known how early the foliage was going to turn this year, i should have planned to stay a week longer to see it in all its glory. it is looking very beautiful even now, and our eyes have a perpetual feast. we have had a charming summer, but one does not want to play all the time, and i hope god has work of some sort for me to do at home during the winter. meanwhile, i wish i could send you a photograph of the little den where i am now writing, and the rustic adornings which make it _sui generis_, and the bit of woods to be seen from its windows, that, taking the lead of all other dorset woods, have put on floral colors, just because they are ours and know we want them looking their best before we go away. but this wish must yield to fate, like many another; and, as i have come to the end of my paper, i will love and leave you. * * * * * iv. _the story lizzie told._ country and city. the law of christian progress. letters to a friend bereft of three children. sudden death of another friend. "go on; step faster." fenelon and his influence upon her religious life. lines on her indebtedness to him. _the story lizzie told_ was published about this time. it had already appeared in the riverside magazine. the occasion of the story was a passage in a letter from london written by a friend, which described in a very graphic and touching way the yearly exhibition of the society for the promotion of window gardening among the poor. the exhibition was held at the "dean's close" at westminster and the earl of shaftesbury gave the prizes. [ ] no one of mrs. prentiss's smaller works, perhaps, has been so much admired as _the story lizzie told_. it was written at dorset in the course of a single day, if not at a single sitting; and so real was the scene to her imagination that, on reading it in the evening to her husband, she had to stop again and again from the violence of her emotion. "what a little fool i am!" she would say, after a fresh burst of tears. [ ] _to mrs. leonard, new york, oct. , ._ your letter came in the midst of the wear and tear of a.'s return to us. we were kept in suspense about her from monday, when she was due, till, friday when she came, and it is years since i have got so excited and wrought up. they had a dreadful passage, but she was not sick at all. prof. smith is looking better than i ever saw him, and we are all most happy in being together once more. i can truly re-echo your wish that you lived half way between us and dorset, for then we should see you once a year at least. i miss you and long to see you. how true it is that each friend has a place of his own that no one else can fill! i do not doubt that the th of october was a silvery wedding-day to your dear husband. his loss has made christ dearer to you, and so has made your union more perfect. i suppose you were never so much one as you are now. we have had a delightful summer, not really suffering from the heat; though, of course, we felt it more or less. all our nights were cool.... i can not tell you how mr. p. and myself enjoy our country home. it seems as if we had slipped into our proper nook. but if we are going to do any more brainwork, we must be where there is stimulus, such as we find here. what a mixed-up letter! i have almost forgotten how to write, in adorning my house and sowing my seeds and the like. _to mrs. frederick field, new york, oct. th, ._ i deeply appreciate the christian kindness that prompted you to write me in the midst of your sorrow. i was prepared for the sad news by a dream only last night. i fancied myself seeing your dear little boy lying very restlessly on his bed, and proposing to carry him about in my arms to relieve him. he made no objection, and i walked up and down with him a long, long time, when some one of the family took him from me. instantly his face was illumined by a wondrous smile of delight that he was to leave the arms of a stranger to go to those familiar to him--such a smile, that when i awoke this morning i said to myself, "eddy field has gone to the arms of his saviour, and gone gladly." you can imagine how your letter, an hour or two later, touched me. but you have better consolation than dreams can give; in the belief that your child will develop, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, into the perfect likeness of christ, and in your own submission to the unerring will of god. i sometimes think that patient sufferers suffer most; they make less outcry than others, but the grief that has little vent wears sorely. "grace does not steel the faithful heart that it should feel no ill," and you have many a pang yet before you. it must be so very hard to see twin children part company, to have their paths diverge so soon. but the shadow of death will not always rest on your home; you will emerge from its obscurity into such a light as they who have never sorrowed can not know. we never know, or begin to know, the great heart that loves us best, till we throw ourselves upon it in the hour of our despair. friends say and do all they can for us, but they do not know what we suffer or what we need; but christ, who formed, has penetrated the depths of the mother's heart. he pours in the wine and the oil that no human hand possesses, and "as one whom his mother comforteth, so will he comfort you." i have lived to see that god never was so good to me as when he seemed most severe. thus i trust and believe it will be with you and your husband. meanwhile, while the peaceable fruits are growing and ripening, may god help you through the grievous time that must pass--a grievous time in which you have my warm sympathy. i know only too well all about it. "i know my griefs; but then my consolations, my joys, and my immortal hopes i know"-- joys unknown to the prosperous, hopes that spring from seed long buried in the dust. i shall read your books with great interest, i am sure, and who knows how god means to prepare you for future usefulness along the path of pain? "every branch that beareth fruit he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." what an epitaph your boy's own words would be--"it is beautiful to be dead"! _to the same, new york, nov th, ._ i thank you so much for your letter about your precious children. i remember them well, all three, and do not wonder that the death of your first-born, coming upon the very footsteps of sorrow, has so nearly crushed you. but what beautiful consolations god gave you by his dying bed! "all safe at god's right hand!" what more can the fondest mother's heart ask than such safety as this? i am sure that there will come to you, sooner or later, the sense of christ's love in these repeated sorrows, that in your present bewildered, amazed state you can hardly realise. let me tell you that i have tried his heart in a long storm--not so very different from yours--and that i know something of its depths. i will enclose you some lines that may give you a moment's light. please not to let them go out of your hands, for no one--not even my husband--has ever seen them. i am going to send my last book to your lonely little boy. you will not feel like reading it now, but perhaps the d chapter, and some that follow, may not jar upon you as the earlier part would. to go back again to the subject of christ's love for us, of which i never tire, i want to make you feel that his sufferers are his happiest, most favored disciples. what they learn about him---his pitifulness, his unwillingness to hurt us, his haste to bind up the very wounds he has inflicted---endear him so, that at last they burst out into songs of thanksgiving, that his "donation of bliss" included in it such donation of pain. perhaps i have already said to you, for i am fond of saying it, "the love of jesus---what it is, only his sufferers know." you ask if your heart will ever be lightsome again. never again with the lightsomeness that had never known sorrow, but light even to gayety with the new and higher love born of tribulation. just as far as a heavenly is superior even to maternal love, will be the elevation and beauty of your new joy; a joy worth all it costs. i know what sorrow means; i know it well. but i know, too, what it is to pass out of that prison-house into a peace that passes all understanding; and thousands can say the same. so, my dear suffering sister, look on and look up; lay hold on christ with _both your poor, empty hands_; let him do with you what seemeth him good; though he slay you, still trust in him; and i dare in his name to promise you a sweeter, better life than you could have known had he left you to drink of the full, dangerous cups of unmingled prosperity. i feel such real and living sympathy with you, that i would love to spend weeks by your side, trying to bind up your broken heart. but for the gospel of christ, to hear of such bereavements as yours would appall, would madden one. yet, what a halo surrounds that word "but"! _to miss e. a. warner, new york, dec , ._ i have not behaved according to my wont, and visited the sick even by way of a letter. and by this time i hope you are quite well again, and do not need ghostly counsels.... i have felt very badly about miss lyman's dying at vassar, but since mrs. s.'s visit and learning how beloved she is there, have changed my mind. what does it matter, after all, from what point of time or space we go home; how we shall smile, after we get there, that we ever gave it one moment's thought! you ask what i am doing; well, i am taking a vacation and not writing anything to speak of, yet just as busy as ever; not one moment in which to dawdle, though i dare say i seem to the folks here at home to be sitting round doing nothing. i must give you a picture of one day and you must photograph one of yours, as we have done before. got up at seven and went through the usual forms; had prayers and breakfast, and started off to school with m. came home and had a nice quiet time reading, etc.; at eleven went to my meeting, which was a tearful one, as one of our members who knelt with us only a week before, was this day to be buried out of our sight. she was at church on sunday afternoon at four p.m., to present her baby in baptism, and at half-past two the following morning was in heaven. we all went together to the funeral after the meeting, and gathered round the coffin with the feeling that she belonged to us. when i got home i found a despatch from miss w., saying they should be here right away. i had let one of my women go out of town to a sick sister, so i must turn chamber-maid and make the bed, dust, clear out closet, cupboard, and bureau forthwith. this done, they arrived, which took the time till half-past seven, when i excused myself and went to an evening meeting, knowing it would be devoted to special prayer for the husband and children of her who had gone. got home half an hour behind time and found a young man awaiting me who was converted last june, as he hopes, while reading stepping heavenward. i had just got seated by him when our doctor was announced; he had lost his only grandchild and had come to talk about it. he stayed till half-past nine, when i went back to my young friend, who stayed till half-past ten and gave a very interesting history which i have not time to put on paper. he writes me since, however, about his christian life that "it gets sweeter and sweeter," and i know you will be glad for me that i have this joy. _saturday morning._--i was interrupted there, had visitors, had to go to a fair, company again, so that i had not time to eat the food i needed, went to see a poor sick girl, had more visitors, and at last, at eleven p.m., scrambled into bed. now i am finishing this, and if nobody hinders, am going to mail it, and then go after a block of ice-cream for that sick girl (isn't it nice, we can get it now done up in little boxes, just about as much as an invalid can eat at one time). then i am going to see a poor afflicted soul that can't get any light on her sorrow. here comes my dear old man to read his sermon, so good-bye. _to a young friend, dec. , ._ i have been led, during the last month or two, to a new love of the holy spirit, or perhaps to more consciousness of the silent, blessed work he is doing in and for us? and for those whose souls lie as a heavy and yet a sweet burden upon our own. and joining with you in your prayers, seeking also for myself what i sought for you, i found myself almost startled by such a response as i can not describe. it was not joy, but a deep solemnity which enfolded me as with a garment, and if i ever pass out of it, which i never want to do, i hope it will be with a heart more than ever consecrated and set apart for christ's service. the more i reflect and the more i pray, the more life narrows down to one point--what am i being for christ, what am i doing for him? why do i tell you this? because the voice of a fellow-traveller always stimulates his brother-pilgrim; what one finds and speaks of and rejoices over, sets the other upon determining to find too. god has been very good to you, as well as to me, but we ought to whisper to each other now and then, "go on, step faster, step surer, lay hold on the rock of ages with both hands." you never need be afraid to speak such words to me. i want to be pushed on, and pulled on, and coaxed on. the allusion to her "beloved fenelon," in several of the preceding letters, renders this a suitable place to say a word about him and his influence upon her religious character. "fenelon i _lean_ on," she wrote. her delight in his writings dated back more than a quarter of a century, and continued, unabated, to the end of her days. she regarded him with a sort of personal affection and reverence. her copy of "spiritual progress," composed largely of selections from his works, is crowded with pencil-marks expressive of her sympathy and approval; not even her imitation of christ, sacra privata, pilgrim's progress, saints' everlasting rest, or leighton on the first epistle of peter, contain so many. these pencil-marks are sometimes very emphatic, underscoring or inclosing now a single word, now a phrase, anon a whole sentence or paragraph; and it requires but little skill to decipher, in these rude hieroglyphics, the secret history of her soul for a third of a century-- one side, at least, of this history. what she sought with the greatest eagerness, what she most loved and most hated, her spiritual aims, struggles, trials, joys and hopes, may here be read between the lines. and a beautiful testimony they give to the moral depth, purity and nobleness of her piety! the story is not, indeed, complete; her religious life had other elements, not found, or only partially found, in fenelon; elements centering directly in christ and his gospel, and which had their inspiration in her daily food and her new testament. what attracted her to fenelon was not the doctrine of salvation as taught by him--she found it better taught in bunyan and leighton--it was his marvellous knowledge of the human heart, his keen insight into the proper workings of nature and grace, his deep spiritual wisdom, and the sweet mystic tone of his piety. and then the two great principles pervading his writings--that of pure love to god and that of self-crucifixion as the way to perfect love--fell in with some of her own favorite views of the christian life. in the study of fenelon, as of madame guyon, her aim was a purely practical one; it was not to establish, or verify, a theory, but to get aid and comfort in her daily course heavenward. what fenelon was to her in this respect she has herself recorded in the following lines, found, after her death, written on a blank page of her "spiritual progress": oh wise and thoughtful words! oh counsel sweet, guide in my wanderings, spurs unto my feet, how often you have met me on the way, and turned me from the path that led astray; teaching that fault and folly, sin and fall, need not the weary pilgrim's heart appall; yea more, instructing how to snatch the sting from timid conscience, how to stretch the wing from the low plane, the level dead of sin, and mount immortal, mystic joys to win. one hour with jesus! how its peace outweighs the ravishment of earthly love and praise; how dearer far, emptied of self to lie low at his feet, and catch, perchance, his eye, alike content when he may give or take, the sweet, the bitter, welcome for his sake! [ ] john wesley, after having pointed out what he considered the grand source of all her mistakes; namely, the being guided by inward impressions and the light of her own spirit rather than by the written word, and also her error in teaching that god never purifies a soul but by inward and outward suffering--then adds: "and yet with all this dross how much pure gold is mixed! so did god wink at involuntary ignorance. what a depth of religion did she enjoy! how much of the mind that was in christ jesus! what heights of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy ghost! how few such instances do we find of exalted love to god, and our neighbor; of genuine humility; of invincible meekness and unbounded resignation! so that, upon the whole, i know not whether we may not search many centuries to find another woman who was such a pattern of true holiness." [ ] see the lines my cup runneth over, _golden hours_, p. . [ ] "i know of no book, the bible excepted as above all comparison, which i, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in christ jesus, as the pilgrim's progress. it is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiæ evangelicæ_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired. i read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, there is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings, and once as a poet. i could not have believed beforehand that calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors."--coleridge. [ ] the allusion is to thekla's song in part i., act iii., sc. of schiller's wallenstein. du heilige, rufe dein kind zurück! ich habe genossen das irdische glück, _ich habe gelebt und gelibet._ [ ] the hymn referred to is paul gerhardt's, beginning: wir singen dir, immanuel, du lebensfürst und gnadenquell. it was one of her favorite german hymns. the lines she quotes belong to the tenth stanza; "ich kann nicht sagen der will ist da," are the words pencilled in the margin. [ ] hartley coleridge's poems. vol. ii., p. . [ ] but greatly to mrs. prentiss' annoyance, with the title changed to _ever heavenward_--as if to make it appear to be a sequel to stepping heavenward. [ ] wife of the late rev. horatio brinsmade, d.d., of newark, n. j. [ ] "polly" was particularly happy; six years old, i should say, shabby, though evidently washed up for the occasion, and very pretty and all pink with excitement. "polly, i _knowed_ you'd get a prize," i heard a young woman, tired out with carrying her own big baby, say. and then she came upon her own geranium with three blossoms on it and marked "second prize," and said, "i _can't_ believe it," when they told her that that meant six shillings. but the plant which my companion and myself both cried over, was a little bit of a weedy marigold, the one poor little flower on it carefully fastened about with a paper ring, such as high and mighty greenhouse men sometimes put round a choice rose in bud. that was all; just this one common, very single little flower, with "lizzie" something's name attached and the name of her street. all the streets were put upon the tickets and added greatly to the pathetic effect; just the poorest lanes and alleys in london. nobody seemed to claim the marigold. perhaps it was the great treasure of some sick child who couldn't come to look at it. it was certain not to get a prize, but the child has found something by this time tucked down in the pot and carefully covered over by f., when no one was looking, with a pinch of earth taken from a more prosperous plant alongside. [ ] miss w. showed me a very pleasant letter of lady augusta stanley, the wife of dean stanley, to a miss c., through whom she received from miss w.'s little niece a copy of _the story lizzie told_. lady stanley is herself, i believe, at the head of the society which holds the annual flower show. she says in her letter that she had just returned from scotland, reaching home quite late in the evening. before retiring, however, she had read your story through. she praises it very warmly, and wonders how anybody but a "londoner" could have written it.--_letter to mrs. p., dated new york, september, ._ chapter xi. in her home. the letters in the preceding chapters give a glimpse, here and there, of mrs. prentiss' home, but relate chiefly to the religious side of her character. what was her manner of life among her children? how were her temper and habits as a mother affected by the ardor and intensity of her christian feeling? a partial answer to these questions is contained in letters written to her eldest daughter, while the latter was absent in europe. these letters show the natural side of her character; and although far from reflecting all its light and beauty--no words could do that!--they depict some of its most interesting traits. they are frankness itself and betray not the least respect of persons; but if she speaks her mind in them without much let or hindrance, it is always done in the pleasantest way. in the portions selected for publication the aim has been to let her be seen, so far as possible, just as she appeared in her daily home-life, both in town and country. i. home-life in new york. new york, _october_ , . i have promised to walk to school with m. this morning, and while i am waiting for her to get ready, will begin my letter to you. we got home from seeing you off all tired out, and i lay on the sofa all the time till i went to bed, except while eating my dinner, and i think papa did pretty much the same. the moment we had done dinner, h. and jane appeared, carrying your bureau drawer between them, and we had a great time over the presents you were thoughtful enough to leave behind you. my little sacque makes me look like angels instead of one, and i am ever so glad of it, and the children were all delighted with their things. well, i have escorted m. to school, come home and read the advance, and hearth and home, and it is now eleven o'clock and the door-bell has only rung twice! papa says you are out of sight of land, and as it is a warm day and we are comfortable, we hope you are. but it is dreadful to have to wait so long before hearing. _ d._--papa says this must be mailed by nine o'clock; so i have hurried up from breakfast to finish it. mr. and mrs. s. spent most of last evening with us. they shouted over my ferrotypes. mr.---- also called and expressed as much surprise at your having gone to europe as if the sky had fallen. i read my sea-journal to the children last evening, and though it is very flat and meagre in itself, h., to whom it was all brand new, thought it ought to be published forthwith. no time for another word but love to all the s.'s, big and little, high and low, great and small. your affectionate mammy. _oct. th._--i can hardly believe that it is only a week today that we saw you and your big steamer disappear from view. h. said last night that it seemed to him one hundred years ago, and we all said amen. so how do you suppose it will seem ten months hence? i hope you do not find the time so long. i take turns waiting upon the children to school, which they are very strict about, and they enjoy their teachers amazingly. i received this morning a very beautiful and touching letter from a young lady in england about the susy books. they are associated in her mind and those of her family with a "little pearlie" whose cunning little photograph she enclosed, who taught herself to read in a fortnight from one of them, and was read to from it on her dying bed, and after she became speechless she made signs to have her head wet as susy's was. i never received such a letter among all i have had. randolph sent me twelve copies of stepping heavenward, and i have had my hands full packing and sending them. m. is reading aloud to h. a charming story called "alone in london." i am sure i could not read it aloud without crying. the following is the letter from england: to the author of "little susy": i feel as if i had a perfect right to call you "my dear friend," so much have i thought of you this last year and a half. bear with me while i tell you why. a year ago last christmas we were a large family--father, mother, and eight children, of whom i, who address you, am the eldest. the youngest was of course the pet, our bright little darling, rather more than five. that christmas morning, of course, there were gifts for all; and among the treasures in the smallest stocking was a copy of "little susy's six teachers," for which i desire to thank you now. many times i have tried to do so, but i could not; the trouble which came upon us was too great and awful in its suddenness. little pearl, so first called in the days of a fragile babyhood--dora margaret was her real name--taught herself to read from her "little susy," during the first fortnight she had it. and she would sit for hours, literally, amusing and interesting herself by it. she talked constantly of the six teachers, and a word about them was enough to quell any rising naughtiness. "pearlie, what would mr. ought say?" or "don't grieve mrs. love," was always sufficient. do you know what it is to have one the youngest in a large family? my darling was seventeen years younger than i. i left school when she was born to take the oversight of the nursery, which dear mamma's illness and always delicate health prevented her from doing. i had nursed her in her illnesses, dressed her, made the little frocks--now laid so sadly by--and to all the rest of us she had been more like a child than a sister. friends used to say, "it is a wonder that child is not spoiled"; but they could never say she _was_. merry, full of life and fun she always was, quick and intelligent, full of droll sayings which recur to us now with _such_ a pain. from christmas to the end of february we often remarked to one another how good that child was! laughing and playing from morning to night, yet never unruly or wild. that february we had illness in the house. jessie, the next youngest, had diphtheria, but she recovered, and we trusted all danger was passed, when one monday evening--the last in the month--our darling seemed ill. the next day we recognised the symptoms we had seen in jessie, and the doctor was called in. tuesday and wednesday he came and gave no hint of danger, but on wednesday night we perceived a change and on thursday came the sentence: no hope. oh friend, dear friend! how can i tell you of the long hours when we could not help our darling--of the dark night when, forbidden the room from the malignity of the case, we went to bed to coax mamma to do so--of the grey february dawn when there came the words, "our darling is _quite well_ now"--quite well, forever taken from the evil to come. the sunday night before, she came into the parlor with "susy" under her arm and petitioned for some one to read the "teachers' meeting." "why, you read it twice this afternoon," said one. "yes, i know--but it's so nice," was the reply. "pearlie will be six in september," said the gentle mother; "we must have a teachers' meeting for her, i think." "but perhaps i sha'n't ever be six," said the little one. "oh pearlie, why do you say so?" "well, people don't all be six, you know," affirmed our darling with solemn eyes and two dimples in the rosy cheeks, that were hid forever from us before the next sabbath day. on the wednesday we borrowed from a little friend the other books of the series, thinking they might afford some amusement for the weary hours of illness, and annie, my next sister, read four of the birthdays to her and then wished to stop, fearing she might be too fatigued. "no, read one more," was the request, and "that will do--i'm five, read the last to-morrow," she said, when it was complied with. ah me! with how many tears we took up that book again. that wednesday she sat up in bed, a glass of medicine in her hand. "mamma," she said, "miss joy has gone quite away and only left mr. pain. she can't come back till my throat is well." "but mrs. love is here, is she not?" "oh, yes," and the dear heavy eyes turned from one to another. in the night, when she lay dying, came intervals of consciousness; in one of these she took her handkerchief and gave it to papa, who watched by her, asking him to wet it and put it on her head. when he told us, we recollected the incident when susy in the favorite book was ill. and can you understand how our hearts felt very tender toward you and we said you must be thanked. i should weary you if i told you all the incidents that presented themselves of how sweet and good she was in her illness; how in the agony of those last hours, when no fear of infection could restrain the passionate kisses papa was showering on her, the dear voice said with a stop and an effort between each word, "don't kiss me on my mouth, papa; you may catch it"; how everything she asked for was prefaced by "please," how self was always last in her thoughts. "i'm keeping you awake, you darling." "don't stand there--you'll be so tired--sit down or go down-stairs, if you like." i will send you a photograph of little pearlie; it is the best we have, but was taken when she was only two years old. she was very small for her age and had been very delicate until the last year of her life. in writing thus to thank you i am not only doing an act of justice to yourself, but fulfilling wishes now rendered binding. often and often my dear mamma said, "how i wish we knew the lady who wrote little susy!" her health, always delicate, never recovered from the shock of pearlie's death, and suddenly, on the morning of the first of may, the angel of death darkened our dwelling with the shadow of his wings. not long did he linger--only two hours--and our mother had left us. she was with her treasure and the saviour, who said so lovingly on earth, "come unto me." but words can not express such trouble as that. we have not realised it yet. forgive me if my letter is abrupt and confused. i have only desired to tell you simply the simple tale--if by any chance it should make you thank god more earnestly for the great gift he has given you--a holy gift indeed; for can you think the lessons from "susy," so useful and so loved on earth, could be suddenly forgotten when the glories of heavens opened on our darling's view? i can not myself. i think, perhaps, our father's home may be more like our human ones, where his love reigns, than our wild hearts allow themselves to imagine; and i think the two, on whose behalf i thank you now, may one day know you and thank you themselves. dear "aunt susan," believe me to be, your unknown yet grateful friend, lizzie wraith l----. mrs. prentiss at once answered this letter, and not long after received another from miss l----, dated january , , breathing the same grateful feeling and full of interesting details. the following is an extract from it: i was so surprised, dear unknown friend, to receive your kind letter so soon. indeed, i hardly expected a reply at all. when i wrote to you, i did not know that i was addressing a daughter of the "edward payson" whose name is fragrant even on this side of the atlantic. had i known it i think i should not have ventured to write--so i am glad i did not. if you should be able to write again, and have a carte-de-visite to spare, may i beg it, that i may form some idea of the friend, "old enough to be my mother"? are you little and slight, like my real mother, i wonder, or stately and tall? i will send you a photograph of the monument which the ladies of papa's church and congregation have erected to dear mamma, in our beautiful cemetery, where the snowdrops will be already peeping, and where roses bloom for ten months out of the twelve. _nov. d._--here beginneth letter no. . we heard of your arrival at southampton by a telegram last evening. we long to get a letter. before i forget it let me tell you that alice h. and julia w. have both got babbies. we are getting nicely settled for the winter; the children are all behaving beautifully. _saturday, th._--well, i have just been to see mrs. f., and found her a bright, frank young thing, fresh and simple and very pleasing. her complexion is like m----'s, and the lower part of her face is shaped like hers, dark eyebrows, light hair, _splendid_ teeth, and i suppose would be called very pretty by you girls. take her altogether i liked her very much. we hear next to nothing from stepping heavenward, and begin to think it is going to fall dead. _monday, th._--your southampton letter has just come and we are delighted to hear that you had such a pleasant voyage, and found so many agreeable people on board.... yesterday afternoon was devoted to hearing a deeply interesting description from dr. hatfield, followed by mr. dodge, of the re-union of the two assemblies at pittsburgh. dr. h. made us all laugh by saying that as the new school entered the church where they were to be received and united to the old school, the latter rose and sang "return, ye ransomed sinners, home!" oh, i don't know but it was just the other way; it makes no great difference, for as dr. h. remarked, "we're all ransomed sinners." _nov. th._--mr. abbot dined here on sunday. he came in again in the evening, and it would have done you good to hear what he said about the children. they are all well and happy, and give me very little trouble. i do not feel so well on the late dinner, and have awful dreams.----i was passing the c----s, after writing the above, and she called me in to see her new parlors. they are beautiful; a great deal of bright, rich coloring, and various articles of furniture of his own designing. _thursday._----you and m. will be shocked to hear that julia w. died last night. as mr. w. was at church on sunday, we supposed all danger was over. we heard it through a telegram sent to your father. _december , ._--i need not tell you that we all remember that this is your birthday, dear child, and that the remembrance brings you very near. i wish i could send you, for a birthday present, all that i have, this morning, asked god to give you. you may depend upon it, that while some people may get along through life at a certain distance from him, _you_ are not one of that sort. you may find a feverish joy, but never abiding _peace_, out of him. remember this whenever you feel the oppression of that vague sense of unrest, of which, i doubt not, you have a great deal underneath a careless outside; this is the thirst of the soul for the only fountain at which it is worth while to drink. you never will be really happy till christ becomes your dearest and most intimate friend. _ th._--we have had a tremendous fall of snow, and culyer says m. ought to wait an hour before starting for school, but she is not willing and i am going with her to see that she is not buried alive. good-bye again, dearie! will begin a new letter right away. _dec. th_--we went to see mrs. w. this afternoon. julia had typhoid fever, which ran twenty-one days, and was delirious a good deal of the time. she got ready to die before her confinement, though she said she expected to live. after she became so very ill mrs. w. heard her praying for something "for christ's sake," "for the sake of christ's _sufferings_," and once asked her what it was she was asking for so earnestly. "oh, to get well for edward's sake and the baby's," she replied. a few days before her death she called mrs. w. to "come close" to her, and said, "i am going to die. i did not think so when baby was born, dear little thing--but now it is impressed upon me that i am." mrs. w. said they hoped not, but added, "yet suppose you _should_ die, what then?" "oh i have prayed, day and night, to be reconciled, and i am, _perfectly_ so. god will take care of edward and of my baby. perhaps it is better so than to run the risk--" she did not finish the sentence. the baby looks like her. mrs. w. told her you had gone to europe with m., and she expressed great pleasure; but if she had known where _she_ was going, and to what, all she would have done would have been to give thanks "for christ's sake." i do not blame her, however, for clinging to life; it was natural she should. _ th_--we went, last evening, to hear father hyacinthe lecture on "charite" at the academy of music. i did not expect to understand a word, but was agreeably disappointed, as he spoke very distinctly. still i did not enjoy hearing as well as i did reading it this morning--for i lost some of the best things in a really fine address. it was a brilliant scene, the very elite of intellectual society gathered around one modest, unpretentious little man. dr. and mrs. crosby were in the box with us, and she, fortunately, had an opera glass with her, so that we had a chance to study his really good face. the only book i expect to write this winter is to you; i am dreadfully lazy since you left, and don't do anything but haze about. there is a good deal of lively talk at the table; the children are waked up by going to school, and there is some rivalry among them, each maintaining that his and hers is the best. _dec. th._--we have cards for a "soiree musicale" at mrs. ----'s, which is to be a great smash-up. she called here to-day and wept and wailed over and kissed me. i have been to see how mrs. c. is. she is a little worse to-day, and he and her father scarcely leave her. he wrung my hand all to pieces, poor man. her illness is exciting great sympathy in our church, and nobody seems willing to let her go. dr. adams spent last evening here. he is splendid company; i really wish he would come once a week. everybody is asking if i meant in katy to describe myself. i have no doubt that if i should catch an old toad, put on to her a short gown and petticoat and one of my caps, everybody would walk up to her and say, "oh, how do you do, mrs. prentiss, you look more like yourself than common; i recognise the picture you have drawn of yourself in stepping heavenward and in the percys," etc., etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. the next book i write i'll make my heroine black and everybody will say, "oh, here you are again, black to the life!" _dec. th._--you and m. will not be surprised to hear that mrs. c.'s sufferings are over. she died this morning. papa and i are greatly shaken. with much hesitation i decided to go over there to see her mother, and the welcome i got from her and from mr. c. are things to remember for a life-time. i will never hesitate again to fly to people in trouble. if you were here i would tell you all about my visit, but i can't write it down. it seems so sad, just as they had got into their lovely new home--sad for _him_, i mean; as for her i can only wish her joy that she is not weeping here below as he is. i stayed till it was time for church, and when i entered it i was met by many a tearful face; papa announced her death from the pulpit, and is going, this afternoon, to throw aside the sermon he intended to preach, and extemporise on "the first sunday in heaven." the children are going in, this noon, to sing; as to the mission festival, that is to be virtually given up; the children are merely to walk in, receive their presents, and go silently out. it is a beautiful day to go to heaven in. mrs. c. did not know she was going to die, but that is of no consequence. only one week ago yesterday she was at the industrial school, unusually bright and well, they all say. well, i see everything double and had better stop writing. _monday, th._--your nice letter was in the letter-box as i started for school with h.; i called to papa to let him know it was there and went off, begrudging him the pleasure of reading it before i did. when i got home there was no papa and no letter to be found; i looked in every room, on his desk and on mine, posted down to the letter-box and into the parlor, in vain. at last he came rushing home with it, having carried it to market, lest i should get and read it alone! so we sat down and enjoyed it together.... i take out your picture now and then, when, lo, a big lump in my throat, notwithstanding which i am glad we let you go; we enjoy your enjoyment, and think it will make the old nest pleasanter to have been vacated for a while. papa and i agreed before we got up this morning that the only fault we had to find with god was, that he was too good to us. i can't get over the welcome i got from mr. c. yesterday. he said i seemed like a mother to him, which made me feel very old on the one hand, and very happy on the other. if i were you i wouldn't marry anybody but a minister; it gives one such lots of people to love and care for. old mrs. b. is failing, and lies there as peaceful and contented as a little baby. i never got sweeter smiles from anybody. i have got each of the servants a pretty dress for christmas; i feel that i owe them a good deal for giving me such a peaceful, untroubled home. _dec. d._--it rained very hard all day yesterday till just about the time of the funeral, half-past three, when the church was well filled, the mission-school occupying seats by themselves and the teachers by themselves.... i thought as i listened to the address that it would reconcile me to seeing you lying there in your coffin, if such a record stood against your name. papa read, at the close, a sort of prophetic poem of mrs. c.'s, which she wrote a year or more ago, of which i should like to send you all a copy, it is so good in every sense. he wants me to send you a few hasty lines i scribbled off on sunday noon, with which he closed his sermon that afternoon, and repeated again at the funeral, but it is not worth the ink. after the service the mission children went up to look at the remains, and passed out; then the rest of the congregation. one of the mission children fainted and fell, and was carried out in mr. l.'s arms. after the rest dispersed papa took me in, and there we saw a most touching sight; a dozen poor women and children weeping about the coffin, offering a tribute to her memory, sweeter than the opulent display of flowers did. _evening._--the interment took place to-day, at woodlawn. mr. c. wished me to go, and i did. on the way home a gentlemanly-looking man stepped up to your father, and taking his hand said, "i never saw you till to-day, but i _love_ you; yes, there is no other word!" wasn't it nice of him? _dec. th._--papa went in last evening, for a half hour, to see ---- and his bride, at their great reception, drank two glasses of "coffee sangaree," and brought me news that overcame me quite,--namely, that ---- was delighted with my book. nesbit & co. sent me a copy of their reprint of it. they have got it up beautifully with six colored illustrations, most of them very good; little earnest is as cunning as he can be, and the old grandpa is perfect. katy, however, has her hair in a waterfall in the year and even after, wears long dresses, and always has on a _sontag_ or something like one. she goes to see dr. cabot in a red sacque, and a red hat, and has a muff in her lap. mrs. ---- was here the other day to say that i had drawn her husband's portrait _exactly_ in dr. elliot. i have been out with m. all the morning, doing up our last shopping. we came home half frozen, and had lunch together, when lo, a magnificent basket of flowers from mrs. d. and some candy from the party; papa and g. came home and we all fell to making ourselves sick.... i have bought lots of candy and little fancy cakes to put in the children's stockings. i know it is very improper, but one can't be good always. dr. p. is sick with pneumonia. mrs. p. has just sent me a basket of fresh eggs, and an illustrated edition of longfellow's "building of the ship." _ th._--i wish you a merry christmas, darling, and wonder what you are all doing to celebrate this day. we have had great times over our presents.... i got a note from mr. abbot saying that a friend of his in boston had given away fourteen katies, all he could get, and that the bookseller said he could have sold the last copy thirty times over. neither papa nor i feel quite up to the mark to-day; we probably got a little cold at mrs. c.'s grave, as the wind blew furiously, and the hymn, and prayer, and benediction took quite a time. _ th._--dr. p. is worse. papa has been to see him since church, and dr. b., who was there, said that dr. murray quoted from katy in his sermon to-day, and then pausing long enough to attract everybody's attention, he said he wished each of them to procure and read it. i hope you and mrs. smith won't get sick hearing about it; i assure you i don't tell you half i might. _evening_.--mr. c. has been here this evening to show us a poem by his wife, just come out in the january number of the sabbath at home, in which she asks the new year what it has in store for her, and says if it is _death_, it is only going home the sooner. neither he, or anyone, had seen it or heard of it, and it came to them with overwhelming power and consolation as the last utterance of her christian faith. [ ] _dec. th, ._--your letter came yesterday morning, after breakfast, and was read to an admiring audience of prentisses by papa, who occasionally called for counsel as to this word and that. we like the plan made for the winter, and hope it will suit all round. you had such a grand birth-day that i don't see what there was left for christmas, and hope you got nothing but a leather button. my percys end to-day, and i am shocked at the wretched way in which i ended them. i wish you would buy a copy of griseldis for me. why don't you tell what you are reading? i got for m. "a sister's bye hours," by jean ingelow, and find it a delightful book; such lots of quiet humor and so much good sense and good feeling; you girls would enjoy reading it aloud together. _jan. d, ._--you will want to hear all about new year's day, and where shall i begin unless at the end thereof, when your and mrs. smith's letters came, and which caused papa ungraciously to leave me to entertain, while he greedily devoured them and his dinner. in spite of rain we had a steady flow of visitors. i will enclose a list for your delectation, for as reading a cook-book sort of feeds one, reading familiar names sort of comforts one. mr. ---- was softer and more languishing than ever, and appeared like a man who had been fed on honey off the tips of a canary bird's feather.... papa and i agreed, talking it over last evening, that it is a bad plan for husbands and wives not to live and die together, as the one who is left is apt to cut up. he hinted that i was "so fond of admiration" that he was afraid i should, if he died. on questioning him as to what he meant by this abominable speech, he said he meant to pay me a compliment!!! that he thought me very susceptible when people loved me and very fond of being loved--which i am by him; all other men i hate. my cousin g. dined with us on friday and took me to the meeting held annually at dr. adams' church. i like him ever so much, though he _is_ a man. g. has brought me in some dandelions from the church-yard. we have not had one day of severe cold yet, and there is a great deal of sickness about in consequence. _friday._--i spent a part of last evening in writing an article about mrs. c.'s poem for the sabbath at home, and have a little fit of indigestion as my reward. have been to see my sick woman with jelly and consolation, and from there to mrs. d., who gave me a beautiful account of mrs. coming's last days and of her readiness and gladness to go. i was at the meeting at dr. rogers' yesterday afternoon and heard old dr. tyng for the first time, and he spoke beautifully.... well, chi alpha [ ] is over; we had a very large attendance and the oysters were burnt. it is dreadfully trying when maria never once failed before to have them so extra nice. dr. hall came and told me he had been sending copies of fred and maria and me to friends in ireland. martha and jane, and m. and h. were all standing in a row together when the parsons come out to tea, and one of them marched up to the row, saying to papa, are these your children? when martha and jane made a precipitate retreat into the pantry. good-night, darling; lots of love to mrs. smith and all of them. your affectionate "marm-er." _ th._--yours came to-day, and papa and i had a brief duel with hair-pins and pen-knives as to which should read it aloud to the other, and i beat. i should have enjoyed eigensinn, i am sure; you know i have read it in german.... the children all three are lovely, and what with them and papa and other things my cup is running over tremendously. i have just heard that a poor woman i have been to see a few times, died this morning. i always came away from her crestfallen, thinking i was the biggest poke in a sick-room there ever was, but she sent me a dying message that quite comforted me. she had once lived in plenty, but was fearfully destitute, and i fear she and her family suffered for want of common necessaries. _thursday._--i had an early and a long call from one of our church, who wanted to tell me, among other things, that her husband scolded her for bumping her head in the night; she wept and i condoled; she went away at last smiling. then i went to the sewing circle and idled about till one; then i had several calls. then papa and i went out to make a lot of calls. then came a note from a sick lady, whom i shall go to see in spite of my horror of strangers. papa got a letter from prof. smith which gave us great pleasure. z. was here yesterday; i asked her to stay to lunch, bribing her with a cup of tea, and so she stayed and we had a real nice time; when she went away i told her i was dead in love with her. _friday evening._--the children have all gone to bed; m. and g. have been reading all the evening; m. busy on miss alcott's "little women," and g. shaking his sides over old numbers of the riverside. papa says our house ought to have a sign put out, "souls cured here"; because so many people come to tell their troubles. people used to do just so to my mother, and i suppose always do to parsons' wives if they'll let 'em. _monday._--papa preached delightfully yesterday. mr. b. took a pew and mr. i don't know who took another. your letter came this morning and was full of interesting things. i hope mrs. s. will send me her own and jean ingelow's verses. what fun to get into a correspondence with her! i have had an interesting time to-day. dr. skinner lent me some months ago a little book called "god's furnace"; i didn't like it at first, but read it through several times and liked it better and better each time. and to-day mrs. ---- brought the author to spend a few hours (she lives out of town), and we three black-eyed women had a remarkable time together. there is certainly such a thing as a heaven below, only it doesn't last as the real heaven will. we had mr. c. to tea last night; after tea he read us three poems of his wife, and papa was weak enough to go and read him some verses of mine, which he ought not to have done till i am dead and gone. then he played and sang with the children, and we had prayers, and i read scraps to him and papa from faber's "all for jesus" and craig's memoir. m. is lying on the sofa studying, papa is in his study, the boys are hazing about; it snows a little and melts as it falls, and so, with love to all, both great and small, i am your loving "elderly lady with grey puffs." _february th, ._--we are having a tremendous snow-storm for a wonder. i started out this morning with g., and when we got to the fifth avenue clock he found he should be late unless he ran, and i was glad to let him go and turn back to meet m., who had heavy books besides her umbrella. the wind blew furiously, my umbrella broke and flew off in a tangent, and when i got it, it turned wrong side out and i came near ascending as in a balloon; m. soon came in sight and i convoyed her safely to school. mrs. ---- told a friend of ours that mr. and mrs. prentiss really _enjoyed_ mrs. c----'s death, and they seemed destitute of natural affection; and that as for mrs. p. it was plain she had never suffered in any way. considering the tears we both shed over mrs. c., and some other little items in our past history, we must set mrs. ---- down as wiser than the ancients. _sunday evening._--yesterday lizzy b. came to say that her mother was "in a gully" and wanted me to come and pull her out. i went and found her greatly depressed, and felt sure it was all physical, and not a case for special spiritual pulling. so i coaxed her, laughed at her, and cheered her all i could. she said she had been "a solemn pig" for a week, in allusion to some pictures dr. p. had drawn for her and for me illustrating the solemn pig and the jolly pig. mr. randolph has sent up a letter from a man in nice whose wife wants to translate katy into french. i sent word they might translate it into hottentot for all me. good-night, my dear, i am sound asleep. your affectionate mother prentiss. _tuesday._--on sunday papa preached a sermon in behalf of the mission, asking for $ , to build a chapel, for which mr. cady had made a plan. i got greatly stirred up, as i hope everybody did. mr. dodge will give one-quarter of the sum needed. it is washington's birthday, and the children are all at home from school, and are at the dining-room table drawing maps. mr. and mrs. g. called, but i was out seeing a poor woman, whose romance of love and sorrow i should like to tell you about if it would not fill a book. she says bishop s. has supported her and her three children for seven months out of his own pocket. _saturday, feb. th._--your two last letters, together with mrs. smith's, were all in the box as i was starting with m. for her music. my children pulled in opposite directions, but i pushed on, and papa saved the letters to read to me when i got back. he reads them awfully, and will puzzle over a word long enough for me to have leisure to go crazy and recover my sanity. however, nobody shall make fun of him save myself; so look out. the boys have gone skating to-day for the third time this winter, there has been so little cold weather. _sunday evening._--i did not mean to plague you with stepping heavenward any more, but we have had a scene to-day which will amuse you and mrs. smith. just before service began, an aristocratic-looking lady seated in front of mrs. b. began to talk to her, whereupon mrs. b. turned round and announced to the congregation that i was the subject of it by pointing me out, and then getting up and bringing her to our pew. once there, she seized me by the hand and said, "i am mrs. ----. i have just read your book and been carried away with it. i knew your husband thirty-three years ago, and have come here to see you both," etc., etc. finding she could get nothing out of me, she fell upon m., and asked her if i was her sister, which m. declared i was not. after church i invited her to step into the parsonage, and she stepped in for an hour and told this story: she had had the book lent her, and yesterday, lunching at mrs. a.'s, asked her if she had read it, and finding she had not, made her promise to get it. she then asked who this e. prentiss was, and a lady present enlightened her. "what! my sister's beloved miss payson, and married to george prentiss, my old friend!! i'll go there to church to-morrow and see for myself." so it turns out that she was a miss ----, of mississippi; that your father gallanted her to louisville, when she was going there to be married at sixteen years of age; that she was living in richmond at the time i was teaching there, her sister boarding in the house with me. such talking, such life and enthusiasm you never saw in a woman of forty-eight! "well," she winds up at last, "i've found two _treasures_, and you needn't think i'm going to let you go. i'll go home and tell mr. ---- all about it." papa and i have called each other "two treasures" ever since she went away. the whole scene worked him up and did him good, for he always loves to have his southern friends drum him up and talk to him of your uncle seargent and aunt anna. mr. ---- is one of our millionaires, and she married him a year ago after thirteen years of widowhood. she says she still has "negroes," who won't go away and won't work, and she has them to support. she talked very rationally about the war, and says not a soul at the south would have slavery back if they could.... i called at mrs. b.'s yesterday--at exactly the right moment, she said; for five surgeons had just decided that the operation had been a failure, and that she must die. her husband looked as white as this paper, and the girls were in great distress, but mrs. b. looked perfectly radiant. _saturday, march th._--yesterday i went to make a ghostly call on mrs. b., and kept her and the girls screaming with laughter for an hour, which did me lots of good, and i hope did not hurt them. i have written the d page of my serial to-day, and hope it is the last. it will soon be time to think of the spring shopping. i don't know what any of us need, and never notice what people are wearing unless i notice by going forth on a tour of observation. _sunday evening._--after church this afternoon mrs. n. and mrs. v. came in to tell us about the death of that servant of theirs, whom they nursed in their own house, who has been dying for seven months, of cancer. she died a most fearless, happy death, and i wish i knew i should be as patient in my last illness as they represent her as being. your letters to the children came yesterday afternoon to their great delight. in an evil moment i told the boys that i had seen it stated, in some paper, that _benzole_ would make paper transparent, and afterwards evaporate and leave the paper uninjured. they drove me raving distracted with questions about it, so that i had to be put in a strait-jacket. the ingenuity and persistence of these questions, asked by each, in separate interviews, was beyond description. _tuesday._--for once i have been caught napping, and have not mailed my weekly letter. but you will be expecting some irregularity about the time of your flight to berlin. i called at mrs. m.'s to-day, and ran on at such a rate that mrs. woolsey, who was there, gave me ten dollars for poor folks, and said she wished i'd stay all day. afterwards i went down town to get stepping heavenward for mr. c., and as he wanted me to write something in it, have just written this: "mr. c. from mrs. prentiss, in loving memory of one who 'did outrun' us, and stepped into heaven first." mr. bates showed me a half-column notice of it in the liberal christian, [ ] of all places! by very far the warmest and best of all that have appeared. papa is at dr. mcclintock's funeral. i declare, if it isn't snowing again, and the sun is shining! now comes a letter from uncle charles, saying that your uncle h. has lost that splendid little girl of his; the only girl he ever had, and the child of his heart of hearts. mrs. w. says she never saw papa and myself look so well, but some gentleman told mr. brace, who told his wife, who told me, that i was killing myself with long walks. i can not answer your questions about mr. ----'s call. so much is all the time going on that one event speedily effaces the impression of another. _march th._--julia willis spent the evening here not long ago, and made me laugh well. she took me on friday to see fanny fern, who hugged and kissed me, and whom it was rather pleasant to see after nearly, if not quite, thirty years' separation. she says nobody but a payson could have written stepping heavenward, which is absurd. _march th._--i went to the sewing circle [ ] and helped tuck a quilt, had a talk with mrs. w., got home at a quarter of one and ate two apples, and have been since then reading the secret correspondence of madame guyon and fenelon in old french. _saturday, th._--have just seen m. to the conservatory; met dr. skinner on the way home, who said he had been reading stepping heavenward, and he hoped he should step all the faster for it. z. has often invited us to come to see her new home, and as the th comes on a saturday, we are talking a little of all going up to lunch with her. _evening_.--it has been such a nice warm day. i had a pleasant call from mrs. dr. ----. she asked me if i did not get the theology of stepping heavenward out of my father's "thoughts," but as i have not read them for thirty years, i doubt if i did, and as i am older than my father was when he uttered those thoughts, i have a right to a theology of my own. _monday._--yesterday, in the afternoon, we had the sunday-school anniversary, which went off very well. mr. c. came to tea; after it and prayers, we sat round the table and i read scraps from madame guyon and fenelon, and we talked them over. papa was greatly pleased at the latter's saying he often stopped in the midst of his devotions to play. quand je suis seul, je joue quelquefois comme un petit enfant, même en faisant oraison. il m'arrive quelquefois de sauter et de rire tout seul comme un fou dans ma chambre. avant-hier, étant dans la sacristie et répondant à une personne qui me questionnait, pour ne la point scandaliser sur la question, je m'embarrassai, et je fis une espèce de mensonge; cela me donna quelque répugnance à dire la messe, mais je ne laissai pas de la dire. i do not advise _you_ to stop to play in the midst of your prayers, or to tell "une espèce de mensonge!" till you are as much of a saint as he was. [ ] _saturday, th._--your letter and mrs. smith's came together this afternoon. it is pleasant to hear from papa's old friends at halle, and he will be delighted, when he comes home from chi alpha, where he is now. lizzy b. called this afternoon; she wanted to open out her poor sick heart to me. she quoted to me several things she says i wrote her a few weeks ago, but i have not the faintest recollection of writing them. that shows what a harum-scarum life i lead. _march st._--we spent tuesday evening at the skinners. we had a charming visit; no one there but mrs. sampson and her sister, and dr. s. wide awake and full of enthusiasm. we did not get to bed till midnight. mrs. ---- came this morning and begged me to lend her some money, as she had got behindhand. i let her have five dollars, though i do not feel sure that i shall see it again, and she wept a little weep, and went away. a lady told cousin c. she had heard i was so shy that once having promised to go to a lunch party, my courage failed at the last moment, so that i could not go. i shall expect to learn next that my hair is red. _monday, april th._--your presents came saturday while i was out. we are all delighted with them, but i was most so, for two such darling little vases were surely never before seen. m. had maggie to spend saturday afternoon and take tea. she asked me if i did not make a distinction between talent and genius, which papa thought very smart of her. i read aloud to them all the evening one of the german stories by julius horn. mr. and mrs. c. came in after church and i asked them to stay to tea, which they did. after it was over, and we had had prayers, we had a little sing, mrs. c. playing, and among other things, sang a little hymn of mine which i wrote i know not when, but which papa liked well enough to have printed. if copies come to-day, as promised, i will enclose one or two. after the singing papa and i took turns, as we could snatch a chance from each other, in reading to them from favorite books, which they enjoyed very much. _april th._--we called on mrs. h. m. field yesterday, and i never saw (or rather heard) her so brilliant. in the evening i read aloud to the children a real live, wide-awake sunday-school book, called "old stories in a new dress"; bible stories, headed thus: "the handsome rebel," "the young volunteer," "the ingenious mechanics." _april th._--i can not go to bed, my dear chicken, till i have told you what a charming day we have had. to go back to yesterday, my headache entirely disappeared by the time the skinners got here, and we had a pleasant cosy evening with them, and at the end made dr. skinner pray over us.... everything went off nicely. the children enjoyed the trip tremendously, and hated to come away. we picked a lot of "filles avant la mère" and they came home in good condition. mr. woolsey and z. gave me a little silver figure holding a cup, on blue velvet, which is ever so pretty. we got home at half-past six. later in the evening president hopkins called to offer his congratulations. and now i am tired, i can tell you. it is outrageous for you and the smiths to be away; i don't see how you can have the heart. you ought to come by dispatch as telegrams. _ th._--dr. hopkins preached a splendid sermon [ ] for us this morning, and came in after it for a call. he asked me last night if i felt conceited about my book; so i said to him, "i like to give people as good as they send--don't you feel a little conceited after that sermon?" on which he gave me a good shaking. _ th._--i have been writing notes of thanksgiving, each of which dear papa reads through rose-colored spectacles and says, "you do beat all!" i have enjoyed writing them, instead of finding it a bore. we shall be curious to hear how you celebrated our wedding-day. well, good-bye, old child. i shall begin another letter to-day, as like as not. _monday, april th._--friday morning, in the midst of my plans for helping aunt e. shop, came a message from mrs. b. that she wanted to see me. i had not expected to see her again, and of course was glad to go. she had altered so that i should not have known her, and it was hard to hear what she had to say, she is so feeble. she went back to the first time she saw me, told me what i had on, and how her heart was knitted to me. she then spoke of her approaching death; said she had no ecstasies, no revelations, but had been in perfect peace, suffering agonies of pain, yet not one pain too many. i asked her if she had any parting counsel to give me. "no, not a word; i only wanted to see your sunny face once more, and tell you what a comfort you have been to me in this sickness." this all came at intervals, she was so weak. she afterward said, "i feel as if i never was acquainted with christ till now. i tell my sons to become intimately acquainted with him." i asked her if she took pleasure in thinking of meeting friends in heaven. with a sweet, somewhat comical smile, she said, "no, i haven't got so far as that. i think only of meeting christ." "for all that," i said, "you will soon see my father and mother and other kindred souls." her face lighted up again. "why, so i shall!" her lips were growing white with pain while this bright smile was on them, and i came away, though i should gladly have listened to her by the hour, everything was so natural, sound, and-heavenly. shopping after it did not prove particularly congenial; but we must shop, as well as die. _april th._--your first dresden letter has just come; yes, it was long enough, though you did not tell us how the cat did. you speak as if you were going to paris, but papa is positive you are not. yesterday was a lovely day, though very hot. dr. adams came and drove papa to the park. late in the afternoon i went to see mrs. g., the woman whose husband is in jail. she is usually all in a muss, but this time was as nice as could be, the floor clean and everything in order. the baby, a year old, had learned to walk since i was last there, and came and planted herself in front of me, and stared at me out of two great bright eyes most of the time. i had a nice visit, as mrs. g. seems to be making a good use of her troubles. after i got home, dr. and mrs. c. arrived and we had dinner and a tremendous thunder shower, after which he went out to make forty-'leven calls. he was pleased to say that he wanted his wife to see the lovely family picture we make! it is a glum, cold, lowering morning, but the c.'s are going to see the frenches at west point, and miss lyman at vassar. _monday._--i went to miss c.'s (the dressmaker) again to-day, and found her much out of health, and about reducing her business and moving. one of the old sisters had been reading stepping heavenward, and almost ate me up. i got a pleasant word about it last night, from mrs. general upton, who has just died at nassau. i have seen mrs. b. to-day; she did not open her eyes, but besought me to pray for her release. she can't last long. the boys are off rolling hoop again, and m. is out walking with ida. papa informed me last night that i had got a very pretty bonnet. the bonnets now consist of a little fuss and a good many flowers. papa has gone to dorset, and has had a splendid day for his journey. _thursday, may th._--yesterday miss ---- came to tell me about the killing of her brother on the railroad, and to cry her very heart out on my shoulder. in the midst of it came a note from lizzy b., saying her mother had just dropped away. i called there early this morning. we then went to the park with your uncle and aunt; after which they left and i rushed out to get cap and collar to wear at mrs. ----'s dinner. i got back in time to go to the funeral at four p.m. dr. murray made an excellent, appreciative address; papa then read extracts from a paper of mine (things she had said), the prayer followed, and then her sons sang a hymn. [ ] i came home tired and laid me down to rest; at half-past six it popped into my head that i was not dressed, and i did it speedily. we supposed we were only to meet the rev. dr. and mrs. ----, of brooklyn, but, lo! a lot of people in full dress. we had a regular state dinner, course after course. dr. ---- sat next me and made himself very agreeable, except when he said i was the most subtle satirist he ever met (i did run him a little). mrs. ---- is a picture. she had a way of looking at me through her eyeglass till she put me out of countenance, and then smiling in a sweet, satisfied manner, and laying down her glass. we came home as soon as the gentlemen left the table, and got here just as the clock was striking twelve. _friday._--we began this day by going at ten a.m. to the funeral of mrs. w.'s poor little baby, and the first words papa read, "it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting," etc., explained his and my state of mind after last night's dissipation. he made a very touching address. later in the day we went out to see miss ----, as we had promised to do. we went through the park, lingered there a while, and then went on and made a long call. when we rose to come away, she said she never let people go away without lunch and made us go down to the following: buns, three kinds of cake, pies, doughnuts, cheese, lemonade, apples, oranges, pine-apples, a soup tureen of strawberries, a quart of cream, two custard puddings, one hot and one cold, home-made wine, cold corned beef, cold roast beef, and for aught i know other things. we came away awfully tired, and papa complained of want of appetite at dinner!! good-bye, dearie. i forgot to tell you the boys have got a dog. he came of his own accord and has made them very happy. we haven't let papa see him, you may depend. _wed., may th._--papa is packing his trunk for philadelphia, and i am sitting at my new library table to write on my letter. i went yesterday to see that lady who has fits. she had one in the morning that lasted over an hour and a half. she is a very bright, animated creature and does not look older than you. _thursday._--papa got off yesterday at eleven for the general assembly and i went to mrs. d.'s and stayed four hours. she sent for mr. s.'s baby, who does not creep, but walks in the quaintest little way. i shall write a note to mr. s., who feels anxious at its not creeping, fearing its limbs will not be strong, to tell him that i hitched along exactly so. now let me give you the history of this busy day. we got up early and miss f. called with m.'s two dresses. after prayers and breakfast i wrote to papa, went to school with h., and marketed. came home and found a letter from cincinnati, urging for two hymns right away for a new hymn-book. they had several of mine already. i said, "go to, let us make a hymn" (prof. smith in his review) and made and sent them. then i wrote to mr. s. and to mrs. charles w----. [ ] then mrs. c. came and stayed till nearly four, when she left and i went down to twenty-second street to call on a lady at the water cure. then i went to see mrs. c. (the wife of the rev. mr. c.). i think i told you she had lost her little florence. i do not remember ever seeing a person so broken down by grief; she seemed absolutely heart-broken. i could not get away till five, and then i took two stages and got home as soon as i could, knowing the children would be famishing. so now count up my various professions, chaplain, marketer, hymnist, consoler of mr. s., mrs. w., mrs. c., and let me add, of dr. b., who came and made a long call. i am now going to lie down and read till i get rested, for my brain has been on the steady stretch for thirteen hours, one thing stepping on the heels of another. [ ] _may d._--if your eyes were bright enough you might have seen me and my cousin george p---- tearing down broadway this afternoon, as if mad dogs were after us. he wanted me to have a fountain pen, and the only way to accomplish it was to take me down to the place where they are sold, below the astor house. i wanted to walk, and so did he, but he had got to be on a boat for norwich at five p.m. and pack up between while; however, he concluded to risk it, hence the way we raced was a caution. i have just written him a long letter in rhyme with my new pen, and now begin one in prose to you. i have just got a letter from an anonymous admirer of stepping heavenward, enclosing ten dollars to give away; i wish it was a thousand! the children are in tribulation about their kitten, who committed suicide by knocking the ironing-board on to herself. h. made a diagram of the position of the board that i might fully comprehend the situation, and then showed me how the corpse lay. they were not willing to part with the remains, and buried them in the yard. _saturday._--i went to yonkers with m. and h. to spend the day with mrs. b. her children are sweet and interesting as ever; but little maggie, now three years old, is the "queen of the house." she is a perfect specimen of what a child should be--gladsome, well, bright, and engaging. her cheeks are rosy and shining, and she keeps up an incessant chatter. they are all wild about her, from papa and mamma down to the youngest child. * * * * * ii. home-life in dorset. dorset, june , . here we are again in dear old dorset. we got here about ten on wednesday evening, expecting to find the house dark and forlorn, but mrs. f. had been down and lighted it up, and put on the dining-table bread, biscuits, butter, cakes, eggs, etc., enough to last for days. thursday was hotter than any day we had had in new york, and not very good, therefore, for the hard work of unpacking, and the yet harder work of sowing our flower-seeds in a huge bed shaped like a palm-leaf. but, with m.'s help, it was done before one o'clock to-day--a herculean task, as the ground had to be thoroughly dug up with a trowel; stones, sticks, and roots got out, and the earth sifted in our hands. the back of my neck and my ears are nearly blistered. m. is standing behind me now anointing me with cocoa butter. our place looks beautifully. some of the trees set out are twelve or fifteen feet high, and when fully leaved will make quite a show. papa is to be here about ten days, as he greatly needs the rest; he will then go home till july st, when he will bring jane and martha. i told martha i thought it very good of maria to be willing to come with me, and she said she did not think it needed much goodness, and that _anybody_ would go with me _any_where. the boys have a little black and tan dog which culyer gave them, and m.'s bird is a fine singer. our family circle now consists of pa prentiss, ma " min." geo. " hen. " maria " (horse) coco " (cow) sukey " (dog) nep " (bird) cherry " we never saw dorset so early, and when the foliage was in such perfection. last tuesday i reached our door perfectly and disgracefully loaded with parcels, and said to myself, "i wonder what mr. m. would say if he saw me with this load?" when instantly he opened the door to let me in! account for this if you can. why should i have thought of him among all the people i know? did his mind touch mine through the closed door? it makes me almost shudder to think such things can be. well, i must love and leave you. i am going to have a small basket on the table in the hall with ferns, mosses, and shells in it. they all send love from pa prentiss down to sukey. what a pity you could not come home for the summer and go back again! i believe i'll go to your bedroom door and say, "i wonder whether annie would shriek out if she saw me in this old sacque, instead of her pretty one?" and perhaps you'll open and let me in. will you or won't you? now i'm going to ride. i've been and i've got back, and i'm frozen solid, and am glad i've got back to my den. g. and h. are now in the kitchen making biscuits. good-bye, chicken. mamma prentiss. _june th._--everybody is in bed save darby and joan. we slept last night under four blankets and a silk comforter, which will give you a faint idea of the weather. it has been beautiful to-day, and we have sat out of doors a good deal. papa and the boys went out to our hill after tea last evening and picked two quarts of strawberries, so as to have a short-cake to-day. m. took me yesterday to see a nest in the orchard which was full of birds parted into fours--not a crack between, and one of them so crowded that it filled about no space at all. the hymn says, "birds in their little nests agree," and i should think they would, for they have no room to disagree in. they all four stared at us with awful, almost embarrassing solemnity, and each had a little yellow moustache. i had no idea they lived packed in so--no wonder they looked melancholy. the sight of them, especially of the one who had no room at all, made me quite low-spirited. _wednesday._--your letter reached us on monday, and we all went out and sat in a row on the upper step, like birds on a telegraph wire, and papa read it aloud. i am lying by to-day--writing, reading, lounging, and enjoying the scenery. you ought to see papa eat strawberries!!! they are very plentiful on our hill. the grass on the lawn is pricking up like needles; easy to see if you kneel down and stare hard, but absolutely invisible otherwise; yet papa keeps calling me to look out of the window and admire it, and shouts to people driving by to do the same. he has just come in, and i told him what i was saying about him, on which he gave me a good beating, doubled up his fist at me, and then kissed me to make up.... _don't sew_ isn't it enough that i have nearly killed myself with doing it? we have just heard of the death of dickens and the sensation it is making in england. _thursday._--this bird of ours is splendid. i have just framed the two best likenesses of you and hung them up in front of my table. you would laugh at papa's ways about coffee. he complains that he drank too much at philadelphia, and says that with strawberries we don't need it, and that i may tell maria so. i tell her, and lo! the next morning there it is. i ask the meaning, and she says he came down saying i did not feel very well and needed it! the next day it appears again. why? he had been down and ordered it because it was _good_. the next day he orders it because it is his last day here but one, and to-morrow it will be on the table because it is the last! dreadful man! and yet i hate to have him go. _friday._--i drove papa to manchester, and as usual, this exploit brought on a thunder shower, with a much needed deluge of rain. i had a hard time getting home, and got wet to the skin. i had not only to drive, but keep a roll of matting from slipping out, hold up the boot and the umbrella, and keep stopping to get my hat out of my eyes, which kept knocking over them. then coco goes like the wind this summer. fortunately i had my waterproof with me and got home safely. the worst of it is that, in my bewilderment, i refused to let a woman get in who was walking to south dorset. i shall die of remorse.. well, well, how it is raining, to be sure. _monday._--i hear that papa sent a dispatch to somebody to know how i got here from manchester. i do not wonder he is worried. i am such a poor driver, and it rained so dreadfully. m. follows me round like a little dog; if i go down cellar she goes down; if i pick a strawberry she picks one; if i stop picking she stops. she is the sweetest lamb that ever was, and i am the mary that's got her. i don't believe anybody else in the world loves me so well, unless it possibly is papa, and he doesn't follow me down cellar, and goes off and picks strawberries all by himself, and that on sunday, too, when i had forbidden berrypicking! we are rioting in strawberries, just as we did last summer. we live a good deal at sixes and sevens, but nobody cares. this afternoon i have been arranging a basket for the hall table, with mosses, ferns, shells and white coral; ever so pretty. _wednesday._--it is a splendid day and i expect papa. the children have not said a word about their food, though partly owing to no butcher and partly to the heat, i have had for two days next to nothing; picked fish one day and fish picked the next. we regarded to-day's dinner as a most sumptuous one, and i am sure victoria's won't taste so good to her. letters keep pouring in, urging papa to accept the professorship at chicago, and declaring the vote of the assembly to be the voice of god. of course, if he must accept, we should have to give up our dear little home here. but to me his leaving the ministry would be the worst thing about it. after dinner the boys carried me off bodily to see strawberries and other plants; then they made me go to the mill, and by that time i had no hair-pins on my head, to say nothing of hair. the boys are working away like all possessed. a little bird, probably one of those hatched here, has just come and perched himself on the piazza, railing in front of me, and is making me an address which, unfortunately, i do not understand.... you have inherited from me a want of reverence for relics and the like. i wouldn't go as far as our barn to see the fig-leaves adam and eve wore, or all the hair of all the apostles; and when people are not born hero-worshippers, they can't even worship themselves as heroes. fancy dr. schaff sending me back the ms. of a hymn i gave him, from a london printing-office! what could i do with it? cover jelly with it? he sent me a beautiful copy of his book, "christ in song." _thursday, june th._--papa, with j. and m., came late last night, and we all made as great a time as if the great mogul had come. they give a most terrific account of the heat in the city. you ask how stepping heavenward is selling. so far , . nidworth has been a complete failure, though the publishers write me that it is a "gem." [ ] _monday, july th._--m. is so absorbed in the study of vick's floral catalogue that she speaks of seeing such a thing in the bible or dictionary, when she means that she saw it in vick. i did the same thing last night. she and i get down on our knees and look solemnly at the bare ground and point out up-springing weeds as better than nothing. i had a long call this morning from mrs. f. field, of east dorset. they had a dear little bright-eyed baby baptized yesterday, which sat through all the morning service and behaved even better than i did, for it had no wandering thoughts. mrs. f. said some friends of hers in brooklyn received letters from france and from japan simultaneously, urging them to read stepping heavenward, which was the first they heard of it. we have celebrated the glorious fourth by making and eating ice-cream. papa brought a new-fashioned freezer, that professed to freeze in two minutes. we screwed it to the wood-house floor--or rather h. did--put in the cream, and the whole family stood and watched papa while he turned the handle. at the end of two minutes we unscrewed the cover and gazed inside, but there were no signs of freezing, and to make a long story short, instead of writing a book as i said i should, there we all were from half-past twelve to nearly two o'clock, when we decided to have dinner and leave the servants to finish it. it came on to the table at last, was very rich and rather good. the boys spent the afternoon in the woods firing off crackers. m. went visiting and papa took me to drive, it being a delightful afternoon. the boys have a few roman candles which they are going to send off as soon as it gets dark enough. _july th._--this is a real dorset day, after a most refreshing rain, and m. and i have kept out of doors the whole morning, gardening and in the woods. dr. and mrs. humphrey came down and spent last evening. she is bright and wide awake, and admired everything from the scenery out of doors to the matting and chintzes within. i told her there was nothing in the house to be compared with those who lived in it. here comes a woman with four quarts of black raspberries and a fuss to make change. papa and the boys are getting in the last hay with albert. m. has just brought in your letter. we are glad you have seen those remarkable scenes [at ober-ammergau].one would fancy it would become an old story. i should not like to see the crucifixion; it must be enough to turn one's hair white in a single night. _saturday._--yesterday i went with the children to walk round rupert. we turned off the road to please the boys, to a brook with a sandy beach, where all three fell to digging wells, and i fell to collecting wild grape-vine and roots for my rustic work, and fell into the brook besides. we all enjoyed ourselves so much that we wished we had our dinners and could stay all day. on the way home, just as we got near col. sykes', we spied papa with the phaeton, and all got in. we must have cut a pretty figure, driving through the village; m. in my lap, g. in papa's, and h. everywhere in general. _july th._--miss vance was in last evening after tea, and says our lawn is getting on extremely well and that our seeds are coming up beautifully. this greatly soothed m.'s and my own uneasy heart, as we had rather supposed the lawn ought to be a thick velvet, and the seeds we sowed two weeks ago up and blooming. if vegetable corresponded to animal life, this would be the case. fancy that what were eggs long after we came here, and then naked birds, are now full-fledged creatures on the wing, all off getting to housekeeping, each on his own hook! _july th._--m. and i went on a tramp this forenoon and while we were gone mrs. m. o. r. and mary and mrs. van w. called. they brought news of the coming war. papa showed them all over the house, not excepting your room, which i think a perfect shame--for the room looks forlorn. i think men ought to be suppressed, or something done to them. maria told me she thought papa's sermon sunday was "ilegant." _ st._--i feel greatly troubled lest this dreadful war should cut us off from each other. mr. butler writes that he does not see how people are to get home, and we do not see either. papa says it will probably be impossible to have the evangelical alliance. and how prices of finery will go up! _july th._--m.'s and my own perseverance at our flower-bed is beginning, at last, to be rewarded. we have portulaccas, mignonette, white candy-tuft, nasturtiums, eutocas, etc.; and the morning-glories, which are all behindhand, are just beginning to bloom. never were flowers so fought for. it is the lion and the unicorn over again. i have nearly finished "soll und haben," and feel more like talking german than english. the riverside magazine has just come and completed my downfall, as it has a syllable left out of one of my verses, as has been the case with a hymn in the hymn-book at cincinnati and one in the association monthly. i am now fairly entitled to the reputation of being a jolty rhymster. it has been a trifle cooler to-day and we are all refreshed by the change. _friday._--papa read me last evening a nice thing about stepping heavenward from dr. robinson in paris and a lady in zurich, and i went to bed and slept the sleep of the just--till daylight, when five hundred flies began to flap into my ears, up my nose, take nips off my face and hands, and drove me distracted. they woke papa, too, but he goes to sleep between the pecks. _august th._--tuesday i went on a tramp with m. and brought home a gigantic bracket. we met papa as we neared the house, and he had had his first bath in his new tank at the mill, and was wild with joy, as were also the boys. after dinner i made a picture frame of mosses, lichens, and red and yellow toadstools, ever so pretty; then proofs came, then we had tea, and then went and made calls. yesterday on a tramp with m., who wanted mosses, then home with about a bushel of ground-pine. every minute of the afternoon i spent in trimming the grey room with the pine and getting up my bracket, and now the room looks like a bower of bliss. i was to go with m. on another tramp to-day, but it rains, and rain is greatly needed. the heat in new york is said to exceed anything in the memory of man, something absolutely appalling. _friday._--here i am on the piazza with miss k. by my side, reading the life of faber. she got here last night in a beautiful moonlight, and as i had not told her about the scenery, she was so enchanted with it on opening her blinds this morning, that she burst into tears. i drove her round rupert and took her into cheney's woods, and the boys invited us down to their workshop; so we went, and i was astonished to find that the bath-house is really a perfect affair, with two dressing-rooms and everything as neat as a pink. miss k. is charmed with everything, the cornucopias, natural brackets, crosses, etc., and her delusion as to all of us, whom she fancies saints and angels, is quite charming, only it won't last. _ th._--there is a good deal of sickness about the village. i made wine-jelly for four different people yesterday, and the rest of the morning miss k., mrs. humphrey, and myself sat on a shawl in our woods, talking. we have had a tremendous rain, to our great delight, and the air is cooler, but the grasshoppers, which are like the frogs of egypt, are not diminished, and are devouring everything. i got a letter from cousin mary yesterday, who says she has no doubt we shall get the ocean up here, somehow, and raise our own oysters and clams. _ th._--papa and i went to manchester to-day to make up a lot of calls, and among other persons, we saw mrs. c. of troy, a bright-eyed old lady who was a schoolmate of my mother's. she could not tell me anything about her except that she was very bright and animated, and that i knew before. mrs. wickham asked me to write some letters for a fair to be held for their church to-morrow; so i wrote three in rhyme, not very good. _august th._--after dinner papa went to manchester, taking both boys, and i went off with m. to cheney's woods, where we got baskets full of moss, etc., and had a good time. the children are all wild on the subject of flowers and spend the evening studying the catalogues, which they ought to know by heart. i wonder if i have told you how our dog hates to remember the sabbath day to keep it holy? the moment the church-bell begins to ring, no matter where he is, or how soundly asleep, he runs out and gazes in the direction of the church, and as the last stroke strikes, lifts his nose high in the air and sets up the most awful wails, howls, groans, despairing remonstrances you can imagine. no games with the boys to-day--no romps, no going to manchester, everybody telling me to get off their sunday clothes--aow! aow! aow! dr. adams' house has been broken into and robbed, and so has dr. field's. mrs. h. gave us the history of a conflict in chicago between her husband and a desperate burglar armed with a dirk, who wanted, but did not get a large sum of money under his pillow; also, of his being garroted and robbed, and having next day sent him a purse of $ , two pistols, a slug, a loaded cane, and a watchman's rattle. imagine him as going about loaded with all these things! i never knew people who had met with such bewitching adventures, and she has the brightest way of telling them. papa has got a telegram from dr. schaff asking him to come on to his little johnny's funeral. this death must have been very sudden, as dr. schaff wrote last tuesday that his wife was sick, but said nothing of johnny. he is the youngest boy, about nine years old, i think, and you will remember they lost philip, a beautiful child, born the same day as our g., the summer we were at hunter. when the despatch came papa and m. thought it was bad news about you, and i only thought of mr. stearns! there is no accounting for the way in which the human mind works. and now for bed, you sleepy head. _monday._--a splendid day, and we have all been as busy as bees, if not as useful,--h. making a whip to chastise the cow with, m., nep and myself collecting mosses and toadstools; of the latter i brought home ! we were out till dinner-time, and after dinner i changed the mosses in my baskets and jardinet, no small job, and m. spread out her treasures. she has at last found her enthusiasm, and i am so glad not only to have found a mate in my tramps, but to see such a source of pleasure opening before her as woods, fields and gardens have always been to me. we lighted this morning on what i supposed to be a horned-headed, ferocious snake, and therefore took great pleasure in killing. it turned out to be a common striped snake that had got a frog partly swallowed, and its legs sticking out so that i took them to be horns. nep relieved his mind by barking at it. i announced at dinner that i was going to send for vick's catalogue of bulbs, which news was received with acclamation. the fact is, we all seem to be born farmers or florists; and unless you bring us home something in the agricultural line, i don't know that you can bring us anything we would condescend to look at. it is awful to read of the carnage going on in europe. _aug. th._--papa got home tuesday night. johnny schaff's death was from a fall; he left the house full of life and health, and in a few minutes was brought in insensible, and only lived half an hour.... i take no pleasure in writing you, because we feel that you are not likely to get my letters. still, i can not make up my mind to stop writing. never was a busier set of people than we. in the evening i read to the children from the german books you sent them; am now on thelka von grumpert's, which is a really nice book. i tell papa we are making an idol out of this place, but he says we are not. _tuesday._--we all set out to climb the mountain near deacon kellogg's. we snatched what we could for our dinner, and when we were ready to eat it, it proved to be eggs, bread and meat, cake, guava jelly, cider and water. we enjoyed the splendid view and the dinner, and then papa and the boys went home, and m., nep and myself proceeded to climb higher, nep so affectionate that he tired me out hugging me with his "arms," as h. calls them, and nearly eating me up, while m. was shaking with laughter at his silly ways. we were gone from a.m. to nearly p.m., and brought home in baskets, bags, pockets and bosom, about thirty natural brackets, some very large and fearfully heavy. one was so heavy that i brought it home by kicking it down the mountain. i have just got some flower seeds for fall planting, and the children are looking them over as some would gems from the mine. _thursday, september st._--your letter has come, and we judge that you have quite given up paris; what a pity to have to do it! we spent yesterday at hager brook with mrs. humphrey and her daughters; papa drove us over in the straw wagon and came for us about p.m. we had lobster salad and marmalade, bread and butter and cake, and we roasted potatoes and corn, and the h.'s had a pie and things of that sort. when they saw the salad they set up such shouts of joy that papa came to see what was the matter. we had a nice time. today i have had proofs to correct and letters to write, and berries to dry, but not a minute to sit down and think, everybody needing me at once. all are busy as bees and send lots of love. give ever so much to the smiths. _september th._--here we are all sitting round the parlor table. the last three days have each brought a letter from you, and to-day one came from mrs. s. to me, and one from prof. s. to papa. i have no doubt that the decision for you to return is a wise one and hope you will fall in with it cheerfully. dr. schaff is here, and yesterday papa took him to hager brook, and to-day to the quarries; splendid weather for both excursions, and dr. s. seems to have enjoyed them extremely. last evening he read to us some private letters of bismarck, which were very interesting and did him great credit in every way. i had a long call from m. h. to-day; she looked as sweet as possible and i loaded her with flowers. papa is writing mr. b. to thank him for a basket of splendid peaches he sent us to-day. h. has just presented me with three pockets full of toadstools. m. walked with me round rupert square this afternoon, and we met a crazy woman who said she wondered i did not go into fits, and asked me why i didn't. in return i asked her where she lived, to which she replied, "in the world." we are all on the _qui vive_ about the war news, especially louis napoleon's downfall, and you may depend we are glad he has used himself up. you can not bring anything to the children that will please them as seeds would. it delights me to see them so interested in garden work. perhaps this will be my last letter. your loving mammie. * * * * * iii. further glimpses of her dorset life. the following recollections of mrs. prentiss by her friend, mrs. frederick field, now of san jose, california, afford additional glimpses of her home life in dorset. the picture is drawn in fair colors; but it is as truthful as it is fair: it was the first sunday in september, . a quiet, perfect day among the green hills of vermont; a sacramental sabbath, and we had come seven miles over the mountain to go up to the house of the lord. i had brought my little two-months-old baby in my arms, intending to leave her during the service at our brother's home, which was near the church. i knew that mrs. prentiss was a "summer-boarder" in this home, that she was the wife of a distinguished clergyman, and a literary woman of decided ability; but it was before the "stepping heavenward" epoch of her life, and i had no very deep interest in the prospect of meeting her. we went in at the hospitably open door, and meeting no one, sat down in the pleasant family living-room. it was about noon, and we could hear cheerful voices talking over the lunch-table in the dining-room. presently the door opened, and a slight, delicate-featured woman, with beautiful large dark eyes, came with rapid step into the room, going across to the hall door; but her quick eye caught a glimpse of my little "bundle of flannel," and not pausing for an introduction or word of preparatory speech, she came towards me with a beaming face and outstretched hands:-- "o, have you a baby there? how delightful! i haven't seen one for such an age,--please, may i take it? the darling tiny creature!--a girl? how lovely!" she took the baby tenderly in her arms and went on in her eager, quick, informal way, but with a bright little blush and smile,--"i'm not very polite--pray, let me introduce myself! i'm mrs. prentiss, and you are mrs. f---, i know." after a little more sweet, motherly comment and question over the baby,--"a touch of nature" which at once made us "akin," she asked, "have you brought the baby to be christened?" i said, no, i thought it would be better to wait till she was a little older. "o, no!" she pleaded, "do let us take her over to the church now. the younger the better, i think; it is so uncertain about our keeping such treasures." i still objected that i had not dressed the little one for so public an occasion. "o, never mind about that," she said. "she is really lovelier in this simple fashion than to be loaded with lace and embroidery." then, her sweet face growing more earnest,--"there will be more of us here to-day than at the next communion--_more of us to pray for her._" the little lamb was taken into the fold that day, and i was mrs. prentiss' warm friend forevermore. her whole beautiful character had revealed itself to me in that little interview,--the quick perception, the wholly frank, unconventional manner, the sweet motherliness, the cordial interest in even a stranger, the fervent piety which could not bear delay in duty, and even the quaint, original, forcible thought and way of expressing it, "there'll be more of us here to pray for her to-day." for seven successive summers i saw more or less of her in this "earthly paradise," as she used to call it, and once i visited her in her city home. i have been favored with many of her sparkling, vivacious letters, and have read and re-read all her published writings; but that first meeting held in it for me the key-note of all her wonderfully beautiful and symmetrical character. she brought to that little hamlet among the hills a sweet and wholesome and powerful influence. while her time was too valuable to be wasted in a general sociability, she yet found leisure for an extensive acquaintance, for a kindly interest in all her neighbors, and for christian work of many kinds. probably the weekly meeting for bible-reading and prayer, which she conducted, was her closest link with the women of dorset; but these meetings were established after i had bidden good-bye to the dear old town, and i leave others to tell how their "hearts burned within them as she opened to them the scriptures." she had in a remarkable degree the lovely feminine gift of _home-making_. she was a true decorative artist. her room when she was boarding, and her home after it was completed, were bowers of beauty. every walk over hill and dale, every ramble by brookside or through wildwood, gave to her some fresh home-adornment. some shy wildflower or fern, or brilliant-tinted leaf, a bit of moss, a curious lichen, a deserted bird's-nest, a strange fragment of rock, a shining pebble, would catch her passing glance and reveal to her quick artistic sense possibilities of use which were quaint, original, characteristic. one saw from afar that hers was a poet's home; and, if permitted to enter its gracious portals, the first impression deepened into certainty. there was as strong an individuality about her home, and especially about her own little study, as there was about herself and her writings. a cheerful, sunny, hospitable christian home! far and wide its potent influences reached, and it was a beautiful thing to see how many another home, humble or stately, grew emulous and blossomed into a new loveliness. mrs. prentiss was naturally a shy and reserved woman, and necessarily a pre-occupied one. therefore she was sometimes misunderstood. but those who--knew her best, and were blest with her rare intimacy, knew her as "a perfect woman nobly planned." her conversation was charming. her close study of nature taught her a thousand happy symbols and illustrations, which made both what she said and wrote a mosaic of exquisite comparisons. her studies of character were equally constant and penetrating. nothing escaped her; no peculiarity of mind or manner failed of her quick observation, but it was always a kindly interest. she did not ridicule that which was simply ignorance or weakness, and she saw with keen pleasure all that was quaint, original, or strong, even when it was hidden beneath the homeliest garb. she had the true artist's liking for that which was simple and _genre_. the common things of common life appealed to her sympathies and called out all her attention. it was a real, hearty interest, too--not feigned, even in a sense generally thought praiseworthy. indeed, no one ever had a more intense scorn of every sort of _feigning_. she was honest, truthful, _genuine_ to the highest degree. it may have sometimes led her into seeming lack of courtesy, but even this was a failing which "leaned to virtue's side." i chanced to know of her once calling with a friend on a country neighbor, and finding the good housewife busy over a rag-carpet. mrs. prentiss, who had never chanced to see one of these bits of rural manufacture in its elementary processes, was full of questions and interest, thereby quite evidently pleasing the unassuming artist in assorted rags and home-made dyes. when the visitors were safely outside the door, mrs. prentiss' friend turned to her with the exclamation, "what tact you have! she really thought you were interested in her work!" the quick blood sprang into mrs. prentiss' face, and she turned upon her friend a look of amazement and rebuke. "tact!" she said, "i despise such tact!--do you think _i would look or act a lie?_" she was an exceedingly practical woman, not a dreamer. a systematic, thorough housekeeper, with as exalted ideals in all the affairs which pertain to good housewifery as in those matters which are generally thought to transcend these humble occupations. like solomon's virtuous woman she "looked well after the ways of her household." methodical, careful of minutes, simple in her tastes, abstemious, and therefore enjoying evenly good health in spite of her delicate constitution--this is the secret of her accomplishing so much. yet all this foundation of exactness and diligence was so "rounded with leafy gracefulness" that she never seemed angular or unyielding. with her children she was a model disciplinarian, exceedingly strict, a wise law-maker; yet withal a tender, devoted, self-sacrificing mother. i have never seen such exact obedience required and given--or a more idolized mother. "mamma's" word was indeed _law_, but--o, happy combination!--it was also _gospel_! how warm and true her friendship was! how little of selfishness in all her intercourse with other women! how well she loved to be of _service_ to her friends! how anxious that each should reach her highest possibilities of attainment! i record with deepest sense of obligation the cordial, generous, sympathetic assistance of many kinds extended by her to me during our whole acquaintance. to every earnest worker in any field she gladly "lent a hand," rejoicing in all the successes of others as if they were her own. but if weakness, or trouble, or sorrow of any sort or degree overtook one she straightway became as one of god's own ministering spirits--an angel of strength and consolation. always more eager, however, that _souls should grow than that pain should cease_. volumes could be made of her letters to friends in sorrow. one tender monotone steals through them all,-- 'come unto me, my kindred, i enfold you in an embrace to sufferers only known; close to this heart i tenderly will hold you, suppress no sigh, keep back no tear, no moan. "thou man of sorrows, teach my lips that often have told the sacred story of my woe, to speak of thee till stony griefs i soften, till hearts that know thee not learn thee to know. "till peace takes place of storm and agitation, till lying on the current of thy will there shall be glorying in tribulation, and christ himself each empty heart shall fill." few have the gift or the courage to deal faithfully yet lovingly with an erring soul, but she did not shrink back even from this service to those she loved. i can bear witness to the wisdom, penetration, skill, and fidelity with which she probed a terribly wounded spirit, and then said with tender solemnity, "_i think you need a great deal of good praying._" o, "vanished hand," still beckon to us from the eternal heights! o, "voice that is still," speak to us yet from the shining shore! "still let thy mild rebuking stand between us and the wrong, and thy dear memory serve to make our faith in goodness strong." [ ] see the poem in the appendix to golden hours, with the "reply of the new year," written by mrs. prentiss. [ ] a clerical circle of new york. [ ] a unitarian paper, published in new york. [ ] an association of ladies for providing garments and other needed articles in aid of families of home and foreign missionaries, especially of those connected in any way with their own congregation. such a circle is found in most of the american churches. [ ] the passage occurs in a letter to madame guyon, dated june , . for another extract from the same letter see appendix f, p. . [ ] on the resurrection of christ. [ ] helen rogers blakeman, wife of w. n. blakeman, m.d., was born on the th of december, , in the city of new york. she was a granddaughter of the rev. james caldwell, of elizabethtown, new jersey, the revolutionary patriot. the tragical fate of her grandmother has passed into history. when the british forces reached connecticut farms, on the th of june, , and began to burn and pillage the place, mrs. caldwell, who was then living there, retired with her two children--one an infant in her arms--to a back room in the house. here, while engaged in prayer, she was shot through the window. two bullets struck her in the breast and she fell dead upon the floor. the infant in her arms was mrs. blakeman's mother. on the father's side, too, she was of an old and god-fearing family. [ ] "your precious lamb was very near my heart; few knew so well as i did all you suffered for and with her, for few have been over just the ground i have. but that is little to the purpose; what i was going to say is this,--'god never makes a mistake.' you know and feel it, i am sure, but when we are broken down with grief, we like to hear simple words, oft repeated. on this anniversary of my child's death, i feel drawn to you. it was a great blow to us because it came to hearts already sore with sorrow for our boy, and because it came so like a thunderclap, and because she suffered so. your baby's death brought it all back."--_from the letter to mrs. w._ [ ] "i must tell you what a busy day i had yesterday, being chaplain, marketer, mother, author, and consoler from early morning till nine at night.... a letter came from cincinnati from the editor of the hymn-book of the y.m.c.a., saying he had some of my hymns in it, and had stopped the press in order to have two more, which he wanted 'right away.' i was exactly in the mood; it was our little bessie's anniversary, she had been in heaven _eighteen_ years; think what she has already gained by my one year of suffering! and i wanted to spend it for others, not for myself."--_letter to her husband, may _. [ ] nidworth, and his three magic wands, published by roberts brothers. chapter xii. the trial of faith. - . i. two years of suffering. its nature and causes. spiritual conflicts. ill-health. faith a gift to be won by prayer. death-bed of dr. skinner. visit to philadelphia. "daily food." how to read the bible so as to love it more. letters of sympathy and counsel. "prayer for holiness brings suffering." perils of human friendship. if in the life of mrs. prentiss the year was marked with a white stone as one of great happiness, the two following years were marked by unusual and very acute suffering. perhaps something of this was, sooner or later, to have been looked for in the experience of one whose organization, both physical and mental, was so intensely sensitive. tragical elements are latent in every human life, especially in the life of woman. and the finer qualities of her nature, her vast capacity of loving and of self-sacrifice, her peculiar cares and trials, as well as outward events, are always tending to bring these elements into action. what scenes surpassing fable, scenes both bright and sad, belong to the secret history of many a quiet woman's heart! then our modern civilization, while placing woman higher in some respects than she ever stood before, at the same time makes her pay a heavy price for her advantages. in the very process of enlarging her sphere and opportunities, whether intellectual or practical, and of educating her for their duties, does it not also expose her to moral shocks and troubles and lacerations of feeling almost peculiar to our times? nor is religion wholly exempt from the spirit that rules the age or the hour. there is a close, though often very subtle, connexion between the two; just as there is between the working of nature and grace in the individual soul. the phase of her history upon which mrs. prentiss was now entering can not be fully understood without considering it in this light. the melancholy that was deep-rooted in her temperament, and her tender, all-absorbing sympathies, made her very quick to feel whatever of pain or sorrow pervaded the social atmosphere about her. the thought of what others were suffering would intrude even upon her rural retreat among the mountains, and render her jealous of her own rest and joy. and then, in all her later years, the mystery of existence weighed upon her heart more and more heavily. in a nature so deep and so finely strung, great happiness and great sorrow are divided by a very thin partition. but spiritual trials and conflict gave its keenest edge to the suffering of these years. such trials and conflict indeed were not wanting in the earliest stages of her religious life, nor had they been wanting all along its course; but they came now with a power and in a manner almost wholly new; and, while not essentially different from those which have afflicted god's children in all ages, they are yet traceable, in no small degree, to special causes and circumstances in her own case. early in she had fallen in with a book entitled "god's furnace," and a few months later had made the acquaintance of its author--a remarkable woman, of great strength of character, of deep religious experience, and full of zeal for god. her book was introduced to the christian public by a distinguished presbyterian clergyman, and was highly recommended by other eminent divines. by means of this work, as well as by correspondence and an occasional visit, she exerted for a time a good deal of influence over mrs. prentiss. at first this influence seemed to be stimulating and healthful, but it was not so in the end. the points of sympathy and the points of difference between them will come out so plainly in mrs. prentiss' letters that they need not be indicated here. it would not be easy to imagine two women more utterly dissimilar, except in love to god, devotion to their saviour, and delight in prayer. these formed the tie between them. miss ----'s last days were sadly clouded by mental trouble and disease. a little book called "holiness through faith," published about this time, was another disturbing influence in mrs. prentiss' religious life. this work and others of a similar character presented a somewhat novel theory of sanctification--a theory zealously taught, and which excited considerable attention in certain circles of the christian community. it was, in brief, this: as we are justified by faith without the deeds of the law, even so are we sanctified by faith; in other words, as we obtain forgiveness and acceptance with god by a simple act of trust in christ, so by simple trust in christ we may attain personal holiness; it is as easy for divine grace to save us at once from the power, as from the guilt, of sin. for more than thirty years mrs. prentiss had made the christian life a matter of earnest thought and study. the subject of personal holiness in particular had occupied her attention. whatever promised to shed new light upon it she eagerly read. her own convictions, however, were positive and decided; and, although at first inclined to accept the doctrine of "holiness through faith," further reflection satisfied her that, as taught by its special advocates, it was contrary to scripture and experience, and was fraught with mischief. certain unhappy tendencies and results of the doctrine, both at home and abroad, as shown in some of its teachers and disciples, also forced her to this conclusion. folly of some sort is indeed one of the fatal rocks upon which all overstrained theories of sanctification are almost certain to be wrecked; and in excitable, crude natures, the evil is apt to take the form either of mental extravagance, perhaps derangement, or of silly, if not still worse, conduct. but, while deeply impressed with the mischief of these perfectionist theories, mrs. prentiss felt the heartiest sympathy with all earnest seekers after holiness, and was grieved by what seemed to her harsh or unjust criticisms upon them. what were her own matured views on the subject will appear in the sequel. it is enough to say here that "holiness through faith" and other works, in advocacy of the same or similar doctrines, meeting her as they did when under a severe mental strain, and touching her at a most sensitive point--for holiness was a passion of her whole soul--had for a time a more or less bewildering effect. she kept pondering the questions they raised, until the native hue of her piety--hitherto so resolute and cheerful--became "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." the inward conflict which has been referred to she described sometimes, in the language of the old divines, as the want of god's "sensible presence," or of "conscious" nearness to and communion with christ; sometimes, as a state of "spiritual deprivation or aridity"; and then again, as a work of the evil one. she laid much stress upon this last point. her belief in the existence of satan and his influence over human souls was as vivid as that of luther; she did not hesitate to accuse him of being the fomenter and, in a sense, the author of her distress; the warnings of the bible against his "wiles" she accepted as in full force still; and she could offer with all her heart, and with no doubt as to the literal meaning of its closing words, the petition of the old litany: "that it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand, and to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those who fall, and finally to _beat down satan under our feet_." the coming trouble seems to have cast its shadow across her path even before the close of . early in it was upon her in power. her letters contain very interesting and pathetic allusions to this experience. but they do not explain it. nor is it easy to explain. in the absence of certain inciting causes from without, it would never, perhaps, have assumed a serious form. but these sharp spiritual trials are generally complicated with external causes, or occasions; ill-health, morbid constitutional tendencies, loss of sleep, wearing cares and responsibilities, sudden calamities, worldly loss or disappointment, and the like. it is in the midst of such conditions that pious souls are most apt to be assailed by gloom and despondency. and yet distressing inward struggles and depression arise sometimes in the midst of outward prosperity and even of unusual religious enjoyment. in truth, among all the phenomena of the christian life none are more obscure or harder to seize than those connected with spiritual conflict and temptation. they belong largely to that _terra incognita_, the dark back-ground of human consciousness, where are the primal forces of the soul and the mustering-place of good and evil. a certain mystery enshrouds all profound religious emotion; whether of the peace of god that passeth all understanding, or of the anguish that comes of spiritual desertion. those who are in the midst of the battle, or bear its scars, will instantly recognise an experience like their own; to all others it must needs remain inexplicable. even in the natural life our deepest joys and sorrows are mostly inarticulate; the great poets come nearest to giving them utterance; but how much the reality always surpasses the descriptions of the poet's pen, even though it be the pen of a shakespeare, or a goethe! mrs. prentiss never afterward referred to this "fiery trial" without strong emotion. it terrified her to think of anyone she loved as exposed to it; and--not to speak of other classes--she seemed to regard those as specially exposed to it, who had just passed, or were passing, through an unusually rich and happy religious experience. one of her last letters, addressed to a dear christian friend, related to this very point. here are a few sentences from it: i want to give you emphatic warning that you were never in such danger in your life. this is the language of bitter, bitter experience and is not mine alone. leighton says the great pirate lets the empty ships go by and robs the full ones. [ ] ... i do hope you will go on your way rejoicing, unto the perfect day. hold on to christ with your teeth [ ] if your hands get crippled; he, alone, is stronger than satan; he, alone, knows _all_ "sore temptations" mean. this, certainly, is strong language and will sound very strange and extravagant in many ears; and yet is it really stronger language than that often used by inspired prophets and apostles? or than that of augustine, bernard, luther, hooker, fenelon, bunyan, and of many saintly women, whose names adorn the annals of piety? strong as it is, it will find an echo in hearts that have been assailed by the "fiery darts of the adversary," and have learned to cry unto god out of the depths of mental anguish and gloom; while others still in the midst of the conflict, will, perhaps, be helped and comforted to read of the manner in which mrs. prentiss passed through it. nothing in the story of her religious life is more striking and beautiful. her faith never failed; she glorified god in the midst of it all; she thanked her lord and master for "taking her in hand," and begged him not to spare her for her crying, if so be she might thus learn to love him more and grow more like him! and, what is especially noteworthy, her own suffering, instead of paralysing, as severe suffering sometimes does, active sympathy with the sorrows and trials of others, had just the contrary effect. "how soon," she wrote to a friend, "our dear lord presses our experiences into his own service! how many lessons he teaches us in order to make us 'sons' (or daughters) 'of consolation!'" to another friend she wrote: i did not perceive any selfishness in you during our interview, and you need not be afraid that i am so taken up with my own affairs as to feel no sympathy with you in yours. what are we made for, if not to bear each other's burdens? and this ought to be the effect of trial upon us; to make us, in the very midst of it, unusually interested in the interests of others. this is the softening, sanctifying tendency of tribulation, and he who lacks it needs harder blows. at no period of her life was she more helpful to afflicted and tempted souls. in visits to sick-rooms and dying beds, and in letters to friends in trouble, her heart "like the noble tree that is wounded itself when it gives the balm," poured itself forth in the most tender, soothing ministrations. it seemed at times fairly surcharged with love. meanwhile she kept her pain to herself; only a few intimate friends, whose prayers she solicited, knew what a struggle was going on in her soul; to all others she appeared very much as in her happiest days. "it is a little curious," she wrote to a young friend, "that suffering as i really am, nobody sees it. 'always bright!' people say to me to my amazement.... i can add nothing but love, of which i am so full that i keep giving off in thunder and lightning." the preceding account would be incomplete without adding that the state of her health during this period, combined with a severe pressure of varied and perplexing cares, served to deepen the distress caused by her spiritual trials. whatever view may be taken of the origin and nature of such trials, it is certain that physical depression and the mental strain that comes of anxious, care-worn thoughts, if not their source, yet tend always greatly to intensify them. in the present case the trials would, perhaps, not have existed without the cares and the ill-health; while the latter, even in the entire absence of the former, would have occasioned severe suffering. _to mrs. frederick field, new york, jan. , ._ 'if i need make any apology for writing you so often, it must be this--i can not help it. having dwelt long in an obscure, oftentimes dark valley, and then passed out into a bright plane of life, i am full of tender yearnings over other souls, and would gladly spend my whole time and strength for them. i long, especially, to see your feet established on an immovable rock. it seems to me that god is preparing you for great usefulness by the fiery trial of your faith. "they learn in suffering what they teach in song." oh how true this is! who is so fitted to sing praises to christ as he who has learned him in hours of bereavement, disappointment and despair? what you want is to let your intellect go overboard, if need be, and to take what god gives just as a little child takes it, without money and without price. faith is his, unbelief ours. no process of reasoning can soothe a mother's empty, aching heart, or bring christ into it to fill up all that great waste room. but faith can. and faith is his gift; a gift to be won by prayer--prayer persistent, patient, determined; prayer that will take no denial; prayer that if it goes away one day unsatisfied, keeps on saying, "well, there's to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow; god may wait to be gracious, and i can wait to receive, but receive i must and will." this is what the bible means when it says, "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force." it does not say the eager, the impatient take it by force, but the violent--they who declare, "i will not let thee go except thou bless me." this is all heart, not head work. do i know what i am talking about? yes, i do. but my intellect is of no use to me when my heart is breaking. i must get down on my knees and own that i am less than nothing, seek _god_, not joy; _consent_ to suffer, not cry for relief. and how transcendently good he is when he brings me down to that low place and there shows me that that self-renouncing, self-despairing spot is just the one where he will stoop to meet me! my dear friend, don't let this great tragedy of sorrow fail to do _everything_ for you. it is a dreadful thing to lose children; but a _lost sorrow_ is the most fearful experience life can bring, i feel this so strongly that i could go on writing all day. it has been said that the intent of sorrow is to "toss us on to god's promises." alas, these waves too often toss us away out to sea, where neither sun or stars appear for many days. i pray, earnestly, that it may not be so with you. among mrs. prentiss' most beloved and honored friends in new york was the rev. dr. thomas h. skinner, the first pastor of the mercer street church, and then, for nearly a quarter of a century, professor in the union theological seminary. his attachment to her, as also that of his family, was very strong. dr. skinner had been among the leaders of the so-called new school branch of the presbyterian church. he was a preacher of great spiritual power, an able, large-hearted theologian, and a man of most attractive personal and social qualities. he was artless as a little child, full of enthusiasm for the best things, and a pattern of saintly goodness. it used to be said that every stone and rafter in the church of the covenant had felt the touch of his prayers. this venerable servant of god entered into his rest on the st of february, , in the th year of his age. in a letter to her cousin, rev. george s. payson, mrs. prentiss thus refers to his last hours: you will hear at dear dr. skinner's funeral to-morrow his dying testimony, and i want you to know that it was whispered in my enraptured ear, that i was privileged to spend the whole of tuesday and all he lived of wednesday, at his side, and that mine were the hands that closed his eyes and composed his features in death. what blissful moments were mine, as i saw his sainted soul fly home; how near heaven seemed and still seems! _to miss e. s. gilman, new york, feb. , ._ i am glad to hear that you have such an interesting class, and yet more glad that you see how much christian culture they need. i am astonished every day by confessions made to me by young people as to their woful state before god, and do hope that all this is to prepare me to write something for them. i began a series of articles in the association monthly, called "twilight talks," which may perhaps prove to be in a degree what you want, but still there is much land untraversed. meanwhile i want to encourage you in your work, by letting you feel my deep sympathy with you in it, and to assure you that nothing will be so blessed to your scholars as personal holiness in yourself. we _must_ practise what we preach, and give ourselves wholly to christ if we want to persuade others to do it. i am saying feebly what i feel very deeply and constantly. you will rejoice with me that i had the rare privilege of being with dear dr. skinner during his last hours. if you have a copy of watts and select hymns, read the th hymn of the d book, beginning at the d verse, "lord, when i quit this earthly stage," and fancy, if you can, the awe and the delight with which i heard him repeat those nine verses, as expressive of his dying love to christ. i feel that god is always too good to me, but to have him make me witness of that inspiring scene, humbles me greatly. in how many ways he seeks us, now smiling, now caressing, now reproving, now thwarting, and _always_ doing the very best thing for us that infinite love and goodness can! let us love him better and better every day, and count no work for him too small and unnoticed to be wrought thankfully whenever he gives the opportunity. i hope i am learning to honor the day of small things. _to mrs. humphrey, new york, march , ._ so you have at last broken the ice and made out, after almost a year, to write that promised letter! well, it was worth waiting for, and welcome when it came, and awakened in me an enthusiasm about seeing the dear creature, of which i hardly thought my old heart was capable (that statement is an affectation; my heart isn't old, and never will be). our plan now is, if all prospers, to go to philadelphia on friday afternoon, spend the night with you, saturday with mrs. kirkbride, and sunday and part of monday with you. i hope you mean to let us have a quiet little time with you, unbeknown to strangers, whom i dread and shrink from.... _march th._--what a queer way we womenkind have of confiding in each other with perfectly reckless disregard of consequences! it is a mercy that men are, for the most part, more prudent, though not half so delightful!... well, i'm ever so glad i've seen you in your home, only i found you more frail (in the way of health) than i found you fair. we hear that your husband preached "splendidly," as of course we knew he would, and the next exchange i shall be there to hear as well as to see. coming out of the cars yesterday, i picked up a "daily food," dropped, i suppose, by its owner, "sarah ----," of philadelphia, given her by "miss h. in ." it has travelled all over europe, and is therefore no doubt precious to her who thus made it her friend. now how shall i get it to her? can you learn her address, or shall i write to her at a venture, without one? i know how i felt--when i once lost mine; it was given me in , and has gone with me ever since whenever i have journeyed (as i was so happy as to find it again). [ ] i think if i have the pleasure of restoring it to its owner, she will feel glad that it did not fall into profane hands. i thought it right to look through it, in order to get some clue, if possible, to its destination; i fancy it was the silent comforter of a wife who went abroad with her husband for his health, and came home a widow; god bless her, whoever she is, for she evidently believes in and loves him. what sort of a world can it be to those who don't? [ ] remember me affectionately to yourself and your dear ones, and now we've got a-going, let's go ahead. _april st._--what a pity it is that one can't have a separate language with which to address each beloved one! it seems so mean to use the same words to two or three or four people one loves so differently! now about my visit to you. one reason why i did not stay longer was your looking worn out. when i am feeling so dragged, visitors are a great wear and tear to me. but i am afraid my selfishness would have got the upperhand of me if that were the whole story. i can't put into words the perfect horror i have of being made into a somebody; it fairly hurts me, and if i had stayed a week with you and the host of people you had about you, i should have shriveled up into the size of a pea. i can't deny having streaks of conceit, but i _know_ enough about myself to make my rational moments bid me keep in the background, and it excruciates me to be set up on a pinnacle. so don't blame me if i fled in terror, and that i am looking forward to your visit, when i hope to have delightful pow-wows with you all by ourselves. i am glad that little book can be returned, and i will mail it to you. i _couldn't_ send it without a loving word; it seemed to fall so providentially into my hands and knock so at the door of my heart. in what strange ways people get introduced to each other, and how subtle are the influences that excite a bond of sympathy!... what do you do with girls who fall madly and desperately in love with you? do you laugh at them, or scold them, or love them, or what? i used to do just such crazy things, and am not sure i never do them now. did you ever live in a queerer world than this is? _to miss e.s. gilman, new york, april , ._ the subject of your letter is one that greatly interests me, and i should be glad to get more light upon it myself. as far as i know, those who live apart from the world, communing with god and working for him chiefly in prayer, have least temptation to wandering and distracted thoughts, and are more devout and spiritual than those of us who live more in the world. but it stands to reason that we _can't_ all live so. the outside work must go on, and somebody must do it. but of course we have the hardest time, since while _in_ the world we must not be of it. i have come, of late, to think that both classes are needed, the contemplative and the active, and god does certainly take the latter aside now and then as you suggest, by sickness and in other ways, to set them thinking. holiness is not a mere abstraction; it is praying and loving and being consecrate, but it is also the doing kind deeds, speaking friendly words, being in a crowd when we thirst to be alone, and so on and so on. the study of christ's life on earth reveals him to us as incessantly busy, yet taking _special_ seasons for prayer. it seems to me that we should imitate him in this respect, and when we find ourselves particularly pressed by outward cares and duties, break short off and withdraw from them till a spiritual tone returns. for we can do nothing well unless we do it consciously for christ, and this consciousness sometimes gets jostled out of us when we undertake to do too much. the more perfectly he is formed in us the more light we shall get on every path of duty, the less likely to go astray from the happy medium of not all contemplation, not all activity. and to have him thus to dwell in us we are led to pray by his own last prayer for us on earth, when he asked for the "_i in them_." let us pray for each other that this may be our blessed lot. nothing will fit us for life but this. in ourselves we do nothing but err and sin. in him we are complete. * * * * * ii. her husband called to chicago. lines on going to dorset. letters to young friends, on the christian life. narrow escape from death. feeling on returning to town. her "praying circle." the chicago fire. the true art of living. god our only safe teacher. an easily-besetting sin. counsels to young friends. letters. mrs. prentiss' letters relating to her husband's call to chicago require perhaps an explanatory word. she had some very pleasant associations with chicago. it was the home of a brother and sister-in-law, to whom she was deeply attached, and of other dear relatives. there stepping heavenward had first appeared, and many unknown friends--grateful for the good it had done them--were eager to form her acquaintance and bid her welcome to the great city of the interior. and yet the thought of removing there filled her with the utmost distress. had her husband's call been to some distant post in the field of foreign missions, her language on the subject could hardly have been stronger. but this language in reality expresses simply the depth of her devotion to her church and her friends in new york, her morbid shyness and shrinking from the presence of strangers, and, especially, her vivid sense of physical inability to make the change without risking the loss of what health and power of sleep still remained to her. misgiving on this last point caused her husband to hesitate long before accepting the call, and to feel in after years that his decision to accept it, although conscientiously made, had been a grave mistake. _to mrs. condict, new york, june , ._ i knew that you would rather hear from me than through the papers, the fact that mr. prentiss has been once more unanimously elected by the general assembly to the chicago professorship. he has come home greatly perplexed as to his duty, and prepared to do it, at any reasonable cost, if he can only find out what it is. we built our dorset house not as a mere luxury, but with the hope that the easy summer there would so build up our health as to increase and prolong our usefulness; but going to chicago would deprive us of that, besides cutting us off from all our friends. but we want to know no will but god's in this question, and i am sure you and miss k. will join us in the prayer that we may not so much as _suggest_ to him what path he will lead us into. the experience of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that _place and position_ have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon. mr. p. said yesterday that it broke his heart to hear me talk of giving up dorset; but perhaps this heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us of what for many years we never had a chance to forget, that we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. two lines of my own keep running in my head: oh foolish heart, oh faithless heart, oh heart on ruin bent, build not with too much care thy nest, thou art in banishment. i have seen the time when the sense of being a pilgrim and a stranger was very sweet; and god can sweeten whatever he does to us. so though perplexed we are not in despair, and if we feel that we are this summer living in a tent that may soon blow down, it is just what you are doing, and in this point we shall have fellowship. i am sure it is good for us to have god take up the rod, even if he lays it down again without inflicting a blow. i know we are going to pray till light comes. i feel very differently about it from what i did last summer. the mental conflicts of the past winter have created a good deal of indifference to everything. without conscious union and nearness to my saviour i can't be happy anywhere; for years he has been the meaning of everything, and when he only _seems_ gone (i know it is only seeming) i don't much care where i am. i am just trying to be patient till he makes satan let go of me. excuse this selfish letter, and write me one just as bad! on the th of june she went to dorset with her husband and the younger children. the following lines, found among her papers, will show in what temper of mind she went. it is worth noting that they were written on monday, and express a week-day, not merely a passing sabbath feeling: once more at home, once more at home-- for what, dear lord, i pray? to seek enjoyment, please myself, make life a summer's day? i shrink, i shudder at the thought; for what is home to me, when sin and self enchain my heart, and keep it far from thee? there is but one abiding joy, nor place that joy can give; it is thy presence that makes home, that makes it "life to live." that presence i invoke; naught else i venture to entreat; i long to see thee, hear thy voice, to sit at thy dear feet. _to a young friend, dorset, june , ._ i trust it is an omen of good that the first letters i have received since coming here this summer, have been full of the themes i love best. i was much struck with the sentence you quote, "they can not go back," etc., [ ] and believe it is true of you. being absorbed in divine things will not make you selfish; you will be astonished to find how loving you will gradually grow toward everybody, how interested in their interests, how happy in their happiness. and if you want work for christ (and the more you love him the more you will _long_ for it), that work will come to you in all sorts of ways. i do not believe much in duty-work; i think that work that tells is the spontaneous expression of the love within. perhaps you have not been sick enough yourself to be skilful in a sick-room; perhaps your time for that sort of work hasn't come. i meant to get you a little book called "the life of faith"; in fact, i went down town on purpose to get it, and passed the episcopal sunday-school union inadvertently. i think that little book teaches how _every_thing we do may be done for christ, and i know by what little experience i have had of it, that it is a blessed, thrice blessed way to live. a great deal is meant by the "cup of cold water," and few of us women have great deeds to perform, and we must unite ourselves to him by little ones. the life of constant self-discipline god requires is a happy one; you and i, and others like us, find a wild, absorbing joy in loving and being loved; but sweet, abiding peace is the fruit of steady check on affections that _must_ be tamed and kept under. is this consistent with what i have just said about growing more loving as we grow more christlike? yes, it is; for _that_ love is absolutely unselfish, it gives much and asks nothing, and there is nothing restless about it.... i have been very hard at work ever since i came here, with my darling m. as my constant, joyous comrade. we have been busy with our flower-beds, sowing and transplanting, and half the china closet has tumbled out of doors to serve as protection from the sun. mr. prentiss says we do the work of three days in one, which is true, for we certainly have performed great feats. the night we got here we found the house lighted up, and the dining-table covered with good things. people seem glad to see us back. i don't know which of my dorset titles would strike you as most appropriate; one man calls me a "branch," another "a child of nature," and another "mr. prentiss' woman," with the consoling reflection that i sha'n't rust out. _to mrs. smith, dorset, august , ._ i don't know when i have written so few letters as i have this summer. my right hand has forgot its cunning under the paralysis, under which my heart has suffered, and which is now beginning to affect my health quite unfavorably. it seems as if body and soul, joints and marrow, were rudely separating. poor george is half-distracted with the weight of the questions concerning chicago, and i think almost anything would be better than this crucifying suspense. but i try not to make a fuss. mrs. d---- can tell you that i have said to her many times, during the last few years, that, according to the ordinary run of life, things would not long remain with us as they were; they were too good to last. i have read and re-read "spiritual dislodgments," and remember it well. i certainly wish for such dislodgments in me and mine, if we need them. george has got hold of a book of a.'s, which delights him, letters of william von humboldt. [ ] i suppose you recommended it to her. you _must_ make your plans to come here this summer; i don't seem fully to have a thing till you've seen it. _to mrs. humphrey, dorset, aug. , ._ it took you a good while to answer my last letter, and i have been equally lazy about writing since yours strayed this way. letter-writing has always been a resource and a pastime to me; a refuge in head-achy and rainy days, and a tiny way to give pleasure or do good, when other paths were hedged up. but this summer i have left almost everybody in the lurch, partly from being more or less unwell and out of spirits, partly because the chicago question, remaining unsettled, has been such a damper that i hadn't much heart to speak either of it or of anything else. we are perplexed beyond measure what to do; the thought of losing _my minister_ and having him turn into a professor, agonizes me; on the other hand, who knows but he needs the rest that change of labor and the five months' vacation would give him? _his_ chief worry is the effect the attending funerals all the time has already had on my health. one day i part with and bury (in imagination!) now this friend, now that, and this mournful work does not sharpen one's appetite or invigorate one's frame. i don't know how we've stood the conflict; and it seems rather selfish to allude to my part of it; but women live more in their friendships than men do, and the thought of tearing up all our roots is more painful to me than to my husband, and he will not lose what i must lose in addition, and as i have said before, my minister, which is the hardest part of it. i want you to know what straits we are in, in the hope that you and yours will be stirred up to pray that we may make no mistake, but go or stay as the lord would have us. we have found our little home a nice refuge for us in the storm; mr. p. says he should have gone distracted in a boarding-house. i do not envy you the conway crowd. but i fancy it is a good region for collecting mosses and like treasures. i think the prettiest thing in our house is a flattish bracket, fastened to the wall and filled with flowers; it looks like a graceful, meandering letter s and is one of the idols i bow down to.... i have "holiness through faith"; the first time i read it at mr. r----'s request, i said i believed every word of it, but this summer, reading it in a different mood, it puzzles me. the idea is plausible; if god tells us to be holy, as he certainly does, is it not for him to provide the way for our being so, and is it likely he needs our whole lives before he can accomplish his own design? i talked with mr. prentiss about it, and at first he rejected the thought of holiness through faith, but last night we got upon the subject again and he was interested in some sentences i read to him and said he must examine the book. when are you coming to spend that week in dorset? love to each and all. _to a young friend, kauinfels, sept. , ._ i have had many letters to write to-day, for to-day our fate is sealed, and we are to go. but i must say a few words to you before going to bed, for i want to tell you how very glad i am that you have been enabled to take a step [ ] which will, i am sure, lead the way to other steps, increase your holiness, your usefulness, and your happiness. may god bless you in this attempt to honor him, and open out before you new fields wherein to glorify and please him. this has not been a sorrowful day to me. i hope i am offering to a "patient god a patient heart." i do not want to make the worst of the sacrifice he requires, or to fancy i am only to be happy on my own conditions. he has been most of the time for years "the spring of all my joys, the life of my delights." where he is, i want to be; where he bids me go, i want to go, and to go in courage and faith. anything is better than too strong cleaving to this world. as i was situated in new york, i lacked not a single earthly blessing. i had a delightful home, freedom from care, and a circle of friends whom i loved with all my heart, and who loved me in a way to satisfy even my rapacity. only one thing was wanting to my perfect felicity--a heart absolutely holy; and was i likely to get that when my earthly cup was so full? at any rate i am content. now and then, as the reality of this coming separation overwhelms me, i feel a spasm of pain at my heart (i don't suppose we are expected to cease to be human beings or to lose our sensibilities), but if my lord and master will go with me, and keeps on making me more and more like himself, i can be happy anywhere and under any conditions, or be made content not to be happy. all this is of little consequence in itself, but perhaps it may make me more of a blessing to others, which, next to personal holiness, is the only thing to be sought very earnestly. as to my relation to you, he who brought you under my wing for a season has something better for you in store. _that's his way._ and wherever i am, if it is his will and his spirit dictates the prayer, i shall pray for you, and that is the best service one soul can render another. about this time she and her husband had an almost miraculous escape from instant death. they had been calling upon friends in east dorset and were returning home. not far from that village is a very dangerous railroad crossing; and, as the sight or sound of cars so affrighted coco as to render him uncontrollable, special pains had been taken not to arrive at the spot while a train was due. but just as they reached it, an "irregular" train, whose approach was masked behind high bushes, came rushing along unannounced, and had they been only a few seconds later, would have crushed them to atoms. so severe was the shock and so vivid the sense of a providential escape, that scarcely a word was spoken during the drive home. the next morning she gave her husband a very interesting account of the thoughts that, like lightning, flashed upon her mind while feeling herself in the jaws of death. they related exclusively to her children--how they would receive the news, and what would become of them. [ ] late in september she returned to town, still oppressed by the thought of going to chicago. in a letter to mrs. condict, dated october d, she writes: we got home on friday night, and very early on saturday were settled down into the old routine. but how different everything is! at church tearful, clouded faces; at home, warmhearted friends looking upon us as for the last time. it is all right. i would not venture to change it if i could; but it is hard. at times it seems as if my heart would literally break to pieces, but we are mercifully kept from realising our sorrows all the time. the waves dash in and almost overwhelm, but then they sweep back and are stayed by an almighty, kind hand.... it is like tearing off a limb to leave our dear prayer-meeting. next to my closet, it has been to me the sweetest spot on earth. i never expect to find such another. to another friend she writes a day or two later: my heart fairly _collapses_ at times, at the thought of tearing myself away from those whom christian ties have made dearer to me than my kindred after the flesh. and then comes the precious privilege and relief of telling my yet dearer and better friend all about it, and the sweet peace begotten of yielding my will to his. i want to be of all the use and comfort to you and to the other dear ones he will let me be during these few months. do pray for me that i may so live christ as to bear others along with me on a resistless tide. those lines you copied for me are a great comfort: "rather walking with him by faith, than walking alone in the light." of the little praying circle, alluded to in her letter to mrs. c., one of its members writes: it was unique even among meetings of its own class. held in an upper chamber, never largely attended and sometimes only by the "two or three," it was almost unknown except to the few, who regarded it as among their chiefest religious privileges. all the other members would gladly have had mrs. prentiss assume its entire leadership; but she assumed nothing and was no doubt quite unconscious as to how large an extent she was the life and soul of the meeting. in the familiar conversation of the hour nothing fell from her lips but such simple words as, coming from a glowing heart, strengthened and deepened the spiritual life of all who heard them. she had, in a degree i never knew equalled, the gift of leading the devotions of others. but there was not the slightest approach to performance in her prayers; she abhorred the very thought of it. those who knelt with her can never forget the pure devotion which breathed itself forth in simple exquisite language; but it was something beyond the power of description. another member of the circle writes: her prayers were so simple, so earnest, so childlike. we all felt we were in the very presence of our loving father. one thing especially always impressed me during that sacred hour--it was her _quietness of manner_. she was very cordial and affectionate in her greetings with each one, as we assembled, and then a holy awe, a solemn hush, came over her spirit and she seemed like one who saw the lord! o how we all miss her! there is never a meeting but we keep her in remembrance and talk together lovingly about her. _to a friend, oct. , ._ mr. prentiss sent in his resignation last evening, and the church refused unanimously to let him go. "praise god from whom all blessings flow" penetrated the walls of the parsonage, as they sang it when the decision was made, and so we knew our fate before a whole parlorful rushed in to shake hands, kiss, and congratulate. you would have been delighted had you been here. prof. smith, who took strong ground in favor of his going, takes just as strong ground in favor of his staying. i feel that all this is the result of prayer. i never got any light on the chicago question when i prayed about it; never could _see_ that it was our duty to go; but i yielded my judgment and my will, because my husband thought that he must go. i think our very reluctance to it made us shrink from evading it; we were so afraid of opposing god's will. now the matter is taken out of our hands and we have only to resume our work here. god grant that this baptism of fire may purge and purify us and prepare us to be a great blessing to the church. it is a most awe-inspiring providence, god's burning us out of chicago, and we feel like putting our shoes from off our feet and adoring him in silence.... pray that the lessons we have been learning through so many trying months may help us to be helping hands to those who may pass through similar straits. one of my brothers was burnt out, and his own and his wife's letters drew tears even down to the kitchen. for two days and a night they lost their baby, five months old, in addition to all the other horrors. but they found refuge with a dear cousin, who has filled his house to overflowing. i may have spoken of this cousin to you: he has a foundling home on müller's trust system. before taking leave of the call to chicago a word should be added to what she says concerning it in her letters. the prospect of her husband's accepting the call rendered the summer a very trying one; but it was far from being all gloom. she had a marvellous power of extracting amusement out of the most untoward situation. in she wrote from richmond, referring to mr. persico's troubles: "i never spent such melancholy weeks in my life; in the midst of it, however, i made fun for the rest, as i believe i should do in a dungeon." it was so in the present case. she relieved the weariness of many an anxious hour by "making fun for the rest." as an illustration, one evening at dorset, while sitting at the parlor-table with her children and a young friend who was visiting her, she seized a pencil and wrote for their entertainment a ludicrous version of the chicago affair in two parts. the paper which was preserved by her young friend, illustrates also another trait which she thus describes at the close of a frolicsome letter to miss e. a. warner: "it is one of the peculiar peculiarities of this woman that she usually carries on, when she wants to hide her feelins." part i. begins thus: where are the prentisses? gone to chicago, gone bag and baggage, the whole crew and cargo. well, they _would_ go, now let's talk 'em over, and see what compensation we can discover. they are all "talked over" and then in part ii. the scene changes to chicago itself: sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, here's the tribe of prentisses just agoing by; dr. prentiss he, mrs. prentiss she, and a lot of young ones that all begin with p. well, let us view them with our eyes, and then begin to criticise. and first the doctor, what of him? the doctor having been fully discussed, the criticism proceeds: now for his wife; well, who would guess she had set up as authoress! why, she looks just like all of us, instead of being in a muss like other literary folks. they say she likes her little jokes, as well as those who've less to say of stepping on the heavenward way. mrs. p. having been disposed of: next comes miss p.; how she will make the hearts of all the students quake! she'll wind them round her fingers' ends, and find in them one hundred friends. they'll sit on benches in a row and watch her come, and watch her go; but they'll be safe, the precious rogues, since she don't care for theologues. the other children next pass in review and the whole closes with the remark: time, and time only, will make clear why the poor geese came cackling here. _to a young friend, new york, nov., ._ my heart is as young and fresh as any girl's, and i am _almost_ as prone to make idols out of those i love, as i ever was; and this is inconsistent with the devotion owed to god. i do not mean that i really love anybody better than i do him, but that human friendships tempt me. this easily-besetting sin of mine has cost me more anguish than tongue can tell, and i deeply feel the need of more love to christ because of my earthly tendencies. i know i would sacrifice every friend to christ, but i am not always disentangled. how strange this is, how passing strange!... in a religious way i find myself much better off here than at dorset. but there is yet something apparently "far off, unattained and dim" that i once thought i had caught by the wing, and enjoyed for a season, but which has flown away. i am afraid i am one who has got to be a religious enthusiast, or else dissatisfied and restless. when i give way to an impulse to the first, i care for nothing worldly, and am at peace. but i am unfitted for daily life, for secular talk and reading. is it so with you? does it run in our blood? i do long and pray for more light; and i _will_ pray for more love, cost what it may. sometimes i long to get to heaven, where i shall not have to be curbing my heart with bit and bridle, and can be as loving as i want to be--as i _am_. _to a young friend abroad--new york, dec. , ._ there never will come a time in my life when i shall not need all my christian friends can do for me in the way of prayer. i am glad you are making such special effort to oppose the icebergs of foreign life; god will meet and bless you in it. let us, if need be, forsake all others to cleave only unto him. i don't know of any real misery except coldness between myself and him. i feel warm and tender sympathy with you in all your struggles, temptations, joys, hopes and fears. as you grow older you will _settle_ more; your troubles, your ups and downs, belong chiefly to your youth. yes, you are right in saying that mr. p---- could go through mental conflicts in silence; he does not pine for sympathy as you and i do. you and i are like david, though i forget, at the moment, what he said happened to him when he "kept silence." (on the whole, i don't think he said anything!) i think the proper attitude to take when restless and lonesome and homesick for want of god's sensible presence, is just what we take when we are missing earthly friends for whom we yearn, and whose letters, though better than nothing, do not half feed our hungry hearts, or fill our longing arms. and that attitude is patient waiting. we are such many-sided creatures that i do not doubt you are getting pleasure and profit out of this european trip, although it is alloyed by so much mental suffering. but such is life. it has in it nothing perfect, nothing ideal. and this conviction, deepened every now and then by some new experience, tosses me anew, again and again, back on to that rock of ages that ever stands sure and steadfast, and on whom our feet may rest. it is well to have the waves and billows of temptation beat upon us; if only to magnify this rock and teach us what a refuge he is. i went, last night, with mr. prentiss and most of the children, to hear the freedmen and women in a concert at steinway hall. it was _packed_ with a brilliant, delighted audience, and it was most interesting to see these young people, simple, dignified, earnest, full of love to christ, and preparing, by education, to work for him. they sang "keep me from sinking down" most sweetly and touchingly. i see you have the blues as i used to do, at your age, and hope you will outgrow them as i have done. i _suffer_ without being _depressed_ in the sense in which i used to be; it is hard to make the distinction, but i am sure there is one. i do not know how far this change has come to me as a happy wife and mother, or how far it is religious. _aunt jane's hero_ was published in . it is hardly inferior to stepping heavenward in its pictures of life and character, or in the wisdom of its teaching. the object of the book is to depict a home whose happiness flows from the living rock, christ jesus. it protests also against the extravagance and other evils of the times, which tend to check the growth of such homes, and aims to show that there are still treasures of love and peace on earth, that may be bought without money and without price. * * * * * iii. "holiness and usefulness go hand-in-hand." no two souls dealt with exactly alike. visits to a stricken home. another side of her life. visit to a hospital. christian friendship. letters to a bereaved mother. submission not inconsistent with suffering. thoughts at the funeral of a little "wee davie." assurance of faith. funeral of prof. hopkins. his character. she entered the new year with weary steps, but with a heart full of tenderness and sympathy. a circle of young friends, living in different parts of the country, looked eagerly to her at this time for counsel, and she was deeply interested in their spiritual progress. she wrote to one of them, january , : your letter has filled my heart with joy. what a friend and saviour we have, and how he comes to meet us on the sea, if we attempt to walk there in faith! i trust your path now will be the ever brightening one that shall shine more and more unto the perfect day. holiness and usefulness go hand in hand, and you will have new work to do for the lord; praying work especially. _pray for me_, for one thing; i need a great deal of grace and strength just now. and pray for all the souls that are struggling toward the light. o that everybody lived only for christ! a few weeks later, writing to the same friend, she thus refers to the "fiery trials" through which she was passing: this season of temptation came right on the heels, if i may use such an expression, of great spiritual illumination. of all the years of my life, - was the brightest, and it seems as if satan could not endure the sight of so much love and joy, and so took me in hand. i have not liked to say much about this to young people, lest it should discourage them; but i hope you will not allow it to affect you in that way, for you must remember that no two souls are dealt with exactly alike, and that the fact that many are looking up to me may have made it necessary for our dear lord to let satan harass and trouble me as he has done. no, let us not be discouraged, either you or i, but rejoice that we are called of our god and saviour to give him all we have and all we are.... if we spent more time in thanking god for what he _has_ done for us, he would do more. malignant scarlet fever and other diseases, had invaded and isolated the household mentioned in the following letter. their gratitude to mrs. prentiss was most touching; it was as if she had been to them an angel from heaven. the story of her visits and loving sympathy became a part of their family history. _to mrs. humphrey, new york, jan. , ._ i came home half frozen from my early walk this morning, to get warm not only at the fire, but at your letter, which i found awaiting me. i am glad if you got anything out of your visit here. i rather think you and i shall "rattle on" together after we get to heaven.... you say, "how skilfully god does fashion our crosses for us!" yes, he does. and for my part, i don't want to rest and be happy without crosses--for i can't _do_ without them. people who set themselves up to be pastors and teachers must "learn in suffering" what they teach in sermon and book. i felt a good deal reproved for making so much of mine, however, by my further visits to the house of mourning of which we spoke to you. the little boy died early on the next day, and before his funeral his poor mother, neglected by everybody else, found it some comfort to get into my arms and cry there. it made no difference that twenty years had passed since i had had a sorrow akin to hers; we mothers may cease to grieve, outwardly, but we never forget what has gone out of our sight, or ever grow unsympathetic because time has soothed and quieted us. but i need not say this to _you_. this was on saturday; all day monday i was there watching a most lovely little girl, about six years old, writhing in agony; she died early next morning. the next eldest has been in a critical state, but will probably recover a certain degree of health, but as a helpless cripple. well, i felt that death alone was _inexorable_--other enemies we may hope and pray and fight against--and that while my children lived, i need not despair. the tax on my sympathies in the case of those half-distracted parents has been terrible, and yet i wouldn't accept a cold heart if i had the offer of it. to give you another side of my life, let me tell you of a pleasant dinner party one night last week, when we met gov. and mrs. c----, of massachusetts, and i fell in love with her then and there.... well, this is a queer world, full of queer things and queer people. will the next one be more commonplace? i know not. good-bye. word has come from that afflicted household that the grandfather has died suddenly of heart disease. his wife died a few weeks ago. mr. prentiss saw him on saturday in vigorous health. _to miss rebecca f. morse, new york, march , ._ can you tell me where the blotting-pads can be obtained? i have got into a hospital of _spines_; in other words, of people who can only write lying on their backs, one of them an authoress, and i think it would be a mercy to them if i could furnish them with the means of writing with more ease than they do now. i was sorry you could not come last friday, and hope you will be able to join us saturday, when the club meets here.... how you would have enjoyed yesterday afternoon with me! i went to call on a lady from vermont, who is here for spinal treatment, and found in her room another of the patients. two such bright creatures i never met at once, and we got a-going at such a rate that though i had never seen either of them before, i stayed nearly three hours! i mean to have another dose of them before long, and give them another dose of e. p. i have been reading a book called "the presence of christ" [ ]--which i liked so well that i got a copy to lend. it is not a great book, but i think it will be a useful one. it says we are all idolaters, and reminds me of my besetting sins in that direction. i feel overwhelmed when i think how many young people are looking to me for light and help, knowing how much i need both myself.... every now and then some providential event occurs that wakes us up, and we find that we have been asleep and dreaming, and that what we have been doing that made us fancy ourselves awake, was mechanical. i must be off now to my sewing society, which is a great farce, since i can earn thirty or forty times as much with my pen as i can with my needle, and if they would let me stay at home and write, i would give them the results of my morning's work. but the minute i stop going everybody else stops. _to mrs. condict, april , ._ how i should love to spend this evening with you! this has been our communion sunday, and i am sure the service would have been very soothing to your poor, sore heart. and yet why do i say _poor_ when i know it is _rich_? oh, you might have the same sorrow without faith and patience with which to bear it, and think how dreadful that would be! your little lamb has been spending his first sunday with the good shepherd and other lambs of the flock, and has been as happy as the day is long. perhaps your two children and mine are claiming kinship together. if they met in a foreign land they would surely claim it for our sakes; why not in the land that is not foreign, and not far off? but still these are not the thoughts to bring you special comfort. "thy will be done!" does the whole. and yet my heart aches for you. some one, who had never had a real sorrow, told mrs. n. that if she submitted to god's will as she ought, she would cease to suffer. what a fallacy this is! mrs. n. was comforted by hearing that your little one was taken away by the consequences of the fever, as her nettie was, for she had reproached herself with having neglected her to see to johnny, who died first, and thought this neglect had allowed her to take cold. i feel very sorry when mothers torture themselves in this needless way, as if god could not avert ill consequences, if he chose. i have shed more than one tear to-day. i heard last night that my dearly-loved brother, prof. hopkins, is on his dying-bed. i never thought of his dying, he comes of such a long-lived race. i expect to go to see him, and if i find i can be of any use or comfort, stay a week or two. his death will come very near to me, but he is a saintly man, and i am glad for him that he can go. how thankful we shall be when our turn comes! the ladies at our little meeting were deeply interested in what i had to tell them about your dear boy, and prayed for you with much feeling. may our dear lord bless you abundantly with his sweet presence! i know he will. and yet he has willed it that you should suffer. "himself hath done it!" oh how glad he will be when the dispensation of suffering is over, and he can gather his beloved round him, tearless, free from sorrow and care, and all forever at rest. _may th._--yesterday, the friend at east dorset whose three children died within a few weeks of each other, sent me some verses, of which i copy one for you: "the eye of faith beholds a golden stair, like that of old, whereon fair spirits go and come; god's angels coming down on errands sweet, our angels going home." i hope this golden stair, up which your dear boy climbed "with shout and song," is covered with god's angels coming down to bless and comfort you. one of the most touching passages in the bible, to my mind, is that which describes angels as coming to minister to jesus after his temptations in the wilderness. it gives one such an idea of his helplessness! just as i was going out to church this morning, mr. prentiss told me of the death of a charming "baby-boy," one of our lambs, and i could scarcely help bursting into tears, though i had only seen him once. you can hardly understand how i feel, as a pastor's wife, toward our people. their sorrows come right home. i have a friend also hanging in agonizing suspense over a little one who has been injured by a fall; she is sweetly submissive, but you know what a mother's heart is. i have yet another friend, who has had to give up her baby. she is a young mother, and far from her family, but says she has "perfect peace." so from all sides i hear sorrowful sounds, but so much faith and obedience mingled with the sighs, that i can only wonder at what god can do. _to miss morse, may , ._ how true and how strange it is that our deepest sorrows, spring from our sweetest affections; that as we love much, we suffer much. what instruments of torture our hearts are! the passage you quote is all true but people are apt to be impatient in affliction, eager to drink the bitter cup at a draught rather than drop by drop, and fain to dig up the seed as soon as it is planted, to see if it has germinated. i am fond of quoting that passage about "the peaceable fruit of righteousness" coming "afterward." i have just come from the funeral of a little "wee davie"; all the crosses around his coffin were tiny ones, and he had a small floral harp in his hand. i thought as i looked upon his face, still beautiful, though worn, that even babies have to be introduced to the cross, for he had a week of fearful struggle before he was released.... i enclose an extract i made for you from a work on the baptism of the holy spirit. this was all the paper i had at hand at the moment. the recipe for "curry" i have copied into my recipe-book, and the two lines at the top of the page i addressed to m. a queer mixture of the spiritual and the practical, but no stranger than life's mixtures always are. _to a young friend, new york, may th, ._ as to assurance of faith, i think we may all have that, and in my own darkest hours this faith has not been disturbed. i have just come home from a brief visit to miss ----, with whom i had some interesting discussions. i use the word _discussions_ advisedly, for we love each other in constant disagreement. she believes in holiness by faith, while denying that she has herself attained it. i think her life, as far as i can see it, very true and beautiful. we spent a whole evening talking about temptation. not long ago i met with a passage, in french, to this effect--i quote from memory only: "god has some souls whom he can not afflict in any ordinary way, for they love him so that they are ready for any outward sorrow or bereavement. he therefore scourges them with inward trials, vastly more painful than any outward tribulation could be; thus crucifying them to self." i can not but think that this explains mrs. ----'s experience, and perhaps my own; at any rate i feel that we are all in the hands of an unerring physician, who will bring us, through varying paths, home to himself. i had a call the other day from an intelligent christian woman, whom i had not seen for eighteen years. she said that some time ago her attention was called to the subject of personal holiness, and as she is a great reader, she devoured everything she could get hold of, and finally became a dogmatic perfectionist. but experience modified these views, and she fell back on the bible doctrine of an indwelling christ, with the conviction that just in proportion to this indwelling will be the holiness of the soul. this is precisely my own belief. this is the doctrine i preached in stepping heavenward and i have so far seen nothing to change these views, while i desire and pray to be taught any other truth if i am wrong. i believe god does reveal himself and his truth to those who are willing to know it. _to miss morse, new york, may , ._ i got home yesterday from williamstown, where i went, with my husband, to attend the funeral of my dearly beloved brother, professor hopkins. he literally starved to death. he died as he had lived, beautifully, thinking of and sending messages to all his friends, and on his last day repeating passages of scripture and even, weak as he was, joining in hymns sung at his bedside. the day of the funeral was a pretty trying one for me, as there was not only his loss to mourn, but there were traces of my darling mother and sister, who both died in that house, all over it; some of my mother's silver, a white quilt she made when a girl, my sister's library, her collection of shells and minerals, her paintings, her little conservatory, the portrait of her only child, dressed in his uniform (he was killed in one of the battles of the wilderness). then, owing to the rain, none of us ladies were allowed to go into the cemetery, and i had thought much of visiting my sister's grave and seeing her boy lying on one side and her husband on the other. but our disappointments are as carefully planned for us as our sorrows, so i have not a word to say. after services at the house, we walked to the church, which we entered through a double file of uncovered students. one of the most touching things about the service was the sight of four students standing in charge of the remains, two at the head and two at the foot of the coffin. his poor folks came in crowds, with their hands full of flowers to be cast into his grave. my brother said he never saw so many men shed tears at a funeral, and i am sure i never did; some sobbing as convulsively as women. i could not help asking myself when my heart was swelling so with pain, whether love _paid_. love is sweet when all goes well, but oh how fearfully exacting it is when separation comes! how many tithes it takes of all we have and are! a worthy young woman in our church has been driven into hysterics by reading "holiness through faith." i went to see her as soon as i got home from w. yesterday, but she was asleep under the influence of an opiate. there is no doubt that too much self-scrutiny is pernicious, especially to weak-minded, ignorant young people. it was said of prof. hopkins that he would have been a mystic but for his love to souls, and i am afraid these new doctrines tend too much to the seeking for peace and joy, too little to seeking the salvation of the careless and worldly. but i hesitate to criticise any class of good people, feeling that those who live in most habitual communion with god receive light directly and constantly from on high; and of that communion we can not seek too much. [ ] * * * * * iv. christian parents to expect piety in their children. perfection. "people make too much parade of their troubles." "higher life" doctrines. letter to mrs. washburn. last visit to williamstown. early in june she went to dorset. the summer, like that of , was shadowed by anxiety and inward conflict; but her care-worn thoughts were greatly soothed by her rural occupations, by visits from young friends, and by the ever-fresh charms of nature around her. _to a christian friend, dorset, june , ._ i was obliged to give up my much-desired visit to you. we went on to the funeral of prof. hopkins, and that took three days out of the busy time just before coming here. i particularly wanted you to know _at the time_ that my three younger children united with the church on sunday last, but had not a moment in which to write you. it was a touching sight to our people. mr. p. looked down on his children so lovingly, and kissed them when the covenant had been read. he said ---'s face was so full of soul that he could not help it, and his heart yearned over them all. someone said there was not a dry eye in the house. i felt not elated, not cast down, but at peace. i think it plain that christian parents are to _expect_ piety in their children, and expect it early. in mine it is indeed "first the blade," and they will, no doubt, have their trials and temptations. but it seems to me i must leave them in god's hands and let him lead them as he will. it was very sweet to have the elements passed to me by their young hands. offer one earnest prayer for them at least, that they may prove true soldiers and servants of jesus christ. no doubt your two little sainted ones looked on and loved the children of their mother's friend. the following testimony of one of president garfield's classmates and intimate friends may fitly be added here: "for him there was but one mark hopkins in all the world; but for professor albert hopkins also, or 'prof. al.,' as he was called in those days, the general--not only while at college, but all through life-- entertained the highest regard, both as a man and a scholar. his intellectual attainments were thought by gen. g. to be of an unusually fine order, rivalling those of his brother, and often eliciting the admiration not only of himself, but of all the other students. in speaking of his williamstown life, gen. garfield always referred to prof. hopkins in the most affectionate manner; and, both from his own statements and my personal observation, i know that their mutual college relations were of the pleasantest nature possible." on the subject of perfection, you say i am looking for angelic perfection. i see no difference in kind. perfection is perfection to my mind, and i have always thought it a dangerous thing for a soul to fancy it had attained it. yet, in her last letters to me, miss ---- virtually professes to have become free from sin. she says self and sin are the same thing, and that she is entirely dead to self. what is this but complete sanctification? what can an angel say more? i feel painfully bewildered amid conflicting testimonies, and sometimes long to flee away from everybody. miss ----'s last letter saddened me, i will own. you say, "i am in danger of becoming morbid, or stupid, or wild, or something i ought not." why in danger? according to your own doctrine you are safe; being "entirely sanctified from moment to moment." at any rate i can say nothing "to quicken" you, for i _am_ morbid and stupid, though just now not wild. those sharp temptations have ceased, though perhaps only for a season; but i have been physically weakened by them, and have got to take care of myself, go to bed early, and vegetate all i can--and this when i ought to be hard at work ministering to other souls. the fact is, i don't know anything and don't do anything, but just get through the day somehow, wondering what all this strange, unfamiliar state of things will end in. poor m---- has gone crazy on "holiness through faith," and will probably have to go to an asylum.... our little home looks and is very pleasant. i take some comfort in it, and try to realise the goodness that gives me such a luxury. but a soul that has known what it is to live to christ can be _happy_ only in him. may he be all in all to you, and consciously so to me in his own good time. _to miss woolsey, dorset, june , ._ i wish you could come and take a look at us this quiet afternoon. not a soul is to be seen or heard; the mountains are covered with the soft haze that says the day is warm but not oppressive, and here and there a brilliantly colored bird flies by, setting "tweedle dum," our taciturn canary, into tune. m. and i have driven at our out-door work like a pair of steam-engines, and you can imagine how dignified i am from the fact that an old fuddy-duddy who does occasional jobs for me, summons me to my window by a "hullo!" beneath it, while g. says to us, "where are you girls going to sit this afternoon?" your sister's allusion to watts and select hymns reminds me of ages long past, when i used to sing the whole book through as i marched night after night through my room, carrying a colicky baby up and down for fifteen months, till i became a living skeleton. we do contrive to live through queer experiences. _to a young friend, dorset, aug. , ._ the lines you kindly copied for me have the ring of the true metal and i like them exceedingly. people make too much parade of their troubles and too much fuss about them; the fact is we are all born to tribulation, as we also are to innumerable joys, and there is no sense in being too much depressed or elated by either. "the saddest birds a season find to sing." few if any lives flow in unmingled currents. as to myself, my rural tastes are so strong, and i have so much to absorb and gratify me, that i _need_ a mixture of experience. two roses that bloomed in my garden this morning, made my heart leap with delight, and when i get off in the woods with m., and we collect mosses and ferns and scarlet berries, i am conscious of great enjoyment in them. at the same time, if i thought it best to tell the other side of the story, i should want some very black ink with which to do it. we must take life as god gives it to us, without murmurings and disputings, and with the checks on our natural eagerness that keeps us mindful of him. you speak of the "higher life people." i still hold my judgment in suspense in regard to their doctrines, reading pretty much all they send me, and asking daily for light from on high. i have had some talks this summer with dr. stearns on these subjects, and he urges me to keep where i am, but i try not to be too much influenced for or against doctrines i do not, by experience, understand. let us do the will of god (and suffer it) and we shall learn of the doctrine. _to mrs. washburn, kauinfels, friday evening, (september, )._ i have done nothing but tear my hair ever since you left, to think i let you go. it would have been so easy to send you to manchester to-morrow morning, after a night here, and an evening over our little wood-fire, but we were so glad to see you both, so bewildered by your sudden appearance, that neither of us thought of it till you were gone. and now you are still within reach, and we want you to reconsider your resolution to turn your backs upon us after such a long, fatiguing journey, and eating no salt with us. i did not urge your staying because i do so hate to be urged myself. but i want you to feel what a great pleasure it would be to us if you could make up your minds to stay at least over sunday, or if to-morrow and sunday are unpleasant, just a day or two more, to take our favorite drives with us, and give us what you may never have a chance to give us again. i declare i shall think you are crazy, if you don't stay a few days, now that you are here. we have been longing to have you come, and only waiting for our place to be a little less naked in order to lay violent hands on you; but now you have seen the nakedness of the land, we don't care, but want you to see more of it. this is the time, and _exactly_ the time, when we have nothing to do but to enjoy our visitors, and next year the house may be running over. and if you don't come now, you'll have the plague of having to come some other time, and it is a long, formidable journey. why _didn't_ we just take and lock you up when we had hold of you! well, now i've torn out _all_ my hair, and people will be saying, "go up, thou bald-head." besides--you left them bunch-berries! and do you suppose you can go home without them? why, it wouldn't be safe. you would be run off the track, and scalded by steam, and broken all to pieces, and caught on the cow-catcher, and get lost, and be run away with, and even struck by lightning, i shouldn't wonder. and now if you go in to-morrow's train you'll catch the small-pox and the measles and the scarlet fever and the yellow fever, and all the colors-in-the-rainbow fever, and go into a consumption and have the pleurisy, and the jaundice and the tooth-ache and the headache, and, above all, the conscience-ache. and you never ate any of our corn or our beans! you never so much as asked the receipt for our ironclads! you haven't seen our cow. you haven't been down cellar. you haven't fished in our brook. you haven't been here at all, now i come to think of it. i dreamed you flew through, but it was nothing _but_ a dream. and the houses have a habit of burning down, and ours is going to do as the rest do, and then how'll you feel in your minds? and when folks set themselves up against us, and won't let us have our own way, why then "i tell my daughter what _makes_ folks do as they'd oughter not, and why _don't_ they do as they'd oughter?" and we all pine away and die like the babes in the woods, and nobody's left to cover us up with leaves. send all these arguments home by telegram, and your folks will shoot you if you dare to go. i could write another sheet if it would do any good. now do lay my words to heart, and come right back. _to miss morse, dorset, oct. , ._ i sent home my servants a month ago, and they have been getting the parsonage to rights, while i have in their places two dear old souls who came to live with me twenty years ago. one stayed ten years and then got married, the other i parted with when my children died because i did not need her. it has been a green spot in the summer to have these affectionate, devoted creatures in the house. we have had only one slight frost, but the woods have been gradually changing, and are in spots very beautiful. we (you know what that word means) have been off gathering bright leaves for ourselves and the servants, who care for pretty things just as we do. yet not a flower has gone; we have had a host of verbenas and gladioli, some japanese lilies, and so on, and have been able to give some pleasure to those who have not time to cultivate them for themselves. it has been a dreadful season for sickness here, and flowers have been wanted in many a sick-room, and at some funerals. since i wrote you last "we" have been to williamstown. i wanted to get possession of my sister's private papers. everything passed off nicely; i burned a large amount and brought away a trunk full, a part of which i have been reading with deep interest. her journals date back to the age of fifteen, though to read the early ones you would never dream of her being less than twenty or thirty. she was a wonderful woman, and as i found such ample material for a memorial of her life, i felt half tempted to carry out her husband's wishes and complete one. but on the whole i do not think i shall. you can imagine how my soul has been stirred by the whole thing; the farewell to the familiar objects of my childhood, the sense of a new race taking possession of her conservatory, her shells, her minerals, her pictures, her german, french, italian, spanish, latin, hebrew and greek library--dear me! but i need not enlarge on it to you. and how stupid it is not to forget it all alongside of her ten years in heaven! [ ] "especially after a time of some special seasons of grace, and some special new supplies of grace, received in such seasons, (as after the holy sacrament), then will he set on most eagerly, when he knows of the richest booty. the pirates that let the ships pass as they go by empty, watch them well, when they return richly laden; so doth this great pirate."--archbishop leighton, on i peter, v. . [ ] "cynegvius, a valiant athenian, being in a great sea-fight against the medes, espying a ship of the enemy's well manned, and fitted for service, when no other means would serve, he grasped it with his hands to maintain the fight; and when his right hand was cut off, he held close with his left; but both hands being taken off, he held it fast with his teeth." [ ] the following lines found on one of its blank pages were written perhaps at this time: precious companion! rendered dear by trial-hours of many a year, i love thee with a tenderness which words have never yet defined. when tired and sad and comfortless, with aching heart and weary mind, how oft thy words of promise stealing like gilead's balm-drops--soft and low. have touched the heart with power of healing, and soothed the sharpest hour of woe. [ ] a friend writing to mrs. prentiss, under date of september , , refers to lady stanley's high praise of the story lizzie told, and then adds: "you must be so accustomed to friendly 'notices'--so almost bored by them--that i hesitate to tell you of meeting another admirer of yours in the person of mrs. ----, of philadelphia, who was indebted to you for the return of a little text-book. she means to call on you some day, if she is ever in new york, to thank you in person for that act of kindness of yours, and for your 'stepping heavenward.' she is a daughter of the late chief justice of pennsylvania. her mother, a staunch old scotch lady over , has just returned from europe. mrs. ---- is a very interesting woman, of warm religious feelings and very outspoken. she was the companion of the famous mrs. h., of philadelphia, all through the war,--as one of the independent workers, or perhaps in connection with the christian commission. she witnessed the battle of chancellorsville--a part of it at mary's heights, and has told me a great deal that was thrilling--told as _she_ tells it--even at this late day. she has the profoundest belief in what is called the 'work of faith' by prayer and i don't believe she would shrink from accepting prof. tyndall's challenge." [ ] from the "power of the cross of christ." [ ] "briefe an eine freundin," a remarkable little book, full of light and sweetness. [ ] praying before others. [ ] since the warning we had the other day that we may be snatched from our children, ought we not to try to form some plan for them in case of such an emergency? i can't account for it, that in those fearful moments i thought only of them. i should have said i ought to have had some thought of the world we seemed to be hurrying to. i suppose there was the instinctive yet blind sense that the preparation for the next life had been made for us by the lord, and that, as far as that life was concerned, we had nothing to do but to enter it. i shudder when i think what a desolate home this might be to-day. poor things! they've got everything before them, without one experience and discipline!--_from a letter to her husband, dated dorset, sept. , ._ [ ] the presence of christ. lectures on the xxiii. psalm. by anthony w. thorold, lord bishop of rochester. a. d. f. randolph & co. [ ] albert hopkins was born in stockbridge, mass., july , . he was graduated at williams college in the class of , and three years later became professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in the same institution. astronomy was afterward added to his chair. in he went abroad. in the summer of he organised and conducted a natural history expedition to nova scotia, the first expedition of the kind in this country. two years later he built at his own expense, and in part by the labor of his own hands, the astronomical observatory at williamstown. in this also, it is said, in advance of all others erected exclusively for purposes of instruction. he was a devoted and profound student, as well as an accomplished teacher, of natural science. but he was still more distinguished for his piety and his religious influence in the college. hundreds of students in successive classes learned to love and revere him as a holy man of god--many of them as their spiritual father. the history of american colleges affords probably no instance of a happier, or more remarkable, union of true science with that personal holiness and zeal for god, by which hearts are won for christ. full of faith and of the holy ghost, he did the work of an evangelist for more than forty years--not in the college only, but all over the town. during the last six years of his life he devoted himself especially to the white oaks--a district in the north-east part of williamstown-which had long before excited his sympathy on account of the poverty, vice, and degradation which marked the neighborhood. he identified himself with the population by buying and carrying on a small farm among them. he also established a sunday-school, and then he built with the aid of friends a tasteful chapel, which was dedicated in october, . later "the church of christ in the white oaks" was organised, and here, as his failing strength allowed, he preached and labored the rest of his days. prof. hopkins was an enthusiastic lover of nature. a few years before his death he organised a society called "the alpine club," composed chiefly of young ladies, with whom, as their chosen leader, he made excursions summer after summer--camping out often among the hills. he took them to many a picturesque nook and retreat, of which they had never heard, in the mountains near by. he also explored with them other interesting and remoter portions of northern berkshire, and interpreted to them on the spot the thoughts of god, as they appeared in the infinitely varied and beautiful details of his works. in these excursions he seemed as young as any of his young companions, with feelings as fresh and joyous as theirs. in earlier years he was a very grave man, with something of the old puritan sternness in his looks and ways, and he bore still the aspect of a homo gravis; but his gentleness, his tender devotion to the gay young companions who surrounded him, and the almost boyish delight with which he shared in their pleasures, took away all its sternness and lighted up his strongly-marked countenance with singular grace and beauty. in these closing years of his life he was, indeed, the ideal of a ripe and noble christian manhood. his name is embalmed in the memory of a great company of his old pupils, now scattered far and wide, from the white house at washington to the remotest corners of the earth. p.s.--this was written soon after the inauguration of gen. garfield, to whom allusion is made. his high regard for the venerable ex-president of williams college--the rev. dr. mark hopkins--he made known to the whole country, but the younger brother was also the object of his warmest esteem and love, and the feeling was heartily reciprocated. nearly a score of years ago, when he was just emerging into public notice from the bloody field of chickamauga, prof. hopkins spoke of him to the writer in terms so full of praise and so prophetic of his future career, that they seem in perfect harmony with the sentiment at once of admiration and poignant grief which to-day moves the heart of the whole american people--yea, one might almost say, which is inspiring all christendom.--_saturday, sept. , ._ chapter xiii. peaceable fruit. - . i. effect of spiritual conflict upon her religious life. overflowing affections. her husband called to union theological seminary. baptism of suffering. the character of her friendships. no perfect life. prayer. "only god can satisfy a woman." why human friendship is a snare. letters. the trouble which had so long weighed upon her heart, crossed with her the threshold of , but long before the close of the year it had in large measure passed away. such suffering, however, always leaves its marks behind; and when complicated with ill-health or bodily weakness, often lingers on after its main cause has been removed. it was so in her case; she was, perhaps, never again conscious of that constant spiritual delight which she had once enjoyed. but if less full of sunshine, her religious life was all the time growing deeper and more fruitful, was centering itself more entirely in christ and rising faster heavenward. its sympathies also became, if possible, still more tender and loving. her whole being, indeed, seemed to gather new light and sweetness from the sharp discipline she had been passing through. even when most tried and tempted, as has been said, she had kept her trouble to herself; few of her most intimate friends knew of its existence; to the world she appeared a little more thoughtful and somewhat careworn, but otherwise as bright as ever. but now, at length, the old vivacity and playfulness and merry laugh began to come back again. never did her heart glow with fresher, more ardent affections. in a letter to a young cousin, who was moving about from place to place, she says: i shall feel more free to write often, if you can tell me that the postmaster at c. forwards your letters from the office at no expense to you, as he ought to do. it is very silly in me to mind your paying three cents for one of my love-letters, but it's a payson trait, and i can't help it, though i should be provoked enough if you _did_ mind paying a dollar apiece for them. there's consistency for you! well, i know, and i'm awfully proud of it, that you'll get very few letters from as loving a fountain as my heart is. i've got enough to drown a small army--and sometimes when you're homesick, and cousin-lizzy-sick, and friend-sick, i shall come to you, done up in a sheet of paper, and set you all in a breeze. her letters during the first half of this year were few, and relate chiefly to those aspects of the christian life with which her own experience was still making her so familiar. "god's plan with most of us," she wrote to mrs. humphrey, "appears to be a design to make us flexible, twisting us this way and that, now giving, now taking; but always at work for and in us. almost every friend we have is going through some peculiar discipline. i fancy there is no period in our history when we do not _need_ and _get_ the sharp rod of correction. the thing is to grow strong under it, and yet to walk softly." "i do not care how much i suffer," she wrote to a friend, "if god will purge and purify me and fit me for greater usefulness. what are trials but angels to beckon us nearer to him! and i do hope that mine are to be a blessing to some other soul, or souls, in the future. i can't think suffering is meant to be wasted, if fragments of bread created miraculously, were not." she studied about this time with great interest the teaching of scripture concerning the baptism of the holy ghost. the work of the spirit had not before specially occupied her thoughts. in her earlier writings she had laid but little stress upon it--not because she doubted its reality or its necessity, but because her mind had not been led in that direction. stepping heavenward is full of god and of christ, but there is in it little express mention of the spirit and his peculiar office in the life of faith. when this fact was brought to her notice she herself appeared to be surprised at it, and would gladly have supplied the omission. to be sure, there is no mention at all of the holy spirit in several of the epistles of the new testament; but a carefully-drawn picture of christian life and progress, like stepping heavenward, would, certainly, have been rendered more complete and attractive by fuller reference to the blessed comforter and his inspiring influences. _to a young friend, new york, jan. , ._ i feel very sorry for you that you are under temptation. i have been led, for some time, to pray specially for the tempted, for i have learned to pity them as greater sufferers than those afflicted in any other way. for, in proportion to our love to christ, will be the agony of terror lest we should sin and fall, and so grieve and weary him. "one sinful wish could make a hell of heaven"; strong language, but not too strong, to my mind. i can only say, suffer, but do not yield. sometimes i think that silent, submissive patience is better than struggle. it is sweet to be in the sunshine of the master's smile, but i believe our souls need winter as well as summer, night as well as day. perhaps not to the end; i have not come to that yet, and so do not know; i speak from my own experience, as far as it goes. temptation has this one good side to it: it keeps us _down_; we are ashamed of ourselves, we see we have nothing to boast of. i told you, you will perhaps remember, that you were going to enter the valley of humiliation in which i have dwelt so long, but i trust we are only taking it in our way to the land of beulah. and how we "pant to be there"! what a curious friendship ours has been! and it is one that can never sever--unless, indeed, we fall away from christ, which may he in mercy forbid!... i do pray for you twice every day, and hope you pray for me. i do long so to know the truth and to enter into it. certainly i have got some new light during the last year, in the midst of my trials, both within and without. to another young friend she writes a few days later: i remember when i was, religiously, at your age i was longing for holiness, but my faith staggered at some of the conditions for it. i had no conception, much as christ was to me, what he was going to become. but i wish i could make you a birth-day present of my experience since then, and you could have him now, instead of learning, as i had to learn him, in much tribulation. _to mrs. condict, jan. , ._ i have been meaning, for some days, to write you about the professorship. [ ] it is a new one, and is called "the skinner and mcalpine" chair, and mr. prentiss says there could not be a more agreeable field of usefulness. it is most likely that he will feel it to be his duty to accept. as to myself, i am about apathetic on the subject. my will has been broken over the master's knee, if i may use such an expression, by so much suffering, that i look with indifference on such outward changes. we can be made willing to be burnt alive, if need be. for four or five years to come i shall not be obliged to leave the church i love so dearly; if the seminary is moved out to harlem, it will be different; but it is not worth while to think of that now. it seems to me that mr. p. has reached an age when, never being very strong, a change like this may be salutary. _february d._--you will be sorry to hear that dear mrs. c. is quite sick. her daughters are all worn out with the care of her. i was there all day saturday, but i can do nothing in the way of night watching; nor much at any time. a very little over-exertion knocks me up this winter. it is just as much as i can do to keep my head above water.... sometimes i think that the _dreadful_ experience i have been passing through is god's way of baptizing me; some _have_ to be baptized with suffering. certainly he has been sitting as the refiner, bringing down my pride, emptying me of this and that, and not leaving me a foot to stand on. if it all ends in sanctification i don't care what i suffer. though cast down, i am not in despair. it is an encouragement to hear mahan compare states of the soul to house-cleaning time. [ ] it is just so with me. every chair and table, every broom and brush is out of place, topsy-turvy.... but i can't believe god has been wasting the last two years on me; i can't help hoping that he is answering my prayer, my cry for holiness--only in a strange way. dr. and mrs. abbot spent sunday and monday with us a week ago, and i read to them dr. steele's three tracts and lent them mahan. they were much interested, but i do not know how much struck. i can not smile, as some do, at dr. steele's testimony. i believe in it fully and heartily. if i do not know what it is to "find god real," i do not know anything. never was my faith in the strongest doctrines of christianity stronger than it is now. _feb. th._--i spent part of yesterday in reading stepping heavenward! you will think that very strange till i add that it was in german; and, as the translator has all my books, i wanted to know whether she had done this work satisfactorily before authorising her to proceed with the rest. she has omitted so much, that it is rather an abridgment than a translation; otherwise it is well done. but she has so purged it of vivacity, that i am afraid it will plod on leaden feet, if it plods at all, heavenward. and now i must hurry off to my sewing-circle. _to a young friend, april , ._ i want to correct any mistaken impression i have made on you in conversation. the utmost i meant to say was, that i had got new light intellectually, or theologically, on the subject of the working of the spirit. in the sense in which i use the words "baptism of the holy ghost," i certainly do not consider that i have received it. i think it means _perfect consecration_.... thus far, no matter what people profess, i have never come into close contact with any life that i did not find more or less imperfect. i find, in other words, the best human beings fallible, and _very fallible_. the best i can say of myself is, that i see the need of _immense_ advances in the divine life. i find it hard to be patient with myself when i see how far i am from reaching even my own poor standard; but if i do not love christ and long to please him, i do not love anybody or anything. and if i have talked less to you on these sacred subjects this winter, it has been partly owing to my seeing less of you, and an impalpable but real barrier between us which i have not known how to account for, but which made me cautious in pushing religion on you. young people usually have their ups and downs and fluctuations of feeling before they settle down on to fixed _principles_, paying no regard to feeling, and older christians should bear with them, make allowance for this, and never obtrude their own views or experiences. i think you will come out all right. satan will fight hard for you, and perhaps for a time get the upper hand; but i believe the lord and master will prevail. perhaps we are never dearer to him than when the wings on which we once _flew_ to him, hang drooping and broken at our side, and we have to make our weary way on foot. i am always thankful to have my heart stirred and warmed by christian letters or conversation; always glad to see any signs of the presence of the holy spirit at work in a human soul. but never force yourself to write or talk of spiritual things; try rather to get so full of christ that mention of him shall be natural and spontaneous. _to the same, april , ._ i have just been reading the sermon of dr. hopkins on prayer you sent me. it sounds just like him. i think his brother and mine (by marriage) would have treated the subject just as logically and far more practically; still, under the circumstances, that was not desirable. as to myself, i would rather have the simple testimony of some unknown praying woman, who is in the habit of "_waiting_" on god, than all the theological discussions in the world. the subject, as you know, is one of deep interest to me. i have not answered your letter, because i was not quite sure what it was best to say. during the winter i was not sure what had come between us, and thought it best to let time show; and i have been harassed and perplexed by certain anxieties, with which it did not seem necessary to trouble you, to a degree that may have given me a preoccupied manner. there have been points where i wanted a divine illumination which i did not get. i wanted to hear, "this is the way, walk in it"; but that word has not come yet, and almost all my spiritual life has been running in that one line, keeping me, necessarily, out of sympathy with everybody. as far as this has been a fault, it has reacted upon you, to whom i ought to have been more of a help. but i can say that it delights me to see you even trying to take a step onward, and to know that while still young, and with the temptations of youth about you, you have set your face heavenward. your temptations, like mine, are through the affections. "only god can satisfy a woman"; and yet we try, every now and then, to see if we can't find somebody else worth leaning on. _we never shall_, and it is a great pity we can not always realise it. i never deliberately make this attempt now, but am still liable to fall into the temptation. i am _sure_ that i can never be really happy and at rest out of or far from christ, nor do i want to be. getting new and warm friends is all very well, but i emerge from this snare into a deepening conviction that i must learn to say, "none but christ."... now, dear ----, it is a dreadful thing to be cold towards our best friend'; a calamity if it comes upon us through satan; a sin and folly if it is the result of any fault or omission of our own. there is but one refuge from it, and that is in just going to him and telling him all about it. we can not force ourselves to love him, but we can ask him to _give_ us the love, and sooner or later he _will_. he may seem not to hear, the answer may come gradually and imperceptibly, but it will come. he has given you one friend at least who prays for your spiritual advance every day. i hope you pray thus for me. friendship that does not do that is not worth the name. _april th_.--of course, i'll take the will for the deed and consider myself covered with "orange blossoms," like a babe in the wood. and it is equally of course that i was married with lots of them among my lovely auburn locks, and wore a veil in point lace twenty feet long. i have had several titles given me in dorset--among others, a "child of nature"--and last night i was shown a letter in which (i hope it is not wicked to quote it in such a connexion) i am styled "a princess in christ's kingdom." can you cap this climax? * * * * * ii. goes to dorset. christian example. at work among her flowers. dangerous illness. her feeling about dying. death an "invitation" from christ. "the under-current bears _home_." "more love, more love!" a trait of character. special mercies. what makes a sweet home. letters. early in june, accompanied by the three younger children, she went to dorset. this change always put her into a glow of pleasurable emotion. once out of the city, she was like a bird let loose from its cage. in a letter to her husband, dated "somewhere on the road, five o'clock p.m.," she wrote: "m. is laughing at me because, paddy-like, i proposed informing you in a p. s. that we had reached dorset; as if the fact of mailing a letter there could not prove it. so i will take her advice and close this now. i feel that our cup of mercies is running over. we ought to be ever so good! and i _am_ ever so loving!" "we are all as gay as larks," she wrote a few days later; and in spite of heat, drought, over-work and sickness, she continued in this mood most of the summer. but while "gay as a lark," she was also grave and thoughtful. her delight in nature seemed only to increase her interest in divine things and her longing to be like christ. in a letter to one of her young friends, having spoken of prayer as "the greatest favor one friend can render another," she adds: but perhaps i may put one beyond it--christian example. i ought to be so saintly, so consecrated, that you could not be with me and not catch the very spirit of heaven; never get a letter from me that did not quicken your steps in the divine life. but while i believe the principle of love to christ is entrenched in the depths of my soul, the emotion of love is hot always in that full play i want it to be. no doubt he judges us by the principle he sees to exist in us, but we can't help judging ourselves, in spite of ourselves, by our feelings. at church this morning my mind kept wandering to and fro; i thought of you about twenty times; thought about my flowers; thought of other things; and then got up and sang "i love thy kingdom, lord," as if i cared for that and nothing else. what he has to put up with in me! but i believe in him, i love him, i hate everything in my soul and in my life that is unlike him. i hope the confession of my shortcomings won't discourage you; it is no proof that at my age you will not be far beyond such weakness and folly as often carry me away captive.... as far as earthly blessings go i am as near perfect happiness as a human being can be; everything is _heaped_ on me. what i want is more of christ, and that is what i hope you pray that i may have. to another young friend she writes, june th: we have varied experiences, sick or well, and the discipline of a heart not perfectly satisfied with what it gets from god, often alternates with the peace of which you speak as just now yours. what a blessed thing this "very peace of god" is! there is no earthly joy to be compared with it. but to go patiently on without it, when it is not given, is, i think, a great achievement; for instance, if i held no communication with you for a year, would it not be a wonderful proof of your love to and faith in me, if you kept on writing me and telling me your joys and trials? to go back--i have been a good deal confused by the contradictory testimony of different christians, and am driven more and more to a conviction that human beings, _at the best_, are very fallible. we must get our light directly from on high. at the same time we influence each other for right or for wrong, and one who is thoroughly upright and true, will, unconsciously, influence and help those about him.... i am enjoying, as i always do, having the three younger children close about me here, and all sleeping on my floor. we are really like _four_ children, continually frolicking together. we are all crowded now into my den, and i wish you were here with us to be the "_fifth_ kitten." did you ever read that story? _to mrs. catherine g. leeds, dorset, july , ._ it was ever so kind in you to let us share in your relief and pleasure, and we unite in affectionate congratulations to you all. i do hope this new and precious treasure will be spared to his dear mother, and grow up to be her stay and staff years hence. it is the nicest thing in the world to have a baby. what marvels they are in every respect, but especially in their royal power over us! in spite of the dry weather we have had a pleasant summer, so far. just before we entirely burned up and turned to tinder, showers came to our relief, and our gardens are putting on some faint smiles and making some promises. i did not allow a drop of water to be wasted for weeks; dish-water, soap-suds, dairy water, everything went to my flower-beds, and each night, after mr. prentiss came, a barrel-full was carted up from the pond for me; how many the rest used i don't know. disposing of such a load has not been blessed to my health, and i have had to draw in my horns a little, but m. and i work generally like two day-laborers for the wages we get, and those wages are flowers here, there and everywhere, to say nothing of ferns, brakes, mosses, scarlet berries, and the like. and when flowers fail we fall back on different shades of green; the german ivy being relieved by a background of dark foliage, or light grasses against grave ones; and when we hit on any new combination, each summons the other to be lost in admiration. and when we are too sore and stiff from weeding, grass-shearing or watering, we fall to framing little pictures, or to darning stockings, which she does so beautifully that it has become a fine art with her, or i betake myself to the sewing-machine and stitch for legs that seem to grow long by the minute. what the rest of the family are about meanwhile, i can not exactly say. mr. prentiss sits in a chair with an umbrella over his head, and pulls up a weed now and then, and then strolls off with a straw in his mouth; he also drives off sometimes on foraging expeditions, and comes back with butter, eggs, etc., and on hot days takes a bath where a stream of cold water dashes over him; "splendid" he says, and "horrid" i say. the boys are up to everything; they are carpenters, and plumbers, and trouters, and harnessers, and drivers; h. has just learned to solder, and saves me no little trouble and expense by stopping leakages; heretofore every holey vessel had to be sent out of town. both boys have gardens and sell vegetables to their father at extraordinary prices, and they are now filling up a deep ditch feet long at a "york shilling" an hour--men get a "long shilling" and do the work no better. with the money thus made they buy tools of all sorts, seeds and fruit trees, but no nonsense. three happier children than these three can not be found.... you may be interested, too, to know what are the famous works of art we are framing, as above referred to. well, photographs of our kindred and friends for one thing: my brothers, my husband's mother and other relatives of his, prof. and mrs. smith, mr. and mrs. b. b., and so on, a good deal as it has happened, for everybody hasn't been photographed; and some bodies have not given us their pictures--you, for instance, and if you want to be hung as high as haman in my den, nine feet square, where i write, why, you can. last summer i had a mania for illuminating, and made about a cord of texts and mottoes; i can't paint, so i cut letters out of red, blue and black paper, and deceived thereby the very elect, for even mrs. washburn was taken in, and said they were painted nicely. your little note has drawn large interest, hasn't it? well, it deserved its fate. hardly had she finished this letter when she was taken very ill. for a while it seemed as if the time of her departure had come. at her request the children were called to her bedside, and she gave them in turn her dying counsels, bade them live for christ as the only true, abiding good, and then kissed each of them good-bye. she was much disappointed on finding that her sickness, after all, was not an "invitation" from the master. "you don't get away _this_ time," said her husband to her, half playfully, half exultingly, referring to her eagerness to go. and here it may not be amiss to say a word as to her state of mind respecting death. after her release her husband thus described it to a friend: her feeling about dying seemed to me to be almost unique. in all my pastoral experience, at least, i do not recall another case quite like it. her faith in a better world, that is, a heavenly, was quite as strong as her faith in god and in christ; she regarded it as the true home of the soul; and the tendency of a good deal of modern culture to put _this_ world in its place as man's highest sphere and end, struck her as a mockery of the holiest instincts at once of humanity and religion. death was associated in her mind with the instant realisation of all her sweetest and most precious hopes. she viewed it as an invitation from the king of glory to come and be with him. during the more than three-and-thirty years of our married life i doubt if there was ever a time when the summons would have found her unwilling to go; rarely, if ever, a time when she would not have welcomed it with great joy. on putting to her the question, "would you be ready to go _now?_" she would answer, "why, yes," in a tone of calm assurance, rather of visible delight, which i can never forget. and during all her later years her answer to such a question would imply a sort of astonishment, that anybody could ask it. so strong, indeed, was her own feeling about death as a real boon to the christian, that she was scarcely able, i think, fully to sympathise with those who regarded it with misgiving or terror. the point may be illustrated, perhaps, by referring to her perfect fearlessness and repose in the midst of the most terrific thunder-storm. no matter how vivid the lightning's flashes or how near and loud the claps that followed, they affected her nerves as little as any summer breeze--scarcely ever awaking her if asleep, or hindering her from going to sleep if awake. and so it was with regard to the terrors of death. but not merely was there an absence of all apparent dread of death, but an exulting joy in the thought of it. there is a passage in the home at greylock, which was evidently inspired by her own experience. it is where old mary, when her first wild burst of grief was over, said: sure she's got her wish and died sudden. she was always ready to go, and now she's gone. often's the time i've heard her talk about dying, and i mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and "what d'ye think of that?" says she. i declare it was just as she looked when she says to me, "mary, i'm going to be married, and what d'ye think of that?" says she. this feeling about death is the more noteworthy in her case because of her very deep, poignant sense of sin and of her own unworthiness. _to a friend, dorset, july , ._ this is my third sunday home from church. i have been confined to my bed only about a week, but it took me some days to run down to that point, and now it is taking some to run me up again. i had two or three very suffering days and nights, and the doctor was here nearly all of one day and night, but was very kind, understood my case and managed it admirably. he is from manchester and is son of a missionary. [ ] you speak in your letter of being oppressed by the heat, and wearied by visitors, and say that prayer is little more than uttering the name of jesus. i have asked myself a great many times this summer how much that means. "all i can utter sometimes is thy name!" this line expresses my state for a good while. of course getting out of one house into another and coming up here, all in the space of one month, was a great tax on time and strength, and all my regular habits _had_ to be broken up. then before the ram was put in i over-exerted myself, unconsciously, carrying too heavy pails of water to my flower-beds, and so broke down. for some hours the end looked very near, but i do not know whether it was stupidity or faith that made me so content to go. i am afraid that a good deal of what passes for the one is really the other. fortunately for us, our faith does not entitle us to heaven any more than our stupidity shuts us out of it; when we get there it will be through him who loved us. but if i may judge by the experience of this little illness, our hearts are not so tied to or in love with this world as we fear. we make the most of it as long as we _must_ stay in it; but the under-current bears _home_. the following extract from a letter to a young relative, dated sept. d, furnishes at once a key to several marked traits of her character and a practical comment upon her own hymn, "more love to thee, o christ!" i had no right to leave my friend undefended. i prayed to do it aright. if i did not i am not ashamed to say i am sorry for it, and ask you to forgive me. and if i were twice as old as i am, and you twice as young, i would do it. i will not tolerate anything wrong in myself. i hate, i hate sin against my god and saviour, and sin against the earthly friends whom i love with such a passionate intensity that they are able to wring my heart out, and always will be, if i live to be a hundred.... people who feel strongly express themselves strongly; vehemence is one of my faults. let us pray for each other. we have great capacities for enjoyment, but we suffer more keenly than many of our race. i have been an intense sufferer in many ways; the story would pain you; nobody can go through this world with a heart and a soul, and jog along smoothly long at a time.... i do not remember ever having a discussion on paper with my husband; we should not dare to run the risk. but i know i said something once in a letter, i forget what, that made him snatch the first train and rush to set things right, though it cost him a two days' journey. we are tremendous lovers still. write and tell me we've kissed and made up! we both mean well; we don't want to hurt each other; but each has one million points that are very vulnerable. and neither can know these points in the other by intuition; a cry of pain will often be the first intimation that the one can hurt the other just there. we must touch each other with the tips of our fingers.... to love christ more--this is the deepest need, the constant cry of my soul. down in the bowling-alley, and out in the woods, and on my bed, and out driving, when i am happy and busy, and when i am sad and idle, the whisper keeps going up for more love, more love, more love! _to a christian friend, dorset, oct. , ._ i do hope you will be in new york this winter and your mother, too. what a blessing to have a mother with whom one can hold christian communion! you need some trials as a set-off to it. you say few live up to what light they have; it is true; i think we get light just as fast as we are ready for it. at the same time i must own that i have not all the light i need. i am still puzzled as to the true way to live; how far to cherish a spirit that makes one sit very lightly to all earthly things, when that spirit unfits one, to a great extent, to be an agreeable, thoroughly sympathising companion to one's children, for instance. my children have a real horror of miss ----, because she thinks and talks on only one subject; of course it never would do for me to do as she does, as far as they are concerned. perhaps the problem may be solved by a resort to the fact that we are not called to the same experience. and yet an experience of as perfect love and faith as is ever vouchsafed to a soul on earth, is what i long for. at times my heart dies within me when i realise how much i need. as you say, no doubt the mental strain i had been passing through prepared the way for my break-down in health; as i lay, as i thought, dying, i said so to myself. that strain is over; i am in a sense at rest; but not satisfied. i have been too near to christ to be _happy_ in anything else; i don't mean by that, however, that i never _try_ to be happy in other things--alas, i do. as to the minor trials, no life is without them. but what mercies we get every now and then! the other day three letters came to me by one mail, each of which was important, and came from exactly the quarter where i was troubled, and dispersed the trouble to a great degree. in fact i am overwhelmed with mercies, and dreadfully stupid and unthankful for them. i have had also some experiences of late of the smallness and meanness, of which you have had specimens. one has to betake oneself to prayer to get a sight of one, who is large-hearted and noble and good and true. oh, how narrow human narrowness must look to him! i don't know how many times i have smiled at your remark about miss ----: "she seems to have such a hard time to learn her lessons." i feel sorry for her in one sense, but if she belongs to christ, isn't he home enough for her? i think it _always_ a very doubtful experiment to offer other people a home with you; and equally doubtful whether such an offer is wisely accepted. being a saint does not, i am sorry to say, necessarily make one an agreeable addition to the family circle as god has formed it; if his hand _sends_ this new element into the house, of course one may expect grace to bear it; but voluntarily to seek it argues either want of experience or an immense power of self-sacrifice. i should prefer miss ----'s friends agreeing to give her an independent home, as far as a boarding-house can furnish a home. and if it provides a place in which to pray, as sweet a home may be found there as anywhere. we go to town on the ninth of this month. mr. prentiss has been gone some time, and has entered upon his new duties with great delight. i must confess that if i were going to choose my work in life, i could think of nothing more congenial than to train young christians. it has come over me lately that _all_ those whom he now instructs, have more or less of the new life in them. i am sorry, however, to add that some young theological friends of mine deny this. they say that many young men preparing for the ministry give no other sign of piety. young people judge hastily and severely. as soon as i get over my first hurry, after reaching home, i hope you will come and see me.... you speak of my experience on my sick-bed as a precious one. to tell you the truth, it does not seem so to me; i mean, nothing extraordinary. not to want to go, if invited, would be a contradiction to most of my life. but as i was _not_ invited i realise that i am needed here; and i am afraid it was selfish to be so delighted to go, horribly selfish. * * * * * iii. change of home and life in new york. a book about robbie. her sympathy with young people. "i have in me two different natures." what dr. de witt said at the grave of his wife. the way to meet little trials. faults in prayer-meetings. how special theories of the christian life are formed. sudden illness of prof. smith. publication of _golden hours_. how it was received. her return from dorset brought with it a new order of life. the transfer of her husband to a theological chair was almost as great a change to her as to him. in ceasing to be a pastor's wife she gave up a position, which for more than a quarter of a century had been to her a spring of constant joy, and which, notwithstanding its cares, she regarded as one of the most favored on earth. while in the parsonage, too, she was in the midst of her friends; the removal to sixty-first street left the most of them at a distance; and distance in new york is no slight hindrance to the full enjoyment of social intimacy and fellowship. several weeks after the return to town were devoted to the congenial task of fitting-up and adorning the new home. then for the first time in many years she found herself at leisure; and one of its earliest fruits was a selection of stray religious verses for publication; which, however, soon gave way to a volume of her own. she was able also to give special attention to her favorite religious reading. the sharp trials and suffering of the previous years showed their effect in deepened spiritual convictions, humility and tenderness of feeling, but not in repressing her natural playfulness. at times her spirits were still buoyant with fun and laughter. an extract from a letter to her youngest daughter, who with her sister was on a visit at portland, will give a glimpse of this gay mood. such mishaps as she recounts are liable to occur in the best-regulated households, especially on a change of servants; but they were rare in her experience and so the more amused her: i undertook to get up a nice dinner for dr. and mrs. v----, about which i must now tell you. first i was to have raw oysters on the shell. _blunder st_, small tea-plates laid for them. ordered off, and big ones laid. _blunder d_, five oysters to be laid on each plate, instead of which five were placed on platters at each end, making ten in all for the whole party! ordered a change to the original order. result, a terrific sound in the parlor of rushing feet and bombardment of oyster-shells. dinner was announced from dr. p., who asked, helplessly, where he should place mrs. v----. _blunder th_ by mrs. p., who remarked that she had got fifty pieces of shell in her mouth. _blunder th_ by dr. p., who failed to perceive that the boiled chickens were garnished with a stunning wine-jelly and regarding it as gizzards, presented it only to the boys! _blunder th_. cranberry-jelly ordered. cranberry as a dark, inky fluid instead; gazed upon suspiciously by the guests, and tasted sparingly by the family.--and now prepare for _blunder no_. , bearing in mind that it is the third course. _four_ prairie hens instead of two! the effect on the rev. mrs. e. prentiss was a resort to her handkerchief, and suppression of tears on finding none in her pocket. _blunder th_. iauch's biscuit glacé stuffed with hideous orange-peel. _delight st_, delicious dessert of farina smothered in custard and dear to the heart of dr. v----. _blunder th_. no hot milk for the coffee, delay in scalding it, and at last serving it in a huge cracked pitcher. _blunder th_. bananas, grapes, apples, and oranges forgotten at the right moment and passed after the coffee and of course declined. but hearing that miss h. v. was fond of bananas, i seized the fruit-basket and poured its contents into one napkin, and a lot of chocolate-cake into another, and sent them to the young princesses in the parsonage, who are, no doubt, dying of indigestion, this morning. give my love to c. and f., and a judicious portion to the old birds. _to a young friend, oct. , ._ i am sorry that we played hide-and-go-seek with each other when you were in town. i have seen all my most intimate friends since i came home; i mean all who live here. there are just eight of them, but they fill my heart so that i should have said, at a guess, there were eighty! try the experiment on yourself and tell me how many such friends you have. it is very curious. i have just got hold of some leaves of a journal rescued from the flames by my (future) husband, written at the age of , in which i describe myself as "one great long sunbeam." it recalled the sweet life in christ i was then leading, and made me feel that if i had got so far on as a girl, i ought to be _infinitely_ farther on as a woman. still, in spite of all shame and regrets, i had a long list of mercies to recount at the communion-table to-day. among other things i feel that i know and love you better than heretofore, and it is pleasant to love. i must not forget to answer your little niece's questions. i remember her father's calling with your sister, but i don't remember any little girl as being with them, much less "kissing her because she liked the susy books." as to writing more about robbie, i can't do that till i get to heaven, where he has been ever so many years. give my love to the wee maiden, and tell her i should love to kiss her. no trait in mrs. prentiss was more striking than her sympathy with young people, especially with young girls, and her desire to be religiously helpful to them. but her interest in them was not confined to the spiritual life. she delighted to join them in their harmless amusements, and to take her part in their playful contests, whether of wit or knowledge. her friend, miss morse, thus recalls this feature of her character: in mrs. prentiss' life the wise man's saying, _a merry heart doeth good like a medicine_, was beautifully exemplified. yet few were thoroughly acquainted with this phase of her character. those who knew her only through her books, or her letters of christian sympathy and counsel--many even who came into near and tender personal relations to her--failed to see the frolicsome side of her nature which made her an eager participant in the fun of young people--in a merry group of girls the merriest girl among them. in contests where playful rhymes were to be composed at command, on a moment's notice, she sharpened the wits of her companions by her own zest, but in most cases herself bore off the palm. she always entered into such contests with an unmistakable desire to win. i remember one evening in her own home in dorset, when four of us were engaged in a game of verbarium, two against two--the opposite party were gaining rapidly. she suddenly turned to her partner with a comical air of chagrin and exclaimed: "why is it they are winning the game? you and i are a great deal brighter than they!" the first time i ever saw mrs. prentiss was through an invitation to her home to meet about half a dozen young persons of my own age. she was in one of her merriest moods. games of wit were played and she took part with genuine interest. she at once impressed me with the feeling that she was one of us, and that this arose from no effort to be sympathetic, but was simply part of her nature. this brightness wonderfully attracted young people to her, and gave her an influence with them that she could not otherwise have exercised. she recognised it in herself as a power, and used it, as she did all her powers, for the service of her master. young christians, seeing that her deeply religious life did not interfere with her keen enjoyment of all innocent pleasures, realised that there need be no gloominess for them, either, in a life consecrated to god. just as her line of thought would often lie absorbingly in some one direction for quite a period of time, so her fun ran "in streaks," as she would have been likely to express it. one winter she amused herself and her friends by a great number of charades and enigmas, many of which i copied and still possess. they were dashed off with an ease and rapidity quite remarkable. and i believe the same thing was true of most of her books. i have watched her when she was writing some funny piece of rhyme, and as her pen literally flew over the paper, i could hardly believe that she was actually composing as she wrote. one day two young girls were translating one of heine's shorter poems. they had agreed to send their several versions to an absent friend, who on his part was to return his own to them. mrs. prentiss entered heartily into the plan and in an hour had written as many as a dozen translations, all in english rhyme and differing entirely one from the other. the stimulating effect on the genius of her companions was such that over thirty translations were produced in that one afternoon. in thinking of the ease with which mrs. prentiss would suddenly turn from grave to gay and the reverse, i often recall her answer when i one day remarked on this trait in her. "yes, i have in me two very different natures. did you ever hear the story of the dog, who by an accident was cut in two, and was joined together by a wonderful healing salve? unfortunately, the pieces were not put together properly, so two of his legs stood up in the air. at first his master thought it a great misfortune, but he found that the dog, when a little accustomed to his strange new form, would run until tired on two legs, and then by turning himself over he would have a fresh unused pair to start with, and so he did double duty! i am like that dog. when i am tired of running on one nature, i can turn over and run on the other, and it rests me." [ ] i want to spend a few minutes of this my birthday in talking with you in reply to your letter. _to a christian friend, new york, oct. , ._ i want to tell you how i love you, because you "learn your lessons" so easily, and how thankful i am that in your great trials and afflictions you have been enabled to glorify god. how small trouble is when set over against that! is not christ enough for a human soul? does it really need anything else for its happiness? you will remember that when madame guyon was not only homeless, but deprived of her liberty, she was perfectly happy. "a little bird am i." [ ] it seems to me that when god takes away our earthly joys and props, he gives himself most generously; and is there any joy on earth to be compared for a moment with such a gift?... my husband has just come in and described the scene at mrs. de witt's funeral, [ ] when her husband said, _good-bye, dear wife, you have been my greatest blessing next to christ_; and he added, "and that i can say of you." this was very sweet to me, for _i_ have faults of manner that often annoy him--i am so vehement, so positive, and lay down the law so! but i believe the grace of god can cure faults of all sorts, be they deep-seated or external. and i ought to be one of the best women in the world, if i am good in proportion to the gifts with which i am overwhelmed. i count it not the least of your and my mercies, that we have been permitted to add four little children to the happy company above. no wonder you miss your darling boy, but i am sure you would not call him back. have you any choice religious verses not in any book, that you would like to put into one i am going to get up? _to the same, nov. th._ i want you and your mother to know what i am now busy about, hoping it may set you to praying over it. when i asked you for bits of poetry, i meant pieces gleaned from time to time from newspapers. my plan was to make a compilation, interspersing verses of my own anonymously. but mr. randolph has convinced me that it is my duty and privilege to have the little book all original, and to appear as mine; and in unexpected ways my will about it has been broken, and i have ceased from all morbid shyness about it, and am only too thankful that god is willing thus to use me for his own glory. of course, i shall meet with a good deal of misapprehension and disgust from some quarters, but not from you or yours. it is a comfort, on the other hand, to think of once more ministering to longing or afflicted souls, as i hope to do in these lines, written for no human eye. you say jesus is pained when his dear ones suffer. i hardly think that can be. tender sympathy he no doubt feels, but not pain. if he did, he would be miserable all the time, the world is so full of misery. when i look back over my own life, the precious times were generally seasons of great suffering; so much so, that the idea of discipline has become a hobby. but one can only learn all this by experience. mrs. ---- says she never sings the verse containing "e'en though it be a cross that raiseth me," and that little children never talk in that way to their mothers, and, therefore, we ought not to talk so to god! i did not argue with her about it, but i felt thankful that i could sing and say that line very earnestly, and had been taught to do so by the spirit of god. _to a friend in texas, new york, dec. , ._ i am glad you like faber better on a closer acquaintance. he certainly has said some wonderful things among many weak and foolish ones. what you quote from him about thanksgiving is very true. our gratitude bears no sort of comparison with our petitions or our sighs and groans. it is contemptible in us to be such thankless beggars. as to domestic cares, you know mrs. stowe has written a beautiful little tract on this subject--"earthly care a heavenly discipline." god never places us in any position in which we can not grow. we may fancy that he does. we may fear we are so impeded by fretting, petty cares that we are gaining nothing; but when we are not sending any branches upward, we may be sending roots downward. perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress. god delights to try our faith by the conditions in which he places us. a plant set in the shade shows where its heart is by turning towards the sun, even when unable to reach it. we have so much to distract us in this world that we do not realise how truly and deeply, if not always warmly and consciously, we love christ. but i believe that this love is the strongest principle in every regenerate soul. it may slumber for a time, it may falter, it may freeze nearly to death; but sooner or later it will declare itself as the ruling passion. you should regard all your discontent with yourself as negative devotion, for that it really is. madame guyon said boldly, but truly, "o mon dieu, plutot pecheur que superbe," and that is the consoling word i feel like sending you to-day. i know all about these little domestic foxes that spoil the vines, and sympathise with you in yours. but if some other trial would serve god's purpose, he would substitute it. _to a young friend, new york, dec. , ._ i was interested in what you wrote about miss g. and of dr. c.'s meeting. you say she spends her time in young works of benevolence. this shows that her piety is of the genuine sort. it is hard to have faith in mere talk. it is a great mystery to me, that, while we meet with negative faults in ordinary prayer-meetings, we find so many positive faults in more earnest ones. perhaps there is less of self in those who conduct them than we imagine. i always regret to see talk to each other supplant address to god in such meetings--always. as to miss ---- and others making a "creed" as you say out of their experience, i think it may be accounted for in this way: they come suddenly into possession of thoughts and emotions to which others are led gradually; they are startled and overwhelmed by the novelty of the revelations, and at once form a theory on the subject; and, having formed the theory, they fall to so interpreting the bible as to support it. those who reach the point they have reached more slowly are not startled, and do not need to form theories or seek for unscriptural expressions with which to declare what they have learned. they are probably less self-conscious, because they have not been aiming to enter any school formed by man, but have been simply following after christ; hardly knowing what they expect will be the result, but getting a great deal of sweet peace on the way. and they also acquire, gradually, a certain kind of heaven-taught wisdom, whose access comes not with observation; blessed truths revealed by the holy spirit, full of strength and consolation. at any rate, this is as far as i have come to; there may be oceans of knowledge i have yet to acquire, which will modify or wholly change my range of thought. and, according to what light i have, i am inclined to advise you not to confuse yourself with trying to believe in or experience this or that because others do, but to get as close to christ as you can every day of your life; feeling sure that if you do, he by his spirit will teach you all you need to know. there has been to my mind, during the last few weeks, something awe-inspiring in the sense i have had of the way in which god instructs his ignorant, forgetful, stupid children. such goodness, such patience, such love! and, on the other hand, our _amazing_ coldness and ingratitude. _to mrs. smith, new york, dec. , ._ i wanted to see you before you left, but it would have been cruel to add to the cares and distractions amid which you were hurrying off. [ ] ... i am reading, with great interest, the letters of sara coleridge. what strikes me most in her is, that knowing so much of her, one still feels what _lots_ there is more to her one does not know. _ d._--strangely enough, in writing you last evening, i forgot to tell you how much prayer is being offered for you and your husband, and what intense sympathy is expressed. dr. vincent said he could not bear to hear another word about his sufferings. mrs. l---- said, "i do love that man." mrs. d., herself all knotted up with rheumatism, would hardly speak of herself when she heard he was so ill; and this is only a specimen of the deep feeling expressed on all sides.... i am glad you find anything to like in my poor little book. i hear very little about it, but its publication has brought a blessing to my soul, which shows that i did right in thus making known my testimony for christ. my will in the matter was quite overturned. the "poor little book" appeared under the title of _religious poems_, afterwards changed to _golden hours; hymns and songs of the christian life_. in a letter of mrs. prentiss to a friend, written in , occurs this passage: most of my verses are too much my own personal experience to be put in print now. after i am dead i hope they may serve as language for some other hearts. after i am dead! that means, oh ravishing thought! that i shall be in heaven one day. until the fall of her husband and two or three friends only knew of the existence of these verses, and their publication had not crossed her mind. but shortly after her return from dorset she was persuaded to let mr. randolph read them. she soon received from him the following letter: the poems _must_ be printed, and at once! "we"--that is, the firm living at yonkers--read aloud all the pieces, except those in the book, at one sitting, and would have gone on to the end but that the eyes gave out. out of the lot three or four pieces were laid aside as not up to the standard of the others. the female member of the firm said that mrs. prentiss would do a wrong if she withheld the poems from the public. this member said _he_ should give up writing, or trying to write, religious verses. i am not joking. the book must be printed. we were charmed with the poems. some of them have all the quaintness of herbert, some the simple subjective fervor of the german hymns, and some the glow of wesley. they are, as mrs. r. said, out of the beaten way, _and all true_. so they differ from the conventional poetry. if published, there may be here and there some sentimental soul, or some soul without sentiment, or some critic who doats on robt. browning and don't understand him, or on morris, or rossetti, because _they_ are high artists, who may snub the book. very well; for compensation you will have the fact that the poems will win for you a living place in the hearts of thousands--in a sanctuary where few are permitted to enter. a day or two later mr. randolph wrote in reply to her misgivings: if i had the slightest thought that you would make even a slight mistake in publishing, i would say so. as i have already said, i am _sure_ that the book would prove a blessing in ten thousand ways, and at the same time add to your reputation as a writer. she could not resist this appeal. the assurance that the verses would prove a blessing to many souls disarmed her scruples and she consented to their publication. the most of them, unfortunately, bore no date. but all, or nearly all of them, belong to the previous twenty years, and they depict some of the deepest experiences of her christian life during that period; they are her tears of joy or of sorrow, her cries of anguish, and her songs of love and triumph. some of them were hastily written in pencil, upon torn scraps of paper, as if she were on a journey. were they all accompanied with the exact time and circumstances of their composition, they would form, in connection with others unpublished, her spiritual autobiography from the death of eddy and bessie, in , to the autumn of . [ ] as she anticipated, the volume met in some quarters with anything but a cordial reception; the criticisms upon it were curt and depreciatory. its representation of the christian life was censured as gloomy and false. it was even intimated that in her expressions of pain and sorrow, there was more or less poetical affectation. alluding to this in a letter to a friend, she writes: i have spoken of the deepest, sorest pain; not of trials, but of sorrow, not of discomfort, but of suffering. and all i have spoken of, i have felt. never could i have known christ, had i not had large experience of him as a chastiser.... you little know the long story of my life, nor is it necessary that you should; but you must take my word for it that if i do not know what suffering means, there is not a soul on earth that does. it has not been my habit to say much about this; it has been a matter between myself and my god; but the _results_ i have told, that he may be glorified and that others may be led to him as the fountain of life and of light. i refer, of course, to the book of verses; i never called them poems. you may depend upon it the world is brimful of pain in some shape or other; it is a "_hurt_ world." but no christian should go about groaning and weeping; though sorrowing, he should be always rejoicing. during twenty years of my life my kind and wise physician was preparing me, by many bitter remedies, for the work i was to do; i can never thank or love him enough for his unflinching discipline. even the favorable notices of the volume, with two or three exceptions, evinced little sympathy with its spirit, or appreciation of its literary merits. [ ] but while failing to make any public impression, the little book soon found its way into thousands of closets and sick-rooms and houses of mourning, carrying a blessing with it. touching and grateful testimonies to this effect came from the east and the farthest west and from beyond the sea. the following is an extract from, a letter to mr. randolph, written by a lady of new york eminent for her social influence and christian character: the book of heart-hymns is wonderful, as i expected from the specimens which you read to me from the little scraps of paper from your desk. do you know that i _lived_ on them ("the school" and "my expectation is from thee") and was greedy to get the book that i might read them again and again. and behold, the volume is full of the things i have felt so often, _expressed_ as no one ever expressed them before. i am overwhelmed every time i read it. mr ---- and the children have quite laughed at "mamma's enthusiasm" over a book of poems, as i am considered very prosaic. i made c. read two or three of them and he _surrenders_. n. too, who is full of appreciation of poetry as well as of the _best things_, is equally delighted. i carried the volume to a sick friend and read to her out of it. i wish you could have seen how she was comforted! i do not know mrs. prentiss, but if you ever get a chance, i would like you to tell her what she has done for me. a highly cultivated swiss lady wrote from geneva: what a precious, precious book! and what mercy in god to enable us to understand, and say amen from the heart to every line! it was he who caused you to send me a book i so much needed--and i thank him as much as you. * * * * * iv. incidents of the year . prayer. starts a bible-reading in dorset. begins to take lessons in painting. a letter from her teacher. publication of _urbane and his friends_. design of the work. her views of the christian life. the mystics. the indwelling christ. an allegory. during the winter and early spring of mrs. prentiss found much delight in attending a weekly bible-reading, held by miss susan warner. she was deeply impressed with the advantages of such a mode of studying the word of god, and in the course of the summer was led to start a similar exercise in dorset. her letters will show how much satisfaction it gave her during all the rest of her life. another incident, that left its mark upon this year, was the sudden and dangerous illness of her husband. his life was barely saved by an immediate surgical operation. he convalesced very slowly and it was many months before she recovered from the shock. _to a christian friend, jan. , ._ i do not perfectly understand what you say about prayer, but it reminds me of mrs.----'s expressing surprise at my praying. she said she did not, because christ was all round her. but it is no less a fact that christ himself spent hours in prayer, using language when he did so. that does not prove, however, that he did not hold silent, mystical communion with the father. it seems to me that communion is one thing, and intercessory prayer another; my own prayers are chiefly of the latter class; the sweet sense of communion of which i have had so much, has been greatly wanting; i dare not ask for it; i must pray as the spirit gives me utterance. no doubt your experience is beyond mine; i can conceive of a silence that unites, not separates, as existing between christ and the soul. as to her of whom we sadly spoke, i am so absolutely lost in confusion of thought that i feel as if chart and compass had gone overboard. i believe there can be falls from the highest state of grace, and that sometimes a fall is the best thing that can happen to one; but it is an appalling thought. how wary all this should make you and me!... though i have felt the greatest respect for miss ----, i have often wondered why i did not _love_ her more. well, we have a new reason for fleeing to christ in this perplexity and disappointment. i had let her be in many things my oracle, and perhaps no human being ought to be that. shall we ever learn to put no confidence in the flesh? my husband thinks miss ---- insane. _to a young friend, jan , ._ the comfort i have had as the fruit of close acquaintance with a sick-room! i see more and more how _wise_ god was, as well as how good, in hiding me away during all the years that might have been very tempting, had i had my freedom. my publishing this book [ ] was a sort of miracle; i _never_ meant to do it, but my will was taken away and it was done in one short month. i should not expect a girl as young as yourself to respond to much of it, but i am glad you found anything to which you could.... when i received my own great blessing thirty-five years ago, i was younger than you are now, and hadn't half the light you have, nor did i know exactly what to aim at, but blundered and suffered not a little.... it seems to me that it is eminently fitting that we should go to the throne of grace together, and expect, in so doing, a different kind of blessing from that sought alone, in the closet. i never feel any embarrassment in praying with those older and better than myself; the better they are, the less disposed they will be to look down upon me. the truth is, we are all alike in being poor and needy, and it is a good thing to get together and confess this to our father, in each other's hearing. i can unite cordially with anyone, man, woman or child, who really _prays_. a very illiterate person could win my heart if i knew he truly loved the lord jesus, no matter how clumsily he expressed that love; and his prayers would edify me. perhaps you can not look at this matter exactly as i do. i know i _suffered_ for years, whenever i prayed with others, old or young; but i persevered in what i believed to be a duty, until, not so very long ago, the duty became a pleasure, all fear of man being taken away. i never think anything about what sort of a prayer i make; in fact _i_ make no prayer; we have to speak as the spirit gives us utterance. _to mrs. condict, kauinfels,_ [ ] _aug. , ._ yesterday miss h. came down and asked me if i would start a bible-reading at her house. i told her i would with pleasure. this morning i decided to open with the sermon on the mount, and have been studying the first promise. do take your bible and study that verse by reading the references. i am _delighted_ that our dear lord has at last pointed out my mission to this village. i have long prayed that he would open a way of access to hearts here. pray next wednesday afternoon that i may be a witness for him. there are a number of families boarding in town, who will join the reading. miss h. wanted to give notice from the pulpit, but i could not consent to that.... you say your mother asks about my book. it is a queer one, and i am not satisfied with it; but my husband is, and thinks it will do good. god grant it may. i entitle it paths of peace; or, christian friends in council. [ ] after the most earnest prayer for light, i can not preach sinless perfection. i think god has provided a way to perfection, and that that is, "looking unto jesus." if the "higher life" means utter sinlessness then i shall have to own that i have never had any experience of it. mr. p. has given me a world of anxiety. he will go round everywhere, even on jolting straw-rides; his wound is nearly healed, however. he is _looking_ the picture of health, but feels uncomfortable and sleeps restlessly. i went up to the tavern lately as a great piece of self-denial to call on a lady boarding there, and found i had thus stumbled on to fine gold; the gold you and i love. she is the wife of the rev. mr. r., of flushing. soon after returning to town she began to take lessons in oil painting. her teacher was mrs. julia h. beers--now mrs. kempson--a lady gifted with much of the artistic power belonging to her distinguished brothers, william and james m. hart. in this new pursuit mrs. prentiss passed many very busy and happy hours. the following letter to her husband gives mrs. kempson's recollections of them: firtree cottage, metuchen, _jan. , ._ my dear dr. prentiss:--when the news came of mrs. prentiss' death i felt that i had lost a friend whose place could not be filled. i never had a pupil in whom i was so much interested, or one that i loved so dearly. she has told me many times that "the days spent with me were red-letter days in her life." they certainly were in my own. i shall never forget her first visit to my studio on the corner of fifth avenue and twenty-sixth street. we had not met before, and i felt somewhat awed in the presence of an authoress. but in a few minutes we were fast friends. taking one of my portfolios in her arms she asked, "may i sit down on the floor and take this in my lap?" of course i assented. she pored over the contents with the delight of a child. then turning to me she said, "this is what i have had a craving for all my life. there has always been a want unsupplied; i knew not what it was; but now i know. it was a reaching out for the beautiful. look at my white hair and tell me if it would be possible for me to learn." i replied, "yes, if you desire to do so." "will you take me for a pupil?" she asked. "i do not know which end of the brush to use." "no matter," i said; "i can teach you." she became my pupil and you know the result. but you can not know, as i do, the delight she took in her studies. my ordinary pupils were limited to two hours. but i said to her, "come at ten and stay as long as you please." punctual to the moment she came, seated herself at her easel, and rarely left it while the light lasted. i never saw such enthusiasm or such appreciation. at first her progress was slow, but as she gained knowledge of the materials, it became very rapid. in my opinion she had remarkable talent, and, if spared, might even have made herself a name as an artist. i have had hundreds of pupils, but not one of them ever made such progress. what a delight it was to teach her! all her quaint sayings and her beautifully expressed thoughts i treasured up as precious things. she always brought brightness to the studio with her. i can see her so plainly this moment as she came in one morning. "well," she said, "i thought when i commenced painting if ever i painted a daisy that did not need to be labeled, i should be proud, and i have done it." i wish, dear dr. prentiss, i could recall the thousand and one pleasant things that every now and then have occurred to me, while i was thinking of her. i tried to write to you when i heard of your great loss, but my heart failed me. i could not, nor can i, imagine you living without her. in her last letter to me she says, speaking of my daughter's marriage: i hope thirty years hence the twain will be as much in love with each other as two old codgers of my acquaintance, who go on talking heavenly nonsense to each other after the most approved fashion. how little i then dreamed that we should never meet again! i should much like to see you all. i have not forgotten that pleasant summer at dorset in , nor the great pan of blackberries you picked for me with your own hands. with kindest regards, very sincerely, julia h. kempson. _to mrs. humphrey, new york, dec. ._ after learning how to manage a "bible-reading" by attending miss warner's once a week for four or five months, i got my tongue so loosed that i have held one by request at dorset. the interest in it did not flag all summer, and ladies, young and old, came from all directions, not only to the readings, but with tears to open their hearts to me. some hitherto worldly ones were among the number. i have also helped to start one at elizabeth, another at orange, another at flushing. my husband says if one were held in every church in the land the country would be revolutionised. it is just such work as you would delight in. do forgive the blots; i am tearing away on this letter so that i forget myself and dip up too much ink. i have been urged to hold three readings a week in different parts of the city, but that is not possible. you can't imagine how thankful i am that i have at last found a sphere of usefulness in dorset. we had a great shock last spring when mr. prentiss was stricken down; i do not dare to think how hard it would have been to become husbandless and homeless at one blow. but i well know that no earthly circumstances need really destroy our happiness in that which is, after all, _our life_. even if it is only for the few years before our boys leave home, never to return permanently to it, i shall be thankful to have it left as it is--if that is best. if i had not known what my husband's trouble was, and summoned aid in the twinkling of an eye, dr. buck says he would have died. he would certainly have died if he had been at dorset. he has never recovered his strength, but is able to give his lectures. although i did very little nursing, i got a good deal run down, especially from losing sleep, and have had to go to bed at half-past eight or nine all summer and thus far in the winter. i am taking lessons this winter in oil-painting with a. she has the advantage of me in having had lessons in drawing, while i have had none. my teacher says she never had a beginner do better than i, so i think beginners very awkward mortals, who get paint all over their clothes, hands and faces, and who, if they get a pretty picture, know in the secrecy of their guilty consciences it was done by a compassionate artist who would fain persuade one into the fancy that the work was one's own. what you say about my having done you good surprises me. whatever treasure god has in me is hidden in an earthen vessel and unseen by my own eyes.... i feel every day how much there is to learn, how much to unlearn, and that no genuine experience is to be despised. some people roundly berate christians for want of faith in god's word, when it is want of faith in their own private interpretation of his word. i think that when the very best and wisest of mankind get to heaven, they'll get a standard of holiness that might make them blush; only it is not likely they _will_ blush. in the latter part of this year _urbane and his friends_ appeared. urbane is an aged pastor and his friends are members of his flock, whom he had invited to meet him from week to week for christian counsel and fellowship. some of their names, antiochus, hermes, junia, claudia, apelles and the like, sound rather strange, but, together with those more familiar, they are all borrowed from the new testament. _urbane and his friends_ is the only book of a didactic sort written by mrs. prentiss. it is not, however, wholly didactic, but contains also touches of narrative and character that add to its interest. among the topics discussed are: the bible, temptation, faith, prayer, the mystics, "the higher christian life," service, pain and sorrow, peace and joy, and the indwelling christ. she was dissatisfied with the work and required some persuasion before she would consent to its being published. but its spiritual tone, its tenderness, its "sweet reasonableness," and the bright little pictures of christian truth and life, which enliven its pages, have led some to prize it more than any other of her writings. and here it may not be out of place to insert the following letter of her husband, written several months after her death. it gives her matured views on certain points relating to the christian life, about which there has been no little difference of opinion: new york, _april , ._ my dear friend:--many thanks for your kind words about urbane and his friends. so far at least as the aim and spirit of the book are concerned, no praise could exceed its merits. it was written with a single desire to honor christ by aiding and cheering some of his disciples on their way heavenward. at that time, as you know, there was a good deal of discussion about "the higher christian life" and "holiness through faith." she herself had felt some of the difficulties connected with the subject, and was anxious to reach out a helping hand to others similarly perplexed. i do not think her mind was specially adapted to the didactic style, nor was it much to her taste. when writing in that style her pen did not seem to be entirely at ease, or to move quite at its own sweet will. careful statement and nice theological distinctions were not her forte. and yet her mental grasp of christian doctrine in its vital substance was very firm, and her power of observing, as well as depicting, the most delicate and varying phenomena of the spiritual life was like an instinct. a purer or more whole-hearted love of "the truth as it is in jesus," i never witnessed in any human being. at the same time she was very modest and distrustful of her own judgment when opposed to that of others whom she regarded as experienced christians. i wish you could enjoy a tithe of the happiness that was mine during the winter and spring of - , as, evening after evening, she talked over with me the various points discussed in her book, and then read to me what she had written. those were golden hours indeed--hours in which was fulfilled the saying that is written--_and it came to pass that while they communed together and reasoned, jesus himself drew near_. as i look back to the sabbath evenings passed with her in such converse, they seem to me radiant still with the glory of the risen christ. nor am i able to imagine what else than his presence could have rendered them, at the time, so soothing and blissful. you refer to her fondness for the mystics. she thought that christian piety owes a large debt of gratitude to such writers as thomas à kempis, madame guyon, fenelon, leighton, tersteegen, and others like them in earlier and later times, to whom "the secret of the lord" seemed in a peculiar manner to have been revealed, and who with seraphic zeal trod as well as taught the paths of peace and holiness. while she was writing the chapter on the mystics, i showed her coleridge's tribute to them in his biographia literaria, which greatly pleased her. it is her own experience that she puts into the mouth of urbane, where he says, after quoting coleridge's tribute, "i have no recollection of ever reading this passage till today, but had _toiled out_ its truth for myself, and now set my hand and seal to it." [ ] it is for her, too, as well as for himself, that urbane speaks, where, in answer to hermes' question, "who are the mystics?" he says: they are the men and women known to every age of the church, who usually make their way through the world completely misunderstood by their fellow-men. their very virtues sometimes appear to be vices. they are often the scorn and contempt of their time, and are even persecuted and thrown into prison by those who think they thus do our lord service. but now and then one arises who sees, or thinks he sees, some clue to their lives and their speech. though not of them, he feels a mysterious kinship to them that makes him shrink with pain when he hears them spoken of unjustly. now, i happen to be such a man. i have not built up any pet theory that i want to sustain; i am not in any way bound to fight for any school; but i should be most ungrateful to god and man if i did not acknowledge that i owe much of the sum and substance of the best part of my life to mystical writers--aye, and mystical thinkers, whom i know in the flesh.... i use christ as a magnet, and say to all who cleave to him--even when i can not perfectly agree with them on every point of doctrine: you love christ, therefore i love you. closely allied to her fondness for the mystics was her delight in the doctrine of the indwelling christ. for more than thirty years it was a favorite subject of our sunday and week-day talk. the closing chapters of the gospel of john, the epistle to the ephesians, and other parts of the new testament, in which this most precious truth is enshrined, were especially dear to her. so too, and for the same reason, was lavater's hymn beginning, o jesus christus, wachs in mir-- a hymn with which we became acquainted soon after our marriage, and which i do not doubt she repeated to herself many thousands of times. [ ] the surest way, as she thought, of rising above the bondage of "frames" and entering into the glorious liberty of the sons of god, is to become fully conscious of our actual union to christ and of what is involved in this thrice-sacred union. it is not enough that we trust in him as our saviour and the lord our righteousness; he must also dwell in our hearts by faith as our spiritual life. the union is indeed mystical and indescribable, but none the less real or less joy-inspiring for all that. we want no metaphor and no mere abstraction in our souls; we want christ himself. we want to be able to say in sublime contradiction, "i live, yet not i, but christ liveth in me." and this, too, is the way of sanctification, as well as of rest of conscience. for just in proportion as christ lives in the soul, self goes out and with it sin. just in proportion as self goes out, christ comes in, and with him righteousness, peace, and joy in the holy ghost. but as, in her view, the doctrine of an indwelling christ did not supplant the doctrine of an atoning and interceding christ, so neither did it supplant that of christ as our example or annul the great law of self-sacrifice by which, following in his steps, we also are to be made perfect through suffering. such is a brief outline of her teaching on this subject in urbane and his friends. and from its publication until her death, her theory of the way of holiness reduced itself more and more to these two simple points: christ in the flesh showing and teaching us how to live, and christ in the spirit living in us. and this presence of christ in the soul she regarded, i repeat, as an actual, as well as actuating, presence; mediated indeed, like his sacrifice upon the cross, by the holy ghost. but, as "through the eternal spirit he offered himself without spot unto god," even so in and through the same eternal spirit, he himself comes and takes up his abode in the hearts of his faithful disciples. his indwelling is not a mere metaphor, not a bare moral relation, but the most blessed reality--a veritable union of life and love. she thought that much of the meaning and comfort of the doctrine was sometimes lost by not keeping this point in mind. in a letter written not long before her death, she reiterated very strongly her conviction on this subject, appealing to our lord's teaching in the seventeenth chapter of john. [ ] and this brings me to what you say about the chapter entitled the mystics of to-day; or, "the higher christian life," and to your inquiry as to her later views on the question. you are quite right in supposing that while writing this chapter she had a good deal of sympathy with some of the advocates of the "higher life" doctrine. she heartily agreed with them in believing that it is the privilege of christ's disciples to rise to a much higher state of holy love, assurance, and rest of soul than the most of them seem ever to reach in this world; and further, that such a spiritual uplifting may come, and sometimes does come, in the way of a sudden and extraordinary experience. but it is never without a history. she gives a beautiful picture of such an experience in the case of stephanas, who was "as gay as any boy," and then adds: "now, the descent of the blessing was sudden and lifted him at once into a new world, but the preparation for it had been going on ever since he learned to pray." but while agreeing with the advocates of the higher life doctrine in some points, she was far from agreeing with them in all. and her disagreement increased and grew more decided in her later years. the subject is often alluded to in her letters to christian friends; and should these letters ever be published, they will answer your inquiry much better than i can do. the points in the "higher life" and "holiness through faith" views which she most strongly dissented from, related to the question of perfection. the christian life--this was her view--is subject to the great law of growth. it is a process, an education, and not a mere volition, or series of volitions. its progress may be rapid, but, ideally considered, each new stage is conditioned by the one that went before: _first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear_. it embraces the whole spirit and soul and body; and its perfect development, therefore, is a very comprehensive thing, touching the length and breadth, the depth and height of our entire being. it is also, in its very nature, conflict as well as growth; the forces of evil must be vanquished, and these forces, whether acting through body, soul, or spirit, are very subtle, treacherous, and often occult, as well as very potent; the best man on earth, if left to himself, would fall a prey to them. no fact of religious experience is more striking than this, that the higher men rise in real goodness--the nearer they come to god, the more keen-eyed and distressed are they to detect evil in themselves. their sense of sin seems to be in a sort of inverse ratio to their freedom from its power. and we meet with a similar fact in the natural life. the finer and more exalted the sentiment of purity and honor, the more sensitive will one be to the slightest approach to what is impure or dishonorable in one's own character and conduct. such is substantially her ground of dissent from the "higher life" theory. her own sense of sin was so profound and vivid that she shuddered at the thought of claiming perfection for herself; and it seemed to her a very sad delusion for anybody else to claim it. true holiness is never self-conscious; it does not look at itself in the glass; and if it did, it would see only christ, not itself, reflected there. this was her way of looking at the subject; and she came to regard all theories, still more all professions, of entire sanctification as fallacious and full of peril--not a help, but a serious hindrance to real christian holiness. for several years she not only read but carefully studied the most noted writers who advocated the "higher life" and "holiness through faith" doctrines, and her testimony was that they had done her harm. "i find myself spiritually injured by them," she wrote to a friend less than two years before her death. "how do you explain the fact," she added, "that truly good people are left to produce such an effect? is it not to shut us up to christ? what a relief it will be to get beyond our own weaknesses, and those of others! i long for that day." i have just alluded to her deep, vivid consciousness of sin. it would have been an intolerable burden, had not her feeling of god's infinite grace and love in christ been still more vivid and profound. the little allegory in the ninth chapter of urbane and his friends expresses very happily this feeling. there are several other points in her theory of the christian life, to which she attached much importance. one is the close connexion between suffering in some form and holiness, or growth in grace. the cross the way to the crown--this thought runs, like a golden thread, through all the records of her religious history. she expressed it while a little girl, as she sat one day with a young friend on a tombstone in the old burying-ground at portland. it occurs again and again in her early letters; in one written in she says: "i thought to myself that if god continued his faithfulness towards me, i shall have afflictions such as i now know nothing more of than the name"; in another written four years later, in the midst of the sweetest joy: "i know there are some of the great lessons of life yet to be learned; i believe i must _suffer_ as long as i have an earthly existence." and in after years, when it formed so large an element in her own experience, she came to regard suffering, when sanctified by the word of god and by prayer, as the king's highway to christian perfection. this point is often referred to and illustrated in her various writings--more especially in stepping heavenward and golden hours. possibly she carried her theory a little too far; perhaps it does not appear to be always verified in actual christian experience; but, certainly, no one can deny that it is in harmony with the general teaching of inspired scripture and with the spirit of catholic piety in all ages. [ ] another point, which also found illustration in her books, is the vital connexion between the habit of devout communion with god in christ and all the daily virtues and charities of religion; another still is the close affinity between depth in piety and the highest, sweetest enjoyment of earthly good. her own christian life was to me a study from the beginning. it had heights and depths of its own, which awed me and which i could not fully penetrate. jonathan edwards' exquisite description of sarah pierrepont at the age of thirteen, mrs. edwards' own account of her religious exercises after her marriage, and goethe's "confessions of a beautiful soul," always reminded me of some of its characteristic features. if my pastoral ministrations gave any aid and comfort to other souls, i can truly say it was all largely due to her. and as for myself, my debt of gratitude to her as a spiritual helper and friend in christ was, and is, and ever will be, unspeakable. the instant i began to know her, i began to feel the cheering influence and uplifting power of her faith. for more than a third of a century it was the most constant and by far the strongest human force that wrought in my religious life. nor was it a human force alone; for surely faith like hers is in real contact with christ himself and is an inspiration of his spirit. she longed so to live and move and have her being in love to christ, that nobody could come near her without being straightway reminded of him. she seemed to be always saying to herself, in the words of an old irish hymn: [ ] christ with me, christ before me, christ behind me, christ within me, christ beneath me, christ above me, christ at my right, christ at my left, christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me, christ in every eye that sees me, christ in every ear that hears me. such was her constant prayer; and it was answered in the experience of many souls, whose faith was kindled into a brighter flame by the intense ardor of hers. so long and so closely, in my own mind, was she associated with christ, that the thought of her still reminds me of him as naturally as does reading about him in the new testament. the allegory referred to above is here given: a benevolent man found a half-starved, homeless, blind beggar-boy in the streets of a great city. he took him, just as he was, to his own house, adopted him as his own son, and began to educate him. but the boy learned very slowly, and his face was often sad. his father asked him why he did not fix his mind more upon his lessons, and why he was not cheerful and happy, like the other children. the boy replied that his mind was constantly occupied with the fear that he had not been really adopted as a son, and might at any moment learn his mistake. _father_. but can you not believe me when i assure you that you are my own dear son? _boy_. i can not, for i can see no reason why you should adopt me. i was a poor, bad boy; you did not need any more children, for you had a house full of them, and i never can do anything for you. _father_. you can love me and be happy, and as you grow older and stronger you can work for me. _boy_. i am afraid i do not love you; that is what troubles me. _father_. would you not be very sorry to have me deny that you are my son, and turn you out of the house? _boy_. oh, yes! but perhaps that is because you take good care of me, not because i love you. _father_. suppose, then, i should provide some one else to take care of you, and should then leave you. _boy_. that would be dreadful. _father_. why? you would be taken good care of, and have every want supplied. _boy_. but i should have no father. i should lose the best thing i have. i should be lonely. _father_. you see you love me a little, at all events. now, do you think i love you? _boy_. i don't see how you can. i am such a bad boy and try your patience so. and i am not half as thankful to you for your goodness as i ought to be. sometimes, for a minute, i think to myself, he _is_ my father and he really loves me; then i do something wrong, and i think nobody would want such a boy, nobody can love such a boy. _father_. my son, i tell you that i do love you, but you can not believe it because you do not know me. and you do not know me because you have not seen me, because you are blind. i must have you cured of this blindness. so the blind boy had the scales removed from his eyes and began to see. he became so interested in using his eyesight that, for a time, he partially lost his old habit of despondency. but one day, when it began to creep back, he saw his father's face light up with love as one after another of his children came to him for a blessing, and said to himself: _they_ are his own children, and it is not strange that he loves them, and does so much to make them happy. but i am nothing but a beggar-boy; he can't love me. i would give anything if he could. then the father asked why his face was sad, and the boy told him. _father_. come into this picture gallery and tell me what you see. _boy_. i see a portrait of a poor, ragged, dirty boy. and here is another. and another. why, the gallery is full of them! _father_. do you see anything amiable and lovable in any of them? _boy_. oh, no. _father_. do you think i love your brothers? _boy_. i know you do! _father_. well, here they are, just as i took the poor fellows out of the streets. _boy_. out of the streets as you did me? they are all your adopted sons? _father_. every one of them. _boy_. i don't understand it. what made you do it? _father_. i loved them so that i could not help it. _boy_. i never heard of such a thing! you loved those miserable beggar- boys? then you must be made of love! _father_. i am. and that is the reason i am so grieved when some such boys refuse to let me become their father. _boy_. refuse? oh, how can they? refuse to become your own dear sons? refuse to have such a dear, kind, patient father? refuse _love?_ _father_. my poor blind boy, don't you now begin to see that i do not wait for these adopted sons of mine to wash and clothe themselves, to become good, and obedient, and affectionate, but loved them _because_ they were such destitute, wicked, lost boys? i did not go out into the streets to look for well-dressed, well-cared-for, faultless children, who would adorn my house and shine in it like jewels. i sought for outcasts; i loved them as outcasts; i knew they would be ungrateful and disobedient, and never love me half as much as i did them; but that made me all the more sorry for them. see what pains i am taking with them, and how beautifully some of them are learning their lessons. and now tell me, my son, in seeing this picture gallery, do you not begin to see me? could anything less than love take in such a company of poor beggars? _boy_. yes, my father, i do begin to see it. i do believe that i know you better now than i ever did before. i believe you love even me. and now i _know_ that i love you! _father_. now, then, my dear son, let that vexing question drop forever, and begin to act as my son and heir should. you have a great deal to learn, but i will myself be your teacher, and your mind is now free to attend to my instructions. do you find anything to love and admire in your brothers? _boy_. indeed i do. _father_. you shall be taught the lessons that have made them what they are. meanwhile i want to see you look cheerful and happy, remembering that you are in your father's heart. _boy_. dear father, i will! but oh, help me to be a better son! _father_. dear boy, i will. [ ] in union theological seminary, new york. [ ] the baptism of the holy ghost, by rev. asa mahau, d.d., p. . [ ] dr. l. h. hemenway. [ ] some of the charades referred to will be found in appendix e, p. . [ ] referring to the following hymn composed by madame guyon in prison: a little bird i am, shut out from fields of air, and in my cage i sit and sing to him who placed me there. well-pleased a prisoner to be, because, my god, it pleaseth thee. naught have i else to do; i sing the whole day long; and he, whom most i love to please, doth listen to my song. he caught and bound my wandering wing, but still he bends to hear me sing. [ ] mrs. de witt was the wife of the rev. thomas de witt, d.d., a man of deep learning, an able preacher in the dutch language as well as the english, and universally revered for his exalted christian virtues. he was a minister of the collegiate church, new york, for nearly half a century. he died may , , in the eighty-third year of his age. here are other sentences uttered by him at the grave of his wife: "farewell, my beloved, honored, and faithful wife! the tie that united us is severed. thou art with jesus in glory; he is with me by his grace. i shall soon be with you. farewell!" [ ] prof. smith had been suddenly stricken down by severe illness and with difficulty removed to the well-known sanitarium at clifton springs. [ ] referring to the book in a letter to a friend, written shortly after its publication, she says: "of course it will meet with rough treatment in some quarters, as indeed it has already done. i doubt if any one works very hard for christ who does not have to be misunderstood and perhaps mocked." [ ] one of the best notices appeared in the churchman, an episcopal newspaper then published at hartford, but since transferred to new york. here is a part of it: "for purity of thought, earnestness and spirituality of feeling, and smoothness of diction, they are all, without exception, good--if they are not great. if no one rises to the height which other poets have occasionally reached, they are, nevertheless, always free from those defects which sometimes mar the perfectness of far greater productions. each portrays some human thirst or longing, and so touches the heart of every thoughtful reader. there is a sweetness running through them all which comes from a higher than earthly source, and which human wisdom can neither produce nor enjoy." [ ] _golden hours_. [ ] the name given to the dorset home. [ ] afterwards changed to _urbane and his friends_. [ ] the passage from coleridge is as follows: "the feeling of gratitude which i cherish towards these men has caused me to digress further than i had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon; for the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any dogmatic system. they contributed to keep alive the _heart_ in the _head_; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment that all the products of the mere _reflective_ faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling of twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which i had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. if they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy desert of utter unbelief." [ ] see her translation of the hymn in _golden hours_, p. . the original will be found in appendix c, p. . [ ] i in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.--v. . [ ] there should be no greater comfort to christian persons, than to be made like unto christ, by suffering patiently adversities, troubles, and sicknesses. for he himself went not up to joy, but first he suffered pain; he entered not into his glory, before he was crucified. so truly our way to eternal joy is to suffer here with christ.--(the book of common prayer.) [ ] ascribed to st. patrick, on the occasion of his appearing before king laoghaire. chapter xiv. work and play. - . i. a bible-reading in new york. her painting. "grace for grace." death of a young friend. the summer at dorset. bible-readings there. encompassed with kindred. typhoid fever in the house. watching and waiting. the return to town. a day of family rejoicing. life a "battle-field." her time and thoughts during were mostly taken up by her bible- readings, her painting, the society of kinsfolk from the east and the west, getting her eldest son ready for college, and by the dangerous illness of her youngest daughter. some extracts from the few letters belonging to this year will give the main incidents of its history. _to a young friend, jan. , ._ i have had two bible-readings, and they bid fair to be more like those of last winter than i had dared to hope. there are earnest, thoughtful, praying souls present, who help me in conducting the meeting, and you would be astonished to see how much better i can do when not under the keen embarrassment of delivering a lecture, as at dorset.... i have a young friend about your age who is dying of consumption, and it is very delightful to see how happy she is. she used to attend the bible-readings last winter. about the painting? well, i have dug away, and mrs. beers painted out and painted in, till i have got a beautiful great picture almost entirely done by her. then i undertook the old fence with the clematis on it here at home, and made a _horrid_ daub. she painted most of that out, and is having me do it at the studio. meanwhile, i have worked on another she lent me, and finished it to-day, and they all say that it is a success. in my last two lessons mrs. b. contrived to let some light into my bewildered brain, and says that if i paint with her this winter and next summer i shall be able to do what i please. my most discouraging time, she says, is over. not that i have been discouraged an atom! i have great faith in a strong will and a patient perseverance, and have had no idea of saying die.... some lady in philadelphia bought forty copies of urbane. it was very discriminating in you to see how comforting to me would be that passage from robertson. god only fully knows how i have got my "education." the school has at times been too awful to talk about to any being save him. [ ] _to mrs. humphrey, new york, april , ._ my point about "grace for grace" [ ] is this: i believe in "growth in grace," but i also believe in, because i have experienced it and find my experience in the word of god, a work of the spirit subsequent to conversion (not necessary in all cases, perhaps, but in all cases where christian life begins and continues feebly), which puts the soul into new conditions of growth. if a plant is sickly and drooping, you must change its atmosphere before you can cure it or make it grow. a great many years ago, _disgusted_ with my spiritual life, i was led into new relations to christ to which i could give no name, for i never had heard of such an experience. when we moved into this house, i found a paper that had long been buried among rubbish, in which i said, "i am one great long sunbeam"; and i don't know any words, that, on the whole, could better cover most of my life since then. i have been a great sufferer, too; but that has, in the main, nothing to do with one's relation to christ, except that most forms of pain bring him nearer. now, one can not read "grace for grace" without loving and sympathising with the author, because of his deep-seated longing for, and final attainment of, holiness; but it seemed to me there was a good deal of needless groping, which more looking to christ might have spared him. it is, as you say, curious to see how people who agree in so many points differ so in others. i suspect it is because our degrees of faith vary; the one who believes most gets most. the subject of sin _versus_ sinlessness is the vexed question, on which, as fast as most people get or think they get light, somebody comes along and snuffs out their candles with unceremonious finger and thumb. a dearly-beloved woman spent a month with me last spring. she thinks she is "kept" from sin, and certainly the change from a most estimable but dogmatic character is absolutely wonderful.... there was this discrepancy between her experience and mine, with, on all other points, the most entire harmony. she had had no special, joyful revelations of christ to her soul, and i had had them till it seemed as if body and soul would fly apart. on the other hand she had a sweet sense of freedom from sin which transcended anything i had ever had consciously; although i really think that when one is "looking unto jesus," one is not likely to fall into much noticeable sin. talking with miss s. about the two experiences of my dear friend and myself, she said that it could be easily explained by the fact that _all_ the gifts of the spirit were rarely, if ever, given to one soul. she is very (properly) reticent as to what she has herself received, but she behaved in such a beautiful, christlike way on a point where we differed, a point of practice, that i can not doubt she has been unusually blest. early in may of this year she was afflicted by the sudden death in paris of a very dear friend of her eldest daughter, miss virginia s. osborn. [ ] during the previous summer miss osborn had passed several weeks at dorset and endeared herself, while there, to all the family. the following is from a letter of mrs. prentiss to the bereaved mother: i feel much more like sitting down and weeping with you than attempting to utter words of consolation. nowhere out of her own home was virginia more beloved and admired than in our family; we feel afflicted painfully at what to our human vision looks like an unmitigated calamity. but if it is so hard for us to bear, to whom in no sense she belonged, what a heartrending event this is to you, her mother! what an amazement, what a mystery. but it will not do to look upon it on this side. we must not associate anything so unnatural as death with a being so eminently formed for life. we must look beyond, as soon as our tears will let us, to the sphere on which she has been honored to enter in her brilliant youth; to the society of the noblest and the best human beings earth has ever known; to the fulness of life, the perfection of every gift and grace, to congenial employment, to the welcome of him who has conquered death and brought life and immortality to light. if we think of her as in the grave, we must own that hers was a hard lot; but she is not in a grave; she is at home; she is well, she is happy, she will never know a bereavement, or a day's illness, or the infirmities and trials of old age; she has got the secret of perpetual youth. but while these thoughts assuage our grief, they can not wholly allay it. we have no reason to doubt that she would have given and received happiness here upon earth, had she been spared; and we can not help missing her, mourning for her, longing for her, out of the very depths of our hearts. the only real comfort is that god never makes mistakes; that he would not have snatched her from us, if he had not had a reason that would satisfy us if we knew it. i can not tell you with what tender sympathy i think of your return to your desolate home; the agonizing meeting with your bereaved boys; the days and nights that have to be lived through, face to face with a great sorrow. may god bless and keep you all. _to mrs. condict, dorset, july , ._ i have been sitting at my window, enjoying the clear blue sky, and the "living green" of the fields and woods, and wishing you were here to share it all with me. but as you are not, the next best thing is to write you. you seem to have been wafted into that strange sea-side spot, to do work there, and i hope you will have health and strength for it. one of the signs of the times is the way in which the hand of providence scatters "city folks" all about in waste places, there to sow seed that in his own time shall spring up and bear fruit for him. i was shocked at what you said about miss ---- not recognising you. it seemed almost incredible. mr. prentiss has persuaded me to have a family bible-reading on sunday afternoon, as we have no service, and studying up for it this morning i came to this proverb which originated with huss, whose name in bohemian signifies goose. he said at the stake: "if you burn a goose a swan will rise from its ashes"; and i thought--well, miss ----'s usefulness is at an end, but god can, and no doubt will, raise up a swan in her place. about forty now attend my bible-reading. we have my eldest brother here and he is a perfect enthusiast about dorset, and has enjoyed his visit immensely. he said yesterday that he had laughed more that afternoon than in the previous ten years. we expect dr. stearns and his daughter on the th, and when they leave mr. p. intends to go to maine and try a change of air and scene. i hate to have him go; his trouble of last year keeps me uneasy, if he is long out of my sight. _to the same, dorset, aug., ._ i have just written a letter to my husband, from whom i have been separated a whole day. he has gone to maine, partly to see friends, partly to get a little sea air. he wanted me to go with him, but it would have ended in my getting down sick. this summer i am encompassed with relatives; two of my brothers, a nephew, a cousin, a second cousin, and in a day or two one brother's wife and child, and two more second cousins are to come; not to our house, but to board next door. there is a troop of artists swarming the tavern; all ladies, some of them very congenial, cultivated, excellent persons. they are all delighted with dorset, and it is pleasant to stumble on little groups of them at their work. a. has been out sketching with them and succeeds very well. i have given up painting landscapes and taken to flowers. i have just had a visit here in my room from three humming-birds. they are attracted by the flowers... one of the cousins is just now riding on the lawn. her splendid hair has come down and covers her shoulders; and with her color, always lovely, heightened by exercise and pleasure, she makes a beautiful picture. what is nicer than an unsophisticated young girl? i have no time for reading this summer among the crowd; but one can not help thinking wherever one is, and i have come to this conclusion: happiness in its strictest sense is found only in christ; at the same time there are many sources of enjoyment independently of him. it is getting dark and i can not see my lines. i am more and more puzzled about good people making such mistakes. dr. stearns says that the rev. mr. ---- has been laying his hands on people and saying, "receive the holy ghost." such excesses give me great doubt and pain. _to the same, sept. , ._ your letter came to find me in a sorrowful and weary spot. my dear m. lies here with typhoid fever, and my heart and soul and body are in less than a fortnight of it pretty well used up, and my husband is in almost as bad a case with double anxiety, he and a. expecting every hour to see me break down. it has been an awful pull for us all, for not one of us has an atom of health to spare, and only keep about by avoiding all the wear and tear we can. dr. buck has sent us an excellent english nurse; she came yesterday and insisted on sitting up with m. all night and we all _dropped_ into our beds like so many shot birds. i heard her go down for ice three times, so i knew my precious lamb was not neglected, and slept in peace. we are encompassed with mercies; the physician who drives over from manchester is as skilful as he is conscientious; this house is admirably adapted to sickness, the stairway only nine feet high, plenty of water, and my room, which i have given her, admits of her lying in a draught as the doctor wishes her to do. while the nurse is sleeping, as she is now, a. and i take turns sitting out on the piazza, where there is a delicious breeze almost always blowing. the ladies here are disappointed that i can no longer hold the bible- readings, but it is not so much matter that i am put off work if you are put on it; the field is one, and the master knows whom to use and when and where. we have been reading with great delight a little book called "miracles of faith." i am called to m., who has had a slight chill, and of course high fever after it. it seems painfully unnatural to see my sunbeam turned into a dark cloud, and it distresses me so to see her suffer that i don't know how i am going to stand it. but i won't plague you with any more of this, nor must i forget how often i have said, "thy will be done." you need not doubt that god's will looks so much better to us than our own, that nothing would tempt us to decide our child's future. _to her eldest son, dorset, sept. , ._ your letters are a great comfort to us, and the way to get many is to write many. m.'s fever ran twenty-one days, as the doctor said it would, and began to break yesterday. on friday it ran very high; her pulse was and her temperature --bad, bad, bad. she is very, very weak. we have sent away pharaoh and the kitten; pha _would_ bark, and kit _would_ come in and stare at her, and both made her cry. the doctor has the house kept still as the grave; he even brought over his slippers lest his step should disturb her. she is not yet out of danger; so you must not be too elated. we four are sitting in the dining-room with a hot fire; papa is reading aloud to a. and h.; it is evening, and m. has had her opiate, and is getting to sleep. i have not much material of which to make letters, sitting all day in a dark room in almost total silence. the artists are rigging up the church beautifully with my flowers, etc., mr. palmer and mr. lawrence lending their aid. your father is reading about hans andersen; you must read the article in the living age, no. , ; it is ever so funny. i had such a queer dream last night. i dreamed that maggie plagued us so that your father went to new york and brought back _two_ cooks. i said i only wanted one. "oh, but these are so rare," he said; "come out and see them." so he led me into the kitchen, and there sat at the table, eating dinner very solemnly, two _ostriches_! now what that dream was made of i can not imagine. now i must go to bed, pretty tired. when you are lonely and blue, think how we all love you. goodnight, dear old fellow. _sept. st._--it cuts me to the heart, my precious boy, that your college life begins under such a shadow. but i hope you know where to go in both loneliness and trouble. you may get a telegram before this reaches you; if you do not you had better pack your valise and have it ready for you to come at a minute's warning. the doctor gives us hardly a hope that m. will live; she may drop away at any moment. while she does live you are better off at princeton; but when she is gone we shall all want to be together. we shall have her buried here in dorset; otherwise i never should want to come here again. a. said this was her day to write you, but she had no heart to do it. the only thing i can do while m. is asleep, is to write letters about her. good-night, dear boy. _ d_--the doctor was here from eight to nine last night and said she would suffer little more and sleep her life away. _she_ says she is nicely and the nurse says so. your father and i have had a good cry this morning, which has done us no little service. dear boy, this is a bad letter for you, but i have done the best i can. _to mrs. george payson, new york, oct. , _ i hope you received the postal announcing our safe arrival home. i have been wanting to answer your last letter, but now that the awful strain is over i begin to flag, am tired and lame and sore, and any exertion is an effort. but after all the dismal letters i have had to write, i want to tell you what a delightful day yesterday was to us all; g. home from princeton, all six of us at the table at once, "eating our meat with gladness"; the pleasantest _family_ day of our lives. m.'s recovery during the last week has been little short of miraculous. we got her home, after making such a bugbear of it, in perfect comfort. we left dorset about noon in a close carriage; the doctor and his wife were at the station and weighed m., when we found she had lost thirty-six pounds. the coachman took her in his arms and carried her into the car, when who should meet us but the warners. on reaching the new york depot, george rushed into the car in such a state of wild excitement that he took no notice of any one but m.; he then flew out and a man flew in, and without saying a word snatched her up in his arms, whipped her into a reclining-chair, and he and another man scampered with her to the carriage and seated her in it; i had to run to keep up with them, and nearly knocked down a gigantic policeman who was guarding it. the warners spent the night here and left next morning before i was up, so afraid of making trouble.... a friend has put a carriage at our disposal, and m. is to drive every day when and where and as long as she pleases. and now i hope i shall have something else to write about.... as to the bible-readings, i do not find commentaries of much use. experience of life has been my chief earthly teacher, and one gains that every day. you must not write me such long letters; it is too much for you. how i do wish you would do something desperate about getting well! at any rate, _don't_, any of you, have typhoid fever. it is the very meanest old snake of a fox i ever heard of, making its way like a masked burglar. _to mrs. condict, new york, nov , ._ we came home on the th of october; m. bore the journey wonderfully well, and has improved so fast that she drives all round the park every day, miss w. having put a carriage at our disposal. how delightful it is to get my family together once more no tongue can tell, nor did i realise all i was suffering till the strain was over. i am longing to get physical strength for work, but my husband is very timid about my undertaking anything.... dr. ludlow [ ] was here one day last week to ask me to give a talk, in his study, to some of his young christians; but my husband told him it was out of the question at present. i shall be delighted to do it; much of my experience of life has cost me a great price, and i want to use it for the strengthening and comforting of other souls. no doubt you feel so too. whatever may be said to the contrary by others, to me life has been a battle-field, and i believe always will be; but is the soldier necessarily unhappy and disgusted because he is fighting? i trow not. i am reading the history of the oxford conference; [ ] there is a great deal in it to like, but what do you think of this saying of its leader? "did it ever strike you, dear christian, that if the poor world could know what we are in christ, it would worship us?" [ ] _i_ say _pshaw!_ what a fallacy! _why_ should it worship us when it rejects christ? well, we have to take even the best people as they are. a few weeks later she met a company of the young ladies of dr. ludlow's church and gave them a familiar talk on the christian life. the following letter from dr. l. will show how much they were interested: dear mrs. prentiss:--i find that you have so taken hold of the young ladies of my church that it will be hard for you to relieve yourself of them. they insist on meeting you again. the hesitancy to ask you questions last thursday was due to the large number present. i have asked _only the younger ones_ to come this week--those who are either "seeking the way," or are just at its beginning. _five_ of those you addressed last week have announced their purpose of confessing christ at the coming communion. several questions have come from those silent lips which i am requested to submit to you: "what is it to believe?" "how much feeling of love must i have before i can count myself jesus' disciple?" "i am troubled with my lack of feeling. i know that sin is heinous, but do not feel deep abhorrence of it. i know that jesus will save me, but i have no enthusiasm of gratitude. am i a christian?" "i am afraid to confess christ lest i should not honor him in my life, for i am naturally impulsive and easily fall into religious thoughtlessness. should i wait for an inward assurance of strength, or begin a christian life trusting him to help me?" any of these topics will be very pertinent. i trust that nothing will prevent you from being present on thursday afternoon. i will call for you. the limited number who will be present will give you a better working basis than you had last week. the _older young_ ladies have assented to their exclusion this week on the condition that at some time they too can come. very gratefully yours, james m. ludlow. in a letter dated may , , dr. ludlow thus refers to these meetings: i regret that i can not speak more definitely of mrs. prentiss' conversations with the young ladies of my charge, as it was my custom to withdraw from the room after a few introductory words, so that she could speak to them with the familiarity of a mother. i know that all that group felt the warmth of her interest in them, the charm of her character which was so refined by her love of christ and strengthened by her experience of needed grace, as well as the wisdom of her words. i was impressed, from so much as i did hear of her remarks, with her ability to combine rarest beauty and highest spirituality of thought with the utmost simplicity of language and the plainest illustrations. her conversation was like the mystic ladder which was "_set up on the earth,_ and the top of it _reached to heaven._" her most solemn counsel was given in such a way as never to repress the buoyant feeling of the young, but rather to direct it toward the true "joy of the lord." she seemed to regard the cheer of to-day as much of a religious duty as the hope for to-morrow, and those with whom she conversed partook of her own peace. i shall always remember these meetings as among the happiest and most useful associations of my ministry in new york. * * * * * ii. the moody and sankey meetings. her interest in them. mr. moody. publication of _griselda_. goes to the centennial. at dorset again. her bible-reading. a moody-meeting convert. visit to montreal. publication of _the home at greylock_. her theory of a happy home. marrying for love. her sympathy with young mothers. letters. the early months of were very busily spent in painting pictures for friends, in attendance upon mr. moody's memorable services at the hippodrome, and in writing a book for young mothers. before going to dorset for the summer she passed a week at philadelphia, visiting the centennial exhibition. her letters during the winter and spring of this year relate chiefly to these topics. _to a christian friend, feb. , ._ you gave me a good deal of a chill by your long silence, and i find it a little hard to be taken up and dropped and then taken up; still, almost everybody has these fitful ways, and very likely i myself among that number. your little boy must take a world of time, and open a new world of thought and feeling. but don't spoil him; the best child can be made hateful by mismanagement. i am trying to write a book for mothers and find it a discouraging work, because i find, on scrutiny, such awfully radical defects among them. and yet such a book would have helped me in my youthful days. you ask if i have been to hear moody; yes, i have and am deeply interested in him and his work. yesterday afternoon he had a meeting for christian workers, in which his sound common-sense created great merriment. some objected to this, but i liked it because it was so genuine, and, to my mind, not un-christlike. so many fancy religion and a long face synonymous. how stupid it is! i wonder they don't object to the sun for shining. i am glad you think urbane may be useful, for i hear little from it. junia's story is true as far as the laudanum and the blindness go; it happened years ago. i do not know what religious effect it had. as to the friend of whom you speak, she would not love you as you say she does if her case was hopeless; at least i don't think so. i am oppressed with the case of one who wants me to help him to christ, while unwilling to confide to me his difficulties. how little they know how we care for their souls! _to mrs. george payson, feb , ._ i have been trying to do more than any mortal can, and now must stop to take breath and write to you. in the first place, m.'s illness cut out three months; then fitting up g.'s room at princeton took a large part of the next three; then ever so many people wanted me to paint them pictures; then i began a book; then moody and sankey appeared, and i wanted to hear them, and was needed to work in co-operation with them. i don't know how you feel about moody, but i am in full sympathy with him, and last friday the testimony of four of the cured "gin-pigs" (their own language) was the most instructive, interesting language i ever heard from human lips. in talking to those he has drawn into the inquiry rooms, i find the most bitterly wretched ones are back-sliders; they are not without hope, and expect to be saved at last; but they have been trying what the world could do for them and found it a failure. their anguish was harrowing; one after another tried to help them, and gave up in despair. i had a vase given me at christmas somewhat like yours, but a trifle larger, and shaped like a fish. the flowers never fell out but once. i had two little tables given me on which to set my majolica vases, with india-rubber plants, which will grow where nothing else will; also a desk and bookcase, and two splendid specimens of grass which grew in california, and had been bleached to a creamy white. they are more beautiful than pampa, or even feather-grass. a. is driven to death about a fair for the young women's christian association. i have given it a german tragedy which i translated a few years ago. [ ] they expect to make $ , on it, but randolph says if they make half that they may thank their stars. i have spent all my evenings of late in revising it, and it goes to the printers to-day. george is going to deliver a literary lecture for the same object this evening, this being the age of obedient parents. no, i never saw and never painted any window-screens. the best things i have done are trailing arbutus and apple-blossoms. a. invited me to do apple-blossoms for her, and said she should have to own that i had more artistic power than herself. i don't agree with her, but it is a matter of no consequence, anyhow. it is a shame for you to buy little lou; i meant to send you one and thought i had done so. the bright speeches are mostly genuine, made by eddy hopkins and ned and charley p. how came you to have blooming hepaticas? it is outrageous. my plants do better this winter than ever before. i have had hyacinths in bloom, and a plant given me, covered with red berries, has held its own. it hangs in a glass basket the boys gave me and has a white dove brooding over it. let me inform you that i have lost my mind. a friend dined with us on sunday, and i asked him when i saw him last. "why, yesterday," he said, "when i met you at randolph's by appointment." there, i must stop and go to work on one of my numerous irons. the "german tragedy" referred to fell into her hands in the spring of , and her letters, written at the time, show how it delighted her. it is, indeed, a literary gem. the works of its author, baron münch- bellinghausen--for friederich halm is a pseudonym--are much less known in this country than they deserve to be. he is one of the most gifted of the minor poets of germany, a master of vivid style and of impressive, varied, and beautiful thought. _griselda_ first appeared at vienna in . it was enthusiastically received and soon passed through several editions. the scene of the poem is laid in wales, in the days of king arthur. the plot is very simple. percival, count of wales, who had married griselda, the daughter of a charcoal burner, appears at court on occasion of a great festival, in the course of which he is challenged by ginevra, the queen, to give an account of griselda, and to tell how he came to wed her. he readily consents to do so, but has hardly begun when the queen and ladies of the court, by their mocking air and questions, provoke him to such anger that swords are at length drawn between him and sir lancelot, a friend of the queen, and only the sudden interposition of the king prevents a bloody conflict. the feud ends in a wager, by which it is agreed that if griselda's love to percival endure certain tests, the queen shall kneel to her; otherwise, percival shall kneel to the queen. the tests are applied, and the young wife's love, although perplexed and tortured in the extreme, triumphantly endures them all. the character of griselda, as maiden, daughter, wife, mother, and woman, is wrought with exquisite skill, and betokens in the author rare delicacy and nobility of sentiment, as well as deep knowledge of the human heart. the following extract gives a part of percival's description of griselda: percival. plague take these women's tongues! ginevra (_to her party_). control your wit and mirth, compose your faces, that longer yet this pastime may amuse us! now, percival, proceed! percival. what was i saying? i have it now! beside the brook she stood; her dusky hair hung rippling round her face. and perched upon her shoulders sat a dove; right home-like sat she there, her wings scarce moving. now suddenly she stoops--i mean the maiden-- down to the spring, and lets her little feet sink in its waters, while her colored skirt covered with care what they did not conceal; and i within the shadow of the trees, inly admired her graceful modesty. and as she sat and gazed into the brook, plashing and sporting with her snow-white feet, she thought not of the olden times, when girls pleased to behold their faces smiling back from the smooth water, used it as their mirror by which to deck themselves and plait their hair; but like a child she sat with droll grimaces, delighted when the brook gave back to her her own distorted charms; so then i said: conceited is she not. kenneth. the charming child! ellinor. what is a collier's child to you! by heaven! don't make me fancy that you know her, sir! percival. and now resounding through the mountain far, from the church-tower rang forth the vesper-bell, and she grew grave and still, and shaking quickly from off her face the hair that fell around it, she cast a thoughtful and angelic glance upward, where clouds had caught the evening red. and her lips gently moved with whispered words, as rose-leaves tremble when the soft winds breathe. o she is saintly, flashed it through my soul; she marking on her brow the holy cross, lifted her face, bright with the sunset's flush, while holy longing and devotion's glow, moistened her eye and hung like glory round her. then to her breast the little dove she clasped, embraced, caressed it, kissed its snow-white wings, and laughed; when, with its rose-red bill, it pecked, as if with longing for her fresh young lips. how she'd caress it, said i to myself, were this her child, the offspring of her love! and now a voice resounded through the woods, and cried, "griselda," cried it, "come, griselda!" while she, the distant voice's sound distinguished, sprang quickly up, and scarcely lingering her feet to dry, ran up the dewy bank with lightning speed, her dove in circles o'er her, till in the dusky thicket disappeared for me the last edge of her flutt'ring robe. "obedient is she," said i to myself; and many things revolving, turned i home. ginevra. by heaven! you tell your tale so charmingly, and with such warmth and truth to life, the hearer out of your words can shape a human form. why, i can see this loveliest of maidens sit by the brook-side making her grimaces; they are right pretty faces spite of coal-smut. is it not so, sir percival? mrs. prentiss' translation is both spirited and faithful--faithful in following even the irregularities of metre which mark the original. it won the praise and admiration of some of the most accomplished judges in the country. the following extract from a letter of the late rev. henry w. bellows, d.d., may serve as an instance: i read it through at one sitting and enjoyed it exceedingly. what a lovely, pure, and exalting story it is! i confess that i prefer it to tennyson's recent dramas or to any of the plays upon the same or kindred themes that have lately appeared from leighton and others. the translation is melodious, easy, natural, and hardly bears any marks of the fetters of a tongue foreign to its author. how admirable must have been the knowledge of german and the skill in english of the translator! _to mrs. condict, new york, may , ._ i do not know but i have been on too much of a drive all winter, for besides writing my book i have been painting pictures for friends, and am now at work on some wild roses for mrs. d.'s golden wedding next monday, and yesterday i wrote her some verses for the occasion. the work at the hippodrome took a great deal of my time, and there is a poor homeless fellow now at work in my garden, whom it was my privilege to lead to christ there, and who touched me not a little this morning by bringing me three plants out of his scanty earnings. he has connected himself with our mission and has made friends there. i do not know what faber says about the silence of christ, but i know that as far as our own consciousness goes, he often answers never a word, and that the grieved and disappointed heart must cling to him more firmly than ever at such times. we live in a mystery, and shall never be satisfied till we see him as he is. i am enjoying a great deal in a great many ways, but i am afraid i should _run_ in if the gates opened. if i go to the centennial it will be to please some of the family, not myself. you ask about my book; it is a sort of story; had to be to get read; i could finish it in two weeks if needful. when i wrote it no mortal knows; i should _say_ that about all i had done this winter was to hold my bible-reading, paint, and work in the revival. i have so few interruptions compared with my previous life, that i hardly have learned to adjust myself to them. _to miss e. a. warner, philadelphia, may , ._ we came here on a hospitable invitation to spend a week in the centennial grounds, and yesterday passed several hours in wandering about, bewildered and amazed at the hosts of things we saw, and the host we didn't see. we found ourselves totally ignorant of norway, for instance, whose contributions are full of artistic grace and beauty; and i suppose we shall go on making similar discoveries about other nations. as to the thirty-two art galleries we have only glanced at them. what interested me most was groups of norwegians, lapps and other northerners, so life-like that they were repeatedly addressed by visitors--wonderful reproductions. the extent of this exhibition is simply beyond description. the only way to get any conception of it is to make a railroad circuit of the grounds. i have had a _very_ busy winter; held a bible-reading once a week, written a book, painted lots of pictures to give away, and really need rest, only i hate rest.... we find out where our hearts really are when we get these fancied invitations homeward. i look upon christians who are, at such times, reluctant to go, with unfeigned amazement. the spectacle, too often seen, of shrinking from the presence of christ, is one i can not begin to understand. i should think it would have been a terrible disappointment to you to get so far on and then have to come back; but we can be made willing for anything. i am glad you liked griselda; i knew you would. [ ] the extreme heat and her unusually enfeebled state rendered the summer a very trying one; but its discomfort was in a measure relieved by the extraordinary loveliness of the dorset scenery this season. there was much in this scenery to remind her of chateau d'oex, where she had passed such happy weeks in the summer and autumn of . if not marked by any very grand features, it is pleasing in the highest degree. in certain states of the atmosphere the entire landscape--mt. equinox, sunset mountain, owl's head, green peak, together with the intervening hills, and the whole valley--becomes transfigured with ever-varying forms of light and shade. at such times she thought it unsurpassed by anything of the kind she had ever witnessed, even in switzerland. the finest parts of this enchanting scene were the play of the cloud-shadows, running like wild horses across the mountains, and the wonderful sunsets; and both were in full view from the windows of her "den." her eyes never grew weary of feasting upon them. the cloud-shadows, in particular, are much admired by all lovers of nature. [ ] _to mrs. george payson, kauinfels, july , ._ we have been here four weeks, and ought to have been here six, for i can not bear heat; it takes all the life out of me. last night when i went up to my room to go to bed, the thermometer was °... are you not going to the centennial? george and i went on first and stayed at dr. kirkbride's. they were as kind as possible, and we all enjoyed a great deal. what interested me most were _wonderful_ life-like figures (some said wax, but they were no more wax than you are) of laplanders, swedes, and norwegians, dressed in clothes that had been worn by real peasants, and done by an artistic hand. next to these came the japanese department; amazing bronzes, amazing screens ($ , a pair, embroidered exquisitely), lovely flowers painted on lovely vases, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. the norwegian jewelry was also a surprise and delight; i don't care for jewelry generally, but these silvery lace-like creations took me by storm. among other pretty things were lots of english bedrooms, exquisitely furnished and enormously expensive. the horticultural department was very poor, except the rhododendrons, which drove me crazy. i only took a chair twice. you pay sixty cents an hour for one with a man to propel it, but can have one for three hours and make your husband (or wife!) wheel you. you do not pay entrance fee for children going in your arms, and i saw boys of eight or nine lugged in by their fathers and mothers. we think everybody should go who can afford it. several countries had not opened when we were there; turkey and spain, for instance; and if switzerland was ready we did not see it. the more i think of the groups i spoke of, the more i am lost in admiration. a young mother kneeling over a little dead baby, and the stern grief of the strong old grandfather, brought a lump into my throat; the young father was not capable of such grief as theirs, and sat by, looking subdued and tender, but nothing more. the artist must be a great student of human nature. i went, every day, to study these domestic groups; at first they did not attract the crowd; but later it was next to impossible to get at them. every one was taken from life, and you see the grime on their knuckles. almost every face expressed strong and agreeable character. there were very few good and a great many had pictures. of statuary "the forced prayer" was very popular; the child has his hands folded, but is in anything but a saintly temper, and two tears are on his cheeks. i should like to own it. if i had had any money to spare i should have bought something from japan and something from denmark. i do not think any one can realise, who has not been there, what an education such an exposition is. china's inferiority to japan i knew nothing about. a. goes out sketching every day. the other day i found her painting a white flower which she said she got from the lawn; it was something like a white lockspur, only very much prettier, and was, of course, not a wild flower, as she supposed, or, at any rate, not indigenous to this soil. she declared it had no leaves, but i made her go out and show me the plant; it grew about ten inches high, with leaves like a lily, and then came the pure, graceful flowers. _to mrs. condict, dorset, july , ._ there has been a great change here in religious interest, the foundation of which is thought to have been laid in the bible-readings. i am ashamed to believe it, all i say and do seems so flat; but our lord can overrule incompetence. the ladies are eager to have the readings resumed, but i can not undertake it unless i get stronger. the rev. mr. and mrs. reed are doing a quiet work among non-churchgoers at the other end of the village. she has been to every house in the neighborhood and "compelled them to come in," having meetings at her own house. _of course the devil is on hand._ he reminds me of a slug that sits on my rose bushes watching for the buds to open, when he falls to and devours them, instanter. i am sure it is as true of him as of the almighty, that he never slumbers or sleeps. his impertinences increase daily. one of the last things i did before leaving home was to decide to bring here one of the hippodrome converts, about whom i presume i wrote you. we knew next to nothing about him, and i could ill afford to support him; but i was his only earthly friend. he had no home, no work, and i felt i ought to look after him. we gave him a little room in the old mill, and he is perfectly happy; calls his room his "castle," does not feel the heat, takes care of my garden, enjoys haying, has put everything in order, is as strong as a horse, and a comfort to us all; being willing to turn his hand to anything. in the evenings he has made for me a manilla mat, of which i am very proud. he has been all over the world and picked up all sorts of information. he went to hear mr. prentiss' centennial address on the fourth at a picnic, and i was astonished when he came back at his intelligent account of it. everybody likes him, and he has proved a regular institution. i would not have had a flower but for him, for i can not work out in such a blazing sun as we have had. [ ] my book is to be called, i believe, "the home at greylock"; but i don't know. my husband and mr. randolph fussed so over the title that i said it would end in being called "much ado about nothing." _they_, being men, look at the financial question, to which i never gave a thought. even satan has never so much as whispered, write to make money; don't be too religious in your books. still he may do it, now i have put it into his head. how little any of us know what he won't make us do! i enjoyed the centennial more than i expected to do, but got my fill very soon, and was glad to go home. no account of the dorset home would be complete without some reference to "the old mill." it had been dismantled during the war, but, at the request of the neighbors, was now restored to its original use. it also contained the boys' workshop, a bathing-room, an ice-house, a ram, and a bowling-alley; formed, indeed, together with the pond and the boat, part and parcel of the dorset home itself. _to mrs. james donaghe, dorset, july , ._ i have hardly put pen to paper since i came here. i never could endure heat; it always laid me flat. yesterday there was a let-up to the torrid zone, and to-day it is comparatively cool. yesterday the mother of our pastor here got her release. i cried for joy, for she has been a great sufferer, and had longed to die. what a mystery death is! i went in to see how she was, and she had just breathed her last, and there lay her poor old body, eighty-two years old, looking as rent and torn as one might suppose it would after a fight of thirty years between the soul and itself. i have wondered if the heat, so dreadful to many, had not been good for you. a rheumatic boy, who works for us off and on, says it has been splendid for him. we heard yesterday that dr. schaff had lost his eldest daughter after a ten days' illness with typhoid fever. he has been greatly afflicted again and again and again by such bereavements, but this must be hardest of all. [ ] there is a different religious atmosphere here now from anything we have ever known. the ladies hoped to begin the bible-readings right off, but it was out of the question. i expect such a number of guests this week that i dare not undertake it. i wish you were coming, too. how you would enjoy sitting on the piazza watching the shadows on the mountains! we have had some magnificent sunsets this season. mr. prentiss and i drive every night after tea, a regular old darby and joan. generally, i prefer working in the garden to driving, but this time it has been too hot, and we have next to no flowers. it quite grieves me that i have nothing to lay on grandma pratt's coffin. however, _she won't care!_ won't it be nice to get rid of these frail, troublesome bodies of ours, and live without them! i hope i shall see you in heaven, with plenty of room and no rheumatism. how could you make such a time over that doggerel! [ ] such things are a drug in this house. i thought i had a long letter from you, and it was that stuff! my last book is all printed. my husband kindly corrected the proof-sheets for me; a thing i hate to do. he likes the book better than i do. i always get tired of my books by the time they are done. i read very little; only some few devotional books over and over. i wonder if you have read "miracles of faith"? it is a remarkable little book. do write and let me know how you and your husband are. we make great account of our afternoon mail. she alludes in the preceding letter to the guests she was expecting. the entertainment of friends formed a marked feature of her dorset life; and it called into play the brightest traits of her character. her visitors always went away feeling like one who has been gazing upon a beautiful landscape or listening to sweet music, so charming was her hospitality. one of them, writing to her husband a year after her death, thus refers to it: i seem to see the dorset hills now with their beautiful cloud-shadows and lovely blue. i can see in my mind your pleasant home and all the faces, including the dear one you miss this summer. what a delightful home she made! the "good cheer" she furnished for the minds, hearts, and bodies of her guests was something remarkable. i shall never forget my visits; i was in a state of high entertainment from beginning to end. what entertaining stories she told! what practical wisdom she gave out in the most natural and incidental way! and what housekeeping! common articles of food seemed to possess new virtues and zest. i always went away full of the marvels of the visit, as well as loaded down with many little tokens of her kindness and thoughtfulness. _to mrs. condict, dorset, sept. , ._ what interested me most at the centennial was in the main building, and two things stand out, prominently, in my memory. the first is groups of swedish figures, dressed in national costume, and all done by the hand of a real artist. especially examine the dead baby and its weeping mother and rugged old wounded grandfather; it will remind you of the words, "a little child shall lead them." next in interest to me were the japanese bronzes and screens; next wares from denmark, butterflies and feathers from brazil. in the art department a picture called "betty" in the british division, up in a corner, and in statuary "the forced prayer." both my girls agreed with me in the main; the boys cared most for machinery hall, and my husband for queensland, for which i did not care a fig. last sunday was as perfect here as with you. my husband preached at pawlet, about six miles from here, and i went with him. he preached a very earnest sermon on prayer. my bible-reading is thronged, and i can't but hope the holy spirit is helping my infirmities and blessing souls. my heart yearns over these women, many of whom have faces stamped with care. there is a class here that nobody has any idea how to get at. to meet their case, apostolic work needs to be done. do you know that irishmen are buying up the new england farms at a great rate? _to mrs. donaghe, dorset, sept. , ._ the extraordinary heat has worked unfavorably on both my husband and myself; he has been under medical treatment most of the time, forlorn and depressed. i have just pushed through as i could; my bible-reading, which has been wonderfully attended, being the only work i have done. the weather is cool now and i feel stronger. a party of young people, who were coming to call on a., were upset just above us; two had broken legs, others bruises and cuts, and one had both knee-pans seriously injured. we got her here and put her to bed, and then i started off to get the rest; but the surgeon, on arriving, decided they should be removed at once, and got them all safely back to manchester. _to mrs. condict, new york, oct. , ._ since my last letter i have been to montreal, fled from and settled down here. my book is out in england, and my husband sat up till midnight, reading an english copy of it, although he had heard me read it aloud when written, and read it twice in proof-sheets. he thinks it will be a useful book. i feel sure you will agree with me in its main points. god grant it may send many a bewildered mother to her knees! miss s. called here a few days ago; she has written a book called "the fullness of the blessing,"--one object of which is to prove that sanctification is not, can not be instantaneous.... i do hope the book will do good. it seems timely to me, for i shudder when i hear that a. and b. "professed sanctification" on such and such a day. my visit to montreal gave me indignant pain when i saw crowds kneeling to the virgin, and not to christ, in those costly churches and cathedrals. as to miss ---- i do not know enough of her to form an opinion of her state; i incline, however, to think that demoniac possession is sometimes permitted. fenelon, you know, thinks we should not be too eager for spiritual delight. he is entirely right when he says that the "night of faith" may witness a faith dearer to god than that of sensible delight. i love job when he says, "though he slay me, yet will i trust in him," more than i do david when he is in green pastures and beside still waters; it does not require much faith to be happy there. _nov. th._--i am glad greylock reached you in safety, and sorry i could not correct its numerous misprints. your question about kitty i don't quite understand; i did not mean to say that her parents had no more trouble with her, but they had no more fights growing out of self-will on both sides. i know that there is no end to trouble with obstinate or otherwise naughty children, only if the mother lives close to christ the fault will be on their side, not hers. you speak, by-the-bye, of my using the word christ rather than the word jesus. i do so because it means more to my mind, and because the apostles use it much more frequently. i do hope my book will be a comfort and help to many well-meaning but inexperienced mothers. and i wish i practised more perfectly what i preach. but i have my infirmities and find it hard to be always on my guard.... a. and i are taking drawing-lessons of a very superior french teacher, who offers us the privilege of spending our whole time in her studio, with "conseil." _the home at greylock_ was published the latter part of october. it embodied, as she said, the results of thirty years of experience and reflection. its views of marriage and of the office of a christian mother found frequent expression in her other writings and in her correspondence. she placed religion and love alike at the foundation of a true home; the one to connect it with heaven above, the other to make it a heaven upon earth. she enjoined it upon her young friends, as they desired enduring domestic felicity, to marry first of all for love. to one of them, who was tempted, as she feared, to marry out of gratitude rather than from love, she wrote: we women are exacting creatures; and you can not please us unless we have the whole of you. oh, if you knew the sacredness, the beauty, the sweetness of married life, as i do, you would as soon think of entering heaven without a wedding garment, as of venturing on its outskirts even, save by the force of a passionate, overwhelming power that is stronger than death itself! how warmly she sympathised with mothers, especially with young mothers, in their peculiar experiences and how great she thought their privilege to be, her writings testify. the same trait is brought out still more fully in her letters. "only a mother," she wrote, "knows the varied discipline of hopes and fears and joys and sorrows through which a mother passes to glory--for this is the mother's pathway, and she rarely walks on a higher road or one that may so lead to perfection." some of her letters addressed to bereaved mothers have already been given. but if her heart was always touched with grief by the death of an infant, it seemed to leap for joy whenever she heard that in the home of a friend a child was coming or had just arrived. here are samples of her letters on such occasions. _to mrs. ----, jan , ._ you little know into what a new world you are going to be introduced! i wouldn't be a bit frightened, if i were you; it is ever so much more likely that you'll get through safely, than that you will not; and then what joy! you will be a very loving, devoted mother, and i hope this little one will only be the beginning of a houseful. i spoke for ten, but only had six; and our dear lord had to take two of them back.... i have just run over your letter again, and want to reiterate my charge to you to feel no fear about your future. if you live and have a child, your joy will be wonderful, but if you do not live (here) it will be because you are going to dwell with christ, which is better than having a thousand children. so i see nothing but bright sides for you. _to the same, april , ._ by this time you ought to be able to receive letters; at any rate i am going to write one and you can do as you please about reading it. well, isn't a baby an institution? i am sure you had no idea what a delightful thing it is to be a mother, and that you have had a most bewildering experience of both suffering and joy. i shall want to hear all about the young gentleman when you get strong enough to write an enthusiastic letter about him; nor have i any objection to hear how his mother is behaving under these new circumstances. what does your husband think of the upsetting of all home customs and the introduction of this young hero therein? thank him for sending me the news in good season. i should not have liked it from a stranger. and by-the-bye, don't let your children say parp-er and marm-er, as nine children out of ten do. i daresay you never meant they should, having a little mite of sense of your own. now this is all a new mother ought to read at once, so with lots of congratulations and thanksgivings, good-bye. the following is an extract from a letter to another friend, dated feb. , : your last letter was so eloquent in its happiness that in writing an article for a magazine on the subject of education, i could not help beginning "the king is coming," and depicting his heralds... i am indeed rejoicing in your joy, and hope the little queen will long sit on the right royal throne of your heart. keep me posted as to miss baby's progress. i know a family where the first son was called "boy" for years, the servants addressing him as "master boy." here are the opening sentences of the article referred to: the king is at hand. heralds have been announcing his advent in language incomprehensible to man, but which woman understands as she does her alphabet. a dainty basket, filled with mysteries half hidden, half displayed; soft little garments, folded away in ranks and files; here delicate lace and cambric; there down and feathers and luxury. the king has come. limp and pink, a nothing and nobody, yet welcomed and treasured as everything and everybody, his wondrous reign begins. his kingdom is the world. his world is peopled by two human beings. yesterday, they were a boy and a girl. to-day, they are man and woman, and are called father and mother. their new king is imperious. he has his own views as to the way he shall live and move and have his being. he has his own royal table, at which he presides in royal pomp. his waiting-maid is refined and educated--his superior in everyway. he takes his meals from her when he sees fit; if he can not sleep, he will not allow her to do so. his treasurer is a man whom thousands look up to, and reverence, but, in this little world, he is valued only for the supplies he furnishes, the equipages he purchases, the castle in which young royalty dwells. the picture is not unpleasing, however; the slaves have the best of it, after all. the reign is not very long. two years later, there is a descent from the throne, to make room for the queen. she is a great study to him. he puts his fingers into her eyes to learn if they are little blue lakelets. he grows chivalrous and patronizing. so the world of home goes on. the king and queen give place to new kings and queens, but, though dethroned, they are still royal; their wants are forestalled, they are fed, clothed, instructed, but above all, beloved. when did their education begin? at six months? a year? two years? no; it began when _they_ began; the moment they entered the little world they called theirs. every touch of the mother's hand, every tone of her voice, educates her child. it never remembers a time when she was not its devoted lover, servant, vassal, slave. many an ear enjoys, is soothed by music, while ignorant of its laws. so the youngest child in the household is lulled by uncomprehended harmonies from its very birth. affections group round and bless it, like so many angels; it could not analyse or comprehend an angel, but it could feel the soft shelter of his wings. [ ] the following was addressed to a friend, whose home was already blessed with six fine boys: dorset, _sept. , ._ dear mr. b.:--i am just as glad as i can be! i _said_ it was a girl, and i _knew_ it was a girl, and that is the reason it _is_ a girl. give my best love to mrs. b., and tell her i hope this little damsel will be to her like a sabbath of rest, after the six week and work days she has had all along. it is hard to tell which one loves best, one's girls or one's boys, but it is pleasant to have both kinds... i hope your place has as appropriate a name as ours has had given to it--"saints' rest"!!--and that you will fill it full of saints and angels; only let them be girls, you have had boys enough. * * * * * iii. the year . death of her cousin, the rev. charles h. payson. illness and death of prof. smith. "let us take our lot in life just as it comes." adorning one's home. how much time shall be given to it? god's delight in his beautiful creations. death of dr. buck. visiting the sick and bereaved. an ill-turn. goes to dorset. the strangeness of life. kauinfels. the bible-reading. letters. during the early months of mrs. prentiss' sympathies were much excited by sickness and death among her friends. "i spend a deal of time," she wrote, "at funerals and going to see people in affliction, and never knew anything like it." and wherever she went, it was as a daughter of consolation. the whole year, indeed, was marked by a very tender and loving spirit, as also by unwonted thoughtfulness. but it was marked no less by the happiest, most untiring activity of both hands and brain. during the month of january she wrote the larger portion of a new serial for the christian at work. it would seem as if she foresaw the end approaching and was pressing toward it with eager steps and a glad heart. _to her eldest son, new york, jan. , ._ the great event of last week was cousin charles' unexpected death. [ ] your father and i attended the funeral, in his church, which was crowded to overflowing with a weeping audience. most of the ministers we know were there. cousin g. came on friday night and said nothing would comfort him like hearing your father preach and he promised to do so. i went with him to inwood, and we have just got back. your father preached a beautiful sermon and paid a glowing tribute to cousin charles in it, and i am very glad i went. after the funeral yesterday i came home and put up some chicken-jelly i had made for prof. smith, and carried it down to him; there i met dr. gould, of rome, who had seen him, and said he considered his case a very critical one. _feb. th_.--your father was invited to repeat his lecture on recollections of hurstmonceux and rydal mount, and did so, yesterday morning, in our lecture-room, which was filled with a fine audience, mostly strangers. what have you on your natural bracket? and have you put up your leaves on your windows? mine are looking splendidly. h. is burning one of them with a magnifying-glass your father gave me at christmas. the sun does lie delightfully in this room. i must now go to the smiths. all send love. prof. smith passed away peacefully in the early morning on the th of february. one of his last conscious utterances was addressed to mrs. prentiss: "i have ceased to cumber myself with the things of time and sense, and have had some precious thoughts about death." henry boynton smith was one of those men who enrich life by their presence, and seem to render the whole world poorer by their absence. he was strongly attached to mrs. prentiss; for more than forty years the relation between him and her husband resembled that of brothers; mrs. smith was one of her oldest and most beloved friends, and for a quarter of a century the two families had dwelt together in unity. and, then, with one of the saddest and one of the happiest events of her domestic history--the burial of her little bessie, at which he ministered with christlike sympathy, and at the baptism of her swiss boy who bore his name--he was tenderly associated. it is not strange, therefore, that his death, as well as the wearisome years of invalidism which preceded it, touched her deeply. what manner of man he was; how gifted, wise and large-hearted; how devoted to the cause of his lord and saviour; what a leader and master-workman in sacred science and in the church of christ; how worthy of love and admiration--all this may be seen and read elsewhere. [ ] _to mrs. condict, feb. , ._ before i go down to the meeting at mrs. d.'s i must have a little chat with you, in reply to your last two letters. i felt like shrieking aloud when you contrasted your life with mine. but it is impossible to state fully why. yet i may say one thing; i have had to learn what i teach in loneliness, suffering, conflict, and dismay, which i do not believe you have physical strength to bear. the true story of my life will never be written. but whatever you do, don't envy it. and i do not mean by that, that i am a disappointed, unhappy woman; _far from it_. but i enjoy and suffer intensely, and one insulting word about greylock, for instance, goes on stinging and cutting me, amid forgetfulness of hundreds of kind ones. [ ] let us take our lot in life just as it comes, courageously, patiently, and faithfully, never wondering at anything the master does. i am concerned just as you are about my interest in things of time and sense. but i have not the faintest doubt that if we could have all we want in christ, inferior objects would fade and fall. but we live in a strange world, amid many claims on time and thought; we can not dwell in a convent, and must dwell among human beings, and fall more or less under their influence. we shall get out of all this by and by. _feb. th._--this winter i am drawing in charcoal under an accomplished teacher; she has so large a class that i had to withdraw from it and take private lessons. she has invited a. to assist her in teaching little ones twice a week, which materially curtails her bill. a. was introduced to one youth, aged five, as _monsieur_ so and so; he had his easel, his big portfolio, and charcoal, in great style, but only took one lesson, he hated it so. i don't see what his mother was made of. i sympathise with your fear of spending too much time adorning your home, etc., etc. it is a nice question how far to go and how far to stay. but i honestly believe that a bare, blank, prosaic house makes religion appear dreadfully homely. we enjoy seeing our children enjoy their work and their play; is our father unwilling to let us enjoy ours? in a german book [ ] i translated, a little boy is very happy in making a scrap-book for a little friend, and god is represented as being glad to see him so happy. and i don't believe he begrudged your making me that pretty picture, or did not wish me to make yours. (by-the-bye, when you have time, tell me how to do it.) it seems to me we are meant to use _all_ the faculties god gives us; to abuse them is another thing. i feel that i am having a vacation, and wonder how long it is going to last. i do not know how i should have stood the _tremendous_ change in my life, through my husband's change of profession, if i had not had this resource of painting. o, how i do miss his preaching! how i miss my pastoral work! dr. buck is on his dying bed, and longing to go. [ ] _to her eldest son, new york, march , ._ we had an excellent sermon from dr. vincent this morning, which he repeated by request. last evening we had chi alpha, and as i saw this body of men enter the dining-room, i wondered whether i had borne any minister to take up your father's and my work when we lay it down. _ th._--i thought within myself, as i listened to a sermon on the union of christ and the believer, whether i should have the bliss of hearing you preach. let me see; how old should i have to be, at soonest? sixty-two; the age at which my ancestors died, unless they died young. i got a beautiful letter, a few days ago, from a minister in philadelphia, the rev. mr. miller, who has , members in his church, and says if he could afford it he would give a copy of greylock to every young mother in it. i went to mrs. p.'s funeral on friday. she wanted to die suddenly, and had her wish. she ate her breakfast on tuesday; then went into the office and arranged papers there; her husband went out at ten, and shortly after, she began to feel sick and the girls made her go to bed. one of them went out to do some errands, and the other sat in the room; she soon heard a sound that made her think her mother wanted something, and on going to her found her dead. dr. p. got home at twelve, long after all was over. he told me it was the most extraordinary death he ever heard of, but his theory was that a small clot of blood arrested the circulation, as she had no disease. i had a talk with c. about his wife's sudden death. i had already written him and sent him a note. i cut from the evening post the slip i enclose about mr. moody's question-drawer. i wish i could hope for as sudden a death as mrs. p.'s. _to mrs. condict, april , ._ i am glad you liked the picture. did you know that you too can get leaves and flowers in advance of spring, by keeping twigs in warm water? i had forsythia bloom, and other things leafed beautifully. it is said that apple and pear blossoms will come out in the same way, if placed in the sun in glass cans. i have been thinking, lately, that if i enjoy my imperfect work, how god, who has made so many beautiful, as well as useful, things, must enjoy his faultless creations. my work is still to go from house to house where sickness and death are so busy. mrs. f. g. has just lost her two only children within a day of each other. neither her mother nor sister could go near her during their illness or after their death, because of the flock of little ones in their house, and it was not safe to have a funeral. dr. hastings made a prayer; he said the scene was heart-rending. _may d._--dr. storrs preached for us last sunday, and said one striking thing i must tell you on the passage, "they were stoned, were sawn asunder, they were tempted," etc. he said many thought the word _tempted_ out of place amid so many horrors, but that it held its true position, since few things could cause such anguish to a christian heart as even a suggestion of infidelity to its lord. to this à kempis adds the _hell_ of not knowing whether one had yielded or not. _may th._--"misery loves company"; and so i am writing to you. perhaps it will be some consolation to you that i too have been knocked up for two weeks, one of which i spent in bed. nothing serious the matter, only put down and kept down; not agreeable, but necessary. how _astounded_ we shall be when we wake up in heaven and find our hateful old bodies couldn't get in!... m. is making, and h. has made, a picture scrap-book for a hospital in syria. your mother might enjoy that. we all _crave_ occupation. "imprisonment with hard labor" never seems to me so frightful as imprisonment and nothing to do, does. did you ever hear the story of the man who spent years in a dark dungeon, idle, and then found some pins in his coat, which he spent years in losing, and crawling about and finding? well, i have got rid of a wee morsel of this weary day in writing this, and you will get rid of another morsel in reading it. so we'll patch each other up, and limp along together, and by and by go where there it no limping and no patching. the new serial, her bible-readings, and painting, with visits to sick- rooms and to the house of mourning, during the early half of this year, left little time for correspondence. her letters were few and brief; but they are marked, as was her life, by unusual quietness and depth of feeling. her delight was still to speak in them a helpful and cheering word to souls struggling with their own imperfections, or with trials of the way. a single extract will illustrate the gentle wisdom of her counsels: i think there is such a thing as peace of conscience even in this life. i do not mean careless peace, or heedless peace; i mean calm consciousness of an understanding, so to speak, between the soul and its lord. a wife, for instance, may say and do things to her husband that show she is human; yet, at the same time, the two may live together loyally, and be happy. and unless a christian is aware of having on hand an idol, dearer than god, i see no reason why he should not live in peace, even while aware that he is not yet finished (perfect). we love god more than we are aware; when he slays us we trust in him, when he strikes us we kiss his hand. her own mood at this time was singularly grave and pensive. she felt more and more keenly the moral puzzle and contradictions of existence. "from beginning to end, in every aspect," she wrote to a friend, "life grows more mysterious to me, not to say queer--for that is not what i mean. such strange things are all the time happening, and even good people doing and saying things that nearly drive one wild.... we live in a mixed state, in a kind of see-saw: we go up and then we go down; go down and then fly up." still this strange, ever-changing mystery of life, although it sometimes perplexed her in the extreme, did not make her unhappy. "i have great sources of enjoyment," she adds, "and do enjoy a good deal; infinitely more than i deserve." early in june she and the younger children went to dorset. on reaching there, she wrote to her husband: here we are, sitting by the fire in our dear little parlor. we made a very comfortable journey to manchester, but the ride from there here was rather cheerless and cold, as they forgot to send wraps. the neighbors had sent in various good things, and the strawberries looked very nice. it rains, but m. and i have surveyed the garden, and she says it is looking better than usual. i only wish you were here. your love is intensely precious to me, as i know mine is to you. how thankful we ought to be that we have loved each other through thick and thin! this is god's gift. i can not write legibly with this pencil, nor see very well, as it is a dark day, and yet too early for a lamp. the latter part of june she made a short visit with her husband to montreal. a pleasant incident of this journey was an excursion to quebec, where two charming days were spent in seeing the falls of montmorenci, the plains of abraham, and other objects of interest in and about that remarkable city. during the ride in the cars from montreal to st. albans, she called the attention of her husband to a paragraph from an english newspaper containing an account of the death of a miner by an explosion, on whose breast was found a lock of hair inscribed with the name of "jessie." she remarked that the incident would serve as an excellent hint for a story. this was the origin of _gentleman jim_, the pathetic little tale published shortly after her death. soon after her return from montreal she began painting in water-colors, which afforded her much delight during the rest of her life. the following note to mrs. ellen s. fisher, of brooklyn, dated july d, will show how her lessons were taken: will you kindly inform me as to your method of teaching your system of water-colors by mail, and as to terms. i have not had time to do anything in that line, as i had to go to canada (by-the-bye, you can get delightful chinese white paint there in tubes). my daughter says she thinks she heard you say that you would paint a little flower-piece reasonably, or perhaps you have one to spare now. i should like a few wild flowers against a blue sky. i got half a dozen parian vases at montreal--each a group of three--and filled with daisies and a few grasses, they are exquisite. some of them are in imitation of the hollow toadstools one finds in the woods. _to mrs. condict, kauinfels, july , ._ kauinfels is a word we invented, after spending no little time, by referring to a spot in a favorite brook as "the place where the old cow fell in"; it looked so german and pleased us so much that we concluded to give our place that name. we are fond of odd names. we have a dog pharaoh and a horse shoo fly. then we had shadrach, meseck, and abednego for cats. we had a dog named penelope ann--a splendid creature, but we had to part with her. my bible-reading began two weeks ago, and neither rain nor shine keeps people away. for a small village the attendance is very large. i do not know how much good they do, but it is a comfort to try. i can't get over miss ---'s tragical end. she must have suffered dreadfully. i do not doubt her present felicity, nor that she counts her life on earth as anything more than a moment's space. i do not feel sure that she did me any good. i saw so much that was morbid when she visited me here, that i never enjoyed her as i did when i knew her less. but there is nothing morbid about her now. _to mrs. james donaghe, dorset, aug. , ._ yesterday was the first fine day we have had in a long time, and, as i sat enjoying it on the front porch, how i wished i could transport you here and share these mountains with you! to-day is equally fine, and how gladly would i bottle it up and send it to you! a score of times i have asked myself why i do not bring you here, and then been reminded that you can not leave your husband. i do not write many letters this summer. we have three or four guests nearly all the time. this uses up what little brain i have left, and by half-past eight or nine i have to go to bed. i am unusually well, but work hard in the garden all the forenoon and get tired. yesterday the rev. mr. reed, of flushing, preached a most impressive sermon on the denial of self. in the afternoon he preached to a neighborhood meeting at his own house, to which we three girls go, namely, m., her friend hatty k., and myself. i give thursdays pretty much up to my bible-reading--studying for it in the morning and holding it at three in the afternoon. utter unfitness for this or any other work for the master makes me very dependent on him. the service is largely attended, and how i get courage to speak to so many, i know not. [illustration: the dorset home.] a. is gone to portland and prout's neck. mr. p. is unusually well this summer, and has actually worked a little in my garden. he is going to saratoga this week to visit mrs. bronson.... m. is a kind of supplement to her father; i love in her what i love in him, and she loves in me what he loves; we never had a jar in our lives, and are more like twin-sisters than mother and daughter. hatty k. is like a second m. to me. at this moment they are each painting a plate. they work all the morning in the garden, and in the afternoon sit in my room sewing "for the poor" like two dorcases, or drive, or row on the pond. they also study their greek testament together like a pair of twins. just here mr. p. came driving up to take me out to make calls. we made three together, and then i made three alone. now we are going to have tea, and should be glad if you could take it with us. _to mrs. condict, kauinfels, sept. , ._ since you left, i have been very busy in various ways; among other things, helping hatty collect her last trophies, pack her various plants, and the like. then there is a woman, close by, who is very sick and very poor, and the parson and his wife (meaning himself and myself) must needs pack a big basket of bread, butter, tea, apples, etc., for her watchers and family, with extract of beef for her. that was real fun, as you may suppose. i mean to devote thursdays to such doings, including the bible-readings. i took for my bible-reading this afternoon, the subject of confession of sin, and should really like to know what perfectionists would say to the passages of scripture relating to it. however, i know they would explain them away or throw them under the table, as they do all the bible says about the discipline of life. our bad pharaoh lifted up his voice in every hymn at mrs. reed's last sunday, and little albert fairly shrieked with laughter. if next sunday is pleasant we are to go to pawlet to preach. good-night. [ ] _to mrs. fisher, kauinfels, sept. , ._ excuse my keeping your pictures so long. it is owing to my having so much company. we feel it a duty to share our delightful home here with friends. will you send me some more pictures, and in your letter please tell me how to make the light-green in the large arbutus leaf; i tried all sorts of experiments, but failed to get such a toned-down tint. my copy is pretty, as i have improved a good deal on the whole; but my work looks parvenu. i had to use a powerful magnifying-glass to puzzle out your delicate touches, and your work bore the test, it is so well done. my work, viewed in the same way, is horrid. a. has been to portland and found there some exquisite placques; some of them of a _very_ delicate cream color; others of a least suspicion of pink. she began to paint thorn apples on one; but a day or two later, found some of the foliage we had thrown away, turned to most delicious browns; so she painted the leaves in those shades, only--and the effect is richly and gravely autumnal. i hope your eyes are better. * * * * * iv. return to town. recollections of this period. "ordinary" christians and spiritual conflict. a tired sunday evening. "we may make an idol of our joy." publication of _pemaquid_. kezia millet. she returned to town early in october and began at once to prepare for the winter's work. her industry was a marvel. the following references to this period are from reminiscences, written by her husband after her death: she lost not a day, scarcely an hour. the next eight months were among the busiest of her life; and in some respects, i think, they were also among the happiest. she resumed her painting with new zeal and delight. it was a never-failing resource, when other engagements were over. hour after hour, day after day, and week after week she would sit near the western window of her sunshiny chamber, absorbed in this fascinating occupation. rarely did i fail to find her there, on going in to kiss her good-bye, as i started for my afternoon lecture. how often the scene comes back again! were i myself a painter i could reproduce it to the life. her posture and expression of perfect contentment, her quick and eager movements, all are as vividly present to my mind, as if i saw and parted from her there yesterday! one morning each week was devoted to her bible-reading; the others, when pleasant, were generally spent in going down town with m. in quest of painting materials, shopping, making calls, etc., etc. she was much exercised in the early part of the winter by a burglary, which robbed her of a beautiful french mantel clock given her on our silver wedding-day by a dear friend; and by the loss of my watch, stolen from me in the cars on my way home from the seminary--a beautiful watch with a chain made of her hair and that which once "crowned little heads laid low." she had ordered it of piguet, when we were in geneva in , and given it to me in memory of our marriage. but _her_ grief over the loss of the watch was small compared with mine, then and even since. what precious memories can become associated with such an object! one of the books which she read during the winter was "les miserables" by victor hugo. she read it in the original in a copy given her by miss woolsey. she was quite captivated by this work, and some of its most striking scenes and incidents she repeated to me, during successive mornings, before we got up. her power of remembering and reproducing, in all its details, and with all the varying lights and shades, any story which she had read was something almost incredible. it always seemed to me like magic. her father possessed the same power and perhaps she inherited it from him. [ ] the following letter will show that while her mind was still exercised about the doctrines taught by writers on the "higher life" and "holiness through faith," it was in the way of a deepening conviction that these doctrines are not in harmony with the teaching of scripture or with christian experience. referring to some of these writers, she says: _to a christian friend, oct. , ._ i have not only no unkind feeling towards them, but have no doubt they have lived near to christ. but this i believe to have been their state of mind for years, though perhaps not consciously: most christians are "ordinary." nearly all are a set of miserable doubters. most of them believe the christian life a warfare. most of them imagine it is also a state of discipline, and make much of chastening, even going so far as to thank god for his strokes of fatherly love! strange love, to be sure! they also fancy they can work out their own salvation. now we are not "ordinary" christians. we understand god's word perfectly; and when he says, "work out your own salvation," he means nothing by it except this, that _he_ will work it in you to will and to do, and you are to do nothing, but _let_ him thus work. and furthermore, we know his mind beyond dispute; we can not err in judgment. therefore, if you doubt our doctrine, it is the same as doubting god, and you should fall on your knees and pray to read scripture as we do. as to the christian life being a conflict, why, you "ordinary" christians are all wrong. satan never tempts us, though he tempted our lord; it comes natural to us to go into canaan with one bound; the old-fashioned saints were ridiculous in "fighting the good fight of faith." look at the characters in the bible, "resisting unto blood, striving against sin"; what blunderers they were to do that!... in our enlightened day nobody is "chastened"; it used to be done to every son the father received and it was a token of his love. he knows better now. he chastens no one; or if he does, we will cover it up and ignore it; religion is all rapture, and this is not a scene of probation. still if you insist that you have been smitten, it only shows how very "ordinary" you are, and how angry god is with you. now you may ask why i have taken time to write this, since you are not led away by these errors. well, they are pleasant and very plausible writers, and it has puzzled me to learn just where they were wrong. so i have been thinking aloud, or thinking on paper, and perhaps you may find one or more persons entangled in this attractive web, and be able to help them out. how a good man and a good woman ever fell into such mischievous mistakes, i can not imagine.... as to you and me, i see nothing strange in the weaning from self god is giving us. it is natural to believe that he weans us from the breast of comfort in which we had delighted, because he has strong meat in store for us. i know i was awfully selfish about my relation to christ, and went about for years on tip-toe, as it were, for fear of disturbing and driving him away; but i do not know that i should _dare_ to live so again. and how better can he show us our weakness than by making it plain that we, who thought we were so strong in prayer, are almost "dumb before him"! my dear friend, i believe more and more in the _deep_ things of god. "strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts, not amid joy." imagine soldiers getting ready for warfare, being told by their commander that they had no need to drill, and had nothing to do but drink nectar! as to being brought low, i will own that i have not been entirely left of god to my own devices and desires; if i had been, i should have gone overboard. he had such a grip of me that he _couldn't_ let go. i saw a man apply a magnet to steel pens the other day, and that's the way i clung to god; there was no power in me to hold on, the magnetism was in him, and so i hung on. wasn't it so with you? and now to change the subject again; if you have any faded ferns, vines, leaves on hand, you can paint and make them beautiful again. for a light wall, paint them with caledonian brown, and they will have a very rich effect. i expect a patent-right for this invention. the vivid sense of human weakness and of the sharp discipline of life, which she expresses in this letter, was deepened by hearing what a sea of trouble some of her friends had been suddenly engulphed in. early in october she wrote to one of them: for some time before i left dorset, your image met me everywhere i went, and i felt sure something was happening to you, though not knowing whether you were enjoying or suffering. and since then there has been nothing i could do for you but to pray that your faith may bear this test and that you may deeply realise that-- god is the refuge of his saints, when storms of sharp distress invade. the longer i live the more conscious i am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we _all_ have of god's grace.... i can not but hope things will turn out better than they seem. but if not, there is god; nothing of this sort can take him from you. you have longed and prayed for holiness; this fearful event may bring the blessing. may god tenderly bless and keep you, dear child. but vivid as was her sense of human weakness and of the imperfections cleaving to the best of men, while yet in the flesh, she still held fast to the conviction, uttered so often in "urbane and his friends" and in her other writings, that it is the privilege of every disciple of jesus to attain, by faith, to high degrees of christian holiness, and that, too, without consuming a whole lifetime in the process. in a letter to a young friend she says: your letter shows me that i have expressed my views very inadequately in urbane, or that you have misunderstood what i have said there.... "there _is_ a shorter way"; a better way; god never meant us to spend a lifetime amid lumbering machinery by means of which we haul ourselves laboriously upward; the work is his, not ours, and when i said i believed in "holiness through faith," i was not thinking of the book by that title, but of utterances made by the church ages before its author saw the light of day. we _can not_ make ourselves holy. we are born sinners. a certain school believe that they are "kept" by the grace of god from all sin. i do not say that they are not. but i do say that i think it requires superhuman wisdom to _know_ positively that one not only keeps all god's law, but leaves no single duty undone. think a minute. law proceeds from an infinite mind; can finite mind grasp it so as to know, through its own consciousness, that it comes up to this standard? on the other hand, i do believe that a way has been provided for us to be set free from an "evil conscience"; that we may live in such integrity and uprightness as to be at peace with god; not being afraid to let his pure eye range through and through us, finding humanity and weakness, but also finding something on which his eye can rest with delight--namely, his own son. every day i live i see that faith is my only hope, as perhaps i never saw it before.... read over again the experience of antiochus; he got in early life what dear dr. ---- only found on his deathbed, and so may you. _to miss e. a. warner, new york, oct. , ._ i am too tired on sunday evenings to find much profit in reading, and have been sitting idle some minutes, asking myself how i should spend the hour till bed-time, if i could pick and choose among human occupations. i decided that if i had just the right kind of a neighbor, i should like to have her come in, or if there was the right kind of a little prayer-meeting round the corner, i would go to that. then i concluded to write to you, in answer to your letter of july . i write few letters during the summer, because it seems a plain duty to keep out of doors as much as i possibly can; then we have company all the time, and they require about all the social element there is in me. we feel that we owe it to him who gives us our delightful home to share it with others, especially those who get no mountain breezes save through us; of some i must pay travelling expenses, or they can not come at all. their enjoyment is sufficient pay. my bible-reading takes all the time of two days not spent in outdoor exercise, as i have given up almost everything of help in preparation for it but that which is given me in answer to prayer and study of the word. i am kept, to use a homely expression, with my nose pretty close to the grindstone; in other words, am kept low and little. but god blesses the work exactly as if i were a better woman. sometimes i think how poor he must be to use such instruments as he does. how is the niece you spoke of as so ill and so happy? for my part i am _confounded_ when i see people hurt and distressed when invited home. how a loving father must feel when his children shrink back crying, "i have so much to live for!" or, in other words, so little to die for. it frightens me sometimes to recall such cases. and now i am going to tote my old head to bed. it is years old and has to go early. _to mrs. fisher, oct. , ._ with young children, and artistic work to do, the wonder is not that you have to neglect other things, but that you ever find time to attend to any one outside of house and home. i do not want you to make a care and trouble of me; i feel it a privilege to _try_ even to copy anything from your hand, and am willing to bide my time. it is shocking to think of your summer's work being burned up; no money can compensate for such a loss--i hate to think of it. i have had your landscape framed, and it is the finest thing in the house. _nov. th._--i have your apple-blossoms ready to mail with this. i found the subject very difficult, and at one time thought i should have to give it up; but your directions are so clear and to the point that i have succeeded in getting a picture we all think pretty, though wanting in the tender grace of yours. the picture, which is a gentle blaze of beauty, has just reached me. we have had burglars in the house, and one of my songs of praise is that they did not take the little gem i got from you last summer. glad you are a _woman_ and not all artist. _to mrs. condict, nov. , _ as to the running fern, i paint it the color of black walnut, and round placques it looks like carving. emerald green i hate, but it is a popular color, and a. was obliged to put it into the flower pictures she painted on portfolios. i am glad you are still interested in your painting. i have just finished the second reading of miss smiley's book, and marked passages which i am sure you will like. i will mail my copy to you. as to joy--"the fruits of the spirit" come naturally to those in the spirit, and joy is one. but we may make an idol of our joy, and so have to part with it. there may come a period when god says, virtually, to the soul, "you clung to me when i smiled upon and caressed you; let me see how you will behave when i smile and speak comfortably no more." fenelon says, "to be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that keeps paradise constantly open--this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing." [ ] when i look at the subject at a distance, as it were, remembering that this life is mere preparation for the next, it seems _likely_ that we shall have religious as well as other discipline; if we ascend the mount of transfiguration it is not that we may _dwell_ there, though it is natural to wish we could. and the fact is, no matter what professions of rapture people make, if they believe in christ and love him as they ought to do, what they have enjoyed will be nothing when compared with going to live _with_ him forever, surrounded by sanctified beings all united in adoring him. when i think of this my courage grows apace, and i say to myself, i may never live in heaven again here below; but i certainly shall, above; and can't i be patient till then? i wonder if you know that i am going to begin a bible-reading on the first wednesday in december? i have a very kind letter from mr. peter carter, who says kezia would make the fortune of any book. kezia is one of the characters in _pemaquid; or, a story of old times in new england_, then recently published. she had written it with "indescribable ease and pleasure," to use her own words, mostly during the previous january. the pictures of new england life--especially its religious life--in old times are vivid and faithful; and the character of kezia millet for originality, quiet humor, and truth to nature, surpasses any other in her writings, with the exception, perhaps, of aunt avery in "fred and maria and me." the following is an extract from a letter of mr. hallock, the publisher of "the christian at work," dated aug. , , in which he begged her to gratify its readers by telling them more about ruth and juliet. she accordingly added some pages to the last chapter, although not quite enough to satisfy the curiosity about juliet: let me express to you my _personal_ thanks for your most excellent serial. i feel that it has done a real good to thousands. you need to be placed in my position, receiving hundreds of letters daily from your readers, to be able to fully appreciate how intensely interested they are in the story. it does not seem to satisfy them to feel assured of ruth's marriage, but they want _to be there_ and see it. juliet, too, is not with them, as with you, a mere impersonation, but a living reality, and they will never rest till they hear from her. if i was a betting man i would bet five to one that what your husband struck out, is just exactly what is wanted. what do we men know about such things, anyhow? a lady friend, well qualified to judge, writes to her: i have read "pemaquid," and have laughed till i cried, then cried and laughed together. in my humble opinion it is the brightest book you have written. you know how to make a saint and how to make a sinner. as for old kezia millet, with her great loving heart, if she is not a model of christian "_consistency_" and a natural born poet, where will you find one? she is perfectly fascinating. how do you keep your wit so ready and so bright? i suppose you'll answer, "by using it." the chapter which contains mrs. woodford's interview with rev. mr. strong (the dear old saint) in her penitential mood, is very, very admirable. _to mrs. george payson, dec. , ._ before the year quite departs, i must tell you, my dear margaret, how glad i am that you appreciate my dear, good bad kezia. it is nineteen years since i read adam bede, but i remember mrs. poysen in general. kezia is not an imitation of her; the main points of her character were written out long before adam bede appeared; i destroyed the book in which i trotted her out, but kept _her_, and once in a while tried her on my husband, but as he did not seem to see it, put her away in her green box, biding my time. as to juliet, my good man _loathes_ so to read about bad people that he almost made me cut out all my last mention of her. i was in an unholy frame when i did it, and with reason, for they who like pemaquid best, say it was a mistake not to dispose of her in some way. but as to mrs. woodford being a model mother, i did not aim to make her a model anything. all i wanted of her was to bring out the new england pecularities as they would appear to a worldly stranger. as to all parties _seeming_ indifferent about juliet, you may be right; i was behind the scenes and knew they were not; but as i say, what i thought the best part of her, george made me cut out. no, i never knew any one sing exactly like kezia, but there are such cases on record. there was "the singing cobbler," whose wife complained of him in court, and he defended himself so wittily in verse, that everybody sided with him, and his wife forgave his offence, whatever it might be. [ ] [ ] the following is the passage referred to: "if you aspire to be a son of consolation; if you would partake of the priestly gift of sympathy; if you would pour something beyond commonplace consolation into a tempted heart; if you would pass through the intercourse of daily life with the delicate tact that never inflicts pain; if to that most acute of human ailments--mental doubt, you are ever to give effectual succor, you must be content to pay the price of the costly education. like him, you must suffer, being tempted." [ ] by the late rev. william james, d.d. [ ] see appendix g, p. . [ ] then pastor of the collegiate reformed church, fifth avenue and forty-eighth street, now of brooklyn. [ ] "account of the union meeting for the promotion of scriptural holiness, held at oxford, august to september , ." [ ] "account of the union meeting for the promotion of scriptural holiness, held at oxford, august to september , ." p. . [ ] griselda; a dramatic poem in five acts. _translated from the german of_ friederich halm (baron münch-bellinghausen), _by mrs. e. prentiss._ [ ] how glad i was to see griselda's fair face! she is a gem, and i am sure will prove a blessing as she moves about the world in her nobleness and purity, so exceedingly womanly and winning. the book is full of poetry, and held me spell-bound to the close. it is very musical, too, in its rich, pure english. i don't know how much of its poetic charm lies in the original or in your rendering, but as it is, it is "just lovely," as the girls say.--_letter from miss warner._ [ ] in a letter written in , just after a visit to dorset, dr. hamlin thus refers to them: "now that i have seen again those lights and shadows of the green mountains, as they lie around your dorset home, i must tell you why they awakened such deep emotions. forty-one years ago i was married to miss henrietta jackson, the youngest daughter of the venerated and beloved pastor of dorset, and we left that lovely valley for our oriental home. i had heard from her lips a glowing description of the magic work of light and shade upon those uplands and heights that lie west of the valley, before i had seen the place. the first morning of my first visit i recognised the truth and accuracy of her description, and was forced to confess that, although i had always admired cloud-shadows, i had never seen them in such rich display and constant recurrence. there were certain days, which we called field-days, when all their resources were called out, and they seemed hurrying in swift battalions to some great contest or grand coronation scene. but at other times they rested in calm repose as though the pulse of nature had ceased to beat... in our home upon the bosphorus we were sometimes reminded of these scenes of her native valley. when, occasionally, the black sea clouds floated down in broken masses, and floods of light here and there poured through the darkly shadowed landscape, lighting up fragments of hill and vale to the very summits of alem dagh, her soul took flight to her beloved dorset and all other thoughts vanished." [ ] on hearing of mrs. prentiss' death, the "poor, homeless fellow" wrote to her husband a touching letter of sympathy. the following is an extract from it: it was, i must acknowledge, a cherished desire of your dear departed lady that i should walk in the footsteps of the lord jesus, and, to obtain that grace, i must invoke god's power that i may accomplish that great result. dear sir, i would like to suggest to you that i am disgusted with a wandering life; would like to see dorset next summer and look on the grave of my greatest friend. nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be under the influence of your christian family; now, if i had any employment, no matter how simple, in that locality for the winter, then i would feel happy to go next season to your country residence and offer my services free. [ ] meeta sophia schaff died july , , in the twenty-first year of her age. she had just returned from the centennial. she was a young lady of unusual loveliness of character, and was deeply lamented by a wide circle of friends, both young and old. [ ] a printed copy of lines on her golden wedding, written by mrs. prentiss. [ ] the article is entitled _educated while educating_, and appeared in the brooklyn journal of education for march, . [ ] the rev. c. h. payson. see the interesting memoir of him, entitled "all for christ," edited by his brother george, and published by the american tract society. [ ] see henry boynton smith; his life and work. edited by his wife. a. c. armstrong & son. . [ ] his biographer, mr. moore, relates of lord byron that in all the plenitude of his fame, he confessed that "the depreciation of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him than the applause of the highest was pleasing." [ ] _peterchen and gretchen_. she translated it at genevrier during the illness of her children. [ ] dr. gurdon buck. he died shortly afterwards. for more than a quarter of a century be had been a faithful friend of mrs. prentiss, and as their family physician had made both her and her husband his debtors alike by his kindness and his skill. with a generosity so characteristic of his profession, he refused, during all these years, to receive any compensation for his services. as a surgeon he stood in the front rank; some of the operations, performed by him, attracted wide attention for then--novelty and usefulness. he published an account of them, with illustrations, which greatly interested mrs. prentiss. she was almost as fond of reading about remarkable eases in surgery as about remarkable criminal trials. dr. buck was one of the founders and first ruling elders of the church of the covenant. his gratuitous labors in connection with the new york hospital and other public institutions were very great. he was a man of solid worth, modest, upright, and devoted to his lord and master. [ ] "one of my brightest recollections of this season at dorset is our last sunday before returning to town. we went in the phaeton to pawlet, where i preached for the rev. mr. aiken. the morning was pleasant, the road lay through a lovely mountain valley, and the beauty of nature was made perfect by the sweet sabbath stillness; and our thoughts were in unison with the scene and the day. i preached on rest in christ, and the service was very comforting to us both. how well i recall the same drive and a similar service early in september of , when prayer was my theme! what sweet talks and sweeter fellowship we had together by the way, going and coming!"--_recollections of_ - . [ ] recollections of - [ ] "better is it sometimes to go down into the pit with him, who beholding darkness and bewailing the loss of consolation, crieth from the bottom of the lowest hell, my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? than continually to walk arm in arm with angels, to sit, as it were, in abraham's bosom, and to have no thought, no cogitation but this, '_i thank my god it is not with me as it is with other men._'"--hooker. [ ] a list of mrs. prentiss' writings, with brief notices of some of them, will be found at the end of the appendix, p. . chapter xv. forever with the lord. . "but a bound into home immortal, and blessed, blessed years." i. enters upon her last year on earth. a letter about the home at greylock. her motive in writing books. visit to the aquarium. about "worry." her painting. saturday afternoons with her. what she was to her friends. resemblance to madame de broglie. recollections of a visit to east river. a picture of her by an old friend. goes to dorset. second advent doctrine. last letters. mrs. prentiss crossed the threshold of her last year on earth with hands and thoughts still unusually busied. her weekly bible-reading, painting in oils and in water-colors, needle-work, and other household duties, left her no idle moment. "my fire is so full of irons," she wrote, "that i do not know which one to take out." nor was her heart less busy than her hands and brain. twice in january, once in february, and again in april, death invaded the circle of her friends; and when her friends were in trouble she was always in trouble, too. [ ] these deaths led to earnest talk with her husband on the mystery of earthly existence, and on the power of faith in christ to sustain the soul in facing its great trials. "i am filled with ever fresh wonder at this amazing power," she said. such subjects always interested her deeply; never more so than at this time, when, although she knew it not, her feet were drawing so near to the pearly gates. the keynote of her being throughout this last winter was one of unwonted seriousness. a certain startling intensity of thought and feeling showed itself every now and then. it was painfully evident that she was under a severe strain, both physical and mental. again and again, as spring advanced, the anxiety of her husband was aroused to the highest pitch by what seemed to him indications that the unresting, ever-active spirit was fast wearing away the frail body. at times, too, there was a light in her eye and in her face an "unearthly, absolutely angelic expression"--to use her own words about her little bessie, six and twenty years before--that filled him with a strange wonder, and which, after her departure, he often recalled as prophetic of the coming event and the glory that should follow. but while to his ear an undertone of unusual seriousness, deepening ever and anon into a strain of the sweetest tenderness and pathos, ran through her life during all these early months of , there was little change in its outward aspect. she was often gay and full as ever of bright, playful fancies. never busier, so was she never more eager to be of service to her friends--and never was she more loving to her children, or more thoughtful of their happiness. she proposed for their gratification and advantage to write four new books, one for each of them, provided only they and their father would furnish her with subjects. the plan seemed to please her greatly, and, had she been spared, would probably have been carried into effect--for it was just the sort of stimulus she needed to set her mind in action. once furnished with a subject, her pen, as has been said before, always moved with the utmost ease and rapidity. but while she wrote very easily, she did not write without reflection. 'she had a keen sense of character in all its phases, and her individual portraits, like those of katy, mrs. grey and margaret, aunt avery and kezia millet, were worked out with the utmost care, the result of years of observation and study being embodied in them. and here, in passing, it may not be out of place to dwell for an instant upon her motives and experience as an author. from first to last she wrote, not to get gain or to win applause, but to do good; and herein she had her reward, good measure, pressed down and running over. but of that kind of reward which gratifies literary taste and ambition, she had almost none. her books, even those most admired by the best judges, and which had the widest circulation, both at home and abroad, attracted but little attention from the press. the organs of literary intelligence and criticism scarcely noticed them at all. nor is it known that any attempt was ever made to analyse any of her more striking characters, or to point out the secret of her power and success as a writer. to be sure, she had never sought or counted upon this sort of recognition; and yet that she was keenly alive to a word of discriminating praise, will appear from a letter to mrs. condict, dated jan. th: the burglary was on this wise, as far as we know. one man stood on the front steps, and another slipped the hasp to one of the parlor windows, stepped in, took a very valuable french clock, given me on my silver- wedding day, and all the hats and overcoats from the hall. this was all they had time to do before our night-watchman came round; they left the window wide open, and at a.m. pat rang the bell and informed mr. prentiss that such was the case. we feel it a great mercy that we were not attacked and maltreated. poor a. was sitting up in bed, hearing what was going on, but being alone on the third floor, did not dare to move. i have just finished a short story called gentleman jim, which i am going to send to scribner's; very likely it will get overlooked and lost. i received, not long ago, a letter from mr. cady [ ] about greylock, which he had just read. it was a gratification to both my husband and myself, as the most discriminating letter i ever received; and after the first rush of pleasure, the evil one troubled me, off and on, for two or three hours, but at last i reminded him that i long ago chose to cast in my lot with the people of god, and so be off the line of human notice or applause, and that i was glad i had been enabled to do it, since literary ambition is unbecoming a christian woman. there are other things i should say, if you were here! the following is a part of the letter referred to: the day after "new year's" i was visited with a severe cold and general prostration that has kept me in my bed--_giving me time!_ as soon as i was strong enough to read i had "the home" brought. after reading it i felt i ought to tell you how deeply i was impressed with the usefulness, excellence, and spirit of the book. as to its usefulness, you are to be envied; to have brought light, as i believe you have, to a large number of people upon the most precious and vital interests of life, is something worth living and suffering for. the good sense, wisdom, experience, and christian faith embodied in it must make it a strong helper and friend to many a home in trouble and to many perplexed and discouraged hearts, who will doubtless rise up some day to call you "blessed." though you cared less about the manner than the matter, i was impressed by its literary qualities. the scene at the death of mrs. grey and parting of herself and margaret is as highly artistic and beautiful as anything i can think of. the contrast of good and bad, or good and indifferent, is common enough; but the contrast of what is noble and what is "saintly" is something infinitely higher and subtler. i can't imagine anything more exquisitely tender and beautiful than mrs. grey's departure, but it is the more realised by the previous action of margaret. the few lines in which this is told bring their whole character--in each case--vividly before you. but i see that if the book had previously to this point been differently written it would have been impossible to have rendered this scene so remarkably impressive. the story of "eric" is extremely quaint and charming; it is a vein i am not familiar with in your writings. it is a little classic. this quaint child's story and the death of mrs. grey affect me as a fine work of art affects one, whenever i recall them. the trite saying is still true, "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." you know children complain of some sweets that they leave a bad taste--and works of fiction often do with me. i feel tired and dissatisfied after i have passed out of their excitements; but the heavenly atmosphere of this book left me better; i know that the blessed spirit must have influenced you in the writing of it, and i doubt not his blessing will accompany its teachings. now will you excuse this blotty letter--written in bed--and accept my thanks for all the good your book has done me. the following is her reply: dear mr. cady:--your letter afforded me more satisfaction than i know how to explain. it is true that i made up my mind, as a very young girl, to keep out of the way of literary people, so as to avoid literary ambition. nor have i regretted that decision. yet the human nature is not dead in me, and my instincts still crave the kind of recognition you have given me. i have had heaps of letters from all parts of this country, england, scotland, ireland, germany, and switzerland, about my books, till i have got sick and tired of them. and the reason i tired of them was, that in most cases there was no discrimination. people liked their religious character, and of course i wanted them to do so. but you appreciate and understand everything in greylock, and have, therefore, gratified my husband and myself. not a soul out of this house, for instance, has ever so much as alluded to my little eric, except one friend who said, "we thought that part of the book forced, and supposed a. wrote it." nobody has ever alluded to margaret, save yourself. i hoped a sequel to the book might be called for, when i meant to elaborate her character. still, it would have been very hard.... i am not sorry that i chose the path in life i did choose. a woman should not live for, or even desire, fame. this is yet more true of a christian woman. if i had not steadily suppressed all such ambition, i might have become a sour, disappointed woman, seeing my best work unrecognised. but it has been my wish to "dare to be little and unknown, seen and loved by god alone." your letter for a few hours, did stir up what i had always trampled down; but only for that brief period, and then i said to myself, god has only taken me at my word; i have asked him, a thousand times, to make me smaller and smaller, and crowd the self out of me by taking up all the room himself. there is so much of that work yet to be done, that i wonder he ventures to make so many lines fall to me in pleasant places, and that i have such a goodly heritage. i trust he will bless you for your labor of love to me. i do not like the idea of your buying my books. greylock being for mothers, i never dreamed of men reading it. have you had the story lizzie told, six little princesses, the little preacher, and nidworth? neither of these is really a child's book, and the next time you are sick, if you have not read them, i shall love to send them to you. if this is conceit, i have the effrontery not to be a mite ashamed of it! the following notes to mrs. fisher show how pleasantly she sympathised with her teacher as a young mother, while taking lessons of and admiring her as an artist: new york, _february , ._ what a relief to have the days come long again! on saturday i found in a.'s portfolio a study you lent her; exquisite ferns behind the fallen trunk of a tree, and a tiny group of orange-colored toad-stools. i will send it with its two lovely sisters, when i get through with them. i wish you could get time to come to see me, or that i could get time to go to see you. but it is my unlucky nature to have a great many irons in the fire at once. i am glad your baby keeps well, and hope he will grow up to be a great comfort to you. _feb. d._--i have just received your letter. i have my hands full and there is no need to hurry you. as to "worry" not being of faith, i do not suppose it is. but a young mother can not be _all_ faith. i do not envy people who love so lightly that they have no wringing out of the heart when they lose their dear ones; nor can i understand her who says she can sit and read the newspaper, while her babies are crying. "none are so old as they who have outlived enthusiasm"; and who should be enthusiastic if a mother may not? i don't think god has laid it up against me that i nearly killed myself for the sake of my babies, because when he took two away within three months of each other, my faith in him did not falter.... dear mrs. fisher, if you love god nothing but his best things will ever come to you. this is the experience of a very young, old woman, and i hope it will comfort you. _april st._--such a fight as i have had with your exquisite studies, and how i have been beaten! i failed entirely in the golden-rod, and do not get the brilliant yellow of the mullein flower; one could not easily fail on the saggitarius, and the clover was tolerable. i think i will take no more lessons at present, as i have much to do in getting another boy fitted for college. after i get settled at dorset i want to make a desperate effort to paint from nature, and if i have any success, send to you for criticism. "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and i am afraid you will be disgusted with my work, which will be in the dark, since i have had no instruction in copying nature.... perhaps you may put alongside of the rejection of your picture a lady's telling me about one of my books into which i had thrown an experience of the last thirty years of my life, "there was nothing in it." "il faut souffrir pour etre belle." as long as memory lasts i shall rejoice that i have seen and studied your work. i remember what a splendid fellow your baby was a year ago. it will depend on your maternal prayers and discipline whether he grows up to be your comfort. a few extracts from her letters will give further glimpses of the manner in which she passed these closing months of her life in new york-- especially of her delight in the weekly bible-reading. one of the ladies who attended it, thus refers to that exercise: you remember that for one or two years she was a member of a small circle, that met weekly for bible-study. when the leader of this circle removed from the city, mrs. prentiss was urgently requested to become its teacher, and she consented to do so. for the last four years of her life she threw her whole soul into this exercise. every week the appointed morning found her surrounded by a little group of from eight to fifteen, each with an open bible and all intent less to analyse the word of god than to feed upon it and "grow thereby." and what a wonderful teacher she was! not neglectful of any helps that dictionary or commentator might give, her chief source of light was none of these, but was received in answer to the promise, "if any man will do the will of god he shall know of the doctrine." she wished the service to be entirely informal, and that each one present should do her part to aid in the study. this brought out diverse views and different standards of opinion. here her keen intellect, her warm heart, the rich stores of her experience and her "sanctified common sense" all found play, and many of the words that fell from her lips dwell in the memory as little less than inspired. the last winter of this service showed some marked differences from previous years. as eager as ever to have questions asked and answered by others, yet from the moment she commenced to speak she scarcely paused till the hour was finished, her eyes sparkling and her whole manner intensely earnest. often those words of the psalmist passed through my mind, _the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up._ her love for her work and zeal in doing it were visibly consuming her. at the last meeting i asked her if she should commence the bible-reading at dorset immediately. she said no, she must rest a little; she would wait till her garden was made. when next i heard from her flowers and her bible-study she had made the "bound into home immortal." and all who loved her must rejoice with her; else have we failed to learn one of the clearest lessons of her life: _for me to live is christ, and to die is gain._ _to mrs. condict, feb. , ._ is it possible i had portiére on the brain when i wrote you last? i thought i had just caught the disease. i am very fond of needle-work, but for years have nearly abandoned it, because i could not thread my needle. but the portiére is made with a large worsted needle and will give me pleasant work for the evening. i am getting my hand in on a contumacious closet door that won't stay open in my bedroom.... imitation macaroni, by the author of pemaquid: boil hominy overnight. next day's dinner prepare like macaroni, with a little milk and grated cheese and bake. good for a change and cheaper. _march th._--what an improvement on the old fashion of _reading_ the bible is the present _search_ of the word! it is, as you say, fascinating work. i have just given m. an admirable book called "emphatic diaglott," being the greek testament with a literal translation; still even that can be misunderstood by one who has a false theory to sustain. the spiritual conflicts i have passed through have been a blessing, as i am beginning to see; i can understand better _how_ such conflicts may prepare one for work. this afternoon i have, as usual, been getting ready for the wednesday reading, and as i was requested to speak of the holy spirit, have been poring over the bible and am astonished at the frequency and variety of passages in which he is spoken of. but i feel painfully unfit to guide even this little circle of women, and would be so glad to sit as a learner. some of the children were going, last friday night, to see the aquarium, and some educated horses and dogs there, and they persuaded me to go. the performance was wonderful, but i could not help thinking of all these poor animals had gone through in learning all these incredible feats; each horse responding to his own name, each dog barking in response to his; two dogs hanging a third, cutting him down, when he lay apparently dead, other dogs driving in, in a cart, and carrying away the body; others waltzing on their hind legs, and others jumping the rope. two horses played see-saw, and one rolled a barrel up an inclined plane with his fore legs; he _hated_ to do it. but the marvellous fishes and sea-flowers charmed me most. _to mrs. reed, new york, march , ._ ... i have had a busy winter. we had a variety of losses, and i undertook, therefore, to manufacture reed, most of my christmas gifts, which were, chiefly, umbrella racks; this took time. then my bible-reading uses up pretty much one day. i never felt so unfit for it, or more determined to keep it up as long as one would come. besides that, i have read and painted more or less and sewed a good deal; on the whole, have had more vacation than work, at least one looking on would say so. but we all lead two lives, and one of them is penetrated and understood by no mortal eye. i heard such a sermon from dr. bevan last sunday night on the text, "they saw god and did eat and drink." he divided mankind into four classes: those who do eat and drink and do not see god; those who do not see him and do not eat and drink; those who see him and do not eat and drink (he handled them tenderly); and those who see him and yet eat and drink. i hope i have made its outline plain to you. it took hold of me. _to mrs. donaghe, new york, april , ._ i am living my life among breakings-up; you gone, mrs. smith about to flee to northampton, and our neighbor miss w. storing her furniture and probably leaving new york for good. on the other hand, m. spends most of her time in helping mr. and mrs. talbot get to rights in apartments they have just taken. mr. t., as i suppose you know, is pastor of our mission and as good as gold. god has been pleased greatly to bless two ladies, who attend the bible-reading, and i am sure he loves to have us study his word. the more i dig into it the richer i find it, and i have had some delightful hours this winter in preparing for my wednesday work. there is to be a women's exchange in this city, where everything manufactured by them (except underclothing) will be exposed for sale; embroidery, pickles, preserves, confectionery, and articles rejected by the society of decorative art. i hope it will be a success, and help many worthy women, all over the land, to help themselves.... i find it hard to consent to your having, at your age, to flit about from home to home, but a loving father has a mansion for you beyond all the changes and chances of this strange complicated life. if he gives you his presence, that will be a home. i wish you could visit us at dorset. a visit to dorset was afterward arranged, and one of mrs. prentiss' last letters was addressed to this old friend, giving her directions how to get there. [ ] _to mrs. condict, new york, may , ._ my last bible-reading, or rather one of the last, was on prayer; as i could not do justice to it in one reading, i concluded to make a resumé of the whole subject. though i devoted all the readings to this topic last summer, yet it loomed up wonderfully in this resumé. last week the subject was "the precious blood of christ," and in studying up the word "precious" i lighted on these lovely verses, deut. xxxiii. - . since i began to _study_ the bible, it often seems like a new book. and that passage thrilled the ladies, as a novelty. i am to have but one more reading. the last sermon i heard was on lying. that is not one of my besetting sins, but, on the other hand, i push the truth too far, haggling about evils better let alone. a. has just finished a splendid placque to order; a japanese figure, with exquisite foliage in black and grey as background. i have a widow lady every saturday to paint with me; she has a large family, limited means, and delicate health; and i want to aid her all i can. she enjoys these afternoons so much, and is doing so well. the lady herself thus recalls these afternoons: how dearly i should love to add but one little flower to her wreath of immortelles! i cherish memories of her as among the pleasantest of my life. i recall her room so bright and cheery, just like herself, and all the incidents of those saturday afternoons. when she first asked me to paint with her, i thought it very kind, but with her multiplicity of cares, felt it must be burdensome to her, and that possibly she would even forget the invitation, and so i hesitated about going. but when the week came round everything was made ready to give me a cordial welcome. again and again i found my chair, palette and other materials waiting for me, while she sat in her little nook, busy as a bee over some painting of her own. one day, passing about the room, i saw on her book-shelves, arranged with order and precision, nine little butter plates in the form of pansies. i uttered an exclamation of delight, and she from her corner, with the artlessness of a child, said, "i _put_ them there for you to see." another time she sprang up with her quick, light step, and ran to the yard to fetch a flower for me to copy, apparently thoughtless of two flights of stairs to tax her strength. sometimes she would read to me verses of poetry that pleased her. once i remember her throwing herself at my feet, and when i stopped to listen to the reading, she said, "oh, go right on with your painting." now she would relate some amusing anecdote that almost convulsed me with laughter, and then again speak of some serious theme with such earnestness of feeling! she was eager to give of her store of strength and cheer to others, but the store seemed inexhaustible. the more she gave, the more one felt that there was enough and to spare. i looked forward to my little weekly visit as to an oasis in the desert; not that all else was bleak, but that spot seemed to me so very refreshing and attractive. little did i think, when she loaded me down that last day with all i could carry, then ran down to the parlor to show me some choice articles there which she knew would give me pleasure--little did i think that i should see her again no more! not a day passed after leaving her that she was not an inspiration to me. while painting a wayside flower i would think, "mrs. prentiss would like this"--or, "in the fall i must show that to mrs. prentiss." even in my dreams she was present with me, and one morning, only a little while before she passed from us, i waked with a heavy burden upon my spirits--for it seemed to me as if she were gone. the impression was so strong that i spoke of it at the time, and for days could not throw it off. but at last, saying to myself, "oh, it is only a dream," i answered her little note, making, of course, no reference to my strange feelings in regard to her. her letter, by a singular mistake, is dated "kauinfels, _october_ , ," nearly two months after she had fallen asleep. how just like her is this passage in it: "i wish you could leave your little flock, and take some rest with us. it would do you good, i am sure. is it impossible? you do look so tired." my letter in reply must have been one of the very last received by her. in it i spoke of having just re-read stepping heavenward and aunt jane's hero, and of having enjoyed them almost as much as at the first. this was, perhaps, one reason why she had been so constantly in my thoughts. when the news came that she had left us, i was at first greatly shocked and grieved--for i felt that i had lost no ordinary friend--but when i considered how complete her life had been in all that makes life noble and beautiful, and how meet it was that, having borne the burden and heat of the day, she should now rest from her labors, it seemed selfish to give way to sorrow and not rather to rejoice that she had gone to be with christ. scores of such grateful testimonies as this might be given. to all who knew and loved her well, mrs. prentiss was "an inspiration." they delighted to talk about her to each other and even to strangers. they repeated her bright and pithy sayings. they associated her with favorite characters in the books they read. the very thought of her wrought upon them with gracious and cheering influence. an extract from a letter of one of her old and dearest friends, written to her husband after her death, will illustrate this: on the very morning of her departure i had been conversing with my physician about her. he spoke in admiration of her published works, and i tried to give him a description of her personal characteristics. the night before, in my hours of sleeplessness, i recounted the names of friends who i thought had been most instrumental in moulding my character, and mrs. prentiss led the list. how little did i dream that already her feet had safely touched "the shining shore"! in all the three and thirty years of our acquaintance i loved her dearly and reverenced her most deeply; but between us there was such a gulf that i always felt unworthy to touch even the hem of her garment. whenever i did touch it, strength and comfort were imparted to me. how much i was indebted to her most tender sympathy and her prayers in my own great sorrow, only another world will reveal. is it not a little remarkable that her last letter to me, written only a few weeks before her death, closed with a benediction? i could go on talking about her without end; for i have often said that there was more of her, and to her, and in her, than belonged to any five women i ever knew. how exceedingly lovely she was in her own home! i remember you once said to me, "the greatest charm of my wife is, after all, her perfect naturalness." all who knew her, must have recognised the same winning characteristic. she was always fresh and always new--for she had "the well-spring of wisdom as a flowing brook." ... were you not struck, in reading thomas erskine's letters on the death of madame de broglie, by the wonderful likeness between her and dear mrs. prentiss? twin sisters could scarcely have resembled each other more perfectly. such passages as the following quite startled me: her friendship has been to me a great gift. she has been a witness to me for god, a voice crying in the wilderness. she has been a warner and a comforter. i have seen her continually thirsting after a spiritual union with god. i have heard the voice of her heart crying after god out from the midst of all things which make this life pleasant and satisfying.... she had all the gifts of mind and character--intelligence, imagination, nobleness, and thoughts that wandered through eternity. she had a heart fitted for friendship, and she had friends who could appreciate her; but god suffered her not to find rest in these things, her ear was open to his own paternal voice, and she became his child, in the way that the world is not and knoweth not. i see her before me, her loving spirit uttering itself through every feature of her beautiful and animated countenance.... there was an unspeakable charm about her. she had a truth and simplicity of character, which one rarely finds even in the highest order of men. i know nobody like her now. i hope to pass eternity with her. it is wonderful to think what a place she has occupied in my life since i became acquainted with her. you know it is my belief that we become better acquainted with our friends after they have passed on "within the veil." and may it not be that they become better acquainted with us, too, loving us more perfectly and forgiving all that has been amiss? [ ] _to her eldest son, new york, may , ._ this is your father's birthday, and i have given him, to his great delight, a fairbanks postal scale. his twenty-years-old one would not weigh newspapers or books, and it is time for an improvement on it. on thursday evening there was a festival at our church in aid of sick mission children. everybody was there with their children, and it was the nicest affair we ever had. m. and i went and enjoyed it ever so much. i took between four and five dollars to spend, though i had given between twenty and thirty to the mission, but did not get a chance to spend much, as mr. m. took me in charge and paid for everything i ate. your father and i rather expect to go to east river, conn., tomorrow to help mrs. washburn celebrate her seventieth birthday; but the weather is so cold he doubts whether i had better go. a. went on a long drive on friday and brought back a host of wild flowers, which i tried with some failure and some success to paint. _may th._--we went to east river on monday afternoon and came home on thursday, making a delightful visit. on tuesday mrs. w. and i went to norwich to see the gilmans. i was very tired when we got back, and had to go to bed at half-past seven. the next day it rained; so mrs. w. and i fell to painting. she became so interested in learning mrs. fisher's system that she got up at five the next morning and worked two hours. in the evening your father gave his lecture at a little club-room, got up chiefly by mr. and mrs. washburn at their own expense. it is just such a room as i should like to build at dorset. on thursday morning mrs. w. took me out to drive through their own woods and dug up some wild flowers for me. a. has a miss crocker, an artistic friend from portland, staying with her--a very nice, plucky girl. she wants me to let her take my portrait. [ ] h. is full of a story of a pious dog, who was only fond of people who prayed, went to church regularly, and, when not prevented, to all the neighborhood prayer-meetings, which were changed every week from house to house; his only knowledge of where they would be held being from sunday notices from the pulpit! i believe this the more readily because of pharaoh's always going to my bible-reading at dorset and never barking there, whereas if i went to the same house to call he barked dreadfully. we are constantly wondering what you boys will be. good men, i hope, at any rate. good-night, with a kiss from your affectionate mother. the substance of the following letter of mrs. washburn, giving an account of the visit to east river, as also her impressions of mrs. prentiss, was written in response to one received by her from an old friend in turk's island: [ ] i am most thankful that we had that last visit from dear mrs. prentiss. it was a rare favor to us that she came. her health was very delicate, and a slight deviation from the regular routine of home life was apt to give her sleepless nights. dr. p. had sent us word that he was going to be in new haven, and would give us a call before returning to new york. we' were overjoyed at the prospect of seeing him, and wrote immediately begging mrs. prentiss to come with him. she, ever ready to sacrifice her own ease for the sake of giving pleasure to others, and knowing that the th of may would be my th anniversary, and that i perfectly longed to see her, took the risk of personal suffering upon herself to satisfy my earnest desire, and came. they arrived on the th in the late afternoon train. she was so bright and cheerful it was difficult to notice any traces of the weariness which she must have felt. we passed a delightful evening, and as dr. p. was to spend a part of the next day in new haven, we formed a plan for mrs. prentiss and me to go to norwich at the same time and make a brief visit to our mutual friends, the misses gilman. mr. washburn telegraphed to them that we were coming. on arriving at new london we found, to our dismay, that we had been misinformed in regard to the trains, and that the one we had taken did not connect with the one to norwich, which had been gone two hours. so there we were, left alone on the platform, strangers in the place, with no means of either going on or returning. what should we do? our first thought was to procure, if possible, some conveyance to take us to norwich and back; but this we found could not be done, for want of time, the distance between the two cities being fourteen miles or more. fortunately for us, a young lad appeared, who promised to take us to our friends in norwich, allow us half an hour to spend with them, and drive to the station there in time for the return train to new london and east river. he looked so honest and true that we felt we could trust him, and we acceded to his terms at once. as soon as he could get his carriage ready we started off on our untried way. it began at the foot of a long hill, and continued up and down over a succession of the same kind, with very rare exceptions of a level space between them, through the whole distance. but the scenery was so varied and beautiful, we thought if our only object in setting out had been a drive, we could not have chosen one more charming. the weather was fine, and dear mrs. prentiss in her happiest mood. as for me, nothing marred my enjoyment but fear that the fatigue would be too much for her, and an undercurrent of anxiety lest by some mishap we should fail to re-arrive at the home-station in time to meet our husbands who would be waiting for us. but if she had any such misgivings nothing in word or manner betrayed it. so entire was her self-control, and so delicate her tact, not to throw the faintest shadow across the wisdom of my precipitate arrangements. she was as happy as a bird all the way, and talked delightfully. we found our friends had been in a state of great excitement on our account, having received the telegram, and knowing that we had taken the wrong train; so that our unexpected arrival was greeted with even more than their usual cordiality; and they were specially gratified to see mrs. prentiss, who almost without looking, discovered a hundred beauties in and around their lovely home, which it would have taken the eyes of an ordinary guest a week to notice. the very shortness of our time to stay, intensified our enjoyment while it lasted. our half hour was soon over, and we came away with our hands full of flowers and our hearts as full of love. we arrived in good time and met our husbands waiting for us at the station. dear mrs. prentiss did not appear to be very much fatigued while recounting in her inimitably pleasant manner the various experiences of the day. a restful night prepared her for the quiet enjoyments of the next day, which we spent mostly at home, merely making short calls in the morning on my two sisters, and slowly driving, or rather, as i call it, "taking a walk in the buggy," through the woods, stopping every few minutes to look at, or gather ferns or mosses or budding wild flowers that could not escape her beauty-loving eye. the afternoon we remained in the house, occupied with our pencils. she painted a spray of trailing arbutus, talking while she was doing it, as nobody else could, about things beloved and fair. our darling julia was with us, completely charmed with her, and as busy as we, trying with her little hands to make pictures as pretty as ours. in the evening dr. p. gave his most interesting lecture on "recollections of hurstmonceaux" in our reading-room; but mrs. prentiss was not able to go, which i regretted the more because i knew many ladies would be there who came almost as much to see her as to hear him. they were greatly disappointed, but enjoyed every word of the lecture, as well they might. the next day was all too short. it seemed to me that i _could not_ let them go. but she had more than enough for her ever busy hands and mind and heart to do in preparation for going to her summer home, and we _had_ to say good-bye. a few short, characteristic, loving notes came from the city, before she left, and i did not hear from her at dorset till the overwhelming news came of her death. i could not control my grief. little julia tried to comfort me with her sweet sympathy. "dear grandma," she said, "i am sorry too. i can not feel so bad as you do, because you loved her so much, and you loved her so long; but _i_ loved her too, and i can think just how she looked when she sat right there by that little table talking, and painting those beautiful flowers. oh! i am very sorry." and here the poor child's tears flowed again with mine. so will all the children who knew her say, "we remember just how she looked." yes, there was no mistaking or forgetting that kindly, loving "look." julia's mother had felt its influence from her own early childhood till she left her precious little one to receive it in her stead. to each of these half-orphaned ones in turn, i had to read "little susy's six birthdays," and both always said to me when i finished, "please read it again." she could read and understand the heart of children through and through, as indeed she could everybody's. and that was, perhaps, her chiefest charm; a keen eye to see and a true heart to sympathise and love. she was absolutely sincere, and no one could help feeling that she was so. we felt ourselves fairly imaged when standing before her, as in a clear plate-glass mirror. there were no distorted lines caused by her own imperfections; for although she considered herself "compassed with infirmity," no one else could take such a view of her, but only saw the abundant charity which could cover and forgive a multitude of failings in others. we felt that if there was any good in us, she knew it, and even when she saw them "with all our faults she loved us still," and loved to do us good. you would like me to tell you "how she looked." you can form some idea from her picture, but not an adequate one. her face defied both the photographer's and the painter's art. the crayon likeness, taken shortly before her death by miss crocker, a young artist from maine, is, in some respects, excellent. the eyes and mouth--not to speak of other features--are very happily reproduced. she was of medium height, yet stood and walked so erect as to appear taller than she really was. her dress, always tasteful, with little or no ornament that one could remember, was ever suited to the time and place, and seemed the most becoming to her which could have been chosen. she was perfectly natural, and, though shy and reserved among strangers, had a quiet, easy grace of manner, that showed at once deference for them and utter unconsciousness of self. her head was very fine and admirably poised. she had a symmetrical figure, and her step to the last was as light and elastic as a girl's. when i first knew her, in the flush and bloom of young maternity, her face scarcely differed in its curving outlines from what it was more than a quarter of a century later, when the joys and sorrows of full-orbed womanhood had stamped upon it indelible marks of the perfection they had wrought. her hair was then a dark-brown; her forehead smooth and fair, her general complexion rich without much depth of color except upon the lips. in silvering her clustering locks time only added to her aspect a graver charm, and harmonised the still more delicate tints of cheek and brow. her eyes were black, and at times wonderfully bright and full of spiritual power; but they were shaded by deep, smooth lids which gave them when at rest a most dove-like serenity. her other features were equally striking; the lips and chin exquisitely moulded and marked by great strength as well as beauty. her face, in repose, wore the habitual expression of deep thought and a soft earnestness, like a thin veil of sadness, which i never saw in the same degree in any other. yet when animated by interchange of thought and feeling with congenial minds, it lighted up with a perfect radiance of love and intelligence, and a most beaming smile that no pen or pencil can describe--least of all in my hand, which trembles when i try to sketch the faintest outline. hundreds of heart-stirring memories crowd upon me as i write, but it is impossible to give them expression. her books give you the truest transcript of herself. she wrote, as she talked, from the heart. to those who knew her, a written page in almost any one of them recalls her image with the vividness of a portrait; and they can almost hear her musical voice as they read it themselves. but, alas! in reality-- no more her low sweet accents can we hear no more our plaints can reach her patient ear. o! loved and lost, oh! trusted, tried, and true, o! tender, pitying eyes forever sealed; how can we bear to speak our last adieu? how to the grave the precious casket yield, and to those old familiar places go that knew thee once, and never more shall know? i hear from heaven a voice angelic cry, "blessed, thrice blessed are the dead who lie beneath the flowery sod and graven stone." "yea," saith the answering spirit, "for they rest forever from the labors they have done. their works do follow them to regions blest; no stain hereafter can their lustre dim; the dead in christ from henceforth live in him." o! doubly dear transfigured friend on high, we, through our tears, behold thine eyelids dry. by him who suffered once, and once was dead, but liveth evermore through endless days, god hath encircled thy redeemed head with rays of glory and eternal praise, and with his own kind hand wiped every trace of tears, and pain and sorrow from thy face. c. w. wildwood, march , . one of the notes referred to is as follows: dear mrs. washburn:--if you judge by my handwriting, you will have to conclude that i am years old. but it all comes of my carrying a heavy bag too long, and is all my own fault for trying to do too many errands in one trip. your dear little chair, the like of which i should love to give to people, only cost $ . , so i enclose my check for the rest of your $ . we sent off mrs. badger's parcel early this morning. i hope digging and driving and packing and climbing in my behalf, has not quite killed you. a lot of flowers in two boxes came to me from matteawan while i was gone, and as my waitress fancied i had been shopping--as if i _should_ shop at east river!--she did not open the boxes or inform the children, so the spectacle of withered beauty was not very agreeable. a. and m. send love and thanks. the flowers you gave me look beautifully. give our love to mr. w. and julia, and write about her. we shall not soon forget our charming visit to east river! in acknowledging this note mrs. washburn alludes to one of mrs. prentiss' most striking traits--the eager promptitude with which she would execute little commissions for her friends. it was as if she had taken a vow that there should not be one instant's delay. i do hope you have not been made sick by doing so many errands in such a short time. the little chair has come and mr. w. is much pleased with it. nobody is so punctual as you. we were all amazed at receiving the picture so soon. how could you possibly have gotten home and packed it and marked the catalogues and bought the chair and written the check and sent me the little package of japanese corn-seed and written me the note and have had a moment even to look at a.'s portrait? it is a mystery to me. you are a wonder of a woman! you are a genius! you are a _beloved friend!_ i thank you again and again. just think of the good you have done us. shall i send you some more daisies? i have written in the greatest haste. that is the reason i have done no better and not because i am seventy years old. here is her last note to mrs. washburn, dated june : the box of daisies, clover, and grass came on saturday. we set the plants out in the box in which they came, and mixed the grass with what cut flowers we had, in the very prettiest receptacle for flowers i ever saw, just given m. the plants look this morning like a piece of wildwood and a piece of you, and will gladden every spring we live to see.... we are packing for dorset, though we do not mean to go if this weather lasts. i wonder if you have a "daily rose"? i have just bought one; first heard of it at the centennial. it is said to bloom every day from may to december. i am going out, now, to do ever so many errands for h.'s outfit for college. give our dear love to mr. washburn and julia. o, what a mercy it is to have somebody to love. [ ] on the th of june mrs. prentiss went to dorset for the last time. her husband, after her departure, thus referred to this period: for four or five weeks after coming here she was very much occupied about the house, and seemed rather weary and care-worn. but the pressure was then over and she had leisure for her flowers and her painting, for going to the woods with the girls, and for taking her favorite drives with me. she spoke repeatedly of you and other friends. on the d of july i started for monmouth beach. the week preceding this little journey was one of the happiest of our married life. no words can tell how sweet and loving and bright--in a word, how just like herself--she was. the impassion of that week accompanied me to the sea-side and continued with me during my whole stay there. as day after day i sat looking out upon the ocean, or walked alone up and down the shore, she was still in all my thoughts. the noise of the breakers, the boundless expanse of waters, the passing ships, going out and coming in, recalled similar scenes long ago on the coast of maine, before and after our marriage--scenes with which her image was indissolubly blended. then i met old friends and found new ones, who talked to me with grateful enthusiasm of "stepping heavenward," "more love to thee, o christ," and other of her writings. in truth, my feelings about her, while i was at monmouth beach, were quite peculiar and excite my wonder still. i scarcely know how to describe them. they were at times very intense, and, i had almost said, awe-struck, seemed bathed in a sweet sabbath stillness, and to belong rather to the other world than to this of time and sense. how do you explain this? was my spirit, perhaps, touched in some mysterious way by the coming event? certainly, had i been warned that she was so soon to leave me, i could hardly have passed those days of absence in a mood better attuned to that in which i now think of her as forever at home with the lord. the following are two of her last letters: _to mrs. condict, kauinfels, july , ._ to begin with the most important part of your letter. i reply that neither mr. prentiss or myself have ever had any sympathy with second adventists. all the talk about it seems to us mere speculation and probable doom to disappointment. i do not see that it is as powerful a stimulant to holiness as the uncertainty of life is. christ may come any day; but he may not come for ages; but we must and _shall_ die in the merest fragment of an age, and see him as he is. it will be a day of unspeakable joy, when we meet him here or there. i shrink from unprofitable discussion of points that, after all, can only be tested by time and events. i do not think our expecting christ will bring him a minute sooner, for the early church expected him, yet he came not. there has been so much wildness in theories on this subject that i am sore when i hear new ones advanced; none of these theories have proved to be correct, and i do not imagine any of them will. i have been busy indoors, upholstering not only curtains and couches, but ever so many boxes, as our bureaus are shallow and our closets small. i made one for a. large enough for her to get into, and she uses it as she would a room, suspending objects from the sides and keeping all her artistic implements in it. i began my bible-reading last thursday, the hottest day we have had; but there was a good attendance. my g. met with an accident from the circular saw which alarmed and distressed me so that his father had to hartshorn and fan me, while the girls did what they could for g. till the doctor could be got from factory point. his eyebrow was cut open and his forehead gashed, but all healed wonderfully, and we have reason to be thankful that he did not lose an eye, as he was so near doing. at any time when you must have change, let me know, as there are often gaps between guests, and sometimes those we expected, fail. mr. prentiss is, apparently, benefited by hot weather, and is unusually well. thanks for the needles, which will be a great comfort. have you painted a horse-shoe? i had one given me; black ground and blue forget-me-nots, and hung by a blue ribbon. i am going to paint one for m. and hatty. i feel as if i had left out something i wanted to say. _to mrs. george payson, kauinfels, aug. , ._ i am all alone in the house, this evening, and as this gives me room at the table, i am going to begin to answer your letter. george is out of town, and all the rest, including the servants, have gone to see the mistletoe bough. it is astonishing how slowly you get well; and yet with such heat and such smells as you have in chicago, it is yet more astonishing that you live at all. i thought it dreadful to have the thermometer stand at ° in my bedroom, three weeks running, and to sniff a bad sniff now and then from our pond, when the water got low, but i see i was wrong. we have next to no flowers this summer; white flies destroyed the roses, frost killed other things, and then the three weeks of burning heat, with no rain, finished up others. portulacca is our rear-guard, on which we fall back, filling empty spaces with it, and i grow more fond of it every year. a good many verbenas sowed themselves, but came up too late to be of any use. we have a splendid bed of pansies, sown by a friend here. i have not done much indoors but renovate the house, but that has been a great job. i brought up a japanese picture-book to use as a cornice in my den, but a. persuaded me to get some wall paper, and use the pictures as a dado for the dining-room. the effect is very unique and pretty. i expect george home to-morrow; he has been spending a delightful week at monmouth beach, visiting friends. i wish i could send you some of our delicious ice-cream. we have it twice a week, with the juices of what fruit is going; peaches being best. we have not had much company yet. last saturday a friend of a.'s came and goes with her to prout's neck to-morrow. we do not count hatty k. as company, but as one of us. she gets the brightest letters from rob s., son of george. i should burst and blow up if my boys wrote as well. they have telephone and microphone on the brain, and such a bawling between the house and the mill you never heard. it is nice for us when we want meal, or to have a horse harnessed. have you heard of the chair, with a fan each side, that fans you twenty-five minutes from just seating yourself in it. it must be delightful, especially to invalids, and ought to prolong life for them.... the clock is striking nine, my hour for fleeing to get ready for bed, but none of the angels have come home from the mistletoe bough, and so i suppose i shall have to make haste slowly in undressing. love to all. _aug. d._--i am delighted that you enjoyed the serge so much; i knew you would. i forgot to answer your question about books. have you read "noblesse oblige"? we admire it extremely. there are two works by this title; one poor. i read "les miserables" last winter, and got greatly interested in it; whether there is a good english translation, i do not know. "that lass o' lowrie's" you have probably read. i saw a russian novel highly praised the other day; "dosea," translated from the french by mary neal (sherwood); "victor lascar" is said to be good. i have, probably, praised "misunderstood" to you. "strange adventures of a phaeton" we liked; also "the maid of sker" and "off the skelligs"; its sequel is "fated to be free." two tongues are running like mill-clappers, so good-night. * * * * * ii. little incidents and details of her last days on earth. last visit to the woods. sudden illness. last bible-reading. last drive to hager-brook. reminiscence of a last interview. closing scenes. death. the burial. her last days on earth were now close at hand. such days have in themselves, of necessity, no virtue above other days; and yet a tender interest clings to them simply as the last. their conjunction with death and the life beyond seems to invest whatsoever comes to pass in them--even trifles light as air--with unwonted significance. soon after her sudden departure her husband noted down, for the satisfaction of absent friends, such little incidents and details as could be recalled of her last ten days on earth. the following is a part of this simple record: _sunday, aug. , ._--to-day she went to the house of god for the last time; and, as would have been her wish, had she known it was for the last time, heard me preach. there was much in both the tone and matter of the sermon, that made it seem, afterwards, as if it had been written in full view of the approaching sorrow. a good deal of the day at home was spent in getting ready for her bible-reading on the ensuing thursday. at four o'clock in the afternoon she and the girls, m. and h., usually drove in the phaeton over to the rev. mr. reed's, on the west road, to attend a neighborhood prayer-meeting; but to-day, on account of a threatening thunder-shower, they did not go. she enjoyed this little meeting very much. _monday, aug. th._--soon after breakfast, she and the girl--"we three girls," as she used to say--started off, carrying each a basket, for the cheney woods in quest of ferns; it having been arranged that at ten o'clock i should come with the phaeton to fetch her and the baskets home. the morning, although warm, was very pleasant and all three were in high spirits. before leaving the house, she ran up to her "den"--so she called the little room where she wrote and painted--to get something; and on passing out of it through the chamber, where just then i was shaving, she suddenly stopped, and pointing at me with her forefinger, her eye and face beaming with love and full of sweet witchery, she exclaimed in a tone of pretended anger: "how dare you, sir, to be shaving in my room?" and in an instant she was gone! a minute or two later i looked after her from the window and saw her, with her two shadows, hurrying towards the woods. at the time appointed, i went for her. she awaited me sitting on the ground on the further side of the woods, near the old sugar-house. the three baskets, all filled with beautiful ferns, were placed in the phaeton and we drove home. the cheney woods, as we call them, form one of the attractions of dorset. they are quite extensive, abound in majestic sugar-maples, some of which have been "tapped," it is said, for more than sixty successive seasons, and at one point in them is a water-shed dividing into two little rivulets, one of which, after mingling with the waters of the battenkill and the hudson, finds its way at last into the atlantic ocean; while the other reaches the same ocean through pawlet river, lake champlain and the st. lawrence river. these woods and our own, together with the mountain and waterfall and groves beyond deacon kellogg's, where she often met her old friend "uncle isaac," [ ] were her favorite resorts. a little while after returning home i found her in her little room, looking well and happy, and busy with her brush. the girls, also, on reaching the house found her there. but somewhat later, without our knowledge, she went out and worked for a long time on and about the lawn. there was a breeze, but the rays of the sun were scorchingly hot and she doubtless exerted herself, as she was always tempted to do, beyond her strength. i was occupied until noon at the mill and later, in the field, watching the men cradling oats. on coming in to dinner, a little past one, i was startled not to find her at the table, "where is mamma?" said i to m. "she is not feeling very well," m. answered, "and said she would not come down, as she did not want any dinner." i ran up-stairs, found her in her little room, and asked her what was the matter. she replied that she had been troubled with a little nausea and felt weak, but it was nothing serious. i went back to the table, but with a worried, anxious mind. somewhat later she lay down on the bed and the prostration became so great, that i rubbed her hands vigorously and administered hartshorn. it occurred to me at once that she had barely escaped a sunstroke. after rallying from this terrible fit of exhaustion, she seemed quite like herself again, and listened with much interest while the girls read to her out of boswell's johnson. she was in a sweet, gentle mood all the afternoon. "i prayed this morning," she said, "that i might be a comfort to-day to everybody in the house." _tuesday, aug. th._--she passed the day in bed; feeble, but otherwise seeming still like herself. in the course of the morning we persuaded her to let margaret, eddy's old nurse, make her some milk-toast, which she enjoyed so much that she said, "i wish, margaret, you were well enough to come and be our cook." m. had taken the place of our two servants, who were gone to east dorset to a confirmation, at which their bishop was to be present. throughout the day she was in a very tender, gentle mood, as she had been on the previous afternoon. she was much exercised by the sudden death of the mother of one of our servants, the news of which came while they were away. had the case been that of a near relative, she could hardly have shown warmer sympathy, or administered consolation in a more considerate manner. during the day there was more or less talk about the bible-reading and i begged her to give it up. we finally agreed that the girls should drive over to mrs. reed's and ask her to take charge of it. they did so; but at mrs. r.'s suggestion it was decided not to give up the meeting, but to convert it, if needful, into a little service of prayer and praise. this arrangement seemed to please her. although feeling very weak, she did not appear at all depressed and was alive to everything that was going on in the room. the girls having written to a friend who was to visit us the next week, she asked if they had mentioned her illness. they both replied no--for each supposed the other had done it. "then (said she) you had better add a postscript, telling her that i lie at the point of death." _wednesday, aug. th._--a beautiful day. she got up, put on a dressing-gown, and sat most of the day in the easy-chair, or rather the _sea_-chair, given us by my dear friend, mr. howland, when we went to europe in . she looked very lovely and we all enjoyed sitting and talking with her in her chamber. the girls arranged her hair to please their own taste, and then told her how very charming she was! she liked to be petted by them; and they were never so happy as in petting and "fussing" about her. she spent an hour or two in looking over a package of old agriculturists, that had belonged to her brother-in-law, prof. hopkins, of williams college. she delighted in such reading, and nothing curious and interesting, or suggestive, escaped her notice. she called my attention to an article on raising tomatoes, and cut it out for me; and also cut out many other articles for her own use. towards night she dressed herself and came down to tea. she remained in the parlor, talking with me and the boys, and reading the paper, until the girls returned from the wednesday evening meeting. something had occurred to excite their mirth, and they came home in such a "gale" that she playfully rebuked them for being so light-minded. but at the same time she couldn't help joining in their mirth. in truth, she was quite as much a girl as either of them; and her laugh was as merry. _thursday, aug. th._--she seemed to feel much better this morning. before getting up we talked about her bible-reading, and she asked me various questions concerning the passage that was to be its theme, namely, john xv. . she referred particularly to our lord's sayings, at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter, on the subject of persecution, and told me how very strange and impressive they seemed to her, coming, as they did, in the midst of his last conversation with his disciples--a conversation so full of divine tenderness and love. this was almost the last of innumerable and never-to-be-forgotten talks which we had had together, during more than a third of a century, upon passages of holy scripture. after breakfast she went to her workshop and painted six large titles; and then went down to the piazza and painted a chair for hatty. she also assisted the girls in watering her flowers. "she came round to the back stoop thursday morning (one of the servants told me afterwards) and i said to her, 'mis prentiss, and how d'ye feel?' and she said, 'ellen, i feel _weak_, but i shall be all right when i get my strength.'" i still felt troubled about her holding the bible-reading and tried to dissuade her from attempting it. she had set her heart upon it, however, and said that the disappointment at giving it up would be worse than the exertion of holding it. her preparation was all made; the ladies would be there, some of them from a distance, expecting to see her, and she could not bear to lose the meeting. so i yielded. we were expecting dr. vincent by the afternoon train and i was to go to the station for him. just as i was seated in the carriage and was about to start, she came out on the porch, already dressed for the bible-reading, and with an expression of infinite sweetness, half playful and half solemn, pointing at me with her finger, said slowly: "_you pray--one--little--prayer for me_." never shall i forget that arch expression--so loving, so spiritual, and yet so stamped with marks of suffering--the peculiar tones of her voice, or that dear little gesture! of her last bible-reading the following brief account is prepared from the recollections kindly furnished me by several of the ladies who were present: her last bible-reading. there was something very impressive in mrs. prentiss' bible-readings. she seemed not unlike her gifted father in the power she possessed of captivating those who heard her. her manner was perfectly natural, quiet, and even shy; it evidently cost her considerable effort to speak in the presence of so many listeners. she rarely looked round or even looked up; but a sort of magnetic influence attracted every eye to _her_ and held all our hearts in breathless attention. her style was entirely conversational; her sentences were short, clear as crystal, full of happy turns, and always fresh and to the point. the tones of her voice were peculiar; i scarcely know how to describe them; they had such a fine, subtle, _womanly_ quality, were touched--especially at this last reading--with such tenderness and depth of feeling; i only know that as we heard them, it was almost as if we were listening to the voice of an angel! and they are, i am sure, echoing still in all our memories. the first glance at her, as she entered the room, a little before three o'clock on the th of august, showed that she was not well. her eyes were unusually bright, but the marks of recent or approaching illness were stamped upon her countenance. it was lighted up, indeed, with even unwonted animation and spiritual beauty; but it had also a pale and wearied look. the reading was usually opened with a silent prayer and closed with two or three short oral prayers. the subject this afternoon was the last verse of the fifteenth chapter of the gospel according to john: _and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning_. witnessing for christ, this was her theme. she began by giving a variety of scripture references illustrative of the nature and different forms of christian witness-bearing. it was her custom always to unfold the topic of the reading, and to verify her own views of it, by copious and carefully prepared citations from the word of god. a bible-reading, as she conducted it, was not merely a study of a text, or passage of scripture, by itself, but study of it in its vital relations to the whole teaching of the bible on the subject in hand. in the present instance her references were all written out and were so numerous and so skilfully arranged that they must have cost her no little labor. feeling, apparently, too feeble to read them herself, she turned to her daughter, who sat by her mother's side, and requested her to do it. after the references had been given and the passages read, she went on to express her own thoughts on the subject. and, surely, had she been fully conscious that this was the last opportunity she would ever have of thus bearing witness for christ, her words could not have been more happily chosen. would that they could be recalled just as they issued from her own lips! but it is not possible so to recall them. one might as well try to reproduce the sunset scene on the evening of her burial. for even if the exact words could be repeated, who could bring back again her tender, loving accents, or that strange earnestness and "unction from the holy one" with which they were uttered? or who could bring back again the awe-struck, responsive emotions that thrilled our hearts? the simplest outline of this farewell talk is all that is now practicable. had we known what was coming, our memories would, no doubt, have been rendered thereby sevenfold more retentive, and little that fell from her lips would have been lost. her first point was the great variety of ways in which we can bear witness for christ. we can do it in private as well as in public; and it is in the private spheres and familiar daily intercourse of life that most of us are called to give this testimony, and to give it by manifesting in this intercourse and in these retired spheres the spirit of our master. what an opportunity does the family, for example, afford for constant and most effective witness-bearing! how a mother may honor christ in what she says to her children about him and especially by the manner in which she fulfils her every-day home duties! how a wife may thus testify of christ to her worldly, unconverted husband! and here she spoke of one form of _public_ testimony which everybody might and ought to give. "i can not (she said) see all the faces in this room but there may be those here who have never confessed christ before men by uniting with his visible church. let me tell any such who may be present that they are grieving their saviour by refusing to give him this testimony of their love and devotion." in referring to this subject she remarked that young persons, after having united with the church, sometimes felt greatly disheartened and thought themselves the worst christians in the world. but this was often a very wrong feeling. their sense of their own weakness and unworthiness might come from the holy comforter; and we should be very careful how we treat him. his influence is a very tender, sacred thing, and, like the sensitive plant, recoils at the touch of a rude hand. i have wanted, she said, to speak _cheerful, comforting_ words to you to-day. it was the particular desire of my husband this morning that i should do so. he thought that young christians, especially, needed much encouragement on this point. it was a great thing to lead them to feel that they could please their master and be witnesses for him in quiet, simple ways, and that, too, every day of their lives. our lord, to be sure, does not really _need_ our services. he could quite easily dispense with them. but he lets us work for him somewhat as a mother lets her little child do things for her--not because she needs the child's help, but because she loves to see the child trying to please her. "and yet, mrs. prentiss (asked one of the ladies), does there not come a time when the child is really of service to the mother?" "i thank you for the suggestion (she replied); i left my remark incomplete. yes, it is true such a time does come. and so, in a certain sense, it may be said, perhaps, that god needs the services of his children. but how easily he can dispense with the best and most useful of them! one may seem to have a great task to perform in the service of the master, but in the midst of it he is taken away, and, while he is missed, the work of god goes right on. god does not see such a difference as we do, she said, between what we call great and small services rendered to him. a cup of cold water given in christ's name, if that is all one can give, is just as acceptable as the richest offering; and so is a tea-spoonful, if one has no more to give. christ loves to be loved; and the smallest testimony of real love is most pleasing to him. and love shown to one of his suffering disciples he regards as love to himself. so a little child, just carrying a flower to some poor invalid, may thus do christ honor and become more endeared to him. there is no one, old or young, who has not the power of blessing other souls. we all have far more influence, both for good and evil, than we dream of." in the course of her talk she alluded to the trials of life and the shortness of them at the longest. we are all passing away, one after another. our intimate friends will mourn for us when we are gone, but the world will move on just the same. and we should not allow ourselves to be troubled lest when our time comes we may be afraid to die. dying grace is not usually given until it is needed. death to the disciple of jesus is only stepping from one room to another and far better room of our father's house. and how little all the sorrows of the way will seem to us when we get to our home above! i suppose st. paul, amidst the bliss of heaven, fairly _laughs_ at the thought of what he suffered for christ in this brief moment of time. and as she said this, she gently waved her hand in the way of emphasis. no one of us who saw it will soon forget that little gesture! in one part of her remarks she cautioned us against hasty and harsh judgments. we should cover with our charity the faults and imperfections of those about us, as nature hides with her mossy covering the unsightly stone. she referred to the case of children: a child often has a sweet disposition until five or six years of age and then becomes very irritable and cross, causing the parents much anxiety--and, perhaps, much impatience. and yet it may not be the child's fault at all; but only the effect of ill-health, too much study and confinement, or pure mismanagement. a large portion of the disobedience and wrong temper of children comes from improper food or loss of sleep, or something of that sort. and it is not cross fretful _children_ alone that need to be judged tenderly. a consumptive friend of hers, rendered nervous and weak by long sickness, upon being asked one morning, as usual, about her health, replied: "don't ask me again--_i feel as if i could throw this chair at you._" now i do not think, said mrs. prentiss, that this speech was a sin in the sight of god. he saw in it nothing but the poor invalid's irritable nerves, god judges us according to the thoughts and intentions of the heart; and we ought, as far as possible, to judge each other in the same way. and when we ourselves are the ones really at fault, we ought to confess it. i never shall forget how humiliated i felt when my mother once came to me and asked my forgiveness--but i loved her ten times as much for it. prayer was another point touched upon in this last bible-reading. she almost always had something fresh and striking to say about prayer. it was one of her favorite topics. i recall two or three of her remarks at this time. "always move the lips in prayer. it helps to keep one's thoughts from wandering." "a mother can pray with a sick child on her lap more acceptably than to leave it alone in order to go and pray by herself." "accustom yourself to turn all your wants, cares and trials into prayer. if anything troubled or annoyed my mother she went straight to the 'spare room,' no matter how cold the weather, and we children knew it was to pray. i shall never forget its influence over me." "when a question as to duty comes up, i think we can soon settle it in this way: 'am i living near to christ? am i seeking his guidance? am i renouncing self in what i undertake to do for him?' if we can say yes to these questions, we may safely go into any path where duty lies." "we never dread to hear people pray who pray truly and in the spirit. they may be unlearned. they may be intellectually weak. but if they pray habitually in the closet, they will edify out of it." such is a poor, meagre account of this last precious bible-reading. possibly some of the things here recorded belonged to previous readings--though mrs. prentiss occasionally repeated remarks on points to which she attached special importance. "some good (she said) will come of these meetings, i feel sure. it is impossible that you should take so much pains, and some of you put yourselves to so much inconvenience, in order to come here and study together god's word--and his blessing not follow." the blessing has already followed, good measure, pressed down and running over, and it will continue to follow in days to come; especially the blessings of this last meeting, when, in a strain so sweet and tender--as though she had a new glimpse of heaven and the heart of god--our beloved and now sainted teacher urged us to bear witness for christ and showed us so plainly how to do it. at the close of the meeting she looked very pale and seemed much exhausted. "you are ill, mrs. prentiss," said one of the ladies, distressed by her appearance. "yes," she said, "i _am_." still, it seemed a great pleasure to her to have met us once more. nor can i help thinking that, even if she herself had no presentiment of what was coming, she was yet led of the spirit, the blessed comforter, to hold this last bible-reading. it was itself just such a testimony for christ as fitly crowned her consecrated and beautiful life. upon my return from the station with dr. vincent she met us on the porch, bade him welcome to dorset, told him with what extraordinary care the girls had made ready his room, and appeared in excellent spirits all the rest of the day. while at tea she expressed to dr. v. our regret that dr. poor could not have made his visit at the same time; although, to be sure, they might, if together, have "brought the house down" upon our heads by the explosions of their mirth. she then related some amusing anecdotes of a queer, crotchety old domestic of ours in new bedford a third of a century ago, and of her delight when dr. poor (then settled at fair haven, opposite new bedford) got married, because "_now_, it was to be hoped, he would stay at home with his wife and not be coming over all the time and drinking up our tea!" on my asking her about the bible-reading, she said she got through with it very well, expressed surprise at the large attendance, and spoke of the deep interest manifested. after tea she sat with us in the parlor for some time and then, kissing m. good-night, omitted hatty and the boys (a most unusual thing), remarking, as she left for her chamber, "well, i'm not going to kiss all this roomful." _friday, aug. th_--a severe thunder-storm had set in early last night and continued at short intervals throughout the day. she was very anxious that dr. vincent should enjoy his visit, and on his account was disturbed by the weather; otherwise, a thunder-storm seemed to exhilarate her, as is said to have been the case with her father. she spent most of friday in her "den," finishing a little picture and chatting from time to time with the girls who were busy in the adjoining room. dr. vincent and i sat a part of the forenoon on the piazza under her window and whiled away the time, he in telling and i in listening to any number of amusing stories. she called the attention of m. and h. to our unclerical behavior: "just hear those doctors of divinity giggling like two schoolgirls!" but nobody enjoyed more an amusing story, or told one with more zest than she did herself. i forget whether it was on friday, or an earlier day, that she showed me a remarkable letter she had received, during my absence at the sea-side, from london. it was written by a young wife and mother nearly related to two of the most honored families of england, and sought her counsel in reference to certain questions of duty that had grown out of special domestic trials. "stepping heavenward," the writer said, had formed an era in her religious life; she had read it through _from fifty to sixty times_; it had its place by the side of her bible; and no words could express the good it had done her, or the comfort she had derived from its pages. "the home at greylock" had also been of great help to her as a wife and mother; and she could not but hope that one whose books had been such a blessing to her, might be able to render her still greater and more direct aid by personal counsel. the letter, which was beautifully written and was full of the most grateful feelings, appealed very strongly to her sympathy. but it was never answered. _saturday, aug. th_--she had a tolerable night, but on coming down to breakfast said, in reply to dr. vincent's question, how she felt? "i feel like bursting out crying." after prayers, however, when the plans for the day were arranged and a drive to hager brook--a picturesque mountain glen and waterfall--was made the order of the forenoon, she proposed to go with us. i had almost feared to suggest it, and yet was greatly relieved to find that she felt able to take the ride. it was decided, therefore, that she, hatty k., dr. vincent and i should form the party. as we drove toward the village i noticed that dr. wyman was just stopping at our next neighbor's. dr. hemenway, our old physician, had removed to st. paul's, and dr. w. had taken his place. i was rejoiced to see him, both on her account and my own. i had not been well myself during the week, and although i had repeatedly proposed to call in the doctor for her, she stoutly refused. so, after getting a prescription for myself, i said, "and now, doctor, i want you to do something for my wife," relating to him her ill-turn on monday. "certainly (the doctor replied) she needs some _arsenicum_," which he gave her, promising to call and see us on the next monday. as we rode on dr. vincent suggested, laughingly, what a strange story might be based upon dr. w.'s prescription. "i might report, for example, that i myself saw the author of 'stepping heavenward' eating arsenic!" she joined heartily in the laugh and during all the rest of the drive conversed with great animation. she related several anecdotes of her early life, talked with admiration of the writings and genius of mrs. stowe--one of whose new england stories she had just been reading--and seemed exactly like herself. upon reaching the brook in east rupert and starting with dr. vincent for the glen, i said to her, "now don't walk off out of sight, where i can't see you when we come back." "oh yes, i shall," she replied in her pleasant way. "after we were left alone that saturday morning (hatty writes) mrs. prentiss gathered quite a bunch of the wild ageratum, and then dug up the roots of three wild clematis vines with her scissors. she then called my attention to the thimbleberry bushes along the edge of the brook, admiring the foliage of the plant and expressing the determination to have one or more in her garden next year." on coming down from the glen i found her sitting on the ground near the brook. taking her by the hand--for she seemed very tired--i helped her to rise and walked back with her toward the carriage. just before reaching the road she saw some clusters of clematis on the side of the brook, which at her desire i gathered. it was the last service of the kind ever performed for her, and i am so thankful that no hands but mine were privileged to perform it! during the drive home she said almost nothing and was, evidently, feeling very much wearied. we returned by the west road and on passing in at our gate i observed that dr. wyman's gig was still in front of miss kent's. "why, lizzy, dr. wyman is still here," said i. "then, i would like to see him now rather than wait till monday," she said, to my surprise. i went immediately and asked him to call. it was, i think, between eleven and twelve o'clock. he came very soon and she received him in the parlor. i noticed at once that she was extremely nervous and agitated, while explaining to him her symptoms; and not being able to recall some point, she remarked that her mind had been much confused all the week. just then she rose hastily, excused herself, and went up to her room. "_she is very ill_ (said the doctor, turning to me) and must go to bed instantly." while he was preparing her medicines judge m. and family from new york, who were sojourning at manchester, called; but learning of her illness, soon left. later in the day i told her who had called and how much mrs. m. and the young ladies admired her flowers, especially the portulacas. she seemed pleased and said to me, "you had better, then, prepare two little boxes of portulacas and send them over to mrs. m. to keep in her windows while she stays at the equinox house." a few days after her death i did so and received a touching note of thanks from mrs. m. as the doctor directed, she at once took to her bed. for an hour or two her prostration was extreme, and she nearly fainted. her head shook and her condition verged on a collapse. i rubbed her hands vigorously, gave her a restorative, and gradually her strength returned. in speaking of the attack she said the sense of weakness was so terrible that she would gladly have died on the spot. in the course of the afternoon, however, she was so much easier that the girls read to her again out of boswell's johnson and she seemed to listen with all the old interest. it pleased her greatly to have them read to her; and she loved to talk with them about the books read and especially to discuss the characters depicted in any of them. toward evening george brought in some trout, which he had caught for her out of our brook. her appetite was exceedingly poor, but she was very fond of trout and g. often caught a little mess for her supper. our brook never seemed so dear to me, nor did its rippling music ever sound so sweet, as when i did the same thing, before he came home from princeton and took the privilege out of my hands. when he brought in the trout, ellen went to his mother's chamber and asked if they should not be kept for breakfast? "no, they are very nice and you had better have them for supper." "shan't i save some for your breakfast?" asked ellen, knowing how fond she was of them. "no," said she, "the doctor says i must take nothing but beef-tea." "and d'ye feel better, mis' prentiss?" continued ellen. "oh i feel better, ellen, but i'm very weak--i shall be all right in a few days." after tea she insisted on sending for mrs. sarah c. mitchell, of philadelphia, whom she had been unable to see on the previous monday. mrs. m. was the last person out of the family, with whom she conversed, excepting the doctors and nurse. [ ] _sunday, aug. th._--she slept better than i feared, but awoke very feeble, taking no nourishment except a little beef-tea. she lay quiet a part of the time; but the quiet intervals grew shorter and were followed by most distressing attacks. m. and i sat by her bed, but could do nothing to relieve her. my fears had now become thoroughly aroused and i awaited the arrival of the doctor with the most intense anxiety. hour after hour of the morning, however, passed slowly away and he did not come. at length a messenger brought word from the "west road," where he had been called at midnight, that an urgent telegram had summoned him to arlington and that he should not be able to reach dorset before one or two o'clock p.m. the anguish of the suspense during the next three or four hours was something dreadful. when the bell rang for church she desired that m. should go, as dr. vincent was to preach, and it would give a little relief from the strain that was upon her. soon after m. had left, during an interval of comparative ease, she fixed her eyes upon me with a most tender, loving expression, and in a sort of beseeching tone, said, "darling, don't you think you could ask the lord to let me go?" perceiving, no doubt, how the question affected me, she went on to give some reasons for wishing to go. she spoke very slowly, in the most natural, simple way, and yet with an indescribable earnestness of look and voice, as if aware that she was uttering her dying words. i can not recall all that she said, but its substance, and some of the exact expressions, are indelibly impressed upon my memory. for my and the children's sake she had been willing and even desired to live; and for several years had made extraordinary efforts to keep up, although much of the time the burden of ill-health, as i well knew, had been well-nigh insupportable. so far as this world was concerned, few persons in it had such reasons for wishing to live, or so much to render life attractive. but the feeling in her heart had become overpowering that no earthly happiness, no interest, no distraction, could any longer satisfy her, or give her content, away from christ; and she longed to be with him, where he is. during the past three months especially, she had passed through very unusual exercises of mind with reference to this subject; and it seemed to her as if she had now reached a point beyond which she could not go. she evidently had in view the dreadful _sleeplessness_, to which she had been so in bondage for a quarter of a century, whose grasp had become more and more relentless, and the effects of which upon her nervous system were such as words can hardly describe. no human being but myself had any conception of her suffering, both physical and mental, from this cause. to return to her conversation.... in answer to a question which i put to her later, about her view of heaven and of the relation of the saints in glory to their old friends there and here, she replied, in substance, that to her view _heaven is being with christ and to be with christ is heaven_. by this she did not mean, i am sure, to imply any doubt respecting the immortality of christian love and friendship, or that our individual human affections will survive the grave. often had she delighted herself in the thought of meeting her sainted father and mother in heaven, of meeting there eddy and bessie and other dear ones who had gone before; and certain i am, too, she believed that those who are gone before retain their peculiar interest in those who are toiling after, only her mind was so absorbed in the thought of the presence and beatific vision of christ in his glory that, for the moment, it was lost to everything else. she then said that, in the event of her death, she would like to be buried in dorset, where we could easily visit her grave. "but i do not expect to go now," she added. this meant, as i interpret it, that she regarded so speedy a departure to be with christ as something _too good to be true_. repeatedly, when very ill, she had thought herself on the verge of heaven and had been called back to earth, and she feared it would be so now. hardly had this never-to-be-forgotten conversation come to a close when her feet entered "the swelling of jordan," and found no rest until they walked the "sweet fields beyond." her disease (gastro-enteritis) returned with great violence; the medical appliances seemed to have little or no effect; and the paroxysms of pain were excruciating. a chill, also, began to creep over her. about two o'clock, to my inexpressible relief, the doctor arrived. her first thought was that he should rest a little and that some ice-cream should be brought to him. in answer to his inquiries she told him that she had never known agony such as she had endured that forenoon, and he immediately applied remedies adapted to the case. but they afforded only temporary relief. a terrible restlessness seized upon her and would not let go its hold. towards evening she got into the sea-chair, and remained in it near the open window until morning. on leaving for the night dr. wyman intrusted her to the care of dr. slocum, who had recently come to dorset. dr. s. remained with her all night and was indefatigable in trying to alleviate her sufferings. "how kind he is!" she said to me once when he had left the room. m. sat up with me till towards morning and assisted in giving the medicines. her distress could only be assuaged by inhaling chloroform every few minutes and by the constant use of ice. as from time to time, going down for the ice, i stepped out on the piazza, the scene that met my eye was in strange contrast to the one i had just left. within the sick-chamber it was a night dark with suffering and anxiety; as the hours passed slowly away, my heart almost died in the shadow of the coming event; all was gloom and agitation except the sweet patience of the sufferer. but the beauty and stillness of the night out of doors was something marvellous. the light of the great harvest moon was like the light of the sun. it flooded hills and valley with its splendor. the outlines of each mountain, of every tree, and of all visible objects, far or near, were as distinct as those of the stars, or of the moon itself. as i stood and gazed upon the infinite beauty of the scene, i felt, as never in my life before, how helpless is nature in the presence of a great trouble. the beauty of the night was fully matched by that of the morning. as the first rays of the sun crossed the mountains and shone down upon the valley, i said to myself, even while my heart was racked with anxious foreboding--"how wonderful! how wonderful!" _monday, aug. th._--for some hours she seemed much more comfortable, and, in the course of the morning, of her own accord, was removed from the chair to the bed. "on monday morning (writes dr. wyman) i found her with temperature nearly normal, pulse less than , and other symptoms improved. this gave us hope that the worst was passed, but it was only the lull before the storm." she was for the most part quiet and took little notice of anything that was going on. during the forenoon m. tried to get some rest in the sea-chair by the window, while hatty kept her place by the bed. several times lizzy looked round the room as if in quest of some one. hatty perceiving this and guessing what it meant, stepped aside (she was between the bed and the chair so as to intercept the view), when she fixed her eyes upon m. and rested as if she had found what she sought. having been up most of the night, i also tried to get a little rest in another room, and later went out in search of a nurse and engaged an excellent one, mrs. c., who came early in the afternoon. notwithstanding my deep anxiety i was deceived by the more favorable symptoms, and did not allow myself, during the day, to think she would not recover. in the early evening i wrote to a., who was absent in maine: i am sorry to say that your mother had a very trying day yesterday and has been extremely weak and exhausted to-day.... nervous prostration appears to be the great trouble. she has rested quietly much of the time to-day and the medicines seem to be doing their work; and in a couple of days, i trust, she may be greatly improved. you know how these ill-turns upset her and how quickly she often rallies from them. she is very anxious you should not shorten your visit on her account. soon after this letter was written, the whole aspect of the case suddenly changed. the unfavorable symptoms had returned with renewed violence. dr. w. asked her, during one of the paroxysms, about the pain. she answered that it was not a pain--it was a distress, an _agony_. but from first to last she never uttered a groan--not during the sharpest paroxysms of distress. she seemed to say to herself, in the words of two favorite german mottoes, which she had illumined and placed on the wall over her bed, _geduld, mein herz!_ (patience, my heart!)--_stille, mein wille!_ (still, my will!) "the patient and uncomplaining manner," writes dr. wyman, "in which the most agonizing pains which it has ever been my lot to witness were borne--with no repining, no murmur, no fretfulness, but quiet, peaceful submission to endure and suffer--will not soon be forgotten." at eleven o'clock, when the doctor left, i sent the nurse away for a couple of hours rest and took her place by the sick-bed. lizzy, who had already begun to feel the effects of the morphine, lay motionless, and breathed somewhat heavily, but not alarmingly so. _tuesday, aug. th._--shortly after one o'clock i called the nurse and, directing her to summon me at once in the event of any change, retired to the green-room for a little rest. the girls had been persuaded before the doctor left, to throw themselves on their bed. everything was quiet until about three o'clock, when hatty knocked at my door with a message from the nurse. i hurried down and saw at the first glance as i entered the room, that a great change had taken place. it seemed as if i heard the crack of doom and that the world was of a sudden going to pieces. i went to g.'s room, woke him, told him what i feared, and desired him to go for dr. slocum as quickly as possible. he was dressed in an instant, as it were, and gone. in the meantime i woke h., and told him his mother, i feared, was dying. when dr. slocum arrived he felt her pulse, looked at her and listened to her breathing for a minute or two, and then, turning slowly to me, said, _it is death!_ this was not far from four o'clock. i asked if i had better send at once for dr. wyman? "he can do nothing for her," was the reply, "but you had better send." i requested g. to call albert, and tell him to go for dr. w. as fast as possible. "i will saddle prince and go myself," g. said; and in a few minutes he was riding rapidly towards factory point. i then knocked at dr. poor's door. upon opening it and being told what was coming, he was so completely stunned that he could with difficulty utter a word. he had arrived the previous afternoon on the same train by which dr. vincent left. i had tried by telegraph to _prevent_ his coming; but a kind providence so ordered it that my message reached burlington, where he had been on a visit, just after he had started for dorset. the night, like that of sunday, was as day for brightness. never shall i forget its wondrous beauty, although it seemed only a mockery of my distress. soon after the first rays of the sun appeared, dr. wyman came, but only to repeat, _it is death_. i asked him how long she might be a dying. "perhaps several hours; but she may drop away at any moment." we all gathered about her bed and watched the ebbing tide of life. the girls were already kneeling together on the left side. they never changed their posture for more than four hours; they wept, but made no noise. the boys stood at the foot of the bed, deeply moved, but calm and self-possessed. the strain was fearful; and yet it was relieved by blessed thoughts and consolations. although the chamber of death, it was the chamber of peace, and a light not of earth shone down upon us all. he who was seen walking, unhurt, in the midst of the fire and whose form was like the son of god, seemed to overshadow us with his presence. as the end drew near, we all knelt together and my old friend, dr. poor, commended the departing spirit to god and invoked for us, who were about to be so heavily bereaved, the solace and support of the blessed comforter.... the breathing had now grown slower and less convulsive, and at length became gentle almost like that of one asleep; the distressed look changed into a look of sweet repose; the eyes shut; the lips closed; and the whole scene recalled her own lines: oh, where are words to tell the joy unpriced of the rich heart, that breasting waves no more, drifts thus to shore, laden with peace and tending unto christ! about half-past seven it became evident that the mortal struggle was on the point of ending. for several minutes we could scarcely tell whether she still lived or not; and at twenty minutes before eight she drew one long breath and all was over. again we knelt together, and in our behalf dr. poor gave thanks to almighty god for the blessed saint now at rest in him--and for all she had been to us and all she had done for him, through the grace of christ her saviour. the following account of the burial was written by the rev. dr. vincent and appeared in the new york evangelist: dorset, vt. _august , ._ this lovely valley has been, for the past few days, "a valley of the shadow." it is not the least significant tribute to one so widely known as mrs. prentiss, that her death has affected with such real sorrow, and with such a deep sense of loss, this little rural community which has been her home during a large part of the last ten years. it would have been hard to find among all who gathered at the funeral services on wednesday, a face which did not bear the marks of true sorrow and of tender sympathy; while from the groups of sunburned farmers gathered round the door or walking towards the cemetery, were often heard the words "a great loss." * * * * * the funeral took place at the house on wednesday afternoon, and was conducted by the rev. p. s. pratt, pastor of the old congregational church of dorset; assisted by dr. vincent, and dr. d. w. poor. mr. pratt read the twenty-third psalm and a part of the fourteenth chapter of john, which was followed by the hymn, "o gift of gifts, o grace of faith," after which dr. poor delivered a most appropriate, tender, and interesting address. dr. vincent then offered prayer, and the hymn "nearer, my god, to thee," was sung, closing the services at the house. the large assemblage passed in succession by the casket, where lay such an image of perfect rest as one is rarely favored to see. all traces of struggle and pain had faded from the expressive face, and nothing was left but the sweetness of eternal repose. it was now a little after six o'clock, and the shadows were lengthening in the valley at the close of one of those rare days of the ripe summer, which only the hill-countries develop in their perfect loveliness. the long procession moved from the house, and at the distance of about a quarter of a mile entered the little cemetery; and as it mounted the slope on which was the grave, the scene was one of most pathetic beauty. standing in the shadow of the hills which bound the valley on the east, the eye ranged southward to the long, undulating outline of the green mountain, coming round to the equinox range on the west, "muffled thick" to its very crest with the green maples and pines, and still farther round to the bold hills and sloping uplands on the north. below lay the quiet village, at our feet "god's acre," with the train of mourners winding among the white stones. who could stand there, compassed about by the mountains, and in the shadow of that great sorrow, and not whisper the words of the pilgrim psalm, "i will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. whence should help come to me? my help cometh from jehovah, who made heaven and earth." as the casket was borne to the grave, the setting sun, which for the last half hour had been hidden by a mass of clouds, burst out in full splendor, gilding the mountain-tops and shedding his parting rays upon the group around the tomb, the stricken family, the weeping neighbors and friends, especially the women whom for some years past she had been in the habit of meeting at her weekly bible-reading, and some of whom had walked each week for miles along the mountain roads, through storm and heat, to drink of the living waters which flowed at her touch. dr. vincent, holding in his hand a little, well-worn volume, and standing at the foot of the grave, spoke substantially as follows: i am glad, my friends, that i am not one of those who know god only as they find him identified with the woods and fields and streams. if this were so, i should turn from the grave of this beloved friend, and go my way in utter heart-sickness and hopelessness; for nature would but mock me to-day with her fulness of summer life. these forest-clad mountains, that waving grain, those woods, pulsating with the hum of insects and with the song of birds, all speak of life, while we stand here at the close of a precious and useful human life, to lay in the dust all that remains of what was so dear, and so fruitful in good. but, thanks to god, we are not here as those who face an insoluble riddle. we believe in the lord jesus christ, and in the resurrection of the dead; and with this key in our hand, we stand here at the grave's mouth, and looking backward, interpret the lesson of this closed life; and looking forward, gaze with hope into the future. thus nature becomes our consoler instead of our mocker; a type, and not a contradiction of human immortality. thus, and only thus, do we find ourselves at the standpoint from which christ viewed nature when he said, "except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit"; the standpoint from which paul viewed nature when he wrote, "that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain; but god giveth it a body as he willeth, and to every seed his own body. so also is the resurrection of the dead. it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." and thus too we can understand the words which i read from this little volume, the daily companion of our friend for many years, containing a passage of scripture for every day in the year, and marked everywhere with her notes of special anniversaries and memorable incidents. was it merely an accidental coincidence that, on the morning of the thirteenth of august, on which she exchanged earth for heaven, the passage for the day was, "i heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write, blessed are the dead which die in the lord, from henceforth, yea, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow them." there are two thoughts in this verse which seem to me to be fraught with comfort and hope to us as we gather round this grave. there is the thought of rest. "they rest from their labors." bethink you of the long life marked by the discipline of sorrow, and by those unwearied labors for others. bethink you of the racking agony of the last two days; and how blessed, how soothing the contrast introduced by the words--"she rests from her labors." still is the busy hand; at rest the active brain; completed the discipline; the pain ended forever. the other thought is that her work is not done, so far as its results are concerned. "their works do follow them." think you that because she will no longer meet you in her weekly bible-readings, because her pen will no more indite the thoughts which have made so many patient under life's burdens, and helped so many to make of their burdens steps on which to mount heavenward--think you her work is ended? nay. go into yonder field, and pluck a single head of wheat, and plant the grains, and you know that out of each grain which falls into the ground and dies, there shall spring up an hundred-fold. shall you recognise so much multiplying power in a corn of wheat, and not discern the infinitely greater power of multiplication enfolded in a holy life and in a holy thought? no. through the long years in which her mortal remains shall be quietly resting beneath this sod, the work of her tongue and pen shall be reproducing itself in new forms of power, of faith, and of patience. and yet we seem to want something more than these two thoughts give us. it does not satisfy us to contemplate only rest from labor and the perpetuated fruits of labor. and that something this same little volume gives us in the words appointed for this day, on which we commit her mortal part to the grave: "for god is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have showed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints and do minister. be not slothful, but followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises." here the veil is lifted, and we get the glimpse we want of her inheritance and reward in heaven. she has inherited the promises; such promises as these: "if children, then heirs, heirs of god, and joint-heirs with christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together." "they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat; for the lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them to living fountains of waters, and god shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." "they shall see his face, and his name shall be in their foreheads." "to him that overcometh will i grant to sit with me in my throne, even as i also overcame, and am set down with my father in his throne." thus we commit this mortal body to the ground in hope, and with assurances of victory. oh, it is one of the most wonderful of facts, that at the grave's very portal, amid all the tears and desolation which death brings, we can stand and sing hymns of triumph--even that song which, from the morning when the angels met mary at the lord's empty supulchre, has been sounding over the graves of the dead in christ--"o death, where is thy sting? o grave, where is thy victory? the sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to god, who giveth us the victory through our lord jesus christ." how sweet, how impressive, is this scene! no wonder that we linger here while nature, at this evening hour, speaks to us so tenderly and beautifully of rest. even as yonder clouds break from the setting sun, and are tinged with glory by its parting beams, so our sorrow is illumined by this truth of the resurrection. there is no terror in death, and relieved by such a faith and hope, our thoughts are all of peace, and flow naturally into the mould of those familiar lines: "so fades a summer cloud away, so sinks the gale when storms are o'er, so gently shuts the eye of day, so dies a wave along the shore." but this scene is adapted also to kindle aspiration in our hearts-- aspiration to be followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises. her victory over death is the victory of love to christ; and that same victory may be yours through the same christ in whose name she conquered. shall we not pray that his love may be shed abroad in all our hearts in richer measure? and can we better frame that prayer than in those lines which she wrote out of her own heart? let us then sing more love to thee, o christ. more love, o christ, to thee! hear thou the prayer i make on bended knee: this is my earnest plea,-- more love, o christ, to thee! more love, o christ, to thee! more love to thee. once earthly joy i craved, sought peace and rest; now thee alone i seek; give what is best! this all my prayer shall be,-- more love, o christ, to thee! more love to thee. let sorrow do its work, send grief and pain; sweet are thy messengers, sweet their refrain, when they can sing with me more love, o christ, to thee! more love to thee. then shall my latest breath whisper thy praise! this be the parting cry my heart shall raise, this still its prayer shall be, more love, o christ, to thee! more love to thee. after the singing of these words, mr. pratt, according to the old country custom, returned thanks to the assembled friends in the name of the family, for their sympathy and aid in the burial of their dead. the several members of the household each laid a floral offering upon the casket lid, and the body was lowered into the grave. dr. vincent uttered the solemn words of committal to the dust, and dr. poor pronounced the parting blessing in the words, "the god of peace who brought again from the dead our lord jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through jesus christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. amen." thus the valley of the shadow has been irradiated. to those who have been permitted to participate in these closing scenes, it has seemed like standing at heaven's gate. the valley of the shadow has become a transfiguration mountain, where we have seen the lord. * * * * * hardly had the news of her death left dorset when there began to pour in upon its stricken household a stream of the tenderest christian sympathy; nor did the stream cease until it had brought loving messages from the remotest parts of the land. her friends seemed overcome with special wonder that she could have died, so vividly was she associated in their thoughts with life and sunlight. for months, too, after the return of the family to their city home, letters from far and near continued to bear witness to the mingled emotions of sorrow and of thanksgiving excited by her sudden departure from earth--sorrow for a great personal loss; thanksgiving that she had gone to be forever with the lord. a little volume of selections from these varied testimonies would form a very touching and precious tribute to her memory. "the human heart," to use her own words, "was made by so delicate, so cunning a hand, that it needs less than a breath to put it out of tune; and an invisible touch, known only to its own consciousness, may set all its silvery bells to ringing out a joyous chime. happy he, thrice blessed she, who is striving to hush its discords and to awaken its harmonies by never so imperceptible a motion!" surely, the triple benediction belonged to her. already tens of thousands, both young and old, who never saw her face, but have been aided and cheered by her writings, gladly call her "thrice blessed." may this story of her life serve to increase their number and so to render her name dearer still. above all, may it help to inspire some other souls with her own impassioned and adoring love to our lord jesus christ. [ ] she was specially touched by the sudden decease of mrs. harriet woolsey hodge, of philadelphia, to whom both for her mother's and her own sake she was warmly attached. [ ] j. cleveland cady, the distinguished architect. [ ] mrs. antoinette donaghe died at staunton, va., april , . her last years were passed amid great bodily sufferings, which she bore with the patience of a saint. she was a woman of uncommon excellence, a true christian lady, and much endeared to a wide circle of friends in new haven, new york, and elsewhere. her husband, mr. james donaghe, a most worthy man, for many years a prominent citizen of new haven, died on the st of january, . he and mrs. donaghe were among the original members of the church of the covenant. [ ] the book alluded to is letters of thomas erskine of linlathen. from till . edited by dr. hanna, and republished by g. p. putnam's sons. the duchess de broglie was born in paris, in , and died in september, , at the age of forty-one. she was the only daughter of the celebrated madame de stael. some pleasant glimpses of her are given in the life, letters, and journals of george ticknor. vol. i., pp. - . vol. ii., pp. - . [ ] the portrait in this volume is from a drawing by miss crocker, engraved by a. h. ritchie. miss c., after pursuing her studies for some time in paris, has opened a studio in new york. [ ] in this letter she told me how much good stepping heavenward had done her and how sorry she felt on hearing of mrs. p.'s death, that she had never written, as she longed to do, to thank her for it. "dear soul! (she added) perhaps she knows now how many hearts she has lifted up and comforted by her wonderful words."--_from a letter of mrs. w._ [ ] mr. washburn died on sunday, the th of september, , aged years. he was born in farmington, conn. his father, the rev. joseph washburn, pastor of the congregational church in f., was cut off in the prime of a beautiful and saintly manhood. he inherited some of his father's most attractive traits and was a model of christian fidelity and uprightness. in a notice which appeared in the new york evangelist, shortly after his death, president porter, of yale college, whose father succeeded the rev. mr. washburn as pastor of the church in farmington, thus refers to his life at wildwood: "some twenty years since he retired for a part of eight years to the singularly beautiful house which was selected and prepared by the taste of himself and wife, near east river, a district in madison, which he has for several years made his permanent residence. his life was singularly even in its course and happy in its allotments; a blessing to himself and a blessing to the world. his memory will long be cherished by the many who knew him as one whom to know was to love and honor." [ ] mr. isaac farwell, or "uncle isaac," as everybody called him, was the most remarkable man in dorset. he died in in the d year of his age. his centennial was celebrated on the th of july, ; the whole town joining in it. he was full of interest in life, retained his mental powers unimpaired, and would relate incidents that occurred in the last century, as if they had just happened. mrs. prentiss was fond of meeting him: and after her departure he delighted to recall his talks with her and to tell where he had seen her creeping through fences, laden with rustic trophies, as she and her daughter came home from their tramps in the fields and over the hills. [ ] the following is an extract from a letter of mrs. m. giving an account of the interview: it was of her i thought, as an hour before sunset, on that day, i passed through the grounds to the door of her beautiful home. i thought of her as i had seen her busy at work among her flowers on the morning of the day when the fatal illness began, wearing a straw hat, with broad brim to protect her from the heat of the sun. several of her family were standing around her, and the pleasant picture we saw as we drove by the lovely lawn is fresh and green in my memory now. once, after this, i had seen her, at our last precious bible-reading (though little thought we then it would be our last), when she so earnestly urged us to be true "witnesses" for our master and lord and gently bade us god-speed, "_encouraging_" us also, as she expressed it, "by the particular desire of my husband to-day," in the heavenward path. i knew that she was not quite well, and as i entered the house was invited to her chamber. i found her attired as usual, but reclining on the bed, apparently only for quiet rest. her greeting was warm, her eyes bright, she was very cheerful, and, i think, was not then suffering from pain. to my inquiries after her health, she replied, that she had been at first prostrated by the heat of the sun, remaining at work in it too long, with no idea of danger from the exposure; "but now," she said, "i do not think much is the matter with me"--though afterwards she added, "the doctor has said something to my husband which has alarmed him about me, and he is anxious, but i can not perceive any reason for this." we talked of many familiar things, even of home-like methods of cookery, and she kindly sent for a small manuscript receipt-book of her own to lend me, looking it over and turning down the leaves at some particular receipts which she approved, and "those were my mother's," she said of several. she spoke of her engagements and the guests she loved to entertain, adding that she thought god had given this pleasant home, surrounded by such beautiful things in nature, that others too might be made happy in enjoying them. all the time while listening to her remarks, and deeply interested in every one she made, the strong desire was in my heart to speak to her of her works, of my appreciation of their great usefulness, and how god had blessed her in permitting her to do so much to benefit others. i longed to say to her, "o had you only written the books for the little ones, 'little susy's six birthdays,' and its companions, it would have been well worth living for! had you never written anything but 'the flower of the family,' it were a blessing for you to have lived! and 'stepping heavenward'--what a privilege to have lived to write only that volume!" i could scarcely refrain from pouring out before her the thoughts which warmed my heart, but i had been told that she preferred not to be spoken to of her works, and i refrained. only once, when we were alone, i said, with some emotion, "i am so glad to have seen you; it was because _you_ were here that i wished to come to this village; this was the strong attraction." ... thus i parted from her. i shall not look upon her again until the day when "those who sleep in jesus shall god bring with him." appendix a. the allusion is to a young officer of the navy, james swan thatcher--a grandson of general knox, the friend of washington, and a younger brother of lieutenant, afterwards the gallant rear admiral, henry knox thatcher. he had become deeply interested in miss payson, and at length solicited her hand. the story of his hopeless attachment to her, as disclosed after his death, is most touching. he would spend hours together late into the night in walking about the house, which, to borrow his brother's expression, "his love had placed on holy ground." he was a young man of singular purity and nobleness of character--"one of a thousand," to use her own words--and, although she could not accept him as a lover, she cherished for him a very cordial friendship. not long after, he was lost at sea. in later years she often referred to him and his tragical end with the tenderest feeling. the following is an extract from a letter of rear admiral thatcher to her husband, written several months after her death and shortly before his own: i have read with great interest your reference to my dear and only brother, james swan thatcher. it carried me back to one of the saddest afflictions of my life. we had both been stationed at portland for the purpose of recruiting some of the hardy sons of maine as seamen for the u. s. naval service. the wife of the rev. dr. dwight had advised my calling upon mrs. payson, cumberland street, to obtain quarters. i did so, and with my wife removed from a noisy hotel to the quiet of that most desirable retreat. my brother made frequent visits to us, and, by invitation of mrs. payson, dined with us on sundays, and passed the hours between meetings, accompanying the ladies to church in the afternoons. this led to an acquaintance between miss payson and himself. as they were both highly intellectual and were both "stepping heavenward," they naturally fancied each other's conversation and formed a mutual friendship. until after my dear brother's death i never imagined that it was more than a fondness for miss payson's conversational gifts that induced him to call so frequently at cumberland street.... james was unexpectedly ordered to join the u. s. schooner grampus at norfolk, va., for a winter cruise on the southern coast for relief of distressed merchant vessels. the cruise continued for some weeks without entering any port, but about the th of march, , the grampus appeared off the bar of charleston, s. c., and sent in a letter-bag for mailing. that night there came on a terrible gale and the grampus disappeared forever--no vestige of her ever having been seen. she was commanded by lt.-commander albert e. downes, a good man and a fine seaman, and who as a midshipman had sailed with me three years before in the pacific. my brother was educated for the law, and studied his profession with the hon. john holmes, and, after completing his studies, became mr. holmes' law-partner. but he being my only brother, i was very desirous that he should obtain a commission as a purser in the navy, in order that we might be associated on duty; and, at mr. h.'s request, he was appointed by general harrison soon after his inauguration. my brother then joined me in portland. it is a consolation to know that he lived and died in the exercise of those christian sentiments which were deeply instilled into his mind by the society of your angelic wife, who has preceded you to our home of rest. god grant that we may all meet there! * * * * * b. s. s. prentiss. one of the best informed writers on the history of the revolutionary times and of the war for the union thus introduces a notice of mr. prentiss: small in stature; limping in gait; broad-chested; a high intellectual forehead; manly beauty in every feature; a voice of remarkable sweetness and flexibility; a mild but deeply penetrating eye; a most retentive memory; endowed with varied knowledge by extensive reading; unrivaled in power of oratory; frank in thought, speech, and manner; patient and forbearing in temper; powerfully governed by the affections, and with unbounded generosity of disposition, seargent smith prentiss was one of the most remarkable characters in our history. living persons who were adults a generation ago will remember how the newspapers between and were filled with his praises as a citizen unapproachable in oratory, whether he spoke as an advocate at the bar, a debater in the halls of legislation, or at occasional public gatherings. [ ] s. s. prentiss was born at portland, maine, september , . while yet an infant, he was reduced by a violent fever to the verge of the grave and deprived for several years of the use of his limbs, the right leg remaining lame and feeble to the last. for his partial recovery he was indebted to the unwearied care and devotion of his mother, herself in delicate health. during the war of his father removed to gorham. at the academy in this town, then one of the best in maine, seargent was fitted for bowdoin college, where he was graduated in the class of , at the age of seventeen. after studying law for a year with judge pierce, of gorham, he set out for what was at that day the far west, in quest of fortune. having tarried a few months at cincinnati, he then made his way down the mississippi to natchez, where he obtained the situation of tutor in a private family. here he completed his legal studies; was admitted to the bar in june, , soon afterwards became the law-partner of gen. felix huston, and almost at a bound stood in the front rank of his profession in the state. "boundless good-nature," to use the language of dr. lossing; "keen logic; quickness and aptness at repartee; overflowing but kindly wit; an absolute earnestness and sincerity in all he undertook to do, made him a universal favorite in every circle." in mr. prentiss removed to vicksburg. john m. chilton, a leading member of the bar of that place, thus describes his first appearance in the circuit court of warren county: there arrived, with other members of the bar, from natchez, a limping youth in plain garb, but in whose bearing there was a manly, indeed almost a haughty, mien; in whose cheek a rich glow, telling the influence of more northern climes; in whose eye a keen but meditative expression; and in whose voice and conversation a vivacity and originality that attracted every one, and drew around him, wherever he appeared, a knot of listeners, whose curiosity invariably yielded in a few moments to admiration and delight. there was then a buzz of inquiry, succeeded by a pleased look of friendly recognition, and a closer approach, and in most instances an introduction, to the object of this general attraction, so soon as it was told that the stranger was s. s. prentiss, of natchez. his fame had preceded him, and men were surprised to see only beardless youth in one whose speeches, and learning, and wit, and fine social qualities, had already rendered him at natchez "the observed of all observers." society in the southwest at that day was full of perils to young men, especially to young men of talent and generous, impressionable natures. drinking, duelling, and gambling widely prevailed. it was a period of "flush times," and wild, reckless habits. mr. prentiss did not wholly escape the contagion; but his faults and errors were very much exaggerated in many of the stories that found currency concerning him. one of his friends wrote after his death: "i have heard many anecdotes of him, which i considered of doubtful authority; for he is a traditional character all over mississippi--their cid, their wallace, their coeur de lion, and all the old stories are wrought over again, and annexed to his name." another of his friends, who knew him long and intimately, the late balie peyton, of tennessee, testified: "no man ever left a purer fame than seargent s. prentiss, in all that constitutes high honor and spotless integrity of character. his principles remained as pure, and his heart continued as warm and fresh, as at the instant he bade farewell to his mother." from his settlement at vicksburg his career as a lawyer was one of remarkable success; and it were hard to say in what department of his profession he most excelled, whether in the varied contests of the _nisi prius_ courts, in an argument on a difficult question of legal construction, or in discussing a fundamental principle of jurisprudence. in , at the age of , he appeared before the supreme court at washington, where, in spite of his youth, he at once attracted the notice of chief justice marshall. "i made a speech three or four hours long (he wrote to his mother); and i suppose you will say i have acquired a great deal of brass since i left home, when i tell you that i was not at all abashed or alarmed in addressing so grave a set of men as their honors the judges of the supreme court of the united states." in attending the circuit courts of mississippi he had experiences of the roughest sort and many a hairbreadth escape. he wrote: i travel entirely on horseback; and have had to swim, on my horse, over creeks and bayous that would astonish you northerners. beyond pearl river i had to ride, and repeatedly to swim, through a swamp four miles in extent, in which the water was all the time up to the horse's belly. what do you think of that for a lawyer's life? in the winter of - he won the great "commons" suit, which involved a considerable portion of the town of vicksburg. this made him, as was supposed, one of the richest men in the state. about this time he was induced to run for the legislature of mississippi. he was elected, and at once took a foremost position as leader of his party. the next summer he visited his home, and by a speech at a whig political meeting in portland, on the fourth of july, he so electrified his hearers by his eloquence that he was pronounced, in the east, the most finished orator of his time; as he really was. he became a candidate for a seat in congress, and made the most remarkable electioneering canvass ever recorded. traveling on horseback, he visited forty-five counties in a sparsely-settled country. for ten weeks he traveled thirty miles each week-day, and spoke each day two hours. he had announced his engagements beforehand, and never missed one. mississippi was a strong "jackson state," but mr. prentiss carried it for the whigs. his seat was contested by his democratic opponent, and his speech in the house of representatives at washington in favor of his claim gained for him a national reputation as the greatest orator of the age. it occupied three days in its delivery. he had not spoken long before intelligence of his wonderful oratory reached the senate chamber and drew its members to the other house. rumors of his speech ran through the city, and before it was concluded the anxiety to hear him became intense. the galleries of the house became densely packed, chiefly with ladies, and the lobbies were crowded with foreign ministers, heads of departments, judges, officers of the army and navy, and distinguished citizens. among the charmed auditors were the best american statesmen of the time who then occupied seats in both branches of congress--john quincy adams leading those of the representatives, and daniel webster and henry clay of the senate. the entire self-possession of mr. prentiss, then only twenty-nine years of age, never forsook him in such an august presence. there was no straining for effect, no trick of oratory; but, from the first to the last sentence, everything in manner, as in matter, seemed perfectly natural, as if he were addressing a jury on an ordinary question of law. this feature of his speech--this evidence of sincerity in every word--with the almost boyish beauty of his face, bound his distinguished audience as with a magic spell. when, at the conclusion of the speech, mr. webster left the hall, he remarked to a friend, with his comprehensive brevity, "nobody can equal that!" [ ] mr. prentiss was rejected by the casting vote of the speaker, mr. polk, and the election sent back to the people; when, after another extraordinary canvass, he was triumphantly returned. after the adjournment of congress he visited his mother in portland. about this time a great reception was given to mr. webster, as defender of the constitution, in faneuil hall, and mr. prentiss was invited to be present and address the assemblage. his speech on the occasion is still fresh in the memory of all who heard it. he was called upon late in the evening, and after a succession of very able speakers; but hardly had the vast audience heard the tap of his cane, as he stepped forward, and caught the first sound of his marvellous voice, when he held them, as it were, spell-bound. before he had uttered a word, indeed, he had taken possession of his audience by his very look--for, when aroused by a great occasion, his countenance flashed like a diamond. gov. everett, who presided at the banquet, himself an orator of classic power, thus referred to mr. prentiss' address, in a letter written more than a dozen years later: it seemed to me the most wonderful specimen of sententious fluency i had ever witnessed. the words poured from his lips in a torrent, but the sentences were correctly formed, the matter grave and important, the train of thought distinctly pursued, the illustrations wonderfully happy, drawn from a wide range of reading, and aided by a brilliant imagination. that it was a carefully prepared speech, no one could believe for a moment. it was the overflow of a full mind, swelling in the joyous excitement of the friendly reception, kindling with the glowing themes suggested by the occasion, and not unmoved by the genius of the place. sitting by mr. webster, i asked him if he had ever heard anything like it? he answered, "never, except from mr. prentiss himself." political life was exceedingly distasteful to mr. prentiss and he soon abandoned it and returned with fresh zeal to the practice of his profession. the applauses of the world seemed never for an instant to deceive him. he wrote after a great speech at nashville, addressed, it was estimated, to , people: "they heap compliments upon me till i am almost crushed beneath them." and yet in the midst of such popular ovations he wrote to his sister: i laugh at those who look upon the uncertain, slight, and changeable regards of the multitude, as worthy even of comparison with the true affection of one warm heart. i have ever yearned for affection; i believe it is the only thing of which i am avaricious. i never had any personal ambition, and do not recollect the time when i would not have exchanged the applause of thousands for the love of one of my fellow-beings. in his yearning for affection was satisfied by his marriage to miss mary jane williams, of natchez; and henceforth his life was full of the sweetest domestic peace and joy. from the moment of first leaving home he had carried on a constant correspondence with his mother, sisters, and brothers, in the north; and he kept it up while he lived. he took a special interest in the education of his youngest brother, and at one time had planned to join him in germany for purposes of study and travel. all the later years of his life were years of unwearied toil and struggle. in a case involving the validity of his title to the "commons" property, was decided against him in the supreme court of the united states; thus wresting from him at a blow that property and the costly buildings which he had erected upon it. in consequence of this misfortune and of his abhorrence of repudiation, which, in spite of his determined opposition, had, unhappily, been foisted upon his adopted state, he removed to new orleans in . here, notwithstanding that he had to master a new system of law, he at once took his natural position as a leader of the bar; and but for failing health, would no doubt have in the end repaired his shattered fortunes and made himself a still more brilliant name among the remarkable men of the country. he died at natchez, july , , in the forty-second year of his age, universally beloved and lamented. he left a wife and four young children, three of whom still survive. mr. prentiss was a natural orator. even as a boy he attracted everybody's attention by the readiness and charm of his speech. but all this would have contributed little toward giving him his marvellous power over the popular mind and heart, had he not added to the rare gifts of nature the most diligent culture, a deep study of life and character, and a wonderful knowledge of books. the whole treasury of general literature--more especially of english poetry and fiction--was at his command; shakespeare, milton, and byron he almost knew by heart; with the bible, pilgrim's progress, and sir walter scott, he seemed to be equally familiar; and from all these sources he drew endless illustrations in aid of his argument, whether it was addressed to a jury, to a judge, to the people, or to the legislative assembly. when, for example, he undertook to show the wrongfulness of mississippi repudiation, he would refer to wordsworth as "a poet and philosopher, whose good opinion was capable of adding weight even to the character of a nation," and then expatiate, with the enthusiasm of a scholar, upon the noble office of such men in human society. he had corresponded with mr. wordsworth and knew that members of his family had suffered heavily from the dishonesty of the state; and perhaps no passages in his great speeches against repudiation were more effective than those in which he thus brought his fine literary taste and feeling to the support of the claims of public honesty. this feature of his oratory, together with the large ethical element which entered into it, was, no doubt, a principal source of its extraordinary power. it would be hard to say in what department of oratory he most excelled. on this point the following is the testimony of henry clay, himself a great orator as well as a great statesman, and one of mr. p.'s most devoted and admiring friends: mr. prentiss was distinguished, as a public speaker, by a rich, chaste, and boundless imagination, the exhaustless resources of which, in beautiful language and happy illustrations, he brought to the aid of a logical power, which he wielded to a very great extent. always ready and prompt, his conceptions seemed to me almost intuitive. his voice was fine, softened, and, i think, improved, by a slight lisp, which an attentive observer could discern. the great theatres of eloquence and public speaking in the united states are the legislative hall, the forum, and the stump, without adverting to the pulpit. i have known some of my contemporaries eminently successful on one of these theatres, without being able to exhibit any remarkable ability on the others. mr. prentiss was brilliant and successful on them all. of the attractions of his personal and social character the testimonies are very striking. judge bullard, in a eulogy pronounced before the bar of new orleans, thus refers to his own experience: what can i say of the noble qualities of his heart? who can describe the charms of his conversation? old as i am, his society was one of my greatest pleasures--i became a boy again. his conversation resembled the ever-varying clouds that cluster round the setting sun of a summer evening--their edges fringed with gold, and the noiseless and harmless flashes of lightning spreading, from time to time, over their dark bosom. in a similar strain gov. j. j. crittenden, of kentucky, wrote of him shortly after his death: it was impossible to know him without feeling for him admiration and love. his genius, so rich and rare; his heart, so warm, generous, and magnanimous; and his manners, so graceful and genial, could not fail to impress these sentiments upon all who approached him. eloquence was a part of his nature, and over his private conversations as well as his public speeches it scattered its sparkling jewels with more than royal profusion. * * * * * c. here are the first stanzas of some of her favorite german hymns, referred to in this letter: jesus, jesus, nichts als jesus soll mein wunsch sein und mein ziel; jetzund mach ich ein verbündniss, dass ich will, was jesus will; denn mein herz, mit ihm erfüllt, rufet nur; herr, wie du willt. _written by elizabeth, countess of schwartzburg_, - . gott ist gegenwärtig! lasset uns anbeten, und in erfurcht vor ihn treten; gott ist in der mitten! alles in uns schweige und sich innig vor ihm beuge; wer ihn kennt, wer ihn nennt, schlagt die augen nieder, kommt, ergebt euch wieder. _by gerhard tersteegen_, - . zum ernst, zum ernst ruft jesu geist inwendig; zum ernst ruft auch die stimme seiner braut; getreu und ganz, und bis zum tod beständig. ein reines herz allein den reinen schaut. _by the same_. wir singen dir, immanuel, du lebensfürst und gnadenquell, du himmelsblum und morgenstern, du jungfrausohn, herr aller herrn. _paul gerhard_, - . such, wer da will, ein ander ziel die seligkeit zu finden, mein herz allein bedacht soll sein auf christum sich zu gründen: sein wort ist wahr, sein werk ist klar, sein heilger mund hat kraft und grund, all feind zü überwinden. _george weissel_, - . gott, mein einziges vertrauen, gott, du meine zuversicht, deine augen zu mir schauen, deine hülf versage mir nicht; lass mich nicht vergeblich schreien, sondern hör und lass gedeihen; so will ich, gott, halten still, gott, dein will ist auch mein will. _elizabeth eleonore, duchess of sax-meiningen_, - . o durchbrecher aller bande, der du immer bei uns bist, bei dem shaden, spott und schande lauter lust und himmel ist, uebe femer dein gerichte wider unsern adamssinn, bis dein treues angesichte uns führt aus dem kerken hin. _gotter. arnold_, - . * * * * * _lavater's hymn._ he must increase, but i must decrease. --john iii. . o jesus christus, ivachs in mir, und alles andre schwinde! mein herz sei täglich näher dir, und ferner von der sünde. lass täglich deine huld und macht um meine schwachheit schweben! dein licht verschlinge meine nacht, und meinen tod dein leben! beim sonnenstrahle deines lichts lass jeden wahn verschwinden! dein alles, christus, und mein nichts, lass täglich mich empfinden. sei nahe mir, werf ich mich hin, wein ich vor dir in stillen; dein reiner gottgelassner sinn beherrsche meinen willen. blick immer herrlicher aus mir voll weisheit huld und freude, ich sei ein lebend bild von dir im gluck, und wenn ich leide. mach alles in mir froh und gut, dass stets ich minder fehle; herr, deiner menschen-liebe glut durchglühe meine seele. es weiche stolz, und trägheit weich; und jeder leichtsinn fliehe, wenn, herr, nach dir und deinem reich ich redlich mich bemühe. mein eignes, eitles, leeres ich sei jeden tag geringer. o rd ich jeden tag durch dich dein würdigerer junger. von dir erfüllter jeden tag und jeden von mir leerer! o du, der uber flehn vermag, sei meines flehns erhörer! der glaub an dich und deine kraft sei trieb von jedem triebe! sei du nur meine leidenschaft, du meine freud und liebe! * * * * * d. a few extracts from the little diaries referred to are here given: _may , ._--box came from mrs. bumstead--my dear, kind friend-- containing _everything_; salmon, tomatoes, oranges, peaches, prunes, cocoa and ham, tea and sugar from her father.[ ] how pleasant the kindness of friends! _ st._--worked at planting aster seeds and putting in verbena cuttings--all in my room, of course. _ d._--first hepaticas in garden. sweet peas coming up. brownie hatched--_one_ chicken. _june st._--books from dear lizzy. "sickness," may it do me good. [ ] _ th._--sent flowers to the b.'s, flowers and strawberries to mrs. n., green peas to e. m., and trout to mother hopkins. _july d._--continue to send strawberries--yesterday to the b.'s--to-day to a. b. and miss g., with rosebuds. _oct. th._--a beautiful autumn day. could not leave my bed till near noon. then albert drove me down the lane and carried me into the woods in his arms. eddy has collected $ for kansas. [ ] _ th._--my whole time, night and day, is spent in setting traps for sleep. to-day the money was sent for kansas--$ , of which $ was from us. _nov. th._--election day. great excitement. _ th._--wretched news; it is feared that buchanan is elected. _nov. th._--the anniversary of my dear mother's death. my own can not be far distant. _i earnestly entreat that none of my friends will wear mourning for me_. _january , ._--outwardly all looks dark--health at the lowest--brain irritated and suffering inexpressibly--but _underneath all_, thank god, some patience, some resignation, some quiet trust. if it were not for wearing out my friends! but this care, too, i must learn to cast on him. _ th._--albert is reading miss bronte's life to me, and oh, how many chords vibrate deep in my soul as i hear of her _shyness_; her dread of coming in contact with others; her morbid sensitiveness and intense suffering from lowness of spirits; her thirst for knowledge, her consciousness of personal defects, etc., etc., etc. _ th._--storms to-day "like mad." present from julia willis. each day seems a week long, but let me be thankful that i have a chair to sit in, limbs free from palsy, books of all sorts to be read, and kind friends to read. oh, yes; let me be _thankful_. a. brought "school-days at rugby." _ d._--eddy began to wear his coat! a. read to me tom brown's "school-days." _ d._--love is the word that fills my horizon to-day. god is love; i must be like him. _feb. d._--how lovely seem the words duty and kight! how i long to be spotless--all pure within and without!... albert read from adolph monod. what a precious book! _ d._--to-morrow i shall be forty-six years old. if i said one hundred i should believe it as well. _ th._--my birthday.... i feel disposed to take as my motto for this year, "i will hope continually, and will yet praise thee _more and more_" eddy began virgil to-day. _ th._--woke with a strong impression that i am christ's, his servant, and as such have nothing to do for myself--no separate interest. oh, to feel this and _act_ upon it always. and not _only_ a servant, but a _child_; and therefore entitled to feel an interest in the affairs of the _family_. albert read from the silent comforter the piece called "wearisome nights," which is an exact expression of my state and feelings. long to do some good, at least by praying for people. a note from mrs. c. stoddard to my husband and myself, which was truly refreshing. _ th._--this morning god assisted me out of great weakness to converse and pray with my beloved child. he also prayed. i can not but entertain a trembling hope that he is indeed a christian. so great a mercy would fill me with transport. _april th._--"i love the lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplication" (ps. cxvi. i). albert read this psalm to me nearly fifteen years ago, the morning of the day succeeding that on which god had delivered me out of great danger and excruciating sufferings and had given us a _living child_. our hearts swelled with thankfulness then; now we have received our child a second time--anew _gift_. _june th._--a.'s holiday. first strawberry! and first rose! (cinnamon). _july d._--oh, my dear, dear sister lizzy! shall i never see you again in this world? i fancied i was familiar with the thought and reconciled to it, but now it agonizes me. [ ] _dec. th._--i do long to submit to--no, to accept joyfully--the will of god in everything; to see only love in every trial. but to be made a whip in his hand with which to scourge others--i, who so passionately desire to give pleasure, to give only pain--i, who so hate to cause suffering, to inflict nothing else on my best friends--oh, this is _hard_!... i write by feeling with eyes closed. it is midnight; and, as usual, i am and have been sleepless. i am full of tossings to and fro until the dawn. all temporal blessings seem to be expressed by one word--_sleep_.... disease is advancing with rapid strides; many symptoms of paralysis; that or insanity certain, unless god in mercy to myself and my friends takes me home first. _ st._--"here then to thee thine own i leave-- mould as thou wilt thy passive clay; but let me all thy stamp receive, but let me all thy words obey. serve with a single heart and eye, and to thy glory live or die." _jan. , ._--cars ran through from adams to troy _first time_. eddy studying greek, latin, etc., at school; geology at home. _feb. d._--much of the day in intense bodily anguish, but have had lately more of christ in my heart. albert is reading me a precious sermon by huntingdon on "a life hid with christ in god." oh, to learn more of christ and his love! _ th._--o god, who art _rich_ in mercy, if thou art looking for some creature on whom to bestow it, behold the poorest, neediest, emptiest of all thou hast made, and _satisfy_ me with thy mercy. _sunday, th._--how thankful i am for the many good books i have! and oh, how i stand _amazed_ at the faith and patience of god's dear children (mrs. coutts, _e.g._), to _read_ of whose sufferings makes my heart bleed and almost murmur on their account. _march th._--"so foolish was i and ignorant, i was as a _beast_ before thee." oh, howr it comforts me that there is such a verse in the bible as this! it comes _near_ describing my folly, stupidity, ignorance, and blindness.... quite overcome to-day by a most unexpected favor from my dear friends the jameses, [ ] who i thought had forgotten me. _april th._--my love to my dear, dear sister. i shall never see her, never write to her, but we will spend eternity together. _dec st._--albert opened the _piano_, and, for the first time in _six years_, i touched it. beautiful flower-pictures from lizzy. [ ] _sunday, jan._ , .--"out of weakness were made strong." this is the verse which has been given me as a motto for the year. may it be fulfilled in my experience! but should it not be so to my apprehension, may i be able to say, "most gladly, therefore, will i glory in my infirmities, that the power of christ may rest upon me." _march th._--for several days i have been led to pray that the indwelling spirit may indite my petitions. to-day he leads me to pray for the annihilation of self. my whole soul cries out for this--to forget my own sorrows, wants, sins even, and lose myself in christ.... o precious saviour, let me see thee; let me behold thy beauty; let me hear thy voice; let me wash thy feet with tears; let me gaze on thee forever. _march st._--a remarkable day. st. weather like indian summer. d. after a very poor night, expecting to spend the day in bed, i was so strengthened as to ride up to the mountain with albert and to enjoy seeing the mosses. in the p.m. rode again with eddy. _june th._--for years i have been constantly fearing insanity or palsy. now i hear of mrs. ---- struck with paralysis and my dear friend ---- with mental alienation, while i am spared. _june th._--let a person take a delicately-strung musical instrument and strike blows on it with a hammer till nearly every string is broken and the whole instrument trembles and shrieks under the infliction--that is what has been done to me. words are entirely inadequate to paint what i suffer. _june th._--another great mercy. a letter from n. p. w. [ ] under date of june th, i wrote, "may god bless," etc., and god has blessed him. oh, praise, praise to him who hears even before we ask. _april , ._--"hangs my helpless soul on thee." oh, how many thousand times do i repeat this line during the sleepless hours of my wretched nights! as the year advanced, the entries became fewer and fewer; some of them, by reason of extreme weakness and suffering, having been left unfinished. but no weakness or suffering could wholly repress her love of nature. imprisoned within the same pages that record her nights and days of anguish are exquisite bits of fern, delicate mosses, rose-leaves, and other flowers pressed and placed there by her own hand. but far more touching than these mementoes of her love of nature are the passages in this diary of her last year on earth, that express her love to christ and testify to his presence and supporting grace in what she describes as "the fathomless abyss of misery" in which she was plunged. they remind one of the tints of unearthly light and beauty that adorn sometimes the face of a thundercloud. they are such as the following: _june , ._--blessed be god for comfort. i see my sins all gone--all set down to christ's account; and not only so, but--oh, wonder!--all his merits transferred to me. well may it be said, "let us come boldly to the throne of grace." why not be bold with such--just like presenting an order at a bank. _nov. th._--come, o come, dear lord jesus! come to this town, this church, this family, and oh, come to this poor longing famished heart. _sunday, nov. th._--a better night and some peace of mind. but o my saviour, support me; let not the fiery billows swallow me up! and o let me not fail to be thankful for the mercies mingled in my cup of suffering--a pleasant room adorned with gifts of love from absent friends, and just now with beautiful mosses brought from the woods by my dear husband. the next entry contains directions respecting parting gifts to be sent to her sister and other absent friends after her death. then comes the last entry, which is as follows: "i need not be afraid to ask to be--first, 'holy and without blame before him in love'; second, 'filled with all the fullness of god'; third--." here her pen dropped from her hand, and a little later her wearisome pilgrimage was over, and she entered into the saint's everlasting rest. * * * * * further extracts from her literary journal: _tuesday, jan. , ._--last meeting of the class. mr. dana made some remarks intended as a sort of leave-taking. he spoke of the importance of having some fixed _principles_ of criticism. these principles should be obtained from within--from the study of our own minds. if we try many criticisms by this standard, we shall turn away from them dissatisfied. addison's criticisms on milton are often miserable, and, where he is right, it seems to be by a sort of accident. he constantly appeals to the french critics as authorities. another advantage will result from establishing principles of judging--we shall acquire self-knowledge. we can not ask ourselves, is this true? does it accord with my own consciousness? etc., without gaining an acquaintance with ourselves. and then, in general, the more the taste is cultivated and refined, the more we shall find to like. critics by rule, who have one narrow standard by which they try everything, may find much to condemn and little to approve: but it is not so in nature, nor with those who judge after nature. the great duty is to learn to be happy in ourselves.... i am surprised (said mr. dana) to find how much my present tastes and judgments are those of my childhood. in some respects, to be sure, i have altered; but, in general, the authors i loved and sympathised with then, i love and sympathise with now. when i was connected with the north-american, i wrote a review of hazlitt's british poets, in which i expressed my opinion of pope and of wordsworth. the sensation it excited is inconceivable. one man said i was mad and ought to be put in a strait-jacket. however, i did not mind it much, so long as they did not put me in one--that, to be sure, i should not have liked very well. public opinion has changed since then. many of the old _prose_ writers are very fine. jeremy taylor, though i admire him exceedingly, has been, i think, rather indiscriminately praised.... to come to the poets again, young should be read and thought upon. he is often antithetical, but is a profound thinker. i was quite ashamed the other day on taking up his works to find how many of my thoughts he had expressed better than i could express them. i am convinced there is nothing new under the sun. collins has written but little, but he is a most graceful and beautiful creature. for faithfulness of portraiture and bringing out every-day characters, crabbe is unrivalled in modern days. and wordsworth--he and coleridge have been obliged to make minds to understand them. who equals wordsworth in purity, in majesty, in tranquil contemplation, in childlikeness? coleridge is exerting a great influence in this country, especially over the minds of some of the young men. _friday._--to-day by invitation i attended the first meeting of the new class and heard the introductory lecture. mr. d. began by speaking of the object of the formation of the class. i shall adopt the first person in writing what he said, though i do not pretend to give his words. i have not invited you here to amuse an idle hour, or to afford you a topic of conversation when you meet. one great design has been to cherish in you a love of home and of solitude. yet this is not all, for of what advantage is it to be at home, unless home is a place for the unfolding of warm affections? and of what use is solitude, unless it be improved by patient thought, self-study and a communion with those great minds who became great by thinking. but it is not merely thinking as an operation of the intellect that is necessary; it must be affectionate thinking; there must be heartfelt love, and this can be attained only by a _habit_ of loving.... i would not impart sternness to the beautiful countenance of english literature. beautiful indeed it is, but not like the beauty of the human face, that may be discovered by all who have eyes to look upon it; the heart as well as the head must engage, or as coleridge says, _the heart in the head_. let us not approach with carelessness or light-mindedness. poetry requires a peculiar state of mind, a peculiar combination of mental and moral qualifications to be feelingly apprehended. but there--i will not write a word more. it is a shame to spoil anything so beautiful. poor mr. dana! i hope he will never know to what he has been subjected. _wednesday._--everybody has set out to invite me to visit them. i made two visits last evening, one to mrs. robinson, where i had a fine opportunity to settle some of my hebrew difficulties with prof. r., and saw de wette's translations of job. this evening i am to make two more, and to-morrow i spend the day out and receive company in the evening. so much for dissipation, and for study. portland, march , . i believe there is scarcely any branch of knowledge in which i am so deficient as history, both ecclesiastical and profane. i have never been much interested _facts_, considered simply as facts, and that is about all that is to be found in most historical works. the relations of facts to each other and of all to reason, in other words, the philosophy of history, are not often to be found in books, and i have not hitherto been able to supply the want from my own mind. _april , ._--if my bump of combativeness does not grow it won't be for want of exercise. i have had another dispute of two hours' length to-day with another person. subjects, cousin--locke--innate ideas--idea of space--of spirit-life, materialism--phrenology--upham--wine--alcohol--etc. _june._--my patience has been sorely tried this afternoon. i was visiting and coleridge was dragged in, as it seemed for the express purpose of provoking me by abusing him--just as anybody might show off a lunatic.... but i did not and never will dispute on such subjects with those who seek not to know the truth. _feb. , ._--why is it that our desires so infinitely transcend our capacities? we grasp at everything--do so by the very constitution of our natures; and seize--less than nothing. we can not rest without perfection in _everything_, yet the labor of a life devoted to _one thing_, only shows us how unattainable it is. i am oppressed with gloom--oh, for light, light, light! _feb. th._--alas! my feelings of discouragement and despondency, instead of diminishing, strengthen every day. i have been ill for the last fortnight; and possibly physical causes have contributed to shroud my mind in this thick darkness. yet i can not believe that conviction so clear, conclusions so irresistible as those which weigh me down, are entirely the result of morbid physical action. in order to prove that they are not, and to have the means of judging hereafter of the rationalness of my present judgments, i will record the grounds of my despondency. as nearly as i can recollect, the thought which oftenest pressed itself upon me, when these feelings of gloom began, was that i was living to no purpose. i was conscious, not only of a conviction that i _ought_ to live to do good, but of an _intense desire_ to do good--to _know_ that i was living to some purpose; and i felt perfectly certain that this knowledge was essential to my happiness. i began to wonder that i had been contented to seek knowledge all my life for my own pleasure, or with an indefinite idea that it might contribute in some way to my usefulness,--without any distinct plan.... i then began to inquire what results i had of "all my labor which i have taken under the sun" and these are my conclusions: . i have not that mental discipline, or that command of my own powers, which is one of the most valuable results of properly directed study. i can not grasp a subject at once, and view it in all its bearings. . i have not that self-knowledge which is another sure result of proper study. i do not know what i am capable of, nor what i am particularly fitted for, nor what i am most deficient in. i am forever pouring into my own mind, and yet never find out what is there. d. i have no principle of arrangement or assimilation which might unite all my scattered knowledge. oh, how different if i had had one definite object which, like the lens, should concentrate all the scattered rays to one focus. i met with this remark of sir egerton bridges to-day; it applies to me exactly: "i have never met with one who seemed to have the same overruling passion for literature as i have always had. a thousand others have pursued it with more principle, reason, method, fixed purpose, and effect; mine i admit to have been pure, blind, unregulated love." th. i have lost the power of thinking for myself. my memory, which was originally good, has been so washed away by the floods of trash which have been poured into it, that now it scarcely serves me at all. a pleasant picture this of a mind, which ought to be in the full maturity of its powers. and much reason have i to hope that with such an instrument i shall leave an impress on other minds!... how i envy the other sex! they have certain fixed paths marked out for them--regular professions and trades--between which they may make a choice and know what they have to do. a friend, to whom i had spoken of some of these feelings, tried last night to convince me that they are the result of physical derangement, and not at all the expression of a sane mind in a sound body. i laughed at him, but have every now and then a suspicion that he was right. _feb. th._--last evening we had the company of some friends who are interested in the subjects which i love most to talk about. we had a good deal of conversation about books, authors, the laws of mind and spirit, etc. my enthusiasm on these subjects revived; i felt a genial glow resulting from the action of mind upon mind, and the delight of finding sympathy in my most cherished tastes and pursuits. whether it is owing to this or not, i can not say; but i must confess to a new change of mood, and, consequently, of opinion. i mean that my studies have not only regained their former attractions in my eyes, but that it seems unquestionably right and proper to pursue them (when they interfere with no positive duty) as a means of expanding and strengthening the mind-- even when i can not point out the precise _use_ i expect to make of such acquisition.... one of my friends tried to convince me last night that i was not deficient in invention, because i assigned the fact that i am so, as a reason for attempting translation rather than original writing. several others have labored to convince me of the same thing. strange that they can be so mistaken! i know that i have no fancy, from having tried to exert it; and, as this is the lower power and implied in imagination, of course i have none of the latter faculty. the only two things which look like it are my enthusiasm and my relish for works of a high imaginative order. _feb. th._--... oh, how transporting--how infinite will be the delight when _all_ truth shall burst upon us as one beautiful and perfect whole--each distinct ray harmonising and blending with every other, and all together forming one mighty flood of radiance!... i can not remember all the thoughts which have given so much pleasure this evening; i only know that i have been very happy, and wondered not a little at my late melancholy. i believe it must have been partly caused by looking at myself (and that, too, as if i were a little, miserable, isolated wretch), instead of contemplating those things which have no relation to space and time and matter--the eternal and the infinite--or, if i thought of myself at all, feeling that i am part of a great and wonderful whole. it seems as if a new inner sense had been opened, revealing to me a world of beauty and perfection that i have never before seen. i am filled with a strange, yet sweet astonishment. _sept. , ._--i have been profoundly interested in the character of goethe, from reading mrs. austin's "characteristics" of him. certainly, very few men have ever lived of equally wonderful powers. a thing most remarkable in him is what the germans call vielseitigkeit, many-sidedness. there was no department of science or art of which he was wholly ignorant, while in very many of both classes his knowledge was accurate and profound. most men who have attained to distinguished excellence, have done so by confining themselves to a single department--frequently being led to the choice by a strong, original bias. even when this is not the case, there is some _class_ of objects or pursuits, towards which a particular inclination is manifested; one loves facts, and devotes himself to observations and experiments; another loves principles and seeks everywhere to discover a _law_. one cherishes the ideal, and neglects and despises the real, while another reverses his judgment. we have become so accustomed to this one-sidedness that it occasions no wonder, and is regarded as the natural state of the mind. thus we are struck with astonishment on finding a mind like goethe's equally at home in the ideal and the real; equally interested in the laws of poetical criticism, and the theory of colors, equally attentive to a drawing of a new species of plants, and to the plan of a railroad or canal. in short, with the most delicate sense of the beautiful, the most accurate conception of the mode of its representation, and the most intense longing for it (which alone would have sufficed to make him an idealist) he united a fondness for observation, a love of the actual in nature, and a susceptibility to deep impressions from and interest in the objects of sense, which would have seemed to mark him out for a realist. but is not this the true stale of the mind, instead of being; one which should excite astonishment? is it not one-sidedness rather than many-sidedness that should be regarded as strange? is it not as much an evidence of disease as the preponderance of one element or function in the physical constitution? _ th._--i have been thinking more about this many-sidedness of goethe. it is by no means that _versatility_ which distinguishes so many second-rate geniuses, which inclines to the selection of many pursuits, but seldom permits the attainment of distinguished excellence in one. it was one and the same principle acting throughout, the striving after unity. it was this which made him seek to idealise the actual, and to actualise the ideal. the former he attempted by searching in each outward object for the law which governed its existence and of which its outward development was but an imperfect symbol, the latter by giving form and consistency to the creations of his own fancy. thus _the one_ was ever-present to him, and he sought it not in one path, among the objects of one science alone, but everywhere in nature and out. in all that was genuine nature he knew that it was to be found; that it was _not_ to be found in the acquired and the artificial was perhaps the reason of his aversion for them. this aversion he carried so far that even acquired virtue was distasteful to him. whatever may be thought of such a distaste esthetically, we must think that, morally, it was carrying his principle rather to an extreme. i have just come across a plan of study which i formed some months ago and i could not but smile to see how nothing of it has been accomplished. i was to divide my attention between philosophy, language (not languages), and poetry. the former i was to study by topics; e.g., take the subject of perception, write out my own ideas upon it, if i had any, and then read those of other people. in studying language, or rather ethnography, i intended-- . to take the hebrew roots, trace all the derivatives and related words first in that language, then in others. . to examine words relating to the spiritual, with a view to discover their original picture-meaning. . search for a type or symbol in nature of every spiritual fact. under the head of poetry i mean, to study the great masters of epic and dramatic poetry, especially shakspeare and milton, and from them make out a science of criticism. alas! _april , ._--i have been thinking about myself--what a strange, wayward, incomprehensible being i am, and how completely misunderstood by almost everybody. uniting excessive pride with excessive sensitiveness, the greatest ardor and passionateness of emotion with an irresolute will, a disposition to _distrust_, in so far only as the affection of others for me is concerned, with the extreme of confidence and credulity in everything else--an incapability of expressing, except occasionally as it were in gushes, any strong feeling--a tendency to melancholy, yet with a susceptibility of enjoyment almost transporting--subject to the most sudden, unaccountable and irresistible changes of mood--capable of being melted and moulded to anything by kindness, but as cold and unyielding as a rock against harshness and compulsion--such are some of the peculiarities which excellently prepare me for un-happiness. it is true that sometimes i am conscious of none of them--when for days together i pursue my regular routine of studies and employments, half mechanically--or when completely under the influence of the outward, i live for a time in what is around me. but this never lasts long. one of the most painful feelings i ever know is the sense of an unappeasable craving for sympathy and appreciation--the desire to be understood and loved, united with the conviction that this desire can never be gratified. i feel _alone_, different from all others and of course misunderstood by them. the only other feeling i have more miserable than this is the sense of being _worse_ than all others, and utterly destitute of anything excellent or beautiful. oh! what mysteries are wrapped up in the mind and heart of man! what a development will be made when the light of another world shall be let in upon these impenetrable recesses! boston, _jan. , ._--i came here on the last day of the last year, and have since then been very much occupied in different ways. yesterday, i heard president hopkins all day, and in the evening, a lecture from dr. follen on pantheism. the most abstract of all pantheistic systems he described to be that of the brahmans, as taught in the vedas and vedashta, and also at _first_ by schelling, viz., that the _absolute_ is the first principle of all things; and this absolute is not to be conceived of as possessing any attribute at all--not even that of existence. a system a little less abstract is that of the eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing. then that of giordano bruno, who made _soul_ and _matter_ the formative principle and the principal recipient of forces--to be the ground of the universe. then spinoza, who postulated _thought_ as the representative of the spiritual, and _extension_ as that of the material principle; and these together are his _originaux_. from thence sprang the spiritual pantheists--such as schelling, fichte, and hegel--and the material pantheists. _wednesday, april th._--to-morrow i go to andover. have been indescribably hurried of late. have finished claudius--am reading prometheus and kant's critique. _april th_.--am reading seneca's medea and southey's life of cowper. andover, _may th._--dr. woods was remarking to-day at dinner on the influence of _hope_ in sustaining under the severest sufferings. it recalled a thought which occurred to me the other day in reading prometheus; that, regarded as an example of unyielding determination and unconquerable fortitude he is not equal to milton's satan. for he has before him not only the _hope_, but the _certainty_ of ultimate deliverance, whereas satan bears himself up, by the mere force of his will, unsustained by hope, "which comes to all," but not to him. _ th_.--it has just occurred to me that the doctrine of the soul's mortality seems to have _no_ point of contact with humanity. it surely can not have been entertained as being agreeable to man's _wishes_. and what is there in the system of things, or in the nature of the mind, to suggest it? on the contrary, everything looks in an opposite direction. how is it _possible_ to help seeing that the soul is not here in its proper element, in its native air? how is it possible to escape the conviction that all its unsatisfied yearnings, its baffled aims, its restless, agonizing aspirings after a _something_, clearly perceived to exist, but to be here unattainable--that all these things point to _another_ life, the _only_ true life of the soul? there is such a manifest disproportion between all objects of earthly attainment and the capacities of the spirit, that, unless man is immortal, he is vastly more to be pitied than the meanest reptile that crawls upon the earth. so i thought as i was walking this morning and saw a frog swimming in a puddle of water. i could hardly help envying him when i considered that _his_ condition was suited to his nature, and that he has no wants which are not supplied. _june th._--i am reading goethe's conversations with eckermann. one thing i remark is this--he does not, as most men do, make the degree of sympathy he finds in others the measure of his interest in them and attention to them. goethe looked at all as specimens of human nature, and, therefore, all worthy of study. but, after all, this way of looking at others seems to be more suited to the _artist_ than to the man; and i can not conceive of any but a very passionless and immobile person who could do it.... does all nature furnish one type of the soul? if so, it might be the ocean; the rough, swelling, fluctuating, unsounded ocean. shall it ever _rest? rest?_ what an infinite, mournful sweetness in the word! how perfectly sure i feel that my soul can never rest in _itself_, nor in anything of earth; if i find peace, it must be in the bosom of god. _july d._--the vulgar proverb, "it never rains but it pours," is fully illustrated in my case. last week i would have given half the world for a new book; yesterday and today have overflooded me. mr. hubbard has sent me prof. park's "german selections," pliny, heeren's ancient greece, two volumes of the biblical repository, and two of his own magazines; mr. judd has sent me two volumes of carlyle, and mr. ripley four of lessing--all of these must be despatched _à la hâte. july th._--last evening we spent upon the common witnessing a beautiful exhibition of fireworks. this morning i have been to union wharf to see the departure of some missionaries. for a few minutes, time seemed a speck and eternity near--but how transient with me are such impressions! i am indulging myself too much of late in a sort of sentimental reverie. life and its changes, the depths of the soul, the fluctuations of passion and feeling--these are the subjects which attract my thoughts perpetually.... we spent last evening at richard h. dana's. _he_ does not separate his intellectual and sentimental tastes from his moral convictions as i do--i mean that neither in books nor men does he find pleasure unless they are such as his conscience approves. _tuesday, th._--have visited the allston gallery and seen rosalie for the last time before going home. i could not have believed that i should feel such a pang at parting from a picture. i did not succeed in getting to the gallery before others--but, no matter. i forgot the presence of everybody else and sat for an hour before rosalie without moving. i took leave of the other pictures mentally, for i could not look. farewell, sweet beatrice, lovely inez, beautiful ursulina--dear, dear rosalie, farewell! _monday, th._--yesterday i was happy; to-day i am not exactly unhappy, but morbid and anxious. i feel continually the pressure of obligation to write something, in order to contribute toward the support of the family--and yet, i can not write. mother wants me to write children's books; lizzy wants me to write a book of natural philosophy for schools. i wish i had a "vocation." _sabbath._--stayed at home on account of the rain and read one of tholuck's sermons to julia. wrote in my other journal some account of my thoughts and feelings. burned up part of an old diary. _thursday, july th._--"my soul is dark." what with the sin i find within me, and the darkness and error, disputes and perplexities around me, i well-nigh despair. whether i seek to _discover_ truth or to _live_ it, i am _equally_ unsuccessful. "i grope at noon-day as in the night." but there is a god, holy and changeless. he _is_. from eternity to eternity, he is. on this rock will i rest----. i stopped a moment and my eye was caught by the waving trees. what do they say to me? how silent they are! and yet how _eloquent!_ and here i sit--to myself the centre of the world, wondering and speculating about this same little self. do the trees so? no; they wave and bend and bloom for _others._ i am ready to join with herbert in wishing that i were a tree; then "at least some bird would trust her household to me, and i should be just." _evening._--i read to-day another of lessing's tragedies--"miss sarah sampson,"--which i do not like nearly as well as mina von barnhelm. we were engaged to take tea with "the mayor," and went with many tremblings and hesitations on account of the rain. very few there, and a most uncommonly stupid time. _saturday evening._--i have been alone for a little while, and, as usual, this time brings with it thronging remembrances of absent friends. their forms flit before me; their spirits are around me; i feel their presence--almost; dear friends, almost i clasp you in my arms. my soul yearns for love and sympathy. i do bless and praise my god for all his goodness to me in this respect, for my _many_ tender and faithful and devoted friends. part of the day i spent in arranging shells in my cabinet of drawers. this afternoon i went to mr. prentiss' library and obtained schlegel's lectures on dramatic art and literature. _monday morning._--have been trying to rouse myself to write lessing, but can not. it looks so little. when it is all done, what will it amount to? why, i shall get a few dollars for mother, which will go to buy bread and butter--and that's the end of it. _evening._--s. w. and m. w. made a call on us and the former played and sang. then we sat up till after eleven naming each of our acquaintances after some flower. _aug. th_,--oh, what a happy half hour i had last evening, looking at the sky after sunset! we went down to the water--it was smooth as a crystal lake. the horizon was all in a glow--the softest, mellowest, warmest glow, and above dark, heavy clouds of every variety of form--the clouds and the glow alike reflected in the answering heaven below--i was almost _too_ happy; but--it _faded_. _evening_.--i had something to wake me up this afternoon, viz., the arrival of the july no. of the new york review, containing "claudius." this led to some conversation about writing, its pecuniary profitableness, subjects for it, etc. julia wished i would take some other topics besides german authors, but when i told her the alternative would be metaphysics, she laughed and retracted the wish. we then laughed over several schemes such as these--that one of us should write a review and another make the book for it afterward; that i should review some book which did not exist and give professed extracts from it, etc. soon after mrs. d. came in and began to talk about "undine," which she and her husband have just been reading--the new translation. i was amused at their opinion of it. the most absurd, ridiculous story, she said--with no _rationality_, nothing that one can _understand_ in it--and so on, showing that she had not the slightest idea of a work of fancy merely. i have been wishing, as i often do, for some records of my past life. what could i not give for a daily journal as minute as this, beginning from my childhood! my past life is mostly a blank to me. _aug. th_.--i am beginning to see dimly some new truths--such i believe them to be--in theology. i am inclined to think, but do not feel sure, that redemption, instead of being merely a necessary _remedy_ for a great evil, is in itself the highest positive good, and that the state into which it brings man, of union with god, is a far nobler and better condition than that of primitive innocence, and at the same time a condition attainable in no other way than through redemption, and, of course, through sin. in this case the plan of redemption, instead of being an _afterthought_ of the divine mind (speaking anthropomorphically), is that in reference to which the whole world-system was contrived. these thoughts were partly suggested by reading schleiermacher, who, if i understand him, has some such notions. if there is any truth in them, do they not throw light on the much-vexed question why god permitted the introduction of moral evil? another point which i feel confident is misunderstood by our theologians is the nature of the redemptive act. the work of christ in redemption is generally explained to be his incarnation, sufferings, and death, by which he made _atonement_ to justice for the sins of the world. this, it is true, is a part of what he did; it is that part which he performed in reference to god and his law, but it is not what coleridge calls the "spiritual and transcendent act" by which he made us one with himself, and thus secured the possibility of our restoration to spiritual life. _aug. th_.--have devoted almost the whole day to coleridge's literary remains, which mr. davenport brought me. my admiration, even veneration, for his almost unequalled power is greater than ever, but i can not help thinking that his studies--some of them--exerted an unfavorable influence upon him, especially, perhaps, spinoza. _aug. d_--mr. park sent me the life of mackintosh by his son. i rejoiced much too soon over it, for it proves very uninteresting. this is partly to be accounted for from my want of interest in politics, etc. in great measure, however, it is the fault of the biographer, who has shown us the man at a distance, on stilts, or at best only in his most outward circumstances, never letting us know, as carlyle says, what sort of stockings he wore, and what he ate for dinner. i don't think sir james himself has much _inwardness_ to him, but certainly his son has shown us only the outermost shell. have read the iliad and schleiermacher to-day. _aug. th_.--a queer circumstance happened this evening. col. kinsman and mr. c. s. davies called. i was considering what unusual occurrence could have brought mr. d. here, when he increased my wonder still more by disclosing his errand. he had received, he said, a letter from prof. woods, requesting that i, or a "lady whose taste was as correct in dress as in literature," would decide upon the fashion of a gown to be worn by him at his inauguration as president of bowdoin college, and forthwith procure such a gown to be made. _aug. th_.--i have been reading the second volume of mackintosh, which is much better than the first, and gives a higher opinion of him. he is certainly well described by coleridge as the "king of men of talent." it is curious, by the way, to compare what m. says of c.: "it is impossible to give a stronger example of a man, whose talents are beneath his understanding, and who trusts to his ingenuity to atone for his ignorance.... shakespeare and burke are, if i may venture on the expression, above talent; but coleridge is not!" ah, well--_de gustibus_, etc. i have been as busy as a bee all day; wrote notes, prepared for leaving home, read schleiermacher, and philip von artevelde, which delighted me; walked after tea with lizzy, then examined my papers to see what is to be burned. i wish i knew what i was made for--i mean, in _particular_--what i _can_ do, and what i _ought_ to do. i can not bear to live a life of literary self-indulgence, which is no better than another self-indulgence. i _do want_ to be of some use in the world, but i am infinitely perplexed as to the _how_ and the _what_. _aug. th_.--hurried through the last pages of mackintosh today. on the whole, there is much to _like_ as well as to admire in him. one thing puzzles me in his case as in others: how men who give no signs through a long life of anything more than the most cold and distant _respect_ for religion--the most unfrequent and uninterested remembrance, if any at all--of the saviour, all at once become so devout--i mean it not disrespectfully--on their death-beds. what strange doubts this and other like mysteries suggest! after tea i carried a bouquet to mrs. french. saw all the way a sky so magnificent that words can do no justice to it--splendors piled on splendors, till my soul was fairly sick with admiration. mrs. french asked me if life ever looked sad and wearisome to me. _ever!_ boston, _saturday morning, sept. th_--the rain keeps me home from church, but i still have the more time for reading and reflection. at every change in my outward situation i find myself forming new purposes and plans for the future.... i _will_ trust that, by the grace of god, the ensuing winter shall be a period of more vigorous effort and more persevering self-culture than any previous season of my life. above all, let me remember that intellectual culture is worthless when dissociated from moral progress; that true spiritual growth embraces both; and the latter as the basis and mould of the former. let me remember, too, that in the universe _everything_ may be had for a price, but nothing can be had without price. the price of successful self-culture is unremitted toil, labor, and self-denial; am i willing to pay it? i feel that i need light and strength and life; may i find them in _christ!_ as to studies, i mean to study the bible _much;_ also dogmatic theology--which of late has an increasing interest for me--and ecclesiastical history. to the spirit of all truth i surrender my mind. _monday._--i have fallen in with swedenborg's writings. wonder whether the destiny which seems to bring to us just what we chance to be interested in is a real ordinance of fate or only a seeming one--because interest in a subject makes us observant. am reading greek with julia. we began the sixth book of the iliad. _tuesday_.--fifty lines in homer; companion proofs; schleiermacher; the prologue and first scene of terence's comedy of andria; two nos. of n. nickleby, and walked round the common with julia twice. _wednesday_.--studies the same as yesterday, except that i read less of schleiermacher and spent an hour or so upon lessing. read "much ado about nothing," and disliked beatrice less than ever before. but i am not satisfied with claudio; he is not _half_ sorry and remorseful enough for the supposed death of hero--and then to think of his being willing to marry another right off! oh, it is abominable! walked over _four miles_ in the morning, and out again before tea. _tuesday, sept. th_--well. the family are off--mr. and mrs. willis, and julia too--and the recorder and companion [ ] are left for a fortnight in my charge. i have been much interested in what i have read to-day in schleiermacher. it is his evolution of the idea of god--if i may so say--from holy, human consciousness. it recalls some thoughts which i had on this subject once before, and which i began to write about. my notion was this--that an absolutely perfect idea of man implies, contains an idea of god. i have a great mind to try and make something out of it, only i am so hurried just now. they keep sending me papers to make selections for the recorder, and i have just been writing an article for the companion. i spend half my time looking over newspapers. double, double toil and trouble; most wearisome and profitless. would not edit a paper for the world. no truth can be said to be seen _as it is_ until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. in this relation only is it true.... no _error_ is understood till we have seen all the truth there is in it, and, therefore, as coleridge says, you must "understand an author's ignorance, or conclude yourself ignorant of his understanding." _monday, th._--i have been very happy this afternoon--writing all the time with a genial flow of thought and without effort. how i love to feel that for this i am indebted to god. he is my intellectual source, the father of my spirit, as well as the author of everything morally good in me. _friday, oct. th._--i have been too busy reading and writing for the last few days to find time for my journal. i go on with schleiermacher and have resumed lessing. i am reading the memoir of mrs. s. l. smith and tappan's "review of edwards on the will." fifty lines in the iliad with julia. finished the andria and to-day began the adelphi. i am amused at comparing the comedy of that day with the modern french school. davus in andria is but a rough sketch of moliere's valet, and the whole plot is so bungling in comparison. have had very few attacks of melancholy lately; because, i suppose, my health is good and i am constantly employed. _evening_.--i never came nearer losing my wits with delight than this afternoon. went to call on mr. and mrs. ripley, and saw his fine library of german books. the sight was enough to excite me to the utmost, but to be told that they were all at my service put me into such an ecstasy that i could hardly behave with decency. i selected several immediately and promised myself fuller examination of the library very soon.... mr. r. proposed to me to translate something for his series. shall i? [ ] _sabbath evening, oct. th_.--i have just been writing to my dear brother g., for whom as well as for my other brothers, i feel the greatest solicitude. i have separate sources of anxiety for each of them, and hope that the intenseness of this anxiety will make me more earnest in commending them to god. _oct. th_.--gave up the time usually devoted to lessing to writing two articles for the mother's magazine. read homer, and the th and th psalms and the first chapter of genesis in hebrew. read or rather _studied_ schleiermacher. corrected proof. read several articles in the biblical repository--one by prof. park--aloud to julia. on the whole, i have been pretty industrious. oh, how many reasons i have for gratitude! health, friends, books--nothing is wanting but the heart to enjoy god in all. wrote to mother. _oct. th._--this morning dear lizzy came; of course the day has been given up to _miscellanies_. _oct. st._--mr. albro [ ] called and stayed till dinner-time. after dinner read greek with julia and then wrote a notice of gesenius' hebrew grammar, and then set off for lucy's, where the others were already gone. mr. albro has concluded to read schleiermacher with me--that is, to keep along at the same rate, that we may talk about it. letter from mother, and notes from mr. condit and mr. hamlin, with a copy of "payson's thoughts" in armenian. have just finished reading mr. ripley's reply to mr. norton. mr. willis is forming a bible-class for me to teach on the sabbath--am very glad. _nov. th._--finished lessing yesterday, and hope for a little rest from hurry. shall resume schleiermacher and take up fichte on the destination of man. _nov. nd._--i am afraid that i may have to be resigned to a very great misfortune; namely, to the partial loss of eyesight--for a time at least; so yesterday i resolved to give them a holiday, though sorely against my will, by not opening a book the whole day. whether i should have succeeded in observing such a desperate resolution without the aid of circumstances is quite problematical, but mr. gray opportunely came with a request that i should take a ride with him to cambridge, and visit the libraries there. this occupied four or five hours, and a lyceum lecture provided for the evening. i have always congratulated myself on being so little dependent on _others_ for entertainment--but never considered how entirely i am dependent on _books_. if i should be deprived of the use of my eyes, i should be a most miserable creature. _thanksgiving, nov. th._--a very pleasant and delightful day--our hearts full of gladness and, i hope, of gratitude. i hope dear mother and all at home are as happy. _dec. th._--how plain that all the creations of the ancient mythology are but representations of something in the heart of man!... what is the end of man? infinite contradictions--all opposites blended into one--a mass of confused, broken parts, of disjointed fragments--such _is_ he. the circumstances that surround him--the events that happen unto him, are no less strange. what shall be the end? oh then, abyss of futurity, declare it! unfold thy dark depths--let a voice come up from thy cloudy infinite--let a ray penetrate thy unfathomable profound. if we could but _rest_ till the question is decided! if we could but float softly on the current of time till we reach the haven! but no, we must _act_. we must _do_ something. _i_ must do something _now_--what? _evening._ but as the morning. in the afternoon i was talking with l. w. [ ] with as much eagerness and vivacity as if i had never known a cloud. this evening i was going to a _dance_ at the _insane_ hospital. for me truly it has been a day of opposites--all the elements of life have met and mingled in it. _wednesday, th._--the end of man, says carlyle, is an action, not a thought. this is partly true, though all noble action has its root in thought. thought, indeed, in its true and highest sense, _is_ action. it is never lost. if uttered, it may breathe inspiration into a thousand minds and become the impulse to ten thousand good actions. if unuttered, and terminating in no single outward act, it yet has an emanative influence; it impregnates the man and makes itself felt in his life. a man can not do so noble and godlike a thing as to think, without being the better for it. indeed, the distinction between thought and action is not always an accurate one. many thoughts deserve the name of activities much better than certain movements of the muscles and changes of the outward organization which we denominate actions. in this sense, it is better of the two to think without acting than to act without thinking. mrs. hopkins was the author of the following works, intended mostly for the young. some of them have had a wide circulation. they are written in an attractive style and breathe the purest spirit of christian love and wisdom: . the pastor's daughter. . lessons on the book of proverbs. . the young christian encouraged. . henry langdon; or, what was i made for? . the guiding star; or, the bible god's message; a sequel to henry langdon. . the silent comforter; a companion for the sick-room. a compilation. * * * * * e. the following is the rhapsody referred to by mr. butler: (the words to be used were _mosquito, brigadier, moon, cathedral, locomotive, piano, mountain, candle, lemon, worsted, charity_, and _success_). a wounded soldier on the ground in helpless languor lay, unheeding in his weariness the tumult of the day; in vain a pert _mosquito_ buzzed madly in his ear, his thoughts were far away from earth--its sounds he could not hear; nor noted he the kindly glance with which his _brigadier_ looked down upon his manly form when chance had brought him near. it was a glorious autumn night on which the _moon_ looked down, calmly she looked and her fair face had neither grief nor frown. just as she gazed in other lands on some _cathedral_ dim, whose aisles resounded to the strains of dirges or of hymn. but now with _locomotive_ speed the soldier's thoughts took wing: back to his home they bore him, and he heard his sisters sing-- heard the softest-toned _piano_ touched by hands he used to love. was it home or was it heaven? was that music from above? oh, for one place or the other! in his mountain air to die, once more upon his mother's breast, as in infancy, to lie! the scene has changed. where is he now? not on the cold, damp ground. whence came this couch? and who are they who smiling stand around? what friendly hands have borne him to his own free _mountain_ air? and father, mother, sisters--every one of them is there. now gentle ministries of love may soothe him in his pain; water to cool his fevered lips he need not ask in vain. his mother shades the _candle_ when she steals across the room; a face like hers would radiant make a very desert's gloom. the fragrant _lemon_ cools his thirst, pressed by his sister's hand-- not one can do enough for him, the hero of their band. oh, happy, convalescing days! how full of pleasant pain! how pleasant to take up the old, the dear old life again! now, sitting on the wooden bench before the cottage door, how many times they make him tell the same old story o'er! how he fought and how he fell; how he longed again to fight; and how he would die fighting yet for the triumph of the right. his good old mother sits all day so fondly by his side; how can she give him up again--her first-born son, her pride? his sisters with their _worsted_ his stockings fashion too, in patriotic colors--the red, the white, the blue. if he should never wear them, a _charity_ 'twill be to give them to some soldier-lad as brave and good as he. they're dreadful homely stockings; one can not well say less, but whosoever wears 'em--why, may he have _success_! here are samples of the charades referred to by miss morse: on returning a lost glove to a friend. march, . a hand i am not, yet have fingers five; alive i am not, yet was once alive. am found in every house and by the dozen, and am of flesh and blood a sort of cousin. now cut my head off. see what i become! no longer am i lifeless, dead, and dumb. i am the very sweetest thing on earth; royal in power and of royal birth. i in the palace reign and in the cot-- there is no place where man is and i'm not. i am too costly to be bought and sold; i can not be enticed by piles of gold. and yet i am so lowly that a smile can woo and win me--and so free from guile, that i look forth from many a gentle face in tenderness and truthfulness and grace. say, do you know me? have you known my reign? my joy, my rapture, and my silent pain? beneath your pillow have i roses placed-- your heart's glad festival have i not graced? ah me! to mother, lover, husband, wife i am the oil and i the wine of life. with you, my dear, i have been hand and _glove_. shall i return the first and keep the _love_? charade. my _first_ was born to rule; before him stand the potentates and nobles of the land. he loves his grandeur--hopes to be more grand. my second you will find in every lass-- both in the highest and the lowest class, and even in a simple blade of grass. but add it to my _first_, and straightway he becomes my _whole_--loses identity; parts with his manhood and becomes a _she_. (prince, _ss.,_ princess). * * * * * f. here is another extract from the same letter: j'ai peine à me mettre à l'oraison, et quelquefois quand j'y suis il me tarde d'en sortir. je n'y fais, ce me semble, presque rien. je me trouve même dans une certaine tiédeur et une tâcheté pour toutes sortes de biens. je n'ai aucune peine considérable ni dans mon intérieur, ni dans mon extérieur, ainsi je ne saurois dire que je passe par aucune épreuve. il me semble que c'est un songe, ou que je me moque quand je cherche mon état tant je me trouve hors de tout état spirituel, dans la voie commune des gens tiedes qui vivent à leur aise. cependant cette languor universelle jointe à l'abandon qui me fait acceptes tout et qui m'empêche de rien rechercher, ne laisse pas de m'abattre, et je sens que j'ai quelquefois besoin de donner à mes sens quelque amusement pour m'égayer. aussi le fais--je simplement, mais bien mieux quand je suis seul que quand je suis avec mes meilleurs amis. quand je suis seul, je joue quelquefois comme un petit enfant, etc., etc. the letter may be found in vol. v., pp. - , of madame guyon's lettres chrÉtiennes et spirituelles _sur divers sujets qui regardent la vie intérieure, ou l'esprit du vrai christianisme_--enrichie de la correspondance secrette de mr. de fenelon avec l'auteur. london, . the whole work is extremely interesting. * * * * * g. [from the evangelist of may , .] in memoriam. died in paris, france, may , , virginia s. osborn, only daughter of william h. and virginia s. osborn, of this city, and granddaughter of the late jonathan sturges. the sudden death of this gifted young girl has overwhelmed with grief a large social and domestic circle. last february, in perfect health and full of the brightest anticipations, she set out, in company with her parents and a young friend, on a brief foreign tour. after passing several weeks at rome and visiting other famous cities of italy, she had just reached paris on the way home when a violent fever seized upon her brain, and, in defiance of the tenderest parental care and the best medical skill, hurried her into the unseen world. and yet it is hardly possible to realise that this brilliant young life has forever vanished away from earth, for she seemed formed alike by nature and providence for length of days. already her character gave the fairest promise of a perfect woman. it possessed a strength and maturity beyond her years. although not yet twenty-one, her varied mental culture and her knowledge of almost every branch of english literature, history, poetry, fiction, even physical science, were quite remarkable; nor was she ignorant of some of the best french and german, not to speak of latin, authors. we have never known one of her age whose intellectual tastes were of a higher order. she seemed to feel equally at home in reading shakespeare and goethe; prescott, motley, and froude; mrs. austin, scott, and dickens; taine, huxley, and tyndall; or the popular biographies and fictions of the day. and yet her studious habits and devotion to books did not render her any the less the unaffected, attractive, and whole-hearted girl. her friends, both old and young, greatly admired her, but they loved her still more. as was natural in one of so much character, she was very decided in her ways; but she was also perfectly frank, truthful, and conscientious--resembling in this respect, as she did in some other excellent traits, her honored grandfather, mr. sturges. several years before her death she was enrolled among the disciples of jesus. how vividly the writer recalls her earnest look and tones of voice when she declared to him her desire publicly to confess her saviour and to remember him at his table! when from beneath the deep sea the news that she was dangerously ill and then soon after that she was dead stole upon her friends here like a thief in the night, almost stunning them with grief; their first feeling was one of tender sympathy for the desolate, sorely-smitten parents, and of prayer that god would be pleased to comfort and uphold them in their affliction. from many hearts, we are sure, that prayer has been offered up oftentimes since. if it were not for the relief which comes of faith and prayer, what a cloud of hopeless gloom would enshroud such an event! blessed be god for this exceeding great and precious relief. the dark cloud is not indeed dispersed even by faith and prayer, but with what a silver lining they are able to invest it! if we really believed that such tragical events are solely the effects of chance or mere natural law--if we did not believe that the hand of infinite wisdom and love is also in them, surely the grass would turn black beneath our feet. _the lord gave; the lord hath taken away; and blessed be the name of the lord._ g. l. p. * * * * * h. _extracts front dr. vincent's memorial discourse._ the men and women who know how to comfort human sorrow, and to teach their fellows to turn it to its highest uses, are among god's best gifts to the world. the office and the name of comforter have the highest and purest associations. it is the holy spirit of god who calls himself by that name, and to be a true comforter is to be indeed a co-worker with god. but even as the _word_ "comfort" goes deeper than those pitying commonplaces which even nature teaches us to utter to those who are in any trouble, so the _office_ of a true comforter requires other qualifications than mere natural tenderness of heart, or even the experience of suffering. one must know how to _interpret_ as well as how to _feel_ sorrow; must know its _lessons_ as well as its _smart_. hence it is that god makes his comforters by processes of his own; by hard masters ofttimes, and by lessons not to be found in books. it is in illustration of this truth that i bring to you to-day some memorials of the experience, character, and life-work of one widely known, deeply beloved, and greatly honored by god as an instrument of christian instruction and of christian comfort. it would, indeed, be possible to strike some other keynote. a character presenting so many points of interest might be studied from more than one of those points with both pleasure and profit; but, on the whole, it seems to me that the thought of a _christian comforter_ best concentrates the lessons of her life, and best represents her mission to society; so that we might aptly choose for our motto those beautiful words of the apostle: "blessed be god, even the father of our lord jesus christ, the father of mercies, and the god of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of god." in endeavoring to depict a life which was largely shaped by sorrow, i am not going to open the record of a sorrowful life, but rather of a joyful one; not of a starved and meager life, but of a very rich one, both in itself and in its fruits; yet it may be profitable for us to see through what kind of discipline that life became so rich, and to strike some of the springs where arose the waters which refreshed so many of the children of pain and care. the daughter of edward payson might justly have appropriated her father's words: "thanks to the fervent, effectual prayers of my righteous parents, and the tender mercies of my god upon me, i have reason to hope that the pious wishes breathed over my infant head are in some measure fulfilled." she might have said with cowper: "my boast is not that i deduce my birth from loins enthroned and rulers of the earth; but higher far my proud pretensions rise; the child of parents passed into the skies." the life and work of that devoted minister of jesus christ have passed into the religious history of new england--not to say of our whole country--and no student of that history is unfamiliar with that character so tried, yet so exalted by suffering; with that ministry so faithful, so unselfish, marked by such yearning for souls, and with such persistence, tact, and success in leading them to christ; with that intellect so richly endowed and so well trained; that devotional spirit so rapt, that conscience so acutely sensitive; with that life so fruitful and that death so triumphant.... * * * * * in the summer of she found a lovely and peaceful retreat among the hills of vermont. there arose that tasteful home with which, perhaps more than any other spot, memory loves to associate her. there, for ten happy summers, she enjoyed the communion with nature's "visible forms," and heard her "various language," and felt her healing touch on the wearied brain and overstrung nerves; there, as i think she would have wished, she took leave of earth amid the pomp and flush of the late summer, and gladly ascended to the eternal sunshine of heaven; and there, in the shadow of the giant hills which "brought peace" to her, and the changing moods of which she so loved to study, her ashes await the morning of the resurrection. in reviewing this life of nearly sixty years, we find its keynote, as was said at the outset, in the thought of the christian comforter. we see in her one whom god commissioned, so far as we can judge, to bring light and comfort to multitudes, and whom he prepared for that blessed work by peculiar and severe discipline. there is nothing in which ordinary minds are more commonly mistaken than in their estimate of _suffering._ they seem often unable to conceive it except in its association with appreciable tragedies, in those grosser forms in which it waits upon visible calamity. such do not know that the heart is often the scene of tragedies which can not be written, and that there are sufferings more subtle and more acute than any which torture the nerve or wring the brow. take a character like this with which we are dealing; combine the nature to which love was a necessity of being with those high and pure ideals of character which culled cautiously the objects of affection; add the intense sensitiveness without the self- esteem which so often serves as a rock of refuge to the most sensitive; add the sharply-cut individuality which could only see and do and express in its own way, and which, therefore, so frequently exposed its subject to the misunderstanding of strangers or of unappreciative souls; crown all with the stern conscientiousness which would not compromise the truth even for love's sake, and the exquisite selfreverence, if you will allow the expression, which held the region of religious emotion as holy ground, and which regarded the attempt to open or to penetrate the inner shrines of christian feeling as something akin to sacrilege--and blend all these in a delicate, highly-strung, nervous organization, and you have the elements of a fearful capacity for suffering. besides this _capacity_ for suffering, mrs. prentiss had a very clear cognition of the sacred _office_ of suffering, and of its relation to perfection of character. there were two ideas which pervaded her whole theory of religious experience. the one was that whenever god has special work for his children to do, he always fits them for it by suffering. she had the most intense conviction of any one i ever knew of the necessity of suffering to perfection of character or of work. doubtless there have been others who have learned as well as she its value as a purifying and exalting power, but very few, i think, who have so early and so uncompromisingly taken that truth into their theory of christian education. she quoted with approval the words of madame guyon, that "god rarely, if ever, makes the educating process a painless one when he wants remarkable results." such must drink of christ's cup and be baptized with his baptism. along with this went another and a complementary thought, viz., that as god prepares his workmen for great work by suffering, so there is another class of his children whom he does not find competent to this preparation; who escape much of the conflict and suffering, but never attain the highest enjoyments or fight the decisive battles of time.... in a volume of fenelon's christian counsel, which was one of her favorite closet companions, this passage is scored: god "attacks all the subtle resources of self-love within, especially in those souls who have generously and without reserve delivered themselves up to the operations of his grace. the more he would purify them, the more he exercises them interiorly." and she has added a special note at the foot of the page: "he never forces himself on ungenerous souls for this work." along with this went the thought that god's discipline was intended to make not only _models_, but _ministers_; that one who had passed through the furnace with christ was to emerge from the fiery baptism not merely to be _gazed_ at, but to go down to his brethren telling with power the story of the "form of the fourth." this is the sentiment of some lines addressed by her to an afflicted friend: "o that this heart with grief so well acquainted might be a fountain, rich and sweet and full, for all the weary that have fallen and fainted in life's parched desert--thirsty, sorrowful. "thou man of sorrows, teach my lips that often have told the sacred story of my woe, to speak of thee till stony griefs i soften-- till those that know thee not, learn thee to know." at a comparatively early period of her christian experience, the theme of her prayer was: "i beseech thee, show me thy glory"; for in the answer to that prayer there seemed, as she said, to be summed up everything that she needed or could desire. in a paper in which she recorded some of her aspirations, she wrote: "let my life be an all-day looking to jesus. let my love to god be so deep, earnest, and all-pervading, that i can not have even the passing emotion of rebellion to suppress. there is such a thing as an implicit faith in, and consequent submission to, christ. let me never rest till they are fully mine." i do not know the precise date, but i think it could not have been very late when she received a mighty answer to the prayer to behold god's glory. new views of christian privilege and of the relation of christ to believing souls came with prayerful searching of the scriptures. she entered, to use her own words, upon "a life of incessant peace and serenity--notwithstanding it became, by degrees, one of perpetual self- denial and effort." the consciousness of god never left her. the whole world seemed holy ground. prayer became a perpetual delight. the pride and turbulence of nature grew quiet under these gentle influences, and anything from god's hand seemed just right and quite good. the secret of her peace and of her usefulness lay very largely in the prayerfulness of her life. from her early years, prayer was her delight. in describing the comforts of her chamber in the school at richmond, she noted as its crowning charm the daily presence of the eternal king, who condescended to make it his dwelling-place. with the deeper experiences of which we have spoken came a fresh delight in prayer. "it was very delightful," she says, "to pray all the time; all day long; not only for myself, but for the whole world--particularly for all those who loved christ." her views of prayer were scriptural, and, therefore, discriminating. she fully accepted paul's statement that "we know not what we should pray for as we ought" without the help of the spirit; and, therefore, she always spoke of prayer as something to be _learned_. if she believed that a christian "learns to pray when first he lives," she believed also that the prayer of the infant christian life was like the feeble breath of infancy. she understood by prayer something far more and higher than the mere preferring of petitions. it was _communion_; god's spirit responding harmoniously to our own. with coleridge she held, that the act of praying with the total concentration of the faculties is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable. hence she was accustomed to speak of _learning_ the mysterious art of prayer by an apprenticeship at the throne of grace. she somewhere wrote: "i think many of the difficulties attending the subject of prayer would disappear if it could be regarded in early life as an art that must be acquired through daily, persistent habits with which nothing shall be allowed to interfere." she saw that prayer is not to be made dependent on the various emotive states in which one comes to god. "the question," she said, "is not one of mere delight." the roman catholic poet accurately expressed her thought on this point: "prayer was not meant for luxury, nor selfish pastime sweet; it is the prostrate creature's place at the creator's feet." she illustrated in her own quaint way the truth that moods have nothing to do with the duty of prayer. when one of your little brothers asks you to lend him your knife, do you inquire first what is the state of his mind? if you do, what reply can he make but this: "the state of my mind is, i want your knife." with her natural temperament and inherited tendencies she might, perhaps, under other influences have been drawn too far over to the emotional, or at least to the contemplative side of religious life. but she saw and avoided the danger. she discerned the harmony and just balance between the contemplative and the active christian life, and felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience. she attached as little meaning to a life of mere raptures as to one of bare, loveless duty. "christian life," she wrote, "is not all contemplation and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew. it is a perfect, practicable union of the two. i believe in your joyful emotions if they result in self-denying, patient work for christ--i believe in your work if it is winged by faith and prayer." she had scored this passage in her copy of fenelon: "to be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that continually keeps paradise open--this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing." such experience and such views were behind the active side of her life, as represented by her personal ministries and by the work of her pen. the one book in which she endeavored to embody _formally_ her views of christian doctrine and experience did not, as might have been expected, find the same reception or the same response which were accorded to other productions. it was a book which appealed to a smaller and higher class of readers. but, when she wrought these same truths into pictures of living men and women--when she illustrated them at the points where they touched the drudgery and commonplace of thousands of lives--when she opened outlooks for hundreds of discouraged souls upon the roads where hundreds more were bearing the very same burdens, and yet stepping heavenward under their pressure--when she, who had walked in the fire herself, went to her sisters in the same old furnace and told them of her vision of the form of the fourth--when she went down to the many who were sadly working out the mistakes of ill-judged alliances, and lifted the veil from sorrows which separate their subject from human sympathy because they must be borne in silence--when she told such how heaven might come even into their life--when she, with her hands yet bleeding from the grasp of her own cross, came to other sufferers, not to mock them by the show of an unattainable beauty and an impossible peace, but to _offer_ them _divine_ peace and the beauty of the lord in the name of her saviour--then she spoke with a power which multitudes felt and confessed. i am sure that hers is, in an eminent degree, the blessing of them that were ready to perish. weary, overtaxed mothers; misunderstood and unappreciated wives, servants, pale seamstresses, delicate women forced to live in an atmosphere of drunkenness and coarse brutality, widows and orphans in the bitterness of their bereavement, mothers with their tears dropping over empty cradles--to thousands of such she was a messenger from heaven. of all her seventeen or eighteen published volumes, "stepping heavenward" is the one which best represents her and her life-work--not that she produced nothing else of value, nor that many of her other books were not widely read, greatly enjoyed, and truly useful; but "stepping heavenward" seemed to meet so many real, deep, inarticulate cravings in such a multitude of hearts, that the response to it was instant and general.... she wrote for readers of all ages. not the least fruitful work of her pen was bestowed upon the little ones; and in the number of copies circulated, the susy books stand next to stepping heavenward. through those little half allegories she initiated the children into the rudiments of self-control, discipline and consecration, and taught eyes and hands and tongue and feet the noble uses of the kingdom of god. even from these children's stories the thought of the discipline of suffering was not absent, and _mr. pain_, as many mothers will remember, figures among little susy's six teachers. with the same pure and wholesome lessons, and with the same easy vivacity she appealed to youth through "the flower of the family," "the percys," and "nidworth," and it would be hard to say by readers of what age was monopolised the interest in "aunt jane's hero," "fred and maria and me," and those two little gems--"the story lizzie told," and "gentleman jim." while all her writings were _religious_ in the best sense, they were in nothing more so than in their _cheerfulness_. they were not only happy and hopeful in their general tone, but sparkled with her delicate and sprightly humor. the children of her books were not religious puppets, moving in time to the measured wisdom of their elders, but real children of flesh and blood, acting and talking out their impish conceits, and in nowise conspicuous by their precocious goodness. i think that those who knew her best in her literary relations, will agree with me that no better type of a consecrated literary talent can be found in the lists of authors. she received enough evidences of popular appreciation to have turned the heads of many writers. over , bound volumes of her books have been sold in this country alone, to say nothing of the circulation in england, france, and germany. she was not displeased at success, as i suppose no one is--but success to her meant doing good. she did not write for popularity, and her aversion to having her own literary work mentioned to her was so well known by her friends, that even those who wished to express to her their gratitude for the good they had received from her books were constrained to be silent. "while," says her publisher, "she was very sensitive to any criticism based on a misconception or a perversion of her purpose, never, in all my intercourse with her, did i discover the slightest evidence of a spirit of literary pique, or pride, or ambition." in attempting to sum up the characteristics of her writings, time will suffer me only to state the more prominent features without enlarging upon details. first, and most prominent, was their _purpose_. her pen moved always and only under a sense of _duty_. she held her talent as a gift from god, and consecrated it sacredly to the enforcement and diffusion of his truth. if i may quote once more the words of her publisher in his tribute to her memory--"her great desire and determination to educate in the highest and best schools was never overlooked or forgotten. she never, like many writers of religious fiction, caught the spirit of sensationalism that is in the air, or sought for effects in unhealthy portraiture, corrupt style, or unnatural combinations." second, she was _unconventional_. her writings were not religious in any stereotyped, popular sense. her characters were not stenciled. the holiest of them were strongly and often amusingly individualized. she did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the holy spirit revealed his presence and work. third, i have already referred to her _sprightliness_. she had naturally a keen sense of humor which overflowed both in her conversation and in her books. she saw nothing in the nature of the faith she professed which bade her lay violent hands on this propensity; and she once said that if her religion could not stand her saying a funny thing now and then it was not worth much. but, whatever she might say or write of this character, one never felt that it betrayed any irreverent lightness of spirit. the undertone of her life was so deeply reverential, so thoroughly pervaded with adoring love for christ, that it made itself felt through all her lighter moods, like the ground-swell of the sea through the sparkling ripples on the surface. fourth, her style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. she aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service of truth. fifth, her books were intensely _personal_; expressions, i mean, of her own experience. many of her characters and scenes are simple transcripts of fact, and much of what she taught in song, was a repetition of what she had learned in suffering. to go back once more to her office of consoler. she exercised this not only through her books, but also through her personal ministries in those large and widening circles which centred in her literary and pastoral life. those who were favored with her friendship in times of sorrow found her a comforter indeed. her letters, of which, at such times, she was prodigal, were to many sore hearts as leaves from the tree of life. she did not expect too much of a sufferer. she recognized human weakness as well as divine strength. but in all her attempts at consolation, side by side with her deep and true sympathy, went the _lesson_ of the _harvest_ of sorrow. she was always pointing the mourner _past_ the floods, to the high place above them--teaching him to sing even amid the waves and billows--"the lord will command his loving-kindness"; "i shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance." "i knew," she wrote to a bereaved friend, "that god would never afflict you so, if he had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what he took." the insight which her writings revealed into many and subtle aspects of sorrow, made her the recipient of hosts of letters from strangers, opening to her their griefs, and asking her counsel; and to all she gave freely and joyfully as far as her strength and time and judgment would allow. there was a tonic vein mingling with her comforts. her touch was firm as well as tender. she knew the shoals of morbid sentimentality which skirt the deeps of trouble, and sought to pilot the sorrowing past the shoals to the shore. and now, having thus spoken of her preparation for god's work, the work itself, and its fruits, how can we gather up and depict the many personal traits and associations which crowd upon the memory? of such things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor vanishing with the moment. how often that which most commends them to remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record. how many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that beautiful home among the hills. how it bore her mark and was pervaded with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate setting of her life. now she was at her chamber window studying the ever shifting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers and grasses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days. and how pleasant her talk. how she would dart off sometimes from the line of the gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit. how many odd things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken, and how graphically and charmingly she told them. with what relish she would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently, with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the discussion of the deep things of god. nor was her home merely a place of rest and retirement. its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits, and also to some of christ's poor, to whom the healing breath of the mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts from heaven. in that little community she was not content to be a mere summer idler. there, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of instruction. eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she sowed in her weekly bible-reading, to which the women came for miles over the mountain roads, through storm and through sunshine. and here the end came. death, if a surprise at all to her, could only be a pleasant surprise. in one of her stories an old family servant says of her departed mistress: "often's the time i've heard her talk about dying, and i mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and it was just as she looked when she said, 'mary, i'm going to be married.'" it was a leaf out of her own life. she had marked in one of her books of devotion a passage which, i imagine, summed up her view of the whole matter: "a true christian is neither fond of life nor weary of it." she had no sentimental disgust with life, but her overmastering desire was to see and be like her lord, and death was the entrance gate to that perfect vision. only the opening of that portal could bring the full answer to her prayer of years, "i beseech thee, show me thy glory." in this attitude the messenger found her. i will not dwell on the closing scenes.... it is pleasanter to turn from that long, weary sabbath, when nature in its perfect beauty and repose seemed to mock the bitter agony of the death-chamber, to the hour when, with the first full brightness of the morning, the silver cord was loosed, and she was present with the lord. surely it was something more than an accidental coincidence that, in the little "daily food," which for nearly forty years had been her closet companion, the passage for the th of august was: "i heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write, blessed are the dead which die in the lord from henceforth: yea, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." that summer afternoon when she was laid to rest had a brightness which was not all of the glories of the setting sun, as he burst forth from the encircling clouds, and touched with his parting splendor the gates of the grave. nature, with its fulness of summer life, was set in the key of the resurrection by the assurance of her victory over death, and it was with a new and mighty sense of their truth that we spoke over her ashes the words of the apostle: "it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. o death, where is thy sting? o grave, where is thy victory?" so now, as then, _more_ even than then, since these months have given us time to study the lesson of that life and the sources of its power, we give thanks to god through jesus christ our lord; thanks for the divine processes which moulded a daughter of consolation; thanks for the fountains of comfort opened by her along life's highways and which continue to flow while she sleeps in jesus; thanks for a good and fruitful life ended "in the communion of the holy catholic church, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope, in charity with all mankind, and in peace with god." * * * * * i. a list of mrs. prentiss' writings, with notices of some of them and the dates of their publication: . _little susy's six birthdays._ . . _only a dandelion, and other stories._ . the first piece, from which the little book takes its name, was written at the time, and is not excelled by anything of the kind written by mrs. prentiss. spring breeze is as fresh and delicate as a may flower. the other stories are mostly a selection from her early contributions to the youth's companion. . _henry and bessie; or, what they did in the country._ . . _little susy's six teachers._ . . _little susy's little servants._ . the three little susy books were republished in england, where they seem to have been as popular among the children as at home. not far from , copies have been sold in this country. . _the flower of the family._ a book for girls. . this work has had a wide circulation at home and abroad. some , copies have been sold here. the following is the title-page of one of the french editions: * * * * * le fleur de la famille ou simple histoire pour les jeunes filles. ouvrage americain. cinquième édition. toulouse, société des livres religieux. . * * * * * die perle der familie is the german title. here are a few sentences from a highly laudatory notice in the well-known "neue preuss. zeitung": in ausserordentlicher lieblicher und sinniger weise wird uns ein häusliches, schlichtes, von edlem christlichen sinn getragenes familien- leben forgeführt, das durch seine treffliche characterschilderung unser lebhaftestes interesse flir jedes glied des kinderreichen hauses in anspruch nimmt. es ist im eigentlichsten sinne ein buch für die familie. _the flower of the family_ was translated into german,--as were also _stepping heavenward, the percys, fred and maria and me_,--by miss marie morgenstern, of göttingen. some omissions in the version of _stepping heavenward_ mar a little the vivacity of the book; but otherwise her work seems to have been very carefully and well done, and to have met with the warm approval of the german public. . _peterchen and gretchen; or, tales of early childhood._ . this is a translation from the german. . _the little preacher._ . one of the most striking of her smaller works. it has throughout the flavor of german peasant life and of the black forest. but it seems never to have found its way across the sea. . _little threads; or, tangle thread, silver thread, and golden thread._ . the aim of _little threads_ is happily indicated in its closing sentences: if you find that you like to have your own way a good deal better than you like your mamma to have hers; if you pout and cry when you can not do as you please; if you never own that you are in the wrong, and are sorry for it; never, in short, try with all your might to be docile and gentle, then your name is tangle thread, and you may depend you cost your mamma many sorrowful hours and many tears. and the best thing you can do is to go away by yourself and pray to jesus to make you see how naughty you are, and to make you humble and sorry. then the old and soiled thread that can be seen in your mother's life will disappear, and in its place there will come first a silver, and by and by, with time and patience, and god's loving help, a sparkling and beautiful golden one. and do you know of anything in this world you should rather be than somebody's golden thread?--especially the golden thread of your dear mamma, who has loved you so many years, who has prayed for you so many years, and who longs so to see you gentle and docile like him of whom it was said: "behold the _lamb_ of god!" _little threads_ is based upon a very keen observation of both the dark and the bright side of childhood. the allegory, in which its lessons are wrought, is, perhaps, less simple and attractive than that of _little susy's six teachers_, or that of _little susy's little servants_; but the lessons themselves are full of the sweetest wisdom, pathos, and beauty. . _little lou's sayings and doings_. . among the papers of her sister, mrs. prentiss found a journal containing numerous little incidents in the early life of her only child, together with more or less of his boyish sayings. much of the material found in this journal was used in the composition of _little lou_; and that is one thing that gives it such an air of perfect reality. . _fred and maria and me._ . . _the old brown pitcher._ . this is a temperance tale. it was written at the request of the national temperance society and issued for their press. _ . stepping heavenward. ._ some interesting details respecting this work have been given already. its circulation has been very large, both at home and abroad; far greater than that of any other of mrs. prentiss' books. more than , copies of it have been sold in this country; while in england it was issued by several houses, and tens of thousands of copies have been sold there, in canada, in australia, and in other parts of the british dominions. among the english houses that republished _stepping heavenward_, were james nisbet & co.; ward, lock & co.; frederick warne & co.; thomas nelson & sons, london and edinburgh; milner & co.; weldon & co. an edition by the last-named house, neatly printed and intended specially for circulation in canada and australia, as well as at home, was sold at fivepence, so that the very poorest could buy it. no accurate estimate can be formed of the number of copies circulated in great britain and its dependencies, but it must have been enormous. it was also issued at leipsic, by tauchnitz, in his famous "collection of british authors." the german translation has already passed into a fourth edition--a remarkable proof of its popularity. in the preface to this edition miss morgenstern, the translator, says: "so möge sie denn hinausziehen in die welt, diese vierte auflage, möge wiederum aufklopfen an die stuben und herzenthüren, der deutschen lesewelt, und nachdem ihr aufgethan, hineintragen in die stuben und herzen, was ihre vorgängerinnen hineintrugen;--freude und rath und trost." nowhere has the work won higher, or more discriminating, praise than in germany. the following extract from one of the critical notices of it may serve as an instance: in form von tagebuch--aufzeichnungen, somit selbstbekenntnissen, wird uns das leben einer frau erzält, welche--ohne andere _äussere_ schickungen freudiger und trüber art, als sie in _jedem_ leben vorzukommen pflegen--aus einem zwar gutartigen und wohlbegabten aber susserst reizbaren und leidenshaftlich erregten müdchen zu einer geläuterten jüngerin des herrn heranreift. was aber dies buch zu einem wahren kleinod macht, das ish nicht die überaus wahre und tiefe analyse jener menschlichen sünde, sündenschwachheit und eitelkeit, die sich auch in die frömmsten regungen einuschleichen sucht, sondern die angabe des wahren heilmittels. der goldne faden nämlich, der sich durch das ganze buch zieht, ist die wahrheit; nicht _unser_ rennen und lanfen, sondern _sein_ erbarmen! nicht _wir_ haben _ihn_ geliebt, sondern _er_ hat _uns_ geliebt, und daran haben _wir_ kindlich zu _glauben_. sich _ihm_ an _sein_ herz werfen mit all unsern schwächen, all unser armuth--das _wirkt_--ja das _ist_ heilung.... das ganze ist im höchsten grade fesselnd. man lebt sich unwillkürlich in dies christliche hauswesen mit ein, und glaubt in vielen zügen einen spiegel des eigenen zu erkennen. [ ] the title-page of the french translation is as follows: * * * * * marchant vers le ciel. par e. prentiss. auteur de _la fleur de la famille_, etc. traduit de l'anglais avec l'autorization de l'auteur. lausanne: georges bridel, editeur. * * * * * the following extract from a letter of madame de fressensé, dated paris, july , , will show what impression the work made not only upon the gifted and accomplished writer, but upon many other of the most cultivated christian women of france and switzerland: c'est un livre qui fait aimer celle qui y a mis son âme, une étude du coeur humain bien vraie et bien délicate. l'amour de dieu déborde dans ses pages charmantes, dont la lecture réchauffe le coeur. je crois qu'il a été fort apprécié dans nos pays de langue française. une personne dont toute la vie est un service de ceux qui souffrent me disait l'autre jour: "c'est _mon_ livre, il m'a fait beaucoup de bien." le nombre d'editions qu'a atteint la traduction française teémoigne qu'il a eu du succès, et je suis sûre que beaucoup de personnes ont préféré, avec raison, le lire dans l'original. je suis heureuse que vous m'avez donné l'occasion de le relire, et d'en éprouver de nouveau la bienfaisante influence.... ce serait un vrai privilége de pouvoir faire connaítre à notre public français cette femme aussi distinguée par le coeur que par l'esprit, que nous aimons tous. . _nidworth, and his three magic wands._ . the three magic wands are: riches, knowledge, and love; and in depicting their peculiar and wonderful virtues mrs. prentiss has wrought into the story with much skill her own theory of a happy life. she wrote the book with intense delight, and its strange, weird-like scenes and characters--the home in the forest; dolman, the poor woodcutter; cinda, his tall and strong-minded wife; nidworth, their first-born; wandering hidda, boding ill-luck; the hermit; these and all the rest--seemed to her, for a while, almost as real as if she had copied them from life. its publishers (roberts brothers) pronounced _nidworth_ "a gem" and were not a little surprised at its failure to strike the popular fancy. it certainly contains some of the author's brightest pictures of life and character. . _the percys._ . this work was translated into french and german, and won warm praise in both languages. it is full of spirit, depicts real boys and girls and a loving christian mother with equal skill, and abounds in the best lessons of domestic peace. . _the story lizzie told._ . . _six little princesses and what they turned into._ . no one of mrs. prentiss' lesser works betrays a keener insight into character or a finer touch than this. its aim is to illustrate the truth that all girls are endowed with their own individual talents; and to enforce the twofold lesson, that the diligent use of these talents, on the one hand, can furnish innocent pleasures beyond the reach of any outward position, however brilliant; and, on the other, is the best preparation for the day of adversity. the closing sentences of the story will give an inkling of its aim and quality: "i see how it is," said the countess. "you must live together. each feels herself incomplete without the others. novella needs somebody to take care of her and somebody to love. in return, she will give love and endless entertainment. reima, too, needs looking after, and some one will watch with a friendly eye the growth of her paintings. our two musicians must not become one-sided by thinking only of melody and song. they must enjoy being clothed by moina's kind hands, listening to novella's poems, and discussing reima's works. and you must train all your ears to appreciate the talents of these two marvellous creatures who sing and play with such rare, such exquisite harmony." "and what shall i do?" cried delicieuse. "you shall do a little of everything, dear child. you shall help moina to guide the house, and reima to mix the colors. you shall take care that the piano is never out of tune, or novella at a loss for pens and paper. in a word, you shall be what you always have been, always ready with the oil of gladness, wherever you see friction, the sweetest, the most lovable creature in the world." delicieuse smiled, and ran to embrace all her sisters, hardly knowing which she loved best. it was not long before those royal maidens, royal only in their virtues and their talents, found themselves in a home in a vine-clad land, where each could live as nature had designed she should live. moina, whose practical skill was not confined to her needle, kept the house with such exquisite care and neatness, that her sisters preferred it to a palace. she found happiness in forgetting herself, in her pride in them, and in the freedom from petty cares from which she shielded them. her calm, serene character was a continual repose to the varying moods of reima and novella; a balance-wheel to works that, running fast, often ran irregularly. reima studied the old masters with no need for further travel, for her home lay among their works. mosella and papeta composed music, made delicieuse listen to and admire it when other hearers were wanting, and were satisfied with her criticisms. novella wrote books, and had her frenzies. she had her gentle and her gay moods, also, and made laughter ring through the house at her will. not one of these four was conscious of her powers, or asked for fame. nor did their aristocratic breeding make them ashamed to work for their bread. they even fancied that bread thus won, needed less butter to help it down, than that of charity. as to delicieuse, she was the bright, the golden link that bound the household together in peace and harmony. her smiles, her caresses, the love that flowed forth from her as from a living fountain, made their home glad with perpetual sunshine. thank god for the gifts of genius he has scattered abroad with a bountiful hand; but thank him also that, without such gifts, one may become a joy and a benediction! . _aunt jane's hero_. . this work was at once republished in england and appeared also in a french version. . _golden hours: hymns and songs of the christian life_. . several of the pieces in this volume had already appeared; among them "more love to thee, o christ." this hymn has passed into most of the later collections. it was translated into arabic, and is sung in the land once trodden by the blessed feet of him whose name it adores, and throughout the east. . _urbane and his friends_. . this work was reprinted in england. . _griselda: a dramatic poem in five acts_. translated from the german of friedrich halm (baron münch-bellinghausen). . mrs. prentiss supposed that hers was the first english version of this poem. but there is a translation by sir r. a. anstruther, which appeared in london as early as and in a new edition four years later. all attempts to obtain a copy of this translation in new york, or from london, have proved futile. . _the home at greylock_. . the following extract from a letter of the author of the french translation to mrs. prentiss deserves a place here: madame,--vous savez sans doute que, sans votre autorisation, une plume, bien hardie peut-être, mais pleine de zèle et de respect pour vous, s'est mise à traduire un de vos ouvrages, "the home at greylock." sans votre autorisation! etait-ce bien? était-ce mal? je me le suis demandé plus d'une fois et je vous l'aurais demandé, madame, si j'avais su votre adresse assez tôt. l'éditeur m'a mis la conscience à l'aise en m'assurant que le droit était le même pour tous, et que les auteurs américains ne pouvaient concéder de privilége à qui que ce fût. forte de cette assurance, je me mis à l'oeuvre, mais j'avoue que j'eus besoin d'encouragements réitérés pour mener mon travail à bonne fin. encore un mot d'explication, si vous le permittez, madame. je ne suis pas mére, mais je suis tante; j'ai vu naître mes neveux et niéces, je les ai bercés dans mes bras, j'ai veillé sur leurs premiers pas, j'ai observé le développement graduel de leur coeur et de leur intelligence, j'ai senti à fond combien l'oeuvre de l'éducation est sérieuse et combien il importe d'étre discipliné soi-même par le seigneur pour discipliner les petits confiés à nos soins. il n'est done pas étonnant que votre livre m'ait vivement intéressée et que j'aie voulu le mettre à la portée d'un grand nombre. cela eût été fait tût ou tard par d'autres, je ne l'ignore point; mais j'avais envie d'essayer mes forces, et.... l'occasion a fait le larron. ne seriez-vous pas ma complice, madame?... m'appuyant sur votre bienveillame et sur la fraternité qui unit les âmes dans le seigneur, je vous prie, madame, de ne pas me considérer comme une étrangère et d'agréer l'expression de mon estime et mes voeux en christ. . _pemaquid; a story of old times in new england._ . . _gentleman jim_. . this little story was the last production of her pen and appeared a few days only after her death. . _avis benson; or, mine and thine, with other sketches_. . this is a collection of pieces that had already appeared in the chicago advance and in the new york observer. it met with a cordial welcome and has had a large circulation. some of the readers of mrs. prentiss' books may be glad to see a specimen of her handwriting. the following is a fac-simile of the closing part of a letter to her cousin, miss shipman, written at dorset in : [illustration: handwriting sample] [ ] b. j. lossing, l.l.d., in the christian union of oct. , . [ ] b. j. lossing in the christian union. [ ] mr. nathaniel willis, then in his th year. he died at boston, may , , in the th year of his age. [ ] sickness: its trials and blessings. a very wise and comforting book. she bequeathed it back to mrs. prentiss at her death. [ ] to aid in defending it against the "border-ruffians." [ ] mrs. prentiss was on her way to europe. before sailing she went to williamstown to say good-bye to her sister, but the latter was too ill to see her. they never met again on earth. [ ] referring to the family of rev. wm. james, d.d., of albany. [ ] sent from genevrier. [ ] n. p. willis. [ ] the boston recorder and the youth's companion. [ ] the late george ripley, the eminent scholar and critic, is referred to. in a letter, dated new york, nov. , , mr. ripley writes: "i beg you to accept, dear dr. prentiss, my most cordial thanks for your kindness in sending me the extract from miss payson's journal. i remember perfectly the visits of the young german enthusiast to my house in boston and the great pleasure they always gave to my wife and myself. my acquaintance with her, i think, was through mr. tappan's family, of which your former parishioner and my dear friend and classmate, thomas denny, afterward became a member. with my infatuation for new england people and new england biography and genealogy and literary endeavor, it would give me great delight to be permitted to see miss payson's journal." the journal was sent to dr. ripley and read by him with great pleasure. the incident led to the renewal of an old acquaintance and to repeated visits at his residence--one shortly before his death--which left upon the writer a strong impression of his deep interest in theological and religious truth, as well as of his genial temper and remarkable literary accomplishments. [ ] the late rev. john adams albro, d.d., of cambridge. [ ] leonard woods, jr., d.d., then president of bowdoin college. [ ] allgemeiner literarischer anzeiger für das evangelische deutschland, jan., . [illustration: dorset mountains.] [illustration: a view of chateau d'oex.] [illustration: la maison des bains.] [illustration: the old mill and pond.] this file was produced from images generously made available by the cwru preservation department digital library mrs. shelley by lucy madox rossetti. . preface. i have to thank all the previous students of shelley as poet and man--not last nor least among whom is my husband--for their loving and truthful research on all the subjects surrounding the life of mrs. shelley. every aspect has been presented, and of known material it only remained to compare, sift, and use with judgment. concerning facts subsequent to shelley's death, many valuable papers have been placed at my service, and i have made no new statement which there are not existing documents to vouch for. this book was in the publishers' hands before the appearance of mrs. marshall's _life of mary wollstonecraft shelley_, and i have had neither to omit, add to, nor alter anything in this work, in consequence of the publication of hers. the passages from letters of mrs. shelley to mr. trelawny were kindly placed at my disposal by his son-in-law and daughter, colonel and mrs. call, as early as the summer of . among authorities used are prof. dowden's _life of shelley_, mr. w. m. rossetti's _memoir_ and other writings, mr. jeaffreson's _real shelley,_ mr. kegan paul's _life of william godwin_, godwin's _memoir of mary wollstonecraft_, mrs. pennell's _mary wollstonecraft godwin_, &c. &c. among those to whom my special thanks are due for original information and the use of documents, &c., are, foremost, mr. h. buxton forman, mr. cordy jeaffreson, mrs. call, mr. alexander ireland, mr. charles c. pilfold, mr. j. h. ingram, mrs. cox, and mr. silsbee, and, for friendly counsel, prof. dowden; and i must particularly thank lady shelley for conveying to me her husband's courteous message and permission to use passages of letters by mrs. shelley, interspersed in this biography. lucy madox rossetti. contents. chapter i. parentage. chapter ii. girlhood of mary--paternal troubles. chapter iii. shelley. chapter iv. mary and shelley. chapter v. life in england. chapter vi. death of shelley's grandfather, and birth of a child. chapter vii. "frankenstein". chapter viii. return to england. chapter ix. life in italy. chapter x. mary's despondency and birth of a son. chapter xi. godwin and "valperga". chapter xii. last months with shelley. chapter xiii. widowhood. chapter xiv. literary work. chapter xv. later works. chapter xvi. italy revisited. chapter xvii. last years. chapter i. parentage. the daughter of mary wollstonecraft and godwin, the wife of shelley: here, surely, is eminence by position, for those who care for the progress of humanity and the intellectual development of the race. whether this combination conferred eminence on the daughter and wife as an individual is what we have to enquire. born as she was at a time of great social and political disturbance, the child, by inheritance, of the great french revolution, and suffering, as soon as born, a loss certainly in her case the greatest of all, that of her noble-minded mother, we can imagine the kind of education this young being passed through--with the abstracted and anxious philosopher-father, with the respectable but shallow-minded step-mother provided by godwin to guard the young children he so suddenly found himself called upon to care for, mary and two half-sisters about her own age. how the volumes of philosophic writings, too subtle for her childish experience, would be pored over; how the writings of the mother whose loving care she never knew, whose sad experiences and advice she never heard, would be read and re-read. we can imagine how these writings, and the discourses she doubtless frequently heard, as a child, between her father and his friends, must have impressed mary more forcibly than the respectable precepts laid down in a weak way for her guidance; how all this prepared her to admire what was noble and advanced in idea, without giving her the ballast needful for acting in the fittest way when a time of temptation came, when shelley appeared. he appeared as the devoted admirer of her father and his philosophy, and as such was admitted into the family intimacy of three inexperienced girls. picture these four young imaginative beings together; shelley, half-crazed between youthful imagination and vague ideas of regenerating mankind, and ready at any incentive to feel himself freed from his part in the marriage ceremony. what prudent parents would have countenanced such a visitor? and need there be much surprise at the subsequent occurrences, and much discussion as to the right or wrong in the case? how the actors in this drama played their subsequent part on the stage of life; whether they did work which fitted them to be considered worthy human beings remains to be examined. * * * * * as no story or life begins with itself, so, more especially with this of our heroine, we must recall the past, and at least know something of her parents. mary wollstonecraft, one of the most remarkable and misunderstood women of even her remarkable day, was born in april , in or near london, of parents of whose ancestors little is known. her father, son of a spitalfields manufacturer, possessed an adequate fortune for his position; her mother was of irish family. they had six children, of whom mary was the second. family misery, in her case as in many, seems to have been the fountainhead of her genius. her father, a hot-tempered, dissipated man, unable to settle anywhere or to anything, naturally proved a domestic tyrant. her mother seems little to have understood her daughter's disposition, and to have been extremely harsh, harassed no doubt by the behaviour of her husband, who frequently used personal violence on her as well as on his children; this, doubtless, under the influence of drink. such being the childhood of mary wollstonecraft, it can be understood how she early learnt to feel fierce indignation at the injustice to, and the wrongs of women, for whom there was little protection against such domestic tyranny. picture her sheltering her little sisters and brother from the brutal wrath of a man whom no law restricted, and can her repugnance to the laws made by men on these subjects be wondered at? only too rarely do the victims of such treatment rise to be eloquent of their wrongs. the frequent removals of her family left little chance of forming friendships for the sad little mary; but she can scarcely have been exactly lonely with her small sisters and brothers, possibly a little more positive loneliness or quiet would have been desirable. as she grew older her father's passions increased, and often did she boldly interpose to shield her mother from his drunken wrath, or waited outside her room for the morning to break. so her childhood passed into girlhood, her senses numbed by misery, till she had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of a mr. and mrs. clare, a clergyman and his wife, who were kind to the friendless girl and soon found her to have undeveloped good qualities. she spent much time with them, and it was they who introduced her to fanny blood, whose friendship henceforth proved one of the chief influences of her life; this it was that first roused her intellectual faculty, and, with the gratitude of a fine nature, she never after forgot where she first tasted the delight of the fountain which transmutes even misery into the source of work and poetry. here, again, mary found the story of a home that might have been ruined by a dissipated father, had it not been for the cheerful devotion of this daughter fanny, who kept the family chiefly by her work, painting, and brought up her young brothers and sisters with care. a bright and happy example at this moment to stimulate mary, and raise her from the absorbing and hopeless contemplation of her own troubles; she then, at sixteen, resolved to work so as to educate herself to undertake all that might and would fall on her as the stay of her family. fresh wanderings of the restless father ensued, and finally she decided to accept a situation as lady's companion; this her hard previous life made a position of comparative ease to her, and, although all the former companions had left the lady in despair, she remained two years with her till her mother's illness required her presence at home. mrs. wollstonecraft's hard life had broken her constitution, and in death she procured her first longed-for rest from sorrow and toil, counselling her daughters to patience. deprived of the mother, the daughters could no longer remain with their father; and mary, at eighteen, had again to seek her fortune in a hard world--fanny blood being, as ever, her best friend. one of her sisters became housekeeper to her brother; and eliza married, but by no means improved her position by this, for her marriage proved another unhappy one, and only added to mary's sad observation of the marriage state. a little later she had to help this sister to escape from a life which had driven her to madness. when her sister's peace of mind was restored, they were enabled to open a school together at stoke newington green, for a time with success; but failure and despondency followed, and mary, whose health was broken, accepted a pressing invitation from her friend fanny, who had married a mr. skeys, to go and stay with her at lisbon, and nurse her through her approaching confinement. this sad visit--for during her stay there she lost her dearly loved friend--broke the monotony of her life, and perhaps the change, with sea voyage which was beneficial to her health, helped her anew to fight the battle of life on her return. but fresh troubles assailed her. some friend suggested to her to try literature, and a pamphlet, _thoughts on the education of daughters_, was her first attempt. for this she received ten guineas, with which she was able to help her friends the bloods. she shortly afterwards accepted a situation as governess in lord kingsborough's family, where she was much loved by her pupils; but their mother, who did little to gain their affection herself, becoming jealous of the ascendency of mary over them, found some pretext for dismissing her. mary's contact, while in this house, with people of fashion inspired her only with contempt for their small pleasures and utterly unintellectual discourse. these surroundings, although she was treated much on a footing of equality by the family, were a severe privation for mary, who was anxious to develop her mind, and to whom spiritual needs were ever above physical. on leaving the kingsboroughs, mary found work of a kind more congenial to her disposition, as mr. johnson, the bookseller in st. paul's churchyard who had taken her pamphlet, now gave her regular work as his "reader," and also in translating. now began the happiest part of mary's life. in the midst of books she soon formed a circle of admiring friends. she lived in the simplest way, in a room almost bare of furniture, in blackfriars. here she was able to see after her sisters and to have with her her young brother, who had been much neglected; and in the intervals of her necessary work she began writing on the subjects which lay nearest to her heart; for here, among other work, she commenced her celebrated _vindication of the rights of woman_, a work for which women ought always to be grateful to her, for with this began in england the movement which, progressing amidst much obloquy and denunciation, has led to so many of the reforms in social life which have come, and may be expected to lead to many which we still hope for. when we think of the nonsense which has been talked both in and out of parliament, even within the last decade, about the advanced women who have worked to improve the position of their less fortunate sisters, we can well understand in what light mary wollstonecraft was regarded by many whom fortunately she was not bound to consider. her reading, which had been deep and constant, together with her knowledge of life from different points of view, enabled her to form just opinions on many of the great reforms needed, and these she unhesitatingly set down. how much has since been done which she advocated for the education of women, and how much they have already benefited both by her example and precept, is perhaps not yet generally enough known. her religious tone is always striking; it was one of the moving factors of her life, as with all seriously thinking beings, though its form became much modified with the advance in her intellectual development. her scheme in the _vindication of the rights of woman_ may be summed up thus:-- she wished women to have education equal to that of men, and this has now to a great extent been accorded. that trades, professions, and other pursuits should be open to women. this wish is now in progress of fulfilment. that married women should own their own property as in other european countries. recent laws have granted this right. that they should have more facilities for divorce from husbands guilty of immoral conduct. this has been partially granted, though much still remains to be effected. that, in the case of separation, the custody of children should belong equally to both parents. that a man should be legally responsible for his illegitimate children. that he should be bound to maintain the woman he has wronged. mary wollstonecraft also thought that women should have representatives in parliament to uphold their interests; but her chief desires are in the matter of education. unlike rousseau, she would have all children educated together till nine years of age; like rousseau, she would have them meet for play in a common play-ground. at nine years their capacities might be sufficiently developed to judge which branch of education would be then desirable for each; girls and boys being still educated together, and capacity being the only line of demarcation. thus it will be seen that mary's primary wish was to make women responsible and sensible companions for men; to raise them from the beings they were made by the frivolous fashionable education of the time; to make them fit mothers to educate or superintend the education of their children, for education does not end or begin with what may he taught in schools. to make a woman a reasoning being, by means of euclid if necessary, need not preclude her from being a charming woman also, as proved by the descriptions we have of mary wollstonecraft herself. doubtless some of the most crying evils of civilisation can only be cured by raising the intellectual and moral status of woman, and thus raising that of man also, so that he, regarding her as a companion whose mind reflects the beauties of nature, and who can appreciate the great reflex of nature as transmitted through the human mind in the glorious art of the world, may really be raised to the ideal state where the sacrilege of love will be unknown. we know that this great desire must have passed through mary wollstonecraft's mind and prompted her to her eloquent appeal for the "vindication of the rights of woman." with mary's improved prospects, for she fortunately lived in a time when the strong emotions and realities of life brought many influential people admiringly around her, she was able to pay a visit to paris in . no one can doubt her interest in the terrible drama there being enacted, and her courage was equal to the occasion; but even this journey is brought up in disparagement of her, and this partly owing to godwin's naïve remark in his diary, that "there is no reason to doubt that if fuseli had been disengaged at the period of their acquaintance he would have been the man of her choice." as the little _if_ is a very powerful word, of course this amounts to nothing, and it is scarcely the province of a biographer to say what might have taken place under other circumstances, and to criticise a character from that standpoint. if mary was attracted by fuseli's genius, and this would not have been surprising, and if she went to paris for change of scene and thought, she certainly only set a sensible example. as it was, she had ample matter of interest in the stirring scenes around her--she with a heart to feel the woes of all: the miseries however real and terrible of the prince did not blind her to those of the peasant; the cold and calculating torture of centuries was not to be passed over because a maddened people, having gained for a time the right of power by might, brought to judgment the representatives, even then vacillating and treacherous, of ages of oppression. her heart bled for all, but most for the longest suffering; and she was struck senseless to the ground by the news of the execution of the "twenty-one," the brave girondins. would that another woman, even greater than herself, had been untrammelled by her sex, and could have wielded at first hand the power she had to exercise through others; and might not france have been thus again saved by a joan of arc--not only france, but the revolution in all its purity of idea, not in its horror. in france, too, the women's question had been mooted; condorcet having written that one of the greatest steps of progress of the human intellect would be the freedom from prejudice that would give equality of right to both sexes: and the _requête des dames à l'assemblée nationale_ , was made simultaneously with the appearance of mary wollstonecraft's _vindication of the rights of woman_. these were strong reasons to attract mary to france, strange as the time was for such a journey; but even then her book was translated and read both in france and germany. so here was mary settled for a time, the english scarcely having realised the turmoil that existed. she arrived just before the execution of louis xvi., and with a few friends was able to study the spirit of the time, and begin a work on the subject, which, unfortunately, never reached more than its first volume. her account, in a letter to mr. johnson, shows how acutely she felt in her solitude on the day of the king's execution; how, for the first time in her life, at night she dared not extinguish her candle. in fact, the faculty of feeling for others so acutely as to gain courage to uphold reform, does not necessarily evince a lack of sensitiveness on the part of the individual, as seems often to be supposed, but the very reverse. we can well imagine how mary felt the need of sympathy and support, separated as she was from her friends and from her country, which was now at war with france. alone at neuilly, where she had to seek shelter both for economy and safety, with no means of returning to england, and unable to go to switzerland through her inability to procure a passport, her money dwindling, still she managed to continue her literary work; and as well as some letters on the subject of the revolution, she wrote at neuilly all that was ever finished of her _historical and moral view of the french revolution_. her only servant at this time was an old gardener, who used to attend her on her rambles through the woods, and more than once as far as paris. on one of these occasions she was so sickened with horror at the evidence of recent executions which she saw in the streets that she began boldly denouncing the perpetrators of such savagery, and had to be hurried away for her life by some sympathetic onlookers. it was during this time of terror around and depression within that mary met captain gilbert imlay, an american, at the house of a mutual friend. now began the complication of reasons and deeds which caused bitter grief in not only one generation. mary was prompted by loneliness, love, and danger on all hands. there was risk in proclaiming herself an english subject by marriage, if indeed there was at the time the possibility of such a marriage as would have been valid in england, though, as the wife of an american citizen, she was safe. thus, at a time when all laws were defied, she took the fatal step of trusting in imlay's honour and constancy; and, confident of her own pure motives, entered into a union which her letters to him, full of love, tenderness, and fidelity, proved that she regarded as a sacred marriage; all the circumstances, and, not least, the pathetic way she writes to him of their child later on, prove how she only wished to remain faithful to him. it was now that the sad experiences of her early life told upon her and warped her better judgment; she who had seen so much of the misery of married life when love was dead, regarded that side, not considering the sacred relationship, the right side of marriage, which she came to understand later--too late, alas! so passed this _année terrible_, and with it mary's short-lived happiness with imlay, for before the end we find her writing, evidently saddened by his repeated absences. she followed him to havre, where, in april, their child fanny was born, and for a while happiness was restored, and mary lived in comfort with him, her time fully occupied between work and love for imlay and their child; but this period was short, for in august he was called to paris on business. she followed him, but another journey of his to england only finished the separation. work of some sort having been ever her one resource, she started for norway with fanny and a maid, furnished with a letter of imlay's, in which he requested "all men to know that he appoints mary imlay, his wife, to transact all his business for him." her letters published shortly after her return from denmark, norway, and sweden, divested of the personal details, were considered to show a marked advance in literary style, and from the slow modes of travelling, and the many letters of introduction to people in all the towns and villages she visited, she was enabled to send home characteristic details of all classes of people. the personal portions of the letters are to be found among her posthumous works, and these, with letters written after her return, and when she was undoubtedly convinced of imlay's baseness and infidelity, are terrible and pathetic records of her misery--misery which drove her to an attempt at suicide. this was fortunately frustrated, so that she was spared to meet with a short time of happiness later, and to prove to herself and godwin, both previous sceptics in the matter, that lawful marriage can be happy. mary, rescued from despair, returned to work, the restorer, and refused all assistance from imlay, not degrading herself by receiving a monetary compensation where faithfulness was wanting. she also provided for her child fanny, as imlay disregarded entirely his promises of a settlement on her. as her literary work brought her again in contact with the society she was accustomed to, so her health and spirits revived, and she was able again to hold her place as one of its celebrities. and now it was that her friendship was renewed with that other celebrity, whose philosophy ranged beyond his age and century, and probably beyond some centuries to come. his advanced ideas are, nevertheless, what most thinking people would hope that the race might attain to when mankind shall have reached a higher status, and selfishness shall be less allowed in creeds, or rather in practice; for how small the resemblance between the founder of a creed and its followers is but too apparent. so now mary wollstonecraft and william godwin, the author of _political justice_, have again met, and this time not under circumstances as adverse as in november , when he dined in her company at mr. johnson's, and was disappointed because he wished to hear the conversation of thomas paine, who was a taciturn man, and he considered that mary engrossed too much of the talk. now it was otherwise; her literary style had gained greatly in the opinion of godwin, as of others, and, as all their subjects of interest were similar, their friendship increased, and melted gently into mutual love, as exquisitely described by godwin himself in a book now little known; and this love, which ended in marriage, had no after-break. but we must now again retrace our steps, for in the father of mary shelley we have another of the representative people of his time, whose early life and antecedents must not be passed over. william godwin, the seventh of thirteen children, was born at wisbeach, cambridgeshire, on march , . his parents, both of respectable well-to-do families, were well known in their native place, his great-great-grandfather having been mayor of newbury in . the father, john godwin, became a dissenting minister, and william was brought up in all the strictness of a sectarian country home of that period. his mother was equally strict in her views; and a cousin, who became one of the family--a miss godwin, afterwards mrs. sotheran, with whom william was an especial favourite--brought in aid her strongly calvinistic tendencies. his first studies began with an "account of the pious deaths of many godly children"; and often did he feel willing to die if he could, with equal success, engage the admiration of his friends and the world. his mother devoutly believed that all who differed from the basis of her own religious views would endure the eternal torments of hell; and his father seriously reproved his levity when, one sunday, he happened to take the cat in his arms while walking in the garden. all this naturally impressed the child at the time, and his chief amusement or pleasure was preaching sermons in the kitchen every sunday afternoon, unmindful whether the audience was duly attentive or not. from a dame's school, where, by the age of eight, he had read through the whole of the old and new testament, he passed to one held by a certain mr. akers, celebrated as a penman and also moderately efficient in latin and mathematics. godwin next became the pupil of mr. samuel newton, whose sandemanian views, surpassing those of calvin in their wholesale holocaust of souls, for a time impressed him, till later thought caused him to detest both these views and the master who promulgated them. indeed, it is not to be wondered at that so thinking a person as godwin, remembering the rules laid down by those he loved and respected in his childhood, should have wandered far into the abstract labyrinths of right and wrong, and, wishing to simplify what was right, should have travelled in his imagination into the dim future, and have laid down a code beyond the scope of present mortals. well for him, perhaps, and for his code, if this is yet so far beyond that it is not taken up and distorted out of all resemblance to his original intention before the time for its possible practical application comes. for godwin himself it was also well that, with these uncongenial early surroundings, he, when the time came to think, was of the calm--most calm and unimpassioned philosophic temperament, instead of the high poetic nature; not that the two may not sometimes overlap and mingle; but with godwin the downfall of old ideas led to reasoning out new theories in clear prose; and even this he would not give to be rashly and indiscriminately read at large, but published in three-guinea volumes, knowing well that those who could expend that sum on books are not usually inclined to overthrow the existing order of things. in fact, he felt it was the rich who wanted preaching to more than the poor. apart from sectarian doctrines, his tutor, mr. newton, seems to have given godwin the advantage of the free range of his library; and doubtless this was excellent education for him at that time. after he had acted as usher for over a year, from the age of fifteen, his mother, at his father's death in , wished him to enter homerton academy; but the authorities would not admit him on suspicion of sandemanianism. he, however, gained admittance to hoxton college. here he planned tragedies on iphigenia and the death of cæsar, and also began to study sandeman's work from a library, to find out what he was accused of. this probably caused, later, his horror of these ideas, and also started his neverending search after truth. in he became, in his turn, a dissenting minister; until, with reading and fresh acquaintances ever widening his views, gradually his profession became distasteful to him, and in , on quitting beaconsfield, he proposed opening a school. his _life of lord chatham_, however, gained notice, and he was led to other political writing, and so became launched on a literary career. with his simple tastes he managed not only for years to keep himself till he became celebrated, but he was also a great help to different members of his family; several of these did not come as well as william out of the ordeal of their strict education, but caused so little gratification to their mother and elder brother--a farmer who resided near the mother--that she destroyed all their correspondence, nearly all william's also, as it might relate to them. letters from the cousin, mrs. sotheran, show, however, that william godwin's novel-writing was likewise a sore point in his family. in the midst of his literary work and philosophic thought, it was natural that godwin should get associated with other men of advanced opinions. joseph fawcet, whose literary and intellectual eminence was much admired in his day, was one of the first to influence godwin--his declamation against domestic affections must have coincided well with godwin's unimpassioned justice; thomas holcroft, with his curious ideas of death and disease, whose ardent republicanism led to his being tried for his life as a traitor; george dyson, whose abilities and zeal in the cause of literature and truth promised much that was unfortunately never realised: these, and later samuel taylor coleridge, were acknowledged by godwin to have greatly influenced his ideas. godwin acted according to his own theories of right in adopting and educating thomas cooper, a second cousin, whose father died, ruined, in india. the rules laid down in his diary show that godwin strove to educate him successfully, and he certainly gained the youth's confidence, and launched him successfully in his own chosen profession as an actor. godwin seems always to have adhered to his principles, and after the success of his _life of chatham_, when he became a contributor to the _political herald_, he attracted the attention of the whig party, to whose cause he was so useful that fox proposed, through sheridan, to set a fund aside to pay him as editor. this, however, was not accepted by godwin, who would not lose his independence by becoming attached to any party. he was naturally, to a great extent, a follower of rousseau, and a sympathiser with the ideas of the french revolution, and was one of the so-called "french revolutionists," at whose meetings horne tooke, holcroft, stanhope, and others figured. nor did he neglect to defend, in the _morning chronicle_, some of these when on their trial for high treason; though, from his known principles, he was himself in danger; and without doubt his clear exposition of the true case greatly modified public opinion and helped to prevent an adverse verdict. among godwin's multifarious writings are his novels, some of which had great success, especially _caleb williams_; also his sketch of english history, contributed to the _annual register_. his historical writing shows much research and study of old documents. on comparing it with the contemporary work of his friends, such as coleridge, it becomes evident that his knowledge and learning were utilized by them. but these works were anonymous; by his _political justice_ he became famous. this work is a philosophical treatise based on the assumption, that man, as a reasoning being, can be guided wholly by reason, and that, were he educated from this point of view, laws would be unnecessary. it must be observed here that godwin could not then take into consideration the laws of heredity, now better understood; how the criminal has not only the weight of bad education and surroundings against him, but also how the very formation of the head is in certain cases an almost insuperable evil. he considered many of the laws relating to property, marriage, &c., unnecessary, as people guided by reason would not, for instance, wish for wealth at the expense of starving brethren. far in the distance as the realisation of this doctrine may seem, it should still be remembered that, as with each physical discovery, the man of genius must foresee. as columbus imagined land where he found america; as a planet is fixed by the astronomer before the telescope has revealed it to his mortal eye; so in the world of psychology and morals it is necessary to point out the aim to be attained before human nature has reached those divine qualifications which are only shadowed forth here and there by more than usually elevated natures. in fact godwin, who sympathised entirely with the theories of the french revolution, and even surpassed french ideas on most subjects, disapproved of the immediate carrying out of these ideas and views; he wished for preaching and reasoning till people should gradually become convinced of the truth, and the rich should be as ready to give as the poor to receive. even in the matter of marriage, though strongly opposed to it personally (on philosophical grounds, not from the ordinary trite reasoning against it), he yielded his opinion to the claim of individual justice towards the woman whom he came to love with an undying affection, and for whom, fortunately for his theories, he needed not to set aside the impulse of affection for that of justice; and these remarks bring us again to the happy time in the lives of godwin and mary wollstonecraft, when friendship melted into love, and they were married shortly afterwards, in march , at old st. pancras church, london. this new change in her life interfered no more with the energy for work with mary wollstonecraft than with godwin. they adopted the singular, though in their case probably advantageous, decision to continue each to have a separate place of abode, in order that each might work uninterruptedly, though, as pointed out by an earnest student of their character, they probably wasted more time in their constant interchange of notes on all subjects than they would have lost by a few conversations. on the other hand, as their thoughts were worth recording, we have the benefit of their plan. the short notes which passed between mary and godwin, as many as three and four in a day, as well as letters of considerable length written during a tour which godwin made in the midland counties with his friend basil montague, show how deep and simple their affection was, that there was no need of hiding the passing cloud, that they both equally disliked and wished to simplify domestic details. there was, for instance, some sort of slight dispute as to who should manage a plumber, on which occasion mary seems to have been somewhat hurt at its being put upon her, as giving an idea of her inferiority. this, with the tender jokes about godwin's icy philosophy, and the references to a little "william" whom they were both anxiously expecting, all evince the tender devotion of husband and wife, whose relationship was of a nature to endure through ill or good fortune. little fanny was evidently only an added pleasure to the two, and godwin's thought of her at a distance and his choice of the prettiest mug at wedgewood's with "green and orange-tawny flowers," testify to the fatherly instinct of godwin. but, alas! this loving married friendship was not to last long, for the day arrived, august , , which had been long expected; and the hopeful state of the case is shown in three little letters written by mary to her husband, for she wished him to be spared anxiety by absence. and there was born a little girl, not the william so quaintly spoken of; but the mary whose future life we must try and realise. even now her first trouble comes, for, within a few hours of the child's birth, dangerous symptoms began with the mother; ten days of dread anxiety ensued, and not all the care of intelligent watchers, nor the constant waiting for service of the husband's faithful intimate friends, nor the skill of the first doctors could save the life which was doomed: fate must wreak its relentless will. her work remains to help many a struggling woman, and still to give hope of more justice to follow; perchance at one important moment it misled her own child. and so the mysteries of the workings of fate and the mysteries of death joined with those of a new life. chapter ii. girlhood of mary--paternal troubles. and now with the beginning of this fragile little life begin the anxieties and sorrow of poor godwin. the blank lines drawn in his diary for sunday th september , show more than words how unutterable was his grief. during the time of his wife's patient agony he had managed to ask if she had any wishes concerning fanny and mary. she was fortunately able to reply that her faith in his wisdom was entire. on the very day of his wife's death godwin himself wrote some letters he considered necessary, nor did he neglect to write in his own characteristic plain way to one who he considered had slighted his wife. his friends mr. basil montague and mr. marshall arranged the funeral, and mrs. reveley, who had with her the children before the mother's death, continued her care till they returned to the father on the th. mrs. fenwick, who had been in constant attendance on mary, then took care of them for a time. indeed, mary's fame and character brought forward many willing to care for the motherless infant, whose life was only saved from a dangerous illness by this loving zeal. among others mr. and mrs. nicholson appeared with offers of help, and as early as september we find that godwin had requested mr. nicholson to give an opinion as to the infant's physiognomy, with a view to her education, which he (with trelawny later) considered could not begin too soon, or as the latter said: "talk of education beginning at two years! two months is too late." thus we see godwin conscientiously trying to bring in an imperfect science to assist him in the difficult task of developing his infant's mind, in place of the watchful love of an intelligent mother, who would check the first symptoms of ill-temper, be firm against ill-placed determination, encourage childish imagination, and not let the idea of untruth be presented to the child till old enough to discriminate for itself. a hard task enough for any father, still harder for godwin, beset by all kinds of difficulties, and having to work in the midst of them for his and the two children's daily sustenance. friends, and good friends, he certainly had; but most people will recognise that strength in these matters does not rest in numbers. the wet nurse needed by little mary, though doubtless the essential necessity of the time, would not add to the domestic comfort, especially to that of miss louisa jones, a friend of harriet godwin, who had been installed to superintend godwin's household. this latter arrangement, again, did not tend to godwin's comfort, as from miss jones's letters it is evident that she wished to marry him. her wish not being reciprocated, she did not long remain an inmate of his house, and the nurse, who was fortunately devoted to the baby, was then over-looked from time to time by mrs. reveley and other ladies. of anecdotes of mary's infancy and childhood there are but few, but from the surroundings we can picture the child. her father about this time seems to have neglected all his literary work except the one of love--writing his wife's "memoirs" and reading her published and unpublished work. in this undertaking he was greatly assisted by mr. skeys. her sisters, on the contrary, gave as little assistance as possible, and ended all communication with godwin at this difficult period of his life, and for a long while utterly neglected their poor sister's little children, when they might have repaid to some extent the debt of gratitude they owed to her. all these complicated and jarring circumstances must have suggested to godwin that another marriage might he the best expedient, and he accordingly set to work in a systematic way this time to acquire his end. passion was not the motive, and probably there was too much system, for he was unsuccessful on two occasions. the first was with miss harriet lee, the authoress of several novels and of _the canterbury tales_. godwin seems to have been much struck by her, and, after four interviews at bath, wrote on his return to london a very characteristic and pressing letter of invitation to her to stay in his house if she came to london, explaining that there was a lady (miss jones) who superintended his home. as this letter met with no answer, he tried three additional letters, drafts of all being extant. the third one was probably too much considered, for miss lee returned it annotated on the margin, expressing her disapproval of its egotistical character. godwin, however, was not to be daunted, and made a fourth attempt, full of many sensible and many quaint reasons, not all of which would be pleasing to a lady; but he succeeded in regaining miss lee's friendship, though he could not persuade her to be his wife. this was from april to august . about the same time there was a project of godwin and thomas wedgewood keeping house together; but as they seem to have much differed when together, the plan was wisely dropped. godwin's notes in his plan of work for the year are interesting, as showing how he was anxious to modify some of his opinions expressed in _political justice_, especially those bearing on the affections, which he now admits must naturally play an important part in human action, though he avers his opinion that none of his previous conclusions are affected by these admissions. much other work was planned out during this time, and many fresh intellectual acquaintances made, wordsworth and southey among others. his mother's letters to godwin show what a constant drain his family were upon his slender means, and how nobly he always strove to help them when in need. these letters are full of much common sense, and though quaintly illiterate are, perhaps, not so much amiss for the period at which they were written, when many ladies who had greater social and monetary advantages were, nevertheless, frequently astray in these matters. godwin's novel of _st. leon_, published in , was another attempt to give the domestic affections their due place in his scheme of life; and the description of marguerite, drawn from mary wollstonecraft, and that of her wedded life with st. leon, are beautiful passages illustrative of godwin's own happy time of marriage. in july , the death of mr. reveley suggested a fresh attempt at marriage to godwin; but now he was probably too prompt, for, knowing that mr. reveley and his wife had not always been on the best of terms, although his sudden death had driven her nigh frantic, godwin, relying on certain previous expressions of affection for himself by mrs. reveley, proposed within a month after her husband's death, and begged her to set aside prejudices and cowardly ceremonies and be his. as in the previous case, a second and a third lengthy letter, full of subtle reasoning, were ineffectual, and did not even bring about an interview till december rd, when godwin and mrs. reveley met, in company with mr. gisborne. to this gentleman mrs. reveley was afterwards married. we shall meet them both again later on. all this time there is little though affectionate mention of mary godwin in her father's diary. little fanny, who had always been a favourite, used to accompany godwin on some of his visits to friends. many of godwin's letters at this time show that he was not too embarrassed to be able to assist his friends in time of need; twenty pounds sent to his friend arnot, ten pounds shortly afterwards through mrs. agnes hall to a lady in great distress, whose name is unknown, prove that he was ready to carry out his theories in practice. it is interesting to observe these frequent instances of generosity, as they account to some extent for his subsequent difficulties. in the midst of straits and disappointments godwin managed to have his children well taken care of, and there was evidently a touching sympathy and confidence between himself and them, as shown in godwin's letters to his friend marshall during a rare absence from the children occasioned by a visit to friends in ireland. his thought and sincere solicitude and messages, and evident anxiety to be with them again, are all equally touching; fanny having the same number of kisses sent her as mary, with that perfect justice which is so beneficial to the character of children. we can now picture the scarcely three year old mary and little fanny taken to await the return of the coach with their father, and sitting under the kentish town trees in glad expectancy. but this time of happy infancy was not to last long; for doubtless godwin felt it irksome to have to consider whether the house-linen was in order, and such like details, and was thus prepared, in , to accept the demonstrative advances of mrs. clairmont, a widow who took up her residence next door to him in the polygon, somers town. she had two children, a boy and a girl, the latter somewhat younger than mary. the widow needed no introduction or admittance to his house, as from the balcony she was able to commence a campaign of flattery to which godwin soon succumbed. the marriage took place in december , at shoreditch church, and was not made known to godwin's friends till after it had been solemnised. mrs. clairmont evidently did her best to help godwin through the pecuniary difficulties of his career. she was not an ignorant woman, and her work at translations proves her not to have been without cleverness of a certain kind; but this probably made more obvious the natural vulgarity of her disposition. for example, when talking of bringing children up to do the work they were fitted to, she discovered that her own daughter jane was fitted for accomplishments, while little mary and fanny were turned into household drudges. these distinctions would naturally engender an antipathy to her, which later on would help in estranging mary from her father's house; but occasionally we have glimpses of the little ones making themselves happy, in childlike fashion, in the midst of difficulties and disappointments on godwin's part. on one occasion mary and jane had concealed themselves under a sofa in order to hear coleridge recite _the ancient mariner_. mrs. godwin, unmindful of the delight they would have in listening to poetry, found the little ones and was banishing them to bed; when coleridge with kind-heartedness, or the love ever prevalent in poets of an audience, however humble, interceded for the small things who could sit under a sofa, and so they remained up and heard the poet read his poem. the treat was never afterwards forgotten, and one cannot over-estimate such pleasures in forming the character of a child. nor were such the only intellectual delights the children shared in, for charles lamb was among godwin's numerous friends at this period, and a frequent visitor at his house; and we can still hear in imagination the merry laughter of children, old and young, whom he gathered about him, and who brightened at his ever ready fun. one long-remembered joke was how one evening, at supper at godwin's, lamb entered the room first, seized a leg of mutton, blew out the candle, and placed the mutton in martin burney's hand, and, on the candle being relit, exclaimed, "oh, martin! martin! i should never have thought it of you." this and such like whimsies (as when lamb would carry off a small cruet from the table, making mrs. godwin go through a long search, and would then quietly walk in the next day and replace it as if it were the most natural thing for a cruet to find its way into a pocket), would break the monotony of the children's days. it was infinitely more enlivening than the routine in some larger houses, where poor little children are frequently shut up in a back room on a third floor and left for long hours to the tender mercies of some nurse, whose small slaves or tyrants they become, according to their nature. and when we remember that the polygon at that time was touching fields and lanes, we know that little mary must have had one of the delights most prized by children, picking buttercups and daisies, unmolested by a gardener. but during this happy age, when the child would probably have infinitely more pleasure in washing a cup and saucer than in playing the scales, however superior the latter performance may be, godwin had various schemes and hopes frustrated. at times his health was very precarious, with frequent fainting fits, causing grave anxiety for the future. in his son william was born, making the fifth member of his miscellaneous family. at times mrs. godwin's temper seems to have been very much tried or trying, and on one occasion she expressed the wish for a separation; but the idea appears to have been dropped on godwin's writing one of his very calm and reasonable letters, saying that he had no obstacle to oppose to it, and that, if it was to take place, he hoped it would not be long in hand; he certainly went on to say that the separation would be a source of great misery to himself. either this reason mollified mrs. godwin, or else the apparent ease with which she might have carried out her project, made her hesitate, as we hear no more of it. godwin, however, had occasion to write her philosophically expostulatory letters on her temper, which we must hope, for the children's sake, produced a satisfactory effect; for surely nothing can be more injurious to the happiness of children than to witness the ungovernable temper of their elders; but with godwin's calm disposition, quarrels must have been one-sided, and consequently less damaging. godwin superintended the education of his children himself, and wrote many books for this purpose, which formed part of his juvenile library later on. "baldwin's" fables and his histories for children were published by godwin under this cognomen, owing to his political views having prejudiced many people against his name. his chief aim appears to have been to keep a certain moral elevation before the minds of children, as in the excellent preface to the _history of rome_, where he dwells on the fact of the stories of mucius, curtius, and regulus being disputed; but considers that stories--if they be no more--handed down from the great periods of roman history are invaluable to stimulate the character of children to noble sentiments and actions. but in godwin's case, as in many others, it must have been a difficult task counteracting the effect of example; for we cannot imagine the influence of a woman to have been ennobling who could act as mrs. godwin did at an early period of her married life; who, when one of her husband's friends, whom she did not care about, called to see godwin, explained that it was impossible, as the kettle had just fallen off the hob and scalded both his legs. when the same friend met godwin the next day in the street, and was surprised at his speedy recovery, the philosopher replied that it was only an invention of his wife. the safe-guard in such cases is often in the quick apprehension of children themselves, who are frequently saved from the errors of their elders by their perception of the consequences. unfortunately, mrs. godwin's influence must have been lessened in other matters where her feeling for propriety, if with her only from a conventional and time-serving point of view, might have averted the fatal consequences which ensued later. could she have gained the love and respect of the children instead of making them, as afterwards expressed by mary, hate her, her moral precepts would have worked to more effect. it may have appeared to the girls, who could not appreciate the self-devotion of godwin in acting against theories for the sake of individual justice, that the cause of all their unhappiness (and doubtless at times they felt it acutely) was owing to their father not having adhered to his previous anti-matrimonial opinions, and they were thus prepared to disregard what seemed to them social prejudices. in the meantime godwin struggled on to provide for his numerous family, not necessarily losing his enthusiasm through his need of money as might be supposed, for, fortunately, there are great compensations in nature, and not unfrequently what appears to be done for money is done really for love of those whom money will relieve; and so through this necessity the very love and anguish of the soul are transfused into the work. on the other hand, we see not infrequently, after the first enthusiasm of youth wears off, how the poetic side of a man's nature deteriorates, and the world and his work lose through the very ease and comfort he has attained to, so that the real degradation of the man or lowering of his nature comes more from wealth than poverty: thus what are spoken of as degrading circumstances, are, truly, the very reverse--a fact felt strongly by shelley and such like natures who feel their ease is to be shared. we find godwin working at his task of chaucer, with love, daily at the british museum, and corresponding with the keeper of records in the exchequer office and chapter of westminster, and herald college, and the librarian of the bodleian library; also writing many still extant letters pertaining to the subject. the sum of three hundred pounds paid to godwin for this work was considered very small by him, though it scarcely seems so now. godwin found means and time occasionally to pay a visit to the country, as in september , when he visited his mother and introduced his wife to her, as also to his old friends in norwich; and during the sojourn of mrs. godwin and some of the children at southend, a deservedly favourite resort of mrs. godwin, and later of mrs. shelley (for the sweet country and lovely essex lanes, of even so late as thirty or forty years ago, made it a resort loved by artists) godwin superintended the letter-writing of his children. we ascertain, also, from their letters to him during absence, that they studied history and attended lectures with him; so that in all probability his daughter mary's mind was really more cultivated and open to receive impressions in after life than if she had passed through a "finishing" education at some fashionable school. it is no mere phrase that to know some people is a liberal education; and if she was only saved from perpetrating some of the school-girl trash in the way of drawing, it was a gain to her intellect, for what can be more lowering to intelligence of perception than the utterly inartistic frivolities which are supposed to inculcate art in a country out of which the sense of it had been all but eradicated in puritan england, though some great artists had happily reappeared! mary at least learnt to love literature and poetry, and had, by her love of reading, a universe of wealth opened to her--surely no mean beginning. in art, had she shown any disposition to it, her father could undoubtedly have obtained some of the best advice of his day, as we see that mulready and linnell were intimate enough to spend a day at hampstead with the children and mrs. godwin during godwin's absence in norfolk in ; in fact, charles clairmont, as seen in his account written to his step-father, was at this time having lessons from linnell. perhaps mrs. godwin had not discovered the same gift in mary. at this same date we have the last of old mrs. godwin's letters to her son. she speaks of the fearful price of food owing to the war, says that she is weary, and only wishes to be with christ. godwin spent a few days with her then, and the next year we find him at her funeral, as she died on august , . his letter to his wife on that occasion is very touching, from its depth of feeling. he mourns the loss of a superior who exercised a mysterious protection over him, so that now, at her death, he for the first time feels alone. another severance from old associations had occurred this year in the death of thomas holcroft who, in spite of occasional differences, had always known and loved godwin well, and whose last words when dying and pressing his hands were, "my dear, dear friend." godwin, however, did not at all approve of hazlitt, in bringing out holcroft's life, using all his private memoranda and letters about his friends, and wrote expostulatory letters to mrs. holcroft on the subject. he considered it pandering to the worst passion of the malignity of mankind. there do not appear to be many records of the godwin family kept during the next two or three years. mary was intimate with the baxters. it was mr. baxter whom mrs. godwin tried to put off by the story of godwin's scalded legs. we also find mary at ramsgate with mrs. godwin and her brother william, in may , when she was nearly fourteen years old. as mary and mrs. godwin were evidently unsuited to live together, these visits, though desirable for her health, were probably not altogether pleasant times to either, to judge by remarks in godwin's letters to his wife. he hopes that, in spite of unfavourable appearances, mary will still become a wise, and, what is more, a good and happy woman; this, evidently, in answer to some complaint of his wife. during these years many fresh acquaintances were made by godwin; but as they had little or no apparent influence on mary's after career, we may pass them over and notice at once the first communications which took place between godwin and another personage, by far the greatest in this life drama, even great in the world's drama, for now for the first time in this story we come across the name of shelley, with the words in godwin's diary, "write to shelley." having arrived at a name so full of import to all concerned in this life, we must yet again retrace the past. chapter iii. shelley. shelley, a name dear to so many now, who are either drawn to him by his lyrics, which open an undreamed-of fountain of sympathy to many a silent and otherwise solitary heart, or who else are held spell-bound by his grand and eloquent poetical utterances of what the human race may aspire to. a being of this transcendent nature seems generally to be more the outcome of his age, of a period, the expression of nature, than the direct scion of his own family. so in shelley's case there appears little immediate intellectual relation between himself and his ancestors, who seem for nearly two centuries preceding his birth to have been almost unknown, except for the registers of their baptisms, deaths, and marriages. prior to , a link has been hitherto missing in the family genealogy--a link which the scrupulous care of mr. jeaffreson has brought to light, and which his courtesy places at the service of the writer. this connects the poet's family with the michel grove shelleys, a fact hitherto only surmised. the document is this:-- shelley's case and coke's report, . sept. & philip and mary. between edward shelley of worminghurst, in the county of sussex, esqre., of the one part, and rd. cowper and wm. martin of the other part. a. covt. to suffer recovery to enure as to findon manor, etc. b. to the use of him the said edward shelley and of the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for lack of such issue. to the use of the heirs male of the body of john shelley, esqre., sometime of michael grove, deceased, father to the said edward shelley, etc. it will be obvious to all readers of this important document that the last clause carries us back unmistakably from the worminghurst shelleys to the michel grove shelleys, establishing past dispute the relationship of father and son. the poet's great grandfather timothy, who died twenty-two years before shelley's birth, seems to have gone out of the beaten track in migrating to america, and practising as an apothecary, or, as captain medwin puts it, "quack doctor," probably leaving england at an early age; he may not have found facilities for qualifying in america, and we may at least hope that he would do less harm with the simple herbs used by the unqualified than with the bleeding treatment in vogue before the brunonian system began. anyway, he made money to help on the fortunes of his family. his younger son, bysshe, who added to the family wealth by marrying in succession two heiresses, also gained a baronetcy by adhering to the whig party and the duke of norfolk. he appears to have increased in eccentricity with age and became exceedingly penurious. he was evidently not regarded as a desirable match for either of his wives, as he had to elope with both of them; and his marriage with the first, miss michell, the grandmother of the poet, is said to have been celebrated by the parson of the fleet. this took place the year before these marriages were made illegal. these facts about shelley's ancestors, though apparently trivial, are interesting as proving that his forerunners were not altogether conventional, and making the anomaly of the coming of such a poet less strange, as genius is not unfrequently allied with eccentricity. bysshe's son timothy seems to have conformed more to ordinary views than his father, and he married, when nearly forty, elizabeth pilfold, reputed a great beauty. the first child of this marriage, born on august , , was the poet, percy bysshe shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an english country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track. shelley's little sisters were the confidants of his childhood, and their sympathy must have made up then for the lack of it in his parents. some of their childish games at diabolical processions, making a little hell of their own by burning a fagot stack, &c., shows how early his searching mind dispersed the terrors, while it delighted in the picturesque or fantastic images, of superstition. few persons realise to themselves how soon highly imaginative children may be influenced by the superstitions they hear around them, and assuredly shelley's brain never recovered from some of these early influences: the mind that could so quickly reason and form inferences would naturally be of that sensitive and susceptible kind which would bear the scar of bad education. shelley's mother does not appear so much to have had real good sense, as what is generally called common sense, and thus she was incapable of understanding a nature like that of her son; and thought more of his bringing home a well-filled game bag (a thing in every way repulsive to shelley's tastes) than of trying to understand what he was thinking; so shelley had to pass through childhood, his sisters being his chief companions, as he had no brother till he was thirteen. at ten years of age he went to school at sion house academy, and thence to eton, before he was turned twelve. at both these schools, with little exception, he was solitary, not having much in common with the other boys, and consequently he found himself the butt for their tormenting ingenuity. he began a plan of resistance to the fagging system, and never yielded; this seems to have displeased the masters as much as the boys. at eton he formed one of his romantic attachments for a youth of his own age. he seems now, as ever after, to have felt the yearning for perfect sympathy in some human being; as one idol fell short of his self-formed ideal, he sought for another. this was not the nature to be trained by bullying and flogging, though sympathy and reason would never find him irresponsive. his unresentful nature was shown in the way he helped the boys who tormented him with their lessons; for though he appeared to study little in the regular way, learning came to him naturally. it must not, however, be supposed that shelley was quite solitary, as the records of some of his old schoolfellows prove the contrary; nor was he averse to society when of a kind congenial to his tastes; but he always disliked coarse talk and jokes. nature was ever dear to him; the walks round eton were his chief recreation, and we can well conceive how he would feel in the lovely and peaceful churchyard of stoke pogis, where undoubtedly he would read gray's elegy. these feelings would not be sympathised with by the average of schoolboys; but, on the other hand, it is not apparent why shelley should have changed his character, as the embryo poet would also necessarily not care for all their tastes. in short, the education at a public school of that day must have been a great cruelty to a boy of shelley's sensitive disposition. one great pleasure of shelley's while at eton was visiting dr. lind, who assisted him with chemistry, and whose kindness during an illness seems to have made a lasting impression on the youth; but generally those who had been in authority over him had only raised a spirit of revolt. one great gain for the world was the passionate love of justice and freedom which this aroused in him, as shown in the stanzas from _the revolt of islam_-- thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first the clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. there can be no doubt that these verses are truly autobiographical; they indicate a first determination to war against tyranny. the very fact of his great facility in acquiring knowledge must have been a drawback to him at school where time on his hands was, for lack of better material, frequently spent in reading all the foolish romances he could lay hold of in the neighbouring book-shops. his own early romances showed the influence of this bad literature. of course, then as now, fine art was a sealed book to the young student. it is difficult to fancy what shelley might have been under different early influences, and whether perchance the gain to himself might not have been a loss to the world. fortunately, shelley's love of imagination found at last a field of poetry for itself, and an ideal future for the world instead of turning to ruffianism, high or low, which the neglect of the legitimate outlet for imagination so frequently induces. how little this moral truth seems to be considered in a country like ours, where art is quite overlooked in the system of government, and where the hereditary owners of hoarded wealth rest content, as a rule, with the canvases acquired by some ancestor on a grand tour at a date when puritan england had already obliterated perception; so that frequently a few _chefs d'oeuvre_ and many daubs are hung indiscriminately together, giving equal pleasure or distaste for art. this is apposite to dwell on as showing the want of this influence on shelley and his surroundings. from a tour in italy made by shelley's own father the chief acquisition is said to have been a very bad picture of vesuvius. it is becoming difficult to realise at present, when flogging is scarcely permitted in schools, what the sufferings of a boy like shelley must have been; sent to school by his father with the admonition to his master not to spare the rod, and where the masters left the boy, who was undoubtedly unlike his companions, to treatment of a kind from which one case of death at least has resulted quite recently in our own time. such proceedings which might have made a tyrant or a slave of shelley succeeded only in making a rebel; his inquiring mind was not to be easily satisfied, and must assuredly have been a difficulty in his way with a conservative master; already, at eton, we find him styled mad shelley and shelley the atheist. in shelley removed to university college, oxford, after an enjoyable holiday with his family, during which he found time for an experiment in authorship, his father authorising a stationer to print for him. if only, instead of this, his father had checked for a time these immature productions of shelley's pen, the youth might have been spared banishment from oxford and his own father's house, and all the misfortune and tragedy which ensued. shelley also found time for a first love with his cousin, harriet grove. this also the unfortunate printing facilities apparently quashed. there is some discussion as to whether he left eton in disgrace, but any way the matter must have been a slight affair, as no one appears to have kept any record of it; and should one of the masters have recommended the removal of shelley from such uncongenial surroundings, it would surely have been very sensible advice. oxford was, in many respects, much to shelley's taste. the freedom of the student life there suited him, as he was able to follow the studies most to his liking. the professional lectures chiefly in vogue, on divinity, geometry, and history, were not the most to his liking--history in particular seemed ever to him a terrible record of misery and crime--but in his own chambers he could study poetry, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. the outcome of these studies, advanced speculative thought, was not, however, to be tolerated within the university precincts, and, unfortunately for shelley, his favourite subjects of conversation were tabooed, had it not been for one light-hearted and amusing friend, thomas jefferson hogg, a gentleman whose acquaintance shelley made shortly after his settling in oxford in the michaelmas term of . this friendship, like all that shelley entered on, was intended to endure "for ever," and, as usual, shelley impulsively for a time threw so much of his own personality into his idea of the character of his friend as to prepare the way for future disappointment. hogg was decidedly intellectual, but with a strong conservative tendency, making him quite content with the existing state of things so long as he could take life easily and be amused. his intellect, however, was clear enough to make him perceive that it is the poet who raises life from the apathy which assails even the most worldly-minded and contented, so that he in his turn was able to love shelley with the love which is not afraid of a laugh, without the possibility of which no friendship, it has been said, can be genuine. many are the charming stories giving a living presence to shelley while at oxford, preserved by this friend; here we meet with him taking an infant from its mother's arms while crossing the bridge with hogg, and questioning it as to its previous existence, which surely the babe had not had time to forget if it would but speak--but alas, the mother declared she had never heard it speak, nor any other child of its age; here comes also the charming incident of the torn coat, and shelley's ecstasy on its having been fine drawn. these and such-like amusing anecdotes show the genuine and unpedantic side of shelley's character, the delightfully natural and loveable personality which is ever allied to genius. with the fun and humour were mixed long readings and discussions on the most serious and solemn subjects. plato was naturally a great delight to him; he had a decided antipathy to euclid and mathematical reasoning, and was consequently unable to pursue scientific researches on a system; but his love of chemistry and his imaginative faculty led him to wish in anticipation for the forces of nature to be utilised for human labour, &c. shelley's reading and reading powers were enormous. he was seldom without a pocket edition of one of his favourite great authors, whose works he read with as much ease as the modern languages. this delightful time of study and ease was not to endure. shelley's nature was impelled onwards as irresistibly as the mountain torrent, and as with it all obstacles had to yield. he could not rest satisfied with reading and discussions with hogg on theological and moral questions, and, being debarred debate on these subjects in the university, he felt he must appeal to a larger audience, the public, and consequently he brought out, with the cognisance of hogg, a pamphlet entitled _the necessity of atheism_. this work actually got into circulation for about twenty minutes, when it was discovered by one of the fellows of the college, who immediately convinced the booksellers that an _auto-da-fé_ was necessary, and all the pamphlets were at once consigned to the back kitchen fire; but the affair did not end there. shelley's handwriting was recognised on some letters sent with copies of the work, and consequently both he and hogg were summoned before a meeting in the common room of the college. first shelley, and then hogg, declined to answer questions, and refused to disavow all knowledge of the work, whereupon the two were summarily expelled from oxford. shelley complained bitterly of the ungentlemanly way they were treated, and the authorities, with equal reason, of the rebellious defiance of the students; yet once more we must regret that there was no one but hogg who realised the latent genius of shelley, that there was no one to feel that patience and sympathy would not be thrown away upon a young man free from all the vices and frivolities of the time and place, whose crime was an inquiring mind, and rashness in putting his views into print. surely the dangers which might assail a young man thus thrown on the world and alienated from his family by this disgrace might have received more consideration. this seems clear enough now, when shelley's ideas have been extolled even in as well as out of the pulpit. so now we find shelley expelled from oxford and arrived in london in march , when only eighteen years of age, alone with hogg to fight the battle of life, with no previous experience of misfortune to give ballast to his feelings, but with a brain surcharged with mysteriously imbibed ideas of the woes of others and of the world--a dangerous age and set of conditions for a youth to be thrown on his own resources. admission to his father's house was only to be accorded on the condition of his giving up the society of hogg; this condition, imposed at the moment when shelley considered himself indebted to hogg for life for the manner in which he stood by him in the oxford ordeal, was refused. shelley looked out for lodgings without result, till a wall paper representing a trellised vine apparently decided him. with twenty pounds borrowed from his printer to leave oxford, shelley is now settled in london, unaided by his father, a small present of money sent by his mother being returned, as he could not comply with the wishes which she expressed on the same occasion. from this time the march of events or of fate is as relentless as in a greek drama, for already the needful woman had appeared in the person of harriet westbrook, a schoolfellow of his sisters at their clapham school. during the previous january shelley had made her acquaintance by visiting her at her father's house, with an introduction and a present from one of his sisters. there seems no reason to doubt that shelley was then much attracted by the beautiful girl, smarting though he was at the time from his rupture with harriet grove; but shakespeare has shown us that such a time is not exempt from the potency of love shafts. this visit of shelley was followed by his presenting harriet westbrook with a copy of his new romance, _st. irvyne_, which led to some correspondence. it was now harriet's turn to visit shelley, sent also by his sisters with presents of their pocket money. shelley moreover visited the school on different occasions, and even lectured the schoolmistress on her system of discipline. there is no doubt that harriet's elder sister, with or without the cognisance of their father, a retired hotel-keeper, helped to make meetings between the two; but shelley, though young and a poet, was no child, and must have known what these dinners and visits and excursions might lead to; and although the correspondence and conversation may have been more directly upon theological and philosophical questions, it seems unlikely that he would have discoursed thus with a young girl unless he felt some special interest in her; besides, shelley need not have felt any great social difference between himself and a young lady brought up and educated on a footing of equality with his own sisters. it is true that her family acted and encouraged him in a way incompatible with old-fashioned ideas of gentility, but shelley was too prone at present to rebel against everything conventional to be particularly sensitive on this point. in may shelley was enabled to return to his father's house, through the mediation of his uncle, captain pilfold, and henceforth an allowance of two hundred a year was made to him. but there had been work done in the two months that no reconciliations or allowances afterwards could undo; for while shelley was bent on proselytising harriet westbrook, not less for his sisters' sake than for his own, harriet, in a school-girl fashion, encouraged by her sister and not discouraged by her father, was falling in love with shelley. how were the _bourgeois_ father and sister to comprehend such a character as shelley's, when his own parents and all the college authorities failed to do so? if shelley were not in love he must have appeared so, and harriet's family did their best by encouraging and countenancing the intimacy to lead to a marriage, they naturally having harriet's interests more at heart than shelley's. however, the fact remains that shelley was a most extraordinary being, an embryo poet, with all a poet's possible inconsistencies, the very brilliancy of the intellectual spark in one direction apparently quelling it for a time in another. in most countries and ages a poet seems to have been accepted as a heaven-sent gift to his nation; his very crimes (and surely shelley did not surpass king david in misdoing?) have been the _lacrymæ rerum_ giving terrible vitality to his thoughts, and so reclaiming many others ere some fatal deed is done; but in england the convention of at least making a show of virtues which do not exist (perhaps a sorry legacy from puritanism) will not allow the poet to be accepted for what he really is, nor his poetry to appeal, on its own showing, to the human heart. he must be analysed, and vilified, or whitewashed in turn. at any rate shelley was superior to some of the respectable vices of his class, and one alleged concession of his father was fortunately loathsome to him, viz.--that he (sir timothy) would provide for as many illegitimate children as percy chose to have, but he would not tolerate a _mésalliance_. to what a revolt of ideas must such a code of morality have led in a fermenting brain like shelley's! were the mothers to be provided for likewise, and to be considered more by shelley's respectable family than his lawful wife? we fear not. a visit to wales followed, during which shelley's mind was in so abstracted a state that the fine scenery, viewed for the first time, had little power to move him, while harriet westbrook, with her sister and father, was only thirty miles off at aberystwith; a hasty and unexplained retreat of this party to london likewise hastened the return of shelley. probably the father began to perceive that shelley did not come forward as he had expected, and so he wished to remove harriet from his vicinity. letters from harriet to shelley followed, full of misery and dejection, complaining of her father's decision to send her back to school, where she was avoided by the other girls, and called "an abandoned wretch" for sympathising or corresponding with shelley; she even contemplated suicide. it is curious how this idea seems to have constantly recurred to her, as in the case of some others who have finally committed the act. shelley wrote, expostulating with the father. this probably only incensed him more. he persisted. harriet again addressed shelley in despair, saying she would put herself under his protection and fly with him; a difficult position for any young man, and for shelley most perplexing, with his avowed hostility to marriage, and his recent assertions that he was not in love with harriet. but it must be put to shelley's credit that, having intentionally or otherwise led harriet on to love him, he now acted as a gentleman to his sister's school friend, and, influenced to some extent by hogg's arguments in a different case in favour of marriage, he at once determined to make her his wife. he wrote to his cousin, charles grove, announcing his intention and impending arrival in london, saying that as his own happiness was altogether blighted, he could now only live to make that of others, and would consequently marry harriet westbrook. on his arrival in london, shelley found harriet looking ill and much changed. he spent some time in town, during which harriet's spirits revived; but shelley, as he described in a letter to hogg, felt much embarrassment and melancholy. not contemplating an immediate marriage, he went into sussex to pay a visit to field place and to his uncle at cuckfield. while here he renewed the acquaintance of miss kitchener, a school mistress of advanced ideas, who had the care of captain pilfold's children. to this acquaintance we owe a great number of letters which throw much light on shelley's _exalté_ character at this period, and which afford most amusing reading. as usual with shelley, he threw much of his own personality into his ideas of miss hitchener, who was to be his "eternal inalienable friend," and to help to form his lovely wife's character on the model of her own. all these particulars are given in letters from shelley to his friends, charles grove, hogg, and miss hitchener; to the latter he is very explanatory and apologetic, but only after the event. shelley had scarcely been a week away from london when he received a letter from harriet, complaining of fresh persecution and recalling him. he at once returned, as he had undertaken to do if required, and then resolved that the only thing was for him to marry at once. he accordingly went straight to his cousin charles grove, and with twenty-five pounds borrowed from his relative mr. medwin, a solicitor at horsham, he entered on one of the most momentous days of his life--the th or th august . after passing the night with his cousin, he waited at the door of the coffee-house in mount street, watching for a girlish figure to turn the corner from chapel street. there was some delay; but what was to be could not be averted, and soon harriet, fresh as a rosebud, appeared. the coach was called, and the two cousins and the girl of sixteen drove to an inn in the city to await the edinburgh mail. this took the two a stage farther on the fatal road, and on august their scotch marriage is recorded in edinburgh. the marriage arrangements were of the quaintest, shelley having to explain his position and want of funds to the landlord of some handsome rooms which he found. fortunately the landlord undertook to supply what was needed, and they felt at ease in the expectation of shelley's allowance of money coming; but this never came, as shelley's father again resented his behaviour, and took that easy means of showing as much. shelley's wife had had the most contradictory education possible for a young girl of an ordinary and unimaginative nature--the conventional surface education of a school of that time followed by the talks with shelley, which were doubtless far beyond her comprehension. what could be the outcome of such a marriage? had shelley, indeed, been a different character, all might have gone smoothly, married as he was to a beautiful girl who loved him; but at present all shelley's ideas were unpractical. without the moral treadmill of work to sober his opinions, whence was the ballast to come when disappointment ensued-- disappointment which he constantly prepared for himself by his over-enthusiastic idea of his friends? troubles soon followed the marriage, in the nonarrival of the money; and after five weeks in edinburgh, where hogg had joined the shelleys, followed by a little over a week in york, the need became so pressing that shelley felt obliged to take a hurried journey to his uncle's at cuckfield, in order to try and mollify his father; in this he did not succeed. though absent little over a week, he prepared the way by his absence, and by leaving harriet under the care of hogg, for a series of complications and misunderstandings which never ended till death had absolved all concerned. harriet's sister, eliza, was to have returned to york with shelley; but hearing of her sister's solitary state with hogg in the vicinity, she hurried alone to york, and from this time she assumed an ascendency over the small _ménage_ which, though probably useful in trifles, had undoubtedly a bad effect in the long run. eliza, rightly from her point of view, thought it necessary to stand between hogg and her sister. it seems far more likely that hogg's gentlemanly instincts would have led him to treat his friend's wife with respect than that he should have really given cause for the grave suspicions which shelley writes of in subsequent letters to miss hitchener. might not eliza be inclined to take an exaggerated view of any attention shown by hogg to her sister, and have persuaded harriet to the same effect? harriet having seen nothing of the world as yet, and eliza's experience before her father's retirement from his tavern not having been that in which ladies and gentlemen stand on a footing of equality. it is true that shelley writes of an interview with hogg before leaving york, in which he describes hogg as much confused and distressed; but perhaps allowance ought to be made for the fanciful turn of shelley's own mind. however this may have been, they left york for keswick, where they delighted in the glorious scenery. at this time we see in letters to miss hitchener how shelley felt the necessity of intellectual sympathy, and how he seemed to consider this friend in some way necessary for the accomplishment of various speculative and social ideas. here at chestnut cottage novels were commenced and much work planned, left unfinished, or lost. while at keswick he made the acquaintance of southey and wrote his first letter to william godwin, whose works had already had a great influence on him, and whose personal acquaintance he now sought. the often quoted letter by which shelley introduced himself to godwin was followed by others, and led up to the subsequent intimacy which had such important results. shelley with his wife and sister-in-law paid a visit to the duke of norfolk at greystoke; this led to a quasi reconciliation with shelley's father, owing to which the allowance of two hundred a year was renewed, harriet's father making her a similar allowance, it is presumed, owing to feeling flattered by his daughter's reception by the duchess. shortly afterwards some restless turn in the trio caused a further move to be contemplated, and now shelley entered on what must have appeared one of the strangest of his fancies--a visit to ireland to effect catholic emancipation and to procure the repeal of the union act. hogg pretends to believe that shelley did not even understand the meaning of the phrases, and most probably many english would not have cared to do so. in any case shelley's enthusiasm for an oppressed people must be admired, and it is noticeable that our greatest statesman of the present day has come to agree with shelley after eighty years of life and of conflicting endeavour. the plan adopted by shelley caused infinite amusement to harriet, who entered with animation into the fun of distributing her husband's pamphlets on irish affairs, and could not well understand his seriousness on the subject. the pamphlets and the speeches which he delivered were not likely to conciliate the different irish parties. the catholics were not to be attracted by an atheist or antichristian, however tolerant he might be of them, and of all religions which tend to good. lord fingal and his adherents were not inclined to follow the ardent republican and teacher of humanitarianism; nor were the extreme party likely to be satisfied with appeals, however eloquent, for the pursuit and practice of virtue before any political changes were to be expected. shelley's exposition of the failure of the french revolution by the fact that although it had been ushered in by people of great intellect, the moral side of intellect had been wanting, was not what irish nationalists then wished to consider. in fact, shelley had not much pondered the character of the people he went to help and reform, if he thought a week of these arguments could have much effect. shelley was much sought after by the poor irish, during another month of his stay in dublin, on account of his generosity. here, also, they met mrs. nugent. harriet's correspondence with her has recently been published. with the views which she expresses, those of the present writer coincide in not casting all the blame of the future separation on shelley; harriet naturally feels mary most at fault, and does not perceive her own mistakes. failing in his aim, and being disheartened by the distress on all sides which he could not relieve, and more especially owing to the strong remonstrance of godwin, who considered that if there were any result it could only be bloodshed, the poet migrated to nantgwilt in wales. here the shelleys contemplated receiving godwin and his family, miss hitchener with her american pupils; and why not miss hitchener's father, reported to have been an old smuggler? here shelley first met thomas love peacock. they were unable to remain at nantgwilt owing to various mishaps, and migrated to that terrestrial paradise in north devon, lynmouth. this lovely place, with its beautiful and romantic surroundings loved and exquisitely described by more than one poet, cannot fail to be dear to those who know it with and through them. here, in a garden in front of their rose and myrtle covered cottage, within near sound of the rushing lynn, would shelley stand on a mound and let off his fire-balloons in the cool evening air. here miss hitchener joined them. what talks and what rambles they must have had, none but those who have known a poet in such a place could imagine; but perhaps shelley, though a poet, was not sufficient for the three ladies in a neighbourhood where the narrow winding paths may have caused one or other to appear neglected and left behind. poor shelley, recalled from heaven to earth by such-like vicissitudes, naturally held by his wife; and forthwith disagreements began which ended in miss hitchener's being called henceforth the "brown demon." what a fall from the ideal reformer of the world!--another of shelley's self-made idols shattered. the shelleys wished fanny godwin to join their party at lynmouth; but this godwin would not permit without more knowledge of his friends, although shelley wrote affecting letters to the sage, trusting that he might be the stay of his declining years. amid the romantic scenery of lynmouth, shelley wrote much of his _queen mab_; he also addressed a sonnet, and a longer poem, to harriet, in august. these poems certainly evince no falling off in affection, although they are not like the glowing love-poems of a later period. from lynmouth shelley, with his party, moved to swansea, and thence to tremadoc, where they agreed to take a house named tanyrallt, and then they moved on to london to meet godwin, who, in the meanwhile, had paid a visit to lynmouth just after their flitting. here shelley had the delight of seeing the philosopher face to face, and now visits were exchanged, and walks and dinners followed, and, among other friends of godwin, shelley met clara de boinville and mrs. turner, who is said to have inspired his first great lyric, "away the moor is dark beneath the moon," but whose husband strongly objected to shelley visiting their house. on this occasion fanny godwin was the most seen; mary godwin, who was just fifteen, only arriving towards the end of shelley's stay in london from a visit to her friends, the baxters, in scotland. no mention is made of her by shelley, though she must have dined in his company about november , . during this visit to london shelley became reconciled with hogg, calling on him and begging him to come to see him and his wife. this certainly does not look as if shelley still thought seriously of his former difference with hogg--scarcely a year before. shortly after, on the th, we find the poor "brown demon" leaving the shelleys, with the promise of an annuity of one hundred pounds. she reopened a school later on at edmonton, and was much loved by her pupils. shelley now returned to tremadoc, where he passed the winter in his house at tanyrallt, helping the poor through this severe season of - . here one of shelley's first practical attempts for humanity was assisting to reclaim some land from the sea; but shelley's early effort, unlike the last one of göthe's _faust_, did not satisfy him, and shortly afterwards another real or fancied attempt on his life, on february th, , obliged the party to leave the neighbourhood, this time again for ireland. he spent a short time on the lake of killarney, with his wife and eliza. in april we again find him in london, in an hotel in albemarle street; thence he passed to half moon street, where in june their first child, ianthe, was born. the baby was a great pleasure to shelley, who, however, objected to the wet nurse. he wrote a touching sonnet to his wife and child three months later. all this time there is no apparent change of affection suggested. soon afterwards, while at bracknell, near windsor, they kept up the acquaintance of the de boinville family, and shelley began the study of italian with them while harriet relinquished hers of latin. from bracknell shelley paid his last visit to field place to see his mother, in the absence of his father and the younger children. an interview with his father followed, and a journey to edinburgh, and then in december a return to london; certainly an ominous restlessness, caused, no doubt, considerably by want of money, but moving about did not seem the way to save or to make it. shelley visited godwin several times during his stay in london. at this time shelley had to raise ruinous post-obits on the family property, and for legal reasons he now thought it desirable to follow the scotch marriage by one in the english church, and he and harriet were re-married on march , , at st. george's church. but even now little rifts seem to have been growing, small enough apparently, and yet, like the small cloud in the sky, indicating the coming storm. this very time of trials, through want of money, seems to have been chosen by harriet to show a hankering after luxuries which their present income could not warrant. a carriage was purchased, and was with its accompanying expenses added to the small _ménage_; silver plate was also considered a necessity; and, perhaps the thing most distasteful to shelley's natural tastes, the wet nurse was retained, although harriet had always appeared to be a strong young woman capable of undertaking her maternal duty. this fact was considered by peacock to have chiefly alienated shelley's affection. apart from this, poor harriet, with the birth of her child, seems to have given up her studies, which she had evidently pursued to please shelley, and to have awakened to the fact that it was a difficult task to take up the whole cause of suffering humanity and aid it with their slender purse, and keep their wandering household going. it is difficult to imagine the genius that could have sufficed, and it certainly needed genius, or something very like it, to keep the faust-like mind of shelley in any peace. there is a letter from fanny godwin to shelley, after his first visit, speaking of his wife as a fine lady. from this accusation shelley strongly defended her, but now he felt that this disaster might really be impending. poor pretty harriet could not understand or talk philosophy with shelley, and, what was worse, her sister was ever present to prevent any spontaneous feeling of dependence on her husband from endearing her to him. even before his second ceremony of marriage with harriet we find him writing a letter in great dejection to hogg. he seemed really in the poet's "premature old age," as he expressed it, though none like the poet have the power of rejuvenescence. his detestation of his sister-in-law at this time was extreme, but he appears to have been incapable of sending her away. it was a perfect torture to him to see her kiss his baby. he writes thus from mrs. de boinville's at bracknell, where he had a month's rest with philosophy and sweet converse. talking was easier than acting philosophy at this juncture, and planning the amelioration of the world pleasanter than struggling to keep one poor soul from sinking to degradation; but who shall judge the strength of another's power, or feel the burden of another's woe? we can only tell how the expression of his agony may help ourselves; but surely it is worthy of admiration to find shelley, four days after writing this most heart-broken letter to hogg, binding his chains still firmer by remarrying, so that, come what would, no slur should be cast on harriet. harriet, who had never understood anything of housekeeping, and whose _ménage_, according to hogg, was of the funniest, now that the novelty of shelley's talk and ways was over, and when even the constant changes were beginning to satiate her, apparently spent a time of intolerable _ennui_. it is still remembered in the pilfold family how harriet appeared at their house late one night in a ball dress, without shawl or bonnet, having quarrelled with shelley. a doctor who had to perform some operation on her child was struck with astonishment at her demeanour, and considered her utterly without feeling, and shelley's poem, "lines, april ," written, according to claire clairmont's testimony, when mr. turner objected to his visiting his wife at bracknell, gives a touching picture of the comfortless home which he was returning to; in fact, they seem to have no sooner been together again than harriet made a fresh departure. there is one imploring poem by shelley, addressed to harriet in may , begging her to relent and pity, if she cannot love, and not to let him endure "the misery of a fatal cure"; but harriet had not generosity, if it was needed, and, according to thornton hunt, she left shelley and went to bath, where she still was in july. what harriet really aimed at by this foolish move is doubtful; it was certainly taken at the most fatal moment. to leave shelley alone, near dear friends, when she had been repelling his advances to regain her affection, and making his home a place for him to dread to come into, was anything but wise; but wisdom was not harriet's _forte_; she needed a husband to be wise for her. shelley, however, had most gifts, except such wisdom at this time. beyond these facts, there seems little but surmises to judge by. it may always be a question how much shelley really knew, or believed, of certain ideas of infidelity on his wife's part in connection with a major ryan--ideas which, even if believed, would not have justified his subsequent mode of action. but here, for a time, we must leave poor harriet--all her loveliness thrown away upon shelley--all shelley's divine gifts worthless to her. what a strange disunion to pass through life with! only the sternest philosophy or callousness could have achieved it--and shelley was still so young, with his philosophy all in theory. chapter iv. mary and shelley. we left godwin about to write in answer to the letter referred to from shelley. the correspondence which followed, though very interesting in itself, is only important here as it led to the increasing intimacy of the families. these letters are full of sound advice from an elderly philosopher to an over-enthusiastic youth; and one dated march , , begging shelley to leave ireland and come to london, ends with the pregnant phrase, "you cannot imagine how much all the females of my family, mrs. godwin and _three_ daughters, are interested in your letters and your history." so here, at fourteen, we find mary deeply interested in all concerning shelley; poor mary, who used to wander forth, when in london, from the skinner street juvenile library northwards to the old st. pancras cemetery, to sit with a book beside her mother's grave to find that sympathy so sadly lacking in her home. about this time godwin wrote a letter concerning mary's education to some correspondent anxious to be informed on the subject. we cannot do better than quote from it:-- your inquiries relate principally to the two daughters of mary wollstonecraft. they are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. i lost her in , and in i married a second time. one among the motives which led me to choose this was the feeling i had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. the present mrs. godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother; and, indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither mrs. godwin nor i have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice; while we both of us honestly endeavour, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind and characters of the younger branches of our family. of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. she is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. my own daughter is, i believe, very pretty. fanny is by no means handsome, but, in general, prepossessing. by this letter necessity appears to have been the chief motor in the education of the children. constantly increasing difficulties surrounded the family, who were, however, kept above the lowering influences of narrow circumstances by the intellect of godwin and his friends. even the speculations into which mrs. godwin is considered to have rashly drawn her husband in the skinner street juvenile library, perhaps, for a time, really assisted in bringing up the family and educating the sons. before the meeting with shelley, mary was known as a young girl of strong poetic and emotional nature. a story is still remembered by friends, proving this: just before her last return from the highlands preceding her eventful meetings with shelley, she visited, while staying with the baxters, some of the most picturesque parts of the highlands, in company with mr. miller, a bookseller of edinburgh; and he told of her passionate enthusiasm when taken into a room arranged with looking-glasses round it to reflect the magic view without of cascade and cloud-capped mountains; how she fell on her knees, entranced at the sight, and thanked providence for letting her witness so much beauty. this was the nature, with its antecedents and surroundings, to come shortly into communion with shelley, at the time of his despondency at his wife's hardness and supposed desertion; shelley then, so far from self-sufficiency, yearning after sympathy and an ideal in life, with all his former idols shattered. godwin's house became for him the home of intellectual intercourse. godwin, surrounded by a cultivated family, was not thought less of by shelley, owing to the accident of his then having a book-shop to look after--shelley, whose childhood, though passed in the comforts of an english country house, yet lacked the riches of the higher culture. through two months of various trials shelley remained on terms of great intimacy, visiting godwin's house and constantly dining there. this was during his wife's voluntary withdrawal to bath, from may--when he seems to have entreated her to be reconciled to him--till july, when she, in her turn, becoming anxious at a four days' cessation of news, wrote an imploring letter to hookham, the bond street bookseller, for information about her husband. in the meantime, what had been passing in godwin's house? the philosopher, whom shelley loved and revered, was becoming inextricably involved in money matters. what was needed but this to draw still closer the sympathies of the poet, who had not been exempt from like straits? he was thus in the anomalous position of an heir to twenty thousand a year, who could wish to raise three thousand pounds on his future expectations, not for discreditable gambling debts, or worse extravagances, but to save his beloved master and his family from dire distress. what a coil of circumstances to be entangling all concerned! mary returning from the delights of her scottish home to find her father, whom she always devotedly loved, on the verge of bankruptcy, with all the hopeless vista which her emotional and highly imaginative nature could conjure up; and then to find this dreaded state of distress relieved, and by her hero--the poet who, for more than two years, "all the women of her family had been profoundly interested in." and for shelley, the contrast from the desolate home, where sulks and ill-humour assailed him, and which, for a time, was a deserted home for him; where facts, or his fitful imagination, ran riot with his honour, to the home where all showed its roseate side for him; where all vied to please the young benefactor, who was the humble pupil of its master; where mary, in the expanding glow of youth and intellect, could talk on equal terms with the enthusiastic poet. were not the eyes of godwin and his wife blinded for the time, when still reconciliation with harriet was possible? surely gratitude came in to play honour false. the one who--were it only from personal feeling--might have tried to turn the course of the rushing torrent was not there. fanny, who had formerly written of shelley as a hero of romance, was in wales during this period. so, step by step, and day by day, the march of fate continued, till, by the time that hookham apparently unbandaged godwin's eyes, on receiving harriet's letter on july , , passion seemed to have subdued the power of will; and the obstacle now imposed by godwin only gave added impetus to the torrent, which nothing further could check. such times as these in a life seem to exemplify the contrasting doctrines of calvin and of schopenhauer; of two courses, either is open. but at that time shelley was more the being of emotion than of will--unless, indeed, will be confounded with emotion. we have seen enough to gather that shelley did not need to enter furtively the house of his benefactor to injure him in his nearest tie, but that circumstances drew shelley to mary with equal force as her to him. the meetings by her mother's grave seemed to sanctify the love which should have been another's. they vaguely tried to justify themselves with crude principles. but self-deception could not endure much longer; and when godwin forbade shelley his house on july , shelley, ever impetuous and headstrong, whose very virtues became for the time vices, thrust all barriers aside. what deceptions beside self-deception must have been necessary to carry out so wild a project can be imagined; for certainly neither godwin nor, still less, his wife, was inclined to sanction so illegal and unjust an act. we see, from hogg's description, how impassioned was a meeting between mary and shelley, which he chanced to witness; and later on shelley is said to have rushed into her room with laudanum, threatening to take it if she would not have pity on him. these and such like scenes, together with the philosophical notions which mary must have imbibed, led up to her acting at sixteen as she certainly would not have done at twenty-six; but now her knowledge of the world was small, her enthusiasm great--and evidently she believed in harriet's faithlessness--so that love added to the impatience of youth, which could not foresee the dreadful future. without doubt, could they both have imagined the scene by the serpentine three years later, they would have shrunk from the action which was a strong link in the chain that conduced to it. but now all thoughts but love and self, or each for the other, were set aside, and on july , , we find mary godwin leaving her father's house before five o'clock in the morning, much as harriet had left her home three years earlier. an entry made by mary in a copy of _queen mab_ given to her by shelley, and dated in july , shows us how a few days before their departure they had not settled on so desperate a move. the words are these:--"this book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, i may write in it what i please. yet what shall i write--that i love the author beyond all powers of expression, and that i am parted from him? dearest and only love, by that love we have promised to each other, although i may not be yours i can never be another's. but i am thine, exclusively thine." mary in her novel of _lodore_, published in , gave a version of the differences between harriet and shelley. though lord lodore is more an impersonation of mary's idea of lord byron than of shelley, cornelia santerre, the heroine, may be partly drawn from harriet, while lady santerre, her match-making mother, is taken from eliza westbrook. lady santerre, when her daughter is married, still keeps her under her influence. she is described as clever, though uneducated, with all the petty manoeuvring which frequently accompanies this condition. when differences arise between lodore and his wife the mother, instead of counselling conciliation, advises her daughter to reject her husband's advances. under these circumstances estrangements lead to hatred, and cornelia declares she will never quit her mother, and desires her husband to leave her in peace with her child. this lodore will not consent to, but takes the child with him to america. the mother-in-law speaks of desertion and cruelty, and instigates law proceedings. by these proceedings all further hope is lost. we trace much of the history of shelley and harriet in this romance, even to the age of lady lodore at her separation, which is nineteen, the same age as harriet's. lady lodore henceforth is regarded as an injured and deserted wife. this might apply equally to lady byron; but there are traits and descriptions evidently applicable to harriet. lady santerre encourages her to expect submission later from her husband, but the time for that is passed. we here trace the period when shelley also begged his wife to be reconciled to him in may, and likewise harriet's attempt at reconciliation with shelley, all too late, in july, when shelley had an interview with his wife and explanations were given, which ended in harriet apparently consenting to a separation. the interview resulted in giving harriet an illness very dangerous in her state of health; she was even then looking forward to the birth of a child. it is true that shelley is said to have believed that this child was not his, though later he acknowledged this belief was not correct. the name of a certain major ryan figures in the domestic history of the shelleys at this time; but certainly there seems no evidence to convict poor harriet upon, although godwin at a later date informed shelley that he had evidence of harriet having been false to him four months before he left her. this evidence is not forthcoming, and the position of his daughter mary may have made slender evidence seem more weighty at the time to godwin; in fact, the small amount of evidence of any kind respecting shelley's and harriet's disagreements and separation seems to point to the curious anomaly in shelley's character, that while he did not hesitate to act upon his avowed early and crude opinions as to the duration of marriage--opinions which he later expressed disapproval of in his own criticism of _queen mab_--yet the innate feeling of a gentleman forbade him to talk of his wife's real or supposed defects even to his intimate friends. thus when peacock cross-questioned him about his liking for harriet, he only replied, "ah, but you do not know how i hated her sister." however more or less faulty, or sinned against, or sinning, we must now leave harriet for a while and accompany shelley and mary on that th of july when she left her father's house with jane, henceforth called "claire" clairmont, to meet shelley near hatton garden about five in the morning. of the subsequent journey we have ample records, for with this tour mary also began a life of literary work, in which she was fortunately able to confide much to the unknown friend, the public, which though not always directly grateful to those who open their hearts to it, is still eager for their works and influenced by them. and so from mary herself we learn all that she cared to publish from her journal in the _six weeks' tour_, and now we have the original journal by mary and shelley, as given by professor dowden. we must repeat for mary the oft-told tale of shelley; for henceforth, till death separates them, their lives are together. on july , , having previously arranged a plan with mary, which must have been also known to claire in spite of her statement that she only thought of taking an early walk, shelley ordered the postchaise, and, as claire says, he and mary persuaded her to go too, as she knew french, with which language they were unfamiliar. shelley gives the account of the subsequent journey to dover and passage to calais, of the first security they felt in each other in spite of all risk and danger. mary suffered much physically, and no doubt morally, having to pause at each stage on the road to dover in spite of the danger of being overtaken, owing to the excessive heat causing faintness. on reaching dover they found the packet already gone at o'clock, so, after bathing in the sea and dining, they engaged a sailing boat to take them to calais, and once more felt security from their pursuers; for, undoubtedly, had they been found in england, shelley would have been unable to carry out his plan. they were not allowed to pass the channel together without danger, for after some hours of calm, during which they could make no progress, a violent squall broke, and the sails of the little boat were well nigh shattered, the lightning and thunder were incessant, and the imminent danger gave shelley cause for serious thought, as he with difficulty supported the sleeping form of mary in his arms. surely all this scene is well described in "the fugitives"-- while around the lashed ocean. though mary woke to hear they were still far from land, and might be forced to make for boulogne if they could not reach calais, still with the dawn of a fresh day the lightning paled, and at length they were landed on calais sands, and walked across them to their hotel. the fresh sights and sounds of a new language soon restored mary, and she was able to remark the different costumes; and the salient contrast from the other side of the channel could not fail to charm three young people so open to impressions. but before night they were reminded that there were others whom their destiny affected, for they were informed that a "fat lady" had been inquiring for them, who said that shelley had run away with her daughter. it was poor mrs. godwin who had followed them through heat and storm, and who hoped at least to induce her daughter claire to return to the protection of godwin's roof; but this, after mature deliberation, which shelley advised, she refused to do. having escaped so far from the routine and fancied dulness of home life, the impetuous claire was not to be so easily debarred from sharing in the magic delight of seeing new countries and gaining fresh experience. so mrs. godwin returned alone, to make the best story she could so as to satisfy the curious about the strange doings in her family. meanwhile the travellers proceeded by diligence on the evening of the th to boulogne, and then, as mary was far from well, hastened on their journey to paris, where by a week's rest, in spite of many annoyances through want of money and difficulty in procuring it, mary regained sufficient strength to enjoy some of the interesting sights. a pedestrian tour was undertaken across france into switzerland. in paris the entries in the diary are chiefly shelley's; he makes some curious remarks about the pictures in the louvre, and mentions with pleasure meeting a frenchman who could speak english who was some help, as claire's french does not seem to have stood the test of a lengthy discussion on business at that time. at length a remittance of sixty pounds was received, and they forthwith settled to buy an ass to carry the necessary portmanteau and mary when unable to walk; and so they started on their journey in , across a country recently devastated by the invading armies of europe. they were not to be deterred by the harrowing tales of their landlady, and set out for charenton on the evening of august , but soon found their ass needed more assistance than they did, which necessitated selling it at a loss and purchasing a mule the next day. on this animal mary set out dressed in black silk, accompanied by claire in a like dress, and by shelley who walked beside. this primitive way of travelling was not without its drawbacks, especially after the disastrous wars. their fare was of the coarsest, and their accommodation frequently of the most squalid; but they were young and enthusiastic, and could enter with delight into the fact that napoleon had slept in their room at one inn. and the picturesque though frequently ruined french towns, with their ramparts and old cathedrals, gave them happiness and content; on the other hand, the dirt, discomfort, and ignorance they met with were extreme. at one wretched village, echemine, people would not rebuild their houses as they expected the cossacks to return, and they had not heard that napoleon was deposed; while two leagues farther, at pavillon, all was different, showing the small amount of communication between one town and another in france at that time. shelley was now obliged to ride the mule, having sprained his ankle, and on reaching troyes mary and claire were thoroughly fatigued with walking. there they had to reconsider ways and means; the mule, no longer sufficing, was sold and a _voiture_ bought, and a man and a mule engaged for eight days to take them to neuchatel. but their troubles did not end here, for the man turned out far more obstinate than the mule, and was determined to enjoy the sweets of tyranny: he stopped where he would, regardless of accommodation or no accommodation, and went on when he chose, careless whether his travellers were in or out of the carriage. mary describes how they had to sit one night over a wretched kitchen fire in the village of mort, till they were only too glad to pursue their journey at a.m. in fact, in those days mary was able, in the middle of france, to experience the same discomforts which tourists have now to go much farther to find out. their tour was far different from a later one described by mary, when comfortable hotels are chronicled; but, oh! how she then looked back to the happy days of this time. the trio would willingly have prolonged the present state of things; but, alas! money vanished in spite of frugal fare, and they decided, on arriving in switzerland, and with difficulty raising about thirty-eight pounds in silver, that their only expedient was to return to england in the least expensive way possible. they first tried, however, to live cheaply in an old chateau on the lake of arx, which they hired at a guinea a month; but the discomfort and difficulties were too great, and even the customary resources of reading and writing failed to induce them to remain in these circumstances. they at one time contemplated a journey south of the alps, but, only twenty-eight pounds remaining to live on from september till december, they naturally felt it would be safer to return to england, and decided to travel the eight hundred miles by water as the cheapest mode of transit. they proceeded from lucerne by the reuss, descending several falls on the way, but had to land at loffenberg as the falls there were impassable. the next day they took a rude kind of canoe to mumph, when they were forced to continue their journey in a return cabriolet; but this breaking down, they had to walk some distance to the nearest place for boats, and were fortunate in meeting with some soldiers to carry their box. having procured a boat they reached basle by the evening, and leaving there for mayence the next morning in a boat laden with merchandise. this ended their short swiss tour; but they passed the time delightfully, shelley reading mary wollstonecraft's letters from norway, and then, again, perfectly entranced, as night approached, with the magic effects of sunset sky, hills surmounted with ruined castles, and the reflected colours on the changing stream. they proceeded in this manner, staying for the night at inns, and taking whatever boat could be found in the morning. thus they reached cologne, passing the romantic scenery of the rhine, recalled to them later when reading _childe harold_. from this point they proceeded through holland by diligence, as they found travelling by the canals and winding rivers would be too slow, and consequently more expensive. mary does not appear to have been impressed with the picturesque flat country of holland, and gladly reached rotterdam; but they were unfortunately detained two days at marsluys by contrary winds, spending their last guinea, but feeling triumphant in having travelled so far for less than thirty pounds. the captain, being an englishman, ventured to cross the bar of the rhine sooner than the dutch would have done, and consequently they returned to england in a severe squall, which must have recalled the night of their departure and banished tranquillity from their minds, if they had for a time been soothed by the changing scenes and their trust in each other. this account, taken chiefly from mary's _six weeks' tour_, published in first, differs in some details from the diary made at the time. in the published edition the names are suppressed. nor does mary refer to the extraordinary letter written by shelley from troyes on august , to the unfortunate harriet, inviting her to come and stay with them in switzerland, writing to her as his "dearest harriet," and signing himself "ever most affectionately yours." fortunately the proposal was not carried out; probably neither harriet nor mary desired the other's company, and shelley was saved the ridicule, or worse, of this arrangement. chapter v. life in england. on leaving the vessel at gravesend, they engaged a boatman to take them up the thames to blackwall, where they had to take a coach, and the boatman with them, to drive about london in search of money to pay him. there was none at shelley's banker, nor elsewhere, so he had to go to harriet, who had drawn every pound out of the bank. he was detained two hours, the ladies having to remain under the care of the boatman till his return with money, when they bade the boatman a friendly farewell and proceeded to an hotel in oxford street. with shelley and mary's return to england their troubles naturally were not at an end. instead of money and security, debts and overdue bills assailed shelley on all sides; so much so, that he dared not remain with mary at this critical moment of their existence, when she, unable to return to her justly indignant father, had to stay in obscure lodgings with claire, while shelley, from some other retreat, ransacked london for money from attorneys and on post obits at gigantic interest. we have now letters which passed between mary and shelley at this time; also mary's diary, which recounts many of their misadventures. day after day we have such phrases as (october ) "shelley goes with peacock to the lawyers, but nothing is done," till on december we find that an agreement is entered into to repay by three thousand pounds a loan of one thousand. godwin, even if he would have helped, could not have done so, as his own affairs were now in their perennial state of distress; and before long, one of shelley's chief anxieties was to raise two hundred pounds to save mary's father from bankruptcy, although apparently they only communicated through a lawyer. it is curious to note how mary complains of the selfishness of harriet; poor harriet who, according to mrs. godwin, still hoped for the return of her husband's affection to herself, and who sent for shelley, after passing a night of danger, some time before her confinement. at one time mary entertained an idea, rightly or wrongly conceived, that harriet had a plan for ruining her father by dissuading hookham from bailing him out from a menaced arrest. and so we find, in the extracts from the joint diary of mary and shelley, harriet written of as selfish, as indulging in strange behaviour, and even, when she sends her creditors to shelley, as the nasty woman who compels them to change their lodgings. before this entry of january , , harriet had given birth (november ) to a second child, a son and heir, which fact mary notes a week later as having been communicated to them in a letter from a _deserted_ wife. what recriminations and heart-burnings, neglect felt on one side and "insulting selfishness" on the other! in april, mary writes, "shelley passes the morning with harriet, who is in a surprisingly good humour;" and then we hear how shelley went to harriet to procure his son who is to appear in one of the courts; and yet once more mary writes, "shelley goes to harriet about his son, returns at four; he has been much teased by harriet"; and then a blank as to harriet, for the diary is lost from may to july . in the meantime we see in the diary how mary, far from well at times, is happy in her love of shelley--how they enjoy intellectual pleasures together. they fortunately were satisfied with each other's company, as most of their few friends fell from them, mrs. boinville writing a "cold and even sarcastic letter;" the newtons were considered to hold aloof; and mrs. turner, whom they saw a little, told shelley her brother considered "you've been playing a german tragedy." shelley replied, "very severe, but very true." about this time hogg renewed his acquaintance with shelley and made that of mary, though at first his answer to shelley's letter was far from sympathetic. on his first visit they also were disappointed with him; but a little later (november ) hogg called at his friend's lodging in nelson square, when he made a more favourable impression on shelley by being himself pleased with mary. she in return found him amusing when he jested, but far astray in his opinions when discussing serious matters--in fact, on a later visit of his, she finds hogg makes a sad bungle, quite muddled on the point when in an argument on virtue. in spite of being shocked by hogg in matters of philosophy and ethics, she gets to like him better daily, and he helps them to pass the long november and december evenings with his lively talk. on one occasion he would describe an apparition of a lady whom he had loved, and who, he averred, visited him frequently after her death. they were all much interested, but annoyed by the interruption of claire's childish superstitions. in fact, hogg glides back to the old friendship of the university days, and his witticisms must have beguiled many a leisure hour, while he would also help mary with her latin studies now commenced. claire frequently accompanied shelley in his walks to the lawyers and other business engagements, as mary's health not infrequently prevented her taking long walks, and claire stated later that shelley had a positive fear of being alone in london, as he was haunted by the fear of an attack from leeson, the supposed tanyrallt assassin. claire's cleverness and liveliness made her a pleasant companion at times for shelley and mary; but even had they been sisters--and they had been brought up together as such--mary might have found her constant presence in confined lodgings irksome, especially as claire tormented herself with superstitious alarms which at times, even in reading shakespeare, quite overcame her. her fanciful imagination also conjured up causes of offence where none were intended, and magnified slight changes of mood on shelley's or mary's part into intentional affronts, when she ought rather to have taken mary's delicate health and difficult position into consideration. mary, by all accounts, seems naturally to have had a sweet and unselfish disposition, although she had sufficient character to be self-absorbed in her work, without which no work is worth doing. it is true that her friend trelawny later appeared to consider her somewhat selfishly indifferent to some of shelley's caprices or whims; but this was with the pardonable weakness of a man who, although he liked character in a woman, still considered it was her first duty to indulge her husband in all his freaks. however this may be, we have constantly recurring such entries in the joint diary as:--"nov. .--jane gloomy; she is very sullen with shelley. well, never mind, my love, we are happy. nov. .--jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day.... go to bed early; shelley and jane sit up till twelve talking; shelley talks her into good humour." then--"shelley explains with clara." again--"shelley and clara explain as usual." mary writes--"nov. .--work, &c. &c. clara in ill humour. she reads _the italian_. shelley sits up and talks her into humour." dec. .--a discussion concerning female character. clara imagines that i treat her unkindly. mary consoles her with her all-powerful benevolence. "i rise (having already gone to bed) and speak with clara. she was very unhappy; i leave her tranquil." clara herself writes as early as october--"mary says things which i construe into unkindness. i was wrong. we soon became friends; but i felt deeply the imaginary cruelties i conjured up." it is clear that where such constant explaining is necessary there could not be much satisfaction in perpetual intimacy. mary is amused at the way shelley and claire sit up and "frighten themselves" by different reasons or forms of superstition, and on one occasion we have their two accounts of the miraculous removal of a pillow in claire's room, claire avowing it had moved while she did not see it; and shelley attesting the miracle because the pillow was on a chair, much as victor hugo describes the peasants of brittany declaring that "the frog _must_ have talked on the stone because there was the stone it talked upon." the result might certainly have been injurious to mary, who was awakened by the excited entrance of claire into her room. shelley had to interpose and get her into the next room, where he informed claire that mary was not in a state of health to be suddenly alarmed. they talked all night, till the dawn, showing shelley in a very haggard aspect to claire's excited imagination (shelley had been quite ill the previous day, as noted by mary). she excited herself into strong convulsions, and mary had finally to be called up to quiet her. the same effect tried a little later fortunately fell flat; but there seemed no end to the vagaries of claire's "unsettled mind" as shelley calls it, for she takes to walking in her sleep and groaning horribly, shelley watching for two hours, finally having to take her to mary. certainly philosophy did not seem to have a calming effect on claire claremont's nature, and often must shelley and mary have bemoaned the fatal step of letting her leave her home with them. it was more difficult to induce her to return, if indeed it was possible for her to do so, with the remaining sister, fanny, still under godwin's roof. fanny's reputation was jealously looked after by her aunts everina and eliza, who contemplated her succeeding in a school they had embarked in in ireland. but it is not to be wondered at that the excitable, lively clara should have groaned and bemoaned her fate when transferred from the exhilaration of travel and the beauties of the rhine and switzerland to the monotony of london life in her anomalous position; and although both mary and shelley evidently wished to be kind to her, she felt more her own wants than their kindness. want of occupation and any settled purpose in life caused pillows and fire-boards to walk in poor claire's room, much as other uninteresting objects have to assume a fictitious interest in the houses and lives of many fashionably unoccupied ladies of the present day, who divide their interest between a twanging voice or a damp hand and the last poem of the last fashionable poet. shelley is not the only imaginative and simple-minded poet who could apparently believe in such a phenomenon as a faded but supernatural flower slipped under his hand in the dark, other people in whom he has faith being present, and perchance helping in the performance. genius is often very confiding. peacock was perhaps the one other friend who, during these sombre, if not altogether unhappy, days of mary, visited them in their lodgings. shelley, through him, hears of some of the movements of his family, and at one time mary enters with delight into the romantic idea of carrying off two heiresses (shelley's sisters) to the west coast of ireland. this idea occupies them for some days through many delightful walks and talks with hogg. peacock also frequently accompanied shelley to a pond touching primrose hill, where the poet would take a fleet of paper boats, prepared for him by mary, to sail in the pond, or he would twist paper up to serve the purpose--it must have been a relaxation from his projects of reform. we must not leave this delightfully unhappy time without making reference to the series of letters exchanged between mary and shelley during an enforced separation. unseen meetings had to be arranged to avoid encounters with bailiffs, at a time when the landlady refused to send them up dinner, as she wanted her money, and shelley, after a hopeless search for money, could only return home--with cake. during this time some of their most precious letters were written to each other. we cannot refrain from quoting some touching passages after mary had received letters from shelley expressing the greatest impatience and grief at his separation from her, appointing vague meeting-places where she had to walk backwards and forwards from street to street, in the hopes of a meeting, and fearful animosity against the whole race of lawyers, money-lenders, &c., though all his hopes depended on them at the time. the london coffee house seemed to be the safest meeting-place. mary, not very clear about business matters at the time, felt most the separation from her husband: the dangers that surrounded them she only felt in a reflected way through him. they must have confidence in each other, she thinks, and their troubles cannot but pass, for there is certainly money which must come to them! she thus writes (october ): for what a minute did i see you yesterday! is this the way, my beloved, we are to live till the th? in the morning when i wake, i turn to look for you. dearest shelley, you are solitary and uncomfortable. why cannot i be with you, to cheer you and press you to my heart? ah! my love, you have no friends. why then should you be torn from the only one who has affection for you? but i shall see you to-night, and this is the hope that i shall live on through the day. be happy, dear shelley, and think of me! why do i say this, dearest and only one? i know how tenderly you love me, and how you repine at your absence from me. when shall we be free from fear of treachery? i send you the letter i told you of from harriet, and a letter we received yesterday from fanny (this letter made an appointment for a meeting between fanny and clara); the history of this interview i will tell you when i come, but, perhaps as it is so rainy a day, fanny will not be allowed to come at all. i was so dreadfully tired yesterday that i was obliged to take a coach home. forgive this extravagance; but i am so very weak at present, and i had been so agitated through the day, that i was not able to stand; a morning's rest, however, will set me quite right again; i shall be well when i meet you this evening. will you be at the door of the coffee-house at five o'clock, as it is disagreeable to go into such places? i shall be there exactly at that time, and we can go into st. paul's, where we can sit down. i send you "diogenes," as you have no books; hookham was so ill-tempered as not to send the book i asked for. two more distracted letters from shelley follow, showing how he had been in desperation trying to get money from harriet; how pistols and microscope were taken to a pawnshop; davidson, hookham, and others are the most hopeless villains, but must be propitiated. trying letters also arrive from mrs. godwin, who was naturally much incensed with mary, and of whom mary expresses her detestation in writing to shelley. one more short letter: october . my own love, i do not know by what compulsion i am to answer you, but your letter says i must; so i do. by a miracle i saved your £ , and i will bring it. i hope, indeed, oh, my loved shelley, we shall indeed be happy. i meet you at three, and bring heaps of skinner st. news. heaven bless my love and take care of him. his own mary. as many as three and four letters in a day pass between shelley and mary at this time. another tender, loving letter on october , and then they decide on the experiment of remaining together one night. warned by hookham, who regained thus his character for feeling, they dared not return to the london tavern, but took up their abode for a night or two at a tavern in st. john street. soon the master of this inn also became suspicious of the young people, and refused to give more food till he received money for that already given; and again they had to satisfy their hunger with cakes, which shelley obtained money from peacock to purchase. another day in the lodgings where the landlady won't serve dinner, cakes again supplying the deficiency. still separation, shelley seeking refuge at peacock's. fresh letters of despair and love, godwin's affairs causing great anxiety and efforts on shelley's part to extricate him. a sussex farmer gives fresh hope. on november mary writes very dejectedly. she had been _nearly_ two days without a letter from shelley, that is, she had received one of november early in the morning, and that of november late in the evening. that day had also brought mary a letter from her old friends the baxters, or rather from mr. david booth, to whom her friend isabel baxter was engaged, desiring no further communication with her. this was a great blow to mary, as, isabel having been a great admirer of mary wollstonecraft, mary had hoped she would remain her friend. mary writes:--"she adores the shade of my mother. but then a married man! it is impossible to knock into some people's heads that harriet is selfish and unfeeling, and that my father might be happy if he chose. by that cant of selling his daughter, i should half suspect that there has been some communication between the skinner street folks and them." but now the separation was approaching its end, and the danger of being arrested past, they move from their lodgings in church terrace, st. pancras, to nelson square, where we have already seen hogg in their company and heard of the sulks, fears, and bemoanings of poor claire. mary shelley's novel of _lodore_ gives a good account of the sufferings of this time, as referred to later. the great resource of intellectual power is manifested during all this period. during a time of ill-health, anxieties of all kinds, constant moves from lodgings where landladies refused to send up dinner, while she was discarded by all her friends, while she had to walk weary distances, dodging creditors, to get a sight from time to time of her loved shelley, while claire bemoaned her fate and seems to have done her best to have the lion's share of shelley's intellectual attention (for she partook in all the studies, was able to take walks, and kept him up half the night "explaining"), mary indefatigably kept to her studies, read endless books, and made progress with latin, greek, and italian. in fact, she was educating herself in a way to subsist unaided hereafter, to bring up her son, and to fit him for any position that might come to him in this world of changing fortunes. whatever faults mary may have had, it is not the depraved who prepare themselves for, and honestly fight out, the battle of life as she did. chapter vi. death of shelley's grandfather, and birth of a child. after shelley had freed himself, for a time, of some of his worst debts towards the close of , the year , with the death of his grandfather on january , brought a prospect of easier circumstances, as he was now his father's immediate heir. although shelley was not invited to the funeral, and only knew of the death through the papers, he determined at once to go into sussex, with claire as travelling companion, as mary was not well enough for the journey. shelley left claire at slinfold, and proceeded alone to his father's house, where he was refused admittance; so he adopted the singular plan of sitting in the garden, before the door, passing the time by reading _comus_. one or two friends come out to see him, and tell him his father is very angry with him, and the will is most extraordinary; finally he is referred to sir timothy's solicitor--whitton. from him, mary writes in her diary, shelley hears that if he will entail the estate he is to have the income of one hundred thousand pounds. the property was really left in this way, as explained by professor dowden. sir bysshe's possessions did not, probably, fall short of £ , . one portion, valued at £ , , consisted of certain entailed estates, but without shelley's concurrence the entail could not be prolonged beyond himself; the rest consisted of unentailed landed property and personal property amounting to £ , . sir bysshe desired that the whole united property should pass from eldest son to eldest son for generations. this arrangement, however, could not be effected without shelley. sir bysshe, in his will, offered his grandson not only the rentals, but the income of the great personal property, if he would renew the entail of the settled property and would also consent to entail the unsettled property; otherwise he should only receive the entailed property, which was bound to come to him, and which he could dispose of at his pleasure, should he survive his father. he had one year to make his choice in. shelley is considered to have been business-like in his negotiations; but to have retained his original distaste of to entailing large estates to descend to his children--in fact, he appears to have considered too little the contingency of what would come to them or to mary in the event of his death prior to that of his father. pressing present needs being paramount at this time, he agreed to an arrangement by which a portion of the estate valued at £ , could be disposed of to his father for £ , , and an income of £ , a year secured to shelley during his and his father's life. at one time there was an idea of disposing of the entailed estate to his father, as a reversion, but this was not sanctioned by the court of chancery. money was also allowed by his father to pay his debts. so now we see mary and shelley with one thousand pounds a year, less two hundred pounds which, as shelley ordered, was to be paid to harriet in quarterly instalments. now that the money troubles were over, which for a time absorbed their whole attention, mary began to perceive signs of failing health in shelley, and one doctor asserted that he had abscesses on the lungs, and was rapidly dying of consumption. whatever these symptoms were really attributable to they rapidly disappeared, although shelley was a frequent sufferer in various ways through his life. in february, we see also the effect of the mental strain and fatigue on mary, as she gave birth, about the nd of that month, to a seven-months' child, a little girl, who only lived a few days, but long enough to win her mother's and father's love, and leave the first blank in their lives. the diary of this time, kept up first by claire, and then by mary, gives some details of the baby's short life. on february -- mary is well and at ease, the child not expected to live, shelley sits up with mary. much agitated and exhausted. hogg sleeps here. .--mary well; child unexpectedly alive. fanny comes and stays the night.... .--mary still well; favourable symptoms of the child. dr. clarke confirms our hope.... hogg comes in evening. shelley unwell and exhausted. .--child and mary very well. shelley is very unwell. .--mary rises to-day. hogg calls; talk. mary retires at o'clock.... shelley has a spasm. on shelley and clara go about a cradle. .--mary goes down-stairs; nurses the baby, and reads _corinne_ and works. shelley goes to consult dr. pemberton. on march st nurse baby, read _corinne_, and work. peacock and hogg call; stay till half-past eleven. on march they move to fresh lodgings. it is uncertain whether it was to marchmont street, from which place letters are addressed in april and may. or whether they were in some other lodgings in the interval. this early move was probably detrimental to mary and the baby, for on march we find the entry: "find my baby dead. send for hogg. talk. a miserable day." mary thinks, and talks, and dreams of her little baby, and finds reading the best palliative to her grief. march .--dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. awake to find no baby. i think about the little thing all day. not in good spirits. shelley is very unwell. march .--dream again about my little baby. mrs. godwin had sent a present of linen for the infant, and fanny godwin repeated her visits; but the little baby, who might have been a link towards peace with the godwins, has escaped from a world of sorrow, where, in spite of a mother's love, she might later on have met with a cold reception. godwin at this time was in the anomalous position of communicating with shelley on his business matters; but for the very reason that shelley lent him, or gave him, money, he felt it the more necessary to hold back from friendly intercourse, or from seeing his daughter--a curious result of philosophic reasoning, which appears more like worldly wisdom. from this time the company of claire was becoming insufferable to mary and shelley. at least for a time, it was desirable to have a change. we find mary sorely puzzled in her diary at times, as on march she writes--"talk about clara's going away; nothing settled. i fear it is hopeless. she will not go to skinner street; then our house is the only remaining place i plainly see. what is to be done? march .--"talk a great deal. not well, but better. very quiet in the morning and happy, for clara does not get up till four...." again on the th march--"the prospect appears more dismal than ever; not the least hope. this is, indeed, hard to bear." at one time godwin, shelley, and mary tried to induce mrs. knapp to take her, but she refused. claire also tried to get a place as companion, but that fell through, till at length the bright idea occurred to them of sending her into devonshire, under the excuse of her needing change of air; and there, according to a letter from mrs. godwin to lady mountcashell, she was placed with a mrs. bicknall, the widow of a retired indian officer. two more entries in mary's journal, of this time, show with what feelings of relief she contemplates the departure of shelley's friend, as she now calls claire. noting that shelley and his friend have their last talk, the next day, may , shelley walks with her, and she is gone! and mary begins "a new diary with our regeneration." there is a letter from claire to fanny godwin, of may , apparently from lynmouth, describing the scenery in a very picturesque manner, and saying how she delights in the peace and quiet of the country after the turmoil of passion and hatred she had passed through. she also expresses delight that their father had received one thousand pounds--this was evidently part of what shelley had undertaken to pay for him, and was included in the sum which sir timothy paid for his debts. claire--or jane, as she was still called in skinner street--supposed her family would be comfortable for a month or two. shelley and mary now yearned for the country, and truly their eight months' experience in london had been a trying period, from various causes, but redeemed by their love and intellectual conversation. now they felt unencumbered by pressing money troubles, and free from the burden of claire's still more trying presence, at least to mary. in june we find them together at torquay, and we can imagine the delight of the poet and his loved mary in their first unshared companionship--the quiet rambles by sea and cliff in the long june evenings, the sunsets, the quiet and undisturbed peace which surrounded them. they were able to give each other quaint pet names, which no one could or need understand--which would have sounded silly in the presence of a third person. this was a time in which they could grow really to know each other without reserve, when there need be no jealous competition as to who was most proficient in greek or latin; when shelley was drawn to poetry, and _alastor_ was contemplated, the melancholy strain of which seems to indicate love as the only redeeming element of life, and which might well follow the time of turmoil in shelley's career. may not this poem have been his self-vindication as exhibiting what he might have become had he not followed the dictates of his heart? "pecksie" and the "elfin knight" were the names which still stand written at the end of the first journal, ending with claire's departure. mary added some useful receipts for future use. one is: "a tablespoonful of the spirit of aniseed, with a small quantity of spermaceti;" to which shelley adds the following: " drops of human blood, grains of gunpowder, / oz. of putrified brain, mashed grave-worms--the pecksie's doom salve. the maie and her elfin knight." we next find mary at clifton, july , , writing in much despondency at being alone while shelley is house-hunting in south devon. although she wishes to have a home of her own, she dreads the time it will take shelley to find it. he ought to be with her the next day, the anniversary of their journey to dover; without him it will be insupportable. and then the th of august will be his birthday, when they must be together. they might go to tintern abbey. if shelley does not come to her, or give her leave to join him, she will leave in the morning and be with him before night to give him her present with her own hand. and then, is not claire in north devon? if shelley has let her know where he is, is she not sure to join him if she think he is alone? insufferable thought! as professor dowden shows, mary must have been very soon joined by shelley after this touching appeal. in all probability a house was fixed on, but in a very opposite direction, before the end of the week, and the lease or arrangements made by august , as the following year he writes from geneva to langdill to give up possession of his house at bishopsgate by august , . so here, far from devonshire, by the gates of windsor forest, near the familiar haunts of his eton days, we again find shelley and mary. here peacock was not far distant at marlow, and hogg could arrive from london, and here they were within reach of the river. no long time elapsed before they were tempted to experience again the delights of a holiday on the thames. so mary and shelley, with peacock and charles clairmont to help him with an oar, embarked and went up the river. they passed reading and oxford, winding through meadows and woods, till arriving at lechlade, fourteen miles from the source of the thames, they still strove to help the boat to reach this point if the boat would not help them. this proved impossible. after three miles, as cows had taken possession of the stream, which only covered their hoofs, the party had perforce to return, still contemplating proceeding by canal and river, even as far as the clyde, the poet ever yearning forwards. but this, money and prudence forbade, as twenty pounds was needed to pass the first canal; so they returned to their pleasant furnished house at bishopsgate. on this trip mary saw shelley's old quarters at oxford, where they spent a night, and they must have lingered in lechlade churchyard, as the sweet verses there written indicate. shelley and mary were now settled for the first time in a home of their own: she was making rapid progress with latin, having finished the fifth book of the aeneid, much to shelley's satisfaction, as recounted in a letter to hogg. hogg was expected to stay with them in october, and in the meanwhile, under the green shades of windsor forest, shelley was writing his _alastor_, and, as his wife describes in her edition of his poems, "the magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest scenery we find in the poem." she writes:-- none of shelley's poems is more characteristic than this. the solemn spirit that exists throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature, and the breedings of a poet's heart in solitude--the mingling of the exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe inspire with the sad and trying pangs which human passion imparts--give a touching interest to the whole. the death which he had often contemplated during the last months as certain and near, he here represented in such colours as had, in his lonely musings, soothed his soul to peace. the versification sustains the solemn spirit which breathes throughout; it is peculiarly melodious. the poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative; it was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and softened by the recent anticipation of death. poetry was theirs, nature their mutual love: nature and two or three friends, if we may include the quaker, dr. pope, who called on shelley and wished to discuss theology with him, and when shelley said he feared his views would not be to the doctor's taste replied "i like to hear thee talk, friend shelley. i see thou art very deep." but beyond these all friends had fallen off, and certainly godwin's conduct seems to have been most extraordinary. he did not hesitate to put shelley to considerable inconvenience for money, for not long after the one thousand pounds had been given, we find shelley having to sell an annuity to help him with more money. yet godwin all this time treated shelley and mary with great haughtiness, much to their annoyance, though neither let it interfere with the duty they owed godwin as father and philosopher. these perpetual worries helped to keep them in an unsettled state in their home. owing perhaps to the loss of the diary at this period, we have no information about harriet. already in january, we find there is an idea of residing in italy, both for the sake of health, and on account of the annoyance they experienced from their general treatment. shelley had the poet's yearning for sympathy, and mary must have suffered with and for him, especially when her father, for whom he did so much, treated him with haughty severity by way of thanks. mary attributed godwin's conduct to the influence of his wife, whom she cordially disliked at this time. she was loth to recognise inconsistency in her father, whom she always revered. godwin on his side was by no means anxious for his daughter and shelley to leave for italy in a few weeks' time, as intimated to him by shelley as possible on the th february. we thus see that a trip to the continent was contemplated some months prior to the journey to geneva. this idea arose after the birth of mary's first son, william, born january , , who was destined to be only for a few short years the joy of his parents, and then to rest in rome, where shelley was not long in following him. it is evident from godwin's diary that claire must have been on a visit or in direct communication with mary at the beginning of january, as godwin notes "write to p.b.s. inviting jane"; and it does not seem to have been possible for shelley and mary to have borne resentment. the facts of this meeting early in the year, and that mary and shelley contemplated another of their restless journeys abroad, certainly take off from the abruptness of their departure for geneva in may with claire claremout. undoubtedly shelley was in a worried and excited state at this period, and he acted so as to rouse the doubts of peacock as to the reason of the hurried journey. the story of williams of tremadock suddenly appearing at bishopsgate, to warn shelley that his father and uncle were engaged in a plot to lock him up, seems without foundation. but when, in addition to this story, we consider claire's history, we can well understand that, in spite of shelley's love of sincerity and truth, circumstances were too strong for him. at a time when he and mary were being avoided by society for openly defying its laws, they might well reflect whether they could afford to avow the new complication which had sprung up in their small circle. claire, in hopes of finding some theatrical engagement, had called upon lord byron at drury lane theatre, apparently about march , during the distressing period of his rupture with his wife. the result of this acquaintance is too well known, and has been too much a source of obloquy to all concerned in it, to need much comment here, and it is only as the facts affect mary that we need refer to them at all. at this time byron was about to leave england, pursued, justly or unjustly, by the hatred of the british mob for a poet who dared to quarrel with his wife and follow the low manners of some of the leaders of fashion whom he had been intimate with. their obscurity has sheltered _them_ from opprobrium. he was accompanied by the young physician, dr. john polidori, who has somehow passed with byron's readers as a fool; yet he certainly could have been no fool in the ordinary sense of the word, as he had taken full degrees as a doctor at an earlier age perhaps than had ever been known before. his family, a simple and highly educated family (his father was italian, and had been secretary to alfieri), caring very much for poetry and intellectual intercourse, were delighted at the prospect of the young physician having such an opening to his career, as his sister, the mother of poets, has told the writer. it is true that this exciting short period with byron must have had an injurious effect on the young physician's after career, though he was still able to obtain the deep interest of harriet martineau at norwich. it might be added that his nephew, not only a poet but a leader in poetic thought, deeply resented the insulting terms in which byron wrote of polidori, and, although h deeply admired the genius of byron, did not fail to note where any weakness of form could be found in his work--such is human nature, and so is poetic justice meted out. this might appear to be a slight digression from our subject, if it were not for the fact that when mary wrote _frankenstein_ at sécheron, as one of the tales of horror that were projected by the assembled party, it was only john polidori's story of _the vampire_ which was completed along with mary's _frankenstein_, _the vampire_, published anonymously, was at first extolled everywhere under the idea that it was byron's, and when this idea was found to be a mistake the tale was slighted in proportion, and its author with it. the fact is that as an imaginative tale of horror _the vampire_ holds its place beside mary's _frankenstein_, though not so fully developed as a literary performance or as an invention. so on the eve of byron's starting for switzerland, we find shelley and mary contemplating a journey with claire in the same direction by another route, but to the same place and hotel, previously settled on and engaged by byron. it certainly might appear that shelley and mary in this dilemma did not feel justified in acting towards another in a way contrary to their own conduct in life. in all probability claire confided her belief in byron's attachment to herseif, after his wife had discarded him, to mary or even to shelley. mary, however distasteful the subject must have been to her, would not perhaps allow herself to stand in the way of what, from her own experience, might appear to be a prospect of a settlement in life for claire, especially as she must deeply have felt their responsibility in having induced or allowed her to accompany them in their own elopement. in fact, the feeling of responsibility in this most trying case might, to a highly imaginative mind, almost conjure up the invention of a frankenstein. we now (may , ) find shelley, mary, and claire at dover, again on a journey to switzerland. from dover shelley wrote a kind letter to godwin, explaining money matters, and promising to do all he could to help him. they pass by paris, then by troyes, dijon, and dôle, through the jura range. this time is graphically described by shelley in letters appended to the _six weeks' tour_; the journey and the eight days' excursion in switzerland. we read of the terrific changes of nature, the thunderstorms, one of which was more imposing than all the others, lighting up lake and pine forests with the most vivid brilliancy, and then nothing but blackness with rolling thunder. these letters are addressed to peacock, but in them we have no reference to the intimacy with byron now being carried on; how he arrived at the hotel sécheron, nor their removal to the maison chapuis to avoid the inquisitive english. there is, fortunately, no further reason to refer to the rumours which scandal-mongers promulgated--rumours which undoubtedly hastened the rupture between byron and claire; although evil rumours, like fire smouldering in a hold, are difficult to extinguish, and, as mr. jeaffreson shows, the slanders of this time were afterwards a trouble to shelley at ravenna, in , when his wife had to take his part. these rumours were the source of certain poems, and also, later, stories about byron. all lovers of shelley owe a debt of deep gratitude to mr. jeaffreson, who, although, severe to a fault on many of the blemishes in his character (as if he considered that poets ought to be almost superhuman in all things), nevertheless proves in so clear a way the utter groundlessness of the rumours as to relieve all future biographers from considering the subject. at the same time he shows how distasteful claire's presence must have become to byron, who was hoping for reconciliation with his wife, and who naturally construed fresh obduracy on her part as the result of reports that were becoming current. anyway, it is manifest that byron did not regard claire in the light that mary may have hoped for--namely, that he would consider her as a wife, taking the place of her who had left him. byron had no such new idea of the nature of a wife, but only accepted claire as she allowed herself to be taken, with the addition that he grew to dislike her intensely. so after shelley and byron had made their eight days' tour of the lake, from june , unaccompanied by mary and claire, we find a month later shelley taking them for an eight days' tour to chamouni, unaccompanied by byron. of this tour shelley each day writes long descriptive letters to peacock, who is looking out for a house for them somewhere in the neighbourhood of windsor. they return by july to montalègre, where he writes of the collection of seeds he has been making, and which mary intends cultivating in her garden in england. for another month these young restless beings enjoy the calm of their cottage by the lake, close to the villa diodati, while the poets breathe in poetry on all sides, and give it to the world in verse. mary notes the books they read, and their visits in the evening to diodati, where she became accustomed to the sound of byron's voice, with shelley's always the answering echo, for she was too awed and timid to speak much herself. these conversations caused her, subsequently, when hearing byron's voice, to feel a sad want for "the sound of a voice that is still." it is during this sojourn by the swiss lake that mary began her first serious attempt at literature. being asked each day by shelley whether she had found a story, she answered "no," till one evening after listening to a conversation between byron and shelley on the principle of life--whether it would be discovered, and the power of communicating life be acquired--"perhaps a corpse might be reanimated; galvanism had given tokens of such things"--she lay awake, and with the sound of the lake and the sight of the moonlight gleaming through chinks in the shutters, were blended the idea and the figure of a student engaged in the ghastly work of creating a man, until such a horror came to light that he shrank in fear from his own performance. such was the original idea for this imaginative work of a girl of nineteen, which has held its place among conspicuous works of fiction to the present day. _frankenstein_ was the outcome of the project before mentioned of writing tales of horror. one night, when pouring rain detained shelley's party at the villa diodati over a blazing fire, they told strange stories, till byron, leading to poetic ideas, recited the witch's scene from "christabel," which so excited shelley's imagination that he shrieked, and ran from the room; and polidori writes that he brought him to by throwing water in his face. upon his reviving, they agreed to write each a supernatural tale. matthew gregory lewis, the author of _the monk_, who visited at diodati, assisted them with these weird fancies. chapter vii. "frankenstein." that a work by a girl of nineteen should have held its place in romantic literature so long is no small tribute to its merit; this work, wrought under the influence of byron and shelley, and conceived after drinking in their enthralling conversation, is not unworthy of its origin. a more fantastically horrible story could scarcely be conceived; in fact, the vivid imagination, piling impossible horror upon horror, seems to claim for the book a place in the company of a poe or a hoffmann. its weakness appears to be that of placing such an idea in the annals of modern life; such a process invariably weakens these powerful imaginative ideas, and takes away from, instead of adding to, the apparent truth, and cannot fail to give an affectation to the work. true, it might add to the difficulty to imagine a different state of society, past or future, but this seems a _sine quâ non_. the story of _frankenstein_ begins with a series of letters of a young man, robert walton, writing to his sister, mrs. saville in england, from st. petersburg, where he is about to embark on a voyage in search of the north pole. he is bent on discovering the secret of the magnet, and is deluded with the hope of a _never_ absent sun. when advanced some distance towards his longed-for goal, walton writes of a most strange adventure which befalls them in the midst of the ice regions--a gigantic being, of human shape, being drawn over the ice in a sledge by dogs. not many hours after this strange sight a fresh discovery was made of another man in another sledge, with only one living dog to it: this time the man was seen to be a european, whom the sailors tried to persuade to enter their ship. on seeing walton the stranger, speaking english, asked whither they were bound before he would consent to enter the ship. this naturally caused intense excitement, as the man, reduced to a skeleton, seemed to have but a short time to live. however, on hearing that the vessel was bound northwards, he consented to enter, and with great care he was restored for the time. in answer to an inquiry as to his object in thus exposing himself, he replied, "to seek one who fled from me." an affection springs up and increases between walton and the stranger, till the latter promises to tell his sad and strange story, which he had hitherto intended should die with him. this commencement leads to the story being told in the form (which might with advantage have been avoided) of a long narrative by the dying man. the stranger describes himself as of a genevese family of high distinction, and gives an interesting account of his father and juvenile surroundings, including a playfellow, elizabeth lavenga, whom we encounter much later in his history. all his studies are pursued with zest, till coming upon the works of cornelius agrippa he is led with enthusiasm into the ideas of experimental philosophy; a passing remark of "trash" from his father, who does not explain the difference between past and modern science, is not enough to deter him and prevent the fatal consequence of the study he persists in, and thus a pupil of albertus magnus appears in the eighteenth century. the effects of a thunderstorm, described from those mary had recently witnessed, decided him in his resolution, for electricity now was the aim of his research. after having passed his youth in his happy swiss home with his parents and dear friends, on the death of his loved mother he starts for the university of ingolstadt. here he is much reprehended by the professors for his useless studies, until one, a mr. waldeman, sympathises with him, and explains how cornelius agrippa and others, although their studies did not bring the immediate fruit they expected, nevertheless helped on science in other directions, and he advises frankenstein to pursue his studies in natural philosophy, including mathematics. the upshot of this advice is that two years are spent in intense study and thought, till he becomes thin and haggard in appearance. he is contemplating a visit to his home, when, making some fresh experiment, he finds that he has discovered the principle of life; this so overcomes him for a time that, oblivious of all else, he is bent on making use of his discovery. after much perplexing thought he determines to create a being superior to man, so that future generations shall bless him. in the first place, by the help of chemistry, he has to construct the form which is to be animated. the grave has to be ransacked in the attempt, and frankenstein describes with loathing some of the details of his work, and shows the danger of overstraining the mind in any one direction--how the virtuous become vicious, and how virtue itself, carried to excess, lapses into vice. the form is created in nervous fear and fever. frankenstein being the ideal scientist, devoid of all feeling for art (whose ideas of it, indeed, might be limited to the elevation and section of a pot), without any ideal of proportion or beauty, reaches the point where he considers nothing but the infusion of life necessary. all is ready, and in the first hour of the morning he applies his fatal discovery. breath is given, the limbs move, the eyes open, and the colossal being or monster, as he is henceforth called, becomes animated; though copied from statues, its fearful size, its terrible complexion and drawn skin, scarcely concealing arteries and muscles beneath, add to the horror of the expression. and this is the end of two years work to the horrified frankenstein. overwhelmed by disgust, he can only rush from the room, and finally falls exhausted on his bed, only to wake to find his monster grinning at him. he runs forth into the street, and here, in mary's first work, we have a reminiscence of her own infant days, when she and claire hid themselves under the sofa to hear coleridge read his poem, for the following stanza from the _ancient mariner_ might seem almost the key-note of _frankenstein_:-- like one who on a lonely road, doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round, walks on, and turns no more his head, because he knows a fearful fiend doth close behind him tread. frankenstein hurries on, but coming across his old friend henri clerval at the stage coach, he recalls to mind his father, elizabeth, his former life and friends. he returns to his rooms with his friend. reaching his door, he trembles, but opening it, finds himself delivered from his self-created fiend. his frenzy of delight being attributed to madness from overwork, clerval induces frankenstein to leave his studies, and, finally (after he had for months endured a terrible illness), to accompany him to his native village. various delays occurring, they are detained too late in the year to pass the dangerous roads on their way home. health and peace of mind returning to some degree, frankenstein is about to proceed on his journey homewards, when a letter arrives from his father with the fatal news of the mysterious death of his young brother. this event hastens still further his return, and gives a renewed gloomy turn to his mind; not only is his loved little brother dead, but the extraordinary event points to some unknown power. from this time frankenstein's life is one agony. one after another all whom he loves fall victims to the demon he has created; he is never safe from his presence; in a storm on the alps he encounters him; in the fearful murders which annihilate his family he always recognises his hand. on one occasion his creation wished to have a truce and to come to terms with his creator. this, after his most fearful treachery had caused the innocent to be sentenced as the perpetrator of his fearful deeds. on meeting frankenstein he recounts the most pathetic story of his falling away from sympathy with humanity: how, after saving the life of a girl from drowning, he is shot by a young man who rushes up and rescues her from him. he became the unknown benefactor of a family for some period of time by doing the hard work of the household while they slept. having taking refuge in a hovel adjoining a corner of their cottage, he hears their pathetic and romantic story, and also learns the language and ways of men; but on his wishing to make their acquaintance the family are so horrified at his appearance that the women faint, the men drive him off with blows, and the whole family leave a neigbourhood, the scene of such an apparition. after these experiences he retaliates, till meeting frankenstein he proposes these terms: that frankenstein shall create another being as repulsive as himself to be his companion--in fact, he desires a wife as hideous as he is. these were the conditions, and the lives of all those whom frankenstein held most dear were in the balance; he hesitated long, but finally consented. everything now had to be put aside to carry out this fearful task--his love of elizabeth, his father's entreaties that he should marry her, his hopes, his ambitions, go for nothing. to save those who remain, he must devote himself to his work. to carry out his aim he expresses a wish to visit england, and, with his friend clerval, descends the rhine, which is described with the knowledge gained in mary's own journey, and the same route is pursued which she, shelley, and claire had taken through holland, embarking for england from rotterdam, and thence reaching the thames. after passing london and oxford and various places of interest, he expresses a desire to be left for a time in solitude, and selects a remote island of the orkneys, where an uninhabited hut answers the purpose of his laboratory. here he works unmolested till his fearful task is nearly accomplished, when a fear and loathing possess his soul at the possible result of this second achievement. although the demon already created has sworn to abandon the haunts of man and to live in a desert country with his mate, what hold will there be over this second being with an individuality and will of its own? what might be the future consequences to humanity of the existence of such monsters? he forms a resolution to abandon his dreaded work, and at that moment it is confirmed by the sight of his monster grinning at him through the window of the hut in the moonlight. not a moment is lost. he tears his just completed work limb from limb. the monster disappears in rage, only to return to threaten eternal revenge on him and his; but the time of weakness is passed; better encounter any evils that may be in store, even for those he loves, than leave a curse to humanity. from that time there is no truce. clerval is murdered and frankenstein is seized as the murderer, but respited for worse fate; he is married to elizabeth, and she is strangled within a few hours. when goaded to the verge of madness by all these events, and seeing his beloved father reduced to imbecility through their misfortunes, he can make no one believe his self-accusing story; and if they did, what would it avail to pursue a being who could scale the alps, live among glaciers, and pass unfathomable seas? there is nothing left but a pursuit till death, single-handed, when one might expire and the other be appeased--onward, with a deluding sight from time to time of his avenging demon. only in sleep and dreams did frankenstein find forgetfulness of his self-imposed torture, for he lived again with those he had loved; he endured life in his pursuit by imagining his waking hours to be a horrible dream and longing for the night, when sleep should bring him life. when hopes of meeting his demon failed, some fresh trace would appear to lead him on through habited and uninhabited countries; he tracks him to the verge of the eternal ice, and even there procures a sledge from the wretched and horrified inhabitants of the last dwelling-place of men to pursue the monster, who, on a similar vehicle, had departed, to their delight. onwards, onwards, over the eternal ice they pass, the pursued and the pursuer, till consciousness is nearly lost, and frankenstein is rescued by those to whom he now narrates his history; all except his fatal scientific secret, which is to die with him shortly, for the end cannot be far off. the story is told; and the friend--for he feels the utmost sympathy with the tortures of frankenstein--can only attempt to soothe his last days or hours, for he, too, feels the end must be near; but at this crisis in frankenstein's existence the expedition cannot proceed northward, for the crew mutiny to return. frankenstein determines to proceed alone; but his strength is ebbing, and walton foresees his early death. but this is not to pass quietly, for the demon is in no mood that his creator should escape unmolested from his grasp. now the time is ripe, and, during a momentary absence, walton is startled by fearful sounds, and then, in the cabin of his dying friend, a sight to appal the bravest; for the fiend is having the death struggle with him--then all is over. some last speeches of the demon to walton are explanatory of his deed, and of his present intention of self-immolation, as he has now slaked his thirst to wreak vengeance for his existence. then he disappears over the ice to accomplish this last task. surely there is enough weird imagination for the subject. mary in this work not merely intended to depict the horror of such a monster, but she evidently wished also to show what a being, with no naturally bad propensities, might sink to when under the influence of a false position--the education of rousseau's natural man not being here possible. some weak points, some incongruities, it would be unreasonable not to expect. whether the _eternal_ light expected at the north pole, if of the sun, was a misapprehension of the author or a shelleyan application of the word eternal (as applied by him to certain friendships, or duration of residence in houses) may be questioned. the question as to the form used for the narrative has already been referred to. the difficulty of such a method is strangely exemplified in the long letters which are quoted by frankenstein to his friend while dying, and which he could not have carried with him on his deadly pursuit. mary's facility in writing was great, and having visited some of the most interesting places in the world, with some of the most interesting people, she is saved from the dreary dulness of the dull. her ideas, also, though sometimes affected, are genuine, not the outcome of some fashionable foible to please a passing faith or superstition, which ought never to be the _raison d'etre_ of a romance, though it may be of a satire or a sermon. the last passage in the book is perhaps the weakest. it is scarcely the climax, but an anticlimax. the end of frankenstein is well conceived, but that of the demon fails. it is ridiculous to conceive anyone, demon or human, having ended his vengeance, fleeing over the ice to burn himself on a funeral pyre where no fuel could be found. surely the tortures of the lowest pit of dante's inferno might have sufficed for the occasion. the youth of the authoress of this remarkable romance has raised comparison between it and the first work of a still younger romancist, the author of _gabriel denver_, written at seventeen, who died before he had completed his twentieth year. while this romance was being planned during the latter part of the stay of the shelley party in switzerland, after their return from chamouni, the diary gives us a charming idea of their life in their cottage of montalègre. we have the books they read, as usual; and well did mary, no less than shelley, make use of that happy reading-time of life--youth. the latin authors read by shelley were also studied by mary. we find her reading "quintus curtius," ten and twelve pages at a time; also on shelley's birthday, august , she reads him the fourth book of virgil, while in a boat with him on the lake. also the fire-balloon is not forgotten, which mary had made two or three days in advance for the occasion. they used generally to visit diodati in the evening, after dinner, though occasionally shelley dined with byron, and accompanied him in his boat. on one occasion mary wrote: "shelley and claire go up to diodati; i do not, for lord byron did not seem to wish it." rousseau, voltaire, and other authors cause the time to fly, until their spirits are damped by a letter arriving from shelley's solicitor, requiring his return to england. while in switzerland mary received some letters from fanny, her half-sister; these letters are interesting, showing a sweet, gentle disposition, very affectionate to both shelley and mary. one letter asks mary questions about lord byron. there are also details as to the unfortunate state of the finances of godwin, who seemed in a perennial state of needing three hundred pounds. fanny also writes of herself, on july , , as not being well--being in a state of mind which always keeps her body in a fever--her lonely life, after her sister's departure, with all the money anxieties, and her own dependence, evidently weighed upon her mind, and led to a state of despondency, although her letters would scarcely give the idea of a tragedy being imminent. she writes to shelley and mary that mrs. godwin--mamma she calls her--tells her that she is the laughing-stock of mary and shelley, and the constant "beacon of their satire." she shows much affection for little william, as well as for his parents; but there is certainly no word in these letters showing more than sisterly and friendly feeling; no word showing jealousy or envy. claire afterwards alleged that fanny had been in love with shelley. mr. kegan paul states the reverse most strongly. it is not easy to conceive how either should have been sure of the fact. even shelley's beautiful verses to her memory do not indicate any special reason for her sadness, as far as he was concerned. her voice did quiver as we parted, yet knew i not that heart was broken from which it came, and i departed, heeding not the words then spoken. misery--oh misery! this world is all too wide for thee. from these lines we see that fanny was in a very depressed state of mind when her sister left england for her second continental tour in . this being two years from the time when mary had first left her home, it does not seem probable that shelley was to blame, or rather was the indirect cause of fanny's sadness. she felt herself generally useless and unneeded in the world, and this idea weighed her down. chapter viii. return to england. on leaving the lake of geneva on august , without having accomplished anything in the way of a settlement for claire, but with pleasant reminiscences of rousseau's surroundings, and the grandeur of the alps, the party of three returned towards england by way of dijon, and thence by a different route from that by which they had gone, returning by rouvray, auxerre, fontainebleau, and versailles. here mary and shelley visited the palace and town, which a few years hence she would revisit under far different circumstances. travelling--in those days so very unlike what it is in ours, when europe can be crossed without being examined--allowed them to become acquainted with the towns they passed through. rouen was visited; but for some reason they were disappointed with the cathedral. prom havre they sailed for portsmouth, when, with their usual fate, they encountered a stormy passage of twenty-seven hours. it must have been a trying journey for them in more ways than one, for if there was any uncertainty as to claire's position on leaving england, mary could now no longer have been in any doubt. on arriving in england she proceeded, with claire and her little william, with his swiss nurse elise, to bath, where claire passed as mrs. clairemont. shelley addressed her as such at abbey churchyard, bath. during this time shelley was again house-hunting, while staying with peacock on the banks of the thames; and mary paid a visit to peacock at the same time, leaving little william to the care of elise and claire at bath. from here claire writes to mary about the "itty babe's" baby ways, and how she and elise puzzled and puzzled over the little night-gowns, or, quoting albè, as they called byron (it has been suggested a condensation of l. b.), "they mused and coddled" without effect. claire certainly did her best to take care of the baby, walking out with it, and so forth. now the three hundred pounds written of by fanny was falling due. mary must also have been kept in great apprehension, as we see by a letter from shelley to godwin, dated october , , that the money was not forthcoming, as hoped. so the fatal rhine gold is again helping to a tragedy, which the romantic prefer to impute to a still more fatal cause; for, so short a time after the nd as october , we find fanny already at bristol, writing to godwin that she is about to depart immediately to the place whence she hopes never to return. on october there is a long letter from her to mary, written just after shelley's letter had reached godwin, when she had read its contents on godwin's countenance as he perused it. her letter is most clear-sighted, noble, and single-minded; she complains of mary's way of exaggerating mrs. godwin's resentment to herself, explaining that whatever mrs. godwin may say in moments of extreme irritation to her, she is quite incapable of making the worst of mary's behaviour to others. she shows mary her own carelessness in leaving letters about for the servants to read, so that they and harriet spread the reports she complains of rather than mrs. godwin. she tells how she had tried to convince shelley that he should only keep french servants, and she endeavours to persuade mary how important it is that they should prevent bad news coming to godwin in a way to give a sudden shock, as he is so sensitive. she saw through certain subterfuges of shelley, and wrote in a calm, affectionate way, trying to set everything right, with a wonderful clearness of vision; for everyone but herself--for herself there was no outlet but despair, no rest but the grave; she, the utterly unselfish one, was useless--all that remained was to smooth her way to the grave. not for herself, but others, she managed to die where she was unknown, travelling for this purpose to swansea, where only a few shillings remained to her, and a little watch mary had brought her from geneva. she wrote of herself in a letter she left, which neither compromised anyone nor indicated who she was, as one whose birth was unfortunate, but whose existence would soon be forgotten. poor fanny! is she not rather likely to be remembered as a type of self-abnegation? certainly hers was not the nature to cause her sister a moment's jealous pang, even though her death called forth one of shelley's sweetest lyrics. there was nothing to be done. godwin paid a brief visit to the scene, and ascertained that all was too true. the door that had had to be forced, the laudanum bottle, and her letter told all that need be known. shelley visited bristol to obtain information; but there was no use in giving publicity to this fresh family sorrow--discretion was the only sympathy that could be shown. mary bought mourning, and worked at it. claire envied for herself fanny's rest; but life had to proceed, awaiting fresh events. work was the great resource. mary was writing her _frankenstein_. she persisted with the utmost fortitude in intellectual employment, as poor fanny wrote to mary on september :--"i cannot help envying your calm, contented disposition, and the calm philosophical habits of life which pursue yon; or, rather, which you pursue everywhere; i allude to your description of the manner in which you pass your days at bath, when most women would hardly have recovered from the fatigues of such a journey as you had been taking." this is, indeed, the key-note of mary's character, which, with her sensitive, retiring nature, enabled her to live through the stormy times of her life with equanimity. mary had shelley's company through november, but at the beginning of december she writes to shelley, who is again staying with peacock house-hunting. mary tells him what she would _like_: "a house (with a lawn) near a river or lake, noble trees, or divine mountains"; but she would be content if shelley would give her "a garden and absentia claire." this is very different from her way of thinking of fanny, who, she says, might now have had a home with her. this expression occurs in a letter to shelley when she was on the point of marrying him, and might have had fanny with her. mary also speaks of her drawing lessons, and how (thank god!) she had finished "that tedious, ugly picture" she had been so long about. this points to that terrible way of teaching art, by accustoming its students to hideousness and vulgarity, till art itself might become an unknown quantity. mary also tells, what is more interesting, that she has finished the fourth chapter, a very long one, of her _frankenstein_, which she thinks shelley will like. she wishes for his return. on december mary receives a letter from shelley, who is with leigh hunt. on december , , he is back with mary at bath, when a letter from hookham, who had been requested by shelley to obtain information about harriet for him, brought further fatal news--for harriet had now committed suicide, and had been found drowned in the serpentine. unknown, she was called harriet smith; uncared for, she had gone to her grave beneath the water--unloved, the lovely harriet cared not to live. what may have happened, it is not for those who may not have been tried to question; of cause and effect it is not for us to judge; but that her memory must have been a haunting shadow to shelley and to mary no one would wish to think them heartless enough to deny. surely the lovely "lines," with no name affixed, must be the dirge to harriet's fate, and shelley's life's failure:-- the cold earth slept below; above, the cold sky shone; and all around with a chilling sound, from caves of ice and fields of snow, the breath of night like death did flow beneath the sinking moon. the wintry hedge was black; the green grass was not seen; the birds did rest on the bare thorn's breast, whose roots, beside the pathway-track, had bound their folds o'er many a crack which the frost had made between. thine eyes glowed in the glare of the moon's dying light. as a fen-fire's beam on a sluggish stream gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; and it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, that shook in the wind of night. the moon made thy lips pale, beloved; the wind made thy bosom chill: the night did shed on thy dear head its frozen dew, and thou didst lie where the bitter breath of the naked sky might visit thee at will. these lines are dated by mary in her edition, but she says she cannot answer for the accuracy of all the dates of minor poems. the death of harriet was necessarily quickly followed by the marriage of shelley and mary. the most sound opinions were ascertained as to the desirability of an early marriage, or of postponing the ceremony for a year after the death of harriet; all agreed that the wedding ought to take place without delay, and it was fixed for december , , at st. mildred's church in the city, where godwin and his wife were present, to their no little satisfaction, as described by shelley to claire. mary notes her marriage thus in her diary: "i have omitted writing my journal for some time. shelley goes to london, and returns; i go with him; spend the time between leigh hunt's and godwin's. a marriage takes place on the th december . draw. read lord chesterfield and locke." no sooner was the marriage over than their one anxiety was to return to bath; for now the time of claire's trial was approaching, and on january a little girl was born, not destined to remain long in a world so sad for some. little allegra, a child of rare beauty, was welcomed by shelley and mary with all the benevolence they were capable of, and byron's duty to his child devolved, for the time at least, on shelley. during this period, shelley's and mary's chief anxiety was to welcome and care for the little children left by poor harriet. they had been placed, before her death, under the care of a clergyman who kept a school in warwick, the rev. john kendall, vicar of budbrooke. shelley had hoped that his marriage with mary would remove all difficulty, and mary was waiting to welcome ianthe and charles; but in this matter they were doomed to disappointment. on january a bill was filed in the court of chancery, on the part of the infants charles and ianthe shelley, john westbrook, their maternal grandfather, acting on their behalf, praying that they might not be transferred to the care of their father, percy bysshe shelley, who had deserted their mother; who was the author of _queen mab_, and an avowed atheist, who wrote against the institution of marriage, and who had been living unlawfully with a woman whom eliza westbrook (as shelley had written to her) might excusably regard as the cause of her sister's ruin. shelley filed his answer on the th, denying the desertion of his wife, as she and he had separated with mutual consent, owing to various causes. he had wished for his children on parting with her, but left them with her at her urgent entreaty. he had given her two hundred pounds to pay her debts, and an allowance of a fifth of his income. as to his theological opinions, he understands that they are abandoned as not applicable to the case. his views on matrimony, he alleged, were only in accordance with the ideas of some of the greatest thinkers that divorce ought to be possible under various conditions. lord eldon gave his judgment on march , . in fifteen carefully worded paragraphs he showed his reasons for depriving shelley of his children. he insists through all that it is shelley's avowed and published opinions, as they affected his _conduct_ in life, which unfitted him to be the guardian of his children. the wording in some passages caused grave anxiety to shelley and mary (as shown in their letters) as to whether they would be deprived of their own children; and they were prepared to abandon everything, property, country, all, and to escape with the infants. the poem "to william" was written under this misapprehension, although when he left england in , shelley's chief reason, as given in his letter to godwin, was on account of his health. undoubtedly the judgment, and all the trying circumstances they had been passing through ever since their return from geneva, helped to decide them in this determination. charles and ianthe were finally placed under the care of dr. and mrs. hume, who were to receive two hundred pounds a year--eighty pounds settled on them by westbrook, and one hundred and twenty pounds to be paid by shelley for the charge. shelley might see them twelve times a year in the presence of the humes, the westbrooks twelve times alone, and sir timothy and his family when they chose. while these proceedings were progressing, mary with claire and the two children had moved to marlow, having previously joined shelley in london on january , as she feared to leave him in his depressed state alone. the intellectual society they met at hunt's and at godwin's helped to pass over this trying period. one evening mary saw together the "three poets"--hunt, shelley, and keats; keats not being much drawn towards shelley, while hazlitt, who was also present, was unfavourably impressed by his worn and sickly appearance, induced by the terrible anxieties and trials which be had recently passed through. horace smith also proved a staunch friend: shelley once remarked it was odd that the only truly generous wealthy person he ever met should be a stockbroker, and that he should write and care for poetry, and yet make money. in the midst of her anxieties, mary shelley enjoyed more social intercourse and amusement than before. we find her noting in her diary, in february, dining with the hunts and horace smith, going to the opera of _figaro_, music, &c. but now they had found their marlow retreat--a house with a garden as mary desired, not with a river view, but a shady little orchard, a kitchen garden, yews, cypresses, and a cedar tree. here mary was able to live unsaddened for a time; the swiss nurse for the children, a cook and man-servant, sufficed for in-door and out-door work, and mary, true to her name, was able to occupy herself with spiritual and intellectual employment, not to the neglect of domestic, as the succession of visitors entertained must prove; study, drawing, and her beloved work of _frankenstein_ were making rapid progress. nor could mary have been indifferent to the woes of the poor, for shelley would scarcely have been so actively benevolent as recorded during the residence at marlow without the co-operation of his wife. while shelley enquired into cases of distress and gave written orders for money, mary dispensed the latter. here godwin paid them his first visit, and the hunts passed a pleasant time. shelley wrote his _revolt of islam_ under the bisham beeches, and mary had the pleasure of welcoming her old friend mr. baxter, of dundee, although his daughter isabel, married to mr. booth, still held aloof. peacock, horace smith, and hogg were also among the guests. we find constant references to godwin having been irritated and querulous with mary or shelley. a forced, unnatural, equanimity during one period of his life seems to have resulted in a querulous irritability later--a not unusual case--and he had to vent it on those who loved and revered him most, or in fact, on those who would alone endure it from amiability of disposition, a quality not remarkable in his second wife. on may we find mary has finished and corrected her _frankenstein_, and she decides to go to london and stay with her father while carrying on the negotiations with murray whom she wishes to publish it. shelley accompanies mary for a few days at godwin's invitation, but returns to look after "blue eyes," to whom he is charged with a million kisses from mary. but mary returns speedily to shelley and "blue eyes," having felt very restless while absent. she soon falls into a plan of shelley's for partially adopting a little polly who frequently spent the day or slept in their house, and mary would find time to tell her before she went to bed whatever she or shelley had been reading that day, always asking her what she thought of it. mary, who was expecting another child in the autumn, was not long idle after the completion of _frankenstein_, but set to work copying and revising her _six weeks' tour_. this work, begun in august, she completed after the birth of her baby clara on september . in october the book was bought and published by hookham. she tells, in her notes on this year , how she felt the illness and sorrows which shelley passed through had widened his intellect, and how it was the source of some of his noblest poems, but that he had lost his early dreams of changing the world by an idea, or, at least, he no longer expected to see the result. a letter from mary to her husband, written soon after the birth of her baby, shows how anxious she was at that time about his health. it had been a positive pain to her to see him languid and ill, and she counselled him obtaining the best advice. change being recommended by the physician, mary has to decide between going to the seaside or italy. with all the reasons for and against italy, mary asks shelley to let her know distinctly his wish in the matter, as she can be well anywhere. one strong reason for their going to italy is that alba, as allegra was then called, should join her father. evidently the embarrassment was too great to settle how to account for the poor child longer in england; and had not she a just claim upon byron? in another letter, september , mary speaks of claire's return to marlow in a croaking state--everything wrong; harriet's debts enormous. she had just been out for her first walk after the birth of clara, and was surprised to find how much warmer it was out than in. shelley is commissioned to buy a seal-skin fur hat for willy, and to take care that it is a round fashionable shape for a boy. she is surrounded by babies while writing--william, alba, and little clara. her love is to be given to godwin when mrs. godwin is not there, as she does not love her. _frankenstein_ is still undisposed of. the house at marlow is soon found to be far too cold for a winter residence. italy or the sea must speedily be settled on. alba is the great consideration in favour of italy, mary feels she will not be safe except with them; byron is so difficult to fix in any way, and the one hope seems to be to get him to provide for the child. anxiety for alba's future ruled their present, so impossible is it to foretell the future, which, read and judged as our past, is easy to be severe upon. this dream of health and rest in italy was not to be so easily realised. instead of being there, they were still dispensing charity at marlow at the end of december, in spite of various negotiations for money in october and november. horace smith had lent two hundred pounds, and, shelley thought, would lend more. mary continued extremely anxious on alba's account. if she could only be got to her father! who could tell how he might change his mind if there be much delay? might he not "change his mind, or go to greece, or to the devil; and then what happens?" the lawyers' delays were heavy trials, and they could not go and leave godwin unprovided for; he was a great anxiety to mary at this time. it was not till december that shelley wrote to tell godwin how he felt bound to go to italy, as he had been informed that he was in a consumption. owing to a visit of mr. baxter to them at marlow, when he wrote a most enthusiastic letter about shelley and mary to his daughter isabel booth, mary had hoped for a renewal of the friendship which had afforded her so much pleasure as a girl, and she invited isabel to accompany them to italy; but this mr. booth would not allow, and, in fact, he appears to have treated his father-in-law, mr. baxter, who was six years younger than himself, with much severity, and wished him to stop all intimacy with shelley. he did not, however, prevent him having a friendly parting with shelley on march , although he would not allow his wife to have any communication with mary--much to their sorrow. mary was in constant anxiety about shelley in the last months of , writing of his suffering and the distress she feels in seeing him in such pain and looking so ill. in january , the month before they left marlow, his sufferings became very great. but two thousand pounds being borrowed on the promise of four thousand five hundred pounds on his father's death, and the house at marlow being sold on january th, we find the packing and flitting taking place soon after. by february , shelley leaves for london, and on tuesday th mary follows. godwin, as usual now, had been beseeching for money, and then, feeling his dignity wounded by the effort, retaliated on the giver with haughtiness and insulting demands. in a biography, unfortunately, characters cannot always be made the consistent beings they frequently become in romances. one more happy month mary is to pass in england with shelley. we, again, have accounts of visits to the opera, to museums, plays, dinners, and pleasant evenings spent with friends. keats is again met, and shelley calls on mr. baxter, who is not allowed by his son-in-law to say farewell to mary shelley: such a martinet may a scotch schoolmaster be. mary lamb calls, and visits are paid and received till the last evening arrives, when shelley, exhausted with ill-health, fatigue, and excitement, fell into one of his profound sleeps on the sofa before some of his friends left the lodgings in great russell street, and thus the hunts were unable to exchange with him their farewells. this small band of literary friends were all to bid shelley and mary farewell on his last few days in england. the contrast is indeed marked between that time and this, when shelley societies are found in various parts of the world, when enthusiasts write from the most remote regions and form friendships in his name, when, churches, including westminster abbey, have rung in praise of his ideal yearnings, and when, not least, some have certainly tried to lead pure unselfish lives in memory of the godlike part of the man in him; but he now left his native shores, never to return, with claire and allegra, and his own two little children, and certainly a true wife willing to follow him through weal or woe. chapter ix. life in italy. a third time, on march , , shelley, mary, and claire are on the road to dover, this time with three young lives to care for--willie, aged two years and two months; clara, six months; and allegra, one year and two months. these small beings kept well during their journey, and it is touching to note how claire clairmont, in her part of the diary recording their progress, mentions bathing her darling at dover, and then cancels the passage from her diary, as many others where her name is given--surely one of the saddest of things for a mother to fear to mention her child's name! after another stormy passage the party again reached calais, which they found as delightful as ever, and where they stayed at the grand cerf hotel. mary continues to note the journey. they took a different route this time--by douai, la fère, rheims, berri-le-bac, and st. dizier, the road winding by the marne. they sleep at langres, which ramparted town surely ought to have left a pleasant reminiscence; but they had hitherto found the route uninteresting and fatiguing. mary finds more interest in the country after langres, and with the help of schlegel, from whom shelley read out loud to her, the time passed pleasantly; no long weary evenings in hotels; no complaints when a carriage broke down and they were kept three hours at macon for it to be repaired: they had with them the friends of whom they never tired. at lyons they rested three days. mary much admired the city, and they visited the theatre, where they saw _l'homme gris et le physionomiste_; and on wednesday, march , they set out towards the mountains whose white tops were seen at a distance. in crossing the frontier there was a difficulty in getting their books allowed to enter sardinian territory, until a canon, who had met shelley's father at the duke of norfolk's, helped to get them through. after leaving chambéry, where mary stayed to allow her nurse elise to see her child, they crossed mont cenis and dined on the top. the beauty of the scenery greatly raised shelley's spirits, causing him to sing with exultation. they stayed one night at turin, visiting the opera; and after reaching milan, shelley and mary went to lake como for a few days, having some idea of spending the summer on its banks; but not being able to suit themselves with a house they returned to milan on april and rejoined claire, who had remained with the children. during the stay at milan till the end of april there had been frequent letters from claire to byron. these were evidently far from satisfactory, as we find shelley writing letters of caution to claire in , with regard to byron and allegra: he mentions having warned her against letting byron get possession of allegra in the spring of , but claire thought it for the interest of the child, whom she undoubtedly loved, to let her go to her father. walks in the public gardens with the "chicks" are noted by claire several times, and the last entry in her diary, before april , when allegra was taken by the nurse elise to byron, mentions a walk with the "chicks" in the morning and drive in the evening with them, mary and shelley. mary had sent her own trusted nurse elise with the little allegra, feeling that she would remain and in some degree replace the mother; and claire believed that the child would stay with its father, though certainly this did not seem desirable or likely to last for long. a change of scene being needed after these trying emotions, mary, with her husband and two children, and claire, now left for pisa and leghorn. they slept on the way at piacenza, parma, modena, and then passed a night at a little inn among the apennines, the fifth at barberino, the sixth at la scala, and on the seventh reached pisa, where they lodged at le tre donzelle. on this journey mary was able to enjoy the italian scenery under the unclouded italian sky--the vine-festooned trees amid the fields of corn, the hedges full of flowers; all these seen from the carriage convey a lasting impression, and poor claire remarks that, driving in a long, straight road, she always hopes it will take her to some place where she will be happier. they pass through beautiful chestnut woods on the southern side of the apennines, and along the fertile banks of the arno to pisa. after a few days' stay at pisa, where the cathedral, "loaded with pictures and ornaments," and the leaning tower are visited, and where, perhaps, the quiet campo santo, with its chapel covered with the beautiful frescos of orcagna and gozzoli, &c., was enjoyed, they proceed to leghorn; here, after a few days at l'aquila nera, they move into apartments. they meet and see much of mary's mother's friend, mrs. gisborne, who grew much attached to both shelley and mary, and who, from her acquaintance with literary people, must have been a pleasant companion to them. they had letters of introduction to the gisbornes from godwin. while here mary made progress with italian, reading ariosto with her husband. leghorn was not a sufficiently interesting place to detain the wandering shelleys long, in spite of the attractions of the gisbornes. on june mary, with her two children and claire, follows shelley to bagni di lucca, where he had taken a house. here mary much enjoyed the quiet after noisy leghorn, as she wrote to mrs. gisborne, hoping to attract her to visit them. mary was in her element in shady woods within the sound of running waters; her only annoyance was the number of english she came in contact with in her walks, where the english nursery-maid flourished, "a kind of animal i by no means like" she wrote; neither was she pleased by "the dashing, staring englishwomen, who surprise the italians (who always are carried about in sedan chairs) by riding on horseback." mary and claire used to visit the casino with shelley, and look on at the dancing in which they did not join. mary, however, did not agree with shelley in admiring the italian style of dancing; but those things on which they were ever of the same mind they had in plenty, for their beloved books arrived after being scrutinised by the church authority; and while shelley revelled in the delights of greek literature, mary shared those of english with him, for who can estimate the advantage of hearing shakespeare and other poets read by shelley! it was at the baths of lucca also that mary found her husband's unfinished _rosalind and helen_, and prevailed on him to complete it, for, as she says in her notes, "shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind and develop some high or abstruse truth." without doubt, mary was the ideal wife for shelley. at this stage in the career of the poet one can but deplore that relentless destiny should only bring mary to shelley when a victim had already been sacrificed on the altar of fate; and the more one realises the sympathetic and intellectual nature of claire, the less possible is it to help wasting a regret that byron could not have met with the philosopher bookseller's adopted daughter earlier, instead of ruining his nature and his life by the fashionable follies he tampered with. but who would alter the workings of destiny? does not the finest lacryma christi grow on the once devastated slopes of vesuvius? life, too, has its earthquakes, and the eruptions of its hidden depths seen through the minds of its poets, though causing at times agony to those who come in contact with them, work surely for the good of the whole. mary had the years of pleasure, which are inestimable to those who can appreciate them, of contact with a great mind; but few among poets' wives have had the gifts which allow them fully to participate in such pleasures. well for mary that she also inherited much of her father's philosophic nature, which enabled her to endure some of the trials inherent in her position. what shelley wrote mary would transcribe--no mere task for her--for did she not, through shelley, enjoy plato's _symposium_, a translation of which he was employed upon at lucca? how could the fashionable idlers at the baths find time to drink in inspiration from the poet and his wife? the poet gives the depths of his nature, but it is not he who writes with the fever or the tear of emotion who can stoop to be his own interpreter to the uninitiated, which seems to be a necessity of modern times, with few exceptions. mary's education, defective though it may have been in some details, made her a fitting companion for some of the greatest of her day, and this quality in a woman could scarcely exist without a refinement of manner and tastes which, at times, might be misleading as to her disposition. the spirit of wandering now came over claire, and by the middle of august her desire to see her child again could no longer be suppressed. accordingly she set out with shelley on august , and reached florence the next day, when shelley wrote to mary the impression the lovely city made on him, begging her, at the same time, not to let little william forget him before his return--little clara could not remember. claire thought at one time of remaining at padua, but on reaching that city could not endure being left alone, and they reached venice in the middle of the night, during a violent storm, which shelley did not fail to write an account of to his wife. he also told her how the hoppners, whom they called on (mr. hoppner being the british consul in venice), advised them to act with regard to byron. by their advice shelley called alone on him, and byron proposed to send allegra to padua for a week on a visit; he would not like her to remain longer, as the venetians would think he had grown tired of her. he afterwards offered them his villa at este, thinking they were all at padua. shelley accepted this proposal, and wrote requesting mary to join him there with the children, not knowing whether he was acting for good or harm, but looking forward to be scolded if he had done wrong, or kissed if right--the event would prove. the event did prove; but it was out of their power to rule it. mary had invited the gisbornes to stay with her at the baths. they arrived on august , but the circumstances seemed imperative for mary to go to este, and she left on the st with a servant, paolo, as attendant. they were detained a day at florence, and did not reach este till poor little clara was dangerously ill from dysentery, which reduced her to a state of fever and weakness. mary endured the misery of an incompetent doctor at este; neither had they confidence in the paduan physician. shelley proceeded to venice to obtain further advice, and prepare for the arrival of his wife and child, writing from there that he felt somewhat uneasy, but trusted there was no cause for real anxiety. this arrangement made, mary set out with her baby and claire to meet shelley at padua, and then proceeded to venice, claire returning to mind william and allegra at este; and now mary had to endure that terrible tension of mind, with her dying child in her arms, driving to venice, the time remembered by her so well when, on the same route, nearly a quarter of a century later, each turn in the road and the very trees seemed as the most familiar objects of her daily life; for had they not been impressed on her mental vision by the strength of despair? the austrian soldiers at the frontier could not detain them, though without passports, for even they would not prevent a dying child from being conveyed on a forlorn hope. such grief could scarcely be rendered more or less acute by circumstances. they arrived at their inn in a gondola, but only for clara to die in her mother's arms within an hour. in this trial the hoppners proved most kind friends, taking mary to their house, and relieving the first hopelessness of grief by kindness, which it seemed ingratitude not to respond to. mary, whatever she may have felt, knew that no expression of her feelings in her diary would nerve her to endure. she went about her daily occupations as usual. one idle day elapsed, after her little clara had been buried on the lido; we find her as usual reading, shopping, and seeing byron, with whom she hoped to make better terms for claire with regard to allegra. there is a curious passage in a letter from godwin to his daughter, illustrative of his own turn of mind, and not without some general truth:--"we seldom indulge long in depression and mourning except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it, and that it does us honour." on september , shelley and mary return to este. claire had taken the children to padua, but returned the next day to the villa i cappuccini. in the evening they went to the opera. their house was most beautifully situated. here shelley wrote his "lines among the euganean hills," for no intense feeling could come to the poet without the necessity of expressing himself in poetry; and it was during this september month that shelley wrote the first act of his _prometheus unbound_. mary revisited venice with her husband, little william, and the nurse elise, on october . the impression then formed of byron and his surroundings was so painful as to render it a matter of surprise that they could think of returning allegra to him; but her extreme youth was her safeguard in this respect, and shelley returned to este on september , to take allegra a second time from her mother who, with all her love for her "darling," as she always wrote of her in the effaced passages of her diary, could not get over the insuperable difficulties of her birth. on january of this same year claire had entered in her diary the fact of its being byron's (albé's) birthday; a note carefully effaced soon after. shelley and mary having decided to spend the winter further south, after a few days of preparation they left este on november , and spent the night at ferrara, where they visited the relics of ariosto and tasso, and the dungeon where the latter was incarcerated. thence to bologna, where they endured much fatigue in the picture galleries, poor shelley being obliged to confess he did not pretend to taste. from bologna, by faenza and cesena, they followed the coast from rimmi to fano, and passed an uncomfortable night at an inn at fossombrone among the apennines. mary was greatly impressed by the beauty and grandeur of spoleto. the impressive falls at terni are duly chronicled by her; and november and are spent in winding through the apennines, and then crossing the solitude of the roman campagna, and then rome is reached. in italy, where wonder succeeds wonder, and where no place is a mere repetition of another, mary may well have been impressed by her first visit to the eternal city. here, in november, she was able to sit and sketch in the coliseum with her child and her husband, who found the wonderful ruin a source of inspiration. but rome was now only a resting-place on their road to still sunnier naples; and on november shelley set out a day in advance of mary and her child to secure rooms in naples, where mary arrived on december . in the best part of the city, facing the royal gardens in front of the marvellous bay, with shelley for her guide, who himself made use of madame de staël's _corinne_ as a handbook, livy for the antiquities, and winckelmann for art, mary could enjoy the sights of naples as no ordinary sightseer would. december was devoted to expeditions--baiæ, vesuvius, and pompeii. the day at baiæ was perhaps the most delightful, with the return by moonlight in the boat to naples. vesuvius, with its stupendous spectacle as of heaven and hell made visible, naturally produced a profound impression, but it was a very tiring expedition, as apparently it was only claire who had a _chaise à porteurs_ for the ascent of the cone; mary and shelley rode on mules as far as they could go, and claire was carried all the way in a chair--though this seems scarcely possible--from resina. how mary could walk through the cinders up the cone seems incomprehensible. she must have had great strength, as it is a trying task for a man, and no wonder shelley, in spite of his pedestrian strength, was exhausted when they arrived at the hermitage of san salvador. the winter at naples seems to have been a trying one to mary, in spite of sunshine and the beauties of nature; for shelley was in a state of depression, as is exemplified in the "stanzas written in dejection near naples." what the immediate cause of this was cannot be said; it seems to be one of the mysteries, or perhaps rather the one mystery, of shelley's life. he asserted to medwin that a lady, young, married, and of noble connections, had become infatuated with him, and declared her love of him on the eve of his departure for the continent in ; that he had gently but firmly repulsed her; that she arrived in naples on the day he did, and had soon afterwards died. it is suggested that a little girl who was left under his guardianship in naples, and whom he spoke of as his poor neapolitan, might possibly be the child of this lady; others doubt the story altogether, which is not to be wondered at, although nothing can be declared impossible in a life where truth is frequently so much stranger than romance. mary was also troubled while at naples by her servants, an unusual subject with her; but paolo, having gone far beyond the limits of cheating, was detected by mary, and also obliged by her to marry elise, whom he had betrayed. they left for rome, but paolo declared he would be revenged on the shelleys, and wrote threatening letters, which a lawyer disposed of for a time. this is known to be the origin of later calumnies, which mr. jeaffreson has now carefully and finally refuted. mary, later, with the regret of love that would be all sufficient, wished that at naples she had entered more into the cause of the grief, which shelley had kept from her, in order not to add to the melancholy she was then feeling with regard to her father. before leaving naples they succeeded in visiting the greek ruins at paestum, which give still a fresh impression in italy; and then, on february , , mary takes leave of naples, never to revisit it with any of her companions of that time. in rome they found rooms in the villa parigi, but removed from them to the palazzo verospi on the corso, and we soon find them busy exploring the treasures of rome the inexhaustible. here they had not to take fatiguing journeys as in naples to visit the chief points of interest, for they were to be found at every turn. visits to st. peter's and the museum of the vatican are mentioned; walks with shelley to the forum, the capitol, and the coliseum, which is visited and re-visited. frequent visits are paid in the evening to the signora marianna dionigi, and with her they hear mass in st. peter's, where the poor old pope pius vii was nearly dying. the palazzo doria and its picture gallery are examined, where the landscapes of claude lorraine particularly strike them. then to the baths of caracalla, where the romantic beauty of the ruins forms one of their chief attractions in rome. they also take walks and drives in the borghese gardens. the statue of pompey, at the base of which cæsar fell, is not passed over--but it would be impossible to tell of all they saw and enjoyed in rome. mary made more acquaintances in rome, nor did the english altogether neglect to call on shelley. mary also recommenced lessons in drawing, while claire had singing lessons, and they met some celebrities at the signora dionigi's conversazioni. altogether this early part of their stay in rome was happy, but shelley's health always fluctuating made them contemplate taking a house for the summer at castellamare, as a doctor recommended this for him. but the days were hurrying towards a fresh calamity, for little william now fell ill, and we find the visits of a physician, dr. bell, chronicled, and on june nd three visits are noted. claire helps to her utmost; shelley does not close his eyes for sixty hours, and mary, the hopes of whose life were bound up with the child, could only endure, watch the wasting of fever, and see the last of three perish on "monday, june th, at noonday," as claire enters in her diary. mary and shelley were deprived of their gentle, blue-eyed darling, by a stronger hand than that of the court of chancery, and little william was buried where shelley was soon to follow, in the cemetery which "might make one in love with death." chapter x. mary's despondency and birth of a son. before the fatal illness of her child willie, mary had encountered an old friend in rome, and had renewed her acquaintance with miss curran whom she had formerly known at her father's. congenial tastes in drawing and painting drew these ladies together, and miss curran did or began portraits of mary, shelley, and, what was of more importance to them at the time, of little willie. the portraits of mary and of shelley, unfinished, and by an amateur, are by no means satisfactory; certainly not giving in mary's case an idea of the beauty and charm which are constantly referred to by her friends, and which seem to have endured up to the time when, much later, an attack of small-pox altered her appearance. the portrait of mary, although not artistic, is interesting as painted from life. her oval face is here given with the high forehead. the complexion described as delicate and white was not in the gift of miss curran, who was not a colourist. to depict the eyes grey, tending to brown near the iris, agrees with shelley's, "brown" and trelawny's "grey" eyes, but the beauty of expression is wanting. the mouth, thin and hard, might have caught a passing look, but certainly not what an artist would have wished to portray; while a certain stiffness of pose is not what one would expect in the high-strung, sensitive mary shelley. the beauty of gold-brown hair was not in the painter's power to catch. mary was of middle height, tending towards short; her hands were considered very beautiful, and by some she was supposed to be given to displaying them, although concealing them would have been difficult and unnecessary. her arms and neck were also beautiful. leigh hunt refers to her at the opera, _décolletée_, with white, gleaming, sloping shoulders. her "voice the sweetest ever heard," added to her gifts of conversation, described as resembling her father's with an added softness of manner and charm of description, with elegance and correctness, devoid of reserve or affectation. cyrus redding, who much admired and esteemed her, obtained her opinion about miss curran's portrait of her husband, for his article in the galignani edition of shelley. she considered it by no means a good one, as unfinished, but with some striking points of resemblance. she consented to superintend the engraving from it for galignani's volume, which was regarded as far more successful. miss curran kindly assisted with advice. while these portraits were being executed mary was gaining the sympathy of the painter, a boon soon much needed, for after the death of her third child her courage for a while broke down entirely. in a very delicate state of health at the time, she could not rouse herself to think of anything but her losses. with no other child needing her care, she could only abandon herself to inconsolable grief. shelley felt that he was out of her life for the first time; that her heart was in rome in the grave with her child. they revisited the falls of terni, but the spirit had fled from the waters. they pass through bustling leghorn, and visit the gisbornes, but the noise is intolerable, and shelley, ever attentive in such matters, finds a house at a short distance in the country, the villa valsovano, down a quiet lane surrounded by a market garden. olives, fig trees, peach trees, myrtles, alive at night with fire-flies, must have been soothing surroundings to the wounded mary, to whom nature was ever a kind friend. nor were they in solitude, for they were within visiting distance of friends at leghorn. two months after her loss she recommences her diary on shelley's birthday, this time not without a wail. she writes to mrs. hunt of the tears she constantly sheds, and confesses she has done little work since coming to italy. she had read, however, several books of livy, antenor, clarissa, some novels, the bible, lucan's pharsalia, and dante. shelley is reading her _paradise lost_, and he is writing the _cenci_, where that fair, blue-eyed boy, who was the lodestar of your life, mary tells us refers to william. shelley wrote that their house was a melancholy one, and only cheered by letters from england. on september mary wrote to her friend, miss curran, that they were about to move, she knew not whither. then shelley, with charles clairmont, went to florence and engaged rooms for six months, and at the end of september shelley returned and took his wife by slow and easy stages to the tuscan capital, for her health was then in a very delicate state for travelling. there, in the lovely city of florence, on november , , she gave birth to her son percy florence, who first broke the spell of unhappiness which had hung for the last five months like a cloud over them; he, as events proved, was to be her one comfort with her memories, when the supreme calamity of her life fell on her, and he was mercifully spared to be the solace of her later years. chapter xi. godwin and "valperga." at this time while political events were absorbing england, and shelley was weaving them into poetry in italy during the remainder of his residence in florence, godwin's personal difficulties were reaching their climax. when he lost, in an action for the rent of his house, shelley came to his help, but in some way godwin expected more than he received, and became very unpleasant in his correspondence, so much so that shelley had to beg him not to write to mary on these subjects, as her health was not then, in october , able to bear the strain, and the subject of money was not a fitting one to be pressed on her by him. mary had not the disposal of money; if she had she would give it all to her father. he assured godwin that the four or five thousand pounds already expended on him might have made him comfortable for the remainder of his life. mrs. godwin, naturally, would not hear of abandoning the skinner street business, as being the only provision for herself when godwin should die. it is extremely painful at this stage of godwin's career to witness the lowering effects of his wife's smaller nature upon him, as he certainly allowed himself to be unduly influenced by her excited and not always truthful views, as known since the early days of their married life. we have mrs. gisborne's diary showing how mrs. godwin could not endure to see anyone in who had an attachment for mary, whom (as godwin told mrs. gisborne) she considered her greatest enemy; and although he described his wife as of "the most irritable disposition possible," he listened to, and repeated her conjectures to the disparagement of shelley and mary at the time when she did not hesitate to accept with her husband the large sums of money which shelley with difficulty raised for them. all the facts shown in this diary prove that mary and fanny must have had a sufficiently trying life at home to account for the result in either case, especially when we consider that claire and her brother charles both preferred to leave godwin's house on the first possible occasion, charles having left for france immediately after mary's and claire's departure with shelley. william alone remained at home, but four years passed in a boarding school at greenwich, from , must have helped him to endure the discomforts of the time. before mrs. gisborne's return to italy godwin gave her a detailed account, in writing, of his money transactions with shelley, which had become very painful to both. in january, , florence proving unsuitable for shelley's health, they left for pisa, the mild climate of which city made it a favourite resort of the poet during most of the short remainder of his life. mary, ever hospitable, although, as shelley said, the bills for printing his poems must be paid for by stinting himself in meat and drink, hoped that mrs. gisborne would have stayed with them during her husband's visit to england in , as they had moved into a pleasant apartment in march. this idea was not carried out. about this time mary and claire, both with their own absorbing anxieties, became again irksome to each other. mary found relief when claire was absent, and claire notes how "the claire and the mai find something to fight about every day," a way of putting it which indicates differences, but certainly no grave cause of disturbance. this was after their removal to leghorn, where they went towards the end of june to be near the lawyer on account of paolo. at the beginning of august the heat at leghorn caused the shelleys to migrate to the baths of san giuliano, where shelley found a very pleasant house, casa prini. the moderate rent suited their slender purse, which had so many outside calls upon it. in october claire's departure for florence, as governess in the family of professor bojti, where she went by the advice of her friend mrs. mason, formerly lady mountcashell, brought an end to her permanent residence with the shelleys, although she was still to look upon their house as her home, and she visited them either for her pleasure or to assist them. her absence from her friends gives us the advantage of letters from them, letters full of a certain exaggeration of affection and sympathy from shelley, who felt more acutely than mary that claire might be unhappy under a strange roof. mary, less anxious on those grounds, writes about the operas she has seen, giving good descriptions of them. one of her letters is full of anxiety as to allegra, who has been placed in the convent of bagnacavallo by byron. she feels that the child ought, as soon as possible, to be taken out of the hands of so "remorseless and unprincipled a man"; but advises caution and waiting for a favourable opportunity. she hopes that he may be returning to england. "he may be reconciled with his wife." at any rate, bagnacavallo is high and in a healthy position, quite different from the dirty canals of venice, which might injure any child's health. mary thus tries to console claire, who is planning, in her imagination, various ways of getting at her child, and corresponding with and seeing shelley on the subject. mary dissuades claire from attempting anything in the spring--their unlucky time. it was in the second spring claire met l. b., &c.; the third they went to marlow--no wise thing, at least; the fourth, uncomfortable in london; fifth, their roman misery; the sixth, paolo at pisa; the seventh, a mixture of emilia and a chancery suit. mary acknowledges this superstitious feeling is more in claire's line than her own, but thinks it worth considering; but this letter to claire carries us a year in advance. during the summer of mary had some of the delightful times she loved so dearly, of poetic wanderings with shelley through woods and by the river, one of which she remembers long afterwards, when, making her note to the "skylark," she recalls how she and shelley, wandering through the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the firefly, heard the carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems. precious memories which helped her through many after years devoid of the sympathy she yearned for. at the baths they had the pleasure of a visit from medwin, who gave a description of how shelley, his wife and child, had to escape from the upper windows of their house in a boat when the canal overflowed and inundated the valley. mary speaks of it as a very picturesque sight, with the herdsmen driving their cattle. during the short absence of shelley, when he took claire to florence, mary was occupied planning her novel of _valperga_, for which she studied villani's chronicle and sismondi's history. on leaving the baths of san giuliano, after the floods, the shelleys returned to pisa, where they passed the late autumn and winter of and the spring of . here they made more acquaintances than heretofore, professor pacchiani, called also "il diavolo," introducing them to the prince mavrocordato, the princess aigiropoli, the _improvisatore_ sgricci, taafe, and last, not least, to emilia viviani. here mary continued to write _valperga_, and pursued her latin, spanish, and greek studies; the latter the prince mavrocordato assisted her with, as mary writes to mrs. gisborne: "do not you envy me my luck? that, having begun greek, an amiable, young, agreeable, and learned greek prince comes every morning to give me a lesson of an hour and a half." but the person of most moment at this time was undoubtedly the contessina emilia viviani, whom, accompanied by pacchiani, claire, then mary, and then shelley, visited at the convent of sant' anna. this beautiful girl, with profuse black hair, grecian profile, and dreamy eyes, placed in the convent till she should be married, to satisfy the jealousy of her stepmother, became naturally an object of extreme interest to the shelleys. many visits were paid, and mary invited her to stay with them at christmas. shelley was convinced that she had great talent, if not genius. shelley and mary sent her books, and claire gave her english lessons at her convent, while she was taking a holiday from the bojtis. many letters are preserved from the beautiful emilia to shelley and mary, letters which, translated into english, seem overflowing with sentiment and affection, but which to italians would indicate rather the style cultivated by italian ladies, which, to this day, seems one of their chief accomplishments if they are not gifted with a voice to sing. to mary she complains of a certain coldness, but certainly this could not be brought to the charge of shelley, who was now inspired to write his _epipsychidion_. to him emilia was as the skylark, an emanation of the beautiful; but to mary for a time, during shelley's transitory adoration, the event evidently became painful, with all her philosophy and belief in her husband. she could not regard the lovely girl who took walks with him as the skylark that soared over their heads; and the _epipsychidion_ was evidently not a favourite poem of mary. surely we may ascribe to this time, in the spring of , the poem written by shelley to lieutenant williams, whose acquaintance he had made in january. there is no month affixed to-- the serpent is cast out from paradise.... and it might well apply, with its reference to "my cold home," to the time when mary, in depression and pique, did not always give her likewise sensitive husband all the welcome he was accustomed to, and shelley took refuge in a poem by way of letter; for this is the time referred to by mary in her letter to claire as their seventh unfortunate spring--a mixture of emilia and a chancery suit! it was not till the next spring that emilia was married, and led her husband and mother-in-law, as mary puts it, "a devil of a life." _we_ have only to be grateful to emilia for having inspired one of the most wondrous poems in any language. the williamses, to whom shelley's poem is addressed, were met by them in january. mary writes of the fascinating jane (mrs. williams) that she is certainly very pretty, but wants animation; while shelley writes that she is extremely pretty and gentle, but apparently not very clever; that he liked her much, but had only seen her for an hour. mary, among her multifarious reading, notes an article by medwin on animal magnetism, and shelley, who suffered severely at this time, shortly afterwards tried its effect through medwin. the latter bored mary excessively; possibly she found the magnetising a wearisome operation, although shelley is said to have been relieved by it. his highly nervous temperament was evidently impressed. when medwin left, mrs. williams undertook to carry on the cure. the chancery suit referred to by mary was an attempt between sir timothy's attorney and shelley's to throw their affairs into chancery, causing great alarm to them in italy, till horace smith came to their rescue in england, and with indignant letters settled the inconsiderate litigation. mrs. shelley, in her notes to poems in , recounts how shelley was nearly drowned, by a flat boat which he had recently acquired being overturned in the canal near pisa, when returning from leghorn. williams upset the boat by standing up and holding the mast. henry reveley, mrs. gisborne's son, rescued shelley and brought him to land, where he fainted with the cold. at this same time, at pisa, mary had to consider with shelley a matter of great importance to claire. byron, now at ravenna, had placed allegra, as already stated, in the convent of bagnacavallo. he told mrs. hoppner that she had become so unmanageable by servants that it was necessary to have her under better care than he could secure, and he considered that it would be preferable to bring her up as a roman catholic with an italian education, as in that way, with a fortune of five or six thousand pounds, she would marry an italian and be provided for, whereas she would always hold an anomalous position in england. at this proposal claire was extremely indignant; but shelley and mary took the opposite view, and considered that byron acted for the best, as the convent was in a healthy position, and the nuns would be kind to the child. this idea of mary would naturally be agreed with by some, and disapproved of by others; but at that time there was certainly no cause to indicate that bagnacavallo would be more fatal to allegra than any other place, although claire's apprehensions were cruelly realised. from this time claire and byron wrote letters of recrimination to each other, which, considering byron's obduracy against the feelings of the mother, shelley and mary came to hold as tyrannically unfeeling. in may, shelley and his wife and son returned to the baths of san giuliano, and while here shelley's _adonais_ was published. in , when the shelleys heard of keats's fatal illness from mrs. gisborne, she having met him the day after he had received his death warrant from the doctor, they were the first to beg him to join them at pisa. a small touch of poetical criticism, however, appears to have weighed more with the sensitive keats than these friendly considerations for his health, and as he was about to accompany his friend mr. severn to rome, he did not accept their kind offer, though in all probability pisa would have been better for him. during this summer at the baths mary had finished her romance of _valperga_, and read it to her husband, who admired it extremely. he considered it to be a "living and moving picture of an age almost forgotten, a profound study of the passions of human nature." _valperga_, published in , the year after shelley's death, is a romance of the th century in italy, during the height of the struggle between the guelphs and the ghibellines, when each state and almost each town was at war with the other; a condition of things which lends itself to romance. mary shelley's intimate acquaintance with italy and italians gives her the necessary knowledge to write on this subject. her zealous italian studies came to her aid, and her love of nature give life and vitality to the scene. valperga, the ancestral castle home of euthanasia, a florentine lady of the guelph faction, is most picturesquely described, on its ledge of projecting rock, overlooking the plain of lucca; the dependent peasants around happy under the protection of their good signora. that this beautiful and high-minded lady should be affianced to a ghibelline leader is a natural combination; but when her lover castruccio, prince of lucca, carries his political enthusiasm the length of making war on her native city of florence, whose republican greatness and love of art are happily described, euthanasia cannot let love stand in the way of duty and gratitude to all those dearest to her. the severe struggle is well described, for euthanasia has loved castruccio from their childhood. when they played about the mountain grounds of her home at valperga, castruccio learnt the secret paths to the castle, which knowledge later helped him to take the fortress when euthanasia refused to yield it to him. castruccio's character is also well described: his devoted attachment to euthanasia from which nothing could turn him, till the passions of the conqueror and party faction are still stronger; and the irresistible force which impels him to make war and subdue the guelphs, which by her is regarded as murder and rapine, disunites beings seemingly formed for each other. all these different emotions are portrayed with great beauty and simplicity. the italian superstitions are well shown, as how the florentines ascribed all good and evil fortune to conjunction of stars. the power of the inquisition in rome comes likewise into play, when the beautiful prophetess beatrice (the child of the prophetess wilhelmina) who had to be given to the leper for protection, as even his filthy and deserted hut was safer for her than that it should be known to the inquisition that she existed. she is rescued from the leper by a bishop who heard her story from the deathbed of the woman to whom her mother when dying had confided her. she was then brought up by the bishop's sister. her mother's spirit of prophecy was inherited by the daughter; and as the mother believed herself to be an emanation of the holy spirit, so beatrice thought herself the ancilla dei. these mystical fancies and their working are depicted with much beauty and strength. these donne estatiche first appear in italy after the th century, and had continued to the time which mary shelley selected for her romance. after giving an account of their pretensions, muratori gravely observes: "we may piously believe that some were distinguished by supernatural gifts and admitted to the secrets of heaven, but we may justly suspect that the source of many of their revelations was their ardent imagination filled with ideas of religion and piety." beatrice, on prophesying the ghibelline rule in ferrara, is seized by the emissaries of the pope, and has to undergo the ordeal of the white hot ploughshares, through which she passes unscathed, there having apparently been connivance to help her through. her exultation and enthusiasm become intense, and it is only after a great shock that she grows conscious of the falseness of her position; for, having met castruccio on his mission to ferrara, she is irresistibly attracted by him, and, mixing up her infatuation with her mystical ideas, does not hesitate to make secret appointments with him, never doubting that her love is returned, and that they are one at heart. when at length castruccio has to return to lucca, and to his betrothed, euthanasia, the shock to the poor mystical beatrice is terrible. finally she is met as a pilgrim wending her weary way to rome. assuredly, shelley was justified in admiring this character. there is a straightforwardness in the plot into which the stormy history of the period is clearly introduced, which gives much interest to this romance, and it is a decided advance upon _frankenstein_, though her age when that was written must not be forgotten. a book of this kind shows forcibly the troubles to which a lovely country like italy is exposed through disunion, and must fill the hearts of all lovers of this beautiful land with gratitude to the noble men who willingly sacrificed themselves to help in the cause of united italy; those whose songs roused the people, and carried hope into the hearts of even the prisoners in the pozzi of venice; for the man of idea who can rouse the nation by his songs does not help less than the brave soldier who can aid with his arms, though alas! he does not always live to see the triumph he has helped to achieve. [footnote: gabriele rossetti, whom mary shelley knew, and to whom she referred for information while writing her lives of italian poets, has been said to have been the first who in modern times had the idea of a united italy under a constitutional monarch, for which idea and for his rousing songs he was forced to leave italy by ferdinand i. of naples in , and remained an exile in england till his death in , at the age of . how mary shelley, with her husband, must have sympathised in these ideas with their love of italy can be understood, although it was the climate and beauty of italy more than the people that charmed shelley; but then was he not also an exile from his native land?] this work, when completed, was sent to her father by mary, for it had been a labour of love, and the sum of four hundred pounds which godwin obtained for it was devoted to help him in his difficulties. unhappily, the romance was not published till the year after her husband's death. chapter xii. last months with shelley. in july , shelley left his wife at the baths while he went to seek a house at florence for the winter; but he returned in three days unsuccessful. he then received a letter from byron begging him to go straight to ravenna, various matters having to be talked over. shelley left at two in the afternoon, on his birthday, august th. here he had to go through the paolo-hoppner scandal, which we have referred to. shelley had to write letters to mary on the subject, and mary wrote the most indignant and decisive denial of the imputation, on her husband and claire. she writes: "i swear by the life of my child, by my blessed beloved child, that i know the accusations to be false." if more were needed, the clear exposition by mr. jeaffreson and later professor dowden, leave nothing to be said. shelley wrote to mary describing his visit to allegra at the convent, where he found her prettily dressed in white muslin with an apron of black silk. she was a most graceful, airy child; she took shelley all over the convent, and began ringing the nun's call-bell, without being reprimanded--although the prioress had considerable trouble to prevent the nuns assembling dressed or undressed--which struck shelley as showing that she was kindly treated. before leaving ravenna, about august th, he wrote to thank his wife for her promise of her miniature, done by williams, which he received a few days later from her at the baths of pisa. mary and shelley both were of those who, wherever they found a friend, found also a pensioner, or person to be benefited by them; as they did not seek their friends for personal advantage, and were among those who hold it more blessed to give than to receive. in january , mrs. leigh hunt wrote to mary shelley, begging her to help her husband and family to come to italy--he was ill and depressed, and surrounded by all his children sick and suffering. while shelley was at ravenna he brought up this subject with byron, who proposed that he, shelley, and leigh hunt should start a periodical for their joint works, and share the profits. shelley did not agree to this for himself, as he was not popular, and could only gain advantage from the others; but for hunt it was different, and shelley joyfully wrote to him from pisa, on his return from ravenna, to join them as soon as possible. delays occurred in hunt's departure, and byron received letters from england warning him against joining with shelley and hunt. byron arrived in pisa with the countess guiccioli and her brother pietro gamba, on november the st, at the lanfranchi palace, and the shelleys had apartments at the top of i tre palazzi di chiesa, opposite. claire, who had been staying with them, and accompanied them on a trip to spezzia, had now returned to professor bojti's at florence. mary had the task of furnishing the ground floor of byron's lanfranchi palace for the hunts, although byron insisted on paying for it. hunt, meanwhile, was unable to proceed beyond plymouth that winter, where they were obliged to stay by stress of weather and mrs. hunt's illness. thus some months passed by, during which time byron lost the first ardour of the enterprise, and became very lukewarm. it must have been when mary had good reason to foresee this result that she wrote to hunt thus:-- my dear friend, i know that s. has some idea of persuading you to come here. i am too ill to write the reasonings, only let me entreat you let no persuasions induce you to come; selfish feelings you may be sure do not dictate me, but it would be complete madness to come. i wish i could write more. i wish i were with you to assist you. i wish i could break my chains and leave this dungeon. adieu, i shall hear about yon and marianne's health from s. ever your m. shelley was forced to apply to byron to help him with money to lend hunt, and byron had ceased to care about the _liberal_, the projected magazine. while staying near byron the shelleys came in for a large influx of visitors, often much to shelley's annoyance, and mary wrote of their wish, if greece were liberated, of settling in one of the lovely islands. the middle of january brought one visitor to the shelleys, who, introduced by the williams, became more than a passing figure in mary's life. in edward john trelawny she found a staunch friend ever after. trelawny, who had led a wild life from the time he left the navy in mere boyhood, was a conspicuous character wherever known. with small reverence for the orthodox creeds, he must have had some of the traits of the ancient vikings, before meeting shelley; but from that time he became his devoted admirer, or, as one has observed who knew him, as ahab at elijah's feet, so trelawny at shelley's was ready to humble himself for the first time; nor did he afterwards, to the end of a long life, ever speak of him without veneration. shelley's exalted ideas touched a chord in the strong man's heart, and within a few weeks of his death he rejoiced in hearing of a crowded assembly in glasgow, enthusiastic in hearing a lecture on shelley, and asserted it is the "spirit of poetry which needs spreading now; science is popular to the exclusion of poetry as a regenerator." the day after their first meeting with trelawny, mary notes in her diary how trelawny discussed with williams and shelley about building a boat which they desired to have, and which captain roberts was to build at genoa without delay. a year later mary added a note to this entry, to the effect how she and jane williams then laughed at the way their husbands decided without consulting them, though they agreed in hating the boat. she adds: "how well i remember that night! how short-sighted we are! and now that its anniversary is come and gone, methinks i cannot be the wretch i too truly am." this winter, at pisa, mary, with popular and strong men to protect her, was not neglected so much as hitherto. she went to mrs. beauclerc's ball with trelawny; but she refers to a strange feeling of depression in the midst of a gay assembly. on february shelley started, with williams, to seek for houses in the neighbourhood of spezzia; the idea being that the shelleys, the williamses, trelawny and captain roberts, byron, countess guiccioli and her brother, should all spend the summer there, although mary feared the party would be too large for unity. only one suitable house could be found; but shelley was not to be stopped by such a trifle, and the house must do for all. in the early spring of this year, mary wrote to mrs. hunt how she and mrs. williams went violet-hunting, while the men went on longer expeditions. the shelleys and their surroundings must have kept the english assembled in pisa in a pleasing state of excitement. at one time mary caused a commotion by attending dr. nott's sunday service, which was held on the ground floor of her house. on one occasion he preached against atheism, and, having specially asked mary to attend, it was taken as a marked attack on shelley, and it was considered that mary had taken part against her husband. mary wrote a pathetic letter to mrs. gisborne that she had only been three times to church, and now longed to be in some sea-girt isle with shelley and her baby, but that shelley was entangled with byron and could not get away. she was longing for the time by the sea when she would have boats and horses. while mary was yearning for sympathy with her kind, or solitude with shelley, he for a time was wasting regrets that she did not sympathise with or feel his poetry. it was the old story of the skylark. while he was seeking inspiration at some fresh source, mary did not become equally enthusiastic about the new idea. but most probably, in spite of trelawny's later notion and her own self-reproaches of not having done all possible things to sympathise with shelley, mary's behaviour was really the best calculated for his comfort. a man who did not like regular meals and conventional habits in this respect, would not have liked his wife to worry him constantly on the subject, and the plate of cold meat and bread placed on a shelf, as his table was probably covered with papers--which trelawny found there forgotten, towards the end of a "lost day" as shelley called it--was not inappropriate for one who forgot his meals and did not like being teased. mary was not of the nature to make, nor shelley of the nature to require, a docile slave; and during the time at naples, for which mary felt most regret, shelley wrote of her as "a dear friend with whom added years old intercourse adds to my appreciation of its value, and who would have more right than anyone to complain that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness." during this time the english visitors believed and manufactured all kinds of stories about the eccentric english then at pisa. trelawny had been murdered--byron wounded--and taaffe was guarded by bulldogs in byron's house! these rumours were laughed over by the people concerned. on one occasion mrs. shelley, with the countess guiccioli, witnessed from their carriage the affair with the dragoon masi, when he jostled against taaffe. byron, shelley, and gamba pursued him; shelley, coming up with him first, was knocked down, but was rescued by captain hay. the dragoon was finally wounded by one of byron's servants, under the idea that he had wounded byron. during this exciting time at pisa, claire was eating her heart at florence with longings and regrets for allegra; and mary and shelley were trying to calm her by letters, and growing themselves more and more dissatisfied at byron's treatment of the mother. there are entries in claire's diary as to her cough, and the last entry before the day she left florence for pisa--april l --is erased. then there is one of her ominous blanks from april till september. while claire travelled with williams and his wife to spezzia to look for a house, news came from bagnacavallo which verified her worst fears. typhus fever had ravaged the convent and district, and the fragile blossom had succumbed. shelley and mary determined to keep this "evil news," as mary calls it, from claire till she is away from the neighbourhood of byron. so, on her return from the unsuccessful visit to spezzia, they have to conceal their sorrow and their feelings. shelley, ever anxious for claire's distress, persuaded her to accompany mary to spezzia, saying they must take any house they could get. claire had thought of returning to florence, but was overruled by shelley, who, as mary wrote to mrs. gisborne, carried all like a torrent before him and sent mary and claire with trelawny to spezzia. shelley followed with their furniture in boats; and so, on april , they were hurried by shelley, or fate, from misfortune to misfortune, in taking claire to a haven where she might be helped to bear her sore trouble. mary, with her companions, secured the only available house--casa magui, at san terenzio, near lerici--in which it was settled that they and the williamses must find room and bring their furniture. difficulties of all kinds had to be overcome from the dogana. the furniture arrived in boats, and they were told the dues upon it would amount to three hundred pounds, but the harbour-master kindly allowed it to be removed to the villa as to a depôt till further orders arrived. then there were the difficulties of mrs. williams, of whom shelley wrote that she was pining for her saucepans. claire felt the necessity of returning to florence, the space being so small. this, however, was not to be thought of. claire still had to have the news of her child's death broken to her, and mrs. williams's room had to be used for secret consultations. claire, entering the room and seeing the agitated silence on her approach, at once realised the state of the case. she felt her allegra was dead, and it only devolved on shelley to tell the sad tale of a fever-ravaged district, and a fever-tossed child dying among the kind nuns, who are ever good nurses. claire's grief was intense; but all that she now wanted was a sight of her child's coffin, a likeness of her, and a lock of her golden hair (a portion of which last is now in the writer's possession). the latter shelley helped to obtain for her; but claire never after forgave him who had consigned her child to the convent in the romagna, nor allowed her another sight of her little one. on may claire left for florence, and mary remained with her husband and the williamses at casa magni. these rapidly succeeding troubles, together with mary's being again in a delicate state of health, left the circle in an unhinged and nervous state of apprehension. shelley saw visions of allegra rising from the sea, clapping her hands and smiling at him. mrs. williams saw shelley on the balcony, and then he was nowhere near, nor had he been there. shelley ranged from wild delight with the beauty around him, to such fits of despondency as when he most culpably proposed to mrs. williams, while in a boat with him and her babies, in the bay--"now let us together solve the great mystery." but she managed to get him to turn shorewards, and escaped at the first opportunity from the boat. mary was not without her prophetic periods--a deep melancholy settled on her amid the lovely scenery. generally at home with mountain and water, she now only felt oppressed by their proximity. shelley was at work on the _triumph of life_, one of his grandest poems; but mary was always apprehensive except when with her husband, least so when lying in a boat with her head on his knees. if shelley were absent, she feared for percy, her son, so that, in spite of the oasis of peace and rest and beauty around them, she was weak and nervous; and shelley, for fear of hurting her, had to conceal such matters as might trouble her, especially the again critical state of the affairs of her father, who was in want of four hundred pounds to compound with his creditors. these alarms for mary's health and tranquillity of mind, and the consequent necessity of keeping any trying subject from her, may have induced shelley in writing to claire to adopt a confidential tone not otherwise advisable. while at casa magni, the fatal boat which had been discussed on the first evening trelawny spent with the shelleys, arrived. the "perfect plaything for the summer" had been built against the advice of trelawny, by a genoese ship-builder, after a model obtained by lieutenant williams from one of the royal dockyards in england. originally it was intended to call it the _don juan_, but recent circumstances had caused a break in the intimacy of shelley with byron, and shelley felt that this would be eternal. he, therefore, no longer wished any name to remind him of byron, and gave the name _ariel_, proposed by trelawny, to the small craft. with considerable difficulty the name _don juan_ was taken from the sail, where byron had manoeuvred to have it painted. towards the end of may, mary was seriously suffering; the difficulties of housekeeping for the williamses as well as themselves were no trifle. provisions had to be fetched from a distance of over three miles. shelley writes to claire, hoping she will be able to find them a man-cook. as mary was somewhat better when shelley wrote, he feared he should have to speak to her about godwin's affairs, but put off the evil day. on june we find shelley setting out with williams in the _ariel_ to meet claire on her way from florence to casa magni. a calm having delayed them till the evening, they were too late to meet claire, who travelled on by land for via reggio. shelley and williams, returning by sea, arrived home a short time before her. their return and her arrival were none too soon; for, on the th or th, mary fell dangerously ill, as she wrote in august to mrs. gisborne: "i was so ill that for seven hours i lay nearly lifeless--kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar, eau-de-cologne, &c. at length ice was brought to our solitude; it came before the doctor, so claire and jane were afraid of using it; but shelley over-ruled them, and, by an unsparing application of it, i was restored. they all thought, and so did i at one time, that i was about to die." shelley, equal to the occasion, felt the strain on his nerves afterwards, and a week after his wife was out of danger he alarmed her greatly, as she relates: "while yet unable to walk, i was confined to my bed. in the middle of the night i was awoke by hearing him scream, and come rushing into my room; i was sure that he was asleep, and tried to waken him by calling on him; but he continued to scream, which inspired me with such a panic that i jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to mrs. williams's room, where i fell through weakness, though i was so frightened that i got up again immediately. she let me in, and williams went to shelley who had been wakened by my getting out of bed. he said that he had not been asleep, and that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him. but as he declared that he had not screamed, it was certainly a dream, and no waking vision." and so the lovely summer months passed by with all these varying emotions, with thoughts soaring to the highest pinnacles of imagination as in the _triumph of life_, and with the enjoyment of the high ideals of others, as in reading the spanish dramas: music also gave enchantment when jane williams played her guitar. with the intense beauty of the scenery, and the wildness of the natives who used sometimes to dance all night on the sands in front of their house; the emotions of life seemed compressed into this time, spent in what would be considered by many great dulness, in the company of trelawny and the williamses. and now an event, long hoped for, arrived, for the hunts were in the harbour of genoa, and shelley was to meet them at leghorn, as hunt's letter, which reached them on june , had been delayed too long to allow of shelley joining them at genoa. on july i intelligence came of the hunts' departure from genoa; and at noon a breeze rising from the west decided the desirability of at once starting for leghorn. shelley, with captain roberts who had joined him at lerici, arrived by nine in the evening, after the officers of health had left their office. the voyagers were thus unable to land that evening, but spent the time alongside of byron's yacht, the _bolivar_, from which they received coverings for the night. the next morning news arrived from byron's villa, which already began to verify mary's forebodings in her letter to hunt, and proved the clear-sightedness of her forecast. disturbances having taken place at his house at monte nero, count gamba and his family were banished by the government from tuscany, and there were rumours that byron might be leaving immediately for america or switzerland. this was indeed trying news for shelley to have to break to the hunts on their first meeting in the hotel at leghorn, where, after four years, the two friends again met. the encounter was most touching, as remembered years later by thornton hunt. shelley had plenty of work on hand for a few days; he procured vacca, the physician, for mrs. hunt; and had to sustain his friend during his anxiety as to his wife's health and the uncertainty as to byron's conduct. shelley would not think of leaving him till he had seen him comfortably installed in the lanfranchi palace, in the rooms which mary had prepared for him at byron's request. the still more difficult task of fixing byron to some promise of assistance with regard to the _liberal_ was likewise carried out; and after one or two days of dejection, during which shelley wrote to mrs. williams on july to relieve his own despondency, and to his wife to relieve hers, as her depression of spirits required more cheering than adding to, he wrote:--"how are you, my best mary? write especially how is your health and how your spirits are, and whether you are not more reconciled to staying at lerici, at least during the summer. you have no idea how i am hurried and occupied. i have not a moment's leisure, but will write by the next post." soon after writing these letters, shelley found with exultation that his work was done. as usual, he had carried ail before him, and secured byron's "vision of judgment" for the first number of the _liberal_, and by july he was able to show his friends the ever-delightful sights of pisa. thus one day of rest and pleasure remained to shelley after doing his utmost to assist his friend hunt. to the last shelley was faithful to his aim--that of doing all he could for others. his interviews with byron had secured a return of the friendly feeling which nought but death was henceforth to sever, and the two great names, which nothing can divide, are linked by the unbreakable chain of genius--genius, the fire of the universe, which at times may flicker low, but which, bursting into flame here and there, illumines the dark recesses of the soul of the universe--genius which has made the world we know, which, never absent, though dormant, has changed the stone to the flower, the flower to animal, and, gaining ever in degree through the various stages of life, is the divine attribute, the will, the idea. genius manifest in the greatest and best of humanity, shown indeed, as the word of god, or as he who holds the mirror up to nature, or by the great power which in colour or monotone can display the love and agony of a dying christ; by the loving poet, who can soar beyond his age to uphold an unselfish aim of perfection to the world; by all those who, throwing off their mortal attributes at times, can live the true life free from the too absorbing pleasures of the flesh, which can only he enjoyed by dividing. but now shelley's mortal battle was nearly over; he who had not let his talent or myriad talents lie dormant was to rest, his work of life was nearly done. not that the good is ever ended; verily, through thousands of generations, through eternity, it endures; while the bad--perhaps not useless--is the chaff which is dispersed, and which has no result unless to hurry on the divine will. our life is double. shelley's atoms were to return to their primal elements. the unknown atoms or attributes of them were undoubtedly to carry on their work; he had added to the eternal intellect. the last facts of shelley's life are related by trelawny and by mrs. shelley. on the morning of july , having finished his arrangements for the hunts and spent one day in showing the noble sights of pisa, shelley, after making purchases for their house and obtaining money from his banker, accompanied by trelawny during the forenoon, was ready by noon to embark on the _ariel_ with edward williams and the sailor-boy, charles vivian. captain roberts was not without apprehensions as to the weather, and urged shelley to delay his departure for a day; but williams was anxious to rejoin his wife, and shelley not in a humour to frustrate his wishes. trelawny, who desired to accompany them in the _bolivar_ into the offing, was prevented, not having obtained his health order, and so could only reluctantly remain behind and watch his friends' small craft through a ship's glass. mistakes were noted, the ship's mate of the _bolivar_ remarking they ought to have started at daybreak instead of after one o'clock; that they were too near shore; that there would soon be a land breeze; the gaff top-sail was foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board; and then, pointing to the southwest, "look at those black lines and dirty rags hanging on them out of the sky; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief." the approaching storm was watched also by captain roberts from the light-house, whence he saw the topsail taken in; then the vessel freighted with such precious life was seen no more in the mist of the storm. for a time the sea seemed solidified and appeared as of lead, with an oily scum; the wind did not ruffle it. then sounds of thunder, wind, and rain filled the air; these lasted with fury for twenty minutes; then a lull, and anxious looks among the boats which had rushed into the harbour for shelley's hark. no glass could find it on the horizon. trelawny landed at eight o'clock; inquiries were useless. an oar was seen on a fishing boat: it might be english--it might be shelley's; but this was denied. nothing to do but wait, till the third day, when he returned to pisa to tell his fears to hunt and byron, who could only listen with quivering lips and speak with faltering voice. while these friends were agitated between hope and fear, the time was passing wearily at san terenzio. jane williams received a letter from her husband on that day (written on saturday from leghorn), where he was waiting for shelley. it stated that if they did not return on monday, he certainly would be back at the latest on thursday in a felucca by himself if necessary. the fatal monday passed amid storm and rain, and no idea was entertained by mrs. shelley or mrs. williams that their husbands had started in such weather as they experienced. mary, who had then scarcely recovered from her dangerous illness, and was unable to join claire and jane williams in their evening walks, could only pace up and down in the verandah and feel oppressed by the very beauty which surrounded her. so till wednesday these days of storm and oppression and undefined fears passed; then, some feluccas arriving from leghorn, they were informed that their husbands had left on monday; but that could not be believed. thursday came and passed, _the_ thursday which should be the latest for williams's arrival. the wind had been fair, but midnight arrived, and still mary and jane were alone; then sad hope gave place to fearful anxiety preceding despair; but friday was letter day--wait for that--and no boat could leave. noon of friday and letters came, but _to_, not _from_ shelley. hunt wrote to him: "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed on monday, and we are anxious." mary read so far when the paper fell from her hands and she trembled all over. jane read it, and said, "it is all over." mary replied, "no, my dear jane, it is not all over; but this suspense is dreadful. come with me; we will go to _leghorn_; we will post, to be swift and learn our fate." thus, as mary shelley herself describes, they crossed to lerici, despair in their hearts, two poor, wild, aghast creatures driving, "like matilda," towards the sea to know if they were to be for ever doomed to misery. the idea of seeing hunt for the first time after four years, to ask "where is he?" nearly drove mary into convulsions. on knocking at the door of the casa lanfranchi they found lord byron was in pisa and. hunt being in bed, their interview was to be with byron, only to hear, "they knew nothing. he had left pisa on sunday; on monday he had sailed. there had been bad weather monday afternoon; more they knew not." mary, who had risen from, a bed of sickness for the journey, and had travelled all day, had now at midnight to proceed to leghorn in search of trelawny; for what rest could there be with such a terrible doubt hanging over their lives? they could not despair, for that would have been death; they had to pass through longer hours and days of anguish to subdue their souls to bear the inevitable. they reached leghorn, and were driven to the wrong inn. nothing to do but wait till the morning--but wait dressed till six o'clock--when they proceeded to other inns and found captain roberts. his face showed that the worst was true. they only heard how their husbands had set out. still hope was not dead; might not their husbands be at corsica or elba? it was said they had been seen in the gulf. they resolved to return; but now not alone, for trelawny accompanied them. agony succeeded agony; the water they crossed told mary it was his grave. while crossing the bay they saw san terenzio illuminated for a festa, while despair was in their hearts. the days passed, a week ever counted as two by mary, and then, when she was very ill, trelawny, who had been long expected from his search, returned, and now they knew that all was over, for the bodies had been cast on shore. one was a tall, slight figure, with sophocles in one pocket of the jacket, and keats's last poems in the other; the poetry he loved remained; his body a mere mutilated corpse, which for a while had enshrined such divine intellect. williams's corpse, also, was found some miles distant, still more unrecognisable, save for the black silk handkerchief tied sailor-fashion round his neck; and after some ten days a third body was found, a mere skeleton., supposed to be the sailor-boy, charles vivian. "is there no hope?" mary asked, when trelawny reappeared on july . he could not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant to take the children to their widowed mothers. he then, on the th, took them from the sound of the cruel waves to the hunts at pisa. naught remained now but to perform the last funeral rites. mary decided that shelley should rest with his dearly-loved son in the english cemetery in rome. with some little difficulty, trelawny obtained permission, with the kind assistance of the english chargé d'affaires at florence, mr. dawkins, to have the bodies burned on the shore, according to the custom of bodies cast up from the sea, so that the ashes could be removed without fear of infection. the iron furnace was made at leghorn, of the dimensions of a human body, according to trelawny's orders; and on august the body of lieutenant williams was disinterred from the sand where it had been buried when cast up. byron recognised him by his clothes and his teeth. the funeral rites were performed by trelawny by throwing incense, salt, and wine on the pyre, according to classic custom; and when nothing remained but some black ashes and small pieces of white bone, these were placed by trelawny in one of the oaken boxes he had provided for the purpose, and then consigned to byron and hunt. the next day another pyre was raised, and again the soldiers had to dig for the body, buried in lime. when placed in the furnace it was three hours before the consuming body showed the still unconsumed heart, which trelawny saved from the furnace, snatching it out with his hand; and there, amidst the italian beauty, on the italian shore, was consumed the body of the poet who held out immortal hope to his kind, who, in advance of the scientists, held it as a noble fact that humanity was progressive; who, more for this than for his unfortunate first marriage and its unhappy sequel, was banished by his countrymen, and held as nothing by his generation. but, as claire wrote later in her diary, "it might be said of him, as cicero said of rome, 'ungrateful england shall not possess my bones.'" the ashes of the body were placed in the oaken box; those of the heart, handed by trelawny to hunt, were afterwards given into the possession of mary, who jealously guarded them during her life, in a place where they were found at her death, in a silken case, in which was kept a pisan copy of the _adonais_. the ashes of shelley's body were finally buried in the cemetery in rome, where the grave of the english poet is now one of the strongest links between the present and the past world; and there beside him rest now the ashes of his faithful friend, trelawny, who survived him nearly sixty years. chapter xiii. widowhood. the last ceremony was over, hope, fear, despair, were past, and mary shelley had to recommence her life, or death in life, her one solace her little son, her one resource for many years her work. fortunately for her, her education and her studious habits were a shield against the cold world which she had to encounter, and her accustomed personal economy, which had fitted her to be the worthy companion to her generous husband, whom she had encouraged rather than thwarted in his constantly recurring acts of philanthropy, would help her in her present struggle; and one friend was ready to assist with advice and out of his then slender means, mr. trelawny. but from england no help was forthcoming. godwin's affairs having reached the climax of bankruptcy already referred to, were not likely to settle down easily now that the ever-ready supply was suddenly cut short. sir timothy shelley was not inclined to continue the terms he made with his son, nor was anything to be arranged but on conditions which mrs. shelley could never consent to. of her despondent state of misery we can judge in her letters of to claire, as when she writes from genoa, september , "this hateful genoa"; and, describing her misery on her husband's death, she exclaims: "well, i shall have his books and his mss., and in these i shall live, and from the study of these i do expect some instants of content.... some seconds of exaltation that may render me both happier here, and more worthy of him hereafter." then, "there is nothing but unhappiness to me, if indeed i except trelawny, who appears so truly generous and kind.... nothing but the horror of being a burden to my family prevents my accompanying jane (to england). if i had any fixed income, i should go at least to paris, and i shall go the moment i have one." and again in december of the same year she writes to claire, addressing her as mdlle. de clairmont, _chez_ mdme. de hennistein, vienna. she mentions an approach to sir timothy, through lawyers, abortive as yet; how she detests genoa; "hunt does not like me." her daily routine is copying shelley's manuscripts and reading greek; in her despair, study is her only relief. she sees no one but lord byron, and the guiccioli once a mouth, trelawny seldom, and he is on the eve of his departure for leghorn. thus we find mary shelley going on from day to day, too poor to travel so far as paris, as yet her child and her work of love on her husband's ms. filling up her time, till in february she had to undergo the mortification of her father-in-law proposing that she should give her son up entirely to him, and in return receive a settled income. but mary was not of those who can be either bought or sold, and, having the means of subsistence in herself, she could be independent; a letter from her father shows how they were at one on this important subject, and it must have been a great encouragement to her in her loneliness, as she was always diffident of her own powers. however, now her work lay in arranging and copying her husband's mss., and saving treasures which but for her loving care might have been lost. in the spring of this year, , trelawny was in rome arranging shelley's grave, which he bought with the adjoining ground for himself, and he had the massive slab of stone placed there which still tells of the "_cor cordium_" in the autumn of the same year mary found means for leaving the hated genoa, and, travelling through france; she stayed for a time at versailles with her father's old friends, the kennys, and of this visit one of the daughters, now mrs. cox, then a child of about six years, retains a lively and pleasing recollection. brought up in france and imbued with the idea and pictures of the madonna and child, the little girl, on seeing mrs. shelley arrive with her small son, became impressed with the idea that the pale, sweet, oval-laced lady was the madonna come to visit them; and this idea was not dispelled by the gentle manner and kind way that she had with the children, reminding one who had been punished by mistake that the next time she was naughty she would have had her punishment in advance. this visit was followed later by the intimacy and friendship of the two families. in london (as we learn from a letter to miss holcroft, mrs. kenny's daughter, by her previous marriage with holcroft) mrs. shelley was settled at , sheldhurst street, brunswick square. she was then hoping that her father-in-law would make her an allowance sufficient for her to live comfortably in dear italy; and, at all events, she had received "a present supply, so that much good at least has been accomplished by my journey." she felt quite lost in london, and percy had not yet learnt english. she had seen lamb, but he did not remark on her being altered. she would then have returned to italy, but her father did not like the idea. among other work at this time mary shelley attempted a drama, but in this her father did not encourage her, as he writes to her in february that her personages are mere abstractions, not men and women. godwin does not regret that she has not dramatic talent, as the want of it will save her much trouble and mortification. this disappointment did not discourage mary, for in the next year she published, with henry colburn of new burlington street, her novel _the last man_, of which a second edition appeared in the succeeding year. this must have been a great help to mary's limited means: she had received four hundred pounds for her previous romance. during this year we find mrs. shelley living in kentish town, as she writes from that address to trelawny in july . she is much cheered by finding her old friend still remembers her. she speaks of him as her warm-hearted friend, the remnant of the happy days of her vagabond life in beloved italy, and now, shortly before writing, she had seen another link in her past life disappear; for the hearse containing the body of lord byron had passed her window going up highgate hill, on his last journey to the seat of his ancestors. mary had been much interested in the account trelawny had sent her of byron's latest moments. she had been to see the poet's remains at the house where they lay in london. she saw his valet, fletcher, and "from a few words he imprudently let fall, it would seem that his lordship spoke of c----- in his last moments, and of his wish to do something for her, at a time when his mind, vacillating between consciousness and delirium, would not permit him to do anything." she describes how fletcher found lady byron in great grief, but inexorable, and how byron's memoirs had been destroyed by mrs. leigh and hobhouse, but adds: "there was not much in them, i know, for i read them some years ago at venice; but the world fancied that it was to have a confession of the hidden feelings of one concerning whom they were always passionately curious." she says that moore was much disgusted. he was writing a life of byron, but it was considered that although he had had the mss. so long in his hands, he had not found time to read them. she asks trelawny to help moore with any facts or details. mary thanks trelawny for his wish that she and jane williams, who see each other and little else every day, should join him in greece. that is impossible, but she looks for him to come in the winter to england. she speaks of july as fatal to her for good and ill. "on this very very day"--she is writing july --"i went to france with my shelley. how young, heedless, and happy and poor we were then, and now my sleeping boy is all that is left to me of that time--my boy and a thousand recollections which never sleep." she describes the pretty country lanes round kentish town. if only there were cloudless skies and orange sunsets, she would not mind the scenery; but she can attach herself to no one. she and jane live alone; her child is in excellent health, a tall, fine, handsome boy. she is still in hopes that she will get an income of three or four hundred a year from sir timothy in a few months; one of her chief wishes in being independent would be to help claire, who is in russia. of this time claire wrote a good account in her diary. these letters to trelawny give much insight into the present life of mary shelley, and refer to much of interest in her past. on february she tells how she had been with jane, her father, and count gamba to see kean in othello, but she adds: "yet, my dear friend, i wish we had seen it represented as was talked of at pisa. iago would never have found a better representative than that strange and wondrous creature whom one regrets daily more; for who can equal him?" trelawny adds a note that in byron had contemplated that he, trelawny, williams, medwin, mary shelley, and mrs. williams were to take the several parts:--byron, iago; trelawny, othello; mary, desdemona. trelawny adds that byron recited a great portion of his part with great gusto, and looked it too. byron said that all pisa were to be the audience. letters from trelawny from zante in , carry on the correspondence. he regrets that poverty keeps them apart; speaks of the difficulty of travelling without money; he rejoices that he still holds a place in her affections, and says, "you know, mary, that i always loved you impetuously and sincerely." in , still writing from kentish town, on easter sunday, but saying that in future her address will be at her father's, , gower place, bedford square, we have another of her charming letters to her friend, full of good reflections. in this letter she tells how jane williams has united her life with that of shelley's early friend, mr. jefferson hogg. he had loved her devotedly since her arrival in england five years earlier, but till now she had been too constant to williams's memory to accept him. claire was still in russia. mary writes:--"i wrote to you last while i entertained the hope that my money cares were diminishing, but shabby as the best of these shabby people was, i am not to arrive at that best without due waiting and anxiety. nor do i yet see the end of this worse than tedious uncertainty." mary was to see shelley's younger brother, who was just married, but she had small hope of reaping any good from his visit. she adds, "adieu, my ever dear friend; while hearts such as yours beat, i will not wholly despond." mary refers with great kindness to hunt, and is most anxious as to his future. she also notices with high satisfaction that the whigs with canning are in the ascendant, and that they may be favourable to greece. while mary shelley was residing in kentish town, before she joined her father in gower place after the winding up of his affairs, a letter from godwin to his wife at the sea-side shows that the latter considered he did not need her society as mrs. shelley was with him; he explains that he sees her about twice a week, but is feeling lonely every day. after mary removed to gower place in , among other work, she was occupied by her _lives of eminent literary men_, for _lardner's cyclopædia_. about the same year godwin writes to his daughter who is evidently in very low spirits, wishing that she resembled him in temperament rather than the wollstonecrafts, but explains that his present good spirits may be owing to his work on cromwell. a little later we find godwin writing to mary, himself in depression. he is troubled by publishers who will not decide to take a novel. "three, four, or five hundred pounds, and to be subsisted by them while i write it," is what he hoped to get. mrs. shelley was at southend for change of air, and wishing her father to join her; but this he could not decide on. every day lost is taking away from his means of subsistence; for he is writing now, not for marble to be placed over his remains, but for bread to be put into his mouth. in april , mrs. shelley, writing still from her father's address, , grower street, complains to trelawny in a truly english way, as she says, of the weather. she rejoices that her friend has taken to work, and hopes that his friends will keep him to recording his own adventures; but she strongly dissuades him from writing a life of shelley, for how could that be done without bringing her into publicity? which she shrinks from fearfully, though she is forced by her hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways; or as she expresses it, "i will tell you what i am, a silly goose, who, far from wishing to stand forward to assert myself in any way, now that i am alone in the world have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. this is weakness, but i cannot help it." neither does mary consider that the time has come to write shelley's life, though she her-self hopes to do so some day. towards the end of we find mary in somerset street, portman square, from which place she writes to trelawny on the subject of his ms. of _the adventures of a younger son,_ which he had consigned to her hands to place with a publisher, make the best terms for that she could, and see through the press; a task distasteful to trelawny to the last. mrs. shelley much admired the work, considering it full of passion and interest. but she does not hesitate to point out the blemishes, certain coarsenesses, which she begs him to allow her to deal with, as she would have dealt with parts of lord byron's _don juan_. she is sure that without this she will have great difficulty in disposing of the book. mary finds the absorbing politics of the day a great hindrance to publishing, and says: "god knows how it will all end, but it looks as if the aristocrats would have the good sense to make the necessary sacrifices to a starving population." the worry of awaiting the decision of the publisher was felt by mrs. shelley more for trelawny than for herself; she finds it difficult to make the terms she wishes for him, and, writing to her friend on march of the next year, she regrets that she cannot make colburn, the best publisher she knows of, give five hundred pounds as she wishes, but trusts to get three hundred pounds for first edition and two hundred pounds for second; but times have changed since she first returned to england, neither she nor her father can command the same prices which they did then. at that time "publishers came to seek me," she writes; "now money is scarcer and readers fewer than ever." three days later she is able to add the news that she has received "the ultimatum of these great people," three hundred pounds down and one hundred pounds on second edition, she thinks, for , copies. she advises acceptance, but will try other publishers if he wish it. mary again regrets that it is impossible for her to go to italy. she expresses herself as wretched in england, and in spite of her sanguine disposition and capacity to endure, which have borne her up hitherto, she feels sinking at last; situated as she is, it is impossible for her not to be wretched. mary does not give way long to despondency, she goes on to tell news as to medwin, hogg, jane, &c.; she can even tease trelawny about the different ladies who believe themselves the sole object of his affection, and tells him she is having a certain letter of his about "caroline" lithographed, and thinks of dispensing copies among "the many hapless fair." a third letter on the subject of the hook, on june , , tells trelawny how his work is in progress, and horace smith, who much admires it, has promised to revise it. again, in july of the same year, she writes that the third volume is in print, and his book will soon be published; but that as his mother talks openly of his memoirs in society, he must not hope for secrecy. in this letter, also, we have a fact which redounds to the credit of both mary shelley and trelawny, as she clearly tells him she cannot marry him; but remains in "all gratitude and friendship" his m. s. trelawny had evidently made her an offer of marriage, moved perhaps by gratitude for her help, as well as probably, in his case, a passing love; for she writes to him: "my name will never be trelawny. i am not so young as i was when you first knew me, but i am as proud. i must have the entire affection, devotion, and, above all, the solicitous protection of any one who would win me. you belong to womenkind in general, and mary s. will _never_ be yours. i write in haste," &c. &c. trelawny would never have offered his name thus to a woman he could not respect, and perhaps few know better than those of his reckless class who are most worthy of respect. mary shelley, who dreaded men's looks or words, by her own knowledge and her intimate friends' accounts had no fear of him; he had the instincts of a gentleman for a true lady, who may be found in any class. four years later, we have mary again writing to mr. trelawny with regard to his book, a second edition being called for, when, to her confusion, she finds that through her not having read over the agreement, and having taken for granted that the proposal of three hundred pounds on first edition with one hundred pounds more on second was inserted, she had signed the contract; but now it turned out that what was proposed by letter was not inserted by oilier in the agreement, and she knew not what to do. in a second letter a few days later from harrow, where she lived for a while to be near her son at school, she wrote in answer to trelawny, proposing peacock as umpire, because, she writes, "he would not lean to the strongest side, which jefferson, as a lawyer, is inclined, i think, to do." oilier, she writes, devoutly wished she had read the agreement, as the clause ought to have been in it. again, a few months later, on april , , there is another letter asking trelawny if he would like to attend her father's funeral, and if he would go with the undertaker to choose the spot nearest to her mother's, in st. pancras churchyard, and, if he could do this, to write to mrs. godwin, at the exchequer, to tell her so. the last few years of godwin's life had not ended, as he had so bitterly apprehended, in penury; as his friends in power had obtained for him the post of yeoman usher of the exchequer, with residence in new palace yard, in . the office was in fact a sinecure, and was soon abolished; but it was arranged that no change should be made in the old philosopher's position. his old friends had died, but his work had its reward for him, as well as its place in the thought of the world, for such people as the duke of wellington and lord melbourne had used their influence for him. mary had been his constant devoted daughter to the last. in he writes to his wife of mrs. shelley, as he always called his daughter to mrs. godwin, of various meetings and dinners with each other, though he cannot attend her evenings as he would wish, since the walk across the park to reach somerset street, where she then lived, was by no means pleasant after dark: and now we find mary honouring trelawny with the last service for her father, apologising, but adding, "are you not the best and most constant of friends?" godwin's last grief was the loss of his son. william in ; he had been settled in a literary career and left a widow. one of mary's first acts of generosity later on was to settle a pension on her. chapter xiv. literary work. having traced mary's life, as far as space will allow, to the death of her father, we must now retrace our steps to show the work she did, which gives the _raison-d'être_ for this biography. it has already been shown that her second book, _valperga_, much admired by shelley, was written to assist her father in his distress before his bankruptcy. after her husband's death, while arranging his mss., and noting facts in connection with them, she planned and wrote her third romance, _the last man_. this highly imaginative work of mary shelley's twenty-sixth year contains some of the author's most powerful ideas; but is marred in the commencement by some of her most stilted writing. the account of the events recorded professes to be found in the cave of the cumsean sibyl, near naples, where they had remained for centuries, outlasting the changes of nature and, when found, being still two hundred and fifty years in advance of the time foretold. the accounts are all written on the sibylline leaves; they are in all languages, ancient and modern; and those concerning this story are in english. we find ourselves in england, in , in the midst of a republic, the last king of england having abdicated at the quietly expressed wish of his subjects. this book, like all mrs. shelley's, is full of biographical reminiscences; the introduction gives the date of her own visit to naples with shelley, in ; the places they visited are there indicated; the poetry, romance, the pleasures and pains of her own existence, are worked into her subjects; while her imagination carries her out of her own surroundings. we clearly recognise in the ideal character of the son of the abdicated king an imaginary portrait of shelley as mary would have him known, not as she knew him as a living person. to give an adequate idea of genius with all its charm, and yet with its human imperfections, was beyond mary's power. adrian, the son of kings, the aristocratic republican, is the weakest part, and one cannot help being struck by mary shelley's preference for the aristocrat over the plebeian. in fact, mary's idea of a republic still needed kings' sons by their good manners to grace it, while, at the same time, the king's son had to be transmuted into an ideal shelley. this strange confusion of ideas allowed for, and the fact that over half a century of perhaps the earth's most rapid period of progress has passed, the imaginative qualities are still remarkable in mary. balloons, then dreamed of, were attained; but naturally the steam-engine and other wonders of science, now achieved, were unknown to marv. when the-pi ague breaks out she has scope for her fancy, and she certainly adds vivid pictures of horror and pathos to a subject which has been handled by masters of thought at different periods. in this time of horror it is amusing to note how the people's candidate, ryland, represented as a vulgar specimen of humanity, succumbs to abject fear. the description of the deserted towns and grass-grown streets of london is impressive. the fortunes of the family, to whom the last man, lionel verney, belongs, are traced through their varying phases, as one by one the dire plague assails them, and verney, the only man who recovers from the disease, becomes the leader of the remnant of the english nation. this small handful of humanity leaves england, and wanders through france on its way to the favoured southern countries where human aid, now so scarce, was less needed. on this journey mrs. shelley avails herself of reminiscences of her own travelling with shelley some few years before; and we pass the places noted in her diary; but strange grotesque figures cross the path of the few wanderers, who are decimated each day. at one moment a dying acrobat, deserted by his companions, is seen bounding in the air behind a hedge in the dusk of evening. at another, a black figure mounted on a horse, which only shows itself after dark, to cause apprehensions soon calmed by the death of the poor wanderer, who wished only for distant companionship through dread of contagion. dijon is reached and passed, and here the old countess of windsor, the ex-queen of england, dies: she had only been reconciled to her changed position by the destruction of humanity. once, near geneva, they come upon the sound of divine music in a church, and find a dying girl playing to her blind father to keep up the delusion to the last. the small party, reduced by this time to five, reach chamouni, and the grand scenes so familiar to mary contrast with the final tragedy of the human race; yet one more dies, and only four of one family remain; they bury the dead man in an ice cavern, and with this last victim find the pestilence has ended, after a seven years' reign over the earth. a weight is lifted from the atmosphere, and the world is before them; but now alone they must visit her ruins; and the beauty of the earth and the love of each other, bear them up till none but the last man remains to complete the cumsæan sibyl's prophecy. various stories of minor importance followed from mrs. shelley's pen, and preparations were made for the lives of eminent literary men. but it was not till the year preceding her father's death that we have _lodore_, published in . of this novel we have already spoken in relation to the separation of shelley and harriet. mary had too much feeling of art in her work to make an imaginary character a mere portrait, and we are constantly reminded in her novels of the different wonderful and interesting personages whom she knew intimately, though most of their characters were far too subtle and complex to be unravelled by her, even with her intimate knowledge. indeed, the very fact of having known some of the greatest people of her age, or of almost any age, gives an appearance of affectation to her novels, as it fills them with characters so far from the common run that their place in life cannot be reduced to an ordinary fashionable level. romantic episodes there may be, but their true place is in the theatre of time of which they are the movers, not the lilliputians of life who are slowly worked on and moulder by them, and whose small doings are the material of most novels. we know of few novelists who have touched at all successfully on the less known characters. this accomplishment seems to need the great poet himself. the manner in which lady lodore is influenced seems to point to harriet; but the unyielding and revengeful side of her character has certainly more of lady byron. she is charmingly described, and shows a great deal of insight on mary's part into the life of fashionable people of her time, which then, perhaps more than now, was the favourite theme with novelists. this must be owing to a certain innate tory propensity in the english classes or masses for whom mary shelley had to work hard, and for whose tendencies in this respect she certainly had a sympathy. mary's own life, at the point we have now reached, is also here touched on in the character of ethel, lord and lady lodore's daughter, who is brought up in america by her father, and on his death entrusted to an aunt, with injunctions in his will that she is not to be allowed to be brought in contact with her mother. her character is sweetly feminine and trusting, and in her fortunate love and marriage (in all but early money matters) might be considered quite unlike mary's own less fortunate experiences; but in her perfect love and confidence in her husband, her devotion and unselfishness through the trials of poverty in london, the descriptions of which were evidently taken from mary's own experiences, there is no doubt of the resemblance, as also in her love and reverence for all connected with her father. there are also passages undoubtedly expressive of her own inner feelings--such as this when describing the young husband and wife at a _tête-à-tête_ supper:-- mutual esteem and gratitude sanctified the unreserved sympathy which made each so happy in the other. did they love the less for not loving "in sin and fear"? far from it. the certainty of being the cause of good to each other tended to foster the most delicate of all passions, more than the rough ministrations of terror and the knowledge that each was the occasion of injury. a woman's heart is peculiarly unfitted to sustain this conflict. her sensibility gives keenness to her imagination and she magnifies every peril, and writhes beneath every sacrifice which tends to humiliate her in her own eyes. the natural pride of her sex struggles with her desire to confer happiness, and her peace is wrecked. what stronger expression of feeling could be needed than this, of a woman speaking from her heart and her own experiences? does it not remind one of the moral on this subject in all george eliot's writing, where she shows that the outcome of what by some might be considered minor transgressions against morality leads even in modern times to the nemesis of the most terrible greek dramas? the complicated money transactions carried on with the aid of lawyers were clearly a reminiscence of shelley's troubles, and of her own incapacity to feel all the distress contingent so long as she was with him, and there was evidently money somewhere in the family, and it would come some time. in this novel we also perceive that mary works off her pent-up feelings with regard to emilia viviani. it cannot be supposed that the corporeal part of shelley's creation of _epipsychidion_ (so exquisite in appearance and touching in manner and story as to give rise, when transmitted through the poet's brain, to the most perfect of love ideals) really ultimately became the fiery-tempered worldly-minded virago that mary shelley indulges herself in depicting, after first, in spite of altering some relations and circumstances, clearly showing whom the character was intended for. it is true that shelley himself, after investing her with divinity to serve the purposes of art, speaks later of her as a very commonplace worldly-minded woman; but poets, like artists, seem at times to need lay figures to attire with their thoughts. enough has been shown to prove that there is genuine subject of interest in this work of mary's thirty-seventh year. the next work, _falkner_, published in , is the last novel we have by mary shelley; and as we see from her letter she had been passing through a period of ill-health and depression while writing it, this may account for less spontaneity in the style, which is decidedly more stilted; but, here again, we feel that we are admitted to some of the circle which mary had encountered in the stirring times of her life, and there is undoubted imagination with some fine descriptive passages. the opening chapter introduces a little deserted child in a picturesque cornish village. her parents had died there in apartments, one after the other, the husband having married a governess against the wishes of his relations; consequently, the wife was first neglected on her husband's death; and on her own sudden death, a few months later, the child was simply left to the care of the poor people of the village--a dreamy, poetic little thing, whose one pleasure was to stroll in the twilight to the village churchyard and be with her mamma. here she was found by falkner, the principal character of the romance, who had selected this very spot to end a ruined existence; in which attempt he was frustrated by the child jogging his arm to move him from her mother's grave. his life being thus saved by the child's instrumentality, he naturally became interested in her. he is allowed to look through the few remaining papers of the parents. among these he finds an unfinished letter of the wife, evidently addressed to a lady he had known, and also indications who the parents were. he was much moved, and offered to relieve the poor people of the child and to restore her to her relations. the mother's unfinished letter to her friend contains the following passage, surely autobiographical:-- when i lost edwin (the husband), i wrote to mr. raby (the husband's father) acquainting him with the sad intelligence, and asking for a maintenance for myself and my child. the family solicitor answered my letter. edwin's conduct had, i was told, estranged his family from him, and they could only regard me as one encouraging his disobedience and apostasy. i had no claim on them. if my child were sent to them, and i would promise to abstain from all intercourse with her, she should be brought up with her cousins, and treated in all respects like one of the family. i declined their barbarous offer, and haughtily and in few words relinquished every claim on their bounty, declaring my intention to support and bring up my child myself. this was foolishly done, i fear; but i cannot regret it, even now. i cannot regret the impulse that made me disdain these unnatural and cruel relatives, or that led me to take my poor orphan to my heart with pride as being all my own. what had they done to merit such a treasure? and did they show themselves capable of replacing a fond and anxious mother? this reminds the reader of the correspondence between mary and her father on shelley's death. it suffices to say that falkner became so attached to the small child, that by the time he discovered her relations he had not the heart to confide her to their hard guardianship, and as he was compelled to leave england shortly, he took her with him, and through all difficulties he contrived that she should be well guarded and brought up. there is much in the character of falkner that reminds the reader of trelawny, the gallant and generous friend of byron and shelley in their last years, the brave and romantic traveller. the description of falkner's face and figure must have much resembled that of trelawny when young, though, of course, the incidents of the story have no connection with him. in the meantime the little girl is growing up, and the nurses are replaced by an english governess, whom falkner engages abroad, and whose praises and qualifications he hears from everyone at odessa. the story progresses through various incidents foreshadowing the cause of falkner's mystery. elizabeth, the child, now grown up, passes under his surname. while travelling in germany they come across a youth of great personal attraction, who appears, however, to be of a singularly reckless and misanthropical disposition for one so young. elizabeth seeming attracted by his daring and beauty, falkner suddenly finds it necessary to return to england. shortly afterwards, he is moved to go to greece during the war of independence, and wishes to leave elizabeth with her relations in england; but this she strenuously opposes so far as to induce falkner to let her accompany him to greece, where he places her with a family while he rushes into the thick of the danger, only hoping to end his life in a good cause. in this he nearly succeeds, but elizabeth, hearing of his danger, hastens to his side, and nurses him assiduously through the fever brought on from his wounds and the malarious climate. by short stages and the utmost care, she succeeds in reaching malta on their homeward journey, and falkner, a second time rescued from death by his beloved adopted child, determines not again to endanger recklessly the life more dear to her than that of many fathers. again, at malta, during a fortnight's quarantine, the smallness of the world of fashionable people brings them in contact with an english party, a lord and lady cecil, who are travelling with their family. falkner is too ill to see anyone, and when elizabeth finally gets him on board a vessel to proceed to genoa, he seems rapidly sinking. in his despair and loneliness, feeling unable to cope with all the difficulties of burning sun and cold winds, help unexpectedly comes: a gentleman whom elizabeth has not before perceived, and whom now she is too much preoccupied to observe, quietly arranges the sail to shelter the dying man from sun and wind, places pillows, and does all that is possible; he even induces the poor girl to go below and rest on a couch for a time while he watches. falkner becomes easier in the course of the night; he sleeps and gains in strength, and from this he progresses till, while at marseilles, he hears the name, neville, of the unknown friend who had helped to restore him to life. he becomes extremely agitated and faints. on being restored to consciousness he begs elizabeth to continue the journey with him alone, as he can bear no one but her near him. the mystery of falkner's life seems to be forcing itself to the surface. the travellers reach england, and elizabeth is sought out by lady cecil, who had been much struck by her devotion to her father. elizabeth is invited to stay with lady cecil, as she much needs rest in her turn. during a pleasant time of repose near hastings, elizabeth hears lady cecil talk much of her brother gerard; but it is not till he, too, arrives on a visit, that she acknowledges to herself that he is really the same mr. neville whom she had met, and from whom she had received such kindness. nor had gerard spoken of elizabeth; he had been too much drawn towards her, as his life also is darkened by a mystery. they spend a short tranquil time together, when a letter announces the approaching arrival of sir boyvill neville, the young man's father (although lady cecil called gerard her brother, they were not really related; sir boyvill had married the mother of lady cecil, who was the offspring of a previous marriage). gerard neville at once determines to leave the house, but before going refers elizabeth to his sister, lady cecil, to hear the particulars of the tragedy which surrounds him. the story told is this. sir boyvill neville was a man of the world with all the too frequent disbelief in women and selfishness. this led to his becoming very tyrannical when he married, at the age of , alethea, a charming young woman who had recently lost her mother, and whose father, a retired naval officer of limited means, would not hear of her refusing so good an offer as sir boyvill's. after their marriage sir boyvill, feeling himself too fortunate in having secured so charming and beautiful a wife, kept out of all society, and after living abroad for some years took her to an estate he possessed in cumberland. they lived there shut out from all the world, except for trips which he took himself to london, or elsewhere, whenever _ennui_ assailed him. they had, at the time we are approaching, two charming children, a beautiful boy of some ten years and a little girl of two. at this time while alethea was perfectly happy with her children, and quite contented with her retirement, which she perceived took away the jealous tortures of her husband, he left home for a week, drawn out to two months, on one of his periodical visits to the capital. lady neville's frequent letters concerning her home and her children were always cheerful and placid, and the time for her husband's return was fixed. he arrived at the appointed hour in the evening. the servants were at the door to receive him, but in an instant alarm prevailed; lady neville and her son gerard were not with him. they had left the house some hours before to walk in the park, and had not since been seen or heard of, an unprecedented occurrence. the alarm was raised; the country searched in all directions, but ineffectually, during a fearful tempest. ultimately the poor boy was found unconscious on the ground, drenched to the skin. on his being taken home, and his father questioning him, all that could be heard were his cries "come back, mamma; stop, stop for me!" nothing else but the tossings of fever. once again, "then she has come back," he cried, "that man did not take her quite away; the carriage drove here at last." the story slowly elicited from the child on his gaining strength was this. on his going for a walk with his mother in the park, she took the key of a gate which led into a lane. a gentleman was waiting outside. gerard had never seen him before, but he heard his mother call him rupert. they walked together through the lane accompanied by the child, and talked earnestly. she wept, and the boy was indignant. when they reached a cross-road, a carriage was waiting. on approaching it the gentleman pulled the child's hands from hers, lifted her in, sprang in after, and the coachman drove like the wind, leaving the child to hear his mother shriek in agony, "my child--my son!" nothing more could be discovered; the country was ransacked in vain. the servants only stated that ten days ago a gentleman called, asked for lady neville and was shown in to her; he remained some two hours, and on his leaving it was remarked that she had been weeping. he had called again but was not admitted. one letter was found, signed "rupert," begging for one more meeting, and if that were granted he would leave her and his just revenge for ever; otherwise, he could not tell what the consequences might be on her husband's return that night. in answer to this letter she went, but with her child, which clearly proved her innocent intention. months passed with no fresh result, till her husband, beside himself with wounded pride, determined to be avenged by obtaining a bill of divorce in the house of lords, and producing his son gerard as evidence against his lost mother, whom he so dearly loved. the poor child by this time, by dint of thinking and weighing every word he could remember, such as "i grieve deeply for you, rupert: my good wishes are all i have to give you," became more and more convinced that his mother was taken forcibly away, and would return at any moment if she were able. he only longed for the time when he should be old enough to go and seek her through the world. his father was relentless, and the child was brought before the house of lords to repeat the evidence he had innocently given against her; but when called on to speak in that awful position, no word could be drawn from him except "she is innocent." the house was moved by the brave child's agony, and resolved to carry on the case without him, from the witnesses whom he had spoken to, and finally they pronounced a decree of divorce in sir boyvill's favour. the struggle and agony of the poor child are admirably described, as also his subsequent flight from his father's house, and wanderings round his old home in cumberland. in his fruitless search for his mother he reached a deserted sea-coast. after wandering about for two months barefoot, and almost starving but for the ewe's milk and bread given him by the cottagers, he was recognized. his father, being informed, had him seized and brought home, where he was confined and treated as a criminal. his state became so helpless that even his father was at length moved to some feeling of self-restraint, and finally took gerard with him abroad, where he was first seen at baden by elizabeth and palkner. there also he first met his sister by affinity, lady cecil. with her he lost somewhat his defiant tone, and felt that for his mother's sake he must not appear to others as lost in sullenness and despair. he now talked of his mother, and reasoned about her; but although he much interested lady cecil, he did not convince her really of his mother's innocence, so much did all circumstances weigh against her. but now, during elizabeth's visit to lady cecil, a letter is received by gerard and his father informing them that one gregory hoskins believed he could give some information; he was at lancaster. sir boyvill, only anxious to hush up the matter by which his pride had suffered, hastened to prevent his son from taking steps to re-open the subject. this hoskins was originally a native of the district round dromoor, neville's home, and had emigrated to america at the time of sir boyvill's marriage. at one time--years ago--he met a man named osborne, who confided to him how he had gained money before coming to america by helping a gentleman to carry off a lady, and how terribly the affair ended, as the lady got drowned in a river near which they had placed her while nearly dead from fright, on the dangerous coast of cumberland. on returning to england, and hearing the talk about the nevilles in his native village, this old story came to his mind, and he wrote his letter. neville, on hearing this, instantly determined to proceed to mexico, trace out osborne, and bring him to accuse his mother's murderer. all these details were written by elizabeth to her beloved father. after some delay, one line entreated her to come to him instantly for one day. falkner could not ignore the present state of things--the mutual attraction of his elizabeth and of gerard. yet how, with all he knew, could that be suffered to proceed? never, except by eternal separation from his adored child; but this should be done. he would now tell her his story. he could not speak, but he wrote it, and now she must come and receive it from him. he told of all his solitary, unloved youth, the miseries and tyranny of school to the unprotected--a reminiscence of shelley; how, on emerging from, childhood, one gleam of happiness entered his life in the friendship of a lady, an old friend of his mother's, who had one lovely daughter; of the happy, innocent time spent in their cottage during holidays; of the dear lady's death; of her daughter's despair; then how he was sent off to india; of letters he wrote to the daughter alethea, letters unanswered, as the father, the naval officer, intercepted all; of his return, after years, to england, his one hope that which had buoyed him up through years of constancy, to meet and marry his only love, for that he felt she was and must remain. he recounted his return, and the news lie received; his one rash visit to her to judge for himself whether she was happy--this, from her manner, he could not feel, in spite of her delight in her children; his mad request to see her; mad plot, and still madder execution of it, till he had her in his arms, dashing through the country, through storm and thunder, unable to tell whether she lived or died; the first moment of pause; the efforts to save the ebbing life in a ruined hut; the few minutes' absence to seek materials for fire; the return, to find her a floating corpse in the wild little river flowing to the sea; the rescue of her body from the waves; her burial on the sea-shore; and his own subsequent life of despair, saved twice by elizabeth. all this was told to the son, to whom falkner denounced himself as his mother's destroyer. he named the spot where the remains would be found. and now what was left to be done? only to wait a little, while sir boyvill and gerard neville proved his words, and traced out the grave. an inquest was held, and falkner apprehended. a few days passed, and then elizabeth found her father gone; and by degrees it was broken to her that he was in carlisle gaol on the charge of murder. she, who had not feared the dangers in greece of war and fever, was not to be deterred now; she, who believed in his innocence. no minutes were needed to decide her to go straight to carlisle, and remain as near as she could to the dear father who had rescued and cared for her when deserted. gerard, who was with his father when the bones were exhumed at the spot indicated, soon realised the new situation. his passion for justice to his mother did not deaden his feeling for others. he felt that falkner's story was true, and though nothing could restore his mother's life, her honour was intact. sir boyvill would leave no stone unturned to be revenged, rightly or wrongly, on the man who had assailed his domestic peace; but gerard saw elizabeth, gave what consolation he could, and determined to set off at once to america to seek osborne, as the only witness who could exculpate falkner from the charge of murder. after various difficulties osborne was found in england, where he had returned in terror of being taken in america as accomplice in the murder. with great difficulty he is brought to give evidence, for all his thoughts and fears are for himself; but at length, when all hopes seem failing, he is induced by elizabeth to give his evidence, which fully confirms falkner's statement. at length the day of trial came. the news of liberty arrived. "not guilty!" who can imagine the effect but those who have passed innocently through the ordeal? once more all are united. gerard has to remain for the funeral of his father, who had died affirming his belief, which in fact he had always entertained, in falkner's innocence. lady cecil had secured for elizabeth the companionship of mrs. raby, her relation on the father's side. she takes falkner and elizabeth home to the beautiful ancestral belleforest. here a time of rest and happiness ensues. those so much tried by adversity would not let real happiness escape for a chimera; honour being restored love and friendship remained, and gerard, elizabeth and falkner felt that now they ought to remain, together, death not having disunited them. too much space may appear to be here given to one romance; but it seems just to show the scope of mary's imaginative conception. there are certainly both imagination and power in carrying it out. it is true that the idea seems founded, to some extent, on godwin's caleb williams, the man passing through life with a mystery; the similar names of falkner and falkland may even be meant to call attention to this fact. the three-volume form, in this as in many novels, seems to detract from the strength of the work in parts, the second volume being noticeably drawn out here and there. it may be questioned, also, whether the form adopted in this as in many romances of giving the early history by way of narrative told by one of the _dramatis personæ_ to another, is the desirable one--a point to which we have already adverted in relation to _frankenstein_. can it be true to nature to make one character give a description, over a hundred pages long, repeating at length, word for word, long conversations which he has never heard, marking the changes of colour which he has not seen--and all this with a minuteness which even the firmest memory and the most loquacious tongue could not recall? does not this give an unreality to the style incompatible with art, which ought to be the mainspring of all imaginative work? this, however, is not mrs. shelley's error alone, but is traceable through many masterpieces. the author, the creator, who sees the workings of the souls of his characters, has, naturally, memory and perception for all. yet mary shelley, in this as in most of her work, has great insight into character. elizabeth's grandfather in his dotage is quite a photograph from life; old oswig raby, who was more shrivelled with narrowness of mind than with age, but who felt himself and his house, the oldest in england, of more importance than aught else he knew of. his daughter-in-law, the widow of his eldest son, is also well drawn; a woman of upright nature who can acknowledge the faults of the family, and try to retrieve them, and who finally does her best to atone for the past. chapter xv. later works. the writing of these novels, with other literary work we must refer to, passed over the many years of mrs. shelley's life until , and saved her from the ennui of a quiet life in london with few friends. certainly in mary's case there had been a reason for the neglect of "society," which at times she bitterly deplored; and as she had little other than intellectual and amiable qualities to recommend her for many years, she was naturally not sought after by the more successful of her contemporaries. there are instances even of her being cruelly mortified by marked rudeness at some receptions she attended; in one case years later, when her fidelity to her husband and his memory might have appeased the sternest moralist. during these early years, which she writes of afterwards as years of privation which caused her to shed many bitter tears at the time, though they were frequently gilded by imagination, mrs. shelley was cheered by seeing her son grow up entirely to her satisfaction, passing through the child's stage and the school-boy's at harrow, from which place he proceeded to cambridge; and many and substantially happy years must have been passed, during which claire was not forgotten. poor claire, who passed through much severe servitude, from which mary would fain have spared her, as she wrote once to mr. trelawny that this was one of her chief reasons for wishing for independence; but "old time," or "eternity," as she called sir timothy, who certainly had no reason to claim her affection, was long in passing; and though a small allowance before of three hundred pounds a year had increased to four hundred pounds a year when her only child reached his majority in , for this, on sir timothy's death, she had to repay thirteen thousand pounds. it had enabled her to make a tour in germany with her son; of this journey we will speak after referring to her _lives of eminent literary men_. these lives, written for _lardner's cyclopedia_, and published in , are a most interesting series of biographies written by a woman who could appreciate the poet's character, and enter into the injustices and sorrows from which few poets have been exempt. they show careful study, her knowledge of various countries gives local colour to her descriptions, and her love of poetry makes her an admirable critic. she is said to have written all the italian and spanish lives with the exception of galileo and tasso; and certainly her writing contrasts most favourably with the life of tasso, to whomever this may have been assigned. mary was much disappointed at not having this particular sketch to write. to her life of dante she affixes byron's lines from _the prophecy of dante_-- 'tis the doom of spirits of my order to be racked in life; to wear their hearts out, and consume their days in endless strife, and die alone. then future thousands crowd around their tomb, and pilgrims, come from climes where they have known the name of him who now is but a name, spread his, by him unheard, unheeded fame. mary felt how these beautiful lines were appropriate to more than one poet. freedom from affectation, and a genuine love of her subject, make her biographies most readable, and for the ordinary reader there is a fund of information. the next life--that of petrarch--is equally attractive; in fact, there is little that can exceed the interest of lives of these immortal beings when written--with the comprehension here displayed. even the complicated history of the period is made clear, and the poet, whose tortures came from the heart, is as feelingly touched on as he who suffered from the political factions of the bianchi and the neri, and who felt the steepness of other's stairs and the salt savour of other's bread. petrarch's banishment through love is not less feelingly described, and we are taken to the life and the homes of the time in the living descriptions given by mary. one passage ought in fairness to be given to show her enthusiastic understanding and appreciation of the poet she writes of:-- dante, as hath been already intimated, is the hero of his own poem; and the divina commedia is the only example of an attempt triumphantly achieved, and placed beyond the reach of scorn or neglect, wherein from beginning to end the author discourses concerning himself individually. had this been done in any other way than the consummately simple, delicate, and unobtrusive one which he has adopted, the whole would have been insufferable egotism, disgusting coxcombry, or oppressive dulness. whereas, this personal identity is the charm, the strength, the soul of the book; he lives, he breathes, he moves through it; his pulse beats or stands still, his eye kindles or fades, his cheek grows pale with horror, colours with shame, or burns with indignation; we hear his voice, his step, in every page; we see his shape by the flame of hell; his shadow in the land where there is no _other_ shadow (_purgatoria_) and his countenance gaining angelic elevation from "colloquy sublime" with glorified intelligence in the paradise above. nor does he ever go out of his natural character. he is, indeed, the lover from infancy of beatrice, the aristocratic magistrate of a fierce democracy, the valiant soldier in the field of campaldino, the fervent patriot in the feuds of guelphs and ghibellines, the eloquent and subtle disputant in the school of theology, the melancholy exile wandering from court to court, depending for bread and shelter on petty princes who knew not his worth, except as a splendid captive in their train; and above all, he is the poet anticipating his own assured renown (though not obtrusively so), and dispensing at his will honour or infamy to others, whom he need but to name, and the sound must be heard to the end of time and echoed from all regions of the globe. dante in his vision is dante as he lived, as he died, and as he expected to live in both worlds beyond death--an immortal spirit in the one, an unforgotten poet in the other. you feel this is written from the heart of the woman who herself felt as she wrote. we would fain go through her different biographies, tracing her feelings, her appreciation, and poetic enthusiasm throughout, but that is impossible. she takes us through boccaccio's life, and, as by the reflection of a sunset from a mirror, we are warmed with the glow and mirth from distant and long-past times in italy. one feels through her works the innate delicacy of her mind. through boccaccio's life, as through all the others, the history of the times and the noteworthy facts concerning the poets are brought forward--such as the sums of money boccaccio spent, though poor, to promote the study of greek, so long before the taking of constantinople by the turks. in the friendship of petrarch and boccaccio, she shows how great souls can love, and makes you love them in return, and you feel the riches of the meetings of such people, these dictators of mankind--not of a faction-tossed country or continent. how paltry do the triumphs of conquerors which end with the night, the feasts of princes which leave still hungry, appear beside the triumphs of intellect, the symposium of souls. after boccaccio, mary rapidly ran over the careers of lorenzo de' medici, ficino, pico della mirandola, politian, and the pulci, exhibiting again, after the lapse of a century, the study in italy of the greek language. the story of the truly great prince with his circle of poet friends, one of whom, politian, died of a broken heart at the death of his beloved patron, is well told. from these she passes on to the followers of the romantic style begun by pulci, cieco da ferrara, burchiello, bojardo; then berni, born at the end of the fifteenth century, who carried on or recast bojardo's _orlando innamorato_, which was followed by ariosto's _orlando furioso_, the delight of italy. in ariosto's life mary, as ever, delights in showing the filial affection and fine traits of the poet's nature. she quotes his lines-- our mother's years with pity fill my heart, for without infamy she could not be by all of us at once forsaken. but with these commendations she strongly denounces the profligacy of his writing as presumably of his life. she says: "an author may not be answerable to posterity for the evil of his mortal life; but for the profligacy of that life which he lives through after ages, contaminating by irrepressible and incurable infection the minds of others, he is amenable even in his grave." through the intricacies of machiavelli mary's clear head and conscientious treatment lead the reader till light appears to gleam. the many-sided character of the man comes out, the difficulties of the time he wrote in, while advising princes how to act in times of danger, and so admonishing the people how to resist. did he not foresee tyranny worked out and resistance complete, and his own favourite republic succeeding to the death of tyrants? one remark of mary's with regard to the time when machiavelli considered himself most neglected is worth recording: "he bitterly laments the inaction of his life, and expresses an ardent desire to be employed. meanwhile he created occupation for himself, and it is one of the lessons that we may derive from becoming acquainted with the feelings and actions of celebrated men, to learn that this very period during which machiavelli repined at the neglect of his contemporaries, and the tranquillity of his life, was that during which his fame took root, and which brought his name down to us. he occupied his leisure in writing those works which have occasioned his immortality." a short life of guicciardini follows; then mrs. shelley comes to the congenial subject of vittoria colonna, the noble widow of the marquis of pescara, the dear friend in her latter years of michael angelo, the woman whose writings, accomplishments, and virtues have made her the pride of italy. with her mary shelley gives a few of the long list of names of women who won fame in italy from their intellect:--the beautiful daughter of a professor, who lectured behind a veil in petrarch's time; the mother of lorenzo de' medici, ippolita sforza; alessandra scala; isotta of padua; bianca d'este; damigella torella; cassandra fedele. we next pass to the life of guarini, and missing tasso, whose life mary shelley did not write, we come to chiabrera, who tried to introduce the form of greek poetry into italian. tassoni, marini, filicaja are agreeable, but shortly touched on. then metastasio is reached, whose youthful genius as an _improvisatore early gained him applause, which was followed up by his successful writing of three-act dramas for the opera, and a subsequent calm and prosperous life at vienna, under the successive protection of the emperor charles vi., maria theresa, and joseph ii. the contrast of the even prosperity of metastasio's life with that of some of the great poets is striking. next goldoni claims attention, whose comedies of italian manners throw much light upon the frivolous life in society before the french revolution, his own career adding to the pictures of the time. then alfieri's varied life-story is well told, his sad period of youth, when taken from his mother to suffer much educational and other neglect, the difficulties he passed through owing to his piedmontese origin and consequent ignorance of the pure italian language. she closes the modern italian poets with monti and ugo foscolo, whose sad life in london is exhibited. mary's studies in spanish enabled her to treat equally well the poets of spain and of portugal. her introduction is a good essay on the poetry and poets of spain, and some of the translations, which are her own, are very happily given. the poetic impulse in spain is traced from the iberians through the romans, visigoths, moors, and the early unknown spanish poets, among whom there were many fine examples. she leads us to boscan at the commencement of the sixteenth century. boscan seems to have been one of those rare beings, a poet endowed with all the favours of fortune, including contentment and happiness. his friends garcilaso di vega and mendoza aided greatly in the formation of spanish poetry, all three having studied the italian school and petrarch. this century, rich in poets, gives us also luis de leon, herrera, saade miranda, jorge de montemayor, castillejo, the dramatists; and ercilla, the soldier poet, who, in the expedition for the conquest of peru went to arauco, and wrote the poem named _araucana_. from him we pass to one of the great men of all time, cervantes, to one who understood the workings of the human heart, and was so much raised above the common level as to be neglected in the magnitude of his own work. originally of noble family, and having served his country in war, losing his left hand at the battle of lepanto, he received no recognition of his services after his return from a cruel captivity among the moors. instead of reward, cervantes seems to have met with every indignity that could be devised by the multitudes of pigmies to lower a great man, were that possible. mary, as ever, rises with her subject. she remarks:--"it is certainly curious that in those days when it was considered part of a noble's duties to protect and patronise men of letters, cervantes should have been thus passed over; and thus while his book was passing through europe with admiration, cervantes remained poor and neglected. so does the world frequently honour its greatest, as if jealous of the renown to which they can never attain." from cervantes we pass on to lope de vega, of whose thousand dramas what remains? and yet what honours and fortune were showered upon him during his life! a more even balance of qualities enabled him to write entertaining plays, and to flatter the weakness of those in power. from gongora and quevedo mary passes to calderon, whom she justly considers the master of spanish poetry. she deplores the little that is known of his life, and that after him the fine period of spanish literature declines, owing to the tyranny and misrule which were crushing and destroying the spirit and intellect of spain; for, unfortunately, art and poetry require not only the artist and the poet, but congenial atmosphere to survive in. writing for this cyclopædia was evidently very apposite work for mrs. shelley. she wrote also for it lives of some of the french poets. some stories were also written. in these she was less happy, as likewise in her novel, _perkin warbeck_, a pallid imitation of walter scott, which does not call for any special comment. shortly after her father's death, mrs. shelley wrote from north bank, regent's park, to moxon, wishing to arrange with him about the publication of godwin's autobiography, letters, &c. but some ten years later we find her still expressing the wish to do some work of the kind as a solemn duty if her health would permit. probably the very numerous notes which mrs. shelley made about her father and his surroundings were towards this object. mrs. shelley's health caused her at times considerable trouble from this period onwards. harrow had not suited her, and in she moved to putney; and the next year, , she was able to make the tour above mentioned, which we cannot do better than refer to at once. chapter xvi. italy revisited. in mary shelley's _rambles in germany and italy_ in - - , published in , we have not only a pleasing account of herself with her son and friends during a pleasure trip, but some very interesting and charming descriptions of continental life at that time. mary, with her son and two college friends, decided in june to spend their vacation on the banks of the lake of como. the idea of again visiting a country where she had so truly lived, and where she had passed through the depths of sorrow, filled her with much emotion. her failing health made her feel the advantage that travelling and change of country would be to her. after spending an enjoyable two months of the spring at richmond, visiting raphael's cartoons at hampton court, she went by way of brighton and hastings. on her way to dover she noticed how hastings, a few years ago a mere fishing village, had then become a new town. they were delayed at dover by a tempest, but left the next morning, the wind still blowing a gale; reaching calais they were further delayed by the tide. at length paris was arrived at, and we find mary making her first experience at a _table d'hote_. mary was now travelling with a maid, which no doubt her somewhat weakened health made a necessity to her. they went to the hotel chatham at paris. she felt all the renovating feeling of being in a fresh country out of the little island; the weight of cares seemed to fall from her; the life in paris cheered her, though the streets were dirty enough then--dirtier than those of london; whereas the contrast is now in the opposite direction. after a week here they went on towards como by way of frankfort. they were to pass metz, treves, the moselle, coblentz, and the rhine to mayence. the freedom from care and, worries in a foreign land, with sufficient means, and only in the company of young people open to enjoyment, gave new life to mary. after staying a night at metz, the clean little town on the moselle, they passed on to treves. at thionville, the german frontier, they were struck by the wretched appearance of the cottages in contrast to the french. from treves they proceeded by boat up the moselle. the winding banks of the moselle, with the vineyards sheltered by mountains, are well described. the peasants are content and prosperous, as, after the french revolution, they bought up the confiscated estates of the nobles, and so were able to cultivate the land. the travellers rowed into the rhine on reaching coblentz, and rested at the bellevue; and now they passed by the grander beauties of the rhine. these made mary wish to spend a summer there, exploring its recesses. they reached mayence at midnight, and the next morning left by rail for frankfort, the first train they had entered on the continent. mary much preferred the comfort of railway travelling. from frankfort they engaged a voiturier to schaffhausen, staying at baden-baden. the ruined castles recall memories of changed times, and mary remarks how, except in england and italy, country houses of the rich seem unknown. at darmstadt, where they stopped to lunch, they were annoyed and amused too by the inconvenience and inattention they were subjected to from the expected arrival of the grand duke. on reaching heidelberg, she remarks how, in travelling, one is struck by the way that the pride of princes for further dominion causes the devastation of the fairest countries. from the ruined castle they looked over the palatinate which had been laid waste owing to the ambition of the princess elizabeth, daughter of our james i. mary could have lingered long among the picturesque weed-grown walls, but had to continue the route to their destination. at baden they visited the gambling saloon, and saw _rouge et noir_ played. they were much struck by the falls of the rhine at schaffhausen; and, on reaching chiavenna, mary had again the delight of hearing and speaking italian. after crossing the blank mountains, who has not experienced the delight of this sensation has not yet known one of the joys of existence. on arriving at their destination at lake como, their temporary resting-place, a passing depression seized the party, the feeling that often comes when shut in by mountains away from home. no doubt mary having reached italy, the land she loved, with shelley, the feeling of being without him assailed her. at cadenabia, on lake como, they had to consider ways and means. it turned out that apartments, with all their difficulties, would equal hotel expenses without the same amount of comfort. so they decided on accepting the moderate terms offered by the landlord, and were comfortably or even luxuriously installed, with five little bedrooms and large private salon. in one nook of this mrs. shelley established her embroidery frame, desk, books, and such things, showing her taste for order and elegance. so for some weeks she and her son and two companions were able to pass their time free from all household worries. the lake and neighbourhood are picturesquely described. one drawback to mary's peace of mind was the arrival of her son's boat. he seemed to have inherited his father's love of boating, and this naturally filled her with apprehension. they made many pleasant excursions, of which she always gives good descriptions, and also enters clearly into any historical details connected with the country. at times she was carried by the beauty and repose of the scene into rapt moods which she thus describes:-- it has seemed to me, and on such an evening i have felt it, that the world, endowed as it is outwardly with endless shapes and influences of beauty and enjoyment, is peopled also in its spiritual life by myriads of loving spirits, from whom, unaware, we catch impressions which mould our thoughts to good, and thus they guide beneficially the course of events and minister to the destiny of man. whether the beloved dead make a portion of this holy company, i dare not guess; but that such exist, i feel. they keep far off while we are worldly, evil, selfish; but draw near, imparting the reward of heaven-born joy, when we are animated by noble thoughts and capable of disinterested actions. surely such gather round me to-night, part of that atmosphere of peace and love which it is paradise to breathe. i had thought such ecstasy dead in me for ever, but the sun of italy has thawed the frozen stream. such poetic feelings were the natural outcome of the quiet and repose after the life of care and anxiety poor mary had long been subjected to. she always seems more in her element when describing mountain cataracts, alpine storms, water lashed into waves and foam by the wind, all the changes of mountain and lake scenery; but this quiet holiday with her son came to an end, and they had to think of turning homewards. before doing so, they passed by milan, enjoyed the opera there, and went to see leonardo da vinci's "last supper," which mary naturally much admires; she mentions the luinis without enthusiasm. while here, the non-arrival of a letter caused great anxiety to mary, as they were now obliged to return on account of percy's term commencing, and there was barely enough money for him to travel without her; however, that was the only thing possible, and so it had to be done. percy returned to england with his two friends, and his mother had to remain at milan awaiting the letter. days pass without any letter coming to hand, lost days, for mary was too anxious and worried to be able to take any pleasure in her stay. nor had she any acquaintances in the place; she could scarcely endure to go down alone to _table d'hôte_ dinner, although she overcame this feeling as it was her only time of seeing anyone. ten days thus passed by, days of storm and tempest, during which her son and his companions recrossed the alps. they had left her on the th september, and it was not till she reached paris on the th october that she became aware of the disastrous journey they had gone through, and how impossible it would have been for them to manage even as they did, had she been with them; indeed, she hardly could have lived through it. the description of this journey was written to mrs. shelley in a most graphic and picturesque letter by one of her son's companions. they were nearly drowned while crossing the lake in the diligence on a raft, during a violent storm. next they were informed that the road of the dazio grande to airolo was washed away sixty feet under the present torrent. they, with a guide, had to find their way over an unused mountain track, rendered most dangerous by the storm. they all lost shoes and stockings, and had to run on as best they could. percy, with some others, had lost the track; but they, providentially, met the rest of the party at an inn at piota, and from there managed to reach airolo; and so they crossed the stupendous st. gothard pass, one of the wonders of the world. mrs. shelley having at last recovered the letter from the post office, returned with her maid and a vetturino who had three irish ladies with him, by way of geneva, staying at isola bella. after passing the lago maggiore, a turn in the road shut the lake and italy from her sight, and she proceeded on her journey with a heavy heart, as many a traveller has done and many more will do, the fascination of italy under most circumstances being intense. mary then describes one of the evils of italy in its then divided state. the southern side of the simplon belonged to the king of sardinia, but its road led at once into austrian boundary. the sardinian sovereign, therefore, devoted this splendid pass to ruin to force people to go by mont cenis, and thus rendered the road most dangerous for those who were forced to traverse it. the journey over the simplon proved most charming, and mrs. shelley was very much pleased with the civility of her vetturino, who managed everything admirably. now, on her way to geneva, she passed the same scenes she had lived first in with shelley. she thus describes them:-- the far alps were hid, the wide lake looked drear. at length i caught a glimpse of the scenes among which i had lived, when first i stepped out from childhood into life. there on the shores of bellerive stood diodati; and our humble dwelling, maison ohapuis, nestled close to the lake below. there were the terraces, the vineyards, the upward path threading them, the little port where our boat lay moored. i could mark and recognise a thousand peculiarities, familiar objects then, forgotten since--now replete with recollections and associations. was i the same person who had lived there, the companion of the dead--for all were gone? even my young child, whom i had looked upon as the joy of future years, had died in infancy. not one hope, then in fair bud, had opened into maturity; storm and blight and death had passed over, and destroyed all. while yet very young, i had reached the position of an aged person, driven back on memory for companionship with the beloved, and now i looked on the inanimate objects that had surrounded me, which survived the same in aspect as then, to feel that all my life since is an unreal phantasmagoria--the shades that gathered round that scene were the realities, the substances and truth of the soul's life which i shall, i trust, hereafter rejoin. mary digresses at some length on the change of manners in the french since the revolution of , saying that they had lost so much of their pleasant agreeable manner, their monsieur and madame, which sounded so pretty. from geneva by lyons, through chalons, the diligence slowly carries her to paris, and thence she shortly returned to england in october. mary's next tour with her son was in , by way of amsterdam, through germany and italy. from frankfort she describes to a friend her journey with its various mishaps. after spending a charming week with friends in hampshire, and then passing a day or two in london to bid farewell to old friends, mrs. shelley, her son, and mr. knox embarked for antwerp on june , . after the sea passage, which mary dreaded, the pleasure of entering the quiet scheldt is always great; but she does not seem to have recognised the charm of the belgian or dutch quiet scenery. with her love of mountains, these picturesque aspects seem lost on her; at least, she remarks that, "it is strange that a scene, in itself uninteresting, becomes agreeable to look at in a picture, from the truth with which it is depicted, and a perfection of colouring which at once contrasts and harmonizes the hues of sky and water." mary does not seem to understand that the artist who does this selects the beauties of nature to represent. a truthful representation of a vulgarised piece of nature would be very painful for an artist to look on or to paint. the english or italian villas of lake como, or the riviera, would require a great deal of neglect by the artist not to vulgarize the glorious scenes round them; but this lesson has yet to be widely learnt in modern times, that beauty can never spoil nature, however humble; but no amount of wealth expended on a palace or mansion can make it fit for a picture, without the artist's feeling, any more than the beauties of italy on canvas can be other than an eyesore without the same subtle power. at liège, fresh worries assailed the party. the difficulty of getting all their luggage, as well as a theft of sixteen pounds from her son's bedroom in the night, did not add to the pleasures of the commencement of their tour; but, as mary said, the discomfort was nothing to what it would have been in , when their means were far narrower, and she feels, "welcome this evil so that it be the only one," for, as she says, one whose life had been so stained by tragedy could never regain a healthy tone, if that is needed not to fear for those we love. on reaching cologne, the party went up the rhine to coblentz. as neither mary nor her companions had previously done this, they were again much imposed upon by the steward. she recalls her former voyage with shelley and claire, when in an open boat they passed the night on the rapid river, "tethered" to a willow on the bank. when frankfort is at length reached, they have to decide where to pass the summer. kissingen is decided on, for mrs. shelley to try the baths. here they take lodgings, and all the discomforts of trying to get the necessaries of life and some order, when quite ignorant of the language of the place, are amusingly described by mrs. shelley. the treatment and diet at the baths seem to have been very severe, nearly every usual necessary of life being forbidden by the government in order to do justice to the efficacy of the baths. passing through various german towns their way to leipsic, they stay at weimar, where mary rather startles the reader by remarking that she is not sure she would give the superiority to goethe; that schiller had always appeared to her the greater man, so complete. it is true she only knew the poets by translations, but the wonderful passages translated from goethe by shelley might have impressed her more. mary is much struck on seeing the tombs of the poets by their being placed in the same narrow chamber as the princes, showing the genuine admiration of the latter for those who had cast a lustre on their kingdom, and their desire to share even in the grave the poet's renown. mary, when in the country of frederic the great, shows little enthusiasm for that great monarch, so simple in his own life, so just, so beloved, and so surrounded by dangers which he overcame for the welfare of the country. what frederic might have been in napoleon's place after the revolution it is difficult to conceive, or how he might have acted. certainly not for mere self aggrandizement. but the tyrannies of the petty german princes mary justly does not pass over, such as the terrible story told in schiller's _cabal and love_. she recalls how the duke of hesse-cassel sold his peasants for the american war, to give with their pay jewels to his mistress, and how, on her astonishment being expressed, the servant replied they only cost seven thousand children of the soil just sent to america. on this mary remarks:--"history fails fearfully in its duty when it makes over to the poet the record and memory of such an event; one, it is to be hoped, that can never be renewed. and yet what acts of cruelty and tyranny may not be reacted on the stage of the world which we boast of as civilised, if one man has uncontrolled power over the lives of many, the unwritten story of russia may hereafter tell." this seems to point to reminiscences of claire's life in russia. mrs. shelley also remarks great superiority in the comfort, order, and cleanliness in the protestant over the catholic parts of germany, where liberty of conscience has been gained, and is profoundly touched on visiting luther's chamber in the castle of wartburg overlooking the thuringian forest. her visits to berlin and dresden, during the heat of summer, do not much strike the reader by her feeling for pictorial art. she is impressed by world-renowned pictures; but her remarks, though those of a clever woman, show that the love of nature, especially in its most majestic forms, does not give or imply love of art. the feeling for plastic art requires the emotion which runs through all art, and without which it is nothing, to be distinctly innate as in the artist, or to have been cultivated by surroundings and influence. true, it is apparently difficult always to trace the influence. there is no one step from the contemplation of the alps to the knowledge of plastic art. literary art does not necessarily understand pictorial art: it may profess to expound the latter, and the reader, equally or still more ignorant, fancies that he appreciates the pictorial art because he relishes its literary exposition. surely a piece of true plastic art, constantly before a child for it to learn to love, would do more than much after study. the best of all ought to be given to children--music, poetry, art--for it is easier then to instil than later to eradicate. it is true these remarks may seem unnecessary with regard to mary shelley, as, with all her real gifts and insight into poetry, she is most modest about her deficiencies in art knowledge, and is even apologetic concerning the remarks made in her letters, and for this her truth of nature is to be commended. in music, also, she seems more really moved by her own emotional nature than purely by the music; how, otherwise, should she have been disappointed at hearing _masaniello_, while admiring german music, when auber's grand opera has had the highest admiration from the chief german musicians? but she had not been previously moved towards it; that is the great difference between perception and acquired knowledge, and why so frequently the art of literature is mistaken for perception. but mary used her powers justly, and drew the line where she was conscious of knowledge; she had real imagination of her own, and used the precious gift justifiably, and thus kept honour and independence, a difficult task for a woman in her position. she expresses pity for the travellers she meets, who simply are anxious to have "done" everything. she truly remarks:--"we must become a part of the scenes around us, and they must mingle and become a portion of us, or we see without seeing, and study without learning. there is no good, no knowledge, unless we can go out from and take some of the external into ourselves. this is the secret of mathematics as well as of poetry." their trip to prague, and its picturesque position, afforded great pleasure to her. the stirring and romantic history is well described--history, as shelley truly says, is a record of crime and misery. the first reformers sprang up in bohemia. the martyrdom of john huss did not extinguish his enlightening influence; and while all the rest of europe was enslaved in darkness, bohemia was free with a pure religion. but such a bright example might not last, and bohemia became a province of the empire, and not a hundred protestants remain in the country now. the interesting story of st. john nepomuk, the history of wallenstein, with schiller's finest tragedy, all lend their interest to prague. in the journey through bohemia and southern germany, dirty and uncomfortable inns were conspicuous. the lake of gemünden much struck mary with its poetic beauty, and she felt it was the place she should like to retreat to for a summer. from ischl they went over the brenner pass of the lago di garda on to italy. mary was particularly struck by the beauties of salzburg, with the immense plain half encircled by mountains crowned by castles, with the high alps towering above all. she considered all this country superior to the swiss alps, and longed to pass months there some time. by this beautiful route they reached verona, and then venice. on the road to venice mary became aware (as we have already noted) of an intimate remembrance of each object, and each turn in the road. it was by this very road she entered venice twenty-five years before with her dying child. she remarks that shakspeare knew the feeling and endued the grief of queen constance with terrible reality; and, later, the poem of "the wood spurge" enforces the same sentiment. it was remarked by holcroft that the notice the soul takes of objects presented to the eye in its hour of agony is a relief afforded by nature to permit the nerves to endure pain. on reaching venice a search for lodgings was not successful; but two gentlemen, to whom they had introductions, found for the party an hotel within their still limited means; their bargain came to £ a month each for everything included. they visited again the rialto, and mrs. shelley observes:--"often when here before, i visited this scene at this hour, or later, for often i expected shelley's return from palazzo mocenigo till two or three in the morning. i watched the glancing of the oars, and heard the far song, and saw the palaces sleeping in the light of the moon, which veils by its deep shadows all that grieved the eye and hurt the heart in the decaying palaces of venice; then i saw, as now i see, the bridge of the rialto spanning the canal. all, all is the same; but, as the poet says,--'the difference to me.'" she notices many of the most celebrated of the pictures in the academia; and she had the good fortune of seeing st. peter martyr, which she misnames st. peter the hermit, out of its dark niche in the church of santi giovanni e paolo. she gives a very good description of venetian life at the time, and much commends its family affection and family life as being of a much less selfish nature than in england; as she remarks truly, if a traveller gets into a vicious or unpleasant set in any country, it would not do to judge all the rest of the nation, by that standard--as she considered shelley did when staying in venice with byron. the want of good education in italy at that time she considers the cause of the ruling indolence, love-making with the young and money-keeping with the elder being the chief occupation. she gives a very good description of the noble families and their descent. many of the italian palaces preserved their pictures, and in the palazzo pisani mary saw the paul veronese, now in the national gallery, of "the family of darius at the feet of alexander." mary's love of venice grew, and she seems to have entertained serious ideas of taking a palace and settling there; but all the fancies of travellers are not realised. one moonlit evening she heard an old gondoliere challenge a younger one to alternate with him the stanzas of the _gerusalemme_. the men stood on the piazzetta beside the laguna, surrounded by other gondolieri in the moonlight. they chanted "the death of clorinda" and other favourite passages; and though, owing to venetian dialect mary could not follow every word, she was much impressed by the dignity and beauty of the scene. the pigeons of st. mark's existed then as now. mary ended her stay in venice by a visit to the opera, and joined a party, by invitation, to accompany the austrian archduke to the lido on his departure. mrs. shelley much admired the expression in the early masters at padua, though she does not mention giotto. in florence, the expense of the hotels again obliged her to go through the tiresome work of seeking apartments. they fortunately found sunny rooms, as the cold was intense. to cold followed rain, and she remarks:--"walking is out of the question; and driving-how i at once envy and despise the happy rich who have carriages, and who use them only to drive every afternoon in the cascine. if i could, i would visit every spot mentioned in florentine history--visit its towns of old renown, and ramble amid scenes familiar to dante, boccaccio, petrarch, and machiavelli." the descriptions of ghirlandajo's pictures in florence are very good. mary now evidently studies art with great care and intelligence, and makes some very clever remarks appertaining to it. she is also able to call attention to the fact that mr. kirkup had recently made the discovery of the head of dante alighieri, painted by giotto, on the wall of the chapel of the palace of the podestà at florence. the fact was mentioned by vasari, and kirkup was enabled to remove the whitewash and uncover this inestimable treasure. giotto, in the act of painting this portrait, is the subject of one of the finest designs of the english school--alas! not painted in any form of fresco on an english wall. from the art of florence mrs. shelley turns to its history with her accustomed clear-headed method. space will not admit all the interesting details, but her account of the factions and of the good work and terrible tragedies of the carbonari is most interesting. the great equality in florence is well noticed, accounting for the little real distress among the poor, and the simplicity of life of the nobles. she next enters into an account of modern italian literature, which she ranks high, and hopes much from. the same struggle between romanticists and classicists existed as in other countries; and she classes manzoni with walter scott, though admitting that he has not the same range of character. mary and her party next proceeded by sea to rome. here, again, the glories of italy and its art failed not to call forth eloquent remarks from mary's pen; and her views, though at times somewhat contradictory, are always well expressed. she, at least, had a mind to appreciate the wonders of the stanze, and to feel that genius and intellect are not out of their province in art. she only regrets that the great italian art which can express so perfectly the religious sentiment and divine ecstasy did not attempt the grand feelings of humanity, the love which is faithful to death, the emotions such as shakespeare describes. while this wish exists, and there are artists who can carry it out, art is not dead. after a very instructive chapter on the modern history of the papal states, we again find mary among the scenes dearest to her heart and her nature: her next letter is dated from sorrento. she feels herself to be in paradise; and who that has been in that wonderful country would not sympathise with her enthusiasm! to be carried up the heights to ravello, and to see the glorious panorama around, she considered, surpassed all her previous most noble experiences. ravello, with its magnificent cathedral covered with mosaics, is indeed a sight to have seen; the road to amalfi, the ruinous paper mills in the ravine, the glorious picturesqueness, are all "well expressed and understood." mrs. shelley seems to have considered june ( ) the perfection of weather for naples. chapter xvii. last years. this last literary work by mrs. shelley, of which she herself speaks slightingly as a poor performance, was noticed about the time of its publication as an interesting and truthful piece of writing by an authority on the subject. mrs. shelley's very modest and retiring disposition gave her little confidence in herself, and she seems to have met, with various discouraging remarks from acquaintances; she used to wonder afterwards that she was not able to defend herself and suppress impertinence. this last book is spoken of by mary as written to help an unfortunate person whose acquaintance claire had made in paris while staying in some capacity in that city with lady sussex lennox. a title has a factitious prestige with some people, and certainly in this case the acquaintance which at first seemed advantageous to mary proved to be much the contrary, both in respect of money and of peace of mind; but, before referring further to this subject, we must explain that the year brought with it a perhaps questionable advantage for her. sir timothy shelley, who had been ailing for some while, and whom percy shelley had visited from time to time at field place, having become rather a favourite with the old gentleman, now reached the bourne of life--he was ninety. his death in april brought his grandson percy florence to the baronetcy. that portion of the estate which had been entailed previous to sir bysshe's proposed rearrangement of the entire property now came to mrs. shelley by her husband's will. owing to the poet's having refused to join in the entail, the larger portion of the property would not under any circumstances, as we have before mentioned, have devolved on him. a sum of £ , is mentioned by the different biographers of shelley as the probable value of the minor estate entailed on him, of which he had the absolute right of disposal. this estate, on sir timothy's death, was found to be burdened to the extent of £ , , which mary borrowed on mortgage at - / per cent. this large sum included £ , due to lady shelley for "the pittance" mary had received; £ , to john shelley for a mortgage shelley signed to pay his debts, probably for the £ , borrowed on leaving marlow, when he paid all his debts there; so that if any trifle was left unpaid on that occasion, it must have been from oversight and want of dunning, as he undoubtedly left there with sufficient money, having also resold his house for £ , . a jointure had to be paid lady shelley of £ a year. the different legacies still due in were £ , to ianthe, two sums of £ , each to claire, £ , to hogg, £ , to peacock. these various sums mounting up to £ , , the remaining £ , can easily have been swallowed up by other post-obits and legal expenses. two sums of £ , each left to his two sons who died, and £ , left to lord byron, had lapsed to the estate. mrs. shelley's first care was to raise the necessary money and pay all the outstanding obligations. her chief anxiety through her struggles had always been not to incur debts; her next thought was to give an annual pension of £ to her brother's widow, and £ a year (afterwards reduced to £ ) to leigh hunt. this was her manner of deriving immediate pleasure from her inheritance. by her husband's will, executed in , everything, "whether in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy," was left to her; but as she always mentioned her son, sir percy, as acting with herself, and said that owing to the embarrassed condition of the estate they intended to share all in common for a time, it is evident that mary had made her son's interest her first duty. the estate had brought £ , the previous year, and this would agree, deducting £ , for interest on mortgage, and £ lady shelley's jointure, in reducing their income to a little below £ , a year, as mrs. shelley stated. field place was let in the first instance for sixty pounds a year, it was so damp. mrs. shelley continued with, her son to live at putney till . they had tried putney in , and towards the end of she took a house there, the white cottage, lower richmond road, putney. mary thus describes it:--"our cot is on the banks of the thames, not looking on it, but the garden-gate opens on the towing-path. it has a nice little garden, but sadly out of order. it is shabbily furnished, and has no spare room, except by great contrivance, if at all; so, perforce, economy will be the order of the day. it is secluded but cheerful, at the extreme verge of putney, close to barnes common; just the situation percy desired. he has bought a boat." mrs. shelley moved into this house shortly after the visit to claire in paris, referred to at the commencement of this chapter. her life in london, in spite of a few very good friends, often appeared solitary to her; for, as she herself observes, those who produce and give original work to the world require the social contact of their fellow-beings. thus, saddened by the neglect which she experienced, she tried to counteract it by sympathising with those less fortunate than herself; but this, also, is at times a very difficult task to carry out single-handed beyond a certain point. during this visit to paris in she had the misfortune to meet, at the house of lady sussex lennox, an italian adventurer of the name of gatteschi. they had known some people of that name formerly in florence, as noted in claire's diary of ; and this may have caused them to take a more special interest in him. suffice it to say, that he appeared to be in the greatest distress, and at the same time was considered by mary and claire to have the _éclat_ of "good birth," and also to have talents, which, if they got but a fair chance, might raise him to any post of eminence. these ideas continued for some time; on one occasion he helped mrs. shelley with her literary work, finding the historical passages for _rambles in germany and italy_. she and claire used to contrive to give him small sums of money, in some delicate way, so as not to wound his feelings, as he would die of mortification. he was invited over to england in , under the idea that he might obtain some place as tutor in a family, and he brought over mss. of his own, which were thought highly of. while in england gatteschi lodged with mr. knox, who had travelled with mrs. shelley and her son, as a friend of the latter. mr. knox seems to have been at that time on friendly terms with gatteschi, though mrs. shelley regretted that her son did not take to him. with all the impulse of a generous nature, she spared no pains to be of assistance to the italian, and evidently must have written imprudently gushing letters at times to this object of her commiseration. whilst mary was poor gatteschi must have approached sentimental gratitude; she says later, "he cannot now be wishing to marry me, or he would not insult me." in fact he had proposed to marry her when she came into her money. gatteschi waited his time, he aimed at larger sums of money. failing to get these by fair means, the scoundrel began to use threats of publishing her correspondence with him. in he was said to be "ravenous for money," and, knowing how mary had yielded to vehement letters on former occasions, and had at first answered him imprudently, instead of at once putting his letters into legal hands, the villain made each fresh letter a tool to serve his purpose. he thus worked upon her sensitive nature and dread of ridicule, especially at a time when she more than ever wished to stand well with the world and the society which she felt it her son's right to belong to--her son, who had never failed in his duty, and who, she said, was utterly without vice, although at times she wished he had more love of reading and steady application. it is easy to see now how perfectly innocent, although quixotically generous, mary shelley was; but it can also be discerned how difficult it would have been to stop the flood of social mirth and calumny, had more of this subject been, made public. mary, knowing this only too well, bitterly deplored it, and accused herself of folly in a way that might even now deceive a passing thinker; but it has been the pleasant task of the writer to make this subject perfectly clear to herself, and some others. it must be added that the letters in question, written by mrs. shelley to gatteschi, were obtained by a requisition of the french police under the pretext of political motives: gatteschi had been known to be mixed up with an insurrection in bologna. mr. knox, who managed this affair for mrs. shelley, showed the talents of an incipient police magistrate. the whole of mary's correspondence with claire clairmont is very cordial. mary did her best to help her from time to time in her usual generous manner, and evidently gave her the best advice in her power. we find her regretting at times claire's ill-health, sending her carriage to her while in osnaburgh street, and so on. she strongly urged her to come to england to settle about the investment of her money, telling her that one £ , she cannot interfere with, as shelley had left it for an annuity which could not be lost or disposed of; but that the other £ , she can invest where she likes. at one time mary tells her of a good investment she has heard of in an opera-box, but that she must act for herself, as it is too dangerous a matter to give advice in. in mary shelley visited brighton for her health, her nerves having been much shaken by the anxiety she had gone through. while there she mentioned seeing mr. and mrs. john shelley at the theatre, but they took no notice of her. when mrs. shelley went over field place after sir timothy's death, lady shelley had expressed herself to a friend as being much pleased with her, and said she wished she had known her before: mary on hearing this exclaimed, "then why on earth didn't she?" in they moved from putney to chester square, and in the summer mary went to baden for her health. from here again she wrote how glad she was to be away from the mortifications of london, and that she detested chester square. her health from this time needed frequent change. in , she moved to field place; she found it damp, but visits to brighton and elsewhere helped to keep up her gradually failing health. the next year she had the satisfaction of seeing her son married to a lady (mrs. st. john) in every way to her liking. a letter received by mrs. shelley from her daughter-in-law while on her wedding tour, and enclosed to claire, shows how she wished the latter to partake in the joy she felt at the happy marriage of her son. mary now had not only a son to love, but a daughter to care for her, and the pleasant duty was not unwillingly performed, for the lady speaks of her to this day with emotion. from this time there is little to record. we find mary in inviting willie clairmont, claire's nephew, to see her at field place, where she was living with her son and his wife. in the same year they rather dissuaded claire, who was then at maidstone, from a somewhat wild project which she entertained, that of going to california. the ground of dissuasion was still wilder than the project, for it was just now said the hoped-for gold had turned out to be merely sulphate of iron. the house in chester square had been given up in , and another was taken at , warwick square, before the marriage of sir percy, and thence at the end of that year mary writes of an improvement in her health, but there was still a tendency to neuralgic rheumatism. the life-long nerve strain for a time was relaxed, but without doubt the tension had been too strong, and loving care could not prevail beyond a certain point. the next year the son and his wife took the drooping mary to nice for her health, and a short respite was given; but the pressure could not much longer remain. the strong brain, and tender, if once too impassioned heart, failed on february , , and nothing remained but a cherished memory of the devoted daughter and mother, and the faithful wife of shelley. women novelists _of_ queen victoria's reign women novelists _of_ queen victoria's reign _a book of appreciations_ by mrs. oliphant, mrs. lynn linton mrs. alexander, mrs. macquoid, mrs. parr mrs. marshall, charlotte m. yonge adeline sergeant & edna lyall london hurst & blackett, limited great marlborough street _all rights reserved_ printed by ballantyne, hanson & co. at the ballantyne press contents the sisters brontË _by_ mrs. oliphant _page_ george eliot _by_ mrs. lynn linton _page_ mrs. gaskell _by_ edna lyall _page_ mrs. crowe mrs. archer clive mrs. henry wood _by_ adeline sergeant _page_ lady georgiana fullerton mrs. stretton anne manning _by_ charlotte m. yonge _page_ dinah mulock (mrs. craik) _by_ mrs. parr _page_ julia kavanagh amelia blandford edwards _by_ mrs. macquoid _page_ mrs. norton _by_ mrs. alexander _page_ "a. l. o. e." (miss tucker) mrs. ewing _by_ mrs. marshall _page_ publishers' note _having been concerned for many years in the publication of works of fiction by feminine writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our contribution to the celebration of "the longest reign," a volume having for its subject leading women novelists of the victorian era._ _in the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early to assess the merit or forecast the future of their works. the present book, therefore, is restricted to women novelists deceased._ _it was further necessary to confine the volume within reasonable limits, and it was decided, consequently, that it should deal only with women who did all their work in fiction after the accession of the queen. this decision excludes not only such writers as lady morgan, mrs. opie, miss ferrier, miss mitford, mrs. shelley, and miss jane porter, who, although they died after , published all their most notable stories early in the century; but also such writers as mrs. gore, mrs. bray, mrs. s. c. hall, mrs. trollope, lady blessington, and mrs. marsh, who made their débuts as novelists between and ._ _as regards some of the last-named, it might be urged that the works they produced have now no interest other than historical, and can be said to live only so far as they embody more or less accurate descriptions of society early in the reign. the "deerbrook" and "the hour and the man" of miss martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps, still read; but it is as a political economist and miscellaneous writer, rather than as a novelist, that their author ranks in literature; while of the tales by miss pardoe, miss geraldine jewsbury, and others once equally popular, scarcely the titles are now recollected._ _on the other hand, the eminence and permanence of the brontës, george eliot, and mrs. gaskell are universally recognised; the popularity of mrs. craik and mrs. henry wood is still admittedly great; the personality of mrs. norton will always send students to her works; mrs. crowe and mrs. clive were pioneers in domestic and "sensational" fiction; lady georgiana fullerton produced a typical religious novel; miss manning made pleasing and acceptable the autobiographico-historical narrative; the authors of "the valley of a hundred fires" of "barbara's history," and of "adèle" have even now their readers and admirers; while "a. l. o. e." and mrs. ewing were among the most successful caterers for the young._ _it has seemed to us that value as well as interest would attach to critical estimates of and biographical notes upon, these representative novelists, supplied by living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad to have been able to secure for the purpose, the services of the contributors to this volume, all of whom may claim to discourse with some authority upon the art they cultivate. it is perhaps scarcely necessary to say that each contributor is responsible only for the essay to which her name is appended._ the sisters brontË _by_ mrs. oliphant the sisters brontË the effect produced upon the general mind by the appearance of charlotte brontë in literature, and afterwards by the record of her life when that was over, is one which it is nowadays somewhat difficult to understand. had the age been deficient in the art of fiction, or had it followed any long level of mediocrity in that art, we could have comprehended this more easily. but charlotte brontë appeared in the full flush of a period more richly endowed than any other we know of in that special branch of literature, so richly endowed, indeed, that the novel had taken quite fictitious importance, and the names of dickens and thackeray ranked almost higher than those of any living writers except perhaps tennyson, then young and on his promotion too. anthony trollope and charles reade who, though in their day extremely popular, have never had justice from a public which now seems almost to have forgotten them, formed a powerful second rank to these two great names. it is a great addition to the value of the distinction gained by the new comer that it was acquired in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination. but this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had no artificial means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the part of a writer possessing little experience or knowledge of the world, and no sort of social training or adventitious aid. the genius was indeed unmistakable, and possessed in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in the most vivid and actual pictures of life. but the life of which it had command was seldom attractive, often narrow, local, and of a kind which meant keen personal satire more than any broader view of human existence. a group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their little parochial background as only the most real art of portraiture, intensified by individual scorn and dislike, could have made them: the circle of limited interests, small emulations, keen little spites and rancours, filling the atmosphere of a great boarding school, the brussels _pensionnat des filles_--these were the two spheres chiefly portrayed: but portrayed with an absolute untempered force which knew neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality, but burned upon the paper and made everything round dim in the contrast. i imagine it was this extraordinary naked force which was the great cause of a success, never perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the present day, when edition follows edition, and thousand thousand, of the books which are the favourites of the public: but one which has lived and lasted through nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to carry on a little literature of its own, book after book following each other not so much to justify as to reproclaim and echo to all the winds the fame originally won. no one else of the century, i think, has called forth this persevering and lasting homage. not dickens, though perhaps more of him than of any one else has been dealt out at intervals to an admiring public; not thackeray, of whom still we know but little; not george eliot, though her fame has more solid foundations than that of miss brontë. scarcely scott has called forth more continual droppings of elucidation, explanation, remark. yet the books upon which this tremendous reputation is founded though vivid, original, and striking in the highest degree, are not great books. their philosophy of life is that of a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost _nil_, their conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a mind self-centred and working in the narrowest orbit. it is rather, as we have said, the most incisive and realistic art of portraiture than any exercise of the nobler arts of fiction--imagination, combination, construction--or humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its problems--upon which this fame is built. the curious circumstance that charlotte brontë was, if the word may be so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder, emily, whose genius has been taken for granted, carrying the wilder elements of the common inspiration to extremity in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of "wuthering heights," while anne diluted such powers of social observation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable novels of a much commoner order, has no doubt also enhanced the central figure of the group to an amazing degree. they placed her strength in relief by displaying its separate elements, and thus commending the higher skill and larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors and wild country and rude image of man better than the one, and misunderstanding the common course of more subdued life less than the other. the three together are for ever inseparable; they were homely, lowly, somewhat neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few charms to the careless eye: yet no group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant as themselves have ever, i think, in the course of history--certainly never in this century--come to such universal recognition. the effect is quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for; but there cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which nobody can deny. * * * * * these three daughters of a poor country clergyman came into the world early in the century, the dates of their births being , , , in the barest of little parsonages in the midst of the moors--a wild but beautiful country, and a rough but highly characteristic and keen-witted people. yorkshire is the very heart of england; its native force, its keen practical sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in the nation of the largest of the shires has given it a strong individual character and position almost like that of an independent province. but the brontës, whose name is a softened and decorated edition of a common irish name, were not of that forcible race: and perhaps the strong strain after emotion, and revolt against the monotonies of life, which were so conspicuous in them were more easily traceable to their celtic origin than many other developments attributed to that cause. they were motherless from an early age, children of a father who, after having been depicted as a capricious tyrant, seems now to have found a fairer representation as a man with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet neither unkind to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. there was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim of a disagreeable romance, but apparent now as only a specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the ordinary ne'er-do-well of a family, without force of character or self-control to keep his place with decency in the world. these children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as the power of inscribing words upon paper was acquired by them, inventing imaginary countries and compiling visionary records of them as so many imaginative children do. the elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls another, connected by the closest links of companionship. it was thought or hoped that the son was the genius of the family, and at the earliest possible age he began to send his effusions to editors, and to seek admission to magazines with the mingled arrogance and humility of a half-fledged creature. but the world knows now that it was not poor branwell who was the genius of the family; and this injury done him in his cradle, and the evil report of him that everybody gives throughout his life, awakens a certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth so unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he must have considered his natural inferiors and vassals. we are told by charlotte brontë herself that he never knew of the successes of his sisters, the fact of their successive publications being concealed from him out of tenderness for his feelings; but it is scarcely to be credited that when the parish knew the unfortunate brother did not find out. the unhappy attempt of mrs. gaskell in writing the lives of the sisters to make this melancholy young man accountable for the almost brutal element in emily brontë's conception of life, and the strange views of charlotte as to what men were capable of, has made him far too important in their history; where, indeed, he had no need to have appeared at all, had the family pride consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in veiling rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. so far as can be made out now, he had as little as possible to do with their development in any way. there was nothing unnatural or out of the common in the youthful life of the family except that strange gift of genius, which though consistent with every genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of scott, seems in other developments of character to turn all the elements into chaos. its effect upon the parson's three daughters was, indeed, not of a very wholesome kind. it awakened in them an uneasy sense of superiority which gave double force to every one of the little hardships which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a governess in a middle-class house, has to support: and made life harder instead of sweeter to them in many ways, since it was full of the biting experience of conditions less favourable than those of many persons round them whom they could not but feel inferior to themselves. the great school, which it was charlotte brontë's first act when she began her literary career to invest with an almost tragic character of misery, privation, and wrong, was her first step from home. yorkshire schools did not at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the world, and nicholas nickleby was forming his acquaintance with the squalid cruelty of dotheboys hall just about the same time when charlotte brontë's mind was being filled with the privations and discontents of lowood. in such a case there is generally some fire where there is so much smoke, and probably lowood was under no very heavenly _régime_: but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply accentuated by that keen criticism which is suggested by the constant sense of injured worth and consciousness of a superiority not acknowledged. the same feeling pursued her into the situations as governess which she occupied one after another, and in which her indignation at being expected to feel affection for the children put under her charge, forms a curious addition to the other grievances with which fate pursues her life. no doubt there are many temptations in the life of a governess; the position of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management with double force because of the effect they have on herself--especially if she feels herself competent, had she but the power, to set things right--must always be a difficult one. it was not continued long enough, however, to involve very much suffering; though no doubt it helped to mature the habit of sharp personal criticism and war with the world. at the same time charlotte brontë made some very warm personal friendships, and wrote a great many letters to the school friends who pleased her, in which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness is occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girlhood, to the great improvement of the atmosphere if not of the mind. ellen nussey, mary taylor, women not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic story, remained her close friends as long as she lived, and her letters to them, though always a little demure, give us a gentler idea of her than anything else she has written. not that there is much charm either of style or subject in them: but there is no sort of bitterness or sense of insufficient appreciation. nothing can be more usual and commonplace, indeed, than this portion of her life. as in so many cases, the artificial lights thrown upon it by theories formed afterwards, clear away when we examine its actual records, and it is apparent that there was neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor internal struggle in the existence of the girl who, though more or less in arms against everybody outside--especially when holding a position superior to her own, more especially still when exercising authority over her in any way--was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy, young woman at home, with friends to whom she could pour out long pages of what is, on the whole, quite moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or other young person of the opposite sex, suspected of "paying attention" to one or other of the little coterie. these allusions are not more lofty or dignified than are similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there is not a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which afterwards put up the haworth curates in all their imperfections before the world. the other sisters at this time in the background, two figures always clinging together, looking almost like one, have no great share in this softer part of charlotte's life. they were, though so different in character, completely devoted to each other, apparently forming no other friendships, each content with the one other partaker of her every thought. a little literature seems to have been created between them, little chapters of recollection and commentary upon their life, sealed up and put away for three years in each case, to be opened on emily's or on anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their close unity, though the little papers were in themselves simple in the extreme. anne too became a governess with something of the same experience as charlotte, and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people who were not the least unkind to her. but emily had no such trials. she remained at home perhaps because she was too uncompromising to be allowed to make the experiment of putting up with other people, perhaps because one daughter at home was indispensable. the family seems to have had kind and trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there is no evidence of exceptional hardness or roughness in their circumstances in any way. in , charlotte and emily, aged respectively twenty-six and twenty-four, went to brussels. their design was "to acquire a thorough familiarity with french," also some insight into other languages, with the view of setting up a school on their own account. the means were supplied by the aunt, who had lived in their house and taken more or less care of them since their mother's death. the two sisters were nearly a year in the pensionnat héger, now so perfectly known in every detail of its existence to all who have read "villette." they were recalled by the death of the kind aunt who had procured them this advantage, and afterwards charlotte, no one quite knows why, went back to brussels for a second year, in which all her impressions were probably strengthened and intensified. certainly a more clear and lifelike picture, scathing in its cold yet fierce light, was never made than that of the white tall brussels house, its class rooms, its gardens, its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous and shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. it startles the reader to find--a fact which we had forgotten--that m. paul emmanuel was m. héger, the husband of madame héger and legitimate head of the house: and that this daring and extraordinary girl did not hesitate to encounter gossip or slander by making him so completely the hero of her romance. slander in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such a fiery spirit as that of charlotte brontë: but it shows her perfect independence of mind and scorn of comment that she should have done this. in the end of ' she returned home, and the episode was over. it was really the only episode of possible practical significance in her life until we come to the records of her brief literary career and her marriage, both towards its end. * * * * * the prospect of the school which the three sisters were to set up together was abandoned; there was no more talk of governessing. we are not told if it was the small inheritance of the aunt--only, mr. clement shorter informs us, £ --which enabled the sisters henceforward to remain at home without thought of further effort: but certainly this was what happened. and the lives of the two younger were drawing so near the end that it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment of comparative grace together. their life was extremely silent, secluded, and apart. there was the melancholy figure of branwell to distract the house with the spectacle of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder; but this can scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had been a more beloved brother. he was not, however, veiled by any tender attempt to cover his follies or wickedness, but openly complained of to all their friends, which mitigates the affliction: and they seem to have kept very separate from him, living in a world of their own. in a volume of poems by currer, ellis, and acton bell, was published at their own cost. it had not the faintest success; they were informed by the publisher that two copies only had been sold, and the only satisfaction that remained to them was to send a few copies to some of the owners of those great names which the enthusiastic young women had worshipped from afar as stars in the firmament. these poems were re-published after charlotte brontë had attained her first triumph, and people had begun to cry out and wonder over "wuthering heights." the history of "jane eyre," on the other hand, is that of most works which have been the beginning of a career. it fell into the hands of the right man, the "reader" of messrs. smith, elder and co., mr. williams, a man of great intelligence and literary insight. the first story written by charlotte brontë, which was called "the professor," and was the original of "villette," written at a time when her mind was very full of the emotions raised by that singular portion of her life, had been rejected by a number of publishers, and was also rejected by mr. williams, who found it at once too crude and too _short_ for the risks of publication, three volumes at that period being your only possible form for fiction. but he saw the power in it, and begged the author to try again at greater length. she did so; not on the basis of the "professor" as might have seemed natural--probably the materials were still too much at fever-heat in her mind to be returned to at that moment--but by the story of "jane eyre," which at once placed charlotte brontë amid the most popular and powerful writers of her time. i remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest which in the midst of all the mrs. gores, mrs. marshs, &c.--the latter name is mentioned along with those of thackeray and dickens even by mr. williams--came upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took up the first volume of "jane eyre." the period of the heroine in white muslin, the immaculate creature who was of sweetness and goodness all compact, had lasted in the common lines of fiction up to that time. miss austen indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and empty fiction, yet it continued, as it always does continue more or less, the primitive ideal. but "jane eyre" gave her, for the moment, the _coup de grace_. that the book should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary to the circumstances of the writer: and the governess was already a favourite figure in fiction. but generally she was of the beautiful, universally fascinating, all-enduring kind, the amiable blameless creature whose secret merits were never so hidden but that they might be perceived by a keen sighted hero. i am not sure, indeed, that anybody believed miss brontë when she said her heroine was plain. it is very clear from the story that jane was never unnoticed, never failed to please, except among the women, whom it is the instinctive art of the novelist to rouse in arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating the jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in respect to the women who please men. no male cynic was ever stronger on that subject than this typical woman. she cannot have believed it, i presume, since her closest friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect faith in their kindness: but this is a matter of conventional belief which has nothing to do with individual experience. it is one of the doctrines unassailable of the art of fiction; a thirty-ninth article in which every writer of novels is bound to believe. miss brontë did not know fine ladies, and therefore, in spite of herself and a mind the reverse of vulgar, she made the competitors for mr. rochester's favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons, an error, curiously enough, which seems to have been followed by george eliot in the corresponding scenes in "mr. gilfil's love story," where captain wybrow's _fiancée_ treats poor tiny very much as the beauty in mr. rochester's house treats jane eyre. both were imaginary pictures, which perhaps more or less excuses their untruthfulness in writers both so sincere and lifelike in treating things they knew. it is amusing to remember that jane eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching argument to miss rigby in the _quarterly_ to decide that the writer was not and could not possibly be a woman. the much larger and more significant fact that no man (until in quite recent days when there have been instances of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the subject and inspiration of his book, the only interest in it, was entirely overlooked in what was, notwithstanding, the very shrewd and telling argument about the dress. the chief thing, however, that distressed the candid and as yet unaccustomed reader in "jane eyre," and made him hope that it might be a man who had written it, was the character of rochester's confidences to the girl whom he loved--not the character of rochester, which was completely a woman's view, but that he should have talked to a girl so evidently innocent of his amours and his mistresses. this, however, i think, though, as we should have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a young woman such as charlotte brontë was, was also emphatically a woman's view. a man might have credited another man of rochester's kind with impulses practically more heinous and designs of the worst kind: but he would not have made him err in that way. in this was a point of honour which the woman did not understand. it marks a curious and subtle difference between the sexes. the woman less enlightened in practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice; but her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently permits her hero to do and say things so completely against the code which is binding on gentlemen whether vicious or otherwise that her want of perception becomes conspicuous. the fact that the writer of the review in the _quarterly_ was herself a woman accounts for her mistake in supposing that the book was written if not by a man, by "a woman unsexed;" "a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex." and afterwards, when mrs. gaskell made her disastrous statements about branwell brontë and other associates of charlotte's youth, it was with the hope of proving that the speech and manners of the men to whom she had been accustomed were of a nature to justify her in any such misapprehension of the usual manners of gentlemen. it was on the contrary, as i think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could have suggested this special error. the mind of such a woman, casting about for something to make her wicked but delightful hero do by way of demonstrating his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the very wickedest thing she could think of, yet still attractive: for is there not a thrill of curiosity in searching out what such a strange being might think or say, which is of itself a strong sensation? miss brontë was, i think, the first to give utterance to that curiosity of the woman in respect to the man, and fascination of interest in him--not the ideal man, not sir kenneth, too reverent for anything but silent worship--which has since risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a tone upon modern fiction at which probably she would have been horrified. * * * * * there were numberless stories in those days of guilty love and betrayal, of how "lovely woman stoops to folly," and all the varieties of that endless subject; but it was, except in the comic vein, or with grotesque treatment, the pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. a true lady of romance walked superior: she accepted (or not) the devotion: she stooped from her white height to reward her adorer: but that she herself should condescend to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashionable life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or call out for him to heaven and earth when he tarried in his coming, was unknown to the situations of romantic art. when the second of charlotte brontë's books appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation in store for the public. the young women in "shirley" were all wild for this lover who, though promised by all the laws of nature and romance, did not appear. they leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their hands, calling for him--appealing to heaven and earth. why were they left to wear out their bloom, to lose their freshness, to spend their days in sewing and dreaming, when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and by sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them? nothing was thought of the extra half-million of women in those days; perhaps it had not begun to exist; but that "nobody was coming to marry us, nobody coming to woo" was apparent. young ladies like miss charlotte brontë and miss ellen nussey her friend, would have died rather than give vent to such sentiments; but when the one of them to whom that gift was given found that her pen had become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current of the restrained feeling burst all boundaries, and she poured forth the cry which nobody had suspected before. it had been a thing to be denied, to be indignantly contradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put herself forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the world. when such a phenomenon appeared, she was condemned as either bad or foolish by every law: and the idea that she was capable of "running after" a man was the most dreadful accusation that could be brought against a woman. miss brontë's heroines, however, did not precisely do this. shirley and caroline helstone were not in love so much as longing for love, clamouring for it, feeling it to be their right of which they were somehow defrauded. there is a good deal to be said for such a view. if it is the most virtuous thing in the world for a man to desire to marry, to found a family, to be the father of children, it should be no shameful thing for a woman to own the same desire. but it is somehow against the instinct of primitive humanity, which has decided that the woman should be no more than responsive, maintaining a reserve in respect to her feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once, and only once, and to one only" of the poet. charlotte brontë was the first to overthrow this superstition. personally i am disposed to stand for the superstition, and dislike all transgression of it. but that was not the view of the most reticent and self-controlled of maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict proprieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising curates, and unacquainted with other men. in her secret heart, she demanded of fate night and day why she, so full of life and capability, should be left there to dry up and wither; and why providence refused her the completion of her being. her heart was not set on a special love; still less was there anything fleshly or sensual in her imagination. it is a shame to use such words in speaking of her, even though to cast them forth as wholly inapplicable. the woman's grievance--that she should be left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the natural openings of life: without hope of motherhood: with the great instinct of her being unfulfilled--was almost a philosophical, and entirely an abstract, grievance, felt by her for her kind: for every woman dropped out of sight and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she was created. and i think it was the first time this cry had been heard out of the mouth of a perfectly modest and pure-minded woman, nay, out of the mouth of any woman; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the sapphos for love. it was more startling, more confusing to the general mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. the gentle victim of "a disappointment," or even the soured and angered victim, was a thing quite understood and familiar: but not the woman calling upon heaven and earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against her to cheat her of her natural career. so far as i can see this was the great point which gave force to charlotte brontë's genius and conferred upon her the curious pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers of her time. in this view "shirley," though i suppose the least popular, is the most characteristic of her works. it is dominated throughout with this complaint. curates? yes, there they are, a group of them. is that the thing you expect us women to marry? yet it is our right to bear children, to guide the house. and we are half of the world, and where is the provision for us? this cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general public in the most curious way; they did not know what to make of it. was it a shameless woman who was so crying out? it is always the easiest way, and one which avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every question. but it was scarcely easy to believe this in face of other circumstances. mrs. gaskell, as much puzzled as any one, when charlotte brontë's short life was over, tried hard to account for it by "environment" as the superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly of her brother, and the coarseness of all the yorkshiremen round; and thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope without other intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject of it inaugurated an entirely new kind of social revolution. the cry of the women indeed almost distressed as well as puzzled the world. the vivid genius still held it, but the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. the _times_ blew a trumpet of dismay; the book was revolution as well as revelation. it was an outrage upon good taste, it was a betrayal of sentiments too widespread to be comfortable. it was indelicate if not immodest. we have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was a potent one at that period. and it was quite a just reproach. that cry shattered indeed altogether the "delicacy" which was supposed to be the most exquisite characteristic of womankind. the softening veil is blown away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the world. from that period to this is a long step. we have travelled through many years and many gradations of sentiment: and we have now arrived at a standard of opinion by which the "sex-problem" has become the most interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction, to be discussed by men and women alike with growing warmth and openness, the immodest and the indelicate being equally and scornfully dismissed as barriers with which art has nothing to do. my impression is that charlotte brontë was the pioneer and founder of this school of romance, though it would probably have shocked and distressed her as much as any other woman of her age. * * * * * the novels of emily and anne brontë were published shortly after "jane eyre," in three volumes, of which "wuthering heights" occupied the first two. i am obliged to confess that i have never shared the common sentiment of enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. the absence of almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality and misery, tempered only by an occasional gleam of the heather, the freshness of an occasional blast over the moors, have prevented me from appreciating a force which i do not deny but cannot admire. the figure of heathcliffe, which perhaps has called forth more praise than any other single figure in the literature of the time, does not touch me. i can understand how in the jumble which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him more or less by rochester and other of charlotte brontë's heroes, he may take his place in a sort of system, and thus have humanities read into him, so to speak, which he does not himself possess. but though the horror and isolation of the house is powerful i have never been able to reconcile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the estimate of emily brontë's genius held so strongly by so many people. there is perhaps the less harm in refraining from much comment on this singular book, of which i gladly admit the unique character, since it has been the occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. to me emily brontë is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common to them both. we perceive better the tempering sense of possibility by which charlotte made her rude and almost brutal hero still attractive, even in his masterful ferocity, when we see emily's incapacity to express anything in _her_ hero except perhaps a touch of that tragic pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still, which is in the soul of a man who never more, whatever he does, can set himself right. this is the one strain of poetry to my mind in the wild conception. there was no measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temperance in her methods. the youngest of all, the gentle anne, would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but for her association with these imperative spirits. an ordinary little novelette and a moral story, working out the disastrous knowledge gained by acquaintance with the unfortunate branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. she was the element wanting in emily's rugged work and nature. instead of being two sisters constantly entwined with each other, never separate when they could help it, had anne been by some fantastic power swamped altogether and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe that emily might then have shown herself the foremost of the three. but the group as it stands is more interesting than any single individual could be. and had charlotte brontë lived a long and triumphant life, a fanciful writer might have imagined that the throwing off of those other threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured greater force and charity into her veins. but we are baffled in all our suggestions for the amendment of the ways of providence. * * * * * the melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months, which swept from haworth parsonage three of its inmates, and left charlotte and her father alone to face life as they might, was now approaching; and it seems so completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. branwell was the first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a pathetic note in the record. then came the extraordinary passion and agony of emily, which has affected the imagination so much, and which, had it been for any noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. but to die the death of a stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection to nature, regardless of the feelings of all around, for the sake of pride and self-will alone, is not an act to be looked upon with the reverential sympathy which, however, it has secured from many. the strange creature with her shoes on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last to acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her weakness, gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and painful work. her death took place in december of the same year ( ) in which branwell died. anne, already delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after her sister's death, and in may she followed, but in all sweetness and calmness, to her early grave. she was twenty-eight; emily twenty-nine. so soon had the fever of life worn itself out and peace come. charlotte was left alone. there had not been to her in either of them the close companion which they had found in each other. but yet life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which occurred in such a startling and quick succession as always makes bereavement more terrible. this occurred at the height of her mental activity. "shirley" had been published, and had been received with the divided feeling we have referred to; and when she was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the solace which of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre seclusion of the parsonage, to which, however, her favourite friend, ellen nussey, came from time to time. one or two visits to london occurred after the two first publications in which, a demure little person, silent and shy, yet capable of expressing herself very distinctly by times, and by no means unconscious of the claim she now had upon other people's respect and admiration, charlotte brontë made a little sensation in the society which was opened to her, not always of a very successful kind. everybody will remember the delightfully entertaining chapter in literary history in which mrs. ritchie, with charming humour and truth, recounts the visit of this odd little lion to her father's house, and thackeray's abrupt and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that nothing more was to be made of her than an absorbed conversation with the governess in the back drawing-room, a situation like one in a novel, and so very like the act of modest greatness, singling out the least important person as the object of her attentions. she is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly--a small woman with a big nose, and no other notable feature, not even the bright eyes which are generally attributed to genius--which was probably, however, better than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography, after a picture by richmond, which is the typical portrait of a governess of the old style, a gentle creature deprecating and wistful. her letters are very good letters, well expressed in something of the old-fashioned way, but without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. indeed, charm does not seem to have been hers in any way. but she had a few very staunch friends who held fast by her all her life, notwithstanding the uncomfortable experience of being "put in a book," which few people like. it is a gift by itself to put other living people in books. the novelist does not always possess it; to many the realms of imagination are far more easy than the arid realms of fact, and to frame an image of a man much more natural than to take his portrait. i am not sure that it is not a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one. anyhow, miss brontë possessed it in great perfection. impossible to doubt that the characters of "shirley" were real men; still more impossible to doubt for a moment the existence of m. paul emmanuel. the pursuit of such a system requires other faculties than those of the mere romancist. it demands a very clear-cut opinion, a keen judgment not disturbed by any strong sense of the complexities of nature, nor troubled by any possibility of doing injustice to its victim. * * * * * one thing strikes us very strongly in the description of the school, lowood, which was her very first step in literature, and in which there can now be no doubt, from her own remarks on the manner in which it was received, she had a vindictive purpose. i scarcely know why, for, of course, the dates are all there to prove the difference--but my own conclusion had always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, old enough to form an opinion when she left the school. i find, with much consternation, that she was only nine; and that so far as such a strenuous opinion was her own at all, it must have been formed at that early and not very judicious age. that the picture should be so vivid with only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful; but it is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great institution, its founder and all its ways. nevertheless, it had its scathing and wounding effect as much as if the little observer, whose small judgment worked so precociously, had been capable of understanding the things which she condemned. it would be rash to trust nineteen in such a report, but nine! it was at a different age and in other circumstances that charlotte brontë made her deep and extraordinary study of the brussels pensionnat. she was twenty-seven; she had already gone through a number of those years of self-repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the heart burns. she was, if we may accept the freedom of her utterances in fiction as more descriptive of her mind than the measured sentences of her letters, angry with fate and the world which denied her a brighter career, and bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the company of despised and almost hated inferiors during the best of her life. her tremendous gift of sight--not second sight or any visionary way of regarding the object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision which took in every detail, and was decisive on every act as if it had been the vision of the gods--was now fully matured. she saw all that was about her with this extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing it all round and through and through. she makes us also see and know the big white house, with every room distinct: the garden, with its great trees and alleys: the class-rooms, each with its tribune: the girls, fat and round and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and herself as spectator, looking on with contemptuous indifference, not caring to discriminate between them. the few english figures, which concern her more, are drawn keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness; the teachers sharply accentuated, mdlle. sophie, for instance, who, when she is in a rage, has no lips, and all the sharp contentions and false civilities of those banded free lances, enemies to everybody and to each other; the image of watchful suspicion in the head of the house--all these are set forth in glittering lines of steel. there is not a morsel of compunction in the picture. everybody is bad, worthless, a hater of the whole race. the mistress of the establishment moves about stealthily, watching, her eyes showing through a mist in every corner, going and coming without a sound. what a picture it is! there is not a good meaning in the whole place--not even that beneficent absence of meaning which softens the view. they are all bent on their own aims, on gaining an advantage great or small over their neighbours; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a revision of judgment--except one. the little englishwoman herself, who is the centre of all this, is not represented as more lovable than the rest. she is the hungry little epicure, looking on while others feast, and envying every one of them, even while she snarls at their fare as apples of gomorrah. she cannot abide that they should be better off than she, even though she scorns their satisfaction in what they possess. her wild and despairing rush through brussels when the town is _en fête_, cold, impassioned, fever-hot with rancour and loneliness, produces the most amazing effect on the mind. she is the banished spirit for whom there is no place, the little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear and rend everything that is happy. one feels that she has a certain justification and realises the full force of being left out in the cold, of having no part or lot in the matter when other people are amused and rejoice. many other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect with milder means, but i suppose because of a feeble-minded desire to preserve the reputation of their forlorn heroine and give the reader an amiable view of her, no one has succeeded like the author of "villette," who is in no way concerned for the amiability of lucy snowe. for the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as its power. lucy snowe is her own historian; it is the hot blood of the autobiographist that rushes through her veins, yet no attempt is made to recommend her to the reader or gain his sympathy. she is much too real to think of these outside things, or of how people will judge her, or how to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes. we do not know whether charlotte brontë ever darted out of the white still house, standing dead in the moonlight, and rushed through the streets and, like a ghost, into the very heart of the gaslights and festivities; but it would be difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done so, imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness upon a living brain. whether it was charlotte brontë or lucy snowe, the effect is the same. we are not even asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to approve her. nothing is demanded from us on her account but merely to behold the soul in revolt and the strange workings of her despair. it was chiefly because of the indifference to her of dr. john that lucy was thus driven into a momentary madness; and with the usual regardless indiscretion of all charlotte brontë's amateur biographers, mr. shorter intimates to us who was the living man who was dr. john and occasioned all the commotion. the tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for the victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began the much more engrossing interest which still remained behind. nothing up to this point has attracted us in "villette," except, indeed, the tremendous vitality and reality of the whole, the sensation of the actual which is in every line, and which forbids us to believe for a moment that what we are reading is fiction. but a very different sentiment comes into being as we become acquainted with the black bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of m. paul emmanuel. he is the one only character in miss brontë's little world who has a real charm, whose entrance upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens in us not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sympathy. the quick-witted, quick-tempered frenchman, with all the foibles of his vanity displayed, as susceptible to any little slight as a girl, as easily pleased with a sign of kindness, as far from the english ideal as it is possible to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with displeasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel, delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the fullest light, intolerable but always enchanting. he is as full of variety as rosalind, as devoid of dignity as pierrot, contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet conquering all our prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not to be capable of. how was it that for this once the artist got the better of all her restrictions and overcame all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to be heartily loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts? i cannot answer that question. i am sorry that he was m. héger, and the master of the establishment, and not the clever tutor who had so much of madame beck's confidence. but anyhow, he is the best that miss brontë ever did for us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect picture. the rochesters were all more or less fictitious, notwithstanding the unconscious inalienable force of realism which gives them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind of overbearing life; but miss brontë never did understand what she did not know. she had to see a thing before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did see it, with what force she saw! she knew m. paul emmanuel, watching him day by day, seeing all his littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man. he stands out, as the curates stood out, absolutely real men about whom we could entertain no doubt, recognisable anywhere. the others were either a woman's men, like the moors of shirley, whose roughness was bluster (she could not imagine an englishman who was not rough and rude), and their strength more or less made up; or an artificial composition like st. john, an ideal bully like rochester. the ideal was not her forte--she had few gifts that way: but she saw with overwhelming lucidity and keenness, and what she saw, without a doubt, without a scruple, she could put upon the canvas in lines of fire. seldom, very seldom, did an object appear within reach of that penetrating light, which could be drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being to be loved. was not the sole model of that species m. paul? it would seem that in the piteous poverty of her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never met before a human creature in whom she could completely trust, or one who commended himself to her entirely, with all his foibles and weaknesses increasing, not diminishing, the charm. it is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endeavour to search out what were the sentiments of charlotte brontë for m. héger. any one whom it would be more impossible to imagine as breaking the very first rule of english decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards another woman's husband, i cannot imagine. her fancy was wild and her utterance free, and she liked to think that men were quite untrammelled by those proprieties which bound herself like bonds of iron in her private person, and that she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their dreadful experiences: but she herself was as prim and puritan as any little blameless governess that ever went out of an english parish. but while believing this i cannot but feel it was an intolerable spite of fortune that the one man whom she knew in her life, whom her story could make others love, the only man whom she saw with that real illumination which does justice to humanity, was not m. paul emmanuel but m. héger. this was why we were left trembling at the end of lucy snowe's story, not knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could fitly end the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against the doom--as if it had concerned our own happiness. was this new-born power in her, the power of representing a man at his best, she who by nature saw both men and women from their worst side, a sign of the development of genius in herself, the softening of that scorn with which she had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of inferior beings, the mellowing influence of maturity? so we might have said, had it not been that after this climax of production she never spake word more in the medium of fiction. had she told the world everything she had to say? could she indeed say nothing but what she had seen and known in her limited experience--the trials of school and governessing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude? that strange form of imagination which can deal only with fact, and depict nothing but what is under its eyes, is in its way perhaps the most impressive of all--especially when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen outward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love for the race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and motives. it is unfortunately true in human affairs that those who expect a bad ending to everything, and suspect a motive at least dubious to every action, prove right in a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth and realism have been appropriated to their works by almost universal consent. indeed there are some critics who think this the only true form of art. but it is at the same time a power with many limitations. the artist who labours, as m. zola does, searching into every dust-heap, as if he could find out human nature, the only thing worth depicting, with all its closely hidden secrets, all its flying indistinguishable tones, all its infinite gradations of feeling, by that nauseous process, or by a roaring progress through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit of a superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle of cities--must lay up for himself and for his reader many disappointments and deceptions: but the science of artistic study, as exemplified in him, had not been invented in charlotte brontë's day. she did not attempt to go and see things with the intention of representing them; she was therefore limited to the representation of those things which naturally in the course of life came under her eyes. she knew, though only as a child, the management and atmosphere of a great school, and set it forth, branding a great institution with an insufferable stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows? she went to another school and turned out every figure in it for our inspection--a community all jealous, spiteful, suspicious, clandestine: even the chance pupil with no particular relation to her story or herself, painted with all her frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape. "she was miss so-and-so," say the army of commentators who have followed miss brontë, picking up all the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the girl who had the misfortune to be in the brussels pensionnat along with that remorseless artist may be able to study the character of her ancestress. the public we fear loves this kind of art, however, notwithstanding all its drawbacks. on the other hand probably no higher inspiration could have set before us so powerfully the image of m. paul. thus we are made acquainted with the best and the worst which can be effected by this method--the base in all their baseness, the excellent all the dearer for their characteristic faults: but the one representation scarcely less offensive than the other to the victim. would it be less trying to the individual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in the light of love and glowing adoration, than in the more natural light of scorn? i know not indeed which would be the worst ordeal to go through, to be drawn like madame beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes appearing out of every corner, surprising every incautious word, than to be put upon the scene in the other manner, with all your peccadilloes exposed in the light of admiration and fondness, and yourself put to play the part of hero and lover. the point of view of the public is one thing, that of the victim quite another. we are told that miss brontë, perhaps with a momentary compunction for what she had done, believed herself to have prevented all injurious effects by securing that "villette" should not be published in brussels, or translated into the french tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile hopes since the very desire to hinder its appearance was a proof that this appearance would be of unusual interest. the fury of the lady exposed in all her stealthy ways could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration of his town as lucy snowe's captivating lover. to be sure it may be said the public has nothing to do with this. these individuals are dead and gone, and no exposure can hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to posterity his delight in m. paul. but all the same it is a cruel and in reality an immoral art; and it has this great disadvantage, that its area is extremely circumscribed, especially when the artist lives most of her life in a yorkshire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable persons come in her way. * * * * * there was however one subject of less absolute realism which charlotte brontë had at her command, having experienced in her own person and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women, of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. the long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out at windows which never show any one coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. was there no help for it? must the women wait and long and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves? the position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed. shirley and caroline helston both cried out for that husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. it might be ludicrous but it was horribly genuine and true. note there was nothing sensual about these young women. it was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which perhaps only women understand. they wanted their life, their place in the world, the rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. why did not it come to them? the old patience in which women have lived for all the centuries fails now and again in a keen moment of energy when some one arises who sees no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working and give up her birthright, which is to carry on the world. the reader was horrified with these sentiments from the lips of young women. the women were half ashamed, yet more than half stirred and excited by the outcry, which was true enough if indelicate. all very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establishing their independence. how much have we said of all that, endeavouring to persuade ourselves! charlotte brontë had the courage of her opinions. it was not education nor a trade that her women wanted. it was not a living but their share in life, a much more legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had there been any way to secure it in england. miss brontë herself said correct things about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines. they wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life--to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world, and link the generations each to each. in her philosophy marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected and with a covert conviction in her mind that if not one man then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path. lucy snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on dr. john and his placid breadth of englishism: but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of paul emmanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place. poor charlotte brontë! she has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life. everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. there was a mr. taylor from london about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend miss nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might be possibly a dozen little joe taylors before all was over. she was hard upon miss austen for having no comprehension of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less impassioned than she as she considered the question of mr. taylor, reluctant to come to any decision yet disappointed when it came to nothing. there was no longing in her mind for mr. taylor, but there was for life and action and the larger paths and the little joes. this longing which she expressed with so much vehemence and some poetic fervour as the burden of the lives of shirley and her friends has been the keynote of a great deal that has followed--the revolts and rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the "sex problem," and a great deal more. from that first point to the prevailing discussion of all the questions involved is a long way; but it is a matter of logical progression, and when once the primary matter is opened, every enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be expected. charlotte brontë was in herself the embodiment of all old-fashioned restrictions. she was proper, she was prim, her life was hedged in by all the little rules which bind the primitive woman. but when she left her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of imagination her exposure of the bondage in which she sat with all her sisters was far more daring than if she had been a woman of many experiences and knew what she was speaking of. she did know the longing, the discontent, the universal contradiction and contrariety which is involved in that condition of unfulfilment to which so many grey and undeveloped lives are condemned. for her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the woman married or did not marry. their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon, but their ambition was neither ignoble nor unclean. it was bold, indeed, in proportion to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of perception of any grosser side. their share in life, their part in the mutual building of the house, was what they sought. but the seed she thus sowed has come to many growths which would have appalled charlotte brontë. those who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have quite forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not emancipation but an extended duty. but while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service--we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth. the marriage which--after all these wild embodiments of the longing and solitary heart which could not consent to abandon its share in life, after shirley and lucy snowe, and that complex unity of three female souls all unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death--she accepted in the end of her life, is the strangest commentary upon all that went before, or rather, upon all the literary and spiritual part of her history, though it was a quite appropriate ending to mr. brontë's daughter, and even to the writer of those sober letters which discussed mr. taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged, and how it was a little disappointing after all to see him go away. her final suitor was one of the class which she had criticised so scathingly, one who, it might have been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter the presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but who would seem to have brought all the urgency of a _grand passion_ to the sombre parlour of the parsonage, to the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman who would not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it was poured out before her without warning. she was startled and confused by his declaration and appeal, never apparently having contemplated the possibility of any such occurrence; and in the interval which followed the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not conceal his heartbroken condition but suffered without complaining while the lady looked on wistful, touched and attracted by the unlooked-for love, and gradually melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who offered it. mr. brontë evidently thought that if this now distinguished daughter who had been worshipped among the great people in london, and talked of in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature age, it should be some one distinguished like herself, and not the mere curate who was the natural fate of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and least known. charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate enact various tragic follies of love for her sake with a sort of awe and wonder, astonished to find herself thus possessed still of the charm which none are so sure as women that only youth and beauty can be expected to possess. and she had never had any beauty, and, though she was not old, was no longer young. it is a conventional fiction that a woman still in the thirties is beyond the exercise of that power. indeed, it would be hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. certainly the demeanour of mr. nicholls gave her full reason to believe that it had not departed from her. he faltered in the midst of the service, grew pale, almost lost his self-possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling figures round the altar; and no doubt this rather shocking and startling exhibition of his feelings was more pardonable to the object of so much emotion than it was likely to have been to any other spectator. the romance is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint ecclesiastical way. and soon charlotte was drawn still more upon her lover's side by the violence of her father. it was decided that the curate was to go, and that this late gleam of love-making was to be extinguished and the old dim atmosphere to settle down again for ever. finally, however, the mere love of love, which had always been more to her than any personal inclination, and the horror of that permanent return to the twilight of dreamy living against which she had struggled all her life, overcame her, and gave her courage; but she married characteristically, not as women marry who are carried to a new home and make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the circumstances of the old and receiving her husband into her father's house where she had already passed through so many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams, and which was full to overflowing with the associations of the past. we have no reason to suppose that it did not add to the happiness of her life; indeed, every indication is to the contrary, and the husband seems to have been kind, considerate and affectionate. still this thing upon which so many of her thoughts had been fixed during her whole life, which she had felt to be the necessary condition of full development, and for which the little impassioned female circle of which she was the expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and earth, came to her at last very much in the form of a catastrophe. no doubt the circumstances of her quickly failing health and shortened life promote this feeling. but without really taking these into consideration the sensation remains the same. the strange little keen soul with its sharply fixed restrictions, yet intense force of perception within its limits, dropped out of the world into which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief and sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum house between the old father and the sober husband, into the clerical atmosphere with which she had no sympathy, into the absolute quiet of domestic life to which no prince charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his wand the grey mornings and evenings into golden days. well! was not this that which she had longed for, the natural end of life towards which her shirley, her caroline, her lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands, indignant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance? and so it was, but how different! lucy snowe's little housekeeping, all the preparations which m. paul made for her comfort and which seemed better to her than any palace, would not they too have taken the colour of perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the professor assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth? ah no, for lucy snowe loved the man, and charlotte brontë, as appears, loved only the love. it is a parable. she said a little later that she began to see that this was the fate which she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend ellen, perhaps for her emily if she had lived--the good man very faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold--yet flatter than the flattest days of old, _solidement nourri_, a good substantial husband, managing all the parish business, full of talk about the archdeacon's charge, and the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland parishes. we can conceive that she got to fetching his slippers for him and taking great care that he was comfortable, and perhaps had it been so ordained might have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked together, of her youth. but she only had a year in which to do all that, and this is how her marriage seems to turn into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild creature that had never borne captivity before, and which now could no longer rush forth into the heart of any shining _fête_, or to the window of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw off the burden of the perennial contradiction, the ceaseless unrest of the soul, the boilings of the volcano under the snow. * * * * * i have said it was difficult to account for the extreme interest still attaching to everything connected with charlotte brontë; not only the story of her peculiar genius, but also of everybody connected with her, though the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance except the sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer part. one way, however, in which these sisters have won some part of their long-lasting interest is due to the treatment to which they have been subjected. they are the first victims of that ruthless art of biography which is one of the features of our time; and that not only by mrs. gaskell, who took up her work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so anxious to explain how it was that her heroine expressed certain ideas not usual in the mouths of women, that she was compelled to take away the reputation of a number of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these two remarkable women. but everybody who has touched their history since, and there have been many--for it would seem that gossip, when restrained by no bonds of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or that of a parish priest--has followed the same vicious way without any remonstrance or appeal for mercy. we have all taken it for granted that no mercy was to be shown to the brontës. let every rag be torn from charlotte, of whom there is the most to say. emily had the good luck to be no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the complete exposure of every confidence and every thought which has happened to her sister. is it because she has nobody to defend her that she has been treated thus barbarously? i cannot conceive a situation more painful, more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father and the husband dwelling silent together in that sombre parsonage, from which every ray of light seems to depart with the lost woman, whose presence had kept a little savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from the inner being of their dearest and nearest. they complained as much as two voiceless persons could, or at least the father complained: and the very servants came hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of their character: but nobody noted the protest of the old man amid the silence of the moors: and the husband was more patient and spoke no word. even he, however, after nearly half a century, when that far-off episode of life must have become dim to him, has thrown his relics open for a little more revelation, a little more interference with the helpless ashes of the dead. no dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. we know, or at least are told, who charlotte meant by every character she ever portrayed, even while the model still lives. we know her opinion of her friends, or rather acquaintances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety of common life. protests have been offered in other places against a similar treatment of other persons; but scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect to charlotte brontë. the resurrection people have been permitted to make their researches as they pleased. it throws a curious pathos, a not unsuitably tragic light upon a life always so solitary, that this should all have passed in silence because there was actually no one to interfere, no one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no mere should be said. when one looks into the matter a little more closely, one finds it is so with almost all those who have specially suffered at the hands of the biographer. the carlyles had no child, no brother to rise up in their defence. it gives the last touch of melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. mrs. gaskell, wise woman, defended herself from a similar treatment by will, and left children behind her to protect her memory. but the brontës are at the mercy of every one who cares to give another raking to the diminished heap of _débris_. the last writer who has done so, mr. clement shorter, had some real new light to throw upon a story which surely has now been sufficiently turned inside out, and has done his work with perfect good feeling, and, curiously enough after so many exploitations, in a way which shows that interest has not yet departed from the subject. but we trust that now the memory of charlotte brontë will be allowed to rest. [signature: mrs. m. oliphant] george eliot _by_ mrs. lynn linton george eliot in this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of george eliot's private life and character. death has resolved her individuality into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and doubtful action no longer troubles us. but her work still remains as common property for all men to appraise at its true value--to admire for its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur, yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime. for that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation more than has george eliot. as a philosopher, once bracketed with plato and kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the laity; her faults of style and method praised as genius--since her death she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always follows on extravagant esteem. the mud-born ephemeridæ of literature have dispossessed her. for her profound learning, which ran like a golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by pedantry, we have the ignorance which misquotes lemprière and thinks itself classic. for her outspoken language and forcible diction, wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive epithets and those unveiled presentations of the sexual instinct which seem to make the world one large lupanar. for her accurate science and profound philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do not understand and never could have created; and for her scholarly diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as defective as taste. yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively great--almost too colossal in her supremacy. but when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss of oblivion, george eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with thackeray's, scott's and fielding's. our immortals will include in their company, as one of the "choir invisible" whose voice will never be stilled for man, the author of "adam bede" and "romola," of the "mill on the floss" and "middlemarch." * * * * * her first essays in fiction, her "scenes of clerical life," show the germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. in "janet's repentance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those germs are already shaped to beauty. nothing can be more delicately touched than the nascent love between janet and mr. tryon. no more subtle sign of janet's besetting sin could be given than by that candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride, timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation, is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. it would be impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. we can indicate only one or two. that splendid paragraph in "mr. gilfil's love story," beginning: "while this poor heart was being bruised"--the sharp summing up of mr. amos barton's "middling" character--lady cheverel's silent criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism--the almost shakesperean humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the commonplace women; such aphorisms as mrs. linnet's "it's right enough to be speritial--i'm no enemy to that--but i like my potatoes meally;"--these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability of the czerlaski episode in "amos barton" and the inherent weakness of the gilfil plot. we, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when they first appeared in _blackwood's magazine_, on re-reading them in cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share its pristine intensity. it was emphatically a new departure in literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and attenuated manner. * * * * * "adam bede," the first novel proper of the long series, shows george eliot at her best in her three most noteworthy qualities--lofty principles, lifelike delineation of character, and fine humour, both broad and subtle. the faults of the story are the all-pervading anachronism of thought and circumstance; the dragging of the plot in the earlier half of the book; and the occasional ugliness of style, where, as in that futile opening sentence the author as i directly addresses the reader as you. the scene is laid in the year --before the trades unions had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make him leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the clock begins to strike--before too the hour of leaving off was fixed at six. we older people can remember when workmen wrought up to eight and were never too exact even then. precision of the kind practised at the present day was not known then; and why were there no apprentices in adam's shop? apprentices were a salient feature in all the working community, and no shop could have existed without them. nor would the seduction by the young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been the heinous crime george eliot has made it. if women of the lower class held a somewhat better position than they did in king arthur's time, when, to be the mother of a knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far above her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her, they still retained some of the old sense of inferiority. does any one remember that famous answer in the yelverton trial not much more than a generation ago? in hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all concerned, save perhaps by adam himself; and arthur donnithorne would have suffered no more for his escapade than did our well-known tom jones for his little diversions. and--were there any night schools for illiterate men in ? and how was that reprieve got so quickly at a time when there were neither railroads nor telegraphs?--indeed, would it have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone was felony and felony was death? also, would hetty have been alone in her cell? in all prisoners were herded together, young and old, untried and condemned; and the separate system was not in existence. save for hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the story might have been made as of present time with more _vraisemblance_ and harmoniousness. these objections apart, how supreme the whole book is! the characters stand out fresh, firm and living. as in some paintings you feel as if you could put your hand round the body, so in george eliot's writings you feel that you have met those people in the flesh, and talked to them, holding them by the hand and looking into their eyes. there is not a line of loose drawing anywhere. from the four bedes, with that inverted kind of heredity which zola has so powerfully shown, to the stately egoism of mrs. irwine--from the marvellous portraiture of hetty sorrel with her soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her heart "as hard as a cherry-stone" according to mrs. poyser--from the weak-willed yet not conscienceless arthur donnithorne to the exquisite purity of dinah, the character-drawing is simply perfect. many were people personally known to george eliot, and those who were at all behind the scenes recognised the portraits. down at wirksworth they knew the bedes, dinah, the poysers, and some others. in london, among the intimates of george lewes, hetty needed no label. mrs. poyser's good things were common property in the neighbourhood long before george eliot crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her matchless setting; and dinah's sermon was not all imaginary. but though in some sense her work was portraiture, it was portraiture passed through the alembic of her brilliant genius, from commonplace material distilled into the finest essence. it is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of the wise, witty, tender and high-minded things scattered broadcast over this book--as, indeed, over all that george eliot ever wrote. that paragraph beginning--"family likeness has often a deep sadness in it"; the description of hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her sharp-tongued aunt; phrases like "john considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant," and "young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world"; that sharp little bit of moral and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man "meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of hebrew"--forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors as is a christian's bounden duty, but treating as "the enemy of his race, the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the hebrew points"; how masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other unnoted passages! hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed finery, reminds one too closely of gretchen with her fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the english version; and we question the truth of adam bede's hypothetical content with such a dorothy doolittle as his wife. writers of love stories among the working classes in bygone days forget that notableness was then part of a woman's virtue--part of her claims to love and consideration--and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness did not count to her honour any more than graceful movements and æsthetic taste would count to the honour of a tommy in the trenches who could neither handle a spade nor load a rifle. blackmore made the same mistake in his "lorna doone," and george eliot has repeated it in adam's love for hetty solely for her beauty and without "faculty" as her dower. in his own way bartle massey, misogynist, is as smart as mrs. poyser herself, as amusing and as trenchant; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty years and more too modern, and the long dissertation at the beginning of the second book is a blot, because it is a clog and an interruption. not so that glorious description of nature in august when "the sun was hidden for a moment and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy;"--nor that deep and tender bit of introspection, setting forth the spiritual good got from sorrow as well as its indestructible impress. yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages there are too many of them in this as in all george eliot's works. they hamper the action and lend an air of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has nothing to do. it is bad style as well as bad art, and irritating to a critical, while depressing to a sympathetic reader. but summing up all the faults together, and giving full weight to each, we gladly own the masterly residuum that is left. the dawning love between adam and dinah alone is enough to claim for "adam bede" one of the highest places in literature, had not that place been already taken by the marvellous truth, diversity and power of the character-drawing. mrs. poyser's epigrams, too, generally made when she was "knitting with fierce rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function like the twittering of a crab's antennæ," both too numerous and too well known to quote, would have redeemed the flimsiest framework and the silliest padding extant. the light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the time to read and appreciate. by the way, is that would-be famous liggins still alive? when he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold attempt to don the giant's robe? * * * * * if "adam bede" was partly reminiscent, "the mill on the floss" was partly autobiographical. there is no question that in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature of maggie tulliver marian evans painted herself. those who knew her when she first came to london knew her as a pronounced insurgent. never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet had not put on that "made" and artificial pose which was her distinguishing characteristic in later years. she was still maggie tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. for indeed, the union between marian evans and george lewes was far more incongruous in some of its details than was maggie's love for philip or her passion for stephen. philip appealed to her affection of old time, her pity and her love of art--stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous love of beauty. but george lewes's total want of all religiousness of feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere _persiflage_, his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his--the woman who did not, like maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who boldly crossed the rubicon--and who, in her after efforts to cover up the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences. read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, maggie is adorable, and her brother tom is but a better-looking jonas chuzzlewit. read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control, much of maggie's charm vanishes, while most of tom's hardness becomes both respectable and inevitable. maggie was truly a thorn in the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed on her; for where there is this unlucky divergence between principle and temperament, the will can never be firm nor the walk steady. sweet little lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof, than could be found in all maggie's struggles between passion and principle. the great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional limitations of the other; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much disgrace on her family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right. there is something in "the mill on the floss" akin to the gloomy fatalism of a greek tragedy. in "adam bede" is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events were worked out to their final issues in "the mill on the floss," it seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. an obstinate, litigious and irascible man like mr. tulliver was bound to come to grief in the end. fighting against long odds as he did, he could not win. blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear perceptions, must go under; and mr. tulliver was no match against the laws of life as interpreted by mr. wakem and the decisions of the law courts. his choice of a fool for his wife--was not mrs. tulliver well known at coventry?--was another step in the terrible march of fate. she was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son. she was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. george eliot never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic conception of tragic fate. there is not a stage hero among them all--not a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is Æschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house. the humour in "the mill on the floss" is almost as rich as that of "adam bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. sister pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely sister grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated gorgon! mrs. tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after george eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy circling round sister pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness. the girlish bond of sympathy between sister pullet and sister tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister grigg--allays contrairy to sophy pullet, would have striped things--is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. by the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack? setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it. "the head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":-- "they're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. things out o' natur never thrive. god almighty doesn't like 'em. he made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"maggie's tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies":--is there anything better than these in mrs. poyser's repertory? of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the dodsons and tullivers, beginning "certainly the religious and moral ideas of the dodsons and tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. no one theoretically knew human nature better than george eliot. practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. but theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own. * * * * * hitherto george eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in maggie tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. in "silas marner" she ventures into a more completely creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. the story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _deus ex machinâ_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. as with "adam bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. yet it is both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. but we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not; and such a man as godfrey cass would not have married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." as we said before, in the story of hetty and arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. it was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves! if the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. the girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. this is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. george eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip of her young women. the beginning of "silas marner" is much finer than that of either of her former books. it strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. in those early days of which "silas marner" treats, a man from the next parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a scotch, irish or welsh man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "frenchy" himself, were he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or west. the state of isolation in which silas marner lived was true on all these counts--his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of ravaloe--his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of providence to show his innocence--and his strange and uncongenial trade. yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the weaving industry?--else what could they have done with the thread which they themselves had spun? if it were disposed of to a travelling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? it would have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. to be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout; but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible. the loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified flight to the rainbow introduces us to one of george eliot's most masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour. "the more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness"--these, as well as mr. snell, the landlord, "a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor"--do their fooling admirably. from the cautious discussion on the red durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of mr. macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called _mr._ in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. there'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself"--from the gossip about the lammeter land to the ghos'es in the lammeter stables, it is all excellent--rich, racy and to the manner born. and the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before. worthy of mrs. poyser, too, was sweet and patient dolly winthrop's estimate of men. "it seemed surprising that ben winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with dolly; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that 'men _would_ be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." good, too, when speaking of his wife, is mr. macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the fairies' dance. "before i said 'sniff' i took care to know as she'd say 'snaff,' and pretty quick too. i wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller." but in spite of all this literary value of "silas marner" we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot. the marriage of godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of silas marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the right moment and in the right place--the adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of living free from the restraint of care--the discovery of dunsay's body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold--the _impasse_ of eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's gates: all these things make "silas marner" a beautiful unreality, taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance. * * * * * in "felix holt" we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it was in the early thirties when the "democratic wave," which has swept away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political, was first beginning to make itself felt. but here again george eliot gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those new conditions of the reform bill which gave treby magna for the first time a member, and which also for the first time created the revising barrister--while trades unions were still unrecognised by the law, and did their work mainly by rattening and violence. any one who was an intelligent and wide-awake child at that time, and who can remember the talk of the excited elders, must remember things somewhat differently from what george eliot has set down. radical was in those days a term of reproach, carrying with it moral obloquy and condemnation. the tories might call the whigs radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with shame, as we might now say anarchists and dynamiters. but the most advanced gentleman would never have stood for parliament as a radical. felix holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also the lower sediment, might be radicals, but scarcely such a man as harold transome, who would have been a whig of a broad pattern. and as for the revising barrister, he was looked on as something akin to frankenstein's monster. no one knew where his power began nor where it ended; and on each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which, once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would stop. in its construction "felix holt" is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of all george eliot's books. the ins and outs of transome and durfey and scaddon and bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. in trying on the garment of miss braddon the author of "felix holt" showed both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. also she repeats the situation of eppie and her adopted father silas in that of esther and rufus lyon. but where it was natural enough for the contentedly rustic eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and unknown--her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state--natural in her though eminently unnatural in the drama of life--it was altogether inharmonious with esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to luxury, felix to harold, malhouse yard to transome court. george eliot's usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in her delineations of esther lyon. even the situation of which she is so fond--the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness--even in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. the humour too is thinner. mrs. holt is a bad mrs. nickleby; and the comic chorus of rustic clowns, which george eliot always introduces where she can, is comparatively poor. she is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at treby manor--"a much grander person than her ladyship"--"as wearing gold and jewelry to a vast amount of suet." when esther has been taken up by the transomes, george eliot misses what would have been absolutely certain--these fine little points of difference between the high-bred lady of transome court and the half-bred esther of malhouse yard; and yet, quite unintentionally, she makes esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversations and flirtatious coquetries with harold transome. nor, we venture to think, as going too far on the other side, would a girl of esther's upbringing and surroundings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as "importunate scents." on the whole we do not think it can be denied that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote "felix holt," it is undeniably her least successful work. and yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it! if homer nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him? the opening of the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. "his sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in undress:"--"the higher pains of a dim political consciousness:"--"the younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his questionable station and unknown experience:"--"her life would be exalted into something quite new--into a sort of difficult blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers" (true for george eliot herself but not for such a girl as esther lyon):--these are instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind. then how exquisite is that first love-scene between felix and esther! it is in these grave and tender indications of love that george eliot is at her best. gentle as "sleeping flowers"--delicately wrought, like the most perfect cameos--graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet strong--they are always the very gems of her work. and in "felix holt" especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior quality of so much that surrounds them. felix himself is one of george eliot's masterpieces in the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. whether he would have won such a girl as esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be doubtful; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his nature--for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in costume--for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is supreme. and with one of george eliot's best aphorisms, made in his intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great master. "blows are sarcasms turned stupid; wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest." the last three books of the series are the most ponderous. still beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and flowers of which the girth is inconvenient; and in one, at least, certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a prominence fatal to perfect work. never spontaneous, as time went on george eliot became painfully laboured. her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and inartistic technicality. the artificial pose she had adopted in her life and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her manners. all her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the general good, of conformity with established moral standards, while her life was in direct opposition to her words; for though she did no other woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of righteousness, however irksome they might be. and it was this endeavour to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-will and self-sacrifice, that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who knew her history, was conscious from the beginning. nowhere do we find this contradiction more markedly shown than in "romola," the first of the ponderous last three. her noblest work, "romola" is yet one of george eliot's most defective in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. the loftiness of sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined with what seems to us to be the most extraordinary indifference to--for it cannot be ignorance of--the social and domestic conditions of the time. the whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of the church--the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the proud exclusiveness of the well-born citizens of any state. take the last first. grant all the honour paid by cosmo and lorenzo to the learned men of all nations, especially to greek scholars who, in the first fervour of the renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. grant, too, the example set by bartolommeo scala, who had given his beautiful daughter alessandra in marriage to the "soldier-poet" marullo; was it likely that even an eccentric old scholar like the blind bardo de' bardi should have so unreservedly adopted a nameless greek adventurer, flung up like a second ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and unidentified by any document? we allow that bardo might have taken tito as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the cennini had already employed him, waif and stray as he was; but that he should have consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her more conservative and more suspicious godfather, bernado del nero, should have consented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as that an english country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a handsome gipsy. if we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the improbability of the whole of tito's career becomes still more striking. as, in athens, the sojourner never stood on the same plane with the autochthon, so in rome the peregrinus was ineligible for public office or the higher kind of marriage; and though the stricter part of the law was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in italy. it seems more than improbable that tito, a greek adventurer, should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a base kind of scout and unhonoured spy. that he should ever have taken the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same substance as a fairy tale. the character of bardo, too, is non-italian; and his modes of life and thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter spoken of. the church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip; and while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded the show of conformity in essentials. lorenzo was a pagan, but he died receiving the sacraments. the borgias were criminals, but their professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. men might inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks and nuns, but they had to confess god and the church; and their diatribes had to be carefully worded--as witness rabelais--or a plea would certainly be found for the fire and faggot--as with fra dolcino and savonarola. so with conformity to the usages of life which, then and now, are considered integral to morality. it could not have been possible for bardo to bring up his daughter "aloof from the debasing influence" of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for a servant. the times did not allow it; no more than we should allow it now in this freer day. this womanless home for an italian girl at any time, more especially in the middle ages, when even young wives were bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in workmanship. so, indeed, is the whole of romola's life, being anachronism and simply nineteenth-century english from start to finish. the things which both she and tessa did, and were allowed to do, are on a par with "gulliver's travels" and "peter wilkins." it was as impossible for tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she was, to come into florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years old to be sent with a message on business into the city of london alone. to this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the streets of italian cities unaccompanied; and maidenhood is, as it always was, sacredly and jealously guarded. nor could romola have gone out and come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. with streets filled by the turbulent factions of the bianchi and neri, always ready for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night? she is said to be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to tessa's house, or merely accompanied by monna brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see her dying brother--which also, by the way, was impossible--or attended, at a distance, by old maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary nun. she would have lost name and state had she committed these eccentricities; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent to a convent--that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that prison for contumacy--and her godfather would have been the first to consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. the scene she has with tito before nello's shop is ludicrously impossible--as is their english-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the public-house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. english, too, is romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at night. for the matter of that, indeed, tito's solitary rambles are as much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as is romola's strange daring. no man of any note whatever appeared alone in the streets when out on a midnight expedition, either to commit murder or break the seventh commandment. he took some one with him, friend or servant, armed; and to this day you will not find italians willingly walk alone at night. the whole of this kind of life, if necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. so is romola's flight, disguised as a nun. splendid as is the scene between her and savonarola, the _vraisemblance_ is spoilt by this impossibility of condition. nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city, have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown bourne. she would have felt as a purdah woman of india suddenly turned loose in the streets and environs of delhi--as felt all those women whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. modern women call it freedom, but in the middle ages such a feeling did not exist. all these things are anachronisms; as much so as if a novelist of the twentieth century, writing of english life in the eighteenth, should clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn them into the football field and cricket-ground. these exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various scenes. nothing can excel the power with which tito's character is shown in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive criminality. the whole action may be summed up in george eliot's own words. "when, the next morning, tito put this determination into act, he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. he had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. the contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of sincerity." but, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and affectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of tito's character, we cannot accept the tessa episode as true to life in general, while it is eminently untrue to italian life, especially of those times. tessa herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes and baby face, so incessantly repeated and harped on. she is as nauseating as she is impossible; and the whole story from first to last is an ugly blot on the book. in romola and in savonarola we touch the heights. the "tall lily" is an exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. her two interviews with savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest is beyond praise both for style and psychology. so, too, are the changes in the great preacher himself--the first, when his simple earnestness of belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal assumption, as is the way with all reformers--the second, when he abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of trial comes on him, and the world no longer stands between god and his soul. the final scenes of the frate's public life are powerfully wrought, with all george eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep religious fervour; but it is in scenes and circumstances of this kind that she is ever at her best. in humour and psychologic insight she is greater than any english woman writer we have had; in aphorisms she is unrivalled; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral, intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is nowhere. contrast romola's character and manner of life--above all those two thoroughly english letters of hers--with all that we know of vittoria colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day--which was romola's--and at once we see the difference between them--the difference wrought by four centuries--vittoria being essentially a woman of the time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck; while romola is as essentially a product of the nineteenth century. in spite of the local colour--which, after all, is only a wash--given by the descriptions of pageants and processions, and by the history of which george eliot so ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from monna brigida's characteristically english speech about tessa's place in the house and the children's sweets, to romola's as characteristically english attitude and hygienic objections--from a little maiden, without a caretaker, carrying eggs to piero, to romola's solitary visit to the studio and night perambulations about the city. all these shortcomings notwithstanding, "romola" will ever remain one of the noblest works of our noblest author; and, after all, did not shakspere make hector quote aristotle, and show all his greeks and romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as nothing but sturdy englishmen, such as lived and loved in the times of the great eliza? where we have so much to admire--nay, to venerate--we may let the smaller mistakes pass. yet they must be spoken of by those who would be candid and not fulsome--just and not flattering. by the way, did george eliot know that "baldassare" is the name of one of the devils invoked to this day by sicilian witches? * * * * * the longest of all the novels, "middlemarch," is the most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordinate interests and personages. the canvas is as crowded as one of george cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by what george eliot would have called fission--a division into two. the stories of dorothea and casaubon and of rosamond and lydgate are essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true unification than the siamese twins or the double-headed nightingale represented one true human being. the contrast between the two beautiful young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential; for george eliot was far too good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well wrought as the fronts. but if one-third of the book had been cut out--failing that fission, which would have been still better--the work would have gained in proportion to its compression. the character of dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the personality which begins with maggie tulliver, and is in reality marian evans's own self. maggie, romola and dorothea are the same person in progressive stages of moral evolution. all are at cross corners with life and fate--all are rebellious against things as they find them. maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; romola's is the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness; dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. in its own way, her action in taking will ladislaw is like esther's in marrying felix holt; but it has not the unlikelihood of esther's choice. it is all for love, if one will, but it runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get from esther's decision. and in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology. the most masterly bits of work in "middlemarch" are the characters of rosamond and casaubon. rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw in the drawing; while casaubon's dryness, his literary indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. they who think that casaubon was meant for the late rector of lincoln know nothing about george eliot's early life. they who do know some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know who was mrs. poyser, who tom tulliver, and who hetty sorrel. hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly idiotic tessa, who is neither english nor italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two copies. no finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of lydgate's married life. the character of rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal. to show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as george eliot could have done. and to show how lydgate, strong man as he was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of any but the few masters of our literature. all the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in george eliot's best manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of rosamond's love, together with lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is tender. that scene on the receipt of sir godwin's letter is as tragic in its own way as othello or a greek drama. it has in it the same sense of human helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. rosamond was lydgate's fate. her weakness, tenacity and duplicity--his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman--his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved--all made the threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the whole worth of his life was destroyed. it is a story that goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know, as lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and feebler species"--who know, as lydgate knew, that their energies have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to exercise over the stronger man. casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is rosamond or lydgate. we confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy with dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of a man. learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to give herself as a wife. one can understand the more impersonal impulse which threw marian evans into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. tom was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against maggie; and celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk than dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish them--or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. and to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying will ladislaw--the utter snob that he is! where were george eliot's perceptions? or was it that in ladislaw she had a model near at hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear-sighted? yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of dorothea's character stands out as did romola's--like a "white lily" in the garden. she is a superb creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a tragedy. but what could any woman expect from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of mr. casaubon's? the canvas of "middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good some of the characters are! the sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of cabel garth; the commonplace negation of all great and all unworthy qualities of the vincys--celia and sir james--mr. farebrother and mr. and mrs. cadwallader--all are supreme. we confess we do not care much for the portraiture of mr. bulstrode and his spiteful delator raffles--george eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole episode of mr. featherstone's illness, with his watching family and mary garth, too vividly recalls old anthony chuzzlewit and all that took place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth or novelty. george eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as that of charles dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. great humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will not bear comparison. no book that george eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things. space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered about these fascinating pages. celia's feeling, which she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious for family comfort. notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"--(but, farther on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!--"in short, woman was a problem which, since mr. brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the _revolutions of an irregular solid_.")--mrs. cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "de bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating; and i fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. but her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred:"--"indeed, she (mrs. waule) herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the almighty's intentions about families:"--"strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain:"--"ladislaw, a sort of burke with a leaven of shelley:"--"but it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences"--an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious experience:--"that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"--these are a few picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but inadequately represented by stray nuggets. before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness in mr. casaubon when he had received his death-warrant from lydgate, and dorothea waits for him to come up to bed. it is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as george eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth. * * * * * the last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, "daniel deronda" is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most unnatural of all george eliot's books. of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. but in plot, treatment and character it is far below its predecessors. some of the characters are strangely unnatural. grandcourt, for instance, is more like the french caricature of an english milord than like a possible english gentleman depicted by a compatriot. deronda himself is a prig of the first water; while gwendolen is self-contradictory all through--like a tangled skein of which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order and intelligibility. begun on apparently clear lines of self-will, pride, worldly ambition and personal self-indulgence--without either conscience or deep affections--self-contained and self-controlled--she wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has prepared us. that she should ever have loved, or even fancied she loved, such a frozen fish as grandcourt was impossible to a girl so full of energy as gwendolen is shown to be. clear in her desires of what she wanted, she would have accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful life to which else she would have been condemned. but she would have accepted him without even that amount of self-deception which is portrayed in the decisive interview. she knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately chose to ignore it. so far good. it is what she would have done. but where is the logic of making her "carry on" as she did when she received the diamonds on her wedding-day? it was a painful thing, sure enough, and the mad letter that came with them was disagreeable enough; but it could not have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred, seeing that she already knew the whole shameful story. these are faults in psychology; and the conduct of the plot is also imperfect. george eliot's plots are always bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining instead confusion and unintelligibility; but surely nothing can be much sillier than the whole story of deronda's birth and upbringing, nor can anything be more unnatural than the character and conduct of his mother. what english gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born jewish child under conditions which made the whole world believe him to be his own illegitimate son? and what young man, brought up in the belief that he was an english gentleman by birth--leaving out on which side of the blanket--would have rejoiced to find himself a jew instead? the whole story is improbable and far-fetched; as also is deronda's rescue of mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the meyricks. it is all distortion, and in no wise like real life; and some of the characters are as much twisted out of shape as is the story. sir hugo mallinger and mr. and mrs. gascoigne are the most natural of the whole gallery--the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling most of the others. of these others, gwendolen herself is far and away the most unsatisfactory. her sudden hatred of her husband is strained; so is her love for deronda; so is her repentance for her constructive act of murder. that she should have failed to throw the rope to grandcourt, drowning in the sea, was perhaps natural enough. that she should have felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself in such humiliating unreserve to deronda was not. all through the story her action with regard to deronda is dead against the base lines of her character, and is compatible only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion as does sometimes make women mad. we have no hint of this. on the contrary, all that gwendolen says is founded on spiritual longing for spiritual improvement--spiritual direction with no hint of sexual impulse. yet she acts as one overpowered by that impulse--throwing to the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common sense. esther was not harmonious with herself in her choice of felix holt over harold transome, but esther was naturalness incarnate compared with gwendolen as towards daniel deronda. and the evolution of esther's soul, and the glimpse given of rosamond's tardy sense of some kind of morality, difficult to be believed as each was, were easy sums in moral arithmetic contrasted with the birth and sudden growth of what had been gwendolen's very rudimentary soul--springing into maturity in a moment, like a fully-armed athene, without the need of the more gradual process. add to all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden wain--add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last novel is also her worst. but then the one immediately preceding was incomparably her best. we come now to the beauties of the work--to the inimitable force of some phrases--to the noble aim and meaning of the story--to the lofty spirit informing all those interrupting disquisitions, which are really interpolated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. take this little shaft aimed at that _græculus esuriens_ lush, that "half-caste among gentlemen" and the _âme damnée_ of grandcourt. "lush's love of ease was well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found them relishing." again: "we sit up at night to read about cakya-mouni, saint francis and oliver cromwell, but whether we should be glad for any one at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another matter:"--"a man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived; but deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which, superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though, to an ardent reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth which makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (we extract this sentence as an instance of george eliot's fine feeling and delicate perception expressed in her worst and clumsiest manner.) "a blush is no language, only a dubious flag-signal, which may mean either of two contradictions." "grandcourt held that the jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist caliban; deronda said he had always felt a little with caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song;" "mrs. davilow observed that her father had an estate in barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the west indies; mrs. torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds." it is in such "polite pea-shooting" as this that george eliot shows her inimitable humour--the quick give-and-take of her conversations being always in harmony with her characters. but, indeed, unsatisfactory as a novel though "daniel deronda" is, it is full of beauties of all kinds, from verbal wit to the grandly colossal sublimity of mordecai, and deronda's outburst of passionate desire to weld the scattered jews into one nation of which he should be the heart and brain. * * * * * whatever george eliot did bears this impress of massive sincerity--of deep and earnest feeling--of lofty purpose and noble teaching. she was not a fine artist, and she spoilt her later work by pedantry and overlay, but she stands out as the finest woman writer we have had or probably shall have--stands a head and shoulders above the best of the rest. she touched the darker parts of life and passion, but she touched them with clean hands and a pure mind, and with that spirit of philosophic truth which can touch pitch and not be defiled. yet prolific as she was, and the creator of more than one living character, she was not a flexible writer and her range was limited. she repeated situations and motives with a curious narrowness of scope, and in almost all her heroines, save dinah and dorothea, who are evoluted from the beginning, paints the gradual evolution of a soul by the ennobling influence of a higher mind and a religious love. we come now to a curious little crop of errors. though so profound a scholar--being indeed too learned for perfect artistry--she makes strange mistakes for a master of the language such as she was. she spells "insistence" with an "a," and she gives a superfluous "c" to "machiavelli." she sometimes permits herself to slip into the literary misdemeanour of no nominative to her sentence, and into the graver sin of making a singular verb govern the plural noun of a series. she says "frightened at" and "under circumstances"; "by the sly" and "down upon"; and she follows "neither" with "or," as also "never" and "not." she is "averse to"; she has even been known to split her infinitive, and to say "and which" without remorse. once she condescends to the iniquity of "proceeding to take," than which "commencing" is only one stage lower in literary vulgarity; and many of her sentences are as clumsy as a clown's dancing-steps. as no one can accuse her of either ignorance or indifference, still less of haste and slap-dash, these small flaws in the great jewel of her genius are instructive instances of the clinging effect of our carelessness in daily speech; so that grammatical inaccuracy becomes as a second nature to us, and has to be unlearned by all who write. nevertheless, with all her faults fully acknowledged and honestly shown, we ever return as to an inexhaustible fountain, to her greatness of thought, her supreme power, her nobility of aim, her matchless humour, her magnificent drawing, her wise philosophy, her accurate learning--as profound as it was accurate. though we do not bracket her with plato and kant, as did one of her panegyrists, nor hold her equal to fielding for naturalness, nor to scott for picturesqueness, nor as able as was thackeray to project herself into the conditions of thought and society of times other than her own, we do hold her as the sceptred queen of our english victorian authoresses--superior even to charlotte brontë, to mrs. gaskell, to harriet martineau--formidable rivals as these are to all others, living or dead. if she had not crossed that rubicon, or, having crossed it, had been content with more complete insurgency than she was, she would have been a happier woman and a yet more finished novelist. as things were, her life and principles were at cross-corners; and when her literary success had roused up her social ambition, and fame had lifted her far above the place where her birth had set her, she realised the mistake she had made. then the sense of inharmoniousness between what she was and what she would have been did, to some degree, react on her work, to the extent at least of killing in it all passion and spontaneity. her whole life and being were moulded to an artificial pose, and the "made" woman could not possibly be the spontaneous artist. her yet more fatal blunder of marrying an obscure individual many years younger than herself, and so destroying the poetry of her first union by destroying its sense of continuity and constancy, would have still more disastrously reacted on her work had she lived. she died in time, for anything below "theophrastus such" would have seriously endangered her fame and lessened her greatness--culminating as this did in "middlemarch," the best and grandest of her novels, from the zenith of which "daniel deronda," her last, is a sensible decline. [signature: e. lynn linton.] mrs. gaskell _by_ edna lyall mrs. gaskell of all the novelists of queen victoria's reign there is not one to whom the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to mrs. gaskell. this feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every description. the hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can forget the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of french verbs as she pores over "wives and daughters" on a saturday half-holiday, and, as george sand remarked to lord houghton, this same book, "wives and daughters," "would rivet the attention of the most _blasé_ man of the world." with the exception of her powerful "life of charlotte brontë," mrs. gaskell wrote only novels or short stories. the enormous difficulties which attended the writing of a biography of the author of "jane eyre" would, we venture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time. it is easy now, years after charlotte brontë's death, to criticise the wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up slight mistakes, to maintain that in some details mrs. gaskell was wrong. to be wise too late is an easy and, to some apparently, a most grateful task; but it would, nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fascinating interest, or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the undertaking. as mr. clement shorter remarks, the "life of charlotte brontë" "ranks with boswell's 'life of johnson' and lockhart's 'life of scott.'" it is pleasant, too, to read charlotte brontë's own words in a letter to mr. williams, where she mentions her first letter from her future friend and biographer: "the letter you forwarded this morning was from mrs. gaskell, authoress of 'mary barton.' she said i was not to answer it, but i cannot help doing so. the note brought the tears to my eyes. she is a good, she is a great woman. proud am i that i can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. in mrs. gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my sister emily. in miss martineau's mind i have always felt the same, though there are wide differences. both these ladies are above me--certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience. i think i could look up to them if i knew them." for lovers of the author of "mary barton" it is hard, however, not to feel a grudge against the "life of charlotte brontë"--or, rather, the reception accorded to it. owing to the violent attacks to which it gave rise, to a threatened action for libel on the part of some of those mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to which the publication of the biography subjected the writer, mrs. gaskell determined that no record of her own life should be written. it is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light mixed with the many vexations. charles kingsley writes to mrs. gaskell in warm appreciation of the "life": "be sure," he says, "that the book will do good. it will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed, age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. i confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. 'jane eyre' i hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and thackeray's are the only ones i care to open. 'shirley' disgusted me at the opening, and i gave up the writer and her books with the notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. how i misjudged her! and how thankful i am that i never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. well have you done your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. i shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written." mrs. gaskell's wish regarding her own biography has, of course, been respected by her family; but the world is the poorer, and it is impossible not to regret that the life of so dearly loved a writer must never be attempted. the books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's, wedded to that true mother's heart which is wide enough to take in all the needy. looking, moreover, at that goodly row of novels--whether in the dear old shabby volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or in that dainty little set recently published in a case, which the rising generation can enjoy--one cannot help reflecting that here is "a little child's monument," surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love and a great grief that could be imagined. it was not until the death of her little child--the only son of the family--that mrs. gaskell, completely broken down by grief, began, at her husband's suggestion, to write. and thus a great sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful harvest, as grief borne with strength and courage always may do; and the world has good reason to remember that little ten months' child whose short life brought about such great results. a question naturally suggests itself at this point as to mrs. gaskell's birth and education. how far had she inherited her literary gifts? and in what way had her mind been influenced by the surroundings of her childhood and girlhood? her mother, mrs. stevenson, was a miss holland, of sandlebridge, in cheshire; her father--william stevenson--was at first classical tutor in the manchester academy, and later on, during his residence in edinburgh, was editor of the _scots magazine_ and a frequent contributor to the _edinburgh review_. he was next appointed keeper of the records to the treasury, an appointment which caused his removal from edinburgh to chelsea; and it was there, in cheyne row, that elizabeth cleghorn stevenson, the future novelist, was born. owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted when only a month old by her aunt, mrs. lumb, and taken to knutsford, in cheshire, the little town so wonderfully described in "cranford." for two years in her girlhood she was educated at stratford-on-avon, walking in the flowery meadows where shakspere once walked, worshipping in the stately old church where he worshipped, and where he willed that his body should be left at rest; nor is it possible to help imagining that the associations of that ideal place had an influence on the mind of the future writer, doing something to give that essentially english tone which characterises all her books. after her father's second marriage she went to live with him, and her education was superintended by him until his death in , when she once more returned to knutsford. here, at the age of twenty-two, she was married to the rev. william gaskell, m.a., of cross street chapel, manchester; and manchester remained her home ever after. such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to have such a wide and lasting influence for good. for nothing is more striking than this when we think over the well-known novels--they are not only consummate works of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and rich with the most delightful humour and pathos--they are books from which that morbid lingering over the loathsome details of vice, those sensuous descriptions of sin too rife in the novels of the present day, are altogether excluded. not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any sense; they are wholly free from the horrid prudery, the pharisaical temper, which makes a merit of walking through life in blinkers and refuses to know of anything that can shock the respectable. mrs. gaskell was too genuine an artist to fall either into this error or into the error of bad taste and want of reserve. she drew life with utter reverence; she held the highest of all ideals, and she dared to be true. how tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her treatment of the difficult subject which forms the _motif_ of "ruth"! how sorrowfully true to life is the story of the dressmaker's apprentice with no place in which to spend her sunday afternoons! we seem ourselves to breathe the dreadful "stuffy" atmosphere of the workroom, to feel the dreary monotony of the long day's work. it is so natural that the girl's fancy should be caught by henry bellingham, who was courteous to her when she mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball; so inevitable that she should lose her heart to him when she witnessed his gallant rescue of the drowning child. but her fall was not inevitable, and one of the finest bits in the whole novel is the description of ruth's hesitation in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and unjustly cast off by her employer, she has just accepted her lover's suggestion that she shall go with him to london, little guessing what the promise involved, yet intuitively feeling that her consent had been unwise. "ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold, and went and opened the window, and leant out into the still, sweet evening air. the bush of sweetbriar underneath the window scented the place, and the delicious fragrance reminded her of her old home. i think scents affect and quicken the memory even more than either sights or sounds; for ruth had instantly before her eyes the little garden beneath the window of her mother's room, with the old man leaning on his stick watching her, just as he had done not three hours before on that very afternoon." she remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and his wife who had served her parents in their lifetime, and for their sake would help and advise her now. would it not be better to go to them? "she put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door; but then she saw the square figure of the landlord standing at the open house door, smoking his evening pipe, and looming large and distinct against the dark air and landscape beyond. ruth remembered the cup of tea that she had drunk; it must be paid for, and she had no money with her. she feared that he would not let her leave the house without paying. she thought that she would leave a note for mr. bellingham saying where she was gone, and how she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared of equal magnitude to her; and the difficulty of passing the landlord while he stood there, and of giving him an explanation of the circumstances, appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with inconvenience as far more serious situations. she kept peeping out of her room after she had written her little pencil note, to see if the outer door was still obstructed. there he stood motionless, enjoying his pipe, and looking out into the darkness which gathered thick with the coming night. the fumes of the tobacco were carried into the house and brought back ruth's sick headache. her energy left her; she became stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion; she modified her plan of action to the determination of asking mr. bellingham to take her to milham grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead of to london. and she thought in her simplicity that he would instantly consent when he had heard her reasons." the selfishness of the man who took advantage of her weakness and ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at all exaggerated. henry bellingham is no monster of wickedness, but a man with many fine qualities spoilt by an over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and yielding too easily to her worldly-wise arguments. ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness--she calls it "unfairness"--when, on their arrival in wales, he persuades the landlady to give them rooms in the hotel and to turn out on a false pretext some other guests into the _dépendance_ across the road. she understands his selfish littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks to him during that wonderfully described interview in the chapter called "the meeting on the sands." he cannot in the least understand her. "the deep sense of penitence she expressed he took for earthly shame, which he imagined he could soon soothe away." he actually has the audacity to tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant refusal, he offers her marriage. to his great amazement she refuses this too. "why, what on earth makes you say that?" asked he.... "i do not love you. i did once. don't say i did not love you then; but i do not now. i could never love you again. all you have said and done since you came to abermouth has only made me wonder how i ever could have loved you. we are very far apart; the time that has pressed down my life like brands of hot iron, and scarred me for ever, has been nothing to you. you have talked of it with no sound of moaning in your voice, no shadow over the brightness of your face; it has left no sense of sin on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts; and yet i might plead that i was an ignorant child; only i will not plead anything, for god knows all. but this is only one piece of our great difference." "you mean that i am no saint," he said, impatient at her speech. "granted. but people who are no saints have made very good husbands before now. come, don't let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness interfere with substantial happiness--happiness both to you and to me--for i am sure i can make you happy--ay! and make you love me too, in spite of your pretty defiance.... and here are advantages for leonard, to be gained by you quite in a holy and legitimate way." she stood very erect. "if there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. you shall have nothing to do with my boy by my consent, much less by my agency. i would rather see him working on the roadside than leading such a life--being such a one as you are.... if at last i have spoken out too harshly and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is yours. if there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that it would bring leonard into contact with you, that would be enough." later on, a fever visits the town, and ruth becomes a nurse. when she hears that the father of her child is ill and untended she volunteers to nurse him, and, being already worn out with work, she dies in consequence. the man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness, are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at ruth as she lies dead. he was "disturbed" by the distress of the old servant sally, and saying, "come, my good woman! we must all die," _tries to console her with a sovereign_!! the old servant turns upon him indignantly, then "bent down and kissed the lips from whose marble, unyielding touch he recoiled even in thought." at that moment the old minister, who had sheltered ruth in her trouble, enters. henry makes many offers to him as to providing for ruth's child, leonard, and says, "i cannot tell you how i regret that she should have died in consequence of her love to me." but from gentle old mr. benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern words, "men may call such actions as yours youthful follies. there is another name for them with god." the sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful humour of sally, the servant. the account of the wooing of jeremiah dixon is a masterpiece; and sally's hesitation when, having found her proof against the attractions of "a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and eighty pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be ready for killing by christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy. "well, now! would you believe it? the pig were a temptation. i'd a receipt for curing hams.... however, i resisted. says i, very stern, because i felt i'd been wavering, 'master dixon, once for all, pig or no pig, i'll not marry you.'" the description of the minister's home is very beautiful. here are a few lines which show in what its charm consisted: "in the bensons' house there was the same unconsciousness of individual merit, the same absence of introspection and analysis of motive, as there had been in her mother; but it seemed that their lives were pure and good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some law the obedience to which was of itself harmonious peace, and which governed them.... this household had many failings; they were but human, and, with all their loving desire to bring their lives into harmony with the will of god, they often erred and fell short. but somehow the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher excellences in another; and so they reacted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace." the publication of "ruth," with its brave, outspoken words, its fearless demand for one standard of morality for men and women, subjected the author to many attacks, as we may gather from the following warm-hearted letter by charles kingsley: "_july , ._ "i am sure that you will excuse my writing to you thus abruptly when you read the cause of my writing. i am told, to my great astonishment, that you had heard painful speeches on account of 'ruth'; what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust.... among all my large acquaintance i never heard, or have heard, but one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteousness of the book, and that above all from really good women. if you could have heard the things which i heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough high church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more doubt than i have, that, whatsoever the 'snobs' and the bigots may think, english people, in general, have but one opinion of 'ruth,' and that is, one of utter satisfaction. i doubt not you have had this said to you already often. believe me, you may have it said to you as often as you will by the purest and most refined of english women. may god bless you, and help you to write many more such books as you have already written, is the fervent wish of your very faithful servant, "c. kingsley." "mary barton," which was the first of the novels, was published in , and this powerful and fascinating story at once set mrs. gaskell in the first rank of english novelists. people differed as to the views set forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its great merits. like "alton locke," it has done much to break down class barriers and make the rich try to understand the poor; and when we see the great advance in this direction which has been made since the date of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the first appearance of such a book must have been. the secret of the extraordinary power which the book exercises on its readers is, probably, that the writer takes one into the very heart of the life she is describing. most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention. why? because they are written either as mere "goody" books for parish libraries, and are carefully watered down lest they should prove too sensational and enthralling; or because they are written by people who have only a surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the life they would fain depict. "david copperfield" is probably the most popular book dickens ever wrote, and is likely to outlive his other works, just because he himself knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass through, and could draw from real knowledge the characters in the background. and at the present time we are all able to understand the indian mutiny in a way that has never been possible before, because mrs. steel in her wonderful novel, "on the face of the waters," has, through her knowledge of native life, given us a real insight into the heart of a great nation. brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons, but unless there is in it some germ of real truth which appeals to the heart and conscience it will not live. sensationalism alone will not hold its ground. there must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his subject if the book is to do its true work. and we venture to think that "mary barton," which for nearly half a century has been influencing people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact that mrs. gaskell knew the working people of manchester, not as a professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any detestable, patronising way, but knew them as _friends_. this surely is the reason why the characters in the novel are so intensely real. what could be finer than the portrait of mary herself, from the time when we are first introduced to her as the young apprentice to a milliner and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when she has passed through her great agony? how entirely the reader learns to live with her in her brave struggle to prove her lover's innocence! one of the most powerful parts of the book is the description of her plucky pursuit of the good ship _john cropper_, on board of which was the only man who could save her lover's life by proving an alibi. but it is not only the leading characters that are so genuine and so true to life. old ben sturgis, the boat-man, rough of speech but with more heart than many a smooth-tongued talker; his wife, who sheltered mary when she had no notion what manner of woman she was; job legh, who proved such a good friend to both hero and heroine in their trouble, and whose well-meaning deception of old mrs. wilson is so humorously described; john barton, the father, with the mournful failure at the close of his upright life; old mr. carson, the rich father of the murdered man, with his thirst for vengeance, and his tardy but real forgiveness, when he let himself be led by a little child--all these are living men and women, not puppets; while in the character and the tragic story of poor esther we see the fruits of the writer's deep knowledge of the life of those she helped when released from gaol. but mrs. gaskell looked on both sides of the question. in "north and south," published in , she deals with the labour question from the master's standpoint, and in mr. thornton draws a most striking picture of a manufacturer who is just and well-meaning--one who really respects and cares for the men he employs. the main interest of this book lies, however, in the character of the heroine, margaret, who is placed in a most cruel dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. by far the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable frederick to escape, margaret tells a deliberate falsehood to the detective who is in search of him. the torture of mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered this intentional lie, and the difficult question whether under any circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the writer's most powerful way. in --the same year in which "ruth" was published--the greatest of all mrs. gaskell's works appeared, the inimitable "cranford." for humour and for pathos we have nothing like this in all the victorian literature. it is a book of which one can never tire: yet it can scarcely be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town and its inhabitants. what english man or woman is there, however, who will not read and re-read its pages with laughter and tears? cranford is said to be in many respects the knutsford of mrs. gaskell's childhood and youth, and there is something so wonderfully lifelike in the descriptions of the manners and customs of the very select little community that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the assertion. they were gently bred, those old cranford folk, with their "elegant economy," their hatred of all display, and their considerate tact. there is pathos as well as fun in the description of mrs. forrester pretending not to know what cakes were sent up "at a party in her baby-house of a dwelling ... though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes!" there is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page of the book, for there was no hurrying life among those dignified old people. "i had often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no garden; the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to some town-dweller. things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in cranford." who has not laughed over miss betsy barker's alderney cow "meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel" after her disaster in the lime-pit! or over the masterly description of miss jenkyns, who "wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. equal, indeed! she knew they were superior." dear old miss matty, however, with her reverence for the stronger sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a closer hold on the heart of the reader. the description of the meeting of the former lovers is idyllic; and when thomas holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home authorities reverses her own ordinance against "followers" in the case of martha, the maid-servant, but otherwise makes no sign. "miss matty made a strong effort to conceal her feelings--a concealment she practised even with me, for she has never alluded to mr. holbrook again, though the book he gave her lies with her bible on the little table by her bedside. she did not think i heard her when she asked the little milliner of cranford to make her caps something like the honourable mrs. jamieson's, or that i noticed the reply: "'but she wears widows' caps, ma'am!' "'oh? i only meant something in that style; not widows', of course, but rather like mrs. jamieson's.'" in the whole book there is not a character that we cannot vividly realise: the honourable (but sleepy) mrs. jamieson; brisk, cheerful lady glenmire, who married the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her title to become plain mrs. hoggins; miss pole, who always with withering scorn called ghosts "indigestion," until the night they heard of the headless lady who had been seen wringing her hands in darkness lane, when, to avoid "the woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered the sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another way! captain brown with his devotion to the writings of mr. boz and his feud with miss jenkyns as to the superior merits of dr. johnson; and peter, the long-lost brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate practical joker. one and all they become our life-long friends, while the book stands alone as a perfect picture of english country town society fifty years ago. mrs. gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet some of them are very beautiful. "cousin phillis," for example, gives one more of the real atmosphere of country life than any other writer except wordsworth. we seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as we read the story. charming, too, is "my lady ludlow" with her genteel horror of dissenters subdued in the end by her genuine good feeling. how often one has longed for that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church, in which, if she did not like the sermon, she would pull up a glass window as though she had been in her coach, and shut out the sound of the obnoxious preacher! but, with all her peculiarities, she was the most courteous of women--a lady in the true sense of the word--and when people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread out her handkerchief on the front of her dress as the footman handed her coffee, my lady ludlow with infinite tact and grace promptly spread _her_ handkerchief exactly in the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had adopted. among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one called "the crooked branch," in which the scene at the assizes has almost unrivalled power; while among the lighter short stories, "my french master," with its delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "mr. harrison's confessions," the delightfully written love-story of a young country doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable. in the novel "sylvia's lovers" was published, and although, by its fine description of old whitby and the pathos of the story, it has won many admirers, we infinitely prefer its successor, "wives and daughters." there is something very sad in the thought that this last and best of the writer's stories was left unfinished; but happily very little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly touched in to the almost perfect picture of english home life by the daughter who had been not only mrs. gaskell's child but her friend. "wives and daughters" will always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of life and character; while molly gibson, with her loyal heart and sweet sunshiny nature, will, we venture to think, better represent the majority of english girls than the happily abnormal dodos and millicent chynes of present-day fashion. in mr. gibson's second wife the author has given us a most subtle study of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted woman, and she is made all the more repulsive because of her outward charms, her soft seductive voice and her lavish employment of terms of endearment. wonderfully clever, too, is the study of poor little cynthia, her daughter, whose relations to molly are most charmingly drawn. the story was just approaching its happy and wholesome ending, and the difficulties which had parted roger hamley and molly had just disappeared, when death summoned the writer from a world she had done so much to brighten and to raise. on sunday evening, november , , mrs. gaskell died quite suddenly at holybourne, alton, hampshire, a house which she had recently bought as a surprise for her husband. sad as such a death must always be for those who are left behind, one can imagine nothing happier than "death in harness" for a worker who loves his work. ".... there's rest above. below let work be death, if work be love!" her "last days," wrote one of those who knew her best, "had been full of loving thought and tender help for others. she was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words." that is the summing-up of the whole; and, after all, what better could a long biography give us? the motto of all of us should surely be the words of mme. viardot garcia: "first i am a woman ... then i am an artist." and assuredly mrs. gaskell's life was ruled on those lines. "it was wonderful"--wrote her daughter, mrs. holland, in a letter to me the other day--"how her writing never interfered with her social or domestic duties. i think she was the best and most practical housekeeper i ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess, to say nothing of being everything as a mother and friend. she combined both, being my mother and greatest friend in a way you do not often, i think, find between mother and daughter." some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal wife and mother cares little and knows less about the world beyond the little world of home. mrs. gaskell, however, took a keen interest in the questions of the day, and was a liberal in politics; while it is quite evident that neither these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended to interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the noblest type. the friend as well as the mother of her children, the sharer of all her husband's interests, she yet found time to use to the utmost the great literary gift that had been entrusted to her; while her sympathy for those in trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with prisoners. she was one of the fellow labourers of thomas wright, the well-known prison philanthropist, and was able to help in finding places for young girls who had been discharged from prison. for working women she also held classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many close friendships. how far the characters in the novels were studied from life is a question which naturally suggests itself; and mrs. holland replies to it as follows: "i do not think my mother ever _consciously_ took her characters from special individuals, but we who knew often thought we recognised people, and would tell her, 'oh, so and so is just like mr. blank,' or something of that kind; and she would say, 'so it is, but i never meant it for him.' and really many of the characters are from originals, or rather are like originals, but they were not consciously meant to be like." for another detail which will interest mrs. gaskell's fellow workers i am indebted to the same source: "sometimes she planned her novels more or less beforehand, but in many cases, certainly in that of 'wives and daughters,' she had very little plot made beforehand, but planned her story as she wrote. she generally wrote in the morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was quiet." few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome influence over their readers than mrs. gaskell. her books, with their wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty, their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead with us to love one another. through them all we seem to hear the author's voice imploring us to "seize the day" and to "make friends," as she does in actual words at the close of one of her christmas stories, adding pathetically: "i ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night on bethlehem heights." [signature: a e bayly. 'edna lyall.'] mrs. crowe. mrs. archer clive. mrs. henry wood _by_ adeline sergeant mrs. crowe. mrs. archer clive. mrs. henry wood mrs. catherine crowe, whose maiden name was stevens, was born at borough green, in kent, about , and died in . she married colonel crowe in , and took up her residence with him in edinburgh. her books were written chiefly between the years and , and she is best known by her novel, "susan hopley," and her collection of ghost stories, "the night side of nature." she was a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of insanity. but love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels, the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment and considerable dramatic power. as a writer, indeed, mrs. crowe was extremely versatile; she wrote plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this generation. it is evident too, that she believed herself--rightly or wrongly--to be possessed of great philosophical discrimination; but it must be acknowledged that her philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander. * * * * * it is worth noting that mrs. crowe's ideas respecting the status and education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly "advanced." in "lilly dawson," for instance, a story published in , she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education which women were then receiving. "it is true," she says, "that there is little real culture amongst men; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they have still more advantages. if their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. six hours a day at latin and greek are better than six hours a day at worsted work and embroidery; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics than in strumming hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte." her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words from the same work of fiction. "if, as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. if her reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer; where man reasons she sees. nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world's history, if man would but let her play it out, and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom." surely we hear the voice of nora helmer herself, the very quintessence of ibsenism! it must have required considerable courage to write in this way in the year , and mrs. crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational reform. in many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong individuality and decided opinions. * * * * * her first work was a drama, "aristodemus," published anonymously in ; it showed considerable ability and was well regarded by the critics. she then wrote a novel, "men and women, or manorial rights," in ; and in published her most successful work of fiction: "susan hopley, or the adventures of a maid-servant." this story was more generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest than the rest. mrs. crowe then embarked upon a translation of "the seeress of provorst," by justinus kerner, a book of revelations concerning the inner life of man; and in she published a book called "the night side of nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the english language. its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the author. she seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in her way. from the humble apologies, however, with which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a change has passed over people's minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to the supernatural. if mrs. crowe had lived in these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the society for psychical research, and would have had no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject. she divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams (where we get sir noel paton's account of his mother's curious vision); warnings; double-dreaming and trance, with the stories of colonel townshend's voluntary trance and the well-known legend of lord balcarres and the ghost of claverhouse; doppel-gängers and apparitions (including the stories of lady beresford's branded wrist and lord lyttleton's warning); and other chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. it is interesting to find among these the original account of "pearlin jean," of which miss sarah tytler has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. an account of the phenomena of _stigmata_ and the case of catherine emmerich, are also described in detail. lovers of the supernatural will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of "the night side of nature." mrs. crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for christmas, in the year ; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the now almost obsolete christmas annual of succeeding years. it is also curious to note, that in , mrs. crowe produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled "pippie's warning, or mind your temper"--another instance of her versatility of mind. "the adventures of a beauty" and "light and darkness" appeared in . the latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. mrs. crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this collection. there is an account of the celebrated poisoners, frau gottfried, madame ursinus, and margaret zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims; and of mr. tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a visit. the histories of lesurques, the hero of the "lyons mail," and of madame louise, princess of france, who became a nun, are well narrated; but nearly all the stories are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of mr. wilkie collins. "the priest of st. quentin" and "the lycanthropist" are two of the most powerful. her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was "linny lockwood," issued in . a sentence from the preface to this book anticipates--rather early, as we may think--the approaching death of the three-volume novel: "messrs. routledge and co. have been for some time soliciting me to write them an original novel for their cheap series; and being convinced that the period for publishing at £ s. d., books of a kind that people generally read but once, is gone by, i have resolved to make the experiment." she wrote another tragedy, "the cruel kindness," in , and abridged "uncle tom's cabin" for children. in a pamphlet on "spiritualism and the age we live in," constituted the last of her more important works, although she continued, for some time after recovery from the attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to write papers and stories for periodicals. in spite of mrs. crowe's love for the supernatural and the horrible, she is one of the pioneers of the purely domestic story--that story of the affections and the emotions peculiar to the victorian age. she is allied to the schools of richardson and fanny burney rather than to those of sir walter scott or miss austen; for although her incidents are often romantic and even far-fetched, her characters are curiously homely and generally of humble environment. thus, for instance, "susan hopley" is a maid-servant (though not of the pamela kind nor with the faintest resemblance to esther waters); lilly dawson, although proved ultimately to be the daughter of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier life as a drudge and a dependent; and linny lockwood, while refined and educated, is reduced to the situation of a lady's maid. the circumstances of her heroines are, as a rule, extremely prosaic, and would possibly have been condemned by writers of miss austen's school as hopelessly vulgar; but mrs. crowe's way of treating these characters and their surroundings bears upon it no stamp of vulgarity at all. its great defect is its want of humour to light up the sordid side of the life which she describes. she is almost always serious, full of exalted and occasionally overstrained sentiment. and even when treating of childhood, it is rarely that she relaxes so far as (in "lilly dawson") to describe the naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying for the cat. this is almost the sole glimpse of a sense of fun to which mrs. crowe treats us in her numerous volumes. to the present age "susan hopley," although so popular at the time of its publication, is less attractive than the stories of "linny lockwood" and "lilly dawson." the form adopted for the recital of susan's narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises susan's reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and supposed to be told by her in mature age, when she is housekeeper to the hero of the story. nevertheless, the plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of susan's brother by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the subsequent exposure of his guilt by means of susan's energy and the repentance of one of his victims. it has all the elements of a sensational story, with the exception of a "sympathetic" heroine or any other really interesting character; for susan hopley, the embodiment of all homely virtues, is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the attractiveness of the "beautiful and haughty" dairymaid, mabel lightfoot, whose frailty forms an important element in the discovery of gaveston's guilt. "lilly dawson" may be said to possess something of a psychological interest, which redeems it from the charge of dulness brought against "susan hopley." the heroine is thrown as a child into the hands of a wild and lawless family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a household slave; and the child appears at first to be utterly stupid and apathetic. a touch of affection and sympathy is needed before her intellect awakes. in fear of being forced to marry one of the sons of the house in which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen, she escapes from her enemies, becomes the guide and adopted child of an old blind man, takes service as a nursemaid, is employed in a milliner's workroom, narrowly escapes being murdered by the man whom she refused to marry, and finally acts as maid in the house of her own relations, where she is discovered and received with the greatest affection. nevertheless, she cannot endure the life of "a fine lady," and goes back ultimately to marry the humble lover whose kindness had cheered her in the days of her childhood and poverty. in "linny lockwood" there is a touch of emotion, even of passion, which is wanting in the previous stories. it embraces scenes and situations which are quite as moving as any which thrilled the english public in the pages of "jane eyre" or "east lynne," but, owing possibly to mrs. crowe's obstinate realism and somewhat didactic homeliness of diction and sentiment, it seems somewhat to have missed its mark. linny lockwood marries a man entirely unworthy of her, whose love strays speedily from her to another woman--a married woman with whom he elopes and whom he afterwards abandons. linny, being poor and destitute, looks about for work, and takes the post of maid to her husband's deserted mistress, without, of course, knowing what had been the connection between them. but before the birth of kate's child, linny learns the truth and nevertheless remains with her to soothe her weakness, and lessen the pangs of remorse of which the poor woman ultimately dies. a full explanation between the two women takes place before kate's death; and the child that is left behind is adopted by linny lockwood, who refuses to pardon the husband, who sues to her for forgiveness, or to live with him again. the character of linny lockwood is a very beautiful one, and the story appeals to the reader's sensibilities more strongly than the recital of susan hopley's adventures or the girlish sorrows of lilly dawson. * * * * * mrs. crowe's writings certainly heralded the advent of a new kind of fiction: a kind which has been, perhaps more than any other, characteristic of the early years of the victorian age. it is the literature of domestic realism, of homely unromantic characters, which no accessories of exciting adventure can render interesting or remarkable in themselves--characters distinguished by every sort of virtue, yet not possessed of any ideal attractiveness. she is old-fashioned enough to insist upon a happy ending, to punish the wicked and to reward the good. but amid all the conventionality of her style, one is conscious of a note of hard common sense and a power of seeing things as they really are, which in these days would probably have forced her (perhaps against her will) into the realistic school. she seems, in fact, to hover between two ages of literature, and to be possessed at times of two different spirits--one the romantic and the supernatural, the other distinctly commonplace and workaday. perhaps it is by the former that she will be chiefly remembered, but it is through the latter that she takes a place in english literature. she left a mark upon the age in which she lived, and she helped, in a quiet, undemonstrative fashion, to mould the women of england after higher ideals than had been possible in the early days of the century. those who consider the development of women to be one of the distinguishing features of queen victoria's reign should not forget that they owe deep gratitude to writers like mrs. crowe, who upheld the standard of a woman's right to education and economic independence long before these subjects were discussed in newspapers and upon public platforms. for, as george eliot has said, with her usual wisdom, it is owing to the labours of those who have lived in comparative obscurity and lie in forgotten graves, that things are well with us here and now. caroline clive was the second daughter and co-heiress of edmund meysey-wigley, of shakenhurst, worcestershire. she was born in , at brompton green, london, and was married in to the rev. archer clive, rector of solihull, warwickshire. in the latest edition of her poems, her daughter states that "mrs. archer clive, from a severe illness when she was three years old, was lame; and though her strong mind and high spirit carried her happily through childhood and early life, as she grew up she felt sharply the loss of all the active pleasures enjoyed by others." her novel, "paul ferroll," contains a touching poem which shows how deeply she felt the privations consequent on her infirmity. "gaeta's orange groves were there half circling round the sun-kissed sea; and all were gone and left the fair rich garden solitude but me. "my feeble feet refused to tread the rugged pathway to the bay; down the steep rocky way they tread and gain the boat and glide away. * * * * * "above me hung the golden glow of fruit which is at one with flowers; below me gleamed the ocean's flow, like sapphires in the midday hours. "a passing by there was of wings, of silent, flower-like butterflies; the sudden beetle as it springs full of the life of southern skies. * * * * * "it was an hour of bliss to die, but not to sleep, for ever came the warm thin air, and, passing by, fanned sense and soul and heart to flame." a great love of nature and a yearning to tread its scenes breathe in every word of these lines, which possess an essentially pathetic charm of their own. mrs. clive died in july , from the result of an accident, by which her dress was set on fire when she was writing in her boudoir at whitfield, with her books and papers around her. her health was extremely delicate, and she had been for many years a confirmed invalid. her first work consisted of the well-known "ix poems by v." published in . these poems were very favourably received, and were much praised by dugald stewart, by lockhart, and by mr. gladstone, who says of them, "they form a small book, which is the life and soul of a great book." they were also very favourably reviewed in the _quarterly_ (lxvi. - ). her other poems, "i watch the heavens," "the queen's ball," "the vale of the rea," etc., have been re-published with the original "ix" in a separate volume. "year after year," published in , passed into two editions; but mrs. clive's reputation chiefly rests upon her story of "paul ferroll," published in , and its sequel, "why paul ferroll killed his wife." the second story was, however, in no way equal to the first; and a subsequent novel, "john greswold," which appeared in , was decidedly inferior to its predecessors, although containing passages of considerable literary merit. "paul ferroll" has passed through several editions, and has been translated into french. it was not until the fourth edition that the concluding chapter, which brings the story down to the death of paul ferroll, was added. * * * * * there is little difference in date between the writings of mrs. crowe and those of mrs. archer clive, but there is a tremendous gap between their methods and the tone of their novels. as a matter of fact they belong to different generations, in spite of their similarity of age. mrs. crowe belongs to the older school of fictionists, while mrs. archer clive is curiously modern. the tone and style are like the tone and style of the present day, not so much in the dialogue, which is generally stilted, after the fashion of the age in which she lived, as in the mental attitude of the characters, in the atmosphere of the books, and the elaborate, sometimes even artistic, collocation of scenes and incidents. * * * * * "paul ferroll" is often looked upon merely as a novel of plot, almost the first "sensational" novel, as we call it, of the century. but it is more than that. there is a distinct working out of character and a subordination of mere incident to its development; and the original ending was of so striking and pathetic a nature that we can only regret the subsequent addition, which probably the influence of others made necessary, just as in "villette" charlotte brontë was obliged to soften down her own conception, in order to satisfy the conventional requirements of her friends. the story of "paul ferroll" displays a good deal of constructive skill, although the mystery enfolded in its pages is more easily penetrated than would be the case in a modern sensational novel. the fact is, we have increased our knowledge of the intricacies both of human nature and of criminal law in these latter days, and our novelists are cleverer in concealing or half revealing their mysteries than they were in "the forties." for a few pages, at least, the reader may be deluded into the belief that paul ferroll is a worthy and innocent man, and that his wife has been murdered by some revengeful servant or ruffianly vagabond. but the secret of his guilt is too speedily fathomed; and from that point to the end of the book, the question turns on the possibilities of its discovery or the likelihood and effects of his own confession. mrs. clive's picture of the "bold bad man" is not so successful as that of charlotte brontë's rochester. rochester, with all his faults, commands sympathy, but our sympathies are alienated from paul ferroll when we find (in the first chapter) that he could ride out tranquilly on a summer's morning, scold his gardener, joke with the farmer's wife, and straighten out the farmer's accounts, when he had just previously murdered his wife in her sleep by thrusting a sharp pointed knife through her head "below the ear." even although he afterwards exhibits agitation on being brought face to face with the corpse of his wife, we cannot rid ourselves of our remembrance of the insensibility which he had shown. the motive for the crime is not far to seek. he had fixed his affections on a young girl, his marriage with whom had been prevented by the woman who became his wife. dissension and increasing bitterness grew up between the pair; and her death was held as a release by paul ferroll, who hastened to bring home, as his second wife, the girl whom he had formerly loved. no suspicion attached to him, and he is careful to provide means of defence for the labourer franks and his wife, who have been accused of the murder. on returning home with his second wife, to whom he is passionately attached, he devotes himself entirely to literary pursuits, refusing to mix with any of the society of the place. from time to time his motive is allowed to appear; he has determined never to accept a favour from, nor become a friend of, the country gentlemen, with whom he is thrown into contact, so that they shall never have to say, supposing the truth should ever be acknowledged, that he has made his way into their houses on false pretences. but in spite of his seclusion, he lives a life of ideal happiness with his wife, ellinor, and their beautiful little child, janet, who, however, occupies quite a secondary place in the hearts of her father and mother, who are wrapt up in one another. the events of the next few years are not treated in detail, although there is at one point a most interesting description of the state of a town in which cholera rages, when paul ferroll flings himself with heroic ardour into every effort to stem the tide of the disease. owing to a riot at the time of the assizes, ferroll fires on one of the crowd and kills him, so that by a curious coincidence, he is tried for murder, and has full experience of the horrors accompanying the situation of a criminal. he is sentenced to death but pardoned, and returns to his old life at home. the widow of the labourer who had formerly been accused of the murder of his first wife then returns to england, and ferroll knows that her return increases the danger of discovery. he tries to escape it by going abroad, but finds on his return that martha franks, the widow, is in possession of some trinkets which belonged to the late mrs. ferroll, that she has been accused of theft and finally of the murder of her mistress. this is the very conjuncture which had always appeared possible to paul ferroll; the moment has come when he feels himself obliged to confess the truth, in order to save a fellow creature from unjust condemnation. he thereupon acknowledges his guilt, is at once conveyed to prison, and after a merely formal trial is condemned to death--the execution to take place, apparently, in three days, according to the inhuman custom of the time. ellinor dies on the day when she hears of his confession; and janet, his daughter, now eighteen years old, and janet's young lover, hugh bartlett, are the only persons who remain faithful to him or make efforts for his safety. through hugh's efforts and the treachery of the gaoler, paul ferroll manages, in a somewhat improbable manner, to escape from prison; and he and janet make their way to spain, whence they will be able to take ship for america. the conclusion of the story, as at first written, is particularly striking. janet, after an illness, has come to herself: "she did not know the place where she was. the air was warm and perfumed, the windows shaded, the room quite a stranger to her. an elderly woman, with a black silk mantle on her head and over her shoulders, spoke to her. she did not understand the meaning, but she knew the words were spanish. then the tide of recollection rushed back, and the black cold night came fully before her, which was the last thing she recollected. 'my father,' she said, rising as well as she could. the woman had gone to the window and beckoned, and in another minute mr. ferroll stood by her bedside. 'can you still love me, janet?' said he. 'love you! oh yes, my father.'" it seems a pity that a concluding chapter was afterwards added, containing a description of janet's life with her father in boston, and of his dying moments and last words, which might well have been left to the imagination. the original conclusion was more impressive without these details. it is rather curious, too, that mrs. clive should have written another volume to explain _why_ paul ferroll killed his wife; but possibly she thought further explanation was necessary, since she prefixed to the latter volume a quotation from froude's "henry the eighth": "a man does not murder his wife gratuitously." in this book she changes the names of all the characters except that of ellinor. paul ferroll is leslie, and his wife, anne, is laura. ellinor, the young and beautiful girl out of a convent, completely enchants leslie, whom laura had intended to marry; and laura contrives, by deliberate malice, so completely to sever them that he makes laura his wife, while ellinor returns to the convent. "violent were the passions of the strong but bitter man; fierce the hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect. wild was the fury of the man who believed in but one world of good, and saw the mortal moments pass away unenjoyed and irretrievable. out of these hours arose a purpose. the reader sees the man and knows the deed. from the premises laid before him, he need not indeed conclude that even that man would do the deed, but since it was told in that the husband killed his wife, so now in it is explained _why_ he killed her." this second volume is decidedly inferior to the first, but it shared in the popularity which "paul ferroll" had already achieved, and the author's vigorous portraiture of characters and events was well marked in both volumes. * * * * * with her third volume, "john greswold," came a sudden falling off, at any rate as regards dramatic force. "john greswold" is the autobiography of a young man who has very little story to tell and does not know how to tell it. no grip is laid on the reader's attention; no character claims especial interest, but the thing that is remarkable in the book is the literary touch, which is far more perceptible than in the more interesting story of "paul ferroll." the book is somewhat inchoate, but contains short passages of real beauty, keen shafts of observation, and an occasional flight of emotional expression, which raise the writer to a greater literary elevation than the merely sensational incidents of her earlier novels. she has gained in reflective power, but lost her dramatic instinct. consequently "john greswold" was less successful than "paul ferroll." the conclusion of the book, vague and indecisive, shows the author to be marked out by nature as one of the impressionist school. it is powerful and yet indefinite; in fact it could only have been written by one with a true poetic gift. "the seven stars that never set are going westward. the funeral car of lazarus moves on and the three mourners follow behind. they are above the fir wood and that's the sign of midnight. twenty-three years ago i was born into this world and now the twenty-third has run out. the time is gone. the known things are all over and buried in the darkness behind. before me lies the great blank page of the future and no writing traced upon it. but it is nothing to me. i won't ask nor think, nor hope, nor fear about it. the leaf of the book is turned and there's an end--the tale is told." * * * * * "paul ferroll" may be considered as the precursor of the purely sensational novel, or of what may be called the novel of mystery. miss brontë in "jane eyre" uses to some extent the same kind of material, but her work is far more a study of character than the story of "paul ferroll" can claim to be. in "paul ferroll," indeed, the analysis of motive is entirely absent. the motives that actuated paul ferroll are to be gathered simply from chance expressions or his actions. no description of the human heart has been attempted. the picture of the violent, revengeful, strongly passionate nature of the man is forcible enough, but it is displayed by action and not by introspection. it is for this reason that mrs. clive may be placed in the forefront of the sensational novelists of the century. she anticipated the work of wilkie collins, of charles reade, of miss braddon, and many others of their school, in showing human nature as expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest. a vigorous representation of the outside semblance of things is the peculiar characteristic of the so-called sensational novelist; and it is in this respect that "paul ferroll" excels many of the novels of incident written during the first half of this century. it heralded a new departure in the ways of fiction. it set forth the delights of a mystery, the pleasures of suspense, together with a thrilling picture of "the strong man in adversity," which has been beloved of fiction-mongers from the first days of fable in the land. but perhaps it was successful, most of all, because it introduced its readers to a new sensation. hitherto they had been taught to look on the hero of a novel as necessarily a noble and virtuous being, endowed with heroic, not to say angelic qualities; but this conviction was now to be reversed. the change was undoubtedly startling. even scott had not got beyond the tradition of a good young man as hero, a tradition which the brontës and mrs. archer clive were destined to break down. for scott's most fascinating character, brian de bois-guilbert, was confessedly the villain of the piece; and the splendidly picturesque figure of dundee was supposed to be less attractive than the tame and scrupulous personality of henry morton. it was a convention amongst writers that vice and crime must be repulsive, and that there was something inherently attractive in virtue--a wholesome doctrine, insufficiently preached in these days, but not strictly consistent with facts. to find, therefore, a villain--and a thorough-paced villain, the murderer of his wife--installed in the place of hero and represented as noble, handsome, and gifted, naturally thrilled the readers' minds with a mixture of horror and delight. the substitution of villain for hero is now too common to excite remark, but it was a striking event in the days when "paul ferroll" was published, although there had been instances of a similar kind in the novels of the eighteenth century. the new fashion gained ground and speedily exceeded the limits which mrs. archer clive would no doubt have set to it; but it is nevertheless in part to her that we owe this curious transposition of _rôles_, which has revolutionised the aims and objects of fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. mrs. henry wood the art of the _raconteur_, pure and simple, is apt to be undervalued in our days. a rage for character-painting, for analysis, for subtle discrimination, down to the minutest detail, has taken hold upon us; and although we have lately returned to a taste for adventure of the more stirring kind, there is still an underlying conviction that the highest forms of literary art deal with mental states and degrees of emotions, instead of with the ordinary complications of every-day life. hence the person who is gifted simply with a desire (and the power) of telling a story _as_ a story, with no ulterior motive, with no ambition of intellectual achievement, the scheherazade of our quiet evenings and holiday afternoons, is apt to take a much lower place in our estimation than she deserves. this is especially the case with mrs. henry wood. it is impossible to claim for her any lofty literary position; she is emphatically un-literary and middle-class. but she never has cause to say, "story? god bless you, i have none to tell, sir," for she always has a very distinct and convincing story, which she handles with a skill which can perhaps be valued only by the professional novelist, who knows the technical difficulty of handling the numerous _groups_ of characters which mrs. wood especially affects. there is no book of hers which deals--as so many novels deal--with merely one or two characters. she takes the whole town into her story, wherever it may be. we not only know the lord-lieutenant and the high sheriff and the squire, but we are intimate (particularly intimate) with the families of the local lawyer and doctor. we are almost equally well acquainted with their bootmaker and green-grocer, while their maids and their grooms are as much living entities to us as if they had served us in our own houses. to take a great group of _dramatis personæ_, widely differing in circumstances, in character, in individuality; to keep them all perfectly clear without confusion and without wavering; to evolve from them some central figures on which the attention of the subsidiary characters shall be unavoidably fixed, and to weave a plot of mystery, intrigue, treachery or passion which must be resolved to its ultimate elements before the last page of the book--to do all this is really an achievement of which many a writer, who values himself on his intellectual superiority to mrs. henry wood, might well be proud. it is no more easy to marshal a multitude of characters in the pages of your book than to dispose bodies of soldiers in advantageous positions over an unknown country. the eye of a general is in some respects needed for both operations, and the true balance and proportion of a plot are not matters which come by accident or can be accomplished without skill. it may not be literary skill, but it is skill of a kind which deserves recognition, under what name soever it may be classed. * * * * * mrs. henry wood was born in worcestershire in , and died in london in . she suffered from delicate health and passed the greater part of her life as an invalid. she was the daughter of mr. thomas price, one of the largest glove manufacturers in the city of worcester. she married mr. henry wood, the head of a large banking and shipping firm, who retired early from work and died comparatively young. it was not until middle life that mrs. wood began to write; and her first work,--perhaps, of all her works, the most popular--was "east lynne," which first appeared in _colburn's new monthly magazine_. its success was prodigious and it is still one of the most popular novels upon the shelves of every circulating library. it has been translated into many languages and dramatised in different forms. it was published in , and reached a fifth edition within the year. amongst her most popular works also are "the channings" and "mrs. halliburton's troubles," ; "the shadow of ashlydyat," ; "st. martin's eve," ; "a life's secret," ; "roland yorke," a sequel to "the channings," ; "johnny ludlow," stories re-printed from the _argosy_, to ; "edina," ; "pomeroy abbey," ; "court netherleigh," ; and many other stories and novels. mrs. wood was for many years the editor of the _argosy_. * * * * * the reason of the popularity of "east lynne" is not far to seek. it is, to begin with, a very touching story; and its central situation, which in some respects recalls the relation of the two women in mrs. crowe's "linny lockwood," is genuinely striking. it is perhaps not worth while to argue as to its probability. it is, of course, barely possible that a woman should come disguised into the house where she formerly reigned as mistress, and act as governess to her own children, without being recognised. as a matter of fact, she is recognised by one of the servants only on account of a momentary forgetfulness of her disguise. her own husband, her own children, do not know her in the least; and although he and his kinswoman are vaguely troubled by what they consider a chance resemblance, they dismiss it from their minds as utterly impossible, until the day when lady isabel, dying in her husband's house, begs to see him for the last time. the changes in her personal appearance, her lameness, for instance, and the greyness of her hair, are very ingeniously contrived; but it certainly seems almost impossible that two or three years should have so completely changed her that nobody should even guess at her identity. the present generation complains that the pathos of the story is overdone; but even if detail after detail is multiplied, so as to harrow the reader's feelings almost unnecessarily, the fact still remains that mrs. wood has imagined as pitiful and tragic a situation as could possibly exist in the domestic relations of man and woman. the erring wife returning to find her husband married to another woman, to nurse one of her own children through his last illness without being recognised by him or by her husband, and to die at last in her husband's house with the merest shadow of consolation in the shape of his somewhat grudging forgiveness, presents us with a figure which cannot fail to be extremely pathetic. the faults of mrs. henry wood's style, its occasional prolixity and commonplaceness, the iteration of the moral reflections, as well as the triteness and feebleness sometimes of the dialogue, very nearly disappear from view when we resign ourselves to a consideration of this tragic situation. it cannot be denied that there is just a touch of mawkishness now and then, just a slight ring of false sentiment in the pity accorded to lady isabel, who was certainly one of the silliest young women that ever existed in the realms of fiction. nevertheless the spectacle of the mother nursing the dying boy, who does not know her, is one that will always appeal to the heart of the ordinary reader, and will go far to account for the extraordinary popularity of "east lynne." a novelist of more aspiring genius would perhaps have concentrated our attention exclusively upon lady isabel's feelings and tragic fate. here mrs. wood's failings, as well as her capacities, reveal themselves. she sees the tragic side of things, but she sees also (and perhaps too much) the pathos of small incidents, the importance of trifles. she spares us no jot of the sordid side of life. and in a novel of the undoubted power of "east lynne" there are some details which might have been spared us. the rapacity of the creditors who seize the body of lady isabel's father, the gossip of the servants, the suspicions of afy hallijohn, and, in short, almost all the underplot respecting richard hare--these matters are superfluous. the reader's eye ought to be kept more attentively upon the heroine and her relations with mr. carlisle and sir francis. the one inexplicable point in the story is lady isabel's desertion of her husband for a man whom she must despise. it is never hinted that she had for one moment lost her heart to francis levison. she left her husband out of sheer pique and jealousy, loving him ardently all the while, although, in her ignorance and folly, she scarcely knew that she loved him. here the story is weak. we feel that mrs. wood sacrifices probability in her effort to obtain a striking situation. for the strongest part of "east lynne" is the description of what occurs when lady isabel returns as a governess to her old home, when her husband, supposing her to be dead, has married his old love barbara hare. to this situation, everything is subordinate; and it is in itself so strong that we cannot wonder if the author strains a point or two in order to achieve it. but the curious, the characteristic, thing is that even in this supreme crisis of the story, mrs. wood's essential love of detail, and of somewhat commonplace detail, asserts itself over and over again. the incidents she takes pains to narrate are rational enough. there is no reason why pathos should be marred because a dying child asks for cheese with his tea, or because the sensible stepmother condemns lucy to a diet of bread and water for some trifling offence, or because miss cornelia carlisle displays her laughable eccentricities at lady isabel's bedside. the pathos is marred now and then, not because of these trifling yet irritating incidents, but because we get an impression that the author has forced a number of utterly prosaic people into a tragic situation for which they are eminently unfitted. the ducking of sir francis levison in the horsepond is an example of this. the man was a heartless villain and murderer, yet he is presented to us in a scene of almost vulgar farce as part of his retribution. if the author had herself realised the insufficiency of her characters to rise to the tragic height demanded of them, she might have achieved either satire or intense realism; but there is a certain smugness in mrs. henry wood's acceptance of the commonplaces of life which makes us feel her an inadequate painter of tragedy. we close the book with a suspicion that she preferred the intolerable barbara to the winsome and erring lady isabel. "east lynne" owes half its popularity, however, to that reaction against inane and impossible goodness which has taken place since the middle of the century. just as rochester and paul ferroll are protests against the conventional hero, so lady isabel is a protest against the conventional heroine--and a portent of her time! we were all familiar with beauty and virtue in distress, from clarissa harlowe downwards. it is during later years that we have become conversant with beauty and guilt as objects of our sympathy and commiseration. the moralists of the time--saturday reviewers, and others--perceived the change from one point of view, and were not slow to comment on it. their opposition to the modern novel was chiefly based upon what they called a glorification of vice and crime. now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, we can see very well that no more praise of wrong-doing was implied by mrs. wood's portrait of lady isabel than by thackeray's keen-edged delineation of becky sharp or george eliot's sorrowful sympathy with maggie tulliver. what was at first set down as a new and revolutionary kind of admiration for weakness and criminality soon resolved itself into a manifestation of that remarkable _zeit-geist_ which has made itself felt in every department of human life. it is that side of the modern spirit which leads to the comprehension of the sufferings of others, to a new pity for their faults and weaknesses, a new breadth of tolerance, and a generous reluctance to judge harshly of one's fellow man. it has crept into the domain of law, of religious thought, of philanthropic effort, and it cannot be excluded from the realms of literature and art. it is, in fact, the scientific spirit, which says "there's nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so;" which refuses to dogmatise or hastily to condemn; which looks for the motives and reasons and causes of men's actions, and knows the infinite gradations between folly and wisdom, between black and white, between right and wrong. if science had done nothing else, it would be an enormous gain that she should teach us to suspend our judgment, to weigh evidence, and thus to pave the way for that diviner spirit by which we refuse to consider any sinner irreclaimable or any criminal beyond the reach of human sympathy. "east lynne" was received with general acclamation, and has been translated, it is said, into every known tongue, including parsee and hindustanee. "some years ago," her son states, "one of the chief librarians in madrid informed mrs. henry wood that the most popular book on his shelves, original or translated, was 'east lynne.' not very long ago it was translated into welsh and brought out in a welsh newspaper. it has been dramatised and played so often that had the author received a small royalty from every representation it was long since estimated that it would have returned to her no less than a quarter of a million sterling, but she never received anything.... in the english colonies the sale of the various works increased steadily year by year. in france the story has been dramatised and is frequently played in paris and the provinces." on its first appearance, an enthusiastic review in the _times_ produced a tremendous effect upon the public; the libraries were besieged for copies, and the printers had to work night and day upon new editions. in fact the success of "east lynne" was one of the most remarkable literary incidents of the century. * * * * * the most popular of mrs. henry wood's books, next to "east lynne," seem to be "mrs. halliburton's troubles" and "the channings." these are stories of more entirely quiet domestic interest than "east lynne." the situations are less tragical and the plots less complicated. mrs. halliburton's quiet endurance of the privations and difficulties of her life, the pathetic life and death of her little janey, and the ultimate success and achievements of her sons, linger in the memory of the reader as a pleasant and homely picture of the vicissitudes of english life. there is a more humorous element in "the channings," from the introduction of so many youthful characters--the boys of the cathedral school, notably bywater, who is the incarnation of good-humoured impudence, giving brightness to the tone of the story. the schoolboys are in this, as in many other of mrs. wood's novels, particularly well drawn. they are not prigs; they are anything but angels, in spite of their white surplices and their beautiful voices; and their escapades and adventures in the old cloisters were wild enough to make the old monks turn in their graves. no doubt many incidents of this kind were drawn from life and owe their origin to mrs. wood's acquaintance with the choir school belonging to worcester cathedral. it was not the only occasion on which the manufacturer's daughter turned her knowledge of worcester to good account. it may be said that the majority of her novels are coloured, more or less, by the author's lengthy residence in a cathedral town. it was in that the first series of short stories, supposed to be narrated by johnny ludlow, began in the _argosy_. johnny ludlow is a young lad belonging to a worcestershire family, who is supposed to narrate incidents which have come under his observation at school or at home. some of the stories thus produced are striking and vigorous; others are of less merit, but all are distinguished by the strong individuality of the characters, and by the fidelity with which worcester and worcestershire life are described. it now seems extraordinary that there should have been the slightest doubt as to the authorship of these stories, for mrs. wood's peculiarities of style are observable on every page. mr. charles w. wood, her son, remarks that "no one knew, or even guessed at, the authorship;" but this is a rather exaggerated statement, as we have reason to be aware that the author was recognised at once by critics of discrimination. still the general public were for some time deceived, imagining johnny ludlow to be a new author, whose stories they occasionally contrasted with those of mrs. henry wood, and were said to prefer, probably much to the novelist's own amusement. the great variety of plot and incident found in the "johnny ludlow" stories is their most remarkable feature. the same characters are, of course, introduced again and again, as johnny ludlow moves in a circle of country squires, clergy, and townspeople. but it is astonishing with how much effect the stories of different lives can be placed in the same setting, and with what infinite changes the life of a country district can be reproduced. the characters are clearly drawn and often very well contrasted, and no doubt mrs. henry wood's memories of her earlier life in the district contributed largely to the success of this series. the first series ran in the _argosy_ and were re-printed, - , while a second and third series maintained their popularity in and in . * * * * * it has been computed that mrs. wood wrote not fewer than from three to four hundred short stories, every one of them with a distinct and carefully worked-out plot, in addition to nearly forty long novels: a proof, if any were wanted, of the extreme fertility of her imagination and the facility of her pen. it has, however, sometimes been wondered why mrs. henry wood's works should have attained so great a circulation when they are conspicuously wanting in the higher graces of literary style or intellectual attainment. the reason appears to lie chiefly in certain qualities of her writings which appeal in an entirely creditable way to the heart and mind of the british public. mrs. wood's stories, although sensational in plot, are purely domestic. they are concerned chiefly with the great middle-class of england, and she describes lower middle-class life with a zest and a conviction and a sincerity which we do not find in many modern writers, who are apt to sneer at the _bourgeois_ habits and modes of thought found in so many english households. now the _bourgeoisie_ does not like to be sneered at. if it eats tripe and onions, and wears bright blue silk dresses, and rejoices in dinner-tea, it nevertheless considers its fashions to be as well worth serious attention as those of the upper ten. mrs. henry wood never satirises, she only records. it is her fidelity to truth, to the smallest domestic detail, which has charmed and will continue to charm, a large circle of readers, who are inclined perhaps to glory in the name of "philistine." then there is the loftier quality of a high, if somewhat conventional, moral tone. mrs. wood's novels are emphatically on the side of purity, honesty, domestic life and happiness. there is no book of hers which does not breathe this spirit, or can be said to be anything but harmless. her character-drawing has merit; but it is not to be wondered at, considering the number of works she produced, that she should repeat the same type over and over again with a certain monotonous effect. the sweet and gentle wife and mother, not too strong in character, but perfectly refined and conscientious, such as maria in the "shadow of ashlydyat"; the "perfect gentleman," noble, upright, proud, generally with blue eyes and straight features, like oswald cray and mr. carlisle and mr. north--these are characters with which we continually meet and of which, admirable in themselves as they are, we sometimes weary. but although the portraiture is not very subtle, it is on the whole faithful to life. then there is that especial group of mrs. wood's stories already mentioned, into which an element of freshness, then somewhat unusual in fiction, is largely introduced. these are the stories which have much to do with boys and boy-life--notably "the channings," "roland yorke," "orville college," "mrs. halliburton's troubles," "lady grace," and the "johnny ludlow" series. these books, less sensational in plot than many of mrs. wood's novels, have been peculiarly successful, perhaps because the scenes and characters are largely drawn from real life. mrs. wood's long residence at worcester made her familiar with the life of the college boys, who haunt the precincts of the stately old cathedral, and she has introduced her knowledge of their pranks with very great effect. her descriptions of the old city itself, of the streets, of the cloisters, of the outlying villages and byways, are remarkably accurate, and remind one of the use which charles dickens made, in the same way, of rochester and its cathedral. it is really extraordinary to see how large a part of mrs. wood's work is concerned with worcester, and how well she could render, when she chose, the dialogue of the country and the customs of its people. the reason is, of course, that these things are true; that she gives us in these books a part of her own experience, of her own life. another group of her books is interesting for a similar reason--the novels in which she deals with business life, and the relations of employers to their men. such are "a life's secret," which is the very interesting history of a strike; "the foggy night at offord," "mrs. halliburton's troubles," and several of the "johnny ludlow" stories, where incidents of the manufacturing districts of england have been introduced with very good effect, mrs. wood's own connection with glove manufacturers in worcester having supplied her with ample materials for this kind of fiction. in "a life's secret" there is an extremely clever picture of the lower type of workman, and some excellent sketches of poor people and of the misery they suffer during the strike and subsequent lockout. the third class of mrs. wood's books consists of what may be called works of pure imagination, with sometimes a slight touch of the romantic and supernatural--such as "the shadow of ashlydyat," "st. martin's eve," "lady adelaide's oath," "lord oakburn's daughters," "george canterbury's will," etc. from the literary point of view these books are less worthy than the others, but they are particularly well constructed and ingenious. there are no loose ends, and mrs. wood's skill in weaving a plot seems never to have diminished to the last day of her life. but her earlier and perhaps simpler work had more real value than even the books which display such great constructive skill. mrs. wood would possibly have taken a higher place amongst english novelists if she had avoided mere sensation, and confined herself to what she could do well--namely, the faithful and realistic rendering of english middle class life. she has had, perhaps, more popularity than any novelist of the victorian age; and her popularity is justified by the wholesomeness and purity of her moral tone, the ingenuity and sustained interest of her plots, and the quiet truthfulness, in many cases, of her delineation of character. her faults are those of the class for which she wrote, her merits are theirs also. it is no small praise to say that she never revelled in dangerous situations, nor justified the wrong-doing of any of her characters. when one considers the amount of work that she produced, and the nature of that work, it is amazing to reflect on the variety of incident and character which she managed to secure. her plots often turned upon sad or even tragic events, but the sadness and the tragedy were natural and simple. there was nothing unwholesome about her books. she will probably be read and remembered longer than many writers of a far higher literary standing; and although fashions, even in fiction, have greatly changed since the days when "east lynne" and "the channings" made their mark, there is no doubt that they hold their place in the affections of many an english novel-reader. they neither aim high nor fall low: their gentle mediocrity is soothing; and they are not without those gleams of insight and intensity which reveal the gift of the born story-teller--a title to which mrs. henry wood may well lay claim. [signature: adeline sergeant.] lady georgiana fullerton mrs. stretton. anne manning _by_ charlotte m. yonge lady georgiana fullerton mrs. stretton. anne manning the three ladies here grouped together are similar in the purity and principle which breathe throughout their writings, though different in other respects. the first named wrote in the stress, and later in the calm, of a religious struggle; the second in the peaceful, fond memory of a happy home-life; the third in the pleasurable realisation of historic days long gone by. in each case, the life is reflected in the books. georgiana charlotte leveson gower was born on september , , being the second daughter of one of those noble families predestined, by their rank and condition, to a diplomatic course. her father became ultimately earl granville, and when his little daughter was twelve years old, he received the appointment of ambassador at paris. it is well known that the upper diplomatic circles form the _crème de la crème_ of aristocratic society, their breeding, refinement, knowledge of man and manners, as well as their tact, being almost necessarily of the highest order. lady granville was noted for her admirable management of her receptions, and her power of steering her way through the motley crowd of visitors and residents presented to her. the charm of her manner was very remarkable, and made a great impression on all who came in her way. and, giving reality and absolute sincerity to all this unfailing sweetness, lady granville was a deeply religious and conscientious woman, who trained her daughters to the highest standard of excellence, and taught them earnest devotion. naturally, french was as familiar to the young ladies as english, and they became intimate with many of the best and purest families in france, among others, with that of de ferronaye, whose memoirs, as told by one of them, mrs. augustus craven, has touched many hearts. it was a happy life, in which study and accomplishment had their place, and gaieties did not lose the zest of youthful enjoyment because they were part of the duty of station. between france and england the time of the family was spent, and, in , both sisters were married--lady georgiana on july , to alexander fullerton, heir to considerable estates in gloucestershire and in ireland. he had been in the guards, but had resigned his commission, and become an _attaché_ to the embassy at paris. there the young couple continued, and there, at the end of the year, was born their only child, a son, whose very delicate health was a constant anxiety. in lord granville ceased to be ambassador, and the whole family led a wandering life in the south of france, italy, and germany, interspersed with visits in england. in mr. fullerton, after long study of the controversy, was received into the church of rome. his wife had always greatly delighted in the deep and beautiful rites of that communion, in its best aspects, and many of her most intimate friends were devout and enlightened members of that church; but she had been bred up as a faithful anglican, and she made no change as long as her father lived. the tale on which her chief fame rests was the product of the heart-searchings that she underwent, at the very time when the thoughts and studies of good men were tending to discover neglected truths in the church of england. lady georgiana said, in her old age, that she had never written for her own pleasure, or to find expression of feeling, but always with a view to the gains for her charities. she would rather have written poetry, and the first impulse was given by her publisher telling her that she would find a novel far more profitable than verses. yet it is hardly possible to believe that when once embarked she did not write from her heart. she was a long time at work on her tale, which was written during sojourns at various continental resorts, and finally submitted to two such different critics as lord brougham and charles greville, both of whom were carried away by admiration of the wonderful pathos of the narrative, and the charm of description, as well as the character-drawing. it is, however, curious that, while marking some lesser mistakes, neither advised her to avoid the difficulty which makes the entire plot an impossibility, namely, the omission of an inquest, which must have rendered the secrecy of "ellen middleton" out of the question. the story opens most effectively with the appearance of a worn and wasted worshipper in salisbury cathedral. one of the canons becomes interested, and with much difficulty induces her to confide her griefs to him in an autobiography, which she had intended to be read only after her death. the keynote of ellen's misfortunes is a slight blow, given in a moment of temper, at fifteen years old, to her cousin, a naughty child of eight, causing a fatal fall into the river below. no one knows the manner of the disaster, except two persons whose presence was unknown to her: henry lovell, a relative of the family, and his old nurse, whom he swears to silence. this woman, however, cannot refrain from strewing mysterious hints in ellen's way, and henry lovell obtains a power over the poor girl which is the bane of her life. his old nurse (by very unlikely means) drives him into a marriage with her grand-daughter, alice, whose lovely, innocent, devotional character, is one of the great charms of the book. ellen, almost at the same time, marries her cousin, edward middleton, whom she loves with all her heart; but he is a hard man, severe in his integrity, and his distrust is awakened by henry's real love for ellen, and the machinations by which he tries to protect her from the malice of the old nurse. the net closes nearer and nearer round ellen, till at last edward finds her on her knees before henry, conjuring him to let her confess her secret. without giving her a hearing, edward commands her to quit his house. a letter from henry, declaring that she is his own, and that she will not escape him, drives her to seek concealment at salisbury, where she is dying of consumption, caused by her broken heart, when the good canon finds her, gives her absolution, and brings about repentance, reconciliation, and an infinite peace, in which we are well content to let her pass away, tended by her husband, her mother-like aunt, and the gentle alice. it is altogether a fine tragedy. the strong passions of henry lovell, the enthusiastic nature of ellen, beaten back in every higher flight by recurring threats from her enemies, the unbending nature of edward, and in the midst the exquisite sweetness of alice, like a dove in the midst of the tempest, won all hearts, either by the masterly analysis of passion or by the beauty of delineation, while the religious side of the tale was warmly welcomed by those who did not think, like lord brougham, that it was "rank popery." the sense of the power and beauty of the story is only enhanced by freshly reading it after the lapse of many years. naturally, it was a great success, and the second book, "grantley manor," which was not published till after her father's death and her own secession to rome, was floated up on the same tide of popularity. it contrasted two half-sisters, margaret and ginevra, one wholly english, the other half italian by race and entirely so by breeding. still, though ginevra is the more fascinating, margaret is her superior in straightforward truth. for, indeed, lady georgiana never fell into the too frequent evil of depreciation and contempt of the system she had quitted, and remained open-minded and loving to the last. the excellence of style and knowledge of character as well as the tone of high breeding which are felt in all these writings recommended both this and "ladybird," published in . both are far above the level of the ordinary novel, and some readers preferred "ladybird" to the two predecessors. * * * * * in the meantime, an estate in england at midgham had become a home, and young granville fullerton had gone into the army. on the th of may , he was cut off by a sudden illness, and his parents' life was ever after a maimed one, though full of submission and devotion. externally, indeed, lady georgiana still showed her bright playfulness of manner, and keen interest in all around her, so that the charm of her society was very great, but her soul was the more entirely absorbed in religion and in charity, doing the most menial offices for the sick poor and throwing herself into the pleasures of little children. she questioned with herself whether she ought to spend time in writing instead of on her poor, when the former task meant earning two hundred pounds a year for them, but she decided on uniting the two occupations, the more readily because she found that her works had a good influence and helped on a religious serial in which she took a warm interest. but her _motifs_ were now taken from history, not actual life. "la comtesse de boneval" is a really marvellous _tour de force_, being a development from a few actual letters written by a poor young wife, whose reluctant husband left her, after ten days, for foreign service, and never returned. lady georgiana makes clear the child's hero-worship, the brief gleam of gladness, the brave resolve not to interfere with duty and honour, and the dreary deserted condition. all is written in french, not only pure and grammatical, but giving in a wonderful manner the epigrammatic life and freshness of the old parisian society. this is really the ablest, perhaps the most pathetic, of her books. "ann sherwood" is a picture of the sufferings of the romanists in elizabethan times, "a stormy life" is the narrative of a companion of margaret of anjou--both showing too much of the author's bias. "too strange not to be true" is founded on a very curious story, disinterred by lord dover, purporting that the unhappy german wife of the ferociously insane son of peter the great, at the point of death from his brutality, was smuggled away by her servants, with the help of countess konigsmark, the mother of marshal saxe, while a false funeral took place. she was conveyed to the french settlements in louisiana, and there, after hearing that the czarowitz was dead, she married a french gentleman, the chevalier d'auban. here, in these days of one-volume tales, the story might well have ended, but lady georgiana pursues the history through the latter days of the princess, after she had returned to europe and had been bereaved of her husband and her daughter. she lived at brussels, and again met marshal saxe in her extreme old age. the figures of the chevalier, and the sweet daughter, mina, are very winning and graceful, and there are some most interesting descriptions of the jesuit missions to the red indians; but, as a whole, the book had better have closed with the marriage with d'auban. * * * * * there is little more to say of lady georgiana's life. it was always affectionate, cheerful and unselfish, and it became increasingly devout as she grew older. after a long illness, she died at bournemouth, on the th of january , remembered fondly by many, and honoured by all who knew her saintly life. as to literary fame, she may be described as having written one first-rate book and a number fairly above the average. mrs. stretton about the same time as "ellen middleton" appeared, a novel was making its way rather by force of affectionate family portraiture than by plot or incident. "the valley of a hundred fires" is really and truly mrs. stretton's picture of her father and mother, and her home; and her mother is altogether her heroine, while old family habits and anecdotes are given with only a few alterations. "the valley of the hundred fires" has been placed by her on the borders of wales, but it really was gateshead, in durham, quite as black and quite as grimy as the more southern region, inasmuch as no flowers would grow in the rectory garden which, nevertheless, the children loved so heartily as to call it dear old dingy. (it is cinder tip in the story.) literally, they lived so as to show that "love's a flower that will not die for lack of leafy screen; and christian hope may cheer the eye that ne'er saw vernal green;" and that--at least, in the early days of this century--an abnormally large family was no misfortune to themselves or their parents. the real name was collinson, and the deep goodness and beneficence of the father, the reverend john collinson, and the undaunted cheerfulness, motherliness, and discipline of emily, his wife, shine throughout, not at all idealised. the number of their children was fifteen, ten daughters and five sons; and the second daughter, julia cecilia, was, as she describes herself, a tall, lank, yellow baby who was born on the th of november . she became as the eldest daughter to the others, for there had always been a promise that if there were several girls the eldest should be adopted by her aunt, wife to a clergyman and childless. the two homes were a great contrast: the one kept in absolute order and great refinement, with music and flowers the constant delight and occupation, and the single adopted child trained up in all the precision of the household; while the other was a house of joyous freedom, kept under the needful restraints of sound religious principle, discipline and unselfishness. the story went that when the children were asked how many of them there were, they answered, "one young lady and eight little girls." mrs. collinson used to say, that if she ever saw any signs that her "one young lady" was either pining for companionship, or growing spoilt by the position, she would recall her at once; but the child was always happy and obedient, and pleased to impart her accomplishments to her sisters, who admired without jealousy. comical adventures are recorded in the "valley," such as when the whole train of little damsels, walking out under the convoy of julia and a young nurserymaid, encountered a bull, which had lifted a gate on its horns. the maid thrust the baby into julia's arms and ran away, while her charges retired into a ditch, the elder ones not much alarmed, because, as they said, the bull could not hurt them with the gate on its horns. it passed safely by them; but the little ones confessed to having been dreadfully frightened by a snail in the ditch, "which put out its horns like a little kerry cow," and it creeped and it creeped! one incident in their early childhood was the rioting that pervaded the collieries in the years immediately following the great french war. mr. collinson, being a magistrate, was called upon to accompany the dragoons in order to read the riot act. he thus left his family unprotected; but the seven thousand pitmen never touched the rectory, and, according to the "valley," replied courteously to two of the children, who rushed out to the top of the cinder tip, begging to know whether they had seen "our papa" and if he was safe. there was another sadder episode, related also with much feeling, though a little altered, for it concerned the second son, not the eldest (then the only son) as described. a blow from a cricket ball did irreparable mischief to his knee, and it was suddenly decreed that amputation was necessary, long before the days of chloroform. the father was away from home, the mother sentenced not to be present, and the doctors consented that julia should hold the patient's hand, smooth his hair, and try to tell him stories through the operation. it was successfully and bravely carried out, but the evil was not removed, and a few weeks later this much-loved boy was taken away. the circumstances, very beautiful and consoling, are given in the story; and there too is told how, before sunset on that sad day, the ninth little daughter was given, and struggled hard for the vigorous life she afterwards attained. the "parson's man" said one day, when his mistress, for once in her life, indulged in a sigh that her garden could never rival that of her sister, "we've got the finer flowers, ma'am." education was not the tyrannical care in those days that it is at present, and the young people obtained it partly through their parents, some at school, and some by the help of their grandmother and their aunt, but mostly by their own intelligence and exertions; and the family income was augmented by mr. collinson taking pupils. he had a fair private income; he had a curate, and was able to give a good education to his sons, one of whom made himself a name as admiral collinson, one of the arctic explorers. if there were anxieties, they did not tell upon the children, whose memories reflect little save sunshine. * * * * * at nineteen, julia collinson became the wife of walter de winton, esquire, of maedlwch castle, radnorshire; but after only twelve years was left a widow, with two sons and a daughter. her life was devoted to making their home as bright and joyous as her own had been; and it was only in the loneliness that ensued on the children going to school that her authorship commenced, with a child's book called "the lonely island." later she wrote "the valley of the hundred fires," tracing the habits, characters and the destiny of the family of gateshead. the father was by this time dead, and extracts from his sermons and diary appear; but "emily," the mother, is the real heroine of the whole narrative, and though there is so little plot that it hardly deserves the name of novel, there is a wonderful charm in the delineation. there are a few descriptions of manners and of dresses which are amusing; nor must we omit the portrait of the grandmother, mrs. king (called reine in the book), daughter to the governor of one of the colonies in america before the separation, with the manners of her former princess-ship and something of the despotism. she was a friend of hannah more, a beneficent builder of schools, and produced a revolt by herself cutting the hair of all the scholars! "the queen of the county" relates mrs. de winton's experiences of elections among "the stormy hills of wales" in the early days of the reform bill. "margaret and her bridesmaids" draws more upon invention. each of two young girls, through the injudiciousness of her parents, has married the _wrong_ person. margaret acquiesces too much in her husband's indolence, and when herself roused to the perception of duty tries in vain to recover lost ground. her friend lottie is a high-spirited little soul, determined to do her duty as a wife, but not to pretend the love she does not feel, till it has been won. she is rather provokingly and unnaturally perfect, especially as she is only seventeen, always knowing when to obey up to the letter in a manner which must so have "riled" her husband that his persistent love is hardly credible, though it shows itself in attempts to isolate her, so that she shall have no resource save himself. his endeavours bring upon him heart complaint, whereof he dies, under her tender care, though she never affects to be grief-stricken. only, as margaret has lost her husband about the same time in a yachting accident, lottie refuses to listen to the addresses of a former lover of margaret's until she is convinced both that her friend will never form another attachment and that the original passion she had inspired is absolutely dead. there is a good deal of character in the story, though overdrawn, and it has survived so as to call for a new edition. * * * * * to her children, as well as to her many nephews and nieces, mrs. de winton was a charming companion-mother, always fresh, young, vigorous and as full of playfulness as the julia who led the band of little sisters. when all her children were grown up, in , she married richard william stretton, who had been their guardian and an intimate friend of the family, by whom he was much beloved. he died in , and mrs. stretton followed him on the th of july , leaving behind her one of the brightest of memories. her books are emphatically herself in their liveliness, their tenderness, their fond enshrining of the past. the third of our group had an even more eventless life, and, instead of letting her imagination dwell on her own past, she studied the women of past history, and realised what they must have felt and thought in the scenes where most of them figure only as names. her father belonged to the higher professional class, and lived with his large family, of whom anne was the eldest, at the paragon, chelsea, where at eight years old anne listened to the crash of the carriages, when the bourbons were on their return to france, and witnessed the ecstasy of london on the visit of the allied sovereigns after waterloo. with the help of masters for special accomplishments, the daughters had the best of educations, namely, the stimulating influence of their father, an accomplished man, for whom they practised their music, wrote their themes, went out star-gazing, and studied astronomy, listening with delight to his admirable reading of scott or shakspere; they also had the absolute freedom of an extensive library. anne manning was pronounced to be no genius, but a most diligent, industrious girl; as indeed was proved, for, becoming convinced during the brief reign of a good governess of the duty of solid reading, she voluntarily read from the age of fourteen ten pages a day of real, if dry, history, persevering year after year, and thus unconsciously laying in a good foundation for her future work. for health's sake the family went into the country, where they became tenants of a tumble-down cistercian priory on the borders of salisbury plain. the numerous girls, with their mother and governess, lived there constantly; the father coming down as often as his business would allow, almost always by the saturday coach, to spend sunday. here the first literary venture was made, when anne was about seventeen. it was a short dialogue on a serious subject, which a young aunt managed to get accepted in st. paul's churchyard; and, as miss manning candidly avows, was so well advertised privately by her fond grandfather that--such were the palmy days of authorship--five hundred copies brought her in a profit of £ . the story, "village belles," was completed at tenby, the priory having become too ruinous for habitation. it was put into the hands of baldwin and cradock, and no proofs were sent till the whole of the two first volumes came together. it was introduced to mr. manning thus, "papa, i don't know what you will say, but i have been writing a story." "ho! ho! ho!" was his first answer, but he afterwards said, "my dear, i like your story very much"--and never again referred to it. her own after judgment was that it was an "incurably young, inexperienced tale which, after all top dressing, remained but daisied meadow grass." sorrow came in to fill the minds of the family (to the exclusion of mere fictitious interests) in the deaths within short intervals of two of the sisters, and their mother's invalidism, ending, within a few years, in her death. after this the winters were spent by the three sisters at the paragon, the summers in a cottage at penshurst, their father coming down for the sunday. anne manning, meantime, was pursuing studies in painting and was an excellent amateur artist. she was also a botanist, and this has much to do with her accuracy in writing details of country life and habits. * * * * * dates, alas! are wanting both in her own "passages in the life of an authoress," and in the recollections of her kind and affectionate biographer, mrs. batty; but it seems to have been in that her "maiden and married life of mary powell," at first written to amuse herself and her sisters, and afterwards sent to assist a brother in australia, who was starting a local magazine, was given to the editor of "sharpe's magazine," then in its early youth. it made her fame. nobody had particularly thought of milton in his domestic capacity before, except as having advocated divorce and made his daughters read greek to him, and it was reserved for miss manning to make the wife paint her own portrait as the lively, eager girl, happy in country freedom with her brothers, important with her "housewife-skep" in her mother's absence, pleased with dress, but touched by the beautiful countenance and the sudden admiration of the strange visitor. there proves to be a debt which makes her marriage with him convenient to the father, and it is carried out in spite of the mother's strong objections, alike to the suitor's age, his politics, and his puritanism. we go along with the country girl in her disappointment and sense of dreariness in her unaccustomed london life, in the staid and serious household, where she sorely misses her brothers and is soon condemned for love of junketing. then come her joy in her visit to her home at forest hill and her reluctance to return, fortified by her father's disapproval of milton's opinions. by the time that a visit to some wise relatives has brought her to a better mind and to yearning after her husband, milton has taken offence and has put forth his plea for divorce, which so angers her father that he will not hear of her return; nor does she go back till after many months and the surrender of oxford, when on her own impulse she hurries to london, meets her husband unexpectedly, and when he "looks down on her with goodness and sweetness 'tis like the sun's gleams shining after rain." there mary powell's journal ends. it is written in beautiful english, such as might well have been contemporary and could only have been acquired by familiarity with the writers of the period, flowing along without effort or pedantry so as to be a really successful imitation. it crept into separate publication anonymously, and achieved a great success, being in fact the first of many books imitating the like style of autobiography; nor has it ever been allowed to drop into oblivion. it was followed up after a time by "deborah's diary," being the record supposed to be kept by milton's one faithful and dutiful daughter, who lived with him in his old age. the "fascination of the old style," as she calls it, led her to deal with "the household of sir thomas more" in the person of his noble daughter margaret. there was a good deal more genuine material here, and she has woven in the fragments from erasmus and others with great ingenuity, and imitated the style of the fifteenth century as well as she had done that of the seventeenth. from that time anne manning's books had a ready sale, though still her name did not appear. "cherry and violet" was a tale of the plague of london; "edward osborne" told of the apprentice who leapt from the window of a house on london bridge to save his master's daughter from drowning; "the old chelsea bunhouse" described the haunts with which miss manning was familiar; and there were other stories of country life, such as the "ladies of bever hollow." all were written in the purest style, such as could only be attained by one to whom slip-shod writing was impossible, and to whom it was equally impossible not to write what was gentle, charitable, and full of religious principle. miss manning was a kind friend and charming letter-writer. her health began to fail in , when she was writing for a magazine "some passages in the life of an authoress," never completed. she continued to be an invalid under the care of her sisters till her death on the th of september, . [signature: c m yonge] dinah mulock (mrs. craik) _by_ mrs. parr dinah mulock (mrs. craik) in the small circle of women writers who shed literary lustre on the early years of her present majesty's reign was dinah mulock, best known to the present novel-reading generation as the author of "john halifax, gentleman." to appreciate fully the position that we claim for her, it will be necessary to turn back to the period when she began to write, and see who were her contemporaries. pre-eminent among these stand out three names--names immortal on the roll of fame for so long as taste and critical judgment last; the books of charlotte brontë, elizabeth gaskell, and george eliot must be regarded as masterpieces of fiction. we, their humble followers, bow before their genius which time, fashion, or progress cannot dim or take from; therefore, to have achieved success and to have made an abiding fame while such luminaries were shining in the firmament was a distinction to be justly proud of--the result of talent, delicacy of handling, and grasp of character that were only a little below genius. how vast the difference that one small step would have made it is not our purpose to show; our intention is rather to take a general view of the work of a writer who--now that close upon half a century has passed, since, in , timidly and without giving her name, she launched on the world her first novel, "the ogilvies"--has never lost her hold upon the reading public of great britain, the colonies, america, or wherever the english tongue is spoken. * * * * * dinah mulock was born in at stoke-upon-trent in staffordshire. her disposition towards literature seems to have been inherited from her father, who was connected--but in no very prosperous way--with letters, and was known to byron and to the poet moore, whose fellow countryman he was. at the time of his daughter's birth, he was acting as spiritual minister to a small congregation who were followers of what were then generally thought to be his advanced and unorthodox opinions. few who forsake the established road for their own peculiar rut find that prosperity bears them company, and the fortunes of the mulock family during the embryo authoress's early years were unsettled and unsatisfactory. we are all given to rebel against the clouds which overcast our youth, seldom realising that to this pinch of adverse circumstance we owe much of that power to depict the sorrows, joys, and perplexities of life in the setting forth of which miss mulock became so eminently successful. before she had reached the age of twenty, she left her home and came to london, "feeling conscious," we are told, "of a vocation for authorship." now, in the present day, when novel writing has become an employment, profession, distraction, i might almost say a curse, there would be nothing remarkable in such a conviction; but in the mania of desiring to see their names in print had not seized upon our sex; therefore the divine afflatus must have been very strong which sent a timid attractive girl, hampered by all the prejudices of her day, to try the fortunes of her pen in london. that she had not been deceived in her quality is shown by the success of "the ogilvies," which not only was popular with novel readers, but raised hopes that the writer possessed great dramatic power, to be more ably used when experience had corrected the crude faults of a first book. the story, based on passionate first love, is written with the enthusiasm and vigour which comes pleasantly from a young hand, and makes us disposed to view leniently the superabundance of sentiment which, under other circumstances, we should censure. the death of the boy, leigh pennythorne, is rendered with a pathos which calls for admiration, and we are not surprised to see it ranked with the death of little paul dombey; while that of katherine lynedon, spoken of at the time as possessing great dramatic force, strikes us now as melodramatic and sensational. * * * * * encouraged by having found favour with the public, miss mulock followed up her success with "olive" ( ), "agatha's husband" ( ), "head of the family" ( ). her literary reputation was now established; and, though her _magnum opus_, "john halifax," had yet to be written, it may be as well to consider some of the merits and weaknesses of her style, her treatment of her subjects, and her delineation of character. in a short sketch, such as this, it is not possible to give a synopsis of the plots of the various books, or even, in most cases, extracts from them. we have to confine ourselves to the endeavour to realise the effect they produced at the time they were written--the estimation they were then held in, and to see what position they now command among the novels of the present day. perhaps it will be only fair towards the faults we are about to find that we should recall the forward strides made by women in the past forty years. we who can recall the faulty teaching and the many prejudices of that date must often question if women now are sufficiently sensible of the advantages they possess. a reviewer of miss mulock's novels, writing in , says: "it is one of the chief misfortunes of almost every female novelist that her own education, as a woman, has been wretchedly defective;" and further on he adds: "the _education_ of the majority of women leaves them not only without information, but without intelligent interest in any subject that does not immediately concern them." he then points out that it seems impossible for women to describe a man as he is--that they see him only from the outside. "they are ignorant of the machinery which sets the thing going, and the principle of the machinery; and so they discreetly tell you what kind of case it has, but nothing more." now, when the time has come that young men and maidens have other interests in common than those which spring out of flirtation and love-making, we may feel quite sure that each sex will get a better insight and have a juster knowledge of the other. the general taste for exercise, and the development of activity and health of body, has killed sentimentality and the heroines of the rosa matilda school. not that these were the heroines that miss mulock created. her ideals are to a certain extent made of flesh and blood, although they are not always living figures. even at the period when we are told that "in the world of letters few authors have so distinct and at the same time so eminent a position as this lady," her judicious admirers find fault with her overflow of feminine sentimentality, which never permitted her ideal sufferers to conquer their griefs so far that they could take a practical and healthy interest in the affairs of the living world. "they live only 'for others'" says one critic, "'the beautiful light' is always in their faces; their hands 'work spasmodically' at least once in every two or three chapters." regarding the cramping influence of the prejudices which hedged in women in miss mulock's day, is it not very possible that this flaw in the portraiture of her own sex may have been due to the narrowness of her training rather than to any deficiency in her talent? nothing more plainly shows how warped her judgment had become than many of the passages in "a woman's thoughts about women." this is a book with much sound argument in it, and full of the desire to rectify the feminine grievances to which she was not blind. but when we come to a passage like the following, in which she asserts that all who "preach up lovely uselessness, fascinating frivolity, delicious helplessness, not only insult womanhood but her creator," we ask how is this to be reconciled with the text which comes immediately after: "equally blasphemous, and perhaps even more harmful, is the outcry about the equality of the sexes; the frantic attempt to force women, many of whom are either ignorant of, or unequal for, their own duties, into the position and duties of men. a pretty state of matters would ensue! who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose confused inanities of a ladies' committee would immediately go and give his vote for a female house of commons? or who, on receipt of a lady's letter of business--i speak of the average--would henceforth desire to have our courts of justice stocked with matronly lawyers and our colleges thronged by 'sweet girl graduates with their golden hair'? as for finance, if you pause to consider the extreme difficulty there always is in balancing mrs. smith's housekeeping book, or miss smith's quarterly allowance, i think, my dear paternal smith, you need not be much afraid lest this loud acclaim for women's rights should ever end in pushing you from your counting house, college, or elsewhere." on this showing, such crass ignorance is to be accepted in women, and is to be taken as a matter of course and as natural to them as cutting their teeth or having measles or chicken pox. it is of little use to advocate "self dependence," "female professions," "female handicrafts," for those who cannot write a business letter or do a simple sum. miss mulock may have had, indeed i fear had, much reason to cast these reproaches at her sex. but that she did not feel their shame, and urge her sister women to strive for an education more worthy of intelligent beings, proves to me how deeply her mental gifts suffered from the cramping influence of the time in which she lived. could she have enjoyed some of the advantages which spring out of the greater freedom of thought and action permitted in the present day, how greatly it would have enlarged her mental vision! her male creations would have been cast in a more vigorous man-like mould. her feminine ideals would no longer be incarnations of sentiment but living vital creatures. where the mind is stunted the mental insight must be limited; and strong as were miss mulock's talents, they were never able to burst the bonds which for generations had kept the greater number of women in intellectual imprisonment. * * * * * in "olive," the novel which immediately followed "the ogilvies," miss mulock ventured on a very fresh and interesting subject. olive, the heroine of the story, is a deformed girl, "a puir bit crippled lassie" with a crooked spine. to make this centre-character attractive and all-absorbing was a worthy effort on the part of an author, and we take up the book and settle ourselves to see how it will be done. unfortunately, before long, the courage which conceived the personal blemish gives way, and, succumbing to the difficulties of making mind triumph over beauty, miss mulock commits the artistic error of trying to impress upon you that, notwithstanding the pages of lamentations over this deformity and the attack made on your sympathy, the disfigurement was so slight that no person could possibly have noticed it. naturally this puts the heroine in a more commonplace position; and as several minor plots are introduced which olive only serves to string together, much of the interest in her with which we started is frittered away. finally, olive marries and restores the faith of a religious sceptic. and here it is curious to read the objections raised at the time against bringing into fiction "subjects most vital to the human soul." one critic, after describing the hero he is willing to accept--and, much to our regret, space prevents us showing this terrible model that we have escaped--says: "but a hero whose intellectual crotchets, or delusions, or blindness, are to be entrusted for repairs to a fascinating heroine--a mental perplexity which is to be solved in fiction--a deep-rooted scepticism which is to lose its _vis vitæ_ according to the artistic demands of a tale of the fancy, this we cannot away with. sceptics are not plastic and obliging. would to heaven scepticism _could_ be cured by bright eyes, dulcet tones, and a novelist's art of love!" criticisms in this tone make more plain to us the difficulties which novelists in the fifties had to grapple with. so many subjects were tabooed, so many natural impulses restrained, while the bogey propriety was flaunted to scare the most innocent actions, so that nothing short of genius could ride safely over such narrow-minded bigotry. that an extreme licence should follow before the happy mean could be arrived at, was a safe prediction; but many of the writers in that day must have had a hard task while trying to clip the wings of their soaring imaginations, so that they might not rise above the level marked out by mrs. grundy. now, all these social dogmas must have had an immense influence on the receptive mind of dinah mulock, and readers must not lose sight of this fact should they be inclined to call some of her books didactic, formal, or old-fashioned. she never posed as a brilliant, impassioned writer of stories which tell of wrongs, or crimes, or great mental conflicts. in her novels there is no dissection of character, no probing into the moral struggles of the human creature. her teaching holds high the standard of duty, patience, and the unquestioning belief that all that god wills is well. * * * * * the enormous hold which, ever since its first appearance in , "john halifax" has had on a great portion of the english-speaking public, is due to the lofty elevation of its tone, its unsullied purity and goodness, combined with a great freshness, which appeals to the young and seems to put them and the book in touch with each other. those who read the story years ago still recollect the charm it had for them; and, in a degree, the same fascination exists for youthful readers at the present time. the theme is noble, setting forth the high moral truth of "the nobility of man as man," and into its development the author threw all her powers. from the opening sentence, where you are at once introduced to the ragged, muddy boy and the sickly helpless lad, you feel that these two will prove to be the leading actors in the story--probably made contrasts of, and perhaps played one against the other. this idea, however, is speedily dispelled. possibly from a dread of failing where it is thought so many women do fail--in the portrayal of the unseen sides of character and the infinite subtleties it gives rise to--miss mulock, wisely we think, decided to place her story in the autobiographic form; and the gentle refined invalid, phineas fletcher, is made the _deus ex machinâ_ to unravel to the reader not only the romance of his friend john halifax's history, but also the working of his noble chivalrous nature. few situations are more pathetically drawn than the attitude of these two lads, with its exchange of dependence and hero-worship on the one side, and of tender, helpful compassion on the other. a true david and jonathan we see them, full of the trust, confidence, and sincerity young unsullied natures are capable of. and the story of the friendship, as it grows towards maturity, is equally well told. his energy and his indomitable faith in himself make a prosperous man of the penniless boy. we follow him on from driving the skin cart to being master of the tan-yard; and throughout all his temptations, struggles, success, he maintains the same honest, fearless spirit. it seems natural that when to such an exalted nature love comes it should come encircled with romance, and the wooing of ursula march, as told by sensitive, affectionate phineas fletcher, is very prettily described. for the reason that ursula is an heiress with a host of aristocratic relations, john believes his love for her to be hopeless. he struggles against this overwhelming passion for some time, until the continuous strain throws him into a fever of which his friend fears he will die. in this agonising strait phineas is inspired with the idea of confessing the truth to ursula; and, after a touching scene in which this is most delicately done, she determines to go to the man who is dying of love for her. in the interview, which is too long to be given in its entirety and too good to be curtailed, john tells her that owing to a great sorrow that has come to him he must leave norton bury and go to america. she begs to be told the reason, and without an actual avowal he lets her see his secret. "'john, stay!' "it was but a low, faint cry, like that of a little bird. but he heard it--felt it. in the silence of the dark she crept up to him, like a young bird to its mate, and he took her into the shelter of his love for evermore. at once all was made clear between them, for whatever the world might say they were in the sight of heaven equal, and she received as much as she gave." when lights are brought into the room john takes ursula's hand and leads her to where old abel fletcher is sitting. "his head was erect, his eyes shining, his whole aspect that of a man who declares before all the world, 'this is my _own_." 'eh?' said my father, gazing at them from over his spectacles. "john spoke brokenly, 'we have no parents, neither she nor i. bless her--for she has promised to be my wife.' "and the old man blessed her with tears." abel fletcher, grave, stern, uncompromising--as members of the society of friends in that day were wont to be--is a clever study. he will not yield readily to the influence of john, and when he does give way it is by slow degrees. yet one of the most winning traits in this somewhat over-perfect young man, given at times to impress his moral obligations rather brusquely, is the deference he pays to his former master and the filial affection he keeps for him; and the author manages in these scenes to put the two into excellent touch with each other--so that, through john's attitude to him, the hard close-fisted old tanner is transfigured into a patriarch who fitly gives his blessing to the bride, and later on, in a scene of great pathos, bestows his last benediction on her blind baby daughter. it was said at the time of its publication, and it is still said, that in "john halifax" miss mulock reached the summit of her power. that she felt this herself seems to be shown by her adopting the title of "author of 'john halifax.'" its publication was in many ways a new departure. it was the first of that numerous series of books brought out by her (after) life-long friend, mr. blackett. those were not the days when "twenty thousand copies were exhausted before a word of this novel was written;" yet the book had a remarkable and legitimate success. of its merits a notable critic said, "if we could erase half a dozen sentences from this book it would stand as one of the most beautiful stories in the english language, conveying one of the highest moral truths." and that these few sentences, while in no way affecting the actual beauty of the story, are a blot and an "artistic and intellectual blunder--" the more to be deplored in a book whose moral teaching throughout is so excellent--we must confess. "the ragged boy, with his open, honest face, as he asks the respectable quaker for work, is no beggar; the lad who drives the cart of dangling skins is not inferior to phineas fletcher, who watches for him from his father's windows and longs for his companionship; and the tanner--the honest and good man who marries ursula march, a lady born--is her equal. having shown that men in the sight of god are equal and that therefore all good men must be equal upon earth, what need that john should have in his keeping a little greek testament which he views as a most precious possession because in it is written 'guy halifax, gentleman'? are we to conclude that all his moral excellence and intellectual worth were derived from _ladies_ and _gentlemen_ who had been his remote ancestors, but with whom he had never been in personal contact at all, since at twelve years old he was a ragged orphan, unable to read and write?" miss mulock could not have meant this, and yet she lays herself open to the charge, a kind of echo of which is heard in the adding to her good plain title of "john halifax" the unnecessary tag, "gentleman." * * * * * her literary career being now fully established, miss mulock decided on taking up her permanent residence in london; and, about this time, she went to live at wildwood, a cottage at north end, hampstead. the now ubiquitous interviewer--that benefactor of those who want to know--had not then been called into being, so there is no record at hand to tell how the rooms were furnished, what the mistress wore, her likes, dislikes, and the various idiosyncrasies she displayed in half an hour's conversation. such being the case we must be content with the simple fact that, charming by the candid sincerity of her disposition, and the many personal attractions that when young she possessed, miss mulock speedily drew around her a circle of friends whom, with rare fidelity, she ever after kept. * * * * * "john halifax" was followed in by "a life for a life," a novel which, although it never obtained the same popularity, fully maintains the position won by its precursor. in it miss mulock breaks new ground both as to plot and the manner in which she relates the story, which is told by the hero and heroine in the form of a journal kept by each, so that we have alternate chapters of _his_ story and _her_ story. this form of construction is peculiar and occasionally presents to the reader some difficulties, but as a medium to convey opinions and convictions which the author desires to demonstrate it is happily conceived. the motive of the book is tragedy, the keynote murder--that is murder according to the exigencies of the story-teller. max urquhart, the hero--who at the time the tale opens is a staid, serious man of forty--is the perpetrator of this crime, committed at the age of nineteen in a fit of intoxication on a man named johnston. journeying from london to join a brother who is dying of consumption at pau, urquhart, through a mistake, finds that instead of being at southampton he is at salisbury. on the way he has made the acquaintance of the pseudo-driver of the coach, a flashy, dissipated fellow, who by a tissue of lies induces the raw scotch lad to remain for some hours at the inn and then be driven on by him to where they will overtake the right coach. by this man young urquhart is made drunk, and when as a butt he no longer amuses the sottish company they brutally turn him into the street. later on he is aroused by the cut of a whip. it is his coach companion who pacifies him with the assurance that if he gets into the gig he will be speedily taken by him to southampton. the lad consents, he is helped up and soon falls fast asleep to be awakened in the middle of salisbury plain by his savage tormentor, who pushes him out and tells him to take up his lodging at stonehenge. the poor youth, with just sufficient sense left in him to feel that he is being kept from his dying brother, implores the ruffian to take him on his way. "to the devil with your brother," is the answer, and in spite of all entreaties, johnston whips up his horse, and is on the point of starting, when urquhart, maddened by rage, catches him unawares, drags him from the gig, and, flings him violently on the ground, where his head strikes against one of the great stones, and he is killed. how urquhart manages to reach southampton, and to get to pau, he never knows; but when he does arrive at his destination, it is to find his brother dead and buried, and the fit of mania which follows is set down to the shock this gives him. at the end of a year, hearing that johnston's death is attributed to accident, and being under the conviction that if the truth were told he would be hanged, he resolves to lock the secret in his own breast until the hour of his death draws near, and, in the meanwhile, to expiate his offence by living for others, and for the good he can do to them. he becomes an army doctor, goes through the crimean war, and, when we are introduced to him, is doing duty at aldershot, near where, at a ball, he meets the inevitable she, theodora johnston. if the hero is drawn dark, thin, with a spare, wiry figure, and a formal, serious air, the portrait of the heroine, with her undeniably ordinary figure, and a face neither pretty nor young, forms a fitting pendant to it. these two are irresistibly drawn towards each other, and, notwithstanding that the lady bears the fatal name of johnston, they soon become engaged. dr. urquhart's tender conscience then demands that the tragic misdeed of his life shall be confessed to the woman he is about to make his wife, and, in a letter, he confides to her the sad history, adding, as postscript, some few days later: "i have found his grave at last." here follows the inscription, which proves the dead man to have been the son of theodora's father, her own half-brother, henry johnston. "farewell, theodora!" it is impossible here to give more than this crude outline of the plot of a book in which, far beyond the story she means to tell, the author has her own individual opinions and convictions to impress on us. the temptation to earnest writers to try, through their writings, to make converts of their readers, is often very strong, and in this instance miss mulock undoubtedly gave way to it. she had not only a vehement abhorrence of capital punishment, but, to quote from her book, she maintained "that any sin, however great, being repented of and forsaken, is, by god, and ought to be by man, altogether pardoned, blotted out, and done away." as was at the time said, "her argument demands a stronger case than she has dared to put;" but so ably are the incidents strung together, so touchingly are the relative positions of these suffering souls described, that their sorrows, affection, and fidelity become convincing; and, full of the pathetic tragedy of the situation, we are oblivious of the fact that what is called a crime is nothing greater than an accident, a misfortune, and that for murder we must substitute manslaughter. * * * * * from the date of the appearance of "john halifax," miss mulock's pen was never long idle. composition was not a labour to her; and friends who knew her at that time, describe her as walking about the room, or bending over on a low stool, rapidly setting down her thoughts in that small delicate writing which gave no trouble to read. she had beautiful hands; a tall, slim, graceful figure; and, with the exception of her mouth, which was too small, and not well shaped, delicate and regular features. these attractions, heightened by a charming frankness of manner, made her very popular. her poetic vein was strong. she published several volumes of poems, and many of her verses, when set to music, became much admired as songs. following "a life for a life," came, in somewhat quick succession, "studies from life," "mistress and maid," "christian's mistake," "a noble life," "two marriages." these in a period of ten years. as may be supposed, they are not all of equal merit; neither does any one of them touch the higher level of the author's earlier books. still, there is good honest work in each, and the same exalted purity of tone, while much of the sentimentality complained of before is wholly omitted or greatly toned down. "mistress and maid" is one of those good, quiet stories, full of homely truths and pleasant teaching, in which is shown the writer's quick sympathy with the working class. the maid, elizabeth, is as full of character and of refined feelings as is hilary leaf, the mistress, and her one romance of love, although not so fortunate, has quite as much interest. the opening scenes, in which these two first meet, are excellent, giving us, all through their early association, touches of humour--a quality which, in miss mulock's writings, is very rare. the picture of the rather tall, awkward, strongly built girl of fifteen, hanging behind her anxious-eyed, sad-voiced mother, who pushes her into notice with "i've brought my daughter, ma'am, as you sent word you'd take on trial. 'tis her first place, and her'll be awk'ard like at first. hold up your head, elizabeth," is drawn with that graphic fidelity which gives interest to the most commonplace things in life. the awkward girl proves to be a rough diamond, capable of much polish, and by the kindly teaching of hilary leaf she is turned into an admirable, praiseworthy woman. one has to resist the temptation to say more about hilary leaf, an energetic, intelligent girl who, when she cannot make a living for herself and her sister by school-keeping, tries, and succeeds, by shop-keeping. the description of the struggles of these two poor ladies to pay their way, and keep up a respectable appearance, comes sympathetically from the pen of a woman whose heart was ever open to similar distresses in real life. to her praise be it remembered that to any tale of true suffering dinah mulock never closed her ears or her hand. * * * * * her next two novels, "christian's mistake" and "a noble life," in our opinion, fall far short of any of her previous efforts. yet they were both received with much popular favour, particularly the former, which called forth warm praise from reviewers. for us not one of the characters has a spark of vitality. christian is not even the shadow of a young girl made of flesh and blood. her forbearance and self-abnegation are maddening. her husband, the "master of st. bede's,'" twenty-five years her senior and a widower, is nothing but a lay figure, meant to represent a good man, but utterly devoid of intellect and, one would think, of feeling, since he permits his young bride, possessed of all the seraphic virtues, to be snubbed and brow-beaten by two vulgar shrewish sisters-in-law. there is no interest of plot or depicting of character, and the children are as unreal and offensive as their grown up relations. in "a noble life," also, there is nothing which stirs our sympathies. even the personal deformities of the unfortunate little earl fail to touch us, and, when grown up and invested with every meritorious attribute, he is more like the "example" of a moral tale than a being of human nature. * * * * * as has been said, the portrayal of men is not this author's strong point. "her sympathy with a good man is complete on the moral, but defective on the intellectual side"--a serious deficiency in one who has to create beings in whom we are asked to take a sustained interest. that she could rise superior to this defect is shown in "the woman's kingdom." in this story miss mulock displays all her old charm of simplicity and directness, and is strong in her treatment of domestic life. at the outset she announces that it will be a thorough love story, and takes as her text that "love is the very heart of life, the pivot upon which its whole machinery turns, without which no human existence can be complete, and with which, however broken and worn in part, it can still go on working somehow, and working to a comparatively useful and cheerful end." this question we shall not stop to argue, but proceed with--we cannot say the plot, for of plot there is none; it is just an every-day version of the old, old story, given with admirable force and sweetness. it is said to appeal principally to young women, and it is possible that this is true, as the writer can recall the intense pleasure reading it gave to her nearly thirty years ago. the book opens with the description of some seaside lodgings, in which we find twin sisters as opposite in character as in appearance. edna is an epitome of all the virtues in a very plain binding. letty, vain, spoilt, but loving her sister dearly, is a beauty. "such women nature makes rarely, very rarely; queens of beauty who instinctively take their places in the tournament of life, and rain influence upon weak mortals, especially men mortals." two of the latter kind arrive as lodgers at the same house, brothers, also most dissimilar--julius stedman, impulsive, erratic and undisciplined; william, his elder brother, a grave, hard-working doctor, just starting practice. the four speedily become acquaintances--friends--and when they part are secretly lovers. letty, by reason of what she calls "her unfortunate appearance," never doubts but that she has conquered both brothers; but happily it is to edna that the young doctor has given his heart; and when in time letty hears the news, "and remembers that she had been placing herself and dr. stedman in the position of the irish ballad couplet, did ye ever hear of captain baxter, whom miss biddy refused afore he axed her? her vanity was too innocent and her nature too easy to bear offence long." "but to think that after all the offers i have had you should be the first to get married, or anyhow, engaged! who would ever have expected such a thing?" "who would, indeed?" said edna, in all simplicity, and with a sense almost of contrition for the fact. "well, never mind," answered letty consolingly, "i am sure i hope you will be very happy; and as for me"--she paused and sighed--"i should not wonder if i were left an old maid after all, in spite of my appearance." but to be left an old maid is not to be letty's fate. julius, already bewitched by her beauty through being much more thrown into her society, falls passionately in love with her, and for lack of any one else, and because his ardour flatters and amuses her, letty encourages him, permits an engagement, and promises to join him in india. but on the voyage out she meets a rich mr. vanderdecken, with whom she lands at the cape, and whom she marries. this is the tragic note in the happy story, the one drop of gall in the stedmans' cup of felicity. edna and her husband are patterns of domestic well-being. the joys and cares of every-day life have mellowed all that was good in them, and the account given of their home and their family is one we dwell upon lovingly. perhaps it is but natural that in our later reading we should note some small discrepancies that had formerly escaped us. we regret that the sisters had drifted so widely apart, and that each should seem to be so unconcerned at the distance which divides them. it is as if happiness can make us callous as well as luxury. and although it was true that letty's desertion suddenly wrecked the hopes of her lover, it seems hardly probable that such an unstable being as julius would have taken her falseness so seriously. a wiser man might have foreseen the possibility. still, when this and more is said, our liking for the story remains as strong as ever. we know of few books which give a better picture of healthful domestic happiness and pure family life. * * * * * although we have hitherto called, and shall continue to call, our authoress by her maiden name, she had in changed it by marrying mr. g. lillie craik, a partner in the house of macmillan & co., and shortly after she removed to shortlands, near bromley, in kent. this change in her state does not appear to have interfered with her occupation, and for many years volume followed volume in quick succession. unwisely, we think, for her literary reputation, she was led, through her strong sympathy, to advocate marriage with a deceased wife's sister in a novel, published in , called "hannah." the novel with a purpose is almost certain to fall into the error of giving the argument on one side only. its author has rarely any toleration for the ethical aspect of the other side of the question, and it is to be doubted if such books ever advance the cause they desire to advocate. in "hannah" we are perfectly surfeited by those who wish to marry within the forbidden degree, and we feel as little toleration for the placid bernard rivers--one of those men who never believe in the pinch of a shoe until they want to put it on their own feet--as for jim dixon, who, after evading the law, speedily grows tired of the deceased wife's sister, and avails himself of his legal advantage to take another wife. the objections we feel to novels of this class are well stated by a writer in the _edinburgh review_, no. clxxxix. "we object," he says, "on principle to stories written with the purpose of illustrating an opinion, or establishing a doctrine. we consider this an illegitimate use of fiction. fiction may be rightfully employed to impress upon the public mind an acknowledged truth, or to revive a forgotten woe--never to prove a disputed one. its appropriate aims are the delineation of life, the exhibition and analysis of character, the portraiture of passion, the description of nature." in most of these aims miss mulock had proved herself an expert. in addition to her numerous novels and volumes of poems, she wrote a large number of tales for children, many of which, i am told, are exceedingly charming. one cannot read her books without being struck by the intense affection she felt for children. she had none of her own, but she adopted a daughter to whom she gave a mother's love and care. from time to time there appeared from her pen volumes of short stories, studies, and essays; but it is not by these that her name and fame will be kept green. neither will her reputation rest on her later novels. this she must have realised herself when writing, "brains, even if the strongest, will only last a certain time and do a certain quantity of work--really good work." miss mulock had begun to work the rich vein of her imagination at an early age. she took few holidays, and gave herself but little rest. she was by no means what is termed a literary woman. she was not a great reader; and although much praise is due to the efforts she made to improve herself, judged by the present standard, her education remained very defective. that she lacked the fire of genius is true, but it is no less true that she was gifted with great imaginative ability and the power of depicting ordinary men and women leading upright, often noble lives. the vast public that such books as hers appeal to is shown in the large circulation of some of her works, the sale of "john halifax, gentleman" amounting to , copies, , of which--the sixpenny edition--have been sold within the last few months. this shows that her popularity is not confined to any one class. the gospel she wrote was for all humanity. as a woman, she was loved best by those who knew her best. "dinah was far more clever than her books," said an old friend who had been recalling pleasant memories to repeat to me. she died suddenly on the th of october , from failure of the heart's action--the death she had described in the cases of catherine ogilvie, of john halifax, and of ursula, his wife--the death she had always foreseen for herself. around her grave in keston churchyard stood a crowd of mourners--rich, poor, old and young--sorrowing for the good loyal friend who had gone from them, whose face they should see no more. [signature: louisa parr] julia kavanagh. amelia blandford edwards _by_ mrs. macquoid julia kavanagh. amelia blandford edwards it is difficult to think of two writers more strongly contrasted, judging from the revelation their books afford of their natures and ways of thought. they both strove, in their novels, to represent individual specimens of humanity. they must both have possessed the power of distinct vision; but though miss kavanagh was a keen observer of externals, her types seem to have been created by imaginative faculty rather than by insight into real men and women, while miss edwards appears to have gone about the world open-eyed, and with note-book in hand, so vivid are some of her portraits. in traditions, also, these writers differ. miss kavanagh has complete faith in the old french motto, "le bon sang ne peut pas mentir;" while one of miss edwards's heroes, an aristocrat by birth, is extremely happy as a merchant captain, with his plebeian italian wife. the two writers, however, strike the same note in regard to some of their female personages. both barbara churchill and nathalie montolieu are truthful to rudeness. julia kavanagh never obtrudes her personality on the reader, though she lifts him into the exquisitely pure and peaceful atmosphere which one fancies must have been hers. there is something so restful in her books, that it is difficult to believe she was born no longer ago than , and that only twenty years ago she died in middle life; she seems to belong to a farther-away age--probably because her secluded life kept her strongly linked to the past, out of touch with the new generation and the new world of thought around her. she began to write for magazines while still very young, and was only twenty-three when her first book, "the three paths," a child's story, was published. after this she wrote about fourteen novels, the best known of which are "madeleine," "nathalie," and "adèle." she wrote many short stories, some of which were re-printed in volumes--notably the collection called "forget-me-nots," published after her death. she also wrote "a summer and winter in the two sicilies," "woman in france in the th century," "women of christianity," and two books which seem to have been highly praised--"englishwomen of letters" and "frenchwomen of letters." * * * * * julia kavanagh's first novel, "madeleine," appeared in --a charming story, its scene being in the auvergne. the beginning is very striking, the theme being somewhat like that of "bertha in the lane"; but madeleine, when she has given up her false lover, devotes the rest of her life to founding and caring for an orphanage. born in ireland, julia kavanagh spent the days of her youth in normandy, and the scene of her second novel, "nathalie," is norman, though nathalie herself is a handsome, warm-blooded provençale. the scenery and surroundings are very lifelike, but, with one exception, the people are less attractive than they are in "adèle." in both books one feels a wish to eliminate much of the interminable talk, which could easily be dispensed with. nathalie, the country doctor's orphan daughter, teacher to the excellently drawn schoolmistress, mademoiselle dantin, is sometimes disturbingly rude and tactless, in spite of her graceful beauty. with all this _gaucherie_, and a violent temper to boot, nathalie exercises a singular fascination over the people of the story, especially over the delightful canoness, aunt radégonde, who is to me the most real of miss kavanagh's characters. madame radégonde de sainville is a true old french lady of fifty years ago, as charming as she is natural. the men in julia kavanagh's books have led secluded lives, or they are extremely reserved--very hard nuts indeed to crack for the ingenuous, inexperienced girls on whom they bestow their lordly affection. one does not pity nathalie, who certainly brings her troubles on herself; but in the subsequent book, sweet little adèle is too bright a bit of sunshine to be sacrificed to such a being as william osborne. the old château in which adèle has spent her short life is in the north-east of france; its luxuriant but neglected garden, full of lovely light and shade, its limpid lake, and the old french servants, are delightfully fresh. the chapters which describe these are exquisite reading--a gentle idyll glowing with sunshine, and with a leisureful charm that makes one resent the highly coloured intrusion of the osborne family, though the osborne women afford an effective contrast. adèle is scantily educated, but she is always delightful, though we are never allowed to forget that she is descended from the ancient family of de courcelles. she is thoroughly amiable and much enduring, in spite of an occasional waywardness. * * * * * fresh and full of beauty as these novels are, with their sweet pure-heartedness, their truth and restful peace, they cannot compare with the admirable short sketches of the quiet side of french life by the same writer. the scenes in which the characters of these short stories are set, show the truth of julia kavanagh's observation, as well as the quality of her style; they are quite as beautiful as some of guy de maupassant's little gem-like norman stories, but they are perfectly free from cynicism, although she truly shows the greedy grasping nature of the norman peasant. the gifts of this writer are intensified, and more incisively shown, in these sketches because they contain few superfluous words and conversations. julia kavanagh must have revelled in the creation of such tales as "by the well," and its companions; they are steeped in joyous brightness, toned here and there with real pathos as in "clément's love" and "annette's love-story," in the collection called "forget-me-nots." * * * * * such a story as "by the well" would nowadays be considered a lovely idyll, and, by critics able to appreciate its breadth and finished detail, a meissonier in point of execution: it glows with true colour. fifine delpierre is not a decked-out peasant heroine; she is a bare-footed, squalid, half-clothed, half-starved little girl, when we first see her beside the well. this is the scene that introduces her. "it has a roof, as most wells have in normandy, a low thatched roof, shaggy, brown, and old, but made rich and gorgeous when the sun shines upon it by many a tuft of deep green fern, and many a cluster of pink sedum and golden stonecrop. beneath that roof, in perpetual shade and freshness, lies the low round margin, built of heavy ill-jointed stones, grey and discoloured with damp and age; and within this ... spreads an irregular but lovely fringe of hart's-tongue. the long glossy leaves of a cool pale green grow in the clefts of the inner wall, so far as the eye can reach, stretching and vanishing into the darkness, at the bottom of which you see a little tremulous circle of watery light. this well is invaluable to the lenuds, for, as they pass by the farm the waters of the little river grow brackish and unfit for use. so long ago, before they were rich, the lenuds having discovered this spring through the means of a neighbouring mason, named delpierre, got him to sink and make the well, in exchange for what is called a servitude in french legal phrase; that is to say, that he and his were to have the use of the well for ever and ever. bitter strife was the result of this agreement. the feud lasted generations, during which the lenuds throve and grew rich, and the delpierres got so poor, that, at the time when this story opens, the last had just died leaving a widow and three children in bitter destitution. maître louis lenud, for the parisian monsieur had not yet reached manneville, immediately availed himself of this fact to bolt and bar the postern-door through which his enemy had daily invaded the courtyard to go to the well.... "'it was easily done, and it cost me nothing--not a sou,' exultingly thought maître louis lenud, coming to this conclusion for the hundredth time on a warm evening in july. the evening was more than warm, it was sultry; yet maître louis sat by the kitchen fire watching his old servant, madeleine, as she got onion soup ready for the evening meal, utterly careless of the scorching blaze which shot up the deep dark funnel of the chimney. pierre, his son, unable to bear this additional heat, stood in the open doorway, waiting with the impatience of eighteen for his supper, occasionally looking out on the farmyard, grey and quiet at this hour, but oftener casting a glance within. the firelight danced about the stone kitchen, now lighting up the _armoire_ in the corner, with cupids and guitars, and shepherds' pipes and tabors, and lovers' knots carved on its brown oak panels; now showing the lad the bright copper saucepans, hung in rows upon the walls; now revealing the stern grim figure of his father, with his heavy grey eyebrows and his long norman features both harsh and acute; and very stern could maître louis look, though he wore a faded blue blouse, an old handkerchief round his neck, and on his head a white cotton nightcap, with a stiff tassel to it; now suddenly subsiding and leaving all in the dim uncertain shadows of twilight. "during one of these grey intervals, the long-drawling norman voice of maître louis spoke: "'the delpierres have given up the well,' he said, with grim triumph. "'ay, but fifine comes and draws water every night,' tauntingly answered pierre. "'hem!' the old man exclaimed with a growl.... "'fifine comes and draws water every night,' reiterated pierre.... "... he had seen the eldest child fifine, a girl of eight or ten, sitting on her doorstep singing her little brother to sleep, with a wreath of hart's-tongue round her head, and a band of it round her waist. 'and a little beggar, too, she looked,' scornfully added pierre, 'with her uncombed hair and her rags.' "'shall we let the dog loose to-night?' he said." "maître louis uttered his deepest growl, and promised to break every bone in his son's body if he attempted such a thing. "pierre silently gulped down his onion soup, but the 'do it if you dare' of the paternal wink only spurred him on. he gave up the dog as too cruel, but not his revenge. "the night was a lovely one and its tender subdued meaning might have reached pierre's heart, but did not. he saw as he crouched in the grass near the old well that the full round moon hung in the sky; he saw that the willows by the little river looked very calm and still" ... [the revengeful lad watches for the child and falls asleep, then wakes suddenly]. "... behold ... there was little fifine with her pitcher standings in the moonlight ... she stood there with her hair falling about her face, her torn bodice, her scanty petticoats, and her little bare feet. how the little traitress had got in, whilst he, the careless dragon, slept, pierre could not imagine; but she was evidently quite unconscious of his presence.... the child set her pitcher down very softly, shook back the hanging hair from her face, and peeped into the well. she liked to look thus into that deep dark hole, with its damp walls clothed with the long green hart's-tongue that had betrayed her. she liked also to look at that white circle of water below; for you see if there was a wrathful adam by her, ready for revenge, she was a daughter of eve, and eve-like enjoyed the flavour of this forbidden fruit.... fifine ... took up her pitcher again and walked straight on to the river. pierre stared amazed, then suddenly he understood it all. there was an old forgotten gap in the hedge beyond the little stream, and through that gap fifine and her pitcher nightly invaded maître louis lenud's territory.... having picked up a sharp flint which lay in the grass pierre rose and bided his opportunity. fifine went on till she had half-crossed a bridge-like plank which spanned the stream, then, as her ill-luck would have it, she stood still to listen to the distant hooting of an owl in the old church tower on the hill. pierre saw the child's black figure in the moonlight standing out clearly against the background of grey willows, he saw the white plank and the dark river tipped with light flowing on beneath it. above all, he saw fifine's glazed pitcher, bright as silver; he was an unerring marksman, and he took a sure aim at this. the flint sped swiftly through the air; there was a crash, a low cry, and all was suddenly still. both fifine and her pitcher had tumbled into the river below and vanished there." pierre rescues her, and when fifine has been for some years in service with the repentant pierre's cousin her improved looks and clothing make her unrecognisable to the thick-headed well-meaning young farmer. * * * * * the only fault that can be found with these chronicles of manneville is the likeness between them. the "miller of manneville," in the "forget-me-not" collection, is full of charm, but it too much resembles "by the well." the "story of monique" gives, however, a happy variety, and monique is a thorough french girl; so is mimi in the bright little story called "mimi's sin." angélique again, in "clément's love," is a girl one meets with over and over again in normandy, but these norman stories are all so exquisitely told that it is invidious to single out favourites. the stories laid in england, in which the characters are english, are less graphic; they lack the fresh and true atmosphere of their fellows placed across the channel. julia kavanagh died at nice, where she spent the last few years of her life. had she lived longer she would perhaps have given us some graphic stories from the riviera, for it is evident that foreign people and foreign ways attracted her sympathies so powerfully that she was able to reproduce them in their own atmosphere. in a brief but touching preface to the collection called "forget-me-nots," published after her death, mr. c. w. wood gives us a lovable glimpse of this charming writer; reading this interesting little sketch deepens regret that one had not the privilege of personally knowing so sweet a woman. in regard to truth of atmosphere in her foreign stories, julia kavanagh certainly surpasses amelia b. edwards. in "barbara's history," in "lord brackenbury," and in other stories by miss edwards, there are beautiful and graphic descriptions of foreign scenery, and we meet plenty of foreign people; but we feel that the latter are described by an englishwoman who has taken an immense amount of pains to make herself acquainted with their ways and their speech--they somewhat lack spontaneity. in the two novels named there are chapters so full of local history and association that one thinks it might be well to have the books for companions when visiting the places described; they are full of talent--in some places near akin to genius. "barbara's history" contains a great deal of genuine humour. it is a most interesting and exciting story, though in parts stagey; the opening chapters, indeed the whole of barbara's stay at her great-aunt's farm of stoneycroft, are so excellent that one cannot wonder the book was a great success. now and again passages and characters remind one of dickens; the great-aunt, mrs. sandyshaft, is a thorough dickens woman, with a touch of the great master's exaggeration; barbara's father is another dickens character. there are power and passion as well as humour in this book, but in spite of its interest it becomes fatiguing when barbara leaves her aunt and the hundred pigs. there is remarkable truth of characterisation in some of this writer's novels. hugh farquhar is sometimes an eccentric bore, but he is real. barbara churchill at times is wearyingly pedantic; then, again, she is just as delightfully original--her first meeting with mrs. sandyshaft is so inimitable that i must transcribe a part of it. a rich old aunt has invited barbara churchill, a neglected child of ten years old, to stay with her in suffolk. barbara is the youngest of mr. churchill's three girls, and she is not loved by either her widowed father or her sisters, though an old servant named goody dotes on the child. barbara is sent by stage-coach from london to ipswich:-- "dashing on between the straggling cottages, and up a hill so closely shaded by thick trees that the dusk seems to thicken suddenly to-night, we draw up all at once before a great open gate, leading to a house of which i can only see the gabled outline and the lighted windows. "the guard jumps down; the door is thrown open; and two persons, a man and a woman, come hurrying down the path. "'one little girl and one box, as per book,' says the guard, lifting me out and setting me down in the road, as if i were but another box, to be delivered as directed. "'from london?' asks the woman sharply. "'from london,' replies the guard, already scrambling back to his seat; 'all right, ain't it?' "'all right.' "whereupon the coach plunges on again into the dusk; the man shoulders my box as though it were a feather; and the woman who looks strangely gaunt and grey by this uncertain light, seizes me by the wrist and strides away towards the house at a pace that my cramped and weary limbs can scarcely accomplish. "sick and bewildered, i am hurried into a cheerful room where the table is spread as if for tea and supper, and a delicious perfume of coffee and fresh flowers fills the air; and--and, all at once even in the moment when i am first observing them, these sights and scents grow all confused and sink away together, and i remember nothing ... when i recover, i find myself laid upon a sofa, with my cloak and bonnet off, my eyes and mouth full of eau de cologne, and my hands smarting under a volley of slaps, administered by a ruddy young woman on one side, and by the same gaunt person who brought me in from the coach on the other. seeing me look up, they both desist; and the latter, drawing back a step or two, as if to observe me to greater advantage, puts on an immense pair of heavy gold spectacles, stares steadily for some seconds, and and at length says: "'what did you mean by that now?' "unprepared for so abrupt a question, i lie as if fascinated by her bright grey eyes, and cannot utter a syllable. "'are you better?' "still silent, i bow my head feebly, and keep looking at her. "'hey now. am i a basilisk? are you dumb, child?' "wondering why she speaks to me thus, and being, moreover, so very weak and tired, what can i do, but try in vain to answer, and failing in the effort, burst into tears again? hereupon she frowns, pulls off her glasses, shakes her head angrily, and, saying: 'that's done to aggravate me, i know it is,' stalks away to the window, and stands there grimly, looking out upon the night. the younger woman, with a world of kindness in her rosy face ... whispers me not to cry. "'that child's hungry,' says the other coming suddenly back. 'that's what's the matter with her. she's hungry, i know she is, and i won't be contradicted. do you hear me, jane?--i won't be contradicted.' "'indeed, ma'am, i think she is hungry, and tired too, poor little thing.' "'tired and hungry!... mercy alive, then why don't she eat? here's food enough for a dozen people. child, what will you have? ham, cold chicken pie, bread, butter, cheese, tea, coffee, ale?' " ... everything tastes delicious; and not even the sight of the gaunt housekeeper ... has power to spoil my enjoyment. "for she is the housekeeper, beyond a doubt. those heavy gold spectacles, that sad-coloured gown, that cap with its plain close bordering can belong to no one but a housekeeper. wondering within myself that she should be so disagreeable; then where my aunt herself can be; why she has not yet come to welcome me; how she will receive me when she does come; and whether i shall have presence of mind enough to remember all the curtseys i have been drilled to make, and all the speeches i have been taught to say, i find myself eating as though nothing at all had been the matter with me, and even staring now and then quite confidently at my opposite neighbour.... left alone now with the sleeping dogs and the housekeeper--who looks as if she never slept in her life--i find the evening wearisome. observing too that she continues to look at me in the same grim imperturbable way, and seeing no books anywhere about, it occurs to me that a little conversation would perhaps be acceptable, and that, as i am her mistress's niece, it is my place to speak first. "'if you please, ma'am,' i begin after a long hesitation. "'hey?' "somewhat disconcerted by the sharpness and suddenness of this interruption, i pause, and take some moments to recover myself. "'if you please, ma'am, when am i to see my aunt?' "'hey? what? who?' "'my aunt, if you please, ma'am?' "'mercy alive! and pray who do you suppose i am?' "'you, ma'am,' i falter, with a vague uneasiness impossible to describe; 'are you not the housekeeper?' "to say that she glares vacantly at me from behind her spectacles, loses her very power of speech, and grows all at once quite stiff and rigid in her chair, is to convey but a faint picture of the amazement with which she receives this observation. "'i,' she gasps at length, 'i! gracious me, child, i am your aunt.' i feel my countenance become an utter blank. i am conscious of turning red and white, hot and cold, all in one moment. my ears tingle; my heart sinks within me; i can neither speak nor think. a dreadful silence follows, and in the midst of this silence my aunt, without any kind of warning, bursts into a grim laugh, and says: "'barbara, come and kiss me.' "i could have kissed a kangaroo just then, in the intensity of my relief; and so getting up quite readily, touch her gaunt cheek with my childish lips, and look the gratitude i dare not speak. to my surprise she draws me closer to her knee, passes one hand idly through my hair, looks not unkindly, into my wondering eyes, and murmurs more to herself than me, the name of 'barbara.' "this gentle mood is, however, soon dismissed, and as if ashamed of having indulged it, she pushes me away, frowns, shakes her head, and says quite angrily: "'nonsense, child, nonsense. it's time you went to bed.'" [next morning at breakfast.] "'your name,' said my aunt, with a little off-hand nod, 'is bab. remember that.'" ... [mrs. sandyshaft asks her great niece why she took her for the housekeeper; the child hesitates, and at last owns that it was because of her dress.] ... "'too shabby?' "'n--no, ma'am, not shabby; but....' "'but what? you must learn to speak out, bab. i hate people who hesitate.' "'but papa said you were so rich, and....' "'ah! he said i was rich did he? rich! oho! and what more, bab? what more? rich indeed! come, you must tell me. what else did he say when he told you i was rich?' "'n--nothing more, ma'am,' i replied, startled and confused by her sudden vehemence. 'indeed nothing more.' "'bab!' said my aunt bringing her hand down so heavily upon the table that the cups and saucers rang again, 'bab, that's false. if he told you i was rich, he told you how to get my money by-and-by. he told you to cringe and fawn, and worm yourself into my favour, to profit by my death, to be a liar, a flatterer, and a beggar, and why? because i am rich. oh yes, because i am rich.' "i sat as if stricken into stone, but half comprehending what she meant, and unable to answer a syllable. "'rich indeed!' she went on, excited more and more by her own words and stalking to and fro between the window and the table, like one possessed. 'aha! we shall see, we shall see. listen to me, child. i shall leave you nothing--not a farthing. never expect it--never hope for it. if you are good and true, and i like you, i shall be a friend to you while i live; but if you are mean and false, and tell me lies, i shall despise you. do you hear? i shall despise you, send you home, never speak to you, or look at you again. either way, you will get nothing by my death. nothing--nothing!' "my heart swelled within me--i shook from head to foot. i tried to speak and the words seemed to choke me. "'i don't want it,' i cried passionately. 'i--i am not mean. i have told no lies--not one.' "my aunt stopped short, and looked sternly down upon me, as if she would read my very soul. "'bab,' said she, 'do you mean to tell me that your father said nothing to you about why i may have asked you here, or what might come of it? nothing? not a word?' "'he said it might be for my good--he told miss whymper to make me curtsey and walk better, and come into a room properly; he said he wished me to please you. that was all. he never spoke of money, or of dying, or of telling lies--never.' "'well then,' retorted my aunt, sharply, 'he meant it.' "flushed and trembling in my childish anger, i sprang from my chair and stood before her, face to face. "'he did not mean it,' i cried. 'how dare you speak so of papa? how dare....' "i could say no more, but, terrified at my own impetuosity, faltered, covered my face with both hands, and burst into an agony of sobs. "'bab,' said my aunt, in an altered voice, 'little bab,' and took me all at once in her two arms, and kissed me on the forehead. "my anger was gone in a moment. something in her tone, in her kiss, in my own heart, called up a quick response; and nestling close in her embrace, i wept passionately. then she sat down, drew me on her knee, smoothed my hair with her hand, and comforted me as if i had been a little baby. "'so brave,' said she, 'so proud, so honest. come, little bab, you and i must be friends.' "and we were friends from that minute; for from that minute a mutual confidence and love sprang up between us. too deeply moved to answer her in words, i only clung the closer, and tried to still my sobs. she understood me. "'come,' said she, after a few seconds of silence, 'let's go and see the pigs.'" the sketch of hilda churchill is very good, and so is that of the grand duke of zollenstrasse. taken as a whole, if we leave out the concluding chapters, "barbara's history" is a stirring, original, and very amusing book, full of historical and topographical information, written in terse and excellent english, and very rich in colour--the people in it are so wonderfully alive. * * * * * "lord brackenbury" is very clever and full of pictures, but it lacks the brightness and the originality of "barbara's history." amelia b. edwards wrote several other novels--"half a million of money," "miss carew," "debenham's vow," &c. &c. she also published a collection of short tales--"monsieur maurice," etc.--and a book of ballads. born in , she began to write at a time when sensational stories were in fashion, and produced a number of exciting stories--"the four-fifteen express," "the tragedy in the bardello palace," "the patagonian brothers"--all extremely popular; though, when we read them now, they seem wanting in the insight into human nature so remarkably shown in some of her novels. she was a distinguished egyptologist, and the foundation in of the egypt exploration fund was largely due to her efforts; she became one of the secretaries to this enterprise, and wrote a good deal on egyptian subjects for european and american periodicals. she wrote and illustrated some interesting travel books, especially her delightful "a thousand miles up the nile," and an account of her travels in among the--at that time--rarely visited dolomites. the latter is called "untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys:" it is interesting, but not so bright as the nile book. when one considers that a large part of her output involved constant and laborious research--that for the purposes of many of the books she had to take long and fatiguing journeys--the amount of good work she accomplished is very remarkable; the more so, because she was not only a writer, but an active promoter of some of the public movements of her time. she was a member of the biblical archæological society--a member, too, of the society for the promotion of hellenic literature. then she entered into the woman's question, not so popular in those days as it is in these, and was vice-president of a society for promoting women's suffrage. it is difficult to understand how in so busy and varied a life she could have found sufficient leisure for writing fiction; but she had a very large mental grasp, and probably as large a power of concentration. remembering that she was an omnivorous reader, a careful student, possessed too of an excellent memory, we need not wonder at the fulness and richness of her books. [signature: katherine s. macquoid] mrs. norton _by_ mrs. alexander mrs. norton it is hardly necessary to state that this beautiful and charming woman was the second daughter of thomas sheridan and grand-daughter of richard brinsley sheridan, of regency renown. she was one of three sisters famous for beauty and brains, the eldest of whom married lord dufferin, and the youngest lord seymour, afterwards duke of somerset. born in the first decade of the present century, she married at nineteen, in , george norton, brother of the third lord grantley--a union which proved most unhappy. in mr. norton sought for a divorce, in an action which entirely failed. nevertheless, norton remained irreconcilable, and availed himself of all the powers which the law then lent to a vindictive husband, claiming the proceeds of his wife's literary work, and interfering between her and her children. but it is with mrs. norton as a writer rather than as a woman that we are concerned, and it is useless now to dwell upon the story of her wrongs and struggles. previous to this unfortunate suit she produced, in , "the story of rosalie, with other poems," which seems to have been her first published work. this was well received and much admired. in "the undying one," a poem on the wandering jew, was brought out, followed in by "the dream and other poems." this was highly praised in the _quarterly review_ by lockhart, who spoke of her as "the byron of poetesses." other poems from her pen touched on questions of social interest: "a voice from the factories" and "the child of the islands," a poem on the social condition of the english people. she also printed "english laws for women in the nineteenth century," and published much of it in pamphlets on lord cranworth's divorce bill of this year ( ), thus assisting in the amelioration of the laws relating to the custody of children, and the protection of married women's earnings. her natural tendency was towards poetry, and the first five books published by her were all in verse. in appeared a novel, in three volumes, called "stuart of dunleath," which was succeeded by "lost and saved" and "old sir douglas." it is curious to observe the depth and width of the gulf which yawns between the novel of and the novel of to-day. the latter opens with some brief sentence spoken by one of the characters, or a short dialogue between two or three of them, followed by a rapid sketch of their position or an equally brief picture of the scene in which the action of the piece is laid. the reader is plunged at once into the drama, and left to guess the parts allotted by the author to his puppets. forty-five years ago, when mrs. norton wrote "stuart of dunleath," the reader had to pass through a wide porch and many long passages before he reached the inner chambers of the story. an account of the hero and heroine's families, even to the third and fourth generation, was indispensable, and the minutest particulars of their respective abodes and surroundings were carefully detailed. the tale travelled by easy stages, with many a pause where byways brought additional wayfarers to join the throng of those already travelling through the pages; while each and all, regardless of proportion, were described with equal fulness whatever their degree of importance. * * * * * these are the characteristics of mrs. norton's novels, which stretch in a leisurely fashion to something like two hundred thousand words. nevertheless, "stuart of dunleath" shows great ability and knowledge of the world. it is evidently written by a well-read, cultivated, and refined woman, with warm feelings and strong religious convictions. the descriptions are excellent, the language is easy and graceful. the scene of the story lies chiefly in scotland, and the scotch characters are very well drawn, save one, lady macfarren, who is inhumanly hard. this, too, is one of the peculiarities of the forty or forty-five year old novel; its people are terribly consistent in good or evil. the dignity, the high-mindedness, the angelic purity of the heroine is insupportable, and the stainless honour, the stern resistance to temptation, the defiance of tyrannical wrongdoers, makes the hero quite as bad. in "stuart of dunleath," however, the hero is decidedly weak. he is the guardian of eleanor raymond, the heroine, and, seeing a probability of making a large profit by a speculative loan, risks her money, hoping to obtain the means to buy back his estate without diminishing her fortune. the speculation fails. eleanor is reduced to poverty, and stuart is supposed to drown himself. then the impoverished heroine, who is desperately in love with her guardian, is compelled to marry a wealthy baronet, sir stephen penrhyn. this is the beginning of troubles, and very bad troubles they are, continuing steadily through two-thirds of the book. sir stephen is a brutally bad husband, is shamelessly unfaithful, personally violent, breaks his wife's arm, and makes her life a burden. her little twin sons are drowned in a boating accident, and then stuart returns from the grave, having been stopped in his attempt to drown himself by a picturesque old clergyman, and started off to america, where he manages to recover the lost fortune. by his advice, eleanor leaves her tyrant and takes steps to obtain a divorce, but before the case is ready for hearing is seized with scruples and gives up the attempt, chiefly because she fears she is influenced by an unholy love for stuart. finally she gets leave of absence from her amiable spouse, and dies of a broken heart before it expires, stuart having married her dearest friend, the brilliant lady margaret fordyce, thinking that eleanor had no real affection for him. the scruples are much to her credit, of course, but she might have tried to save the remainder of her life from the degradation which must have been the result of a reunion with her husband, yet kept aloof from stuart without offending god or breaking any sacred law. eighteen very distinct characters figure in these pages, and three or four children. of these the best drawn are those most lightly sketched. the author's favourites are too much described, their merits, their peculiarities, their faults (if allowed to have any) are detailed as the writer sees them. but they do not act and live and develop themselves to the reader, and, therefore, become abstractions, not living entities. * * * * * "lost and saved," written some dozen of years afterward, has much the same qualities as "stuart of dunleath." the subsidiary characters are more convincing than the leading ladies and gentlemen. the hero, if such a man could be so termed, with his extreme selfishness, his surface amiability, his infirmity of purpose and utter faithlessness, is well drawn. there is a respectable hero also, but we do not see much of him, which is not to be regretted, as he is an intolerable prig. in this romance the heroine elopes with treherne, the villainous hero. (of course, there are the usual family objections to their wedding.) they intend to go to trieste, but in the confusion of a night march they get on board the wrong steamer, and find themselves at alexandria. here treherne is confronted with his aunt, the magnificent marchioness of updown. he is therefore obliged to suppress beatrice (the heroine) until the marchioness "moves on." they consequently set off on a voyage up the nile, apparently in search of a clergyman to marry them. it seems, by the way, a curious sort of hunting-ground in which to track an english parson. then beatrice falls dangerously ill, and nothing will save her save a parson and the marriage service. a benevolent and sympathetic young doctor is good enough to simulate a british chaplain, and the knot is tied to the complete satisfaction of beatrice. much misery ensues. it must be added that the magnificent marchioness of updown is an extraordinary picture. besides being a peeress by marriage, she is the daughter of an earl, an aristocrat born and bred. yet her vulgarity is amazing. her stupid ill-nature, her ignorance, her speech and manner, suggest the idea of a small shopkeeper in a shabby street. in this novel mrs. norton portrays the whited-sepulchre sort of woman very clearly in milly, lady nesdale, who is admired and petted by society, always smiling, well tempered, well dressed, careful to observe _les bienséances_, making herself pleasant even to her husband; while, screened by this fair seeming, she tastes of a variety of forbidden fruit, one mouthful of which would be enough to consign a less astute woman to social death. this class of character figures largely in present day novels, but few equal, none surpass, mrs. norton's masterly touch. "old sir douglas," her last novel, was published in _macmillan's magazine_, . it is planned on the same lines as her previous works of fiction--the plot rather complicated, the characters extremely numerous; among these is an almost abnormally wicked woman who works endless mischief. * * * * * it was, however, as a poetess that mrs. norton was chiefly known. her verse was graceful and harmonious, but more emotional than intellectual. wrath at injustice and cruelty stirred the depths of her soul; her heart was keenly alive to the social evils around her and she longed passionately for power to redress them. the effect of her own wrongs and sufferings was to quicken her ardour to help her fellow women smarting under english law as it at that time existed. what that law then permitted is best exemplified by her own experience. when the legal proceedings between her and her husband were over, and her innocence of the charges brought against her was fully established, she was allowed to see her children only _once_ for the space of half an hour in the presence of two witnesses chosen by mr. norton, though this state of things was afterwards ameliorated by the infant custody act, which allowed some little further restricted intercourse. but these evil times are past. indeed, it seems hard to believe that barely fifty years separates the barbarous injustice of that period from the decent amenities of this, as regards the respective rights of husbands and wives. mrs. norton's second poem of importance, "the undying one," is founded on the legend of the wandering jew, a subject always attractive to the poetic imagination. it contains many charming lines, and touches on an immense variety of topics, wandering, like its hero, over many lands. the sufferings of isolation are vividly depicted, and isolation must, of necessity, be the curse of endless life in this world. "thus, thus, to shrink from every outstretched hand, to strive in secret and alone to stand, or, when obliged to mingle in the crowd, curb the pale lip which quiveringly obeys, gapes wide with sudden laughter, vainly loud, or writhes a faint, slow smile to meet their gaze. this, this is hell! the soul which dares not show the barbed sorrow which is rankling there, gives way at length beneath its weight of woe, withers unseen, and darkens to despair!" in these days of rapidity and concentration, poems such as this would never emerge from the manuscript stage, in which they might be read by appreciative friends with abundant leisure. the same observation applies to "the dream." a mother sits watching the slumber of her beautiful young daughter who, waking, tells her dream of an exquisite life with the one she loves best, unshadowed by grief or pain. the mother warns her that life will not be like this, and draws a somewhat formidable picture of its realities. from this the girl naturally shrinks, wondering where good is to be found, and is answered thus: "he that deals blame, and yet forgets to praise, who sets brief storms against long summer days, hath a sick judgment. and shall we _all_ condemn, and _all_ distrust, because some men are false and some unjust?" some of mrs. norton's best and most impassioned verses are to be found in the dedication of this poem to her friend, the duchess of sutherland. affection, gratitude, indignation, grief, regret--_these_ are the sources of mrs. norton's inspiration; but of any coldly intellectual solution of life's puzzles, such as more modern writers affect, there is little trace. "the lady of la garaye" is a breton tale (a true one) of a beautiful and noble châtelaine, on whom heaven had showered all joy and blessing. adored by her husband, she shared every hour of his life and accompanied him in his favourite sport of hunting. one day she dared to follow him over too wide a leap. her horse fell with and on her. she was terribly injured, and crippled for life. after much lamenting she is comforted by a good priest, and institutes a hospital for incurables, she and her husband devoting themselves to good works for the remainder of their days. the versification is smooth, the descriptions are graceful and picturesque; but neither the subject nor its treatment is enthralling. mrs. norton's finest poetic efforts are to be found in her short pieces. one entitled "ataraxia" has a soothing charm, which owes half its melody to the undertone of sadness which pervades the verse. "come forth! the sun hath flung on thetis' breast the glittering tresses of his golden hair; all things are heavy with a noon-day rest, and floating sea-birds cleave the stirless air. against the sky in outlines clear and rude the cleft rocks stand, while sunbeams slant between and lulling winds are murmuring through the wood which skirts the bright bay, with its fringe of green. "come forth! all motion is so gentle now it seems thy step alone should walk the earth, thy voice alone, the 'ever soft and low,' wake the far haunting echoes into birth. "too wild would be love's passionate store of hope, unmeet the influence of his changeful power, ours be companionship whose gentle scope hath charm enough for such a tranquil hour." from the perusal of her writings, the impression given by her portrait, and the reminiscences of one who knew her, we gather an idea of this charming and gifted woman, whose nature seems to have been rich in all that makes for the happiness of others, and of herself. we feel that she possessed a mind abundantly stored, an imagination stimulated and informed by sojourning in many lands; a heart, originally tender and compassionate, mellowed by maternal love, a judgment trained and restrained by constant intercourse with the best minds of the period, a wit keen as a damascene blade, and a soul to feel, even to enthusiasm, the wrongs and sufferings of others. add to these gifts the power of swift expression, and we can imagine what a fascination mrs. norton must have possessed for those of her contemporaries who had the privilege of knowing her. "she was the most brilliant woman i ever met," said the late charles austen, "and her brilliancy was like summer lightning; it dazzled, but did not hurt." unless, indeed, she was impelled to denounce some wrong or injustice, when her words could strike home. yet to this lovely and lovable woman, life was a long disappointment; and through all she has written a strain of profound rebellion against the irony of fate colours her views, her delineations of character, her estimate of the social world. by her relations and friends she was warmly appreciated. she did not succeed in obtaining the relief of divorce until about . mr. norton survived till , and in , a few months before her death, his widow married sir william stirling-maxwell. * * * * * it is a curious instance of the change of fashion and the transient nature of popular memory that great difficulty is experienced in obtaining copies of mrs. norton's works, especially of her poems. "the undying one," "the dream," and one or two smaller pieces, are found only in the british museum library. the novels are embedded in the deeper strata of mudie's, but are not mentioned in the catalogue of that all-embracing collection. yet forty years ago, mrs. norton acknowledged that she made at one time about £ a year by her pen, this chiefly by her contributions to the annuals of that time. mrs. norton, however, had not to contend with the cruel competition which lowers prices while it increases labour. in her day, the workers were few, and the employers less difficult to please. but these comparisons are not only odious, but fruitless. the crowd, the competition, the desperate struggle for life, exists, increases, and we cannot alter it. we can but train for the contest as best we may, and say with the lovely and sorely tried subject of this sketch, as she writes in her poem to her absent boys: "though my lot be hard and lonely, yet i hope--i hope through all." [signature: annie hector] ("mrs. alexander") "a. l. o. e." (miss tucker) mrs. ewing _by_ mrs. marshall "a. l. o. e." (miss tucker) mrs. ewing forty years ago, the mystic letters "a. l. o. e." ("a lady of england") on the title-page of a book ensured its welcome from the children of those days. there was not then the host of gaily bound volumes pouring from the press to be piled up in tempting array in every bookseller's shop at christmas. the children for whom "a. l. o. e." wrote were contented to read a "gift-book" more than once; and, it must be said, her stories were deservedly popular, and bore the crucial test of being read aloud to an attentive audience several times. many of these stories still live, and the allegorical style in which "a. l. o. e." delighted has a charm for certain youthful minds to this day. there is a pride and pleasure in thinking out the lessons hidden under the names of the stalwart giants in the "giant killer," which is one of "a. l. o. e.'s" earlier and best tales. a fight with giant pride, a hard battle with giant sloth, has an inspiriting effect on boys and girls, who are led to "look at home" and see what giants hold them in bondage. "a. l. o. e.'s" style was almost peculiar to herself. she generally used allegory and symbol, and she was fired with the desire to arrest the attention of her young readers and "do them good." we may fear that she often missed her aim by forcing the moral, and by indulging in long and discursive "preachments," which interrupted the main current of the story, and were impatiently skipped that it might flow on again without vexatious hindrances. in her early girlhood and womanhood "a. l. o. e." had written plays, which, we are told by her biographer, miss agnes giberne, were full of wit and fun. although her literary efforts took a widely different direction when she began to write for children, still there are flashes of humour sparkling here and there on the pages of her most didactic stories, showing that her keen sense of the ludicrous was present though it was kept very much in abeyance. from the first publication of "the claremont tales" her success as a writer for children was assured. the list of her books covering the space of fifteen or twenty years is a very long one, and she had no difficulty in finding publishers ready to bring them out in an attractive form. * * * * * "the rambles of a rat" is before me, as i write, in a new edition, and is a very fair specimen of "a. l. o. e.'s" work. weighty sayings are put into the mouth of the rats, and provoke a smile. the discussion about the ancestry of whiskerando and ratto ends with the trite remark--which, however, was not spoken aloud--that the great weakness of one opponent was pride of birth, and his anxiety to be thought of an ancient family; but the chief matter, in ratto's opinion, was not whether our ancestors do honour to us, but whether by our conduct we do not disgrace them. probably this page of the story was hastily turned here, that the history of the two little waifs and strays who took shelter in the warehouse, where the rats lived, might be followed. later on there is a discussion between a father and his little boy about the advantage of ragged schools, then a somewhat new departure in philanthropy. imagine a boy of nine, in our time, exclaiming, "what a glorious thing it is to have ragged schools and reformatories, to give the poor and the ignorant, and the wicked, a chance of becoming honest and happy." boys of neddy's age, nowadays, would denounce him as a little prig, who ought to be well snubbed for his philanthropical ambition, when he went on to say, "how i should like to build a ragged school myself!" "the voyage of the rats to russia" is full of interest and adventure, and the glimpse of russian life is vivid, and in "a. l. o. e.'s" best manner. indeed, she had a graphic pen, and her descriptions of places and things were always true to life. in "pride and his prisoners," for instance, there are stirring scenes, drawn with that dramatic power which had characterised the plays she wrote in her earlier days. "the pretender, a farce in two acts, by charlotte maria tucker," is published in miss giberne's biography. in this farce there is a curious and constantly recurring play on words, but the allegory and the symbol with which she afterwards clothed her stories are absent. * * * * * "a. l. o. e." did not write merely to _amuse_ children; and the countless fairy tales and books of startling adventure, in their gilded covers and with their profuse illustrations, which are published every year, have thrown her stories into the shade. but they are written with verve and spirit, and in good english, which is high praise, and cannot always be given to the work of her successors in juvenile literature. in her books, as in every work she undertook throughout her life, she had the high and noble aim of doing good. whether she might have widened the sphere of her influence by less of didactic teaching, and by allowing her natural gifts to have more play, it is not for us to inquire. it is remarkable that this long practice in allegory and symbol fitted her for her labours in her latter years, amongst the boys and girls of the far east. her style was well adapted to the oriental mind, and kindled interest and awoke enthusiasm in the hearts of the children in the batala schools. here she did a great work, which she undertook at the age of fifty-four, when she offered her services to the church missionary society as an unpaid missionary. "all for love, and no reward" may surely be said to be "a. l. o. e.'s" watchword, as, with untiring energy, she laboured amongst the children in a distant part of the empire. even there she was busy as an author. by her fertile pen she could reach thousands in that part of india who would never see her face or hear her voice. she wrote for india as she had written for england, ever keeping before her the good of her readers. the hindu boys and girls, as well as the children of this country, have every reason to hold her name in grateful remembrance as one of the authors who have left a mark on the reign of queen victoria. mrs. ewing there lingers over some people whom we know a nameless charm. it is difficult to define it, and yet we feel it in their presence as we feel the subtle fragrance of flowers, borne to us on the wings of the fresh breeze, which has wandered over gorse and heather, beds of wild hyacinth, and cowslip fields, in the early hours of a sunny spring day. a charm like this breathes over the stories which mrs. ewing has left as an inheritance for english children, and for their elders also, for all time. the world must be better for her work; and looking back over the sometimes toilsome paths of authorship, this surely, above all others, is the guerdon all craftswomen of the pen should strive to win. there is nothing morbid or melodramatic in mrs. ewing's beautiful stories. they bubble over with the joys of child-life; they bristle with its humour; they touch its sorrows with a tender, sympathetic hand; they lend a gentle sadness of farewell to death itself, with the sure hope of better things to come. * * * * * it was in and that those who were looking for healthy stories for children found, in "melchior's dream and other tales," precisely what they wanted. soon after, _aunt judy's magazine_, edited by mrs. ewing's mother, mrs. gatty, made a new departure in the periodical literature for children. the numbers were eagerly looked for month by month, and the title of the magazine was given to commemorate the "judy" of the nursery, who had often kept a bevy of little brothers and sisters happy and quiet by pouring forth into their willing ears stories full of the prowess of giants, the freaks of fairies, with occasional but always good-natured shafts aimed at the little faults and frailties of the listening children. _aunt judy's magazine_ had no contributions from mrs. ewing's pen till may and may . then the delightful "remembrances of mrs. overtheway" enchanted her youthful readers. little ida's own story and her lonely childhood had an especial charm for them; and mrs. overtheway's remembrances of the far-off days when she, too, was a child, were told as things that had really happened. and so they had! for, in the disappointment of the imaginative child who had created a fair vision from her grandmother's description of mrs. anastasia moss as a golden-haired beauty in rose-bud brocade, and instead, saw an old lady with sunken black eyes, dressed in _feuilles mortes_ satin, many a child may have found the salient parts of her own experience rehearsed! "alas!" says mrs. overtheway, when little ida, soothed by her gentle voice, has fallen asleep. "alas! my grown-up friends, does the moral belong to children only? have manhood and womanhood no passionate, foolish longings, for which we blind ourselves to obvious truth, and of which the vanity does not lessen the disappointment? do we not all toil after rose-buds to find _feuilles mortes_?" it is in touches like this, in her stories, that mrs. ewing appeals to many older hearts as well as to those of the young dreamers, taking their first steps in the journey of life. in , juliana horatia gatty married alexander ewing, a.p.d., and for some time "mrs. overtheway's remembrances" were not continued. the last of them, "kerguelin's land," is considered by some critics the most beautiful of the series, ending with the delightful surprise of little ida's joy in the return of her lost father. * * * * * mrs. ewing's stories are so rich in both humour and pathos, that it is difficult to choose from them distinctive specimens of her style, and of that charm which pervades them, a charm which we think is peculiarly her own. mrs. ewing gave an unconsciously faithful portrait of herself in "madam liberality." the reader has in this story glimpses of the author's own heroic and self-forgetful childhood. perhaps this tale is not as well known as some which followed it: so a few notes from its pages may not be unwelcome here. madam liberality, when a little girl, was accustomed to pick out all the plums from her own slice of cake and afterwards make a feast with them for her brothers and sisters and the dolls. oyster shells served for plates, and if by any chance the plums did not go round the party, the shell before madam liberality's place was always the empty one. her eldest brother had given her the title of madam liberality; and yet he could, with refreshing frankness, shake his head at her and say, "you are the most _meanest_ and the _generousest_ person i ever knew." madam liberality wept over this accusation, and it was the grain of truth in it that made her cry, for it was too true that she screwed, and saved, and pinched to have the pleasure of "giving away." "tom, on the contrary, gave away without pinching and saving. this sounds much handsomer, and it was poor tom's misfortune that he always believed it to be so, though he gave away what did not belong to him, and fell back for the supply of his own pretty numerous wants upon other people, not forgetting madam liberality." what a clever analysis of character is this! we have all known the "toms," for they are numerous, and some of us have known and but scantily appreciated the far rarer "madam liberalitys." it is difficult to read unmoved of the brave child's journey alone to the doctor to have a tooth taken out which had caused her much suffering. then when about to claim the shilling from her mother, which was the accustomed reward for the unpleasant operation, she remembered the agreement was a shilling for a tooth with fangs, sixpence for a tooth without them. she did so want the larger sum to spend on christmas presents; so, finding a fang left in her jaw, she went back to the doctor, had it extracted, and staggered home once more, very giddy but very happy, with the tooth and the fang safe in a pill box! "moralists say a great deal about pain treading so very closely on the heels of pleasure in this life, but they are not always wise or grateful enough to speak of the pleasure which springs out of pain. and yet there is a bliss which comes just when pain has ceased, whose rapture rivals even the high happiness of unbroken health. "relief is certainly one of the most delicious sensations which poor humanity can enjoy." madam liberality often suffered terrible pain from quinsy. thus we read sympathetically of her heroic efforts one christmastide, when nearly suffocated with this relentless disease, to go on with her preparations to get her little gifts ready for the family. and how we rejoice when a cart rumbles up to the door and brings a load of beautiful presents, sent by a benevolent lady who has known madam liberality's desire to make purchases for her brothers and sisters, and has determined to give her this delightful surprise. * * * * * the story of madam liberality, from childhood to maturity, is, we think, written in mrs. ewing's best manner, though, perhaps, it has never gained the widespread popularity of "jackanapes," and "the story of a short life," or "a flat iron for a farthing." of the last-named story mrs. bundle is almost the central figure. in the childhood of reginald dacre, who writes his own reminiscences, she played a prominent part. loyal and true, she held the old traditions of faithful service; her master's people were her people, and she had but few interests apart from them. the portrait of reginald's mother hung in his father's dressing-room, and was his resort in the early days of his childish sorrows. once when his dog rubens had been kicked by a guest in his father's house, reginald went to that picture of his golden-haired mother and wept out his plaintive entreaties that "mamma would come back to rubens and to him--they were so miser-ra-ble." "then," he says, "in the darkness came a sob that was purely human, and i was clasped in a woman's arms and covered with tender kisses and soothing caresses. for one wild moment, in my excitement and the boundless faith of childhood, i thought my mother had heard me and come back. but it was only nurse bundle!" then, passing over many years, when reginald dacre brought his bride to his old home, this faithful friend, after giving her loving welcome to the new mrs. dacre, went, in the confusion and bewilderment of old age, with its strange mingling of past and present, to the room where the portrait of her lost lady with the golden hair still hung; and there, the story goes on to say, "there, where years before she had held me in her arms with tears, i, weeping also, held her now in mine--quite dead!" this is one of the most pathetic incidents in all mrs. ewing's works, told without the least exaggeration and with the simplicity which is one of the characteristics of her style. "lob lie by the fire" contains some of the author's brightest flashes of humour, and yet it closes with a description of macalister's death, drawn with the tender hand with which that solemn mystery is ever touched by mrs. ewing, beautiful in its pathetic simplicity. nothing in its way can be more profoundly touching than the few words which end this story:-- "after a while macalister repeated the last word, '_home_.' and as he spoke there spread over his face a smile so tender and so full of happiness that john broom held his breath as he watched him. as the light of sunrise creeps over the face of some rugged rock, it crept from chin to brow, and the pale blue eyes shone, tranquil, like water that reflects heaven. and when it had passed, it left them still open--but gems that had lost their ray." * * * * * "jackanapes" is so well known, almost the best known of the author's charming stories, that we will not dwell on the pathos of that last scene, when jackanapes, like one in the old allegory, heard the trumpets calling for him on the other side--the gallant boy who had laid down his life for his friend. but the character of the gray goose, who slept securely with one leg tucked up under her on the green, is so delightfully suggestive that we must give some of her wisdom as a specimen of the author's humorous but never unkindly hits at the weaknesses to which we are all prone. "the gray goose and the big miss jessamine were the only elderly persons who kept their ages secret. indeed, miss jessamine never mentioned any one's age, or recalled the exact year in which anything had happened. the gray goose also avoided dates. she never got farther than 'last michaelmas,' 'the michaelmas before that,' and 'the michaelmas before the michaelmas before that.' after this her head, which was small, became confused, and she said 'ga-ga!' and changed the subject." then again: "the gray goose always ran away at the first approach of the caravans, and never came back to the green till nothing was left of the fair but footmarks and oyster-shells. running away was her pet principle; the only system, she maintained, by which you can live long and easily, and lose nothing. "why in the world should any one spoil the pleasures of life, or risk his skin, if he can help it? 'what's the use? said the goose.' before answering which one might have to consider what world, which life, and whether his skin were a goose skin. but the gray goose's head would never have held all that." * * * * * major ewing was stationed at aldershot in , and during the eight years mrs. ewing lived there her pen was never idle. _aunt judy's magazine_ for was well supplied with tales, of which "amelia" is perhaps one of the best. to her life at aldershot we owe the story which had for its motto "loetus sorte mea," and which is full of the most graphic descriptions of the huts and the soldiers' life in camp. as in the story of madam liberality we have glimpses of the author's childhood with all its little cares and joys, so in the "story of a short life" we have the actual experience of a soldier's life in camp. o'reilly, the useful man of all trades, with his warm irish heart, and his devotion to the colonel's wife, his erratic and haphazard way of performing his duties, his admiration for the little gentleman in his velvet coat and lace collar, who stood erect by his side when the funeral passed to the music of the dead march, imitating his soldierlike bearing and salute, is a vivid picture touched by the skilled hand of a word painter. so also is the figure of the v.c., who in his first talk with the crippled child, stands before us as the ideal of a brave soldier, who sets but little store on his achievements, modest as the truly great always are, and encouraging the boy to fight a brave battle against irritable temper and impatience at the heavy cross of suffering laid upon him. "'you are a v.c.,' leonard is saying, 'and you ought to know. i suppose nothing--not even if i could be good always from this minute right away till i die--nothing could ever count up to the courage of a v.c.?' "'god knows it could, a thousand times over,' was the v.c.'s reply. "'where are you going? please don't go. look at me. they're not going to chop the queen's head off, are they?' "'heaven forbid! what are you thinking about?' "'why because--look at me again--ah! you've winked it away; but your eyes were full of tears, and the only other brave man i ever heard of crying was uncle rupert, and that was because he knew they were going to chop the poor king's head off.' that was enough to make anybody cry." they were in the room where the picture of the young cavalier ancestor of leonard hung. he always called him "uncle rupert," and he would meditate on the young face with the eyes dim with tears--eyes which always seemed to follow him, and, as he fancied, watched him sorrowfully, now no longer able to jump about and play with the sweep, but lying helpless on his couch, or limping about on his crutches, often with pain and difficulty. this conversation between the v.c. and leonard was the beginning of a strong friendship which was put to the test one sunday when leonard lay dying in the hut of his uncle, the barrack-master. the v.c. hated anything like display or bringing himself into notice. thus it cost him something to take up his position outside the iron church in the camp, that leonard might hear the last verses of the tug-of-war hymn. the v.c.'s attachment to his little friend triumphed over his dislike to stand alone singing, "the son of god goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain." the melodious voice of the gallant young soldier rang through the air and reached the dying ears of little leonard. the soldiers loved this hymn, and the organist could never keep them back. the soldiers, the story says, had begun to tug. in a moment more the organ stopped, and the v.c. found himself with over three hundred men at his back, singing without accompaniment and in unison: "a noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid, around the saviour's throne rejoice in robes of white arrayed." even now, as the men paused to take breath after their "tug," the organ spoke again softly but seraphically. clearer and sweeter above the voices behind him rose the voice of the v.c. singing to his little friend: "they climbed the steep ascent to heaven through peril, toil and pain." the men sang on, but the v.c. stopped as if he had been shot. for a man's hand had come to the barrack master's window _and pulled down the blind_! here, again, we have an instance of this author's power to touch her readers, even to tears, by the true pathos which needs but few words to bring it home to many hearts. taken as a whole, "the story of a short life" has, it may be, some faults of construction, which arose from its being written in detached portions. the history of st. martin, though it is not without its bearing on the story of the beautiful and once active child's bruised and broken life, and his desire to be a soldier, rather spoils the continuity of the narrative. "the story of a short life" was not published in book form until four days before the author's death; but it was not her last work, though from its appearance at that moment the title was spoken of by some reviewers as singularly appropriate. mrs. ewing's love for animals may be seen in all her stories--leonard's beloved "sweep," lollo the red-haired pony on which jackanapes took his first ride, and the dog in the blind man's story dying of grief on his grave, are all signs of the author's affection for those who have been well called "our silent friends." her own pets were indeed her friends--from a pink-nosed bulldog called hector, to a refugee pup saved from the common hang-man, and a collie buried with honours, his master making a sketch of him as he lay on his bier. mrs. ewing was passionately fond of flowers, and "mary's meadow" was written in the last years of her life as a serial for _aunt judy's magazine_. her very last literary work was a series of letters from a little garden, and the love of and care for flowers is the theme. * * * * * much of mrs. ewing's work cannot be noticed in a paper which is necessarily short. but enough has been said to show what was her peculiar gift as a writer for children. it is sometimes said that to write books for children cannot be considered a high branch of literature. we venture to think this is a mistake. there is nothing more difficult than to arrest the attention of children. they do not as a rule care to be _written down_ to--they can appreciate what is good and are pleased when their elders can enter into and admire the story which has interested and delighted them. to write as mrs. ewing wrote is undoubtedly a great gift which not many possess, but a careful study of her works by young and old authors and readers alike cannot be without benefit. she was a perfect mistress of the english language; she was never dull and never frivolous. there is not a slip-shod sentence, or an exaggerated piling up of adjectives to be found in her pages. she knew what she had to say, and she said it in language at once pure, forcible, and graceful. we must be grateful to her for leaving for us, and for our children's children, so much that is a model of all that tends to make the literature of the young--yes, and of the old also--attractive, healthy, and delightful. [signature: emma marshall] printed by ballantyne, hanson & co. london & edinburgh * * * * * transcriber notes: punctuation has been normalized without note. the following have been corrected: page : "beween" changed to "between" (discriminate between them) page : "esipodes" changed to "episodes" (of the episodes in her own life) page : "of of" changed to "of" (part of a woman's virtue) page : "shakespeare" changed to "shakspere" for consistency (did not shakspere make hector) page : "sorel" chanaged to "sorrel" (and who hetty sorrel) page : "mon s" changed to "monks" (to make the old monks) page : "melchoir's" changed to "melchior's" ("melchior's dream and other tales") transcribed from the william blackwood and sons edition by david price, email ccx @coventry.ac.uk the ethics of george eliot's works by the late john crombie brown fourth edition william blackwood and sons edinburgh and london mdccclxxxiv _all rights reserved_ preface. the greater part of the following essay was written several years ago. it was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then entertained of publishing it in a separate form. one day, however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on george eliot's works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. one of the friends then present--a competent critic and high literary authority--expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication was determined on. the author then proposed to complete his work by taking up 'middlemarch' and 'deronda'; and if any trace of failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only five days before his death. preface to third edition. it is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that his little volume has already been so well received that the second edition has been out of print for some time. in now publishing a third, they have been influenced by two considerations,--the continued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by "george eliot" herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public. in a letter to her friend and publisher, the late mr john blackwood, received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with reference to certain passages: "they seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything i have read in the way of printed comments on my own writings." again, in a letter to a friend of the author, she says: "when i read the volume in the summer, i felt as if i had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in never having made his personal acquaintance. and it would have been a great benefit,--a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with so much insight and delicate sensibility. it is difficult for me to speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work, but i will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on page , as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction." once more. in an article in the 'contemporary review' of last month, on "the moral influence of george eliot," by "one who knew her," the writer says: "it happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by messrs blackwood." with such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not be thought uncalled for. _march_ . the ethics of george eliot's works. "there is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness." such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. the truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated. representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest reality in man--that which most directly represents him in whose image he is made--it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the earliest times. the older theosophies and philosophies--gymnosophist and cynic, chaldaic and pythagorean, epicurean and stoic, platonist and eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out in life. they saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the truth are all one-sided and inadequate. but they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded. the whole scheme of judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful theism, where the divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the omnipotent and the avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the aim and aspiration of his life. in one sense the jew of moses had no individual as apart from a national existence. the secret sin of achan, the vaunting pride of david, call forth less individual than national calamity. at last in the fulness of time there came forth one--whence and how we do not stop to inquire--who gathered up into himself all these tangled, broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive practical exemplification, by life and by death. endless controversies have stormed and are still storming around that name which he so significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "son of man." but from amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of his human greatness--"he pleased not himself." by every act he did, every word he spoke, and every pain he bore, he put away from him happiness as the aim and end of man. he reduced it to its true position of a possible accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard. thenceforth the cross, as the typical representation of this truth, became a recognised power on the earth. thenceforth every great teacher of humanity within the pale of nominal christendom, whatever his apparent tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true, explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the practical embodiment of it. "endure hardness," said one of its greatest apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of christ." and to the endurance of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its head and trample on his cross. in no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the triumph of the cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will be near at hand. yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt christendom has yet seen--have god and his christ been without their witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine, yet by life and death. even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it, arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose, and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and therefore anti-christian, it fell. amid all its actual corruption the church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments, to this fundamental truth of the cross; and ever and anon from its deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending under this noblest burden of our doom--some savonarola or st francis charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of hell. perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental principle of christian ethics--this doctrine of the cross--sharply and strongly proclaimed to it. our vast advances in physical science tend, in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher requirements of life. even the progress of commerce and navigation, at once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for these. systems of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is simply coincident with physical well-being. political economy aims as undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as political economy claims to deal with man in his physical life only, it were unreasonable to expect from it regard to aught above this. our current and popular literature--fiction, poetry, essays on social relations--is emphatically a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. and last, and in some respects most serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit of the age. representative of a debased and emasculated christianity, it attacks our humanity at its very core. it rings out to us, with wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own souls: degrades the religion of the cross into a slightly-refined and long-sighted selfishness: and makes our following him who "pleased not himself" to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the pains of hell--to win what it calls the joys of heaven. this is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too. these advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this political economy, which from its very nature must first "labour for the meat that perisheth,"--these are all god's servants and man's ministers still--the ministers of man's higher and nobler life. consciously or unconsciously, they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care, ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher aspiration is wellnigh impossible. sanitary reform in itself may mean nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more abundant water: to the "governor among the nations" it means lessened impossibility that men should live to him. if in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the cross. sometimes directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time. our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and only here: maurice and arnold, trench and vaughan, robertson and stanley, james martineau and seeley, thirlwall and wilberforce, kingsley and brooke, caird and tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this. the thought underlying all their thoughts of man is that "higher than love of happiness" in humanity which expresses the true link between man and god. the practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, "love not pleasure--love god. love him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm. though he hide himself in the thick darkness, yet" give thanks at remembrance of his holiness. "though he slay thee, yet trust still in him." the hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future. it is the hope of a true life _now_, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns. even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation before god: though the inversion of the very idea of him fundamentally involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to an arbitrary despotism for our being "made partakers of his holiness." one of the sternest and most consistent of calvinistic theologians, jonathan edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be damned for the glory of god, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone is in very truth his "eternal life." among what may be called essayists, two by general consent stand out as most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age--carlyle and ruskin. to the former, brief reference has already been made. in the work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his regard. never since has carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many- headed hydra of wrong. of ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. they have read him to little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him of that divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty, life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously used to subserve that higher life. his ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity. art is to him god's minister, not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth, beauty, and purity. the ios and ariadnes of the debased italian schools, the boors of teniers, the madonnas of guido, are truer to one phase of nature than are fra angelico's angels, or tintoret's crucifixion. but that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement. in poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by wordsworth in his noble "ode to duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than wordsworth did, that it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears "the godhead's most benignant grace;" for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged, and toilsome. take almost any one of tennyson's more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "ulysses" is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear. "the lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek--ease and release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless straining on toward right. "in memoriam" is the record of love "making perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the valley of the shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light "behind the veil." "the vision of sin" portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad bewilderment, "is there any hope?"--can but dimly see, far off over the darkness, "god make himself an awful rose of dawn." in one of the most profound of all his creations--"the palace of art"--we have presented to us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. but the palace of art, _made the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell. the "idylls of the king" are but exquisite variations on the one note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. in "vivien"--the most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more. many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest poetry--from the works of the brownings, the "saints' tragedy" of charles kingsley, the dramatic poems of henry taylor--of the extent to which it is vitally, even where not formally christian; the extent to which the truth of the cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its depth and power. but we must hasten on to our more immediate object in these remarks. those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of christianity,--that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him. even those who read novels more thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good or evil on the age, may be startled to find george eliot put forward as the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us the christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life. yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer's mind; that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series. other qualities george eliot has, that would of themselves entitle her to a very high place among the teachers of the time. in largeness of christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power of finding "a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil," she has not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day. throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the fierce self-opinionative arrogance of carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic intolerance of ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a frederick, so- called the great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age. but as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true preacher of the doctrine of the cross, even when least formally so, we leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on, the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics. the 'scenes of clerical life,' delicately outlined as they are, still profess to be but sketches. in them, however, what we have assumed to be the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within the series itself gathers in clearness and power. self-sacrifice as the divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self- pleasing, but wherever god has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves, and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure,--such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these "scenes." the lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self- devotion of the "milly" of amos barton, so touchingly free and full that it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all. in "mr gilfil's love- story" we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of mr gilfil's love to tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of captain wybrow--a type of character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations and modifications in nearly all the author's subsequent works. it is, however, in "janet's repentance" that the power of the author is put most strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. here also we have illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the christian life. she goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at dissonance, one of her most touching illustrations of a life struggling on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death. that narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving of his own individual soul, has furnished to her mr tryan, whose life is based on the principle laid down by the one great evangelist, "he that loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal." { } mr tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. narrow and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self- conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to invest such a figure with one heroic element. yet it is before this man we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer, greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with janet dempster beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the world, the flesh, and the devil." the explanation of the paradox is not far to seek. the principle which animated the life now withdrawn from sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness for god and his christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the presence of "him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. so at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before him to whom all things are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self in us which is the highest created reflex of his image--the growing up of it into his likeness for ever. we may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of the author's works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it. in each of these sketches one principal figure is blotted out just when our regards are fixed most strongly on it. milly, tina, and mr tryan all die, at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for themselves or others. there is in this--if not in specific intention, certainly in practical teaching--something deeper and more earnest than any mere artistic trick of pathos--far more real than the weary commonplace of suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the completion and elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler, too, than the only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of god's ways in what we call untimely death. the true import of it we take to be the separation of all the world calls success or reward from the life that is thus seeking its highest fulfilment. in conformity with the average doctrine of "compensation," amos barton should have appeared before us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by his flock, and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours around. with a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us in that brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and the sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety and sorrow. love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within, bring no success or achievement that the eye can note. by all the principles of "poetic justice," mr tryan ought to have recovered and married janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition, and become the respected influential incumbent of the town; and in due time to have toned down from his "enthusiasm of humanity" into the simply earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector. better, because truer, as it is. only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days of the isaacs and jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the abrahams, the moses', or the joshuas even then; only when the soul first begins to apprehend that its true relation to god is to be realised only through the cross--is there conscience and habitual "respect unto the recompense" of _any_ reward. in 'adam bede,' the first of george eliot's more elaborate works, the illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. on the one hand, dinah morris--one of the most exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction--and seth and adam bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good. on the other hand, arthur donnithorne and hetty sorrel--poor little vain and shallow-hearted hetty--bring before us the meanness, the debasement, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and remediless death inevitably associated with and accruing from that "self- pleasing" which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and sin. of these, arthur donnithorne and adam bede seem to us the two who are most sharply and subtilely contrasted; and to these we shall confine our remarks. in arthur donnithorne, the slight sketch placed before us in captain wybrow is elaborated into minute completeness, and at the same time freed from all that made wybrow even superficially repellent. handsome, accomplished, and gentlemanly; loving and lovable; finding his keenest enjoyment in the enjoyment of others; irreproachable in life, and free from everything bearing the semblance of vice,--what more could the most exacting fictionist desire to make up his ideal hero? yet, without ceasing to be all thus portrayed, he scatters desolation and crime in his path. he does this, not through any revulsion of being in himself, but in virtue of that very principle of action from which his lovableness proceeds. of duty simply as duty, of right solely as right, his knowledge is yet to come. essentially, his ideal of life as yet is "self- pleasing." this impels him, constituted as he is, to strive that he shall stand well with all. this almost necessitates that he shall be kindly, genial, loving; enjoying the joy and well-being of all around him, and therefore lovable. but this also assures that his struggle against temptation shall be weak and vacillating; and that when, through his paltering with it, it culminates, he shall at once fall before it. the wood scene with adam bede still further illustrates the same characteristics. this man, so genial and kindly, rages fiercely in his heart against him whom he has unwittingly wronged. frank and open, apparently the very soul of honour, he shuffles and lies like a coward and a knave; and this in no personal fear, but because he shrinks to lose utterly that goodwill and esteem of others,--of adam in particular, because adam constrains his own high esteem,--which are to him the reflection of his own self-worship. repentance comes to him at last, because conscience has never in him been entirely overlaid and crushed. it comes when the whirlwind of anguish has swept over him, scattered all the flimsy mists of self-excuse in which self-love had sought to veil his wrong-doing, and bowed him to the dust; but who shall estimate the remediless and everlasting loss already sustained? we have spoken of captain wybrow as the prototype of arthur. he is so in respect of both being swayed by that vital sin of self-pleasing to which all wrong-doing ultimately refers itself; but that in arthur the corruption of life at its source is not complete, is shown throughout the whole story. the very form of action which self-love assumes in him, tells that self though dominant is not yet supreme. it refers itself to others. it absolutely requires human sympathy. so long as the man lives to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,--so long as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own _interests_,--we may be quite sure he is not wholly lost. the difference between the two men is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the result of their wrong-doing. with each there is sorrow, but in wybrow, and still more vividly as we shall see in tito melema, it is the sorrow of self-worship only. no thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an obstacle and embarrassment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong, can touch him. this sorrow is merely remorse, "the sorrow of the world which worketh death." arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its ascendancy. there is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say about him. all thought is for the wretched hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her. the wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong. this is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible and begins. adam bede contrasts at nearly every point with arthur donnithorne. lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. hard almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong; savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any true fulfilment of that christian life whose great law is love. yet, examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with the larger fulness of that life. they are born of the same spirit which said of old, "woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!" fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the christian code. the hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. it subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the realities of existence. even seth can be more tolerant than adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament; while in adam whatever has been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest. in the 'mill on the floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is concentrated to a very great degree on maggie tulliver; and in her is also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and evil, the spirit of the cross and that of the world; for stephen guest is little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her own humanity assails her. her life is the field upon which we see the great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. then at one rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death. from her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance or control whatever. the passionate craving for human sympathy and love, which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger of hardness and self-inclusion. the strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. this danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought. when at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism, cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and privations. she strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make it as hard as may be to bear. she would deny to herself the very beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. from all this she is brought back by philip. but he, touching as he is in the humility and tender unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her being. he may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy; but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and god, is being fought out within her. with her introduction to stephen guest, that conflict assumes specific and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out _alone_. all external circumstances are against her; even lucy's sweet unjealous temper, and tom's bitter hatred, combining with philip's painful self- consciousness to keep the safeguard of his presence less constantly at her side. at last the crowning temptation comes. without design, by a surprise on the part of both, the step has been taken which may well seem irretraceable. going back from it is not merely going back from joy and hope, but going back to deeper loneliness than she has ever known; and going back also to misunderstanding, shame, and lifelong repentance. but conscience, the imperative requirements of the higher life within, have resumed their power. there is no paltering with that inward voice; no possibility but the acceptance of the present urgent right,--the instant fleeing from the wrong, though with it is bound up all of enjoyment life can know. it is thus she has to take up her cross, not the less hard to bear that her own hands have so far fashioned it. one grave criticism on the death-scene has been made, that at first sight seems unanswerable. it is said that no such full, swift recognition between the brother and sister, in those last moments of their long-severed lives, is possible; because there is no true point of contact through which such recognition, on the brother's part, could ensue. we think, however, there is something revealed to us in the brother which brings him nearer to what is noblest and deepest in the sister than at first appears. he also has his ideal of duty and right: it may not be a very broad or high one, but it is there; it is something without and above mere self; and it is resolutely adhered to at whatsoever cost of personal ease or pleasure. that such aim cannot be so followed on without, to some extent, ennobling the whole nature, is shown in his love for lucy. it has come on him, and grown up with him, unconsciously, when there was no wrong connected with it; but with her engagement to stephen all this is changed. hard and stern as he is to others, he is thenceforth the harder and sterner still to self. there is no paltering with temptation, such as brings the sister so near to hopeless fall. here the cold harsh brother rises to true nobility, and shows that upon him too life has established its higher claim than that of mere self-seeking enjoyment. there is, then, this point of contact between these two, that each has an ideal of duty and light, and to it each is content to sacrifice all things else. through this, in that death-look, they recognise each other; and the author's motto in its full significance is justified, "in their death they were not divided." 'silas marner,' though carefully finished, is of slighter character than any of the author's later works, and does not require lengthened notice. in godfrey cass we have again, though largely modified, the type of character in which self is the main object of regard, and in which, therefore, with much that is likeable, and even, for the circumstances in which it has grown up, estimable, there is little depth, truth, or steadfastness. repentance, and, so far as it is possible, restoration, come to him mainly through the silent ministration of a purer and better nature than his own: but the self-pleasing of the past has brought about that which no repentance can fully reverse or restore. even on the surface this is shown; for eppie, unowned and neglected, can never become his daughter. but--far beyond and beneath this--we have here, and elsewhere throughout the author's works, indicated to us one of the most solemn, and, at the same time, most certain truths of our existence: that there are forms of accepted and fostered evil so vital that no repentance can fully blot them out from the present or the future of life. no turning away from the accursed thing, no discipline, no futurity near or far, can ever place arthur donnithorne or godfrey cass alongside dinah morris or adam bede. their irreversible part of self-worship precludes them, by the very laws of our being, from the highest and broadest achievement of life and destiny. leaving for the present 'romola,' as in many respects more directly linking itself with george eliot's great poetic effort, 'the spanish gypsy,' we turn for a little to 'felix holt,' the next of her english tales. it would be perhaps natural to select, from among the characters here presented to us, in illustration of life consciously attuning itself to the highest aim irrespective of any end save that aim itself, one or other of the two in whom this is most palpably presented to us--felix himself or esther lyon. we prefer, however, selecting harold transome, certainly one of the most difficult and one of the most strikingly wrought out conceptions, not only in the works of george eliot, but in modern fiction. harold, we believe, is not a general favourite with the modern public, any more than he was with his own contemporaries. he has none of those lovablenesses which make arthur donnithorne so attractive; and at first sight nothing of that uncompromising sense of right which characterises adam bede. he comes before us apparently no more than a clearheaded, hard, shrewd, successful man of the world, greatly alive to his own interests and importance, and with no particular principles to boast of. how does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the truer and better of the two? when felix attempts to interfere in the conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong. he buys christian's secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables, if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has been the great object of his desires and efforts. by simply allowing the trial and sentence of felix to take their course, he would, to all appearance, strengthen the possibility that by marriage to esther his position shall be maintained, with the further joy of having that "white new-winged dove" thenceforth by his side. he comes forward as witness on behalf of felix, and gives his evidence fairly, truly, and in such guise as makes it tell most favourably for the accused, and at the same time against himself; and, last and most touching of all, it is after he knows the full depth of the humiliation in which his mother's sin has for life involved him, that his first exhibition of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence towards that poor stricken heart and blighted life comes forth. how comes it that this "well-tanned man of the world" thus always chooses the higher and more difficult right; and does this in no excitement or enthusiasm, but coolly, calculatingly, with clear forecasting of all the consequences, and fairly entitled to assume that these shall be to his own peril or detriment? we cannot assign this seeming anomaly to that undefinable something called the instinct of the gentleman, { } so specially recognised in the elder and younger debarry, as a reality and power in life. to say nothing of the fact that this instinct deals primarily with questions of feeling, and only indirectly and incidentally with questions of moral right, harold transome, alike congenitally and circumstantially, could scarcely by possibility have been animated by it even in slight degree, nor does it ever betray its presence in him through those slight but graceful courtesies of life which are pre-eminently the sphere of its manifestation. equally untenable is the hypothesis which ascribes these manifestations of character wholly to the influence of a nature higher than his own appealing to him--that of felix holt, the glorious old dissenter, or esther lyon. such appeals can have any avail only when in the nature appealed to there remains the capability to recognise that right is greater than success or joy, and the moral power of will to act on that recognition. in the fact that harold's nature does respond to these appeals we have the clue to the apparent anomaly his character presents. we see that, howsoever overlaid by temperament and restrained by circumstance, the noblest capability in man still survives and is active in him. he _can_ choose the right which imperils his own interests, because it _is_ the right; he _can_ set his back on the wrong which would advantage himself, because it _is_ the wrong. that he does this coolly, temperately, without enthusiasm, with full, clear forecasting of all the consequences, is only saying that he is harold transome still. that he does so choose when the forecast probabilities are all against those objects which the mere man of the world most desires, proves that under that hard external crust dwells as essential a nobleness as any we recognise in felix holt. there is an inherent strength and manliness in harold transome to which arthur donnithorne or godfrey cass can never attain. few things in the literary history of the age are more puzzling than the reception given to 'romola' by a novel-devouring public. that the lovers of mere sensationalism should not have appreciated it, was to be fully expected. but to probably the majority of readers, even of average intelligence and capability, it was, and still is, nothing but a weariness. with the more thoughtful, on the other hand, it took at once its rightful place, not merely as by far the finest and highest of all the author's works, but as perhaps the greatest and most perfect work of fiction of its class ever till then produced. of its artistic merits we do not propose to speak in detail. but as a historical reproduction of an epoch and a life peculiarly difficult of reproduction, we do not for a moment hesitate to say that it has no rival, except, perhaps,--and even that at a distance,--victor hugo's incomparably greatest work, 'notre dame de paris.' it is not that we _see_ as in a panorama the florence of the medicis and savonarola,--we live, we move, we feel as if actors in it. its turbulence, its struggles for freedom and independence, its factions with their complicated transitions and changes, its conspiracies and treasons, its classical jealousies and triumphs,--we feel ourselves mixed up with them all. names historically immortal are made to us familiar presences and voices. its nobles and its craftsmen alike become to us as friends or foes. its very buildings--the duomo and the campanile, and many another--rise in their stateliness and their grace before those who have never been privileged to see them, clear and vivid as the rude northern houses that daily obtrude on our gaze. so distinct and all-pervading, in this great work, is what we are maintaining to be the central moral purpose of all the author's works, that it can scarcely escape the notice of the most superficial reader. affirmatively and negatively, in romola and tito--the two forms of illustration to some extent combined in savonarola--the constant, persistent, unfaltering utterance of the book is, that the only true worth and greatness of humanity lies in its pursuit of the highest truth, purity, and right, irrespective of every issue, and in exclusion of every meaner aim; and that the true debasement and hopeless loss of humanity lies in the path of self-pleasing. the form of this work, the time and country in which the scene is laid, and the selection of one of the three great actors in it, leads the author more definitely than in almost any of those which preceded it to connect her moral lesson, not merely with christianity as a religious faith, but with that church which, as called by the name of christ, howsoever fallen away from its "first love," is still, in the very fact of its existence, a witness for him. while, on the other hand, through many of its subordinate characters, we have the broad catholic truth kept ever before us, that, irrespective of all formal profession or creed, voluntary acceptance of a higher life-law than the seeking our own interests, pleasure, or will, is, according to its degree, life's best and highest fulfilment; and thus we trace him who "pleased not himself" as the life and the light of the world, even when that world may be least formally acknowledging him. the three in whom this great lesson is most prominently illustrated in the work before us are, of course, romola herself, tito melema, and savonarola. and in each the illustration is so modified, and, through the three together, so almost exhaustively accomplished, that some examination of each seems necessary to our main object in this survey of george eliot's works. few, we think, can study the delineation of romola without feeling that imagination has seldom placed before us a fairer, nobler, and completer female presence. perfectly human and natural; unexaggerated, we might almost say unidealised, alike in her weaknesses and her nobleness; combining such deep womanly tenderness with such spotless purity; so transparent in her truthfulness; so clear in her perceptions of the true and good, so firm in her aspirations after these; so broad, gentle, and forbearing in her charity, yet so resolute against all that is mean and base;--everything fair, bright, and high in womanhood seems to combine in romola. so true, also, is the process of her development to what is called nature--to the laws and principles that regulate human action and life--that, as it proceeds before us, we almost lose note that there is development. the fair young heathen first presented to us, linked on to classic times and moralities through all the surroundings of her life, passes on so imperceptibly into the "visible madonna" of the after-time, that we scarcely observe the change till it is accomplished. from the first, we know that the mature is involved in the young romola. the reason of this is, that from first to last the essential principle of life is in her the same. equally, when she first comes before us, and in all the after-glory of her serene unconscious self-devotedness, she is living to others, not to herself. her first devotion is to her father. her one passion of life is to compensate to him all he has lost: the eyes, once so full of fire, now sightless; the son and brother, who, at the call of an enthusiasm with which their nobler natures refuse to sympathise--for it was, in the first instance, but the supposed need to save his own soul--has fled from his nearest duty of life. to this devotion she consecrates her fair young existence. for this she dismisses from it all thought of ease or pleasure, and chooses retirement and isolation; gives herself to uncongenial studies and endless labours, and accepts, in uncomplaining sadness, that which to such a nature is hardest of all to bear--her father's non-appreciation of all she would be and is to him. from the first, her life is one of entire self-consecration. the sphere of its activities expands as years flow on, but the principle is throughout the same. in the exquisite simplicity, purity, and tenderness of her young love, she is romola still. there is no self-isolation included in it. side by side with satisfying her own yearning heart, lies the thought that she is thus giving to her father a son to replace him who has forsaken him. her first perception of the want of perfect oneness between tito and herself dawns upon her through no change in him towards herself, but through his less sedulous attendance on her father. and when at last the conviction is borne in upon her that between him and her, seemingly so closely united, there lies the gulf that parts truth and falsehood, heaven and hell, it is no perceptible withdrawal of his love from her that forces on her this conviction. it is his falseness and treason to the dead. then comes the crisis of her career; her flight from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths,--the precedence of duty above all else. savonarola's demand might well seem to one such as romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne. it was not that it called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love and life, could not but seem degradation and sin,--according in the living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one. to any lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain. it prevails with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture. she goes back to reassume her cross: sadly, weariedly forecasting, as only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only dimly assured that her true path lies here. the very nobleness which constrains her return makes that return the harder. the unknown into which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her, compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in daily contact with baseness,--may even have, through virtue of her relation to tito, tacitly to concur in treason. she goes back to what, constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she goes back to it knowing that such it must be. thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings, makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,--the "making perfect through suffering." it is not necessary we should trace the process step by step. it is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle to be so traced. we see rather by result than in operation how her path of voluntary self-consecration--of care and thought for all save self--of patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is brightening more and more toward the perfect day. in the streets of the faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the outraged baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress tessa; most of all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,--she moves and stands more and more before us the "visible madonna." how sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her decisive interview with tessa. she, the high-born lady, spotless in purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot. otherwise there is no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust, impeaching god of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in his ear, any more than in the ear of man. meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark- garmented piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of mercy and love. ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is emphatically herself. in those frequent touching appeals to tito, deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the intensity of her ever-present inward pain. in them all the self-seeking of love has no place. the effort is always primarily directed, not toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul. her pure high instinct knows that only so can love return between them--can the shattered bond be again taken up. she seeks to save _him_--him who will not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of possible salvation. one of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her relations to tessa. it would seem as if in that large heart jealousy, the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. her discovery of the relation in which tessa stands to tito awakens first that saddest of all sad hopes in one like romola, that through the contadina she may be released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life. when that hope is gone, no thought of tessa as a successful rival presents itself. she thinks of her only as another victim of tito's wrong-doing--as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need. at last, after the foulest of tito's treasons, which purchases safety and advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by fleeing. there is no savonarola now to meet and turn her back. savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so. the pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler, purer, deeper, more entire than his. the last words exchanged between these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual relations between them. "the cause of my party," says savonarola, "_is_ the cause of god's kingdom." "i do not believe it," is the reply of romola's "passionate repugnance." "god's kingdom is something wider, else let me stand without it with the beings that i love." these words tell us the secret of savonarola's gathering weakness and of romola's strength. self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right with his own party--with his own personal judgment of the cause and the course of right--has so far led _him_ astray from the straight onward path. right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself. it is another agency than savonarola's now that brings her back once more to take up the full burden of her cross. she goes forth not knowing or heeding whither she goes, "drifting away" unconscious before wind and wave. these bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness. she knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond uniting her to tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth from that sphere of doing and suffering which is _hers_. she returns, not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope--in love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness to stand by him whose baseness drove her away when suffering and loss have come upon him. but death--the mystery to which we look as the solver of all earthly mysteries--has resolved for her this darkest and saddest perplexity of her life. tito is gone to his place: and his baseness shall vex her no more with antagonistic duties and a divided life. there is no joy, no expressed sense of relief and release; no reproach of him other than that implied one which springs out of the necessities of her being, the putting away from her, quietly and unobtrusively, the material gains of his treasons. the poor innocent wrong-doer, tessa, is sought for, rescued, and cared for; and is never allowed to know the foul wrong to her rescuer of which she has been made the unconscious instrument. even to her the language is that "naldo will return no more, not because he is cruel, but because he is dead." one direct trial of her faith and patience remains, through the weakness and apparent apostasy of savonarola. has he, through whom first came to her definite guidance amid the dark perplexities of her life, been always untrue? has the light that seemed through him to dawn on her been therefore misleading and perverting? in almost agonised intentness she listens for some word, watches for some sign, which shall tell her it has not been so. she outrages all her womanly sensibilities by being present at the death-scene, in hope that something there, were it but the uplifting of the drooping head to the clear true light of heaven, shall reassure her that the prophet was a true prophet, and his voice to her the voice of god. but she watches in vain. without word or sign that even her quick sure instinct can interpret, savonarola passes into "the eternal silence." what measure of overshadowing darkness and sorrow then again fell over her life we are not told: we only know how that life passed from under this cloud also into purer and serener light. this perplexity also solves itself for her in the path of unquestioning acceptance of duty, human service, and human love; and as she treads this path, the mists clear away from around savonarola too, and she sees him again at last as he really was, in the essential truthfulness, nobleness, and self-devotedness of his life. of the after-life little is told us, but little needed to be told. we have followed romola thus far with dulled intelligence of mind and soul if we cannot picture it clearly and certainly for ourselves. love that never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails, truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of heaven. few, we think, can carefully study the character and development of romola del bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that imagination has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory of feminine loveliness. the sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased, no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless greek, tito melema. yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity. that which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple, unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. he knows little of himself who does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by tito as his life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth death;" death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the most hopeless that can engulf the human soul. the conception of tito as one great central figure in a work of art would scarcely, we think, have occurred to any one whose moral aim was other than that which it is the endeavour of these remarks to trace out in george eliot's works. the working out of that conception, as it is here worked out, would, we believe, have been impossible to any one who had less strongly realised wherein all the true nobleness and all the true debasement of humanity lie. outwardly, on his first appearance, there is not merely nothing repellent about tito; in person and manner, in genial kindly temper, in those very forms of intelligence and accomplishment that specially suit the city and the time, there is superficially everything to conciliate and attract. it is almost impossible to define the subtle threads of indication through which, from the first, we are forced to distrust him. superficially, it might seem at this time as if with tito the probabilities were equal as regards good and evil; and that with romola's love thrown into the scale, their preponderance on the side of good were all but irresistible. yet from the first we feel that it is otherwise--that this light, genial, ease-loving nature has already, by its innate habitude of self-pleasing, foreordained itself to sink down into ever deeper and more utter debasement. with the "slight, almost imperceptible start," at the accidental words which connect the value of his jewels with "a man's ransom," we feel that some baseness is already within himself contemplated. with the transference of their price to the goldsmith's hands, we know that the baseness is in his heart resolved on. when the message through the monk tells him that the ransom may still be available, we never doubt what the decision will be. present ease and enjoyment, the maintaining and improving the position he has won--in short, the "something that is due to himself," rather than a distant, dangerous, possibly fruitless duty, howsoever clear. the one purer feeling in that corrupt heart--his love for romola--is almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness. from the first he recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and greek suppleness this is all that is needed to secure his further advancement. the vital antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the thorn in his ease-loving life. in his earlier relations with tessa, there is nothing more than seeking a present and passing amusement, and the desire to sun himself in her childish admiration and delight. he is as far as possible from the intentional seducer and betrayer. but his accidental encounters with her, cause him perplexity and annoyance; and at last it seems to him safer for his own position, especially in regard to romola, that she should be secretly housed as she is, and taught to regard herself as his wife. soon there comes to be more of ease for him with the bond-submissive child-mistress, than in the presence of the high-souled, pure-hearted wife. in the first and decisive encounter with baldassarre, the words of repudiation which seal the whole after-character of his life, apparently escape from him unconsciously and by surprise. but it is the traitor-heart that speaks them. they could never even by surprise have escaped the lips, had not the baseness of their denial and desertion been already in the heart consummated. we need not follow him through all his subsequent and deepening treasons. they all, without exception, want every element that might make even treason impressive. they want even such factitious elevation as their being prompted by hatred or revenge might lend;--even such broader interest as their being done in the interest of a party, or for some wide end, could confer. they have no fuller or deeper import than the present ease, present safety, present or future advantage, of that object which fills up his universe,--self. he would rather not have betrayed the trust reposed in him by romola's father, if the end he thereby proposed to himself could have been attained otherwise than through such betrayal. his plot with dolfo spini for placing the great monk-prophet in the hands of his enemies, has no darker motive than the getting out of the way an indirect obstacle to his own advancement, and a man whose labours tend to make life harder and more serious for all who come under his influence. bernardo del nero, with his stainless honour, has from the first taken up an attitude of tacit revulsion toward him; but there is no revenge prompting the part he plays towards the noble, true-hearted old man. he would rather that he and his fellow-victims were saved, if his own safety and ultimate gain could be secured otherwise than through their betrayal and death. there is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its transient displays toward romola are necessary for furthering some present end: he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and unprofitable sins. the sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of tito is even more marked than that of romola, for twice romola falters, and turns to flee. the supple, flexible greek follows out the law he has laid down as the law of his life,--worships the god he has set up as the god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance moment falters. that god is self; that law is, in one word, self-pleasing. long before the end comes, we feel that tito melema is a lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human language has ever embodied;--he has sinned the "sin which _cannot_ be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come." "justice," says the author, as the dead tito is borne past still locked in the death-clutch of the human avenger--"justice is like the kingdom of god: it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning." in these solemn truthful words we have suggested to us how feebly mere physical death can shadow forth that spiritual corruption, that "second death," which we have seen hour by hour consummating in him who has lived for self alone. few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than savonarola. on a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two alternatives--regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan. and even more careful examination leaves in his character and life anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity--the insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism--as the only one adequate to explain the mystery. whether george eliot has in this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do not attempt formally to determine. we are sure, however, that every thoughtful reader will recognise that the solution she offers is one in strict and deep consistency with all the laws of human action, and all the tendencies of human imperfection; and that the savonarola she places before us is a being we can understand _by sympathy_--sympathy at once with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the weaknesses that lead him astray. the picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our life: alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness. the great monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new "voice crying in the wilderness" of selfishness and wrong around him--an impassioned witness that "there is a god that judgeth in the earth," protesting by speech and by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side. to the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to god; merging all private interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking each one not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth,--to this end he has consecrated himself and all his powers. the path thus chosen is for himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been otherwise--never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain. mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like savonarola's, and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen lot. it is the opposition,--active, in the intrigues and machinations of enemies both in church and state--passive, in the dull cold hearts that respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of direct disappointment,--it is things like these that make his cross so heavy to bear. but they cannot turn him aside from his course--cannot win him to lower his aim to something short of the highest good conceivable by him. we may smile now in our days of so-called enlightenment at some of the measures he directs in pursuance of his great aim. his "pyramid of vanities" may be to our self-satisfied complacency itself a vanity. to him it represents a stern reality of reformation in character and life; and to the florentine of his age it symbolises one form of vain self-pleasing offered up in solemn willing sacrifice to god. one trial of his faith and steadfastness, long expected, comes on him at last. the recognised head of that great organisation of which he is a vowed and consecrated member declares against him, and the papal sentence of excommunication goes forth. we, looking as we deem on the papacy trembling to its fall, can very imperfectly enter into the awful gravity of this struggle. to us, the prohibition of an alexander borgia may seem of small account, and his anathema of small weight in the councils of the universe. but it was otherwise with savonarola: the monk-apostle, trained and vowed to unqualified obedience, has thus forced on him the most difficult problem of his time. this to him more than earthly authority, the visible embodiment of the divine on earth, the direct and only representative of the one authority of god in christ, has declared his course to be a course of error and sin. shall he accept or reject the decision? to reject, is to break with the supposed tradition of fourteen centuries, and with all his own past training, predilections, and habits of thought; it is to nullify his own voluntary act of the past, accepting implicit obedience, and to go forth on a path which has thenceforth no outward guidance, light, or stay. to accept, is to break with all his own truest and deepest past, to abandon all that for him gives truth and reality to life, and to retire to his cell, and limit his attention thenceforth--if he can--to making the "salvation" of his own soul secure. we may safely esteem that this is the culminating struggle of his life. we may well understand the solemn pause that ensues, the retirement to solitude, there to review the position before the only court of appeal that remains to him,--that inward voice of conscience, that inward sense of right, which is the immediate presence of god within. but we never doubt what the decision will be. "i must obey god rather than man; i cannot recognise that this voice--even of god's vicegerent--is the voice of god. necessity is laid on me, which i dare not gainsay, to preach this gospel of god's kingdom, as, even on earth, a kingdom of righteousness, truth, and love." such is one phase of the savonarola here portrayed to us; and herein is placed before us the secret of his greatness and strength. this firm assertion of the highest right his consciousness recognises, amid all difficulty, hardness, and disappointment; this persistent endeavour by precept and example to rouse men to a truer and better life than their own varied self-seekings; this unflinching struggle against everything false, mean, and base,--these things make him a power in the state before which king and pope are compelled to bow in respect or fear. over even the larger nature of romola his words at this time have sway,--the sway which more distinct perception of _all_ the relations of duty gives over a spirit equally earnest to seek the right alone. in time there comes a change, almost imperceptibly, working from within outwards, first clearly announced through the changed relations of others to him, though these are but symptomatic of change within himself. the political strength of his sway is broken, its moral strength is all but gone. the nature of the change in himself he unwittingly defines in those last words to romola already quoted, "the cause of _my party_ is the cause of god's kingdom." various external circumstances have contributed to bring about the result thus indicated; but on these it is unnecessary to dwell. god's kingdom has lowered and narrowed itself into his party. the spirit of the partisan has begun to overshadow the purity of the patriot, to contract and abase the wide aim of the christian; and he has come to substitute a law of right modified to suit the interests of the party, for that law which is absolute and unconditional. he whom we listened to in the duomo as the fervid proclaimer of god's justice, stands now before us as the perverter of even human justice and human law. the very nobleness of bernardo del nero strengthens the necessity that he should die, that the mediceans may be thus deprived of the support of his stainless honour and high repute; though to compass this death the law of mercy which savonarola himself has instituted must be put aside. as we listen to the miserable sophistries by which he strives to justify himself--far less to romola than before his own accusing soul--we feel that the greatness of his strength has departed from him. all thenceforth is deepening confusion without and within. less and less can he control the violences of his party, till these provoke all but universal revolt, and the "masque of the furies" ends his public career. the uncertainties and vacillations of the "trial by fire," the long series of confessions and retractations, historically true, are still more morally and spiritually significant. they tell of inward confusion and perplexity, generated through that partial "self-pleasing" which, under guise so insidious, had stolen into the inner life; of faith and trust perturbed and obscured thereby; of dark doubts engendered whether god had indeed ever spoken by him. we feel it is meet the great life should close, not as that of the triumphant martyr, but amid the depths of that self-renouncing penitence through which once more the soul resumes its full relation to the divine. * * * * * we have now come to the one great poem george eliot has as yet given to the world, and which we have no hesitation in placing above every poetical or poetico-dramatic work of the day--'the spanish gypsy.' less upon it than upon any of its predecessors can we attempt any general criticism. our attention must be confined mainly to two of the great central figures of the drama--fedalma herself, and don silva; the representatives respectively of humanity accepting the highest, noblest, most self-devoting life presented to it, simultaneously with life's deepest pain; and of humanity choosing something--in itself pure and noble, but--short of the highest. fedalma is essentially a poetic romola, but romola so modified by circumstances and temperament as to be superficially contrasting. she is the romola of a different race and clime, a different nurture, and an era which, chronologically nearly the same, is in reality far removed. for the warm and swift italian we have the yet warmer and swifter gypsy blood; for the long line of noble ancestry, descent from an outcast and degraded race; for the nurture amid the environments, almost in the creed of classicism, the upbringing under noble female charge in a household of that land where the roman church had just sealed its full supremacy by the establishment of the inquisition; for the era when italian subtleties of thought, policy, and action had attained their highest elaboration, the grander and simpler time when "castilian gentlemen _choose_ not their task--they choose _to do it well_." but howsoever modified through these and other accessories of existence are the more superficial aspects of character, and the whole outward form and course of life, the great vital principle is the same in both;--clearness to see, nobleness to choose, steadfastness to pursue, the highest good that life presents, through whatsoever anguish, darkness, and death of all joy and hope the path may lead. on fedalma's first appearance on the wonderful scene upon the placa, she presents herself as emphatically what her poet-worshipper juan hymns her, the "child of light"--a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty, brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with darkness and sorrow. but even then we have intimated to us that vital quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path. for her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in it. in her exquisite justification of the placa scene to don silva, she herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do-- "_i_ was not, but joy was, and love and triumph." she is but a form and presence in which the joy, not merely of the fair sunset scene, but primarily and emphatically of the human hearts around her, enshrines itself. it has no free life in herself apart from others; it must inevitably die if shut out from this tremulousness of human sympathy. and we know it shall give place to a sorrow correspondingly sensitive, intense, and absorbing, whenever the young bright spirit is brought face to face with human sorrow. even while we gaze on her as the embodied joy, and love, and triumph of the scene, the shadow begins to fall. the band of gypsy prisoners passes by, and her eyes meet those eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more superficial than hers-- "seemed to say he bore the pain of those who never could be saved." joy collapses at once within her; the light fades away from the scene; the very sunset glory becomes dull and cold. we are shown from the first that no life can satisfy this "child of light" which shall not be a life in the fullest and deepest unison to which circumstances shall call her with the life of humanity. that true greatness of our humanity is already active within her, which makes it impossible she should live or die to herself alone. her destiny is already marked out by a force of which circumstance may determine the special manifestation, but which no force of circumstance can turn aside from its course; the force of a living spiritual power within herself which constrains that she shall be faithful to the highest good which life shall place before her. we would fain linger for a little over the scenes which follow between her and don silva; portraying as they do a love so intense in its virgin tenderness, and so spiritually pure and high. it is the same "child of light" that comes before us here; the same tremulous living in the light and joy of her love, but also the same impossibility of living even in its light and joy apart from those of her beloved. and not from his only: that passion which in more ordinary natures so almost inevitably contracts the sphere of the sympathies, in fedalma expands and enlarges it. amid all the intoxicating sweetness of her bright young joys, the loving heart turns again and again to the thought of human sorrow and wrong; and among all the hopes that gladden her future, one is never absent from her thoughts--"oh! i shall have much power as well as joy;" power to redress the wrong and to assuage the suffering. half playfully, half seriously, she asks the question-- "but is it _what_ we love, or _how_ we love, that makes true good?" most seriously and solemnly is the question answered through her after- life. to love less wholly, purely, unselfishly--yet still holding the outward claims of that love subordinate to a possible still higher and more imperative claim--to such a nature as hers is no love and no true good at all. and this thirst for the highest alike in love and life includes her lover as well as herself. the darkest terror that overtakes her in all those after-scenes comes when he is about to abjure country, honour, and god on her account. to her, the gypsy, without a country, without a faith save faithfulness to the highest right, without a god such as the spaniards' god, this might be a small thing. but for him, spanish noble and christian knight, she knows it to be abnegation of nobleness, treason to duty, dishonour and shame. she is jealous for his truth, but the more that its breach might seem to secure her own happiness. the first and decisive scene with her gypsy father is so true in conception, and so full of poetic force and grandeur throughout, that no analysis, nothing short of extracting the whole, can do justice to it. seldom before has art in any guise placed the grand, heroic, self-devoting purpose of a grand, heroic, self-devoting nature more impressively before us than in the gypsy chief. it is easy to think and speak of such an enterprise as quixotic and impossible. there is a stage in every great enterprise humanity has ever undertaken when it might be so characterised: and the greatest of all enterprises, when an obscure jew stood forth to become light and life, not to a tribe or a race, but to humanity, was to the judgers according to appearance of his day, the most quixotic and impossible of all. it has been felt and urged as an objection to this scene, and consequently to the whole scheme of the drama, that such influence, so immediately exerted over fedalma by a father whom till then she had never known, is unnatural if not impossible. if it were only as father and daughter they thus stand face to face, there might be force in the objection. but this very partially and inadequately expresses the relation between these two. it is the father possessed with a lofty, self-devoting purpose, who calls to share in, and to aid it, the daughter whose nature is strung to the same lofty, self-devoting pitch. it is the saviour of an oppressed, degraded, outcast race, who calls to share his mission her who could feel the brightness of her joy of love brightened still more by the hope of assuaging sorrow and redressing evil. it is the appeal through the father of that which is highest and noblest in humanity to that which is most deeply inwrought into the daughter's soul. to a narrower and meaner nature the appeal would have been addressed by any father in vain: for a narrower and meaner end, the appeal even by such a father would have been addressed to fedalma in vain. with her it cannot but prevail, unless she is content to forego--not merely her father's love and trust, but--her own deepest and truest life. the "child of light," the embodied "joy and love and triumph" of the placa, is called on to forego all outward and possible hope on behalf of that love which is for her the concentration of all light and joy and triumph. very touching are those heart-wrung pleadings by which she strives to avert the sacrifice; and we are oppressed almost as by the presence of the calm, loveless, hateless fate of the old greek tragedy, as zarca's inexorable logic puts them one by one aside, and leaves her as sole alternatives the offering up every hope, every present and possible joy of the love which is entwined with her life, or the turning away from that highest course to which he calls her. as her own young hopes die out under the pressure of that deepest energy of her nature to which he appeals, it can hardly be but that all hope should grow dull and cold within--hope even with regard to the issue of that mission to which she is called; and it is thus that she accepts the call:-- "yes, say that we shall fail. i will not count on aught but being faithful. . . . i will seek nothing but to shun base joy. the saints were cowards who stood by to see christ crucified. they should have thrown themselves upon the roman spears, and died in vain. the grandest death, to die in vain, for love greater than rules the courses of the world. such death shall be my bridegroom. . . . oh love! you were my crown. no other crown is aught but thorns on this poor woman's brow." in this spirit she goes forth to meet her doom, faithfulness thenceforth the one aim and struggle of her life--faithfulness to be maintained under the pressure of such anguish of blighted love and stricken hope as only natures so pure, tender, and deep can know--faithfulness clung to with but the calmer steadfastness when the last glimmer of mere hope is gone. the successive scenes in the gypsy camp with juan, with her father, and with the gypsy girl hinda, bring before us at once the intensity of her suffering and the depth of her steadfastness. trembling beneath the burden laid upon her,--laid on her by no will of another, but by the earnestness of her own humanity,--we see her seeking through juan whatever of possible comfort can come through tidings of him she has left; in the strong and noble nature of her father, the consolation of at least hoping that her sacrifice shall not be all in vain; and in hinda's untutored, instinctive faithfulness to her name and race, support to her own resolve. but no pressure of her suffering, no despondency as to the result of all, no thought of the lonely life before her, filled evermore with those yearnings toward the past and the vanished, can turn her back from her chosen path. "father, my soul is weak, . . . . . . . . but if i cannot plant resolve on hope, it will stand firm on certainty of woe. . . . hopes have precarious life; but faithfulness can feed on suffering, and knows no disappointment. trust in me. if it were needed, this poor trembling hand should grasp the torch--strive not to let it fall, though it were burning down close to my flesh. no beacon lighted yet. i still should hear through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers. father, i will be true." the scenes which follow, first with her lover, then with her lover and her father together, present the culmination at once of her trial and of her steadfastness. hitherto she has made her choice, as it were, in the bodily absence of that love, the abnegation of whose every hope gives its sharpness to her crown of thorns. now the light and the darkness, the joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were, visibly and tangibly side by side. on the one hand her father, with his noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base, represents that deepest in humanity--and in her--which impels to seek and to cling to the highest good. on the other her lover, associated with all the deeply-cherished life, joy, and hope of her past, pleads with his earnest, impassioned, almost despairing eloquence, for her return to _happiness_. more nobly beautiful by far in her sad steadfastness than when she glowed before us as the "child of light" upon the placa,-- "her choice was made. . . . . . . . slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain, yearning, yet shrinking: . . . . . . firm to slay her joy, that cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife, like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy." to all the despairing pleadings and appeals of her lover she has but one answer:-- "you must forgive fedalma all her debt. she is quite beggared. if she gave herself, 'twould be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts of a forsaken better. . . . oh, all my bliss was in our love, but now i may not taste it; some deep energy compels me to choose hunger." what that energy is, we surely do not need to ask. it is that deep principle of all true life which represents the affinity--latent, oppressed by circumstances, repressed by sin, but always there--between our human nature and the divine, and through subjection to which we reassume our birthright as "the sons of god"; conscience to see and will to choose--not what shall please ourselves, but--the highest and purest aim that life presents to us. it is the same "deep energy," the same inexorable necessity of her nature, that she should put away from her all beneath the best and purest, which originates the sudden terror that smiles upon her when don silva, for her sake, breaks loose from country and faith, from honour and god. there is no triumph in the greatness of the love thus displayed; no rejoicing in prospect of the outward fulfilment of the love thus made possible; no room for any emotion but the dark chill foreboding of a separation thus begun, wider than all distance, and more profound and hopeless than death. the separation of aims no longer single, of souls no longer one; of his life falling, though for her sake, from its best and highest, and therefore ceasing, inevitably and hopelessly, fully to respond to hers. "what the zincala may not quit for you, i cannot joy that you should quit for her." the last temptation has now been met and conquered. henceforth we see fedalma only in her calm, sad, unwavering steadfastness, bearing, without moan or outward sign, the burden of her cross. not even her father's dying charge is needed to confirm her purpose, to fix her life in a self- devotedness already fixed beyond all relaxing and all change. with his death, indeed, the last faint hope fades utterly away that his great purpose shall be achieved; and she thenceforth is "but as the funeral urn that bears the ashes of a leader." but necessity lies only the more upon her--that most imperious of all necessities which originates in her own innate nobleness--that she should be _true_. when first she accepted this burden of her nobleness and her sorrow, she had said-- "i will not count on aught but being faithful;" and faithfulness without hope--truthfulness without prospect, almost without possibility, of tangible fulfilment--is all that lies before her now. she accepts it in a mournful stillness, not of despair, and not of resignation, but simply as the only true accomplishment of her life that now remains. the last interview with don silva almost oppresses us with its deep severe solemnity. no bitterness of separation broods over it: the true bitterness of separation fell upon her when her lover became false to himself in the vain imagination that, so doing, he could by any possibility be fully true to her. "our marriage rite"--thus she addresses the repentant and returning renegade-- "our marriage rite is our resolve that we will each be true to high allegiance, higher than our love;" and it is thus she answers for herself, and teaches him to answer, that question asked in the fullest and fairest flush of her love's joys and hopes-- "but is it what we love, or how we love, that makes true good?" the tremulous sensitiveness of her former life has now passed beyond all outward manifestation, lost in absorbing self-devotedness and absorbing sorrow; and every thought, feeling, and word is characterised by an ineffable depth of calm. those closing lines, whose still, deep, melancholy cadence lingers upon ear and heart as do the concluding lines of 'paradise lost'-- "straining he gazed, and knew not if he gazed on aught but blackness overhung with stars"-- tell us how fedalma passes away from the sight, the life, and all but the heart of don silva. not thus does she pass away from our gaze. one star overhanging the blackness, clear and calm beyond all material brightness of earth and firmament, for us marks out her course: the star of unwavering faith, unfaltering truth, self-devotion to the highest and holiest that knows no change for ever. "a man of high-wrought strain, fastidious in his acceptance, dreading all delight that speedy dies and turns to carrion. . . . . . . a nature half-transformed, with qualities that oft bewrayed each other, elements not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects. . . . . . a spirit framed too proudly special for obedience, too subtly pondering for mastery: born of a goddess with a mortal sire; heir of flesh-fettered weak divinity. . . . a nature quiveringly poised in reach of storms, whose qualities may turn to murdered virtues that still walk as ghosts within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse." such is duke silva: and in this portraiture is up-folded the dark and awful story of his life. noble, generous, chivalrous; strong alike by mind and by heart to cast off the hard and cruel superstition of his age and country; capable of a love pure, deep, trustful, and to all appearance self-forgetting, beyond what men are usually capable of; trenching in every quality close on the true heroic: he yet falls as absolutely short of it as a man can do who has not, like tito melema, by his own will coalescing with the unchangeable laws of right, foreordained himself to utter and hopeless spiritual death. it was, perhaps, needful he should be portrayed as thus nearly approaching true nobility; otherwise such perfect love from such a nature as fedalma's were inexplicable, almost impossible. but this was still more needful toward the fulfilment of the author's purpose: the showing how the one deadly plague-spot shall weaken the strongest and vitiate the purest life. every element of the heroic is there except that one element without which the truly heroic is impossible: he cannot "deny himself." superficially, indeed, it might seem that self was not the object of his regard, but fedalma: and by much of the distorted, distorting, and radically immoral fiction of the day, his sacrifice of everything for her love's sake would have been held up to us as the crowning glory of his heroism, and the consummation of his claims upon our sympathy and admiration. george eliot has seen with a different and a clearer eye: and in duke silva's placing--not his love, but--the earthly fulfilment of his love above honour and faith, she finds at the root the same vital corruption of self- pleasing which conducts tito melema through baseness on baseness, and treason after treason, to the lowest deep of perdition. throughout the first wonderful love-scene with fedalma, the vital difference, the essential antagonism between these two natures, is revealed to us through a hundred subtle and delicate touches, and we are made to feel that there is a depth in hers beyond the power of his to reach. chivalrous, absorbing, tyrannising over his whole being, even pure as his love is, it far fails of the deeper and holier purity of hers. it shudders at the possibility of even outward soil upon her loveliness; but it does so primarily because such soil would react upon his self-love:-- "have _i_ not made your place and dignity the very height of my ambition?" her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first breach of trust, _because_ it is a fall from his truest and highest right. his answer to her question already quoted, reveals a love which the world's judgment may rank as the best and noblest, but reveals a principle which, applied to aught beneath the only and supremest good, makes love only a more insidious and deeply corrupting form of self-pleasing: "'tis what i love determines how i love." love is his "highest allegiance"; and it becomes ere long an allegiance before which truth, faith, and honour give way, and guidance and control of conscience are swept before the fierce storm of self-willed passion that brooks no interposition between itself and its aim. we are not attempting a formal review of this work; and as we have passed without notice the powerful embodiment in father isidor of whatever was true and earnest in the inquisition, we must also pass very slightly over the interview with a still more remarkable creation--the hebrew physician and astrologer sephardo--except as we have in this interview further illustration of the character of don silva, and of the direction in which the self-love of passion is impelling him. we see conscience seeking from sephardo--and seeking in vain--confirmation of the purpose already determined in his own heart; striving toward self-justification by every sophistry the passion-blinded intellect can suggest; struggling to transfer to another the wrong, if not the shame, of his own contemplated breach of trust; endeavouring to take refuge in stellar and fatalistic agencies from his own "nature quiveringly poised" between good and evil; and at last, merging all sophistries and all influences in the fierce resolve of the self-love which has made fedalma the one aim, glory, and crown of his life. throughout all the apparent struggle and uncertainty, we never doubt how all shall end. amid all the appearances of vacillation, all the seeking external aid and furtherance, we see that the resolve is fixed, that the eager passionate self which identifies fedalma as its inalienable right and property will prevail--prevail even to set aside every obstacle of duty and right which shall seem to interpose between it and realisation. equally and profoundly characteristic is the position he mentally takes up with regard to the gypsy chief, as well as fedalma herself. not simply or primarily from mere arrogance of rank does he assume it as a certainty that he has but to find fedalma to win her back to his side; that he has but to lay before zarca the offer of his rank, wealth, and influence on behalf of the outcast race, to win him to forego his purpose and to surrender the daughter whom he has called to the same lofty aim. it is because of the impossibility, swayed and tossed by the self-will of passion as he is, of his rising to the height of their nobleness; the impossibility of his realising natures so possessed by a great, heroic, self-devoting thought, that hope, joy, happiness become of little or no account in the scale, and even what is called success dwindles into insignificance, or fades away altogether from regard. the first betrayal of his trust, the first fall from truth and honour, has been accomplished. conscience has begun to succumb to self--self under the guise of fedalma and the overmastering self-will which refuses to resign his claim upon her. he has secretly deserted his post, transferring to another's hands the trust which was his, and only his. a slight offence it may appear--a mere error of judgment swayed by devoted love--to leave for a day or two when no danger seems specially impending, and to leave in the hands of the trusted and loving friend the charge committed to him. a slight offence, but it has been done in direct violation of conscience, and so in practical abnegation of god. therefore the flood-gate is opened, and all sweeps swiftly, resistlessly, remedilessly on towards catastrophe. the tender beauty of the brief scene with fedalma is for her overcast, and hope, the highest hope, dies out within her, when she knows that her lover, in apparent faithfulness to her, has been false to himself. from that hour for her, "our joy is dead, and only smiles on us, a loving shade from out the place of tombs." then comes the interposition of the gypsy chief, fedalma's sweet sad steadfastness to her "high allegiance, higher than our love;" the brief moment of suspense, when "his will was prisoner to the double grasp of rage and hesitancy;"-- and then before the stormful revulsion of baffled and despairing passion all else is swept away, and there only survives in the self-clouded mind and soul the fixed resolve to secure that which for him has come to overmaster all allegiance. strange and sad beyond all description are the sophistries under which the sinner strives to veil his sin,--by which to silence that still small voice which will not be hushed amid all that inward moil. fedalma's earnest pleadings with his better self, zarca's calm, pitying, almost sorrowful scorn-- "_our_ poor faith allows not rightful choice save of the right our birth has made for us"-- fall unheeded amid that fierce tempest of aroused self-will; and the spanish knight and noble of that very age when "castilian gentlemen choose not their task--they choose to do it well," becomes the renegade, abjuring and forswearing country, honour, and god. we have hitherto abstained from quotation, except where necessary to illustrate our remarks. but we cannot forbear extracting from this scene the most exquisite of the many beautiful lyrics scattered throughout the poem, expressing, as it does, with a mystic power and depth beyond what the most elaborate commentary could do, the all but hopelessness of return from such a fall as don silva's:-- "push off the boat, quit, quit the shore, the stars will guide us back:-- o gathering cloud, o wide, wide sea, o waves that keep no track! on through the pines! the pillared woods, where silence breathes sweet breath:-- o labyrinth, o sunless gloom, the other side of death!" in the scenes which follow among the gypsy guard, both that with juan and the lonely night immediately preceding the march, the terrible reaction has already begun to set in. the "quivering" poise of don silva's nature makes it impossible he should rest quiet in this utterness of moral and spiritual fall. already we hear and see the "murdered virtues" begin "to walk as ghosts within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse." the past returns on him with tyrannous power,--early associations, the taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by forsaking betrayed-- "the life that made his full-formed self, as the impregnant sap of years successive frames the full-branched tree"-- all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who, in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and forsworn them all. fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the accusing throng. still the same plea-- "my sin was made for me by men's perverseness:" still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion-- "i have a _right_ to choose my good or ill, a right to damn myself!"-- still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between fedalma's high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of all truth, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he, morally so weak and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength--"i with my love will be her providence." when with the fearful gypsy chant and curse "the newer oath thrusts its loud presence on him," we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has become possible; and we follow to that presence of fedalma which is now the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness of deed and fallen to such a depth of ruin. we see the trust he has deserted in the hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn zincalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with the havoc they have wrought. the "right to damn" himself which he had claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self damnation upon the gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning "deed was done before you took your oath, or reached our camp, done when you slipped in secret from the post 'twas yours to keep, and not to meditate if others might not fill it." the climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when the prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin, is led forth to die. then all sophistries are swept away, and the full import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as _his_, only and wholly his. zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which "strangles one whom ages watch for vainly," gives also to don silva himself to carry "for ever with him what he fled-- _her_ murdered love--her love, a dear wronged ghost, facing him, beauteous, 'mid the throngs of hell." few authors or artists but george eliot could have won us again to look on don silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost divides our interest and sympathy with fedalma herself; and this by no condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes. but the better and nobler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to assert themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness, apostasy, and sin. the wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self- renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured. the self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and tenderness remain. without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him of that "high allegiance higher than our love," which is thenceforth the only bond of union between these two. in that last sad interview with her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, we can regard don silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth, beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love. * * * * * in the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating--'middlemarch'--george eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is--not sketched or outlined, but--filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who that speaker is. and each is the type or representative of a class; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. to a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil,--it cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself. dorothea and her sister, mr brooke and sir james chettam, rosamond vincy and her brother, mr vincy and his wife, casaubon and lydgate, farebrother and ladislaw, mary garth and her parents, bulstrode and raffles, even drs sprague and minchin, old featherstone and his kindred--all are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and analysis of george eliot, might claim personal acquaintance. this richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of the two great antagonistic principles of human life--self-pleasing and self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of god more or less absolute and consummate--that it is no easy task to select from among them. but two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such finished yet unlaboured art--living, moving, talking before us--contrasted with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life--that which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in the infinite of truth, purity, and love--that instinctively and irresistibly the mind fixes upon them. these are dorothea and rosamond vincy. to not a few of george eliot's readers, we believe that dorothea is and will always be a fairer and more attractive form than dinah morris or romola di bardi, fedalma or mirah cohen. in her sweet young enthusiasm, often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always struggling and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts mr casaubon as her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one faint betrayal--wrung from her by momentary anguish--of that disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance, with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own deepest consciousness that in mr casaubon there is no help or stay for her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long night's heart-struggle which precedes the close--a struggle not against her own higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of what--almost against conscience and right--her answer must be;--there is an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to recognise. not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from first to last, characterises her whole relations to ladislaw. if there is one flaw in this noble work, it is that ladislaw on first examination is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. yet it might have been nearly as difficult even for george eliot to satisfy our instinctive cravings in this particular with regard to dorothea, as in respect to romola or fedalma. and when we study her portrait of ladislaw more carefully, there is a latent beauty and nobleness about him; an innate and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean and base,--that almost makes us cancel the word flaw. we recognise this nobleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence with which he regards dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the guileless candour of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of his trust in the spotless purity of her whole nature. and in him we have presented all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which give assurance that, dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting helpmeet to her, no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall rise to the elevation and purity of her self-consecration, and shall stand by her side sustaining, guiding, expanding that life of ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness to which each is dedicated. but the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its unconsciousness. self has no place in it. from the first the one absorbing life aim and action is toward others--toward aiding the toils, advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, elevating the life, of all around her. and this in no spirit of self-satisfied and vainglorious self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness which is characteristic of her whole being. of the social reformer, the purposed philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the wretched, and the fallen, there is no trace in dorothea brooke. grant that, as she is first presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently concentrated in improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here there is no thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: there is thought alone of the object she seeks--ameliorating the condition of those she yearns to benefit. in her very first interview with casaubon, there is something inexpressibly touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she accepts him and his "great mind," and the innocent purity with which she allows herself to indulge the vision of a life passed by his side; a life which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full and free, and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fashion which restrict it. at last his cold, formal proposal of marriage is made. she sees nothing of its true character--that he is but seeking, not an helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher requirements, but simply and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive dependant and drudge. in the _impossibility_ of marriage presenting itself to her purity of maiden innocence as a mere establishment in life, or in any of those meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard it, she sees nothing of all this--nothing save that the yearning of her heart is fulfilled, and that henceforth her life shall pass under a higher guardianship, sustained by a holier strength, animated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided toward nobler and fuller aims. picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of her awakening to what this man, who "has no good red blood in his body," really is--a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. the first faint dawn of discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at rome. conscious of her want of mere aesthetic culture--neglected in the past as a turning aside from life's highest aims--she has looked forward to his guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies. for all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. nay, more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander. soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be. soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is thrown back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is the very essence and life-in-death of the man. for the first and only time, a faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description could do. a single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of self isolation and self-insistence there:--"however just her indignation might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give tenderness_." she meets ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague labours and accumulations of years which have constituted her husband's nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind" has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to accomplish. again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is thus throwing away life in vain. so it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, yet unmated, life. effort, always more earnest on the part of her yearning, unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between them; to find in him something of that sweet support, that expansive and elevating force, silently entering into her own innermost life, which her first childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if no more may be, that to which her childlike humility at first alone aspired--eyes to his weakness, and strength and freedom to his pen. so it goes on; ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her yearning love and pity is thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart and all-absorbing egoism can find only irritation in her timid attempts at sympathy, only dread of detection of the half-conscious futility of all his labours, in her humble proffers of even mechanical aid. not easily can even the most fervid and penetrative imagination conceive what, to a nature like dorothea's, such a life must be, with its never-ceasing, ever-gathering pain; its longing tenderness not even actively repelled, but simply ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, equally with its highest yearnings, baffled and shattered against that triple mail of shallowest self-includedness. and all has to be borne in silence and alone. no word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, the deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope. nay, for long, on indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be almost wholly on her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave no room for resentment. ere long--indeed, very soon--another, and, if possible, a still deeper humiliation comes upon her,--another, and, in some respects, a keener pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown into her life,--in her husband's jealousy of ladislaw. yet jealousy it cannot be called. of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is utterly incapable. jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, dependence, and aid, towards another existence. in mr casaubon there is no capability, no possibility of this. what in him wears the aspect of jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. for long her guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self- love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would devolve on her should be shared with ladislaw. then it is that casaubon is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life contracting clutch of "the dead hand." in the innocence of her entire relations with ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind obedience to his will. she thinks alone of his thus binding her to a lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns. then follows the long and painful struggle,--a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. for it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. on one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband's wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies have been wasted--that life has been thrown away--on an object in which there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably achieved. on the other stands her clear undoubting _conscience_ of her own truest and highest course,--the course to which every prompting of the divine within impels her,--that she shall not thus isolate herself within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the dead hand that holds her in its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her. we instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the answer will be. we know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness, the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience, and will prevail. the agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on the ear of the dead. it is scarcely necessary to follow dorothea minutely through all the details of her widowed relations to mr casaubon. enough that these are all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone before. no resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her--nothing but the sweet unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies--her failures to be to him what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she had hoped she might become. even on the discovery of the worse than treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in his "dead hand" with regard to ladislaw, and she only escaped the irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her by his death,--the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting everything she said or did, _terrified her as if it had been a sin_. it is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple, unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of dorothea brooke displays itself. toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out unobtrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass, to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. even for her "pulpy" uncle she has no supercilious contempt--no sense of isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward him. toward celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather superficial yet _naive_ worldly wisdom, her half-conscious selfishness, her baby-worship, and her inimitable "staccato," she is more than tolerant. she looks up to her as in many respects a superior, even though her own far higher instincts and aims of life cannot accept her as an aid and guidance toward the realisation of these. even at old featherstone's funeral, her one emotion is of pitiful sorrow over that loveless mockery of all human pity and love; and for the "frog-faced" there is no feeling but sympathetic compassion for his apparent loneliness amongst strangers, who all stand aloof and look askance on him. into all lydgate's plans, into the whole question of the hospital and all he hopes to achieve through means of it, she throws herself with swift intelligence, with active, eager sympathy, as a probable instrumentality by which at least one phase of suffering may be redressed or allayed. and in the hour of his deep humiliation, when all others have fallen away from his side, when the wife of his bosom forsakes him in callous and heartless resentment of what was done for her sake alone; when he stands out the mark of scorn and obloquy for all save farebrother, and scans and all but loathes himself--she, with her artless trust in the best of humanity, in the strength of her instinctive recognition of the merest glimmering of whatever is true and right and high in others, comes to his side, yields him at once her fullest confidence, gives him with frank simplicity her aid, and enables him, so far as determined prejudice and uncharity will allow, to right himself before others. reference has already been made to her whole relations, from first to last, with ladislaw. it is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. the utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, of vague uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought of what is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward her--ever dawns upon her guileless innocence. through all her yearning to do justice to him as regards the property of her dead husband, which she looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least to be shared with him, there arises before her the determination of her dead husband that it should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness over that meagre wasted life prevails. anon, when at last through the will she is made aware of the crowning act of that concentrated callousness of heart and soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing grasp it had sought to lay on her for life, and had so far succeeded in doing, then for the first time her "tremulous" maiden purity and simplicity awakens, and for the first time it enters her mind that ladislaw could, under any circumstances, become her lover; that another had thought of them in that light, and that he himself had been conscious of such a possibility arising. the later scenes between them are characterised by a quiet beauty, a suppressed power and pathos, compared to which most other love- scenes in fiction appear dull and coarse. the tremulous yearning of her love, as it awakens more and more to distinct consciousness within; the new-born shyness blent with the old, trustful, frank simplicity,--bring before us a picture of love, in its purest and most beautiful aspect, such as cannot easily be paralleled in fiction. toward her late husband's parishioners there is the same wise instinctive insight as to their true needs, the same thoughtful and provident consideration that characterises her in every relation into which she is brought. if she at once objects, on their behoof, to mr tyke's so-called "apostolic" preaching, it is that she means by that, sermons about "imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the apocalypse. i have always been thinking of the different ways in which christianity is taught, and whenever i find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, i cling to that as the truest--i mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it." and in her final selection of mr farebrother, she is guided not alone by her sense of his general and essential fitness for the work assigned to him, but also in some degree by her desire to make whist-playing for money, and the comparatively inferior society into which it necessarily draws him, no longer a need of his outer life. of all the less prominent relations into which dorothea brooke is brought, there is not one more touchingly tender, or in which her whole nature is drawn more beautifully out, than that to rose vincy. between these two, at least on the side of the hard unpenetrable incarnation of self-inclusion and self-pleasing, any approach to harmony or sympathy is impossible. there is not even any true ground of womanhood on which rosamond can meet dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from womanhood as tito melema is from manliness or manhood. yet even here the tender pitifulness of dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other would be impassable. in her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no fancied sense of superiority--solely from the sense of common human need--she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope and trust, with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own. such, as portrayed by unquestionably the greatest fictionist of the time--is it too much to say, the greatest genius of our english nineteenth century?--is the nineteenth century st theresa. the question may be raised by some of george eliot's readers whether it constitutes the best and completest ethical teaching that fiction can attain, to bring before its readers such high ideals of the possibilities of humanity--of the aim and purpose of life toward which it should ever aspire. were the author's canvas occupied with such portraitures alone--with romolas and fedalmas, dinah morrises and dorothea brookes, daniel derondas and adam bedes, even mr tryans and mr gilfils--the question might call for full discussion, and a contrast might be unfavourably drawn between the author and him whose emphatic praise it is that he "holds the mirror up to nature." but the great artist for all time brings before us not only an iago and an edmund, an angelo and an iachimo, a regan and a goneril, but a miranda and an imogen, an isabella and a viola, a cordelia and a desdemona, with every conceivable intermediate shade of human character and life; and in george eliot we have the same clearly-defined contrasts and endless variety. that a becky sharp and a beatrix castlewood are drawn with the consummate skill and force of the most perfect artist in his own special sphere our age has produced, few will be disposed to deny: and that they have momentous lessons to teach us all,--that they may by sheer antagonism rouse some from dreams of selfish vanity and corruption, and awaken within some germ of better and purer elements of life,--will scarcely be disputed. but it is not from these, or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the purest and most penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and elevation of the world has come. that has come emphatically from him whose self-chosen name, "the son of man," designates him the ideal of humanity on earth; him who is at once the "lamb of god" and "the lion of the tribe of judah," the "good shepherd," and the stern and fearless but ever-righteous judge--the concentration of all tender and holy love, and of divinest scorn of, and revulsion from, everything mean and false in humanity; him who for the repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke than "go and sin no more," and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt, all-despising pharisees thundered back, to his own ultimate destruction, his terrible "woe unto you _hypocrites_." he too stands out, not isolated or severed, but prominent, amid every conceivable phase and gradation of human character, from a john to a judas; touches each and all at some point of living contact; meets them with tender sympathy, with gentle patience, and pitying love, over their weaknesses and falls. can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures such ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social and political relations? or can such ideals, presented before us, fail to arouse in some degree the better elements of our humanity, and to lead us to strive toward the realisation of these? in wonderfully drawn and finished yet never obtruded contrast to this beautiful creation comes before us rosamond vincy. outwardly even more characterised by every personal charm, save that one living and crowning charm which outshines from the soul within; to the eye, therefore--such eyes as can penetrate no deeper than the surface--prettier, more graceful, more accomplished and fascinating, than dorothea brooke;--it is difficult to conceive a more utterly unlovable example of womanhood, whether as maiden or wife. hard and callous of heart and dead of soul, incapable of one thought or emotion that rises above or extends beyond self, insistent on her own petty claims and ambitions to the exclusion of all others, ever aiming to achieve these, now by dogged sullen persistence, now by mean concealments and frauds, no more repellent portraiture of womanhood has ever been placed before us. the fundamental character of her entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn by a single delicate touch--her objecting to her brother's red herring, or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. in her relation to her husband there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that can be called love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. she looks on him solely as a means for removing herself to what she considers a higher social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, and luxury of daily life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider sphere of petty and selfish enjoyment. seeking these ends, she resorts to every mean device of deceit and concealment. utterly callous and impenetrable to his feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all. even toward mary garth there is nothing approaching true friendship or affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and earnestness of nature. she is nothing to her but a tool and _confidante_, the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries and cares. all dorothea's gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win her back to truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken to active life and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet instinct believes to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference or dull resistance. and in the one act of apparent friendliness or rather explanation toward dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy or desire to clear away what has come between her and ladislaw, than by sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly and unwifely advances to him. in the position she at last takes up toward ladislaw, there is no approach to anything in the very least resembling love--even illicit and overmastering passion. of that her very nature is incapable. she is influenced solely by resentment against her husband, and his failure to fulfil her vain and self-absorbed dreams; by the hope that he will remove her to a sphere which will give wider scope to her heartless selfishness, and take her away from the social disappointments and humiliations into which that selfishness has mainly plunged her. in every relation of life near or far, important or trivial, amid all environments, under all impulsion toward anything purer and better, rosamond vincy is ever the same; as consistent and unvarying in her hard unwomanliness and impenetrable, insistent self-seeking, as is dorothea in every opposite characteristic. and even while the picture in one way fascinates the reader, it is the fascination of ever-increasing contempt and loathing where the extremest charity can hardly even pity; and from it we ever turn to that of st theresa with the more intense refreshment alike of mind and heart, and the deeper sense of its elevating and refining influence. among the many clearly defined and vividly drawn portraits in this great work, it would be easy, did space permit, to select others well worthy of detailed examination, and illustrative of the salient aim and tendency of all george eliot's works. the homely yet beautiful family groups of the garths, celia and sir james chettam, the bulstrodes, { } even the wretched old featherstone, and the crowd of vultures "waiting for death around him," all more or less illustrate the fundamental principle of the highest ethics--that self-abnegation is life, elevation, purity, uplifting our humanity toward the divine; that self-seeking and self-isolation tend surely toward moral and spiritual death. two, however, stand out so delicately yet clearly defined and contrasting, that they claim brief consideration before passing from this great work--lydgate and farebrother. the whole character and career of lydgate are brought before us with the skill of the consummate artist. at first he appears as a man of massive and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses and aims, resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and amid all indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through these aims the general good of humanity--the alleviation of suffering, and the arrestment, it may be, of death. but even then there are signs of inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall. there are indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious contempt for others; of undue deference for bulstrode, not from respect or esteem, but as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat patients not as human beings but as cases--objects to experiment on, and verify hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which betray a nature not attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that cannot be expected to stand in the hour of trial. his first direct lapse is when, against his secret conviction, he supports tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to farebrother; but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general style of his reception at the board meeting, and the opposition he encounters there. anon comes his marriage to rosamond vincy,--a marriage prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments. led on mainly by his own taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of every kind. debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, cramping his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional aims and efforts. to his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or aid. she only aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his life by her callous selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all her own claims, her mean deceits and concealments. embarrassments of every kind thicken around him; and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory to murder. his end is as sad a one for his character, and in his circumstances, as can well be conceived: falling from all his high if somewhat arrogant professional aims, his hopes of elevating the general practitioner, and of raising medicine from an art to a science, into the fashionable london lady's doctor. though mr farebrother occupies a somewhat less prominent place in the narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill. he comes before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly alive to, and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies. there is an utter absence of pretence and affectation about him, a graceful and engaging simplicity and frankness of whole nature, that can hardly fail to win the heart. all his home relations--toward mother and sisters--are singularly touching. feeling all his defects as a clergyman, half laughing, half apologetic over his devotion to his favourite coleoptera, and admitting that which is so far a necessity to him, not of choice, but of actual external need in his narrow circumstances--admitting, too, the comparatively inferior and uncongenial society into which he is drawn--the full revelation of his nobler and higher nature begins. his true and deep appreciation of mary garth, and tender, devoted, and unselfish love for her, more clearly reveal his innate manliness, self-denial, and simplicity of character. this revelation is still further unfolded before us in his entire relations with fred vincy. that firm persistent interview in the billiard-room, is actuated by the one absorbing and self- abnegating desire that he may still be saved from the moral and spiritual decay impending over him: and when, in answer to fred's appeal for his intercession, we discover the blighting of his own hopes, the shattering of his love, the tender heart stricken to the core should fred prove, as he suspects, his successful rival, we discern in him a nature of the finest capabilities, and surely tending on and up toward the noblest ends; and we part from him as from a dear and valued friend, whose society has cheered and elevated us, whose pure simplicity of nature has refuted our vain pretensions, and whose memory clings to us as a fragrance and refreshment. there now only remains the last yet published, and in the estimation of many, the greatest, of george eliot's works--'daniel deronda.' in it the author takes up--not a new scope, but extends one that has all along been present, and that indeed was inevitably associated with her great ethical principle,--the bringing of that principle definitely and directly to bear upon not only every domestic but every social and political relation of human life. this tendency may be briefly expressed in the old and profound words: "no man liveth to himself; no man dieth to himself." as we aim toward the true and good and pure, or surrender ourselves the slaves of self and sense, we live or die to god or to the devil. before, however, proceeding to detailed examination of this remarkable work, it seems necessary to draw attention to one objection which has been urged against it--the prominent introduction of the jewish element into its scheme. such objection could scarcely have been put forward by any one who considers what the jew has been in the past--what an enormous factor his past and present have been and are, in the development and progress of our highest civilisation. historically, we first meet him coming forth from the arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom he is thrown. a terrible weapon arms him--a theism stern, hard, and pitiless, beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. to the bravest and best of his race--a moses and a joshua, a deborah and a jephtha--this presents ruthless massacre, the vilest treachery, offering up a sacrifice the dearest and most loved, not as mere permissible acts, but as deeds of religious homage solemnly enjoined by his most high. this theism has one central thought in which it practically stands alone, and which it was the aim of all its supposed heads and legislators to keep inviolate amid all surrounding antagonisms--the intense assertion of the divine unity. "hear, o israel! the lord thy god is _one_ lord." in these brief words lies the very core of judaism. so long as he holds fast by this central truth, the jew is exhibited to us as practically omnipotent. seas and floods divide before him; hosts numberless as the sands are scattered at his appearance; cyclopean walls fall prone at his trumpet-blast. and this thought of the divine unity, thus intensely pervading the national life, upfolds within capacity of indefinite development. no long time in the life of a nation elapses ere "the lord thy god is a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children," became "as a father pitieth his children, so the lord pitieth them that fear him." "can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, she _may_ forget; yet will not _i_ forget thee." in no sense of the word was the jew a creature of imagination. the stern and hard realities of his life would seem to have crushed out every trace of the aesthetic element within him. yet from among these people arose a literature, especially a hymnology, which has never been approached elsewhere; and it arose emphatically and distinctly out of the great central and animating thought of the divine unity. to the psalms so-called of david, the glorious outbursts of sacred song in their mythico-historical books, as in isaiah { } and some of the minor prophets, the finest of the vedic or orphic hymns or the homeric ballads are cold and spiritless. these address themselves to scholars alone, or chiefly to a cultivated few, and address themselves to them eloquently and gloriously. the hymns of the jews have so interpenetrated the very heart of humanity, so identified themselves with the best longings, the noblest aspirations, the purest hopes, and the deepest sorrows of man, that still, after more than twenty centuries, that wonderful hymnology breathes up day after day, week after week, from millions of households and hearts. they outbreathe its fervid aspirations toward a purer and diviner life. they give expression to its profound wailings over degradation and fall. they give utterance on all the inscrutable mysteries of existence; and ever and anon as the clouds and darkness break away from the infinite love,--they burst forth into the exultant cry, "god reigneth, let the earth be glad. . . . give thanks at remembrance of his _holiness_." but important as is this factor of judaism, there is another generally considered which has perhaps exercised a still more profound and cumulative influence on the civilisation especially of the west. this lies in the intense indestructible nationality of the race. eighteen centuries have passed since they became a people, "scattered and peeled," their "holy and beautiful house" a ruin, their capital a desolation, their land proscribed to the exile's foot. during these centuries deluge after deluge of so-called barbarians has swept over asia and europe: hun and tartar, alan and goth, suev and vandal,--we attach certain vague meanings to the names, but can the most learned scholar identify one individual of the true unmingled blood? all have disappeared, merged in the race they overran, in the kingdoms they conquered and devastated. the jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the jew: proscribed, persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined, as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without and beyond the despised and hated gentile. and this intense and conservative nationality springs essentially out of the central conception of judaism, "god is _one_." be he the incarnation of pitiless vengeance, hardening pharaoh's heart that he may execute sevenfold wrath on him and his people; be he the good shepherd, who "gathers the lambs in his arms," and for their sakes "tempers his rough wind in the day of his east wind;"--to the jew he has been and is, "i am the lord; that is my name; and my glory will i not give to another." through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all. persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail. on the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words embodied the central confession of judaism, "o israel, the lord _thy_ god is one lord." christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more central truth, "god is love," had to all appearance failed of its mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic presentation, dark and terroristic as that of judaism at its dawn, but had absorbed into its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet his god face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is his free gift to all who seek it. between this heathenised christianity and judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most embittered and unvarying. elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and indulgence even for the hunted monotheist,--in medieval christendom, never. the inquisition plied its rack for the jews with a more fiendish zeal than even for the hated morisco. the mob held him responsible for plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to indiscriminate massacre. the jew lived on through it all,--lived, multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the jew. is it too much to say that in the west in particular, where this contrast and contest were keenest, judaism was, during these long ages of terror and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the divine unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, all human advance is impossible? is it exaggerating the importance of the jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that, but for his presence, "scattered and peeled," among all nations, the europe we now know could not have been? and this indestructible nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account--has it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past? there seems an impression that the jew is being absorbed by other races. we hear much of relaxing judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to those around them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood the wear and tear of centuries. the inference is sought to be drawn that the jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national life amid that among which he dwells. we accept all the facts; but can only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought and research of its great leaders, judaism is shaking off the dust of ages, and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth. we believe it is coming forth from all this superficial change, more intensely and powerfully judaical, more penetrated and vivified by that thought which for untold centuries has been the life of its life. what is to be its specific future as a leader in the advancement and redemption of humanity, none can foresee. but it seems the reverse of strange that a genius like george eliot's should have been powerfully attracted by this problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it. that the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider the subject will, we think, deny. the establishment of a jewish polity, in the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the infinite holiness is supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and love;--the establishment of such a polity locally between the materialistic proclivities of the west and the psychological subtleties of the east, mediative between them, communicating from each to each of those essentials to human life in which the other is deficient, is a conception worthy of her genius. another minor and very trivial objection to the presence of this jewish element need be no more than adverted to. it is the presence of such different types as the mean-souled scoundrel lapidoth; the shrewd self- approving trader cohen, with the inimitable picture of a home-life so pleasant and kindly; the vague intense enthusiasm, the ardent aspirations and fervent hopes of mordecai; the absorbing judaism of the physician; the fierce revulsion of his daughter against her race and name; the meek, delicate, ethereal purity of mirah; the innate jewish yearnings and aspirations of deronda, expanded by all the breadth that could be given by the highest anglo-saxon culture and training. to those who take exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, as an artist, it was necessary to present every typical phase of jewish character and life; and we confess there are other passages in the work we could better spare than these delicious pictures of a london-jewish pawnbroker at home. of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not one so difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently in this wonderful work, gwendolen harleth. at once attractive and repellent--fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the estimation of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded--bewitching, alike from her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial and seemingly heartless coquette,--she presents a combination of at once some of the finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman. her hardness towards her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her sisters, are conspicuous almost from her first appearance. her arrogant defiance of deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion of pride with which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely in keeping with these characteristics. and the news of the reduction of her family to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf alone. yet, ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards her gentle mother break forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance with which her own claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves. her first acceptance of grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold nature; her rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview with mrs glasher, are equally characteristic of the second. that rejection is actuated much more by resentment against mrs glasher, that she should have dared to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to give, and against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a heart already sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest approach to it in her own. the leap, as it were, by which she ultimately accepts him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own deliverance from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external enjoyments of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in addition, a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters obtrudes, it holds only a very secondary place in her mind. deeming herself born for dominion over every male heart, in her utter childish ignorance of human character, she deems that grandcourt also shall be her slave. but through all her relations with that magnificent incarnation of self- isolation and self-love, she is compelled to cower before him. again and again she attempts to turn, only to be crushed under his heel as ruthlessly as a worm. during the yachting voyage it is the same; intense inward revulsion on the one side--cold, inexorable despotism on the other. the drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within her. the intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary murderous thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour of remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a nature which may yet be attuned to the highest qualities. on the other hand, the sweet clinging trust with which she hangs on deronda, looks up to him, feels that for her every possibility of good lies in association with him, are those of a guileless, artless child. she has been called a hard-hearted, callous woman of the world: her worldliness is on the surface alone. her first cry to deronda is the piteous wail of a forsaken child; the letter with which their relations close is the fond yearning of a child towards one whom she looks up to as protector and saviour. grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions as a type of concentrated selfishness. we dare not despise him, we cannot loathe him--we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. he never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation--never for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself. without a moment's exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. he stands up before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. we cannot conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him--all equally shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by human self-love. fain would we linger over the jewish girl, mirah. she has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness have ever been portrayed. from her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with deronda, her brother, and gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a jewess as--in harmony with the life of her race--one of "sufferance." even as her spirits gladden in that sunny meyrick home, with its delicious interiors, and brighten under the noble-hearted musician klesmer's encouragement, the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. in one sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. her sad, humble complaints that she has not been a good jewess, because she has been inevitably cut off from the use of jewish books, and restrained by her scoundrel father from attendance at jewish worship, find their answer in her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering. we feel with mrs meyrick "that she is a pearl, and the mud has only washed her." in her startling interview with gwendolen, the sudden indignant protest which the inquiry of the latter calls out is a protest against even a hint of evil being directed towards that which has been best and highest to her. her love for deronda steals into the maiden purity of her soul with an unconscious delicacy which cannot be surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she is no judith or esther, but the meek mary of the annunciation, going forth on her unknown mission of love with the words, "behold the handmaid of the lord." beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate head faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her race, stands up deronda in his calm dignity. as he lies on the grass, and the first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his life breaks upon him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment against sir hugo are softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; and the longings for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink from full discovery of what she may have been or may still be. he and he alone, in unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before grandcourt. his whole relations to mordecai are characterised by a deep suppressed enthusiasm, that fully responds to the enthusiast's soul. towards gwendolen every word he speaks, every act he does, is marked by the fervour of his whole nature; but it is beside the fair head drooping under its burden of hereditary sorrow that deronda passes from our sight, the fitting type of him who shall yet, sooner or later, re-establish that great jewish theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm that judaism yet holds a great place in human life and civilisation. we have throughout had no intention of dealing with george eliot merely as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these creations,--the question naturally arises, whether this does not constitute her an artist of the highest possible order. but the true worth of george eliot's works rests, we think, on higher grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground, specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound commentator on the solemn words, "he that loveth his soul shall lose it: he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal." footnotes: { } the translators of our english bible, possibly perplexed by the seeming paradox involved in these remarkable words, have taken an unwarrantable freedom with the original, in rendering the greek [greek text], invariably the synonym of the soul, the spiritual and undying element in man, by "life"--the [greek text] of all greek literature so- called, sacred and profane alike; the synonym of that life which is his in common with the beast of the field and the tree of the forest. { } perhaps no finer and more subtle illustration of this "instinct of the gentleman" can be found in literature than when, at the moment of harold transome's deepest humiliation, where jermyn claims him as his son, good old sir marmaduke, not only his political opponent but personally disliking him, for the first and only time in all their intercourse addresses him by his christian name, "come, _harold_." { } in connection with bulstrode occurs one of those delicate indications of character, condensed into a few words, which others would expand into pages, peculiar to george eliot. it occurs in the depth of his humiliation, when his wife, hitherto comparatively characterless, in full token of her acceptance of their fallen lot, "takes off all her ornaments, and puts on a plain gown, and instead of wearing her much adorned-cap and large bows of hair, brushes down her hair, and puts on a plain bonnet-cap, which makes her look like an early methodist." { } does all poetry ancient or modern, so-called sacred or profane, contain an image more impressive and majestic than that in the "doom of babylon," as the great incarnation of pride and luxury descends to its place: "hades from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations." [frontispiece: jane austen] jane austen and her country-house comedy by w. h. helm author of "aspects of balzac," etc. eveleigh nash fawside house london richard clay & sons, limited, bread street hill, e.c., and bungay, suffolk. to my mother "i concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed from that quality in the author. good-nature produces a disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express themselves with smartness against the errors of men, without bitterness towards their persons."--steele, _tatler_, no. . note the author is much indebted to the hon. c. m. knatchbull-hugessen, and also to messrs. macmillan & co., ltd., for permission to make extracts from the _letters of jane austen_. contents i dominant qualities jane austen's abiding freshness--why she has not more readers--characteristics of her work--absence of passion--balzac, jane austen, and charlotte brontë--jane in her home circle--her tranquil nature--her unselfishness--compared with dorothy osborne--prudent heroines--thoughtless admiration ii equipment and method literary influences--jane austen's defence of novelists--the old essayists--her favourite authors--some novels of her time--criticism of her niece's novel--sense of her own limitations--her method--humour--familiar names--some characteristics of style--suggested emendations--a new "problem" of authorship--a "forbidding" writer--"commonplace" and "superficial"--thomas love peacock--sapient suggestions iii contact with life origins of characters--matchmaking--second marriages--negative qualities of the novels--close knowledge of one class--dislike of "lionizing"--madame de staël--the "lower orders"--tradesmen--social position--quality of jane's letters--balls and parties iv ethics and optimism dr. whately on jane austen--"moral lessons" of her novels--charge of "indelicacy"--marriage as a profession--a "problem" novel--"the nostalgia of the infinite"--the "whitewashing" of willoughby--lady susan condemned by its author--_the watsons_--change in manners--no "heroes"--woman's love--the prince regent--_the quarterly review_ v the impartial satirist what has woman done?--"nature's salic law"--women deficient in satire--some types in the novels--the female snob--the valetudinarian--the fop--the too agreeable man--"personal size and mental sorrow"--knightley's opinion of emma--ashamed of relations--mrs. bennet--the clergy and their opinions--worldly life--absence of dogma--authors confused with their creations vi personal and topographical the novelist and her characters--her sense of their reality--accessories rarely described--her ideas on dress--her own millinery and gowns--thin clothes and consumption--domestic economy--jane as housekeeper--"a very clever essay"--mr. collins at longbourn--the gipsies at highbury--topography of jane austen--hampshire--lyme regis--godmersham--bath--london vii influence in literature jane austen's genius ignored--negative and positive instances--the literary orchard--jane's influence in english literature bibliographical note index frontispiece . . . . . . _by violet helm._ a letter of jane austen's { } jane austen and her country-house comedy i dominant qualities jane austen's abiding freshness--why she has not more readers--characteristics of her work--absence of passion--balzac, jane austen, and charlotte brontë--jane in her home circle--her tranquil nature--her unselfishness--compared with dorothy osborne--prudent heroines--thoughtless admiration. the year , which deprived england of her american colonies, was generous to english art and literature. had it only produced walter savage landor, or even no better worthy than james smith of the _rejected addresses_, it would not have done badly. but these were its added bounties. its greater gifts were turner, charles lamb and jane austen. could we be offered the choice of re-possessing the united states, or losing the very memory of these three, which alternative would we choose? { } it is difficult to appreciate the lapse of time since jane austen was at work. we are now within a few years of the centenary of her death. she had been laid beneath that black slab in winchester cathedral before the first railway had been planned, or the first telegraph wire stretched from town to town, or the first steamship steered across the atlantic. yet the must of age has not settled on her books. the lavender may lie between their pages, but it is still sweet, and there is many a successful novelist of our own times whose work is already far more out of date than hers. this perennial timeliness of atmosphere is no necessity of genius. fielding and scott remain a delight for succeeding generations, because they possess the essential quality of humanity, but the life which they offer us is largely remote from our own, foreign to our experience. jane austen invites us to enjoy a change of air among people with most of whom we may soon feel at ease, finding nothing in their conversation that will disturb our equanimity. if you are one of jane austen's lovers, you come back to her novels for a holiday from the noise and whirl of modern { } fiction, as you would come from a great city to the countryside or the coast village for rest and restoration. the failure of her books to attract the mass of novel-readers is due in the first place to a lack of "exciting" qualities. no syndicate that knew its business would offer them for serial purposes; they have no breathless "situations," and their strong appeal is to the calmer feelings and the intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. in one respect only has she anything in common with the popular novelists of our day. her set of characters is even more limited than theirs. the virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the frivolous coquette, the fascinating libertine, the worldly priest, are to be encountered in her pages, but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adventuress find no places there. what is often overlooked, however, by those who speak of jane austen's few characters, is that no two of them have quite the same characteristics of mind. they are differentiated with admirable art. even so, the types are few, and the smallness of the field which she cultivated has been frequently adduced as a bar to her inclusion among the { } masters of english fiction. she has the least range of them all. when one thinks of the host of strongly-marked types in scott, in dickens, in thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and incidents which fill the pages of their books, her few squires and parsons and unemployed officers, with their wives and daughters, who live out their days in georgian parlours and in shrubberies and parks, make a poor enough show in the dramatic and spectacular way. no particular passion dominates the life of any one of her leading personages. avarice, which has afforded such notable figures to almost every great novelist, in her world is only represented by meanness; lust and hate are nowhere strongly emphasized, even love is rarely permitted to suggest the possibility of becoming violent. there are no pecksniffs, quilps, père grandets, nor lord steynes; no lady kews, jane eyres, nor lisbeth fischers. only into the hearts of her younger women does jane austen throw the searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by her own feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her heroines still leave a large part of virtuous womankind unrepresented. { } balzac, describing the origins of his play _la marâtre_ to the manager who produced it, said: "we are not concerned with an appalling melodrama wherein the villain sets light to houses and massacres the inhabitants. no, i imagine a drawing-room comedy where all is calm, tranquil, pleasant. the men play peacefully at the whist-table, by the light of wax candles under little green shades. the women chat and laugh as they do their fancy needlework. presently they all take tea together. in a word, everything shows the influence of regular habits and harmony. but for all that, beneath this placid surface the passions are at work, the drama progresses until the moment when it bursts out like the flame of a conflagration. that is what i want to show." the scene described is jane austen's--the quiet parlour, the card-players, the women chatting, and working with their coloured silks, the tea-tray, the shaded candles, the general air of ease and tranquillity. we find it at mansfield park with the bertrams, at hartfield with the woodhouses, and, in spite of lydia and her "mamma," at longbourn with the bennets. but the _dénouement_ to which balzac looked for his { } effect has no attraction for jane austen. catherine morland, at northanger abbey, imagines some such tragedy smouldering into life below the surface of quiet habitude as balzac discovers in his horrid war of step-daughter and step-mother, and jane austen herself laughs with henry tilney at this impressionable country maiden whom he mocks while he admires. balzac and jane austen both strove to depict life, to show the motives and instincts of men and women as the causes of action; in his case of an energetic and passionate type, wherein the primary instincts are freely exercised, in her case, of a simple, orderly kind, which allows but little scope for the display of violence or the elaboration of plots. there are exceptions, of course, which for fear of the precise critic must at least be illustrated. balzac has his quiet pierrettes and rose cormons, who suffer as patiently and far more poignantly than an elinor dashwood or a fanny price; jane austen has her dissolute willoughbys and disturbing henry crawfords, and also her maria rushworths and mrs. clays, who throw their bonnets over the windmills with even less regard for their reputations than a beatrix de { } rochefide or a natalie de manerville. when a lapse from virtue on the part of any of her characters was, on some rare occasion, necessary to her plan, jane austen did not allow any prudish reserve to stand in the way, but it may be said no less unreservedly that she never introduced vice where her story could do quite as well without it, and it is never the central motive of her novels. it is, then, not alone for the narrowness of her field that her title to greatness has often been disputed. many persons whose literary tastes are marked by understanding and catholicity refuse to acknowledge the genius of so peaceful a novelist. because of the absence of passion and sentiment in jane austen's works, the author of _jane eyre_ would not recognize in her the great artist that scott and coleridge believed her to be. "the passions," wrote miss brontë, "are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition--too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress." the three novelists here brought into momentary { } association, the creators of _eugénie grandet_, _emma_, and _jane eyre_ represent three distinctive forces in fiction. charlotte brontë, disillusioned with the world, of which she knew very little, and angry at its follies and injustices, sat alone and poured out her feelings in her books; balzac, hungry for fame, wrote furiously all night by the light of a dip, stimulating his fiery imagination with the strong coffee which was the irresponsible author of many of his most astonishing chapters; jane austen, taking her meals and her rest regularly, sat at her little desk in the parlour where her mother and sister were sewing or writing letters, and placidly turned her observations and reflections into manuscript. her hazel eyes, we may be certain, never rolled in any kind of frenzy, her brown curls were never disturbed by the spasmodic movements of nervous hands. great artist as she was, she had no greater share of the "artistic temperament" than many a popular novelist who "turns out" two or three serial stories at a time by the simple process of shuffling the situations, changing the scenery, and re-naming the characters. if she had been touched by the strong emotion of a charlotte brontë, or the { } burning imagination of a balzac, she might have produced work which would have set the world on fire, instead of merely infusing keen happiness into responsive minds and compelling their love and admiration. that is only to say that if she had been somebody else she would not have been herself. it is peace, not war, that she carries to us. even her irony is not of the sardonic kind, and in her work the "master spell" is so daintily mingled that the bitter ingredients seem to have disappeared in the making. respect and admiration and sympathy in a high degree have been given by millions of minds, not always emotional, to many authors, but jane austen is loved as few have been. the love is inspired by her works, and she shares it with elizabeth bennet, emma woodhouse, and anne elliot. milton, in a line which is as clear in meaning as it is foggy in construction, speaks of eve as "the fairest of her daughters." jane austen is regarded by the generality of her lovers as the most delightful of her own heroines, and not merely as the woman who brought them into existence. could we have loved her so much if we had { } lived with her at steventon rectory or at chawton cottage? what she was at home i think we know much better from her own letters than from her brother henry's panegyric, which, in spite of its obvious sincerity of intention, too nearly resembles the memorial inscriptions of his own period to be regarded with quite as much confidence as respect. "faultless herself," he wrote, "as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive, or forget." "always" is a word which--as captain corcoran discovered of its reverse--can hardly ever be used without considerable reservations. we know, from her own pen, that jane--we call one unwedded queen "elizabeth," why should we not call another "jane"?--did not "always" show so much tenderness for the faults of others, and when we remember the endless variety of human nature we cannot but regard this ascription of "faultlessness" by an affectionate brother as of little more evidential value than mrs. dashwood's opinion (in _sense and sensibility_) of the "faultlessness" of marianne's lovers. it is no disparagement to henry austen to say that his little { } memoir is more convincing as a record of his own character than of his sister's. their nephew, mr. austen leigh, who wrote the fullest and most admirable account of jane austen, was still in his teens when she died. apart from these sparse reminiscences we know practically nothing about her except from her own novels and letters, but from them we may learn almost as much of the mind of this delightful woman as any loving relation could have told us. it may be possible for an author to write an artificial novel without betraying his own nature to any positive extent, but such novels as jane austen's cannot so be produced; it is possible to write letters which, apart from the penmanship, offer no evidences of character; but a pair of devoted sisters, however different their ability or their philosophy of life, could not correspond during twenty years without displaying much of the workings of their minds. some of jane's literary admirers think that she was lively and talkative, others that she was prone to silence in company. probably both views are correct. it depended on the company. among those who could appreciate her fun and her wit, her harmless quips and quizzing, she was { } full of vivacity; among those who raised their eyebrows at her impromptu verses and missed the points of her piquant remarks on persons and incidents she was speedily content, within the bounds of good manners, to observe rather than to join in the comedy of conversation. we need not unreservedly believe her brother's assurance that "she never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression," but we may, from all we know of her, be fairly confident that she had a control over her tongue which few such gifted humourists have possessed. as for her temper, it was said in her family that "cassandra had the _merit_ of having her temper always under command, but that jane had the _happiness_ of a temper that never required to be commanded." that her nature was not, in any marked degree, what is commonly called "sympathetic" we may see from many passages in her letters, and her novels afford ample corroboration. there was no avoidable hypocrisy about her. in this at least she is the counterpart of elizabeth or anne. "do not be afraid of my encroaching on your privilege of universal goodwill. you need not. there are { } few people whom i really love, and still fewer of whom i think well. the more i see of the world, the more am i dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." in a letter from jane austen to cassandra there would have been nothing to surprise us in this passage, which is actually taken from the remarks of elizabeth bennet to her sister on the subject of bingley's long silence after the netherfield ball. if jane austen did not cry over misfortunes which did not affect her, neither did she pretend to ignore the affectations and weaknesses even of her nearest relations. can it be supposed, for instance, that she was in the least degree blinded to the shortcomings of a beloved mother of whom she could, on various occasions, write such news as that she "continues hearty, her appetite and nights are very good, but she sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a liver disorder"? a daughter and sister and friend whose attention was so closely devoted, however { } unobtrusively, to the study of character in a narrow circle, would in most cases be "a little trying," but when the observer was endowed with a keen sense of the absurd, and an irony which, however weak in caustic, was strong in veracity, it might be supposed that she would be an _enfant terrible_ of that mature kind which in our own days is commoner than the nursery variety. in her case, the supposition would be ill-founded. she was at once too well-bred, and too kind-hearted, to let her special powers of wounding take exercise on gentle hearts. but falsehood of any sort was abhorrent to her, and as a consequence she was inclined, in communing with her sister, to show herself a little intolerant even of those amiable pretences of sorrow for common ailments and small troubles which are so soothing to weak humanity. she rejected, for example, the idea of commiserating with any one on account of a cold or a headache, unless there were feverish symptoms! of the "vacant chaff well-meant for grain" of which tennyson sings so sadly, jane brought little to market. she would express to cassandra her sympathy with their acquaintances under great { } disasters and trivial misfortunes with the same penful of ink. what she wrote to her sister--of her devotion for whom, from earliest childhood, her mother said, "if cassandra was going to have her head cut off, jane would insist on sharing her fate"--is far more free than what she uttered in the family circle. few have realized better the value of the unspoken word, or given their relations less opportunity to remind them of the evils of indiscretion. if she was unemotional and, in the ordinary sense of the word, unsympathetic, she is not to be blamed for this lack of the qualities with one of which she so amply endowed marianne and with the other elinor dashwood. we can no more make ourselves emotional or sympathetic than we can make ourselves fair or dark, or rather, we can only alter our ways as we can alter our complexions, by artifice. the outward show of sympathy which is not felt is one of the commonest of hypocrisies, perhaps inevitable at times from very charity. happily it is not a necessary part of that ultimate barrier which, even in the truest friendships and the deepest love, makes it as impossible for one human being to see the { } whole of another's heart as it is impossible to see more than a little of the "other side" of the moon. we cannot help being more or less unfeeling, but we can subdue our selfishness in action. almost everything that can be learned about jane austen strengthens the conviction that she was one of the least selfish of women. in her last illness the fidelity of her spirit is constantly shown, and her affection becomes more unreserved in its utterance. there is one letter wherein, after speaking of cassandra, she says, in a phrase curiously suggestive of thackeray: "as to what i owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, i can only cry over it, and pray god to bless them more and more." that she was by nature "meek and lowly," as one of her american adorers declares, i cannot believe, but if she preferred the spacious rooms and well-spread board of her brother's mansion to the common parlour and boiled mutton-and-turnips of her father's rectory, she did not grizzle over her state, nor did she allow her conscious superiority of intelligence to claim distinction in her home. one of the few glimpses (apart from { } her own writings) that we have of her in her family relations is when, in the closing year of her life, her illness having begun to weaken her body, she was obliged to lie down frequently during the day. there was only one sofa at chawton cottage, and although mrs. austen, in spite of the many ailments she had formerly complained of, was a tolerably healthy old lady, the stricken daughter made herself a couch by putting several chairs together, and declared that she preferred it to the sofa which her mother commonly occupied. sofas, we must remember, were at least as rare then as oak-panelled walls are now. it was in those days that cobbett regretted that the sofa had ever been introduced into his country, and he no doubt, according to his habit, held the prime minister responsible for the aid to effeminate indulgence of which his contemporary cowper sang. jane's discontent with the comparative poverty of her surroundings was not translated into ill temper. there are many reasons for believing, and few indeed for doubting, that she tried to do her duty in that state of life to which she was born, and from which she was not destined to { } emerge into the more varied pleasures and pains of a larger world. what if, among those whom she trusted, she could not resist expressing the lively thoughts suggested to her acute wit by the acts or utterances of her friends. she was the pride of her family, and its sunshine, even if her rays were more akin to the sun as we know him on a fine spring day at home than as we seek him on the côte d'azur. she seems to have been more nearly understood among the clergy and squires, and other members of her family, than most humourists in their immediate circles. the common experience of the genius in childhood and youth, if biographers are to be credited, is for the delicate shoots of his intelligence to be nipped by domestic frosts; but if there had been any freezing in the austen family, it was more likely to be produced by the chill of jane's own satirical remarks than by any harm that the convention and narrowness of others could do to a mind so well defended as hers. there are few traces of any such wintry weather having occurred at steventon or chawton. jane was certainly beloved, greatly and deservedly, in her home. she was, no doubt, a little { } lonely, as genius, one may suppose, must always be, and as those who are blest, or curst, with a strong sense of the absurd must be whether they be geniuses or not. her sister was her closest friend, but jane's published letters to cassandra, read in the light of the novels, suggest a reserve in discussing her inmost thoughts with that devoted spirit which seems hardly compatible with the closest concordance of ideas, in spite of the completest concordance of affection and a high respect on jane's part for cassandra's sound sense and critical judgment. very different is the tone of the letters of that other pretty humourist, dorothy osborne, to william temple. in dorothy's case there was a perfect confidence in the entire sympathy and comprehension of the recipient. this factor apart, how much there is in common between the two dear women. the one was dead more than eighty years before the other was born, but in all the history of womanhood is there any pair in which the smiling philosophy that is the salt of the mind is more fairly divided? jane austen lives still in elizabeth bennet and in emma woodhouse; dorothy osborne only in her sweet self. the one had { } no passion but her work--and it was a quiet, unconsuming passion. the other had no passion but her love, and it was never able to overmaster her intelligence. "in earnest," she wrote, "i am no more concerned whether people think me handsome or ill-favoured, whether they think i have wit or that i have none, than i am whether they think my name elizabeth or dorothy." it was not quite true in her case, nor would it have been in jane's, but it contains no more exaggeration than is allowed to any woman of sense, and it was as true of the one as of the other. love has lately been defined by a ruthless analyzer of feelings as "a specific emotion, exclusive in selection, more or less permanent in duration, and due to a mental fermentation in itself caused by a law of attraction." jane austen had never read such an explanation of love as this, yet her views on the most powerful of the mixings of animal and spiritual instincts are usually more placid than would please the fancies of maidens who sleep with bits of wedding-cake beneath their pillows. that passionate love "is woman's whole existence" is not exemplified by jane's favourite heroines. emma or elizabeth did not { } so regard it, even if anne elliot did lose some of her good looks and catherine morland her appetite when their hopes of particular bridegrooms seemed likely to be disappointed. elizabeth would not have worried greatly over darcy if he had not come back for her, and emma would have been as happy at hartfield without a husband as she had always been, so long as knightley was friendly. we cannot imagine that jane austen could ever have written to any man, as dorothy osborne wrote to temple of a love which she could not make her family understand: "for my life i cannot beat into their heads a passion that must be subject to no decay, an even perfect kindness that must last perpetually, without the least intermission. they laugh to hear me say that one unkind word would destroy all the satisfaction of my life, and that i should expect our kindness should increase every day, if it were possible, but never lessen." the conjugal instinct was not strongly developed in jane; and, although she seems to have been very fond of children, and especially of her nephews and nieces, it may be assumed with some { } confidence that the maternal instinct also found little place in her nature. marianne dashwood, emotional, fastidiously truthful--she left to her elder sister "the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it"--romantically fond of scenery and poetry as any of mrs. radcliffe's heroines, stands out among the girls of jane's imagining as the only one who outwardly exhibits the conventional signs of passionate affection for a lover, catherine's and fanny's emotions being more suggestive of maiden fancies, of "the flimsy furniture of a country miss's brain," than of the yearnings of a juliet or a roxane. nevertheless the idea that the austen people are cold-blooded is warmly opposed in an appreciative little essay published in america a few years ago by mr. w. l. phelps. "let no one believe," he writes, "that jane austen's men and women are deficient in passion because they behave with decency: to those who have the power to see and interpret, there is a depth of passion in her characters that far surpasses the emotional power displayed in many novels where the lovers seem to forget the meaning of such words as honour, { } virtue, and fidelity." it may be that, like richard feverel on a certain occasion, the henrys and edwards, the emmas and annes are "too british to expose their emotions." but lucy feverel, one of the purest and truest women in fiction, shows passion so that no special "power to see and interpret" is requisite on the reader's part, and the same note is true of many of the charming heroines drawn by the masters of imagination. at any rate jane allowed her heroines as much passion and sentiment as--so far as we can discover--she experienced herself. the one known man who seems to have come near to being regarded as her accepted lover was thomas lefroy, who lived to be chief justice of ireland. "you scold me so much," she writes, in her twenty-first year, to cassandra, "in the nice long letter which i have this moment received from you, that i am almost afraid to tell you how my irish friend and i behaved. imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. i _can_ expose myself, however, only _once more_, because he leaves the country soon after next friday, on which day we _are_ to have a { } dance at ashe after all. he is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, i assure you. but as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, i cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to steventon, and ran away when we called on mrs. lefroy a few days ago." no coquettish "reigning beauty" was ever more easy as to the fate of her lovers, or less likely to suffer at their hands, than this hampshire maiden, whose fine complexion, hazel eyes, and well-proportioned figure attracted so much admiration, and whose sweet voice and lively conversation completed the conquest of those whom she cared to entertain. "tell mary," she writes to her sister (also in ), "that i make over mr. heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which c. powlett wanted to give me, as i mean to confine myself in future to mr. tom lefroy, for whom i don't care six-pence." { } this agreeable irishman, to whom, in later years, we find references in the records of the edgeworth family, was speedily to pass out of jane's young life. very soon she has to write: "at length the day is come on which i am to flirt my last with tom lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. my tears flow as i write at the melancholy idea. william chute called here yesterday. i wonder what he means by being so civil." we need not picture her as stopping her writing while she wiped the tears from her streaming eyes. "we went by bifrons," she says on another occasion, "and i contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him on whom i once fondly doted." she never did "dote" on any man, so far as can be discovered or reasonably surmised, to any greater extent than her favourite emma may be said to have "doted" on frank churchill. emma's feelings about the man who was secretly engaged to jane fairfax at the time, are thus analyzed by jane austen-- "emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. her ideas only varied as to the { } how much. at first she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards but little. she had great pleasure in hearing frank churchill talked of; and, for his sake, greater pleasure than ever in seeing mr. and mrs. weston; she was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was, how were his spirits, how was his aunt, and what was the chance of his coming to randalls again this spring. but, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual.... 'i do not find myself making any use of the word _sacrifice_,' said she. 'in not one of all my clever replies, my delicate negatives, is there any allusion to making a sacrifice. i do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness. so much the better. i certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than i do. i am quite enough in love. i should be sorry to be more.'" save for willoughby's burst of misplaced enthusiasm over marianne, frank churchill's description of jane fairfax to emma is the warmest bit of love-painting in the austen comedy-- "she is a complete angel. look at her. is not she an angel in every gesture? observe the turn of her throat. observe her eyes, as she is looking up at my father. you will be glad to { } hear (inclining his head, and whispering seriously) that my uncle means to give her all my aunt's jewels. they are to be new set. i am resolved to have some in an ornament for the head. will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?" such raptures as these are rarely permitted to the austen lovers. in their affairs of the heart, as in the general conduct of their lives, plain living and quiet thinking reflect the simple habits of the people among whom jane passed her own smoothly-ordered life. to the simplicity of that life we owe one of her peculiar charms. if she had been the famous, sought-after literary woman who is the necessary complement of a dinner-party in a house of cultured luxury, and whose name is found in the index of every volume of contemporary reminiscences, she would not have been half so attractive to the type of mind that most enjoys her novels. yet when all possible allowance has been made for her lightness of expression her own predilections were certainly for the conditions of "opulent leisure" rather than of decent comfort, for the amenities of mansfield park and pemberley rather than for those of fullerton rectory or the { } dashwoods' cottage. "people get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world," she wrote from steventon to her sister at godmersham, "that i have no patience with them. kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there." this was written early in her life. in the year before she died, writing to her niece fanny, she said: "single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony, but i need not dwell on such arguments with _you_, pretty dear." contempt for poverty is expressed by several characters in her work. "be honest and poor, by all means"--says mary crawford to edmund bertram--"but i shall not envy you; i do not much think i shall even respect you. i have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich." perhaps neither the real jane nor the imaginary mary is to be taken quite literally, but that jane would have freely assented to a disbelief in the wisdom of marrying on a small income, however little she approved of mary's "too positive admiration for wealth," is certain from all that { } we know of her opinions on the essentials of happiness. godmersham is in kent, and it was in that spacious, well-provided house of her brother edward, amid all the charms of parks and beechwoods, of home comforts and "elegances" that marked the life of the large landowner in those days, that she usually found herself most contented. then was the time when the squire was not driven to find an income by letting his manor to a company promoter to whom the difference between an oak and an elm is scarcely known, and whose chief object in hiring a mansion in rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end parties who play bridge indoors on summer afternoons and leave the beauties of the gardens and the park to the peacocks and the deer. with such a modern plutocrat jane would have had little in common, but she would have had less with the modern socialist. landed property stood for everything stable and dignified in her days, and those critics of _pride and prejudice_ who unkindly emphasized the fact that elizabeth bennet only decided to marry darcy after she had seen the glories of pemberley and its park { } and gardens, while they implicitly libelled the girl, were not so unfair to the general sentiment of her period. sir walter scott, by the way, was one of those who regarded elizabeth bennet's change of feeling towards darcy as the result of her visit to the fine place in derbyshire. surely such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the humour of the conversation on this point between jane bennet and her sister. the elder girl asks the younger how long it is since she has felt any affection for darcy, and elizabeth replies: "it has been coming on so gradually, that i hardly know when it began; but i believe i must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at pemberley." even jane bennet, whose humour sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give a serious answer. this much may be admitted, that the idea of marrying the curate never presented itself to any one of the maidens who brighten the novels of jane austen with their charms of mind and appearance. elinor dashwood seems to have regarded about £ a year (with sure prospect of increase) as the minimum on which married life could hopefully be entered upon, and i fancy { } jane would have agreed with her. the majority of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and heroine whose love will triumph over all obstacles of position, and opposition, of want of sympathy on the part of others or of sense on their own, and there have actually been readers who thought lydia bennet more "interesting" than elizabeth! the prudence of the heroines may to some small extent account for the failure of jane austen's work to captivate the "great heart of the public." in any case her fame is far from universal. she has never been, and never will be, popular in the sense in which the men and women whose publishers cheerfully print first editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. her appeal, in her own lifetime, when her name was unknown, was not to "the general," and it is only much less restricted now because of the enormous increase in the reading public. actually it is immensely greater; relatively, its increase is evidently small. one cannot, as in the case of some authors, describe her work as being enjoyed only by the cultured class, and neglected, because misapprehended, by the rest. true culture is always discriminating, even in the presence of its { } divinities. mr. anthony hope said not long ago, referring to literary snobbishness: "there are certain companies in which to suggest, even with the utmost humility, that certain parts of jane austen's novels are less entertaining than other parts is thought considerably worse than drawing invidious distinctions between various passages of holy writ." with those who regard jane austen's work as equally excellent in every part, no patience is possible. the reader who finds it easy to get as much enjoyment from _sense and sensibility_ or _northanger abbey_ as from _pride and prejudice_ or _mansfield park_ must be blessed with a comfortable absence of discrimination. those who see no degree of superiority in the presentation of the characters of elizabeth bennet and anne elliot as compared with elinor dashwood and catherine morland might be expected to regard blanche amory and mrs. jarley as the equals respectively of becky sharp and mrs. gamp. such uncritical admiration as mr. anthony hope referred to is even more annoying than the tone in which i have heard a distinguished writer speak of jane austen as "that woman"--the { } mildest of the contemptuous terms that napoleon applied to madame de staël. the author who spoke of jane austen so slightingly admitted her power of presenting a "bloodless" and trivial society in a life-like manner. no such recognition of power is allowed to her by an american critic of to-day, who says of her work "it may be called art, but it is a poor species of that old art which depended for its effect upon false similitudes." it is hard to believe that the writer of this astonishing opinion had read many pages of the author he thus condemned to a place among the third-rates. { } ii equipment; and method literary influences--jane austen's defence of novelists--the old essayists--her favourite authors--some novels of her time--criticism of her niece's novel--sense of her own limitations--her method--humour--familiar names--some characteristics of style--suggested emendations--a new "problem" of authorship--a "forbidding" writer--"commonplace" and "superficial"--thomas love peacock--sapient suggestions. "i believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign jane austen was born and died. but the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. macaulay declared that but for fanny burney's example jane austen would never have been a novelist. some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary { } form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired richardson, who, i think, fired her ambition quite as much as miss burney. it would also seem that mrs. radcliffe's wild romances had induced in jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular. i doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of buffon could be more justly applied than to jane austen. "_le style est la femme même_" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. _clarissa_, _sir charles grandison_ and _pamela_ influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. miss burney she now and then laughs at a little, { } as when, after john thorpe has said to catherine (who confesses she has never read _camilla_): "you had no loss, i assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning latin; upon my soul, there is not," jane austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor catherine." but where she loved she laughed. she appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "there are two traits in her character which are pleasing--namely, she admires camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea." scott's poetry, of course, jane read and enjoyed. three of his most popular novels--_waverley_, _guy mannering_, and _the antiquary_--appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. how wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of jane's letters of , where she says: "walter scott has no business to write novels; { } especially good ones. it is not fair. he has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. i do not like him, and do not mean to like _waverley_ if i can help it, but i fear i must." she herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. she did not, like robert burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. the offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her. the machine-made horrors of ann radcliffe--"_la reine des épouvantements_" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition--were as familiar to jane as were those, far less _pouvantable_, of ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. the radcliffe novels were published between jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction { } which they represent that we chiefly owe _northanger abbey_, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of shakespeare: "my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; coral is far more red than her lips' red: * * * * * i grant i never saw a goddess go,-- my mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground." it is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of miss burney and of miss edgeworth-- "let us not desert one another--we are an injured body. although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. from pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of england, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of milton, pope, and prior, with a paper from the _spectator_, and a chapter from sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,--there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and { } undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'i am no novel-reader.--i seldom look into novels.--do not imagine that '_i_ often read novels.--it is really very well for a novel.' such is the common cant. 'and what are you reading, miss----?' 'oh! it is only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'it is only _cecilia_, or _camilla_, or _belinda_;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the _spectator_, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it." { } this is a hard saying for those who count "sir roger de coverley," "mr. bickerstaff," and many "clarindas" and "sophronias" among their friends. the age of the regency may or may not have been as lax in its morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the pages of the _spectator_ is not easily to be believed. the girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their novels. they did not read french fiction as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it scarcely possible to read french "without contracting some pollution, so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." times had changed since dorothy osborne discussed the voluminous romances of calprenède and mademoiselle de scudéri with william temple. another important branch of jane's private and voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of steele and addison { } and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the _spectator_ and the _tatler_ which had their little days and died, particularly during the reign of george ii. not only in the _rambler_ and the _idler_ of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in the _world_, the _mirror_, the _lounger_, the _connoisseur_, and other less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own. her favourite poet was crabbe. she never met him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to say, "if she ever married at all, she could fancy being mrs. crabbe." her appreciation of such poems as _the village_ and _the parish register_ is suggestive. she herself made no attempt to illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." born in a family which was itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the peasantry. george crabbe, on the other { } hand, the son of lowly folk, was born and nurtured in poverty, and he never forgot that he had sprung from the sand-dunes of the east coast. his pictures of the poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the most delightful of his verses; his ease in their society, his understanding of their minds and characters mark him off as clearly from jane austen as--to take a very modern instance--the admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in la vendée offered in _la terre qui meurt_ distinguish m. rené bazin from m. marcel batilliat, who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence of the château in _la vendée aux genêts_. jane found in crabbe something that she missed in herself, a ready appreciation of all classes. she loved cowper too, both in his poems and his prose. there was much in _the task_ that could not but please her, though the humour must have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and the descriptions over-laboured. cowper, though kindly to the rural poor, and often referring to their occupations, smiles derisively at those who pretend to envy the labourer's lot and to regard his cottage, if properly "rose-bordered," as preferable to any other kind of residence. { } "so farewell envy of the _peasant's nest_! if solitude make scant the means of life, society for me! thou seeming sweet, be still a pleasing object in my view; my visit still, but never mine abode." jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of these lines. in some verses--composed in for a family competition in producing rhymes with "rose"--which, but for the rhyming, are a burlesque of cowper's style, we find a picture of a cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be naturally of small account, are lines that would mark it, without the direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not cassandra's or mrs. austen's. "happy the lab'rer in his sunday clothes! in light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose, and hat upon his head, to church he goes; as oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws a glance upon the ample cabbage-rose, which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose, he envies not the gayest london beaux. in church he takes his seat among the rows, pays to the place the reverence he owes, likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows, lists to the sermon in a softening doze, and rouses joyous at the welcome close." there is a letter of january from johnson to bennet langton which, as boswell remarks, shows its writer "in as easy and pleasant a state of { } existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy." i cannot help quoting it here as evidence of an affinity of johnson, in his happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful admirer, jane austen-- "the two wartons just looked into the town, and were taken to see _cleone_, where, david says, they were starved for want of company to keep them warm. david and doddy have had a new quarrel, and, i think, cannot conveniently quarrel any more. _cleone_ was well acted by all the characters, but bellamy left nothing to be desired. i went the first night, and supported it as well as i might; for doddy, you know, is my patron, and i would not desert him. the play was very well received. doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor cleone. i have left off housekeeping, and therefore made presents of the game which you were pleased to send me. the pheasant i gave to mr. richardson, the bustard to dr. lawrence, and the pot i placed with miss williams, to be eaten by myself.... mr. reynolds has within these few days raised his price to twenty guineas a head, and miss is much employed in miniatures. i know not anybody else whose prosperity has increased since you left them." { } if the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one of jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed "boswellian." "david" is garrick, of course, while "doddy" is dodsley, author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the langton pheasant is the author of _clarissa_, another of jane's favourites more than thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up. richardson, fanny burney, ann radcliffe, maria edgeworth (after ), scott (as poet), johnson, crabbe, and cowper, then, afforded the more solid literary nourishment of jane austen. she had studied the essayists of queen anne's time and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "mrs. martin," she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. she might have spared this pretension to _our_ family, who { } are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, i suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers." unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure. the novels supplied by "mrs. martin" and others, forerunners of those which now go forth from the strand and oxford street, are frequently referred to in jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at the british museum. there was, for example, sarah burney's _clarentine_, which jane and her mother read for the third time (in ), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is ... full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was _self-control_, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but which jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her own work forestalled by it; there was the _alphonsine_ of madame de genlis, which "did not do. we were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure"; and there was _margiarna_, which the austens were reading in the winter of , at { } southampton, and "like very well indeed. we are just going to set off for northumberland to be shut up in widdrington tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain." about the same time cassandra tells of some romance which the godmersham circle has been devouring, and jane replies--"to set up against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got _ida of athens_, by miss owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. we have only read the preface yet, but her irish girl does not make me expect much. if the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather." we shall not find much criticism of books either in the novels or the letters. there is a passage in one of "aunt jane's" letters to her niece anna, written in , in which her point of view on one important question of style is clearly expressed. anna, probably inspired by her aunt's example--for the authorship of _sense and sensibility_ and _pride and prejudice_ had leaked out { } in the family in spite of all precaution--had written a novel herself, and had sent the ms. to jane for kindly consideration and advice. the result was not wholly encouraging-- "your aunt c. (cassandra) does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. it will not be so great an objection to me if it does. i allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort.... i have scratched out the introduction between lord portman and his brother and mr. griffin. a country surgeon (don't tell mr. c. lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank, and when mr. p. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the honourable. that distinction is never mentioned at such times, at least i believe not." of a later novel of anna's, which jane "read to your aunt cassandra in our own room at night, while we undressed," she tells the girl that "devereux forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but i wish you would not let { } him plunge into a 'vortex of dissipation.' i do not object to the thing, but i cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that i dare say adam met with it in the first novel he opened...." mrs. austen had said, and jane agreed with her, that anna had allowed a married couple in the novel to be too long in returning a visit from the vicar's wife, and jane had ventured to expunge, as "too familiar and inelegant," the "bless my heart" in which sir thomas, one of the characters, indulged. jane's own emma might say "good god!" when she pleased, but anna's sir thomas might not even bless his heart! a last criticism on anna's book is worth quoting for its direct bearing on the critic's own method. "you describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. you give too many particulars of right hand and left." jane's estimate of her own manner of work is modest enough. "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which i work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour," she says. { } with this phrase of her own as a text she has been called a "miniaturist," but if authors and artists are to be compared, there is quite as much of the selection and the richness of a gainsborough in her work as of the minuteness of a metzu or a meissonier. in her reply to the amazing proposal of the librarian at carlton house that she should compose an historical romance founded on the records of the saxe-coburg family, she writes, not without a touch of her gentle satire-- "i am fully sensible that (such a romance) might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as i deal in. but i could no more write a romance than an epic poem. i could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other people, i am sure i should be hung before i had finished the first chapter. no, i must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though i may never succeed again in that, i am convinced that i should totally fail in any other." her limitations of subject are clear to her own mind. even of the "domestic life in villages" { } she would only deal with the side where the daily bread was provided out of income, not out of retail profits or weekly wages. it is a suggestive fact, to which i have already alluded, that she never even tried to draw a peasant's family. her heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a cottage to inquire after a sick child or leave a charitable gift, but of the conditions under which the labouring classes lived, during the hard times of the french wars, we learn nothing at all from her writings. the nearest approaches to such subjects are the account of the prices' home at portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, i think not unjustly, to be as vivid in its suggestion of impecuniosity and discomfort as anything written by zola), and the similar, but far less effective, picture of the watsons' family life. her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and so, in comparison with that of "stylists," it certainly is. she had stored her mind with good literature while still in her teens, and no doubt most of her limpid sentences flowed freely from her pen. but the consistent absence of superfluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence that she had consciously formed an ideal of { } composition, and that she thought out the means of producing her effects is clear from several passages in her letters. to her niece who addressed her as "dear miss darcy," and wanted her to answer in that character, jane replied--"even had i more time i should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that miss d. would write." she had studied her art till she could analyze its qualities, as we may see from a letter written from chawton in . mrs. austen had been reading _pride and prejudice_ aloud to jane and martha lloyd (who lived with the austens), and jane tells cassandra that-- "though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. upon the whole, however, i am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. the work is rather too light and bright and sparkling, it wants shade--to be stretched out here and there ... an essay on writing, a critique on walter scott, or the history of buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style." happily she did not provide the conventional "shade," which would have been on a par with { } the "brown tree" that, according to sir george beaumont, was an indispensable feature of every properly composed landscape painting. shade, however, did appear in several chapters of _persuasion_, which, for a certain suggestion of melancholy, stands apart from the other novels, though not as markedly as _northanger abbey_ stands apart for its exuberant frivolity. macaulay declared of fanny burney's later style that it was "the worst that has ever been known among men." jane austen's style, in its happy hours, is so admirably adapted to its purpose that, while we may not call it "the best," a term which advertisement has rendered meaningless as a standard of excellence, it has never been surpassed as a means to a desired end. it seems trite to say that the first point to consider in any question of style is the intended result, but it is a point so frequently overlooked that much criticism about art and letters, as about politics or agriculture, is vitiated by the hopeless effort to set up an abstract ideal applicable to all cases, like a universal watch-key. the result for which jane austen worked can scarcely be put in question. she was impelled to { } make her little world live in fiction, not precisely as she saw it and heard it, but as she could most attractively present it to minds possessing the indispensable modicum of humour, without which the charm is lost at least as nearly as the charm of a turner sunset by a person whose optic nerve is irresponsive to the red rays. apart from her prevailing humour, the modesty of her style is a continual beauty. there is none of that florid eloquence which depends more on sound than sense for its effect, nor of that forcing of strange phrases which in these days so often passes for literary excellence. there is no preciosity about her books; the narrative is easy, the incidents are probable; the dialogue, with few exceptions, is natural, the bright people being differentiated from the dull by their talk, and not, as in most novels, by the author's assurances. if mr. meredith was right when he declared that "it is unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better than they should be," there must be many "unwholesome" pages in jane austen's work for the tolerably large class to which he referred. neither in real life nor in the life of her books did she "suffer fools gladly," { } and so far as the men of her creation are concerned she is on the whole more successful in representing the foolish than the wise. her chief failure is in the realization of such a young man as one of her heroines would have been likely to admire. most of the younger men are sketchily drawn, and we who are men would fain believe that she did not understand the nature of a man's heart, seeing that she never found one worth accepting. knightley and bertram seem to have been favourites of hers, but they are not lively people, nor sufficiently wanting in priggishness. the liveliest of them all is henry tilney, whatever his qualities of mind. the jane austen touch is charmingly varied, and it is felt in some of its happy strokes in the talk between this mercurial young rector and the girl whose early-budding affections he so speedily returns. "'have you been long in bath, madam?' "'about a week, sir,' replied catherine, trying not to laugh. "'really!' with affected astonishment. "'why should you be surprised, sir?' "' why, indeed!' said he, in his natural tone; 'but some emotion must appear to be raised by { } your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other.'" this bit of dialogue recalls a remark in a letter written by jane to cassandra: "benjamin portal is here. how charming that is! i do not exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that i could not help putting it down." mr. collins is one of the most finished of jane's studies of men. he comes near to the impossible at times, but she makes him a living creature. the speech in which he offers his hand and advantages to his cousin elizabeth has often been quoted, and its charms can never fade. only a page of it is necessary to tempt the reader to turn--again or for the first time--to _pride and prejudice_ in order that he may find the rest of the inimitable scene-- "my reasons for marrying are, first, that i think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that i am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps i ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom { } i have the honour of calling patroness. twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very saturday night before i left hunsford--between our pools at quadrille, while mrs. jenkinson was arranging miss de bourgh's footstool--that she said, 'mr. collins, you must marry. a clergyman like you must marry. choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own; let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. this is my advice. find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to hunsford, and i will visit her.' allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that i do not reckon the notice and kindness of lady catherine de bourgh as among the least of the advantages in my power to offer. you will find her manners beyond anything i can describe; and your wit and vivacity, i think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite." the immediate consequences of elizabeth's refusal are delightfully imagined and described. the moment mrs. bennet hears of it, she rushes to her husband's room-- "'you must come and make lizzy marry mr. collins, for she vows she will not have him; and { } if you do not make haste he will change his mind and not have _her_.' "mr. bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by her communication. "'i have not the pleasure of understanding you,' said he, when she had finished her speech. 'of what are you talking?' "'of mr. collins and lizzy. lizzy declares she will not have mr. collins, and mr. collins begins to say that he will not have lizzy.' "'and what am i to do on the occasion? it seems a hopeless business.' "'speak to lizzy about if yourself. tell her that you insist upon her marrying him.' "'let her be called down. she shall hear my opinion.' "mrs. bennet rang the bell, and miss elizabeth was summoned to the library. "'come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'i have sent for you on an affair of importance. i understand that mr. collins has made you an offer of marriage. is it true?' elizabeth replied that it was. 'very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?' "'i have, sir.' "'very well. we now come to the point. your mother insists upon your accepting it. is it not so, mrs. bennet?' { } "'yes, or i will never see her again.' "'an unhappy alternative is before you, elizabeth. from this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. your mother will never see you again if you do not marry mr. collins, and i will never see you again if you _do_.'" there is nothing "commonplace" about this. what matter that the characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford material for such excellent wit? in one respect, judged by the present standard in fiction, jane austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." no novelist was ever less troubled in the search for names. she merely took those of people she had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. bennet, dashwood, elliot, price, woodhouse--names that the modern "popular" novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a darcy or a tilney being her highest flights in nomenclature. as for the christian names, they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. in _sense and sensibility_, for example, three of the prominent characters are named john--john dashwood, john middleton, and john willoughby. there are two { } catherines in _pride and prejudice_. elizabeths, fannys, annes, marys, henrys, edwards, roberts, "fill the bills," and such a name as frank churchill seems recondite. it is much the same in the letters, the truth being that the gwladyses, and evadnes, and marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural society. the burden which her sister cassandra bore must have strengthened jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should not have unusual names, and so we have our elinors and elizabeths, and fannys, with their edwards and edmunds, and henrys. the darcys are almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "fitzwilliam" and "georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life." so much for names. how are the men and women who bear them "introduced" to us? when a colonel newcome, or an alfred jingle, or a sylvain pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us with similar formalities. jane austen, like a casual hostess at a modern { } dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in any way we can. scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and crofters, was the most generous giver of types among jane austen's contemporaries; maria edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry of ireland, and john galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in the scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. jane had no use for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be specially described for a particular purpose. only in one of her novels (_sense and sensibility_) is the busy life of london made the subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three towns-people back to their london houses from their country visits that is effected. (the general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks, and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. yet, as we know from many passages in her letters, jane during her visits was a keen spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she { } jestingly declared, played havoc with her character. "here i am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from cork street in august , "and i begin already to find my morals corrupted." and in the next month she sends this little message to mr. austen: "my father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, i hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the temple, or mount guard at st. james'." she was not "prodigal"--save in gloves and ribbons--but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in town. she went very often to the play, so often at times as to be weary of it. _the hypocrite_ (bickerstaff's "alteration" of cibber's "adaptation" of _tartuffe_) "well entertained" her, dowton and mathews being the chief actors; and she saw liston, miss stephens, miss o'neill, and kean at the outset of his fame. "the clandestine marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in don juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." such joys, however, did not move her mind enough to seduce { } her from the country as a source of inspiration for her work. "_all_ lives lived out of london are mistakes more or less grievous--but mistakes," said sydney smith, adapting, consciously or not, the saying of mascarille to the _précieuses_: "pour moi, je tiens que hors de paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens." the life of jane austen, whose humour the author of the _plymley letters_, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved generalization. her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of knowledge. it is one of jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. lord chesterfield told his son: "if, instead of saying that tastes are different, and that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb, and say, that 'what is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ... everybody would be persuaded that you had { } never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids." proverbial philosophy finds little encouragement from jane, who places it in the mouths of her least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her books and her letters, that she agrees with her own marianne dashwood, who, when sir john middleton has dared to suggest that she will be "setting her cap" at willoughby, warmly replies: "that is an expression, sir john, which i particularly dislike. i abhor every commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." the offending sir john "did not much understand this reproof," but he "laughed as heartily as if he did." elizabeth bennet's use of the saying, "keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse shock than it can have given to darcy, so unexpected is it from the mouth of a jane austen heroine. when one of cassandra's letters had diverted jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "i could die of { } laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say at school." whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by catherine morland when she said to henry tilney, "i cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible," a remark which mr. tilney hailed with delight as "an excellent satire on modern language." its origin may be found in that first volume of _the mirror_ which catherine's mother brought down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected." a peculiarity of jane austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty," "unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"--a pet fancy of hers, which occurs, i am told, at least eight times in _emma_ alone--being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion" in the older romances of wardour street. some day, perhaps, a lost novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years { } of her residence at bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its text. in clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to carelessness as to defective art. not that she was exempt from all the weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of her sex. henry tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the author over her own achievements-- "'i have sometimes thought,' says catherine, doubtfully, 'whether ladies _do_ write so much better letters than gentlemen. that is, i should not think the superiority was always on our side.' "'as far as i have had opportunity of judging,' replies tilney, 'it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.' "'and what are they?' "'a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.' "'upon my word, i need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment! you do not think too highly of us in that way.' { } "'i should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. in every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'" deficiency of subject has not been charged against jane's published letters, but they have often been charged with deficiency of serious interest. her works certainly do exhibit an occasional looseness of grammar, mostly due to bad punctuation. the faulty construction of lucy's letters (_sense and sensibility_) is noted by the author, but while jane would not have been likely to regard "sincerely wish you happy in your choice" as a proper way of beginning a sentence, her own delinquencies with respect to commas are sometimes no less grave than those of mrs. robert ferrars. she would have felt no serious sympathy with cyrano's declaration concerning his literary compositions-- "... mon sang se coagule en pensant qu'on y peut changer une virgule." her blood was too cool to be frozen by the printer's fancies in punctuation. { } in an old number of the _cambridge observer_ the curious student may find some suggested emendations of jane austen's text by mr. a. w. verrall, many of them being concerned with what are probably printers' errors. those which deal with punctuation need not reflect on the printer as prime offender. the author was a woman. mr. verrall's ingenious suggestion that when jane austen is made to say that william price's "direct holidays" might justly be given to his friends at mansfield park (his own family seeing him frequently at portsmouth, where his ship was lying), she really wrote "derelict holidays," has little to commend it, "direct" so evidently, i think, being used to differentiate his actual leave from his ordinary leisure hours when on service. but there are two emendations, typical of many which might be suggested (mr. verrall has probably noted them for the edition which he ought to undertake in time for the centenary), which are entirely acceptable. fanny price is made to say to mr. rushworth, on the occasion when maria bertram and crawford gave that unfortunate person the slip in his own garden, "they desired me to stay; my { } cousin maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." mr. verrall justly observes that no one had desired fanny to stay, and she would be the last girl to utter "an irrelevant falsehood." he holds that "she really did on this occasion, for kindness' sake, say something 'not quite true,'" and it was: "they desired me to say--my cousin maria charged me to say, that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." again, when in describing the discussion over mrs. weston's proposed dance, jane austen is made to say (in _emma_), "the want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be attempted to attend, were mentioned," the author's words were, in mr. verrall's opinion, "tempted to attend." like shakespeare's, the mss. of jane austen's masterpieces are to seek, so that what she wrote we cannot prove. the probability that in these two cases, as in others, the author omitted to notice in proof the errors of the printer is more likely, on the whole, than that her pen had slipped badly, and that her "copy" had never been carefully read over. she { } cared little for such slips, however, as we know from a letter written after _pride and prejudice_ was published, wherein she says: "there are a few typical errors, and a 'said he' or 'said she' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear, but 'i do not write for such dull elves,' as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves." "typical," of course, is here used in its obsolete sense of "typographical." the negative bond of union referred to above between jane austen and the only english writer whom some of her eminent admirers have allowed to take precedence of her--that the mss. of both have disappeared--suggests the passing reflection that in these days when shakespeare is not allowed to hold the title to his plays without challenge, when anne and emily brontë are accused of being (so far as the public is concerned) mere pseudonyms of their sister charlotte, when george henry lewes has been given the credit for george eliot's novels, and the speeches of eminent statesmen are said to be written by their wives, it is rather surprising that no one in search of a striking subject for a magazine article has attacked the claims of jane austen to a place among english { } authors. there is no evidence in the memoirs of her time that any distinguished person ever found himself in her company, her name did not appear on the title-pages of any books, she was almost unknown outside a small provincial circle, and in that circle no one seems to have had any idea that there was anything specially remarkable about her. is it likely that such an obscure little body should have written such admirable books? is it not much more likely that they were the work of madame d'arblay, or that in these peaceful compositions mrs. radcliffe found rest and recreation after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous system involved in the production of her "_èpouvantable_" melodramas? jane austen lays claim to some of the novels in her letters, it is true, but, since ben jonson's references to shakespeare, and all other contemporary evidence in favour of the stratford actor's authorship of the plays have been explained away to the complete satisfaction of those who dispute his claims, it would be no very difficult task to persuade a number of earnest souls that jane austen's letters are not really evidence of her authorship of the novels. as for her nearest relations, they were { } not in the real secret. the secret they are supposed to have kept during her life was that she wrote the novels, but if so, where are the mss.? why did not her admiring brothers treasure those most precious relics? two of her mss. (in addition to the opening chapters of her final effort in fiction) her family did, as a fact, preserve, those of _lady susan_ and _the watsons_, and these (here italic type becomes necessary) _are so inferior to the six novels acknowledged, soon after her death, as hers_, that it is easy (if we like) to find it _difficult to believe that they are from the same pen_! the real secret was that she did not write those six novels. this fascinating theory is freely offered to whomsoever it may please to follow it up. we gain many vivid glimpses of jane austen's views of life in her novels, and _northanger abbey_ holds a place apart from the others, not only for its many pages of burlesque, but as the vehicle by which so many of the author's reflections are conveyed, in a bright wrapping, to her appreciative readers. let me give one or two examples-- "the advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen { } of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject i will only add, in justice to men, that though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable, and too well-informed themselves, to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. but catherine did not know her own advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward." the sister author is fanny burney. the opinion of men, the "trifling" or the "reasonable," is jane austen's. in henry tilney's remarks upon catherine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's conduct to mrs. tilney we may discover something of jane's view of the general condition of society in her time. "dear miss morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. what have you been judging from? remember the country and the age in which we live. remember that we are english: that we are christians. consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of { } what is passing around you. does our education prepare us for such atrocities? do our laws connive at them? could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies; and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? dearest miss morland, what ideas have you been admitting?" of jane austen as humourist there is no need to write specifically at any length. almost every extract given from her novels, whatever the point to be illustrated, shows her in that capacity. it is impossible for long to separate her humour from the rest of her qualities. yet there are people who see no humour in her, and actually like her novels in spite of their "seriousness "! an american author, mr. oscar adams, wrote a book about her some years ago in order "to place her before the world as the winsome, delightful woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her." who were these "many" people? evidently they existed (either without or within the author's own circle) or there would have been no reason { } to write a book for their conversion. they were probably those worthy persons--we have all met a few of them ourselves--who read _emma_, and _pride and prejudice_, and the rest, without noticing that a malicious little sprite is for ever peeping between the lines. imagine a reader who regards all mr. bennet's remarks as sober statements of considered opinion, and you will understand how jane austen might seem formidable. though she is never so ruthless to her characters as mr. bennet is to his wife, jane is herself a member of his family. perhaps "ruthless" is the wrong word. you might apply it to a boy who throws pebbles at a donkey, but if the object of his attack was a rhinoceros, the boy would suffer more than the pachyderm. to the slings and arrows of her husband's outrageous humour mrs. bennet was less sensible than was gulliver to the darts of the lilliputians. gulliver did feel a pricking sensation, whereas mrs. bennet was merely annoyed that mr. bennet did not always agree with her mood of the moment. in his critical introduction to _pride and prejudice_ professor saintsbury forcibly says, in reply to those who resent the presence of such a husband as mr. bennet, that { } mrs. bennet was "a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but the ironic." the most unpleasant aspect of mr. bennet's sarcasms is not that they hurt his wife, which they could not, but that they were heard by his five daughters, three of whom at least were more or less able to understand them. jane austen the novelist, then, may truly be "forbidding" to readers who take her _au pied de la lettre_. such readers are in the position of catherine morland listening to henry tilney's imaginary account of the antiquities and mysteries of northanger abbey. she went there and painfully discovered the truth, while they can no more hope to discover it than a man with one eye can hope to see things as they appear to his fellows who have two. still, he is a king among the blind, and the readers who find pleasure in jane austen as an entirely serious author are to be counted happy as compared with those who cannot read her at all. it has been said by mr. goldwin smith that there is no philosophy beneath the surface of jane austen's novels "for profound scrutiny to bring { } to light," her characters typifying nothing, because "their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing." such justification as may be discovered for the charge that the subjects of the novels are commonplace is chiefly negative in kind. it is not that we may find in real life innumerable people as distinctive and entertaining as the principal characters of these stories, but that jane does not introduce us to dramatically unusual scenes or persons. there are no houses like dotheboys hall or ravenswood tower, no incidents like the flight of jos sedley from brussels or the arrest of vautrin, no strange creatures like mr. rochester or jonas chuzzlewit, no scenes like those in fagin's kitchen or shirley's mill. she was immediately followed by a humourist whose scenes and characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. he is almost unknown to the great fiction-devouring public, and little read in comparison even with jane austen, with whom he has some strong affinities as well as antipathies. thomas love peacock was never, so happily inspired--or so happy perhaps--as when he was "ironing" the { } insincerity or the unreasonable prejudice of the "well-to-do" class. there is, among the parsons of jane austen's creating, none who is more gloriously diverting than dr. ffolliot in _crotchet castle_, and it is pleasant to imagine mr. collins as curate to that militant theologian. the talk of the young women in peacock's modern novels is better "informed" and much less natural than that of elizabeth bennet, or emma, or anne, and as for the men, while mr. tilney or mr. darcy might not have found it difficult to hold their own with most of the lovers in peacock's novels, his intellectuals--milestone, mcqueedy, and the rest--would have found no one to refute their arguments among the company at netherfield or at mansfield park. peacock allows his satirical hobby-horse to run wild over the bramble-covered desert of british prejudice, while jane austen never leaves go of the rein. the result is that while he frequently makes us laugh at the absurdities of his scythrops and chainmails, whose performances we know to be burlesque, she makes us chuckle by her silver-shod satire of the class which she had studied from childhood. there are some who read jane austen and cannot read { } peacock, and the reverse is also true. those who can read both are never likely to be in want of pleasure on winter evenings so long as mind and eyes are left. it is certain that no one familiar with either author could mistake a page written by one of them for a page by the other. jane austen's people, in spite of the humour with which the atmosphere is charged, are always possible--except, some of her most intimate admirers say, for mr. collins--while peacock was never to be deterred from breaking through the fence which borders the pathway of probability. only such readers as the prelate who declined to believe some of the incidents in _gulliver's travels_ could be expected to regard _melincourt_ or _nightmare abbey_ as veracious narratives. for all that peacock, whose first novel, _headlong hall_, appeared in the year ( ) in which jane austen's last (published) work was done, was her immediate successor as a satirist of the follies and foibles of english men and women, and he was succeeded in turn by the splendid thackeray, whose most obvious difference from jane austen lies in his frequent indulgence in sentimental reflections. { } jane was amused by the suggestions for improving her work, or for the plots of fresh novels, given to her from time to time, and among the papers found after her death was one endorsed "plan of a novel according to hints from various quarters," the names of some of these human "quarters" being given in the margin. there were to be a "faultless" heroine and her "faultless" father driven from place to place over europe by the vile arts of a "totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion." wherever she went somebody fell in love with her, and she received frequent offers of marriage, which she referred to her father, who was "exceedingly angry that he should not be the first applied to." the "anti-hero" again and again carried her off, and she was "now and then starved to death," but was always rescued either by her father or the hero! for even the mildest varieties of the plots thus burlesqued jane had no use, unless to laugh at them. { } iii contact with life origins of characters--matchmaking--second marriages--negative qualities of the novels--close knowledge of one class--dislike of "lionizing"--madame de staël--the "lower orders"--tradesmen--social position--quality of jane's letters--balls and parties. in her letters, as in her books, the satiric touch was on almost everything that jane austen wrote. her habit of making pithy little notes on the doings of her acquaintances was, in writing to her sister, irrepressible. the pith was not bitter. it was just the comment of a highly intelligent woman to whom the gods had given the gift of humour, and who, at an age when most girls of her day were as ingenuous as evelina or as catherine morland, had learnt how much insincerity and affectation coloured the conduct even of kind and well-meaning people. in her references to the foibles of real men and women we gain many glimpses of the origins--if not the originals--of some of her character studies. { } at an ashford ball in one of the royal dukes was present, and among those who supped in his company were cassandra and a mrs. cage, with whom the austens were well acquainted. this lady was uneasy in the presence of royalty, and her mistakes were described in a letter from cassandra. jane's mention of the incident in her reply is a fair sample of the way in which, in her more serious mood, this young woman of twenty-three regarded the weakness of her less cool and reasonable friends: "i can perfectly comprehend mrs. cage's distress and perplexity. she has all those kind of foolish and incomprehensible feelings which would make her fancy herself uncomfortable in such a party. i love her, however, in spite of all her nonsense." one can see a hint of mrs. allen and mrs. bennet in the silly woman who flustered herself and fidgeted her companions in her attempts to assume what she supposed to be the right behaviour on such an occasion. jane, who had never seen a prince, so far as we know, would have had no "distress and perplexity." she would have curtsied in the prettiest way, the duke would have been charmed by her graceful figure, her { } clear complexion, and her soft brown eyes, and she would next day have written to her sister "all the minute particulars, which only woman's language can make interesting." her reflections on the gossip of the hour are not always quite so kindly. when charles powlett (of whose rejected offer of a kiss we have already heard) brings home a wife, jane tells her sister that this bride "is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant." once, when a story has reached her in the way that "russian scandal" is played, by the muddling up of half-understood particulars in the process of transmission from mouth to ear, she has to correct a previous statement about some of the austen circle-- "on inquiring of mrs. clerk, i find that mrs. heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the crooks and morleys. it is young mr. crook who is to marry the second miss morley, and it is the miss morleys instead of the second miss crook who were the beauties at the music meeting. this seems a more likely tale, a better devised imposture." { } the sting is where stings usually are. scandal was as distasteful to her as it can have been to madame du châtelet, of whom voltaire said that "_tout ce qui occupe la société était de son ressort, hors la médisance._" jane gave cassandra many little bits of news about their friends which the principals might have resented, but between sister and sister such things are not scandalous, and as for those who read them now, they may talk about the incidents referred to as freely as they like without harm to any one. many of the "scandals" jane mentions are "serious" only in her innocent fun. we hear, for instance, that in , "martha and dr. mant are as bad as ever, he runs after her in the street to apologize for having spoken to a gentleman while she was near him the day before. poor mrs. mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married daughters." jane amused herself and her sister and teased poor martha by her jokes on this affair. "as dr. m. is a clergyman," she writes, "this attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air." mrs. jennings, sir john middleton's mother-in-law, would have told the story quite seriously, and with immense gusto, at the barton { } breakfast-table, but dr. mant and martha were not transferred to a novel to the discomfort of themselves and their families and the delight of the _roman à clef_ hunters of southampton. the letters do seem occasionally to bring us into the company of people whom we know quite well in the novels. jane, replying to cassandra at christmas , says: "i am glad to hear such a good account of harriet bridges; she goes on now as young ladies of seventeen ought to do, admired and admiring.... i dare say she fancies major elkington as agreeable as warren, and if she can think so, it is very well." alter the surnames, and this passage might apply as well to harriet smith as to harriet bridges. "i dare say she fancies mr. martin as agreeable as mr. churchill, and if she can think so, it is very well," might have been written by emma to dear anne weston about the "little friend" from the boarding-school. jane, as in this case of harriet bridges, took so much interest in the love affairs of her friends that we often think of emma woodhouse and her match-making propensities, about which mr. knightley spoke so harshly. by emma's advice harriet smith, having refused { } robert martin, the young farmer, had regarded mr. elton as a prospective husband, and when he went elsewhere emma had selected frank churchill for the vacant post. then, through a serious mistake, mr. knightley was the man, until at last the "inconsiderate, irrational, unfeeling" nature of her conduct became clear to her mind, and harriet was allowed to marry the constant martin. mrs. mitford declared that jane austen was husband-hunting at twelve years of age, but the old lady's memory was evidently quite untrustworthy about people and dates when she talked such nonsense. jane was, however, on her own showing, fond of looking out for possible husbands for her pretty little nieces. here is an instance, from a letter of --"young wyndham accepts the invitation. he is such a nice, gentlemanlike, unaffected sort of young man, that i think he may do for fanny." next day she is less pleased with him--"this young wyndham does not come after all; a very long and very civil note of excuse is arrived. it makes one moralize upon the ups and downs of this life." that the habit was hereditary--it was a custom { } of jane's time, even more than it is of our own--we may see from a report she sent to cassandra of the pleasure with which mr. and mrs. austen, with one accord, lighted upon a suitable "match" for their elder daughter. he was "a beauty of my mother's." having no _affaire_ of her own to trouble her rest, jane took an active part as adviser for those in whose fate she was affectionately interested. especially was this the case with this favourite niece, fanny knight, who, having fancied she was "in love" with one man, discovered that she preferred, or thought she preferred, another. "do not be in a hurry," wrote aunt jane, "the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before." fanny, who was "inimitable, irresistible," whose "queer little heart" and its flutterings were "the delight of my life," might have been fickle, but she did not, said her aunt, deserve such a punishment { } as to fall in love after marriage, and with the wrong man. jane's views on second marriages are expressed in the case of lady sondes, whose haste to find consolation after the death of lord sondes was the subject of much chatter among the mrs. jenningses and mrs. bennets of her neighbourhood. "had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, i should not have forgiven her; but i consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches, and being pathetic, i can allow her, i can _will_ her, to be happy." in the novels no woman of consequence--excepting the callous and selfish lady susan vernon--is allowed a second mate, nor is the courtship before any of the marriages much in accord with the general practice of english fiction. there is not even a description of some splendid wedding. jane, by the way, did not regard a marriage as the proper occasion for public advertisement of the bride's qualities. "such a parade," she writes of the conduct of a certain { } "alarming bride," is "one of the most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine. to attract notice could have been her only wish." it might seem, indeed, that the most original characteristic of her works is the absence of almost all the qualities of plot and treatment on which fiction usually depends for success with the public. if we were asked of some modern lady writer, "what are her books like?" and we replied, "in one respect they are conventional, for they all end in the choosing of wedding-rings. but scarcely anybody in these novels feels the 'grand passion,' they have no relation to current events, nobody ever has a strange adventure, only one married woman is faithless to her vows, no adventuress appears, there are no foreigners, no one is in revolt against anything, nobody is seriously troubled about the trend of society or the decadence of morals and taste, nobody starves, or commits a murder, or engineers a swindle, there are no cruel husbands, no triple _ménages_ and no mysterious occurrences or detectives, and as nobody dies, nobody makes death-bed revelations," the retort would probably imply, "what stupid stuff they must be." these novels { } do, indeed, depend for their effect on less of "plot and passion" than almost any others of consequence yet written. there are many novels of small plot. balzac, in _eugénie grandet_, george sand, in _tamaris_, show what even "stormy" novelists can do with a modicum of events. but the lack of both plot and passion is rare in the work that lives. it is thus that the genius of jane austen is strongly displayed. only genius could give a vital, an enduring fascination to a record chiefly concerned with the ordinary experiences of a few respectable country people, almost all of one class. she had the power, because, with the gifts of expression and of humour, she combined an almost perfect knowledge of a typical section of society, all the more clearly exhibited because of her comparative ignorance of any other section. she did not care to study the very poor, the very rich were outside her circle of common experience, and she would rarely write about people or phases of life that were not as familiar to her as the squire's daughter and the manners of the hunt ball. she had none of disraeli's audacity. "my son," said isaac disraeli, when some one { } expressed surprise at the knowledge of "exalted circles" shown in _the young duke_, "my son, sir, when he wrote that book, had never even _seen_ a duke." jane austen, "never having seen a duke," or a ducal palace, never attempted to describe either. she shrank from any kind of "lionizing," whether in village society or in the "great world," and to this healthy pride is no doubt partly due the obscurity in which she lived and died. one instance of her reserve may be adduced. soon after the appearance of _mansfield park_ she was invited, "in the politest manner," to a party at the house of a nobleman who suspected her of the authorship of that book, and who, as an inducement, intimated that she would be able to converse with madame de staël. "miss austen," says her brother, "immediately declined the invitation. to her truly delicate mind such a display would have given pain instead of pleasure." the story, which has sometimes been regarded as evidence of improper pride on the part of the english novelist, is in keeping with all that is known of jane austen's nature. had the meeting of the authors of _emma_ and { } _corinne_ come about, one would like to have heard their conversation. the talking would have been largely on one side. madame, who knew the "world," and enjoyed the distinction of having been called a "wicked schemer" and a "fright" by the greatest man of her time, would have tried in vain to impress the unaffected englishwoman who cared so little for politics and napoleon that, in those novels which madame regarded as "_vulgaire_," she scarcely alluded to either. jane would have listened attentively, and now and again, when madame paused for breath, would have made a polite remark, the covert humour of which would have been lost on her famous companion. there is no suggestion that any hint as to madame de staël's reputation had reached chawton cottage, otherwise some might suppose that it was not only the diffident modesty jane's brother alleges which prevented her from going to the party. it is quite likely that she who described the loves of lydia bennet and maria rushworth with such an entire absence of sermonizing would yet have felt that, though she might like to converse on a more private occasion with the author of _corinne_ and _delphine_, she would { } prefer not to be matched with a lady who had put to so practical a test her theories "_de l'influence des passions sur le bonheur_." could there be a stronger contrast, physical or moral, than between the country parson's slight and good-looking daughter, whose knowledge of men and affairs was gained in the parlours of manor-houses and the assembly-rooms of watering-places, and the financier's stout and ugly daughter, whose political activities were so persistent that she had been expelled from paris, who had travelled, mingling in the society of the governing classes, the artists, the men of letters in italy, germany, and other lands, and whose literary performances, historical, political, and imaginative, were read wherever educated readers existed? if jane had no strong desire to be brought into contact with the great, wise, and eminent of her time, neither were her tastes at all in the direction of social equality or the advocacy of the "rights of man," and while she was indifferent to the famous and influential, she was scarcely more concerned for the obscure and lowly. admire her work as we may, and love her as many of us { } must, we cannot recognize that she was much in sympathy with any class but her own. it is certainly to no undue regard for social position, to no want of charitable intention, that we can attribute her general neglect of the drama, comedy and tragedy alike, of humble life. it might be said that she could, and if she would, have drawn the poor as well as she drew the "gentry." she knew her limitations, and thus such rare sketches of the "lower orders" as she gives stop short of any errors of understanding. mrs. reynolds, darcy's housekeeper, whose admiration for her master and his sister is so strongly expressed, and thomas, the servant at barton cottage, who comes in to describe how he has seen "mr. and mrs. ferrars" in exeter, are in no way out of drawing, though the phrase with which the author finishes off the man-servant--"thomas and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon dismissed"--so aptly suggests the position accorded to the working classes in her own works that it almost seems to have a double meaning. let any one familiar with the novels try to recall occasions when a servant is introduced even in such common cases as the answering of a bell or waiting { } at table, and he will find it hard to add to the examples already given any with a better part than the overworked nanny at the watsons', who, when lord osborne is paying his untimely visit, puts her head in at the door and says, "please, ma'am, master wants to know why he be'nt to have his dinner." as for the class from which most of these servants came, it has no place at all. emma takes harriet to a cottage where there is a convalescent child who requires jellies or beef tea, but the incident is of no account except as leading up to the visit to mr. elton; and she goes to see an old servant while harriet pays her formal call at the abbey mill farm. robert martin is a farmer, and a letter from him is introduced, but he has no share of any consequence in the dialogue. when we remember jane austen's avowed partiality for emma, and emma's disgust at the idea of harriet marrying a mere farmer, no matter how much her admirer knightley might support the man's claims, we may not unreasonably suppose that jane to some extent shared emma's prejudice. there was, however, a notable exception to jane's remoteness from the farming class. the joint tenant of the manor { } farm at steventon, the happily named james digweed--who seems to have been ordained later on--was admitted to so much favour that she could not only dance and dine, and gossip with him, but could chaff her sister about his evident desire to gain cassandra's affection. two or three apothecaries are admitted into the novels. one attends jane bennet at netherfield, and another attends marianne dashwood at cleveland. apothecary was almost a term of contempt in those days, and one of jane's hits at the neighbourhood of hans place was that there seemed to be only one person there who was "not an apothecary." she even, as we have seen, corrects her niece for supposing that a country doctor--not a mere "apothecary"--would ever be "introduced" to a peer! the only country tradesman who figures at all prominently is sir william lucas, who had "risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. the distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. it had given him a disgust to his business.... by nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at st. james's had made him courteous." he is { } not so diverting a creature as martin tinman of crikswich in mr. meredith's delightful comedy _the house on the beach_, who, when rescued from that storm-beaten home on a terrible night, was found to be wearing the court suit in which, long before, he had presented an address to the throne! but sir william lucas's constant recollection of the fact that _he_ had been received by the sovereign, while his neighbours, the "small" country-gentlemen, had not, is illustrated with admirable art. in his "emporium," with his stock-in-trade around him, his portrait would never have been drawn. mr. weston also made money in trade, apparently "in the wholesale line," after he had retired from the militia, and of the proud and conceited bingley sisters we are told that "they were of a respectable family in the north of england; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade." jane has many kindly things to tell her sister about, her mother's maids, especially of a faithful and industrious "nannie." of the maids' relations, the agricultural class, amid whose homes { } she passed nearly all her life, she has, as i have said, left no account in her novels. her letters do indeed contain many bits of news concerning the ploughmen and washerwomen of the parish, and they are significant as to the manner, proper to the age, in which she regarded her humble neighbours. her references to the cottagers are commonly devoid of any indication of deeper feeling than the consciousness of a need to give them clothes. of the people employed on her father's farm, she says-- "john bond begins to find himself grow old, which john bond ought not to do, and unequal to much hard work; a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labour, and john himself is to have the care of the sheep. there are not more people engaged than before, i believe; only men instead of boys. i fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters. lizzie bond is just apprenticed to miss small, so we may hope to see her able to spoil gowns in a few years." about christmas ( ) she writes-- "of my charities to the poor since i came home you shall have a faithful account. i have given a pair of worsted stockings to mary hutchins, dame kew, mary steevens, and dame staples; { } a shift to hannah staples, and a shawl to betty dawkins, amounting in all to about half-a-guinea. but i have no reason to suppose that the _battys_ would accept of anything, because i have not made them the offer." of personal service we hear but little. there is just the old "lady bountiful" idea, adapted to the purse of the parson's younger daughter. alms were what the poor chiefly wanted, and alms they received--if not in money, in warm garments. she gave them worsted stockings, and flannel to wear in the cold weather. she did not often, so far as we hear, sit and chat with dame staples and dame kew over the things that made up their life-interests, or listen to the confidences of lizzie bond and hannah staples concerning their rustic lovers. sometimes we do hear of talks with poor women, as when jane writes, "i called yesterday upon betty londe, who inquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. this was an oblique reproach at me, which i am sorry to have merited, and from which i will profit." we may well believe that jane was no { } pioneer in "district visiting." her services to humanity were of another kind. almost alone among the greater novelists who have written the fiction of drawing-rooms, she was hardly less indifferent as a writer to the concerns of the governing class of her day than of the voteless class, unless, indeed, she was a hostile witness so far as her knowledge went. among the worst-bred persons in the novels, with john thorpe, mr. collins, and the ever-delightful mrs. bennet, are sir walter elliot and lady catherine de bourgh, and the hero whose manners are most open to reproach is lady catherine's nephew, darcy--before he has been refused by elizabeth. jane austen's views on the claims of social position, as distinct from individual character, were much the same as anne elliot's. mr. elliot and anne, we learn-- "did not always think alike. his value for rank and connection she perceived to be greater than hers. it was not merely complaisance, it must be a liking to the cause, which made him enter warmly into her father's and sister's solicitudes on a subject which she thought unworthy to excite them.... she was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen--a wish that they { } had more pride.... had lady dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created; but they were nothing. there was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding." the dalrymples and lady catherine de bourgh do not lead one to suppose that jane's acquaintance with their class was a fortunate one. had it been, she would probably have given some happier examples of the titular aristocracy. lord osborne, in _the watsons_, is in some ways a more amiable type, but too "sketchy" to be of much account as an antidote to such unpleasing people as the aunt of darcy and the cousins of anne elliot. if persons of artificial eminence are almost unknown in the novels, there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for their individual gifts or achievements. sir john middleton fills his too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. he hardly allows { } time to speed the parting guests before he must turn to welcome their successors. but no statesman, or traveller, or professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those ever-open doors. they do not come, for one reason--and it seems a sufficient one--because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and madeira around the mahogany tables at netherfield, or barton, or uppercross, know and care nothing whatever about them and their performances. "each thinks his little set mankind" is as true of the characters in jane austen's books as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their author. the morlands, and musgroves, and woodhouses, and bennets have never travelled, unless an occasional visit to london may count as travel. they have been into some neighbouring county, they have been perchance to bath. they have not so much as been to paris. emma had never seen the sea. twenty years earlier it would have been different. darcy at any rate would have known something of france had he been twenty years older. from the outbreak of the revolution till the first exile of { } napoleon, france was not a likely place for any but the most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after the rise of napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the continent very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. thus, not only are the conversations which jane austen offers devoid of any such elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance of byron in _venetia_, or of shelley in _nightmare abbey_, but the opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. on the other hand, we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a contemporary of jane austen's declared, "if you introduce the name of a river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the _rhine_, or make you dizzy with the height of _mont blanc_." in any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities for enlarging her knowledge, jane, literature apart, took very little interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own class in the country. her published correspondence has been described as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what { } madame de staël meant by "_vulgaire_," and not "vulgar," as sir james mackintosh and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary letters as byron's or lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. they are, however, exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. her satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her time. it is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are hunting or shooting--the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids, the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that young woman who is so pretty--enlivened by jane's wit. the dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops" were among the favourite pleasures of jane austen. if you have read her letters you will feel that she is present when fanny price dances so prettily at mansfield park, or when darcy declines to dance with elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is { } "not handsome enough" to tempt him. "i danced twice with warren last night, and once with mr. charles watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment i entirely escaped john lyford. i was forced to fight hard for it, however. we had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated in a very elegant manner." such bits of news are common at all periods of jane's correspondence. for example: "the ball on thursday was a very small one indeed, hardly so large as an oxford smack;" and again, "our ball on thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but twenty-three people in the room"--just as it was when they got up the scratch dance at the bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall." on another occasion, at a public hall at the county town-- "the portsmouths, dorchesters, boltons, portals, and clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. there was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. i danced nine dances out of ten--five with stephen terry, t. chute, and james digweed, and four with { } catherine. there was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves." jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another girl as with a man--it was the dancing she loved, and watching the behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs and affectations. emma woodhouse, the day after a dance at highbury, might have sent to her sister in brunswick square just such an account as jane austen to her sister at godmersham-- "there were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome." one of the girls seemed to her: "a queer animal with a white neck. mrs. warren, i was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which i much regret. she danced away with great activity. her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin john; but he does not look so _very_ old. the miss maitlands are both prettyish, very like anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. the general has got the gout, and mrs. maitland the jaundice." a ball to which jane austen went in --her { } thirty-fourth year--was "rather more amusing" than she expected. "the melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. it was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago. i thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that i was quite as happy now as then. we paid an additional shilling for our tea." this letter is but one of many bits of evidence that no memory of a captain wentworth troubled jane's own life. the "shame" such a woman could have felt in being "older" one can scarcely imagine, and the context shows it was not seriously felt. the most pathetic dancing incident in the novels was the impromptu affair at uppercross (in _persuasion_), where anne saw her old lover apparently losing his heart elsewhere. "the evening ended with dancing. on its being proposed, anne offered her services, as usual; and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved." she did not know that wentworth, who was making so merry with { } the musgrove girls, was faithful all the time to his old love--herself. we might doubt whether the author knew it until later on in the story, were it not that the idea of ending a novel without the marriage of the principal maiden to the man she liked best would have been entirely foreign to jane austen's method. so frederick wentworth danced with the musgroves, and anne played for their delight. the dance most fully described was that given by the westons at the "crown," when mr. elton behaved so abominably to harriet smith, and mr. knightley showed himself a _preux chevalier_ and saved emma's lovely _protégée_ from the humiliation of being the only "wallflower." in describing how elizabeth at netherfield, catherine at bath, harriet at highbury, and fanny at mansfield park idly watched the dancing because no man had asked them to join it, jane, pretty girl and excellent dancer as she was, spoke from personal experience. once at any rate, when "in the pride of youth and beauty," she was able to write, after a dance at a neighbouring house-- "i do not think i was very much in request. people were rather apt not to ask me till they { } could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. there was one gentleman, an officer of the cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, i was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about." she would not, if she could help it, dance with bad partners. "one of my gayest actions," she writes after a ball, "was sitting down two dances in preference to having lord bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured." it is in connection with one of the westons' parties that mr. woodhouse makes his sage observations on the eternal question of ventilation. when frank churchill says that the fresh air difficulty will be settled by their dancing in a large room, so that the windows need not be opened, because "it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows, letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which does the mischief," mr. woodhouse cries-- "'open the windows! but surely, mr. churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at randalls. nobody could be so imprudent! i never heard of such a thing. dancing with open windows! i am sure neither your father nor { } mrs. weston (poor miss taylor that was) would suffer it.' "'ah! sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. i have often known it done myself.' "'have you, indeed, sir? bless me! i never could have supposed it. but i live out of the world, and am often astonished at what i hear.'" the conversation of this valetudinarian quietist is always diverting. he suggests that emma should leave the coles' party before it is half over, as it is so bad to be up late. "but, my dear sir," cried mr. weston, "if emma comes away early it will be breaking up the party." "and no great harm if it does," said mr. woodhouse. "the sooner every party breaks up the better." advancing maturity did not do much to spoil jane's love of dances. from southampton, in , she wrote: "your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. we were very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and i did not like to keep them waiting in the cold." [illustration: a letter of jane austen's] { } if jane tells cassandra about her own dances, she is ever ready in return for news of cassandra's. "i shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that i shall be tired of reading it.... we were at a ball on saturday i assure you. we dined at goodnestone and in the evening danced two country dances and the boulangeries." this french dance, by the way, was on the unwritten programme at mr. bingley's ball, in _pride and prejudice_. it seems to have had its birth in the revolution, when the bakers, men and women together, kept themselves warm by joining hands and dancing up and down the streets. after jane fairfax had sung herself hoarse at the coles' party-- "the proposal of dancing--originating nobody exactly knew where--was so effectually promoted by mr. and mrs. cole that everything was rapidly clearing away, to give proper space. mrs. weston, capital in her country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and frank churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to emma, had secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment." { } the waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be classed as a country dance. it had been imported from germany, where mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after jane austen had written her earlier novels, and i cannot remember any other reference to it in her work. it was at first considered an "improper" dance, and one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered by the new fashion. sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room, repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when emma danced at the "crown" and jane austen at goodnestone. "with tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance, behold the well-paired couple now advance. in such sweet posture our first parents moved, while, hand in hand, through eden's bowers they roved, ere yet the devil, with promise fine and false, turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz." little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if edmund bertram, fanny, and sir thomas were shocked at the very idea of play-acting by the family and guests at mansfield park. { } not that there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a play, when lady bertram asked her children not to "act anything improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer, but because "sir thomas would not like it." the bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which mrs. weston played, serve to emphasize the place which jane austen fills as an historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific nineteenth. "what is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks her sister in ; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." morals change but little as compared with _moeurs_. the girls who act in private theatricals every winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their { } garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet was moved to utter the quatrain-- "when dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days, scarce an atom of dress on them leave; nor blame them, for what is an evening dress but a dress that is suited to eve." thus the mother of mankind is accused by one poet of having danced the first waltz, and held responsible by another for the airy fashions of the récamier period. one of the principal differences of etiquette, we may note before passing on, between the customs of the ball-room a century ago and now, was that in the days when john lyford was eluded with so much difficulty a girl danced two successive dances with the same partner as a matter of course, so that neither an imaginary john thorpe nor a real john lyford could be got rid of by the promise of one dance. the scraps from the letters, given on the last few pages, help us to realize how clearly jane austen's own life is at times reflected in her books. { } iv ethics and optimism dr. whately on jane austen--"moral lessons" of her novels--charge of "indelicacy"--marriage as a profession--a "problem" novel--"the nostalgia of the infinite"--the "whitewashing" of willoughby--_lady susan_ condemned by its author--_the watsons_--change in manners--no "heroes"--woman's love--the prince regent--_the quarterly review_. "the moral lessons of this lady's novels," wrote archbishop whately in his _quarterly_ article of , "though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story." so inoffensively, indeed, are they offered to our notice, that dr. whately himself seems to have been unable to discover them at all. "on the whole," writes the archbishop, "miss austin's (_sic_) works may safely be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct effort { } at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes defeating its object." the most obvious "moral" of jane austen's novels is that if you are a heroine you need not trouble yourself about your future. you are certain to marry a worthy man with an income sufficient for a comfortable existence. he may be endowed with something less than a thousand a year, like edward ferrars, with a couple of thousand like captain wentworth, or with the ten thousand a year which made darcy appear so admirable to mrs. bennet. in any case you will not have to eat bread-and-scrape or go without a fire in your bedroom. the country-house comedy of jane austen is full of morals if you are in need of them, but it was not written to improve you, only to amuse you--and its maker. if you must have a clear moral for each story, after the manner of tracts, you may take them thus. _pride and prejudice_ conveys the useful lesson that the person you most dislike in one month may be the one you will very sensibly give your affection to in the next; _sense and sensibility_ that when the bad man falls into the pit he has dug for himself, the good man comes by his own; _emma_ that the { } man whose society is most necessary to a woman's quiet contentment is the man she ought to marry; _mansfield park_ that a simple, unaffected girl who gains the second place in a man's affections may win the prize through the disqualification of her more brilliant rival; _persuasion_ that nothing is more likely to revive an old passion than to see its object warmly admired by some other eligible party; _northanger abbey_ that a tuft-hunting father may be induced to receive a daughter-in-law of no importance by the kindly influence of a son-in-law of superior rank. as for _lady susan_, the moral of that unpleasing story is that if a worldly _mater pulchra_ is the rival in love of an ingenuous _filia pulchrior_ she will probably lose the battle after much suffering on either side; and from _the watsons_ we may see that if a girl is educated above her family she will find it hard to be happy beside the domestic hearth. all these are plain workable morals. whether the author of the novels would have endorsed them we cannot certainly know, but it is more than probable she would not. we need not suppose that jane austen was ignorant of the coarseness of conversation, the { } hard-drinking, the wild gambling, the moral laxity of a large section of society that are so frequently exhibited in the records of the age, in spite of the improvement in manners. but we can hardly help laughing at the objection taken to her novels even by some of her contemporaries, that they were "indelicate"! the "indelicacy" was usually found in the views of marriage held and expressed by the heroines and their families. the love-affairs of these country maidens were not often, we must admit, such as to steal away their beauty sleep or spoil their appetites for breakfast. mrs. jennings' kindly endeavour to cure a girl's disappointment in love by a variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire, was perhaps not wholly unjustified by experience. in those days, when no profession save that of governess was open to women, when nursing the sick was regarded as an occupation specially suitable for those of a low class, when no door opened from the drawing-room on to the professional stage, and when the very idea of a "female" as secretary to a man of affairs or of business would have been condemned as "improper," marriage was undoubtedly viewed by most people as the only aim { } of a young woman, "the pleasantest preservative from want," as charlotte lucas regarded it, and, moreover, the average age of brides was much lower than it is now-a-days. to avoid being a governess by attracting the admiration of a man who could afford a wife was the hope, at least, of most poorly endowed girls, and even if matrimony is not viewed with so much sentiment and reserve by jane austen's heroines as by the excessively squeamish evelina, we may be inclined to prefer the "indelicacy" of jane austen to the elaborate, delicacy of fanny burney. scott himself, by an ingenious paradox, has been accused--as a novelist--of immorality, and _quentin durward_ in particular described as "one of the most immoral novels that has even been written," because its romance expresses nothing. the interest a boy takes in its romantic passages "depends on the fact that he dreams himself to be in similar circumstances; he must treat the novel subjectively, and it is the subjective use of the imagination which does all the damage. it is in reading such books as this that a bad habit of mind is begun, and _quentin durward_ is more immoral for a boy of fourteen than a translation of the most { } shockingly indecent french novel." well may the anonymous writer of this unexpected criticism add: "there are paradoxes to be met everywhere, and most of all in the question of morality." this particular kind of immorality has not yet, so far as i know, been charged against jane austen. she cannot be justly accused of writing romance which "expresses nothing," but she certainly leaves plenty of opportunity for young readers to exercise their imaginations, and thus begin a "bad habit of mind." the view of marriage as a profession, with or without ardent affection, is not the only thing that has shocked the delicacy of many of jane austen's readers. serious objection has been taken to her introduction of episodes of an "improper" nature. how is the charge supported? lydia bennet, a vulgar, badly brought-up girl still in her teens, infatuated with the red coats of the militia officers, insists on going away with wickham, and lives with him as his mistress until, by the generous aid of darcy, and the determination of the gardiners--her uncle and aunt--"a marriage is arranged" and does "shortly take place." this episode, say the stern critics, was ( ) unnecessary to the plot, { } and ( ) if it was necessary, it is too much insisted on and developed. that it is an essential part of the little plot, worked in to exhibit the best side of darcy's character, which before has only been seen in its least attractive light, seems to me obvious, and i agree with professor saintsbury's opinion that it brings about the _dénouement_ with complete propriety. lydia's entire indifference to the moral aspect of her conduct is and was unusual in a girl of sixteen and of her class, but her character from first to last is consistently drawn, and the contrast between the selfishness of wickham and lydia, who care nothing for any one's happiness except their own, and not even for each other's, and the sympathy of heart and variety of temperament which bring elizabeth and darcy together is admirably drawn. then we are asked to be shocked at the illustration of the bad character and selfish cruelty of willoughby given to elinor dashwood by the very worthy and very dull colonel brandon in _sense and sensibility_. it is a painful story. willoughby, the faithless lover of marianne dashwood, had seduced an impressionable girl whom brandon, out of affection for the memory of her { } mother, herself ruined by a scoundrel, had practically adopted, and whom such scandal-mongers as mrs. jennings declared to be the colonel's own child. "why drag in this nasty story?" ask the objectors, and above all, "why allow the colonel to pour it into the ears of a young girl like elinor?" that it comes unfortunately from brandon, who is a rival--hopeless as it had seemed--of willoughby for marianne's affection, and that in the middle-class society of to-day a well-bred man would not tell such a tale to a girl if he could find any other means of achieving an imperative object is undeniable. what was brandon to do? he knew that marianne was pining for love of a man at least as unworthy of her as, in his worst days, was tom jones of sophia, and he believed, with or without reason, that the knowledge of willoughby's character would be a bitter but efficacious medicine for her heart-sickness. elinor, the sensible, prudent, devoted sister, seemed the only person to whom he could tell the story with any hope that it would be discreetly used. "he had spent many hours in convincing himself that he was right," and when elinor said, "i understand you, you have { } something to tell me of mr. willoughby that will open his character farther. your telling it will be the greatest act of friendship that can be shown to marianne. my gratitude will be ensured immediately by any information tending to that end, and hers must be gained by it in time. pray, pray let me hear it," there is little reason for wonder that "upon this hint he spake," and told the story of the moral ruin of the mother and the cruel desertion of the daughter which the reader of _sense and sensibility_ will recall, elinor lost little time in retailing it to her sister, with the immediate and apparently unexpected effect of increasing the girl's unhappiness. "she felt the loss of willoughby's character yet more heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart," though we know that she soon afterwards became as fond a wife of colonel brandon as she ever could have been of willoughby. far more remarkable, i think, than brandon's telling elinor the miserable story of his sister-in-law and her daughter is the manner in which elinor herself receives willoughby's attempt to excuse his conduct. he admits his treatment of miss williams, but asks how elinor could think { } colonel brandon an impartial reporter of the affair, and proceeds to offer his own excuse in the words that follow-- "i do not mean to justify myself, but at the same time cannot leave you to suppose that i have nothing to urge,--that because she was injured, she was irreproachable,--and because i was a libertine, she must be a saint. if the violence of her passion, the weakness of her understanding--i do not mean, however, to defend myself. her affection for me deserved better treatment, and i often, with great self-reproach, recall the tenderness which, for a very short time, had the power of creating any return. i wish--i heartily wish it had never been. but i have injured more than herself; and i have injured one whose affection for me (may i say it?) was scarcely less warm than hers, and whose mind--oh! how infinitely superior." in other words, the inexperienced child was of weak understanding, and loved him passionately, and therefore he was not so much to blame as if she had been less warm in her affection and stronger in her intelligence. surely the reasoning should have been reversed. yet after this fine oration elinor "pities" him, and, when he goes on to disparage his wife, whom he has married for { } her fortune, and to express his continued love for marianne, all that elinor says is, "you are very wrong, mr. willoughby, very blamable, you ought not to speak in this way, either of mrs. willoughby or my sister," and in saying this "her voice, in spite of herself, betrayed her compassionate emotion." when he left her, elinor assured him that she thought better of him than she had done, "that she forgave, pitied him, wished him well--was even interested in his happiness--and added some gentle counsel as to the behaviour most likely to promote it;" counsel which he showed little disposition to take. this tolerance by elinor for a man who, on his own admission, had "taken advantage" of a simple young girl, ignorant in the world's ways, this readiness to allow extenuating circumstances to a mercenary breaker of reputations and hearts, is a far more serious fact than the mere introduction of a story which does fit quite easily into the plan of the novel. elinor's reflections when willoughby had ended his apologies sufficiently show that the point of view suggested in the duologue between the sinner and the sister was deliberately set up by the author-- { } "she made no answer. her thoughts were silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper. the world had made him extravagant and vain; extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least its offspring necessity, had required to be sacrificed. each faulty propensity, in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment. the attachment from which, against honour, against feeling, against every better interest he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no longer allowable, governed every thought; and the connection, for the sake of which he had, with little scruple, left her sister to misery, was likely to prove a source of unhappiness to himself of a far more incurable nature." the chapter describing this interview between willoughby and elinor is the only one in all the novels of jane austen wherein a "problem," after the kind dear to the dramatist of to-day and the novelists of yesterday, is fully presented and { } considered, the heroines, with this exception, answering to mr. andrew lang's description, being "ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts." elinor only, as we find her on this occasion, is a pioneer of that school of sociology which whitewashes the individual at the expense of his early environment and education. her defence of this wretched man is, in principle, that which an old bailey advocate offers when he cites the theories of lombroso in favour of a beetle-browed criminal who has stuck his knife into the breast of some confiding woman. it was "the world" that had made him what he was, he was to be pitied, not condemned. though we have not to consider here whether elinor and the advocate are right or wrong, it is hard to avoid the thought that, when she wrote this remarkable chapter, jane austen was influenced in a degree quite unusual in that age with people of her class by the sense of futility which, not long before her day, had been the motive of _candide_. voltaire's irony is bitter, in spite of the optimism which his book preaches, and of the essential kindness of his nature, while jane austen's is as sweet { } as irony can ever be. that she was intentionally ironical in this case of elinor's tolerance is scarcely possible. only a cynic would treat a pure-minded maiden's apology for a heartless seducer as a subject for covert satire, and jane was not a cynic. writing of maria edgeworth in his _notes for a diary_, sir m. e. grant duff says: "in her, as in miss austen, there is something wanting. is it what has been called the _nostalgie de l'infini_?" that intellectual ailment is more common now-a-days than it was in the eighteenth century, and there was little of it in the grey matter of any country brains when jane was born. certainly it cannot be diagnosed from her work generally. only in the particular case of elinor and willoughby does that idea of the helplessness of man in the maelstrom of infinity which has paralyzed the wills of so many unhappy victims, and induced the devastating literature of determinism, seem to have entered into her plan of work--for only thus can i account for the moral whitewashing of willoughby, not by a "man-of-the-world," with his "after all," and his "human nature" arguments, but by a country ingénue. the more i { } read jane austen's writings the stronger grows my conviction that she was one of those fortunate beings whose optimism is differentiated from pessimism by the good offices of an excellent digestion and an even pulse. we need not suppose that she had thought much about the philosophical sanction of conduct as opposed to the purely religious, or that she had studied the french _encyclopædia_. she was born and brought up in an atmosphere wherein convention, in regard to the things that matter, was almost omnipotent, and she was not of the type whereof iconoclasts are made. she attacked no system, social or religious; but she had no fondness for "isms," and thus it is that dogmatism is quite as hard to discover in her writings as scepticism. it has been said already that jane austen was not a cynic. yet it would be easy, by making _lady susan_ one's text, and ignoring the rest of her writings, to show that she was as cynical as a swift or an anatole france. of course i do not mean that her apparent cynicism in this case was exercised on the kind of subjects which is ridiculed in _the tale of a tub_ or in _l'ile des { } pingouins_. but i know nothing, in its way, more cold-blooded in the presentation of "love" than the conclusion of that novel of jane's springtime, which she herself, her own wise critic, withheld from publication. the rivalry of mother and daughter for the affections of the same man must always be an unpleasant subject, and the story of the conflict between lady susan vernon and her daughter for the matrimonial prize represented by reginald de courcy, as told in letters among the characters concerned, is on a low plane. the morals of the "heroine" may not be suspect, but her tone is below suspicion. what is the _dénouement_ of _lady susan_? the mother's schemes to marry the man of the daughter's choice have ended in her own marriage to the wealthy noodle whom she had tried to force upon the daughter. "frederica," says the author,--dropping the "correspondence" plan in order to wind up the book more readily--"was therefore fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt till such time as reginald de courcy could be talked, flattered and finessed into an affection for her which, allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her mother, for his abjuring all future { } attachments, and detesting the sex, might be reasonably looked for in the course of a twelve-month. three months might have done it in general, but reginald's feelings were no less lasting than lively. whether lady susan was or was not happy in her second choice, i do not see how it can ever be ascertained...." it is certain that to some considerable extent _lady susan_ was a satire on several lady novelists of the period. all jane austen's novels are more or less satirical, from _northanger abbey_, which is full of burlesque passages, to _persuasion_, in which they are so rare that it needs a hunt to discover any. whether or not _lady susan_ was intended to be taken more seriously than in jest, it is a dull performance. the whole plan and treatment of the book are artificial. it was not jane's natural instinct or her finer art which was at work in its making. so foreign is it to herself that if the ms. had been found in some cupboard of a manor-house no occupants of which had been of known relationship to the austens, i doubt if it would have been attributed to her by any one who had not made a meticulous comparison of its phraseology with her acknowledged works. { } there is, i think, no surer evidence of jane's fine taste, alike in character and in literature, than that, having brought this novel to completion, she deliberately suppressed it. had she sold it to a publisher, and allowed it to run its chance of popularity like the rest of her finished novels, we should have had to revise our views on her nature and judgment to a considerable extent. as it is, the fact that having written a poor novel of disagreeable tendency she recognized the unsatisfactory thing that she had done in time to cancel it is much in her favour, and justifies the opinion that whatever defects of subject or of treatment we may find in _lady susan_ were condemned by its author. it is for this reason that we need not regret the decision of her nephew and niece to publish, many years after their aunt's death, the book which she herself had withheld. only, let us never forget as we read it that it was cancelled by the author. _the watsons_ was produced, as far as can be ascertained, in that middle period of jane's life when, after her father's resignation of the steventon living he was spending his few remaining years at bath with his wife and daughters. having { } written three of her six novels in the nineties of the eighteenth century--the six novels by which she chose to be judged--at steventon, she produced nothing more of her best until at chawton, in the early years of the nineteenth century, she completed her life's work. all her books that live by their own merits were written in the heart of the country. the book that comes nearest to the commonest fiction of her period was chiefly written in a town which, however staid and irreproachable in its tone at the present date, was in her time a centre of worldliness and frivolity. _the rivals_ was first acted in the year of jane austen's birth, but the picture it offers of bath society is almost as true of as of . dress had changed much in the intervening years, but in all else there seems to have been little change between the bath of sheridan the lover of elizabeth linley, and the bath of sheridan the friend of the prince regent. it was among lydia languishes and captain absolutes that jane austen walked in milsom street and danced at the assembly-rooms in - , and it was in an atmosphere of social affectation and busy idleness that she found { } her powers unequal to any nobler performance than the account of the husband-hunting and silly young women who angle for lord osborne and his friends. the futilities of _the watsons_ form a remarkable interlude between _pride and prejudice_ and _mansfield park_. the rural society into which jane austen takes us in all her novels marks a rapid development from the manners of the preceding age. if we regard the squire western of fielding as representative of a considerable class of the country gentlemen of his time, we may wonder how it is that no such rude disturber of the peace bursts in among the woodhouses and the dashwoods. his nearest relation in jane's novels is sir john middleton, and he, with all his noise and ignorance, is a quiet, well-bred person in comparison with the rude father of the delicious sophia. even the less rubicund and animal squire of the hardcastle species is here unknown, and squire allworthy himself would have been strange in the drawing-rooms of mansfield park and pemberley, or the parlours of longbourn and hartfield. there is less change to be seen in the "manners and tone" of the women, especially the younger { } women, than of the men. sophia and amelia would have used a few expressions, perhaps, that might have made emma stare and cry "good god!" or the fine colour deepen on elizabeth's cheeks, and marianne dashwood would have confided to elinor her astonishment that such otherwise attractive girls should be so ignorant of the poets, and of the proper arrangement of natural scenery. had the girls become confidential on further acquaintance, sophia might have wondered why elizabeth said so little about the appearance of her lover, and so much about his intelligence. but tom jones and booth would never have got on intimate terms with knightley, or darcy, or edward ferrars, until these austen young men had drunk more port than anybody in jane's novels--with the exception of john thorpe as described by himself--could carry without disaster. there are no "heroes" among these honest gentlemen of a hundred years ago. wentworth has indeed won credit and fortune at sea. bertram and knightley do nothing to entitle them to the name, beyond marrying the heroine. edward ferrars merely behaves properly in keeping faith { } with lucy as long as she wants him. darcy is heroic in taking mrs. bennet for a mother-in-law; henry tilney makes fun of his chosen mate in a way that would have cost him her heart in a more conventional novel. "il y a des héros en mal comme en bien," says rochefoucauld, but of the evil-doing kind there are none here, unless, indeed, the effrontery with which, after jilting marianne for a rich wife, willoughby comes to her sister elinor and asks for her sympathy for his sad fate, or the coolness of wickham in the presence of the people he has wronged may be regarded as evidence of heroism. it is to the wonderfully true presentation of the hearts and minds of girls that these novels chiefly owe their immense power of attraction even for readers who miss the greater part of the humour. fanny price and elinor dashwood are themselves but poorly endowed with humour, and catherine morland only possesses it in the rudimentary way of a lively school-girl. with how much of understanding, how clearly and fully are the hopes and fears, the innocent little plans of fanny and catherine, the more mature and reasoned ways of elinor shown to us, without the least apparent effort. { } the trustful reader nurtured on the successful fiction of our own time, especially that of the last ten years, during which english novelists have been able to indulge themselves and their public by the introduction of incidents and types of character which up to about the commencement of that decade would have secured the ban of the circulating libraries, has been led to believe that sensual impulse plays as large a part in woman's life as in man's. that such women as lady bellaston in _tom jones_, arabelle in _le lys dans la vallée_, or the bellona of _richard feverel_ exist, and in great numbers, is certain, but they are not representative of woman. balzac, who was not: much restrained by any fear of the libraries, knew that many faithless wives (so very common in french fiction and drama, whatever they might be in life) gave themselves to men their love for whom contained much less of sensuality than of other instincts. esther, the unhappy jewess of _splendeurs et misèes de courtisanes_, loves lucien with an affection far more chaste than that which many a correct heroine is made to display for the man with whom she goes to the altar in the last chapter. the mistresses of famous men, as known to us from memoirs and histories, have not { } generally been of a sensual nature. aspasia, most distinguished of them all, was of the intellectual, not the sensual, type. strangely indelicate as was madame du châtelet, her relations with voltaire were based on affinity of literary taste and critical appreciation much more than on physical attraction. even among the unintellectual women who have figured among the _grandes amoureuses_ of history, the passion of the woman does not in most instances appear to have been of the coarser kind. louise de la vallière is at least more typical of womanhood than barbara villiers. emma woodhouse, deeply distressed at the supposed intention of knightley to marry harriet smith, feels that she cares not what may happen, if he will but remain single all his life. "could she be secure of that, indeed, of his never marrying at all, she believed she should be perfectly satisfied. let him but continue the same mr. knightley to her and her father, the same mr. knightley to all the world; let donwell and hartfield lose none of their precious intercourse of friendship and confidence, and her peace would be fully secured. marriage, in fact, would not do for her." marriage, we know, "did for her" very { } well, and not at all, so far as we have her story, in the idiomatic sense in which the words are commonly used. but in this healthy maiden, who could regard with equanimity a future wherein the man she liked best should never be more to her than a dear friend who dropped in for tea or supper, we have an effective illustration of the relative insignificance of passion in jane austen's view of life. emma woodhouse has near relations in elinor dashwood and edward ferrars, who, after the marriage of lucy steele to robert ferrars had cleared away the only barrier to their own avowals of affection, "were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life." kitty and lydia bennet could simultaneously adore all the officers of a militia regiment, but there was nothing of the "all for love, and the world well lost" nonsense about any of the agreeable women of jane austen's creation. they were not to be captured by a man's attractions of mind and person in the way that millamant was by mirabell's, nor even by the art of others, as beatrice was won for { } benedick--and he for her. the names of millamant and beatrice were in the ancestral tree of elizabeth bennet, but her pulses beat more regularly than theirs. in the effect of mary crawford's charms on edmund bertram we may see some pale suggestion of such an awakening as that of robert orange (in _the school for saints_), who, on meeting with brigit, "suddenly had found presented to him a mind and a nature in such complete harmony with his own that it had seemed as though he were the words and she the music, of one song." but it was only a "seeming" in edmund's case, and while we read jane austen our thoughts are rarely allowed to flow into a "romeo and juliet" channel for more than a few moments at a time. the re-awakening of wentworth's dormant love for anne elliot would have afforded to most lady novelists an opportunity for some fine, romantic writing. jane austen allows herself no romance in the matter. the sea air at lyme has heightened anne's colour, and a passing visitor--her cousin, as it happens--is attracted by her appearance. wentworth notices his glances of admiration and is _reminded_ that she is charming! { } "when they came to the steps leading upwards from the beach, a gentleman, at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew back and stopped to give them way. they ascended and passed him; and as they passed, anne's face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration which she could not be insensible of. she was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced. it was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. captain wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which showed his noticing of it. he gave her a momentary glance--a glance of brightness which seemed to say, 'that man is struck with you'--and even i, at this moment, see something like anne elliot again." this scene may be deficient in the sentiment that delights catherine morlands and marianne dashwoods, but it is a bit of true observation of a familiar phase of human folly. archbishop whately remarks that: "authoresses ... can scarcely ever forget that they _are authoresses_. they seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female mind. _elles se peignent en buste_, and { } leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like richardson or marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own conjectures the rest. now from this fault miss austin is free. her heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge it." it is a striking proof of the little that was known of jane austen by her contemporaries that, even four years after her death, neither whately himself, nor the editor of the _quarterly review_ knew how to spell her name. the criticism that the mind brought up on modern fiction would be likely to make on the girls of jane austen would be the reverse of whately's. it would be that her chief defect in depicting woman's character was that she almost invariably did force the reader to spin from his own conjectures when the "mysteries of the heart" were the subject of her pages. the truth is divided, i think, between the archbishop and the supposed modern critic. jane's heroines are true women, admirably portrayed, but they only represent a certain proportion of their sex. it could never be suspected of elizabeth, or elinor, { } or anne, or fanny that there was southern blood in her veins. there might have been a few drops--no more--in marianne's. the feelings of the author are reflected in her most attractive characters. she might have married, again and again, of that there can be small doubt; and while for herself she shared dorothy osborne's opinion as to the essentials of conjugal happiness, i fancy that she would also have agreed with dorothy's brother that "all passions have more of trouble than satisfaction in them, and therefore they are happiest that have least of them." that, indeed, as we have already seen, was very much the fault that miss brontë found in her as a novelist. anne elliot comes nearer than any of her fellow-heroines to dorothy osborne's ideal of the changelessness of affection, the true union of hearts, but, save for her involuntary tears at the musgroves', she kept her feelings under the most perfect control, and never, we may be sure, tried to beat her convictions into the heads of her silly family, or even of her faithful friend lady russell. there were, we may fairly believe, not a few who would like to have been jane's chosen mate. { } one such unhappy being seems, as we read, to be the actor in the little bit of serious comedy related, with lively exaggeration, in a letter written when she was twenty-five years old. "your unfortunate sister was betrayed last thursday into a situation of the utmost cruelty. i arrived at ashe park before the party from deane, and was shut up in the drawing-room with mr. holder alone for ten minutes. i had some thoughts of insisting on the housekeeper or mary corbett being sent for, and nothing could prevail on me to move two steps from the door, on the lock of which i kept one hand constantly fixed." elizabeth bennet was not more uncomfortable when her mother took kitty up-stairs after breakfast in order that mr. collins might have what he called "the honour of a private audience" with the elder girl. "dear ma'am," elizabeth cried, "do not go. i beg you will not go. mr. collins must excuse me. he can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. i am going away myself." but her mother's, "lizzy, i _insist_ upon your staying and hearing mr. collins," compelled her to remain, with results for which we must ever be grateful to { } mrs. bennet. it is not clear, however, that mr. holder was a suitor for jane. we are left in doubt both as to his hopes and his demerits. there is a little matter connected with the _quarterly's_ two articles in praise of jane which is perhaps worth noting here. gifford, who was editor when both appeared, was so warm a supporter of the prince regent that hazlitt--one of gifford's "beasts"--wrote in an open letter to him: "when you damn an author, one knows that he is not a favourite at carlton house." now the prince is said to have been so fond of jane austen's novels that he kept a set in each of his residences, and it is unquestionable that, in consequence of a suggestion that was "equivalent to a command," she dedicated emma to him. "you will be pleased to hear," she wrote on april , , to john murray the first, who published the book, "that i have received the prince's thanks for the _handsome_ copy i sent him of 'emma.' whatever he may think of _my_ share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right." in the same letter she expresses her disappointment at the "total omission of 'mansfield park'" { } in the _quarterly's_ review of her work in the preceding autumn. as to that review, it is a curious fact that until lockhart's "life of scott" appeared, whately, who wrote the article, was credited with the authorship of the earlier review, and it is still to be found against his name in the british museum catalogue, not from the ignorance of the cataloguers, but because he appears as author on the title-page of a reprint of the article issued at ahmedabad in . { } v the impartial satirist what has woman done?--"nature's salic law"--women deficient in satire--some types in the novels--the female snob--the valetudinarian--the fop--the too agreeable man--"personal size and mental sorrow"--knightley's opinion of emma--ashamed of relations--mrs. bennet--the clergy and their opinions--worldly life--absence of dogma--authors confused with their creations. it is a commonplace of those who refuse to recognize the claims of woman to equal treatment in spheres of activity where man has long held a monopoly, to ask what great thing has woman done in any walk of life? one may talk in reply of sappho, of joan of arc, of george sand, of george eliot, of florence nightingale, and two or three others, and the retort, if the greatness of these be admitted, is that they are the exceptions that "prove" the rule. it is difficult, impossible perhaps, to upset the man who denies that anything of "the greatest" in art, or literature, or science has been achieved by a woman. the list { } of women who have left an abiding fame as poets, or novelists, or painters is soon exhausted, and there is not a name that can, without reserve, be placed among the rembrandts and turners, the goethes and miltons, the newtons and darwins of mankind. maybe this deficiency is largely due to lack of opportunity. since the gates were partly opened to woman, within the lifetime of those who are still not old, she has done enough to change the opinions of many who held that rocking the cradle was a sufficiently active share in the ruling of the world for the sex that produced the maid of orleans and the lady with the lamp. such justly conspicuous success as madame curie has attained in chemistry, or mrs. garrett anderson in medicine, or mrs. scharlieb in surgery, has compelled the admission that even if woman were by nature unfitted to reach the highest levels of intellectual achievement, she at least could not be excluded from the learned professions on the ground of inadequate mental equipment. "nature's old salic law," said huxley, "will not be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected." jane austen, at any rate, did not { } desire to repeal it. she was among the most feminine of the women writers who have left an enduring reputation. it is something of a paradox, therefore, that the quality on which her fame chiefly rests is one which is rare among women, and in which most of those women who have attained success in literature have been conspicuously lacking--satirical humour. apart from physical disabilities, want of humour is woman's heaviest handicap in the conflict of life. humour is the principal ingredient of the philosophic temperament. woman has courage in adversity, she can suffer intensely without complaint, but she rarely possesses the power of laughing at her own misfortunes. it has been said, and the saying might not easily be gainsaid, that none of the great jokes of the world was made by a woman. there are perhaps fifty great jokes--spoken jokes, of course, are meant, not those generally humourless things known as "practical jokes"--and the good stories that are told and received as novelties are, save in the rarest instances, merely new editions of some wheeze which was already ancient when it was told to a circle of mead-drinkers round a fire { } the smoke whereof--or some of it--escaped through the roof. it is, there is reason to believe, no mere figure of speech that originally most of the basic jokes were told round the galley fire of the ark during the long dark evenings after the animals had been fed, the decks swept down, and the women had retired to their quarters. thus may we account for the otherwise inexplicably large proportion of sea-faring and animal tales among the mirth-provoking yarns of man. a woman might never make a joke, and yet have a keen sense of humour, while, on the other hand, she might make many jokes, and have no sense of humour at all. most of the jokes that have any element of freshness are alive with fun, and not with humour. who is more humourless than the notoriously funny man? jane austen is not often funny and seldom makes jokes in her novels. her humour is of the essential kind, which is so nearly akin to wit that it is often almost identical with it. wit and humour, after all definitions, are brothers who might be taken for one another by those who do not notice that the one has colder hands than the other. { } if you want to laugh heartily you must not trust to jane's novels for a stimulant. her characters laugh but little among themselves, and are the cause of intellectual joy rather than of physical contractions in those who read about them. when, after a re-reading of the novels, we sit and think over their delights, many are the admirable bits of character-drawing that come to mind. after we have thought of the heroines, the "good" people, in the common meaning of the word, do not come back to us so readily as those who, if not "bad," are decidedly faulty. the westons, the gardiners, the harvilles, the crofts, lady russell, the john knightleys, we recall when we jog our memories. after elizabeth, and emma, and anne, it is the appallingly tactless mrs. bennet, the odiously snobbish mrs. elton, the race-proud lady catherine, the entirely selfish mr. collins, the lazy and thoughtless lady bertram, the mean and tyrannical mrs. norris, the fatuous sir walter elliot, these and their like, who throng into view. no writer--not even thackeray--has realized the female snob more knowingly than jane austen in mrs. elton, whose { } constant reference of all matters of taste to the standard presented by "maple grove" and the "barouche-landau" renders her as diverting to us as she was insufferable to emma woodhouse. a woman like this, who is never betrayed into an unselfish action or a noble aspiration, is happily not a common object in real life, but there are enough of mrs. elton's great-granddaughters about the world to exculpate jane from the charge of undue exaggeration. emma herself has been called a snob, and only the other day was described as "perpetually acting with bad taste." but emma's disdain for robert martin, and her opinion of the degradation of marrying a governess, were due to prejudices of convention, which thought--under knightley's influence--dispelled. mrs. elton was a snob at heart, who revelled in her own vulgarity of instinct. if the snob is portrayed to perfection in mrs. elton, the valetudinarian is no less happily presented in mr. woodhouse--"my dear emma, suppose we all have a little gruel"--and for a picture of an empty-headed, frivolous wife married to a rational and bearish husband, the palmers, in _sense and sensibility_, have few equals. as for { } miss bates, she is without a serious rival as an inconsequential babbler, and though we may be, and ought to be, as angry with emma for her rudeness at the box hill picnic as was mr. knightley himself, we must admit that years of miss bates's disjoined garrulity were some set-off against that gross breach of charity and good manners. lady catherine de bourgh has been placed by some critical readers among jane austen's obvious caricatures. is she not an entirely credible, if happily rare, type? she is seen in a strong light in her attempt to bully elizabeth into a promise not to marry darcy-- "'with regard to the resentment of his family,' says elizabeth at last, 'or the indignation of the world, if the former _were_ excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern--and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.' "'and this is your real opinion!' replies lady catherine. 'this is your final resolve! very well. i shall now know how to act. do not imagine, miss bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. i came to try you. i hoped to find you reasonable; but, depend upon it, i will carry my point.' "in this manner lady catherine talked on till { } they were at the door of the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added-- "'i take no leave of you, miss bennet. i send no compliments to your mother. you deserve no such attention. i am most seriously displeased.' "elizabeth made no answer, and without attempting to persuade her ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself." thus ends one of the great scenes of jane austen, a bit of duologue which gives us the natures and capacities of two remarkable people, a charming, clear-headed, self-reliant girl, and a blustering, stupidly proud old woman. sir walter elliot is the companion figure, more highly-coloured, of lady catherine. this man, a vain fop who has not sense enough to govern his own affairs, regards professional men as contemptible, if necessary, adjuncts of society, and, at a time when only the splendid services of our sailors had saved england from disaster he thus babbles about the navy-- "yes; it is in two points offensive to me, i have two strong grounds of objection to it. first, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure { } birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and, secondly, as it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most horribly; a sailor grows old sooner than any other man. i have observed it all my life. a man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one whose father his father might have disdained to speak to, and of becoming prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other line. one day last spring, in town, i was in company with two men, striking instances of what i am talking of,--lord st. ives, whose father we all know to have been a country curate, without bread to eat: i was to give place to lord st. ives,--and a certain admiral baldwin, the most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine; his face the colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree; all lines and wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top. 'in the name of heaven, who is that old fellow?' said i to a friend of mine who was standing near (sir basil morley). 'old fellow!' cried sir basil, 'it is admiral baldwin. what do you take his age to be?' 'sixty,' said i, 'or perhaps sixty-two.' 'forty,' replied sir basil, 'forty, and no more.' picture to yourselves my amazement: i shall not easily forget admiral baldwin. i never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do; but to a degree, i know it is the same with them all: they are all knocked about, and { } exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. it is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach admiral baldwin's age." there have been such fools as sir walter elliot, but as a type he is overdrawn. jane loved the navy so much that her anger with those who disparaged it gave her pen speed and added colour to the ink. anne's cousin william elliot, whose attentions to her help to revive wentworth's affection, is more closely studied by the author than any of her "heroes." "everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. he had strong feelings of family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public opinion in any point of worldly decorum. he was steady, observant, moderate, candid; never run away with by spirits or by selfishness, which fancied itself strong feeling; and yet, with a sensibility to what was amiable and lovely, and a value for all the felicities of domestic { } life, which characters of fancied enthusiasm and violent agitation seldom really possess." anne, however, was not long in discovering grave defects in this outwardly model person. she saw that while he was "rational, discreet, polished, he was not open. there never was any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. this, to anne, was a decided imperfection. her early impressions were incurable. she prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. she felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped. "mr. elliot was too generally agreeable. various as were the tempers in her father's house, he pleased them all. he endured too well, stood too well with everybody." those who accuse jane austen of hardness have sometimes relied on her treatment of mrs. musgrove's sorrow over her ne'er-do-well son, long after his death, to support this charge. anne and wentworth, whose mutual liking was just { } beginning to bloom again, were "actually on the same sofa, for mrs. musgrove had most readily made room for him; they were divided only by mrs. musgrove. it was no insignificant barrier, indeed. mrs. musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, captain wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." and then the author stops in her narrative to observe that "personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. a large, bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. but, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain--which taste cannot tolerate--which ridicule will seize." she thus bluntly expresses what almost every satirist merely implies, but she underrates her own powers. the ordinary writer might or might not { } be able to describe the grief of "a large, bulky figure" without offence to the ordinary "taste." genius could assuredly do this thing. shakespeare, with whom whately, macaulay and tennyson compared jane austen, made one of his greatest characters "fat and scant of breath," but when hamlet says to his friend, "thou woulds't not think how ill all's here about my heart," we do not find it "ridiculous" that this "too, too solid flesh" should be joined with a mind weighted with such poignant sorrow. in any case, whether she mistrusted her own powers, or wanted mrs. musgrove to be slightly ridiculous, which seems more likely, jane did not here strive to achieve what she pointedly tells us it would be beyond reason to expect. the character of emma is described with unusual fulness, but the description is placed in the mouth of george knightley, her candid admirer, who was perhaps not guiltless of the fault which fainall attributed to mirabell, of being "too discerning in the failings of his mistress." mrs. weston ("miss taylor that was") has said that emma means to read with harriet smith-- { } "'emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old,' replies mr. knightley. 'i have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. the list she drew up when only fourteen--i remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that i preserved it some time, and i dare say she may have made out a very good list now. but i have done with expecting any course of steady reading from emma. she will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. where miss taylor failed to stimulate, i may safely affirm that harriet smith will do nothing. you never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished. you know you could not.' "'i dare say,' replied mrs. weston, smiling, 'that i thought so _then_; but since we have parted, i can never remember emma's omitting to do anything i wished.' "'there is hardly any desiring to refresh such a memory as _that_,' said mr. knightley, feelingly; and for a moment or two he had done. 'but i,' he soon added, 'who have had no such charm thrown over my senses, must still see, hear, and remember. emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. at ten years old she had the { } misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. she was always quick and assured; isabella slow and diffident. and ever since she was twelve, emma has been mistress of the house and of you all. in her mother she lost the only person able to cope with her.'" an unhappy condition of most of jane's heroines is that they are of necessity ashamed of their nearest relations. anne elliot felt this trouble keenly, when at length she and wentworth decided to take the happiness which she had refused years before-- "anne, satisfied at a very early period of lady russell's meaning to love captain wentworth as she ought, had no other alloy to the happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness of having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value. there she felt her own inferiority keenly. the disproportion in their fortune was nothing; it did not give her a moment's regret; but to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will, to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could { } well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity." one can readily understand her regret. her father was a fool, her elder sister elizabeth a slave of convention, with few rational ideas of her own, and her younger sister a neurotic egotist, who grudged to others the simplest pleasures if she did not feel able or disposed to share them. fanny price was ashamed of the slovenly home at portsmouth to which henry crawford so inopportunely penetrated. elizabeth bennet's mother was, of course, more nearly "impossible" even than lady catherine had so pointedly suggested, for her defects were far worse than those of obscure birth. this terrible woman, who kept her elder daughters constantly on the rack by her fatuous chatter, who always said the wrong thing, who had no desire for her children's welfare but to marry them to anybody, with money if possible, or without it rather than not at all, made one of her usual quick changes when she heard the surprising news of elizabeth's engagement to darcy-- { } "she began at length to recover, to fidget about in her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself. "'good gracious! lord bless me! only think! dear me! mr. darcy! who would have thought it! and it is really true? oh, my sweetest lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! what pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! jane's is nothing to it--nothing at all. i am so pleased--so happy! such a charming man!--so handsome! so tall--oh, my dear lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before. i hope he will overlook it. dear, dear lizzy! a house in town! everything that is charming! three daughters married! ten thousand a-year! oh, lord! what will become of me? i shall go distracted.' "this was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted; and elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself, soon went away. but before she had been three minutes in her own room, her mother followed her. "'my dearest child,' she cried, 'i can think of nothing else! ten thousand a-year, and very likely more! 'tis as good as a lord! and a special license. you must and shall be married by a special license. but, my dearest love, tell me what dish mr. darcy is particularly fond of, that i may have it to-morrow.' "this was a sad omen of what her mother's behaviour to the gentleman himself might be; and { } elizabeth found that, though in the certain possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations' consent, there was still something to be wished for." of catherine morland we are told that "her whole family were plain matter-of-fact people, who seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father at the utmost being contented with a pun, and her mother with a proverb." having given us this little _aperçu_ of mr. and mrs. morland, the author, _more suo_, adds the information: "they were not in the habit, therefore, of telling lies to increase their importance, or of asserting at one moment what they would contradict the next." if we seek in our memories for scenes of particular excellence we shall recall with renewed pleasure the rehearsals (_mansfield park_), the encounters between elizabeth and mr. collins and elizabeth and lady catherine (_pride and prejudice_), the second and last proposal of wentworth to anne elliot (_persuasion_), the picnic at box hill and the dance at the "crown" (_emma_). in all of these the spontaneity of the narrative, the vitality of the talk and the vividness with which the circumstances are realized with { } the smallest amount of description show the author's art in its most delightful vein. it is often in little touches, generally satirical, that jane austen reveals the characters of her people. lady middleton, whose "reserve was a mere calmness of _manner_ with which _sense_ had nothing to do"; mary bennet, whom, when her sisters visited her, "they found, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature, and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of threadbare morality to listen to"; the gushing louisa musgrove, who declared that if she loved a man as mrs. croft loved the admiral, she "would always be with him, nothing should ever separate" them, and that she "would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else"; mr. allen, a country gentleman of fortune who "did not care about the garden, and never went into it"; and general tilney, poring over pamphlets when he ought to be in bed, blinding his eyes "for the good of others" who would never benefit in the least by his exertions; the heartless and humbugging mrs. norris, whose plentiful talk about helping her poor, child-burdened sister ended in her { } "writing the letters" while others sent substantial assistance--these, and many other entertaining people live for us largely from such casual peeps into their natures and sentiments. jane austen rarely describes a man or woman as possessing qualities which are not justified by the evidence she offers. almost the only notable exceptions are mrs. dashwood, of whom we are told that "a man could not very well be in love with either of her daughters, without extending the passion to her," but who does not herself give us any reason to regard her as other than an affectionate, well-meaning, and injudicious person, and captain wentworth, who is stated to have been witty, but who usually manages to restrain his wit when we happen to meet him. the many parsons of the novels are at once too steady and too prosperous to be in accord with either of the types of eighteenth-century clergy most frequently conveyed by the literature of their period. they may not have done much for their parishioners beyond preaching to them once or twice a week, and sending them soup occasionally, but they set them good examples by conducting themselves decently and soberly. of { } their "views" we know little. indeed, few things are more remarkable in these novels, in the light of later fiction, than that almost complete absence of any reference to dogmatic religion to which attention has already been drawn. you may hunt through them all and hardly find two definite statements that, except to see what the vicar's bride was like, any of the characters went to church. we know that the parsons preached, but whether there was any one to hear their sermons we are usually left in doubt. in fact, as dr. whately puts it, the author's religion is "not at all obtrusive." his favourable view of jane austen's influence may be contrasted with robert hall's of maria edgeworth's: "in point of tendency i should class her books among the most irreligious i ever read.... she does not attack religion nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it." it has frequently been said that the atmosphere of jane austen's books is "church of england," and this is in a sense true. she assumes that the squires of whom she writes are adherents of church and state, much as a provincial { } clergyman wrote quite recently in his parish magazine: "it is generally taken for granted that church is the only possible religion for an english gentleman." we meet with no romish priests or methodist preachers, not so much as a member of the society of friends, but, on the other hand, we meet with no one who talks against faith. it was a period when the church itself had become apathetic, when pluralists abounded, and when many rectors lived comfortably on their great tithes, far from the parishes which they left to the care of curates who were often worse off than gamekeepers. a young man went into the church, if there was a good living to be had, just as he went to the bar if his uncle was a flourishing attorney, or into the navy if his friends had influence with the board of admiralty. many parsons, if they were well-to-do and fond of society, did not even wear any distinctive dress. one meets vicars and curates to-day, in summer-time, wearing green ties and grey tweed suits, and even a bishop has been known to abandon his episcopal uniform when he was away on a holiday. but, to take an instance from the novels, catherine morland, who has met henry { } tilney at a dance in bath, and meets him again at the pump-room or elsewhere, does not know he is a clergyman until she is told. the church was merely a profession for most of those who entered it. "did henry's income depend solely on his living," says general tilney, "he would not be well provided for. perhaps it may seem odd, that with only two younger children, i should think any profession necessary to him; and certainly there are moments when we could all wish him disengaged from every tie of business." the most conscientious clergyman in the austen comedy is edmund bertram, who really seems to have wished to do his duty, and thereby damaged his chance of marrying mary crawford. the scanty reference to the observances of religion in the novels bears on the worldly life of the age, as we know it from those who were of it and saw it at its centre of activity, london society. doctor warner, george selwyn's chaplain, who attracted large congregations by his eloquent preaching, and who was an avowed sceptic away from church, who toadied the rich and noble, and told stories that delighted the duke of queensberry, was no rare type of the { } clergy of his time, and we may be pretty certain that jane austen's mr. collins (who was not at all likely to tell an improper story himself) would have found it very difficult to believe that so exalted a personage as "old q." was unfit for the society of clergymen. jane frankly admitted that she knew too little of literature, philosophy, and science, to allow her adequately to draw the character of a scholarly and serious parson. "the comic side of the character i might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy of which i know nothing, or at least occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving." according to her brother and her nephew, jane was better educated than she here makes out, knowing french, and a good deal of italian. whether we believe her or not about her literary and linguistic limitations, we can have small doubt that she knew very little indeed about science and philosophy, in spite of being so much { } of a philosopher. in those days, when cuvier was bringing his genius in palæontology to bear on the recovery of lost types, and preparing a way for darwin, whose own grandfather was bravely aiding in the clearance of paths in hitherto trackless jungles of prejudice and obscurantism, science was scarcely regarded as a decent subject of conversation before ladies in country drawing-rooms, and it never obtrudes itself at hartfield or at mansfield park. if we may read through every word of jane's novels without discovering any expression of dogmatic belief, we may equally find no direct evidence, unless in that one story of elinor and willoughby, of acceptance of the chilly deism which had eaten so deeply into the intellects both of laymen and clergy. the unrest, both moral and physical, which had spread from paris, from holland, and from switzerland over the whole of western europe at that time, finds little place for its fidgeting in the families to whom we are here introduced. people, with the rare exceptions of a wickham or a willoughby, are born, live, and die, in peace with the world and in general harmony with their environments. { } admirable as jane austen's pictures of country life in house and garden are, they are not to be accepted as literal transcripts. she was, before all else, an artist, and the more an artist is devoted to finicking reproduction of exact details the further is he removed from art. almost every author, if he writes with sincerity, must draw his own moral portrait in his best work. in a literal sense there is no reason to suppose that novelists often give us studies of themselves in any degree comparable with the self-portraits of rembrandt, velasquez, madame vigée le brun or the moderns in the uffizi gallery. sometimes, of course, as in _villette_ and _delphine_, an author reports episodes in his life almost as they happened, and it is certain, save in the rarest cases, that something of an author's mental processes is reproduced in all his creatures, "bad" as well as "good," though he is more likely to show his own temperament and experience in a prominent and sympathetic character than in any other. very few writers follow the example of milton, of whom coleridge declared "his satan, his adam, his raphael, almost all his eve, are all john milton." the common mistake, a mistake so obvious that { } we may wonder at its continuance, is such a close identification of the author with any one of his creations. thus, because "vivian grey is disraeli himself," disraeli is to be credited with the strange experiences of that uneasy hero among foreign politicians and card-sharpers; and because "jane eyre is charlotte brontë," charlotte brontë must at least have wished to unite herself with a wild man whose wife had gone mad. there were no doubt readers of goethe's _faust_ who, ignoring the legend, thought the author had bargained with mephisto and, it "goes without saying" (marianne dashwood is not within hearing), that "hamlet is shakespeare." such arbitrary reasoning may account for the general confusion of frankenstein with the creature that he made. among the widest traps, indeed, for those who love to see a _roman à clef_ in every novel, is this identification of the author with one or other of his characters. some people have convinced themselves that cassandra and jane austen were the originals of elinor and marianne dashwood. such an idea could only be held by those who had not seen jane's letters. marianne, { } sentimental, romantic, disagreeable in a quite serious way, and usually inattentive "to the forms of general civility," could not be jane, and as certainly not cassandra as we know her, and while elinor, the patient, long-suffering girl, might in some ways represent either of the austen sisters, she is very far from being a portrait. yet if neither elinor dashwood nor marianne is to be described as a likeness of jane, the elder sister in her philosophical submission to what she believed to be the loss of her lover, and the younger in her literary tastes and her impatience with people who talk without thinking may fairly be regarded as in part reflecting the author's personality. none of her heroines _is_ jane, but there is much of her also in elizabeth bennet and emma woodhouse, and a good deal in anne elliot, though she admitted that anne was too nearly perfect to be altogether after her heart. the simple little souls of fanny price and catherine morland, so dependent on the direct assistance of others in the formation of their feelings, are in very small degree expressions of the author's temperament. we may, i think, regard emma woodhouse as the nearest approach to a { } portrait of the artist who painted her, but "nearest" is a relative superlative. many people do not care for emma. a strong expression of recent disapproval was quoted a few pages back. jane austen anticipated objections. "i am going," she said, when she was beginning the book, "to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." whether or not we may see in emma a good deal of jane herself, we may fairly be certain that none of her characters is an intentional copy of any one in the circle of her friends and acquaintances. she herself declared her opinion, which tallies with all that we know of her, that the introduction of living people as actors in a work of imagination is a breach of good manners, and that, propriety apart, she was too proud of her characters to admit that they were "only mrs. a. or colonel b." how far she made use of individuals in the composition of such strongly-marked figures as mrs. elton, mr. collins and sir walter elliot, we cannot, of course, know. the point, for what it is worth, could have been better elucidated if miss austen's circle had been less far removed from the world wherein the { } wraxalls, the gronows and the grevilles listen and watch. we know that, whatever the degree of similitude, disraeli's rigby offers a recognizable likeness to croker, dickens's boythorn to landor, stevenson's weir of hermiston to braxfield. accepting jane austen's denial of the deliberate introduction of real persons in her novels, we cannot tell how many of her hampshire acquaintances served intellectually for her pictures of country society as the maidens of crotona served physically for the picture of helen by zeuxis. we may be certain that, all unconsciously, they gave her of their best, each according to his means. { } vi personal and topographical the novelist and her characters--her sense of their reality--accessories rarely described--her ideas on dress--her own millinery and gowns--thin clothes and consumption--domestic economy--jane as housekeeper--"a very clever essay"--mr. collins at longbourn--the gipsies at highbury--topography of jane austen--hampshire--lyme regis--godmersham--bath--london. on an earlier page a contrast between balzac and jane austen has been suggested. one characteristic they had in common was the sense of the reality of their own creations. madame de surville, the sister of balzac, has recorded how, when the affairs of the family were being discussed, he would say, "ah, yes, but do you know to whom felix de vandenesse is engaged? one of the grandville girls. it is an excellent marriage for him." further than this an author's sense of the actuality of his own imaginings could hardly go, unless, indeed, like one modern author--if the { } story is true, as it probably is not--he were to invite the figments of his brain to lunch! jane austen was not quite so much obsessed by her inventions, though she spoke of the very novels themselves as personal entities. _pride and prejudice_ was "my own darling child," and of _sense and sensibility_ she writes, when it is passing through the press: "no, indeed, i am never too busy to think of _s. and s_. i can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child; and i am much obliged to you for your inquiries." as for the characters, she loved to talk of them as living people, and was so fond of elizabeth bennet, for instance, that, as she wrote to cassandra, she did not know how she should be "able to tolerate" those who did not like her. she used to tell her nieces what happened to her imaginary people after the novels were ended, how mary bennet married her uncle's clerk, or her sister kitty a clergyman, and how mrs. robert ferrars's sister "never caught the doctor." one of the most delightful of her letters, as evidence of her happiness in her work, and of her half-serious consciousness of the reality of her creations, was written after a round of london picture { } galleries. the portraits she looked for were not those of knights, or austens, or leighs, but of beautiful women out of her own novels. they might be labelled lady this or mrs. that, but she should recognize them if they were portraits of her darling elizabeth or her dearest anne. she was disappointed. it is true that at the gallery in spring gardens she found "a small portrait of mrs. bingley, excessively like her," and, moreover, "she is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what i had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. i dare say mrs. d. will be in yellow." for it was "mrs. d."--the beloved elizabeth darcy (_née_ bennet), whose face her creator and devoted admirer looked forward to seeing on some fashionable portrait-painter's canvas. alas! at none of the shows was the desired picture to be found. "i can only imagine," writes the disappointed "friend," soothing her regrets with a reflection natural to her mind, "that mr. d. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. i can imagine he would have that sort of feeling--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy." { } thus we can see that jane knew exactly what her heroines were like, even if in their case, as in that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left to fill in details of colour and feature very much as he chooses. she was far more particular in describing the personal appearance of real people, and in her letters the handsome and the ugly are as clearly differentiated as the lively and the dull. "i never saw so plain a family"--she declares after calling on some people named fagg--"five sisters so very plain! they are as plain as the foresters, or the franfraddops, or the seagraves, or the rivers, excluding sophy. miss sally fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family." sometimes she attributed the blame for ill-looks to a definite part of the genealogical tree. "i wish she was not so very palmery," she says of one of her nieces, "but it seems stronger than ever, i never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence." the mrs. palmer of _sense and sensibility_ was not of that family. she was as pretty as she was foolish. even if it be true that jane austen only painted the life which she found immediately around her, { } and that she would almost as soon have attempted to depict the interior of a thibetan lamassary as of an english country-house of the kind disraeli loved to paint, yet do her characters "typify nothing?" if mrs. elton, and sir john middleton, and mary musgrove are not types, then i do not see why sir charles grandison, or mrs. proudie, or mr. tulliver should be regarded as types. perhaps they should not, but then, what are types? most of jane austen's people may be common; there may be, in the flesh, a hundred lady russells for one lady camper, and five hundred john willoughbys for one willoughby patterne. that is only to say that humanity is richer in one type than in another. jane was a realist, though realism, in the sense in which we apply the term in the criticism of living writers, has little place in her novels. she assumes that her readers--the men and women of her own age--are neither blind nor unaccustomed to the ordinary resources of contemporary civilization. when her characters dine, they may usually, for all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a common dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after the manner of the nomads of the asiatic steppes; { } they may drink out of gourds like the bushmen, while, after the custom of the romans, they recline on raised couches in the attitude of madame récamier. we know that they sat round solid mahogany or oaken tables, covered with damask cloths during the meat and pudding service, that the silver was polished, and the glass bright, even though the supply of plates was perhaps not always equal to the number of courses; we have little doubt as to the kind of chairs whereon the diners sat, and we may wish we had more of them in our own dining-rooms. as to the costumes of the men and women who sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress them as we like, and there is little doubt that many a modern reader has mentally pictured darcy wearing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, charles musgrove in a golfing-cap and loose knickerbockers, and mr. collins or mr. elton in a stiff "round-about" collar of the kind usually worn by the anglican clergy of to-day. for the ladies, the whirligig of time has brought back the modes of a century ago. in spite of the cry for the equality of the sexes, there are, as the lord chancellor and other eminent authorities have laid down, marked { } distinctions between the ways of women and of men. one of such distinctions may be found in the fact that the fashions of feminine dress move in a (very irregular and therefore theoretically impossible) circle, while those of masculine dress rarely cross the same point twice. thus while, during the last few years, we have seen our sisters and aunts affecting "modes" that were in vogue in the periods of the renaissance, the directory, and the empire, we have never seen our brothers and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the courtiers either of françois _premier_ or of the first consul. a woman need not despair of wearing, without being followed by a crowd, almost any costume of any period of woman's history. a man need not look for the day when he may walk in the parks in the garb of raleigh or of burke without attracting more attention than will be agreeable to the modesty of any one but an actor-manager or the european agent of some american world-industry. the misses bertram, of mansfield park, might go shopping in regent street to-day without any one remarking that their dress, or their coiffure, was seriously out of date. but we only know how they dressed because we know the date { } of their birth, not because the author of a bit of their life-history has told us. who that has ever read _weir of hermiston_ can forget the description of the heroine as she first appeared to archie in the kirk? it was in the very year ( ) in which fanny price's story was related, and of mary crawford, if not of fanny, a tale of town finery as bright as that of kirstie might have been told. we know how alluring kirstie looked to archie in her "frock of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle," and "drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between ... surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses." of some such charming pictures we get at least the preliminary sketches in jane austen's letters, but the finished works are never shown in the novels, and we may dress the pretty heroines to our own fancy so long as we keep to the style of their period, or, if our imaginations are feeble and our knowledge of regency costume deficient, mr. brock will do the work for us in the more delightful of his coloured drawings, or mr. hugh thomson in his lively illustrations in pen and ink. { } this point--that the material factors of manners and habits are little noted by jane austen--will strike many readers, at first sight, as of quite trivial importance. but it is largely the reason why her novels have so modern an external air compared with those, let us say, of scott, or even of balzac, who only began to write when her short career was ending. if jane austen had described the conditions of life at hartfield or kellynch with the particularity with which balzac describes the grandets' house at saumur, and the guenics' at guerande, or had given us such full accounts of the villagers on the estate of the bertrams of mansfield park as scott gave us of the smugglers and gipsies on the lands of the bertrams of ellangowan, we should see more clearly the changes that a hundred years have wrought in the habits of the english country. jane austen was by no means indifferent to the cut and colour of her own clothing, however little she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. but when we read of "jane austen frocks" for bridesmaids in the accounts of modern weddings, they are copied from the illustrations of mr. thomson or mr. brock, or else are so-called merely because { } they are of the period of her novels, which is much the same thing. with the general subject of dress she deals as a novelist, we may almost say once for all, in a single paragraph of _northanger abbey_. the occasion was the dance at bath which was to prove so momentous an event in catherine's life. "what gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern. she cannot be justified in it. dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. catherine knew all this very well; her great-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. this would have been an error in judgment, great though not uncommon, from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown. it would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biassed by the texture { } of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. no man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better, for it. neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter." if we regard these as the author's considered opinions, expressed with a characteristic touch of _malice_, we shall probably agree that she is, on the whole, right. were women to make a note, every time a man describes one of them as "well dressed," of what the subject of the remark was wearing, they would, i believe, find an overwhelming preponderance of votes in favour of well-fitting, plain, if not actually "tailor-made" costumes for the daytime, and simple though not conventual frocks for the evening, as compared with all the highly decorated "confections," covered with what one may call "applied art," whereon women spend so large a proportion of their allowances. the letters to cassandra make up to some extent for the deficiencies of the novels in a { } matter so attractive to the author's admirers among her own sex, though the particulars given are almost always incomplete; that is to say, they depend on information which cassandra possessed, but which is denied to us. such a case is presented when we read: "elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a pretty _style_ of hat too. it is something like eliza's, only, instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. i flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from this description. heaven forbid that i should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! but i must write no more of this." the tantalizing thing is that while we know that this pretty hat was something like eliza's, we have no idea what eliza's was like, beyond the untrimmed fact that it was "all straw." then cassandra is told by jane, "i believe i _shall_ make my new gown like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect?" alas! that we cannot discover how the robe was made, except that "the back was all in a { } piece with the tail." often, of course, the news about dress is mixed up with other news, as when jane writes: "at nackington ... miss fletcher and i were very thick, but i am the thinnest of the two. she wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does not become her complexion...." once jane's account of her own necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed by a sentence which not only contains evidence of her close acquaintance with fielding's greatest novel, but also reminds us of mr. tom lefroy. "you say nothing of the silk stockings; i flatter myself, therefore, that charles has not purchased any, as i cannot very well afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian.... after i had written the above, we received a visit from mr. tom lefroy and his cousin george. the latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but _one_ fault, which time will, i trust, entirely remove--it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. he is a very great admirer of tom jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, i imagine, which _he_ did when he was wounded." many of her references to dress are of the { } partly serious, partly humorous kind which came naturally from her pen. "flowers are very much worn," she writes from bath in the summer of , "and fruit is still more the thing. elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries and i have seen grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. there are likewise almonds and raisins, french plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but i have never seen any of them in hats." she had, in the southampton days, a spotted muslin which she meant to wear out, in spite of its durability. "you will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feebleness, which, with a little care, may come to something." then she has some "bombazins" with trains, which "i cannot reconcile myself to giving up as morning gowns; they are so very sweet by candlelight. i would rather sacrifice my blue one ... in short i do not know and i do not care." a peep into the economy of steventon parsonage is now and again offered. in , "we are very busy making edward's shirts, and i am proud to say that i am the neatest worker of the party. they say that there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps _i_ may kill a few." { } another bit of work that the want of the riches of kent forced upon the poorer folks of hampshire is shown to us when jane writes: "i bought some japan ink and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend." in this case there is no difficulty of interpretation. now-a-days there are simple "dips" wherewith young ladies whose allowances are small or who in any case wish to make the most of their money can change old straw hats into new, soiled white into black, or green, or heliotrope. it was not so a century ago, and when jane wanted to turn her old white straw hat into a new black one, she must needs japan it. "i have read the 'corsair,' mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do," she writes from london in , and on another day about the same time she informs her sister: "i have determined to trim my lilac sarsenet with black satin ribbon, just as my china crape is, six-penny width at the bottom, threepenny or four-penny at top." an even closer glimpse of jane in her home is afforded by a letter in which she says-- { } "i find great comfort in my stuff gown, but i hope you do not wear yours too often. i have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since i came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering." such references may remind us of henry tilney's astonishment that catherine did not keep a journal of her doings. "how are your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life...? how are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion and curl of your hair to be described, in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? my dear madam, i am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me." jane austen was not reduced, as was her own mrs. hurst, to playing with her bracelets and rings when there were no games or dances in progress. on such occasions, like elizabeth bennet, she took up some needlework, and amused herself by listening to the general conversation, and entering into it when opportunity offered. like everything { } done by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is admirable, and her embroidery would be treasured by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no such charming associations attached to it. there is a muslin scarf adorned by her needle which, to her true lovers, might seem a more precious relic than even her mahogany desk itself. one little "interior" sketched by jane, after a visit to a young wife who had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative of her own neat habits, and her ideas of the material needs of happiness, that, intimate as it is, it merits quotation: "mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. she is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one." we have seen on an earlier page that jane austen provided warm garments for the village poor. on one occasion we know where she bought her flannel. in an entry (made at basingstoke) which might form the text for a dissertation on prejudice and economy, she notes that: "i gave { } _s._ _d._ a yard for my flannel, and i fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." why this contempt for what, in spite of all patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise, is still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless and necessary of materials? marianne dashwood included the wearing of a flannel waistcoat by colonel brandon among the several defects which made it impossible that she should ever be his wife, and when, for reasons not all unconnected with the "happy ending" of the novel, she agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that this gallant officer had "sought the constitutional safeguard" of the much-despised garment. to jane austen and marianne dashwood flannel, it seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as celluloid collars and cuffs are to most people of our own day. the ravages of consumption, as the baron de frenilly reflects in his recently published memoirs, would have been far less terrible in those times if women had been less hostile to warm dresses and flannel petticoats. fresh air and thick boots were { } also to seek. the women could not walk ten yards on a wet day without the water coming through the thin soles of their dainty little shoes. miss bates was quite exceptional in wearing shoes with reasonable soles. one more sumptuary extract must be quoted; it comes from a letter from london in : "my poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. it has been promised to be done several times. what wicked people dyers are. they begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin." the last sentence brings its writer for the moment very near to modern fiction, a considerable proportion of which is mainly occupied with the vivid representation of the process in question as applied to the world in general. after clothes, the table. out of the works of some novelists you might draw up menus, or at least bills-of-fare, for a month. people who dwell in a bracing air, and take a great deal of exercise, could live very comfortably on a small selection from the dishes served up in the novels of dickens, and those who like an even more simple cuisine could rely quite confidently on the meals described by dumas _père_. there is plenty of { } substantial fare, of course, in the waverley novels, and as for the works of harrison ainsworth, they groan under the sirloins and haunches that were provided in those imaginary ages when in merry england the spits were always turning in every castle and hall. the people of jane austen ate quite as much as was good for them. they had breakfast, lunch--or noonshine--dinner, supper, and tea, and everybody--always excepting mr. woodhouse and those whose spirits were temporarily depressed--came with an appetite to every meal, for all we know of the matter. no dinner is particularly described, but those who want to know what people ate and drank at the end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify their appetite from the references which inevitably occur. except that there were not quite so many dishes on the table at once the meals differed little from that to which swift introduces us in his dialogue between the company at lady smart's table. the smarts, by the way, dined at three, which in jane austen's time was still about the hour for the small country-houses, though in the big houses it was five, marking the gradual advance from the ten o'clock in the morning of the { } twelfth century to the eight o'clock in the evening or later of the twentieth. plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, beef and veal, chickens, game in season, sweetbreads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet puddings, apple-tarts, jellies and custards were the ordinary food of the well-to-do. port and burgundy were their principal drinks, but probably the port was not usually such as is chiefly sold now-a-days. it was less fortified, nearer to the natural wine, which is itself more like a burgundy than the port of modern commerce. wine of any sort is scarcely mentioned in jane austen's works. one of the few exceptions i can recall is that--of unnamed species--offered to mrs. and miss bates at the woodhouses', which the host advised them to mix freely with water, advice they successfully managed to avoid taking, thanks to the good offices of emma. jane austen herself seems to have been fond of wine. in her thirty-eighth year she writes: "as i must leave off being young, i find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for i am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as i like." on a much earlier occasion, when she was herself under { } chaperonage, she had written: "i believe i drank too much wine last night at hurstbourne. i know not how else to account for the shaking of my hands to-day. you will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error." with our full knowledge of jane's habit of playful exaggeration we may be certain that her "too much" was nothing to shake our heads over, and that the "error" was indeed "venial." jane gives us sufficient evidence of the simplicity with which the austens' own table was furnished. from steventon parsonage, in , she thus refers to one of the doctor's professional visits to her mother. "mr. lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. i was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. he wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither." years later, from chawton, she writes that: "captain foote dined with us on friday, and i fear will not soon venture again, for the strength of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for james." { } jane herself did the housekeeping when her mother was indisposed and cassandra away, and she prided herself on her success, though she detested the necessity of great economy. her ideas on the eternal servant question are not, we may be sure, quite faithfully expressed when she writes: "my mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the secret. we plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former, and sweetheart to the latter. no children, of course, to be allowed on either side." the simple life of the parsonage is more accurately reflected in a comparison between the house of the austens and that of the knights at godmersham. "we dine now at half-past three, and have done dinner, i suppose, before you begin. we drink tea at half-past six. i am afraid you will despise us. my father reads cowper to us in the morning, to which i listen when i can. how do you spend your evenings? i guess that elizabeth works, that you read to her, and that edward goes to sleep." jane declares that she "always takes care to provide such things as please (her) own { } appetite," which she considers "the chief merit in housekeeping." ragout of veal and haricot mutton seem to have been specially attractive to her. picnics we hear of--one in particular, of course, at box hill--and the middletons were always getting them up. cold pies and cold chickens, and no doubt cold punch, were provided in plenty on those happy occasions. french cookery was not so much appreciated in england in those days as it had been twenty or thirty years earlier, before the revolution. the bread of our then hostile neighbours across the channel was, however, not infrequently copied in the bakehouse, as was the boulanger dance in the ball-room. mrs. morland reproached catherine for talking so much at breakfast about the french bread at northanger, but the poor little girl who had been so shamefully treated by general tilney, and sadly missed the attentions of his younger son, replied that she did not care about the bread, and it was all the same to her what she ate. mrs. morland could only attribute the girl's obvious unhappiness to the contrast afforded by their humble parsonage to the glories of { } the tilney mansion, "there is a very clever essay in one of the books up-stairs, upon much such a subject," says this anxious mother, "about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance--_the mirror_, i think. i will look it out for you some day or other, because i am sure it will do you good." catherine tried to be cheerful, but presently relapsed into languor and weariness; and mrs. morland went off to seek for the "very clever essay." as henry tilney arrived before she returned with it, its efficacy as a prophylactic for listlessness and discontent was never put to the test. i will take the risk of inducing the "listlessness and discontent" of the present reader by devoting a page to this moral souvenir of jane austen's infancy and of her own literary diversions. the "very clever essay" is dated march , , and is in the form of a letter from john homespun, a "plain country gentleman, with a small fortune and a large family," two of whose daughters had been allowed--his opposition having been overcome--to spend the christmas holidays with a "great lady" whom they had met at the house of a relation. they went with sparkling { } eyes and rosy cheeks, they came back with "cheeks as white as a curd, and eyes as dead as the beads in the face of a baby." their father sees no reason to wonder at the change when he hears the girls, with new-found affectations of speech and manner, describe the habits of their new friends. "instead of rising at seven, breakfasting at nine, dining at three, supping at eight, and getting to bed by ten, as was their custom at home, my girls lay till twelve, breakfasted at one, dined at six, supped at eleven, and were never in bed till three in the morning. their shapes had undergone as much alteration as their faces. from their bosoms (_necks_ they called them), which were squeezed up to their throats, their waists tapered down to a very extraordinary smallness; they resembled the upper half of an hour-glass. at this, also, i marvelled; but it was the only shape worn at ----. nor is their behaviour less changed than their garb. instead of joining in the good-humoured cheerfulness we used to have among us before, my two _fine_ young ladies check every approach to mirth, by calling it _vulgar_. one of them chid their brother the other day for laughing, and told him it was monstrously ill-bred.... would you believe it, sir, my daughter _elizabeth_ (since her visit she is offended if we call her { } _betty_) said it was _fanatical_ to find fault with card-playing on sunday; and her sister _sophia_ gravely asked my son-in-law, the clergyman, if he had not some doubts of the soul's immortality?" mr. homespun declares that the moral plague among the worldly rich should be dealt with by government "as much as the distemper among the _horned cattle_." happily catherine morland had not caught this particular disease of all--it was only the plague of love that troubled her innocent soul, and the medicine was provided without the interference of a government inspector. from such a deliberate departure from the straight path i come back to the subject of the economy of accessories in jane austen's novels. when the french bread at northanger led me astray, i was writing about domestic economy, costumes and cookery. why _should_ the dresses be described or the dishes be named? we are concerned with the sayings and doings of squires and parsons and their wives and daughters, not with the achievements of cooks and milliners. this would be quite a fair criticism, but it is none { } the less certain that an author who tells you what people eat and drink and wear does enable you to realize more fully the contrast between the present and the period with which the novel is concerned. that is our business, however, not his. he is an artist, not an historian. there is a common practice on the stage of "furbishing up" old plays by cutting out obsolete references and introducing topical touches. the comedies of robertson may be "freshened" considerably to meet the taste of thoughtless play-goers, by giving captain hawtrey a motor-car and jack poyntz a magazine-rifle. the "moral" of these present pages is merely this, that with a few such slight changes as making post-chaise read motor and coach read train, and retarding the dinner from three or five to eight or half-past, cutting out the occasional "elegants," and otherwise changing a word here and there in the dialogue, long scenes from any one of jane austen's novels could be acted without material alteration, in the costume of to-day, with no serious offence to the unities. the absence of physical detail in her narrative is no artistic defect. mr. collins's first evening at longbourn, for instance, is so vividly represented that { } we gain the impression of having been in the room, though of its size and shape, and furniture, or of the appearance and costume of its occupants, we are told little or nothing-- "mr. bennet's expectations were fully answered. his cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure. "by tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and mr. bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. mr. collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. kitty stared at him, and lydia exclaimed. other books were produced, and after some deliberation he chose _fordyce's sermons_. lydia gaped as he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages she interrupted him with-- "'do you know, mamma, that my uncle phillips talks of turning away richard; and if he does, colonel forster will hire him? my aunt told me { } so herself on saturday. i shall walk to meryton to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when mr. denny comes back from town.' "lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but mr. collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said-- "'i have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. it amazes me, i confess; for certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to them as instruction. but i will no longer importune my young cousin.' "then turning to mr. bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at backgammon. mr. bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements." the mephistophelian delight of the father in the unconscious absurdity of his sententious guest, the rudeness of the younger daughters, and the attempts of the elder girls to enforce the observance of ordinary good manners, could not well be realized with finer effect, and no description of accessories would heighten it. it is not only material accessories and necessaries, furniture, dress, and so on that are slighted by jane austen. incidents that are of positive { } value to her plan are not allowed to linger a moment after they have served the turn. the adventure of harriet smith (in _emma_) with the gipsies, ending in her rescue by frank churchill, fills just half a page. it would have filled a chapter in a novel by scott or dickens. one possible reason for this brevity is clear enough. the author knew little about gipsies, they were to her merely low ruffians and drabs, horse-stealers and pilferers, and of their fascination for the student of character she had no idea at all. there were hundreds and hundreds of genuine romany about the country in those days. borrow was not yet at work, and few people had taken the trouble to discover what manner of mind the "egyptians" possessed, and how they spent their time when they were not robbing henroosts or swindling housemaids. scott felt something of the mysterious charm of this ancient and nomadic race, but he was romantic, and romance, in jane austen's way of thinking, was very nearly a synonym for absurdity. so it is, therefore, that the gipsies in the highbury lane appear for half a page, speak no word that is reported, and then vanish from our ken. the author implies that they hurried { } away to avoid prosecution. perhaps she was almost as glad to see the last of them as were the inhabitants of highbury. thus is a fine opportunity for a "picturesque" scene thrown away. undeveloped as it is, the adventure stands absolutely alone in the novels as the sole occasion whereon any of the characters has reason to fear violence at the hands of ill-disposed persons. it was only in imagination that catherine morland was carried off by masked men, though a spirited illustration of mr. hugh thomson's did once mislead a too hurried critic into regarding the affair as an event in the heroine's life. there are, in fact, very few digressions in these books. fielding "digressed" by whole chapters at a time, sterne's digressions filled more space than his tale in his one "novel." jane austen keeps to the road, and leaves the by-lanes unexplored. it is a pleasant road, old, and bordered here and there with attractive-looking houses into which we may enter by her kindly introduction, but if we wish to go off to that hamlet on the right, or that coppice on the left, we must go alone. she will sit on a stile till we return to pursue the direct route. it is to her { } effort to avoid all but the essential factors in achieving her object that the general absence of landscape and topographical detail of all kinds in her work is to be attributed. in the case of a dickens, a balzac, a hardy or a meredith, you can constantly identify the places where the scenes are laid. in lincoln's inn fields you can watch mr. tulkinghorn's windows; at rochester you can see the very room where mr. pickwick slept; at nemours you can gaze at the house where the minoret-levraults (in _ursule mirouet_) lived; at woolbridge you can find the manor house where the unhappy tess passed her bridal night. down in surrey you can take a photograph of the crossways house which was almost the whole fortune of diana, at seaford you can see the "elba hall" of _the house on the beach_ sheltering beneath the downs, and as in these instances so in scores of others. but in connection with the austen novels, save for the london streets and squares, there are only bath and lyme regis and portsmouth where one can truly feel sure that such or such an incident in one or other novel "occurred" on this very spot. if, however, there is no special "jane austen { } country" to be traced out by the diligent seeker for visible associations, there are scattered spots where her presence is still to be felt. at steventon, where the earlier works were produced, the house of the austens no longer stands, having given place long since to a rectory on the other side of the valley, more convenient and comfortable than that wherein the father wrote his sermons and the daughter her novels--sermons and novels which at the time seemed equally likely to achieve enduring fame. only the well and the pump remain to mark the site. the surroundings are not all new--how should they be in a thinly populated parish? there are still farms and cottages that were old before jane was born. the church is in better trim, but, externally at least, it is much the same. probably with scenery as with men and women jane austen did not usually draw from models, and when she did, she gave the models their own names. the one real bit of description of a place named in her work is the account of the environs of lyme regis, which is so obviously written from personal interest that some of her biographers have supposed that her own { } experiences during her visits there had included a captain wentworth or at least a captain benwick. "a very strange stranger it must be," she writes, "who does not see charms in the immediate environs of lyme, to make him wish to know it better. the scenes in its neighbourhood, charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of up lyme; and, above all, pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed isle of wight--these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of lyme understood." this was quite an exceptional digression from the thoughts and conversation of jane austen's characters. one of those letters which leslie stephen and others have thought so "trivial," but { } which are so characteristic in their spirit, was written from lyme by jane to cassandra, on september , -- "i continue quite well; in proof of which i have bathed again this morning..... i endeavour, as far as i can, to supply your place, and be useful and keep things in order. i detect dirt in the water decanters, as fast as i can, and keep everything as it was under your administration.... the ball last night was pleasant.... nobody asked me for the two first dances; the two next i danced with mr. crawford, and had i chosen to stay longer might have danced with mr. granville ... or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction, asked me if i meant to dance again." it is impossible to leave lyme regis without recalling how tennyson, when he was shown the place where the duke of monmouth was supposed to have landed, cried: "don't talk to me of the duke of monmouth! show me the exact spot where louisa musgrove fell!" jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined to steventon, godmersham, chawton, southampton, bath, and their neighbourhood. it is not a { } day's walk or an hour's motoring from steventon to chawton, where, after the long interval of comparative inactivity, the later novels were "born." at chawton, according to one of her later biographers, the "cottage" where she lived and worked has disappeared. this is happily not true. it is true that it is now turned to other uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughters. it has been divided internally, and now forms a couple of labourers' cottages and a village club, where tired toilers who have never read a line of the books that were written under that roof discuss the merits and defects of the tobacco tax and the old age pensions act. chawton house itself shows little structural change, and the park is scarcely altered since jane walked across from the cottage to take tea with her relations at the great house. at either of these villages, steventon the birthplace of jane herself and of _pride and prejudice_ and _mansfield park_, and chawton where _persuasion_ and _emma_ came into being, you may find scenes which you will associate with this or that story or incident, but nowhere are you likely to feel the influence of locality more strongly in { } connection with either author or novels than at godmersham, the home of her brother edward, where, until long after her death, her relations dwelt amid their own broad acres. the place, with other property, came to edward austen from mr. and mrs. knight, who had adopted him, and whose name he ultimately took. there is no more typically english seat in the typically english county of kent. the small sylvan village, the old church above the stour river, offer no special attractions for tourists, and godmersham house itself is one of the plainest even among the country seats of the early georgian age. its one external charm is its unpretentiousness. it has not even the huge classic portico on which so many of the country houses of its period depend for "impressiveness." plain, commodious, well-placed, the house is lovely for us only in that it sheltered for many a week, from year to year, the author of _pride and prejudice_. it is just such a house as sir john middleton filled with visitors at all seasons, or mr. darcy showed to his future bride and her uncle and aunt gardiner. if the house itself is without external beauty, the park surrounding it is delightful. the { } sparkling river flows through the midst of great elms and oaks beneath which mingled herds of deer, sheep, and oxen browse in the peaceful security of the golden age. as you sit on the low wall of the lichen-covered bridge you see nothing that can have changed in character since jane austen sat there and thought over the doings of her dear heroines. one can almost hear the rumble of the barouche that brought her mother and herself from the coach at ashford to the hall at godmersham, and if that high-hung carriage were suddenly to turn the corner beside the big elm near the gate one would scarcely be astonished. this park and this house, this river, the old trees, the thatched cottages, the lanes and brooks all speak of the days when bingley came for jane bennet, and henry tilney for catherine morland. if there is anything in the influence of place, godmersham was part author of the novels. the spirit of jane austen abides in the delicious air of this quiet and unspoilt valley, where, when the wind blows strongly from the south-east, the salt of the sea-breeze mingles with the perfumes of the grass and the wood smoke as pleasantly as the attic wit of { } jane austen mingles with the sweetness of her heroines and the thousand delights of her dialogue. these are the chief country scenes of jane's life. as to the towns, we know more or less of her associations with bath, southampton, and winchester, as well as london. at bath she used to stay in early youth with her uncle and aunt, and she lived there for four years with her parents. the fruits of her experience there may be enjoyed in _northanger abbey_ and _persuasion_, though her lack of the topographical instinct is suggested by the absence of evident interest in the buildings of bath. we learn as much about the place from the _pickwick papers_, which merely touch there on their way, or from the allusions of the characters in _the rivals_, where the events are of a few days, as we do from chapters that cover long periods of residence in one of the most beautiful, and still, in spite of the disproportionate and architecturally discordant hotel, the least injured cities of england. souvenirs of the personal association of jane austen with bath are almost as plentiful as those of johnson with fleet street. the house in sydney place where the { } austens lived during most of the time between mr. austen's resignation and his death is the only one that bears a tablet to jane's memory. but in queen square, whence several of her letters are dated, in gay street, in the green park, in the paragon, the rooms she occupied with her relations at one time or another remain very much as they were in her day, and externally the buildings are unaltered, one and all being built of the local stone which gives so notable a character to the georgian architecture of the city. in camden place where the elliots rented "the best house," in pulteney street where catherine stayed with the allens, in westgate buildings where anne cheered mrs. smith's lonely days, there has been little change since _northanger abbey_ and _persuasion_ were written. there is probably no town in the world associated with the work of a famous person of even so near a period which has altered less in appearance than bath since . at southampton the mother and daughters lived, after the father's death, in a house in that secluded part of the town which stands between the high street and the old walls above the { } "water." there is a bit of those walls which abuts on the spot where the austens' house stood, and it is one of the places where we may feel confident that we are walking where jane often walked, and gazing out over a scene which was familiar to her in almost all save the funnels of the steam yachts and the distant view of the train on its way to bournemouth or to london. in london itself there are many spots that will always recall jane austen to her devoted friends and her lovers. in henrietta street (covent garden), in hans place, in cork street, we know that she herself stayed. many of the characters in _sense and sensibility_--the only novel in which we hear much of london--are associated with familiar streets. edward ferrars stayed in pall mall, the steele girls in bartlett's buildings, mrs. jennings in berkeley street, the john dashwoods in harley street. the gardiners (_pride and prejudice_) lived in gracechurch street. the day has not yet come when public bodies could be sufficiently affected by imaginative literature to place memorials on the houses where fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. { } in paris the memorial to charlet is an admirable group of a grenadier and a gamin--typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the monument of dumas. the gods forbid that any sculptor should be commissioned to give us life-size figures of emma, elizabeth, anne, and fanny to sit around a statue of jane austen. but when next the london county council contemplates the placing of plaques on the former residences of departed worthies they might consider whether--of course with the consent of the freeholder and the leaseholder--her name might not be placed on the house in henrietta street, once her brother henry's home, where so many of her letters were written. she tells of the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort of herself and her nieces, and from its door she went to the neighbouring church, or the theatres, which were within a few minutes' walk. it is not likely that any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced progressive on the council to object to the name of so very mild a tory being thus honoured. as to the more probable objection that she did not "reside" there, but was only a visitor, one may plead that as there is { } a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling the "residence" of mrs. siddons, and that a tablet proclaims that turner "lived" in a house built thirty years after his death, there would be no great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a house in which jane austen did undoubtedly write, and sleep, and talk. the front was cemented in the middle of the last century, and the ground-floor is now used for business purposes, but otherwise the house is little changed since the austens were there. { } vii influence in literature jane austen's genius ignored--negative and positive instances--the literary orchard--jane's influence in english literature. the author of a book bearing the title _great english novelists_, published just ninety-one years after jane austen's death, does not include her in his selection. he deals with eleven authors--defoe, richardson, fielding, smollett, sterne, scott, lytton, disraeli, dickens, thackeray, meredith. the very fact that he stops short at eleven, instead of making a round dozen, suggests that he really could not think of any other novelist worthy to be credited with greatness. it will be observed that all the team are men. without quibbling as to whether they are all "english," or all "great," or even all "novelists" in the ordinary sense of the word, we may legitimately suppose that the author is one of those to whom jane austen makes { } no strong appeal. the peculiarity of her position among english novelists could not well be more pointedly emphasized than in the fact that while macaulay placed her next to shakespeare as a painter of character-studies, a critic should be found--and he is by no means isolated--who can choose eleven great representatives of english fiction without adding her as a twelfth. in the same week in which the book just referred to was published, came a portfolio of twelve photogravures entitled _britain's great authors_. scott, thackeray, dickens, of course, were among them, and of right, but not jane austen. perhaps even more suggestive is the statement of a clever woman-writer the other day that jane austen's novels are merely "memorials," books which no gentleman's (or lady's) library should be without, but which are for show rather than for use. her name may never be among those that are painted round the reading-rooms of national libraries, nor included by many school-children in examination lists of eminent authors. hers is too delicate a product to attract the man or woman "in the street." there is a bouquet about it that is lost on the palate which enjoys the "strong" { } fiction of the material phase through which humanity is now passing--passing perhaps more briefly than most of us imagine. it has been the endeavour of this book to show jane austen as she lives in her writings, and to suggest some at least of the many directions in which those writings may be explored, and thus, if so may be, to bring new members into the large but comparatively restricted circle wherein she is regarded, not always as the first of english novelists, but at least as second to none in the quality of her work. sappho enjoys undying fame with only a few fragments of verse still to her credit, omar for his one poem transformed by another mind, boccaccio for a volume of short stories, boswell for one biography, thomas à kempis for one devotional manual. sparsity of performance, it is evident, is no bar to enduring fame. jane austen's work, indeed, was not sparse. there are, undoubtedly, novelists who have passed the record of balzac with his forty novels and scores of short stories, but their books for the most part suggest the interminable succession of poplars along so many a high road of france. some of the trees have more foliage than others, some are { } more green or more blue in tone, a little more tortuous, or robust, but in spite of all trivial differences _plus ça change plus c'est la même chose_. if this arboreal parallel may be pursued, may we not compare the work of jane austen with a group of apple-trees in a sunny corner of some vast orchard? there are eight austen trees in the literary orchard. two of them are stunted and bear a poor crop of a sort little better than crabapples. the other six are of several kinds, but all of fine quality and producing delicious fruit of varying sweetness. countless thousands of novels have been published since jane austen's were given to the world, and many of them have been unseemly, and of evil influence. but the taste of countless writers and readers has been sweetened by the fruit of her delightful mind, of the passing of whose fragrant harvest through english literature it is not too much to say, as jane herself said of anne elliot's walk through bath: "it was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way." { } bibliographical note . _sense and sensibility_. [completed in . commenced many years earlier in the form of letters, under the title _elinor and marianne_.] . _pride and prejudice_. [completed in . originally entitled (in ms.) _first impressions_.] . _mansfield park_. [written in - .] . _emma_. [written in - .] . _northanger abbey_ and _persuasion_. [_northanger abbey_ (mostly written in ) was sold to a bath bookseller for £ in . he laid it aside, and it was bought back by henry austen, _at the same price_, after _sense and sensibility_ and _pride and prejudice_ had appeared. _persuasion_, as originally completed (in ) had only eleven chapters, but the author was not satisfied with chapter x, and replaced it by the present chapters x and xi. the cancelled chapter is included in mr. austen leigh's memoir. it brings about the re-engagement of anne and wentworth in a different, and certainly less admirable, manner.] { } . _lady susan_, _the watsons_, and some extracts from the novel on which jane was at work until four months before her death. [these are all included in mr. austen leigh's book. the ms. of _lady susan_, written before jane was of age, was given by cassandra austen to her niece fanny (lady knatchbull), who consented to its publication. as for the incomplete novel known as _the watsons_, written about , jane was not responsible for the naming of it, and had laid it aside several years before _mansfield park_ was written. the work from which she was compelled by illness to cease in march had not, in the twelve chapters we possess, reached a point when its plan could be foretold with reasonable confidence.] . _letters of jane austen_, edited by her great-nephew, the first lord brabourne. [these, which, with few exceptions were addressed to cassandra austen, belonged to lady knatchbull, to whom some of them were written. many of jane's letters were destroyed by cassandra as being too private to pass into other hands.] mr. j. e. austen leigh's _memoir_ of his aunt is not only to be highly valued for its biographical details, but for its many anecdotes of jane austen, and for the letters which fill a good many gaps in the other published correspondence. { } those to whom the subject of the present volume is fresh, and who care to pursue it, are advised to read the "introductions" contributed to recent editions of jane austen's novels by various critics, particularly mr. austin dobson, professor saintsbury, and mr. e. v. lucas, as well as the _life_ contributed by mr. goldwin smith to the _great writers_ series. [the dates given on the left hand are those of publication.] { } index adams, oscar, on jane austen, addison, joseph, "allen, mr.," "----, mrs.," _alphonsine_, anderson, mrs. garrett, _antiquary, the_, apothecaries, arc, joan of, aspasia, austen, cassandra, , , , , ----, edward (_see_ knight), , , , ----, the rev. george, , , ----, henry, , , ----, jane, freshness of her work, ; her aim, , ; at home, ; her nature, - ; views on love, ; her admirers, - , ; her limited appeal, ; on novels, - ; favourite authors, - ; criticism of niece's work, - ; limitations of subject, - , , , , ; literary style, - , - ; choice of names, ; in london, , ; views of life, , , ; as humourist, , - ; a "forbidding" writer, ; mr. goldwin smith on her novels, ; contrasted with peacock, - ; her letters, , , , , - ; declines to meet madame de staël, ; her charities, - ; at balls and dances, - ; dr. whately on her work, , , , ; views of marriage, , - ; influenced by current philosophy, - ; her fine taste, ; her opinion of _lady susan_, ; her heroines, , - , - ; their relations, ; her avoidance of dogmatism, , ; love for her own creations, ; economy of description, , , ; on dress, - ; food, - ; places--bath, , , ; chawton, , , ; godmersham, , , ; london, , ; lyme regis, , - ; southampton, ; steventon, , , , ; her literary influence, - austen, mrs., , , , balzac, , , , , "barton," "bates, miss," , , bath, , , , batilliat, marcel, bazin, rené, beaconsfield, lord, "bellaston, lady," "bellona" (_richard feverel_), "bennet, elizabeth," , , , "----, jane," , "----, lydia," , , "----, mr.," , , "----, mrs.," , , "bertram, edmund," , , "----, lady," "----, maria," , "----, sir thomas," , "bingleys, the," , bond, john, boswell, james, boulangeries (dance), "bourgh, lady catherine de," , box hill, picnic at, brabourne, lord, "brandon, colonel," - brock, c. e., brontë, charlotte, , , barney, frances, , , , , ----, sarah, byron, lord, cage, mrs., calprenède, _cambridge observer_, "camper, lady," _candide_, carlton house, , "chainmail, mr.," charlet, châtelet, madame du, , chawton, , , chesterfield, lord, church of england, - "churchill, frank," , , , chute, william, cibber, colley, _clandestine marriage_, _clarentine_, _clarissa_, "clay, mrs.," coleridge, , "coles, the," "collins, mr.," , , , , colonies, american, _connoisseur, the_, consumption, cork street, "cormon, rose," _corsair, the_, "courcy, reginald de," cowper, william, , , crabbe, george, "crawford, henry," , "----, mary," , critic, an american, croker, john wilson, _crotchet castle_, curie, madame, cuvier, "dalrymples, the," "darcy, fitzwilliam," , , , , "----, georgiana," darwin, erasmus, "dashwood, elinor," , , - "----, marianne," , "----, mrs.," deism, dickens, , digweed, james, , disraeli, isaac, dobson, austin, dodsley, robert, - "dotheboys hall," dowton, william, dress, - "dudley, arabelle," duff, sir m. e. grant, dumas _père_, , edgeworth, maria, , , , , eliot, george, , "elliot, anne," , , , , "----, sir walter," , "----, william, , "elliott, kirstie," "elton, mr.," "----, mrs.," , _emma_, , , , _eugénie grandet_, "evelina," , "eyre, jane," , "fagin," "fairfax, jane," , "ferrars, edward," "----, lucy," "feverel, lucy," "----, richard," "ffolliot, dr.," fielding, henry, , "fischer, lisbeth," food, - france, anatole, frénilly, baron de, on dress, galt, john, "gardiners, the," , garrick, - genlis, madame de, george iii, on genius, gifford, william, gipsies, "gobseck, esther van," godmersham, , , "grandet, père," "grandison, sir charles," _great english novelists_, _gulliver's travels_, _guy mannering_, hall, robert, on miss edgeworth, "hamlet," hardy, thomas, hazlitt, william, _headlong hall_, henrietta street, "homespun, mr.," hope, anthony, _house on the beach, the_, "hurst, mrs.," huxley, thomas, _hypocrite, the_, _ida of athens_, _idler, the_, "jennings, mrs.," , , "jingle, alfred," johnson, samuel, , "jones, tom," , jonson, ben, kean, edmund, "kew, lady," knatchbull, lady, _see_ knight, fanny knight, edward (austen), , , , ----, fanny, , , "knightley, george," , , _lady susan_, , , - , lamb, charles, landor, walter savage, , lang, andrew, langton, bennet, _la terre qui meurt_, _la vendée aux genêts_, lefroy, thomas, - , leigh, j. e. austen, , , _letters of jane austen_, lewes, g. h., liston, john, lloyd, martha, lockhart, william, his "life of scott," lombroso, london, , _lounger, the_, love, jane austen's views on, "lucas, charlotte," ----, e. v., "----, sir william," - lyford, john, lyme regis, , - _lys dans la vallée, le_, macaulay, , , mackintosh, sir james, "manerville, natalie de," _mansfield park_, , , , , , _margiana_, marriage, , martin, mrs., her library, "----, robert," "mascarille," mathews, charles, "mcqueedy, mr.," _melincourt_, meredith, george, , , "middleton, lady," "----, sir john," , , , "milestone, mr.," "millamant," milton, , "mirabell," _mirror, the_, mitford, mrs., "morland, catherine," , , , , , , , , , "----, mr. and mrs.," murray, john, "the first," "musgrove, louisa," , names, "nanny," napoleon on madame de staël, "nature's salic law," "newcome, colonel," nightingale, florence, _nightmare abbey_, , "norris, mrs.," _northanger abbey_, , , , , , , "nostalgie de l'infini," novel, "plan of," ----, suggestion for, novelists, defence of, novels, , - ----, french, , o'neill, miss, "orange, robert," _ordeal of richard feverel, the_, osborne, dorothy, , , , "----, lord," ----, mr., on passions, owenson, miss, _pamela_, "patterne, sir willoughby," peacock, thomas love, - "pecksniff," "pemberley," _persuasion_, , , , , , , phelps, w. l., _pickwick papers_, picnics, , "pierrette," plutocrats, _plymley letters_, "pons, sylvain," portsmouth, , , poverty, powlett, charles, , _précieuses ridicules_, "price, fanny," , , _pride and prejudice_, , , , , , , , property, landed, - "proudie, mrs.," _quarterly review_, , , queensberry, duke of, _quentin durward_, "quilp," radcliffe, mrs., , , , _rambler, the_, "ravenswood tower," realism, regent, the, , religion, reynolds, sir joshua, "----, mrs.," richardson, samuel, , , "rigby, mr.," _rivals, the_, "rochefide, beatrix de," "rushworth, maria," "rushworth, mr.," "russell, lady," , , saintsbury, george, , , sand, george, , sappho, saxe-coburg family, scharlieb, mrs., _school for saints, the_, scott, sir walter, , , , , , ----, life of, scudéri, mademoiselle de, "scythrop," "sedley, jos," _self-control_, selwyn, george, _sense and sensibility_, , , , , , , shakespeare, - , shelley, sheridan, , "shirley," _sir charles grandison_, smith, goldwin, , "----, harriet," , ----, james, ----, sydney, socialists, sondes, lady, southampton, _spectator, the_, - staël, madame de, , - steele, richard, stephen, leslie, stephens, miss, steventon, , , , "steyne, lord," surville, madame de, swift, jonathan, , _tamaris_, _tartuffe_, _tatler, the_, temple, sir william, , tennyson, , thackeray, , , theatricals at the bertrams', thomson, hugh, , "thorpe, john," "tilney, general," , "----, henry," , , , , , , , , "tinman, martin," _tom jones_, "tulliver, mr.," turner, j. m. w., "uppercross," dancing at, vallière, louise de la, "vandenesse, felix de," "vautrin," vendée, la, _venetia_, ventilation, mr. woodhouse on, "vernon, lady susan," verrall, a. w., on text of jane austen's novels, _village, the_, villiers, barbara, voltaire, , waltz, - warner, dr., _watsons, the_, , , , _waverley_, , _weir of hermiston_, "wentworth, frederick," , , , "western, sophia," , "----, squire," "weston, mr.," "----, mrs.," , , whately, archbishop, , , , "wickham," "williams, miss," "willoughby, john," , , - wine, "woodhouse, emma," , , , , , , "----, mr.," , , _world, the_, wyndham, mr., zola, the end richard clay & sons, limited, bread street hill, e.c., and bungay, suffolk. http://www.archive.org/details/lifelettersofmar marsrich the life and letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley ii [illustration: photogravure by annan & swan _e. j. trelawny._ _from a portrait after severn._ _in the possession of sir percy f. shelley, bart._ london. richard bentley & son: .] the life & letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley by mrs. julian marshall with portraits and facsimile in two volumes vol. ii london richard bentley & son publishers in ordinary to her majesty the queen contents pages chapter xvii july-september (july).--mary and mrs. williams go to pisa--they can learn nothing--trelawny accompanies them back to casa magni--the bodies of shelley and williams are washed ashore--trelawny brings mary, jane, and clare back to pisa--mary's endurance--letters from godwin--mary's letter to mrs. gisborne--the bodies are cremated--dispute about shelley's heart--it remains with mary--mary's decision to remain for a time with the hunts, and to assist them and byron with the _liberal_--goes to genoa--mrs. williams goes to england--letter from mary to mrs. gisborne and clare-- letters from clare and jane williams--the hunts and byron are established at albaro - chapter xviii september -july (october).--mary's desolate condition--her diary-- extracts--discomfort with the hunts--byron's antipathy to them all--note from him to mary--trelawny's presence a refreshment--letters to and from him--letter from godwin-- journal--letter to clare--mary's poem "the choice." . trelawny's zealous care for shelley's tomb--mary's gratitude--she decides on returning to england--sir timothy shelley's refusal to assist her--letter from godwin-- correspondence between mary and trelawny--letter from godwin criticising _valperga_--byron is induced to go to greece--summons trelawny to accompany him--mrs. hunt's confinement--letters from mary to jane williams--she starts on her journey to england--diary - chapter xix july -december . mary's journey--letters to the leigh hunts--arrival in london--jane williams--her attractiveness--_frankenstein_ on the stage--publication of shelley's posthumous poems. . journal--mary's wish to write for the stage--godwin discourages the idea--affairs of the _examiner_ newspaper-- the novellos--mrs. cowden clarke's reminiscences of mary-- death of byron--profound sensation--journal--letters from trelawny--description of the "cavern fortress of mount parnassus"--letter from mary to trelawny--letter to leigh hunt--negotiation with sir t. shelley--allowance-- suppression of the posthumous poems--journal--medwin's memoirs of byron--asks mary to assist him--her feelings on the subject--letter to mrs. hunt--journal - chapter xx january -july . improvement in mary's prospects--letter to miss curran--letter to leigh hunt about his article on shelley-- shelley's portrait arrives--journal--trelawny's adventures and escape from greece--mary's letter to him (february ). . reminiscences of lord byron's projected performance of _othello_ at pisa--clare clairmont's life as a governess in russia--description of her--letter from her to jane williams--publication of _the last man_--hogg's appreciation--stoppage of mary's allowance--peacock's intervention in her behalf--death of charles shelley--mary's letter to leigh hunt on the subject of shelley's intended legacy--increase of allowance--melancholy letter from trelawny. . mary's reply--letter from clare to jane williams--jane williams' duplicity--mary becomes aware of it--her misery-- journal - chapter xxi july -august . letter to mary from frances wright presented by robert dale owen--friendly correspondence--acquaintance-- fanny wright's history--her personal appearance--contrast between her and mrs. shelley--she returns to america--letter from her--letter from godwin to mary--mary's stay at arundel--the miss robinsons--letter from trelawny-- explanation with jane williams--letter from mary--visit to paris--mary catches the small-pox--trelawny arrives in england--letters from him. . he returns to italy--letter to mary to say he is writing his own life--asks mary to help him with reminiscences of shelley--she declines--he is angry--letter from lord dillon--_perkin warbeck_. . journal (january)--mrs. shelley's "at homes" in somerset street--t. moore--_perkin warbeck_ a disappointment--need of money--letter from clare--mary writes for the _keepsake_ - chapter xxii august -october . trelawny's autobiographical adventures to be entitled _a man's life_--correspondence with mary respecting the preparation and publication of the book. . she negotiates the matter--entreats for certain modifications--the title is altered to _adventures of a younger son_--the author's vexation--mary's patience--horace smith's assistance--trelawny surmises that "fate" may unite him and mary shelley some day--"my name will never be trelawny"--publication of the _adventures_--trelawny's later _recollections of shelley, byron, and the author_--his rare appreciation of shelley--singular discrepancies between the first and second editions of the book--complete change of tone in later life with regard to mrs. shelley--conclusions - chapter xxiii october -october godwin's _thoughts on man_ ( )--letter to mary--letter from clare--question of percy's going to a public school. . mary shelley applies to sir timothy for an increase of allowance--she is refused. . letter from godwin asking for an idea or suggestion-- mary writes "lives of italian and spanish literary men" for lardner's _cyclopædia_--clare's tale--cholera in london-- mary goes to sandgate--trelawny returns--his daughter stays with mary at sandgate--death of lord dillon--letter from godwin--his son william dies of cholera--posthumous novel, _transfusion_--clare's letters to jane and mary. . mrs. shelley goes to live at harrow--letter to mrs. gisborne--influenza--solitude--hard work--letter from godwin--letters from mary to trelawny and to mrs. gisborne--offer of £ for annotated edition of shelley's works--difficulties. . _lodore_--its success--reminiscences of her own experiences--letter from clare--melancholy letter from mary to mrs. gisborne--"a dirge"--trelawny returns from america-- mary's friendship with mrs. norton--letter to mrs. gisborne--godwin's death--efforts to get an annuity for his widow--letters from mrs. norton and trelawny. . letters from mary to trelawny--death of the gisbornes-- impediments to mary's undertaking the biography of her father--her edition of shelley's works--painful task. . letter from sir e. l. bulwer--fragment from mrs. norton--the diplomatic service--journal--bitter vexations-- illness--recovery - chapter xxiv october -february . publication of shelley's prose works--motto--letter from carlyle. . journal--brighton--continental tour with percy and his reading-party--stay at como--mary's enjoyment--her son takes his degree, and receives allowance from his grandfather-- letter of congratulation from mrs. norton--mary and percy go abroad again--kissingen; gotha; weimar; leipzig; berlin; dresden; prague; linz; salzburg; venice-- associations--winter at florence--rome--sorrento--home again. . _rambles in germany and italy_--dedication to rogers: note from him--death of sir t. shelley--mary's letter to leigh hunt--shelley's various legacies--letter from hogg-- portrait--mrs. shelley's literary friendships--letter from walter savage landor--hogg's _shelley papers_--subsequent _life of shelley_--facsimile of fragment in mary's handwriting--medwin's book inaccurate and objectionable-- mary fails to write shelley's life--marriage of sir percy shelley--mary lives with her son and daughter-in-law-- her sweetness and unselfishness--her kindness to her son's friends--clare's visits to field place--her excitability and eccentricity--her death at florence; . . mary shelley's health declines--her death--her grave in bournemouth churchyard--retrospect of her history and mental development--extract from journal of october , giving her own views--the success of her life a moral rather than an intellectual one--her nobility of character--her influence on shelley--her lifelong devotion to him - the life and letters of mary wollstonecraft shelley chapter xvii july-september they set off at once, death in their hearts, yet clinging outwardly to any semblance of a hope. they crossed to lerici, they posted to pisa; they went first to casa lanfranchi. byron was there; he could tell them nothing. it was midnight, but to rest or wait was impossible; they posted on to leghorn. they went about inquiring for trelawny or roberts. not finding the right inn they were forced to wait till next morning before prosecuting their search. they found roberts; he only knew the _ariel_ had sailed on monday; there had been a storm, and no more had been heard of her. still they did not utterly despair. contrary winds might have driven the boat to corsica or elsewhere, and information was perhaps withheld. "so remorselessly," says trelawny, "are the quarantine laws enforced in italy that, when at sea, if you render assistance to a vessel in distress, or rescue a drowning stranger, on returning to port you are condemned to a long and rigorous quarantine of fourteen or more days. the consequence is, should one vessel see another in peril, or even run it down by accident, she hastens on her course, and by general accord not a word is said or reported on the subject." trelawny accompanied the forlorn women back to casa magni, whence, for the next seven or eight days, he patrolled the coast with the coastguards, stimulating them to keep a good look-out by the promise of a reward. on thursday, the th, he left for leghorn, and on the next day a letter came to him from captain roberts with the intelligence that the bodies of shelley and williams had been washed ashore. the letter was received and opened by clare clairmont. to communicate its contents to mary or jane was more than she could do: in her distress she wrote to leigh hunt for help or counsel. _friday evening, th july ._ my dear sir--mr. trelawny went for livorno last night. there came this afternoon a letter to him from captain roberts--he had left orders with mary that she might open it; i did not allow her to see it. he writes there is no hope, but they are lost, and their bodies found three miles from via reggio. this letter is dated th july, and says he had heard this news th july. outside the letter he has added, "i am now on my way to via reggio, to ascertain the facts or _no facts_ contained in my letter." this then implies that he doubts, and as i also doubt the report, because we had a letter from the captain of the port at via reggio, th july, later than when mr. roberts writes, to say nothing had been found, for this reason i have not shown his letter either to mary or mrs. williams. how can i, even if it were true? i pray you to answer this by return of my messenger. i assure you i cannot break it to them, nor is my spirit, weakened as it is from constant suffering, capable of giving them consolation, or protecting them from the first burst of their despair. i entreat you to give me some counsel, or to arrange some method by which they may know it. i know not what further to add, except that their case is desperate in every respect, and death would be the greatest kindness to us all.--ever your sincere friend, clare. this letter can hardly have been despatched before trelawny arrived. he had seen the mangled, half-devoured corpses, and had identified them at once. it remained for him now to pronounce sentence of doom, as it were, on the survivors. this is his story, as he tells it-- i mounted my horse and rode to the gulf of spezzia, put up my horse, and walked until i caught sight of the lone house on the sea-shore in which shelley and williams had dwelt, and where their widows still lived. hitherto in my frequent visits--in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary--i had buoyed up their spirits by maintaining that it was not impossible but that the friends still lived; now i had to extinguish the last hope of these forlorn women. i had ridden fast to prevent any ruder messenger from bursting in upon them. as i stood on the threshold of their house, the bearer or rather confirmer of news which would rack every fibre of their quivering frames to the uttermost, i paused, and, looking at the sea, my memory reverted to our joyous parting only a few days before. the two families then had all been in the verandah, overhanging a sea so clear and calm that every star was reflected on the water as if it had been a mirror; the young mothers singing some merry tune with the accompaniment of a guitar. shelley's shrill laugh--i heard it still--rang in my ears, with williams' friendly hail, the general _buona notte_ of all the joyous party, and the earnest entreaty to me to return as soon as possible, and not to forget the commissions they had severally given me. i was in a small boat beneath them, slowly rowing myself on board the _bolivar_, at anchor in the bay, loath to part from what i verily believed to have been at that time the most united and happiest set of human beings in the whole world. and now by the blow of an idle puff of wind the scene was changed. such is human happiness. my reverie was broken by a shriek from the nurse caterina as, crossing the hall, she saw me in the doorway. after asking her a few questions i went up the stairs, and unannounced entered the room. i neither spoke nor did they question me. mrs. shelley's large gray eyes were fixed on my face. i turned away. unable to bear this horrid silence, with a convulsive effort she exclaimed-- "is there no hope?" i did not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant with the children to them. the next day i prevailed on them to return with me to pisa. the misery of that night and the journey of the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, i can neither describe nor forget. there is no journal or contemporary record of the next three or four weeks; only from a few scattered hints in letters can any idea be gleaned of this dark time, when the first realisation of incredible misfortune was being lived out in detail. leigh hunt was almost broken-hearted. "dearest mary," he wrote from casa lanfranchi on the th july, "i trust you will have set out on your return from that dismal place before you receive this. you will also have seen trelawny. god bless you, and enable us all to be a support for one another. let us do our best if it is only for that purpose. it is easier for me to say that i will do it than for you: but whatever happens, this i can safely say, that i belong to those whom shelley loves, and that all which it is possible to me to do for them now and for ever is theirs. i will grieve with them, endure with them, and, if it be necessary, work for them, while i have life.--your most affectionate friend, leigh hunt. marianne sends you a thousand loves, and longs with myself to try whether we can say or do one thing that can enable you and mrs. williams to bear up a little better. but we rely on your great strength of mind." mary bore up in a way that surprised those who knew how ill she had been, how weak she still was, and how much she had previously been suffering in her spirits. it was a strange, tense, unnatural endurance. except to miss curran at rome, she wrote to no one for some time, not even to her father. this, which would naturally have been her first communication, may well have appeared harder to make than any other. godwin's relations with shelley had of late been strained, to say the least,--and then, mary could not but remember his letters to her after williams' death, and the privilege he had claimed "as a father and a philosopher" of rebuking, nay, of contemptuously deprecating her then excess of grief. how was she to write now in such a tone as to avert an answer of that sort? how write at all? she did accomplish it at last, but before her letter arrived godwin had heard of the catastrophe through miss kent, sister of mrs. leigh hunt. his fatherly feeling of anxiety for his daughter was aroused, and after waiting two days for direct news, he wrote to her as follows-- godwin to mary. no. strand, _ th august _. dear mary--i heard only two days ago the most afflicting intelligence to you, and in some measure to all of us, that can be imagined--the death of shelley on the th ultimo. i have had no direct information; the news only comes in a letter from leigh hunt to miss kent, and, therefore, were it not for the consideration of the writer, i should be authorised to disbelieve it. that you should be so overcome as not to be able to write is perhaps but too natural; but that jane could not write one line i could never have believed; and the behaviour of the lady at pisa towards us on the occasion is peculiarly cruel. leigh hunt says you bear up under the shock better than could have been imagined; but appearances are not to be relied on. it would have been a great relief to me to have had a few lines from yourself. in a case like this, one lets one's imagination loose among the possibilities of things, and one is apt to rest upon what is most distressing and intolerable. i learned the news on sunday. i was in hope to have had my doubts and fears removed by a letter from yourself on monday. i again entertained the same hope to-day, and am again disappointed. i shall hang in hope and fear on every post, knowing that you cannot neglect me for ever. all that i expressed to you about silence and not writing to you again is now put an end to in the most melancholy way. i looked on you as one of the daughters of prosperity, elevated in rank and fortune, and i thought it was criminal to intrude on you for ever the sorrows of an unfortunate old man and a beggar. you are now fallen to my own level; you are surrounded with adversity and with difficulty; and i no longer hold it sacrilege to trouble you with my adversities. we shall now truly sympathise with each other; and whatever misfortune or ruin falls upon me, i shall not now scruple to lay it fully before you. this sorrowful event is, perhaps, calculated to draw us nearer to each other. i am the father of a family, but without children; i and my wife are falling fast into infirmity and helplessness; and in addition to all our other calamities, we seem destined to be left without connections and without aid. perhaps now we and you shall mutually derive consolation from each other. poor jane is, i am afraid, left still more helpless than you are. common misfortune, i hope, will incite between you the most friendly feelings. shelley lived, i know, in constant anticipation of the uncertainty of his life, though not in this way, and was anxious in that event to make the most effectual provision for you. i am impatient to hear in what way that has been done; and perhaps you will make me your lawyer in england if any steps are necessary. i am desirous to call on longdill, but i should call with more effect if i had authority and instructions from you. mamma desires me to say how truly and deeply she sympathises in your affliction, and i trust you know enough of her to feel that this is the language of her heart. i suppose you will hardly stay in italy. in that case we shall be near to, and support each other.--ever and ever affectionately yours, william godwin. i have received your letter dated (it has no date) since writing the above; it was detained for some hours by being directed to the care of monro, for which i cannot account. william wrote to you on the th of june, and i on the d of july. i will call on peacock and hogg as you desire. perhaps williams' letter, and perhaps others, have been kept from you. let us now be open and unreserved in all things. this letter was doubtless intended to be kind and sympathetic, even in the persistent prominence given to the business aspect of recent events. yet it was comical in its solemnity. for when had godwin held it sacrilege to trouble his daughter with his adversities, or shown the slightest scruple in laying before her any misfortune or ruin that may have fallen on him? and what new prospect was afforded her in the future by his promise of doing so now? no; this privilege of a father and a philosopher had never been neglected by him. well indeed might he feel anxious as to what provision had been made for his daughter by her husband. in these matters he had long ceased to have a conscience, yet it was impossible he should be unaware that the utmost his son-in-law had been able to effect, and that at the expense of enormous sacrifices on the part of himself and his heirs, and of all the credit he possessed with publishers and the one or two friends who were not also dependents, had been to pay his, godwin's, perpetual debts, and to keep him, as long as he could be kept, afloat. small opportunity had shelley's "dear"[ ] friends allowed him as yet to make provision for his family in case of sudden misfortune! godwin, however, was really anxious about mary, and his anxiety was perhaps increased by his letter; for in three days he wrote again, with out alluding to money. godwin to mary. _ th august ._ my dear mary--i am inexpressibly anxious to hear from you, and your present situation renders the reciprocation of letters and answers--implying an interval of a month between each letter i receive from you to the next--intolerable. my poor girl, what do you mean to do with yourself? you surely do not mean to stay in italy? how glad i should be to be near you, and to endeavour by new expedients each day to endeavour to make up your loss. but you are the best judge. if italy is a country to which in these few years you are naturalised, and if england is become dull and odious to you, then stay! i should think, however, that now that you have lost your closest friend, your mind would naturally turn homeward, and to your earliest friend. is it not so? surely we might be a great support to each other under the trials to which we are reserved. what signify a few outward adversities if we find a friend at home? one thing i would earnestly recommend in our future intercourse, is perfect frankness. i think you are of a frank nature, i am sure i am so. we have now no battle to fight,--no contention to maintain,--that is over now. above all, let me entreat you to keep up your courage. you have many duties to perform; you must now be the father as well as the mother; and i trust you have energy of character enough to enable you to perform your duties honourably and well.--ever and ever most affectionately yours, w. godwin. the stunning nature of the blow she had endured, the uncertainty and complication of her affairs, and the absence of any one preponderating motive, made it impossible for mary to settle at once on any scheme for the future. her first idea was to return to england without delay, so as to avoid any possible risk to her boy from the italian climate. her one wish was to possess herself, before leaving, of the portrait of shelley begun at rome by miss curran, and laid aside in an unfinished state as a failure. in the absence of any other likeness it would be precious, and it might perhaps be improved. it was on this subject that she had written to miss curran in the quite early days of her misfortune; no answer had come, and she wrote again, now to request "that favour now nearer my heart than any other thing--the picture of my shelley." "we leave italy soon," she continued, "so i am particularly anxious to obtain this treasure, which i am sure you will give me as soon as possible. i have no other likeness of him, and in so utter desolation, how invaluable to me is your picture. will you not send it? will you not answer me without delay? your former kindness bids me hope everything." she was awakening to life again; in other words, to pain: with keen anguish, like that of returning circulation to a limb which has been frozen and numb, her feelings, her forces, her intellect, began to respond to outward calls upon them, with a sensation, at times, of even morbid activity. it was a kind of relief, now, to write to mrs. gisborne that letter which contains the most graphic and connected of all accounts of the past tragedy. mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. _ th august ._ i said in a letter to peacock, my dear mrs. gisborne, that i would send you some account of the last miserable months of my disastrous life. from day to day i have put this off, but i will now endeavour to fulfil my design. the scene of my existence is closed, and though there be no pleasure in retracing the scenes that have preceded the event which has crushed my hopes, yet there seems to be a necessity in doing so, and i obey the impulse that urges me. i wrote to you either at the end of may or the beginning of june. i described to you the place we were living in--our desolate house, the beauty yet strangeness of the scenery, and the delight shelley took in all this. he never was in better health or spirits than during this time. i was not well in body or mind. my nerves were wound up to the utmost irritation, and the sense of misfortune hung over my spirits. no words can tell you how i hated our house and the country about it. shelley reproached me for this--his health was good, and the place was quite after his own heart. what could i answer? that the people were wild and hateful, that though the country was beautiful yet i liked a more _countrified_ place, that there was great difficulty in living, that all our tuscans would leave us, and that the very jargon of these _genovesi_ was disgusting. this was all i had to say, but no words could describe my feelings; the beauty of the woods made me weep and shudder; so vehement was my feeling of dislike that i used to rejoice when the winds and waves permitted me to go out in the boat, so that i was not obliged to take my usual walk among the shaded paths, alleys of vine festooned trees--all that before i doated on, and that now weighed on me. my only moments of peace were on board that unhappy boat when, lying down with my head on his knee, i shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone. my ill health might account for much of this. bathing in the sea somewhat relieved me, but on the th of june (i think it was) i was threatened with a miscarriage, and after a week of great ill health, on sunday, the th, this took place at in the morning. i was so ill that for seven hours i lay nearly lifeless--kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar, and eau-de-cologne, etc. at length ice was brought to our solitude; it came before the doctor, so clare and jane were afraid of using it, but shelley overruled them, and by an unsparing application of it i was restored. they all thought, and so did i at one time, that i was about to die, i hardly wished that i had,--my own shelley could never have lived without me; the sense of eternal misfortune would have pressed too heavily upon him, and what would have become of my poor babe? my convalescence was slow, and during it a strange occurrence happened to retard it. but first i must describe our house to you. the floor on which we lived was thus-- +--------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----+--------------------------------+-----| | | | | +--------------------------------------------+ is a terrace that went the whole length of our house and was precipitous to the sea; , the large dining-hall; , a private staircase; , my bedroom; , mrs. williams' bedroom; , shelley's; and , the entrance from the great staircase. now to return. as i said, shelley was at first in perfect health, but having over-fatigued himself one day, and then the fright my illness gave him, caused a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times. i think it was the saturday after my illness, while yet unable to walk, i was confined to my bed--in the middle of the night i was awoke by hearing him scream and come rushing into my room; i was sure that he was asleep, and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream, which inspired me with such a panic that i jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to mrs. williams' room, where i fell through weakness, though i was so frightened that i got up again immediately. she let me in, and williams went to shelley, who had been wakened by my getting out of bed--he said that he had not been asleep, and that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him. but as he declared that he had not screamed, it was certainly a dream, and no waking vision. what had frightened him was this. he dreamt that, lying as he did in bed, edward and jane came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition; their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood; they could hardly walk, but edward was the weakest, and jane was supporting him. edward said, "get up, shelley, the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down." shelley got up, he thought, and went to his window that looked on the terrace and the sea, and thought he saw the sea rushing in. suddenly his vision changed, and he saw the figure of himself strangling me; that had made him rush into my room, yet, fearful of frightening me, he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping out awoke him, or, as he phrased it, caused his vision to vanish. all this was frightful enough, and talking it over the next morning, he told me that he had had many visions lately; he had seen the figure of himself, which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him, "how long do you mean to be content?" no very terrific words, and certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. but shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that mrs. williams saw him. now jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination, and is not in the slightest degree nervous, neither in dreams nor otherwise. she was standing one day, the day before i was taken ill, at a window that looked on the terrace, with trelawny. it was day. she saw, as she thought, shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket; he passed again. now, as he passed both times the same way, and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall feet from the ground), she was struck at her seeing him pass twice thus, and looked out and seeing him no more, she cried, "good god, can shelley have leapt from the wall? where can he be gone?" "shelley," said trelawny, "no shelley has passed. what do you mean?" trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this, and it proved, indeed, that shelley had never been on the terrace, and was far off at the time she saw him. well, we thought no more of these things, and i slowly got better. having heard from hunt that he had sailed from genoa, on monday, st july, shelley, edward, and captain roberts (the gentleman who built our boat) departed in our boat for leghorn to receive him. i was then just better, had begun to crawl from my bedroom to the terrace, but bad spirits succeeded to ill health, and this departure of shelley's seemed to add insufferably to my misery. i could not endure that he should go. i called him back two or three times, and told him that if i did not see him soon i would go to pisa with the child. i cried bitterly when he went away. they went, and jane, clare, and i remained alone with the children. i could not walk out, and though i gradually gathered strength, it was slowly, and my ill spirits increased. in my letters to him i entreated him to return; "the feeling that some misfortune would happen," i said, "haunted me." i feared for the child, for the idea of danger connected with him never struck me. when jane and clare took their evening walk, i used to patrol the terrace, oppressed with wretchedness, yet gazing on the most beautiful scene in the world. this gulf of spezzia is subdivided into many small bays, of which ours was far the most beautiful. the two horns of the bay (so to express myself) were wood-covered promontories, crowned with castles; at the foot of these, on the farthest, was lerici, on the nearest san terenzo; lerici being above a mile by land from us, and san terenzo about a hundred or two yards. trees covered the hills that enclosed this bay, and their beautiful groups were picturesquely contrasted with the rocks, the castle, and the town. the sea lay far extended in front, while to the west we saw the promontory and islands, which formed one of the extreme boundaries of the gulf. to see the sun set upon this scene, the stars shine, and the moon rise, was a sight of wondrous beauty, but to me it added only to my wretchedness. i repeated to myself all that another would have said to console me, and told myself the tale of love, peace, and competence which i enjoyed; but i answered myself by tears--did not my william die, and did i hold my percy by a firmer tenure? yet i thought when he, when my shelley, returns, i shall be happy; he will comfort me, if my boy be ill he will restore him, and encourage me. i had a letter or two from shelley, mentioning the difficulties he had in establishing the hunts, and that he was unable to fix the time of his return. thus a week passed. on monday, th, jane had a letter from edward, dated saturday; he said that he waited at leghorn for shelley, who was at pisa; that shelley's return was certain; "but," he continued, "if he should not come by monday, i will come in a felucca, and you may expect me tuesday evening at farthest." this was monday, the fatal monday, but with us it was stormy all day, and we did not at all suppose that they could put to sea. at at night we had a thunderstorm; tuesday it rained all day, and was calm--wept on their graves. on wednesday the wind was fair from leghorn, and in the evening several feluccas arrived thence; one brought word that they had sailed on monday, but we did not believe them. thursday was another day of fair wind, and when at night came, and we did not see the tall sails of the little boat double the promontory before us, we began to fear, not the truth, but some illness--some disagreeable news for their detention. jane got so uneasy that she determined to proceed the next day to leghorn in a boat, to see what was the matter. friday came, and with it a heavy sea and bad wind. jane, however, resolved to be rowed to leghorn (since no boat could sail), and busied herself in preparations. i wished her to wait for letters, since friday was letter day. she would not; but the sea detained her; the swell rose so that no boat could venture out. at at noon our letters came; there was one from hunt to shelley; it said, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed monday, and we are anxious." the paper fell from me. i trembled all over. jane read it. "then it is all over," she said. "no, my dear jane," i cried, "it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful. come with me, we will go to leghorn; we will post to be swift, and learn our fate." we crossed to lerici, despair in our hearts; they raised our spirits there by telling us that no accident had been heard of, and that it must have been known, etc., but still our fear was great, and without resting we posted to pisa. it must have been fearful to see us--two poor, wild, aghast creatures driving (like matilda) towards the sea, to learn if we were to be for ever doomed to misery. i knew that hunt was at pisa, at lord byron's house, but i thought that lord byron was at leghorn. i settled that we should drive to casa lanfranchi, that i should get out, and ask the fearful question of hunt, "do you know anything of shelley?" on entering pisa, the idea of seeing hunt for the first time for four years, under such circumstances, and asking him such a question, was so terrific to me, that it was with difficulty that i prevented myself from going into convulsions. my struggles were dreadful. they knocked at the door, and some one called out, _chi è?_ it was the guiccioli's maid. lord byron was in pisa. hunt was in bed; so i was to see lord byron instead of him. this was a great relief to me. i staggered upstairs; the guiccioli came to meet me, smiling, while i could hardly say, "where is he--sapete alcuna cosa di shelley?" they knew nothing; he had left pisa on sunday; on monday he had sailed; there had been bad weather monday afternoon. more they knew not. both lord byron and the lady have told me since, that on that terrific evening i looked more like a ghost than a woman--light seemed to emanate from my features; my face was very white; i looked like marble. alas! i had risen almost from a bed of sickness for this journey; i had travelled all day; it was now at night, and we, refusing to rest, proceeded to leghorn--not in despair--no, for then we must have died; but with sufficient hope to keep up the agitation of the spirits, which was all my life. it was past in the morning when we arrived. they took us to the wrong inn; neither trelawny nor captain roberts were there, nor did we exactly know where they were, so we were obliged to wait until daylight: we threw ourselves drest on our beds, and slept a little, but at o'clock we went to one or two inns, to ask for one or the other of these gentlemen. we found roberts at the "globe." he came down to us with a face that seemed to tell us that the worst was true, and here we learned all that occurred during the week they had been absent from us, and under what circumstances they had departed on their return. shelley had passed most of the time at pisa, arranging the affairs of the hunts, and screwing lord byron's mind to the sticking place about the journal. he had found this a difficult task at first, but at length he had succeeded to his heart's content with both points. mrs. mason said that she saw him in better health and spirits than she had ever known him, when he took leave of her, sunday, july , his face burnt by the sun, and his heart light, that he had succeeded in rendering the hunts tolerably comfortable. edward had remained at leghorn. on monday, july , during the morning, they were employed in buying many things, eatables, etc., for our solitude. there had been a thunderstorm early, but about noon the weather was fine, and the wind right fair for lerici. they were impatient to be gone. roberts said, "stay until to-morrow, to see if the weather is settled;" and shelley might have stayed, but edward was in so great an anxiety to reach home, saying they would get there in seven hours with that wind, that they sailed; shelley being in one of those extravagant fits of good spirits, in which you have sometimes seen him. roberts went out to the end of the mole, and watched them out of sight; they sailed at , and went off at the rate of about seven knots. about , roberts, who was still on the mole, saw wind coming from the gulf, or rather what the italians call _a temporale_. anxious to know how the boat would weather the storm, he got leave to go up the tower, and, with the glass, discovered them about ten miles out at sea, off via reggio; they were taking in their topsails. "the haze of the storm," he said, "hid them from me, and i saw them no more. when the storm cleared, i looked again, fancying that i should see them on their return to us, but there was no boat on the sea." this, then, was all we knew, yet we did not despair; they might have been driven over to corsica, and not knowing the coast, have gone god knows where. reports favoured this belief; it was even said that they had been seen in the gulf. we resolved to return with all possible speed; we sent a courier to go from tower to tower, along the coast, to know if anything had been seen or found, and at a.m. we quitted leghorn, stopped but one moment at pisa, and proceeded towards lerici. when at two miles from via reggio, we rode down to that town to know if they knew anything. here our calamity first began to break on us; a little boat and a water cask had been found five miles off--they had manufactured a _piccolissima lancia_ of thin planks stitched by a shoemaker, just to let them run on shore without wetting themselves, as our boat drew four feet of water. the description of that found tallied with this, but then this boat was very cumbersome, and in bad weather they might have been easily led to throw it overboard,--the cask frightened me most,--but the same reason might in some sort be given for that. i must tell you that jane and i were not alone. trelawny accompanied us back to our home. we journeyed on and reached the magra about half-past p.m. i cannot describe to you what i felt in the first moment when, fording this river, i felt the water splash about our wheels. i was suffocated--i gasped for breath--i thought i should have gone into convulsions, and i struggled violently that jane might not perceive it. looking down the river i saw the two great lights burning at the _foce_; a voice from within me seemed to cry aloud, "that is his grave." after passing the river i gradually recovered. arriving at lerici we were obliged to cross our little bay in a boat. san terenzo was illuminated for a festa. what a scene! the waving sea, the sirocco wind, the lights of the town towards which we rowed, and our own desolate hearts, that coloured all with a shroud. we landed. nothing had been heard of them. this was saturday, july , and thus we waited until thursday july , thrown about by hope and fear. we sent messengers along the coast towards genoa and to via reggio; nothing had been found more than the _lancetta_; reports were brought us; we hoped; and yet to tell you all the agony we endured during those twelve days, would be to make you conceive a universe of pain--each moment intolerable, and giving place to one still worse. the people of the country, too, added to one's discomfort; they are like wild savages; on festas, the men and women and children in different bands--the sexes always separate--pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door; running into the sea, then back again, and screaming all the time one perpetual air, the most detestable in the world; then the sirocco perpetually blew, and the sea for ever moaned their dirge. on thursday, th, trelawny left us to go to leghorn, to see what was doing or what could be done. on friday i was very ill; but as evening came on, i said to jane, "if anything had been found on the coast, trelawny would have returned to let us know. he has not returned, so i hope." about o'clock p.m. he did return; all was over, all was quiet now; they had been found washed on shore. well, all this was to be endured. well, what more have i to say? the next day we returned to pisa, and here we are still. days pass away, one after another, and we live thus; we are all together; we shall quit italy together. jane must proceed to london. if letters do not alter my views, i shall remain in paris. thus we live, seeing the hunts now and then. poor hunt has suffered terribly, as you may guess. lord byron is very kind to me, and comes with the guiccioli to see me often. to-day, this day, the sun shining in the sky, they are gone to the desolate sea-coast to perform the last offices to their earthly remains, hunt, lord byron, and trelawny. the quarantine laws would not permit us to remove them sooner, and now only on condition that we burn them to ashes. that i do not dislike. his rest shall be at rome beside my child, where one day i also shall join them. _adonais_ is not keats', it is his own elegy; he bids you there go to rome. i have seen the spot where he now lies,--the sticks that mark the spot where the sands cover him; he shall not be there, it is too near via reggio. they are now about this fearful office, and i live! one more circumstance i will mention. as i said, he took leave of mrs. mason in high spirits on sunday. "never," said she, "did i see him look happier than the last glance i had of his countenance." on monday he was lost. on monday night she dreamt that she was somewhere, she knew not where, and he came, looking very pale and fearfully melancholy. she said to him, "you look ill; you are tired; sit down and eat." "no," he replied, "i shall never eat more; i have not a soldo left in the world." "nonsense," said she, "this is no inn, you need not pay." "perhaps," he answered, "it is the worse for that." then she awoke; and, going to sleep again, she dreamt that my percy was dead; and she awoke crying bitterly--so bitterly, and felt so miserable--that she said to herself, "why, if the little boy should die, i should not feel it in this manner." she was so struck with these dreams, that she mentioned them to her servant the next day, saying she hoped all was well with us. well, here is my story--the last story i shall have to tell. all that might have been bright in my life is now despoiled. i shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child, and render myself worthy to join him. soon my weary pilgrimage will begin. i rest now, but soon i must leave italy, and then there is an end of all but despair. adieu! i hope you are well and happy. i have an idea that while he was at pisa, he received a letter from you that i have never seen; so not knowing where to direct, i shall send this letter to peacock. i shall send it open; he may be glad to read it.--yours ever truly, mary w. s. pisa, _ th august _. i shall probably write soon again. i have left out a material circumstance. a fishing-boat saw them go down. it was about in the afternoon. they saw the boy at mast-head, when baffling winds struck the sails. they had looked away a moment, and, looking again, the boat was gone. this is their story, but there is little doubt that these men might have saved them, at least edward, who could swim. they could not, they said, get near her; but three-quarters of an hour after passed over the spot where they had seen her. they protested no wreck of her was visible; but roberts, going on board their boat, found several spars belonging to her: perhaps they let them perish to obtain these. trelawny thinks he can get her up, since another fisherman thinks that he has found the spot where she lies, having drifted near shore. trelawny does this to know, perhaps, the cause of her wreck; but i care little about it. all readers know trelawny's graphic account of the burning of the bodies of shelley and williams. subsequent to this ceremony a painful episode took place between mary and leigh hunt. hunt had witnessed the obsequies (from lord byron's carriage), and to him was given by trelawny the heart of shelley, which in the flames had remained unconsumed. this precious relic he refused to give up to her who was its rightful owner, saying that, to induce him to part with it, her claim must be maintained by "strong and conclusive arguments." it was difficult to advance arguments strong enough if the nature of the case was not in itself convincing. he showed no disposition to yield, and mary was desperate. where logic, justice, and good feeling failed, a woman's tact, however, succeeded. mrs. williams "wrote to hunt, and represented to him how grievous it was that shelley's remains should become a source of dissension between his dearest friends. she obtained her purpose. hunt said she had brought forward the only argument that could have induced him to yield." under the influence of a like feeling mary seems to have borne hunt no grudge for what must, at least, have appeared to her as an act of most gratuitous selfishness. but mary shelley and jane williams had, both of them, to face facts and think of the future. hardest of all, it became evident that, for the present, they must part. their affection for each other, warm in happier times, had developed by force of circumstances into a mutual need; so much nearer, in their sorrow, were they to each other than either could be to any one else. but jane had friends in england, and she required to enlist the interest of edward's relations in behalf of his orphan children. meanwhile, if mary had for the moment any outward tie or responsibility, it was towards the leigh hunts, thus expatriated at the request and desire of others, with a very uncertain prospect of permanent result or benefit. byron, having helped to start the _liberal_ with contributions of his own, and thus fulfilled a portion of his bond, might give them the slip at any moment. shelley, although little disposed toward the "coalition," had promised assistance, and any such promise from him would have been sure to mean, in practice, more, and not less, than it said. mary had his mss.; she knew his intentions; she was, as far as any mortal could be, his fitting literary representative. she had little to call her elsewhere. the hunts were friendly and affectionate and full of pity for her; they were also poor and dependent. all tended to one result; she and they must for the present join forces, so saving expense; and she was to give all the help she could to the _liberal_. lord byron was going to genoa. mary and the hunts agreed to take a house together there for several months or a year. once more she wrote from pisa to her friend. mary shelley to mrs. gisborne. pisa, _ th september _. and so here i am! i continue to exist--to see one day succeed the other; to dread night, but more to dread morning, and hail another cheerless day. my boy, too, is alas! no consolation. when i think how he loved him, the plans he had for his education, his sweet and childish voice strikes me to the heart. why should he live in this world of pain and anguish? at times i feel an energy within me to combat with my destiny; but again i sink. i have but one hope for which i live, to render myself worthy to join him,--and such a feeling sustains one during moments of enthusiasm, but darkness and misery soon overwhelm the mind when all near objects bring agony alone with them. people used to call me lucky in my star; you see now how true such a prophecy is! i was fortunate in having fearlessly placed my destiny in the hands of one who, a superior being among men, a bright "planetary" spirit enshrined in an earthly temple, raised me to the height of happiness. so far am i now happy, that i would not change my situation as his widow with that of the most prosperous woman in the world; and surely the time will at length come when i shall be at peace, and my brain and heart no longer be alive with unutterable anguish. i can conceive of but one circumstance that could afford me the semblance of content, that is the being permitted to live where i am now, in the same house, in the same state, occupied alone with my child, in collecting his manuscripts, writing his life, and thus to go easily to my grave. but this must not be! even if circumstances did not compel me to return to england, i would not stay another summer in italy with my child. i will at least do my best to render him well and happy, and the idea that my circumstances may at all injure him is the fiercest pang my mind endures. i wrote you a long letter containing a slight sketch of my sufferings. i sent it directed to peacock, at the india house, because accident led me to fancy that you were no longer in london. i said in that, that on that day ( th august) they had gone to perform the last offices for him; however, i erred in this, for on that day those of edward were alone fulfilled, and they returned on the th to celebrate shelley's. i will say nothing of the ceremony, since trelawny has written an account of it, to be printed in the forthcoming journal. i will only say that all, except his heart (which was inconsumable), was burnt, and that two days ago i went to leghorn and beheld the small box that contained his earthly dross; those smiles, that form--great god! no, he is not there, he is with me, about me--life of my life, and soul of my soul; if his divine spirit did not penetrate mine i could not survive to weep thus. i will mention the friends i have here, that you may form an idea of our situation. mrs. williams, clare, and i live all together; we have one purse, and, joined in misery, we are for the present joined in life. she, poor girl, withers like a lily; she lives for her children, but it is a living death. lord byron has been very kind; the guiccioli restrains him. she, being an italian, is capable of being jealous of a living corpse, such as i. of hunt i will speak when i see you. but the friend to whom we are eternally indebted is trelawny. i have, of course, mentioned him to you as one who wishes to be considered eccentric, but who was noble and generous at bottom. i always thought so, even when no fact proved it, and shelley agreed with me, as he always did, or rather i with him. we heard people speak against him on account of his vagaries; we said to one another, "still we like him--we believe him to be good." once, even, when a whim of his led him to treat me with something like impertinence, i forgave him, and i have now been well rewarded. in my outline of events you will see how, unasked, he returned with jane and me from leghorn to lerici; how he stayed with us poor miserable creatures[ ] five days there, endeavouring to keep up our spirits; how he left us on thursday, and, finding our misfortune confirmed, then without rest returned on friday to us, and again without rest returned to pisa on saturday. these were no common services. since that he has gone through, by himself, all the annoyances of dancing attendance on consuls and governors for permission to fulfil the last duties to those gone, and attending the ceremony himself; all the disagreeable part, and all the fatigue, fell on him. as hunt said, "he worked with the meanest and felt with the best." he is generous to a distressing degree. but after all these benefits to us, what i most thank him for is this. when on that night of agony, that friday night, he returned to announce that hope was dead for us; when he had told me that his earthly frame being found, his spirit was no longer to be my guide, protector, and companion in this dark world, he did not attempt to console me--that would have been too cruelly useless,--but he launched forth into, as it were, an overflowing and eloquent praise of my divine shelley, till i was almost happy that thus i was unhappy, to be fed by the praise of him, and to dwell on the eulogy that his loss thus drew from his friend. of my friends i have only mrs. mason to mention; her coldness has stung me; yet she felt his loss keenly, and would be very glad to serve me; but it is not cold offers of service one wants; one's wounded spirit demands a number of nameless slight but dear attentions that are a balm, and wanting these, one feels a bitterness which is a painful addition to one's other sufferings. god knows what will become of me! my life is now very monotonous as to outward events, yet how diversified by internal feeling! how often in the intensity of grief does one instant seem to fill and embrace the universe! as to the rest, the mechanical spending of my time: of course i have a great deal to do preparing for my journey. i make no visits, except one once in about ten days to mrs. mason. i have not seen hunt these nine days. trelawny resides chiefly at leghorn, since he is captain of lord byron's vessel, the _bolivar_; he comes to see us about once a week, and lord byron visits me about twice a week, accompanied by the guiccioli; but seeing people is an annoyance which i am happy to be spared. solitude is my only help and resource; accustomed, even when he was with me, to spend much of my time alone, i can at those moments forget myself, until some idea, which i think i would communicate to him, occurs, and then the yawning and dark gulph again displays itself, unshaded by the rainbow which the imagination had formed. despair, energy, love, desponding and excessive affliction are like clouds driven across my mind, one by one, until tears blot the scene, and weariness of spirit consigns me to temporary repose. i shudder with horror when i look back on what i have suffered, and when i think of the wild and miserable thoughts that have possessed me i say to myself, "is it true that i ever felt thus?" and then i weep in pity of myself; yet each day adds to the stock of sorrow, and death is the only end. i would study, and i hope i shall. i would write, and when i am settled i may. but were it not for the steady hope i entertain of joining him, what a mockery would be this world! without that hope i could not study or write, for fame and usefulness (except as regards my child) are nullities to me. yet i shall be happy if anything i ever produce may exalt and soften sorrow, as the writings of the divinities of our race have mine. but how can i aspire to that? the world will surely one day feel what it has lost when this bright child of song deserted her. is not _adonais_ his own elegy? and there does he truly depict the universal woe which should overspread all good minds since he has ceased to be their fellow-labourer in this worldly scene. how lovely does he paint death to be, and with what heartfelt sorrow does one repeat that line-- but i am chained to time, and cannot thence depart. how long do you think i shall live? as long as my mother? then eleven long years must intervene. i am now on the eve of completing my five and twentieth year; how drearily young for one so lost as i. how young in years for one who lives ages each day in sorrow. think you that these moments are counted in my life as in other people's? oh no! the day before the sea closed over mine own shelley he said to marianne, "if i die to-morrow i have lived to be older than my father; i am ninety years of age." thus, also, may i say. the eight years i passed with him was spun out beyond the usual length of a man's life, and what i have suffered since will write years on my brow and intrench them in my heart. surely i am not long for this world; most sure should i be were it not for my boy, but god grant that i may live to make his early years happy. well, adieu! i have no events to write about, and can, therefore, only scrawl about my feelings; this letter, indeed, is only the sequel of my last. in that i closed the history of all events that can interest me; that letter i wish you to send my father, the present one it is best not. i suppose i shall see you in england some of these days, but i shall write to you again before i quit this place. be as happy as you can, and hope for better things in the next world; by firm hope you may attain your wishes. again, adieu!--affectionately yours, m. s. do not write to me again here, or at all, until i write to you. within a day or two after this letter was written, mary, with jane williams and their children, quitted pisa; clare only remaining behind. from a letter--a very indignant one--of mrs. mason's, it may be inferred that appeals for a little assistance had been made on clare's behalf to byron, who did not respond. he had been, unwittingly, contributing to her support during the last few weeks of shelley's life; shelley having undertaken to get some translations (from goethe) made for byron, and giving the work secretly to clare. the truth now came out, and she found more difficulty than heretofore in getting paid. dependent for the future on her own exertions, she was going, according to her former resolution, to vienna, where charles clairmont was now established. mary's departure left her dreadfully solitary, and within a few hours she despatched one of her characteristic epistles, touched with that motley of bitter cynicism and grotesque, racy, humour which developed in her later letters. _half-past , wednesday morning._ my dear mary--you have only been gone a few hours. i have been inexpressibly low-spirited. i hope dear jane will be with you when this arrives. nothing new has happened--what should? to me there seems nothing under the sun, except the old tale of misery, misery! * * * * * _thursday._ i am to begin my journey to vienna on monday. mrs. mason will make me go, and the consequence is that it will be double as much, as i am to go alone. imagine all the lonely inns, the weary long miles, if i do. observe, whatever befalls in life, the heaviest part, the very dregs of the misfortune fall on me. alone, alone, all, all alone, upon a wide, wide sea, and christ would take no mercy upon my soul in agony. but i believe my minerva[ ] is right, for i might wait to all eternity for a party. you may remember what lord byron said about paying for the translation; now he has mumbled and grumbled and demurred, and does not know whether it is worth it, and will only give forty crowns, so that i shall not be overstocked when i arrive at vienna, unless, indeed, god shall spread a table for me in the wilderness. i mean to chew rhubarb the whole way, as the only diversion i can think of at all suited to my present state of feeling, and if i should write you scolding letters, you will excuse them, knowing that, with the psalmist, "out of the bitterness of my mouth have i spoken." * * * * * kiss the dear little percy for me, and if jane is with you, tell her how much i have thought of her, and that her image will always float across my mind, shining in my dark history like a ray of light across a cave. kiss her children also with all a grandmother's love. accept my best wishes for your happiness. dio ti da, maria, ventura.--your affectionate clare. mary answered this letter from genoa. from mary to clare. genoa, _ th september _. my dear clare--i do not wonder that you were and are melancholy, or that the excess of that feeling should oppress you. great god! what have we gone through, what variety of care and misery, all close now in blackest night. and i, am i not melancholy? here in this busy hateful genoa, where nothing speaks to me of him, except the sea, which is his murderer. well, i shall have his books and manuscripts, and in those i shall live, and from the study of these i do expect some instants of content. in solitude my imagination and ever-moving thoughts may afford me some seconds of exaltation that may render me both happier here and more worthy of him hereafter. such as i felt walking up a mountain by myself at sunrise during my journey, when the rocks looked black about me, and a white mist concealed all but them. i thought then, that, thinking of him and exciting my mind, my days might pass in a kind of peace; but these thoughts are so fleeting; and then i expect unhappiness alone from all the worldly part of my life--from my intercourse with human beings. i know that will bring nothing but unhappiness to me, if, indeed, i except trelawny, who appears so truly generous and kind. but i will not talk of myself, you have enough to annoy and make you miserable, and in nothing can i assist you. but i do hope that you will find germany better suited to you in every way than italy, and that you will make friends, and, more than all, become really attached to some one there. i wish, when i was in pisa, that you had said that you thought you should be short of money, and i would have left you more; but you seemed to think francesconi plenty. i would not go on with goethe except with a fixed price per sheet, to be paid regularly, and that price not less than five guineas. make this understood fully through hunt before you go, and then i will take care that you get the money; but if you do not _fix_ it, then i cannot manage so well. you are going to vienna--how anxiously do i hope to find peace; i do not hope to find it here. genoa has a bad atmosphere for me, i fear, and nothing but the horror of being a burthen to my family prevents my accompanying jane. if i had any fixed income i would go at least to paris, and i shall go the moment i have one. adieu, my dear clare; write to me often, as i shall to you.--affectionately yours, mary w. s. i cannot get your german dictionary now, since i must have packed it in my great case of books, but i will send it by the first opportunity. jane and her children were the next to depart, and for a short time mary shelley and her boy were alone. besides taking a house for the hunts and herself, she had the responsibility of finding one for lord byron. people never scrupled to make her of use; but any object, any duty to fulfil, was good for her in her solitary misery, and she devoted some of her vacant time to sending an account of her plans to mrs. gisborne. mary shelley to mrs. gisborne. genoa, _ th september _. ... i am here alone in genoa; quite, quite alone! j. has left me to proceed to england, and, except my sleeping child, i am alone. since you do not communicate with my father, you will perhaps be surprised, after my last letter, that i do not come to england. i have written to him a long account of the arguments of all my friends to dissuade me from that miserable journey; jane will detail them to you; and, therefore, i merely say now that, having no business there, i am determined not to spend that money which will support me nearly a year here, in a journey, the sole end of which appears to me the necessity i should be under, when arrived in london, of being a burthen to my father. when my crowns are gone, if sir timothy refuses, i hope to be able to support myself by my writings and mine own shelley's mss. at least during many long months i shall have peace as to money affairs, and one evil the less is much to one whose existence is suffering alone. lord byron has a house here, and will arrive soon. i have taken a house for the hunts and myself outside one of the gates. it is large and neat, with a _podere_ attached; we shall pay about eighty crowns between us, so i hope that i shall find tranquillity from care this winter, though that may be the last of my life so free, yet i do not hope it, though i say so; hope is a word that belongs not to my situation. he--my own beloved, the exalted and divine shelley--has left me alone in this miserable world; this earth, canopied by the eternal starry heaven--where he is--where, oh, my god! yes, where i shall one day be. clare is no longer with me. jane quitted me this morning at . after she left me i again went to rest, and thought of pugnano, its halls, its cypresses, the perfume of its mountains, and the gaiety of our life beneath their shadow. then i dozed awhile, and in my dream saw dear edward most visibly; he came, he said, to pass a few hours with us, but could not stay long. then i woke, and the day began. i went out, took hunt's house; but as i walked i felt that which is with me the sign of unutterable grief. i am not given to tears, and though my most miserable fate has often turned my eyes to fountains, yet oftener i suffer agonies unassuaged by tears. but during these last sufferings i have felt an oppression at my heart i never felt before. it is not a palpitation, but a _stringimento_ which is quite convulsive, and, did i not struggle greatly, would cause violent hysterics. looking on the sea, or hearing its roar, his dirge, it comes upon me; but these are corporeal sufferings i can get over, but that which is insurmountable is the constant feeling of despair that shadows me: i seem to walk on a narrow path with fathomless precipices all around me. yet where can i fall? i have already fallen, and all that comes of bad or good is a mere mockery. those about me have no idea of what i suffer; none are sufficiently interested in me to observe that, though my lips smile, my eyes are blank, or to notice the desolate look that i cast up towards the sky. pardon, dear friend, this selfishness in writing thus. there are moments when the heart must _sfogare_ or be suffocated, and such a moment is this--when quite alone, my babe sleeping, and dear jane having just left me, it is with difficulty i prevent myself from flying from mental misery by bodily exertion, when to run into that vast grave (the sea) until i sink to rest, would be a pleasure to me, and instead of this i write, and as i write i say, oh god, have pity on me. at least i will have pity on you. good-night, i will finish this when people are about me, and i am in a more cheerful mood. good-night. i will go look at the stars. they are eternal, so is he, so am i. you have not written to me since my misfortune. i understand this; you first waited for a letter from me, and that letter told you not to write. but answer this as soon as you receive it; talk to me of yourselves, and also of my english affairs. i am afraid that they will not go on very well in my absence, but it would cost more to set them right than they are worth. i will, however, let you know what i think my friends ought to do, that when you talk to peacock he may learn what i wish. a claim should be made on the part of shelley's executors for a maintenance for my child and myself from sir timothy. lord byron is ready to do this or any other service for me that his office of executor demands from him; but i do not wish it to be done separately by him, and i want to hear from england before i ask him to write to whitton on the subject. secondly, ollier must be asked for all mss., and some plan be reflected on for the best manner of republishing shelley's works, as well as the writings he has left. who will allow money to ianthe and charles? as for you, my dear friends, i do not see what you can do for me, except to send me the originals or copies of shelley's most interesting letters to you. i hope soon to get into my house, where writing, copying shelley's mss., walking, and being of some use in the education of marianne's children will be my occupations. where is that letter in verse shelley once wrote to you? let me have a copy of it. is not peacock very lukewarm and insensible in this affair? tell me what hogg says and does, and my father also, if you have an opportunity of knowing. here is a long letter all about myself, but though i cannot write, i like to hear of others. adieu, dear friends.--your sincerely attached, mary w. shelley. the fragment that follows is from mrs. williams' first letter, written from geneva, where she and edward had lived in such felicity, and where they had made friends with medwin, roberts, and trelawny: a happy, light-hearted time on which it was torture to look back. jane williams to mary shelley. geneva, _september _. i only arrived this day, my dearest mary, and find your letter, the only friend who welcomes me. i will not detail all the misery i have suffered, let it be added to the heap that must be piled up; and when the measure is brimful, it needs must overflow; and then, peace! what have been my feelings to-day? i have gazed on that lake, still and ever the same, rolling on in its course, as if this gap in creation had never been made. i have passed that place where our little boat used to land, but where is the hand stretched out to meet mine, where the glad voice, the sweet smile, the beloved form? oh! mary, is my heart human that i endure scenes like this, and live? my arrival at the inn here has been one of the most painful trials i have yet undergone. the landlady, who came to the door, did not recognise me immediately, and when she did, our mutual tears prevented both interrogation and answer for some minutes. i then bore my sorrowful burden up these stairs he had formerly passed in all the pride of youth, hope, and love. when will these heartrending scenes be finished? never! for, when they cease, memory will furnish others. * * * * * god bless you, dearest girl; take care of yourself. remember me to the hunts.--ever yours, jane. not long after this byron arrived at genoa with his train, and the hunts with their tribe. "all that were now left of our pisan circle," writes trelawny, "established themselves at albaro,--byron, leigh hunt, and mrs. shelley. the fine spirit that had animated and held us together was gone. left to our own devices, we degenerated apace." chapter xviii september -july an eminent contemporary writer, speaking of trelawny's writings, has remarked: "so long as he dwells on shelley, he is, like the visitants to the _witch of atlas_, 'imparadised.'" this was true, in fact not as to the writings, but the natures, of all who had friendly or intimate relations with shelley. his personality was like a clear, deep lake, wherein the sky and the surrounding objects were reflected. now and again a breeze, or even a storm, might sweep across the "watery glass," playing strange, grotesque pranks with the distorted reflections. but in general those who surrounded it saw themselves, and saw each other, not as they were, but as they appeared,--transfigured, idealised, glorified, by the impalpable, fluid, medium. and like a tree that overhangs the water's edge, whose branches dip and play in the clear ripples, nodding and beckoning to their own living likeness there, so mary had grown up by the side of this, her own image in him,--herself indeed, but "imparadised" in the immortal unreality of the magic mirror. now the eternal frost had fallen: black ice and dreary snow had extinguished that reflection for ever, and the solitary tree was left to weather all storms in a wintry world, where no magic mirror was to be hers any more. mary shelley's diary, now she was alone, altered its character. in her husband's lifetime it had been a record of the passing facts of every day; almost as concise in statement as that of her father. now and then, in travelling, she would stereotype an impression of beautiful scenery by an elaborate description; sometimes, but very rarely, she had indulged (as at pisa) on reflections on people or things in general. the case was now exactly reversed. alone with her child, with no one else to live for; having no companion-mind with which to exchange ideas, and having never known what it was to be without one before, her diary became her familiar,--or rather her shadow, for it took its sombre colouring from her and could give nothing back. the thoughts too monotonously sad, too harrowing in their eloquent self-pity to be communicated to other people, but which filled her heart, the more that heart was thrown back on itself, found here an outlet, inadequate enough, but still the only one they had. in thus recording her emotions for her own benefit, she had little idea that these melancholy self-communings would ever be gathered up and published for the satisfaction of the "reading world"; a world that loves nothing so well as personal details, and would rather have the object of its interest misrepresented than not represented at all. outwardly uneventful as mrs. shelley's subsequent life was, its few occurrences are, as a rule, not even alluded to in her journal. such things for the most part lost their intrinsic importance to her when shelley disappeared; it was only in the world of abstractions that she felt or could imagine his companionship. her journal, in reality, records her first essay in living alone. it was, to an almost incredible degree, a beginning. her existence, from its outset, had been offered up at the shrine of one man. to animate his solitude, to foster his genius, to help--as far as possible--his labours, to companion him in a world that did not understand him,--this had been her life-work, which lay now as a dream behind her, while she awakened to find herself alone with the solitude, the work, the cold unfriendly world, and without shelley. could any woman be as lonely? all who share an abnormal lot must needs be isolated when cut adrift from the other life which has been their _raison d'être_; and mary had begun so early, that she had grown, as it were, to this state of double solitude. she had not been unconscious of the slight hold they had on actualities. "mary," observed shelley one day at pisa, when trelawny was present, "trelawny has found out byron already. how stupid we were; how long it took us!" "that," she observed, "is because he lives with the living and we with the dead." and as a fact, shelley lived with the immortals; finite things were outside his world; in his contemporaries it was what he would have considered their immortal side that he cared for. there are conjurors who can be tied by no knot from which they cannot escape, and so the limitations of practical convention, those "ideas and feelings which are but for a day," had no power to hold shelley. and mary knew no world but his. now, young,--only twenty-five,--yet with the past experience of eight years of chequered married life, and of a simultaneous intellectual development almost perilously rapid, she stood, an utter novice, on the threshold of ordinary existence. _journal, october ._--on the th of july i finished my journal. this is a curious coincidence. the date still remains--the fatal th--a monument to show that all ended then. and i begin again? oh, never! but several motives induce me, when the day has gone down, and all is silent around me, steeped in sleep, to pen, as occasion wills, my reflections and feelings. first, i have no friend. for eight years i communicated, with unlimited freedom, with one whose genius, far transcending mine, awakened and guided my thoughts. i conversed with him, rectified my errors of judgment; obtained new lights from him; and my mind was satisfied. now i am alone--oh, how alone! the stars may behold my tears, and the wind drink my sighs, but my thoughts are a sealed treasure which i can confide to none. but can i express all i feel? can i give words to thoughts and feelings that, as a tempest, hurry me along? is this the sand that the ever-flowing sea of thought would impress indelibly? alas! i am alone. no eye answers mine; my voice can with none assume its natural modulation. what a change! o my beloved shelley! how often during those happy days--happy, though chequered--i thought how superiorly gifted i had been in being united to one to whom i could unveil myself, and who could understand me! well, then, now i am reduced to these white pages, which i am to blot with dark imagery. as i write, let me think what he would have said if, speaking thus to him, he could have answered me. yes, my own heart, i would fain know what to think of my desolate state; what you think i ought to do, what to think. i guess you would answer thus: "seek to know your own heart, and, learning what it best loves, try to enjoy that." well, i cast my eyes around, and, looking forward to the bounded prospect in view, i ask myself what pleases me there. my child;--so many feelings arise when i think of him, that i turn aside to think no more. those i most loved are gone for ever; those who held the second rank are absent; and among those near me as yet, i trust to the disinterested kindness of one alone. beneath all this, my imagination never flags. literary labours, the improvement of my mind, and the enlargement of my ideas, are the only occupations that elevate me from my lethargy: all events seem to lead me to that one point, and the courses of destiny having dragged me to that single resting-place, have left me. father, mother, friend, husband, children--all made, as it were, the team which conducted me here, and now all, except you, my poor boy (and you are necessary to the continuance of my life), all are gone, and i am left to fulfil my task. so be it. _october ._--well, they are come;[ ] and it is all as i said. i awoke as from sleep, and thought how i had vegetated these last days; for feeling leaves little trace on the memory if it be, like mine, unvaried. i have felt for, and with myself alone, and i awake now to take a part in life. as far as others are concerned, my sensations have been most painful. i must work hard amidst the vexations that i perceive are preparing for me, to preserve my peace and tranquillity of mind. i must preserve some, if i am to live; for, since i bear at the bottom of my heart a fathomless well of bitter waters, the workings of which my philosophy is ever at work to repress, what will be my fate if the petty vexations of life are added to this sense of eternal and infinite misery? oh, my child! what is your fate to be? you alone reach me; you are the only chain that links me to time; but for you, i should be free. and yet i cannot be destined to live long. well, i shall commence my task, commemorate the virtues of the only creature worth loving or living for, and then, may be, i may join him. moonshine may be united to her planet, and wander no more, a sad reflection of all she loved on earth. _october ._--i have received my desk to-day, and have been reading my letters to mine own shelley during his absences at marlow. what a scene to recur to! my william, clara, allegra, are all talked of. they lived then, they breathed this air, and their voices struck on my sense; their feet trod the earth beside me, and their hands were warm with blood and life when clasped in mine, where are they all? this is too great an agony to be written about. i may express my despair, but my thoughts can find no words. * * * * * i would endeavour to consider myself a faint continuation of his being, and, as far as possible, the revelation to the earth of what he was, yet, to become this, i must change much, and, above all, i must acquire that knowledge and drink at those fountains of wisdom and virtue from which he quenched his thirst. hitherto i have done nothing; yet i have not been discontented with myself. i speak of the period of my residence here. for, although unoccupied by those studies which i have marked out for myself, my mind has been so active that its activity, and not its indolence, has made me neglectful. but now the society of others causes this perpetual working of my ideas somewhat to pause; and i must take advantage of this to turn my mind towards its immediate duties, and to determine with firmness to commence the life i have planned. you will be with me in all my studies, dearest love! your voice will no longer applaud me, but in spirit you will visit and encourage me: i know you will. what were i, if i did not believe that you still exist? it is not with you as with another, i believe that we all live hereafter; but you, my only one, were a spirit caged, an elemental being, enshrined in a frail image, now shattered. do they not all with one voice assert the same? trelawny, hunt, and many others. and so at last you quitted this painful prison, and you are free, my shelley; while i, your poor chosen one, am left to live as i may. what a strange life mine has been! love, youth, fear, and fearlessness led me early from the regular routine of life, and i united myself to this being, who, not one of _us_, though like to us, was pursued by numberless miseries and annoyances, in all of which i shared. and then i was the mother of beautiful children, but these stayed not by me. still he was there; and though, in truth, after my william's death this world seemed only a quicksand, sinking beneath my feet, yet beside me was this bank of refuge--so tempest-worn and frail, that methought its very weakness was strength, and, since nature had written destruction on its brow, so the power that rules human affairs had determined, in spite of nature, that it should endure. but that is gone. his voice can no longer be heard; the earth no longer receives the shadow of his form; annihilation has come over the earthly appearance of the most gentle creature that ever yet breathed this air; and i am still here--still thinking, existing, all but hoping. well, i close my book. to-morrow i must begin this new life of mine. _october ._--how painful all change becomes to one, who, entirely and despotically engrossed by [his] own feelings leads, as it were, an _internal_ life, quite different from the outward and apparent one! whilst my life continues its monotonous course within sterile banks, an under-current disturbs the smooth face of the waters, distorts all objects reflected in it, and the mind is no longer a mirror in which outward events may reflect themselves, but becomes itself the painter and creator. if this perpetual activity has power to vary with endless change the everyday occurrences of a most monotonous life, it appears to be animated with the spirit of tempest and hurricane when any real occurrence diversifies the scene. thus, to-night, a few bars of a known air seemed to be as a wind to rouse from its depths every deep-seated emotion of my mind. i would have given worlds to have sat, my eyes closed, and listened to them for years. the restraint i was under caused these feelings to vary with rapidity; but the words of the conversation, uninteresting as they might be, seemed all to convey two senses to me, and, touching a chord within me, to form a music of which the speaker was little aware. i do not think that any person's voice has the same power of awakening melancholy in me as albé's. i have been accustomed, when hearing it, to listen and to speak little; another voice, not mine, ever replied--a voice whose strings are broken. when albé ceases to speak, i expect to hear _that other_ voice, and when i hear another instead, it jars strangely with every association. i have seen so little of albé since our residence in switzerland, and, having seen him there every day, his voice--a peculiar one--is engraved on my memory with other sounds and objects from which it can never disunite itself. i have heard hunt in company and in conversation with many, when my own one was not there. trelawny, perhaps, is associated in my mind with edward more than with shelley. even our older friends, peacock and hogg, might talk together, or with others, and their voices suggest no change to me. but, since incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of diodati, they were, as it were, entirely _tête-à-tête_ between my shelley and albé; and thus, as i have said, when albé speaks and shelley does not answer, it is as thunder without rain,--the form of the sun without light or heat,--as any familiar object might be shorn of its best attributes; and i listen with an unspeakable melancholy that yet is not all pain. the above explains that which would otherwise be an enigma--why albé, by his mere presence and voice, has the power of exciting such deep and shifting emotions within me. for my feelings have no analogy either with my opinion of him, or the subject of his conversation. with another i might talk, and not for the moment think of shelley--at least not think of him with the same vividness as if i were alone; but, when in company with albé, i can never cease for a second to have shelley in my heart and brain with a clearness that mocks reality--interfering even by its force with the functions of life--until, if tears do not relieve me, the hysterical feeling, analogous to that which the murmur of the sea gives me, presses painfully upon me. well, for the first time for about a month, i have been in company with albé for two hours, and, coming home, i write this, so necessary is it for me to express in words the force of my feelings. shelley, beloved! i look at the stars and at all nature, and it speaks to me of you in the clearest accents. why cannot you answer me, my own one? is the instrument so utterly destroyed? i would endure ages of pain to hear one tone of your voice strike on my ear! for nearly a year--not a happy one--mary lived with the hunts. a bruised and bleeding heart exposed to the cuffs and blows of everyday life, a nervous temperament--too recently strained to its utmost pitch of endurance--liable to constant, unavoidable irritation, a nature sensitive and reserved, accustomed to much seclusion and much independence, thrown into the midst of a large, noisy, and disorderly family,--these conditions could hardly result in happiness. leigh hunt was nervous, delicate, overworked, and variable in mood: his wife an invalid, condemned by the doctors on her arrival in italy, now expecting her confinement in the ensuing summer, an event which she was told would be, for good or evil, the crisis of her fate. six children they had already had, who were allowed--on principle--to do exactly as they chose, "until such time as they were of an age to be reasoned with." the opening for activity and usefulness would, at another time, have been beneficial to mary, and, to some extent, was so now; but it was too early, the change from her former state was too violent; she was not fit yet for such severe bracing. she met her trials bravely; but it was another case where buoyancy of spirits was indispensable to real success, and buoyancy of spirits she had not, nor was likely to acquire in her present surroundings. there was another person to whom these surroundings were even more supremely distasteful than to her, and this was byron. small sympathy had he for domestic life or sentiment even in their best aspects, and this virtuous, slipshod, cockney bohemianism had no attraction for him whatever. the poor man must have suffered many things while the hunts were in possession of his _pian terreno_ at pisa; he was rid of them now, but the very sight of them was too much for him. lord byron to mrs. shelley. _ th october ._ the sofa--which i regret is _not_ of your furniture--it was purchased by me at pisa since you left it. it is convenient for my room, though of little value (about pauls), and i offered to send another (now sent) in its stead. i preferred retaining the purchased furniture, but always intended that you should have as good or better in its place. i have a particular dislike to anything of shelley's being within the same walls with mrs. hunt's children. they are dirtier and more mischievous than yahoos. what they can't destroy with their filth they will with their fingers. i presume you received ninety and odd crowns from the wreck of the _don juan_, and also the price of the boat purchased by captain r., if not, you will have _both_. hunt has these in hand. with regard to any difficulties about money, i can only repeat that i will be your banker till this state of things is cleared up, and you can see what is to be done; so there is little to hinder you on that score. i was confined for four days to my bed at lerici. poor hunt, with his six little blackguards, are coming slowly up; as usual he turned back once--was there ever such a _kraal_ out of the hottentot country before? n. b. among those of their former acquaintance who now surrounded mary, the one who by his presence ministered most to the needs of her fainting moral nature was trelawny. leigh hunt, when not disagreeing from her, was affectionate, nay, gushing, and he had truly loved shelley, but he was a feeble, facetious, feckless creature,--a hypochondriac,--unable to do much to help himself, still less another. byron was by no means ill-disposed, especially just now, but he was egotistic and indolent, and too capricious,--as the event proved,--to be depended on. trelawny's fresh vigorous personality, his bright originality and rugged independence, and his unbounded admiration for shelley, made him wonderfully reviving to mary; he had the effect on her of a gust of fresh air in a close crowded room. he was unconventional and outspoken, and by no means always complimentary, but he had a just appreciation of mary's real mental and moral superiority to the people around her, and a frank liking for herself. their friendship was to extend over many years, during which mary had ample opportunity of repaying the debt of obligation she always felt she owed him for his kindness to her and mrs. williams at the time of their great misery. the letters which follow were among the earliest of a long and varied correspondence. mary shelley to trelawny. _november ._ my dear trelawny--i called on you yesterday, but was too late for you. i was much pained to see you out of spirits the other night. i can in no way make you better, i fear, but i should be glad to see you. will you dine with me monday after your ride? if hunt rides, as he threatens, with lord byron, he will also dine late and make one of our party. remember, you will also do hunt good by this, who pines in this solitude. you say that i know so little of the world that i am afraid i may be mistaken in imagining that you have a friendship for me, especially after what you said of jane the other night; but besides the many other causes i have to esteem you, i can never remember without the liveliest gratitude all you said that night of agony when you returned to lerici. your praises of my lost shelley were the only balm i could endure, and he always joined with me in liking you from the first moment we saw you. adieu.--your attached friend, m. w. s. have you got my books on shore from the _bolivar_? if you have, pray let me have them, for many are odd volumes, and i wish to see if they are too much destroyed to rank with those i have. trelawny to mrs. shelley. _november ._ dear mary--i will gladly dine on monday with you. as to melancholy, i refer you to the good antonio in shylock. "alas! i know now why i am so sad. it is time, i think." you are not so learned in human dealings as iago, but you cannot so sadly err as to doubt the extent or truth of my friendship. as to gain esteem, i do not think it a word applicable to such a lawless character. ruled by impulse, not by reason, i am satisfied you should like me upon my own terms--impulse. as to gratitude for uttering my thoughts of him i so loved and admired, it was a tribute that all who knew him have paid to his memory. "but weeping never could restore the dead," and if it could, hope would prevent our tears. you may remember i always in preference selected as my companion edward, not jane, and that i always dissented from your general voice of her being perfection. i am still of the same opinion; nothing more. but i have and ever shall feel deeply interested, and would do much to serve her, and if thinking on those trifles which diminish her lustre in my eyes makes me flag, edward's memory and my perfect friendship for him is sufficient excitement to spur me on to anything. it is impossible to dislike jane; but to have an unqualified liking, such as i had for edward, no--no--no! talking of gratitude, i really am and ought to be so to you, for bearing on, untired, with my spleen, humours, and violence; it is a proof of real liking, particularly as you are not of the sect who profess or practise meekness, humility, and patience in common. t. mary had not as yet been successful in getting possession of the half-finished portrait of shelley. her letters had followed miss curran to paris, whence, in october, a reply at last arrived. "i am sorry," miss curran wrote, "i am not at rome to execute your melancholy commission. i mean to return in spring, but it may be then too late. i am sure mr. brunelli would be happy to oblige you or me, but you may have left pisa before this, so i know not what to propose. your picture and clare's i left with him to give you when you should be at rome, as i expected, before you returned to england. the one you now write for i thought was not to be inquired for; it was so ill done, and i was on the point of burning it with others before i left italy. i luckily saved it just as the fire was scorching, and it is packed up with my other pictures at rome; and i have not yet decided where they can be sent to, as there are serious difficulties in the way i had not adverted to. i am very sorry indeed, dear mary, but you shall have it as soon as i possibly can."... this was the early history of that portrait, which was recovered a year or two later, and which has passed, and passes still, for shelley's likeness, and which, bad or good, is the only authentic one in existence. mary now began to feel it a matter of duty as well as of expediency to resume literary work, but she found it hard at first. "i am quite well, but very nervous," she wrote to mrs. gisborne; "my excessive nervousness (how new a disorder for me--my illness in the summer is the foundation of it) is the cause i do not write." she made a beginning with an article for the _liberal_. shelley's _defence of poetry_ was, also, to be published in the forthcoming number, and the ms. of this had to be got from england. she had reason to believe, too, that ollier, the publisher, had in his keeping other mss. of shelley's, and she was restlessly desirous to get possession of all these, feeling convinced that among them there was nothing perfect, nothing ready for publication exactly as it stood. in her over-anxiety she wrote to several people on this subject, thereby incurring the censure of her father, whom she had also consulted about her literary plans. his criticisms on his daughter's style were not unsound; she had not been trained in a school of terseness, and, like many young authors, she was apt to err on the side of length, and not to see that she did so. godwin to mary. no. strand, _ th november _. my dear mary--i have devoted the last two days to the seeing everybody an interview with whom would best enable me to write you a satisfactory letter. yesterday i saw hogg and mrs. williams, and to-day peacock and hanson junior. from hogg i had, among other things, to learn mrs. williams' address, for, owing to your neglect, she had been a fortnight in london before i knew of her arrival. she appeared to be in better health and better spirits than i expected; she did not drop one tear; occasionally she smiled. she is a picturesque little woman, and, as far as i could judge from one interview, i like her. peacock has got ollier's promise to deliver all shelley's manuscripts, and as earnest, he has received _peter bell_ and _a curse on l.e._, which he holds at your disposal. by the way, you should never give one commission but to one person; you commissioned me to recover these manuscripts from ollier, you commissioned peacock, and, i believe, mrs. gisborne. this puts us all in an awkward situation. i heard of peacock's applying just in time to prevent me from looking like a fool. peacock says he cannot make up a parcel for you till he has been a second time to marlow on the question, which cannot be till about christmas. he appears to me, not lukewarm, but assiduous. mrs. williams told me she should write to you by this day's post. she had been inquiring in vain for miss curran's address--you should have referred her to me for it, but you referred her to me for nothing. this, by the way, is another instance of your giving one commission to more than one person. you gave the commission about miss curran to mrs. williams and to me. i received your letter, inclosing one to miss curran, st october, which i immediately forwarded to her by a safe hand, through her brother. you have probably heard from her by this time; she is in paris.... i have a plan upon the house of longman respecting _castruccio_, but that depends upon coincidences, and i must have patience. you ask my opinion of your literary plans. if you expect any price, you must think of something new: _manfred_ is a subject that nobody interests himself about; the interest, therefore, must be made, and no bookseller understands anything about that contingency. a book about italy as it is, written with any talent, would be sure to sell; but i am afraid you know very little about the present race of italians. as to my own affairs, nothing is determined. i expected something material to have happened this week, but as yet i have heard nothing. if the subscription fills, i shall perhaps be safe; if not, i shall be driven to sea on a plank. perhaps it may be of some use to you if i give you my opinion of _castruccio_. i think there are parts of high genius, and that your two females are exceedingly interesting; but i am not satisfied. _frankenstein_ was a fine thing; it was compressed, muscular, and firm; nothing relaxed and weak; no proud flesh. _castruccio_ is a work of more genius; but it appears, in reading, that the first rule you prescribed to yourself was, i will let it be long. it contains the quantity of four volumes of _waverley_. no hard blow was ever hit with a woolsack! mamma desires me to remember her to you in the kindest manner, and to say that she feels a deep interest in everything that concerns you. she means to take the earliest opportunity to see mrs. williams, both as she feels an earnest sympathy in her calamity, and as she will be likely to learn a hundred particulars respecting the dispositions and prospects of yourself and jane, which she might in vain desire to learn in any other quarter. you asked mamma for some present, a remembrance of your mother. she has reserved for you a ring of hers, with fanny blood's hair set round with pearls. you will, of course, rely on it that i will send you the letters you ask for by peacock's parcel. miss curran's address is hotel de dusseldorf rue petits st. augustin, à paris.--believe me, ever your most affectionate father, william godwin. my last letter was dated th october. _journal, november ._--i have made my first probation in writing, and it has done me much good, and i get more calm; the stream begins to take to its new channel, insomuch as to make me fear change. but people must know little of me who think that, abstractedly, i am content with my present mode of life. activity of spirit is my sphere. but we cannot be active of mind without an object; and i have none. i am allowed to have some talent--that is sufficient, methinks, to cause my irreparable misery; for, if one has genius, what a delight it is to be associated with a superior! mine own shelley! the sun knows of none to be likened to you--brave, wise, noble-hearted, full of learning, tolerance, and love. love! what a word for me to write! yet, my miserable heart, permit me yet to love,--to see him in beauty, to feel him in beauty, to be interpenetrated by the sense of his excellence; and thus to love singly, eternally, ardently, and not fruitlessly; for i am still his--still the chosen one of that blessed spirit--still vowed to him for ever and ever! _november ._--it is better to grieve than not to grieve. grief at least tells me that i was not always what i am now. i was once selected for happiness; let the memory of that abide by me. you pass by an old ruined house in a desolate lane, and heed it not. but if you hear that that house is haunted by a wild and beautiful spirit, it acquires an interest and beauty of its own. i shall be glad to be more alone again; one ought to see no one, or many; and, confined to one society, i shall lose all energy except that which i possess from my own resources; and i must be alone for those to be put in activity. a cold heart! have i a cold heart? god knows! but none need envy the icy region this heart encircles; and at least the tears are hot which the emotions of this cold heart forces me to shed. a cold heart! yes, it would be cold enough if all were as i wished it--cold, or burning in the flame for whose sake i forgive this, and would forgive every other imputation--that flame in which your heart, beloved, lay unconsumed. my heart is very full to-night. i shall write his life, and thus occupy myself in the only manner from which i can derive consolation. that will be a task that may convey some balm. what though i weep? all is better than inaction and--not forgetfulness--that never is--but an inactivity of remembrance. and you, my own boy! i am about to begin a task which, if you live, will be an invaluable treasure to you in after times. i must collect my materials, and then, in the commemoration of the divine virtues of your father, i shall fulfil the only act of pleasure there remains for me, and be ready to follow you, if you leave me, my task being fulfilled. i have lived; rapture, exultation, content--all the varied changes of enjoyment--have been mine. it is all gone; but still, the airy paintings of what it has gone through float by, and distance shall not dim them. if i were alone, i had already begun what i had determined to do; but i must have patience, and for those events my memory is brass, my thoughts a never-tired engraver. france--poverty--a few days of solitude, and some uneasiness--a tranquil residence in a beautiful spot--switzerland--bath--marlow--milan--the baths of lucca--este--venice--rome--naples--rome and misery--leghorn--florence--pisa--solitude--the williams'--the baths--pisa: these are the heads of chapters, and each containing a tale romantic beyond romance. i no longer enjoy, but i love. death cannot deprive me of that living spark which feeds on all given it, and which is now triumphant in sorrow. i love, and shall enjoy happiness again. i do not doubt that; but when? these fragments of journal give the course of her inward reflections; her letters sometimes supply the clue to her outward life, _au jour le jour_. mary shelley to clare clairmont. _ th december ._ my dear clare--i have delayed writing to you so long for two reasons. first, i have every day expected to hear from you; and secondly, i wished to hear something decisive from england to communicate to you. but i have waited in vain for both things. you do not write, and i begin to despair of ever hearing from you again. a few words will tell you all that has been done in england. when i wrote to you last, i think that i told you that lord byron had written to hanson, bidding him call upon whitton. hanson wrote to whitton desiring an interview, which whitton declined, requesting hanson to make his application by letter, which hanson has done, and i know no more. this does not look like an absolute refusal, but sir timothy is so capricious that we cannot trust to appearances. and now the chapter about myself is finished, for what can i say of my present life? the weather is bitterly cold with a sharp wind, very unlike dear, _carissima_ pisa; but soft airs and balmy gales are not the attributes of genoa, which place i daily and duly join marianne in detesting. there is but one fireplace in the house, and although people have been for a month putting up a stove in my room, it smokes too much to permit of its being lighted. so i am obliged to pass the greater part of my time in hunt's sitting-room, which is, as you may guess, the annihilation of study, and even of pleasure to a great degree. for, after all, hunt does not like me: it is both our faults, and i do not blame him, but so it is. i rise at , breakfast, work, read, and if i can at all endure the cold, copy my shelley's mss. in my own room, and if possible walk before dinner. after that i work, read greek, etc., till , when hunt and marianne go to bed. then i am alone. then the stream of thought, which has struggled against its _argine_ all through the busy day, makes a _piena_, and sorrow and memory and imagination, despair, and hope in despair, are the winds and currents that impel it. i am alone, and myself; and then i begin to say, as i ever feel, "how i hate life! what a mockery it is to rise, to walk, to feed, and then go to rest, and in all this a statue might do my part. one thing alone may or can awake me, and that is study; the rest is all nothing." and so it is! i am silent and serious. absorbed in my own thoughts, what am i then in this world if my spirit live not to learn and become better? that is the whole of my destiny; i look to nothing else. for i dare not look to my little darling other than as--not the sword of damocles, that is a wrong simile, or to a wrecked seaman's plank--true, he stands, and only he, between me and the sea of eternity; but i long for that plunge! no, i fear for him pain, disappointment,--all, all fear. you see how it is, it is near , and my good friends repose. this is the hour when i can think, unobtruded upon, and these thoughts, _malgré moi_, will stain this paper. but then, my dear clare, i have nothing else except my nothingless self to talk about. you have doubtless heard from jane, and i have heard from no one else. i see no one. the guiccioli and lord byron once a month. trelawny seldom, and he is on the eve of his departure for leghorn.... * * * * * marianne suffers during this dreadfully cold weather, but less than i should have supposed. the children are all well. so also is my percy, poor little darling: they all scold him because he speaks loud _à l'italien_. people love to, nay, they seem to exist on, finding fault with others, but i have no right to complain, and this unlucky stove is the sole source of all my _dispiacere_; if i had that, i should not tease any one, or any one me, or my only one; but after all, these are trifles. i have sent for another _ingeniere_, and i hope, before many days are elapsed, to retire as before to my hole. i have again delayed finishing this letter, waiting for letters from england, that i might not send you one so barren of all intelligence. but i have had none. and nothing new has happened except trelawny's departure for leghorn, so that our days are more monotonous than ever. the weather is drearily cold, and an eternal north-east whistles through every crevice. percy, however, is far better in this cold than in summer; he is warmly clothed, and gets on. adieu. pray write. my love to charles; i am ashamed that i do not write to him, but i have only an old story to repeat, and this letter tells that.--affectionately yours, mary shelley. _journal, december ._--so this year comes to an end. shelley, beloved! the year has a new name from any thou knewest. when spring arrives leaves you never saw will shadow the ground, and flowers you never beheld will star it; the grass will be of another growth, and the birds sing a new song--the aged earth dates with a new number. sometimes i thought that fortune had relented towards us; that your health would have improved, and that fame and joy would have been yours, for, when well, you extracted from nature alone an endless delight. the various threads of our existence seemed to be drawing to one point, and there to assume a cheerful hue. again, i think that your gentle spirit was too much wounded by the sharpness of this world; that your disease was incurable, and that in a happy time you became the partaker of cloudless days, ceaseless hours, and infinite love. thy name is added to the list which makes the earth bold in her age and proud of what has been. time, with unwearied but slow feet, guides her to the goal that thou hast reached, and i, her unhappy child, am advanced still nearer the hour when my earthly dress shall repose near thine, beneath the tomb of cestius. it must have been at about this time that mary wrote the sad, retrospective poem entitled "the choice." the choice. my choice!--my choice, alas! was had and gone with the red gleam of last autumnal sun; lost in that deep wherein he bathed his head, my choice, my life, my hope together fled:-- a wanderer here, no more i seek a home, the sky a vault, and italy a tomb. yet as some days a pilgrim i remain, linked to my orphan child by love's strong chain; and, since i have a faith that i must earn, by suffering and by patience, a return of that companionship and love, which first upon my young life's cloud like sunlight burst, and now has left me, dark, as when its beams, quenched in the might of dreadful ocean streams, leave that one cloud, a gloomy speck on high, beside one star in the else darkened sky;-- since i must live, how would i pass the day, how meet with fewest tears the morning's ray, how sleep with calmest dreams, how find delights, as fireflies gleam through interlunar nights? first let me call on thee! lost as thou art, thy name aye fills my sense, thy love my heart. oh, gentle spirit! thou hast often sung, how fallen on evil days thy heart was wrung; now fierce remorse and unreplying death waken a chord within my heart, whose breath, thrilling and keen, in accents audible a tale of unrequited love doth tell. it was not anger,--while thy earthly dress encompassed still thy soul's rare loveliness, all anger was atoned by many a kind caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.-- it speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes, that blindly crushed thy soul's fond sacrifice:-- my heart was all thine own,--but yet a shell closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable, till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain, which gaping lies, nor may unite again. forgive me! let thy love descend in dew of soft repentance and regret most true;-- in a strange guise thou dost descend, or how could love soothe fell remorse,--as it does now?-- by this remorse and love, and by the years through which we shared our common hopes and fears, by all our best companionship, i dare call on thy sacred name without a fear;-- and thus i pray to thee, my friend, my heart! that in thy new abode, thou'lt bear a part in soothing thy poor mary's lonely pain, as link by link she weaves her heavy chain!-- and thou, strange star! ascendant at my birth, which rained, they said, kind influence on the earth, so from great parents sprung, i dared to boast fortune my friend, till set, thy beams were lost! and thou, inscrutable, by whose decree has burst this hideous storm of misery! here let me cling, here to the solitudes, these myrtle-shaded streams and chestnut woods; tear me not hence--here let me live and die, in my adopted land--my country--italy. a happy mother first i saw this sun, beneath this sky my race of joy was run. first my sweet girl, whose face resembled _his_, slept on bleak lido, near venetian seas. yet still my eldest-born, my loveliest, dearest, clung to my side, most joyful then when nearest. an english home had given this angel birth, near those royal towers, where the grass-clad earth is shadowed o'er by england's loftiest trees: then our companion o'er the swift-passed seas, he dwelt beside the alps, or gently slept, rocked by the waves, o'er which our vessel swept, beside his father, nurst upon my breast, while leman's waters shook with fierce unrest. his fairest limbs had bathed in serchio's stream; his eyes had watched italian lightnings gleam; his childish voice had, with its loudest call, the echoes waked of este's castle wall; had paced pompeii's roman market-place; had gazed with infant wonder on the grace of stone-wrought deities, and pictured saints, in rome's high palaces--there were no taints of ruin on his cheek--all shadowless grim death approached--the boy met his caress, and while his glowing limbs with life's warmth shone, around those limbs his icy arms were thrown. his spoils were strewed beneath the soil of rome, whose flowers now star the dark earth near his tomb: its airs and plants received the mortal part, his spirit beats within his mother's heart. infant immortal! chosen for the sky! no grief upon thy brow's young purity entrenched sad lines, or blotted with its might the sunshine of thy smile's celestial light;-- the image shattered, the bright spirit fled, thou shin'st the evening star among the dead. and thou, his playmate, whose deep lucid eyes, were a reflection of these bluest skies; child of our hearts, divided in ill hour, we could not watch the bud's expanding flower, now thou art gone, one guileless victim more, to the black death that rules this sunny shore. companion of my griefs! thy sinking frame had often drooped, and then erect again with shows of health had mocked forebodings dark;-- watching the changes of that quivering spark, i feared and hoped, and dared to trust at length, thy very weakness was my tower of strength. methought thou wert a spirit from the sky, which struggled with its chains, but could not die, and that destruction had no power to win from out those limbs the soul that burnt within. tell me, ye ancient walls, and weed-grown towers, ye roman airs and brightly painted flowers, does not his spirit visit that recess which built of love enshrines his earthly dress?-- no more! no more!--what though that form be fled, my trembling hand shall never write thee--dead-- thou liv'st in nature, love, my memory, with deathless faith for aye adoring thee, the wife of time no more, i wed eternity. 'tis thus the past--on which my spirit leans, makes dearest to my soul italian scenes. in tuscan fields the winds in odours steeped from flowers and cypresses, when skies have wept, shall, like the notes of music once most dear, which brings the unstrung voice upon my ear of one beloved, to memory display past scenes, past hopes, past joys, in long array. pugnano's trees, beneath whose shade he stood, the pools reflecting pisa's old pine wood, the fireflies beams, the aziola's cry all breathe his spirit which can never die. such memories have linked these hills and caves, these woodland paths, and streams, and knelling waves past to each sad pulsation of my breast, and made their melancholy arms the haven of my rest. here will i live, within a little dell, which but a month ago i saw full well:-- a dream then pictured forth the solitude deep in the shelter of a lovely wood; a voice then whispered a strange prophecy, my dearest, widowed friend, that thou and i should there together pass the weary day, as we before have done in spezia's bay, as though long hours we watched the sails that neared o'er the far sea, their vessel ne'er appeared; one pang of agony, one dying gleam of hope led us along, beside the ocean stream, but keen-eyed fear, the while all hope departs, stabbed with a million stings our heart of hearts. the sad revolving year has not allayed the poison of these bleeding wounds, or made the anguish less of that corroding thought which has with grief each single moment fraught. edward, thy voice was hushed--thy noble heart with aspiration heaves no more--a part of heaven-resumèd past thou art become, thy spirit waits with his in our far home. trelawny had departed for leghorn and his favourite maremma, _en route_ for rome, where, by his untiring zeal for the fit interment of shelley's ashes, he once more earned mary's undying gratitude. the ashes, which had been temporarily consigned to the care of mr. freeborn, british consul at rome, had, before trelawny arrived, been buried in the protestant cemetery: the grave was amidst a cluster of others. in a niche--formed by two buttresses--in the old roman wall, immediately under an ancient pyramid, said to be the tomb of caius cestius, trelawny (having purchased the recess) built two tombs. in one of these the box containing shelley's ashes was deposited, and all was covered over with solid stone. the details of the transaction, which extended over several months, are supplied in his letters. trelawny to mary shelley. piombino, _ th_ and _ th january _. thus far into the bowels of the land have we marched on without impediment. dear mary shelley--pardon my tardiness in writing, which from day to day i have postponed, having no other cause to plead than idleness. on my arrival at leghorn i called on grant, and was much grieved to find our fears well founded, to wit, that nothing definitely had been done. grant had not heard from his correspondent at rome after his first statement of the difficulties; the same letter that was enclosed me and read by you he (grant) had written, but not received a reply. i then requested grant to write and say that i would be at rome in a month or five weeks, and if i found the impediments insurmountable, i would resume possession of the ashes, if on the contrary, to personally fulfil your wishes, and in the meantime to deposit them secure from molestation, so that, without grant writes to me, i shall say nothing more till i am at rome, which will be early in february. in the meantime roberts and myself are sailing along the coast, shooting, and visiting the numerous islands in our track. we have been here some days, living at the miserable hut of a cattle dealer on the marshes, near this wretched town, well situated for sporting. to-morrow we cross over to elba, thence to corsica, and so return along the maremma, up the tiber in the boat, to rome.... ... i like this maremma, it is lonely and desolate, thinly populated, particularly after genoa, where human brutes are so abundant that the air is dense with their garlic breath, and it is impossible to fly the nuisance. here there is solitude enough: there are less of the human form here in midday than at genoa midnight; besides, this vagabond life has restored my health. next year i will get a tent, and spend my winter in these marshes.... ... dear mary, of all those that i know of, or you have told me of, as connected with you, there is not one now living has so tender a friendship for you as i have. i have the far greater claims on you, and i shall consider it as a breach of friendship should you employ any one else in services that i can execute. my purse, my person, my extremest means lye all unlocked to your occasion. i hope you know my heart so well as to make all professions needless. to serve you will ever be the greatest pleasure i can experience, and nothing could interrupt the almost unmingled pleasure i have received from our first meeting but you concealing your difficulties or wishes from me. with kindest remembrances to my good friends the hunts, to whom i am sincerely attached, and love and salaam to lord byron, i am your very sincere edward trelawny. "indeed, i do believe, my dear trelawny," wrote mary in reply, on the th of january , "that you are the best friend i have, and most truly would i rather apply to you in any difficulty than to any one else, for i know your heart, and rely on it. at present i am very well off, having still a considerable residue of the money i brought with me from pisa, and besides, i have received £ from the _liberal_. part of this i have been obliged to send to clare. you will be sorry to hear that the last account she has sent of herself is that she has been seriously ill. the cold of vienna has doubtless contributed to this,--as it is even a dangerous aggravation of her old complaint. i wait anxiously to hear from her. i sent her fifteen napoleons, and shall send more if necessary and if i can. lord b. continues kind: he has made frequent offers of money. i do not want it, as you see." _journal, february nd._--on the st of january those rites were fulfilled. shelley! my own beloved! you rest beneath the blue sky of rome; in that, at least, i am satisfied. what matters it that they cannot find the grave of my william? that spot is sanctified by the presence of his pure earthly vesture, and that is sufficient--at least, it must be. i am too truly miserable to dwell on what at another time might have made me unhappy. he is beneath the tomb of cestius. i see the spot. _february ._--a storm has come across me; a slight circumstance has disturbed the deceitful calm of which i boasted. i thought i heard my shelley call me--not my shelley in heaven, but my shelley, my companion in my daily tasks. i was reading; i heard a voice say, "mary!" "it is shelley," i thought; the revulsion was of agony. never more.... mrs. shelley's affairs now assumed an aspect which made her foresee the ultimate advisability, if not necessity, of returning to england. sir timothy shelley had declined giving any answer to the application made to him for an allowance for his son's widow and child; and lord byron, as shelley's executor, had written to him directly for a decisive answer, which he obtained. sir timothy shelley to lord byron. field place, _ th february _. my lord--i have received your lordship's letter, and my solicitor, mr. whitton, has this day shown me copies of certificates of the marriage of mrs. shelley and of the baptism of her little boy, and also, a short abstract of my son's will, as the same have been handed to him by mr. hanson. the mind of my son was withdrawn from me and my immediate family by unworthy and interested individuals, when he was about nineteen, and after a while he was led into a new society and forsook his first associates. in this new society he forgot every feeling of duty and respect to me and to lady shelley. mrs. shelley was, i have been told, the intimate friend of my son in the lifetime of his first wife, and to the time of her death, and in no small degree, as i suspect, estranged my son's mind from his family, and all his first duties in life; with that impression on my mind, i cannot agree with your lordship that, though my son was unfortunate, mrs. shelley is innocent; on the contrary, i think that her conduct was the very reverse of what it ought to have been, and i must, therefore, decline all interference in matters in which mrs. shelley is interested. as to the child, i am inclined to afford the means of a suitable protection and care of him in this country, if he shall be placed with a person i shall approve; but your lordship will allow me to say that the means i can furnish will be limited, as i have important duties to perform towards others, which i cannot forget. i have thus plainly told your lordship my determination, in the hope that i may be spared from all further correspondence on a subject so distressing to me and my family. with respect to the will and certificates, i have no observation to make. i have left them with mr. whitton, and if anything is necessary to be done with them on my part, he will, i am sure, do it.--i have the honour, my lord, to be your lordship's most obedient humble servant, t. shelley. granting the point of view from which it was written, this letter, though hard, was not unnatural. the author of _adonais_ was, to sir timothy, a common reprobate, a prodigal who, having gone into a far country, would have devoured his father's living--could he have got it--with harlots; but who had come there to well-deserved grief, and for whose widow even husks were too good. to any possible colouring or modification of this view he had resolutely shut his eyes and ears. no modification of his conclusions was, therefore, to be looked for. but neither could it be expected that his point of view should be intelligible to mary. nor did it commend itself to godwin. it would have been as little for his daughter's interest as for her happiness to surrender the custody of her child. mary shelley to lord byron. my dear lord byron-- ... it appears to me that the mode in which sir timothy shelley expresses himself about my child plainly shows by what mean principles he would be actuated. he does not offer him an asylum in his own house, but a beggarly provision under the care of a stranger. setting aside that, i would not part with him. something is due to me. i should not live ten days separated from him. if it were necessary for me to die for his benefit the sacrifice would be easy; but his delicate frame requires all a mother's solicitude; nor shall he be deprived of my anxious love and assiduous attention to his happiness while i have it in my power to bestow it on him; not to mention that his future respect for his excellent father and his moral wellbeing greatly depend upon his being away from the immediate influence of his relations. this, perhaps, you will think nonsense, and it is inconceivably painful to me to discuss a point which appears to me as clear as noonday; besides i lose all--all honourable station and name--when i admit that i am not a fitting person to take charge of my infant. the insult is keen; the pretence of heaping it upon me too gross; the advantage to them, if the will came to be contested, would be too immense. as a matter of feeling, i would never consent to it. i am said to have a cold heart; there are feelings, however, so strongly implanted in my nature that, to root them out, life will go with it.--most truly yours, mary shelley. godwin to mrs. shelley. strand, _ th february _. my dear mary--i have this moment received a copy of sir timothy shelley's letter to lord byron, dated th february, and which, therefore, you will have seen long before this reaches you. you will easily imagine how anxious i am to hear from you, and to know the state of your feelings under this, which seems like the last, blow of fate. i need not, of course, attempt to assist your judgment upon the proposition of taking the child from you. i am sure your feelings would never allow you to entertain such a proposition. * * * * * i requested you to let lord byron's letter to sir timothy shelley pass through my hands, and you did so; but to my great mortification, it reached me sealed with his lordship's arms, so that i remained wholly ignorant of its contents. if you could send me a copy, i should be then much better acquainted with your present situation. your novel is now fully printed and ready for publication. i have taken great liberties with it, and i fear your _amour propre_ will be proportionately shocked. i need not tell you that all the merit of the book is exclusively your own. beatrice is the jewel of the book; not but that i greatly admire euthanasia, and i think the characters of pepi, binda, and the witch decisive efforts of original genius. i am promised a character of the work in the _morning chronicle_ and the _herald_, and was in hopes to have sent you the one or the other by this time. i also sent a copy of the book to the _examiner_ for the same purpose. _tuesday, th february._ do not, i entreat you, be cast down about your worldly circumstances. you certainly contain within yourself the means of your subsistence. your talents are truly extraordinary. _frankenstein_ is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading, is everywhere respected. it is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that i ever heard of. you are now five and twenty, and, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind, in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. if you cannot be independent, who should be? your talents, as far as i can at present discern, are turned for the writing of fictitious adventures. if it shall ever happen to you to be placed in sudden and urgent want of a small sum, i entreat you to let me know immediately; we must see what i can do. we must help one another.--your affectionate father, william godwin. mary felt the truth of what her father said, but, wounded and embittered as she was, she had little heart for framing plans. _journal, february ._--evils throng around me, my beloved, and i have indeed lost all in losing thee. were it not for my child, this would be rather a soothing reflection, and, if starvation were my fate, i should fulfil that fate without a sigh. but our child demands all my care now that you have left us. i must be all to him: the father, death has deprived him of; the relations, the bad world permits him not to have. what is yet in store for me? am i to close the eyes of our boy, and then join you? the last weeks have been spent in quiet. study could not give repose to, but somewhat regulated, my thoughts. i said: "i lead an innocent life, and it may become a useful one. i have talent, i will improve that talent; and if, while meditating on the wisdom of ages, and storing my mind with all that has been recorded of it, any new light bursts upon me, or any discovery occurs that may be useful to my fellows, then the balm of utility may be added to innocence. what is it that moves up and down in my soul, and makes me feel as if my intellect could master all but my fate? i fear it is only youthful ardour--the yet untamed spirit which, wholly withdrawn from the hopes, and almost from the affections of life, indulges itself in the only walk free to it, and, mental exertion being all my thought except regret, would make me place my hopes in that. i am indeed become a recluse in thought and act; and my mind, turned heavenward, would, but for my only tie, lose all commune with what is around me. if i be proud, yet it is with humility that i am so. i am not vain. my heart shakes with its suppressed emotions, and i flag beneath the thoughts that oppress me. each day, as i have taken my solitary walk, i have felt myself exalted with the idea of occupation, improvement, knowledge, and peace. looking back to my life as a delicious dream, i steeled myself as well as i could against such severe regrets as should overthrow my calmness. once or twice, pausing in my walk, i have exclaimed in despair, "is it even so?" yet, for the most part resigned, i was occupied by reflection--on those ideas you, my beloved, planted in my mind--and meditated on our nature, our source, and our destination. to-day, melancholy would invade me, and i thought the peace i enjoyed was transient. then that letter came to place its seal on my prognostications. yet it was not the refusal, or the insult heaped upon me, that stung me to tears. it was their bitter words about our boy. why, i live only to keep him from their hands. how dared they dream that i held him not far more precious than all, save the hope of again seeing you, my lost one. but for his smiles, where should i now be? stars that shine unclouded, ye cannot tell me what will be--yet i can tell you a part. i may have misgivings, weaknesses, and momentary lapses into unworthy despondency, but--save in devotion towards my boy--fortune has emptied her quiver, and to all her future shafts i oppose courage, hopelessness of aught on this side, with a firm trust in what is beyond the grave. visit me in my dreams to-night, my beloved shelley! kind, loving, excellent as thou wert! and the event of this day shall be forgotten. _march ._--as i have until now recurred to this book to discharge into it the overflowings of a mind too full of the bitterest waters of life, so will i to-night, now that i am calm, put down some of my milder reveries; that, when i turn it over, i may not only find a record of the most painful thoughts that ever filled a human heart even to distraction. i am beginning seriously to educate myself; and in another place i have marked the scope of this somewhat tardy education, intellectually considered. in a moral point of view, this education is of some years' standing, and it only now takes the form of seeking its food in books. i have long accustomed myself to the study of my own heart, and have sought and found in its recesses that which cannot embody itself in words--hardly in feelings. i have found strength in the conception of its faculties; much native force in the understanding of them; and what appears to me not a contemptible penetration in the subtle divisions of good and evil. but i have found less strength of self-support, of resistance to what is vulgarly called temptation; yet i think also that i have found true humility (for surely no one can be less presumptuous than i), an ardent love for the immutable laws of right, much native goodness of emotion, and purity of thought. enough, if every day i gain a profounder knowledge of my defects, and a more certain method of turning them to a good direction. study has become to me more necessary than the air i breathe. in the questioning and searching turn it gives to my thoughts, i find some relief to wild reverie; in the self-satisfaction i feel in commanding myself, i find present solace; in the hope that thence arises, that i may become more worthy of my shelley, i find a consolation that even makes me less wretched than in my most wretched moments. _march ._--i have now finished part of the _odyssey_. i mark this. i cannot write. day after day i suffer the most tremendous agitation. i cannot write, or read, or think. whether it be the anxiety for letters that shakes a frame not so strong as hitherto--whether it be my annoyances here--whether it be my regrets, my sorrow, and despair, or all these--i know not; but i am a wreck. a letter from trelawny gladdened her heart. it said-- i must confess i am to blame in not having sooner written, particularly as i have received two letters from you here. nothing particular has happened to me since our parting but a desperate assault of maremma fever, which had nearly reunited me to my friends, or, as iago says, removed me. on my arrival here, my first object was to see the grave of the noble shelley, and i was most indignant at finding him confusedly mingled in a heap with five or six common vagabonds. i instantly set about removing this gross neglect, and selecting the only interesting spot. i enclosed it apart from all possibility of sacrilegious intrusion, and removed his ashes to it, placed a stone over it, am now planting it, and have ordered a granite to be prepared for myself, which i shall place in this beautiful recess (of which the enclosed is a drawing i took), for when i am dead, i have none to do me this service, so shall at least give one instance in my life of proficiency. in reply mary wrote informing him of her change of plan, and begging for all minute details about the tomb, which she was not likely, now, to see. trelawny was expecting soon to rejoin byron at genoa, but he wrote at once. trelawny to mrs. shelley. rome, _ th april _. dear mary--i should have sooner replied to your last, but that i concluded you must have seen roberts, who is or ought to be at genoa. he will tell you that the ashes are buried in the new enclosed protestant burying-ground, which is protected by a wall and gates from every possible molestation, and that the ashes are so placed apart, and yet in the centre and most conspicuous spot of the burying-ground. i have just planted six young cypresses and four laurels, in front of the recess you see by the drawing is formed by two projecting parts of the old ruin. my own stone, a plain slab till i can decide on some fitting inscription, is placed on the left hand. i have likewise dug my grave, so that, when i die, there is only to lift up my coverlet and roll me into it. you may lie on the other side, if you like. it is a lovely spot. the only inscription on shelley's stone, besides the _cor cordium_ of hunt, are the lines i have added from shakespeare-- nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. this quotation, by its double meaning, alludes both to the manner of his death and his genius, and i think the element on which his soul took wing, and the subtle essence of his being mingled, may still retain him in some other shape. the waters may keep the dead, as the earth may, and fire and air. his passionate fondness might have been from some secret sympathy in their natures. thence the fascination which so forcibly attracted him, without fear or caution, to trust an element almost all others hold in superstitious dread, and venture as cautiously on as they would in a lair of lions. i have just compiled an epitaph for keats and sent it to severn, who likes it much better than the one he had designed. he had already designed a lyre with only two of the strings strung, as indicating the unaccomplished maturity and ripening of his genius. he had intended a long inscription about his death having been caused by the _neglect_ of his countrymen, and that, as a mark of his displeasure, he said--thus and then. what i wished to substitute is simply thus-- here lies the spoils of a young english poet, "whose master-hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung," and by whose desire is inscribed, that his name was writ in water. the line quoted, you remember, is in shelley, _adonais_, and the last keats desired might be engraved on his tomb. ask hunt if he thinks it will do, and to think of something to put on my ante-dated grave. i am very anxious to hear how marianne is getting on, and hunt. you never mention a word of them or the _liberal_. i have been delayed here longer than i had intended, from want of money, having lent and given it away thoughtlessly. however, old dunn has sent me a supply, so i shall go on to florence on monday. i will assuredly see you before you go, and, if my exchequer is not exhausted, go part of the way with you. however, i will write further on this topic at florence. do not go to england, to encounter poverty and bitter retrospections. stay in italy. i will most gladly share my income with you, and if, under the same circumstances, you would do the same by me, why then you will not hesitate to accept it. i know of nothing would give me half so much pleasure. as you say, in a few years we shall both be better off. commend me to marianne and hunt, and believe me, yours affectionately, e. trelawny. poste restante a gènes. * * * * * you need not tell me that all your thoughts are concentrated on the memory of your loss, for i have observed it, with great regret and some astonishment. you tell me nothing in your letters of how the _liberal_ is getting on. why do you not send me a number? how many have come out? does hunt stay at genoa the summer, and what does lord byron determine on? i am told the _bolivar_ is lent to some one, and at sea. where is jane? and is mrs. hunt likely to recover? i shall certainly go on to switzerland if i can raise the wind. * * * * * mary shelley to trelawny. _ th may ._ my dear trelawny--you appear to have fulfilled my entire wish in all you have done at rome. do you remember the day you made that quotation from shakespeare in our living room at pisa? mine own shelley was delighted with it, and thus it has for me a pleasing association. some time hence i may visit the spot which, of all others, i desire most to see. * * * * * it is not on my own account, my excellent friend, that i go to england. i believe that my child's interests will be best consulted by my return to that country.... desiring solitude and my books only, together with the consciousness that i have one or two friends who, although absent, still think of me with affection, england of course holds out no inviting prospect to me. but i am sure to be rewarded in doing or suffering for my little darling, so i am resigned to this last act, which seems to snap the sole link which bound the present to the past, and to tear aside the veil which i have endeavoured to draw over the desolations of my situation. your kindness i shall treasure up to comfort me in future ill. i shall repeat to myself, i have such a friend, and endeavour to deserve it. do you go to greece? lord byron continues in the same mind. the g---- is an obstacle, and certainly her situation is rather a difficult one. but he does not seem disposed to make a mountain of her resistance, and he is far more able to take a decided than a petty step in contradiction to the wishes of those about him. if you do go, it may hasten your return hither. i remain until mrs. hunt's confinement is over; had it not been for that, the fear of a hot journey would have caused me to go in this month,--but my desire to be useful to her, and my anxiety concerning the event of so momentous a crisis has induced me to stay. you may think with what awe and terror i look forward to the decisive moment, but i hope for the best. she is as well, perhaps better, than we could in any way expect. i had no opportunity to send you a second no. of the _liberal_; we only received it a short time ago, and then you were on the wing: the third number has come out, and we had a copy by post. it has little in it we expected, but it is an amusing number, and l. b. is better pleased with it than any other.... i trust that i shall see you soon, and then i shall hear all your news. i shall see you--but it will be for so short a time--i fear even that you will not go to switzerland; but these things i must not dwell upon,--partings and separations, when there is no circumstance to lessen any pang. i must brace my mind, not enervate it, for i know i shall have much to endure. i asked hunt's opinion about your epitaph for keats; he said that the line from _adonais_, though beautiful in itself, might be applied to any poet, in whatever circumstances or whatever age, that died; and that to be in accord with the two-stringed lyre, you ought to select one that alluded to his youth and immature genius. a line to this effect you might find in _adonais_. among the fragments of my lost shelley, i found the following poetical commentary on the words of keats,--not that i recommend it for the epitaph, but it may please you to see it. here lieth one, whose name was writ in water, but, ere the breath that could erase it blew, death, in remorse for that fell slaughter, death, the immortalising winter, flew athwart the stream, and time's mouthless torrent grew a scroll of crystal, emblazoning the name of adonais. i have not heard from jane lately; she was well when she last wrote, but annoyed by various circumstances, and impatient of her lengthened stay in england. how earnestly do i hope that edward's brother will soon arrive, and show himself worthy of his affinity to the noble and unequalled creature she has lost, by protecting one to whom protection is so necessary, and shielding her from some of the ills to which she is exposed. adieu, my dear trelawny. continue to think kindly of me, and trust in my unalterable friendship. mary shelley. albaro, th may. on his journey to genoa, trelawny stayed a night at lerici, and paid a last visit to the villa magni. there, "sleeping still on the mud floor," its mast and oars broken, was shelley's little skiff, the "boat on the serchio." he mounted the "stairs, or rather ladder," into the dining-room. as i surveyed its splotchy walls, broken floor, cracked ceiling, and poverty-struck appearance, while i noted the loneliness of the situation, and remembered the fury of the waves that in blowing weather lashed its walls, i did not marvel at mrs. shelley's and mrs. williams' groans on first entering it; nor that it had required all ned williams' persuasive powers to induce them to stop there. but these things were all far away in the past. as music and splendour survive not the lamp and the lute, the heart's echoes render no song when the spirit is mute. no song but sad dirges, like the wind through a ruined cell, or the mournful surges that ring the dead seaman's knell. at genoa he found the "pilgrim" in a state of supreme indecision. he had left him discontented when he departed in december. the new magazine was not a success. byron had expected that other literary and journalistic advantages, leading to fame and power, would accrue to him from the coalition with leigh hunt and shelley, but in this he was disappointed, and he was left to bear the responsibility of the partnership alone. "the death of shelley and the failure of the _liberal_ irritated byron," writes trelawny; "the cuckoo-note, 'i told you so,' sung by his friends, and the loud crowing of enemies, by no means allayed his ill humour. in this frame of mind he was continually planning how to extricate himself. his plea for hoarding was that he might have a good round tangible sum of current coin to aid him in any emergency.... "he exhausted himself in planning, projecting, beginning, wishing, intending, postponing, regretting, and doing nothing: the unready are fertile in excuses, and his were inexhaustible." since that time he had been flattered and persuaded into joining the greek committee, formed in london to aid the greeks in their war of independence. byron's name and great popularity would be a tower of strength to them. their proposals came to him at a right moment, when he was dissatisfied with himself and his position. he hesitated for months before committing himself, and finally summoned trelawny, in peremptory terms, to come to him and go with him. _ th june ._ my dear t.--you must have heard that i am going to greece. why do you not come to me? i want your aid and am extremely anxious to see you.... they all say i can be of use in greece. i do not know how, nor do they; but, at all events, let us go.--yours, etc., truly, n. byron. and, always ready for adventure, the "pirate" came. before his arrival mary's journey had been decided on. mrs. hunt's confinement was over: she and the infant had both done well, and she was now in a fair way to live, in tolerable health, for many years longer. want of funds was now the chief obstacle in mary's way, but byron was no longer ready, as he had been, with offers of help. changeable as the wind, and utterly unable to put himself in another person's place, he, without absolutely declining to fulfil his promises, made so many words about it, and treated the matter as so great a favour on his own part, that mary at last declined his assistance, although it obliged her to take advantage of trelawny's often-repeated offers of help, which she would not rather have accepted, as he was poor, while byron was rich. the whole story unfolds itself in the three ensuing letters. mary shelley to jane williams. albaro, near genoa, _july _. i write to you in preference to my father, because you, to a great degree, understand the person i have to deal with, and in communicating what i say concerning him, you can, _viva voce_, add such comments as will render my relation more intelligible. the day after marianne's confinement, the th june, seeing all went on so prosperously, i told lord byron that i was ready to go, and he promised to provide means. when i talked of going post, it was because he said that i should go so, at the same time declaring that he would regulate all himself. i waited in vain for these arrangements. but, not to make a long story, since i hope soon to be able to relate the details--he chose to transact our negotiation through hunt, and gave such an air of unwillingness and sense of the obligation he conferred, as at last provoked hunt to say that there was no obligation, since he owed me £ . glad of a quarrel, straight i clap the door! still keeping up an appearance of amity with hunt, he has written notes and letters so full of contempt against me and my lost shelley that i could stand it no longer, and have refused to receive his still proffered aid for my journey. this, of course, delays me. i can muster about £ of my own. i do not know whether this is barely sufficient, but as the delicate constitution of my child may oblige me to rest several times on the journey, i cannot persuade myself to commence my journey with what is barely necessary. i have written, therefore, to trelawny for the sum requisite, and must wait till i hear from him. i see you, my poor girl, sigh over these mischances, but never mind, i do not feel them. my life is a shifting scene, and my business is to play the part allotted for each day well, and, not liking to think of to-morrow, i never think of it at all, except in an intellectual way; and as to money difficulties, why, having nothing, i can lose nothing. thus, as far as regards what are called worldly concerns, i am perfectly tranquil, and as free or freer from care as if my signature should be able to draw £ from some banker. the extravagance and anger of lord byron's letters also relieve me from all pain that his dereliction might occasion me, and that his conscience twinges him is too visible from his impatient kicks and unmannerly curvets. you would laugh at his last letter to hunt, when he says concerning his connection with shelley "that he let himself down to the level of the democrats." in the meantime hunt is all kindness, consideration, and friendship--all feeling of alienation towards me has disappeared even to its last dregs. he perfectly approves of what i have done. so i am still in italy, and i doubt not but that its sun and vivifying geniality relieve me from those biting cares which would be mine in england, i fear, if i were destitute there. but i feel above the mark of fortune, and my heart too much wounded to feel these pricks, on all occasions that do not regard its affections, _s'arma di se, e d'intero diamante_. thus am i changed; too late, alas! for what ought to have been, but not too late, i trust, to enable me, more than before, to be some stay and consolation to my own dear jane. mary. trelawny to mrs. shelley. _saturday._ dear mary--will you tell me what sum you want, as i am settling my affairs? you must from time to time let me know your wants, that i may do my best to relieve them. you are sure of me, so let us use no more words about it. i have been racking my memory to remember some person in england that would be of service to you for my sake, but my rich friends and relations are without hearts, and it is useless to introduce you to the unfortunate; it would but augment your repinings at the injustice of fortune. my knight-errant heart has led me many a weary journey foolishly seeking the unfortunate, the miserable, and the outcast; and when found, i have only made myself as one of them without redressing their grievances, so i pray you avoid, as you value your peace of mind, the wretched. i shall see you, i hope, to-day.--yours very faithfully, e. trelawny. mary shelley to jane williams. albaro, _ d july _. dearest jane--i have at length fixed with the _vetturino_. i depart on the th, my best girl. i leave italy; i return to the dreariest reality after having dreamt away a year in this blessed and beloved country. lord byron, trelawny, and pierino gamba sailed for greece on the th inst. i did not see the former. his unconquerable avarice prevented his supplying me with money, and a remnant of shame caused him to avoid me. but i have a world of things to tell you on that score when i see you. if he were mean, trelawny more than balanced the moral account. his whole conduct during his last stay here has impressed us all with an affectionate regard, and a perfect faith in the unalterable goodness of his heart. they sailed together; lord byron with £ , , trelawny with £ , and lord byron cowering before his eye for reasons you shall hear soon. the guiccioli is gone to bologna--_e poi cosa farà? chi lo sa? cosa vuoi che lo dico?_... i travel without a servant. i rest first at lyons; but do you write to me at paris, hotel nelson. it will be a friend to await me. alas! i have need of consolation. hunt's kindness is now as active and warm as it was dormant before; but just as i find a companion in him i leave him. i leave him in all his difficulties, with his head throbbing with overwrought thoughts, and his frame sometimes sinking under his anxieties. poor marianne has found good medicine, _facendo un bimbo_, and then nursing it, but she, with her female providence, is more bent by care than hunt. how much i wished, and wish, to settle near them at florence; but i must submit with courage, and patience may at last come and give opiate to my irritable feelings. both hunt and trelawny say that percy is much improved since maria left me. he is affectionately attached to sylvan, and very fond of _bimbo nuovo_. he kisses him by the hour, and tells me, _come il signore enrico ha comprato un baby nuovo--forse ti darà il baby vecchio_, as he gives away an old toy on the appearance of a new one. i will not write longer. in conversation, nay, almost in thought, i can, at this most painful moment, force my excited feelings to laugh at themselves, and my spirits, raised by emotion, to seem as if they were light, but the natural current and real hue overflows me and penetrates me when i write, and it would be painful to you, and overthrow all my hopes of retaining my fortitude, if i were to write one word that truly translated the agitation i suffer into language. i will write again from lyons, where i suppose i shall be on the d of august. dear jane, can i render you happier than you are? the idea of that might console me, at least you will see one that truly loves you, and who is for ever your affectionately attached mary shelley. if there is any talk of my accommodations, pray tell mrs. gisborne that i cannot sleep on any but a _hard_ bed. i care not how hard, so that it be a mattress. and now mary's life in italy was at an end. her resolution of returning to england had been welcomed by her father in the letter which follows, and it was to his house, and not to mrs. gisborne's that she finally decided to go on first arriving. godwin to mary. no. strand, _ th may _. it certainly is, my dear mary, with great pleasure that i anticipate that we shall once again meet. it is a long, long time now since you have spent one night under my roof. you are grown a woman, have been a wife, a mother, a widow. you have realised talents which i but faintly and doubtfully anticipated. i am grown an old man, and want a child of my own to smile on and console me. i shall then feel less alone than i do at present. what william will be, i know not; he has sufficient understanding and quickness for the ordinary concerns of life, and something more; and, at any rate, he is no smiler, no consoler. when you first set your foot in london, of course i and mamma expect that it will be in this house. but the house is smaller, one floor less, than the house in skinner street. it will do well enough for you to make shift with for a few days, but it would not do for a permanent residence. but i hope we shall at least have you near us, within a call. how different from your being on the shores of the mediterranean! your novel has sold five hundred copies--half the impression. peacock sent your box by the _berbice_, captain wayth. i saw him a fortnight ago, and he said that he had not yet received the bill of lading himself, but he should be sure to have it in time, and would send it. i ought to have written to you sooner. your letter reached me on the th ult., but i have been unusually surrounded with perplexities.--your affectionate father, william godwin. on the th of july she left genoa, hunt accompanying her for the first twenty miles. if one thought more than any other sustained her in her unprotected loneliness, it was that of being reunited in england to her sister in misfortune, jane williams, to whom her heart turned with a singular tenderness, and to whom on her journey she addressed one more letter, full of grateful affection and of a touching humility, new in her character. mary shelley to jane williams. st. jean de la maurienne, _ th july _. my best jane--i wrote to you from genoa the day before i quitted it, but i afterwards lost the letter. i asked the hunts to look for it, and send it if found, but ten to one you will never receive it. it contained nothing, however, but what i can tell you in five minutes if i see you. it told you of the departure of lord byron and trelawny for greece, the former escaping with all his crowns, and the other disbursing until he had hardly £ left. it went to my heart to borrow the sum from him necessary to make up my journey, but he behaved with so much quiet generosity that one was almost glad to put him to that proof, and witness the excellence of his heart. in this and in another trial he acquitted himself so well that he gained all our hearts, while the other--but more when we meet. i left genoa thursday, th. hunt and thornton accompanied me the first twenty miles. this was much, you will say, for hunt. but, thank heaven, we are now the best friends in the world. he set his heart on my quitting italy with as comfortable feelings as possible, and he did so much that notwithstanding all the [bitterness] that such an event, joined to parting with a dear friend, occasioned me, yet i have borne up with better spirits than i could in any way have hoped. it is a delightful thing, my dear jane, to be able to express one's affection upon an old and tried friend like hunt, and one so passionately attached to my shelley as he was, and is. it is pleasant also to feel myself loved by one who loves me. you know somewhat of what i suffered during the winter, during his alienation from me. he was displeased with me for many just reasons, but he found me willing to expiate, as far as i could, the evil i had done, so his heart was again warmed; and if, my dear friend, when i return, you find me more amiable and more willing to suffer with patience than i was, it is to him that i owe this benefit, and you may judge if i ought not to be grateful to him. i am even so to lord byron, who was the cause that i stayed at genoa, and thus secured one who, i am sure, can never change. the illness of one of our horses detains me here an afternoon, so i write, and shall put the letter in the post at chambéry. i have come without a servant or companion; but percy is perfectly good, and no trouble to me at all. we are both well; a little tired or so. will you tell my father that you have heard from me, and that i am so far on my journey. i expect to be at lyons in three days, and will write to him from that place. if there be any talk of my accommodations, pray put in a word for a _hard_ bed, for else i am sure i cannot sleep. so i have left italy, and alone with my child i am travelling to england. what a dream i have had! and is it over? oh no! for i do nothing but dream; realities seem to have lost all power over me,--i mean, as it were, mere tangible realities,--for, where the affections are concerned, calamity has only awakened greater sensitiveness. i fear things do not go on well with you, my dearest girl! you are not in your mother's house, and you cannot have settled your affairs in india,--mine too! why, i arrive poor to nothingness, and my hopes are small, except from my own exertions; and living in england is dear. my thoughts will all bend towards italy; but even if sir timothy shelley should do anything, he will not, i am sure, permit me to go abroad. at any rate we shall be together a while. we will talk of our lost ones, and think of realising my dreams; who knows? adieu, i shall soon see you, and you will find how truly i am your affectionate mary shelley. with the following fragment, the last of her italian journal, this chapter may fitly close. _journal, may ._--the lanes are filled with fire-flies; they dart between the trunks of the trees, and people the land with earth-stars. i walked among them to-night, and descended towards the sea. i passed by the ruined church, and stood on the platform that overlooks the beach. the black rocks were stretched out among the blue waters, which dashed with no impetuous motion against them. the dark boats, with their white sails, glided gently over its surface, and the star-enlightened promontories closed in the bay: below, amid the crags, i heard the monotonous but harmonious voices of the fishermen. how beautiful these shores, and this sea! such is the scene--such the waves within which my beloved vanished from mortality. the time is drawing near when i must quit this country. it is true that, in the situation i now am, italy is but the corpse of the enchantress that she was. besides, if i had stayed here, the state of things would have been different. the idea of our child's advantage alone enables me to keep fixed in my resolution to return to england. it is best for him--and i go. four years ago we lost our darling william; four years ago, in excessive agony, i called for death to free me from all i felt that i should suffer here. i continue to live, and _thou_ art gone. i leave italy and the few that still remain to me. that i regret less; for our intercourse is so much chequered with all of dross that this earth so delights to blend with kindness and sympathy, that i long for solitude, with the exercise of such affections as still remain to me. away, i shall be conscious that these friends love me, and none can then gainsay the pure attachment which chiefly clings to them because they knew and loved you--because i knew them when with you, and i cannot think of them without feeling your spirit beside me. i cannot grieve for you, beloved shelley; i grieve for thy friends--for the world--for thy child--most for myself, enthroned in thy love, growing wiser and better beneath thy gentle influence, taught by you the highest philosophy--your pupil, friend, lover, wife, mother of your children! the glory of the dream is gone. i am a cloud from which the light of sunset has passed. give me patience in the present struggle. _meum cordium cor!_ good-night! i would give all that i am to be as now thou art, but i am chained to time, and cannot thence depart. chapter xix july -december mary's journey extended over a month, one week of which was passed in paris and versailles, for the sake of seeing the horace smiths and other old acquaintances now living there. her letters to the hunts, describing the incidents and impressions of her journey, were as lively and cheerful as she could make them. a few extracts follow here. to leigh hunt. asti, _ th july_. * * * * * percy is very good and does not in the least _annoy_ me. in the state of mind i am now in, the motion and change is delightful to me: my thoughts run with the coach and wind, and double, and jerk, and are up and down, and forward, and most often backward, till the labyrinth of crete is a joke in comparison to my intricate wanderings. they now lead me to you, hunt. you rose early, wrote, walked, dined, whistled, sang and punned most outrageously, the worst puns in the world. my best polly, you, full of your chicks and of your new darling, yet sometimes called "henry" to see a beautiful new effect of light on the mountains.... dear girl, i have a great affection for you, believe that, and don't talk or think sorrowfully, unless you have the toothache, and then don't think, but talk infinite nonsense mixed with infinite sense, and hunt will listen, as i used. thorny, you have not been cross yet. oh, my dear johnny (don't be angry, polly, with this nonsense), do not let your impatient nature ever overcome you, or you may suffer as i have done--which god forbid! be true to yourself, and talk much to your father, who will teach you as he has taught me. it is the idea of his lessons of wisdom that makes me feel the affection i do for him. i profit by them, so do you: may you never feel the remorse of having neglected them when his voice and look are gone, and he can no longer talk to you; that remorse is a terrible feeling, and it requires a faith and a philosophy immense not to be destroyed by the stinging monster. _ th july._ ... i was too late for the post yesterday at turin, and too early this morning, so as i determined to put this letter in the post myself, i bring it with me to susa, and now open it to tell you how delighted i am with my morning's ride--the scenery is so divine. the high, dark alps, just on this southern side tipt with snow, close in a plain; the meadows are full of clover and flowers, and the woods of ash, elm, and beech descend and spread, and lose themselves in the fields; stately trees, in clumps or singly, arise on each side, and wherever you look you see some spot where you dream of building a home and living for ever. the exquisite beauty of nature, and the cloudless sky of this summer day soothe me, and make this th so full of recollections that it is almost pleasurable. wherever the spirit of beauty dwells, _he_ must be; the rustling of the trees is full of him; the waving of the tall grass, the moving shadows of the vast hills, the blue air that penetrates their ravines and rests upon their heights. i feel him near me when i see that which he best loved. alas! nine years ago he took to a home in his heart this weak being, whom he has now left for more congenial spirits and happier regions. she lives only in the hope that she may become one day as one of them. absolutely, my dear hunt, i will pass some three summer months in this divine spot, you shall all be with me. there are no gentlemen's seats at palazzi, so we will take a cottage, which we will paint and refit, just as this country here is, in which i now write, clean and plain. we will have no servants, only we will give out all the needlework. marianne shall make puddings and pies, to make up for the vegetables and meat which i shall boil and spoil. thorny shall sweep the rooms, mary make the beds, johnny clean the kettles and pans, and then we will pop him into the many streams hereabouts, and so clean him. swinny, being so quick, shall be our mercury, percy our gardener, sylvan and percy florence our weeders, and vincent our plaything; and then, to raise us above the vulgar, we will do all our work, keeping time to hunt's symphonies; we will perform our sweepings and dustings to the march in _alceste_, we will prepare our meats to the tune of the _laughing trio_, and when we are tired we will lie on our turf sofas, while all our voices shall join in chorus in _notte e giorno faticar_. you see my paper is quite out, so i must say, for the last time, adieu! god bless you. mary w. s. _tuesday, th august._ i have your letter, and your excuses, and all. i thank you most sincerely for it: at the same time i do entreat you to take care of yourself with regard to writing; although your letters are worth infinite pleasure to me, yet that pleasure cannot be worth pain to you; and remember, if you must write, the good, hackneyed maxim of _multum in parvo_, and, when your temples throb, distil the essence of three pages into three lines, and my "fictitious adventure"[ ] will enable me to open them out and fill up intervals. not but what three pages are best, but "you can understand me." and now let me tell you that i fear you do not rise early, since you doubt my _ore mattutine_. be it known to you, then, that on the journey i always rise _before_ o'clock, that i _never_ once made the _vetturino_ wait, and, moreover, that there was no discontent in our jogging on on either side, so that i half expect to be a _santa_ with him. he indeed got a little out of his element when he got into france,--his good humour did not leave him, but his self-possession. he could not speak french, and he walked about as if treading on eggs. when at paris i will tell you more what i think of the french. they still seem miracles of quietness in comparison with marianne's noisy friends. and the women's dresses afford the drollest contrast with those in fashion when i first set foot in paris in . then their waists were between their shoulders, and, as hogg observed, they were rather curtains than gowns; their hair, too, dragged to the top of the head, and then lifted to its height, appeared as if each female wished to be a tower of babel in herself. now their waists are long (not so long, however, as the genoese), and their hair flat at the top, with quantities of curls on the temples. i remember, in , a frenchman's pathetic horror at clare's and my appearance in the streets of paris in "oldenburgh" (as they were called) hats; now they all wear machines of that shape, and a high bonnet would of course be as far out of the right road as if the earth were to take a flying leap to another system. after you receive this letter, you must direct to me at my father's (pray put william godwin, esq., since the want of that etiquette annoys him. i remember shelley's unspeakable astonishment when the author of _political justice_ asked him, half reproachfully, why he addressed him _mr._ godwin), strand. on the th of august mary met her father once more. at his house in the strand she spent her first ten days in england. consideration for others, and the old habit of repressing all show of feeling before godwin helped to steel her nerves and heart to bear the stings and aches of this strange, mournful reunion. and now again, too, she saw her friend jane. but fondly as mary ever clung to her, she must have been sensible of the difference between them. mrs. williams' situation was forlorn indeed; in some respects even more so than mrs. shelley's. but, though she had grieved bitterly, as well she might, for edward's loss, her nature was not _impressible_, and the catastrophe which had fallen upon her had left her unaltered. jane was unhappy, but she was not inconsolable; her grief was becoming to her, and lent her a certain interest which enhanced her attractions. and to men in general she was very attractive. godwin himself was somewhat fascinated by the "picturesque little woman" who had called on him on her first arrival; who "did not drop one tear" and occasionally smiled. as for hogg, he lost his heart to her at once. all this mary must have seen. but jane was an attaching creature, and mary loved her as the greater nature loves the lesser; she lavished on her a wealth of pent-up tenderness, content to get what crumbs she could in return. for herself a curious surprise was in store, which entertained, if it did not cheer her. just at the time of its author's return to england, _frankenstein_, in a dramatised form, was having a considerable "run" at the english opera house. mrs. shelley to leigh hunt. _ th september ._ my dear hunt--bessy promised me to relieve you from any inquietude you might suffer from not hearing from me, so i indulged myself with not writing to you until i was quietly settled in lodgings of my own. want of time is not my excuse; i had plenty, but, until i saw all quiet around me, i had not the spirit to write a line. i thought of you all--how much? and often longed to write, yet would not till i called myself free to turn southward; to imagine you all, to put myself in the midst of you, would have destroyed all my philosophy. but now i do so. i am in little neat lodgings, my boy in bed, i quiet, and i will now talk to you, tell you what i have seen and heard, and with as little repining as i can, try (by making the best of what i have, the certainty of your friendship and kindness) to rest half content that i am not in the "paradise of exiles." well, first i will tell you, journalwise, the history of my sixteen days in london. i arrived monday, the th of august. my father and william came for me to the wharf. i had an excellent passage of eleven hours and a half, a glassy sea, and a contrary wind. the smoke of our fire was wafted right aft, and streamed out behind us; but wind was of little consequence; the tide was with us, and though the engine gave a "short uneasy motion" to the vessel, the water was so smooth that no one on board was sick, and persino played about the deck in high glee. i had a very kind reception in the strand, and all was done that could be done to make me comfortable. i exerted myself to keep up my spirits. the house, though rather dismal, is infinitely better than the skinner street one. i resolved not to think of certain things, to take all as a matter of course, and thus contrive to keep myself out of the gulf of melancholy, on the edge of which i was and am continually peeping. but lo and behold! i found myself famous. _frankenstein_ had prodigious success as a drama, and was about to be repeated, for the twenty-third night, at the english opera house. the play-bill amused me extremely, for, in the list of _dramatis personæ_, came "----, by mr. t. cooke." this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good. on friday, th august, jane, my father, william, and i went to the theatre to see it. wallack looked very well as frankenstein. he is at the beginning full of hope and expectation. at the end of the first act the stage represents a room with a staircase leading to frankenstein's workshop; he goes to it, and you see his light at a small window, through which a frightened servant peeps, who runs off in terror when frankenstein exclaims "it lives!" presently frankenstein himself rushes in horror and trepidation from the room, and, while still expressing his agony and terror, "----" throws down the door of the laboratory, leaps the staircase, and presents his unearthly and monstrous person on the stage. the story is not well managed, but cooke played ----'s part extremely well; his seeking, as it were, for support; his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard; all, indeed, he does was well imagined and executed. i was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience. it was a third piece, a scanty pit filled at half-price, and all stayed till it was over. they continue to play it even now. on saturday, th august, i went with jane to the gisbornes. i know not why, but seeing them seemed more than anything else to remind me of italy. evening came on drearily, the rain splashed on the pavement, nor star nor moon deigned to appear. i looked upward to seek an image of italy, but a blotted sky told me only of my change. i tried to collect my thoughts, and then, again, dared not think, for i am a ruin where owls and bats live only, and i lost my last _singing bird_ when i left albaro. it was my birthday, and it pleased me to tell the people so; to recollect and feel that time flies, and what is to arrive is nearer, and my home not so far off as it was a year ago. this same evening, on my return to the strand, i saw lamb, who was very entertaining and amiable, though a little deaf. one of the first questions he asked me was, whether they made puns in italy: i said, "yes, now hunt is there." he said that burney made a pun in otaheite, the first that was ever made in that country. at first the natives could not make out what he meant, but all at once they discovered the _pun_, and danced round him in transports of joy.... ... on the strength of the drama, my father had published for my benefit a new edition of _frankenstein_, for he despaired utterly of my doing anything with sir timothy shelley. i wrote to him, however, to tell him of my arrival, and on the following wednesday had a note from whitton, where he invited me, if i wished for an explanation of sir t. shelley's intentions concerning my boy, to call on him. i went with my father. whitton was very polite, though long-winded: his great wish seemed to be to prevent my applying again to sir t. shelley, whom he represented as old, infirm, and irritable. however, he advanced me £ for my immediate expenses, told me that he could not speak positively until he had seen sir t. shelley, but that he doubted not but that i should receive the same annually for my child, and, with a little time and patience, i should get an allowance for myself. this, you see, relieved me from a load of anxieties. having secured neat cheap lodgings, we removed hither last night. such, dear hunt, is the outline of your poor exile's history. after two days of rain, the weather has been _uncommonly_ fine, _cioè_, without rain, and cloudless, i believe, though i trusted to other eyes for that fact, since the white-washed sky is anything but blue to any but the perceptions of the natives themselves. it is so cold, however, that the fire i am now sitting by is not the first that has been lighted, for my father had one two days ago. the wind is east and piercing, but i comfort myself with the hope that softer gales are now fanning your _not_ throbbing temples, that the climate of florence will prove kindly to you, and that your health and spirits will return to you. why am i not there? this is quite a foreign country to me, the names of the places sound strangely, the voices of the people are new and grating, the vulgar english they speak particularly displeasing. but for my father, i should be with you next spring, but his heart and soul are set on my stay, and in this world it always seems one's duty to sacrifice one's own desires, and that claim ever appears the strongest which claims such a sacrifice. * * * * * it is difficult to imagine _frankenstein_ on the stage; it must, at least, lose very much in dramatic representation. like its modern successor, _dr. jekyll and mr. hyde_,--that remarkable story which bears a certain affinity to _frankenstein_,--its subtle allegorical significance would be overweighted, if not lost, by the effect of the grosser and more material incidents which are all that could be _played_, and which, as described, must have bordered on the ludicrous. still the charm of life imparted by a human impersonation to any portion, even, of one's own idea, is singularly powerful; and so mary felt it. she would have liked to repeat the experience. her situation, looked at in the face, was unenviable. she was unprovided for, young, delicate, and with a child dependent on her. her rich connections would have nothing to do with her, and her boy did not possess in their eyes the importance which would have attached to him had he been heir to the baronetcy. she had talent, and it had been cultivated, but with her sorely-tried health and spirits, the prospect of self-support by the compulsory production of imaginative work must, at the time, have seemed unpromising enough. two sheet-anchors of hope she had, and by these she lived. they were, her child--so friendless but for her--and the thought of shelley's fame. the collecting and editing of his mss., this was her work; no one else should do it. it seemed as though her brief life with him had had for its purpose to educate her for this one object. those who now, in naming shelley, feel they name a part of everything beautiful, ethereal, and spiritual--that his words are so inextricably interwoven with certain phases of love and beauty as to be indistinguishable from the very thing itself--may well find it hard to realise how little he was known at the time when he died. with other poets their work is the blossom and fruit of their lives, but shelley's poetry resembles rather the perfume of the flower, that subtle quality pertaining to the bloom which can be neither described, nor pourtrayed, nor transmitted; an essence of immortality. not many months after this the news of byron's early death struck a kind of remorseful grief into the hearts of his countrymen. a letter of miss welsh's (mrs. carlyle) gives an idea of the general feeling-- "i was told it," she says, "in a room full of people. had i heard that the sun and moon had fallen out of their spheres it could not have conveyed to me the feeling of a more awful blank than did the simple words, 'byron is dead.'" how many, it may be asked, were conscious of any blank when the news reached them that shelley had been "accidentally drowned"? their numbers might be counted by tens. the sale, in every instance, of mr. shelley's works has been very confined, was his publishers' report to his widow. one newspaper dismissed his memory by the passing remark, "he will now find out whether there is a hell or not." the small number of those who recognised his genius did not even include all his personal friends. "mine is a life of failures;" so he summed it up to trelawny and edward williams. "peacock says my poetry is composed of day-dreams and nightmares, and leigh hunt does not think it good enough for the _examiner_. jefferson hogg says all poetry is inverted sense, and consequently nonsense.... "i wrote, and the critics denounced me as a mischievous visionary, and my friends said that i had mistaken my vocation, that my poetry was mere rhapsody of words...." leigh hunt, indeed, thought his own poetry more than equal to shelley's or byron's. byron knew shelley's power well enough, but cared little for the subjects of his sympathy. trelawny was more appreciative, but his admiration for the poetry was quite secondary to his enthusiasm for the man. in hogg's case, affection for the man may be said to have _excused_ the poetry. all this mary knew, but she knew too--what she was soon to find out by experience--that among his immediate associates he had created too warm an interest for him to escape posthumous discussion and criticism. and he had been familiar with some of those regarding whom the world's curiosity was insatiable, concerning whom any shred of information, true or false, was eagerly snapped up. his name would inevitably figure in anecdotes and gossip. his fame was mary's to guard. during the years she lived at albaro she had been employed in collecting and transcribing his scattered mss., and at the end of this year, , the volume of posthumous poems came out. one would imagine that publishers would have bid against each other for the possession of such a treasure. far from it. among the little band of "true believers" three came forward to guarantee the expenses of publication. they were, the poet thomas lovell beddoes, procter, and t. f. kelsall. the appearance of this book was a melancholy satisfaction to mary, though, as will soon be seen, she was not long allowed to enjoy it. mrs. shelley to mrs. hunt. london, _ th november _. my dearest polly--are you not a naughty girl? how could you copy a letter to that "agreeable, unaffected woman, mrs. shelley," without saying a word from yourself to your loving...? my dear polly, a line from you forms a better picture for me of what you are about than--alas! i was going to say three pages, but i check myself--the rare one page of hunt. do not think that i forget you--even percy does not, and he often tells me to bid the signor enrico and you to get in a carriage and then into a boat, and to come to _questo paese_ with _baby nuovo_, henry, swinburne, _e tutti_. but that will not be, nor shall i see you at mariano; this is a dreary exile for me. during a long month of cloud and fog, how often have i sighed for my beloved italy, and more than ever this day when i have come to a conclusion with sir timothy shelley as to my affairs, and i find the miserable pittance i am to have. nearly sufficient in italy, here it will not go half-way. it is £ per annum. nor is this all, for i foresee a thousand troubles; yet, in truth, as far as regards mere money matters and worldly prospects, i keep up my philosophy with excellent success. others wonder at this, but i do not, nor is there any philosophy in it. after having witnessed the mortal agonies of my two darling children, after that journey from and to lerici, i feel all these as pictures and trifles as long as i am kept out of contact with the unholy. i was upset to-day by being obliged to see whitton, and the prospect of seeing others of his tribe. i can earn a sufficiency, i doubt not. in italy i should be content: here i will not bemoan. indeed i never do, and mrs. godwin makes _large eyes_ at the quiet way in which i take it all. it is england alone that annoys me, yet sometimes i get among friends and almost forget its fogs. i go to shacklewell rarely, and sometimes see the novellos elsewhere. he is my especial favourite, and his music always transports me to the seventh heaven.... i see the lambs rather often, she ever amiable, and lamb witty and delightful. i must tell you one thing and make hunt laugh. lamb's new house at islington is close to the new river, and george dyer, after having paid them a visit, on going away at at noonday, walked deliberately into the water, taking it for the high road. "but," as he said afterwards to procter, "i soon found that i was in the water, sir." so miss lamb and the servant had to fish him out.... i must tell hunt also a good saying of lamb's,--talking of some one, he said, "now some men who are very veracious are called matter-of-fact men, but such a one i should call a matter-of-lie man." i have seen also procter, with his "beautifully formed head" (it is beautifully formed), several times, and i like him. he is an enthusiastic admirer of shelley, and most zealous in bringing out the volume of his poems; this alone would please me; and he is, moreover, gentle and gentlemanly, and apparently endued with a true poetic feeling. besides, he is an invalid, and some time ago i told you, in a letter, that i have always a sneaking (for sneaking read open) kindness for men of literary and particularly poetic habits, who have delicate health. i cannot help revering the mind delicately attuned that shatters the material frame, and whose thoughts are strong enough to throw down and dilapidate the walls of sense and dikes of flesh that the unimaginative contrive to keep in such good repair.... after all, i spend a great deal of my time in solitude. i have been hitherto too fully occupied in preparing shelley's mss. it is now complete, and the poetry alone will make a large volume. will you tell hunt that he need not send any of the mss. that he has (except the essay on devils, and some lines addressed to himself on his arrival in italy, if he should choose them to be inserted), as i have recopied all the rest? we should be very glad, however, of his notice as quickly as possible, as we wish the book to be out in a month at furthest, and that will not be possible unless he sends it immediately. it would break my heart if the book should appear without it.[ ] when he does send a packet over (let it be directed to his brother), will he also be so good as to send me a copy of my "choice," beginning after the line entrenched sad lines, or blotted with its might? perhaps, dear marianne, you would have the kindness to copy them for me, and send them soon. i have another favour to ask of you. miss curran has a portrait of shelley, in many things very like, and she has so much talent that i entertain great hopes that she will be able to make a good one; for this purpose i wish her to have all the aids possible, and among the rest a profile from you.[ ] if you could not cut another, perhaps you would send her one already cut, and if you sent it with a note requesting her to return it when she had done with it, i will engage that it will be most faithfully returned. at present i am not quite sure where she is, but if she should be there, and you can find her and send her this, i need not tell you how you would oblige me. i heard from bessy that hunt is writing something for the _examiner_ for me. i _conjecture_ that this may be concerning _valperga_. i shall be glad, indeed, when that comes, or in lieu of it, anything else. john hunt begins to despair. * * * * * and now, dear polly, i think i have done with gossip and business: with words of affection and kindness i should never have done. i am inexpressibly anxious about you all. percy has had a similar though shorter attack to that at albaro, but he is now recovered. i have a cold in my head, occasioned, i suppose, by the weather. ah, polly! if all the beauties of england were to have only the mirror that richard iii desires, a very short time would be spent at the looking-glass! what of florence and the gallery? i saw the elgin marbles to-day; to-morrow i am to go to the museum to look over the prints: that will be a great treat. the theseus is a divinity, but how very few statues they have! kiss the children. ask thornton for his forgotten and promised p.s., give my love to hunt, and believe me, my dear marianne, the exiled, but ever, most affectionately yours, mary w. shelley. _journal, january _ ( ).--i have now been nearly four months in england, and if i am to judge of the future by the past and the present, i have small delight in looking forward. i even regret those days and weeks of intense melancholy that composed my life at genoa. yes, solitary and unbeloved as i was there, i enjoyed a more pleasurable state of being than i do here. i was still in italy, and my heart and imagination were both gratified by that circumstance. i awoke with the light and beheld the theatre of nature from my window; the trees spread their green beauty before me, the resplendent sky was above me, the mountains were invested with enchanting colours. i had even begun to contemplate painlessly the blue expanse of the tranquil sea, speckled by the snow-white sails, gazed upon by the unclouded stars. there was morning and its balmy air, noon and its exhilarating heat, evening and its wondrous sunset, night and its starry pageant. then, my studies; my drawing, which soothed me; my greek, which i studied with greater complacency as i stole every now and then a look on the scene near me; my metaphysics, that strengthened and elevated my mind. then my solitary walks and my reveries; they were magnificent, deep, pathetic, wild, and exalted. i sounded the depths of my own nature; i appealed to the nature around me to corroborate the testimony that my own heart bore to its purity. i thought of _him_ with hope; my grief was active, striving, expectant. i was worth something then in the catalogue of beings. i could have written something, been something. now i am exiled from these beloved scenes; its language is becoming a stranger to mine ears; my child is forgetting it. i am imprisoned in a dreary town; i see neither fields, nor hills, nor trees, nor sky; the exhilaration of enwrapt contemplation is no more felt by me; aspirations agonising, yet grand, from which the soul reposed in peace, have ceased to ascend from the quenched altar of my mind. writing has become a task; my studies irksome; my life dreary. in this prison it is only in human intercourse that i can pretend to find consolation; and woe, woe, and triple woe to whoever seeks pleasure in human intercourse when that pleasure is not founded on deep and intense affection; as for the rest-- the bubble floats before, the shadow stalks behind. my father's situation, his cares and debts, prevent my enjoying his society. i love jane better than any other human being, but i am pressed upon by the knowledge that she but slightly returns this affection. i love her, and my purest pleasure is derived from that source--a capacious basin, and but a rill flows into it. i love some one or two more, "with a degree of love," but i see them seldom. i am excited while with them, but the reaction of this feeling is dreadfully painful, but while in london i cannot forego this excitement. i know some clever men, in whose conversation i delight, but this is rare, like angels' visits. alas! having lived day by day with one of the wisest, best, and most affectionate of spirits, how void, bare, and drear is the scene of life! oh, shelley, dear, lamented, beloved! help me, raise me, support me; let me not feel ever thus fallen and degraded! my imagination is dead, my genius lost, my energies sleep. why am i not beneath that weed-grown tower? seeing coleridge last night reminded me forcibly of past times; his beautiful descriptions reminded me of shelley's conversations. such was the intercourse i once daily enjoyed, added to supreme and active goodness, sympathy, and affection, and a wild, picturesque mode of living that suited my active spirit and satisfied its craving for novelty of impression. i will go into the country and philosophise; some gleams of past entrancement may visit me there. lonely, poor, and dull as she was, these first months were a dreadful trial. she was writing, or trying to write, another novel, _the last man_, but it hung heavy; it did not satisfy her. shrinking from company, yet recoiling still more from the monotony of her own thoughts, she was possessed by the restless wish to write a drama, perhaps with the idea that out of dramatic creations she might (frankenstein-like) manufacture for herself companions more living than the characters of a novel. it may have been fortunate for her that she did not persevere in the attempt. her special gifts were hardly of a dramatic order, and she had not the necessary experience for a successful playwright. she consulted her father, however, sending him at the same time some specimens of her work, and got some sound advice from him in return. godwin to mary. no. strand, _ th february _. my dear mary--your appeal to me is a painful one, and the account you give of your spirits and tone of mind is more painful. your appeal to me is painful, because i by no means regard myself as an infallible judge, and have been myself an unsuccessful adventurer in the same field toward which, in this instance, you have turned your regards. as to what you say of your spirits and tone of mind, your plans, and your views, would not that much more profitably and agreeably be made the subject of a conversation between us? you are aware that such a conversation must be begun by you. so begun, it would be quite a different thing than begun by me. in the former case i should be called in as a friend and adviser, from whom some advantage was hoped for; in the latter i should be an intruder, forcing in free speeches and unwelcome truths, and should appear as if i wanted to dictate to you and direct you, who are well capable of directing yourself. you have able critics within your command--mr. procter and mr. lamb. you have, however, one advantage in me; i feel a deeper interest in you than they do, and would not mislead you for the world. as to the specimens you have sent me, it is easy for me to give my opinion. there is one good scene--manfred and the two strangers in the cottage; and one that has some slight hints in it--the scene where manfred attempts to stab the duke. the rest are neither good nor bad; they might be endured, in the character of cement, to fasten good things together, but no more. am i right? perhaps not. i state things as they appear to my organs. thus far, therefore, you afford an example, to be added to barry cornwall, how much easier it is to write a detached dramatic scene than to write a tragedy. is it not strange that so many people admire and relish shakespeare, and that nobody writes or even attempts to write like him? to read your specimens, i should suppose that you had read no tragedies but such as have been written since the date of your birth. your personages are mere abstractions--the lines and points of a mathematical diagram--and not men and women. if a crosses b, and c falls upon d, who can weep for that? your talent is something like mine--it cannot unfold itself without elbow-room. as gray sings, "give ample room and verge enough the characters of hell to trace." i can do tolerably well if you will allow me to explain as much as i like--if, in the margin of what my personage says, i am permitted to set down and anatomise all that he feels. dramatic dialogue, in reference to any talent i possess, is the devil. to write nothing more than the very words spoken by the character is a course that withers all the powers of my soul. even shakespeare, the greatest dramatist that ever existed, often gives us riddles to guess and enigmas to puzzle over. many of his best characters and situations require a volume of commentary to make them perspicuous. and why is this? because the law of his composition confines him to set down barely words that are to be delivered. for myself, i am almost glad that you have not (if you have not) a dramatic talent. how many mortifications and heart-aches would that entail on you. managers are to be consulted; players to be humoured; the best pieces that were ever written negatived, and returned on the author's hands. if these are all got over, then you have to encounter the caprice of a noisy, insolent, and vulgar-minded audience, whose senseless _non fiat_ shall turn the labour of a year in a moment into nothing. full little knowest thou, that hast not tried, what hell it is---- to fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, to eat thy heart through comfortless despairs; to fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, to spend, to give, to want, to be undone. it is laziness, my dear mary, that makes you wish to be a dramatist. it seems in prospect a short labour to write a play, and a long one to write a work consisting of volumes; and as much may be gained by the one as by the other. but as there is no royal road to geometry, so there is no idle and self-indulgent activity that leads to literary eminence. as to the idea that you have no literary talent, for god's sake, do not give way to such diseased imaginations. you have, fortunately, ascertained that at a very early period. what would you have done if you had passed through my ordeal? i did not venture to face the public till i was seven and twenty, and for ten years after that period could not contrive to write anything that anybody would read; yet even i have not wholly miscarried. much of this was shrewd, and undeniable, but the _wish_ to write for the stage continued to haunt mary, and recurred two years later when she saw kean play _othello_. to the end of her life she expressed regret that she had not tried her hand at a tragedy. meanwhile, besides her own novel, she was at no loss for literary jobs and literary occupation; her friends took care of that. her pen and her powers were for ever at their service, and they never showed any scruple in working the willing horse. her disinterested integrity made her an invaluable representative in business transactions. the affairs of the _examiner_ newspaper, edited in england by leigh hunt's brother john, were in an unsatisfactory condition; and there was much disagreement between the two brothers as to both pecuniary and literary arrangements. mary had to act as arbiter between the two, softening the harsh and ungracious expressions which, in his annoyance, were used by john; looking after leigh hunt's interests, and doing all she could to make clear to him the complicated details of the concern. in this she was aided by vincent novello, the eminent musician, and intimate friend of the hunts, to whom she had had a letter of introduction on arriving in italy. the novellos had a large, old-fashioned house on shacklewell green; they were the very soul of hospitality and kindness, and the centre of a large circle of literary and artistic friends, they had made shelley's acquaintance in the days when the leigh hunts lived at the vale of health in hampstead, and they now welcomed his widow, as well as mrs. williams, doing all in their power to shed a little cheerfulness over these two broken and melancholy lives. "very, very fair both ladies were," writes mrs. cowden clarke, then mary victoria novello, who in her charming _recollections of writers_ has given us a pretty sketch of mary shelley as she then appeared to a "damsel approaching towards the age of 'sweet sixteen,' privileged to consider herself one of the grown-up people." "always observant as a child," she writes, "i had now become a greater observer than ever; and large and varied was the pleasure i derived from my observation of the interesting men and women around me at this time of my life. certainly mary wollstonecraft godwin shelley was the central figure of attraction then to my young-girl sight; and i looked upon her with ceaseless admiration,--for her personal graces, as well as for her literary distinction. "the daughter of william godwin and mary wollstonecraft godwin, the wife of shelley, the authoress of _frankenstein_, had for me a concentration of charm and interest that perpetually excited and engrossed me while she continued a visitor at my parents' house." elsewhere she describes ... "her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that time allowed to be cut low, and which her own taste adopted (for neither she nor her sister-in-sorrow ever wore the conventional 'widow's weeds' and 'widow's cap'); her thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved mouth, with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility when speaking; her exquisitely formed, white, dimpled, small hands, with rosy palms, and plumply commencing fingers, that tapered into tips as slender and delicate as those in a vandyke portrait." and though it was not in the power of these kind genial people to change mary's destiny, or even to modify very sensibly the tenour of her inner life and thought, still their friendship was a solace to her; she was grateful for it, and did her utmost to respond with cheerfulness to their kindly efforts on her behalf. to leigh hunt (from whom depression, when it passed into querulousness, met with almost as little quarter as it did from godwin) she wrote-- i am not always in spirits, but if my friends say that i am good, contrive to fancy that i am so, and so continue to love yours most truly, mary shelley. the news of lord byron's death in greece, which in may of this year created so profound a sensation in england, fell on mary's heart as a fresh calamity. she had small reason, personally, to esteem or regret him. circumstances had made her only too painfully familiar with his worst side, and she might well have borne him more than one serious grudge. but he was associated in her mind with shelley, and with early, happy days, and now he, like shelley, was dead and gone, and his faults faded into distance, while all that was great and might have been noble in him--the hero that should have been rather than the man that was--survived, and stood out in greater clearness and beauty, surrounded by the tearful halo of memory. the tidings reached her at a time of unusual--it afterwards seemed of prophetic--dejection. _journal, may ._--this, then, is my english life; and thus i am to drag on existence; confined in my small room, friendless. each day i string me to the task. i endeavour to read and write, my ideas stagnate and my understanding refuses to follow the words i read; day after day passes while torrents fall from the dark clouds, and my mind is as gloomy as this odious sky. without human friends i must attach myself to natural objects; but though i talk of the country, what difference shall i find in this miserable climate. italy, dear italy, murderess of those i love and of all my happiness, one word of your soft language coming unawares upon me, has made me shed bitter tears. when shall i hear it again spoken, when see your skies, your trees, your streams? the imprisonment attendant on a succession of rainy days has quite overcome me. god knows i strive to be content, but in vain. amidst all the depressing circumstances that weigh on me, none sinks deeper than the failure of my intellectual powers; nothing i write pleases me. whether i am just in this, or whether the want of shelley's (oh, my loved shelley, it is some alleviation only to write your name!) encouragement i can hardly tell, but it seems to me as if the lovely and sublime objects of nature had been my best inspirers, and, wanting them, i am lost. although so utterly miserable at genoa, yet what reveries were mine as i looked on the aspect of the ravine, the sunny deep and its boats, the promontories clothed in purple light, the starry heavens, the fireflies, the uprising of spring. then i could think, and my imagination could invent and combine, and self became absorbed in the grandeur of the universe i created. now my mind is a blank, a gulf filled with formless mist. the last man! yes, i may well describe that solitary being's feelings: i feel myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me. and thus has the accumulating sorrow of days and weeks been forced to find a voice, because the word _lucena_ met my eyes, and the idea of lost italy sprang in my mind. what graceful lamps those are, though of base construction and vulgar use; i thought of bringing one with me; i am glad i did not. i will go back only to have a _lucena_. if i told people so they would think me mad, and yet not madder than they seem to be now, when i say that the blue skies and verdure-clad earth of that dear land are necessary to my existence. if there be a kind spirit attendant on me in compensation for these miserable days, let me only dream to-night that i am in italy! mine own shelley, what a horror you had (fully sympathised in by me) of returning to this miserable country! to be here without you is to be doubly exiled, to be away from italy is to lose you twice. dearest, why is my spirit thus losing all energy? indeed, indeed, i must go back, or your poor utterly lost mary will never dare think herself worthy to visit you beyond the grave. _may ._--this then was the coming event that cast its shadow on my last night's miserable thoughts. byron had become one of the people of the grave--that miserable conclave to which the beings i best loved belong. i knew him in the bright days of youth, when neither care nor fear had visited me--before death had made me feel my mortality, and the earth was the scene of my hopes. can i forget our evening visits to diodati? our excursions on the lake, when he sang the tyrolese hymn, and his voice was harmonised with winds and waves. can i forget his attentions and consolations to me during my deepest misery?--never. beauty sat on his countenance and power beamed from his eye. his faults being, for the most part, weaknesses, induced one readily to pardon them. albé--the dear, capricious, fascinating albé--has left this desert world! god grant i may die young! a new race is springing about me. at the age of twenty-six i am in the condition of an aged person. all my old friends are gone, i have no wish to form new. i cling to the few remaining; but they slide away, and my heart fails when i think by how few ties i hold to the world. "life is the desert and the solitude--how populous the grave"--and that region--to the dearer and best beloved beings which it has torn from me, now adds that resplendent spirit whose departure leaves the dull earth dark as midnight. _june ._--what a divine night it is! i have just returned from kentish town; a calm twilight pervades the clear sky; the lamp-like moon is hung out in heaven, and the bright west retains the dye of sunset. if such weather would continue, i should write again; the lamp of thought is again illumined in my heart, and the fire descends from heaven that kindles it. such, my loved shelley, now ten years ago, at this season, did we first meet, and these were the very scenes--that churchyard, with its sacred tomb, was the spot where first love shone in your dear eyes. the stars of heaven are now your country, and your spirit drinks beauty and wisdom in those spheres, and i, beloved, shall one day join you. nature speaks to me of you. in towns and society i do not feel your presence; but there you are with me, my own, my unalienable! i feel my powers again, and this is, of itself, happiness; the eclipse of winter is passing from my mind. i shall again feel the enthusiastic glow of composition, again, as i pour forth my soul upon paper, feel the winged ideas arise, and enjoy the delight of expressing them. study and occupation will be a pleasure, and not a task, and this i shall owe to sight and companionship of trees and meadows, flowers and sunshine. england, i charge thee, dress thyself in smiles for my sake! i will celebrate thee, o england! and cast a glory on thy name, if thou wilt for me remove thy veil of clouds, and let me contemplate the country of my shelley and feel in communion with him! i have been gay in company before, but the inspiriting sentiment of the heart's peace i have not felt before to-night; and yet, my own, never was i so entirely yours. in sorrow and grief i wish sometimes (how vainly!) for earthly consolation. at a period of pleasing excitement i cling to your memory alone, and you alone receive the overflowing of my heart. beloved shelley, good-night. one pang will seize me when i think, but i will only think, that thou art where i shall be, and conclude with my usual prayer,--from the depth of my soul i make it,--may i die young! trelawny to mrs. shelley. missolonghi, _ th april _. my dear mary--my brain is already dizzy with business and writing. i am transformed from the listless being you knew me to one of all energy and fire. not content with the camp, i must needs be a great diplomatist, i am again, dear mary, in my _element_, and playing no _second_ part in greece. if i live, the outcast reginald will cut his name out on the grecian hills, or set on its plains. i have had the merit of discovering and bringing out a noble fellow, a gallant _soldier_, and a man of most wonderful mind, with as little bigotry as shelley, and nearly as much imagination; he is a glorious being. i have lived with him--he calls me brother--wants to connect me with his family. we have been inseparable now for eight months--fought side by side. but i am sick at heart with losing my friend,[ ]--for still i call him so, you know, with all his weakness, you know i loved him. i cannot live with men for years without feeling--it is weak, it is want of judgment, of philosophy,--but this is my weakness. dear mary, if you love me,--_write_--write--write, for my heart yearns after you. i certainly must have you and jane out. i am serious. this is the place after my own heart, and i am certain of our good cause triumphing. believe nothing you hear; gamba will tell you everything about me--about lord byron, but he knows nothing of greece--nothing; nor does it appear any one else does by what i see published. colonel stanhope is here; he is a good fellow, and does much good. the loan is achieved, and that sets the business at rest, but it is badly done--the commissioners are bad. a word as to your wooden god, mavrocordato. he is a miserable jew, and i hope, ere long, to see his head removed from his worthless and heartless body. he is a mere shuffling soldier, an aristocratic brute--wants kings and congresses; a poor, weak, shuffling, intriguing, cowardly fellow; so no more about him. dear mary, dear jane, i am serious, turn you thoughts this way. no more a nameless being, i am now a greek chieftain, willing and able to shelter and protect you; and thus i will continue, or follow our friends to wander over some other planet, for i have nearly exhausted this.--your attached trelawny. care of john hunt, esq., _examiner_ office, catherine street, london. tell me of clare, do write me of her! this is written with the other in desperate haste. i have received a letter from you, one from jane, and none from hunt. this letter reached mary at about the same time as the fatal news. trelawny also sent her his narrative of the facts (now so well known to every one) of byron's death. it had been intended for hobhouse, but the writer changed his mind and entrusted it to mrs. shelley instead, adding, "hunt may pick something at it if he please." trelawny had been byron's friend, and clearly as he saw the pilgrim's faults and deficiencies, there would seem no doubt that he genuinely admired him, in spite of all. but his mercurial, impulsive temperament, ever in extremes, was liable to the most sudden revulsions of feeling, and retrospect hardened his feeling as much as it softened mary shelley's towards the great man who was gone. only four months later he was writing again, from livadia-- i have much to say to you, mary, both as regards myself and the part i am enacting here. i would give much that i could, as in times dead, look in on you in the evening of every day and consult with you on its occurrences, as i used to do in italy. it is curious, but, considering our characters, natural enough, that byron and i took the diametrically opposite roads in greece--i in eastern, he in western. he took part with, and became the paltry tool of the weak, imbecile, cowardly being calling himself prince mavrocordato. five months he dozed away. by the gods! the lies that are said in his praise urge one to speak the truth. it is well for his name, and better for greece, that he is dead. with the aid of his name, his fame, his talents, and his fortune, he might have been a tower of strength to greece, instead of which the little he did was in favour of the aristocrats, to destroy the republic, and smooth the road for a foreign king. but he is dead, and i now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could so long have influenced me. it is a degrading reflection, and ever will be. i wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have witnessed how i would have soared above him here, how i would have triumphed over his mean spirit. i would do much to see and talk to you, but as i am now too much irritated to disclose the real state of things, i will not mislead you by false statements. with this fine flourish was enclosed a "description of the cavern fortress of mount parnassus," which he was commanding (and of which a full account is given in his _recollections_), and then followed a p.s. to this effect-- dear mary--will you make an article of this, as leigh hunt calls it, and request his brother to publish it in the _examiner_, which will very much oblige me. from mary shelley to trelawny. th july . so, dear trelawny, you remember still poor mary shelley; thank you for your remembrance, and a thousand times for your kind letter. it is delightful to feel that absence does not diminish your affection, excellent, warm-hearted friend, remnant of our happy days, of my vagabond life in beloved italy, our companion in prosperity, our comforter in sorrow. you will not wonder that the late loss of lord byron makes me cling with greater zeal to those dear friends who remain to me. he could hardly be called a friend, but, connected with him in a thousand ways, admiring his talents, and (with all his faults) feeling affection for him, it went to my heart when, the other day, the hearse that contained his lifeless form--a form of beauty which in life i often delighted to behold--passed my windows going up highgate hill on his last journey to the last seat of his ancestors. your account of his last moments was infinitely interesting to me. going about a fortnight ago to the house where his remains lay, i found there fletcher and lega--lega looking a most preposterous rogue,--fletcher i expect to call on me when he returns from nottingham. from a few words he imprudently let fall, it would seem that his lord spoke of clare in his last moments, and of his wish to do something for her, at a time when his mind, vacillating between consciousness and delirium, would not permit him to do anything. did fletcher mention this to you? it seems that this doughty leporello speaks of his lord to strangers with the highest respect; more than he did a year ago,--the best, the most generous, the most wronged of peers,--the notion of his leading an irregular life,--quite a false one. lady b. sent for fletcher; he found her in a fit of passionate grief, but perfectly implacable, and as much resolved never to have united herself again to him as she was when she first signed their separation. mrs. claremont (the governess) was with her. his death, as you may guess, made a great sensation here, which was not diminished by the destruction of his memoirs, which he wrote and gave to moore, and which were burned by mrs. leigh and hobhouse. there was not much in them, i know, for i read them some years ago at venice, but the world fancied it was to have a confession of the hidden feelings of one concerning whom they were always passionately curious. moore was by no means pleased: he is now writing a life of him himself, but it is conjectured that, notwithstanding he had the ms. so long in his possession, he never found time to read it. i breakfasted with him about a week ago, and he is anxious to get materials for his work. i showed him your letter on the subject of lord byron's death, and he wishes very much to obtain from you any anecdote or account you would like to send. if you know anything that ought to be known, or feel inclined to detail anything that you may remember worthy of record concerning him, perhaps you will communicate with moore. you have often said that you wished to keep up our friend's name in the world, and if you still entertain the same feeling, no way is more obvious than to assist moore, who asked me to make this request. you can write to him through me or addressed to longmans.... * * * * * here then we are, jane and i, in kentish town.... we live near each other now, and, seeing each other almost daily, for ever dwell on one subject.... the country about here is really pretty; lawny uplands, wooded parks, green lanes, and gentle hills form agreeable and varying combinations. if we had orange sunsets, cloudless noons, fireflies, large halls, etc. etc., i should not find the scenery amiss, and yet i can attach myself to nothing here; neither among the people, though some are good and clever, nor to the places, though they be pretty. jane is my chosen companion and only friend. i am under a cloud, and cannot form near acquaintances among that class whose manners and modes of life are agreeable to me, and i think myself fortunate in having one or two pleasing acquaintances among literary people, whose society i enjoy without dreaming of friendship. my child is in excellent health; a fine, tall, handsome boy. and then for money and the rest of those necessary annoyances, the means of getting at the necessaries of life; jane's affairs are yet unsettled.... my prospects are somewhat brighter than they were. i have little doubt but that in the course of a few months i shall have an independent income of £ or £ per annum during sir timothy's life, and that with small sacrifice on my part. after his death shelley's will secures me an income more than sufficient for my simple habits. one of my first wishes in obtaining the independence i mention, will be to assist in freeing clare from her present painful mode of life. she is now at moscow; sufficiently uncomfortable, poor girl, unless some change has taken place: i think it probable that she will soon return to england. her spirits will have been improved by the information i sent her that his family consider shelley's will valid, and that she may rely upon receiving the legacy.... but mary's hopes of better fortune were again and again deferred, and she now found that any concession on the part of her husband's family must be purchased by the suppression of his later poems. she was too poor to do other than submit. mary shelley to leigh hunt. kentish town, _ d august _. ... a negotiation has begun between sir timothy shelley and myself, by which, on sacrificing a small part of my future expectations on the will, i shall ensure myself a sufficiency for the present, and not only that, but be able, i hope, to relieve clare from her disagreeable situation at moscow. i have been obliged, however, as an indispensable preliminary, to suppress the posthumous poems. more than copies had been sold, so this is the less provoking, and i have been obliged to promise not to bring dear shelley's name before the public again during sir timothy's life. there is no great harm in this, since he is above seventy; and, from choice, i should not think of writing memoirs now, and the materials for a volume of more works are so scant that i doubted before whether i could publish it. such is the folly of the world, and so do things seem different from what they are; since, from whitton's account, sir timothy writhes under the fame of his incomparable son, as if it were the most grievous injury done to him; and so, perhaps, after all it will prove. all this was pending when i wrote last, but until i was certain i did not think it worth while to mention it. the affair is arranged by peacock, who, though i seldom see him, seems anxious to do me all these kind of services in the best manner that he can. it is long since i saw your brother, nor had he any news for me. i lead a most quiet life, and see hardly any one. the gliddons are gone to hastings for a few weeks. hogg is on circuit. now that he is rich he is so very queer, so unamiable, and so strange, that i look forward to his return without any desire of shortening the term of absence. poor pierino is now in london, _non fosse male questo paese_, he says, _se vi vedesse mai il sole_. he is full of greece, to which he is going, and gave us an account of our good friend, trelawny, which was that he was not at all changed. trelawny has made a hero of the greek chief, ulysses, and declares that there is a great cavern in attica which he and ulysses have provisioned for seven years, and to which, if the cause fails, he and this chieftain are to retire; but if the cause is triumphant, he is to build a city in the negropont, colonise it, and jane and i are to go out to be queens and chieftainesses of the island. when he first came to athens he took to a turkish life, bought twelve or fifteen women, _brutti mostri_, pierino says, one a moor, of all things, and there he lay on his sofa, smoking, these gentle creatures about him, till he got heartily sick of idleness, shut them up in his harem, and joined and combated with ulysses.... * * * * * one of my principal reasons for writing just now is that i have just heard miss curran's address ( via sistina, roma), and i am anxious that marianne should (if she will be so very good) send one of the profiles already cut to her, of shelley, since i think that, by the help of that, miss curran will be able to correct her portrait of shelley, and make for us what we so much desire--a good likeness. i am convinced that miss curran will return the profile immediately that she has done with it, so that you will not sacrifice it, though you may be the means of our obtaining a good likeness. _journal, september ._--with what hopes did i come to england? i pictured little of what was pleasurable, the feeling i had could not be called hope; it was expectation. yet at that time, now a year ago, what should i have said if a prophet had told me that, after the whole revolution of the year, i should be as poor in all estimable treasures as when i arrived. i have only seen two persons from whom i have hoped or wished for friendly feeling. one, a poet, who sought me first, whose voice, laden with sentiment, passed as shelley's, and who read with the same deep feeling as he; whose gentle manners were pleasing, and who seemed to a degree pleased; who once or twice listened to my sad plaints, and bent his dark blue eyes upon me. association, gratitude, esteem, made me take interest in his long, though rare, visits. the other was kind; sought me, was pleased with me. i could talk to him; that was much. he was attached to another, so that i felt at my ease with him. they have disappeared from my horizon. jane alone remains; if she loved me as well as i do her it would be much; she is all gentleness, and she is my only consolation, yet she does not console me. i have just completed my twenty-seventh year; at such a time hope and youth are still in their prime, and the pains i feel, therefore, are ever alive and vivid within me. what shall i do? nothing. i study, that passes the time. i write; at times that pleases me, though double sorrow comes when i feel that shelley no longer reads and approves of what i write; besides, i have no great faith in my success. composition is delightful; but if you do not expect the sympathy of your fellow-creatures in what you write, the pleasure of writing is of short duration. i have my lovely boy, without him i could not live. i have jane; in her society i forget time; but the idea of it does not cheer me in my griefful moods. it is strange that the religious feeling that exalted my emotions in happiness, deserts me in my misery. i have little enjoyment, no hope. i have given myself ten years more of life. god grant that they may not be augmented. i should be glad that they were curtailed. loveless beings surround me; they talk of my personal attractions, of my talents, my manners. the wisest and best have loved me. the beautiful, and glorious, and noble, have looked on me with the divine expression of love, till death, the reaper, carried to his overstocked barns my lamented harvest. but now i am not loved! never, oh, never more shall i love. synonymous to such words are, never more shall i be happy, never more feel life sit triumphant in my frame. i am a wreck. by what do the fragments cling together? why do they not part, to be borne away by the tide to the boundless ocean, where those are whom day and night i pray that i may rejoin. i shall be happier, perhaps, in italy; yet, when i sometimes think that she is the murderess, i tremble for my boy. we shall see; if no change comes, i shall be unable to support the burthen of time, and no change, if it hurt not his dear head, can be for the worse. in the month of july mary had received another request for literary help; this time from medwin, who wanted her aid in eking out and correcting his notes of conversations with lord byron, shortly to be published. "you must have been, as i was, very much affected with poor lord byron's death," he wrote to mary. "all parties seem now writing in his favour, and the papers are full of his praise.... "how do you think i have been employing myself? with writing; and the subject i have chosen has been memoirs of lord byron. every one here has been disappointed in the extreme by the destruction of his private biography, and have urged me to give the world the little i know of him. i wish i was better qualified for the task. when i was at pisa i made very copious notes of his conversations, for private reference only, and was surprised to find on reading them (which i have never done till his death, and hearing that his life had been burnt) that they contained so many anecdotes of his life. during many nights that we sat up together he was very confidential, and entered into his history and opinions on most subjects, and from them i have compiled a volume which is, i am told, highly entertaining. shelley i have made a very prominent feature in the work, and i think you will be pleased with that part, at least, of the memoir, and all the favourable sentiments of lord byron concerning him. but i shall certainly not publish the work till you have seen it, and would give the world to consult you in person about the whole; you might be of the greatest possible use to me, and prevent many errors from creeping in. i have been told it cannot fail of having the greatest success, and have been offered £ for it--a large and tempting sum--in consequence of what has been said in its praise by grattan.... "before deciding finally on the publication there are many things to be thought of. lady byron will not be pleased with my account of the marriage and separation; in fact, i shall be assailed on all sides. now, my dear friend, what do you advise? let me have your full opinion, for i mean to be guided by it. i hear to-day that moore is manufacturing five or six volumes out of the _burnt materials_, for which longman advanced £ , and is to pay £ more; _they_ will be in a great rage. if i publish, promptitude is everything, so that i know you will answer this soon." the idea of entertaining the world, however highly, at whatever price, with "tit-bits" from the private life and after-dinner talk of her late intimate friends, almost before those friends were cold in their graves, did not find favour with mrs. shelley. as an excuse for declining to have any hand in this work, she gave her own desire to avoid publicity or notice. in a later letter medwin assured her that her name was not even mentioned in the book. he frankly owned that most of his knowledge of byron had been derived from her and shelley, but added, by way of excuse-- they tell me it is highly interesting, and there is at this moment a longing after and impatience to know something about the most extraordinary man of the age that must give my book a considerable success. what mary felt about this publication can be gathered from her allusion to it in the following letter-- mrs. shelley to mrs. hunt. kentish town, _ th october _. ... i write to you on the most dismal of all days, a rainy sunday, when dreary church-going faces look still more drearily from under dripping umbrellas, and the poor plebeian dame looks reproachfully at her splashed white stockings,--not her gown,--that has been warily held high up, and the to-be-concealed petticoat has borne all the ill-usage of the mud. dismal though it is, dismal though i am, i do not wish to write a discontented letter, but in a few words to describe things as they are with me. a weekly visit to the strand, a monthly visit to shacklewell (when we are sure to be caught in the rain) forms my catalogue of visits. i have no visitors; if it were not for jane i should be quite alone. the eternal rain imprisons one in one's little room, and one's spirits flag without one exhilarating circumstance. in some things, however, i am better off than last year, for i do not doubt but that in the course of a few months i shall have an independence; and i no longer balance, as i did last winter, between italy and england. my father wished me to stay, and, old as he is, and wishing as one does to be of some use somewhere, i thought that i would make the trial, and stay if i could. but the joke has become too serious. i look forward to the coming winter with horror, but it _shall be_ the last. i have not yet made up my mind to the where in italy. i shall, if possible, immediately on arriving, push on to rome. then we shall see. i read, study, and write; sometimes that takes me out of myself; but to live for no one, to be necessary to none, to know that "where is now my hope? for my hope, who shall see it? they shall go down to the base of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust." but change of scene and the sun of italy will restore my energy; the very thought of it smooths my brow. perhaps i shall seek the heats of naples, if they do not hurt my darling percy. and now, what news?... * * * * * hazlitt is abroad; he will be in italy in the winter; he wrote an article in the _edinburgh review_ on the volume of poems i published. i do not know whether he meant it to be favourable or not; i do not like it at all; but when i saw him i could not be angry. i never was so shocked in my life, he has become so thin, his hair scattered, his cheek-bones projecting; but for his voice and smile i should not have known him; his smile brought tears into my eyes, it was like a sunbeam illuminating the most melancholy of ruins, lightning that assured you in a dark night of the identity of a friend's ruined and deserted abode.... have you, my polly, sent a profile to miss curran in rome? now pray do, and pray write; do, my dear girl. next year by this time i shall, perhaps, be on my way to you; it will go hard but that i contrive to spend a week (that is, if you wish) at florence, on my way to the eternal city. god send that this prove not an airy castle; but i own that i put faith in my having money before that; and i know that i could not, if i would, endure the torture of my english life longer than is absolutely necessary. by the bye, i heard that you are keeping your promise to trelawny, and that in due time he will be blessed with a namesake. how is _occhi turchini_, thornton the reformed, johnny the--what johnny? the good boy? mary the merry, irving the sober, percy the martyr, and dear sylvan the good? percy is quite well; tell his friend he goes to school and learns to read and write, being very handy with his hands, perhaps having a pure anticipated cognition of the art of painting in his tiny fingers. mrs. williams' little girl, who calls herself dina, is his wife. poor clare, at moscow! at least she will be independent one day, and if i am so soon, her situation will be quickly ameliorated. have you heard of medwin's book? notes of conversations which he had with lord byron (when tipsy); every one is to be in it; every one will be angry. he wanted me to have a hand in it, but i declined. years ago, when a man died, the worms ate him; now a new set of worms feed on the carcase of the scandal he leaves behind him, and grow fat upon the world's love of tittle-tattle. i will not be numbered among them. have you received the volume of poems? give my love to "very," and so, dear, very patient, adieu.--yours affectionately, mary shelley. _journal, october ._--time rolls on, and what does it bring? what can i do? how change my destiny? months change their names, years their cyphers. my brow is sadly trenched, the blossom of youth faded. my mind gathers wrinkles. what will become of me? how long it is since an emotion of joy filled my once exulting heart, or beamed from my once bright eyes. i am young still, though age creeps on apace; but i may not love any but the dead. i think that an emotion of joy would destroy me, so strange would it be to my withered heart. shelley had said-- lift not the painted veil which men call life. mine is not painted; dark and enshadowed, it curtains out all happiness, all hope. tears fill my eyes; well may i weep, solitary girl! the dead know you not; the living heed you not. you sit in your lone room, and the howling wind, gloomy prognostic of winter, gives not forth so despairing a tone as the unheard sighs your ill-fated heart breathes. i was loved once! still let me cling to the memory; but to live for oneself alone, to read, and communicate your reflections to none; to write, and be cheered by none; to weep, and in no bosom; no more on thy bosom, my shelley, to spend my tears--this is misery! such is the alpha and omega of my tale. i can speak to none. writing this is useless; it does not even soothe me; on the contrary, it irritates me by showing the pitiful expedient to which i am reduced. i have been a year in england, and, ungentle england, for what have i to thank you? for disappointment, melancholy, and tears; for unkindness, a bleeding heart, and despairing thoughts. i wish, england, to associate but one idea with thee--immeasurable distance and insurmountable barriers, so that i never, never might breathe thine air more. beloved italy! you are my country, my hope, my heaven! _december ._--i endeavour to rouse my fortitude and calm my mind by high and philosophic thoughts, and my studies aid this endeavour. i have pondered for hours on cicero's description of that power of virtue in the human mind which render's man's frail being superior to fortune. "eadem ratio habet in re quiddam amplum at que magnificum ad imperandum magis quam ad parendum accommodatum; omnia humana non tolerabilia solum sed etiam levia ducens; altum quiddam et excelsum, nihil temens, nemini cedens, semper invictum." what should i fear? to whom cede? by whom be conquered? little truly have i to fear. one only misfortune can touch me. that must be the last, for i should sink under it. at the age of seven and twenty, in the busy metropolis of native england, i find myself alone. the struggle is hard that can give rise to misanthropy in one, like me, attached to my fellow-creatures. yet now, did not the memory of those matchless lost ones redeem their race, i should learn to hate men, who are strong only to oppress, moral only to insult. oh ye winged hours that fly fast, that, having first destroyed my happiness, now bear my swift-departing youth with you, bring patience, wisdom, and content! i will not stoop to the world, or become like those who compose it, and be actuated by mean pursuits and petty ends. i will endeavour to remain unconquered by hard and bitter fortune; yet the tears that start in my eyes show pangs she inflicts upon me. so much for philosophising. shall i ever be a philosopher? chapter xx january -july at the beginning of mrs. shelley's worldly affairs were looking somewhat more hopeful. the following extract is from a letter to miss curran, dated d january-- ... i have now better prospects than i had, or rather, a better reality, for my prospects are sufficiently misty. i receive now £ a year from my father-in-law, but this in so strange and embarrassed a manner that, as yet, i hardly know what to make of it. i do not believe, however, that he would object to my going abroad, as i daresay he considers that the first step towards kingdom come, whither, doubtless, he prays that an interloper like me may speedily be removed. i talk, therefore, of going next autumn, and shall be grateful to any power, divine or human, that assists me to leave this desert country. mine i cannot call it; it is too unkind to me. what you say of my shelley's picture is beyond words interesting to me. how good you are! send it, i pray you, for perhaps i cannot come, and, at least, it would be a blessing to receive it a few months earlier. i am afraid you can do nothing about the cameo. as you say, it were worth nothing, unless like; but i fancied that it might be accomplished under your directions. would it be asking too much to lend me the copy you took of my darling william's portrait, since mine is somewhat injured? but from both together i could get a nice copy made. you may imagine that i see few people, so far from the centre of bustling london; but, in truth, i found that even in town, poor, undinner-giving as i was, i could not dream of society. it was a great confinement for percy, and i could not write in the midst of smoke, noise, and streets. i live here very quietly, going once a week to the strand. my chief dependence for society is on mrs. williams, who lives at no great distance. as to theatres, etc., how can a "lone woman" think of such things? no; the pleasures and luxuries of life await me in divine italy; but here, privation, solitude, and desertion are my portion. what a change for me! but i must not think of that. i contrive to live on as i am; but to recur to the past and compare it with the present is to deluge me in grief and tears. my boy is well; a fine tall fellow, and as good as i can possibly expect; he is improved in looks since he came here. clare is in moscow still, not very pleasantly situated; but she is in a situation, and being now well in health, waits with more patience for better times. the godwins go on as usual. my father, though harassed, is in good health, and is employed in the second volume of the _commonwealth_. the weather here is astonishingly mild, but the rain continual; half england is under water, and the damage done at seaports from storms incalculable. in rome, doubtless, it has been different. rome, dear name! i cannot tell why, but to me there is something enchanting in that spot. i have another friend there, the countess guiccioli, now unhappy and mournful from the death of lord byron. poor girl! i sincerely pity her, for she truly loved him, and i cannot think that she can endure an italian after him. you have there also a mr. taaffe, a countryman of yours, who translates dante, and rides fine horses that perpetually throw him. he knew us all very well. the english have had many a dose of scandal. first poor dear lord byron, from whom, now gone, many a poor devil of an author is now fearless of punishment, then mr. fauntleroy, then miss foote; these are now dying away. the fame of mr. fauntleroy, indeed, has not survived him; that of lord byron bursts forth every now and then afresh; whilst miss foote smokes most dismally still. then we have had our quantum of fires and misery, and the poor exiled italians and spaniards have added famine to the list of evils. a subscription, highly honourable to the poor and middle classes who subscribed their mite, has relieved them. will you write soon? how much delight i anticipate this spring on the arrival of the picture! in all thankfulness, faithfully yours, mary w. shelley. the increase of allowance, from £ to £ , had not been actually granted at the beginning of the year, but it appeared so probable an event that, thanks partly to the good offices of mr. peacock, sir timothy's lawyers agreed, while the matter was pending, to advance mrs. shelley the extra £ on their own responsibility. the concession was not so great as it looks, for all money allowed to her was only advanced subject to an agreement that every penny was to be repaid, with interest, to sir timothy's executors at the time when, according to percy bysshe shelley's will, she should come into the property; and every cheque was endorsed by her to this effect. but her immediate anxieties were in some measure relieved by this addition to her income. not, indeed, that it set her free from pressing money cares, for the ensuing letter to leigh hunt incidentally shows that her father was a perpetual drain on her resources, that there was every probability of her having to support him partly--at times entirely--in the future, and that she was endeavouring, with peacock's help, to raise a large sum, on loan, to meet these possible emergencies. the main subject of the letter is an article of hunt's about shelley, the proof of which had been sent to mary to read. it contained, in an extended form, the substance of that biographical notice, originally intended for a preface to the volume of posthumous poems. mrs. shelley to leigh hunt. _ th april ._ my dear hunt--i have just finished reading your article upon shelley. it is with great diffidence that i write to thank you for it, because perceiving plainly that you think that i have forfeited all claim on your affection, you may deem my thanks an impertinent intrusion. but from my heart i thank you. you may imagine that it has moved me deeply. of course this very article shows how entirely you have cast me out from any corner in your affections. and from various causes--none dishonourable to me--i cannot help wishing that i could have received your goodwill and kindness, which i prize, and have ever prized; but you have a feeling, i had almost said a prejudice, against me, which makes you construe foreign matter into detractation against me (i allude to the, to me, deeply afflicting idea you got upon some vague expression communicated to you by your brother), and insensible to any circumstances that might be pleaded for me. but i will not dwell on this. the sun shines, and i am striving so hard for a continuation of the gleams of pleasure that visit my intolerable state of regret for the loss of beloved companionship during cloudless days, that i will dash away the springing tears and make one or two necessary observations on your article. i have often heard our shelley relate the story of stabbing an upper boy with a fork, but never as you relate it. he always described it, in my hearing, as being an almost involuntary act, done on the spur of anguish, and that he made the stab as the boy was going out of the room. shelley did not allow harriet half his income. she received £ a year. mr. westbrook had always made his daughter an allowance, even while she lived with shelley, which of course was continued to her after their separation. i think if i were near you, i could readily persuade you to omit all allusion to clare. after the death of lord byron, in the thick of memoirs, scandal, and turning up of old stories, she has never been alluded to, at least in any work i have seen. you mention (having been obliged to return your ms. to bowring, i quote from memory) an article in _blackwood_, but i hardly think that this is of date subsequent to our miserable loss. in fact, poor clare has been buried in entire oblivion, and to bring her from this, even for the sake of defending her, would, i am sure, pain her greatly, and do her mischief. would you permit this part to be erased? i have, without waiting to ask your leave, requested messrs. bowring to leave out your mention that the remains of dearest edward were brought to england. jane still possesses this treasure, and has once or twice been asked by his mother-in-law about it,--once an urn was sent. consequently she is very anxious that her secret should be kept, and has allowed it to be believed that the ashes were deposited with shelley's at rome. such, my dear hunt, are all the alterations i have to suggest, and i lose no time in communicating them to you. they are too trivial for me to apologise for the liberty, and i hope that you will agree with me in what i say about clare--allegra no more--she at present absent and forgotten. on sir timothy's death she will come in for a legacy which may enable her to enter into society,--perhaps to marry, if she wishes it, if the past be forgotten. i forget whether such things are recorded by "galignani," or, if recorded, whether you would have noticed it. my father's complicated annoyances, brought to their height by the failure of a very promising speculation and the loss of an impossible-to-be-lost law-suit, have ended in a bankruptcy, the various acts of which drama are now in progress; that over, nothing will be left to him but his pen and me. he is so full of his _commonwealth_ that in the midst of every anxiety he writes every day now, and in a month or two will have completed the second volume, and i am employed in raising money necessary for my maintenance, and in which he must participate. this will drain me pretty dry for the present, but (as the old women say) if i live, i shall have more than enough for him and me, and recur, at least to some part of my ancient style of life, and feel of some value to others. do not, however, mistake my phraseology; i shall not live with my father, but return to italy and economise, the moment god and mr. whitton will permit. my percy is quite well, and has exchanged his constant winter occupation of drawing for playing in the fields (which are now useful as well as ornamental), flying kites, gardening, etc. i bask in the sun on the grass reading virgil, that is, my beloved _georgics_ and lord shaftesbury's _characteristics_. i begin to live again, and as the maids of greece sang joyous hymns on the revival of adonis, does my spirit lift itself in delightful thanksgiving on the awakening of nature. lamb is superannuated--do you understand? as madame says. he has left the india house on two-thirds of his income, and become a gentleman at large--a delightful consummation. what a strange taste it is that confines him to a view of the new river, with houses opposite, in islington! i saw the novellos the other day. mary and her new babe are well; he, vincent all over, fat and flourishing moreover, and she dolorous that it should be her fate to add more than her share to the population of the world. how are all yours--henry and the rest? percy still remembers him, though occupied by new friendships and the feelings incident to his state of matrimony, having taken for better and worse to wife mrs. williams' little girl. i suppose you will receive with these letters bessy's new book, which she has done very well indeed, and forms with the other a delightful prize for plant and flower worshippers, those favourites of god, which enjoy beauty unequalled and the tranquil pleasures of growth and life, bestowing incalculable pleasure, and never giving or receiving pain. have you seen hazlitt's notes of his travels? he is going over the same road that i have travelled twice. he surprised me by calling the road from susa to turin dull; there, where the alps sink into low mountains and romantic hills, topped by ruined castles, watered by brawling streams, clothed by magnificent walnut trees; there, where i wrote to you in a fit of enchantment, exalted by the splendid scene; but i remembered, first, that he travelled in winter, when snow covers all; and, besides, he went from what i approached, and looked at the plain of lombardy with the back of the diligence between him and the loveliest scene in nature; so much can _relation_ alter circumstances. clare is still, i believe, at moscow. when i return to italy i shall endeavour to enable her to go thither also. i shall not come without my jane, who is now necessary to my existence almost. she has recourse to the cultivation of her mind, and amiable and dear as she ever was, she is in every way improved and become more valuable. trelawny is in the cave with ulysses, not in polypheme's cave, but in a vast cavern of parnassus; inaccessible and healthy and safe, but cut off from the rest of the world. trelawny has attached himself to the part of ulysses, a savage chieftain, without any plan but personal independence and opposition to the government. trelawny calls him a hero. ulysses speaks a word or two of french; trelawny, no greek! pierino has returned to greece. horace smith has returned with his diminished family (little horace is dead). he already finds london too expensive, and they are about to migrate to tunbridge wells. he is very kind to me. i long to hear from you, and i am more tenderly attached to you and yours than you imagine; love me a little, and make marianne love me, as truly i think she does. am i mistaken, polly?--your affectionate and obliged, mary w. shelley. outwardly, this year was uneventful. mary was busily working at her novel, _the last man_. the occupation was good for her, and perhaps it was no bad thing that necessity should stand at her elbow to stimulate her to exertion when her interest and energy flagged. for, in spite of her utmost efforts to the contrary, her heart and spirit were often faint at the prospect of an arduous and lonely life. and when, in early autumn, shelley's portrait was at last sent to her by miss curran, the sight of it brought back the sense of what she had lost, and revived in all its irrecoverable bitterness that past happy time, than to remember which in misery there is no greater sorrow. _journal, september _ ( ).--thy picture is come, my only one! thine those speaking eyes, that animated look; unlike aught earthly wert thou ever, and art now! if thou hadst still lived, how different had been my life and feelings! thou art near to guard and save me, angelic one! thy divine glance will be my protection and defence. i was not worthy of thee, and thou hast left me; yet that dear look assures me that thou wert mine, and recalls and narrates to my backward-looking mind a long tale of love and happiness. my head aches. my heart--my hapless heart--is deluged in bitterness. great god! if there be any pity for human suffering, tell me what i am to do. i strive to study, i strive to write, but i cannot live without loving and being loved, without sympathy; if this is denied to me i must die. would that the hour were come! on the same day when mary penned these melancholy lines, trelawny was writing to her from cephalonia. he had been treacherously shot by an inmate of his mountain fortress, an englishman newly arrived, whom he had welcomed as a guest. the true instigator of the crime was one fenton, a scotchman, who in the guise of a volunteer had ostensibly served under trelawny for a twelvemonth past, and who by his capability and apparent zeal had so won his confidence as to be entrusted with secret missions. he was, in fact, an emissary of the greek government, foisted on trelawny at missolonghi to act as a spy on odysseus, the insurgent greek chieftain. through his machinations odysseus was betrayed and murdered, and trelawny narrowly escaped death. trelawny to mrs. shelley. cephalonia, _ th september _. dear mary--i have just escaped from greece and landed here, in the hopes of patching up my broken frame and shattered constitution. two musket balls, fired at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my framework, which damn'd near finished me; but 'tis a long story, and my writing arm is rendered unfit for service, and i am yet unpractised with the left. but a friend of mine here, a major bacon, is on his way to england, and will enlighten you as to me. i shall be confined here some time. write to me then at this place. i need rest and quiet, for i am shook to the foundation. love to jane and clare, and believe me still your devoted friend, edward trelawny. it would seem that this letter was many months in reaching mary, for in february she was writing to him in these terms-- i hear at last that mr. hodges has letters for me, and that prevents a thousand things i was about to say concerning the pain your very long silence had occasioned me. consider, dear friend, that your last was in april, so that nearly a year has gone by, and not only did i not hear _from_ you, but until the arrival of mr. hodges, many months had elapsed since i had heard of you. sometimes i flattered myself that the foundations of my little habitation would have been shaken by a "ship shelley ahoy" that even jane, distant a mile, would have heard. that dear hope lost, i feared a thousand things. hamilton browne's illness, the death of many english, the return of every other from greece, filled me with gloomy apprehensions. but you live,--what kind of life your letters will, i trust, inform me,--what possible kind of life in a cavern surrounded by precipices,--inaccessible! all this will satisfy your craving imagination. the friendship you have for odysseus, does that satisfy your warm heart?... i gather from your last letter and other intelligence that you think of marrying the daughter of your favourite chief, and thus will renounce england and even the english for ever. and yet,--no! you love some of us, i am sure, too much to forget us, even if you neglect us for a while; but truly, i long for your letters, which will tell all. and remember, dear friend, it is about yourself i am anxious. of greece i read in the papers. i see many informants, but i can learn your actions, hopes, and, above all valuable to me, the continuation of your affection for me, from your letters only. * * * * * _ th february._ i now close my letter--i have not yet received yours. last night jane and i went with gamba and my father to see kean in _othello_. this play, as you may guess, reminded us of you. do you remember, when delivering the killing news, you awoke jane, as othello awakens desdemona from her sleep on the sofa? kean, abominably supported, acted divinely; put as he is on his mettle by recent events and a full house and applause, which he deserved, his farewell is the most pathetic piece of acting to be imagined. yet, my dear friend, i wish we had seen it represented as was talked of at pisa. iago would never have found a better representative than that strange and wondrous creature whom one regrets daily more,--for who here can equal him? adieu, dear trelawny, take care of yourself, and come and visit us as soon as you can escape from the sorceries of ulysses.--in all truth, yours affectionately, m. w. s. at pisa, , lord byron talked vehemently of our getting up a play in his great hall at the lanfranchi; it was to be _othello_. he cast the characters thus: byron, iago; trelawny, othello; williams, cassio; medwin, roderigo; mrs. shelley, desdemona; mrs. williams, emilia. "who is to be our audience?" i asked. "all pisa," he rejoined. he recited a great portion of his part with great gusto; it exactly suited him,--he looked it, too. all this time miss clairmont was pursuing her vocation as a governess in russia, and many interesting glimpses into russian family and social life are afforded by her letters to mrs. shelley and mrs. williams. she was a voluminous letter-writer, and in these characteristic epistles she unconsciously paints, as no other hand could have done, a vivid portrait of herself. we can see her, with all her vivacity, versatility, and resource, her great cleverness,--never at a loss for a word, an excuse, or a good story,--her indefatigable energy, her shifting moods and wild caprices, the bewildering activity of her restless brain, and the astonishing facility with which she transferred to paper all her passing impressions. in narration, in description, in panegyric, and in complaint she is equally fluent. unimpeachably correct as her conduct always was after her one miserable adventure, she had, from first to last, an innate affinity for anything in the shape of social gossip and scandal; her really generous impulses were combined with the worldliest of worldly wisdom, and the whole tinctured with the highest of high-flown sentiment. fill in the few details wanting, the flat, sleek, black hair,--eyes so black that the pupil was hardly to be distinguished from the iris (eyes which seemed unmistakably to indicate an admixture of portuguese, if not of african, blood in her descent),--a complexion which may in girlhood have been olive, but in later life was sallow,--features not beautiful, and depending on expression for any charm they might have,--and she stands before the reader, the unmanageable, amusing, runaway schoolgirl; a stumbling-block first, then a bugbear, to byron; a curse, which he persistently treated as a blessing, to shelley; a thorn in the side of mary and of every one who ever was responsible for her; yet liked by her acquaintance, admired in society, commiserated by her early friends, and regarded with well-deserved affection and gratitude by many of her pupils and _protégés_. clare to jane. moscow, _ th october _. my dearest jane--it is now so long since i heard from you that i begin to think you have quite forgotten me. i wrote twice to you during the summer; both letters went by private hand, and to neither of which have i received your answer. i enclosed also a letter or letters for trelawny, and i hope very much you have received them. whenever some time elapses without hearing from england, then i begin to grow miserable with fear. in a letter i received from mary in the autumn, she mentions the approaching return of the hunts from italy, and i console myself with believing that you are both so much taken up with them that you have delayed from day to day to write to me. be that as it may, i have never been in greater need of your letters than for these last two months, for i have been truly wretched. to convince you that i am not given to fret for trifles, i will tell you how they have been passed. i spent a very quiet time, if not a very agreeable one, until the th of august; then a french newspaper fell into my hands, in which it mentioned that trelawny had been dangerously wounded in a duel on the th of june. you who have known the misery of anxiety for the safety and wellbeing of those dear to us may imagine what i suffered. at last a letter from mary came, under date of th of july, not mentioning a word of this, and i allowed myself to hope that it was not true, because certainly she would have heard of it by the time she wrote. then, a week after, another newspaper mentioned his being recovered. this was scarcely passed when our two children fell ill; one got better, but the other, my pupil, a little girl of six years and a half old, died. i was truly wretched at her loss, and our whole house was a scene of sorrow and confusion, that can only happen in a savage country, where a disciplined temper is utterly unknown. we came to town, and directly the little boy fell sick again of a putrid fever, from which he was in imminent danger for some time. at last after nights and days of breathless anxiety he did recover. by the death of the little girl, i became of little or no use in the house, and the thought of again entering a new house, and having to learn new dispositions, was quite abhorrent to me. nothing is so cruel as to change from house to house and be perpetually surrounded by strangers; one feels so forlorn, so utterly alone, that i could not have the courage to begin the career over again; so i settled to remain in the same house, to continue the boy's english, and to give lessons out-of-doors. i do not know whether my plan will succeed yet, but, at any rate, i am bent upon trying it. it is not very agreeable to walk about in the snow and in a cold of twenty, sometimes thirty degrees; but anything is better than being a governess in the common run of moscow houses. but you have not yet heard my greatest sorrow, and which i think might well have been spared. i had one englishwoman here, to whom i was attached--a woman of the most generous heart, and whom misfortune, perhaps imprudence, had driven to russia. she thought with me that nothing can equal the misery of our situation, and accordingly she went last spring to odessa, hoping to find some means of establishing a boarding-house in order to have a home. if it succeeded, she was to have sent for me; but, however, she wrote to me that, after well considering everything, she found such a plan would not succeed, and that i might expect her shortly in moscow, to resume her old manner of life. i expected her arrival daily, and began to grow uneasy, and at length some one wrote to another acquaintance of hers here that she had destroyed herself. i, who knew her thoughts, have no doubt the horror of entering again as governess made her resolve upon this as the only means to escape it. you see, dearest jane, whether these last two months have been fruitful in woes. i cannot tell you what a consolation it would have been to have received a letter from you whilst i have been suffering under such extreme melancholy. the only amelioration in my present situation is that i can withdraw to my room and be much more alone than i could formerly, and this solitude is so friendly to my nature that it has been my only comfort. i have heard all about the change in my mother's situation, and am truly glad of it. i am sure she will be much better off than she was before. as for mary, her affairs seem inexplicable. nothing can ever persuade me that a will can dispose of estates which the maker of it never possessed. do clear up this mystery to me. what a strange way of thinking must that be which can rely on such a hope! yet my brother, my mother, and mary never cease telling me that one day i shall be free, and the state of doubt, the contradiction between their assertions and my intimate persuasion of the contrary, that awakens in my mind, is very painful. you are almost quite silent upon the subject, but i wish, my dear jane, that you would answer me the following questions. has any professional man ever been consulted on the subject? what is hogg's opinion? why in this particular case should the law be set aside, which says that no man can dispose of what he has never possessed? do have the goodness to ask these questions very clearly and to give me the answers, which no one has ever done yet. they simply tell me, "whitton has come forward," "whitton thinks the will valid," etc. etc., all of which cannot prove to me that it is so. i know you will excuse my giving you so much trouble, but really when you consider the painful uncertainty which hangs on my mind, you will think it very natural that i should wish to know the reasons of what is asserted to me. to say the truth, i daily grow more indifferent about the issue of the affair. the time is past when independence would have been an object of my desires, and i am now old enough to know that misery is the universal malady of the human race, and that there is no escaping from it, except by a philosophic indifference to all external circumstances, and by a disciplined mind completely absorbed in intellectual subjects. i fashion my life accordingly to this, and i often enjoy moments of serenest calm, which i owe to this way of thinking. do not mistake and think that i am indifferent to seeing you again; so far from this, i dream of this as one dreams of paradise after death, as a thing of another world, and not to be obtained here. it would be too much happiness for me to venture to hope it. i endeavour often to imagine the circle in which you live, but it is impossible, and i think it would be equally difficult for you to picture to yourself my mode of life. i often think what in the world mary or jane would do in the dull routine i tread; no talk of public affairs, no talk of books, no subject do i ever hear of except cards, eating, and the different manner of managing slaves. now and then some heroic young man devotes himself like a second marcus curtius to the public good, and, in order to give the good ladies of moscow something new to talk of, rouses them from their lethargic gossipings by getting himself shot in a duel; or some governess disputes with the mother of her pupils, and what they both said goes over the town. mary mentioned in her last that she thought it very likely you might both go to paris. i hope you may be there, for i am sure you would find the mode of life more cheerful than london. as i have told you so many of my sorrows, i must tell you the only good piece of news i have to communicate. i have lately made acquaintance with a german gentleman, who is a great resource to me. in such a country as russia, where nothing but ignorant people are to be met, a cultivated mind is the greatest treasure. his society recalls our former circle, for he is well versed in ancient and modern literature, and has the same noble, enlarged way of thinking. you may imagine how delighted he was to find me so different from everything around him, and capable of understanding what has been so long sealed up in his mind as treasures too precious to be wasted on the coarse russian soil. i talk to you thus freely about him, because i know you will not believe that i am in love, or that i have any other feeling than a most sincere and steady friendship for him. what you felt for shelley i feel for him. i feel it also my duty to tell you i have a real friend, because, in case of sickness or death happening to me, you would at least feel the consolation of knowing that i had not died in the hands of strangers. i talk to him very often of you and mary, until his desire to see you becomes quite a passion. he is, like all germans, very sentimental, a very sweet temper, and uncommonly generous. his attachment to me is extreme, but i have taken the very greatest care to explain to him that i cannot return it in the same degree. this does not make him unhappy, and therefore our friendship is of the utmost importance to both. i hope, my dear jane, that you will one day see him, and that both you and mary may find such an agreeable friend in him as i have had. i must now turn from this subject to speak of trelawny, which comes naturally into my mind with the idea of friendship; you cannot think how uneasy i am at not hearing from him. i am not afraid of his friendship growing cold for me, for i am sure he is unchangeable on that point, but i am afraid for his happiness and safety. is it true that his friend ulysses is dead? and if so, do pray write to him and prevail upon him to return. i should be at ease if i were to know him near you and mary. do think if you can do anything to draw him to you, my dearest jane. it would render me the happiest of human beings to know him in the hands of two such friends. if this could be, how hard i should work to gain a little independence here, and return perhaps in ten years and live with you. as yet i have done nothing, notwithstanding my utmost exertions, towards such a plan, but i am turning over every possible means in my brain for devising some scheme to get money, and perhaps i may. that is my reason for staying in russia, because there is no country so favourable to foreigners. pray, my dear jane, do write to me the moment you receive this, and answer very particularly the questions i have asked you. i have filled this whole letter, do you the same in your answer, and tell me every particular about percy, neddy, and dina; they little guess how warm a friend they have in this distant land, who thinks perpetually of them, and wishes for nothing so much as to see them and to play with them. give my love to mary. i will write soon again to her. in the meantime do some of you pray write. these horrid long winters, and the sky, which is from month to month of the darkest dun colour, need some news from you to render life supportable. kiss all the dear children for me, and tell me everything about them.--ever your affectionate friend, clare. pray beg mary to tell my mother that i wrote to her on or about the d of august; has she had this letter? and do tell me in yours what you know of her. i have just received your letter of the d of september, for which i thank you most cordially. thank heaven, you are all well! what you say of trelawny distresses me, as it seems to me that you are unwilling to say what you have heard, as it is of a disagreeable nature. you could do me a great benefit if you could make yourself mistress of the logier's system of teaching music, and communicate it to me in its smallest details. i am sure it would take here. do, pray, make serious inquiries of some one who has been taught by him. if any one would undertake to write me a very circumstantial account of his method, i would cheerfully pay them. it might be the means of my making a small independence here, and then i could join you soon in italy without fear for the future. do think seriously of this, my dear jane, and do not take it into your head that it is an idle project, for it would be of the greatest use to me. as to your admirer, i think he is mad, and his society, which would otherwise be a relief, must now be a burthen. you are very right in saying you only find solace in mental occupation; it is the only thing that saves me from such a depression of spirits taking hold of me when i have an instant to reflect upon the past that i am ready for any rash act; but i am occupied from in the morning until at night, and then am so worn out i have no time for thinking. once more farewell. my address is--chez monsieur lenhold, marchand de musique, a moscow. _the last man_, mrs. shelley's third novel, was published early in . it differed widely from its predecessors. _frankenstein_ was an allegorical romance; _valperga_ a historical novel, italian, of the fifteenth century; the plot of the one depends for its interest chiefly on incident, that of the other on the development of character, but both have a definite purpose in the inculcation of certain moral or philosophical truths. the story of _the last man_ is purely romantic and imaginary, probabilities and possibilities being entirely discarded. its supposed events take place in the twenty-first century of our era, when a devouring plague depopulates by degrees the whole world, until the narrator remains, to his own belief, the only surviving soul. at the book's conclusion he is left, in a little boat, coasting around the shores of the sea-washed countries of the mediterranean, with the forlorn hope of finding a companion solitary. he writes the history of his fate and that of his race on the leaves of trees,--supposed to be discovered and deciphered long afterwards in the sibyl's cave at baiae,--the world having been (as we must infer) repeopled by that time. it is not difficult to understand the kind of fascination this curious, mournful fancy had for mary in her solitude. much other matter is, of course, interwoven with the leading idea. the characteristics of the hero, adrian, his benevolence of heart, his winning aspect, his passion of justice and self-devotion, and his fervent faith in the possibilities of human nature and the future of the human race, are unmistakably sketched from shelley, and the portrait was at once recognised by shelley's earliest friend, the value of whose appreciation was, if anything, enhanced by the fact of the great unlikeness between his temperament and shelley's. t. j. hogg to mrs. shelley. york, _ d march _. my dear mary--as i am about to send a frank to dearest jane, i enclose a note to you to thank you for the pleasure you have given me. i read your _last man_ with an intense interest and not without tears. i began it at stamford yesterday morning as soon as it was light; i read on all day, even during the short time that was allowed us for dinner, and, if i had not finished it before it was dark, i verily believe that i should have bought a candle and held it in my hand in the mail. i think that it is a decided improvement, and that the character of adrian is most happy and most just.--i am, dear mary, yours ever faithfully, t. j. hogg. the appearance of mary's novel had for its practical consequence the stoppage of her supplies. the book was published anonymously, as "by the author of _frankenstein_," but mrs. shelley's name found its way into some newspaper notices, and this misdemeanour (for which she was not responsible) was promptly punished by the suspension of her allowance. peacock's good offices were again in request, to try and avert this misfortune, but it was not at once that he prevailed. he impressed on whitton (the solicitor) that the name did not appear in the title-page, and that its being brought forward at all was the fault of the publisher and quite contrary to the wishes of the writer, who, solitary and despondent, could not be reasonably condemned for employing her time according to her tastes and talents, with a view to bettering her condition. this whitton acknowledged, but said, "the name was the matter; it annoyed sir timothy." he would promise nothing, and peacock could only assure mary that he felt little doubt of her getting the money at last, though she might be punished by a short delay. it may be assumed that this turned out so. late in the year, however, another turn was given to mary's affairs by the death of shelley's eldest boy. _journal, september ._--charles shelley died during this month. percy is now shelley's only son. mary's son being now direct heir to the estates, and her own prospects being materially improved by this fact, she at once thought of others whom shelley had meant to benefit by his will, and who, she was resolved, should not be losers by his early death, if she lived to carry out for him his unwritten intentions. she did not think, when she wrote to leigh hunt the letter which follows, that nearly twenty years more would elapse before the will could take effect. mary shelley to leigh hunt. bartholomew place, kentish town, _ th october _. my dear hunt--is it, or is it not, right that these few lines should be addressed to you now? yet if the subject be one that you may judge better to have been deferred, set my _delay_ down to the account of over-zeal in writing to relieve you from a part of the care which i know is just now oppressing you; too happy i shall be if you permit any act of mine to have that effect. i told you long ago that our dear shelley intended on rewriting his will to have left you a legacy. i think the sum mentioned was £ . i trust that hereafter you will not refuse to consider me your debtor for this sum merely because i shall be bound to pay it you by the laws of honour instead of a legal obligation. you would, of course, have been better pleased to have received it immediately from dear shelley's bequest; but as it is well known that he intended to make such an one, it is in fact the same thing, and so i hope by you to be considered; besides, your kind heart will receive pleasure from the knowledge that you are bestowing on me the greatest pleasure i am capable of receiving. this is no resolution of to-day, but formed from the moment i knew my situation to be such as it is. i did not mention it, because it seemed almost like an empty vaunt to talk and resolve on things so far off. but futurity approaches, and a feeling haunts me as if this futurity were not far distant. i have spoken vaguely to you on this subject before, but now, you having had a recent disappointment, i have thought it as well to inform you in express terms of the meaning i attached to my expressions. i have as yet made no will, but in the meantime, if i should chance to die, this present writing may serve as a legal document to prove that i give and bequeath to you the sum of £ sterling. but i hope we shall both live, i to acknowledge dear shelley's intentions, you to honour me so far as to permit me to be their executor. i have mentioned this subject to no one, and do not intend; an act is not aided by words, especially an act unfulfilled, nor does this letter, methinks, require any answer, at least not till after the death of sir timothy shelley, when perhaps this explanation would have come with better grace; but i trust to your kindness to put my writing now to a good motive.--i am, my dear hunt, yours affectionately and obliged, mary wollstonecraft shelley. it was admitted by the shelley family that, percy being now the heir, some sort of settlement should be made for his mother, yet for some months longer nothing was done or arranged. apparently mary wrote to trelawny in low spirits, and to judge from his reply, her letter found him in little better plight than herself. trelawny to mrs. shelley. zante, _ th december _. dear mary--i received your letter the other day, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to hear from you, for however assured we are of a friend's durability of affection, it is soothing to be occasionally reassured of it. i sympathise in your distresses. i have mine, too, on the same score--a bountiful will and confined means are a curse, and often have i execrated my fortunes so ill corresponding with my wishes. but who can control his fate? old age and poverty is a frightful prospect; it makes the heart sick to contemplate, even in the mind's eye the reality would wring a generous nature till the heart burst. poverty is the vampyre which lives on human blood, and haunts its victims to destruction. hell can fable no torment exceeding it, and all the other calamities of human life--wars, pestilence, fire--cannot compete with it. it is the climax of human ill. you may be certain that i could not write thus on what i did not feel. i am glad you say you have better hopes; when things are at the worst, they say, there is hope. so do i hope. lord cochrane and his naval expedition having so long and unaccountably been kept back, delayed me here from month to month till the winter has definitively set in, and i am in no state for a winter's voyage; my body is no longer weatherproof. but i must as soon as possible get to england, though my residence there will be transitory. i shall then most probably hurry on to italy. the frigate from america is at last arrived in greece, but whether cochrane is on board of her i know not. with the loss of my friend odysseus, my enthusiasm has somewhat abated; besides that i could no longer act with the prospect of doing service, and toiling in vain is heartless work. but have i not done so all my life? the affairs of greece are so bad that little can be done to make them worse. if cochrane comes, and is supported with means sufficient, there is still room for hope. i am in too melancholy a mood to say more than that, whatever becomes of me.--i am always your true and affectionate e. trelawny. mary answered him at once, doing and saying, to console him, all that friendship could. kentish town, _ th march _. [direct me at w. godwin, esq., gower place, gower street, london.] my dear trelawny--your long silence had instilled into me the delusive hope that i should hear you sooner than from you. i have been silly enough sometimes to start at a knock,--at length your letter is come. [by] that indeed i entertain more reasonable hopes of seeing you. you will come--ah, indeed you must; if you are ever the kind-hearted being you were--you must come to be consoled by my sympathy, exhilarated by my encouragements, and made happy by my friendship. you are not happy! alas! who is that has a noble and generous nature? it is not only, my noble-hearted friend, that your will is bountiful and your means small,--were you richer you would still be tormented by ingratitude, caprice, and change. yet i say amen to all your anathema against poverty, it is beyond measure a torment and despair. i am poor, having once been richer; i live among the needy, and see only poverty around. i happen, as has always been my fate, to have formed intimate friendships with those who are great of soul, generous, and incapable of valuing money except for the good it may do--and these very people are all even poorer than myself, is it not hard? but turning to you who are dearest to me, who of all beings are most liberal, it makes me truly unhappy to find that you are hard pressed: do not talk of old age and poverty, both the one and the other are in truth far from you,--for the one it will be a miracle if you live to grow old,--this would appear a strange compliment if addressed to another, but you and i have too much of the pure spirit of fire in our souls to wish to live till the flickering beam waxes dim;--think then of the few present years only. i have no doubt you will do your fortunes great good by coming to this country. a too long absence destroys the interest that friends take, if they are only friends in the common acceptation of the word; and your relations ought to be reminded of you. the great fault to us in this country is its expensiveness, and the dreadful ills attendant here on poverty; elsewhere, though poor, you may live--here you are actually driven from life, and though a few might pity, none would help you were you absolutely starving. you say you shall stay here but a short time and then go to italy--alas! alas! it is impossible in a letter to communicate the exact state of one's feelings and affairs here--but there is a change at hand--i cannot guess whether for good or bad as far as regards me. this winter, whose extreme severity has carried off many old people, confined sir tim. for ten weeks by the gout--but he is recovered. all that time a settlement for me was delayed, although it was acknowledged that percy now being the heir, one ought to be made; at length after much parading, they have notified to me that i shall receive a magnificent £ a year, to be increased next year to £ . but then i am not permitted to leave this cloudy nook. my desire to get away is unchanged, and i used to look forward to your return as a period when i might contrive--but i fear there is no hope for me during sir t.'s life. he and his family are now at brighton. john shelley, dear s.'s brother, is about to marry, and talks of calling upon me. i am often led to reflect in life how people situated in a certain manner with regard to me might make my life less drear than it is--but it is always the case that the people that might--won't, and it is a very great mistake to fancy that they will. such thoughts make me anxious to draw tighter the cords of sympathy and friendship which are so much more real than those of the world's forming in the way of relationship or connection. from the ends of the world we were brought together to be friends till death; separated as we are, this tie still subsists. i do not wonder that you are out of heart concerning greece; the mismanagement here is not less than the misgovernment there, the discord the same, save that here ink is spilt instead of blood. lord cochrane alone can assist them--but without vessels or money how can he acquire sufficient power? at any rate except as the captain of a vessel i do not see what good you can do them. but the mischief is this,--that while some cold, unimpressive natures can go to a new country, reside among a few friends, enter into the interests of an intimate and live as a brother among them for a time, and then depart, leaving small trace, retaining none,--as if they had ascended from a bath, they change their garments and pass on;--while others of subtler nature receive into their very essences a part of those with whom they associate, and after a while they become enchained, either for better or worse, and during a series of years they bear the marks of change and attachment. these natures indeed are the purest and best, and of such are you, dear friend; having you once, i ever have you; losing you once, i have lost you for ever; a riddle this, but true. and so life passes, year is added to year, the word youth is becoming obsolete, while years bring me no change for the better. yet i said, change is at hand--i know it, though as yet i do not feel it--you will come, in the spring you will come and add fresh delight for me to the happy change from winter to summer. i cannot tell what else material is to change, but i feel sure the year will end differently from its beginning. jane is quite well, we talk continually of you, and expect you anxiously. her fortunes have been more shifting than mine, and they are about to conclude,--differently from mine,--but i leave her to say what she thinks best concerning herself, though probably she will defer the explanation until your arrival. she is my joy and consolation. i could never have survived my exile here but for her. her amiable temper, cheerfulness, and never ceasing sympathy are all so much necessary value for one wounded and lost as i. come, dear friend, again i read your melancholy sentences and i say, come! let us try if we can work out good from ill; if i may not be able to throw a ray of sunshine on your path, at least i will lead you as best i may through the gloom. believe me that all that belongs to you must be dear to me, and that i shall never forget all i owe to you. do you remember those pretty lines of burns?-- a monarch may forget his crown that on his head an hour hath been, a bridegroom may forget his bride who was his wedded wife yest'reen, a mother may forget her child that smiles so sweetly on her knee, but i'll remember thee, dear friend, and all that thou hast done for me. such feelings are not the growth of the moment. they must have lived for years--have flourished in smiles, and retained their freshness watered by tears; to feel them one must have sailed much of life's voyage together--have undergone the same perils, and sympathised in the same fears and griefs; such is our situation; and the heartfelt and deep-rooted sentiments fill my eyes with tears as i think of you, dear friend, we shall meet soon. adieu, m. s. ... i cannot close this letter without saying a word about dear hunt--yet that must be melancholy. to feed nine children is no small thing. his health has borne up pretty well hitherto, though his spirits sink. what is it in the soil of this green earth that is so ill adapted to the best of its sons? he speaks often of you with affection. to edward trelawny, esq., to the care of samuel barff, esq., zante, the ionian isles. seal--judgment of paris. endorsed--received th april . change was indeed at hand, though not of a kind that mary could have anticipated. the only event in prospect likely to affect her much was a step shortly to be taken by mrs. williams. that intended step, vaguely foreshadowed in jane's correspondence, aroused the liveliest curiosity in clare clairmont, as was natural. miss clairmont to mrs. williams. my dearest jane--if i have not written to you before, it is owing to low spirits. i have not been able to take the pen, because it would have been dipped in too black a melancholy. i am tired of being in trouble, particularly as it goes on augmenting every day. i have had a hard struggle with myself lately to get over the temptation i had to lay down the burthen at once, and be free as spirits are, and leave this horrid world behind me. in order to let you understand what now oppresses me, i must tell you my history since i came to moscow. i came here quite unknown. i was at first ill treated on that account, but i soon acquired a great reputation, because all my pupils made much more progress in whatever they undertook than those of other people. i had few acquaintances among the english; to these i had never mentioned a single circumstance of myself or fortunes, but took care, on the contrary, to appear content and happy, as if i had never known or seen any other society all my days. i sent you a letter by miss f., because i knew your name would excite no suspicions; but it seems my mother got hold of miss f., sought her out, and has thereby done me a most incalculable mischief. miss f. came back full of my story here, and though she is very friendly to me, yet others who are not so have already done me injury. the professor at the university here is a man of a good deal of talent, and was in close connection with lockhart, the son-in-law of sir walter scott, and all that party; he has a great deal of friendship for me, because, as he says, very truly, i am the only person here besides himself who knows how to speak english. he professes the most rigid principles, and is come to that age when it is useless to endeavour to change them. i, however, took care not to get upon the subject of principles, and so he was of infinite use to me both by counselling and by protecting me with the weight of his high approbation. you may imagine this man's horror when he heard who i was; that the charming miss clairmont, the model of good sense, accomplishments, and good taste, was brought, issued from the very den of freethinkers. i see that he is in a complete puzzle on my account; he cannot explain to himself how i can be so extremely delightful, and yet so detestable. the inveteracy of his objections is shaken. this, however, has not hindered him from doing me serious mischief. i was to have undertaken this winter the education of an only daughter, the child of a very rich family where the professor reigns despotic, because he always settles every little dispute with some unintelligible quotation or reference to a latin or greek author. i am extremely interested in the child, he used to say, and no one can give her the education she ought to have but miss clairmont. the father and the mother have been running after me these years to persuade me to enter when the child should be old enough. i consented, when now, all is broken off, because the scruples of my professor do not allow of it. god knows, he says, what godwinish principles she might not instil. you may, therefore, think how teased i have been; more so from the uncertainty of my position, as i do not know how far this may extend. if this is only the beginning, what may be the end? i am not angry with this man, he only acts according to his conscience; nor am i surprised. i shall never cease feeling and thinking that if i had my choice, i had rather a thousand times have a child of mine resigned to an early grave, and lost for ever to me, than have it brought up in principles i abhor. if you ask me what i shall do, i can only answer you as did the princess mentimiletto, when buried under the ruins of her villa by an earthquake, "i await my fate in silence." in the meantime, while the page of fate is unrolling, i feel a secret agitation which consumes me, the more so for being repressed. i am fallen again into a bad state of health, but this is habitual to me upon the recurrence of winter. what torments me the most is the restraint i am under of always appearing gay in society, which i am obliged to do to avoid their odious curiosity. farewell awhile dismay and terror, and let us turn to love and happiness. never was astonishment greater than mine on receiving your letter. i had somehow imagined to myself that you never would love again, and you may say what you like, dearest jane, you won't drive that out of my head. "blue bag" may be a friend to you, but he never can be a lover. a happy attachment that has seen its end leaves a void that nothing can fill up; therefore i counsel the timorous and the prudent to take the greatest care always to have an unhappy attachment, because with it you can veer about like a weathercock to every point of life. what would i not give to have an unhappy passion, for then one has full permission and a perfect excuse to fall into a happy one; one has something to expect, but a _happy passion_, like death, has _finis_ written in such large characters in its face there is no hoping for any possibility of a change. you will allow me to talk upon this subject, for i am unhappily the victim of a _happy passion_. i had one; like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting, and mine only lasted ten minutes, but these ten minutes have discomposed the rest of my life. the passion, god knows for what cause, from no faults of mine, however, disappeared, leaving no trace whatever behind it except my heart wasted and ruined as if it had been scorched by a thousand lightnings. you will therefore, i hope, excuse my not following the advice you give me in your last letter, of falling in love, and you will readily believe me when i tell you that i am not in love, as you suspected, with my german friend hermann. he went away last spring for five years to the country. i have a great friendship for him, because he has the most ardent love of all that is good and beautiful of any one i know. i feel interested for his happiness and welfare, but he is not the being who could make life feel less a burthen to me than it does. it would, however, seem that you are a little happier than you were, therefore i congratulate you on this change of life. i am delighted that you have some one to watch over you and guard you from the storms of life. do pray tell me blue bag's name, (for what is a man without a name?), or else i shall get into the habit of thinking of him as blue bag, and never be able to divest myself of this disagreeable association all my life. you say trelawny is coming home, but you have said so so long, i begin to doubt it. if he does come, how happy you will be to see him. happy girl! you have a great many happinesses. i have written to him many times, but he never answers my letters; i suppose he does not wish to keep up the correspondence, and so i have left off. if he comes home i am sure he will fall ill, because the change of climate is most pernicious to the health. the first winter i passed in russia i thought i should have died, but then a good deal was caused by extreme anxiety. so take care of trelawny, and do not let him get his feet wet. you ask me to tell you every particular of my way of life. for these last six months i have been tormented to death; i am shut up with five hateful children; they keep me in a fever from morning till night. if they fall into their father's or mother's way, and are troublesome, they are whipped; but the instant they are with me, which is pretty nearly all the day, they give way to all their violence and love of mischief, because they are not afraid of my mild disposition. they go on just like people in a public-house, abusing one another with the most horrid names and fighting; if i separate them, then they roll on the ground, shrieking that i have broken their arm, or pretend to fall into convulsions, and i am such a fool i am frightened. in short, i never saw the evil spirit so plainly developed. what is worse, i cannot seriously be angry with them, for i do not know how they can be otherwise with the education they receive. everything is a crime; they may neither jump, nor run, nor laugh. it is now two months they have never been out of the house, and the only thing they are indulged in is in eating, drinking, and sleeping, so that i look upon their defects as proceeding entirely from the pernicious lives they lead. this is a pretty just picture of all russian children, because the russians are as yet totally ignorant of anything like real education. you may, therefore, imagine what a life i have been leading. in the summer, and we had an italian one, i bore up very well, because we were often in the garden, but since the return of winter, which always makes me ill, and their added tiresomeness, i am quite overpowered. the whole winter long i have a fever, which comes on every evening, and prevents my sleeping the whole night; sometimes it leaves me for a fortnight, but then it begins again, but in summer i am as strong and healthy as possible. the approach of winter fills me with horror, because i know i have eight long months of suffering and sickness. the only amusement i have is sunday evening, to see miss f. and some others like her, and the only subject of conversation is to laugh at the russians, or dress. my god, what a life! but complaint is useless, and therefore i shall not indulge in it. i have said, so as those i love live, i will bear all without a murmur. if ever i am independent, i will instantly retire to some solitude; i will see no one, not even you nor mary, and there i will live until the horrible disgust i feel at all that is human be somewhat removed by quiet and retirement. my heart is too full of hatred to be fit for society in its present mood. i am very sorry for the death of little charles. the chances for succession are now so equally balanced--the life of an old man and the life of _one_ young child--that i confess i see less hope than ever of the will's taking effect. it is frightful for the despairing to have their hopes suspended thus upon a single hair. pray do not forget to write to me when trelawny is come. how glad i shall be to know he is in england, and yet how frightened for fear he should catch cold. i wish you would tell me how you occupy your days; at what hour you do this, and at what hour that. from till i teach my children, then we dine; at we rise from the table. they have half an hour's dawdling, for play it cannot be called, as they are in the drawing-room, and then they learn two hours more. at we drink tea, and then they go to bed, which is never over till , because all must have their hair curled, which takes up an enormous time. since i have written the first part of my letter i have thought over my affairs. i must go to petersburgh, because it is quite another town from moscow, and being so much more foreign in their manners and ways of thinking, i shall be less tormented. i have decided to go, therefore i wish you very much to endeavour to procure me letters of introduction. if trelawny comes home, beg him to do so for me, because, as he will be much in fashion, some of the numerous dear female friends he will instantly have will do it for him. if i could have a letter of recommendation, not a letter of introduction, to the english ambassador or his wife, i should be able to get over the difficulties which now beset my passage. do think of this, jane. my head is so completely giddy from worry and torment, that i am unable to think upon my own affairs; only this i know, that i am in a tottering situation. it is absolutely necessary that i should have letters of recommendation, and to people high in the world at petersburgh, because it is very common in russia for adventurers, such as opera dancers too old to dance any more, and milliners, and that class of women to come here. they are received with open arms by the russians, who are very hospitable, and then naturally they betray themselves by their atrocious conduct, and are thrown off; and i have known since i have been here several lamentable instances of this, and i shall be classed with these people if i cannot procure letters to people whose countenance and protection must refute the possibility of such a supposition. i must confess to you that my pride never could stand this, for these adventurers are such detestable people that i have the utmost horror of them. what a miserable imposture is life, that such as follow philosophy, nature and truth, should be classed with the very refuse of mankind; that people who ought to be cited as models of virtue and self-sacrifice should be trampled under foot with the dregs of vice. it was not thus in the time of the greeks; and this reflection makes me tired of life, for i might have been understood in the time of socrates, but never shall be by the moderns. for this reason i do not wish to live, as i cannot be understood; in order, therefore, not to be despised, i must renounce all worldly concerns whatever. i have long done so, and therefore you will not wonder that i have long since given my parting look to life. do not be surprised i am so dull; i am surrounded by difficulties which i am afraid i never shall get out of, and after so many years of trouble and anguish it is natural i should wish it were over. do not, my dearest jane, mention to my mother the harm her indiscretion has done, for though i shall frankly tell her of it, yet it would wound her if she were to know i had told you, and there is already so much pain in the world it is frightful to add ever so little to the stock. you can merely say i have asked for letters of introduction at petersburgh. from the time of her first arrival in england after edward's death, hogg had been jane williams' persistent, devoted, and long-suffering admirer. not many months after receiving clare's letter, she changed her name and her abode, and was thenceforward known as mrs. hogg. mary's familiar intercourse with her might, in any case, have been somewhat checked by this event, but such a change would have been a small matter compared to the bitter discovery she was soon to make, that, while accepting her affection, jane had never really cared for her; that her feeling had been of the most superficial sort. once independent of mary, and under other protection, she talked away for the benefit and amusement of other people,--talked of their past life, prating of her power over shelley and his devotion to her,--of mary's gloom during those sad first weeks at lerici,--intimating that jealousy of herself was the cause. stories which lost nothing in the telling, wherein jane williams figured as a good angel, while mary shelley was made to appear in an unfavourable or even an absurd light. mary had no suspicion, no foreboding of the mine that was preparing to explode under her feet. she sympathised in her friend's happiness, for she could not regard it but as happiness for one in jane's circumstances to be able to accept the love and protection of a devoted man. she herself could not do it, but she often felt a wish that she were differently constituted. she knew it was impossible; but no tinge of envy or bitterness coloured her words to trelawny when she wrote to tell him of jane's resolution. ... this is to be an eventful summer to us. janey is writing to you and will tell her own tale best. the person to whom she unites herself is one of my oldest friends, the early friend of my own shelley. it was he who chose to share the honour, as he generously termed it, of shelley's expulsion from oxford. (and yet he is unlike what you may conceive to be the ideal of the best friend of shelley.) he is a man of talent,--of wit,--he has sensibility and even romance in his disposition, but his exterior is composed and, at a superficial glance, cold. he has loved jane devotedly and ardently since she first arrived in england, almost five years ago. at first she was too faithfully attached to the memory of edward, nor was he exactly the being to satisfy her imagination; but his sincere and long-tried love has at last gained the day. ... nor will i fear for her in the risk she must run when she confides her future happiness to another's constancy and good principles. he is a man of honour, he longs for home, for domestic life, and he well knows that none could make such so happy as jane. he is liberal in his opinions, constant in his attachments, if she is happy with him now she will be always.... of course after all that has passed it is our wish that all this shall be as little talked of as possible, the obscurity in which we have lived favours this. we shall remove hence during the summer, for of course we shall still continue near each other. i, as ever, must derive my only pleasure and solace from her society. before the summer of was over the cloud burst. mary's journal in june is less mournful than usual. congenial society always had the power of cheering her and making her forget herself. and in her acquaintance with thomas moore she found a novelty which yet was akin to past enjoyment. _journal, june _ ( ).--i have just made acquaintance with tom moore. he reminds me delightfully of the past, and i like him much. there is something warm and genuine in his feelings and manner which is very attractive, and redeems him from the sin of worldliness with which he has been charged. _july ._--moore breakfasted with me on sunday. we talked of past times,--of shelley and lord byron. he was very agreeable, and i never felt myself so perfectly at my ease with any one. i do not know why this is; he seems to understand and to like me. this is a new and unexpected pleasure. i have been so long exiled from the style of society in which i spent the better part of my life; it is an evanescent pleasure, but i will enjoy it while i can. _july ._--moore has left town; his singing is something new and strange and beautiful. i have enjoyed his visits, and spent several happy hours in his society. that is much. _july ._--my friend has proved false and treacherous! miserable discovery. for four years i was devoted to her, and earned only ingratitude. not for worlds would i attempt to transfer the deathly blackness of my meditations to these pages. let no trace remain save the deep, bleeding, hidden wound of my lost heart of such a tale of horror and despair. writing, study, quiet, such remedies i must seek. what deadly cold flows through my veins! my head weighed down; my limbs sink under me. i start at every sound as the messenger of fresh misery, and despair invests my soul with trembling horror. _october ._--quanto bene mi rammento sette anni fa, in questa medesima stagione i pensieri, i sentimenti del mio cuore! allora cominciai valperga--allora sola col mio bene fui felice. allora le nuvole furono spinte dal furioso vento davanti alla luna, nuvole magnifiche, che in forme grandiose e bianche parevano stabili quanto le montagne e sotto la tirannia del vento si mostravano piu fragili che un velo di seta minutissima, scendeva allor la pioggia, gli albori si spogliavano. autunno bello fosti allora, ed ora bello terribile, malinconico ci sei, ed io, dove sono? by those who hold their hearts safe at home in their own keeping, these little breezes are called "storms in tea-cups." the matter was of no importance to any one but mary. the aspect of her outward life was unchanged by this heart-shipwreck over which the world's waves closed and left no sign. chapter xxi july -august many weary months passed away. mary said nothing to the shallow-hearted woman who had so grievously injured her. jane had been so dear to her, and was so inextricably bound up with a beloved past, that she shrank from disturbing the superficial friendship which she nevertheless knew to be hollow. to one of mary's temperament there was actual danger in living alone with such a sorrow, and it was a happy thing when, in august, an unforeseen distraction occurred to compel her thoughts into a new channel. she received from an unknown correspondent a letter, resulting in an acquaintance which, though it passed out of her life without leaving any permanent mark, was, at the time, not unfruitful of interest. the letter was as follows-- frances wright to mrs. shelley. paris, _ d august _. i shall preface this letter with no apology; the motive which dictates it will furnish, as i trust, a sufficient introduction both for it and its writer. as the daughter of your father and mother (known to me only by their works and opinions), as the friend and companion of a man distinguished during life, and preserved in the remembrance of the public as one distinguished not by genius merely, but, as i imagine, by the strength of his opinions and his fearlessness in their expression;--viewed only in these relations you would be to me an object of interest and--permit the word, for i use it in no vulgar sense--of curiosity. but i have heard (vaguely indeed, for i have not even the advantage of knowing one who claims your personal acquaintance, nor have i, in my active pursuits and engagements in distant countries, had occasion to peruse your works), yet i have heard, or read, or both, that which has fostered the belief that you share at once the sentiments and talents of those from whom you drew your being. if you possess the opinions of your father and the generous feelings of your mother, i feel that i could travel far to see you. it is rare in this world, especially in our sex, to meet with those opinions united with those feelings, and with the manners and disposition calculated to command respect and conciliate affection. it is so rare, that to obtain the knowledge of such might well authorise a more abrupt intrusion than one by letter; but, pledged as i am to the cause of what appears to me moral truth and moral liberty, that i (should) neglect any means for discovering a real friend of that cause, i were almost failing to a duty. in thus addressing my inquiries respecting you to yourself, it were perhaps fitting that i should enter into some explanations respecting my own views and the objects which have fixed my attention. i conceive, however, the very motive of this letter as herein explained, with the printed paper i shall enclose with it, will supply a sufficient assurance of the heterodoxy of my opinions and the nature of my exertions for their support and furtherance. it will be necessary to explain, however, what will strike you but indistinctly in the deed of nashoba, that the object of the experiment has in view an association based on those principles of moral liberty and equality heretofore advocated by your father. that these principles form its base and its cement, and that while we endeavour to undermine the slavery of colour existing in the north american republic, we essay equally to destroy the slavery of mind now reigning there as in other countries. with one nation we find the aristocracy of colour, with another that of rank, with all perhaps those of wealth, instruction, and sex. our circle already comprises a few united co-operators, whose choice of associates will be guided by their moral fitness only; saving that, for the protection and support of all, each must be fitted to exercise some useful employment, or to supply dollars per annum as an equivalent for their support. the present generation will in all probability supply but a limited number of individuals suited in opinion and disposition to such a state of society; but that that number, however limited, may best find their happiness and best exercise their utility by uniting their interests, their society, and their talents, i feel a conviction. in this conviction i have devoted my time and fortune to laying the foundations of an establishment where affection shall form the only marriage, kind feeling and kind action the only religion, respect for the feelings and liberties of others to the only restraint, and union of interest the bond of peace and security. with the protection of the negro in view, whose cruel sufferings and degradation had attracted my special sympathy, it was necessary to seek the land of his bondage, to study his condition and imagine a means for effecting his liberation; with the emancipation of the human mind in view, from the shackles of moral and religious superstition, it was necessary to seek a country where political institutions should allow free scope for experiment; and with a practice in view in opposition to all the laws of public opinion, it was necessary to seek the seclusion of a new country, and build up a city of refuge in the wilderness itself. youth, a good constitution, and a fixed purpose enabled me to surmount the fatigues, difficulties, and privations of the necessary journeys, and the first opening of a settlement in the american forests. fifteen months have placed the establishment in a fair way of progress, in the hands of united and firm associates, comprising a family of colour from new orleans. as might be expected, my health gave way under the continued fatigues of mind and body [incidental] to the first twelvemonth. a brain fever, followed by a variety of sufferings, seemed to point to a sea-voyage as the only chance of recovery. accordingly i left nashoba in may last, was placed on board a steamboat on the mississippi for orleans, then on board a vessel for havre, and landed in fifty days almost restored to health. i am now in an advanced state of convalescence, but still obliged to avoid fatigue either bodily or mental. the approaching marriage of a dear friend also retains me in paris, and as i shall return by way of new orleans to my forest home in the month of november, or december, i do not expect to visit london. the bearer of this letter, should he, as i trust, be able to deliver it, will be able to furnish any intelligence you may desire respecting nashoba and its inhabitants. in the name of robert dale owen you will recognise one of the trustees, and a son of robert owen of lanark. whatever be the fate of this letter, i wish to convey to mary wollstonecraft godwin shelley my respect and admiration of those from whom she holds those names, and my fond desire to connect her with them in my esteem, and in the knowledge of mutual sympathy to sign myself her friend, frances wright. my address while in europe--aux soins du general lafayette, rue d'anjou, and st. honoré, à paris. the bearer of this letter would seem to have been robert dale owen himself. his name must have recalled to mary's mind the letter she had received at geneva, long, long ago, from poor fanny, describing and commenting on the schemes for social regeneration of his father, robert owen. mary shelley's feeling towards frances wright's schemes in may have been accurately expressed by fanny godwin's words in . ... "the outline of his plan is this: 'that no human being shall work more than two or three hours every day; that they shall be all equal; that no one shall dress but after the plainest and simplest manner; that they be allowed to follow any religion, or no religion, as they please; and that their studies shall be mechanics and chemistry.' i hate and am sick at heart at the misery i see my fellow-beings suffering, but i own i should not like to live to see the extinction of all genius, talent, and elevated generous feeling in great britain, which i conceive to be the natural consequence of mr. owen's plan." but any plan for human improvement, any unselfish effort to promote the common weal, commanded the sure sympathy of shelley's widow and mary wollstonecraft's daughter, whether her judgment accorded perfectly or not with that of its promoters. she responded warmly to the letter of her correspondent, who wrote back in almost rapturous terms-- frances wright to mary shelley. paris, _ th september _. my friend, my dear friend--how sweet are the sentiments with which i write that sacred word--so often prostituted, so seldom bestowed with the glow of satisfaction and delight with which i now employ it! most surely will i go to england, most surely to brighton, to wheresoever you may be. the fond belief of my heart is realised, and more than realised. you are the daughter of your mother. i opened your letter with some trepidation, and perused it with more emotion than now suits my shattered nerves. i have read it again and again, and acknowledge it before i sleep. most fully, most deeply does my heart render back the sympathy yours gives. it fills up the sad history you have sketched of blighted affections and ruined hopes. i too have suffered, and we must have done so perhaps to feel for the suffering. we must have loved and mourned, and felt the chill of disappointment, and sighed over the moral blank of a heartless world ere we can be moved to sympathy for calamity, or roused to attempt its alleviation. the curiosity you express shall be most willingly answered in (as i trust) our approaching meeting. you will see then that i have greatly pitied and greatly dared, only because i have greatly suffered and widely observed. i have sometimes feared lest too early affliction and too frequent disappointment had blunted my sensibilities, when a _rencontre_ with some one of the rare beings dropt amid the dull multitude, like oases in the desert, has refreshed my better feelings, and reconciled me with others and with myself. that the child of your parents should be one among these sweet visitants is greatly soothing and greatly inspiring. but have we only discovered each other to lament that we are not united? i cannot, will not think it. when we meet,--and meet we must, and i hope soon,--how eagerly, and yet tremblingly, shall i inquire into all the circumstances likely to favour an approach in our destinies. i am now on the eve of separation from a beloved friend, whom marriage is about to remove to germany, while i run back to my forests. and i must return without a bosom intimate? yes; our little circle has mind, has heart, has right opinions, right feelings, co-operates in an experiment having in view human happiness, yet i do want one of my own sex to commune with, and sometimes to lean upon in all the confidence of equality of friendship. you see i am not so disinterested as you suppose. delightful indeed it is to aid the progress of human improvement, and sweet is the peace we derive from aiding the happiness of others. but still the heart craves something more ere it can say--i am satisfied. i must tell, not write, of the hopes of nashoba, and of all your sympathising heart wishes to hear. on the th instant i shall be in london, where i must pass some days with a friend about to sail for madeira. then, unless you should come to london, i will seek you at brighton, arundel, anywhere you may name. let me find directions from you. i will not say, use no ceremony with me--none can ever enter between us. our intercourse begins in the confidence, if not in the fulness of friendship. i have not seen you, and yet my heart loves you. i cannot take brighton in my way; my sweet friend, julia garnett, detaining me here until the latest moment, which may admit of my reaching london on the th. i must not see you in passing. however short our meeting, it must have some repose in it. the feelings which draw me towards you have in them i know not what of respect, of pitying sympathy, of expectation, and of tenderness. they must steal some quiet undivided hours from the short space i have yet to pass in europe. tell me when they shall be, and where. i expect to sail for america with mr. owen and his family early in november, and may leave london to visit a maternal friend in the north of england towards the th of october. direct to me to the care of mr. robert bayley, basinghall street, london. permit me the assurance of my respect and affection, and accord me the title, as i feel the sentiments, of a friend, frances wright. circumstances conspired to postpone the desired meeting for some weeks, but the following extract from another letter of fanny wright's shows how friendly was the correspondence. yes, i do "understand the happiness flowing from confidence and entire sympathy, independent of worldly circumstances." i know the latter compared to the former are nothing. a delicate nursling of european luxury and aristocracy, i thought and felt for myself, and for martyrised humankind, and have preferred all hazards, all privations in the forests of the new world to the dear-bought comforts of miscalled civilisation. i have made the hard earth my bed, the saddle of my horse my pillow, and have staked my life and fortune on an experiment having in view moral liberty and human improvement. many of course think me mad, and if to be mad mean to be one of a minority, i am so, and very mad indeed, for our minority is very small. should that few succeed in mastering the first difficulties, weaker spirits, though often not less amiable, may carry forward the good work. but the fewer we are who now think alike, the more we are of value to each other. to know you, therefore, is a strong desire of my heart, and all things consistent with my engagements (which i may call duties, since they are connected with the work i have in hand) will i do to facilitate our meeting. soon after this mary made frances wright's acquaintance, and heard from herself all the story of her stirring life. she was not of american, but of scottish birth (dundee), and had been very early left an orphan. her father had been a man of great ability and culture, of advanced liberal opinions, and independent fortune. fanny had been educated in england by a maternal aunt, and in , when twenty-three years of age, had gone with her younger sister to the united states. since that time her life had been as adventurous as it was independent. enthusiastic, original, and handsome, she found friends and adherents wherever she went. two years she spent in the states, where she found sympathy and stimulus for her speculative energies, and free scope for her untried powers. she had written a tragedy, forcible and effective, which was published at philadelphia and acted at new york. after that she had been three years in paris, where she enjoyed the friendship and sympathy of lafayette and other liberal leaders. in she was once more in america, fired with the idea of solving the slavery question. she purchased a tract of land on the nashoba river (tennessee), and settled negroes there, assuming, in her impetuosity, that to convert slaves into freemen it was only necessary to remove their fetters, and that they would soon work out their liberty. she found out her error. in shelley's words, slightly varied, "how should slaves produce anything but idleness, even as the seed produces the plant?" the slaves, freed from the lash, remained slaves as before, only they did very little work. fanny wright was disappointed; but, as her letters plainly show, her schemes went much farther than negro emancipation; she aimed at nothing short of a complete social reconstruction, to be illustrated on a small scale at the nashoba settlement. overwork, exposure to the sun, and continuous excitement, told, at last, on her constitution. as she informed mrs. shelley in her first letter, she had broken down with brain fever, and, when convalescent, had been ordered to europe. in mary wollstonecraft's daughter she found a friend, hardly an adherent. fundamentally, their principles were alike, but their natures were differently attuned. neither mentally nor physically had mary shelley the temperament of a revolutionary innovator. she had plenty of moral courage, but she was too scrupulous, too reflective, and too tender. the cause of liberty was sacred to her, so long as it bore the fruit of justice, self-sacrifice, fidelity to duty. fanny wright worshipped liberty for its own sake, confident that every other good would follow it, with the generous, unpractical certainty of conviction that proceeds as much from a sanguine disposition as from a set of opinions. experience and disappointment have little power over these temperaments, and so they never grow old--or prudent. it may well be that all the ideas, all the great changes, in which is summed up the history of progress, have originated with natures like these. they are the salt of the earth; but man cannot live by salt alone, and their ideas are carried out for them in detail, and the actual everyday work of the world is unconsciously accomplished, by those who, having put their hand to the plough, do not look back, nor yet far forward. still, it was a remarkable meeting, that of these two women. fanny wright was a person who, once seen, was not easily forgotten. "she was like minerva;" such is the recollection of mrs. shelley's son. mrs. trollope has described her personal appearance when, three years later, she was creating a great sensation by lecturing in the chief american cities-- she came on the stage surrounded by a bodyguard of quaker ladies in the full costume of their sect.... her tall and majestic figure, the deep and almost solemn expression of her eyes, the simple contour of her finely-formed head, her garment of plain white muslin, which hung around her in folds that recalled the drapery of a grecian statue,--all contributed to produce an effect unlike anything that i had ever seen before, or ever expect to see again. on the other hand the following is robert dale owen's sketch of mary shelley. ... in person she was of middle height and graceful figure. her face, though not regularly beautiful, was comely and spiritual, of winning expression, and with a look of inborn refinement as well as culture. it had a touch of sadness when at rest. she impressed me as a person of warm social feelings, dependent for happiness on living encouragement, needing a guiding and sustaining hand. it is certain that mary felt a warm interest in her new friend. she made her acquainted with godwin, and lost no opportunity of seeing and communing with her during her stay in england; nor did they part till fanny wright was actually on board ship. "dear love," wrote fanny, from torbay, "how your figure lives in my mind's eye as i saw you borne away from me till i lost sight of your little back among the shipping!" from nashoba, a few months later, she addressed another letter to mary, which, though slightly out of place, is given here. there had, apparently, been some passing discord between her and the founder of the "new harmony" colony.[ ] frances wright to mrs. shelley. nashoba, _ th march _. very, very welcome was your letter of the th november, which awaited my return from a little excursion down the mississippi, undertaken soon after my arrival. bless your sweet kind heart, my sweet mary! your little enclosure, together with a little billet brought me by dale, and which came to the address of mr. trollope's chambers just as he left london, is all the news i have yet received of or from our knight-errant. once among greeks and turks, correspondence must be pretty much out of the question, so unless he address to you some more french compliments from toulon, i shall not look to hear of him for some months. ay, truly, they are incomprehensible animals, these same _soi-disant_ lords of this poor planet! like their old progenitor, father adam, they walk about boasting of their wisdom, strength, and sovereignty, while they have not sense so much as to swallow an apple without the aid of an eve to put it down their throats. i thank thee for thine attempt to cram caution and wisdom into the cranium of my wandering friend. thy good offices may afford a chance for his bringing his head on his shoulders to these forests, which otherwise would certainly be left on the shores of the euxine, on the top of caucasus, or at the sources of the nile. i wrote thee hastily of my arrival and all our wellbeing in my last, and of dale's _amende honorable_, and of fanny's departure up the western waters, nor have i now leisure for details too tedious for the pen, though so short to give by the tongue. dale arrived, his sweet kind heart all unthawed, and truly when he left us for harmony i think the very last thin flake of scotch ice had melted from him. camilla and whitby leave me also in a few days for harmony, from whence the latter will probably travel back with dale, and whitby go up the ohio to engage a mechanic for the building of our houses. i hoped to have sent you, with this, the last communication of our little knot of trustees, in which we have stated the modification of our plan which we have found it advisable to adopt, with the reasons of the same. we have not been able to get it printed at memphis, so dale is to have it thrown off at harmony, from whence you will receive it. the substance of it is, that we have reduced our co-operation to a simple association, each throwing in from our private funds dollars per annum for the expenses of the table, including those of the cook, whom we hire from the institution, she being one of the slaves gifted to it. all other expenses regard us individually, and need not amount to dollars more. also, each of us builds his house or room, the cost of which, simple furniture included, does not surpass dollars. the property of the trust will stand thus free of all burden whatsoever, to be devoted to the foundation of a school, in which we would fain attempt a thorough co-operative education, looking only to the next generation to effect what we in vain attempted ourselves. you see that the change consists in demanding as a requisite for admission an independent income of dollars, instead of receiving labour as an equivalent. yes, dear mary, i do find the quiet of these forests and our ill-fenced cabins of rough logs more soothing to the spirit, and now no less suited to the body than the warm luxurious houses of european society. yet that it would be so with you, or to any less broken in by enthusiastic devotion to human reform and mental liberty than our little knot of associates, i cannot judge. i now almost forget the extent of the change made in the last few years in my habits, yet more than in my views and feelings; but when i recall it, i sometimes doubt if many could imitate it without feeling the sacrifices almost equal to the gains; to me sacrifices are nothing. i have not felt them as such, and now forget that there were any made. farewell, dear mary. recall me affectionately and respectfully to the memory of your father. you will wear me in your own, i know. camilla sends her affectionate wishes.--yours fondly, f. wright. it was probably in connection with fanny wright's visit that mrs. shelley had, in october of , contemplated the possibility of a flying trip to the continent; an idea which alarmed her father (for his own sake) not a little, although she had taken care to assure him of her intended speedy return. he was in as bad a way, financially, and as dependent as ever, but proud of the fact that he kept up his good spirits through it all, and sorry for mary that she could not say as much. godwin to mary. gower place, _ th october _. dear mary--we received your letter yesterday, and i sent you the _examiner_. nothing on earth, as you may perceive, could have induced me to break silence respecting my circumstances, short of your letter of the st instant, announcing a trip to the continent, without the least hint when you should return. it seems to me so contrary to the course of nature that a father should look for supplies to his daughter, that it is painful to me at any time to think of it. you say that [as] you had announced some time ago that you must be in town in november, i should have inferred that that was irreversible. all i can answer is, that i did not so infer. i called yesterday, agreeably to your suggestion, upon young evans; but all i got from him was, that the thing was quite out of his way; to which he added (and i reproved him for it accordingly) that we had better go to the jews. i called on hodgetts on the th of september, and asked him to lend me £ or £ . he said, "would a month hence do? he could then furnish £ ." last saturday he supped here, and brought me £ , adding that was all he could do. i have heard nothing either from peacock or from your anonymous friend. i wrote to you, of course, at brighton on saturday (before supper-time), which letter i suppose you have received. how differently you and i are organised. in my seventy-second year i am all cheerfulness, and never anticipate the evil day (with distressing feelings) till to do so is absolutely unavoidable. would to god you were my daughter in all but my poverty! but i am afraid you are a wollstonecraft. we are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life. but my present cheerfulness is greatly owing to _cromwell_, and the nature of my occupation, which gives me an object _omnium horarum_--a stream for ever running, and for ever new. do you remember denham's verses on the thames at cooper's hill?-- oh! could i flow like thee, and make thy stream my great example, as it is my theme! though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull; strong, without rage; without o'erflowing, full. though i cannot attain this in my _commonwealth_, you, perhaps, may in your _warbeck_. may blessings shower on you as fast as the perpendicular rain at this moment falls by my window! prays your affectionate father, william godwin. during most of this autumn mrs. shelley and her boy were staying at arundel, in sussex, with, or in the near neighbourhood of her friends, the miss robinsons. there were several sisters, to one of whom, julia, mrs. shelley was much attached. while at arundel another letter reached her from trelawny, who was contemplating the possibility of a return to england. trelawny to mrs. shelley. zante, ionian islands, _ th october _. dearest mary--i received your letter dated july, and replied to both you and hunt; but i was then at cerigo, and as the communication of the islands is carried on by a succession of boats, letters are sometimes lost. i have now your letter from arundel, th september. it gives me pleasure to hear your anxieties as to money matters are at an end; it is one weighty misery off your heart. you err most egregiously if you think i am occupied with women or intrigues, or that my time passes pleasantly. the reverse of all this is the case; neither women nor amusements of any sort occupy my time, and a sadder or more accursed kind of existence i never in all my experience of life endured, or, i think, fell to the lot of human being. i have been detained here for these last ten months by a villainous law-suit, which may yet endure some months longer, and then i shall return to you as the same unconnected, lone, and wandering vagabond you first knew me. i have suffered a continual succession of fevers during the summer; at present they have discontinued their attack; but they have, added to what i suffered in greece, cut me damnably, and i fancy now i must look like an old patriarch who has outlived his generation. i cannot tell whether to congratulate jane or not; the foundation she has built on for happiness implies neither stability nor permanent security; for a summer bower 'tis well enough to beguile away the summer months, but for the winter of life i, for my part, should like something more durable than a fabric made up of vows and promises. nor can i say whether it would be wise or beneficial to either should clare consent to reside with you in england; in any other country it might be desirable, but in england it is questionable. the only motive which has deterred me from writing to jane and clare is that i have been long sick and ill at ease, daily anticipating my return to the continent, and concocting plans whereby i might meet you all, for one hour after long absence is worth a thousand letters. and as to my heart, it is pretty much as you left it; no new impressions have been made on it or earlier affections erased. as we advance in the stage of life we look back with deeper recollections from where we first started; at least, i find it so. since the death of odysseus, for whom i had the sincerest friendship, i have felt no private interest for any individual in this country. the egyptian fleet, and part of the turkish, amounting to some hundred sail, including transports, have been totally destroyed by the united squadron of england, france, and russia in the harbour of navarino; so we soon expect to see a portion of greece wrested from the turks, and something definitely arranged for the benefit of the greeks.--dearest mary, i am ever your edward trelawny. to jane and clare say all that is affectionate from me, and forget not leigh hunt and his mary ann. _i_ would write them all, but i am sick at heart. all these months the gnawing sorrow of her friend's faithlessness lay like an ambush at mary's heart. in responding to fanny wright's overtures of friendship she had sought a distraction from the bitter thoughts and deep dejection which had been mainly instrumental in driving her from town. but in vain, like the hunted hare, she buried her head and hoped to be forgotten. slanderous gossip advances like a prairie-fire, laying everything waste, and defying all attempts to stop or extinguish it. jane williams' stories were repeated, and, very likely, improved upon. they got known in a certain set. mary shelley might still have chosen not to hear or not to notice, had she been allowed. but who may ignore such things in peace? as the french dramatist says in _nos intimes_, "_les amis sont toujours là_." _les amis_ are there to enlighten you--if you are ignorant--as to your enemies in disguise, to save you from illusions, and to point out to you--should you forget it--the duty of upholding, at any sacrifice, your own interests and your own dignity. _journal, february , ._--moore is in town. by his advice i disclosed my discoveries to jane. how strangely are we made! she is horror-struck and miserable at losing my friendship; and yet how unpardonably she trifled with my feelings, and made me all falsely a fable to others. the visit of moore has been an agreeable variety to my monotonous life. i see few people--lord dillon, g. paul, the robinsons, _voilà tout_. mrs. shelley to mrs. hogg. since monday i have been ceaselessly occupied by the scene begun and interrupted, which filled me with a pain that now thrills me as i revert to it. i then strove to speak, but your tears overcame me, whilst the struggle gave me an appearance of coldness. if i revert to my devotion to you, it is to prove that no worldly motives could estrange me from the partner of my miseries. often, having you at kentish town, i have wept from the overflow of affection; often thanked god who had given you to me. could any but yourself have destroyed such engrossing and passionate love? and what are the consequences of the change? when first i heard that you did not love me, every hope of my life deserted me. the depression i sank under, and to which i am now a prey, undermines my health. how many hours this dreary winter i have paced my solitary room, driven nearly to madness, and i could not expel from my mind the memories of harrowing import that one after another intruded themselves! it was not long ago that, eagerly desiring death, though death should only be oblivion, i thought that how to purchase oblivion of what was revealed to me last july, a tortuous death would be a bed of roses. * * * * * do not ask me, i beseech you, a detail of the revelations made to me. some of those most painful you made to several; others, of less import, but which tended more, perhaps, than the more important to show that you loved me not, were made only to two. i could not write of these, far less speak of them. if any doubt remain on your mind as to what i know, write to isabel,[ ] and she will inform you of the extent of her communication to me. i have been an altered being since then; long i thought that almost a deathblow was given, so heavily and unremittingly did the thought press on and sting me; but one lives on through all to be a wreck. though i was conscious that, having spoken of me as you did, you could not love me, i could not easily detach myself from the atmosphere of light and beauty that ever surrounded you. now i tried to keep you, feeling the while that i had lost you; but you penetrated the change, and i owe it to you not to disguise the cause. what will become of us, my poor girl? * * * * * this explains my estrangement. while with you i was solely occupied by endeavouring not to think or feel, for had i done either i should not have been so calm as i daresay i appeared.... nothing but my father could have drawn me to town again; his claims only prevent me now from burying myself in the country. i have known no peace since july. i never expect to know it again. is it not best, then, that you forget the unhappy m. w. s.? we hear no more of this painful episode. it did not put a stop to jane's intercourse with mary. friendship, in the old sense, could never be. but, to the end of mary's life, her letters show the tenderness, the half-maternal solicitude she ever felt for the companion and sharer of her deepest affliction. another distraction came to her now in the shape of an invitation to paris, which she accepted, although she was feeling far from well, a fact which she attributed to depression of spirits, but which proved to have quite another cause. _journal, april _ ( ).--i depart for paris, sick at heart, yet pining to see my friend (julia robinson). a lady, an intimate friend of hers at this time, who, in a little book called _traits of character_, has given a very interesting (though, in some details, inaccurate) sketch of mary shelley, says that her visit to paris was eagerly looked forward to by many. "honour to the authoress and admiration for the woman awaited her." but, directly after her arrival, she was prostrated on a sick--it was feared, death-bed. her journal, three months later, tells the sequel. _journal, july , hastings._--there was a reason for my depression: i was sickening of the small-pox. i was confined to my bed the moment i arrived in paris. the nature of my disorder was concealed from me till my convalescence, and i am so easily duped. health, buoyant and bright, succeeded to my illness. the parisians were very amiable, and, a monster to look at as i was, i tried to be agreeable, to compensate to them. the same authoress asserts that neither when she recovered nor ever after was she in appearance the mary shelley of the past. she was not scarred by the disease ("which in its natural form she had had in childhood"), but the pearly delicacy and transparency of her skin and the brightness and luxuriance of her soft hair were grievously dimmed. she bore this trial to womanly vanity well and bravely, for she had that within which passeth show--high intellectual endowments, and, better still, a true, loving, faithful heart. the external effects of her illness must, to a great degree, have disappeared in course of time, for those who never knew her till some twenty years later than this revert to their first impression of her in words almost identical with those used by christy baxter when, at ninety years of age, she described mary godwin at fifteen as "white, bright, and clear." if, however, she had any womanly vanity at all, it must have been a trial to her that, just now, her old friend trelawny should return for a few months to england. she did not see him till november, when clare also arrived, on a flying visit to her native land. but, before their meeting, she had received some characteristic letters from trelawny. trelawny to mrs. shelley. southampton, _ th july _. dear mary--my moving about and having had much to do must be my excuse for not writing as often as i should do. that it is but an excuse i allow; the truth would be better, but who nowadays ever thinks of speaking truth? the true reason, then, is that i am getting old, and writing has become irksome. you cannot plead either, so write on, dear mary. i love you sincerely, no one better. time has not quenched the fire of my nature; my feelings and passions burn fierce as ever, and will till they have consumed me. i wear the burnished livery of the sun. to whom am i a neighbour? and near whom? i dwell amongst tame and civilised human beings, with somewhat the same feelings as we may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wilderness, he is tortured into domestic intercourse with what shakespeare calls "forked animals," the most abhorrent to his nature. you see by this how little my real nature is altered, but now to reply to yours. i cannot decidedly say or fix a period of our meeting. it shall be soon, if you stay there, at hastings; but i have business on hand i wish to conclude, and now that i can see you when i determine to do so, i, as you see, postpone the engagement because it is within my grasp. such is the perverseness of human nature! nevertheless, i will write, and i pray you to do so likewise. you are my dear and long true friend, and as such i love you.--yours, dear, trelawny. i shall remain ten or twelve days here, so address southampton; it is enough. trelawny to mrs. shelley. trewithen, _september _. dear mary--i really do not know why i am everlastingly boring you with letters. perhaps it is to prevent you forgetting me; or to prove to you that i do not forget you; or i like it, which is a woman's reason.... how is jane (hogg)? do remember me kindly to her. i hope you are friends, and that i shall see her in town. i have no right to be discontented or fastidious when she is not. i trust she is contented with her lot; if she is, she has an advantage over most of us. death and time have made sad havoc amongst my old friends here; they are never idle, and yet we go on as if they concerned us not, and thus dream our lives away till we wake no more, and then our bodies are thrown into a hole in the earth, like a dead dog's, that infects the atmosphere, and the void is filled up, and we are forgotten. can such things be, and overcome us like a summer cloud, without our special wonder?... trelawny's visit to england was of short duration. before the end of the next february ( ) he was in florence, overflowing with new plans, and, as usual, imparting them eagerly, certain of sympathy, to mrs. shelley. his renewed intercourse with her had led to no diminution of friendship. he may have found her even more attractive than when she was younger; more equable in spirits, more lenient in her judgments, her whole disposition mellowed and ripened in the stern school of adversity. their correspondence, which for two or three years was very frequent, opened, however, with a difference of opinion. trelawny was ambitious of writing shelley's biography, and wanted mary to help him by giving him the facts for it. trelawny to mrs. shelley. poste restante, florence, _ th march _. dear mary--i arrived here some sixteen or seventeen days back. i travelled in a very leisurely way; whilst on the road i used expedition, but i stayed at lyons, turin, genoa, and leghorn. i have taken up my quarters with brown. i thought i should get a letter here from you or clare, but was disappointed. the letter you addressed to paris i received; tell clare i was pained at her silence, yet though she neglects to write to me, i shall not follow her example, but will write her in a few days. my principal object in writing to you now is to tell you that i am actually writing my own life. brown and landor are spurring me on, and are to review it sheet by sheet, as it is written; moreover, i am commencing as a tribute of my great love for the memory of shelley his life and moral character. landor and brown are in this to have a hand, therefore i am collecting every information regarding him. i always wished you to do this, mary; if you will not, as of the living i love him and you best, incompetent as i am, i must do my best to show him to the world as i found him. do you approve of this? will you aid in it? without which it cannot be done. will you give documents? will you write anecdotes? or--be explicit on this, dear--give me your opinion; if you in the least dislike it, say so, and there is an end of it; if on the contrary, set about doing it without loss of time. both this and my life will be sent you to peruse and approve or alter before publication, and i need not say that you will have free scope to expunge all you disapprove of. i shall say no more till i get your reply to this. the winter here, if ten or twelve days somewhat cold can be called winter, has been clear, dry, and sunny; ever since my arrival in italy i have been sitting without fire, and with open windows. come away, dear mary, from the horrible climate you are in; life is not endurable where you are. florence is very gay, and a weight was taken from my mind, and body too, in getting on this side of the alps. heaven and hell cannot be very much more dissimilar.... you may suppose i have now writing enough without scrawling long letters, so pardon this short one, dear mary, from your affectionate e. j. trelawny. _p.s._--love to clare. mrs. shelley to trelawny. _april ._ my dear trelawny--your letter reminded me of my misdeeds of omission, and of not writing to you as i ought, and it assured me of your kind thoughts in that happy land where as angels in heaven you can afford pity to us arctic islanders. it is too bad, is it not, that when such a paradise does exist as fair italy, one should be chained here, without the infliction of such absolutely cold weather? i have never suffered a more ungenial winter. winter it is still; a cold east wind has prevailed the last six weeks, making exercise in the open air a positive punishment. this is truly english; half a page about the weather, but here this subject has every importance; is it fine? you guess i am happy and enjoying myself; is it as it always is? you know that one is fighting against a domestic enemy which saps at the very foundations of pleasure. i am glad that you are occupying yourself, and i hope that your two friends will not cease urging you till you really put to paper the strange wild adventures you recount so well. with regard to the other subject, you may guess, my dear friend, that i have often thought, often done more than think on the subject. there is nothing i shrink from more fearfully than publicity. i have too much of it, and, what is worse, i am forced by my hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways. could you write my husband's life without naming me, it would be something; but even then i should be terrified at the rousing the slumbering voice of the public;--each critique, each mention of your work might drag me forward. nor indeed is it possible to write shelley's life in that way. many men have his opinions,--none heartily and conscientiously act on them as he did,--it is his act that marks him. you know me, or you do not--in which case i will tell you what i am--a silly goose, who, far from wishing to stand forward to assert myself in any way, now that i am alone in the world, have but the time to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. this is weakness, but i cannot help it; to be in print, the subject of men's observations, of the bitter hard world's commentaries, to be attacked or defended, this ill becomes one who knows how little she possesses worthy to attract attention, and whose chief merit--if it be one--is a love of that privacy which no woman can emerge from without regret. shelley's life must be written. i hope one day to do it myself, but it must not be published now. there are too many concerned to speak against him; it is still too sore a subject. your tribute of praise, in a way that cannot do harm, can be introduced into your own life. but remember, i pray for omission, for it is not that you will not be too kind, too eager to do me more than justice. but i only seek to be forgotten. clare has written to you she is about to return to germany. she will, i suppose, explain to you the circumstances that make her return to the lady she was before with desirable. she will go to carlsbad, and the baths will be of great service to her. her health is improved, though very far from restored. for myself, i am as usual well in health and longing for summer, when i may enjoy the peace that alone is left me. i am another person under the genial influence of the sun; i can live unrepining with no other enjoyment but the country made bright and cheerful by its beams; till then i languish. percy is quite well; he grows very fast and looks very healthy. it gives me great pleasure to hear from you, dear friend, so write often. i have now answered your letter, though i can hardly call this one. so you may very soon expect another. how are your dogs? and where is roberts? have you given up all idea of shooting? i hear medwin is a great man at florence, so pisa and economy are at an end. adieu.--yours, m. s. the fiery "pirate" was much disappointed at mary's refusal to collaborate with him, and quite unable to understand her unwillingness to be the instrument of making the facts of her own and shelley's life the subject of public discussion. his resentment soon passed away, but his first wrath was evidently expressed with characteristic vigour. mary shelley to trelawny. _ th december ._ ... your last letter was not at all kind. you are angry with me, but what do you ask, and what do i refuse? you talk of writing shelley's life, and ask me for materials. shelley's life, as far as the public have to do with it, consisted of few events, and these are publicly known; the private events were sad and tragical. how would you relate them? as hunt has, slurring over the real truth? wherefore write fiction? and the truth, any part of it, is hardly for the rude cold world to handle. his merits are acknowledged, his virtues;--to bring forward actions which, right or wrong (and that would be a matter of dispute), were in their results tremendous, would be to awaken calumnies and give his enemies a voice. * * * * * as to giving moore materials for lord byron's life, i thought--i think--i did right. i think i have achieved a great good by it. i wish it to be kept secret--decidedly i am averse to its being published, for it would destroy me to be brought forward in print. i commit myself on this point to your generosity. i confided the fact to you as i would anything i did, being my dearest friend, and had no idea that i was to find in you a harsh censor and public denouncer.... did i uphold medwin? i thought that i had always disliked him. i am sure i thought him a great annoyance, and he was always borrowing crowns which he never meant to pay and we could ill spare. he was jane's friend more than any one's. to be sure, we did not desire a duel, nor a horsewhipping, and lord byron and mrs. b. ... worked hard to promote peace.--affectionately yours, m. w. s. during this year mrs. shelley was busily employed on her own novel, _perkin warbeck_, the subject of which may have occurred to her in connection with the historic associations of arundel castle. it is a work of great ingenuity and research, though hardly so spontaneous in conception as her earlier books. in spite of her retired life she had come to be looked on as a celebrity, and many distinguished literary people sought her acquaintance. among these was lord dillon, conspicuous by his good looks, his conversational powers, his many rare qualities of head and heart, and his numerous oddities. between him and mrs. shelley a strong mutual regard existed, and the following letter is of sufficient interest to be inserted here. the writer had desired mary's opinion on the subject of one of his poems. lord dillon to mrs. shelley. ditchley, _ th march _. my dear mrs. shelley--i return you many thanks for your letter and your favourable opinion. it is singular that you should have hit upon the two parts that i almost think the best of all my poem. i fear that my delineations of women do not please you, or persons who think as you do. i have a classic feeling about your sex--that is to say, i prefer nature to what is called delicacy.... i must be excused, however; i have never loved or much liked women of refined sentiment, but those of strong and blunt feelings and passions.... pray tell me candidly, for i believe you to be sincere, though at first i doubted it, for your manner is reserved, and that put me on my guard; but now i admit you to my full confidence, which i seldom give. is not eccelino considered as too free? tell me then truly--i never quote whenever i write to a person. you may trust me. you might tell me all the secrets in the world; they would never be breathed. i shall see you in may, and then we may converse more freely, but i own you look more sly than i think you are, and therefore i never was so candid with you as i think i ought to be. have not people who did not know you taken you for a cunning person? you have puzzled me very much. women always feel flattered when they are told they have puzzled people. i will tell you what has puzzled me. your writings and your manner are not in accordance. i should have thought of you--if i had only read you--that you were a sort of my sybil, outpouringly enthusiastic, rather indiscreet, and even extravagant; but you are cool, quiet, and feminine to the last degree--i mean in delicacy of manner and expression. explain this to me. shall i desire my brother to call on you with respect to mr. peter in the tower? he is his friend, not mine. he is very clever, and i think you would like him. pray tell miss g. to write to me.--yours most truly, dillon. _journal, october _ ( ).--i was at sir thomas lawrence's to-day whilst moore was sitting, and passed a delightful morning. we then went to the charter house, and i saw his son, a beautiful boy. _january _ ( ).--poor lawrence is dead. having seen him so lately, the suddenness of this event affects me deeply. his death opens all wounds. i see all those i love die around me, while i lament. _january ._--i have begun a new kind of life somewhat, going a little into society and forming a variety of acquaintances. people like me, and flatter and follow me, and then i am left alone again, poverty being a barrier i cannot pass. still i am often amused and sometimes interested. _march ._--i gave a _soirée_, which succeeded very well. mrs. hare is going, and i am very sorry. she likes me, and she is gentle and good. her husband is clever and her set very agreeable, rendered so by the reunion of some of the best people about town. mrs. shelley now resided in somerset street, portman square. her occasional "at homes," though of necessity simple in character, were not on that account the less frequented. here might be met many of the most famous and most charming men and women of their day, and here moore would thrill all hearts and bring tears to all eyes by his exquisitely pathetic singing of his own melodies. the hostess herself, gentle and winning, was an object of more admiration than would ever be suspected from the simple, almost deprecatory tone of her scraps of journal. among her mss. are numerous anonymous poems addressed to her, some sentimental, others high-flown in compliment, though none, unfortunately, of sufficient literary merit to be, in themselves, worth preserving. but, whether they afforded her amusement or gratification, it is probable that she had to work too hard and too continuously to give more than a passing thought to such things. from the following letter of clare's it may be inferred that _perkin warbeck_, which appeared in , was, in a pecuniary sense, something of a disappointment, and that this was the more vexatious as mary had lent clare money during her visit to england, and would have been glad, now, to be repaid, not, however, on her own account, but that of marshall, godwin's former amanuensis and her kind friend in her childhood, whom, it is evident, she was helping to support in his old age. clare to mrs. shelley. dresden, _ th march _. my dear mary--at last i take up the pen to write to you. at least thus much can i affirm, that i take it up, but whether i shall ever get to the end of my task and complete this letter is beyond me to decide. one of the causes of my long delay has been the hope of being able to send you the money for marshall. i was to have been paid in february, but as yet have received neither money nor notice from mrs. k. ... by this i am led to think she does not intend to do so until her return here in may. i am vexed, for i have been reproaching myself the whole winter with this debt. of this be sure, the instant i am paid i will despatch what i owe you to london.... here i was interrupted, and for two days have been unable to continue. how delighted i was with the news of percy's health, as also with his letter, though i am afraid it was written unwillingly and cost him a world of pains. poor child! he little thinks how much i am attached to him! when i first saw him i thought him cold, but afterwards he discovered so much intellect in all his speeches, and so much originality in his doings, that i willingly pardoned him for not being interested in anything but himself. in some weeks he will again be at home for easter. but what is this to me, since i shall not see him, nor perhaps even ever again. it seems settled that my destination is vienna. the negotiation with mrs. k. ... has been broken off on my showing great unwillingness to go to italy; that it may not be renewed i will not say. she now talks of going to nice, to which place i have no objection in the world to accompany her. but nothing of this can be settled till she comes, for as neither of us can speak frankly in our letters, owing to their being subject to her husband's inspection, we have as yet done nothing but mutually misinterpret the circumspect and circuitous phraseology in which our real meaning was wrapped. nothing can equal the letters she has written to me; they were detached pieces of agony. how she lived at all after bringing such productions into the world i cannot guess. instruments of torture are nothing to them. she favoured me with one every week, which was a very clever contrivance on her part to keep us in an agitation equal to the one she suffered at moghileff. thanks to her and natalie's perpetual indisposition, i have passed a tolerably disagreeable winter. at home i was employed in rubbings, stretchings, putting on trusses, dressing ulcers, applying leeches, and bandaging swollen glands. out-of-doors our recreations were [all] baths, baths of bullock's blood, mud baths, steam baths, soap baths, and electricity. if i had served in a hospital i should not have been more constantly employed with sickness and its appendages. i could understand this order of things pretty well, and even perhaps from custom find some beauty in their deformity if the sky were pitch black and the stars red; but when i see them so beautiful i cannot help imagining that they were made to look down upon a life more consonant with their own natures than the one i lead, and i am filled with the most bitter dislike of it. i ought to confess, however, that it is a great mitigation of my disagreeable life to live in dresden; such is the structure of existence here that a thousand alleviations to misery are offered. here, as in italy, you cannot walk the streets without meeting with some object which affords ready and agreeable occupation to the mind. i never yet was in a place where i met so much to please and so little to shock me. in vain i endeavour to recollect anything i could wish otherwise; not a fault presents itself. the more i become acquainted with the town and see its smallness, the more i am struck with the uncommon resources in literature _e le belle arti_ it possesses. with what regret shall i leave it for vienna. farewell, then, a long farewell to mount olympus and its treasures of wisdom, science, poetry, and skill; the vales may be green and many rills trill through them, and many flocks pasture there, but the inhabitants will be as vile and miserable to me as were the shepherds of admetus to apollo when he kept their company. at any rate vienna is better than russia. i trust and hope when i am there you will make some little effort to procure the newspapers and reviews and new works; this alone can soften the mortification i shall feel in being obliged to live in that city. already i have lost the little i had gained in my english, and i can only write with an effort that is painful to me; it precludes the possibility of my finding any pleasure in composition. i pause a hundred times and lean upon my hand to endeavour to find words to express the idea that is in my mind. it is a vain endeavour; the idea is there, but no words, and i leave my task unfinished. another favour i have to ask you, which is, if i should require your mediation to get a book published at paris, you will write to your friends there, and otherwise interest yourself as warmly as you can about it. promise me this, and give me an answer upon it as quick as you can. i have had many letters from charles. his affairs have taken the most favourable turn at vienna. everything is _couleur de rose_. more employment than he can accept seems likely to be offered to him; this is consolatory. he talks with rapture of his future plans, has taken a charming house, painted and furnished a pretty room for me, and will send antonia and the babes to the lovely hills at some miles from the town so soon as they arrive. mamma has written to me everything concerning colburn; this is indeed a disappointment, and the more galling because odiously unjust. let me hear if your plan of writing the _memoirs of josephine_ is likely to be put into execution. this perhaps would pay you better. i tremble for the anxiety of mind you suffer about papa and your own pecuniary resources. * * * * * what says the world to moore's _lord byron_? i saw some extracts in a review, and cannot express the pleasure i experienced in finding it was sad stuff. it was the journal of the noble lord, and i should say contained as fine a picture of indigestion as one could expect to meet with in dr. paris, graham, or johnson. of trelawny i know little. he wrote to me, describing where he was living and what kind of life he was leading. i have not yet answered him, although i make a sacred promise every day not to let it go over my head without so doing. but there is a certain want of sympathy between us which makes writing to him extremely disagreeable to me. i admire, esteem, and love him; some excellent qualities he possesses in a degree that is unsurpassed, but then it is exactly in another direction from my centre and my impetus. he likes a turbid and troubled life, i a quiet one; he is full of fine feelings and has no principles, i am full of fine principles but never had a feeling; he receives all his impressions through his heart, i through my head. _que voulez vous? le moyen de se recontrer_ when one is bound for the north pole and the other for the south? what a terrible description you give of your winter. ours, though severe, was an exceedingly fine one. from the time i arrived here until now there has not been a day that was not perfectly dry and clear. within this last week we have had a great deal of rain. i well understand how much your spirits must have been affected by three months' incessant foggy raw weather. in my mind nothing can compensate for a bad climate. how i wish i could draw you to dresden. you would go into society and would see a quantity of things which, treated by your pen, would bring you in a good profit. life is very cheap here, and in the summer you might take a course of josephlitz or carlsbad, which would set up your health and enable you to bear the winter of london with tolerable philosophy. forgive me if i don't write descriptions. it is impossible, situated as i am. i have not one moment free from annoyance from morning till night. this state of things depresses my mind terribly. when i have a moment of leisure it is breathed in a prayer for death. you will not wonder, therefore, that i think the miss booths right in their manner of acting; what is the use of trifling or mincing the matter with so despotic a ruler as the disposer of the universe? the one who is left is much to be pitied, for now she must die by herself, and that i think is as disagreeable as to live by oneself. in your next pray mention something about politics and how the london university is getting on. the accounts here of the distress in england are awful. foreigners talk of that country as they would of torre del greco or torre dell' annunciata at the announcement of an eruption of vesuvius. i should think my mother must be delighted to be no more plagued with us; it was really a great bother and no pleasure for her. she writes me a delightful account of papa's health and spirits. heaven grant it may continue. i am reading _political justice_, and am filled with admiration at the vastness of the plan, and the clearness and skill, nothing less than immortal, with which it is executed. farewell! write to me about your novel and particularly the opinion it creates in society. pray write. the letters of my acquaintances (friends i have none) are my only pleasure. natalie is pretty well; the knee is better, inasmuch as the swelling is smaller, but the weakness is as great as ever. we sit opposite to one another in perfect wretchedness; i because i am obliged to entreat her all day to do what she does not like, and she because she is entreated. c. c. my love to william. during the next five years the "author of _frankenstein_" wrote several short tales (some of which were published in the _keepsake_, an annual periodical, the precursor of the _book of beauty_), but no new novel. she was to have abundant employment in furthering the work of another. chapter xxii august -october to all who know trelawny's curious book, the following correspondence, which tells the story of its publication and preparation for the press, will in itself be interesting. to readers of mary shelley's life it has a strong additional interest as illustrating, better than any second-hand narrative can do, the unique kind of friendship subsisting between her and trelawny, and which, based on genuine mutual regard and admiration, and a common devotion to the memory of shelley and of a golden age which ended at his death, proved stronger than all obstacles, and, in spite of occasional eclipses through hasty words and misunderstandings, in spite of wide differences in temperament, in habits, in opinions, and morals, yet survived with a kind of dogged vitality for years. shelley said of _epipsychidion_ that it was "an idealised history of his life and feelings." _the adventures of a younger son_ is an idealised history of trelawny's youth and exploits, and very amusing it is, though rather gruesome in some of its details; a romance of adventures, of hair-breadth escapes by flood and field. as will be seen, the original ms. had to be somewhat toned down before it was presented to the public, but it is, as it stands, quite sufficiently forcible, as well as blood-curdling, for most readers. the letters may now be left to tell their own tale. trelawny to mrs. shelley. _ th august ._ my dear mary--that my letter may not be detained, i shall say nothing about continental politics. my principal motive in writing is to inform you that i have nearly completed the first portion of _my history_, enough for three ordinary volumes, which i wish published forthwith. the johnsons, as i told you before, are totally ruined by an indian bankruptcy; the smallness of my income prevents my supporting them. mr. johnson is gone to india to see if he can save aught from the ruin of his large fortune. in the meantime his wife is almost destitute; this spurs me on. brown, who is experienced in these matters, declares i shall have no difficulty in getting a very considerable sum for the ms. now. i shall want some friend to dispose of it for me. my name is not to appear or to be disclosed to the bookseller or any other person. the publisher who may purchase it is to be articled down to publish the work without omitting or altering a single word, there being nothing actionable, though a great deal objectionable, inasmuch as it is tinctured with the prejudices and passions of the author's mind. however, there is nothing to prevent women reading it but its general want of merit. the opinion of the two or three who have read it is that it will be very successful, but i know how little value can be attached to such critics. i'll tell you what i think--that it is good, and might have been better; it is [filled] with events that, if not marred by my manner of narrating, must be interesting. i therefore plainly foresee it will be generally read or not at all. who will undertake to, in the first place, dispose of it, and, in the second, watch its progress through the press? i care not who publishes it: the highest bidder shall have it. murray would not like it, it is too violent; parsons and _scots_, and, in short, also others are spoken of irreverently, if not profanely. but when i have your reply i shall send the ms. to england, and your eyes will be the judge, so tell me precisely your movements.--your attached e. j. t. poste restante, florence. when does moore conclude his _life of byron_? if i knew his address i could give him a useful hint that would be of service to the fame of the poet. trelawny to mrs. shelley. florence, _ th october _. dearest mary--my friend baring left florence on the th to proceed directly to london, so that he will be there as soon as you can get this letter. he took charge of my mss., and promised to leave them at hookham's, bond street, addressed to you. i therefore pray you lose no time in inquiring about them; they are divided into chapters and volumes, copied out in a plain hand, and all ready to go to press. they have been corrected with the greatest care, and i do not think you will have any trouble with them on that score. all i want you to do is to read them attentively, and then show them to murray and colburn, or any other publisher, and to hear if they will publish them and what they will give. you may say the author cannot at present be _named_, but that, when the work goes forth in the world, there are many who will recognise it. besides the second series, which treats of byron, shelley, greece, etc., will at once remove the veil, and the publisher who has the first shall have that. yet at present i wish the first series to go forth strictly anonymous, and therefore you must on no account trust the publisher with my name. surely there is matter enough in the book to make it interesting, if only viewed in the light of a _romance_. you will see that i have divided it into very short chapters, in the style of fielding, and that i have selected mottoes from the only three poets who were the staunch advocates of liberty, and my contemporaries. i have left eight or nine blanks in the mottoes for you to fill up from the work of one of those poets. brown, who was very anxious about the fame of keats, has given many of his mss. for the purpose. now, if you could find any from the mss. of shelley or byron, they would excite much interest, and their being strictly applicable is not of much importance. if you cannot, why, fill them up from the published works of byron, shelley, or keats, but no others are to be admitted. when you have read the work and heard the opinion of the booksellers, write to me before you settle anything; only remember i am very anxious that no alterations or omissions should be made, and that the mottoes, whether long or short, double or treble, should not be curtailed. will not hogg assist you? i might get other people, but there is no person i have such confidence in as you, and the affair is one of confidence and trust, and are we not bound and united together by ties stronger than those which earth has to impose? dearest friend, i am obliged hastily to conclude.--yours affectionately, e. j. trelawny. george baring, esq., who takes my book, is the brother of the banker; he has read it, and is in my confidence, and will be very ready to see and confer with you and do anything. he is an excellent person. i shall be very anxious till i hear from you. mrs. shelley to trelawny. somerset street, _ th december _. my dear trelawny--at present i can only satisfy your impatience with the information that i have received your ms. and read the greater part of it. soon i hope to say more. george baring did not come to england, but after considerable delay forwarded it to me from cologne. i am delighted with your work; it is full of passion, energy, and novelty; it concerns the sea, and that is a subject of the greatest interest to me. i should imagine that it must command success. but, my dear friend, allow me to persuade you to permit certain omissions. in one of your letters to me you say that "there is nothing in it that a woman could not read." you are correct for the most part, and yet without the omission of a few words here and there--the scene before you go to school with the mate of your ship--and above all the scene of the burning of the house, following your scene with your scotch enemy--i am sure that yours will be a book interdicted to women. certain words and phrases, pardoned in the days of fielding, are now justly interdicted, and any gross piece of ill taste will make your booksellers draw back. i have named all the objectionable passages, and i beseech you to let me deal with them as i would with lord byron's _don juan_, when i omitted all that hurt my taste. without this yielding on your part i shall experience great difficulty in disposing of your work; besides that i, your partial friend, strongly object to coarseness, now wholly out of date, and beg you for my sake to make the omissions necessary for your obtaining feminine readers. amidst so much that is beautiful and imaginative and exalting, why leave spots which, believe me, are blemishes? i hope soon to write to you again on the subject. the burnings, the alarms, the absorbing politics of the day render booksellers almost averse to publishing at all. god knows how it will all end, but it looks as if the autocrats would have the good sense to make the necessary sacrifices to a starving people. i heard from clare to-day; she is well and still at nice. i suppose there is no hope of seeing you here. as for me, i of course still continue a prisoner. percy is quite well, and is growing more and more like shelley. since it is necessary to live, it is a great good to have this tie to life, but it is a wearisome affair. i hope you are happy.--yours, my dearest friend, ever, mary shelley. trelawny to mrs. shelley. firenze, _ th january _. my dearest mary--for, notwithstanding what you may think of me, you every day become dearer to me. the men i have linked myself to in my wild career through life have almost all been prematurely cut off, and the only friends which are left me are women, and they are strange beings. i have lost them all by some means or other; they are dead to me in being married, or (for you are all slaves) separated by obstacles which are insurmountable, and as lord chatham observes, "friendship is a weed of slow growth in aged bosoms." but now to your letter. i to-day received yours of the th of december; you say you have received my ms. it has been a painful and arduous undertaking narrating my life. i have omitted a great deal, and avoided being a pander to the public taste for the sake of novelty or effect. landor, a man of superior literary acquirements; kirkup, an artist of superior taste; baring, a man of the world and very religious; mrs. baring, moral and squeamish; lady burghersh, aristocratic and proud as a queen; and lastly, charles brown, a plain downright cockney critic, learned in the trade of authorship, and has served his time as a literary scribe. all these male and female critics have read and passed their opinions on my narrative, and therefore you must excuse my apparent presumption in answering your objections to my book with an appearance of presumptuous dictation. your objections to the coarseness of those scenes you have mentioned have been foreseen, and, without further preface or apology, i shall briefly state my wishes on the subject. let hogg or horace smith read it, and, without your _giving any_ opinion, hear theirs; then let the booksellers, colburn or others, see it, and then if it is their general opinion that there are _words_ which are better omitted, why i must submit to their being omitted; but do not prompt them by prematurely giving your opinion. my life, though i have sent it you, as the dearest friend i have, is not written for the amusement of women; it is not a novel. if you begin clipping the wings of my true story, if you begin erasing words, you must then omit sentences, then chapters; it will be pruning an indian jungle down to a clipped french garden. i shall be so appalled at my ms. in its printed form, that i shall have no heart to go on with it. dear mary, i love women, and you know it, but my life is not dedicated to them; it is to men i write, and my first three volumes are principally adapted to sailors. england is a nautical nation, and, if they like it, the book will amply repay the publisher, and i predict it will be popular with sailors, for it is true to its text. by the time you get this letter the time of publishing is come, and we are too far apart to continue corresponding on the subject. let hogg, horace smith, or any one you like, read the ms.; or the booksellers; if they absolutely object to any particular words or short passages, why let them be omitted by leaving blanks; but i should prefer a first edition as it now stands, and then a second as the bookseller thought best. in the same way that _anastasius_ was published, the suppression of the first edition of that work did not prevent its success. all men lament that _don juan_ was not published as it was written, as under any form it would have been interdicted to women, and yet under any form they would have unavoidably read it. brown, who is learned in the bookselling trade, says i should get £ per volume. do not dispose of it under any circumstances for less than £ the three volumes. have you seen a book written by a man named millingen? he has written an article on me, and i am answering it. my reply to it i shall send you. the _literary gazette_, which published the extract regarding me, i have replied to, and to them i send my reply; the book i have not seen. if they refuse, as the article i write is amusing, you will have no difficulty in getting it admitted in some of the london magazines. it will be forwarded to you in a few days, so you see i am now fairly coming forward in a new character. i have laid down the sword for the pen. brown has just called with the article in question copied, and i send it together. i have spoken to you about filling up the mottoes; the title of my book i wish to be simply thus--_the life of a man_, and not _the discarded son_, which looks too much like romance or a common novel.... florence is very gay, and there are many pretty girls here, and balls every night. tell mrs. paul not to be angry at my calling her and her sisters by their christian names, for i am very lawless, as you know, in that particular, and not very particular on other things. brown talks of writing to you about the mottoes to my book, as he is very anxious about those of his friend keats. have you any ms. of shelley's or byron's to fill up the eight or ten i left blank? remember the short chapters are to be adhered to in its printed form. i shall have no excitement to go on writing till i see what i have already written in print. by the bye, my next volumes will to general readers be far more interesting, and published with my name, or at least called treloen, which is our original family name. trelawny to mrs. shelley. poste restante, firenze, _ th april _. my dear mary--since your letter, dated december , i have not had a single line from you, yet in that you promised to write in a few days. why is this? or have you written, and has your letter miscarried, or have not my letters reached you? i was anxious to have published the first part of my life this year, and if it had succeeded in interesting general readers, it would have induced me to have proceeded to its completion, for i cannot doubt that if the first part, published anonymously, and treating of people, countries, and things little known, should suit the public palate, that the latter, treating of people that everybody knows, and of things generally interesting, must be successful. but till i see the effect of the first part, i cannot possibly proceed to the second, and time is fleeting, and i am lost in idleness. i cannot write a line, and thus six months, in which i had leisure to have finished my narrative, are lost, and i am now deeply engaged in a wild scheme which will lead me to the east, and it is firmly my belief that when i again leave europe it will be for ever. i have had too many hair-breadth escapes to hope that fortune will bear me up. my present quixotic expedition is to be in the region wherein is still standing the column erected by sardanapalus, and on it by him inscribed words to the effect: _il faut jouir des plaisirs de la vie; tout le reste n'est rien_. at present i can only say, if nothing materially intervenes to prevent me, that in the autumn of this year i shall bend my steps towards the above-mentioned column, and try the effect of it. i am sick to death of the pleasureless life i lead here, and i should rather the tinkling of the little bell, which i hear summoning the dead to its last resting-place, was ringing for my body than endure the petty vexations of what is called civilised life, and see what i saw a few days back, the austrian tyrants trampling on their helot italians; but letters are not safe.--your affectionate friend, e. j. t. mrs. shelley to trelawny. somerset street, _ d march _. my dear trelawny--what can you think of me and of my silence? i can guess by the contents of your letters and your not having yet received answers. believe me that if i am at all to blame in this it arises from an error in judgment, not from want of zeal. every post-day i have waited for the next, expecting to be able to communicate something definitive, and now still i am waiting; however, i trust that this letter will contain some certain intelligence before i send it. after all, i have done no more than send your manuscripts to colburn, and i am still in expectation of his answer. in the first place, they insist on certain parts being expunged,--parts of which i alone had the courage to speak to you, but which had before been remarked upon as inadmissible. these, however (with trifling exceptions), occur only in the first volume. the task of deciding upon them may very properly be left to horace smith, if he will undertake it--we shall see. meanwhile, colburn has not made up his mind as to the price. he will not give £ . the terms he will offer i shall hope to send before i close this letter, so i will say no more except to excuse my having conceded so much time to his dilatoriness. in all i have done i may be wrong; i commonly act from my own judgment; but alas! i have great experience. i _believe_ that, if i sent your work to murray, he would return it in two months unread; simply saying that he does not print novels. your end part would be a temptation, did not your intention to be severe on moore make it improbable that he would like to engage in it; and he would keep me as long as colburn in uncertainty; still this may be right to do, and i shall expect your further instructions by return of post. however, in one way you may help yourself. you know lockhart. he reads and judges for murray; write to him; your letter shall accompany the ms. to him. still, this thing must not be done hastily, for if i take the ms. out of colburn's hands, and, failing to dispose of it elsewhere, i come back to him, he will doubtless retreat from his original proposal. there are other booksellers in the world, doubtless, than these two, but, occupied as england is by political questions, and impoverished miserably, there are few who have enterprise at this juncture to offer a price. i quote examples. my father and myself would find it impossible to make any tolerable arrangement with any one except colburn. he at least may be some guide as to what you may expect. mr. brown remembers the golden days of authors. when i first returned to england i found no difficulty in making agreements with publishers; they came to seek me; now money is scarce, and readers fewer than ever. i leave the rest of this page blank. i shall fill it up before it goes on friday. _friday, th march._ at length, my dear friend, i have received the ultimatum of these great people. they offer you £ , and another £ on a second edition; as this was sent me in writing, and there is no time for further communication before post-hour, i cannot _officially_ state the number of the edition. i should think . i think that perhaps they may be brought to say £ at once, or £ at once and £ on the second edition. there can be no time for parleying, and therefore you must make up your mind whether after doing good battle, if necessary, i shall accept their terms. believe _my experience_ and that of those about me; you will not get a better offer from others, because money is not to be had, and bulwer and other fashionable and selling authors are now obliged to content themselves with half of what they got before. if you decline this offer, i will, if you please, try murray; he will keep me two months at least, and the worst is, if he won't do anything, colburn will diminish his bargain, and we shall be in a greater mess than ever. i know that, as a woman, i am timid, and therefore a bad negotiator, except that i have perseverance and zeal, and, i repeat, experience of things as they are. mr. brown knows what they were, but they are sadly changed. the omissions mentioned must be made, but i will watch over them, and the mottoes and all that shall be most carefully attended to, depend on me. do not be displeased, my dear friend, that i take advantage of this enormous sheet of paper to save postage, and ask you to tear off one half sheet, and to send it to mrs. hare. you talk of my visiting italy. it is impossible for me to tell you how much i repine at my imprisonment here, but i dare not anticipate a change to take me there for a long time. england, its ungenial clime, its difficult society, and the annoyances to which i am subjected in it weigh on my spirits more than ever, for every step i take only shows me how impossible [it is], situated as i am, that i should be otherwise than wretched. my sanguine disposition and capacity to endure have borne me up hitherto, but i am sinking at last; but to quit so stupid a topic and to tell you news, did you hear that medwin contrived to get himself gazetted for full pay in the guards? i fancy that he employed his connection with the shelleys, who are connected with the king through the fitz clarences. however, a week after he was gazetted as retiring. i suppose the officers cut him at mess; his poor wife and children! how i pity them! jane is quite well, living in tranquillity. hogg continues all that she can desire.... she lives where she did; her children are well, and so is my percy, who grows more like shelley. i hear that your old favourite, margaret shelley, is prettier than ever; your miss burdett is married. i have been having lithographed your letter to me about caroline. i wish to disperse about copies among the many hapless fair who imagine themselves to have been the sole object of your tenderness. clare is to have a first copy. have you heard from poor dear clare? she announced a little time ago that she was to visit italy with the kaisaroff to see you. i envied her, but i hear from her brother charles that she has now quarrelled with madame k., and that she will go to vienna. god grant that her sufferings end soon. i begin to anticipate it, for i hear that sir tim is in a bad way. i shall hear more certain intelligence after easter. mrs. p. spends her easter with caroline, who lives in the neighbourhood, and will dine at field place. i have not seen mrs. aldridge since her marriage; she has scarcely been in town, but i shall see her this spring, when she comes up as she intends. you know, of course, that elizabeth st. aubyn is married, so you know that your ladies desert you sadly. if clare and i were either to die or marry you would be left without a dulcinea at all, with the exception of the sixscore new objects for idolatry you may have found among the pretty girls in florence. take courage, however; i am scarcely a dulcinea, being your friend and not the lady of your love, but such as i am, i do not think that i shall either die or marry this year, whatever may happen the next; as it is only spring you have some time before you. we are all here on the _qui vive_ about the reform bill; if it pass, and tories and all expect it, well,--if not, parliament is dissolved immediately, and they say that the new writs are in preparation. the whigs triumphed gloriously in the boldness of their measure. england will be free if it is carried. i have had very bad accounts from rome, but you are quiet as usual in florence. i am scarcely wicked enough to desire that you should be driven home, nor do i expect it, and yet how glad i should be to see you. you never mention zella. adieu, my dear trelawny.--i am always affectionately yours, mary w. shelley. hunt has set up a little d. paper, the _tatler_, which is succeeding; this keeps him above water. i have not seen him very lately. he lives a long way off. he is the same as ever, a person whom all must love and regret. trelawny to mrs. shelley. poste restante, firenze, _ th april _. dear mary--the day after i had despatched a scolding letter to you, i received your titanic letter, and sent mrs. hare her fathom of it.... now, let's to business. i thank you for the trouble you have taken about the ms. let colburn have it, and try to get £ down, for as to what may be promised on a second edition, i am told is mere humbug. when my work is completed i have no doubt the first part will be reprinted, but get what you can paid down at once; as to the rest, i have only to say that i consent to horace smith being the sole arbitrator of what is necessary to be omitted, but do not let him be prompted, and tell him only to omit what is _absolutely indispensable_. say to him that it is a friend of shelley's who asks him this favour, but do not let him or any other individual know that i am the author. if my name is known, and the work can be brought home to me, the consequences will be most disastrous. i beseech you bear this in mind. let all the mottoes appear in their respective chapters without any omission, regardless of their number to each chapter, for they are all good, and fill up the eight or ten i left blank from byron and shelley; if from ms. so much the better. the changes in the opinions of all mankind on political and other topics are favourable to such writers as i and the poets of liberty whom i have selected. we shall no longer be hooted at; it is our turn to triumph now. would those glorious spirits, to whose genius the present age owes so much, could witness the triumphant success of these opinions. i think i see shelley's fine eyes glisten, and faded cheek glow with fire unearthly. england, france, and belgium free, the rest of europe must follow; the theories of tyrants all over the world are shaken as by an earthquake; they may be propped up for a time, but their fall is inevitable. i am forgetting the main business of my letter. i hope, mary, that you have not told colburn or any one else that i am the author of the book. remember that i must have the title simply _a man's life_, and that i should like to have as many copies for my friends as you can get from colburn--ten, i hope--and that you will continue to report progress, and tell me when it is come out. you must have a copy, horace smith one, and jane and lady burghersh; she is to be heard of at apsley house--duke of wellington's--and then i have some friends here; you must send me a parcel by sea. if the time is unfavourable for publication, from men's minds being engrossed with politics, yet it is so far an advantage that my politics go with the times, and not as they would have been some years back, obnoxious and premature. i decide on colburn as publisher, not from liberality of his terms, but his courage, and trusting that as little as possible will be omitted; and, by the bye, i wish you to keep copies, for i have none, of those parts which are omitted. enough of this. of clare i have seen nothing. do not you, dear mary, abandon me by following the evil examples of my other ladies. i should not wonder if fate, without our choice, united us; and who can control his fate? i blindly follow his decrees, dear mary.--your e. j. t. mrs. shelley to trelawny. somerset street, _ th june _. my dear trelawny--your work is in progress at last, and is being printed with great rapidity. horace smith undertook the revision, and sent a very favourable report of it to the publishers; to me he says: "having written to you a few days ago, i have only to annex a copy of my letter to colburn and bentley, whence you will gather my opinion of the ms.; it is a most powerful, but rather perilous work, which will be much praised and much abused by the liberal and bigoted. i have read it with great pleasure and think it admirable, in everything but the conclusion;" by this he means, as he says to colburn and bentley, "the conclusion is abrupt and disappointing, especially as previous allusions have been made to his later life which is not given. probably it is meant to be continued, and if so it would be better to state it, for i have no doubt that his first part will create a sufficient sensation to ensure the sale of a second." in his former letter to me h. s. says: "any one who has proved himself the friend of yourself and of him whom we all deplore i consider to have strong claims on my regard, and i therefore willingly undertake the revision of the ms. pray assure the author that i feel flattered by this little mark of his confidence in my judgment, and that it will always give me pleasure to render him these or any other services." and now, my dear trelawny, i hope you will not be angry at the title given to your book; the responsibility of doing anything for any one so far away as you is painful, and i have had many qualms, but what could i do? the publishers strongly objected to the _history of a man_ as being no title at all, or rather one to lead astray. the one adopted is taken from the first words of your ms., where you declare yourself a younger son--words pregnant of meaning in this country, where to be the younger son of a man of property is to be virtually discarded,--and they will speak volumes to the english reader; it is called, therefore, _the adventures of a younger son_. if you are angry with me for this i shall be sorry, but i knew not what to do. your ms. will be preserved for you; and remember, also, that it is pretty well known whom it is by. i suppose the persons who read the ms. in italy have talked, and, as i told you, your mother speaks openly about it. still it will not appear in print, in no newspaper accounts over which i have any control as emanating from the publisher. let me know immediately how i am to dispose of the dozen copies i shall receive on your account. one must go to h. smith, another to me, and to whom else? the rest i will send to you in italy. there is another thing that annoys me especially. you will be paid in bills dating from the day of publication, now not far distant; three of various dates. to what man of business of yours can i consign these? the first i should think i could get discounted at once, and send you the cash; but tell me what i am to do. i know that all these hitches and drawbacks will make you vituperate womankind, and had i ever set myself up for a woman of business, or known how to manage my own affairs, i might be hurt; but you know my irremediable deficiencies on those subjects, and i represented them strongly to you before i undertook my task; and all i can say in addition is, that as far as i have seen, both have been obliged to make the same concessions, so be as forgiving and indulgent as you can. we are full here of reform or revolution, whichever it is to be; i should think something approaching the latter, though the first may be included in the last. will you come over and sit for the new parliament? what are you doing? have you seen clare? how is she? she never writes except on special occasions, when she wants anything. tell her that percy is quite well. you tell me not to marry,--but i will,--any one who will take me out of my present desolate and uncomfortable position. any one,--and with all this do you think that i shall marry? never,--neither you nor anybody else. mary shelley shall be written on my tomb,--and why? i cannot tell, except that it is so pretty a name that though i were to preach to myself for years, i never should have the heart to get rid of it. adieu, my dear friend. i shall be very anxious to hear from you; to hear that you are not angry about all the _contretemps_ attendant on your publication, and to receive your further directions.--yours very truly, m. w. shelley. trelawny to mrs. shelley. poste restante, firenze, _ th june _. dear mary--your letter, dated th june, i have received, after a long interval, and your letter before that is dated d march. it would appear by your last that you must have written another letter between march and june, by allusions in this last respecting my mother. if so, it has never reached me, so that if it contained anything which is necessary for me to know, i pray you let me have a transcript, so far as your memory will serve to give it me. i am altogether ignorant of what arrangements you have made with colburn; and am only in possession of the facts contained in the second, to wit, that horace smith is revising the work for publication. i trust he will not be too liberal with the pruning-knife. when will the cant and humbug of these costermonger times be reformed? nevertheless tell h. smith that the author is fully sensible of his kindness and (for once, at least, in his life) with all his heart joins his voice to that of the world in paying tribute to the sterling ability of mr. horace smith; and i remember shelley and others speaking of him as one often essayed on the touchstone of proof, and never found wanting. horace smith's criticism on the _life_ is flattering, and as regards the perilous part--why i never have, and never shall, crouch to those i utterly despise, to wit, the bigoted. the roman pontiff might as well have threatened me with excommunication when on board the _grub_, if i failed to strike my top-sails, and lower my proud flag to the lubberly craft which bore his silly banner, bedaubed with mitres, crosses, and st. peter's keys. i did not mean to call my book _the history of a man_, but simply thus, _a man's life_; "adventures" and "younger son" are commonplace, and i don't like it; but if it is to be so, why, i shall not waste words in idle complaints: would it were as i had written it. by the bye, you say justly the ms. ends abruptly; the truth is, as you know, it is only the first part of my life, and to conclude it will fill three more volumes: that it is to be concluded, i thought i had stated in a paragraph annexed to the last chapter of that which is now in the press, which should run thus-- "i am, or rather have, continued this history of my life, and it will prove i have not been a passive instrument of despotism, nor shall i be found consorting with those base, sycophantic, and mercenary wretches who crouch and crawl and fawn on kings, and priests, and lords, and all in authority under them. on my return to europe, its tyrants had gathered together all their helots and gladiators to restore the cursed dynasty of the bourbons, and thousands of slaves went forth to extinguish and exterminate liberty, truth, and justice. i went forth, too, my hand ever against them, and when tyranny had triumphed, i wandered an exile in the world and leagued myself with men worthy to be called so, for they, inspired by wisdom, uncoiled the frauds contained in lying legends, which had so long fatally deluded the majority of mankind. alas! those apostles have not lived to see the tree they planted fructify; would they had tarried a little while to behold this new era of - , how they would have rejoiced to behold the leagued conspiracy of kings broken, and their bloodhound priests and nobles muzzled, their impious confederacy to enslave and rob the people paralysed by a blow that has shaken their usurpation to the base, and must inevitably be followed by their final overthrow. yes, the sun of freedom is dawning on the pallid slaves of europe," etc. the conclusion of this diatribe i am certain you have, and if you have not the beginning, why put it in beginning with the words: "i have continued the history of my life." if i thought there was a probability that i could get a seat in the reformed house of commons, i would go to england, or if there was a probability of revolution. i was more delighted with your resolve not to change your name than with any other portion of your letter. trelawny, too, is a good name, and sounds as well as shelley; it fills the mouth as well and will as soon raise a spirit. by the bye, when you send my books, send me also mary wollstonecraft's _rights of women_, and godwin's new work on _man_, and tell me what you are now writing. the hares are at lucca baths. never omit to tell me what you know of caroline. do you think there is any opening among the demagogues for me? it is a bustling world at present, and likely so to continue. i must play a part. write, mary mine, speedily. is my book advertised? if so, the motto from byron should accompany it. clare only remained in florence about ten days; some sudden death of a relative of the family she resides with recalled them to russia. i saw her three or four times. she was very miserable, and looked so pale, thin, and haggard. the people she lived with were bigots, and treated her very badly. i wished to serve her, but had no means. poor lady, i pity her; her life has been one of continued misery. i hope on sir timothy's death it will be bettered; her spirits are broken, and she looks fifty; i have not heard of her since her departure. mrs. hare once saw her, but she was so prejudiced against her, from stories she had heard against her from the beauclercs, that she could hardly be induced to notice her. you are aware that i do not wish my book to appear as if written for publication, and therefore have avoided all allusions which might induce people to think otherwise. i wish all the mottoes to be inserted, as they are a selection of beautiful poetry, and many of them not published. the bills, you say, colburn and bentley are to give you; perhaps horace smith may further favour me by getting them negotiated. i am too much indebted to him to act so scurvily as not to treat him with entire confidence, so with the injunction of secrecy you may tell him my name. if he dislikes the affair of the bills, as i cannot employ any of my people of business, why give the bills, or rather place them in the hands of a man who keeps a glover's shop (i know him well). his name is moon, and his shop is corner one in orange street, bloomsbury square. when i get your reply, i will, if necessary, write to him on the subject. i pray you write me on receipt of this. my child zella is growing up very pretty, and with a soul of fire. she is living with friends of mine near lucca. the only copies of the book i wish you to give away are to horace smith, mary shelley, lady burghersh, no. hyde park terrace, oxford road, and jane williams, to remind her that she is not forgotten. shelley's tomb and mine in rome, is, i am told, in a very dilapidated state. i will see to its repair. send me out six copies by sea; one if you can sooner. address them to henry dunn, leghorn. e. j. trelawny. trelawny to mrs. shelley. poste restante, firenze, _ th july _. * * * * * by the bye, mary, if it is not too late, i should wish the name of zella to be spelt in the correct arabic, thus, _zellâ_, in my book. i changed it in common with several others of the names to prevent my own being too generally recognised; with regard to hers, if not too late, i should now wish it to appear in its proper form, besides which, in the chapter towards the conclusion, wherein i narrate an account of a pestilence which was raging in the town of batavia, i wish the word java fever to be erased, and cholera morbus substituted. for we alone had the former malady on board the schooner, having brought it into the batavia roads with us, but on our arrival there we found the cholera raging with virulence, most of those attacked expiring in the interval of the setting and rising of the sun. luis, our steward, i thought died from fever, as we had had it previously on board, but the medicals pronounced it or denounced it cholera. if the alteration can be made, it will be interesting, as in the history of the cholera i see published, they only traced the origin to , when the fact is, it was in that i am speaking of, and no doubt it has existed for thousands of years before, but it is only of late, like the natives of hindoostan, it has visited europe. it is sent by nemesis, a fitting retribution for the gold and spices we have robbed them of. the malediction of my malayan friends has come to pass, for i have no doubt the russian caravans which supply that empire with tea, silks, and spices introduced the cholera, or gave it into the bargain, or as _bona mano_. i wish you would write, for i am principally detained here by wishing to get a letter from you ere i go to some other place.--yours, and truly, e. t. mrs. shelley to trelawny. somerset street, _ th july _. my dear trelawny--your third volume is now printing, so i should imagine that it will very soon be published; everything shall be attended to as you wish. the letter to which i alluded in my former one was a tiny one enclosed to clare, which perhaps you have received by this time. it mentioned the time of the agreement; £ in bills of three, six, and eight months, dated from the day of publication, and £ more on a second edition. the mention i made of your mother was, that she speaks openly in society of your forthcoming memoirs, so that i should imagine very little real secrecy will attend them. however, you will but gain reputation and admiration through them. i hope you are going on, for your continuation will, i am sure, be ardently looked for. i am so sorry for the delay of all last winter, yet i did my best to conclude the affair; but the state of the nation has so paralysed bookselling that publishers were very backward, though colburn was in his heart eager to get at your book. as to the price, i have taken pains to ascertain; and you receive as much as is given to the best novelists at this juncture, which may console your vanity if it does not fill your pocket. the reform bill will pass, and a considerable revolution in the government of the country will, i imagine, be the consequence. you have talents of a high order. you have powers; these, with industry and discretion, would advance you in any career. you ought not, indeed you ought not to throw away yourself as you do. still, i would not advise your return on the speculation, because england is so sad a place that the mere absence from it i consider a peculiar blessing. my name will _never_ be trelawny. i am not so young as i was when you first knew me, but i am as proud. i must have the entire affection, devotion, and, above all, the solicitous protection of any one who would win me. you belong to womenkind in general, and mary shelley will _never_ be yours. i write in haste, but i will write soon again, more at length. you shall have your copies the moment i receive them. believe me, with all gratitude and affection, yours, m. w. shelley. jane thanks you for the book promised. i am infinitely chagrined at what you tell me concerning clare. if the b.'s spoke against her, that means mrs. b. and her stories were gathered from lord byron, who feared clare and did not spare her; and the stories he told were such as to excuse the prejudice of any one. the same to the same. somerset street, _ d october _. my dear trelawny--i suppose that i have now some certain intelligence to send you, though i fear that it will both disappoint and annoy you. i am indeed ashamed that i have not been able to keep these people in better order, but i trusted to honesty, when i ought to have ensured it; however, thus it stands: your book is to be published in the course of the month, and then your bills are to be dated. as soon as i get them i will dispose of them as you direct, and you will receive notice on the subject without delay. i cannot procure for you a copy until then; they pretend that it is not all printed. if i can get an opportunity i will send you one by private hand, at any rate i shall send them by sea without delay. i will write to smith about negotiating your bills, and i have no doubt that i shall be able somehow or other to get you money on them. i will go myself to the city to pay barr's correspondent as soon as i get the cash. thus your _pretty dear_ (how fascinating is flattery) will do her best, as soon as these tiresome people fulfil their engagements. in some degree they have the right on their side, as the day of publication is a usual time from which to date the bills, and that was the time which i acceded to; but they talked of such hurry and speed that i expected that that day was nearer at hand than it now appears to be. november _is_ the publishing month, and no new things are coming out now. in fact, the reform bill swallows up every other thought. you have heard of the lords' majority against it, much longer than was expected, because it was not imagined that so many bishops would vote against government.... do whenever you write send me news of clare. she never writes herself, and we are all excessively anxious about her. i hope she is better. god knows when fate will do anything for us. i despair. percy is well, i fancy that he will go to harrow in the spring; it is not yet finally arranged, but this is what i wish, and therefore i suppose it will be, as they have promised to increase my allowance for him, and leave me pretty nearly free, only with eton prohibited; but harrow is now in high reputation under a new head-master. i am delighted to hear that zella is in such good hands, it is so necessary in this world of woe that children should learn betimes to yield to necessity; a girl allowed to run wild makes an unhappy woman. hunt has set up a penny daily paper, literary and theatrical; it is succeeding very well, but his health is wretched, and when you consider that his sons, now young men, do not contribute a penny towards their own support, you may guess that the burthen on him is very heavy. i see them very seldom, for they live a good way off, and when i go he is out, she busy, and i am entertained by the children, who do not edify me. jane has just moved into a house about half a mile further from town, on the same road; they have furnished it themselves. dina improves, or rather she always was, and continues to be, a very nice child. * * * * * the _adventures_ did not reach a second edition in their original form; the first edition failed, indeed, to repay its expenses; but they were afterwards republished in _colburn's family library_. the second part of trelawny's autobiography took the chatty and discursive form, so popular at the present day, of "reminiscences." it is universally known as _recollections[ ] of shelley, byron, and the author_. so long as shelley and byron survive as objects of interest in this world, so long must this fascinating book share their existence. as originally published, it has not a dull page. life-like as if written at the moment it all happened, it yet has the pictorial sense of proportion which can rarely exist till a writer stands at such a distance (of time) from the scenes he describes that he can estimate them, not only as they are, but in their relation to surrounding objects. it would seem as if, for the conversations at least, trelawny must sometimes have drawn on his imagination as well as his memory; if so, it can only be replied that, by his success, he has triumphantly vindicated his artistic right to do so. terse, original, and characteristic, each speech paints its speaker in colours which we know and feel to be true. nothing seems set down for effect; it is spontaneous, unstudied, everyday reality. and if the history of trelawny's own exploits in greece somewhat recall the "tarasconnades" of his early adventures, it at least puts a thrilling finish to a book it was hard to conclude without falling into bathos. as a writer on shelley, trelawny surely stands alone. many authors have praised shelley, others have condemned and decried him, others again have tried to pity and "excuse" him. no one has apprehended as happily as trelawny the peculiar _timbre_, if it may be so described, of his nature, or has brought out so vividly, and with so few happy touches, his moral and social characteristics. saint or sinner, the shelley of trelawny is no lay figure, no statue even, no hero of romance; it is _shelley_, the man, the boy, the poet. trelawny assures us that hogg's picture of shelley as a youth is absolutely faithful. but hogg's picture only shows us shelley in his "salad days," and even that we are never allowed to contemplate without the companion-portrait of the biographer, smiling with cynical amusement while he yields his tribute of heartfelt, but patronising praise. the conclusions to which hogg had come by observation trelawny arrived at by intuition. fiery and imaginative, his nature was by far the more sympathetic of the two; though it may be that, in virtue of very unlikeness, hogg would have proved, in the long run, the fitter companion for shelley. between trelawny and mary there existed the same kind of adjustable difference. his descriptions of her have been largely drawn upon in earlier chapters of the present work, and need not be reverted to here. she had been seven years dead when the _recollections_ were published. twenty years later, when mary shelley had been twenty-seven years in her grave, there appeared a second edition of the book. in those twenty years, what change had come over the spirit of its pages? an undefinable difference, like that which comes over the face of nature when the wind changes from west to east,--and yet not so undefinable either, for it had power to reverse some very definite facts. byron's feet, for instance, which--as the result of an investigation after death--were described, in , as having, both, been "clubbed and withered to the knee," "the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr," are, in , pronounced to have been _faultless_, but for the contraction of the back sinews (the "tendon achilles"), which prevented his heels from resting on the ground. "unfortunately," to quote mr. garnett's comment on this discrepancy, in his article on _shelley's last days_, "as in the natural world the same agencies that are elevating one portion of the earth's surface are at the same time depressing another, so, in the microcosm of mr. trelawny's memory and judgment, the embellishment of lord byron's feet has been accompanied by a corresponding deterioration of mrs. shelley's heart and head." yes; the mary shelley with whom, in early days, even trelawny could find no fault, save perhaps for a tendency to mournfulness in solitude and an occasional fit of literary abstraction when she might have been looking after the commissariat--who in later years was his trusty friend, his sole correspondent, his literary editor, his man of business--and withal his "pretty dear" "every day dearer" to him, "mary--my mary"--superior surely to the rest of her sex, with whom at one time it seems plain enough that he would have been nothing loth to enter into an alliance, offensive and defensive, for life, would she but have preferred the name of trelawny to that of shelley,--this mary whose voice had been silent for seven and twenty years, and to whom he himself had raised a monument of praise, rises from her tomb as conventional and commonplace, unsympathetic and jealous, narrow, orthodox, and worldly. yet she had borne with his exactions and scoldings and humours for friendship's sake, and with full faith in the loyalty and generosity of his heart. a pure and delicate-minded woman, she had not been scandalised by his lawless morals. she had had the courage to withstand him when he was wrong, working for him the while like a devoted slave. never was a more true and disinterested friendship than hers for him; and he, who knew her better than most people did, was well aware of it. where then was the change? alas! it was in himself. in this revolving world, where "time that gave doth now his gift confound," and where "nought may endure but mutability," the "flourish set on youth" is soon transfixed. greek fevers and gunshot wounds told on the "pirate's" disposition as well as on his constitution. the habits of mind he had cultivated and been proud of,--combativeness, opposition to all authority as such--finally became his masters; he could not even acquiesce in his own experience. age and the ravages of time were to blame for his morbid censoriousness; time--that "feeds on the rarities of nature's truth." these later recollections are but the distorted images of a blurred mirror. but, none the less, the tale is a sad one. we can but echo trelawny's own words to mary[ ]--"can such things be, and overcome us like a summer cloud, without our especial wonder?" chapter xxiii october -october trelawny's book was only one among many things which claimed mrs. shelley's attention during these three years. in godwin published his _thoughts on man_. the relative positions of father and daughter had come to be reversed, and mary now negotiated with the publishers for the sale of his work, as he had formerly done for her. godwin himself set a high value, even for him, on this book, and anticipated for it a future and an influence which were not to be realised. godwin to mary. _ th april ._ dear mary--if you do me the favour to see murray, i know not how far you can utter the following things; or if you do, how far they will have any weight with his highness; yet i cannot but wish you should have them in your mind. the book i offer is a collection of ten new and interesting truths, illustrated in no unpopular style. they are the fruit of thirty years' meditation (it being so long since i wrote the _enquirer_), in the full maturity of my understanding. the book, therefore, will be very far from being merely one book more added to the number of books already existing in english literature. it must, as i conceive, when published make a deep impression, and cause the thinking part of the public to perceive--there are here laid before us ten interesting truths never before delivered. whether it is published during my life or after my death it is a light that cannot be extinguished--"the precious life-blood of a discerning spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." in the following amusing letter clare gives mary a few commissions. she was to interest her literary acquaintance in paris in the publication and success of a french poem by a friend of clare's at moscow, the greatest wish of whose heart was to appear in print. she was also to find a means of preventing the french translatress of moore's _life of byron_ from introducing clare's name into her elucidatory footnotes. this was indeed all-important to clare, as any revival of scandal about her might have robbed her of the means of subsistence, but it was also an extremely difficult and delicate task for mary. but no one ever hesitated to make her of use. her friends estimated her power by her goodwill, and her goodwill by their own need of her services; and they were generally right, for the will never failed, and the way was generally found. clare to mrs. shelley. nice, _ th december _. my dear mary--your last letter, although so melancholy, gave me much pleasure, merely, therefore, because it came from you. i intended to have written to all and each of you, but until now have not been able to put my resolution into execution. it must seem to you that i am strangely neglectful of my friends, or perhaps you think since i am so near trelawny that i have been taking a lesson from him in the art of cultivating one's friendships; but neither of these is the case, my silence is quite on another principle than this. i am not desperately in love, nor just risen from my bed at four in the afternoon in order to write my millionth love letter, nor am i indifferent to those whom time and the malice of fortune have yet spared to me, but simply i have been too busy. since i have been at nice i have had to change lodgings four times; besides this, we were a long time without a maid, and received and paid innumerable visits. my whole day was spent in shifting my character. in the morning i arose a waiting-maid, and, having attended to the toilette of natalie, sank into a house-maid, a laundry-maid, and, after noon, i fear me, a cook, having to look to the cleaning of the rooms, the getting up of linen, and the preparation of various pottages fit for the patient near me. at mid-day i turned into a governess, gave my lessons, and at four or five became a fine lady for the rest of the day, and paid visits or received them, for at nice it is the custom, so soon as a stranger arrives, that everybody _comme il faut_ in the place comes to call upon you; nor can you shut your doors against them even if you were dying, for as nice is the resort of the sick, and as everybody either is sick or has been sick, nursing has become the common business. so we went on day after day. we had _dejeuners dansants_, _soirées dansantes_ (_dîners dansants_ are considered as _de trop_ by order of the physicians), _bals parés_, _théatres_, _opéras_, _grands dîners_, _petits soupers_, _concerts_, _visites de matin_, _promenades à âne_, _parties de campagne_, _réunions littéraires_, _grands cercles_, _promenades en bateau_, _coteries choisies_, _thunder-storms_ from the sea, and _political storms_ from france; in short, if we had only had an earthquake, or the shock of one, we should have run through the whole series of modifications of which human existence is susceptible. _voilà paris, voilà paris_, as the song says. you may perhaps expect that the novelty of society should have suggested to me remarks and observations as multifarious as the forms under which i observed it. sorry i am to say that either from its poverty, or from my own poverty of intellect, i have not gathered from it anything beyond the following couple of conclusions, that people of the world, disguise themselves as they may, possess but two qualities, a great want of understanding, and a vast pretension to sentiment. from this duplexity arises the duplicity with which they are so often charged, and no wonder, for with hearts so heavy, and heads so light, how is it possible to keep anything like a straightforward course? in alleviation of this, i must confess that wherever i went i carried about with me my own identity (that unhappy identity which has cost me so dear, and of which, with all my pains, i have never been able to lose a particle), and contemplated the people i judge through the medium of its rusty atoms. i must speak to you of an affair that interests me deeply. m. gambs has informed me that he has sent to paris a poem of his in manuscript called _möise_. he gave it to the prince nicolas scherbatoff at moscow, just upon his setting out for paris; this is many months ago. whether the prince gave any promise to endeavour to get it published i do not know; but if he did, he is such a very indolent and selfish man that his efforts would never get the thing done. m. gambs has written to me to ask if you have any literary friends in paris who would be kind enough to interest themselves about it. the address of the prince is as follows: son excellence le prince nicolas scherbatoff, rue st. lazare, no. , à paris. can you not get some one to call upon him to ask about the manuscript, and to propose it to some bookseller? this some one may enter into a direct correspondence with m. gambs by addressing him chez m. lenhold, marchand de musique, à moscow. i should be highly delighted if you could settle things in this way, as i know my friend has nothing more at heart than to appear in print, and that i should be glad to be the means of communicating some pleasure to an existence which i know is almost utterly without it, and of showing my gratitude for the kindness and goodness he has showered upon me; nor, as far as my poor judgment goes, is the work unworthy of inspiring interest, and of being saved from oblivion. it pleased me much when it was read to me; but then it is true i was in a desert, and there a drop of water will often seem to us more precious than the finest jewel. another subject connected with paris also presses itself on my mind. in moore's _life of lord byron_ only the most distant allusion was made to lady caroline lamb; yet, in the french translation, its performer, madame sophie bellay (or some such name) had the indelicacy to unveil the mystery in a note, and to expose it in distinct and staring characters to the public. this piece of impudence was harmless to lady caroline, since her independence of others was assured beyond a doubt; but to any one whose bread depends upon the public a printed exposure of their conduct will infallibly bring on destitution, and reduce them to the necessity of weighing upon their relations for support. i know the subject is a disagreeable one, and that you do not like disagreeable subjects. i know nothing of business or whether there exists any means of averting this blow; perhaps a representation to the translator of the evils that would follow would be sufficient; but as i have no means of trying this, i am reduced to suggest the subject to your attention, with the firm hope that you will find some method of warding off the threatened mischief. what you tell me of the state of family resources has naturally depressed my spirits. will the future never cease unrolling new shapes of misery? stair above stair of wretchedness is all we know; the present, bad as it is, is always better than what comes after. of all the crowd of eager inquirers at the delphic shrine was there ever found one who thanked, or had any reason to thank, the pythia for what she disclosed to him? for me, i have long abandoned hope and the future, and am now diligently pursuing and retracing the past, going the back way as it were to eternity in order to avoid the disappointments and perplexities of an unknown course. but i must beg pardon for my cowardice and disagreeableness, and leave it, or else i shall be recollected with as much reluctance as the pythia. i wish i could give you any idea of the beauty of nice. so long as i can walk about beside the sounding sea, beneath its ambient heaven, and gaze upon the far hills enshrined in purple light, i catch such pleasure from their loveliness that i am happy without happiness; but when i come home, then it seems to me as if all the phantasmagoria of hell danced before my eyes. mrs. k. has arrived and in no very amiable humour. the only conversation i hear is, first, the numberless perfections of herself, husband, and child; this, as it is true, would be well enough, but still upon repetition it tires; second, the infinite superiority of russia over all other countries, since it is an established truth that liberty and civilisation are the most dreadful of all evils. i, to avoid ill-temper, assent to all they say; then in company, when opposed in their doctrines, they drag me forward, and the tacit consent i have given, as an argument in favour of their way of thinking, and i am at once set down by everybody either as a fawning creature or an utter fool. however, i am glad she has come, as the responsibility of natalie's health was too much. for heaven's sake excuse me to dear jane that i have not written. my first moment shall be given to do so. i think of england and my friends all day long. entreat everybody to write to me. do pray do so yourself. my love to my mother and papa, and william and everybody. how happy was i that percy was well.--in haste, ever yours, c. clairmont. mrs. shelley's mind was much occupied during by the serious question of sending her son to a public school. she wished to give him the best possible education, and she wished, too, to give it him in such a form as would place him at no disadvantage among other young men when he took his place in english society. shelley (she mentions in one of her letters) had expressed himself in favour of a public school, but shelley's family had also to be consulted, and she seems to have had reason to hope they would help in the matter. they quite concurred in her views for percy, only putting a veto on eton, where legends of his father's school-days might still be lingering about. nothing was better than that she should send him to a public school--_if she could_. these last words were implied, not expressed. but a public school education in england is not to be given on a very limited income. funds had to be found; and mrs. shelley made, through the lawyer, a direct request to sir timothy for assistance. she received the following answer-- mr. whitton to mrs. shelley. stone hall, _ th november _. dear madam--i have been, from the time i received your last favour to the present, in correspondence with sir timothy shelley as to your wishes of an advance upon the £ per annum he now makes to you, and i recommended him to consult his friend and solicitor, mr. steadman, of horsham, thereon, and which he did. you have not perhaps well put together and estimated on the great amount of the charges upon the estate by the late mr. shelley, and on the legacies given by his will; but looking at all these, and the very limited interest of the estate now vested in you, sir timothy has paused in his consideration thereof, and in the result has brought his mind, that, having regard to the other provisions he is bound to make for his other children, he ought not to increase the allowance to you, and upon that ground he declines so doing; and therefore feels the necessity of your making such arrangements as you may find necessary to make the £ per annum answer the purposes for yourself and for your son, and he has this morning stated to me his fixed determination to abide thereby; and i lose not a moment, after i receive this communication from him, to make it known to you, and i trust and hope you will find it practicable to give him a good education out of the £ a year.--i remain, madam, your very obedient servant, wm. whitton. the seeming brutality of the concluding sentence must in fairness be ascribed to the writer and not to those he represented. to mrs. shelley, knowing the impossibility of carrying out the public school plan on her own income, the wishes and hopes must have sounded a mockery. it had to be done, however, if it was the best thing for the boy. the money must be earned, and she worked on. one day she received from her father a new kind of petition, which, showing the effect on him of advancing years, must have struck a pang to her heart. she was accustomed to his requests for money, but now he wrote to her for _an idea_. godwin to mrs. shelley. _ th april ._ my dear mary--you desire me to write to you, if i have anything particular to say. i write, then, to say that i am still in the same dismaying predicament in which i have been for weeks past--at a loss for materials to make up my third volume. this is by no means what i expected. i knew, and i know, that incidents of hair-breadth escapes and adventures are innumerable, and that without having fixed on any one of them, i took for granted they would come when i called for them. such is the mischievous effect, the anxious expectation, that is produced by past success. i believe that when i came to push with all my force against the barriers that seemed to shut me in they would give way, and place all the treasures of invention before me. meanwhile, it unfortunately happens that i cannot lay my present disappointment to the charge of advancing age. i find all my faculties and all my strength in full bloom about me. my disappointment has put that to a sharp trial. i thought that the severe stretch of my faculties would cause them to yield, and subside into feebleness and torpor. no such thing. day after day, week after week, i apply to this one question, without remission and with discernment. but i cannot please myself. if i make the round of all my thoughts, and come home empty-handed, it would seem that in the flower and vigour of my youth i should have done the same. meanwhile, my situation is deplorable. i am not free to choose the thing i would do. i have written two volumes and a quarter, and have received five-sixths of the price of my work. i am afraid you will think i am useless, by teasing you with "conceptions only proper to myself." but it is not altogether so. a bystander may see a point of game which a player overlooks. though i cannot furnish myself with satisfactory incidents i have disciplined my mind into a tone that would enable me to improve them, if offered to me. my mind is like a train of gunpowder, and a single spark, now happily communicated, might set the whole in motion and activity. do not tease yourself about my calamity; but give it one serious thought. who knows what such a thought may produce?--your affectionate father, william godwin. in the spring of the cholera appeared in london. clare, at a distance, was torn to pieces between real apprehension for the safety of her friends, and distracting fears lest the disease should select among them for its victim some one on whose life depended the realisation of shelley's will. for percy especially she was solicitous. mary must take him away at once, to the seaside--anywhere: if money was an obstacle she, clare, was ready to help to defray the cost out of her salary. mrs. shelley did leave london, although, it may safely be asserted, at no one's expense but her own. she stayed for a month at southend, and afterwards for a longer time at sandgate. besides contributing tales and occasionally verses to the _keepsake_, she was employed now and during the next two or three years in preparing and writing the italian and spanish lives of literary men for lardner's _cabinet cyclopædia_. these included, among the italians--petrarch, boccaccio, bojardo, macchiavelli, metastasio, goldoni, alfieri, ugo foscolo, etc.; among the spanish and portuguese--cervantes, lope de vega, calderon, camoens, and a host of others, besides notices of the troubadours, the "romances moriscos," and the early poets of portugal. clare, too, tried her hand at a story, to which she begged mary to be a kind of godmother. i have written a tale, which i think will do for the _keepsake_. i shall send it home for your perusal. will you correct it? do write and let me know where i may send it, so as to be sure to find you. will you be angry with me if i beg you to write the last scene of it? i am now so unwell i can't. my only time for writing is after at night; the rest of the tale was composed at that hour, after having been scolding and talking and giving lessons from in the morning. it was very near its end when i got so ill, i gave it up. if you cannot do anything with it you can at least make curl-papers of it, and that is always something. do not mention it to anybody; should it be printed one can speak of it, and if you judge it not worthy, then it is no use mortifying my vanity. the truth, is i should never think of writing, knowing well my incapacity for it, but i want to gain money. what would one not do for that, since it is the only key of freedom? one is even impudent enough to ask a great authoress to finish one's tale for one. i think, in your hands, it might get into the _keepsake_, for it is about a pole, and that is the topic of the day. if it should get any money, half will naturally belong to you. should you have the kindness to arrange it, julia would perhaps also be so kind as to copy it out for me, that the alterations in your hand may not be seen. i wish it to be signed "mont obscur."... mary did what was asked of her. trelawny, now in england again, had influence in some literary quarters, and, at her request, willingly consented to exert it on clare's behalf. meanwhile he requested her to receive his eldest daughter on a visit of considerable length. trelawny to mrs. shelley. _ th july ._ my dear mary--i am awaiting an occasion of sending ---- to italy, my friend, lady d., undertaking the charge of her. it may be a month before she leaves england. at the end of this month mrs. b. leaves london, and you will do me a great service if you will permit my daughter to reside with you till i can make the necessary arrangements for going abroad; she has been reared in a rough school, like her father. i wish her to live and do as you do, and that you will not put yourself to the slightest inconvenience on her account. as we are poor, the rich are our inheritance, and we are justified on all and every occasion to rob and use them. but we must be honest and just amongst ourselves, therefore ---- must to the last fraction pay her own expenses, and neither put you to expense nor inconvenience. for the rest, i should like ---- to learn to lean upon herself alone--to see the practical part of life: to learn housekeeping on trifling means, and to benefit by her intercourse with a woman like you; but i am ill at compliments. if you will permit ---- to come to you, i will send or bring her to you about the th of this month. i should like you and ---- to know each other before she leaves england, and thus i have selected you to take charge of her in preference to any other person; but say if it chimes in with your wishes. adieu, dear mary.--your attached friend, edward trelawny. by the bye, tell me where the sandgate coach starts from, its time of leaving london, and its time of arrival at sandgate, and where you are, and if they will give you another bedroom in the house you are lodging in; and if you have any intention of leaving sandgate soon. trelawny to mrs. shelley. _ th july ._ my dear mary--you told me in your letter that it would be more convenient for you to receive ---- on the last of the month, so i made my arrangements accordingly. i now find it will suit me better to come to you on wednesday, so that you may expect ---- on the evening of that day by the coach you mention. i shall of course put up at the inn. as to your style of lodging or living, ---- is not such a fool as to let that have any weight with her; if you were in a cobbler's stall she would be satisfied; and as to the dulness of the place, why, that must mainly depend on ourselves. brompton is not so very gay, and the reason of my removing ---- to italy is that mrs. b. was about sending her to reside with strangers at lincoln; besides ---- is acting entirely by her own free choice, and she gladly preferred sandgate to lincoln. at all events, come we shall; and if you, by barricading or otherwise, oppose our entrance, why i shall do to you, not as i would have others do unto me, but as i do unto others,--make an onslaught on your dwelling, carry your tenement by assault, and give the place up to plunder. so on wednesday evening (at , by your account) you must be prepared to quietly yield up possession or take the consequences. so as you shall deport yourself, you will find me your friend or foe, trelawny. mary's guest stayed with her over a month. during this time she was saddened by the sudden death of her friendly acquaintance, lord dillon. she was anxious, too, about her father, whose equable spirits had failed him this year. no assistance seemed to avail much to ease his circumstances; he was not far from his eightieth year, and still his hopes were anchored in a yet-to-be-written novel. "i feel myself able and willing to do everything, and to do it well," so he wrote, "and nobody disposed to give me the requisite encouragement. if i can agree with these tyrants" (his publishers) "for £ , £ , or £ for a novel, and to be subsisted by them while i write it, i probably shall not starve for a twelvemonth to come ... but this dancing attendance wears my spirits and destroys my tranquillity. 'hands have i, but i handle not; i have feet, but i walk not; neither is there any breath in my nostrils.' "meanwhile my life wears away, and 'there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither i go.' but, indeed, i am wrong in talking of that, for i write now, not for marble to be placed over my remains, but for bread to put into my mouth." mary tried in the summer to tempt him down to sandgate for a change. but the weather was very cold, and he declined. _ th august ._ dear mary-- see, winter comes, to rule the varied year, sullen and sad, with all his rising train-- vapours, and clouds, and storms. i am shivering over a little fire at the bottom of my grate, and have small inclination to tempt the sea-breezes and the waves; we must therefore defer our meeting till it comes within the walls of london. * * * * * _au revoir!_ to what am i reserved? i know not. the wide (no not) the unbounded prospect lies before me, but shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. a new shadow was now to fall upon the poor old man, in the death from cholera of his only son, mary's half-brother, william. this son in his early youth had given some trouble and caused some anxiety, but his character, as he grew up, had become steadier and more settled. he was happily married, and seemed likely to be a source of real comfort and satisfaction to his parents in their old age. by profession he was a reporter, but he had his hereditary share of literary ability and of talent "turned for the relation of fictitious adventures," and left in ms. a novel called _transfusion_, published by his father after his death, with the motto-- some noble spirits, judging by themselves, may yet conjecture what i might have been. although inevitably somewhat hardened against misfortune of the heart by his self-centred habits of mind and anxiety about money, godwin was much saddened by this loss, and to mrs. godwin it was a very great and bitter grief indeed. clare saw at once in this the beginning of fresh troubles; the realisation of all the gloomy forebodings in which she had indulged. she wrote to jane hogg-- that nasty year, , could not go over without imitating in some respects , and bringing death and misfortune to us. from the time it came in till it went out i trembled, expecting at every moment to hear the most gloomy tidings. william's death came, and fulfilled my anticipations; misfortune as it was, it was not such a heavy one to me as the loss of others might have been. i, however, was fond of him, because i did not view his faults in that desponding light which his other relations did. i have seen more of the world, and, comparing him with other young men, his frugality, his industry, his attachment to his wife, and his talents, raised him, in my opinion, considerably above the common par. but in our family, if you cannot write an epic poem or novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature, not worth acknowledging. what would they have done or said had their children been fond of dress, fond of cards, drunken, profligate, as most people's children are? to mary she wrote in a somewhat different tone, assuming that she, clare, was the victim on whom all misfortune really fell, and wondering at mary's incredible temerity in allowing her boy, that all-important heir-apparent, to face the perils of a public school. and then, losing sight for a moment of her own feverish anxiety, she gives a vivid sketch of mrs. mason's family. miss clairmont to mrs. shelley. pisa, _ th october _. my dear mary--though your last letter was on so melancholy a subject, yet i am so destitute of all happiness that to receive it was one to me. i have not yet got over the shock of william's death; from the moment i heard of it until now i have been in a complete state of annihilation. how long it will last i am sure i cannot tell; i hope not much longer, or perhaps i shall go mad. a horrible and most inevitable future is the image that torments me, just as it did ten years ago, in this very city. but i won't torment you, who have a thousand enjoyments that veil it from you, and need not feel the blow till it comes. our fates were always different; mine is to feel the shadow of coming misfortunes, and to sicken beneath it. there seems to have been great imprudence on william's part: my mother says he went to bartholomew fair the day before he was taken ill; then he did not have medical assistance so soon as ill, which they say is of the highest importance in the cholera, so altogether i suppose his life was thrown away--a most lucky circumstance for himself, but god knows what it will be for the godwins. his death changed my plans. i had settled to go to vienna, but as the cholera is still there, i no longer considered myself free to offer another of my mother's children to be its victim. mrs. mason represented the imprudence of it, considering my weak health, the depressed state of my spirits for the last twelve years, the fatigue of the long journey, and the chilliness of the season of the year, which are all things that predispose excessively to the disease, and i yielded out of regard to my mother. i thought she would prefer anything to my dying, or else at vienna, charles tells me, i could earn more than i am likely to earn here. for the same reason paris was abandoned. i beg you will tell her this, and hope she will think i have done well. in the meantime i stay with mrs. mason, and have got an engagement as day governess with an english family, which will supply me with money for my own expenses, but nothing more. in the spring they wish to take me entirely, but the pay is not brilliant. when i know more about them i will tell you. nothing can equal mrs. mason's kindness to me. hers is the only house, except my mother's, in which all my life i have always felt at home. with her, i am as her child; from the merest trifle to the greatest object, she treats me as if her happiness depended on mine. then she understands me so completely. i have no need to disguise my sentiments; to barricade myself up in silence, as i do almost with everybody, for fear they should see what passes in my mind, and hate me for it, because it does not resemble what passes in theirs. this ought to be a great happiness to me, and would, did not her unhappiness and her precarious state of health darken it with the torture of fear. it is too bitter, after a long life passed in unbroken misery, to find a good only that you may lose it. laurette's marriage is to take place at the end of november. mrs. mason having tried every means to hinder it, and seeing that she cannot, is now impatient it should be over. their present state is too painful. she cannot disguise her dislike of galloni; he having nearly killed her with his scenes, and laurette cannot sympathise with her; being on the point of marrying him, and feeling grateful for his excessive attachment, she wishes to think as well of him as she can. it is the first time the mother and daughter have ever divided in opinion, and galls both in a way that seems unreasonable to those who live in the world, and are accustomed to meet rebuffs in their dearest feelings at every moment. but our friends live in solitude, and have nursed themselves into a height of romance about everything. they both think their destinies annihilated, because the union of their minds has suffered this interruption. however, no violence mingles with this sentiment and excites displeasure; on the contrary, i wish it did, for it would be easier to heal than the tragic immutable sorrow with which they take it. while these two dissolve in quiet grief, nerina, the italian, agitates herself on the question; she forgets all her own love affairs, and all the sabre slashes and dagger stabs of her own poor heart, to fall into fainting fits and convulsions every time she sees laurette and her mother fix their eyes mournfully upon each other; then she talks and writes upon the subject incessantly, even till o'clock in the morning. she has a band of young friends of both sexes, and with them, either by word of mouth or by letter, she _sfogares_ herself of her hatred of galloni, of the unparalleled cruelty of laurette's fate, and of the terrific grave that is yawning for her mother; her mind is discursive, and she introduces into her lamentations observations upon the faulty manner in which she and her sister have been educated, strictures upon the nature of love, objurgations against the whole race of man, and eloquent appeals to the female sex to prefer patriotism to matrimony. all the life that is left in the house is now concentrated in nerina, and i am sure she cannot complain of a dearth of sensations, for she takes good care to feel with everything around her, for if the chair does but knock the table, she shudders and quakes for both, and runs into her own study to write it down in her journal. into this small study she always hurries me, and pours out her soul, and i am well pleased to listen, for she is full of genius; when the tide has flowed so long, it has spent itself, we generally pause, and then begin to laugh at the ridiculous figures human beings cut in struggling all their might and main against a destiny which forces millions and millions of enormous planets on their way, and against which all struggling is useless. _ th november._ my letter has been lying by all this time, i not having time to write. i am afraid this winter i shall scarcely be able to keep up a correspondence at all. i must be out at in the morning, and am not home before at night. i inhabit at mrs. mason's a room without a fire, so that when i get home there is no sitting in it without perishing with cold. i cannot sit with the masons, because they have a set of young men every night to see them, and i do not wish to make their acquaintance. i walk straight into my own room on my return. writing either letters or articles will be a matter of great difficulty. the season is very cold here. my health always diminishes in proportion to the cold. i am very glad to hear that percy likes harrow, but i shudder from head to foot when i think of your boldness in sending him there. i think in certain things you are the most daring woman i ever knew. there are few mothers who, having suffered the misfortunes you have, and having such advantages depending upon the life of an only son, would venture to expose that life to the dangers of a public school. as for me, it is not for nothing that my fate has been taken out of my own hands and put into those of people who have wantonly torn it into miserable shreds and remnants; having once endured to have my whole happiness sacrificed to the gratification of some of their foolish whims, why i can endure it again, and so my mind is made up and my resolution taken. i confess, i could wish there were another world in which people were to answer for what they do in this! i wish this, because without it i am afraid it will become a law that those who inflict must always go on inflicting, and those who have once suffered must always go on suffering. i hope nothing will happen to percy; but the year, the school itself that you have chosen, and the ashes[ ] that lie near it, and the hauntings of my own mind, all seem to announce the approach of that consummation which i dread. i am very glad you are delighted with trelawny. my affections are entirely without jealousy; the more those i love love others, and are loved by them, the better pleased am i. i am in a vile humour for writing a letter; you would not wonder at it if you knew how i am plagued. i can say from experience that the wonderful variety there is of miseries in this world is truly astonishing; if some linnæus would class them as he did flowers, the number of their kinds would far surpass the boasted infinitude of the vegetable creation. not a day nor hour passes but introduces me to some new pain, and each one contains within itself swarms of smaller ones--animalculæ pains which float up and down in it, and compose its existence and their own. what mademoiselle de l'espinasse was for love, i am for pain,--all my letters are on the same subject, and yet i hope i do not repeat myself, for truly, with such diversity of experience, i ought not. our friends here send their best love to you, and are interested in your perilous destiny. i have just received a letter from my mother, and in obedience to her representations draw my breath as peacefully as i can till the month of january. will you explain to me one phrase of her letter? talking of the chances of their getting money, she says: "then miss northcote is not expected to live over the winter," and not a word beside. who in the world is miss northcote? and what influence can her death have in bettering their prospects? notwithstanding my writing such a beastly letter as this to you, pray do write. i work myself into the most dreadful state of irritation when i am long without letters from some of you. tell jane i entreat her to write, and tell my mother that the bill of lading of the parcel for me is come, but mrs. mason sent it off to leghorn without my seeing it, and was too ill herself to look at the date, so i know not when it was shipped, but as mr. routh has the bill, i suppose i shall hear when it has arrived and performed quarantine. thank trelawny for me for his kindness about the article. pisa is very dull yet. i am told there are seven or eight english families arrived, but i have not seen them. farewell, my dear mary. be well and happy, and excuse my dulness.--yours ever affectionately, c. clairmont. one term's experience was enough to convince mrs. shelley that she could only afford to continue her son's school education by leaving london herself and settling with him at harrow for some years. in january she wrote an account of her affairs to her old friend, mrs. gisborne-- never was poor body so worried as i have been ever since i last wrote, i think; worries which plague and press on one, and keep one fretting. money, of course, is the alpha and omega of my tale. harrow proves so fearfully expensive that i have been sadly put to it to pay percy's bill for one quarter (£ , _soltanto_), and, to achieve it, am hampered for the whole year. my only resource is to live at harrow, for in every other respect i like the school, and would not take him from it. he will become a home boarder, and school expenses will be very light. i shall take a house, being promised many facilities for furnishing it by a kind friend. to go and live at pretty harrow, with my boy, who improves each day and is everything i could wish, is no bad prospect, but i have much to go through, and am so poor that i can hardly turn myself. it is hard on my poor dear father, and i sometimes think it hard on myself to leave a knot of acquaintances i like; but that is a fiction, for half the times i am asked out i cannot go because of the expense, and i am suffering now for the times when i do go, and so incur debt. no, maria mine, god never intended me to do other than struggle through life, supported by such blessings as make existence more than tolerable, and yet surrounded by such difficulties as make fortitude a necessary virtue, and destroy all idea of great and good luck. i might have been much worse off, and i repeat this to myself ten thousand times a day to console myself for not being better. my father's novel is printed, and, i suppose, will come out soon. poor dear fellow! it is hard work for him. i am in all the tremor of fearing what i shall get for my novel, which is nearly finished. his and my comfort depend on it. i do not know whether you will like it. i cannot guess whether it will succeed. there is no writhing interest; nothing wonderful nor tragic--will it be dull? _chi lo sa?_ we shall see. i shall, of course, be very glad if it succeeds. percy went back to harrow to-day. he likes his school much. have i any other news for you? trelawny is gone to america; he is about to cross to charlestown directly there is a prospect of war--war in america. i am truly sorry. brothers should not fight for the different and various portions of their inheritance. what is the use of republican principles and liberty if peace is not the offspring? war is the companion and friend of monarchy; if it be the same of freedom, the gain is not much to mankind between a sovereign and president. * * * * * not long after taking up her residence at harrow, which she did in april , mrs. shelley was attacked by influenza, then prevailing in a virulent form. she did not wholly recover from its effects till after the midsummer holidays, which she spent at putney for change of air. she found the solitude of her new abode very trying. her boy had, of course, his school pursuits and interests to occupy him, and, though her literary work served while it lasted to ward off depression, the constant mental strain was attended with an inevitable degree of reaction for which a little genial and sympathetic human intercourse would have been the best--indeed, the only--cure. as for her father, now she had gone he missed her sadly. godwin to mrs. shelley. _july ._ dear mary--i shall certainly not come to you on monday. it would do neither of us good. i am a good deal of a spoiled child. and were i not so, and could rouse myself, like diogenes, to be independent of all outward comforts, you would treat me as if i could not, so that it would come to the same thing. what a while it is since i saw you! the last time was the th of may,--towards two months,--we who used to see each other two or three times a week! but for the scale of miles at the bottom of the map, you might as well be at timbuctoo or in the deserts of arabia. oh, this vile harrow! your illness, for its commencement or duration, is owing to that place. at one time i was seriously alarmed for you. and now that i hope you are better, with what tenaciousness does it cling to you! if i ever see you again i wonder whether i shall know you. i am much tormented by my place, by my book, and hardly suppose i shall ever be tranquil again. i am disposed to adopt the song of simeon, and to say, "lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!" at seventy years of age, what is there worth living for? i have enjoyed existence, been active, strenuous, proud, but my eyes are dim, and my energies forsake me.--your affectionate father, william godwin. the next letter is addressed to trelawny, now in america, mrs. shelley to trelawny. harrow, _ th may _. dear trelawny--i confess i have been sadly remiss in not writing to you. i have written once, however, as you have written once (but once) to me. i wrote in answer to your letter. i am sorry you did not get it, as it contained a great deal of gossip. it was misdirected by a mistake of jane's.... it was sent at the end of last september to new york. i told you in it of the infidelity of several of your womankind,--how mrs. r. s. was flirting with bulwer, to the infinite jealousy of mrs. bulwer, and making themselves the talk of the town.... such and much tittle-tattle was in that letter, all old news now.... the s.'s (captain robert and wife, i mean) went to paris and were ruined, and are returned under a cloud to rusticate in the country in england. bulwer is making the amiable to his own wife, who is worth in beauty all the mrs. r. s.'s in the world.... jane has been a good deal indisposed, and has grown very thin. jeff had an appointment which took him away for several months, and she pined and grew ill on his absence; she is now reviving under the beneficent influence of his presence. i called on your mother a week or two ago; she always asks after you with _empressement_, and is very civil indeed to me. she was looking well, but ---- tells me, in her note enclosing your letter, that she is ill of the same illness as she had two years ago, but not so bad. i think she lives too well. ---- is expecting to be confined in a very few weeks, or even days. she is very happy with b.... he is a thoroughly good-natured and estimable man; it is a pity he is not younger and handsomer; however, she is a good girl, and contented with her lot; we are very good friends.... i should like much to see your friend, lady dorothea, but, though in europe, i am very far from her. i live on my hill, descending to town now and then. i should go oftener if i were richer. percy continues quite well, and enjoys my living at harrow, which is more than i do, i am sorry to say, but there is no help. my father is in good health. mrs. godwin has been very ill lately, but is now better. i thought fanny kemble was to marry and settle in america: what a singular likeness you have discovered! i never saw her, except on the stage. so much for news. they say it is a long lane that has no turning. i have travelled the same road for nearly twelve years; adversity, poverty, and loneliness being my companions. i suppose it will change at last, but i have nothing to tell of myself except that percy is well, which is the beginning and end of my existence. i am glad you are beginning to respect women's feelings.... you have heard of sir h.'s death. mrs. b. (who is great friends with s., now sir william, an m.p.) says that it is believed that he has left all he could to the catholic members of his family. why not come over and marry letitia, who in consequence will be rich? and, i daresay, still beautiful in your eyes, though thirty-four. we have had a mild, fine winter, and the weather now is as warm, sunny, and cheering as an italian may. we have thousands of birds and flowers innumerable, and the trees of spring in the fields. jane's children are well. the time will come, i suppose, when we may meet again more (richly) provided by fortune, but youth will have flown, and that in a woman is something.... i have always felt certain that i should never again change my name, and that is a comfort, it is a pretty and a dear one. adieu, write to me often, and i will behave better, and as soon as i have accumulated a little news, write again.--ever yours, m. w. s. mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. _ th july ._ i am satisfied with my plan as regards him (percy). i like the school, and the affection thus cultivated for me will, i trust, be the blessing of my life. still there are many drawbacks; this is a dull, inhospitable place. i came counting on the kindness of a friend who lived here, but she died of the influenza, and i live in a silence and loneliness not possible anywhere except in england, where people are so _islanded_ individually in habits; i often languish for sympathy, and pine for social festivity. percy is much, but i think of you and henry, and shrink from binding up my life in a child who may hereafter divide his fate from mine. but i have no resource; everything earthly fails me but him; except on his account i live but to suffer. those i loved are false or dead; those i love, absent and suffering; and i, absent and poor, can be of no use to them. of course, in this picture, i subtract the enjoyment of good health and usually good spirits,--these are blessings; but when driven to think, i feel so desolate, so unprotected, so oppressed and injured, that my heart is ready to break with despair. i came here, as i said, in april , and th june was attacked by the influenza, so as to be confined to my bed; nor did i recover the effects for several months. in september, during percy's holidays, i went to putney, and recovered youth and health; julia robinson was with me, and we spent days in richmond park and on putney heath, often walking twelve or fourteen miles, which i did without any sense of fatigue. i sorely regretted returning here. i am too poor to furnish. i have lodgings in the town,--disagreeable ones,--yet often, in spite of care and sorrow, i feel wholly compensated by my boy.... god help me if anything was to happen to him--i should not survive it a week. besides his society i have also a good deal of occupation. i have finished a novel, which, if you meet with, read, as i think there are parts which will please you. i am engaged writing the lives of some of the italian _literati_ for dr. lardner's _cyclopædia_. i have written those of petrarch, boccaccio, etc., and am now engaged on macchiavelli; this takes up my time, and is a source of interest and pleasure. my father, i suppose you know, has a tiny, shabby place under government. the retrenchments of parliament endanger and render us anxious. he is quite well, but old age takes from his enjoyments. mrs. godwin, after influenza, has been suffering from the tic-doloreux in her arm most dreadfully; they are trying all sorts of poisons on her with little effect. their discomfort and low spirits will force me to spend percy's holidays in town, to be near them. jane and jeff are well; he was sent last autumn and winter by lord brougham as one of the corporation commissioners; he was away for months, and jane took the opportunity to fall desperately in love with him--she pined and grew ill, and wasted away for him. the children are quite well. dina spent a week here lately; she is a sweet girl. edward improves daily under the excellent care taken of his education. i leave jane to inform you of their progress in greek. dina plays wonderfully well, and has shown great taste for drawing, but this last is not cultivated. i did not go to the abbey, nor the opera, nor hear grisi; i am shut out from all things--like you--by poverty and loneliness. percy's pleasures are not mine; i have no other companion. what effect paganini would have had on you, i cannot tell; he threw me into hysterics. i delight in him more than i can express. his wild, ethereal figure, rapt look, and the sounds he draws from his violin are all superhuman--of human expression. it is interesting to see the astonishment and admiration of spagnoletti and nervi as they watch his evolutions. bulwer is a man of extraordinary and delightful talent. he went to italy and sicily last winter, and, i hear, disliked the inhabitants. yet, notwithstanding, i am sure he will spread inexpressible and graceful interest over the _last days of pompeii_, the subject of his new novel. trelawny is in america, and not likely to return. hunt lives at chelsea, and thrives, i hear, by his london pursuit. i have not seen him for more than a year, for reasons i will not here detail--they concern his family, not him. clare is in a situation in pisa, near mrs. mason. laurette and nerina are married; the elder badly, to one who won her at the dagger's point--a sad unintelligible story; nerina, to the best and most delightful pistoiese, by name bartolomeo cini--both to italians. laurette lives at genoa, nerina at livorno; the latter is only newly a bride, and happier than words can express. my italian maid, maria, says to clare, _non vedrò ora mai la mia padrona ed il mio bimbo?_ her bimbo--as tall as i am and large in proportion--has good health withal.... pray write one word of information concerning your health before i attribute your silence to forgetfulness; but you must not trifle now with the anxiety you have awakened. i will write again soon. with kindest regards to your poor, good husband, the fondest hopes that your health is improved, and anxious expectation of a letter, believe me, ever affectionately yours, m. w. shelley. mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. harrow, _ th october _. my dearest maria--thank you many times for your kind dear letter. god grant that your constitution may yet bear up a long time, and that you may continue impressed with the idea of your happiness. to be loved is indeed necessary. sympathy and companionship are the only sweets to make the nauseous draught of life go down; and i, who feel this, live in a solitude such as, since the days of hermits in the desert, no one was ever before condemned to! i see no one, speak to no one--except perhaps for a chance half-hour in the course of a fortnight. i never walk beyond my garden, because i cannot walk alone. you will say i ought to force myself; so i thought once, and tried, but it would not do. the sense of desolation was too oppressive. i only find relief from the sadness of my position by living a dreamy existence from which realities are excluded; but going out disturbed this; i wept; my heart beat with a sense of injury and wrong; i was better shut up. poverty prevents me from visiting town; i am too far for visitors to reach me; i must bear to the end. twelve years have i spent, the currents of life benumbed by poverty; life and hope are over for me, but i think of percy! yet for the present something more is needed--something not so _unnatural_ as my present life. not that i often feel _ennui_--i am too much employed--but it hurts me, it destroys the spring of my mind, and makes me at once over-sensitive with my fellow-creatures, and yet their victim and their dupe. it takes all strength from my character, and makes me--who by nature am too much so--timid. i used to have one resource, a belief in my _good fortune_; this is exchanged after twelve years--one adversity, blotted and sprinkled with many adversities; a dark ground, with sad figures painted on it--to a belief in my ill fortune. percy is spared to me, because i am to live. he is a blessing; my heart acknowledges that perhaps he is as great an one as any human being possesses; and indeed, my dear friend, while i suffer, i do not repine while he remains. he is not all you say; he has no ambition, and his talents are not so transcendent as you appear to imagine; but he is a fine, spirited, clever boy, and i think promises good things; if hereafter i have reason to be proud of him, these melancholy days and weeks at harrow will brighten in my imagination--and they are not melancholy. i am seldom so, but they are not right, and it will be a good thing if they terminate happily soon. at the same time, i cannot in the least regret having come here: it was the only way i had of educating percy at a public school, of which institution, at least here at harrow, the more i see the more i like; besides that, it was shelley's wish that his son should be brought up at one. it is, indeed, peculiarly suited to percy; and whatever he may be, he will be twice as much as if he had been brought up in the narrow confinement of a private school. the boys here have liberty to the verge of licence; yet of the latter, save the breaking of a few windows now and then, there is none. his life is not quite what it would be if he did not live with me, but the greater scope given to the cultivation of the affections is surely an advantage. * * * * * you heard of the dreadful fire at the houses of parliament. we saw it here from the commencement, raging like a volcano; it was dreadful to see, but, fortunately, i was not aware of the site. papa lives close to the speaker's, so you may imagine my alarm when the news reached me, fortunately without foundation, as the fire did not gain that part of the speaker's house near them, so they were not even inconvenienced. the poor dear speaker has lost dreadfully; what was not burnt is broken, soaked, and drenched--all their pretty things; and imagine the furniture and princely chambers--the house was a palace. for the sake of convenience to the commons, they are to take up their abode in the ruins. with kindest wishes for you and s. g., ever dearest friend, your affectionate mary w. shelley. the same to the same. _february ._ ... i must tell you that i have had the offer of £ for an edition of shelley's works, with _life and notes_. i am afraid it cannot be arranged, yet at least, and the _life_ is out of the question; but in talking over it the question of letters comes up. you know how i shrink from all private detail for the public; but shelley's letters are beautifully written, and everything private might be omitted. would you allow the publisher to treat with you for their being added to my edition? if i could arrange all as i wish, they might be an acquisition to the books, and being transacted through me, you could not see any inconvenience in receiving the price they would be worth to the bookseller. this is all _in aria_ as yet, but i should like to know what you think about it. i write all this, yet am very anxious to hear from you; never mind postage, but do write. percy is reading the _antigone_; he has begun mathematics. mrs. cleveland[ ] and jane dined with me the other day. mrs. cleveland thought percy wonderfully improved. the volume of lardner's _cyclopædia_, with my _lives_, was published on the first of this month; it is called _lives of eminent literary men_, vol. i. the lives of dante and ariosto are by mr. montgomery, the rest are mine. do write, my dearest maria, and believe me ever and ever, affectionately yours, m. w. shelley. _lodore_, mrs. shelley's fifth novel, came out in . it differs from the others in being a novel of society, and has been stigmatised, rather unjustly, as weak and colourless, although at the time of its publication it had a great success. it is written in a style which is now out of date, and undoubtedly fails to fulfil the promise of power held out by _frankenstein_ and to some extent by _valperga_, but it bears on every page the impress of the refinement and sensibility of the author, and has, moreover, a special interest of its own, due to the fact that some of the incidents are taken from actual occurrences in her early life, and some of the characters sketched from people she had known. thus, in the description of clorinda, it is impossible not to recognise emilia viviani. the whole episode of edward villier's arrest and imprisonment for debt, and his young wife's anxieties, is an echo of her own experience at the time when shelley was hiding from the bailiffs and meeting her by stealth in st. paul's or holborn. lodore himself has some affinity to byron, and possibly the account of his separation from his wife and of their daughter's girlhood is a fanciful train of thought suggested by byron's domestic history. most of mary's novels present the contrast of the shelleyan and byronic types. in this instance the latter was recognised by clare, and drew from her one of those bitter tirades against byron, which, natural enough in her at the outset, became in the course of years quite morbidly venomous. not content with laying allegra's death to his charge, she, in her later letters, accuses him of treacherously plotting and conspiring, out of hatred to herself, to do away with the child, an allegation unjust and false. in the present instance, however, she only entered an excited protest against his continual reappearance as the hero of a novel. mrs. hare admired _lodore_ amazingly; so do i, or should i, if it were not for that modification of the beastly character of lord byron of which you have composed lodore. i stick to _frankenstein_, merely because that vile spirit does not haunt its pages as it does in all your other novels, now as castruccio, now as raymond,[ ] now as lodore. good god! to think a person of your genius, whose moral tact ought to be proportionately exalted, should think it a task befitting its powers to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human being! as i do not want to be severe on the poor man, because he is dead and cannot defend himself, i have only taken the lighter defects of his character, or else i might say that never was a nature more profoundly corrupted than his became, or was more radically vulgar than his was from the very outset. never was there an individual less adapted, except perhaps alcibiades, for being held up as anything but an object of commiseration, or as an example of how contemptible is even intellectual greatness when not joined with moral greatness. i shall be anxious to see if the hero of your new novel will be another beautified byron. thank heaven! you have not taken to drawing your women upon the same model. cornelia i like the least of them; she is the most like him, because she is so heartlessly proud and selfish, but all the others are angels of light. euthanasia[ ] is shelley in female attire, and what a glorious being she is! no author, much less the ones--french, english, or german--of our day, can bring a woman that matches her. shakespeare has not a specimen so perfect of what a woman ought to be; his, for amiability, deep feeling, wit, are as high as possible, but they want her commanding wisdom, her profound benevolence. i am glad to hear you are writing again; i am always in a fright lest you should take it into your head to do what the warriors do after they have acquired great fame,--retire and rest upon your laurels. that would be very comfortable for you, but very vexing to me, who am always wanting to see women distinguishing themselves in literature, and who believe there has not been or ever will be one so calculated as yourself to raise our sex upon that point. if you would but know your own value and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing! you could write upon metaphysics, politics, jurisprudence, astronomy, mathematics--all those highest subjects which they taunt us with being incapable of treating, and surpass them; and what a consolation it would be, when they begin some of their prosy, lying, but plausible attacks upon female inferiority, to stop their mouths in a moment with your name, and then to add, "and if women, whilst suffering the heaviest slavery, could out-do you, what would they not achieve were they free?" with this manifesto on the subject of women's genius in general and of mary's in particular--perhaps just redeemed by its tinge of irony from the last degree of absurdity--it is curious to contrast mrs. shelley's own conclusions, drawn from weary personal experience, and expressed, towards the end of the following letter, in a mood which permitted her no illusions and few hopes. mrs. shelley to mrs. gisborne. harrow, _ th june _. my dearest friend--it is so inexpressibly warm that were not a frank lying before me ready for you, i do not think i should have courage to write. do not be surprised, therefore, at stupidity and want of connection. i cannot collect my ideas, and this is a goodwill offering rather than a letter. still i am anxious to thank s. g. for the pleasure i have received from his tale of italy--a tale all italy, breathing of the land i love. the descriptions are beautiful, and he has shed a charm round the concentrated and undemonstrative person of his gentle heroine. i suppose she is the reality of the story; did you know her? it is difficult, however, to judge how to procure for it the publication it deserves. i have no personal acquaintance with the editors of any of the annuals--i had with that of the _keepsake_, but that is now in mrs. norton's hands, and she has not asked me to write, so i know nothing about it; but there arises a stronger objection from the length of the story. as the merit lies in the beauty of the details, i do not see how it could be cut down to _one quarter_ of its present length, which is as long as any tale printed in an annual. when i write for them, i am worried to death to make my things shorter and shorter, till i fancy people think ideas can be conveyed by intuition, and that it is a superstition to consider words necessary for their expression. i was so very delighted to get your last letter, to be sure the "wisest of men" said no news was good news, but i am not apt to think so, and was uneasy. i hope this weather does not oppress you. what an odd climate! a week ago i had a fire, and now it is warmer than italy; warmer at least in a box pervious to the sun than in the stone palaces where one can breathe freely. my father is well. he had a cough in the winter, but after we had persuaded him to see a doctor it was easily got rid of. he writes to me himself, "i am now well, now nervous, now old, now young." one sign of age is, that his horror is so great of change of place that i cannot persuade him ever to visit me here. one would think that the sight of the fields would refresh him, but he likes his own nest better than all, though he greatly feels the annoyance of so seldom seeing me. indeed, my kind maria, you made me smile when you asked me to be civil to the brother of your kind doctor. i thought i had explained my situation to you. you must consider me as one buried alive. i hardly ever go to town; less often i see any one here. my kind and dear young friends, the misses robinson, are at brussels. i am cut off from my kind. what i suffer! what i have suffered! i, to whom sympathy, companionship, the interchange of thought is more necessary than the air i breathe, i will not say. tears are in my eyes when i think of days, weeks, months, even years spent alone--eternally alone. it does me great harm, but no more of so odious a subject. let me speak rather of my percy; to see him bright and good is an unspeakable blessing; but no child can be a companion. he is very fond of me, and would be wretched if he saw me unhappy; but he is with his boys all day long, and i am alone, so i can weep unseen. he gets on very well, and is a fine boy, very stout; this hot weather, though he exposes himself to the sun, instead of making him languid, heightens the colour in his cheeks and brightens his eyes. he is always gay and in good humour, which is a great blessing. you talk about my poetry and about the encouragement i am to find from jane and my father. when they read all the fine things you said they thought it right to attack me about it, but i answered them simply, "she exaggerates; you read the best thing i ever wrote in the _keepsake_ and thought nothing of it." i do not know whether you remember the verses i mean. i will copy it in another part; it was written for music. poor dear lord dillon spoke of it as you do of the rest; but "one swallow does not make a summer." i can never write verses except under the influence of strong sentiment, and seldom even then. as to a tragedy, shelley used to urge me, which produced his own. when i returned first to england and saw kean, i was in a fit of enthusiasm, and wished much to write for the stage, but my father very earnestly dissuaded me. i think that he was in the wrong. i think myself that i could have written a good tragedy, but not now. my good friend, every feeling i have is blighted, i have no ambition, no care for fame. loneliness has made a wreck of me. i was always a dependent thing, wanting fosterage and support. i am left to myself, crushed by fortune, and i am nothing. you speak of woman's intellect. we can scarcely do more than judge by ourselves. i know that, however clever i may be, there is in me a vacillation, a weakness, a want of eagle-winged resolution that appertains to my intellect as well as to my moral character, and renders me what i am, one of broken purposes, failing thoughts, and a heart all wounds. my mother had more energy of character, still she had not sufficient fire of imagination. in short, my belief is, whether there be sex in souls or not, that the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite different creatures, better, though weaker, but wanting in the higher grades of intellect. i am almost sorry to send you this letter, it is so querulous and sad; yet, if i write with any effusion, the truth will creep out, and my life since you left has been so stained by sorrow and disappointments. i have been so barbarously handled both by fortune and my fellow-creatures, that i am no longer the same as when you knew me. i have no hope. in a few years, when i get over my present feelings and live wholly in percy, i shall be happier. i have devoted myself to him as no mother ever did, and idolise him; and the reward will come when i can forget a thousand memories and griefs that are as yet alive and burning, and i have nothing to do but brood. percy is gone two miles off to bathe; he can swim, and i am obliged to leave the rest to fate. it is no use coddling, yet it costs me many pangs; but he is singularly trustworthy and careful. do write, and believe me ever your truly attached friend, m. w. s. a dirge i this morn thy gallant bark, love, sailed on a stormy sea; 'tis noon, and tempests dark, love, have wrecked it on the lee. ah woe! ah woe! ah woe! by spirits of the deep he's cradled on the billow to his unwaking sleep. ii thou liest upon the shore, love, beside the knelling surge, but sea-nymphs ever more, love, shall sadly chant thy dirge. oh come! oh come! oh come! ye spirits of the deep; while near his seaweed pillow my lonely watch i keep. iii from far across the sea, love, i hear a wild lament, by echo's voice for thee, love, from ocean's caverns sent. oh list! oh list! oh list! ye spirits of the deep, loud sounds their wail of sorrow, while i for ever weep. _p.s._--do you not guess why neither these nor those i sent you could please those you mention? papa loves not the memory of shelley, because he feels that he injured him; and jane--do you not understand enough of her to be convinced of the thoughts that make it distasteful to her that i should feel, and above all be thought by others to feel, and to have a right to feel? oh! the human heart! it is a strange puzzle. the weary, baffled tone of this letter was partly due to a low state of health, which resulted in a severe attack of illness. during her boy's midsummer holidays she went to dover in search of strength, and, while there, received a letter from trelawny, who had returned from america, as vivacious and irrepressible as ever. trelawny to mrs. shelley. bedford hotel, brighton, _ th september _. mary, dear--six days i rest, and do all that i have to do on the seventh, because it is forbidden. if they would make it felony to obey the commandments (without benefit of clergy), don't you think the pleasures of breaking the law would make me keep them? * * * * * i cannot surmise _one_ of the "thousand reasons" which you say are to prevent my seeing you. on the contrary, your being "chained to your rock" enables me to play the vulture at discretion. it is well for you, therefore, that i am "the most prudent of men." what a host of virtues i am gifted with! when i am dead, lady mine, build a temple over me and make pilgrimages. talking of tombs, let it be agreed between you and me that whichever _first_ has _five hundred pounds_ at his disposal shall dedicate it to the placing a fitting monument over the ashes of shelley. we will go to rome together. the time, too, cannot be far distant, considering all things. remember me to percy. i shall direct this to jane's, not that i think you are there. adieu, mary!--your e. trelawny. during the latter part of mary's residence in london she had seen a great deal of mrs. norton, who was much attracted by her and very fond of her society, finding in her a most sympathetic friend and confidant at the time of those domestic troubles, culminating in the separation from her children, which afterwards obtained a melancholy publicity. mrs. shelley never became wholly intimate with her brilliant contemporary. reserve, and a certain pride of poverty, forbade it, but she greatly admired her, and they constantly corresponded. _ ._ ... "i do not wonder," mary wrote to trelawny, "at your not being able to deny yourself the pleasure of mrs. norton's society. i never saw a woman i thought so fascinating. had i been a man i should certainly have fallen in love with her; as a woman, ten years ago, i should have been spellbound, and, had she taken the trouble, she might have wound me round her finger. ten years ago i was so ready to give myself away, and being afraid of men, i was apt to get _tousy-mousy_ for women; experience and suffering have altered all that. i am more wrapt up in myself, my own feelings, disasters, and prospects for percy. i am now proof, as hamlet says, both against man and woman. "there is something in the pretty way in which mrs. norton's witticisms glide, as it were, from her lips, that is very charming; and then her colour, which is so variable, the eloquent blood which ebbs and flows, mounting, as she speaks, to her neck and temples, and then receding as fast; it reminds me of the frequent quotation of 'eloquent blood,' and gives a peculiar attraction to her conversation--not to speak of fine eyes and open brow. "now do not in your usual silly way show her what i say. she is, despite all her talents and sweetness, a london lady. she would quiz me--not, perhaps, to you--well do i know the london _ton_--but to every one else--in her prettiest manner." the day after this she was writing again to mrs. gisborne. _ th october ._ of myself, my dearest maria, i can give but a bad account. solitude, many cares, and many deep sorrows brought on this summer an illness, from which i am only now recovering. i can never forget, nor cease to be grateful to jane for her excessive kindness to me, when i needed it most, confined, as i was, to my sofa, unable to move. i went to dover during percy's holidays, and change of air and bathing made me so much better that i thought myself well, but on my return here i had a relapse, from which now this last week i am, i trust, fast recovering. bark and port wine seem the chief means of my getting well. but in the midst of all this i had to write to meet my expenses. i have published a second volume of italian lives in lardner's _encyclopædia_. all in that volume, except galileo and tasso, are mine. the last is chief, i allow, and i grieve that it had been engaged to mr. m. before i began to write. i am now about to write a volume of spanish and portuguese lives. this is an arduous task, from my own ignorance, and the difficulty of getting books and information. the booksellers want me to write another novel, _lodore_ having succeeded so well, but i have not as yet strength for such an undertaking. then there is no spanish circulating library. i cannot, while here, read in the museum if i would, and i would not if i could. i do not like finding myself a stray bird alone among men, even if i knew them.[ ] one hears how happy people will be to lend me their books, but when it comes to the point it is very difficult to get at them. however, as i am rather persevering, i hope to conquer these obstacles after all. percy grows; he is taller than i am, and very stout. if he does not turn out an honour to his parents, it will be through no deficiency in virtue or in talents, but from a dislike of mingling with his fellow-creatures, except the two or three friends he cannot do without. he may be the happier for it; he has a good understanding, and great integrity of character. adieu, my dear friend.-ever affectionately yours, mary w. shelley. in april poor old godwin died, and with him passed away a large part of mary's life. of those in whose existence her own was summed up only her son now remained, and even he was not more dependent on her than her father had been. godwin had been to his daughter one of those lifelong cares which, when they disappear, leave a blank that nothing seems to fill, too often because the survivor has borne the burden so long as to exhaust the power and energy indispensable to recovery. but she had also been attached to him all her life with an "excessive and romantic attachment," only overcome in one instance by a stronger devotion still--a defection she never could and never did repent of, but for which her whole subsequent life had been passed in attempting to make up. if she confided any of her feelings to her diary, no fragment has survived. she busied herself in trying to obtain from government some assistance--an annuity if possible--for mrs. godwin. it was very seldom in her life that mary asked anybody for anything, and the present exception was made in favour of one whom she did not love, and who had never been a good friend to her. but had mrs. godwin been her own mother instead of a disagreeable, jealous, old stepmother, she could not have made greater exertions in her behalf. mrs. norton was ready and willing to help by bringing influence to bear in powerful quarters, and gave mary some shrewd advice as to the wording of her letter to lord melbourne. she wrote-- ... press _not_ on the politics of mr. godwin (for god knows how much gratitude for that ever survives), but on his _celebrity_, the widow's _age_ and _ill health_, and (if your proud little spirit will bear it) on your own _toils_; for, after all, the truth is that you, being generous, will, rather than see the old creature starve, work your brains and your pen; and you have your son and delicate health to hinder you from having _means_ to help her. as to petitioning, no one dislikes begging more than i do, especially when one begs for what seems mere justice; but i have long observed that though people will resist _claims_ (however just), they like to do _favours_. therefore, when _i_ beg, i am a crawling lizard, a humble toad, a brown snake in cold weather, or any other simile most feebly _rampante_--the reverse of _rampant_, which would be the natural attitude for petitioning,--but which must never be assumed except in the poodle style, standing with one's paws bent to catch the bits of bread on one's nose. forgive my jesting; upon my honour i feel sincerely anxious for your anxiety, and sad enough on my own affairs, but irish blood _will_ dance. my meaning is, that if one asks _at all_, one should rather think of the person written to than one's own feelings. he is an indolent man--talk of your literary labours; a kind man--speak of her age and infirmities; a patron of all _genius_--talk of your father's _and your own_; a prudent man--speak of the likelihood of the pension being a short grant (as you have done); lastly, he is a _great_ man--take it all as a personal favour. as to not apologising for the intrusion, we ought always to kneel down and beg pardon for daring to remind people we are not so well off as they are. what was asked was that godwin's small salary, or a part of it, should be continued to mrs. godwin for her life. as the nominal office godwin had held was abolished at his death, this could not be; but lord melbourne pledged himself to do what he could to obtain assistance for the widow in some form or other, so it is probable that mary effected her purpose. trelawny to mrs. shelley. hastings, _ th september _. mary, dear--your letter was exceedingly welcome; it was honoured accordingly. you divine truly; i am leading a vegetable sort of a life. they say the place is pretty, the air is good, the sea is fine. i would willingly exchange a pretty place for a pretty girl. the air is keen and shrewish, and as to the sea, i am satisfied with a bath of less dimensions. notwithstanding the want of sun, and the abundance of cold winds, i lave my sides daily in the brine, and thus i am gradually cooling down to the temperature--of the things round about me--so that the thinnest skinned feminine may handle me without fear of consequences. possibly you may think that i am like the torpid snake that the forester warmed by his hearth. no, i am not. i am steeling myself with plato and platonics; so now farewell to love and womankind. "othello's occupation's gone." * * * * * from an allusion in one of mrs. norton's letters to mary, it appears likely that what follows refers to fanny kemble (mrs. butler). you say, "had i seen those eyes you saw the other day." yes, the darts shot from those eyes are still rankling in my body; yet it is a pleasing pain. the wound of the scorpion is healed by applying the scorpion to the wound. is she not a glorious being? have you ever seen such a presence? is she not dazzling? there is enchantment in all her ways. talk of the divine power of music, why, she is all melody, and poetry, and beauty, and harmony. how envious and malignant must the english be not to do her homage universal. they never had, or will have again, such a woman as that. i would rather be her slave than king of such an island of calibans. you have a soul, and sense, and a deep feeling for your sex, and revere such "cunning patterns of excelling nature," therefore--besides, i owe it you--i will transcribe what she says of you: "i was nervous, it was my first visit to any one, and there is a gentle frankness in her manner, and a vague remembrance of the thought and feeling in her books which prevents my being as with a 'visiting acquaintance.'" * * * * * zella is doing wondrous well, and chance has placed her with a womankind that even i (setting beauty aside) am satisfied with. by the bye, i wish most earnestly you could get me some good _morality_ in the shape of italian and french. it is indispensable to the keeping alive her remembrance of those languages, and not a book is to be had here, nor do i know exactly how to get them by any other means, so pray think of it. * * * * * i am inundated with letters from america, and am answering them by mrs. jameson; she sailing immediately is a very heavy loss to me. she is the friendliest-hearted woman in the world. i would rather lose anything than her.... i don't think i shall stay here much longer; it is a bad holding ground; my cable is chafing. i shall drift somewhere or other. it is well for mamma percy has so much of her temperate blood. when us three meet, we shall be able to ice the wine by placing it between us; that will be nice, as the girls say. a glance from mrs. nesbitt has shaken my firm nerves a little. there is a mystery--a deep well of feeling in those star-like eyes of hers. it is strange that actresses are the only true and natural people; they only act in the proper season and place, whilst all the rest seem eternally playing a part, and like dilettanti acting, damn'd absurdly. j. trelawny. from brighton, at new year, mrs. shelley sent trelawny a cheery greeting. from mrs. shelley to trelawny. brighton, _ d january _. my dear trelawny--this day will please you; it is a thaw; what snow we had! hundreds of people have been employed to remove it during the last week; at first they cut down deep several feet as if it had been clay, and piled it up in glittering pyramids and masses; then they began to cart it on to the beach; it was a new sort of augean stable, a never-ending labour. yesterday, when i was out, it was only got rid of in a very few and very circumscribed spots. nature is more of a hercules; she puts out a little finger in the shape of gentle thaw, and it recedes and disappears. * * * * * percy arrived yesterday, having rather whetted than satisfied his appetite by going seven times to the play. he plays like apollo on the flageolet, and like apollo is self-taught. jane thinks him a miracle! it is very odd. he got a frock-coat at mettes, and, if you had not disappointed us with your handkerchief, he would have been complete; he is a good deal grown, though not tall enough to satisfy me; however, there is time yet. he is quite a child still, full of theatres and balloons and music, yet i think there is a gentleness about him which shows the advent of the reign of petticoats--how i dread it! * * * * * poor jane writes dismally. she is so weak that she has frequent fainting fits; she went to a physician, who ordered her to wean the child, and now she takes three glasses of wine a day, and every other strengthening medicament, but she is very feeble, and has a cough and tendency to inflammation on the chest. i implored her to come down here to change the air, and jeff gave leave, and would have given the money; but fear lest his dinner should be overdone while she was away, and lest the children should get a finger scratched, makes her resolve not to come; what bad bogie is this? if she got stronger how much better they would be in consequence! i think her in a critical state, but she will not allow of a remedy. * * * * * poor dear little zella. i hope she is well and happy.... thank you for your offer about money. i have plenty at present, and hope to do well hereafter. you are very thoughtful, which is a great virtue. i have not heard from your mother or charlotte since you left; a day or two afterwards i saw betsy freeman; she was to go to her place the next day. i paid her for her work; she looked so radiantly happy that you would have thought she was going to be married rather than to a place of hardship. i never saw any one look so happy. i told her to let me know how she got on, and to apply to me if she wanted assistance.... i am glad you are amused at your brother's. i really imagined that fanny butler had been the attraction, till, sending to the gloucester, i found you were gone by the southampton coach, and then i suspected another magnet--till i find that you are in all peace, or rather war, at sherfield house--much better so. i am better a great deal; quite well, i believe i ought to call myself, only i feel a little odd at times. i have seen nothing of the s.'s. i have met with scarce an acquaintance here, which is odd; but then i do not look for them. i am too lazy. i hope this letter will catch you before you leave your present perch.--believe me always, yours truly, m. w. shelley. will this be a happy new year? tell me; the last i can't say much for, but i always fear worse to come. nobody's mare is dead,--if this frost does not kill,--my own (such as it will be) is far enough off still. the next letter is dated only three weeks later. what happened in that short time to account for its complete change of tone does not appear, except that from one allusion it may be inferred that mrs. shelley was overtaken by unexpected money difficulties at a moment when she had fancied herself tolerably at ease on that score. nothing more likely, for in the matter of helping others she never learnt prudence or the art of self-defence.[ ] probably, however, there was a deeper cause for her sombre mood. she was being pressed on all sides to write the biography of her father. the task would have been well suited to her powers; she looked on it, moreover, in the light of a duty which she wished and intended to perform. fragments and sketches of hers for this book have been published, and are among the best specimens of her writing. but circumstances--scruples--similar to those which had hindered her from writing shelley's life stood between her and the present fulfilment of the task. there were few people to whom she could bring herself to explain her reasons, and those few need not have required, still less insisted on any such explanation. but trelawny, hot and vehement, could and would not see why mary did not rush into the field at once, to immortalise the man whose system of philosophy, more than any other writer's, had moulded shelley's. he never spared words, and he probably taxed her with cowardice or indolence, time-serving and "worldliness." shaken by her father's loss, and saddened by that of her friends, mr. and mrs. gisborne, who had died within a short time of each other shortly before this, exhausted by work, her feelings warped by solitude, struggle, and disappointment, this challenge to explain her conduct evoked the most mournful of all her letters, as explicit as any one could wish; true in its bitterness, and most bitter in its truth. mrs. shelley to trelawny. brighton, _thursday, th january _. dear trelawny--i am very glad to hear that you are amused and happy; fate seems to have turned her sunny side to you, and i hope you will long enjoy yourself. i know of but one pleasure in the world--sympathy with another, or others, rather; leaving out of the question the affections, the society of agreeable, gifted, congenial-minded beings is the only pleasure worth having in the world. my fate has debarred me from this enjoyment, but you seem in the midst of it. with regard to my father's life i certainly could not answer it to my conscience to give it up. i shall therefore do it, but i must wait. this year i have to fight my poor percy's battle, to try and get him sent to college without further dilapidation of his ruined prospects, and he has now to enter life at college. that this should be undertaken at a moment when a cry was raised against his mother, and that not on the question of _politics_ but _religion_, would mar all. i must see him fairly launched before i commit myself to the fury of the waves. a sense of duty towards my father, whose passion was posthumous fame, makes me ready, as far as i am concerned, to meet the misery that must be mine if i become an object of scurrility and attack; for the rest, for my own private satisfaction, all i ask is obscurity. what can i care for the parties that divide the world, or the opinions that possess it? what has my life been? what is it? since i lost shelley i have been alone, and worse. i had my father's fate for many a year pressing me to the earth; i had percy's education and welfare to guard over, and in all this i had no one friendly hand stretched out to support me. shut out from even the possibility of making such an impression as my personal merits might occasion, without a human being to aid or encourage, or even to advise me, i toiled on my weary solitary way. the only persons who deigned to share those melancholy hours, and to afford me the balm of affection, were those dear girls[ ] whom you chose so long to abuse. do you think that i have not felt, that i do not feel all this? if i have been able to stand up against the breakers which have dashed against my stranded, wrecked bark, it has been by a sort of passive, dogged resistance, which has broken my heart, while it a little supported my spirit. my happiness, my health, my fortunes, all are wrecked. percy alone remains to me, and to do him good is the sole aim of my life. one thing i will add; if i have ever found kindness, it has not been from liberals; to disengage myself from them was the first act of my freedom. the consequence was that i gained peace and civil usage, which they denied me; more i do not ask; of fate i only ask a grave. i know not what my future life is, and shudder, but it must be borne, and for percy's sake i must battle on. if you wish for a copy of my novel[ ] you shall have one, but i did not order it to be sent to you, because, being a rover, all luggage burthens. i have told them to send it to your mother, at which you will scoff, but it was the only way i had to show my sense of her kindness. you may pick and choose those from whom you deign to receive kindness; you are a man at a feast, champagne and comfits your diet, and you naturally scoff at me and my dry crust in a corner. often have you scoffed and sneered at all the aliment of kindness or society that fate has afforded me. i have been silent, for the hungry cannot be dainty, but it is useless to tell a pampered man this. remember in all this, except in one or two instances, my complaint is not against _persons_, but _fate_. fate has been my enemy throughout. i have no wish to increase her animosity or her power by exposing [myself] more than i possibly can to her venomous attacks. you have sent me no address, so i direct this to your mother; give her and charlotte my love, and tell them i think i shall be in town at the beginning of next month; my time in this house is up on the d, and i ought to be in town with percy to take him to sir tim's solicitors, and so begin my attack. i should advise you, by the bye, not to read my novel; you will not like it. i cannot _teach_; i can only paint--such as my paintings are,--and you will not approve of much of what i deem natural feeling, because it is not founded on the new light. i had a long letter from mrs. n[orton]. i admire her excessively, and i _think_ i could love her infinitely, but i shall not be asked nor tried, and shall take very good care not to press myself. i know what her relations think. if you are still so rich, and can lend me £ till my quarter, i shall be glad. i do not know that i absolutely [need] it here now, but may run short at last, so, if not inconvenient, will you send it next week? i shall soon be in town, i suppose; _where_, i do not yet know. i dread my return, for i shall have a thousand worries. despite unfavourable weather, quiet and ease have much restored my health, but mental annoyance will soon make me as ill as ever. only writing this letter makes me feel half dead. still, to be thus at peace is an expensive luxury, and i must forego it for other duties, which i have been allowed to forget for a time, but my holiday is past. happy is fanny butler if she can shed tears and not be destroyed by them; this luxury is denied me. i am obliged to guard against low spirits as my worst disease, and i do guard, and usually i am not in low spirits. why then do you awaken me to thought and suffering by forcing me to explain the motives of my conduct? could you not trust that i thought anxiously, decided carefully, and from disinterested motives, not to save myself, but my child, from evil. pray let the stream flow quietly by, as glittering on the surface as it may, and do not awaken the deep waters which are full of briny bitterness. i never wish any one to dive into the secret depths; be content, if i can render the surface safe sailing, that i do not annoy you with clouds and tempests, but turn the silvery side outward, as i ought, for god knows i would not render any living creature so miserable as i could easily be; and i would also guard myself from the sense of woe which i tie hard about, and sink low, low, out of sight and fathom line. adieu. excuse all this; it is your own fault; speak of yourself. never speak of me, and you will never again be annoyed with so much stupidity.--yours truly, m. s. the painful mood of this letter was not destined to find present relief. from her father's death in till the year was to be perhaps the hardest, dreariest, and most laborious time she had ever known. no chance had she now to distract her mind or avoid the most painful themes. her very occupation was to tie her down to these. she was preparing her edition of shelley's works, with notes. the prohibition as to bringing his name before the public seems to have been withdrawn or at any rate slackened; it had probably become evident, even to those least disposed to see, that the undesirable publicity, if not given by the right person, would inevitably be given by the wrong one. much may also have been due to the fact that mr. whitton, sir timothy's solicitor, was dead, and had been replaced by another gentleman who, unlike his predecessor, used his influence to promote milder counsels and a better mutual understanding than had prevailed hitherto. this task was accepted by mary as the most sacred of duties, but it is probable that if circumstances had permitted her to fulfil it in the years which immediately followed shelley's death she would have suffered from it less than now. it might not have been so well done, she might have written at too great length, or have indulged in too much expression of personal feeling; and in the case of omissions from his writings, the decision might have been even harder to make. still it would have cost her less. her heart, occupied by one subject, would have found a kind of relief in the necessity for dwelling on it. but seventeen years had elapsed, and she was forty-two, and very tired. seventeen years of struggle, labour, and loneliness; even the mournful satisfaction of retrospect poisoned and distorted by jane williams' duplicity. she could no longer dwell on the thought of that affection which had consoled her in her supreme misfortune. mary had had many and bitter troubles and losses, but nothing entered into her soul so deeply as the defection of this friend. alienation is worse than bereavement. other sorrows had left her desolate; this one left her different. hence the fact that an undertaking which would once have been a painful pleasure was too often a veritable martyrdom. who does not remember hans andersen's little princess, in his story of the _white swans_, who freed her eleven brothers from the evil enchantment which held them transformed, by spinning shirts of stinging-nettles? such nettle-shirts had mary now to weave and spin, to exorcise the evil spirits which had power of misrepresenting and defaming shelley's memory, and to save percy for ever from their sinister spells. her health was weak, her heart was sore, her life was lonely, and, in spite of her undaunted efforts, she was still so badly off that she was, as the last letter shows, reduced to accepting trelawny's offer of a loan of money. nor was it only her work that she had on her mind; she was also very anxious about her son's future. he had, at this time, an idea of entering the diplomatic service, and his mother overcame her diffidence so far as to try and procure an opening for him--no easy thing to find. among the people she consulted and asked was lytton bulwer; his answer was not encouraging. sir e. l. bulwer to mrs. shelley. hertford street, _ th march _. my dear mrs. shelley--many thanks for your kind congratulations. i am delighted to find you like _richelieu_. with regard to your son, with his high prospects, the diplomacy may do very well; but of all professions it is the most difficult to rise in. the first steps are long and tedious. an attaché at a small court is an exile without pay, and very little opening to talent. however, for young men of fortune and expectations it fills up some years agreeably enough, what with flirting, dressing, dancing, and perhaps, if one has good luck, a harmless duel or two! to be serious, it is better than being idle, and one certainly learns languages, knowledge of the world, and good manners. perhaps i may send my son, some seventeen years hence, if my brother is then a minister, into that career. but it will depend on his prospects. are you sure that you can get an attachéship? it requires a good deal of interest, and there are plenty of candidates among young men of rank, and, i fear, claims more pressing and urging than the memory of genius. i could not procure that place for a most intimate friend of mine a little time ago. i will take my chance some evening, but i fear not thursday; in fact, i am so occupied just at present that till after easter i have scarcely a moment to myself, and at easter i must go to lincoln.--yours ever, e. l. bulwer. mrs. norton interested herself in the matter. she could not effect much, but she was sympathetic and kind. "you have your troubles," she wrote, "struggling for one who, i trust, will hereafter repay you for every weary hour and years of self-denial, and i shall be glad to hear from you now and then how all goes on with you and him, so do not forget me when you have a spare half hour, and if ever i have any good news to send, do not doubt my then writing by the first post, for i think my happiest moments now are when, in the strange mixture of helplessness and power which has made the warp and woof of my destiny, i can accidentally serve some one who has had more of the world's buffets than its good fortune." some scraps of journal belonging to afford a little insight into mrs. shelley's difficulties while editing her husband's mss. _journal, february _ ( ).--i almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness. i am editing shelley's poems, and writing notes for them. i desire to do shelley honour in the notes to the best of my knowledge and ability; for the rest, they are or are not well written; it little matters to me which. would that i had more literary vanity, or vanity of any kind; i were happier. as it is, i am torn to pieces by memory. would that all were mute in the grave! i _much_ disliked the leaving out any of _queen mab_. i dislike it still more than i can express, and i even wish i had resisted to the last; but when i was told that certain portions would injure the copyright of all the volumes to the publisher, i yielded. i had consulted hunt, hogg, and peacock; they all said i had a right to do as i liked, and offered no one objection. trelawny sent back the volume to moxon in a rage at seeing parts left out.... hogg has written me an insulting letter because i left out the dedication to harriet.... little does jefferson, how little does any one, know me! when clarke's edition of _queen mab_ came to us at the baths of pisa, shelley expressed great pleasure that these verses were omitted. this recollection caused me to do the same. it was to do him honour. what could it be to me? there are other verses i should well like to obliterate for ever, but they will be printed; and any to her could in no way tend to my discomfort, or gratify one ungenerous feeling. they shall be restored, though i do not feel easy as to the good i do shelley. i may have been mistaken. jefferson might mistake me and be angry; that were nothing. he has done far more, and done his best to give another poke to the poisonous dagger which has long rankled in my heart. i cannot forgive any man that insults any woman. she cannot call him out,--she disdains words of retort; she must endure, but it is never to be forgiven; not, "indeed, cherished as matter of enmity"--that i never feel,--but of caution to shield oneself from the like again. in so arduous a task, others might ask for encouragement and kindness from their friends,--i know mine better. i am unstable, sometimes melancholy, and have been called on some occasions imperious; but i never did an ungenerous act in my life. i sympathise warmly with others, and have wasted my heart in their love and service. all this together is making me feel very ill, and my holiday at woodlay only did me good while it lasted. _march._ ... illness did ensue. what an illness! driving me to the verge of insanity. often i felt the cord would snap, and i should no longer be able to rule my thoughts; with fearful struggles, miserable relapses, after long repose i became somewhat better. _october , ._--twice in my life i have believed myself to be dying, and my soul being alive, though the bodily functions were faint and perishing, i had opportunity to look death in the face, and i did not fear it--far from it. my feelings, especially in the first and most perilous instance, was, i go to no new creation. i enter under no new laws. the god that made this beautiful world (and i was then at lerici, surrounded by the most beautiful manifestation of the visible creation) made that into which i go; as there is beauty and love here, such is there, and i feel as if my spirit would when it left my frame be received and sustained by a beneficent and gentle power. i had no fear, rather, though i had no active wish but a passive satisfaction in death. whether the nature of my illness--debility from loss of blood, without pain--caused this tranquillity of soul, i cannot tell; but so it was, and it had this blessed effect, that i have never since anticipated death with terror, and even if a violent death (which is the most repugnant to human nature) menaced me, i think i could, after the first shock, turn to the memory of that hour, and renew its emotion of perfect resignation. the darkest moment is that which precedes the dawn. these unhappy years were like the series of "clearing showers" which often concludes a stormy day. the clouds were lifting, and though mary shelley could never be other than what sorrow and endurance had made her, the remaining years of her life were to bring alleviations to her lot,--slanting rays of afternoon sunshine, powerless, indeed, to warm into life the tender buds of morning, but which illumined the landscape and lightened her path, and shed over her a mild radiance which she reflected back on others, affording to them the brightness she herself could know no more, and diffusing around her that sensation of peace which she was to know now, perhaps, for the first time. chapter xxiv october -february mrs. shelley's annotated edition of shelley's works was completed by the appearance, in , of the collected prose writings; along with which was republished the _journal of a six weeks' tour_ (a joint composition) and her own two letters from geneva, reprinted in the present work. mary's correspondence with carlyle on the subject of a motto for her book was the occasion of the following note-- cheyne row, chelsea, _ d december _. dear mrs. shelley--there does some indistinct remembrance of a sentence like the one you mention hover in my head; but i cannot anywhere lay hand on it. indeed, i rather think it was to this effect: "treat men as what they should be, and you help to make them so." further, is it not rather one of wilhelm's kind speeches than of the uncle's or the fair saint's? james fraser shall this day send you a copy of the work; you, with your own clear eyes, shall look for yourself. i have no horse now; the mud forced me to send it into the country till dry weather came again. layton house is so much the farther off. _tant pis pour moi._--yours always truly, t. carlyle. the words ultimately prefixed to the collection are the following, from carlyle-- that thou, o my brother, impart to me truly how it stands with thee in that inner heart of thine; what lively images of things past thy memory has painted there; what hopes, what thoughts, affections, knowledge, do now dwell there. for this and no other object that i can see was the gift of hearing and speech bestowed on us two. the proceeds of this work were such as to set her for some time at comparative ease on the score of money; the godwin quicksand was no longer there to engulf them. _journal, june , _ (brighton).--i must mark this evening, tired as i am, for it is one among few--soothing and balmy. long oppressed by care, disappointment, and ill health, which all combined to depress and irritate me, i felt almost to have lost the spring of happy reverie. on such a night it returns--the calm sea, the soft breeze, the silver bow new bent in the western heaven--nature in her sweetest mood, raised one's thoughts to god and imparted peace. indeed i have many, many blessings, and ought to be grateful, as i am, though the poison lurks among them; for it is my strange fate that all my friends are sufferers--ill health or adversity bears heavily on them, and i can do little good, and lately ill health and extreme depression have even marred the little i could do. if i could restore health, administer balm to the wounded heart, and banish care from those i love, i were in myself happy, while i am loved, and percy continues the blessing that he is. still, who on such a night must not feel the weight of sorrow lessened? for myself, i repose in gentle and grateful reverie, and hope for others. i am content for myself. years have--how much!--cooled the ardent and swift spirit that at such hours bore me freely along. yet, though i no longer soar, i repose. though i no longer deem all things attainable, i enjoy what is; and while i feel that whatever i have lost of youth and hope, i have acquired the enduring affection of a noble heart, and percy shows such excellent dispositions that i feel that i am much the gainer in life. fate does indeed visit some too heavily--poor r. for instance, god restore him! god and good angels guard us! surely this world, stored outwardly with shapes and influences of beauty and good, is peopled in its intellectual life by myriads of loving spirits that mould our thoughts to good, influence beneficially the course of events, and minister to the destiny of man. whether the beloved dead make a portion of this company i dare not guess, but that such exist i feel--far off, when we are worldly, evil, selfish; drawing near and imparting joy and sympathy when we rise to noble thoughts and disinterested action. such surely gather round one on such an evening, and make part of that atmosphere of love, so hushed, so soft, on which the soul reposes and is blest. these serene lines were written by mrs. shelley within a few days of leaving england on the first of those tours described by her in the series of letters published as _rambles in germany and italy_. it had been arranged that her son and two college friends, both of whom, like him, were studying for their degree, should go abroad for the long vacation, and that mrs. shelley should form one of the reading party. paris was to be the general rendezvous. mrs. shelley, who was staying at brighton, intended travelling _viâ_ dieppe, but her health was so far from strong that she shrank from the long crossing, and started from dover instead. she was now accompanied by a lady's-maid, a circumstance which relieved her from some of the fatigue incidental to a journey. they travelled by diligence; a new experience to her, as, in her former wanderings with shelley, they had had their own carriage (save indeed on the first tour of all, when they set off to walk through france with a donkey); and in more recent years she had travelled, in england, by the newly-introduced railroads-- "to which, whatever their faults may be, i feel eternally grateful," she says; adding afterwards, "a pleasant day it will be when there is one from calais to paris." so recent a time, and yet how remote it seems! mary had never been a good traveller, but she found now, to her surprise and satisfaction, that in spite of her nervous suffering she was better able than formerly to stand the fatigue of a journey. she had painful sensations, but the fatigue i endured seemed to take away weariness instead of occasioning it. i felt light of limb and in good spirits. on the shores of france i shook the dust of accumulated cares from off me: i forgot disappointment and banished sorrow: weariness of body replaced beneficially weariness of soul--so much heavier, so much harder to bear. change, in short, did her more good than travelling did her harm. "i feel a good deal of the gipsy coming upon me," she wrote a few days later, "now that i am leaving paris. i bid adieu to all acquaintances, and set out to wander in new lands, surrounded by companions fresh to the world, unacquainted with its sorrows, and who enjoy with zest every passing amusement. i myself, apt to be too serious, but easily awakened to sympathy, forget the past and the future, and am ready to be amused by all i see as much or even more than they." from paris they journeyed to metz and trèves, down the moselle and the rhine, by schaffhausen and zurich, over the splugen pass to cadenabbia on the lake of como. here they established themselves for two months. mrs. shelley occupied herself in the study of italian literature, while the young men were busy with their cambridge work. her son's friends were devoted to her, and no wonder. indeed, her amiability and sweetness, her enjoyment of travelling, her wide culture and great store of knowledge, her acuteness of observation, and the keen interest she took in all she saw, must have made her a most fascinating companion. on leaving como they visited milan, and, on their way home, passing through genoa, mary looked again on the villa diodati, and the little maison chapuis nestling below, where she had begun to write _frankenstein_. all unaltered; but in her, what a change! shelley, byron, the blue-eyed william, where were they? where was fanny, whose long letters had kept them informed of english affairs? mary herself, and clare, were they the same people as the two girls, one fair, one dark, who had excited so much idle and impertinent speculation in the tourists from whose curiosity byron had fled? but where are the snows of yester-year? in autumn mrs. shelley and her son returned to england; but the next year they again went abroad, and this time for a longer sojourn. they were now better off than they had ever been, for, after percy had attained his majority and taken his degree, his grandfather made him an allowance of £ a year; a free gift, not subject to the condition of repayment. this welcome relief from care came not a day too soon. mrs. shelley's strength was much shaken, her attacks of nervous illness were more frequent, and, had she had to resume her life of unvaried toil, the results might have been serious. it is probably to this event that mrs. norton refers in the following note of congratulation-- mrs. norton to mrs. shelley. dear mrs. shelley--i cannot tell you how sincerely glad i was to get a note so cheerful, and cheerful on such good grounds as your last. i hope it is the _dawn_, that your day of struggling is over, and nothing to come but gradually increasing comfort. with tolerable prudence, and abroad, i should hope percy would find his allowance quite sufficient, and i think it will be a relief that may lift your mind and do your health good to see him properly provided for. i am too ill to leave the sofa or i should (by rights) be at lord palmerston's this evening, but, when i see any one likely to support the very modest request made to lord p., i will speak about it to them; i have little doubt that, since they are not asked for a paid attachéship, you will succeed. ... in three weeks i am to set up the magnificence of a "one 'orse chay" myself, and then fulham and the various streets of london where friends and foes live will become attainable; at present i have never stirred over the threshold since i came up from brighton.--ever yours very truly, car. norton. they began their second tour by a residence at kissingen, where mrs. shelley had been advised to take the waters for her health. the "cur" over (by which she benefited a good deal), they proceeded to gotha, weimar, leipzig, berlin, and dresden--all perfectly new ground to mary. dresden and its treasures of art were a delight to her, only marred by the overwhelming heat of the summer. through saxon switzerland they travelled to prague, and mary was roused to enthusiasm by the intense romantic interest of the bohemian capital, as she was afterwards by the magnificent scenery of the approach to linz (of which she gives in her letters a vivid description), and of salzburg and the salzkammergut. through the tyrol, over the brenner pass, by the lake of garda, they came to verona, and finally to venice--another place fraught to mary with associations unspeakable. many a scene which i have since visited and admired has faded in my mind, as a painting in a diorama melts away, and another struggles into the changing canvass; but this road was as distinct in my mind as if traversed yesterday. i will not here dwell on the sad circumstances that clouded my first visit to venice. death hovered over the scene. gathered into myself, with my "mind's eye" i saw those before me long departed, and i was agitated again by emotions, by passions--and those the deepest a woman's heart can harbour--a dread to see her child even at that instant expire, which then occupied me. it is a strange, but, to any person who has suffered, a familiar circumstance, that those who are enduring mental or corporeal agony are strangely alive to immediate external objects, and their imagination even exercises its wild power over them.... i have experienced it; and the particular shape of a room, the progress of shadows on a wall, the peculiar flickering of trees, the exact succession of objects on a journey, have been indelibly engraved in my memory, as marked in and associated with hours and minutes when the nerves were strung to their utmost tension by endurance of pain, or the far severer infliction of mental anguish. thus the banks of the brenta presented to me a moving scene; not a palace, not a tree of which i did not recognise, as marked and recorded, at a moment when life and death hung upon our speedy arrival at venice. and at fusina, as then, i now beheld the domes and towers of the queen of ocean arise from the waves with a majesty unrivalled upon earth. they spent the winter at florence, and by april were in rome. this indeed was the holy land of mary shelley's pilgrimage. there was the spot where william lay; there the tomb which held the heart of shelley. mary may well have felt as if standing by her own graveside. was not her heart of hearts buried with them? and there, too, was the empty grave where now trelawny lies; the touching witness to that undying devotion of his to shelley's memory which mary never forgot. none of this is touched upon--it could not be--in the published letters. the eternal city itself filled her with such emotions and interests as not even she had ever felt before. it is curious to compare some of these with her earlier letters from abroad, and to notice how, while her power of observation was undiminished, the intellectual faculties of thought and comparison had developed and widened, while her interest was as keen as in her younger days, nay keener, for her attention now, poor thing, was comparatively undivided. scenery, art, historical associations, the political and social state of the countries she visited, and the characteristics of the people, nothing was lost on her, and on all she saw she brought to bear the ripened faculties of a reflective and most appreciative mind. some of her remarks on italian politics are almost prophetic in their clear-sighted sagacity.[ ] that after all she had suffered she should have retained such keen powers of enjoyment as she did may well excite wonder. perhaps this enjoyment culminated at sorrento, where she and her son positively revelled in the luxuriant beauty and witchery of a perfect southern summer. her impressions of these two tours were published in the form of letters, and entitled _rambles in germany and italy_, and were dedicated to samuel rogers in . he thus acknowledged the copy of the work she sent him-- st. james's place, _ th july _. what can i say to you in return for the honour you have done me--an honour so undeserved! if some feelings make us eloquent, it is not so with others, and i can only thank you from the bottom of my heart, and assure you how highly i shall value and how carefully i shall preserve the two precious volumes on every account--for your sake and for their own.--ever yours most sincerely, s. rogers. in the spring of it became evident that sir timothy shelley's life was drawing to a close. in anticipation of what was soon to happen, mary, always mindful of her promise to leigh hunt, wrote to him as follows-- putney, _ th april _. my dear hunt--the tidings from field place seem to say that ere long there will be a change; if nothing untoward happens to us till then, it will be for the better. twenty years ago, in memory of what shelley's intentions were, i said that you should be considered one of the legatees to the amount of £ . i need scarcely mention that when shelley talked of leaving you this sum he contemplated reducing other legacies, and that one among them is (by a mistake of the solicitor) just double what he intended it to be. twenty years have, of course, much changed my position. twenty years ago it was supposed that sir timothy would not live five years. meanwhile a large debt has accumulated, for i must pay back all on which percy and i have subsisted, as well as what i borrowed for percy's going to college. in fact, i scarcely know how our affairs will be. moreover, percy shares now my right; that promise was made without his concurrence, and he must concur to render it of avail. nor do i like to ask him to do so till our affairs are so settled that we know what we shall have--whether shelley's uncle may not go to law; in short, till we see our way before us. it is both my and percy's great wish to feel that you are no longer so burdened by care and necessity; in that he is as desirous as i can be; but the form and the degree in which we can do this must at first be uncertain. from the time of sir timothy's death i shall give directions to my banker to honour your quarterly cheques for £ a quarter; and i shall take steps to secure this to you, and to marianne if she should survive you. percy has read this letter, and approves. i know your _real_ delicacy about money matters, and that you will at once be ready to enter into my views; and feel assured that if any present debt should press, if we have any command of money, we will take care to free you from it. with love to marianne, affectionately yours, mary shelley. sir timothy died in this year, and mary's son succeeded to the baronetcy and estates. the fortune he inherited was much encumbered, as, besides paying shelley's numerous legacies and the portions of several members of the family, he had also to refund, with interest, all the money advanced to his mother for their maintenance for the last twenty-one years, amounting now to a large sum, which he met by means of a mortgage effected on the estates. but all was done at last. clare was freed from the necessity for toil and servitude; she was, indeed, well off, as she inherited altogether £ , . hers is the legacy to which mrs. shelley alludes as being, by a mistake, double what had been intended. when shelley made his will, he bequeathed to her £ . not long before the end of his life he added a codicil, to the effect that _these_ £ should be invested for her benefit, intending in this way (it is supposed) to secure to her the interest of this sum, and to protect her against recklessness on her own part or needy rapacity on the part of others. through the omission in the lawyer's draft of the word "these" this codicil was construed into a second bequest of £ , which she received. the hunts, by shelley's bounty and the generosity of his wife and son, were made comparatively easy in their circumstances. byron had declined to be numbered among shelley's legatees; not so mr. hogg, whose letter on the occasion is too characteristic to omit. hogg to mrs. shelley. dear mary--i have just had an interview with mr. gregson. he spoke of your affairs cheerfully, and thinks that, with prudence and economy, you and your baronet-boy will do well; and such, i trust and earnestly hope, will be the result of this long turmoil of worldly perplexity. mr. gregson paid me the noble tribute of the most generous and kind and munificent affection of our incomparable friend. he not only paid the legacy, but very obligingly offered me some interest; for which offer, and for such prompt payment, i return my best thanks to yourself and to percy. i was glad to hear from mr. gregson, for the honour of poesy, that lord byron had declined to receive his legacy. how much i wish that my scanty fortunes would justify the like refusal on my part! i daresay you wish that you were a good deal richer--that this had happened and not that--and that a great deal, which was quite impossible, had been done, and so on! i should be sorry to believe that you were quite contented; such a state of mind, so preposterous and unnatural, especially in any person whose circumstances were affluent, would surely portend some great calamity. i hope that i may venture to look forward to the time when the baronet will inhabit field place in a style not unworthy of his name. my desire grows daily in the strength to keep up _families_, for it is only from these that shelleys and byrons proceed. [illustration: thomas jefferson hogg, as he sat playing at chess at boscombe. from a sketch by r. easton. _to face page (vol. ii.)_] if low people sometimes effect a little in some particular line, they always show that they are poor, creeping creatures in the main and in general. however this may be, and whatever you or yours may take of shelley property, "either by heirship or conquest," as they say in scotland, i hope that you may not be included in the unbroken entail of gout, which takes so largely from the comforts, and adds so greatly to the irritability natural to yours, dear mary, very faithfully, t. j. hogg. for many and good reasons there could be little real sympathy between hogg and mary shelley. in lieu of it she willingly accepted his genuine enthusiasm for shelley, and she was a better friend to him than he was to her. the veiled impertinence of his tone to her must have severely tried her patience, if not her endurance. indeed, the mocking style of his ironical eulogies of her talents, and her fidelity to the memory of her husband are more offensive to those who know what she was than any ill-humoured tirade of trelawny's. the high esteem in which mrs. shelley was held by the eminent literary men who were her contemporaries is pleasantly attested in a number of letters and notes addressed to her by t. moore, samuel rogers, carlyle, bulwer, prosper merimée, and others; letters for the most part of no great importance except in so far as they show the familiar and friendly terms existing between the writers and mrs. shelley. one, however, from walter savage landor, deserves insertion here for its intrinsic interest-- dear mrs. shelley--it would be very ungrateful in me to delay for a single post an answer to your very kind letter. if only three or four like yourself (supposing there are that number in one generation) are gratified by my writings, i am quite content. hardly do i know whether in the whole course of fifty years i have been so fortunate. for one of my earliest resolutions in life was never to read what was written about me, favourable or unfavourable; and another was, to keep as clear as possible of all literary men, well knowing their jealousies and animosities, and so little did i seek celebrity, or even renown, that on making a present of my gebir and afterwards of my later poems to the bookseller, i insisted that they should not even be advertised. whatever i have written since i have placed at the disposal and discretion of some friend. are not you a little too enthusiastic in believing that writers can be much improved by studying my writings? i mean in their style. the style is a part of the mind, just as feathers are part of the bird. the style of addison is admired--it is very lax and incorrect. but in his manner there is the shyness of the loves; there is the graceful shyness of a beautiful girl not quite grown up! people feel the cool current of delight, and never look for its source. however, he wrote the vision of mirza, and no prose man in any age of the world had written anything so delightful. alas! so far from being able to teach men how to write, it will be twenty years before i teach them how to spell. they will write simil_e_, for_ei_gn, sover_ei_gn, therefo_re_, imp_el_, comp_el_, reb_el_, etc. i wish they would turn back to hooker, not for theology--the thorns of theology are good only to heat the oven for the reception of wholesome food. but hooker and jonson and milton spelt many words better than we do. we need not wear their coats, but we may take the gold buttons off them and put them on smoother stuff.--believe me, dear mrs. shelley, very truly yours, w. s. landor. [illustration] of individuals as of nations, it may be true that those are happiest who have no history. the later years of mrs. shelley, which offer no event of public interest, were tranquil and comparatively happy. she brought out no new work after .[ ] it had been her intention, now that the prohibition which constituted the chief obstacle was removed, to undertake the long-projected _life of shelley_. it seemed the more desirable as there was no lack of attempts at biography. chief among these was the series of articles entitled "shelley papers," contributed by mr. hogg to the _new monthly_ magazine during . they were afterwards incorporated with that so-called _life of shelley_ which deals only with shelley's first youth, and which, though it consists of one halfpennyworth of shelley to an intolerable deal of hogg, is yet a classic, and one of the most amusing classics in the world; so amusing, indeed, that, for its sake, we might address the author somewhat as sterne is said to have apostrophised mrs. cibber, after hearing her sing a pathetic air of handel, "man, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!" the second chapter of the book includes some fragments of biography by mary, a facsimile of one of which, in her handwriting, is given here. medwin's _life of shelley_, inaccurate and false in facts, distasteful in style and manner, had caused mrs. shelley serious annoyance. the author, who wrote for money chiefly, actually offered to suppress the book _for a consideration_; a proposal which mrs. shelley treated with the silent contempt it deserved. these were, however, strong arguments in favour of her undertaking the book herself. she summoned up her resolution and began to collect her materials. but it was not to be. her powers and her health were unequal to the task. the parallel between her and the princess of the nettle-shirts was to be carried out to the bitter end, for the last nettle-shirt lacked a sleeve, and the youngest brother always retained one swan's wing instead of an arm. the last service mary could have rendered to shelley was never to be completed, and so the exact details of certain passages of shelley's life must remain for ever, to some extent, matters of speculation. no one but mary could have supplied the true history and, as she herself had said, in the introductory note to her edition of his poems, it was not yet time to do that. too many were living who might have been wounded or injured; nay, there still are too many to admit of a biographer's speaking with perfect frankness. but, although she might have furnished to some circumstances a key which is now for ever lost, it is equally true that there was much to be said, which hardly could, and most certainly never would have been told by her. of his earliest youth and his life with harriet she could, herself, know nothing but by hearsay. but the chief difficulty lay in the fact that too much of her own history was interwoven with his. how could she, now, or at any time, have placed herself, as an observer, so far outside the subject of her story as to speak of her married life with shelley, of its influence on the development of his character and genius, of the effect of that development, and of her constant association with it on herself? yet any life of him which left this out of account would have been most incomplete. more than that, no biography of such a man as shelley can be completely successful which is written under great restrictions and difficulties. to paint a life-like picture of a nature like his requires a genius akin to his, aglow with the fervour of confident enthusiasm. it was, then, as well that mary never wrote the book. the invaluable notes which she did write to shelley's poems have done for him all that it was in her power to accomplish, and all that is necessary. they put the reader in possession of the knowledge it concerns him to have; that of the scenes or the circumstances which inspired or suggested the poems themselves. in she became acquainted with the lady to whom her son was afterwards married, and who was to be to mrs. shelley a kind of daughter and sister in one. no one, except her son, is living who knew mary so well and loved her so enthusiastically. a mutual friend had urged them to become acquainted, assuring them both "they ought to know each other, they would suit so perfectly." some people think that this course is one which tends oftener to postpone than to promote the desired intimacy. in the present case it was justified by the result. mrs. shelley called. her future daughter-in-law, on entering the room, beheld something utterly unlike what she had imagined or expected in the famous mrs. shelley,--a fair, lovely, almost girlish-looking being, "as slight as a reed," with beautiful clear eyes, who put out her hand as she rose, saying half timidly, "i'm mary shelley." from that moment--we have her word for it--the future wife of sir percy had lost her heart to his mother! their intercourse was frequent, and soon became necessary to both. the younger lady had had much experience of sorrow, and this drew the bond all the closer. not for some time after this meeting did sir percy appear on the scene. his engagement followed at no distant date, and after his marriage he, with his wife and his mother, who never during her life was to be parted from them, again went abroad. the cup of such happiness as in this world was possible to mary shelley seemed now to be full, but the time was to be short during which she could taste it. she only lived three years longer, years chequered by very great anxiety (on account of illness), yet to those who now look back on them they seem as if lived under a charm. to live with mary shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel. perfect unselfishness, _selflessness_ indeed, characterised her at all times. one illustration of this is afforded by her repression of the terror she felt when she saw shelley's passion for the sea asserting itself in his son. her own nerves had been shaken and her life darkened by a catastrophe, but not for this would she let it overshadow the lives of others. not even when her son, with a friend, went off to norway in a little yacht, and she was dependent for news of them on a three weeks' post, would she ever let him know the mortal anxiety she endured, but after his marriage she told it to her daughter-in-law, saying, "now he will never wish to go to sea." but of herself she never seemed to think at all; she lived in and for others. her gifts and attainments, far from being obtruded, were kept out of sight; modest almost to excess as she was, she yet knew the secret of putting others at their ease. she was ready with sympathy and help and gentle counsel for all who needed them, and to the friends of her son she was such a friend as they will never forget. the thought of shelley, the idea of his presence, never seemed to leave her mind for a moment. she would constantly refer to what he might think, or do, or approve of, almost as if he had been in the next room. of his history, or her own, she never spoke, nor did she ever refer to other people connected with their early life, unless there was something good to be said of them. of those who had behaved ill to her, no word--on the subject of their behaviour--passed her lips. her daughter-in-law had so little idea of what her associations were with clare, that on one occasion when miss clairmont was coming to stay at field place, and lady shelley, who did not like her, expressed a half-formed intention of being absent during her visit and leaving mrs. shelley to entertain her, she was completely taken aback by the exclamation which escaped mary's lips, "don't go, dear! don't leave me alone with her! she has been the bane of my life ever since i was three years old!" no more was ever said, but this was enough, even to those who did not know all, to reveal a long history of endurance. clare came, and more than once, to stay at field place, but her excitability and eccentricity had so much increased as, at times, to be little if at all under her own control, and after one unmistakable proof of this, it was deemed (by those who cared for mrs. shelley) desirable that she should go and return no more. she died at florence in . mary shelley's strength was ebbing, her nervous ailments increased, and the result was a loss of power in one side. life at field place had had to be abandoned on grounds of health (not her own), and sir percy shelley had purchased boscombe manor for their country home, anticipating great pleasure from his mother's enjoyment of the beautiful spot and fine climate. but she became worse, and never could be moved from her house in chester square till she was taken to her last resting-place. she died on the st of february . she died, "and her place among those who knew her intimately has never been filled up. she walked beside them, like a spirit of good, to comfort and benefit, to lighten the darkness of life, to cheer it with her sympathy and love." these, her own words about shelley, may with equal fitness be applied to her. her grave is in bournemouth churchyard, where, some time after, her father and mother were laid by her side. * * * * * as an author mary shelley did not accomplish all that was expected of her. her letters from abroad, both during her earlier and later tours, the descriptive fragments intended for her father's biography, and above all her notes on shelley's works, are indeed valuable and enduring contributions to literature. but it was in imaginative work that she had aspired to excel, and in which both shelley and godwin had urged her to persevere, confident that she could achieve a brilliant success. none of her novels, however, except _frankenstein_, can be said to have survived the generation for which they were written. only in that work has she left an abiding mark on literature. yet her powers were very great, her culture very extensive, her ambition very high. the friend whose description of her has been quoted in an earlier chapter tries to account for this. she says-- i think a partial solution for the circumscribed fame of mrs. shelley as a writer may be traced to her own shrinking and sensitive retiringness of nature. if, as thackeray, perhaps justly, observes, "persons, to succeed largely in this world, must assert themselves," most assuredly mary shelley never tried that path to distinction.... i never knew, in my life, either man or woman whose whole character was so entirely in harmony: no jarring discords--no incongruous, anomalous, antagonistic opposites met to disturb the perfect unity, and to counteract one day the impressions of the former. gentleness was ever and always her distinguishing characteristic. many years' friendship never showed me a deviation from it. but with this softness there was neither irresolution nor feebleness.... many have fancied and accused her of being cold and apathetic. she was no such thing. she had warm, strong affections: as daughter, wife, and mother she was exemplary and devoted. besides this, she was a faithful, unswerving friend. * * * * * she was not a mirthful--scarcely could be called a cheerful person; and at times was subject to deep and profound fits of despondency, when she would shut herself up, and be quite inaccessible to all. her undeviating love of truth was ever acted on--never swerved from. her worst enemy could never charge her with falsification--even equivocation. truth--truth--truth--was the governing principle in all the words she uttered, the thoughts and judgments she expressed. hence she was most intolerant to deceit and falsehood, in any shape or guise, and those who attempted to practise it on her aroused as much bitter indignation as her nature was capable of.... it is too often the case that authors talk too much of their writings, and all thereunto belonging. mrs. shelley was the extremest reverse of this. in fact, she was almost morbidly averse to the least allusion to herself as an authoress. to call on her and find her table covered with all the accessories and unmistakable traces of _book-making_, such as copy, proofs for correction, etc., made her nearly as nervous and unselfpossessed as if she had been detected in the commission of some offence against the conventionalities of society, or the code of morality.... i really think she deemed it unwomanly to print and publish; and had it not been for the hard cash which, like so many of her craft, she so often stood in need of, i do not think she would ever have come before the world as an authoress.... like all raised in supremacy above their fellows, either mentally or physically, mrs. shelley had her enemies and detractors. but none ever dared to impugn the correctness of her conduct. from the hour of her early widowhood to the period of her death, she might have married advantageously several times. but she often said, "i know not what temptation could make me change the name of shelley." but the true cause lay deeper still, and may afford a clue to more puzzles than this one. what mary godwin might have become had she remained mary godwin for six or eight years longer it is impossible now to do more than guess at. but the free growth of her own original nature was checked and a new bent given to it by her early union with shelley. two original geniuses can rarely develop side by side, certainly not in marriage, least of all in a happy marriage. two minds may, indeed, work consentaneously, but one, however unconsciously, will take the lead; should the other preserve its complete independence, angles must of necessity develop, and the first fitness of things disappear. and in a marriage of enthusiastic devotion and mutual admiration, the younger or the weaker mind, however candid, will shirk or stop short of conclusions which, it instinctively feels, may lead to collision. on the other hand, strong and pronounced views or peculiarities on the part of one may tend to elicit their exact opposite on the part of the other; both results being equally remote from real independence of thought. however it may be, either in marriage or in any intellectual partnership, it is a general truth that from the moment one mind is penetrated by the influence of another, its own native power over other minds has gone, and for ever. and mary parted with this power at sixteen, before she knew what it was to have it. when she left her father's house with shelley she was but a child, a thing of promise, everything about her yet to be decided. shelley himself was a half-formed creature, but of infinite possibilities and extraordinary powers, and mary's development had not only to keep pace with his, but to keep in time and tune with his. sterne said of lady elizabeth hastings that "to have loved her was a liberal education." to love shelley adequately and worthily was that and more--it was a vocation, a career,--enough for a life-time and an exceptional one. every reader of the present biography must see too that in mary shelley's case physical causes had much to do with the limit of her intellectual achievements. between seventeen and twenty-five she had drawn too largely on the reserve funds of life. weak health and illness, a roving unsettled life, the birth and rearing, and then the loss, of children; great joys and great griefs, all crowded into a few young years, and coinciding with study and brain-work and the constant call on her nervous energy necessitated by companionship with shelley, these exhausted her; and when he who was the beginning and end of her existence disappeared, "and the light of her life as if gone out,"[ ] she was left,--left what those eight years had made her, to begin again from the beginning all alone. and nobly she began, manfully she struggled, and wonderfully, considering all things, did she succeed. no one, however, has more than a certain, limited, amount of vitality to express in his or her life; the vital force may take one form or another, but cannot be used twice over. the best of mary's power spent itself in active life, in ministering to another being, during those eight years with shelley. what she gained from him, and it was much, was paid back to him a hundredfold. when he was gone, and those calls for outward activity were over, there lay before her the life of literary labour and thought for which nature and training had pre-eminently fitted her. but she could not call back the freshness of her powers nor the wholeness of her heart. she did not fully know, or realise, then, the amount of life-capital she had run through. she did realise it at a later time, and the very interesting entry in her journal, dated october , , is a kind of profession of faith; a summary of her views of life; the result of her reflections and of her experience-- _journal, october ._--i have been so often abused by pretended friends for my lukewarmness in "the good cause," that i disdain to answer them. i shall put down here a few thoughts on this subject. i am much of a self-examiner. vanity is not my fault, i think; if it is, it is uncomfortable vanity, for i have none that teaches me to be satisfied with myself; far otherwise--and, if i use the word disdain, it is that i think my qualities (such as they are) not appreciated from unworthy causes. in the first place, with regard to "the good cause"--the cause of the advancement of freedom and knowledge, of the rights of women, etc.--i am not a person of opinions. i have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this. some have a passion for reforming the world, others do not cling to particular opinions. that my parents and shelley were of the former class makes me respect it. i respect such when joined to real disinterestedness, toleration, and a clear understanding. my accusers, after such as these, appear to me mere drivellers. for myself, i earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow-creatures, and see all, in the present course, tending to the same, and rejoice; but i am not for violent extremes, which only bring on an injurious reaction. i have never written a word in disfavour of liberalism: that i have not supported it openly in writing arises from the following causes, as far as i know-- that i have not argumentative powers: i see things pretty clearly, but cannot demonstrate them. besides, i feel the counter-arguments too strongly. i do not feel that i could say aught to support the cause efficiently; besides that, on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex) i am far from making up my mind. i believe we are sent here to educate ourselves, and that self-denial, and disappointment, and self-control are a part of our education; that it is not by taking away all restraining law that our improvement is to be achieved; and, though many things need great amendment, i can by no means go so far as my friends would have me. when i feel that i can say what will benefit my fellow-creatures, i will speak; not before. then, i recoil from the vulgar abuse of the inimical press. i do more than recoil: proud and sensitive, i act on the defensive--an inglorious position. to hang back, as i do, brings a penalty. i was nursed and fed with a love of glory. to be something great and good was the precept given me by my father; shelley reiterated it. alone and poor, i could only be something by joining a party; and there was much in me--the woman's love of looking up, and being guided, and being willing to do anything if any one supported and brought me forward--which would have made me a good partisan. but shelley died and i was alone. my father, from age and domestic circumstances, could not _me faire valoir_. my total friendlessness, my horror of pushing, and inability to put myself forward unless led, cherished and supported--all this has sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, i believe, endured--except robinson crusoe. how many tears and spasms of anguish this solitude has cost me, lies buried in my memory. if i had raved and ranted about what i did not understand, had i adopted a set of opinions, and propagated them with enthusiasm; had i been careless of attack, and eager for notoriety; then the party to which i belonged had gathered round me, and i had not been alone. it has been the fashion with these same friends to accuse me of worldliness. there, indeed, in my own heart and conscience, i take a high ground. i may distrust my own judgment too much--be too indolent and too timid; but in conduct i am above merited blame. i like society; i believe all persons who have any talent (who are in good health) do. the soil that gives forth nothing may lie ever fallow; but that which produces--however humble its product--needs cultivation, change of harvest, refreshing dews, and ripening sun. books do much; but the living intercourse is the vital heat. debarred from that, how have i pined and died! my early friends chose the position of enemies. when i first discovered that a trusted friend had acted falsely by me, i was nearly destroyed. my health was shaken. i remember thinking, with a burst of agonising tears, that i should prefer a bed of torture to the unutterable anguish a friend's falsehood engendered. there is no resentment; but the world can never be to me what it was before. trust and confidence, and the heart's sincere devotion are gone. i sought at that time to make acquaintances--to divert my mind from this anguish. i got entangled in various ways through my ready sympathy and too eager heart; but i never crouched to society--never sought it unworthily. if i have never written to vindicate the rights of women, i have ever befriended women when oppressed. at every risk i have befriended and supported victims to the social system; but i make no boast, for in truth it is simple justice i perform; and so i am still reviled for being worldly. god grant a happier and a better day is near! percy--my all-in-all--will, i trust, by his excellent understanding, his clear, bright, sincere spirit and affectionate heart, repay me for sad long years of desolation. his career may lead me into the thick of life or only gild a quiet home. i am content with either, and, as i grow older, i grow more fearless for myself--i become firmer in my opinions. the experienced, the suffering, the thoughtful, may at last speak unrebuked. if it be the will of god that i live, i may ally my name yet to "the good cause," though i do not expect to please my accusers. thus have i put down my thoughts. i may have deceived myself; i may be in the wrong; i try to examine myself; and such as i have written appears to me the exact truth. enough of this! the great work of life goes on. death draws near. to be better after death than in life is one's hope and endeavour--to be so through self-schooling. if i write the above, it is that those who love me may hereafter know that i am not all to blame, nor merit the heavy accusations cast on me for not putting myself forward. i cannot do that; it is against my nature. as well cast me from a precipice and rail at me for not flying. the true success of mary shelley's life was not, therefore, the intellectual triumph of which, during her youth, she had loved to dream, and which at one time seemed to be actually within her grasp, but the moral success of beauty of character. to those people--a daily increasing number in this tired world--who erect the natural grace of animal spirits to the rank of the highest virtue, this success may appear hardly worth the name. yet it was a very real victory. her nature was not without faults or tendencies which, if undisciplined, might have developed into faults, but every year she lived seemed to mellow and ripen her finer qualities, while blemishes or weaknesses were suppressed or overcome, and finally disappeared altogether. as to her theological views, about which the most contradictory opinions have been expressed, it can but be said that nothing in mrs. shelley's writings gives other people the right to formulate for her any dogmatic opinions at all. brought up in a purely rationalistic creed, her education had of course, no tinge of what is known as "personal religion," and it must be repeated here that none of her acts and views were founded, or should be judged as if they were founded on biblical commands or prohibitions. that the temper of her mind, so to speak, was eminently religious there can be no doubt; that she believed in god and a future state there are many allusions to show.[ ] perhaps no one, having lived with the so-called atheist, shelley, could have accepted the idea of the limitation, or the extinction of intelligence and goodness. her liberality of mind, however, was rewarded by abuse from some of her acquaintance, because her toleration was extended even to the orthodox. her moral opinions, had they ever been formulated, which they never were, would have approximated closely to those of mary wollstonecraft, limited, however, by an inability, like her father's, _not_ to see both sides of a question, and also by the severest and most elevated standard of moral purity, of personal faith and loyalty. to be judged by such a standard she would have regarded as a woman's highest privilege. to claim as a "woman's right" any licence, any lowering of the standard of duty in these matters, would have been to her incomprehensible and impossible. but, with all this, she discriminated. her standard was not that of the conventional world. at every risk, as she says, she befriended those whom she considered "victims to the social system." it was a difficult course; for, while her acquaintance of the "advanced" type accused her of cowardice and worldliness for not asserting herself as a champion of universal liberty, there were more who were ready to decry her for her friendly relations with countess guiccioli, lady mountcashel, and others not named here; to say nothing of clare, to whom much of her happiness had been sacrificed. she refrained from pronouncing judgment, but reserved her liberty of action, and in all doubtful cases gave others the benefit of the doubt, and this without respect of persons. she would not excommunicate a humble individual for what was passed over in a man or woman of genius; nor condemn a woman for what, in a man, might be excused, or might even add to his social reputation. least of all would she secure her own position by shunning those whose case had once been hers, and who in their after life had been less fortunate than she. pure herself, she could be charitable, and she could be just. the influence of such a wife on shelley's more vehement, visionary temperament can hardly be over-estimated. their moods did not always suit or coincide; each, at times, made the other suffer. it could not be otherwise with two natures so young, so strong, and so individual. but, if forbearance may have been sometimes called for on the one hand, and on the other a charity which is kind and thinks no evil, it was only a part of that discipline from which the married life of geniuses is not exempt, and which tests the temper and quality of the metal it tries; an ordeal from which two noble natures come forth the purer and the stronger. the indirect, unconscious power of elevation of character is great, and not even a shelley but must be the better for association with it, not even he but must be the nobler, "yea, three times less unworthy" through the love of such a woman as mary. he would not have been all he was without her sustaining and refining influence; without the constant sense that in loving him she loved his ideals also. we owe him, in part, to her. love--the love of love--was shelley's life and creed. this, in mary's creed, was interpreted as love of shelley. by all the rest she strove to do her duty, but, when the end came, that survived as the one great fact of her life--a fact she might have uttered in words like his-- and where is truth? on tombs; for such to thee has been my heart; and thy dead memory has lain from (girlhood), many a changeful year, unchangingly preserved, and buried there. _f. d. & co._ _printed by_ r. & r. clark, _edinburgh_. postscript since this book was printed, a series of letters from harriet shelley to an irish friend, mrs. nugent, containing references to the separation from shelley, has been published in the new york _nation_. these letters, however, add nothing to what was previously known of harriet's history and life with shelley. after november the correspondence ceases. it is resumed in august , after the separation and shelley's departure from england. harriet's account of these events--gathered by her at second-hand from those who can, themselves, have had no knowledge of the facts they professed to relate--embodies all the slanderous reports adverted to in the seventh chapter of the present work, and all the gratuitous falsehoods circulated by mrs. godwin;--falsehoods which professor dowden, in the appendix to his _life of shelley_, has been at the trouble directly to disprove, statement by statement;--falsehoods of which the author cannot but hope that an amply sufficient, if an indirect, refutation may be found in the present life of mary shelley. errata vol. i. p. , footnote, _for_ "schlabrendorf," _read_ "schlaberndorf." vol. i. p. , line , _for_ "(including his own mother, in skinner street)," _read_ "(including his own mother) in skinner street." vol. i. p. , line , _for_ "heeding not the misery then spoken," _read_ "heeding not the words then spoken." vol. ii. p. , line , _for_ "moghiteff," _read_ "moghileff." vol. ii. p. , line , _for_ "zela," _read_ "zella." footnotes: [ ] leigh hunt used often to say that he was the dearest friend shelley had; i believe he was the most costly.--_trelawny's recollections._ [ ] mrs. shelley's letter says twelve days, but this is an error, due, no doubt, to her distress of mind. she gives the date of trelawny's return to leghorn as the th of july; it should have been the th. [ ] mrs. mason. [ ] the hunts. [ ] see godwin's letter, page . [ ] so it happened, however. [ ] mrs. hunt, an amateur sculptress of talent, was also skilful in cutting out profiles in cardboard. from some of these, notably from one of lord byron, successful likenesses were made. [ ] lord byron. [ ] fanny wright subsequently married a frenchman, m. phiquepal darusmont. under the head of "darusmont" a sketch of her life, by mr. r. garnett, containing many highly interesting details of her career, is to be found in the _dictionary of national biography_. [ ] miss robinson. [ ] "recollections" in the original; "records" in the later and, now, better known edition. [ ] page . [ ] allegra was buried at harrow. [ ] jane's mother. [ ] in _the last man_. [ ] the heroine of _valperga_. [ ] things have changed at the british museum, not a little, since these words were written. [ ] in a letter of clare's, before this time, referring to the marriage of one of the miss robinsons, she remarks, "i am quite glad to think that for the future you may only have percy and yourself to maintain." [ ] the miss robinsons. [ ] _lodore._ [ ] such as the following, taken from the preface: we have lately been accustomed to look on italy as a discontented province of austria, forgetful that her supremacy dates only from the downfall of napoleon. from the invasion of charles viii till italy has been a battlefield, where the spaniard, the french, and the german have fought for mastery; and we are blind indeed if we do not see that such will occur again, at least among the two last. supposing a war to arise between them, one of the first acts of aggression on the part of france would be to try to drive the germans from italy. even if peace continue, it is felt that the papal power is tottering to its fall,--it is only supported because the french will not allow austria to extend her dominions, and the austrian is eager to prevent any change that may afford pretence for the french to interfere. did the present pope act with any degree of prudence, his power, thus propped, might last some time longer; but as it is, who can say how soon, for the sake of peace in the rest of italy, it may not be necessary to curtail his territories. the french feel this, and begin to dream of dominion across the alps; the occupation of ancona was a feeler put out; it gained no positive object except to check austria; for the rest its best effect was to reiterate the lesson they have often taught, that no faith should be given to their promises of liberation. [ ] she had published her last novel, _falkner_, in . [ ] carlyle's epitaph on his wife. [ ] "my belief is," she says in the preface to her edition of shelley's prose works, "that spiritual improvement in this life prepares the way to a higher existence." _in vols. crown vo, with portraits, s._ john francis and the 'athenÆum.' _a literary chronicle of half a century._ by john c. francis. opinions of the press. 'the career of john francis, publisher of the _athenæum_, was worth telling for the zeal with which, for more than thirty years, he pursued the definite purpose of obtaining the abolition of the paper duty.... with equal ardour did mr. francis labour for half a century in publishing the weekly issue of the _athenæum_; and these two volumes, which describe its progress from its birth in january, , to the full perfection of its powers in , are a fitting record of the literary history of that period.'--_academy._ 'anybody who wants a complete summary of what the world has been thinking and doing since silk buckingham, with dr. stebbing and charles knight and sterling and maurice as his staff, started the _athenæum_ in , will find plenty to satisfy him in _john francis, a literary chronicle of half a century_.... mr. francis's autobiography is not the least valuable part of this valuable record.'--_graphic._ 'as a record of the literature of fifty years, and in a less complete degree of the progress of science and art, and as a memento of many notable characters in various fields of intellectual culture, these volumes are of considerable value.'--_morning post._ 'the volumes abound with curious and interesting statements, and in bringing before the public the most notable features of a distinguished journal from its infancy almost to the present hour, mr. francis deserves the thanks of all readers interested in literature.'--_spectator._ 'no memoir of mr. francis would be complete without a corresponding history of the journal with which his name will for ever be identified.... the extraordinary variety of subjects and persons referred to, embracing as they do every event in literature, and referring to every person of distinction in science or letters, is a record of such magnitude that we can only indicate its outlines. to the literary historian the volumes will be of incalculable service.'--_bookseller._ 'this literary chronicle of half a century must at once, or in course of a short time, take a place as a permanent work of reference.'--_publishers' circular._ 'some valuable and interesting matter has been collected chronologically regarding the literary history of the last fifty years.'--_murray's magazine._ 'we have put before us a valuable collection of materials for the future history of the victorian era of english literature.'--_standard._ 'john francis was a faithful servant, and also an earnest worker for the good of his fellow-creatures. sunday schools, charitable societies, and mechanics' institutes found in him a patient and steady helper, and no one laboured more persistently and unselfishly to procure the abolition of the pernicious taxes on knowledge.'--_daily chronicle._ 'such a life interests us, and carries with it a fruitful moral.... the history of the _athenæum_ also well deserved to be told.'--_daily news._ 'a worthy monument of the development of literature during the last fifty years.... the volumes contain not a little specially interesting to scotsmen.'--_scotsman._ 'rich in literary and social interest, and afford a comprehensive survey of the intellectual progress of the nation.'--_leeds mercury._ 'it is in characters so sterling and admirable as this that the real strength of a nation lies.... the public will find in the book reading which, if light and easy, is also full of interest and suggestion.... we suspect that writers for the daily and weekly papers will find out that it is convenient to keep these volumes of handy size, and each having its own index, extending the one to , the other to pages, at their elbow for reference.'--_liverpool mercury._ 'the book is, in fact, as it is described, a literary chronicle of the period with which it deals, and a chronicle put together with as much skill as taste and discrimination. the information given about notable people of the past is always interesting and often piquant, while it rarely fails to throw some new light on the individuality of the person to whom it refers.'--_liverpool daily post._ 'our survey has been unavoidably confined almost exclusively to the first volume; indeed, anything like an adequate account of the book is impossible, for it may be described as a history in notes of the literature of the period with which it deals. we confess that we have been able to find very few pages altogether barren of interest, and by far the larger portion of the book will be found irresistibly attractive by all who care anything for the history of literature in our own time.'--_manchester examiner._ 'it was a happy thought in this age of jubilees to associate with a literary chronicle of the last fifty years a biographical sketch of the life of john francis.... as we glance through the contents there is scarcely a page which does not induce us to stop and read about the men and events that are summoned again before us.'--_western daily mercury._ 'a mine of information on subjects connected with literature for the last fifty years.'--_echo._ 'the volumes are full of interest.... the indexes of these two volumes show at a glance that a feast of memorabilia, of gossip, of reminiscence, is in store for the reader.'--_nonconformist._ 'the thought of compiling these volumes was a happy one, and it has been ably carried out by mr. john c. francis, the son of the veteran publisher.'--_literary world._ 'the entire work affords a comprehensive view of the intellectual life of the period it covers, which will be found extremely helpful by students of english literature.'--_christian world._ 'no other fifty years of english literature contain so much to interest an english reader.'--_freeman._ 'to literary men the two volumes will have much interest; they contain the raw material of history, and many of the gems which make it sparkle.'--_sword and trowel._ richard bentley & son, new burlington street, publishers in ordinary to her majesty the queen. woman's work in english fiction from the restoration to the mid-victorian period by clara h. whitmore, a.m. g. p. putnam's sons new york and london the knickerbocker press copyright, by clara h. whitmore the knickerbocker press, new york preface the writings of many of the women considered in this volume have sunk into an oblivion from which their intrinsic merit should have preserved them. this is partly due to the fact that nearly all the books on literature have been written from a man's stand-point. while in other arts the tastes of men and women vary little, the choice of novels is to a large degree determined by sex. many men who acknowledge unhesitatingly that jane austen is superior as an artist to smollett, will find more pleasure in the breezy adventures of _roderick random_ than in the drawing-room atmosphere of _emma_; while no woman can read a novel of smollett's without loathing, although she must acknowledge that the scottish writer is a man of genius. this book is written from a woman's viewpoint. wherever my own judgment has been different from the generally accepted one, as in the estimate of some famous heroines, the point in question has been submitted to other women, and not recorded unless it met with the approval of a large number of women of cultivated taste. this work was first undertaken at the suggestion of dr. e. charlton black of boston university for a master's thesis, and it was due to his appreciative words that it was enlarged into book form. i also wish to thank professor ker of london university, and dr. henry a. beers and dr. wilbur l. cross of yale university for the help which i obtained from them while a student in their classes. it is with the deepest sense of gratitude that i acknowledge the assistance given to me in this work by mr. charles welsh, at whose suggestion the scope of the book was enlarged, and many parts strengthened. i wish especially to thank him for calling my attention to _the cheap repository_ of hannah more, and to the literary value of maria edgeworth's stories for children. it is my only hope that this book may in a small measure fill a want which a school-girl recently expressed to me: "our club wanted to study about women, but we have searched the libraries and found nothing." c. h. w. contents page chapter i. margaret cavendish, duchess of newcastle ( - )-- aphra behn ( - )--mary manley ( - ) chapter ii. sarah fielding ( - )--eliza haywood ( - )-- charlotte lennox ( - )--frances sheridan ( - ) chapter iii. frances burney ( - ) chapter iv. hannah more ( - ) chapter v. charlotte smith ( - )--elizabeth inchbald ( - ) chapter vi. clara reeve ( - )--ann radcliffe ( - )--sophia lee ( - )--harriet lee ( - ) chapter vii. maria edgeworth ( - )--lady morgan ( - ) chapter viii. elizabeth hamilton ( - )--anna porter ( - )--jane porter ( - ) chapter ix. amelia opie ( - )--mary brunton ( - ) chapter x. jane austen ( - ) chapter xi. susan edmonstone ferrier ( - )--mary russell mitford ( - )--anna maria hall ( - ) chapter xii. lady caroline lamb ( - )--mary shelley ( - ) chapter xiii. catherine grace frances gore ( - )--anna eliza bray ( - ) chapter xiv. julia pardoe ( - )--frances trollope ( - )-- harriet martineau ( - ) chapter xv. emily brontË ( - )--anne brontË ( - )-- charlotte brontË ( - ) chapter xvi. elizabeth cleghorn gaskell ( - ) conclusion index woman's work in english fiction chapter i the duchess of newcastle. mrs. behn. mrs. manley in the many volumes containing the records of the past, the names of few women appear, and the number is still smaller of those who have won fame in art or literature. sappho, however, has shown that poetic feeling and expression are not denied the sex; jeanne d'arc was chosen to free france; mrs. somerville excelled in mathematics; maria mitchell ranked among the great astronomers; rosa bonheur had the stroke of a master. these women possessed genius, and one is tempted to ask why more women have not left enduring work, especially in the realm of art. the madonna and child, what a subject for a woman's brush! yet the joy of maternity which shines in a mother's eyes has seldom been expressed by her in words or on canvas. it was left for a man, william blake, to write some of our sweetest songs of childhood. but as soon as the novel appeared, a host of women writers sprang up. women have always been story-tellers. long before homer sang of the fall of troy, the grecian matrons at their spinning related to their maids the story of helen's infidelity; and, as they thought of their husbands and sons who had fallen for her sake, the story did not lack in fervour. but the minstrels have always had this advantage over the story-tellers: their words, sung to the lyre, were crystallised in rhythmic form, so that they resisted the action of time, while only the substance of the stories, not the words which gave them beauty and power, could be retained, and consequently they crumbled away. when the novel took on literary form, women began to write. they were not imitators of men, but opened up new paths of fiction, in many of which they excelled. the first woman to essay prose fiction as an art was margaret, queen of navarre. in the seventy-two tales of _the heptameron_, a book written before the dawn of realism, she related many anecdotes of her brother, francis the first, and his courtiers. woman's permanent influence over the novel began about , and was due directly to the hotel rambouillet, in whose grand _salon_ there mingled freely for half a century the noblest minds of france. this _salon_ was presided over by the marquise de rambouillet, who had left the licentious court of henry the fourth, and had formed here in her home between the louvre and the tuileries a little academy, where corneille read his tragedies before they were published, and bousset preached his first sermon, while among the listeners were the beautiful duchess de longueville, madame de lafayette, madame de sévigné and mademoiselle de scudéri, besides other persons of royal birth or of genius. the ladies of this _salon_ became the censors of the manners, the literature, and even the language of france. here was the first group of women writers whose fame extended beyond their own country, and has lasted, though somewhat dimmed, to the present. since the seventeenth century the influence of women novelists has been ever widening. in england, women entered the domain of literature later than in france, spain, or italy. not until the restoration did they take any active part in the world of letters; and not until the reign of george the third did they make any marked contribution to fiction. the first woman writer of prose fiction in england was the thrice noble and illustrious princess margaret, duchess of newcastle. during the commonwealth, the duke and duchess of newcastle had lived in exile, but with the restoration of charles the second, in , they returned to london, where the duchess soon became a notable personage. crowds gathered in the park merely to see her pass, attracted partly by her fame as a writer, partly by the singularities she affected. her black coach furnished with white curtains and adorned with silver trimmings instead of gilt, with the footmen dressed in long black coats, was readily distinguished from other carriages in the park. her peculiarities of dress were no less marked. her long black _juste-au-corps_, her hair hanging in curls about her bared neck, her much beplumed velvet cap of her own designing, were objects of ridicule to the court wits, who even asserted that she wore more than the usual number of black patches upon her comely face. more singular than her habiliments were her pretentions as a woman of letters, which caused the courtiers to laugh at her conceit. she was evidently aware of this failing as she writes in her _autobiography_: "i fear my ambition inclines to vain-glory, for i am very ambitious; yet 't is neither for beauty, wit, titles, wealth, or power, but as they are steps to raise me to fame's tower, which is to live by remembrance in after-ages." but, notwithstanding her detractors, she received sufficient praise to foster her belief in her own genius. her plays were well received. her poems were declared by her admirers equal to shakespeare's. her philosophical works, which she dedicated to the great universities of oxford and cambridge, were accepted with fulsome flattery of their author. when she visited the royal society at arundel house, the lord president met her at the door, and, with mace carried before him, escorted her into the room, where many experiments were performed for her pleasure. in , a folio volume was published, entitled _letters and poems in honour of the incomparable princess margaret, duchess of newcastle_, written by men of high rank and of learning, with the following dedication by the university of cambridge: to margaret the first: princess of philosophers: who hath dispelled errors: appeased the difference of opinions: and restored peace to learning's commonwealth. yet this praise was not all flattery, for the scholarly evelyn always speaks of her with respect, and after visiting her writes, "i was much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse of the duchess." amid the arid wastes of her philosophical works are green spots enlivened by good sense and humour that have a peculiar charm. at the time when the trained minds of the royal society were broadening scientific knowledge by careful experiments, this lady, with practically no education, sat herself down to write her thoughts upon the great subjects of matter and motion, mind and body. she was emboldened to publish her opinions, for, as she says: "although it is probable, that some of the opinions of ancient philosophers in ancient times are erroneous, yet not all, neither are all modern opinions truths, but truly i believe, there are more errors in the one than truth in the other." some of her explanations are very artless, as when she decides that passions are created in the heart and not in the head, because "passion and judgment seldom agree." her philosophical works are often compounded of fiction and fact. her book called _the description of a new world called the blazing world_ reminds one of some of the marvellous stories of jules verne. according to the story a merchant fell in love with a lady while she was gathering shells on the sea-coast, and carried her away in a light vessel. they were driven to the north pole, thence to the pole of another world which joined it. the conjunction of these two poles doubled the cold, so that it was insupportable, and all died but the lady. bear-men conducted her to a warmer clime, and presented her to the emperor of the blazing world, whose palace was of gold, with floors of diamonds. the emperor married the lady, and, at her desire to study philosophy, sent for the duchess of newcastle, "a plain and rational writer," to be her teacher. the story at this point rambles into philosophy. _nature's pictures drawn by fancy's pencil_ contains many suggestions for poems and novels. particularly beautiful is the fragment of a story of a lord and lady who were forbidden to love in this world, but who died the same night, and met on the shores of the styx. "their souls did mingle and intermix as liquid essences, whereby their souls became as one." they preferred to enjoy themselves thus rather than go to elysium, where they might be separated, and where the talk of the shades was always of the past, which to them was full of sorrow. the duchess of newcastle wrote a series of letters on beauty, eloquence, time, theology, servants, wit, and kindred subjects, often illustrated by a little story, reminding the reader of some of the _spectator_ papers, which delighted the next generation. as in those papers, characters were introduced. mrs. p.i., the puritan dame, appears in several letters. she had received sanctification, and consequently considered all vanities of dress, such as curls, bare necks, black patches, fans, ribbons, necklaces, and pendants, temptations of satan and the signs of damnation. in a subsequent letter she becomes a preaching sister, and the duchess has been to hear her, and thus comments upon the meeting: "there were a great many holy sisters and holy brethren met together, where many took their turns to preach; for as they are for liberty of conscience, so they are for liberty of preaching. but there were more sermons than learning, and more words than reason." this is the first example of the use of letters in english fiction. in the next century it was adopted by richardson for his three great novels, _pamela_, _clarissa harlowe_, and _sir charles grandison_; it was used by smollett in the novel of _humphry clinker_, and became a popular mode of composition with many lesser writers. but posterity is chiefly indebted to the duchess of newcastle for her life of her husband and the autobiography that accompanies it. of the former charles lamb wrote that it was a jewel for which "no casket is rich enough." of the beaux and belles who were drawn by the ready pens of the playwrights of the court of charles the second none are worthy of a place beside the duke of newcastle and his incomparable wife. with rare felicity she has described her home life in london with her brothers and sisters before her marriage. their chief amusements were a ride in their coaches about the streets of the city, a visit to spring gardens and hyde park; and sometimes a sail in the barges on the river, where they had music and supper. she announces with dignity her first meeting with the duke of newcastle in paris, where she was maid of honour to the queen mother of england: "he was pleased to take some particular notice of me, and express more than an ordinary affection for me; insomuch that he resolved to choose me for his second wife." and in another place she writes: "i could not, nor had not the power to refuse him, by reason my affections were fixed on him, and he was the only person i ever was in love with. neither was i ashamed to own it, but gloried therein." here is the charm of brevity. richardson would have blurred these clearly cut sentences by eight volumes. in the biography of her husband she relates faithfully his services to charles the first at the head of an army which he himself had raised; his final defeat near york by the parliamentary forces; and his escape to the continent in . then followed his sixteen years of exile in paris, rotterdam, and antwerp, where "he lived freely and nobly," entertaining many persons of quality, although he was often in extreme poverty, and could obtain credit merely by the love and respect which his presence inspired. what a sad picture is given of the return of the exiles to their estates, which had been laid waste in the civil war and later confiscated by cromwell! but how the greatness of the true gentleman shines through it all, who, as he viewed one of his parks, seven of which had been completely destroyed, simply said, "he had been in hopes it would not have been so much defaced as he found it." in the closing chapter the duchess gives _discourses gathered from the mouth of my noble lord and husband_. these show both sound sense and a broad view of affairs. she writes: "i have heard my lord say, i "that those which command the wealth of a kingdom, command the hearts and hands of the people. * * * * * xxxiii "that many laws do rather entrap than help the subject." clarendon, who thought but poorly of the duke's abilities as a general, gives the same characterisation of him: a man of exact proportion, pleasant, witty, free but courtly in his manner, who loved all that were his friends, and hated none that were his enemies, and who had proved his loyalty to his king by the sacrifice of his property and at the risk of his life. perhaps the duchess of newcastle has unwittingly drawn a true representation of the great body of english cavaliers, and has partly removed the stain which the immoralities of the court afterward put upon the name. these biographies give a story of marital felicity with all the characteristics of the domestic novel. at this time the english novel was a crude, formless thing, without dignity in literature. the duchess of newcastle, who aspired to be ranked with homer and plato, would have spurned a place among writers of romance, although her genius was primarily that of the novelist. she constantly thought of plots, which she jotted down at random, her common method of composition. she has described characters, and has left many bright pictures of the manners and customs of her age. her style of writing is better than that of many of her more scholarly contemporaries, who studied latin models and strove to imitate them. she wrote as she thought and felt, so that her style is simple when not lost in the mazes of philosophical speculation. she had all the requisites necessary to write the great novel of the restoration. but in the next century her voluminous writings were forgotten, and the casual visitor to westminster abbey who paused before the imposing monument in the north transept read with amused indifference the quaint inscription which marks the tomb of the noble pair; that she was the second wife of the duke of newcastle, that her name was margaret lucas; "a noble family, for all the brothers were valiant and all the sisters were virtuous." to charles lamb belongs the credit of discovering the worth of her writings. delighting in oddities, but quick to discern truth from falsehood, he loved to pore over the old folios containing her works, and could not quite forgive his sister mary for speaking disrespectfully of "the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine of the last century but one--the thrice noble, chaste and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and original-brained, generous margaret newcastle." her desire for immortality is nearer its fulfilment to-day than at any previous time. a third edition of the _life of the duke of newcastle_ was published in , the year after her death. nearly two hundred years later, in , it was included in russell smith's "library of old authors," and since then a modernised english edition and a french edition of this book have been published. no one can read this biography without feeling the charm of the quaint, childlike personality of the duchess of newcastle. while all london was talking of the "mad duchess of newcastle," another lady was living there no less eminent as a writer, but so distinguished for her wit, freedom of temper, and brilliant conversation, that even the great dryden sought her friendship, and sothern, rochester, and wycherley were among her admirers. she was named "astrea," and hailed as the wonder and glory of her sex. but aphra behn's talents brought her a more substantial reward than fame. her plays were presented to crowded houses; her novels were in every library, and she obtained a large income from her writings; she was the first english woman to earn a living by her pen. in her early youth, mrs. behn lived for a time at surinam in dutch guiana, where her father was governor. on one of the plantations was a negro in whose fate she became deeply interested. she learned from his own lips about his life in africa, and was herself an eye witness of the indignities and tortures he suffered in slavery. she was so deeply impressed by his horrible fate, that on her return to london she related his story to king charles the second and at his request elaborated it into the novel _oroonoko_. according to the story, oroonoko, an african warrior, was married to imoinda, a beautiful maiden of his own people. his grandfather, a powerful chieftain, also fell in love with the beautiful imoinda and placed her in his harem. when he found that her love for oroonoko still continued, he sold her secretly into slavery and her rightful husband could learn nothing of her whereabouts. later oroonoko and his men were invited by the captain of a dutch trading ship to dine on board his vessel. they accepted the invitation, but, after dinner, the captain seized his guests, threw them into chains, and carried them to the west indies, where he sold them as slaves. here oroonoko found his wife, whose loss he had deeply mourned, and they were reunited. oroonoko, however, indignant at the treachery practised against himself and his men, incited the slaves to a revolt. they were overcome, and oroonoko was tied to a whipping-post and severely punished. as he found that he could not escape, he resolved to die. but rather than leave imoinda to the cruelty of her owners, he determined to slay first his wife, then his enemies, lastly himself. he told his plans to imoinda, who willingly accompanied him into the forest, where he put her to death. when he saw his wife dead at his feet, his grief was so great that it deprived him of the strength to take vengeance on his enemies. he was again captured and led to a stake, where faggots were placed about him. the author has described his death with a faithfulness to detail that carries with it the impress of truth: "'my friends, am i to die, or to be whipt?' and they cry'd, 'whipt! no, you shall not escape so well.' and then he reply'd, smiling, 'a blessing on thee'; and assured them they need not tie him, for he would stand fix'd like a rock, and endure death so as should encourage them to die: 'but if you whip me' [said he], 'be sure you tie me fast.'" the popularity of the book was instantaneous. it passed through several editions. it was translated into french and german, and adapted for the german stage, while sothern put it on the stage in england. it created almost as great a sensation as did _uncle tom's cabin_ two hundred years later. like mrs. stowe's novel it had a strong moral influence, as it was among the earliest efforts to call the attention of europe to the evils of the african slave trade. moreover, this her first novel gave mrs. behn an acknowledged place as a writer. _oroonoko_ marks a distinct advance in english fiction. nearly all novels before this had consisted of a series of stories held together by a loosely formed plot running through a number of volumes, sometimes only five, but occasionally, as in _the grand cyrus_, filling ten quartos. their form was such that like the _thousand and one nights_ they could be continued indefinitely. most of these novels belonged either to the pastoral romance or the historical allegory. in the former the ladies and gentlemen who in a desultory sort of way carried on the plot were disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses and lived in idyllic state in arcadia. in the latter they masqueraded under the names of kings and queens of antiquity and entered with the flourish of trumpets and the sound of drums. _oroonoko_ was the first english novel with a well developed plot. it moves along rapidly, without digression, to its tragic conclusion. not until fielding wrote _joseph andrews_ was the plot of any english novel so definitely wrought. the lesser writer had a slight advantage over the greater. mrs. behn's novel is constructed upon dramatic lines, so that it holds the interest more closely to the main characters, and the end is awaited with intense expectation; while fielding chose the epic form, which is more discursive, and _joseph andrews_ like all his novels is excessively tame, almost hackneyed in its conclusion. mrs. behn's black hero is the first distinctly drawn character in english fiction, the first one that has any marked personality. sometimes the enthusiasm with which he is described brings a smile to the lips of the modern reader and reminds one of the heroic savages of james fenimore cooper and helen hunt jackson. she writes of him: "he was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancy'd: the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot.... there was no one grace wanting, that bears the standard of true beauty." and thus she continues the description in the superlative degree. but the story is for the most part realistic. although the scenes in africa show the influence of the french heroic novels, as if the author were afraid to leave her story in its simple truth but must adorn it with purple and ermine, as soon as it is transferred to surinam, where mrs. behn had lived, it becomes real. it has local colouring, at that time an almost unknown attribute. it has the atmosphere of the tropics. the descriptions are vivid, and often photographic. occasionally they are exaggerated, but few travellers to a region of which their hearers know nothing have been able to resist the temptation to deviate from the exact truth. but the whole novel, even at this late day, leaves one with the impression that it is a true biography. in the history of the english novel, in which _pamela_ is given an important place as the morning star which heralded the great light of english realism about to burst upon the world, this well arranged, definite, picturesque story of _oroonoko_, whose author was reposing quietly within the hallowed precincts of westminster abbey fifty years before richardson introduced _pamela_ to an admiring public, should not be forgotten. before _pamela_ was published, the complete works of mrs. behn passed through eight editions. the plots of all her novels are well constructed, with little extraneous matter, but with the exception of oroonoko the characters are shadowy beings, many of whom meet with a violent death. _the nun or the perjured duty_ has only five characters, all of whom perish in the meshes of love. _the fair jilt or the amours of prince tarquin and miranda_, founded on incidents that came to the author's knowledge during her residence in antwerp, is well fitted for the columns of a modern yellow journal; the beautiful heroine causes the death of everyone who stands in the way of her love or her ambition, but she finally repents and lives happy ever after. mrs. behn's style is always careless, owing to her custom of writing while entertaining friends. a great change took place in the public taste during the next hundred years, so that mrs. behn's novels, plays, and poems fell into disrepute. sir walter scott tells the story of his grand-aunt who expressed a desire to see again mrs. behn's novels, which she had read with delight in her youth. he sent them to her sealed and marked "private and confidential." the next time he saw her, she gave them back with the words: "take back your bonny mrs. behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for i find it impossible to get through the very first novel. but is it not a very odd thing that i, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago i have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in london?" mrs. behn has been accused of great license in her conduct and of gross immorality in her writings. her friend and biographer says of the former: "for my part i knew her intimately, and never saw ought unbecoming the just modesty of our sex, though more free and gay than the folly of the precise will allow." for the latter the fashion must be blamed more than she. mrs. behn was not actuated by the high moral principles of mademoiselle de scudéri and madame de lafayette, with whom love was an ennobling passion, nor was she writing for the refined men and women of the hotel rambouillet; she was striving to earn a living by pleasing the court of charles the second, and in that she was eminently successful. * * * * * nearly a quarter of a century after the death of mrs. behn, mrs. manley published anonymously the first two volumes of the _new atlantis_, the book by which she is chiefly known, under the title of _secret memoirs and manners of several persons of quality of both sexes from the new atalantis, an island in the mediterranean_. mrs. manley was a tory, and she peopled the new atalantis with members of the whig party under marlborough as prince fortunatus. the book is written in the form of a conversation carried on by astrea, virtue, and intelligence, a personification of the _court gazette_. they described the whig leaders so accurately, and related the scandal of the court so faithfully, that, although fictitious names were used, no key was needed to recognise the personages in the story. the publisher and printer were arrested for libel, but mrs. manley came forward and owned the authorship. in her trial she was placed under a severe cross-examination by lord sunderland, who attempted to learn where she had obtained her information. she persisted in her statement that no real characters were meant, that it was all a work of imagination, but if it bore any resemblance to truth it must have come to her by inspiration. upon lord sunderland's objecting to this statement, on the grounds that so immoral a book bore no trace of divine impulse, she replied that there were evil angels as well as good, who might possess equal powers of inspiration. the book was published in may, ; in the following february, she was discharged by order of the queen's bench. soon after her discharge from court, she wrote a third and fourth volume of the _new atalantis_ under the title, _memoirs of europe toward the close of the eighth century written by eginardus, secretary and favorite to charlemagne, and done into english, by the translator of the new atalantis_. here she has followed the french models. there is a loosely constructed plot, and the characters tell a series of stories. many of the writers of queen anne's reign are described with none of that lustre that surrounds them now, but as they appeared to a cynical woman who knew them well. she refers to steele as don phaebo, and ridicules his search for the philosopher's stone; and laments that addison, whom she calls maro, should prostitute his talents for gold, when he might become a second vergil. mrs. manley had been well trained to write a book like the _new atalantis_. at sixteen, an age when addison and steele were at the charterhouse preparing for oxford, her father, sir roger manley, died. a cousin, taking advantage of her helplessness, deceived her by a false marriage, and after three years abandoned her. upon this she entered the household of the duchess of cleveland, the mistress of charles the second, who soon tired of her and dismissed her from her service. she then began to write, and by her plays and political articles soon won an acknowledged place among the writers of grub street. from the many references to her in the letters and journals of the period, she seems to have been popular with the writers of both political parties. swift writes to stella that she is a very generous person "for one of that sort," which many little incidents prove. she dedicated her play _lucius_ to steele, with whom she was on alternate terms of enmity and friendship, as a public retribution for her ridicule of him in the _new atalantis_, saying that "scandal between whig and tory goes for not." steele, equally generous, wrote a prologue for the play, perhaps in retribution for some of the harsh criticisms of her in the _tatler_. all readers of pope remember the reference to her in the _rape of the lock_, where lord petre exclaims that his honour, name and praise shall live as long as atalantis shall be read. although mrs. manley's pen was constantly and effectively employed in the interest of the tory party, she being at one time the editor of the _examiner_, the tory organ, none of her writings had the popularity of the _new atalantis_. it went through seven editions and was translated into the french. the book has no intrinsic merit; its language is scurrilous and obscene; but it appealed to the eager curiosity of the public concerning the private immoralities of men and women who were prominent at court. human nature in its pages furnishes a contemptible spectacle. the _new atalantis_ has now, however, assumed a permanent place in the history of fiction. this species of writing had been common, in france, but it was the first english novel in which political and personal scandal formed the groundwork of a romance. swift followed its general plan in _gulliver's travels_, placing his political enemies in public office in lilliput and brobdingnag, only he so wrought upon them with his imagination that he gave to the world a finished work of art, while mrs. manley has left only the raw material with which the artist works. smollett's political satire, _adventures of an atom_, was also suggested by the _new atalantis_, but here the earlier writer has surpassed the later. all three of these writers took a low and cynical view of humanity. the women novelists who directly followed mrs. manley did not have her strength, but they had a delicacy that has given to their writings a subtle charm. from the time of sarah fielding to the present threatened reaction the writings of women have been marked by chastity of thought and purity of expression. chapter ii sarah fielding. mrs. lennox. mrs. haywood. mrs. sheridan about the middle of the eighteenth century, some interesting novels were written by women, but their fame was so overshadowed by the early masters of english fiction, who were then writing, that they have been almost forgotten. for in _pamela_ was published, the first novel of samuel richardson; in , _humphry clinker_ appeared, the last novel of tobias smollett; and during the thirty-one years between these two dates all the books of richardson, fielding, sterne, and smollett were given to the world, and determined the nature of the english novel. the plot of most of their fifteen realistic novels is practically the same. the hero falls in love with a beautiful young lady, not over seventeen, and there is a conflict between lust and chastity. the hero, balked of his prey, travels up and down the world, where he meets with a series of adventures, all very much alike, and all bearing very little on the main plot. at last fate leads the dashing hero to the church door, where he confers a ring on the fair heroine, a paltry piece of gold, the only reward for her fidelity, with the hero thrown in, much the worse for wear, and the curtain falls with the sound of the wedding bells in the distance. the range of these novels is narrow. they describe a world in which the chief occupation is eating, drinking, swearing, gambling, and fighting. their chief artistic excellence is the strength and vigour with which these low scenes are described. sidney lanier says of them: "they play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavour to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument." and taine, who could hardly endure any of them, writes of fielding what he implies of the others: "one thing is wanted in your strongly-built folks--refinement; the delicate dreams, enthusiastic elevation, and trembling delicacy exist in nature equally with coarse vigour, noisy hilarity, and frank kindness." the women who essayed the art of fiction during these years did not have so firm a grasp of the pen as their male contemporaries, and they have added no portraits to the gallery of fiction; but they saw and recorded many interesting scenes of british life which quite escaped the quick-sighted fielding, or sterne with the microscopic eyes. in , when richardson had written only one book, and fielding had published only two, before _tom jones_ or _clarissa harlowe_ had seen the light of day, sarah fielding published _david simple_, under the title of _the adventures of david simple, containing an account of his travels through the cities of london and westminster in the search of a real friend, by a lady_. the author commenced the story as a satire on society. for a long time david's search is unsuccessful. although he changed his lodgings every week, he could hear of no one who could be trusted. many, to be sure, dropped hints of their own excellence, and the pity that they had to live with inferior neighbours. among these was mr. spatter, who introduced him to mr. varnish. the former saw the faults of people through a magnifying glass; while the latter, when he mentioned a person's failings, added, "he was sure they had some good in them." but david soon learned that mr. varnish was no readier to assist a friend in need than the fault-finding mr. spatter. like her brother henry, sarah fielding is often sarcastic. in one of the chapters she leaves david to his sufferings, "lest it should be thought," she added, "i am so ignorant of the world as not to know the proper time of forsaking people." but the pessimistic vein of the first volume changes to a more optimistic tone in the second. david, in his search for one friend, finds three. fortunately these consist of a brother and sister and a lady in love with the brother. even at this early time, an author had no doubts as to how a novel should end. the heading of the last chapter in the book informs us that it contains two weddings, "and consequently the conclusion of the book." in its construction, the plot is similar to that of the other novels of the period. david has plenty of time at his disposal, and listens with more patience than the reader to the detailed history of all the people he meets, and often begs a casual acquaintance to favour him with the story of his life. but sarah fielding's chief charm to her women readers is the feminine view of her times. in _david simple_ we have the pleasure of travelling through england, but with a woman as our guide. as harry fielding travelled between bath and london, the fair reader wonders what he reported to mrs. fielding of what he had seen and heard. surely at these various inns there must have been some by-play of real affection, some act of modest kindness, some incident of delicate humour. did he regale mrs. fielding with the scenes he has described for his readers? probably when she asked him if anything had happened _en route_, he merely yawned and replied, "oh, nothing worth while." he had too much reverence for his wife to repeat these low scenes to her, and we suspect he had eyes for no others. what would addison or steele have seen in the same place? sarah fielding also takes her characters on a stage-coach journey, but here we sit beside the fair heroine, an intelligent lady, and gaze at the men who sit opposite her. there is the butterfly with his hair pinned up in blue papers, wearing a laced waistcoat, and humming an italian air. he admires nothing but the ladies, and offered some little familiarity to our heroine, which she repulsed; upon this he paid her the greatest respect imaginable, being convinced, as she would not suffer any intimacy from _him_, she must be one of the most virtuous women that had ever been born. there is the atheist, who being alone with her for a few moments makes love to her in an insinuating manner, and tries to prove to her that pleasure is the only thing to be sought in life, and assures her that she may follow her inclinations without a crime, "while she knew that nothing could so much oppose her _gratifying him_, as her _pleasing herself_." then there is the clergyman who makes honourable love to her, but by doing so puts an end to the friendship which she had hoped might be between them; until at the end of the journey, "she almost made a resolution never to speak to a man again, beginning to think it impossible for a man to be civil to a woman, unless he had some designs upon her." whether or not women have ever portrayed the masculine sex truthfully is an open question. but a gentleman mellowed and softened in the light of ladies' smiles is quite a different creature from the same gentleman when seen among the sterner members of his own sex, and there are certain phases of men's characters portrayed in the novels of women which fielding, scott, and thackeray seem never to have seen. miss fielding descants upon many familiar scenes in a manner that would have made her a valuable contributor to the _tatler_ or _spectator_. all kinds of human nature interested her. there is the man who advises david as a friend to buy a certain stock which he himself is secretly trying to sell because he knows it has decreased in value, thus showing that money transactions in london in the reigns of the georges differed little from money transactions on the stock exchange to-day. in some respects, however, society has improved since the days of sarah fielding. she describes the gentlemen of social prominence who tumble up to the carriages of ladies who are driving through covent garden in the morning, and present them with cabbages or other vegetables which they have picked up from the stalls, too intoxicated to know that their conduct is ridiculous. there are the crowds at the theatres who show their displeasure with a playwright by making so much noise that his play cannot be heard on its first night and so is condemned. other writers of the period complain of having received this kind of treatment at the hands of the gentlemen mob. and then we are introduced to a scene in the fashionable west end which is a familiar one to-day, where the ladies of quality have their whist assemblies and spend all the morning visiting each other and discussing how the cards were played the previous evening and why certain tricks were lost. we recognise the fact, however, that miss fielding's knowledge of life was but slight. she writes from the standpoint of a spectator, not like her brother as one who had been a part of it. she was one of that group of gentlewomen who gathered around richardson and heard him read _clarissa_, or discussed life and books with him at the breakfast table in the summer-house at north end, hammersmith. life was not lived there, but philosophy often sat at the board, and there was fine penetration into the characters and manners of men. richardson transferred to miss fielding the compliment which dr. johnson had bestowed upon him, and it was not undeserved by the author of _david simple_: "what a knowledge of the human heart! well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. his was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside." * * * * * it is not difficult to conjure up a picture of the literary gentlemen and gentlewomen who used to breakfast with richardson in the summer-house at north end; the gentlemen in their many-coloured velvet suits, the ladies wearing broad hoops, loose sacques, and pamela hats. one of these ladies was charlotte ramsay, better known by her married name of mrs. lennox. her father, colonel james ramsay, was lieutenant-governor of new york, where his daughter charlotte was born in . she was sent to england at the age of fifteen, and soon after her father died, leaving her unprovided for. she turned her attention to literature as a means of livelihood, and at once became a favourite in the literary circles of london, where she met and won the esteem of the great dr. johnson. when her first novel, _the life of harriet stuart_, was published, he showed his appreciation of its author in a unique manner. at his suggestion, the ivy lane club and its friends entertained mrs. lennox and her husband at the devil's tavern with a night of festivity. after an elaborate supper had been served, a hot apple-pie was brought in, stuffed full of bay-leaves, and johnson with appropriate ceremonies crowned the author with a wreath of laurel. the night was passed in mirth and conversation; tea and coffee were often served; and not until the creaking of the street doors reminded them that it was eight o'clock in the morning did the guests, twenty in number, leave the tavern. mrs. lennox's claim to a place in english literature rests solely upon her novel, _the female quixote_, published in . arabella, the heroine, is the daughter of a marquis who has retired into the country, where he lives remote from society. her mother is dead; her father is immersed in his books, so that arabella is left alone, and whiles away the hours by reading the novels of mademoiselle de scudéri. her three great novels, _clelia_, _the grand cyrus_ and _ibrahim_, are historical allegories, in which the france of louis xiv is given an historical setting, and his courtiers masquerade under the names of famous men of antiquity. there is no attempt at historical accuracy. but to arabella these books represented true history and depicted the real life of the world. in a fine satirical passage arabella informs mr. selvin, a man so deeply read in ancient history that he fixed the date of any occurrence by olympiads, not years, that pisistratus had been inspired to enslave his country because of his love for cleorante. mr. selvin wonders how this important fact could have escaped his own research, and conceives a great admiration for arabella's learning. in the novels of mademoiselle de scudéri the characters, even in moments of extreme danger, entertain each other with stories of their past experiences. when arabella has unexpected guests she bids her maid relate to them the history of her mistress. she instructs her to "relate exactly every change of my countenance, number all my smiles, half-smiles, blushes, turnings pale, glances, pauses, full-stops, interruptions; the rise and falling of my voice, every motion of my eyes, and every gesture which i have used for these ten years past: nor omit the smallest circumstance that relates to me." all the people arabella meets are changed by her fancy into the characters of her favourite books. in common people she sees princes in disguise. if a man approaches her, she fancies that he is about to bear her away to some remote castle, or to mention the subject of love, which would be unpardonable, unless he had first captured cities in her behalf. yet amid the wildest extravagances arabella never loses her charm. her generosity and purity of thought make her a very lovable heroine, much more womanly than clarissa or sophia western, and we do not wonder that mr. glanville continues to love her, although he is so often annoyed by her ridiculous fancies. but her belief in her hallucinations is as firm as that of the spanish quixote for whom the book was named. everyone will remember his attack on the windmills, which he mistook for giants. arabella was equally brave. thinking herself and some other ladies pursued, when the thames cuts off their escape, she addresses her companions in language becoming one of her favourite heroines: "once more, my fair companions, if your honour be dear to you, if an immortal glory be worth your seeking, follow the example i shall set you, and equal, with me, the roman clelia." she plunged into the river, but was promptly rescued. the doctor who attended her in the illness that followed this heroic deed convinced her of the folly of trying to live according to these old books, and she consented to marry her faithful and deserving lover. the character of arabella is not drawn with the broad strong lines of fielding, nor with the attention to minute detail which gives life to the characters of richardson. but the girlish sweetness of arabella, her refusal to believe wrong of others, her ignorance of life, her contempt for a lover who has not shed blood nor captured cities in her behalf, is a reality, and shows that the author knew the nature of the romantic girl. in the noble simplicity of arabella, mrs. lennox has, perhaps unconsciously, paid a high tribute to the moral effects of the novels of scudéri. arabella is the only clearly drawn character in the book. but one humorous situation follows another, so that the interest never flags. the other novels of mrs. lennox have no value save as they show the trend of thought of the period. in _henrietta_, afterward dramatised as _the sister_, the heroine, granddaughter of an earl, rather than change her religion, leaves her family and becomes the maid of a rich but vulgar tradesman's daughter. of course her mistress, who has treated her scurrilously, in time learns her true rank and is properly humbled. the name given to one of the chapters might suffice for the most of them: "in which our heroine is in great distress." this would seem to be the proper heading for many chapters of many books of the period. in the days of good queen bess, heroines were good and happy. in the merry reign of charles, they were bad but happy. pamela set a fashion from which heroines seldom dared to deviate for over a hundred years. they were good--but, oh, so wretched! this type of women became such a favourite with both sexes, that even the sane-minded scott says: and love is loveliest when embalmed in tears. during her period of distress henrietta lodged with a milliner. her landlady showed her a small collection of books and pointed with especial pleasure to her favourite novels: "there is mrs. haywood's novels, did you ever read them? oh! they are the finest love-sick passionate stories: i assure you, you'll like them vastly." henrietta, however, chose _joseph andrews_ for her diversion. mrs. eliza haywood was never admitted into that inner circle of highly respectable english ladies who clustered around richardson. she was more of an adventuress in the domain of letters. in her first novels she followed the fashion set by mrs. manley and supplied the public with scandals in high life. _memoirs of a certain island adjacent to utopia_, published in , _the secret intrigues of the count of caramania_, published in , are the highly suggestive titles of two of the most popular of her early works. after richardson had made virtue more popular than vice, mrs. haywood followed the literary fashion which he had set, and in wrote _the history of miss betsey thoughtless_. this has sometimes been called a domestic novel, but that is a misnomer, since the characters are seldom found at home, but rather are met in the various pleasure resorts of london. as was the fashion in the novels of this time, and probably not an uncommon occurrence in the english capital, the heroine was often forced into a chariot by some lawless libertine, but fortunately was always rescued by some more virtuous lover. the whole story is but a new arrangement of the one or two incidents with which richardson had wrung the heart of the british public. it has one advantage over the most of the novels which had preceded it. there is little told that does not bear directly on the plot, the characters of the sub-plot being important personages in the main story, and the book has a definite conclusion. none of the characters, however, are pleasing. the hero, mr. trueworthy, a combination of tom jones and sir charles grandison, is a hypocrite. the other male characters are insignificant. miss betsey, the heroine, is almost charming. conscious of her own innocence, she repeatedly appears in a light that makes her worldly lover, mr. trueworthy, suspect her virtue, until at last he begs to be released from his engagement to her. the author of the book stands as a duenna at miss betsey's side, and points out by the misfortunes of the heroine how foolish it is for girls to ignore public opinion, and strives to inculcate the lesson that a husband is the best protection for a young girl. we are properly shocked at miss betsey's levity, who, although she had arrived at the mature age of fourteen, cared not a straw for any of the gentlemen who sought her hand, but liked to have them about her only because they flattered her vanity or afforded her a subject for mirth. miss betsey's gaiety, wit, and generosity would be very attractive--in fact, she is quite an up-to-date young lady--but we see how much better she would "get on" if she had a little more worldly wisdom. she is punished, as she deserves to be, by losing her lover, and marries a man who makes her very unhappy. mr. trueworthy, however, learns of her innocence; her husband fortunately dies, and the author takes the bold step of uniting the widow to her former lover, after a year of mourning and passing through much suffering, brought upon herself by her own thoughtlessness. she is rewarded, however, very much as pamela was rewarded, by marrying a man of honour, who had judged her formerly by his own conduct, being too willing to believe by appearances that she had lost her chastity, or, at least, had sullied her good name. in this novel, mrs. haywood is very near the line that divides the artist from the artisan. like a young girl with good health and good spirits, miss betsey is ever on the verge of sweeping aside the prejudices of her duenna, and asserting her own individuality, but is constantly held back by the sense of worldly propriety. had mrs. haywood permitted miss betsey to carry the plot whither she would without let or hindrance, she would have won for herself an acknowledged place among the heroines of fiction. _the history of miss betsey thoughtless_ was an epoch-making book. the adventures of its heroine in the city of london took possession of the imagination of fanny burney, while little more than a child, and led to the story of _evelina_, the forerunner of jane austen and her school. * * * * * the fashion for weeping heroines was at its height, when, in , mrs. francis sheridan published _the memoirs of miss sidney biddulph_. the story is written in the form of letters, in which the heroine reveals to a friend of her own sex all the secrets of her heart. all london rejoiced over the virtues of sidney biddulph, and wept over her sorrows. she had been educated "in the strictest principles of virtue; from which she never deviated, through the course of an innocent, though unhappy life." it was so pathetic a story that dr. johnson doubted if mrs. sheridan had a right to make her characters suffer so much, and charles james fox, who sat up all night to read it, pronounced it the best of all novels of his time. the book, as first written, was in three volumes. the author had brought the story to a most fitting close. both sidney's husband and the man whom she had really loved were dead, and the widow could have spent her days in pleasing melancholy, contented with the thought that she had never done a wrong. but the public demanded a continuation of the story. in , two volumes were added, giving the history of sidney's daughters, who seem to have inherited from their mother the enmity of the fates, for their sufferings were as great as hers. authors are prone to draw upon their own history for the emotions they depict. but mrs. sheridan's life did not furnish the tragic elements of _sidney biddulph_, although it was not without romance. before her marriage, she wrote a pamphlet in praise of the conduct of one thomas sheridan, the manager of the theatre royal in dublin, during a riot that occurred in the theatre. sheridan read these words in his praise, sought the acquaintance of their author, and before long married her. history furnishes a long list of women of talent whose sons were men of genius. mrs. sheridan's second son, richard brinsley, the author of the light and sparkling _rivals_, inherited his mother's talents without her gloom. but mrs. sheridan also had some ability as a writer of comedy, and the most famous character of the _rivals_ was first sketched by her. in a comedy, _a journey to bath_, declined by garrick, one of the characters was mrs. twyford, whom richard brinsley sheridan transformed into that famous blundering coiner of words, mrs. malaprop. mrs. sheridan's place in literature rests upon _sidney biddulph_. this novel was an innovation in english fiction. nearly one hundred years earlier, madame de lafayette had written _the princess of clèves_, one of the most nearly perfect novels that has ever been written, and the first that depended for its interest, not alone on what was done, but on the subtle workings of the human heart which led to the doing of it. from that time the novels of french women were largely introspective. english women, however, were either less interested in the inner life, or more reserved in laying bare its secrets. _sidney biddulph_ was the first english novel of this kind, and it left no definite trace on fiction, although it was the favourite novel of charlotte smith and had some slight effect upon her writings, and mrs. inchbald, mrs. opie, and mary brunton noted the feelings of their characters. not until _jane eyre_ was published, long after mrs. sheridan had been forgotten, was there any great english novel of the inner life. in its day _sidney biddulph_ was exceedingly popular on the continent of europe as well as in england. it was translated into german, and an adaptation of it was made in french by the abbé prévost, under the title, _memoirs pour servir a l'histoire de la vertu_. but after all, sidney's sorrows were not real, or she herself was not real; and we of to-day smile or yawn over the pages that drew tears from the eyes of the mighty dr. johnson. * * * * * notwithstanding the many excellencies of english fiction during the middle of the eighteenth century, it was held in low repute. there had been many writers attempting to portray real life who, without the genius of the greater novelists, could imitate only their faults. in the preface to _polly honeycomb_, which was acted at drury lane theatre in , george colman, the author, gives the titles of about two hundred novels whose names appeared in a circulating library at that time. _amorous friars, or the intrigues of a convent_; _beauty put to its shifts, or the young virgin's rambles_; _bubbled knights, or successful contrivances, plainly evincing, in two familiar instances lately transacted in this metropolis, the folly and unreasonableness of parents laying a restraint upon their children's inclinations in the affairs of love and marriage_; _the impetuous lover, or the guiltless parricide_; these are the titles of a few of the popular books of that period. colman in the character of polly honeycomb, an earlier lydia languish, attempts to show the moral effects of such reading. her head had been so turned by these books that her father exclaims, "a man might as well turn his daughter loose in covent-garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to a circulating library." fiction at this time lacked delicacy and refinement. the characters lived largely in the streets or taverns, and were too much engrossed in the pleasures of active life to give any heed to thoughts or emotions. though love was the constant theme of these books, as yet no true love story had been written. the fires of home had not been lighted. the refinements, the pure affections, the high ideals which cluster around the domestic hearth had as yet no place in the novel. it needed the feminine element, which, while no broader than that which had previously made the novel, by its own addition gave something new to it and made it truer to life. while no woman of marked genius had appeared, the number and influence of women novelists continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century. tim cropdale in the novel _humphry clinker_, who "had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume," complains that "that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality." schlosser in his _history of the eighteenth century_ pays this tribute to the moral influence of the women novelists: "with the increase of the number of writers in england in the course of the eighteenth century, women began to appear as authors instead of educating their children, and their influence upon morals and modes of thinking increased, as that of the clergy diminished." chapter iii fanny burney a noteworthy transformation took place in the english novel during the late years of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth. this change cannot be explained by the great difference in manners only. the mode of life described by the early novelists was in existence sixty years after they wrote scenes typical of the customs and manners of their day, just as the quiet home life described by miss austen was to be found in england a hundred years before it graced the pages of a book. this new era in the english novel was due not to a change of environment, but to the new ideals of those who wrote. in , english fiction was represented by the work of miss burney, and for thirty-six years, until , when _waverley_ appeared, this rare plant was preserved and kept alive by a group of women, who trimmed and pruned off many of its rough branches and gave to the wild native fruit a delicacy and fragrance unknown to it before. english women writers did at that time for the english novel what french women had done in the preceding century for the french novel; they made it so pure in thought and expression that bishop huet was able to say of the french romances of the seventeenth century, "you'll scarce find an expression or word which may shock chaste ears, or one single action which may give offence to modesty." this great change in the english novel was inaugurated by a young woman ignorant of the world, whose power lay in her innocent and lively imagination. at his home in queen square and later in st. martin's street, charles burney, the father of frances, entertained the most illustrious men of his day. johnson, reynolds, garrick, burke, and colman were frequent guests, while members of the nobility thronged his parlours to listen to the famous italian singers who gladly sang for the author of the _history of music_. here fanny, a bashful but observant child, saw life in the drawing-room. but as dr. burney gave little heed to the comings and goings of his daughters, they played with the children of a wigmaker next door, where, perhaps, fanny became acquainted with the vulgar side of london life, which is so humorously depicted in _evelina_. she received but little education, nor was she more than a casual reader, but she was familiar with _pamela_, _betsey thoughtless_, _rasselas_, and the _vicar of wakefield_. such was her preparation for becoming a writer of novels. from her earliest years, she had delighted in writing stories and dramas, although she received little encouragement in this occupation. in her fifteenth year her stepmother proved to her so conclusively the folly of girls' scribbling that fanny burned all her manuscripts, including _the history of caroline evelyn_. she could not, however, banish from her mind the fate of caroline's infant daughter, born of high rank, but related through her grandmother to the vulgar people of the east end of london. the many embarrassing situations in which she might be placed haunted the imagination of the youthful writer, but it was not until her twenty-sixth year that these situations were described, when _evelina or a young lady's entrance into the world_ was published. the success of the book was instantaneous. the name of the author, which had been withheld even from the publishers, was eagerly demanded. all agreed that only a man conversant with the world could have written such accurate descriptions of life both high and low. the wonder was increased when it was learned that the author was a young woman who had drawn her scenes, not from a knowledge of the world, but from her own intuition and imagination. miss burney became at once an honoured member of the literary circle which mrs. thrale had gathered at streatham, and a favourite of dr. johnson, who declared that _evelina_ was superior to anything that fielding had written, and that some passages were worthy of the pen of richardson. the book was accorded a place among english classics, which it has retained for over a century. "it was not hard fagging that produced such a work as _evelina_," wrote mr. crisp to the youthful author. "it was the ebullition of true sterling genius--you wrote it because you could not help it--it came--and so you put it down on paper." the novel, following the form so common in the eighteenth century, is written in the form of letters. the plot is somewhat time-honoured; there is the nurse's daughter substituted for the real heiress, and a mystery surrounding some of the characters; it is unfolded slowly with a slight strain upon the readers' credulity at the last, but it ends to the satisfaction of all concerned. in many incidents and in some of the characters the story suggests _betsey thoughtless_, but miss burney had greater powers of description than mrs. haywood. the plot of the novel is forgotten, however, in the lively, witty manner in which the characters are drawn and the ludicrous situations in which they are placed. so long had these men and women held the mind of the author that they are intensely real as they are presented to us at assemblies, balls, theatres, and operas, where we watch their oddities with amusement. indeed no woman has given so many graphic, droll, and minute descriptions of life as miss burney. her genius in this respect is different from that of other women novelists. she has made a series of snap-shots of people in the most absurd situations and ridicules them while she is taking the picture. few women writers can resist the temptation of peeping into the hearts of their men and women, and the knowledge thus gained gives them sympathy, while it often detracts from the strong lines of the external picture; a writer will not paint a villain quite so black if he believes he still preserves some remnants of a noble nature. but miss burney has no interest in the inner life of her men and women. she saw their peculiarities and was amused by them, and has presented them to the reader with minute descriptions and lively wit. she also makes fine distinctions between people. sir clement willoughby, the west end snob, and mr. smith, the east end beau, are drawn with discrimination. with what wit miss burney describes the scene at the _ridotto_ between evelina and sir clement. he had asked her to dance with him. unwilling to do so, because she wished to dance with another gentleman, if he should ask her, she told sir clement she was engaged for that dance. he did not leave her, however, but remained by her side and speculated as to who the beast was so hostile to his own interests as to forget to come to her; pitied the humiliation a lady must feel in having to wait for a gentleman, and pointed to each old and lame man in the room asking if he were the miscreant; he offered to find him for her and asked what kind of a coat he had on. when evelina did not know, he became angry with the wretch who dared to address a lady in so insignificant a coat that it was unworthy of her notice. to save herself from further annoyance she danced with him, for she now knew that sir clement had seen through her artifice from the beginning. but the portrait of mr. smith, the east end snob, is even better than that of sir clement willoughby. evelina is visiting her relatives at snow hill, when mr. smith enters, self-confident and vulgar. his aim in life, as he tells us, is to please the ladies. when tom branghton is disputing with his sister about the place where they shall go for amusement, he reprimands tom for his lack of good breeding. "o fie, tom,--dispute with a lady!" cried mr. smith. "now, as for me, i'm for where you will, providing this young lady [meaning evelina] is of the party; one place is the same as another to me, so that it be but agreeable to the ladies. i would go anywhere with you, ma'm, unless, indeed, it were to church;--ha, ha, ha, you'll excuse me, ma'm, but, really, i never could conquer my fear of a parson;--ha, ha, ha,--really, ladies, i beg your pardon, for being so rude, but i can't help laughing for my life." mr. smith endeavoured to make himself particularly pleasing to evelina, and for that purpose bought tickets for her and her relatives to attend the hampstead assembly. when he observed that evelina was a little out of sorts, he attributed her low spirits to doubts of his intentions towards her. "to be sure," he told her, "marriage is all in all with the ladies; but with us gentlemen it's quite another thing." he advised her not to be discouraged, saying with a patronising air, "you may very well be proud, for i assure you there is nobody so likely to catch me at last as yourself." both sir clement willoughby and mr. smith are selfish and conceited; but the former had lived among the gentlemen of mayfair, the latter among the tradespeople of snow hill, and this difference of environment is shown in every speech they utter. it is the contrast between these two distinct classes of society that saves the book from becoming monotonous. evelina visits the pantheon with her west end friends. when captain mirvan wonders what people find in such a place, mr. lovel, a fashionable fop, quickly rejoins: "what the ladies may come hither for, sir, it would ill become _us_ to determine; but as to we men, doubtless we can have no other view, than to admire them." at another time evelina visits the opera with the vulgar branghtons, who all rejoiced when the curtain dropped, and mr. branghton vowed he would never be caught again. the branghtons at the opera is hardly inferior to partridge at the play. tom branghton is a good representative of his class. he describes with glee the last night at vauxhall: "there's such squealing and squalling!--and then all the lamps are broke,--and the women skimper scamper;--i declare i would not take five guineas to miss the last night!" all the characters, even the heroine, take delight, in boisterous mirth. much of the humour of the book consists rather in ludicrous situations than in any real delicacy of wit. too often the laugh is at another's discomfiture, and so fails to please the present age with its kindlier feeling towards others. such are the practical jokes which captain mirvan plays upon madame duval. in one instance, disguised as a robber, he waylays the lady's coach, and leaves her in a ditch with her feet tied to a tree. the many tricks which the doughty salt plays upon this lady so much resemble some of the humorous scenes in _joseph andrews_, and _tom jones_ that we may infer the readers of that century found them laughable. the captain and the french woman are two puppets which serve to introduce much of this horse-play. they are not even caricatures; they are entirely unlike anything in human life. with the exception of these two characters, all the men and women who provoked the mirth of the heroine are well portrayed. miss burney is less felicitous in her descriptions of serious characters. lord orville, the same type of man as sir charles grandison, is true only in the sense that miss burney announces the truth of the entire book. "i have not pretended to show the world what it actually _is_, but what it _appears_ to a girl of seventeen," she wrote in the preface to _evelina_. lord orville, all dignity, nobility, charm, and perfection, is but the ideal of a young girl. evelina was a new woman in literature, a revelation to the men of the time of george the third. the sincerity of the book could not be doubted. "but," they asked, "did evelina represent the woman's point of view of life? surely no man ever held like views." the lovelaces and tom joneses are not so attractive as when seen through the eyes of their own sex, and the heroines are not so soft and yielding as a man would create them. evelina, like all miss burney's heroines, is independent, fearless, and witty, with scarcely a trace of the traditional heroine of fiction. saints and magdalenes have always appealed to the masculine imagination. _la donna dolorosa_ has occupied a prominent place in the art and literature of man's creation. here he has revealed his sex egoism in all its nudity: the woman weeping for man, either lover, husband, or son; man the centre of her thoughts, her hopes and fears. this new heroine with a new regard towards man was a revelation to them. evelina was the first woman to break the spell, to show them woman as woman, in lieu of woman as parasite and adjunct to man. evelina is not always pleasing; she hasn't always good manners; she sometimes laughs in the faces of the dashing beaux who are addressing her. but she is a woman of real flesh and blood; such women have existed in all time, and, liked many women we meet every day and whom men in all ages have known, evelina insists on being the centre of every scene. in july, , miss burney's second book, _cecilia, or memoirs of an heiress_, was published. this novel met with as enthusiastic a reception as _evelina_. gibbon read the whole five volumes in a day; burke declared they had cost him three days, though he did not part with the story from the time he first opened it, and had sat up a whole night to finish it; and sir joshua reynolds had been fed while reading it, because he refused to quit it at the table. the book shows more care and effort than _evelina_. that was an outburst of youthful vivacity and spirits, but in _cecilia_ the author is striving to do her best. this is particularly revealed in the style, which shows the influence of doctor johnson, for it has lost the simplicity of _evelina_. the diction is more ambitious, and the sentences are longer, many of them balanced. even some of the inferior characters from their speech, appear to have received a lesson in english composition from dr. johnson. but the novel owes its place among english classics to the varieties of characters portrayed and the vivid pictures of english life. here again the gaieties of vauxhall, ranelagh, marylebone and the pantheon have become immortal, drawn with colours as vivid and enduring as hogarth used in painting the sadder sides of london life. no other writer has brought these places before our eyes as clearly and as fully as fanny burney. the plot of _cecilia_, like that of _evelina_, is so arranged as to present different classes of society. _cecilia_ has three guardians, with one of whom she must live during her minority. first she visits mr. harrel, a gay, fashionable man, a spendthrift and a gambler, who lives in a fashionable house in portman square, where cecilia, during a constant round of festivities, meets the fashionable people of london. next she visits mr. briggs in the city, "a short thick, sturdy man, with very small keen black eyes, a square face, a dark complexion, and a snub nose." he was so miserly that when cecilia asked for pen, ink, and a sheet of paper, he gave her a slate and pencil, as he supposed she had nothing of consequence to say. he was as sparing of his words as of his money, and used the same elliptical sentences in his speech as dickens afterwards put into the mouth of alfred jingle, the famous character in _pickwick papers_. he thus advises cecilia in regard to her lovers: "take care of sharpers; don't trust shoe-buckles, nothing but bristol stones! tricks in all things. a fine gentleman sharp as another man. never give your heart to a gold-topped cane, nothing but brass gilt over. cheats everywhere: fleece you in a year; won't leave you a groat. but one way to be safe,--bring 'em all to me." lastly she visits mr. delvile, her third guardian, a man of family, who despised both the men associated with him as trustees of cecilia; he lived in such gloomy state in his magnificent old house in st. james's square that it inspired awe, and repressed all pleasure. pride in their birth and prejudice against all parvenus were the faults of mr. and mrs. delvile. besides these characters, there were many others whose names were for a long time familiar in every household. sir robert floyer was as vain as mr. smith. mr. meadows was constantly bored to death; it was insufferable exertion to talk to a quiet woman, and a talkative one put him into a fever. at the opera the solos depressed him and the full orchestra fatigued him. he yawned while ladies were talking to him, and after he had begged them to repeat what they had said, forgot to listen. "i am tired to death! tired of everything," was his constant expression. in his critical essay on madame d'arblay, fanny burney's married name, under which her later works were published, macaulay has thus dealt with her treatment of character: "madame d'arblay has left us scarcely anything but humours. almost every one of her men and women has some one propensity developed to a morbid degree. in _cecilia_, for example, mr. delvile never opens his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or mr. briggs without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or mr. hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or mr. simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favour with his customers; or mr. meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or mr. albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or mrs. belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or lady margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, mr. gosport all sarcasm, lady honoria all lively prattle, miss larolles all silly prattle; if ever madame d'arblay aimed at more, as in the character of monckton, we do not think that she succeeded well.... the variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a most lively and agreeable diversity." while the character of monckton is not strongly drawn, one or two scenes in which he figures have great power. mr. monckton, who had married an aged woman for her money, lived in constant hope of her dissolution. he planned to keep cecilia from marrying until that happy event, when he schemed to make her his bride, and thus acquire a second fortune. he had used his influence as a family friend to prejudice her lovers in her eyes, and had just succeeded in breaking up an intimacy which he feared: "a weight was removed from his mind which had nearly borne down even his remotest hopes; the object of his eager pursuit seemed still within his reach, and the rival into whose power he had so lately almost beheld her delivered, was totally renounced, and no longer to be dreaded. a revolution such as this, raised expectations more sanguine than ever; and in quitting the house, he exultingly considered himself released from every obstacle to his view,--till, just as he arrived home, he recollected his wife!" cecilia, the heroine of the novel, is only evelina grown a little older, a little sadder, a little more worldly wise. the humour is, too, a little kindlier. the practical jokes so common in _evelina_ do not mar the pages of _cecilia_. at times the latter novel becomes almost tragic. the scene at vauxhall where mr. harrel puts an end to his life of dissipation is dramatic and thrilling. but miss burney had lost the buoyancy and lively fancy which made the charm of _evelina_. miss burney's last two novels, _camilla, or a picture of youth_ and _the wanderer, or female difficulties_, have no claim to a place among english classics. it is strange that, as she saw more of life, she depicted it with less accuracy. this might seem to show that her first novels owe their excellence to her vivid imagination rather than to her powers of observation. her weary life at court as second keeper of the robes to queen charlotte; her marriage to monsieur d'arblay, and the sorrows that came to her as the wife of a french refugee; all her deeper experiences of life during the fourteen years between the publication of _cecilia_ and _camilla_--these had completely changed her light, humorous view of externals, and with that loss her power as an artist disappeared. _camilla_ has several heroines whose love affairs interest the reader. it thus bears a resemblance to miss austen's novels, who speaks of it with admiration and was, perhaps, influenced by it. eugenia, who has received the education of a man, is pleasing. clermont lynmere, like mr. smith and sir robert floyer, imagines that all the ladies are in love with him. sir hugh tyrold, with his love for the classics and his regret that he had not been beaten into learning them when he was a boy, his strict ideas of virtue and his desire to make everybody happy, is well conceived, but the outlines are not strong enough to make him a living character. _camilla_ shows more than _cecilia_ the style of dr. johnson. it is heavy and slow, the words are long, and many of them of latin derivation. it was not until the year , the year of _waverley_, that her last novel, _the wanderer, or female difficulties_, was published, which, following the style of _camilla_, was in five volumes. it was partly founded on incidents arising out of the french revolution. the book was eagerly awaited; the publishers paid fifteen hundred guineas for it; but even the friendliest critic pronounced it a literary failure. to sum up, macaulay in the essay before quoted makes clear miss burney's place in fiction: "miss burney did for the english novel what jeremy collier did for the english drama; and she did it in a better way. she first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of london might be exhibited with great force and with broad comic humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. she took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. she vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters ... we owe to her not only _evelina_, _cecilia_, and _camilla_, but also _mansfield park_ and _the absentee_." chapter iv hannah more during the time that dr. johnson dominated the literary conscience of england, a group of ladies who had wearied of whist and quadrille, the common amusements of fashion, used to meet at the homes of one another to discuss literary and political subjects. they were called in ridicule the "blue stocking club," because mr. benjamin stillingfleet, who was always present at these gatherings, wore hose of that colour. among the members distinguished by their wit and talents were mrs. elizabeth montagu, the author of an _essay on the genius of shakespeare_; mrs. elizabeth carter, a poetess and excellent greek scholar; mrs. chapone, whose _letters to young ladies_ formed the standard of conduct for young women of two generations; miss reynolds, the sister of sir joshua; and mrs. vesey, noted as a charming hostess. dr. johnson, david garrick, reynolds, and burke were frequenters of this club. one may well imagine that the conversation and wit of the blue stockings were far too rare to be understood by the grosser minds of the mere devotees of fashion, who in consequence threw a ridicule upon them which has always adhered to the name. hannah more, who had already become known as a playwright, visited london in , and at once was welcomed by this group. in a poem called _the bas bleu_, dedicated to mrs. vesey, she thus describes the pleasure of these meetings: enlighten'd spirits! you, who know what charms from polish'd converse flow, speak, for you can, the pure delight when kindling sympathies unite; when correspondent tastes impart communion sweet from heart to heart; you ne'er the cold gradations need which vulgar souls to union lead; no dry discussion to unfold the meaning caught ere well 't is told: in taste, in learning, wit, or science, still kindled souls demand alliance: each in the other joys to find the image answering to his mind. the blue stocking club was composed largely of tories, so that when all europe became restless under the influence of the french revolution, they strongly combated the levelling doctrines of democracy. hannah more in particular, who had been conducting schools for the very poor near bristol, saw how the teachings of the revolutionists affected men already prone to idleness and drink. to offset these influences, she published a little book with the following title-page: "village politics. addressed to all the mechanics, journeymen, and labourers, in great britain. by will chip, a country carpenter." it is not a novel in the strict sense of the word, but in simple language, easily understood, it teaches the labouring people the inconsistent attitude of france, and the strength and safety of the english constitution. it is not a deep book, but has good work-a-day common-sense, such as keeps the world jogging on, ready to endure the ills it has rather than fly to others it knows not of. the book is in the form of a dialogue between jack anvil, the blacksmith, and tom hood, the mason. "tom. but have you read the _rights of man_? "jack. no, not i: i had rather by half read the _whole duty of man_. i have but little time for reading, and such as i should therefore only read a bit of the best." * * * * * "tom. and what dost thou take a _democrat_ to be? "jack. one who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants, and yet can't bear a king." * * * * * "tom. what is it to be _an enlightened people_? "jack. to put out the light of the gospel, confound right and wrong, and grope about in pitch darkness." * * * * * "tom. and what is _benevolence_? "jack. why, in the new-fangled language, it means contempt of religion, aversion to justice, overturning of law, doating on all mankind in general, and hating everybody in particular." for a long time the authorship of the book remained a secret, and will chip became a notable figure. the clergy and the land-owners in particular rejoiced over his homely common-sense, and distributed these pamphlets broadcast over the land. one hundred thousand copies were sold in a short time. _village politics_ is said to have been one of the strongest influences in england to awaken the common people to the dangers which lie in a sudden overthrow of government. the book was timely, for that decade had become intoxicated by the name of liberty. to-day democracy and equality are no longer feared. during many years hannah more worked industriously among the poor of cheddar and its vicinity. on a visit to the cliffs of cheddar she found an ignorant, half-savage people, many of whom dwelt in the caves and fissures of the rocks, and earned a miserable subsistence by selling stalactites and other minerals native to the place, to the travellers who were attracted thither by the beautiful scenery. among these people hannah more opened a sunday-school, and later a day school, where the girls were taught knitting, spinning, and sewing. a girl trained in her school was presented on her marriage day with five shillings, a pair of white stockings, and a new bible. the teaching in the schools was so practical that within a year schools were opened in nine parishes. in this missionary work, miss more became intimately acquainted not only with the very poor, but also with the rich farmers living in the neighbourhood and the prosperous tradespeople of the villages. from these better educated men she met with great opposition. one petty landlord met her request for assistance with the remark: "the lower classes are fated to be poor, ignorant and wicked; and wise as you are, you cannot alter what is decreed." another man informed her that religion was the worst thing for the poor, it made them so lazy and useless. * * * * * but the minds of the people had been awakened by the french revolution. they were beginning to think. books and ballads attacking church and constitution were hawked through the country and placed within reach of all. to counteract the influence of these "corrupt and inflammatory publications" hannah more, between the years - , published _the cheap repository_, the first regular issue of this kind. every month a story, a ballad, and a tract for sunday were published. hannah more knew so well the common reasoning and the mental attitude of those for whom she wrote, that she was able to make her lessons most effective. so great was the demand for these chap-books that over two million were sold the first year.[ ] [ ] for a complete bibliography of these chap-books, see the _catalogue of english and american chap-books_ in harvard college library, pp. - ; compiled in part by charles welsh. these stories were divided into two classes, those for "persons of middle rank" and those for the common people. the former point out the dangers of pride and covetousness; of substituting abstract philosophy for religion; and warn masters not to forget their moral obligations towards their servants. the latter aim to teach neatness, sobriety, regularity in church attendance, and point out the happiness of those who follow these precepts, and the misery of those who neglect them. her two best known stories are _mr. fantom_ and _the shepherd of salisbury plain_. _mr. fantom: or the history of the new-fashioned philosopher, and his man william_ was written to warn masters of the danger of teaching their servants disrespect for the bible and for civil law. mr. fantom was a shallow man, who glided upon the surface of philosophy and culled those precepts which relieved his conscience from any moral obligations. when he was asked to help the poor in his own parish, he refused to consider their wants because his mind was so engrossed by the partition of poland. like mrs. jellyby of a later time, he was so much troubled by sufferings which he could not see that he neglected his family and servants. when he reprimanded his butler, william, for being intoxicated, the young man replied: "why, sir, you are a philosopher, you know; and i have often overheard you say to your company, that private vices are public benefits; and so i thought that getting drunk was as pleasant a way of doing good to the public as any, especially when i could oblige my muster at the same time." in course of time william became a thief and a murderer, and expiated his crimes on the scaffold. in contrast to this is _the shepherd of salisbury plain_. this shepherd was contented with his lot, and says: "david was happier when he kept his father's sheep on such a plain as this, and employed in singing some of his own psalms perhaps, than ever he was when he became king of israel and judah. and i dare say we should never have had some of the most beautiful texts in all those fine psalms, if he had not been a shepherd, which enabled him to make so many fine comparisons and similitudes, as one may say, from country life, flocks of sheep, hills and valleys, fields of corn, and fountains of water." the shepherd's neat cottage with its simple furnishings, his frugal wife and industrious children are described in simple and convincing language. in the stories of the poor there are many interesting details of the everyday life of that class that did not blossom into heroes and heroines of romance for nearly half a century. mrs. sponge, in _the history of betty brown, the st. giles's orange girl_, is a character that dickens might have immortalised. mrs. sponge kept a little shop and a kind of eating-house for poor girls near the seven dials. she received stolen goods, and made such large profits in her business that she was enabled to become a broker among the poor. she loaned betty five shillings to set her up in the orange business; she did not ask for the return of her money, but exacted a sixpence a day for its use, and was regarded by betty, and the other girls whom she thus befriended, as a benefactor. at last, betty was rescued from the clutches of mrs. sponge. by industry and piety she became mistress of a handsome sausage-shop near the seven dials, and married a hackney coachman, the hero of one of miss more's ballads: i am a bold coachman, and drive a good hack with a coat of five capes that quite covers my back; and my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles from the narrowest alley in all broad st. giles. though poor, we are honest and very content, we pay as we go, for meat, drink, and for rent; to work all the week i am able and willing, i never get drunk, and i waste not a shilling; and while at a tavern my gentleman tarries, the coachman grows richer than he whom he carries, and i'd rather (said i), since it saves me from sin, be the driver without, than the toper within. _the cheap repository_ was written to teach moral precepts. neither hannah more nor her readers saw any artistic beauty in the sordid lives of this lower stratum of society. they were not interested in the superstitions of "poor sally evans," who hung a plant called "midsummer-men" in her room on midsummer eve so that she might learn by the bending of the leaves if her lover were true to her, and who consulted all the fortune-tellers that came to her door to learn whether the two moles on her cheek foretold two husbands or two children. hannah more recorded these simple fancies of poor sally only to show her folly and the misfortunes that afterwards befell her on account of her superstitions. writers of that century either laughed at the ignorant blunders of the poor, or used them to point a moral. an interest in them because they are human beings like ourselves with common frailties belongs to the next century. nothing proves more conclusively the growth of the democratic idea than the changed attitude of the novel toward the ignorant and the criminal. * * * * * hannah more was always interested in the education of young ladies. she wrote a series of essays called _strictures on the modern system of female education_, in which she protested loudly against the tendency to give girls an ornamental rather than a useful education. this was so highly approved that she was asked to make suggestions for the education of the princess charlotte. this led to her writing _hints towards forming the character of a young princess_. hannah more finally embodied her theories on the education of women in a book which she thought might appeal most strongly to the young ladies themselves, _coelebs in search of a wife_. running through it, is a slight romance. coelebs, filled with admiration for eve, as described in _paradise lost_, where she is intent on her household duties, goes forth into the world to find, if possible, such a helpmate for himself. as he meets different women, he compares them with his ideal, and, finding them lacking, passes a severe criticism upon female education and accomplishments. finally, he meets a lady with well-trained mind, who delights in works of charity and piety, one well calculated to conduct wisely the affairs of his household. she has besides proper humility, and accepts with gratitude the honour of becoming coelebs's wife. until her death at the advanced age of eighty-eight years, hannah more continued to write moral and religious essays, so that she was before the public view for over fifty years, mrs. s. c. hall in her book _pilgrimages to english shrines_ thus describes her in old age: "hannah more wore a dress of very light green silk--a white china crape shawl was folded over her shoulders; her white hair was frizzled, after a by-gone fashion, above her brow, and that _backed_, as it were, by a very full double border of rich lace. the reality was as dissimilar from the picture painted by our imagination as anything could well be; such a sparkling, light, bright, 'summery'-looking old lady--more like a beneficent fairy, than the biting author of _mr. fantom_, though in perfect harmony with _the shepherd of salisbury plain_." chapter v charlotte smith. mrs. inchbald while hannah more was endeavouring to improve the condition of the poor by teaching them diligence and sobriety, a group of earnest men and women were writing books and pamphlets in which they claimed that poverty and ignorance were due to unjust laws. the writings of voltaire and rousseau had filled their minds with bright pictures of a democracy. these theories were considered most dangerous in england, but they were the theories which helped to shape the american constitution. among these english revolutionists were william godwin, mary wollstonecraft, charlotte smith, mrs. inchbald, and for a time amelia opie. the strongest political novel was _caleb williams_ by william godwin. in this he shows how through law man may become the destroyer of man. this interest in the rights of man awakened interest in the condition of women; and mary wollstonecraft, who afterward became mrs. godwin, wrote _vindication of the rights of woman_. this pamphlet was declared contrary to the bible and to christian law, although all its demands have now been conceded. charlotte smith was also interested in the position of women and the laws affecting them. in _desmond_ she discussed freely a marriage problem which in her day seemed very bold, while in her private life she ignored british prejudices. she was the mother of twelve children and the wife of a man of many schemes, so that she was continually devising ways to extricate her large family from the financial difficulties into which he plunged them. at one time a friend suggested to her that her husband's attention should be turned toward religion. her reply was: "oh, for heaven's sake, do not put it into his head to take to religion, for if he does, he will instantly begin by building a cathedral." she is supposed to have caricatured him in the projector who hoped to make a fortune by manuring his estate with old wigs. but when her husband was imprisoned for debt, she shared his captivity, and began to write to support her family. although she died at the age of fifty-seven, she found time during her manifold cares to write thirty-eight volumes. but not only did mrs. smith endure sorrows as great as those of her favourite heroine, sidney biddulph, but one of her daughters was equally unfortunate. she was married unhappily, and returned with her three children for her mother to support. mr. and mrs. smith, after twenty-three years of married life, agreed to live in separate countries, he in normandy, and she in england, although they always corresponded and were interested in each other's welfare. yet this separation, together with the revolutionary tendencies discovered in her writings, raised a storm of criticism against her. in _desmond_, which was regarded as so dangerous, mrs. smith has presented the following problem: geraldine, the heroine, is married to a spendthrift, who attempts to retrieve his fortunes by forcing his wife to become the mistress of his friend, the rich duc de romagnecourt. to preserve her honour she leaves him, hoping to return to her mother's roof; but her mother refuses to receive her and bids her return to her husband. as she dares not do this, and is without money, a faithful friend, desmond, takes her under his protection, asking no reward but the pleasure of serving her. finally geraldine receives a letter informing her that her husband is ill. she returns to him, and nurses him until he dies; after a year of mourning she marries desmond. how could a woman have behaved more virtuously than geraldine? she is always high-minded and actuated by the purest motives. but it was feared that her example might encourage wives to desert their husbands, and consequently the novel was declared immoral. _desmond_ was published in , when the feeling against france was very bitter in england. the plot, as it meanders slowly through three volumes, is constantly interrupted by political discussions. the author's clearly expressed preference for a republican government, and her criticism of english law, met with bitter disapproval. one of the characters pronounces a panegyric upon the greater prosperity and happiness that has come to the french soldiers, farmers, and peasants, since they came to believe that they were sharers in their own labours, and the hero of the book, writing from france to a friend in england, says: "i lament still more the disposition which too many englishmen show to join in this unjust and infamous crusade, against the holy standard of freedom; and i blush for my country." in the same book, the author censures the penal laws of england, by which robbery to the amount of forty shillings is punishable with death; and criticises the delay of the courts in dealing justice. this criticism is expressed tamely, barely more than suggested, when compared with the vigorous attacks which dickens made in the next century on english law and the slow action of justice in the famous "circumlocution office." dickens wrote with such vigour that he brought about a reform. a modern reader finds _desmond_ earnest and sincere, but tame to the point of dulness. it seems strange how the tory party could see in this book a menace to the british constitution. but a writer in the _monthly review_ for december, , advocated her cause. "she is very justly of opinion," he writes, "that the great events that are passing in the world are no less interesting to women than to men, and that, in her solicitude to discharge the domestic duties, a woman ought not to forget that, in common with her father and husband, her brothers and sons, she is a citizen." the publication of _the old manor house_ in the following year won back for her many of the friends that she had lost by _desmond_. but in this work also the same love of liberty, the same indifference to social distinctions, occur. the hero of _the old manor house_ joins the english army, and is sent to fight against the americans; in the many reflections upon this conflict, the author shows that her sympathies are with the colonists. the father of the hero had married a young woman who had nothing to recommend her but "beauty, simplicity, and goodness." the hero himself falls in love with and marries a girl beneath him in rank, but he does not seem to feel that he has done a generous thing, nor does the heroine show any gratitude for this honour. each seems unconscious that their difference in rank should be a bar to their union, provided they do not offend old mrs. rayland, the owner of the manor. a great change had come over the novel since pamela was overpowered with gratitude to her profligate master, mr. b, for condescending to make her his wife. the revolutionary principles of mrs. smith's novels were soon forgotten, but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in english fiction. her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined, quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom evelina and cecilia seem but school-girls. her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank, but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners, and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her had reached. a contemporary said of emmeline, "all is graceful, and pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful and chaste." this might be said of all the women she has created. old mrs. rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, _the old manor house_, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as a member of the rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the high-born lady. we smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect. scott said of her, "old mrs. rayland is without a peer." mrs. smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of rural scenery. nature had for a long time been banished from the arts. wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote: "excepting _the nocturnal reverie_ of lady winchelsea, and a passage or two in the _windsor forest_ of pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of _paradise lost_ and _the seasons_ does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination." fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. none of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of goldsmith. _the vicar of wakefield_ has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of charlotte smith. in _ethelinda_ there are beautiful descriptions of the english lakes, part of the scene being laid at grasmere; _celestina_ is in the romantic provence; _desmond_ in normandy; and in _the old manor house_ we have the soft landscape of the south of england. in _the old manor house_ she thus describes one of the paths that led from the gate of the park to rayland hall: "the other path, which in winter or in wet seasons was inconvenient, wound down a declivity, where furze and fern were shaded by a few old hawthorns and self-sown firs: out of the hill several streams were filtered, which, uniting at its foot, formed a large and clear pond of near twenty acres, fed by several imperceptible currents from other eminences which sheltered that side of the park; and the bason between the hills and the higher parts of it being thus filled, the water found its way over a stony boundary, where it was passable by a foot bridge unless in time of floods; and from thence fell into a lower part of the ground, where it formed a considerable river; and, winding among willows and poplars for near a mile, again spread into a still larger lake, on the edge of which was a mill, and opposite, without the park paling, wild heaths, where the ground was sandy, broken, and irregular, still however marked by plantations made in it by the rayland family." every feature of the landscape is brought distinctly before the eye. such descriptions are not unusual now, but they were first used by charlotte smith. even more realistic is the picture of a road in a part of the new forest near christchurch: "it was a deep, hollow road, only wide enough for waggons, and was in some places shaded by hazel and other brush wood; in others, by old beech and oaks, whose roots wreathed about the bank, intermingled with ivy, holly, and evergreen fern, almost the only plants that appeared in a state of vegetation, unless the pale and sallow mistletoe, which here and there partially tinted with faint green the old trees above them. * * * * * "everything was perfectly still around; even the robin, solitary songster of the frozen woods, had ceased his faint vespers to the setting sun, and hardly a breath of air agitated the leafless branches. this dead silence was interrupted by no sound but the slow progress of his horse, as the hollow ground beneath his feet sounded as if he trod on vaults. there was in the scene, and in this dull pause of nature, a solemnity not unpleasant to orlando, in his present disposition of mind." in , miss mitford wrote to miss barrett: "charlotte smith's works, with all their faults, have yet a love of external nature, and a power of describing it, which i never take a spring walk without feeling." and again she wrote to a friend referring to mrs. smith, "except that they want cheerfulness, nothing can exceed the beauty of the style." * * * * * the life and writings of mrs. inchbald had some things in common with the life and writings of mrs. smith. both were obliged to write to support themselves as well as those dependent upon them. both had seen many phases of human nature, and both viewed with scorn the pretensions of the rich and beheld with pity the sorrows of the poor. both were champions of social and political equality. mrs. inchbald, however, was an actress and a successful playwright, hence her novels are the more dramatic, but they lack the beautiful rural setting which gives a poetic atmosphere to the writings of charlotte smith. _a simple story_, the first, of mrs. inchbald's two novels, has been called the precursor of _jane eyre_. it is the first novel in which we are more interested in what is felt than in what actually happens. mr. dorriforth, a catholic priest, and miss milner, his ward, fall in love with each other, and we watch this hidden passion, which preys upon the health of both. he is horrified that he has broken his vows; she is mortified that she loves a man who, she believes, neither can nor does return her feeling for him. when he is released from his vow, it is the emotion, not external happenings, that holds the interest. the first part of the story is brought to a close with the marriage of mr. dorriforth, now lord elmwood, and miss milner. seventeen years elapse between the two halves of the novel. during this time trouble has come between them and they have separated. the character of each has undergone a change. traits of disposition that were first but lightly observed have been intensified with years. mrs. inchbald writes of the hero: "dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant; the compassionate, the feeling, the just lord elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and justice." his friend sandford has also changed with the years, but he has been softened, not hardened by them--"the reprover, the enemy of the vain, the idle, and the wicked, but the friend and comforter of the forlorn and miserable." the story of dorriforth gives unity to the two parts of the novel. the conflict between his love and his anger holds the reader in suspense until the conclusion. the characters of eighteenth-century fiction were actuated by but a small number of motives. in nearly all the novels the men were either generous and free or stingy and hypocritical; the women were either virtuous and winsome, or immoral and brazen. mrs. inchbald possessed, only in a less degree, george eliot's power of character-analysis; she observed minor qualities, and she was as unflinching in following the development of evil traits to a tragic conclusion as was the author of _adam bede_. in _the gentleman's magazine_ for march, , some one wrote of _a simple story_: "she has struck out a path entirely her own. she has disdained to follow the steps of her predecessors, and to construct a new novel, as is too commonly done, out of the scraps and fragments of earlier inventors. her principal character, the roman catholic lord, is perfectly new: and she has conducted him, through a series of surprising well-contrasted adventures, with an uniformity of character and truth of description that have rarely been surpassed." there is, however, one hackneyed scene. a young girl is seized, thrust into a chariot, and carried at full speed to a lonely place. there is hardly an early novel where this bald incident is not worked up into one or more chapters, with variations to suit the convenience of the plot. it was as much a part of the stock in trade of the novelist of the eighteenth century as a family quarrel is of the twentieth. with this exception, _a simple story_ is new in its plot, incidents, characters, and mode of treatment. emotion did not play so important a part in a novel again until charlotte brontë wrote _jane eyre_. mrs. inchbald's only other novel, _nature and art_, shows the artificialities of society. two cousins, william and henry, are contrasted. william is the son of a dean. henry's father went to africa to live, whence he sent his son to his rich uncle to be educated. henry fails to comprehend the society in which he finds himself placed, and cannot understand that there should be any poor people. "'why, here is provision enough for all the people,' said henry; 'why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?' "'they must not,' said the dean, 'unless they were their own.' "'what, uncle! does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?'" his uncle fails to answer this question to his nephew's satisfaction. the vices and the fawning duplicity of william are contrasted with the virtues and independent spirit of henry. "'i know i am called proud,' one day said william to henry. "'dear cousin,' replied henry, 'it must be only then by those who do not know you; for to me you appear the humblest creature in the world.' "'do you really think so?' "'i am certain of it; or would you always give up your opinion to that of persons in a superior state, however inferior in their understanding? ... i have more pride than you, for i will never stoop to act or to speak contrary to my feelings.'" william rises to eminence, in time becoming a judge. henry, who is always virtuous, can obtain no preferment. this contrast in the two cousins is not so overdrawn as at first appears. william represents the aristocracy of the old world; henry, the free representative of a new country. a tragic story runs through the novel, which becomes intensely dramatic at the point where william puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence on the girl whom he had ruined years before. he does not recognise her; but she, who had loved him through the years, becomes insane, not at the thought of death, but that he should be the one to pronounce the sentence. it is doubtful if any novelist before scott had produced so thrilling a situation, a situation which grew naturally out of the plot, and the anguish of the poor unfortunate agnes has the realism of thomas hardy or tolstoi. only by reading these old novels can one comprehend the change produced in england by the next half-century. the teachings of mrs. charlotte smith and mrs. inchbald were declared dangerous to the state. that they taught disrespect for authority, was one of the many charges brought against them. yet with what ladylike reserve they advance views which a later generation applauded when boldly proclaimed by dickens, thackeray, and disraeli! chapter vi clara reeve. ann radcliffe. harriet and sophia lee the novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear in modern literature until horace walpole wrote _the castle of otranto_ in , during the decade that was dominated by the realism of smollett and sterne. the author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, which was a realistic copy of nature. the machinery of this novel is clumsy. an enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestor of otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant, who proves to be the rightful heir. * * * * * this book produced no imitators until , when clara reeve wrote _the old english baron_, which was plainly suggested by walpole's novel, but is more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. here, as in _the castle of otranto_, the rightful heir has been brought up a peasant, ignorant of his high birth. again his ancestors, supposedly dead and gone, bring him into his own. one night he is made to sleep in the haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in a dream things which he is later able to prove legally. he learns the truth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of his heart. when he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors fly open through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord. the characters of both these novels are without interest, and the mysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill. * * * * * twelve years passed before walpole's novel found another imitator in mrs. ann radcliffe, who so far excelled her two predecessors that she has been called the founder of the gothic romance, and in this field she remains without a peer. in her first novel, _the castles of athlin and dunbayne_, as in _the old english baron_ by clara reeve, a peasant renowned for his courage and virtue loves and is beloved by a lady of rank. a strawberry mark on his arm proves that he is the baron malcolm and owner of the castle of dunbayne, at which juncture amid great rejoicings the story ends. the characters and the style foreshadow mrs. radcliffe's later work. the usurping baron of dunbayne, who has imprisoned in his castle the women who might oppose his ambition; the two melancholy widows; their gentle and pensive daughters; their brave, loyal, and virtuous sons in love respectively with the two daughters; the count santmorin, bold and passionate, who endeavours by force to carry off the woman he loves--these are types that mrs. radcliffe repeatedly developed until in her later novels they became real men and women with strong conflicting emotions. but superior to all her other powers is her ability to awaken a feeling of the presence of the supernatural. the castle of dunbayne has secret doors and subterranean passages. the mysterious sound, as of a lute, is wafted on the air from an unknown source. alleyn, in endeavouring to escape through a secret passage, stumbles over something in the dark, and, on stooping to learn what it is, finds the cold hand of a corpse in his grasp. this dead man has nothing to do with the story, but is introduced merely to make the reader shudder, which mrs. radcliffe never fails to do, even after we have learned all the secrets of her art. we learn later in the book how the corpse happened to be left here unburied; for in that day of intense realism, half-way between the ancient belief in ghosts and the modern interest in mental suggestion, every occurrence outside the known laws of physics was greeted with a cynical smile. but, although mrs. radcliffe always explains the mystery in her books, we hold our breath whenever she designs that we shall. _the sicilian romance_, _the romance of the forest_, _the mysteries of udolpho_, and _the italian_ were written and published during the next seven years and each one shows a marked artistic advance over its predecessor. with the opening paragraph of each, we are carried at once into the land of the unreal, into regions of poetry rather than of prose. rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. it is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. this is heightened by the ghostly suggestions she brings to the mind, as incorporeal as spirits. a low hurried breathing in the dark, lights flashing out from unexpected places, forms gliding noiselessly along the dark corridors, a word of warning from an unseen source, cause the reader to wait with hushed attention for the unfolding of the mystery. sometimes the solution is trivial. the reader and the inmates of udolpho are held in suspense chapter after chapter by some terrible appearance behind a black veil. when emily ventures to draw the curtain, she drops senseless to the ground. but this appearance turns out to be merely a wax effigy placed there by chance. often the explanation is more satisfactory. the disappearance of ludovico during the night from the haunted chamber where he was watching in hopes of meeting the spirits that infested it, makes the most sceptical believe for a time in the reality of the ghostly visitants; and his reappearance at the close of the book, the slave of pirates who had found a secret passage leading from the sea to this room, and had used it as a place of rendezvous, is declared by sir walter scott to meet all the requirements of romance. but by a series of strange coincidences and dreams mrs. radcliffe still makes us feel that the destiny of her characters is shaped by an unseen power. adeline is led by chance to the very ruin where her unknown father had been murdered years before. she sees in dreams all the incidents of the deed, and a manuscript he had written while in the power of his enemies falls into her hands. again by chance she finds an asylum in the home of a clergyman, arnaud la luc, who proves to be the father of her lover, theodore peyrou. it seems to be by the interposition of providence that ellena finds her mother and is recognised by her father. so in every tale we are made aware of powers not mortal shaping human destiny. mrs. radcliffe adds to this consciousness of the presence of the supernatural by another, perhaps more legitimate, method. she felt what wordsworth expressed in _tintern abbey_, written the year after her last novel was published: and i have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. mrs. radcliffe seldom loses her feeling for nature, and has a strong sense of the effect of environment on her characters. julia, when in doubt about the fate of hippolitus, often walked in the evening under the shade of the high trees that environed the abbey. "the dewy coolness of the air refreshed her. the innumerable roseate tints which the parting sun-beams reflected on the rocks above, and the fine vermil glow diffused over the romantic scene beneath, softly fading from the eye as the night shades fell, excited sensations of a sweet and tranquil nature, and soothed her into a temporary forgetfulness of her sorrow." as the happy lovers, vivaldi and ellena, are gliding along the bay of naples, they hear from the shore the voices of the vine-dressers, as they repose after the labours of the day, and catch the strains of music from fishermen who are dancing on the margin of the sea. sometimes nature is prophetic. the whole description of the castle of udolpho, when emily first beholds it, is symbolical of the sufferings she is to endure there: "as she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. from these, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. silent, lonely, and sublime it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared invade its solitary reign." when emily is happy in the peasant's home in the valley below, she lingers at the casement after the sun has set: "but a clear moonlight that succeeded gave to the landscape what time gives to the scenes of past life, when it softens all their harsh features, and throws over the whole the mellowing shade of distant contemplation." it is this feeling for nature as a constant presence in daily life, now elating the mind with joy, now awakening a sense of foreboding or inspiring terror, and again soothing the mind to repose, that gives to her books a permanent hold upon the imagination and marks their author as a woman of genius. in her response to nature, she belongs to the lake school. scott said of her: "mrs. radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction, that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry." mrs. smith describes nature as we all know it, as it appears on the canvasses of constable and wilson. mrs. radcliffe's descriptions of ideal and romantic nature have earned for her the name of the english salvator rosa. mrs. radcliffe's characters are not without interest, although they are often mere types. all her heroes and heroines are ladies and gentlemen of native courtesy, superior education, and accomplishments. in _the mysteries of udolpho_ she has set forth the education which st. aubert gave to his daughter, emily: "st. aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. he gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. he taught her latin and english, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. she discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was st. aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. 'a well informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of vice and folly.'" in all their circumstances her characters are well-bred. this type has been nearly lost in literature, due, perhaps, to the minuter study of manners and the analysis of character. when an author surveys his ladies and gentlemen through a reading-glass, and points the finger at their oddities and pries into their inmost secrets, even the chesterfields become awkward and clownish. but mrs. radcliffe, like mrs. smith, is a true gentlewoman, and speaks of her characters with the delicate respect of true gentility. julia, adeline, emily, and ellena, the heroines of four of her books, love nature, and while away the melancholy hours by playing on the lute or writing poetry, and are, moreover, well qualified to have charge of a baronial castle and its dependencies. her heroes are worthy of her heroines. as they are generally seen in the presence of ladies, if they have vices there is no occasion for their display. it is only in the characters of her villains that good and evil are intertwined, and she awakens our sympathy for them equally with our horror. monsieur la motte, a weak man in the power of an unscrupulous one, is the best drawn character in _the romance of the forest_. he has taken adeline under his protection and has been as a father to her. but before this he had committed a crime which has placed his life in the hands of a powerful marquis. to free himself he consents to surrender adeline to the marquis, who has become enamoured of her beauty, hoping by the sacrifice of her honour to save his own life. he is agitated in the presence of adeline, and trembles at the approach of any stranger. scott said of him, "he is the exact picture of the needy man who has seen better days." in _the italian_, schedoni, a monk of the order of black penitents for whom the novel is named, is guilty of the most atrocious crimes in order that he may further his own ambition, but he is not devoid of natural feeling. scott says the scene in which he "is in the act of raising his arm to murder his sleeping victim, and discovers her to be his own child, is of a new, grand, and powerful character; and the horrors of the wretch who, on the brink of murder, has just escaped from committing a crime of yet more exaggerated horror, constitute the strongest painting which has been produced by mrs. radcliffe's pencil, and form a crisis well fitted to be actually embodied on canvas by some great master." every book has one or more gloomy, deep-plotting villains. but all the people of rank bear unmistakable marks of their nobility, even when their natures have become depraved by crime. in this she is the equal of scott. in every ruined abbey and castle there is a servant who brings in a comic element and relieves the strained feelings. peter, annette, and paulo are all faithful but garrulous, and often bring disaster upon their masters by overzeal in their service. when vivaldi, the hero of _the italian_, is brought before the tribunal of the inquisition, his faithful servant, paulo, rails bitterly at the treatment his master has received. vivaldi, well knowing the danger which they both incur by too free speech, bids him speak in a whisper: "'a whisper,' shouted paulo, 'i scorn to speak in a whisper. i will speak so loud that every word i say shall ring in the ears of all those old black devils on the benches yonder, ay, and those on that mountebank stage, too, that sit there looking so grim and angry, as if they longed to tear us in pieces. they--' "'silence,' said vivaldi with emphasis. 'paulo, i command you to be silent.' "'they shall know a bit of my mind,' continued paulo, without noticing vivaldi. 'i will tell them what they have to expect from all their cruel usage of my poor master. where do they expect to go to when they die, i wonder? though for that matter, they can scarcely go to a worse place than that they are in already, and i suppose it is knowing that which makes them not afraid of being ever so wicked. they shall hear a little plain truth for once in their lives, however; they shall hear--'" but by this time paulo is dragged from the room. the plots of all mrs. radcliffe's novels are complicated. a whole skein is knotted and must be unravelled thread by thread. _the mysteries of udolpho_ is the most involved. characters are introduced that are for a time apparently forgotten; one sub-plot appears within another, but at the end each is found necessary to the whole. _the italian_ is simpler than the others: the plot is less involved, and there are many strong situations. the opening sentence at once arouses the interests of the reader: "within the shade of the portico, a person with folded arms, and eyes directed towards the ground, was pacing behind the pillars the whole extent of the pavement, and was apparently so engaged by his own thoughts as not to observe that strangers were approaching. he turned, however, suddenly, as if startled by the sound of steps, and then, without further pausing, glided to a door that opened into the church, and disappeared." another scene in which the marchesa vivaldi and schedoni are plotting the death of ellena, is justly famous. the former is actuated by the desire to prevent her son's marriage to a woman of inferior rank; the latter hopes that he may gain an influence over the powerful marchesa that will lead to his promotion in the church. their conference, which takes place in the choir of the convent of san nicolo, is broken in upon by the faint sound of the organ followed by slow voices chanting the first requiem for the dead. _the italian_ is generally considered the strongest of mrs. radcliffe's novels. it was published in , and was as enthusiastically received as were its predecessors, but for some reason it was the last book mrs. radcliffe published. neither the fame it brought her, nor the eight hundred pounds she received for it from her publishers, tempted its author from her life of retirement. publicity was distasteful to her. at the age of thirty-four, at an age when many novelists had written nothing, she ceased from writing, and spent the rest of her years either in travel or in the seclusion of her own home. the novel at this time was not considered seriously as a work of art, and mrs. radcliffe may have considered that she was but trifling with time by employing her pen in that way. in looking over the book reviews in _the gentlemen's magazine_ for the years from to , it is significant that, while column after column is spent in lavish praise of a book of medicine or science which the next generation proved to be false, and of poetry that had no merit except that its feet could be counted, seldom is a novel reviewed in its pages. _the mysteries of udolpho_ was criticised for its lengthy descriptions, and _the italian_ was ignored. the direct influence of these novels on the literature of the nineteenth century cannot be estimated. mrs. radcliffe's influence upon her contemporaries can be more easily traced. the year after the publication of _the mysteries of udolpho_ lewis wrote _the monk_. this has all the horrors but none of the refined delicacy of mrs. radcliffe's work. robert charles maturin borrowed many suggestions from her, and the gentle satire of _northanger abbey_ could never have been written if jane austen had not herself come under the influence of _the romance of the forest_. but her greatest influence was upon scott. the four great realistic novelists of the eighteenth century, richardson, fielding, smollett and sterne whose influence can be so often traced in thackeray and dickens, seem never to have touched the responsive nature of scott. he edited their works and often spoke in their praise, but that which was deepest and truest in him, which gave birth to his poetry and his novels, seems never to have been aware of their existence. mrs. radcliffe and maria edgewood were his most powerful teachers. andrew lang in the introduction to _rob roy_ in the border edition of the _waverley novels_ calls attention to the fact that waverley, guy mannering, lovel of _the antiquary_, and frank osbaldistone were all poets. not only these men, but others, as edward glendinning and edgar ravenswood, bear a strong family resemblance to theodore peyrou, valancourt, and vivaldi, as well as to some of the other less important male characters in mrs. radcliffe's novels. scott's men stand forth more clearly drawn, while mrs. radcliffe's are often but dimly outlined. ellen douglas, the daughter of an exiled family; the melancholy flora macivor, who whiled away her hours by translating highland poetry into english; mary avenel, dwelling in a remote castle, are all refined, educated gentlewomen such as mrs. smith and mrs. radcliffe delighted in, and are placed in situations similar to those in which julia, adeline, and emily are found. but the heroines of mrs. smith and mrs. radcliffe have a quality which not even scott has been able to give to his women. it is expressed by a word often used during the reign of the georges, but since gone out of fashion. they were women of fine sensibilities. johnson defines this as quickness of feeling, and it has been used to mean a quickness of perception of the soul as distinguished from the intellect. the sensibilities of women may not be finer than those of men, but they respond to a greater variety of emotions. this gives to them a certain evanescent quality which we find in elizabeth bennet, jane eyre, maggie tulliver, romola, the portraits of madame le brun and angelica kauffman, and the poetry of elizabeth barrett browning. this quality men have almost never grasped whether working with the pen or the brush. rosalind, juliet, viola, beatrice, all possess it; and in a less degree, diana of the crossways is true to her sex in this respect. but the features of nearly every famous madonna, no matter how skilful the artist that painted her, are stiff and wooden when looked at from this point of view, and scott's heroines, with the possible exception of jeanie deans, are immobile when compared with woman as portrayed by many an inferior artist of her own sex. scott's complicated plots and his constant introduction of characters who are surrounded by mystery or are living in disguise again suggest mrs. radcliffe. again and again he selected the same scenes that had appealed to her, and in his earlier novels and poems he filled them in with the same details which she had chosen. perhaps it is due to her influence that all the hills of scotland, as some critic has observed, become mountains when he touches them: "the sun was nearly set behind the distant mountain of liddesdale" was the beginning of an early romance to have been entitled _thomas the rhymer_. knockwinnock bay in _the antiquary_ is first seen at sunset, and it is night when guy mannering arrives at ellangowan castle. melrose is described by moonlight. the sun as it sets in the trossachs brings to the mind of scott the very outlines and colours which mrs. radcliffe had used in giving the first appearance of udolpho, a scene which scott has highly praised; while these famous lines of james fitz-james have caught the very essence of one of her favourite spots: on this bold brow, a lordly tower; in that soft vale, a lady's bower; on yonder meadow, far away, the turrets of a cloister grey! how blithely might the bugle horn chide, on the lake, the lingering morn! how sweet, at eve, the lover's lute chime, when the groves were still and mute! and, when the midnight moon should lave her forehead in the silver wave, how solemn on the ear would come the holy matin's distant hum. in his later works scott is tediously prosaic in description, far inferior to mrs. radcliffe, and in the romantic description of scenery he never excels her. it would seem to be no mere chance that in his poetry and in his earlier novels he has so often struck the same key as did the author of _the mysteries of udolpho_. * * * * * two sisters, harriet and sophia lee, were writing books and finding readers during the time of mrs. smith, mrs. inchbald, and mrs. radcliffe. in , sophia lee published a three-volume novel, _the recess_, a story of the time of queen elizabeth, in which elizabeth, mary queen of scots, and the earls leicester, norfolk, and essex play important rôles. the two heroines are unacknowledged daughters of mary queen of scots and norfolk, to whom she has been secretly married during her imprisonment in england. many other situations in the book are equally fictitious. the historical novels written in france during the reign of louis xiv paid no heed to chronology, but men and women whom the author knew well were dressed in the garb of historical personages, and various periods of the past were brought into the space of the story. _the recess_ was not a masquerade, but the plot and characters slightly picture the reign of elizabeth. this was one of the first novels in which there was an attempt to represent a past age with something like accuracy. as this was one of the first historical novels, using the term in the modern sense, it had perhaps a right to be one of the poorest; for it is impossible to conceive three volumes of print in which there are fewer sentences that leave any impress on the mind than this once popular novel. sophia lee wrote other novels which are said to be worse than this; but in she and her sister harriet, who had the greater imagination, published _the canterbury tales_. some of those written by harriet are excellent. according to the story a group of travellers have met at an inn in canterbury, where they are delayed on account of a heavy fall of snow. to while away the weary hours of waiting, as they are gathered about the fire in true english fashion, they agree, as did the canterbury pilgrims of long ago, that each one shall tell a story. but the pilgrims whom chaucer accompanied to the shrine of thomas à becket are accurately described, and between the tales they discuss the stories and exchange lively banter in which the nature of each speaker is clearly revealed. in _the canterbury tales_ there is little character-drawing. any one of the stories might have been told by any one of the narrators, and before the conclusion the authors dropped this device. in the stories that are told the characters are weak, but the plots are interesting and many of them original and clever. these _tales_ represent the beginning of the modern short story. in a preface to a complete edition of the _tales_ published in , harriet lee wrote: "before i finally dismiss the subject, i think i may be permitted to observe that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of _tales_, professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of the day. innumerable _tales_ of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which i presume not to compete in merit, though i think i may fairly claim priority of design and style." _the canterbury tales_ were read and reread a long time after they were written. a critic in _blackwood's_ says of them: "they exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we have already remarked, was never common in english literature than any of the works of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the single exception of fielding." the most famous story of the collection is _kruitzener, or the german's tale_. part of the story is laid in silesia during the thirty years' war. frederick kruitzener, a bohemian, is the hero, if such a term may be used for so weak a man. in his youth he is thus described: "the splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education, fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, was early mistaken for a personal gift--a sort of emanation proceeding from the lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he was indebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... he was distinguished!--he saw it--he felt it--he was persuaded he should ever be so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father--dependent on his paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the world merely for what he was to be--he secretly looked down on that world as made only for him." the tale traces the troubles which kruitzener brings upon himself, his misery and his death. it belongs to romantic literature; the mountain scenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, a mysterious murder, all these remind us of mrs. radcliffe's novels, but the story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. ernest hartley coleridge said of this tale: "but the _motif_--a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father's punishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the very key-note of tragedy." byron read this story when he was about fourteen, and it affected him powerfully. by a strange coincidence kruitzener bears a strong resemblance to lord byron himself. he was proud and melancholy, and, while he led a life of pleasure, his spirits were always wrapped in gloom. "it made a deep impression on me," writes byron, "and may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that i have since written." in , he dramatised it under the title of _werner, or the inheritance_. the play follows the novel closely both in plot and conversation. an editor of byron's works wrote of it: "there is not one incident in his play, not even the most trivial, that is not in miss lee's novel. and then as to the characters--not only is every one of them to be found in _kruitzener_, but every one is there more fully and powerfully developed." _the landlady's tale_ is far superior to all others in the collection, if judged by present-day standards. this story of sin and its punishment reminds one in its moral earnestness of george eliot. mr. mandeville had brought ruin upon a poor girl, mary lawson, whose own child died, when she became the wet nurse of robert, mr. mandeville's legitimate son and heir. mary grew to love the boy, but, when the father threatened to expose her character unless she would continue to be his mistress, she ran away, taking the infant with her. she became a servant in a lodging-house in weymouth, where she lived for fifteen years, respected and beloved. at the end of that time, mr. mandeville came to the house as a lodger, where he neither recognised mary nor knew his son. but he disliked robert, and paid no heed to the fact that one of his own servants was leading the boy into evil ways. when robert was accused of a crime which his own servant had committed, he saw him sent to prison and later transported with indifference. the grief of the father when he learned that robert was his own child was most poignant, and his unavailing efforts to save him are vividly told. he is left bowed with grief, for he suffers under the double penalty of "a reproachful world and a reproaching conscience." chapter vii maria edgeworth. lady morgan "my real name is thady quirk, though in the family i have always been known by no other than 'honest thady'; afterward, in the time of sir murtagh, diseased, i remember to hear them calling me 'old thady,' and now i'm come to 'poor thady.'" thus the faithful servant of the rackrent family introduces himself, before relating the history of the lords of the castle, where he and his had lived rent-free time out of mind. and what consummate art maria edgeworth showed in her first novel, _castle rackrent_, in letting "poor thady" ramble with all the garrulity of old age. to him, who had never been farther than a day's tramp from the castle, there was nothing in the world's history but it and its owners. no servant but an irish servant could have told the story as he did, judging the characters of his masters with shrewd wit and relating their worst failings with a "god bless them." and where out of ireland could thady have found such masters, ready to spend all they had and another man's too, happy and free, and dying as merrily as they had lived! there was sir patrick, who, as thady tells us, "could sit out the best man in ireland, let alone the three kingdoms"; sir kit, who married a jewess for her money; and sir condy, who signed away the estate rather than be bothered to look into his steward's accounts, and then feigned that he was dead that he might hear what his friends said of him at the wake. but he soon came to life, and a merry time they had of it. "but to my mind," says thady, "sir condy was rather upon the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there was such a great talk about himself after his death, as he had expected to hear." but thady loved his master, and it is with genuine grief that he records his ultimate death, and with simple and unconscious wit he adds, "he had but a very poor funeral after all." in _the absentee_, the manners and customs of the irish peasants are more broadly delineated than in _castle rackrent_. _the absentee_ was written to call the attention of the irish landlords who were living in england to the wretched condition of their tenants left in the power of unscrupulous stewards. lord colambre, the son of lord clonbrony, an absentee, visits his father's estates, which he has not seen for many years, in disguise, and goes among the peasants, many of whom are in abject poverty. but the quick generosity of the nation speaks in the poor widow o'neil's "kindly welcome, sir," with which she opens the door to the unknown lord, and its enthusiastic loyalty in the joyful acclamations of the peasants when he reveals himself to them,--a scene which macaulay has pronounced the finest in literature since the twenty-second book of the _odyssey_. _ennui_ is another of her stories of irish life, in which the supposed earl of glenthorn, after a long residence in england, returns to his irish estates. the heroine of this tale is the old nurse, ellinor o'donoghoe. as the nurses of many stories are said to have done, she had substituted her own child for the rightful heir, and was frantic with joy when she saw him the master of glenthorn castle. her devotion to the earl is pathetic, and her secret fears of the deception she had practised on the old earl may have prompted her strange speech that, if it pleased god, she would like to die on christmas day, of all days, "because the gates of heaven will be open all that day; and who knows but a body might slip in unbeknownst?" ellinor is a woman of many virtues and many failings, but she is always pure celt. how well contrasted are the two cousins, friends of ormond, sir ulick o'shane, a wily politician and a member of parliament, and mr. cornelius o'shane, king of the black islands, called by his dependents king corny. the latter, bluff, generous, brave, open as the day, is yet a match for his crafty kinsman. sir ulick's visit to king corny is a masterpiece. he has a purpose in his visit and a secret to guard, which king corny is watching to discover. sir ulick has been bantering his kinsman on the old-fashioned customs observed on his estate and ridicules his method of ploughing: "'your team, i see, is worthy of your tackle,' pursued sir ulick. 'a mule, a bull, and two lean horses. i pity the foremost poor devil of a horse, who must starve in the midst of plenty, while the horse, bull, and even mule, in a string behind him, are all plucking and munging away at their hay ropes.' "cornelius joined in sir ulick's laugh, which shortened its duration. "''tis comical ploughing, i grant,' said he, 'but still, to my fancy, anything's better and more profitable nor the tragi-comic ploughing you practise every sason in dublin.' "'i?' said sir ulick. "'ay, you and all your courtiers, ploughing the half-acre, continually pacing up and down that castle-yard, while you're waiting in attendance there. every one to his own taste, but, "'if there's a man on earth i hate, attendance and dependence be his fate.'" king corny has been studying his diplomatic kinsman carefully to learn his secret, until the wily politician, by unnecessary caution in guarding it, overreaches himself, when king corny exclaims to himself: "woodcocked! that he has, as i foresaw he would." while the trained diplomat murmurs as he takes his leave, "all's safe." native wit had got the better of artful cunning. and when sir ulick dies in disgrace, how pithy is the remark of one of the men, as he is filling in the grave: "there lies the making of an excellent gentleman--but the cunning of his head spoiled the goodness of his heart." in the same book, how generous and how irish is moriarty, lying on the brink of death, as he thinks of ormond, who had shot him in a fit of passion but bitterly repented his rash deed: "i'd live through all, if possible, for his sake, let alone my mudther's, or shister's or my own--'t would be too bad, after all the trouble he got these two nights, to be dying at last, and hanting him, maybe, whether i would or no." the quick kindness which so often twists an irishman's tongue is humorously illustrated in the _essay on irish bulls_, which maria edgeworth and her father wrote together. mr. phelim o'mooney, disguised as sir john bull, accepts his brother's wager that he cannot remain four days in england without the country of his birth being discovered eight times. whenever his speech betrays him, it is the result of his emotions. when he sees bourke, a pugilist of his own country, overcome by an englishman, he cries to him excitedly: "how are you, my gay fellow? can you see at all with the eye that is knocked out?" a little later, in discussing a certain impost duty, he grows angry and exclaims: "if i had been the english minister, i would have laid the dog-tax upon cats." the humour of his situation increases to a climax, so that the fun never flags. such stories as this in which the wit is simply sparkling good-nature, with no attempt to use it as a weapon against frail humanity as did fielding and thackeray, or to produce a smile by exaggeration as did dickens, but simply bubbling fun, as free from guile as the sun's laughter on killarney, show that miss edgeworth was a comedian of the first rank. like all true comedians, she is also strong in the pathetic, but it is the irish pathos, in which there is ever a smile amid the tears. this is found in the story of the return of lady clonbrony to her own country; the fall of castle rackrent; and the ruin by their sudden splendour of the family of christy o'donoghoe. whenever miss edgeworth writes of ireland and its people, her pages glow with the inspiration of genius. there is no exaggeration, no caricature; all is told with simple truth. it has often been the fate of novelists whose aim has been to depict the manners and customs of a locality to win the ill-will of the obscure people they have brought into prominence. but not so with maria edgeworth. her family, although originally english, had been settled for two hundred years in ireland. she loved the country and always wrote of it with a loving pen. before _castle rackrent_ was written, ireland had been for many centuries an outcast in literature, known only for her blunders and bulls. but, as one of her characters says, "an irish bull is always of the head, never of the heart." even though her characters are humorous, they are never clowns. all the men have dignity, and all the women grace. she gave them a respectable place in literature. but her influence was felt outside of ireland. old thady, in his garrulous description of the masters of castle rackrent, had introduced the first national novel, in which the avowed object is to represent traits of national character. patriotic writers in other countries learned through her how to serve their own land, and she was one of the many influences which led to the writing of the waverley novels. scott says in the preface of these books: "without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact which pervade the work of my accomplished friend, i felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which miss edgeworth so fortunately achieved for ireland--something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles." as the reader realises the power of maria edgeworth's mind, her ability to describe manners and customs, to read character, and to depict comic and tragic scenes, he wishes that her father, richard lovell edgeworth, had not so constantly interfered in her work, and insisted that every book she wrote must illustrate some principle of education. he was not singular in this respect. rousseau, whom he greatly admired at one time, had taught educational methods by a novel. madame de genlis, the teacher of louis philippe, was writing novels that were celebrated throughout europe, in which she expounded rules for the training of the young. maria edgeworth, with her father at her elbow, never lost sight of the moral of her tale. vivian, in the story of that name, was so weak that he was always at the mercy of the artful. ormond's passions led him into trouble. beauclerc was almost ruined by his foolish generosity. lady delacour, with no object in life but pleasure, cast aside her own happiness that she might outshine the woman she hated. lady clonbrony squandered her fortune and health that she might be snubbed by her social superiors. mrs. beaumont played a deep diplomatic game in her small circle of friends, and finally overreached herself. lady cecilia, the friend of helen, brought sorrow to her and infamy upon herself by her duplicity. in the analysis of motive, and the growth of cecilia's wrong-doing from a small beginning, the book resembles the novels of george eliot. but maria edgeworth could not know her own characters as she otherwise would, because the moral was always uppermost. when mrs. inchbald criticised her novel _patronage_, she replied: "please to recollect, we had our moral to work out." mr. edgeworth, in his preface to _tales of fashionable life_, thus sets forth his daughter's purpose: "it has been my daughter's aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave. all the parts of this series of moral fiction bear upon the faults and excellencies of different ages and classes; and they have all risen from that view of society which we have laid before the public in more didactic works on education." such a method of writing tended to kill emotion, yet emotion breaks out at times with genuine force, and always has a true ring. this is especially true in the _tales of fashionable life_. there society women appear cold and heartless in the drawing-room, and so they have generally been represented in fiction. so thackeray regarded them. but maria edgeworth followed them to the boudoir, and there reveals beneath the laces and jewels many beautiful womanly traits. as we see in tale after tale true feeling welling to the surface, and then choked up by the moral, we recognise the pathetic truth that mr. edgeworth's educational methods were fatal to genius. but strong emotion sways only a small part of the lives of most men and women. were it otherwise, like the great lyric poets, we should all die young. and she has written about the common, everyday, prosaic life with a truthfulness rarely excelled. one of the most interesting studies in a novel is to observe the author's view of life. with the exception of those of mademoiselle de scudéri nearly all the novels of french women considered love as the ruling passion for happiness or woe, and all of the characters were under its sway. even mademoiselle de scudéri in the preface to _ibrahim_ announced it as her distinct purpose that all her heroes were to be ruled by the two most sublime passions, love and ambition; but she was a humorist and unconsciously interested her readers more by her witty descriptions of people than by the loves of cyrus and mandane. but this passion has seldom held such an exaggerated place in the stories of english women. maria edgeworth in particular noticed that men and women were actuated by many motives or passions. a large income or a title was often capable of inspiring a feeling so akin to love that even the bosom that felt its glow was unable to distinguish the difference. loss of respect could kill the strongest passion, and some of her heroines have even remained single, or else married men whom at first they had regarded with indifference, rather than marry the object of their first love after he had forfeited their esteem. sometimes the tameness of her heroines shocked their author. while correcting _belinda_ for mrs. barbauld's "novelists' library," miss edgeworth wrote to a friend: "i really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone belinda, that i could have torn the pages out." propinquity, opportunity, almost a mental suggestion are quite enough to produce a long chain of events affecting a lifetime. "ask half the men you are acquainted with why they are married, and their answer, if they speak the truth, will be, 'because i met miss such-a-one at such a place, and we were continually together.' 'propinquity, propinquity,' as my father used to say, and he was married five times, and twice to heiresses." so speaks mrs. broadhurst, a match-making mother in _the absentee_. and this is the reason why most of miss edgeworth's heroes and heroines love. but the advances of a designing woman are quite sufficient, as in _vivian_, to make a fond lover forget his plighted troth to another, and the flattery of an unscrupulous man makes him suspicious of his real friends. character is destiny, if the character is strong, but circumstances are destiny, if the character is weak. it is the aim of her novels to show how certain traits of character, as indecision, pride, love of luxury, indolence, lead to misfortune, and how these dangerous traits may be overcome. * * * * * notwithstanding her moral, her plots are never hackneyed and never repeated. they are drawn from life and have the variety of life. in the story of _ennui_, there is the twice-told tale of the nurse's son substituted for the real heir; but when he learns the true story of his birth, and resigns the castle, the title, and all its wealth to the rightful earl of glenthorn, who has been living in the village working at the forge, there is a great change from the usual story. the heir of the ancient family of glenthorn accepts the earldom for his son, but with reluctance. the manners of the peasant remain with the earl, and the poor man, at last, begs the one who has been educated for the position to accept the title and the estates. in this she emphasised again what she constantly taught, that education and environment are more powerful than heredity. as she taught that reason should be the guide of life, so she lived. her fourscore years and three were spent largely at her ancestral home of edgeworthstown. she assisted her father in making improvements to better the condition of the tenantry, and to promote their happiness. when in paris, she met a mr. edelcrantz, a gentleman in the service of the king of sweden. admiration was succeeded by love. but he could not leave the court at stockholm, and miss edgeworth felt that neither duty nor inclination would permit her to leave her quiet life in ireland. reason was stronger than love. so they parted like her own heroes and heroines. all that history records of him is that he never married. she resumed her responsibilities at home, and if the thought of this separation sometimes brought the tears to her eyes, as her stepmother once wrote to a friend, she was as cheerful, gay, and light-hearted in the home circle as she had always been. * * * * * besides her moral tales for adults, which were read throughout europe, maria edgeworth was always interested in the education of boys and girls. the eldest sister in a family of twenty-one children, the offspring of four marriages, she taught her younger brothers and sisters, and thus grew to know intimately the needs of childhood and what stories would appeal to them. as her father wrote, it was her "aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave." in her stories for children she inculcated lessons of industry, economy, thoughtfulness, and unselfishness. if she helped to eradicate from the novel its false, highly colored sentimental pictures of life, still greater was her work in producing literature for young people. hers were among the first wholesome stories written for children. before this the chapman had carried about with him in his pack small paper-covered books which warned boys and girls of the dangers of a life of crime. one book was named _an hundred godly lessons which a mother on her death-bed gave to her children_. another book of religious and moral sunday reading was called _the afflicted parent, or the undutiful child punished_. this gives the sad history of the two children of a gentleman in chester, a son and a daughter. the daughter chided her brother for his wickedness, upon which he struck her and killed her. he was hanged for this, but even then his punishment was not completed. he came back to life, told the minister several wicked deeds which he had committed, and was hanged a second time. in most of these tales the gallows loomed dark and threatening. * * * * * in contrast to these morbid tales are the wholesome stories of maria edgeworth. the boys and girls about whom she writes are drawn from life. if they are bad, their crimes are never enormous, but simply a yielding to the common temptations of childhood. hal, in _waste not, want not_, thinks economy beneath a gentleman's notice, and at last loses a prize in an archery contest for lack of a piece of string which he had destroyed. fisher in _the barring out_, a cowardly boy, buys twelve buns for himself with a half-crown which belonged to his friend, and then gives a false account of the money. his punishment is expulsion from the school. lazy lawrence has a worse fate. he will not work, plays pitch farthing, is led by bad companions to steal, and is sent to bridewell. but he is not left in a hopeless condition. after he had served his term of imprisonment he became remarkable for his industry. but there are more good boys and girls than bad ones in her stories. the love of children for their parents, and the sacrifices they will make for those they love, are beautifully told. in the story of _the orphans_, mary, a girl of twelve, finds a home for her brothers and sisters, after her father and mother die, in the ruins of rossmore castle, where they support themselves by their labour. mary finds that she can make shoes of cloth with soles of platted hemp, and by this industry the children earn enough for all their needs. as directions are given for making these shoes, any little girl reading the story would know how to follow the example of mary. jem in the story of _lazy lawrence_ finds that there are many ways by which he can earn the two guineas without which his horse lightfoot must be sold. he works early and late, and at last accomplishes his purpose. mrs. ritchie says of this story: "lightfoot deserves to take his humble place among the immortal winged steeds of mythology along with pegasus, or with black bess, or balaam's ass, or any other celebrated steeds." the story of _simple susan_ with its pictures of village life has the charm of an idyl. the children by the hawthorn bush choosing their may queen; susan with true heroism refusing this honour, in order that she may care for her sick mother; the incident of the guinea-hen; rose's love for susan; the old harper, playing tunes to the children grouped about him--are all simply told. susan's love for her pet lamb reminds one of wordsworth's poem of that name. and yet these children are not unusual. most boys and girls have days when they are as good as mary, or jem, or susan. maria edgeworth is not inculcating virtues which are impossible of attainment. a hundred years ago, these stories, as they came from the pen of maria edgeworth, delighted boys and girls, and for at least fifty years were read by parents and children. then for a time they were hidden in libraries, but a collection of them has lately been edited by mr. charles welsh under the appropriate title _tales that never die_, which have proved as interesting to the children of to-day as to those of by-gone generations. whether maria edgeworth is writing for old or young, there is one marked trait in all her stories, her kind feeling for all humanity. the vices of her villains are recorded in a tone of sorrow. she seldom uses satire; never "makes fun" of her characters. her attitude towards them is that of the lady of edgeworthstown towards her dependents, or rather that of the elder sister towards the younger members of the family. such broad and loving sympathy is found in shakespeare and scott, but seldom among lesser writers. * * * * * in sydney owenson, better known by her married name of lady morgan, ireland found at this time another warm but less judicious friend. her life was more interesting than her books. her father, an irish actor, introduced his daughter, while yet a child, to his associates, so that she appeared in society at an early age. but mr. owenson was improvident; debts accumulated, and sydney at the age of fourteen began to earn her own living. the position of a governess, which she filled for a time, being unsuited to her gay, independent disposition, she began to write. like johnson a half century or more earlier, with a play in manuscript as her most valuable possession, she went alone to london. she did not wait so long as he did for recognition. new books by new authors were eagerly read. she earned money, a social position, fame, and with it some disagreeable notoriety. an independent, witty irish woman of great charm, fearless in expressing her opinions, who had introduced herself into society and for whom nobody stood as sponsor, was looked upon by the old-fashioned english aristocracy as an adventuress; and later, when she came forth as the champion of irish liberties, and upbraided england for tyranny, she was maliciously denounced by the tory party. she entered upon life with three purposes, to each of which she adhered: to advocate the interest of ireland by her writings; to pay her father's debts; and to provide for his old age. all of these purposes she accomplished. besides plays and poems, and two or three insignificant stories, she wrote four novels upon irish subjects: _the wild irish girl_, _o'donnel_, _florence macarthy_, and _the o'briens and the o'flahertys_. in all these books the beauty of irish scenery is depicted as background; the fashionable life of dublin is described, as well as the peasant life in remote hamlets; while the natural resources of the land and the native gaiety of the celtic temperament are feelingly contrasted with the poverty and misery brought about by unjust laws. she thus feelingly describes the condition of ireland in the novel _o'donnel_. its sincerity must excuse its overwrought style: "silence and oblivion hung upon her destiny, and in the memory of other nations she seemed to hold no place; but the first bolt which was knocked off her chain roused her from paralysis, and, as link fell after link, her faculties strengthened, her powers revived; she gradually rose upon the political horizon of europe, like her own star brightening in the west, and lifting its light above the fogs, vapours, and clouds, which obscured its lustre. the traveller now beheld her from afar, and her shores, once so devoutly pressed by the learned, the pious, and the brave, again exhibited the welcome track of the stranger's foot. the natural beauties of the land were again explored and discovered, and taste and science found the reward of their enterprise and labours in a country long depicted as savage, because it had long been exposed to desolation and neglect." in this book a party of travellers visits the giant's causeway and its scenery is described as an almost unfrequented place. the new interest in ireland of which she writes was very largely due to the novels of maria edgeworth, and partly to those of lady morgan herself. her last novel, _the o'briens and the o'flahertys_, is of historic value. its plot was furnished by the stirring events which took place when the society of united irishmen were fighting for parliamentary reforms. lord edward fitzgerald, the devoted patriot, is easily recognised in the brave lord walter fitzwalter, and the life of thomas corbet furnished the thrilling adventures of the hero, lord arranmore. when thomas moore visited thomas corbet at caen he referred to the account given of his escape from prison in lady morgan's novel as remarkably accurate in its details. the style of miss owenson's earlier books was execrable and fully justified the severe criticism in the first number of the _quarterly review_. it gives this quotation from _ida, or the woman of athens_: "like aurora, the extremities of her delicate limbs were rosed with flowing hues, and her little foot, as it pressed its naked beauty on a scarlet cushion, resembled that of a youthful thetis from its blushing tints, or that of a fugitive atalanta from its height." the wonder is that any serious magazine should have wasted two pages of space upon such nonsense. in ridiculing the book and the author, it gives her some serious advice, with the encouragement that if she follow it, she may become, not a writer of novels, but the happy mistress of a family. whether lady morgan took this ill-meant advice or not, her style improved with each book, until in _the o'briens and the o'flahertys_ it became simple and clear, with only an occasional tendency to high colouring and bombast. maria edgeworth has described the customs and manners of ireland, and unfolded the character of its people in a manner that has never been equalled. but lady morgan, far inferior as an artist, has given fuller and more picturesque descriptions of the landscape of the country, and has made a valuable addition to the books bearing on the history of ireland. chapter viii elizabeth hamilton. anna porter. jane porter elizabeth hamilton was also an irish writer, but through her one novel she will always be associated with scotland. in _the cottagers of glenburnie_ she did for the scotch people what maria edgeworth had done for the irish, and represented for the first time in fiction the life of the common people. it is a story of poor people of the serving class. mrs. mason, who had been an upper servant in the family of a lord, has been pensioned and takes up her abode with a cousin in the village of glenburnie. she was among the earliest of our settlement workers. this little village with the pretty name, situated in a beautiful country, had accumulated about its homes as much filth as the tenements of the poorest ward of a large city, and for the same reason, that its inhabitants did not understand the value of cleanliness. its thatched cottages, had it not been for their chimneys and the smoke issuing from them, would have passed for stables or hog-sties, for there was a dunghill in front of every door. mrs. macclarty's cottage, where mrs. mason was to live, was like all the rest. it was as dirty inside as out. mrs. macclarty picked up a cloth from the floor beside her husband's boots, with which to wipe her dishes, and made her cheese in a kettle which had not been washed since the chickens had eaten their last meal from it, although the remains of their feast still adhered to the sides. when mrs. macclarty put her black hands into the cheese to stir it, mrs. mason reminded her gently that she had not washed them: "'hoot,' returned the gudewife, 'my hands do weel eneugh. i canna be fash'd to clean them at ilka turn.'" when mrs. mason proposed that the windows should be hung on hinges and supplied with iron hooks, so that they could be opened at pleasure, mr. macclarty objected to the plan: "'and wha do you think wad put in the cleek?' returned he. 'is there ane, think ye, aboot this hoose, that would be at sic a fash?' "'ilka place has just its ain gait,' said the gudewife, 'and ye needna think that ever we'll learn yours. and, indeed, to be plain wi' you, cusine, i think you hae owre mony fykes. there, didna ye keep grizzy for mair than twa hours, yesterday morning, soopin' and dustin' your room in every corner, an' cleanin' out the twa bits of buird, that are for naething but to set your foot on after a'?'" it may be well to explain that the chickens had been roosting in this chamber before mrs. mason's arrival. the story of mr. macclarty's death is pathetic. he is lying ill with a fever in the press-bed in the kitchen, where not a breath of air reaches him. the neighbours have crowded in to offer sympathy. the doors are tightly closed, and his wife has piled blankets over him and given him whiskey and hot water to drink. when mrs. mason, who knows that with proper care his life can be saved, urges that he be removed to her room where he can have air, all the neighbours violently oppose her advice. but peter macglashon, the oracle of the village, looks at it more philosophically: "'if it's the wull o' god that he's to dee, it's a' ane whar ye tak him; ye canna hinder the wull o' god.'" but upon mrs. mason's insisting that we should do our best to save the life of the sick with the reason god has given us, peter becomes alarmed: "'that's no soond doctrine,' exclaimed peter. 'it's the law of works.'" elizabeth hamilton had been a teacher and had written books on education, so that her description of the school which mrs. mason opened in the village gives an accurate idea of the scottish schools for the poorer classes. each class was divided into landlord, tenants, and under-tenants, one order being responsible for a specific amount of reading and writing to the order above it. the landlord was responsible to the master both for his own diligence and the diligence of his vassals. if the tenants disobeyed the laws they were tried by a jury of their mates. the results of the training at mrs. mason's school might well be an aim of teachers to-day: "to have been educated at the school of glenburnie implied a security for truth, diligence and honesty." the pupils in the school gradually learned to love cleanliness and order. the little flower-garden in front gave pleasure to all. the villagers declared, "the flowers are a hantel bonnier than the midden and smell a hantel sweeter, too." with this improvement in taste, the "gude auld gaits" gave way to a better order of things. _the cottagers of glenburnie_ is more realistic in detail than anything which had yet been written. it is a short simple story told in simple language. there is a slight plot, but it is the village upon which our attention is fastened. one individual stands out more strongly than the rest: that is mrs. macclarty with her constant expression, "it is well eneugh. i canna be fashed." this little book was read in every scotch village, and many of the poor people saw in it a picture of their own homes. but its sound common-sense appealed to them. it was reasonable that butter without hairs would sell for more than with them, and that gardens without weeds would produce more vegetables than when so encumbered. the book did for the cottagers of scotland what mrs. mason had done for those of glenburnie. * * * * * the lives of anna maria and jane porter resemble in a few particulars that of elizabeth hamilton. like her they belonged, at least on the father's side, to ireland, and like her they lived in scotland, and their names will always be associated with that country. but elizabeth hamilton wrote the first novel of scotland's poor, the ancestor of _the window in thrums_ and _beside the bonnie brier bush_; jane porter wrote the first novel of scotland's kings, the immediate forerunner of _waverley_, _the abbot_, and _the monastery_. upon the death of major porter, who had been stationed for some years with his regiment at durham, mrs. porter removed to edinburgh, where her children were educated. their quick lively imaginations found food for growth on scottish soil. at that time caledonia was a land of cliff and crag, inhabited by a quarrelsome people, whom the english still regarded with something the same aversion which dr. johnson had so often expressed to boswell. but every castle had its story of brave knights and fair ladies, and every brae had been the scene of renowned deeds of arms. in every cottage the memory of the past was kept alive, and fathers and mothers related to their children stories of wallace and of bruce, until the romantic past became more real than the living present. mrs. porter's servants delighted to relate to her eager children stories of scotland's glory. the maids would sing to them the songs of "wallace wight," and the serving-man would tell them tales of bannockburn and cambus-kenneth. rarely have stories fallen on such fertile soil. in a short time, three of these children became famous. sir robert ker porter, the brother of anna and jane, followed closely in the footsteps of scotland's heroes, and became distinguished as a soldier and diplomat, as well as a famous painter of battles. he painted the enormous canvas of _the storming of seringapatam_, a sensational panorama, one hundred and twenty feet in length, the first of its kind, but in a style that has often been followed in recent years. the idol of his family, it would seem that he was endowed with many of those qualities which his sisters gave to the heroes of their romances. anna maria porter, the youngest of the group, was the first to appear in print. at the age of fifteen, she published a little volume called _artless tales_. from this time until her death, at least every two years a new book from her pen was announced. she wrote a large number of historical romances, which were widely read and translated into many languages. this kind of story, in the hands of sophia lee, was tame and uninteresting. anna porter increased its scope and its popularity. her plots are well worked out with many thrilling adventures. her imagination, however, had been quickened by reading, not by observation, and although her scenes cover many countries of europe and many periods of history, they differ but little in pictorial detail, and her characters are lifeless. her style of writing is, moreover, so inflated that it gives an air of unreality to her books. she thus describes the hungarian brothers: "they were, indeed, perfect specimens of the loveliness of youth and the magnificence of manhood." this novel, dealing with the french revolution, was one of the most popular of all her stories. it went through several editions both in england and on the continent. superlative expressions seem to have been fashionable in that age which was still encumbered by much that was artificial in dress and manners. miss porter with proper formality thus writes of her heroine as she was recovering from a fainting fit: "with a blissful shiver, ippolita slowly unclosed her eyes, and turning them round, with such a look as we may imagine blessed angels cast, when awakening amid the raptures of another world, she met those of her sweet and gracious uncle." some of her society novels are witty and have a lively style, which suggests the truth of mr. s. c. hall's description of the sisters. anna, a blonde, handsome and gay, he named l'allegro, in contrast to jane, a brunette, equally handsome, but with the dignified manners of the heroines of her own romances, whom he styled il penseroso. * * * * * jane porter took a more serious view of the responsibilities of authorship than her sister. her first novel, _thaddeus of warsaw_, was written while england was agitated against france and excited over the wrongs of poland. it grew out of popular feeling. miss porter had become acquainted with friends of kosciusko, men who had taken part with him in his country's struggle for liberty, and made him the hero of the story. the scenery of poland was so well described that the poles refused to believe that she had not visited their country; and events were related in a manner so pleasing to them that they distinguished the author by many honours. it is one thing to write an historical novel of people and events that have long been buried in oblivion; but to write a story of times so near the present that its chief actors are still living, is, indeed, a rash task. and for any history to meet with the approval of its hero and his friends bespeaks rare excellence in the work. in the light of the classic standing of the historical novel, due to the genius of scott and dumas, it is interesting to read how _thaddeus of warsaw_ came to be published. miss porter wrote the romance merely for her own amusement, with no thought of its being read outside the circle of her family and intimate friends. they urged her to publish it. but for a long time she resisted their importunities on the ground that it did not belong to any known style of writing: stories of real life, like _tom jones_, or improbable romances, like _the mysteries of udolpho_, were the only legitimate forms of fiction. _thaddeus of warsaw_ had the exact details of history with a romance added to please the author's fancy. thus did jane porter discover to the world the possibilities of the historical novel. her next novel, _the scottish chiefs_, grew out of the stories she had heard in her childhood. besides the tales of scotland's struggle for independence which she heard from the servants in her own home, a venerable old woman called luckie forbes, who lived not far from mrs. porter's house, used to tell her of the wonderful deeds of william wallace. of the influence these stories had upon her childish mind, jane porter has thus written: "i must avow, that to luckie forbes's familiar, and even endearing, manner of narrating the lives of william wallace and his dauntless followers; her representation of their heart-sacrifices for the good of their country, filling me with an admiration and a reverential amazement, like her own; and calling forth my tears and sobs, when she told of the deaths of some, and of the cruel execution of the virtuous leader of them all;--to her i must date my early and continued enthusiasm in the character of sir william wallace! and in the friends his truly hero-soul delighted to honour." before writing _the scottish chiefs_, miss porter read everything she could find bearing upon the history of england and scotland during the reigns of the first two edwards. she personally visited the places she described. she wrote in the preface: "i assure the reader that i seldom lead him to any spot in scotland whither some written or oral testimony respecting my hero had not previously conducted myself." besides these sources of information, miss porter was familiar with the poem of _wallace_ by blind harry the minstrel, the biographer of scotland's national hero. blind harry lived nearly two centuries after the death of wallace, but he had access to books now lost, and collected stories about scotland's struggle for independence while it was still prominent in the public mind. although he tells many exalted stories of the numbers whom wallace overcame by his single arm, the poem is on the whole authentic. sheriff mackay in the _dictionary of national biography_ writes that the life of wallace by blind harry "became the secular bible of his countrymen, and echoes through their later history." miss porter introduced love scenes to vary the deeds of war, but there is nothing else in _the scottish chiefs_ which is not true to history, or to that more legitimate source of romance, the traditions common among the people. from the opening chapter, in which wallace is described as an outlaw because he had refused to take the oath of allegiance to an english king, to his death in london and the final crowning of bruce, there is not a dull page. especially interesting is the scene between william wallace and the earl of carrick, after the battle of falkirk, and the appearance of robert bruce, who overheard this conversation, fighting by the side of wallace. the truth of this incident has been denied, but it is related by blind harry. the trial of william wallace in the great hall at westminster for treason, and his defence that he had never acknowledged the english government, is most impressive, and is a matter of record. _the scottish chiefs_ is the first historical novel in which the author made diligent research in order to give a truthful representation of the times. it has the atmosphere of feudal days. notwithstanding the ridicule cast upon wallace as a lady's hero, he is drawn in heroic proportions. miss mitford declared that she scarcely knew "one _herós de roman_ whom it is possible to admire, except wallace in miss porter's story." the work is written in the style of the old epics. the many puerile attempts of the last few years to write an historical romance in which washington or lincoln should figure have shown how difficult is the task. how weak and commonplace have these great men appeared in fiction! it requires a nature akin to the heroic to draw it. in , when it was published, _the scottish chiefs_ was the only great historical romance. four years later _waverley_ was published, the first of the novels of sir walter scott. this was superior in imagination and in craftsmanship to miss porter's novel, but not in interest. _the scottish chiefs_ has since been excelled by many others of the waverley novels, though not by all, by _henry esmond_, and _a tale of two cities_, but it preceded all these in time, and still holds a place as a classic of the second rank. critics of to-day smile at its enthusiastic style, but miss porter speaks with no more enthusiasm than did the poor folk from whom she heard the story. as long as enthusiastic youth loves an unblemished hero, _the scottish chiefs_ will be read. it is impossible to analyse these early impressions or to test their truth. one can only remember them with gratitude. jane porter has, however, taught the youth of other lands to reverence scotland's popular hero, so that the mention of his name awakens a thrill of pleasure, and the hills and glades associated with his deeds glow with the light of romance. in , jane porter wrote a third historical novel, _the pastor's fireside_. this is far inferior to _the scottish chiefs_. it has the same elevated style, and the mystery which surrounds the hero awakens and holds the attention. but the novel deals with the later stuarts, and one feels that the author herself was but little interested in the historical events about which she was writing. the book has no abiding qualities. in was published a book bearing the title _sir edward seaward's narrative of his shipwreck and consequent discovery of certain islands in the caribbean sea, with a detail of many extraordinary and highly interesting events in his life from the year to as written in his own diary. edited by jane porter._ in the preface miss porter explains how the manuscript was given to her by the relatives of sir edward. the story reads like a second robinson crusoe. it has all the minute details that give an air of verisimilitude to the writings of defoe. in the opening chapter, edward seaward supposedly gives this account of himself: "born of loyal and honest parents, whose means were just sufficient to give a common education to their children, i have neither to boast of pedigree nor of learning; yet they bequeathed to me a better inheritance--a stout constitution, a peaceable disposition, and a proper sense of what is due to my superiors and equals; for such an inheritance i am grateful to god, and to them." in the story he is married to a woman of his own rank, and she embarks with him for jamaica, but they are shipwrecked on an island near lat. deg. min. n. and long. deg. w. they find bags of money hidden on the island, some negroes come to them, and a schooner is driven to their haven. edward sees in this a purpose which afterward is fulfilled. he says to his wife: "i should be the most ungrateful of men, to the good god who has bestowed all this on me, if i did not feel that this money, so wonderfully delivered into my hands, was for some special purpose of stewardship. the providential arrival of the poor castaway negroes, and then of the schooner,--all--all working together to give us the means of providing every comfort, towards planting a colony of refuge in that blessed haven of our own preservation,--seem to me, in solemn truth, as so many signs from the divine will, that it is our duty to fulfil a task allotted to us, in that long unknown island." this island becomes inhabited by a happy people, and seaward is knighted by george the second. everybody read the book. a second edition was called for within the year. old naval officers got out their charts, and hunted up the probable locality of the places mentioned. nobody at first doubted its veracity. the _quarterly_, however, decided that no such man had ever existed and that the whole story was a fiction. it hunted for a schooner mentioned and the names of the naval officers. the latter had never served in his majesty's navy and the former had not timed her voyages according to the story. the uniform of a naval officer described in the narrative was not worn until thirteen years after these adventures had taken place, and no man by the name of seaward had been knighted during this time, nor was there any village in england having the name of the village which he gave as his birthplace. supposing the editor had changed names and dates, the _quarterly_ criticism becomes valueless. although the magazine declared it a work of fiction, it gave both the story and the style high praise, and declared it far superior to her romances. when miss porter was asked about it, she declined to answer, but said that scott had his great secret and she might be permitted to have her little one. it is generally considered now to have been the work of jane porter. no two books differ more in style than _the scottish chiefs_ and _sir edward seaward_. but twenty-two years had elapsed between them. the former is written in dignified, stately language; the latter in simple homely words, and both its invention and its style entitle it to a place among english classics. chapter ix amelia opie. mary brunton every novel that touches upon the life of its generation naturally in course of time becomes historical. these novels should be preserved, not necessarily for their literary excellence, but because they bear the imprint of an age. such are the novels of amelia opie and mary brunton. mrs. opie, then miss alderson, left her quiet home in norwich to visit london at the height of the furor occasioned by the french revolution. the literary circles in which she was received were discussing excitedly the rights of men and women, and the beauties of life lived according to the dictates of nature. among these enthusiasts, miss alderson met mary wollstonecraft, the author of _vindication of the rights of woman_, and esteemed her highly. her own imagination did not, however, yield to the intoxication of a life of perfect freedom, a dream which wrecked the life of mary wollstonecraft. there is no sadder biography than that of mary wollstonecraft. in paris, she met gilbert imlay, an american, with whom she fell in love. when he wished to marry her, she refused to permit him to make her his wife, because she had family debts to pay, and she was unwilling to have him legally responsible for them. but she had read the books of rousseau, and had been deeply impressed with the thought that marriage is a bondage, not needed by true love. she took the name of imlay, and passed for his wife, but the marriage was not sanctioned either by the church or by law. after the birth of a daughter, imlay deserted her. at first she tried to commit suicide, and there is the sad picture of this talented woman walking about in the drenching rain, and then throwing herself from the bridge at putney. she was rescued, and a little over a year later became the wife of william godwin. the life-story of mary wollstonecraft suggested to amelia opie the novel of _adeline mowbray, or the mother and daughter_, which was not written until after the death of the original. it is a tender pathetic story. mrs. mowbray, the mother of adeline, believed by her neighbours to be a genius, is interested in new theories of education, and, while writing a book on that subject, occasionally experiments with adeline, although she neglects her for the most part. in spite of this adeline grows up beautiful and pure, totally ignorant of the world and its wickedness. her mother often quoted in her presence the book of a mr. glenmurray, in which he proves marriage to be a tyranny and a profanation of the sacred ties of love. adeline is captivated by the enthusiastic ideals of the young author. there is a fine contrast in character and motive, where adeline is entertaining mr. glenmurray, the high-minded writer, and sir patrick o'carrol, a man of many gallantries. sir patrick is shocked to meet at her home the man whose theories have banished him from respectable society. adeline, innocent of any low interpretation that may be put upon her words, makes the frank avowal that, in her opinion, marriage is a shameless tie, and that love and honour are all that should bind men and women. sir patrick heartily agrees with her sentiments, and as a consequence accosts her with a freedom repugnant to her, although she hardly understands its import, while glenmurray sits by gloomily, resolving to warn her in private that the opinions she had expressed were better confined in the present dark state of the public mind to a select and discriminating circle. after they leave adeline, glenmurray, as the outcome of this meeting, had the satisfaction of fighting a duel with sir patrick, contrary to the tenets of his own book. but when, to escape the advances of sir patrick, adeline places herself under the protection of glenmurray, who ardently loves her, he urges her to marry him. this she refuses to do, and encourages him to show the world the truth and beauty of his teachings. glenmurray, a man of sensitive nature, suffers more than adeline from the indignities she constantly receives when she frankly says she is mr. glenmurray's companion, not his wife. he takes her from place to place to avoid them, for he realises that the world censures her, while it excuses him. but adeline is so happy in her love for him, and in her faith in his teachings, that she endures every humiliation with the faith of the early christian martyrs. when he urges her, as he so often does, to marry him, he reads in her eyes only grief that he will not gladly suffer for what he believes to be right, and desists rather than pain her. but his death is hastened by the harassing thought that her whole future is blighted by his teachings. as he says to her just before his death: "had not i, with the heedless vanity of youth, given to the world the crude conceptions of four-and-twenty, you might at this moment have been the idol of a respectable society; and i, equally respected, have been the husband of your heart; while happiness would perhaps have kept that fatal disease at bay, of which anxiety has facilitated the approach." it is a beautiful love story, but the hero and heroine were of too fine a fibre to stand alone against the world. after the death of glenmurray, the interest flags. the conclusion is weak, not at all worthy of the beginning. love of every variety has been the theme of poets and novelists, but there is no love story more beautiful for its self-sacrificing devotion to principle and to each other, than the few pages of this novel which tell of the unsanctioned married life of the high-minded idealist and his bride. mrs. opie wrote _simple tales_ and _tales of real life_. they are for the most part pathetic stories in which unhappiness in the family circle is caused either by undue sternness of a parent, the unfilial conduct of a son or daughter, or a misunderstanding between husband and wife. the feelings of the characters are often minutely described. a firm faith in the underlying goodness of human nature is shown throughout all these tales, and all teach love and forbearance. * * * * * mary brunton like mrs. opie wrote to improve the ethical ideals of her generation. in the books of that day the theory was often advanced that young men must sow their wild oats, and that men were more pleasing to the ladies for a few vices. her first novel, _self-control_, was written to contradict this doctrine. in a letter to joanna baillie, mrs. brunton wrote: "i merely intended to show the power of the religious principle in bestowing self-command, and to bear testimony against a maxim as immoral as indelicate, that a reformed rake makes the best husband." laura, the heroine of _self-control_, ardently loved a man of rank and fashion. when she learned of his amours, her love turned first to grief, then to disgust. stung by her abhorrence, he attempted to seduce her to conquer her pride. the purity of the heroine triumphs. she meets a man whom she esteems and afterwards marries. many of laura's adventures border on the improbable, but her emotions are truthfully depicted. this was a bolder novel than appears on the surface. long before this the wicked heroine had been banished from fiction. the leading lady must be virtuous to keep the love of the hero. richardson laid down that law of the novel. mary brunton asserted the same rule for the hero, and maintained that a gentleman, handsome, noble, accomplished, could not retain the love of a pure woman, if he were not virtuous. the book gave rise to heated discussions. two gentlemen had a violent dispute over it: one said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman; the other, that it ought to be written in letters of gold. beyond its ethical import, the novel has no literary value. the kind reception given to _self-control_ led the author to begin her second novel, _discipline_. this was intended to show how the mind must be trained by suffering before it can hope for true enjoyment when self-control is lacking. mary brunton had read miss edgeworth's description of the irish people with pleasure; so she planned to set forth in this novel the manners of the scottish highlands and of the orkneys, where she herself had been born. but before it was finished, _waverley_ was published. there the scottish highlands stood forth on a large canvas, distinct and truthful, and mrs. brunton realised at once how weak her own attempts were compared with scott's masterly work. her interest in her book flagged, although it was published in december of that year. some of the highland scenes are interesting because accurately described, and her account of a mad-house in edinburgh is said to be an exact representation of an asylum for the insane in that city. mrs. brunton died before her third novel, _emmeline_, was finished. her husband, the reverend alexander brunton, professor of oriental languages at edinburgh university, published the fragment of it with her memoirs after her death. the aim of this novel was to show how little chance of happiness there is when a divorced woman marries her seducer. it only shows the inability of emmeline to live down her past shame and the unhappiness which follows the married pair. in the novels of mrs. opie and mary brunton the standard of conduct is the same as to-day. both men and women are expected to lead upright lives, with true regard for the happiness of those about them. in _self-control_ the hero refuses to fight a duel with the villain who has injured him, and forgives him with a true christian spirit. to be sure, there are still seductions, and the world of fashion is without a heart. but conduct which the former generation would have regarded with a smile is here denominated sin, and that which they named prudery shines forth as virtue. the problems of life which these novels discuss are the same, as we have said, which agitate the world to-day. chapter x jane austen if in this age of steam and electricity you would escape from the noise of the city, and experience for an hour the quiet joys of the english countryside, at a time when a chaise and four was the quickest means of reaching the metropolis from any part of the kingdom, turn to the pages of jane austen. in them have been preserved faithful pictures of the peaceful life of the south of england exactly as it existed a hundred and more years ago. the gently sloping downs crossed by hedgerows, the lazy rivers meandering through the valleys, the little villages half hidden in the orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum, all suggest the land of happy homes. on the outskirts of every village there are the two of three gentlemen's houses: the substantial mansion of the squire, with its park of old elms, oaks, and beeches; a smaller house suitable for a gentleman of slender income, like mr. bennet, the father of the four girls of _pride and prejudice_, or for an elder son who will in time take possession of the hall, like charles musgrove in the story of _persuasion_; and the still smaller parsonage standing in the garden of vegetables and flowers, surrounded by a laurel hedge, where lives a younger son or a friend of the family. the gentry that inhabit these homes carry on the plot of jane austen's novels. and what an even, almost uneventful life they lead. life with them is one long holiday. dance follows dance, varied only by a dinner at the mansion, a picnic party, private theatricals, a brief sojourn at bath, a briefer one in london, or a ride to lyme, seventeen miles away. but cupid ever hovers near, and in each one of these groups of gentle folk we watch the course of true love, "which never did run smooth." for in spite of match-making mammas and stern fathers with an eye that the marriage settlements shall be sufficient to clothe sentiment with true british respectability, the six novels of jane austen contain as many true and tender love stories, differing from one another not so much in the incidents as in the characters of the lovers. unlike the older novelists, who constantly drew the attention away from the main theme by stories of thrilling adventure, jane austen holds closely to the great problem of fiction, whether or not the youths and maidens will be happily married at the conclusion of the book. when darcy first meets elizabeth, the heroine of _pride and prejudice_, he shuns her and her family as vulgar. elizabeth is so prejudiced against him that she cannot forget his insulting arrogance. but darcy's love cannot be stemmed. other heroes have plunged into raging floods to rescue the fair heroine. darcy does more. for love of elizabeth he accepts the whole bennet family, including mrs. bennet, who always says the silly thing, and lydia, who had almost invited wickham to elope with her and was indifferent as to whether or not he married her, until darcy compelled him to do so--a bitter humiliation for a man whose greatest fault was overweening pride of birth. at last, elizabeth comprehends the extent of his generosity, his superior understanding and strength of character, and darcy is rewarded by the hand of the sunniest heroine in all fiction. who but elizabeth with her independent spirit, quick intelligence and lively wit could curb his family pride! they marry, and we know they will be happy. _sense and sensibility_ works out a problem for lovers. like many romantic girls, marianne asserts that a woman can love but once. "he never loved that loved not at first sight" is also part of her creed. but after her infatuation for willoughby has been cured, she contentedly marries colonel brandon, although she knows that he frequently has rheumatism and wears flannel waistcoats. marianne will be much happier as the wife of a man of mature years who loves her impulsive nature and can control it than she would have been with the gallant who won her first love. in the piquant satire of _northanger abbey_ there is another problem suggested. this book is distinctly modern. man is the pursued; woman the pursuer. bernard shaw has treated this momentous question in a serious manner in many of his plays. jane austen regards it with a humorous smile. did henry tilney ever know why he married catherine morland? or was this daughter of a country parsonage, without beauty, without accomplishments, and without riches, aware that on her first visit to bath she used feminine arts that would have put becky sharp to shame--who, by the way, was a little girl at that time--and would have made anne, the knowing heroine of _man and superman_, green with envy? yet her arts consisted simply in following the dictates of her heart. she fell in love with henry tilney; looked for him whenever she entered the pump-room; was unhappy if he were absent and expressed her joy at his approach; saw in him the paragon of wisdom and looked at every thing with his eyes. from first ignoring her, he began to seek her society, and learn the true excellence of her character. and then jane austen explains: "i must confess that this affection originated in nothing better than gratitude; or in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. it is a new circumstance in romance, i acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine's dignity, but if it is as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will be all my own." but lest we think that miss austen is asserting a rule that women take the initiative in this matter of love and marriage, it is well to remember that darcy first loved elizabeth bennet, and forced her to acknowledge his worth, and that colonel brandon married a young lady who had formerly supposed him at the advanced age of thirty-five to be occupied with thoughts of death rather than of love. and mr. knightley is another hero who fell in love and waited patiently for its return. emma is like marianne in one respect, she needed guidance. almost from childhood the mistress of her father's house and the first lady in the society of highbury, she was threatened by two evils, "the power of having too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself." mr. knightley, the elder brother of her elder sister's husband, is the only person that sees that she is not always wise and that she is sometimes selfish. he is the only one that chides her. emma is interested in promoting the welfare of all about her, but she lacks that most feminine quality of insight, so that her well-meant help, as in the case of her protégée, poor harriet smith, is sometimes productive of evil. and yet emma is brave and self-forgetful. not until she has schooled herself to think of mr. knightley as married to harriet, is she aware how much he is a part of her own life. but this is only another instance of her blindness. when she learns that he has loved her with all her faults ever since she was thirteen, she is very happy. there is no tumultuous passion in this union, but we are assured of a love that will abide through the years. in _mansfield park_ and in _persuasion_, there is another variety of the old story. fanny price and anne elliot, the one the daughter of a poor lieutenant of marines, whose family is the most ill-bred in all miss austen's books, the other the neglected daughter of sir walter elliot, baronet, have more in common than any other of her heroines. although these stories are different, yet in each it is the devotion of the heroine that guides the course of love through many obstacles into a quiet haven. who that reads their story will say that miss austen's maidens are without passion? they do not analyse their feelings, nor do they pour them forth in wild soliloquy. but the heart of each is clearly revealed through little acts and expressions. fanny price, cherishing a love for edmund bertram, who was kind to her when she was neglected by everybody else, refuses to marry the rich, handsome, and brilliant mr. crawford, although she herself is penniless. we feel her misery as she realises that she is nothing but a friend to edmund and rejoice with her when her love awakens a response. anne elliot, the gentlest of all her heroines, who in obedience to her father has broken her engagement to captain wentworth eight years before, when she is again thrown into his company, observes his every expression, and grows sad and weak in health at his studied neglect. other heroines have said more, but none have felt more than miss austen's. anne elliot herself has spoken for them: "all the privilege i claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one) is that of loving longest, when existence, or when hope, is gone." but jane austen, like shakespeare, is a dramatist. so, lest this be taken for miss austen's opinion, captain wentworth has the last word here when he writes to anne, "dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. unjust i have been, weak and resentful i have been, but never inconstant." and so, at the close of these novels, two more happy homes are added to those of rural england. are there many heroes and heroines for whom we dare predict a happy married life? would mr. b. and pamela have written such long letters to each other about the training of their children if conversation had not been a bore? evelina must have been disappointed to discover that lord orville lived on roast beef, plum-pudding, and port wine instead of music and poetry. of all scott's heroes and heroines none had sacrificed more for each other than ivanhoe and rowena; he gave up rotherwood, and, as a disinherited son, sought forgetfulness of her charms in distant palestine; she put aside all hopes of becoming a saxon queen, and was true to the gallant son of cedric. yet we have thackeray for authority that they were not only unhappy, but often quarrelled after scott left them at the altar. and none of thackeray's marriages turned out well, although becky sharp made rodney crawley very happy until he discovered her wiles. dickens was perhaps more fortunate, but david was led away by the cunning ways of dora before he discovered a companion and helpmate in agnes, a heroine worthy to be placed beside elizabeth and jane bennet. george eliot's books and those of later novelists are rather a warning than an incentive to matrimony. have all our sighs and tears over the mishaps of ill-starred lovers been in vain, and is it true that when the curtain falls at the wedding it is only to shut from view a scene of domestic infelicity? not so with jane austen. she is the queen of match-makers. the marriages brought about by her guidance give a belief in the permanency of english home life, quite as necessary for the welfare of the kingdom as the stability of magna charta. her heroes have qualities that wear well, and her heroines might have inspired wordsworth's lines: a creature not too bright or good for human nature's daily food, for transient sorrows, simple wiles, praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles. besides the lovers, many diverting people lived in these homes of the gentry, quite as amusing as any of the peasants who were brought upon the stage by the older dramatists for our entertainment; perhaps more amusing, because of their self-sufficiency. these people seldom do anything that is peculiar, nor are they the objects of practical jokes, as were so many men and women in the earlier books; but they talk freely both at home and abroad about whatever is of interest to them. they seldom use stereotyped words or phrases, yet their conversation is a crystal from which the whole mental horizon of the speaker shines forth. when mrs. bennet learns that netherfield park has been let to a single gentleman of fortune, her first exclamation comes from the heart--"what a fine thing for our girls!" after mr. collins, upon whom mr. bennet's estate is entailed, has resolved to make all possible amends to his daughters by marrying one of them, and is making his famous proposal to elizabeth, he says with solemn composure: "but, before i am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying--and, moreover, for coming into hertfordshire with the design of selecting a wife, as i certainly did." no wonder elizabeth laughed at such a lover. mr. collins is the same type of man as mr. smith, whom evelina meets at snow hill, but infinitely more ridiculous because he is an educated man of some attainments. then there is mr. woodhouse, the father of emma, with his constant solicitude for everybody's health and his fears that they may have indigestion. when his daughter and her family arrive from london, all well and hearty, he says by way of hospitality: "you and i will have a nice basin of gruel together. my dear emma, suppose we all have a basin of gruel." his friend mrs. bates is always voluble. she is describing mr. dixon's country seat in ireland to emma: "jane has heard a great deal of its beauty--from mr. dixon, i mean--i do not know that she ever heard about it from anybody else--but it was very natural, you know, that he should like to speak of his own place while he was paying his addresses--and as jane used to be very often walking out with them--for colonel and mrs. campbell were very particular about their daughter's not walking out often with only mr. dixon, for which i do not at all blame them; of course she heard everything he might be telling miss campbell about his own home in ireland." one respects the mental power of a woman who could remember the main thread of her discourse amid so many digressions. how characteristic is sir walter elliot's reply to the gentleman who is trying to bring a neighbour's name to his mind. "wentworth? oh, ay! mr. wentworth, the curate of monkford. you misled me by the term _gentleman_. i thought you were speaking of some man of property." and not the least amusing of these people is mr. elton's bride, a pert sort of woman who for some reason patronises everybody into whose company she is thrown. after meeting mr. knightley, by far the most consequential person about highbury, she expresses her approval of him to emma: "knightley is quite the gentleman! i like him very much! decidedly, i think, a very gentlemanlike man." and emma wonders if mr. knightley has been able to pronounce this self-important newcomer as quite the lady. pick out almost any speech at random, and anyone who is at all familiar with miss austen will easily recognise the speaker. this ability to describe people by such delicate touches has been highly praised by macaulay in the essay on madame d'arblay before quoted. he thus compares jane austen with shakespeare: "admirable as he [shakespeare] was in all parts of his art, we must admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. but among the writers who, in the point which we have mentioned, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing jane austen, a woman of whom england is justly proud. she has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. there are, for instance, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, mr. edward ferrars, mr. henry tilney, mr. edmund bertram, and mr. elton. they are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. they have all been liberally educated. they all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. they are all young. they are all in love. not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of sterne. not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in pope. who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? no such thing. harpagon is not more unlike to jourdain, joseph surface is not more unlike to sir lucius o'trigger, than every one of miss austen's young divines to his reverend brethren. and almost all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed." like shakespeare jane austen knew the inner nature by intuition, and had learned its outward expression by observation. character not only affects the speech of each one of her men and women, but determines their destiny and shapes the plot of the story. the class she has chosen to represent is the least under the sway of circumstances of any in england. with money for all needs, and leisure for enjoyment, free from obligations which pertain to higher rank, character here develops freely and naturally. not one of the matchmaking men or women, not even the intelligent emma, succeeds in changing the life of those whom they attempt to influence. character is stronger than any outside agency. in this respect, jane austen is decidedly at variance with thomas hardy or tolstoi, but she is at one with shakespeare. in the opening paragraph of each book, character begins to assert itself. if darcy had been without pride, and elizabeth had been without prejudice; if marianne had had her sensibilities under control; if emma had not been blind; if captain wentworth had not been unjust and resentful--there would have been no story to tell, the course of true love would have run so smooth. but all of them are loving and faithful, and these qualities in the end conquer, and bring the stories to a happy conclusion. edmund gosse thus writes of her delineation of character: "like balzac, like tourgenieff at his best, jane austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. she presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. she never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. among the creators of the world, jane austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely her own." this seeming control of her characters is due largely to the fact that whatever happens to them is just what might have been expected. this is particularly true of the bad people she has created. innocence led astray has been a popular means of exciting interest ever since richardson told the sad story of clarissa harlowe. but there is no such incident in jane austen's books. lydia, who hasn't a thought for anybody nor anything but a red-coat, and wickham, who elopes with her without any intention of matrimony, are properly punished, by being married to each other, and the future unhappiness which must be their lot is due to their own natures. willoughby had seduced one girl, trifled with the affections of another, and married an heiress, but he finds only misery, and sadly says: "i must rub through the world as well as i can." henry crawford, and his sister, with so much that is good in their natures, yet with a lack of moral fibre, are both unhappy. each has lost the one they respected and loved and might have married. with what wit she leaves william elliot, the all-agreeable man, the heir of sir walter, who, that he may keep the latter single, has enticed the scheming mrs. clay from his home: "and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning or hers may finally carry the day; whether, after preventing her from being the wife of sir walter, he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of sir william." and so punishment is meted out with that nicety of judgment which distinguishes every detail of her novels. but jane austen has little interest in immorality. "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery; i quit such odious subjects as soon as i can," she says in _mansfield park_. and her readers have observed that deeds of evil take place off the stage, while she records only what is reported of them in the drawing-room. she dwells as little on misery as on guilt. she shows in her letters charitable regard for the poor people of steventon and chawton. she describes minutely the unkempt house of lieutenant price at portsmouth with its incessant noise of heavy steps, banging doors, and untrained servants, where every voice was loud excepting mrs. price's, which resembled "the soft monotony of lady bertram's, only worn into fretfulness." miss austen's pen was able to portray scenes of squalor and vice; she chose to turn from them. perhaps she felt instinctively that true æsthetic pleasure cannot be produced by dwelling on a scene in a book which would be repulsive to the eye. miss austen wrote before there was much serious interest in the lives of the poor. their only function in literature had been to provoke laughter. the sensitive daughter of the rector of steventon may have felt, as others have, that there was no occasion to laugh at the blunders and ill-manners of peasants, which were proper and natural to their condition of life. she did not need these people to entertain us. there were quite as funny people in the hall as in the cottage, funnier, even, because their humorous sayings spring from a humorous twist in their natures, not from ignorance. sir walter scott, after reading _pride and prejudice_ for the third time, said: "that young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful i ever met with. the big bow-wow strain i can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me." sir walter scott proved the truth of the above statement in _st. ronan's well_, one of the least successful of his novels, which was written in imitation of jane austen. because jane austen confined her work so closely to ordinary middle-class people, she has been called narrow. but if we judge men and women not by dress and manners, but by what they are, these people furnish as broad a view of humanity as could be obtained by travelling up and down the world. a trained botanist will gather an herbarium from a country lane that will give a more extended knowledge of botany than a less skilful one could get by travelling through the woods and fields of a continent. very few novelists have portrayed greater varieties of human nature than miss austen. jane austen's style has been praised by all critics. george william curtis wrote of her art: "she writes wholly as an artist, while george eliot advocates views, and miss brontë's fiery page is often a personal protest. in miss austen, on the other hand, there is in kind, but infinitely less in degree, the same clear atmosphere of pure art which we perceive in shakespeare and goethe." while miss austen has been so often likened to shakespeare, she is in no sense a romantic writer. she belongs purely to the classic school. she has the restraint, the perfect poise of the greeks. she recognises everywhere the need of law. she accepts society as it exists under the restraints of law and religion. she no more questioned the english prayer book and the english constitution than homer questioned the existence of the gods and the supreme power of kings. this feeling for law shaped her art. her plots are perfectly symmetrical. there is no redundancy in expression. there is none of that wild luxuriance in fancy or expression so common in romanticism. each word used is needed in the sentence, and is in its proper place. the strength of romanticism lies in its impetuosity; the strength of classicism lies in its self-control. this is the strength of jane austen. emotion in her books is so restrained that the superficial reader doubts its existence. yet her characters feel deeply and are sensitive to the acts and words of those about them. although their feelings are under control, they are none the less real. the reader watches, but is not asked to participate in their griefs. as she never moves to tears, neither does she provoke laughter, but she lightens every page with a quiet glow of humour. humour was as natural to her as to elizabeth bennet, whose sayings give the sparkle to _pride and prejudice_. much of the humour in her letters consists of an unexpected turn to a sentence or an incongruous combination of words. she writes of meeting "dr. hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife or himself must be dead." she announces the marriage of a gentleman to a widow by the laconic message, "dr. gardiner was married yesterday to mrs. percy and her three daughters." and again she says that a certain mrs. blount appeared the same as in september, "with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck." she sees through the affectations of society and observes the pleasure afforded by the small misfortunes of another as plainly as did thackeray later. the wife of a certain gentleman is discovered "to be everything the neighbourhood could wish, silly and cross as well as extravagant." she finds continual source of enjoyment in people's foibles, and thinks that her own misfortunes ought to furnish jokes to her acquaintances, or she will die in their debt for entertainment. in a less refined degree, this was the view of life of miss burney, her favourite author. miss austen was but three years old when evelina made her début at ranelagh, and not over seven when cecilia visited her three guardians in london: _camilla_ was published in the year that it is thought that miss austen began _pride and prejudice_. during these years, miss burney's fame was undimmed. consider yourself for a moment in a circulating library, in the year or , suppose you are fond of novel reading, and have moreover the refined tastes of miss austen; you will find there no novelist who can hold a rival place to miss burney. miss austen refers to her both in her novels and letters. in only one passage in her novels has she interrupted her story to express a general opinion; that is in _northanger abbey_, where she praises the art of the novelist, and refers particularly to _cecilia_, _camilla_, and _belinda_. in the same novel john thorpe's lack of taste is emphasised by his calling _camilla_ a stupid book of unnatural stuff, which he could not get through. she evidently discussed miss burney's novels with the people she met; a certain young man just entered at oxford has heard that _evelina_ was written by dr. johnson, and she finds two traits in a certain miss fletcher very pleasing: "she admires _camilla_, and drinks no cream in her tea." but miss austen was no blind disciple of miss burney. all the odd characters which miss burney culled from the lower ranks of society were swept away by miss austen. everything approaching tragedy or the improbable is avoided, but what is left is amplified and refined until there is no more trace of miss burney than there is of perugino in the paintings of raphael. artists in other lines have striven in their work for a unified whole. most novelists have been more intent on pointing a moral or producing a sensation than on the technique of their writing. their works as a whole lack proportion. they obtrude unnecessarily in one part and are weak in another. miss austen wrote because the characters in her brain demanded expression. who could remain silent with elizabeth bennet urging her to utterance? she wrote with the greatest care because she could do nothing slovenly. whatever place may be assigned to her as the years go by, her novels surpass all others written in english in their perfect art. miss austen's genius was but slowly recognised. her first books were published in , only three years before _waverley_, and her last novels were published after it. who will linger over the teacups while knights in armour are riding the streets without? it is not until the cavalcade has passed that home seems again a quiet, refreshing spot. so the public, tired of the brilliant scenes and conflicting passions of other novels, has in the last few years turned back to the simple, wholesome stories of jane austen. chapter xi miss ferrier. miss mitford. anna maria hall walter scott, the most chivalrous of all writers, brought to an end woman's supremacy in the novel, in . at this time prose fiction was far different from what it was in , when tobias smollet died, and much of this difference was due to women. professor masson, in his lectures on the novel, gives the names of twenty novelists who wrote between - who are remembered in the history of english literature. "with the exception of godwin," he writes, "i do not know that any of the male novelists i have mentioned could be put in comparison, in respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the other sex as mrs. radcliffe, miss edgeworth, and miss austen." it is equally worthy of note that, of the twenty names given, fourteen are women. although during these years women had developed the historical novel, and had brought the novel of mystery to a high degree of perfection, they left the most enduring stamp on literature as realists, as painters of everyday life and commonplace people. francis jeffrey wrote: "it required almost the same courage to get rid of the jargon of fashionable life and the swarms of peers, foundlings, and seducers, that infested our modern fables as it did in those days to sweep away the mythological persons of antiquity, and to introduce characters who spoke and acted like those who were to peruse their adventures." women awakened interest in the humdrum lives of their neighbours next door, and this without any exaggeration, simply by minute attention to little things, and quick sympathy in the joys and sorrows of others. they described manners and customs; their view of life was largely objective. it is a noteworthy fact that while scott was casting over all europe the light of romanticism, the women writers of the time, with but one or two exceptions, were viewing life with the clear vision of miss edgeworth and miss austen, as if the world obtruded too glaringly upon their eyes to be lost sight of in happy day-dreams. * * * * * susan edmonstone ferrier is better known to-day as the friend of scott, and an occasional visitor at abbotsford, than as a successful novelist. she was born at edinburgh in , where her father, james ferrier, was writer to the signet, and at one time clerk of session, scott being one of his colleagues. that great genius was one of the earliest to appreciate the excellence of her descriptions of scottish life given in her first book, entitled _marriage_, published anonymously in . in the conclusion of the _tales of my landlord_ he paid the unknown writer this graceful tribute: "there remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of gathering it in; more than one writer has of late displayed talents of this description, and if the present author, himself a phantom, may be permitted to distinguish a brother, or perhaps a sister, shadow, he would mention in particular the author of the very lively work entitled _marriage_." miss ferrier wrote but three novels, _marriage_, _the inheritance_, and _destiny_, a period of six years intervening between the appearance of each of them. like miss burney and miss edgeworth she depicts two grades of society. she shows forth the fashionable life of edinburgh and london, and the cruder mode of living found in the scottish highlands. but between her and her models there is the great difference of genius and talent. they passed what they had seen through the alembic of imagination; she has depicted what she saw with the faithfulness of the camera, and the crude realism of these scenes does not always blend with the warp and woof of the story. like miss edgeworth, miss ferrier had a moral to work out. she treats society as a satirist, and lays bare its heartlessness, and the unhappiness of its members who to escape ennui are led hither and thither by the caprice of the moment. while she may present one side of the picture, one hesitates to accept lady juliana, mrs. st. clair, or lady elizabeth as common types of a london drawing-room. her plots as well as her characters suffer from this conscious attempt to teach the happiness that must follow the practice of the christian virtues. in _marriage_ there are two complete stories. lady juliana is the heroine of the first part; her two daughters, who are born in the first half, supplant their mother as heroines of the second half. the plot of _destiny_ is not much better. the denouement is tame, and the characters lack consistency. _the inheritance_ has the strongest plot of the three; but mrs. st. clair and her secret interviews with the monstrosity lewiston, who, by the way, has the honour to be an american, throw an air of unreality over a story in many respects intensely real. in this story, as in so many old novels, the nurse's daughter had been brought up as the rightful heiress. the scene in which she tells her betrothed lover, the heir of the estate, the story of her birth, which she had just learned, is said to have suggested to tennyson the beautiful ballad of _lady clare_. but when miss ferrier sees loom in imagination the sombre purple hills of the highlands, with the black tarns in the hollows half-hidden in mist, her genius awakes. if she had devoted herself to these people and this region, and ignored the fashionable life of the cities, she might have written a book worthy to be placed beside the best of miss edgeworth or miss mitford. at the time she wrote, the highland chief no longer summoned his clan about him at a blast from his bugle, but he had lost little of his old-time picturesqueness. the opening of _destiny_ describes the wealth of the chief of glenroy: "all the world knows that there is nothing on earth to be compared to a highland chief. he has his loch and his islands, his mountains and his castle, his piper and his tartan, his forests and his deer, his thousands of acres of untrodden heath, and his tens of thousands of black-faced sheep, and his bands of bonneted clansmen, with claymores and gaelic, and hot blood and dirks." but miss ferrier also depicted a more sordid type of highlander. christopher north in his _noctes ambrosianæ_ writes of her novels: "they are the works of a very clever woman, sir, and they have one feature of true and melancholy interest quite peculiar to themselves. it is in them alone that the ultimate breaking-down and debasement of the highland character has been depicted. sir walter scott had fixed the enamel of genius over the last fitful gleams of their half-savage chivalry, but a humbler and sadder scene--the age of lucre-banished clans,--of chieftains dwindled into imitation squires, and of chiefs content to barter the recollections of a thousand years for a few gaudy seasons of almacks and crockfords, the euthanasia of kilted aldermen and steamboat pibrochs, was reserved for miss ferrier." besides her descriptions of the highlands, miss ferrier has drawn several scotch characters that deserve to live. what a delightful group is described in _marriage_, consisting of the three misses douglas, known as "the girls," and their friend mrs. maclaughlan! miss jacky douglas, the senior of the trio, "was reckoned a woman of sense"; miss grizzy was distinguished by her good-nature and the entanglement of her thoughts; and it was said that miss nicky was "not wanting for sense either"; while their friend lady maclaughlan loved and tyrannised over all three of them. sir walter scott admired the character of miss becky duguid, a poor old maid, who "was expected to attend all accouchements, christenings, deaths, chestings, and burials, but she was seldom asked to a marriage, and never to any party of pleasure." joanna baillie thought the loud-spoken minister, m'dow, a true representative of a few of the scotch clergy whose only aim is preferment and good cheer. but none of her other characters can compare with the devoted mrs. molly macaulay, the friend of the chief of glenroy in _destiny_. when glenroy has an attack of palsy, she hurries to him, and when she is told that he has missed her, she exclaims with perfect self-forgetfulness: "deed, and i thought he would do that, for he has always been so kind to me,--and i thought sometimes when i was away, oh, thinks i to myself, i wonder what glenroy will do for somebody to be angry with,--for ben-bowie's grown so deaf, poor creature, it's not worth his while to be angry at him,--and you're so gentle that it would not do for him to be angry at you; but i'm sure he has a good right to be angry at me, considering how kind he has always been to me." christopher north said of molly macaulay, "no sinner of our gender could have adequately filled up the outline." george saintsbury, considering the permanent value of miss ferrier's work, wrote for the _fortnightly review_ in : "of the four requisites of the novelist, plot, character, description, and dialogue, she is only weak in the first. the lapse of an entire half-century and a complete change of manners have put her books to the hardest test they are ever likely to have to endure, and they come through it triumphantly." but, besides the excellences mentioned by mr. saintsbury, miss ferrier is master of humour and pathos. no story is sadder than that of ronald malcolm, the hero of _destiny_. he had been willed the castle of inch orran with its vast estates, but with the provision that he was to have no benefit from it until his twenty-sixth year. in case of his death the property was to go to his father, an upright but poor man. as ronald had many years to wait before he could enjoy his riches, he entered the navy. his ship was lost at sea and the news of his death reported in scotland. but ronald had been rescued from the sinking ship, and returned to his father's cottage. here he met a purblind old woman, who told him how his father, captain malcolm, had moved to the castle, and what good he was doing among his tenantry. she described the sorrow of the people at the death of ronald, but added: "och! it was god's providence to tak' the boy out of his worthy father's way; and noo a' thing 's as it should be, and he has gotten his ain, honest man; and long, long may he enjoy it!" and then she said thankfully, "the poor lad's death was a great blessing--och ay, 'deed was 't." the scene where ronald goes to the castle and looks in at the window upon the happy family group, consisting of his father and mother, brothers and sisters, resembles in many particulars the sad return of enoch arden. the close of the scene is as touching in the novel as in the poem: "yes, yes, they are happy, and i am forgotten!" sobs the lad, as he turns away. miss ferrier, however, seldom touches the pathetic; she is first of all a humourist. but there is a blending of the smiles and tears of human life in the delightful character of adam ramsay. engaged as a boy to lizzie lundie, he had gone forth into the world to make a fortune, but when he returned after many years he found that she had married in his absence, and soon afterwards had died. crabbed to all about him, he still cherished the remembrance of his early love, and was quickly moved by any appeal to her memory. the practical philosophy of the scottish peasantry is amusingly set forth in the scene where miss st. clair visits one of the cottages on lord rossville's estate. she found the goodman very ill, and everything about the room betokening extreme poverty. when she offered to send him milk and broth, and a carpet and chairs to make the room more comfortable, his wife interposed, "a suit o' gude bein comfortable dead claise, tammes, wad set ye better than aw the braw chyres an' carpets i' the toon." sometime afterward, when miss st. clair called to see how the invalid was, she found him in the press-bed, while the clothes were warming before the fire. his wife explained that she could not have him in the way, and if he were cold, it could not be helped, as the clothes had to be aired, and added, "an' i 'm thinkin' he 'll no be lang o' wantin' them noo." but notwithstanding her humour, miss ferrier was a stern moralist, whose attitude toward life had been influenced indirectly by the teachings of john knox. she sometimes seems to stand her characters in the stocks, and call upon the populace to view their sins or absurdities. she seldom throws the veil of charity over them. men as novelists are prone to exaggeration. women have represented life with greater truth both in its larger aspects and in details. miss ferrier carries this quality to an extreme. she tells not only the truth, but, with almost heartless honesty, reveals the whole of it, so that many of her men and women are repugnant to the reader while they amuse him. the best judges of scottish manners have borne witness to the exactness of her portraiture. she is, perhaps, an example of the artistic failure of over-realism. mary russell mitford like miss ferrier painted her scenes and her portraits from real life. but there is as wide a difference between their writings as between the rocky ledges of the grampian hills and the soft meadows bathed in the sunshine which stretch back of the cottages of our village. miss mitford's, indeed, was a sunny nature, not to be hardened nor embittered by a lifelong anxiety over poverty and debts. her father, dr. mitford, had spent nearly all his own fortune when he married miss mary russell, an heiress. besides being constantly involved in lawsuits, he was addicted to gambling, and soon squandered the fortune which his wife had brought him, besides twenty thousand pounds won in a lottery. he is said to have lost in speculations and at play about seventy thousand pounds, at that time a large fortune. the authoress was a little over thirty years of age when the poverty of the family forced them to leave bertram house, their home for many years, and remove to a little labourer's cottage about a mile away, on the principal street of a little village near reading, known as three mile cross. here the support of the family devolved upon the daughter, a burden made harder by the continual extravagance of the father, whom she devotedly loved. although she received large sums for her writings, it is with the greatest weariness that she writes to her friend miss barrett, afterwards mrs. browning, of the struggles that have been hers the greater part of her life, the ten or twelve hours of literary drudgery each day, often in spite of ill health, and her hope that she may always provide for her father his accustomed comforts. not only was she enabled to do this, but, through the help of friends, to pay, after his death, the one thousand pounds indebtedness, his only legacy to her. yet there is not a trace of this worry in the delightful series of papers called _our village_, which she began to contribute at this time to the _lady's magazine_. before this she had become known as a poet and a successful playwright, but had believed herself incapable of writing good prose. necessity revealed her fine power of description, and three mile cross furnished her with scenes and characters. _our village_ marked a new style in fiction. the year it was commenced, she wrote to a friend: "with regard to novels, i should like to see one undertaken without any plot at all. i do not mean that it should have no story; but i should like some writer of luxuriant fancy to begin with a certain set of characters--one family, for instance--without any preconceived design farther than one or two incidents or dialogues, which would naturally suggest fresh matter, and so proceed in this way, throwing in incidents and characters profusely, but avoiding all stage tricks and strong situations, till some death or marriage should afford a natural conclusion to the book." miss mitford followed this plan as far as her great love of nature would permit. for when she found her daily cares too great to be borne in the little eight-by-eight living-room, she escaped to the woods and fields. she loved the poets who wrote of nature, and next to miss austen, whom she placed far above any other novelist, she delighted in the novels of charlotte smith, and in her own pages there is the same true feeling for nature. _our village_ follows in a few particulars gilbert white's _history of selborne_. as he described the beauties of selborne through the varying seasons of the year, she describes her walks about three mile cross, first when the meadows are covered with hoar frost, then when the air is perfumed with violets, and later when the harvest field is yellow with ripened corn. all the lanes, the favourite banks, the shady recesses are described with delicate and loving touch. how her own joyous, optimistic nature speaks in this record of a morning walk in a backward spring: "cold bright weather. all within doors, sunny and chilly; all without, windy and dusty, it is quite tantalising to see that brilliant sun careering through so beautiful a sky, and to feel little more warmth from his presence than one does from that of his fair but cold sister, the moon. even the sky, beautiful as it is, has the look of that one sometimes sees in a very bright moonlight night--deeply, intensely blue, with white fleecy clouds driven vigorously along by a strong breeze, now veiling and now exposing the dazzling luminary around whom they sail. a beautiful sky! and, in spite of its coldness, a beautiful world!" but how naturally we meet the people of the village and become interested in them. there is harriet, the belle of the village, "a flirt passive," who made the tarts and puddings in the author's kitchen; joel brent, her lover, a carter by calling, but, by virtue of his personal accomplishments, the village beau. there is the publican, the carpenter, the washerwoman; little lizzie, the spoilt child, and all the other boys and girls of the village. it is very natural to-day to meet these poor people in novels; at that time the poor people of ireland and scotland had begun to creep into fiction, but it was as unusual in england as a novel without a plot. even to-day miss mitford's attitude toward these people is not common. it seems never to have occurred to the author, and certainly does not to her readers, that these men dressed in overalls and these women in print dresses with sleeves rolled to the elbow were not the finest ladies and gentlemen of the land. she greets them all with a playful humour which reminds one of the genial smile of elia. c. h. herford in _the age of wordsworth_ wrote of _our village_: "no such intimate and sympathetic portrayal of village life had been given before, and perhaps it needed a woman's sympathetic eye for little things to show the way. of the professional story-teller on the alert for a sensation there is as little as of the professional novelist on the watch for a lesson." _belford regis_, a series of country and town sketches, was written soon after the completion of _our village_. here again is the happy blending of nature and humanity; the same fusion of truth and fiction. as belford regis is "our market town," there is a wider range of characters, as different classes are represented; and a more intimate view, since the same people appear in more than one story. stephen lane, the butcher, and his wife are often met with. he is so fat that "when he walks, he overfills the pavement, and is more difficult to pass than a link of full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies." of mrs. lane she writes: "butcher's wife and butcher's daughter though she were, yet was she a graceful and gracious woman, one of nature's gentlewomen in look and in thought." there was miss savage, "who was called a sensible woman because she had a gruff voice and vinegar aspect"; and miss steele, who was called literary, because forty years ago she made a grand poetical collection. miss mitford even does justice to mrs. hollis, the fruiterer and the village gossip; "there she sits, a tall, square, upright figure, surmounted by a pleasant, comely face, eyes as black as a sloe, cheeks as rounds as an apple, and a complexion as ruddy as a peach, as fine a specimen of a healthy, hearty english tradeswoman, the feminine of john bull, as one would desire to see on a summer's day.... as a gossip she was incomparable. she knew everybody and everything; had always the freshest intelligence, and the newest news; her reports like her plums had the bloom on them, and she would as much have scorned to palm upon you an old piece of scandal as to send you strawberries that had been two days gathered." a reviewer in the _athenæum_ thus criticises the book: "if (to be hypercritical) the pictures they contain be a trifle too sunny and too cheerful to be real--if they show more generosity and refinement and self-sacrifice existing among the middle classes than does exist,--too much of the meek beauty, too little of the squalidity of humble life,--we love them none the less, and their authoress all the more." in _belford regis_ we miss the fields, the brooks, the flowers, and the sky, which made the charm of _our village_. in some respects it is a more ambitious book, but it has not the perennial charm of _our village_. miss mitford's favourite author, as we have seen, was jane austen. she had the same regard for her that miss austen felt for fanny burney. the two authors have many points of resemblance. both have the same clear vision, and sunny nature; the same repugnance to all that is sensational, or coarse, or low; the same dislike of strong pathos or broad humour; and miss mitford has approached more closely than any other writer to the elegance of diction and purity of style of miss austen. they have another point in common, they both show excellent taste in their writings. this quality of good taste is due to native delicacy and refinement, a sensitive withdrawal from what is ugly, and a quick feeling for true proportion; the very things which give to a woman her superior tact, which ruskin has called "the touch sense." in the novel it is pre-eminently a feminine characteristic. few men have it in a marked degree. it adds all the charm we feel in the presence of a refined woman to the novels of miss edgeworth, miss austen, and miss mitford. but, while miss mitford and miss austen have many points of resemblance, they have many points of difference. miss austen liked the society of men and women, and during her younger days was fond of dinner-parties and balls. miss mitford preferred the woods and fields, liked the society of her dogs, and wrote to a friend before she was twenty that she would never go to another dance if she could help it. miss austen selects a small group of gentry, and by the intertwining of their lives forms a beautiful plot; miss mitford rambles through the village and the country walks of three mile cross, and as she meets the butcher, the publican, the boys at cricket, she gleans some story of interest, and brings back to us, as it were, a basket in which have been thrown in careless profusion violets and anemones, cowslips and daisies, and all the other flowers of the field. * * * * * mrs. anna maria hall, a country-woman of miss edgeworth, wrote of her first novel: "_my sketches of irish character_, my first dear book, was inspired by a desire to describe my native place, as miss mitford had done in _our village_, and this made me an author." most of these sketches were drawn from the county of wexford, her native place, whose inhabitants, she says in the preface, are descendants of the anglo-norman settlers of the reign of henry the second, and speak a language unknown in other districts of ireland. the book is a series of well-told stories of the poor people, whom we should have imagined to be pure celt, if the author had not said they resembled the english. there is the tender pathos, the quick humour, the joke which often answers an argument, the guidance of the heart rather than the head; but she has dwelt upon one characteristic but lightly touched upon by miss edgeworth and lady morgan, the poetic feeling of the celt, the imagery that so often adorns their common speech. the old irish wife says to the bride who speaks disrespectfully of the fairies: "hush, avourneen! sure they have the use of the may-dew before it falls, and the colour of the lilies and the roses before it's folded in the tender buds; and can steal the notes out of the birds' throats while they sleep." _the irish peasantry_, and _lights and shadows of irish life_, won mrs. hall the ill-will rather than the love of her countrymen. she had lived for a long time in england, and upon returning to her native land was impressed by the lack of forethought which kept the country poor. their early marriages, their indifference to time, their frequent visits to the public house, their hospitality to strangers even when they themselves were in extreme poverty and debt--all made so deep an impression upon her mind that she attempted to teach the irish worldly wisdom. but the lesson was distasteful to the people and probably useless, as the characteristics which she would change were the very essence of the irish nature, the traits which made him a celt, not a saxon. in these books, the wooings, weddings, and funerals are portrayed, and there is a little glimpse of fairy lore. _midsummer eve, a fairy tale of love_, grew out of the fairy legends of ireland. it is said that a child whose father has died before its birth is placed by nature under the peculiar guardianship of the fairies; and, if born on midsummer eve, it becomes their rightful property; they take it to their own homes and leave in its place one of their changelings. the heroine of the story is a child of that nature, over whose birth the fairies of air, earth, and water preside. but at the will of nightstar, queen of the fairies of the air, she is left with her mother, but adopted and watched over by the fairies as their own. their great gift to her is that of loving and being loved. the human element is not well blended with the fairy element. the entire setting should have been rural, for in the city of london, particularly in the exhibition of the royal academy, where part of the story is placed, it is not easy to keep the tranquil twilight atmosphere, which fairies love. the book is like a song in which the bass and soprano are written in different keys. but when we are back in ireland, and the fairies again appear and disappear, it is charming. the old woodcutter, randy, who sees and talks with the fairies, is a delightful creature, and gives to the story much of its beauty. mrs. hall's novels have but little literary value, but she has brought to light irish characteristics and irish traditions which were overlooked by her predecessors, and for that reason they deserve to live. chapter xii lady caroline lamb. mrs. shelley it is impossible to comprehend the byronic craze which swept cool-headed england off her feet during the regency. _childe harold_ was the fashion, and many a hero of romance, even down to the time of _pendennis_, aped his fashions. disraeli and bulwer were among his disciples. bulwer's early novels, _falkland_ and _pelham_, were influenced by him; and _vivian grey_ and _venetia_ might have been the offspring of byron's prose brain, so completely was disraeli under his influence at the time. the poorest of the novels of this class, but the one which gives the most intimate picture of byron, is _glenarvon_, by lady caroline lamb. its hero is byron. the plot follows the outlines of her own life, and all the characters were counterparts of living people whom she knew. calantha, the heroine, representing lady caroline, is married to lord avondale, or william lamb, better known as lord melbourne, at one time premier of england. lord and lady avondale are very happy, until glenarvon, "the spirit of evil," appears and dazzles calantha. twice she is about to elope with him, but the thought of her husband and children keeps her back. they part, and for a time tender _billets-doux_ pass between them, until calantha receives a cruel letter from glenarvon, in which he bids her leave him in peace. other well-known people appeared in the book. lord holland was the great nabob, lady holland was the princess of madagascar, and samuel rogers was the yellow hyena or the pale poet. the novel had also a moral purpose; it was intended to show the danger of a life devoted to pleasure and fashion. of course the book made a sensation. lady caroline lamb, the daughter of earl bessborough, the granddaughter of earl spencer, related to nearly all the great houses of england, had all her life followed every impulse of a too susceptible imagination. her infatuation for lord byron had long been a theme for gossip throughout london. she invited him constantly to her home; went to assemblies in his carriage; and, if he were invited to parties to which she was not, walked the streets to meet him; she confided to every chance acquaintance that she was dying of love for him. yet, as one reads of this affair, one suspects that this devotion was nothing more than the infatuation of a high-strung nature for the hero of a romance. in writing to a friend about her husband, she says, "he was privy to my affair with lord byron and laughed at it." on her death-bed she said of her husband, "but remember, the only noble fellow i ever met with was william lamb." a month after her death, lord melbourne wrote a sketch of her life for the _literary gazette_. in this he said: "her character it is difficult to analyse, because, owing to the extreme susceptibility of her imagination, and the unhesitating and rapid manner in which she followed its impulses, her conduct was one perpetual kaleidoscope of changes.... to the poor she was invariably charitable--she was more: in spite of her ordinary thoughtlessness of self, for them she had consideration as well as generosity, and delicacy no less than relief. for her friends she had a ready and active love; for her enemies no hatred: never perhaps was there a human being who had less malevolence; as all her errors hurt only herself, so against herself only were levelled her accusation and reproach." how far byron was in earnest in this tragicomedy is more difficult to determine. in one letter to her he writes: "i was and am yours, freely and entirely, to obey, to honour, to love, and fly with you, where, when, and how yourself might and may determine." that byron was piqued when he read the book, his letter to moore proves: "by the way, i suppose you have seen _glenarvon_. it seems to me if the authoress had written the truth--the whole truth--the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertaining. as for the likeness, the picture can't be good; i did not sit long enough." it was not pleasing to lord byron's vanity to appear in her book as the spirit of evil, beside her husband, a high-minded gentleman, ready to sacrifice for his friends everything "but his honour and integrity." notwithstanding the humorous elements in the connection of lord byron and lady caroline lamb, the story is pathetic. his poetic personality attracted her as the light does the poor moth. disraeli caricatured her in the character of mrs. felix lorraine in _vivian grey_, and introduced her into _venetia_ under the title of lady monteagle, where he made much of her love for the poet cadurcis, otherwise lord byron. lady caroline lamb wrote two other novels, but they are of no value. in her third, _ada reis_, considered her best, she introduced bulwer as the good spirit. the little poem written by lady caroline lamb on the day fixed for her departure from brocket hall, after it had been decided that she was to live in retirement away from her husband and son, shows tenderness and poetic feeling: they dance--they sing--they bless the day, i weep the while--and well i may: husband, nor child, to greet me come, without a friend--without a home: i sit beneath my favourite tree, sing then, my little birds, to me, in music, love, and liberty. at the time that the british public was smiling graciously, even if a little humorously, upon lady caroline lamb, and was lionising lord byron, it spurned from its presence with the greatest disdain percy and mary shelley. even after the death of shelley, when mary returned to london with herself and son to support, it received her as the prodigal daughter for whom the crumbs from the rich man's table must suffice. mary shelley had inherited from her mother the world's frown. mary wollstonecraft godwin had been, the greater part of her life, at variance with society. she was the author, as has been said, of the _vindication of the rights of woman_, and had for a long time been an opponent of marriage, chiefly because the civil laws pertaining to it deprived both husband and wife of their proper liberty. her bitter experience with imlay had, however, so modified her views on this latter subject that she became the wife of william godwin a short time before the birth of their daughter mary, who in after years became mrs. shelley. although her mother died at her birth, mary godwin was deeply imbued with her theories of life. she had read her books, and had often heard her father express the same views concerning the bondage of marriage and its uselessness. her elopement with shelley while his wife harriet was still living gains a certain sanction from the fact that she plighted her troth to him at her mother's grave. after the sad death of harriet, however, shelley and mary godwin conceded to the world's opinion, and were legally married. but the anger of society was not appeased, and, even after both had become famous, it continued to ignore the poet shelley and his gifted wife. at the age of nineteen mrs. shelley was led to write her first novel. mr. and mrs. shelley and byron were spending the summer of in the mountains of switzerland. continuous rain kept them in-doors, where they passed the time in reading ghost stories. at the suggestion of byron, each one agreed to write a blood-curdling tale. it is one of the strange freaks of invention that this young girl succeeded where shelley and byron failed. byron wrote a fragment of a story which was printed with _mazeppa_. shelley also began a story, but when he had reduced his characters to a most pitiable condition, he wearied of them and could devise no way to bring the tale to a fitting conclusion. after listening to a conversation between the two poets upon the possibilities of science discovering the secrets of life, the story known as _frankenstein, or the modern prometheus_ shaped itself in mary's mind. _frankenstein_ is one of those novels that defy the critic. everyone recognises that the letters written by captain walton to his sister in which he tells of his meeting with frankenstein, and repeats to her the story he has just heard from his guest, makes an awkward introduction to the real narrative. yet all this part about captain walton and his crew was added at the suggestion of shelley after the rest of the story had been written. but the narrative of frankenstein is so powerful, so real, that, once read, it can never be forgotten. mrs. shelley wrote in the introduction of the edition of that, before writing it, she was trying to think of a story, "one that would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart." that she has done this the experience of every reader will prove. but the story has a greater hold on the imagination than this alone would give it. the monster created by frankenstein is closely related to our own human nature. "my heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy," he says, "and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture, such as you cannot even imagine." there is a wonderful blending of good and evil in this demon, and, while the magnitude of his crimes makes us shudder, his wrongs and his loneliness awaken our pity. "the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. yet even that enemy of god and man had friends and associates in his desolation; i am quite alone," the monster complains to his creator. who can forget the scene where he watches frankenstein at work making for him the companion that he had promised? perhaps sadder than the story of the monster is that of frankenstein, who, led by a desire to widen human knowledge, finds that the fulfilment of his lofty ambition has brought only a curse to mankind. in , mary shelley published a second novel, _valperga_, so named from a castle and small independent territory near lucca. castruccio castracani, whose life machiavelli has told, is the hero of the story. the greatest soldier and satirist of his times, the man of the novel is considered inferior to the man of history. mrs. shelley had read broadly before beginning the book, and she has described minutely the customs of the age about which she is writing. shelley pronounced it "a living and moving picture of an age almost forgotten." the interest centres in the two heroines, euthanasia, countess of valperga, and beatrice, prophetess of ferrara. strong, intellectual, and passionate, not until the time of george eliot did women of this type become prominent in fiction. euthanasia, a guelph and a florentine, with a soul "adapted for the reception of all good," was betrothed to the youth castruccio, whom she at that time loved. later, when his character deteriorated under the influence of selfish ambition, she ceased to love him, and said, "he cast off humanity, honesty, honourable feeling, all that i prize." castruccio belonged to the ghibelines, so that the story of their love is intertwined with the struggle between these two parties in italy. but more beautiful than the intellectual character of euthanasia, is the spiritual one of beatrice, the adopted daughter of the bishop of ferrara, who is regarded with feelings of reverence by her countrymen, because of her prophetic powers. pure and deeply religious, she accepted all the suggestions of her mind as a message from god. when castruccio came to ferrara and was entertained by the bishop as the prince and liberator of his country, she believed that together they could accomplish much for her beloved country: "she prayed to the virgin to inspire her; and, again giving herself up to reverie, she wove a subtle web, whose materials she believed heavenly, but which were indeed stolen from the glowing wings of love." no wonder she believed the dictates of her own heart, she whose words the superstition of the age had so often declared miraculous. she was barely seventeen and she loved for the first time. how pathetic is her disillusionment when castruccio bade her farewell for a season, as he was about to leave ferrara. she had believed that the holy spirit had brought castruccio to her that by the union of his manly qualities and her divine attributes some great work might be fulfilled. but as he left her, he spoke only of earthly happiness: "it was her heart, her whole soul she had given; her understanding, her prophetic powers, all the little universe that with her ardent spirit she grasped and possessed, she had surrendered, fully, and without reserve; but, alas! the most worthless part alone had been accepted, and the rest cast as dust upon the winds." afterwards, when she wandered forth a beggar, and was rescued by euthanasia, she exclaimed to her: "you either worship a useless shadow, or a fiend in the clothing of a god." the daughter of mary wollstonecraft could fully sympathise with beatrice. in the grief, almost madness, with which beatrice realises her self-deception, there are traces of frankenstein. perhaps no problem plucked from the tree of good and evil was so ever-present to mary shelley as why misery so often follows an obedience to the highest dictates of the soul. both her father and mother had experienced this; and she and shelley had tasted of the same bitter fruit. in the analysis of beatrice's emotions mrs. shelley shows herself akin to charlotte brontë. three years after the death of shelley, she published _the last man_. it relates to england in the year when, the king having abdicated his throne, england had become a republic. soon after this, however a pestilence fell upon the people, which drove them upon the continent, where they travelled southward, until only one man remained. the plot is clumsy; the characters are abstractions. but the feelings of the author, written in clear letters on every page, are a valuable addition to the history of the poet shelley and his wife. besides her fresh sorrow for her husband, byron had died only the year before. her mind was brooding on the days the three had spent together. her grief was too recent to be shaken from her mind or lost sight of in her imaginative work. shelley, and the scenes she had looked on with him, the conversations between him and his friends, creep in on every page. lionel verney, the last man, is the supposed narrator of the story. he thus describes adrian, the son of the king: "a tall, slim, fair boy, with a physiognomy expressive of the excess of sensibility and refinement, stood before me; the morning sunbeams tinged with gold his silken hair, and spread light and glory over his beaming countenance ... he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck, with unerring skill, the 'lyre of mind,' and produced thence divinest harmony.... his slight frame was over informed by the soul that dwelt within.... he was gay as a lark carrolling from its skiey tower.... the young and inexperienced did not understand the lofty severity of his moral views, and disliked him as a being different from themselves." shelley, of course, was the original of this picture. lord byron suggested the character of lord raymond: "the earth was spread out as a highway for him; the heavens built up as a canopy for him." "every trait spoke predominate self-will; his smile was pleasing, though disdain too often curled his lips--lips which to female eyes were the very throne of beauty and love.... thus full of contradictions, unbending yet haughty, gentle yet fierce, tender and again neglectful, he by some strange art found easy entrance to the admiration and affection of women; now caressing and now tyrannising over them according to his mood, but in every change a despot." a large part of the three volumes is taken up with a characterisation of adrian and lord raymond, the latter of whom falls when fighting for the greeks. how impossible it was for her to rid her mind of her own sorrow is shown at the end of the third volume, where adrian is drowned, and lionel verney is left alone. he thus says of his friend: "all i had possessed of this world's goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue--i owed to him. he had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. beyond all other beings he had taught me that goodness, pure and simple, can be an attribute of man." mrs. shelley made the great mistake of writing this novel in the first person. _the last man_, who is telling the story, although he has the name of lionel, is most assuredly of the female sex. the friendship between him and adrian is not the friendship of man for man, but rather the love of man and woman. mrs. shelley's next novel, _lodore_, written in , thirteen years after the death of her husband, had a better outlined plot and more definite characters. but again it echoes the past. lord byron's unhappy married relations and shelley's troubles with harriet are blended in the story, lord byron furnishing the character in some respects of lord lodore, while his wife, cornelia santerre, resembles both harriet and lady byron. lady santerre, the mother of cornelia, augments the trouble between lord and lady lodore, and, contrary to the evident intentions of the writer, the reader's sympathies are largely with cornelia and lady santerre. when lodore wishes cornelia to go to america to save him from disgrace, lady santerre objects to her daughter's accompanying him: "he will soon grow tired of playing the tragic hero on a stage surrounded by no spectators; he will discover the folly of his conduct; he will return, and plead for forgiveness, and feel that he is too fortunate in a wife who has preserved her own conduct free from censure and remark while he has made himself a laughing-stock to all." these words strangely bring to mind lord byron as having evoked them. again lady lodore's letter to her husband at the time of his departure to america reminds one of lady byron: "if heaven have blessings for the coldly egotistical, the unfeeling despot, may those blessings be yours; but do not dare to interfere with emotions too pure, too disinterested for you ever to understand. give me my child, and fear neither my interference nor resentment." lady lodore's character changes in the book, and becomes more like that of harriet shelley. as mrs. shelley wrote, fragments of the past evidently came into her mind and influenced her pen, and her original conception of the characters was forgotten. clorinda, the beautiful, eloquent, and passionate neapolitan, was drawn from emilia viviani, who had suggested to shelley his poem _epipsychidion_, while both horatio saville, who had "no thought but for the nobler creations of the soul, and the discernment of the sublime laws of god and nature," and his cousin villiers, also an enthusiastic worshipper of nature, possessed many of shelley's qualities. besides two other novels of no value, _perkin warbeck_ and _falkner_, mrs. shelley wrote numerous short stories for the annuals, at that time so much in vogue. in , these were collected and edited with an appreciative criticism by sir richard garnett. many of them have the intensity and sustained interest of frankenstein. after the death of her husband, grief and trouble dimmed mrs. shelley's imagination. but the pale student frankenstein, the monster he created, and the beautiful priestess, beatrice, three strong conceptions, testify to the genius of mary shelley. chapter xiii mrs. gore. mrs. bray during the second decade of the nineteenth century, while scott was writing some of the most powerful of the waverley novels, a host of new writers sprang into popular notice. john galt, william harrison ainsworth, and g. p. r. james began their endless series of historical romances, while in , bulwer lytton and benjamin disraeli introduced to the reading public, as the representatives of fashionable society, _falkland_ and _vivian grey_. the decade was prolific also in novels by women. jane austen had died in , but maria edgeworth, lady morgan, the porters, amelia opie, miss ferrier, mrs. shelley and miss mitford were still writing; during this period, mrs. s. c. hall began her work in imitation of miss mitford, while mrs. gore and mrs. bray took up the goose-quill, piled reams of paper on their desks, and began their literary careers. about a score of years before thackeray tickled english society with pictures of its own snobbery, mrs. gore, a young woman, wife of an officer in the life guards, saw through the many affectations of the polite world, and in a series of novels, pointed out its ludicrous pretences with lively wit. mrs. gore has suffered, however, from the multiplicity of her writings. during the years between , when she wrote her first novel, _theresa marchmont_, and , when, quite blind, she retired from the world of letters, she published two hundred volumes of novels, plays, and poems. her plots are often hastily constructed, her men and women dimly outlined, but she is never dull. no writer since congreve has so many sparkling lines. she has been likened to horace, and if we compare her wit with that of thackeray, who by the way ridiculed her in his _novels by eminent hands_, her humour has qualities of old falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour of old english beer. the englishman is inclined to take his wit, like his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice of envy. mrs. gore has none of this, however, and skims along the surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely diverting. her writings are so voluminous that one can only make excerpts at random. one of the liveliest is _cecil, or the adventures of a coxcomb_, a humorous satire on _vivian grey_. "the arch-coxcomb of his coxcombical time" had become a coxcomb at the age of six months, when he first saw himself in the mirror, from which time his nurse stopped his crying by tossing him in front of a looking-glass. his curls made him so attractive that at six years of age he was admitted to his mother's boudoir, from which his red-headed brother was excluded, and he superseded the spaniel in her ladyship's carriage. with the loss of his curls went the loss of favour. he did not prosper at school, and was rusticated after a year's residence at oxford. here he formed an acquaintance which helped him much in the world of coxcombry. though this man was not well born, he was an admitted leader among gentlemen. cecil soon discovered that his high social position was due entirely to his impertinence, and he made this wise observation: "impudence is the quality of a footman; impertinence of his master. impudence is a thing to be rebutted with brute force; impertinence requires wit for the putting down." so he matched his wit with this man's impertinence, and they became sworn friends. when cecil went to london, he found that "people had supped full of horrors, during the revolution, and were now devoted to elegiac measures. my languid smile and hazel eyes were the very thing to settle the business of the devoted beings left for execution." of course all the women fell desperately in love with him. "i had always a predisposition to woman-slaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power," he explains to us. like childe harold and vivian grey, this coxcomb soon became weary of london, and travelled through europe in an indolent way, for after all it was his chief pleasure "to lie in an airy french bed, showered over with blue convolvulus," and read tender billets from the ladies. this book was an excellent antidote to the byronic fever, then at its height. in her _sketches of english character_, mrs. gore describes different men who were in her time to be met with in the social life of london. the dining-out man thus speaks for himself: "ill-natured people fancy that the life of a dining-out man is a life of corn, wine, and oil; that all he has to do is to eat, drink and be merry. i only know that, had i been aware in the onset of life, of all i should have to go through in my vocation, i would have chosen some easier calling. i would have studied law, physic, or divinity." in the sketches of _the clubman_, she assigns john bull's dislike of ladies' society as the reason for the many clubs in the english metropolis: "while admitting woman to be a divinity, he chooses to conceal his idol in the holy of holies of domestic life. duly to enjoy the society of mrs. bull, he chooses a smoking tureen, and cod's head and shoulders to intervene between them, and their olive branches to be around their table.... for john adores woman in the singular, and hates her in the plural; john loves, but does not like. woman is the object of his passion, rarely of his regard. there is nothing in the gaiety of heart or sprightliness of intellect of the weaker sex which he considers an addition to society. to him women are an interruption to business and pleasure." mrs. gore could also unveil hypocrisy. in her novel _preferment, or my uncle the earl_, she thus describes a worthy ornament of the church: "the dean of darbington glided along his golden railroad--'mild as moonbeams'--soft as a swansdown muff--insinuating as a silken eared spaniel. his conciliating arguments were whispered in a tone suitable to the sick chamber of a nervous hypochondriac, and his strain of argument resembled its potations of thin, weak, well-sweetened barley water. while dr. macnab succeeded with _his_ congregation by kicking and bullying them along the path of grace, dr. nicewig held out his finger with a coaxing air and gentle chirrup, like a bird-fancier decoying a canary." a critic in the _westminster review_ in thus writes of her: "mrs. gore has a perfectly feminine knowledge of all the weaknesses and absurdities of an ordinary man of fashion, following the routine of london life in the season. she unmasks his selfishness with admirable acuteness; she exposes his unromantic egotism, with delightful sauciness. her portraits of women are also executed with great spirit; but not with the same truth. in transferring men to her canvas, she has relied upon the faculty of observation, usually fine and vigilant in a woman; but when portraying her own sex, the authoress has perhaps looked within; and the study of the internal operations of the human machine is a far more complex affair, and requires far more extensive experience, and also different faculties, from those necessary to acquire a perfect knowledge of the appearances on the surface of humanity." notwithstanding mrs. gore touches so lightly on the surface of life, certain definite sociological and moral principles underlie her work. she is as democratic as charlotte smith, mrs. inchbald, miss mitford, or even william godwin. she asserts again and again that men of inferior birth with the same opportunities of education may be as intellectual and refined as the sons of a "hundred earls." those members of the aristocracy who fail to recognise the true worth of intelligent men of plebeian origin are made very ridiculous. in her novel _pin money_, published in , how very funny is lady derenzy's speech when she learns that a soap manufacturer is being fêted in fashionable society! lady derenzy, by the way, is the social law-giver to her little coterie: "it is now some years," said she, "since the independence of america, and the influence exerted in this country by the return of a large body of enlightened men, habituated to the demoralising spectacle of an equalisation of rank, was supposed to exert a pernicious influence on the minds of the secondary and inferior classes of great britain. at that critical moment i whispered to my husband, 'derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. let the aristocracy of great britain unite in support of the order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' lord derenzy took my advice, and the country was saved. "again, when the assemblage of the states general of france,--the fatal tocsin of the revolution,--spread consternation and horror throughout the higher ranks of every european country, and the very name of the guillotine operated like a spell on the british peerage, i whispered to my husband, 'derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. let the aristocracy of great britain unite in support of the order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' again lord derenzy took my advice, and again the country was saved." mrs. gore has so cleverly mingled the so-called self-made men and men of inherited rank in her books that one cannot distinguish between them. in _the soldier of lyons_, one of her early novels, which furnished bulwer with the plot of his play _the lady of lyons_, the hero, a peasant by birth and a soldier of the republic, enters into a marriage contract with the widow of a french marquis, in order to save her from the guillotine. this lady of high rank learns to respect her husband, and becomes the suitor for his love. in _the heir of selwood_, a former field marshal of napoleon, a peasant, devotes his energies to improving the condition of the poor on the estate he had won by his services to his country, and at his death his tenants erected a column to his memory, bearing the inscription: "most dear to god, to the king, and to the people." mrs. gore constantly asserts that the only distinctions between men are based upon character and ability. she says of one of her characters, a poet: "his footing in society is no longer dependent upon the caprice of a drawing-room. it is the security of that intellectual power which forces the world to bend the knee. the poor, dreamy boy, self-taught, self-aided, had risen into power. he wields a pen. and the pen in our age weighs heavier in the social scale than a sword of a norman baron." mrs. gore lived at a time when the introduction of machinery and the establishment of large factories was producing a new type of man: men like burtonshaw in _the hamiltons_: "a practical, matter-of-fact individual, with plenty of money and plenty of intellect; the sort of human power-loom one would back to work wonders against a dawdling old spinning-jenny like lord tottenham." a critic in the _westminster review_ wrote in as follows: "the wealthy merchant or money-dealer is represented, perhaps for the first time in fiction, as a man of true dignity, self-respect, education, and thorough integrity, agreeable in manners, refined in tastes, and content with, if not proud of, his position in society." mrs. gore was called by her contemporaries the novelist of the new era. she was also interested in the great ethical questions of life. she did not write of the love of youthful heroes and more youthful heroines. she often traced the consequences of sin on character and destiny. in _the heir of selwood_, she is as stern a moralist in tracing the effects of vice as george eliot. _the banker's wife_, the scene of which is laid among the merchants of london, is a serious study of the sorrows of a life devoted to outward show. the picture of the banker among his guests, whose wealth, unknown to them, he has squandered, reminds one of the days before the final overthrow of dombey and son. mrs. gore was a woman of genius. with the stern principles of the puritan, and feelings as republican as the mountain-born swiss, she was never controversial. she saw the absurdities of certain hollow pretensions of society, but her good-humoured raillery offended no one. if her two hundred volumes could be weeded of their verbiage by some devotee of literature, and reduced to ten or fifteen, they would be not only entertaining reading, but would throw strong lights upon the _élite_ of london in the days when hair-oils, pomades, and strong perfumes were the distinguishing marks of the quality. * * * * * mrs. gore owed her place in english letters to native wit and ability; mrs. bray owed hers to hard study and painstaking endeavour. she was one of the few women who followed the style of writing brought to perfection by sir walter scott. mrs. bray became imbued with the historic spirit early in life. her first husband was charles stothard, the author of _monumental effigies of great britain_, with whom she travelled through brittany, normandy and flanders. while he made careful drawings of the ruins of castles and abbeys, she read froissart's _chronicles_, visited the places which he has described, and traced out among the people any surviving customs which he has recorded. two novels were the result of these studies. _de foix, or sketches of the manners and customs of the fourteenth century_, is a story of gaston phoebus, count de foix, whose court froissart visited, and of whom he wrote: "to speak briefly and truly, the count de foix was perfect in person and in mind; and no contemporary prince could be compared with him for sense, honour, or liberality." _the white hoods_, a name by which the citizens of ghent were denominated, is laid in the netherlands, and tells of the conflict between the court and the citizens of ghent, under philip von artaveld, during the reign of charles the fifth of france and the early kingship of charles the sixth. as in all her novels, the accuracy for which she strove in the most minute details retards the action of the plot, but adds to the historical value of these romances. for the tragic romance of _the talba, or moor of portugal_, mrs. bray, as she had not visited the spanish peninsula, depended upon her reading. the plot was suggested to her by a picture of ines de castro in the royal academy. it represented the gruesome coronation of the corpse of ines de castro, six years after her death. thus did her husband, don pedro, show honour to his wife, who had been put to death while he, then a prince, was serving in the army of portugal. the whole story is a fitting theme for tragedy, and was at one time dramatised by mary mitford. in order to give her mind the proper elevation for the impassioned scenes of this novel, it was mrs. bray's custom to read a chapter of isaiah or job each day before beginning to write. after the death of her first husband, mrs. bray married the vicar of tavistock, and for thirty-five years lived in the vicarage of that town. here she became interested in the legends of devon and cornwall, and wrote five novels founded upon the history of tradition of those counties. _henry de pomeroy_ opens at the abbey of tavistock, one of the oldest abbeys in england, during the reign of richard coeur-de-leon. the scene of _fitz of fitz-ford_ is also laid at tavistock, but during the reign of queen elizabeth. another story of the reign of the virgin queen was _warleigh, or the fatal oak: a legend of devon_. _courtenay of walreddon: a romance of the west_ takes place in the reign of charles the first, about the commencement of the civil war. a gypsy girl, by name cinderella small, is introduced into the story, and has been highly praised. the character, as well as some of the stories told of her, was drawn from life. but the most famous of these novels is _trelawny of trelawne; or the prophecy: a legend of cornwall_, a story of the rebellion of monmouth. like most of the romances upon english themes, the private history of the family furnishes the romance, the historical happenings being used only for the setting: the usual method of scott. the hero of this novel is sir jonathan trelawny, one of the seven bishops who were committed to the tower by james the second. when he was arrested by the king's command, the cornish men rose one and all, and marched as far as exeter, in their way to extort his liberation. trelawny is a popular hero of cornwall, as the following lines testify: a good sword and a trusty hand! a merry heart and true! king james's men shall understand what cornish lads can do! and have they fixed the where and when? and shall trelawny die? here's twenty thousand cornish men will know the reason why! out spake their captain brave and bold, a merry wight was he-- "if london tower were michael's hold, we'll set trelawny free!" we'll cross the tamar, land to land, the severn is no stay, all side to side, and hand to hand, and who shall say us nay? and when we come to london wall, a pleasant sight to view, come forth! come forth! ye cowards all, to better men than you! trelawny he's in keep and hold-- trelawny he may die, but here's twenty thousand cornish bold will know the reason why! like scott, mrs. bray went about with notebook in hand, and noted the features of the landscape, the details of a ruin, or the furniture or armour of the period of which she was writing. it is this painstaking work, together with the fact that she had access to places and books that were then denied to the ordinary reader, and chose subjects and places not before treated in fiction, that gives permanent value to her writings. she also had the proper feeling for the past, and dignity and elevation of style. sometimes an entire page of her romances might be attributed to the pen of the "mighty wizard." perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid her as an artist is that she resembles scott when he is nodding. chapter xiv julia pardoe. mrs. trollope. harriet martineau somewhere between the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, the modern novel was born. the romances of the twenties are, for the most part, old-fashioned in tone, and speak of an earlier age; but in the thirties, the modern novel, with its exact reproduction of places, customs, and speech, and strong local flavour, was full-grown. dickens, under the name of boz, was contributing his sketches to _the old monthly magazine_ and the _evening chronicle_. thackeray was beginning to contribute articles to _fraser's magazine_, established in . annuals and monthlies sprang up in the night, and paid large sums for long and short stories. the thirst for them was unquenchable. many women were supporting themselves by writing tales which did not live beyond the year of their publication. mrs. marsh was writing stories of fashionable life varied by historical romances. mrs. crowe wrote stories of fashionable life varied by supernatural romances and tales of adventure. in _the story of lilly dawson_, published in , the heroine was captured and brought up by smugglers, and the gradual development of her character was traced; thus giving to the story a psychological interest. lady blessington earned two thousand pounds a year for twenty years by novels and short stories of fashionable life. lady blessington had a european reputation as a court beauty and a brilliant and witty conversationalist. this with the coronet must have helped to sell her books. they do not contain even a sentence that holds the attention. a friend said of her, "her genius lay in her tongue; her pen paralysed it." more enduring work in fiction was done by julia pardoe, mrs. trollope, and harriet martineau. * * * * * the novels of julia pardoe, like those of mrs. bray, owe their value, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the comparatively unknown places to which she introduces her readers. she accompanied her father, major pardoe, to constantinople, where they were entertained by natives of high position, to whom they had letters of introduction, and miss pardoe was the guest of their wives in the harem. her knowledge of the mode of life and habits of thought of turkish women is considered second only to that of mary wortley montagu. the material for her story _the romance of the harem_ was obtained during her visits to these turkish ladies. in this she has caught the languid, heavily perfumed atmosphere of the orient. besides the main plot, stories of adventure and love are related which beguiled the slowly passing hours of the inmates of the seraglio. some of them might have been told by schehezerhade, if she had wished to add to her entertainment of _the thousand and one nights_. after miss pardoe's return to england, she wrote a series of fashionable novels, inferior to many of those of mrs. gore, and better than the best of those by lady blessington. _confessions of a pretty woman_, _the jealous wife_, and _the rival beauties_ were the most popular of these, although they have long since been forgotten. in , miss pardoe published a collection of stories under the title _flies in amber_. the title, she explains in the preface, was suggested by a belief of the orientals that amber comes from the sea, and attracts about it all insects, which find in it both a prison and a posthumous existence. some of the stories of this collection were gathered in her travels. _an adventure in bithynia_, _the magyar and the moslem, or an hungarian legend_, and the _yèrè-batan-seraï_, which means swallowed-up palace, the great subterranean ruin of constantinople, have the interest which always attaches to tales gathered by travellers in unfrequented places. * * * * * mrs. frances trollope, the mother of the more famous author anthony trollope, like miss pardoe, found material for stories in unfamiliar places. mrs. trollope had the nature of the pioneer. with her family, she sought our western lands of the mississippi valley, where the virgin forest had resounded to the axe of the first settler but a short time before. she wrote the first book of any note describing the manners of the americans; the first strong novel calling attention to the evils of slavery in our southern states; and the first one describing graphically the white slavery in the cotton-mills of lancashire; and she is, perhaps, the only writer who began a long literary career at the age of fifty-two. on the fourth of november, , mrs. trollope with her three children sailed from london, and, after about seven weeks on the sea, arrived on christmas day at the mouth of the mississippi. after a brief visit in new orleans, this party of english travellers sailed up the river to memphis, where, remote from the comforts of civilisation, they abode for a time under the direction of mrs. wright, an english lecturer who had come to america for the avowed purpose of proving the perfect equality of the black and white races. but mrs. trollope and her family soon tired of life in the wilderness, and sought cincinnati, at that time a small city of wooden houses, not over thirty years of age. after two years' residence in cincinnati, she went by stage to baltimore, visited philadelphia and new york, and returned to england, after a sojourn of three and a half years in this country. during her residence in the united states, she made copious notes of what she saw and heard. these she published the year after her return to england, under the title _domestic manners of the americans_. at once the pens of all the critics were let loose upon the author. her american critics declared that she knew nothing about them or their country; and their english friends refused to believe that the people of america had such shocking bad manners. mrs. trollope reported truthfully what she saw and heard. but a frontier city is made up of people gathered from the four corners of the earth: each family is a law unto itself; so that the speeches mrs. trollope carefully set down, and the customs she depicted, were often peculiarities of individuals rather than of a community. but she has left a vivid picture of american life in the twenties, less exaggerated than the picture charles dickens gave of it in the forties. mrs. trollope's attitude is no more hostile than his, but he is more entertaining. he held us up to ridicule and laughed at us; she seriously pointed out our errors in the hope that we might amend. she is slightly inconsistent at times, for, while asserting the equality of whites and blacks, she as bitterly resented the equality of white master and white servant. her purpose in writing this book was to warn her own countrymen of the evils which must follow a government of the many. although she never takes the broad view, but always the narrow and partial one, her book gives a good picture of the everyday life and habits of thought of the next generation to that which had fought and won the american revolution. the white heat of republican fervour, so obnoxious to a european, welded the nation together as one people, and filled their hearts with a religious reverence for the constitution. she meant them as a reproach, but we read these words with pride: "i never heard from anyone a single disparaging word against their government." mrs. trollope has been described by her friends as a refined woman of charming personality. but as soon as she began to write, she donned her armour and proclaimed her hostility either to her hero or to the larger part of the characters of the book. this method is dangerous to art. even the genius of thackeray is lessened by his lack of sympathy. in mrs. trollope published her first novel, _the refugee in america_. it is the story of an english lord who has fled to america to escape english justice. he and his friends have settled in rochester, new york. it was written for the sole purpose of describing the manners of the people of our eastern cities. the author's attitude toward them is well illustrated by a conversation between caroline, the young english girl, and her american _protégée_, emily. after a dinner in washington, caroline exclaims to her friend: "'oh, my own emily, you must not live and die where such things be.' "emily sighed as she answered, 'i am born to it, miss gordon.' "'but hardly bred to it. we have caught you young, and we have spoiled you for ever as an american lady.'" three years later mrs. trollope published her strongest novel, _the life and adventures of jonathan jefferson whitlaw_. this is a powerful picture of early life on the mississippi; it was the first novel since mrs. behn's _oroonoko_ which called attention to the evils of african slavery. it is marred, however, by want of sympathy with the community she is describing. mr. jonathan whitlaw senior has "squat in the bush," an expression to which mrs. trollope objects, but which brings to mind at once the log cabin in the forest clearing, and the muscular, uncouth pioneer. jonathan furnishes firewood to the mississippi steamers, and by this means gains sufficient wealth to carry out his life's ambition: to set up a store in natchez, and to own "niggers." but the life of a pioneer has made jonathan as cunning as a fox. this cunning his son jonathan, the hero of the story, has inherited to the full. as a slave-owner he is as grasping and cruel as legree, whom mrs. stowe immortalised some years later. his character, though drawn with strength and vigour, is inconsistent. he is a miser, yet he is a gambler and a spendthrift, qualities not often found together. he is not a true representative of the son of a pioneer. clio whitlaw, the aunt of the hero, belongs more truly to her environment. one suspects the english family at cincinnati had received neighbourly kindnesses from women like her. with her physical strength and great courage she is kind and neighbourly to all who need her help. the sad story of edward bligh, the young kentuckian who preached the gospel to the slaves, the victim of lynch law, a word dreaded even then, is as thrilling as parts of _uncle tom's cabin_. besides _jonathan jefferson whitlaw_, mrs. trollope created two other characters that will cause her name to live as long as those of william harrison ainsworth or g. p. r. james. the coarse scheming widow barnaby is the heroine of three novels, _widow barnaby_, _the widow married_, and _the widow wedded, or the barnabys in america_. in the last book mrs. trollope somewhat humorously pays off her scores against her american critics, who had dubbed her a cockney, unfamiliar with good society in either england or america. the widow barnaby, who has come to new orleans with her husband after his little gambling ways have made residence in london unpleasant, decides to earn some money by writing a book on america. she describes the americans, not as they are, but as they think they are. she listens to all their boasts about themselves and country, and puts it faithfully in her book. of course they like it and she becomes the literary lion of america. anthony trollope, in his book _an autobiography_, said of his mother's books on america: "her volumes were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin." she is also given the credit of having improved the manners of american society. whenever a "gentleman" at his club put his feet on the table, or indulged in any liberty of which she would not have approved, others cried, "trollope! trollope! trollope!" the _vicar of wrexhill_, the scene of which is laid in england, is an attack on the evangelical clergy in the episcopal church. the vicar is no truer to the great body of evangelical preachers than jonathan jefferson whitlaw is true to the great body of slave-owners. there is the same exaggeration to prove a theory. evangelical preaching is harmful, is the theorem, and a man is selected to prove it who in any walk of life would be a hypocrite and libertine. the book has many interesting situations. the vicar's proposal to the rich widow, one of his parishioners, is clever: "let me henceforth be as the shield and buckler that shall guard thee; so that thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day." and he promises, if she will marry him, to lead her "sinful children into the life everlasting." no other book has shown, as this does, the powerful effect upon sensitive natures of this kind of preaching. one feels that the followers of the reverend vicar were under the influence of hypnotic suggestion, and that their awakening from this spell was like the awakening from a trance. mrs. trollope was actuated by humanitarian motives. this was not as usual then as since dickens popularised the humanitarian novel. only three years after he wrote _sketches by boz_, mrs. trollope wrote _the life and adventures of michael armstrong_, the story of a boy employed in the mills of lancashire. negro slavery in the south, even as mrs. trollope saw it, was a happy state of existence compared with child slavery in the mills of ashleigh and deep valley, lancashire, where the children were driven to work by the lash in the morning, and were crippled by the "billy roller," the name of the stick by which they were beaten for inattention to their work during the day. if the truth of these horrors were not attested by other writers of this time, one would doubt the possibility of their existence in the same land and at the same time in which wordsworth was writing of the beauties of his own childhood, where the river derwent mingled its murmurs with his nurse's song. mrs. trollope assailed injustice with a powerful pen. woman's moral nature is truer and more sensitive than man's. even if her sympathies cloud her judgment, it is better than that her judgment should reason away her sympathies. neither has woman in her philanthropy contented herself with broad principles which would help all and therefore reach none. the dusky slave in the cotton-fields, the pale-faced child in the cotton-mills, have alike touched the hearts of women, who by their pens have been able to awaken the conscience of a nation. the horror of child labour wrung from mrs. browning the heart-felt poem, _the cry of the children_. the four strong novels proclaiming the tyranny of the whites over the blacks, _oronooko_, _jonathan jefferson whitlaw_, _uncle tom's cabin_, and _the hour and the man_, were written by women. * * * * * the name of harriet martineau was a familiar one in every household during the early years of queen victoria's reign. like mrs. trollope she was a woman of fearless honesty. but harriet martineau was never the _raconteur_, she was first the educator. she wrote story after story to teach lessons in political and social science. her method of work, as set forth in her autobiography, was peculiar, and the result is not uninteresting. in her _political economy tales_, she selected certain principles which she wished to set forth, and embodied each principle in a character. the operations of these principles furnished the plot of the story. besides the illustrations of the principles by the characters, the laws were discussed in conversation, and thus the lesson was taught. in the story _brooke and brooke farm_, she made use of an expression which ruskin almost paraphrased: "the whole nation, the whole world, is obliged to him who makes corn grow where it never grew before; and yet more to him who makes two ears ripen where only one ripened before." in the tale _a manchester strike_, factory life and the problems that face the working men are set forth, the aim being to show that work and wages depend upon the great laws of supply and demand. miss martineau wrote two novels. _deerbrook_, in , was modelled on _our village_. the village doctor, mr. hope, is the central figure. firm in his convictions, he loses the favour of the leading families, and through their influence he is deprived of his practice. a fever, however, sweeps over the place and his former enemies beg, not in vain, for his skilful services. a double love story runs through the book. mrs. rowland, a scheming woman, is the most cleverly drawn of the characters, and was evidently suggested by some of miss edgeworth's fashionable ladies. harriet martineau also visited america, but some years later than mrs. trollope, when the slavery agitation was at its height. as she had written upon the evils of slavery before she left england, she was invited to attend a meeting of the abolitionists in boston. she accepted this invitation, and expressed there her abhorrence of slavery. after this she received letters from some of the citizens of the pro-slavery states, threatening her life if she entered their domain. this naturally threw her entirely with the abolition party, and she wrote many articles to help their cause. miss martineau's second novel, _the hour and the man_, grew out of her sympathy and belief in the coloured race. toussaint de l'ouverture, the devoted slave, soldier, liberator, and martyr, is the hero. every scene in which this wonderful black figures is vividly written. many of the minor incidents are but slightly sketched, and many of the minor characters elude the reader's grasp. how far this book is a truthful portrayal of the negro cannot be judged until the "race problem" is surveyed with unprejudiced eyes. then and not until then will its place in literature be assigned. she gives the same characterisation of this hero of st. domingo as does wendell phillips in his wonderful speech of which the following is the peroration: "but fifty years hence, when truth gets a hearing, the muse of history will put phocian for the greek, brutus for the roman, hampden for england, fayette for france, choose washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilisation, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, toussaint l'ouverture." _the hour and the man_ was published in , and was warmly received by the abolitionists. william lloyd garrison, after reading it, wrote the following sonnet to the author: england! i grant that thou dost justly boast of splendid geniuses beyond compare; men great and gallant,--women good and fair,-- skilled in all arts, and filling every post of learning, science, fame,--a mighty host! poets divine, and benefactors rare,-- statesmen,--philosophers,--and they who dare boldly to explore heaven's vast and boundless coast, to one alone i dedicate this rhyme, whose virtues with a starry lustre glow, whose heart is large, whose spirit is sublime, the friend of liberty, of wrong the foe: long be inscribed upon the roll of time the name, the worth, the works of harriet martineau. miss martineau wrote on a variety of subjects, and generally held a view contrary to the accepted one. she wrote upon mesmerism, positivism, atheism, which she professed, and after each book warriors armed with pens sprang up to assail the author. but she had many friends, even among those who were most bitter against her doctrines. one wrote of her, "there is the fine, honest, solid, north-country element in her." r. brimley johnson in _english prose_, edited by craik in , said of her writings: "her gift to literature was for her own generation. she is the exponent of the infant century in many branches of thought:--its eager and sanguine philanthropy, its awakening interest in history and science, its rigid and prosaic philosophy. but her genuine humanity and real moral earnestness give a value to her more personal utterances, which do not lose their charm with the lapse of time." harriet martineau's name and personality will be remembered in history after her books have been forgotten. chapter xv the brontës during the middle of the nineteenth century, english fiction largely depicted manners and customs of different classes and different parts of england. while dickens, thackeray, disraeli, and mrs. gaskell were writing realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in the brontë sisters. the quiet life lived by the brontës in the vicarage on the edge of the village of haworth in the west riding of yorkshire seems prosaic to the casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. the purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature here as it does over the mountains in westmoreland, make thought earnest and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. it is a serious country, that of the wharf valley; the people are a serious people, silent and observant. the brontës were a direct outcome of this country and people, only in them their severity and silence were kindled into life by a celtic imagination. what a group of people lived within those grey stone walls! as the vicar and his four motherless children gathered about their simple board, while they engaged in conversation with each other or with the curate, what scenes would have been enacted in that quiet room if the fancies teeming in each childish brain could have been suddenly endowed with life! how could even a dull curate, with an undercurrent of addition and subtraction running in his brain, based upon his meagre salary and economical expenditures, have been insensible to the thought with which the very atmosphere must have been surcharged? the brother, patrick branwell, found his audience in the public house, and delighted it with his wit and conversation. the sisters, after their household tasks were done, wrote their stories and often read them to each other. but fate had chosen her darkest hues in which to weave the warp and woof of their lives. the wild dissipations and wilder talk of their brother branwell clouded the imaginations of his sisters, and in a short time death was a constant presence in their midst. in september, , branwell died at the age of thirty; in less than three months, emily died at the age of twenty-nine; and in five-months, anne died at the age of twenty-seven; and charlotte, the eldest, was left alone with her father. during the remaining six years of her life, her compensation for her loss of companionship was her writing. not long after the death of her sisters, mr. nicholls proposed to her; was refused; proposed again and was accepted; then came the separation caused by mr. brontë's hostility to the marriage; then the marriage in the church under whose pavement so many members of her family were buried, grim attendants of her wedding; then the nine short months of married life; then the death of the last of the brontë sisters at the age of thirty-nine. mr. brontë outlived her only six years, but he was the last of his family. six children had been born to patrick brontë, not one survived him. forty years had eliminated a family which yet lives through the imaginative powers of the three daughters who reached years of maturity. of the three sisters, the least is known of emily, and her one novel, _wuthering heights_, reveals nothing of herself. not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring author. yet so great was her dramatic power that her brother branwell was credited with the book, as it was deemed impossible for a woman to have conceived the character of heathcliff. and yet this arch-fiend of literature was created by the daughter of a country vicar, whose only journeys from home had been to schools, either as pupil or governess. charlotte brontë has thrown but little light upon her sister's character. she says that she loved animals and the moors, but was cold toward people and repelled any attempt to win her confidence. the author of _jane eyre_ seems neither to have understood emily's nature nor her genius. yet we are told that emily was constantly seen with her arms around the gentle anne, and that they were inseparable companions. if anne brontë could have lived longer, she would have thrown much light upon the character of the author of _wuthering heights_. but now, as we read of her brief life and her one novel, she seems to belong to the great dramatists rather than to the novelists, to the poets who live apart from the world and commune only with the people of their own creating. _wuthering heights_ stands alone in the history of prose fiction. it belongs to the wild region of romanticism, but it imitates no book, and has never been copied. no incident, no character, no description, can be traced to the influence of any other book, but the atmosphere is that of the west riding of yorkshire. charlotte brontë thus speaks of it in a letter to a friend: "_wuthering heights_ was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. the statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur--power. he wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. with time and labour, the crag took human shape, and there it stands, colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock, in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it, and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot." all of this is true, but it gives only the general outlines, nothing of the inner meaning. in all literature, there is not so repulsive a villain as heathcliff, the offspring of the gipsies. insensible to kindness, but resentful of wrong; hard, scheming, indomitable in resolution; quick to put off the avenging of an injury until he can make his revenge serve his purpose; the personification of strength and power; he is yet capable of a love stronger than his hate. heathcliff is so repulsive that he does not attract, and drawn with such skill that, as has been said, he has not been imitated. but the strong, dark picture of heathcliff makes us forget that catharine is the centre of the story. the night that mr. lockwood spends at wuthering heights he reads her books, and her spirit appears to him crying for entrance at the window, and complaining that she has wandered on the moors for twenty years. while living, she represents a human soul balanced between heaven and hell, loved by both the powers of darkness and of light. but in her earliest years, she had loved heathcliff; their thoughts, their affections were intertwined, and they were welded, as it were, into one soul, not at first by love, but by their common hatred of hindley earnshaw. when catharine meets edgar linton, her finer nature asserts itself. she loves him as a being from another world; he gives her the first glimpse of real goodness, kindness, and gentleness. she catches through him a gleam of paradise. but she knows how transient this is, and says to her old nurse, nelly dean: "i've no more business to marry edgar linton than i have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought heathcliff so low, i shouldn't have thought of it. it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now; and that, not because he's handsome, no, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire." but catharine is married to edgar, and for three years her better nature triumphs. heathcliff is away; edgar linton loves her truly, and their home is happy. catharine alone knows that that house is not her true place of abode. she alone knows that edgar has not touched her inner nature. she knows that her real self, the self that must abide through the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. and when heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. not once is she deceived as to his true nature. she knows the depth of his depravity, and thus warns the girl who has fallen in love with him: "he's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic;--he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. i never say to him, let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,--i say, let them alone, because i should hate them to be wronged: and he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge." but catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost brutal delight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girl does not trust her word. then comes the strife between edgar and heathcliff for the soul, so it seems, of catharine. there is no jealousy on edgar's part. the book never stoops to anything so earthly. edgar loathes heathcliff and cannot understand catharine's affection for her early playmate. although she never for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to heathcliff, it is this strife that causes her death. the strife between good and evil wears her out. even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. it is still joined to heathcliff's. it resembles here the story of paola and francesca. catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in her haunting presence. heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping catharine from paradise. in life she would not let him from her presence, and she clings to him now. it is the story of _undine_ reversed. undine gained a soul through a mortal's love. and we feel toward the close that catharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet heathcliff's better spirit. catharine while living had prevented heathcliff from killing her brother. although he loved catharine better than himself, and would have made any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for her offspring than for his own. but the spirit of catharine lived in her child and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he had no pleasure in his revenge upon the son of hindley nor on the daughter of edgar linton. in the tenderness that once or twice comes over heathcliff as he looks at hareton earnshaw, there is a ray of promise that he may be redeemed. and in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that catharine's restless spirit, as it watches and waits for heathcliff, is striving to bring some blessing upon her house. the awakening of a better nature in hareton, through his love for catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender idyl. the book is like a greek tragedy in this, that at the close the atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows of wuthering heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme. _wuthering heights_ is a novel not of externals, not of character, but of something deeper, more vital. the love of catharine and heathcliff has no physical basis; it is the union of souls evil, but not material. it is the sex of spirit, not of body, that adds its might to the resistless force that unites these two. notwithstanding the external pictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to his canvas, the book is a soul-tragedy. _wuthering heights_ cannot be classed among the so-called popular novels. it has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers of fiction. it has received the warmest praise from the poet swinburne. in _the athenæum_ of june , , he thus eulogises it: "now in _wuthering heights_ this one thing needful ['logical and moral certitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as in _king lear_ or _the duchess of malfi_, in _the bride of lammermoor_ or _notre-dame de paris_. from the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragic passion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flying sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. there is no monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. this is the first and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown of all success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is that distinguishes the hand of emily from the hand of charlotte brontë. all the works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling, and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term." at the close of this essay he writes: "it may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose." all that we know of emily brontë's nature is consistent, such as we would expect of the author of _wuthering heights_. the first stanza of her last poem, written but a short time before her death, reveals her strength of will and faith: no coward soul is mine, no trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: i see heaven's glories shine, and faith shines equal, arming me from fear. these lines evoked the following tribute from matthew arnold: ----she (how shall i sing her?) whose soul knew no fellow for might, passion, vehemence, grief, daring, since byron died, that world-famed son of fire--she, who sank baffled, unknown, self-consumed; whose too bold dying song stirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul. the great books of prose fiction have been for the most part the work of mature years. the lyric poets burst into rhapsody at the dawn of life; but the powers of the novelist have ripened more slowly. the novelists have done better work after thirty-five than at an earlier age but few of them have written a classic at the age of twenty-eight, as did emily brontë. * * * * * anne brontë's fame has been both augmented and dimmed by the greater genius of her two sisters. she is remembered principally as one of the brontës, so that her books have been oftener reprinted and more extensively read than their actual merit would warrant. in comparison with the greater genius of charlotte and emily, her writings have been declared void of interest, and without any ray of the brilliancy which distinguishes their books. this latter statement is not true. anne brontë did not have their imaginative power, but she reproduced what she had seen and learned of life with conscientious devotion to truth. _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_, anne brontë's first book, were published together in three volumes so as to meet the popular demand that novels, like the graces, should appear in threes. it is a photographic representation of the life of a governess in england during the forties. agnes's courage in determining to augment the family income by seeking a position as governess; the high hopes with which she enters upon her first position; her conscientious resolve to do her full christian duty to the spoiled children of the bloomfields; her dismissal and sad return home; her second position in the family of mr. murray, a country squire; the two daughters, one determined to make a fine match for herself, the other a perfect hoyden without a thought beyond the horses and dogs; the disregard of the truth in both; mr. hatfield, the minister, who cared only for the county families among his parishioners; miss murray's marriage for position and the unhappiness that followed it--form a series of photographs, which only a sensitive, responsive nature could have produced. the contrast between the gentle, refined governess, and the coarse natures upon whom she is dependent, is well shown, although there is no attempt on the part of the author to assert any superiority of one over the other. we have many books in which the shrinking governess is described from the point of view of the family or one of their guests, but here the governess of an english fox-hunting squire has spoken for herself; she has described her trials and the constant self-sacrifice which is demanded of her without bitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the book is a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of the century. _the tenant of wildfell hall_, her second novel, was a peculiar book to have shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of the vicar of haworth. but anne brontë had seen phases of life which must have sorely wounded her pure spirit. she had been governess at thorp green, where her brother branwell was tutor, and where he formed that unfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with the help of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. anne wrote in her diary at this time, "i have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature." as we picture anne brontë, with her light brown hair, violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparent complexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to behold daily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills her with wonderment and horror. mr. huntingdon of wildfell hall was drawn from personal observation of her brother. she wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her duty to hold up his life as a warning to others. the gradual change in mr. huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee is well traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, so reckless that he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme. but what a change in the novel! a hundred years before, huntingdon would have made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to the position of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity and loathing. probably a man's pen would have touched his errors more lightly, but anne brontë painted him as he appeared to her. the author attributes such a character as huntingdon's to false education, and makes her heroine say: "as for my son--if i thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world,--one that has 'seen life,' and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society--i would rather that he died to-morrow--rather a thousand times." notwithstanding its defects--and it is full of them judged from the stand-point of art--_wildfell hall_ is a book of promise. in the descriptions of the hall, the mystery that surrounds its mistress, the rumours of her unknown lover, the heathclad hills and the desolate fields, there are romantic elements that remind one of _wuthering heights_. the book is more faulty than _agnes grey_, but the writer had a deeper vision of life with its weaknesses and its depths of human passion. if years had mellowed that "undreamt-of experience" of thorp green, anne brontë with her truthful observation and sympathetic insight into character might have written a classic. the material out of which _wildfell hall_ was wrought, under a more mature mind, with a better grasp of the whole and a better regard for proportion, would have made a novel worthy of a place beside _jane eyre_. * * * * * that english fiction has produced sweeter and more varied fruit by being grafted with the novels of women no one who gives the matter a serious thought can for a moment doubt. one distinctive phase of woman's mind made its way but slowly in the english novel. women are by nature introspective. they read character and are quick to grasp the motives and passions that underlie action. the french women have again and again embodied this view of human nature in their novels, which are essentially of the inner life. _the princess of clèves_ by madame de lafayette, written in , is the first book in which all the conflicts are those of the emotions; here the great triumph is that which a woman wins over her own heart. madame de tencin in _mémoires du comte de comminges_ represents her hero and heroine under the influence of two great passions, religion and love. madame de souza, madame cottin, madame de genlis, madame de staël, and george sand wrote novels of the inner life. the princess of clèves with noble dignity controls her emotion and at last conquers it. the pages of george sand thrill with unbridled passion. the english women, however, are more repressed by nature than the french, and the english novel of the inner life advanced but slowly. the emotions of the long-forgotten sidney biddulph are minutely told. _a simple story_ by mrs. inchbald is a psychological novel. amelia opie, mary brunton, and mrs. shelley wrote novels of the inner life. but _jane eyre_ is the first english novel which in sustained intensity of emotion can compare with the novels of madame de staël or george sand. the style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he too partakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the book fevered and exhausted. it is one of the ironies of fate that charlotte brontë with her strong pro-anglican prejudices should belong to the school of these french women. but there is the same difference between their writings that there is between the french temperament and the english. even in the wildest moments of jane eyre her passion is rather like the river wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs is like the mountain torrent that bears all down before it. much of the passion that charlotte brontë describes is pure imagination. she wrote freely to her friends about herself and the people whom she knew. the three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. her love for mr. nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmer than respect. we could as easily weave a romance out of jane austen's remark that the poet crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make a love story out of charlotte's relations to monseiur héger, who figures as the hero in three of her books. here she is greater than the french women writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innate genius. perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to make four novels than had charlotte brontë: her sisters, monsieur and madame héger, the curates, and herself; a small village in yorkshire, two boarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent in a school in brussels. compare this range with the material that scott, dickens, or thackeray had--then judge how much of the elixir of genius was given to each. the early pages of _jane eyre_, the first novel which charlotte brontë published, describe lowood institution, a place modelled upon cowan's bridge school. the two teachers, the kind miss temple and the cruel miss scatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the brontës attended it. helen burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was maria brontë, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as a result of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. with what calm she replies to jane, when she would sympathise with her for an unjust punishment: "i am, as miss scatcherd said, slatternly; i seldom put, and never keep, things in order; i am careless; i forget rules; i read when i should learn my lessons; i have no method; and sometimes i say, like you, i cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. this is all very provoking to miss scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular." helen burns, with her calm submission, and jane eyre, with her rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. jane's passionate resentment of the punishments which miss scatcherd inflicted on helen was genuine. charlotte was nine years old when she left cowan's bridge school, but her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister maria had received there flashed out years afterwards in _jane eyre_. charlotte brontë was writing _jane eyre_ at the same time that emily and anne were writing _wuthering heights_ and _agnes grey_. as they read from their manuscripts, charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a heroine, and said, "i will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." so arose the conception of jane eyre. if the slight, shy, yorkshire governess, without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance as cruelly as hannah shut the door in the face of jane eyre, when she came to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights' exposure on the moor, and asking for charity. but charlotte brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form. jane eyre is not, however, charlotte brontë, as has been so often asserted. she would not have gone back to comfort mr. rochester, after she had once left the hall. one suspects that he was drawn from reading, since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw a fitting lover for jane. mr. rochester is very much the same type of man as mr. b., whom pamela married, and the independent jane addresses him as "my master," an expression constantly on the lips of pamela. yet rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a strong man at war with destiny. he conceals his marriage because of his determination to conquer fate. it is pointed out by critics to-day that he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's hero. it is well to remember, however, that the author of _jane eyre_ was believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossible for a man like rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, and not until mrs. gaskell's life of the brontës was published was charlotte's character as a modest woman established. but men have repudiated mr. rochester, and so we must accept their judgment. the heroine of her next novel, _shirley_, was suggested by emily brontë. only shirley was not emily. shirley could not have conceived even the dim outlines of _wuthering heights_, but she had many of the strong qualities of emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own nature, make her contradictory but charming, and louis moore, an agreeable tutor whom emily brontë would have quite despised, naturally falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the school-room. shirley is contrasted with caroline helstone, of whom mrs. humphry ward says: "for delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, caroline stands supreme among the women of miss brontë's gallery." even if other admirers of miss brontë deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses all the qualities, rare among heroines, which mrs. ward has attributed to her. in many of the conversations between shirley and caroline, there are reminders of what passed between the brontë sisters in their own home. the relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested them. shirley evidently expressed charlotte's own views in the following words: "if men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. they do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem--novel--drama, thinking it fine,--divine! fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial--false as the rose in my best bonnet there. if i spoke all i think on this point, if i gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should i be? dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour." "after all," says caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes." "not at all," shirley replies. "women read men more truly than men read women. i'll prove that in a magazine article some day when i've time; only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's." the greater part of the men in _shirley_ were drawn from life, and are as true to their sex as were the heroines of dickens, thackeray, or disraeli, who were then writing. as for the curates, they are perfect. no man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. they have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their respective parishes. but this daughter of a country vicar, who knew nothing of the london cockney, who was then enlivening the books of dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they have been immortalised. there is often in charlotte brontë's novels a separation of plot and character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. this is especially true of _shirley_. at that time the attention of england was directed toward the manufacturing towns of lancashire and yorkshire. mrs. trollope and harriet martineau had written upon conditions of life there. in _sybil_ disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of the misery of the operatives. mrs. gaskell wrote _mary barton_, a story of manchester life, the same year that charlotte brontë was writing _shirley_. the plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the introduction of machinery. but the plot and characters are constantly getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. though the book is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. when she began the funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters were with her. before it was finished, she and her father were left alone. but at this time the public demanded melodrama. fires, drownings, and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing upon the emotions of the reader. she, like mrs. gaskell, constantly resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which jane austen would not have admitted in a book of hers. before charlotte brontë wrote _jane eyre_ or _shirley_, she had finished _the professor_, and offered it to different publishers, but it was rejected by all. finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformed it into the beautiful story of _villette_, where the school of madame and monseiur héger in brussels is made immortal. in the plot of _villette_, as in the plot of _jane eyre_ and of _shirley_, many extraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary. like _jane eyre_, _villette_ is steeped in the romantic spirit, but the hard light of reason again dispels the illusion. in the management of the supernatural charlotte is far inferior to emily. the explanation of the nun in _villette_ is even childish. it is the mistake made by mrs. radcliffe, by nearly all writers of the age of reason. they give a ray, as it were, a whisper from the mysterious world which surrounds that which is manifest to our everyday senses. be it the fourth dimension, or what not, we catch for a moment a message from this other world, which, even indistinct, still tells us that this visible world is not all, that there is something beyond. then, with hard common-sense, they deny their own message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leave us only the material world in which to believe. not so emily brontë. not so scott or shakespeare. we may believe in hamlet's ghost or not; we may believe or not in the white lady of avenel; we may believe or not that catharine's soul hovered near heathcliff. but we are still left with a belief in the life after death, and still believe in something beyond experience, and still grope to find those things in heaven and earth of which philosophy does not dream. but the characters, not the plot, remain in the mind, after reading _villette_. madame beck, whose prototype was madame héger, is as clever as cardinal wolsey or cardinal richelieu; but she uses all her diplomatic skill in the management of a lady's school, which, under her ever watchful eye, with the aid of duplicate keys to the trunks and drawers of the teachers and pupils, runs without friction of any kind. lucy snowe, the english teacher in _villette_, is far more pleasing than jane eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper and broader, and consequently kinder. and there is paul emanuel. who would have believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholar of middle age? he is so distinctly the foreigner in showing every emotion under which he is labouring. how pathetic and how lovable he is on the day of his fête when he thinks that the english governess has forgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happier for him! so fretful in little things, so heroic in large things, with so many faults which every pupil can see, but with so many virtues, frank even about his little deceptions, he is a lovable man. but many of miss brontë's readers do not find paul emanuel as delightful as paulina, the womanly little girl who grows into the childlike woman. she is as sensitive as the mimosa plant to the people about her. every event of her childhood, all the people she cared for then, remained indelibly imprinted on her mind, so that, with her, friendship and love are strong and abiding. notwithstanding their many defects, charlotte brontë's novels have left a permanent impression upon english fiction and have won an acknowledged place among english classics. she first made a minute analysis of the varying emotions of men and women, and noted the strange, unaccountable attractions and repulsions which everybody has experienced. paulina, a girl of six, is happy at the feet of graham, a boy of sixteen, although he is unconscious of her presence. and so instance after instance can be given of affinities and antipathies which lie beyond human reason. she, like her sister emily, though with less clear vision, was searching for the hidden sources of human feeling and human action. charlotte brontë wrote to a friend: "i always through my whole life liked to penetrate to the real truth; i like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and daring the dread glance." her truthfulness in painting emotion, which to her own generation seemed most daring, even coarse, has given an abiding quality to her work. and besides she created paulina and paul emanuel. chapter xvi mrs. gaskell ever since eve gave adam of the forbidden fruit, "and he did eat," the relative position of the sexes has rankled in the heart of man. the sons of adam proclaim loudly that they were given dominion over the earth and all that the earth contained; but they have been ever ready to follow blindly the beckoning finger of some fair daughter of eve. perhaps it is a consciousness of this domination of the weaker sex that has led man to proclaim in such loud tones his mastery over woman, having some doubts of its being recognised by her unless asserted in bold language. at a time when the novels of women received as warm a welcome from the public and as large checks from the publishers as those of men, a writer whose sex need not be given thus discussed their relative merits: "what is woman, regarded as a literary worker? simply an inferior animal, educated as an inferior animal. and what is man? he is a superior being, educated by a superior being. so how can they ever be equal in that particular line?" granted the premises, there can be but one conclusion. the perfect assurance with which men have asserted their own sufficiency in all lines of art would be amusing if it had not been so disastrous in distorting and warping at least three of them: music, the drama, and prose fiction. as slow as the growth of spirituality, has been the recognition of woman's mental and moral power. it seems almost incredible that not many years ago only male voices were heard in places of amusement. deep, rich, full, and sonorous, no one disputes the beauty of the male chorus; but modern opera would be impossible without the soprano and alto voices, and madame patti, madame sembrich, and madame lehman have proved that in natural gifts and in the technique of art women are not inferior to their brethren. by the same slow process women have won recognition on the stage. even in shakespeare's time men saw no reason why women should acquire the histrionic art. imagine juliet played by a boy! yet essex, leicester, southampton, in the boxes, the groundlings in the pit, and ben jonson sitting as critic of all, were well satisfied with it, for they were used to it, just as men have accepted the heroines of their own novels, though every woman they meet is a refutation of their truth. it only needed a woman in a woman's part to open the eyes of the audience to all they had missed before. not until the restoration, did any woman appear on the english stage. the following lines given in the prologue written for the revival of _othello_, in which the part of desdemona was acted for the first time by a woman, show how quick critics were to see the folly of the old custom: for to speak truth, men act, that are between forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen, with bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant, when you call desdemona, enter giant. as we cannot conceive of the english stage without such women as mrs. siddons, charlotte cushman, and ellen terry, so we cannot conceive of the english novel without such writers as maria edgeworth, jane austen, mary mitford, the brontës, elizabeth gaskell, and george eliot, each one of whom carried some phase of the novel to so high a point that she has stood pre-eminent in her own particular line. too often we confuse art with its subject-matter. if it requires as much skill to give interest to the everyday occurrences of the home as to the thrilling adventures abroad; to depict the life of women as the life of men; to reveal the joys and sorrows of a woman's heart as the exultations and griefs of man's; then these women deserve a place equal to that held by richardson, fielding, scott, dickens, and thackeray. their art, as their subject-matter, is different. with the exception of george eliot, they have not virility with its strength and power, but they have femininity, no less strong and powerful, a quality possessed by scott, but by no other of these masculine writers, with the possible exception of dickens, and in him it is a femininity, which tends to run to sentimentalism, a different characteristic. * * * * * elizabeth gaskell, one of the most feminine of writers, is so well known as the author of _cranford_, that delightful village whose only gentleman dies early in the story, that many of its readers do not know that its author was better known by her contemporaries through her humanitarian novels; in which she discussed the great problems that face the poor. mrs. gaskell, whose maiden name was stevenson, was born in chelsea in . she spent the greater part of her childhood and girlhood at the home of her mother's family, knutsford in cheshire, the place she afterward made famous under the name of cranford. in , she married the reverend william gaskell, minister of the unitarian chapel in manchester, and that city became her home. she took an active interest in all the affairs of the city, and constantly visited the poor. her husband's father, besides being the professor of english history and literature in manchester new college, a unitarian institution, was a manufacturer; thus mrs. gaskell had the opportunity of hearing both sides of the controversy which was then waging between labour and capital. in the early forties, there was much suffering among the "mill-hands"; many were dying of starvation, and consequently there were many strikes and uprisings. these conditions led to her writing her first novel, _mary barton_. the book was written during the years - , although it was not published until . the nucleus of it, mrs. gaskell wrote to a friend, was john barton. since she herself was constantly wondering at the inequalities of fortune, which permitted some to starve, while others had abundance, how must it affect an ignorant man, himself on the verge of starvation, and filled with pity for the sufferings of his friends? driven almost insane by the condition of society, and hoping to remedy it, he commits a crime, which preys so upon his conscience that it finally wears out his own life. mrs. gaskell in this, her first novel, has left an undying picture of that section of smoky manchester where the mill-workers live: its narrow lanes; small but not uncomfortable cottages, well supplied with furniture in days when work was plentiful, but destitute even of a fire when it was scarce; the undersized men and women, with irregular features, pale blue eyes, sallow complexions, but with an intelligence rendered quick and sharp by their life among the machinery, and by their hard struggle for existence. the life of the poor had often furnished a theme for the poets, but it was the life of shepherds and milkmaids, above whom the blue sky arched, and whose labours were brightened by the songs of the birds, and the colours and sweet odours of fruit and flowers. but mrs. gaskell described the life of the poor in a town where factory smoke obscured the light of the sun, and where the weariness of labour was rendered more intense by the clanging factory bell, and the constant whirr of machinery ringing in their ears. it is a gloomy picture, but no gloomier than the reality. disraeli in _sybil_ discussed the questions of labour and capital in their relations to the history of england, with a broad intellectual grasp of the sociological causes which produced these conditions. he wrote in the interests of two classes, the crown and the people, with the hope that england might again have a free monarchy and a prosperous people. it is a well illustrated treatise on government, but the principles advocated or discussed always overshadow the characters. he had no such intimate knowledge of the lives of the poor as had mrs. gaskell. she conducts us to the homes of john barton, george wilson, and job legh, shows the simplicity of their lives, and their sense of the injustice under which they are suffering, and their helpfulness to each other in times of need. how simple and true is the friendship that binds mary barton, the dressmaker's apprentice; margaret, the blind singer; and alice wilson, the aged laundress, whose mind is constantly dwelling on the green fields and running brooks of her childhood's home. these women possess the strength of character of the early teutonic women. they are reticent, not given to the exchange of confidences, but ready to help a friend with all they have in the hour of need. when margaret thinks that the bartons are in want of money, she says to mary, "remember, if you're sore pressed for money, we shall take it very unkind if you do not let us know." but she does not question her. later when her great trouble comes to mary barton, which she must bear alone, when she must free a lover from the charge of murder without incriminating her father, she shows presence of mind, clearness of vision, and both moral and physical courage. jem wilson, the hero of the story, is as strong as mary barton, the heroine. although dickens was writing of the poor, he always found some means to educate his heroes, and generally placed them among gentlemen. jem wilson's education was received in the factory, and the little rise he made above his fellows was due to his better understanding of machinery. he was a working man, proud of his skill, and of his good name for honesty and sobriety. the plot of _mary barton_ is highly melodramatic, and its technique is open to criticism. it should not be read, however, for the story, but for the many home scenes in which we come into close sympathy with the men and women of manchester. there is no novel in which we feel more strongly the heart-beats of humanity. it leaves the impression, not of art, but of life. mrs. gaskell turned again to the struggles between labour and capital for the plot of her novel _north and south_. between this story and _mary barton_ she had written _cranford_ and _ruth_, but her mind seemed to revert, as it were, from the peaceful village life to the stirring mill-towns of lancashire. the great contrast between life in the counties of england presided over by the landed gentry, and that in the counties where the manufacturers formed the aristocracy, suggested this book. it was published in , seven years after _mary barton_. the plot of _north and south_ is better proportioned than is that of _mary barton_. there are fewer characters, better contrasted. it is a brighter picture, with more humour, but it does not leave so strong an impression on the mind as does the earlier work. both, however, are more accurate than _hard times_, a book with which dickens himself was highly dissatisfied. he knew little of the life in the manufacturing districts, but, in a spirit of indignation at the poverty brought on by grasping manufacturers, he caricatured the entire class in the persons of mr. gradgrind and mr. bounderby. when these men are compared with the manufacturers as represented in _north and south_, mrs. gaskell's more intimate knowledge of them is at once apparent. mrs. gaskell had been accused of taking sides with the working men, and representing their point of view in _mary barton_. in _north and south_, the hero, mr. thornton, is a rich manufacturer, a fine type of the self-made man, but standing squarely on his right to do what he pleases in his own factory. "he looks like a person who would enjoy battling with every adverse thing he could meet with--enemies, winds, or circumstances," was margaret hale's comment when she first met him. "he's worth fighting wi', is john thornton," said one of the leaders of the strike. for although the condition of affairs in the mill-towns had much improved since john barton went to london as a delegate from his starving townsmen, and was refused a hearing by parliament, a large part of the book is concerned with the story of a strike, which in its outcome brought starvation to many of the men, and bankruptcy to some of the masters, the acknowledged victors. higgins, one of the leaders of the working men, is a true lancashire man, and like thornton, the leader of the masters, has many traits of character as truly american as english. his sturdy independence is well shown in margaret's first interview with him. the daughter of a vicar in the south of england, she had been accustomed to call upon the poor in her father's parish. learning that higgins's daughter, bessy, is ill she expresses her desire to call upon her. "i'm none so fond of having stranger folk in my house," higgins informs her, but he finally relents and says, "yo may come if yo like." but besides the conflict between the manufacturers and their employees, with which much of the book is concerned, there is the sharp contrast between the hales, born and bred in the south of england, and the mill-owners in whose society they are placed. mr. hale, indecisive, inactive, in whom thought is more powerful than reality, is as helpless as a child among these men of action, and utterly unable to cope with the problems they are facing. margaret, the refined daughter of a poor clergyman, is contrasted with the proud mrs. thornton, the mother of a wealthy manufacturer, who would make money, not birth, the basis of social distinctions. but margaret is even better contrasted with the poor factory girl, bessy higgins, who turns to her for help and sympathy. there is hardly a story of mrs. gaskell's which is not adorned by the friendship of the heroine for some other woman in the book. in both these novels, she taught that the only solution of the great problem of capital and labour was a recognition of the fact that their interests were identical, and that friendly intercourse was the only means of breaking down the barrier that divided them. mrs. gaskell was so versatile, she touched upon so many problems of human life, that it is almost impossible to summarise her work. _ruth_ considers the question of the girl who has been betrayed. ruth is as pure as tess of the d'urbervilles, and like her is a victim of circumstances. a stranger who has taken her under her protection reports that ruth is a widow, and ruth passively acquiesces in the deception, hoping that her son may never know the disgrace of his birth. but the truth comes to light, involving in temporary disgrace ruth and her son, and the household of mr. benson, the dissenting minister whose home had been her place of refuge. but mrs. gaskell is always optimistic. by her good deeds, ruth wins the love and honour of the entire community. this novel was loudly assailed. it was claimed that mrs. gaskell had condoned immorality, and it was considered dangerous teaching that good deeds were an atonement for such a sin. but if _ruth_ found detractors, it also found warm admirers, who recognised the broader teachings of the story. mrs. jameson wrote to mrs. gaskell: "i hope i do understand your aim--you have lifted up your voice against 'that demoralising laxity of principle,' which i regard as the ulcer lying round the roots of society; and you have done it wisely and well, with a mingled courage and delicacy which excite at once my gratitude and my admiration." the scene of _sylvia's lovers_ is laid in whitby, at a time when the press-gang was kidnapping men for the british navy. it is a story of the loves, jealousies, and sorrows of sailors, shopkeepers, and small farmers, among whom sylvia moves as the central figure. du maurier, who illustrated the second edition of this novel, was so charmed with the heroine that he named his daughter sylvia for her. this story, like _ruth_, has much of the sentimentalism so fashionable in the middle of the nineteenth century. the leading canon of criticism at that time was the power with which a writer could move the emotions of the reader, and the novelist was expected either to convulse his readers with laughter or dissolve them into tears. there are many funny scenes in _sylvia's lovers_, but the key-note is pathos. like many novels of dickens, there are death-bed scenes introduced only for the luxury of weeping over sorrows that are not real, and there are melodramatic situations as in her other books. parts of this novel suggested to tennyson the poem of _enoch arden_. but, however powerful may be the novels dealing with the questions that daily confront the poor, there is a perennial charm in the society of people who dwell amid rural scenes. mrs. gaskell has written several short stories of the pastoral type. such a story is _cousin phillis_. it is a beautiful idyl and reminds one of the old pastorals in which ladies and gentlemen played at shepherds and shepherdesses. cousin phillis cooks, irons, reads dante, helps the haymakers, falls in love, and mends a broken heart, and is brave, true, and unselfish. her father is what one would expect from such a daughter. he cultivates his small farm, finds rest from his labours in reading, and neglects none of the many duties which belong to him as the dissenting minister of a small village. _cranford_ and _wives and daughters_ have this in common, that the scene of both is laid in the village of knutsford. the former is a rambling story of events in two or three households, and of the social affairs in which all the village is concerned. it is without doubt the favourite of mrs. gaskell's novels. _wives and daughters_ was mrs. gaskell's last story, and was left unfinished at her death. it shows a great artistic advance over her earlier work. the plot is more natural; it has not so many sharp contrasts, which george eliot criticised in mrs. gaskell's stories. the characters are also more subtle. molly, the daughter of the village doctor, is an unselfish, thoughtful girl, but with none of that unreal goodness which dickens sometimes gave to his heroines. when she receives her first invitation to a child's party, and her father is wondering whether or not she can go, her speech is characteristic of her nature: "please, papa,--i do wish to go--but i don't care about it." molly feels very keenly, and longs for things with all the strength of an ardent nature, but she always subordinates herself and her wishes to others. in the character of cynthia, mrs. gaskell makes a plea for the heartless coquette. cynthia is beautiful, she likes to please those in whose company she finds herself, but quickly forgets the absent. it is not her fault that young men's hearts are brittle, for it is as natural for her to smile, and be gay and forget, as it is for molly to love, be silent, and remember. so it is cynthia who has the lovers, while molly is neglected. clare, cynthia's mother, is more selfish than her daughter, but she has learned the art of seeming to please others while thinking only of pleasing herself. she is as crafty as becky sharp, but softer, more feline, and more subtle; a much commoner type in real life than thackeray's diplomatic heroine. mr. a. w. ward, in the biographical introduction to the knutsford edition of her novels, says of her later work: "when mrs. gaskell had become conscious that if true to herself, to her own ways of looking at men and things, to the sympathies and hopes with which life inspired her, she had but to put pen to paper, she found what it has been usual to call her later manner--the manner of which _cranford_ offered the first adequate illustration, and of which _cousin phillis_ and _wives and daughters_ represent the consummation." the same critic compares the later work of mrs. gaskell with the later work of george sand and finds that "in their large-heartedness" they are similar. he also gives george sand's tribute to her english contemporary. "mrs. gaskell," she said, "has done what neither i nor other female writers in france can accomplish: she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading." it is not often that a novelist finds another writer to take up and enlarge her work as did mrs. gaskell. her novels contain the germ of much of george eliot's earlier writings. _the moorland cottage_ suggested many parts of _the mill on the floss_. edward and maggie brown--the former important, consequential and dictatorial, the latter self-forgetful, eager to help others, and by her very eagerness prone to blunders--were developed by george eliot into the characters of tom and maggie tulliver. the weak and fretful mothers in the two books are much alike, while the love story and the catastrophe have the same general outline. they both drew largely from the working people of the north or of the midlands, and both constantly introduced dissenters. silas marner belongs to the manufacturing north, and the people of lantern yard are of the same class as those of manchester and milton. felix holt and adam bede belong to the same type as jem wilson and mr. thornton, while esther lyon is not unlike margaret hale. both often presented life from the point of view of the poor. both were interested in the development of character, and in the changes which it underwent for good or evil under the influence of outward circumstances. but george eliot had greater intellectual power than mrs. gaskell. she had the broader view and the deeper insight. mrs. gaskell could never have conceived the plots nor the characters of _romola_ nor _middlemarch_. she constantly introduced extraneous matter to shape her plots according to her will, while with george eliot the fate of character is as hard and unyielding as was the fate of predestination in the sermons of the old calvinistic divines. mrs. gaskell, like dickens, introduced death-bed scenes merely to play upon the emotions. george eliot was never guilty of this defect; with her, character is a fatalism that is inexorable. but mrs. gaskell had a more hopeful view of life than had george eliot. the unitarians believe in man and have faith in the clemency of god. this makes them a cheerful people. however dark the picture that mrs. gaskell paints, we have faith that conditions will soon be better, and at the close of the book we see the dawn of a brighter day. george eliot had taken the suggestions of mrs. gaskell and amplified them with many details that the woman of lesser genius had omitted. but to each was given her special gift. if george eliot's characters stand out as more distinct personalities, they are drawn with less sympathy. george eliot's men and women are often hard and sharp in outline; mrs. gaskell's, no matter how poor or ignorant, are softened and refined. it was this quality that made it possible for her to write that inimitable comedy of manners, _cranford_. her other novels with their deep pathos, strong passion, and dramatic situations must be read to show the breadth of her powers, but _cranford_ will always give its author a unique place in literature. imagine the material that furnished the groundwork of this story put into the hands of any novelist from richardson to henry james. it seems almost like sacrilege to think what even jane austen might have said of these dear elderly ladies. as for thackeray, their little devices to keep up appearances would have seemed to him instances of feminine deceit, and he might have put even miss jenkyns with her admiration of dr. johnson into his _book of snobs_. what tears dickens would have drawn from our eyes over the love story of miss matty and mr. holbrook. how george eliot would have mourned over the shallowness of their lives. henry james would have squinted at them and their surroundings through his eye-glass until he had discovered every faded spot on the carpet or skilful darn in the curtain. miss mitford would have appreciated these ladies and loved them as did mrs. gaskell, only she would have been so interested in the flowers and birds and clouds that she would have forgotten all about the cranford parties, and would probably have ignored the presence in their midst of the honourable mrs. jamieson, the sister-in-law of an earl. so we must conclude that only mrs. gaskell could make immortal this village of femininity, where to be a man was considered almost vulgar, but into which she has introduced one of the most chivalrous gentlemen in the person of captain browne, and one of the most faithful of lovers in the person of mr. holbrook, while no book has a more lovable heroine than fluttering, indecisive miss matty, over whose fifty odd years the sorrows of her youth have cast their lengthening shadows. _mary barton_ is a work of genius. only a woman of high ideals could have drawn the character of margaret hale, an earlier marcella, or molly gibson, or mr. thornton, or mr. holman. only a woman of deep insight could have created a woman like ruth: a book which in its problem and its deep earnestness reminds one of _aurora leigh_. but her readers will always love mrs. gaskell for the sake of the gentle ladies of _cranford_. conclusion mrs. gaskell died on the twelfth of november, . of the novelists who have been considered in this book only three survived her, mrs. bray, mrs. s. c. hall, and harriet martineau, but they added little to prose fiction after that date. during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the number of books written by women continued to increase each year. julia kavanagh was the author of several novels, the first of which _the three paths_, was published in ; all her stories were written with high moral aim and delicacy of feeling. _uncle tom's cabin_, by harriet beecher stowe, published in , is probably the most powerful novel ever written to plead the cause of oppressed humanity. dinah maria muloch craik kept up the interest in the domestic novel; her most popular book, _john halifax, gentleman_, has lost none of its charm for young women, even if it does not meet the requirements of a classic. mrs. henry wood is still remembered as the author of the melodramatic _east lynne_, but her best stories are the _johnny ludlow papers_, which deal with character alone; her popularity is attested by the fact that more than a million copies of her books have been issued. charlotte yonge's forgotten novels were classed among the _church stories_, because they contain so much piety and devotion. of a different type was miss de la ramée, who wrote under the name of ouidà; she had fine gifts of word-painting, but a fondness for the questionable in conduct. miss braddon, the author of _lady audley's secret_, excelled in complicated plots. mrs. oliphant has been a most versatile writer, and followed almost every style of prose fiction; her domestic stories are generally considered her best. anne thackeray, better known as mrs. ritchie, the daughter of the great novelist, has written several novels, all of which have a delightfully feminine touch. miss rhoda broughton has entertained the reading public by love stories which hold the attention until the marriage takes place. but all these women fade into insignificance beside george eliot, whose first story, _the sad fortunes of the rev. amos barton_, appeared in _blackwood's magazine_ in , and whose last novel, _daniel deronda_, was published nearly twenty years later, in . it seems strange that any reader of her books should have thought them the product of a man's brain, as was at first believed. for, notwithstanding her power in developing a plot, her breadth of view, and her mental grasp, her genius is essentially feminine. she excelled in analysis of character, in attention to details, in ethical teaching, and in artistic truthfulness, the qualities in which women have been pre-eminent. only a woman's pen could have drawn such characters as dinah morris, maggie tulliver, and dorothea casaubon, or could have followed the minute and subtle influences under which the plot of _middlemarch_ is shaped. george eliot has left a larger portrait gallery of women than any other novelist. not only has she drawn different grades of society, but, what is perhaps a more difficult task, she has drawn the different grades of spiritual greatness and moral littleness. she brought the psychological novel to a degree of perfection which has never been surpassed. mrs. oliphant has thus written of george eliot's place in literature: "another question which has been constantly put to this age, and which is pushed with greater zeal every day, as to the position of women in literature and the height which it is in their power to attain, was solved by this remarkable woman, in a way most flattering to all who were and are fighting the question of equality between the two halves of mankind; for here was visibly a woman who was to be kept out by no barriers, who sat down quietly from the beginning of her career in the highest place, and, if she did not absolutely excel all her contemporaries in the revelation of the human mind and the creation of new human beings, at least was second to none in those distinguishing characteristics of genius." we are too near the nineteenth century to decide as to the relative positions of its great novelists. at one time george eliot was placed at the head of all writers of fiction, with dickens and thackeray as rivals for the second place. but she was dethroned by thackeray, and there are signs that the final kingship will be given to charles dickens, unless scott receives it instead. fashions in novels change at least every fifty years. exciting plots and situations, strong emotional scenes, sharp contrasts, are not demanded by present readers, who also turn away with disgust from the saintly heroine and the irreclaimable villain. of the many volumes of fiction written in the eighteenth century only two are in general circulation to-day, _robinson crusoe_ and _the vicar of wakefield_. but all those once popular novels, even if their very names are now forgotten, have done their work in shaping the thought and morals of their own and succeeding generations. index _abbott, the_, _absentee, the_, , - , _ada reis_, _adam bede_, , , addison, joseph, , _adeline mowbray, or the mother and daughter_, - _adventures of an atom_, _afflicted parent, the, or the undutiful child punished_, _age of wordsworth, the_, _agnes grey_, - , , ainsworth, william harrison, , alderson, miss, _see_ opie, amelia _amorous friars, or the intrigues of a convent_, _amos barton_, _amours of prince tarquin and miranda_, _antiquary, the_, , _arabian nights_, , arblay, madame d', _see_ burney, frances _arblay, madame d', essay on_, - , , - arden, enoch, arnold, matthew, _artless tales_, _athenæum, the_, , _aurora leigh_, austen, jane, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , baillie, joanna, , balzac, honoré de, _banker's wife, the_, barbauld, mrs. anna letitia, barrett, miss, _see_ browning, elizabeth _barring out, the_, _bas bleu_, , _beauty put to its shifts, or the young virgin's rambles_, behn, aphra, , - _belford regis_, - _belinda_, , _beside the bonny brier bush_, _betsy thoughtless, miss, the history of_, - , , _bithynia, an adventure in_, _blackwood's magazine_, , blake, william, _blazing world, description of a new world called the_, - blessington, lady, , blind harry the minstrel, , bonheur, rosa, _book of snobs, the_, boswell, james, bousset, braddon, mary elizabeth, bray, ann eliza, , - , , _bride of lammermoor, the_, brontë, anne, , , - brontë, charlotte, , , , , , , , - brontë, emily, , - , , , , , brontës, the, - , _brooke and brooke farm_, broughton, rhoda, browning, elizabeth barrett, , , , brunton, alexander, brunton, mary, , , - , _bubbled knights, or successful contrivances_, bulwer, edward, lord lytton, , , burke, edmund, , , burney, charles, burney, frances, , - , , , , , byron, lord (george gordon), , - , - , _caleb williams_, _camilla, or a picture of youth_, - , , _canterbury tales, the_, - _caroline evelyn, the history of_, carter, elizabeth, _castle of otranto, the_, _castle rackrent_, - , _castles of athlyn and dunbayne_, cavendish, margaret, _see_ newcastle, duchess of cavendish, william, _see_ newcastle, duke of _cecil, or the adventures of a coxcomb_, - _cecilia, or memoirs of an heiress_, - , , , , , _celestina_, _chap-books_, chapone, hester, chaucer, geoffrey, _cheap repository, the_, - _childe harold_, , clarendon, earl of (edward hyde), _clarissa harlowe_, , , , _clelia_, _clubman, the_, _coelebs in search of a wife_, - coleridge, ernest hartley, collier, jeremy, colman, george, , , _confessions of a pretty woman_, congreve, william, cooper, james fenimore, corneille, _cottagers of glenburnie, the_, cottin, sophie, madame de, _court gazette_, _courtenay of walreddon; a romance of the west_, _cousin phillis_, - , , crabbe, george, craik, dinah maria muloch, craik's _english prose_, _cranford_, , , , , - crewe, catherine, _cry of the children, the_, curtis, george william, _daniel deronda_, dante, alighieri, david copperfield, _david simple_, - _deerbrook_, defoe, daniel, _de foix, or sketches of the manners and customs of the fourteenth century_, _desmond_, - , _destiny_, , , , , - diana of the crossways, dickens, charles, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _discipline_, disraeli, benjamin, , , , , , dombey and son, _domestic manners of the americans_, - dryden, john, _duchess of malfi, the_, du maurier, _east lynne_, edgeworth, maria, , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , edgeworth, richard lovell, , , , , _eighteenth century, history of the_, elia, _see_ lamb, charles eliot, george, , , , , , , , - , - emma, - , - , , _emmeline_, _ennui_, , _enoch arden_, _epipsychidion_, _essay on irish bulls_, see _irish bulls, essay on_ _essay on madame d'arblay_, see _arblay, madame d', essay on_ _ethelinda_, evans, marian, _see_ eliot, george _evelina, or a young lady's entrance into the world_, , , - , , , , , , , evelyn, john, _evening chronicle_, _examiner_, _fair jilt, the_, _falkland_, , _falkner_, _fantom, mr.: or the history of the new-fashioned philosopher, and his man william_, , felix holt, _female education, strictures on the modern system of_, _female quixote, the_, - ferrier, susan edmonstone, - , , fielding, henry, , , , , , , , , , fielding, sarah, , , - _fits of fitz-ford_, _flies in amber_, _florence macarthy_, _fortnightly review_, fox, charles james, _frankenstein, or the modern prometheus_, - , _fraser's magazine_, froissart's _chronicles_, gait, john, garnett, sir richard, garrick, david, , , garrison, william lloyd, gaskell, elizabeth cleghorn, , , , , - genlis, stephanie felicite, comtesse de, , _gentleman's magazine, the_, gibbon, edward, _glenarvon_, - godwin, mary wollstonecraft, _see_ wollstonecraft, mary godwin, william, , , , , , goethe, johann wolfgang von, goldsmith, oliver, gore, catherine grace frances, - , gosse, edmund, _grand cyrus, the_, , , _gulliver's travels_, guy mannering, _hackney coachman, the_, hall, anna maria (mrs. s. c.), , , - , , hall, s. c., hamilton, elizabeth, - _hamiltons, the_, hamlet, _hard times_, hardy, thomas, , _harriet stuart, the life of_, harry, blind, the minstrel, _see_ blind harry the minstrel haywood, eliza, , - , _heir of selwood, the_, , helen, _henrietta_, _henry de pomeroy_, _henry esmond_, _heptameron_, the, herford, c. h., _hints towards forming the character of a young princess_, homer, , , horace, _hour and the man, the_, , - huet, bishop, pierre daniel, _humphry clinker_, , , _hungarian brothers_, _ibrahim_, , _ida, or the woman of athens_, _impetuous lover, the, or the guiltless parricide_, inchbald, elizabeth, , , - , , , , _inheritance, the_, , - , , , - _irish bulls, essay on_, - _irish peasantry, stories of the_, , _italian, the_, , , , , , , ivanhoe, jackson, helen hunt (h. h.), james, g. p. r., , james, henry, jameson, mrs. (anna), _jane eyre_, , , , , , , - , , _jealous wife, the_, jeffrey, francis, joan of arc, _john halifax, gentleman_, _johnny ludlow papers_, johnson, r. brimley, johnson, dr. samuel, , , , , , , , , , , , , , _jonathan jefferson whitlaw, the life and adventures of_, - , jonson, ben, _joseph andrews_, , , _journey to bath_, jules verne, _see_ verne, jules kauffman, angelica, kavanagh, julia, _king lear_, see _lear_ knox, john, _kruitzener, or the german's tale_, - _lady audley's secret_, _lady clare_, _lady of lyons, the_, _lady's magazine_, lafayette, madame de, , , , lamb, lady caroline, - lamb, charles, , , lamb, william (lord melbourne), , , , , _landlady's tale, the_, lang, andrew, lanier, sidney, _last man, the_, - _lazy lawrence_, , _lear, king_, lee, harriet, , - lee, sophia, , - , lennox, charlotte, , - _letters of the duchess of newcastle_, - _letters to young ladies_, lewis, matthew gregory, "library of old authors," russell smith, _life of the duke of newcastle_, see _newcastle, life of the duke of_ _lights and shadows of irish life_, - _lilly dawson, the story of_, _literary gazette_, _lodore_, - longueville, duchesse de, _lucius_, lytton, bulwer, _see_ bulwer, edward (lord lytton) macaulay, thomas babington, , , , machiavelli, niccolo, mackay, sheriff, _magyar, the, and the moslem_, _man and superman_, _manchester strike, a_, manley, mary, , - , _mansfield park_, , - , , marcella, margaret, queen of navarre, _marriage_, , , marsh, anne, martineau, harriet, , , - , , _mary barton_, , - , , , , masson, david, maturin, charles robert, _mazeppa_, mémoires du comte de comminges, _mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vertu_, _memoirs of a certain island adjacent to utopia_, _michael armstrong, the life and adventures of_, _middlemarch_, , _midsummer eve, a fairy tale of love_, - _mill on the floss_, the, , mitford, mary russell, , , , , - , , , , , , _monastery, the_, , _monk, the_, montagu, elizabeth, montagu, mary wortley, _monthly review_, _monumental effigies of great britain_, moore, thomas, _moorland cottage, the_, more, hannah, - , morgan, lady, , , _music, history of_, _mysteries of udolpho, the_, , , , , , , , , , _nature and art_, - _nature's pictures drawn by fancy's pencil_, _new atalantis_, - newcastle, duchess of, , - newcastle, duke of, , , , , , _newcastle, life of the duke of_, - _noctes ambrosianæ_, _nocturnal reverie_, north, christopher (john james wilson), , _north and south_, - , , _northanger abbey_, , - , _notre dame de paris_, "novelists' library," _novels by eminent hands_, _nun, the, or the perjured duty_, _o'briens, the, and the o'flahertys_, , - _o'donnel_, - _odyssey_, _old english baron, the_, , _old manor house, the_, - , , oliphant, mrs. margaret, , opie, mrs. amelia, , , - , , , _orange girl of st. giles's, the_, - ormond, - _oroonoko_, - , , _orphans, the_, _othello_, ouidà, _our village_, , - , , , owenson, sydney, _see_ morgan, lady _pamela_, , , , , , , , , , _paradise lost_, , pardoe, julia, - _pastor's fireside, the_, _patronage_, _pelham_, _pendennis_, _perkin warbeck, the fortunes of_, _persuasion_, , - , , , phillips, wendell, _pickwick papers_, _pilgrimages to english shrines_, _pin money_, - plato, _political economy tales_, - _polly honeycomb_, , pope, alexander, , , porter, anna maria, , - , porter, jane, , , , - , _preferment, or my uncle the earl_, prévost, abbé, _pride and prejudice_, , - , , , , , , , , , princess of clèves, the, , _professor, the_, _quarterly review_, , , radcliffe, ann, , - , , , rambouillet, marquise de, ramée, louise de la, _see_ ouidà ramsey, charlotte, _see_ lennox, charlotte _rape of the lock_, _rasselas_, _recess, the_, - reeve, clara, - _refugee in america, the_, richardson, samuel, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _rights of man_, _rights of woman, vindication of the_, see _vindication of the rights of woman_ ritchie, mrs., , _rival beauties, the_, _rivals, the_, , _rob roy_, _robinson crusoe_, , rogers, samuel, _romance of the forest, the_, , , , , _romance of the harem, the_, _romance of the west, a_, romeo and juliet, _romola_, rousseau, jean jacques, , ruskin, _ruth_, , - , , _st. ronan's well_, saintsbury, george, , sand, george, , , sappho, schlosser, scott, sir walter, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _scottish chiefs, the_, - scudèri, mlle. de, , , , , , , _seasons, the_, _secret intrigues of the count of caramania, the_, _selborne, the natural history and antiquities of_, _self-control_, - , _sense and sensibility_, - , , , sévigné, madame, de, shakespeare, william, , , , , , , , , _shakespeare, essay on the genius of_, shaw, bernard, shelley, mary, , - , shelley, percy bysshe, , , , , - _shepherd of salisbury plain, the_, , , sheridan, mrs. frances, , - sheridan, richard brinsley, , _shirley_, - _sicilian romance, the_, , , _sidney biddulph, the memoirs of miss_, - , _silas marner_, _simple story, a_, - , _simple susan_, - _simple tales_, _sir charles grandison_, , , _sir edward seaward's narrative_, - _sister, the_, _sketches by boz_, _sketches of english character_, - _sketches of irish character_, - smith, charlotte, , - , , , , , , smith russell, "library of old authors," _see_ "library of old authors" smollett, tobias, , , , , , _soldier of lyons, the, a tale of the tuileries_, sothern, thomas, , souza, madame de, _spectator papers_, , staël, madame de (anne louise necker), , steele, richard, , , sterne, laurence, , , , , _stories of the irish peasantry_, see _irish peasantry, stories of the_ stothard, charles, stowe, harriet beecher, , , swift, jonathan, , swinburne, charles algernon, _sybil_, , _sylvia's lovers_, - taine, _talba, the, or moor of portugal_, _tale of two cities_, _tales of fashionable life_, - _tales of my landlord, the_, _tales of real life_, _tales that never die_, _tatler, the_, , _tenant of wildfell hall, the_, - tencin, mme. de, tennyson, alfred, lord, , tess of the d'urbervilles, thackeray, anna isabella, _see_ ritchie, mrs. thackeray, william makepeace, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _thaddeus of warsaw_, - _theresa marchmont_, _thomas the rhymer_, thrale, mrs. (mrs. piozzi), _three paths, the_, _tintern abbey_, tolstoi, count leo, , _tom jones_, , , , tourgenieff, _trelawny of trelawne; or the prophecy: a legend of cornwall_, trollope, anthony, , trollope, frances, , , - , , _udolpho, the mysteries of_, see _mysteries of udolpho, the_ _uncle tom's cabin_, , , _undine_, _valperga: or the life and adventures of castruccio, prince of lucca_, - _vanity fair_, , _venetia_, verne, jules, _vicar of wakefield, the_, , , _vicar of wrexhill, the_, _village politics: addressed to all mechanics, journeymen, and labourers in great britain. by will chip, a country carpenter_, - _villette_, - _vindication of the rights of woman_, , , vivian, , _vivian grey_, , , , voltaire, françois, wallace, walpole, horace, , _wanderer, the, or female difficulties_, , ward, a. w., ward, mrs. humphry, _warleigh, or the fatal oak; a legend of devon_, _waste not, want not_, _waverley_, , , , , , _waverley novels_, , , , welsh, charles, , _werner, or the inheritance_, _westminster review_, , white, gilbert, _white hoods, the_, _whole duty of man_, _widow barnaby_, _widow married, the_, _widow wedded, the, or the barnabys in america_, _wild irish girl, the_, _will chip, a country carpenter_, see _village politics_ _winchelsea, lady_, _window in thrums, the_, _windsor forest_, _wives and daughters_, - , , wollstonecraft, mary, , , , , , , wood, mrs. henry, wordsworth, william, , , , , _wuthering heights_, , , , , , , _wycherley, william_, _yèrè-batan-seraï_, yonge, charlotte mary, _famous women._ harriet martineau. _already published_: george eliot. by miss blind. emily brontË. by miss robinson. george sand. by miss thomas. mary lamb. by mrs. gilchrist. margaret fuller. by julia ward howe. maria edgeworth. by miss zimmern. elizabeth fry. by mrs. e. r. pitman. the countess of albany. by vernon lee. mary wollstonecraft. by mrs. e. r. pennell. harriet martineau. by mrs. f. fenwick miller. rachel. by mrs. nina h. kennard. madame roland. by mathilde blind. susanna wesley. by eliza clarke. margaret of angoulÊme. by miss robinson. mrs. siddons. by mrs. nina h. kennard. madame de staËl. by bella duffy. [illustration: famous women] harriet martineau. by mrs. f. fenwick miller. boston: roberts brothers. . _copyright, _, by roberts brothers. university press: john wilson and son, cambridge. preface. the material for this biographical and critical sketch of harriet martineau and her works has been drawn from a variety of sources. some of it is quite new. her own _autobiography_ was completed in ; and there has not hitherto been anything at all worth calling a record of the twenty-one years during which she lived and worked after that date. even as regards the earlier period, although, of course i have drawn largely for facts upon the _autobiography_, yet i have found much that is new to relate. for some information and hints about this period i am indebted to her relatives of her own generation, dr. james martineau, and mrs. henry turner, of nottingham, as well as to one or two others. with reference to the latest twenty-one years of her life, my record is entirely fresh, though necessarily brief. mrs. chapman, of boston, u.s.a., has written a volume in completion of the _autobiography_, which should have covered this later period; but her account is little more than a repetition, in a peculiar style, of the story that miss martineau herself had told, and leaves the later work of the life without systematic record. as a well-known critic remarked in _macmillan_--"this volume is one more illustration of the folly of intrusting the composition of biography to persons who have only the wholly irrelevant claim of intimate friendship." but it should be remembered that when miss martineau committed to mrs. chapman the task of writing a memorial sketch, and when the latter accepted the undertaking, both of them believed that the life and work of the subject of it were practically over. i have reason to know that if harriet martineau had supposed it to be even remotely possible that so much of her life remained to be spent and recorded, she would have chosen some one more skilled in literature, and more closely acquainted with english literary and political affairs, to complete her "life." having once asked mrs. chapman to fulfill the task, however, harriet martineau was too loyal and generous a friend to remove it from her charge; and mrs. chapman, on her side, while continually begging instructions from her subject as to what she was to say, and while doubtless aware that she would not be adequate to the undertaking which had grown so since she accepted it, yet would not throw it off her hands. but her volume is in no degree a record of those last years, which constitute nearly a third of harriet martineau's whole life. i have had to seek facts and impressions about that period almost entirely from other sources. my deepest obligations are due, and must be first expressed, to mr. henry g. atkinson, the dearest friend of harriet martineau's maturity. it is commonly known that she forbade, by her will, the publication of her private letters; but she showed her supreme faith in and value for her friend, mr. atkinson, by specially exempting him from such prohibition. her objection to the publication of letters was made on general grounds. her own letters are singularly beautiful specimens of their class; and she declared that she would not mind if every word that ever she wrote were published; but she looked upon it as a duty to uphold the principle that letters should be held sacred confidences, just as all honorable people hold private conversations, not to be published without leave. but in authorizing mr. atkinson to print her letters, if he pleased, she maintained that she was not departing from this principle; for it was only the same as it would be if two friends agreed to make their conversation known. i feel deeply grateful to mr. atkinson for allowing me the privilege of presenting some of her letters to the public in this volume, and of perusing very many more. i have been permitted, also, to read a vast number of harriet martineau's letters addressed to other friends besides mr. atkinson, and how much they have aided me in the following work and in appreciating her personality, may easily be guessed; but, of course, i may not publish these letters. amongst many persons to whom i am indebted for helping me to "get touch" with my subject in this way, i must specially thank two. mr. henry reeve, the editor of the _edinburgh review_, was a relative and intimate friend of harriet martineau; and her correspondence with so distinguished a man of letters was, naturally, peculiarly interesting--not the less so because they differed altogether on many matters of opinion. her letters, which mr. reeve has kindly allowed me to see, have been of very great service to me. miss f. arnold, of fox how, (the youngest daughter of dr. arnold, of rugby,) is the second to whom like particular acknowledgments is due. she was young enough to have been harriet martineau's daughter; but she was also a beloved friend, and was almost a daily visitor at "the knoll" during the later years of miss martineau's life. the letters which miss arnold, during occasional absences from home, received from her old friend, are very domestic, lively, and characteristic of the writer. it has been of great value to me to have seen all the letters that have been lent me, but especially these two sets, so different and yet so similar as i have found them to be. i have visited norwich, and seen the house where harriet martineau was born; tynemouth, where she lay ill; ambleside, where she lived so long and died at last; and birmingham, to see my valued friends, her nieces and nephew. if i should thank by name all with whom i have talked of her, and from whom i have learned something about her, the list would grow over-long; and so i must content myself with thus comprehensively expressing my sense of individual obligations to all who have laid even a small stone to this little memorial cairn. f. f. m. contents. page. chapter i. the child at home and at school chapter ii. early womanhood; developing influences chapter iii. earliest writings chapter iv. grief struggle, and progress chapter v. the great success chapter vi. five active years chapter vii. five years of illness, and the mesmeric recovery chapter viii. the home life chapter ix. in the maturity of her powers chapter x. in retreat; journalism chapter xi. the last years harriet martineau. chapter i. the child at home and at school. when louis xiv. of france revoked the edict of nantes, in , a large number of the protestants who were driven out of france by the impending persecutions came to seek refuge in this favored land of liberty of ours. many who thus settled in our midst were amongst the most skillful and industrious workers, of various grades, that could have been found in the dominions of the persecuting king who drove them forth. they must have been, too, in the nature of the case, strong-hearted, clear in the comprehension of their principles, and truthful and conscientious about matters of opinion; for the cowardly, the weak, and the false could stay in their own land. from the good stock of these exiles for conscience-sake sprang harriet martineau. her paternal huguenot ancestor was a surgeon, who was married to a fellow-countrywoman and co-religionist of the name of pierre. this couple of exiles for freedom of opinion settled in norwich, where the husband pursued his profession. their descendants supplied a constant succession of highly-respected surgeons to the same town, without intermission, until the early part of this century, when the line of medical practitioners was closed by the death of harriet martineau's elder brother at less than thirty years old. the martineau family thus long occupied a good professional position in the town of norwich. harriet's father, however, was not a surgeon, but a manufacturer of stuffs, the very names of which are now strange in our ears--bombazines and camlets. his wife was elizabeth rankin, the daughter of a sugar-refiner of newcastle-on-tyne. a true northumbrian woman was mrs. martineau; with a strong sense of duty, but little warmth of temperament; with the faults of an imperious disposition, and its correlative virtues of self-reliance and strength of will. these qualities become abundantly apparent in her in the story of her relationship with her famous daughter. on both sides, therefore, harriet martineau was endowed by hereditary descent with the strong qualities--the power, the clear-headedness, and the keen conscience--which she interfused into all the work of her life. thomas and elizabeth martineau, her father and mother, were the parents of eight children, two of whom became widely known and influential as thinkers and writers. harriet was the sixth of the family, and was born at norwich, in magdalen street, on the th of june, , the mother being at that time thirty years old. the next child, born in , was the boy who grew up to become known as dr. james martineau; so that the two who were to make the family name famous were next to each other in age. another child followed in this family group, but not until , when harriet was nine years old, so that she could experience with reference to this baby some of that tender, protective affection which is such an education for elder children, and so delightful to girls with strong maternal instincts such as she possessed. the sixth child in a family of eight is likely to be a personage of but small consequence. the parents' pride has been somewhat satiated by previous experiences of the wonders of the dawning faculties of their children; and the indulgence which seems naturally given to "the baby" gets comparatively soon transferred from poor number six to that interloper number seven. mrs. martineau, too, was one of that sort of women who, as they would say, do not "spoil" their children. ready to work for them, to endure for them, to struggle to provide them with all necessary comforts, and even with pleasures, at the cost, if need be, of personal sacrifice of comfort and pleasure, such mothers yet do not give to their children that bountiful outpouring of tender, caressing, maternal love, which the young as much require for their due and free growth as plants do the floods of the summer sunshine. to starve the emotions in a child is not less cruel than to stint its body of food. to repress and chain up the feelings is to impose as great a hardship as it would be to fetter the freedom of the limbs. mothers who have labored and suffered through long years for the welfare of their children, are often grieved and pained in after days to find themselves regarded with respect rather than with fondness; but it was they themselves who put the seal upon the fountains of affection at the time when they might have been opened freely--and whose fault is it if, later, the outflow is found to be checked for evermore? the pity of it is that such mischief is often wrought by parents who love their children intensely, but who err in the management of them for want of the wisdom of the heart, the power of sympathetic feeling, which is seen so much stronger sometimes in comparatively shallow natures than in the deeper ones that have really more of love and of self-sacrifice in their souls. those who lack tenderness either of manner or feeling, those to whom the full and free expression of affection is difficult or seems a folly, may perhaps be led to reflect, by the story of harriet martineau's childhood, on the suffering and error that may result from a neglect of the moral command: "parents, provoke not your children to wrath." "my life has had no spring," wrote harriet martineau, sadly; yet there was nothing in the outer circumstances of her childhood and youth to justify this feeling. her mother's temper and character were largely responsible for what harriet calls her "habit of misery" during childhood. it is right to explain, however, that this unhappiness was doubtless partly due to physical causes. she was a weakly child, her health having been undermined by the dishonesty of the wet nurse employed for her during the first three months of her life. the woman lost her milk, and managed to conceal the fact until the baby was found to be in an almost dying condition from the consequences of want of nourishment. how far her frequent ill-health, during many succeeding years, was to be ascribed to this cannot be known; but her mother naturally attributed all harriet's delicacy of health to this cause, even the deafness from which she suffered, although this did not become pronounced till she was over twelve years of age. her deafness, which was the most commonly known of her deficiencies of sensation, was not her earliest deprivation of a sense. she was never able to smell, that she could remember; and as smell and taste are intimately joined together, and a large part of what we believe to be flavor is really odor, it naturally followed that she was also nearly destitute of the sense of taste. thus two of the avenues by which the mind receives impressions from the outer world were closed to her all her life, and a third was also stopped before she reached womanhood. the senses are the gates by which pleasure as well as pain enter into the citadel where consciousness resides. of all the senses, those which most frequently give entrance to pleasure and seldomest to pain, were those which she had lost. "when three senses out of five are deficient," as she said, "the difficulty of cheerful living is great, and the terms of life are truly hard." she suffered greatly, even as a little child, from indigestion. milk in particular disagreed with her; but it was held essential by mrs. martineau that children should eat bread and milk, and for years poor harriet endured daily a lump at her chest and an oppression of the spirits, induced by her inability to digest her breakfast and supper. nightmares and causeless apprehensions in the day also afflicted the nervous and sensitive girl, and she had "hardly any respite from terror." a child so delicate in health could not have been very happy under any home conditions. only a truly wise and tender maternal guardianship could have made the life of such an one at all tolerable; but harriet martineau was one of the large family of a sharp-tempered, masterful, stern, though devoted mother, whose cleverness found vent in incessant sarcasm, and in whom the love of power natural to a capable, determined person degenerated, as it so often does in domestic life, into a severe despotism. mrs. martineau's circumstances were such as to increase her natural tendency to stern and decided rule. dr. martineau tells me that all who knew his mother feel that harriet does not do justice in her "autobiography" to that mother's nobler qualities, both moral and intellectual, and especially the latter. harriet and james martineau, like so many other men and women of mark, were the children of a mother of uncommon mental capacity. her business faculties were so good, and her judgment so clear, that her husband (a man of a sweet and gentle disposition) invariably took counsel with her about all his affairs, and acted by her advice. there are still inhabitants of norwich who remember mrs. martineau, and their testimony of her is identical with her son's. "she was the ruling spirit in that house," says one of them. "whatever was done there, you understood that it was she who did it." the way in which this gentleman came to know so much of her corroborates dr. martineau's declaration that "she was really devoted to her children, and would do anything for them; if we were miserable in our childhood (a fact which he does not dispute) it could not be said to be consciously her fault." mr. ---- was the husband of a lady who had been reared from early childhood by mrs. martineau, having been adopted by her simply in order to provide her little daughter, ellen, who was nine years younger than harriet, with a child companion somewhat about her own age. this lady, her widowed husband tells me, retained a most warm admiration and affection for mrs. martineau. mothers who have brought up eight children of their own can appreciate the self-devotedness of this mother in receiving a ninth child by adoption in order to increase the well-being of her own little daughter. several other instances were told to me of mrs. martineau's benevolence and kindness of disposition. young men belonging to her religious body, and living in lodgings in norwich, were uniformly made welcome to her house, as a home, every sunday evening. one of the norwich residents, with whom i have talked about her, received a presentation from her to the unitarian free school, and afterwards, in his school life, met with constant encouragement and patronage at her hands. he tells me that he has never forgotten the stately and impressive address with which she gave him the presentation ticket, concluding with a reminder that if he made good use of this opportunity he might even hope one day to become a member of the town council of that city,--and at that giddy eminence her _protégé_ now stands. for the sake of the lesson, it should be understood that she was thus truly benevolent and kindly, and no vulgar termagant or scold. it is for us to see how such a nature can be spoiled for daily life by too unchecked a course of arbitrary rule, and by repression of outward signs of tenderness. not the least evil which a stern parent, who maintains a reserve of demeanor, and who requires strictness of discipline within the home, may do to himself and his children, is that by denying expression to the children's feelings he closes to himself the possibility of knowing what goes on in their young minds. thus, a child so restrained may for years suffer under a sense of injustice, and of undue favoritism shown to another, or under a belief that the parent's love is lacking, when a few words might have cleared away the misapprehension, and given the child the natural happiness of its age. speaking of her childhood, harriet says: "i had a devouring passion for justice; justice, first, to my own precious self, and then to other oppressed people. justice was precisely what was least understood in our house, in regard to servants and children. now and then i desperately poured out my complaints; but in general i brooded over my injuries and those of others who dared not speak, and then the temptation to suicide was very strong." the most vivid picture that she has drawn of the discipline under which such emotions were induced in her is found in a story, _the crofton boys_, which she wrote during a severe illness, and under the impression that it would contain her last words uttered through the press. mrs. proctor, in _the crofton boys_, is depicted with remarkable vividness by a series of little touches, and in a succession of trivial details, with an avoidance of direct description, that reminds us of the method of jane austen. harriet never achieved any other portrait of a character such as this one; for this is treated with such minute fidelity, and such evident unconsciousness, that we feel sure, as we sometimes do with a picture, that the likeness must be an exact one. so distinct an individuality is shown to us, and at the same time, the evidences of the artist's close and careful observation of his model are so obvious, that, without having seen the subject, we _feel_ the accuracy of the likeness. so does the "portrait of a mother" in that tale which harriet wrote for her last words through the press, show us the nature of mrs. martineau in her maternal relation. "mrs. proctor so seldom praised anybody that her words of esteem went a great way.... everyone in the house was in the habit of hiding tears from mrs. proctor, who rarely shed them herself, and was known to think that they might generally be suppressed, and should be so." if any person were weak enough to express emotion in this way in her presence, mrs. proctor would promptly and sternly intimate her disapproval of such indulgence of the feelings. when the little lad was leaving home for the first time, all the rest of the household became a little unhappy over the parting. "susan came in about the cord for his box, and her eyes were red,--and at the sight of her agnes began to cry again; and jane bent down over the glove she was mending for him, and her needle stopped. "'jane,' said her mother, gravely, 'if you are not mending that glove, give it to me. it is getting late.' "jane brushed her hand across her eyes, and stitched away again. then she threw the gloves to hugh without looking at him, and ran to get ready to go to the coach." so little allowance was ordinarily made in that house for signs of affection, or manifestations of personal attachment, that the child who was going away for six months was "amazed to find that his sisters were giving up an hour of their lessons that they might go with him to the coach." even when hugh got his foot so crushed it had to be amputated, though his mother came to him and gave him every proper attention, yet "hugh saw no tears from her"; nothing more than that "her face was very pale and grave." his anticipations of her coming had not been warm; his one anxiety had been that he might bear his pain resolutely before her. "as hugh cried, he said he bore it so very badly he did not know what his mother would say if she saw him." and it was well that he had not anticipated any outburst of pity or expression of sympathy from her, for, when she did come, "she kissed him with a long, long kiss; but she did not speak." her first words in the hearing of her agonized child were spoken to give him an intimation that the surgeons were waiting to take off his foot. the boy's reply was--not to cling to her for support, and to nestle in her bosom for comfort in the most terrible moment of his young life, but--"do not stay now; this pain is so bad! i can't bear it well at all. do go, now, and bid them make haste, will you?" later, when the leg was better, the poor boy's mental misery once overpowered him, even in his mother's presence. sitting with her and his sister--"... he said, 'he did not know how he should bear his misfortune. when he thought of the long, long days, and months, and years, to the end of his life, and that he should never run and play, and never be like other people, and never able to do the commonest things without labor and trouble, he wished he was dead. he would rather have died!' agnes thought he must be miserable indeed if he would venture to say this to his mother." such was the idea that these children had of maternal sympathy and love! so little did they look upon their mother as the one person above all others to whom their secret troubles should be opened! it is proper to observe that the mother came out of this test well. there is no record that mrs. martineau was ever found wanting in due care for her children when the pent-up agony of their bodies or spirits became so violent as to burst the bonds of reserve that her general demeanor and method of management imposed upon them. her children's misery (for harriet was not the only one of the family whose childhood was wretched) came not from any intentional neglect, or even from any indifference on her part to their comfort and happiness, but solely, let it be repeated, from her arbitrary manner and her quickness of temper. it is worth repeating (if biography be of value for the lessons which may be drawn from it for the conduct of other lives) that the mother whose children were so spirit-tossed and desolate was, nevertheless, one who gave herself up to their interests, and labored incessantly and unselfishly for their welfare. it was not love that really was wanting; far less was it faithfulness in the performance of a mother's material duties to her children; all that was lacking was the free play of the emotions on the surface, the kisses, the loving phrases, the fond tones, which are assuredly neither weaknesses nor works of supererogation in family life. by means of candid expression alone can the emotions of one mind touch those of another; and from the lack of such contact between a child and its mother there must come, in so close a life relationship, misery to the younger and disappointment to the elder of the two. "i really think," says harriet, "if i had once conceived that anybody cared for me, nearly all the sins and sorrows of my anxious childhood would have been spared me." yet, not only was she well fed, well clothed, well educated, and sent to amusements to give her pleasure (magic lanterns, parties and seaside trips are all mentioned); but besides all this, when she did burst forth, like hugh proctor in the book, with the expression of her suffering, she was soothed and cared for. but this last happened so rarely--of course entirely because it was made so difficult for her to express herself--that the occasions lived in her memory all her life. the moral consequences of all this were naturally bad. even with all motherly sympathy and encouragement, so sickly a child would have been likely to suffer from timidity, and to fall into occasional fits of despondency and irritability; but, with fear continually excited in her mind, and with an eternal storm of passionate opposition to arbitrary authority raging in her soul, it is no wonder that the poor child made for herself a character for willfulness and obstinacy, while internally she suffered dreadfully from her conscience. "in my childhood," she says, "i would assert or deny anything to my mother that would bring me through most easily.... this was so exclusively to one person that, though there was remonstrance and punishment, i was never regarded as a liar in the family." her strength of will was very great; and when she had been placed in a false position by her dread of rebuke, the powerful will came into play to maintain a dogged, stubborn, indifferent appearance. yet all the while her conscientiousness--the strong convictions as to what was right, and the ardent desire to do it, which marked her whole career--was at work within her, causing a mental shame and distress which might have been easily aided by gentle treatment to overcome the fear and the firmness which were acting together to make her miserable and a sinner. it is altogether a sad story, but i have not told it at length without reason. the fact that other children are suffering similarly every day makes the record worth repeating. but, besides this, her vivid remembrance of her childish pangs tends to show how warm and strong were her natural affections. if harriet martineau's mind had not been sensitive and emotional, and if her love for those united to her by family ties had not been ardent, she would not have felt as she did in her childhood, and she would not have remembered, all through her life, how she had suffered in her early years from unsatisfied affection. now, this soft, loving, emotional side of her character must be recognized before her life and her work can be properly appreciated. the intellectual influences of her home life were not more happy than the moral ones. she was thought by her family anything but a clever child. indeed, dr. james martineau (whose recollections are peculiarly valuable, both from his nearness to harriet in age and from their great attachment in early life) still thinks that she really was a dull child. her intelligence, he believes, awoke only in her later youth, coincidentally with some improvement in health. it is hard to guess what the impression of her childish intellectual powers might have been under different conditions. she suggestively remarks[ ]: "it should never be forgotten that the happier a child is the cleverer he will be. this is not only because in a state of happiness the mind is free, and at liberty for the exercise of its faculties instead of spending its thoughts and energy in brooding over troubles, but also because the action of the brain is stronger when the frame is in a state of hilarity; the ideas are more clear, impressions of outward objects are more vivid, and the memory will not let them slip." moreover, it is a fact worthy of note that the recognition by her family of her mental development followed upon her return home after she had been away for a time, and had been learning at a boarding-school under "the first person of whom she never felt afraid." still, the fact remains that harriet was the ugly duckling of her family, and supposed to be the most stupid of the group of martineau children. [ ] _household education_, p. . she was active-minded enough, however, to begin early that spontaneous self-education which only intellects of real power undertake, either in childhood or in later years. milton was her master. when she was seven years old she came by accident upon a copy of _paradise lost_ lying open upon a table. taking it up, she saw the heading "argument," and in the text her eye caught the word "satan." instantly the mind which her relations thought so sluggish was fired by the desire to know how satan could be argued about. she sought the passage which tells how the arch-fiend was-- hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, with hideous ruin and combustion, down to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire. for the ensuing seven years her thoughts dwelt daily in the midst of the solemn scenes, and moved to the sound of the sonorous music of milton's poetry. "i wonder how much of it i knew by heart--enough to be always repeating it to myself with every change of light and darkness, and sound, and silence, the moods of the day and the seasons of the year." the dull child, who neglected her multiplication table, did so because her mind was pre-occupied with thoughts of this grander order. her love of books increased, and her range of reading became wide. milton, although the favorite, was by no means her only beloved author. she read rapidly, and, as clever children often do, voraciously. whole pages or scenes from shakespeare, goldsmith, thompson, and milton she learned by heart, until she knew enough poetry to have fitted her for the occupation of a wandering reciter. in this way her self-education in the english classics, and in literary style, went on at the same time with her daily education by living teachers. harriet's formal education was somewhat desultory; but it is a noteworthy fact that it was, so far as it went, what would have been called a "boy's education." in this respect the history of her mental development is the same as that of many other illustrious women of the past. girls' high schools, and university examinations for young women, are products of the present day, and are rapidly rendering obsolete the old ideas about the necessary differences and distinctions between the education of boys and girls. but up to the first quarter of this century, the minds of boys and of girls were commonly submitted to entirely different courses of training. while the boys learned precision in reasoning from mathematics, the girls were considered sufficiently equipped for their lot in life by a knowledge of the first three rules of arithmetic. while any faculty of language that a lad possessed was trained and exercised by the study of the classics, his sister was thought to require no more teaching in composition and grammar than would enable her to write a letter. elaborate samplers, specimens of fine stitching, of hemming done by a thread on the most delicate cambric, of marking in tiny stitches and wonderful designs, and of lace more noticeable for difficulty in the doing than for beauty, have come down to us from our grandmothers' days, to show us how the school-time of the girls was being disposed of, while the boys were studying euclid, virgil, and homer. if we have changed all that, and are now beginning to give a considerable proportion of our girls the same mental diet for the growth and sustenance of their minds with that which is supplied to boys, it is largely owing to the direct efforts in favor of such a course put forth by women such as harriet martineau, who had themselves been, at least partially, educated "like boys," and were conscious that to such education they owed much of their mental superiority over average women. in her earlier years harriet was taught at home by her elder brothers and sisters, with the addition of lessons in some subjects from masters. she was well grounded in this manner in latin, french and the ordinary elementary subjects. but her systematic education did not begin until she was eleven, when she and her sister rachel were sent to a school kept by a good master, at which boys also were receiving their education. the school-life was delectable to harriet. mr. perry, the master, was gentle in his manner, and methodical in his style of teaching; and under his tuition the shy, nervous child felt for the first time encouraged to do her best, and aided not merely to learn her lessons, but also to expand her mental faculties. the two years that she remained at mr. perry's school gave her a fair insight into latin and french, and enabled her to discover that arithmetic was to her mind a delightful pastime rather than a difficult study. english composition was formally and carefully taught. this was harriet's favorite lesson; but she would spend her playtime in covering a slate with sums for the mere pleasure of the exercise. when harriet had been at this school for about two years, mr. perry left norwich. the home system of education was then resumed. she had visiting masters in latin, french, and music. for the rest, mrs. martineau selected a course of reading on history, biography, and literature. one of the girls read aloud daily while the others did needle-work. "the amount of time we spent in sewing now appears frightful; but it was the way in those days among people like ourselves." harriet became a thoroughly accomplished needle-woman. she had, indeed, a liking for the occupation, and continued to do much of it all through her life. many of her friends can show handsome pieces of fancy-work done by her hands. again and again she contributed to public objects by sending a piece of her own beautiful needle-work to be sold for the benefit of a society's funds. not even in the busiest time of her literary life did she ever entirely cease to exercise her skill in this feminine occupation. in fact, she made wool-work her artistic recreation. but with all her liking for needle-work, and with all the use that she made of her skill in the art, she did feel very keenly how much her time and strength had been wasted in childhood upon the practice of this mechanical occupation that should have been employed in the cultivation of her mental powers. a girl then was required to become a proficient in the making of every kind of garment. it was considered a good test of her capacity to know at an early age how to cut out and put together a shirt for her father; drawing threads to cut it by, and drawing threads to do the rows of fine stitching by, and stitching evenly and regularly, only two threads of the finest material being taken for each stitch! the expenditure of time out of a girl's life, involved in making her capable of doing all this, was something shocking. in these days, when the development of the means of communication has made division of labor more generally practicable than of old, and when nearly all men and women, from the richest to the artizan classes, wear garments made chiefly by machinery, i doubt if many readers can be got to realize how much a girl's intellectual training was diminished when harriet martineau was a child by the vast amount of time consumed in training her as a seamstress. harriet was taught how to make all her own clothes, even to covering shoes with silk for dancing, and to plaiting straw bonnets. it is as though every boy were taught in his school-life to be a thorough carpenter, so as to be able, in youth, to turn out, unaided, any article of furniture. it is obvious how much time such technical training must swallow up. to conceive how a girl was held back by it, we must ask ourselves: what was her brother doing while she was learning needle-work? the matter did not end with the waste of time alone. health, strength and nerve-force--in a word, _power_--was squandered upon it to a degree truly lamentable. harriet martineau's testimony[ ] upon this point may be taken, because of her real fondness for the employment and the skill which she displayed in it: [ ] _household education_, p. . "i believe it is now generally agreed among those who know best that the practice of sewing has been carried much too far for health, even in houses where there is no poverty or pressure of any kind. no one can well be more fond of sewing than i am, and few, except professional seamstresses, have done more of it, and my testimony is that it is a most hurtful occupation, except where great moderation is observed. i think it is not so much the sitting and stooping posture as the incessant monotonous action and position of the arms that causes such wear and tear. whatever it may be, there is something in prolonged sewing which is remarkably exhausting to the strength, and irritating beyond endurance to the nerves. the censorious gossip, during sewing, which was the bane of our youth," she adds, "wasted more of our precious youthful powers and dispositions than any repentance and amendment in after life could repair." harriet's reading for pleasure in childhood had mostly to be done by snatches. she learned much poetry by keeping the book under her work, on her lap, and glancing at a line now and another then. shakespeare she first enjoyed, while a child, by stealing away from table in the evenings of one winter, and reading by the light of the drawing-room fire, while the rest lingered over dessert in the dining-room. in this way, too, she had to read the newspaper. the older she grew, the less time was afforded her from domestic duties for study. she was sent, at the age of fourteen, to a boarding-school near bristol, kept by an aunt of her own, where she stayed fifteen months, and on her return home her education was considered finished. thenceforth it was a struggle to obtain permission to spend any time in reading or writing, and such opportunities as she got, or could make, had to be taken advantage of in secrecy. it is melancholy to read of her "spending a frightful amount of time in sewing," and being "expected always to sit down in the parlor to sew," instead of studying; of her being "at the work-table regularly after breakfast, making my own clothes or the shirts of the household, or about some fancy work, or if ever i shut myself into my own room for an hour of solitude, i knew it was at the risk of being sent for to join the sewing-circle;" and of the necessity that she lay under to find time for study by stealing secret hours from sleep. but it is needful to lay stress upon these hindrances through which the growing girl fought her way to mental development. wide though her knowledge was, great though her mental powers became, who can tell how much was taken from her possibilities (as from those of all other great women of the past) by such waste of her powers in childhood and youth? it is distressing to think about. the only comfort is that it was inevitable. of all the causes that unite to make the women of the present more favorably circumstanced than those of the past, none is more potent than the progress of mechanical discovery having relieved them from the necessity of making all the clothing of mankind with their own hands. from the era when errina, the greek poetess, mournfully lamented that her mother tied her to her distaff, down to the days in which harriet martineau studied by snatches, and spent her days in making shirts in the parlor, an enormous amount of feminine power has been squandered wastefully in this direction. if women hereafter draw out a comtist calendar of days upon which to reverence the memory of those who have helped them on in the scale of beings, assuredly they must find places for the inventors of the spinning-mule, the stocking-loom and the sewing-machine. religion formed the chief source of happiness to harriet martineau in childhood and early youth. her parents were unitarians, and their child's theology was, therefore, of a mild type, lacking a hell, a personal devil, a theory of original sin, and the like. she did not fear god, while she feared almost all human beings, and her devotion was thus a source of great joy and little misery. when she was at the bristol boarding-school, she came under the ministerial influence of the great unitarian preacher, the rev. dr. carpenter. the power of his teaching increased the ardor of her religious sentiments. she was just at an intense age--between fourteen and sixteen. dr. carpenter's religious instructions made the theism in which she had been educated become a firm personal conviction, and caused the natural action of a sensitive conscience, the self-devotion and humility of a deep power of veneration, and the truthfulness and sincerity of a rare courage, to be blended indistinguishably in their exercise with emotional outpourings of the spirit in worship, and with attachment to certain theological tenets. her younger sister well remembers that harriet's fervent and somewhat gloomy piety was the cause of a good deal of quizzing amongst her elders, when she returned home from bristol; their amusement being mixed, however, with much respect for her sincerity and conscientiousness. but, as her mind expanded, she thought as well as felt about her theology, and her religious development did not end with childhood. chapter ii. early womanhood: developing influences. old norwich, in the early years of this century, was a somewhat exceptional place. it so chanced that besides the exclusiveness natural even now to the society of a cathedral town--besides the insular tone of thought and manners which most towns possessed in those pre-railway days, and while our continental wars were holding our country-people isolated from foreign nations--besides all this, norwich then prided herself upon having produced a good deal of literary ability. her william taylor was considered to be almost the only german scholar in england, and other men, whose names are now nearly forgotten, but who in their day were looked up to as lights of learning and literature--sayers, smith, enfield, alderson, and others,--gave a tone to the society of norwich, which, if somewhat pedantic, was, nevertheless, favorable to the intellectual life. it is no small testimony to the healthy and stimulating mental atmosphere of old norwich that there successively came out from her, in an age when individuality and intellect in woman were steadily repressed, three women of such mark as amelia opie, elizabeth fry and harriet martineau. but even in norwich the repression just alluded to was felt by women. even there it was held, to say the least, peculiar and undesirable for a girl to wish to study deep subjects. "when i was young," miss martineau writes, "it was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand." they were required to be always ready "to receive callers, without any sign of blue-stockingism which could be reported abroad. my first studies in philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve.... i won time for what my heart was set upon either in the early morning or late at night." it was thus at unseasonable hours, and without the encouraging support of that public feeling of the value and desirability of knowledge, and the honorableness of its acquisition, by which a young man's studies are unconsciously aided, that harriet in her young womanhood continued to learn. she read latin with her brother james, and translated from the classics by herself. her cousin, mr. lee, read italian with her and her sister; and in course of time they undertook the translation of petrarch's sonnets into english verse. she read blair's rhetoric repeatedly. her biblical studies were continued until she was in that position which, according to macaulay, is necessary "for a critic of the niceties of the english language;" she had "the bible at her fingers' ends." but her solitary studies went also into heavier and less frequented paths. dr. carpenter had taught her to interest herself in mental and moral philosophy. she read about these subjects at first because he had written upon them, and afterwards because she found them really congenial to her mind. locke and hartley were the authors whom she studied most closely. then the works of priestley, and the study of his life and opinions--which she naturally undertook, because dr. priestley was the great apostle and martyr of unitarianism--led her to make a very full acquaintance with the metaphysicians of the scotch school. to how much purpose she thus read the best books then available, upon some of the highest topics that can engage the attention, soon became apparent when she began to write; but of this i must speak in due course later on. two other of the most important events, or rather trains of events, in the history of her young womanhood, must be mentioned first. the earlier of these was the gradual oncoming and increase of her deafness. she began to be slightly deaf while she was at mr. perry's school, and the fact was there recognized so far as to cause her to be placed next to her teacher in the class. how keenly she even then felt this loss, she has in part revealed in the story of hugh procter; and a few lines from an essay of hers on scott may here be added: "few have any idea of the all-powerful influence which the sense of personal infirmity exerts over the mind of a child. if it were known, its apparent disproportionateness to other influences would, to the careless observer, appear absurd; to the thoughtful it would afford new lights respecting the conduct of educational discipline; it would also pierce the heart of many a parent who now believes that he knows all, and who feels so tender a regret for what he knows that even the sufferer wonders at its extent. but this is a species of suffering which can never obtain sufficient sympathy, because the sufferer himself is not aware, till he has made comparison of this with other pains, how light all others are in comparison." as pathetically, but more briefly, she says about herself:--"my deafness, when new, was the uppermost thing in my mind day and night." her inability to hear continued to increase by slow degrees during the next six years; and when she was eighteen "a sort of accident" suddenly increased it. music had, until then, been one of her great delights, and it shows how gradual was the progress of her deafness, that she found herself able to hear at an orchestral concert, provided she could get a seat with a back against which she could press her shoulder-blades, for a long time after the music had become inaudible without this assistance. such a gradual deprivation of a most important sense is surely far more trying than a quick, unexpected, and obviously irremediable loss would be. the alternations of hope and despair, the difficulty of inducing the sufferer's friends to recognize how serious the case is, the perhaps yet greater difficulty to the patient to resolutely step out of the ranks of ordinary people and take up the position of one deficient in a sense, the mortifications which have to be endured again and again both from the ignorance of strangers and the mistaken sympathy of friends--all these make up the special trial of one who becomes by degrees the subject of a chronic affliction. no sensitive person can possibly pass through this fiery trial unchanged. such an experience must either refine or harden; must either strengthen the powers of endurance or break down the mind to querulous ill-temper; must either make self the centre of creation or greatly add to the power of putting personal interests aside for the sake of wider and more unselfish thoughts and feelings. which class of influences harriet martineau accepted from her trial the history of her courageous, resolute life-work, and her devotion to truth and duty as she saw them, will sufficiently show. how much she suffered in mind was quite unknown to her family at the time. she was always reserved in speaking about her own feelings and emotions to her mother, and in this particular case mrs. martineau, with the kindest intentions, discouraged, as far as possible, all recognition of the growing infirmity. the society of norwich had never been very attractive to the young girl, who was above the average in natural abilities, and still further removed from the petty and frivolous gossip of the commonplace evening party, by the extensive and elevating course of study through which her mind had passed. had she been well able to hear, she could have quietly accepted what such intercourse could give her. this would have been much. kindliness and good feeling, common sense, and ideas about man and his circumstances, are to be enjoyed and gained quite as much in ordinary as in what is commonly called intellectual society. but in the freshness of her sensitive suffering harriet shrank from the norwich evening parties. her mother, however, insisted upon her taking her full share of visiting. the case was made worse by the customary errors in the treatment of deaf persons; namely, the endeavoring to keep up the illusion that she was not deaf, the occasional assurances that she could hear as well as ever if it were not for her habits of abstraction, and so forth, and the imploring her to always ask when she did not hear what was said, followed by scoldings (kindly meant, but none the less irritating to the object) when it was found that she had been silently losing the larger part of a conversation. false pride, pretence, and selfish exactions were thus sought to be nourished in her; while the blessings of an open recognition of her trouble, and a full and free sympathy with her pain and her difficulty in learning to bear it, were at the same time withheld. i have spoken of this method of treatment of such a case as erroneous. but in such a matter only those who have gone through the experience and have come out of it at last, as she did, with the moral nature strengthened, and the power of self-management increased, can be really competent to express an opinion upon the proper method of behavior to similar sufferers. i hasten to add, therefore, that in substance the view that i have given is that expressed in harriet martineau's _letter to the deaf_, published in . in that remarkable fragment of autobiography she appealed to the large number of people who suffered like herself, to insist upon the frank recognition of their infirmity, and to themselves acquiesce with patience in all the deprivations and mortifications which the loss of a sense must bring. the revelation in this essay of her own sufferings is most touching; and very noble and beautiful is the way in which she urges that the misery must be met, and the humiliation must be turned aside, by no other means than courage, candor, patience, and an unselfish determination to consider first the convenience and happiness of others instead of the sufferer's own. "instead of putting the singularity out of sight we should acknowledge it in words, prepare for it in habits, and act upon it in social intercourse. thus only can we save others from being uneasy in our presence, and sad when they think of us. that we can thus alone make ourselves sought and beloved is an inferior consideration, though an important one to us, to whom warmth and kindness are as peculiarly animating as sunshine to the caged bird. this frankness, simplicity, and cheerfulness can only grow out of a perfect acquiescence in our circumstances. submission is not enough. pride fails at the most critical moment. but hearty acquiescence cannot fail to bring forth cheerfulness. the thrill of delight which arises during the ready agreement to profit by pain (emphatically the joy with which no stranger intermeddleth) must subside like all other emotions; but it does not depart without leaving the spirit lightened and cheered; and every visitation leaves it in a more genial state than the last.... i had infinitely rather bear the perpetual sense of privation than become unaware of anything which is true--of my intellectual deficiences, of my disqualifications for society, of my errors in matter of fact, and of the burdens that i necessarily impose on those who surround me. we can never get beyond the necessity of keeping in full view the worst and the best that can be made of our lot. the worst is either to sink under the trial or to be made callous by it. the best is to be as wise as possible under a great disability, and as happy as possible under a great privation." it is essential, for a correct understanding of her character, that this great trial of her youth should be presented amidst the moulding influences of that time with as much strength as it was experienced. but it is difficult, within the necessary limits of quotation, to convey an idea to the reader of either the intensity and bitterness of the suffering revealed, or of the firmness and beauty of the spirit with which the trial was met. nor was the advice that she gave to others mere talk, which she herself never put in practice. if her family did not realize at the time how deeply she suffered, still less could her friends in later life discover by anything in her manners that her soul had been so searched and her spirits so tried. so frankly and candidly, and with such an utter absence of affectation, did she accept this condition of her life, that those around her hardly realized that she felt it as a deprivation; and a few lines in her autobiography, in which she mentions how conscious she was of intellectual fatigue from the lack of those distractions to the mind which enter continually through the normal ear, came like a painful shock to her friends, making them feel that they had been unconscious of a need ever present with her throughout life. for some time after the deafness began, she did not use an ear-trumpet. like many in a similar position, she persuaded herself that her deafness was not sufficiently great to cause any considerable inconvenience to others in conversation. at length, however, she was enlightened upon this point. an account appeared in a unitarian paper of two remarkable cures of deafness by galvanism, and harriet's friends persuaded her to try this new remedy. for a brief while, hope was revived in her; the treatment threw her into a state of nervous fever, during which she regained considerable sensibility in the organ of hearing. the improvement was very temporary, but it lasted sufficiently long to let her know how much her friends had been straining their throats for her sake. from that time she invariably carried and used an ear-trumpet, commencing with an india-rubber tube, with a cup at the end for the speaker to take into his hand, but afterwards employing an ordinary stiff trumpet. into this existence, which had hitherto been so full of sadness, there came at length the bright-tinted and vivid shower of light, which means so much to a woman. love came to brighten the life so dark hitherto for lack of that sunshine. much as it is to any woman to know herself beloved by the man whom she loves, to harriet martineau it was even more than to most. it was not only that her character was a strong one, and that to such a nature all influences that are accepted become powerful forces, but besides this she had always loved more than she had been loved; and her self-esteem had been systematically suppressed by her mother's stern discipline, and afterwards injured by the mortifications to which the on-coming of her deafness gave rise. how much, in such a case, it must have been, when the hour at last came for the history of the heart to be written! how delightful the time when she could cherish in her thoughts a love which was at once an equal friendship and a vivid passion! how great the revolution in her mind when she found that the man whom she could love would choose her from all the world of women to be his dearest, the partner of his life! it would be a proof, if proof were needed at this time of day, that it is well-nigh impossible for any person to give a candid, full and unerring record of his own past, and the circumstances in it which have most influenced his development, to turn from the brief and cursory record which harriet martineau's autobiography gives of this attachment, to the complete story as i have it to tell, here and in a future chapter. the strongest of all the family affections of her childhood and youth was that which she felt for her brother james. he was two years younger than herself. they had been playmates in childhood, and companions in study later on. harriet's first attraction to mr. worthington was that he was her brother's friend. the two young men were fellow-students at college, preparing for the unitarian ministry. worthington was already well known to harriet from her brother's letters before she saw him. he then went on a visit to norwich, to spend a part of the vacation with james, and the interest which the friend and the sister already felt in each other, from their mutual affection for the brother, soon ripened into love. this was, i believe, in , when she was twenty years old. her father and mother looked not unkindly upon the dawning of this affection. the brother, however, who knew the two so well, felt quite certain that they were not suited for each other. harriet was of a strong, decided temper, even somewhat arbitrary and hasty, quick in her judgments, and firm in her opinions. the temperament of worthington, on the other hand, was, i am told, gentle, impressionable and sensitive in the extreme. he was highly conscientious, and ultra-tender in his treatment of the characters and opinions of others. the two seemed in many respects the antipodes of each other. he who knew them both best was convinced that they would not be happy together, and that opinion he has never changed. it is above all things difficult to predict beforehand whether two apparently antagonistic characters will really clash and jar in the close union of married life, or whether, on the contrary, the deficiencies of the one will be supplemented by those opposite tendencies which are rather in excess in the other. it is notorious that marriages are seldom perfect matches in the view of outsiders; the incongruities in the temperaments and the habits of life and thought, are more easily discerned than the fusing influence of ardent love can be measured. nor, indeed, can the changes which will be worked in the disposition by a surrender to the free play of emotion be accurately foreseen. considerations such as these, however, do not have much weight in the mind of a young man whose experience of the mysteries of the human heart is yet to come; and james martineau was strongly averse to the engagement of his sister and his friend. their attachment was not then permitted to become an engagement. worthington was poor--was still only a student--harriet was supposed, at that time, to be well portioned; the sensitive temperament of the young lover felt the variety of discouragements placed in the path of his affection, and so that affection which should have brought only joy became, in fact, to harriet the cause of sorrow, suspense and anxiety. yet its vivifying influence was felt, and the true happiness which is inseparable from mutual love, however the emotion be checked and denied its full expression, was not lacking. for some insight into what harriet martineau knew and felt of love, we must look elsewhere than in the formal record of the autobiography.[ ] but this, like all the other chief events of her life, has found a place in her works under a thin veiling of her personality. let us see from one of her early essays how harriet martineau learned to regard love. the essay is called "in a hermit's cave." [ ] mr. h. g. atkinson writes to me: "she had written much more at length (than is published) in her autobiography about her courtship; but she consulted me about publishing it, and i advised her not to do so--the matter counted for so little in such a life as hers." the quotation which i give here shows for what it did really count in the history of her mental development. but so difficult must it needs be for the writer of an autobiography to speak frankly of the more sacred experiences of the life, that it is not surprising that harriet martineau "destroyed what she had written," when so advised by the friend whom she consulted. i need only add that the many new details about the facts of this matter, which i am able to give, i have received from two of her own generation, both of whom were very intimate friends of hers at the time when all this occurred. "the place was not ill-chosen by the holy man, if the circumstances could but have been adapted to that highest worship--the service of the life.... but there is yet wanting the altar of the human heart, on which alone a fire is kindled from above to shine in the faces of all true worshippers for ever. where this flame, the glow of human love, is burning, there is the temple of worship, be it only beside the humblest village hearth: where it has not been kindled there is no sanctuary; and the loftiest amphitheatre of mountains, lighted up by the ever-burning stars, is no more the dwelling-place of jehovah than the temple of solomon before it was filled with the glory of the presence.... "yes, love is worship, authorized and approved.... many are the gradations through which this service rises until it has reached that on which god has bestowed his most manifest benediction, on which jesus smiled at cana, but which the devotee presumed to decline. not more express were the ordinances of sinai than the divine provisions for wedded love; never was it more certain that jehovah benignantly regarded the festivals of his people than it is daily that he has appointed those mutual rejoicings of the affections, which need but to be referred to him to become a holy homage. yet there have been many who pronounce common that which god has purified, and reject or disdain that which he has proffered and blest. how ignorant must such be of the growth of that within! how unobservant of what passes without! would that all could know how from the first flow of the affections, until they are shed abroad in their plentitude, the purposes of creation become fulfilled. would that all could know how, by this mighty impulse, new strength is given to every power; how the intellect is vivified and enlarged; how the spirit becomes bold to explore the path of life, and clear-sighted to discern its issues.... for that piety which has humanity for its object--must not that heart feel most of which tenderness has become the element? must not the spirit which is most exercised in hope and fear be most familiar with hope and fear wherever found? "how distinctly i saw all this in those who are now sanctifying their first sabbath of wedded love.... the one was at peace with all that world which had appeared so long at war with him. he feared nothing, he possessed all; and of the overflowings of his love he could spare to every living thing. the other thought of no world but the bright one above, and the quiet one before her, in each of which dwelt one in whom she had perfect trust.... in her the progression has been so regular, and the work so perfect, that any return to the former perturbations of her spirit seems impossible. she entered upon a new life when her love began; and it is as easy to conceive that there is one life giver to the body, and another to the spirit, as that this progression is not the highest work of god on earth, and its results abounding to his praise.... to those who know them as i know them, they appear already possessed of an experience in comparison with which it would appear little to have looked abroad from the andes, or explored the treasure-caves of the deep, or to have conversed with every nation under the sun. if they could see all that the eyes of the firmament look upon, and hear all the whispered secrets that the roving winds bear in their bosoms, they could learn but little new; for the deepest mysteries are those of human love, and the vastest knowledge is that of the human heart." even more vividly, at a later period, she told something of her experiences in one of her fictions, under the guise of a conversation between a young husband and wife:-- "do you really think there are any people that have passed through life without knowing what that moment was, that stir in one's heart on being first sure that one is beloved? it is most like the soul getting free of the body and rushing into paradise, i should think. do you suppose anybody ever lived a life without having felt this?" walter feared it might be so; but, if so, a man missed the moment that made a man of one that was but an unthinking creature before; and a woman the moment best worth living for.... "it seems to me," said effie, "that though god has kindly given this token of blessedness to all--or to so many that we may nearly say all--without distinction of great or humble, rich or poor, the great and the lowly use themselves to the opposite faults. the great do not seem to think it the most natural thing to marry where they first love; and the lowly are too ready to love." "that is because the great have too many things to look to besides love; and the lowly have too few. the rich have their lighted palaces to bask in, as well as the sunshine; and they must have a host of admirers, as well as one bosom friend. and when the poor man finds that there is one bliss that no power on earth can shut him out from, and one that drives out all evils for the time--one that makes him forget the noon-day heats, and one that tempers the keen north wind, and makes him walk at his full height when his superiors lounge past him in the street--no wonder he is eager to meet it, and jogs the time-glass to make it come at the soonest. if such a man is imprudent, i had rather be he than one that first lets it slip through cowardice, and would then bring it back to gratify his low ambition!" "and for those who let it go by for conscience sake, and do not ask for it again?" "why, they are happy in having learned what _the one feeling is that life is worth living for_. they may make themselves happy upon it for ever, after that. oh! effie, you would not believe, nothing could make you believe, what i was the day before and the day after i saw that sudden change of look of yours that told me all. the one day, i was shrinking inwardly from everything i had to do, and every word of my father's, and everybody i met; and was always trying to make myself happy in myself alone, with the sense of god being near me and with me. the other day, i looked down upon everybody, in a kindly way; and yet i looked up to them, too, for i felt a respect that i never knew before for all that were suffering and enjoying; and i felt as if i could have brought the whole world nearer to god, if they would have listened to me. i shall never forget the best moment of all--when my mind had suddenly ceased being in a great tumult, which had as much pain as pleasure in it. when i said distinctly to myself, 'she loves me,' heaven came down round about me that minute."[ ] [ ] _illustrations of political economy_: "a tale of the tyne," pp. , _et seq._ this passage is doubly interesting from the fact that mr. malthus, the discoverer of the population law, sent specially to thank her for having written it. this tells how harriet martineau could love in her youth. perhaps the stream ran all the more powerfully for its course being checked; for it was over three years after she met and became attached to mr. worthington before their love was allowed to be declared, and their engagement was permitted--a long period for hope and fear to do their painful office in the soul, a long test of the reality of the love on both sides. her extensive and deep studies, her sufferings and inward strivings from her deafness, and the joys and anxieties of her love, were the chief moulding influences of her early womanhood. we shall soon see how she came to seek expression for the results of all these in literature. chapter iii. earliest writings. harriet martineau's first attempt to write for publication was made in the same year that her acquaintance with mr. worthington was formed; in , when she was twenty years old. it was, apparently, at the close of the vacation in which worthington had visited his friend martineau at norwich, that she commenced a paper with the design of offering it to the unitarian magazine, _the monthly repository_. she had told james that when he had returned to college she should be miserable, and he had, with equal kindness and sense, advised her to try to forget her feelings about the parting by an attempt at authorship. on a bright september morning, therefore, when she had seen him start by the early coach, soon after six, she sat down in her own room with a supply of foolscap paper before her to write her first article. the account which she--writing from memory--gives in her autobiography, of this little transaction, is curiously inaccurate, as far as the trifling details are concerned. her own statement is that she took the letter "v" for her signature, and that she found her paper printed in the next number of the magazine, "and in the 'notices to correspondents' a request to hear more from 'v' of norwich." her little errors about these facts must be corrected, because the truth of the matter is at once suggestive and amusing. the article may be found in the _monthly repository_ for october, . it is signed, not "v," but "discipulus." this, it need hardly be pointed out, is the _masculine_ form of the latin for learner, or apprentice. the note in the correspondents' column is not in that same month's magazine; but in the number for the succeeding month, the editor says in his answers to correspondents: "the continuation of 'discipulus' has come to hand. _his_ other proposed communications will probably be acceptable." if more proofs than these were required that the youthful authoress had presented herself to her editor in a manly disguise, it would be furnished by a passage in one of these "discipulus" articles, in which she definitely figures herself as a masculine writer, speaking of "our sex" (_i.e._ the male sex) as a man would do. the interesting fact is thus disclosed that harriet martineau adds another to the group of the most eminent women writers of this century who thought it necessary to assume the masculine sex in order to obtain a fair hearing and an impartial judgment for their earliest work. surely, as our "discipulus" takes her place in this list with george eliot, george sand, and currer, ellis, and acton bell, a great deal is disclosed to us about how women in the past have had to make their way to recognition _against the tide_ of public opinion. that first printed essay is interesting because it was the precursor of so long a course of literary work, rather than for itself. yet it is not without its own interest, and is very far indeed from being the crude, imperfect performance of the ordinary amateur. the subject is "female writers of practical divinity." here are the first words that harriet martineau uttered through the press: "i do not know whether it has been remarked by others as well as myself, that some of the finest and most useful english works on the subject of practical divinity are by female authors. i suppose it is owing to the peculiar susceptibility of the female mind, and its consequent warmth of feeling, that its productions, when they are really valuable, find a more ready way to the heart than those of the other sex; and it gives me great pleasure to see women gifted with superior talents applying those talents to promote the cause of religion and virtue." there is nothing remarkable in the literary form of this first article. how soon she came to have a style of her own, vivid, stirring, and instinct with a powerful individuality, may have been gathered already from the quotations given in our last chapter. but in her first paper the style is coldly correct; imitative of good but severe models, and displaying none of the writer's individuality. two points as regards the matter of the essay are of special interest, and thoroughly characteristic. it is interesting, in the first place, to know that she who was destined to do probably more than any other one woman of her century for the enlargement of the sphere of her sex in the field of letters, should have written her first article on the subject of the capacity of women to teach through their writings. the second point worth noticing is that her idea of "practical divinity" is simply, good conduct. theological disputation and dogma do not disturb her pages. her view of practical divinity is that it teaches morals; and it is largely because the women to whose writings she draws attention have occupied themselves with the attempt to trace out rules of conduct, that she is interested in their writings, and rejoices in their labors. indeed, she only alludes once to the opinions on dogmatic theology of the writers whom she quotes, and then she does it only to put aside with scorn the idea that morality and teaching should be rejected because of differences upon points of theology. encouraged by the few stately words with which the editor of the _repository_ had received the offer of more contributions, "discipulus" continued his literary labors, and the result appeared in a paper on "female education," published in the _monthly repository_ of february, . this is a noble and powerful appeal for the higher education of girls and the full development of all the powers of our sex. it is written with gentleness and tact, but it courageously asserts and demands much that was strange indeed to the tone of that day, though it has become quite commonplace in ours. the author (supposed to be a man, be it remembered,) disclaimed any intention of proving that the minds of women were equal to those of men, but only desired to show that what little powers the female intellect might possess should be fully cultivated. nevertheless, the fact was pointed out that women had seldom had a chance of showing how near they might be able to equal men intellectually, for while the lad was at the higher school and college, preparing his mind for a future, "the girl is probably confined to low pursuits, her aspirings after knowledge are subdued, she is taught to believe that solid information is unbecoming her sex; almost her whole time is expended on low accomplishments, and thus, before she is sensible of her powers, they are checked in their growth and chained down to mean objects, to rise no more; and when the natural consequences of this mode of treatment are seen, all mankind agree that the abilities of women are far inferior to those of men." having shown reasons to believe that women would take advantage of higher opportunities if such were allowed them, "discipulus" maintained in detail that the cultivation of their minds would improve them for all the accepted feminine duties of life, charitable, domestic and social, and that the consequent elevation of the female character would react beneficially on the male; cited the works of a cluster of eminent authoresses, as showing that women could think upon "the noblest subjects that can exercise the human mind;" and closed with the following paragraph, wherein occurred the phrases by which it is shown that our "discipulus" of twenty is masquerading as a man, more decisively even than by the termination of the latin _nom de guerre_: "i cannot better conclude than with the hope that these examples of what may be done may excite a noble emulation in _their own_ sex, and in _ours_ such a conviction of the value of the female mind, as shall overcome _our_ long-cherished prejudices, and induce _us_ to give _our_ earnest endeavors to the promotion of _women's_ best interests." it is most interesting to thus discover that harriet martineau's first writings were upon that "woman question" which she lived to see make such wonderful advances, and which she so much forwarded, both by her direct advocacy, and by the indirect influence of the proof which she afforded, that a woman may be a thinker upon high topics and a teacher and leader of men in practical politics, and yet not only be irreproachable in her private life, but even show herself throughout it, in the best sense, truly feminine. harriet contributed nothing more to the _monthly repository_ after this (so far as can now be ascertained), for a considerable time. encouraged by the success of her first attempts with periodicals, she commenced a book of a distinctly religious character, which was issued in the autumn of the same year, , by hunter, of st. paul's churchyard. the little volume was published anonymously. its title-page runs thus: "_devotional exercises_; consisting of reflections and prayers for the use of young persons. to which is added an address on baptism. by a lady." the character of the work is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the title. but it would be a mistake to suppose that the book is a commonplace one. it contains a good deal of dogmatism and many platitudes. it contains, likewise, however, many a noble thought and many a high aspiration, expressed in words equally flowing and fervent. a "reflection" (something like a short sermon) and a prayer are supplied for each morning and each evening of the seven days of the week. she had already attained to such an insight into the human mind as to recognize that religious devotion is an exercise of the emotions. proof, too, is given in this little work of the fullness with which she realized that true religion must be expressed by service to mankind; to those nearest to one first, and afterwards to others; and indeed, that a high sense of social duty, with a fervent and unselfish devotion to it, _is_ religion, rather than either the spiritual dram-drinking, or the dogmatic irrationality to which that name of high import is frequently applied. the prayers in this little volume differ much from the supplications for personal benefits which are commonly called prayers. these are rather aspirations, or meditations. the highest moral attributes, personified in god, are held up for the worship of the imperfect human creature, with fervent aspiration to approach as nearly as possible towards that light of unsullied goodness. the lack of petitions for material benefits which appears in these "devotions" was by no means unconscious, instinctive, or accidental. she had deliberately given up the practice of praying for personal benefits, partly because she held that, since it is impossible for us to foresee how far our highest interests may be served or hindered by changes in our external circumstances, it is not for us to attempt to indicate, or even to form a desire, as to what those circumstances shall be. as regarded the emotional side of her religion, she had come to prefer to leave herself and her fate to the unquestioned direction of a higher power. but there was more than this in it. in her philosophical studies, she had, of course, met with the eternal debates of metaphysicians and theologians on foreknowledge, fate, and freedom of the will. the difficult question had, indeed, presented itself to her active and acute young mind long before those studies began. she remembered that when she was but eleven years old she found courage to offer her questionings upon this point to her elder brother thomas. she asked: if god foreknew from eternity all the evil deeds that every one of us should do in our lives, how can he justly punish us for those actions, when the time comes that we are born, and in due course commit them? her brother replied merely that she was not yet old enough to understand the point. the answer did not satisfy the child. she knew that if she were old enough to feel the difficulty, she must also be mentally fit to receive some kind of explanation. but under the pastoral influence of dr. carpenter, the emotional side of her religion was cultivated, and such doubts and difficulties of the reason were put away for the time. not for all time, however, could the problem be shirked by so active, logical, and earnest a mind. it recurred to her when she was left to her own spiritual guidance. long before the date of these "devotions" she had fought out the battle in her own mind, and had reached the standpoint from which her prayers are written. she had convinced herself of the truth of the necessitarian doctrine, that we are what we are, we do what we do, because of the impulses given by our previous training and circumstances; and that the way to amend any human beings or all mankind is to improve their education, and to give them good surroundings and influences, and mental associations; in short, that physical and psychological phenomena alike depend upon antecedent phenomena, called causes. as soon as she had thus settled her mind in the doctrine of necessity, she perceived that prayer, in the ordinary sense of the term, had become impossible. if it be believed that all that happens in the world is the consequence of the course of the events which have happened before, it is clear that no petitions can alter the state of things at any given moment. a belief in the efficacy of "besieging heaven with prayers" implies a supposition that a supreme ruler of the universe interferes arbitrarily with the sequence of events. those whose minds are clear that no such arbitrary interference ever does take place, but that, on the contrary, like events always and invariably follow from like causes, cannot rationally ask for this fundamental rule of the government of the universe to be set aside for their behoof; even although they may believe in an all-powerful divine ruler, who has appointed this sequence of events for the law under which his creatures shall live and develop. still, however, harriet martineau supplicated for spiritual benefits, as we have seen in the little volume of _devotional exercises_. these aspirations not only gave her an emotional satisfaction, but were, she then thought, justifiable on necessitarian principles; for each time that we place our minds in a certain attitude we increase their "set" in the same direction; and she believed at that time that a holy life was in this way aided by frequent reflections on and aspirations towards the highest ideal of holiness personified in the name of god. her religious belief was, then, pure theism. to her, it was still very good to be a worshipper of jehovah, the eternal presence, the ever-living supreme; and jesus was his messenger, the highest type that he had ever permitted to be revealed to man of the excellencies of the divine nature. but there was no atonement, no personal evil one, no hell, no verbally-inspired revelation in her creed. it will be unnecessary to say more about her theological beliefs till the next twenty years have been recorded, for in that period there was substantially no change in her views. there did come, indeed, a change in her method of self-management and in her opinions as to the way in which religious feelings should affect daily life. she soon concluded that we are best when least self-conscious about our own goodness, and that, therefore, we should rely upon receiving inspiration to right and elevated feelings from passing influences, and should refrain from putting our minds, by a regular exercise of volition, into affected postures in anticipation of those high emotions which we cannot command. under these beliefs she soon ceased all formal prayer. meantime she was still, at twenty-one years old, in the condition of mind to write _devotional exercises_. the little book met with a favorable acceptance among the unitarians, and speedily went into the second edition. thus encouraged, harriet began another volume of the same character. such work could not proceed very fast, however, for her domestic duties were not light, and her writing was still looked upon in her family as a mere recreation. she labored under all the disadvantages of the amateur. but events soon began to crowd into her life to alter this view of the case, and to prepare the way for her beginning to do the work of her life in the only fashion in which such labor can be effectively carried on--as a serious occupation, the principal feature of every day's duties. after a long period of poverty and distress, caused by the napoleonic wars, england, in , experienced the special dangers of a time of rapidly increasing wealth. there was more real wealth in the country, owing to the expansion of trade, which followed on the re-opening of the continent to our commerce, but speculation made this development appear far greater than it was in reality. there was, at that time, no sort of check upon the issue of paper money. not only did the bank of england send out notes without limit; not only could every established bank multiply its drafts recklessly; but any small tradesman who pleased might embark in the same business, and put forth paper money without check or control. thus there was money in abundance, the rate of interest was low, and prices rose. the natural and inevitable consequence of this state of things, at a moment when trade was suddenly revived, was a rage for speculation. not only merchants and manufacturers were seized with this epidemic; the desire for higher profits than could be obtained by quiet and perfectly safe investments spread amongst every class. "as for what the speculation was like, it can hardly be recorded on the open page of history without a blush. besides the joint-stock companies who undertook baking, washing, baths, life insurance, brewing, coal-portage, wool-growing, and the like, there was such a rage for steam navigation, canals and railroads, that in the session of , petitions for private bills were presented, and private acts were passed.... it is on record that a single share of a mine on which £ had been paid, yielded per cent, having risen speedily to a premium of £ per share."[ ] [ ] harriet martineau's _history of the peace_, book ii, p. . periods of such inflation invariably and necessarily close in scenes of disaster. gold becomes scarce; engagements that have been recklessly entered into cannot be met; goods have been produced in response to a speculative instead of a legitimate demand, and therefore will not sell; the locked-up capital cannot be released, nor can it be temporarily supplied, except upon ruinous terms. panic commences; it spreads over the business world like fire over the dry prairies. the badly-managed banks and the most speculative business houses begin to totter; the weakest of them fall, and the crash brings down others like a house of cards; and in the depreciation of goods and the disappearance of capital, the prudent, sagacious and honorable merchant suffers for the folly, the recklessness, the avarice and the dishonesty of others. such a crash came, from such causes, in the early winter of . harriet martineau's father was one of those injured by the panic, without having been a party to the errors which produced it. he had resisted the speculative mania, and allowed it to sweep by him to its flood. it was, therefore, by no fault of his own that he was caught by the ebbing wave, and carried backwards, to be stranded in the shallows. his house did not fail; but the struggle was a cruel one for many months. how severe the crisis was may be judged from the fact that between sixty and seventy banks stopped payment within six weeks. the strain of this business anxiety told heavily upon the already delicate health of mr. thomas martineau. in the early spring of it became clear that his days were numbered. up to the commencement of that troubled winter it had been supposed that his daughters would be amply provided for in the event of his death. but so much had been lost in the crisis, that he found himself, in his last weeks, compelled to alter his will, and was only able to leave to his wife and daughters a bare maintenance. he lingered on till june, and in that month he died. it was while mr. martineau lay ill, that harriet's second book, _addresses, prayers, and hymns_, passed through the press, and the dying father took great interest and found great comfort in his child's work. much of it he must have read with feelings rendered solemn by his situation. this little volume so closely resembles the _devotional exercises_, that it is unnecessary to refer to it at greater length. the hymns, which are the special feature of this volume, do not call for much notice. they are not quite commonplace; but verse was not harriet's natural medium of expression: she wrote a considerable quantity of it in her early days, as most young authors do; but she soon came to see for herself that her gift of expression in its most elevated form was rather that which makes the orator than the poet. the comparative poverty to which the family were reduced on mr. martineau's death at once freed harriet, to a considerable extent, from the obstacles which had previously been interposed to her spending time in writing. it was still far from being recognized that literature was to be her profession; but it was obvious that if her pen could bring any small additions to her income they would be very serviceable. a friend gave her an introduction to mr. houlston, then publishing at wellington, shropshire; and a few little tales, which she had lying by, were offered to him. he accepted them, issued them in tiny volumes, and paid her five guineas for the copyright of each story. this, then, was the beginning of harriet martineau's professional authorship. chapter iv. grief struggle and progress. the loss of pecuniary position did something more for harriet martineau besides opening the way to work in literature. the knowledge that she was now poor gave her lover courage to declare himself, and to seek her for his wife. poverty, therefore, brought her that experience which is so much in a woman's mental history, however little it, perhaps, goes for in a man's. a love in youth, fervent, powerful, and pure; a love, happy and successful in the essential point that it is reciprocated by its object, however fate may deny it outward fruition; such a love once filling a woman's soul, sweetens it and preserves it for her whole life through. pity the shriveled and decayed old hearts which were not thus embalmed in youth! harriet martineau did have this precious experience; and her womanliness of nature remained fresh and true and sweet to the end of her days because of it. there may be many married women old maids in heart--to be so is the punishment of those who marry without love; and there are many, like harriet martineau, who are single in life, but whose hearts have been mated, and so made alive. i do not know that she would have gained by marriage, in any way, except in the chance of motherhood, a yet greater fact than love itself to a woman. on the other hand, her work must have been hindered by the duties of married life, even if her marriage had been thoroughly happy, and her lot free from exceptional material cares. matronage is a profession in itself. the duties of a wife and mother, as domestic life is at present arranged, absorb much time and strength, and so diminish the possibilities of intellectual labor. moreover, the laws regulating marriage are still, and fifty years ago were far more, in a very bad state; and, leaving a woman wholly dependent for fair treatment, whether as a wife or mother, upon the mercy and goodness of the man she marries, justify harriet martineau's observation: "the older i have grown, the more serious have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life, as it exists among us at this time." the wife who is beloved and treated as an equal partner in life, the mother whose natural rights in the guardianship of her family are respected, the mistress of a home in which she is the sunshine of husband and children, must ever be the happiest of women. but far better is it to be as harriet martineau was--a widow of the heart by death--than to have the affections torn through long years by neglect and cruelty, springing less from natural badness than from the evil teaching of vile laws and customs. fifty years ago marriage was a dangerous step for a woman; and harriet martineau had reason for saying at last: "thus, i am not only entirely satisfied with my lot, but think it the very best for me." for a while, however, the happy prospect of a beloved wifehood cheered her struggling and anxious life. but it was not for long. her actual and acknowledged engagement lasted, i believe, only a few months. mr. worthington had, at this time, but lately completed his course as a divinity student; and he had been appointed to the joint charge of a very large unitarian church at manchester. conscientiousness was one of the most marked features of his character, according to his college friend; and harriet herself declares that she "venerated his moral nature." he had thrown himself into the very heavy pastoral work committed to him with all the devotion of this high characteristic. moreover, the long doubt and suspense of his love for her before their engagement, had, doubtless, worked unfavorably upon his nervous system. the end of it was, that he was suddenly seized with a brain fever, in which he became delirious. he was removed to his father's home in leicestershire, to be nursed; and in process of time, the fever was subdued. but the mind did not regain its balance. he was still, as she says, "insane"; but from one of her dear and early friends, i hear that "his family did not call it insanity,"--only a feeble and unhinged state, from which recovery might have been expected hopefully. in this state of things it was thought desirable that the woman he loved should be brought to see him. the beloved presence, his physician believed, might revive old impressions and happy anticipations, and might be the one thing needful to induce a favorable change in his condition. his mother wrote to beg harriet martineau to come to him; harriet eagerly sought her mother's permission to hasten to his side; and mrs. martineau forbade her daughter to go. the old habit of obedience to her mother, and the early implanted ideas of filial duty, were too strong for harriet at once to break through them; she did not defy her mother and go; and in a few more weeks--terrible weeks of doubt and mental storm they must have been, between her love and her obedience dragging her different ways--worthington died, and left her to her life of heart-widowhood, darkened by this shadow of arbitrary separation to the last. "the calamity was aggravated to me," she says, "by the unaccountable insults i received from his family, whom i had never seen. years after, the mystery was explained. they had been given to understand, by cautious insinuation, that i was actually engaged to another while receiving my friend's addresses." they had not appreciated how submissive she was as a daughter; and their belief that her love was insincere was not an unnatural one in the circumstances. had those relatives of the dead lover lived to read harriet martineau's autobiography, they would not have been made to think differently of her feelings towards him; for there she goes calmly on, after the passage above quoted, to say only: "considering what i was in those days, it was happiest for us both that our union was prevented." as we have had to look outside the autobiography for a record of what love was to her, and what it did for her, so we must seek elsewhere for the cry of agony which tells how she felt her loss. but the record exists; it is found in an essay entitled _in a death chamber_, one of that autobiographical series published in _the monthly repository_, from which i have previously quoted. this beautiful piece of writing--far more of a poem in essence than anything which she ever published in verse--is spoiled as a composition by mutilation in quoting. but its length leaves me no option but to select from it only a few of the more confessional passages, to aid us in our psychological study: this weary watch! in watching by the couch of another there is no weariness; but this lonely tending of one's own sick heart is more than the worn-out spirit can bear. what an age of woe since the midnight clock gave warning that my first day of loneliness was beginning--to others a sabbath, to me a day of expiation. all is dull, cold and dreary before me, until i also can escape to the region where there is no bereavement, no blasting root and branch, no rending of the heart-strings. what is aught to me, in the midst of this all-pervading, thrilling torture, when all i want is to be dead? the future is loathsome, and i will not look upon it; the past, too, which it breaks my heart to think about--what has it been? it might have been happy, if there is such a thing as happiness; but i myself embittered it at the time, and for ever. what a folly has mine been! multitudes of sins now rise up in the shape of besetting griefs. looks of rebuke from those now in the grave; thoughts which they would have rebuked if they had known them; moments of anger, of coldness; sympathy withheld when looked for; repression of its signs through selfish pride; and worse, far worse even than this ... all comes over me now. o! if there be pity, if there be pardon, let it come in the form of insensibility; for these long echoes of condemnation will make me desperate. but was there ever human love unwithered by crime--by crime of which no human law takes cognizance, but the unwritten everlasting laws of the affections? many will call me thus innocent. the departed breathed out thanks and blessing, and i felt them not then as reproaches. if, indeed, i am only as others, shame, shame on the impurity of human affections; or, rather, alas! for the infirmity of the human heart! for i know not that i could love more than i have loved. since the love itself is wrecked, let me gather up its relics, and guard them more tenderly, more steadily, more gratefully. this seems to open up glimpses of peace. o grant me power to retain them--the light and music of emotion, the flow of domestic wisdom and chastened mirth, the life-long watchfulness of benevolence, the thousand thoughts--are these gone in their reality? must i forget them as others forget? if i were to see _my_ departed one--that insensible, wasted form--standing before me as it was wont to stand, with whom would i exchange my joy?... but it is not possible to lose all. the shadows of the past may have as great power as their substance ever had, and the spirit of human love may ever be nigh, invested with a majesty worthy to succeed the lustre of its mortal days. this is the poem of harriet martineau's love. this is what remains to show that the girl whose intellect was so powerful, and who had habitually and of choice exercised her mind upon the most abstruse studies and the most difficult thoughts which can engage the attention, could nevertheless feel at least as fervently, and deliver herself up to her emotions at least as fully, as any feeble, ignorant, or narrow-minded creature that ever lived. surely, with the truth emphasized by such an example, the common but stupid delusion that the development of the intellect diminishes the capacity for passion and tenderness, must fade away! this girl's mental power and her mental culture were both unusually large; but here is the core of her heart, and is it not verily womanly? this experience did more than give her hours of happiness; it did more than bring to her that enlargement of the spirit which she so well described; for it taught her to appreciate, and to properly value, the influence of the emotions in life. never in one of her works, never in a single phrase, is she found guilty of that blasphemy against the individual affections, into which some who have yet sought to pose as high priests of the religion of humanity have fallen and lost themselves. in all her writings one finds the continual recognition of the great truth which was in the mind of him who said: "if a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love god whom he hath not seen?"--a truth of the very first consequence to those who aim at expressing their religion by service to the progress of mankind. the year , to harriet crowded so full of trouble, came to an end soon after mr. worthington's death. in the following year, though she was in very bad health, she wrote a vast quantity of manuscript. some of it was published at once. other portions waited in her desk for a couple of years, when her contributions to _the monthly repository_ recommenced, after a change in its editorship. she wrote in the year various short stories, which were published by houlston, of shrewsbury, without her name on their title-pages. their character may be guessed by the fact that they were circulated as mrs. sherwood's writings! in tone, they resemble the ordinary sunday-school story-book; but there is a fire, an earnestness, and an originality often discoverable in them which are enough to mark them out from common hack-writing. two of them, _the rioters_ and _the turn out_, deal with topics of political economy; but the questions were thought out (very accurately) in her own mind, for at that time she had never read a book upon the subject. these little stories were so successful that the publisher invited her to write a longer one, which should have her name attached to it. she went to work, accordingly, and produced a good little tale, of one hundred and fifty pages of print, which she called _principle and practice_. it recounts the struggles of an orphan family in their efforts after independence. as in all her writings of this kind, her own experience is interfused into the fiction. no part of this story is so interesting as that where a young man who has met with an accident has to reconcile his mind to the anticipation of life-long lameness--as she to deafness. the sisters of this orphan family, too, make money by a kind of fancy-work by which she herself was earning a few guineas from the wealthier members of her family, namely, by cutting bags and baskets out of pasteboard, fitting them together with silk and gold braid, and painting plaques upon their sides. _principle and practice_ was so warmly received in the circle to which it was suited that the publisher called for a sequel, which was accordingly written early in the following year. there was a vast quantity of writing in all these publications; and, besides this, she was continually at work with her needle. such unremitting sedentary occupation, together with her sorrow, caused a serious illness, from which she suffered during . it was an affection of the liver and stomach, for which she went to be treated by her brother-in-law, mr. greenhow, a surgeon at newcastle-on-tyne. her remarkable powers of steady application, and her untiring industry, were always[ ] amongst her most noteworthy characteristics--as, indeed, is proved by the vast quantity of work she achieved. in each of her various illnesses, friends who had watched with wonder and alarm how much she wrote, and how unceasingly she worked, either with pen, or book, or needle in hand, told her that her suffering was caused by her merciless industry. her "staying power" was great; she rarely felt utterly exhausted, and therefore she was impatient of being told that she had, in fact, over-exerted her strength. sometimes, indeed, she admitted that she worked too much, and pleaded only that she could not help it--that the work needed doing, or that the thoughts pressed for utterance, and she could not refuse the call of duty. but more often she said, as in a letter to mr. atkinson, which lies before me, "my best aid and support in the miseries of my life has been in _work_--in the intellectual labor which i believe has done me nothing but good." so her immense industry in may have seemed to her a relief from her heart-sorrows at the moment; but none the less it probably was the chief cause of her partial breakdown in the next year. a blister relieves internal inflammation; but a succession of such stimuli too long continued will exhaust the strength, and render the condition more critical than it would have been without such treatment. [ ] "i should think there never was such an industrious lady," said the maid who was with her for the last eleven years of her life; "when i caught sight of her, just once, leaning back in her chair, with her arms hanging down, and looking as though she wasn't even thinking about anything, it gave me quite a turn. i felt she _must_ be ill to sit like that!" at newcastle there was a brief cessation from work, under the doctor's orders. but in the middle of harriet began to write again for the _repository_, in response to an appeal put forth by the editor for gratuitous literary aid. that editor was the well-known unitarian preacher, william johnston fox, of south place chapel. mr. fox became harriet martineau's first literary friend. he had no money with which to reward her work for his magazine; but he paid her amply in a course of frank, full, and generous private criticism and encouragement. "his correspondence with me," she says, "was unquestionably the occasion, and, in great measure, the cause, of the greatest intellectual progress i ever made before the age of thirty." mr. fox was so acute a critic that he ere long predicted that "she would be one of the first authors of the age if she continued to write;" while, at the same time, he offered suggestions for improvement, and made corrections in her work upon occasion. her advance in literary capacity was now very rapid. her style went on improving, as it should do, till her latest years; but it now first became an _individual_ one, easy, flowing, forcible, and often most moving and eloquent. during the latter half of and the early part of the succeeding year, she contributed, more or less, to nearly every monthly number of the _repository_, without receiving any payment. she wrote essays, poems, and so-called reviews, which last, however, were really thoughtful and original papers, suggested by the subject of a new book. some of these contributions were signed "v"; but others, including all the reviews, were anonymous. most of these articles are on philosophical subjects, and are written with the calmness of style suitable to logical and argumentative essays. in the _repository_ for february, , and the succeeding month, for instance, there appeared two papers, headed, "on the agency of feelings in the formation of habits," which are simply an accurate, clear, and forcibly-reasoned statement of the philosophical doctrine of association, with which that of necessity is inseparably connected. these were, it has been already observed, the theories by which she was learning both to guide her own action and to see that society is moulded, however unconsciously, as regards most of the individuals composing it. a clearer statement of the doctrines, or a more forcible indication of how they can be made to serve as a moral impulse, cannot be imagined. here is very different work from _devotional exercises_, or _principle and practice_. but it brought its author neither fame nor money. another piece of work done in , or early in the following year, was a _life of howard_, which was written on a positive commission from a member of the committee of lord brougham's "society for the diffusion of useful knowledge," who promised her thirty pounds for it. the ms. was at first said to be lost at the office; eventually she found that its contents were liberally cribbed by the writer of the _life_ which was published; but she never received a penny of the promised payment. these were her times of stress, and struggle, and suffering, and disappointment, in literature as in ordinary life. her great success, when at last it did come, was so sudden that her previous work was obscured and pushed out of sight in the blaze of triumph. but these years of labor, unrecognized and almost unrewarded, must not be left out of our view, if we would judge fairly of her character. courage, resolution, self-reliance, determination to conquer in a field once entered upon, are displayed by her quiet industrious perseverance through those laborious years. harriet martineau did not make a sudden and easy rush far up the ladder of fame all at once; her climb, like that of most great men and women, was arduous and slow, and her final success proved not only that she had literary ability, but also the strength of character which could work on while waiting for recognition. fresh trouble was yet impending. after mr. martineau's death, his son henry remained a partner in the weaving business which the father had carried on so long; and the incomes (small, but sufficient for a maintenance) of the widow and unmarried daughters had to be paid out of the profits of the factory. just three years after mr. martineau's death, however, in june, , the old house became bankrupt, with but small assets. mrs. martineau and her daughters were thus deprived suddenly of all means of support. the whole family met this final blow to their fortunes with calm courage. it was soon settled that the two girls who possessed all their senses should go out to teach; but harriet could not be set to work in the same way--for pupils could not easily be found who would say their lessons into an ear-trumpet. the husband of the lady brought up by mrs. martineau with her youngest daughter tells me that upon this occasion harriet's mother said to her adopted child, "i have no fear for any of my daughters, except poor harriet; the others can work, but, with her deafness, i do not know how _she_ can ever earn her own bread!" the first resource for harriet was fancy work of different kinds. "i could make shirts and puddings," she declares, "and iron, and mend, and get my bread by my needle, if necessary--as it was necessary, for a few months, before i won a better place and occupation with my pen." during the winter which followed the failure of the old norwich house, she spent the entire daylight hours poring over fancy-work, by which alone she could with certainty earn money. but she did not lay aside the sterner implement of labor for that bright little bread-winner, the needle. after dark she began a long day's literary labor in her own room. every night, i believe, i was writing till two, or even three, in the morning, obeying always the rule of the house of being present at the breakfast-table as the clock struck eight. many a time i was in such a state of nervous exhaustion and distress that i was obliged to walk to and fro in the room before i could put on paper the last line of a page, or the last half-sentence of an essay or review. yet was i very happy. the deep-felt sense of progress and expansion was delightful; and so was the exertion of all my faculties; and not least, that of will to overcome my obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of which i believed myself more or less worthy. she offered the results of this nightly literary toil to a great number of magazine editors and publishers, but without the slightest success. totally unknown in london society, having no literary friends or connections beyond the editor of the obscure magazine of her sect, her manuscripts were scarcely looked at. everything that she wrote was returned upon her hands, until she offered it in despair to the _monthly repository_, where she was as invariably successful. her work, when published there, however, brought her not an atom of fame, and only the most trifling pecuniary return. she wrote to mr. fox, when she found herself penniless, to tell him that it would be impossible for her to continue to render as much gratuitous service as she had been doing to the _repository_; but he could only reply that the means at his disposal were very limited, and that the utmost he could offer her was £ a year, for which she was to write "as much as she thought proper." with this letter he forwarded her a parcel of nine books to review, as a commencement. a considerable portion of the space in his magazine was filled by miss martineau for the next two years on these terms. the essay previously referred to, on the "agency of feelings in the formation of habits," which appeared in the _repository_ for february and march, , was harriet martineau's first marked work. it was followed up by a series, commencing in the august of the same year, of "essays on the art of thinking," which were continued in the magazine until december, when two chapters were given in the one number, in order, as the editor remarked, that his readers "might possess entire in one volume this valuable manual of the art of thought." "v," the writer of these articles, was supposed to be of the superior sex. in those days, mr. fox would have shown rare courage if he had informed his readers that they were "receiving valuable instruction" in how to exercise their ratiocinative faculties from the pen of a woman. in the index, i find the references run--"v.'s" "ode to religious liberty"; _his_ "last tree of the forest"; _his_ "essays on the art of thinking," etc., etc. the "essays on the art of thinking" are nothing less than an outline of logic. in substance, they present no great originality; but they display full internal evidence that the thoughts presented were the writer's own, and not merely copied from authority. it is really no light test of clearness and depth of thought to write on an abstruse science in lucid, perspicuous fashion, giving a brief but complete view of all its parts in their true relations. only an accurate thinker, with a mind both capacious and orderly, can perform such a task. the highest function of the human mind is, doubtless, that of the discoverer. the original thinker, he who observes his facts from nature at first hand, who compares them, and reasons about them, and combines them, and generalizes a principle from them, is the one whom posterity to all time must honor and reverence for his additions to the store of human knowledge. but not far inferior in power, and equal in immediate usefulness, is the disciple who can judge the originator's work, and, finding it perfectly in accordance with facts as known to him, can receive it into his mind, arrange it in order, deck it with illustration, illuminate it with power of language, and represent it in a form suitable for general comprehension. there is originality of mind needed for such work; that which is done, the adaptation of the truths to be received to the receptive powers of the multitude, is an original work performed upon the truths, hardly inferior in difficulty and utility to that of him who first discerns them. this was the class of work which harriet martineau was beginning to do, and to do well. but there was more than this in her purposes. as these articles, though vastly inferior in execution to what she afterwards did, nevertheless show the essential characteristics of her work, this seems to be the most favorable opportunity to pause to inquire what was the special feature of her writings. for, various though her subjects appear to be, ranging from the humblest topics, such as the duties of maids-of-all-work, up to the highest themes of mental and political philosophy, yet i find one informing idea, one and the same moving impulse to the pen of the writer, throughout the whole series. let us see what it was that she really, though half unconsciously perhaps, kept before her as her aim. it is obvious at once that her writings are all designed to _teach_. a little closer consideration shows that what they seek to teach is always _what is right conduct_. abstract truth merely as such does not content her. she seeks its practical concrete application to daily life. further, not merely has she the aim of teaching morals, but she invariably makes _facts_ and _reasonings from facts the basis_ of her moral teachings. in other words, she approaches morals from the scientific instead of the intuitional side; and to thus influence conduct is the invariable final object of her writings. it would sound simpler to say that she wrote on the science of morals. but the term "moral science" has already been appropriated to a class of writing than which nothing could, very often, less deserve the name of science. the work which harriet martineau spent her whole life in doing, was, however, true work in moral science. what she was ever seeking to do was to find out how men should live from what men and their surroundings are. she must be recognized as one of the first thinkers to uniformly consider practical morals as derived from reasoned science. many of the articles contributed to the _repository_ were naturally, from the character of the publication, upon theology. much that is noticeable might be culled from amongst them; as, indeed, could be inferred from the fact that an able leader of her religious body allowed her to fill so very large a portion of the pages by which, under his guidance, the unitarian public were instructed. in all the essays, a distinguishing feature is the earnestness of the effort put forth to judge the questions at issue by reason, and not by prejudice. it is true that the effort often fails. there comes the moment at which faith in dogma intervenes, and submerges the pure argument; but none the less do the spirit of justice and fairness, and the love of truth, irradiate the whole of these compositions. mr. fox soon asked her if she thought that any of her ideas could be expressed through the medium of fiction. it so happened that the suggestion precisely fell in with a thought that had already occurred to her that "of all delightful tasks, the most delightful would be to describe, with all possible fidelity, the aspect of the life and land of the hebrews, at the critical period of the full expectation of the messiah." she wrote a story which she called _the hope of the hebrews_, in which a company of young people, relatives and friends, were shown as undergoing the alternations of doubt and hope about whether this teacher was indeed messiah, on the first appearance of jesus in palestine. the day after this story appeared in the _repository_ mr. fox was at an anniversary dinner of the sect, where so many persons spoke to him about the tale, that he wrote and generously advised harriet not to publish any more such stories in his magazine, but to make a book of them. she adopted the suggestion; the little volume was issued with her name, and proved her first decisive success. not only was it well circulated and highly appreciated in england, but it was translated into french, under high ecclesiastical sanction, and was also immediately reproduced in the united states. while this book was in the press, she went to stay for a short time in london. mr. fox, hearing from her how anxious she was to earn her livelihood by literature, succeeded in obtaining from a printer friend of his an offer for her to do "proof correcting and other drudgery," if she liked to remain in london for the work. this would have given her a small but certain income, and there could be little doubt that, if she stayed in london, she would gradually get into some journalistic employment which would enable her to support herself tolerably well. there were no great hopes in the matter. mr. fox told her that "one hundred or one hundred and fifty pounds a year is as much as our most successful writers usually make"--success here meaning, of course, full employment in hackwork. it had not yet occurred, even to mr. fox, that she was to be really a successful author. but to do even this drudgery, and to take the poor chance now offered to her, implied that she must make her home in london; and she wrote to inform her mother of this fact. the same post which carried harriet's letter to this effect, bore to mrs. martineau a second missive, from the relative with whom her daughter was staying, which strongly advised that harriet should be recalled home, there to pursue the needle-work by which she had proved she could earn money. the good lady had been wont to ask harriet day by day "how much she would get" for the literary labor upon which she had expended some hours; and the poor young author's reply not being satisfactory or precise, her hostess looked upon the time spent at the desk as so much wasted. she gave harriet some pieces of silk, "lilac, blue, and pink," and advised her to keep to making little bags and baskets, which the kind friend generously promised to assist in disposing of for good coin of the realm. the mother who had stood between her full-grown daughter and the bed of a dying betrothed, now thought herself justified in interposing between the woman of twenty-seven and the work which she desired to undertake for her independence. mrs. martineau sent harriet a stern letter, peremptorily ordering her to return home forthwith. bitterly disappointed at seeing this chance of independence in the vocation she loved thus snatched away, harriet's sense of filial duty led her to obey her mother's commands. she went home with a heavy heart; and with equal sadness, her little sister of eighteen turned out of home, at the same despotic bidding, to go a-governessing. "my mother received me very tenderly. she had no other idea at the moment than that she had been doing her best for my good." harriet did not return to norwich entirely discouraged. resolution such as hers was not easily broken down. the british and foreign unitarian association had advertised three prizes for the best essays designed to convert roman catholics, jews and mohammedans respectively to unitarianism. the sum offered for each was but small: ten guineas for the catholic, fifteen for the jewish, and twenty for the mohammedan essays. but it was less the money than interest in the cause, and desire to see if she could succeed in competition with others, that led harriet to form the intention of trying for _all three_ prizes. she went to work immediately upon the catholic essay, which was to be adjudicated upon six months earlier than the other two. when it was finished, she paid a schoolboy, who wrote a good hand, a sovereign that she could ill spare, for copying the essay, which was about two-thirds the length of this volume. the essays were to be superscribed, as usual in such competitions, with a motto, and the writer's name and address had to be forwarded in a sealed envelope, with the same motto outside. in september, , she received the gratifying news that the committee of adjudication had unanimously awarded this prize to her. the other two essays were commenced with the spirit induced by this success. one of them was copied out by a poor woman, the other by a schoolmaster. harriet was careful even to have the two essays written upon different sorts of paper, to do them up in differently shaped packages, and to use separate kinds of wax and seals. the sequel may be told, with all the freshness of the moment, in a quotation from the _monthly repository_ for may, : "we were about to review it [_i.e._ the catholic essay] when the somewhat startling fact transpired of her having carried off the other premiums offered by the association's committee for tracts addressed to the mohammedans and the jews. we shall not now stop to inquire how it has happened that our ministers would not or could not prevent the honor of championing the cause of pure christianity against the whole theological world from developing upon a young lady. however that may be, she has won the honor and well deserves to wear it." the essays were published by the unitarian association. there can be little doubt that, however many ministers may have competed, the committee did select the best papers offered to their choice. the learning in all is remarkable; the freedom from sectarian bitterness, from bigotry, and from the insolent assumption of moral and religious superiority, is even more striking, in such proselytising compositions. while waiting the result of the prize competition, harriet wrote a long story for young people, which she called _five years of youth_. it is one of the prettiest and most attractive of all her writings of this class. it has a moral object, of course--a somewhat similar one to that of jane austen's _sense and sensibility_; but the warning against allowing sensitiveness to pass into sentimentality is here directed to girls just budding into womanhood; and the punishment for the error is not a love disappointment, but the diminution of the power of domestic and social helpfulness. harriet's work of this year, , comprised the doing of much fancy-work for sale, making and mending everything that she herself wore, knitting stockings even while reading, studying a course of german literature, and writing for the press the following quantity of literary matter:--_traditions of palestine_, a duodecimo volume of printed pages; _five years of youth_, small octavo pages; three theological essays, making a closely printed crown octavo volume of pages; and fifty-two articles of various lengths in the twelve numbers of the _monthly repository_. and now she had touched the highest point of sectarian fame. the chosen expositor to the outer world of her form of religion, and the writer of its favorite sunday school story-book of the hour, she must already have felt that her industrious, resolute labor through many years had at last borne some fruit. but the moment for wider fame and a greater usefulness was now at hand. in the autumn of she had read mrs. marcet's _conversations on political economy_, and had become aware that the subject which she had thought out for herself, and treated in her little stories of _the rioters_, and _the turn-out_, was a recognized science. she followed this up by a study of adam smith, and other economists, and the idea then occurred to her that it might be possible to illustrate the whole system of political economy by tales similar in style to those she had already written. the thought had lain working in her mind for long, and, in this autumn of , the idea began to press upon her as a duty. there were many reasons why it was especially necessary just then that the people should be brought to think about social science. the times were bitter with the evils arising from unwise laws. none knew better than she did how largely the well-being of mankind depends upon causes which cannot be affected by laws. it is individual conduct which must make or mar the prosperity of the nation. but, on the other hand, laws are potent, both as direct causes of evil conditions (and in a less degree of good conditions), and from their educational influence upon the people. harriet martineau felt that she had come to see more clearly than the masses of her fellow-countrymen exactly how far the miseries under which english society groaned were caused directly or indirectly by mischievous legislative acts. moreover, the circumstances of the moment made the imparting of such knowledge not only possible, but specially opportune. the bishops had just thrown out the reform bill; but no person who watched the temper of the time could doubt that their feeble opposition would be speedily swept aside, and that self-government was about to be extended to a new class of the people. most suitable was the occasion, then, for offering information to these upon the science and art of society. harriet was right in her judgment when she started her project of a series of tales illustrative of political economy, under a "thorough, well-considered, steady conviction that the work was wanted, was even craved for by the popular mind." she began to write the first of her stories. the next business was to find a publisher to share her belief that the undertaking would be acceptable to the public. she wrote to one after another of the great london publishers, receiving instant refusal to undertake the series from all but two; and even these two, after giving her a little of that delusive hope which ends by plunging the mind into deeper despair, joined with their brethren in declining to have anything to do with the scheme. finally, she went to london to try if personal interviews would bring her any better success. she stayed in a house attached to a brewery (whitbread's), belonging to a cousin of hers, and situated near the city road. thence, she tramped about through the mud and sleet of december to the publishers' offices day after day for nearly three weeks. the result was always failure. but though she returned to the house worn-out and dispirited, her determination that the work should be done never wavered, and night after night she sat up till long after the brewery clock struck twelve, the pen pushing on in her trembling hand, preparing the first two numbers of the series, to be ready for publication when the means should be found. it was the kind friend who had helped her before who came to the rescue at last at this crisis. mr. w. j. fox induced his brother charles to make her proposals for publishing her series. mr. charles fox took care to offer only such arrangement as should indemnify him from all risk in the undertaking. he required, first, that five hundred subscribers should be obtained for the work; and second, that he, the publisher, should receive about seventy-five per cent of the possible profits. hopeless of anything better, she accepted these hard terms, and it was arranged that the first number should appear with february, . the original stipulation as to the time that this agreement should run was that the engagement should be terminable by either party at the end of every five numbers. but a few days afterwards, when harriet called upon mr. w. j. fox to show him her circular inviting subscribers for the series, she found that mr. charles fox had decided to say that he would not publish more than two numbers, unless a thousand copies of no. i were sold in the first fortnight! this decision had been arrived at chiefly in consequence of a conversation which w. j. fox had held with james mill, in which the distinguished political economist had pronounced against the essential point of the scheme--the narrative form--and had advised that, if the young lady must try her hand at political economy, she should write it in the orthodox didactic style. mr. fox lived at dalston. when harriet left his house, after receiving this unreasonable and discouraging ultimatum, she "set out to walk the four miles and a half to the brewery. i could not afford to ride more or less; but, weary already, i now felt almost too ill to walk at all. on the road, not far from shoreditch, i became too giddy to stand without some support; and i leaned over some dirty palings, pretending to look at a cabbage-bed, but saying to myself as i stood with closed eyes, 'my book will do yet.'" that very night she wrote the long, thoughtful, and collected preface to her work. after she had finished it she sat over the fire in her bedroom, in the deepest depression; she cried, with her feet on the fender, till four o'clock, and then she went to bed, and cried there till six, when she fell asleep. but if any persons suppose that because the feminine temperament finds a relief in tears, the fact argues weakness, they will be instructed by hearing that she was up by half-past eight, continuing her work as firmly resolved as ever that it should be published. chapter v. the great success. the work which had struggled into printed existence with such extreme difficulty raised its author at a bound to fame. ten days after the publication of the first number, charles fox sent harriet word that not only were the fifteen hundred copies which formed the first edition all sold off, but he had such orders in hand that he proposed to print another five thousand at once. the people had taken up the work instantly. the press followed, instead of leading the public in this instance; but it, too, was enthusiastic in praise, both of the scheme and the execution of the stories. more than one publisher who had previously rejected the series made overtures for it now. its refusal, as they saw, had been one of those striking blunders of which literary history has not a few to tell. but there is no occasion to cry out about the stupidity of publishers. they can judge well how far a work written on lines already popular will meet the demand of the market; but an entirely original idea, or the work of an original writer, is a mere lottery. there is no telling how the public will take it until it has been tried. publishers put into a good many such lotteries, and often lose by them; then nothing more is heard of the matter. but the cases where they decline a speculation which afterwards turns out to have been a good one are never forgotten. still, the fact remains that it was harriet martineau alone who saw that the people needed her work, and whose wonderful courage and resolution brought it out for the public to accept. her success grew, as an avalanche gains in volume, by its own momentum. besides the publishers' communications she had letters, and pamphlets, and blue-books, and magazines forwarded to her in piles, in order that she might include the advocacy of the senders' hobbies in her series. one day the postmaster sent her a message that she must let a barrow be fetched for her share of the mail, as it was too bulky to come in any other way. lord brougham declared, that it made him tear his hair to think that the society for the diffusion of knowledge, which he had instituted for the very purpose of doing such work as she was undertaking, seemed not to have a man in it with as much sense of what was wanted as this little deaf girl at norwich. the public interest in the work was, perhaps, heightened by the fact that so ignorant was everybody of her personality, that this description of brougham's passed muster. but she was not little, and she was now twenty-nine years of age. she stayed in norwich, going on writing hard, until the november of , by which time eight numbers of her series had appeared. then she went to london, taking lodgings with an old servant of mrs. martineau's, who lived in conduit street. in the course of a few months, however, mrs. martineau settled herself in london, and her daughter again resided with her, in a house in fludyer street, westminster. the purely literary success which she had hitherto enjoyed was now turned into a social triumph. however she might strive against being lionized she could not avoid the attentions and honors that were poured upon her. it is little to say that all the distinguished people in town hastened to know her; it was even considered to give distinction to a party if she could be secured to attend it. literary celebrities, titled people, and members of parliament, competed for the small space of time that she could spare for society. this was not very much, for the work she had undertaken was heavy enough to absorb all her energies. she had engaged to produce one of her stories every month. they were issued in small paper-covered volumes of from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pages of print. she began publication with only two or three numbers ready written. thus, to keep on with her series, she had to write one whole number every month. it would have been hard work had it been simple story-telling, had she been merely imaginatively reproducing scenes and characters from her past experience, or writing according to her fancy. but it was, in fact, a much more difficult labor upon which she was engaged. her scheme required that she should embody every shade of variety of the human character; that her scenes should be laid in different parts of the world, with topography and surroundings appropriate to the story; and that the governments and social state of all these various places should be accurately represented. in addition to all this she had to lay down for each tale the propositions which had to be illustrated in it; to assure herself that she clearly saw the truth and the bearings of every doctrine of political economy; and then to work into a connected fiction in a concrete form the abstract truths of the science--representing them as exemplified in the lives of individuals. political economy treats of the production, distribution and consumption, or use, of all the material objects of human desire, which are called by the general name of wealth. thus, it is a subject which concerns every one of us in our daily lives, and not merely a matter belonging (as its name unfortunately leads many to suppose) entirely to the province of the legislator. the great mass of mankind are producers of wealth. all are necessarily consumers--for the bare maintenance of existence demands the consumption of wealth. the well-being of the community depends upon the industry and skill with which wealth is produced; upon the distribution of it in such a manner as to encourage future production; and upon the consumption of it with due regard to the claims of the future. it is individuals who, as the business of common life, produce, exchange, divide and consume wealth; it is, therefore, each individual's business to comprehend the science which treats of his daily life. a science is nothing but a collection of facts, considered in their relationship to each other. miss martineau's plan, in her series, was strictly what i have indicated as being always her aim; namely, to deduce from an abstract science rules for daily life--the secondary, practical or concrete science. it was the union of a scientific basis with practical morals that made this subject attractive to her mind, and led her (in the words of her preface,) to "propose to convey the leading truths of political economy, as soundly, as systematically, as clearly and faithfully, as the utmost painstaking and the strongest attachment to the subject will enable us to do." she did her work very methodically. having first noted down her own ideas on the branch of the subject before her, she read over the chapters relating to it in the various standard works that she had at hand, making references as she read. the next thing to do was to draw out as clearly and concisely as possible the truths that she had to illustrate; this "summary of principles," as she called it, was affixed to each tale. by this time she would see in what part of the world, and amongst what class of people, the principles in question were operating most manifestly; and if this consideration dictated the choice of a foreign background, the next thing to be done was to get from a library works of travel and topography, and to glean hints from them for local coloring. the material thus all before her in sheets of notes, she reduced it to chapters; sketching out the characters of her _dramatis personæ_, their action, and the features of the scenes, and also the political economy which they had to convey either by exemplification or by conversation. finally, she paged her paper. then "the story went off like a letter. i did it," she says, "as i write letters; never altering the expression as it came fresh from my brain." i have seen the original manuscript of one of the political economy tales. it shows the statement just quoted to be entirely accurate. the writing has evidently been done as rapidly as the hand could move; every word that will admit of it is contracted, to save time. "socy.," "opporty.," "agst.," "abt.," "independce.," these were amongst the abbreviations submitted to the printer's intelligence; not to mention commoner and more simple words, such as wh., wd., and the like. the calligraphy, though very readable, has a somewhat slipshod look. thus, there is every token of extremely rapid composition. yet the corrections on the ms. are few and trifling; the structure of a sentence is never altered, and there are but seldom emendations even of principal words. the manuscript is written (in defiance of law and order) on both sides of the paper; the latter being quarto, of the size now commonly called _sermon_ paper, but, in those pre-envelope ages, it was letter paper. her course of life in london was as follows: she wrote in the morning, rising, and making her own coffee at seven, and going to work immediately after breakfast until two. from two till four she saw visitors. having an immense acquaintance, she declined undertaking to make morning calls; but people might call upon her any afternoon. she was charged with vanity about this arrangement; but, with the work on her hands and the competition for her company, she really could not do differently. still, sydney smith suggested a better plan; he told her she should "hire a carriage, and engage an inferior authoress to go round in it to drop the cards!" after any visitors left, she went out for her daily "duty walk," and returned to glance over the newspapers, and to dress for dinner. almost invariably she dined out, her host's or some other friend's carriage being commonly sent to fetch her. one or two evening parties would conclude the day, unless the literary pressure was extreme, in which case she would sometimes write letters after returning home. during the whole time of writing her series, she was satisfied with from five to six hours' sleep out of the twenty-four; and though she was not a teetotaller, but drank wine at dinner, still she took no sort of stimulant to help her in her work. this was the course of life that a woman, of no extraordinary physical strength, was able to maintain with but little cessation or interval for two years. when i look at the thirty-four little volumes which she produced in less than as many months, and when i consider the character of their contents, i am bound to say that i consider the feat of mere industry unparalleled, within my knowledge. the _illustrations of political economy_ are plainly and inevitably damaged, as works of art, by the fact that they are written to convey definite lessons. the fetters in which the story moves are necessarily far closer than in the ordinary "novel with a purpose;" for here the object is not merely to show the results, upon particular characters or upon individual careers, of a certain course of conduct, and thence to argue that in similar special circumstances all persons would experience similar consequences: but the task here is to show in operation those springs of the social machinery by which we are _all_, generally quite unconsciously, guided in our _every-day_ actions, the natural laws by which _all_ our lives are _inevitably_ governed. to do this, the author was compelled to select scenes from common life, and to eschew the striking and the unusual. again, it was absolutely necessary that much of the doctrine which had to be taught must be conveyed by dialogue; not because it would not be possible to exemplify in action every theory of political economy--for all those theories have originally been derived from observation of the facts of human history--but because no such a small group of persons and such a limited space of time as must be taken to _tell a story about_, can possibly display the whole consequences of many of the laws of social science. the results of our daily actions as members of society are not so easily visible as they would be if we could wholly trace them out amongst our own acquaintances or in our own careers. the consequences of our own conduct, good or bad, must _come round_ to us, it is true, but often only as members of the body politic. thus, they are very often in a form as little distinguishable to the uninstructed mind as we may suppose it would be comprehensible to the brain, if the organs of the body had a separate consciousness, that it was responsible for its own aches arising from the disturbance of the liver consequent upon intemperance. but in a tale it is obviously impossible to show _in action_ any more of the working of events than can be exemplified in one or two groups of persons, all of whom must be, however slightly, personally associated. the larger questions and principles at issue must be expounded and argued out in conversations, or else by means of an entire lapse from the illustrative to the didactic method. now, as ordinary people do not go about the world holding long conversations or delivering themselves of dissertations on political economy, it is clear that the introduction of such talks and preachments detracts from the excellence of the story as a work of art. still less artistically admirable does the fiction become when a lesson is introduced as a separate argument intruded into the course of the tale. political economy as a science was then but fifty years old. adam smith had first promulgated its fundamental truths in his immortal _wealth of nations_, in . malthus, ricardo, and one or two others had since added to the exposition of the facts and the relationship between the facts (that is to say, the science) of social arrangements. but it was not then--nor is it, indeed, yet, in an age when the great rewards of physical research have attracted into that field nearly all the best intellects for science of the time--a complete body of reasoned truths. some of the positions laid down by all the earlier writers are now discredited; others are questioned. in a few passages, accordingly, these tales teach theories which would now require revision. it must be added at once that these instances are few and far between. the reasoning, the grasp of the facts of social life and the logical acumen with which they are dissected and explained in these tales are, generally speaking, nearly perfect, and therefore such as all competent students of the subject would at this day indorse. the slips in exposition of the science as it was then understood are _exceedingly_ rare. greater clearness, and more precision, and better arrangement could hardly have been attained had years been spent upon the work, in revising, correcting, and re-copying, instead of each "illustration" being written in a month, and sent to press with hardly a phrase amended. the accuracy and excellence in the presentation of the science were admitted at once by the highest authorities. mr. james mill early made honorable amends for his previous doubts as to the possibility of miss martineau's success. whately and malthus expressed their admiration of the work. lord brougham called upon her, and engaged her pen to illustrate the necessity for reform in the treatment of the social canker of pauperism. the gurneys, and the rest of the quaker members of parliament got mrs. fry to make an appointment to ask miss martineau's advice as to their action in the house on the same subject, when it was ripe for legislation. the chancellor of the exchequer (lord althorp) even sent his private secretary (mr. drummond, the author of the world-famous phrase "property has its duties as well as its rights") to supply miss martineau with information to enable her to prepare the public for the forthcoming budget. the chairman of the royal commission on excise taxes gave her the manuscript of the evidence taken, and the draft of the report of the commission, before they were formally presented to the ministers of the crown (a thing without precedent!), in order that she might use the facts to pave the way for the reception of the report in the house and by the people. the whole public of male students of her science paid her work what men consider in their unconscious insolence to be the highest compliment that they _can_ pay a woman's work: the milder-mannered ones said she had "a masculine intelligence"; the stronger characters went further, and declared that the books were so good that it was impossible to believe them to be written by a woman. newspaper critics not infrequently attributed them to lord brougham, then lord chancellor; that versatile and (at the moment) most popular politician was supposed either to write them all himself, or to supply their main features for the inferior mind to throw into shape. while statesmen, politicians, thinkers, and students were thus praising the clearness and appreciating the power of the work as political economy, the general public eagerly bought and read the books, both for their bearing on the legislative questions of the day and for their vividness and interest as stories. and indeed, they richly deserved to be read as works of fiction. remembering the limitations to their artistic excellence previously adverted to, they may be with justice praised for most of the essential features of good novel-writing. the characters are the strongest point. clearly individualized, consistently carried out, thinking, speaking, and acting in accordance with their nature, the characters are always personages; and some of them must live long in the memories of those who have made their acquaintance. the sterner virtues in cousin marshall, in lady f----, in ella of garveloch, and in mary kay, are no less clearly and attractively depicted than the milder and more passive ones in the patience of christian vanderput, in the unconscious devotion to duty of nicholas, in the industry and hopefulness of frank and ellen castle, in the wifely love and agony of hester morrison, in the quiet public spirit of charles guyon, in the proved patriotism of the polish exiles, and in a dozen other instances. her feelings and her spirit are at home in depicting these virtues of the character; but none the less does she well succeed in realizing both vice and folly. her real insight into character was quite remarkable; as dr. martineau observed to me, when he said, "my sister's powers of observation were extraordinary." if, on the one hand, her deafness often prevented her from appreciating the delicacies and the chances of verbal expression (which really reveal so much of the nature) in those around her, so that she was apt to draw sharper lines than most people do between the sheep and the goats in her estimation; on the other hand, she saw more than those whose minds are distracted by sounds, the light and play of the countenance, and the indications of character in trivial actions. the excellence of her character-drawing in these novels gives abundant evidence that the disqualification was more than counterbalanced by the cultivation of the other faculty. the unconsciousness of her mental analysis is at once its greatest charm and the best token of its truthfulness. florence nightingale realized how fully this was so with reference to the finer qualities of morals. in her tribute to harriet martineau's memory miss nightingale justly observes:-- in many parts of her _illustrations of political economy_--for example, the death of a poor drinking-woman, "mrs. kay,"--what higher religious feeling (or _one should rather say instinct_) could there be? to the last she had religious feeling--in the sense of good working out of evil into a supreme wisdom penetrating and moulding the whole universe; into the natural subordination of intellect and intellectual purposes and of intellectual self to purposes of good, even were these merely the small purposes of social or domestic life. on the other side of the human character in her delineation of the bad qualities, she as instinctively seeks and finds causes for the errors and evils of the minds she displays. foolishness, and ignorance, and poverty are traced, entirely without affectation and "cant," in their action as misleading influences in the lives of the poor sinners and sufferers. the stories told in the _illustrations_ are frequently very interesting. in this respect, there is a notable advance in the course of the series. the earlier tales, such as _life in the wilds_ and _brooke farm_, are not to be compared, as mere stories, with even those written later on by only eight or nine stirring eventful months, such as _ireland_ and _the loom and the lugger_. still better are the latest tales. the _illustrations of taxation_ and _illustrations of poor-laws and paupers_ are, despite the unattractiveness of their topics, of the highest interest. _the parish_, _the town_, _the jerseymen meeting_, _the jerseymen parting_; and _the scholars of arnside_, would assuredly be eagerly read by any lover of fiction almost without consciousness that there was anything in the pages except a deeply interesting story. archbishop whately pronounced _the parish_ the best thing she had done. _vanderput and snook_, the story dealing with bills of exchange, was the favorite with mr. hallam. lord brougham, on whose engagement she did the five "poor-law" stories, wrote most enthusiastically that they surpassed all the expectations that her previous works had led him to form. coleridge told her that he "looked eagerly every month" for the new number; and lord durham recounted to her how one evening he was at kensington palace (where the widowed duchess of kent was then residing, and devoting herself to that education which has made her daughter the best sovereign of her dynasty), when the little princess victoria came running from an inner room to show her mother, with delight, the advertisement of the "taxation" tales; for the young princess was being allowed to read the _illustrations_, and found them her most fascinating story-books. harriet's experiences, however, were not all quite so agreeable. mrs. marcet, who "had a great opinion of great people--of people great by any distinction, ability, office, birth, and what not--and innocently supposed her own taste to be universal," formed a warm and generous friendship for miss martineau, and used to delight in carrying to her the "homages" of the savants and the aristocratic readers of the _illustrations_ in france, where mrs. marcet's acquaintance was extensive. she one day told miss martineau, with much delight, that louis philippe, the then king of the french, had ordered a copy of the series for each member of his family, and had also requested m. guizot to have the stories translated, and introduced into the french national schools. this was presently confirmed by a large order from france for copies, and by a note from the officially-appointed translator requesting harriet martineau to favor him with some particulars of her personal history, for introduction into a periodical which was being issued by the government for the promotion of education amongst the french people. the writer added that m. guizot wished to have miss martineau's series specially noticed in connection with her own personality, since she afforded the first instance on record of a woman who was not born to sovereign station affecting practical legislation otherwise than through a man. at the very time that she received this flattering note, harriet was engaged in writing her twelfth number, _french wines and politics_. the topic treated in this story is that of value, with the subsidiary questions relating to prices and their fluctuations. the tale takes up the period of the great french revolution, and shows how the fortunes of certain wine-merchants near bordeaux, and of the head of the paris house in connection, were affected by the course of that great social convulsion. the scene was unquestionably happily chosen. the circumstances were abnormal, it is true; but the causes which created such vast fluctuations in prices, and such changes in the value of goods, were, in fact, only the same fundamental causes as are always at the basis of such alterations in price and value; it was merely the rapidity and violence of the movement which were peculiar. the story was well put together; and the "illustration" was in every way admirable for every possible desirable object, except only for the one of being pleasant to the ruling powers in the france of . harriet martineau's constant sympathy with democracy, her hatred of oppression and tyranny, and her aversion to class government, all became conspicuous in this story. "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" of mankind was her ideal of the aim of legislation; and she well knew, as bentham saw, that only the democratic form of government can produce a body of laws approximating to this ideal. her efforts were constant, therefore, to prepare the people to demand, and to afterwards wisely use, the power of governing themselves. now, though louis philippe was the citizen-king, though he was the head of a republican monarchy, though his legislative chamber rejected in that same year a ministerial document because it spoke of the people as "subjects," yet it may be easily understood that this king and his ministers did not care to stimulate the democratic feeling of the nation any more than they found inevitable. the whole tone of this work would be objectionable to them; and a dozen passages might be readily quoted to show why royal and aristocratic rulers were little likely to aid its circulation amongst the people whom they governed. here, for instance, is a portion of the passage on the storming of the bastile:-- the spectacles of a life-time were indeed to be beheld within the compass of this one scene.... here were the terrors which sooner or later chill the marrow of despotism, and the stern joy with which its retribution fires the heart of the patriot. here were the servants of tyranny quailing before the glance of the people.... the towers of palaces might be seen afar, where princes were quaking at this final assurance of the downfall of their despotic sway, knowing that the assumed sanctity of royalty was being wafted away with every puff of smoke which spread itself over the sky, and their irresponsibility melting in fires lighted by the hands which they had vainly attempted to fetter, and blown by the breath which they had imagined they could stifle. they had denied the birth of that liberty whose baptism in fire and in blood was now being celebrated in a many-voiced chant with which the earth should ring for centuries. some from other lands were already present to hear and join in it; some free britons to aid, some wondering slaves of other despots to slink homewards with whispered tidings of its import; for from that day to this, the history of the fall of the bastile has been told as a secret in the vineyards of portugal, and among the groves of spain, and in the patriotic conclaves of the youth of italy, while it has been loudly and joyfully proclaimed from one end to the other of great britain, till her lisping children are familiar with the tale. besides such passages as this, scarcely likely to please the french king, there was the special ground for his objection that his immediate ancestor, egalité, was introduced into the story, and depicted in no favorable light his efforts to inflame the popular violence for his selfish ends, his hypocrisy, his cowardice, and so on, being held up to contempt. mrs. marcet, when she read all this, came breathless to harriet martineau to ask her how she could have made such a blunder as to write a story that plainly would (and, of course, in fact, did) put an end to the official patronage of her series in france, and would destroy for ever any hopes that she might have entertained of being received at the court of louis philippe? greatly surprised was the good lady at finding harriet's reverence for that monarch so limited in extent. she replied to her kind friend that she "wrote with a view to the people, and especially the most suffering of them; and the crowned heads must for once take their chance for their feelings." at the very moment that mrs. marcet's remonstrance was made, miss martineau was writing a story of a character likely to be even more distasteful to the emperor of russia than this one to the king of the french. she had found it difficult to illustrate the theory of the currency in a story treating of the existence of civilized people. the only situation in which she could find persons, above the rank of savages, transacting their exchanges by aid of a kind of money which made the business only one remove from bartering, was amongst the polish exiles in siberia. she therefore wrote _the charmed sea_, a story founded upon the terrible facts of the lives of the exiled poles "in the depths of eastern siberia," working in "a silver-mine near the western extremity of the daourian range, and within hearing of the waters of the baikal when its storms were fiercest." had the melancholy tale been written in the service of the poles, it could not have been more moving. so powerful, and interesting was it, indeed, that the criticism of the _edinburgh review_ was that the fiction too entirely overpowered the political economy. the arrival of _the charmed sea_ in russia changed the favorable opinion which the czar had previously been so kind as to express about the _illustrations_. he had been purchasing largely of the french translation of the series for distribution amongst his people. but now he issued a proclamation ordering every copy in russia of every number to be immediately burnt, and forbidding the author ever to set foot upon his soil. austria, equally concerned in the polish business, followed this example, and a description of harriet martineau's person was hung in the appointed places, amidst the lists of the proscribed, all over russia, austria, and austrian-italy. despots, at least, had no admiration for her politics. the only important adverse criticism in the press appeared in the _quarterly review_.[ ] the reviewer objected impartially to every one of the twelve stories which had then appeared. every circumstance which could arouse prejudice against the series was taken advantage of, from party political feeling and religious bigotry, down to the weakness of fluid philanthropy, and "the prudery and timidity of the middle-classes of england." the principal ground of attack was the story which dealt with malthusianism, _weal and woe in garveloch_. [ ] in the same number, by the way, appeared the notorious biting and sarcastic notice of tennyson's second volume. it is a distinction, indeed, for a critical review, that one number should have devoted half its space to violently unfavorable criticisms of alfred tennyson's poetry and harriet martineau's political economy. when the course of my exposition brought me to the population subject, i, with my youthful and provincial mode of thought and feeling--brought up, too, amidst the prudery which is found in its great force in our middle class--could not but be sensible that i risked much in writing and publishing on a subject which was not universally treated in the pure, benevolent, and scientific spirit of malthus himself.... i said nothing to anybody; and, when the number was finished, i read it aloud to my mother and aunt. if there had been any opening whatever for doubt or dread, i was sure that these two ladies would have given me abundant warning and exhortation--both from their very keen sense of propriety and their anxious affection for me. but they were as complacent and easy as they had been interested and attentive. i saw that all ought to be safe. the _quarterly review_ seized the opportunity of the appearance of this number to make a vile attack upon the series and its writer. harriet suffered under it to a degree which seems almost excessive. the review is so obviously full of fallacies, as regards its political economy, that any person whose opinion was worth having could hardly hesitate in deciding that she, and not her critic, was talking common-sense and arguing logically. as to the personal part of the article, it is, though scurrilous, and even indecent, so very funny that the attacked might almost have forgotten the insult in the amusement. nevertheless, the writers, croker and lockhart, did their worst. croker openly said that he expected to lose his pension very shortly, and, being wishful to make himself a literary position before that event happened, he had begun by "tomahawking miss martineau." all that could be painful to her as a woman, and injurious to her as a writer, was said, or attempted to be conveyed, in this article. let us see what it was all about. garveloch, one of the hebridean islands, is seen in the "illustration" rapidly multiplying its population, both by early marriages and by immigration, under the stimulus of a passing prosperity in the fishing industry. the influx of capital and the increase of the demand for food, have led to such an improvement in the cultivation of the land, that the food produce of the island has been doubled in ten years. ella, the heroine (a fine, strong, self-contained, helpful woman--one of the noblest female characters in these works), foresees that if the reckless increase of population continues, the supply of food will by-and-by run short. her interlocutor asks how this will be the case, since the population will surely not double again, as it has done already, in ten years? then the _quarterly_ quotes ella's reply, and comments on it:-- "certainly not; but say twenty, thirty, fifty or any number of years you choose; still, as the number of the people doubles itself for ever, while the produce of the land does not, the people must increase faster than the produce." this is rare logic and arithmetic, and not a little curious as natural history. a plain person now would have supposed that if the produce doubled itself in ten, and the people only in a hundred years, the people would not increase _quite_ so fast as the produce, seeing that at the end of the first century the population would be multiplied but by two, the produce by one thousand and twenty-four. but these are the discoveries of genius! why does miss martineau write, except to correct our mistaken notions and to expound to us the mysteries of "the principle of population." the reviewer goes on to suggest, in the broadest language, that she has confounded the rate of the multiplication of the herring-fisher-women with that of the herrings themselves; reproves her for writing on "these ticklish topics" with so little physiological information; and tells her that she, "poor innocent, has been puzzling over mr. malthus's arithmetical and geometrical ratios for knowledge which she should have obtained by a simple question or two of her mamma." in one and the same paragraph, he tells her that he is "loth to bring a blush unnecessarily upon the cheek of any woman," and asks her if she picked up her information on the subject "in her conferences with the lord chancellor?" this is enough to show to what a sensitive young lady was exposed in illustrating "a principle as undeniable as the multiplication table," and in stating the facts upon which hangs the explanation of the poverty, and therefore of a large part of the vice and misery, of mankind. miss martineau's exposition was, of course, entirely right, and the fallacy in the review is obvious, one would suppose on the surface. the reviewer's error consists in his assumption--the falsity of which is at once apparent on the face of the statement--that land can go on doubling its produce _every_ ten years, for an indefinite period. so far from this being true, the fact is that the limit of improving the cultivation of land is soon reached. better agricultural treatment may easily make half-cultivated land bring forth double its previous produce; but the highest pitch of farming once reached--as it comparatively soon is--the produce cannot be further increased; and even before this limit is reached, the return for each additional application of capital and labor becomes less and less proportionately bountiful. this is the truth known to political economists as "the law of the diminishing return of land." taken in conjunction with the fact that the human race _can_ double for ever, theoretically, and in reality _does_ multiply its numbers with each generation, checked only by the forethought of the more prudent and the operations of famine, war, crime, and the diseases caused by poverty, this law explains why mankind does not more rapidly improve its condition--why the poor have been always with us--and why teaching such as harriet martineau here gave must be received into the popular mind before the condition of society can be expected to be improved in the only way possible, by the wisdom and prudence of its members. painful as was the attack she had undergone, intensely as she had suffered from its character and nature, miss martineau did not allow what she had felt of personal distress to have any influence on her future writings. her moral courage had been well trained and exercised, first by the efforts that her mind had had to make in following her conscience as a guide to the formation of opinions, in opposition to the tendency implanted by her mother's treatment to bow supinely before authority; secondly, by the lesson of endurance which her deafness had brought to her. she had now to show, for the first, but by no means the last time, that hers was one of those temperaments which belong to all leaders of men, whether in physical or moral warfare; that danger was to her a stimulus, and that her courage rose the higher the greater the demand for its exercise. praise and blame, appreciation and defamation, strengthened and enlarged her mind during this period. but at the end of it, sydney smith could say: "she has gone through such a season as no girl before ever knew, and she has kept her own mind, her own manners, and her own voice. she's safe." chapter vi. five active years. on the conclusion of the publication of the _illustrations of political economy_, harriet went to the united states, and travelled there for more than two years. her fame had preceded her; and she received the warm and gracious greeting from the generous people of america that they are ever ready to give to distinguished guests from their "little mother-isle." she travelled not only in the northern states, but in the south and the west too, going in the one direction from new york to new orleans, and in the other to chicago and michigan. everywhere she was received with eager hospitality. public institutions were freely thrown open to her, and eminent citizens vied with each other in showing her attention, publicly and privately. the most noteworthy incident in the course of the whole two years was her public declaration of her anti-slavery principles. the anti-slavery movement was in its beginning. the abolitionists were the subjects of abuse and social persecution, and miss martineau was quickly made aware that by a declaration in their favor she would risk incurring odium, and might change her popularity in society into disrepute and avoidance. it would have been perfectly easy for a less active conscience and a less true moral sense to have evaded the question, in such a manner that neither party could have upbraided her for her action. she might simply have said that she was there as a learner, not as a teacher; that her business was to survey american society, and not to take any share in its party disputes, or to give any opinion on the political questions of a strange land. such paltering with principle was impossible to harriet martineau. she did not obtrude her utterances on the subject, but when asked in private society what she thought, she frankly spoke out her utter abhorrence, not merely of slavery in the abstract, but also of the state of the southern slave-holders and their human property. she could not help seeing that this candor often gave offense; but that was not her business when her opinion was sought on a moral question. the really searching test of her personal character did not come, however, with regard to this matter, till she went to stay for a while in boston, the head-quarters of the abolitionists, fifteen months after her arrival in america. it happened that she reached boston the very day a ladies' anti-slavery meeting was broken up by the violence of a mob, and that garrison, falling into the hands of the enraged multitude, was half-murdered in the street. harriet had given a promise, long previously, to attend an abolitionists' meeting; and though these occurrences showed her that there was actual personal danger in keeping her word, she was not to be intimidated. she went to the very next meeting of the ladies' society, which was held a month after the one so violently disturbed, and there, being unexpectedly begged to "give them the comfort" of a few words from her, she rose, and as the official report says, "with great dignity and simplicity of manner," declared her full sympathy with the principles of the association. she knew well how grave would be the social consequences to her of thus throwing in her lot with the despised and insulted abolitionists; but she felt that "she never could be happy again" if she shrunk from the duty of expression thrust upon her. the results to her were as serious as she had apprehended. she received innumerable personal insults and slights, public and private, where before all had been homage; the southern newspapers threatened her personal safety, calling her a foreign "incendiary;" and, to crown all, she had to give up an intended ohio tour, on the information of an eminent cincinnati merchant that he had heard with his own ears the details of a plot to hang her on the wharf at louisville, before the respectable inhabitants could intervene, in order to "warn all other meddlesome foreigners." all this abuse and insult and threatening from the lower kind of persons, interested for their purses, had, of course, no influence upon the hundred private friendships that she had formed. ardent and deep was the affection with which many americans came to regard her, and with some of them her intimate friendship lasted through all the succeeding forty years of her life. emerson was one of these friends, and garrison another. it was her frequent correspondence with these and many others that kept her interest in the affairs of the united states so active, and made her so well-informed about them as to give her the great authority that she had, both in england and america, during the life and death struggle of the union, so that at that time, when she was writing leaders for the london _daily news_, mr. w. e. forster said that "it was harriet martineau alone who was keeping english public opinion about america on the right side through the press." loath to leave such friendships behind, and yet longing for home, she sailed from new york at the end of july, , and reached liverpool on the th august. a parting act of american chivalry was that her ship-passage was paid for her by some unknown friend. it was while she was in the united states that the first portrait of her which i have seen was painted. she herself did not like it, calling the attitude melodramatic; but her sister rachel, i am told, always declared that it was the only true portrait of harriet that was ever taken. at this point, then, some idea of her person may be given. she was somewhat above the middle height, and at this time had a slender figure. the face in the portrait is oval; the forehead rather broad, as well as high, but not either to a remarkable degree. the most noticeable peculiarity of the face is found in a slight projection of the under lip. the nose is straight, not at all turned up at the end, but yet with a definite tip to it. the eyes are a clear gray, with a calm, steadfast, yet sweet gaze; indeed there is an almost appealing look in them. the hair is of so dark a brown as to appear nearly black. a tress of it (cut off twenty years later than this american visit, when it had turned snow-white) has been given to me; and i find the treasured relic to be of exceptionally fine texture--a sure sign of a delicate and sensitive nervous organization. her hands and feet were small. she was certainly not beautiful; besides the slight projection of the lower lip the face has the defect of the cheeks sloping in too much towards the chin. but she was not strikingly plain either. the countenance in this picture has a look both of appealing sweetness and of strength in reserve; and one feels that with such beauty of expression it could not fail to be attractive to those who looked upon it with sympathy. the competition amongst the publishers for miss martineau's book on america was an amusing contrast to the scorn with which her proposals for her _political economy_ had been received. murray sent a message through a friend, offering to undertake the american work; and letters from two other publishers were awaiting her arrival in england. on the day that the newspapers announced that she had reached town no fewer than three of the chief london publishers called upon her with proposals. she declined those of bentley and colburn, and accepted the offer of messrs. saunders and otley to pay her £ per volume for the first edition of three thousand copies. the book appeared in three volumes, so that she received £ for it. she completed the three goodly volumes in six months. she had wished to call the book _theory and practice of society in america_, a title which would have exactly expressed the position that she took up in it, viz., that the americans should be judged by the degree in which they approached, in their daily lives, to the standard of the principles laid down in their constitution. her publishers so strongly objected to this title, that she consented to call the work simply _society in america_. she held to her scheme none the less, and the book proceeds upon it. she quotes the declaration of independence that all men are created equal, with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. "every true citizen," she claims, "must necessarily be content to have his self-government tried by the test of the principles to which, by his citizenship, he has become a subscriber." she brings social life in the united states of - to this test accordingly. that method of approaching her subject had some advantages. it enabled her to treat with peculiar force the topics of slavery, of the exclusion of women from political affairs, and of the subservience to the despotism of public opinion which she found to exist at that time in america. but she herself came to see, in after times, that her _plan_ (leaving the details aside) was radically faulty. she was, as she says, "at the most metaphysical period" of her mental history. thus, she failed at the moment to perceive that she commenced her subject _at the wrong end_ in taking a theory and judging the facts of american society by their agreement or disagreement with that _a priori_ philosophy. it was the theory that had to be judged by the way in which the people lived under a government framed upon it, and not the people by the degree in which they live up to the theory. the english public wanted a book that would help them to know the american public and its ways; the americans required to see through the eyes of an observant, cultivated foreigner, what they were being and doing. it is this which a traveller has to do--to observe _facts_: to draw lessons from them, if he will, but not to consider the facts in their relationship to a pre-conceived theory. human experience is perennially important and eternally interesting; and this is what a traveller has to note and record. political philosophies must be gathered from experience instead of (what she attempted) the real life being viewed only as related to the philosophy. in fine, her error was in treating abstractedly what was necessarily a concrete theme. with this objection to the scheme of the book, all criticism may end. all criticism did not end (any more than it began) in this way in . speaking out so boldly as she did on a variety of the most important social topics, she naturally aroused opposition, which the power and eloquence of the style did not mitigate. the anti-slavery tone of the book alone would have ensured violent attacks upon it and its author, as, after her ostracism because of her anti-slavery declaration, she well knew would be the case. "this subject haunts us on every page," distressfully wrote margaret fuller; and greatly exaggerated though this statement was, it certainly is true that there is hardly a chapter in which the reader is allowed to forget that the curse of humanity made merchandise, shadowed life, directly or indirectly, throughout the whole united states. neither by the holders of slaves in the south, nor by their accessories in the north, was it possible that she could be regarded otherwise than as an enemy, the more powerful, and therefore the more to be hated and abused, because of her standing and her ability. in estimating the courage and disinterestedness which she displayed in so decisively bearing her witness against the state of american society under the slave system, it must be remembered not only that she had many valued personal friends in the south, and amongst the anti-abolitionists of the north, but also that she knew that she was closing against herself a wide avenue for the dissemination of her opinions upon any subject whatsoever. no book written by an abolitionist would be admitted into any one of thousands of american homes. the abolitionists reprinted portions of _society of america_, as a pamphlet, and distributed it broadcast. the result was that, up to the time when slavery was abolished harriet martineau was continually held up to scorn and reprobation in southern newspapers, "in the good company of mrs. chapman and mrs. harriet beecher stowe." even greater courage was displayed by harriet martineau in her boldness of utterance upon some other points, about which freedom of thought was as obnoxious in england as in america. when she maintained that divorce should be permissible by mutual consent, provided only that the interests of children and the distribution of property were equitably arranged for; when she pleaded for the emancipation of women; or when she devoted a chapter to showing the evils which spring from the accumulation of enormous fortunes, and incidentally attacked the laws and customs of primogeniture, of the transfer of land, and the like, which are devised specially to facilitate and encourage such accumulations: in these and other passages of an equally radical nature, she braved a large body of opinion in english society, as well as in the other country for which she wrote. she mentions subsequently, that for many years she was occasionally startled by finding herself regarded in various quarters as a free-thinker upon dangerous subjects, and as something of a demagogue. i have little doubt that the "advanced" political philosophy of _society in america_ did originate such suspicions in minds of the conservative order, "the timid party," as she described them in this same book. yet she adds: i have never regretted its boldness of speech. i felt a relief in having opened my mind which i would at no time have exchanged for any gain of reputation or fortune. the time had come when, having experienced what might be called the extremes of obscurity and difficulty first, and influence and success afterwards, i could pronounce that there was nothing for which it was worth sacrificing freedom of thought and speech. there was but little in _society in america_ of the ordinary book of travels. as an account of the political condition and the social arrangements of the american people it was of singular value. but the personal incidents of travel, the descriptions of scenery, the reminiscences of eminent persons, of all which harriet martineau had gathered a store, were entirely omitted from this work. messrs. saunders and otley suggested to her that she should make a second book out of this kind of material. she consented; and wrote her _retrospect of western travel_. she completed the manuscript of this in december, , and it was published soon afterwards in three volumes. the publishers gave her six hundred pounds for it. the fifteen hundred pounds which she thus earned exceeded in amount the whole of what she had then received for her _illustrations of political economy_. the last-named great work was nearly all published upon the absurdly unequal terms which charles fox had secured from her in the beginning. it was characteristic of her generosity in pecuniary matters and her loyalty to her friends, that although her agreement with fox was dissoluble at the end of every five numbers, she nevertheless allowed it to hold good, and permitted him to pocket a very leonine share of her earnings throughout the whole publication of the original series, only claiming a revision of the terms when she commenced afresh, as it were, with the "poor-law," and "taxation" tales. thus the immense popularity of the _illustrations_ had not greatly enriched her. a portion of her earnings by them was invested in her american tour; and now that she received this return from her books of travels she felt it her duty to make a provision for the future. she purchased a deferred annuity of one hundred pounds to begin in april, . it displayed a characteristic calm confidence in herself that she should thus have entirely locked up her earnings for twelve years. she clearly felt a quiet assurance that her brain and her hand would serve to maintain her, at least as long as she was in the flower of her age. the six volumes about america were not the whole of her work during the first eighteen months after her return to england. she wrote an article on miss sedgwick's works for the _westminster review_, and several other short papers for various magazines. the extraordinary industry with which she returned to labor after her long rest requires no comment. early in she wrote a work called _how to observe in morals and manners_. it forms a crown octavo volume of two hundred and thirty-eight pages, and was published by mr. charles knight. the book is an interesting one, both for the reflections which it contains upon the subject of its title, and as indicating the method which she had herself pursued in her study of the morals and manners of the country in which she had been travelling. there is certainly no failure in the courage with which she expresses her convictions. she admits elsewhere that the abuse which she received from america had so acted upon her mind that she had come to quail at the sight of letters addressed in a strange handwriting, or of newspapers sent from the united states. but there is no trace in this her next considerable work of any tendency to follow rather than to lead the public opinion of her time. one paragraph only may be quoted to indicate this fact: persecution for opinion is always going on. it can be inflicted out of the province of law as well as through it.... whatever a nation may tell him of its love of liberty should go for little if he sees a virtuous man's children taken from him on the ground of his holding an unusual religious belief; or citizens mobbed for asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light on the sacred text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with long established suppositions.[ ] [ ] _how to observe_, p. . the next piece of work that harriet did in this spring of was of a very different order. the poor-law commissioners were desirous of issuing a series of "guides to service," and application was made to miss martineau to write some of these little books. she undertook _the maid of all work_, _the housemaid_, _the lady's maid_ and _the dress-maker_. these were issued without her name on the title-page, but the authorship was an open secret. she was a thoroughly good housekeeper herself. her conscience went into this, as into all her other business. "housewifery is supposed to transact itself," she wrote; "but in reality it requires all the faculties which can be brought to bear upon it, and all the good moral habits which conscience can originate." it was in this spirit that she wrote instructions for servants. the fine moral tone invariably discoverable in her works, is as delightful here as elsewhere. but the little "guides to service," contain also the most precise and practical directions for the doing of the household duties and the needlework which fall to the hands of the classes of servants for whom she wrote. practical hints are given from which the majority of these classes of women-workers might learn much, for _brains tell_ in the mean and dirty scrubbery of life as well as in pleasanter things, and science is to be applied to common domestic duties as to bigger undertakings. the heart and mind of harriet martineau were equal to teaching upon matters such as these, as well as to studying the deeper relations of mankind in political economy, or the state of society in a foreign land. her great power of sympathy enabled her to enter fully into every human position. so well was the maid-of-all-work's station described, and her duties indicated, and her trials pointed out, and how she might solace herself under those troubles discovered, and the way in which her work should be set about detailed, that the rumor spread pretty widely that harriet had once occupied such a situation herself. she regarded this mistake with complacency, as a tribute to the practical character of her little work. as a fact, she was herself a capable housewife. her housekeeping was always well done. her own hands, indeed, as well as her head, were employed in it on occasion. when in her home, she daily filled her lamp herself. she dusted her own books, too, invariably. sometimes she did more. soon after her establishment at the lakes (an event which we have not yet reached, but the anecdote is in place here), a lady who greatly reverenced her for her writings called upon her in her new home, accompanied by a gentleman friend. as the visitors approached the house by the carriage-drive, they saw someone perched on a set of kitchen steps, cleaning the drawing-room windows. it was the famous authoress herself! she calmly went for her trumpet, to listen to their business; and when they had introduced themselves, she asked them in, and entered into an interesting conversation on various literary topics. before they left, she explained, with evident amusement at having been caught at her housemaid's duties, that the workmen had been long about the house; that this morning, when the dirty windows might for the first time be cleaned, one of her servants had gone off to marry a carpenter, and the other to see the ceremony; and so the mistress, tired of the dirt, had set to work to wash and polish her window for herself. an article on "domestic service," for the _westminster review_, was written easily, while her mind was so full of the subject, in the beginning of june, . but a great enterprise was before her--a novel; and at length she settled down to this, beginning it on her thirty-sixth birthday, june th, . the writing of this new book was interrupted by a tour in scotland during august and september, and by writing a remarkable and eloquent article on slavery, "the martyr age of the united states," which occupies' fifty-five pages of the _westminster review_ in the january, , number of that publication. the novel got finished, however, in february of this latter year; and it was published by easter under the title of _deerbrook_. great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of harriet martineau's first novel. the excellences of her _illustrations_ as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was anticipated that she might write a novel of the highest order when released from the trammels under which she wrote those tales. to most of those who had expected so much _deerbrook_ was a complete disappointment. i believe i may justly say that it is the weakest of all harriet martineau's writings. it is, indeed, far superior in all respects to nine hundred out of every thousand novels published. but she is not judged by averages. a far higher standard of literary art is that to which we expect harriet martineau's writings to conform. the book is deficient in story. deerbrook is a country village, where two sisters from birmingham, hester and margaret ibbotson, take up their temporary abode. mr. hope, the village surgeon, falls in love with margaret; but being told that hester loves him, while margaret is attached to philip enderby, hope decides to propose to hester; is accepted, married to the sister he does not love, and sets up housekeeping with the sister with whom he is in love as an inmate of his home. the wife, moreover, is of a jealous, exacting disposition, ever on the watch for some token of neglect of her feelings by her friends, anxious, irritable, and hyper-sensitive. here is a situation which, the characters being what they are described to be, could in real life eventuate only in either violent tragedy or long, slow heart-break. a woman of ultra-sensitive and refined feelings could not live with a husband and a sister under such circumstances without discovering the truth. a man of active temperament and warm emotions, who declares to himself on the night of his return from his wedding tour that his marriage "has been a mistake, that he has desecrated his own home, and doomed to withering the best affections of his nature,"--such a man, with the woman he really loves living in his home, beside the unloved wife, could not completely conceal his state of mind from everybody, and presently find that after all he likes the one he has married best. yet in the impossible manner just indicated do all things end in _deerbrook_. the interest of the book is then suddenly shifted to margaret and enderby. hope and hester become mere accessories. but the plot does not improve. the deerbrook people, hitherto adorers of their doctor, suddenly take to throwing stones at him, and to mobbing his house, because he votes for the parliamentary candidate opposed by the great man of the village, and because they take it into their heads (not a particle of reason why they do so being shown,) that he anatomizes bodies from the graveyard. we are invited to believe that though his practice had been singularly successful, all his patients deserted him; and notwithstanding that hester and margaret had each seventy pounds a year of private income, the household was thus reduced to such distress that they could not afford gloves, and had to part with all their servants, and dined as a rule off potatoes and bread and butter! then margaret's lover, enderby, hears that she and hope loved each other before hope married; and though he does not for a moment suspect anything wrong in the present, and though he passionately loves margaret, this supposed discovery that he is not her first love causes him to peremptorily and without explanation break off the engagement. presently, however, an epidemic comes and restores confidence in mr. hope; and enderby's sister, who had given him the information on which he acted, confesses that she had exaggerated the facts and invented part of her story; and so it all ends, and they live happily ever after! feeble and untrue as are plot and characters in this "poor novel" (as carlyle without injustice called it), yet many scenes are well written, the details are truly colored, and every page is illuminated with thought of so high an order and language so brilliant, so flowing, so felicitous, that one forgives, for the sake of merits such as these, the failure of the fiction to be either true or interesting. this seemed to show, nevertheless, that harriet could write essays, and travels, and didactic and philosophical works, but could not write a novel except "with a purpose," when the accomplishment of the purpose might excuse any other shortcomings. but when one considers the great excellence of many of the _illustrations_, the decided drawing of the characters, the truthful analysis of the springs of human action, the manner in which the incidents are combined and arranged to develop and display dispositions and histories, it becomes clear that she _had_ great powers as an imaginative depicter of human nature and social life, and that there must have been other causes than sheer incapacity for the faults and the feebleness of _deerbrook_. the first cause was what seems to me a mistaken theory about plots in fiction, which she had adopted since writing the _illustrations_. she now fancied that a perfect plot must be taken from life, forgetting that we none of us know the whole plot of the existence of any other creature than ourselves, and that the psychological insight of the gifted novelist is displayed in arguing from what is known to what is unknown, and in combining the primary elements of human character into their necessary consequences in act and feeling. this error she would have been cured from by experience had she gone on writing fiction. she might have been aided in this by what she naïvely enough avows about _deerbrook_: that she supposed that she took the story of hope's marriage from the history of a friend of her family, and that she afterwards found out that nothing of the sort had really happened to him! she might then have asked herself whether the story as she had told it was more possible than it was possible that gunpowder should be put to flame without an explosion. a girl in her teens might have been forgiven for playing with the history of the wildest passions of the human heart; but harriet martineau erred because she tried to enslave herself to fact in a matter in which she should have inferred, judged from psychological principles, and trusted to the intuitions of her own mind for the final working out of her problem. as it was, if her "fact" had been a reality we should have been compelled to account for the placid progress of events by the supposition that she had utterly misrepresented the characters of the persons involved. this bondage to (supposed) fact was one cause of her failure. a lesser, but still important reason for it, was that she tried to imitate jane austen's style. her admiration of the works of this mistress of the art of depicting human nature was very great. harriet's diary of the period when she was preparing to write _deerbrook_, shows that she re-read miss austen's novels, and found them "wonderfully beautiful." this judgment she annexed to _emma_; and again, after recording her new reading of _pride and prejudice_, she added, "i think it as clever as before; but miss austen seems wonderfully afraid of pathos. i long to try." when she did "try," she, either intentionally or unconsciously, but very decidedly, modelled her style on miss austen's. but the two women were essentially different. harriet martineau had an original mind; she did wrong, and prepared the retribution of failure for herself, in imitating at all; and jane austen was one of the last persons she should have imitated. the principal reasons for the inferiority of _deerbrook_, however, are found in her personal history. three months after its publication, she was utterly prostrated by an illness which had undoubtedly been slowly growing upon her for long before. thus, she wrote her novel under the depression and failure of strength caused by this malady. the illness itself was partly the result of what further tended to make her work poor in quality--the domestic anxieties, miseries and heart-burnings of that period. the three anxious members of her family were at this time upon her hands. that brother who had succeeded to the father's business, and in whose charge it had failed, was at this time in london. before the weaving business stopped, henry martineau was engaged; but the girl broke off the affair in consequence of the downfall of his pecuniary prospects. henry then undertook a wine-merchant's business, and wretched with the mortification of his double failure in purse and in heart, he yielded to the temptations of his new employment, and became intemperate. during the time that _deerbrook_ was being written, he was living with his mother and sister in london. at the same time mrs. martineau, now nearing seventy years old, was becoming blind. the natural irritability of her temper was thus increased. the heart-wearing trials of a home with two such inmates were made greater to harriet by the fact that an aged aunt also lived with them, who, besides the many cares exacted for the well-being of age, added to harriet's troubles by the necessity of shielding her from the tempers and depressions of the other two. it was in this home that harriet martineau did all the work that has now been recorded after her return from america. no one who has the least conception of how imperatively necessary domestic peace and comfort are for the relief of the brain taxed with literary labor, will be surprised to hear that harriet's strength and spirits failed during all that summer and winter in which she was writing _deerbrook_, and that presently her health completely broke down. chapter vii. five years of illness and the mesmeric recovery. almost immediately after the publication of _deerbrook_ harriet started for a continental tour. she was to escort an invalid cousin to switzerland, and afterwards to travel through italy with two other friends. but her illness became so severe by the time that she reached venice that the remainder of the journey had to be abandoned. under medical advice, a couch was fitted up in the travelling carriage, and upon it, lifted in and out at every stage, she returned to england and was conveyed to her sister's at newcastle-on-tyne. in the autumn of that same year ( ) she took up her abode in front street, tynemouth, in order to remain under the medical care of her brother-in-law, mr. greenhow of newcastle. her physical sufferings during the next five years were very severe, and almost incessant. she could not go out of the house, and alternated only between her bed in one room and her couch in another. from her sick-room window she overlooked a narrow space of down, the ruins of the priory, the harbor with its traffic, and the sea. on the farther side of the harbor she could discern through the telescope a railroad, a spreading heath, and, on the hills which bounded the view, two or three farms. to this outlook she, whose life had been hitherto spent so actively, and in the midst of such a throng of society, found herself confined for a term of five years. at the same time her pain was so great that she was compelled to take opiates daily. "i have observed, with inexpressible shame, that with the newspaper in my hand, no details of the peril of empires, or of the starving miseries of thousands, could keep my eye from the watch before me, or detain my attention one second beyond the time when i might have my opiate. for two years, too, i wished and intended to dispense with my opiate for once, to try how much there was to bear, and how i should bear it; but i never did it, strong as was the shame of always yielding. i am convinced that there is no more possibility of becoming inured to acute agony of body, than to paroxysms of remorse--the severest of moral pains. a familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead of becoming more lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. the pain itself becomes more odious, more oppressive, more feared in proportion to the accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives."[ ] [ ] _life in the sick-room._ some indication of what she endured in those weary years is given in this quotation. if we had to rely upon the inferences to be drawn from the amount of work which she did in her sick-room, we should naturally suppose the suffering not to have been very great; for she produced, in the midst of her illness, as much and as noble work as we look for from the most active persons in ordinary health. the first business of the sick-room life was to write both an article for publication, and a number of letters of personal appeal to friends, on behalf of oberlin college, an institution which was being founded in america for the education of persons of color of both sexes, and of the students who had been turned out of lane college for their advocacy of anti-slavery principles. the next undertaking was another novel; or, rather, a history, imaginatively treated, of the negro revolution in san domingo. toussaint l'ouverture, the leader of the revolution and the president of the black republic of hayti, was the hero of this story. _the hour and the man_, as a mere novel, is vastly superior to _deerbrook_. harriet wrote it, however, rather as a contribution to the same anti-slavery cause for which she had written her preceding article, believing that it would be useful to that cause to show forth the capacity and the high moral character which had been displayed by a negro of the blackest shade when in possession of power. the work was begun in may, , and published in november of the same year. lord jeffrey, in a familiar private letter to empson, his successor in the editorship of the _edinburgh review_, wrote thus of _the hour and the man_:-- i have read harriet's first volume, and give in my adhesion to her black prince with all my heart and soul. the book is really not only beautiful and touching, but _noble_; and i do not recollect when i have been more charmed, whether by very sweet and eloquent writing and glowing description, or by elevated as well as tender sentiments.... the book is calculated to make its readers better, and does great honor to the heart as well as the talent and fancy of the author. i would go a long way to kiss the hem of her garment, or the hand that delineated this glowing and lofty representation of purity and noble virtue. and she must not only be rescued from all debasing anxieties about her subsistence, but placed in a station of affluence and honor; though i believe she truly cares for none of these things. it is sad to think that she suffers so much, and may even be verging to dissolution. even the morose and ungracious carlyle, writing to emerson of this book, is obliged to say "it is beautiful as a child's heart; and in so shrewd a brain!" while florence nightingale declares that she "can scarcely refrain from thinking of it as the greatest of historical romances." the allusion in the latter part of lord jeffrey's letter was to a proposal just then made to give harriet martineau one of the civil list literary pensions. this idea had been mooted first during the progress of her _illustrations_, and again after her return from america; but upon each occasion she had stated privately that she would not be willing to accept it. she replied from tynemouth to the same effect to mr. hutton, who wrote to inquire if she would now be thus assisted. her objection was, in the first place, one of principle; she disapproved of the money of the people being dispensed in any pensions at the sole will of the ministry, instead of being conferred directly by the representatives of the people. her second reason was, that after accepting she would feel herself bound to the ministers, and would be understood by the public to be so bound, and would thus suffer a loss of both freedom and usefulness during whatever life might remain to her. lord melbourne, a few months later, in july, , made her an explicit offer of a pension of £ per annum, and her answer to the minister was substantially the same as to her friend. she said that while taxation was levied so unequally, and while parliament had no voice in the distribution of pensions, she would rather receive public aid from the parish, if necessary, than as a pensioner. she added an earnest plea that all influential persons who held themselves indebted on public grounds to any writer, would show that gratitude by endeavoring to make better copyright arrangements and foreign treaties, so as to secure to authors the full, due and independent reward of their efforts. the rare (perhaps mistaken) generosity of this refusal can only be appreciated by bearing in mind that she had invested a large part of her earnings a few years before in a form from which she was now receiving no return. during her illness she was really in want of money, so far as to have to accept assistance from relatives. for her charities she partly provided by doing fancy-work, sending subscriptions both in this form and in the shape of articles for publication to the anti-slavery cause in america. in the early part of she began a series of four children's stories, which were published under the general title of _the playfellow_. these admirable tales are still amongst the best-known and most popular of her writings; simple, vivid and interesting, they are really model children's stories, and it would have been quite impossible for any reader to imagine that they were written by an invalid, in constant suffering. _settlers at home_ was the first one written, _the prince and the peasant_ came next; then _feats on the fjord_; and, finally, that one from which i quoted largely in an early chapter, _the crofton boys_. by the time the last-named was finished she was very ill, and believed that she should never write another book. her interest in all public affairs continued, nevertheless, to be as keen as ever. in she wrote for publication a long letter to support the american anti-slavery society under a secession from its ranks of a number of persons, chiefly clerical, who objected, of all things, to women being allowed to be members of the society! another piece of work which she did for the public benefit was by a course of correspondence, full of delicate tact, to personally reconcile sir robert peel and mr. cobden, and so to pave the way for the amicable work of the two statesmen in the repeal of the corn laws. in , some of her friends who knew her circumstances, and that she had refused a pension, collected money to present her with a testimonial. £ , , thus obtained, was invested for her benefit in the terminable long annuities, and a considerable sum besides was expended in a present of plate. the ladies lambton (the eldest of whom, as countess of elgin, was afterwards one of her warmest friends) went over to tynemouth to use the plate with her for the first time, and "it was a testimonial fête." it was about this time, too, that the personal acquaintance, destined to become an intimate association in work, between harriet martineau and florence nightingale was commenced. miss martineau's younger sister ellen had been governess in miss nightingale's family. sick-nursing occupied florence nightingale's hands and heart long before the crimean war made her famous, and harriet martineau was one of the sick to whom she ministered in those earlier days. towards the end of , harriet's mind had accumulated a store of thoughts and feelings which imperatively pressed to be poured forth. she wrote then, in about six weeks, her volume of essays, _life in the sick-room_. the book was published under the pseudonym of "an invalid," but was immediately attributed to her on all hands. it is a most interesting record of the high thoughts and feelings by which so melancholy an experience as years of suffering, of an apparently hopeless character, can be elevated, and made productive of benefit to the sufferer's own nature. incidentally there is much wise counsel in the volume for those who have the care of invalids of this class. amidst the many expressions of admiration and interest which this work drew forth, the following is perhaps most worthy of preservation because of the source whence it came. mr. quillinan, wordsworth's son-in-law, wrote as follows to his friend, henry crabbe robinson, on december , :-- mr. wordsworth, mrs. wordsworth and miss fenwick have been quite charmed, affected, and instructed by the invalid's volume.... mrs. wordsworth, after a few pages were read, at once pronounced it to be miss martineau's production, and concluded that you knew all about it and caused it to be sent hither. in some of the most eloquent parts it stops short of their wishes and expectations: but they all agree that it is _a rare book_, doing honor to the head and heart of your able and interesting friend. mr. wordsworth praised it with more unreserve--i may say, with more _earnestness_--than is usual with him. the serene and heavenly-minded miss fenwick was prodigal of her admiration. but mrs. wordsworth's was the crowning praise. she said--and you know how she would say it--"i wish i had read exactly such a book as that years ago!"... it is a _genuine_ and touching series of meditations by an invalid not sick in mind or heart.[ ] [ ] _diary and letters of h. c. robinson_, vol. iii., p. . from one of the letters with which mr. henry g. atkinson has favored me and my readers, i find that she wrote a chapter for that book, which undoubtedly must have been of the deepest interest, but which was not published. letter to mr. atkinson. [extract.] november , . dear friend: ... you will feel at once how earnestly i must be longing for death--i who never loved life, and who would any day of my life have rather departed than stayed. well! it can hardly go on very much longer now. but i do wish it was permitted to us to judge for ourselves a little how long we ought to carry on the task which we never desired and could not refuse, and how soon we may fairly relieve our comrades from the burden of taking care of us. i wonder whether the chapter i wrote about this for the "sick-room" book will ever see the light. i rather wish it may, because i believe it utters what many people think and feel. i let it be omitted from that book because it might perhaps injure the impression of the rest of the volume; but, so far as i remember it, it is worth considering, and therefore publishing. i have made such inquiries as i could (of one of miss martineau's executors and others), but can get no tidings of this missing chapter on euthanasia. it was just such a subject--needing for its discussion, courage, calmness, common sense, and logic, combined with sympathy, and a high standard of moral beauty and goodness--as she would have been sure to treat rarely well. there is one passage in _life in the sick-room_, bearing upon the question; she observes that the great reason why hopeless invalids so commonly endure on when they are longing for the rest of insensibility, is the uncertainty as to whether they may not find themselves still conscious in another state. her own history was to supply a stronger reason still against the irrevocable action being taken upon our rash assumptions that our work and our usefulness in life are ended. as she truly observed: "no one knows when the spirits of men begin to work, or when they leave off, or whether they work best when their bodies are weak, or when they are strong. every human creature that has a spirit in him must therefore be taken care of, and kept alive as long as possible, that his spirit may do all it can in the world." so she wrote at that very time--showing how her mind was pondering every view of the subject. the sentence just quoted is from _dawn island_, a little one-hundred paged story which she wrote in the midst of her suffering, as her contribution to the funds of the anti-corn law league. it was printed and sold for the benefit of that league, at the great bazaar of . after the publication of the "sick-room" book, she commenced the writing of her autobiography--not as it was published afterwards, be it understood--for she was too ill to make much progress with it, and soon stopped writing. but she _never_ became too ill to feel and to show a vivid interest in every cause that had the happiness and progress of mankind for its object. she kept up an extensive correspondence with those engaged in the world's work, and such personal efforts for public objects as those above mentioned she frequently exerted--sometimes over-exerted--herself to make. her body was chained to two small rooms; but her mind, with all its powers and affections, yet swept freely through the universe. no one would have been more impatient than she herself of any pretence that she lived incessantly on a high plane of lofty emotions, where pain ceased to be felt, or that her care for others was so extraordinary that self-regard was swallowed up in the depths of altruism. i have quoted her candid revelations about her sufferings and her opiates, to avoid the possibility of conveying an impression that she was thus guilty of hypocrisy or affectation. but the wide interests and the sympathies with mankind that were the solace of her sick life, and the inspiration of the work which she did so heavily, and yet so continuously, amidst her pain, assuredly shall be marked with the reverence that they merit. in the long illness came to an end. harriet martineau was restored to perfect health by means of mesmerism. such a cure of such a person could not fail to make a great sensation. not only had she a wide circle of personal acquaintances, but she had deeply impressed the public at large with a sense of her perfect sanity, her calm common-sense, and her practical wisdom, as well as with a conviction of her truthfulness and accuracy. accordingly, as the _zoist_ (dr. elliotson's mesmeric periodical) declared at the time:-- the subject which the critic, a few months since, would not condescend to notice, has been elevated to a commanding position. it is the topic with which the daily papers and the weekly periodicals are filled; in fact, all classes are moved by one common consent, and mesmerism, from the palace to the smallest town in the united kingdom, is the scientific question absorbing public attention.... the immediate cause of all this activity, is the publication of the case of miss martineau, who, after five years' incessant suffering and confinement to her couch, is now well. i have thought that what needs to be said here of the medical aspect and course of this period of suffering, and of the final cure, will best be said consecutively; and, therefore, we will look back briefly over the five busy but suffering years, the work of which has now been recorded, and see what were the physical conditions under which that work was executed. her health had been declining gradually from to ; there was a slow but a marked deterioration in strength, and her spirits became depressed. in april of the latter year, when she undertook a continental journey the fatigue of travelling suddenly aggravated her condition; and in venice, early in june, she was compelled to consult a physician, dr. nardo. she was found to be suffering from a tumor, with enlargement and displacement of an important organ, all this causing great internal pain, accompanied by frequent weakening hemorrhages. she was carried back to england by easy stages, and lying on a couch, and reached newcastle-on-tyne at the end of july, . she stayed for some time at the house in that town of her eldest sister, and then was removed only nine miles off, in order that her brother-in-law, mr. t. m. greenhow, f.r.c.s., might undertake the medical care of her case. until october, she persevered in taking walking exercise; but the pain, sickness and breathlessness which accompanied this were so distressing, that soon after her removal to tynemouth she ceased to go out of doors, or even to descend the stairs. mr. greenhow's prescriptions were confined at first to opiates, and other medicines to alleviate symptoms. the opiates were not taken in excess--as, indeed, the books written in the period would conclusively prove. the patient's suffering was so great, however, that extreme recourse to such palliatives might have been forgiven. she could not raise the right leg; and could neither sit up for the faintness which then ensued, nor lie down with ease because of the pain in her back. "she could not sleep at night till she devised a plan of sleeping under a basket, for the purpose of keeping the weight of the bed-clothes from her; and even then she was scared by horrors all night, and reduced by sickness during the day. this sickness increased to such a degree that for two years she was extremely low from want of food." at the end of two years, that is to say, in september, , sir charles clarke, m.d., was called in consultation; and he prescribed iodine, remarking at the same time that, in his view, such a case as hers was practically incurable, and admitting that he "had tried iodine in an infinite number of such cases, and never knew it avail." for the next _three years_ miss martineau took three grains per diem of iodide of iron. it relieved the sickness; but up to april, (two and a half years from the commencement of its administration), mr. greenhow did not pretend that any improvement in the physical condition had taken place. in that month, as he afterwards said, he believed he found a slight change, "but he was not sure"; and, if any, it was very trifling. the patient, on her part, was quite convinced that her state then was in no way altered. more than once different friends--amongst them lord lytton, mr. hallam, and the basil montagus--had urged her to try mesmerism; but she had thought it due to her relative to give his orthodox medicines the fullest trial, before taking herself out of his hands in such a way. in june, , however, mr. greenhow himself suggested that she should be mesmerized. of course, so advised, she consented to make the trial. a mr. hall, brought by mr. greenhow, accordingly mesmerized her for the first time on june d, , and again on the following day. the patient thought she experienced some relief, but did not feel quite sure. "on occasion of a perfectly new experience, scepticism and self-distrust are strong."[ ] the next day, however, set her doubts at rest. mr. hall was unable to come to her, and she asked her maid to make the passes in his stead. [ ] this and the succeeding quotations are from her "letters on mesmerism," published in the _athenæum_, . within one minute, the twilight and phosphoric lights appeared; and in two or three more a delicious sensation of ease spread through me--a cool comfort, before which all pain and distress gave way, oozing out, as it were, at the soles of my feet. during that hour, and almost the whole evening, i could no more help exclaiming with pleasure than a person in torture crying out with pain. i became hungry, and ate with relish for the first time for five years. there was no heat, oppression, or sickness during the _séance_, nor any disorder afterwards. during the whole evening, instead of the lazy, hot ease of opiates, under which pain is felt to lie in wait, i experienced something of the indescribable sensations of health, which i had quite lost and forgotten. her dear friend during all the years that remained to her--mr. henry g. atkinson[ ]--had just come into her life. his interest in her case was enlisted by their mutual friend, basil montagu; and mr. atkinson undertook to direct the mesmeric treatment by correspondence. margaret, the maid, continued the mesmerism till september, and then mr. atkinson induced his friend mrs. montague wynyard, the young widow of a clergyman, to undertake the case. "in pure zeal and benevolence this lady came to me, and has been with me ever since. when i found myself able to repose on the knowledge and power (mental and moral) of my mesmerist the last impediments to my progress were cleared away and i improved accordingly." [ ] as this friendship had a profound influence upon harriet's after thought and work, some description of mr. atkinson seems in place; and i need offer that gentleman no apology for merely quoting what has appeared in print before about him. margaret fuller wrote thus of him in a private letter, in :-- "mr. atkinson is a man about thirty, in the fullness of his powers, tall and finely formed, with a head for leonardo to paint; mild and composed, but powerful and sagacious; he does not think, but perceives and acts. he is intimate with artists, having studied architecture himself as a profession; but has some fortune on which he lives. sometimes stationary and acting in the affairs of other men; sometimes wandering about the world and learning; he seems bound by no tie, yet looks as if he had relatives in every place."--_memoirs of margaret fuller_, by emerson. on december the th mr. greenhow found his patient quite well, and about to leave the place of her imprisonment, and start on a series of friendly visits. he declared, notwithstanding, that firstly, her _physical condition_ was not essentially different from what it had been all through; secondly, that the change in her _sensations_ arose from the iodine suddenly and miraculously becoming more effective, and not from mesmerism. such is the medical history, so interesting to all physiological students and to all sufferers of the same class, of harriet martineau's five years' illness and recovery. my business is simply to state facts, and i need not here undertake any dissertation upon mesmerism. it is sufficient to add that only those who are unaware of the profundity of our ignorance (up to the present day) about the action of the nervous system, and still more about what _life_ really is, can be excused for rash jeering and hasty incredulity in such a case as this. harriet martineau knew that she was well again, and it seemed to her a clear duty to make as public as possible the history of how her recovery had been brought about. she did so by six letters to the _athenæum_; and these were reprinted in pamphlet form. mr. greenhow was thereupon guilty of one of the most serious professional faults possible. he also published an account of _the case of miss h. m._, in a shilling pamphlet, giving the most minute and painful details of her illness, and respecting no confidence that had been reposed in his medical integrity. the result of this conduct on his part was that his patient felt herself compelled to break off all future intercourse with a man capable of such objectionable action. it may be added here that the cure was a permanent one.[ ] she enjoyed ten years of health so good that she declared it taught her that in no previous period of her life had she ever been well. it may be as well to say that she never wavered in her assurance that her cure was worked by mesmerism, and that the cure was complete. all dispute about her firm conviction on this point may be set at rest by the following extracts from letters to mr. atkinson. [extract.] july , . notices of my mesmeric experience in illness have revived an anxiety of mine about what may happen when i am gone, if certain parties should bring up the old falsehoods again, when i am not here to assert and prove the truth. i don't in the least suppose you can help me, any more than mrs. chapman, whom i have got to look over a box of papers of mine deposited with her. but i had rather tell you what is on my mind about it. i wrote, at tynemouth, a diary of my case and experience under the mesmeric experiment (experiment desired and proposed by mr. greenhow himself). _he_ read it when finished, and so did several of my friends. there are two copies somewhere, for, not wishing to show certain passages, rather saucy, about the greenhow prejudices and behavior, i accepted mrs. wynyard's kind offer to copy the ms., omitting those remarks. now where are those mss? i cannot find them, nor say what i did with them, beyond having a dim notion that they (or at least mrs. wynyard's copy) were put away into some safe place, to await future chances. i perfectly remember the look of the packet, and the label on it, etc. when i remember what was said after reading it, by one of the wisest people i have known, i am _shocked_ at our inability to find it. "one must dispute anything being the cause of anything, if one disputes after reading this statement, that your recovery is due to mesmerism." and now, while i see false statements of the "facts," and false references circulating, as at present, i cannot find my own narrative, written from day to day, and do not know where to turn next! if i had strength i would turn out all the papers in my possession, and make sure for myself. now, dear friend, do you think you ever saw that statement? [extract.] september , . my malady was absolutely unlike cancer, and it never had any sort of relation to "malignant" disease. the doctors called it "indolent tumor--most probably polypus." don't you remember how, at that very time, the great dispute on elliotson's hands was whether any instance could be adduced of cure of organic disease by mesmerism? elliotson was nearly certain, but not quite, of the cure of a cancer case in his own practice. the doctors were full of the controversy, and some of them wrote both to me and to mr. greenhow to inquire the nature of my case, whether malignant or not. of course we both replied "no." it would be a dreadful misfortune if now anybody concerned should tell a different story. greenhow is still living (aged ) and all alive; and he would like nothing better than to get hold of it, and bring out another indecent pamphlet. if i could but lay hands on the diary of the case, written at the time, what a security it would be? but i can nowhere find it. the next best security is turning back to the statement, "letters" in the _athenæum_ of the autumn of . those "letters" went through two editions when reprinted, after having carried those numbers of the _athenæum_ through three editions. one would think the narrative must be accessible enough. above all things, let there be no mistake in our statements. it ought to be enough for observers that i had ten years of robust health after that recovery, walking from sixteen to twenty miles in a day, on occasion, and riding a camel in the heart of nubia, and hundreds of miles on horseback, through palestine to damascus, and back to the levant. i have written so much because i could not help it. i shall hardly do it again. i will add only that the mesmerizing began in june, , and the cure was effected before the following christmas. dear friend, i am yours ever, h. m. [ ] i find there is a widespread impression that she eventually died of the same tumor that she supposed to have been cured at this time. it should be distinctly stated, however, that if this were the case, mr. greenhow and sir c. clarke were both _utterly_ wrong in their diagnosis in . i have read mr. greenhow's _report of the case of miss h. m._, and the notes of the post-mortem lie before me--kindly lent me by the surgeon, mr. king, now of bedford park, who made the autopsy. i find that the organ which mr. greenhow and his consultant both stated to be the seat of the disease, enlargement and tumor, in , is described as being found "particularly small and unaffected" after death. chapter viii. the home life. at forty-two years old, harriet martineau found herself free for the first time to form and take possession of a _home of her own_. now, for the first time, she could have the luxury which many girls obtain by marriage so young that they spoil it to themselves and others, and which it is as natural for each grown woman to desire, irrespective of marriage, as it is for a fledged bird to leave the old nest--a house and a domestic circle in which she could be the organizing spirit, where the home arrangements should be of her own ordering, and where she could have the privacy and self-management which can no otherwise be enjoyed, in combination with the exercise of that housewifely skill to which all women more or less incline. the beauty of the scenery led her to fix upon the english lakes for the locality in which to make her home, and, finding no suitable house vacant, she resolved to build one for herself. she purchased two acres of land, within half-a-mile of the village of ambleside; borrowed some money on mortgage from a well-to-do cousin; had the plans drawn out under her own instructions, and watched the house being built so that it should suit her own tastes. it is a pretty little gabled house, built of gray stone, and stands upon a small rocky eminence--whence its name "the knoll." there is enough rock to hold the house, and to allow the formation of a terrace about twenty feet wide in front of the windows; then there comes the descent of the face of the rock. at the foot of the rock is the garden. narrow flights of steps at either end of the terrace lead down to the greensward and the flower-beds; in the centre of these is a gray granite sun-dial, with the characteristic motto around it--"come light! visit me!" to the left is the gardener's cottage, with the cow-house, pig-stye and root-shed. the front of the house looks across the garden, and over the valley to loughrigg. its back is turned to the road, and concealed from passers-by, partly by the growth of greenery, and partly by the methodist chapel. a winding path leads up from the road to the house, and a small path forking off from this goes round past the cottage to the field where the cows used to graze, and to the piece of land that was appropriated to growing the roots for the cows and the household fruit and vegetables. within, "the knoll" is just a nice little residence for a maiden lady, with her small household, and room for an occasional guest. you enter by a covered porch, and find the drawing-room on the right hand of the hall. it is a fairly large room, and remarkably well-lighted; there was a window-tax when she built, but she showed her faith in the growth of political common-sense abrogating so mischievous an impost, by building in anticipation of freedom of light and air from taxation. the drawing-room has two large windows, one of which descends quite to the floor, and is provided with two or three stone steps outside, so that the inmates may readily step forth on to the terrace. this window, by the way, exposed her to another tax than the government one. hunters of celebrities were wont, in the tourist season, not merely to walk round her garden and terrace without leave, but even to mount these steps and flatten the tips of their noses against her window. objectionable as the liability to this friendly attention would be felt by most of us, it was doubly so to miss martineau because of her deafness, which precluded her from receiving warning of her admirers' approaches from the crunching of their footsteps on the gravel--so that the first intimation that she would receive of their presence would be to turn her head by chance and find the flattened nose and the peering eyes against the window-pane. there is a special record of one occasion, when her bell rang in an agitated fashion, and the maid, on going, found her mistress much disturbed. "there is a _big_ woman, with a _big_ pattern on her dress, beckoning to me to come to the window--go, and tell her to go away." but similar incidents were manifold, and her servants had to be trained to guard their mistress as if she were the golden apples of the hesperides. indeed, for several years (till she became too ill to travel) she used to leave her lake-side home altogether during the tourist season. in her latest years she commonly wrote in the drawing-room, as the sunniest and most cheerful apartment, and where, too, she could sit by the fire, and yet get plenty of daylight. her proper study, however, was the room on the opposite side of the hall. this is a long room with a bay window at the other end of the fire-place, and the door in the centre. book-cases lined the whole of these walls; but her library was an extensive one, and there were books all over the house. this room served as dining-room and study, both; the writing table was near the window, the dining-table further towards the fire. the only other room on the ground floor is the kitchen, which runs parallel with the drawing-room. her principles and her practice went hand-in-hand in her domestic arrangements as in her life generally; and her kitchen was as airy, light and comfortable for her maids as her drawing-room was for herself. the kitchen, too, was provided with a book-case for a servants' library. a scullery, dairy, etc., are annexed to the kitchen, and the entrance to the cellars below is also found through the green baize door which shuts off the cooking region from the front of the house. up-stairs, that which was her own room is large and cheerful, and provided with two windows, a big hanging cupboard, and a good sized dressing-room--the latter indeed, fully large enough for a maid to sleep in. the next was the spare-room; and there lingers no small interest about the guest-chamber, where harriet martineau received such guests as charlotte brontë, george eliot, emerson, and douglas jerrold. a small servants' room is next to this, and a larger one is over the kitchen, so that it comes just at the head of the stairs. such is the size and arrangement of harriet martineau's home. climbing plants soon covered "the knoll" on every side. the ivy kept it green through all the year; the porch was embowered in honeysuckle, clematis, passion-flower, and virginia creeper. wordsworth, macready, and other friends of note, planted trees for harriet below the terrace. the making of all these arrangements was a source of satisfaction and delight to her such as can only be imagined by those who have felt what it is to come abroad after a long and painful confinement from illness, and to find life and usefulness freely open again under agreeable conditions and prospects. while her house was being built, she lodged in ambleside; and in that time, during the autumn and winter of - , she wrote her _forest and game law tales_, with the object of showing how mischievous the game laws were in their operation upon society at large, and more particularly upon the fortunes of individual farmers, and upon the laborers who were led into poaching. these tales occupy three volumes of the ordinary novel size. they had a sale which would have been very good for a novel; two thousand copies were disposed of, and doubtless did some service for the cause for which she had worked. so far as her own pecuniary interests were concerned, however, these tales made her first failure. it was the only work which never returned her any remuneration. the publisher had reckoned on a very large circulation, and so had put out too much capital in stock, stereotypes, and the like, to leave any profit on the sale that actually took place; and the publication unfortunately coincided with the agitation of the political world about the repeal of the corn laws. but one pleasing incident arose out of them for her personally. she had been in difficulties as to how to obtain turf to lay down upon the land under her terrace. one fine morning, soon after her entrance on her home, her maid found a great heap of sods under the window, when she opened the shutters in the morning. a dirty note, closed with a wafer, was stuck upon the pile, and this was found to state that the sods were "a token of gratitude for the _game law tales_, from a poacher." harriet never discovered from whom this tribute came. she took possession of her home on april th, . during the summer she wrote another story for young people--one of her most interesting tales, and instructive in its moral bearing--_the billow and the rock_. it must here be noted, in passing, that this is the last of her works in which the theism that she had, up to this time, held for religious truth, makes itself visible. a new experience was about to lead her to think afresh upon the theological subjects, and to revise her opinions about the genesis of faiths, and their influence upon morals. in the autumn of , she accepted an invitation from her friends, mr. and mrs. r. v. yates, of liverpool, to join them in a journey to the east, they bearing the expense. the party left england in october, and were met at malta by mr. j. c. ewart, afterwards m.p. for liverpool. together, these four travellers sailed up the nile to the second cataract, studied thebes and philæ, went up and into the great pyramid, visited bazaars, mosques and (the ladies) harems, in cairo. then they travelled in the track of moses in the desert, passing sinai and reaching petra. next, they completely traversed palestine; and finally, passed through syria to beyrout, where they took ship again for home. this journey occupied eight months. in october, , harriet reached "the knoll" again, and settled herself in her permanent course of home life. as the same habits were continued, with only the interruptions of occasional visits to other parts of the country, day by day, for many years, i may as well mention what was the course of that daily home life. she rose very early: not infrequently, in the winter, before daylight; and immediately set out for a good, long walk. sometimes, i am told, she would appear at a farm-house, four miles off, before the cows were milked. the old post-mistress recollects how, when she was making up her early letter-bags, in the gray of the morning mists, miss martineau would come down with her large bundle of correspondence, and never failed to have a pleasant nod and smile, or a few kindly inquiries, for her humble friend. "i always go out before it is quite light," writes miss martineau to mr. atkinson, in november, ; "and in the fine mornings i go up the hill behind the church--the kirkstone road--where i reach a great height, and see from half way along windermere to rydal. when the little shred of moon that is left and the morning star hang over wansfell, among the amber clouds of the approaching sunrise, it is delicious. on the positively rainy mornings, my walk is to pelter bridge and back. sometimes it is round the south end of the valley. these early walks (i sit down to my breakfast at half-past seven) are good, among other things, in preparing me in mind for my work." returning home, she breakfasted at half-past seven; filled her lamp ready for the evening, and arranged all household matters; and by half-past eight was at her desk, where she worked undisturbed till two, the early dinner-time. these business hours were sacred, whether there were visitors in the house or not. after dinner, however, she devoted herself to guests, if there were any; if not, she took another walk, or in bad weather, did wool-work--"many a square yard of which," she says, she "all invisibly embossed with thoughts and feelings worked in." tea and the newspaper came together, after which she either read, wrote letters, or conversed for the rest of the evening, ending her day always, whatever the weather, by a few moments of silent meditation in the porch or on the terrace without. she was not one of those mistresses who cannot talk to their servants, any more than she was one to indulge them in idle and familiar gossip. if there were any special news of the day, she would invite the maids into her sitting-room for half an hour in the evening, to tell them about it. during the crimean war, and again during the american struggle, in particular, the servants had the frequent privilege of tracing with her on the map the position of the battles, and learning with her aid to understand the great questions that were at stake. the servants thus trained and considered[ ] were not, certainly, common domestics. she kept two girls in the house, besides the laboring man and his wife at the cottage; and, as the place was small, and her way of living simple, the work did not require that she should choose rough women for servants merely because of their strength. on the contrary, she made special efforts to secure young girls of a somewhat superior order, whom she might train and attach to herself. she got servants whom she had to dismiss now and again, of course; but the time that most of her maids stopped with her and the warm feelings that they showed towards her, are a high testimony to the domestic character of their "strong minded" mistress. at the time of which we are now speaking, her maids were "jane," who had been cured from chronic illness by miss martineau's mesmerizing, and who was in her service for seven years, when the girl emigrated; and "martha," who had been trained for teaching, and had to resign it from ill-health, but who later on married the master of miss carpenter's bristol ragged schools, and returned to teaching, after serving miss martineau for some eight years. [ ] henry crabbe robinson writes to miss fenwick on january , :-- "miss martineau makes herself an object of envy by the success of her domestic arrangements.... mrs. wordsworth declares she is a model in her household economy, making her servants happy, and setting an example of activity to her neighbors." of the servants who came after this, "caroline" was there twenty years, till she was removed by death; and "mary anne" served miss martineau eleven years, till the mistress's death closed the long term of attendance and almost filial love. indications of how different the relationship was in this home from what it only too often is, are found in many of miss martineau's letters. when "martha" married, she had the rare honor of having harriet martineau and mary carpenter for her bridesmaids. the mistress gave the wedding breakfast, and partook of it, too, in company with the bride and bridegroom and their friends; and when she had seen them all off, she sat down to write to her family about her loss "with a bursting heart." references to her feelings for her "dear friend, caroline," will be seen presently in her letters to mr. atkinson; and her care and affection for this valued servant are expressed yet more frequently in letters which i may not quote, to more domestic friends. as to "mary anne," she has travelled a long way while in delicate health, to see me, to tell me all she could of her mistress, and to express how glad she was "to know of anything being done to make miss martineau's goodness better understood." "mary anne" is now a married woman. she was engaged for three or four years before miss martineau's death, but would not leave her mistress in her old age and her ill-health. that mistress, on her part, when told of the engagement, not only admitted the lover to an interview with herself, but even generously urged that the wedding should not be delayed for her sake, although at this time she had an almost morbid shrinking from strangers, and the loss of the personal attendant who knew her ways, would have been one of the greatest calamities of the commoner order that could have befallen her. but "mary anne" did not leave her; and when, at last, it became quite certain that death was at hand, the generous lady said to a relative that it made her "so glad to think that, when it was over, there could be nothing to stand in the way of mary anne's marriage." i have thus anticipated in order to show that the domestic peace which existed under her household rule was no special thing dependent upon the character of a single servant, but was maintained through all the years of her home life, and therefore unquestionably was the result of the mistress's qualities of heart and mind. what may be called her external home-life--that is to say, what she was to her poorer neighbors--during that ten years of activity, may also be best noticed before the mental progress and literary work of the period come under further review. every winter, for several years, she gave a course of lectures to the working-people and tradesfolk of the place, in the methodist school-room at the back of her house. many of the gentry desired to attend, but she would have none of them, on the double ground that there was no room for them, and that the lectures were designed for people who had little access to books or other educational resources. the subjects that she treated were as various as those of her books, but all chosen with what i have previously observed seems to me to have been the object of all her works--to influence conduct through knowledge and reasoning. there was a course on sanitary matters, others on her travels (and we know from her books on the same topics from what point of view these were treated), some on the history of england, another on the history and constitution of the united states; and, finally, the last course for which she had health and strength was given in november and december, , and was on the crimean war and the character of the government of russia. i have seen some of the older inhabitants of ambleside who attended these lectures, and who now speak of them in the warmest terms of admiration. "they were so clear; and she never stopped for a word; and so interesting!--one could have listened to them over and over again." but there is no one who could tell, with the aid of a cultivated taste, what she was as a public speaker. so eloquent is some of her writing that one holds one's breath as one reads it; and the evident rapidity of the penmanship of her ms.[ ] shows that such passages were produced with all the improvisatory impulse and flow of the orator. if, besides this, her delivery was fervent and impressive, one cannot but think how great a statesman and parliamentary leader she might have been, with these essential qualifications for modern public life added to all that knowledge, judgment, strength of principle, and political capacity which made men willing (as we shall see soon) to accept her as their political teacher in the daily and quarterly press. that she had the orator's stirring gifts, the personal magnetism which compels the minds of a mass to move with the words of a speaker, and the reciprocal power of receiving stimulus from an audience, when the hearts of many fires the lips of one, there is one shadowy incident left to show, besides the testimony of her local hearers who survive. it is this: in charlotte brontë, then in the first flush of her fame, sought harriet martineau's acquaintance, saying that she desired "to see one whose works have so often made her the subject of my thoughts." in the following year charlotte visited harriet at "the knoll," and heard one of the english history lectures. her bright eyes were fixed on the lecturer all through; and as harriet stood on her low platform, while the audience dispersed, she heard charlotte say, in the very voice of the lecturer, what edward said in the wind-mill at cressy: "is my son dead?" they walked silently to the house together--about three hundred paces--and when harriet turned up her lamp in the drawing-room, the first thing she saw was charlotte looking at her with wide, shining eyes, and repeating, in the same tone, "is my son dead?" to those who know the dramatic quality of charlotte brontë's imagination, there is a beam of light reflected from this trifling anecdote upon the force and the manner of the speaker who had so impressed her. [ ] in speaking of her eloquent writings i refer specially to the _history of the peace_; and i have seen the manuscript of this, bearing evidence that the hand could not keep pace with the flow of words and thoughts. the opinion which this keenly observant and candid woman formed of harriet martineau is of peculiar interest, and, as it specially refers to the period and the relations of which we are now treating, i quote it from mrs. gaskell's _life of charlotte brontë_. it is given in some private letters, written from "the knoll" (not, as mrs. chapman absurdly says, to emily brontë, who was dead, but) to charlotte's life-long and most confidential friend, miss ellen nussey:-- "i am at miss martineau's for a week. her house is very pleasant both within and without; arranged at all points with admirable neatness and comfort. her visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them.... she is a great and good woman.... the manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration; while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude. i think her good and noble qualities far outweigh her defects. it is my habit to consider the individual apart from his (or her) reputation, practice independent of theory, natural disposition isolated from acquired opinion. harriet martineau's person, practice, and character inspire me with the truest affection and respect. "i find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency and benevolence and perseverance in her practice, such as win the sincerest esteem and affection. she is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. she seems to me the benefactress of ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. the government of her household is admirably administered; all she does is well done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest feminine occupation. no sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under her rule, and yet she is not over-strict, or too rigidly exacting; her servants and her poor neighbors love as well as respect her. "i must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much about her, merely because my mind is just now deeply impressed with what i have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth." some of her lectures were given with the express object of inducing the people to form a building society. rents were excessively high for the working classes from the scarcity of cottages; and therefore they lived and slept crowded together, while the open country extended all around them. the moral screw was turned upon them, too, about politics and religion, by the threat of the landlord that, if they offended him, he would turn them out of the only cottages they could get. with that true philanthropy which her studies in political economy had taught, miss martineau went to work to aid the people to improve their own condition. she obtained a loan of £ from her old friend, mrs. reid, of london (to whom the foundation of bedford college is mainly due), with which she purchased a field just above the village at ellercross, and parcelled it out, drained it, and made the road. then, by her lectures, she showed the people how they could "buy a house with its rent"; and she undertook all the infinite trouble that devolved upon her when the society was formed, as the only member of it with legal and general knowledge, and, therefore, the only one able to guide its affairs. before me there lies a package of the notes that she sent at different times on this business to mr. bell, the ambleside chemist, who was the nominal chairman--though she was the real one--of the society. "jealousy and ridicule went to work against the scheme"; but her philanthropic energy and wisdom were fully successful. the cottages are healthily planned and well built, and remain there as a monument to the efforts which she made for the good of her poor neighbors. besides these more general undertakings for their benefit, there yet live many amongst them who are grateful to her for personal kindness and assistance. while her strength lasted, she was ever ready to try to relieve others from illness by the means which she believed to have cured herself; and seven mesmerized patients were sometimes asleep at one time in her drawing-room. she was a powerful mesmerist. most of her patients were at least relieved--some cured. a present resident of ambleside, who owes his success in business life to her kindness, told me how she mesmerized him for nearly an hour every day for a year; and to show that she did not do this without very decided results to herself, he remembers that her fingers used to swell during the process, so as to almost hide her rings, if she forgot to take them off before beginning. again, her library was placed freely at the service of deserving young men in the village, and only book-lovers will be able to appreciate the generosity of this neighborly kindness. old miss nicholson tells me of miss martineau's kindness to her invalid sister; sharing with her the luxuries which were not to be bought in ambleside, but which the famous writer frequently received from some of her many friends. nor was the mere personal human sympathy wanting in her; those who needed no gifts or material aid from her knew her as a kind friend, ready to think for them and advise with them in their troubles or perplexities. in mentioning her activities other than literary, during those ten busy and healthy years of home life, i must not omit her "farming"--her farm of two acres. she had no intention, at first, of embarking in such an enterprise. she let on hire that portion of her land which she did not wish to have in her garden, and her maids and herself, with the occasional help of a man, kept the garden in order. but this plan did not answer well. the tenant allowed the grass to get untidy, and his sheep broke into the garden to eat the cabbages. neither the vegetable nor the flower garden could be kept so nicely as might be wished. milk, butter, eggs, and hams, all had to be bought at high prices; and so small was the supply at times that these articles of country produce were actually unattainable by purchase. the energetic lady of the small domain was profoundly dissatisfied with this state of affairs. so to work she went to study the science of agriculture and practical farming; and soon a norfolk laborer was established on her land, and this small farm was under her own management. she set up a cross-pole fence around her estate, the first one ever seen in the lake district; and, like a true woman, she planted roses all along the fence, to wreathe and decorate it in summer. then she initiated her fellow-farmers into the mysteries of high farming, and stall feeding. "a cow to three acres" was the lake rule; but she hired another half-acre of land, to add to her own, and showed that upon this total of two acres she could _almost_ keep two cows. fowls and pigs were, of course, kept also; and all the household comforts which cows, hens, and pigs supply were obtained from her land at, practically, no cost at all. the subsistence of the laborer and his wife was created out of the soil; and the house had a constant supply of vegetables, milk, eggs, and hams, at a less expense than buying had previously been, and with a much nicer and always certain supply. the experiment became famous in a small way. "people came to see how we arranged our ground, so as to get such crops out of it,"[ ] and one of the poor-law commissioners, having asked her for a private account of how she had managed her little farm, printed her letter in the _times_, without asking her consent. this brought such a flood of correspondence on her that she was compelled to write on the subject for publication, and so the farm superintendence resulted in a piece of literary work for the mistress. [ ] _health, husbandry and handicraft_, p. , "our farm of two acres." now we will see what her pen was doing while all these activities were helping to fill her days. chapter ix. in the maturity of her powers. the book, published early in , in which harriet described her egyptian, desert and palestine travels, was entitled _eastern life, past and present_. if i were required to give from some one only of her works a series of extracts which should illustrate the special powers of her mind and the finest features of her style, it would be this book that i should choose. i do not mean to say that the most eloquent and vivid passage that i might find in all her writings is here; nor that her deepest and noblest qualities as a thinker are more forcibly displayed here than elsewhere. but i mean that in _eastern life, past and present_, all her best moral and intellectual faculties were exerted, and their action becomes visible, at one page or another, in reading the book from the first to the last chapters. the keen observation, the active thought, the vigorous memory, the power of deep and sustained study, the mastery of language, giving the ability to depict in words and to arouse the reader's imagination to mental vision--all these requisites for the writing of a good book of travel she showed that she possessed. but there is even more than all this in _eastern life_. there is the feeling for humanity in all its circumstances, which can sympathize no less with the slave of the harem at this moment alive in degradation, than with the highest intelligences that ceased from existence unnumbered thousands of years ago. the most interesting and characteristic feature distinguishing this work is, however, the openness and freedom of its thought combined with the profound reverence that it shows for all that is venerable. it was _eastern life_ which first declared to the world that harriet martineau had ceased to have a theology. she had learned in travelling through egypt, how much of what moses taught was derived from the ancient mythology of egypt. passing afterwards through the lands where the hebrew, the christian, and the mohammedan faiths in turn arose, observing, thinking, and studying, the conclusion at which she arrived at last was, in brief, this: that men have ever constructed the image of a ruler of the universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the supreme power have been originated from within, and modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination, and have no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see to be the true and the right. her conviction that the highest moral conduct, and the most unselfish goodness, and the noblest aspirations, are in no degree connected with any kind of creed, was aided and supported, no doubt, by her warm personal affection for mr. atkinson, and some other of her friends of his way of thinking, in whom she found aspirations as lofty and feelings as admirable as ever she had enjoyed communion with, together with a complete rejection, on scientific grounds, of all theology. her belief now was that-- the best state of mind was to be found, however it might be accounted for, in those who were called philosophical atheists.... i knew several of that class--some avowed, and some not; and i had for several years felt that they were among my most honored acquaintances and friends; and now i knew them more deeply and thoroughly, i must say that, for conscientiousness, sincerity, integrity, seriousness, effective intellect, _and the true religious spirit_, i knew nothing like them. her own "true religious" earnestness was unabated. _eastern life_ contains abundance of evidence that the spirit in which she now wrote against all theological systems was exactly at one with that in which she had twenty years before written _addresses, prayers and hymns_. her intellectual range had become far wider; her knowledge of human nature and of the history and conditions of mankind had vastly increased; but her religious earnestness--that is to say, her devotion to truth, and her emotional reverence for her highest conceptions of goodness and duty--was as fervent as ever. notwithstanding the boldness and heterodoxy of _eastern life_, it did not cause much outcry; and her two next books were amongst the most successful of all her works. the first of these was _household education_; the second, _a history of the thirty years' peace_. the former was partly written for periodical publication during in the _people's journal_, for which magazine she wrote also a few desultory articles. the _history of the peace_ was a voluminous work of the first order of importance. its execution is in most respects entirely admirable. her task of writing the history of the time in which she had herself lived was one of extreme delicacy. honest contemporary judgments about still-living or lately-dead persons, and about actions which have been observed with all the freshness of feeling of the passing moment, must often seem unduly stern to those who look back through the softening veil of the past, and to whom the actors have always been purely historic personages. moreover, i have before mentioned her tendency, which seems to me to have arisen from her deafness, to give insufficient _shading off_ in depicting character. but wonderfully little allowance is, after all, required on such grounds from the reader at the present day of harriet martineau's history of the years between and . the view taken by her of o'connell, brougham, and some others is perhaps too stern; the picture has too many dark shades, and not a due proportion of light tints; but it can scarcely be questioned that the outline is accurate, and the whole drawing substantially correct. the earnest endeavor after impartiality, and the success with which the judicial attitude of the historian is on the whole maintained, are very remarkable. this appears so to one who looks upon the book with the eyes of the present generation; but the recognition of the fact at the moment when she wrote is perhaps more conclusive, and the following quotation may serve to show the opinion of those who (with her) had lived through the time of which she treats. miss martineau has been able to discuss events which may almost be called contemporary as calmly as if she were examining a remote period of antiquity. she has written the history of a rather undignified reign with a dignity that raises even the strifes of forgotten and exploded parties into philosophic importance. she exhibits warm sympathies for all that is noble, honorable, or exalted--and a thorough disdain of every paltry contrivance devised to serve a temporary purpose, or gain an unworthy end. the principles which she enunciates are based on eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused. there are few living authors who may be so implicitly trusted with the task of writing contemporary history as miss martineau. she has spared no pains in investigating the truth, and allowed no fears to prevent her from stating it.[ ] [ ] _athenæum_, march, st, . though all her other books should die, and be buried utterly under the dust of time, this one will never be entirely lost. it is as accurate and as careful in its facts as the driest compendium, while yet its pages glow with eloquence, and are instinct with political wisdom. she really did here what she had designed to do in _society in america_; but here she did it in the right method, there in a wrong one. the great growth of her mind in twelve years of maturity could not be better gauged than by a comparison of these two works. her political principles did not change in the time; she was a true believer in popular government all her life--her love of justice caused her to be a hater of class rule, and of every kind of privilege; her sympathies were boundless, and made her in earnest for the freedom and progress of the democracy; her conscience was active so that she loved truth for its own sake; and her sense of duty never failed to keep alive in her large mind a feeling of personal concern in the progress of public affairs. all this was true of her when she wrote her american book; it was equally true when she treated the history of her own land and her own times. but in the latter case, she writes on political philosophy like a statesman--in the former there is much of the doctrinaire. in the latter work, principles underlie the whole fabric; but the actions of politicians are made the means of judging their own professed creeds, the value of those creeds being easily appraised by the results seen to follow on actions in conformity with them. in the earlier work, as we saw, the theories were postulated first, and the actions were measured against those self-derived standards of right and wrong. for political sagacity, for nobility of public spirit, for effective thought, for knowledge of facts, for clear presentation of them, for accuracy in judging of their permanent importance, for candor, and impartiality, for insight into character, and for vivid and glowing eloquence, _the history of the thirty years' peace_ stands forth unmatched amongst books of its class. this, i take it, will be the most enduring and valuable of all her works, and the one by which chiefly posterity will learn what were her powers and how estimable was her character. in the two works last mentioned, _eastern life_ and _the thirty years' peace_, it seems to me that she touched the high-water mark of her permanent achievements. we have nearly reached the end of the long catalogue of her books, though by no means the end of her writings. very much more work she did in her life, as will presently be told, but it was that kind of work which is (with the single exception of oratory) the most powerful at the moment, but the most evanescent--journalism. she was soon to begin to apply her ripe wisdom and her life-long study of the theory of government to the concrete problems of practical politics. the influence of an active and powerful journalist cannot be measured; the work itself cannot be adequately surveyed and criticized; and thus what is, perhaps, the most useful, capable and important work which harriet martineau did, eludes our detailed survey. we can best judge what was her power as a leader-writer and review and magazine essayist by noting how progressively her mind improved, and to what a high moral and intellectual standpoint she had attained in her latest volumes, just before she exchanged such sustained labors for the briefer though not less arduous efforts of leading and teaching through the periodical press. _the history of the peace_ was completed in , and was so immediately successful that the publisher asked miss martineau to write an introductory volume on the history of the first fifteen years of this century. while at work upon this "introduction" she did also some short articles on various subjects for charles dickens' periodical, _household words_, and was likewise proceeding with the preparation of another volume of a very different kind. this last was published in january, (before the introductory volume of the _history_), under the title of _letters on the laws of man's nature and development_, by henry george atkinson, f.g.s., and harriet martineau. the contents of the book were actual letters which had passed between the friends. it will be remembered that harriet did not meet mr. atkinson during the progress of her mesmeric treatment and recovery from illness under his written advice. but soon after she got better, they were visiting together at the house of a cousin of hers, and during the six years or so which had since then passed, they had often met, and their correspondence had grown to be very frequent. mr. atkinson had gradually become the friend dearest to harriet martineau in all the world. he gained her affection (i use the word advisedly) by entirely honorable roads--by the delight which she took in observing his scientific knowledge, his originality of thought and his elevated tone of mind. but i cannot doubt that long before this volume of _letters_ was published, he had become dear to her by virtue of that personal attraction which is not altogether dependent upon merit, but which enhances such merits as may be possessed by the object of the attachment, and somewhat confuses the relationship on the intellectual side. this condition of things is in no way especially feminine; john stuart mill bowed down to mrs. taylor, and comte erected his admiration of clotilde into a _culte_. mr. atkinson was many years younger than his friend, and very likely she never fully realized the depth of her own feelings towards him. but still the attraction had its influence, though unacknowledged in words, and unreciprocated in kind. miss martineau was really taught by mr. atkinson much of science that she had not previously studied; but yet it was an error, from every point of view, for her to present to the world a book in which she avowed herself his pupil. her letters are mainly composed of questions, upon which she seeks enlightenment. the answers cannot, in the nature of the case, give forth a connected system of thought upon "man's nature and development." no one was more ready than she herself to recognize that, as she says, "in literature, no mind can work well upon the lines laid down by another"; yet this was what she required mr. atkinson to do in replying to her questions and taking up her points. the errors that one would expect are found in the results of this mistaken form; the facts and the inferences are neither sufficiently separated, nor properly connected; and the real value which the book had as a contribution to science and philosophy is lost sight of in the disorder. in fact, no form could be less suitable than the epistolary for such work--either for the writers to arrange and analyze what they were doing, or for the reader to see and understand what they have done. besides this, the public had long consented to learn from harriet martineau; but mr. atkinson, though highly respected by his own circle, was not known to the general public, and it was therefore an error in policy for miss martineau to show herself sitting as a pupil at his feet, and to call on those who believed in her to believe in him as her teacher and guide. her fine tact and long experience must have led her to perceive all this in an ordinary case; and only the personal reason of a desire to win for her friend the recognition from the public which she herself had already given him so fully in her own head and heart, could have led an experienced and able woman of letters to so blunder in her selection of the literary form of the book. as to the substance of the _letters_, but little need be said, because the bulk of the volume is not her writing, but mr. atkinson's. the ideas which she had then accepted, however, were those by which she lived the rest of her life, and must have their due share of notice for that reason. the fundamental point in the book is its insistance on the baconian, or experiential, or scientific, method of inquiry being adopted in studying man and his mental constitution, just as much as in studying inanimate nature. a great first cause of all things is not denied, but declared unknown and unknowable, as necessarily beyond the comprehension of the senses of man. supernatural revelation is, of course, entirely rejected; indeed, the very word supernatural is held to involve a fallacy, for only natural things can be known. mr. atkinson pointed out that the whole of the facts which are around us can be observed, analyzed, and found to occur in an invariable sequence of causes and effects, which form natural laws; and that the mind of man is no exception to this general truth, that all events spring from causes, and are themselves in turn causes of other effects. it follows from these conclusions that the "first cause" (which, as miss martineau said, the constitution of the human mind requires it to suppose) never intervenes in the world as an errant influence, disturbing natural law; and all speculations about its nature, character, and purposes are put aside as out of the field of inquiry. passing on from method to results, mr. atkinson gave the first hints of many doctrines now fully accepted: as that of unconscious cerebration, or that of more senses than five, for instance; and many others (based mainly on phrenology and mesmerism) not held, up to the present time, even by the scientists of his own school. for the rest the book has much that is interesting; it has much that is true; but it has, also, much that might well have been put forward as speculation, but should not have been stated so dogmatically as it was on the evidence available.[ ] [ ] it is right that i should say that i alone am responsible for the above (necessarily imperfect) digest of the contents of the book. i at first thought of asking mr. atkinson to do me the favor of reading my account of his work in proof; but i ultimately concluded that it would be better that in this instance, as in the case of all harriet martineau's other books, i myself should be wholly responsible to the public for my own substantial accuracy and fairness. it was received in with a howl from the orthodox press which would seem strange indeed in these days. but of competent criticism it had very little. miss martineau's name, of course, secured attention for it; and small though her share in the book was, it was quite enough to make the fact perfectly clear that she was henceforth to be looked upon as a "materialist" and a "philosophical atheist," and the rest of the names by which it was customary to stigmatize any person who rejected supernaturalism and revelation. the motives with which this book was written and published could hardly be misunderstood. there could be no idea of making money out of a work on philosophy--even if either of the authors had been in the habit of writing merely to make money; while as to fame and applause, everyone is more or less acquainted with the history of the reception given in all ages to those who have questioned the popular beliefs of their time! the sole motive with which harriet martineau wrote and issued this book was the same that impelled her to do all her work--the desire to teach that which she believed to be true, and to be valuable in its influence upon conduct. with regard to the latter point, it seemed to her that one great cause for the slow advance of civilization is the degree to which good men and women have occupied themselves with supernatural concerns, neglecting for these the actual world, its conditions, and its wants, and giving themselves over to the guidance of a spiritual hierarchy instead of exercising all their own powers in freedom. she struck at this error in publishing the _letters_. at the same time she felt doubtful if her future writings would ever be read after her bold utterances, and even, as the following letter shows, whether she might not find herself the occupant of a felon's dock for the crime of which socrates, and jesus, and galileo were each in turn accused--blasphemy: letter to mr. atkinson. [extract.] august , . one thing more is worth saying. do you remember how, when we were bringing out our "letters," i directed your attention to our blasphemy law, and the trial of moxon, under that law, for publishing shelley's "queen mab" among his _poems_? you ridiculed my statement, and said mr. procter[ ] denied there being such a law, or moxon having been tried, in the face of the fact that i had corresponded with moxon on the occasion, on the part of certain personal friends. the fact appeared afterwards in the _annual register_, but it seemed to produce no effect. well, now you can know the truth by looking at the _life of denman_, by sir joseph arnould. if you can lay your hands on the book, please look at vol. ii. p. , where there is an account of the trial, judge denman being the judge who tried the case. the narrative ends thus:--"the verdict was for the crown" (conviction for blasphemy), "but mr. moxon was never called up for sentence." it is too late for mr. procter to learn the truth, but it is surely always well for us, while still engaged in the work of life, to be accurately informed on such matters as the laws we live under, and our consequent responsibilities. is it not so? [ ] "barry cornwall." it was, then, with the full anticipation, not only of social obloquy, but also of legal penalty, that the brave thinker fulfilled (to quote her own words in the preface to the _letters_) "that great social duty, to impart what we believe, and what we think we have learned. among the few things of which we can pronounce ourselves certain is the obligation of inquirers after truth to communicate what they obtain." the heroic soul fulfilled now, as before and afterwards, what she held to be her duty, as simply and unwaveringly as ever a soldier on the battlefield charged the cannon's mouth. five times in her life did harriet martineau write and publish that which she believed would ruin her prospects, silence her voice for ever, and close her career. far from her was that common paltering with the conscience by which so many men confuse their minds--the poor pretence that truth must not be spoken for fear that the speaker's influence for future worthy work may be injured by his boldness. this is how the devil tempts, saying, "fall down, and worship me, and i will give thee all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." harriet martineau never worshipped evil even by silence, when silence was sin, playing fast and loose with her conscience by a promise to use the power so obtained for higher objects hereafter. the truth that appeared to her mind she spoke frankly; the work that was placed for her to do she did simply; and so the quagmire of the expedient never engulfed her reputation, her self-respect and her usefulness, as it has done that of so many who have been lured into it from the straight path of right action and truthful speech in public life, by will-o'-the-wisp hopes of greater power and glory for themselves in the future--which they hope they may use for good when they shall be smothered in cowardice and lies. she had much to suffer, and did suffer. martyrs are not honored because they are insensate, but because they defy their natural human weaknesses in maintaining that which they believe to be true. probably the keenest grief which she experienced on the occasion now before us came from the complete separation which took place between her and the dearest friend of her youth, her brother james. dr. martineau was, at that time, one of the editors of the _prospective review_. philosophy was his department, and in the natural order the _letters_ came to him for review. he reviewed the book accordingly and in such terms that all intercourse between him and his sister was thenceforward at an end. they had long before drifted apart in thought; but this final separation was none the less felt as a wrench. dr. martineau's attack was almost exclusively aimed against mr. atkinson. but with harriet's loyalty of nature she was more impelled to resent what was said about her friend and colleague than if it had been directed against herself. the brother and sister never met or communicated with each other again. the introductory volume of the _history of the peace_ was published soon after the atkinson _letters_. the next work which she undertook was a great labor--the rendering into english of comte's _positive philosophy_. what she accomplished with this book was not a mere translation, nor could it be precisely described as a condensation; it was both these and more. comte had propounded his groundwork of philosophy and his outline of all the sciences in six bulky volumes, full of repetitions, and written in an imperfect french style. harriet martineau rendered the whole substance of these six volumes into two of clear english, orderly, consecutive, and scientific in method as in substance. so well was her work accomplished that comte himself adopted it for his students' use, removing from his list of books for positivists his own edition of his course, and recommending instead the english version by miss martineau. it thus by-and-bye came to pass that comte's own work fell entirely out of use, and his complete teachings became inaccessible to the french people in their own tongue; so that twenty years afterwards, when one of his disciples wished to call public attention to the master's work as teaching the method of social science by which the french nation must find its way back to prosperity after the great war, he was constrained to ask harriet martineau's permission to re-translate her version. comte wrote her the warmest expressions of his gratitude; but this he owed her on another ground besides the one of the value of her labors in popularizing his work so ably. while she was laboring at her task, mr. lombe, then high sheriff of norfolk, sent her a cheque for £ , which he begged her to accept, since she was doing a work which he had long desired to see accomplished, but which he knew could not possibly be remunerative to her. she accepted the money, but with her customary generosity in pecuniary affairs, she employed more than half of it in paying the whole expenses of publication, and arranged that the proceeds of the sale, whatever they might be, should be shared with m. comte. there was a considerable demand for the work on its first appearance; and up to this present date a fair number of copies is annually disposed of. it came out in november, , having partly occupied her time during the preceding two years. only partly, however; for, besides all the efforts for her neighborhood previously referred to (the building society was in progress during those years, and gave her much thought, as her business notes are in evidence), and besides her farming, she was now writing largely for periodicals and newspapers. these are the pulpits from which our modern preachers are most widely and effectively heard, and the right tone of which is, therefore, of the first consequence to society. for every hundred persons who listen to the priest, the journalist (including in this term writers for all periodicals) speaks to a thousand; and while the words of the one are often heard merely as a formality, those of the other, dealing with the matters at the moment most near and interesting to his audience, may effectively influence the thoughts and consciences and actions of thousands in the near future. shallow, indeed, would be the mind which undervalued the power of the journalist, or underrated the seriousness of his vocation. harriet martineau saw the scope which journalism afforded for the kind of work which she had all her life been doing--the influencing of conduct by considering practical affairs in the light of principle. her periodical writing being, according to our mistaken english custom, anonymous, neither brought her any increase of fame nor carried with it the influence which her personality as a teacher would have contributed to the weight of what she wrote. nevertheless, she repeatedly in her letters, speaks of her journalism as the most delightful work of her life, and that which she believed had been perhaps the most useful of all her efforts. some stories with sanitary morals, which she now contributed to _household words_, were admirably written. "the people of bleaburn" is the true story of what was done by a grand american woman, mary ware, when she happened to go into an isolated village at the very time that half its inhabitants were lying stricken down by an epidemic. "woodruffe, the gardener," was a presentation of the evils of living in low-lying damp countries. "the marsh fog and the sea breeze" is perhaps the most interesting of all her stories since the political economy tales, which it much resembles in lightness of touch and in practical utility. a series of slight stories under the general title of "sketches from life," was also contributed at this time to the _leader_; they were all of them true tales and, like most real life stories, extremely pathetic. the most touching is one called "the old governess," describing the feelings with which an educated elderly woman, past her work, and with an injured hand, sought refuge in the workhouse; and how she conducted herself there. these stories were republished in a volume in . a series of descriptive accounts of manufactures, some of which contain most graphic writing, were also done in this time. these papers, with others written between - , were re-published in a volume in .[ ] there are some passages which i am greatly tempted to quote, merely as specimens of the perfection to which her literary style had at this time arrived. it is now a style of that clear simplicity which seems so easy to the reader, but which is in reality the highest triumph of the literary artist. the inexperienced reader is apt to suppose that anybody could write thus, until perhaps he gains some glimpse of the truth by finding the powerful effect which it is producing upon his thoughts and imagination. the practiced writer knows meanwhile that, simple though the vocabulary appears, he could not change a word for the better; and easily though the sentences swing, the rounding of their rhythm is an achievement to admire. i may not pause to quote, but i may especially refer to the paper on "the life of a salmon," in illustration of this eloquence of style. [ ] _health, husbandry and handicraft._ early in , harriet martineau received an invitation from the _daily news_ to send a "leader" occasionally. busily engaged as she was with comte, and with work for other periodicals, she yet gladly accepted this proposition; and thus began her connection with that paper (then newly started) which was so valuable both to her and the proprietors of the _daily news_. during the early summer of , she wrote two "leaders" each week, and, before she had finished comte, the regular contributions to the newspaper had grown to three a week. in the autumn of she made a two months' tour through ireland; and at the request of the editor she wrote thence a descriptive letter for publication in the _daily news_, almost every other day. the letters described the state of ireland at the moment, with observations such as few were so well qualified as she to make upon the facts. she did now what daniel o'connell had entreated her to do years before. in the liberator begged her to travel through his country, and without bias or favor represent calmly what really was the political and social condition of ireland.[ ] the "letters from ireland" attracted immediate attention as they appeared in the _daily news_; and before the end of the year they were re-published in a volume. at the same time some of her "leaders" secured much attention, and the editor pressed her to write even more frequently. during she wrote on an average four articles a week, and shortly afterwards the number rose to six--one in each day's paper. [ ] it may be mentioned that a similar plea was made to her by the crown prince oscar of sweden, who desired her aid in preparing his people for constitutional reform; and again, at a later date, by count porro, of milan, who begged that she would let the world know what was the condition of italy under austrian rule. the tale of the journalistic work of these busy two years is not yet complete. there is a long article of hers in the _westminster review_ for january, ; the subject is, "the condition and prospects of ireland." all this journalism was done at the same time that the heavy sustained task of the condensation of comte's abstruse and bulky work was proceeding. when to all this we add in our recollection her home duties, and when the fact is borne in mind that it was her common practice to take immense walks, not infrequently covering from twelve to fifteen miles in the day, it will be seen that the mere industry and energy that she showed were most extraordinary. but, besides this, her work was of a high order of literary excellence, and full of intellectual power. such incessant labor is not to be held up as altogether an example to be imitated. there are some few whose duty it is to consciously moderate the amount of labor to which their mental activity impels them; and no one ought to allow the imperative brain to overtax the rest of the system. during the irish journey, harriet began to be aware of experiencing unusual fatigue. she gave herself no sufficient pause, however, either then or afterwards, until she could not help doing so. after the publication of comte she wrote a remarkable article for the _westminster review_ (anonymous of course) on "england's foreign policy." this appeared in the number for january, . it dealt largely with the impending struggle between england and russia. true liberal as harriet martineau was, she hated with all her soul, not the russian people, but the hideous despotism, the asiatic and barbarian and brutal government of that empire. she foresaw a probable great struggle in the future between tyranny and freedom, in which russia, by virtue of all her circumstances, will be the power against which the free peoples of the earth will have to fight. not only, then, did she fully recognize the necessity for the immediate resistance, which the crimean war was, to the encroachments on europe of the czar, but her article also included a powerful plea for the abolition of that system of secrecy of english diplomacy, by which it is rendered quite possible for our ministry to covertly injure our liberties, and to take action behind our backs in our names in opposition to our warmest wishes. the article, as a whole, is one of her most powerful pieces of writing, and had it been delivered as a speech in parliament, it would undoubtedly have produced a great effect, and have placed her high amongst the statesmen of that critical time. in the april ( ) number of the same _review_, there appeared an article from her pen upon "the census of ." this paper was not a mere comment upon the census return, but an historical review of the progress of the english people from barbarism to the civilization of our century. in the spring of this year she made a careful survey of the beautiful district around her home, in order to write a _complete guide to the lakes_ for a local publisher. she was already thoroughly acquainted with the neighborhood by means of her long and frequent pedestrian excursions, and reminiscences of these abound in this "guide." the vivid description of a storm on blake fell, for instance, is a faithful account of an occurrence during a visit which a niece and nephew from birmingham paid to her soon after her settlement at the lakes. the word-paintings of the scenery, too, were drawn, not from what she saw on one set visit only, but were the results of her many and frequent pilgrimages to those beauties of nature which she so highly appreciated. but still she would not write her "guide" without revisiting the whole of the district. the most interesting point about this book is that it reveals one feature of her character that all who knew her mention, but that very rarely appears in her writings. this is, her keen sense of humor. she dearly loved a good story, and could tell one herself with pith and point. her laugh is said to have been very hearty and ready. even when she was old and ill, she was always amusable, and her laughter at any little bit of fun would even then ring through her house as gaily as though the outburst had been that of a child's frank merriment. it is surprising that this sense of and enjoyment in the ludicrous so rarely appears in her writings. but i think it was because her authorship was to her too serious a vocation for fun to come into it often. she felt it almost as the exercise of a priestly function. it was earnest and almost solemn work for her to write what might be multiplied through the printing-press many thousand times over, and so uttered to all who had ears to hear. she showed that this was so by the greater deliberateness with which she expressed judgments of persons and pronounced opinions of any kind in her writings than in conversation. similarly she showed it by the abeyance of her humor in writing; it was no more possible for her to crack jokes when seated at her desk than it would have been for a priestess when standing by her tripod. but this particular book, this "guide, written for neighborly reasons," did not admit of the seriousness of her intellect being called into action, and the result is that it is full of good stories and lighted up with fun. her enjoyment in such stories reveals that sense of humor which, however strongly visible in daily intercourse, rarely appears in her books in any other form than in her perfect appreciation of the line between the sublime and the ludicrous. this summer brought her much annoyance of a pecuniary kind. her generosity about money matters were repeatedly shown, from the time when she left her "_illustrations_" in the hands of mr. c. fox, onwards; and she had now given what was for her means an extravagant contribution to the maintenance of the _westminster review_, taking a mortgage on the proprietorship for her only security. in the summer of , dr. chapman, its publisher and editor, failed; and an attempt was made to upset the mortgage. harriet martineau gave chapman the most kindly assistance and sympathy in his affairs at this juncture; not only overlooking the probable loss to herself, but exerting herself to write two long articles for the next number of the _review_ (october, ). one of these essays is on "rajah brooke;" a name that has half faded out of the knowledge of the present generation, but which well deserves memory from the heroic devotedness, and courage, and governing faculty of the man. his qualities were those most congenial to harriet martineau; and, finding his enemies active and potent, she made a complete study of his case and represented it in full in an article which (like her previous one on "foreign policy") was so statesman-like and so wise, so calm and yet so eloquent, that it would have made her famous amongst the politicians of the day had it been delivered as a speech in the house, instead of being printed anonymously in a review with too small a circulation to pay its way. nor did generous aid to dr. chapman end here. he was disappointed of some expected contributions, and miss martineau wrote him a second long article for the same number--the one on "the crystal palace," which concludes the _westminster_ for october, . her two contributions amounted to fifty-four pages of print--truly a generous gift to an impecunious magazine editor. it was now precisely ten years since her recovery from her long illness. the work done in that time shows how complete the recovery had been. those ten happy years of vigor and of labor were, she was wont to say, mr. atkinson's gift to her. well had she used these last years of her strength. chapter x. in retreat; journalism. miss martineau's health failed towards the end of ; and early in , symptoms of a disorganized circulation became so serious that she went up to london to consult physicians. dr. latham and sir thomas watson both came to the conclusion that she was suffering from enlargement and enfeeblement of the heart; and, in accordance with her wish to hear a candid statement of her case, they told her that her life would probably not be much prolonged. in short they gave her to understand that she was dying; and her own sensations confirmed the impression. she had frequent sinking fits; and every night when she lay down, a struggle for breath began, which lasted sometimes for hours. she received her death sentence then, and began a course of life as trying to the nerves and as searching a test of character as could well be imagined. that trial she bore nobly for twenty-one long suffering years. she was carefully carried home, and at once occupied herself with making every preparation for the departure from earth which she supposed to be impending. the first business was to make a new will; and this was a characteristic document. after ordering that her funeral should be conducted in the plainest manner, and at the least possible cost, she continued thus:--"it is my desire, from an interest in the progress of scientific investigation, that my skull should be given to henry george atkinson, of upper gloucester place, and also my brain, if my death take place within such distance of the said henry george atkinson's then present abode as to enable him to have it for purposes of scientific investigation." her property was then ordered to bear various small charges, including one of £ to mrs. chapman for writing a conclusion to the testator's autobiography, over and above a fourth share of the profits on the sale of the whole work after the first edition. "the knoll" was bequeathed to her favorite "little sister," ellen. the remainder of her possessions were divided amongst all her brothers and sisters, or their heirs, with as much impartiality as though she held, with maggie tulliver's aunt glegg, that "in the matter of wills, personal qualities were subordinate to the great fundamental fact of blood." although mesmerism had estranged her from a sister, and theology from a brother, she made no display of bitter feelings towards them and theirs in her last will. all her personal affairs being made as orderly as possible, she proceeded to write her _autobiography_. readers of that interesting but misleading work must bear in mind that it was a very hasty production. the two large volumes were written in a few months; the ms. was sent to the printer as it was produced, the sheets for the first edition were printed off, then the matter was stereotyped, and the sheets and plates were packed up in the office of the printer, duly insured, and held ready for immediate publication after her death. she wrote in this hot haste with "the shadow cloaked from head to foot" at her right hand. so much reason had she to believe that her very days were numbered, that she wrote the latter part of her _autobiography_ before the first portion. she had already given forth, in _household education_ and _the crofton boys_, the results of her childish experiences of life; and she was now specially anxious not to die without leaving behind her a definite account of the later course of her intellectual history. no one who knew her considers that she did herself justice in the _autobiography_. it is hard and censorious; it displays vanity, both in its depreciation of her own work, and in its recital of the petty slights and insults which had been offered to her from time to time; it is aggressive, as though replying to enemies rather than appealing to friends; and no one of either the finer or the softer qualities of her nature is at all adequately indicated. it is, in short, the least worthy of her true self of all the writings of her life. the reasons of this unfortunate fact was not far to seek. her rationalism, and the abuse and moral ill-usage which she had incurred by her avowal of her anti-theological opinions, were still new to her. her very thoughts, replacing as they did the ideas which she held without examination for some twenty years (the time which intervened between her devotional writings and her _eastern life_) were still so far new that they had not the unconsciousness and the quiet placidity which habit alone gives; for new ideas, like new clothes, sit uneasily, and are noticeable to their wearer, however carefully they may have been fitted before adoption. again, the announcement in the press that her illness was fatal revived the discussion of her infidelity, and brought down upon her a whole avalanche of signed and anonymous letters, of little tracts, awe-inspiring hymns, and manuals of divinity. the letters were controversial, admonishing, minatory, or entreating; but whatever their character they were all agreed upon one point, viz., that her unbelief in christianity was a frightful sin, of which she had been willfully guilty. they all agreed in supposing that it was within her own volition to resume her previous faith, and that she would not only go to eternal perdition if she did not put on again her old beliefs, but that she would richly deserve to do so for her willful wickedness. thus, as miss arnold remarked to me, the moment at which she wrote the _autobiography_ was the most aggressive and unpleasant of her whole life. conscious as she was of the purity of her motives in uttering her philosophical opinions, she found herself suddenly spoken to by a multitude, whom she could not but know were mentally and morally incapable of judging her, as a sinner, worthy of their pity and reprobation. knowing that she had long been recognized as a teacher, in advance of the mass of society in knowledge and power of thought, here was a crowd of people talking to her in the tones which they might have adopted towards some ignorant inmate of a prison. what wonder that her wounded self-esteem seemed for a little while to pass into vanity, when she had to remind the world, from which such insults were pouring in, of all that she had done for its instruction in the past? what wonder that the strength which was summed up to bear with fortitude this species of modern martyrdom, seemed to give a tone of coldness and hardness to writing of so personal a kind? then the extreme haste with which the writing and printing were done gave no time for the subsidence of such painful impressions; and great physical suffering and weakness, together with the powerful depressing medicines which were being employed, added to the difficulty of writing with calmness, and with a full possession of the sufferer's whole nature. in short, an autobiography could not have been written under less favorable conditions. all things taken into account, it is no wonder that those who knew and loved her whole personality were shocked and amazed at the inadequate presentation given of it in those volumes. the sensitive, unselfish, loving, domestic woman, and the just, careful, disinterested, conscientious and logical author, were alike obscured rather than revealed; and the biographer whom she chose to complete the work had neither the intimate personal knowledge, the mental faculty which might have supplied its place, nor the literary skill requisite to present a truer picture. her _autobiography_ completed, the plates engraved, and all publishing arrangements made, she might, had she been an ordinary invalid, have settled down into quiet after so hard-working a life. harriet martineau could not do this. her labors continued uninterruptedly, and were pursued to the utmost limit which her illness would allow. she did not cease (except during the few months that the _autobiography_ was in hand) writing her "leaders" for the _daily news_. every week it contained articles by her, instructing thousands of readers. yet she was _very_ ill. she never left her home again, after that journey to london early in . sometimes she was well enough to go out upon her terrace; and she frequently sat in her porch, which was a bower, in the summer time, of clematis, honeysuckle, and passion-flowers, intermingled with ivy; but she could do no more. she was given, as soon as she became ill, the daughterly care of her niece, maria, the daughter of her elder brother, robert martineau, of birmingham; and no mother ever received tenderer care or more valuable assistance from her own child than harriet martineau did from the sensible and affectionate girl whose life was thenceforth devoted to her service. maria once tried if her aunt could be taken out of her own grounds in a bath-chair; but before they reached the gates a fainting fit came on, with such appalling symptoms of stoppage of the heart that the experiment was never repeated. sometimes miss martineau would be well enough to see visitors; more frequently, however, those whom she would most have liked to talk with had to be sent away by the doctor's orders. but, through it all, her work continued. soon after the _autobiography_ was finished, she wrote a long paper upon a most important subject, and one which she felt to be a source of the gravest anxiety for the future of english politics--the true sphere of state interference with daily life. the common ignorance and carelessness upon this point she believed to be the most painful and perilous feature of our present situation. it has been brought to light by beneficent action which is, in another view, altogether encouraging. our benevolence towards the helpless, and our interest in personal morality, have grown into a sort of public pursuit; and they have taken such a hold on us that we may fairly hope that the wretched and the wronged will never more be thrust out of sight. but, in the pursuit of our new objects, we have fallen back--far further than --in the principle of our legislative proposals--undertaking to provide by law against personal vices, and certain special social contracts. her devotion to freedom, and her belief in personal liberty, led her to write an article on "meddlesome legislation" for the _westminster review_. her pecuniary sacrifices for the _review_ had been made because she looked upon it as an organ for free speech. her feelings may be imagined when the editor refused to insert this article, not on any ground of principle, but merely because it spoke too freely of some of the advocates of meddlesome factory laws. the essay was published however, as a pamphlet, and had such influence upon a bill then before parliament that the association of factory occupiers requested to be allowed to signalize their appreciation of it by giving one hundred guineas in her name to a charity. a somewhat similar piece of work followed in the next year, a rather lengthy pamphlet _on corporate traditions and national rights_. she offered nothing more to the _westminster review_, however, for some time; not, indeed, until that subject in which she took so profound an interest, the welfare of the united states, and the progress of the anti-slavery cause, seemed to require of her that she should avail herself of every possible means of addressing the public upon it. then, in , she wrote an article on _the manifest destiny of the american union_, which appeared in the _westminster_ for july of that year. having thus signalized her forgiveness of that _review_, she went on writing again for it for a little while. in the october number of the same year there was a paper by her on _female dress_ in . crinoline had then lately been introduced by the empress of the french. if one good, rousing argument could have stood in the path of fashion, this amusing and vigorous paper from harriet martineau's sick-room might have answered the purpose. but, alas! crinoline flourished; and five whole years later on was still so enormous that she took up her parable against it once more, in _once a week_, as the cause of "willful murder." about this time she determined to assume the prefix of "mrs." "there were so many misses martineau," she said; and, besides, she felt the absurdity of a woman of mature years bearing only the same complimentary title as is accorded to a little girl in short frocks at school. her cards and the envelopes of her friends bore thenceforward the inscription, "mrs. harriet martineau." although she continued to write, contributing almost every day to the _daily news_, as well as to these larger periodicals, she was, it must be remembered, an invalid. her health fluctuated from day to day; but it may as well be explicitly stated that she was more or less ill during the whole of the rest of her life. she suffered a considerable amount daily of actual pain, which was partly the consequence of the medicines prescribed for her, and partly the result of the displacement of the internal organs arising, as her doctors led her to suppose, from the enlargement of the heart; but in reality, as was afterwards discovered, from the growth of a tumor. her most constant afflictions were the difficulty of breathing, dizziness, and dimness of sight, resulting from disturbed circulation. at irregular, but not infrequent, intervals she was seized with fainting-fits, in which her heart appeared to entirely cease beating for a minute or two; and it was not certain from day to day but that she might die in one of these attacks. not only did she continue her work under these conditions, but her interest in her poor neighbors remained unabated. there is more than one man now living in ambleside who traces a part of his prosperity to the interest which she from her sick-room displayed in his progress. a photograph of her, still sold in ambleside, was taken in her own drawing-room by a young beginner whom she allowed thus to benefit himself. he and several others were given free access to her library. a sickly young woman in the village was made a regular sharer in the good things--the wine, the turtle soup, the game and the flowers--which devoted friends sent frequently to cheer harriet martineau's retirement. every christmas, there was a party of the oldest inhabitants of ambleside invited to spend a long day in the kitchen of the "knoll." the residents in her own cottages looked upon her less as a landlady than as a friend to whom to send in every difficulty. nor did she cease to do whatever was possible to her in the local public life. the question of church rates was approaching a crisis when she was taken ill; and when the ambleside quakers resolved to organize resistance to payment of these rates, they found harriet martineau ready to help. the householders who refused to pay were summoned before the local bench; and it was harriet martineau whom the justices selected to be distrained upon; but events marched rapidly, and the distraint was not made. the next article that she contributed to the _westminster review_ appeared in the july ( ) number, and, under the title of _the last days of church rates_, gave an account of the efforts by which non-conformists in all parts of the country were rendering this impost impossible. in october, , there was another long article in the _westminster_, entitled _travel during the last half-century_. she was now, however, growing tired of wasting her work in that quarter, and, as we shall presently see, she sought a more influential and appreciative medium for her longer communications with the public. subjects which could be treated briefly were always taken up as "leaders" for the _daily news_. lengthier topics, too, were occasionally dealt with in those columns in the form of serial articles. one set of papers on _the endowed schools of ireland_, were contributed in this manner, in , to the _daily news_, and afterwards reprinted in a small volume. in that same year occurred the terrible indian crisis which compelled the people of this country to give, for a time, the attention which they so begrudge to their great dependency. miss martineau then wrote a series of articles, under the title of _the history of british rule in india_, for the _daily news_, and this most useful work was immediately re-published in a volume. alas! even she could not make so involved and distant a story interesting; but her book was clear and vivid, and whenever it dealt with the practical problem of the moment, it was full of wisdom and conscientiousness. this volume was immediately followed by _suggestions towards the future government of india_. the preface of the first is dated october, ; and that of the second, january, . the key-note of these books is a plea for the government of india according to indian ideas; and, as a natural consequence, its government with the assistance of its natives. courage as well as insight were required at that particular moment of popular passion to put forward these calm, statesman-like ideas. the wisdom and the practical value of the books cannot be shown by extracts; but one paragraph may be given as a faint indication of the tone: "if instead of attempting to hold india as a preserve of english destinies, a nursery of british fortunes, we throw it open with the aim of developing india for the indians, by means of british knowledge and equity, we shall find our own highest advantage, political and material, and may possibly recognize brethren and comrades at length, where we have hitherto perceived only savages, innocents, or foes."[ ] such was the spirit to which the _daily news_, under harriet martineau's hand, led the people at a moment of great political excitement. the amplest testimony to the practical wisdom of the suggestions that she made was borne by those anglo-indians who were qualified to judge. [ ] _future government of india_, p. . in june, , she wrote the first letter, which lies before me, to her relative, mr. henry reeve, the editor of the _edinburgh review_. in this, after telling him that she never before has offered or wished to write for that _review_, because in politics she had generally disagreed with it (to her, it may be remarked in passing, toryism was less odious than official whigism), she says that she has now a subject in view which she thinks would be suitable for the pages of the good old whig organ. before entering into details, she begs him to tell her frankly if any article will be refused merely because it comes from her. she adds that her health is so sunk and her life so precarious, that all her engagements have to be made with an explanation of the chances against their fulfillment; still she _does_ write a good deal, and with higher success than in her younger days. mr. reeve replied cordially inviting her contributions, and the result was the establishment both of an intimate correspondence with him, and of a relationship with the _review_ under his charge, which lasted until she could write no more. the particular subject which she offered mr. reeve at first did not seem to him a suitable one. the title of it was to have been _french invasion panics_; but as mr. reeve did not like the idea, the paper was not written. but for the _edinburgh_ of april, , she wrote a long article on _female industry_, which attracted much attention. its purpose was to show how greatly the conditions of women's lives are altered in this century from what they were of old. "a very large proportion of the women of england earn their own bread; and there is no saying how much good may be done by a timely recognition of this simple truth. a social organization framed for a community of which half stayed at home while the other half went out to work, cannot answer the purposes of a society of which a quarter remains at home while three-quarters go out to work." after considering in detail, with equal benevolence and wisdom, the condition of the various classes of women workers--those employed in agriculture, mines, fishing, domestic service, needlework, and shop-keeping, and suggesting, in passing, the schools of cookery which have since become established facts, the article concludes: "the tale is plain enough. so far from our countrywomen being all maintained as a matter of fact by us, the 'bread-winners,' three millions out of six of adult english women work for subsistence, and two out of the three in independence. with this new condition of affairs new duties and new views must be adopted. old obstructions must be removed; and the aim must be set before us, as a nation as well as in private life, to provide for the free development and full use of the powers of every member of the community." it scarcely needs to be pointed out that here she went quietly but surely to the foundation of that whole class of new claims and demands on behalf of the women of our modern world, of which she was so valuable an advocate, and for the granting of which her life was so excellent a plea. in these few sentences she at one time displayed the character of the changes required, and the reasons why it is now necessary, as it did not use to be, that women should be completely enfranchised, industrially and otherwise. the year was a very busy one. besides the long article just mentioned, she published in april of that year quite a large volume on _england and her soldiers_. the book was written to aid the work which her beloved friend florence nightingale, had in hand for the benefit of the army. it was, in effect, a popularization of all that had come out before the royal commission on the sanitary condition of the army; with the additional advantage of the views and opinions of florence nightingale, studied at first hand. one of the most beautiful features of the book is the hearty and generous delight with which the one illustrious lady recounts the efforts, the sacrifices, and the triumphs of the other. in , also, mrs. martineau began to write frequent letters for publication to the american _anti-slavery standard_. the affairs of the republic were plainly approaching a crisis; and those in america who knew how well-informed she was on the politics of both countries, and on political principles, were anxious to have the guidance that only she could give in the difficult time that was approaching. during the three years, to , she sent over ninety long articles for publication in america. an article on _trades unions_, denouncing the tyranny of men in fustian coats sitting round a beer-shop table, as to the full as mischievous as that of crowned and titled despots, appeared in the _edinburgh review_ for october, . in the july ( ) issue of the same _review_ she wrote on _russia_, and in october of that year on _the american union_. besides these large undertakings, she was writing during these years almost weekly articles, on one topic or another, for the illustrated periodical _once a week_; whilst the _daily news_ "leaders" continued without intermission during the whole time. as regards these latter, i shall presently mention when she entirely ceased to write; but in the meanwhile i do not attempt to follow them in detail. nothing that i could say would give any adequate impression of their quality. _that_ may be sufficiently judged by the fact that the newspaper in which they were issued was one of the best of the great london dailies; and that, during her time, it touched the highest point of influence and circulation, as the organ of no clique, but the consistent advocate of high principles, and just, consistent, sound (not mere "liberal party") political action. as to the subjects of the _daily news_ articles, they range over the whole field of public interests, excepting only those "hot and hot" topics which had to be treated immediately that fresh news about them reached london. those who were with mrs. martineau tell me that the only difficulty with her was to choose what subject she would treat each day, out of the many that offered. she kept up an extensive correspondence, and read continually; and her fertile mind, highly cultivated as it was by her life-long studies, had some original and valuable contribution to make upon the vast variety of the topics of which each day brought suggestions. the marvel that a sick lady, shut up in her house in a remote village, could thus keep touch with and take an active part in all the interests and movements of the great world, increases the more it is considered. the very correspondence by which she was aided in knowing and feeling what the public mind was stirred about, was in itself a heavy labor, and a great tax upon such feeble strength as she possessed. the letters with which mr. reeve has favored me give glimpses of how ideas and calls came to her sometimes. here is a graphic account, for instance, of a man riding up with a telegram from miss nightingale--"agitate! agitate! for lord de grey in place of sir g. cornewall lewis"--which gives the first intimation in ambleside that the post of war minister is vacant. the newspaper arrives later, and lewis' death is learned; so a "leader" is written early next morning, to catch the coach, and appears in the following morning's _daily news_. presently lord de grey is appointed, and then the two women friends rejoice together in the chance of getting army reforms made by a minister who, they hope, will not be a slave to royal influences. another time she tells mr. reeve how she is treating the _reversion of mysore_ in the _daily news_, on the suggestion of a man learned in indian affairs; and again, that she is reviewing a book of eastern travel at the request of a friend. in fine, there were constant letters seeking to engage her interest and aid in every description of reforms, and for all kinds of movements in public affairs. but with all the wide circle of suggesting correspondents, the wonder of the prolific mind working so actively from the ambleside hermitage remains untouched. perhaps i cannot better show how much she did, and how wide a range she covered, in _daily news_ "leaders," than by giving a list of the articles of a single year. i take , really at random. it was simply the page at which the office ledger happened to be open before me. here are the subjects of her _daily news_ "leaders" in : the american union; the king of prussia; arterial drainage; sidney herbert; the secession of south carolina; cotton supply; laborers' dwellings; the american difficulty (two days); destitution and its remedy; the american revolution; cotton culture; the american union; indian affairs; america; north and south; american politics; agricultural labor; the london bakers; president buchanan; the southern confederacy; united states population; the duchess of kent; indian famines; agricultural statistics; president lincoln's address; indian currency; american census; the southern confederacy; the action of the south; the census; america and cotton; the american envoy; lord canning's address; the american crisis; spain and san domingo; east indian irrigation; water-mills; hayti and san domingo; the conflict in america; american movements; the secession party; the american contest; the literary fund; working-men's visit to paris; mr. clay's letter; the american contest; money's "java" (four articles); mr. douglas; our american relations; lord campbell; results of american strife; our cotton supply; american union; soldiers' homes; indian irrigation; san domingo; american movements; slavery in america; the morrill tariff; drainage in agriculture; neutrality with america; the builders' strike; lord herbert; lord elgin's government; the builders' dispute; the strike; the american contest; indian famines; syrian improvement; affairs of hayti; cotton supply; the american war and slavery; mr. cameron and general butler; post-office robberies; the american press; mrs. stowe; the morrill tariff; american affairs; domestic servants; the education minutes; the georgian circular; french free trade; the fremont resolution; laborers' improvidence; american humiliation; the education code; a real social evil; captain jervis in america; the american contest; indian cotton; slaves in america; the prince of wales; american movements; lancashire cotton trade; india and cotton; cotton growing; the herbert testimonial; captain wilkes' antecedents; arterial drainage; the american controversy; land in india; slaves in america; death of prince albert; slavery; loyalty in canada; review of the year, five columns long. this gives a total of one hundred and nine leading articles, in that one year, on political and social affairs. in the same year she wrote to the boston _anti-slavery standard_ as much matter as would have made about forty-five "leaders;" and during the same period she regularly contributed to _once a week_[ ] a fortnightly article on some current topic, and also a series of biographical sketches entitled "representative men." these _once a week_ articles were all much longer than "leaders;" the year's aggregate of space filled, in , is two hundred and eighty-one of the closely printed columns of _once a week_; and this would be equivalent to at least one hundred and forty leading articles in the usual "leaded" type. i need not give a complete list of titles of the year's _once a week_ articles; but a few may be cited to show what class of subjects she selected: "our peasantry in progress," "ireland and her queen," "the harvest," "the domestic service question," "what women are educated for," "american soldiering," "deaths by fire," "the sheffield outrages," "education and the racing season." [ ] most of these papers are signed "from the mountain." such was harriet martineau's work for the year ; and thus could she, confined to her house, comprehend and care for the condition of mankind. it will be noticed that she had written on domestic servants both in the _daily news_ and _once a week_; but still she had not said all that she wished to say about the subject, and early in the next year she wrote a long article on it, which appeared in the _edinburgh_ for april, . it is a capital article, distinguished alike by common-sense, and by wide-reaching sympathy; _womanly_ in the best sense--in its domestic knowledge, and its feeling for women in their perplexities and troubles, whether as servants or mistresses,--and yet philosophical in its calmness, its power of tracing from causes to effects, and its practical wisdom in forestalling future difficulties. in this year she began to write historical stories, "historiettes," as she called them, for _once a week_. as fictions, they are not equal to her best productions of that class; but their special value was less in this direction, or even in the detailed historical knowledge that they displayed, than in the insight into the philosophy of political history which the reader gained. they were illustrated by millais, and proved so attractive that they were continued during the next two years. one, dealing with the constitutional struggle in the reign of charles i., and called "the hampdens," has been re-published so recently as . a large portion of her time and thought was absorbed, in these years, by the american struggle and its consequences. loving the united states and their people as she did, the interest and anxiety with which she watched their progress were extreme. she was no coward--as it is, no doubt, hardly necessary to remark on this page--and though she grieved deeply for the sufferings both of personal friends and of the whole country, yet her soul rose up in noble exultation over the courage, the resolution, and the high-mindedness of the bulk of the american nation. over here, she threw herself with warm eagerness into the effort to support those lancashire workers upon whom fell so heavy a tax of deprivation in the cotton famine. the patience, the quietness, the heroism with which our north-country workers bore all that they had to suffer, supported as they were by the sympathy of the mass of their fellow-countrymen, and by their own intelligent convictions that they were aiding a good cause by remaining peaceful and quiet--this was just the sort of thing to arouse all harriet martineau's loving sympathies. "her face would all light up and the tears would rush to her eyes whenever she was told of a noble deed," says miss arnold; "no matter how humble the doer, or how small the matter might seem, you could see the delight it gave her to know that a fine, brave, or unselfish act had been done." animated by such respectful joy in the attitude of the lancashire workers, she threw herself into their service; and her correspondence on this topic during , when she used all her public and private influence on their behalf, and employed her best energies in aiding and advising the relief committees, would fill a large volume. in the midst of her labors for america, she could not but be gratified by the testimonies which constantly reached her from that country to the appreciation of the work which she had done and was doing. _the history of the peace_ was reprinted in boston in the very midst of the civil war, "at the instance of men of business throughout the country, who believe it will do great good from its political and yet more economical lessons, which are so much wanted." the publishers of the _atlantic monthly_ appealed to her to write them a series of articles on "military hygiene;" and, over-pressed as she was, she could not refuse a request which enabled her to do much good service for the soldiers of the north, for whom she felt so deeply. nor were more private tributes to the value of her efforts lacking. a set of the _rebellion record_, published by putnam, was sent to her with the cover stamped under the title with these words: "presented by citizens of new york to harriet martineau;" and innumerable books came with testimonies inscribed by the writers, such as that in henry wilson's _slave power in america_, which was as follows: "mrs. harriet martineau; with the gratitude of the author for her friendship for his country, and her devotion to freedom."[ ] [ ] the highest honor yet done to her memory is the work of our sisters and brothers across the atlantic. a public subscription has raised funds for a statue of harriet martineau, which has been executed by anne whitney, in white marble. the statue represents mrs. martineau seated, with her hands folded over a manuscript on her knees. the head is raised, and has a light veil thrown over the back of it and falling down upon the shoulders, while a shawl is draped partially over the figure. the eyes are looking forth, as though in that thoughtful questioning of the future to which she often gave herself. the statue was unveiled in the old south hall, boston, december th, , in the presence of many notable personages. mrs. mary livermore presided, and speeches were made by william lloyd garrison, jun., and wendell phillips, in the case of the last-named it was his final speech, for he, too, six weeks after, was numbered amongst those who are at rest. "the audience sat in silence for a moment as the white vision was unveiled; then went up such applause as stirred the echoes of the historic interior in which the ceremony took place." in the latter part of the year , harriet martineau wrote a paper on "our convict system," which appeared in the following january number of the _edinburgh_. it will be noted that she never wrote on the politics of the day--the action of the government and opposition of the moment--in this _review_; her political principles were too democratic for the great whig organ. in _once a week_, however, her articles became more decisively political year by year. some of her best political papers are in that magazine for . the most noteworthy feature in them are their basis of principles and not of party, and their practical wisdom. when i speak of her devotion to principles, in politics, i half fear that i may be misunderstood--for so shockingly does cant spawn its loathsomeness over every holy phrase, that such expressions come to us "defamed by every charlatan," and doubtful in their use. but she was neither doctrinaire, nor blind, nor pig-headed, nor pharisaic, nor jealous, nor scheming; but wise, brave, truthful, upright, and independent. love of justice and truthfulness of speech were as much to her in public affairs as they are to any high-minded person in private. her desire in her thoughts and utterances on politics was simply to secure "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" of the people; and the spirit in which she worked was correctly appraised by the then editor of the _daily news_, william weir, when he wrote to her in these terms, in :-- i have never before met--i do not hope again to meet--one so earnest (as you) to promote progress, so practical in the means by which to arrive at it. my aim in life is to be able to say, when it is closing, "i, too, have done somewhat, though little, to benefit my kind;" and there are so few who do not regard this as quixotism or hypocrisy, that i shrink even from confessing it. he so well recognized that as truly _her_ aim also that he did not fear to utter to her his high aspiration. it is in this spirit that her political articles are written, and the result of the constant reference to principles is that her essays are almost as instructive reading now as they were when first published; _then_, their interest and their importance were both incalculable. of such articles harriet martineau wrote in the _daily news_, from first to last, _sixteen hundred and forty-two_: besides the great number that i have referred to, which appeared in other journals. i wonder how many of the men who have presumed to say that the women are "incapable of understanding politics," or of "sympathizing in great causes," received a large part of their political education, and of rousing stimulus to public-spirited action, from those journalistic writings by harriet martineau? an instructive article on "the progress of the negro race" was prepared for the _edinburgh_ of january, . only a few weeks after the appearance of this, there fell upon her the greatest blow of her old age. her beloved niece maria, who had for so long filled the place of a daughter to her, was taken ill with typhoid fever, and died after a three weeks' illness. maria martineau's active disposition, and her intellectual power (which was far above the average) had made her an ideal companion for her aunt, and the blow to _her_ was a terrible one. ill and suffering as she was before, this shock completed the wreck of harriet martineau's health. she had a dreary time of illness immediately after her niece's death; and although she went on writing for some time longer, it was always with the feeling that the end of her long life's industry was near at hand. she was not left alone; for maria's youngest sister, jane, presently offered voluntarily to fill, as far as she could, the vacant place at "the knoll." the family from which these sisters came was one in which kindliness and generosity were (and are to this day, with its younger members who remain) distinguishing features. it was no light matter for mr. and mrs. robert martineau to part with a second daughter to their sister; but, as it was jane's own wish to try to be to that beloved and honored relative what maria had been, the parents would not refuse their permission. harriet wrote of this to mr. reeve with her heart full; telling him how "humbly grateful" she felt for what was so generously offered to her, and with what thankfulness she accepted the blessing. even in such circumstances, she could note what a delight it was to find that maria's own spirit of devotedness prevailed amongst them all--for nothing could be nobler and sweeter than the conduct of everyone. by june of that same year, , mrs. martineau was ready to undertake another article on a topic which pressed upon her mind, "co-operative societies," which was published in the _edinburgh_ for october following. she went on writing for the _daily news_, through that year and the next, though the effort came to be constantly more and more laborious. her interest in public affairs did not flag; nor is there the least sign of failure of power in her letters; but she became increasingly conscious that it was a strain upon her to write under the responsibility of addressing the public. early in she wrote some articles on "the scarcity of nurses," "poked up to do it," as she said, by florence nightingale. in the april of the same year was prepared an article on "female convicts," which was published in the _edinburgh_ for october. in sending this she intimated to the editor that it would be her last contribution, as she felt the strain of such writing too great for her strength. after all she did prepare one more article for the _edinburgh_, though it was as long afterwards as . this was the paper on "salem witchcraft," which will be found in the number of that _review_ for july. it formed harriet martineau's last contribution of any length to literature; and she wrote it with some reluctance, after having suggested the subject to mr. reeve, and he having replied that he could find no one suitable to undertake it but herself. she was very loath to cease her writing for the _daily news_, and continued it until the spring of . it was a great trial when at last the moment came that she felt she absolutely _must_ be freed from the obligation and the temptation to frequent work. but the spring was always her worst time as to health; and during this customary vernal exacerbation of illness, in april, , she found herself obliged at last, after fourteen years' service, to send in her resignation to the _daily news_. when she thus terminated her connection with the paper through whose columns she had spoken so long, she practically concluded her literary life. neither her intellectual powers, nor her interest in public affairs, were perceptibly diminished; as will presently be seen, these continued to the end of her life all but unabated. her regular literary exertions were now, however, at an end; and she was ill enough by this time, her niece tells me, to feel only relief at being freed from the constant pressure of the duty of thought and speech. chapter xi. the last years. harriet martineau had never gone the right way to work to become rich by literature. she had not chosen her subjects with a view to the mere monetary success she might attain, and, not infrequently, she had displayed a rare generosity in her pecuniary affairs. in april, , she was plunged into perplexity about the means of living, by the temporary failure of the brighton railway to pay its dividends. after all her work, she had but little to lose. she had from investments in the preference stock of that railway £ per annum, and she had only £ yearly from all other sources. such was the fortune saved, after labors such as hers, through a long life of industry and thrift. there was a beautiful contest between the inmates of that home, when the trouble came, as to which of them should begin to make the necessary sacrifices involved in economizing. miss jane martineau and the maid caroline were each ready with their offers, and the invalid mistress of the house was with difficulty induced to continue her wine and dinner ale, while she declared, with a brave assumption of carelessness, that she should be rather glad than otherwise to be rid of seeing the _times_ daily and getting the periodic box of books from "mudie's." it is touching to note how she tried to lightly pass off this sacrifice of current literature, when one knows that reading was the chief solace of her lonely and suffering days. her family intervened, however, to prevent any such deprivations, and by-and-by the company resumed payment of its dividends. in , she received a generous offer, which touched her very deeply. mr. j. r. robinson, of the _daily news_, proposed to her that there should be a reprint of the several biographical sketches which she had contributed to the paper during her connection with it; and he offered to take all the trouble and responsibility of putting the volume through the press, while leaving to her the whole of the profits. she had not even supposed that the copyright in the biographies which she had written for the paper from time to time, upon the occasions of the deaths of eminent persons, remained her property. mr. robinson had the satisfaction of assuring her that the proprietors held her at liberty to reproduce these writings, and, with that comrade's generosity which is not altogether rare among journalists, her kind friend devoted himself to securing her a good publisher, and editing the volume, _biographical sketches_, for her benefit. these vignettes well deserved re-production. she had had more or less personal acquaintance with nearly every one of the forty-six eminent persons of whom she treated; and the portraits which she sketched were equally vivid and impartial. the work was received by the public with an enthusiasm which repaid mr. robinson for his generous efforts. it was reprinted in america; and it is now in its fourth english edition. the last occasion upon which she was to give her powers and her influence to a difficult but great public work must now be mentioned. it was the final effort of her career. marked as that life had been all through by devotedness to public duty, she never before was engaged in a task so painful and difficult, or one which, upon mere personal grounds, she might more strongly have desired to evade. but at near seventy years old, and so enfeebled that she had thought her work quite finished, she no more hesitated to come to the front under fire when it became necessary, than she had done in those active younger days when combat may have had its own delights. the subject was an act of parliament passed in , having reference to certain police powers over women in various large towns. "in our time, or in any other," wrote mrs. martineau, "there never was a graver question." it was clear to her that if women "did not insist upon the restoration of the most sacred liberties of half the people of england, men alone would never do it;" and she wrote four letters on the subject to the _daily news_, as powerful, as sensible, as free from cant of any kind, as clear in the appreciation of facts, and as definite and able in the presentation of them, as anything she had ever written. she wrote, also, and signed an "appeal to the women of england" upon the subject, where her name headed the list of signers, whilst that of florence nightingale came next. two such women, venerated not less for the intellectual capacity and practical wisdom than for the devoted benevolence that they had shown in their long lives, were well able to arouse and lead the moral sense of the womanhood of england in this crisis. other respected names were soon added to theirs, but it would not be easy to over-estimate the value of the self-sacrificing, brave action, at the most critical moment, of these two great and honorable women. besides writing articles, and appeals, and signing documents which were placarded as election posters in some great towns, mrs. martineau helped that cause in the way told in the following letter to mr. atkinson: may st, . one pleasant thing has happened lately. i _longed_ for money for a public object [repeal of the acts in question], and, unable to do better, worked a chair, and had it beautifully made up. it was produced at a great evening party in, london, and seized upon and vehemently competed for, and it has actually brought fifty guineas! in the middle of the night it occurs to me what a thing it is to give fifty guineas--so much as i had longed for money to give that fund. i was asked for a letter of explanation and statement to go with the chair, and, of course, did it by that post. work for this cause formed the most keen and active interest of her latest years. in this she thought and labored constantly. she gave her name and support to other objects, but only quietly. amongst other things she was a member of the women's suffrage society; and she was a subscriber to the movement for the medical education of women. in all public affairs, indeed, her interest remained keen and unabated to the very last, as the letters for which i am indebted to mr. atkinson, and which i am to quote, will abundantly show. these letters will indicate, too, something of the quiet course of her now uneventful daily life. sick and weary as she was, it will be seen that literature and politics, the public welfare, and the concerns of her household's inmates, still occupied her thoughts and her pen. letters to mr. atkinson. august , . ... i am as careful as possible to prevent anyone losing sleep on my account, and being disturbed at meals, or failing in air, exercise and pleasure. if these regular healthy habits of my household become difficult, we are to have a trained nurse at once. this is settled. i am disposed to think, myself, that the last stage will be short, probably the end sudden. the tone of this last sentence is no affectation. "she used to talk about her death as if it meant no more than going into the next room," said one who knew her in these years. september , . ... i am not sure whether you have read dr. bence jones's _life and letters of faraday_. i have been thankful, this last week, for the strong interest of that book, which puts continental affairs out of my head for hours together. the first half volume is rather tiresome--giving us four times as much as necessary of the uncultivated youth's early prosing on crude moralities, etc. it is quite right to give us _some_ of this, to show from how low a point of thought and style he rose up to his perfection of expression as a lecturer and writer; but a quarter of the early stuff would have been enough for that. the succeeding part, for hundreds of pages, is the richest treat i have had for many a day. i can only distantly and dimly follow the scientific lectures and writings; but i understand enough of sympathy; and the disclosures of the moral nature of the man is perfectly exquisite. i have never known, and have scarcely dreamed of, a spirit and temper so thoroughly uniting the best attributes of the sage and the child. october , . i had my envelope directed yesterday, but was prevented writing, and in the evening came your welcome letter. i am glad to know _when_ you mean to leave your quarters; and every line from france is interesting. i wonder whether you remember a night in london when dear mrs. reid and you and i were returning in her carriage from exeter hall and the _messiah_. i was saying that that sacred drama reminded me of holy philæ, and the apotheosis of osiris, and how the one was as true as the other, with its "peace on earth, and good-will to men," so false a prophesy, etc., etc. whereupon mrs. reid said, plaintively (of the _messiah_), "i believe it all at the time," but she did not set up any pretense of the promises having been fulfilled. it does not seem as if christendom had got on very much since the world said, "see how these christians love one another!" i seem to have got to a new state of mind about war, or i may perhaps forget the emotions of youth; but i seem never before to have felt the horror, disgust, shame--in short, misery--that the spectacle of this war creates now. i am reading less and less in the newspapers; for the truth is, i cannot endure it. there is no good in any _hopeless_ spectacle; and for france, i am, like, most people, utterly hopeless.... by selling themselves for twenty years to the worst and meanest man in europe, the people of france have incurred destruction; and though most of us knew this all the time, we do not suffer the less from the spectacle now.... i suppose the french will have no alternative but peace in a little while; but, when all that is settled, internal strife and domestic ruin will remain ahead. the truth is, the _morale_ of the french is corrupted to the core. all habit of integrity and sincerity is apparently lost; and when a people prefers deception to truth, vain-glory to honor, passion to reason--all is over. i will leave it, for it is a terrible subject. i must just say that i believe and know that there _are_ french citizens--a very few--who understand the case, but they are as wretched as they necessarily must be. but "the gay, licentious, proud," the pleasure-loving, self-seeking aristocracy, and the brutally ignorant rural population, must entirely paralyze the intelligent, an honest few scattered in their midst. but i must leave all this. the only news we have is of the royal marriage (princess louise) which pleases everybody. it is a really great event--as a sign politically, and as a fact socially and morally. after the queen's marriage, i wrote repeatedly on behalf of repealing the royal marriage act _then_, while there could be no invidious appearance in it. the present chaotic condition of protestant princedoms in germany may answer the purpose almost as well as a period of abeyance. any way, the relaxation seems a wise and happy one. my items of news are small in comparison, but not small to me; especially that a happy idea struck me lately, of trying a spring mattress as a means of obtaining sleep of some continuance. i have ventured upon getting one; and, after four nights, there is no doubt of my being able to sleep longer, and with more loss of consciousness than for a very long time. last night i once slept three hours with only one break. otherwise, i go on much the same. there is one objection to these beds which healthy people are unaware of--that so much more strength is required to move in bed, from want of _purchase_. this is a trouble, but the advantages far outweigh it. dear jenny comes home to-morrow evening, all the better, i am assured, for three weeks at the sea, in breeze and sun, and all manner of beauty of land and sea (at barmouth, and with a merry party of young people). and here is a game basket, arrived from parts unknown, with a fine hare, two brace of partridges, and a pheasant. a savory welcome for jenny! cousin mary has been more good and kind than i can say. she stays for jenny, and leaves us on friday. i must not begin upon huxley, tyndall, and evans, whom i have been reading. much pleasure to you, dear friend, in your closing weeks. yours ever, h. martineau. the sleepless nights repeatedly mentioned in these letters were a source of great suffering to her in these latest years; under medical advice she tried smoking as a means of procuring better rest, with some success. she smoked usually through the chiboque which she had brought home with her from the east, and which she had there learned to use, as she relates with her customary simplicity and directness in the appendix to _eastern life_: "i found it good for my health," she says there, "and i saw no more reason why i should not take it than why english ladies should not take their glass of sherry at home--an indulgence which i do not need. i continued the use of my chiboque for some weeks after my return, and then only left it off because of the inconvenience." when health and comfort were to be promoted by it, she resumed it. her nights were, nevertheless, very broken, and frequent allusions occur in her letters to the suffering of sleeplessness, with its concomitant of drowsiness in the day-time. the next letter is on trivial topics, truly; but is none the less valuable for the unconscious record which it affords of her domestic character. the anxiety for her household companion's enjoyment, the delight in the kindness that the young folk had shown to each other and to the poor christmas guests, the pleasure in the happiness of other people, are all characteristic features which are of _no trivial_ consequence. ambleside, jan. , ' . i am so sorry for the way you are passing from the old year to the new that i cannot help saying so. i ought to be anything but sorry, considering what good you are doing--essential, indispensable good; but you must be so longing for your own quiet, warm home, and the friends around it, that i heartily wish you were there.... as for me, my business is to promote, as far as possible, the cheerfulness of my household. there really has been much fun,--and yet more sober enjoyment, throughout this particular christmas. in my secret mind i am nervously anxious about jenny to whom cold is a sort of poison; but, when she had once observed that there was much less cold here than at home, or anywhere else that she could be, i determined to say no more, and to make the best of it. she said it for my sake, i know (the only reason for her ever speaking of herself), and i frankly received it as a comfortable saying. she is getting on better than any of us expected, and she has been thoroughly happy in exercising our hospitalities.... jenny's brother frank came for three days at christmas; and harriet made herself housekeeper and secretary, and made jenny the guest, to set her wholly at liberty for her brother. it was quite a pretty sight--they were all so happy! there was a kitchen party on christmas day; by far the best we ever had; for frank did the thing thoroughly--read a comic tale, taught the folk games, played off the snapdragons, and finally produced boxes of new and strange crackers, which spat forth the most extraordinary presents! all the guests and the servants were in raptures with him. the oldest widow but one vowed that "she did not know _when_ she had seen such a gentleman"--which i think very probable. they came to dinner at noon, and stayed till past p.m. think of spending those ten hours entirely in the two kitchens, and having four meals, in the time! my nieces, _and nephews were_ tired! so was i, though i had only the consciousness of the occasion.... all this is so good for jenny! and she will like the quiet and leisure that will follow.... i am more alive and far less suffering than in the great heats of autumn. your slips and cuttings are very interesting, and i am very thankful for them. more of them when (or if) my head is worth more. of course we shall hear when you get home. may it be soon! yours ever, dear friend, h. martineau. ambleside, march , ' . _we_ are in a queer state just now. gladstone turns out _exactly_ as i expected. i once told some, who are his colleagues now, that he would do some very fine deeds--give us some separate measures of very great value, and would do it in an admirable manner; but that he would show himself incapable of governing the country. for two years he did the first thing; and now, this third year, he is showing the expected incapacity. were there ever such means thrown away as we see this session? probably you are out of the way of hearing the whole truth of the situation, and i cannot go into it here. suffice it, that gladstone totters (and three or four more), and that several departments are in such a mess and muddle that one hardly sees how they are to be brought straight again; and all this without the least occasion! one matter, in which i feel deep interest, and on which i have acted, is prospering, and we have the government at our disposal; so that we hope they will remain in office till we have secured what we want; but the more we have to do with ministers, the weaker we find them. and gladstone is not only weak as a reasoner (with all his hair-splitting), but ignorant in matters of political principle. the next letter is very characteristic and perfectly true to her state of mind with regard to flatterers: may , ' . and now you will want to know how miss ---- and we fared this day week. we (she and i) were together only three-quarters of an hour; and for part of that time i was too much exhausted to benefit much. my impression is that she is not exactly the person for the invalid room. but i may be utterly wrong in this. i might be misled by the fatiguing sort of annoyance of overpraise--of worship in fact. i don't want to be ungracious about what my books were to her in her childhood and youth; i am quite ready to believe her sincere in what she said. but not the less is it bad taste. it must be bad taste to expatiate on that one topic which it is most certain that the hearer cannot sympathize in. also, i have much doubt of her being accurate in her talk. there is a random air about her statements, and she said two or three things that certainly were mistakes, more or less. these things, and a general smoothness in her talk, while she was harsh about some of the ---- were what i did not quite like. as for the rest, she was as kind as possible; and not only kind to me, but evidently with a turn that way, and a habit of it in regard to children and friends.... june , ' . ... of all odd things, dean stanley and lady augusta have been, by way of a trip, to paris, from last monday to saturday. how _can_ they! one would think nothing could take one there but some strong call of duty. the least that one must read and hear is enough to make one's heart ache, and to spoil one's sleep, and to disfigure life till one does not wish to look at it any more. i do long to have done with it. i believe it is the first occasion in my life of my having felt hopeless of any destiny, individual or national.... how badly our public affairs are going! gladstone & co, are turning out exactly as many of us foresaw. the thing nearest my heart (repeal of the acts above alluded to), and more important than all other public questions, will do well. it is, i believe, secure, in virtue of an amount of effort and devotedness never surpassed. you know what i mean. i rest upon that achievement--a vital aim with me and others for many years--with satisfaction and entire hopefulness, but in all other directions the prospect is simply dreary. in that one case, we, who shall have achieved the object, have saved ministers from themselves, and from evil councillors. wherever they have, this year, trusted their own wisdom and resources, they have failed, or see that they must fail. they would have been _out_ since early in april, but for want of a leader on the conservative side; and they still make their party dwindle till there will be no heart or energy left in the liberal ranks--lately so strong and ardent! they may be individually clever; but they cannot govern the country. this is eminently the case with gladstone; and it may serve as the description of the group. i shall not dare to ask the arnolds about such matters--so thoroughly did they assume, when they went away, that all must be right with "william" and co. in the cabinet. nov. , ' . ... mrs. grote seems to like to open her feelings to me, as a very old friend of hers and her husband's. did i tell you that she sent me--to put me in possession of her state--her private diary, from the first day of her alarm about her husband's health to the day she sent it? it was more interesting than i can say; but it brought after it something more striking still. some half-century ago, jeremy bentham threw upon paper some thoughts on the operation of natural religion on human welfare, or _ill-fare_. his mss. were left to mrs. grote (or portions of them), and those papers were issued by the grotes under the title, "_analysis of the influence of natural religion_, etc. etc., by philip beauchamp." it is a tract of pp. it is the boldest conceivable effort at fair play; and in this particular effect, it is most striking. at the outset, all attempts to divide the "abuses" of religion from other modes of operation are repudiated at once; and the claim is so evidently sound that the effect of the exposure is singular. well! of course the tendency of the exposition is to show that the absolute darkness of the unseen life supposed must produce a demoralizing effect, and destroy ease of mind. there is something almost appalling in the unflinching representation of the mischief of the spirit of fear, of its torment, and of its damaging effects in creating a habit of adulation, in perverting the direction of our desires, in corrupting our estimate of good and evil, in leaving us, in short, no chance of living a healthy and natural life, but rather, making cowards, liars, and selfish rascals of us all. i can't go on, being tired; and you will be thinking, as you read, that this is only the old story--of the mischiefs and miseries of superstition. but there is something impressive in the cheerful simplicity with which bentham tells us his opinion of the sort of person recommended to us for a master under the name of god, and with which he warns us all of the impossibility of our being good or happy under such a supreme being. in looking at the table of contents, and seeing the catalogue he gives of evil effects of belief in the barest scheme of natural religion, one becomes aware, as if for the first time, of the atmosphere of falsehood against which we ought to have recoiled all our lives since becoming capable of thought. dec. , ' . ... i go off rapidly as a correspondent; there is no use blinking the fact. i am so slow and write so badly! and leave off _too_ tired. oddly enough, this very week one of the _daily news_ authorities has been uttering a groaning longing for my pen in the service of that paper, as of old. the occasion is a short letter of mine in last thursday's paper, which you may have seen.[ ] if so, you will see that i had no choice. w. e. forster was at fox how; and i got jenny to carry the volume of brougham (vol. iii. p. ) to consult forster and arnolds about what i should do, w. e. forster being in the same line of business with my father, and a public man--man of the world. he was clear: it was impossible to leave my father under a false imputation of having failed. and when my letter appeared, he was delighted with it; so are those of my family that i have heard from; and, above all, _daily news_ editors. they hope and believe it will excite due distrust of brougham's representations, and encourage others to expose his falsehoods. his suppressions are as wonderful as his disclosures; _e.g._ the very important crisis in his career, known by the name of the "grey banquet" at edinburgh, he cuts completely out of the history of the time--perverting lord durham's story as well as his own. i can see how the false story of me and mine got made; but enough of that--especially if you have _not_ seen the letter in the _daily news_. forster is kindly and quiet, but he is altered. he is now--the courtier!--and odd sort of one, with much quaker innocence and prudence in it; but of a sort which leaves me no hope of _his_ handling of his education measure. there will be such a fight! and the nonconformists are right, and know that they are. you will probably see _that_ achieved--a real national education established, secular and compulsory. [ ] refuting a statement made in lord brougham's _autobiography_ that her father had failed in business. the ambleside surgeon, who had undertaken, in acccordance with harriet martineau's will, to prepare and transmit her skull and brain to mr. atkinson, died in the year . the following letter shows that the progress of time had in no way diminished her willingness to leave her head for scientific investigation: ambleside, april , ' . (shakespere's birthday and wordsworth's death-day.) dear friend, i am not writing about poets to-day, nor about any "play" topic, nor anything gay, or pretty, or amusing. i write on business only. when you heard of mr. shepherd's death, you must, i should think, have considered what was to be done in regard to fulfilling the provision of my will about skull and brain. it is to inform you of this that i write. mr. shepherd's assistant and successor is _mr. william moore king_, a young man who is considered very clever, and is certainly very kind, gentlemanly, simple in mind and manners, and married to a charming girl (grand-daughter of martin, the artist). jenny has known them for two years, having called on their arrival. i had seen him twice before this last week. i wrote to him the other day, to ask him to give me half an hour for confidential conversation; and he came when i was quite alone for the morning. i told him the whole matter of the provision in my will, and of mr. shepherd's engagement, in case of his surviving me in sufficient vigor to keep his word. mr. king listened anxiously, made himself master of the arrangement, and distinctly engaged to do what we ask, saying that it was so completely clear between us that we need never speak of it again. i may add that mr. king has shown me the letters in which mrs. martineau made the necessary arrangements with him for his task. mr. atkinson was, however, now residing out of england, and not in a position to usefully accept the bequest, so he intimated his desire to be freed from his promise to undertake the examination of his friend's brain. a codicil was added to harriet martineau's will, therefore, revoking the provision about this matter. the next quotation shows how little the long prospect of death had changed her expectations and desires about things supernatural:-- november , ' . i mean to try to do justice to what i think and believe, by avowing the satisfaction i truly feel with my release from selfish superstition and trumpery self-regards, and with the calm conclusions of my reason about what to desire and expect in the position in which each one of us mysterious human beings finds him or herself. it is all we have to do now (such as you and i), to be satisfied with the conditions of the life we have left behind us, and fearless of the death which lies before us. nobody will ever find me craving the "glory and bliss" which the preachers set before us, and pray that we may obtain. some of them are very good and kind, i know; but they will never create any longing of the sort in me. but why should i scribble on in this way to you? perhaps because our new evangelical curate has written me almost the worst and silliest letter of this sort that i ever saw. enough of him then! but i have left myself no room or strength for other matters this time. i wanted to tell you about the effect--according to my experience--of a second reading of _adam bede_, miss evans' first great novel. a singular mind is hers, i should think, and truly wonderful in power and scope. her intellectual power and grace attract and win people of very high intellectual quality. miss jane martineau was at this time in very delicate health, and, after long fluctuations of hope and fear, was compelled to leave her aunt for the winter and go to a warmer climate. mrs. martineau's letters show how cruel was her anxiety for "my precious jenny," and are filled with expressions of her feelings about the state of her beloved young companion. all this is, of course, too personal for quotation, but a perusal of it amply confirms the accounts of her domestic affection, and the warmth and sensitiveness of her heart. the loss of her niece from her side ultimately compelled the engagement of a companion, miss goodwin, a young lady who became as much attached to harriet martineau as did all others who came in close relationship with her in those years. may th, ' . ... the great event to me and my household is, that caroline--my dear maid and nurse--has seen jenny.... it was such a pouring out on both sides. it would have almost broken jenny's heart not to have seen this very dear friend of ours, when only half an hour off. all her longing is to be by my side again. i never discourage this; but i don't believe it can come to pass.... everybody is kind and helpful; and our admiration of miss goodwin ever increases. ambleside, sept. th, ' . dear friend, i am not ungrateful nor insensible about your treating me with letters, whether i reply or not. you may be sure i _would_ write if i could. but you know i cannot, and why. at times i really indulge in the hope and belief that the end is drawing near, and then again, if i compare the present day with a year ago, it seems as if there was no very great change. i still do not make mistakes--or only in trifling slips of memory common enough at seventy. still i have no haunting ideas, no delusions, no fears,--except that vague sort of misgiving that occurs when it becomes a fatigue to talk, and to move about, and to plan the duties of the day. yet aware as i am of the character of the change in me, and confident as i still am of not making a fool of myself till i alter further, i now seldom or never (almost never) feel _quite_ myself. i have told you this often lately; but i feel as if it would not be quite honest to omit saying it while feeling it to be the most prominent experience of my life at this time. it is not always easy to draw the line as to what one should tell in such a case. on the one hand, i desire to avoid all appearance of weak and tiresome complaining of what cannot be helped; and on the other, i do wish not to appear unaware of my failures. i am sure you understand this, and can sympathize in the anxiety about keeping the balance honest. there have been heart-attacks now and then lately, which have caused digitalis and belladonna to be prescribed for me; and this creates a hope that the general bodily condition is declining in good proportion to the brain weakening.... miss ---- and her naval partner remind me of the pair in the novel that i have read eleven times--miss austen's _persuasion_--unequalled in interest, charm and truth (to my mind). there is a hint there of the drawback of separation; but yet,--who would have desired anything for anne elliot and her captain wentworth but that they should marry? i am now in the middle of miss thackeray's _old kensington_--reading it with much keen pleasure, and some satisfaction and surprise. there are exquisite touches in it; and there is a further disclosure of power, of genuine, substantial, vital power; but her mannerism grows on her deplorably, it seems to me. the amount and the mode of analysis of minds and characters are too far disproportioned to the other elements to be accepted without regret, and, perhaps, some fear for the future. but i have not read half the book yet; and i hope i may have to recall all fault-finding, and to dwell only on the singular value and beauty of the picture-gallery she has given us. an incident of this year's ( ) story, which must not be overlooked, was an offer of a pension made to harriet martineau by mr. gladstone. she had written sadly of her own sufferings in a letter to mrs. grote, which referred also to mr. grote's life, and that lady had published the letter. mr. gladstone, in delicate and friendly terms, intimated to mrs. martineau that if pecuniary anxiety in any way added to her troubles, he would recommend the queen to give her one of the literary pensions of the civil list. she declined it with real gratitude, partly upon the same grounds which had before led her to refuse a similar offer, but with the additional reason now that she would not expose the queen and the premier to insult for showing friendliness to "an infidel." the next letter is mainly domestic, but i am sure that those spoken of by name in it will not object to publication of references in order to show harriet martineau in her amiable, considerate household character:-- december , . dear friend, i will not trouble and pain you by a long story about the cares and anxieties which make the last stage of my long life hard to manage and to bear. if i could be quite sure of the end being as near as one would suppose, i could bear my own share quietly enough; but it is a different thing watching a younger life going out prematurely. my beloved jenny will die, after all, we think, bravely as she has borne up for two years. the terrible east winds again got hold of her before she went (so early as october!) to her winter quarters; and there are sudden and grave symptoms of dropsy. the old dread of the post has returned upon me; and i am amazed to find how i can still suffer from fear. i am quite unfit to live alone--even for a week; yet i mean to venture it, if necessary. miss goodwin _shall_ go (to leeds) for christmas day, on which the family have always hitherto assembled. i will not prevent their doing so now. my niece harriet (higginson) was to come, as usual, for a month's holiday at christmas; but her mother has lamed herself by a fall, and it must be doubtful whether she can be left. parents protest the dear girl shall come, but she and i wait to see. there is nobody else; for there is illness in all families, or anxiety about illness elsewhere. "well! we shall be on the other side of it somehow," as people say, and it won't matter much then. my young cook is wanted on christmas day to be a bridesmaid, at nottingham. so i have a real reason for giving up the great christmas party i have given (in the kitchen) every year till now. it will be costly giving the people handsome dinners in their own homes; but the house will be quiet, and to me the day will be like any other day. it is not now a time for much mirth; the arnolds meeting at their mother's grave, my jenny absent, from perilous illness, my brain failing, so that i can do nothing for anybody but by money (and not very much in that way). we are all disposed to keep quiet--wishing the outside world a "merry christmas." april th, . i am reading again that marvellous _middlemarch_, finding i did not half value it before. it is not a book to issue as a serial. yet, read _en suite_, i find it almost more (greater) than i can bear. the casaubons set me dreaming all night. do you ever hear _any_-thing of lewes and miss evans? during the whole of the time over which these letters extend mrs. martineau was subject to fainting fits, in any one of which her life might have ended. it was thus necessary for her to have her maid sleeping in her bed-room. caroline, the "dear friend and servant" for twenty-one years, died early in . her place was filled by the younger maid, mary anne, whom caroline had trained. the maid has told me of her mistress's kindness and readiness to be amused; of the gentleness of her manner, and the gratitude which she seemed to feel for all loving tendance. the next letter gives a glimpse of the daily life from the mistress' pen:-- dec. , ' . east winds have been abundantly bitter; but this house is sheltered from the east and north. we do pity the babes and their mothers in the cottages below; and there is no denying that i am painfully stupefied by such cold as we have; but my _aides_ and my maids are all as well and as happy as if we had the making of the season. it is a daily surprise to me to see how jenny holds _out_ and on, without any sort of relapse; yet i _cannot_ rise above the anxiety which haunts me in the midst of every night and early morning--dread of hearing that she and miss goodwin are ill with the cold which makes _me_ so ill. by six o'clock i can stay in bed no longer. my maid and i (in the same room) turn out of our beds as the clock strikes; she puts a match to the fire, and goes for my special cup of tea (needed after my bad nights), while i brush my hair. i take the tea to the window, and look out for the lights (fox how usually the first) as they kindle and twinkle throughout the valley--orion going down behind loughrigg as day is breaking. then i get on the bed for half an hour's reading, till the hot water comes up. by that time i am in a panic about my _aides_; but as soon as i am seated at my little table ready for breakfast, in come the dear creatures, as gay as larks, with news how the glass stands, out-door and in. out-door (not on the ground) it is somewhere between ° and ° at present; and in my room (before the fire has got up), from ° to °. so now you know what our present life and climate are like. after dinner--i must end almost before i have begun! but, have you seen, in any newspaper, the address presented to carlyle on his th birthday? i had no doubt about subscribing, and my name is there. i feel great deference for masson, who asked me; and though i do not agree with all the ascriptions of the address, there is enough in which i do heartily agree to enable me to sign; so i send my sovereign with satisfaction. i shall not see the medal, not even a bronze one (you know carlyle's is gold). my expenses are considerable _at present_ (not always), and i must not spend on such an object. the way in which the thing was done is delicate. instead of overwhelming the old man with a deputation, the promoters had the packet quietly left at his door. it would set him weeping for his loneliness,--that his long-suffering, faithful wife did not witness this crowning glory. he does love fame (or _did_), and no man would despise such a tribute as this; but i think he will find it oppressive. what a change since the day when the _edinburgh review_ was obliged, as jeffrey said, to decline articles from carlyle--much as he wished to aid him--because the readers could not tolerate c.'s writings! and that was after his now famous "burns" article had appeared, and founded his fame in america! did you see that the _times_ death-list showed, in two days last week, thirty-three deaths of persons over , eleven of whom were over ? the effect of the cold! ... the sick and aged will die off fast this winter. may i be one! january , ' . dear old friend, it is time that you were hearing from us of the marked increase in my illness within the few days since i last reported of matters of mutual interest. i will not trouble you with disagreeable descriptions of ailments which admit of no advantageous treatment. last week there was, as twice before (and now again twice), a copious hemorrhage from some interior part, by which i am much weakened. the cause is not understood; and what does it matter? i neither know nor much care how it happens that i find myself sinking more rapidly than hitherto. all i know is that i am fully satisfied with my share of the interest and amusement of life, and of the value of the knowledge which has come to me by means of the brain, which is worth all the rest of us. i have not much pain, none very severe, but much discomfort. at times i _see_ very badly, and _hear_ almost nothing; and then i recover more or less of both powers. there is so much cramp in the hands, and elsewhere, that it seems very doubtful whether you and other friends will hear much from me during the (supposed) short time that i shall be living. but i do hope you will let me hear, to the last, of your interests and pursuits, your friendships and companionships, and prospects of increasing wisdom. i cannot write more to-day. perhaps i may become able another day. my beloved niece jenny is well; better here than she would be anywhere else, and more happy in her restoration to her home with me than i can describe. i could easily show you how and why my death within a short time may be for the happiness of some whom i love, and who love me; and if it should be the severest trial to this most dear helper of my latter days, i am sure she will bear it wisely and well. it cannot but be the happiest thought in her mind and heart--what a blessing she has been to my old age! what have not _you_ been, dear friend! i must not enter on that now. jenny observed this morning that old or delicate people live wonderfully long. true! but i hope my term will be short, if i am to continue as ill as at present. the end was, indeed, approaching; and now, when at the worst of her illness, it so came about that she was asked and consented to do one last piece of writing for publication. her young companion, miss goodwin, had translated pauli's _simon de montfort_, and mr. trübner, unaware of course, how ill mrs. martineau was, offered to publish the translation on the condition that she would write an introduction. she would not refuse this favor to miss goodwin, and did the work with great difficulty. it was characteristic that she should think it necessary to take the trouble to _read_ the whole ms. before writing her few pages of introduction. she was now nearing her seventy-fourth birthday; and the strong constitution which had worn through so much pain and labor had almost exhausted its vitality. even in these last weeks she could not be idle. her hands were cramped, her eyes weak, her sensations of fatigue very hard to bear; still, she not only continued her correspondence with one or two of her dearest friends, but also went on with her fancy work. the latter was now of that easiest kind, requiring least effort of eye and thought--knitting. she occupied herself with making cot blankets, in double knitting, for the babies of her young friends; some of them among her poorer neighbors, whom she had known when they were little children themselves and she came first to ambleside, others among more distant and wealthier couples. she finished one blanket early in the year , for a baby born in ambleside in the january, and she left a second one unfinished when she died. babies were an unfailing delight to her, to the end. her maids knew that even if she were too ill to see grown-up visitors, a little child was always a welcome guest, for at least a few moments. her letters to children were altogether charming, and so were her ways with them, and children always loved her with all their wise little hearts. she was a pleasant old lady, even for them to look at. the expression of the countenance became very gentle and motherly, when the strife of working life was laid aside; the eyes were ever kind; and the mouth loved to laugh, sternly and firmly though it could at times be compressed. she wore a large cap of delicate lace, and was dainty about her person, as regarded the fairest cleanliness. plain in her youth and middle life, she had now grown into a beautiful old age--beauty of the kind which such years can gain from the impress on the features of the high thoughts and elevated emotions of the past, with patience, lovingness, and serenity in the present. patient, loving, and serene the last years of harriet martineau were. those who lived with her knew less than her correspondents of what she suffered; for she felt it a duty to tell the absent what they could not see for themselves of her state; but to her household she spoke but seldom, comparatively, of her painful sensations, leaving the matter to their own observation. she could be absorbed to the last in all that concerned the world and mankind; and she was equally accessible to the smaller and more homely interests of the quiet daily life of her inmates. the incidents which go to show what she was in her domestic circle are but trifling; but what is it that makes the difference between an intolerable and a venerable old age (or youth, for the matter of that, in domestic life) except its conduct about trifles? one who was with her tells of her delight when a basket of newly-fledged ducklings was brought to her bedside, before she was up, on st. valentine's day in the year of her death, offering her a doggerel tribute as follows:-- st. valentine hopes you will not scorn this little gift on st. valentine's morn. we'd have come with the chime of last evening's bells, but, alas! we could not break our shells! then another remembers her amusement when one of her nephews had just started to go to the coach for london, and the doctor, coming in unannounced, left his hat on the hall table, which the active servant seeing, and jumping to the conclusion that mr. martineau (travelling in a felt) had left his high hat behind him, rushed off with it to the coach-office, half a mile away; so that when the doctor wanted to go, his hat was off to the coach; and "the old lady did laugh so." only a week or two before her death, she was merry enough to ask her doctor that dreadful punning conundrum about the resemblance between an ice-cream vender, and an hydrophobic patient--the answer turning on the legend "water ices and ice creams" (water i sees, and i screams)--telling him that it was a _professional_ conundrum. at the same time she was kind enough to repeat to him the compliments which a visitor of hers had been paying his baby. this was the lighter side of the aged woman's life, the more serious aspect of which is shown in some of her letters to mr. atkinson. the last of these letters must now be given:-- ambleside, may , . dear friend, jenny, and also my sister, have been observing that you ought to be hearing from us, and have offered to write to you. you will see at once what this means; and it is quite true that i have become so much worse lately that we ought to guard against your being surprised, some day soon, by news of my life being closed. i feel uncertain about how long i _may_ live in my present state. i can only follow the judgment of unprejudiced observers; and i see that my household believe the end to be not far off. i will not trouble you with disagreeable details. it is enough to say that i am in no respect better, while all the ailments are on the increase. the imperfect heart-action immediately affects the brain, causing the suffering which is worse than all other evils together,--the horrid sensation of not being quite myself. this strange, dreamy _non-recognition of myself_ comes on every evening, and all else is a trifle in comparison. but there is a good deal more. cramps in the hands prevent writing, and most other employment, except at intervals. indications of dropsy have lately appeared: and after this, i need not again tell you that i see how fully my household believe that the end is not far off. meantime i have no cares or troubles beyond the bodily uneasiness (which, however, i don't deny to be an evil). i cannot think of any future as at all probable, except the "annihilation" from which some people recoil with so much horror. i find myself here in the universe,--i know not how, whence, or why. i see everything in the universe go out and disappear, and i see no reason for supposing that it is not an actual and entire death. and for _my_ part, i have no objection to such an extinction. i well remember the passion with which w. e. forster said to me, "i had rather be damned than annihilated." if he once felt five minutes' damnation, he would be thankful for extinction in preference. the truth is, i care little about it any way. now that the event draws near, and that i see how fully my household expects my death, pretty soon, the universe opens so widely before my view, and i see the old notions of death and scenes to follow to be so merely human--so impossible to be true, when one glances through the range of science--that i see nothing to be done but to wait without fear or hope, or ignorant prejudice, for the expiration of life. i have no wish for further experience, nor have i any fear of it. under the weariness of illness i long to be asleep; but i have not set my mind in any state. i wonder if all this represents your notions at all. i should think it does, while yet we are fully aware how mere a glimpse we have of the universe and the life it contains. above all, i wish to escape from the narrowness of taking a mere human view of things, from the absurdity of making god after man's own image, etc. but i will leave this, begging your pardon for what may be so unworthy to be dwelt on. however, you _may_ like to know how the case looks to a friend under the clear knowledge of death being so near at hand. my hands are cramped and i must stop. my sister is here for the whole of may, and she and jenny are most happy together. many affectionate relations and friends are willing to come if needed (the browns among others), if i live beyond july. you were not among the boulogne theological petitioners, i suppose. i don't know whether you can _use_----there? i was very thankful for your last, though i have said nothing about its contents. if i began _that_, i should not know how to stop. so good-bye for to-day, dear friend! yours ever, h. m. the internal tumor which was the prime cause of her malady (an entirely different kind of thing, however, from that which she suffered from at tynemouth), had long been the source of great inconvenience, compelling her to descend the stairs backwards, and to spend much time in a recumbent position. the post mortem examination made by her medical attendant, at the request of her executors, two days after she died, revealed the fact that this tumor was the true cause of her sufferings. she never knew it herself. relying on the statement of the eminent men whom she consulted in , that it was the heart that was affected, she accepted that as her fate. it was, however, the slow growth of a "dermoid cyst" which made her linger till such an age, through the constant suffering of twenty-one preceding years. in the early part of june, , she had an attack of bronchitis, and though medical treatment subdued this speedily, it exhausted her strength greatly. from about the th of that month--two days after her seventy-fourth birthday--she was confined to her room, but still rose from bed. on the th she was too ill to get up. then drowsiness gradually increased and in a little while she sank quietly into a dreamy state, in which she seemed to retain consciousness when aroused, but was too weak to either take food or to speak. at last, on the th of june, , just as the summer sunset was gilding the hills that she knew and loved so well, she quietly and peacefully drew her last breath, and entered into eternal rest. truly her death--not only the last moments, but the long ordeal--might stand for an illustration of the saying of the wise men of old--"keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for _that_ shall bring a man peace at the last." she was buried amidst her kindred, in the old cemetery of birmingham; and upon the tombstone, where it stands amidst the smoke, there is no inscription beyond her name and age, and the places of birth and death. more was, perhaps, needless. her works, and a yet more precious possession, her character remain. faults she had, of course--the necessary defects of her virtues. let it be said that she held her own opinions too confidently--the uncertain cannot be teachers. let it be said that her personal dislikes were many and strong--it is the necessary antithesis of powerful attachments. let it be said that her powers of antagonism at times were not sufficiently restrained--how, without such oppugnancy, could she have stood forth for unpopular truths? let all that detractors can say be said, and how much remains untouched! in the paths where harriet martineau trod at first almost alone, many women are now following. serious studies, political activity, a share in social reforms, an independent, self-supporting career, and freedom of thought and expression, are by the conditions of our age, becoming open to the thousands of women who would never have dared to claim them in the circumstances in which she first did so. in a yet earlier age such a life, even to such powers as hers, would have been impossible. as it was, she was only a pioneer of the new order of things inevitable under the advance of civilization and knowledge. the printing-press, which multiplies the words of the thinker; the steam-engine, which both feeds the press and rushes off with its product, and the electric telegraph, which carries thought around the globe, make this an age in which mental force assumes an importance which it never had before in the history of mankind. mind will be more and more valued and cultivated, and will grow more and more influential; and the condition and status of women must alter accordingly. some people do not like this fact; and no one can safely attempt to foresee all its consequences; but we can no more prevent it than we can return to hornbooks, or to trial by ordeal, or to the feudal tenure of land, or to any other bygone state of social affairs. more and more it will grow customary for women to study such subjects as harriet martineau studied; more commonplace will it constantly become for women to use all their mental faculties, and to exert every one of their powers to the fullest extent in the highest freedom. what, then, have we to wish about that which is inevitable, except that the old high womanly standard of moral excellence may be no whit lowered, but may simply be carried into the wider sphere of thought and action? it may do much, indeed, for us that we have had such a pioneer as harriet martineau. it is not only that she lived so that all worthy people, however differing from her in opinion, respected and honored her--though that is much. it is not only that she has settled, once for all, that a woman can be a political thinker and a teacher from whom men may gladly receive guidance--though that is much. but the great value of her life to us is as a splendid example of the moral qualities which we should carry into our widest sphere, and which we should display in our public exertions. she cared for nothing before the truth; her efforts to discover it were earnest and sincere, for she spared no pains in study and no labor in thought in the attempt to form her opinions correctly. having found what she must believe to be a right cause to uphold, or a true word to speak, no selfish consideration intruded between her and her duty. she could risk fame, and position, and means of livelihood, when necessary, to unselfishly support and promulgate what she believed it to be important for mankind to do and believe. she longed for the well-being of her kind; and so unaffectedly and honestly that men who came under her influence were stimulated and encouraged by her to share and avow similar high aims. withal, those who lived with her loved her; she was a kind mistress, a good friend, and tender to little children; she was truly helpful to the poor at her gates, and her life was spotlessly pure. is not this what we should all strive to be? shall we not love knowledge, and use it to find out truth; and place outspoken fidelity to conscience foremost amongst our duties; and care for the progress of our race rather than for our own fame; shall we not be truthful, and honest, and upright--and, to this end, brave--in public as in private life; and shall we not seek so to bear ourselves that men shall shrink from owning their ignobler thoughts and baser shifts to us, but shall never fear to avow high aims and pure deeds, while yet we retain our womanly kindness and all our domestic virtues unchanged? all this we may know that we can be and do, if we will; for we have seen it exemplified in the life of harriet martineau. _messrs. roberts brothers' publications._ _famous women series._ mary wollstonecraft. by elizabeth robins pennell. one volume. mo. cloth. price $ . . "so far as it has been published, and it has now reached its ninth volume, the famous women series is rather better on the whole than the english men of letters series. one had but to recall the names and characteristics of some of the women with whom it deals,--literary women, like maria edgeworth, margaret fuller, mary lamb, emily brontë, george eliot, and george sand; women of the world (not to mention the other parties in that well-known scriptural firm), like the naughty but fascinating countess of albany; and women of philanthropy, of which the only example given here so far is mrs. elizabeth fry,--one has but to compare the intellectual qualities of the majority of english men of letters to perceive that the former are the most difficult to handle, and that a series of which they are the heroines is, if successful, a remarkable collection of biographies. we thought so as we read miss blind's study of george sand, and vernon lee's study of the countess of albany, and we think so now that we have read mrs. elizabeth robins pennell's study of mary wollstonecraft, who, with all her faults, was an honor to her sex. she was not so considered while she lived, except by those who knew her well, nor for years after her death; but she is so considered now, even by the granddaughters of the good ladies who so bitterly condemned her when the century was new. she was notable for the sacrifices that she made for her worthless father and her weak, inefficient sisters, for her dogged persistence and untiring industry, and for her independence and her courage. the soul of goodness was in her, though she would be herself and go on her own way; and if she loved not wisely, according to the world's creed, she loved too well for her own happiness, and paid the penalty of suffering. what she might have been if she had not met capt. gilbert imlay, who was a scoundrel, and william godwin, who was a philosopher, can only be conjectured. she was a force in literature and in the enfranchisement of her sisterhood, and as such was worthy of the remembrance which she will long retain through mrs. pennell's able memoir."--_r. h. stoddard, in the mail and express._ _sold by all booksellers. mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston harriet martineau. by mrs. f. fenwick miller. mo. cloth. price $ . . "the almost uniform excellence of the 'famous women' series is well sustained in mrs. fenwick miller's life of harriet martineau, the latest addition to this little library of biography. indeed, we are disposed to rank it as the best of the lot. the subject is an entertaining one, and mrs. miller has done her work admirably. miss martineau was a remarkable woman, in a century that has not been deficient in notable characters. her native genius, and her perseverance in developing it; her trials and afflictions, and the determination with which she rose superior to them; her conscientious adherence to principle, and the important place which her writings hold in the political and educational literature of her day,--all combine to make the story of her life one of exceptional interest.... with the exception, possibly, of george eliot, harriet martineau was the greatest of english women. she was a poet and a novelist, but not as such did she make good her title to distinction. much more noteworthy were her achievements in other lines of thought, not usually essayed by women. she was eminent as a political economist, a theologian, a journalist, and a historian.... but to attempt a mere outline of her life and works is out of the question in our limited space. her biography should be read by all in search of entertainment."--_professor woods in saturday mirror._ "the present volume has already shared the fate of several of the recent biographies of the distinguished dead, and has been well advertised by the public contradiction of more or less important points in the relation by the living friends of the dead genius. one of mrs. miller's chief concerns in writing this life seems to have been to redeem the character of harriet martineau from the appearance of hardness and unamiability with which her own autobiography impresses the reader.... mrs. miller, however, succeeds in this volume in showing us an altogether different side to her character,--a home-loving, neighborly, bright-natured, tender-hearted, witty, lovable, and altogether womanly woman, as well as the clear thinker, the philosophical reasoner, and comprehensive writer whom we already knew."--_the index._ "already ten volumes in this library are published; namely, george eliot, emily brontë, george sand, mary lamb, margaret fuller, maria edgeworth, elizabeth fry, the countess of albany, mary wollstonecraft, and the present volume. surely a galaxy of wit and wealth of no mean order! miss m. will rank with any of them in womanliness or gifts or grace. at home or abroad, in public or private. she was noble and true, and her life stands confessed a success. true, she was literary, but she was a home lover and home builder. she never lost the higher aims and ends of life, no matter how flattering her success. this whole series ought to be read by the young ladies of to-day. more of such biography would prove highly beneficial."--_troy telegram._ _our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price._ roberts brothers, boston. rachel. by mrs. nina h. kennard. one volume. mo. cloth. price, $ . . "_rachel_, by nina h. kennard, is an interesting sketch of the famous woman whose passion and genius won for her an almost unrivalled fame as an actress. the story of rachel's career is of the most brilliant success in art and of the most pathetic failure in character. her faults, many and grievous, are overlooked in this volume, and the better aspects of her nature and history are recorded."--_hartford courant._ "the book is well planned, has been carefully constructed, and is pleasantly written."--_the critic._ "the life of mlle. Élisa rachel félix has never been adequately told, and the appearance of her biography in the 'famous women series' of messrs. roberts brothers will be welcomed.... yet we must be glad the book is written, and welcome it to a place among the minor biographies; and because there is nothing else so good, the volume is indispensable to library and study."--_boston evening traveller._ "another life of the great actress rachel has been written. it forms part of the 'famous women series,' which that firm is now bringing out, and which already includes eleven volumes. mrs. kennard deals with her subject much more amiably than one or two of the other biographers have done. she has none of those vindictive feelings which are so obvious in madame b.'s narrative of the great tragedienne. on the contrary, she wants to be fair, and she probably is as fair as the materials which came into her possession enabled her to be. the endeavor has been made to show us rachel as she really was, by relying to a great extent upon her letters.... a good many stories that we are familiar with are repeated, and some are contradicted. from first to last, however, the sympathy of the author is ardent, whether she recounts the misery of rachel's childhood, or the splendid altitude to which she climbed when her name echoed through the world and the great ones of the earth vied in doing her homage. on this account mrs. kennard's book is a welcome addition to the pre-existing biographies of one of the greatest actresses the world ever saw."--_n.y. evening telegram._ _sold everywhere. mailed postpaid, by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston. madame roland. by mathilde blind, author of "george eliot's life." one volume. mo. cloth. price, $ . . "of all the interesting biographies published in the famous women series, mathilde blind's life of mme. roland is by far the most fascinating.... but no one can read mme. roland's thrilling story, and no one can study the character of this noble, heroic woman without feeling certain that it is good for the world to have every incident of her life brought again before the public eye. among the famous women who have been enjoying a new birth through this set of short biographies, no single one has been worthy of the adjective _great_ until we come to mme. roland.... "we see a brilliant intellectual woman in mme. roland; we see a dutiful daughter and devoted wife; we see a woman going forth bravely to place her neck under the guillotine,--a woman who had been known as the 'soul of the girondins;' and we see a woman struggling with and not being overcome by an intense and passionate love. has history a more heroic picture to present us with? is there any woman more deserving of the adjective 'great'? "mathilde blind has had rich materials from which to draw for mme. roland's biography. she writes graphically, and describes some of the terrible scenes in the french revolution with great picturesqueness. the writer's sympathy with mme. roland and her enthusiasm is very contagious; and we follow her record almost breathlessly, and with intense feeling turn over the last few pages of this little volume. no one can doubt that this life was worth the writing, and even earnest students of the french revolution will be glad to refresh their memories of lamartine's 'history of the girondins,' and again have brought vividly before them the terrible tragedy of mme. roland's life and death."--_boston evening transcript._ "the thrilling story of madame roland's genius, nobility, self-sacrifice, and death loses nothing in its retelling here. the material has been collected and arranged in an unbroken and skilfully narrated sketch, each picturesque or exciting incident being brought out into a strong light the book is one of the best in an excellent series."--_christian union._ _for sale by all booksellers. mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston. kansas women in literature by nettie garmer barker to my nearest and dearest-- my silent partners-- my husband and my mother. kansas women in literature. "we are proud of kansas, the beautiful queen, and proud are we of her fields of corn; but a nobler pride than these i ween, is our pride in her children, kansas born!" --ellen p. allerton-- --or adopted. in this galaxy of bright women, the state has a noble pride for every name, be its owner kansas born or adopted, is a mightier force for good than its "walls of corn." effie graham. the last place one would expect to find romance is in arithmetic and yet--miss effie graham, the head of the department of mathematics in the topeka high school, has found it there and better still, in her lecture "living arithmetic" she has shown others the way to find it there. miss graham is one of the most talented women of the state. ex-gov. hoch has called her "one of the most gifted women in the state noted for its brilliant women. her heart and life are as pure as her mind is bright." she was born and reared in ohio, the daughter of a family of ohio pioneers, a descendant of a revolutionary soldier and also, of a warrior of . as a student of the ohio northern university and later as a post-graduate worker at the university of california, chicago university, and harvard summer school, she has as she says, "graduated sometimes and has a degree but never 'finished' her education." desiring to get the school out into the world as well as the world back to the school, she has spoken and written on "moving into the king row," "other peoples' children," "spirit of the younger generation," "vine versus oak," and "the larger service." "pictures eight hundred children selected," "speaking of automobiles," "the unusual thing," "the high cost of learning," and "wanted--a funeral of algebraic phraseology;" also, some verse, "the twentieth regiment knight" and "back to god's country" are magazine work that never came back. school science & mathematics, a magazine to which she contributes and of which she is an associate editor, gives hers as the only woman's name on its staff of fifty editors. her book, "the passin' on party," raises the author to the rank of a classic. to quote a critic: it is "a little like 'mrs. wiggs of the cabbage patch,' a little like 'uncle tom's cabin,' but not just like either of them. she reaches right down into human breasts and grips the heart strings." it is the busy people who find time to do things and the mother-heart of miss graham finds expression in her household in west lawn, a suburb of topeka. among the members of her family are a niece and nephew whose high school and college education she directs. esther m. clark. every kansan, homesick in a foreign land, knows the call of kansas and every kansan book lover knows esther clark's "call of kansas." "sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer rains: nearer my heart than these mighty hills are the wind-swept kansas plains: dearer the sight of a shy, wild rose by the roadside's dusty way than all the splendor of poppy-fields ablaze in the sun of may. gay as the bold poinsetta is, and the burden of pepper trees, the sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer, to me, than these. and rising ever above the song of the hoarse, insistent sea, the voice of the prairie, calling, calling me. miss clark was born in neosho co., kansas, about twelve miles southeast of chanute, on a farm. at seven years of age, the family moved to chanute and her school days were spent at the old pioneer building, where her mother went to school before her. in , she graduated here, later entering the university of kansas for work in english. in , "verses by a commonplace person" was published. "the call of kansas and other verse" came out in . this volume contained "my dear" and "good night" which were set to music, and "rose o' my heart." "rose o' my heart, to-day i send a rose or two, you love roses, rose o' my heart, i love you. rose o' my heart, a rose is sweet and fresh as dew. some have thorns, but, rose o' my heart, none have you. rose o' my heart, this day wear my roses, do! for next to my heart, rose o' my heart, i wear you." "my dear" was written for her baby brother, during an absence from home, and is miss clark's favorite. she is in the office of the extension department at the university of kansas, and has exclusive charge of club programs and does some work in package libraries. just now she is contributing prose to some of the newspapers and doing some splendid feature work. mary vance humphrey. mary vance humphrey of junction city, kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "the legal status of mrs. o'rourke" and "king lear in kansas" are two of the series. when young in heart and experience, mrs. humphrey wrote a number of poems. her work in later years has been only prose. her novel, "the squatter sovereign" is an historical romance of pioneer days, the settlement of kansas in the fifties. mrs. humphrey is one of the founders of the kansas state social science club and the woman's kansas day club and the founder of the reading club of junction city. she has served as president of the state federation and as director of the general federation of women's clubs and president of the woman's kansas day club. her work as member of the board of education has done much for junction city and her interest in libraries has done equally as much for the state of kansas. of her record as an official, margaret hill mccarter has written: "her whole soul is in her work. she is the genuine metal, shirking nothing, cheapening nothing, and withal happy in the enjoyment of her obligation. she stands for patriotism, progress and peace. something of the message of the shepherds heard out beyond bethlehem that christmas morning long ago sounds in the chords she strikes." as the wife of the late judge james humphrey, she proved herself the able companion of such a worthy man. kate a. aplington. the kansas state traveling art gallery owes its birth and much of its success to kate a. aplington, the author of that typical western story, "pilgrims of the plains." since feb., , the art gallery has been a recognized state institution, and as its vice-president and superintendent and as the writer of the art lectures that accompany the work, mrs. aplington's broad-minded, artistic temperament and student's persistency have made the gallery truly a work of art. at present, the aplingtons are living at miami, florida, but for a quarter of a century, council grove, the most famous spot on the santa fe trail, was their home. special investigations and researches on the subject of the old santa fe trail days and lecturers on educational and literary topics resulted from years spent in that historic place. "pilgrims of the plains," which came out in feb., , is worthy of a place in the front rank of western stories. in july of this year, grossett and dunlap will bring it out in their "popular edition" of novels. mrs. aplington is now working on a book on "art-museums of america" and judging from the comments of prominent museum directors, this will be as great a success as her novel. "florida of the reclamation," a character story with scenes laid in and around miami, florida, is also in preparation. emma upton vaughn. the author of that versatile little book of short stories, "the lower bureau drawer" is emma upton vaughn, a kansas city, kansas teacher. these heart stories, showing keen insight of human nature--especially woman nature--deal with every day life, each one a fascinating revelation, of character and soul. mrs. vaughn was born in kalamazoo, michigan. her early life was spent in kansas. she is a graduate of the kansas university, and has taught in the public schools of the state. she wrote the "bible and the flag in the public schools" and has contributed both prose and verse to the leading magazines and newspapers. feature articles and many good essays appear over her signature. her "passing from under the partial eclipse" did much to give kansas city, kansas her recognized place commercially on the map. a novel, "the cresap pension," exposing a great pension fraud, is ready for the press. jessie wright whitecomb. jessie wright whitcomb, a topeka writer of juvenile books is a lawyer in active practice with her husband, judge george h. whitcomb and a mother of a remarkable family of five boys and one girl. the oldest son gained his a. b. in at the age of eighteen; in was appointed rhodes scholar for kansas; and is now a student at oxford. his father and mother are in england at present visiting him. mrs. whitcomb is a contributor to the magazines and in addition, has written "odd little lass," "freshman and senior," "majorbanks," "his best friend," "pen's venture," "queer as she could be," and "curly head." she is a graduate of the university of vermont and the boston university law school and was the first woman to lecture before a man's law school. myra williams jarrell. myra williams jarrell, the daughter of the late archie l. williams, for thirty years, the attorney for the union pacific railway in kansas, and the grand-daughter of judge archibald williams, the first united states circuit judge of kansas, appointed by lincoln, comes of a literary family. all of the men and some of the women on the father's side of the family and also, on the mother's to a great extent, had literary talent. as a child, she cherished an ambition to write and when occasionally one of her letters to st. nicholas saw publication, she felt she had crossed the alps of her desire. her first real story, however, was written as she rocked the cradle of her first born. the day, when she first saw her "stuff" in print, stands out in her memory second only to the hallowed days of her personal history, her wedding day and the days upon which her children were born. since then, mrs. jarrell has contributed to almost all the high class magazines and has furnished special feature articles to newspapers. some years ago, a small book, "meg, of valencia," was written and now, a novel, "the hand of the potter" is ready for publication. in , myra williams and j. f. jarrell were married. this union was blest with four children, three sons and one daughter. mr. jarrell is publicity agent of the santa fe. a number of years ago, he bought the holton signal and in trying to help her husband put some individuality into the paper, mrs. jarrell began a department headed "ramblings." later this was syndicated and finally issued in book form. last winter, a play, "the plain clothes man," was produced by the north brothers stock co., at the majestic theatre, topeka. this well written play, with its novel and original characterization and its effective comedy lines, is now in the hands of two new york play brokers. before many months, mrs. jarrell will be enjoying a royalty. in preparation, are two plays, as yet nameless; also, a play in collaboration with mr. north of the north stock co. with her brother, burus l. williams, of kansas city, mo., mrs. jarrell has written an opera, "the mix up in the kingdom of something-like," which awaits only the lyrics mr. williams is writing and the music. an opera, "the kingdom of never come true," also, in collaboration with mr. williams, is being set to music by arthur pryor, the bandmaster. a serial story, "john bishop, farmer," a collaboration with albert t. reed, the artist, is to be published soon in the kansas farmer. later, this will appear in book form. a novel, which mrs. jarrell believes will be her best work, is in construction and is clamoring to be written. ellen palmer allerton. ellen palmer allerton, the sweet and gentle poetess, beloved of kansas, lived at padonia, in brown county, when she wrote her famous poem, "wall of corn." she was past her prime when she came to kansas from the wisconsin home, the subject of many of her noble gems. as she grew older, she grew stronger in poetic strength. three volumes of poems have been published, "walls of corn and other poems," "annabel and other poems," and "poems of the prairie." her "walls of corn," written in , famous from the first, as used as railroad immigration advertising, was translated in several languages and distributed all over europe. this and her "trail of forty-nine" are her best, although the classic beauty of "beautiful things" is unsurpassed by any other american writer. "beautiful twilight, at set of sun, beautiful goal, with race well run, beautiful rest, with work well done." is a fitting close to the beautiful, useful life of the author. mrs. allerton was born in centerville. new york, in and began writing verse at the age of seventeen. much as she has written, yet writing was only a pastime. she never let it interfere with her housework. thoroughly practical, she did all her own work, just because she loved to do it. her flowers of which she had many, in doors and out, resulted in many noble, inspiring lines. in , she was married to a. b. allerton of wisconsin, coming to kansas in . she was best appreciated for her social qualities and her interest in charity--that broader charity that praises the beauty and ignores the blemishes. her last poem, "when days grow dark" is a beautiful pen picture of her sweetness and resignation in her growing blindness and her love and trust in him who had been her companion down the years. "you take the book and pour into my ear in accent sweet, the words i cannot see; i listen charmed, forget my haunting fear, and think with you as with your eyes i see. in the world's thought, so your dear voice be left, i still have part, i am not all bereft. and if this darkness deepens, when for me the new moon bends no more her silver rim, when stars go out, and over land and sea black midnight falls, where now is twilight dim, o, then may i be patient, sweet and mild, while your hands lead me like a little child!" she died in , at padonia, and was buried in a bed of her favorite white flowers, donated by loving friends. in the little graveyard at hamlin, one reads "beautiful things" on a modest stone at the head of her little bed. emma tanner wood. mrs. emma tanner wood (caroline cunningham), a topeka woman, began newspaper work in . the result of those early years' work was "spring showers," a volume of prose. after thirty years of study and experience among the defectives, she wrote "too fit for the unfit," advocating surgery for the feeble-minded. the story of mrs. benton, one of the characters, led mrs. wood to introduce a law preventing children being sent to the poor house. this was the first law purely in the interest of children ever passed in kansas. later, a law preventing traveling hypnotists from using school children as subjects in public exhibitions was drawn up by mrs. wood and passed. several years ago, a book on hypnotism, far in advance of the public thought, was written and is to be published this year. mrs. wood is seventy years young and as she says: "finds age the very sweetest part of life. it is no small satisfaction to laugh at the follies of others and know that you are past committing them. it is equally delightful to be responsible only to one's self and order one's life as one chooses. every day is a holy day to me now and the sweetness of common things, grass, flowers, neighborly love, grand-children, and home comforts fill me with satisfaction. to think kindly of all things under the sun (but sin); to speak kindly to all; to do little kindly acts is a greater good to the world at large than we think while we are in the heat of battle." cornelia m. stockton. a cheerful little room in the east wing of st. margaret's hospital, kansas city, kansas; an invalid chair wheeled up to a window over looking the street; and the eager, expectant face and the warm hand clasp of the occupant, mrs. cornelia m. stockton, assures the visitor of a hearty welcome. greatly enfeebled by long illness and with impaired sight, this bright, little woman's keen interest in current events and the latest "best seller" puts to shame the half-hearted zeal of the average woman. for four years, mrs. stockton has lived at st. margaret's, depending upon the visits of friends and the memory of an eventful life to pass the days. prominence in club work in her earlier years has brought reward. the history club of kansas city, kansas, of which she was once a member, each week sends a member to read to her and these are red letter days to this brave, patient, little woman. mrs. stockton began writing very young. when a little girl, back in the village of walden, new york, she stole up to the pulpit of the church and wrote in her pastor's bible: "i have not seen the minister's eyes, and cannot describe his glance divine, for when he prays he shuts them up and when he preaches he shuts mine." she was born in in shawangunk, new york, and came to kansas city in , living in missouri some years but most of the time in kansas city, kansas. in , she published a limited edition of poems, "the shanar dancing girl and other poems." dedicated to mrs. bertha m. honore palmer, her ideal of the perfect type of gracious and lovely womanhood. "the shanar dancing girl" was first written for the friends in council, a literary club of kansas city, mo. it has received the encomiums of thomas bailey aldrich, john j. ingalls and others for its beauty of expression and dramatic qualities. "invocation," an april idyl; "the sea-shell;" and "mountain born" sing of the love of nature. "in the conservatory;" "my summer heart;" and "tired of the storm" hint of sorrow and unrest and longing. then in , "compensation" was written. "irma's love for the king" is a favorite; also, "'sold'--a picture," written for her daughter, "yes, but she never came. "the sorrowful stone" mrs. stockton considers her best. "the story without a suspicion of rhyme, and dim with the mists of the morning of time, is told of a goddess, who, wandering alone, did go and sit down on the sorrowful stone. we find our gethsemane somewhere, though late; the angel of shadows throws open the gate. we creep with our burden of pain, to atone, for all of life's ills, to the sorrowful stone. above is the vault of the pitiless stars; the trees stretch their arms all blackened with scars; the gales of lost paradise are faintly blown to where we sit down on the sorrowful stone." "from a poem 'vagaries'" warns of * * * --the product of the age and clime, we do too much! grow old before our time, yet--would we stray to morning hills again? unlearn sad prophecies, and dream as then! ah, no! with sense of peace the shadows creep, there droppeth on tired eyes the spell of sleep-- we left the dawn long leagues behind, and stand, waiting and wistful in the evening land! the patient nurse of destiny, at best, leads us like children to the needed rest! a ghostly wind puts out our little light, and we have bid the busy world "good night!" mrs. stockton was married twice. her first husband was the father of her two sons, one of whom, dr. henry m. downs, in his practice, came often to st. margaret's. the second marriage, as the wife of the late judge john s. stockton, was a very happy one. last year, a brother the only surviving member of her family, died, leaving mrs. stockton the last of a family of five children. the two sons have also passed into the great beyond. in her younger days, she contributed many poems and some prose to newspapers and magazines over the name of cora m. downs. ex-gov. st. john appointed her one of the regents of the university of kansas. her beautiful poem: "in memoriam" to sarah walter chandler coates was her last. "'we seem like children,' she was wont to say, 'talking of what we cannot understand,' and in the dark or daylight, all the way, holding so trustfully a father's hand. and this was her religion, not to dwell on tenets, creeds, or doctrines, but to live on a pure faith, and striving to do well the simple duties that each hour should give." margaret hill mccarter. the most successful kansas woman writer financially and the most prolific is margaret hill mccarter of topeka. from the advent of her little book in , "a bunch of things, tied up with strings" to the hearty reception of her latest novel every step of the way spells success. margaret hill was born in indiana and came to kansas in to teach english in the topeka high school. two years later, she became the wife of dr. william mccarter. of this union there are two daughters, students at baker university and the topeka high school and a young son, his mother's literary critic. a wife and a mother first, a kansas woman second, and an author third is the way mrs. mccarter rates herself. she is capable of and does do all her housework. her love for literature she owes to her mother, who believed in higher education and taught margaret to prize the few books that came her way. after leaving the school room, the teacher instinct still strong within her, she argued if she could teach out of books written by others, why not out of books of her own? then followed poems, short stories, biography, textbooks, the editing of crane classics, "one hundred kansas women" and miscellanies. in , "cuddy and other folks" was written and in , "the cottonwood's story." this same year, "the overflowing waters," the story of the flood, and one of her best bits of heart writing paid for the school books of almost a thousand unfortunate children. "cuddy's baby" appeared in , followed the next year with "in old quivera," a thread of coronado history. "the price of the prairies," three weeks after publication in the fall of , became kansas' best seller. "the peace of the solomon valley" came out in and proved a popular gift book. "the wall of men," mrs. mccarter's offering should be one of the required books in kansas schools. it is authentic history and the close of the story leaves every kansan with a greater respect and love for the state and the heroic pioneers who stood as a living wall between kansas and the slave question. gave us the "master's degree," considered by many her best work. this year we have "winning the wilderness." mrs. mccarter founded the club member and organized the sorosis, serving as president seven years and two terms as president of the topeka federation of women's clubs. baker university, at baldwin, kansas, gave her an honorary master's degree in , its semi-centennial anniversary. bessie may bellman. and june bellman henthorne. bessie may bellman and june bellman henthorne, her daughter, hail from winfield. they write both prose and verse and mrs. henthorne was a reporter for years. mrs. bellman, when a girl, lived five years on a cattle ranch and to those five lonely years she credits her habit of introspection, meditation and writing. much of her poetry and short stories are used in platform work. red leaves. red leaves-- aflame in the air, aflame in the trees. blue streams, smoky hills-- gold, gold the sunlight spills-- red leaves! dead leaves-- a swirl in the air-asleep 'neath the trees. gone every lark and swallow-- haunting echoes bid me follow-- dead leaves! bessie may bellman-- mrs. henthorne's "if" is published in a new york reader. "if, in a bird-heart, beating 'neath the gray there chants a song, no matter what the day. if, in a bird-heart happy sunbeams shine, why not in mine? if, in a flower-face, beat down by rain, the hope of clear skies be in spite of pain-- if, in a flower-face a great hope shine, why not in mine?" amanda t. jones. one of the few kansas women to have a place in "who's who" was the late amanda t. jones of junction city. she was one of the most prolific poets of kansas. her "atlantic" is a story of the rebellion; "utah and other poems;" "a prairie idyl;" "flowers and a weed;" and "rubaiyat of solomon valley" are volumes of verse. her prose: "children's stories," "fairy arrows" and "the white blackbird;" "a psychic autobiography," published in ; "man and priest," a story of psychic detection; "mother of pioneers," and a novel ready for publication, "a daughter of wall st." miss jones originated a working women's home and patented many inventions, mostly household necessities. * * * * * charlotte f. wilder. charlotte frances wilder, manhattan, has been writing half a century and it has won for her a place in bibliotheque nationale, paris, "entitled to go down to posterity, her lifework preserved as information for future generations." she has written "land of the rising sun," "sister ridenour's sacrifice," "christmas cheer in all lands," "easter gladness," "mission ships," "the child's own book" and "the wonderful story of jesus." her essays, alone, would make a volume, original and interesting. she has written for the press since sixteen years of age and has been a bible teacher forty years. anna l. january. osawatomie claims anna l. january, the author of "historic souvenir of osawatomie, kansas," "john brown battle grounds," "calvin monument," and "lookout and park;" also, numerous poems. mrs. january is a native of wilmington, ohio, coming to kansas in . she taught school three years and in married d. a. january of osawatomie. they have one child, a son of four years. an active worker in the congress of mothers and interested in temperance and suffrage work, mrs. january still finds time to write many short poems. hattie horner louthan. hattie horner louthan, a former white water, kansas girl, is the author of five books and many contributions to newspapers and first class magazines. after graduation at the normal school, emporia, in , miss horner engaged in teaching and literary work. ten years later, she became the wife of overton earl louthan, who died in . she is editor of the great southwest and a member of the staff of the denver republican. her first volume of poems came out in ; the next year, "some reasons for our choice." "not at home," a book of travels, was published in ; "collection of kansas poetry," in ; and "thoughts adrift," in . her work is versatile; the rhyme easy flowing and strong. georgiana freeman mccoy. and mary freeman startzman. georgiana freeman mccoy, wichita, has taught music in kansas longer than any other teacher in the state and incidentally writes verse. she remodeled elizabeth browning's "a drama of exile" and wrote the musical setting for simon buchhalter, the viennese pianist and composer. a sister, mary freeman startzman, while living in fort scott, wrote a volume of poems, "wild flowers." eva morley murphy. eva morley murphy of goodland, recent candidate for congress, is author of two books: "the miracle on the smoky and other stories," and "lois morton's investment." she is a descendant of nathaniel perry of revolutionary fame, and of rodger williams; an active temperance worker; and one of the women who made equal suffrage possible in kansas. sallie f. toler. mrs. sallie f. toler, wichita, has written on every subject from pigs and pole cats to patriotism. she is the author of several plays and three vaudeville sketches. a comedy, a racing romance, "handicapped;" "thekla," a play in three acts; "on bird's island," a four-act play; and "waking him up," a farce, are played in stock now. mrs. toler contributes to many papers and lectures on "the short story" and "the modern drama." margaret perkins. as a christmas offering, margaret perkins, a hutchinson high school teacher, gave us her volume of beautiful poems. "the love letters of a norman princess" is the love story, in verse, of hersilie, a ward and relative of william, the conqueror, and eric, a kinsman of the unfortunate king harold. "i thought once, in a dream, that love came near with silken flutter of empurpled wings that wafted faint, strange fragrance from the things abloom where age and season never sear. the joy of mating birds was in my ear, and flamed my path with dancing daffodils whose splendor melted into greening hills upseeking, like my spirit, to revere." "before you came, this heart of mine a fairy garden seemed with lavender and eglantine; and lovely lilies gleamed above the purple-pansy sod where ruthless passion never trod." "if heaven had been pleased to let you be a keeper of the sheep, a peasant me, within a shepherd's cottage thatched with vine now might we know the bliss of days divine." --"we are part of heaven's scheme, you and i: child of sunshine and the dew i was earthly--born as you. "yet my little hour i go, troubled maid, even where the storm blasts blow, unafraid; confident that from the sod all things upward wend to god." "dear heart, the homing hour is here, the task is done. toilers, and they who course the deer turn, one by one, at day's demise, where dwells a deathless glow in loving eyes. i hear them hearthward go to castle, or to cottage on the lea; but him i love comes never home to me." the peaks that rift the saffron sheen of sunset skies in purple loveliness, when seen by nearer eyes, are bleakly bare. to brave those boulders gray no climbers dare. o, in some future may this mountain mass of unfulfilled desires be unto me as yonder haloed spires!" miss perkins is the compiler of "echoes of pawnee rock," and writes short stories and poems for the magazines. some of her verse is published in woolard's "father." anna e. arnold. anna e. arnold, cottonwood falls, superintendent of chase county schools, is a thorough kansan, and a farm product. she was born at whiting, jackson county, but when a very small child, her parents moved to chase and all her life since has been spent in that county. until the last few years, she lived on a farm. she is a graduate of the state university and has taught in the grade and high schools. in , she became a candidate for superintendent of schools of chase county. her success and her unusual ability as a teacher were rewarded by a two to one majority on a close county ticket. at the second term, she had no opposition and out of votes cast, she received all but . the present year, after four elections, is her seventh continuous year as superintendent of chase county. in addition to her official duties, miss arnold has written two text-books. her "civics and citizenship" in was adopted as the state text-book on civil government for use in the public schools of kansas. it is being used by a large number of womens' clubs. many outlines for club work on civic subjects have come from miss arnold's pen. her second textbook, "a history of kansas," the first book printed under the new state publication law, has also been adopted by the text-book commission. miss arnold is considered one of the foremost educational leaders of the state. topeka gives us anna deming gray, a writer of negro dialect stories, stories for children, and some verse. elizabeth barr arthur, has written a number of books, histories of several kansas counties and some volumes of poems, "washburn ballads." mrs. sarah e. roby is a writer of both prose and verse. a granddaughter, marjory roby, has written a number of stories and plays. eva bland black contributes poems and song lyrics to the magazines. she served her apprenticeship as reporter and city editor of the journal and evening news of garnett and as associate editor of the concordia "magnet." mrs. isabel mcarthur is a natural poet and song writer. she has published one volume of verse, "every body loves a lover." her last song, "when the bloom is on the cherry at sardou" is widely sung. edna e. haywood is author of "fifty common birds around the capital." mrs. mary a. cornelius, while a resident of topeka, wrote four books, "little wolf," "uncle nathan's farm," "the white flame," and "why? a kansas girl's query." another book is ready for publication. mrs. mary worrall hudson, wife of the late general j. k. hudson, former editor of the topeka capital, is author of "two little maids and their friends," "esther, the gentile," and many short stories and poems. her classic prose-poem: "in the missouri woods" is considered her masterpiece. mrs. sara josephine albright, formerly of topeka, now of leavenworth, is a sweet singer of childlife. her volume of verse, "with the children" is lullabies and mother-love poems. a book of stories for children will soon be ready for publication. jessie lewellyn call, deceased, the clever and beautiful daughter of the first populist governor of kansas, was a well-known essayist and short story writer. for many years she was one of the editors of the chicago inter-ocean. lawrence claims dorothy canfield fisher, a writer of both fiction and text-books and many short stories. she is the author of "corneille and racine in england," "english rhetoric and composition," "what shall we do now," "gunhild," "the squirrel cage" and "the montessori mother." louise c. don carlos has written "a battle in the smoke," one of the best kansas works on fiction. she did special work on the nashville tennessee banner and writes a great deal of magazine verse. mrs. anna w. arnett, a lawrence teacher, writes verse and songs. in addition, she has issued a primer, the kansas text-book and a primary reading chart for which she has a united states patent. margaret lynn, one of the faculty of kansas university, is a writer of short stories and "a step-daughter of the prairies." mrs. a. b. butler of manhattan wrote "the trial and condemnation of jesus christ from a lawyer's point of view;" a novel, "ad astra per aspera;" and much newspaper work. mrs. elizabeth champney, a former teacher in the kansas state agricultural college, is the author of more than twenty books and many short stories. "three vassar girls abroad," "witch winnie series," "dames and daughters of colonial days," "romance of french abbeys," "romance of italian villas," and "romance of imperial rome" are her most popular works. sadie e. lewis, hutchinson, is the author of "hard times in kansas" and other verse. her daughter, ida margaret glazier, is a poet and song writer. mrs alice mcallily wrote "terra-cotta" and many other books. lillian w. hale, kansas city, is author of verse, short stories, and a novel. another novel will be ready for publication this autumn. lois oldham henrici, a one-time sabetha and parsons woman, is the author of "representative women" and many good short stories. laura d. congdon, a newton pioneer, is a verse and short story writer. mary h. finn, sedgwick, writes beautiful verse and much prose. jennie c. graves, pittsburg, writes poetry and moving picture plays. mrs. johannas bennett, another pittsburg woman, has written an historical novel, "la belle san antone." florence l. snow, neosho falls, is an artistic and finished writer of verse and prose. she is the author of "the lamp of gold." sharlot m. hall, lincoln, writes prose and verse. a volume of poems, "cactus and pine," "history of arizona," "a woman of the frontier," "the price of the star" and short stories are her important works. mrs. a. s. mcmillan, lyons, a poetess, song writer and licensed preacher, writes clever verse, much of which has been set to music. "land where dreams come true" is her best known poem. kittie skidmore cowen, a former columbus woman, is author of "an unconditional surrender," a civil war story. "the message of hagar," a study of the mormon question will be in the press soon. miss mary e. upshaw, mcpherson, wrote verse at the age of seven and published her first story at fifteen. she has a book in preparation which she expects to publish at an early date. jeanette scott benton, formerly of fort scott, writes short stories novelettes, and stories for children. may belleville brown of salina, has a very clever pen, as has, also mrs. lulu r. fuhr of meade, the author of "tenderfoot tales." mrs. e. m. adams, mound city, writes exquisite verse and in the past, had many short stories to her credit. mrs. c. w. smith, stockton, writes both prose and verse. cara a. thomas hoover, formerly of halstead, harvey county, now living in rialto, california, writes prose and beautiful verse. rose hartwick thorpe, the author of "curfew shall not ring to-night," was a kansan in the early sixties. she lived at wilmington. miss margaret stevenson, olathe, is a writer of books for the blind. she has some short stories, nature and text-books published. lelia hardin bugg, wichita, has written "the prodigal daughter," "the people of our parish," and "orchids." edna thacher russ, also of wichita, writes short stories and educational articles. mrs. e. hamilton myers, englewood, is a dramatic writer and a poet of rare talents. being a musician, much of her verse is used for songs. mrs. myers contributes to the english papers. her first story was published by a magazine which had accepted writings of her mother's. other than literature proper, we have mrs. lillian m. mitchner, of topeka, a scientific writer; mrs. lumina c. r. smythe, a writer of verse, also of topeka, who is co-author with her late husband in the revised "flora and check list of kansas." among the clever newspaper women of the state are margie webb tennal, sabetha; maud c. thompson, howard; frances garside, formerly of atchison, now with the new york journal; mrs. e. e. kelley, toronto; anna carlson, lindsborg; mrs. mary riley, kansas city; and isabel worrel ball, a larned woman, who bears the distinction of being the only woman given a seat in the congressional press gallery. grace d. brewer, girard, has been a newspaper woman and magazine short story writer for ten years. among the early kansas writers are clarinda howard nichols, mrs. a. b. bartlett, lucy b. armstrong, sarah richart, mrs. porter sherman, and mary tenny gray, all of wyandotte and mrs. c. h. cushing of leavenworth. sara t. d. robinson, the wife of the first governor of kansas, was one of the very first women writers of the state. her "kansas, interior and exterior" was published in and went through ten editions up to . index. adams, mrs. e. m. albright, sara josephine allerton, ellen palmer aplington, kate a. armstrong, lucy b. arnett, anna w. arnold, anna e. arthur, elizabeth barr ball, isabel warrel bartlett, mrs. a. b. bellman, bessie may bennett, mrs. johannas benton, jeanette scott black, eva bland brewer, grace d. brown, may bellville bugg, leila hardin butler, mrs. a. b. call, jessie lewellyn carlson, anna champney, elizabeth clark, esther m. congdon, laura d. cornelius, mary a. cowen, kittie skidmore cushing, mrs. c. h. don carlos, louise c. finn, mary h. fisher, dorothy canfield fuhr, lulu r. garside, frances glazier, ida margaret graham, effie graves, jennie c. gray, anna deming gray, mary tenny hale, lillian w. hall, sharlot m. haywood, edna e. henrici, lois oldham henthorne, june bellman hoover, cara a. thomas hudson, mary worrell humphrey, mary vance january, anna l. jarrell, myra williams jones, amanda t. kelley, mrs. e. e. lewis, sadie e. louthan hattie horner lynn, margaret mcallily, alice mcarthur, isabel mccarter, margaret hill mccoy, georgiana freeman mcmillan, mrs. a. s. mitchner, lillian w. murphy, eva morley myers, mrs. e. hamilton nichols, clarinda howard perkins, margaret richart, sarah riley, mary robinson, sara t. d. roby, marjory roby, sara e. russ, edna thatcher sherman, mrs. porter smith, mrs. c. w. smythe, lumina c. r. snow, florence l. startzman, mary freeman stevenson, margaret stockton, cornelia m. tennal, margie webb thompson, maude c. thorpe, rose hartwick toler, sallie f. upshaw, mary e. vaughn, emma upton whitcomb, jessie wright wilder, charlotte f. wood, emma tanner anne bradstreet and her time by helen campbell author of "prisoners of poverty," "mrs. herndon's income," "miss melinda's opportunity," etc. a book for "miss icy." introduction. grave doubts at times arise in the critical mind as to whether america has had any famous women. we are reproached with the fact, that in spite of some two hundred years of existence, we have, as yet, developed no genius in any degree comparable to that of george eliot and george sand in the present, or a dozen other as familiar names of the past. one at least of our prominent literary journals has formulated this reproach, and is even sceptical as to the probability of any future of this nature for american women. what the conditions have been which hindered and hampered such development, will find full place in the story of the one woman who, in the midst of obstacles that might easily have daunted a far stouter soul, spoke such words as her limitations allowed. anne bradstreet, as a name standing alone, and represented only by a volume of moral reflections and the often stilted and unnatural verse of the period, would perhaps, hardly claim a place in formal biography. but anne bradstreet, the first woman whose work has come down to us from that troublous colonial time, and who, if not the mother, is at least the grandmother of american literature, in that her direct descendants number some of our most distinguished men of letters calls for some memorial more honorable than a page in an encyclopedia, or even an octavo edition of her works for the benefit of stray antiquaries here and there. the direct ancestress of the danas, of dr. oliver wendell holmes, wendell phillips, the channings, the buckminsters and other lesser names, would naturally inspire some interest if only in an inquiry as to just what inheritance she handed down, and the story of what she failed to do because of the time into which she was born, holds equal meaning with that of what she did do. i am indebted to mr. john harvard ellis's sumptuous edition of anne bradstreet's works, published in , and containing all her extant works, for all extracts of either prose or verse, as well as for many of the facts incorporated in mr. ellis's careful introduction. miss bailey's "history of andover," has proved a valuable aid, but not more so than "the history of new england," by dr. john gorham palfrey, which affords in many points, the most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. they have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch has found anne bradstreet, in spite of all such deficiencies, a very real and vital person, and ends her task with the belief which it is hoped that the reader may share, that among the honorable women not a few whose lives are to-day our dearest possession, not one claims tenderer memory than she who died in new england two hundred years ago. new york, . contents. chapter i. the old home chapter ii. upheavals chapter iii. the voyage chapter iv. beginnings chapter v. old friends and new chapter vi. a theological tragedy chapter vii. colonial literary development in the seventeenth century chapter viii. some phases of early colonial life chapter ix. andover chapter x. village life in chapter xi a first edition chapter xii. miscellaneous poems chapter xiii. chances and changes chapter xiv. a legacy chapter xv. the puritan reign of terror chapter xvi. home and abroad chapter xvii. the end anne bradstreet and her time. chapter i. the old home. the birthday of the baby, anne dudley, has no record; her birthplace even is not absolutely certain, although there is little doubt that it was at northhampton in england, the home of her father's family. she opened her eyes upon a time so filled with crowding and conflicting interests that there need be no wonder that the individual was more or less ignored, and personal history lost in the general. to what branch of the dudley family she belonged is also uncertain. moore, in his "lives of the governors of new plymouth and massachusetts bay," writes: "there is a tradition among the descendants of governor dudley in the eldest branch of the family, that he was descended from john dudley, duke of northumberland, who was beheaded february, ." such belief was held for a time, but was afterward disallowed by anne bradstreet. in her "elegy upon sir philip sidney," whose mother, the lady mary, was the eldest daughter of that duke of northumberland, she wrote: "let, then, none disallow of these my straines, which have the self-same blood yet in my veines." with the second edition of her poems, however, her faith had changed. this may have been due to a growing indifference to worldly distinctions, or, perhaps, to some knowledge of the dispute as to the ancestry of robert dudley, son of the duke, who was described by one side as a nobleman, by another as a carpenter, and by a third as "a noble timber merchant"; while a wicked wit wrote that "he was the son of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the family and the only one who died in his bed." whatever the cause may have been she renounced all claim to relationship, and the lines were made to read as they at present stand: "then let none disallow of these my straines whilst english blood yet runs within my veines." in any case, her father, thomas dudley, was of gentle blood and training, being the only son of captain roger dudley, who was killed in battle about the year , when the child was hardly nine years old. of his mother there is little record, as also of the sister from whom he was soon separated, though we know that mrs. dudley died shortly after her husband. her maiden name is unknown; she was a relative of sir augustine nicolls, of paxton, kent, one of his majesty's justices of his court of common pleas, and keeper of the great seal to prince charles. the special friend who took charge of thomas dudley through childhood is said to have been "a miss purefoy," and if so, she was the sister of judge nicolls, who married a leicestershire squire, named william purefoy. five hundred pounds was left in trust for him, and delivered to him when he came of age; a sum equivalent to almost as many thousand to-day. at the school to which he was sent he gained a fair knowledge of latin, but he was soon taken from it to become a page in the family of william lord compton, afterward the earl of northumberland. his studies were continued, and in time he became a clerk of his kinsman, "judge nicholls," whose name appears in letters, and who was a sergeant-at-law. such legal knowledge as came to him here was of service through all his later life, but law gave place to arms, the natural bias of most englishmen at that date, and he became captain of eighty volunteers "raised in and about northhampton, and forming part of the force collected by order of queen elizabeth to assist henry iv. of france, in the war against philip ii. of spain," he was at the siege of amiens in , and returned home when it ended, having, though barely of age, already gained distinction as a soldier, and acquired the courtesy of manner which distinguished him till later life, and the blandness of which often blinded unfamiliar acquaintances to the penetration and acumen, the honesty and courage that were the foundations of his character. as his belief changed, and the necessity for free speech was laid upon him, he ceased to disguise his real feelings and became even too out-spoken, the tendency strengthening year by year, and doing much to diminish his popularity, though his qualities were too sterling to allow any lessening of real honor and respect. but he was still the courtier, and untitled as he was, prestige enough came with him to make his marriage to "a gentlewoman whose extract and estate were considerable," a very easy matter, and though we know her only as dorothy dudley, no record of her maiden name having been preserved, the love borne her by both husband and daughter is sufficient evidence of her character and influence. puritanism was not yet an established fact, but the seed had been sown which later became a tree so mighty that thousands gathered under its shadow. the reign of elizabeth had brought not only power but peace to england, and national unity had no further peril of existence to dread. with peace, trade established itself on sure foundations and increased with every year. wealth flowed into the country and the great merchants of london whose growth amazed and troubled the royal council, founded hospitals, "brought the new river from its springs at chadwell and amwell to supply the city with pure water," and in many ways gave of their increase for the benefit of all who found it less easy to earn. the smaller land-owners came into a social power never owned before, and "boasted as long a rent-roll and wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles.... in wealth as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who formed the bulk of the house of commons, stood far above the mass of the peers." character had changed no less than outward circumstances. "the nation which gave itself to the rule of the stewarts was another nation from the panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and religious order to the guidance of the tudors." english aims had passed beyond the bounds of england, and every english "squire who crossed the channel to flesh his maiden sword at ivry or ostend, brought back to english soil, the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustable resources, which had bourn him on through storm and battle field." such forces were not likely to settle into a passive existence at home. action had become a necessity. thoughts had been stirred and awakened once for all. consciously for the few, unconsciously for the many, "for a hundred years past, men had been living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. not only the world about them, but the world within every breast had been utterly transformed. the work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order, which had been accepted without question by the middle ages. the sudden freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the universal activity of the renaissance were but outer expressions of the pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him." this was the first stage, but another quickly and naturally followed, and dread took the place of confidence. with the deepening sense of human individuality, came a deepening conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. not as a theological dogma, but as a human fact man knew himself to be an all but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. the drama towered into sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breasts of othello or macbeth. poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. from that hour one dominant influence told on human action; and all the various energies that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were seized, concentrated and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion. among the myriads upon whom this change had come, thomas dudley was naturally numbered, and the ardent preaching of the well-known puritan ministers, dodd and hildersham, soon made him a non-conformist and later an even more vigorous dissenter from ancient and established forms. as thinking england was of much the same mind, his new belief did not for a time interfere with his advancement, for, some years after his marriage he became steward of the estate of the earl of lincoln, and continued so for more than ten years. plunged in debt as the estate had been by the excesses of thomas, earl of lincoln, who left the property to his son theophilus, so encumbered that it was well nigh worthless, a few years of dudley's skillful management freed it entirely, and he became the dear and trusted friend of the entire family. his first child had been born in , a son named samuel, and in came the daughter whose delicate infancy and childhood gave small hint of the endurance shown in later years. of much the same station and training as mrs. lucy hutchinson, anne dudley could undoubtedly have written in the same words as that most delightful of chroniclers: "by the time i was four years old i read english perfectly, and having a great memory i was carried to sermons.... when i was about seven years of age, i remember i had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needle work; but my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that i was so eager of, that my mother thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment i could steal from my play i would employ in any book i could find when my own were locked up from me." it is certain that the little anne studied the scriptures at six or seven, with as painful solicitude as her elders, for she writes in the fragmentary diary which gives almost the only clue to her real life: "in my young years, about or , as i take it, i began to make conscience of my wayes, and what i knew was sinful, as lying, disobedience to parents, etc., i avoided it. if at any time i was overtaken with the like evills, it was a great trouble. i could not be at rest 'till by prayer i had confest it unto god. i was also troubled at the neglect of private duteys, tho' too often tardy that way. i also found much comfort in reading the scriptures, especially those places i thought most concerned my condition, and as i grew to have more understanding, so the more solace i took in them. "in a long fitt of sickness which i had on my bed, i often communed with my heart and made my supplication to the most high, who sett me free from that affliction." for a childhood which at six searches the scriptures to find verses applicable to its condition, there cannot have been much if any natural child life, and mrs. hutchinson's experience again was probably duplicated for the delicate and serious little anne. "play among other children i despised, and when i was forced to entertain such as came to visit me, i tried them with more grave instruction than their mothers, and plucked all their babies to pieces, and kept the children in such awe, that they were glad when i entertained myself with elder company, to whom i was very acceptable, and living in the house with many persons that had a great deal of wit, and very profitable serious discourses being frequent at my father's table and in my mother's drawing room, i was very attentive to all, and gathered up things that i would utter again, to great admiration of many that took my memory and imitation for wit.... i used to exhort my mother's words much, and to turn their idle discourses to good subjects." given to exhortation as some of the time may have been, and drab- colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later years, in her poem "in honour of du bartas," the delight of puritan maids and mothers; "my muse unto a child i may compare, who sees the riches of some famous fair, he feeds his eyes but understanding lacks, to comprehend the worth of all those knacks; the glittering plate and jewels he admires, the hats and fans, the plumes and ladies' tires, and thousand times his mazed mind doth wish some part, at least, of that brave wealth was his; but seeing empty wishes nought obtain, at night turns to his mother's cot again, and tells her tales (his full heart over glad), of all the glorious sights his eyes have had; but finds too soon his want of eloquence, the silly prattler speaks no word of sense; but seeing utterance fail his great desires, sits down in silence, deeply he admires." it is probably to one of the much exhorted maids that she owed this glimpse of what was then a rallying ground for the jesters and merry andrews, and possibly even a troop of strolling players, frowned upon by the puritan as children of satan, but still secretly enjoyed by the lighter minded among them. but the burden of the time pressed more and more heavily. freedom which had seemed for a time to have taken firm root, and to promise a better future for english thought and life, lessened day by day under the pressure of the stuart dynasty, and every nonconformist home was the center of anxieties that influenced every member of it from the baby to the grandsire, whose memory covered more astonishing changes than any later day has known. the year preceding anne dudley's birth, had seen the beginning of the most powerful influence ever produced upon a people, made ready for it, by long distrust of such teaching as had been allowed. with the translation of the bible into common speech, and the setting up of the first six copies in st. pauls, its popularity had grown from day to day. the small geneva bibles soon appeared and their substance had become part of the life of every english family within an incredibly short space of time. not only thought and action but speech itself were colored and shaped by the new influence. we who hold to it as a well of english undefiled, and resent even the improvements of the new version as an infringement on a precious possession, have small conception of what it meant to a century which had had no prose literature and no poetry save the almost unknown verse of chaucer. "sunday after sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the bible in the nave of st. pauls, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. legend and annal, war song and psalm, state-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of evangelists, stories of mission-journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathens, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. the disclosure of the stores of greek literature had wrought the revolution of renaissance. the disclosure of the older mass of hebrew literature, wrought the revolution of the reformation. but the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. no version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of greece and rome. classical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few, and among these, with the exception of colet and more, or of the pedants who revived a pagan worship in the gardens of the florentine academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. but the language of the hebrew, the idiom of the hellenistic greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. as a mere literary monument the english version of the bible remains the noblest example of the english tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance, the standard of our language. "one must dwell upon this fact persistently, before it will become possible to understand aright either the people or the literature of the time. with generations the influence has weakened, though the best in english speech has its source in one fountain. but the englishman of that day wove his bible into daily speech, as we weave shakespeare or milton or our favorite author of a later day. it was neither affectation nor hypocrisy but an instinctive use that made the curious mosaic of biblical words and phrases which colored english talk two hundred years ago. the mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural, that the range of the hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. when spencer poured forth his warmest love-notes in the 'epithalamion,' he adopted the very words of the psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the entrance of his bride. when cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of david: 'let god arise, and let his enemies be scattered. like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms of today." children caught the influence, and even baby talk was half scriptural, so that there need be no surprise in finding anne bradstreet's earliest recollections couched in the phrases of psalms learned by heart as soon as she could speak, and used, no doubt, half unconsciously. translate her sentences into the thought of to-day, and it is evident, that aside from the morbid conscientiousness produced by her training, that she was the victim of moods arising from constant ill-health. her constitution seems to have been fragile in the extreme, and there is no question but that in her case as in that of many another child born into the perplexed and troubled time, the constant anxiety of both parents, uncertain what a day might bring forth, impressed itself on the baby soul. there was english fortitude and courage, the endurance born of faith, and the higher evolution from english obstinacy, but there was for all of them, deep self-distrust and abasement; a sense of worthlessness that intensified with each generation; and a perpetual, unhealthy questioning of every thought and motive. the progress was slow but certain, rising first among the more sensitive natures of women, whose lives held too little action to drive away the mists, and whose motto was always, "look in and not out"--an utter reversal of the teaching of to-day. the children of that generation lost something that had been the portion of their fathers. the elizabethan age had been one of immense animal life and vigor, and of intense capacity for enjoyment, and, deny it as one might, the effect lingered and had gone far toward forming character. the early nonconformist still shared in many worldly pleasures, and had found no occasion to condense thought upon points in calvinism, or to think of himself as a refugee from home and country. the cloud at first no bigger than a man's hand, was not dreaded, and life in nonconformist homes went on with as much real enjoyment as if their ownership were never to be questioned. serious and sad, as certain phases come to be, it is certain that home life developed as suddenly as general intelligence. the changes in belief in turn affected character. "there was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the subtle and tender play of feeling, the breath of sympathy, the quick pulse of delight, which had marked the age of elizabeth; but on the other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of manhood, in orderliness and equable force. the larger geniality of the age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within the narrower circle of the home. home, as we now conceive it, was the creation of the puritan. wife and child rose from mere dependants on the will of husband or father, as husband or father saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine spirit and called with a divine calling like his own. the sense of spiritual fellowship gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections." the same influence had touched thomas dudley, and dorothy dudley could have written of him as lucy hutchinson did of her husband: "he was as kind a father, as dear a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." in a time when, for the cavalier element, license still ruled and lawless passion was glorified by every play writer, the puritan demanded a different standard, and lived a life of manly purity in strange contrast to the grossness of the time. of hutchinson and dudley and thousands of their contemporaries the same record held good: "neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or temptation. scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure." naturally with such standards life grew orderly and methodical. "plain living and high thinking," took the place of high living and next to no thinking. heavy drinking was renounced. sobriety and self-restraint ruled here as in every other act of life, and the division between cavalier and nonconformist became daily more and more marked. persecution had not yet made the gloom and hardness which soon came to be inseparable from the word puritan, and children were still allowed many enjoyments afterward totally renounced. milton could write, even after his faith had settled and matured: "haste then, nymph, and bring with thee jest and youthful jollity, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, such as hang on hebe's cheek and love to live in dimple sleek; sports that wrinkled care derides and laughter holding both his sides." cromwell himself looked on at masques and revels, and whitelock, a puritan lawyer and his ambassador to sweden, left behind him a reputation for stately and magnificent entertaining, which his admirers could never harmonize with his persistent refusal to conform to the custom of drinking healths. in the report of this embassy printed after whitelock's return and republished some years ago, occurs one of the best illustrations of puritan social life at that period. "how could you pass over their very long winter nights?" was one of the questions asked by the protector at the first audience after his return from the embassy. "i kept my people together," was the reply, "and in action and recreation, by having music in my house, and encouraging that and the exercise of dancing, which held them by the eyes and ears, and gave them diversion without any offence. and i caused the gentlemen to have disputations in latin, and declamations upon words which i gave them." cromwell, "those were very good diversions, and made your house a little academy." whitelock, "i thought these recreations better than gaming for money, or going forth to places of debauchery." cromwell, "it was much better." in the earl of lincoln's household such amusements would be common, and it was not till many years later, that a narrowing faith made anne write them down as "the follyes of youth." through that youth, she had part in every opportunity that the increased respect for women afforded. many a puritan matron shared her husband's studies, or followed her boys in their preparation for oxford or cambridge, and anne bradstreet's poems and the few prose memorials she left, give full evidence of an unusually broad training, her delicacy of health making her more ready for absorption in study. shakespeare and cervantes were still alive at her birth, and she was old enough, with the precocious development of the time, to have known the sense of loss and the general mourning at their death in . it is doubtful if the plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her, though there are hints in her poems of some knowledge of shakespeare, but by the time girlhood was reached, the feeling against them had increased to a degree hardly comprehensible save in the light of contemporaneous history. the worst spirit of the time was incorporated in the later plays, and the puritans made no discrimination. the players in turn hated them, and mrs. hutchinson wrote: "every stage and every table, and every puppet- play, belched forth profane scoffs upon them, the drunkards made them their songs, and all fiddlers and mimics learned to abuse them, as finding it the most gameful way of fooling." if, however, the dramatists were forbidden, there were new and inexhaustible sources of inspiration and enjoyment, in the throng of new books, which the quiet of the reign of james allowed to appear in quick succession. chapman's magnificent version of homer was delighting cavalier and puritan alike. "plutarch's lives," were translated by sir thomas north and his book was "a household book for the whole of the seventeenth century." montaigne's essays had been "done into english" by john florio, and to some of them at least thomas dudley was not likely to take exception. poets and players had, however, come to be classed together and with some reason, both alike antagonizing the puritan, but the poets of the reign of james were far more simple and natural in style than those of the age of elizabeth, and thus, more likely to be read in puritan families. their numbers may be gauged by their present classification into "pastoral, satirical, theological, metaphysical and humorous," but only two of them were in entire sympathy with the puritan spirit, or could be read without serious shock to belief and scruples. for the sake of her own future work, deeper drinking at these springs was essential, and in rejecting them, anne dudley lost the influence that must have moulded her own verse into much more agreeable form for the reader of to-day, though it would probably have weakened her power in her own day. the poets she knew best hindered rather than helped development. wither and quarles, both deeply calvinistic, the former becoming afterward one of cromwell's major-generals, were popular not only then but long afterward, and quarles' "emblems", which appeared in , found their way to new england and helped to make sad thought still more dreary. historians and antiquaries were at work. sir walter raleigh's "history of the world," must have given little anne her first suggestion of life outside of england, while buchanan, the tutor of king james, had made himself the historian and poet of scotland. bacon had just ended life and labor; hooker's ecclesiastical polity was before the world, though not completed until , and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a "mass of sermons, books of devotion, religious tracts and controversial pamphlets." sermons abounded, those of archbishop usher, andrews and donne being specially valued, while "the saint's cordial," of dr. richard sibbs, and the pious meditations of bishop hall were on every puritan bookshelf. but few strictly sectarian books appeared, "the censorship of the press, the right of licensing books being almost entirely arrogated to himself by the untiring enemy of the nonconformists, laud, bishop of london, whose watchful eye few heretical writings could escape.. . . many of the most ultra pamphlets and tracts were the prints of foreign presses secretly introduced into the country without the form of a legal entry at stationers' hall." the same activity which filled the religious world, was found also in scientific directions and dr. harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, and napier's introduction of logarithms, made a new era for both medicine and mathematics. that every pulse of this new tide was felt in the castle at lempingham is very evident, in all anne bradstreet's work. the busy steward found time for study and his daughter shared it, and when he revolted against the incessant round of cares and for a time resigned the position, the leisure gained was devoted to the same ends. the family removed to boston in lincolnshire, and there an acquaintance was formed which had permanent influence on the minds of all. here dwelt the rev. john cotton, vicar of the parish and already obnoxious to the bishops. no man among the nonconformists had had more brilliant reputation before the necessity of differing came upon him, and his personal influence was something phenomenal. to the girl whose sensitive, eager mind reached out to every thing high and noble he must have seemed of even rarer stuff than to-day we know him to have been. at thirteen he had entered emmanuel college at cambridge, and adding distinction to distinction had come at last to be dean of the college to which he belonged. his knowledge of greek was minute and thorough, and he conversed with ease in either latin or hebrew. as a pulpit orator he was famous, and crowds thronged the ancient church of st. mary in cambridge whenever he preached. here he gave them "the sort of sermons then in fashion--learned, ornate, pompous, bristling with epigrams, stuffed with conceits, all set off dramatically by posture, gesture and voice." the year in which anne dudley was born, had completed the change which had been slowly working in him and which tyler describes in his vivid pages on the theological writers of new england: "his religious character had been deepening into puritanism. he had come to view his own preaching as frivolous, sadducean, pagan." he decided to preach one sermon which would show what changes had come, and the announcement of his intention brought together the usual throng of under-graduates, fellows and professors who looked for the usual entertainment. never was a crowd more deceived. "in preparing once more to preach to this congregation of worldly and witty folk, he had resolved to give them a sermon intended to exhibit jesus christ rather than john cotton. this he did. his hearers were astonished, disgusted. not a murmur of applause greeted the several stages of his discourse as before. they pulled their shovel caps down over their faces, folded their arms, and sat it out sullenly, amazed that the promising john cotton had turned lunatic or puritan." nearly twenty years passed before his energies were transferred to new england, but the ending of his university career by no means hampered his work elsewhere. as vicar of st. botolphs at boston his influence deepened with every year, and he grew steadily in knowledge about the bible, and in the science of god and man as seen through the dim goggles of john calvin. his power as a preacher was something tremendous, but he remained undisturbed until the reign of james had ended and the "fatal eye of bishop laud" fell upon him. "it was in that laud became primate of england; which meant, among other things, that nowhere within the rim of that imperial island was there to be peace or safety any longer for john cotton. some of his friends in high station tried to use persuasive words with the archbishop on his behalf, but the archbishop brushed aside their words with an insupportable scorn. the earl of dorset sent a message to cotton, that if he had only been guilty of drunkenness or adultery, or any such minor ministerial offence, his pardon could have been had; but since his crime was puritanism, he must flee for his life. so, for his life he fled, dodging his pursuers; and finally slipping out of england, after innumerable perils, like a hunted felon; landing in boston in september, ." long before this crisis had come, thomas dudley had been recalled by the earl of lincoln, who found it impossible to dispense with his services, and the busy life began again. whether anne missed the constant excitement the strenuous spiritual life enforced on all who made part of john cotton's congregation, there is no record, but one may infer from a passage in her diary that a reaction had set in, and that youth asserted itself. "but as i grew up to bee about fourteen or fifteen i found my heart more carnall and sitting loose from god, vanity and the follys of youth take hold of me. "about sixteen, the lord layd his hand sore upon me and smott mee with the small-pox. when i was in my affliction, i besought the lord, and confessed my pride and vanity and he was entreated of me, and again restored me. but i rendered not to him according to ye benefit received." here is the only hint as to personal appearance. "pride and vanity," are more or less associated with a fair countenance, and though no record gives slightest detail as to form or feature, there is every reason to suppose that the event, very near at hand, which altered every prospect in life, was influenced in degree, at least, by considerations slighted in later years, but having full weight with both. that thomas dudley was a "very personable man," we know, and there are hints that his daughter resembled him, though it was against the spirit of the time to record mere accidents of coloring or shape. but anne's future husband was a strikingly handsome man, not likely to ignore such advantages in the wife he chose, and we may think of her as slender and dark, with heavy hair and the clear, thoughtful eyes, which may be seen in the potrait of paul dudley to-day. there were few of what we consider the typical englishmen among these puritan soldiers and gentry. then, as now, the reformer and liberal was not likely to be of the warm, headlong saxon type, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and open to every suggestion of pleasure loving temperament. it was the dark-haired men of the few districts who made up cromwell's regiment of ironsides, and who from what galton calls, "their atrabilious and sour temperament," were likely to become extremists, and such puritan portraits as remain to us, have most of them these characteristics. the english type of face altered steadily for many generations, and the englishmen of the eighteenth century had little kinship with the race reproduced in holbein's portraits, which show usually, "high cheek-bones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank, dark hair. it would be impossible ... for the majority of modern englishmen so to dress themselves and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits." the type was perpetuated in new england, where for a hundred years, there was not the slightest admixture of foreign blood, increased delicacy with each generation setting it farther and farther apart from the always grosser and coarser type in old england. puritan abstinence had much to do with this, though even for them, heavy feeding, as compared with any modern standard was the rule, its results being found in the diaries of what they recorded and believed to be spiritual conflicts. then, as now, dyspepsia often posed as a delicately susceptible temperament, and the "pasty" of venison or game, fulfilled the same office as the pie into which it degenerated, and which is one of the most firmly established of american institutions. then, as occasionally even to day, indigestion counted as "a hiding of the lord's face," and a bilious attack as "the hand of the lord laid heavily on one for reproof and correction." such "reproof and correction" would often follow if the breakfasts of the earl of lincoln and his household were of the same order as those of the earl of northumberland, in whose house "the family rose at six and took breakfast at seven. my lord and lady sat down to a repast of two pieces of salted fish, and half a dozen of red herrings, with four fresh ones, or a dish of sprats and a quart of beer and the same measure of wine ... at other seasons, half a chine of mutton or of boiled beef, graced the board. capons at two-pence apiece and plovers (at christmas), were deemed too good for any digestion that was not carried on in a noble stomach." with the dropping of fasts and meager days, fish was seldom used, and the sunday morning breakfast of queen elizabeth and her retinue in one of her "progresses" through the country, for which three oxen and one hundred and forty geese were furnished, became the standard, which did not alter for many generations. a diet more utterly unsuited to the child who passed from one fit of illness to another, could hardly be imagined, and the gloom discoverable in portions of her work was as certainly dyspepsia as she imagined it to be "the motion and power of ye adversary." winthrop had encountered the same difficulty and with his usual insight and common sense, wrote in his private dairy fifteen years before he left england, "sep: , . ffinding that the variety of meates drawes me on to eate more than standeth with my healthe i have resolved not to eat of more than two dishes at any one meale, whither fish, fleshe, fowle or fruite or whitt-meats, etc; whither at home or abroade; the lord give me care and abilitie to perform it." evidently the flesh rebelled, for later he writes: "idlenesse and gluttonie are the two maine pillars of the flesh his kingdome," but he conquered finally, both he and simon bradstreet being singularly abstinent. her first sixteen years of life were, for anne dudley, filled with the intensest mental and spiritual activity--hampered and always in leading strings, but even so, an incredible advance on anything that had been the portion of women for generations. then came, for the young girl, a change not wholly unexpected, yet destined to alter every plan, and uproot every early association. but to the memories of that loved early life she held with an english tenacity, not altered by transplanting, that is seen to-day in countless new englanders, whose english blood is of as pure a strain as any to be found in the old home across the sea. chapter ii. upheavals. though the long engagement which mr. ruskin demands as a necessity in lessening some of the present complications of the marriage question may not have been the fortune of simon and anne bradstreet, it is certain that few couples have ever had better opportunity for real knowledge of one another's peculiarities and habits of thought. circumstances placed them under the same roof for years before marriage, and it would have been impossible to preserve any illusions, while every weakness as well as every virtue had fullest opportunity for disclosure. there is no hint of other suitors, nor detail of the wooing, but the portrait of governor bradstreet, still to be seen in the senate chamber of the massachusetts state house, shows a face that even in middle life, the time at which the portrait was painted, held an ardor, that at twenty-five must have made him irresistible. it is the head of cavalier rather than roundhead--the full though delicately curved lips and every line in the noble face showing an eager, passionate, pleasure-loving temperament. but the broad, benignant forehead, the clear, dark eyes, the firm, well-cut nose, hold strength as well as sweetness, and prepare one for the reputation which the old colonial records give him. the high breeding, the atmosphere of the whole figure, comes from a marvellously well- balanced nature, as well as from birth and training. there is a sense of the keenest life and vigor, both mental and physical, and despite the puritan garb, does not hide the man of whom his wife might have written with mrs. hutchinson: "to sum up, therefore, all that can be said of his outward frame and disposition, we must truly conclude that it was a very handsome and well-furnished lodging prepared for the reception of that prince who, in the administration of all excellent virtues, reigned there a while, till he was called back to the palace of the universal emperor." simon bradstreet's father, "born of a wealthy family in suffolk, was one of the first fellows of emanuel college, and highly esteemed by persons distinguished for learning." in he was minister at horbling in lincolnshire, but was never anything but a nonconformist to the church of england. here in simon bradstreet was born, and until fourteen years old was educated in the grammar school of that place, till the death of his father made some change necessary. john cotton was the mutual friend of both dudley and the elder bradstreet, and dudley's interest in the son may have arisen from this fact. however this may be, he was taken at fifteen into the earl of lincoln's household, and trained to the duties of a steward by dudley himself. anne being then a child of nine years old, and probably looking up to him with the devotion that was shared by her older brother, then eleven and always the friend and ally of the future governor. his capacity was so marked that dr. preston, another family friend and a noted nonconformist, interested himself in his further education, and succeeded in entering him at emanuel college, cambridge, in the position of governor to the young lord rich, son of the earl of warwick. for some reason the young nobleman failed to come to college and bradstreet's time was devoted to a brother of the earl of lincoln, who evidently shared the love of idleness and dissipation that had marked his grandfather's career. it was all pleasant and all eminently unprofitable, bradstreet wrote in later years, but he accomplished sufficient study to secure his bachelor's degree in . four years later, while holding the position of steward to the earl of lincoln, given him by dudley on the temporary removal to boston, that of master of arts was bestowed upon him, making it plain that his love of study had continued. with the recall of dudley, he became steward to the countess of warwick, which position he held at the time of his marriage in . it was in this year that anne, just before her marriage recorded, when the affliction had passed: "about , the lord layde his hand sore upon me and smott me with the small-pox." it is curious that the woman whose life in many points most resembles her own--mrs. lucy hutchinson--should have had precisely the same experience, writing of herself in the "memoirs of colonel hutchinson": "that day that the friends on both sides met to conclude the marriage, she fell sick of the small-pox, which was in many ways a great trial upon him. first, her life was in almost desperate hazard, and then the disease, for the present, made her the most deformed person that could be seen, for a great while after she recovered; yet he was nothing troubled at it, but married her as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look on her; but god recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her, though she was longer than ordinary before she recovered to be as well as before." whether disease or treatment held the greater terror, it would be hard to say. modern medical science has devised many alleviations, and often restores a patient without spot or blemish. but to have lived at all in that day evidenced extraordinary vitality. cleanliness was unknown, water being looked upon as deadly poison whether taken internally or applied externally. covered with blankets, every window tightly sealed, and the moaning cry for water answered by a little hot ale or tincture of bitter herbs, nature often gave up the useless struggle and released the tortured and delirious wretch. the means of cure left the constitution irretrievably weakened if not hopelessly ruined, and the approach of the disease was looked upon with affright and regarded usually as a special visitation of the wrath of god. that anne dudley so viewed it is evident from the passage in her diary, already quoted; that the lord "smott" her, was unquestioned, and she cast about in her girlish mind for the shadow of the sin that had brought such judgment, making solemn resolutions, not only against any further indulgence in "pride and vanity," but all other offences, deciding that self-abnegation was the only course, and possibly even beginning her convalescence with a feeling that love itself should be put aside, and all her heart be "sett upon god." but simon bradstreet waited, like colonel hutchinson, only till "she was fit to leave her chamber," and whether "affrighted" or not, the marriage was consummated early in . of heavier, stouter frame than colonel hutchinson, and of a far more vigorous constitution, the two men had much in common. the forces that moulded and influenced the one, were equally potent with the other. the best that the time had to give entered into both, and though hutchinson's name and life are better known, it is rather because of the beauty and power with which his story was told, by a wife who worshipped him, than because of actually greater desert. but the first rush of free thought ennobled many men who in the old chains would have lived lives with nothing in them worth noting, and names full of meaning are on every page of the story of the time. we have seen how the whole ideal of daily life had altered, as the puritan element gained ground, and the influence affected the thought and life--even the speech of their opponents. a writer on english literature remarks: "in one sense, the reign of james is the most religious part of our history; for religion was then fashionable. the forms of state, the king's speeches, the debates in parliament and the current literature, were filled with quotations from scripture and quaint allusions to sacred things." even the soldier studied divinity, and colonel hutchinson, after his "fourteen months various exercise of his mind, in the pursuit of his love, being now at rest in the enjoyment of his wife," thought it the most natural thing in the world to make "an entrance upon the study of school divinity, wherein his father was the most eminent scholar of any gentleman in england and had a most choice library.... having therefore gotten into the house with him an excellent scholar in that kind of learning, he for two years made it the whole employment of his time." much of such learning simon bradstreet had taken in unconsciously in the constant discussions about his father's table, as well as in the university alive to every slightest change in doctrine, where freer but fully as interested talk went on. puritanism had as yet acquired little of the bitterness and rigor born of persecution, but meant simply emancipated thought, seeking something better than it had known, but still claiming all the good the world held for it. milton is the ideal puritan of the time, and something of the influences that surrounded his youth were in the home of every well-born puritan. even much farther down in the social scale, a portrait remains of a london house mother, which may stand as that of many, whose sons and daughters passed over at last to the new world, hopeless of any quiet or peace in the old. it is a turner in eastcheap, nehemiah wallington, who writes of his mother: "she was very loving and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. she was a pattern of sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take her needle-work and say--'here is my recreation'.... god had given her a very pregnant wit and an excellent memory. she was very ripe and perfect in all stories of the bible, likewise in all the stories of the martyrs, and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in the english chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of england. she lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four days." if the influence of the new thought was so potent with a class who in the tudor days had made up the london mob, and whose signature, on the rare occasions when anybody wanted it, had been a mark, the middle class, including professional men, felt it infinitely more. in the early training with many, as with milton's father, music was a passion; there was nothing illiberal or narrow. in milton's case he writes: "my father destined me while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which i seized with such eagerness that from the twelth year of my age i scarcely ever went from my lessons to my bed before midnight." "to the greek, latin and hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add italian and french. nor were english letters neglected. spencer gave the earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. in spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a puritan youth could still in milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest shakspeare fancy's child, warble his native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique pageantry,' of the court revels, hints for his own 'comus' and 'arcades'." simon bradstreet's year at cambridge probably held much the same experience, and if a narrowing faith in time taught him to write it down as "all unprofitable," there is no doubt that it helped to broaden his nature and establish the catholic-mindedness which in later years, in spite of every influence against it, was one of his distinguishing characteristics. in the meantime he was a delightful companion. cut off by his principles from much that passed as enjoyment, hating the unbridled licentiousness, the "ornate beastliness," of the stuart reign, he like others of the same faith took refuge in intellectual pleasures. like colonel hutchinson--and this portrait, contrary in all points to the preconceived idea, is a typical one--he "could dance admirably well, but neither in youth nor riper years made any practice of it; he had skill in fencing such as became a gentleman; he had great love to music and often diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly; he had an exact ear and judgment in other music; he shot excellently in bows and guns, and much used them for his exercise; he had great judgment in paintings, graving, sculpture, and all liberal arts, and had many curiosities of value in all kinds; he took great delight in perspective glasses, and, for his other rarities was not so much affected with the antiquity as the merit of the work; he took much pleasure in improvement of grounds, in planting groves and walks and fruit trees, in opening springs, and making fish-ponds." all these tastes were almost indispensable to anyone filling the position which, alike, dudley and bradstreet held. "steward" then, had a very different meaning from any associated with it now, and great estates were left practically in the hands of managers while the owners busied themselves in other directions, relying upon the good taste as well as the financial ability of the men who, as a rule, proved more than faithful to the trust. the first two years of marriage were passed in england, and held the last genuine social life and intellectual development that anne bradstreet was to enjoy. the love of learning was not lost in the transition from one country to another, but it took on more and more a theological bias, and embodied itself chiefly in sermons and interminable doctrinal discussions. even before the marriage, dudley had decided to join the new england colony, but simon bradstreet hesitated and lingered, till forced to a decision by the increasing shadow of persecution. had they remained in england, there is little doubt that anne bradstreet's mind, sensitively alive as it was to every fine influence, would have developed in a far different direction to that which it finally took. the directness and joyous life of the elizabethan literature had given place to the euphuistic school, and as the puritans put aside one author after another as "not making for godliness," the strained style, the quirks and conceits of men like quarles and withers came to represent the highest type of literary effort. but no author had the influence of du bartas, whose poems had been translated by joshua sylvester in , under the title of "du bartas. his duuine weekes and workes, with a complete collection of all the other most delightfull workes, translated and written by ye famous philomusus, josvah sylvester, gent." he in turn was an imitator; a french euphuist, whose work simply followed and patterned after that of ronsard, whose popularity for a time had convinced france that no other poet had been before him, and that no successor could approach his power. he chose to study classical models rather than nature or life, and his most formidable poem, merely a beginning of some five or six thousand verses on "the race of french kings, descended from francion, a child of hector and a trojan by birth," ended prematurely on the death of charles ix, but served as a model for a generation of imitators. what spell lay in the involved and interminable pages the modern reader cannot decide, but milton studied them, and affirmed that they had aided in forming his style, and spenser wrote of him-- "and after thee, (du bellay) 'gins barras hie to raise his heavenly muse, th' almighty to adore. live, happy spirits! th' honor of your name, and fill the world with never dying fame." dryden, too, shared the infatuation, and in the epistle dedicatory to "the spanish friar," wrote: "i remember when i was a boy, i thought inimitable spenser a mean poet, in comparison of sylvester's 'dubartas,' and was wrapt into an ecstasy when i read these lines: "'now when the winter's keener breath began to crystallize the baltic ocean; to glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, and periwig with snow (wool) the bald-pate woods.' "i am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." van lann stigmatizes this poem, _le semaine ou creation du monde_, as "the marriage-register of science and verse, written by a gascon moses, who, to the minuteness of a walt whitman and the unction of a parish-clerk, added an occasional dignity superior to anything attained by the abortive epic of his master." but he had some subtle, and to the nineteenth century mind, inscrutable charm. poets studied him and anne bradstreet did more than study; she absorbed them, till such originality as had been her portion perished under the weight. in later years she disclaimed the charge of having copied from him, but the infection was too thorough not to remain, and the assimilation had been so perfect that imitation was unconscious. there was everything in the life of du bartas to appeal to her imagination as well as her sympathy, and with her minute knowledge of history she relished his detail while reverencing his character. for du bartas was a french puritan, holding the same religious views as henry iv, before he became king of france, his strong religious nature appealing to every english reader. born in , of noble parents, and brought up, according to michaud in the biographic universelle, to the profession of arms, he distinguished himself as a soldier and negotiater. attached to the person of prince henry "in the capacity of gentleman in ordinary of his bedchamber, he was successfully employed by him on missions to denmark, scotland and england. he was at the battle of ivry and celebrated in song the victory which he had helped to gain. he died four months after, in july, , at the age of forty-six, in consequence of some wounds which had been badly healed. he passed all the leisure which his duties left him, at his chateau du bartas. it was there that he composed his long and numerous poems.... his principal poem, _la semaine,_ went through more than thirty editions in less than six years, and was translated into latin, italian, spanish, english, german and dutch." the influence was an unfortunate one. nature had already been set aside so thoroughly that, as with dryden, spenser was regarded as common-place and even puerile, and the record of real life or thought as no part of a poet's office. such power of observation as anne bradstreet had was discouraged in the beginning, and though later it asserted itself in slight degree, her early work shows no trace of originality, being, as we are soon to see, merely a rhymed paraphrase of her reading. that she wrote verse, not included in any edition of her poems, we know, the earliest date assigned there being , but the time she had dreaded was at hand, and books and study went the way of many other pleasant things. with the dread must have mingled a certain thrill of hope and expectation common to every thinking man and woman who in that seventeenth century looked to the new world to redress every wrong of the old, and who watched every movement of the little band that in holland waited, for light on the doubtful and beclouded future. the story of the first settlement needs no repetition here. the years in holland had knit the little band together more strongly and lastingly than proved to be the case with any future company, their minister, john robinson, having infused his own intense and self-abnegating nature into every one. that the virginian colonies had suffered incredibly they knew, but it had no power to dissuade them. "we are well weaned," john robinson wrote, "from the delicate milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land; the people are industrious and frugal. we are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof, we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole. it is not with us, as with men whom small things can discourage." by , the worst difficulties had been overcome, and the struggle for mere existence had ended. the little colony, made up chiefly of hard working men, had passed through every phase of suffering. sickness and famine had done their worst. the settlers were thoroughly acclimated, and as they prospered, more and more the eyes of puritan england turned toward them, with a longing for the same freedom. laud's hand was heavy and growing heavier, and as privileges lessened, and one after another found fine, or pillory, or banishment awaiting every expression of thought, the eagerness grew and intensified. as yet there had been no separation from the mother church. it had simply "divided into two great parties, the prelatical or hierarchical, headed by laud, and the nonconformist or puritan." for the latter, calvin had become the sole authority, and even as early as , their preachers made up more than a ninth of the clergy. the points of disagreement increased steadily, each fresh severity from the prelatical party being met by determined resistance, and a stubborn resolution never to yield an inch of the new convictions. no clearer presentation of the case is to be found anywhere than in mason's life of milton, the poet's life being absolutely contemporaneous with the cause, and his own experience came to be that of hundreds. from his childhood he had been set apart for the ministry, but he was as he wrote in later life, with a bitterness he never lost, "church-outed by the prelates." "coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the church, that he who would take orders, must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either straight perjure or split his faith, i thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." each year of the increasing complications found a larger body enrolled on his side, and with , simon bradstreet resigned any hope of life in england, and cast in his fortunes once for all with the projected colony. in dissolving his third parliament charles had granted the charter for the massachusetts colony, and seizing upon this as a "providential call," the puritans at once circulated "conclusions" among gentry and traders, and full descriptions of massachusetts. already many capitalists deemed encouragement of the emigration an excellent speculation, but the prospective emigrants had no mind to be ruled by a commercial company at home, and at last, after many deliberations, the old company was dissolved; the officers resigned and their places were filled by persons who proposed to emigrate. two days before this change twelve gentlemen met at cambridge and "pledged themselves to each other to embark for new england with their families for a permanent residence." "provided always, that, before the last of september next, the whole government, together with the patent for the said plantation, be first legally transferred." dudley's name was one of the twelve, and at another meeting in october he was also present, with john winthrop, who was shortly chosen governor. a day or two later, dudley was made assistant governor, and in the early spring of , but a few days before sailing simon bradstreet was elected to the same office in the place of mr. thomas goffe. one place of trust after another was filled by the two men, whose history henceforward is that of new england. dudley being very shortly made "undertaker," that is, to be one of those having "the sole managinge of the joynt stock, wth all things incydent theronto, for the space of years." even for the sternest enthusiasts, the departure seemed a banishment, though winthrop spoke the mind of all when he wrote, "i shall call that my country where i may most glorify god and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends." for him the dearest were left behind for a time, and in all literature there is no tenderer letter than that in which his last words go to the wife whom he loved with all the strength of his nature, and the parting from whom, was the deepest proof that could have been of his loyalty to the cause he had made his own. as he wrote the arbella was riding at anchor at cowes, waiting for favorable winds. some of the party had gone on shore, and all longed to end these last hours of waiting which simply prolonged a pain that even the most determined and resolute among them, felt to be almost intolerable. many messages went back carried by friends who lingered at cowes for the last look at the vanishing sails, but none better worth record than the words which hold the man's deep and tender soul. "and now, my sweet soul, i must once again take my last farewell of thee in old england. it goeth very near to my heart to leave thee, but i know to whom i have committed thee, even to him, who loves thee much better than any husband can; who hath taken account of the hairs of thy head, and puts all thy tears in his bottle; who can, and (if it be for his glory) will, bring us together again with peace and comfort. oh, how it refresheth my heart to think, that i shall yet again see thy sweet face in the land of the living; that lovely countenance that i have so much delighted in, and beheld with so great content! i have hitherto been so taken up with business, as i could seldom look back to my former happiness; but now when i shall be at some leisure, i shall not avoid the remembrance of thee, nor the grief for thy absence. thou hast thy share with me, but i hope the course we have agreed upon will be some ease to us both. mondays and fridays at five o'clock at night we shall meet in spirit till we meet in person. yet if all these hopes should fail, blessed be our god, that we are assured we shall meet one day, if not as husband and wife, yet in a better condition. let that stay and comfort thine heart. neither can the sea drown thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy husband or children. therefore i will only take thee now and my sweet children in mine arms, and kiss and embrace you all, and so leave you with god. farewell, farewell. i bless you all in the name of the lord jesus." "farewell, dear england!" burst from the little group on that th of april, , when at last, a favorable wind bore them out to sea, and anne bradstreet's voice had part in that cry of pain and longing, as the shores grew dim and "home faded from their sight. but one comfort or healing remained for them, in the faith that had been with all from the beginning, one record being for them and the host who preceded and followed their flight. so they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place; ... but they knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." chapter iii. the voyage. it is perhaps the fault of the seventeenth century and its firm belief that a woman's office was simply to wait such action as man might choose to take, that no woman's record remains of the long voyage or the first impressions of the new country. for the most of them writing was by no means a familiar task, but this could not be said of the women on board the arbella, who had known the highest cultivation that the time afforded. but poor anne bradstreet's young "heart rose," to such a height that utterance may have been quite stifled, and as her own family were all with her, there was less need of any chronicle. for all details, therefore, we are forced to depend on the journal kept by governor winthrop, who busied himself not only with this, making the first entry on that easter monday which found them riding at anchor at cowes, but with another quite as characteristic piece of work. a crowded storm-tossed ship, is hardly a point to which one looks for any sustained or fine literary composition, but the little treatise, "a model of christian charity," the fruit of long and silent musing on the new life awaiting them, holds the highest thought of the best among them, and was undoubtedly read with the profoundest feeling and admiration, as it took shape in the author's hands. there were indications even in the first fervor of the embarkation, that even here some among them thought "every man upon his own," while greater need of unselfishness and self-renunciation had never been before a people. "only by mutual love and help," and "a grand, patient, self-denial," was there the slightest hope of meeting the demands bound up with the new conditions, and winthrop wrote--"we must be knit together in this work as one man. we must entertain each other in brotherly affection. we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. we must uphold a familiar commerce together, in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. we must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes, our commission and community in the work as members of the same body." a portion of this body were as closely united as if forming but one family. the lady arbella, in compliment to whom the ship, which had been first known as the eagle, had been re-christened, had married mr. isaac johnson, one of the wealthiest members of the party. she was a sister of the earl of lincoln who had come to the title in , and whose family had a more intimate connection with the new england settlements than that of any other english nobleman. her sister susan had become the wife of john humfrey, another member of the company, and the close friendship between them and the dudleys made it practically a family party. anne bradstreet had grown up with both sisters, and all occupied themselves in such ways as their cramped quarters would allow. space was of the narrowest, and if the governor and his deputies indulged themselves in spreading out papers, there would be small room for less important members of the expedition. but each had the little geneva bible carried by every puritan, and read it with a concentrated eagerness born of the sense that they had just escaped its entire loss, and there were perpetual religious exercises of all varieties, with other more secular ones recorded in the journal. in the beginning there had been some expectation that several other ships would form part of the expedition, but they were still not in sailing order and thus the first entry records "it was agreed, (it being uncertain when the rest of the fleet would be ready) these four ships should consort together; the arbella to be admiral, the talbot vice-admiral, the ambrose rear-admiral, and the jewel a captain; and accordingly articles of consortship were drawn between the said captains and masters." the first week was one of small progress, for contrary winds drove them back persistently and they at last cast anchor before yarmouth, and with the feeling that some jonah might be in their midst ordered a fast for friday, the d of april, at which time certain light-minded "landmen, pierced a runlet of strong water, and stole some of it, for which we laid them in bolts all the night, and the next morning the principal was openly whipped, and both kept with bread and water that day." nothing further happened till monday, when excitement was afforded for the younger members of the party at least, as "a maid of sir robert saltonstall fell down at the grating by the cook-room, but the carpenter's man, who unwittingly, occasioned her fall caught hold of her with incredible nimbleness, and saved her; otherwise she had fallen into the hold." tuesday, finding that the wind was still against them, the captain drilled the landmen with their muskets, "and such as were good shot among them were enrolled to serve in the ship if occasion should be"; while the smell of powder and the desire, perhaps, for one more hour on english soil, made the occasion for another item: "the lady arbella and the gentlewomen, and mr. johnson and some others went on shore to refresh themselves." the refreshment was needed even then. anne bradstreet was still extremely delicate, never having fully recovered from the effects of the small-pox, and the lady arbella's health must have been so also, as it failed steadily through the voyage, giving the sorest anxiety to her husband and every friend on board. it is evident from an entry in anne bradstreet's diary after reaching new england that even the excitement of change and the hope common to all of a happy future, was not strong enough to keep down the despondency which came in part undoubtedly from her weak health. the diary is not her own thoughts or impressions of the new life, but simply bits of religious experience; an autobiography of the phase with which we could most easily dispense. "after a short time i changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, where i found a new world and new manners at which my heart rose. but after i was convinced it was the will of god i submitted to it and joined to the church at boston." this rebellion must have been from the beginning, for every inch of english soil was dear to her, but she concealed it so thoroughly, that no one suspected the real grief which she looked upon as rebellion to the will of god. conservative in thought and training, and with the sense of humor which might have lightened some phases of the new dispensation, almost destroyed by the puritan faith, which more and more altered the proportions of things, making life only a grim battle with evil, and the days doings of absolute unimportance save as they advanced one toward heaven, she accepted discomfort or hardship with quiet patience. there must have been unfailing interest, too, in the perpetual chances and changes of the perilous voyage. they had weighed anchor finally on the th of april, and were well under way on the morning of the th, when their journey seemed suddenly likely to end then and there. the war between spain and england was still going on, and privateers known as dunkirkers, were lying in wait before every english harbor. thus there was reason enough for apprehension, when, "in the morning we descried from the top, eight sail astern of us.... we supposing they might be dunkirkers, our captain caused the gun room and gun deck to be cleared; all the hammocks were taken down, our ordnance loaded, and our powder chests and fireworks made ready, and our landmen quartered among the seamen, and twenty-five of them appointed for muskets, and every man written down for his quarter. "the wind continued n. with fair weather, and after noon it calmed, and we still saw those eight ships to stand towards us; having more wind than we, they came up apace, so as our captain and the masters of our consorts were more occasioned to think they might be dunkirkers, (for we were told at yarmouth, that there were ten sail of them waiting for us); whereupon we all prepared to fight with them, and took down some cabins which were in the way of our ordnance, and out of every ship were thrown such bed matters as were subject to take fire, and we heaved out our long boats and put up our waste cloths, and drew forth our men and armed them with muskets and other weapons, and instruments for fireworks; and for an experiment our captain shot a ball of wild fire fastened to an arrow out of a cross bow, which burnt in the water a good time. the lady arbella and the other women and children, were removed into the lower deck, that they might be out of danger. all things being thus fitted, we went to prayer upon the upper deck. it was much to see how cheerful and comfortable all the company appeared; not a woman or child that shewed fear, though all did apprehend the danger to have been great, if things had proved as might well be expected, for there had been eight against four, and the least of the enemy's ships were reported to carry thirty brass pieces; but our trust was in the lord of hosts; and the courage of our captain, and his care and diligence did much to encourage us. "it was now about one of the clock, and the fleet seemed to be within a league of us; therefore our captain, because he would show he was not afraid of them, and that he might see the issue before night should overtake us, tacked about and stood to meet them, and when we came near we perceived them to be our friends-- the little neptune, a ship of some twenty pieces of ordnance, and her two consorts, bound for the straits, a ship of flushing, and a frenchman and three other english ships bound for canada and newfoundland. so when we drew near, every ship (as they met) saluted each other, and the musketeers discharged their small shot, and so (god be praised) our fear and danger was turned into mirth and friendly entertainment. our danger being thus over, we espied two boats on fishing in the channel; so every one of our four ships manned out a skiff, and we bought of them great store of excellent fresh fish of divers sorts." it is an astonishing fact, that no line in anne bradstreet's poems has any reference to this experience which held every alternation of hope and fear, and which must have moved them beyond any other happening of the long voyage. but, inward states, then as afterward, were the only facts that seemed worthy of expression, so far as she personally was concerned, and they were all keyed to a pitch which made danger even welcome, as a test of endurance and genuine purpose. but we can fancy the dismay of every house-wife as the limited supply of "bed matters," went the way of many other things "subject to take fire." necessarily the household goods of each had been reduced to the very lowest terms, and as the precious rugs and blankets sunk slowly, or for a time defied the waves and were tossed from crest to crest, we may be sure that the heart of every woman, in the end at least, desired sorely that rescue might be attempted. sheets had been dispensed with, to avoid the accumulation of soiled linen, for the washing of which no facilities could be provided, and winthrop wrote of his boys to his wife in one of his last letters, written as they rode at anchor before cowes, "they lie both with me, and sleep as soundly in a rug (for we use no sheets here) as ever they did at groton; and so i do myself, (i praise god)." among minor trials this was not the least, for the comfort we associate with english homes, had developed, under the puritan love of home, to a degree that even in the best days of the elizabethan time was utterly unknown. the faith which demanded absolute purity of life, included the beginning of that cleanliness which is "next to godliness," if not an inherent part of godliness itself, and fine linen on bed and table had become more and more a necessity. the dainty, exquisite neatness that in the past has been inseparable from the idea of new england, began with these puritan dames, who set their floating home in such order as they could, and who seized the last opportunity at yarmouth of going on shore, not only for refreshment, but to wash neckbands and other small adornments, which waited two months for any further treatment of this nature. there were many resources, not only in needlework and the necessary routine of each day, but in each other. the two daughters of sir robert saltonstall, mrs. phillips the minister's wife, the wives of nowell, coddington and others made up the group of gentlewomen who dined with lady arbella in "the great cabin," the greatness of which will be realized when the reader reflects that the ship was but three hundred and fifty tons burden and could carry aside from the fifty or so sailors, but thirty passengers, among whom were numbered various discreet and reputable "young gentlemen" who, as winthrop wrote, "behave themselves well, and are conformable to all good orders," one or two of whom so utilized their leisure that the landing found them ready for the marriage bells that even puritan asceticism still allowed to be rung. disaster waited upon them, even when fairly under way. winthrop, whose family affection was intense, and whose only solace in parting with his wife had been, that a greatly loved older son, as well as two younger ones were his companions, had a sore disappointment, entered in the journal, with little comment on its personal bearings. "the day we set sail from cowes, my son henry winthrop went on shore with one of my servants, to fetch an ox and ten wethers, which he had provided for our ship, and there went on shore with him mr. pelham and one of his servants. they sent the cattle aboard, but returned not themselves. about three days after my servant and a servant of mr. pelham's came to us in yarmouth, and told us they were all coming to us in a boat the day before, but the wind was so strong against them as they were forced on shore in the night, and the two servants came to yarmouth by land, and so came on shipboard, but my son and mr. pelham (we heard) went back to the cowes and so to hampton. we expected them three or four days after, but they came not to us, so we have left them behind, and suppose they will come after in mr. goffe's ships. we were very sorry they had put themselves upon such inconvenience when they were so well accommodated in our ship." a fresh gale on the day of this entry encouraged them all; they passed the perils of scilly and looked for no further delay when a fresh annoyance was encountered which, for the moment, held for the women at least, something of the terror of their meeting with supposed "dunkirkers." "about eight in the morning, ... standing to the w. s. w. we met two small ships, which falling in among us, and the admiral coming under our lee, we let him pass, but the jewel and ambrose, perceiving the other to be a brazilman, and to take the wind of us, shot at them, and made them stop and fall after us, and sent a skiff aboard them to know what they were. our captain, fearing lest some mistake might arise, and lest they should take them for enemies which were friends, and so, through the unruliness of the mariners some wrong might be done them, caused his skiff to be heaved out, and sent mr. graves, one of his mates and our pilot (a discreet man) to see how things were, who returned soon after, and brought with him the master of one of the ships, and mr. lowe and mr. hurlston. when they were come aboard to us, they agreed to send for the captain, who came and showed his commission from the prince of orange. in conclusion he proved to be a dutchmen, and his a man of war from flushing, and the other ship was a prize he had taken, laden with sugar and tobacco; so we sent them aboard their ships again, and held on our course. in this time (which hindered us five or six leagues) the jewel and the ambrose came foul of each other, so as we much feared the issue, but, through god's mercy, they came well off again, only the jewel had her foresail torn, and one of her anchors broken. this occasion and the sickness of our minister and people, put us all out of order this day, so as we could have no sermons." no words hold greater force of discomfort and deprivation than that one line, "so as we could have no sermons," for the capacity for this form of "temperate entertainment," had increased in such ratio, that the people sat spell bound, four hours at a stretch, both hearers and speaker being equally absorbed. winthrop had written of himself at eighteen, in his "christain experience": "i had an insatiable thirst after the word of god; and could not misse a good sermon, though many miles off, especially of such as did search deep into the conscience," and to miss this refreshment even for a day, seemed just so much loss of the needed spiritual food. but the wind, which blew "a stiffe gale," had no respect of persons, and all were groaning together till the afternoon of the next day, when a device occurred to some inventive mind, possibly that of mistress bradstreet herself, which was immediately carried out. "our children and others that were sick and lay groaning in the cabins, we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the main mast, we made them stand, some of one side and some of the other, and sway it up and down till they were warm, and by this means they soon grew well and merry." the plan worked well, and three days later, when the wind which had quieted somewhat, again blew a "stiffe gale," he was able to write: "this day the ship heaved and set more than before, yet we had but few sick, and of these such as came up upon the deck and stirred themselves, were presently well again; therefore our captain set our children and young men, to some harmless exercises, which the seamen were very active in, and did our people much good, though they would sometimes play the wags with them." wind and rain, rising often till the one was a gale and the other torrents, gave them small rest in that first week. the fish they had secured at yarmouth returned to their own element, winthrop mourning them as he wrote: "the storm was so great as it split our foresail and tore it in pieces, and a knot of the sea washed our tub overboard, wherein our fish was a-watering." the children had become good sailers, and only those were sick, who, like "the women kept under hatches." the suffering from cold was constant, and for a fortnight extreme, the journal reading: "i wish, therefore, that all such as shall pass this way in the spring have care to provide warm clothing; for nothing breeds more trouble and danger of sickness, in this season, than cold." from day to day the little fleet exchanged signals, and now and then, when calm enough the masters of the various ships dined in the round-house of the arbella, and exchanged news, as that, "all their people were in health, but one of their cows was dead." two ships in the distance on the th of april, disturbed them for a time, but they proved to be friends, who saluted and "conferred together so long, till his vice admiral was becalmed by our sails, and we were foul one of another, but there being little wind and the sea calm, we kept them asunder with oars, etc., till they heaved out their boat, and so towed their ship away. they told us for certain, that the king of france had set out six of his own ships to recover the fort from them." here was matter for talk among the travellers, whose interest in all that touched their future heightened day by day, and the item, with its troublous implications may have been the foundation of one of the numerous fasts recorded. may brought no suggestion of any quiet, though three weeks out, they had made but three hundred leagues, and the month opened with "a very great tempest all the night, with fierce showers of rain intermixed, and very cold.... yet through god's mercy, we were very comfortable and few or none sick, but had opportunity to keep the sabbath, and mr. phillips preached twice that day." discipline was of the sharpest, the puritan temper brooking no infractions of law and order. there were uneasy and turbulent spirits both among the crew and passengers, and in the beginning swift judgment fell upon two young men, who, "falling at odds and fighting, contrary to the orders which we had published and set up in the ship, were adjudged to walk upon the deck till night, with their hands bound behind them, which accordingly was executed; and another man for using contemptuous speeches in our presence, was laid in bolts till he submitted himself and promised open confession of his offence." impressive as this undoubtedly proved to the "children and youth thereby admonished," a still greater sensation was felt among them on the discovery that "a servant of one of our company had bargained with a child to sell him a box worth three-pence for three biscuits a day all the voyage, and had received about forty and had sold them and many more to some other servants. we caused his hands to be tied up to a bar, and hanged a basket with stones about his neck, and so he stood two hours." other fights are recorded, the cause a very evident one. "we observed it a common fault in our young people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately." brandy then as now was looked upon as a specific for sea-sickness, and "a maid servant in the ship, being stomach sick, drank so much strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed herself." the constant cold and rain, the monotonous food, which before port was reached had occasioned many cases of scurvy and reduced the strength of all, was excuse enough for the occasional lapse into overindulgence which occurred, but the long penance was nearly ended. on the th of june mount mansell, now mt. desert, was passed, an enchanting sight for the sea-sad eyes of the travellers. a "handsome gale" drove them swiftly on, and we may know with what interest they crowded the decks and gazed upon these first glimpses of the new home. as they sailed, keeping well in to shore, and making the new features of hill and meadow and unfamiliar trees, winthrop wrote: "we had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden." peril was past, and though fitful winds still tormented them, the th of may saw the long imprisonment ended, and they dropped anchor "a little within the islands," in the haven where they would be. chapter iv. beginnings. there are travellers who insist that, as they near american shores in may or early june, the smell of corn-blossom is on the wind, miles out at sea, a delicate, distinct, penetrating odor, as thoroughly american as the clearness of the sky and the pure, fine quality in the air. the wild grape, growing as profusely to-day on the cape as two hundred years ago, is even more powerful, the subtle, delicious fragrance making itself felt as soon as one approaches land. the "fine, fresh smell like a garden," which winthrop notes more than once, came to them on every breeze from the blossoming land. every charm of the short new england summer waited for them. they had not, like the first comers to that coast to disembark in the midst of ice and snow, but green hills sloped down to the sea, and wild strawberries were growing almost at high-tide mark. the profusion of flowers and berries had rejoiced higginson in the previous year, their men rowing at once to "ten pound island," and bringing back, he writes: "ripe strawberries and gooseberries and sweet single roses. thus god was merciful to us in giving us a taste and smell of the sweet fruit, as an earnest of his bountiful goodness to welcome us at our first arrival." but no fairness of nature could undo the sad impression of the first hour in the little colony at salem, where the arbella landed, three days before her companions reached there. their own cares would have seemed heavy enough, but the winter had been a terrible one, and dudley wrote later in his letter to the countess of lincoln: "we found the colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive, weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all, hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another, failed us and left them behind; whereupon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about l or l a person, furnishing and sending over." salem holding only discouragement, they left it, exploring the charles and the mystic rivers, and finally joining the settlement at charlestown, to which francis higginson had gone the previous year, and which proved to be in nearly as desperate case as salem. the charlestown records as given in young's "chronicles of massachusetts," tell the story of the first days of attempt at organization. the goods had all been unshipped at salem and were not brought to charlestown until july. in the meantime, "the governor and several of the patentees dwelt in the great house which was last year built in this town by mr. graves and the rest of their servants. the multitude set up cottages, booths and tents about the town hill. they had long passage; some of the ships were seventeen, some eighteen weeks a coming. many people arrived sick of the scurvy, which also increased much after their arrival, for want of houses, and by reason of wet lodging in their cottages, etc. other distempers also prevailed; and although [the] people were generally very loving and pitiful, yet the sickness did so prevail, that the whole were not able to tend the sick as they should be tended; upon which many perished and died, and were buried about the town hill." saddest of all among these deaths must have been that of the lady arbella, of whom mather in a later day, wrote: "she came from a paradise of plenty and pleasure, in the family of a noble earldom, into a wilderness of wants, and took new england in her way to heaven." there had been doubt as to the expediency of her coming, but with the wife of another explorer she had said: "whithersoever your fatal destiny shall drive you, either by the waves of the great ocean, or by the manifold and horrible dangers of the land, i will surely bear you company. there can no peril chance to me so terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you." weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and anne bradstreet's first experience of new england was over the grave, in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that england both had loved alike. within a month, winthrop wrote in his journal: "september . about two in the morning, mr. isaac johnson died; his wife, the lady arbella, of the house of lincoln, being dead about one month before. he was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace, leaving some part of his substance to the colony." "he tried to live without her, liked it not and died." still another tragedy had saddened them all, though in the press of overwhelming business, winthrop wrote only: "friday, july . my son henry winthrop drowned at salem," and there is no other mention of himself till july , when he wrote the first letter to his wife from america. the loss was a heavy one to the colony as well as the father, for henry winthrop, though but twenty-two, had already had experience as a pioneer, having gone out to barbadoes at eighteen, and became one of the earliest planters in that island. ardent, energetic, and with his fathers deep tenderness for all who depended on him, he was one who could least be spared. "a sprightly and hopeful young gentleman he was," says hubbard, and another chronicle gives more minute details. "the very day on which he went on shore in new england, he and the principal officers of the ship, walking out to a place now called by the salemites, northfield, to view the indian wigwams, they saw on the other side of the river a small canoe. he would have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather; but none of the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with the cramp a few roods from the shore and drowned." the father's letter is filled with an anguish of pity for the mother and the young wife, whose health, like that of the elder mrs. winthrop, had made the journey impossible for both. "i am so overpressed with business, as i have no time for these or other mine own private occasions. i only write now that thou mayest know, that yet i live and am mindful of thee in all my affairs. the larger discourse of all things thou shalt receive from my brother downing, which i must send by some of the last ships. we have met with many sad and discomfortable things as thou shalt hear after; and the lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. my son henry! my son henry! ah, poor child! yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. the lord strengthen and comfort her heart to bear this cross patiently. i know thou wilt not be wanting to her in this distress." not one of the little colony was wanting in tender offices in these early days when a common suffering made them "very pitiful one to another," and as the absolutely essential business was disposed of they hastened to organize the church where free worship should make amends for all the long sorrow of its search. a portion of the people from the arbella had remained in salem, but on friday, july oth, , winthrop, dudley, johnson and wilson entered into a church covenant, which was signed two days after by increase nowell and four others--sharpe, bradstreet, gager and colborne. it is most probable that anne bradstreet had been temporarily separated from her husband, as johnson in his "wonder-working providence," writes, that after the arrival at salem, "the lady arrabella and some other godly women aboad at salem, but their husbands continued at charles town, both for the settling the civill government and gathering another church of christ." the delay was a short one, for her name stands thirteenth on the list. charlestown, however, held hardly more promise of quiet life than salem. the water supply was, curiously enough, on a peninsula which later gave excellent water, only "a brackish spring in the sands by the water side ... which could not supply half the necessities of the multitude, at which time the death of so many was concluded to be much the more occasioned by this want of good water." heat was another evil to the constitutions which knew only the equable english temperature, and could not face either the intense sun, or the sudden changes of the most erratic climate the earth knows. in the search for running-water, the colonists scattered, moving from point to point, "the governor, the deputy-governor and all the assistants except mr. nowell going across the river to boston at the invitation of mr. blaxton, who had until then been its only white inhabitant." even the best supplied among them were but scantily provided with provisions. it was too late for planting, and the colony already established was too wasted and weakened by sickness to have cared for crops in the planting season. in the long voyage "there was miserable damage and spoil of provisions by sea, and divers came not so well provided as they would, upon a report, whilst they were in england, that now there was enough in new england." even this small store was made smaller by the folly of several who exchanged food for beaver skins, and, the council suddenly finding that famine was imminent "hired and despatched away mr. william pearce with his ship of about two hundred tons, for ireland to buy more, and in the mean time went on with their work of settling." the last month of the year had come before they could decide where the fortified town, made necessary by indian hostilities, should be located. the governor's house had been partly framed at charlestown, but with the removal to boston it was taken down, and finally cambridge was settled upon as the most desirable point, and their first winter was spent there. here for the first time it was possible for anne bradstreet to unpack their household belongings, and seek to create some semblance of the forsaken home. but even for the dudleys, among the richest members of the party there was a privation which shows how sharply it must have fared with the poorer portion, and dudley wrote, nine months after their arrival, that he "thought fit to commit to memory our present condition, and what hath befallen us since our arrival here; which i will do shortly, after my usual manner, and must do rudely, having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my family must have leave to resort, though they break good manners, and make me many times forget what i would say, and say what i would not." no word of mistress dudley's remains to tell the shifts and strivings for comfort in that miserable winter which, mild as it was, had a keenness they were ill prepared to face. petty miseries and deprivations, the least endurable of all forms of suffering, surrounded them like a cloud of stinging insects, whose attacks, however intolerable at the moment, are forgotten with the passing, and either for this reason, or from deliberate purpose, there is not a line of reference to them in any of anne bradstreet's writings. scarcity of food was the sorest trouble. the charlestown records show that "people were necessitated to live upon clams and muscles and ground nuts and acorns, and these got with much difficulty in the winter-time. people were very much tried and discouraged, especially when they heard that the governor himself had the last batch of bread in the oven." all fared alike so far as possible, the richer and more provident distributing to the poor, and all watching eagerly for the ship sent back in july in anticipation of precisely such a crisis. six months had passed, when, on the fifth of february, , mather records that as winthrop stood at his door giving "the last handful of meal in the barrel unto a poor man distressed by the wolf at the door, at that instant, they spied a ship arrived at the harbor's mouth with provisions for them all." the fast day just appointed became one of rejoicing, the first formal proclamation for thanksgiving day being issued, "by order of the governour and council, directed to all the plantations, and though the stores held little reminder of holiday time in old england, grateful hearts did not stop to weigh differences. in any case the worst was past and early spring brought the hope of substantial comfort, for the town was 'laid out in squares, the streets intersecting each other at right-angles,' and houses were built as rapidly as their small force of carpenters could work. bradstreet's house was at the corner of 'brayntree' and wood streets, the spot now occupied by the familiar university book- store of messrs. sever and francis on harvard square, his plot of ground being 'aboute one rood,' and dudley's on a lot of half an acre was but a little distance from them at the corner of the present dunster and south streets." governor winthrop's decision not to remain here, brought about some sharp correspondence between dudley and himself, but an amicable settlement followed after a time, and though the frame of his house was removed to boston, the town grew in spite of its loss, so swiftly that in , wood wrote of it: "this is one of the neatest and best compacted towns in new england, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. the inhabitants most of them are very rich and well stored with cattell of all sorts." rich as they may have appeared, however, in comparison with many of the settlements about them, sickness and want were still unwelcome guests among them, so that dudley wrote: "there is not a house where there is not one dead and in some houses many. the natural causes seem to be in the want of warm lodging and good diet, to which englishmen are habituated at home, and in the sudden increase of heat which they endure that are landed here in summer, the salt meats at sea having prepared their bodies thereto; for those only these two last years died of fevers who landed in june and july; as those of plymouth, who landed in winter, died of the scurvey, as did our poorer sort, whose houses and bedding kept them not sufficiently warm, nor their diet sufficiently in heart." thus far there were small inducements for further emigration. the tide poured in steadily, but only because worse evils were behind than semi-starvation in new england. the fairest and fullest warning was given by dudley, whose letter holds every strait and struggle of the first year, and who wrote with the intention of counteracting the too rosy statements of higginson and graves: "if any come hither to plant for worldly ends that can live well at home, he commits an error, of which he will soon repent him; but if for spiritual, and that no particular obstacle hinder his removal, he may find here what may well content him, viz., materials to build, fuel to burn, ground to plant, seas and rivers to fish in, a pure air to breathe in, good water to drink till wine or beer can be made; which together with the cows, hogs and goats brought hither already, may suffice for food; for as for fowl and venison, they are dainties here as well as in england. for clothes and bedding, they must bring them with them, till time and industry produce them here. in a word, we yet enjoy little to be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. and i do the more willingly use this open and plain dealing, lest other men should fall short of their expectations when they come hither, as we to our great prejudice did, by means of letters sent us from hence into england, wherein honest men, out of a desire to draw over others to them, wrote something hyperbolically of many things here. if any godly men, out of religious ends, will come over to help us in the good work we are about, i think they cannot dispose of themselves nor their estates more to god's glory and the furtherance of their own reckoning. but they must not be of the poorer sort yet, for divers years; for we have found by experience that they have hindered, not furthered the work. and for profane and debauched persons, their oversight in coming hither is wondered at, where they shall find nothing to content them." this long quotation is given in full to show the fair temper of the man, who as time went on was slightly less in favor than in the beginning. no one questioned his devotion to the cause, or the energy with which he worked for it, but as he grew older he lost some portion of the old urbanity, exchanging it disastrously for traits which would seem to have been the result of increasing narrowness of religious faith rather than part of his real self. savage writes of him: "a hardness in publick and ridgidity in private life, are too observable in his character, and even an eagerness for pecuniary gain, which might not have been expected in a soldier and a statesman." that the impression was general is evident from an epitaph written upon him by governor belcher, who may, however, have had some personal encounter with this "rigidity," which was applied to all without fear or favor. "here lies thomas dudley, that trusty old stud, a bargain's a bargain and must be made good." whatever his tendencies may have been they did not weigh heavily on his family, who delighted in his learning and devoted spirit, and whose affection was strong enough to atone for any criticism from outsiders. objectionable as his methods may sometimes have been--sour as his compatriots now and then are said to have found him, "the world it appears, is indebted for much of its progress, to uncomfortable and even grumpy people," and tyler whose analysis of the puritan character has never been surpassed, writes of them: "even some of the best of them, perhaps, would have seemed to us rather pragmatical and disputatious persons, with all the edges and corners of their characters left sharp, with all their opinions very definitely formed, and with their habits of frank utterance quite thoroughly matured. certainly ... they do not seem to have been a company of gentle, dreamy and euphemistical saints, with a particular aptitude for martyrdom and an inordinate development of affability." they argued incessantly, at home and abroad, and "this exacting and tenacious propensity of theirs, was not a little criticized by some who had business connections with them." very probably governor belcher had been worsted in some wordy battle, always decorously conducted, but always persistent, but these minor infelicities did not affect the main purposes of life, and the settlement grew in spite of them; perhaps even, because of them, free speech being, as yet, the privilege of all, though as the answering became in time a little too free, means were taken to insure more discretion. in the meantime cambridge grew, and suddenly arose a complaint, which to the modern mind is preposterous. "want of room" was the cry of every citizen and possibly with justice, as the town had been set within fixed limits and had nearly doubled in size through the addition in august, , of the congregation of the rev. thomas hooker at chelmsford in the county of essex, england, who had fallen under laud's displeasure, and escaped with difficulty, being pursued by the officers of the high commission from one county to another, and barely eluding them when he took ship for new england. one would have thought the wilderness at their doors afforded sense of room enough, and that numbers would have been a welcome change, but the complaint was serious enough to warrant their sending out men to ipswich with a view of settling there. then for a time the question dropped, much to the satisfaction, no doubt, of mistress dudley and her daughter, to whom in , or ' , the date being uncertain, came her first child, the son samuel, who graduated at harvard college in , and of whom she wrote long after in the little diary of "religious experiences": "it pleased god to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great greif to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before i obtained one, and after him gave mee many more of whom i now take the care." cambridge still insisting that it had not room enough, the town was enlarged, but having accomplished this, both dudley and bradstreet left it for ipswich, the first suggestion of which had been made in january, , when news came to them that "the french had bought the scottish plantation near cape sable, and that the fort and all the amunition were delivered to them, and that the cardinal, having the managing thereof, had sent many companies already, and preparation was made to send many more the next year, and divers priests and jesuits among them---called the assistants to boston, and the ministers and captains, and some other chief men, to advise what was fit to be done for our safety, in regard the french were like to prove ill neighbors, (being papists)." another change was in store for the patient women who followed the path laid open before them, with no thought of opposition, desiring only "room for such life as should in the ende return them heaven for an home that passeth not away," and with the record in winthrop's journal, came the familiar discussion as to methods, and the decision which speedily followed. dudley and bradstreet as "assistants" both had voice in the conclusions of the meeting, the record of which has just been given, though with no idea, probably, at that time, that their own movements would be affected. it was settled at once that "a plantation and a fort should be begun at natascott, partly to be some block in an enemy's way (though it could not bar his entrance), and especially to prevent an enemy from taking that passage from us.... also, that a plantation be begun at agawam (being the best place in the land for tillage and cattle), least an enemy, finding it void should possess and take it from us. the governor's son (being one of the assistants) was to undertake this, and to take no more out of the bay than twelve men; the rest to be supplied, at the coming of the next ships." that they were not essential to cambridge, but absolutely so at this weak point was plain to both dudley and bradstreet, who forthwith made ready for the change accomplished in , when at least one other child, dorothy, had come to anne bradstreet. health, always delicate and always fluctuating, was affected more seriously than usual at this time, no date being given, but the period extending over several years, "after some time, i fell into a lingering sickness like a consumption, together with a lameness, which correction i saw the lord sent to humble and try me and do me good: and it was not altogether ineffectual." patient soul! there were better days coming, but, self-distrust was, after her affections, her strongest point, and there is small hint of inward poise or calmness till years had passed, though she faced each change with the quiet dauntlessness that was part of her birthright. but the tragedy of their early days in the colony still shadowed her. evidently no natural voice was allowed to speak in her, and the first poem of which we have record is as destitude of any poetic flavor, as if designed for the bay psalm- book. as the first, however, it demands place, if only to show from what she afterward escaped. that she preserved it simply as a record of a mental state, is evident from the fact, that it was never included in any edition of her poems, it having been found among her papers after her death. upon a fit of sickness, _anno_. . _aetatis suce_, . twice ten years old not fully told since nature gave me breath, my race is run, my thread is spun, lo! here is fatal death. all men must dye, and so must i, this cannot be revoked, for adam's sake, this word god spake, when he so high provoke'd. yet live i shall, this life's but small, in place of highest bliss, where i shall have all i can crave, no life is like to this. for what's this life but care and strife? since first we came from womb, our strength doth waste, our time doth hast and then we go to th' tomb. o bubble blast, how long can'st last? that always art a breaking, no sooner blown, but dead and gone ev'n as a word that's speaking, o whil'st i live this grace me give, i doing good may be, then death's arrest i shall count best because it's thy degree. bestow much cost, there's nothing lost to make salvation sure, o great's the gain, though got with pain, comes by profession pure. the race is run, the field is won, the victory's mine, i see, for ever know thou envious foe the foyle belongs to thee. this is simply very pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than mistress anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. there were many of them, for among the same papers is a shorter burst of trouble: upon some distemper of body. in anguish of my heart repleat with woes, and wasting pains, which best my body knows, in tossing slumbers on my wakeful bed, bedrencht with tears that flow from mournful head, till nature had exhausted all her store, then eyes lay dry disabled to weep more; and looking up unto his throne on high, who sendeth help to those in misery; he chas'd away those clouds and let me see, my anchor cast i' th' vale with safety, he eas'd my soul of woe, my flesh of pain, and brought me to the shore from troubled main. the same brooding and saddened spirit is found in some verses of the same period and written probably just before the birth of her third child, the latter part containing a touch of jealous apprehension that has been the portion of many a young mother, and that indicates more of human passion than could be inferred from anything in her first attempt at verse. all things within this fading world hath end, adversity doth still our joys attend; no tyes so strong, no friends so dear and sweet but with death's parting blow is sure to meet. the sentence past is most irrevocable a common thing, yet oh, inevitable; how soon, my dear, death may my steps attend, how soon 't may be thy lot to lose thy friend! we both are ignorant, yet love bids me these farewell lines to recommend to thee, that when that knot's untyed that made us one, i may seem thine, who in effect am none. and if i see not half my dayes that's due, what nature would, god grant to yours and you; the many faults that well you know i have, let be interred in my oblivious grave; if any worth or virtue were in me, let that live freshly in thy memory, and when thou feel'st no grief as i no harms, yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms: and when thy loss shall be repaid with gains look to my little babes my dear remains, and if thou love thyself, or loved'st me, these o protect from step-dames injury. and if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse, with some sad sighs honor my absent herse; and kiss this paper for thy love's dear sake who with salt tears this last farewell did take. --_a. b._ chapter v. old friends and new. in spite of the fits of depression evident in most of the quotations thus far given, there were many alleviations, as life settled into more tolerable conditions, and one chief one was now very near. probably no event in the first years of anne bradstreet's life in the little colony had as much significance for her as the arrival at boston in , of the rev. john cotton, her father's friend, and one of the strongest influences in the lives of both english and american puritans. she was still living in cambridge and very probably made one of the party who went in from there to hear his first sermon before the boston church. he had escaped from england with the utmost difficulty, the time of freedom allowed him by king james who admired his learning, having ended so thoroughly that he was hunted like an escaped convict. fearless and almost reckless, the colonial ministers wondered at his boldness, a brother of nathaniel ward saying as he and some friends "spake merrily" together: "of all men in the world, i envy mr. cotton of boston, most; for he doth nothing in way of conformity, and yet hath his liberty, and i do everything in that way and cannot enjoy mine." the child born on the stormy passage over, and who in good time became anne bradstreet's son-in-law, marrying her daughter dorothy in , appeared with the father and mother at the first public service after his arrival, and before it was positively decided that he should remain in boston. the baptism, contrary to the usual custom of having it take place, not later than ten days after birth, had been delayed, and winthrop gives a characteristic picture of the scene: "the lord's day following, he (mr. cotton) exercised in the afternoon, and being to be admitted, he signified his desire and readiness to make his confession according to order, which he said might be sufficient in declaring his faith about baptism (which he then desired for their child, born in their passage, and therefore named seaborn). he gave two reasons why he did not baptize it at sea (not for want of fresh water, for he held sea-water would have served): st, because they had no settled congregation there; d, because a minister hath no power to give the seals, but in his own congregation." some slight question, as to whether boston alone, or the colony at large should be taxed for his support was settled with little difficulty, and on sept. , another gathering from all the neighboring towns, witnessed his induction into the new church a ceremony of peculiar solemnity, preceded by a fast, and followed by such feasting as the still narrow stores of the people admitted. no one can estimate the importance of this occasion, who does not realize what a minister meant in those first days, when the sermon held for the majority the sole opportunity of intellectual stimulus as well as spiritual growth. the coming of john cotton to boston, was much as if phillips brooks should bestow himself upon the remotest english settlement in australia, or a missionary station in northern minnesota, and a ripple of excitement ran through the whole community. it meant keener political as well as religious life, for the two went side by side. mather wrote later of new england: "it is a country whose interests were most remarkably and generally enwrapped in its ecclesiastical circumstances," and he added: "the gospel has evidently been the making of our towns." it was the deacons and elders who ruled public affairs, always under direction of well-nigh supreme authority vested in the minister. there was reason for such faith in them. "the objects of much public deference were not unaware of their authority; they seldom abused it; they never forgot it. if ever men, for real worth and greatness, deserved such pre-eminence, they did; they had wisdom, great learning, great force of will, devout consecration, philanthropy, purity of life. for once in the history of the world, the sovereign places were filled by the sovereign men. they bore themselves with the air of leaderships; they had the port of philosophers, noblemen and kings. the writings of our earliest times are full of reference to the majesty of their looks, the awe inspired by their presence, the grandeur and power of their words." new england surely owes something of her gift of "ready and commanding speech," to these early talkers, who put their whole intellectual force into a sermon, and who thought nothing of a prayer lasting for two hours and a sermon for three or even four. nathaniel ward, whose caustic wit spared neither himself nor the most reverend among his brethren, wrote in his "simple cobbler": "we have a strong weakness in new england, that when we are speaking, we know not how to conclude. we make many ends, before we make an end.... we cannot help it, though we can; which is the arch infirmity in all morality. we are so near the west pole, that our longitudes are as long as any wise man would wish and somewhat longer. i scarce know any adage more grateful than '_grata brevitas_'." mr. cotton was no exception to this rule, but his hearers would not have had him shorter. it was, however, the personality of the man that carried weight and nothing that he has left for a mocking generation to wonder over gives slightest hint of reason for the spell he cast over congregations, under the cathedral towers, or in the simple meeting house in the new boston. the one man alive, who, perhaps, has gone through his works conscientiously and hopefully, moses coit tyler, writes of john cotton's works: "these are indeed clear and cogent in reasoning; the language is well enough, but that is all. there are almost no remarkable merits in thought or style. one wanders through these vast tracts and jungles of puritanic discourse--exposition, exhortation, logic- chopping, theological hair-splitting--and is unrewarded by a single passage of eminent force or beauty, uncheered even by the felicity of a new epithet in the objurgation of sinners, or a new tint in the landscape-painting of hell." hubbard wrote, while he still lived: "mr. cotton had such an insinuating and melting way in his preaching, that he would usually carry his very adversary captive, after the triumphant chariot of his rhetoric," but "the chariot of his rhetoric ceased to be triumphant when the master himself ceased to drive it," and we shall never know the spell of his genius. for one who had shown himself so uncompromising in action where his own beliefs were concerned, he was singularly gentle and humble. followed from his church one day, by a specially sour and peevish fanatic, who announced to him with a frown that his ministry had become dark and flat, he replied: "both, brother--it may be both; let me have your prayers that it may be otherwise." such a nature would never revolt against the system of spiritual cross-questioning that belonged to every church, and it is easy to see how his hold on his congregation was never lost, even at the stormiest episode in his new england career. the people flocked to hear him, and until the removal to ipswich, there is no doubt that anne bradstreet and her husband met him often, and that he had his share in confirming her faith and stimulating her thought. dudley and he remained friends to the end, and conferred often on public as well as private matters, but there are no family details save the record of the marriage in later years, which united them all more closely, than even their common suffering had done. health alone, or the want of it, gave sufficient reason for at least a shadow of gloom, and there were others as substantial, for fresh changes were at hand, and various circumstances had brought her family under a general criticism against which anne bradstreet always revolted. minute personal criticism was the order of the day, considered an essential in holding one another in the straight path, and the new england relish for petty detail may have had its origin in this religious gossip. as usual the first trouble would seem to have arisen from envy, though undoubtedly its originator strenuously denied any such suspicion. the houses at cambridge had gradually been made more and more comfortable, though even in the beginning, they were the rudest of structures, the roofs covered with thatch, the fire-places generally made of rough stones and the chimneys of boards plastered with clay. to shelter was the only requisite demanded, but dudley, who desired something more, had already come under public censure, the governor and other assistants joining in the reproach that "he did not well to bestow such cost about wainscotting and adorning his house in the beginning of a plantation, both in regard to the expense, and the example." this may have been one of the "new customs" at which poor anne's "heart rose, for none of the company, not even excepting the governor, had come from as stately and well-ordered a home as theirs, the old castle still testifying to the love of beauty in its ancient owners." dudley's excuse was, however, accepted, "that it was for the warmth of his house, and the charge was but little, being but clapboards nailed to the wall in the form of wainscot." the disagreement on this question of adornment was not the only reason why a removal to ipswich, then known as agawam, may have seemed desirable. dudley, who was some thirteen years older than the governor, and whose capacity for free speech increased with every year, had criticised sharply the former's unexpected removal to boston, and placable as winthrop always was, a little feeling had arisen, which must have affected both families. the first open indication of dudley's money-loving propensities had also been made a matter of discussion, and was given "in some bargains he had made with some poor members of the same congregation, to whom he had sold seven bushels and a half of corn, to receive ten for it after harvest, which the governor and some others held to be oppressing usury." dudley contested the point hotly, the governor taking no "notice of these speeches, and bore them with more patience than he had done upon a like occasion at another time," but the breach had been made, and it was long before it ceased to trouble the friends of both. with all his self-sacrifice, dudley desired leadership, and the removal to ipswich gave him more fully the position he craved, as simply just acknowledgment of his services to the colony, than permanent home at cambridge could have done. objections were urged against the removal, and after long discussion waxing hotter and hotter dudley resigned, in a most puritan fit of temper, leaving the council in a passion and "clapping the door behind him." better thoughts came to all. the gentle temper of both wife and daughter quieted him, and disposed him to look favorably upon the letter in which the council refused to accept his resignation, and this was the last public occasion upon which such scandal arose. but ipswich was a safe harbor, and life there would hold fewer thorns than seemed sown in the cambridge surroundings, and we may feel sure, that in spite of hardships, the long-suffering anne and her mother welcomed the change, when it had once been positively decided upon. the most serious objection arose from the more exposed situation of ipswich and the fact that the indians were becoming more and more troublesome. the first year, however, passed in comparative quiet. a church was organized, sermons being the first necessity thought of for every plantation, and "mr. wilson, by leave of the congregation of boston whereof he was pastor, went to agawam to teach the people of that plantation, because they had yet no minister," to be succeeded shortly by nathaniel ward, a man of most intense nature and personality, who must have had marked effect on every mind brought under his influence. a worker of prodigious energy, he soon broke down, and after two years of pastorship, left ipswich to become a few years later, one of the commission appointed to frame laws for the colony and to write gradually one of the most distinctive books in early american literature, "the simple cobbler of agawam." that he became the strong personal friend of the bradstreet family was natural, for not only were they of the same social status, but sympathetic in many points, though simon bradstreets' moderation and tolerant spirit undoubtedly fretted the uncompromising puritan whose opinions were as stiff and incisive as his way of putting them. an extensive traveller, a man of ripe culture, having been a successful lawyer before the ministry attracted him, he was the friend of francis bacon, of archbishop usher and the famous heidelberg theologian, david pareus. he had travelled widely and knew men and manners, and into the exhortations and expoundings of his daily life, the unfoldings of the complicated religious experience demanded of every puritan, must have crept many a reminiscence of old days, dear to the heart of anne bradstreet, who, no matter what theory she deemed it best to follow, was at heart, to the end of her life a monarchist. we may know with what interest she would listen, and may fancy the small simon and dorothy standing near as puritan discipline allowed, to hear tales of prince rupert, whom nathaniel ward had held as a baby in his arms, and of whom he wrote what we may be sure he had often said: "i have had him in my arms; . . . i wish i had him there now. if i mistake not, he promised then to be a good prince; but i doubt he hath forgot it. if i thought he would not be angry with me, i would pray hard to his maker to make him a right roundhead, a wise-hearted palatine, a thankful man to the english; to forgive all his sins, and at length to save his soul, notwithstanding all his god-damn-me's." even in these early days, certain feminine pomps and vanities had emigrated with their owners, and much disconcerted the energetic preacher. anne bradstreet had no share in them, her gentle simplicity making her always choose the least obtrusive form of speech and action, as well as dress, but she must have smiled over the fierceness with which weaker sisters were attacked, and perhaps have sought to change the attitude of this chronic fault- finder; "a sincere, witty and valiant grumbler," but always a grumbler, to whom the fashions of the time seemed an outrage on common sense. he devotes a separate section of his book to them, and the delinquencies of women in general because they were "deficients or redundants not to be brought under any rule," and therefore not entitled to "pester better matter with such stuff," and then announces that he proposes, "for this once to borrow a little of their loose-tongued liberty, and mis-spend a word or two upon their long-waisted but short-skirted patience." "i honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire," he goes on, his wrath rising as he writes; "a good text always deserves a fair margent, but as for a woman who lives but to ape the newest court- fashions, i look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing; fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. to speak moderately, i truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable virtue, that have so little wit as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native, lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gaunt bar-geese, ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish, egyptian hieroglyphics, or at the best into french flirts of the pastry, which a proper english woman should scorn with her heels. it is no marvel they wear trails on the hinder part of their heads; having nothing it seems in the forepart but a few squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-favored fashion to another.... we have about five or six of them in our colony; if i see any of them accidentally, i cannot cleanse my fancy for a month after.... if any man think i have spoken rather merrily than seriously, he is much mistaken; i have written what i write, with all the indignation i can, and no more than i ought." let it be remembered, that these ladies with "squirrels brains," are the "grandmothers" whose degenerate descendants we are daily accused of being. it is an old tune, but the generations have danced to it since the world began, each with a profound conviction of its newness, and their own success in following its lead. nor was he alone in his indignation, for even in the midst of discussions on ordnance, and deep perplexities over unruly settlers, the grave elders paused, and as winthrop records: "at the lecture in boston a question was propounded about veils. mr. cotton concluded, that where (by the custom of the place) they were not a sign of the woman's subjection, they were not commanded by the apostle. mr. endecott opposed, and did maintain it by the general arguments brought by the apostle. after some debate, the governor, perceiving it to grow to some earnestness, interposed, and so it brake off." isaiah had protested, before nathaniel ward or the council echoed him, but if this is the attitude the sturdy preacher held toward the women of his congregation, he must have found it well to resign his place to his successor, also a nathaniel, nathaniel rogers, one of the row of "nine small children," still to be seen in the new england primer, gazing upon the martyr, john rogers, the famous preacher of dedham, whose gifts of mind and soul made him a shining mark for persecution, and whose name is still honored in his descendants. of less aggressive and incisive nature than nathaniel ward, he was a man of profound learning, his son and grandson succeeding him at ipswich, and the son, who had accompanied him from england becoming the president of harvard college. his sympathy with simon bradstreet's moderate and tolerant views, at once brought them together, and undoubtedly made him occasionally a thorn in the side of governor dudley, who felt then, precisely the same emotions as in later life were chronicled in his one attempt at verse: "let men of god in courts and churches watch, o'er such as do a toleration hatch, lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice to poison all with heresie and vice." nathaniel rogers has left no written memorial save a tract in the interest of this most objectionable toleration, in which, while favoring liberty and reformation, he censured those who had brought false charges against the king, and as a result, was accused of being one of the king's agents in new england. anne bradstreet's sympathies were even more strongly with him than those of her husband, and in the quiet listening to the arguments which went on, she had rarest opportunity for that gradual accumulation of real worldly wisdom to be found in many of her "reflections" in prose. at present there was more room for apprehension than reflection. indian difficulties were more and more pressing, and in sept., , the general court had included ipswich in the order that no dwelling-house should be more than half a mile from the meeting- house, it being impossible to guard against the danger of coming and going over longer space. the spring of - brought still more stringent care. watches were kept and no one allowed to travel without arms. the pequot war was the culmination for the time, the seed of other and more atrocious conflicts to come, and whatever the judgment of to-day may be on the causes which brought such results, the terror of the settlers was a very real and well- grounded fact. as with deerfield at a later date, they were protected from indian assaults, only by "a rude picketted fort. sentinels kept guard every night; even in the day time, no one left his door-steps without a musket; and neighborly communication between the houses was kept up principally by underground passages from cellar to cellar." mr. daniel dennison, who had married anne bradstreet's sister, was chosen captain for ipswich and remained so for many years. as the indians were driven out, they concentrated in and about new hampshire, which, being a frontier colony, knew no rest from peril day and night, but it was many years before any massachusetts settler dared move about with freedom, and the perpetual apprehension of every woman who dreaded the horrible possibilities of indian outrage, must have gone far toward intensifying and grinding in the morbid sensitiveness which even to-day is part of the genuine new england woman's character. the grim details of expeditions against them were known to every child. the same impatience of any word in their favor was shown then, as we find it now in the far west, where their treachery and barbarity is still a part of the story of to-day, and johnson, in his "wonder- working providence," gives one or two almost incredible details of warfare against them with a davidic exultation over the downfall of so pestilent an enemy, that is more gothic than christian. "the lord in mercy toward his poor churches, having thus destroyed these bloody, barbarous indians, he returns his people in safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners. the squaws and some young youths they brought home with them; and finding the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook the war for, they brought away only their heads." such retribution seemed just and right, but its effect on puritan character was hardly softening, and was another unconscious factor in that increasing ratio of hatred against all who opposed them, whether in religious belief, or in the general administration of affairs. in these affairs every woman was interested to a degree that has had no parallel since, unless it may be, on the southern side during our civil war. politics and religion were one, and removal to ipswich had not deadened the interest with which they watched and commented on every fluctuation in the stormy situation at "home," as they still called england, cotton taking active part in all discussions as to colonial action. it was at this period that she wrote the poem, "a dialogue between old england and new," which holds the political situation at that time. many of the allusions in the first edition, were altered in the second, for as charles ii. had then begun his reign, loyalty was a necessity, and no strictures upon kings could be allowed. the poem, which is rather a summary of political difficulties, has its own interest, as showing how thoroughly she had caught the spirit of the time, as well as from the fact that it was quoted as authority by the wisest thinkers of the day, and regarded with an awe and admiration we are hardly likely to share, as the phenomenal work of a phenomenal woman. a dialogue between old england and new, concerning their present troubles. _anno_, . _new england_. alas, dear mother, fairest queen and best, with honour, wealth and peace happy and blest; what ails thee hang thy head and cross thine arms? and sit i' th' dust, to sigh these sad alarms? what deluge of new woes thus overwhelme the glories of thy ever famous realme? what means this wailing tone, this mournful guise? ah, tell thy daughter, she may sympathize. _old england._ art ignorant indeed of these my woes? or must my forced tongue my griefs disclose? and must myself dissect my tatter'd state, which mazed christendome stands wond'ring at? and thou a child, a limbe, and dost not feel my fainting weakened body now to reel? this physick purging portion i have taken, will bring consumption, or an ague quaking, unless some cordial, thou fetch from high, which present help may ease my malady. if i decease, dost think thou shalt survive? or by my wasting state dost think to thrive? then weigh our case, if't be not justly sad; let me lament alone, while thou art glad. _new england._ and thus (alas) your state you much deplore, in general terms, but will not say wherefore; what medicine shall i seek to cure this woe if th' wound so dangerous i may not know? but you, perhaps, would have me ghess it out, what hath some hengist like that saxon stout, by fraud or force usurp'd thy flow'ring crown, or by tempestuous warrs thy fields trod down? or hath canutus, that brave valiant dane, the regal peacefull scepter from the tane? or is't a norman, whose victorious hand with english blood bedews thy conquered land? or is't intestine warrs that thus offend? do maud and stephen for the crown contend? do barons rise and side against their king, and call in foreign aid to help the thing? must edward be deposed? or is't the hour that second richard must be clapt i' th' tower? or is't the fatal jarre again begun that from the red white pricking roses sprung? must richmond's aid, the nobles now implore, to come and break the tushes of the boar? if none of these, dear mother, what's your woe? pray do you fear spain's bragging armado? doth your allye, fair france, conspire your wrack, or do the scots play false behind your back? doth holland quit you ill for all your love? whence is the storm from earth or heaven above? is't drought, is't famine, or is't pestilence, dost feel the smart or fear the consequence? your humble child intreats you, shew your grief, though arms nor purse she hath for your relief, such is her poverty; yet shall be found a suppliant for your help, as she is bound. _old england._ i must confess, some of those sores you name, my beauteous body at this present maime; but forreign foe, nor feigned friend i fear, for they have work enough, (thou knowst) elsewhere. nor is it alce's son nor henrye's daughter, whose proud contention cause this slaughter; nor nobles siding to make john no king, french jews unjustly to the crown to bring; no edward, richard, to lose rule and life, nor no lancastrians to renew old strife; no duke of york nor earl of march to soyle their hands in kindred's blood whom they did foil. no crafty tyrant now usurps the seat, who nephews slew that so he might be great; no need of tudor roses to unite, none knows which is the red or which the white; spain's braving fleet a second time is sunk, france knows how oft my fury she hath drunk; by edward third, and henry fifth of fame her lillies in mine arms avouch the same, my sister scotland hurts me now no more, though she hath been injurious heretofore; what holland is i am in some suspence, but trust not much unto his excellence. for wants, sure some i feel, but more i fear, and for the pestilence, who knows how near famine and plague, two sisters of the sword, destruction to a land doth soon afford. they're for my punishment ordain'd on high, unless our tears prevent it speedily. but yet i answer not what you demand to shew the grievance of my troubled land? before i tell the effect i'le shew the cause, which are my sins, the breach of sacred laws, idolatry, supplanter of a nation, with foolish superstitious adoration, are liked and countenanced by men of might the gospel trodden down and hath no right; church offices were sold and bought for gain, that pope had hoped to find rome here again; for oaths and blasphemies did ever ear from belzebub himself such language hear? what scorning of the saints of the most high, what injuries did daily on them lye, what false reports, what nick-names did they take not for their own but for their master's sake? and thou, poor soul, wert jeer'd among the rest, thy flying for the truth was made a jest for sabbath-breaking, and for drunkenness, did ever loud profaneness more express? from crying blood yet cleansed am not i, martyrs and others, dying causelessly. how many princely heads on blocks laid down for nought but title to a fading crown! 'mongst all the crueltyes by great ones done, of edward's youths, and clarence hapless son, o jane, why didst thou dye in flow'ring prime? because of royal stem, that was thy crime. for bribery, adultery and lyes, where is the nation i can't parallize? with usury, extortion and oppression, these be the hydraes of my stout transgression. these be the bitter fountains, heads and roots, whence flowed the source, the sprigs, the boughs, and fruits, of more than thou canst hear or i relate, that with high hand i still did perpetrate; for these were threatened the woful day i mockt the preachers, put it far away; the sermons yet upon record do stand that cri'd destruction to my wicked land; i then believed not, now i feel and see, the plague of stubborn incredulity. some lost their livings, some in prison pent, some fin'd from house and friends to exile went. their silent tongues to heaven did vengeance cry, who saw their wrongs, and hath judg'd righteously, and will repay it seven fold in my lap; this is forerunner of my after clap. nor took i warning by my neighbors' falls, i saw sad germany's dismantled walls, i saw her people famish'd, nobles slain, the fruitful land a barren heath remain. i saw immov'd her armyes foil'd and fled, wives forc'd, babes toss'd, her houses calimed. i saw strong rochel yielded to her foe, thousands of starved christians there also i saw poor ireland bleeding out her last, such crueltyes as all reports have passed; mine heart obdurate stood not yet aghast. now sip i of that cup, and just't may be the bottome dreggs reserved are for me. new england. to all you've said, sad mother, i assent, your fearful sins great cause there's to lament, my guilty hands in part, hold up with you, a sharer in your punishment's my due. but all you say amounts to this affect, not what you feel but what you do expect, pray in plain terms what is your present grief? then let's joyn heads and hearts for your relief. old england. well to the matter then, there's grown of late 'twixt king and peers a question of state, which is the chief, the law or else the king. one said, it's he, the other no such thing. 'tis said, my beter part in parliament to ease my groaning land, shew'd their intent, to crush the proud, and right to each man deal, to help the church, and stay the common-weal so many obstacles came in their way, as puts me to a stand what i should say; old customes, new prerogatives stood on, had they not held law fast, all had been gone; which by their prudence stood them in such stead they took high strafford lower by the head. and to their land be't spoke, they held i' th' tower all england's metropolitane that hour; this done, an act they would have passed fain no prelate should his bishoprick retain; here tugged they hard (indeed), for all men saw this must be done by gospel, not by law. next the militia they urged sore, this was deny'd (i need not say wherefore), the king displeas'd at york himself absents, they humbly beg return, shew their intents; the writing, printing, posting too and fro, shews all was done, i'll therefore let it go; but now i come to speak of my disaster, contention grown, 'twixt subjects and their master; they worded it so long, they fell to blows, that thousands lay on heaps, here bleeds my woes; i that no wars so many years have known, am now destroy'd and slaughter'd by mine own; but could the field alone this strife decide, one battle two or three i might abide. but these may be beginnings of more woe who knows but this may be my overthrow? oh, pity me in this sad perturbation, my plundered towns, my houses devastation, my weeping virgins and my young men slain; my wealthy trading fall'n, my dearth of grain, the seed times come, but ploughman hath no hope because he knows not who shall inn his crop! the poor they want their pay, their children bread, their woful--mothers' tears unpittied. if any pity in thy heart remain, or any child-like love thou dost retain, for my relief, do what there lyes in thee, and recompence that good i've done to thee. new england. dear mother, cease complaints and wipe your eyes, shake off your dust, chear up and now arise, you are my mother nurse, and i your flesh, your sunken bowels gladly would refresh, your griefs i pity, but soon hope to see, out of your troubles much good fruit to be; to see those latter days of hop'd for good, though now beclouded all with tears and blood; after dark popery the day did clear, but now the sun in's brightness shall appear; blest be the nobles of thy noble land, with ventur'd lives for truth's defence that stand; blest be thy commons, who for common good, and thy infringed laws have boldly stood; blest be thy counties, who did aid thee still, with hearts and states to testifie their will; blest be thy preachers, who did chear thee on, o cry the sword of god and gideon; and shall i not on them with mero's curse, that help thee not with prayers, arms and purse? and for myself let miseries abound, if mindless of thy state i ere be found. these are the dayes the churches foes to crush, to root out popelings, head, tail, branch and rush; let's bring baals' vestments forth to make a fire, their mytires, surplices, and all their tire, copes, rotchets, crossiers, and such empty trash, and let their names consume, but let the flash light christendome, and all the world to see, we hate romes whore, with all her trumpery. go on, brave essex, with a loyal heart, not false to king, nor to the better part; but those that hurt his people and his crown, as duty binds, expel and tread them down, and ye brave nobles, chase away all fear, and to this hopeful cause closely adhere; o mother, can you weep and have such peers, when they are gone, then drown yourself in tears, if now you weep so much, that then no more the briny ocean will o'erflow your shore. these, these are they i trust, with charles our king, out of all mists, such glorious days shall bring; that dazzled eyes beholding much shall wonder, at that thy settled peace, thy wealth and splendor. thy church and weal establish'd in such manner, that all shall joy, that then display'st thy banner; and discipline erected so i trust, that nursing kings shall come and lick thy dust. then justice shall in all thy courts take place, without respect of person, or of case; then bribes shall cease, and suits shall not stick long patience and purse of clients oft to wrong; then high commissions shall fall to decay, and pursivants and catchpoles want their pay. so shall thy happy nation ever flourish, when truth and righteousness they thus shall nourish, when thus in peace, thine armies brave send out, to sack proud rome, and all her vassals rout; there let thy name, thy fame and glory shine, as did thine ancestors in palestine; and let her spoyls full pay with interest be, of what unjustly once she poll'd from thee, of all the woes thou canst, let her be sped and on her pour the vengeance threatened; bring forth the beast that rul'd the world with 's beck, and tear his flesh, and set your feet on 's neck; and make his filthy den so desolate, to th' astonishment of all that knew his state. this done, with brandish'd swords to turky goe, for then what is 't, but english blades dare do? and lay her waste for so 's the sacred doom, and to gog as thou hast done to rome. oh abraham's seed lift up your heads on high, for sure the day of your redemption 's nigh; the scales shall fall from your long blinded eyes, and him you shall adore who now despise, then fulness of the nations in shall flow, and jew and gentile to one worship go; then follows days of happiness and rest; whose lot doth fall, to live therein is blest. no canaanite shall then be found i' th' land, and holiness on horses bell's shall stand; if this make way thereto, then sigh no more, but if it all, thou did'st not see 't before; farewell, dear mother, rightest cause prevail and in a while, you'll tell another tale. this, like all her earlier work, is heavy reading, the account given by "old age" in her "four ages of man," of what he has seen and known of puritan affairs, being in somewhat more lively strain. but lively was an adjective to which mistress anne had a rooted objection. her contemporaries indulged in an occasional solemn pun, but the only one in her writings is found in the grim turn on laud's name, in the "dialogue" just quoted, in which is also a sombre jest on the beheading of strafford. "old age" recalls the same period, opening with a faint--very faint--suggestion of shakespeare's thought in his "seven ages." "what you have been, even such have i before and all you say, say i, and somewhat more, babe's innocence, youth's wildness i have seen, and in perplexed middle age have been; sickness, dangers and anxieties have past, and on this stage am come to act my last, i have been young and strong and wise as you; but now _bis pueri senes,_ is too true. in every age i've found much vanity an end of all perfection now i see. it's not my valour, honor, nor my gold, my ruined house now falling can uphold, it's not my learning rhetorick wit so large, hath now the power, death's warfare to discharge, it's not my goodly state, nor bed of downs that can refresh, or ease, if conscience frown, nor from alliance can i now have hope, but what i have done well that is my prop; he that in youth is godly, wise and sage, provides a staff then to support his age. mutations great, some joyful and some sad, in this short pilgrimage i oft have had; sometimes the heavens with plenty smiled on me, sometime again rain'd all adversity, sometimes in honor, sometimes in disgrace, sometime an abject, then again in place. such private changes oft mine eyes have seen, in various times of state i've also been, i've seen a kingdom nourish like a tree, when it was ruled by that celestial she; and like a cedar, others so surmount, that but for shrubs they did themselves account. then saw i france and holland say'd cales won, and philip and albertus half undone, i saw all peace at home, terror to foes, but oh, i saw at last those eyes to close. and then methought the clay at noon grew dark, when it had lost that radiant sunlike spark; in midst of griefs i saw our hopes revive, (for 'twas our hopes then kept our hearts alive) we changed our queen for king under whose rayes we joy'd in many blest and prosperous dayes. i've seen a prince, the glory of our land in prime of youth seiz'd by heaven's angry hand, which fil'd our hearts with fears, with tears our eyes, wailing his fate, and our own destinies. i've seen from rome an execrable thing, a plot to blow up nobles and their king, but saw their horrid fact soon disappointed, and land nobles say'd with their annointed. i've princes seen to live on others' lands; a royal one by gifts from strangers' hands admired for their magnanimity, who lost a prince-dome and a monarchy. i've seen designs for ree and rochel crost, and poor palatinate forever lost. i've seen unworthy men advanced high, and better ones suffer extremity; but neither favour, riches, title, state, could length their days or once reverse their fate. i've seen one stab'd, and some to loose their heads, and others fly, struck both with gilt and dread; i've seen and so have you, for tis but late the desolation of a goodly state, plotted and acted so that none can tell who gave the counsel, but the prince of hell. three hundred thousand slaughtered innocents by bloody, popish, hellish miscreants; oh, may you live, and so you will i trust, to see them swill in blood until they burst. i've seen a king by force thrust from his thrones and an usurper subt'ly mount thereon; i've seen a state unmoulded, rent in twain, but ye may live to see't made up again. i've seen it plunder'd, taxt and soaked in blood, but out of evill you may see much good. what are my thoughts, this is no time to say. men may more freely speak another day; these are no old-wives tales, but this is truth, we old men love to tell what's done in youth." though this is little more than rhymed chronology, there are curious reminders here and there of the spirit of the time. gentle as was anne bradstreet's nature, it seemed to her quite natural to write of the "bloody, popish, hellish miscreants"-- "oh may you live, and so you will i trust, to see them swill in blood untill they burst." there was reason it was true; the same reason that brings the same thought to-day to women on the far western frontiers, for the irish butcheries had been as atrocious as any indian massacre our own story holds. the numbers butchered were something appaling, and hume writes: "by some computations, those who perished by all these cruelties are supposed to be a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand; by the most moderate, and probably the most reasonable account, they are made to amount to forty thousand---if this estimation itself be not, as is usual in such cases, somewhat exaggerated." irish ferocity was more than matched by english brutality. puritanism softened many features of the saxon character, but even in the lives of the most devoted, there is a keen relish for battle whether spiritual or actual, and a stern rejoicing in any depth of evil that may have overtaken a foe. in spite of the tremendous value set upon souls, indifference to human life still ruled, and there was even a certain relish, if that life were an enemy's, in turning it over heartily and speedily to its proper owner, satan. anne bradstreet is no exception to the rule, and her verses hold various fierce and unexpected outbursts against enemies of her faith or country. the constant discussion of mooted points by the ministers as well as people, made each man the judge of questions that agitated every mind, and problems of all natures from national down to town meeting debates, were pondered over in every puritan home. cotton's interest in detail never flagged, and his influence was felt at every point in the colony, and though ipswich, both in time and facilities for reaching it, was more widely separated from boston than boston now is from the remotest hamlet on cape cod, there is no doubt that nathaniel ward and mr. cotton occasionally met and exchanged views if not pulpits, and that the bradstreet family were not entirely cut off from intercourse. when nathaniel ward became law-maker instead of settled minister, it was with john cotton that he took counsel, and anne undoubtedly thought of the latter what his grandson cotton mather at a later day wrote. "he was indeed a most universal scholar, and a living system of the liberal arts and a walking library." walking libraries were needed, for stationary ones were very limited. governer dudley's, one of the largest in the colony, contained between fifty and sixty books, chiefly on divinity and history, and from the latter source anne obtained the minute historical knowledge shown in her rhymed account of "the four monarchies." it was to her father that she owed her love of books. she calls him in one poem, "a magazine of history," and at other points, her "guide," and "instructor," writing: "most truly honored and as truly dear, if worth in me, or ought i do appear, who can of right better demand the same? then may your worthy self from whom it came?" as at cambridge, and in far greater degree, she was cut off from much that had held resources there. at the worst, only a few miles had separated them from what was fast becoming the center and soul of the colony. but ipswich shut them in, and life for both mistress dudley and her daughter was an anxious one. the general court called for the presence of both dudley and bradstreet, the latter spending much of his time away, and some of the tenderest and most natural of anne bradstreet's poems, was written at this time, though regarded as too purely personal to find place in any edition of her poems. the quiet but fervent love between them had deepened with every year, and though no letters remain, as with winthrop, to evidence the steady and intense affection of both, the "letter to her husband, absent upon some publick employment," holds all the proof one can desire. "my head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, my more, my joy, my magazine of earthly store. if two be one as surely thou and i, how stayest thou there, whilst i at ipswich lie? so many steps, head from the heart to sever, if but a neck, soon would we be together; i like the earth this season mourn in black my sun is gone so far in 's zodiack, whom whilst i joyed, nor storms nor frosts i felt, his warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt. my chilled limbs now nummed lye forlorn, return, return sweet sol, from capricorn; in this dead time, alas, what can i more than view those fruits which through thy heat i bore? which sweet contentment yield me for a space, true, living pictures of their father's face. o strange effect! now thou art southward gone, i weary grow, the tedious day so long; but when thou northward to me shalt return, i wish my sun may never set but burn within the cancer of my glowing breast. the welcome house of him my dearest guest. where ever, ever stay, and go not thence till nature's sad decree shall call thee hence; flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, i here, thou there, yet both are one." a second one is less natural in expression, but still holds the same longing. phoebus, make haste, the day's too long, be gone, the silent nights, the fittest time for moan; but stay this once, unto my suit give ear, and tell my griefs in either hemisphere. (and if the whirling of thy wheels don't drown'd) the woeful accents of my doleful sound, if in thy swift carrier thou canst make stay, i crave this boon, this errand by the way, commend me to the man more lov'd than life, shew him the sorrows of his widowed wife; my dumpish thoughts, my groans, my brakish tears, my sobs, my longing hopes, my doubting fears, and if he love, how can he there abide? my interest's more than all the world beside. he that can tell the starrs or ocean sand, or all the grass that in the meads do stand, the leaves in th' woods, the hail or drops of rain, or in a corn field number every grain, or every mote that in the sunshine hops, may count my sighs, and number all my drops: tell him, the countless steps that thou dost trace, that once a day, thy spouse thou mayst embrace; and when thou canst not treat by loving mouth, thy rays afar salute her from the south. but for one month i see no day (poor soul) like those far scituate under the pole, which day by day long wait for thy arise, o, how they joy, when thou dost light the skyes. o phoebus, hadst thou but thus long from thine, restrained the beams of thy beloved shine, at thy return, if so thou could'st or durst behold a chaos blacker than the first. tell him here's worse than a confused matter, his little world's a fathom under water, nought but the fervor of his ardent beams hath power to dry the torrent of these streams tell him i would say more but cannot well, oppressed minds, abruptest tales do tell. now post with double speed, mark what i says by all our loves, conjure him not to stay." in the third and last, there is simply an imitation of much of the work of the seventeenth century; with its conceits and twisted meanings, its mannerisms and baldness, but still the feeling is there, though mistress bradstreet has labored painfully to make it as unlike nature as possible. "as loving hind that (hartless) wants her deer, scuds through the woods and fern with hearkening ear, perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry, her dearest deer might answer ear or eye; so doth my anxious soul, which now doth miss, a dearer deer (far dearer heart) than this. still wait with doubts and hopes and failing eye; his voice to hear or person to descry. or as the pensive dove doth all alone (on withered bough) most uncouthly bemoan the absence of her love and loving mate, whose loss hath made her so unfortunate; ev'n thus doe i, with many a deep sad groan, bewail my turtle true, who now is gone, his presence and his safe return, still wooes with thousand doleful sighs and mournful cooes. or as the loving mullet that true fish, her fellow lost, nor joy nor life do wish, but lanches on that shore there for to dye, where she her captive husband doth espy, mine being gone i lead a joyless life, i have a living sphere, yet seem no wife; but worst of all, to him can't steer my course, i here, he there, alas, both kept by force; return, my dear, my joy, my only love, unto thy hinde, thy mullet and thy dove, who neither joys in pasture, house nor streams, the substance gone, o me, these are but dreams, together at one tree, o let us brouse, and like two turtles roost within one house. and like the mullets in one river glide, let's still remain one till death divide. thy loving love and dearest dear, at home, abroad and everywhere. _a.b._" of a far higher order are a few lines, written at the same time, and with no suspicion of straining or of imitation in the quiet fervor of the words, that must have carried a thrill of deep and exquisite happiness to the heart of the man, so loved and honored. _"to my dear and loving husband:_ if ever two were one then surely we, if ever man were loved by wife, then thee; if ever wife was happy in a man, compare with me ye women if you can. i prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, or all the riches that the east doth hold. my love is such that rivers cannot quench, nor ought but love from thee give recompense. thy love is such i can no way repay, the heavens reward thee, manifold i pray. then while we live in love let's so persevere, that when we live no more, we may live ever." the woman who could feel such fervor as these lines express, owed the world something more than she ever gave, but every influence tended, as we have seen, to silence natural expression. one must seek, however, to discover why she failed even when admitting that failure was the only thing to be expected, and the causes are in the nature of the time itself, the story of literary development for that period being as complicated as politics, religion and every other force working on the minds of men. chapter vi. a theological tragedy. it was perhaps anne bradstreet's youth, and a sense that she could hardly criticise a judgment which had required the united forces of every church in the colony to pronounce, that made her ignore one of the most stormy experiences of those early days, the trial and banishment of anne hutchinson. her silence is the more singular, because the conflict was a purely spiritual one, and thus in her eyes deserving of record. there can be no doubt that the effect on her own spiritual and mental life must have been intense and abiding. no children had as yet come to absorb her thoughts and energies, and the events which shook the colony to the very center could not fail to leave an ineffaceable impression. no story of personal experience is more confounding to the modern reader, and none holds a truer picture of the time. governor dudley and simon bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in anne bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. there are hints that anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of puritan life. that she cared to write had already excited the wonder of her neighbors and anne stoutly asserted her right to speak freely whatever it seemed good to say, taking her stand afterwards given in the prologue to the first edition of her poems, in which she wrote: "i am obnoxious to each carping tongue who says my hand a needle better fits, a poet's pen all scorn i should thus wrong, for such despite they cast on female wits; if what i do prove well, it won't advance, they'l say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance. "but sure the antique greeks were far more mild, else of our sexe, why feigned they those nine and poesy made callippi's own child; so 'mongst the rest they placed the arts divine, but this weak knot they will full soon untie, the greeks did nought but play the fools and lye." this has a determined ring which she hastens to neutralize by a tribute and an appeal; the one to man's superior force, the other to his sense of justice. "let greeks be greeks, and women what they are, men have precedency and still excell, it is but vain unjustly to wage warrs; men can do best and women know it well, preheminence in all and each is yours; yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours." plain speaking was a dudley characteristic, but the fate of anne hutchinson silenced all save a few determined spirits, willing to face the same consequences. in the beginning, however, there could have been only welcome for a woman, whose spiritual gifts and unusual powers had made her the friend of john cotton, and who fascinated men and woman alike. there was reason, for birth and training meant every gift a woman of that day was likely to possess. her father, thomas marbury, was one of the puritan ministers of lincolnshire who afterward removed to london; her mother, a sister of sir erasmus dryden. she was thus related in the collateral line to two of the greatest of english intellects. free thinking and plain speaking were family characteristics, for john dryden the poet, her second cousin, was reproached with having been an anabaptist in his youth, and johnathan swift, a more distant connection, feared nothing in heaven or earth. it is no wonder, then, that even an enemy wrote of her as "the masterpiece of women's wit," or that her husband followed her lead with a devotion that never swerved. she had married him at alford in lincolnshire, and both were members of mr. cotton's congregation at boston. mr. hutchinson's standing among his puritan contemporaries was of the highest. he had considerable fortune, and the gentlest and most amiable of dispositions. the name seems to have meant all good gifts, for the same devoted and tender relation existed between this pair as between colonel hutchinson and his wife. from the quiet and happy beginning of their married life to its most tragic ending, they clung together, accepting all loss as part of the cross they had taken up, when they left the ease of lincolnshire behind, and sought in exile the freedom which intolerance denied. it is very probable that anne hutchinson may have known the dudley family after their return to lincolnshire, and certainly in the first flush of her new england experiences was likely to have had intimate relations with them. her opinions, so far as one can disentangle them from the mass of testimony and discussion, seem to have been in great degree, those held by the early quakers, but they had either not fully developed in her own mind before she left england, or had not been pronounced enough to attract attention. in any case the weariness of the long voyage seems to have been in part responsible for much that followed. endless discussions of religious subtleties were their chief occupation on board, and one of the company, the rev. mr. symmes, a dogmatic and overbearing man, found himself often worsted by the quick wit of this woman, who silenced all objections, and who, with no conception of the rooted enmity she was exciting, told with the utmost freedom, past and present speculations and experiences. the long fasts, and continuous religious exercises, worked upon her enthusiast's temper, and excited by every circumstance of time and place, it is small wonder that she supposed a direct revelation had come to her, the nature of which winthrop mentions in his history. "one mrs. hutchinson, a member of the church of boston, a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errours: " . that the person of the holy ghost dwells in a justified person. " . that no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification. from these two, grew many branches; as, st, our union with the holy ghost, so as a christian remains dead to every spiritual action, and hath no gifts nor graces, other than such as are in hypocrites, nor any other sanctification but the holy ghost himself. there joined with her in these opinions a brother of hers, one mr. wheelwright, a silenced minister sometime in england." obnoxious as these doctrines came to be, she had been in new england two years before they excited special attention. her husband served in the general court several elections as representative for boston, until he was excused at the desire of the church, and she herself found constant occupation in a round of kindly deeds. she denied the power of works as any help toward justification, but no woman in the colony, gave more practical testimony of her faith or made herself more beloved. though she had little children to care for, she found time to visit and nurse the sick, having special skill in all disorders of women. her presence of mind, her warm sympathy and extraordinary patience made her longed for at every sick bed, and she very soon acquired the strongest influence. dudley had made careful inquiries as to her religious standing, and must have been for the time at least, satisfied, and unusual attention was paid her by all the colonists; the most influential among them being her chief friends. coddington, who had built the first brick house in boston, received them warmly. her public teaching began quietly, her ministrations by sick beds attracting many, and it is doubtful if she herself realized in the least the extent of her influence. governor vane, young and ardent, the temporary idol of the colony, who had taken the place governor winthrop would have naturally filled, visited her and soon became one of her most enthusiastic supporters. just and unprejudiced as winthrop was, this summary setting aside by a people for whom he had sacrificed himself steadily, filled him with indignation, though the record in his journal is quiet and dignified. but naturally, it made him a sterner judge, when the time for judgment came. in the beginning, however, her work seemed simply for good. it had been the custom for the men of the boston church to meet together on thursday afternoons, to go over the sermon of the preceding sunday, of which notes had been taken by every member. no women were admitted, and believing that the same course was equally desirable for her own sex, anne hutchinson appointed two days in the week for this purpose, and at last drew about her nearly a hundred of the principal women of the colony. her lovely character and spotless life, gave immense power to her words, and her teaching at first was purely practical. we can imagine anne bradstreet's delight in the tender and searching power of this woman, who understood intuitively every womanly need, and whose sympathy was as unfailing as her knowledge. even for that time her scriptural knowledge was almost phenomenal, and it is probable that, added to this, there was an unacknowledged satisfaction in an assembly from which men were excluded, though many sought admission. mrs. hutchinson was obliged at last to admit the crowd who believed her gifts almost divine, but refused to teach, calling upon the ministers to do this, and confining herself simply to conversation. but boston at last seemed to have gone over wholly to her views, while churches at other points opposed them fiercely. up to this time there had been no attempt to define the character of the holy ghost, but now a powerful opposition to her theory arose, and furious discussions were held in meetings and out. the very children caught the current phrases, and jeered one another as believers in the "covenant of grace," or the "covenant of works," and the year came and passed with the colony at swords points with one another. every difficulty was aggravated by vane, whose youth and inexperience made it impossible for him to understand the temper of the people he ruled. the rise of differences had been so gradual that no one suspected what mischief might come till the results suddenly disclosed themselves. that vagaries and eccentricities were to be expected, never entered the minds of this people, who accepted their own departure from authority and ancient ordinances as just and right, but could never conceive that others might be justified in acting on the same principle. to understand even in slight degree the conflict which followed, one must remember at every turn, that no interests save religious interests were of even momentary importance. every member of the colony had hard, laborious work to do, but it was hurried through with the utmost speed, in order to have time for the almost daily lectures and expoundings that made their delight. certain more worldly minded among them had petitioned for a shortening of these services, but were solemnly reproved, and threatened with the "judgment of god on their frowardness." with minds perpetually concentrated on subtle interpretations, agreement was impossible. natural life, denied and set aside at every point, gave place to the unnatural, and every colonist was, quite unconsciously, in a state of constant nervous tension and irritability. the questions that to us seem of even startling triviality, were discussed with a fervor and earnestness it is well nigh impossible to comprehend. they were a slight advance on the scholastic disputations of the preceding century, but they meant disagreement and heart-burnings, and the more intolerant determined on stamping out all variations from their own convictions. any capacity for seeking to carry out robinson's injunction in his final sermon at leyden seems to have died once for all, in the war of words. "i beseech you," he had said, "remember that it is an article of your church covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of god." there was small remnant of this spirit even among the most liberal. dudley was one of the chief movers in the course resolved upon, and mourned over cotton, who still held to anne hutchinson, and wrote and spoke of her as one who "was well beloved, and all the faithful embraced her conference, and blessed god for her fruitful discourses." mr. welde, on the contrary, one of her fiercest opponents, described her as "a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment inferior to many women." how far the object of all this confusion realized the real state of things cannot be determined. but by january, , dissension had reached such a height that a fast was appointed for the pequot war and the religious difficulties. the clergy had become her bitterest enemies, and with some reason, for through her means many of their congregations had turned against them. mr. wilson, once the most popular minister in boston, had been superseded by her brother,--mr. wheelwright, and boston began the heretical career which has been her portion from that day to this. active measures were necessary. the general court was still governed by the clergy, and by march had settled upon its future course, and summoned wheelwright, who was censured and found guilty of sedition. governor vane opposed the verdict bitterly. the chief citizens of boston sent in a "remonstrance," and actual anarchy seemed before them. the next court was held at newtown to avoid the danger of violence at boston, and a disorderly election took place in which the puritan fathers came to blows, set down by winthrop as "a laying on of hands." the grave and reverend wilson, excited beyond all considerations of puritanical propriety, climbed a tree, and made a vigorous speech to the throng of people, in which many malcontents were at work urging on an opposition that proved fruitless. vane was defeated and winthrop again made governor, his calm forbearance being the chief safety of the divided and unhappy colonists, who resented what they settled to be tyranny, and cast about for some means of redress. none was to be had. exile, imprisonment and even death, awaited the most eminent citizens; winthrop's entry into boston was met by gloomy silence, and for it all, welde and symmes protested anne hutchinson to be responsible, and denounced her as a heretic and a witch. she in the meantime seems to have been in a state of religious exaltation which made her blind and deaf to all danger. her meetings continued, and she in turn denounced her opponents and believed that some revelation would be given to show the justice of her claims. there was real danger at last. if the full story of these dissensions were told in england, possession of charter, which had already been threatened, might be lost entirely. dudley was worked up to the highest pitch of apprehension, believing that if the dissension went on, there might even be a repetition of the horrors of munster. divided as they were, concerted action against enemies, whether indian or foreign, could not be expected. there was danger of a general league of the new england indians, and "when a force was ordered to take the field for the salvation of the settlements, the boston men refused to be mustered because they suspected the chaplain, who had been designated by lot to accompany the expedition, of being under a covenant of works." such a state of things, if known in full at home, would shut off all emigration. that men of character and means should join them was an essential to the continued life of the colony. setting aside any question of their own personal convictions, their leaders saw that the continuance among them of these disturbing elements meant destruction, and winthrop, mild and reasonable as he sought to be, wrote: "he would give them one reason, which was a ground for his judgment, and that was, for that he saw that those brethren, etc., were so divided from the rest of the country in their judgment and practice, as it could not stand with the public peace, that they should continue amongst us. so by the example of lot in abraham's family, and after hagar and ishmael, he saw they must be sent away." with august came the famous synod of cambridge, the first ever held in new england, in which the church set about defining its own position and denouncing the hutchinsonians. eighty-two heresies were decided to have arisen, all of which were condemned, and this being settled, cotton was admonished, and escaped exile only by meekly explaining away his errors. wheelwright, refusing to yield, was sentenced to imprisonment and exile; mrs. hutchinson's meetings were declared seditious and disorderly, and prohibited, and the synod separated, triumphant. the field was their own. what they had really accomplished was simply to deepen the lines and make the walls of division still higher. in later years no one cared to make public the proceedings of the body, and there is still in existence a loose paper, described by the rev. george e. ellis in his "life of anne hutchinson"; a petition from mr. john higginson, son of the salem minister ... by which it appears that he was employed by the magistrates and ministers to take down in short hand, all the debates and proceedings of the synod. he performed the work faithfully, and having written out the voluminous record, at "the expense of much time and pains," he presented it to the court in may, . the long time that elapsed may indicate the labor. the court accepted it, and ordered that, if approved by the ministers, after they had viewed it, it should be printed, mr. higginson being entitled to the profits, which were estimated as promising a hundred pounds. the writer waited with patience while his brethren examined it, and freely took their advice. some were in favor of printing it; but others advised to the contrary, "conceiving it might possibly be an occasion of further disputes and differences both in this country and other parts of the world." naturally they failed to agree. the unfortunate writer, having scruples which prevented his accepting an offer of fifty pounds for the manuscript, made probably by some hutchinsonian, waited the pleasure of the brethren, reminding them at intervals of his claim, but so far as can be discovered, failing always to make it good, and the manuscript itself disappeared, carrying with it the only tangible testimony to the bitterness and intolerance of which even the owners were in after years ashamed. in the meantime, harry vane, despairing of peaceful life among his enemies, had sailed for england early in august, to pass through every phase of political and spiritual experience, and to give up his life at last on the scaffold to which the treachery of the second charles condemned him. with his departure, no powerful friend remained to anne hutchinson, whose ruin had been determined upon and whose family were seeking a new and safer home. common prudence should have made her give up her public meetings and show some deference to the powers she had always defied. even this, however, could not have saved her, and in november, , the trial began which even to-day no new englander can recall without shame; a trial in which civil, judicial, and ecclesiastical forces all united to crush a woman, whose deepest fault was a too enthusiastic belief in her own inspiration. winthrop conducted the prosecution, mild and calm in manner, but resolutely bent upon punishment, and by him sat dudley, endicott, bradstreet, nowell and stoughton; bradstreet and winthrop being the only ones who treated her with the faintest semblance of courtesy. welde and symmes, wilson and hugh peters, faced her with a curious vindictiveness, and in the throng of excited listenders, hardly a friendly face met her eyes, even her old friend, john cotton, having become simply a timid instrument of her persecutors. the building in which the trial took place was thronged. hundreds who had been attracted by her power, looked on: magistrates and ministers, yeoman and military, the sad colored garments of the gentry in their broad ruffs and high crowned hats, bringing out the buff coats of the soldiers, and the bright bodices of the women, who clung to the vanities of color, and defied the tacit law that limited them to browns and drabs. over all hung the gray november sky, and the chill of the dolorous month was in the air, and did its work toward intensifying the bitterness which ruled them all. it is doubtful if anne bradstreet made one of the spectators. her instinct would have been to remain away, for the sympathy she could not help but feel, could not betray itself, without at once ranking her in opposition to the judgment of both husband and father. anne hutchinson's condition was one to excite the compassion and interest of every woman, but it had no such effect on her judges, who forced her to stand till she nearly fell from exhaustion. food was denied her; no counsel was allowed, or the presence of any friend who could have helped by presence, if in no other way. feeble in body, depressed and anxious in mind, one reacted on another, and the marvel is not that she here and there contradicted herself, or lost patience, but that any coherence or power of argument remained. the records of the trial show both. winthrop opened it by making a general charge of heresy, and anne demanded a specific one, and when the charge of holding unlawful meetings was brought, denied it so energetically and effectually, that winthrop had no more words and turned the case over to the less considerate dudley, whose wrath at her presumption knew no bounds. both he and the ministers who swore against her, used against her statements which she had made in private interviews with them, which she had supposed to be confidential, but which were now reported in detail. naturally she reproached the witnesses with being informers, and they justified their course hotly. mr. cotton's testimony, given most reluctantly, confirmed their statements. the chief grievance was not her meetings, so much as the fact that she had publicly criticized the teaching and religious character of the ministers, insisting that mr. cotton alone had the full "thorough-furnishing" for such work. deep but smothered feeling was apparent in every word the initiated witnesses spoke, and the magistrate, mr. coddington, in vain assured them, that even if she had said all this and more, no real harm had been done. cotton sided with him, and spoke so powerfully that there was a slight diversion in her favor, rendered quite null by her claim of immediate inspiration in what she had done. the records at this point, show none of the excitement, the hysterical ecstasy which marked the same declaration in the case of some among the quakers who were afterward tried. her calmness increased instead of lessening. on the score of contempt of the ministers it had become evident that she could not be convicted, but this claim to direct revelation, was an even more serious matter. scripture might be twisted to the point of dismemberment, so long as one kept to the text, and made no pretence of knowledge beyond it; contention within these bounds was lawful and honorable, and the daily food of these argumentative christians who gave themselves to the work of combining intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery, with perpetual surprise at any indication that the two were incompatible. the belief in personal revelation, actually no more than a deep impression produced by long pondering over some passage, was really part of the puritan faith, but the united company had no thought of discovering points of harmony, or brushing aside mere phrases which simply concealed the essential truth held by both. such belief could come only from the direct prompting of satan, and when she firmly and solemnly declared that whatever way their judgment went, she should be saved from calamity, that she was and should remain, in direct communion with god, and that they were simply pitiless persecutors of the elect, the wrath was instant and boundless. a unanimous vote condemned her at once, and stands in the records of massachusetts as follows: "mrs. hutchinson, the wife of mr. william hutchinson, being convicted for traducing the ministers and their ministry in the country, she declared voluntarily her revelations, and that she should be delivered, and the court ruined with their posterity, and thereupon was banished, and in the meanwhile was committed to mr. joseph welde (of roxbury) until the court shall dispose of her." her keeper for the winter was the brother of her worst enemy. she was to be kept there at the expense of her husband, but forbidden to pursue any of her usual occupations. naturally she sunk into a deep melancholy, in no wise lessened by constant visits from the ministers, who insisted upon discussing her opinions, and who wrought upon her till she was half distracted. they accused her of falsehoods, declaring that she held "gross errors, to the number of thirty or thereabouts," and badgering the unhappy creature till it is miraculous that any spirit remained. then came the church trial, more legitimate, but conducted with fully as much virulence as the secular one, the day of the weekly lecture, thursday, being chosen, as that which brought together the greatest number of people. the elders accused her of deliberate lying, and point by point, brought up the thirty errors. of some she admitted her possible mistake; others she held to strenuously, but all were simply speculation, not one having any vital bearing on faith or life. public admonition was ordered, but before this her two sons had been publicly censured for refusing to join in signing the paper which excommunicated her, mr. cotton addressing them "most pitifully and pathetically," as "giving way to natural affection and as tearing the very bowels of their souls by hardening their mother in sin." until eight in the evening, an hour equivalent to eleven o'clock with our present habits, the congregation listened to question and answer and admonition, in which last, mr. cotton "spake to the sisters of the church, and advised them to take heed of her opinions, and to withhold all countenance and respect from her, lest they should harden her in her sin." anne bradstreet must have listened with a curious mixture of feelings, though any evidence of them would naturally be repressed. once more all came together, and once more, anne hutchinson, who faced them in this last encounter with a quiet dignity, that moved the more sympathetic to pity, denied the charges they brought, and the three years controversy which, as ellis writes, "had drawn nearly the whole of the believers in boston---magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, and the common multitude under the banners of a female leader, had changed the government of the colony, and spread its strange reports over protestant europe, was thus brought to an issue, by imputing deception about one of the most unintelligible tenets of faith to her, who could not be circumvented in any other way." the closest examination of her statements shows no ground for this judgment. it was the inferences of her opponents, and no fact of her real belief that made against her, but inference, then as now, made the chief ground for her enemies. excommunication followed at once, and now, the worst having come, her spirits rose, and she faced them with quiet dignity, but with all her old assurance, glorying in the whole experience so that one of the indignant ministers described her manner with deep disgust, and added: "god giving her up, since the sentence of excommunication, to that hardness of heart, as she is not affected with any remorse, but glories in it, and fears not the vengeance of god which she lies under, as if god did work contrary to his own word, and loosed from heaven, while his church had bound upon earth." other ministers were as eager in denunciation, preaching against her as "the american jezebel," and even the saintly hooker wrote: "the expression of providence against this wretched woman hath proceeded from the lord's miraculous mercy, and his bare arm hath been discovered therein from first to last, that all the churches may hear and fear. i do believe such a heap of hideous errors at once to be vented by such a self-deluding and deluded creature, no history can record; and yet, after recantation of all, to be cast out as unsavory salt, that she may not continue a pest to the place, that will be forever marvellous in the eyes of all the saints." even the lapse of several generations left the animus unchanged, and graham, usually so dispassionate and just in statement, wrote of her almost vindictively: "in the assemblies which were held by the followers of mrs. hutchinson, there was nourished and trained a keen, contentious spirit, and an unbridled license of tongue, of which the influence was speedily felt in the serious disturbance, first of domestic happiness, and then of the public peace. the matrons of boston were transformed into a synod of slanderous praters, whose inquisitional deliberations and audacious decrees, instilled their venom into the innermost recesses of society; and the spirits of a great majority of the citizen being in that combustible state in which a feeble spark will suffice to kindle a formidable conflagration, the whole colony was inflamed and distracted by the incontinence of female spleen and presumption." amidst this rattle of theological guns there was danger that others might be heard. to subdue boston was the first necessity, and an order for disarming the disaffected was issued. the most eminent citizens, if suspected of favoring her, had their firearms taken from them, and even capt. john underhill was forced to give up his sword. an account of the whole controversy was written by mr. welde and sent over to england for publication in order that the colony might not suffer from slanderous reports, and that no "godly friends" might be prevented from coming over. for the winter of , boston was quiet, but it was an ominous quiet, in which destructive forces gathered, and though never visible on the surface, worked in evil ways for more than one of the generations that followed. freedom had ended for any who differed from the faith as laid down by the cambridge synod, and but one result could follow. all the more liberal spirits saw that massachusetts could henceforth be no home for them, and made haste to other points. coddington led a colony to rhode island, made up chiefly of the fifty-eight who had been disarmed, and in process of time became a quaker. this was the natural ending for many, the heart of anne hutchinson's doctrine being really a belief in the "inward light," a doctrine which seems to have outraged every puritan susceptibility for fully a hundred years, and until the reaction began, which has made individual judgment the only creed common to the people of new england. it was reasonable enough, however, that massachusetts should dread a colony of such uneasy spirits, planted at her very doors, enfranchised and heretical to an appalling degree and considered quite as dangerous as so many malefactors, and an uneasy and constant watch was kept. the hutchinsons had sold their property in boston and joined coddington at pocasset, of which mr. hutchinson soon became the chief magistrate. his wife, as before, was the master spirit. she even addressed an admonition to the church in boston, turning the tables temporarily upon her enemies, though the end of her power was at hand. in , her husband died, and various circumstances had before this made her influence feared and disliked. freedom in any english settlement had ceased to be possible, and as massachusetts grew more powerful, she resigned any hope of holding the place won by so many sacrifices and emigrated to the dutch settlement, forming a small colony of sixteen persons at pelham in westchester county, new york, where a little river still bears her name. one son had remained in boston, and was the ancestor of the tory governor of massachusetts during the revolution, and a daughter also married and settled there, so that her blood is still found in the veins of more than one new england family, some of whose ancestors were most directly concerned in casting her out. but her younger children and a son-in-law were still with her, with a few of her most devoted followers, and she still anticipated peace and a quiet future. both came at last, but not in the looked-for guise. no date remains of the fate of the little colony and only the indian custom of preserving the names of those they killed, has made us know that wampago himself, the owner of the land about pelham, was the murderer of the woman, whose troubled but not unhappy life went out in the fire and blood of an indian massacre. to the puritans in boston, such fate seemed justice, and they rejoiced with a grim exultation. "the lord," said welde, "heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from our great and sore affliction." no tale was too gross and shameless to find acceptance, and popular feeling against her settled into such fixed enmity that even her descendant, the historian hutchinson, dared not write anything that would seem to favor her cause. yet, necessary as her persecution and banishment may have been to the safety of the colony, the faith for which she gave her life has been stronger than her enemies. mistaken as she often was, a truer christianity dwelt with her than with them, and the toleration denied her has shown itself as the heart of all present life or future progress. chapter vii. colonial literary development in the seventeenth century. it was before the final charge from ipswich to andover, that the chief part of anne bradstreet's literary work was done, the ten years after her arrival in new england being the only fruitful ones. as daughter and wife of two of the chief magistrates, she heard the constant discussion of questions of policy as well as questions of faith, both strongly agitated by the stormy years of anne hutchinson's stay in boston, and it is very probable that she sought refuge from the anxiety of the troubled days, in poetical composition, and in poring over ancient history found consolation in the fact that old times were by no means better than the new. the literary life of new england had already begun, and it is worth while to follow the lines of its growth and development, through the colonial days, if only to understand better the curious limitations for any one who sought to give tangible form to thought, whether in prose or poetry. for north and south, the story was the same. the points of divergence in the northern and southern colonies have been so emphasized, and the impression has become so fixed, that the divisions of country had as little in common as came later to be the fact, that any statement as to their essential agreement, is distrusted or denied. yet even to-day, in a region where many causes have made against purity of blood, the traveller in the south is often startled, in some remote town of the carolinas or of virginia, at the sight of what can only be characterized as a southern yankee. at one's very side in the little church may sit a man who, if met in boston, would be taken for a brahmin of the brahmins. his face is as distinctively a new england one as was emerson's. high but narrow forehead, prominent nose, thin lips, and cheek bones a trifle high; clear, cold blue eyes and a slender upright figure every line shows repressed force, the possibility of passionate energy, of fierce enmity and ruthless judgment on anything outside of personal experience. culture is equally evident, but culture refusing to believe in anything modern, and resting its claims on little beyond the time of queen anne. it is the puritan alive again, and why not? descended directly from some stray member of the cromwellian party who fled at the restoration, he chose virginia rather than new england, allured by the milder climate. but he is of the same class, the same prejudices and limitations as the new england puritan, the sole difference being that he has stood still while the other passed on unrestingly. but in , it was merely a difference of location, never of mental habit, that divided them. for both alike, the description given by one of our most brilliant writers, applied the english people of the seventeenth century being summed up in words quite as applicable to-day as then: "at that time, though they were apparently divided into many classes, they were really divided into only two---first, the disciples of things as they are; second, the disciples of things as they ought to be." it was chiefly "the disciples of things as they ought to be" that passed over from old england to the new, and as such faith means usually supreme discomfort for its holder, and quite as much for the opposer, there was a constant and lively ebullition of forces on either side. every puritan who came over waged a triple war-- first, with himself as a creature of malignant and desperate tendencies, likely at any moment to commit some act born of hell; second, with the devil, at times regarded as practically synonymous with one's own nature, at others as a tangible and audacious adversary; and last and always, with all who differed from his own standard of right and wrong---chiefly wrong. the motto of that time was less "dare to do right," than "do not dare to do wrong." all mental and spiritual furnishings were shaken out of the windows daily, by way of dislodging any chance seeds of vice sown by the great adversary. one would have thought the conflict with natural forces quite enough to absorb all superfluous energy, every fact of climate, soil and natural features being against them, but neither scanty harvests, nor indian wars, nor devastating disease, had the power to long suppress this perpetual and unflinching self-discipline. unlike any other colony of the new world, the sole purpose and motive of action was an ideal one. the dutch sought peltries and trade in general, and whereever they established themselves, at once gave tokens of material comfort and prosperity. the more southern colonies were this basis, adding to it the freedom of life--the large hospitality possible where miles of land formed the plantation, and service meant no direct outlay or expense. here and there a southern puritan was found, as his type may be found to-day, resisting the charm of physical ease and comfort, and constituting himself a missionary to the indians of south carolina, or to settlements remote from all gospel privileges, but for the most part the habits of an english squire-ruled country prevailed, and were enlarged upon; each man in the centre of his great property being practically king. dispersion of forces was the order, and thus many necessities of civilization were dispensed with. the man who had a river at his door had no occasion to worry over the making or improvement of roads, a boat carrying his supplies, and bridle-paths sufficing his horse and himself. with no need for strenuous conflict with nature or man, the power of resistance died naturally. sharp lines softened; muscles weakened, and before many generations the type had so altered that the people who had left england as one, were two, once for all. the law of dispersion, practical and agreeable to the southern landholder, would have been destruction to his new england brethren. for the latter, concentration was the only safety. they massed together in close communities, and necessarily were forced to plan for the general rather than for the individual good. in such close quarters, where every angle made itself felt, and constant contact developed and implied criticism, law must work far more minutely than in less exacting communities. every tendency to introspection and self-judging was strengthened to the utmost, and merciless condemnation for one's self came to mean a still sharper one for others. with every power of brain and soul they fought against what, to them, seemed the one evil for that or any time--toleration. each man had his own thought, and was able to put it into strong words. no colony has ever known so large a proportion of learned men, there being more graduates of cambridge and oxford between the years and than it was possible to find in a population of the same size in the mother country. "in its inception, new england was not an agricultural community, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community; it was a thinking community---an arena and mart for ideas--its characteristic organ being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket, but the brain." the material for learning, we have seen, was of the scantiest, not only for winthrop's colony but for those that preceded it. the three little ships that, on a misty afternoon in december, , dropped down the thames with sails set for an unknown country, carried any freight but that of books. book-makers were there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that, in , took a more northerly course, and cast anchor at last off the bleak and sullen shore of massachusetts; but for both alike the stress of those early years left small energy or time for any composition beyond the reports that, at stated intervals, went back to the mother country. the work of the pioneer is for muscles first, brain having small opportunity, save as director; and it required more than one generation before authorship could become the business of any, not even the clergy being excepted from the stress of hard manual labor. yet, for the first departure, an enthusiasm of hope and faith filled many hearts. the england of that day had not been too kindly toward her men of letters, who were then, as now, also men of dreams, looking for something better than the best she had to offer, and who, in the early years of the seventeenth century, gathered in london as the centre least touched by the bigotry and narrowness of one party, the wild laxity and folly of the other. "the very air of london must have been electric with the daily words of those immortals whose casual talk upon the pavement by the street-side was a coinage of speech richer, more virile, more expressive than has been known on this planet since the great days of atheman poetry, eloquence and mirth." there were "wits, dramatists, scholars, orators, singers, philosophers." for every one of them was the faith of something undefined, yet infinitely precious, to be born of all the mysterious influences in that new land to which all eyes turned, and old michael drayton's ringing ode on their departure held also a prophecy: "in kenning of the shore, thanks to god first given, o you, the happiest men, be frolic then; let cannons roar, frighting the wide heaven. "and in regions far such heroes bring ye forth as those from whom we came; and plant our name under that star not known unto our north. "and as there plenty grows of laurel everywhere-- apollo's sacred tree-- you, it may see, a poet's brows to crown that may sing there." the men who, in passing over to america could not cease to be englishmen, were the friends and associates--the intellectual equals in many points of this extraordinary assemblage of brilliant and audacious intellects; and chief among them was the man at whose name we are all inclined to smile--captain john smith. so many myths have hid the real man from view--some of them, it must be admitted, of his own making--that we forget how vivid and resolute a personality he owned, and the pride we may well have in him as the writer of the first distinctively american book. his work was not only for virginia, but for new england as well. his life was given to the interests of both. defeated plans, baffled hopes, had no power to quench the absorbing love that filled him to the end, and, at the very last, he wrote of the american colonies: "by that acquaintance i have with them, i call them my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right." certain qualities, most prominent then, have, after a long disappearance, become once more, in degree at least, characteristic of the time. the book man of to-day is quite as likely to be also the man of affairs, and the pale and cloistered student of the past is rather a memory than a present fact. history thus repeats itself as usual, and the story of the literary men of the nineteenth century has many points in common with that of the seventeenth. smith's description of new england had had active circulation in the mother country, and many a puritan trusted it entirely, who would have frowned upon the writer had he appeared in person to testify of what he had seen. certainly the cavalier predominated in him, the type to which he belonged being of the noble one "of which the elizabethan age produced so many examples--the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator. of this type of manhood, spacious, strong, refined and sane, were the best men of the elizabethan time, george gascoigne, sir philip sidney, sir walter raleigh, and, in a modified sense, hakluyt, bacon, sackville, shakespeare, ben johnson and nearly all the rest." it would have been impossible to make john smith a puritan, but an ameliorated puritan might easily have become a john smith. it is worth while to recall his work and that of his fellow colonists, if only to note the wide and immediate departure of thought in the northern and southern colonies, even where the puritan element entered in, nor can we understand anne bradstreet, without a thought of the forces at work in the new country, unconscious but potent causes of all phases of literary life in that early time. the virginia colonist had more knowledge of the world and less knowledge of himself, introspection, or any desire for it, being no part of his mental constitution or habit. intellectually, he demanded a spherical excellence, easier then than now, and attained by many a student of that day, and to this captain john aspired, one at least of his contemporaries giving proof of faith that he had attained it in lines written on him and his book on the history of virginia and new england: "like caesar, now thou writ'st what them hast done. these acts, this book, will live while there's a sun." the history is picturesque, and often amusing. as a writer he was always "racy, terse, fearless," but, save to the special student, there is little value to the present student, unless he be a searcher after the spirit that moved not only the man, but, through him, the time he moulded. for such reader will still be felt "the impression of a certain personal largeness ... magnanimity, affluence, sense and executive force. over all his personal associates in american adventure he seems to tower, by the natural loftiness and reach of the perception with which he grasped the significance of their vast enterprise and the means to its success.... he had the faults of an impulsive, irascible, egotistic and imaginative nature; he sometimes bought human praise at too high a price, but he had great abilities in word and deed; his nature was, upon the whole, generous and noble; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, he did more than any other englishman to make an american nation and an american literature possible." behind the stockade at jamestown, only the most persistent bent toward letters had chance of surviving. joyful as the landing had been, the colony had no sturdy backbone of practical workers. their first summer was unutterably forlorn, the beauty and fertility that had seemed to promise to the sea-sad eyes a life of instant ease, bringing with it only a "horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence and indian hostility." no common purpose united them, as in the northern colony. save for the leaders, individual profit had been the only ambition or intention. work had no place in the scheme of life, and even when ship after ship discharged its load of immigrants matters were hardly mended. perpetual discord became the law. smith fled from the tumults which he had no power to quiet, and a long succession of soon-discouraged officers waged a species of hand-to-hand conflict with the wild elements that made up the colony. one poet, george sandys, whose name and work are still of meaning and value to the student, found leisure, borrowed from the night, for a translation of ovid's "metamorphoses," commended by both dryden and pope, and which passed at once through eight editions, but there were no others. twenty years of colonial life had ended when he returned to england, and the spirit of the early founders had well nigh disappeared. literary work had died with it. a few had small libraries, chiefly latin classics, but a curious torpor had settled down, the reasons for which are now evident. there was no constant intercourse, as in new england. the "policy of dispersion" was the law, for every man aspired to be a large land- owner, and, in the midst of his tract of half-cleared land, had small communication with any but his inferiors. within fifty years any intellectual standard had practically ceased to exist. the governor, sir william berkeley, whose long rule meant death to progress, thundered against the printing-press, and believed absolutely in the "fine old conservative policy of keeping subjects ignorant in order to keep them submissive." for thirty- six years his energies were bent in this direction. protest of any sort simply intensified his purpose, and when dawned he had the happiness of making to the english commissioners a reply that has become immortal, though hardly in the sense anticipated, when he wrote: "i thank god there are no free schools, nor printing; and i hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. god keep us from both." a dark prayer, and answered as fully as men's own acts can fulfill their prayers. the brilliant men who had passed from the scene had no successors. the few malcontents were silenced by a law which made "even the first thrust of the pressman's lever a crime," and until there was neither printing nor desire for printing in any general sense. the point where our literature began had become apparently its burial-place; the historians and poets and students of an earlier generation were not only unheeded but forgotten, and a hundred years of intellectual barrenness, with another hundred, before even partial recovery could be apparent, were the portion of virginia and all the states she influenced or controlled. no power could have made it otherwise. "had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? the units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle mind; no schools; no literary institutions, high or low; no public libraries; no printing-press; no intellectual freedom; no religious freedom; the forces of society tending to create two great classes--a class of vast land-owners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics; and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs; these constitute a situation out of which may be evolved country gentlemen, loud-lunged and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, men of boundless domestic heartiness and social grace, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and, by and by, here and there, perhaps after awhile, a few amateur literary men---but no literary class, and almost no literature." * * * * * the northern colony had known strange chances also, but every circumstance and accident of its life fostered the literary spirit and made the student the most honored member of the community. the mayflower brought a larger proportion of men with literary antecedents and tendencies than had landed on the virginia coast; and though every detail of life was fuller of hard work, privation and danger--climate being even more against them than indians or any other misery of the early years--the proportion remained much the same. it is often claimed that this early environment was utterly opposed to any possibility of literary development. on the contrary, "those environments were, for a certain class of mind, extremely wholesome and stimulating." hawthorne has written somewhere: "new england was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of man." and tyler, in his brilliant analysis of early colonial forces, takes much the same ground: "there were about them many of the tokens and forces of a picturesque, romantic and impressive life; the infinite solitudes of the wilderness, its mystery, its peace; the near presence of nature, vast, potent, unassailed; the strange problems presented to them by savage character and savage life; their own escape from great cities, from crowds, from mean competition; the luxury of having room enough; the delight of being free; the urgent interest of all the protestant world in their undertaking; the hopes of humanity already looking thither; the coming to them of scholars, saints, statesmen, philosophers." yet even for these men there were restraints that to-day seem shameful and degrading. harvard college had been made responsible for the good behavior of the printing-press set up in , and for twenty-three years this seemed sufficient. finally two official licensers were appointed, whose business was to read and pronounce a verdict either for or against everything proposed for publication. anyone might consider these hindrances sufficient, but intolerance gained with every year of restriction, and when finally the officers were induced by arguments which must have been singularly powerful, to allow the printing of an edition of "invitation of christ," a howl arose from every council and general assembly, whether of laws of divinity, and the unlucky book was characterized as one written "by a popish minister, wherein is contained some things that are less safe to be infused amongst the people of this place"; and the authorities ordered not only a revisal of its contents but a cessation of all work on the printing-press. common sense at length came to the rescue, but legal restraints on printing were not abolished in massachusetts until twenty-one years before the declaration of independence. as with virginia the early years were most fertile in work of any interest to the present time, and naturally so. fresh from the life not only of books but of knowledge of "the central currents of the world's best thinking," these influences could not die out in the generation nearest them. for every writer some history of the colony was the first instinct, and william bradford holds the same relation to new england as captain john smith to virginia-- the racy, incisive, picturesque diction of the latter being a key- hole to their colonial life, as symbolical as the measured, restrained and solemn periods of the puritan writer. argument had become a necessity of life. it had been forced upon them in england in the endeavor to define their position not only to the cavalier element but to themselves, and became finally so rooted a mental habit that "even on the brink of any momentous enterprise they would stop and argue the case if a suspicion occurred to them that things were not right." they were never meek and dreamy saints, but, on the contrary, "rather pragmatical and disputatious persons, with all the edges and corners of their characters left sharp, with all their opinions very definitely formed, and with their habits of frank utterance quite thoroughly matured." but for bradford, and morton, and johnson, and other equally worthy and honored names, this disputatious tendency was a surface matter, and the deeper traits were of an order that make petty peculiarities forgotten. for bradford especially, was "an untroubled command of strong and manly speech.... the daily food of his spirit was noble. he uttered himself without effort, like a free man, a sage and a christian," and his voice was that of many who followed him. loving the mother country with passion, the sense of exile long remained with them--a double exile, since they had first taken firm hold in leyden, and parted from its ease and prosperity with words which hold the pathos and quiet endurance still the undertone of much new england life, and which, though already quoted, are the key note of the early days. "so they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting-place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on these things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, that dearest country, and quieted their spirits." what john winthrop's work was like, whether in private diary or letter, or in more formal composition, we have already seen, but there is one speech of his in , which was of profoundest interest to the whole colony, and must have stirred anne bradstreet to the very depths. this speech was made before the general court after his acquittal of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy governor. and one passage, containing his statement of the nature of liberty, has been pronounced by both english and american thinkers far beyond the definition of blackstone, and fully on a par with the noblest utterances of john locke or algernon sidney. as time went on authorship passed naturally into the hands of the clergy, who came to be the only class with much leisure for study. the range of subjects treated dwindled more and more from year to year. the breadth and vigor of the early days were lost, the pragmatical and disputatious element gaining more and more ground. unfortunately, "they stood aloof with a sort of horror from the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their own tongue." the hebrew scriptures and many classics of roman and greek literature were still allowed; but no genuine literary development could take place where the sinewy and vital thought of their own nation was set aside as unworthy of consideration. the esthetic sense dwindled and pined. standards of judgment altered. the capacity for discrimination lessened. theological quibbling made much of the literature of the day, though there was much more than quibbling. but the keenest minds, no matter how vivid and beautiful their intelligence, were certain that neither man as a body, nor the world as a home, were anything but lack evils, ruined by the fall of adam, and to be ignored and despised with every power and faculty. faith in god came to be faith in "a microscopic and picayune providence," governing the meanest detail of the elect's existence, and faith in man had no place in any scheme of life or thought. if a poem were written it came to be merely some transcription from the bible, or an epitaph or elegy on some departed saint. in spite of themselves, however, humor, the saxon birthright, refused to be suppressed, and asserted itself in unexpected ways, as in nathaniel ward's "simple cobbler of agawam," already mentioned. what the cobbler saw was chiefly the theological difficulties of the time. discord and confusion seemed to have settled upon the earth, and "looking out over english christendom, he saw nothing but a chaos of jangling opinions, upstart novelties, lawless manners, illimitable changes in codes, institutions and creeds." he declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this protestant book, that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." he laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration of man's vileness. liberty had received many a blow from the hands of these men, who had fled from home and country to secure it, but it could not die while their own principles were remembered, and constantly at one point or another, irrepressible men and women rose up, bent upon free thought and free speech, and shaming even the most determined and intolerant spirit. one of such men, outspoken by nature, recorded his mind in some two thousand printed pages, and roger williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." it is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether spoken or implied, and we have positive "relief in the easy swing of this man's gait, the limberness of his personal movement, his escape from the pasteboard proprieties, his spontaneity, his impetuosity, his indiscretions, his frank acknowledgements that he really had a few things yet to learn." he demanded spiritual liberty, and though, as time went on, he learned to use gentler phrases, he was always a century or two ahead of his age. the mirthfulness of his early days passed, as well it might, but a better possession-- cheerfulness--remained to the end. exile never embittered him, and the writings that are his legacy "show an habitual upwardness of mental movement; they grow rich in all gentle, gracious, and magnanimous qualities as the years increase upon him." his influence upon new england was a profound one, and the seed sown bore fruit long after his mortal body had crumbled into dust; but it was chiefly in theological lines, to which all thought now tended. poetry, so far as drama or lyric verse was concerned, had been forsworn by the soul of every true puritan, but "of course poetry was planted there too deep even for his theological grub- hooks to root out. if, however, his theology drove poetry out of many forms in which it has been used to reside, poetry itself practiced a noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology." stedman gives a masterly analysis of this time in the opening essay of his "victorian poets," showing the shackles all minds wore, and comparing the time when "even nature's laws were compelled to bow to church fanaticism," to the happier day in which "science, freedom of thought, refinement and material progress have moved along together." we have seen how the power of keen and delicate literary judgment or discrimination died insensibly. the first era of literary development passed with the first founders of the republic, and original thought and expression lay dormant, save in theological directions. as with all new forms of life, the second stage was an imitative one, and the few outside the clergy who essayed writing at all copied the worst models of the johnsonian period. verse was still welcome, and the verse-makers of the colonial time were many. even venerable clergymen like peter bulkley gave way to its influence. ostensible poems were written by more than one governor; john cotton yielded to the spell, though he hid the fact discreetly by writing his english verses in greek characters, and confining them to the blank leaves of his almanac. debarred from ordinary amusements or occupations, the irrepressible need of expression effervesced in rhymes as rugged and unlovely as the writers, and ream upon ream of verse accumulated. had it found permanent form, our libraries would have been even more encumbered than at present, but fortunately most of it has perished. elegies and epitaphs were its favorite method, and the "most elaborate and painful jests," every conceivable and some inconceivable quirks and solemn puns made up their substance. the obituary poet of the present is sufficiently conspicuous in the daily papers which are available for his flights, but the leading poets of to-day do not feel that it is incumbent upon them to evolve stanzas in a casual way on every mournful occasion. in that elder day allegories, anagrams, acrostics--all intended to have a consolatory effect on mourning friends--flowed from every clerical pen, adding a new terror to death and a new burden to life, but received by the readers with a species of solemn glee. of one given to this habit cotton mather writes that he "had so nimble a faculty of putting his devout thoughts into verse that he signalized himself by ... sending poems to all persons, in all places, on all occasions ... wherein if the curious relished the piety sometimes rather than the poetry, the capacity of the most therein to be accommodated must be considered." another poet had presently the opportunity to "embalm his memory in some congenial verses," and wrote an epitaph, and ended with a full description of-- "his care to guide his flock and feed his lambs, by words, works, prayers, psalms, alms and anagrams." to this period belongs a poetic phenomenon--a metrical horror known as "the bay psalm book," being the first english book ever issued from an american printing-press. tyler has given with his accustomed happy facility of phrase the most truthful description yet made of a production that formed for years the chief poetical reading of the average new englander, and undoubtedly did more to lower taste and make inferior verse seem praiseworthy than any and all other causes. he writes: "in turning over these venerable pages, one suffers by sympathy something of the obvious toil of the undaunted men who, in the very teeth of nature, did all this; and whose appalling sincerity must, in our eyes, cover a multitude of such sins as sentences wrenched about end for end, clauses heaved up and abandoned in chaos, words disemboweled or split quite in two in the middle, and dissonant combinations of sound that are the despair of such poor vocal organs as are granted to human beings. the verses seem to have been hammered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge. in all parts of the book is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme---more or less; and so often as this arduous feat is achieved, the poetic athlete appears to pause awhile from sheer exhaustion, panting heavily for breath. let us now read, for our improvement, a part of the fifty-eighth psalm: "the wicked are estranged from the womb, they goe astray as soon as ever they are borne, uttering lyes are they. their poyson's like serpents' poyson, they like deafe aspe her eare that stops. though charmer wisely charm, his voice she will not heare. within their mouth, doe thou their teeth, break out, o god most strong, doe thou jehovah, the great teeth break of the lions young." it is small wonder that anne bradstreet's poems struck the unhappy new englanders who had been limited to verse of this description as the work of one who could be nothing less than the "tenth muse." when the first edition of her poems appeared, really in , though the date is usually given as , a younger generation had come upon the scene. the worst hardships were over. wealth had accumulated, and the comfort which is the distinguishing characteristic of new england homes to-day, was well established. harvard college was filled with bright young scholars, in whom her work awakened the keenest enthusiasm; who had insight enough to recognize her as the one shining example of poetic power in that generation, and who wrote innumerable elegies and threnodies on her life and work. the elegy seems to have appealed more strongly to the puritan mind than any other poetical form, and they exhausted every verbal device in perpetuating the memory of friends who scarcely needed this new terror added to a death already surrounded by a gloom that even their strongest faith hardly dispelled. "let groans inspire my quill," one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient illustration of the whole unutterably dreary mass of verse: "gospel and law in's heart had each its column; his head an index to the sacred volume; his very name a title page and next his life a commentary on the text. oh, what a monument of glorious worth, when in a new edition he comes forth without _erratas_ may we think he'll be, in leaves and covers of eternity." better examples were before them, for books were imported freely, but minds had settled into the mould which they kept for more than one generation, unaffected in slightest measure by the steady progress of thought in the old home. the younger writers were influenced to a certain degree by the new school, but lacked power to pass beyond it. pope was now in full tide of success, and, with thomson, watts and young, found hosts of sympathetic and admiring readers who would have turned in horror from the pages of shakespeare or the early dramatists. the measure adopted by pope charmed the popular mind, and while it helped to smooth the asperities of puritan verse, became also the easy vehicle of the commonplace. there were hints here and there of something better to come, and in the many examples of verse remaining it is easy to discern a coming era of free thought and more musical expression. peter folger had sent out from the fogs of nantucket a defiant and rollicking voice; john rogers and urian oakes, both poets and both harvard presidents, had done something better than mere rhyme, but it remained for another pastor, teacher and physician to sound a note that roused all new england. michael wigglesworth might have been immortal, could the genius born in him have been fed and trained by any of the "sane and mighty masters of english song"; but, born to the inheritance of a narrow and ferocious creed, with no power left to even admit the existence of the beautiful, he was "forever incapable of giving utterance to his genius--except in a dialect unworthy of it," and became simply "the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the five points of calvinism." cotton mather describes him as "a feeble little shadow of a man." he was "the embodiment of what was great, earnest and sad in colonial new england." he was tenderly sympathetic, and his own life, made up mostly of sorrow and pain, filled him with longing to help others. "a sensitive, firm, wide-ranging, unresting spirit, he looks out mournfully over the throngs of men that fill the world, all of them totally depraved, all of them caught, from farthest eternity, in the adamantine meshes of god's decrees; the most of them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent michael wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." his "day of doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a swinging ballad measure that took instant hold of the popular mind. no book ever printed in america has met with a proportionate commercial success. "the eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of 'the day of doom' by at least every thirty-fifth person in new england.... since that time the book has been repeatedly published, at least once in england and at least eight times in america, the last time being in ." it penetrated finally all parts of the country where puritan faith or manners prevailed. it was an intellectual influence far beyond anything we can now imagine. it was learned by heart along with the catechism, and for a hundred years was found on every book- shelf, no matter how sparsely furnished otherwise. even after the revolution, which produced the usual effect of all war in bringing in unrestrained thought, it was still a source of terror, and thrilled and prepared all readers for the equally fearful pictures drawn by edwards and his successors. it is fortunate, perhaps, that anne bradstreet did not live to read and be influenced by this poem, as simply candid in its form and conception as the "last judgements" of the early masters, and like them, portraying devils with much more apparent satisfaction than saints. there is one passage that deserves record as evidence of what the puritan faith had done toward paralyzing common sense, though there are still corners in the united states where it would be read without the least sense of its grotesque horror. the various classes of sinners have all been attended to, and now, awaiting the last relay of offenders-- "with dismal chains, and strongest reins like prisoners of hell, they're held in place before christ's face, till he their doom shall tell. these void of tears, but filled with fears, and dreadful expectation of endless pains and scalding flames, stand waiting for damnation." the saints have received their place and look with an ineffable and satisfied smirk on the despair of the sinners, all turning at last to gaze upon the battalion of "reprobate infants," described in the same brisk measure: "then to the bar all they drew near who died in infancy, and never had, or good or bad, effected personally. but from the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried, or, at the least, ere they transgressed-- who thus began to plead." these infants, appalled at what lies before them, begin to first argue with true puritanic subtlety, and finding this useless, resort to pitiful pleadings, which result in a slight concession, though the unflinching michael gives no hint of what either the judge or his victims would regard as "the easiest room." the infants receive their sentence with no further remark. "you sinners are; and such a share as sinners may expect; such you shall have, for i do save none but mine own elect. yet to compare your sin with their who lived a longer time, i do confess yours is much less, though every sin's a crime. a crime it is; therefore in bliss you may not hope to dwell; but unto you i shall allow the easiest room in hell." in such faith the little bradstreets were brought up, and the oldest, who became a minister, undoubtedly preached it with the gusto of the time, and quoted the final description of the sufferings of the lost, as an efficient argument with sinners: "then might you hear them rend and tear the air with their outcries; the hideous noise of their sad voice, ascendeth to the skies. they wring their hands, their cartiff-hands, and gnash their teeth for terror; they cry, they roar, for anguish sore, and gnaw their tongue for horror. but get away without delay; christ pities not your cry; depart to hell, there may you yell and roar eternally. * * * * * "die fain they would, if die they could, but death will not be had; god's direful wrath their bodies hath forever immortal made. they live to lie in misery and bear eternal woe; and live they must whilst god is just that he may plague them so." of the various literary children who may be said to have been nurtured on anne bradstreet's verses, three became leaders of new england thought, and all wrote elegies on her death, one of them of marked beauty and power. it remained for a son of the sulphurous wigglesworth, to leave the purest fragment of poetry the epoch produced, the one flower of a life, which at once buried itself in the cares of a country pastorate and gave no further sign of gift or wish to speak in verse. the poem records the fate of a gifted classmate, who graduated with him at harvard, sailed for england, and dying on the return voyage, was buried at sea. it is a passionate lamentation, an appeal to death, and at last a quiet resignation to the inevitable, the final lines having a music and a pathos seldom found in the crabbed new england verse: "add one kind drop unto his watery tomb; weep, ye relenting eyes and ears; see, death himself could not refrain, but buried him in tears." with him the eighteenth century opens, beyond which we have no present interest, such literary development as made part of anne bradstreet's knowledge ending with the seventeenth. chapter viii. some phases of early colonial life. much of the depression evident in anne bradstreet's earlier verses came from the circumstances of her family life. no woman could have been less fitted to bear absence from those nearest to her, and though her adhesive nature had made her take as deep root in ipswich, as if further change could not come, she welcomed anything that diminished the long separations, and made her husband's life center more at home. one solace seems to have been always open to her, her longest poem, the "four monarchies," showing her devotion to ancient history and the thoroughness with which she had made it her own. anatomy seems to have been studied also, the "four humours in man's constitution," showing an intimate acquaintance with the anatomical knowledge of the day; but in both cases it was not, as one might infer from her references to greek and latin authors, from original sources. sir walter raleigh's "history of the world," archbishop usher's "annals of the world," and pemble's "period of the persian monarchy," were all found in puritan libraries, though she may have had access to others while still in england. pemble was in high favor as an authority in biblical exposition, the title of his book being a stimulant to every student of the prophecies: "the period of the persian monarchy, wherein sundry places of ezra, nehemiah and daniel are cleared, extracted, contracted and englished, (much of it out of dr. raynolds) by the late learned and godly man, mr. william pemble, of magdalen hall, in oxford." this she read over and over again, and many passages in her poem on the "four monarchies" are merely paraphrases of this and raleigh's work, though before a second edition was printed she had read plutarch, and altered here and there as she saw fit to introduce his rendering. galen and hippocrates, whom she mentions familiarly, were known to her through the work of the "curious learned crooke," his "description of the body of man, collected and translated out of all the best authors on anatomy, especially out of gasper, banchinus, and a. sourentius," being familiar to all students of the day. if her muse could but have roused to a sense of what was going on about her, and recorded some episodes which winthrop dismisses with a few words, we should be under obligations that time could only deepen. why, for instance, could she not have given her woman's view of that indomitable "virgin mother of taunton," profanely described by governor winthrop as "an ancient maid, one mrs. poole. she went late thither, and endured much hardships, and lost much cattle. called, after, taunton." precisely why mrs. poole chose tecticutt, afterward titicut, for her venture is not known, but the facts of her rash experiment must have been discussed at length, and moved less progressive maids and matrons to envy or pity as the chance might be. but not a hint of this surprising departure can be found in any of mistress bradstreet's remains, and it stands, with no comment save that of the diligent governor's faithful pen, as the first example of an action, to be repeated in these later days in prairie farms and western ranches by women who share the same spirit, though more often young than "ancient" maids. but ancient, though in her case a just enough characterization, was a term of reproach for any who at sixteen or eighteen at the utmost, remained unmarried, and our present custom of calling every maiden under forty, "girl" would have struck the puritan mothers with a sense of preposterousness fully equal to ours at some of their doings. a hundred years passed, and then an appreciative kinsman, who had long enjoyed the fruit of her labors, set up "a faire slab," still to be seen in the old burying ground. here rests the remains of mrs. elizabeth pool, a native of old england, of good family, friends and prospects, all which she left in the prime of her life, to enjoy the religion of her conscience in this distant wilderness; a great proprietor of the township of taunton, a chief promoter of its settlement and its incorporation - , about which time she settled near this spot; and, having employed the opportunity of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanctity of manners, died may st a.d. , aged . to whose memory this monument is gratefully erected by her next of kin, john borland, esquire, a.d. . undoubtedly every detail of this eccentric settlement was talked over at length, as everything was talked over. gossip never had more forcible reason for existence, for the church covenant compelled each member to a practical oversight of his neighbor's concerns, the special clause reading: "we agree to keep mutual watch and ward over one another." at first, united by a common peril, the dangers of this were less perceptible. the early years held their own necessities for discussion, and the records of the time are full of matter that anne bradstreet might have used had she known her opportunity. she was weighed down like every conscientious puritan of the day not only by a sense of the infinitely great, but quite as strenuously by the infinitely little. it is plain that she saw more clearly than many of her time, and there are no indications in her works of the small superstitions held by all. superstition had changed its name to providence, and every item of daily action was believed to be under the constant supervision and interference of the almighty. the common people had ceased to believe in fairies and brownies, but their places had been filled by satan's imps and messengers, watchful for some chance to confound the elect. the faith in dreams and omens of every sort was not lessened by the transferrence of the responsibility for them to the lord, and the superstition of the day, ended later in a credulity that accepted the salem witchcraft delusion with all its horrors, believing always, that diligent search would discover, if not the lord's, then the devil's hand, working for the edification or confounding of the elect. even winthrop does not escape, and in the midst of wise suggestions for the management of affairs sandwiches such a record as the following: "at watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. the pastor of boston, mr. wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor, contemptible, people, which god had brought hither, which should overcome satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom. upon the same occasion, he told the governor that, before he was resolved to come into this country, he dreamed he was here, and that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelously goodly church." they had absolute faith that prayer would accomplish all things, even to strengthening a defective memory. thomas shepard, whose autobiography is given in young's "chronicles of massachusetts bay," gave this incident in his life when a student and "ambitious of learning and being a scholar; and hence, when i could not take notes of the sermon i remember i was troubled at it, and prayed the lord earnestly that he would help me to note sermons; and i see some cause of wondering at the lord's providence therein; for as soon as ever i had prayed (after my best fashion) him for it, i presently, the next sabbath, was able to take notes, who the precedent sabbath, could do nothing at all that way." anthony thacher, whose story may have been told in person to governor dudley's family, and whose written description of his shipwreck, included in young's "chronicles," is one of the most picturesque pieces of writing the time affords, wrote, with a faith that knew no question: "as i was sliding off the rock into the sea the lord directed my toes into a joint in the rock's side, as also the tops of some of my fingers, with my right hand, by means whereof, the wave leaving me, i remained so, hanging on the rock, only my head above water." when individual prayer failed to accomplish a desired end, a fast and the united storming of heaven, never failed to bring victory to the besiegers. thus winthrop writes: "great harm was done in corn, (especially wheat and barley) in this month, by a caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. they eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels, whereupon the ear withered. it was believed by divers good observers, that they fell in a great thunder shower, for divers yards and other places, where not one of them was to be seen an hour before, were immediately after the shower almost covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so easily discerned. they did the most harm in the southern parts.... in divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away." still another instance, the fame of which spread through the whole colony and confounded any possible doubter, found record in the "magnalia", that storehouse of fact so judiciously combined with fable that the author himself could probably never tell what he had himself seen, and what had been gleaned from others. mr. john wilson, the minister of the church at boston until the arrival of cotton, was journeying with a certain mr. adams, when tidings came to the latter of the probably fatal illness of his daughter. "mr. wilson, looking up to heaven, began mightily to wrestle with god for the life of the young woman ... then, turning himself about unto mr. adams, 'brother,' said he, 'i trust your daughter shall live; i believe in god she shall recover of this sickness.' and so it marvelously came to pass, and she is now the fruitful mother of several desirable children." among the books brought over by john winthrop the younger, was a volume containing the greek testament, the psalms, and the english common prayer, bound together, to which happened an accident, which was gravely described by the governor in his daily history of events: "decem . about this time there fell out a thing worthy of observation. mr. winthrop the younger, one of the magistrates, having many books in a chamber where there was corn of divers sorts, had among them one, wherein the greek testament, the psalms and the common prayer were bound together. he found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two other touched, nor any other of his books, though there were above a thousand. not a puritan of them all, unless it may be the governor himself, but believed that the mice were agents of the almighty sent to testify his dissatisfaction with the objectionable form of prayer, and not a fact in daily life but became more and more the working of providence. thus, as the good governor records later: "a godly woman of the church of boston, dwelling sometimes in london, brought with her a parcel of very fine linen of great value, which she set her heart too much upon, and had been at charge to have it all newly washed, and curiously folded and pressed, and so left it in press in her parlor over night. she had a negro maid went into the room very late, and let fall some snuff of the candle upon the linen, so as by morning all the linen was burned to tinder, and the boards underneath, and some stools and a part of the wainscot burned and never perceived by any in the house, though some lodged in the chamber overhead, and no ceiling between. but it pleased god that the loss of this linen did her much good, both in taking off her heart from worldly comforts, and in preparing her for a far greater affliction by the untimely death of her husband, who was slain not long after at isle of providence." the thrifty housewife's heart goes out to this sister, whose "curiously folded and pressed linen," lavender-scented and fair, was the one reminder of the abounding and generous life from which she had come. it may have been a comfort to consider its loss a direct dispensation for her improvement, and by this time, natural causes were allowed to have no existence save as they became tools of this "wonder-working providence." it was the day of small things more literally than they knew, and in this perpetual consideration of small things, the largeness of their first purpose dwindled and contracted, and inconceivable pettiness came at last to be the seal upon much of their action. mr. johnson, a minister whose course is commented upon by bradford, excommunicated his brother and own father, for disagreement from him in certain points of doctrine, though the same zeal weakened when called upon to act against his wife, who doubtless had means of influencing his judgment unknown to the grave elders who remonstrated. but the interest was as strong in the cut of a woman's sleeve as in the founding of a new plantation. they mourned over their own degeneracy. "the former times were better than these," the croakers sighed, and governor bradford wrote of this special case; "in our time his wife was a grave matron, and very modest both in her apparel and all her demeanor, ready to any good works in her place, and helpful to many, especially the poor, and an ornament to his calling. she was a young widow when he married her, and had been a merchant's wife by whom he had a good estate, and was a godly woman; and because she wore such apparel as she had been formerly used to, which were neither excessive nor immodest, for their chiefest exception were against her wearing of some whalebone in the bodice and sleeves of her gown, corked shoes and other such like things as the citizens of her rank then used to wear. and although, for offence sake, she and he were willing to reform the fashions of them, so far as might be, without spoiling of their garments, yet it would not content them except they came full up to their size. such was the strictness or rigidness (as now the term goes) of some in those times, as we can by experience and of our own knowledge, show in other instances." governor bradford, who evidently leans in his own mind toward the side of mistress johnson, proceeds to show the undue severity of some of the brethren in holland. "we were in the company of a godly man that had been a long time prisoner at norwich for this cause, and was by judge cooke set at liberty. after going into the country he visited his friends, and returning that way again to go into the low countries by ship at yarmouth, and so desired some of us to turn in with him to the house of an ancient woman in the city, who had been very kind and helpful to him in his sufferings. she knowing his voice, made him very welcome, and those with him. but after some time of their entertainment, being ready to depart, she came up to him and felt of his hand (for her eyes were dim with age) and perceiving it was something stiffened with starch, she was much displeased and reproved him very sharply, fearing god would not prosper his journey. yet the man was a plain country man, clad in gray russet, without either welt or guard (as the proverb is) and the band he wore, scarce worth three-pence, made of their own home-spinning; and he was godly and humble as he was plain. what would such professors, if they were now living, say to the excess of our times?" women spoke their minds much more freely in the early days than later they were allowed to, this same "ancient woman" of amsterdam, having a sister worker of equally uncompromising tongue and tendencies, who was, for her various virtues chosen as deaconess, "and did them service for many years, though she was sixty years of age when she was chosen. she honored her place and was an ornament to the congregation. she usually sat in a convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing the congregation. she did frequently visit the sick and weak, especially women, and, as there was need, called out maids and young women to watch and do them other helps as their necessity did require; and if they were poor, she would gather relief for them of those that were able, or acquaint the deacons; and she was obeyed as a mother in israel and an officer of christ." whether this dame had the same objection to starch as the more "ancient" one, is not recorded, but in any case she was not alone. men and women alike, forswore the desired stiffness, retaining it only in their opinions. by the time that anne bradstreet had settled in andover, bodily indulgence so far as adornment or the gratification of appetite went, had become a matter for courts to decide upon. whether simon bradstreet gave up the curling locks which, while not flowing to his shoulders as in colonel hutchinson's case, still fell in thick rings about his neck, we have no means of knowing. his wife would naturally protest against the cropping, brought about by the more extreme, "who put their own cropped heads together in order to devise some scheme for compelling all other heads to be as well shorn as theirs were." one of the first acts of john endecott when again appointed governor of massachusetts bay, was "to institute a solemn association against long hair," but his success was indifferent, as evidenced in many a moan from reverend ministers and deacons. john eliot, one of the sweetest and most saintly spirits among them, wrote that it was a "luxurious feminine prolixity for men to wear their hair long and to ... ruffle their heads in excesses of this kind," but in later years, with many another wearied antagonist of this abomination, added hopelessly--"the lust is insuperable." tobacco was fulminated against with equal energy, but no decree of court could stamp out the beloved vice. winthrop yielded to it, but afterward renounced it, and the ministers compared its smoke to the smoke ascending from the bottomless pit, but no denunciation could effectually bar it out, and tobacco and starch in the end asserted their right to existence and came into constant use. a miraculous amount of energy had been expended upon the heinousness of their use, and the very fury of protest brought a reaction equally strong. radical even in her conservatism, new england sought to bind in one, two hopelessly incompatible conditions: intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery. absolute obedience to an accepted formula of faith was hardly likely to remain a fact for a community where thought was stimulated not only by education and training but every circumstance of their daily lives. a people who had lived on intimate terms with the innermost counsels of the almighty, and who listened for hours on sunday to speculations on the component elements not only of the almighty, but of all his works were, while apparently most reverential, losing all capacity for reverence in any ancient sense. undoubtedly this very speculation did much to give breadth and largeness, too much belief preparing the way, first, for no belief, and, at last, for a return to the best in the old and a combination of certain features of the new, which seems destined to make something better for practical as well as spiritual life than the world has ever known. the misfortune of the early puritan was in too rigid a creed, too settled an assurance that all the revelation needed had been given. unlike the dunkard elders, who refused to formulate a creed, lest it should put them in a mental attitude that would hinder further glimpses of truth, they hastened to bind themselves and all generations to come in chains, which began to rattle before the last link was forged. not a baptist, or quaker, or antinomian but gave himself to the work of protestation, and the determined effort to throw off the tyranny and presumption of men no wiser than he. whippings, imprisonments and banishments silenced these spirits temporarily, but the vibration of particles never ceased, and we know the final result of such action. no wonder that the silent work of disintegration, when it showed itself in the final apparent collapse of all creeds, was looked upon with horrified amazement, and a hasty gathering up of all the old particles with a conviction that fusing and forging again was as easy of accomplishment now as in the beginning. the attempt has proved their error. up to nearly the opening of the eighteenth century new england life kept pace with the advances in england. there was constant coming and going and a sense of common interests and common needs. but even before emigration practically ceased, the changes in modes of speech were less marked than in the old home. english speech altered in many points during the seventeenth century. words dropped out of use, their places filled by a crowd of claimants, sometimes admitted after sharp scrutiny, as often denied, but ending in admitting themselves, as words have a trick of doing even when most thoroughly outlawed. but in new england the old methods saw no reason for change. forms of speech current in the england of the seventeenth century crystallized here and are heard to-day. "yankeeisms" is their popular title, but the student of old english knows them rather as "anglicisms." "since the year the new england race has not received any notable addition to its original stock, and to-day their anglican blood is as genuine and unmixed as that of any county in england." dr. edward freeman, in his "impressions of america," says of new england particularly, the remark applying in part also to all the older states: "when anything that seems strange to a british visitor in american speech or american manners is not quite modern on the face of it, it is pretty certain to be something which was once common to the older and the newer england, but which the newer england has kept, while the older england has cast it aside." such literature as had birth in new england adhered chiefly to the elder models, and has thus an archaic element that broader life and intercourse would have eliminated. the provincial stage, of feeble and uncertain, or stilled but equally uncertain expression was at hand, but for the first generation or so the colonists had small time to consider forms of speech. their passion for knowledge, however, took on all the vitality that had forsaken english ground, and that from that day to this, has made the first thought of every new england community, east or west, a school. their corner-stone "rested upon a book." it has been calculated that there was one cambridge graduate for every two- hundred and fifty inhabitants, and within six years from the landing of john winthrop and his party, harvard college had begun its work of baffling "that old deluder, sathan," whose business in part it was "to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures." to secular learning they were indifferent, but every man must be able to give reason for the faith that was in him, and the more tongues in which such statement could be made the more confusion for this often embarrassed but still undismayed sathan. orders of nobility among them had passed. very rarely were they joined by even a simple "sir," and as years went on, nobility came to be synonymous with tyranny, and there was less and less love for every owner of a title. to them the highest earthly distinction came to be found in the highest learning. the earnest student deserved and obtained all the honors that man could give him, and his epitaph even recorded the same solemn and deep-seated admiration. "the ashes of an hard student, a good scholar, and a great christian." anne bradstreet shared this feeling to the full, and might easily have been the mother of whom mather writes as saying to her little boy: "child, if god make thee a good christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." simon bradstreet became both, and in due time pleased his mother by turning sundry of her "meditations" into latin prose, in which stately dress they are incorporated in her works. the new england woman kept up as far as possible the same pursuits in which she had been trained, and among others the concoction of innumerable tinctures and waters, learned in the 'still-room' of every substantial english home. room might have given place to a mere corner, but the work went on with undiminished interest and enthusiasm. there were few doctors, and each family had its own special formulas--infallible remedies for all ordinary diseases and used indiscriminately and in combination where a case seemed to demand active treatment. they believed in their own medicines absolutely, and required equal faith in all upon whom they bestowed them. sturdy english stock as were all these new england dames, and blessed with a power of endurance which it required more than one generation to lessen, they were as given to medicine-taking as their descendants of to-day, and fully as certain that their own particular prescription was more efficacious than all the rest put together. anne bradstreet had always been delicate, and as time went on grew more and more so. the long voyage and confinement to salt food had developed certain tendencies that never afterward left her, and there is more than a suspicion that scurvy had attacked her among the rest. every precaution was taken by governor winthrop to prevent such danger for those who came later, and he writes to his wife, directing her preparations for the voyage: "be sure to be warme clothed & to have store of fresh provisions, meale, eggs putt up in salt or ground mault, butter, ote meal, pease & fruits, & a large strong chest or , well locked, to keep these provisions in; & be sure they be bestowed in the shippe where they may be readyly come by.... be sure to have ready at sea or skilletts of several syzes, a large fryinge panne, a small stewinge panne, & a case to boyle a pudding in; store of linnen for use at sea, & sacke to bestow among the saylors: some drinking vessells & peuter & other vessells." dr. nathaniel wright, a famous physician of hereford, and private physician to oliver cromwell for a time, had given winthrop various useful prescriptions, and his medicines were in general use, winthrop adding in this letter: "for physick you shall need no other but a pound of doctor wright's _electuariu lenitivu_, & his direction to use it, a gallon of scirvy grasse, to drink a litle or morninges together, with some saltpeter dissolved in it, & a little grated or sliced nutmeg." dr. wright's prescriptions were supplemented by a collection prepared for him by dr. edward stafford of london, all of which were used with great effect, the governor's enthusiasm for medical receipts and amateur practice, passing on through several generations. a letter to his son john at ispwich contains some of his views and a prescription for pills which were undoubtedly taken faithfully by mistress anne and administered as faithfully to the unwilling simon, who like herself suffered from one or two attacks of fever. the colonists were, like all breakers of new ground, especially susceptible to fevers of every variety, and governor winthrop writes anxiously: "you must be very careful of taking cold about the loins; & when the ground is open, i will send you some pepper-wort roots. for the flux, there is no better medicine than the cup used two or three times, &, in case of sudden torments, a clyster of a quart of water boiled to a pint, which, with the quantity of two or three nutmegs of saltpetre boiled in it, will give present ease. "for the pills, they are made of grated pepper, made up with turpentine, very stiff, and some flour withal; and four or five taken fasting, & fast two hours after. but if there be any fever with the flux, this must not be used till the fever is removed by the cup." each remedy bears the internal warrant of an immediate need for a fresh one, and it is easy to see from what source the national love of patent medicines has been derived. another prescription faithfully tried by both giver and receiver, and which anne bradstreet may have tested in her various fevers, was sent to john winthrop, jr., by sir kenelm digby and may be found with various other singularities in the collections of the massachusetts historical society. "for all sorts of agues, i have of late tried the following magnetical experiment with infallible success. pare the patient's nails when the fit is coming on, and put the parings into a little bag of fine linen or sarsenet, and tie that about a live eel's neck in a tub of water. the eel will die and the patient will recover. and if a dog or hog eat that eel, they will also die. i have known one that cured all deliriums and frenzies whatsoever, and at once taking, with an elixer made of dew, nothing but dew purified & nipped up in a glass & digested months till all of it was become a gray powder, not one drop of humidity remaining. this i know to be true, & that first it was as black as ink, then green, then gray, & at month's end it was as white & lustrous as any oriental pearl. but it cured manias at months' end." the mania for taking it or anything else sufficiently mysterious and unpleasant to give a value to its possession remains to this day. but the prescriptions made up by the chief magistrate had a double efficacy for a time that believed a king's touch held instant cure for the king's evil, and that the ordinary marks known to every physician familiar with the many phases of hysteria, were the sign-manual of witches. the good governor's list of remedies had been made up from the stafford prescriptions, the diseases he arranged to deal with being "plague, smallpox, fevers, king's evil, insanity, and falling sickness," besides broken bones and all ordinary injuries. simples and mineral drugs are used indiscriminately, and there is one remedy on which dr. holmes comments, in an essay on "the medical profession in massachusetts," "made by putting live toads into an earthern pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning them 'in the open ayre, not in a house'--concerning which latter possibility i suspect madam winthrop would have had something to say--until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown and then into a black, powder." this powder was the infallible remedy "against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; poyson; either by way of prevention or after infection." consumption found a cure in a squirrel, baked alive and also reduced to a powder, and a horrible witches' broth of earth-worms and other abominations served the same purpose. the governor makes no mention of this, but he gives full details of an electuary of millipedes, otherwise sowbugs, which seems to have been used with distinguished success. coral and amber were both powdered and used in special cases, and antimony and nitre were handled freely, with rhubarb and the whole series of ancient remedies. the winthrop papers hold numberless letters from friends and patients testifying to the good he had done them or begging for further benefactions, one of these from the agitator, samuel gostun, who at eighty-two had ceased to trouble himself over anything but his own infirmities, holding a wonder how "a thing so little in quantity, so little in sent, so little in taste, and so little to sence in operation, should beget and bring forth such efects." these prescriptions were handed down through four generations of winthrops, who seem to have united law and medicine, a union less common than that of divinity and medicine. michael wigglesworth, whom we know best through his "day of doom," visited and prescribed for the sick, "not only as a pastor but as a physician too, and this not only in his own town, but also in all those of the vicinity." but this was in later days, when john eliot's desire had been accomplished, written to the rev. mr. shepard in : "i have thought in my heart that it were a very singular good work, if the lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in england, to give some maintenance toward some schoole or collegiate exercise this way, wherein there should be anatomies and other instructions that way, and where there might be some recompense given to any that should bring in any vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of physick. there is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way, namely, that our young students in physick may be trained up better than they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to fall to practice before ever they saw an anatomy made, or duely trained up in making experiments, for we never had but one anatomy in the countrey." this anatomy had been made by giles firmin, who was the friend of winthrop and of the bradstreet's, and who found the practice of medicine so little profitable that he wrote to the former: "i am strongly set upon to studye divinity; my studyes else must be lost, for physick is but a meene helpe." a "meene helpe" it proved for many years, during which the puritan dames steeped herbs and made ointments and lotions after formulas learned in the still- room at home. the little bradstreet's doubtless swallowed their full share, though fortunately blessed for the most part with the sturdy constitution of their father, who, save for a fever or two, escaped most of the sicknesses common to the colonists and lived through many serene and untroubled years of physical and mental health, finding life enjoyable even at four-score and ten. chapter ix. andover. what causes may have led to the final change of location we have no means of knowing definitely, save that every puritan desired to increase the number of churches as much as possible; a tendency inherited to its fullest by their descendants. on the th of march, - , "it is ordered that the land aboute cochichowicke, shall be reserved for an inland plantacon, & that whosoever will goe to inhabite there, shall have three yeares imunity from all taxes, levyes, publique charges & services whatsoever, (millitary dissipline onely excepted), etc." here is the first suggestion of what was afterward to become andover, but no action was taken by bradstreet until , when in late september, "mr. bradstreet, mr. dudley, junior, captain dennison, mr. woodbridge and eight others, are allowed (upon their petition) to begin a plantation at merrimack." this plantation grew slowly. the bradstreets lingered at ipswich, and the formal removal, the last of many changes, did not take place until september, . simon bradstreet, the second son, afterward minister at new london, conn., whose manuscript diary is a curious picture of the time, gives one or two details which aid in fixing the date. " . i was borne n. england, at ipswitch, septem. being munday . " . i had my education in the same town at the free school, the master of w'ch was my ever respected ffreind mr. ezekiell cheevers. my father was removed from ipsw. to andover, before i was putt to school, so yt my schooling was more chargeable." the thrifty spirit of his grandfather dudley is shown in the final line, but simon bradstreet the elder never grudged the cost of anything his family needed or could within reasonable bounds desire, and stands to-day as one of the most signal early examples of that new england woman's ideal, "a good provider." other threads were weaving themselves into the "sad-colored" web of daily life, the pattern taking on new aspects as the days went on. four years after the landing of the arbella and her consorts, one of the many bands of separatists, who followed their lead, came over, the celebrated thomas parker, one of the chief among them, and his nephew, john woodbridge, an equally important though less distinguished member of the party. they took up land at newbury, and settled to their work of building up a new home, as if no other occupation had ever been desired. the story of john woodbridge is that of hundreds of young puritans who swelled the tide of emigration that between and literally poured into the country, "thronging every ship that pointed its prow thitherward." like the majority of them, he was of good family and of strong individuality, as must needs be where a perpetual defiance is waged against law and order as it showed itself to the prelatical party. he had been at oxford and would have graduated, but for his own and his father's unwillingness that he should take the oath of conformity required, and in the midst of his daily labor, he still hoped privately to become one of that ministry, who were to new england what the house of lords represented to the old. prepossessing in appearance, with a singularly mild and gentle manner, he made friends on all sides, and in a short time came to be in great favor with governor dudley, whose daughter mercy was then nearly the marriagable age of the time, sixteen. the natural result followed, and mercy dudley, in , became mercy woodbridge, owning that name for fifty years, and bearing, like most puritan matrons, many children, with the well marked traits that were also part of the time. the young couple settled quietly at newbury, but his aspiration was well known and often discussed by the many who desired to see the churches increased with greater speed. dudley was one of the most earnest workers in this direction, but there is a suggestion that the new son-in-law's capacity for making a good bargain had influenced his feelings, and challenged the admiration all good new englanders have felt from the beginning for any "fore handed" member of their community. this, however, was only a weakness among many substantial virtues which gave him a firm place in the memory of his parishioners. but the fact that after he resigned his ministry he was recorded as "remarkably blest in private estate," shows some slight foundation for the suggestion, and gives solid ground for dudley's special interest in him. a letter is still in existence which shows this, as well as dudley's entire willingness to take trouble where a benefit to anyone was involved. its contents had evidently been the subject of very serious consideration, before he wrote: son woodbridge: on your last going from rocksbury, i thought you would have returned again before your departure hence, and therefore neither bade you farewell, nor sent any remembrance to your wife. since which time i have often thought of you, and of the course of your life, doubting you are not in the way wherein you may do god best service. every man ought (as i take it) to serve god in such a way whereto he had best filled him by nature, education or gifts, or graces acquired. now in all these respects i concieve you to be better fitted for the ministry, or teaching a school, than for husbandry. and i have been lately stirred up the rather to think thereof by occasion of mr. carter's calling to be pastor at woburn the last week, and mr. parker's calling to preach at pascattaway, whose abilities and piety (for aught i know) surmount not yours. there is a want of school-masters hereabouts, and ministers are, or in likelihood will be, wanting ere long. i desire that you would seriously consider of what i say, and take advise of your uncle, mr. nayse, or whom you think meetest about it; withal considering that no man's opinion in a case wherein he is interested by reason of your departure from your present habitation is absolutely to be allowed without comparing his reason with others. and if you find encouragement, i think you were best redeem what time you may without hurt of your estate, in perfecting your former studies. above all, commend the case in prayer to god, that you may look before you with a sincere eye upon his service, not upon filthy lucre, which i speak not so much for any doubt i have of you, but to clear myself from that suspicion in respect of the interest i have in you. i need say no more. the lord direct and bless you, your wife and children, whom i would fain see, and have again some thoughts of it, if i live till next summer. your very loving father, thomas dudley. rocksbury, november , . to my very loving son, mr. john woodbridge, at his house in newbury. as an illustration of dudley's strong family affection the letter is worth attention, and its advice was carried out at once. the celebrated thomas parker, his uncle, became his instructor, and for a time the young man taught the school in boston, until fixed upon as minister for the church in andover, which in some senses owes its existence to his good offices. the thrifty habits which had made it evident in the beginning to the london company that separatists were the only colonists who could be trusted to manage finances properly, had not lessened with years, and had seldom had more thorough gratification than in the purchase of andover, owned then by cutshamache "sagamore of ye massachusetts." if he repented afterward of his bargain, as most of them did, there is no record, but for the time being he was satisfied with "ye sume of l & a coate," which the rev. john woodbridge duly paid over, the town being incorporated under the name of andover in , as may still be seen in the massachusetts colony records, which read: "at a general court at boston th of d month, , cutshamache, sagamore of massachusetts, came into the court and acknowledged that, for the sum of l and a coat which he had already received, he had sold to mr. john woodbridge, in behalf of the inhabitants of cochichewick, now called andover, all the right, interest and privilege in the land six miles southward from the town, two miles eastward to rowley bounds, be the same more or less; northward to merrimack river, provided that the indian called roger, and his company, may have liberty to take alewives in cochichewick river for their own eating; but if they either spoil or steal any corn or other fruit to any considerable value of the inhabitants, the liberty of taking fish shall forever cease, and the said roger is still to enjoy four acres of ground where now he plants." punctuation and other minor matters are defied here, as in many other records of the time, but it is plain that cutshamache considered that he had made a good bargain, and that the rev. john woodbridge, on his side was equally satisfied. the first settlements were made about cochichewick brook, a "fair springe of sweet water." the delight in the cold, clear new england water comes up at every stage of exploration in the early records. in the first hours of landing, as bradford afterward wrote, they "found springs of fresh water of which we were heartily glad, and sat us down and drunk our first new england water, with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives." "the waters are most pure, proceeding from the entrails of rocky mountains," wrote john smith in his enthusiastic description, and francis higginson was no less moved. "the country is full of dainty springs," he wrote, "and a sup of new england's air is better than a whole draught of old england's ale." the "new english canaan" recorded: "and for the water it excelleth canaan by much; for the land is so apt for fountains, a man cannot dig amiss. therefore if the abrahams and lots of our time come thither, there needs be no contention for wells. in the delicacy of waters, and the conveniency of them, canaan came not near this country." boston owed its first settlement to its "sweet and pleasant springs," and wood made it a large inducement to emigration, in his "new england's prospect." "the country is as well watered as any land under the sun; every family or every two families, having a spring of sweet water betwixt them. it is thought there can be no better water in the world." new englanders still hold to this belief, and the soldier recalls yet the vision of the old well, or the bubbling spring in the meadow that tantalized and mocked his longing in the long marches, or in the hospital wards of war time. the settlement gathered naturally about the brook, and building began vigorously, the houses being less hastily constructed than in the first pressure of the early days, and the meeting-house taking precedence of all. even, however, with the reverence inwrought in the very name of minister we must doubt if anne bradstreet found the rev. john woodbridge equal to the demand born in her, by intercourse with such men as nathaniel ward or nathaniel rogers, or that he could ever have become full equivalent for what she had lost. with her intense family affection, she had, however, adopted him at once, and we have very positive proof of his deep interest in her, which showed itself at a later date. this change from simple "husbandman" to minister had pleased her pride, and like all ministers he had shared the hardships of his congregation and known often sharp privation. it is said that he was the second one ordained in new england, and like most others his salary for years was paid half in wheat and half in coin, and his life divided itself between the study and the farm, which formed the chief support of all the colonists. his old record mentions how he endeared himself to all by his quiet composure and patience and his forgiving temper. he seems to have yearned for england, and this desire was probably increased by his connection with the dudley family. anne bradstreet's sympathies, in spite of all her theories and her determined acceptance of the puritan creed, were still monarchical, and mercy would naturally share them. dudley himself never looked back, but the "gentlewoman of fortune" whom he married, was less content, and her own hidden longing showed itself in her children. friends urged the young preacher to return, which he did in , leaving wife and children behind him, his pastorate having lasted but a year. there is a letter of dudley's, written in , addressed to him as "preacher of the word of god at andover in wiltshire," and advising him of what means should be followed to send his wife and children, but our chief interest in him lies in the fact, that he carried with him the manuscript of anne bradstreet's poems, which after great delay, were published at london in . he left her a quiet, practically unknown woman, and returned in , to find her as widely praised as she is now forgotton; the "tenth muse, lately sprung up in america." what part of them were written in andover there is no means of knowing, but probably only a few of the later ones, not included in the first edition. the loneliness and craving of her ipswich life, had forced her to composition as a relief, and the major part of her poems were written before she was thirty years old, and while she was still hampered by the methods of the few she knew as masters. with the settling at andover and the satisfying companionship of her husband, the need of expression gradually died out, and only occasional verses for special occasions, seem to have been written. the quiet, busy life, her own ill-health, and her absorption in her children, all silenced her, and thus, the work that her ripened thought and experience might have made of some value to the world, remained undone. the religious life became more and more the only one of any value to her, and she may have avoided indulgence in favorite pursuits, as a measure against the adversary whose temptations she recorded. our interest at present is in these first andover years, and the course of life into which the little community settled, the routine holding its own interpretation of the silence that ensued. the first sharp bereavement had come, a year or so before the move was absolutely determined upon, mrs. dudley dying late in december of , at roxbury, to which they had moved in , and her epitaph as written by her daughter anne, shows what her simple virtues had meant for husband and children. an epitaph on my dear and ever-honored mother, mrs. dorothy dudley, who deceased decemb , and of her age . here lyes a worthy matron of unspotted life, a loving mother and obedient wife, a friendly neighbor pitiful to poor, whom oft she fed and clothed with her store, to servants wisely aweful but yet kind, and as they did so they reward did find; a true instructer of her family, the which she ordered with dexterity. the publick meetings ever did frequent, and in her closet constant hours she spent; religious in all her words and wayes preparing still for death till end of dayes; of all her children, children lived to see, then dying, left a blessed memory." there is a singular aptitude for marriage in these old puritans. they "married early, and if opportunity presented, married often." even governor winthrop, whose third marriage lasted for thirty years, and whose love was as deep and fervent at the end as in the beginning, made small tarrying, but as his biographer delicately puts it, "he could not live alone, and needed the support and comfort which another marriage could alone afford him." he did mourn the faithful margaret a full year, but governor dudley had fewer scruples and tarried only until the following april, marrying then catherine, widow of samuel hackburne, the first son of this marriage, joseph dudley, becoming even more distinguished than his father, being successively before his death, governor of massachusetts, lieutenant governor of the isle of wight, and first chief justice of new york, while thirteen children handed on the name. the first son, samuel, who married a daughter of governor winthrop, and thus healed all the breaches that misunderstanding had made, was the father of eighteen children, and all through the old records are pictures of these exuberant puritan families. benjamin franklin was one of seventeen. sir william phipps, the son of a poor gunsmith at pemaquid, and one of the first and most notable instances of our rather tiresome "self-made men," was one of twenty-six, twenty-one being sons, while roger clapp of dorchester, handed down names that are in themselves the story of puritanism, his nine, being experience, waitstill, preserved, hopestill, wait, thanks, desire, unite and supply. the last name typifies the new england need, and tyler, whose witty yet sympathetic estimate of the early puritans is yet to be surpassed, writes: "it hardly needs to be mentioned after this, that the conditions of life there were not at all those for which malthus subsequently invented his theory of inhospitality to infants. population was sparce; work was plentiful; food was plentiful; and the arrival in the household of a new child was not the arrival of a new appetite among a brood of children already half-fed--it was rather the arrival of a new helper where help was scarcer than food; it was, in fact, a fresh installment from heaven of what they called, on biblical authority, the very 'heritage of the lord.' the typical household of new england was one of patriarchal populousness. of all the sayings of the hebrew psalmist--except, perhaps, the damnatory ones--it is likely that they rejoiced most in those which expressed the davidic appreciation of multitudinous children: 'as arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth. happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.' the new englanders had for many years quite a number of enemies in the gate, whom they wished to be able to speak with, in the unabashed manner intimated by the devout warrior of israel." hardly a town in new england holds stronger reminders of the past, or has a more intensely new england atmosphere than andover, wherein the same decorous and long-winded discussions of fate, fore-knowledge and all things past and to come, still goes on, as steadily as if the puritan debaters had merely transmigrated, not passed over, to a land which even the most resigned and submissive soul would never have wished to think of as a "silent land." all that cambridge has failed to preserve of the ancient spirit lives here in fullest force, and it stands to-day as one of the few representatives remaining of the original puritan faith and purpose. its foundation saw instant and vigorous protest, at a small encroachment, which shows strongly the spirit of the time. a temporary church at rowley was suggested, while the future one was building, and hubbard writes: "they had given notice thereof to the magistrates and ministers of the neighboring churches, as the manner is with them in new england. the meeting of the assembly was to be at that time at rowley; the forementioned plantations being but newly erected, were not capable to entertain them that were likely to be gathered together on that occasion. but when they were assembled, most of those who were to join together in church fellowship, at that time, refused to make confession of their faith and repentance, because, as was said, they declared it openly before in other churches upon their admission into them. whereupon the messengers of the churches not being satisfied, the assembly broke up, before they had accomplished what they intended." english reticence and english obstinacy were both at work, the one having no mind to make a private and purely personal experience too common; the other, resenting the least encroachment on the christian liberty they had sought and proposed to hold. by october, the messengers had decided to compromise, some form of temporary church was decided upon, and the permanent one went up swiftly as hands could work. it had a bell, though nobody knows from whence obtained, and it owned two galleries, one above another, the whole standing till , when a new and larger one became necessary, the town records describing, what must have been a building of some pretension, " feet long, feet wide, and feet between joints"; and undoubtedly a source of great pride to builders and congregation. no trace of it at present remains, save the old graveyard at the side, "an irregular lot, sparsely covered with ancient moss-grown stones, in all positions, straggling, broken and neglected, and overrun with tall grass and weeds." but in may, as the writer stood within the crumbling wall, the ground was thick with violets and "innocents," the grass sprung green and soft and thick, and the blue sky bent over it, as full of hope and promise as it seemed to the eyes that two hundred years before, had looked through tears, upon its beauty. from her window mistress bradstreet could count every slab, for the home she came to is directly opposite, and when detained there by the many illnesses she suffered in later days, she could, with opened windows, hear the psalm lined out, and even, perhaps, follow the argument of the preacher. but before this ample and generous home rose among the elms, there was the usual period of discomfort and even hardship. simon bradstreet was the only member of the little settlement who possessed any considerable property, but it is evident that he shared the same discomforts in the beginning. in there is record of a house which he had owned, being sold to another proprieter, richard sutton, and this was probably the log- house built before their coming, and lived in until the larger one had slowly been made ready. the town had been laid out on the principle followed in all the early settlements, and described in one of the early volumes of the massachusetts historical society collections. four, or at the utmost, eight acres, constituted a homestead, but wood-lots and common grazing lands, brought the amount at the disposal of each settler to a sufficient degree for all practical needs. it is often a matter of surprise in studying new england methods to find estates which may have been owned by the same family from the beginning, divided in the most unaccountable fashion, a meadow from three to five miles from the house, and wood-lots and pasture at equally eccentric distances. but this arose from the necessities of the situation. homes must be as nearly side by side as possible, that indians and wild beasts might thus be less dangerous and that business be more easily transacted. thus the arrangement of a town was made always to follow this general plan: "suppose ye towne square miles every waye. the houses orderly placed about ye midst especially ye meeting house, the which we will suppose to be ye center of ye wholl circumference. the greatest difficulty is for the employment of ye parts most remote, which (if better direction doe not arise) may be this: the whole being miles, the extent from ye meeting-house in ye center, will be unto every side miles; the one half whereof being paces round about & next unto ye said center, in what condition soever it lyeth, may well be distributed & employed unto ye house within ye compass of ye same orderly placed to enjoye comfortable conveniance. then for that ground lying without, ye neerest circumference may be thought fittest to be imployed in farmes into which may be placed skillful bred husbandmen, many or fewe as they may be attayned unto to become farmers, unto such portions as each of them may well and in convenient time improve according to the portion of stocke each of them may be intrusted with." house-lots would thus be first assigned, and then in proportion to each of them, the farm lands, called variously, ox-ground, meadow- land, ploughing ground, or mowing land, double the amount being given to the owner of an eight-acre house-lot, and such lands being held an essential part of the property. a portion of each township was reserved as "common or undivided land," not in the sense in which "common" is used in the new england village of to- day, but simply for general pasturage. with andover, as with many other of the first settlements, these lands were granted or sold from time to time up to the year , when a final sale was made, and the money appropriated for the use of free schools. as the settlement became more secure, many built houses on the farm lands, and removed from the town, but this was at first peremptorily forbidden, and for many years after could not be done without express permission. mr. bradstreet, as magistrate, naturally remained in the town, and the new house, the admiration of all and the envy of a few discontented spirits, was watched as it grew, by its mistress, who must have rejoiced that at last some prospect of permanence lay before her. the log house in which she waited, probably had not more than four rooms, at most, and forced them to a crowding which her ample english life had made doubly distasteful. she had a terror of fire and with reason, for while still at cambridge her father's family had had in the narrowest of escapes, recorded by winthrop in his journal: "about this time mr. dudley, his house, at newtown, was preserved from burning down, and all his family from being destroyed by gunpowder, by a marvellous deliverance--the hearth of the hall chimney burning all night upon a principal beam, and store of powder being near, and not discovered till they arose in the morning, and then it began to flame out." the thatch of the early house, which were of logs rilled in with clay, was always liable to take fire, the chimneys being of logs and often not clayed at the top. dudley had warned against this carelessness in the first year of their coming, writing: "in our new town, intended this summer to be builded, we have ordered, that no man there shall build his chimney with wood, nor cover his house with thatch, which was readily assented unto; for that divers houses since our arrival (the fire always beginning in the wooden chimneys), and some english wigwams, which have taken fire in the roofs covered with thatch or boughs." with every precaution, there was still constant dread of fire, and anne must have rejoiced in the enormous chimney of the new house, heavily buttressed, running up through the centre and showing in the garret like a fortification. this may have been an enlargement on the plan of the first, for the house now standing, took the place of the one burned to the ground in july, , but duplicated as exactly as possible, at a very short time thereafter. doubts have been expressed as to whether she ever lived in it, but they have small ground for existence. it is certain that dudley bradstreet occupied it, and it has been known from the beginning as the "governor's house." its size fitted it for the large hospitality to which she had been brought up and which was one of the necessities of their position, and its location is a conspicuous and important one. whatever temptation there may have been to set houses in the midst of grounds, and make their surroundings hold some reminder of the fair english homes they had left, was never yielded to. to be near the street, and within hailing distance of one another, was a necessity born of their circumstances. dread of indians, and need of mutual help, massed them closely together, and the town ordinances forbade scattering. so the great house, as it must have been for long, stood but a few feet from the old haverhill and boston road, surrounded by mighty elms, one of which measured, twenty-five years ago, "sixteen and a half feet in circumference, at one foot above the ground, well deserving of mention in the 'autocrat's' list of famous trees." the house faces the south, and has a peculiar effect, from being two full stories high in front, and sloping to one, and that a very low one, at the back. the distance between caves and ground is here so slight, that one may fancy a venturous boy in some winter when the snow had drifted high, sliding from ridge pole to ground, and even tempting a small and ambitious sister to the same feat. massive old timbers form the frame of the house, and the enormous chimney heavily buttressed on the four sides is exactly in the center, the fireplaces being rooms in themselves. the rooms at present are high studded, the floor having been sunk some time ago, but the doors are small and low, indicating the former proportions and making a tall man's progress a series of bows. some of the walls are wainscotted and some papered, modern taste, the taste of twenty-five years ago, having probably chosen to remove wainscotting, as despised then as it is now desired. at the east is a deep hollow through which flows a little brook, skirted by alders, "green in summer, white in winter," where the bradstreet children waded, and fished for shiners with a crooked pin, and made dams, and conducted themselves in all points like the children of to-day. beyond the brook rises the hill, on the slope of which the meeting-house once stood, and where wild strawberries grew as they grow to-day. a dense and unbroken circle of woods must have surrounded the settlement, and cut off many glimpses of river and hill that to- day make the drives about andover full of surprise and charm. slight changes came in the first hundred years. the great mills at lawrence were undreamed of and the merrimack flowed silently to the sea, untroubled by any of mans' uses. today the hillsides are green and smooth. scattered farms are seen, and houses outside the town proper are few, and the quiet country gives small hint of the active, eager life so near it. in , dr. timothy dwight, whose travels in america were read with the same interest that we bestow now upon the "merv oasis," or the "land of the white elephant," wrote of north andover, which then held many of its original features: "north andover is a very beautiful piece of ground. its surface is elegantly undulating, and its soil in an eminent degree, fertile. the meadows are numerous, large and of the first quality. the groves, charmingly interspersed, are tall and thrifty. the landscape, everywhere varied, neat and cheerful, is also everywhere rich. "the parish is a mere collection of plantations, without anything like a village. the houses are generally good, some are large and elegant the barns are large and well-built and indicate a fertile and well-cultivated soil. "upon the whole, andover is one of the best farming towns in eastern massachusetts." andover roads were of incredible crookedness, though the rev. timothy makes no mention of this fact: "they were at first designed to accommodate individuals, and laid out from house to house," and thus the traveller found himself quite as often landed in a farm-yard, as at the point aimed for. all about are traces of disused and forgotten path-ways-- "old roads winding, as old roads will, some to a river and some to a mill," and even now, though the inhabitant is sure of his ground, the stranger will swear that there is not a street, called, or deserving to be called, straight, in all its borders. but this was of even less consequence then than now. the new england woman has never walked when she could ride, and so long as the church stood within easy distance, demanded nothing more. one walk of anne bradstreets' is recorded in a poem, and it is perhaps because it was her first, that it made so profound an impression, calling out, as we shall presently see, some of the most natural and melodious verse which her serious and didactic muse ever allowed her, and being still a faithful picture of the landscape it describes. but up to the beginning of the andover life, nature had had small chance of being either seen or heard, for an increasing family, the engrossing cares of a new settlement, and the puritan belief that "women folk were best indoors," shut her off from influences that would have made her work mean something to the present day. she had her recreations as well as her cares, and we need now to discover just what sort of life she and the puritan sisterhood in general led in the first years, whose "new manners and customs," so disturbed her conservative spirit. chapter x. village life in . of the eight children that came to simon and anne bradstreet, but one was born in the "great house" at andover, making his appearance in , when life had settled into the routine that thereafter knew little change, save in the one disastrous experience of . this son, john, who like all the rest, lived to marry and leave behind him a plenteous family of children, was a baby of one year old, when the first son, samuel, "stayed for many years," was graduated at harvard college, taking high honor in his class, and presently settling as a physician in boston, sufficiently near to be called upon in any emergency in the andover home, and visited often by the younger brothers, each of whom became a harvard graduate. samuel probably had no share in the removal, but dorothy and sarah, simon and hannah, were all old enough to rejoice in the upheaval, and regard the whole episode as a prolonged picnic made for their especial benefit. simon was then six years old, quite ready for latin grammar and other responsibilities of life, and according to the puritan standard, an accountable being from whom too much trifling could by no means be allowed, and who undoubtedly had a careful eye to the small hannah, aged four, also old enough to knit a stocking and sew a seam, and read her chapter in the bible with the best. dorothy and sarah could take even more active part, yet even the mature ages of eight and ten did not hinder surreptitious tumbles into heaped up feather beds, and a scurry through many a once forbidden corner of the ipswich home. for them there was small hardship in the log house that received them, and unending delight in watching the progress of the new. and one or another must often have ridden before the father, who loved them with more demonstration than the puritan habit allowed, and who in his frequent rides to the new mill built on the cochichewick in , found a petitioner always urging to be taken, too. the building of the mill probably preceded that of the house, as bradstreet thought always of public interests before his own, though in this case the two were nearly identical, a saw and grist-mill being one of the first necessities of any new settlement, and of equal profit to owner and users. anne bradstreet was now a little over thirty, five children absorbing much of her thought and time, three more being added during the first six years at andover. when five had passed out into the world and homes of their own, she wrote, in , half regretfully, yet triumphantly, too, a poem which is really a family biography, though the reference to her fifth child as a son, mr. ellis regards as a slip of the pen: "i had eight birds hatcht in one nest, four cocks there were, and hens the rest; i nurst them up with pain and care, nor cost, nor labour did i spare, till at the last they felt their wing, mounted the trees, and learn'd to sing; chief of the brood then took his flight to regions far, and left me quite; my mournful chirps i after send, till he return, or i do end; leave not thy nest, thy dam and sire, fly back and sing amidst this quire. my second bird did take her flight, and with her mate flew out of sight; southward they both their course did bend, and seasons twain they there did spend; till after blown by southern gales, they norward steer'd with filled sayles. a prettier bird was no where seen, along the beach among the treen. i have a third of colour white on whom i plac'd no small delight; coupled with mate loving and true, hath also bid her dam adieu; and where aurora first appears, she now hath percht, to spend her years; one to the academy flew to chat among that learned crew; ambition moves still in his breast that he might chant above the rest, striving for more than to do well, that nightingales he might excell. my fifth, whose down is yet scarce gone is 'mongst the shrubs and bushes flown, and as his wings increase in strength, on higher boughs he'l pearch at length. my other three, still with me nest, untill they'r grown, then as the rest, or here or there, they'l take their flight, as is ordain'd, so shall they light. if birds could weep, then would my tears let others know what are my fears lest this my brood some harm should catch, and be surpriz'd for want of watch, whilst pecking corn, and void of care they fish un'wares in fowler's snare; or whilst on trees they sit and sing, some untoward boy at them do fling; or whilst allur'd with bell and glass, the net be spread, and caught, alas. or least by lime-twigs they be foyl'd, or by some greedy hawks be spoyl'd. o, would my young, ye saw my breast, and knew what thoughts there sadly rest, great was my pain when i you bred, great was my care when i you fed, long did i keep you soft and warm, and with my wings kept off all harm; my cares are more, and fears then ever, my throbs such now, as 'fore were never; alas, my birds, you wisdome want, of perils you are ignorant; oft times in grass, on trees, in flight, sore accidents on you may light. o, to your safety have an eye, so happy may you live and die; mean while my dayes in tunes i'll spend, till my weak layes with me shall end. in shady woods i'll sit and sing, and things that past, to mind i'll bring. once young and pleasant, as are you, but former boyes (no joyes) adieu. my age i will not once lament, but sing, my time so near is spent. and from the top bough take my flight, into a country beyond sight, where old ones, instantly grow young, and there with seraphims set song; no seasons cold, nor storms they see, but spring lasts to eternity; when each of you shall in your nest among your young ones take your rest, in chirping language, oft them tell, you had a dam that lov'd you well, that did what could be done for young, and nurst you up till you were strong, and 'fore she once would let you fly, she shew'd you joy and misery; taught what was good, and what was ill, what would save life, and what would kill? thus gone, amongst you i may live, and dead, yet speak, and counsel give; farewel, my birds, farewel, adieu, i happy am, if well with you. a. b." the bradstreets and woodbridges carried with them to andover, more valuable worldly possessions than all the rest put together, yet even for them the list was a very short one. an inventory of the estate of joseph osgood, the most influential citizen after mr. bradstreet, shows that only bare necessities had gone with him. his oxen and cattle and the grain stored in his barn are given first, with the value of the house and land and then follow the list of household belongings, interesting now as showing with how little a reputable and honored citizen had found it possible to bring up a family. a feather bed and furniture. a flock bed, (being half feathers) & furniture. a flock bed & furniture. five payre of sheets & an odd one. table linen. fower payre of pillow-beeres. twenty-two pieces of pewter. for iron pott, tongs, cottrell & pot-hooks. two muskets & a fowling-piece. sword, cutlass & bandaleeres. barrels, tubbs, trays, cheese-moates and pailes. a stand. bedsteads, cords & chayers. chests and wheels. various yards of stuffs and english cloth are also included, but nothing could well be more meager than this outfit, though doubtless it filled the narrow quarters of the early years. whatever may have come over afterward, there were none of the heirlooms to be seen to-day, in the shape of family portraits, and plate, china or heavily carved mahogany or oak furniture. for the poorer houses, only panes of oiled paper admitted the light, and this want of sunshine was one cause of the terrible loss of life in fevers and various epidemics from which the first settlers suffered. leaden sashes held the small panes of glass used by the better class, but for both the huge chimneys with their roaring fires did the chief work of ventilation and purification, while the family life centered about them in a fashion often described and long ago lost. there is a theory that our grandmothers in these first days of the settlement worked with their own hands, with an energy never since equalled, and more and more departed from as the years go on. but all investigation of early records shows that, as far as practicable, all english habits remained in full force, and among such habits was that of ample service. it is true that mistress and maid worked side by side, but the tasks performed now by any farmer's wife are as hard and more continuous than any labor of the early days, where many hands made light work. if spinning and weaving have passed out of the hands of women, the girls who once shared in the labor, and helped to make up the patriarchal households of early times, have followed, preferring the monotonous and wearing routine of mill-life, to the stigma resting upon all who consent to be classed as "help". if social divisions were actually sharper and more stringent in the beginning, there was a better relation between mistress and maid, for which we look in vain to-day. in many cases, men and women secured their passage to america by selling their time for a certain number of years, and others whose fortunes were slightly better, found it well, until some means of living was secured, to enter the families of the more wealthy colonists, many of whom had taken their english households with them. so long as families centered in one spot, there was little difficulty in securing servants, but as new settlements were formed servants held back, naturally preferring the towns to the chances of indian raids and the dangers from wild beasts. necessity brought about a plan which has lasted until within a generation or so, and must come again, as the best solution of the servant problem. roger williams writes of his daughter that "she desires to spend some time in service & liked much mrs. brenton who wanted help." this word "help" applied itself to such cases, distinguishing them from those of the ordinary servant, and girls of the good families put themselves under notable housekeepers to learn the secrets of the profession--a form of cooking and household economy school, that we sigh for vainly to-day. the bradstreets took their servants from ipswich, but others in the new town were reduced to sore straits, in some cases being forced to depend on the indian woman, who, fresh from the wigwam, looked in amazement on the superfluities of civilized life. hugh peters, the dogmatic and most unpleasant minister of salem, wrote to a boston friend: "sir, mr endecott & myself salute you in the lord jesus, &c. wee have heard of a dividence of woman & children in the bay & would be glad of a share, viz: a young woman or girle & a boy if you thinke good." this was accomplished but failed to satisfy, for two years later peters again writes: "my wife desires my daughter to send to hanna that was her mayd, now at charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with us, for truly wee are so destitute (having now but an indian) that wee know not what to do." this was a desperate state of things, on which lowell comments: "let any housewife of our day, who does not find the keltic element in domestic life so refreshing as to mr. arnold in literature, imagine a household with one wild pequot woman, communicated with by signs, for its maid of all work, and take courage. those were serious times indeed, when your cook might give warning by taking your scalp, or chignon, as the case might be, and making off with it, into the woods." negro slavery was the first solution of these difficulties and one hard-headed member of the colony, emanual downing, as early as , saw in the indian wars and the prisoners that were taken, a convenient means of securing the coveted negro, and wrote to winthrop: "a war with the narragansett is very considerable to this plantation, ffor i doubt whither it be not synne in us, having power in our hands, to suffer them to maynteyne the worship of the devill which their paw-wawes often doe; lie, if upon a just warre the lord should deliver them into our hands, wee might easily have men, woemen and children enough to exchange for moores, which wilbe more gaynefull pillage for us than wee conceive, for i do not see how we can thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves, sufficient to doe all our buisenes, for our children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people, soe that our servants will still desire freedome to plant for themselves, and not stay but for verie great wages. and i suppose you know verie well how wee shall maynteyne moores cheaper than one english servant." the canny puritan considered that indian "devil-worship" fully balanced any slight wrong in exchanging them for, "moores", and writes of it as calmly as he does of sundry other events, somewhat shocking to the modern mind. but, while slaves increased english servants became harder and harder to secure, and often revolted from the masters to whom their time had been sold. there is a certain relish in winthrop's record of two disaffected ones, which is perhaps not unnatural even from him, and is in full harmony with the puritan tendency to see a special providence in any event according to their minds: "two men servants to one moodye, of roxbury, returning in a boat from the windmill, struck upon the oyster bank. they went out to gather oysters, and not making fast their boat, when the float came, it floated away and they were both drowned, although they might have waded out on either side, but it was an evident judgement of god upon them, for they were wicked persons. one of them, a little before, being reproved for his lewdness, and put in mind of hell, answered that if hell were ten times hotter, he had rather be there than he would serve his master, &c. the occasion was because he had bound himself for divers years, and saw that, if he had been at liberty, he might have had greater wages, though otherwise his master used him very well." from whatever source the "moores" were obtained, they were bought and sold during the first hundred years that andover had existence. "pomps' pond" still preserves the memory of pompey lovejoy, servant to captain william lovejoy. pompey's cabin stood there, and as election day approached, great store of election- cake and beer was manufactured for the hungry and thirsty voters, to whom it proved less demoralizing than the whiskey of to-day. there is a record of the death in , of jack, a negro servant of captain dudley bradstreet's, who lost also, in , by drowning, "stacy, ye servant of major dudley bradstreet, a mullatoe born in his house." mistress bradstreet had several, whose families grew up about her, their concerns being of quite as deep interest as those of her neighbors, and the andover records hold many suggestions of the tragedies and comedies of slave life. strong as attachments might sometimes be, the minister himself sold candace, a negro girl who had grown up in his house, and five year old dinah was sent from home and mother at dunstable, to a new master in andover, as witness the bill of sale, which has a curious flavor for a massachusetts document: "received of mr. john abbott of andover fourteen pounds, thirteen shillings and seven pence, it being the full value of a negrow garl named dinah about five years of age of a healthy sound constution, free from any disease of body and do hereby deliver the same girl to the said abbott and promise to defend him in the improvement of her as his servant forever. robert blood." undoubtedly dinah and all her contemporaries proved infinitely better servants than the second generation of those brought from england; who even as early as , had learned to prefer independence, the rev. zechariah symmes writing feelingly: "much ado i have with my own family, hard to get a servant glad of catechising or family duties. i had a rare blessing of servants in yorkshire and those i brought over were a blessing, but the young brood doth much afflict me." an enthusiastic cook, even of most deeply puritanic spirit, had been known to steal out during some long drawn prayer, to rescue a favorite dish from impending ruin, and the offence had been condoned or allowed to pass unnoticed. but the "young brood" revolted altogether at times from the interminable catechisings and "family duties", or submitted in a sulky silence, at which the spirit of the master girded in vain. there seems to have been revolt of many sorts. nature asserted itself, and boys and girls smiled furtively upon one another, and young men and maidens planned means of outwitting stern masters and mistresses, and securing a dance in some secluded barn, or the semblance of a merry making in picnic or ride. but stocks, pillory and whipping-post awaited all offenders, who still found that the secret pleasure outweighed the public pain, and were brought up again and again, till years subdued the fleshly instincts, and they in turn wondered at their children's pertinacity in the same evil ways. holidays were no part of the puritan system, and the little bradstreets took theirs on the way to and from school, doing their wading and fishing and bird's-nesting in this stolen time. there was always saturday afternoon, and anne bradstreet was also, so far as her painful conscientiousness allowed, an indulgent mother, and gave her children such pleasure as the rigid life allowed. andover from the beginning had excellent schools, mr. dane and mr. woodbridge, the ministers, each keeping one, while "dame schools" also flourished, taking the place of the present kindergarten, though the suppressed and dominated babies of three and four, who swung their unhappy feet far from the floor, and whose only reader was a catechism, could never in their wildest dreams have imagined anything so fascinating as the kindergarten or primary school of to-day. horn books were still in use and with reason, the often- flagellated little puritans giving much time to tears, which would have utterly destroyed anything less enduring than horn. until , the teaching of all younger children had been done chiefly at home, and anne bradstreet's older children learned their letters at her knee, and probably, like all the children of the day, owned their little bibles, and by the time they were three or four years of age, followed the expounding at family prayers with only a glance now and then toward the kitten, or the family dog, stretched out before the fire, and watching for any look of interest and recognition. after , and the order of the general court, "that every township in this jurisdiction, after the lord hath increased them to fifty house-holders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their towns to teach all such children as shall resort to him, to read and write." the district school-house waited till indian raids had ceased to be dreaded, but though the walk to the small, square building which in due time was set in some piece of woods or at a point where four roads meet, was denied them, it was something to come together at all, and the children found delight in berrying or nutting, or the crackle of the crisp snow-crust, over which they ran. they waked in those early days, often with the snow lying lightly on their beds under the roof, through the cracks of which it sifted, and through which they saw stars shine or the morning sunlight flicker. even when this stage passed, and the "great house" received them, there was still the same need for rushing down to the fire in kitchen or living-room, before which they dressed, running out, perhaps, in the interludes of strings and buttons, to watch the incoming of the fresh logs which caesar or cato could never bear alone. in the bradstreet mansion, with its many servants, there was less need of utilizing every child as far as possible, but that all should labor was part of the puritan creed, and the boys shared the work of foddering the cattle, bringing in wood and water, and gaining the appetite which presently found satisfaction, usually in one of two forms of porridge, which for the first hundred and fifty years was the puritan breakfast. boiled milk, lightly thickened with indian meal, and for the elders made more desirable by "a goode piece of butter," was the first, while for winter use, beans or peas were used, a small piece of pork or salted beef giving them flavor, and making the savory bean porridge still to be found here and there. wheaten bread was then in general use; much more so than at a later date, when "rye and indian" took its place, a fortunate choice for a people who, as time went on, ate more and more salt pork and fish. game and fresh fish were plentiful in the beginning and poultry used with a freedom that would seem to the farmer of to-day, the maddest extravagance. the english love of good cheer was still strong, and johnson wrote in his "wonder-working providence": "apples, pears and quince tarts, instead of their former pumpkin- pies. poultry they have plenty and great rarity, and in their feasts have not forgotten the english fashion of stirring up their appetites with variety of cooking their food." certain new england dishes borrowed from the natives, or invented to meet some emergency, had already become firmly established. hasty-pudding, made chiefly then as now, from indian meal, was a favorite supper dish, rye often being used instead, and both being eaten with molasses, and butter or milk. samp and hominy, or the whole grain, as "hulled corn", had also been borrowed from the indians, with "succotash", a fascinating combination of young beans and green corn. codfish made saturday as sacred as friday had once been, and baked beans on sunday morning became an equally inflexible law. every family brewed its own beer, and when the orchards had grown, made its own cider. wine and spirits were imported, but rum was made at home, and in the early records of andover, the town distiller has honorable mention. butcher's meat was altogether too precious to be often eaten, flocks and herds bearing the highest money value for many years, and game and poultry took the place of it. but it was generous living, far more so than at the present day, abundance being the first essential where all worked and all brought keen appetites to the board, and every householder counted hospitality one of the cardinal virtues. pewter was the only family plate, save in rarest instances. forks had not yet appeared, their use hardly beginning in england before , save among a few who had travelled and adopted the custom. winthrop owned one, sent him in , and the bradstreets may have had one or more, but rather as a curiosity than for daily use. fingers still did much service, and this obliged the affluence of napkins, which appears in early inventories. the children ate from wooden bowls and trenchers, and their elders from pewter. governor bradford owned "fourteen dishes of that material, thirteen platters, three large and two small plates, a candlestick and a bottle," and many hours were spent in polishing the rather refractory metal. he also owned "four large silver spoons" and nine smaller ones. but spoons, too, were chiefly pewter, though often merely wood, and table service was thus reduced as nearly to first principles as possible. very speedily, however, as the colony prospered, store of silver and china was accumulated, used only on state occasions, and then carefully put away. the servant question had other phases than that of mere inadequacy, and there are countless small difficulties recorded; petty thefts, insolent speeches, and the whole familiar list which we are apt to consider the portion only of the nineteenth century. but there is nothing more certain than that, in spite of creeds, human nature remains much the same, and that the puritan matron fretted as energetically against the pricks in her daily life, as any sinner of to-day. mistress bradstreet, at least, had one experience in which we hear of her as "very angry at the mayde", and which gave food for gossips for many a day. probably one of the profoundest excitements that ever entered the children's lives, was in the discovery of certain iniquities perpetrated by a hired servant john--whose surname, if he ever had one, is lost to this generation, and who succeeded in hiding his evil doings so thoroughly, that there were suspicions of every one but himself. he was a hard worker, but afflicted with an inordinate appetite, the result of which is found in this order: "to the constable of andover. you are hereby required to attach the body of john----, to answer such compt as shall be brought against him, for stealing severall things, as pigges, capons, mault, bacon, butter, eggs &c, & for breaking open a seller-doore in the night several times &c. th d month ." john, suddenly brought to trial, first affirmed that his appetite was never over large, but that the food provided the bradstreet servants "was not fit for any man to eate," the bread especially being "black & heavy & soure," and that he had only occasionally taken a mere bite here and there to allay the painful cravings such emptiness produced. but hereupon appeared goodwife russ, in terror lest she should be accused of sharing the spoils, and testifying that john had often brought chickens, butter, malt and other things to her house and shared them with goodman russ, who had no scruples. the "mayde had missed the things" and confided her trouble to goodwife russ, who had gone up to the great house, and who, pitying the girl, knowing that "her mistress would blame her and be very angry," brought them all back, and then told her husband and john what she had done. another comrade made full confession, testifying in court that at one time they killed and roasted a "great fatt pigg" in the lot, giving what remained "to the dogges," john seasoning the repast with stories of former thefts. it was in court that master jackson learned what had been the fate of "a great fatt turkey ... fatted against his daughter's marriage" and hung for keeping in a locked room, down the chimney of which, " or fellowes" let the enterprising john by a rope who, being pulled up with his prize, "roasted it in the wood and ate it," every whit. down the same chimney he went for "strong beare," and anyone who has once looked upon and into an ancient andover chimney will know that not only john, but the " or fellowes," as well, could have descended side by side. then came a scene in which little john bradstreet, aged nine, had part, seeing the end if not the beginning, of which hannah barnard "did testifye that being in my father's lott near mr. bradstreet's barn, did see john run after mr. bradstreet's fouls & throughing sticks and stones at them & into the barne." looking through a crack to find out the result she "saw him throw out a capon which he had killed, and heard him call to sam martin to come; but when he saw that john bradstreet was with martin, he ran and picked up the capon and hid it under a pear tree." this pear tree, climbed by every bradstreet child, stood at the east of the old house, and held its own till well into the present century, and little john may have been on his way for a windfall, when the capon flew toward him. to stealing was added offences much more malicious, several discreet puritan lads, sons of the foremost land holders having been induced by sudden temptation, to join him in running mr. bradstreet's wheels down hill into a swamp, while at a later date they watched him recreating himself in the same manner alone, testifying that he "took a wheele off mr. bradstreet's tumbril and ran it down hill, and got an old wheel from goodman barnard's land, & sett it on the tumbril." john received the usual punishment, but mended his ways only for a season, his appetite rather increasing with age, and his appearance before the court being certain in any town to which he went. no other servant seems to have given special trouble, and probably all had laid to heart the "twelve good rules," printed and hung in every colonial kitchen: profane no divine ordinance. touch no state matters. urge no healths. pick no quarrels. encourage no vice. repeat no grievances. reveal no secrets. mantain no ill opinions. make no comparisons. keep no bad company. make no long meals. lay no wagers. the problem of work and wages weighed heavily on the young colony. there were grasping men enough to take advantage of the straits into which many came through the scarcity of labor, and winthrop, as early as , had found it necessary to interfere. wages had risen to an excessive rate, "so as a carpenter would have three shillings a day, a labourer two shillings and sixpence &c.; and accordingly those that had commodities to sell, advanced their prices sometime double to that they cost in england, so as it grew to a general complaint, which the court taking knowledge of, as also of some further evils, which were springing out of the excessive rates of wages, they made an order, that carpenters, masons, &c., should take but two shillings the day, and labourers but eighteen pence, and that no commodity should be sold at above fourpence in the shilling more than it cost for ready money in england; oil, wine, &c., and cheese, in regard of the hazard of bringing, &c., excepted. the evils which were springing, &c., were: . many spent much time idly, &c., because they could get as much in four days as would keep them a week. . they spent much in tobacco and strong waters, &c., which was a great waste to the commonwealth, which by reason of so many commodities expended, could not have subsisted to this time, but that it was supplied by the cattle and corn which were sold to new comers at very dear rates." this bit of extortion on the part of the colony as a government, does not seem to weigh on winthrop's mind with by any means as great force as that of the defeated workmen, and he gives the colonial tariff of prices with even a certain pride: "corn at six shillings the bushel, a cow at l --yea, some at l , some l --a mare at l , an ewe goat at or l ; and yet many cattle were every year brought out of england, and some from virginia." at last the new arrivals revolted, and one order ruled for all, the rate of profit charged, being long fixed at four pence in the shilling. andover adopted this scale, being from the beginning of a thrifty turn of mind, which is exemplified in one of the first ordinances passed. many boys and girls had been employed by the owners of cattle to watch and keep them within bounds, countless troubles arising from their roaming over the unfenced lands. to prevent the forming of idle habits the court at once, did "hereupon order and decree that in every towne the chosen men are to take care of such as are sett to keep cattle, that they be sett to some other employment withall, as spinning upon the rock, knitting & weaving tape, &c., that boyes and girls be not suffered to converse together." such conversations as did take place had a double zest from the fact that the sharp-eyed herdsman was outwitted, but as a rule the small puritans obeyed orders and the spinners and knitters in the sun, helped to fill the family chests which did duty as bureaus, and three varieties of which are still to be seen in old houses on the cape, as well as in the museum at plymouth. the plain sea- chest, like the sailor's chest of to-day, was the property of all alike, and usually of solid oak. a grade above this, came another form, with turned and applied ornaments and two drawers at the bottom, a fine specimen of which is still in the old phillips house at north andover, opposite the bradstreet house. the last variety had more drawers, but still retained the lid on top, which being finally permanently fastened down, made the modern bureau. high-backed wooden chairs and an immense oaken table with folding ladder legs, furnished the living-room, settles being on either side of the wide chimney, where, as the children roasted apples or chestnuts, they listened to stories of the wolves, whose howl even then might still be heard about the village. there are various references to "wolf-hooks" in governor bradstreet's accounts, these being described by josselyn as follows: "four mackerel hooks are bound with brown thread and wool wrapped around them, and they are dipped into melted tallow till they be as big and round as an egg. this thing thus prepared is laid by some dead carcase which toles the wolves. it is swallowed by them and is the means of their being taken." every settler believed that "the fangs of a wolf hung about children's necks keep them from frightning, and are very good to rub their gums with when they are breeding of teeth." it was not at all out of character to look on complacently while dogs worried an unhappy wolf, the same josselyn writing of one taken in a trap: "a great mastiff held the wolf . . . tying him to a stake we bated him with smaller doggs and had excellent sport; but his hinder leg being broken, they knocked out his brains." to these hunts every man and boy turned out, welcoming the break in the monotonous life, and foxes and wolves were shot by the dozen, their method being to "lay a sledg-load of cods-heads on the other side of a paled fence when the moon shines, and about nine or ten of the clock, the foxes come to it; sometimes two or three or half a dozen and more; these they shoot, and by that time they have cased them there will be as many more; so they continue shooting and killing of foxes as long as the moon shineth." road-making became another means of bringing them together for something besides religious services, and as baskets of provisions were taken with the workers, and the younger boys were allowed to share in the lighter part of the work, a suggestion of merry- making was there also. these roads were often changed, being at no time much more than paths marked by the blazing of trees and the clearing away of timber and undergrowth. there were no bridges save over the narrower streams, fording being the custom, till ferries were established at various points. roads and town boundaries were alike undetermined and shifting. "preambulators," otherwise surveyors, found their work more and more complicated. "marked trees, stakes and stones," were not sufficient to prevent endless discussions between selectmen and surveyors, and there is a document still on file which shows the straits to which the unhappy "preambulators" were sometimes reduced. "to ye selectmen of billerica: loving friends and neighbors, we have bine of late under such surcomstances that wee could not tell whether wee had any bounds or no between our towne, but now we begine to think we have--this therefore are to desier you to send some men to meet with ours upon the third munday of ye next month by nine a'clock in ye morning, if it be a faire day, if not the next drie day, and so to run one both side of the river and to meet at the vesil place and the west side of ye river." there were heart burnings from another source than this, and one which could never be altered by selectmen, whether at home or abroad. for generations, no person was allowed to choose a seat in church, a committee, usually the magistrates, settling the places of all. in the beginning, after the building of any meeting-house, the seats were all examined and ranked according to their desirability, this process being called, "dignifying the pews." all who held the highest social or ecclesiastical positions were then placed; and the rest as seemed good, the men on one side, the women on another, and the children, often on a low bench outside the pews, where they were kept in order by the tithing man, who, at the first symptom of wandering attention, rapped them over the head with his hare's foot mounted on a stick, and if necessary, withdrew them from the scene long enough for the administration of a more thorough discipline. there are perpetual complaints of partiality--even hints that bribery had been at work in this "seating the meeting-house," and the committee chosen found it so disagreeable a task that dudley bradstreet, when in due time his turn came to serve, protested against being compelled to it, and at last revolted altogether. at boston a cage had been set up for sabbath-breakers, but andover found easier measures sufficient, though there are constant offences recorded. a smile in meeting brought admonishment, and a whisper, the stocks, and when the boys were massed in the galleries the tithing man had active occupation during the entire service, and could have had small benefit of the means of grace. two were necessary at last, the records reading: "we have ordered thomas osgood and john bridges to have inspection over the boys in the galleries on the sabbath, that they might be contained in order in the time of publick exercise." later, even worse trouble arose. the boys would not be "contained," and the anxious selectmen wrote: "and whereas there is grevious complaints of great prophaneness of ye sabbath, both in y time of exercise, at noon time, to ye great dishonor of god, scandall of religion, & ye grief of many serious christians, by young persons, we order & require ye tything-men & constables to tak care to p'vent such great and shamefull miscarriages, which are soe much observed and complained of." the little bradstreets, chilled to the bone by sitting for hours in the fireless church, could rush home to the warm hearth and the generous buttery across the street, but many who had ridden miles, and who ate a frosty lunch between services may be pardoned for indulging in the "great and shameful miscarriages," which were, undoubtedly, a rush across the pews or a wrestle on the meeting- house steps. even their lawlessness held more circumspectness than is known to the most decorous boy of to-day, and it gained with every generation, till neither tithing-men nor constables had further power to restrain it, the puritans of the eighteenth century wailing over the godlessness and degeneracy of the age as strenuously as the pessimists of the nineteenth. even for the seventeenth there are countless infractions of law, and a study of court records would leave the impression of a reckless and utterly defiant community, did not one recall the fact that life was so hedged about with minute detail, that the most orderly citizen of this day would have been the disorderly one of that. one resource, of entertainment, was always open to puritan households. hospitality was on a scale almost of magnificence, and every opportunity seized for making a great dinner or supper, the abundant good cheer of which was their strongest reminder of england. the early privations were ended, but to recall them gave an added zest, and we may fancy roger clap repeating the experience found in his memoir, with a devout thankfulness that such misery was far behind them. "bread was so scarce, that frequently i thought the very crusts of my father's table would have been very sweet unto me. and when i could have meal and water and salt boiled together who could wish better. it was not accounted a strange thing in those days to drink water, and to eat samp or hominy without butter or milk. indeed it would have been strange to see a piece of roast beef, mutton or veal, though it was not long before there was roast goat." generous living had become the colonial characteristic. even in the first years, while pressure was still upon them, and supplies chiefly from england, one of them wrote: "sometimes we used bacon and buttered pease, sometimes buttered bag pudding, made with currants and raisins, sometimes drinked pottage of beer and oatmeal, and sometimes water pottage well buttered." health had come to many who had been sickly from childhood. in fact, in spite of the theory we are all inclined to hold, that "the former days were better than these," and our ancestors men and women of a soundness and vigor long since lost, there is every proof that the standard of health has progressed with all other standards, and that the best blood of this generation is purer and less open to disorder than the best blood of that. francis higginson may stand as the representative of many who might have written with him: "whereas i have for divers years past been very sickly and ready to cast up whatsoever i have eaten, . . . he hath made my coming to be a method to cure me of a wonderful weak stomach and continual pain of melancholy mind from the spleen." his children seem to have been in equally melancholy case, but he was able after a year or two of new england life to write: "here is an extraordinary clear and dry air, that is of a most healing nature to all such as are of a cold, melancholy, phlegmatic, rheumatic temper of body." the puritans, as life settled into a less rasping routine than that of the early years, grew rotund and comfortable in expression, and though the festivities of training days, and the more solemn one of ordination or thanksgiving day, meant sermon and prayers of doubled length, found this only an added element of enjoyment. judge sewall's diary records many good dinners; sometimes as "a sumptuous feast," sometimes as merely "a fine dinner," but always with impressive unction. at one of these occasions he mentions governor bradstreet as being present and adds that he "drank a glass or two of wine, eat some fruit, took a pipe of tobacco in the new hall, wished me joy of the house and desired our prayers." at andover he was equally ready for any of these diversions, though never intemperate in either meat or drink, but, like every magistrate, he kept open house, and enjoyed it more than some whose austerity was greater, and there are many hints that mistress bradstreet provided good cheer with a freedom born of her early training, and made stronger by her husband's tastes and wishes. the andover dames patterned after her, and spent many of the long hours, in as close following of honored formulas as the new conditions allowed, laying then the foundation for that reputation still held by andover housewives, and derided by one of her best known daughters, as "the cup-cake tendencies of the town." chapter xi. a first edition. though the manuscript of the first edition of anne bradstreet's poems was nearly if not entirely complete before the removal to andover, some years were still to pass before it left her hands entirely, though her brother-in-law, knowing her self-distrustful nature, may have refused to give it up when possession had once been obtained. but no event in her life save her marriage, could have had quite the same significance to the shy and shrinking woman, who doubted herself and her work alike, considering any real satisfaction in it a temptation of the adversary. authorship even to-day has its excitements and agitations, for the maker of the book if not for its readers. and it is hardly possible to measure the interest, the profound absorption in the book, which had been written chiefly in secret in hours stolen from sleep, to ensure no trenching on daylight duties. we are helpless to form just judgment of what the little volume meant to the generation in which it appeared, simply because the growth of the critical faculty has developed to an abnormal degree, and we demand in the lightest work, qualities that would have made an earlier poet immortal. this is an age of versification. the old times--when a successful couplet had the same prominence and discussion as a walking match to-day; when one poet thought his two lines a satisfactory morning's work, and another said of him that when such labor ended, straw was laid before the door and the knocker tied up--are over, once for all. now and then a poet stops to polish, but for the most part spontaneity, fluency, gush, are the qualities demanded, and whatever finish may be given, must be dominated by these more apparent facts. delicate fancies still abound, and are more and more the portion of the many; but fancy fills the place once held for imagination, a statelier and nobler dame, deaf to common voices and disdaining common paths. every country paper, every petty periodical, holds verse that in the queen anne period in literature would have given the author permanent place and name. all can rhyme, and many can rhyme melodiously. the power of words fitly set has made itself known, and a word has come to be judged like a note in music--as a potential element of harmony--a sound that in its own place may mean any emotion of joy or sorrow, hate or love. whether a thought is behind these alluring rhythms, with their sensuous swing or their rush of sound, is immaterial so long as the ear has satisfaction; thus swinburne and his school fill the place of spenser and the elder poets, and many an "idle singer of an empty day" jostles aside the masters, who can wait, knowing that sooner or later, return to them is certain. schools have their power for a time, and expression held in their moulds forgets that any other form is possible. but the throng who copied herrick are forgotten, their involved absurdities and conceits having died with the time that gave them birth. the romantic school had its day, and its power and charm are uncomprehended by the reader of this generation. and the lake poets, firmly as they held the popular mind, have no place now, save in the pages where a school was forgotten and nature and stronger forces asserted their power. no poet has enduring place whose work has not been the voice of the national thought and life in which he has had part. theology, politics, great questions of right, all the problems of human life in any age may have, in turn, moulded the epic of the period; but, from homer down, the poet has spoken the deepest thought of the time, and where he failed in this has failed to be heard beyond his time. with american poets, it has taken long for anything distinctively american to be born. with the early singers, there was simply a reproduction of the mannerisms and limitations of the school for which pope had set all the copies. why not, when it was simply a case of unchangeable identity, the englishman being no less an englishman because he had suddenly been put down on the american side of the atlantic? then, for a generation or so, he was too busy contending with natural forces, and asserting his claims to life and place on the new continent, to have much leisure for verse-making, though here and there, in the stress of grinding days, a weak and uncertain voice sounded at times. anne bradstreet's, as we know, was the first, and half assured, half dismayed at her own presumption, she waited long, till convinced as other authors have since been, by the "urgency of friends," that her words must have wider spread than manuscript could give them. now and again it is asserted that the manuscript for the first edition was taken to london without her knowledge and printed in the same way, but there is hardly the slightest ground for such conclusion, while the elaborate dedication and the many friendly tributes included, indicate the fullest knowledge and preparation. all those whose opinion she most valued are represented in the opening pages of the volume. evidently they felt it necessary to justify this extraordinary departure from the proper sphere of woman, a sphere as sharply defined and limited by every father, husband and brother, as their own was left uncriticised and unrestrained. nathaniel ward forgot his phillipics against the "squirrel's brains" of women, and hastened to speak his delight in the little book, and woodbridge and john rogers and sundry others whose initials alone are affixed to their prose or poetical tributes and endorsements, all banded together to sustain this first venture. the title page follows the fashion of the time, and is practically an abstract of what follows. * * * * * the tenth muse, lately sprung up in america, or _severall poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight, wherein especially is contained a compleat discourse, and description of_ ( elements, ( constitutions, the four--( ages of man, ( seasons of the year. _together with an exact epitomie of the four monarchies, viz.:_ ( assyrian, the ( persian, ( grecian, ( roman. _also, a dialogue between old england and new, concerning the late troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious poems._ by a gentlewoman in those parts. printed at london for stephen bowtell at the signe of the bible in popes head-alley, . * * * * * whether anne herself wrote the preface is uncertain. it is apologetic enough for one of her supporters, but has some indications that she chose the first word should be her own. kind reader: had i opportunity but to borrow some of the author's wit, 'tis possible i might so trim this curious work with such quaint expressions, as that the preface might bespeak thy further perusal; but i fear 'twill be a shame for a man that can speak so little, to be seen in the title-page of this woman's book, lest by comparing the one with the other, the reader should pass his sentence that it is the gift of women not only to speak most, but to speak best; i shall leave therefore to commend that, which with any ingenious reader will too much commend the author, unless men turn more peevish than women, to envy the excellency of the inferiour sex. i doubt not but the reader will quickly find more than i can say, and the worst effect of his reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a woman's work and aske, "is it possible?" if any do, take this as an answer from him that dares avow it: it is the work of a woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and more than so, these poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments. i dare adde but little lest i keep thee too long; if thou wilt not believe the worth of these things (in their kind) when a man sayes it, yet believe it from a woman when thou seest it. this only i shall annex, i fear the displeasure of no person in the publishing of these poems but the author, without whose knowledg, and contrary to her expectation, i have presumed to bring to publick view, what she resolved in such a manner should never see the sun; but i found that diverse had gotten some scattered papers, and affected them well, were likely to have sent forth broken pieces, to the authors predjudice, which i thought to prevent, as well as to pleasure those that earnestly desired the view of the whole. nathaniel ward speaks next and with his usual conviction that his word is all that is necessary to stamp a thing as precisely what he considers it to be. mercury shew'd appollo, bartas book, minerva this, and wish't him well to look, and tell uprightly which did which excell, he view'd and view'd, and vow'd he could not tel. they bid him hemisphear his mouldy nose, with's crack't leering glasses, for it would pose the best brains he had in's old pudding-pan, sex weigh'd, which best, the woman or the man? he peer'd and por'd & glar'd, & said for wore, i'me even as wise now, as i was before; they both 'gan laugh, and said it was no mar'l the auth'ress was a right du bartas girle, good sooth quoth the old don, tell ye me so, i muse whither at length these girls will go; it half revives my chil frost-bitten blood, to see a woman once, do aught that's good; and chode by chaucer's book, and homer's furrs, let men look to't, least women wear the spurrs. n. ward. john woodbridge takes up the strain in lines of much easier verse, in which he pays her brotherly tribute, and is followed by his brother, benjamin, who had been her neighbor in andover. upon the author; by a known friend. now i believe tradition, which doth call the muses, virtues, graces, females all; only they are not nine, eleven nor three; our auth'ress proves them but one unity. mankind take up some blushes on the score; monopolize perfection no more; in your own arts confess yourself out-done, the moon hath totally eclips'd the sun, not with her sable mantle muffling him; but her bright silver makes his gold look dim; just as his beams force our pale lamps to wink, and earthly fires, within their ashes shrink. _b. w._ in praise of the author, mistress anne bradstreet, virtues true and lively pattern, wife of the worshipfull simon bradstreet esq: at present residing in the occidental parts of the world in america, _alias nov-anglia_. what golden splendent star is this so bright, one thousand miles twice told, both day and night, (from the orient first sprung) now from the west that shines; swift-winged phoebus, and the rest of all jove's fiery flames surmounting far as doth each planet, every falling star; by whose divine and lucid light most clear, nature's dark secret mysteryes appear; heavens, earths, admired wonders, noble acts of kings and princes most heroick facts, and what e're else in darkness seemed to dye, revives all things so obvious now to th' eye, that he who these its glittering rayes views o're, shall see what's done in all the world before. _n. h._ three other friends add their testimony before we come to the dedication. upon the author. 'twere extream folly should i dare attempt, to praise this author's worth with complement; none but herself must dare commend her parts, whose sublime brain's the synopsis of arts. nature and skill, here both in one agree, to frame this master-piece of poetry: false fame, belye their sex no more, it can surpass, or parrallel the best of man. _c. b._ another to mrs. anne bradstreet, author of this poem. i've read your poem (lady) and admire, your sex to such a pitch should e're aspire; go on to write, continue to relate, new historyes, of monarchy and state: and what the romans to their poets gave, be sure such honour, and esteem you'l have. _h. s._ an anagram. anna bradstreet. deer neat an bartas. so bartas like thy fine spun poems been, that bartas name will prove an epicene. another. anna bradstreet. artes bred neat an. there follows, what can only be defined as a gushing tribute from john rogers, also metrical, though this was not included until the second edition. "twice i have drunk the nectar of your lines," he informs her, adding that, left "thus weltring in delight," he is scarcely capable of doing justice either to his own feelings, or the work which has excited them, and with this we come at last to the dedication in which anne herself bears witness to her obligations to her father. _to her most honoured father, thomas dudley, esq; these humbly presented,_ dear sir of late delighted with the sight of your four sisters cloth'd in black and white. of fairer dames the sun n'er saw the face, though made a pedestal for adams race; their worth so shines in these rich lines you show their paralels to finde i scarely know to climbe their climes, i have nor strength nor skill to mount so high requires an eagle's quill; yet view thereof did cause my thoughts to soar, my lowly pen might wait upon these four i bring my four times four, now meanly clad to do their homage, unto yours, full glad; who for their age, their worth and quality might seem of yours to claim precedency; but by my humble hand, thus rudely pen'd they are, your bounden handmaids to attend these same are they, from whom we being have these are of all, the life, the muse, the grave; these are the hot, the cold, the moist, the dry, that sink, that swim, that fill, that upwards fly, of these consists our bodies, clothes and food, the world, the useful, hurtful, and the good, sweet harmony they keep, yet jar oft times their discord doth appear, by these harsh rimes yours did contest for wealth, for arts, for age, my first do shew their good, and then their rage. my other foures do intermixed tell each others faults, and where themselves excel; how hot and dry contend with moist and cold, how air and earth no correspondence hold, and yet in equal tempers, how they 'gree how divers natures make one unity something of all (though mean) i did intend but fear'd you'ld judge du bartas was my friend. i honour him, but dare not wear his wealth my goods are true (though poor) i love no stealth but if i did i durst not send them you who must reward a thief, but with his due. i shall not need, mine innocence to clear these ragged lines will do 't when they appear; on what they are, your mild aspect i crave accept my best, my worst vouchsafe a grave. from her that to your self, more duty owes then water in the boundess ocean flows. _anne bradstreet_. march , . the reference in the second line, to "your four sisters, clothed in black and white," is to a poem which the good governor is said to have written in his later days, "on the four parts of the world," but which a happy fate has spared us, the manuscript having been lost or destroyed, after his death. his daughter's verse is often as dreary, but both dedication and prologue admit her obligations to du bartas, and that her verse was modeled upon his was very plain to nathaniel ward, who called her a "right du bartas girl," with the feeling that such imitation was infinitely more creditable to her than any originality which she herself carefully disclaims in the prologue. to sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, of cities founded, commonwealths begun, for my mean pen are too superior things: or how they all, or each their dates have run let poets and historians set these forth, my obscure lines shall not so dim their worth. but when my wondring eyes and envious heart great bartas sugared lines, do but read o'er fool i do grudg the muses did not part 'twixt him and me that overfluent store; a bartas can do what a bartas will but simple i according to my skill. from school-boyes' tongues no rhet'rick we expect nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings, nor perfect beauty, where's a main defect; my foolish, broken, blemish'd muse so sings and this to mend, alas, no art is able, 'cause nature, made it so irreparable. nor can i, like that fluent sweet-tongu'd greek, who lisp'd at first, in future times speak plain by art he gladly found what he did seek a full requital of his, striving pain art can do much, but this maxima's most sure a weak or wounded brain admits no cure. i am obnoxious to each carping tongue who says my hand a needle better fits, a poet's pen all scorn i should thus wrong, for such despite they cast on female wits; if what i do prove well, it won't advance, they'l say it's stolen, or else it was by chance. but sure the antique greeks were far more mild else of our sexe, why feigned they those nine and poesy made, calliope's own child; so 'mongst the rest they placed the arts' divine, but this weak knot, they will full soon untie, the greeks did nought, but play the fools & lye. let greeks be greeks, and women what they are men have precedency and still excel, it is but vain unjustly to wage warre: men can do best, and women know it well preheminence in all and each is yours; yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours. and oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies, and ever with your prey still catch your praise, if e're you daigne these lowly lines your eyes give thyme or parsley wreath, i ask no bayes, this mean and unrefined ure of mine will make you glistening gold, but more to shine. with the most ambitious of the longer poems--"the four monarchies"-- and one from which her readers of that day probably derived the most satisfaction, we need not feel compelled to linger. to them its charm lay in its usefulness. there were on sinful fancies; no trifling waste of words, but a good, straightforward narrative of things it was well to know, and tyler's comment upon it will be echoed by every one who turns the apallingly matter-of-fact pages: "very likely, they gave to her their choicest praise, and called her, for this work, a painful poet; in which compliment every modern reader will most cordially join." of much more attractive order is the comparatively short poem, one of the series of quaternions in which she seems to have delighted. "the four elements" is a wordy war, in which four personages, fire, earth, air and water, contend for the precedence, glorifying their own deeds and position and reproaching the others for their shortcomings and general worthlessness with the fluency and fury of seventeenth century theological debate. there are passages, however, of real poetic strength and vividness, and the poem is one of the most favorable specimens of her early work. the four have met and at once begin the controversy. the fire, air, earth and water did contest which was the strongest, noblest and the best, who was of greatest use and might'est force; in placide terms they thought now to discourse, that in due order each her turn should speak; but enmity this amity did break all would be chief, and all scorn'd to be under whence issued winds & rains, lightning & thunder. the quaking earth did groan, the sky looked black, the fire, the forced air, in sunder crack; the sea did threat the heav'ns, the heavn's the earth, all looked like a chaos or new birth; fire broyled earth, & scorched earth it choaked both by their darings, water so provoked that roaring in it came, and with its source soon made the combatants abate their force; the rumbling, hissing, puffing was so great the worlds confusion, it did seem to threat till gentle air, contention so abated that betwixt hot and cold, she arbitrated the others difference, being less did cease all storms now laid, and they in perfect peace that fire should first begin, the rest consent, the noblest and most active element. fire rises, with the warmth one would expect, and recounts her services to mankind, ending with the triumphant assurance, that, willing or not, all things must in the end be subject to her power. what is my worth (both ye) and all men know, in little time i can but little show, but what i am, let learned grecians say what i can do well skil'd mechanicks may; the benefit all living by me finde, all sorts of artists, here declare your mind, what tool was ever fram'd, but by my might? ye martilisk, what weapons for your fight to try your valor by, but it must feel my force? your sword, & gun, your lance of steel your cannon's bootless and your powder too without mine aid, (alas) what can they do; the adverse walls not shak'd, the mines not blown and in despight the city keeps her own; but i with one granado or petard set ope those gates, that 'fore so strong were bar'd ye husband-men, your coulters made by me your hooes your mattocks, & what ere you see subdue the earth, and fit it for your grain that so it might in time requite your pain; though strong-limb'd vulcan forg'd it by his skill i made it flexible unto his will; ye cooks, your kitchen implements i frame your spits, pots, jacks, what else i need not name your dayly food i wholsome make, i warm your shrinking limbs, which winter's cold doth harm ye paracelsians too in vain's your skill in chymistry, unless i help you still. and you philosophers, if e're you made a transmutation it was through mine aid, ye silver smiths, your ure i do refine what mingled lay with earth i cause to shine, but let me leave these things, my fame aspires to match on high with the celestial fires; the sun an orb of fire was held of old, our sages new another tale have told; but be he what they will, yet his aspect a burning fiery heat we find reflect and of the self same nature is with mine cold sister earth, no witness needs but thine; how doth his warmth, refresh thy frozen back and trim thee brave, in green, after thy black. both man and beast rejoyce at his approach, and birds do sing, to see his glittering coach and though nought, but salamanders live in fire and fly pyrausta call'd, all else expire, yet men and beasts astronomers will tell fixed in heavenly constellations dwell, my planets of both sexes whose degree poor heathen judg'd worthy a diety; there's orion arm'd attended by his dog; the theban stout alcides with his club; the valiant persens, who medusa slew, the horse that kil'd beleuphon, then flew. my crab, my scorpion, fishes you may see the maid with ballance, twain with horses three, the ram, the bull, the lion, and the beagle, the bear, the goat, the raven, and the eagle, the crown, the whale, the archer, bernice hare the hidra, dolphin, boys that water bear, nay more, then these, rivers 'mongst stars are found eridanus, where phaeton was drown'd. their magnitude, and height, should i recount my story to a volume would amount; out of a multitude these few i touch, your wisdome out of little gather much. i'le here let pass, my choler, cause of wars and influence of divers of those stars when in conjunction with the sun do more augment his heat, which was too hot before. the summer ripening season i do claim, and man from thirty unto fifty framed, of old when sacrifices were divine, i of acceptance was the holy signe, 'mong all thy wonders which i might recount, there's none more strange then aetna's sulphry mount the choaking flames, that from vesuvius flew the over curious second pliny flew, and with the ashes that it sometimes shed apulia's 'jacent parts were covered. and though i be a servant to each man yet by my force, master, my masters can. what famous towns, to cinders have i turned? what lasting forts my kindled wrath hath burned? the stately seats of mighty kings by me in confused heaps, of ashes may you see. where's ninus great wall'd town, & troy of old carthage, and hundred more in stories told which when they could not be o'ercome by foes the army, thro'ugh my help victorious rose and stately london, our great britian's glory my raging flame did make a mournful story, but maugre all, that i, or foes could do that phoenix from her bed, is risen new. old sacred zion, i demolished thee lo great diana's temple was by me, and more than bruitish london, for her lust with neighbouring towns, i did consume to dust what shall i say of lightning and of thunder which kings & mighty ones amaze with wonder, which make a caesar, (romes) the world's proud head, foolish caligula creep under 's bed. of meteors, ignus fatuus and the rest, but to leave those to th' wise, i judge it best. the rich i oft made poor, the strong i maime, not sparing life when i can take the same; and in a word, the world i shall consume and all therein, at that great day of doom; not before then, shall cease, my raging ire and then because no matter more for fire now sisters pray proceed, each in your course as i, impart your usefulness and force. fully satisfied that nothing remains to be said, fire takes her place among the sisterhood and waits scornfully for such poor plea as earth may be able to make, surprised to find what power of braggadocio still remains and hastens to display itself. the next in place earth judg'd to be her due, sister (quoth shee) i come not short of you, in wealth and use i do surpass you all, and mother earth of old men did me call such is my fruitfulness, an epithite, which none ere gave, or you could claim of sight among my praises this i count not least, i am th' original of man and beast, to tell what sundry fruits my fat soil yields in vineyards, gardens, orchards & corn-fields, their kinds, their tasts, their colors & their smells would so pass time i could say nothing else. the rich, the poor, wise, fool, and every sort of these so common things can make report. to tell you of my countryes and my regions, soon would they pass not hundreds but legions; my cities famous, rich and populous, whose numbers now are grown innumerous, i have not time to think of every part, yet let me name my grecia, 'tis my heart. for learning arms and arts i love it well, but chiefly 'cause the muses there did dwell. ile here skip ore my mountains reaching skyes, whether pyrenean, or the alpes, both lyes on either side the country of the gaules strong forts, from spanish and italian brawles, and huge great taurus longer then the rest, dividing great armenia from the least; and hemus, whose steep sides none foot upon, but farewell all for dear mount helicon, and wondrous high olimpus, of such fame, that heav'n itself was oft call'd by that name. parnapus sweet, i dote too much on thee, unless thou prove a better friend to me: but ile leap ore these hills, not touch a dale, nor will i stay, no not in temple vale, he here let go my lions of numedia, my panthers and my leopards of libia, the behemoth and rare found unicorn, poyson's sure antidote lyes in his horn, and my hiaena (imitates man's voice) out of great numbers i might pick my choice, thousands in woods & plains, both wild & tame, but here or there, i list now none to name; no, though the fawning dog did urge me sore, in his behalf to speak a word the more, whose trust and valour i might here commend; but times too short and precious so to spend. but hark you wealthy merchants, who for prize send forth your well man'd ships where sun doth rise, after three years when men and meat is spent, my rich commodityes pay double rent. ye galenists, my drugs that come from thence, do cure your patients, fill your purse with pence; besides the use of roots, of hearbs, and plants, that with less cost near home supply your wants. but mariners where got your ships and sails, and oars to row, when both my sisters fails your tackling, anchor, compass too is mine, which guides when sun, nor moon, nor stars do shine. ye mighty kings, who for your lasting fames built cities, monuments, call'd by your names, were those compiled heaps of massy stones that your ambition laid, ought but my bones? ye greedy misers, who do dig for gold for gemms, for silver, treasures which i hold, will not my goodly face your rage suffice but you will see, what in my bowels lyes? and ye artificers, all trades and forts my bounty calls you forth to make reports, if ought you have, to use, to wear, to eat, but what i freely yield, upon your sweat? and cholerick sister, thou for all thine ire well knowst my fuel, must maintain thy fire. as i ingenuously with thanks confess, my cold thy fruitfull heat doth crave no less; but how my cold dry temper works upon the melancholy constitution; how the autumnal season i do sway, and how i force the gray-head to obey, i should here make a short, yet true narration. but that thy method is mine imitation now must i shew mine adverse quality, and how i oft work man's mortality; he sometimes finds, maugre his toiling pain thistles and thorns where he expected grain. my sap to plants and trees i must not grant, the vine, the olive, and the fig tree want: the corn and hay do fall before the're mown, and buds from fruitfull trees as soon as blown; then dearth prevails, that nature to suffice the mother on her tender infant flyes; the husband knows no wife, nor father sons. but to all outrages their hunger runs: dreadful examples soon i might produce, but to such auditors 'twere of no use, again when delvers dare in hope of gold to ope those veins of mine, audacious bold; while they thus in mine entrails love to dive, before they know, they are inter'd alive. y' affrighted nights appal'd, how do ye shake, when once you feel me your foundation quake? because in the abysse of my dark womb your cities and yourselves i oft intomb: o dreadful sepulcher! that this is true dathan and all his company well knew, so did that roman far more stout than wise bur'ing himself alive for honours prize. and since fair italy full sadly knowes what she hath lost by these remed'less woes. again what veins of poyson in me lye, some kill outright, and some do stupifye: nay into herbs and plants it sometimes creeps, in heats & colds & gripes & drowzy sleeps; thus i occasion death to man and beast when food they seek, & harm mistrust the least, much might i say of the hot libian sand which rise like tumbling billows on the land wherein cambyses armie was o'rethrown (but winder sister, 'twas when you have blown) i'le say no more, but this thing add i must remember sons, your mould is of my dust and after death whether interr'd or burn'd as earth at first so into earth returned. water, in no whit dismayed by pretensions which have left no room for any future claimant, proceeds to prove her right to the championship, by a tirade which shows her powers quite equal to those of her sisters, considering that her work in the floods has evidenced itself quite as potent as anything fire may claim in the future. scarce earth had done, but th' angry water moved. sister (quoth she) it had full well behoved among your boastings to have praised me cause of your fruitfulness as you shall see: this your neglect shews your ingratitude and how your subtilty, would men delude not one of us (all knows) that's like to thee ever in craving from the other three; but thou art bound to me above the rest, who am thy drink, thy blood, thy sap, and best: if i withhold what art thou? dead dry lump thou bearst nor grass or plant, nor tree nor stump, thy extream thirst is moistn'ed by my love with springs below, and showres from above or else thy sun-burnt face and gaping chops complain to th' heavens, if i withhold my drops thy bear, thy tiger and thy lion stout, when i am gone, their fierceness none needs doubt thy camel hath no strength, thy bull no force nor mettal's found in the courageous horse hinds leave their calves, the elephant the fens the wolves and savage beasts forsake their dens the lofty eagle, and the stork fly low, the peacock and the ostrich, share in woe, the pine, the cedar, yea, and daphne's tree do cease to nourish in this misery, man wants his bread and wine, & pleasant fruits he knows, such sweets, lies not in earth's dry roots then seeks me out, in river and in well his deadly malady i might expell: if i supply, his heart and veins rejoyce, if not, soon ends his life, as did his voyce; that this is true, earth thou can'st not deny i call thine egypt, this to verifie, which by my falling nile, doth yield such store that she can spare, when nations round are poor when i run low, and not o'reflow her brinks to meet with want, each woeful man bethinks; and such i am in rivers, showrs and springs but what's the wealth, that my rich ocean brings fishes so numberless, i there do hold if thou should'st buy, it would exhaust thy gold: there lives the oyly whale, whom all men know such wealth but not such like, earth thou maist show. the dolphin loving musick, arians friend the witty barbel, whose craft doth her commend with thousands more, which now i list not name thy silence of thy beasts doth cause the same my pearles that dangle at thy darling's ears, not thou, but shel-fish yield, as pliny clears, was ever gem so rich found in thy trunk as egypts wanton, cleopatra drunk? or hast thou any colour can come nigh the roman purple, double tirian dye? which caesar's consuls, tribunes all adorn, for it to search my waves they thought no scorn, thy gallant rich perfuming amber greece i lightly cast ashore as frothy fleece: with rowling grains of purest massie gold, which spains americans do gladly hold. earth thou hast not moe countrys vales & mounds then i have fountains, rivers lakes and ponds; my sundry seas, black, white and adriatique, ionian, baltique, and the vast atlantique, aegean, caspian, golden rivers fire, asphaltis lake, where nought remains alive: but i should go beyond thee in my boasts, if i should name more seas than thou hast coasts, and be thy mountains ne'er so high and steep, i soon can match them with my seas as deep. to speak of kinds of waters i neglect, my diverse fountains and their strange effect: my wholsome bathes, together with their cures; my water syrens with their guilefull lures, the uncertain cause of certain ebbs and flows, which wondring aristotles wit n'er knows, nor will i speak of waters made by art, which can to life restore a fainting heart. nor fruitfull dews, nor drops distil'd from eyes, which pitty move, and oft deceive the wise: nor yet of salt and sugar, sweet and smart, both when we lift to water we convert. alas thy ships and oars could do no good did they but want my ocean and my flood. the wary merchant on his weary beast transfers his goods from south to north and east, unless i ease his toil, and do transport the wealthy fraight unto his wished port, these be my benefits, which may suffice: i now must shew what ill there in me lies. the flegmy constitution i uphold, all humours, tumours which are bred of cold: o're childhood and ore winter i bear sway, and luna for my regent i obey. as i with showers oft times refresh the earth, so oft in my excess i cause a dearth, and with abundant wet so cool the ground, by adding cold to cold no fruit proves found. the farmer and the grasier do complain of rotten sheep, lean kine, and mildew'd grain. and with my wasting floods and roaring torrent, their cattel hay and corn i sweep down current. nay many times my ocean breaks his bounds, and with astonishment the world confounds, and swallows countryes up, ne'er seen again, and that an island makes which once was main: thus britian fair ('tis thought) was cut from france scicily from italy by the like chance, and but one land was africa and spain untill proud gibraltar did make them twain. some say i swallow'd up (sure tis a notion) a mighty country in th' atlantique ocean. i need not say much of my hail and snow, my ice and extream cold, which all men know, whereof the first so ominous i rain'd, that israel's enemies therewith were brain'd; and of my chilling snows such plenty be, that caucasus high mounts are seldome free, mine ice doth glaze europes great rivers o're, till sun release, their ships can sail no more, all know that inundations i have made, wherein not men, but mountains seem'd to wade; as when achaia all under water stood, that for two hundred years it n'er prov'd good. deucalions great deluge with many moe, but these are trifles to the flood of noe, then wholly perish'd earths ignoble race, and to this day impairs her beauteous face, that after times shall never feel like woe, her confirm'd sons behold my colour'd bow. much might i say of wracks, but that he spare, and now give place unto our sister air. there is a mild self-complacency, a sunny and contented assertion about "sister air," that must have proved singularly aggravating to the others, who, however, make no sign as to the final results, the implication being, that she is after all the one absolutely indispensable agent. but to end nowhere, each side fully convinced in its own mind that the point had been carried in its own favor, was so eminently in the spirit of the time, that there be no wonder at the silence as to the real victor, though it is surprising that mistress bradstreet let slip so excellent an opportunity for the moral so dear to the puritan mind. content (quoth air) to speak the last of you, yet am not ignorant first was my due: i do suppose you'l yield without controul i am the breath of every living soul. mortals, what one of you that loves not me abundantly more than my sisters three? and though you love fire, earth and water well yet air beyond all these you know t' excell. i ask the man condemn'd that's neer his death, how gladly should his gold purchase his breath, and all the wealth that ever earth did give, how freely should it go so he might live: no earth, thy witching trash were all but vain, if my pure air thy sons did not sustain, the famish'd thirsty man that craves supply, his moving reason is, give least i dye, so both he is to go though nature's spent to bid adieu to his dear element. nay what are words which do reveal the mind, speak who or what they will they are but wind. your drums your trumpets & your organs found, what is't but forced air which doth rebound, and such are ecchoes and report of th' gun that tells afar th' exploit which it hath done, your songs and pleasant tunes they are the same, and so's the notes which nightingales do frame. ye forging smiths, if bellows once were gone your red hot work more coldly would go on. ye mariners, tis i that fill your sails, and speed you to your port with wished gales. when burning heat doth cause you faint, i cool, and when i smile, your ocean's like a pool. i help to ripe the corn, i turn the mill, and with myself i every vacuum fill. the ruddy sweet sanguine is like to air, and youth and spring, sages to me compare, my moist hot nature is so purely thin, no place so subtilly made, but i get in. i grow more pure and pure as i mount higher, and when i'm thoroughly varifi'd turn fire: so when i am condens'd, i turn to water, which may be done by holding down my vapour. thus i another body can assume, and in a trice my own nature resume. some for this cause of late have been so bold me for no element longer to hold, let such suspend their thoughts, and silent be, for all philosophers make one of me: and what those sages either spake or writ is more authentick then our modern wit. next of my fowles such multitudes there are, earths beasts and waters fish scarce can compare. th' ostrich with her plumes th' eagle with her eyn the phoenix too (if any be) are mine, the stork, the crane, the partridg, and the phesant the thrush, the wren, the lark a prey to th' pesant, with thousands more which now i may omit without impeachment to my tale or wit. as my fresh air preserves all things in life, so when corrupt, mortality is rife; then fevers, pmples, pox and pestilence, with divers more, work deadly consequence: whereof such multitudes have di'd and fled, the living scarce had power to bury the dead; yea so contagious countryes have we known that birds have not 'scapt death as they have flown of murrain, cattle numberless did fall, men feared destruction epidemical. then of my tempests felt at sea and land, which neither ships nor houses could withstand, what wofull wracks i've made may well appear, if nought were known but that before algere, where famous charles the fifth more loss sustained then in his long hot war which millain gain'd again what furious storms and hurricanoes know western isles, as christophers barbadoes; where neither houses, trees nor plants i spare, but some fall down, and some fly up with air. earthquakes so hurtfull, and so fear'd of all, imprison'd i, am the original. then what prodigious sights i sometimes show, as battles pitcht in th' air, as countryes know, their joyning fighting, forcing and retreat, that earth appears in heaven, o wonder great! sometimes red flaming swords and blazing stars, portentous signs of famines, plagues and wars, which make the monarchs fear their fates by death or great mutation of their states. i have said less than did my sisters three, but what's their wrath or force, the fame's in me. to adde to all i've said was my intent, but dare not go beyond my element. here the contest ends, and though the second edition held slight alterations here and there, no further attempt was made to add to or take away from the verses, which are as a whole the best examples of the early work, their composition doubtless beguiling many weary hours of the first years in new england. "the four humours of man" follows, but holds only a few passages of any distinctive character, the poem, like her "four monarchies," being only a paraphrase of her reading. in "the four seasons," there was room for picturesque treatment of the new conditions that surrounded her, but she seems to have been content, merely to touch the conventional side of nature, and to leave her own impressions and feelings quite out of the question. the verses should have held new england as it showed itself to the colonists, with all the capricious charges that moved their wonder in the early days. there was everything, it would have seemed, to excite such poetical power as she possessed, to the utmost, for even the prose of more than one of her contemporaries gives hints of the feeling that stirred within them as they faced the strange conditions of the new home. even when they were closely massed together, the silent spaces of the great wilderness shut them in, its mystery beguiling yet bewildering them, and the deep woods with their unfamiliar trees, the dark pines on the hill-side, all held the sense of banishment and even terror. there is small token of her own thoughts or feelings, in any lines of hers, till late in life, when she dropped once for all the methods that pleased her early years, and in both prose and poetry spoke her real mind with a force that fills one with regret at the waste of power in the dreary pages of the "four monarchies." that she had keen susceptibility to natural beauty this later poem abundantly proves, but in most of them there is hardly a hint of what must have impressed itself upon her, though probably it was the more valued by her readers, for this very reason. chapter xii. miscellaneous poems. though the series of quaternions which form the major part of the poems, have separate titles and were written at various times, they are in fact a single poem, containing sixteen personified characters, all of them giving their views with dreary facility and all of them to the puritan mind, eminently correct and respectable personalities. the "four seasons" won especial commendations from her most critical readers, but for all of them there seems to have been a delighted acceptance of every word this phenomenal woman had thought it good to pen. even fifty years ago, a woman's work, whether prose or verse, which came before the public, was hailed with an enthusiastic appreciation, it is difficult to-day to comprehend, mrs. s. c. hall emphasizing this in a paragraph on hannah more, who held much the relation to old england that anne bradstreet did to the new. "in this age, when female talent is so rife--when, indeed, it is not too much to say women have fully sustained their right to equality with men in reference to all the productions of the mind--it is difficult to comprehend the popularity, almost amounting to adoration, with which a woman writer was regarded little more than half a century ago. mediocrity was magnified into genius, and to have printed a book, or to have written even a tolerable poem, was a passport into the very highest society." even greater veneration was felt in days when many women, even of good birth, could barely write their own names, and if anne bradstreet had left behind her nothing but the quaternions, she would long have ranked as a poet deserving of all the elegies and anagrammatic tributes the puritan divine loved to manufacture. the "four seasons," which might have been written in lincolnshire and holds not one suggestion of the new life and methods the colonists were fast learning, may have been enjoyed because of its reminders of the old home. certainly the "nightingale and thrush" did not sing under cambridge windows, nor did the "primrose pale," fill the hands of the children who ran over the new england meadows. it seems to have been her theory that certain well established forms must be preserved, and so she wrote the conventional phrases of the poet of the seventeenth century, only a line or two indicating the real power of observation she failed to exercise. the four seasons of the year. _spring._ another four i've left yet to bring on, of four times four the last quarternion, the winter, summer, autumn & the spring, in season all these seasons i shall bring; sweet spring like man in his minority, at present claim'd, and had priority. with smiling face and garments somewhat green, she trim'd her locks, which late had frosted been, nor hot nor cold, she spake, but with a breath, fit to revive, the nummed earth from death. three months (quoth she) are 'lotted to my share march, april, may of all the rest most fair. tenth of the first, sol into aries enters, and bids defiance to all tedious winters, crosseth the line, and equals night and day, (stil adds to th' last til after pleasant may) and now makes glad the darkned nothern nights who for some months have seen but starry lights. now goes the plow-man to his merry toyle, he might unloose his winter locked soyle; the seeds-man too, doth lavish out his grain, in hope the more he casts, the more to gain; the gardener now superfluous branches lops, and poles erect for his young clambring hops. now digs then sowes his herbs, his flowers & roots and carefully manures his trees of fruits. the pleiades their influence now give, and all that seemed as dead afresh doth live. the croaking frogs, whom nipping winter kil'd like birds now chirp, and hop about the field, the nightingale, the black-bird and the thrush now tune their layes, on sprayes of every bush. the wanton frisking kid, and soft fleec'd lambs do jump and play before their feeding dams, the tender tops of budding grass they crop, they joy in what they have, but more in hope: for though the frost hath lost his binding power, yet many a fleece of snow and stormy shower doth darken sol's bright eye, makes us remember the pinching north-west wind of cold december. my second month is april, green and fair, of longer dayes, and a more temperate air: the sun in taurus keeps his residence, and with his warmer beams glareeth from thence this is the month whose fruitful showers produces all set and sown for all delights and uses: the pear, the plum, and apple-tree now flourish the grass grows long the hungry beast to nourish the primrose pale, and azure violet among the virduous grass hath nature set, that when the sun on's love (the earth) doth shine these might as lace set out her garments fine. the fearfull bird his little house now builds in trees and walls, in cities and in fields. the outside strong, the inside warm and neat; a natural artificer compleat. the clocking hen her chirping chickins leads with wings & beak defends them from the gleads my next and last is fruitfull pleasant may, wherein the earth is clad in rich aray, the sun now enters loving gemini, and heats us with the glances of his eye, our thicker rayment makes us lay aside lest by his fervor we be torrified. all flowers the sun now with his beams discloses, except the double pinks and matchless roses. now swarms the busy, witty, honey-bee, whose praise deserves a page from more than me the cleanly huswife's dary's now in th' prime, her shelves and firkins fill'd for winter time. the meads with cowslips, honey-suckles dight, one hangs his head, the other stands upright: but both rejoice at th' heaven's clear smiling face, more at her showers, which water them apace. for fruits my season yields the early cherry, the hasty peas, and wholsome cool strawberry. more solid fruits require a longer time, each season hath its fruit, so hath each clime: each man his own peculiar excellence, but none in all that hath preheminence. sweet fragrant spring, with thy short pittance fly let some describe thee better than can i. yet above all this priviledg is thine, thy dayes still lengthen without least decline: _summer._ when spring had done, the summer did begin, with melted tauny face, and garments thin, resembling fire, choler, and middle age, as spring did air, blood, youth in 's equipage. wiping the sweat from of her face that ran, with hair all wet she pussing thus began; bright june, july and august hot are mine, in th' first sol doth in crabbed cancer shine. his progress to the north now's fully done, then retrograde must be my burning sun, who to his southward tropick still is bent, yet doth his parching heat but more augment though he decline, because his flames so fair, have throughly dry'd the earth, and heat the air. like as an oven that long time hath been heat, whose vehemency at length doth grow so great, that if you do withdraw her burning store, 'tis for a time as fervent as before. now go those foolick swains, the shepherd lads to wash the thick cloth'd flocks with pipes full glad in the cool streams they labour with delight rubbing their dirty coats till they look white; whose fleece when finely spun and deeply dy'd with robes thereof kings have been dignified, blest rustick swains, your pleasant quiet life, hath envy bred in kings that were at strife, careless of worldly wealth you sing and pipe, whilst they'r imbroyl'd in wars & troubles rife: wich made great bajazet cry out in 's woes, oh happy shepherd which hath not to lose. orthobulus, nor yet sebastia great, but whist'leth to thy flock in cold and heat. viewing the sun by day, the moon by night endimions, dianaes dear delight, upon the grass resting your healthy limbs, by purling brooks looking how fishes swims, if pride within your lowly cells ere haunt, of him that was shepherd then king go vaunt. this moneth the roses are distil'd in glasses, whose fragrant smel all made perfumes surpasses the cherry, gooseberry are now in th' prime, and for all sorts of pease, this is the time. july my next, the hott'st in all the year, the sun through leo now takes his career, whose flaming breath doth melt us from afar, increased by the star ganicular, this month from julius ceasar took its name, by romans celebrated to his fame. now go the mowers to their flashing toyle, the meadowes of their riches to dispoyle, with weary strokes, they take all in their way, bearing the burning heat of the long day. the forks and rakes do follow them amain, wich makes the aged fields look young again, the groaning carts do bear away their prize, to stacks and barns where it for fodder lyes. my next and last is august fiery hot (for much, the southward sun abateth not) this moneth he keeps with vigor for a space, the dry'ed earth is parched with his face. august of great augustus took its name, romes second emperour of lasting fame, with sickles now the bending reapers goe the rustling tress of terra down to mowe; and bundles up in sheaves, the weighty wheat, which after manchet makes for kings to eat: the barly, rye and pease should first had place, although their bread have not so white a face. the carter leads all home with whistling voyce. he plow'd with pain, but reaping doth rejoice, his sweat, his toyle, his careful wakeful nights, his fruitful crop abundantly requites. now's ripe the pear, pear-plumb and apricock, the prince of plumbs, whose stone's as hard as rock the summer seems but short, the autumn hasts to shake his fruits, of most delicious tasts like good old age, whose younger juicy roots hath still ascended, to bear goodly fruits. until his head be gray, and strength be gone. yet then appears the worthy deeds he'th done: to feed his boughs exhausted hath his sap, then drops his fruit into the eaters lap. _autumn._ of autumn moneths september is the prime, now day and night are equal in each clime, the twelfth of this sol riseth in the line, and doth in poizing libra this month shine. the vintage now is ripe, the grapes are prest, whose lively liquor oft is curs'd and blest: for nought so good, but it may be abused, but its a precious juice when well its used. the raisins now in clusters dryed be, the orange, lemon dangle on the tree: the pomegranate, the fig are ripe also, and apples now their yellow sides do show. of almonds, quinces, wardens, and of peach, the season's now at hand of all and each, sure at this time, time first of all began, and in this moneth was made apostate man: for then in eden was not only seen, boughs full of leaves, or fruits unripe or green, or withered stocks, which were all dry and dead, but trees with goodly fruits replenished; which shows nor summer, winter nor the spring our grand-sire was of paradice made king: nor could that temp'rate clime such difference make, if cited as the most judicious take. october is my next, we hear in this the northern winter-blasts begin to hip, in scorpio resideth now the sun, and his declining heat is almost done. the fruitless trees all withered now do stand, whose sapless yellow leavs, by winds are fan'd which notes when youth and strength have passed their prime decrepit age must also have its time. the sap doth slily creep toward the earth there rests, until the sun give it a birth. so doth old age still tend until his grave, where also he his winter time must have; but when the sun of righteousness draws nigh, his dead old stock, shall mount again on high. november is my last, for time doth haste, we now of winters sharpness 'gins to taste this moneth the sun's in sagitarius, so farre remote, his glances warm not us. almost at shortest, is the shorten'd day, the northern pole beholdeth not one ray, nor greenland, groanland, finland, lapland, see no sun, to lighten their obscurity; poor wretches that in total darkness lye, with minds more dark then is the dark'ned sky. beaf, brawn, and pork are now in great request, and solid meats our stomacks can digest. this time warm cloaths, full diet, and good fires, our pinched flesh, and hungry marres requires; old cold, dry age, and earth autumn resembles, and melancholy which most of all dissembles. i must be short, and shorts the short'ned day, what winter hath to tell, now let him say. _winter._ cold, moist, young flegmy winter now doth lye in swaddling clouts, like new born infancy bound up with frosts, and furr'd with hail & snows, and like an infant, still it taller grows; december is my first, and now the sun to th' southward tropick, his swift race doth run: this moneth he's hous'd in horned capricorn, from thence he 'gins to length the shortned morn, through christendome with great feastivity, now's held, (but ghest) for blest nativity, cold frozen january next comes in, chilling the blood and shrinking up the skin; in aquarius now keeps the long wisht sun, and northward his unwearied course doth run: the day much longer then it was before, the cold not lessened, but augmented more. now toes and ears, and fingers often freeze, and travellers their noses sometimes leese. moist snowie feburary is my last, i care not how the winter time doth haste, in pisces now the golden sun doth shine, and northward still approaches to the line, the rivers 'gin to ope, the snows to melt, and some warm glances from his face are felt; which is increased by the lengthen'd day, until by's heat, he drives all cold away, and thus the year in circle runneth round: where first it did begin, in th' end its found. with the final lines a rush of dissatisfaction came over the writer, and she added certain couplets, addressed to her father, for whom the whole set seems to have been originally written, and who may be responsible in part for the bald and didactic quality of most of her work. my subjects bare, my brain is bad, or better lines you should have had; the first fell in so nat'rally, i knew not how to pass it by; the last, though bad i could not mend, accept therefore of what is pen'd, and all the faults that you shall spy shall at your feet for pardon cry. mr. john harvard ellis has taken pains to compare various passages in her "four monarchies" with the sources from which her information was derived, showing a similarity as close as the difference between prose and verse would admit. one illustration of this will be sufficient. in the description of the murder of the philosopher callisthenes by alexander the great, which occurs in her account of the grecian monarchy, she writes: the next of worth that suffered after these, was learned, virtuous, wise calisthenes, who loved his master more than did the rest, as did appear, in flattering him the least; in his esteem a god he could not be, nor would adore him for a deity. for this alone and for no other cause, against his sovereign, or against his laws, he on the rack his limbs in pieces rent, thus was he tortur'd till his life was spent of this unkingly act doth seneca this censure pass, and not unwisely say, of alexander this the eternal crime, which shall not be obliterate by time. which virtue's fame can ne're redeem by far, nor all felicity of his in war. when e're 'tis said he thousand thousands slew, yea, and calisthenes to death he drew. the mighty persian king he over came, yea, and he killed calisthenes of fame. all countreyes, kingdomes, provinces he won, from hellespont, to the farthest ocean. all this he did, who knows not to be true? but yet withal, calisthenes he slew. from nacedon, his english did extend, unto the utmost bounds o' th' orient, all this he did, yea, and much more 'tis true, but yet withal, calisthenes he slew. the quotation from raleigh's "history of the world," which follows, will be seen to hold in many lines the identical words. "alexander stood behind a partition, and heard all that was spoken, waiting but an opportunity to be revenged on callisthenes, who being a man of free speech, honest, learned, and a lover of the king's honour, was yet soon after tormented to death, not for that he had betrayed the king to others, but because he never would condescend to betray the king to himself, as all his detestable flatterers did. for in a conspiracy against the king, made by one hermolaus and others, (which they confessed,) he caused callisthenes, without confession, accusation or trial, to be torn assunder upon the rack. this deed, unworthy of a king, seneca thus censureth. [he gives the latin, and thus translates it.] 'this is the eternal crime of alexander, which no virtue nor felicity of his in war shall ever be able to redeem. for as often as any man shall say, he slew many thousand persians, it shall be replied, he did so, and he slew callisthenes; when it shall be said, he slew darius, it shall be replied, and callisthenes; when it shall be said, he won all as far as to the very ocean, thereon also he adventured with unusual navies, and extended his empire from a corner of thrace, to the utmost bounds of the orient; it shall be said withal, but he killed callisthenes. let him have outgone all the ancient examples of captains and kings, none of all his acts makes so much to his glory, as callisthenes to his reproach'." the school girl of the present day could furnish such arrangements of her historical knowledge with almost as fluent a pen as that of mistress bradstreet, who is, however, altogether innocent of any intention to deceive any of her readers. the unlearned praised her depth of learning, but she knew well that every student into whose hands the book might fall, would recognize the source from which she had drawn, and approve the method of its use. evidently there was nothing very vital to her in these records of dynasties and wars, for not a line indicates any thrill of feeling at the tales she chronicles. yet the feeling was there, though reserved for a later day. it is with her own time, or with the "glorious reign of good queen bess," that she forgets to be didactic and allows herself here and there, a natural and vigorous expression of thought or feeling. there was capacity for hero-worship, in this woman, who repressed as far as she had power, the feeling and passion that sometimes had their way, though immediately subdued and chastened, and sent back to the durance in which all feeling was held. but her poem on queen elizabeth has here and there a quiet sarcasm, and at one point at least rises into a fine scorn of the normal attitude toward women: she hath wip'd off the aspersion of her sex, that women wisdome lack to play the rex. through the whole poem runs an evident, almost joyous delight in what a woman has achieved, and as she passes from point to point, gathering force with every period, she turns suddenly upon all detractors with these ringing lines: now say, have women worth or have they none? or had they some, but with our queen is't gone? nay, masculines, you have thus taxed us long; but she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. let such as say our sex is void of reason, know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason. sir philip sidney fills her with mixed feeling, her sense that his "arcadia" was of far too fleshly and soul-beguiling an order of literature, battling with her admiration for his character as a man, and making a diverting conflict between reason and inclination. as with queen elizabeth, she compromised by merely hinting her opinion of certain irregularities, and hastened to cover any damaging admission with a mantle of high and even enthusiastic eulogy. an elegie upon that honourable and renowned knight _sir philip sidney,_ who was untimely slain at the siege of zutphen, _anno, ._ when england did enjoy her halsion dayes, her noble sidney wore the crown of bayes; as well an honour to our british land, as she that swayed the scepter with her hand; mars and minerva did in one agree, of arms and arts he should a pattern be, calliope with terpsichore did sing, of poesie, and of musick, he was king; his rhetorick struck polimina dead, his eloquence made mercury wax red; his logick from euterpe won the crown, more worth was his then clio could set down. thalia and melpomene say truth, witness arcadia penned in his youth, are not his tragick comedies so acted, as if your ninefold wit had been compacted. to shew the world, they never saw before, that this one volume should exhaust your store; his wiser dayes condemned his witty works, who knows the spels that in his rhetorick lurks, but some infatuate fools soon caught therein, fond cupids dame had never such a gin, which makes severer eyes but slight that story, and men of morose minds envy his glory: but he's a beetle-head that can't descry a world of wealth within that rubbish lye, and doth his name, his work, his honour wrong, the brave refiner of our british tongue, that sees not learning, valour and morality, justice, friendship, and kind hospitality, yea and divinity within his book, such were prejudicate, and did not look. in all records his name i ever see put with an epithite of dignity, which shows his worth was great, his honour such, the love his country ought him, was as much. then let none disallow of these my straines whilst english blood yet runs within my veins, o brave achilles, i wish some homer would engrave in marble, with characters of gold the valiant feats thou didst on flanders coast, which at this day fair belgia may boast. the more i say, the more thy worth i stain, thy fame and praise is far beyond my strain, o zutphen, zutphen that most fatal city made famous by thy death, much more the pity: ah! in his blooming prime death pluckt this rose e're he was ripe, his thread cut atropos. thus man is born to dye, and dead is he, brave hector, by the walls of troy we see. o who was near thee but did sore repine he rescued not with life that life of thine; but yet impartial fates this boon did give, though sidney di'd his valiant name should live: and live it doth in spight of death through fame, thus being overcome, he overcame. where is that envious tongue, but can afford of this our noble scipio some good word. great bartas this unto thy praise adds more, in sad sweet verse, thou didst his death deplore. and phoenix spencer doth unto his life, his death present in sable to his wife. stella the fair, whose streams from conduits fell for the sad loss of her astrophel. fain would i show how he fame's paths did tread, but now into such lab'rinths i am lead, with endless turnes, the way i find not out, how to persist my muse is more in doubt; wich makes me now with silvester confess, but sidney's muse can sing his worthiness. the muses aid i craved, they had no will to give to their detractor any quill, with high disdain, they said they gave no more, since sidney had exhausted all their store. they took from me the scribling pen i had, i to be eas'd of such a task was glad then to reveng this wrong, themselves engage, and drove me from parnassus in a rage. then wonder not if i no better sped, since i the muses thus have injured. i pensive for my fault, sate down, and then errata through their leave, threw me my pen, my poem to conclude, two lines they deign which writ, she bad return't to them again; so sidneys fame i leave to englands rolls, his bones do lie interr'd in stately pauls. _his epitaph._ here lies in fame under this stone, philip and alexander both in one; heir to the muses, the son of mars in truth, learning, valour, wisdome, all in virtuous youth, his praise is much, this shall suffice my pen, that sidney dy'd 'mong most renown'd of men. with du bartas, there is no hesitation or qualification. steeped in the spirit of his verse, she was unconscious how far he had moulded both thought and expression, yet sufficiently aware of his influence to feel it necessary to assert at many points her freedom from it. but, as we have already seen, he was the puritan poet, and affected every rhymester of the time, to a degree which it required generations to shake off. in new england, however, even he, in time came to rank as light-minded, and the last shadow of poetry fled before the metrical horrors of the bay psalm book, which must have lent a terror to rhyme, that one could wish might be transferred to the present day. the elegy on du bartas is all the proof needed to establish anne bradstreet as one of his most loyal followers, and in spite of all protest to the contrary such she was and will remain. in honour of du bartas. among the happy wits this age hath shown great, dear, sweet bartas thou art matchless known; my ravished eyes and heart with faltering tongue, in humble wise have vowed their service long but knowing th' task so great & strength but small, gave o're the work before begun withal, my dazled sight of late reviewed thy lines, where art, and more than art in nature shines, reflection from their beaming altitude did thaw my frozen hearts ingratitude which rayes darting upon some richer ground had caused flours and fruits soon to abound, but barren i, my dasey here do bring, a homely flower in this my latter spring, if summer, or my autumm age do yield flours, fruits, in garden orchard, or in field, volleyes of praises could i eccho then, had i an angels voice, or bartas pen; but wishes can't accomplish my desire, pardon if i adore, when i admire. o france thou did'st in him more glory gain then in st. lewes, or thy last henry great, who tam'd his foes in warrs, in bloud and sweat, thy fame is spread as far, i dare be bold, in all the zones, the temp'rate, hot and cold, their trophies were but heaps of wounded slain, shine the quintessence of an heroick brain. the oaken garland ought to deck their brows, immortal bayes to thee all men allows, who in thy tryumphs never won by wrongs, lead'st millions chained by eyes, by ears, by tongues, oft have i wondred at the hand of heaven, in giving one what would have served seven, if e're this golden gift was show'd on any, they shall be consecrated in my verse, and prostrate offered at great bartas herse; my muse unto a child i may compare who sees the riches of some famous fair, he feeds his eyes, but understanding lacks to comprehend the worth of all those knacks the glittering plate and jewels he admires, the hats and fans, the plumes and ladies tires, and thousand times his mazed mind doth wish, some part (at least) of that great wealth was his, but feeling empty wishes nought obtain, at night turnes to his mothers cot again, and tells her tales, (his full heart over glad) of all the glorious sights his eyes have had; but finds too soon his want of eloquence, the silly prattler speaks no word of sense; but feeling utterance fail his great desires sits down in silence, deeply he admires, thus weak brained i, reading thy lofty stile, thy profound learning, viewing other while; thy art in natural philosophy, thy saint like mind in grave divinity; thy piercing skill in high astronomy, and curious insight in anatomy; thy physick, musick and state policy, valour in warr, in peace good husbandry, sure lib'ral nature did with art not small, in all the arts make thee most liberal, a thousand thousand times my senseless sences moveless stand charmed by thy sweet influences; more senseless then the stones to amphious luto, mine eyes are sightless, and my tongue is mute, my full astonish'd heart doth pant to break, through grief it wants a faculty to speak; thy double portion would have served many, unto each man his riches is assign'd of name, of state, of body and of mind: thou had'st thy part of all, but of the last, o pregnant brain, o comprehension vast; thy haughty stile and rapted wit sublime all ages wondring at, shall never climb, thy sacred works are not for imitation, but monuments to future admiration, thus bartas fame shall last while starrs do satnd, and whilst there's air or fire, or sea or land. but least my ignorance shall do thee wrong, to celebrate thy merits in my song. he leave thy praise to those shall do thee right, good will, not skill, did cause me bring my mite. his epitaph. here lyes the pearle of france, parnassus glory; the world rejoyc'd at's birth, at's death, was sorry, art and nature joyn'd, by heavens high decree naw shew'd what once they ought, humanity! and natures law, had it been revocable to rescue him from death, art had been able, but nature vanquish'd art, so bartas dy'd; but fame out-living both, he is reviv'd. bare truth as every line surely appeared to the woman who wrote, let us give thanks devoutly that the modern mind holds no capacity for the reproduction of that "haughty stile and rapted wit sublime all ages wond'ring at shall never climb," and that more truly than she knew, his "sacred works are not for imitation but monuments to future admiration." not the "future admiration" she believed his portion, but to the dead reputation which, fortunately for us, can have no resurrection. chapter xiii. chances and changes. with the appearance of the little volume and the passing of the flutter of interest and excitement it had aroused, the andover life subsided into the channel through which, save for one or two breaks, it was destined to run for many years. until , nothing of note had taken place, but this year brought two events, one full of the proud but quiet satisfaction the puritan mother felt in a son who had ended his college course with distinction, and come home to renew the associations somewhat broken in his four years absence; the other, a sorrow though hardly an unexpected one. samuel bradstreet, who became a physician, living for many years in boston, which he finally left for the west indies, was about twenty at the time of his graduation from harvard, the success of which was very near anne bradstreet's heart and the pride of his grandfather, governor dudley, who barely lived to see the fruition of his wishes for this first child of his favorite daughter. his death in july, , softened the feeling that seems slowly to have arisen against him in the minds of many who had been his friends, not without reason, though many of them had showed quite as thorough intolerance as he. with increasing years, dudley's spirit had hardened and embittered against all who ventured to differ from the cast-iron theology his soul loved. bradstreet and winthrop had both been a cross to him with the toleration which seemed to him the child of satan himself. his intense will had often drawn concessions from winthrop at which his feelings revolted and he pursued every sort of sectary with a zeal that never flagged. hutchinson wrote: "he was zealous beyond measure against all sorts of heretics," and roger williams said bitterly: "it is known who hindered but never promoted the liberty of other men's consciences." between the "vagaries of many sectaries," the persistent and irrepressible outbreaks from roger williams, the bewildering and confounding presumption of anne hutchinson, who seems to have been the forerunner of other boston agitations of like nature, governor dudley's last days were full of astonishments, not the least being the steady though mild opposition of his son-in-law bradstreet to all harsh measures. toleration came to seem to him at last the crowning sin of all the ages, and his last recorded written words are a valiant testimony against it. there was a curious tendency to rhyme in the gravest of these decorous fathers; a tendency carefully concealed by some, as in john winthrop's case, who confined his "dropping into poetry" to the margins of his almanacs. others were less distrustful, and printed their "painful verses" on broad sheets, for general circulation and oppression. governor dudley rhymed but once, but in the bald and unequal lines, found in his pocket after death, condensed his views of all who had disagreed from him, as well as the honest, sturdy conviction in which he lived and died. they were written evidently but a short time before his death, and are in the beginning much after the order of his daughter's first poem. dim eyes, deaf ears, cold stomach, shew my dissolution is in view, eleven times seven near liv'd have i. and now god calls i willing die, my shuttle's shot, my race is run, my sun is set, my day is done. my span is measured, tale is told, my flower is faded and grown old. my dream is vanish'd, shadows fled, my soul with christ, my body dead, farewel dear wife, children and friends, hate heresie, make blessed ends, bear poverty, live with good men; so shall we live with joy agen. let men of god in courts and churches watch, o're such as do a toleration hatch, lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice to poison all with heresie and vice. if men be left and otherwise combine, my epitaph's i dy'd no libertine. to the old puritan, scowling to the last at any shade of difference from the faith to which he would willingly have been a martyr, a "libertine" included all blasphemous doubters and defiers of current beliefs--quakers, antinomians and other pestilent people who had already set the colony by the ears and were soon to accomplish much more in this direction. the verses were at once creed and protest, and are a fair epitome of the puritan mind in . other rhymes from other hands had expressed equally uncompromising opinions. he had survived the anagramatic warning sent to him by an unknown hand in , which still stands on the files of the first church in roxbury, and which may have been written by one of his opponents in the general court. thomas dudley. ah! old must dye, a death's head on your hand you need not weare; a dying head you on your shoulders bear; you need not one to mind you you must dye, you in your name may spell mortalitye. young men may dye, but old men, these dye must, 'twill not be long before you turn to dust. before you turn to dust! ah! must! old! dye! what shall young men doe, when old in dust do lye? when old in dust lye, what new england doe? when old in dust do lye it's best dye too. death condoned these offences, and left only the memory of his impartial justice and his deep and earnest piety, and morton wrote of him, what expressed the feeling even of his enemies: "his love to justice appeared at all times, and in special upon the judgement seat, without respect of persons in judgement, and in his own particular transactions with all men, he was exact and exemplary. his zeal to order appeared in contriving good laws and faithfully executing them upon criminal offenders, heretics and underminers of true religion. he had a piercing judgement to discover the wolf, though clothed with a sheepskin. his love to the people was evident, in serving them in a public capacity many years at his own cost, and that as a nursing father to the churches of christ. he loved the true christian religion, and the pure worship of god, and cherished as in his bosom, all godly ministers and christians. he was exact in the practice of piety, in his person and family, all his life. in a word he lived desired, and died lamented by all good men." this was stronger language than the majority of his fellow- colonists would have been inclined to use, his differences with governor winthrop having embittered many of the latter's friends. winthrop's persistent gentleness went far toward quieting the feeling against him, which seems to have taken deep root in dudley's breast, but the jealousy of his authority, and questioning of his judgement, though perhaps natural from the older man, brought about many uncomfortable complications. all the towns about boston had been ordered to send their quota to aid in finishing the fort built in , but governor dudley would not allow any party from newtown to be made up, nor would he give the reason for such course to governor winthrop. there was cause, for salem and saugus had failed to pay their share of money, and dudley's sense of justice would not allow his constituents to do their share till all had paid the amount levied. remonstrated with, he wrote a most unpleasant letter, a habit of his when offended, refusing to act till the reluctant salem had paid. this letter, brought to winthrop by mr. hooker, he returned to him at once. the rest of the story may be given in his own words. the record stands in his journal given in the third person, and as impartially as if told of another: "the governour told them it should rest till the court, and withal gave the letter to mr. hooker with this speech: i am not willing to keep such an occasion of provocation by me. and soon after he wrote to the deputy (who had before desired to buy a fat hog or two of him, being somewhat short of provisions) to desire him to send for one, (which he would have sent him, if he had known when his occasion had been to have made use of it), and to accept it as a testimony of his good will; and lest he should make any scruple of it, he made mr. haynes and mr. hooker, (who both sojurned in his house) partakers with him. upon this the deputy returned this answer: 'your overcoming yourself hath overcome me. mr. haynes, mr. hooker, and myself, do most kindly accept your good will, but we desire, without offence, to refuse your offer, and that i may only trade with you for two hogs;' and so very lovingly concluded." there was no word, however, of yielding the disputed point, which was settled for him a few days later. "the court being two days after, ordered, that newtown should do their work as others had done, and then salem, &c., should pay for three days at eighteen pence a man." the records of that time hold instance after instance of the old man's obstinacy and winthrop's gentle and most patient consideration. to anne, however, who came in contact only with his milder side, it was an irreparable loss, and she never spoke of him save with grateful and tender remembrance, her elegy on his death, though conventional as the time made her, being full of the sorrow time soothed but never destroyed. _to the memory of my dear and ever honoured father,_ _thomas dudley esq._ _who deceased july , , and of his age, ._ by duty bound, and not by custome led to celebrate the praises of the dead, my mournfull mind, sore prest, in trembling verse presents my lamentations at his herse, who was my father, guide, instructor too, to whom i ought whatever i could doe: nor is't relation near my hand shall tye; for who more cause to boast his worth than i? who heard or saw, observed or knew him better? or who alive then i, a greater debtor? let malice bite, and envy knaw its fill, he was my father, and ile praise him still. nor was his name, or life lead so obscure that pitty might some trumpeters procure. who after death might make him falsly seen such as in life, no man could justly deem. well known and lov'd where ere he liv'd, by most both in his native, and in foreign coast, these to the world his merits could make known, so needs no testimonial from his own; but now or never i must pay my sum; while others tell his worth, ile not be dumb: one of thy founders, him new england know, who staid thy feeble sides when thou wast low, who spent his state, his strength & years with care that after-comers in them might have a share, true patriot of this little commonweal, who is't can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal? truths friend thou wert, to errors still a foe, which caus'd apostates to maligne so. thy love to true religion e're shall shine, my fathers god, be god of me and mine, upon the earth he did not build his nest, but as a pilgrim. what he had, possest, high thoughts he gave no harbour in his heart, nor honours pufft him up, when he had part; those titles loathed, which some do too much love for truly his ambition lay above. his humble mind so lov'd humility, he left it to his race for legacy; and oft and oft, with speeches mild and wise, gave his in charge, that jewel rich to prize. no ostentation seen in all his wayes, as in the mean ones of our foolish dayes. which all they have, and more still set to view, their greatness may be judg'd by what they shew. his thoughts were more sublime, his actions wise, such vanityes he justly did despise. nor wonder 'twas, low things n'er much did move for he a mansion had, prepar'd above, for which he sigh'd and pray'd & long'd full sore he might be cloath'd upon, for evermore. oft spake of death, and with a smiling chear, he did exult his end was drawing near, now fully ripe, as shock of wheat that's grown, death as a sickle hath him timely mown, and in celestial barn hath hous'd him high, where storms, nor showrs, nor ought can damnifie. his generation serv'd, his labours cease; and to his fathers gathered is in peace. ah happy soul, 'mongst saints and angels blest, who after all his toyle, is now at rest: his hoary head in righteousness was found; as joy in heaven on earth let praise resound. forgotten never be his memory, his blessing rest on his posterity: his pious footsteps followed by his race, at last will bring us to that happy place where we with joy each other's face shall see, and parted more by death shall never be. his epitaph. within this tomb a patriot lyes that was both pious, just and wise, to truth a shield, to right a wall, to sectaryes a whip and maul, a magazine of history, a prizer of good company in manners pleasant and severe the good him lov'd, the bad did fear, and when his time with years was spent if some rejoyc'd, more did lament. of the nine children, of whom anne bradstreet was the most distinguished, the oldest son of his second wife took most important part in the colonial life. joseph dudley, who was born in , became "governor of massachusetts, lieutenant-governor of the isle of wight, and first chief-justice of new york. he had thirteen children, one of whom, paul, was also a distinguished man; being attorney-general and afterward chief-justice of massachusetts, fellow of the royal society, and founder of the dudleian lectures at harvard college." his honors came to him after the sister who prized them most had passed on to the heaven for which, even when happiest, she daily longed. none of the sons possessed the strong characteristics of the father, but sons and daughters alike seem to have inherited his love of books, as well as of hospitality, and the name for every descendant has always held honor, and often, more than fair ability. the preponderance of ministers in every generation may, also, still gladden the heart of the argumentative ancestor whose dearest pleasure was a protracted tussle with the five points, and their infinitely ramifying branches, aided and encouraged by the good wine and generous cheer he set, with special relish, before all who could meet him on his own ground. it was fortunate for the daughter that many fresh interests were springing up in her own family, which in , received a new member. one had already been added, in the person of the youngest son john, who had been born in , and was still a baby, and now marriage gave another son, who valued her almost as heartily as her own. seaborn cotton, whose name held always a reminder of the stormy days on which his eyes opened, had grown into a decorous youth, a course at harvard, and an entering of his father's profession, and though the old record holds no details, it is easy to read between the lines, the story that told itself alike to puritan and cavalier, and to which mistress dorothy listened with a flutter beneath the gray gown that could not disguise the pretty girlish outlines of her dainty figure. dorothy, as well as the other daughters, had been carefully trained in every housewifely art, and though part of her mother's store of linen bleached in lincolnshire meadows, may have helped to swell her simple outfit, it is probable that she spun and wove much of it herself. a fulling mill, where the cloth made at home was finished and pressed, had been built very early in the history of the town, and while there were "spinsters" who went from house to house, much of the work was done by mother and daughters. seaborn cotton, who must often during his courtship have ridden over from boston, found dorothy like the priscilla she may have known, busy in the graceful fashion of that older time, and-- ... as he opened the door, he beheld the form of the maiden seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle, while with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion. like priscilla, too, she must have said-- ... i knew it was you, when i heard your step in the passage, for i was thinking of you as i sat there spinning and singing. dorothy had in full her mother's power of quiet devotion, and became a model mother, as well as minister's wife, for the parish at hampton, n. h., where the young pastor began work in , and where after twenty-eight years of such labor as came to all pioneers, she passed on, leaving nine children, whose name is still a familiar one in new england. though the date of the next daughter's marriage is not quite as certain, it is given by some authorities as having taken place in the previous year, and in any case was within a few months of the same time. contrary to the usual puritan rule, which gave to most men from two to four wives, sarah outlived her first husband, and married again, when a middle-aged but still young-hearted woman. marriage inevitably held some suggestion at least of merry-making, but the ceremony had been shorn of all possible resemblance to its english form. the puritans were in terror lest any prelatical superstitions or forms should cling to them in faintest degree, and bradford wrote of the first marriage which took place in the plymouth colony: "the first marriage in this place, which, according to the laudable custom of the low countries, in which they had lived, was thought most requisite to be performed by the magistrate, as being a civil thing, ... and nowhere found in the gospel to be laid on the ministers as a part of their office." winthrop, three of whose marriages had been in the parish church of his english home, shared the same feeling, and when preparations were made for "a great marriage to be solemnized at boston," wrote: "the bridegroom being of hingham, mr. hubbard's church, he was procured to preach, and came to boston to that end. but the magistrates hearing of it, sent to him to forbear. we were not willing to bring in the english custom of ministers performing the solemnity of marriage, which sermons at such times might induce; but if any minister were present, and would bestow a word of exhortation, &c., it was permitted." fortunately for dorothy and sarah bradstreet, their father was a magistrate, and his clear and gentle eyes the only ones they were obliged to face. andover couples prefered him to any other and with reason, for while following the appointed method strictly, "giving the covenant unto the parties and also making the prayers proper for the occasion," he had no frowns for innocent enjoyment, and may even have allowed the dancing which was afterward forbidden. in the beginning, as the largest in the township, his house had probably served as stopping-place for all travellers, where they were entertained merely as a matter of courtesy, though an "inholder" or "taverner" had been appointed and liscenced for andover in . only an honored citizen could hold this office, and marriages were often celebrated in their houses, which naturally were enlarged at last to meet all necessities. but the strong liquors of the inn often circulated too freely, and quarrels and the stocks were at times the end of a day which it had been planned should hold all the merriment the puritan temper would allow. such misfortunes waited only on the humbler members of the community, who appear to have been sufficiently quarrelsome and excitable to furnish more occupiers of both pillory and stocks, than the religious character of the settlement would seem to admit, and who came to blows on the least provocation, using their fists with genuine english ardor, and submitting to punishment with composure, if only the adversary showed bruises enough for compensation. wine and beer flowed freely at both the marriages, as they did at every entertainment, but governor bradstreet, while having due liking for all good cheer, was personally so abstinent that none would be likely in his presence to forget proper bounds. ministers and laymen alike drank an amount impossible to these later days, and that if taken now would set them down as hopeless reprobates; but custom sanctioned it, though many had already found that the different climate rendered such indulgence much more hazardous than the less exhilarating one of england. as the family lessened, the mother seems to have clung even more closely to those that remained, and to have lost herself in work for and with them. whatever may have been written at this time, appears to have been destroyed, nothing remaining but the poem "contemplations," which is more truly poetry than any of its more labored predecessors, its descriptive passages holding much of the charm of the lovely landscape through which she moved to the river, flowing still through the andover meadows. contemplations. some time now past in the autumnal tide when phoebus wanted but one hour to bed the trees all richly clad, yet void of pride where gilded o're by his rich golden head. their leaves and fruits seemed painted but was true of green, of red, of yellow mixed hew, rapt were my sences at this delectable view. i wist not what to wish, yet sure thought i, if so much excellence abide below; how excellent is he that dwells on high? whose power and beauty by his works we know. sure he is goodness, wisdome, glory, light, that hath this under world so richly dight; more heaven than earth was here, no winter & no night. then on a stately oak i cast mine eye, whose ruffling top the clouds seemed to aspire; how long since thou wast in thine infancy? thy strength and stature, more thy years admire. hath hundred winters past since thou wast born? or thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn, if so, all these as nought, eternity doth scorn. then higher on the glistening sun i gazed, whose beams was shaded by the leavie tree, the more i looked, the more i grew amazed, and softly said, what glory's like to thee? soul of this world, this universes eye had i not, better known, (alas) the same had i. thou as a bridegroom from thy chamber rushes and as a strong man, joyes to run a race, the morn doth usher thee with smiles and blushes the earth reflects her glances in thy face. birds, insects, animals with vegetive, thy heart from death and dulness doth revive: and in the darksome womb of fruitful nature dive. thy swift annual and diurnal course, thy daily streight and yearly oblique path. thy pleasing fervor and thy scorching force, all mortals here the feeling knowledg hath. thy presence makes it day thy absence night, quaternal seasons caused by thy might; hail creature full of sweetness, beauty and delight. art them so full of glory, that no eye hath strength, thy shining rayes once to behold? and is thy splendid throne erect so high? as to approach it can no earthly mould. how full of glory then must thy creator be? who gave this bright light luster unto thee, admir'd, ador'd for ever, be that majesty. silent alone, where none or saw or heard, in pathless paths i lead my wandering feet; my humble eyes to lofty skyes i rear'd, to sing some song my mazed muse thought meet. my great creator i would magnifie, that nature had thus decked liberally; but ah, and ah, again my imbecility. the reader who may be disposed to echo this last line must bear in mind always, that stilted as much of this may seem, it was in the day in which it appeared a more purely natural voice than had been heard at all, and as the poem proceeds it gains both in force and beauty. as usual she reverts to the past for illustrations and falls into a meditation aroused by the sights and sounds about her. the path has led to the meadows not far from the river, where-- i heard the merry grasshopper then sing, the black-clad cricket, bear a second part, they kept one tune and plaid on the same string, seeming to glory in their little art. shall creatures abject, thus their voices raise? and in their kind resound their makers praise, whilst i as mute, can warble forth no higher layes. * * * * * when present times look back to ages past, and men in being fancy those are dead, it makes things gone perpetually to last, and calls back moneths and years that long since fled. it makes a man more aged in conceit, then was methuselah, or's grandsire great; while of their persons & their acts his mind doth treat. * * * * * sometimes in eden fair, he seems to be, sees glorious adam there made lord of all, fancyes the apple, dangle on the tree, that turn'd his sovereign to a naked thral, who like a miscreant's driven from that place, to get his bread with pain and sweat of face a penalty impos'd on his backsliding race. * * * * * here sits our grandame in retired place, and in her lap, her bloody cain new-born, the weeping imp oft looks her in the face, bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn; his mother sighs to think of paradise, and how she lost her bliss to be more wise, beleiving him that was, and is father of lyes. * * * * * here cain and abel came to sacrifice, fruits of the earth and fallings each do bring, on abels gift the fire descends from skies, but no such sign on false cain's offering; with sullen, hateful looks he goes his wayes; hath thousand thoughts to end his brothers dayes, upon whose blood his future good he hopes to raise. * * * * * there abel keeps his sheep no ill he thinks, his brother comes, then acts his fratracide the virgin earth, of blood her first draught drinks, but since that time she often hath been clay'd; the wretch with gastly face and dreadful mind, thinks each he sees will serve him in his kind, though none on earth but kindred near, then could he find. * * * * * who fancyes not his looks now at the barr, his face like death, his heart with horror fraught, nor male-factor ever felt like warr, when deep dispair with wish of life hath fought, branded with guilt, and crusht with treble woes, a vagabond to land of nod he goes; a city builds, that wals might him secure from foes. * * * * * who thinks not oft upon the father's ages. their long descent, how nephews sons they saw, the starry observations of those sages, and how their precepts to their sons were law, how adam sigh'd to see his progeny, cloath'd all in his black sinful livery, who neither guilt, nor yet the punishment could fly. * * * * * our life compare we with their length of dayes who to the tenth of theirs doth now arrive? and though thus short, we shorten many wayes, living so little while we are alive; in eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight, so unawares comes on perpetual night, and puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight. * * * * * when i behold the heavens as in their prime, and then the earth, (though old) stil clad in green the stones and trees insensible of time, nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; if winter come and greeness then do fade, a spring returns, and they more youthfull made; but man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid. * * * * * by birth more noble then those creatures all, yet seems by nature and by custome curs'd, no sooner born, but grief and care makes fall, that state obliterate he had at first: nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again, nor habitations long their names retain, but in oblivion to the final day remain. * * * * * shall i then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth, because their beauty and their strength last longer shall i wish there, or never to have had birth, because they're bigger & their bodyes stronger? nay, they shall darken, perish, fade and dye, and when unmade, so ever shall they lye, but man was made for endless immortality. here at last she is released from the didactic. she can look at the sun without feeling it necessary to particularize her knowledge of its-- "... swift annual and diurnal course, thy daily streight and yearly oblique path." imagination has been weighted by the innumerable details, more and more essential to the puritan mind, but now she draws one long free breath, and rises far beyond the petty limit of her usual thought, the italicised lines in what follows holding a music one may seek for in vain in any other verse of the period: under the cooling shadow of a stately elm, close sate i by a goodly rivers side, where gliding streams the rocks did overwhelm; a lonely place with pleasures dignifi'd, i once that lov'd the shady woods so well, now thought the rivers did the trees excel, and if the sun would ever shine there would i dwell. * * * * * while on the stealing stream i fixt mine eye, which to the longed-for ocean held its course, i markt not crooks, nor rubs that there did lye could hinder ought but still augment its force, _o happy flood, quoth i, that holds thy race till thou arrive at thy beloved place, nor is it rocks or shoals that can obstruct thy pace_. * * * * * nor is't enough that thou alone may'st slide, but hundred brooks in thy cleer waves do meet, so hand in hand along with thee they glide to thetis house, where all embrace and greet: thou emblem true of what i count the best, o could i lead my rivolets to rest, so may we press to that vast mansion, ever blest. * * * * * ye fish which in this liquid region 'bide, that for each season have your habitation, now salt, now fresh where you think best to glide, to unknown coasts to give a visitation, in lakes and ponds you leave your numerous fry, so nature taught, and yet you know not why, you watry folk that know not your felicity. * * * * * look how the wantons frisk to taste the air, then to the colder bottome streight they dive, eftsoon to neptun's glassie hall repair, to see what trade they great ones there do drive who forrage ore the spacious, sea-green field, and take the trembling prey before it yield, whose armour is their scales, their spreading fins their shield. * * * * * while musing thus with contemplation fed, and thousand fancies buzzing in my brain, the sweet tongu'd philomel percht ore my head, and chanted forth a most melodious strain, which rapt me so with wonder and delight, i judg'd my hearing better then my sight, and wisht me wings with her awhile to take my flight. * * * * * o merry bird (said i) that fears no snares, that neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn, feels no sad thoughts, no cruciating cares to gain more good, or shun what might thee harm. thy cloaths ne're wear, thy meat is everywhere, thy bed a bough, thy drink the water deer, reminds not what is past nor whats to come dost fear. * * * * * _the dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent, sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew, so each one tunes his pretty instrument, and warbling out the old, begin anew, and thus they pass their youth in summer season, then follow thee into a better region, where winter's never felt in that sweet airy legion_. * * * * * up to this point natural delight in the sights and sounds of a summer's day has had its way, and undoubtedly struck her as far too much enjoyment for any sinful worm of the dust. she proceeds, therefore, to chasten her too exuberant muse, presenting for that sorely-tried damsel's inspection, the portrait of man, as calvin had taught her to view him. * * * * * man at the best a creature frail and vain, in knowledg ignorant, in strength but weak, subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain, each storm his state, his mind, his body break, from some of these he never finds cessation but day or night, within, without, vexation, troubles from foes, from friends, from dearest nears't relation. * * * * * and yet this sinfull creature, frail and vain, this lump of wretchedness, of sin and sorrow, this weather-beaten vessel wrackt with pain, joyes not in hope of an eternal morrow; nor all his losses crosses and vexations in weight and frequency and long duration, can make him deeply groan for that divine translation. * * * * * the mariner that on smooth waves doth glide, sings merrily and steers his barque with ease, as if he had command of wind and tide, and now become great master of the seas; but suddenly a storm spoiles all the sport, and makes him long for a more quiet port, which 'gainst all adverse winds may serve for fort. * * * * * so he that saileth in this world of pleasure, feeding on sweets, that never bit of th' sowre, that's full of friends, of honour and of treasure, fond fool, he takes this earth even for heav'n's bower. but sad affliction comes & makes him see, here's neither honour, wealth nor safety, only above is found all with security. * * * * * o time the fatal wrack of mortal things, that draws oblivion's curtain over kings, their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, their names without a record are forgot, their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust, nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust; but he whose name is grav'd in the white stone shall last and shine when all of these are gone. with this poem, anne bradstreet seems to have bidden a final farewell to any attempt at sustained composition. a sense of disgust at the poor result of long thought and labor appears to have filled her, and this mood found expression in a deprecating little poem in which humor struggles with this oppressive sense of deficiency and incompleteness, the inclination on the whole, however, as with most authors, being toward a lenient judgment of her own inadequate accomplishment. the author to her book. thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain, who after birth didst by my side remain, till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then true who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view, made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudg, where errors were not lessened (all may judg) at thy return my blushing was not small, my rambling brat (in print,) should mother call, i cast thee by as one unfit for light, thy visage was so irksome in my sight; yet being mine own, at length affection would thy blemishes amend, if so i could: i wash'd thy face, but more defects i saw, and rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. i stretcht thy joynts to make thee even feet, yet still thou run'st more hobling then is meet; in better dress to trim thee was my mind, but nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house i find in this array, mong'st vulgars mayst thou roam in critick's hands, beware thou dost not come; and take thy way where yet thou art not known, if for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none; and for thy mother, she alas is poor. which caused her thus to turn thee out of door. chapter xiv. the legacy. though it was only as a poet that anne bradstreet was known to her own time, her real strength was in prose, and the "meditations, divine and morall," written at the request of her second son, the rev. simon bradstreet, to whom she dedicated them, march , , show that life had taught her much, and in the ripened thought and shrewd observation of men and manners are the best testimony to her real ability. for the reader of to-day they are of incomparably more interest than anything to be found in the poems. there is often the most condensed and telling expression; a swift turn that shows what power of description lay under all the fantastic turns of the style du bartas had created for her. that he underrated them was natural. the poems had brought her honor in the old home and the new. the meditations involved no anxious laboring after a rhyme, no straining a metaphor till it cracked. they were natural thought naturally expressed and therefore worthless for any literary purpose, and as she wrote, the wail of the preacher repeated itself, and she smiled faintly as the words grew under her pen: "there is no new thing under the sun, there is nothing that can be sayd or done, but either that or something like it hath been done and sayd before." many of the paragraphs written in pain and weakness show how keenly she had watched the course of events, and what power of characterization she had to use, three of them especially holding the quiet sarcasm in which she occasionally indulged, though always with a tacit apology for the possession of such a quality. "dimne eyes are the concomitants of old age; and short-sightednes in those that are eyes of a republique, foretells a declineing state." "authority without wisdome, is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." "ambitious men are like hops that never rest climbing so long as they have anything to stay upon; but take away their props, and they are of all, the most dejected." the perpetual dissensions, religious and political, which threatened at times the absolute destruction of the colony, were all familiar to her, and she draws upon them for illustrations of many points, others being afforded by her own experience with the eight children to whom she proved so devoted and tender a mother. like other mothers, before and since, their differences in temperament and conduct, seem to have been a perpetual surprise, but that she had tact enough to meet each on his or her own ground, or gently draw them toward hers, seems evident at every point. that they loved her tenderly is equally evident, the diary of her second son mentioning her always as "my dear and honored mother," and all of them, though separated by early marriages for most of them, returning as often as practicable to the old roof, under which thanksgiving day had taken on the character it has held from that clay to this. the small blank-book which held these "meditations" was copied carefully by simon bradstreet, and there is little doubt that each of the children did the same, considering it as much theirs as the brother's for whom it was originally intended. whatever anne bradstreet did, she had her children always in view, and still another blank-book partially filled with religious reflections, and found among her papers after death, was dedicated, "to my dear children." the father probably kept the originals, but her words were too highly valued, not to have been eagerly desired by all. a special word to her son opens the series of "meditations." for my deare sonne simon bradstreet. parents perpetuate their lines in their posterity, and their maners in their imitation. children do naturally rather follow the failings than the virtues of their predecessors, but i am persuaded better things of you. you once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more. i could think of nothing more fit for you, nor of more ease to my selfe, than these short meditations following. such as they are i bequeath to you: small legacys are accepted by true friends, much more by dutiful children. i have avoyded incroaching upon others conceptions, because i would leave you nothing but myne owne, though in value they fall short of all in this kinde, yet i presume they will be better priz'd by you for the author's sake. the lord blesse you with grace heer, and crown you with glory heerafter, that i may meet you with rejoyceing at that great day of appearing, which is the continuall prayer of your affectionate mother, a. b. march , . meditations, divine and morall. i. there is no object that we see; no action that we doe; no good that we injoy; no evill that we feele or feare, but we may make some spiritu(a)ll, advantage of all: and he that makes such improvement is wise as well as pious. ii. many can speak well, but few can do well. we are better scholars in the theory then the practique part, but he is a true christian that is a proficient in both. iii. youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age. he that hath nothing to feed on but vanity and lyes must needs lye down in the bed of sorrow. iv. a ship that beares much saile, and little or no ballast, is easily overset; and that man, whose head hath great abilities, and his heart little or no grace, is in danger of foundering. v. it is reported of the peakcock that, prideing himself in his gay feathers, he ruffles them up; but, spying his black feet, he soon lets fall his plumes, so he that glorys in his gifts and adornings should look upon his corruptions, and that will damp his high thoughts. vi. the finest bread hath the least bran; the purest hony, the least wax; and the sincerest christian, the least self love. vii. the hireling that labors all the day, comforts himself that when night comes he shall both take his rest and receive his reward; the painfull christian that hath wrought hard in god's vineyard, and hath born the heat and drought of the day, when he perceives his sun apace to decline, and the shadows of his evening to be stretched out, lifts up his head with joy, knowing his refreshing is at hand. viii. downny beds make drosey persons, but hard lodging keeps the eyes open. a prosperous state makes a secure christian, but adversity makes him consider. ix. sweet words are like hony, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach. x. diverse children have their different natures; some are like flesh which nothing but salt will keep from putrefaction; some again like tender fruits that are best preserved with sugar: those parents are wise that can fit their nurture according to their nature. xi. that town which thousands of enemys without hath not been able to take, hath been delivered up by one traytor within; and that man, which all the temptations of sathan without could not hurt, hath been foild by one lust within. xii. authority without wisdome is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. xiii. the reason why christians are so both to exchange this world for a better, is because they have more sence than faith: they se what they injoy, they do but hope for that which is to come. xiv. if we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes tast of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. xv. a low man can goe upright under that door wher a taller is glad to stoop; so a man of weak faith, and mean abilities may undergo a crosse more patiently than he that excells him, both in gifts and graces. xvi. that house which is not often swept, makes the cleanly inhabitant soone loath it, and that heart which is not continually purifieing itself, is no fit temple for the spirit of god to dwell in. xvii. few men are so humble as not to be proud of their abilitys; and nothing will abase them more than this--what hast thou, but what thou hast received? come, give an account of thy stewardship. xviii. he that will undertake to climb up a steep mountain with a great burden on his back, will finde it a wearysome, if not an impossible task; so he that thinks to mount to heaven clog'd with the cares and riches of this life, 'tis no wonder if he faint by the way. xix. corne, till it has passed through the mill and been ground to powder, is not fit for bread. god so deales with his servants: he grindes them with grief and pain till they turn to dust, and then are they fit manchet for his mansion. xx god hath sutable comforts and supports for his children according to their severall conditions if he will make his face to shine upon them: he then makes them lye down in green pastures, and leads them beside the still waters: if they stick in deepe mire and clay, and all his waves and billows goe over their heads, he then leads them to the rock which is higher than they. xxi. he that walks among briars and thorns will be very carefull where he sets his foot. and he that passes through the wilderness of this world, had need ponder all his steps. xxii. want of prudence, as well as piety, hath brought men into great inconveniencys; but he that is well stored with both, seldom is so insnared. xxiii. the skillfull fisher hath his severall baits for severall fish, but there is a hooke under all; satan, that great angler, hath his sundry bait for sundry tempers of men, which they all catch gredily at, but few perceives the hook till it be too late. xxiv. there is no new thing under the sun, there is nothing that can be sayd or done, but either that or something like it hath been both done and sayd before. xxv. an akeing head requires a soft pillow; and a drooping heart a strong support. xxvi. a sore finger may disquiet the whole body, but an ulcer within destroys it: so an enemy without may disturb a commonwealth, but dissentions within overthrow it. xxvii. it is a pleasant thing to behold the light, but sore eyes are not able to look upon it; the pure in heart shall see god, but the defiled in conscience shall rather choose to be buried under rocks and mountains then to behold the presence of the lamb. xxviii. wisedome with an inheritance is good, but wisedome without an inheritance is better then an inheritance without wisedome. xxix. lightening doth generally preceed thunder, and stormes, raine; and stroaks do not often fall till after threat'ning. xxx. yellow leaves argue the want of sap, and gray haires want of moisture; so dry and saplesse performances are symptoms of little spirituall vigor. xxxi. iron till it be thoroughly heat is uncapable to be wrought; so god sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction, and then beats them on his anvile into what frame he pleases. xxxii. ambitious men are like hops that never rest climbing soe long as they have anything to stay upon; but take away their props and they are, of all, the most dejected. xxxiii. much labour wearys the body, and many thoughts oppresse the minde: man aimes at profit by the one, and content in the other; but often misses of both, and findes nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. xxxiv. dimne eyes are the concomitants of old age; and short-sightednes, in those that are eyes of a republique, foretells a declineing state. xxxv. we read in scripture of three sorts of arrows--the arrow of an enemy, the arrow of pestilence, and the arrow of a slanderous tongue; the two first kill the body, the last the good name; the two former leave a man when he is once dead, but the last mangles him in his grave. xxxvi. sore labourers have hard hands, and old sinners have brawnie consciences. xxxvii. wickednes comes to its height by degrees. he that dares say of a lesse sin, is it not a little one? will ere long say of a greater, tush, god regards it not! xxxviii. some children are hardly weaned, although the breast be rub'd with wormwood or mustard, they will either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together; so is it with some christians, let god embitter all the sweets of this life, that so they might feed upon more substantiall food, yet they are so childishly sottish that they are still huging and sucking these empty brests, that god is forced to hedg up their way with thornes, or lay affliction on their loynes, that so they might shake hands with the world before it bid them farewell xxxix. a prudent mother will not clothe her little childe with a long and cumbersome garment; she easily forsees what events it is like to produce, at the best but falls and bruises, or perhaps somewhat worse, much more will the alwise god proportion his dispensations according to the stature and strength of the person he bestows them on. larg indowments of honor, wealth, or a helthfull body would quite overthrow some weak christian, therefore god cuts their garments short, to keep them in such trim that they might run the wayes of his commandment. xl. the spring is a lively emblem of the resurrection. after a long winter we se the leavlesse trees and dry stocks (at the approach of the sun) to resume their former vigor and beauty in a more ample manner then what they lost in the autumn; so shall it be at that great day after a long vacation, when the sun of righteousness shall appear, those dry bones shall arise in far more glory then that which they lost at their creation, and in this transcends the spring, that their leafe shall never faile, nor their sap decline. xli. a wise father will not lay a burden on a child of seven yeares old, which he knows is enough for one of twice his strength, much less will our heavenly father (who knows our mould) lay such afflictions upon his weak children as would crush them to the dust, but according to the strength he will proportion the load, as god hath his little children so he hath his strong men, such as are come to a full stature in christ; and many times he imposes waighty burdens on their shoulders, and yet they go upright under them, but it matters not whether the load be more or less if god afford his help. xlii. i have seen an end of all perfection (sayd the royall prophet); but he never sayd, i have seen an end of all sinning: what he did say, may be easily sayd by many; but what he did not say, cannot truly be uttered by any. xliii. fire hath its force abated by water, not by wind; and anger must be alayed by cold words, and not by blustering threats. xliv. a sharp appetite and a thorough concoction, is a signe of an healthfull body; so a quick reception, and a deliberate cogitation, argues a sound mind. xlv. we often se stones hang with drops, not from any innate moisture, but from a thick ayer about them; so may we sometime se marble- hearted sinners seem full of contrition; but it is not from any dew of grace within, but from some black clouds that impends them, which produces these sweating effects. xlvi. the words of the wise, sath solomon, are as nailes and as goads both used for contrary ends--the one holds fast, the other puts forward; such should be the precepts of the wise masters of assemblys to their hearers, not only to bid them hold fast the form of sound doctrin, but also, so to run that they might obtain. xlvii. a shadow in the parching sun, and a shelter in the blustering storme, are of all seasons the most welcome; so a faithfull friend in time of adversity, is of all other most comfortable. xlviii. there is nothing admits of more admiration, then god's various dispensation of his gifts among the sons of men, betwixt whom he hath put so vast a disproportion that they scarcely seem made of the same lump, or sprung out of the loynes of one adam; some set in the highest dignity that mortality is capable of; and some again so base, that they are viler then the earth; some so wise and learned, that they seem like angells among men; and some again so ignorant and sotish, that they are more like beasts then men: some pious saints; some incarnate devils; some exceeding beautyfull; and some extreamly deformed; some so strong and healthfull that their bones are full of marrow; and their breasts of milk; and some again so weak and feeble, that, while they live, they are accounted among the dead--and no other reason can be given of all this, but so it pleased him, whose will is the perfect rule of righteousness. xlix. the treasures of this world may well be compared to huskes, for they have no kernell in them, and they that feed upon them, may soon stuffe their throats, but cannot fill their bellys; they may be choaked by them, but cannot be satisfied with them. l. sometimes the sun is only shadowed by a cloud that wee cannot se his luster, although we may walk by his light, but when he is set we are in darkness till he arise again; so god doth sometime vaile his face but for a moment, that we cannot behold the light of his countenance as at some other time, yet he affords so much light as may direct our way, that we may go forward to the citty of habitation, but when he seems to set and be quite gone out of sight, then must we needs walk in darkness and se no light, yet then must we trust in the lord, and stay upon our god, and when the morning (which is the appointed time) is come, the sun of righteousness will arise with healing in his wings. li. the eyes and the eares are the inlets or doores of the soule, through which innumerable objects enter, yet is not that spacious roome filled, neither doth it ever say it is enough, but like the daughters of the horsleach, crys, give, give! and which is most strang, the more it receives, the more empty it finds itself, and sees an impossibility, ever to be filled, but by him in whom all fullness dwells. lii. had not the wisest of men taught us this lesson, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, yet our owne experience would soon have speld it out; for what do we obtain of all these things, but it is with labour and vexation? when we injoy them it is with vanity and vexation; and, if we loose them, then they are lesse then vanity and more then vexation.: so that we have good cause often to repeat that sentence, vanity of vanityes, vanity of vanityes, all is vanity. liii. he that is to saile into a farre country, although the ship, cabbin and provision, be all convenient and comfortable for him, yet he hath no desire to make that his place of residence, but longs to put in at that port where his bussines lyes; a christian is sailing through this world unto his heavenly country, and heere he hath many conveniences and comforts; but he must beware of desire(ing) to make this the place of his abode, lest he meet with such tossings that may cause him to long for shore before he sees land. we must, therefore, be beer as strangers and pilgrims, that we may plainly declare that we seek a citty above, and wait all the dayes of our appointed time till our chang shall come. liv. he that never felt what it was to be sick or wounded, doth not much care for the company of the physitian or chirurgian; but if he perceive a malady that threatens him with death, he will gladly entertaine him, whom he slighted before: so he that never felt the sicknes of sin, nor the wounds of a guilty conscience, cares not how far he keeps from him that hath skill to cure it; but when he findes his diseases to disrest him, and that he must needs perish if he have no remedy, will unfeignedly bid him welcome that brings a plaister for his sore, or a cordiall for his fainting. lv. we read of ten lepers that were cleansed, but of one that returned thanks: we are more ready to receive mercys than we are to acknowledg them: men can use great importunity when they are in distresses, and show great ingratitude after their successes; but he that ordereth his conversation aright, will glorifie him that heard him in the day of his trouble. lvi. the remembrances of former deliverances is a great support in present distresses: he that delivered me, sath david, from the paw of the lion and the paw of the beare, will deliver mee from this uncircumcised philistin; and he that hath delivered mee, saith paul, will deliver mee: god is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; we are the same that stand in need of him, to-day as well as yesterday, and so shall forever. lvii. great receipts call for great returnes; the more that any man is intrusted withall, the larger his accounts stands upon god's score: it therefore behoves every man so to improve his talents, that when his great master shall call him to reckoning he may receive his owne with advantage. lviii. sin and shame ever goe together. he that would be freed from the last, must be sure to shun the company of the first. lix. god doth many times both reward and punish for the same action: as we see in jehu, he is rewarded with a kingdome to the fourth generation, for takeing veangence on the house of ahab; and yet a little while (saith god), and i will avenge the blood of jezevel upon the house of jehu: he was rewarded for the matter, and yet punished for the manner, which should warn him, that doth any speciall service for god, to fixe his eye on the command, and not on his own ends, lest he meet with jehu's reward, which will end in punishment. lx. he that would be content with a mean condition, must not cast his eye upon one that is in a far better estate than himself, but let him look upon him that is lower than he is, and, if he see that such a one beares poverty comfortably, it will help to quiet him; but if that will not do, let him look on his owne unworthynes, and that will make him say with jacob, i am lesse then the least of thy mercys. lxi. corne is produced with much labour, (as the husbandman well knowes), and some land askes much more paines then some other doth to be brought into tilth, yet all must be ploughed and harrowed; some children (like sowre land) are of so tough and morose a dispo(si)tion, that the plough of correction must make long furrows on their back, and the harrow of discipline goe often over them, before they bee fit soile to sow the seed of morality, much lesse of grace in them. but when by prudent nurture they are brought into a fit capacity, let the seed of good instruction and exhortation be sown in the spring of their youth, and a plentiful! crop may be expected in the harvest of their yeares. lxii. as man is called the little world, so his heart may be cal'd the little commonwealth: his more fixed and resolved thoughts are like to inhabitants, his slight and flitting thoughts are like passengers that travell to and fro continually; here is also the great court of justice erected, which is always kept by conscience who is both accuser, excuser, witness, and judge, whom no bribes can pervert, nor flattery cause to favour, but as he finds the evidence, so he absolves or condemnes: yea, so absolute is this court of judicature, that there is no appeale from it--no, not to the court of heaven itself--for if our conscience condemn us, he, also, who is greater than our conscience, will do it much more; but he that would have boldness to go to the throne of grace to be accepted there, must be sure to carry a certificate from the court of conscience, that he stands right there. lxiii. he that would keep a pure heart, and lead a blameless life, must set himself alway in the awefull presence of god, the consideration of his all-seeing eye will be a bridle to restrain from evill, and a spur to quicken on to good duties: we certainly dream of some remotenes betwixt god and us, or else we should not so often faile in our whole course of life as we doe; but he that with david sets the lord alway in his sight, will not sinne against him. lxiv. we see in orchards some trees so fruitful, that the waight of their burden is the breaking of their limbs; some again are but meanly loaden; and some among them are dry stocks: so it is in the church, which is god's orchard, there are some eminent christians that are soe frequent in good dutys, that many times the waight thereof impares both their bodys and estates; and there are some (and they sincere ones too) who have not attained to that fruitfullness, altho they aime at perfection: and again there are others that have nothing to commend them but only a gay profession, and these are but leavie christians, which are in as much danger of being cut down as the dry stock, for both cumber the ground. lxv. we see in the firmament there is but one sun among a multitude of starres, and those starres also to differ much one from the other in regard of bignes and brightnes, yet all receive their light from that one sun: so is it in the church both militant and triumphant, there is but one christ, who is the sun of righteousnes, in the midst of an innumerable company of saints and angels; those saints have their degrees even in this life, some are stars of the first magnitude, and some of a lesse degree; and others (and they indeed the most in number), but small and obscure, yet all receive their luster (be it more or less) from that glorious sun that inlightenes all in all; and, if some of them shine so bright while they move on earth, how transcendently splendid shall they be when they are fixt in their heavenly spheres! lxvi. men that have walked very extravagantly, and at last bethink themselves of turning to god, the first thing which they eye, is how to reform their ways rather than to beg forgivenes for their sinnes; nature lookes more at a compensation than at a pardon; but he that will not come for mercy without mony and without price, but bring his filthy raggs to barter for it, shall meet with miserable disapointment, going away empty, beareing the reproach of his pride and folly. lxvii. all the works and doings of god are wonderfull, but none more awfull than his great worke of election and reprobation; when we consider how many good parents have had bad children, and againe how many bad parents have had pious children, it should make us adore the soverainty of god who will not be tyed to time nor place, nor yet to persons, but takes and chuses when and where and whom he pleases: it should alsoe teach the children of godly parents to walk with feare and trembling, lest they, through unbeleif, fall short of a promise: it may also be a support to such as have or had wicked parents, that, if they abide not in unbeleif, god is able to grasse them in: the upshot of all should make us, with the apostle, to admire the justice and mercy of god, and say, how unsearchable are his wayes, and his footsteps past finding out. lxviii. the gifts that god bestows on the sons of men, are not only abused, but most commonly imployed for a clean contrary end, then that which might be so many steps to draw men to god in consideration of his bounty towards them, but have driven them the further from him, that they are ready to say, we are lords, we will come no more at thee. if outward blessings be not as wings to help us mount upwards, they will certainly prove clogs and waights that will pull us lower downward. lxix. all the comforts of this life may be compared to the gourd of jonah, that notwithstanding we take great delight for a season in them, and find their shadow very comfortable, yet their is some worm or other of discontent, of feare, or greife that lyes at root, which in great part withers the pleasure which else we should take in them; and well it is that we perceive a decay in their greennes, for were earthly comforts permanent, who would look for heavenly? lxx. all men are truly sayd to be tenants at will, and it may as truly be sayd, that all have a lease of their lives--some longer, some shorter--as it pleases our great landlord to let. all have their bounds set, over which they cannot passe, and till the expiration of that time, no dangers, no sicknes, no paines nor troubles, shall put a period to our dayes; the certainty that that time will come, together with the uncertainty how, where, and when, should make us so to number our days as to apply our hearts to wisedome, that when wee are put out of these houses of clay, we may be sure of an everlasting habitation that fades not away. lxxi. all weak and diseased bodys have hourly mementos of their mortality. but the soundest of men have likewise their nightly monitor by the embleam of death, which is their sleep (for so is death often called), and not only their death, but their grave is lively represented before their eyes, by beholding their bed; the morning may mind them of the resurrection; and the sun approaching, of the appearing of the sun of righteousnes, at whose comeing they shall all rise out of their beds, the long night shall fly away, and the day of eternity shall never end: seeing these things must be, what manner of persons ought we to be, in all good conversation? lxxii. as the brands of a fire, if once feverered, will of themselves goe out, altho you use no other meanes to extinguish them, so distance of place, together with length of time (if there be no intercourse) will cool the affectiones of intimate friends, though tjere should be no displeasance between them. lxxiii. a good name is as a precious oyntment, and it is a great favor to have a good repute among good men; yet it is not that which commends us to god, for by his ballance we must be weighed, and by his judgment we must be tryed, and, as he passes the sentence, so shall we stand. lxxiv. well doth the apostle call riches deceitfull riches, and they may truely be compared to deceitfull friends who speake faire, and promise much, but perform nothing, and so leave those in the lurch that most relyed on them: so is it with the wealth, honours, and pleasures of this world, which miserably delude men, and make them put great confidence in them, but when death threatens, and distresse lays hold upon them, they prove like the reeds of egipt that peirce instead of supporting, like empty wells in the time of drought, that those that go to finde water in them, return with their empty pitchers ashamed. lxxv. it is admirable to consider the power of faith, by which all things are (almost) possible to be done; it can remove mountaines (if need were) it hath stayd the course of the sun, raised the dead, cast out divels, reversed the order of nature, quenched the violence of the fire, made the water become firme footing for peter to walk on; nay more than all these, it hath overcome the omnipotent himself, as when moses intercedes for the people, god sath to him, let me alone that i may destroy them, as if moses had been able, by the hand of faith, to hold the everlasting arms of the mighty god of jacob; yea, jacob himself, when he wrestled with god face to face in peniel: let me go! sath that angell. i will not let thee go, replys jacob, till thou blesse me, faith is not only thus potent, but it is so necessary that without faith there is no salvation, therefore, with all our seekings and gettings, let us above all seek to obtain this pearle of prise. lxxvi. some christians do by their lusts and corruptions as the isralits did by the canaanites, not destroy them, but put them under tribute, for that they could do (as they thought) with lesse hazard, and more profit; but what was the issue? they became a snare unto them, prickes in their eyes, and thornes in their sides, and at last overcame them, and kept them under slavery; so it is most certain that those that are disobedient to the commandment of god, and endeavour not to the utmost to drive out all their accursed inmates, but make a league with them, they shall at last fall into perpetuall bondage under them, unlesse the great deliverer, christ jesus come to their rescue. lxxvii. god hath by his providence so ordered, that no one country hath all commoditys within itself, but what it wants, another shall supply, that so there may be a mutuall commerce through the world. as it is with countrys so it is with men, there was never yet any one man that had all excellences, let his parts, naturall and acquired, spirituall and morall, be never so large, yet he stands in need of something which another man hath, (perhaps meaner than himself,) which shows us perfection is not below, as also, that god will have us beholden one to another. chapter xv. the puritan reign of terror. the ten years which followed the death of governor winthrop early in , were years of steady outward prosperity, yet causes were at work, which gradually complicated the political situation and prepared the necessity for the explanation which the mother country at last peremptorily demanded, simon bradstreet being selected as one of the men most capable of suitable reply. so long as winthrop lived, his even and sagacious course hindered many complications which every circumstance fostered. even in the fierce dissensions over anne hutchinson and her theories, he had still been able to retain the personal friendship of those whom as a magistrate he had most severely judged. wheelwright and coddington, who had suffered many losses; sir harry vane, who had returned to england sore and deeply indignant at the colonial action; clark and williams, bitter as they might be against massachusetts principles, had only affection for the gracious and humane governor, who gave himself as freely as he gave his fortune, and whose theories, however impracticable they may at times have seemed, have all justified themselves in later years. through the early privations and the attempts of some to escape the obligations laid upon them, by the mere fact of having come together to the unknown country, he set his face steadily against all division, and there is no more characteristic passage in his journal than that in which he gives the reasons which should bind them to common and united action. various disaffected and uneasy souls had wandered off to other points, and winthrop gives the results, at first quietly and judicially, but rising at the close to a noble indignation. "others who went to other places, upon like grounds, succeeded no better. they fled for fear of want, and many of them fell into it, even to extremity, as if they had hastened into the misery which they feared and fled from, besides the depriving themselves of the ordinances and church fellowship, and those civil liberties which they enjoyed here; whereas, such as staid in their places kept their peace and ease, and enjoyed still the blessing of the ordinances, and never tasted of those troubles and miseries, which they heard to have befallen those who departed. much disputation there was about liberty of removing for outward advantages, and all ways were sought for an open door to get out at; but it is to be feared many crept out at a broken wall. for such as come together into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beast-like men, and there confederate together in civil and church estate, whereby they do, implicitly at least, bind themselves to support each other, and all of them that society, whether civil or sacred, whereof they are members, how they can break from this without free consent, is hard to find, so as may satisfy a tender or good conscience in time of trial. ask thy conscience, if thou wouldst have plucked up thy stakes, and brought thy family miles, if thou hadst expected that all, or most, would have forsaken thee there. ask again, what liberty thou hast towards others, which thou likest not to allow others towards thyself; for if one may go, another may, and so the greater part, and so church and commonwealth may be left destitute in a wilderness, exposed to misery and reproach, and all for thy ease and pleasure, whereas these all, being now thy brethren, as near to thee as the israelites were to moses, it were much safer for thee after his example, to choose rather to suffer affliction with thy brethren than to enlarge thy ease and pleasure by furthering the occasion of their ruin." what he demanded of others he gave freely himself, and no long time was required to prove to all, that union was their only salvation. he had lived to see the spirit of co-operation active in many ways. churches were quietly doing their work with as little wrangling over small doctrinal differences as could be expected from an age in which wrangling was the chief symptom of vitality. education had settled upon a basis it has always retained, that of "universal knowledge at the public cost"; the college was doing its work so effectually that students came from england itself to share in her privileges, and justice gave as impartial and even- handed results as conscientious magistrates knew how to furnish. the strenuous needs and sacrifices of the early days were over. a generation had arisen, knowing them only by hearsay, and for even the humblest, substantial prosperity was the rule. johnson, in his "wonder-working providence," wrote words that held no exaggeration in their description of the comfort which has, from that day to this, been the characteristic of new england homes. "the lord hath been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the english dwelt in at their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built houses, well furnished many of them, together with orchards, filled with goodly fruit-trees, and gardens with variety of flowers.... there are many hundreds of laboring men, who had not enough to bring them over, yet now, worth scores, and some, hundreds of pounds. the lord whose promises are large to his sion, hath blessed his people's provision, and satisfied her poor with bread, in a very little space. everything in the country proved a staple commodity. and those who were formerly forced to fetch most of the bread they eat, and the beer they drink, a thousand leagues by sea, are, through the blessing of the lord, so increased, that they have not only fed their elder sisters, virginia, barbadoes and many of the summer islands, that were preferred before her for fruitfulness, but also the grandmother of us all, even the fertile isle of great britain." with such conditions the colonists were happy, and as the work of their hands prospered, one might have thought that gentler modes of judgment would have grown with it, and toleration if not welcome have been given to the few dissenting minds that appeared among them. had winthrop lived, this might have been possible, but the new generation, fast replacing the early rulers, had their prejudices but not their experience, and were as fierce opponents of any new _ism_ as their fathers had been before them, while their rash action often complicated the slower and more considerate movements of the elders that remained. for england the ten years in which the colony had made itself a power, had been filled with more and more agitation and distress. there was little time for attention to anything but their own difficulties and perplexities, the only glances across seas being those of distrust and jealousy. winthrop happily died before the news of the beheadal of charles i. had reached new england, and for a time, cromwell was too busy with the reduction of ireland and the problem of government suddenly thrust upon him, to do anything but ignore the active life so much after his own heart, in the new venture of which he had once so nearly become a part. it is possible that the attitude of new england for a time based itself on the supposition, that life with them was so thoroughly in harmony with the protector's own theories that interference was impossible. there were men among them, however, who watched his course warily, and who were not indisposed to follow the example he had set by revolt against hated institutions, but for the most part they went their way, quietly reticent and content to wait for time to demonstrate the truth or error of their convictions. but for the most there was entire content with the present. evidently no hint of a possible and coming restoration found slightest credence with them, and thus they laid up a store of offences for which they were suddenly to be called to account. when at last the restoration had been accomplished and charles ii, whose laughing eyes had held less mockery for william penn than any among the representatives of sects he so heartily despised, turned to question how quakers had fared in this objectionable and presumptuous colony of new england, the answer was not one to propitiate, or to incline to any favor. the story is not one that any new englander will care to dwell upon, even to-day, when indifference is the rule toward all theological dissension, past or present. it is certain that had winthrop lived, matters could never have reached the extremity they did. it is equally certain that the non-combatants conquered, though the victory was a bloody one. two sides are still taken to-day, even among new england authorities. for quakers, there is of course but one, yet in all their statements there seems to be infinitely less bitterness than they might reasonably have shown. that one or two wild fanatics committed actions, which could have no other foundation than unsettled minds, cannot be denied by even the most uncompromising advocate of the quaker side. but they were so evidently the result of distempered and excited brains, that only a community who held every inexplicable action to result from the direct influence of satan, could have done anything but pass them by in silent forbearance. had john cotton been alive in the year in which the quakers chose boston as their working ground, his gentle and conciliating nature, shown so fully in the trial of anne hutchinson, would have found some means of reconciling their theories with such phases of the puritan creed as were in sympathy with them. but a far different mind held his place, and had become the leading minister in the colony. john norton, who had taken nathaniel ward's place at ipswich, was called after twenty years of service, to the boston church, and his melancholy temperament and argumentative, not to say pragmatical turn of mind, made him ready to seize upon the first cause of offence. news of the doings of the obnoxious sect in england had been fully discussed in the colony, and the law passed as a means of protection against the heresies of anne hutchinson and her school, and which had simply waited new opportunity for its execution, came into exercise sooner than they had expected. it is difficult to re-create for our own minds, the state of outraged susceptibility--of conviction that jehovah in person had received the extremity of insult from every one who dared to go outside the fine points for a system of belief, which filled the churches in . the "inward light" struck every minister upon whose ears the horrid words fell, as only less shocking than witchcraft or any other light amusement of satan, and a day of public humiliation had already been appointed by the general court, "to seek the face of god in behalf of our native country, in reference to the abounding of errors, especially those of the ranters and quakers." the discussion of their offences was in full height, when in july, , there sailed into boston harbor a ship from the barbadoes, in which were two quaker women, mary fisher and anne austin. never were unwelcome visitors met by a more formidable delegation. down to the wharf posted governor and deputy-governor, four principal magistrates, with a train of yeoman supplemented by half the population of boston, who faced the astonished master of the vessel with orders which forced him to give bonds to carry the women back to the point from whence they came. this might have seemed sufficient, but was by no means considered so. the unhappy women were ordered to goal till the return of the vessel; a few books brought with them were burned by the executioner, and from every pulpit in the colony came fierce denunciations of the intruders. they left, and the excitement was subsiding a little when a stronger occasion for terror presented itself in another vessel, this time from england, bearing eight more of the firebrands, four men and four women, besides a zealous convert made on the way from long island, where the vessel had stopped for a short time. eleven weeks of imprisonment did not silence the voices of these self- elected missionaries, and the uncompromising character of their utterances ought to have commended them to a people who had been driven out of england for the identical cause. a people who had fallen to such depths of frenzied fanaticism as to drive cattle and swine into churches and cathedrals and baptize them with mock solemnity, who had destroyed or mutilated beyond repair organs, fonts, stained glass and every article of priestly use or adornment, might naturally have looked with understanding and sympathetic eyes on the women who, made desperate by suffering, turned upon them and pronounced their own preachers, "hirelings, baals, and seed of the serpent." the quakers frowned upon church music, but not before the puritan prynne had written of choirs: "choirsters bellow the tenor as it were oxen; bark a counterpart, as it were a kennel of dogs; roar out a treble, as it were a sort of bulls; and grunt a bass, as it were a number of hogs." they arraigned bishops, but in words less full of bitterness, than those in which one of the noblest among puritan leaders of thought, recorded his conviction. milton, writing of all bishops: "they shall be thrown down eternally, into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell the trample and spurn of all the other damned ... and shall exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them ... they shall remain in that plight forever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected and down-trodden vassels of perdition." no word from the most fanatical quaker who ever appeared before tribunal of man, exceeded this, or thousands of similar declarations, from men as ready for martyrdom as those they judged, and as obstinately bent upon proving their creed the only one that reasonable human beings should hold. the wildest alarm seized upon not only massachusetts but each one of the confederated colonies. the general court passed a series of laws against them, by which ship-masters were fined a hundred pounds if a quaker was brought over by them, as well as forced to give security for the return of all to the point from whence they came. they enacted, also, that all quakers who entered the colony from any point should "be forthwith committed to the house of correction, and at their entrance to be severely whipped, and by the master thereof to be kept constantly to work, and none suffered to converse or speak with them during the time of their imprisonment." no quaker book could be imported, circulated or concealed, save on penalty of a fine of five pounds, and whoever should venture to defend the new opinions, paid for the first offence a fine of two pounds; for the second, double that amount and for the third, imprisonment in the house of correction till there should "be convenient passage for them to be sent out of the land." through the streets of boston went the crier with his drum, publishing the law which was instantly violated by an indignant citizen, one nicholas upsall, who, for "reproaching the honored magistrates, and speaking against the law made and published against quakers," not only once but with a continuous and confounding energy, was sentenced to pay a fine of twenty pounds, and "to depart the jurisdiction within one month, not to return, under the penalty of imprisonment." then came a period in which fines, imprisonments, whippings and now and then a cropping of ears, failed to lessen the numbers who came, with full knowledge of what the consequences must be, and who behaved themselves with the aggressiveness of those bent upon martyrdom. more and more excited by daily defiance, penalties were doubled, the fine for harboring a quaker being increased to forty shillings an hour, and the excitement rising to higher and higher point. could they but have looked upon the insane freaks of some of their visitors with the same feeling which rose in the mohammedan mind, there would have been a different story for both sides. dr. palfrey describes the turk's method, which only a turk, however, could have carried out: "prompted by that superstitious reverence which he (the turk) was educated to pay to lunatics, as persons inspired, he received these visitors with deferential and ceremonious observance, and with a prodigious activity of genuflections and salams, bowed them out of his country. they could make nothing of it, and in that quarter gave up their enterprise in despair." the general court was the despairing body at this time. months had passed, and severity had simply multiplied the numbers to be dealt with. but one remedy remained to be tried, a remedy against which simon bradstreet's voice is said to have been the only one raised, and the general court, following the advice of endicott and norton, passed the vote which is still one of the darkest blots on the old records-- "whereas, there is an accursed and pernicious sect of heretics lately risen up in the world who are commonly called quakers, who take upon them to be immediately sent of god and infallibly assisted; who do speak and write blasphemous things, despising government and the order of god in church and commonwealth, speaking evil of dignities, reproaching and reviling magistrates and the ministers of the gospel, seeking to turn the people from the faith, and to gain proselytes to their pernicious ways; and whereas the several jurisdictions have made divers laws to prohibit and restrain the aforesaid cursed heretics from coming amongst them, yet notwithstanding they are not deterred thereby, but arrogantly and presumptuously do press into several of the jurisdictions, and there vent their pernicious and devilish opinions, which being permitted, tends manifestly to the disturbance of our peace, the withdrawing of the hearts of the people from their subjection to government, and so in issue to cause division and ruin if not timely prevented; it is therefore propounded and seriously commended to the several general courts, upon the considerations aforesaid, to make a law that all such quakers formerly convicted and punished as such, shall (if they return again) be imprisoned, and forthwith banished or expelled out of the said jurisdiction, under pain of death; and if afterwards they presume to come again into that jurisdiction, then to be put to death as presumptuously incorrigible, unless they shall plainly and publicly renounce their cursed opinions; and for such quakers as shall come into any jurisdiction from any foreign parts, or such as shall arise within the same, after due conviction that either he or she is of that cursed sect of heretics, they be banished under pain of severe corporal punishment; and if they return again, then to be punished accordingly, and banished under pain of death; and if afterwards they shall yet presume to come again, then to be put to death as aforesaid, except they do then and there plainly and publicly renounce their said cursed opinions and devilish tenets." this was not the first time that death had been named as the penalty against any who returned after banishment, and it had proved effectual in keeping away many malcontents. but the quakers were of different stuff, the same determined temper which had made the puritan submit to any penalty rather than give up his faith, being the common possession of both. in an address made to the king, partly aggressive partly apologetic in tone, the wretched story sums itself up in a single paragraph: "twenty-two have been banished upon pain of death. three have been martyred, and three have had their right ears cut. one hath been burned in the hand with the letter h. thirty-one persons have received six hundred and fifty stripes. one was beat while his body was like a jelly. several were beat with pitched ropes. five appeals made to england were denied by the rulers of boston. one thousand, forty-four pounds' worth of goods hath been taken from them (being poor men) for meeting together in the fear of the lord, and for keeping the commands of christ. one now lieth in iron fetters condemned to die." that massachusetts felt herself responsible for not only her own safety but that of her allies, and that this safety appeared to be menaced by a people who recognized few outward laws, was the only palliation of a course which in time showed itself as folly, even to the most embittered. the political consequences were of a nature, of which in their first access of zeal, they had taken no account. the complaints and appeals of the quakers had at last produced some effect, and there was well-grounded apprehension that the sense of power which had brought the colony to act with the freedom of an independent state, might result in the loss of some of their most dearly-prized privileges. the quakers had conquered, and the magistrates suddenly became conscious that such strength as theirs need never have dreaded the power of this feeble folk, and that their institutions could never fall before an attack from any hands save those of the king himself, toward whom they now turned with an alarmed deprecation. the puritan reign of terror for new england was over, its story to this generation seeming as incredible as it is shameful. brutality is not quite dead even to-day, but there is cause for rejoicing that, for america at least, freedom of conscience can never again mean whipping, branding and torturing of unnamable sorts for tender women and even children. puritan and quaker have sunk old differences, but it is the quaker who, while ignoring some phases of a past in which neither present as calm an expression to the world as should be the portion of the infallibility claimed tacitly by both sides, is still able to write: "the mission of the puritans was almost a complete failure. their plan of government was repudiated, and was succeeded by more humane laws and wiser political arrangements. their religion, though it long retained its hold in theory, was replaced by one less bigoted and superstitious. it is now a thing of the past, a mere tradition, an antiquated curiosity. the early quakers, or some of them, in common with the puritans, may illustrate some of the least attractive characteristics of their times; but they were abreast, if not in advance, of the foremost advocates of religious and civil freedom. they were more than advocates--they were the pioneers, who, by their heroic fortitude, patient suffering and persistent devotion, rescued the old bay colony from the jaws of the certain death to which the narrow and mistaken policy of the bigoted and sometimes insincere founders had doomed it. they forced them to abandon pretentious claims, to admit strangers without insulting them, to tolerate religious differences, and to incorporate into their legislation the spirit of liberty which is now the life-blood of our institutions. the religion of the society of friends is still an active force, having its full share of influence upon our civilization. the vital principle--'the inward light'--scoffed at and denounced by the puritans as a delusion, is recognized as a profound spiritual truth by sages and philosophers." through it all, though simon bradstreet's name occurs often in the records of the court, it is usually as asking some question intended to divert attention if possible from the more aggressive phases of the examination, and sooth the excited feelings of either side. but naturally his sympathies were chiefly with his own party, and his wife would share his convictions. there is no surprise, therefore, in finding him numbered by the quakers as among those most bitterly against them. it is certain that simon bradstreet plead for moderation, but some of the quaker offences were such as would most deeply wound his sense of decorum, and from the quaker standpoint he is numbered among the worst persecutors. in "new england judged by the spirit of the lord," a prominent quaker wrote: "your high-priest, john norton, and simon bradstreet, one of your magistrates, ... were deeply concerned in the blood of the innocents and their cruel sufferings, the one as advising, the other as acting," and he writes at another: point "simon bradstreet, a man hardened in blood and a cruel persecutor." there is a curious suggestiveness in another count of the same indictment. "simon bradstreet and william hathorn aforesaid were assistant to denison in these executions, whose names i record to rot and stink as of you all to all generations, unto whom this shall be left as a perpetual record of your everlasting shame." william hathorn had an unwholesome interest in all sorrow and catastrophe, the shadow of these evil days descending to the representative nathanael hawthorne, whose pen has touched puritan weaknesses and puritan strength, with a power no other has ever held, but the association was hardly more happy for bradstreet then, than at a later day when an economical hathorn bundled him out of his tomb to make room for his own bones. chapter xvi. home and abroad. in the midst of all this agitation and confusion anne bradstreet pursued her quiet way, more disposed to comment on the misdoings of the persians or romans than on anything nearer home, though some lines in her "dialogue between old england and new," indicate that she followed the course of every event with an anxious and intelligent interest. in , her oldest son had left for england, where he remained until , and she wrote then some verses more to be commended for their motherly feeling than for any charm of expression: upon my son samuel his goeing for england, novem. , . thou mighty god of sea and land, i here resigne into thy hand the son of prayers, of vowes, of teares, the child i stayed for many yeares. thou heard'st me then and gave'st him me; hear me again, i give him thee. he's mine, but more, o lord thine own, for sure thy grace is on him shown. no friend i have like thee to trust, for mortall helps are brittle dust. preserve o lord, from stormes and wrack, protect him there and bring him back; and if thou shall spare me a space, that i again may see his face, then shall i celebrate thy praise, and blesse thee for't even all my dayes. if otherwise i goe to rest, thy will bee done, for that is best; perswade my heart i shall him see forever happefy'd with thee. there were others of much the same order on his return, in , but her feelings centered then on the anxieties and dangers of the course which had been resolved upon. the enemies of the colony were busy in london, and the king was strongly inclined to take very decisive measures for its humiliation. explanations must be made by some one who had had personal experience in every case now used against them, and after long and troubled consultation the colonial government reluctantly decided to send two commissioners to england, selecting john norton and simon bradstreet as best capable of meeting the emergency. there was personal peril as well as political anxiety. the king constitutionally listened to the first comer rather than the second, and had already sided with the quakers. to norton it seemed a willful putting of his head into the lion's jaws, and he hesitated, and debated, and at last, from pure nervousness fell violently ill. the ship which was to carry them waited, and finally as it seemed impossible for him to rally his forces, began unlading the provisions sent on board. the disgusted government officers prepared explanatory letters, and were on the point of sending them when mr. norton came to his senses, and announced that the lord had "encouraged and strengthened his heart," and he went decorously on board. the mission, though pronounced by some quaker historians a failure, was in reality after many delays and more hard words a tolerable success. the king was still too uncertain of his own position to quarrel with as powerful a set of friends as the massachusetts colony were now disposed to prove themselves, and the commissioners returned home, bearing a renewal of the charter, though the letters held other matters less satisfactory to the puritan temper. the king required an oath of allegiance from all, and that "all laws and ordinances ... contrary or derogative to his authority and government should be annulled and repealed." toleration was made obligatory, and one clause outraged every puritan susceptibility; that in which it was ordered that, "in the election of the governor or assistants, there should be only consideration of the wisdom and integrity of the persons to be chosen, and not of any faction with reference to their opinion or profession." governor dudley's shade must have looked with amazed dismay and wrath upon this egg, which could hardly fail to "a toleration hatch," filled with every evil his verses had prophesied, and there were many of the same mind. but popular dissatisfaction in time died away, as no ill results came from the new methods, which were ignored as often as possible, and the working of which could not be very effectually watched in england. simon bradstreet, though censured by many, pursued his quiet way, thankful to be safely at home again with his head in its proper place, and his wife rejoiced over him in various poems which celebrated the letters he wrote, and every detail of his coming and going. the summer of brought one of the sharpest trials her life had ever known, the destruction of her house by fire taking place in july. each change of location to one of her tenacious affections and deep love of home, had been a sharp wrench, and she required long familiarity to reconcile her to new conditions. though the first and greatest change from england to america would seem to have rendered all others trivial and not to be regarded, she had shrank from each as it came, submitting by force of will, but unreconciled till years had past. in andover she had allowed herself to take firm root, certain that from this point she would never be dislodged, and the house had gradually become filled not only with treasured articles of furniture and adornments, but with the associations to which she always clung. there were family portraits and heirlooms brought from the old home in lincolnshire; a library of nearly eight hundred volumes, many of them rare editions difficult to replace, as well as her own special books and papers. for these last there was no hope of renewal. many of them were the work of her early womanhood; others held the continuation of her roman monarchy; small loss to the world at large, but the destruction of a work which had beguiled many hours of the bodily suffering from which she was seldom free. the second edition of her poems, published after her death, held an apology found among her papers, for the uncompleted state of this monarchy, in which she wrote: to finish what's begun was my intent, my thoughts and my endeavors thereto bent; essays i many made but still gave out, the more i mus'd, the more i was in doubt: the subject large my mind and body weak, with many more discouragements did speak. all thoughts of further progress laid aside, though oft persuaded, i as oft deny'd, at length resolv'd when many years had past, to prosecute my story to the last; and for the same, i, hours not few did spend, and weary lines (though lanke) i many pen'd: but 'fore i could accomplish my desire my papers fell a prey to th' raging fire. and thus my pains with better things i lost, which none had cause to wail, nor i to boast. no more i'le do, sith i have suffer'd wrack, although my monarchies their legs do lack: no matter is't this last, the world now sees hath many ages been upon his knees. the disaster finds record in the rev. simon bradstreet's diary: "july , . whilst i was at n. london my father's house at andover was burnt, where i lost my books and many of my clothes, to the valieu of or pounds at least; the lord gave, and the lord hath taken, blessed bee the name of the lord. tho: my own losse of books (and papers espec.) was great and my fathers far more being about , yet ye lord was pleased gratiously many wayes to make up ye same to us. it is therefore good to trust in the lord" the "newe house" built at once and furnished with the utmost elegance of the time, simon bradstreet's prosperity admitting the free expenditure he always loved, could by no means fill the place of the old. she looked about each room with a half-expectation that the familiar articles with which so much of her outward life had been associated, must be in the old places, and patiently as she bore the loss, their absence fretted and saddened her. one of her latest poems holds her sorrow and the resignation she came at last to feel: "in silent night when rest i took, for sorrow neer i did not look, i waken'd was with thundring nois and piteous shreiks of dreadfull voice; that fearfull sound of fire and fire, let no man know is my desire. i, starting up the light did spye, and to my god my heart did cry to strengthen me in my distress and not to leave me succourlesse, when coming out, beheld a space, the flame consume my dwelling place. and, when i could no longer look, i blest his name that gave and took, that layd my goods now in the dust; yea so it was, and so 'twas just. it was his own; it was not mine ffar be it that i should repine. he might of all justly bereft but yet sufficient for us left. when by the ruines oft i past, my sorrowing eyes aside did cast, and here and there the places spye where oft i sate, and long did lye. here stood that trunk and there that chest; there lay that store i counted best; my pleasant things in ashes lye, and them behold no more shall i. vnder thy roof no guest shall sitt, nor at thy table eat a bitt. no pleasant tale shall 'ere be told, nor things recounted done of old. no candle 'ere shall shine in thee, nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee. in silence ever shalt thou lye; adieu, adieu; all's vanity. then streight i 'gin my heart to chide, and did thy wealth on earth abide? dids't fix thy hope on mouldering dust, the arm of flesh dids't make thy trust? raise up thy thoughts above the skye that dunghill mists away may flie. thou hast a house on high erect, fram'd by that mighty architect with glory richly furnished, stands permanent tho: this be fled. 'its purchased and paid for too by him who hath enough to doe. a prise so vast as is unknown yet by his gift is made thine own. ther's wealth enough, i need no more; farewell my pelf, farewell my store. the world no longer let me love, my hope and treasure lyes above." the fortunes of the new house were hardly happy ones. with the death of his wife governor bradstreet left it in possession of a younger son, captain dudley bradstreet, who was one of the most important citizens of andover, having been "selectman, colonel of militia, and magistrate," while still a young man. his father's broad yet moderate views and his mother's gentle and devoted spirit seem to have united in him, for when the witchcraft delusion was at its height, and even the most honored men and women in the little community were in danger of their lives, he suddenly resolved to grant no more warrants for either apprehension or imprisonment. this was shocking enough to the excited popular mind, but when he added to such offence a plea, which he himself drew up for some of the victims, who, as they admitted, had made confession of witchcraft "by reason of sudden surprisal, when exceedingly astonished and amazed and consternated and affrighted even out of reason," there was no room left for any conviction save that he was under the same spell. loved as he had been by all the people whom he had served unselfishly for twenty years, the craze which possessed them all, wiped out any memory of the past or any power of common sense in the present, and he fled in the night and for a long time remained in hiding. the delusion ended as suddenly as it had begun, a reaction setting in, and the people doing all in their power to atone for the suspicion and outrage that had caused his flight. placable and friendly, the old relations were resumed as far as possible, though the shadow had been too heavy an one ever to pass entirely. another terror even greater had come before the century ended: an act of treachery had been commited by a citizen of andover, a captain chubb, who had in been in command of fort pemaquid, and having first plied a delegation of penobscot indians with liquor, gave orders for their massacre while still in their drunken sleep. in an after attack by french and indians upon the fort, he surrendered on promise of personal safety, and in time, returned to andover, disgraced, but abundantly satisfied to have saved his scalp. the rest of the story is given by cotton mather in the magnalia: "the winter, ( ) was the severest that ever was in the memory of man. and yet february must not pass without a stroke upon pemquid chub, whom the government had mercifully permitted after his examination to retire unto his habitation in andover. as much out of the way as to andover there came above thirty indians about the middle of february as if their errand had been for vengeance upon chub, whom, with his wife they now massacred there." hutchinson comments gravely: "it is not probable they had any knowledge of the place of his abode, but it caused them greater joy than the taking of many towns. rapin would have pronounced such an event the immediate judgement of heaven. voltaire, that in the place of supposed safety, the man could not avoid his destiny." the towns mustered hastily, but not before the flames of the burning buildings had arisen at many points, and terrified women and children had been dragged from their beds and in one or two cases murdered at once, though most were reserved as captives. dudley bradstreet and his family were of this latter number. the house was broken into and plundered; his kinsman who attempted defence, cut down on the spot, and the same fate might have overtaken all, had not an indian who had received some special kindness from the colonel, interfered and prevented the butchery. the family were carried some fifty rods from the house and then released and allowed to return, and by this time the soldiers were armed and the party routed. no sense of safety could be felt then, or for many years thereafter, and from terror and other causes, the house was in time forsaken by its natural owners and passed into other hands, though no tenant, even of sixty years standing has had power to secure to it any other title than that which it still holds--"the bradstreet house." * * * * * for its first occupants possession was nearly over. the vitality which had carried anne bradstreet through longer life than could have been imagined possible, was nearly exhausted. constant weakness and pain and occasional attacks of severe illness marked all the later years of her life, which for the last three, was a weariness to herself, and a source of suffering to all who saw her suffer. certain that it could not last long, she began at one time the little autobiographical diary, found among her papers after death, and containing the only personal details that remained, even these being mere suggestions. all her life she had been subject to sudden attacks of faintness, and even as early as , lay for hours unconscious, remaining in a state of pitiful weakness many days thereafter. one of these attacks found record on a loose paper, added by one of her sons to the manuscript book of "religious reflections," and showing with what patience she met the ills for the overcoming of which any physician of the time was powerless, and against which she made a life-long resistance. it was the beginning of a battle which has ever since held its ground in new england, to "enjoy poor health," yet be ready for every emergency, being a state of things on which the average woman rather prides herself, medicine, quack or home- brewed, ranking in importance with the "means of grace." submission and reliance. "july th, . i had a sore fitt of fainting, which lasted or days, but not in that extremity which at first it took me, and so moch the sorer it was to me, because my dear husband was from home (who is my chiefest comforter on earth); but my god, who never failed me, was not absent, but helped me, and gratiously manifested his love to me, which i dare not passe by without remembrance, that it may bee a support to me when i shall have occasion to read this hereafter, and to others that shall read it when i shall possesse that i now hope for, that so they may bee encourage'd to trust in him who is the only portion of his servants. o lord, let me never forgett thy goodness, nor question thy faithfullness to me, for thou art my god: thou hast said, and shall not i believe it? thou hast given me a pledge of that inheritance thou hast promised to bestow upon me. o, never let satan prevail against me, but strengthen my faith in thee, 'till i shall attain the end of my hopes, even the salvation of my soul. come, lord jesus; come quickly." deliverance from a fitt of fainting. worthy art thou o lord of praise! but ah! it's not in me; my sinking heart i pray thee raise, so shall i give it thee. my life as spider's webb's cut off, thos fainting have i said, and liveing man no more shall see, but bee in silence layd. my feblee spirit thou didst revive, my doubting thou didst chide, and tho: as dead mad'st me alive, i here a while might 'bide. why should i live but to thy praise? my life is hid with thee; o lord no longer bee my dayes, then i may froitfull bee. "august , . after much weaknes and sicknes when my spirits were worn out, and many times my faith weak likewise, the lord was pleased to uphold my drooping heart, and to manifest his love to me; and this is that which stayes my soul that this condition that i am in is the best for me, for god doth not afflict willingly, nor take delight in grieving the children of men: he hath no benefitt by my adversity, nor is he the better for my prosperity; but he doth it for my advantage, and that i may be a gainer by it. and if he knowes that weaknes and a frail body is the best to make mee a vessell fitt for his use, why should i not bare it, not only willingly but joyfully? the lord knowes i dare not desire that health that sometimes i have had, least my heart should bee drawn from him, and sett upon the world. "now i can wait, looking every day when my saviour shall call for me. lord, grant that while i live i may doe that service i am able in this frail body, and bee in continual expectation of my change, and let me never forget thy great love to my soul so lately expressed, when i could lye down and bequeath my soul to thee, and death seem'd no terrible thing. o, let mee ever see thee, that art invisible, and i shall not bee unwilling to come, tho: by so rough a messenger." through all the long sickness the family life went on unchanged, save in the contracting circle, from which one child and another passed. there was still strength to direct the daily round of household duties, and to listen with quick sympathy to the many who came to her trouble. there was not only the village life with its petty interests, but the larger official one of her husband, in which she shared so far as full knowledge of its details allowed, simon bradstreet, like governor winthrop, believing strongly in that "inward sight" which made women often clearer judges than men of perplexed and knotty points. two bits of family life are given in a document still in existence and copied by the new england historical and genalogical register for . to it is appended the full signature of anne bradstreet, in a clear, upright hand, of singular distinctness and beauty when compared with much of the penmanship of that period. but one other autograph is in existence. it is evident from the nature of the document, that village life had its infelicities in , quite as fully as to-day, and that a poem might have grown out of it, had daily life been thought worthy of a poem. "this witnesseth, that wee heard good(tm) sutton say, there was noe horses in his yard that night in wch mr bradstreetes mare was killed, & afterwards that there was none that he knew of; but being told by mr bradstreete that hee thought hee could p've hee drave out some, then hee sd, yes, now i remembr there was or . "further, wee testifie the sd. sutton sd. att yt tyme there was noe dogg there, but his wch was a puppy, & mr danes that would not byte. anne bradstreet mercy bradstreet dudley bradstreet john bradstreet edward whittington alexander sessions [his marke] robte. rb busely." law was resorted to in even small disagreements with a haste and frequency excellent for the profession employed, but going far to intensify the litigious spirit of the day, and tolerant as simon bradstreet was in all large matters, his name occurs with unpleasant frequency in these petty village suits. this suit with goodman sutton was but one of many, almost all of which arose from the trespasses of animals. fences were few, and though they were viewed at intervals by the "perambulators," and decided to be "very sufficient against all orderly cattle," the swine declined to come under this head, and rooted their way into desirable garden patches to the wrath and confusion of their owners, all persons at last, save innholders, being forbidden to keep more than ten of the obnoxious animals. horses, also, broke loose at times, and mr. bradstreet was not the only one who suffered loss, one of the first tragedies in the little town, being a hand to hand fight, ending in a stabbing of one of the parties, both of whom belonged to good families and were but lightly judged in the trial which followed. they were by no means a peaceful community, and if the full truth be told, a week of colonial life would prove to hold almost as large a proportion of squabbles as any town record of to-day. the second one gives some difficulties connected with the marriage of governor bradstreet's daughter mercy, which took place oct. , , but not till various high words had passed, and sufficient hard feeling been engendered to compel the preparing of the affidavit, which probably, whatever its effect may have been on the parents, did not touch the happiness of the young pair for whose respective rights they had debated. "when mr. johnathan wade of ipswich came first to my house att andover in the yeare , to make a motion of marriage betwixt his son nathaniel and my daughter mercy hee freely of himself told mee what he would give to his son vz. one halfe of his farme att mistick and one third p't of his land in england when hee dyed, and that hee should have liberty to make use of p't of the imp'ved and broken upp ground upon the sd farme, till hee could gett some broken upp for himselfe upon his owne p't and likewis | that hee should live in and have the use of halfe the house, and untill he had one | of his owne built upon his p't of the farme. i was willing to accept of his | offer, or at least sd. nothing against it; but p'p'ounded that hee would make | his sd soil a deede of guift of that third p't of his land in england to enjoy to | him and his heires after his death. this hee was not free to doe, but sd. it was | as sure, for he had soe putt it into his will, that his sons should have | that in england equally devyded betwixt them, vz. each a p't. i objected | he marry | againe and have other children, wich hee thought a vaine obieccon. much | othr discourse there was about the stocke on the farme, &c., but remayneing unwilling | to give a deede for that in england, saying he might live to spend it, and often | repeating hee had soe ordered it in his will, as aforesd., wch hee should never altr without | great necessity, or words to that purpose. soe wee p'ted for that tyme leaveing | that mattr to further consideracon. after hee came home hee told sev'all of my | friends and others as they informed me, that hee had p'ffered to give his son nathaniel bettr then lb | and i would not accept of it. the next tyme hee came to my house, after some | discourse about the premises and p'esining his resolucon as form'ly ingaged, and left it to him to add wt he pleased | towards the building of him a house &c., and soe agreed that the young p'sons might | p'ceede in marriage with both or consents, wch accordingly they did. s. bradstreet." "the honble simon bradstreet esqr | made oath to the truth of the above written sept. th, , before samuell nowell, assistant. "the interlines [as aforesaid], line th, and [as they informed me] line th, were before the oath was made." the brackets are in the original and were used as quotations marks. governor bradstreet's name and all above it are in his handwriting; all below it is in mr. nowell's. another mercy bradstreet, niece of the mercy whose name figures in the foregoing statement, and the daughter of the oldest son, married dr. james oliver, from whom are descended dr. oliver wendell holmes and wendell phillips, while lucy, the daughter of simon, the second son, became the ancestress of dr. channing and of richard n. dana, the poet and his distinguished son. many of the grandchildren died in infancy, and the pages of the second edition of their grandmother's poems are sprinkled with elegies long and short, upon the babies almost as well loved as her own, though none of them have any poetical merit. but her thoughts dwelt chiefly in the world for which she longed, and there are constant reminders of what careless hold she kept upon the life which had come to be simply a burden to be borne with such patience as might be given her. chapter xvii. the end. through all these later years anne bradstreet had made occasional records, in which her many sicknesses find mention, though never in any complaining fashion. now and then, as in the following meditation, she wrote a page full of gratitude at the peace which became more and more assured, her doubting and self-distrustful spirit retaining more and more the quietness often in early life denied her: meditations when my soul hath been refreshed with the consolations which the world knowes not. lord, why should i doubt any more when thou hast given me such assured pledges of thy love? first, thou art my creator, i thy creature; thou my master, i thy servant. but hence arises not my comfort: thou art my ffather, i thy child. yee shall [be] my sons and daughters, saith the lord almighty. christ is my brother; i ascend unto my ffather and your ffather, unto my god and your god. but least this should not be enough, thy maker is thy husband. nay, more, i am a member of his body; he, my head. such priviledges, had not the word of truth made them known, who or where is the man that durst in his heart have presumed to have thought it? so wonderfull are these thoughts that my spirit failes in me at the consideration thereof; and i am confounded to think that god, who hath done so much for me should have so little from me. but this is my comfort, when i come into heaven, i shall understand perfectly what he hath done for me, and then shall i be able to praise him as i ought. lord, haveing this hope, let me pruefie myself as thou art pure, and let me bee no more affraid of death, but even desire to be dissolved, and bee with thee, which is best of all. of the same nature are the fragments of diary which follow: july th, . i had a sore fitt of fainting which lasted or days, but not in that extremity which at first it took me, and so much the sorer it was to me because my dear husband was from home (who is my chiefest comforter on earth); but my god, who never failed me, was not absent, but helped me, and gratiously manifested his love to me, which i dare not passe by without remembrance, that it may be a support to me when i shall have occasion to read this hereafter, and to others that shall read it when i shall posesse that i now hope for, that so they may bee encourag'd to trust in him who is the only portion of his servants. o lord, let me never forget thy goodness, nor question thy faithfulness to me, for thou art my god: thou hast said and shall i not beleive it? thou hast given me a pledge of that inheritance thou hast promised to bestow upon me. o, never let satan prevail against me, but strengthen my faith in thee 'till i shall attain the end of my hopes, even the salvation of my soul. come, lord jesus; come quickly. what god is like to him i serve, what saviour like to mine? o, never let me from thee swerve, for truly i am thine. sept. , . it pleased god to viset me with my old distemper of weakness and fainting, but not in that sore manner sometimes he hath. i desire not only willingly, but thankfully, to submitt to him, for i trust it is out of his abundant love to my straying soul which in prosperity is too much in love with the world. i have found by experience i can no more live without correction than without food. lord, with thy correction give instruction and amendment, and then thy strokes shall bee welcome. i have not been refined in the furnace of affliction as some have been, but have rather been preserved with sugar then brine, yet will he preserve me to his heavenly kingdom. thus (dear children) have yee seen the many sicknesses and weaknesses that i have passed thro: to the end that, if you meet with the like, you may have recourse to the same god who hath heard and delivered me, and will doe the like for you if you trust in him: and, when he shall deliver you out of distresse, forget not to give him thankes, but to walk more closely with him then before. this is the desire of your loving mother, a. b. with this record came a time of comparative health, and it is not till some years later that she finds it necessary to again write of sharp physical suffering, this being the last reference made in her papers to her own condition: may , . it hath pleased god to give me a long time of respite for these years that i have had no great fitt of sickness, but this year, from the middle of january 'till may, i have been by fitts very ill and weak. the first of this month i had a feaver seat'd upon me which, indeed, was the longest and sorest that ever i had, lasting dayes, and the weather being very hott made it the more tedious, but it pleased the lord to support my heart in his goodness, and to hear my prayers, and to deliver me out of adversity. but alas! i cannot render unto the lord according to all his loving kindnes, nor take the cup salvation with thanksgiving as i ought to doe. lord, thou that knowest all things, know'st that i desire to testefye my thankfulnes, not only in word, but in deed, that my conversation may speak that thy vowes are upon me. the diary of "religious reflections" was written at this period and holds a portrait of the devout and tender mind, sensitive and morbidly conscientious, but full of an aspiration that never left her. the few hints as to her early life are all embodied here, though the biographer is forced to work chiefly by inference: to my dear children: this book by any yet unread, i leave for you when i am dead, that, being gone, here you may find what was your living mother's mind. make use of what i leave in love and god shall blesse you from above. a. b. my dear children: knowing by experience that the exhortations of parents take most effect when the speakers leave to speak, and those especially sink deepest which are spoke latest--and being ignorant whether on my death-bed i shall have opportunity to speak to any of you, much lesse to all--thought it the best, whilst i was able to compose some short matters, (for what else to call them i know not) and bequeath to you, that when i am no more with you, yet i may bee dayly in your remembrance, (although that is the least in my aim in what i now doe) but that you may gain some spiritual advantage by my experience. i have not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth---not to sett forth myself, but the glory of god. if i had minded the former, it had been perhaps better pleasing to you,--but seing the last is the best, let it bee best pleasing to you. the method i will observe shall bee this--i will begin with god's dealing with me from my childhood to this day. in my young years, about or as i take it, i began to make conscience of my wayes, and what i knew was sinful, as lying, disobedience to parents, &c., i avoided it. if at any time i was overtaken with the like evills, it was a great trouble. i could not be at rest 'till by prayer i had confest it unto god. i was also troubled at the neglect of private dutyes, tho: too often tardy that way. i also found much comfort in reading the scriptures, especially those places i thought most concerned my condition, and as i grew to have more understanding, so the more solace i took in them. in a long fitt of sicknes which i had on my bed i often communed with my heart, and made my supplication to the most high who sett me free from that affliction. but as i grew up to bee about or i found my heart more carnall, and sitting loose from god, vanity and the follyes of youth take hold of me. about , the lord layed his hand sore upon me and smott mee with the small pox. when i was in my affliction, i besought the lord, and confessed my pride and vanity and he was entreated of me, and again restored me. but i rendered not to him according to the benefitt received. after a short time i changed my condition and was marryed, and came into this contry, where i fond a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. but after i was convinced it was the way of god, i submitted to it and joined to the church at boston. after some time i fell into a lingering sicknes like a consumption, together with a lamenesse, which correction i saw the lord sent to humble and try me and doe mee good: and it was not altogether ineffectual. it pleased god to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great grief to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before i obtained one, and after him gave mee many more, of whom i now take the care, that as i have broght you into the world, and with great paines, weaknes, cares, and feares, brought you to this, i now travail in birth again of you till christ bee formed in you. among all my experiences of god's gratious dealings with me i have constantly observed this, that he hath never suffered me long to sitt loose from him, but by one affliction or other hath made me look home, and search what was amisse so usually thos it hath been with me that i have no sooner felt my heart out of order, but i have expected correction for it, which most commonly hath been upon my own person, in sicknesse, weaknes, paines, sometimes on my soul, in doubts and feares of god's displeasure, and my sincerity towards him, sometimes he hath smott a child with sicknes, sometimes chastened by losses in estate,--and these times (thro: his great mercy) have been the times of my greatest getting and advantage, yea i have found them the times when the lord hath manifested the most love to me. then have i gone to searching, and have said with david, lord search me and try me, see what wayes of wickednes are in me, and lead me in the way everlasting; and seldom or never, but i have found either some sin i lay under which god would have reformed, or some duty neglected which he would have performed. and by his help i have layed vowes and bonds upon my soul to perform his righteous commands. if at any time you are chastened of god, take it as thankfully and joyfully as in greatest mercyes, for if yee bee his yee shall reap the greatest benefit by it. it hath been no small support to me in times of darkness when the almighty hath hid his face from me, that yet i have had abundance of sweetness and refreshment after affliction, and more circumspection in my walking after i have been afflicted. i have been with god like an untoward child, that no longer than the rod has been on my back (or at least in sight) but i have been apt to forgett him and myself too. before i was afflicted i went astray, but now i keep thy statutes. i have had great experience of god's hearing my prayers, and returning comfortable answers to me, either in granting the thing i prayed for, or else in satisfying my mind without it; and i have been confident it hath been from him, because i have found my heart through his goodnes enlarged in thankfullnes to him. i have often been perplexed that i have not found that constant joy in my pilgrim age and refreshing which i supposed most of the servants of god have; although he hath not left me altogether without the wittnes of his holy spirit, who hath oft given mee his word and sett to his seal that it shall bee well with me. i have sometimes tasted of that hidden manna that the world knowes not, and have sett up my ebenezer, and have resolved with myself that against such a promise such taste of sweetnes, the gates of hell shall never prevail. yet have i many times sinkings and droopings, and not enjoyed that felicity that sometimes i have done. but when i have been in darknes and seen no light, yet have i desired to stay myself upon the lord. and, when i have been in sicknes and pain, i have thought if the lord would but lift up the light of his countenance upon me, altho he ground me to powder, it would bee but light to me; yea, oft have i thought were if hell itself, and could there find the love of god toward me, it would bee a heaven. and, could i have been in heaven without the love of god it would have been a hell to me; for in truth, it is the absence and presence of god that makes heaven or hell. many times hath satan troubled me concerning the verity of the scriptures, many times by atheisme how could i know whether there was a god; i never saw any miracles to confirm me, and those which i read of how did i know but they were feigned. that there is a god my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous workes that i see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumne, the dayly providing for this great houshold upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end. the consideration of these things would with amazement certainly resolve me that there is an eternall being. but how should i know he is such a god as i worship in trinity, and such a savior as i rely upon? tho: this hath thousands of times been suggested to mee, yet god hath helped me ever. i have argued this with myself. that there is a god i see. if ever this god hath revealed himself, it must bee in his word, and this must be it or none. have i not found that operation by it that no humane invention can work upon the soul? hath not judgments befallen diverse who have scorned and contemd it? hath it not been preserved thro: all ages mangre all the heathen tyrants and all of the enemies who have opposed it? is there any story but that which shows the beginnings of times, and how the world came to bee as wee see? doe wee not know the prophecyes in it fullfilled which could not have been so long foretold by any but god himself? when i have gott over this block, then have i another pott in my way, that admitt this bee the true god whom we worship, and that be his word, yet why may not the popish religion bee the right? they have the same god, the same christ, the same word; they only interprett it one way, wee another. this hath sometimes stuck with me, and more it would, but the vain fooleries that are in their religion, together with their lying miracles and cruell persecutions of the saints, which admitt were they as they terme them, yet not so to be dealt with all. the consideration of these things and many the like would soon turn me to my own religion again. but some new troubles i have had since the world has been filled with blasphemy, and sectaries, and some who have been accounted sincere christians have been carryed away with them, that sometimes i have said, is there ffaith upon the earth? and i have not known what to think. but then i have remembered the words of christ that so it must bee, and that, if it were possible, the very elect should bee deceived. behold, faith our savior, i have told you before. that hath stayed my heart, and i can now say, return, o my soul, to thy rest, upon this rock christ jesus will i build my faith; and if i perish, i perish. but i know all the powers of hell shall never prevail against it. i know whom i have trusted, and whom i have believed, and that he is able to keep that i have committed to his charge. now to the king, immortall, eternall, and invisible, the only wise god, bee honor and glory forever and ever! amen. this was written in much sicknesse and weakness, and is very weakly and imperfectly done; but, if you can pick any benefitt out of it, it is the marke which i aimed at. for a few of the years that remained there were the alternations to which she had long been accustomed, but with she had become a hopeless and almost helpless invalid, longing to die, yet still held by the intense vitality which must have been her characteristic, and which required three years more of wasting pain before the struggle could end. in august, of , she had written one of the most pathetic of her poems: aug: , . as weary pilgrim now at rest, hugs with delight his silent nest his wasted limbes now lye full soft that myrie steps have trodden oft. blesses himself to think upon his dangers past, and travails done. the burning sun no more shall heat nor stormy raines on him shall beat. the bryars and thornes no more shall scratch, nor hungry wolves at him shall catch he erring pathes no more shall tread nor wilde fruits eate, instead of bread for waters cold he doth not long for thirst no more shall parch his tongue. no rugged stones his feet shall gaule, nor stumps nor rocks cause him to fall. all cares and feares, he bids farewell and meanes in safity now to dwell. a pilgrim i, on earth, perplext, wth sinns wth cares and sorrovys vext by age and paines brought to decay. and my clay house mouldring away oh how i long to be at rest and soare on high among the blesst. this body shall in silence sleep mine eyes no more shall ever weep no fainting fits shall me assaile nor grinding paines my body fraile wth cares and fears n'er cumbred be nor losses know, nor sorrows see what tho my flesh shall there consume it is the bed christ did perfume and when a few yeares shall be gone this mortall shall be cloth'd upon a corrupt carcasse ddwne it lyes a glorious body it shall rise in weakness and dishonour sowne in power 'tis rais'd by christ alone when soule and body shall unite and of their maker have the sight such lasting joyes shall there behold as care ne'r heard nor tongue e'er told lord make me ready for that day then come dear bridegrome, come away. the long waiting ended at last, and her son, simon bradstreet, wrote in his diary: "sept. , . my ever honoured & most clear mother was translated to heaven. her death was occasioned by a consumption being wasted to skin & bone & she had an issue made in her arm bee: she was much troubled with rheum, & one of ye women yt tended herr dressing her arm, s'd shee never saw such an arm in her life, i, s'd my most dear mother but yt shall bee a glorious arm. "i being absent fro her lost the opportunity of committing to memory her pious & memorable xpressions uttered in her sicknesse. o yt the good lord would give unto me and mine a heart to walk in her steps, considering what the end of her conversation was, yt so wee might one day have a happy & glorious greeting." dorothy, the wife of seaborn cotton and the namesake of her grandmother, had died in february of the same year, making the first break in the family circle, which had been a singularly united one, the remainder all living to advanced years. grief at the loss had been softened by the certainty that separation could not last long, and in spite of the terror with which her creed filled even the thought of death, suffering had made at last a welcome one. no other touch could bring healing or rest to the racked and weary body, and deeply as simon bradstreet mourned her loss, a weight rolled away, when the long suffering had ended. that the country-side thronged to the funeral of the woman whose name was honored in every new england settlement, we may know, but no record remains of ceremony, or sermon, or even of burial place. the old graveyard at andover holds no stone that may perhaps have been hers, and it is believed that her father's tomb at roxbury may have received the remains, that possibly she herself desired should lie by those of her mother. sermons were preached in all the principal churches, and funeral elegies, that dearest form of the puritan muse, poured in, that by john norton being the best illustration of manner and method. a funeral elogy, _upon that pattern and patron of virtue, the truely pious, peerless matchless gentlewoman_ mrs. anne bradstreet, _right panaretes,_ _mirror of her age, glory of her sex, whose heaven-born-soul its earthly shrine, chose its native home, and was taken to its rest upon th sept. ._ ask not why hearts turn magazines of passions, and why that grief is clad in several fashions; why she on progress goes, and doth not borrow the small'st respite from the extreams of sorrow, her misery is got to such an height, as makes the earth groan to support its weight, such storms of woe, so strongly have beset her, she hath no place for worse, nor hope for better her comfort is, if any for her be, that none can shew more cause of grief then she. ask not why some in mournfull black are clad; the sun is set, there needs must be a shade. ask not why every face a sadness shrowdes; the setting sun ore-cast us hath with clouds. ask not why the great glory of the skye that gilds the stars with heavenly alchamy, which all the world doth lighten with his rayes, the _persian_ god, the monarch of the dayes; ask not the reason of his extasie, paleness of late, in midnoon majesty, why that the pale fac'd empress of the night disrob'd her brother of his glorious light. did not the language of the stars foretel a mournfull scoene when they with tears did swell? did not the glorious people of the skye seem sensible of future misery? did not the low'ring heavens seem to express the worlds great lose and their unhappiness? behold how tears flow from the learned hill, how the bereaved nine do daily fill the bosom of the fleeting air with groans, and wofull accents, which witness their moanes. how doe the goddesses of verse, the learned quire lament their rival quill, which all admire? could _maro's_ muse but hear her lively strain, he would condemn his works to fire again, methinks i hear the patron of the spring, the unshorn deity abruptly sing. some doe for anguish weep, for anger i that ignorance should live, and art should die. black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day, unblest forever by sol's precious ray, be it the first of miseries to all; or last of life, defam'd for funeral. when this day yearly comes, let every one, cast in their urne, the black and dismal stone, succeeding years as they their circuit goe, leap o'er this day, as a sad time of woe. farewell my muse, since thou hast left thy shrine, i am unblest in one, but blest in nine. fair thespian ladyes, light your torches all, attend your glory to its funeral, to court her ashes with a learned tear, a briny sacrifice, let not a smile appear. grave matron, whoso seeks to blazon thee, needs not make use of witts false heraldry; whoso should give thee all thy worth would swell so high, as'twould turn the world infidel. had he great _maro's_ muse, or tully's tongue, or raping numbers like the _thracian_ song, in crowning of her merits he would be sumptuously poor, low in hyperbole. to write is easy; but to write on thee, truth would be thought to forfeit modesty. he'l seem a poet that shall speak but true; hyperbole's in others, are thy due. like a most servile flatterer he will show though he write truth, and make the subject, you. virtue ne'er dies, time will a poet raise born under better stars, shall sing thy praise. praise her who list, yet he shall be a debtor for art ne're feigned, nor nature fram'd a better. her virtues were so great, that they do raise a work to trouble fame, astonish praise. when as her name doth but salute the ear, men think that they perfections abstract hear. her breast was a brave pallace, a broad-street, where all heroick ample thoughts did meet, where nature such a tenement had tane, that others souls, to hers, dwelt in a lane. beneath her feet, pale envy bites her chain, and poison malice, whetts her sting in vain. let every laurel, every myrtel bough be stript for leaves t'adorn and load her brow. victorious wreaths, which 'cause they never fade wise elder times for kings and poets made let not her happy memory e're lack its worth in fame's eternal almanack, which none shall read, but straight their lots deplore, and blame their fates they were not born before. do not old men rejoyce their fates did last, and infants too, that theirs did make such hast, in such a welcome time to bring them forth, that they might be a witness to her worth. who undertakes this subject to commend shall nothing find so hard as how to end. _finis & non,_ john norton. forty years of wedded life, and a devotion that remained unaltered to the end, inclined simon bradstreet to a longer period of mourning than most puritan husbands seemed to have submitted to, but four years after her death, the husband, at seventy-three, still as hale and well-preserved as many a man of fifty, took to himself another wife. she was the widow of captain joseph gardner of salem, killed in the attack on the narragansett fort in december, , and is described by her step-son simon, in his diary as "a gentl. of very good birth and education, and of great piety and prudence." of her prudence there could hardly be a doubt, for as daughter and sister of emanuel and george downing, she had had before her through all her early years, examples of shrewdness and farsightedness for all personal ends, that made the names of both, an offence then and in later days. but no suspicion of the tendencies strong in both father and son, ever rested on mistress gardner, who was both proud and fond of her elderly husband, and who found him as tender and thoughtful a friend as he had always been to the wife of his youth. for twenty-one years he passed from honor to honor in the colony, living in much state, though personally always abstemious and restrained, and growing continually in the mildness and toleration, from which his contemporaries more and more diverged. clear-sighted, and far in advance of his time, his moderation hindered any chafing or discontent, and his days, even when most absorbed in public interests, held a rare severity and calm. no act of all bradstreet's life brought him more public honors than his action against andros, whose tyranny had roused every man in new england to protest and revolt. almost ninety years old, he met the deputation who came to consult him, and set his hand to a letter, which held the same possibilities and was in many senses, the first declaration of independence. from the town house in boston went out the handbill, printed in black letter and signed by fifteen names, the old patriarch heading the list. bancroft, who is seldom enthusiastic, tells the story of the demand upon andros of immediate surrender of the government and fortifications, and the determination of the passionate and grasping soldier to resist. "just then the governor of the colony, in office when the charter was abrogated, simon bradstreet, glorious with the dignity of four-score years and seven, one of the early emigrants, a magistrate in , whose experience connected the oldest generation with the new, drew near the town-house, and was received with a great shout from the free men. the old magistrates were reinstated, as a council of safety; the whole town rose in arms, with the most unanimous resolution that ever inspired a people; and a declaration read from the balcony, defending the insurrection as a duty to god and the country. 'we commit our enterprise,' it is added, 'to him who hears the cry of the oppressed, and advise all our neighbors, for whom we have thus ventured ourselves, to joyn with us in prayers and all just actions for the defence of the land.' on charlestown side, a thousand soldiers crowded together; and the multitude would have been longer if needed. the governor vainly attempting to escape to the frigate was, with his creatures, compelled to seek protection by submission; through the streets where he had first displayed his scarlet coat and arbitrary commission, he and his fellows were marched to the town-house and thence to prison. all the cry was against andros and randolph. the castle was taken; the frigate was mastered; the fortifications occupied." once more massachusetts assembled in general court, and the old man, whose blood could still tingle at wrong, was called again to the chair of state, filling it till the end of all work came suddenly, and he passed on, leaving a memory almost as tenderly preserved as that of "the beloved governor," john winthrop. in the ancient burial place at salem may still be seen the tomb of the old man who had known over sixty years of public service. simon bradstreet. armiger, exordine senatoris, in colonia massachusettensi ab anno , usque ad anum . deinde ad anum , vice-gubernator. denique ad anum , ejusdem coloniae, communi et constanti populi suffragio, gubernator. vis, judicio lynceario preditus; guem nec numma, nec honos allexit. regis authoritatem, et populi libertatem, aequa lance libravit. religione cerdatus, vita innocuus, mundum et vicit, et deseriut, die, martii, a. d. . annog, guliel, t ix, et aet, . few epitaphs hold as simple truth. "he was a man," says felt, "of deep discernment, whom neither wealth nor honor could allure from duty. he poised with an equal balance the authority of the king, and the liberty of the people. sincere in religion and pure in his life, he overcame and left the world." the assembly was in session on the day of his death and, "in consideration of the long and extraordinary service of simon bradstreet, late governor, voted l , toward defraying the charges of his interment." they buried him in salem where his tomb may still be seen in the old charter street burying-ground, though there is grave doubt if even the dust of its occupant could be found therein. his memory had passed, and his services meant little to the generation which a hundred years later, saw one of the most curious transactions of the year . that an ancestor of nathanael hawthorne should have been a party to it, holds a suggestion of the tendencies which in the novelist's case, gave him that interest in the sombre side of life, and the relish for the somewhat ghoul-like details, on which he lingered with a fascination his readers are compelled to share. on an old paper still owned by a gentleman of salem, one may read this catastrophe which has, in spite of court orderings and stately municipal burial, forced simon bradstreet's remains into the same obscurity which hides those of his wife. "ben, son of col b. pickman, sold ye tomb, being claimed by him for a small expence his father was at in repairing it aft ye yr or to one daniel hathorne, who now holds it." having taken possession, daniel hawthorne, with no further scruples cleaned out the tomb, throwing the remains of the old governor and his family into a hole not far off. the new england of simon bradstreet's day is as utterly lost as his own dust. yet many of the outward forms still remain, while its spirit is even more evident and powerful. wherever the new england element is found--and where is it not found?--its presence means thrift, thoroughness, precision and prudence. every circumstance of life from the beginning has taught the people how to extract the utmost value from every resource. dollars have come slowly and painfully, and have thus, in one sense, a fictitious worth; but penuriousness is almost unknown, and the hardest working man or woman gives freely where a need is really felt. the ideal is still for the many, more powerful than the real. the conscientiousness and painful self-consciousness of the early days still represses the joyful or peaceful side of life, and makes angles more to be desired than curves. reticence is the new england habit. affection, intense as it may be, gives and demands small expression. good-will must be taken for granted, and little courtesies and ameliorations in daily life are treated with disdain. "duty" is the watchword for most, and no matter how strange the path, if this word be lined above it, it is trodden unquestioned. as in the beginning, the corner-stone still "rests upon a book." the eagerness for knowledge shown in every act of the early colonial years has intensified, till "to know" has become a demon driving one to destruction. eternity would seem to have been abolished, so eager are the learners to use every second of time. overwork, mental and physical, has been the portion of the new england woman from the beginning. climate and all natural conditions fostered an alertness unknown to the moist and equable air of the old home. while for the south there was a long perpetuation of the ease of english life, and the adjective which a southern woman most desires to hear before her name is "sweet"; the new england woman chooses "bright," and the highest mark of approval is found in that rather aggressive word. tin pans, scoured to that point of polish which meets the new england necessity for thoroughness, are "bright," and the near observer blinks as he suddenly comes upon them in the sun. a bit of looking-glass handled judiciously by the small boy, has the same quality, and is warranted to disconcert the most placid temperament; and so the new england woman is apt to have jagged edges and a sense of too much light for the situation. "sweetness and light" is the desirable combination, and may come in the new union of north and south. the wise woman is she who best unites the two. yet, arraign new england as we may--and there are many unmentioned counts in the indictment--it is certain that to her we owe the best elements in our national life. "the decadence of new england" is a popular topic at present. it is the fashion to sneer at her limitations. our best novelists delight in giving her barrenness, her unloveliness in all individual life--her provincialism and conceit, and strenuous money-getting. "it is a good place to be born in," they say, "provided you emigrate early," and then they proceed to analyze her very prominent weaknesses, and to suppress as carefully as possible just judgment, either of past or present. her scenery they cannot dispense with. her very inadequacies and absurdities of climate involve a beauty which unites northern sharpness of outline with southern grace of form and color. the short and fervid summer owns charms denied a longer one. spring comes uncertainly and lingeringly, but it holds in many of its days an exquisite and brooding tenderness no words can render, as elusive as that half- defined outline on budding twigs against the sky--not leaves, but the shadow and promise of leaves to be. the turf of the high pasture-lands springing under the foot; the smell of sweet fern and brake; the tinkle of cow-bells among the rocks, or the soft patter of feet as the sheep run toward the open bars--what new england boy or girl does not remember and love, till loving and remembering are over for the life we live here? yet in all the ferment of old and new beliefs--the strange departures from a beaten track--the attitude always, not of those who have found, but of those who seek, there has ever been the promise of a better day. the pathos which underlies all record of human life is made plain, and a tender sadness is in the happiest lines. and this is the real story of new england. her best has passed on. what the future holds for her it is impossible to say, or what strange development may come from this sudden and overmastering celtic element, pervading even the remotest hill-towns. but one possession remains intact: the old graveyards where the worthies of an elder day sleep quietly under stones decaying and crumbling faster than their memories. it all comes to dust in the end, but even dust holds promise. growth is in every particle, and whatever time may bring--for the past it is a flower that "smells sweet and blossoms in the dust"--for present and future, a steady march toward the better day, whose twilight is our sunshine. index. agawam andover, mass. andros, governor arbella, the bay psalm book belcher, governor berkeley, sir william bibles, geneva blaxton, rev. mr. bradford, william bradstreet, simon " anne " dorothy " dudley " hannah " john " mercy " sarah " simon, jr. buchanan, mr. cage for offenders cambridge, mass. " synod of cattle keeping charlestown, mass chapman, version of homer church music chests, family clapp, roger compton, william, lord coddington, rev. mr cotton, john " seaborn contemplations, a poem cromwell, oliver criticism, personal dennison, daniel digby, sir kenelm dodd, puritan minister downing, emanual drinking customs dryden, john " erasmus du bartas dunkirkers dudley, anne " dorothy " john " joseph " paul " robert " roger " thomas " samuel education in new england eliot, rev. john elizabeth, queen endicott, rev. john fire, in andover firmin, giles folger, peter food in new england four ages of man, (poem) four elements, the, (poem) four humours of man, (poem) four monarchies, (poem) four seasons, (poem) fulling mill furniture, colonial galton gardener, capt. joseph goffe, thomas grandmothers, puritan harvard college hathorn, daniel " william hawthorne, nathanael harvey, discovery of circulation of the blood higginson, rev. francis hospitality in new england hooker, rev. thomas holmes, oliver wendell house-lots homes, nonconformist hutchinson, anne " colonel " mrs. lucy hurlstone, mr. hubbard hunting indians inns ipswich, mass jamestown, va. johnson, lady arbella " isaac " rev. mr. labor, scarcity of lempingham, castle of laud, bishop law in the colony libertines light, the inward lincoln, earl of lowe, rev. mr. marbury, thomas marriage masson's life of milton mansell, mt. mather, cotton medical profession in mass. meditations, divine and moral michaud milton, john montaigne, essays of new england nonconformists northumberland, duke of norton, john nowell, rev. mr. pareus, david parker, thomas pemble, william peters, hugh phipps, sir william pearce, william pewter plate pelham players poems, anne bradstreet's poets, american poole, mrs. elizabeth preston, dr. puritan puritanism quarles, the emblems of quakers in new england renascence revolution, a spiritual religious reflections road-making robinson, rev. john rogers, john rupert, prince ruskin, john russ, goodman and goodwife salem saltonstall, sir robert schools, andover " new england servants, english " indian the women of the french salons by amelia gere mason preface it has been a labor of love with many distinguished frenchmen to recall the memories of the women who have made their society so illustrious, and to retouch with sympathetic insight the features which time was beginning to dim. one naturally hesitates to enter a field that has been gleaned so carefully, and with such brilliant results, by men like cousin, sainte-beuve, goncourt, and others of lesser note. but the social life of the two centuries in which women played so important a role in france is always full of human interest from whatever point of view one may regard it. if there is not a great deal to be said that is new, old facts may be grouped afresh, and old modes of life and thought measured by modern standards. in searching through the numerous memoirs, chronicles, letters, and original manuscripts in which the records of these centuries are hidden away, nothing has struck me so forcibly as the remarkable mental vigor and the far-reaching influence of women whose theater was mainly a social one. though society has its frivolities, it has also its serious side, and it is through the phase of social evolution that was begun in the salons that women have attained the position they hold today. however beautiful, or valuable, or poetic may have been the feminine types of other nationalities, it is in france that we find the forerunners of the intelligent, self-poised, clear-sighted, independent modern woman. it is possible that in the search for larger fields the smaller but not less important ones have been in a measure forgotten. the great stream of civilization flows from a thousand unnoted rills that make sweet music in their course, and swell the current as surely as the more noisy torrent. the conditions of the past cannot be revived, nor are they desirable. the present has its own theories and its own methods. but at a time when the reign of luxury is rapidly establishing false standards, and the best intellectual life makes hopeless struggles against an ever aggressive materialism, it may be profitable as well as interesting to consider the possibilities that lie in a society equally removed from frivolity and pretension, inspired by the talent, the sincerity, and the moral force of american women, and borrowing a new element of fascination from the simple and charming but polite informality of the old salons. it has been the aim in these studies to gather within a limited compass the women who represented the social life of their time on its most intellectual side, and to trace lightly their influence upon civilization through the avenues of literature and manners. though the work may lose something in fullness from the effort to put so much into so small a space, perhaps there is some compensation in the opportunity of comparing, in one gallery, the women who exercised the greatest power in france for a period of more than two hundred years. the impossibility of entering into the details of so many lives in a single volume is clearly apparent. only the most salient points can be considered. many who would amply repay a careful study have simply been glanced at, and others have been omitted altogether. as it would be out of the question in a few pages to make an adequate portrait of women who occupy so conspicuous a place in history as mme. de maintenon and mme. de stael, the former has been reluctantly passed with a simple allusion, and the latter outlined in a brief resume not at all proportional to the relative interest or importance of the subject. i do not claim to present a complete picture of french society, and without wishing to give too rose-colored a view, it has not seemed to me necessary to dwell upon its corrupt phases. if truth compels one sometimes to state unpleasant facts in portraying historic characters, it is as needless and unjust as in private life to repeat idle and unproved tales, or to draw imaginary conclusions from questionable data. the conflict of contemporary opinion on the simplest matters leads one often to the suspicion that all personal history is more or less disguised fiction. the best one can do in default of direct records is to accept authorities that are generally regarded as the most trustworthy. this volume is affectionately dedicated to the memory of my mother, who followed the work with appreciative interest in its early stages, but did not live to see its conclusion. amelia gere mason paris, july , table of contents chapter i. salons of the seventeenth century characteristics of french woman--gallic genius for conversation--social conditions--origin of the salons--their power--their composition--their records chapter ii. the hotel de rambouillet mme. de rambouillet--the salon bleu--its habitues--its diversions--corneille--balzac--richelieu--romance of the grand conde--the young bossuet--voiture--the duchesse de longueville--angelique paulet--julie d'angennes--les precieuses ridicules--decline of the salon--influence upon literature and manners chapter iii. mademoiselle de scudery and the samedis salons of the noblesse--"the illustrious sappho"--her romances--the samedis--bons mots of mme. cornuel--estimate of mlle. de scudery chapter iv. la grande mademoiselle her character--her heroic part in the fronde--her exile--literary diversions of her salon--a romantic episode chapter v. a literary salon at port royal mme. de sable--her worldly life--her retreat--her friends--pascal--the maxims of la rochefoucauld--last days of the marquise chapter vi. madame de sevigne her genius--her youth--her unworthy husband--her impertinent cousin--her love for her daughter--her letters--hotel de carnavalet--mme. duplessis guengaud--mme. de coulanges--the curtain falls chapter vii. madame de la fayette her friendship with mme. de sevigne--her education--her devotion to the princess henrietta--her salon--la rochefoucauld-- talent as a diplomatist--comparison with mme. de maintenon--her literary work--sadness of her last days--woman in literature chapter viii. salons of the eighteenth century characteristics of the eighteenth century--its epicurean philosophy--anecdote of mme. du deffand--the salon an engine of political power--great influence of woman--salons defined--literary dinners--etiquette of the salons--an exotic on american soil chapter ix. an antechamber of the academie francaise the marquise de lambert--her "bureau d'esprit"--fontenelle--advice to her son--wise thoughts on the education of women--her love of consideration--her generosity--influence of women upon the academy chapter x. the duchesse du maine her capricious character--her esprit--mlle. de launay--clever portrait of her mistress--perpetual fetes at sceaux--voltaire and the "divine emilie"--dilettante character of this salon chapter xi. madame de tencin and madam du chatelet an intriguing chanoinesse--her singular fascination--her salon--its philosophical character--mlle. aisse--romances of mme. de tencin--d'alembert--la belle emilie--voltaire--the two women compared chapter xii. madame geoffrin and the philosophers cradles of the new philosophy--noted salons of this period--character of mme. geoffrin--her practical education--anecdotes of her husband--composition of her salon--its insidious influence--her journey to warsaw--her death chapter xiii. ultra philosophical salons--madame d'epinay mme. de graffigny--baron d'holbach--mme. d'epinay's portrait of herself--mlle. quinault--rousseau--la chevrette--grimm--diderot--the abbe galiani--estimate of mme. d'epinay chapter xiv. salons of the noblesse--madame du deffand la marechale de luxenbourg--the temple--comtesse de boufflers--mme. du dufand--her convent salon--rupture with mlle. de lespinasse--her friendship with horace walpole--her brilliancy and her ennui chapter xv. mademoiselle de lespinasse a romantic career--companion of mme. du deffand--rival salons--association with the encyclopedists--d'alembert--a heart tragedy--impassioned letters--a type unique in her age chapter xvi. the salon helvetique the swiss pastor's daughter--her social ambition--her friends mme. de marchais--mme. d'houdetot--duchesse de lauzun--character of mme. necker--death at coppet--close of the most brilliant period of the salons chapter xvii. salons of the revolution--madame roland change in the character of the salons--mme. de condorcet--mme. roland's story of her own life--a marriage of reason--enthusiasm for the revolution--her modest salon--her tragical fate chapter xviii. madam de stael supremacy of her genius--her early training--her sensibility--a mariage de convenance--her salon--anecdote of benjamin constant--her exile--life at coppet--secret marriage--close of a stormy life chapter xix. salons of the empire and restoration--madame recamier a transition period--mme. de montesson--mme. de genus--revival of the literary spirit--mme. de beaumont--mme. de remusat--mme. de souza--mme. de duras--mme. de krudener--fascination of mme. recamier--her friends--her convent salon--chateaubriand decline of the salon chapter i. salons of the seventeenth century _characteristics of french woman--gallic genius for conversation--social conditions--origin of the salons--their power--their composition--their records._ "inspire, but do not write," said lebrun to women. whatever we may think today of this rather superfluous advice, we can readily pardon a man living in the atmosphere of the old french salons, for falling somewhat under the special charm of their leaders. it was a charm full of subtle flattery. these women were usually clever and brilliant, but their cleverness and brilliancy were exercised to bring into stronger relief the talents of their friends. it is true that many of them wrote, as they talked, out of the fullness of their own hearts or their own intelligence, and with no thought of a public; but it was only an incident in their lives, another form of diversion, which left them quite free from the dreaded taint of feminine authorship. their peculiar gift was to inspire others, and much of the fascination that gave them such power in their day still clings to their memories. even at this distance, they have a perpetual interest for us. it may be that the long perspective lends them a certain illusion which a closer view might partly dispel. something also may be due to the dark background against which they were outlined. but, in spite of time and change, they stand out upon the pages of history, glowing with an ever-fresh vitality, and personifying the genius of a civilization of which they were the fairest flower. the gallic genius is eminently a social one, but it is, of all others, the most difficult to reproduce. the subtle grace of manner, the magic of spoken words, are gone with the moment. the conversations of two centuries ago are today like champagne which has lost its sparkle. we may recall their tangible forms--the facts, the accessories, the thoughts, even the words, but the flavor is not there. it is the volatile essence of gaiety and wit that especially characterizes french society. it glitters from a thousand facets, it surprises us in a thousand delicate turns of thought, it appears in countless movements and shades of expression. but it refuses to be imprisoned. hence the impossibility of catching the essential spirit of the salons. we know something of the men and women who frequented them, as they have left many records of themselves. we have numerous pictures of their social life from which we may partially reconstruct it and trace its influence. but the nameless attraction that held for so long a period the most serious men of letters as well as the gay world still eludes us. we find the same elusive quality in the women who presided over these reunions. they were true daughters of a race of which mme. de graffigny wittily said that it "escaped from the hands of nature when there had entered into its composition only air and fire." they certainly were not faultless; indeed, some of them were very faulty. nor were they, as a rule, remarkable for learning. even the leaders of noted literary salons often lacked the common essentials of a modern education. but if they wrote badly and spelled badly, they had an abundance of that delicate combination of intellect and wit which the french call esprit. they had also, in superlative measure, the social gifts which women of genius reared in the library or apart from the world, are apt to lack. the close study of books leads to a knowledge of man rather than of men. it tends toward habits of introspection which are fatal to the clear and swift vision required for successful leadership of any sort. social talent is distinct, and implies a happy poise of character and intellect; the delicate blending of many gifts, not the supremacy of one. it implies taste and versatility, with fine discrimination, and the tact to sink one's personality as well as to call out the best in others. it was this flexibility of mind, this active intelligence tempered with sensibility and the native instinct of pleasing, that distinguished the french women who have left such enduring traces upon their time. "it is not sufficient to be wise, it is necessary also to please," said the witty and penetrating ninon, who thus very aptly condensed the feminine philosophy of her race. perhaps she has revealed the secret of their fascination, the indefinable something which is as difficult to analyze as the perfume of a rose. a history of the french salons would include the history of the entire period of which they were so prominent a factor. it would make known to us its statesmen and its warriors; it would trace the great currents of thought; it would give us glimpses of every phase of society, from the diversions of the old noblesse, with their sprinkling of literature and philosophy, to the familiar life of the men of letters, who cast about their intimate coteries the halo of their own genius. these salons were closely interwoven with the best intellectual life of more than two hundred years. differing in tone according to the rank, taste, or character of their leaders, they were rallying points for the most famous men and women of their time. in these brilliant centers, a new literature had its birth. here was found the fine critical sense that put its stamp on a new poem or a new play. here ministers were created and deposed, authors and artists were brought into vogue, and vacant chairs in the academie francaise were filled. here the great philosophy of the eighteenth century was cradled. here sat the arbiters of manners, the makers of social success. to these high tribunals came, at last, every aspirant for fame. it was to the refinement, critical taste, and oral force of a rare woman, half french and half italian, that the first literary salons owed their origin and their distinctive character. in judging of the work of mme. de rambouillet, we have to consider that in the early days of the seventeenth century knowledge was not diffused as it is today. a new light was just dawning upon the world, but learning was still locked in the brains of savants, or in the dusty tomes of languages that were practically obsolete. men of letters were dependent upon the favors of noble but often ignorant patrons, whom they never met on a footing of equality. the position of women was as inferior as their education, and the incredible depravity of morals was a sufficient answer to the oft-repeated fallacy that the purity of the family is best maintained by feminine seclusion. it is true there were exceptions to this reign of illiteracy. with the natural disposition to glorify the past, the writers of the next generation liked to refer to the golden era of the valois and the brilliancy of its voluptuous court. very likely they exaggerated a little the learning of marguerite de navarre, who was said to understand latin, italian, spanish, even greek and hebrew. but she had rare gifts, wrote religious poems, besides the very secular "heptameron" which was not eminently creditable to her refinement, held independent opinions, and surrounded herself with men of letters. this little oasis of intellectual light, shadowed as it was with vices, had its influence, and there were many women in the solitude of remote chateaux who began to cultivate a love for literature. "the very women and maidens aspired to this praise and celestial manna of good learning," said rabelais. but their reading was mainly limited to his own unsavory satires, to spanish pastorals, licentious poems, and their books of devotion. it was on such a foundation that mme. de rambouillet began to rear the social structure upon which her reputation rests. she was eminently fitted for this role by her pure character and fine intelligence; but she added to these the advantages of rank and fortune, which gave her ample facilities for creating a social center of sufficient attraction to focus the best intellectual life of the age, and sufficient power to radiate its light. still it was the tact and discrimination to select from the wealth of material about her, and quietly to reconcile old traditions with the freshness of new ideas, that especially characterized mme. de rambouillet. it was this richness of material, the remarkable variety and originality of the women who clustered round and succeeded their graceful leader, that gave so commanding an influence to the salons of the seventeenth century. no social life has been so carefully studied, no women have been so minutely portrayed. the annals of the time are full of them. they painted one another, and they painted themselves, with realistic fidelity. the lights and shadows are alike defined. we know their joys and their sorrows, their passions and their follies, their tastes and their antipathies. their inmost life has been revealed. they animate, as living figures, a whole class of literature which they were largely instrumental in creating, and upon which they have left the stamp of their own vivid personality. they appear later in the pages of cousin and sainte-beuve, with their radiant features softened and spiritualized by the touch of time. we rise from a perusal of these chronicles of a society long passed away, with the feeling that we have left a company of old friends. we like to recall their pleasant talk of themselves, of their companions, of the lighter happenings, as well as the more serious side of the age which they have illuminated. we seem to see their faces, not their manner, watch the play of intellect and feeling, while they speak. the variety is infinite and full of charm. mme. de sevigne talks upon paper, of the trifling affairs of every-day life, adding here and there a sparkling anecdote, a bit of gossip, a delicate characterization, a trenchant criticism, a dash of wit, a touch of feeling, or a profound thought. all this is lighted up by her passionate love of her daughter, and in this light we read the many-sided life of her time for twenty-five years. mme. de la fayette takes the world more seriously, and replaces the playful fancy of her friend by a richer vein of imagination and sentiment. she sketches for us the court of which madame (title given to the wife of the king's brother) is the central figure--the unfortunate princes henrietta whom she loved so tenderly, and who died so tragically in her arms. she writes novels too; not profound studies of life, but fine and exquisite pictures of that side of the century which appealed most to her poetic sensibility. we follow the leading characters of the age through the ten-volume romances of mlle. de scudery, which have mostly long since fallen into oblivion. doubtless the portraits are a trifle rose-colored, but they accord, in the main, with more veracious history. the grande mademoiselle describes herself and her friends, with the curious naivete of a spoiled child who thinks its smallest experiences of interest to all the world. mme. de maintenon gives us another picture, more serious, more thoughtful, but illuminated with flashes of wonderful insight. most of these women wrote simply to amuse themselves and their friends. it was only another mode of their versatile expression. with rare exceptions, they were not authors consciously or by intention. they wrote spontaneously, and often with reckless disregard of grammar and orthography. but the people who move across their gossiping pages are alive. the century passes in review before us as we read. the men and women who made its literature so brilliant and its salons so famous, become vivid realities. prominent among the fair faces that look out upon us at every turn, from court and salon, is that of the duchesse de longueville, sister of the grand conde, and heroine of the fronde. her lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. we trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for la rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others have done. were not twenty-five years of suffering and penance an ample expiation? she was one of the three women of whom cardinal mazarin said that they were "capable of governing and overturning three kingdoms." the others were the intriguing duchesse de chevreuse, who dazzled the age by her beauty and her daring escapades, and the fascinating anne de gonzague, better known as the princesse palatine, of whose winning manners, conversational charm, penetrating intellect, and loyal character bossuet spoke so eloquently at her death. we catch pleasant glimpses of mme. deshoulieres, beautiful and a poet; of mme. cornuel, of whom it was said that "every sin she confessed was an epigram"; of mme. de choisy, witty and piquante; of mme. de doulanges, also a wit and femme d'esprit. linked with these by a thousand ties of sympathy and affection were the worthy counterparts of pascal and arnauld, of bossuet and fenelon, the devoted women who poured out their passionate souls at the foot of the cross, and laid their earthly hopes upon the altar of divine love. we follow the devout jacqueline pascal to the cloister in which she buries her brilliant youth to die at thirty-five of a wounded conscience and a broken heart. many a bruised spirit, as it turns from the gay world to the mystic devotion which touches a new chord in its jaded sensibilities, finds support and inspiration in the strong and fervid sympathy of jacqueline arnauld, better known as mere angelique of port royal. this profound spiritual passion was a part of the intense life of the century, which gravitated from love and ambition to the extremes of penitence and asceticism. a multitude of minor figures, graceful and poetic, brilliant and spirituelles, flit across the canvas, leaving the fragrance of an exquisite individuality, and tempting one to extend the list of the versatile women who toned and colored the society of the period. but we have to do, at present, especially with those who gathered and blended this fresh intelligence, delicate fancy, emotional wealth, and religious fervor, into a society including such men as corneille, balzac, bossuet, richelieu, conde, pascal, arnault, and la rochefoucauld--those who are known as leaders of more or less celebrated salons. of these, mme. de rambouillet and mme. de sable were among the best representative types of their time, and the first of the long line of social queens who, through their special gift of leadership, held so potent a sway for two centuries. chapter ii. the hotel de rambouillet _mme. de rambouillet--the salon bleu--its habitues--its diversions--corneille--balzac--richelieu--romance of the grand conde--the young bossuet--voiture--the duchesse de longueville--angelique paulet--julie d'angennes--les precieuses ridicules--decline of the salon--influence upon literature and manners_ the hotel de rambouillet has been called the "cradle of polished society," but the personality of its hostess is less familiar than that of many who followed in her train. this may be partly due to the fact that she left no record of herself on paper. she aptly embodied the kind advice of le brun. it was her special talent to inspire others and to combine the various elements of a brilliant and complex social life. the rare tact which enabled her to do this lay largely in a certain self-effacement and the peculiar harmony of a nature which presented few salient points. she is best represented by the salon of which she was the architect and the animating spirit; but even this is better known today through its faults than its virtues. it is a pleasant task to clear off a little dust from its memorials, and to paint in fresh colors one who played so important a role in the history of literature and manners. catherine de vivonne was born at rome in . her father, the marquis de pisani, was french ambassador, and she belonged through her mother to the old roman families of strozzi and savelli. married at sixteen to the count d'angennes, afterwards marquis de rambouillet, she was introduced to the world at the gay court of henry iv. but the coarse and depraved manners which ruled there were altogether distasteful to her delicate and fastidious nature. at twenty she retired from these brilliant scenes of gilded vice, and began to gather round her the coterie of choice spirits which later became so famous. filled with the poetic ideals and artistic tastes which had been nourished in a thoughtful and elegant seclusion, it seems to have been the aim of her life to give them outward expression. her mind, which inherited the subtle refinement of the land of her birth, had taken its color from the best italian and spanish literature, but she was in no sense a learned woman. she was once going to study latin, in order to read virgil, but was prevented by ill health. it is clear, however, that she had a great diversity of gifts, with a basis of rare good sense and moral elevation. "she was revered, adored," writes mme. de motteville; "a model of courtesy, wisdom, knowledge, and sweetness." she is always spoken of in the chronicles of her time as a loyal wife, a devoted mother, the benefactor of the suffering, and the sympathetic adviser of authors and artists. the poet segrais says: "she was amiable and gracious, of a sound and just mind; it is she who has corrected the bad customs which prevailed before her. she taught politeness to all those of her time who frequented her house. she was also a good friend, and kind to every one." we are told that she was beautiful, but we know only that her face was fair and delicate, her figure tall and graceful, and her manner stately and dignified. her greek love of beauty expressed itself in all her appointments. the unique and original architecture of her hotel,--which was modeled after her own designs,--the arrangement of her salon, the pursuits she chose, and the amusements she planned, were all a part of her own artistic nature. this was shown also in her code of etiquette, which imposed a fine courtesy upon the members of her coterie, and infused into life the spirit of politeness, which one of her countrymen has called the "flower of humanity." but this esthetic quality was tempered with a clear judgment, and a keen appreciation of merit and talent, which led her to gather into her society many not "to the manner born." sometimes she delicately aided a needy man of letters to present a respectable appearance--a kindness much less humiliating in those days of patronage that it would be today. as may readily be imagined, these new elements often jarred upon the tastes and prejudices of her noble guests, but in spite of this it was considered an honor to be received by her, and, though not even a duchess, she was visited by princesses. adding to this spirit of noble independence the prestige of rank, beauty, and fortune; a temper of mingled sweetness and strength; versatile gifts controlled by an admirable reason; a serene and tranquil character; a playful humor, free from the caprices of a too exacting sensibility; a perfect savoir-faire, and we have the unusual combination which enabled her to hold her sway for so many years, without a word of censure from even the most scandal-loving of chroniclers. "we have sought in vain," writes cousin, "for that which is rarely lacking in any life of equal or even less brilliancy, some calumny or scandal, an equivocal word, or the lightest epigram. we have found only a concert of warm eulogies which have run through many generations.... she has disarmed tallemant himself. this caricaturist of the seventeenth century has been pitiless towards the habitues of her illustrious house, but he praises her with a warmth which is very impressive from such a source." the modern spirit of change has long since swept away all vestiges of the old rue saint-thomas-du-lourvre and the time-honored dwellings that ornamented it. conspicuous among these, and not far from the palais royal, was the famous hotel de rambouillet. the salon bleu has become historic. this "sanctuary of the temple of athene," as it was called in the stilted language of the day, has been illuminated for us by the rank, beauty, and talent of the augustan age of france. we are more or less familiar with even the minute details of the spacious room, whose long windows, looking across the little garden towards the tuileries, let in a flood of golden sunlight. we picture to ourselves its draperies of blue and gold, its curious cabinets, its choice works of art, its venetian lamps, and its crystal vases always filled with flowers that scatter the perfume of spring. it was here that mme. de rambouillet held her court for nearly thirty years, her salon reaching the height of its power under richelieu, and practically closing with the fronde. she sought to gather all that was most distinguished, whether for wit, beauty, talent, or birth, into an atmosphere of refinement and simple elegance, which should tone down all discordant elements and raise life to the level of a fine art. there was a strongly intellectual flavor in the amusements, as well as in the discussions of this salon, and the place of honor was given to genius, learning, and good manners, rather than to rank. but it was by no means purely literary. the exclusive spirit of the old aristocracy, with its hauteur and its lofty patronage, found itself face to face with fresh ideals. the position of the hostess enabled her to break the traditional barriers, and form a society upon a new basis, but in spite of the mingling of classes hitherto separated, the dominant life was that of the noblesse. woman of rank gave the tone and made the laws. their code of etiquette was severe. they aimed to combine the graces of italy with the chivalry of spain. the model man must have a keen sense of honor, and wit without pedantry; he must be brave, heroic, generous, gallant, but he must also possess good breeding and gentle courtesy. the coarse passions which had disgraced the court were refined into subtle sentiments, and women were raised upon a pedestal, to be respectfully and platonically adored. in this reaction from extreme license, familiarity was forbidden, and language was subjected to a critical censorship. it was here that the word precieuse was first used to signify a woman of personal distinction, accomplished in the highest sense, with a perfect accord of intelligence, good taste, and good manners. later, when pretension crept into the inferior circles which took this one for a model, the term came to mean a sort of intellectual parvenue, half prude and half pedant, who affected learning, and paraded it like fine clothes, for effect. "do you remember," said flechier, many years later, in his funeral oration on the death of the duchesse de montausier, "the salons which are still regarded with so much veneration, where the spirit was purified, where virtue was revered under the name of the incomparable arthenice; where people of merit and quality assembled, who composed a select court, numerous without confusion, modest without constraint, learned without pride, polished without affectation?" whatever allowance we may be disposed to make for the friendship of the eminent abbe, he spoke with the authority of personal knowledge, and at a time when the memories of the hotel de rambouillet were still fresh. it is true that those who belonged to this professed school of morals were not all patterns of decorum. but we cannot judge by the anglo-saxon standards of the nineteenth century the faults of an age in which a ninon de l'enclos lives on terms of veiled intimacy with a strait-laced mme. de maintenon, and, when age has given her a certain title to respectability, receives in her salon women of as spotless reputation as mme. de la fayette. measured from the level of their time, the lives of the rambouillet coterie stand out white and shining. the pure character of the marquise and her daughters was above reproach, and they were quoted as "models whom all the world cited, all the world admired, and every one tried to imitate." to be a precieuse was in itself an evidence of good conduct. "this salon was a resort not only for all the fine wits, but for every one who frequented the court," writes mme. de motteville. "it was a sort of academy of beaux esprits, of gallantry, of virtue, and of science," says st. simon; "for these things accorded marvelously. it was a rendevous of all that was most distinguished in condition and in merit; a tribunal with which it was necessary to count, and whose decisions upon the conduct and reputation of people of the court and the world, had great weight." corneille read most of his dramas here, and, if report be true, read them very badly. he says of himself: et l'on peut rarement m'ecouter sans ennui, que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui. he was shy, awkward, ill at ease, not clear in speech, and rather heavy in conversation, but the chivalric and heroic character of his genius was quite in accord with the lofty and rather romantic standards affected by this circle, and made him one of its central literary figures. another was balzac, whose fine critical taste did so much for the elegance and purity of the french language, and who was as noted in his day as was his namesake, the brilliant author of the "comedie humaine," two centuries later. his long letters to the marquise, on the romans, were read and discussed in his absence, and it was through his influence, added to her own classic ideals, that roman dignity and urbanity were accepted as models in the new code of manners; indeed, it was he who introduced the word urbanite into the language. armand du plessis, who aimed to be poet as well as statesman, read here in his youth a thesis on love. when did a frenchman ever fail to write with facility upon this fertile theme? after he became cardinal de richelieu he feared the influence of the hotel de rambouillet, and sent a request to its hostess to report what was said of him there. she replied with consummate tact, that her guests were so strongly persuaded of her friendship for his eminence, that no one would have the temerity to speak ill of him in her presence. even the grand conde courted the muses, and wrote verses which were bad for a poet, though fairly good for a warrior. if it be true that every man is a poet once in his life, we may infer that this was about the time of his sad little romance with the pretty and charming mlle. du vigean, who was one of the youthful attractions of this coterie. family ambition stood in the way of their marriage, and the prince yielded to the wishes of his friends. the grande mademoiselle tells us that this was the only veritable passion of the brave young hero of many battles, and that he fainted at the final separation. united to a wife he did not love, and whom he did not scruple to treat very ill, he gave himself to glory and, it must be added, to unworthy intrigues. the pure-hearted young girl buried her beauty and her sorrows in the convent of the carmelites, and was no more heard of in the gay world. it is evident that the great soldier sometimes forgot the urbanity which was so strongly insisted upon in this society. he is said to have carried the impetuosity of his character into his conversation. when he had a good cause, he sustained it with grace and amiability. if it was a bad one, however, his eyes flashed, and he became so violent that it was thought prudent not to contradict him. it is related that boileau, after yielding one day in a dispute, remarked in a low voice to a friend: "hereafter i shall always be of the opinion of the prince when he is wrong." bossuet, when a boy of seventeen, improvised here one evening a sermon on a given theme, which was so eloquent that it held the company until near midnight. "i have never heard any one preach so early and so late," remarked the witty voiture, as he congratulated the youthful orator at the close. this famous bel esprit played a very prominent part here. his role was to amuse, and his talents gave him great vogue, but at this distance his small vanities strike one much more vividly than the wit which flashed out with the moment, or the vers de societe on which his fame rests. he owed his social success to a rather high-flown love letter which he evidently thought too good to be lost to the world. he sent it to a friend, who had it printed and circulated. what the lady thought does not appear, but it made the fortune of the poet. though the son of a wine merchant, and without rank, he had little more of the spirit of a courtier than voltaire, and his biting epigrams were no less feared. "if he were one of us, he would be insupportable," said conde. but his caprices were tolerated for the sake of his inexhaustible wit, and he was petted and spoiled to the end. a list of the men of letters who appeared from time to time at the hotel de rambouillet would include the most noted names of the century, besides many which were famous in their day, but at present are little more than historical shadows. the conversations were often learned, doubtless sometimes pretentious. one is inclined to wonder if these noble cavaliers and high-born woman did not yawn occasionally over the scholarly discourse of corneille and balzac upon the romans, the endless disputes about rival sonnets, and the long discussions on the value of a word. "doubtless it is a very beautiful poem, but also very tiresome," said mme. de longueville, after chapelain had finished reading his "pucelle"--a work which aimed to be the iliad of france, but succeeded only in being very long and rather heavy. this lovely young princess, who at sixteen had the exaltation of a religieuse, and was with difficulty won from her dreams of renunciation and a cloister, had become the wife of a man many years her senior, whom she did not love, and the idol of the brilliant world in which she lived. la rochefoucauld had not yet disturbed the serenity of her heart, nor political intrigues her peace of mind. it was before the fronde, in which she was destined to play so conspicuous a part, and she was still content with the role of a reigning beauty; but she was not at all averse to the literary entertainments of this salon, in which her own fascinations were so delightfully sung. she found the flattering verses of voiture more to her taste than the stately epic of chapelain, took his side warmly against benserade in the famous dispute as to the merits of their two sonnets, "job" and "urania," and won him a doubtful victory. the poems of voiture lose much of their flavor in translation, but i venture to give a verse in the original, which was addressed to the charming princesse, and which could hardly fail to win the favor of a young and beautiful woman. de perles, d'astres, et de fleurs, bourbon, le ciel fit tes couleurs, et mit dedans tout ce melange l'esprit d'une ange. but the diversions were by no means always grave or literary. life was represented on many sides, one secret, doubtless, of the wide influence of this society. the daughters of mme. de rambouillet, and her son, the popular young marquis de pisani, formed a nucleus of youth and gaiety. to these we may add the beautiful angelique paulet, who at seventeen had turned the head of henri iv, and escaped the fatal influence of that imperious sovereign's infatuation by his timely, or untimely, death. fair and brilliant, the best singer of her time, skilled also in playing the lute, and gifted with a special dramatic talent, she was always a favorite, much loved by her friends and much sung by the poets. her proud and impetuous character, her frank and original manners, together with her luxuriance of blonde hair, gained her the sobriquet of la belle lionne. nor must we forget mlle. de scudery, one of the most constant literary lights of this salon, and in some sense its chronicler; nor the fastidious mme. de sable. the brightest ornament of the hotel de rambouillet, however, was julie d'angennes, the petted daughter of the house, the devoted companion and clever assistant of her mother. her gaiety of heart, amiable temper, ready wit, and gracious manners surrounded her with an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine. fertile in resources, of fine intelligence, winning the love alike of men and women, she was the soul of the serious conversations, as well as of the amusements which relieved them. these amusements were varied and often original. they played little comedies. they had mythological fetes, draping themselves as antique gods and goddesses. sometimes they indulged in practical jokes and surprises, which were more laughable than dignified. malherbe and racan, the latter sighing hopelessly over the attractions of the dignified marquise, gave her the romantic name of arthenice, and forthwith the other members of the coterie took some nom de parnasse, by which they were familiarly known. they read the "astree" of d'urfe, that platonic dream of a disillusioned lover; discussed the romances of calprenede and the sentimental bergeries of racan. such arcadian pictures seemed to have a singular fascination for these courtly dames and plumed cavaliers. they tried to reproduce them. assuming the characters of the rather insipid strephons and florimels, they made love in pastoral fashion, with pipe and lute--these rustic diversions serving especially to while away the long summer days in the country at rambouillet, at chantilly, or at ruel. they improvised sonnets and madrigals; they praised each other in verse; they wrote long letters on the slightest pretext. as a specimen of the badinage so much in vogue, i quote from a letter written by voiture to one of the daughters of mme. de rambouillet, who was an abbess, and had sent him a present of a cat. "madame, i was already so devoted to you that i supposed you knew there was no need of winning me by presents, or trying to take me like a rat, with a cat. nevertheless, if there was anything in my thought that was not wholly yours, the cat which you have sent me has captured it." after a eulogy upon the cat, he adds: "i can only say that it is very difficult to keep, and for a cat religiously brought up it is very little inclined to seclusion. it never sees a window without wishing to jump out, it would have leaped over the wall twenty times if it had not been prevented, and no secular cat could be more lawless or more self-willed." the wit here is certainly rather attenuated, but the subject is an ungrateful one. mme. de sevigne finds voiture "libre, badin, charmant," and disposes of his critics by saying, "so much the worse for those who do not understand him." one is often puzzled to detect this rare spirituelle quality; but it is fair to presume that it was of the volatile sort that evaporates with time. all this sentimental masquerading and exaggerated gallantry suggests the vulnerable side of the hotel de rambouillet, and the side which its enemies have been disposed to make very prominent. among those who tried to imitate this salon, spanish chivalry doubtless degenerated into a thousand absurdities, and it must be admitted that the salon itself was not free from reproach on this point. it became the fashion to write and talk in the language of hyperbole. sighing lovers were consumed with artificial fires, and ready to die with affected languors. like the old poets of provence, whose spirit they caught and whose phrases they repeated, they were dying of love they did not feel. the eyes of phyllis extinguished the sun. the very nightingales expired of jealousy, after hearing the voice of angelique. it would be difficult, perhaps, to find anywhere a company of clever people bent upon amusing themselves and passing every day more or less together, whose sayings and doings would bear to be exactly chronicled. the literary diversions and poetic ideals of this circle, too, gave a certain color to the charge of affectation, among people of less refined instincts, who found its esprit incomprehensible, its manners prudish, and its virtue a tacit reproach; but the dignified and serious character of many of its constant habitues should be a sufficient guarantee that it did not greatly pass the limits of good taste and good sense. the only point upon which mme. de rambouillet seems to have been open to criticism was a certain formal reserve and an over-fastidious delicacy; but in an age when the standards of both refinement and morals were so low, this implies a virtue rather than a defect. nor does her character appear to have been at all tinged with pretension. "i should fear from your example to write in a style too elevated," says voiture, in a letter to her. but traditions are strong, and people do not readily adapt themselves to new models. character and manners are a growth. that which is put on, and not ingrained, is apt to lack true balance and proportion. hence it is not strange that this new order of things resulted in many crudities and exaggerations. it is not worth while to criticize too severely the plumed knights who took the heroes of corneille as models, played the harmless lover, and paid the tribute of chivalric deference to women. the strained politeness may have been artificial, and the forms of chivalry very likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive, while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral protests against the coarse vices of the time. the prudery which reached a satirical climax in "les precieuses ridicules" was a natural reaction from the sensuality of a marguerite and a gabrielle. mme. de rambouillet saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor does it appear that she was at all disturbed by the keen satire which was generally supposed to have been directed toward her salon. moliere himself disclaims all intention of attacking the true precieuse; but the world is not given to fine discrimination, and the true suffers from the blow aimed at the false. this brilliant comedian, whose manners were not of the choicest, was more at home in the lax and epicurean world of ninon and mme. de la sabliere--a world which naturally did not find the decorum of the precieuses at all to its taste; the witticism of ninon, who defined them as the "jansenists of love," is well known. it is not unlikely that moliere shared her dislike of the powerful and fastidious coterie whose very virtues might easily have furnished salient points for his scathing wit. but whatever affectations may have grown out of the new code of manners, it had a more lasting result in the fine and stately courtesy which pervaded the later social life of the century. we owe, too, a profound gratitude to these women who exacted and were able to command a consideration which with many shades of variation has been left as a permanent heritage to their sex. we may smile at some of their follies; have we not our own which some nineteenth century moliere may serve up for the delight and possible misleading of future generations? there is a warm human side to this daily intercourse, with its sweet and gracious courtesies. the women who discuss grave questions and make or unmake literary reputations in the salon, are capable of rare sacrifices and friendships that seem quixotic in their devotion. cousin, who has studied them so carefully and so sympathetically, has saved from oblivion many private letters which give us pleasant glimpses of their everyday life. as we listen to their quiet exchange of confidences, we catch the smile that plays over the light badinage, or the tear that lurks in the tender words. a little son of mme. de rambouillet has the small pox, and his sister julie shares the care of him with her mother, when every one else has fled. at his death, she devotes herself to her friend mme. de longueville, who soon after her marriage is attacked with the same dreaded malady. mme. de sable is afraid of contagion, and refuses to see mlle. de rambouillet, who writes her a characteristic letter. as it gives us a vivid idea of her esprit as well as of her literary style, i copy it in full, though it has been made already familiar to the english reader by george eliot, in her admirable review of cousin's "life of mme. de sable." mlle de chalais (dame de compagnie to the marquise) will please read this letter to mme. la marquise, out of the wind. madame, i cannot begin my treaty with you too early, for i am sure that between the first proposition made for me to see you, and the conclusion, you will have so many reflections to make, so many physicians to consult, and so many fears to overcome, that i shall have full leisure to air myself. the conditions which i offer are, not to visit you until i have been three days absent from the hotel de conde, to change all my clothing, to choose a day when it has frozen, not to approach you within four paces, not to sit down upon more than one seat. you might also have a great fire in your room, burn juniper in the four corners, surround yourself with imperial vinegar, rue, and wormwood. if you can feel safe under these conditions, without my cutting off my hair, i swear to you to execute them religiously; and if you need examples to fortify you, i will tell you that the queen saw m. de chaudebonne when he came from mlle. de bourbon's room, and that mme. d'aiguillon, who has good taste and is beyond criticism on such points, has just sent me word that if i did not go to see her, she should come after me. mme. de sable retorts in a satirical vein, that her friend is too well instructed in the needed precautions, to be quite free from the charge of timidity, adding the hope that since she understands the danger, she will take better care of herself in the future. this calls forth another letter, in which mlle. de rambouillet says, "one never fears to see those whom one loves. i would have given much, for your sake, if this had not occurred." she closes this spicy correspondence, however, with a very affectionate letter which calms the ruffled temper of her sensitive companion. mme. de sable has another friend, mlle. d'attichy, who figures quite prominently in the social life of a later period, as the comtesse de maure. this lady was just leaving paris to visit her in the country, when she learned that mme. de sable had written to mme. de rambouillet that she could conceive of no greater happiness than to pass her life alone with julie d'angennes. this touches her sensibilities so keenly that she changes her plans, and refuses to visit one who could find her pleasure away from her. mme. de sable tries in vain to appease her exacting friend, who replies to her explanations by a long letter in which she recalls their tender and inviolable friendship, and closes with these words: malheurteuse est l'ignorance, et plus malheureux le savoir. having thus lost a confidence which alone rendered life supportable to me, i cannot dream of taking the journey so much talked of; for there would be no propriety in traveling sixty leagues at this season, in order to burden you with a person so uninteresting to you, that after years of a passion without parallel you cannot help thinking that the greatest pleasure would consist in passing life without her. i return then into my solitude, to examine the faults which cause me so much unhappiness, and unless i can correct them, i should have less joy than confusion in seeing you. i kiss your hands very humbly. how this affair was adjusted does not appear, but as they remained devoted friends through life, unable to live apart, or pass a day happily without seeing each other, it evidently did not end in a serious alienation. it suggests, however, a delicacy and an exaltation of feeling which we are apt to accord only to love, and which go far toward disproving the verdict of mongaigne, that "the soul of a woman is not firm enough for so durable a tie as friendship." we like to dwell upon these inner phases of a famous and powerful coterie, not only because they bring before us so vividly the living, moving, thinking, loving women who composed it, letting us into their intimate life with its quiet shadings, its fantastic humors, and its wayward caprices, but because they lead us to the fountain head of a new form of literary expression. we have seen that the formal letters of balzac were among the early entertainments of the hotel de rambouillet, and that voiture had a witty or sentimental note for every occasion. mlle. de scudery held a ready pen, and was in the habit of noting down in her letters to absent friends the conversation, which ran over a great variety of topics, from the gossip of the moment to the gravest questions. there was no morning journal with its columns of daily news, no magazine with its sketches of contemporary life, and these private letters were passed from one to another to be read and discussed. the craze for clever letters spread. conversations literally overflowed upon paper. a romantic adventure, a bit of scandal, a drawing room incident, or a personal pique, was a fruitful theme. everybody aimed to excel in an art which brought a certain prestige. these letters, most of which had their brief day, were often gathered into little volumes. many have long since disappeared, or found burial in the dust of old libraries from which they are occasionally exhumed to throw fresh light upon some forgotten nook and by way of an age whose habits and manners, virtues and follies, they so faithfully record. a few, charged with the vitality of genius, retain their freshness and live among the enduring monuments of the society that gave them birth. the finest outcome of this prevailing taste was mme. de sevigne, who still reigns as the queen of graceful letter writers. although her maturity belongs to a later period, she was familiar with the rambouillet circle in her youth, and inherited its best spirit. the charm of this literature is its spontaneity. it has no ulterior aim, but delights in simple expression. these people write because they like to write. they are original because they sketch from life. there is something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. they give us all the accessories. they tell us how they lived, how they dressed, how they thought, how they acted. they talk of their plans, their loves, and their private piques, with the same ingenuous frankness. they condense for us their worldly philosophy, their sentiments, and their experience. the style of these letters is sometimes heavy and stilted, the wit is often strained and far-fetched, but many of them are written with an easy grace and a lightness of touch as fascinating as inimitable. the marriage of julie d'angennes, in , deprived the hotel de rambouillet of one of its chief attractions. it was only through the earnest wish of her family that, after a delay of thirteen years, she yielded at last to the persevering suit of the marquis, afterwards the duc de montausier, and became his wife. she was then thirty-eight, and he three years younger. the famous "guirlande de julie," which he dedicated and presented to her, still exists, as the unique memorial of his patient and enduring love. this beautiful volume, richly bound, decorated with a flower exquisitely painted on each of the twenty-nine leaves and accompanied by a madrigal written by the marquis himself or by some of the poets who frequented her house, was a remarkable tribute to the graces of the woman whose praises were so delicately sung. the faithful lover, who was a protestant, gave a crowning proof of his devotion, in changing his religion. so much adoration could hardly fail to touch the most capricious and obdurate of hearts. we cannot dismiss this woman, whom cousin regards as the most accomplished type of the society she adorned, without a word more. though her ambition was gratified by the honors that fell upon her husband, who after holding many high positions was finally entrusted with the education of the dauphin; and though her own appointment of dame d'honneur to the queen gave her an envied place at court, we trace with regret the close of her brilliant career. as has been already indicated, she added to much esprit a character of great sweetness, and manners facile, gracious, even caressing. with less elevation, less independence, and less firmness than her mother, she had more of the sympathetic quality, the frank unreserve, that wins the heart. no one had so many adorers; no one scattered so many hopeless passions; no one so gently tempered these into friendships. she knew always how to say the fitting word, to charm away the clouds of ill humor, to conciliate opposing interests. but this spirit of complaisance which, however charming it may be, is never many degrees removed from the spirit of the courtier, proved to be the misfortune of her later life. too amiable, perhaps too diplomatic, to frown openly upon the king's irregularities, she was accused, whether justly or otherwise, of tacitly favoring his relations with mme. de montespan. the husband of this lady took his wife's infidelity very much to heart, and, failing to find any redress, forced himself one day into the presence of madam de montausier, and made a violent scene which so affected her that she fell into a profound melancholy and an illness from which she never rallied. there is always an air of mystery thrown about this affair, and it is difficult to fathom the exact truth; but the results were sufficiently tragical to the woman who was quoted by her age as a model of virtue and decorum. in , the troubles of the fronde, which divided friends and added fuel to petty social rivalries, scattered the most noted guests of the hotel de rambouillet. voiture was dead; angelique paulet died two years later. the young marquis de pisani, the only son and the hope of his family, had fallen with many brave comrades on the field of nordlingen. of the five daughters, three were abbesses of convents. the health of the marquise, which had always been delicate, was still further enfeebled by the successive griefs which darkened her closing years. her husband, of whom we know little save that he was sent on various foreign missions, and "loved his wife always as a lover," died in . she survived him thirteen years, living to see the death of her youngest daughter, angelique, wife of the comte de grignan who was afterwards the son-in-law of mme. de sevigne. she witnessed the elevation of her favorite julie, but was spared the grief of her death which occurred five or six years after her own. the aged marquise, true to her early tastes, continued to receive her friends in her ruelle, and her salon had a brief revival when the duchesse de montausier returned from the provinces, after the second fronde; but its freshness had faded with its draperies of blue and gold. the brilliant company that made it so famous was dispersed, and the glory of the salon bleu was gone. there is something infinitely pathetic in the epitaph this much-loved and successful woman wrote for herself when she felt that the end was near: ici git arthenice, exempte des rigueurs don't la rigueur du sort l'a touours poursuivie. et si tu veux, passant, compter tous ses malheurs, tu n'aura qu'a, compter les moments de sa vie. the spirit of unrest is there beneath the calm exterior. it may be some hidden wound; it may be only the old, old weariness, the inevitable burden of the race. "mon dieu!" wrote mme. de maintenon, in the height of her worldly success, "how sad life is! i pass my days without other consolation than the thought that death will end it all." mme. de rambouillet had worked unconsciously toward a very important end. she found a language crude and inelegant, manners coarse and licentious, morals dissolute and vicious. her influence was at its height in the age of corneille and descartes, and she lived almost to the culmination of the era of racine and moliere, of boileau and la bruyere, of bossuet and fenelon, the era of simple and purified language, of refined and stately manners, and of at least outward respect for morality. to these results she largely contributed. her salon was the social and literary power of the first half of the century. in an age of political espionage, it maintained its position and its dignity. it sustained corneille against the persecutions of richelieu, and numbered among its habitues the founders of the academie francaise, who continued the critical reforms begun there. as a school of politeness, it has left permanent traces. this woman of fine ideals and exalted standards exacted of others the purity of character, delicacy of thought, and urbanity of manner, which she possessed in so eminent a degree herself. her code was founded upon the best instincts of humanity, and whatever modifications of form time has wrought its essential spirit remains unchanged. "politeness does not always inspire goodness, equity, complaisance, gratitude," says la bruyere, "but it gives at least the appearance of these qualities, and makes man seem externally what he ought to be internally." it was in this salon, too, that the modern art of conversation, which has played so conspicuous a part in french life, may be said to have had its birth. men and women met on a footing of equality, with similar tastes and similar interests. different ranks and conditions were represented, giving a certain cosmopolitan character to a society which had hitherto been narrow in its scope and limited in its aims. naturally conversation assumed a new importance, and was subject to new laws. to quote again from labruyere, who has so profoundly penetrated the secrets of human nature: "the esprit of conversation consists much less in displaying itself than in drawing out the wit of others... men do not like to admire you, they wish to please; they seek less to be instructed or even to be entertained, than to be appreciated and applauded, and the most delicate pleasure is to make that of others." "to please others," says la rochefoucauld, "one must speak of the things they love and which concern them, avoid disputes upon indifferent maters, ask questions rarely, and never let them think that one is more in the right than themselves." many among the great writers of the age touch in the same tone upon the philosophy underlying the various rules of manners and conversation which were first discussed at the hotel de rambouillet, and which have passed into permanent though unwritten laws--unfortunately a little out of fashion in the present generation. it is difficult to estimate the impulse given to intelligence and literary taste by this breaking up of old social crystallizations. what the savant had learned in his closet passed more or less into current coin. conversation gave point to thought, clearness to expression, simplicity to language. women of rank and recognized ability imposed the laws of good taste, and their vivid imaginations changed lifeless abstractions into something concrete and artistic. men of letters, who had held an inferior and dependent position, were penetrated with the spirit of a refined society, while men of the world, in a circle where wit and literary skill were distinctions, began to aspire to the role of a bel esprit, to pride themselves upon some intellectual gift and the power to write without labor and without pedantry, as became their rank. many of them lacked seriousness, dealing mainly with delicate fancies and trivial incidents, but pleasures of the intellect and taste became the fashion. burlesques and chansons disputed the palm with madrigals and sonnets. a neatly turned epigram or a clever letter made a social success. perhaps it was not a school for genius of the first order. society favors graces of form and expression rather than profound and serious thought. no homer, nor aeschylus, nor milton, nor dante is the outgrowth of such a soil. the prophet or seer shines by the light of his own soul. he deals with problems and emotions that lie deep in the pulsing heart of humanity, but he does not best interpret his generation. it is the man living upon the level of his time, and finding his inspiration in the world of events, who reflects its life, marks its currents, and registers its changes. matthew arnold has aptly said that "the qualities of genius are less transferable than the qualities of intelligence, less can be immediately learned and appropriated from their product; they are less direct and stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more beautiful and divine." it was this quality of intelligence that eminently characterized the literature of the seventeenth century. it was a mirror of social conditions, or their natural outcome. the spirit of its social life penetrated its thought, colored its language, and molded its forms. we trace it in the letters and vers de societe which were the pastime of the hotel de rambouillet and the samedis of mlle. de scudery, as well as in the romances which reflected their sentiments and pictured their manners. we trace it in the literary portraits which were the diversion of the coterie of mademoiselle, at the luxembourg, and in the voluminous memoirs and chronicles which grew out of it. we trace it also in the "maxims" and "thoughts" which were polished and perfected in the convent salon of mme. de sable, and were the direct fruits of a wide experience and observation of the great world. it would be unfair to say that anything so complex as the growth of a new literature was wholly due to any single influence, but the intellectual drift of the time seems to have found its impulse in the salons. they were the alembics in which thought was fused and crystallized. they were the schools in which the french mind cultivated its extraordinary clearness and flexibility. as the century advanced, the higher literature was tinged and modified by the same spirit. society, with its follies and affectations, inspired the mocking laughter of moliere, but its unwritten laws tempered his language and refined his wit. its fine urbanity was reflected in the harmony and delicacy of racine, as well as in the critical decorum of boileau. the artistic sentiment rules in letters, as in social life. it was not only the thought that counted, but the setting of the thought. the majestic periods of bossuet, the tender persuasiveness of fenelon, gave even truth a double force. the moment came when this critical refinement, this devotion to form, passed its limits, and the inevitable reaction followed. the great literary wave of the seventeenth century reached its brilliant climax and broke upon the shores of a new era. but the seeds of thought had been scattered, to spring up in the great literature of humanity that marked the eighteenth century. chapter iii. mademoiselle de scudery and the samedis _salons of the noblesse--"the illustrious sappho"--her romances--the samedis--bon mots of mme. cornuel--estimate of mlle. de scudery_ there were a few contemporary salons among the noblesse, modeled more or less after the hotel de rambouillet, but none of their leaders had the happy art of conciliating so many elements. they had a literary flavor, and patronized men of letters, often doubtless, because it was the fashion and the name of a well-known litterateur gave them a certain eclat; but they were not cosmopolitan, and have left no marked traces. one of the most important of these was the hotel de conde, over which the beautiful charlotte de montmorency presided with such dignity and grace, during the youth of her daughter, the duchesse de longueville. another was the hotel de nevers, where the gifted marie de gonzague, afterward queen of poland, and her charming sister, the princesse palatine, were the central attractions of a brilliant and intellectual society. richelieu, recognizing the power of the rambouillet circle, wished to transfer it to the salon of his niece at the petit luxembourg. we have a glimpse of the young and still worldly pascal, explaining here his discoveries in mathematics and his experiments in physics. the tastes of this courtly company were evidently rather serious, as we find another celebrity, of less enduring fame, discoursing upon the immortality of the soul. but the rank, talent, and masterful character of the duchesse d'aiguillon did not suffice to give her salon the wide influence of its model; it was tainted by her own questionable character, and always hampered by the suspicion of political intrigues. there were smaller coteries, however, which inherited the spirit and continued the traditions of the hotel de rambouillet. prominent among these was that of madeleine de scudery, who held her samedis in modest fashion in the marais. these famous reunions lacked the prestige and the fine tone of their model, but they had a definite position, and a wide though not altogether favorable influence. as the forerunner of mme. de la fayette and mme. de sevigne, and one of the most eminent literary women of the century with which her life ran parallel, mlle. de scudery has a distinct interest for us and it is to her keen observation and facile pen that we are indebted for the most complete and vivid picture of the social life of the period. the "illustrious sappho," as she was pleased to be called, certainly did not possess the beauty popularly accorded to her namesake and prototype. she was tall and thin, with a long, dark, and not at all regular face; mme. cornuel said that one could see clearly "she was destined by providence to blacken paper, as she sweat ink from every pore." but, if we may credit her admirers, who were numerous, she had fine eyes, a pleasing expression, and an agreeable address. she evidently did not overestimate her personal attractions, as will be seen from the following quatrain, which she wrote upon a portrait made by one of her friends. nanteuil, en faisant mon image, a de son art divin signale le pouvoir; je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir, je les aime dans son ouvrage. she had her share, however, of small but harmless vanities, and spoke of her impoverished family, says tallemant, "as one might speak of the overthrow of the greek empire." her father belonged to an old and noble house of provence, but removed to normandy, where he married and died, leaving two children with a heritage of talent and poverty. a trace of the provencal spirit always clung to madeleine, who was born in , and lived until the first year of the following century. after losing her mother, who is said to have been a woman of some distinction, she was carefully educated by an uncle in all the accomplishments of the age, as well as in the serious studies which were then unusual. according to her friend conrart she was a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge both useful and ornamental. "she had a prodigious imagination," he writes, "an excellent memory, an exquisite judgment, a lively temper, and a natural disposition to understand everything curious which she saw done, and everything laudable which she heard talked of. she learned the things that concern agriculture, gardening, housekeeping, cooking, and a life in the country; also the causes and effects of maladies, the composition of an infinite number of remedies, perfumes, scented waters and distillations useful or agreeable. she wished to play the lute, and took some lessons with success." in addition to all this, she mastered spanish and italian, read extensively and conversed brilliantly. at the death of her uncle and in the freshness of her youth, she went to paris with her brother who had some pretension as a poet and dramatic writer. he even posed as a rival of corneille, and was sustained by richelieu, but time has long since relegated him to comparative oblivion. his sister, who was a victim of his selfish tyranny, is credited with much of the prose which appeared under his name; indeed, her first romances were thus disguised. her love for conversation was so absorbing, that he is said to have locked her in her room, and refused her to her friends until a certain amount of writing was done. but, in spite of this surveillance, her life was so largely in the world that it was a mystery when she did her voluminous work. of winning temper and pleasing address, with this full equipment of knowledge and imagination, versatility and ambition, she was at an early period domesticated in the family of mme. de rambouillet as the friend and companion of julie d'angennes. her graces of mind and her amiability made her a favorite with those who frequented the house, and she was thus brought into close contact with the best society of her time. she has painted it carefully and minutely in the "grand cyrus," a romantic allegory in which she transfers the french aristocracy and french manners of the seventeenth century to an oriental court. the hotel de rambouillet plays an important part as the hotel cleomire. when we consider that the central figures were the prince de conde and his lovely sister the duchesse de longueville, also that the most distinguished men and women of the age saw their own portraits, somewhat idealized but quite recognizable through the thin disguise of persians, greeks, armenians, or egyptians, it is easy to imagine that the ten volumes of rather exalted sentiment were eagerly sought and read. she lacked incident and constructive power, but excelled in vivid portraits, subtle analysis, and fine conversations. she made no attempt at local color; her plots were strained and unnatural, her style heavy and involved. but her penetrating intellect was thoroughly tinged with the romantic spirit, and she had the art of throwing a certain glamour over everything she touched. cousin, who has rescued the memory of mlle. de scudery from many unjust aspersions, says that she was the "creator of the psychological romance." unquestionably her skill in character painting set the fashion for the pen portraits which became a mania a few years later. she depicts herself as sapppho, whose opinions may be supposed to reflect her own. in these days, when the position of women is discussed from every possible point of view, it may be interesting to know how it was regarded by one who represented the thoughtful side of the age in which their social power was first distinctly asserted. she classes her critics and enemies under several heads. among them are the "light and coquettish women whose only occupation is to adorn their persons and pass their lives in fetes and amusements--women who think that scrupulous virtue requires them to know nothing but to be the wife of a husband, the mother of children, and the mistress of a family; and men who regard women as upper servants, and forbid their daughters to read anything but their prayer books." "one does not wish women to be coquettes," she writes again, "but permits them to learn carefully all that fits them for gallantry, without teaching them anything which can fortify their virtue or occupy their minds. they devote ten or a dozen years to learning to appear well, to dress in good style, to dance and sing, for five or six; but this same person, who requires judgment all her life and must talk until her last sigh, learns nothing which can make her converse more agreeably, or act with more wisdom." but she does not like a femme savante, and ridicules, under the name of damophile, a character which might have been the model for moliere's philaminte. this woman has five or six masters, of whom the least learned teaches astrology. she poses as a muse, and is always surrounded with books, pencils, and mathematical instruments, while she uses large words in a grave and imperious tone, although she speaks only of little things. after many long conversations about her, sappho concludes thus: "i wish it to be said of a woman that she knows a hundred things of which she does not boast, that she has a well-informed mind, is familiar with fine works, speaks well, writes correctly, and knows the world; but i do not wish it to be said of her that she is a femme savante. the two characters have no resemblance." she evidently recognized the fact that when knowledge has penetrated the soul, it does not need to be worn on the outside, as it shines through the entire personality. after some further discussion, to the effect that the wise woman will conceal superfluous learning and especially avoid pedantry, she defines the limit to which a woman may safely go in knowledge without losing her right to be regarded as the "ornament of the world, made to be served and adored." one may know some foreign languages and confess to reading homer, hesiod, and the works of the illustrious aristee (chapelain), without being too learned. one may express an opinion so modestly that, without offending the propriety of her sex, she may permit it to be seen that she has wit, knowledge, and judgment. that which i wish principally to teach women is not to speak too much of that which they know well, never to speak of that which they do not know at all, and to speak reasonably. we note always a half-apologetic tone, a spirit of compromise between her conscious intelligence and the traditional prejudice which had in no wise diminished since martial included, in his picture of a domestic menage, "a wife not too learned..." she is not willing to lose a woman's birthright of love and devotion, but is not quite sure how far it might be affected by her ability to detect a solecism. hence, she offers a great deal of subtle flattery to masculine self-love. with curious naivete she says: whoever should write all that was said by fifteen or twenty women together would make the worst book in the world, even if some of them were women of intelligence. but if a man should enter, a single one, and not even a man of distinction, the same conversation would suddenly become more spirituelle and more agreeable. the conversation of men is doubtless less sprightly when there are no women present; but ordinarily, although it may be more serious, it is still rational, and they can do without us more easily than we can do without them. she attaches great importance to conversation as "the bond of society, the greatest pleasure of well-bred people, and the best means of introducing, not only politeness into the world, but a purer morality." she dwells always upon the necessity of "a spirit of urbanity, which banishes all bitter railleries, as well as everything that can offend the taste," also of a certain "esprit de joie." we find here the code which ruled the hotel de rambouillet, and the very well-defined character of the precieuse. but it may be noted that mlle. de scudery, who was among the avant-coureurs of the modern movement for the advancement of women, always preserved the forms of the old traditions, while violating their spirit. true to her gallic instincts, she presented her innovations sugar-coated. she had the fine sense of fitness which is the conscience of her race, and which gave so much power to the women who really revolutionized society without antagonizing it. her conversations, which were full of wise suggestions and showed a remarkable insight into human character, were afterwards published in detached form and had a great success. mme. de sevigne writes to her daughter: "mlle. de scudery has just sent me two little volumes of conversations; it is impossible that they should not be good, when they are not drowned in a great romance." when the hotel de rambouillet was closed, mlle. de scudery tried to replace its pleasant reunions by receiving her friends on saturdays. these informal receptions were frequented by a few men and women of rank, but the prevailing tone was literary and slightly bourgeois. we find there, from time to time, mme. de sable, the duc and duchesse de montausier, and others of the old circle who were her lifelong friends. la rochefoucauld is there occasionally, also mme. de. la fayette, mme. de sevigne, and the young mme. scarron whose brilliant future is hardly yet in her dreams. among those less known today, but of note in their age, were the comtesse de la suze, a favorite writer of elegies, who changed her faith and became a catholic, as she said, that she "might not meet her husband in this world or the next;" the versatile mlle. cheron who had some celebrity as a poet, musician, and painter; mlle. de la vigne and mme. deshoulieres, also poets; mlle. descartes, niece of the great philosopher; and, at rare intervals, the clever abbess de rohan who tempered her piety with a little sage worldliness. one of the most brilliant lights in this galaxy of talent was mme. cornuel, whose bons mots sparkle from so many pages in the chronicles of the period. a woman of high bourgeois birth and of the best associations, she had a swift vision, a penetrating sense, and a clear intellect prompt to seize the heart of a situation. mlle. de scudery said that she could paint a grand satire in four words. mme. de sevigne found her admirable, and even the grave pomponne begged his friend not to forget to send him all her witticisms. of the agreeable but rather light comtesse de fiesque, she said: "what preserves her beauty is that it is salted in folly." of james ii of england, she remarked, "the holy spirit has eaten up his understanding." the saying that the eight generals appointed at the death of turenne were "the small change for turenne" has been attributed to her. it is certainly not to a woman of such keen insight and ready wit that one can attach any of the affectations which later crept into the samedis. the poet sarasin is the voiture of this salon. conrart, to whose house may be traced the first meetings of the little circle of lettered men which formed the nucleus of the academie francaise, is its secretary; pellisson, another of the founders and the historian of the same learned body, is its chronicler. chapelain is quite at home here, and we find also numerous minor authors and artists whose names have small significance today. the samedis follow closely in the footsteps of the hotel de rambouillet. it is the aim there to speak simply and naturally upon all subjects grave or gay, to preserve always the spirit of delicacy and urbanity, and to avoid vulgar intrigues. there is a superabundance of sentiment, some affectation, and plenty of esprit. they converse upon all the topics of the day, from fashion to politics, from literature and the arts to the last item of gossip. they read their works, talk about them, criticize them, and vie with one another in improvising verses. pellisson takes notes and leaves us a multitude of madrigals, sonnets, chansons and letters of varied merit. he says there reigned a sort of epidemic of little poems. "the secret influence began to fall with the dew. here one recites four verses; there, one writes a dozen. all this is done gaily and without effort. no one bites his nails, or stops laughing and talking. there are challenges, responses, repetitions, attacks, repartees. the pen passes from hand to hand, and the hand does not keep pace with the mind. one makes verses for every lady present." many of these verses were certainly not of the best quality, but it would be difficult, in any age, to find a company of people clever enough to divert themselves by throwing off such poetic trifles on the spur of the moment. in the end, the samedis came to have something of the character of a modern literary club, and were held at different houses. the company was less choice, and the bourgeois coloring more pronounced. these reunions very clearly illustrated the fact that no society can sustain itself above the average of its members. they increased in size, but decreased in quality, with the inevitable result of affectation and pretension. intelligence, taste, and politeness were in fashion. those who did not possess them put on their semblance, and, affecting an intellectual tone, fell into the pedantry which is sure to grow out of the effort to speak above one's altitude. the fine-spun theories of mlle. de scudery also reached a sentimental climax in "clelie," which did not fail of its effect. platonic love and the ton galant were the texts for innumerable follies which finally reacted upon the samedis. after a few years, they lost their influence and were discontinued. but mlle. de scudery retained the position which her brilliant gifts and literary fame had given her, and was the center of a choice circle of friends until a short time before her death at the ripe age of ninety-four. even tallemant, writing of the decline of these reunions, says, "mlle. de scudery is more considered than ever." at sixty-four she received the first prix d'eloquence from the academie francaise, for an essay on glory. this prize was founded by balzac, and the subject was specified. thus the long procession of laureates was led by a woman. in spite of her subtle analysis of love, and her exact map of the empire of tenderness, the sentiment of the "illustrious sappho" seems to have been rather ideal. she had numerous adorers, of whom conrart and pellisson were among the most devoted. during the long imprisonment of the latter for supposed complicity with fouquet, she was of great service to him, and the tender friendship ended only with his life, upon which she wrote a touching eulogy at its close. but she never married. she feared to lose her liberty. "i know," she writes, "that there are many estimable men who merit all my esteem and who can retain a part of my friendship, but as soon as i regard them as husbands, i regard them as masters, and so apt to become tyrants that i must hate them from that moment; and i thank the gods for giving me an inclination very much averse to marriage." it was the misfortune of mlle. de scudery to outlive her literary reputation. the interminable romances which had charmed the eloquent flechier, the grand conde in his cell at vincennes, the ascetic d'andilly at port royal, as well as the dreaming maidens who signed over their fanciful descriptions and impossible adventures, passed their day. the touch of a merciless criticism stripped them of their already fading glory. their subtle analysis and etherealized sentiment were declared antiquated, and fashion ran after new literary idols. it was boileau who gave the severest blow. "this despreaux," said segrais, "knows how to do nothing else but talk of himself and criticize others; why speak ill of mlle. de scudery as he has done?" there has been a disposition to credit the founder of the samedis with many of the affectations which brought such deserved ridicule upon their bourgeois imitators, and to trace in her the original of moliere's "madelon." but cousin has relieved her of such reproach, and does ample justice to the truth and sincerity of her character, the purity of her manners, and the fine quality of her intellect. he calls her "a sort of french sister of addison." perhaps her resemblance to one of the clearest, purest, and simplest of english essayists is not quite apparent on the surface; but as a moralist and a delineator of manners she may have done a similar work in her own way. sainte-beuve, who has left so many vivid and exquisite portraits of his countrywomen, does not paint mlle. de scudery with his usual kindly touch. he admits her merit, her accomplishments, her versatility, and the perfect innocence of her life; but he finds her didactic, pedantic, and tiresome as a writer, and without charm or grace as a woman. doubtless one would find it difficult to read her romances today. she lacks the genius which has no age and belongs to all ages. her literary life pertains to the first half of the seventeenth century, when style had not reached the attic purity and elegance of a later period. she was teacher rather than artist; but no one could be farther from a bas bleu, or more severe upon pedantry or pretension of any sort. she takes the point of view of her time, and dwells always upon the wisdom of veiling the knowledge she claims for her sex behind the purely feminine graces. how far she practiced her own theories, we can know only from the testimony of her contemporaries. it is not possible to perpetuate so indefinable a thing as personal charm, but we are told repeatedly that she had it in an eminent degree. it is certain that no woman without beauty, fortune, or visible rank, living simply and depending mainly upon her own talents, could have retained such powerful and fastidious friends, during a long life, unless she had had some rare attractions. that she was much loved, much praised, and much sought, we have sufficient evidence among the writers of her own time. she was familiarly spoken of as the tenth muse, and she counted among her personal friends the greatest men and women of the century. leibnitz sought her correspondence. the abbe de pure, who was not friendly to the precieuses and made the first severe attack upon them, thus writes of her: "one may call mlle. de scudery the muse of our age and the prodigy of her sex. it is not only her goodness and her sweetness, but her intellect shines with so much modesty, her sentiments are expressed with so much reserve, she speaks with so much discretion, and all that she says is so fit and reasonable, that one cannot help both admiring and loving her. comparing what one sees of her, and what one owes to her personally, with what she writes, one prefers, without hesitation, her conversation to her works. although she has a wonderful mind, her heart outweighs it. it is in the heart of this illustrious woman that one finds true and pure generosity, an immovable constancy, a sincere and solid friendship." the loyalty of her character was conspicuously shown in her brave devotion to the interests of the conde family, through all the reverses of the fronde. in one of her darkest moments mme. de longueville received the last volume of the "grand cyrus," which was dedicated to her, and immediately sent her own portrait encircled with diamonds, as the only thing she had left worthy of this friend who, without sharing ardently her political prejudices, had never deserted her waning fortunes. the same rare quality was seen in her unwavering friendship for fouquet, during his long disgrace and imprisonment. mme. de sevigne, whose satire was so pitiless toward affectation of any sort, writes to her in terms of exaggerated tenderness. "in a hundred thousand words, i could tell you but one truth, which reduces itself to assuring you, mademoiselle, that i shall love you and adore you all my life; it is only this word that can express the idea i have of your extraordinary merit. i am happy to have some part in the friendship and esteem of such a person. as constancy is a perfection, i say to myself that you will not change for me; and i dare to pride myself that i shall never be sufficiently abandoned of god not to be always yours... i take to my son your conversations. i wish him to be charmed with them, after being charmed myself." mlle. de scudery is especially interesting to us as marking a transition point in the history of women; as the author of the first romances of any note written by her sex; as a moral teacher in an age of laxity; and as a woman who combined high aspirations, fine ideals, and versatile talents with a pure and unselfish character. she aimed at universal accomplishments from the distillation of a perfume to the writing of a novel, from the preparation of a rare dish to fine conversation, from playing the lute to the dissection of the human heart. in this versatility she has been likened to mme. de genlis, whom she resembled also in her moral teaching and her factitious sensibility. she was, however, more genuine, more amiable, and far superior in true elevation of character. she was full of theories and loved to air them, hence the people who move across the pages of her novels are often lost in a cloud of speculation. but she gave a fresh impulse to literature, adding a fine quality of grace, tenderness, and pure though often exaggerated sentiment. mme. de la fayette, who had more clearness of mind as well as a finer artistic sense, gave a better form to the novel and pruned it of superfluous matter. the sentiment which casts so soft and delicate a coloring over her romances was more subtle and refined. it may be questioned, however, if she wrote so much that has been incorporated in the thought of her time. chapter iv. la grande mademoiselle _her character--her heroic part in the fronde--her exile--literary diversions of her salon--a romantic episode_ there are certain women preeminently distinguished by diversity of gifts, who fail to leave behind them a fame at all commensurate with their promise. it may be from a lack of unity, resulting from a series of fragmentary efforts, no one of which is of surpassing excellence; it may be that the impression of power they give is quite beyond any practical manifestation of it; or it may be that talents in themselves remarkable are cast into the shade by some exceptional brilliancy of position. the success of life is measured by the harmony between its ideals and its attainments. it is the symmetry of the temple that gives the final word, not the breadth of its foundations nor the wealth of its material. it was this lack of harmony and fine proportion which marred the career of a woman who played a very conspicuous part in the social and political life of her time, and who belongs to my subject only through a single phase of a stormy and eventful history. no study of the salons would be complete without that of the grande mademoiselle, but it was not as the leader of a coterie that she held her special claim to recognition. by the accident of birth she stood apart, subject to many limitations that modified the character of her salon and narrowed its scope, though they emphasized its influence. it was only an incident of her life, but through the quality of its habitues and their unique diversions it became the source of an important literature. anne marie louise d'orleans, duchesse de montpensier, has left a very distinct record of herself in letters, romances, memoirs and portraits, written out of an abounding fullness of nature, but with infinite detail and royal contempt for precision and orthography. she talks naively of her happy childhood, of her small caprices, of the love of her grandmother, marie de medicis, of her innocent impressions of the people about her. she dwells with special pleasure upon a grand fete at the palais royal, in which she posed as an incipient queen. she was then nineteen. "they were three entire days in arranging my costume," she writes. "my robe was covered with diamonds, and trimmed with rose, black, and white tufts. i wore all the jewels of the crown and of the queen of england, who still had some left. no one could be better or more magnificently attired than i was that day, and many people said that my beautiful figure, my imposing mien, my fair complexion, and the splendor of my blonde hair did not adorn me less than all the riches which were upon my person." she sat resplendent upon a raised dais, with the proud consciousness of her right and power to grace a throne. louis xiv, than a child, and the prince of wales, afterwards charles ii, were at her feet. the latter was a devoted suitor. "my heart as well as my eyes regarded the prince de haut en bas," she says. "i had the spirit to wed an emperor." there were negotiations for her marriage with the emperor of austria, and she thought it wise to adapt herself in advance to his tastes. she had heard that he was religious, and immediately began to play the part of a devote so seriously, that she was seized with a violent desire to become a veritable religieuse and enter the convent of the carmelites. she could neither eat nor sleep, and it was feared that she would fall dangerously ill. "i can only say that, during those eight days, the empire was nothing to me," she writes. but she confesses to a certain feeling of vanity at her own spirit of self-sacrifice, and the sensibility which made her weep at the thought of leaving those she loved. this access of piety was of short duration, however, as her father quickly put to flight all her exalted visions of a cloister. her dreams of an emperor for whom she lost a prospective king were alike futile. "she had beauty, talent, wealth, virtue, and a royal birth," says mme. de motteville. "her face was not without defects, and her intellect was not one which always pleases. her vivacity deprived all her actions of the gravity necessary to people of her rank, and her mind was too much carried away by her feelings. as she was fair, had fine eyes, a pleasing mouth, was of good height, and blonde, she had quite the air of a great beauty." but it was beauty of a commanding sort, without delicacy, and dependent largely upon the freshness of youth. the same veracious writer says that "she spoiled all she went about by the eagerness and impatience of her temper. she was always too hasty and pushed things too far." what she may have lacked in grace and charm, she made up by the splendors of rank and position. a princess by birth, closely related to three kings, and glowing with all the fiery instincts of her race, the grand mademoiselle curiously blended the courage of an amazon with the weakness of a passionate and capricious woman. as she was born in , the most brilliant days of her youth were passed amid the excitements of the fronde. she casts a romantic light upon these trivial wars, which were ended at last by her prompt decision and masculine force. we see her at twenty-five, riding victoriously into the city of orleans at the head of her troops and, later, ordering the cannon at the bastile turned against the royal forces, and opening the gates of paris to the exhausted army of conde. this adventure gives us the key-note to her haughty and imperious character. she would have posed well for the heroine of a great drama; indeed, she posed all her life in real dramas. at this time she had hopes of marrying the prince de conde, whom she regarded as a hero worthy of her. his wife, an amiable woman who was sent to a convent after her marriage to learn to read and write, was dangerously ill, and her illustrious husband did not scruple to make tacit arrangements to supply her place. unfortunately for these plans, and fortunately perhaps for a certain interesting phase of literature, she recovered. soon afterwards, mademoiselle found the reward of her heroic adventures in a sudden exile to her estates at saint fargeau. the country life, so foreign to her tastes, pressed upon her very heavily at first, the more so as she was deserted by most of her friends. "i received more compliments than visits," she writes. "i had made everybody ill. all those who did not dare send me word that they feared to embroil themselves with the court pretended that some malady or accident had befallen them." by degrees, however, she adapted herself to her situation, and in her loneliness and disappointment betook herself to pursuits which offered a strong contrast to the dazzling succession of magnificent fetes and military episodes which had given variety and excitement to her life at the tuileries. when she grew tired of her parrots, her dogs, her horses, her comedians and her violin, she found solace in literature, beginning the "memoirs," which were finished thirty years later, and writing romances, after the manner of mlle. de scudery. the drift of the first one, "les nouvelles francaises et les divertissements de la princesse aurelie," is suggested by its title. it was woven from the little stories or adventures which were told to amuse their solitude by the small coterie of women who had followed the clouded fortunes of mademoiselle. a romance of more pretension was the "princesse de paphlagonie," in which the writer pictures her own little court, and introduces many of its members under fictitious names. these romances have small interest for the world today, but the exalted position of their author and their personal character made them much talked of in their time. it was in quite another fashion, however, that the grande mademoiselle made her most important contribution to literature. one day in , while still in the country, she proposed to her friends to make pen portraits of themselves, and set the fashion by writing her own, with a detailed description of her physical, mental, and moral qualities. this was followed by carefully drawn pictures of others, among whom were louis xiv, monsieur, and the grand conde. all were bound in honor to give the lights and shadows with the same fidelity, though it would be hardly wise to call them to too strict an account on this point. as may be readily imagined, the result was something piquant and original. that the amusement was a popular one goes without saying. people like to talk of themselves, not only because the subject is interesting, but because it gives them an opportunity of setting in relief their virtues and tempering their foibles. they like also to know what others think of them--at least, what others say of them. it is too much to expect of human nature, least of all, of french human nature, that an agreeable modicum of subtle flattery should not be added under such conditions. when mademoiselle opened her salon in the luxembourg, on her return from exile, these portraits formed one of its most marked features. the salon was limited mainly to the nobility, with the addition of a few men of letters. among those who frequented it on intimate terms were the marquise de sable, the comtesse de maure, the beautiful and pure-hearted mme. de hautefort, the dame d'honneur of anne of austria, so hopelessly adored by louis xiii, and mme. de choisy, the witty wife of the chancellor of the duc d'orleans. its most brilliant lights were mme. de sevigne, mme. de la fayette, and la rochefoucauld. it was here that mme. de la fayette made the vivid portrait of her friend mme. de sevigne. "it flatters me," said the latter long afterwards, "but those who loved me sixteen years ago may have thought it true." the beautiful comtesse de bregy, who was called one of the muses of the time, portrayed the princess henrietta and the irrepressible queen christine of sweden. mme. de chatillon, known later as the duchesse de mecklenbourg, who was mingled with all the intrigues of this period, traces a very agreeable sketch of herself, which may serve as a specimen of this interesting diversion. after minutely describing her person, which she evidently regards with much complacence, she continues: "i have a temper naturally cheerful and a little given to raillery; but i correct this inclination, for fear of displeasing. i have much esprit, and enter agreeably into conversation. i have a pleasant voice and a modest air. i am very sincere and do not fail my friends. i have not a trifling mind, nor do i cherish a thousand small malices against my neighbor. i love glory and fine actions. i have heart and ambition. i am very sensitive to good and ill, but i never avenge myself for the ill that has been done me, although i might have the inclination; i am restrained by self-love. i have a sweet disposition, take pleasure in serving my friends, and fear nothing so much as the petty drawing-room quarrels which usually grow out of little nothings. i find my person and my temper constructed something after this fashion; and i am so satisfied with both, that i envy no one. i leave to my friends or to my enemies the care of seeking my faults." it was under this stimulating influence that la rochefoucauld made the well-known pen-portrait of himself. "i will lack neither boldness to speak as freely as i can of my good qualities," he writes, "nor sincerity to avow frankly that i have faults." after describing his person, temper, abilities, passions, and tastes, he adds with curious candor: "i am but little given to pity, and do not wish to be so at all. nevertheless there is nothing i would not do for an afflicted person; and i sincerely believe one should do all one can to show sympathy for misfortune, as miserable people are so foolish that this does them the greatest good in the world; but i also hold that we should be content with expressing sympathy, and carefully avoid having any. it is a passion that is wholly worthless in a well-regulated mind, that only serves to weaken the heart, and should be left to people, who, never doing anything from reason, have need of passion to stimulate their actions. i love my friends; and i love them to such an extent that i would not for a moment weigh my interest against theirs. i condescend to them, i patiently endure their bad temper. but i do not make much of their caresses, and i do not feel great uneasiness at their absence." it would be interesting to quote in full this sample of the close and not always flattering self-analysis so much in fashion, but its length forbids. its revelation of the hidden springs of character is at least unique. the poet segrais, who was attached to mademoiselle's household, collected these graphic pictures for private circulation, but they were so much in demand that they were soon printed for the public under the title of "divers portraits." they served the double purpose of furnishing to the world faithful delineations of many more or less distinguished people and of setting a literary fashion. the taste for pen-portraits, which originated in the romances of mlle. de scudery, and received a fresh impulse from this novel and personal application, spread rapidly among all classes. it was taken up by men of letters and men of the world, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. there were portraits of every grade of excellence and every variety of people, until they culminated, some years later in "les caracteres" of la bruyere, who dropped personalities and gave them the form of permanent types. it is a literature peculiarly adapted to the flexibility and fine perception of the french mind, and one in which it has been preeminent, from the analytic but diffuse mlle. de scudery, and the clear, terse, spirited cardinal de retz, to the fine, penetrating, and exquisitely finished sainte-beuve, the prince of modern critics and literary artists. it was this skill in vivid delineation that gave such point and piquancy to the memoirs of the period, which are little more than a series of brilliant and vigorous sketches of people outlined upon a shifting background of events. in this rapid characterization the french have no rivals. it is the charm of their fiction as well as of their memoirs. balzac, victor hugo, and daudet, are the natural successors of la bruyere and saint-simon. the marriage of louis xiv shattered one of the most brilliant illusions of the grande mademoiselle, and it was about this time that she wrote a characteristic letter to mme. de motteville, picturing an arcadia in some beautiful forest, where people are free to do as they like. the most ardent apostle of socialism could hardly dream of an existence more democratic or more utopian. these favored men and women lead a simple, pastoral life. they take care of the house and the garden, milk the cows, make cheese and cakes, and tend sheep on pleasant days. but this rustic community must have its civilized amusements. they visit, drive, ride on horseback, paint, design, play on the lute or clavecin, and have all the new books sent to them. after reading the lives of heroes and philosophers, the princess is convinced that no one is perfectly happy, and that christianity is desirable, as it gives hope for the future. her platonic and christian republic is composed of "amiable and perfect people," but it is quite free from the entanglements of love and the "vulgar institution of marriage." mme. de motteville replies very gracefully, accepting many of these ideas, but as it is difficult to repress love altogether, she thinks "one will be obliged to permit that error which an old custom has rendered legitimate, and which is called marriage." this curious correspondence takes its color from the spanish pastorals which tinged the romantic literature of the time as well as its social life. the long letters, carefully written on large and heavy sheets yellow with age, have a peculiarly old-time flavor, and throw a vivid light upon the woman who could play the role of a heroine of corneille or of a sentimental shepherdess, as the caprice seized her. a tragical bit of romance colored the mature life of the grande mademoiselle. she had always professed a great aversion to love, regarding it as "unworthy of a well-ordered soul." she even went so far as to say that it was better to marry from reason or any other thing imaginable, dislike included, than from passion that was, in any case, short-lived. but this princess of intrepid spirit, versatile gifts, ideal fancies, and platonic theories, who had aimed at an emperor and missed a throne; this amazon, with her penchant for glory and contempt for love, forgot all her sage precepts, and at forty-two fell a victim to a violent passion for the comte de lauzun. she has traced its course to the finest shades of sentiment. her pride, her infatuation, her scruples, her new-born humility--we are made familiar with them all, even to the finesse of her respectful adorer, and the reluctant confession of love which his discreet silence wrings from her at last.. her royal cousin, after much persuasion, consented to the unequal union. the impression this affair made upon the world is vividly shown in a letter written by mme. de sevigne to her daughter: i am going to tell you a thing the most astonishing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most astounding, the most unheard of, the most singular, the most extraordinary, the most incredible, the most unexpected, the grandest, the smallest, the rarest, the most common, the most dazzling, the most secret even until today, the most brilliant, the most worthy of envy.... a thing in fine which is to be done sunday, when those who see it will believe themselves dazed; a thing which is to be done sunday and which will not perhaps have been done monday... m. de lauzun marries sunday, at the louvre--guess whom?... he marries sunday at the louvre, with the permission of the king, mademoiselle, mademoiselle de, mademoiselle; guess the name; he marries mademoiselle, ma foi, par ma foi, ma foi juree, mademoiselle, la grande mademoiselle, mademoiselle, daughter of the late monsieur, mademoiselle, grand-daughter of henry iv, mademoiselle d'eu, mademoiselle de dombes, mademoiselle de montpensier, mademoiselle d'orleans, mademoiselle, cousin of the king, mademoiselle, destined to the throne, mademoiselle, the only parti in france worthy of monsieur. voila a fine subject for conversation. if you cry out, if you are beside yourself, if you say that we have deceived you, that it is false, that one trifles with you, that it is a fine bit of raillery, that it is very stupid to imagine, if, in fine, you abuse us, we shall find that you are right; we have done as much ourselves. in spite of the prudent warnings of her friends, the happy princess could not forego the eclat of a grand wedding, and before the hasty arrangements were concluded, the permission was withdrawn. her tears, her entreaties, her cries, her rage, and her despair, were of no avail. louis xiv took her in his arms, and mingled his tears with hers, even reproaching her for the two or three days of delay; but he was inexorable. ten years of loyal devotion to her lover, shortly afterward imprisoned at pignerol, and of untiring efforts for his release which was at last secured at the cost of half her vast estates, ended in a brief reunion. a secret marriage, a swift discovery that her idol was of very common clay, abuse so violent that she was obliged to forbid him forever her presence, and the disenchantment was complete. the sad remnant of her existence was devoted to literature and to conversation; the latter she regarded as "the greatest pleasure in life, and almost the only one." when she died, the count de lauzun wore the deepest mourning, had portraits of her everywhere, and adopted permanently the subdued colors that would fitly express the inconsolable nature of his grief. without tact or fine discrimination, the grande mademoiselle was a woman of generous though undisciplined impulses, loyal disposition, and pure character; but her egotism was colossal. under different conditions, one might readily imagine her a second joan of arc, or a heroine of the revolution. she says of herself: "i know not what it is to be a heroine; i am of a birth to do nothing that is not grand or elevated. one may call that what one likes. as for myself, i call it to follow my own inclination and to go my own way. i am not born to take that of others." she lacked the measure, the form, the delicacy of the typical precieuse; but her quick, restless intellect and ardent imagination were swift to catch the spirit of the hotel de rambouillet, and to apply it in an original fashion. though many subjects were interdicted in her salon, and many people were excluded, it gives us interesting glimpses into the life of the literary noblesse, and furnishes a complete gallery of pen-portraits of more or less noted men and women. with all the brilliant possibilities of her life, it was through the diversion of her idle hours that this princess, author, amazon, prospective queen, and disappointed woman has left the most permanent trace upon the world. chapter v. a literary salon at port royal _mme. de sable--her worldly life--her retreat--her friends--pascal--the maxims of la rochefoucauld--last days of the marquise_ the transition from the restless character and stormy experiences of the grande mademoiselle, to the gentler nature and the convent salon of her friend and literary confidante, mme. de sable, is a pleasant one. perhaps no one better represents the true precieuse of the seventeenth century, the happy blending of social savoir-faire with an amiable temper and a cultivated intellect. without the genius of mme. de sevigne or mme. de la fayette, without the force or the rare attractions of mme. de longueville, without the well-poised character and catholic sympathies of mme. de rambouillet, she played an important part in the life of her time, through her fine insight and her consummate tact in bringing together the choicest spirits, and turning their thoughts into channels that were fresh and unworn. born in , madeleine de souvre passed her childhood in touraine, of which province her father was governor. in the brilliancy of her youth, we find her in paris among the early favorites of the hotel de rambouillet, and on terms of lifelong intimacy with its hostess and her daughter julie. beautiful, versatile, generous, but fastidious and exacting in her friendships, with a dash of coquetry--inevitable when a woman is fascinating and french--she repeated the oft-played role of a mariage de convenance at sixteen, a few brilliant years of social triumphs marred by domestic neglect and suffering, a period of enforced seclusion after the death of her unworthy husband, a brief return to the world, and an old age of mild and comfortable devotion. "the marquise de sable," writes mme. de motteville, "was one of those whose beauty made the most sensation when the queen (anne of austria) came into france. but if she was amiable, she desired still more to appear so. her self-love rendered her a little too sensible to that which men professed for her. there was still in france some remnant of the politeness which catherine de medicis had brought from italy, and mme. de sable found so much delicacy in the new dramas, as well as in other works, in prose and verse, which came from madrid, that she conceived a high idea of the gallantry which the spaniards had learned from the moors. she was persuaded that men may without wrong have tender sentiments for women; that the desire of pleasing them leads men to the greatest and finest actions, arouses their spirit, and inspires them with liberality and all sorts of virtues; but that, on the other side, women, who are the ornaments of the world, and made to be served and adored, ought to permit only respectful attentions. this lady, having sustained her views with much talent and great beauty, gave them authority in her time." the same writer says that she has "much light and sincerity," with "penetration enough to unfold all the secrets of one's heart." mlle. de scudery introduces her in the "grand cyrus," as parthenie, "a tall and graceful woman, with fine eyes, the most beautiful throat in the world, a lovely complexion, blonde hair, and a pleasant mouth, with a charming air, and a fine and eloquent smile, which expresses the sweetness or the bitterness of her soul." she dwells upon her surprising and changeful beauty, upon the charm of her conversation, the variety of her knowledge, the delicacy of her tact, and the generosity of her tender and passionate heart. one may suspect this portrait of being idealized, but it seems to have been in the main correct. of her husband we know very little, excepting that he belonged to the family of montmorency, passed from violent love to heart-breaking indifference, and died about , leaving her with four children and shattered fortunes. to recruit her failing health, and to hide her chagrin and sorrow at seeing herself supplanted by unworthy rivals, she had lived for some time in the country, where she had leisure for the reading and reflection which fitted her for her later life. but after the death of her husband she was obliged to sell her estates, and we find her established in the place royale with her devoted friend, the comtesse de maure, and continuing the traditions of the hotel de rambouillet. her tastes had been formed in this circle, and she had also been under the instruction of the chevalier de mere, a litterateur and courtier who had great vogue, was something of an oracle, and molded the character and manners of divers women of this period, among others the future mme. de maintenon. his confidence in his own power of bringing talent out of mediocrity was certainly refreshing. among his pupils was the duchesse de lesdiguieres, who said to him one day, "i wish to have esprit."--"eh bien, madame," replied the complaisant chevalier, "you shall have it." how much mme. de sable may have been indebted to this modest bel esprit we do not know, but her finished manner, fine taste, exquisite tact, cultivated intellect, and great experience of the world made her an authority in social matters. to be received in her salon was to be received everywhere. cardinal mazarin watched her influence with a jealous eye. "mme. de longueville is very intimate with the marquise de sable," he writes in his private note book. "she is visited constantly by d'andilly, the princesse de guemene, d'enghien and his sister, nemours, and many others. they speak freely of all the world. it is necessary to have some one who will advise us of all that passes there." but the death of her favorite son--a young man distinguished for graces of person, mind, heart, and character, who lost his life in one of the battles of his friend and comrade, the prince de conde--together with the loss of her fortune and the fading of her beauty, turned the thoughts of the marquise to spiritual things. we find many traces of the state of mind which led her first into a mild form of devotion, serious but not too ascetic, and later into pronounced jansenism. in a note to a friend who had neglected her, she dwells upon "the misery and nothingness of the world," recalls the strength of their long friendship, the depth of her own affection, and tries to account for the disloyalty to herself, by the inherent weakness and emptiness of human nature, which renders it impossible for even the most perfect to do anything that is not defective. all this is very charitable, to say the least, as well as a little abstract. time has given a strange humility and forgivingness to the woman who broke with her dearest friend, the unfortunate duc de montmorency, because he presumed to lift his eyes to the queen, saying that she "could not receive pleasantly the regards which she had to share with the greatest princess in the world." the fashion of the period furnished a peaceful and dignified refuge for women, when their beauty waned and the "terrible forties" ended their illusions. to go into brief retreat for penitence and prayer was at all times a graceful thing to do, besides making for safety. it was only a step further to retire altogether from the scenes of pleasure which had begun to pall. the convent offered a haven of repose to the bruised heart, a fresh aim for drooping energies, a needed outlet for devouring emotions, and a comfortable sense of security, not only for this world, but for the next. it was the next world which was beginning to trouble mme. de sable. she had great fear of death, and after many penitential retreats to port royal, she finally obtained permission to build a suite of apartments within its precincts, and retired there about to prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible by the most assiduous care of her health. "if she was not devoted, she had the idea of becoming so," said mademoiselle. but her devotion was in quite a mundane fashion. her pleasant rooms were separate and independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to conversation. she never practiced the severe asceticism of her friend, mme. de longueville. with a great deal of abstract piety, the iron girdle and the hair shirt were not included. she did not even forego her delicate and fastidious tastes. her elegant dinners and her dainty comfitures were as famous as ever. "will the anger of the marquise go so far, in your opinion, as to refuse me her recipe for salad?" writes mme. de choisy at the close of a letter to the comtesse de maure, in which she has ridiculed her friend's jansenist tendencies; "if so, it will be a great inhumanity, for which she will be punished in this world and the other." she had great skill in delicate cooking, and was in the habit of sending cakes, jellies, and other dainties, prepared by herself, to her intimate friends. la rochefoucauld says, "if i could hope for two dishes of those preserves, which i did not deserve to eat before, i should be indebted to you all my life." mme. de longueville, who is about to visit her, begs her not to give a feast as she has "scruples about such indulgence." this spice of worldliness very much tempered the austerity of her retreat, and lent an added luster to its intellectual attractions. but the marquise had many conflicts between her luxurious tastes and her desire to be devout. her dainty and epicurean habits, her extraordinary anxiety about her health, and her capricious humors were the subject of much light badinage among her friends. the grande mademoiselle sketches these traits with a satiric touch in the "princesse de paphlagonie," where she introduces her with the comtesse de maure. "there are no hours when they do not confer together upon the means of preventing themselves from dying, and upon the art of rendering themselves immortal," she writes. "their conferences are not like those of other people; the fear of breathing an air too cold or too hot, the apprehension that the wind may be too dry or too damp, a fancy that the weather is not as moderate as they judge necessary for the preservation of their health--these are sufficient reasons for writing from one room to another...." if one could find this correspondence, one might derive great advantages in every way; for they were princesses who had nothing mortal, except the knowledge of being so... of mme. de sable she adds: "the princess parthenie had a taste as dainty as her mind; nothing equaled the magnificence of her entertainments; all the viands were exquisite, and her elegance was beyond anything that one could imagine." the fastidious marquise suffered, with all the world, from the defects of her qualities. her extreme delicacy and sensibility appear under many forms and verge often upon weakness; but it is an amiable weakness that does not detract greatly from her fascination. she was not cast in a heroic mold, and her faults are those which the world is pleased to call essentially feminine. the records of her life were preserved by conrart, also by her friend and physician, valant. they give us a clear picture of her character, with its graces and its foibles, as well as of her pleasant intercourse and correspondence with many noted men and women. they give us, too, interesting glimpses of her salon. we find there the celebrated jansenists nicole and arnauld, the eminent lawyer domat, esprit, sometimes pascal, with his sister, mme. perier; the prince and princesse de conti, the grand conde, la rochefoucauld, the penitent mme. de longueville, mme. de la fayette, and many others among the cultivated noblesse, who are attracted by its tone of bel esprit and graceful, but by no means severe, devotion. the duc d'orleans and the lovely but unfortunate madame were intimate and frequent visitors. in this little world, in which religion, literature, and fashion are curiously blended, they talk of theology, morals, physics, cartesianism, friendship, and love. the youth and gaiety of the hotel de rambouillet have given place to more serious thoughts and graver topics. the current which had its source there is divided. at the samedis, in the marais, they are amusing themselves about the same time with letters and vers de societe. at the luxembourg, a more exclusive coterie is exercising its mature talent in sketching portraits. these salons touch at many points, but each has a channel of its own. the reflective nature of mme. de sable turns to more serious and elevated subjects, and her friends take the same tone. they make scientific experiments, discuss calvinism, read the ancient moralists, and indulge in dissertations upon a great variety of topics. mme. de bregy, poet, dame d'honneur and femme d'esprit, who amused the little court of mademoiselle with so many discreetly flattering pen-portraits, has left two badly written and curiously spelled notes upon the merits of socrates and epictetus, which throw a ray of light upon the tastes of this aristocratic and rather speculative circle. mme. de sable writes an essay upon the education of children, which is very much talked about, also a characteristic paper upon friendship. the latter is little more than a series of detached sentences, but it indicates the drift of her thought, and might have served as an antidote to the selfish philosophy of la rochefoucauld. it calls out an appreciative letter from d'andilly, who, in his anchorite's cell, continues to follow the sayings and doings of his friends in the little salon at port royal. "friendship," she writes, "is a kind of virtue which can only be founded upon the esteem of people whom one loves--that is to say, upon qualities of the soul, such as fidelity, generosity, discretion, and upon fine qualities of mind." after insisting that it must be reciprocal, disinterested, and based upon virtue, she continues: "one ought not to give the name of friendship to natural inclinations because they do not depend upon our will or our choice; and, though they render our friendships more agreeable, they should not be the foundation of them. the union which is founded upon the same pleasures and the same occupations does not deserve the name of friendship because it usually comes from a certain egotism which causes us to love that which is similar to ourselves, however imperfect we may be." she dwells also upon the mutual offices and permanent nature of true friendship, adding, "he who loves his friend more than reason and justice, will on some other occasion love his own pleasure and profit more than his friend." the abbe esprit, jansenist and academician, wrote an essay upon "des amities en apparence les plus saints des hommes avec les femmes," which was doubtless suggested by the conversations in this salon, where the subject was freely discussed. the days of chivalry were not so far distant, and the subtle blending of exalted sentiment with thoughtful companionship, which revived their spirit in a new form, was too marked a feature of the time to be overlooked. these friendships, half intellectual, half poetic, and quite platonic, were mostly formed in mature life, on a basis of mental sympathy. "there is a taste in pure friendship which those who are born mediocre do not reach," said la gruyere. mme. de lambert speaks of it as "the product of a perfect social culture, and, of all affections, that which has most charm." the well-known friendship of mme. de la fayette and la rochefoucauld, which illustrates the mutual influence of a critical man of intellect and a deep-hearted, thoughtful woman who has passed the age of romance, began in this salon. its nature was foreshadowed in the tribute la rochefoucauld paid to women in his portrait of himself. "where their intellect is cultivated," he writes, "i prefer their society to that of men. one finds there a gentleness one does not meet with among ourselves; and it seems to me, beyond this, that they express themselves with more neatness, and give a more agreeable turn to the things they talk about." mme. de sable was herself, in less exclusive fashion, the intimate friend and adviser of esprit, d'andilly, and la rochefoucauld. the letters of these men show clearly their warm regard as well as the value they attached to her opinions. "indeed," wrote voiture to her many years before, "those who decry you on the side of tenderness must confess that if you are not the most loving person in the world, you are at least the most obliging. true friendship knows no more sweetness than there is in your words." her character, so delicately shaded and so averse to all violent passions, seems to have been peculiarly fitted for this calm and enduring sentiment which cast a soft radiance, as of indian summer, over her closing years. at a later period, the sacred name of friendship was unfortunately used to veil relations that had lost all the purity and delicacy of their primitive character. this fact has sometimes been rather illogically cited, as an argument not only against the moral influence of the salons but against the intellectual development of women. there is neither excuse nor palliation to be offered for the italian manners and the recognized system of amis intimes, which disgraced the french society the next century. but, while it is greatly to be deplored that the moral sense has not always kept pace with the cultivation of the intellect, there is no reason for believing that license of manners is in any degree the result of it. there is striking evidence to the contrary, in the incredible ignorance and laxity that found its reaction in the early salons; also in the dissolute lives of many distinguished women of rank who had no pretension to wit or education. the fluctuation of morals, which has always existed, must be traced to quite other causes. virtue has not invariably accompanied intelligence, but it has been still less the companion of ignorance. it was mme. de sable who set the fashion of condensing the thoughts and experiences of life into maxims and epigrams. this was her specific gift to literature; but her influence was felt through what she inspired others to do rather than through what she did herself. it was her good fortune to be brought into contact with the genius of a pascal and a la rochefoucauld,--men who reared immortal works upon the pastime of an idle hour. one or two of her own maxims will suffice to indicate her style as well as to show the estimate she placed upon form and measure in the conduct of life: a bad manner spoils everything, even justice and reason. the how constitutes the best part of things, and the air which one gives them gilds, modifies, and softens the most disagreeable. there is a certain command in the manner of speaking and acting, which makes itself felt everywhere, and which gains, in advance, consideration and respect. we find here the spirit that underlies french manners, in which form counts for so much. there is another, which suggests the delicate flavor of sentiment then in vogue: wherever it is, love is always the master. it seems truly that it is to the soul of the one who loves, what the soul is to the body it animates. among the eminent men who lent so much brilliancy to this salon was the great jurist domat. he adds his contribution and falls into the moralizing vein: a little fine weather, a good word, a praise, a caress, draws me from a profound sadness from which i could not draw myself by any effort of meditation. what a machine is my soul, what an abyss of misery and weakness! here is one by the abbe d'ailly, which foreshadows the thought of the next century: too great submission to books, and to the opinions of the ancients, as to the eternal truths revealed of god, spoils the head and makes pedants. the finest and most vigorous of these choice spirits was pascal, who frequented more or less the salon of mme. de sable previous to his final retirement to the gloom and austerity of the cloister. his delicate platonism and refined spirituality go far towards offsetting the cold cynicism of la rochefoucauld. each gives us a different phase of life as reflected in a clear and luminous intelligence. the one led to port royal, the other turned an electric light upon the selfish corruption of courts. many of the pensees of pascal were preserved among the records of this salon, and cousin finds reason for believing that they were first suggested and discussed here; he even thinks it possible, if not probable, that the "discours sur les passions de l'amour," which pertains to his mundane life, and presents the grave and ascetic recluse in a new light, had a like origin. but the presiding genius was la rochefoucauld. he complains that the mode of relaxation is fatiguing, and that the mania for sentences troubles his repose. the subjects were suggested for conversation, and the thoughts were condensed and reduced to writing at leisure. "here are all the maxims i have," he writes to mme. de sable; "but as one gives nothing for nothing, i demand a potage aux carottes, un ragout de mouton, etc." "when la rochefoucauld had composed his sentences," says cousin, "he talked them over before or after dinner, or he sent them at the end of a letter. they were discussed, examined, and observations were made, by which he profited. one could lessen their faults, but one could lend them no beauty. there was not a delicate and rare turn, a fine and keen touch, which did not come from him." after availing himself of the general judgment in this way, he took a novel method of forestalling crtiticism before committing himself to publication. mme. de sable sent a collection of the maxims to her friends, asking for a written opinion. one is tempted to make long extracts from their replies. the men usually indorse the worldly sentiments, the women rarely. the princesse de guemene, who, in the decline of her beauty, was growing devout, and also had apartments for penitential retreat at port royal, responds: "i was just going to write to beg you to send me your carriage as soon as you had dined. i have yet seen only the first maxims, as i had a headache yesterday; but those i have read appear to me to be founded more upon the disposition of the author than upon the truth, for he believes neither in generosity without interest, nor in pity; that is, he judges every one by himself. for the greater number of people, he is right; but surely there are those who desire only to do good." the countesse de maure, who does not believe in the absolute depravity of human nature, and is inclined to an elevated christian philosophy quite opposed to jansenism, writes with so much severity that she begs her friend not to show her letter to the author. mme. de hautefort expresses her disapproval of a theory which drives honor and goodness out of the world. after many clever and well-turned criticisms, she says: "but the maxim which is quite new to me, and which i admire, is that idleness, languid as it is, destroys all the passions. it is true, and he had searched his heart well to find a sentiment so hidden, but so just... i think one ought, at present, to esteem idleness as the only virtue in the world, since it is that which uproots all the vices. as i have always had much respect for it, i am glad it has so much merit." but she adds wisely: "if i were of the opinion of the author, i would not bring to the light those mysteries which will forever deprive him of all the confidence one might have in him." there is one letter, written by the clever and beautiful eleonore de rohan, abbess de malnoue, and addressed to the author, which deserves to be read for its fine and just sentiments. in closing she says: the maxim upon humility appears to me perfectly beautiful; but i have been so surprised to find it there, that i had the greatest difficulty in recognizing it in the midst of all that precedes and follows it. it is assuredly to make this virtue practiced among your own sex, that you have written maxims in which their self-love is so little flattered. i should be very much humiliated on my own part, if i did not say to myself what i have already said to you in this note, that you judge better the hearts of men than those of women, and that perhaps you do not know yourself the true motive which makes you esteem them less. if you had always met those whose temperament had been submitted to virtue, and in whom the senses were less strong than reason, you would think better of a certain number who distinguish themselves always from the multitude; and it seems to me that mme. de la fayette and myself deserve that you should have a better opinion of the sex in general. mme. de la fayette writes to the marquise: "all people of good sense are not so persuaded of the general corruption as is m. de la rochefoucauld. i return to you a thousand thanks for all you have done for this gentleman."--at a later period she said: "la rochefoucauld stimulated my intellect, but i reformed his heart." it is to be regretted that he had not known her sooner. at his request mme. de sable wrote a review of the maxims, which she submitted to him for approval. it seems to have been a fair presentation of both sides, but he thought it too severe, and she kindly gave him permission to change it to suit himself. he took her at her word, dropped the adverse criticisms, retained the eulogies, and published it in the "journal des savants" as he wished it to go to the world. the diplomatic marquise saved her conscience and kept her friend. the maxims of la rochefoucauld, which are familiar to all, have extended into a literature. that he generalized from his own point of view, and applied to universal humanity the motives of a class bent upon favor and precedence, is certainly true. but whatever we may think of his sentiments, which were those of a man of the world whose observations were largely in the atmosphere of courts, we are compelled to admit his unrivaled finish and perfection of form. similar theories of human nature run through the maxims of esprit and saint evremond, without the exquisite turn which makes each one of la rochefoucauld's a gem in itself. his tone was that of a disappointed courtier, with a vein of sadness only half disguised by cold philosophy and bitter cynicism. la bruyere, with a broader outlook upon humanity, had much of the same fine analysis, with less conciseness and elegance of expression. vauvenargues and joubert were his legitimate successors. but how far removed in spirit! "the body has graces," writes vauvenargues, "the mind has talents; has the heart only vices? and man capable of reason, shall he be incapable of virtue?" with a fine and delicate touch, joubert says: "virtue is the health of the soul. it gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life." these sentiments are in the vein of pascal, who represents the most spiritual element of the little coterie which has left such a legacy of condensed thought to the world. the crowning act of the life of mme. de sable was her defense of port royal. she united with mme. de longueville in protecting the persecuted jansenists, nicole and arnauld, but she had neither the courage, the heroism, nor the partisan spirit of her more ardent companion. with all her devotion she was something of a sybarite and liked repose. she had the tact, during all the troubles which scattered her little circle, to retain her friends, of whatever religious color, though not without a few temporary clouds. her diplomatic moderation did not quite please the religieuses of port royal, and chilled a little her pleasant relations with d'andilly. toward the close of her life, the marquise was in the habit of secluding herself for days together, and declining to see even her dearest friends. the abbe de la victoire, piqued at not being received, spoke of her one day as "the late mme. la marquise de sable." la rochefoucauld writes to her, "i know no more inventions for entering your house; i am refused at the door every day." mme. de la fayette declares herself offended, and cites this as a proof of her attachment, saying, "there are very few people who could displease me by not wishing to see me." but the friends of the marquise are disposed to treat her caprices very leniently. as the years went by and the interests of life receded, mme. de sable became reconciled to the thought that had inspired her with so much dread. when she died at the advanced age of seventy-nine, the longed-for transition was only the quiet passing from fevered dreams to peaceful sleep. it is a singular fact that this refined, exclusive, fastidious woman, in whom the artistic nature was always dominant to the extent of weakness, should have left a request to be buried, without ceremony, in the parish cemetery with the people, remote alike from the tombs of her family and the saints of port royal. chapter vi. madame de sevigne _her genius--her youth--her unworthy husband--her impertinent cousin--her love for her daughter--her letters--hotel de carnavalet--mme. duiplessis guenegaud--mme. de coulanges--the curtain falls_ among the brilliant french women of the seventeenth century, no one is so well-known today as mme. de sevigne. she has not only been sung by poets and portrayed by historians, but she has left us a complete record of her own life and her own character. her letters reflect every shade of her many-sided nature, as well as the events, even the trifling incidents, of the world in which she lived; the lineaments, the experiences, the virtues, and the follies of the people whom she knew. we catch the changeful tints of her mind that readily takes the complexion of those about her, while retaining its independence; we are made familiar with her small joys and sorrows, we laugh with her at her own harmless weaknesses, we feel the inspiration of her sympathy, we hear the innermost throbbings of her heart. no one was ever less consciously a woman of letters. no one would have been more surprised than herself at her own fame. one is instinctively sure that she would never have seated herself deliberately to write a book of any sort whatever. while she was planning a form for her thoughts, they would have flown. she was essentially a woman of the great world, for which she was fitted by her position, her temperament, her esprit, her tastes, and her character. she loved its variety, its movement, its gaiety; she judged leniently even its faults and its frailties. if they often furnished a target for her wit, behind her sharpest epigrams one detects an indulgent smile. the natural outlet for her full mind and heart was in conversation. when she was alone, they found vent in conversation of another sort. she talks on paper. her letters have the unstudied freedom, the rapidity, the shades, the inflections of spoken words. she gives her thoughts their own course, "with reins upon the neck," as she was fond of saying, and without knowing where they will lead her. but it is the personal element that inspires her. let her heart be piqued, or touched by a profound affection, and her mind is illuminated; her pen flies. her nature unveils itself, her emotions chase one another in quick succession, her thoughts crystallize with wonderful brilliancy, and the world is reflected in a thousand varying colors. the sparkling wit, the swift judgment, the subtle insight, the lightness of touch, the indefinable charm of style--these belong to her temperament and her genius. but the clearness, the justness of expression, the precision, the simplicity that was never banal--such qualities nature does not bestow. one must find their source in careful training, in wise criticism, in early familiarity with good models. living from to , mme. de sevigne was en rapport with the best life of the great century of french letters. she was the granddaughter of the mystical mme. de chantal, who was too much occupied with her convents and her devotions to give much attention to the little marie, left an orphan at the age of six years. the child did not inherit much of her grandmother's spirit of reverence, and at a later period was wont to indulge in many harmless pleasantries about her pious ancestress and "our grandfather, st. francois de sales." deprived so early of the care of a mother, she was brought up by an uncle, the good abbe de coulanges--the "bien-bon"--whose life was devoted to her interests. though born in the place royale, that long-faded center of so much that was brilliant and fascinating two centuries ago, much of her youth was passed in the family chateau at livry, where she was carefully educated in a far more solid fashion than was usual among the women of her time. she had an early introduction to the hotel de rambouillet, and readily caught its intellectual tastes, though she always retained a certain bold freedom of speech and manners, quite opposed to its spirit. her instructors were chapelain and menage, both honored habitues of that famous salon. the first was a dull poet, a profound scholar, somewhat of a pedant, and notoriously careless in his dress--le vieux chapelain, his irreverent pupil used to call him. when he died of apoplexy, years afterwards, she wrote to her daughter: "he confesses by pressing the hand; he is like a statue in his chair. so god confounds the pride of philosophers." but he taught her latin, spanish, and italian, made her familiar with the beauties of virgil and tasso, and gave her a critical taste for letters. menage was younger, and aspired to be a man of the world as well as a savant. repeating one day the remark of a friend, that out of ten things he knew he had learned nine in conversation, he added, "i could say about the same thing myself"--a confession that savors more of the salon than of the library. he had a good deal of learning, but much pretension, and moliere has given him an undesirable immortality as vadius in "les femmes savantes," in company with his deadly enemy, the abbe cotin, who figures as "trissotin." it appears that the susceptible savant lost his heart to his lively pupil, and sighed not only in secret but quite openly. he wrote her bad verses in several languages, loaded her with eulogies, and followed her persistently. "the name of mme. de sevigne," said the bishop of laon, "is in the works of menage what bassan's dog is in his portraits. he cannot help putting it there." she treated him in a sisterly fashion that put to flight all sentimental illusions, but she had often to pacify his wounded vanity. one day, in the presence of several friends, she gave him a greeting rather more cordial than dignified. noticing the looks of surprise, she turned away laughing and said, "so they kissed in the primitive church." but the wide knowledge and scholarly criticism of menage were of great value to the versatile woman, who speedily surpassed her master in style if not in learning. evidently she appreciated him, since she addressed him in one of her letters as "friend of all friends, the best." at eighteen the gay and unconventional marie de rabutin-chantal was married to the marquis de sevigne; but her period of happiness was a short one. the husband, who was rich, handsome, and agreeable, proved weak and faithless. he was one of the temporary caprices of the dangerous ninon, led a dashing, irresponsible life, spent his fortune recklessly, and left his pretty young wife to weep alone at a convenient distance, under the somber skies of brittany. fortunately for her and for posterity, his career was rapid and brief. for some trifling affair of so-called honor--a quality of which, from our point of view, he does not seem to have possessed enough to be worth the trouble of defending--he had the kindness to get himself killed in a duel, after seven years of marriage. his spirited wife had loved him sincerely, and first illusions die slowly. she shed many bitter and natural tears, but she never showed any disposition to repeat the experiment. perhaps she was of the opinion of another young widow who thought it "a fine thing to bear the name of a man who can commit no more follies." but it is useless to speculate upon the reasons why a woman does or does not marry. it is certain that the love of her two children filled the heart of mme. de sevigne; her future life was devoted to their training, and to repairing a fortune upon which her husband's extravagance had made heavy inroads. but the fascinating widow of twenty-five had a dangerous path to tread. that she lived in a society so lax and corrupt, unprotected and surrounded by distinguished admirers, without a shadow of suspicion having fallen upon her fair reputation is a strong proof of her good judgment and her discretion. she was not a great beauty, though the flattering verses of her poet friends might lead one to think so. a complexion fresh and fair, eyes of remarkable brilliancy, an abundance of blond hair, a face mobile and animated, and a fine figure--these were her visible attractions. she danced well, sang well, talked well, and had abounding health. mme. de la fayette made a pen-portrait of her, which was thought to be strikingly true. it was in the form of a letter from an unknown man. a few extracts will serve to bring her more vividly before us. "your mind so adorns and embellishes your person, that there is no one in the world so fascinating when you are animated by a conversation from which constraint is banished. all that you say has such a charm, and becomes you so well, that the words attract the smiles and the graces around you; the brilliancy of your intellect gives such luster to your complexion and your eyes, that although it seems that wit should touch only the ears, yours dazzles the sight. "your soul is great and elevated. you are sensitive to glory and to ambition, and not less so to pleasures; you were born for them and they seem to have been made for you... in a word, joy is the true state of your soul, and grief is as contrary to it as possible. you are naturally tender and impassioned; there was never a heart so generous, so noble, so faithful... you are the most courteous and amiable person that ever lived, and the sweet, frank air which is seen in all your actions makes the simplest compliments of politeness seem from your lips protestations of friendship." mlle. de scudery sketches her as the princesse clarinte in "clelie," concluding with these words: "i have never seen together so many attractions, so much gaiety, so much coquetry, so much light, so much innocence and virtue. no one ever understood better the art of having grace without affectation, raillery without malice, gaiety without folly, propriety without constraint, and virtue without severity." her malicious cousin, bussy-rabutin, who was piqued by her indifference, and basely wished to avenge himself, said that her "warmth was in her intellect;" that for a woman of quality she was too badine, too economical, too keenly alive to her own interests; that she made too much account of a few trifling words from the queen, and was too evidently flattered when the king danced with her. this opinion of a vain and jealous man is not entitled to great consideration, especially when we recall that he had already spoken of her as "the delight of mankind," and said that antiquity would have dressed altars for her and she would "surely have been goddess of something." the most incomprehensible page in her history is her complaisance towards the persistent impertinences of this perfidious friend. the only solution of it seems to lie in the strength of family ties, and in her unwillingness to be on bad terms with one of her very few near relatives. bussy-rabutin was handsome, witty, brilliant, a bel esprit, a member of the academie francaise, and very much in love with his charming cousin, who clearly appreciated his talents, if not his character. "you are the fagot of my intellect," she says to him; but she forbids him to talk of love. unfortunately for himself, his vanity got the better of his discretion. he wrote the "histoire amoureuse des gauls," and raised such a storm about his head by his attack upon many fair reputations, that, after a few months of lonely meditation in the bastille, he was exiled from paris for seventeen years. long afterwards he repented the unkind blow he had given to mme. de sevigne, confessed its injustice, apologized, and made his peace. but the world is less forgiving, and wastes little sympathy upon the base but clever and ambitious man who was doomed to wear his restless life away in the uncongenial solitude of his chateau. among the numerous adorers of mme. de sevigne were the prince de conti, the witty comte de lude, the poet segrais, fouquet, and turenne. her friendship for the last two seems to have been the most lively and permanent. we owe to her sympathetic pen the best account of the death of turenne. her devotion to the interests of fouquet and his family lasted though the many years of imprisonment that ended only with his life. there was nothing of the spirit of the courtier in her generous affection for the friends who were out of favor. the loyalty of her character was notably displayed in her unwavering attachment to cardinal de retz, during his long period of exile and misfortune, after the fronde. but one must go outside the ordinary channels to find the veritable romance of mme. de sevigne's life. her sensibility lent itself with great facility to impressions, and her gracious manners, her amiable character, her inexhaustible fund of gaiety could not fail to bring her a host of admirers. she had doubtless a vein of harmless coquetry, but it was little more than the natural and variable grace of a frank and sympathetic woman who likes to please, and who scatters about her the flowers of a rich mind and heart, without taking violent passions too seriously, if, indeed, she heeds them at all. friendship, too, has its shades, its subtleties, its half-perceptible and quite unconscious coquetries. but the supreme passion of mme. de sevigne was her love for her daughter. it was the exaltation of her mystical grandmother, in another form. "to love as i love you makes all other friendships frivolous," she writes. whatever her gifts and attractions may have been, she is known to the world mainly through this affection and the letters which have immortalized it. nowhere in literature has maternal love found such complete and perfect expression. nowhere do we find a character so clearly self-revealed. others have professed to unveil their innermost lives, but there is always a suspicion of posing in deliberate revelations. mme. de sevigne has portrayed herself unconsciously. it is the experience of yesterday, the thought of today, the hope of tomorrow, the love that is at once the joy and sorrow of all the days, that are woven into a thousand varying but living forms. one naturally seeks in the character of the daughter a key to the absorbing sentiment which is the inspiration and soul of these letters; but one does not find it there. more beautiful than her mother, more learned, more accomplished, she lacked her sympathetic charm. cold, reserved, timid, and haughty, without vivacity and apparently without fine sensibility, she was much admired but little loved by the world in which she lived. "when you choose, you are adorable," wrote her mother; but evidently she did not always so choose. bussy-rabutin says of her, "this woman has esprit, but it is esprit soured and of insupportable egotism. she will make as many enemies as her mother makes friends and adorers." he did not like her, and one must again take his opinion with reserve; but she says of herself that she is "of a temperament little communicative." in her mature life she naively writes: "at first people thought me amiable enough, but when they knew me better they loved me no more." "the prettiest girl in france," whose beauty was expected to "set the world on fire," created a mild sensation at court; was noticed by the king, who danced with her, received her share of adulation, and finally became the third wife of the comte de grignan, who carried her off to provence, to the lasting grief of her adoring mother, and to the great advantage of posterity, which owes to this fact the series of incomparable letters that made the fame of their writer, and threw so direct and vivid a light upon an entire generation. the world has been inclined to regard the son of mme. de sevigne as the more lovable of her two children, but she doubtless recognized in his light and inconsequent character many of the qualities of her husband which had given her so much sorrow during the brief years of her marriage. amiable, affectionate, and not without talent, he was nevertheless the source of many anxieties and little pride. he followed in the footsteps of his father, and became a willing victim to the fascinations of ninon; he frequented the society of champmesle, where he met habitually boileau and racine. he recited well, had a fine literary taste, much sensibility, and a gracious ease of manner that made him many friends. "he was almost as much loved as i am," remarked the brilliant mme. de coulanges, after accompanying him on a visit to versailles. he appealed to mme. de la fayette to use her influence with his mother to induce her to pay his numerous debts. there is a touch of satire in the closing line of the note in which she intercedes for him. "the great friendship you have for mme. de grignan," she writes, "makes it necessary to show some for her brother."--but we have glimpses of his weakness and instability in many of his mother's intimate letters. in the end, however, having exhausted the pleasures of life and felt the bitterness of its disappointments, he took refuge in devotion, and died in the odor of sanctity, after the example of his devout ancestress. mme. de grignan certainly offered a more solid foundation for her mother's confidence and affection. it is quite possible, too, that her reserve concealed graces of character only apparent on a close intimacy. but love does not wait for reasons, and this one had all the shades and intensities of a passion, with few of its exactions. d'andilly called the mother a "pretty pagan," because she made such an idol of her daughter. she sometimes has her own misgivings on the score of religion. "i make this a little trappe," she wrote from livry, after the separation. "i wish to pray to god and make a thousand reflections; but, ma pauvre chere, what i do better than all that is to think of you. .. i see you, you are present to me, i think and think again of everything; my head and my mind are racked; but i turn in vain, i seek in vain; the dear child whom i love with so much passion is two hundred leagues away. i have her no more. then i weep without the power to help myself." she rings the changes upon this inexhaustible theme. a responsive word delights her; a brief silence terrifies her; a slight coldness plunges her into despair. "i have an imagination so lively that uncertainty makes me die," she writes. if a shadow of grief touches her idol, her sympathies are overflowing. "you weep, my very dear child; it is an affair for you; it is not the same thing for me, it is my temperament." but though this love pulses and throbs behind all her letters, it does not make up the substance of them. to amuse her daughter she gathers all the gossip of the court, all the news of her friends; she keeps her au courant with the most trifling as well as the most important events. now she entertains her with a witty description of a scene at versailles, a tragical adventure, a gracious word about mme. scarron, "who sups with me every evening," a tender message from mme. de la fayette; now it is a serious reflection upon the death of turenne, a vivid picture of her own life, a bit of philosophy, a spicy anecdote about a dying man who takes forty cups of tea every morning, and is cured. a few touches lay bare a character or sketch a vivid scene. it is this infinite variety of detail that gives such historic value to her letters. in a correspondence so intimate she has no interest to conciliate, no ends to gain. she is simply a mirror in which the world about her is reflected. but the most interesting thing we read in her letters is the life and nature of the woman herself. she has a taste for society and for seclusion, for gaiety and for thought, for friendship and for books. for the moment each one seems dominant. "i am always of the opinion of the one heard last," she says, laughing at her own impressibility. it is an amiable admission, but she has very fine and rational ideas of her own, notwithstanding. in books, for which she had always a passion, she found unfailing consolation. corneille and la fontaine were her favorite traveling companions. "i am well satisfied to be a substance that thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. her tastes were catholic. she read astree with delight, loved petrarch, ariosto, and montaigne; rabelais made her "die of laughter," she found plutarch admirable, enjoyed tacitus as keenly as did mme. roland a century later, read josephus and lucian, dipped into the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of the holy fathers and of the saints. she preferred the history of france to that of rome because she had "neither relatives nor friends in the latter place." she finds the music of lulli celestial and the preaching of bourdaloue divine. racine she did not quite appreciate. in his youth, she said he wrote tragedies for champmesle and not for posterity. later she modified her opinion, but corneille held always the first place in her affection. she had a great love for books on morals, read and reread the essays of nicole, which she found a perpetual resource against the ills of life--even rain and bad weather. st. augustine she reads with pleasure, and she is charmed with bossuet and pascal; but she is not very devout, though she often tries to be. there is a serious naivete in all her efforts in this direction. she seems to have always one eye upon the world while she prays, and she mourns over her own lack of devotion. "i wish my heart were for god as it is for you," she writes to her daughter. "i am neither of god nor of the devil," she says again; "that state troubles me though, between ourselves, i find it the most natural in the world." her reason quickly pierces to the heart of superstition; sometimes she cannot help a touch of sarcasm. "i fear that this trappe, which wishes to pass humanity, may become a lunatic asylum," she says. she believes little in saints and processions. over the high altar of her chapel she writes soli deo honor et gloria. "it is the way to make no one jealous," she remarks. she was rather inclined toward jansenism, but she could not fathom all the subtleties of her friends the port royalists, and begged them to "have the kindness, out of pity for her, to thicken their religion a little as it evaporated in so much reasoning." as she grows older the tone of seriousness is more perceptible. "if i could only live two hundred years," she writes, "it seems to me that i might be an admirable person." the rationalistic tendencies of mme. de grignan give her some anxiety, and she rallies her often upon the doubtful philosophy of her pere descartes. she could not admit a theory which pretended to prove that her dog marphise had no soul, and she insisted that if the cartesians had any desire to go to heaven, it was out of curiosity. "talk to the cardinal (de retz) a little of your machines; machines that love, machines that have a choice for some one, machines that are jealous, machines that fear. allez, allez, you are jesting! descartes never intended to make us believe all that." in her youth mme. de sevigne did not like the country because it was windy and spoiled her beautiful complexion; perhaps, too, because it was lonely. but with her happy gift of adaptation she came to love its tranquillity. she went often to the solitary old family chateau in brittany to make economies and to retrieve the fortune which suffered successively from the reckless extravagance of her husband and son, and from the expensive tastes of the comte de grignan, who was acting governor of provence, and lived in a state much too magnificent for his resources. of her life at the rocks she has left us many exquisite pictures. "i go out into the pleasant avenues; i have a footman who follows me; i have books, i change place, i vary the direction of my promenade; a book of devotion, a book of history; one changes from one to the other; that gives diversion; one dreams a little of god, of his providence; one possesses one's soul, one thinks of the future." she embellishes her park, superintends the planting of trees, and "a labyrinth from which one could not extricate one's self without the thread of ariadne;" she fills her garden with orange trees and jessamine until the air is so perfumed that she imagines herself in provence. she sits in the shade and embroiders while her son "reads trifles, comedies which he plays like moliere, verses, romances, tales; he is very amusing, he has esprit, he is appreciative, he entertains us." she notes the changing color of the leaves, the budding of the springtime. "it seems to me that in case of need i should know very well how to make a spring," she writes. she loves too the "fine, crystal days of autumn." sometimes, in the evening, she has "gray-brown thoughts which grow black at night," but she never dwells upon these. her "habitual thought--that which one must have for god, if one does his duty"--is for her daughter. "my dear child," she writes, "it is only you that i prefer to the tranquil repose i enjoy here." if her own soul is open to us in all its variable and charming moods, we also catch in her letters many unconscious reflections of her daughter's character. she offers her a little needed worldly advice. "try, my child," she says, "to adjust yourself to the manners and customs of the people with whom you live; adapt yourself to that which is not bad; do not be disgusted with that which is only mediocre; make a pleasure of that which is not ridiculous." she entreats her to love the little pauline and not to scold her, nor send her away to the convent as she did her sister marie-blanche. with what infinite tenderness she always speaks of this child, smiling at her small outbursts of temper, soothing her little griefs, and giving wise counsels about her education. evidently she doubted the patience of the mother. "you do not yet too well comprehend maternal love," she writes; "so much the better, my child; it is violent." unfortunately this adoring mother could not get on very well with her daughter when they were together. she drowned her with affection, she fatigued her with care for her health, she was hurt by her ungracious manner, she was frozen by her indifference in short, they killed each other. it is not a rare thing to make a cult of a distant idol, and to find one's self unequal to the perpetual shock of the small collisions which diversities of taste and temperament render inevitable in daily intercourse. in this instance, one can readily imagine that a love so interwoven with every fiber of the mother's life, must have been a little over-sensitive, a little exacting, a trifle too demonstrative for the colder nature of the daughter; but that it was the less genuine and profound, no one who has at all studied the character of mme. de sevigne can for a moment imagine. how she suffers when it becomes necessary for mme. de grignan to go back to provence! how the tears flow! how readily she forgives all, even to denying that there is anything to forgive. "a word, a sweetness, a return, a caress, a tenderness, disarms me, cures me in a moment," she writes. and again: "would to god, my daughter, that i might see you once more at the hotel de carnavalet, not for eight days, nor to make there a penitence, but to embrace you and to make you see clearly that i cannot be happy without you, and that the chagrins which my friendship for you might give me are more agreeable than all the false peace of a wearisome absence." in spite of these little clouds, the old love is never dimmed; we are constantly bewildered with the inexhaustible riches of a heart which gives so lavishly and really asks so little for itself. the hotel de carnavalet was one of the social centers of the latter part of the century, but it was the source of no special literature and of no new diversions. mme. de sevigne was herself luminous, and her fame owes none of its luster to the reflection from those about her. she was original and spontaneous. she read because she liked to read, and not because she wished to be learned. she wrote as she talked, from the impulse of the moment, without method or aim excepting to follow where her rapid thought led her. her taste for society was of the same order. her variable and sparkling genius would have broken loose from the formal conversations and rather studied brilliancy that had charmed her youth at the hotel de rambouillet. the onerous duties of a perpetual hostess would not have suited her temperament, which demanded its hours of solitude and repose. but she was devoted to her friends, and there was a delightful freedom in all her intercourse with them. she has not chronicled her salon, but she has chronicled her world, and we gather from her letters the quality of her guests. she liked to pass an evening in the literary coterie at the luxembourg; to drop in familiarly upon mme. de la fayette, where she found la rochefoucauld, cardinal de retz, sometimes segrais, huet, la fontaine, moliere, and other wits of the time; to sup with mme. de coulanges and mme. scarron. she is a constant visitor at the old hotel de nevers, where marie de gonzague and the princesse palatine had charmed an earlier generation, and where mme. duplessis guenegaud, a woman of brilliant intellect, heroic courage, large heart, and pure character, whom d'andilly calls one of the great souls, presided over a new circle of young poets and men of letters, reviving the fading memories of the hotel de rambouillet. mme. de sevigne, who had fine dramatic talent, acted here in little comedies. she heard boileau read his satires and racine his tragedies. she met the witty chevalier de chatillon, who asked eight days to make an impromptu, and pomponne, who wrote to his father that the great world he found in this salon did not prevent him from appearing in a gray habit. in a letter from the country house of mme. duplessis, at fresnes, to the same pomponne, then ambassador to sweden, mme. de sevigne says: "i have m. d'andilly at my left, that is, on the side of my heart; i have mme. de la fayette at my right; mme. duplessis before me, daubing little pictures; mme. de motteville a little further off, who dreams profoundly; our uncle de cessac, whom i fear because i do not know him very well." it is this life of charming informality; this society of lettered tastes, of wit, of talent, of distinction, that she transfers to her own salon. its continuity is often broken by her long absences in the country or in provence, but her irresistible magnetism quickly draws the world around her, on her return. in addition to her intimate friends and to men of letters like racine, boileau, benserade, one meets representatives of the most distinguished of the old families of france. conde, richelieu, colberg, louvois, and sully are a few among the great names, of which the list might be indefinitely extended. we have many interesting glimpses of the grande mademoiselle, the "adorable" duchesse de chaulnes, the duc and duchesse de rohan, who were "germans in the art of savoir-vivre," the abbess de fontevrault, so celebrated for her esprit and her virtue, and a host of others too numerous to mention. the sculptured portals and time-stained walls of the hotel de carnavalet are still alive with the memories of these brilliant reunions and the famous people who shone there two hundred years ago. among those who exercised the most important influence upon the life of mme. de sevigne was corbinelli, the wise counselor, who, with a soul untouched by the storms of adversity through which he had passed, devoted his life to letters and the interests of his friends. no one had a finer appreciation of her gifts and her character. her compared her letters to those of cicero, but he always sought to temper her ardor, and to turn her thoughts toward an elevated christian philosophy. "in him," said mme. de sevigne, "i defend one who does not cease to celebrate the perfections and the existence of god; who never judges his neighbor, who excuses him always; who is insensible to the pleasures and delights of life, and entirely submissive to the will of providence; in fine, i sustain the faithful admirer of sainte therese, and of my grandmother, sainte chantal." this gentle, learned, and disinterested man, whose friendship deepened with years, was an unfailing resource. in her troubles and perplexities she seeks his advice; in her intellectual tastes she is sustained by his sympathy. she speaks often of the happy days in provence, when, together with her daughter, they translate tacitus, read tasso, and get entangled in endless discussions upon descartes. even mme. de grignan, who rarely likes her mother's friends, in the end gives due consideration to this loyal confidant, though she does not hesitate to ridicule the mysticism into which he finally drifted. after mme. de la fayette, the woman whose relations with mme. de sevigne were the most intimate was mme. de coulanges, who merits here more than a passing word. her wit was proverbial, her popularity universal. the leaf, the fly, the sylph, the goddess, her friend calls her in turn, with many a light thrust at her volatile but loyal character. this brilliant, spirituelle, caustic woman was the wife of a cousin of the marquis de sevigne, who was as witty as herself and more inconsequent. both were amiable, both sparkled with bons mots and epigrams, but they failed to entertain each other. the husband goes to italy or germany or passes his time in various chateaux, where he is sure of a warm welcome and good cheer. the wife goes to versailles, visits her cousin louvois, the duchesse de richelieu, and mme. de maintenon, who loves her much; or presides at home over a salon that is always well filled. "ah, madame," said m. de barillon, "how much your house pleases me! i shall come here very evening when i am tired of my family." "monsieur," she replied, "i expect you tomorrow." when she was ill and likely to die, her husband had a sudden access of affection, and nursed her with great tenderness. mme. de coulanges dying and her husband in grief, seemed somehow out of the order of things. "a dead vivacity, a weeping gaiety, these are prodigies," wrote mme. de sevigne. when the wife recovered, however, they took their separate ways as before. "your letters are delicious," she wrote once to mme. de sevigne, "and you are as delicious as your letters." her own were as much sought in her time, but she had no profound affection to consecrate them and no children to collect them, so that only a few have been preserved. there is a curious vein of philosophy in one she wrote to her husband, when the pleasures of life began to fade. "as for myself, i care little for the world; i find it no longer suited to my age; i have no engagements, thank god, to retain me there. i have seen all there is to see. i have only an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover there. ah! what avails it to recommence every day the visits, to trouble one's self always about things that do not concern us? .... my dear sir, we must think of something more solid." she disappears from the scene shortly after the death of mme. de sevigne. long years of silence and seclusion, and another generation heard one day that she had lived and that she was dead. the friends of mme. de sevigne slip away one after another; la rochefoucauld, de retz, mme. de la fayette are gone. "alas!" she writes, "how this death goes running about and striking on all sides." the thought troubles her. "i am embarked in life without my consent," she says; "i must go out of it--that overwhelms me. and how shall i go? whence: by what door? when will it be? in what disposition: how shall i be with god? what have i to present to him? what can i hope?--am i worthy of paradise? am i worthy of hell? what an alternative! what a complication! i would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse." the end came to her in the one spot where she would most have wished it. she died while on a visit to her daughter in provence. strength and resignation came with the moment, and she faced with calmness and courage the final mystery. to the last she retained her wit, her vivacity, and that eternal youth of the spirit which is one of the rarest of god's gifts to man. "there are no more friends left to me," said mme. de coulanges; and later she wrote to mme. de grignan, "the grief of seeing her no longer is always fresh to me. i miss too many things at the hotel de carnavalet." the curtain falls upon this little world which the magical pen of mme. de sevigne has made us know so well. the familiar faces retreat into the darkness, to be seen no more. but the picture lives, and the woman who has outlined it so clearly, and colored it so vividly and so tenderly, smiles upon us still, out of the shadows of the past, crowned with the white radiance of immortal genius and immortal love. chapter vii. madame de la fayette _her friendship with mme. de sevigne--her education--her devotion to the princess henrietta--her salon--la rochefoucauld--talent as a diplomatist--comparison with mme. de maintenon her literary work--sadness of her last days--woman in literature_ "believe me, my dearest, you are the person in the world whom i have most truly loved," wrote mme. de la fayette to mme. de sevigne a short time before her death. this friendship of more than forty years, which mme. de sevigne said had never suffered the least cloud, was a living tribute to the mind and heart of both women. it may also be cited for the benefit of the cynically disposed who declare that feminine friendships are simply "pretty bows of ribbon" and nothing more. these women were fundamentally unlike, but they supplemented each other. the character of mme. de la fayette was of firmer and more serious texture. she had greater precision of thought, more delicacy of sentiment, and affections not less deep. but her temperament was less sunny, her genius less impulsive, her wit less sparkling, and her manner less demonstrative. "she has never been without that divine reason which was her dominant trait," wrote her friend. no praise pleased her so much as to be told that her judgment was superior to her intellect, and that she loved truth in all things. "she would not have accorded the least favor to any one, if she had not been convinced it was merited," said segrais; "this is why she was sometimes called hard, though she was really tender." as an evidence of her candor, he thinks it worth while to record that "she did not even conceal her age, but told freely in what year and place she was born." but she combined to an eminent degree sweetness with strength, sensibility with reason, and it was the blending of such diverse qualities that gave so rare a flavor to her character. in this, too, lies the secret of the vast capacity for friendship which was one of her most salient points. it is through the records which these friendships have left, through the literary work that formed the solace of so many hours of sadness and suffering, and through the letters of mme. de sevigne, that we are able to trace the classic outlines of this fine and complex nature, so noble, so poetic, so sweet, and yet so strong. mme. de la fayette was eight years younger than mme. de sevigne, and died three years earlier; hence they traversed together the brilliant world of the second half of the century of which they are among the most illustrious representatives. the young marie-madeleine pioche de la vergne had inherited a taste for letters and was carefully instructed by her father, who was a field-marshal and the governor of havre, where he died when she was only fifteen. she had not passed the first flush of youth when her mother contracted a second marriage with the chevalier renaud de sevigne, whose name figures among the frondeurs as the ardent friend of cardinal de retz, and later among the devout port royalists. it is a fact of more interest to us that he was an uncle of the marquis de sevigne, and the best result of the marriage to the young girl, who was not at all pleased and whose fortunes it clouded a little, was to bring her into close relations with the woman to whom we owe the most intimate details of her life. the rare natural gifts of mlle. de la vergne were not left without due cultivation. rapin and menage taught her latin. "that tiresome menage," as she lightly called him, did not fail, according to his custom, to lose his susceptible heart to the remarkable pupil who, after three months of study, translated virgil and horace better than her masters. he put this amiable weakness on record in many latin and italian verses, in which he addresses her as laverna, a name more musical than flattering, if one recalls its latin significance. she received an education of another sort, in the salon of her mother, a woman of much intelligence, as well as a good deal of vanity, who posed a little as a patroness of letters, gathering about her a circle of beaux esprits, and in other ways signaling the taste which was a heritage from her provencal ancestry. on can readily imagine the rapidity with which the young girl developed in such an atmosphere. the abbe costar, "most gallant of pedants and most pedantic of gallants," who had an equal taste for literature and good dinners, calls her "the incomparable," sends her his books, corresponds with her, and expresses his delight at finding her "so beautiful, so spirituelle, so full of reason." the poet scarron speaks of her as "toute lumineuse, toute precieuse." the circle she met in the salon of her godmother, the duchesse d'aiguillon, had no less influence in determining her future fortunes. with her rare reputation for beauty and esprit, as well as learning, she took her place early in this brilliant and distinguished society in which she was to play so graceful and honored a part. she was sought and admired not only by the men of letters who were so cordially welcomed by the favorite niece of richelieu, but by the gay world that habitually assembled at the petit luxembourg. it was here that she perfected the tone of natural elegance which always distinguished her and made her conspicuous even at court, where she passed so many years of her life. she was not far from twenty-one when she became the wife of the comte de la fayette, of whom little is known save that he died early, leaving her with two sons. he is the most shadowy of figures, and whether he made her life happy or sad does not definitely appear, though there is a vague impression that he left something to be desired in the way of devotion. a certain interest attaches to him as the brother of the beautiful louise de la fayette, maid of honor to anne of austria, who fled from the compromising infatuation of louis xiii, to hide her youth and fascinations in the cloister, under the black robe and the cherished name of mere angelique de chaillot. the young, brilliant, and gifted comtesse goes to the convent to visit her gently austere sister-in-law, and meets there the princess henrietta of england, than a child of eleven years. the attraction is mutual and ripens into a deep and lasting friendship. when this graceful and light-hearted girl becomes the duchesse d'orleans, and sister-in-law of the king, she attaches her friend to her court and makes her the confidante of her romantic experiences. "do you not think," she said to her one day, "that if all which has happened to me, and the things relating to it, were told it would make a fine story? you write well; write; i will furnish you good materials." the interesting memorial, to which madame herself contributes many pages, is interrupted by the mysterious death of the gay and charming woman who had found so sympathetic and so faithful a chronicler. she breathed her last sigh in the arms of this friend. "it is one of those sorrows for which one never consoles one's self, and which leave a shadow over the rest of one's life," wrote mme. de la fayette. she had no heart to finish the history, and added only the few simple lines that record the touching incidents which left upon her so melancholy and lasting an impression. she did not care to remain longer at court, where she was constantly reminded of her grief, and retired permanently from its gaieties; but in these years of intimacy with one of its central figures, she had gained an insight into its spirit and its intrigues, which was of inestimable value in the memoirs and romances of her later years. the natural place of mme. de la fayette was in a society of more serious tone and more lettered tastes. in her youth she had been taken by her mother to the hotel de rambouillet, and she always retained much of its spirit, without any of its affectations. we find her sometimes at the samedis, and she belonged to the exclusive coterie of the grande mademoiselle, at the luxembourg, where her facile pen was in demand for the portraits so much in vogue. she was also a frequent visitor in the literary salon of mme. de sable, at port royal. it was here that her friendship with la rochefoucauld glided imperceptibly into the intimacy which became so important a feature in her life. this intimacy was naturally a matter of some speculation, but the world made up its mind of its perfectly irreproachable character. "it appears to be only friendship," writes mme. de scudery to bussy-rabutin; "in short the fear of god on both sides, and perhaps policy, have cut the wings of love. she is his favorite and his first friend." "i do not believe he has ever been what one calls in love," writes mme. de sevigne. but this friendship was a veritable romance, without any of the storms or vexations or jealousies of a passionate love. "you may imagine the sweetness and charm of an intercourse full of all the friendship and confidence possible between two people whose merit is not ordinary," she says again; "add to this the circumstance of their bad health, which rendered them almost necessary to each other, and gave them the leisure not to be found in other relations, to enjoy each other's good qualities. it seems to me that at court people have no time for affection; the whirlpool which is so stormy for others was peaceful for them, and left ample time for the pleasures of a friendship so delicious. i do not believe that any passion can surpass the strength of such a tie." in the earlier stages of this intimacy, mme. de la fayette was a little sensitive as to how the world might regard it, as may be seen in a note to mme. de sable, in which she asks her to explain it to the young comte de saint-paul, a son of mme. de longueville. "i beg of you to speak of the matter in such a way as to put out of his head the idea that it is anything serious," she writes. "i am not sufficiently sure what you think of it yourself to feel certain that you will say the right thing, and it may be necessary to begin by convincing my embassador. however, i must trust to your tact, which is superior to ordinary rules. only convince him. i dislike mortally that people of his age should imagine that i have affairs of gallantry. it seems to them that every one older than themselves is a hundred, and they are astonished that such should be regarded of any account. besides, he would believe these things of m. de la rochefoucauld more readily than of any one else. in fine, i do not want him to think anything about it except that the gentleman is one of my friends." the picture we have of la rochefoucauld from the pen of mme. de sevigne has small resemblance to the ideal that one forms of the cynical author of the maxims. he had come out of the storms of the fronde a sad and disappointed man. the fires of his nature seem to have burned out with the passions of his youth, if they had ever burned with great intensity. "i have seen love nowhere except in romances," he says, and even his devotion to mme. de longueville savors more of the ambitious courtier than of the lover. his nature was one that recoiled from all violent commotions of the soul. the cold philosophy of the maxims marked perhaps the reaction of his intellect against the disenchanting experiences of his life. in the tranquil atmosphere of mme. de sable he found a certain mental equilibrium; but his character was finally tempered and softened by the gentle influence of mme. de la fayette, whose exquisite poise and delicacy were singularly in harmony with a nature that liked nothing in exaggeration. "i have seen him weep with a tenderness that made me adore him," writes mme. de sevigne, after the death of his mother. "the heart or m. de la rochefoucauld for his family is a thing incomparable." when the news came that his favorite grandson had been killed in battle, she says again: "i have seen his heart laid bare in this cruel misfortune; he ranks first among all i have ever known for courage, fortitude, tenderness, and reason; i count for nothing his esprit and his charm." in all the confidences of the two women, la rochefoucauld makes a third. he seems always to be looking over the shoulder of mme. de la fayette while she writes to the one who "satisfies his idea of friendship in all its circumstances and dependences"; adding usually a message, a line or a pretty compliment to mme. de grignan that is more amiable than sincere, because he knows it will gladden the heart of her adoring mother. the side of mme. de la fayette which has the most fascination for us is this intimate life of which mme. de sevigne gives such charming glimpses. for a moment it was her ambition to establish a popular salon, a role for which she had every requisite of position, talent, and influence. "she presumed very much upon her esprit," says gourville, who did not like her, "and proposed to fill the place of the marquise de sable, to whom all the young people were in the habit of paying great deference, because, after she had fashioned them a little, it was a passport for entering the world; but this plan did not succeed, as mme. de la fayette was not willing to give her time to a thing so futile." one can readily understand that it would not have suited her tastes or her temperament. besides, her health was too delicate, and her moods were too variable. "you know how she is weary sometimes of the same thing," wrote mme. de sevigne. but she had her coterie, which was brilliant in quality if not in numbers. the fine house with its pretty garden, which may be seen today opposite the petit luxembourg, was a favorite meeting place for a distinguished circle. the central figure was la rochefoucauld. every day he came in and seated himself in the fauteuil reserved for him. one is reminded of the little salon in the abbaye-aux-bois, where more than a century later chateaubriand found the pleasure and the consolation of his last days in the society of mme. recamier. they talk, they write, they criticize each other, they receive their friends. the cardinal de retz comes in, and they recall the fatal souvenirs of the fronde. perhaps he thinks of the time when he found the young mlle. de lavergne pretty and amiable, and she did not smile upon him. the prince de conde is there sometimes, and honors her with his confidence, which mme. de sevigne thinks very flattering, as he does not often pay such consideration to women. segrais has transferred his allegiance from the grande mademoiselle to mme. de la fayette, and is her literary counselor as well as a constant visitor. la fontaine, "so well known by his fables and tales, and sometimes so heavy in conversation," may be found there. mme. de sevigne comes almost every day with her sunny face and her witty story. "the mist" she calls mme. de la fayette, who is so often ill and sad. she might have called herself the sunbeam, though she, too, has her hours when she can only dine tete-a-tete with her friend, because she is "so gloomy that she cannot support four people together." mme. de coulanges adds her graceful, vivacious, and sparkling presence. mme. scarron, before her days of grandeur, is frequently of the company, and has lost none of the charm which made the salon of her poet-husband so attractive during his later years. "she has an amiable and marvelously just mind," says mme. de sevigne... "it is pleasant to hear her talk. these conversations often lead us very far, from morality to morality, sometimes christian, sometimes political." this circle was not limited however to a few friends, and included from time to time the learning, the elegance and the aristocracy of paris. but mme. de la fayette herself is the magnet that quietly draws together this fascinating world. in her youth she had much life and vivacity, perhaps a spice of discreet coquetry, but at this period she was serious, and her fresh beauty had given place to the assured and captivating grace of maturity. she had a face that might have been severe in its strength but for the sensibility expressed in the slight droop of the head to one side, the tender curve of the full lips, and the variable light of the dark, thoughtful eyes. in her last years, when her stately figure had grown attenuated, and her face was pallid with long suffering, the underlying force of her character was more distinctly defined in the clear and noble outlines of her features. her nature was full of subtle shades. over her reserved strength, her calm judgment, her wise penetration played the delicate light of a lively imagination, the shifting tints of a tender sensibility. her sympathy found ready expression in tears, and she could not even bear the emotion of saying good-by to mme. de sevigne when she was going away to provence. but her accents were always tempered, and her manners had the gracious and tranquil ease of a woman superior to circumstances. her extreme frankness lent her at times a certain sharpness, and she deals many light blows at the small vanities and affectations that come under her notice. "mon dieu," said the frivolous mme. de marans to her one day, "i must have my hair cut." "mon dieu," replied mme. de la fayette simply, "do not have it done; that is becoming only to young persons." gourville said she was imperious and over-bearing, scolding those she loved best, as well as those she did not love. but this valet-de-chambre of la rochefoucauld, who amassed a fortune and became a man of some note, was jealous of her influence over his former master, and his opinions should be taken with reservation. her delicate satire may have been sometimes a formidable weapon, but it was directed only against follies, and rarely, if ever, used unkindly. she was a woman for intimacies, and it is to those who knew her best that we must look for a just estimate of her qualities. "you would love her as soon as you had time to be with her, and to become familiar with her esprit and her wisdom," wrote mme. de sevigne to her daughter, who was disposed to be critical; "the better one knows her, the more one is attached to her." one must also take into consideration her bad health. people thought her selfish or indifferent when she was only sad and suffering. for more than twenty years she was ill, consumed by a slow fever which permitted her to go out only at intervals. la rochefoucauld had the gout, and they consoled each other. mme. de sevigne thought it better not to have the genius of a pascal, than to have so many ailments. "mme. de la fayette is always languishing, m. de la rochefoucauld always lame," she writes; "we have conversations so sad that it seems as if there were nothing more to do but to bury us; the garden of mme. de la fayette is the prettiest spot in the world, everything blooming, everything perfumed; we pass there many evenings, for the poor woman does not dare go out in a carriage." "her health is never good," she writes again, "nevertheless she sends you word that she should not like death better; au contraire." there are times when she can no longer "think, or speak, or answer, or listen; she is tired of saying good morning and good evening." then she goes away to meudon for a few days, leaving la rochefoucauld "incredibly sad." she speaks for herself in a letter from the country house which gourville has placed at her disposal. "i am at saint maur; i have left all my affairs and all my husbands; i have my children and the fine weather; that suffices. i take the waters of forges; i look after my health, i see no one. i do not mind at all the privation; every one seems to me so attached to pleasures which depend entirely upon others, that i find my disposition a gift of the fairies. "i do not know but mme de coulanges has already sent you word of our after-dinner conversations at gourville's about people who have taste above or below their intelligence. mme. scarron and the abbe tetu were there; we lost ourselves in subtleties until we no longer understood anything. if the air of provence, which subtilizes things still more, magnifies for you our visions, you will be in the clouds. you have taste below your intelligence; so has m. de la rochefoucauld; and myself also, but not so much as you two. voila an example which will guide you." she disliked writing letters, and usually limited herself to a few plain facts, often in her late years to a simple bulletin of her health. this negligence was the subject of many passages-at-arms between herself and mme. de sevigne. "if i had a lover who wished my letters every morning, i would break with him," she writes. "do not measure our friendship by our letters. i shall love you as much in writing you only a page in a month, as you me in writing ten in eight days." again she replies to some reproach: "make up your mind, ma belle, to see me sustain, all my life, with the whole force of my eloquence, that i love you still more than you love me. i will make corbinelli agree with me in a quarter of an hour; your distrust is your sole defect, and the only thing in you that can displease me." but in spite of a certain apparent indolence, and her constant ill health, there were many threads that connected with the outside world the pleasant room in which mme. de la fayette spent so many days of suffering. "she finds herself rich in friends from all sides and all conditions," writes mme. de sevigne; "she has a hundred arms; she reaches everywhere. her children appreciate all this, and thank her every day for possessing a spirit so engaging." she goes to versailles, on one of her best days, to thank the king for a pension, and receives so many kind words that it "suggests more favors to come." he orders a carriage and accompanies her with other ladies through the park, directing his conversation to her, and seeming greatly pleased with her judicious praise. she spends a few days at chantilly, where she is invited to all the fetes, and regrets that mme. de sevigne could not be with her in that charming spot, which she is "fitted better than anyone else to enjoy." no one understands so well the extent of her influence and her credit as this devoted friend, who often quotes her to mme. de grignan as a model. "never did any one accomplish so much without leaving her place," she says. but there was one phase in the life of mme. de la fayette which was not fully confided even to mme. de sevigne. it concerns a chapter of obscure political history which it is needless to dwell upon here, but which throws much light upon her capacity for managing intricate affairs. her connection with it was long involved in mystery, and was only unveiled in a correspondence given to the world at a comparatively recent date. it was in the salon of the grande mademoiselle that she was thrown into frequent relations with the two daughters of charles amedee de savoie, duc de nemours, one of whom became queen of portugal, the other duchesse de savoie and, later, regent during the minority of her son. these relations resulted in one of the ardent friendships which played so important a part in her career. her intercourse with the beautiful but vain, intriguing, and imperious duchesse de savoie assumed the proportion of a delicate diplomatic mission. "her salon," says lescure, "was, for the affairs of savoy, a center of information much more important in the eyes of shrewd politicians than that of the ambassador." she not only looked after the personal matters of mme. royale, but was practically entrusted with the entire management of her interests in paris. from affairs of state and affairs of the heart to the daintiest articles of the toilette her versatile talent is called into requisition. now it is a message to louvois or the king, now a turn to be adroitly given to public opinion, now the selection of a perfume or a pair of gloves. "she watches everything, thinks of everything, combines, visits, talks, writes, sends counsels, procures advice, baffles intrigues, is always in the breach, and renders more service by her single efforts than all the envoys avowed or secret whom the duchesse keeps in france." nor is the value of these services unrecognized. "have i told you," wrote mme. de sevigne to her daughter, "that mme. de savoie has sent a hundred ells of the finest velvet in the world to mme. de la fayette, and a hundred ells of satin to line it, and two days ago her portrait, surrounded with diamonds, which is worth three hundred louis?" the practical side of mme. de la fayette's character was remarkable in a woman of so fine a sensibility and so rare a genius. her friends often sought her counsel; and it was through her familiarity with legal technicalities that la rochefoucauld was enabled to save his fortune, which he was at one time in danger of losing. in clear insight, profound judgment, and knowledge of affairs, she was scarcely, if at all, surpassed by mme. de maintenon, the feminine diplomatist par excellence of her time, though her field of action was less broad and conspicuous. but her love of consideration was not so dominant and her ambition not so active. it was one of her theories that people should live without ambition as well as without passion. "it is sufficient to exist," she said. her energy when occasion called for it does not quite accord with this passive philosophy, and suggests at least a vast reserved force; but if she directed her efforts toward definite ends it was usually to serve other interests than her own. she had been trained in a different school from mme. de maintenon, her temperament was modified by her frail health, and the prizes of life had come to her apparently without special exertion. she was a woman, too, of more sentiment and imagination. her fastidious delicacy and luxurious tastes were the subject of critical comment on the part of this austere censor, who condemned the gilded decorations of her bed as a useless extravagance, giving the characteristic reason that "the pleasure they afforded was not worth the ridicule they excited." the old friendship that had existed when mme. scarron was living in such elegant and mysterious seclusion, devoting herself to the king's children, and finding her main diversion in the little suppers enlivened by the wit of mme. de sevigne and mme. de coulanges, and the more serious, but not less agreeable, conversation of mme. de la fayette, had evidently grown cool. they had their trifling disagreements. "mme. de la fayette puts too high a price upon her friendship," wrote mme. de maintenon, who had once attached such value to a few approving words from her. in her turn mme. de la fayette indulged in a little light satire. referring to the comedy of esther, which racine had written by command for the pupils at saint cyr, she said, "it represents the fall of mme. de montespan and the rise of mme. de maintenon; all the difference is that esther was rather younger, and less of a precieuse in the matter of piety." there was certainly less of the ascetic in mme. de la fayette. she had more color and also more sincerity. in symmetry of character, in a certain feminine quality of taste and tenderness, she was superior, and she seems to me to have been of more intrinsic value as a woman. whether under the same conditions she would have attained the same power may be a question. if not, i think it would have been because she was unwilling to pay the price, not because she lacked the grasp, the tact, or the diplomacy. it is mainly as a woman of letters that mme. de la fayette is known today, and it was through her literary work that she made the strongest impression upon her time. boileau said that she had a finer intellect and wrote better than any other woman in france. but she wrote only for the amusement of idle or lonely hours, and always avoided any display of learning, in order not to attract jealousy as well as from instinctive delicacy of taste. "he who puts himself above others," she said, "whatever talent he may possess, puts himself below his talent." but her natural atmosphere was an intellectual one, and the friend of la rochefoucauld, who would have "liked montaigne for a neighbor," had her own message for the world. her mind was clear and vigorous, her taste critical and severe, and her style had a flexible quality that readily took the tone of her subject. in concise expression she doubtless profited much from the author of the maxims, who rewrote many of his sentences at least thirty times. "a phrase cut out of a book is worth a louis d'or," she said, "and every word twenty sous." unfortunately her "memoires de la cour de france" is fragmentary, as her son carelessly lent the manuscripts, and many of them were lost. but the part that remains gives ample evidence of the breadth of her intelligence, the penetrating, lucid quality of her mind, and her talent for seizing the salient traits of the life about her. in her romances, which were first published under the name of segrais, one finds the touch of an artist, and the subtle intuitions of a woman. in the rapid evolution of modern taste and the hopeless piling up of books, these works have fallen somewhat into the shade, but they are written with a vivid naturalness of style, a truth of portraiture, and a delicacy of sentiment, that commend them still to all lovers of imaginative literature. fontenelle read the "princesse de cleves" four times when it appeared. la harpe said it was "the first romance that offered reasonable adventures written with interest and elegance." it marked an era in the history of the novel. "before mme. de la fayette," said voltaire, "people wrote in a stilted style of improbable things." we have the rare privilege of reading her own criticism in a letter to the secretary of the duchesse de savoie, in which she disowns the authorship, and adds a few lines of discreet eulogy. "as for myself," she writes, "i am flattered at being suspected of it. i believe i should acknowledge the book, if i were assured the author would never appear to claim it. i find it very agreeable and well written without being excessively polished, full of things of admirable delicacy, which should be read more than once; above all, it seems to be a perfect presentation of the world of the court and the manner of living there. it is not romantic or ambitious; indeed it is not a romance; properly speaking, it is a book of memoirs, and that i am told was its title, but it was changed. voila, monsieur, my judgment upon mme. de cleves; i ask yours, for people are divided upon this book to the point of devouring each other. some condemn what others admire; whatever you may say, do not fear to be alone in your opinion." sainte-beuve, whose portrait of mme. de la fayette is so delightful as to make all others seem superfluous, has devoted some exquisite lines to this book. "it is touching to think," he writes, "of the peculiar situation which gave birth to these beings so charming, so pure, these characters so noble and so spotless, these sentiments so fresh, so faultless, so tender;" how mme. de la fayette put into it all that her loving, poetic soul retained of its first, ever-cherished dreams, and how m. de la rochefoucauld was pleased doubtless to find once more in "m. de nemours" that brilliant flower of chivalry which he had too much misused--a sort of flattering mirror in which he lived again his youth. thus these two old friends renewed in imagination the pristine beauty of that age when they had not known each other, hence could not love each other. the blush so characteristic of mme. de cleves, and which at first is almost her only language, indicates well the design of the author, which is to paint love in its freshest, purest, vaguest, most adorable, most disturbing, most irresistible--in a word, in its own color. it is constantly a question of that joy which youth joined to beauty gives, of the trouble and embarrassment that love causes in the innocence of early years, in short, of all that is farthest from herself and her friend in their late tie." but whatever tints her tender and delicate imaginings may have taken from her own soul, mme. de la fayette has caught the eternal beauty of a pure and loyal spirit rising above the mists of sense into the serene air of a lofty christian renunciation. the sad but triumphant close of her romance foreshadowed the swift breaking up of her own pleasant life. in , not long after the appearance of the "princesse de cleves," la rochefoucauld died, and the song of her heart was changed to a miserere. "mme. de la fayette has fallen from the clouds," says mme. de sevigne. "where can she find such a friend, such society, a like sweetness, charm, confidence, consideration for her and her son?" a little later she writes from the rocks, "mme. de la fayette sends me word that she is more deeply affected than she herself believed, being occupied with her health and her children; but these cares have only rendered more sensible the veritable sadness of her heart. she is alone in the world... the poor woman cannot close the ranks so as to fill this place." the records of the thirteen years that remain to mme. de la fayette are somber and melancholy. "nothing can replace the blessings i have lost," she says. restlessly she seeks diversion in new plans. she enlarges her house as her horizon diminishes; she finds occupation in the affairs of mme. royale and interests herself in the marriage of the daughter of her never-forgotten friend, the princess henrietta, with the heir to the throne of savoy. she writes a romance without the old vigor, occupies herself with historic reminiscences, and takes a passing refuge in an ardent affection for the young mme. de schomberg, which excites the jealousy of some older friends. but the strongest link that binds her to the world is the son whose career opens so brilliantly as a young officer and for whom she secures an ample fortune and a fine marriage. in this son and the establishment of a family centered all her hopes and ambitions. she was spared the pain of seeing them vanish like the "baseless fabric of a vision." the object of so many cares survived her less than two years; her remaining son and the only person left to represent her was the abbe who had so little care for her manuscripts and her literary fame. a century later, through a collateral branch of the family, the glory of the name was revived by the distinguished general so dear to the american heart. it was in the less tangible realm of the intellect that mme. de la fayette was destined to an unlooked-for immortality. but in spite of these interests, the sense of loneliness and desolation is always present. her few letters give us occasional flashes of the old spirit, but the burden of them is inexpressibly sad. her sympathies and associations led her toward a mild form of jansenism, and as the evening shadows darkened, her thoughts turned to fresh speculations upon the destiny of the soul. she went with mme. de coulanges to visit mme. de la sabliere, who was expiating the errors and follies of her life in austere penitence at the incurables. the devotion of this once gay and brilliant woman, who had been so deeply tinged with the philosophy of descartes, touched her profoundly, and suggested a source of consolation which she had never found. she sought the counsels of her confessor, who did not spare her, and though she was never sustained by the ardor and exaltation of the religieuse, her last days were not without peace and a tranquil hope. to the end she remained a gracious, thoughtful, self-poised, calmly-judging woman whose illusions never blinded her to the simple facts of existence, though sometimes throwing over them a transparent veil woven from the tender colors of her own heart. above the weariness and resignation of her last words written to mme. de sevigne sounds the refrain of a life that counts among its crowning gifts and graces a genius for friendship. "alas, ma belle, all i have to tell you of my health is very bad; in a word, i have repose neither night nor day, neither in body nor in mind. i am no more a person either by one or the other. i perish visibly. i must end when it pleases god, and i am submissive. believe me, my dearest, you are the person in the world whom i have most truly loved." mme. de la fayette represents better than any other woman the social and literary life of the last half of the seventeenth century. mme. de sevigne had an individual genius that might have made itself equally felt in any other period. mme. de maintenon, whom roederer regards as the true successor of mme. de rambouillet, was narrowed by personal ambition, and by the limitations of her early life. born in a prison, reared in poverty, wife in name, but practically secretary and nurse of a crippled, witty, and licentious poet over whose salon she presided brilliantly; discreet and penniless widow, governess of the illegitimate children of the king, adviser and finally wife of that king, friend of ninon, model of virtue, femme d'esprit, politician, diplomatist, and devote--no fairy tale can furnish more improbable adventures and more striking contrasts. but she was the product of exceptional circumstances joined to an exceptional nature. it is true she put a final touch upon the purity of manners which was so marked a feature of the hotel de rambouillet, and for a long period gave a serious tone to the social life of france. but she ruled through repression, and one is inclined to accept the opinion of sainte-beuve that she does not represent the distinctive social current of the time. in mme. de la fayette we find its delicacy, its courtesy, its elegance, its intelligence, its critical spirit, and its charm. in considering the great centers in which the fashionable, artistic, literary, and scientific paris of the seventeenth century found its meeting ground, one is struck with the practical training given to its versatile, flexible feminine minds. women entered intelligently and sympathetically into the interests of men, who, in turn, did not reserve their best thoughts for the club or an after-dinner talk among themselves. there was stimulus as well as diversity in the two modes of thinking and being. men became more courteous and refined, women more comprehensive and clear. but conversation is the spontaneous overflow of full minds, and the light play of the intellect is only possible on a high level, when the current thought has become a part of the daily life, so that a word suggests infinite perspectives to the swift intelligence. it is not what we know, but the flavor of what we know, that adds"sweetness and light" to social intercourse. with their rapid intuition and instinctive love of pleasing, these french women were quick to see the value of a ready comprehension of the subjects in which clever men are most interested. it was this keen understanding, added to the habit of utilizing what they thought and read, their ready facility in grasping the salient points presented to them, a natural gift of graceful expression, with a delicacy of taste and an exquisite politeness which prevented them from being aggressive, that gave them their unquestioned supremacy in the salons which made paris for so long a period the social capital of europe. it was impossible that intellects so plastic should not expand in such an atmosphere, and the result is not difficult to divine. from mme. de rambouillet to mme. de la fayette and mme. de sevigne, from these to mme. de stael and george sand, there is a logical sequence. the saxon temperament, with a vein of la bruyere, gives us george eliot. this new introduction of the feminine element into literature, which is directly traceable to the salons of the seventeenth century, suggests a point of special interest to the moralist. it may be assumed that, whether through nature or a long process of evolution, the minds of women as a class have a different coloring from the minds of men as a class. perhaps the best evidence of this lies in the literature of the last two centuries, in which women have been an important factor, not only through what they have done themselves, but through their reflex influence. the books written by them have rapidly multiplied. doubtless, the excess of feeling is often unbalanced by mental or artistic training; but even in the crude productions, which are by no means confined to one sex, it may be remarked that women deal more with pure affections and men with the coarser passions. a feminine zola of any grade of ability has not yet appeared. it is not, however, in literature of pure sentiment that the influence of women has been most felt. it is true that, as a rule, they look at the world from a more emotional standpoint than men, but both have written of love, and for one sappho there have been many anacreons. mlle. de scudery and mme. de la fayette did not monopolize the sentiment of their time, but they refined and exalted it. the tender and exquisite coloring of mme. de stael and george sand had a worthy counterpart in that of chateaubriand or lamartine. but it is in the moral purity, the touch of human sympathy, the divine quality of compassion, the swift insight into the soul pressed down by the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world, that we trace the minds of women attuned to finer spiritual issues. this broad humanity has vitalized modern literature. it is the penetrating spirit of our century, which has been aptly called the woman's century. we do not find it in the great literatures of the past. the greek poets give us types of tragic passions, of heroic virtues, of motherly and wifely devotion, but woman is not recognized as a profound spiritual force. this masculine literature, so perfect in form and plastic beauty, so vigorous, so statuesque, so calm, and withal so cold, shines across the centuries side by side with the feminine christian ideal--twin lights which have met in the world of today. it may be that from the blending of the two, the crowning of a man's vigor with a woman's finer insight, will spring the perfected flower of human thought. robert browning in his poem "by the fireside" has said a fitting word: oh, i must feel your brain prompt mine, your heart anticipate my heart. you must be just before, in fine, see and make me see, for your part, new depths of the divine! chapter viii. salons of the eighteenth century _characteristics of the eighteenth century--its epicurean philosophy--anecdote of mme. du deffand--the salon an engine of political power--great influence of women--salons defined literary dinners--etiquette of the salons--an exotic on american soil._ the traits which strike us most forcibly in the lives and characters of the women of the early salons, which colored their minds, ran through their literary pastimes, and gave a distinctive flavor to their conversation, are delicacy and sensibility. it was these qualities, added to a decided taste for pleasures of the intellect, and an innate social genius, that led them to revolt from the gross sensualism of the court, and form, upon a new basis, a society that has given another complexion to the last two centuries. the natural result was, at first, a reign of sentiment that was often over-strained, but which represented on the whole a reaction of morality and refinement. the wits and beauties of the salon bleu may have committed a thousand follies, but their chivalrous codes of honor and of manners, their fastidious tastes, even their prudish affectations, were open though sometimes rather bizarre tributes to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of a well-ordered society. they had exalted ideas of the dignity of womanhood, of purity, of loyalty, of devotion. the heroines of mlle. de scudery, with their endless discourses upon the metaphysics of love, were no doubt tiresome sometimes to the blase courtiers, as well as to the critics; but they had their originals in living women who reversed the common traditions of a gabrielle and a marion delorme, who combined with the intellectual brilliancy and fine courtesy of the greek aspasia the moral graces that give so poetic a fascination to the christian and medieval types. mme. de la fayette painted with rare delicacy the old struggle between passion and duty, but character triumphs over passion, and duty is the final victor. in spite of the low standards of the age, the ideal woman of society, as of literature, was noble, tender, modest, pure, and loyal. but the eighteenth century brings new types to the surface. the precieuses, with their sentimental theories and naive reserves, have had their day. it is no longer the world of mme. de rambouillet that confronts us with its chivalrous models, its refined platonism, and its flavor of literature, but rather that of the epicurean ninon, brilliant, versatile, free, lax, skeptical, full of intrigue and wit, but without moral sense of spiritual aspiration. literary portraits and ethical maxims have given place to a spicy mixture of scandal and philosophy, humanitarian speculations and equivocal bons mots. it is piquant and amusing, this light play of intellect, seasoned with clever and sparkling wit, but the note of delicacy and sensibility is quite gone. society has divested itself of many crudities and affectations perhaps, but it has grown as artificial and self-conscious as its rouged and befeathered leaders. the woman who presided over these centers of fashion and intelligence represent to us the genius of social sovereignty. we fall under the glamour of the luminous but factitious atmosphere that surrounded them. we are dazzled by the subtlety and clearness of their intellect, the brilliancy of their wit. their faults are veiled by the smoke of the incense we burn before them, or lost in the dim perspective. it is fortunate, perhaps, for many of our illusions, that the golden age, which is always receding, is seen at such long range that only the softly colored outlines are visible. men and women are transfigured in the rosy light that rests on historic heights as on far-off mountain tops. but if we bring them into closer view, and turn on the pitiless light of truth, the aureole vanishes, a thousand hidden defects are exposed, and our idol stands out hard and bare, too often divested of its divinity and its charm. to do justice to these women, we must take the point of view of an age that was corrupt to the core. it is needless to discuss here the merits of the stormy, disenchanting eighteenth century, which was the mother of our own, and upon which the world is likely to remain hopelessly divided. but whatever we may think of its final outcome, it can hardly be denied that this period, which in france was so powerful in ideas, so active in thought, so teeming with intelligence, so rich in philosophy, was poor in faith, bankrupt in morals, without religion, without poetry, and without imagination. the divine ideals of virtue and renunciation were drowned in a sea of selfishness and materialism. the austere devotion of pascal was out of fashion. the spiritual teachings of bossuet and fenelon represented the out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. it was voltaire who gave the tone, and even voltaire was not radical enough for many of these iconoclasts. "he is a bigot and a deist," exclaimed a feminine disciple of d'holbach's atheism. the gay, witty, pleasure-loving abbe, who derided piety, defied morality, was the pet of the salon, and figured in the worst scandals, was a fair representative of the fashionable clergy who had no attribute of priesthood but the name, and clearly justified the sneers of the philosophers. tradition had given place to private judgment and in its first reaction private judgment knew no law but its own caprices. the watchword of intellectual freedom was made to cover universal license, and clever sophists constructed theories to justify the mad carnival of vice and frivolity. "as soon as one does a bad action, one never fails to make a bad maxim," said the clever marquise de crequi. "as soon as a school boy has his love affairs, he wishes no more to say his prayers; and when a woman wrongs her husband, she tries to believe no more in god." the fact that this brilliant but heartless and epicurean world was tempered with intellect and taste changed its color but not its moral quality. talent turned to intrigue, and character was the toy of the scheming and flexible brain. the maxims of la rochefoucauld were the rule of life. wit counted for everything, the heart for nothing. the only sins that could not be pardoned were stupidity and awkwardness. "bah! he has only revealed every one's secret," said mme. du defand to an acquaintance who censured helvetius for making selfishness the basis of all human actions. to some one who met this typical woman of her time, in the gay salon of mme. de marchais, and condoled with her upon the death of her lifelong friend and lover, pont de veyle, she quietly replied, "alas! he died this evening at six o'clock; otherwise you would not see me here." "my friend fell ill, i attended him; he died, and i dissected him" was the remark of a wit on reading her satirical pen portrait of the marquise du chatelet. this cold skepticism, keen analysis, and undisguised heartlessness strike the keynote of the century which was socially so brilliant, intellectually so fruitful, and morally so weak. the liberty and complaisance of the domestic relations were complete. it is true there were examples of conjugal devotion, for the gentle human affections never quite disappear in any atmosphere; but the fact that they were considered worthy of note sufficiently indicates the drift of the age. in the world of fashion and of form there was not even a pretense of preserving the sanctity of marriage, if the chronicles of the time are to be credited. it was simply a commercial affair which united names and fortunes, continued the glory of the families, replenished exhausted purses, and gave freedom to women. if love entered into it at all, it was by accident. this superfluous sentiment was ridiculed, or relegated to the bourgeoisie, to whom it was left to preserve the tradition of household virtues. every one seems to have accepted the philosophy of the irrepressible ninon, who "returned thanks to god every evening for her esprit, and prayed him every morning to be preserved from follies of the heart." if a young wife was modest or shy, she was the object of unflattering persiflage. if she betrayed her innocent love for her husband, she was not of the charmed circle of wit and good tone which frowned upon so vulgar a weakness, and laughed at inconvenient scruples. "indeed," says a typical husband of the period, "i cannot conceive how, in the barbarous ages, one had the courage to wed. the ties of marriage were a chain. today you see kindness, liberty, peace reign in the bosom of families. if husband and wife love each other, very well; they live together; they are happy. if they cease to love, they say so honestly, and return to each other the promise of fidelity. they cease to be lovers; they are friends. that is what i call social manners, gentle manners." this reign of the senses is aptly illustrated by the epitaph which the gay, voluptuous, and spirtuelle marquise de boufflers wrote for herself: ci-git dans une paix profonde cette dame de volupte qui, pour plus grande surete, fit son paradis de ce monde. "courte et bonne," said the favorite daughter of the regent, in the same spirit. it is against such a background that the women who figure so prominently in the salons are outlined. such was the air they breathed, the spirit they imbibed. that it was fatal to the finer graces of character goes without saying. doubtless, in quiet and secluded nooks, there were many human wild flowers that had not lost their primitive freshness and delicacy, but they did not flourish in the withering atmosphere of the great world. the type in vogue savored of the hothouse. with its striking beauty of form and tropical richness of color, it had no sweetness, no fragrance. many of these women we can only consider on the worldly and intellectual side. sydney smith has aptly characterized them as "women who violated the common duties of life, and gave very pleasant little suppers." but standing on the level of a time in which their faults were mildly censured, if at all, their characteristic gifts shine out with marvelous splendor. it is from this standpoint alone that we can present them, drawing the friendly mantle of silence over grave weaknesses and fatal errors. in this century, in which women have so much wider scope, when they may paint, carve, act, sing, write, enter professional life, or do whatever talent and inclination dictate, without loss of dignity or prestige, unless they do it ill,--and perhaps even this exception is a trifle superfluous,--it is difficult to understand fully, or estimate correctly, a society in which the best feminine intellect was centered upon the art of entertaining and of wielding an indirect power through the minds of men. these frenchwomen had all the vanity that lies at the bottom of the gallic character, but when the triumphs of youth were over, the only legitimate path to individual distinction was that of social influence. this was attained through personal charm, supplemented by more or less cleverness, or through the gift of creating a society that cast about them an illusion of talent of which they were often only the reflection. to these two classes belong the queens of the salons. but the most famous of them only carried to the point of genius a talent that was universal. in its best estate a brilliant social life is essentially an external one. its charm lies largely in the superficial graces, in the facile and winning manners, the ready tact, the quick intelligence, the rare and perishable gifts of conversation--in the nameless trifles which are elusive as shadows and potent as light. it is the way of putting things that tells, rather than the value of the things themselves. this world of draperies and amenities, of dinners and conversaziones, of epigrams, coquetries, and sparkling trivialities in the frenchwoman's milieu. it has little in common with the inner world that surges forever behind and beneath it; little sympathy with inconvenient ideals and exalted sentiments. the serious and earnest soul to which divine messages have been whispered in hours of solitude finds its treasures unheeded, its language unspoken here. the cares, the burdens, the griefs that weigh so heavily on the great heart of humanity are banished from this social eden. the frenchman has as little love for the somber side of life as the athenian, who veiled every expression of suffering. "joy marks the force of the intellect," said the pleasure-loving ninon. it is this peculiar gift of projecting themselves into a joyous atmosphere, of treating even serious subjects in a piquant and lively fashion, of dwelling upon the pleasant surface of things, that has made the french the artists, above all others, of social life. the parisienne selects her company, as a skillful leader forms his orchestra, with a fine instinct of harmony; no single instrument dominates, but every member is an artist in his way, adding his touch of melody or color in the fitting place. she aims, perhaps unconsciously, at a poetic ideal which shall express the best in life and thought, divested of the rude and commonplace, untouched by sorrow or passion, and free from personality. but the representative salons, which have left a permanent mark upon their time, and a memory that does not seem likely to die, were no longer simply centers of refined and intellectual amusement. the moral and literary reaction of the seventeenth century was one of the great social and political forces of the eighteenth. the salon had become a vast engine of power, an organ of public opinion, like the modern press. clever and ambitious women had found their instrument and their opportunity. they had long since learned that the homage paid to weakness is illusory; that the power of beauty is short-lived. with none of the devotion which had made the convent the time-honored refuge of tender and exalted souls, finding little solace in the domestic affections which played so small a role in their lives, they turned the whole force of their clear and flexible minds to this new species of sovereignty. their keenness of vision, their consummate skill in the adaptation of means to ends, their knowledge of the world, their practical intelligence, their instinct of pleasing, all fitted them for the part they assumed. they distinctly illustrated the truth that "our ideal is not out of ourselves, but in ourselves wisely modified." the intellect of these women was rarely the dupe of the emotions. their clearness was not befogged by sentiment, nor, it may be added, were their characters enriched by it. "the women of the eighteenth century loved with their minds and not with their hearts," said the abbe galiani. the very absence of the qualities so essential to the highest womanly character, according to the old poetic types, added to their success. to be simple and true is to forget often to consider effects. spontaneity is not apt to be discriminating, and the emotions are not safe guides to worldly distinction. it is not the artist who feels the most keenly, who sways men the most powerfully; it is the one who has most perfectly mastered the art of swaying men. self-sacrifice and a lofty sense of duty find their rewards in the intangible realm of the spirit, but they do not find them in a brilliant society whose foundations are laid in vanity and sensualism. "the virtues, though superior to the sentiments, are not so agreeable," said mme. du deffand; and she echoed the spirit of an age of which she was one of the most striking representatives. to be agreeable was the cardinal aim in the lives of these women. to this end they knew how to use their talents, and they studied, to the minutest shade, their own limitations. they had the gift of the general who marshals his forces with a swift eye for combination and availability. to this quality was added more or less mental brilliancy, or, what is equally essential, the faculty of calling out the brilliancy of others; but their education was rarely profound or even accurate. to an abbe who wished to dedicate a grammar to mme. geoffrin she replied: "to me? dedicate a grammar to me? why, i do not even know how to spell." even mme. du deffand, whom sainte beuve ranks next to voltaire as the purest classic of the epoch in prose, says of herself, "i do not know a word of grammar; my manner of expressing myself is always the result of chance, independent of all rule and all art." but it is not to be supposed that women who were the daily and lifelong companions and confidantes of men like fontenelle, d'alembert, montesquieu, helvetius, and marmontel were deficient in a knowledge of books, though this was always subservient to a knowledge of life. it was a means, not an end. when the salon was at the height of its power, it was not yet time for mme. de stael; and, with rare exceptions, those who wrote were not marked, or their literary talent was so overshadowed by their social gifts as to be unnoted. their writings were no measure of their abilities. those who wrote for amusement were careful to disclaim the title of bel esprit, and their works usually reached the public through accidental channels. mme. de lambert herself had too keen an eye for consideration to pose as an author, but it is with an accent of regret at the popular prejudice that she says of mme. dacier, "she knows how to associate learning with the amenities; for at present modesty is out of fashion; there is no more shame for vices, and women blush only for knowledge." but if they did not write, they presided over the mint in which books were coined. they were familiar with theories and ideas at their fountain source. indeed the whole literature of the period pays its tribute to their intelligence and critical taste. "he who will write with precision, energy, and vigor only," said marmontel, "may live with men alone; but he who wishes for suppleness in his style, for amenity, and for that something which charms and enchants, will, i believe, do well to live with women. when i read that pericles sacrificed every morning to the graces, i understand by it that every day pericles breakfasted with aspasia." this same author was in the habit of reading his tales in the salon, and noting their effect. he found a happy inspiration in "the most beautiful eyes in the world, swimming in tears;" but he adds, "i well perceived the cold and feeble passages, which they passed over in silence, as well as those where i had mistaken the word, the tone of nature, or the just shade of truth." he refers to the beautiful, witty, but erring and unfortunate mme. de la popeliniere, to whom he read his tragedy, as the best of all his critics. "her corrections," he said, "struck me as so many rays of light." "a point of morals will be no better discussed in a society of philosophers than in that of a pretty woman of paris," said rousseau. this constant habit of reducing thoughts to a clear and salient form was the best school for aptness and ready expression. to talk wittily and well, or to lead others to talk wittily and well, was the crowning gift of these women. this evanescent art was the life and soul of the salons, the magnet which attracted the most brilliant of the french men of letters, who were glad to discuss safely and at their ease many subjects which the public censorship made it impossible to write about. they found companions and advisers in women, consulted their tastes, sought their criticism, courted their patronage, and established a sort of intellectual comradeship that exists to the same extent in no country outside of france. its model may be found in the limited circle that gathered about aspasia in the old athenian days. it is perhaps this habit of intellectual companionship that, more than any other single thing, accounts for the practical cleverness of the frenchwomen and the conspicuous part they have played in the political as well as social life of france. nowhere else are women linked to the same degree with the success of men. there are few distinguished frenchmen with whose fame some more or less gifted woman is not closely allied. montaigne and mlle. de gournay, la rochefoucauld and mme. de la fayette, d'alembert and mlle. de lespinasse, chateaubriand and mme. recamier, joubert and mme. de beaumont--these are only a few of the well-known and unsullied friendships that suggest themselves out of a list that might be extended indefinitely. the social instincts of the french, and the fact that men and women met on a common plane of intellectual life, made these friendships natural; that they excited little comment and less criticism made them possible. the result was that from the quiet and thoughtful marquise de lambert, who was admitted to have made half of the academicians, to the clever but less scrupulous mme. de pompadour, who had to be reckoned with in every political change in europe, women were everywhere the power behind the throne. no movement was carried through without them. "they form a kind of republic," said montesquieu, "whose members, always active, aid and serve one another. it is a new state within a state; and whoever observes the action of those in power, if he does not know the women who govern them, is like a man who sees the action of a machine but does not know its secret springs." mme. de tenein advised marmontel, before all things, to cultivate the society of women, if he wished to succeed. it is said that both diderot and thomas, two of the most brilliant thinkers of their time, failed of the fame they merited, through their neglect to court the favor of women. bolingbroke, then an exile in paris, with a few others, formed a club of men for the discussion of literary and political questions. while it lasted it was never mentioned by women. it was quietly ignored. cardinal fleury considered it dangerous to the state, and suppressed it. at the same time, in the salon of mme. de tenein, the leaders of french thought were safely maturing the theories which montesquieu set forth in his "esprit des lois," the first open attack on absolute monarchy, the forerunner of rousseau, and the germ of the revolution. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- but the salons were far from being centers of "plain living and high thinking." "supper is one of the four ends of man," said mme. du deffand; and it must be admitted that the great doctrine of human equality was rather luxuriously cradled. the supreme science of the frenchwomen was a knowledge of men. understanding their tastes, their ambitions, their interests, their vanities, and their weaknesses, they played upon this complicated human instrument with the skill of an artist who knows how to touch the lightest note, to give the finest shade of expression, to bring out the fullest harmony. in their efforts to raise social life to the most perfect and symmetrical proportions, the pleasures of sense and the delicate illusions of color were not forgotten. they were as noted for their good cheer, for their attention to the elegances that strike the eye, the accessories that charm the taste, as for their intelligence, their tact, and their conversation. but one must look for the power and the fascination of the french salons in their essential spirit and the characteristics of the gallic race, rather than in any definite and tangible form. the word simply suggests habitual and informal gatherings of men and women of intelligence and good breeding in the drawing-room, for conversation and amusement. the hostess who opened her house for these assemblies selected her guests with discrimination, and those who had once gained an entree were always welcome. in studying the character of the noted salons, one is struck with a certain unity that could result only from natural growth about a nucleus of people bound together by many ties of congeniality and friendship. society, in its best sense, does not signify a multitude, nor can a salon be created on commercial principles. this spirit of commercialism, so fatal to modern social life, was here conspicuously absent. it was not at all a question of debit and credit, of formal invitations to be given and returned. personal values were regarded. the distinctions of wealth were ignored and talent, combined with the requisite tact, was, to a certain point, the equivalent of rank. if rivalries existed, they were based upon the quality of the guests rather than upon material display. but the modes of entertainment were as varied as the tastes and abilities of the women who presided. many of the well-known salons were open daily. sometimes there were suppers, which came very much into vogue after the petits soupers of the regent. the duchesse de choiseul, during the ministry of her husband, gave a supper every evening excepting on friday and sunday. at a quarter before ten the steward glanced through the crowded rooms, and prepared the table for all who were present. the monday suppers at the temple were thronged. on other days a more intimate circle gathered round the tables, and the ladies served tea after the english fashion. a few women of rank and fortune imitated these princely hospitalities, but it was the smaller coteries which presented the most charming and distinctive side of french society. it was not the luxurious salon of the duchesse du maine, with its whirl of festivities and passion for esprit, nor that of the temple, with its brilliant and courtly, but more or less intellectual, atmosphere; nor that of the clever and critical marechale de luxembourg, so elegant, so witty, so noted in its day--which left the most permanent traces and the widest fame. it was those presided over by women of lesser rank and more catholic sympathies, of whom voltaire aptly said that "the decline of their beauty revealed the dawn of their intellect;" women who had the talent, tact, and address to gather about them a circle of distinguished men who have crowned them with a luminous ray from their own immortality. the names of mme. de lambert, mme. de tencin, mme. geoffrin, mme. du deffand, mme. necker, mme. de stael, and others of lesser note, call up visions of a society which the world is not likely to see repeated. not the least among the attractions of this society was its charming informality. a favorite custom in the literary and philosophical salons was to give dinners, at an early hour, two or three times a week. in the evening a larger company assembled without ceremony. a popular man of letters, so inclined, might dine monday and wednesday with mme. geoffrin, tuesday with mme. helvetius, friday with mme. necker, sunday and thursday with mme. d'holbach, and have ample time to drop into other salons afterward, passing an hour or so, perhaps, before going to the theater, in the brilliant company that surrounded mlle. de lespinasse, and, very likely, supping elsewhere later. at many of these gatherings he would be certain to find readings, recitations, comedies, music, games, or some other form of extemporized amusement. the popular mania for esprit, for literary lions, for intellectual diversions ran through the social world, as the craze for clubs and culture, poets and parlor readings, musicales and amateur theatricals, runs through the society of today. it had numberless shades and gradations, with the usual train of pretentious follies which in every age furnish ample material for the pen of the satirist, but it was a spontaneous expression of the marvelously quickened taste for things of the intellect. the woman who improvised a witty verse, invented a proverb, narrated a story, sang a popular air, or acted a part in a comedy entered with the same easy grace into the discussion of the last political problem, or listened with the subtlest flattery to the new poem, essay, or tale of the aspiring young author, whose fame and fortune perhaps hung upon her smile. in the musical and artistic salon of mme. de la popeliniere the succession of fetes, concerts, and receptions seems to have been continuous. on sunday there was a mass in the morning, afterward a grand dinner, at five o'clock a light repast, at nine a supper, and later a musicale. one is inclined to wonder if there was ever any retirement, any domesticity in this life so full of movement and variety. but it was really the freedom, wit, and brilliancy of the conversation that constituted the chief attraction of the salons. men were in the habit of making the daily round of certain drawing rooms, just as they drop into clubs in our time, sure of more or less pleasant discussion on whatever subject was uppermost at the moment, whether it was literature, philosophy, art, politics, music, the last play, or the latest word of their friends. the talk was simple, natural, without heat, without aggressive egotism, animated with wit and repartee, glancing upon the surface of many things, and treating all topics, grave or gay, with the lightness of touch, the quick responsiveness that make the charm of social intercourse. the unwritten laws that governed this brilliant world were drawn from the old ideas of chivalry, upon which the etiquette of the early salons was founded. the fine morality and gentle virtues which were the bases of these laws had lost their force in the eighteenth century, but the manners which grew out of them had passed into a tradition. if morals were in reality not pure, nor principles severe, there was at least the vanity of posing as models of good breeding. honor was a religion; politeness and courtesy were the current, though by no means always genuine, coin of unselfishness and amiability; the amenities stood in the place of an ethical code. egotism, ill temper, disloyalty, ingratitude, and scandal were sins against taste, and spoiled the general harmony. evil passions might exist, but it was agreeable to hide them, and enmities slept under a gracious smile. noblesse oblige was the motto of these censors of manners; and as it is perhaps a gallic trait to attach greater importance to reputation than to character, this sentiment was far more potent than conscience. vice in many veiled forms might be tolerated, but that which called itself good society barred its doors against those who violated the canons of good taste, which recognize at least the outward semblance of many amiable virtues. sincerity certainly was not one of these virtues; but no one was deceived, as it was perfectly well understood that courteous forms meant little more than the dress which may or may not conceal a physical defect, but is fit and becoming. it was not best to inquire too closely into character and motives, so long as appearances were fair and decorous. how far the individual may be affected by putting on the garb of qualities and feelings that do not exist may be a question for the moralist; but this conventional untruth has its advantages, not only in reducing to a minimum the friction of social machinery, and subjecting the impulses to the control of the will, but in the subtle influence of an ideal that is good and true, however far one may in reality fall short of it. imagine a society composed of a leisure class with more or less intellectual tastes; men eminent in science and letters; men less eminent, whose success depended largely upon their social gifts, and clever women supremely versed in the art of pleasing, who were the intelligent complements of these men; add a universal talent for conversation, a genius for the amenities of social life, habits of daily intercourse, and manners formed upon an ideal of generosity, amiability, loyalty, and urbanity; consider, also, the fact that the journals and the magazines, which are so conspicuous a feature of modern life, were practically unknown; that the salons were centers in which the affairs of the world were discussed, its passing events noted--and the power of these salons may be to some extent comprehended. the reason, too, why it is idle to dream of reproducing them today on american soil will be readily seen. the forms may be repeated, but the vitalizing spirit is not there. we have no leisure class that finds its occupation in this pleasant daily converse. our feverish civilization has not time for it. we sit in our libraries and scan the news of the world, instead of gathering it in the drawing rooms of our friends. perhaps we read and think more, but we talk less, and conversation is a relaxation rather than an art. the ability to think aloud, easily and gracefully, is not eminently an anglo-saxon gift, though there are many individual exceptions to this limitation. our social life is largely a form, a whirl, a commercial relation, a display, a duty, the result of external accretion, not of internal growth. it is not in any sense a unity, nor an expression of our best intellectual life; this seeks other channels. men are immersed in business and politics, and prefer the easy, less exacting atmosphere of the club. the woman who aspires to hold a salon is confronted at the outset by this formidable rival. she is a queen without a kingdom, presiding over a fluctuating circle without homogeneity, and composed largely of women--a fact in itself fatal to the true esprit de societe. it is true we have our literary coteries, but they are apt to savor too much of the library; we take them too seriously, and bring into them too strong a flavor of personality. we find in them, as a rule, little trace of the spontaneity, the variety, the wit, the originality, the urbanity, the polish, that distinguished the french literary salons of the last century. even in their own native atmosphere, the salons exist no longer as recognized institutions. this perfected flower of a past civilization has faded and fallen, as have all others. the salon in its widest sense, and in some modified form, may always constitute a feature of french life, but the type has changed, and its old glory has forever departed. in a foreign air, even in its best days, it could only have been an exotic, flourishing feebly, and lacking both color and fragrance. as a copy of past models it is still less likely to be a living force. society, like government, takes its spirit and its vitality from its own soil. chapter ix. an antechamber of the academie francaise _the marquise de lambert--her "bureau d'esprit"--fontenelle--advice to her son--wise thoughts on the education of women--her love of consideration--her generosoty--influence of women upon the academy._ while the gay suppers of the regent were giving a new but by no means desirable tone to the great world of paris, and chasing away the last vestiges of the stately decorum that marked the closing days of louis xiv, and mme. de maintenon, there was one quiet drawing room which still preserved the old traditions. the marquise de lambert forms a connecting link between the salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaning to the side of the latter, intellectually, but retaining much of the finer morality that distinguished the best life of the former. her attitude towards the disorders of the regency was similar to that which mme. de rambouillet had held towards the profligate court of henry iv, though her salon never attained the vogue of its model. it lacked a certain charm of youth and freshness perhaps, but it was one of the few in which gambling was not permitted, and in which conversation had not lost its serious and critical flavor. if mme. de lambert were living today she would doubtless figure openly as an author. her early tastes pointed clearly in that direction. she was inclined to withdraw from the amusements of her age, and to pass her time in reading, or in noting down the thoughts that pleased her. the natural bent of her mind was towards moral reflections. in this quality she resembled mme. de sable, but she was a woman of greater breadth and originality, though less fine and exclusive. she wrote much in later life on educational themes, for the benefit of her children and for her own diversion; but she yielded to the prejudices of her age against the woman author, and her works were given to the world only through the medium of friends to whom she had read or lent them. "women," she said, "should have towards the sciences a modesty almost as sensitive as towards vices." but in spite of her studied observance of the conventional limits which tradition still assigned to her sex, her writings suggest much more care than is usually bestowed upon the amusement of an idle hour. if, like many other women of her time, she wrote only for her friends, she evidently doubted their discretion in the matter of secrecy. as the child who inherited the rather formidable name of anne theresa de marguenat de coucelles was born during the last days of the hotel de rambouillet, she doubtless cherished many illusions regarding this famous salon. its influence was more or less apparent when the time came to open one of her own. her father was a man of feeble intellect, who died early; but her mother, a woman more noted for beauty than for decorum, was afterward married to bachaumont, a well-known bel esprit, who appreciated the gifts of the young girl, and brought her within a circle of wits who did far more towards forming her impressible mind than her light and frivolous mother had done. she was still very young when she became the wife of the marquis de lambert, an officer of distinction, to whose interests she devoted her talents and her ample fortune. the exquisitely decorated hotel lambert, on the ile saint louis, still retains much of its old splendor, though the finest masterpieces of lebrun and lesueur which ornamented its walls have found their way to the louvre. "it is a home made for a sovereign who would be a philosopher," wrote voltaire to frederick the great. in these magnificent salons, mme. de lambert, surrounded by every luxury that wealth and taste could furnish, entertained a distinguished company. she carried her lavish hospitalities also to luxembourg, where she adorned the position of her husband, who was governor of that province for a short period before his death in . after this event, she was absorbed for some years in settling his affairs, which were left in great disorder, and in protecting the fortunes of her two children. this involved her in long and vexatious lawsuits which she seems to have conducted with admirable ability. "there are so few great fortunes that are innocent," she writes to her son, "that i pardon your ancestors for not leaving you one. i have done what i could to put in order our affairs, in which there is left to women only the glory of economy." it was not until the closing years of her life, from to , that her social influence was at its height. she was past sixty, at an age when the powers of most women are on the wane, when her real career began. she fitted up luxurious apartments in the palais mazarin, employing artists like watteau upon the decorations, and expending money as lavishly as if she had been in the full springtide of life, instead of the golden autumn. then she gathered about her a choice and lettered society, which seemed to be a world apart, a last revival of the genius of the seventeenth century, and quite out of the main drift of the period. "she was born with much talent," writes one of her friends; "she cultivated it by assiduous reading; but the most beautiful flower in her crown was a noble and luminous simplicity, of which, at sixty years, she took it into her head to divest herself. she lent herself to the public, associated with the academicians, and established at her house a bureau d'esprit." twice a week she gave dinners, which were as noted for the cuisine as for the company, and included, among others, the best of the forty immortals. here new works were read or discussed, authors talked of their plans, and candidates were proposed for vacant chairs in the academy. "the learned and the lettered formed the dominant element," says a critic of the time. "they dined at noon, and the rest of the day was passed in conversations, in readings, in literary and scientific discussions. no card tables; it was in ready wit that each one paid his contribution." ennui never came to shed its torpors over these reunions, of which the academy furnished the most distinguished guests, in company with grands seigneurs eager to show themselves as worthy by intelligence as by rank to play a role in these gatherings of the intellectual elite. fontenelle was the presiding genius of this salon, and added to its critical and literary spirit a tinge of philosophy. this gallant savant, who was adored in society as "a man of rare and exquisite conversation," has left many traces of himself here. no one was so sparkling in epigram; no one talked so beautifully of love, of which he knew nothing; and no one talked to delightfully of science, of which he knew a great deal. but he thought that knowledge needed a seasoning of sentiment to make it palatable to women. in his "pluralite des mondes," a singular melange of science and sentiment, which he had written some years before and dedicated to a daughter of the gay and learned mme. de la sabliere, he talks about the stars, to la belle marquise, like a lover; but his delicate flatteries are the seasoning of serious truths. it was the first attempt to offer science sugar-coated, and suggests the character of this coterie, which prided itself upon a discreet mingling of elevated thought with decorous gaiety. the world moves. imagine a female undergraduate of harvard or columbia taking her astronomy diluted with sentiment! president henault, the life-long friend of mme. du deffand, whose light criticism of a pure-minded woman might be regarded as rather flattering than otherwise, says: "it was apparent that mme. de lambert touched upon the time of the hotel de rambouillet; she was a little affected, and had not the force to overstep the limits of the prude and the precieuse. her salon was the rendevous of celebrated men.... in the evening the scenery changed as well as the actors. a more elegant world assembled at the suppers. the marquise took pleasure in receiving people who were agreeable to each other. her tone, however, did not vary, and she preached la belle galanterie to some who went a little beyond it. i was of the two parties; i dogmatized in the morning and sang in the evening." the two eminent greek scholars, la motte and mme. dacier, held spirited discussions on the merits of homer, which came near ending in permanent ill-feeling, but the amiable hostess gave a dinner for them, "they drank to the health of the poet, and all was forgotten." the war between the partizans of the old and the new was as lively then as it is today. "la motte and fontenelle prefer the moderns," said the caustic mme. du deffand; "but the ancients are dead, and the moderns are themselves." the names of sainte-aulaire, de sacy, mairan, president henault, and others equally scholarly and witty, suffice to indicate the quality of the conversation, which treated lightly and gracefully of the most serious things. the duchesse du maine and her clever companion, mlle. de launay were often among the guests; also the beautiful and brilliant mme. de caylus, a niece of mme. de maintenon, whom some poetical critic has styled "the last flower of the seventeenth century." sainte-aulaire, tired of the perpetual excitement at sceaux, characterized this salon by a witty quatrain: je suis las de l'esprit, il me met en courroux, il me renverse la cervelle; lambert, je viens chercher un asile chez vous, entre la motte et fontenelle. the wits of the day launched many a shaft of satire against it, as they had against the hotel de rambouillet a century earlier; but it was an intellectual center of great influence, and was regarded as the sanctuary of old manners as well as the asylum of new liberties. its decorous character gave it the epithet of "very respectable;" but this eminently respectable company, which represented the purest taste of the time, often included adrienne lecouvreur, who was much more remarkable for talent than for respectability. we have a direct glimpse of it through the pen of d'artenson: "i have just met with a very grievous loss in the death of the marquise de lambert" (he writes in ). "for fifteen years i have been one of her special friends, and she has done me the favor of inviting me to her house, where it is an honor to be received. i dined there regularly on wednesday, which was one of her days.... she was rich, and made a good and amiable use of her wealth, for the benefit of her friends, and above all for the unfortunate. a pupil of bachaumont, having frequented only the society of people of the world, and of the highest intelligence, she knew no other passion than a constant and platonic tenderness." the quality of character and intellect which gave mme. de lambert so marked an influence, we find in her own thoughts on a great variety of subjects. she gives us the impression of a woman altogether sensible and judicious, but not without a certain artificial tone. her well-considered philosophy of life had an evident groundwork of ambition and worldly wisdom, which appears always in her advice to her children. she counsels her son to aim high and believe himself capable of great things. "too much modesty," she says, "is a languor of the soul, which prevents it from taking flight and carrying itself rapidly towards glory"--a suggestion that would be rather superfluous in this generation. again, she advises him to seek the society of his superiors, in order to accustom himself to respect and politeness. "with equals one grows negligent; the mind falls asleep." but she does not regard superiority as an external thing, and says very wisely, "it is merit which should separate you from people, not dignity or pride." by "people" she indicates all those who think meanly and commonly. "the court is full of them," she adds. her standards of honor are high, and her sentiments of humanity quite in the vein of the coming age. she urges her daughter to treat her servants with kindness. "one of the ancients says they should be regarded as unfortunate friends. think that humanity and christianity equalize all." her criticisms on the education of women are of especial interest. behind her conventional tastes and her love of consideration she has a clear perception of facts and an appreciation of unfashionable truths. she recognizes the superiority of her sex in matters of taste and in the enjoyment of "serious pleasures which make only the mind laugh and do not trouble the heart" she reproaches men with "spoiling the dispositions nature has given to women, neglecting their education, filling their minds with nothing solid, and destining them solely to please, and to please only by their graces or their vices." but she had not always the courage of her convictions, and it was doubtless quite as much her dislike of giving voice to unpopular opinions as her aversion to the publicity of authorship, that led her to buy the entire edition of her "reflexions sur les femmes," which was published without her consent. one of her marked traits was moderation. "the taste is spoiled by amusements," she writes. "one becomes so accustomed to ardent pleasures that one cannot fall back upon simple ones. we should fear great commotions of the soul, which prepare ennui and disgust." this wise thought suggests the influence of fontenelle, who impressed himself strongly upon the salons of the first half of the century. his calm philosophy is distinctly reflected in the character of mme. de lambert, also in that of mme. geoffrin, with whom he was on very intimate terms. it is said that this poet, critic, bel esprit, and courtly favorite, whom rousseau calls "the daintiest pedant in the world," was never swayed by any emotion whatever. he never laughed, only smiled; never wept; never praised warmly, though he did say pretty things to women; never hurried; was never angry; never suffered, and was never moved by suffering. "he had the gout," says one of his critics, "but no pain; only a foot wrapped in cotton. he put it on a footstool; that was all." it is perhaps fair to present, as the other side of the medallion, the portrait drawn by the friendly hand of adrienne lecouvreur. "the charms of his intellect often veiled its essential qualities. unique of his kind, he combines all that wins regard and respect. integrity, rectitude, equity compose his character; an imagination lively and brilliant, turns fine and delicate, expressions new and always happy ornament it. a heart pure, actions clear, conduct uniform, and everywhere principles.... exact in friendship, scrupulous in love; nowhere failing in the attributes of a gentleman. suited to intercourse the most delicate, though the delight of savants; modest in his conversation, simple in his actions, his superiority is evident, but he never makes one feel it." he lived a century, apparently because it was too much trouble to die. when the weight of years made it too much trouble to live, he simply stopped. "i do not suffer, my friends, but i feel a certain difficulty in existing," were his last words. with this model of serene tranquillity, who analyzed the emotions as he would a problem in mathematics, and reduced life to a debit and credit account, it is easy to understand the worldly philosophy of the women who came under his influence. but while mme. de lambert had a calm and equable temperament, and loved to surround herself with an atmosphere of repose, she was not without a fine quality of sentiment. "i exhort you much more to cultivate your heart," she writes to her son, "than to perfect your mind; the true greatness of the man is in the heart." "she was not only eager to serve her friends without waiting for their prayers or the humiliating exposure of their needs," said fontenelle, "but a good action to be done in favor of indifferent people always tempted her warmly.... the ill success of some acts of generosity did not correct the habit; she was always equally ready to do a kindness." she has written very delicately and beautifully of friendships between men and women; and she had her own intimacies that verged upon tenderness, but were free from any shadow of reproach. long after her death, d'alembert, in his academic eulogy upon de sacy, refers touchingly to the devoted friendship that linked this elegant savant with mme. de lambert. "it is believed," says president henault, "that she was married to the marquis de sainte-aulaire. he was a man of esprit, who only bethought himself, after more than sixty years, of his talent for poetry; and mme. de lambert, whose house was filled with academicians, gained him entrance into the academy, not without strong opposition on the part of boileau and some others." whether the report of this alliance was true or not, the families were closely united, as the daughter of mme. de lambert was married to a son of sainte-aulaire; it is certain that the enduring affection of this ancient friend lighted the closing years of her life. though tinged with the new philosophy, mme. de lambert regarded religion as a part of a respectable, well-ordered life. "devotion is a becoming sentiment in women, and befitting in both sexes," she writes. but she clearly looked upon it as an external form, rather than an internal flame. when about to die, at the age of eighty-six, she declined the services of a friendly confessor, and sent for an abbe who had a great reputation for esprit. perhaps she thought he would give her a more brilliant introduction into the next world; this points to one of her weaknesses, which was a love of consideration that carried her sometimes to the verge of affectation. it savors a little of the hypercritical spirit that is very well illustrated by an anecdote of the witty duchesse de luxenbourg. one morning she took up a prayer book that was lying upon the table and began to criticize severely the bad taste of the prayers. a friend ventured to remark that if they were said reverently and piously, god surely would pay no attention to their good or bad form. "indeed," exclaimed the fastidious marechale, whose religion was evidently a becoming phase of estheticism, "do not believe that." the thoughts of mme. de lambert, so elevated in tone, so fine in moral quality, so rich in worldly wisdom, and often so felicitous in expression, tempt one to multiply quotations, especially as they show us an intimate side of her life, of which otherwise we know very little. her personality is veiled. her human experiences, her loves, her antipathies, her mistakes, and her errors are a sealed book to us, excepting as they may be dimly revealed in the complexion of her mind. of her influence we need no better evidence than the fact that her salon was called the antechamber to the academie francaise. the precise effect of this influence of women over the most powerful critical body of the century, or of any century, perhaps, we can hardly measure. in the fact that the academy became for a time philosophical rather than critical, and dealt with theories rather than with pure literature, we trace the finger of the more radical thinkers who made themselves so strongly felt in the salons. sainte=beuve tells us that fontenelle, with other friends of mme. de lambert, first gave it this tendency; but his mission was apparently an unconscious one, and strikingly illustrates the accidental character of the sources of the intellectual currents which sometimes change the face of the world. "if i had a handful of truths, i should take good care not to open it," said this sybarite, who would do nothing that was likely to cause him trouble. but the truths escaped in spite of him, and these first words of the new philosophy were perhaps the more dangerous because veiled and insidious. "you have written the 'histoire des oracles,'" said a philosopher to him, after he had been appointed the royal censor, "and you refuse me your approbation." "monsieur," replied fontenelle, "if i had been censor when i wrote the 'histoire des oracles,' i should have carefully avoided giving it my approbation." but if the philosophers finally determined the drift of this learned body, it was undoubtedly the tact and diplomacy of women which constituted the most potent factor in the elections which placed them there. the mantle of authority, so gracefully worn by mme. de lambert, fell upon her successors, mme. geoffrin and mlle. de lespinasse, losing none of its prestige. as a rule, the best men in france were sooner or later enrolled among the academicians. if a few missed the honor through failure to enlist the favor of women, as has been said, and a few better courtiers of less merit attained it, the modern press has not proved a more judicious tribunal. chapter x. the duchesse du maine _her capricious character--her esprit--mlle. de launay--clever portrait of her mistress--perpetual fetes at sceaux--voltaire and the "divine emilie"--dilettante character of this salon._ the life of the eighteenth century, with its restlessness, its love of amusements, its ferment of activities, and its essential frivolity, finds a more fitting representative in the duchesse du maine, granddaughter of the grand conde, and wife of the favorite son of louis xiv, and mme. de montespan. the transition from the serene and thoughtful atmosphere which surrounded mme. de lambert, to the tumultuous whirl of existence at sceaux, was like passing from the soft light and tranquillity of a summer evening to the glare and confusion of perpetual fireworks. of all the unique figures of a masquerading age this small and ambitious princess was perhaps the most striking, the most pervading. it was by no means her aim to take her place in the world as queen of a salon. louise-benedicte de bourbon belonged to the royal race, and this was by far the most vivid fact in her life. she was but a few steps from the throne, and political intrigues played a conspicuous part in her singular career. but while she waited for the supreme power to which she aspired, and later, when the feverish dream of her life was ended, she must be amused, and her diversions must have an intellectual and imaginative flavor. wits, artists, literary men, and savants were alike welcome at sceaux, if they amused her and entertained her guests. "one lived there by esprit, and esprit is my god," said mme. du deffand, who was among the brightest ornaments of this circle. born in , the duchesse du maine lived through the first half of the next century, of which her little court was one of the most notable features. scarcely above the stature of a child of ten years, slightly deformed, with a fair face lighted by fine eyes; classically though superficially educated; gifted in conversation, witty, brilliant, adoring talent, but cherishing all the prejudices of the old noblesse--she represented in a superlative degree the passion for esprit which lent such exceptional brilliancy to the social life of the time. in character the duchess was capricious and passionate. "if she were as good as she is wicked," said the sharp-tongued palatine, "there would be nothing to say against her. she is tranquil during the day and passes it playing at cards, but at its close the extravagances and fits of passion begin; she torments her husband, her children, her servants, to such a point that they do not know which way to turn." her will brooked no opposition. when forced to leave the tuileries after the collapse of her little bubble of political power, she deliberately broke every article of value in her apartments, consigning mirrors, vases, statues, porcelains alike to a common ruin, that no one else might enjoy them after her. this fiery scion of a powerful family, who had inherited its pride, its ambition, its uncontrollable passions, and its colossal will, had little patience with the serene temperament and dilettante tastes of her amiable husband, and it is said she did not scruple to make him feel the force of her small hands. "you will waken some morning to find yourself in the academie francaise, and the duc d'orleans regent," she said to him one day when he showed her a song he had translated. her device was a bee, with this motto: "i am small, but i make deep wounds." doubtless its fitness was fully realized by those who belonged to the ordre de la mouche-a-miel which she had instituted, and whose members were obliged to swear, by mount hymettus, fidelity and obedience to their perpetual dictator. but what pains and chagrins were not compensated by the bit of lemon-colored ribbon and its small meed of distinction! the little princess worked valiantly for political power, but she worked in vain. the conspiracy against the regent, which seemed to threaten another fronde, came to nothing, and this ardent instrigante, who had the disposition to "set the four corners of the kingdom on fire" to attain her ends, found her party dispersed and herself in prison. but this was only an episode, and though it gave a death blow to her dreams of power, it did not quench her irrepressible ardor. if she could not rule in one way, she would in another. as soon as she regained her freedom, her little court was again her kingdom, and no sovereign ever reigned more imperiously. "i am fond of company," she said, "for i listen to no one, and every one listens to me." it was an incessant thirst for power, a perpetual need of the sweet incense of flattery, that was at the bottom of this "passion for a multitude." "she believed in herself," writes mlle. de launay, afterward baronne de staal, "as she believed in god or descartes, without examination and without discussion." this lady's maid, who loved mathematics and anatomy, was familiar with malebranche and descartes, and left some literary reputation as a writer of gossipy memoirs, was a prominent figure in the lively court at sceaux for more than forty years, and has given us some vivid pictures of her capricious mistress. a young girl of clear intellect and good education, but without rank, friends, or fortune, she was forced to accept the humiliating position of femme de chambre with the duchesse du maine, who had been attracted by her talents. she was brought into notice through a letter to fontenelle, which was thought witty enough to be copied and circulated. if she had taken this cool dissector of human motives as a model, she certainly did credit to his teaching. her curiously analytical mind is aptly illustrated by her novel method of measuring her lover's passion. he was in the habit of accompanying her home from the house of a friend. when he began to cross the square, instead of going round it, she concluded that his love had diminished in the exact proportion of two sides of a square to the diagonal. promoted to the position of a companion, she devoted herself to the interests of her restless mistress, read to her, talked with her, wrote plays for her, and was the animating spirit of the famous nuits blanches. while the duchess was in exile she shared her disgrace, refused to betray her, and was sent to the bastille for her loyalty. she resigned herself to her imprisonment with admirable philosophy, amused herself in the study of latin, in watching the gambols of a cat and kitten, and in carrying on a safe and sentimental flirtation with the fascinating duc de richelieu, who occupied an adjoining cell and passed the hours in singing with her popular airs from iphigenie. "sentimental" is hardly a fitting word to apply to the coquetries of this remarkably clear and calculating young woman. she returned with her patroness to sceaux, found many admirers, but married finally with an eye to her best worldly interests, and, it appears, in the main happily--at least, not unhappily. the shade of difference implies much. she had a keen, penetrating intellect which nothing escaped, and as it had the peculiar clearness in which people and events are reflected as in a mirror, her observations are of great value. "aside from the prose of voltaire, i know of none more agreeable than that of mme. de staal de launay," said grimm. her portrait of her mistress serves to paint herself as well. "mme. la duchesse du maine, at the age of sixty years, has yet learned nothing from experience; she is a child of much talent; she has its defects and its charms. curious and credulous, she wishes to be instructed in all the different branches of knowledge; but she is contented with their surface. the decisions of those who educated her have become for her principles and rules upon which her mind has never formed the least doubt; she submits once for all. her provision for ideas is made; she rejects the best demonstrated truths and resists the best reasonings, if they are contrary to the first impressions she has received. all examination is impossible to her lightness, and doubt is a state which her weakness cannot support. her catechism and the philosophy of descartes are two systems which she understands equally well.... her mirror cannot make her doubt the charms of her face; the testimony of her eyes is more questionable than the judgment of those who have decided that she is beautiful and well-formed. her vanity is of a singular kind, but seems the less offensive because it is not reflective, though in reality it is the more ridiculous, intercourse with her is a slavery; her tyranny is open; she does not deign to color it with the appearance of friendship. she says frankly that she has the misfortune of not being able to do without people for whom she does not care. she proves it effectually. one sees her learn with indifference the death of those who would call forth torrents of tears if they were a quarter of an hour too late for a card party or a promenade." but this vain and self-willed woman read virgil and terence in the original, was devoted to greek tragedies, dipped into philosophy, traversed the surface of many sciences, turned a madrigal with facility, and talked brilliantly. "the language is perfect only when you speak it or when one speaks of you," wrote mme. de lambert, in a tone of discreet flattery. "no one has ever spoken with more correctness, clearness, and rapidity, neither in a manner more noble or more natural," said mlle. de launay. through this feminine la bruyere, as sainte-beuve has styled her, we are introduced to the life at sceaux. it was the habit of the guests to assemble at eight, listen to music or plays, improvise verses for popular airs, relate racy anecdotes, or amuse themselves with proverbs. "write verses for me," said the insatiable duchess when ill; "i feel that verses only can give me relief." the quality does not seem to have been essential, provided they were sufficiently flattering. sainte-aulaire wrote madrigals for her. malezieu, the learned and versatile preceptor of the duc du maine, read sophocles and euripides. mme. du maine herself acted the roles of athalie and iphigenie with the famous baron. they played at science, contemplated the heavens through a telescope and the earth through a microscope. in their eager search for novelty they improvised fetes that rivaled in magnificence the arabian nights; they posed as gods and goddesses, or, affecting simplicity, assumed rustic and pastoral characters, even to their small economies and romantic platitudes. mythology, the chivalry of the middle ages, costumes, illuminations, scenic effects, the triumphs of the artists, the wit of the bel esprit--all that ingenuity could devise or money could buy was brought into service. it was the life that watteau painted, with its quaint and grotesque fancies, its sylvan divinities, and its sighing lovers wandering in endless masquerade, or whispering tender nothings on banks of soft verdure, amid the rustle of leaves, the sparkle of fountains, the glitter of lights, and the perfume of innumerable flowers. it was a perpetual carnival, inspired by imagination, animated by genius, and combining everything that could charm the taste, distract the mind, and intoxicate the senses. the presiding genius of this fairy scene was the irrepressible duchess, who reigned as a goddess and demanded the homage due to one. well might the weary courtiers cry out against les galeres du bel esprit. but this fantastic princess who carried on a sentimental correspondence with the blind la motte, and posed as the tender shepherdess of the adoring but octogenarian sainte-aulaire, had no really democratic notions. there was no question in her mind of the divine right of kings or of princesses. she welcomed voltaire because he flattered her vanity and amused her guests, but she was far enough from the theories which were slowly fanning the sparks of the revolution. her rather imperious patronage of literary and scientific men set a fashion which all her world tried to follow. it added doubtless to the prestige of those who were insidiously preparing the destruction of the very foundations on which this luxurious and pleasure-loving society rested. but, after all, the bond between this restless, frivolous, heartless coterie and the genuine men of letters was very slight. there was no seriousness, no earnestness, no sincerity, no solid foundation. the literary men, however, who figured most conspicuously in the intimate circle of the duchesse du maine were not of the first order. malezieu was learned, a member of two academies, faintly eulogized by fontenelle, warmly so by voltaire, and not at all by mlle. de launay; but twenty-five years devoted to humoring the caprices and flattering the tastes of a vain and exacting patroness were not likely to develop his highest possibilities. there is a point where the stimulating atmosphere of the salon begins to enervate. his clever assistant, the abbe genest, poet and academician, was a sort of voiture, witty, versatile, and available. he tried to put descartes into verse, which suggests the quality of his poetry. sainte-aulaire, who, like his friend fontenelle, lived a century, frequented this society more or less for forty years, but his poems are sufficiently light, if one may judge from a few samples, and his genius doubtless caught more reflections in the salon than in a larger world. he owed his admission to the academy partly to a tender quatrain which he improvised in praise of his lively patroness. it is true we have occasional glimpses of voltaire. once he sought an asylum here for two months, after one of his numerous indiscretions, writing tales during the day, which he read to the duchess at night. again he came with his "divine emilie," the learned marquise du chatelet, who upset the household with her eccentric ways. "our ghosts do not show themselves by day," writes mlle. de launay; "they appeared yesterday at ten o'clock in the evening. i do not think we shall see them earlier today; one is writing high facts, the other, comments upon newton. they wish neither to play nor to promenade; they are very useless in a society where their learned writings are of no account." but voltaire was a courtier, and, in spite of his frequent revolts against patronage, was not at all averse to the incense of the salons and the favors of the great. it was another round in the ladder that led him towards glory. the cleverest women in france were found at sceaux, but the dominant spirit was the princess herself. it was amusement she wanted, and even men of talent were valued far less for what they were intrinsically than for what they could contribute to her vanity or to her diversion. "she is a predestined soul," wrote voltaire. "she will love comedy to the last moment, and when she is ill i counsel you to administer some beautiful poem in the place of extreme unction. one dies as one has lived." mme. du maine represented the conservative side of french society in spite of the fact that her abounding mental vitality often broke through the stiff boundaries of old traditions. it was not because she did not still respect them, but she had the defiant attitude of a princess whose will is an unwritten law superior to all traditions. the tone of her salon was in the main dilettante, as is apt to be the case with any circle that plumes itself most upon something quite apart from intellectual distinction. it reflected the spirit of an old aristocracy, with its pride, its exclusiveness, its worship of forms, but faintly tinged with the new thought that was rapidly but unconsciously encroaching upon time-honored institutions. beyond the clever pastimes of a brilliant coterie, it had no marked literary influence. this ferment of intellectual life was one of the signs of the times, but it led to no more definite and tangible results than the turning of a madrigal or the sparkle of an epigram. chapter xi. madame de tencin and madame du chatelet _an intriguing chanoinesse--her singular fascination--her salon--its philosophical character--mlle. aisse--romances of mme. de tencin--d'alembert--la belle emilie--voltaire--the two women compared_ it was not in the restless searchings of an old society for new sensations, new diversions, nor in the fleeting expressions of individual taste or caprice, which were often little more than the play of small vanities, that the most potent forces in the political as well as in the intellectual life of france were found. it was in the coteries which attracted the best representatives of modern thought, men and women who took the world on a more serious side, and mingled more or less of earnestness even in their amusements. while the duchesse du maine was playing her little comedy, which began and ended in herself, another woman, of far different type, and without rank or riches, was scheming for her friends, and nursing the germs of the philosophic party in one of the most notable salons of the first half of the century. mme. de tencin is not an interesting figure to contemplate from a moral standpoint. "she was born with the most fascinating qualities and the most abominable defects that god ever gave to one of his creatures," said mme. du deffand, who was far from being able to pose, herself, as a model of virtue or decorum. but sin has its degrees, and the woman who errs within the limits of conventionality considers herself entitled to sit in judgment upon her sister who wanders outside of the fold. measured even by the complaisant standards of her own time, there can be but one verdict upon the character of mme. de tencin, though it is to be hoped that the scandal-loving chroniclers have painted her more darkly than she deserved. but whatever her faults may have been, her talent and her influence were unquestioned. she posed in turn as a saint, an intrigante, and a femme d'esprit, with marked success in every one of these roles. but it was not a comedy she was playing for the amusement of the hour. beneath the velvet softness of her manner there was a definite aim, an inflexible purpose. with the tact and facility of a frenchwoman, she had a strong, active intellect, boundless ambition, indomitable energy, and the subtlety of an italian. an incident of her early life, related by mme. du deffand, furnishes a key to her complex character, and reveals one secret of her influence. born of a poor and proud family in grenoble, in , claudine alexandrine guerin de tencin was destined from childhood for the cloister. her strong aversion to the life of a nun was unavailing, and she was sent to a convent at montfleury. this prison does not seem to have been a very austere one, and the discipline was far from rigid. the young novice was so devout that the archbishop prophesied a new light for the church, and she easily persuaded him of the necessity of occupying the minds of the religieuses by suitable diversions. though not yet sixteen, this pretty, attractive, vivacious girl was fertile in resources, and won her way so far into the good graces of her superiors as to be permitted to organize reunions, and to have little comedies played which called together the provincial society. she transformed the convent, but her secret disaffection was unchanged. she took the final vows under the compulsion of her inflexible father, then continued her role of devote to admirable purpose. by the zeal of her piety, the severity of her penance, and the ardor of her prayers, she gained the full sympathy of her ascetic young confessor, to whom she confided her feeling of unfitness for a religious life, and her earnest desire to be freed from the vows which sat so uneasily upon her sensitive conscience. he exhorted her to steadfastness, but finally she wrote him a letter in which she confessed her hopeless struggle against a consuming passion, and urged the necessity of immediate release. the conclusion was obvious. the abbe fleuret was horrified by the conviction that this pretty young nun was in love with himself, and used his influence to secure her transference to a secular order at neuville, where as chanoinesse, she had many privileges and few restrictions. here she became at once a favorite, as before, charming by her modest devotion, and amusing by her brilliant wit. artfully, and by degrees, she convinced those in authority of the need of a representative in paris. this office she was chosen to fill. playing her pious part to the last, protesting with tears her pain at leaving a life she loved, and her unfitness for so great an honor she set out upon her easy mission. there are many tales of a scandalous life behind all this sanctity and humility, but her new position gave her consideration, influence, and a good revenue. "young, beautiful, clever, with an adorable talent," this "nun unhooded" fascinated the regent, and was his favorite for a few days. but her ambition got the better of her prudence. she ventured upon political ground, and he saw her no more. with his minister, the infamous dubois, she was more successful, and he served her purpose admirably well. through her notorious relations with him she enriched her brother and secured him a cardinal's hat. the intrigues of this unscrupulous trio form an important episode in the history of the period. when dubois died, within a few months of the regent, she wept, as she said, "that fools might believe she regretted him." her clear, incisive intellect and conversational charm would have assured the success of any woman at a time when these things counted for so much. "at thirty-six," wrote mme. du deffand, "she was beautiful and fresh as a woman of twenty; her eyes sparkled, her lips had a smile at the same time sweet and perfidious; she wished to be good, and gave herself great trouble to seem so, without succeeding." indolent and languid with flashes of witty vivacity, insinuating and facile, unconscious of herself, interested in everyone with whom she talked, she combined the tact, the finesse, the subtle penetration of a woman with the grasp, the comprehensiveness, and the knowledge of political machinery which are traditionally accorded to a man. "if she wanted to poison you, she would use the mildest poison," said the abbe trublet. "i cannot express the illusion which her air of nonchalance and easy grace left with me," says marmontel. "mme. de tencin, the woman in the kingdom who moved the most political springs, both in the city and at court, was for me only an indolente. ah, what finesse, what suppleness, what activity were concealed beneath this naive air, this appearance of calm and leisure!" but he confesses that she aided him greatly with her counsel, and that he owed to her much of his knowledge of the world. "unhappy those who depend upon the pen," she said to him; "nothing is more chimerical. the man who makes shoes is sure of his wages; the man who makes a book or a tragedy is never sure of anything." she advises him to make friends of women rather than of men. "by means of women, one attains all that one wishes from men, of whom some are too pleasure-loving, others too much preoccupied with their personal interests not to neglect yours; whereas women think of you, if only from idleness. speak this evening to one of them of some affair that concerns you; tomorrow at her wheel, at her tapestry, you will find her dreaming of it, and searching in her head for some means of serving you." prominent among her friends were bolingbroke and fontenelle. "it is not a heart which you have there," she said to the latter, laying her hand on the spot usually occupied by that organ, "but a second brain." she had enlisted what stood in the place of it, however, and he interested himself so far as to procure her final release from her vows, through benedict xiv, who, as cardinal lambertini, had frequented her salon, and who sent her his portrait as a souvenir, after his election to the papacy. through her intimacy with the duc de richelieu, mme. de tencin made herself felt even in the secret councils of louis xv. her practical mind comprehended more clearly than many of the statesmen the forces at work and the weakness that coped with them. "unless god visibly interferes," she said, "it is physically impossible that the state should not fall in pieces." it was her influence that inspired mme. de chateauroux with the idea of sending her royal lover to revive the spirits of the army in flanders. "it is not, between ourselves, that he is in a state to command a company of grenadiers," she wrote to her brother, "but his presence will avail much. the troops will do their duty better, and the generals will not dare to fail them so openly... a king, whatever he may be, is for the soldiers and people what the ark of the covenant was for the hebrews; his presence alone promises success." her devotion to her friends was the single redeeming trait in her character, and she hesitated at nothing to advance the interests of her brother, over whose house she gracefully presided. but she failed in her ultimate ambition to elevate him to the ministry, and her intrigues were so much feared that cardinal fleury sent her away from paris for a short time. her disappointments, which it is not the purpose to trace here, left her one of the disaffected party, and on her return her drawing room became a rallying point for the radical thinkers of france. such was the woman who courted, flattered, petted, and patronized the literary and scientific men of paris, called them her menagerie, put them into a sort of uniform, gave them two suppers a week, and sent them two ells of velvet for small clothes at new year's. of her salon, marmontel gives us an interesting glimpse. he had been invited to read one of his tragedies, and it was his first introduction. "i saw assembled there montesquieu, fontenelle, mairan, marivaux, the young helvetius, astruc, and others, all men of science or letters, and, in the midst of them, a woman of brilliant intellect and profound judgment, who, with her kind and simple exterior, had rather the appearance of the housekeeper than the mistress. this was mme. de tencin.... i soon perceived that the guests came there prepared to play their parts, and that their wish to shine did not leave the conversation always free to follow its easy and natural course. every one tried to seize quickly and on the wing the moment to bring in his word, his story, his anecdote, his maxim, or to add his dash of light and sparkling wit; and, in order to do this opportunely, it was often rather far-fetched. in marivaux, the impatience to display his finesse and sagacity was quite apparent. montesquieu, with more calmness, waited for the ball to come to him, but he waited. mairan watched his opportunity. astruc did not deign to wait. fontenelle alone let it come to him without seeking it, and he used so discreetly the attention given him, that his witty sayings and his clever stories never occupied more than a moment. alert and reserved, helvetius listened and gathered material for the future." mme. de tencin loved literature and philosophy for their own sake, and received men of letters at their intrinsic value. she encouraged, too, the freedom of thought and expression at that time so rare and so dangerous. it was her influence that gave its first impulse to the success of montesquieu's esprit des lois, of which she personally bought and distributed many copies. if she talked well, she knew also how to listen, to attract by her sympathy, to aid by her generosity, to inspire by her intelligence, to charm by her versatility. another figure flits in and out of this salon, whose fine qualities of soul shine so brightly in this morally stifling atmosphere that one forgets her errors in a mastering impulse of love and pity. there is no more pathetic history in this arid and heartless age than that of mlle. aisse, the beautiful circassian, with the lustrous, dark, oriental eyes, who was brought from constantinople in infancy by the french envoy, and left as a precious heritage to mme. de ferriol, the intriguing sister of mme. de tencin, and her worthy counterpart, if not in talent, in the faults that darkened their common womanhood. this delicate young girl, surrounded by worldly and profligate friends, and drawn in spite of herself into the errors of her time, redeemed her character by her romantic heroism, her unselfish devotion, and her final revolt against what seemed to be an inexorable fate. the struggle between her self-forgetful love for the knightly chevalier d'aydie and her sensitive conscience, her refusal to cloud his future by a portionless marriage, and her firmness in severing an unholy tie, knowing that the sacrifice would cost her life, as it did, form an episode as rare as it is tragical. but her exquisite personality, her rich gifts of mind and soul, her fine intelligence, her passionate love, almost consecrated by her pious but fatal renunciation, call up one of the loveliest visions of the century--a vision that lingers in the memory like a medieval poem. mme. de tencin amused her later years b writing sentimental tales, which were found among her papers after her death. these were classed with the romances of mme. de la fayette. speaking of the latter, la harpe said, "only one other woman succeeded, a century later, in painting with equal power the struggles of love and virtue." it is one of the curious inconsistencies of her character, that her creations contained an element which her life seems wholly to have lacked. behind all her faults of conduct there was clearly an ideal of purity and goodness. her stories are marked by a vividness and an ardor of passion rarely found in the insipid and colorless romances of the preceding age. her pictures of love and intrigue and crime are touched with the religious enthusiasm of the cloister, the poetry of devotion, the heroism of self-sacrifice. perhaps the dark and mysterious facts of her own history shaped themselves in her imagination. did the tragedy of la fresnaye, the despairing lover who blew out his brains at her feet, leaving the shadow of a crime hanging over her, with haunting memories of the bastille, recall the innocence of her own early convent days? did she remember some long-buried love, and the child left to perish upon the steps of st. jean le rond, but grown up to be her secret pride in the person of the great mathematician and philosopher d'alembert? what was the subtle link between this worldly woman and the eternal passion, the tender self-sacrifice of adelaide, the loyal heroine who breathes out her solitary and devoted soul on the ashes of la trappe, unknown to her faithful and monastic lover, until the last sigh? the fate of adelaide has become a legend. it has furnished a theme for the poet and the artist, an inspiration for the divine strains of beethoven, another leaf in the annals of pure and heroic love. but the woman who conceived it toyed with the human heart as with a beautiful flower, to be tossed aside when its first fragrance was gone. she apparently knew neither the virtue, nor the honor, nor the purity, nor the truth of which she had so exquisite a perception in the realm of the imagination. or were some of the episodes which darken the story of her life simply the myths of a gossiping age, born of the incidents of an idle tale, to live forever on the pages of history? but it was not as a literary woman that mme. de tencin held her position and won her fame. her gifts were eminently those of her age and race, and it may be of interest to compare her with a woman of larger talent of a purely intellectual order, who belonged more or less to the world of the salons, without aspiring to leadership, and who, though much younger, died in the same year. mme. du chatelet was essentially a woman of letters. she loved the exact sciences, expounded leibnitz, translated newton, gave valuable aid to voltaire in introducing english thought into france, and was one of the first women among the nobility to accept the principles of philosophic deism. "i confess that she is tyrannical," said voltaire; "one must talk about metaphysics, when the temptation is to talk of love. ovid was formerly my master; it is now the turn of locke." she has been clearly but by no means pleasantly painted for us in the familiar letters of mme. de graffigny, in the rather malicious sketches of the marquise de crequi, and in the still more strongly outlined portrait or mme. du deffand, as a veritable bas bleu, learned, pedantic, eccentric, and without grace or beauty. "imagine a woman tall and hard, with florid complexion, face sharp, nose pointed--voila la belle emilie," writes the latter; "a face with which she was so contented that she spared nothing to set it off; curls, topknots, precious stones, all are in profusion... she was born with much esprit; the desire of appearing to have more made her prefer the study of the abstract sciences to agreeable branches of knowledge; she thought by this singularity to attain a greater reputation and a decided superiority over all other women. madame worked with so much care to seem what she was not, that no one knew exactly what she was; even her defects were not natural." "she talks like an angel"--"she sings divinely"--"our sex ought to erect altars to her," wrote mme. de graffigny during a visit at her chateau. a few weeks later her tone changed. they had quarreled. of such stuff is history made. but she had already given a charming picture of the life at cirey. mme. du chatelet plunged into abstractions during the day. in the evening she was no more the savante, but gave herself up to the pleasures of society with the ardor of a nature that was extreme in everything. voltaire read his poetry and his dramas, told stories that made them weep and then laugh at their tears, improvised verses, and amused them with marionettes, or the magic lantern. la belle emilie criticized the poems, sang, and played prominent parts in the comedies and tragedies of the philosopher poet, which were first given in her little private theater. among the guests were the eminent scientist, maupertuis, her life-long friend and teacher; the italian savant, algarotti, president henault, helvetius, the poet, saint-lambert, and many others of equal distinction. "of what do we not talk!" writes mme. de graffigny. "poetry, science, art, everything, in a tone of graceful badinage. i should like to be able to send you these charming conversations, these enchanting conversations, but it is not in me." mme. du chatelet owned for several years the celebrated hotel lambert, and a choice company of savants assembled there as in the days when mme. de lambert presided in those stately apartments. but this learned salon had only a limited vogue. the thinking was high, but the dinners were too plain. the real life of mme. du chatelet was an intimate one. "i confess that in love and friendship lies all my happiness," said this astronomer, metaphysician, and mathematician, who wrote against revelation and went to mass with her free-thinking lover. her learning and eccentricities made her the target for many shafts of ridicule, but she counted for much with voltaire, and her chief title to fame lies in his long and devoted friendship. he found the "sublime and respectable emilie" the incarnation of all the virtues, though a trifle ill-tempered. the contrast between his kindly portrait and those of her feminine friends is striking and rather suggestive. "she joined to the taste for glory a simplicity which does not always accompany it, but which is often the fruit of serious studies. no woman was ever so learned, and no one deserves less to be called a femme savante. born with a singular eloquence, this eloquence manifested itself only when she found subjects worthy of it... the fitting word, precision, justness, and force were the characteristics of her style. she would rather write like pascal and nicole than like mme. de sevigne; but this severe strength and this vigorous temper of her mind did not render her inaccessible to the beauties of sentiment. the charms of poetry and eloquence penetrated her, and no one was ever more sensitive to harmony... she gave herself to the great world as to study. everything that occupies society was in her province except scandal. she was never known to repeat an idle story. she had neither time nor disposition to give attention to such things, and when told that some one had done her an injustice, she replied that she did not wish to hear about it." "she led him a life a little hard," said mme. de graffigny, after her quarrel; but he seems to have found it agreeable, and broke his heart--for a short time--when she died. "i have lost half of my being," he wrote--"a soul for which mine was made." to marmontel he says: "come and share my sorrow. i have lost my illustrious friend. i am in despair. i am inconsolable." one cannot believe that so clear-sighted a man, even though a poet, could live for twenty years under the spell of a pure illusion. what heart revelations, what pictures of contemporary life, were lost in the eight large volumes of his letters which were destroyed at her death! while mme. de tencin studied men and affairs, mme. du chatelet studied books. one was mistress of the arts of diplomacy, gentle but intriguing, ambitious, always courting society and shunning solitude. the other was violent and imperious, hated finesse, and preferred burying herself among the rare treasures of her library at cirey. the influence of mme. de tencin was felt, not only in the social and intellectual, but in the political life of the century. the traditions of her salon lingered in those which followed, modified by the changes that time and personal taste always bring. mme. du chatelet was more learned, but she lacked the tact and charm which give wide personal ascendancy. her influence was largely individual, and her books have been mostly forgotten. these women were alike defiant of morality, but taken all in all, the character of mme. chatelet has more redeeming points, though little respect can be accorded to either. with the wily intellect of a talleyrand, mme. de tencin represents the social genius, the intelligence, the esprit, and the worst vices of the century on which she has left such conspicuous traces. "she knew my tastes and always offered me those dishes i preferred," said fontenelle when she died in . "it is an irreparable loss." perhaps his hundred years should excuse his not going to her funeral for fear of catching cold. chapter xii. madame geoffrin and the philosophers _cradles of the new philosophy--noted salons of this period-- character of mme. geoffrin--her practical education--anecdotes of her husband--composition of her salon--its insidious influence--her journey to warsaw--her death_ during the latter half of the eighteenth century the center of social life was no longer the court, but the salons. they had multiplied indefinitely, and, representing every shade of taste and thought, had reached the climax of their power as schools of public opinion, as well as their highest perfection in the arts and amenities of a brilliant and complex society. there was a slight reaction from the reckless vices and follies of the regency. if morals were not much better, manners were a trifle more decorous. though the great world did not take the tone of stately elegance and rigid propriety which it had assumed under the rule of mme. de maintenon, it was superficially polished, and a note of thoughtfulness was added. affairs in france had taken too serious an aspect to be ignored, and the theories of the philosophers were among the staple topics of conversation; indeed, it was the great vogue of the philosophers that gave many of the most noted social centers their prestige and their fame. it is not the salons of the high nobility that suggest themselves as the typical ones of this age. it is those which were animated by the habitual presence of the radical leaders of french thought. economic questions and the rights of man were discussed as earnestly in these brilliant coteries as matters of faith and sentiment, of etiquette and morals, had been a hundred years before. such subjects were forced upon them by the inexorable logic of events; and fashion, which must needs adapt itself in some measure to the world over which it rules, took them up. if the drawing rooms of the seventeenth century were the cradles of refined manners and a new literature, those of the eighteenth were literally the cradles of a new philosophy. the practical growth and spread of french philosophy was too closely interwoven with the history of the salons not to call for a word here. its innovations were faintly prefigured in the coterie of mme. de lambert, where it colored almost imperceptibly the literary and critical discussions. but its foundations were more firmly laid in the drawing room of mme. de tencin, where the brilliant wit and radical theories of montesquieu, as well as the pronounced materialism of helvetius, found a congenial atmosphere. though the mingled romance and satire of the "persian letters," with their covert attack upon the state and society, raised a storm of antagonism, they called out a burst of admiration as well. the original and aggressive thought of men like voltaire, rousseau, d'alembert, and diderot, with its diversity of shading, but with the cardinal doctrine of freedom and equality pervading it all, had found a rapidly growing audience. it no longer needed careful nursing, in the second half of the century. it had invaded the salons of the haute noblesse, and was discussed even in the anterooms of the court. mme. de pompadour herself stole away from her tiresome lover-king to the freethinking coterie that met in her physician's apartments in the entresol at versailles, and included the greatest iconoclasts of the age. if she had any misgivings as to the outcome of these discussions, they were fearlessly cast aside with "apres nous le deluge." "in the depth of her heart she was with us," said voltaire when she died. there were clairvoyant spirits who traced the new theories to their logical results. mme. du deffand speaks with prophetic vision of the reasoners and beaux esprits "who direct the age and lead it to its ruin." there were conservative women, too, who used their powerful influence against them. it was in the salon of the delicate but ardent young princesse de robecq that palissot was inspired to write the satirical comedy of "the philosophers," in which rousseau was represented as entering on all fours, browsing a lettuce, and the encyclopedists were so mercilessly ridiculed. this spirited and heroic daughter-in-law of the duchesse de luxembourg, the powerful patroness of rousseau, was hopelessly ill at the time, and, in a caustic reply to the clever satire, the abbe morellet did not spare the beautiful invalid who desired for her final consolation only to see its first performance and be able to say, "now, lord, thou lettest thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen vengeance." the cruel attack was thought to have hastened her death, and the witty abbe was sent to the bastille; but he came out in two months, went away for a time, and returned a greater hero than ever. there is a picture, full of pathetic significance, which represents the dying princess on her pillow, crowned with a halo of sanctity, as she devotes her last hours to the defense of the faith she loves. one is reminded of the sweet and earnest souls of port royal; but her vigorous protest, which furnished only a momentary target for the wit of the philosophers, was lost in the oncoming wave of skepticism. the vogue of these men received its final stamp in the admiring patronage of the greatest sovereigns in europe. voltaire had his well-known day of power at the court of frederick the great. grimm and diderot, too, were honored guests of that most liberal of despots, and discussed their novel theories in familiar fashion with catherine ii, at st. petersburg. the reply of this astute and clear-sighted empress to the eloquent plea of diderot may be commended for its wisdom to the dreamers and theorists of today. "i have heard, with the greatest pleasure, all that your brilliant intellect has inspired you to say; but with all your grand principles, which i comprehend very well, one makes fine books and bad business. you forget in all your plans of reform the difference of our two positions. you work only on paper, which permits everything; it is quite smooth and pliant, and opposes no obstacles to your imagination nor to your pen; while i, poor empress, i work upon the human cuticle, which is quite sensitive and irritable." it is needless to say that the men so honored by sovereigns were petted in the salons, in spite of their disfavor with the government. they dined, talked, posed as lions or as martyrs, and calmly bided their time. the persecution of the encyclopedists availed little more than satire had done, in stemming the slowly rising tide of public opinion. utopian theories took form in the ultra circles, were insidiously disseminated in the moderate ones, and were lightly discussed in the fashionable ones. men who talked, and women who added enthusiasm, were alike unconscious of the dynamic force of the material with which they were playing. of the salons which at this period had a european reputation, the most noted were those of mme. du deffand, mlle. de lespinasse, and mme. geoffrin. the first was the resort of the more intellectual of the noblesse, as well as the more famous of the men of letters. the two worlds mingled here; the tone was spiced with wit and animated with thought, but it was essentially aristocratic. the second was the rallying point of the encyclopedists and much frequented by political reformers, but the rare gifts of its hostess attracted many from the great world. the last was moderate in tone, though philosophical and thoroughly cosmopolitan. sainte-beuve pronounced it "the most complete, the best organized, and best conducted of its time; the best established since the foundation of the salons; that is, since the hotel de rambouillet." "do you know why la geoffrin comes here? it is to see what she can gather from my inventory," remarked mme. de tencin on her death bed. she understood thoroughly her world, and knew that her friend wished to capture the celebrities who were in the habit of meeting in her salon. but she does not seem to have borne her any ill will for her rather premature schemes, as she gave her a characteristic piece of advice: "never refuse any advance of friendship," she said; "for, if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you. everything is of service in a menage if one knows how to use his tools." mme. geoffrin was an apt pupil in the arts of diplomacy, and the key to her remarkable social success may be found in her ready assimilation of the worldly wisdom of her sage counselor. but to this she added a far kinder heart and a more estimable character. of all the women who presided over famous salons, mme. geoffrin had perhaps the least claim to intellectual preeminence. the secret of her power must have lain in some intangible quality that has failed to be perpetuated in any of her sayings or doings. a few commonplace and ill-spelled letters, a few wise or witty words, are all the direct record she has left of herself. without rank, beauty, youth, education, or remarkable mental gifts of a sort that leave permanent traces, she was the best representative of the women of her time who held their place in the world solely through their skill in organizing and conducting a salon. she was in no sense a luminary; and conscious that she could not shine by her own light, she was bent upon shining by that of others. but, in a social era so brilliant, even this implied talent of a high order. a letter to the empress of russia, in reply to a question concerning her early education, throws a ray of light upon her youth and her peculiar training. "i lost my father and mother," she writes, "in the cradle. i was brought up by an aged grandmother, who had much intelligence and a well-balanced head. she had very little education; but her mind was so clear, so ready, so active, that it never failed her; it served always in the place of knowledge. she spoke so agreeably of the things she did not know that no one wished her to understand them better; and when her ignorance was too visible, she got out of it by pleasantries which baffled the pedants who tried to humiliate her. she was so contented with her lot that she looked upon knowledge as a very useless thing for a woman. she said: 'i have done without it so well that i have never felt the need of it. if my granddaughter is stupid, learning will make her conceited and insupportable; if she has talent and sensibility, she will do as i have done--supply by address and with sentiment what she does not know; when she becomes more reasonable, she will learn that for which she has the most aptitude, and she will learn it very quickly.' she taught me in my childhood simply to read, but she made me read much; she taught me to think by making me reason; she taught me to know men by making me say what i thought of them, and telling me also the opinion she had formed. she required me to render her an account of all my movements and all my feelings, correcting them with so much sweetness and grace that i never concealed from her anything that i thought or felt; my internal life was as visible as my external. my education was continual." the daughter of a valet de chambre of the duchess of burgundy, who gave her a handsome dowry, marie therese rodet became, at fourteen, the wife of a lieutenant-colonel of the national guard and a rich manufacturer of glass. her husband did not count for much among the distinguished guests who in later years frequented her salon, and his part in her life seems to have consisted mainly in furnishing the money so essential to her success, and in looking carefully after the interests of the menage. it is related that some one gave him a history to read, and when he called for the successive volumes the same one was always returned to him. not observing this, he found the work interesting, but "thought the author repeated a little." he read across the page a book printed in two columns, remarking that "it seemed to be very good, but a trifle abstract." one day a visitor inquired for the white-haired old gentleman who was in the habit of sitting at the head of the table. "that was my husband," replied mme. geoffrin; "he is dead." but if her marriage was not an ideal one, it does not appear that it was unhappy. perhaps her bourgeois birth and associations saved her youth from the domestic complications which were so far the rule in the great world as to have, in a measure, its sanction. at all events her life was apparently free from the shadows that rested upon many of her contemporaries. "her character was a singular one," writes marmontel, who lived for ten years in her house, "and difficult to understand or paint, because it was all in half-tints and shades; very decided nevertheless, but without the striking traits by which one's nature distinguishes and defines itself. she was kind, but had little sensibility; charitable, without any of the charms of benevolence; eager to aid the unhappy, but without seeing them, for fear of being moved; a sure, faithful, even officious friend, but timid and anxious in serving others, lest she should compromise her credit or her repose. she was simple in her taste, her dress, and her furniture, but choice in her simplicity, having the refinements and delicacies of luxury, but nothing of its ostentation nor its vanity; modest in her air, carriage, and manners, but with a touch of pride, and even a little vainglory. nothing flattered her more than her intercourse with the great. at their houses she rarely saw them,--indeed she was not at her ease there,--but she knew how to attract them to her own by a coquetry subtly flattering; and in the easy, natural, half-respectful and half-familiar air with which she received them, i thought i saw remarkable address." in a woman of less tact and penetration, this curious vein of hidden vanity would have led to pretension. but mme. geoffrin was preeminently gifted with that fine social sense which is apt to be only the fruit of generations of culture. with her it was innate genius. she was mistress of the amiable art of suppressing herself, and her vanity assumed the form of a gracious modesty. "i remain humble, but with dignity," she writes to a friend; "that is, in depreciating myself i do not suffer others to depreciate me." she had the instinct of the artist who knows how to offset the lack of brilliant gifts by the perfection of details, the modesty that disarms criticism, and a rare facility in the art of pleasing. there was an air of refinement and simple elegance in her personality that commanded respect. tall and dignified, with her silvery hair concealed by her coif, she combined a noble presence with great kindliness of manner. she usually wore somber colors and fine laces, for which she had great fondness. her youth was long past when she came before the world, and that sense of fitness which always distinguished her led her to accept her age seriously and to put on its hues. the "dead-leaf mantle" of mme. de maintenon was worn less severely perhaps, but it was worn without affectation. diderot gives us a pleasant glimpse of her at grandval, where they were dining with baron d'holbach. "mme. geoffrin was admirable," he wrote to mlle. volland. "i remark always the noble and quiet taste with which this woman dresses. she wore today a simple stuff of austere color, with large sleeves, the smoothest and finest linen, and the most elegant simplicity throughout." in her equanimity and her love of repose she was a worthy disciple of fontenelle. she carefully avoided all violent passions and all controversies. to her lawyer, who was conducting a suit that worried her, she said, "wind up my case. do they want my money? i have some, and what can i do with money better than to buy tranquillity with it?" this aversion to annoyance often reached the proportions of a very amiable selfishness. "she has the habit of detesting those who are unhappy," said the witty abbe galiani, "for she does not wish to be so, even by the sight of the unhappiness of others. she has an impressionable heart; she is old; she is well; she wishes to preserve her health and her tranquillity. as soon as she learns that i am happy she will love me to folly." but her generosity was exceptional. "donner et pardonner" was her device. many anecdotes are related of her charitable temper. she had ordered two marble vases of bouchardon. one was broken before reaching her. learning that the man who broke it would lose his place if it were known, and that he had a family of four children, she immediately sent word to the atelier that the sculptor was not to be told of the loss, adding a gift of twelve francs to console the culprit for his fright. she often surprised her impecunious friends with the present of some bit of furniture she thought they needed, or an annuity delicately bestowed. "i have assigned to you fifteen thousand francs," she said one day to the abbe morellet; "do not speak of it and do not thank me." "economy is the source of independence and liberty" was one of her mottoes, and she denied herself the luxuries of life that she might have more to spend in charities. but she never permitted any one to compromise her, and often withheld her approbation where she was free with her purse. to do all the good possible and to respect all the convenances were her cardinal principles. marmontel was sent to the bastille under circumstances that were rather creditable than otherwise; but it was a false note, and she was never quite the same to him afterwards. she wept at her own injustice, schemed for his election to the academy, and scolded him for his lack of diplomacy; but the little cloud was there. when the sorbonne censured his belisarius her friendship could no longer bear the strain, and, though still received at her dinners, he ceased to live in her house. her dominant passion seems to have been love of consideration, if a calm and serene, but steadily persistent, purpose can be called a passion. no trained diplomatist ever understood better the world with which he had to deal, or managed more adroitly to avoid small antagonisms. it was her maxim not to create jealousy by praising people, nor irritation by defending them. if she wished to say a kind word, she dwelt upon good qualities that were not contested. she prided herself upon ruling her life by reason. sainte-beuve calls her the fontenelle of women, but it was fontenelle tempered with a heart. this "foster-mother of philosophers" evidently wished to make sure of her own safety, however matters might turn out in the next world. she had a devotional vein, went to mass privately, had a seat at the church of the capucins, and an apartment for retreat in a convent. during her last illness the marquise de la ferte-imbault, who did not love her mother's freethinking friends, excluded them, and sent for a confessor. mme. geoffrin submitted amiably, and said, smiling, "my daughter is like godfrey of bouillon; she wishes to defend my tomb against the infidels." into the composition of her salon she brought the talent of an artist. we have a glimpse of her in through a letter from montesquieu. she was then about fifty, and had gathered about her a more or less distinguished company, which was enlarged after the death of mme. de tencin, in the following year. she gave dinners twice a week--one on monday for artists, among whom were vanloo, vernet, and boucher; and one on wednesday for men of letters. as she believed that women were apt to distract the conversation, only one was usually invited to dine with them. mlle. de lespinasse, the intellectual peer and friend of these men, sat opposite her, and aided in conducting the conversation into agreeable channels. the talent of mme. geoffrin seems to have consisted in telling a story well, in a profound knowledge of people, ready tact, and the happy art of putting every one at ease. she did not like heated discussions nor a too pronounced expression of opinion. "she was willing that the philosophers should remodel the world," says one of her critics, "on condition that the kingdom of diderot should come without disorder or confusion." but though she liked and admired this very free and eloquent diderot, he was too bold and outspoken to have a place at her table. helvetius, too, fell into disfavor after the censure which his atheistic de l'esprit brought upon him; and baron d'holbach was too apt to overstep the limits at which the hostess interfered with her inevitable "voila qui est bien." indeed, she assumed the privilege of her years to scold her guests if they interfered with the general harmony or forgot any of the amenities. but her scoldings were very graciously received as a slight penalty for her favor, and more or less a measure of her friendship. she graded her courtesies with fine discrimination, and her friends found the reflection of their success or failure in her manner of receiving them. her keen, practical mind pierced every illusion with merciless precision. she defined a popular abbe who posed for a bel esprit, as a "fool rubbed all over with wit." rulhiere had read in her salon a work on russia, which she feared might compromise him, and she offered him a large sum of money to throw it into the fire. the author was indignant at such a reflection upon his courage and honor, and grew warmly eloquent upon the subject. she listened until he had finished, then said quietly, "how much more do you want, m. rulhiere?" the serene poise of a character without enthusiasms and without illusions is very well illustrated by a letter to mme. necker. after playfully charging her with being always infatuated, never cool and reserved, she continues: "do you know, my pretty one, that your exaggerated praises confound me, instead of pleasing and flattering me? i am always afraid that your giddiness will evaporate. you will then judge me to be so different from your preconceived opinion that you will punish me for your own mistake, and allow me no merit at all. i have my virtues and my good qualities, but i have also many faults. of these i am perfectly well aware, and every day i try to correct them. "my dear friend, i beg of you to lessen your excessive admiration. i assure you that you humiliate me; and that is certainly not your intention. the angels think very little about me, and i do not trouble myself about them. their praise or their blame is indifferent to me, for i shall not come in their way; but what i do desire is that you should love me, and that you should take me as you find me." again she assumes her position of mentor and writes: "how is it possible not to answer the kind and charming letter i have received from you? but still i reply only to tell you that it made me a little angry. i see that it is impossible to change anything in your uneasy, restless, and at the same time weak character." horace walpole, who met her during his first visit to paris, and before his intimacy with mme. du deffand had colored his opinions, has left a valuable pen-portrait of mme. geoffrin. in a letter to gray, in , he writes: "mme. geoffrin, of whom you have heard much, is an extraordinary woman, with more common sense than i almost ever met with, great quickness in discovering characters, penetrating and going to the bottom of them, and a pencil that never fails in a likeness, seldom a favorable one. she exacts and preserves, spite of her birth and their nonsensical prejudices about nobility, great court and attention. this she acquires by a thousand little arts and offices of friendship, and by a freedom and severity which seem to be her sole end for drawing a concourse to her. she has little taste and less knowledge, but protects artisans and authors, and courts a few people to have the credit of serving her dependents. in short, she is an epitome of empire, subsisting by rewards and punishments." later, when he was less disinterested, perhaps, he writes to another friend: "mme. du deffand hates the philosophers, so you must give them up to her. she and mme. geoffrin are no friends; so if you go thither, don't tell her of it--indeed you would be sick of that house whither all the pretended beaux esprits and false savants go, and where they are very impertinent and dogmatic." the real power of this woman may be difficult to define, but a glance at her society reveals, at least partly, its secret. nowhere has the glamour of a great name more influence than at paris. a few celebrities form a nucleus of sufficient attraction to draw all the world, if they are selected with taste and discrimination. after the death of fontenelle, d'alembert, always witty, vivacious, and original, in spite of the serious and exact nature of his scientific studies, was perhaps the leading spirit of this salon. among its constant habitues were helvetius, who put his selfishness into his books, reserving for his friends the most amiable and generous of tempers; marivaux, the novelist and dramatist, whose vanity rivaled his genius, but who represented only the literary spirit, and did not hesitate to ridicule his companions the philosophers; the caustic but brilliant and accomplished abbe morellet, who had "his heart in his head and his head in his heart;" the severe and cheerful mairan, mathematician, astronomer, physician, musical amateur, and member of two academies, whose versatile gifts and courtly manners gave him as cordial a welcome in the exclusive salon at the temple as among his philosophical friends; the gay young marmontel, who has left so clear and simple a picture of this famous circle and its gentle hostess; grimm, who combined the savant and the courtier; saint-lambert, the delicate and scholarly poet; thomas, grave and thoughtful, shining by his character and intellect, but forgetting the graces which were at that time so essential to brilliant success; the eloquent abbe raynal; and the chevalier de chastellux, so genial, so sympathetic, and so animated. to these we may add galiani, the smallest, the wittiest, and the most delightful of abbes, whose piercing insight and machiavellian subtlety lent a piquant charm to the stories with which for hours he used to enliven this choice company; caraccioli, gay, simple, ingenuous, full of neapolitan humor, rich in knowledge and observation, luminous with intelligence and sparkling with wit; and the comte de crentz, the learned and versatile swedish minister, to whom nature had "granted the gift of expressing and painting in touches of fire all that had struck his imagination or vividly seized his soul." hume, gibbon, walpole, indeed every foreigner of distinction who visited paris, lent to this salon the eclat of their fame, the charm of their wit, or the prestige of their rank. it was such men as these who gave it so rare a fascination and so lasting a fame. a strong vein of philosophy was inevitable, though in this circle of diplomats and litterateurs there were many counter-currents of opinion. it was her consummate skill in blending these diverse but powerful elements, and holding them within harmonious limits, that made the reputation of the autocratic hostess. the friend of savants and philosophers, she had neither read nor studied books, but she had studied life to good purpose. though superficial herself, she had the delicate art of putting every one in the most advantageous light by a few simple questions or words. it was one of her maxims that "the way not to get tired of people is to talk to them of themselves; at the same time, it is the best way to prevent them from getting tired of you." perhaps mme. necker was thinking of her when she compared certain women in conversation to "light layers of cotton wool in a box packed with porcelain; we do not pay much attention to them, but if they were taken away everything would be broken." mme. geoffrin was always at home in the evening, and there were simple little suppers to which a few women were invited. the fare was usually little more than "a chicken, some spinach, and omelet." among the most frequent guests were the charming, witty, and spirituelle comtesse d'egmont, daughter of the duc de richelieu, who added to the vivacious and elegant manners of her father an indefinable grace of her own, and a vein of sentiment that was doubtless deepened by her sad little romance; the marquise de duras, more dignified and discreet; and the beautiful comtesse de brionne, "a venus who resembled minerva." these women, with others who came there, were intellectual complements of the men; some of them gay and not without serious faults, but adding beauty, rank, elegance, and the delicate tone of esprit which made this circle so famous that it was thought worth while to have its sayings and doings chronicled at berlin and st. petersburg. perhaps its influence was the more insidious and far reaching because of its polished moderation. the "let us be agreeable" of mme. geoffrin was a potent talisman. among the guests at one time was stanislas poniatowski, afterwards king of poland. hearing that he was about to be imprisoned by his creditors, mme. geoffrin came forward and paid his debts. "when i make a statue of friendship, i shall give it your features," he said to her; "this divinity is the mother of charity." on his elevation to the throne he wrote to her, "maman, your son is king. come and see him." this led to her famous journey when nearly seventy years of age. it was a series of triumphs at which no one was more surprised than herself, and they were all due, she modestly says, "to a few mediocre dinners and some petits soupers." one can readily pardon her for feeling flattered, when the emperor alights from his carriage on the public promenade at vienna and pays her some pretty compliments, "just as if he had been at one of our little wednesday suppers." there is a charm in the simple naivete with which she tells her friends how cordially maria theresa receives her at schonbrunn, and she does not forget to add that the empress said she had the most beautiful complexion in the world. she repeats quite naturally, and with a slight touch of vanity perhaps, the fine speeches made to her by the "adorable prince galitzin" and prince kaunitz, "the first minister in europe," both of whom entertained her. but she would have been more than a woman to have met all this honor with indifference. no wonder she believes herself to be dreaming. "i am known here much better than in the rue st. honore," she writes, "and in a fashion the most flattering. my journey has made an incredible sensation for the last fifteen days." to be sure, she spells badly for a woman who poses as the friend of litterateurs and savants, and says very little about anything that does not concern her own fame and glory. but she does not cease to remember her friends, whom she "loves, if possible, better than ever." nor does she forget to send a thousand caresses to her kitten. a messenger from warsaw meets her with everything imaginable that can add to the comfort and luxury of her journey, and on reaching there she finds a room fitted up for her like her own boudoir in the rue st. honore. she accepts all this consideration with great modesty and admirable good sense. "this tour finished," she writes to d'alembert, "i feel that i shall have seen enough of men and things to be convinced that they are everywhere about the same. i have my storehouse of reflections and comparisons well furnished for the rest of my life. all that i have seen since leaving my penates makes me thank god for having been born french and a private person." the peculiar charm which attracted such rare and marked attentions to a woman not received at her own court, and at a time when social distinctions were very sharply defined, eludes analysis, but it seems to have lain largely in her exquisite sense of fitness, her excellent judgment, her administrative talent, the fine tact and penetration which enabled her to avoid antagonism, an instinctive knowledge of the art of pleasing, and a kind but not too sensitive heart. these qualities are not those which appeal to the imagination or inspire enthusiasm. we find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual distinction. in her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of the heart. her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship of self-consciousness. of spontaneity she has none. "she loved nothing passionately, not even virtue," says one of her critics. there was a certain method in her simplicity. she carried to perfection the art of savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom of thought and action, it was always strictly within conventional limits. she suffered the fate of all celebrities in being occasionally attacked. the role assigned to her in the comedy of "the philosophers" was not a flattering one, and some criticisms of montesquieu wounded her so deeply that she succeeded in having them suppressed. she did not escape the shafts of envy, nor the sneers of the grandes dames who did not relish her popularity. but these were only spots on the surface of a singularly brilliant career. calm, reposeful, charitable, without affectation or pretension, but not untouched by ennui, the malady of her time, she held her position to the end of a long life which closed in . "alas," said d'alembert, who had been in the habit of spending his mornings with mlle. de lespinasse until her death, and his evenings with mme. geoffrin, "i have neither evenings nor mornings left." "she has made for fifty years the charm of her society," said the abbe morellet. "she has been constantly, habitually virtuous and benevolent." her salon brought authors and artists into direct relation with distinguished patrons, especially foreigners, and thus contributed largely to the spread of french art and letters. it was counted among "the institutions of the eighteenth century." chapter xiii. ultra-philosophical salons--madame d'epinay _mme. de graffigny--baron d'holbach--mme. d'epinay's portrait of herself--mlle. quinault--rousseau--la chevrette--grimm--diderot--the abbe galiani--estimate of mme. d'epinay_ a few of the more radical and earnest of the philosophers rarely, if ever, appeared at the table of mme. geoffrin. they would have brought too much heat to this company, which discussed everything in a light and agreeable fashion. perhaps, too, these free and brilliant spirits objected to the leading-strings which there held every one within prescribed limits. they could talk more at their ease at the weekly dinners of baron d'holbach, in the salons of mme. helvetius, mme. de marchais, or mme. de graffigny, in the encyclopedist coterie of mlle. de lespinasse, or in the liberal drawing room of mme. d'epinay, who held a more questionable place in the social world, but received much good company, mme. geoffrin herself included. mme. de graffigny is known mainly as a woman of letters whose life had in it many elements of tragedy. her youth was passed in the brilliant society of the little court at luneville. she was distantly related to mme. du chatelet, and finally took refuge from the cruelties of a violent and brutal husband in the "terrestrial paradise" at cirey. la belle emilie was moved to sympathy, and voltaire wept at the tale of her sorrows. a little later she became a victim to the poet's sensitive vanity. he accused her of sending to a friend a copy of his "pucello," an unfinished poem which was kept under triple lock, though parts of it had been read to her. her letters were opened, her innocent praises were turned against her, there was a scene, and cirey was a paradise no more. she came to paris, ill, sad, and penniless. she wrote "les lettres d'une peruvienne" and found herself famous. she wrote "cenie," which was played at the comedie francaise, and her success was established. then she wrote another drama. "she read it to me," says one of her friends; "i found it bad; she found me ill-natured. it was played; the public died of ennui and the author of chagrin." "i am convinced that misfortune will follow me into paradise," she said. at all events, it seems to have followed her to the entrance. her salon was more or less celebrated. the freedom of the conversations may be inferred from the fact that helvetius gathered there the materials for his "de l'esprit," a book condemned by the pope, the parliament, and the sorbonne. it was here also that he found his charming wife, a niece of mme. de graffigny, and the light of her house as afterwards of his own. a more permanent interest is attached to the famous dinners of baron d'holbach, where twice a week men like diderot, helvetius, grimm, marmontel, duclos, the abbe galiani and for a time buffon and rousseau, met in an informal way to enjoy the good cheer and good wines of this "maitre d'hotel of philosophy," and discuss the affairs of the universe. the learned and free-thinking baron was agreeable, kind, rich, and lavish in his hospitality, but without pretension. "he was a man simply simple," said mme. geoffrin. we have many pleasant glimpses of his country place at grandval, with its rich and rare collections, its library, its pictures, its designs, and of the beautiful wife who turned the heads of some of the philosophers, whom, as a rule, she did not like overmuch, though she received them so graciously. "we dine well and a long time," wrote diderot. "we talk of art, of poetry, of philosophy, and of love, of the greatness and vanity of our own enterprises... of gods and kings, of space and time, of death and of life." "they say things to make a thunderbolt strike the house a hundred times, if it struck for that," said the abbe morellet. among the few women admitted to these dinners was mme. d'epinay, for whom d'holbach, as well as his amiable wife, always entertained the warmest friendship. this woman, whose position was not assured enough to make people overlook her peculiar and unfortunate domestic complications, has told the story of her own life in her long and confidential correspondence with grimm, galiani, and voltaire. the senseless follies of a cruel and worthless husband, who plunged her from great wealth into extreme poverty, and of whom diderot said that "he had squandered two millions without saying a good word or doing a good action," threw her into intimate relations with grimm; this brought her into the center of a famous circle. her letters give us a clear but far from flattering reflection of the manners of the time. she unveils the bare and hard facts of her own experience, the secret workings of her own soul. the picture is not a pleasant one, but it is full of significance to the moralist, and furnishes abundant matter for psychological study. the young girl, who had entered upon the scene about , under the name of louise florence petronille-tardieu d'esclavelles, was married at twenty to her cousin. it seems to have been really a marriage of love; but the weak and faithless m. d'epinay was clearly incapable of truth or honor, and the torturing process by which the confiding young wife was disillusioned, the insidious counsel of a false and profligate friend, with the final betrayal of a tender and desolate heart, form a chapter as revolting as it is pathetic. the fresh, lively, pure-minded, sensitive girl, whose intellect had been fed on rollin's history and books of devotion, who feared the dissipations of the gay world and shrank with horror from the rouge which her frivolous husband compelled her to put on, learned her lesson rapidly in the school of suffering. at thirty she writes of herself, after the fashion of the pen portraits of the previous century: "i am not pretty; yet i am not plain. i am small, thin, very well formed. i have the air of youth, without freshness, but noble, sweet, lively, spirituelle, and interesting. my imagination is tranquil. my mind is slow, just, reflective, and inconsequent. i have vivacity, courage, firmness, elevation, and excessive timidity. i am true without being frank. timidity often gives me the appearance of dissimulation and duplicity; but i have always had the courage to confess my weakness, in order to destroy the suspicion of a vice which i have not. i have the finesse to attain my end and to remove obstacles; but i have none to penetrate the purposes of others. i was born tender and sensible, constant and no coquette. i love retirement, a life simple and private; nevertheless i have almost always led one contrary to my taste. bad health, and sorrows sharp and repeated, have given a serious cast to my character, which is naturally very gay." her first entrance into the world in which wit reigned supreme was in the free but elegant salon of mlle. quinault, an actress of the comedie francaise, who had left the stage, and taking the role of a femme d'esprit, had gathered around her a distinguished and fashionable coterie. this woman, who had received a decoration for a fine motet she had composed for the queen's chapel, who was loved and consulted by voltaire, and who was the best friend of d'alembert after the death of mlle. de lespinasse, represented the genius of esprit and finesse. she was the companion of princes, the adoration of princesses, the oracle of artists and litterateurs, the model of elegance, and the embodiment of social success. it did not matter much that the tone of her salon was lax; it was fashionable. "it distilled dignity, la convenance, and formality," says the marquise de crequi, who relates an anecdote that aptly illustrates the glamour which surrounded talent at that time. she was taken by her grandmother to see mlle. quinault, and by some chance mistook her for mlle. de vertus, who was so much flattered by her innocent error that she left her forty thousand francs, when she died a few months later. mme. d'epinay was delighted to find herself in so brilliant a world, and was greatly fascinated by its wit, though she was not sure that those who met there did not "feel too much the obligation of having it." but she caught the spirit, and transferred it, in some degree, to her own salon, which was more literary than fashionable. here francueil presents "a sorry devil of an author who is as poor as job, but has wit and vanity enough for four." this is rousseau, the most conspicuous figure in the famous coterie. "he is a man to whom one should raise altars," wrote mme. d'epinay. "and the simplicity with which he relates his misfortunes! i have still a pitying soul. it is frightful to imagine such a man in misery." she fitted up for him the hermitage, and did a thousand kind things which entitled her to a better return than he gave. there is a pleasant moment when we find him the center of an admiring circle at la chevrette, falling madly in love with her clever and beautiful sister-in-law the comtesse d'houdetot, writing "la nouvelle heloise" under the inspiration of this passion, and dreaming in the lovely promenades at montmorency, quite at peace with the world. but the weeping philosopher, who said such fine things and did such base ones, turned against his benefactress and friend for some imaginary offense, and revenged himself by false and malicious attacks upon her character. the final result was a violent quarrel with the whole circle of philosophers, who espoused the cause of mme. d'epinay. this little history is interesting, as it throws so much light upon the intimate relations of some of the greatest men of the century. behind the perpetual round of comedies, readings, dinners, music, and conversation, there is a real comedy of passion, intrigue, jealousy, and hidden misery that destroys many illusions. mme. d'epinay has been made familiar to us by grimm, galiani, diderot, rousseau, and voltaire. perhaps, on the whole, voltaire has given us the most agreeable impression. she was ill of grief and trouble, and had gone to geneva to consult the famous tronchin when she was thrown into more or less intimacy with the sage of ferney. he invited her to dinner immediately upon her arrival. "i was much fatigued, besides having confessed and received communion the evening before. i did not find it fitting to dine with voltaire two days afterward," writes this curiously sensitive friend of the free-thinkers. he addresses her as ma belle philosophe, speaks of her as "an eagle in a cage of gauze," and praises in verse her philosophy, her esprit, her heart, and her "two great black eyes." he weeps at her departure, tells her she is "adored at delices, adored at paris, adored present and absent." but "the tears of a poet do not always signify grief," says mme. d'epinay. there is a second period in her life, when she introduces us again to the old friends who always sustained her, and to many new ones. the world that meets in her salon later is much the same as that which dines with baron d'holbach. to measure its attractions one must recall the brilliancy and eloquence of diderot; the wit, the taste, the learning, the courtly accomplishments of grimm; the gaiety and originality of d'holbach, who had "read everything and forgotten nothing interesting;" the sparkling conversation of the most finished and scholarly diplomats in europe, many of whom we have already met at the dinners of mme. geoffrin. they discuss economic questions, politics, religion, art, literature, with equal freedom and ardor. they are as much divided on the merits of gluck's "armida" and piccini's "roland" as upon taxes, grains, and the policy of the government. the gay little abbe galiani brings perennial sunshine with the inexhaustible wit and vivacity that lights his clear and subtle intellect. "he is a treasure on rainy days," says diderot. "if they made him at the toy shops everybody would want one for the country." "he was the nicest little harlequin that italy has produced," says marmontel, "but upon the shoulders of this harlequin was the head of a machiavelli. epicurean in his philosophy and with a melancholy soul, seeing everything on the ridiculous side, there was nothing either in politics or morals apropos of which he had not a good story to tell, and these stories were always apt and had the salt of an unexpected and ingenious allusion." he did not accept the theories of his friends, which he believed would "cause the bankruptcy of knowledge, of pleasure, and of the human intellect." "messieurs les philosophes, you go too fast," he said. "i begin by saying that if i were pope i would put you in the inquisition, and if i were king of france, into the bastille." he saw the drift of events; but if he reasoned like a philosopher he laughed like a neapolitan. what matters tomorrow if we are happy today! the familiar notes and letters of these clever people picture for us a little world with its small interests, its piques, its loves, its friendships, its quarrels, and its hatreds. diderot, who refused for a long time to meet mme. d'epinay, but finally became an intimate and lasting friend, touches often, in his letters to sophie, upon the pleasant informality of la chevrette, with its curious social episodes and its emotional undercurrents. he does not forget even the pigeons, the geese, the ducks, and the chickens, which he calls his own. pouf, the dog, has his place here too, and flits often across the scene, a tiny bit of reflected immortality. these letters represent the bold iconoclast on his best side, kind, simple in his tastes, and loyal to his friends. he was never at home in the great world. he was seen sometimes in the salons of mme. geoffrin, mme. necker, and others, but he made his stay as brief as possible. mme. d'epinay succeeded better in attaching him to her coterie. there was more freedom, and he probably had a more sympathetic audience. "four lines of this man make me dram more and occupy me more," she said, "than a complete work of our pretended beaux esprits." grimm, too, was a central figure here, and grimm was his friend. but over his genius, as over that of rousseau, there was the trail of the serpent. the breadth of his thought, the brilliancy of his criticisms, the eloquence of his style were clouded with sensualism. "when you see on his forehead the reflection of a ray from plato," says sainte-beuve, "do not trust it; look well, there is always the foot of a satyr." it was to the clear and penetrating intellect of grimm, with its vein of german romanticism, that mme. d'epinay was indebted for the finest appreciation and the most genuine sympathy. "bon dieu," he writes to diderot, "how this woman is to be pitied! i should not be troubled about her if she were as strong as she is courageous. she is sweet and trusting; she is peaceful, and loves repose above all; but her situation exacts unceasingly a conduct forced and out of her character; nothing so wears and destroys a machine naturally frail." she aided him in his correspondance litteraire; wrote a treatise on education, which had the honor of being crowned by the academy; and, among other things of more or less value, a novel, which was not published until long after her death. with many gifts and attractions, kind, amiable, forgiving, and essentially emotional, mme. d'epinay seems to have been a woman of weak and undecided character, without sufficient strength of moral fiber to sustain herself with dignity under the unfortunate circumstances which surrounded her. "it depends only upon yourself," said grimm, "to be the happiest and most adorable creature in the world, provided that you do not put the opinions of others before your own, and that you know how to suffice for yourself." her education had not given her the worldly tact and address of mme. geoffrin, and her salon never had a wide celebrity; but it was a meeting place of brilliant and radical thinkers, of the men who have perhaps done the most to change the face of the modern world. in a quiet and intimate way, it was one among the numberless forces which were gathering and gaining momentum to culminate in the great tragedy of the century. mme. d'epinay did not live to see the catastrophe. worn out by a life of suffering and ill health, she died in . whatever her faults and weaknesses may have been, the woman who could retain the devoted affection of so brilliant and versatile a man as grimm for twenty-seven years, who was the lifelong friend and correspondent of galiani and voltaire, and the valued confidante of diderot, must have had some rare attractions of mind, heart, or character. chapter xiv. salons of the noblesse--madame du deffand _la marechale de luxembourg--the temple--comtesse de boufflers-- mme. du deffand--her convent salon--rupture with mlle. de lespinasse--her friendship with horace walpole--her brilliancy and her ennui_ while the group of iconoclasts who formed the nucleus of the philosophical salons was airing its theories and enjoying its increasing vogue, there was another circle which played with the new ideas more or less as a sort of intellectual pastime, but was aristocratic au fond, and carefully preserved all the traditions of the old noblesse. one met here the philosophers and men of letters, but they did not dominate; they simply flavored these coteries of rank and fashion. in this age of esprit no salon was complete without its sprinkling of literary men. we meet the shy and awkward rousseau even in the exclusive drawing room of the clever and witty but critical marechale de luxembourg, who presides over a world in which the graces rule--a world of elegant manners, of etiquette, and of forms. this model of the amenities, whose gay and faulty youth ripened into a pious and charitable age, was at the head of that tribunal which pronounced judgment upon all matters relating to society. she was learned in genealogy, analyzed and traced to their source the laws of etiquette, possessed a remarkable memory, and without profound education, had learned much from conversation with the savants and illustrious men who frequented her house. her wit was proverbial, and she was never at a loss for a ready repartee or a spicy anecdote. she gave two grand suppers a week. mme. de genlis, who was often there, took notes, according to her custom, and has left an interesting record of conversations that were remarkable not only for brilliancy, but for the thoughtful wisdom of the comments upon men and things. la harpe read a great part of his works in this salon. rousseau entertained the princely guests at montmorency with "la nouvelle heloise" and "emile," and though never quite at ease, his democratic theories did not prevent him from feeling greatly honored by their friendly courtesies; indeed, he loses his usual bitterness when speaking of this noble patroness. he says that her conversation was marked by an exquisite delicacy that always pleased, and her flatteries were intoxicating because they were simple and seemed to escape without intention. mme. de luxembourg was an autocrat, and did not hesitate to punish errors in taste by social ostracism. "erase the name of monsieur -- -- from my list," she said, as a gentleman left after relating a scandalous story reflecting upon some one's honor. it was one of her theories that "society should punish what the law cannot attack." she maintained that good manners are based upon noble and delicate sentiments, that mutual consideration, deference, politeness, gentleness, and respect to age are essential to civilization. the disloyal, the ungrateful bad sons, bad brothers, bad husbands, and bad wives, whose offenses were serious enough to be made public, she banished from that circle which called itself la bonne compagnie. it must be admitted, however, that it was les convenances rather than morality which she guarded. a rival of this brilliant salon, and among the most celebrated of its day, was the one at the temple. the animating spirit here was the amiable and vivacious comtesse de boufflers, celebrated in youth for her charms, and later for her talent. she was dame d'honneur to the princesse de conti, wife of the duc d'orleans, who was noted for her caustic wit, as well as for her beauty. it was in the salon of his clever and rather capricious sister that the learned prince de conti met her and formed the intimacy that ended only with his life. she was called the idole of the temple, and her taste for letters gave her also the title of minerve savante. she wrote a tragedy which was said to be good, though she would never let it go out of her hands, and has been immortalized by rousseau, with whom she corresponded for sixteen years. hume also exchanged frequent letters with her, and she tried in vain to reconcile these two friends after their quarrel. president henault said he had never met a woman of so much esprit, adding that "outside all her charms she had character." for society she had a veritable passion. she said that when she loved england the best she could not think of staying there without "taking twenty-four or twenty-five intimate friends, and sixty or eighty others who were absolutely necessary to her." her conversation was full of fire and brilliancy, and her gaiety of heart, her gracious manners, and her frank appreciation of the talent of others added greatly to her piquant fascination. she delighted in original turns of expression, which were sometimes far-fetched and artificial. one of her friends said that "she made herself the victim of consideration, and lost it by running after it." her rule of life may be offered as a model. "in conduct, simplicity and reason; in manners, propriety and decorum; in actions, justice and generosity; in the use of wealth, economy and liberality; in conversation, clearness, truth, precision; in adversity, courage and pride; in prosperity, modesty and moderation." unfortunately she did not put all this wisdom into practice, if we judge her by present standards. we have a glimpse of the famous circle over which she presided in an interesting picture formerly at versailles, now at the louvre. the figures are supposed to be portraits. among others are mme. de luxembourg, the comtesse de boufflers, and the lovely but ill-fated young stepdaughter, amelie, comtesse de lauzun, to whom she is so devoted; the beautiful comtesse d'egmont, mme. de beauvan, president henault, the witty pont de veyle, mairan, the versatile scientist, and the prince de conti. in the midst of this group the little mozart, whose genius was then delighting europe, sits at the harpsichord. the chronicles of the time give us pleasant descriptions of the literary diversions of this society, which met by turns at the temple and ile-adam. but the prince as well as the clever comtesse had a strong leaning towards philosophy, and the amusements were interspersed with much conversation of a serious character that has a peculiar interest today when read by the light of after events. among the numerous salons of the noblesse there was one which calls for more than a passing word, both on account of its world-wide fame and the exceptional brilliancy of its hostess. though far less democratic and cosmopolitan than that of mme. geoffrin, with which it was contemporary, its character was equally distinct and original. linked by birth with the oldest of the nobility, allied by intellect with the most distinguished in the world of letters, mme. du deffand appropriated the best in thought, while retaining the spirit of an elegant and refined social life. she was exclusive by nature and instinct, as well as by tradition, and could not dispense with the arts and amenities which are the fruit of generations of ease; but the energy and force of her intellect could as little tolerate shallowness and pretension, however disguised beneath the graceful tyranny of forms. her salon offers a sort of compromise between the freedom of the philosophical coteries and the frivolities of the purely fashionable ones. it included the most noted of the men of letters--those who belonged to the old aristocracy and a few to whom nature had given a prescriptive title of nobility--as well as the flower of the great world. her sarcastic wit, her clear intelligence, and her rare conversational gifts added a tone of individuality that placed her salon at the head of the social centers of the time in brilliancy and in esprit. in this group of wits, litterateurs, philosophers, statesmen, churchmen, diplomats, and men of rank, mme. du deffand herself is always the most striking figure. the art of self-suppression she clearly did not possess. but the art of so blending a choice society that her own vivid personality was a pervading note of harmony she had to an eminent degree. she could easily have made a mark upon her time through her intellectual gifts without the factitious aid of the men with whom her name is associated. but society was her passion society animated by intellect, sparkling with wit, and expressing in all its forms the art instincts of her race. she never aspired to authorship, but she has left a voluminous correspondence in which one reads the varying phases of a singularly capricious character. in her old age she found refuge from a devouring ennui in writing her own memoirs. merciless to herself as to others, she veils nothing, revealing her frailties with a freedom that reminds one of rousseau. it is not the portrait of an estimable woman that we can paint from these records; but in her intellectual force, her social gifts, and her moral weakness she is one of the best exponents of an age that trampled upon the finest flowers of the soul in the blind pursuit of pleasure and the cynical worship of a hard and unpitying realism. living from to , she saw the train laid for the revolution, and died in time to escape its horrors. she traversed the whole experience of the women of her world with the independence and abandon of a nature that was moderate in nothing. it is true she felt the emptiness of this arid existence, and had an intellectual perception of its errors, but she saw nothing better. "all conditions appear to me equally unhappy, from the angel to the oyster," is the burden of her hopeless refrain. she reveals herself to us as two distinct characters. the one best known is hard, bitter, coldly analytic, and mocks at everything bordering upon sentiment or feeling. the other, which underlies this, and of which we have rare glimpses, is frank, tender, loving even to weakness, and forever at war with the barrenness of a period whose worst faults she seems to have embodied, and whose keenest penalties she certainly suffered. voltaire, the lifelong friend whom she loved, but critically measured, was three years old when she was born; mme. de sevigne had been dead nearly a year. of a noble family in burgundy, marie de vichy-chamroud was brought to paris at six years of age and placed in the convent of st. madeleine de traisnel, where she was educated after the superficial fashion which she so much regrets in later years. she speaks of herself as a romantic, imaginative child, but she began very early to shock the pious sisters by her dawning skepticism. one of the nuns had a wax figure of the infant jesus, which she discovered to have been a doll formerly dressed to represent the spanish fashions to anne of austria. this was the first blow to her illusions, and had a very perceptible influence upon her life. she pronounced it a deception. eight days of solitude with a diet of bread and water failed to restore her reverence. "it does not depend upon me to believe or disbelieve," she said. the eloquent and insinuating massillon was called in to talk with her. "she is charming," was his remark, as he left her after two hours of conversation; adding thoughtfully, "give her a five-cent catechism." skeptical by nature and saturated with the free-thinking spirit of the time, she reasoned that all religion was au fond, only paganism disguised. in later years, when her isolated soul longed for some tangible support, she spoke regretfully of the philosophic age which destroyed beliefs by explaining and analyzing everything. but a beautiful, clever, high-spirited girl of sixteen is apt to feel her youth all suffering. it is certain that she had no inclination towards the life of a religieuse, and the country quickly became insupportable after her return to its provincial society. ennui took possession of her. she was glad even to go to confessional, for the sake of telling her thoughts to some one. she complained bitterly that the life of women compelled dependence upon the conduct of others, submission to all ills and all consequences. long afterwards she said that she would have married the devil if he had been clothed as a gentleman and assured her a moderate life. but a husband was at last found for her, and merely to escape the monotony of her secluded existence, she was glad, at twenty-one, to become the wife of the marquis du deffand--a good but uninteresting man, much older than herself. brilliant, fascinating, restless, eager to see and to learn, she felt herself in her element in the gay world of paris. she confessed that, for the moment, she almost loved her husband for bringing her there. but the moment was a short one. they did not even settle down to what a witty frenchman calls the "politeness of two indifferences." it is a curious commentary upon the times, that the beautiful but notorious mme. de parabere, who introduced her at once into her own unscrupulous world and the petits soupers of the regent, condoled with the young bride upon her marriage, regretting that she had not taken the easy vows of a chanoinesse, as mme. de tencin had done. "in that case," she said, "you would have been free; well placed everywhere; with the stability of a married woman; a revenue which permits one to live and accept aid from others; the independence of a widow, without the ties which a family imposes; unquestioned rank, which you would owe to no one; indulgence, and impunity. for these advantages there is only the trouble of wearing a cross, which is becoming; black or gray habits, which can be made as magnificent as one likes; a little imperceptible veil, and a knitting sheath." under such teaching she was not long in taking her own free and independent course, which was reckless even in that age of laxity. at her first supper at the palais royal she met voltaire and fascinated the regent, though her reign lasted but a few days. the counsels of her aunt, the dignified duchesse de luynes, availed nothing. her husband was speedily sent off on some mission to the provinces and she plunged into the current. once afterwards, in a fit of ennui, she recalled him, frankly stating her position. but she quickly wearied of him again, grew dull, silent, lost her vivacity, and fell into a profound melancholy. her friend mme. de parabere took it upon herself to explain to him the facts, and he kindly relieved her forever of his presence, leaving a touching and pathetic letter which gave her a moment of remorse in spite of her lightened heart. this sin against good taste the parisian world could not forgive, and even her friends turned against her for a time. but the duchesse due maine came to her aid with an all-powerful influence, and restored her finally to her old position. for some years she passed the greater part of her time at sceaux, and was a favorite at this lively little court. it is needless to trace here the details of a career which gives us little to admire and much to condemn. it was about when her salon became noted as a center for the fashionable and literary world of paris. montesquieu and d'alembert were then among her intimate friends. of the latter she says: "the simplicity of his manners, the purity of his morals, the air of youth, the frankness of character, joined to all his talents, astonished at first those who saw him." it is said to have been through her zeal that he was admitted to the academy so young. among others who formed her familiar circle were her devoted friend pont de veyle; the chevalier d'aydie; formont, the "spirituel idler and amiable egotist," who was one of the three whom she confesses really to have loved; and president henault, who brought always a fund of lively anecdote and agreeable conversation. this world of fashion and letters, slightly seasoned with philosophy, is also the world of mme. de luxembourg, of the brilliant mme. de mirepoix, of the prince and princesse de beauvau, and of the lovely duchesse de choiseul, a femme d'esprit and "mistress of all the elegances," whose gentle virtues fall like a ray of sunlight across the dark pages of this period. it is the world of elegant forms, the world in which a sin against taste is worse than a sin against morals, the world which hedges itself in by a thousand unwritten laws that save it from boredom. after the death of the duchesse du maine, mme. du deffand retired to the little convent of st. joseph, where, after the manner of many women of rank with small fortunes, she had her menage and received her friends. "i have a very pretty apartment," she writes to voltaire; "very convenient; i only go out for supper. i do not sleep elsewhere, and i make no visits. my society is not numerous, but i am sure it will please you; and if you were here you would make it yours. i have seen for some time many savants and men of letters; i have not found their society delightful." the good nuns objected a little to voltaire at first, but seem to have been finally reconciled to the visits of the arch-heretic. at this time mme. du deffand had supposably reformed her conduct, if not her belief. she continued to entertain the flower of the nobility and the stars of the literary and scientific world. but while the most famous of the men of letters were welcome in her salon, the tone was far from pedantic or even earnest. it was a society of conventional people, the elite of fashion and intelligence, who amused themselves in an intellectual but not too serious way. montesquieu, who liked those houses in which he could pass with his every-day wit, said, "i love this woman with all my heart; she pleases and amuses me; it is impossible to feel a moment's ennui in her company." mme. de genlis, who did not love her expressed her surprise at finding her so natural and so kindly. her conversation was simple and without pretension. when she was pleased, her manners were even affectionate. she never entered into a discussion, confessing that she was not sufficiently attached to any opinion to defend it. she disliked the enthusiasm of the philosophers unless it was hidden behind the arts of the courtier, as in voltaire, whose delicate satire charmed her. diderot came once, "eyed her epicurean friends," and came no more. the air was not free enough. when at home she had three or four at supper every day, often a dozen, and, once a week, a grand supper. all the intellectual fashions of the time are found here. la harpe reads a translation from sophocles and his own tragedy. clairon, the actress in vogue, recites the roles of phedre and agrippine, lekain reads voltaire, and goldoni a comedy of his own, which the hostess finds tiresome. new books, new plays, the last song, the latest word of the philosophers--all are talked about, eulogized, or dismissed with a sarcasm. the wit of mme. du deffand is feared, but it fascinates. she delights in clever repartees and sparkling epigrams. a shaft of wit silences the most complacent of monologues. "what tiresome book are you reading?" she said one day to a friend who talked too earnestly and too long--saving herself from the charge of rudeness by an easy refuge in her blindness. her criticisms are always severe. "there are only two pleasures for me in the world--society and reading," she writes. "what society does one find? imbeciles, who utter only commonplaces, who know nothing, feel nothing, think nothing; a few people of talent, full of themselves, jealous, envious, wicked, whom one must hate or scorn." to some one who was eulogizing a mediocre man, adding that all the world was of the same opinion, she replied, "i make small account of the world, monsieur, since i perceive that one can divide it into three parts, les trompeurs, les trompes, et les trompettes." still it is life alone that interests her. though she is not satisfied with people, she has always the hope that she will be. in literature she likes only letters and memoirs, because they are purely human; but the age has nothing that pleases her. "it is cynical or pedantic," she writes to voltaire; "there is no grace, no facility, no imagination. everything is a la glace, hardness without force, license without gaiety; no talent, much presumption." as age came on, and she felt the approach of blindness, she found a companion in mlle. de lespinasse, a young girl of remarkable gifts, who had an obscure and unacknowledged connection with her family. for ten years the young woman was a slave to the caprices of her exacting mistress, reading to her through long nights of wakeful restlessness, and assisting to entertain her guests. the one thing upon which mme. du deffand most prided herself was frankness. she hated finesse, and had stipulated that she would not tolerate artifice in any form. it was her habit to lie awake all night and sleep all day, and as she did not receive her guests until six o'clock, mlle. de lespinasse, whose amiable character and conversational charm had endeared her at once to the circle of her patroness, arranged to see her personal friends--among whom were d'alembert, turgot, chastellux, and marmontel--in her own apartments for an hour before the marquise appeared. when this came to the knowledge of the latter, she fell into a violent rage at what she chose to regard as a treachery to herself, and dismissed her companion at once. the result was the opening of a rival salon which carried off many of her favorite guests, notably d'alembert, to whom she was much attached. "if she had died fifteen years earlier, i should not have lost d'alembert," was her sympathetic remark when she heard of the death of mlle. de lespinasse. but the most striking point in the career of this worldly woman was her friendship for horace walpole. when they first met she was nearly seventy, blind, ill-tempered, bitter, and hopelessly ennuyee. he was not yet fifty, a brilliant, versatile man of the world, and saw her only at long intervals. their curious correspondence extends over a period of fifteen years, ending only with her death. in a letter to grayson, after meeting her, he writes: "mme. du deffand is now very old and stone blind, but retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgment, passion, and agreeableness. she goes to operas, plays, suppers, versailles; gives supper twice a week; has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams--aye, admirably--and remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. she corresponds with voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. in a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as possible; for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved--i don't mean by lovers--and a vehement enemy openly." the acquaintance thus begun quickly drilled into an intimacy. friendship she calls this absorbing sentiment, but it has all the caprices and inconsistencies of love. fed by the imagination, and prevented by separation from wearing itself out, it became the most permanent interest of her life. there is something curiously pathetic in the submissive attitude of this blind, aged, but spirited woman--who scoffs at sentiment and confesses that she could never love anything--towards the man who criticizes her, scolds her, crushes back her too ardent feeling, yet calls her his dear old friend, writes her a weekly letter, and modestly declares that she "loves him better than all france together." the spirit of this correspondence greatly modifies the impression which her own words, as well as the facts of her career, would naturally give us. we find in the letters of this period little of the freshness and spontaneity that lent such a charm to the letters of mme. de sevigne and her contemporaries. women still write of the incidents of their lives, the people they meet, their jealousies, their rivalries, their loves, and their follies; but they think, where they formerly mirrored the world about them. they analyze, they compare, the criticize, they formulate their own emotions, they add opinions to facts. the gaiety, the sparkle, the wit, the play of feeling, is not there. occasionally there is the tone of passion, as in the letters of mlle. aisse and mlle. de lespinasse, but this is rare. even passion has grown sophisticated and deals with phrases. there is more or less artificiality in the exchange of written thoughts. mme. du deffand thinks while she writes, and what she sees takes always the color of her own intelligence. she complains of her inability to catch the elusive quality, the clearness, the flexibility of mme. de sevigne, whom she longs to rival because walpole so admires her. but if she lacks the vivacity, the simplicity, the poetic grace of her model, she has qualities not less striking, though less lovable. her keen insight is unfailing. with masterly penetration she grasps the essence of things. no one has portrayed so concisely and so vividly the men and women of her time. no one has discriminated between the shades of character with such nicety. no one has so clearly fathomed the underlying motives of action. no one has forecast the outcome of theories and events with such prophetic vision. the note of bitterness and cynicism is always there. the nature of the woman reveals itself in every line: keen, dry, critical, with clear ideals which she can never hope to attain. but we feel that she has stripped off the rags of pretension and brought us face to face with realities. "all that i can do is to love you with all my heart, as i have done for about fifty years," wrote voltaire. "how could i fail to love you? your soul seeks always the true; it is a quality as rare as truth itself." so far does she carry her hatred of insincerity that one is often tempted to believe she affects a freedom from affectation. "i am so fatigued with the vanity of others that i avoid the occasion of having any myself," she writes. is there not here a trace of the quality she so despises? but beneath all this runs the swift undercurrent of an absorbing passion. a passion of friendship it may be, but it forces itself through the arid shells of conventionalism; it is at once the agony and the consolation of a despairing soul. heartless, mme. du deffand is called, and her life seems to prove the truth of the verdict; but these letters throb and palpitate with feeling which she laughs at, but cannot still. it is the cry of the soul for what it has not; what the world cannot give; what it has somehow missed out of a cold, hard, restless, and superficial existence. with a need of loving, she is satisfied with no one. there is something wanting; even in the affection of her friends. "ma grand'maman," she says to the gentle duchesse de choiseul, "you know that you love me, but you do not feel it." devouring herself in solitude, she despises the society she cannot do without. "men and women appear to me puppets who go, come, talk, laugh, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling," she writes. she confesses that she has a thousand troubles in assembling a choice company of people who bore her to death. "one sees only masks, one hears only lies," is her constant refrain. she does not want to live, but is afraid to die; she says she is not made for this world, but does not know that there is any other. she tries devotion, but has no taste for it. of the light that shines from within upon so many darkened and weary souls she has no knowledge. her vision is bounded by the tangible, which offers only a rigid barrier, against which her life flutters itself away. she dies as she has lived, with a deepened conviction of the nothingness of existence. "spare me three things," she said to her confessor in her last moments; "let me have no questions, no reasons, and no sermons." seeing wiart, her faithful servitor, in tears, she remarks pathetically, as if surprised, "you love me then?" "divert yourself as much as you can," was her final message to walpole. "you will regret me, because one is very glad to know that one is loved." she commends to his care and affection tonton, her little dog. strong but not gentle, brilliant but not tender, too penetrating for any illusions, with a nature forever at war with itself, its surroundings, and its limitations, no one better points the moral of an age without faith, without ideals, without the inner light that reveals to hope what is denied to sense. the influence of such a woman with her gifts, her energy, her power, and her social prestige, can hardly be estimated. it was not in the direction of the new drift of thought. "i am not a fanatic as to liberty," she said; "i believe it is an error to pretend that it exists in a democracy. one has a thousand tyrants in place of one." she had no breadth of sympathy, and her interests were largely personal; but in matters of style and form her taste was unerring. pitiless in her criticisms, she held firmly to her ideals of clear, elegant, and concise expression, both in literature and in conversation. she tolerated no latitudes, no pretension, and left behind her the traditions of a society that blended, more perfectly, perhaps, than any other of her time, the best intellectual life with courtly manners and a strict observance of les convenances. chapter xv. mademoiselle de lespinasse _a romantic career--companion of mme. du deffand--rival salons-- association with the encyclopedists--d'alembert--a heart tragedy--impassioned letters--a type unique in her age_ inseparably connected with the name of mme. du deffand is that of her companion and rival, mlle. de lespinasse, the gifted, charming, tender and loving woman who presided over one of the most noted of the philosophical salons; who was the chosen friend and confidante of the encyclopedists; and who died in her prime of a broken heart, leaving the world a legacy of letters that rival those of heloise or the poems of sappho, as "immortal pictures of passion." the memory of her social triumphs, remarkable as they were, pales before the singular romances of her life. in the midst of a cold, critical, and heartless society, that adored talent and ridiculed sentiment, she became the victim of a passion so profound, so ardent, so hopeless, that her powerful intellect bent before it like a reed before a storm. she died of that unsuspected passion, and years afterwards these letters found the light and told the tale. the contrast between the two women so closely linked together is complete. mme. du deffand belonged to the age of voltaire by every fiber of her hard and cynical nature. what she called love was a fire of the intellect which consumed without warming. it was a violent and fierce prejudice in favor of those who reflected something of herself. the tenderness of self-sacrifice was not there. mlle. de lespinasse was of the later era of rousseau; the era of exaggerated feeling, of emotional delirium, of romantic dreams; the era whose heroine was the loving and sentimental "julie," for whose portrait she might have sat, with a shade or so less of intellect and brilliancy. but it was more than a romantic dream that shadowed and shortened the life of mlle. de lespinasse. she had a veritable heart of flame, that consumed not only itself but its frail tenement as well. julie-jeanne-eleonore de lespinasse, who was born at lyons in , had a birthright of sorrow. her mother, the comtesse d'albon, could not acknowledge this fugitive and nameless daughter, but after the death of her husband she received her on an inferior footing, had her carefully educated, and secretly gave her love and care. left alone and without resources at fifteen, julie was taken, as governess and companion, into the family of a sister who was the wife of mme. du deffand's brother. here the marquise met her on one of her visits and heard the story of her sorrows. tearful, sad, and worn out by humiliations, the young girl had decided to enter a convent. "there is no misfortune that i have not experienced," she wrote to guibert many years afterwards. "some day, my friend, i will relate to you things not to be found in the romances of prevost nor of richardson... i ought naturally to devote myself to hating; i have well fulfilled my destiny; i have loved much and hated very little. mon dieu, my friend, i am a hundred years old." mme. du deffand was struck with her talent and a certain indefinable fascination of manner which afterwards became so potent. "you have gaiety," she wrote to her, "you are capable of sentiment; with these qualities you will be charming so long as you are natural and without pretension." after a negotiation of some months, mlle. de lespinasse went to paris to live with her new friend. the history of this affair has been already related. parisian society was divided into two factions on the merits of the quarrel--those who censured the ingratitude of the younger woman, and those who accused the marquise of cruelty and injustice. but many of the oldest friends of the latter aided her rival. the marechale de luxembourg furnished her apartments in the rue de belle-chasse. the duc de choiseul procured her a pension, and mme. geoffrin gave her an annuity. she carried with her a strong following of eminent men from the salon of mme. du deffand, among whom was d'alembert, who remained faithful and devoted to the end. it is said that president henault even offered to marry her, but how, under these circumstances, he managed to continue in the good graces of his lifelong friend, the unforgiving marquise, does not appear. a letter which he wrote to mlle. de lespinasse throws a direct light upon her character, after making due allowance for the exaggeration of french gallantry. "you are cosmopolitan; you adapt yourself to all situations. the world pleases you; you love solitude. society amuses you, but it does not seduce you. your heart does not give itself easily. strong passions are necessary to you, and it is better so, for they will not return often. nature, in placing you in an ordinary position, has given you something to relieve it. your soul is noble and elevated, and you will never remain in a crowd. it is the same with your person. it is distinguished and attracts attention, without being beautiful. there is something piquante about you... you have two things which do not often go together: you are sweet and strong; your gaiety adorns you and relaxes your nerves, which are too tense... you are extremely refined; you have divined the world." the age of portraits was not quite passed, and the privilege of seeing one's self in the eyes of one's friends was still accorded, a fact to which we owe many striking if sometimes rather highly colored pictures. a few words from d'alembert are of twofold interest. he writes some years later: "the regard one has for you does not depend alone upon your external charms; it depends, above all, upon your intellect and your character. that which distinguishes you in society is the art of saying to every one the fitting word and that art is very simple with you; it consists in never speaking of yourself to others, and much of themselves. it is an infallible means of pleasing; thus you please every one, though it happens that all the world pleases you; you know even how to avoid repelling those who are least agreeable." this epitome of the art of pleasing may be commended for its wisdom, aside from the very delightful picture it gives of an amiable and attractive woman. again he writes: "the excellence of your tone would not be a distinction for one reared in a court, and speaking only the language she has learned. in you it is a merit very real and very rare. you have brought it from the seclusion of a province, where you met no one who could teach you. you were, in this regard, as perfect the day after your arrival at paris as you are today. you found yourself, from the first, as free, as little out of place in the most brilliant and most critical society as if you had passed your life there; you have felt its usages before knowing them, which implies a justness and fineness of tact very unusual, an exquisite knowledge of les convenances." it was her innate tact and social instinct, combined with rare gifts of intellect and great conversational charm, that gave this woman without name, beauty, or fortune so exceptional a position, and her salon so distinguished a place among the brilliant centers of paris. as she was not rich and could not give costly dinners, she saw her friends daily from five to nine, in the interval between other engagements. this society was her chief interest, and she rarely went out. "if she made an exception to this rule, all paris was apprised of it in advance," says grimm. the most illustrious men of the state, the church, the court, and the army, as well as celebrated foreigners and men of letters, were sure to be found there. "nowhere was conversation more lively, more brilliant, or better regulated," writes marmontel.. . "it was not with fashionable nonsense and vanity that every day during four hours, without languor or pause, she knew how to make herself interesting to a circle of sensible people." caraccioli went from her salon one evening to sup with mme. du deffand. "he was intoxicated with all the fine works he had heard read there," writes the latter. "there was a eulogy of one named fontaine by m. de condorcet. there were translations of theocritus; tales, fables by i know not whom. and then some eulogies of helvetius, an extreme admiration of the esprit and the talents of the age; in fine, enough to make one stop the ears. all these judgments false and in the worst taste." a hint of the rivalry between the former friends is given in a letter from horace walpole. "there is at paris," he writes, "a mlle. de lespinasse, a pretended bel esprit, who was formerly a humble companion of mme. du deffand, and betrayed her and used her very ill. i beg of you not to let any one carry you thither. i dwell upon this because she has some enemies so spiteful as to try to carry off all the english to mlle. de lespinasse." but this "pretended bel esprit" had socially the touch of genius. her ardent, impulsive nature lent to her conversation a rare eloquence that inspired her listeners, though she never drifted into monologue, and understood the value of discreet silence. "she rendered the marble sensible, and made matter talk," said guibert. versatile and suggestive herself, she knew how to draw out the best thoughts of others. her swift insight caught the weak points of her friends, and her gracious adaptation had all the fascination of a subtle flattery. sad as her experience had been, she had nevertheless been drawn into the world most congenial to her tastes. "ah, how i dislike not to love that which is excellent," she wrote later. "how difficult i have become! but is it my fault? consider the education i have received with mme. du deffand. president henault, abbe bon, the archbishop of toulouse, the archbishop of aix, turgot, d'alembert, abbe de boismont--these are the men who have taught me to speak, to think, and who have deigned to count me for something." it was men like these who thronged her own salon, together with such women as the duchesse d'anville, friend of the economists, the duchesse de chatillon whom she loved so passionately, and others well-known in the world of fashion and letters. but its tone was more philosophical than that of mme. du deffand. though far from democratic by taste or temperament, she was so from conviction. the griefs and humiliations of her life had left her peculiarly open to the new social and political theories which were agitating france. she liked free discussion, and her own large intelligence, added to her talent for calling out and giving point to the ideas of others, went far towards making the cosmopolitan circle over which she presided one of the most potent forces of the time. her influence may be traced in the work of the encyclopedists, in which she was associated, and which she did more than any other woman to aid and encourage. as a power in the making of reputations and in the election of members to the academy she shared with mme. geoffrin the honor of being a legitimate successor of mme. de lambert. chastellux owed his admission largely to her, and on her deathbed she secured that of la harpe. but the side of her character which strikes us most forcibly at this distance of time is the emotional. the personal charm which is always so large a factor in social success is of too subtle a quality to be caught in words. the most vivid portrait leaves a divine something to be supplied by the imagination, and the fascination of eloquence is gone with the flash of the eye, the modulation of the voice, or some fleeting grace of manner. but passion writes itself out in indelible characters, especially when it is a rare and spontaneous overflow from the heart of a man or woman of genius, whose emotions readily crystallize into form. her friendship for d'alembert, loyal and devoted as it was, seems to have been without illusions. it is true she had cast aside every other consideration to nurse him through a dangerous illness, and as soon as he was able to be removed, he had taken an apartment in the house where she lived, which he retained until her death. but he was not rich, and marriage was not to be thought of. on this point we have his own testimony. "the one to whom they marry me in the gazettes is indeed a person respectable in character, and fitted by the sweetness and charm of her society to render a husband happy," he writes to voltaire; "but she is worthy of an establishment better than mine, and there is between us neither marriage nor love, but mutual esteem, and all the sweetness of friendship. i live actually in the same house with her, where there are besides ten other tenants; this is what has given rise to the rumor." his devotion through so many years, and his profound grief at her loss, as well as his subsequent words, leave some doubt as to the tranquillity of his heart, but the sentiments of mlle. de lespinasse seem never to have passed the calm measure of an exalted and sympathetic friendship. it was remarked that he lost much of his prestige, and that his society which had been so brilliant, became infinitely more miscellaneous and infinitely less agreeable after the death of the friend whose tact and finesse had so well served his ambition. not long after leaving mme. du deffand she met the marquis de mora, a son of the spanish ambassador, who became a constant habitue of her salon. of distinguished family and large fortune, brilliant, courtly, popular, and only twenty-four, he captivated at once the fiery heart of this attractive woman of thirty-five. it seems to have been a mutual passion, as during one brief absence of ten days he wrote her twenty-two letters. but his family became alarmed and made his delicate health a pretext for recalling him to spain. her grief at the separation enlisted the sympathy of d'alembert. at her request he procured from his physician a statement that the climate of madrid would prove fatal to m. de mora, whose health had steadily failed since his return home, and that if his friends wished to save him they must lose no time in sending him back to paris. the young man was permitted to leave at once, but he died en route at bordeaux. in the meantime mlle. de lespinasse, sad and inconsolable, had met m. guibert, a man of great versatility and many accomplishments, whose genius seems to have borne no adequate fruit. we hear of him later through the passing enthusiasm of mme. de stael, who in her youth, made a pen-portrait of him, sufficiently flattering to account in some degree for the singular passion of which he became the object. mlle. de lespinasse was forty. he was twenty-nine, had competed for the academie francaise, written a work on military science, also a national tragedy which was still unpublished. she was dazzled by his brilliancy, and when she fathomed his shallow nature, as she finally did, it was too late to disentangle her heart. he was a man of gallantry, and was flattered by the preference of a woman much in vogue, who had powerful friends, influence at the academy, and the ability to advance his interest in many ways. he clearly condescended to be loved, but his own professions have little of the true ring. distracted by this new passion on one side, and by remorse for her disloyalty to the old one, on the other, the health of mlle. de lespinasse, naturally delicate and already undermined, began to succumb to the hidden struggle. the death of m. de mora solved one problem; the other remained. mr. guibert wished to advance his fortune by a brilliant marriage without losing the friend who might still be of service to him. she sat in judgment upon her own fate, counseled him, aided him in his choice, even praised the woman who became his wife, hoping still, perhaps, for some repose in that exaltation of friendship which is often the last consolation of passionate souls. but she was on a path that led to no haven of peace. there was only a blank wall before her, and the lightning impulses of her own heart were forced back to shatter her frail life. the world was ignorant of this fresh experience; and, believing her crushed by the death of m. de mora, sympathized with her sorrow and praised her fidelity. she tried to sustain a double role--smiles and gaiety for her friends, tears and agony for the long hours of solitude. the tension was too much for her. she died shortly afterwards at the age of forty-three. "if to think, to love, and to suffer is that which constitutes life, she lived in these few years many ages," said one who knew her well. it was not until many years later, when those most interested were gone, that the letters to guibert, which form her chief title to fame, were collected, and, curiously enough, by his widow. then for the first time the true drama of her life was unveiled. it is impossible in a few extracts to convey an adequate idea of the passion and devotion that runs through these letters. they touch the entire gamut of emotion, from the tender melancholy of a lonely soul, the inexpressible sweetness of self-forgetful love, to the tragic notes or agony and despair. there are many brilliant passages in them, many flashes of profound thought, many vivid traits of the people about her; but they are, before all, the record of a soul that is rapidly burning out its casket. "i prefer my misery to all that the world calls happiness or pleasure," she writes. "i shall die of it, perhaps, but that is better than never to have lived." "i have no more the strength to love," she says again; "my soul fatigues me, torments me; i am no more sustained by anything. i have every day a fever; and my physician, who is not the most skillful of men, repeats to me without ceasing that i am consumed by chagrin, that my pulse, my respiration, announce an active grief, and he always goes out saying, 'we have no cure for the soul.'" "adieu, my friend," were her last words to him. "if i ever return to life i shall still love to employ it in loving you; but there is no more time." one could almost wish that these letters had never come to light. a single grand passion has always a strong hold upon the imagination and the sympathies, but two passions contending for the mastery verge upon something quite the reverse of heroic. the note of heart-breaking despair is tragic enough, but there is a touch of comedy behind it. though her words have the fire, the devotion, the abandon of heloise, they leave a certain sense of disproportion. one is inclined to wonder if they do not overtop the feeling. d'alembert was her truest mourner, and fell into a profound melancholy after her death. "yes," he said to marmontel, "she was changed, but i was not; she no longer lived for me, but i ever lived for her. since she is no more, i know not why i exist. ah! why have i not still to suffer those moments of bitterness that she knew so well how to sweeten and make me forget? do you remember the happy evenings we passed together? now what have i left? i return home, and instead of herself i find only her shade. this lodging at the louvre is itself a tomb, which i never enter but with horror." to this "shade" he wrote two expressive and well-considered eulogies, which paint in pathetic words the perfections of his friend and his own desolation. "adieu, adieu, my dear julie," says the heartbroken philosopher; "for these eyes which i should like to close forever fill with tears in tracing these last lines, and i see no more the paper on which i write." his grief called out a sympathetic letter from frederick the great which shows the philosophic warrior and king in a new light. there is a touch of bitter irony in the inflated eulogy of guibert, who gave the too-loving woman a death blow in furthering his ambition, then exhausted his vocabulary in laments and praises. perhaps he hoped to borrow from this friendship a fresh ray of immortality. whatever we may think of the strange inconsistencies of mlle. de lespinasse, she is doubly interesting to us as a type that contrasts strongly with that of her age. her exquisite tact, her brilliant intellect, her conversational gifts, her personal charm made her the idol of the world in which she lived. her influence was courted, her salon was the resort of the most distinguished men of the century, and while she loved to discuss the great social problems which her friends were trying to solve, she forgot none of the graces. with the intellectual strength and grasp of a man, she preserved always the taste, the delicacy, the tenderness of a woman. her faults were those of a strong nature. her thoughts were clear and penetrating, her expression was lively and impassioned. but in her emotional power she reached the proportion of genius. with "the most ardent soul, the liveliest fancy, the most inflammable imagination that has existed since sappho," she represents the embodied spirit of tragedy outlined against the cold, hard background of a skeptical, mocking, realistic age. "i love in order to live," she said, "and i live to love." this is the key-note of her life. chapter xvi. the salon helvetique _the swiss pastor's daughter--her social ambition--her friends--mme. de marchais--mme. d'houdetot--duchesse de lauzun--character of mme. necker--death at coppet--close of the most brilliant period of the salons._ there was one woman who held a very prominent place in the society of this period, and who has a double interest for us, though she was not french, and never quite caught the spirit of the eighteenth-century life whose attractive forms she loved so well. mme. necker, whose history has been made so familiar through the interesting memoirs of the comte d'haussonville, owes her fame to her marked qualities of intellect and character rather than to the brilliancy of her social talents. these found an admirable setting in the surroundings which her husband's fortune and political career gave her. the salon helvetique had a distinctive color of its own, and was always tinged with the strong convictions and exalted ideals of the swiss pastor's daughter, who passed through this world of intellectual affluence and moral laxity like a white angel of purity--in it, but not of it. the center of a choice and lettered circle which included the most noted men and women of her time, she brought into it not only rare gifts, a fine taste, and genuine literary enthusiasm, but the fresh charm of a noble character and a beautiful family life, with the instincts of duty and right conduct which she inherited from her simple protestant ancestry. she lacked a little, however, in the tact, the ease, the grace, the spontaneity, which were the essential charm of the french women. her social talents were a trifle theoretical. "she studied society," says one of her critics, "as she would a literary question." she had a theory of conducting a salon, as she had of life in general, and believed that study would attain everything. but the ability to do a thing superlatively well is by no means always implied in the knowledge of how it ought to be done. social genius is as purely a gift of nature as poetry or music; and, of all others, it is the most subtle and indefinable. it was a long step from the primitive simplicity in which suzanne curchod passed her childhood on the borders of lake leman to the complex life of a parisian salon; and the provincial beauty, whose fair face, soft blue eyes, dignified but slightly coquettish manner, brilliant intellect, and sparkling though sometimes rather learned conversation had made her a local queen, was quick to see her own shortcomings. she confessed that she had a new language to learn, and she never fully mastered it. "mme. necker has talent, but it is in a sphere too elevated for one to communicate with her," said mme. du deffand, though she was glad to go once a week to her suppers at saint-ouen, and admitted that in spite of a certain stiffness and coldness she was better fitted for society than most of the grandes dames. the salon of mme. necker marks a transition point between two periods, and had two quite distinct phases. one likes best to recall her in the freshness of her early enthusiasm, when she gave friday dinners, modeled after those of mme. geoffrin, to men of letters, and received a larger world in the evening; when her guests were enlivened by the satire of diderot, the anecdotes of marmontel, the brilliancy or learning of grimm, d'alembert, thomas, suard, buffon, the abbe raynal, and other wits of the day; when they discussed the affairs of the academy and decided the fate of candidates; when they listened to the recitations of mlle. clairon, and the works of many authors known and unknown. it is interesting to recall that "paul and virginia" was first read here. but there was apt to be a shade of stiffness, and the conversation had sometimes too strong a flavor of pedantry. "no one knows better or feels more sensibly than you, my dear and very amiable friend," wrote mme. geoffrin, "the charm of friendship and its sweetness; no one makes others experience them more fully. but you will never attain that facility, that ease, and that liberty which give to society its perfect enjoyment." the abbe morellet complained of the austerity that always held the conversation within certain limits, and the gay little abbe galiani found fault with mme. necker's coldness and reserve, though he addresses her as his "divinity" after his return to naples, and his racy letters give us vivid and amusing pictures of these fridays, which in his memory are wholly charming. in spite of her firm religious convictions, mme. necker cordially welcomed the most extreme of the philosophers. "i have atheistic friends," she said. "why not? they are unfortunate friends." but her admiration for their talents by no means extended to their opinions, and she did not permit the discussion of religious questions. it was at one of her own dinners that she started the subscription for a statue of voltaire, for whom she entertained the warmest friendship. one may note here, as elsewhere, a fine mental poise, a justness of spirit, and a discrimination that was superior to natural prejudices. sometimes her frank simplicity was misunderstood. "there is a mme. necker here, a pretty woman and a bel esprit, who is infatuated with me; she persecutes me to have me at her house," wrote diderot to mlle. volland, with an evident incapacity to comprehend the innocent appreciation of a pure-hearted woman. when he knew her better, he expressed his regret that he had not known her sooner. "you would certainly have inspired me with a taste for purity and for delicacy," he says, "which would have passed from my soul into my works." he refers to her again as "a woman who possesses all that the purity of an angelic soul adds to an exquisite taste." among the many distinguished foreigners who found their way into this pleasant circle was her early lover, gibbon. the old days were far away when she presided over the literary coterie at lausanne, speculated upon the mystery of love, talked of the possibility of tender and platonic friendships between men and women, after the fashion of the precieuses, and wept bitter tears over the faithlessness of the embryo historian. the memory of her grief had long been lost in the fullness of subsequent happiness, and one readily pardons her natural complacency in the brilliancy of a position which took little added luster from the fame of the man who had wooed and so easily forgotten her. this period of mme. necker's career shows her character on a very engaging side. loving her husband with a devotion that verged upon idolatry, she was rich in the friendship of men like thomas, buffon, grimm, diderot, and voltaire, whose respectful tone was the highest tribute to her dignity and her delicacy. but the true nature of a woman is best seen in her relations with her own sex. there are a thousand fine reserves in her relations with men that, in a measure, veil her personality. they doubtless call out the most brilliant qualities of her intellect, and reveal her character, in some points, on its best and most lovable side; but the rare shades of generous and unselfish feeling are more clearly seen in the intimate friendships, free from petty vanities and jealous rivalries, rich in cordial appreciation and disinterested affection, which we often find among women of the finest type. it is impossible that one so serious and so earnest as mme. necker should have cherished such passionate friendships for her own sex, if she had been as cold or as calculating as she has been sometimes represented. her intimacy with mme. de marchais, of which we have so many pleasant details, furnishes a case in point. this graceful and vivacious woman, who talked so eloquently upon philosophical, political, and economic questions, was the center of a circle noted for its liberal tendencies. a friend of mme. de pompadour, at whose suppers she often sang; gifted, witty, and, in spite of a certain seriousness, retaining always the taste, the elegance, the charming manners which were her native heritage, she attracted to her salon not only a distinguished literary company, but many men and women from the great world of which she only touched the borders. mme. necker had sought the aid and advice of mme. de marchais in the formation of her own salon, and had taken for her one of those ardent attachments so characteristic of earnest and susceptible natures. she confided to her all the secrets of her heart; she felt a double pleasure when her joys and her little troubles were shared with this sympathetic companion. "i had for her a passionate affection," she says. "when i first saw her my whole soul was captivated. i thought her one of those enchanting fairies who combine all the gifts of nature and of magic. i loved her; or, rather, i idolized her." so pure, so confiding, so far above reproach herself, she refuses to see the faults of one she loves so tenderly. her letters glow with exalted sentiment. "adieu, my charming, my beautiful, my sweet friend," she writes. "i embrace you. i press you to my bosom; or, rather, to my soul, for it seems to me that no interval can separate yours from mine." but the character of mme. de marchais was evidently not equal to her fascination. her vanity was wounded by the success of her friend. she took offense at a trifling incident that touched her self-love. "the great ladies have disgusted me with friendship," she wrote, in reply to mme. necker's efforts to repair the breach. they returned to each other the letters so full of vows of eternal fidelity, and were friends no more. apparently without any fault of her own, mme. necker was left with an illusion the less, and the world has another example to cite of the frail texture of feminine friendships. she was not always, however, so unfortunate in her choice. she found a more amiable and constant object for her affections in mme. d'houdetot, a charming woman who, in spite of her errors, held a very warm place in the hearts of her cotemporaries. we have met her before in the philosophical circles of la chevrette, and in the beautiful promenades of the valley of montmorency, where rousseau offered her the incense of a passionate and poetic love. she was facile and witty, graceful and gay, said wise and thoughtful things, wrote pleasant verses which were the exhalations of her own heart, and was the center of a limited though distinguished circle; but her chief attraction was the magic of a sunny temper and a loving spirit. "he only is unhappy who can neither love, nor work, nor die," she writes. though more or less linked with the literary coteries of her time, mme. d'houdetot seems to have been singularly free from the small vanities and vulgar ambitions so often met there. she loved simple pleasures and the peaceful scenes of the country. "what more have we to desire when we can enjoy the pleasures of friendship and of nature?" she writes. "we may then pass lightly over the small troubles of life." she counsels repose to her more restless friend, and her warm expressions of affection have always the ring of sincerity, which contrasts agreeably with the artificial tone of the time. mme. d'houdetot lived to a great age, preserving always her youthfulness of spirit and sweet serenity of temper, in spite of sharp domestic sorrows. she took refuge from these in the life-long friendship of saint-lambert, for whom mme. necker has usually a gracious message. it is a curious commentary upon the manners of the age that one so rigid and severe should have chosen for her intimate companionship two women whose lives were so far removed from her own ideal of reserved decorum. but she thought it best to ignore errors which her world did not regard as grave, if she was conscious of them at all. one finds greater pleasure in recalling her ardent and romantic attachment to the granddaughter of the marechale de luxembourg, the lovely amelie de boufflers, duchesse de lauzun, whose pen-portrait she sketched so gracefully and so tenderly; whose gentle sweetness and shy delicacy, in the rather oppressive glare of her surroundings, suggest a modest wild flower astray among the pretentious beauties of the hothouse, and whose untimely death on the scaffold has left her fragrant memory entwined with a garland of cypress. but we cannot dwell upon the intimate phases of this friendship, whose fine quality is shown in the few scattered leaves of a correspondence overflowing with the wealth of two rare though unequally gifted natures. at a later period her husband's position in the ministry, and the pronounced opinions of her brilliant daughter, gave to the salon of mme. necker a marked political and semi-revolutionary coloring. her inclinations always led her to literary diversions, rather than to the discussion of economic questions, but as mme. de stael gradually took the scepter that was falling from her hand, she found it difficult to guide the conversation into its old channels. her pale, thoughtful face, her gentle manner, her soft and penetrating voice, all indicated an exquisitely feminine quality quite in unison with the spirit of urbanity and politeness that was even then going out of fashion. her quiet and earnest though interesting conversation was somewhat overshadowed by the impetuous eloquence of mme. de stael, who gave the tone to every circle into which she came. "i am more and more convinced that i am not made for the great world," she said to the duchesse de lauzun, with an accent of regret. "it is germaine who should shine there and who should love it, for she possesses all the qualities which put her in a position to be at once feared and sought." if she was allied to the past, however, by her tastes and her sympathies, she belonged to the future by her convictions, and her many-sided intellect touched upon every question of the day. profoundly religious herself, she was broadly tolerant; always delicate in health, she found time amid her numerous social duties to aid the poor and suffering, and to establish the hospital that still bears her name. her letters and literary records reveal a woman of liberal thought and fine insight, as well as scholarly tastes. if she lacked a little in the facile graces of the french women, she had to an eminent degree the qualities of character that were far rarer in her age and sphere. though she was cold and reserved in manner, beneath the light snow which she brought from her native hills beat a heart of warm and tender, even passionate, impulses. devoted wife, loyal friend, careful mother, large-minded and large-souled woman, she stands conspicuous, in a period of lax domestic relations, for the virtues that grace the fireside as well as for the talents that shine in the salon. but she was not exempt from the sorrows of a nature that exacts from life more than life can give, and finds its illusions vanish before the cold touch of experience. she had her hours of darkness and of suffering. even the love that was the source of her keenest happiness was also the source of her sharpest griefs. in the days of her husband's power she missed the exclusive attention she craved. there were moments when she doubted the depth of his affection, and felt anew that her "eyes were wedded to eternal tears." she could not see without pain his extreme devotion to her daughter, whose rich nature, so spontaneous, so original, so foreign to her own, gave rise to many anxieties and occasional antagonisms. this touches the weak point in her character. she was not wholly free from a certain egotism and intellectual vanity, without the imagination to comprehend fully an individuality quite remote from all her preconceived ideas. she was slow to accept the fact that her system of education was at fault, and her failure to mold her daughter after her own models was long a source of grief and disappointment. she was ambitious too, and had not won her position without many secret wounds. when misfortunes came, the blows that fell upon her husband struck with double force into her own heart. she was destined to share with him the chill of censure and neglect, the bitter sting of ingratitude, the lonely isolation of one fallen from a high place, whose friendship and whose favors count no more. in the solitude of coppet, where she died at fifty-seven, during the last and darkest days of the revolution, perhaps she realized in the tireless devotion of her husband and the loving care of mme. de stael the repose of heart which the brilliant world of paris never gave her. with all her gifts, which have left many records that may be read, and in spite of a few shadows that fall more or less upon all earthly relations, not the least of her legacies to posterity was the beautiful example, rarer then than now, of that true and sympathetic family life in which lies the complete harmony of existence, a safeguard against the storms of passion, a perennial fount of love that keeps the spirit young, the tranquility out of which spring the purest flowers of human happiness and human endeavor. there were many salons of lesser note which have left agreeable memories. it would be pleasant to recall other clever and beautiful women whose names one meets so often in the chronicles of the time, and whose faces, conspicuous for their clear, strong outlines, still look out upon us from the galleries that perpetuate its life; but the list is too long and would lead us too far. from the moving procession of social leaders who made the age preceding the revolution so brilliant i have chosen only the few who were most widely known, and who best represent its dominant types and its special phases. the most remarkable period of the literary salons was really closed with the death of mme. du deffand, in . mme. geoffrin had already been dead three years, and mlle. de lespinasse, four. some of the most noted of the philosophers and men of letters were also gone, others were past the age of forming fresh ties, the young men belonged to another generation, and no new drawing rooms exactly replaced the old ones. mme. necker still received the world that was wont to assemble in the great salons, mme. de condorcet presided over a rival coterie, and there were numerous small and intimate circles; but the element of politics was beginning to intrude, and with it a degree of heat which disturbed the usual harmony. the reign of esprit, the perpetual play of wit had begun to pall upon the tastes of people who found themselves face to face with problems so grave and issues so vital. there was a slight reaction towards nature and simplicity. "they may be growing wiser," said walpole, "but the intermediate change is dullness." for nearly half a century learned men and clever women had been amusing themselves with utopian theories, a few through conviction, the majority through fashion, or egotism, or the vanity of saying new things, just as the world is doing today. the doctrines put forth by montesquieu, vivified by voltaire, and carried to the popular heart by rousseau had been freely discussed in the salons, not only by philosophers and statesmen, but by men of the world, poets, artists, and pretty women. the sparks of thought with which they played so lightly filtered slowly through the social strata. the talk of the drawing room at last reached the street. but the torch of truth which, held aloft, serves as a beacon star to guide the world towards some longed for ideal becomes often a deadly explosive when it falls among the poisonous vapors of inflammable human passions. liberty, equality, fraternity assumed a new and fatal significance in the minds of the hungry and restless masses who, embittered by centuries of wrong, were ready to carry these phrases to their immediate and living conclusions. they had found their watchwords and their hour. the train was already laid beneath this complex social structure, and the tragedy that followed carried to a common ruin court and salon, philosophers and beaux esprits, innocent women and dreaming men. that the salons were unconscious instruments in hastening the catastrophe, which was sooner or later inevitable, is undoubtedly true. their influence in the dissemination of thought was immense. the part they played was, to a limited extent, precisely that of the modern press, with an added personal element. they moved in the drift of their time, directed its intelligence, and reflected its average morality. as centers of serious conversation they were distinctly stimulating. it is quite possible that they stimulated the intellect to the exclusion of the more solid qualities of character, and that they were the source of a vast amount of affectation. it was the fashion to have esprit, and those who were deficient in an article so essential to success were naturally disposed to borrow it, or to put on the semblance of it. but no phase of life is without its reverse side, and the present generation cannot claim freedom from pretension of the same sort. it is not unlikely that in expanding the intelligence they established new standards of distinction, which in a measure weakened the old ones. but if they precipitated the downfall of the court they began by rivaling, it was in the logical course of events, which few were wise enough to foresee, much less to determine. it is worthy of remark that this reign of women, in which the manners and forms of modern society found their initiative and their models, was not a reign of youth, or beauty, though these qualities are never likely to lose their own peculiar fascination. it was, before all things, a reign of intelligence, and ascendency of women who had put on the hues of age without laying aside the permanent charm of a fully developed personality. it was intelligence blended with practical knowledge of the world and with the graceful amenities that heightened while half disguising its power. the women of the present have different aims. they are no longer content with the role of inspirer. their methods are more direct. they depend less upon finesse, more upon inherent right and strength. but it is to the women who shone so conspicuously in france for more than two hundred years that we may trace the broadened intellectual life, the unfettered activities, the wide and beneficent influence of the women of today. chapter xvii. salons of the revolution--madame roland _change in the character of the salons--mme. de condorcet--mme. roland's story of her own life--a marriage of reason--enthusiasm for the revolution--her modest salon--her tragical fate_ the salons of the revolution were no longer simply the fountains of literary and artistic criticism, the centers of wit, intelligence, knowledge, philosophy, and good manners, but the rallying points of parties. they took the tone of the time and assumed the character of political clubs. the salon of was not the salon of . a new generation had arisen, with new ideals and a new spirit that made for itself other forms or greatly modified the old ones. it was not led by philosophers and beaux esprits who evolved theories and turned them over as an intellectual diversion, but by men of action, ready to test these theories and force them to their logical conclusions. mirabeau, vergniaud, and robespierre had succeeded voltaire, diderot, and d'alembert. impelled towards one end, by vanity, ambition, love of glory, or genuine conviction, these men and their colleagues turned the salon, which had so long been the school of public opinion, into an engine of revolution. the exquisite flower of the eighteenth century had blossomed, matured, and fallen. perhaps it was followed by a plant of sturdier growth, but the rare quality of its beauty was not repeated. the time was past when the gentle touch of women could temper the violence of clashing opinions, or subject the discussion of vital questions to the inflexible laws of taste. no tactful hostess could hold in leading strings these fiery spirits. the voices that had charmed the old generation were silent. of the women who had made the social life of the century so powerful and so famous, many were quietly asleep before the storm broke; many were languishing in prison cells, with no outlook but the scaffold; some were pining in the loneliness of exile; and a few were buried in a seclusion which was their only safeguard. but nature has always in reserve fresh types that come to the surface in a great crisis. the women who made themselves felt and heard above the din of revolution, though by no means deficient in the graces, were mainly distinguished for quite other qualities than those which shine in a drawing room or lead a coterie. they were either women of rare genius and the courage of their convictions, or women trained in the stern school of a bitter experience, who found their true milieu in the midst of stirring events. the names of mme. de stael, mme. roland, and mme. de condorcet readily suggest themselves as the most conspicuous representatives of this stormy period. with different gifts and in different measure, each played a prominent role in the brief drama to which they lent the inspiration of their genius and their sympathy, until they were forced to turn back with horror from that carnival of savage passions which they had unconsciously helped to let loose upon the world. the salon of the young, beautiful, and gifted mme. de condorcet had its roots in the old order of things. during the ministry of necker it was in come degree a rival of the salon helvetique, and included many of the same guests; later it became a rendezvous for the revolutionary party. the marquis de condorcet was not only philosopher, savant, litterateur, a member of two academies, and among the profoundest thinkers of his time, but a man of the world, who inherited the tastes and habits of the old noblesse. his wife, whom he had married late in life, was sophie de grouchy, sister of the marechal, and was noted for remarkable talents, as well as for surpassing beauty. belonging by birth and associations to the aristocracy, and by her pronounced opinions to the radical side of the philosophic party, her salon was a center in which two worlds met. in its palmy days people were only speculating upon the borders of an abyss which had not yet opened visibly before them. the revolutionary spirit ran high, but had not passed the limits of reason and humanity. mme. de condorcet, who was deeply tinged with the new doctrines, presided with charming grace, and her youthful beauty lent an added fascination to the brilliancy of her intellect and the rather grave eloquence of her conversation. in her drawing room were gathered men of letters and women of talent, nobles and scientists, philosophers and beaux esprits. turgot and malesherbes represented its political side; marmontel, the abbe morellet, and suard lent it some of the wit and vivacity that shone in the old salons. literature, science, and the arts were discussed here, and there was more or less reading, music, or recitation. but the tendency was towards serious conversation, and the tone was often controversial. the character of condorcet was a sincere and elevated one. "he loved much and he loved many people," said mlle. de lespinasse. he aimed at enlightening and regenerating the world, not at overturning it; but, like many others, strong souls and true, he was led from practical truth in the pursuit of an ideal one. his wife, who shared his political opinions, united with them a fiery and independent spirit that was not content with theories. her philosophic tastes led her to translate adam smith, and to write a fine analysis of the "moral sentiments." but the sympathy of which she spoke so beautifully, and which gave so living a force to the philosophy it illuminated, if not directed by broad intelligence and impartial judgment, is often like the ignis fatuus that plays over the poisonous marsh and lures the unwary to destruction. for a brief day the magical influence of mme. de condorcet was felt more or less by all who came within her circle. she inspired the equable temper of her husband with her own enthusiasm, and urged him on to extreme measures from which his gentler soul would have recoiled. when at last he turned from those scenes of horror, choosing to be victim rather than oppressor, it was too late. perhaps she recalled the days of her power with a pang of regret when her friends had fallen one by one at the scaffold, and her husband, hunted and deserted by those he tried to serve, had died by his own hand, in a lonely cell, to escape a sadder fate; while she was left, after her timely release from prison, to struggle alone in poverty and obscurity, for some years painting water-color portraits for bread. she was not yet thirty when the revolution ended, and lived far into the present century; but though the illusions of her youth had been rudely shattered, she remained always devoted to her liberal principles and a broad humanity. the woman, however, who most fitly represents the spirit of the revolution, who was at once its inspiration, its heroine, and its victim, is mme. roland. it is not as the leader of a salon that she takes her place in the history of her time, but as one of the foremost and ablest leaders of a powerful political party. born in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, she had neither the prestige of a name nor the distinction of an aristocratic lineage. reared in seclusion, she was familiar with the great world by report only. though brilliant, even eloquent in conversation when her interest was roused, her early training had added to her natural distaste for the spirit, as well as the accessories, of a social life that was inevitably more or less artificial. she would have felt cramped and caged in the conventional atmosphere of a drawing room in which the gravest problems were apt to be forgotten in the flash of an epigram or the turn of a bon mot. the strong and heroic outlines of her character were more clearly defined on the theater of the world. but at a time when the empire of the salon was waning, when vital interests and burning convictions had for the moment thrown into the shade all minor questions of form and convenance, she took up the scepter in a simpler fashion, and, disdaining the arts of a society of which she saw only the fatal and hopeless corruption, held her sway over the daring and ardent men who gathered about her by the unassisted force of her clear and vigorous intellect. it would be interesting to trace the career of the thoughtful and precocious child known as manon or marie phlipon, who sat in her father's studio with the burin of an engraver in one hand and a book in the other, eagerly absorbing the revolutionary theories which were to prove so fatal to her, but it is not the purpose here to dwell upon the details of her life. in the solitude of a prison cell and under the shadow of the scaffold she told her own story. she has introduced us to the simple scenes of her childhood, the modest home on the quai de l'horloge, the wise and tender mother, the weak and unstable father. we are made familiar with the tiny recess in which she studies, reads, and makes extracts from the books which are such strange companions for her years. we seem to see the grave little face as it lights with emotion over the inspiring pages of fenelon or the chivalrous heroes of tasso, and sympathize with the fascination that leads the child of nine years to carry her plutarch to mass instead of her prayer book. she portrays for us her convent life with its dreams, its exaltations, its romantic friendships, and its ardent enthusiasms. we have vivid pictures of the calm and sympathetic sophie cannet, to whom she unburdens all her hopes and aspirations and sorrows; of the lively sister henriette, who years afterward, in the generous hope of saving her early friend, proposed to exchange clothes and take her place in the cells of sainte-pelagie. in the long and commonplace procession of suitors that files before us, one only touches her heart. la blancherie has a literary and philosophic turn, and the young girl's imagination drapes him in its own glowing colors. the opposition of her father separates them, but absence only lends fuel to this virgin flame. one day she learns that his views are mercenary, that he is neither true nor disinterested, and the charm is broken. she met him afterward in the luxembourg gardens with a feather in his hat, and the last illusion vanished. there is an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully sketched. she sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies, the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that make so beautiful a background for youthful loves and hopes. perhaps we could wish sometimes that she were a little less frank. we miss a touch of delicacy in this nature that was so strong and self-poised. we are sorry that she dismissed la blancherie quite so theatrically. there is a trace too much of consciousness in her fine self-analysis, perhaps a little vanity, and we half suspect that her unchildlike penetration and precocity of motive was sometimes the reflection of an afterthought. but it is to be remembered that, even in childhood, she had lived in such close companionship with the heroes and moralists of the past that their sentiments had become her own. she doubtless posed a little to herself, as well as to the world, but her frankness was a part of that uncompromising truthfulness which scorned disguises of any sort, and led her to paint faults and virtues alike. family sorrows--the death of the mother whom she adored, and the unworthiness of her father--combined to change the current of her free and happy life, and to deepen a natural vein of melancholy. in her loneliness of soul the convent seemed to offer itself as the sole haven of peace and rest. the child, who loved fenelon, and dreamed over the lives of the saints, had in her much of the stuff out of which mystics and fanatics are made. her ardent soul was raised to ecstasy by the stately ceremonial of the church; her imagination was captivated by its majestic music, its mystery, its solemnity, and she was wont to spend hours in rapt meditation. but her strong fund of good sense, her firm reason fortified by wide and solid reading, together with her habits of close observation and analysis, saved her from falling a victim to her own emotional needs, or to chimeras of any sort. she had drawn her mental nourishment too long from voltaire, rousseau, montesquieu, the english philosophers, and classic historians, to become permanently a prey to exaggerated sensibilities, though it was the same temperament fired by a sense of human inequality and wrong, that swept her at last along the road that led to the scaffold. at twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage of reason. it may be noted here that though mme. roland had lost her belief in ecclesiastical systems, and, as she said, continued to go to mass only for the "edification of her neighbors and the good order of society," there was always in her nature a strong undercurrent of religious feeling. her faith had not survived the full illumination of her reason, but her trust in immortality never seriously wavered. the invocation that was among her last written words is the prayer of a soul that is conscious of its divine origin and destiny. she retained, too, the firm moral basis that was laid in her early teachings, and which saved her from the worst errors of her time. she might be shaken by the storms of passion, but one feels that she could never be swept from her moorings. tall and finely developed, with dark brown hair; a large mouth whose beauty lay in a smile of singular sweetness; dark, serious eyes with a changeful expression which no artist could catch; a fresh complexion that responded to every emotion of a passionate soul; a deep, well-modulated voice; manners gentle, modest, reserved, sometimes timid with the consciousness that she was not readily taken at her true value--such was the personnelle of the woman who calmly weighed the possibilities of a life which had no longer a pleasant outlook in any direction, and, after much hesitation, became the wife of a grave, studious, austere man of good family and moderate fortune, but many years her senior. it was this marriage, into which she entered with all seriousness, and a devotion that was none the less sincere because it was of the intellect rather than the heart, that gave the final tinge to a character that was already laid on solid foundations. strong, clear-sighted, earnest, and gifted, her later experience had accented a slightly ascetic quality which had been deepened also by her study of antique models. her tastes were grave and severe. but they had a lighter side. as a child she had excelled in music, dancing, drawing, and other feminine accomplishments, though one feels always that her distinctive talent does not lie in these things. she is more at home with her thoughts. there was a touch of poetry, too, in her nature, that under different circumstances might have lent it a softer and more graceful coloring. she had a natural love for the woods and the flowers. the single relief to her somber life at la platiere, after her marriage, was in the long and lonely rambles in the country, whose endless variations of hill and vale and sky and color she has so tenderly and so vividly noted. in her last days a piano and a few flowers lighted the darkness of her prison walls, and out of these her imagination reared a world of its own, peopled with dreams and fancies that contrasted strangely with the gloom of her surroundings. this poetic vein was closely allied to the keen sensibility that tempered the seriousness of her character. with the mental equipment of a man, she combined the rich sympathy of a woman. her devotion to her mother was passionate in its intensity; her letters to sophie throb with warmth and sentiment. she is tender and loving, as well as philosophic and thoughtful. her emotional ardor was doubtless partly the glow of youth and not altogether in the texture of a mind so eminently rational; but there were rich possibilities behind it. a shade of difference in the mental and moral atmosphere, a trace more or less of sunshine and happiness are important factors in the peculiar combination of qualities that make up a human being. the marriage of mme. roland led her into a world that had little color save what she brought into it. her husband did not smile upon her friends. sympathy other than that of the intellect she does not seem to have had. but her story is best told in her own words, written in the last days of her life. "in considering only the happiness of my partner, i soon perceived that something was wanting to my own. i had never, for a single instant, ceased to see in my husband one of the most estimable of men, to whom i felt it an honor to belong; but i have often realized that there was a lack of equality between us, that the ascendency of an overbearing character, added to that of twenty years more of age, gave him too much superiority. if we lived in solitude, i had many painful hours to pass; if we went into the world, i was loved by men of whom i saw that some might touch me too deeply. i plunged into work with my husband, another excess which had its inconvenience; i gave him the habit of not knowing how to do without me for anything in the world, nor at any moment. "i honor, i cherish my husband, as a sensible daughter adores a virtuous father to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but i have found the man who might have been that lover, and remaining faithful to my duties, my frankness has not known how to conceal the feelings which i subjected to them. my husband, excessively sensitive both in his affections and his self-love, could not support the idea of the least change in his influence; his imagination darkened, his jealousy irritated me; happiness fled; he adored me, i sacrificed myself for him, and we were miserable. "if i were free, i would follow him everywhere to soften his griefs and console his old age; a soul like mine leaves no sacrifices imperfect. but roland was embittered by the thought of sacrifice, and the knowledge once acquired that i mad made one ruined his happiness; he suffered in accepting it, and could not do without it." the sequel to this tale is told in allusions and half revelations, in her letters to buzot, which glow with suppressed feeling; in her touching farewell to one whom she dared not to name, but whom she hoped to meet where it would not be a crime to love; in those final words of her "last thoughts"--"adieu.... no, it is from thee alone that i do not separate; to leave the earth is to approach each other." beneath this semi-transparent veil the heart-drama of her life is hidden. for the sake of those who would be pained by this story, as well as for her own, we would rather it had never been told. we should like to believe that the woman who worked so nobly with and for the man who died by his own hand five days after her death, because he could stay no longer in a world where such crimes were possible, had lived in the full perfection of domestic sympathy. but, if she carried with her an incurable wound, one cannot help regretting that her spartan courage had not led her to wear the mantle of silence to the end. posterity is curious rather than sympathetic, and the world is neither wiser nor better for these needless soul-revelations. there is always a certain malady of egotism behind them. but it is often easier to scale the heights of human heroism than to still the cry of a bruised spirit. mme. roland had moments of falling short of her own ideals, and this was one of them. pure, loyal, self-sustained as she was, her strong sense of verity did not permit the veil which would have best served the interests of the larger truth. it is fair to say that she thought the malicious gossip of her enemies rendered this statement necessary to the protection of her fame. perhaps, after all, she shows here her most human and lovable if not her strongest side. we should like minerva better if she were not so faultlessly wise. the outbreak of the revolution found mme. roland at la platiere, where she shared her husband's philosophic and economic studies, brought peace into a discordant family, attended to her household duties and the training of her child, devoted many hours to generous care for the sick and poor, and reserved a little leisure for poetry and the solitary rambles she loved so well. the first martial note struck a responsive chord in her heart. her opportunity had come. embittered by class distinctions over which she had long brooded, saturated with the sentiments of rousseau, and full of untried theories constructed in the closet, with small knowledge of the wide and complex interests with which it was necessary to deal, she centered all the hitherto latent energies of her forceful nature upon the quixotic effort to redress human wrongs. her birth, her intellect, her character, her temperament, her education, her associations--all led her towards the role she played so heroically. she had a keen appreciation for genuine values, but none whatever for factitious ones. her inborn hatred of artificial distinctions had grown with her years and colored all her estimates of men and things. when she came to paris, she noted with a sort of indignation the superior poise and courtesy of the men in the assembly who had been reared in the habit of power. it added fuel to her enmity towards institutions in which reason, knowledge, and integrity paid homage to fine language and distinguished manners. she found even vergniaud too refined and fastidious in his dress for a successful republican leader. her old contempt for a "philosopher with a feather" had in no wise abated. with such principles ingrained and fostered, it is not difficult to forecast the part mme. roland was destined to play in the coming conflict of classes. whatever we may think of the wisdom of her attitude towards the revolution, she represented at least its most sincere side. as she stood white-robed and courageous at the foot of the scaffold, facing the savage populace she had laid down her life to befriend, perhaps her perspectives were truer. experience had given her an insight into the characters of men which is not to be gained in the library, nor in the worship of dead heroes. if it had not shaken her faith in human perfectibility, it had taught her at least the value of tradition in chaining brutal human passions. the tragical fate of mme. roland has thrown a strong light upon the modest little salon in which the unfortunate girondists met four times a week to discuss the grave problems that confronted them. a salon in the old sense it certainly was not. it had little in common with the famous centers of conversation and esprit. it was simply the rallying point of a party. the only woman present was mme. roland herself, but at first she assumed no active leadership. she sat at a little table outside of the circle, working with her needle, or writing letters, alive to everything that was said, venturing sometimes a word of counsel or a thoughtful suggestion, and often biting her lips to repress some criticism that she feared might not be within her province. she had left her quiet home in the country fired with a single thought--the regeneration of france. the men who gathered about her were in full accord with her generous aims. it was not to such enthusiasms that the old salons lost themselves. they had been often the centers of political intrigues, as in the days of the fronde; or of religious partisanship, as during the troubles of port royal; they had ranged themselves for and against rival candidates for literary or artistic honors; but they had preserved, on the whole, a certain cosmopolitan character. all shades of opinion were represented, and social brilliancy was the end sought, not the triumph of special ideas. it is indeed true that earnest convictions were, to some extent, stifled in the salons, where charm and intelligence counted for so much, and the sterling qualities of character for so little. but the etiquette, the urbanity, the measure, which assured the outward harmony of a society that courted distinction of every kind, were quite foreign to the iconoclasts who were bent upon leveling all distinctions. the revolution which attacked the whole superstructure of society, was antagonistic to its minor forms as well, and it was the revolutionary party alone which was represented in the salon of mme. roland. brissot, vergniaud, petion, guadet, and buzot were leaders there--men sincere and ardent, though misguided, and unable to cope with the storm they had raised, to be themselves swept away by its pitiless rage. robespierre, scheming and ambitious, came there, listened, said little, appropriated for his own ends, and bided his time. mme. roland had small taste for the light play of intellect and wit that has no outcome beyond the meteoric display of the moment, and she was impatient with the talk in which an evening was often passed among these men without any definite results. as she measured their strength, she became more outspoken. she communicated to them a spark of her own energy. the most daring moves were made at her bidding. she urged on her timid and conservative husband, she drew up his memorials, she wrote his letters, she was at once his stimulus, and his helper. weak and vacillating men yielded to her rapid insight, her vigor, her earnestness, and her persuasive eloquence. this was probably the period of her greatest influence. many of the swift changes of those first months may be traced to her salon. the moves which were made in the assembly were concocted there, the orators who triumphed found their inspiration there. still, in spite of her energy, her strength, and her courage, she prides herself upon maintaining always the reserve and decorum of her sex. if she assumed the favorite role of the french woman for a short time while her husband was in the ministry, it was in a sternly republican fashion. she gave dinners twice a week to her husband's political friends. the fifteen or twenty men who met around her table at five o'clock were linked by political interests only. the service was simple, with no other luxury than a few flowers. there were no women to temper the discussions or to lighten their seriousness. after dinner the guests lingered for an hour or so in the drawing room, but by nine o'clock it was deserted. she received on friday, but what a contrast to the fridays of mme. necker in those same apartments! it was no longer a brilliant company of wits, savants, and men of letters, enlivened by women of beauty, esprit, rank, and fashion. there was none of the diversity of taste and thought which lends such a charm to social life. mme. roland tells us that she never had an extended circle at any time, and that, while her husband was in power, she made and received no visits, and invited no women to her house. she saw only her husband's colleagues, or those who were interested in his tastes and pursuits, which were also her own. the world of society wearied her. she was absorbed in a single purpose. if she needed recreation, she sought it in serious studies. it is always difficult to judge what a man or a woman might have been under slightly altered conditions. but for some single circumstance that converged and focused their talent, many a hero would have died unknown and unsuspected. the key that unlocks the treasure house of the soul is not always found, and its wealth is often scattered on unseen shores. but it is clear that the part of mme. roland could never have been a distinctively social one. she lived at a time when great events brought out great qualities. her clear intellect, her positive convictions, her boundless energy, and her ardent enthusiasm, gave her a powerful influence in those early days of the revolution, that looked towards a world reconstructed but not plunged into the dark depths of chaos, and it is through this that she has left a name among the noted women of france. in more peaceful times her peculiar talent would doubtless have led her towards literature. in her best style she has rare vigor and simplicity. she has moments of eloquent thought. there are flashes of it in her early letters to sophie, which she begs her friend not to burn, though she does not hope to rival mme. de sevigne, whom she takes for her model. she lacked the grace, the lightness, the wit, the humor of this model, but she had an earnestness, a serious depth of thought, that one does not find in mme. de sevigne. she had also a vein of sentiment that was an underlying force in her character, though it was always subject to her masculine intellect. she confesses that she should like to be the annalist of her country, and longs for the pen of tacitus, for whom she has a veritable passion. when one reads her sharp, incisive pen-portraits, drawn with such profound insight and masterly skill, one feels that her true vocation was in the world of letters. at the close she verges a little upon the theatrical, as sometimes in her young days. but when she wrote her final records she felt her last hours slipping away. life, with its large possibilities undeveloped and its promises unfulfilled, was behind her. darkness was all around her, eternal silence before her. and she had lived but thirty-nine years. mme. roland does not really belong to the world of the salons, though she has been included among them by some of her own cotemporaries. she was of quite another genre. she represents a social reaction in which old forms are adapted to new ideas and lose their essential quality by the change. but she foreshadows a type of woman that has had great influence since the salons have lost their prestige. she relied neither upon the reflected light of a coterie, the arts of the courtier, nor the subtle power of personal attraction; but, firm in her convictions, clear in her purpose, and unselfish in her aims, she laid down her interests, and, in the end, her life, upon the altar of liberty and humanity. she could hardly be regarded, however, as herself a type. she was cast in a rare mold and lived under rare conditions. she was individual, as were hypatia, joan of arc, and charlotte corday--a woman fitted for a special mission which brought her little but a martyr's crown and a permanent fame. chapter xviii. madame de stael _supremacy of her genius--her early training--her sensibility--a mariage de convenance--her salon--anecdote of benjamin constant--her exile--life at coppet--secret marriage--close of a stormy life._ the fame of all other french women is more or less overshadowed by that of one who was not only supreme in her own world, but who stands on a pinnacle so high that time and distance only serve to throw into stronger relief the grand outlines of her many-sided genius. without the simplicity and naturalness of mme. de sevigne, the poise and judgment of mme. de lafayette, or the calm foresight and diplomacy of mme. de maintenon, mme. de stael had a brilliancy of imagination, a force of passion, a grasp of intellect, and a diversity of gifts that belonged to none of these women. it is not possible within the limits of a brief chapter to touch even lightly upon the various phases of a character so complex and talents so versatile. one can only gather a few scattered traits and indicate a few salient points in a life of which the details are already familiar. as woman, novelist, philosopher, litterateur, and conversationist, she has marked, if not equal, claims upon our attention. to speak of her as simply the leader of a salon is to merge the greater talent into the less, but her brilliant social qualities in a measure brought out and illuminated all the others. it was not the gift of reconciling diverse elements, and of calling out the best thoughts of those who came within her radius, that distinguished her. her personality was too dominant not to disturb sometimes the measure and harmony which fashion had established. she did not listen well, but her gift was that of the orator, and, taking whatever subject was uppermost into her own hands, she talked with an irresistible eloquence that held her auditors silent and enchained. living as she did in the world of wit and talent which had so fascinated her mother, she ruled it as an autocrat. the mental coloring of mme. de stael was not taken in the shade, as that of mme. roland had been. she was reared in the atmosphere of the great world. that which her eager mind gathered in solitude was subject always to the modification which contact with vigorous living minds is sure to give. the little germaine necker who sat on a low stool at her mother's side, charming the cleverest men of her time by her precocious wit; who wrote extracts from the dramas she heard, and opinions upon the authors she read; who made pen-portraits of her friends, and cut out paper kings and queens to play in the tragedies she composed; whose heart was always overflowing with love for those around her, and who had supreme need for an outlet to her sensibilities, was a fresh type in that age of keen analysis, cold skepticism, and rigid forms. the serious utterances of her childhood were always suffused with feeling. she loved that which made her weep. her sympathies were full and overflowing, and when her vigorous and masculine intellect took the ascendency it directed them, but only partly held them in check. it never dulled nor subdued them. the source of her power, as also of her weakness, lay perhaps in her vast capacity for love. it gave color and force to her rich and versatile character. it animated all she did and gave point to all she wrote. it found expression in the eloquence of her conversation, in the exaltation and passionate intensity of her affections, in the fervor of her patriotism, in the self-forgetful generosity that brought her very near the verge of the scaffold. here was the source of that indefinable quality we call genius--not genius of the sort which buffon has defined as patience, but the divine flame that crowns with life the dead materials which patience has gathered. it was impossible that a child so eager, so sympathetic, so full of intellect and esprit, should not have developed rapidly in the atmosphere of her mother's salon. whether it was the best school for a young girl may be a question, but a character like that of mme. de stael is apt to go its own way in whatever circumstances it finds itself. she was the despair of mme. necker, whose educational theories were altogether upset by this precocious daughter who refused to be cast in a mold. but she was habituated to a high altitude of thought. men like marmontel, la harpe, grimm, thomas, and the abbe raynal delighted in calling out her ready wit, her brilliant repartee, and her precocious ideas. surrounded thus from childhood with all the appointments as well as the talent and esprit that made the life of the salons so fascinating; inheriting the philosophic insight of her father, the literary gifts of her mother, to which she added a genius all her own; heir also to the spirit of conversation, the facility, the enthusiasm, the love of pleasing which are the gallic birthright, she took her place in the social world as a queen by virtue of her position, her gifts, and her heritage. already, before her marriage, she had changed the tone of her mother's salon. she brought into it an element of freshness and originality which the dignified and rather precise character of mme. necker had failed to impart. she gave it also a strong political coloring. this influence was more marked after she became the wife of the swedish ambassador, as she continued for some time to pass her evenings in her mother's drawing room, where she became more and more a central figure. her temperament and her tastes were of the world in which she lived, but her reason and her expansive sympathies led her to ally herself with the popular cause; hence she was, to some extent, a link between two conflicting interests. it was in that mme. de stael entered the world as a married woman. this marriage was arranged for her after the fashion of the time, and she accepted it as she would have accepted anything tolerable that pleased her idolized father and revered mother. when only ten years of age, she observed that they took great pleasure in the society of gibbon, and she gravely proposed to marry him, that they might always have this happiness. the full significance of this singular proposition is not apparent until one remembers that the learned historian was not only rather old, but so short and fat as to call out from one of his friends the remark that when he needed a little exercise he had only to take a turn of three times around m. gibbon. the baron de stael had an exalted position, fine manners, a good figure, and a handsome face, but he lacked the one thing that mme. de stael most considered, a commanding talent. she did not see him through the prism of a strong affection which transfigures all things, even the most commonplace. what this must have meant to a woman of her genius and temperament whose ideal of happiness was a sympathetic marriage, it is not difficult to divine. it may account, in some degree, for her restlessness, her perpetual need of movement, of excitement, of society. but, whatever her domestic troubles may have been, they were of limited duration. she was quietly separated from her husband in . four years later she decided to return to coppet with him, as he was unhappy and longed to see his children. he died en route. the period of this marriage was one of the most memorable of france, the period when noble and generous spirits rallied in a spontaneous movement for national regeneration. mme. de stael was in the flush of hope and enthusiasm, fresh from the study of rousseau and her own dreams of human perfectibility; radiant, too, with the reflection of her youthful fame. among those who surrounded her were the montmorencys, lafayette, and count louis de narbonne, whose brilliant intellect and charming manners touched her perhaps too deeply for her peace of mind. there were also barnave, chenier, talleyrand, mirabeau, vergniaud, and many others of the active leaders of the revolution. a few woman mingled in her more intimate circle, which was still of the old society. of these were the ill-fated duchesse de gramont, mme. de lauzun, the princesse de poix, and the witty, lovable marechale de beauvau. as a rule, though devoted to her friends and kind to those who sought her aid, mme. de stael did not like the society of women. perhaps they did not always respond to her elevated and swiftly flowing thoughts; or it may be that she wounded the vanity of those who were cast into the shade by talents so conspicuous and conversation so eloquent, and who felt the lack of sympathetic rapport. society is au fond republican, and is apt to resent autocracy, even the autocracy of genius, when it takes the form of monologue. it is contrary to the social spirit. the salon of mme. de stael not only took its tone from herself, but it was a reflection of herself. she was not beautiful, and she dressed badly; indeed, she seems to have been singularly free from that personal consciousness which leads people to give themselves the advantages of an artistic setting, even if the taste is not inborn. she was too intent upon what she thought and felt, to give heed to minor details. but in her conversation, which was a sort of improvisation, her eloquent face was aglow, her dark eyes flashed with inspiration, her superb form and finely poised head seemed to respond to the rhythmic flow of thoughts that were emphasized by the graceful gestures of an exquisitely molded hand, in which she usually held a sprig of laurel. "if i were queen," said mme. de tesse, "i would order mme. de stael to talk to me always." but this center in which the more thoughtful spirits of the old regime met the brilliant and active leaders of the new was broken up by the storm which swept away so many of its leaders, and mme. de stael, after lingering in the face of dangers to save her friends, barely escaped with her life on the eve of the september massacres of . "she is an excellent woman," said one of her contemporaries, "who drowns all her friends in order to have the pleasure of angling for them." mme. de stael resumed her place and organized her salon anew in . but it was her fate to live always in an atmosphere surcharged with storms. she was too republican for the aristocrats, and too aristocratic for the republicans. distrusted by both parties and feared by the directoire, she found it advisable after a few months to retire to coppet. less than two years later she was again in paris. her friends were then in power, notably talleyrand. "if i remain here another year i shall die," he had written her from america, and she had generously secured the repeal of the decree that exiled him, a kindness which he promptly forgot. though her enthusiasm for the republic was much moderated, and though she had been so far dazzled by the genius of napoleon as to hail him as a restorer of order, her illusions regarding him were very short-lived. she had no sympathy with his aims at personal power. her drawing room soon became the rallying point for his enemies and the center of a powerful opposition. but she had a natural love for all forms of intellectual distinction, and her genius and fame still attracted a circle more or less cosmopolitan. ministers of state and editors of leading journals were among her guests. joseph and lucien bonaparte were her devoted friends. the small remnant of the noblesse that had any inclination to return to a world which had lost its charm for them found there a trace of the old politeness. mathieu de montmorency, devout and charitable; his brother adrien, delicate in spirit and gentle in manners; narbonne, still devoted and diplomatic, and the chevalier de boufflers, gay, witty, and brilliant, were of those who brought into it something of the tone of the past regime. there were also the men of the new generation, men who were saturated with the principles of the revolution though regretting its methods. among these were chebnier, regnault, and benjamin constant. the influence of mme. de stael was at its height during this period. her talent, her liberal opinions, and her persuasive eloquence gave her great power over the constitutional leaders. the measures of the government were freely discussed and criticized in her salon, and men went out with positions well defined and speeches well considered. the duchesse d'abrantes relates an incident which aptly illustrates this power and its reaction upon herself. benjamin constant had prepared a brilliant address. the evening before it was to be delivered, mme. de stael was surrounded by a large and distinguished company. after tea was served he said to her: "your salon is filled with people who please you; if i speak tomorrow, it will be deserted. think of it." "one must follow one's convictions," she replied, after a moment's hesitation. she admitted afterward that she would never have refused his offer not to compromise her, if she could have foreseen all that would follow. the next day she invited her friends to celebrate his triumph. at four o'clock a note of excuse; in an hour, ten. from this time her fortunes waned. many ceased to visit her salon. even talleyrand, who owed her so much, came there no more. in later years she confessed that the three men she had most loved were narbonne, talleyrand, and mathieu de montmorency. her friendship for the first of these reached a passionate exaltation, which had a profound and not altogether wholesome influence upon her life. how completely she was disenchanted is shown in a remark she made long afterward of a loyal and distinguished man: "he has the manners of narbonne and a heart." it is a character in a sentence. mathieu de montmorency was a man of pure motives, who proved a refuge of consolation in many storms, but her regard for him was evidently a gentler flame that never burned to extinction. whatever illusions she may have had as to talleyrand--and they seem to have been little more than an enthusiastic appreciation of his talent--were certainly broken by his treacherous desertion in her hour of need. not the least among her many sorrows was the bitter taste of ingratitude. but napoleon, who, like louis xiv, sought to draw all influences and merge all power in himself, could not tolerate a woman whom he felt to be in some sense a rival. he thought he detected her hand in the address of benjamin constant which lost her so many friends. he feared the wit that flashed in her salon, the satire that wounded the criticism that measured his motives and his actions. he recognized the power of a coterie of brilliant intellects led by a genius so inspiring. his brothers, knowing her vulnerable point and the will with which she had to deal, gave her a word of caution. but the advice and intercession of her friends were alike without avail. the blow which she so much feared fell at last, and she found herself an exile and a wanderer from the scenes she most loved. we have many pleasant glimpses of her life at coppet, but a shadow always rests upon it. a few friends still cling to her through the bitter and relentless persecutions that form one of the most singular chapters in history, and offer the most remarkable tribute to her genius and her power. we find here schlegel, sismondi, mathieu de montmorency, prince augustus, monti, mme. recamier, and many other distinguished visitors of various nationalities. the most prominent figure perhaps was benjamin constant, brilliant, gifted, eloquent, passionate, vain, and capricious, the torturing consolation and the stormy problem of her saddest years. she revived the old literary diversions. at eleven o'clock, we are told, the guests assembled at breakfast, and the conversations took a high literary tone. they were resumed at dinner, and continued often until midnight. here, as elsewhere, mme. de stael was queen, holding her guests entranced by the magic of her words. "life is for me like a ball after the music has ceased," said sismondi when her voice was silent. she was a veritable corinne in her esprit, her sentiment, her gift of improvisation, and her underlying melancholy. but in this choice company hers was not the only voice, though it was heard above all the others. thought and wit flashed and sparkled. dramas were played--the "zaire" and "tancred" of voltaire, and tragedies written by herself. mme. recamier acted the aricie to mme. de stael's phedre. this life that seems to us so fascinating, has been described too often to need repetition. it had its tumultuous elements, its passionate undercurrents, its romantic episodes. but in spite of its attractions mme. de stael fretted under the peaceful shades of coppet. its limited horizon pressed upon her. the silence of the snowcapped mountains chilled her. she looked upon their solitary grandeur with "magnificent horror." the repose of nature was an "infernal peace" which plunged her into gloomier depths of ennui and despair. to some one who was admiring the beauties of lake leman she replied; "i should like better the gutters of the rue du bac." it was people, always people, who interested her. "french conversation exists only in paris," she said, "and conversation has been from infancy my greatest pleasure." restlessly she sought distraction in travel, but wherever she went the iron hand pressed upon her still. italy fostered her melancholy. she loved its ruins, which her imagination draped with the fading colors of the past and associated with the desolation of a living soul. but its exquisite variety of landscape and color does not seem to have touched her. "if it were not for the world's opinion," she said, "i would not open my window to see the bay of naples for the first time, but i would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom i have not met." germany gave her infinite food for thought, but her "astonishing volubility," her "incessant movement," her constant desire to know, to discuss, to penetrate all things wearied the moderate germans, as it had already wearied the serious english. "tell me, monsieur fichte," she said one day, "could you in a short time, a quarter of an hour for example, give me a glimpse of your system and explain what you understand by your me; i find it very obscure." the philosopher was amazed at what he thought her impertinence, but made the attempt through an interpreter. at the end of ten minutes she exclaimed, "that is sufficient, monsieur fichte. that is quite sufficient. i comprehend you perfectly. i have seen your system in illustration. it is one of the adventures of baron munchhausen." "we are in perpetual mental tension," said the wife of schiller. even schiller himself grew tired. "it seems as if i were relieved of a malady," he said, when she left. it was this excess of vivacity and her abounding sensibility that constituted at once her fascination and her misfortune. her beliefs were enthusiasms. her friendships were passions. "no one has carried the religion of friendship so far as myself," she said. to love, to be loved was the supreme need of her soul; but her love was a flame that irradiated her intellect and added brilliancy to the life it consumed. she paints in "corinne" the passions, the struggles, the penalties, and the sorrows of a woman of genius. it is a life she had known, a life of which she had tasted the sweetest delights and experienced the most cruel disenchantments. "corinne" at the capitol, "corinne" thinking, analyzing, loving, suffering, triumphing, wearing a crown of laurel upon her head and an invisible crown of thorns upon her heart--it is mme. de stael self-revealed by the light of her own imagination. it was in a moment of weakness and weariness, when her idols had one after another been shattered, and all the pleasant vistas of her youth seemed shut out forever, that she met m. de rocca, a wounded officer of good family, but of little more than half her years, whose gentle, chivalric character commanded her admiration, whose suffering touched her pity, and whose devotion won her affection. "i will love her so much that she will end by marrying me," he said, and the result proved his penetration. this marriage, which was a secret one, has shadowed a little the brilliancy of her fame, but if it was a weakness to bend from her high altitude, it was not a sin, though more creditable to her heart than to her worldly wisdom. at all events it brought into her life a new element of repose, and gave her a tender consolation in her closing years. when at last the relentless autocrat of france found his rock-bound limits, and she was free to return to the spot which had been the goal of all her dreams, it was too late. her health was broken. it is true her friends rallied around her, and her salon, opened once more, retook a little of its ancient glory. few celebrities who came to paris failed to seek the drawing room of mme. de stael, which was still illuminated with the brilliancy of her genius and the splendor of her fame. but her triumphs were past, and life was receding. her few remaining days of weakness and suffering, darkened by vain regrets, were passed more and more in the warmth and tenderness of her devoted family, in the noble and elevated thought that rose above the strife of politics into the serene atmosphere of a christian faith. at her death bed chateaubriand did her tardy justice. "bon jour, my dear francis; i suffer, but that does not prevent me from loving you," she said to one who had been her critic, but never her friend. her magnanimity was as unfailing as her generosity, and it may be truly said that she never cherished a hatred. the life of mme. de stael was in the world. she embodied the french spirit; she could not conceive of happiness in a secluded existence; a theater and an audience were needed to call out her best talents. she could not even bear her griefs alone. the world was taken into her confidence. she demanded its sympathy. she chanted exquisite requiems over her dead hopes and her lost illusions, but she chanted them in costume, never quite forgetting that her role was a heroic one. she added, however, to the gifts of an improvisatrice something infinitely higher and deeper. there was no problem with which she was not ready to deal. she felt the pulse beats in the great heart of humanity, and her tongue, her pen, her purse, and her influence were ever at the bidding of the unfortunate. she traversed all fields of thought, from the pleasant regions of poetry and romance to the highest altitudes of philosophy. we may note the drift of her ardent and imaginative nature in the youthful tales into which she wove her romantic dreams, her fancied griefs, her inward struggles, and her tears. in the pages of "corinne" we read the poetry, the sensibility, the passion, the melancholy, the thought of a matured woman whose youth of the soul neither sorrow nor experience could destroy. we may divine the direction of her sympathies, and the fountain of her inspiration, in her letters on rousseau, written at twenty, and foreshadowing her own attitude towards the theories which appealed so powerfully to the generous spirits of the century. we may follow the active and scholarly workings of her versatile intellect in her pregnant thoughts on literature, on the passions, on the revolution; or measure the clearness of her insight, the depth of her penetration, the catholicity of her sympathies, and the breadth of her intelligence in her profound and masterly, if not always accurate, studies of germany. the consideration of all this pertains to a critical estimate of her character and genius which cannot be attempted here. it has grown to be somewhat the fashion to depreciate the literary work of mme. de stael. measured by present standards she leaves something to be desired in logical precision; she had not the exactness of the critical scholar, nor the simplicity of the careful artist; the luxuriance of her language often obscures her thought. she is talking still, and her written words have the rapid, tumultuous flow of conversation, together with its occasional negligences, its careless periods, its sudden turns, its encumbered phrases. misguided she sometimes was, and carried away by the resistless rush of ideas that, like the mountain torrent, gathered much debris along their course. but her rapid judgments, which have the force of inspiration, are in advance of her time, though in the main correct from her own point of view, while her flaws in workmanship are more than counterbalanced by that inward illumination which is heaven's richest and rarest gift. but who cares to dwell upon the shadows that scarcely dim the brilliancy of a genius so rare and so commanding? they are but spots on the sun that are only discovered by looking through a glass that veils its radiance. it is just to weigh her by the standards of her own age. born at its highest level, she soared far above her generation. she carried within herself the vision of a statesman, the penetration of a critic, the insight of a philosopher, the soul of a poet, and the heart of a woman. if she was not without faults, she had rare virtues. no woman has ever exercised a wider or more varied influence. with one or two exceptions, none stands on so high a pinnacle. george sand was a more finished artist; george eliot was a greater novelist, a more accurate scholar, and a more logical thinker; but in versatility, in intellectual spontaneity, in brilliancy of conversation and natural eloquence of thought she is without a rival. her moral standards, too, were above the average of her time. her ideals were high and pure. the wealth of her emotions and the rich coloring of sentiment in which her thoughts and feelings were often clothed left her open to possible misconceptions. it was her fate to be grossly misunderstood, to miss the domestic happiness she craved, to be the victim of a sleepless persecution, to pass her best years in a dreary exile from the life she most loved, to be maligned by her enemies and betrayed by her friends. her very virtues were construed into faults and turned against her. though we may not lift the veil from her intimate life, we may fairly judge her by her own ideals and her dominant traits. the world, which is rarely indulgent, has been in the main just to her motives and her character. "i have been ever the same, intense and sad," were among her last words. "i have loved god, my father, and liberty." but she was a victim to the contradictory elements in her own nature, and walked always among storms. this nature, so complex, so rich, so ardent, so passionate, could it ever have found permanent repose? chapter xix. the salons of the empire and restoration--madame recamier _a transition period--mme. de montesson--mme. de genlis--revival of the literary spirit--mme. de beaumont--mme. de remusat--mme. de souza--mme. de duras--mme. de krudener--fascination of mme. recamier--her friends--her convent salon-- chateaubriand--decline of the salon_ in the best sense, society is born, not made. a crowd of well-dressed people is not necessarily a society. they may meet and disperse with no other bond of union than a fine house and lavish hospitality can give. it may be an assembly without unity, flavor, or influence. in the social chaos that followed the revolution, this truth found a practical illustration. the old circles were scattered. the old distinctions were virtually destroyed, so far as edicts can destroy that which lies in the essence of things. a few who held honored names were left, or had returned from a long exile, to find themselves bereft of rank, fortune, and friends; but these had small disposition to form new associations, and few points of contact with the parvenus who had mounted upon the ruins of their order. the new society was composed largely of these parvenus, who were ambitious for a position and a life of which they had neither the spirit, the taste, the habits, nor the mellowing traditions. naturally they mistook the gilded frame for the picture. unfamiliar with the gentle manners, the delicate sense of honor, and the chivalrous instincts which underlie the best social life, though not always illustrated by its individual members, they were absorbed in matters of etiquette of which they were uncertain, and exacting of non-essentials. they regarded society upon its commercial side, contended over questions of precedence, and, as one of the most observing of their contemporaries has expressed it, "bargained for a courtesy and counted visits." "i have seen quarrels in the imperial court," she adds, "over a visit more or less long, more or less deferred." perhaps it is to be considered that in a new order which has many aggressive elements, this balancing of courtesies is not without a certain raison d'etre as a protection against serious inroads upon time and hospitality; but the fault lies behind all this, in the lack of that subtle social sense which makes the discussion of these things superfluous, not to say impossible. it was the wish of napoleon to reconstruct a society that should rival in brilliancy the old courts. with this view he called to his aid a few women whose names, position, education, and reputation for esprit and fine manners he thought a sufficient guarantee of success. but he soon learned that it could not be commanded at will. the reply of the duchesse d'brantes, who has left us so many pleasant reminiscences of this period, in which she was an actor as well as an observer, was very apt. "you can do all that i wish," he said to her; "you are all young, and almost all pretty; ah, well! a young and pretty woman can do anything she likes." "sire, what your majesty says may be true," she replied, "but only to a certain point. if the emperor, instead of his guard and his good soldiers, had only conscripts who would recoil under fire, he could not win great battles like that of austerlitz. nevertheless, he is the first general in the world." but this social life was to serve a personal end. it was to furnish an added instrument of power to the autocrat who ruled, to reflect always and everywhere the glory of napoleon. the period which saw its cleverest woman in hopeless exile, and its most beautiful one under a similar ban for the crime of being her friend, was not one which favored intellectual supremacy. the empire did not encourage literature, it silenced philosophy, and oppressed the talent that did not glorify itself. its blighting touch rested upon the whole social fabric. the finer elements which, to some extent, entered into it were lost in the glitter of display and pretension. the true spirit of conversation was limited to private coteries that kept themselves in the shade, and were too small to be noted. the salon which represented the best side of the new regime was that of mme. de montesson, wife of the duc d'orleans, a woman of brilliant talents, finished manners, great knowledge of the world, fine gifts of conversation, and, what was equally essential, great discrimination and perfect tact. if her niece, mme. de genlis, is to be trusted, she had more ambition that originality, her reputation was superior to her abilities, and her beauty covered many imperfections. but she had experience, finesse, and prestige. napoleon was quick to see the value of such a woman in reorganizing a court, and treated her with the greatest consideration, even asking her to instruct josephine in the old customs and usages. her salon, however, united many elements which it was impossible to fuse. there were people of all parties and all conditions, a few of the nobles and returned emigres, the numerous members of the bonaparte family, the new military circle, together with many people of influence "not to the manner born." mme. de montesson revived the old amusements, wrote plays for the entertainment of her guests gave grand dinners and brilliant fetes. but the accustomed links were wanting. her salon simply illustrates a social life in a state of transition. mme. de genlis had lived much in the world before the revolution, and her position in the family of the duc d'orleans, together with her great versatility of talent, had given her a certain vogue. author, musician, teacher, moralist, critic, poser, egotist, femme d'esprit, and friend of princes, her romantic life would fill a volume and cannot be even touched upon in a few lines. after ten years of exile she returned to paris, and her salon at the arsenal was a center for a few celebrities. many of these names have small significance today. a few men like talleyrand, laharpe, fontanes, and cardinal maury were among her friends, and she was neutral enough, or diplomatic enough, not to give offense to the new government. but she was a woman of many affectations, and in spite of her numerous accomplishments, her cleverness, and her literary fame, the circle she gathered about her was never noted for its brilliancy or its influence. as a historic figure, she is more remarkable for the variety of her voluminous work, her educational theories, and her observations upon the world in which she lived, than for talents of a purely social order. one is little inclined to dwell upon the ruling society of this period. it had neither the dignity of past traditions nor freedom of intellectual expression. its finer shades were drowned in loud and glaring colors. the luxury that could be commanded counted for more than the wit and intelligence that could not. as the social elements readjusted themselves on a more natural basis, there were a few salons out of the main drift of the time in which the literary spirit flourished once more, blended with the refined tastes, the elegant manners, and the amiable courtesy that had distinguished the old regime. but the interval in which history was made so rapidly, and the startling events of a century were condensed into a decade, had wrought many vital changes. it was no longer the spirit of the eighteenth century that reappeared under its revived and attractive forms. we note a tone of seriousness that had no permanent place in that world of esprit and skepticism, of fine manners and lax morals, which divided its allegiance between fashion and philosophy. the survivors of so many heart-breaking tragedies, with their weary weight of dead hopes and sad memories, found no healing balm in the cold speculation and scathing wit of diderot or voltaire. even the devotees of philosophy gave it but a half-hearted reverence. it was at this moment that chateaubriand, saturated with the sorrows of his age, and penetrated with the hopelessness of its philosophy, offered anew the truths that had sustained the suffering and broken-hearted for eighteen centuries, in a form so sympathetic, so fascinating, that it thrilled the sensitive spirits of his time, and passed like an inspiration into the literature of the next fifty years. the melancholy of "rene" found its divine consolation in the "genius of christianity." it was this spirit that lent a new and softer coloring to the intimate social life that blended in some degree the tastes and manners of the old noblesse with a refined and tempered form of modern thought. it recalls, in many points, the best spirit of the seventeenth century. there is a flavor of the same seriousness, the same sentiment. it is the sentiment that sent so many beautiful women to the solitude of the cloister, when youth had faded and the air of approaching age began to grow chilly. but it is not to the cloister that these women turn. they weave romantic tales out of the texture of their own lives, they repeat their experiences, their illusions, their triumphs, and their disenchantments. as the day grows more somber and the evening shadows begin to fall, they meditate, they moralize, they substitute prayers for dreams. but they think also. the drama of the late years had left no thoughtful soul without earnest convictions. there were numerous shades of opinion, many finely drawn issues. in a few salons these elements were delicately blended, and if they did not repeat the brilliant triumphs of the past, if they focused with less power the intellectual light which was dispersed in many new channels, they have left behind them many fragrant memories. one is tempted to linger in these temples of a goddess half-dethroned. one would like to study these women who added to the social gifts of their race a character that had risen superior to many storms, hearts that were mellowed and purified by premature sorrow, and intellects that had taken a deeper and more serious tone from long brooding over the great problems of their time. but only a glance is permitted us here. most of them have been drawn in living colors by saint-beuve, from whom i gather here and there a salient trait. who that is familiar with the fine and exquisite thought of joubert can fail to be interested in the delicate and fragile woman whom he met in her supreme hour of suffering, to find in her a rare and permanent friend, a literary confidante, and an inspiration? mme. de beaumont--the daughter of montmorin, who had been a colleague of necker in the ministry--had been forsaken by a worthless husband, had seen father, mother, brother, perish by the guillotine, and her sister escape it only by losing her reason, and then her life, before the fatal day. she, too, had been arrested with the others, but was so ill and weak that she was left to die by the roadside en route to paris--a fate from which she was saved by the kindness of a peasant. it was at this moment that joubert befriended her. these numerous and crushing sorrows had shattered her health, which was never strong, but during the few brief years that remained to her she was the center of a coterie more distinguished for quality than numbers. joubert and chateaubriand were its leading spirits, but it included also fontanes, pasquier, mme. de vintimille, mme. de pastoret, and other friends who had survived the days in which she presided with such youthful dignity over her father's salon. the fascination of her fine and elevated intellect, her gentle sympathy, her keen appreciation of talent, and her graces of manner lent a singular charm to her presence. her character was aptly expressed by this device which rulhiere had suggested for her seal: "un souffle m'agite et rien ne m'ebrante." chateaubriand was enchanted with a nature so pure, so poetic, and so ardent. he visited her daily, read to her "atala" and "rene," and finished the "genius of christianity" under her influence. he was young then, and that she loved him is hardly doubtful, though the friendship of joubert was far truer and more loyal than the passing devotion of this capricious man of genius, who seems to have cared only for his own reflection in another soul. but this sheltered nook of thoughtful repose, this conversational oasis in a chaotic period had a short duration. mme. de beaumont died at rome, where she had gone in the faint hope of reviving her drooping health, in . chateaubriand was there, watched over her last hours with bertin, and wrote eloquently of her death. joubert mourned deeply and silently over the light that had gone out of his life. we have pleasant reminiscences of the amiable, thoughtful, and spirituelle mme. de remusat, who has left us such vivid records of the social and intimate life of the imperial court. a studious and secluded childhood, prematurely saddened by the untimely fate of her father in the terrible days of , an early and congenial marriage, together with her own wise penetration and clear intellect, enabled her to traverse this period without losing her delicate tone or serious tastes. she had her quiet retreat into which the noise and glare did not intrude, where a few men of letters and thoughtful men of the world revived the old conversational spirit. she amused her idle hours by writing graceful tales, and, after the close of her court life and the weakening of her health, she turned her thoughts towards the education and improvement of her sex. blended with her wide knowledge of the world, there is always a note of earnestness, a tender coloring of sentiment, which culminates towards the end in a lofty christian resignation. we meet again at this time a woman known to an earlier generation as mme. de flahaut, and made familiar to us through the pens of talleyrand and gouverneur morris. she saw her husband fall by the guillotine, and, after wandering over europe for years as an exile, became the wife of m. de souza, and, returning to paris, took her place in a quiet corner of the unaccustomed world, writing softly colored romances after the manner of mme. de la fayette, wearing with grace the honors her literary fame brought her, and preserving the tastes, the fine courtesies, the gentle manners, the social charms, and the delicate vivacity of the old regime. one recalls, too, mme. de duras, whose father, the noble and fearless kersaint, was the companion of mme. roland at the scaffold; who drifted to our own shores until the storms had passed, and, after saving her large fortune in martinique, returned matured and saddened to france. as the wife of the duc de duras, she gathered around her a circle of rank, talent, and distinction. chateaubriand, humboldt, curier, de montmorency were among her friends. what treasures of thought and conversation do these names suggest! what memories of the past, what prophecies for the future! mme. de duras, too, wore gracefully the mantle of authorship with which she united pleasant household cares. she, too, put something of the sad experiences of her own life into romances which reflect the melancholy of this age of restlessness and lost illusions. she, too, like many of the women of her time whose youth had been blighted by suffering, passed into an exalted christian strain. the friend of mme. de stael, the literary confidante of chateaubriand, the woman of many talents, many virtues, and many sorrows, died with words of faith and hope and divine consolation on her lips. the devotion of mme. de cantal, the mysticism of mme. guyon, find a nineteenth-century counterpart in the spiritual illumination of mme. de krudener. passing from a life of luxury and pleasure to a life of penitence and asceticism, singularly blending worldliness and piety, opening her salon with prayer, and adding a new sensation to the gay life of paris, this adviser of alexander i, and friend of benjamin constant, who put her best life into the charming romances which ranked next to "corinne" and "delphine" in their time; this beautiful woman, novelist, prophetess, mystic, illuminee, fanatic, with the passion of the south and the superstitious vein of the far north, disappeared from the world she had graced, and gave up her life in an ecstasy of sacrifice in the wilderness of the crimea. it is only to indicate the altered drift of the social life that flowed in quiet undercurrents during the empire and came to the surface again after the restoration; to trace lightly the slow reaction towards the finer shades of modern thought and modern morality, that i touch--so briefly and so inadequately--upon these women who represent the best side of their age, leaving altogether untouched many of equal gifts and equal note. there is one, however, whose salon gathered into itself the last rays of the old glory, and whose fame as a social leader has eclipsed that of all her contemporaries. mme. recamier, "the last flower of the salons," is the woman of the century who has been, perhaps, most admired, most loved, and most written about. it has been so much the fashion to dwell upon her marvelous beauty, her kindness, and her irresistible fascination, that she has become, to some extent, an ideal figure invested with a subtle and poetic grace that folds itself about her like the invisible mantle of an enchantress. her actual relations to the world in which she lived extended over a long period, terminating only on the threshold of our own generation. without strong opinions or pronounced color, loyal to her friends rather than to her convictions, of a calm and happy temperament, gentle in character, keenly appreciative of all that was intellectually fine and rare, but without exceptional gifts herself, fascinating in manner, perfect in tact, with the beauty of an angel and the heart of a woman--she presents a fitting close to the long reign of the salons. we hear of her first in the bizarre circles of the consulate, as the wife of a man who was rather father than husband, young, fresh, lovely, accomplished, surrounded by the luxuries of wealth, and captivating all hearts by that indefinable charm of manner which she carried with her to the end of her life. both at paris and at her country house at clichy she was the center of a company in which the old was discreetly mingled with the new, in which enmities were tempered, antagonisms softened, and the most discordant elements brought into harmonious rapport, for the moment, at least, by her gracious word or her winning smile. here we find adrien and mathieu de montmorency, who already testified the rare friendship that was to outlive years and misfortunes; mme. de stael before her exile; narbonne, barrere, bernadotte, moreau, and many distinguished foreigners. lucien bonaparte was at her feet; laharpe was devoted to her interests; napoleon was trying in vain to draw her into his court, and treasuring up his failure to another. the salon of mme. recamie was not in any sense philosophical or political, but after the cruel persecution of laharpe, the banishment or mme. de stael, and the similar misfortunes of other friends, her sympathies were too strong for her diplomacy, and it gradually fell into the ranks of the opposition. it was well known that the emperor regarded all who went there as his enemies, and this young and innocent woman was destined to feel the full bitterness of his petty displeasure. we cannot trace here the incidents of her varied career, the misfortunes of the father to whom she was a ministering angel, the loss of her husband's fortune and her own, the years of wandering and exile, the second period of brief and illusive prosperity, and the swift reverses which led to her final retreat. she was at the height of her beauty and her fame in the early days of the restoration, when her salon revived its old brilliancy, and was a center in which all parties met on neutral ground. her intimate relations with those in power gave it a strong political influence, but this was never a marked feature, as it was mainly personal. but the position in which one is most inclined to recall mme. recamier is in the convent of abbaye-aux-bois, where, divested of fortune and living in the simplest manner, she preserved for nearly thirty years the fading traditions of the old salons. through all the changes which tried her fortitude and revealed the latent heroism of her character, she seems to have kept her sweet serenity unbroken, bending to the passing storms with the grace of a facile nature, but never murmuring at the inevitable. one may find in this inflexible strength and gentleness of temper a clue to the subtle fascination which held the devoted friendship of so many gifted men and women, long after the fresh charm of youth was gone. the intellectual gifts of mme. recamier, as has been said before, were not of a high or brilliant order. she was neither profound nor original, nor given to definite thought. her letters were few, and she has left no written records by which she can be measured. she read much, was familiar with current literature, also with religious works. but the world is slow to accord a twofold superiority, and it is quite possible that the fame of her beauty has prevented full justice to her mental abilities. mme. de genlis tells us that she has a great deal of esprit. it is certain that no woman could have held her place as the center of a distinguished literary circle and the confidante and adviser of the first literary men of her time, without a fine intellectual appreciation. "to love what is great," said mme. necker "is almost to be great one's self." ballanche advised her to translate petrarch, and she even began the work, but it was never finished. "believe me," he writes, "you have at your command the genius of music, flowers, imagination, and elegance. ... do not fear to try your hand on the golden lyre of the poets." he may have been too much blinded by a friendship that verged closely upon a more passionate sentiment to be an altogether impartial critic, but it was a high tribute to her gifts that a man of such conspicuous talents thought her capable of work so exacting. her qualities were those of taste and a delicate imagination rather than of reason. her musical accomplishments were always a resource. she sang, played the harp and piano, and we hear of her during a summer at albano playing the organ at vespers and high mass. she danced exquisitely, and it was her ravishing grace that suggested the shawl dance of "corinne" to mme. de stael and of "valerie" to mme. de krudener. one can fancy her, too, at coppet, playing the role of the angel to mme. de stael's hagar--a spirit of love and consolation to the stormy and despairing soul of her friend. but her real power lay in the wonderful harmony of her nature, in the subtle penetration that divined the chagrins and weaknesses of others, only to administer a healing balm; in the delicate tact that put people always on the best terms with themselves, and gave the finest play to whatever talents they possessed. add to this a quality of beauty which cannot be caught by pen or pencil, and one can understand the singular sway she held over men and women alike. mme. de krudener, whose salon so curiously united fashion and piety, worldliness and mysticism, was troubled by the distraction which the entrance of mme. recamier was sure to cause, and begged benjamin constant to write and entreat her to make herself as little charming as possible. his note is certainly unique, though it loses much of its piquancy in translation: "i acquit myself with a little embarrassment of a commission which mme. de krudener has just given me. she begs you to come as little beautiful as you can. she says that you dazzle all the world, and that consequently every soul is troubled and attention is impossible. you cannot lay aside your charms, but do not add to them." in her youth she dressed with great simplicity and was fond of wearing white with pearls, which accorded well with the dazzling purity of her complexion. mme. recamier was not without vanity, and this is the reverse side of her peculiar gifts. she would have been more than mortal if she had been quite unconscious of attractions so rare that even the children in the street paid tribute to them. but one finds small trace of the petty jealousies and exactions that are so apt to accompany them. she liked to please, she wished to be loved, and this inevitably implies a shade of coquetry in a young and beautiful woman. there is an element of fascination in this very coquetry, with its delicate subtleties and its shifting tints of sentiment. that she carried it too far is no doubt true; that she did so wittingly is not so certain. her victims were many, and if they quietly subsided into friends, as they usually did, it was after many struggles and heart burnings. but if she did not exercise her power with invariable discretion, it seems to have been less the result of vanity than a lack of decision and an amiable unwillingness to give immediate pain, or to lose the friend with the lover. with all her fine qualities of heart and soul, she had a temperament that saved her from much of the suffering she thoughtlessly inflicted upon others. the many violent passions she roused do not seem to have disturbed at all her own serenity. the delicate and chivalrous nature of mathieu de montmorency, added to his years, gave his relations to her a half-paternal character, but that he loved her always with the profound tenderness of a loyal and steadfast soul is apparent through all the singularly disinterested phases of a friendship that ended only with his life. prince augustus, whom she met at coppet, called up a passing ripple on the surface of her heart, sufficiently strong to lead her to suggest a divorce to her husband, whose relations to her, though always friendly, were only nominal. but he appealed to her generosity, and she thought of it no more. why she permitted her princely suitor to cherish so long the illusions that time and distance do not readily destroy is one of the mysteries that are not easy to solve. perhaps she thought it more kind to let absence wear out a passion than to break it too rudely. at all events, he cherished no permanent bitterness, and never forgot her. at his death, nearly forty years later he ordered her portrait by gerard to be returned, but her ring was buried with him. the various phases of the well-known infatuation of benjamin constant, which led him to violate his political principles and belie his own words rather than take a course that must result in separation from her, suggest a page of highly colored romance. the letters of mlle. de lespinasse scarcely furnish us with a more ardent episode in the literature of hopeless passion. the worshipful devotion of ampere and ballanche would form a chapter no less interesting, though less intense and stormy. but the name most inseparably connected with mme. recamier is that of chateaubriand. the friendship of an unquestioned sort that seems to have gone quite out of the world, had all the phases of a more tender sentiment, and goes far towards disproving the charge of coldness that has often been brought against her. it was begun after she had reached the dreaded forties, by the death bed of mme. de stael, and lasted more than thirty years. it seems to have been the single sentiment that mastered her. one may trace in the letters of chateaubriand the restless undercurrents of this life that was outwardly so serene. he writes to her from berlin, from england, from rome. he confides to her his ambitions, tells her his anxieties, asks her counsel as to his plans, chides her little jealousies, and commends his wife to her care and attention. this recalls a remarkable side of her relations with the world. women are not apt to love formidable rivals, but the wives of her friends apparently shared the admiration with which their husbands regarded her. if they did not love her, they exchanged friendly notes, and courtesies that were often more than cordial. she consoles mme. de montmorency in her sorrow, and mme. de chateaubriand asks her to cheer her husband's gloomy moods. indeed, she roused little of that bitter jealousy which is usually the penalty of exceptional beauty or exceptional gifts of any sort. the sharp tongue of mme. de genlis lost its sting in writing of her. she idealized her as athenais, in the novel of that name, which has for its background the beauties of coppet, and vaguely reproduces much of its life. the pious and austere mme. swetchine, whose prejudices against her were so strong that for a long time she did not wish to meet her, confessed herself at once a captive to her "penetrating and indefinable charm." though she did not always escape the shafts of malice, no better tribute could be offered to the graces of her character than the indulgence with which she was regarded by the most severely judging of her own sex. but she has her days of depression. chateaubriand is absorbed in his ambitions and sometimes indifferent; his antagonistic attitude towards montmorency, who is far the nobler character of the two, is a source of grief to her. she tries in vain to reconcile her rival friends. once she feels compelled to tear herself from an influence which is destroying her happiness, and goes to italy. but she carries within her own heart the seeds of unrest. she still follows the movements of the man who occupies so large a space in her horizon, sympathizes from afar with his disappointments, and cares for his literary interest, ordering from tenerani, a bas-relief of a scene from "the martyrs." after her return her life settles into more quiet channels. chateaubriand, embittered by the chagrins of political life, welcomed her with the old enthusiasm. from this time he devoted himself exclusively to letters, and sought his diversion in the convent-salon which has left so wide a fame, and of which he was always the central figure. the petted man of genius was moody and capricious. his colossal egotism found its best solace in the gentle presence of the woman who flattered his restless vanity, anticipated his wishes, studied his tastes, and watched every shadow that flitted across his face. he was in the habit of writing her a few lines in the morning; at three o'clock he visited her, and they chatted over their tea until four, when favored visitors began to arrive. in the evening it was a little world that met there. the names of ampere, tocqueville, montalembert, merimee, thierry, and sainte-beuve suggest the literary quality of this circle, in which were seen from time to time such foreign celebrities as sir humphry and lady darcy, maria edgeworth, humboldt, the duke of hamilton, the gifted duchess of devonshire, and miss berry. lamartine read his "meditations" and delphine gay her first poems. rachel recited, and pauline viardot, garcia, rubini, and lablache sang. delacroix, david, and gerard represented the world of art, and the visitors from the grand monde were too numerous to mention. in this brilliant and cosmopolitan company, what resources of wit and knowledge, what charms of beauty and elegance, what splendors of rank and distinction were laid upon the altar of the lovely and adored woman, who recognized all values, and never forgot the kindly word or the delicate courtesy that put the most modest guests at ease and brought out the best there was in them! one day in there was a vacant place, and the faithful ballanche came no more from his rooms across the street. a year later chateaubriand died. after the death of his wife he had wished to marry mme. recamier, but she thought it best to change nothing, believing that age and blindness had given her the right to devote herself to his last days. to her friends she said that if she married him, he would miss the pleasure and variety of his daily visits. old, blind, broken in health and spirit, but retaining always the charm which had given her the empire over so many hearts, she followed him in a few months. mme. recamier represents better than any woman of her time the peculiar talents that distinguished the leaders of some of the most famous salons. she had tact, grace, intelligence, appreciation, and the gift of inspiring others. the cleverest men and women of the age were to be met in her drawing room. one found there genius, beauty, esprit, elegance, courtesy, and the brilliant conversation which is the gallic heritage. but not even her surpassing fascination added to all these attractions could revive the old power of the salon. her coterie was charming, as a choice circle gathered about a beautiful, refined, accomplished woman, and illuminated by the wit and intelligence of thoughtful men, will always be; but its influence was limited and largely personal, and it has left no perceptible traces. nor has it had any noted successor. it is no longer coteries presided over by clever women that guide the age and mold its tastes or its political destinies. the old conditions have ceased to exist, and the prestige of the salon is gone. the causes that led to its decline have been already more or less indicated. among them, the decay of aristocratic institutions played only a small part. the salons were au fond democratic in the sense that all forms of distinction were recognized so far as they were amenable to the laws of taste, which form the ultimate tribunal of social fitness in france. but it cannot be denied that the code of etiquette which ruled them had its foundation in the traditions of the noblesse. the genteel manners, the absence of egotism and self-assertion, as of disturbing passions, the fine and uniform courtesy which is the poetry of life, are the product of ease and assured conditions. it is struggle that destroys harmony and repose, whatever stronger qualities it may develop, and the greater mingling of classes which inevitably resulted in this took something from the exquisite flavor of the old society. the increase of wealth, too, created new standards that were fatal to a life in which the resources of wit, learning, and education in its highest sense were the chief attractions. the greater perfection of all forms of public amusement was not without its influence. men drifted, also, more and more into the one-sided life of the club. considered as a social phase, no single thing has been more disastrous to the unity of modern society than this. but the most formidable enemy of the salon has been the press. intelligence has become too universal to be focused in a few drawing rooms. genius and ambition have found a broader arena. when interest no longer led men to seek the stimulus and approval of a powerful coterie, it ceased to be more than an elegant form of recreation, a theater of small talents, the diversion of an idle hour. when the press assumed the sovereignty, the salon was dethroned. a book of sibyls mrs barbauld miss edgeworth mrs opie miss austen by miss thackeray (mrs richmond ritchie) london smith, elder, & co., waterloo place [_all rights reserved_] [_reprinted from the cornhill magazine_] _to_ _mrs oliphant_ _my little record would not seem to me in any way complete without your name, dear sibyl of our own, and as i write it here, i am grateful to know that to mine and me it is not only the name of a sibyl with deep visions, but of a friend to us all._ _a. t. r._ preface. not long ago, a party of friends were sitting at luncheon in a suburb of london, when one of them happened to make some reference to maple grove and selina, and to ask in what county of england maple grove was situated. everybody immediately had a theory. only one of the company (a french gentleman, not well acquainted with english) did not recognise the allusion. a lady sitting by the master of the house (she will, i hope, forgive me for quoting her words, for no one else has a better right to speak them) said, 'what a curious sign it is of jane austen's increasing popularity! here are five out of six people sitting round a table, nearly a hundred years after her death, who all recognise at once a chance allusion to an obscure character in one of her books.' it seemed impossible to leave out jane austen's dear household name from a volume which concerned women writing in the early part of this century, and although the essay which is called by her name has already been reprinted, it is added with some alteration in its place with the others. putting together this little book has been a great pleasure and interest to the compiler, and she wishes once more to thank those who have so kindly sheltered her during her work, and lent her books and papers and letters concerning the four writers whose works and manner of being she has attempted to describe; and she wishes specially to express her thanks to the baron and baroness von hÜgel, to the ladies of miss edgeworth's family, to mr. harrison, of the london library, to the miss reids, of hampstead, to mrs. field and her daughters, of squire's mount, hampstead, to lady buxton, mrs. brookfield, miss alderson, and miss shirreff. contents. page mrs. barbauld [ - ] maria edgeworth [ - ] mrs. opie [ - ] jane austen [ - ] a book of sibyls. _mrs. barbauld._ - . 'i've heard of the lady, and good words went with her name.' _measure for measure._ i. 'the first poetess i can recollect is mrs. barbauld, with whose works i became acquainted--before those of any other author, male or female--when i was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children.' so says hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. he goes on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers of poesy as she goes. the writer must needs, from the same point of view as hazlitt, look upon mrs. barbauld with a special interest, having also first learnt to read out of her little yellow books, of which the syllables rise up one by one again with a remembrance of the hand patiently pointing to each in turn; all this recalled and revived after a lifetime by the sight of a rusty iron gateway, behind which mrs. barbauld once lived, of some old letters closely covered with a wavery writing, of a wide prospect that she once delighted to look upon. mrs. barbauld, who loved to share her pleasures, used to bring her friends to see the great view from the hampstead hill-top, and thus records their impressions:-- 'i dragged mrs. a. up as i did you, my dear, to our prospect walk, from whence we have so extensive a view. 'yes,' said she, 'it is a very fine view indeed for a flat country.' 'while, on the other hand, mrs. b. gave us such a dismal account of the precipices, mountains, and deserts she encountered, that you would have thought she had been on the wildest part of the alps.' the old hampstead highroad, starting from the plain, winds its way resolutely up the steep, and brings you past red-brick houses and walled-in gardens to this noble outlook; to the heath, with its fresh, inspiriting breezes, its lovely distances of far-off waters and gorsy hollows. at whatever season, at whatever hour you come, you are pretty sure to find one or two votaries--poets like mrs. barbauld, or commonplace people such as her friends--watching before this great altar of nature; whether by early morning rays, or in the blazing sunset, or when the evening veils and mists with stars come falling, while the lights of london shine far away in the valley. years after mrs. barbauld wrote, one man, pre-eminent amongst poets, used to stand upon this hill-top, and lo! as turner gazed, a whole generation gazed with him. for him italy gleamed from behind the crimson stems of the fir-trees; the spirit of loveliest mythology floated upon the clouds, upon the many changing tints of the plains; and, as the painter watched the lights upon the distant hills, they sank into his soul, and he painted them down for us, and poured his dreams into our awakening hearts. he was one of that race of giants, mighty men of humble heart, who have looked from hampstead and highgate hills. here wordsworth trod; here sang keats's nightingale; here mused coleridge; and here came carlyle, only yesterday, tramping wearily, in search of some sign of his old companions. here, too, stood kind walter scott, under the elms of the judges' walk, and perhaps joanna baillie was by his side, coming out from her pretty old house beyond the trees. besides all these, were a whole company of lesser stars following and surrounding the brighter planets--muses, memoirs, critics, poets, nymphs, authoresses--coming to drink tea and to admire the pleasant suburban beauties of this modern parnassus. a record of many of their names is still to be found, appropriately enough, in the catalogue of the little hampstead library which still exists, which was founded at a time when the very hands that wrote the books may have placed the old volumes upon the shelves. present readers can study them at their leisure, to the clanking of the horses' feet in the courtyard outside, and the splashing of buckets. a few newspapers lie on the table--stray sheets of to-day that have fluttered up the hill, bringing news of this bustling now into a past serenity. the librarian sits stitching quietly in a window. an old lady comes in to read the news; but she has forgotten her spectacles, and soon goes away. here, instead of asking for 'vice versâ,' or ouida's last novel, you instinctively mention 'plays of the passions,' miss burney's 'evelina,' or some such novels; and mrs. barbauld's works are also in their place. when i asked for them, two pretty old quaker volumes were put into my hands, with shabby grey bindings, with fine paper and broad margins, such as mr. ruskin would approve. of all the inhabitants of this bookshelf mrs. barbauld is one of the most appropriate. it is but a few minutes' walk from the library in heath street to the old corner house in church row where she lived for a time, near a hundred years ago, and all round about are the scenes of much of her life, of her friendships and interests. here lived her friends and neighbours; here to church row came her pupils and admirers, and, later still, to the pretty old house on rosslyn hill. as for church row, as most people know, it is an avenue of dutch red-faced houses, leading demurely to the old church tower, that stands guarding its graves in the flowery churchyard. as we came up the quiet place, the sweet windy drone of the organ swelled across the blossoms of the spring, which were lighting up every shabby corner and hillside garden. through this pleasant confusion of past and present, of spring-time scattering blossoms upon the graves, of old ivy walks and iron bars imprisoning past memories, with fragrant fumes of lilac and of elder, one could picture to oneself, as in a waking dream, two figures advancing from the corner house with the ivy walls--distinct, sedate--passing under the old doorway. i could almost see the lady, carefully dressed in many fine muslin folds and frills with hooped silk skirts, indeed, but slight and graceful in her quick advance, with blue eyes, with delicate sharp features, and a dazzling skin. as for the gentleman, i pictured him a dapper figure, with dark eyes, dressed in black, as befitted a minister even of dissenting views. the lady came forward, looking amused by my scrutiny, somewhat shy i thought--was she going to speak? and by the same token it seemed to me the gentleman was about to interrupt her. but margaret, my young companion, laughed and opened an umbrella, or a cock crew, or some door banged, and the fleeting visions of fancy disappeared. many well-authenticated ghost stories describe the apparition of bygone persons, and lo! when the figure vanishes, a letter is left behind! some such experience seemed to be mine when, on my return, i found a packet of letters on the hall table--letters not addressed to me, but to some unknown miss belsham, and signed and sealed by mrs. barbauld's hand. they had been sent for me to read by the kindness of some ladies now living at hampstead, who afterwards showed me the portrait of the lady, who began the world as miss betsy belsham and who ended her career as mrs. kenrick. it is an oval miniature, belonging to the times of powder and of puff, representing not a handsome, but an animated countenance, with laughter and spirit in the expression; the mouth is large, the eyes are dark, the nose is short. this was the _confidante_ of mrs. barbauld's early days, the faithful friend of her latter sorrows. the letters, kept by 'betsy' with faithful conscientious care for many years, give the story of a whole lifetime with unconscious fidelity. the gaiety of youth, its impatience, its exuberance, and sometimes bad taste; the wider, quieter feelings of later life; the courage of sorrowful times; long friendship deepening the tender and faithful memories of age, when there is so little left to say, so much to feel--all these things are there. ii. mrs. barbauld was a schoolmistress, and a schoolmaster's wife and daughter. her father was dr. john aikin, d.d.; her mother was miss jane jennings, of a good northamptonshire family--scholastic also. dr. aikin brought his wife home to knibworth, in leicestershire, where he opened a school which became very successful in time. mrs. barbauld, their eldest child, was born here in , and was christened anna lætitia, after some lady of high degree belonging to her mother's family. two or three years later came a son. it was a quiet home, deep hidden in the secluded rural place; and the little household lived its own tranquil life far away from the storms and battles and great events that were stirring the world. dr. aikin kept school; mrs. aikin ruled her household with capacity, and not without some sternness, according to the custom of the time. it appears that late in life the good lady was distressed by the backwardness of her grandchildren at four or five years old. 'i once, indeed, knew a little girl,' so wrote mrs. aikin of her daughter, 'who was as eager to learn as her instructor could be to teach her, and who at two years old could read sentences and little stories, in her _wise_ book, roundly and without spelling, and in half a year or more could read as well as most women; but i never knew such another, and i believe i never shall.' it was fortunate that no great harm came of this premature forcing, although it is difficult to say what its absence might not have done for mrs. barbauld. one can fancy the little assiduous girl, industrious, impulsive, interested in everything--in all life and all nature--drinking in, on every side, learning, eagerly wondering, listening to all around with bright and ready wit. there is a pretty little story told by mrs. ellis in her book about mrs. barbauld, how one day, when dr. aikin and a friend 'were conversing on the passions,' the doctor observes that joy cannot have place in a state of perfect felicity, since it supposes an accession of happiness. 'i think you are mistaken, papa,' says a little voice from the opposite side of the table. 'why so, my child?' says the doctor. 'because in the chapter i read to you this morning, in the testament, it is said that "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance."' besides her english testament and her early reading, the little girl was taught by her mother to do as little daughters did in those days, to obey a somewhat austere rule, to drop curtsies in the right place, to make beds, to preserve fruits. the father, after demur, but surely not without some paternal pride in her proficiency, taught the child latin and french and italian, and something of greek, and gave her an acquaintance with english literature. one can imagine little nancy with her fair head bending over her lessons, or, when playing time had come, perhaps a little lonely and listening to the distant voices of the schoolboys at their games. the mother, fearing she might acquire rough and boisterous manners, strictly forbade any communication with the schoolboys. sometimes in after days, speaking of these early times and of the constraint of many bygone rules and regulations, mrs. barbauld used to attribute to this early formal training something of the hesitation and shyness which troubled her and never entirely wore off. she does not seem to have been in any great harmony with her mother. one could imagine a fanciful and high-spirited child, timid and dutiful, and yet strong-willed, secretly rebelling against the rigid order of her home, and feeling lonely for want of liberty and companionship. it was true she had birds and beasts and plants for her playfellows, but she was of a gregarious and sociable nature, and she was unconsciously longing for something more, and perhaps feeling a want in her early life which no silent company can supply. she was about fifteen when a great event took place. her father was appointed classical tutor to the warrington academy, and thither the little family removed. we read that the warrington academy was a dissenting college started by very eminent and periwigged personages, whose silhouettes mrs. barbauld herself afterwards cut out in sticking-plaster, and whose names are to this day remembered and held in just esteem. they were people of simple living and high thinking, they belonged to a class holding then a higher place than now in the world's esteem, that of dissenting ministers. the dissenting ministers were fairly well paid and faithfully followed by their congregations. the college was started under the auspices of distinguished members of the community, lord willoughby of parham, the last presbyterian lord, being patron. among the masters were to be found the well-known names of dr. doddridge; of gilbert wakefield, the reformer and uncompromising martyr; of dr. taylor, of norwich, the hebrew scholar; of dr. priestley, the chemical analyst and patriot, and enterprising theologian, who left england and settled in america for conscience and liberty's sake. many other people, neither students nor professors, used to come to warrington, and chief among them in later years good john howard with mss. for his friend dr. aikin to correct for the press. now for the first time mrs. barbauld (miss aikin she was then) saw something of real life, of men and manners. it was not likely that she looked back with any lingering regret to knibworth, or would have willingly returned thither. a story in one of her memoirs gives an amusing picture of the manners of a young country lady of that day. mr. haines, a rich farmer from knibworth, who had been greatly struck by miss aikin, followed her to warrington, and 'obtained a private audience of her father and begged his consent to be allowed to make her his wife.' the father answered 'that his daughter was there walking in the garden, and he might go and ask her himself.' 'with what grace the farmer pleaded his cause i know not,' says her biographer and niece. 'out of all patience at his unwelcome importunities, my aunt ran nimbly up a tree which grew by the garden wall, and let herself down into the lane beyond.' the next few years must have been perhaps the happiest of mrs. barbauld's life. once when it was nearly over she said to her niece, mrs. le breton, from whose interesting account i have been quoting, that she had never been placed in a situation which really suited her. as one reads her sketches and poems, one is struck by some sense of this detracting influence of which she complains: there is a certain incompleteness and slightness which speaks of intermittent work, of interrupted trains of thought. at the same time there is a natural buoyant quality in much of her writing which seems like a pleasant landscape view seen through the bars of a window. there may be wider prospects, but her eyes are bright, and this peep of nature is undoubtedly delightful. iii. the letters to miss belsham begin somewhere about . the young lady has been paying a visit to miss aikin at warrington, and is interested in everyone and everything belonging to the place. miss aikin is no less eager to describe than miss belsham to listen, and accordingly a whole stream of characters and details of gossip and descriptions in faded ink come flowing across their pages, together with many expressions of affection and interest. 'my dear betsy, i love you for discarding the word miss from your vocabulary,' so the packet begins, and it continues in the same strain of pleasant girlish chatter, alternating with the history of many bygone festivities, and stories of friends, neighbours, of beaux and partners; of the latter genus, and of miss aikin's efforts to make herself agreeable, here is a sample:--'i talked to him, smiled upon him, gave him my fan to play with,' says the lively young lady. 'nothing would do; he was grave as a philosopher. i tried to raise a conversation: "'twas fine weather for dancing." he agreed to my observation. "we had a tolerable set this time." neither did he contradict that. then we were both silent--stupid mortal thought i! but unreasonable as he appeared to the advances that i made him, there was one object in the room, a sparkling object which seemed to attract all his attention, on which he seemed to gaze with transport, and which indeed he hardly took his eyes off the whole time.... the object that i mean was his shoebuckle.' one could imagine miss elizabeth bennett writing in some such strain to her friend miss charlotte lucas after one of the evenings at bingley's hospitable mansion. and yet miss aikin is more impulsive, more romantic than elizabeth. 'wherever you are, fly letter on the wings of the wind,' she cries, 'and tell my dear betsy what?--only that i love her dearly.' miss nancy aikin (she seems to have been nancy in these letters, and to have assumed the more dignified lætitia upon her marriage) pours out her lively heart, laughs, jokes, interests herself in the sentimental affairs of the whole neighbourhood as well as in her own. perhaps few young ladies now-a-days would write to their _confidantes_ with the announcement that for some time past a young sprig had been teasing them to have him. this, however, is among miss nancy's confidences. she also writes poems and _jeux d'esprit_, and receives poetry in return from betsy, who calls herself camilla, and pays her friend many compliments, for miss aikin in her reply quotes the well-known lines:-- who for another's brow entwines the bays, and where she well might rival stoops to praise. miss aikin by this time has attained to all the dignity of a full-blown authoress, and is publishing a successful book of poems in conjunction with her brother, which little book created much attention at the time. one day the muse thus apostrophises betsy: 'shall we ever see her amongst us again?' says my sister (mrs. aikin). my brother (saucy fellow) says, 'i want to see this girl, i think (stroking his chin as he walks backwards and forwards in the room with great gravity). i think we should admire one another.' 'when you come among us,' continues the warm-hearted friend, 'we shall set the bells a-ringing, bid adieu to care and gravity, and sing "o be joyful."' and finally, after some apologies for her remiss correspondence, 'i left my brother writing to you instead of patty, poor soul. well, it is a clever thing too, to have a husband to write one's letters for one. if i had one i would be a much better correspondent to you. i would order him to write every week.' and, indeed, mrs. barbauld was as good as her word, and did not forget the resolutions made by miss aikin in . in comes some eventful news: 'i should have written to you sooner had it not been for the uncertainty and suspense in which for a long time i have been involved; and since my lot has been fixed for many busy engagements which have left me few moments of leisure. they hurry me out of my life. it is hardly a month that i have certainly known i should fix on norfolk, and now next thursday they say i am to be finally, irrevocably married. pity me, dear betsy; for on the day i fancy when you will read this letter, will the event take place which is to make so great an era in my life. i feel depressed, and my courage almost fails me. yet upon the whole i have the greatest reason to think i shall be happy. i shall possess the entire affection of a worthy man, whom my father and mother now entirely and heartily approve. the people where we are going, though strangers, have behaved with the greatest zeal and affection; and i think we have a fair prospect of being useful and living comfortably in that state of middling life to which i have been accustomed, and which i love.' and then comes a word which must interest all who have ever cared and felt grateful admiration for the works of one devoted human being and true christian hero. speaking of her father's friend, john howard, she says with an almost audible sigh: 'it was too late, as you say, or i believe i should have been in love with mr. howard. seriously, i looked upon him with that sort of reverence and love which one should have for a guardian angel. god bless him and preserve his health for the health's sake of thousands. and now farewell,' she writes in conclusion: 'i shall write to you no more under this name; but under any name, in every situation, at any distance of time or place, i shall love you equally and be always affectionately yours, tho' _not_ always, a. aikin.' * * * * * poor lady! the future held, indeed, many a sad and unsuspected hour for her, many a cruel pang, many a dark and heavy season, that must have seemed intolerably weary to one of her sprightly and yet somewhat indolent nature, more easily accepting evil than devising escape from it. but it also held many blessings of constancy, friendship, kindly deeds, and useful doings. she had not devotion to give such as that of the good howard whom she revered, but the equable help and sympathy for others of an open-minded and kindly woman was hers. her marriage would seem to have been brought about by a romantic fancy rather than by a tender affection. mr. barbauld's mind had been once unhinged; his protestations were passionate and somewhat dramatic. we are told that when she was warned by a friend, she only said, 'but surely, if i throw him over, he will become crazy again;' and from a high-minded sense of pity, she was faithful, and married him against the wish of her brother and parents, and not without some misgivings herself. he was a man perfectly sincere and honourable; but, from his nervous want of equilibrium, subject all his life to frantic outbursts of ill-temper. nobody ever knew what his wife had to endure in secret; her calm and restrained manner must have effectually hidden the constant anxiety of her life; nor had she children to warm her heart, and brighten up her monotonous existence. little charles, of the reading-book, who is bid to come hither, who counted so nicely, who stroked the pussy cat, and who deserved to listen to the delightful stories he was told, was not her own son but her brother's child. when he was born, she wrote to entreat that he might be given over to her for her own, imploring her brother to spare him to her, in a pretty and pathetic letter. this was a mother yearning for a child, not a schoolmistress asking for a pupil, though perhaps in after times the two were somewhat combined in her. there is a pretty little description of charles making great progress in 'climbing trees and talking nonsense:' 'i have the honour to tell you that our charles is the sweetest boy in the world. he is perfectly naturalised in his new situation; and if i should make any blunders in my letter, i must beg you to impute it to his standing by me and chattering all the time.' and how pleasant a record exists of charles's chatter in that most charming little book written for him and for the babies of babies to come! there is a sweet instructive grace in it and appreciation of childhood which cannot fail to strike those who have to do with children and with mrs. barbauld's books for them: children themselves, those best critics of all, delight in it. 'where's charles?' says a little scholar every morning to the writer of these few notes. iv. soon after the marriage, there had been some thought of a college for young ladies, of which mrs. barbauld was to be the principal; but she shrank from the idea, and in a letter to mrs. montagu she objects to the scheme of higher education for women away from their natural homes. 'i should have little hope of cultivating a love of knowledge in a young lady of fifteen who came to me ignorant and uncultivated. it is too late then to begin to learn. the empire of the passions is coming on. those attachments begin to be formed which influence the happiness of future life. the care of a mother alone can give suitable attention to this important period.' it is true that the rigidness of her own home had not prevented her from making a hasty and unsuitable marriage. but it is not this which is weighing on her mind. 'perhaps you may think,' she says, 'that having myself stepped out of the bounds of female reserve in becoming an author, it is with an ill grace that i offer these statements.' her arguments seem to have been thought conclusive in those days, and the young ladies' college was finally transmuted into a school for little boys at palgrave, in norfolk, and thither the worthy couple transported themselves. one of the letters to miss belsham is thus dated:--'_the th of july, in the village of palgrave (the pleasantest village in all england), at ten o'clock, all alone in my great parlour, mr. barbauld being studying a sermon, do i begin a letter to my dear betsy._' when she first married, and travelled into norfolk to keep school at palgrave, nothing could have seemed more tranquil, more contented, more matter-of-fact than her life as it appears from her letters. dreams, and fancies, and gay illusions and excitements have made way for the somewhat disappointing realisation of mr. barbauld with his neatly turned and friendly postscripts--a husband, polite, devoted, it is true, but somewhat disappointing all the same. the next few years seem like years in a hive--storing honey for the future, and putting away--industrious, punctual, monotonous. there are children's lessons to be heard, and school-treats to be devised. she sets them to act plays and cuts out paper collars for henry iv.; she always takes a class of babies entirely her own. (one of these babies, who always loved her, became lord chancellor denman; most of the others took less brilliant, but equally respectable places, in after life.) she has also household matters and correspondence not to be neglected. in the holidays, they make excursions to norwich, to london, and revisit their old haunts at warrington. in one of her early letters, soon after her marriage, she describes her return to warrington. 'dr. enfield's face,' she declares, 'is grown half a foot longer since i saw him, with studying mathematics, and for want of a game of romps; for there are positively none now at warrington but grave matrons. i who have but half assumed the character, was ashamed of the levity of my behaviour.' it says well indeed for the natural brightness of the lady's disposition that with sixteen boarders and a satisfactory usher to look after, she should be prepared for a game of romps with dr. enfield. on another occasion, in , she takes little charles away with her. 'he has indeed been an excellent traveller,' she says; 'and though, like his great ancestor, some natural tears he shed, like him, too, he wiped them soon. he had a long sound sleep last night, and has been very busy to-day hunting the puss and the chickens. and now, my dear brother and sister, let me again thank you for this precious gift, the value of which we are both more and more sensible of as we become better acquainted with his sweet disposition and winning manners.' she winds up this letter with a postscript:-- 'everybody here asks, "pray, is dr. dodd really to be executed?" as if we knew the more for having been at warrington.' dr. aikin, mrs. barbauld's brother, the father of little charles and of lucy aikin, whose name is well known in literature, was himself a man of great parts, industry, and ability, working hard to support his family. he alternated between medicine and literature all his life. when his health failed he gave up medicine, and settled at stoke newington, and busied himself with periodic literature; meanwhile, whatever his own pursuits may have been, he never ceased to take an interest in his sister's work and to encourage her in every way. it is noteworthy that few of mrs. barbauld's earlier productions equalled what she wrote at the very end of her life. she seems to have been one of those who ripen with age, growing wider in spirit with increasing years. perhaps, too, she may have been influenced by the change of manners, the reaction against formalism, which was growing up as her own days were ending. prim she may have been in manner, but she was not a formalist by nature; and even at eighty was ready to learn to submit to accept the new gospel that wordsworth and his disciples had given to the world, and to shake off the stiffness of early training. it is idle to speculate on what might have been if things had happened otherwise; if the daily stress of anxiety and perplexity which haunted her home had been removed--difficulties and anxieties which may well have absorbed all the spare energy and interest that under happier circumstances might have added to the treasury of english literature. but if it were only for one ode written when the distracting cares of over seventy years were ending, when nothing remained to her but the essence of a long past, and the inspirations of a still glowing, still hopeful, and most tender spirit, if it were only for the ode called 'life,' which has brought a sense of ease and comfort to so many, mrs. barbauld has indeed deserved well of her country-people and should be held in remembrance by them. her literary works are, after all, not very voluminous. she is best known by her hymns for children and her early lessons, than which nothing more childlike has ever been devised; and we can agree with her brother, dr. aikin, when he says that it requires true genius to enter so completely into a child's mind. after their first volume of verse, the brother and sister had published a second in prose, called 'miscellaneous pieces,' about which there is an amusing little anecdote in rogers's 'memoirs.' fox met dr. aikin at dinner. '"i am greatly pleased with your 'miscellaneous pieces,'" said fox. aikin bowed. "i particularly admire," continued fox, "your essay 'against inconsistency in our expectations.'" '"that," replied aikin, "is my sister's." '"i like much," returned fox, "your essay 'on monastic institutions.'" '"that," answered aikin, "is also my sister's." 'fox thought it best to say no more about the book.' these essays were followed by various of the visions and eastern pieces then so much in vogue; also by political verses and pamphlets, which seemed to have made a great sensation at the time. but mrs. barbauld's turn was on the whole more for domestic than for literary life, although literary people always seem to have had a great interest for her. during one christmas which they spent in london, the worthy couple go to see mrs. siddons; and mrs. chapone introduces mrs. barbauld to miss burney. 'a very unaffected, modest, sweet, and pleasing young lady,' says mrs. barbauld, who is always kind in her descriptions. mrs. barbauld's one complaint in london is of the fatigue from hairdressers, and the bewildering hurry of the great city, where she had, notwithstanding her quiet country life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. her poem on 'corsica' had brought her into some relations with boswell; she also knew goldsmith and dr. johnson. here is her description of the 'great bear:'-- 'i do not mean that one which shines in the sky over your head; but the bear that shines in london--a great rough, surly animal. his christian name is dr. johnson. 'tis a singular creature; but if you stroke him he will not bite, and though he growls sometimes he is not ill-humoured.' johnson describes mrs. barbauld as suckling fools and chronicling small beer. there was not much sympathy between the two. characters such as johnson's harmonise best with the enthusiastic and easily influenced. mrs. barbauld did not belong to this class; she trusted to her own judgment, rarely tried to influence others, and took a matter-of-fact rather than a passionate view of life. she is as severe to him in her criticism as he was in his judgment of her: they neither of them did the other justice. 'a christian and a man-about-town, a philosopher, and a bigot acknowledging life to be miserable, and making it more miserable through fear of death.' so she writes of him, and all this was true; but how much more was also true of the great and hypochondriacal old man! some years afterwards, when she had been reading boswell's long-expected 'life of johnson,' she wrote of the book:--'it is like going to ranelagh; you meet all your acquaintances; but it is a base and mean thing to bring thus every idle word into judgment.' in our own day we too have our boswell and our johnson to arouse discussion and indignation. 'have you seen boswell's "life of johnson?" he calls it a flemish portrait, and so it is--two quartos of a man's conversation and petty habits. then the treachery and meanness of watching a man for years in order to set down every unguarded and idle word he uttered, is inconceivable. yet with all this one cannot help reading a good deal of it.' this is addressed to the faithful betsy, who was also keeping school by that time, and assuming brevet rank in consequence. mrs. barbauld might well complain of the fatigue from hairdressers in london. in one of her letters to her friend she thus describes a lady's dress of the period:-- 'do you know how to dress yourself in dublin? if you do not, i will tell you. your waist must be the circumference of two oranges, no more. you must erect a structure on your head gradually ascending to a foot high, exclusive of feathers, and stretching to a penthouse of most horrible projection behind, the breadth from wing to wing considerably broader than your shoulder, and as many different things in your cap as in noah's ark. verily, i never did see such monsters as the heads now in vogue. i am a monster, too, but a moderate one.' she must have been glad to get back to her home, to her daily work, to charles, climbing his trees and talking his nonsense. in the winter of her mother died at palgrave. it was christmas week; the old lady had come travelling four days through the snow in a postchaise with her maid and her little grandchildren, while her son rode on horseback. but the cold and the fatigue of the journey, and the discomfort of the inns, proved too much for mrs. aikin, who reached her daughter's house only to die. just that time three years before mrs. barbauld had lost her father, whom she dearly loved. there is a striking letter from the widowed mother to her daughter recording the event. it is almost spartan in its calmness, but nevertheless deeply touching. now she, too, was at rest, and after mrs. aikin's death a cloud of sadness and depression seems to have fallen upon the household. mr. barbauld was ailing; he was suffering from a nervous irritability which occasionally quite unfitted him for his work as a schoolmaster. already his wife must have had many things to bear, and very much to try her courage and cheerfulness; and now her health was also failing. it was in that they gave up the academy, which, on the whole, had greatly flourished. it had been established eleven years; they were both of them in need of rest and change. nevertheless, it was not without reluctance that they brought themselves to leave their home at palgrave. a successor was found only too quickly for mrs. barbauld's wishes; they handed over their pupils to his care, and went abroad for a year's sunshine and distraction. v. what a contrast to prim, starched scholastic life at palgrave must have been the smiling world, and the land flowing with oil and wine, in which they found themselves basking! the vintage was so abundant that year that the country people could not find vessels to contain it. 'the roads covered with teams of casks, empty or full according as they were going out or returning, and drawn by oxen whose strong necks seemed to be bowed unwillingly under the yoke. men, women, and children were abroad; some cutting with a short sickle the bunches of grapes, some breaking them with a wooden instrument, some carrying them on their backs from the gatherers to those who pressed the juice; and, as in our harvest, the gleaners followed.' from the vintage they travel to the alps, 'a sight so majestic, so totally different from anything i had seen before, that i am ready to sing _nunc dimittis_,' she writes. they travel back by the south of france and reach paris in june, where the case of the diamond necklace is being tried. then they return to england, waiting a day at boulogne for a vessel, but crossing from thence in less than four hours. how pretty is her description of england as it strikes them after their absence! 'and not without pleasing emotion did we view again the green swelling hills covered with large sheep, and the winding road bordered with the hawthorn hedge, and the english vine twirled round the tall poles, and the broad medway covered with vessels, and at last the gentle yet majestic thames.' there were dissenters at hampstead in those days, as there are still, and it was a call from a little unitarian congregation on the hillside who invited mr. barbauld to become their minister, which decided the worthy couple to retire to this pleasant suburb. the place seemed promising enough; they were within reach of mrs. barbauld's brother, dr. aikin, now settled in london, and to whom she was tenderly attached. there were congenial people settled all about. on the high hill-top were pleasant old houses to live in. there was occupation for him and literary interest for her. they are a sociable and friendly pair, hospitable, glad to welcome their friends, and the acquaintance, and critics, and the former pupils who come toiling up the hill to visit them. rogers comes to dinner 'at half after three.' they have another poet for a neighbour, miss joanna baillie; they are made welcome by all, and in their turn make others welcome; they do acts of social charity and kindness wherever they see the occasion. they have a young spanish gentleman to board who conceals a taste for 'seguars.' they also go up to town from time to time. on one occasion mr. barbauld repairs to london to choose a wedding present for miss belsham, who is about to be married to mr. kenrick, a widower with daughters. he chose two slim wedgwood pots of some late classic model, which still stand, after many dangers, safely on either side of mrs. kenrick's portrait in miss reid's drawing-room at hampstead. wedgwood must have been a personal friend: he has modelled a lovely head of mrs. barbauld, simple and nymph-like. hampstead was no further from london in those days than it is now, and they seem to have kept up a constant communication with their friends and relations in the great city. they go to the play occasionally. 'i have not indeed seen mrs. siddons often, but i think i never saw her to more advantage,' she writes. 'it is not, however, seeing a play, it is only seeing one character, for they have nobody to act with her.' another expedition is to westminster hall, where warren hastings was then being tried for his life. 'the trial has attracted the notice of most people who are within reach of it. i have been, and was very much struck with all the apparatus and pomp of justice, with the splendour of the assembly which contained everything distinguished in the nation, with the grand idea that the equity of the english was to pursue crimes committed at the other side of the globe, and oppressions exercised towards the poor indians who had come to plead their cause; but all these fine ideas vanish and fade away as one observes the progress of the cause, and sees it fall into the summer amusements, and take the place of a rehearsal of music or an evening at vauxhall.' mrs. barbauld was a liberal in feeling and conviction; she was never afraid to speak her mind, and when the french revolution first began, she, in common with many others, hoped that it was but the dawning of happier times. she was always keen about public events; she wrote an address on the opposition to the repeal of the test act in , and she published her poem to wilberforce on the rejection of his great bill for abolishing slavery:-- friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band! she cries, in warm enthusiasm for the devoted cause. horace walpole nicknamed her deborah, called her the virago barbauld, and speaks of her with utter rudeness and intolerant spite. but whether or not horace walpole approved, it is certain that mrs. barbauld possessed to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less common than it was in her day. not very many years ago i was struck on one occasion when a noble old lady, now gone to her rest, exclaimed in my hearing that people of this generation had all sorts of merits and charitable intentions, but that there was one thing she missed which had certainly existed in her youth, and which no longer seemed to be of the same account: that public spirit which used to animate the young as well as the old. it is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the beautiful, and the gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may be the modern rendering of the good old-fashioned sentiment. mrs. barbauld lived in very stirring days, when private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes of public affairs. to her the fortunes of england, its loyalty, its success, were a part of her daily bread. by her early associations she belonged to a party representing opposition, and for that very reason she was the more keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs and the opinions of those she trusted. her friend dr. priestley had emigrated to america for his convictions' sake; howard was giving his noble life for his work; wakefield had gone to prison. now the very questions are forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the answers have come while the questions are forgotten, in this their future which is our present, and to which some unborn historian may point back with a moral finger. dr. aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different from horace walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not writing more constantly. he wrote a copy of verses on this theme:-- thus speaks the muse, and bends her brows severe: did i, lætitia, lend my choicest lays, and crown thy youthful head with freshest bays, that all the expectance of thy full-grown year, should lie inert and fruitless? o revere those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise, whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise far from the vapours of this earthly sphere, seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain. she seems to have willingly left the lyre for dr. aikin's use. a few hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, and _jeux d'esprit_, a certain number of well-written and original essays, and several political pamphlets, represent the best of her work. her more ambitious poems are those by which she is the least remembered. it was at hampstead that mrs. barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's volume of 'evenings at home,' among which the transmigrations of indur may be quoted as a model of style and delightful matter. one of the best of her _jeux d'esprit_ is the 'groans of the tankard,' which was written in early days, with much spirit and real humour. it begins with a classic incantation, and then goes on:-- 'twas at the solemn silent noontide hour when hunger rages with despotic power, when the lean student quits his hebrew roots for the gross nourishment of english fruits, and throws unfinished airy systems by for solid pudding and substantial pie. the tankard now, replenished to the brink, with the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink, but, accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with voice and utters its bitter reproaches:-- unblest the day, and luckless was the hour which doomed me to a presbyterian's power, fated to serve a puritanic race, whose slender meal is shorter than their grace. vi. thumbkin, of fairy celebrity, used to mark his way by flinging crumbs of bread and scattering stones as he went along; and in like manner authors trace the course of their life's peregrinations by the pamphlets and articles they cast down as they go. sometimes they throw stones, sometimes they throw bread. in ' and ' mrs. barbauld must have been occupied with party polemics and with the political miseries of the time. a pamphlet on gilbert wakefield's views, and another on 'sins of the government and sins of the people,' show in what direction her thoughts were bent. then came a period of comparative calm again and of literary work and interest. she seems to have turned to akenside and collins, and each had an essay to himself. these were followed by certain selections from the _spectator_, _tatler_, &c., preceded by one of those admirable essays for which she is really remarkable. she also published a memoir of richardson prefixed to his correspondence. sir james mackintosh, writing at a later and sadder time of her life, says of her observations on the moral of clarissa that they are as fine a piece of mitigated and rational stoicism as our language can boast of. in another congregation seems to have made signs from stoke newington, and mrs. barbauld persuaded her husband to leave his flock at hampstead and to buy a house near her brother's at stoke newington. this was her last migration, and here she remained until her death in . one of her letters to mrs. kenrick gives a description of what might have been a happy home:--'we have a pretty little back parlour that looks into our little spot of a garden,' she says, 'and catches every gleam of sunshine. we have pulled down the ivy, except what covers the coach-house we have planted a vine and a passion-flower, with abundance of jessamine against the window, and we have scattered roses and honeysuckle all over the garden. you may smile at me for parading so over my house and domains.' in may she writes a pleasant letter, in good spirits, comparing her correspondence with her friend to the flower of an aloe, which sleeps for a hundred years, and on a sudden pushes out when least expected. 'but take notice, the life is in the aloe all the while, and sorry should i be if the life were not in our friendship all the while, though it so rarely diffuses itself over a sheet of paper.' she seems to have been no less sociable and friendly at stoke newington than at hampstead. people used to come up to see her from london. her letters, quiet and intimate as they are, give glimpses of most of the literary people of the day, not in memoirs then, but alive and drinking tea at one another's houses, or walking all the way to stoke newington to pay their respects to the old lady. charles lamb used to talk of his two _bald_ authoresses, mrs. barbauld being one and mrs. inchbald being the other. crabb robinson and rogers were two faithful links with the outer world. 'crabb robinson corresponds with madame de staël, is quite intimate,' she writes, 'has received i don't know how many letters,' she adds, not without some slight amusement. miss lucy aikin tells a pretty story of scott meeting mrs. barbauld at dinner, and telling her that it was to her that he owed his poetic gift. some translations of bürger by mr. taylor, of norwich, which she had read out at edinburgh, had struck him so much that they had determined him to try his own powers in that line. she often had inmates under her roof. one of them was a beautiful and charming young girl, the daughter of mrs. fletcher, of edinburgh, whose early death is recorded in her mother's life. besides company at home, mrs. barbauld went to visit her friends from time to time--the estlins at bristol, the edgeworths, whose acquaintance mr. and mrs. barbauld made about this time, and who seem to have been invaluable friends, bringing as they did a bright new element of interest and cheerful friendship into her sad and dimming life. a man must have extraordinarily good spirits to embark upon four matrimonial ventures as mr. edgeworth did; and as for miss edgeworth, appreciative, effusive, and warm-hearted, she seems to have more than returned mrs. barbauld's sympathy. miss lucy aikin, dr. aikin's daughter, was now also making her own mark in the literary world, and had inherited the bright intelligence and interest for which her family was so remarkable. much of miss aikin's work is more sustained than her aunt's desultory productions, but it lacks that touch of nature which has preserved mrs. barbauld's memory where more important people are forgotten. our authoress seems to have had a natural affection for sister authoresses. hannah more and mrs. montague were both her friends, so were madame d'arblay and mrs. chapone in a different degree; she must have known mrs. opie; she loved joanna baillie. the latter is described by her as the young lady at hampstead who came to mr. barbauld's meeting with as demure a face as if she had never written a line. and miss aikin, in her memoirs, describes in johnsonian language how the two miss baillies came to call one morning upon mrs. barbauld:--'my aunt immediately introduced the topic of the anonymous tragedies, and gave utterance to her admiration with the generous delight in the manifestation of kindred genius which distinguished her.' but it seems that miss baillie sat, nothing moved, and did not betray herself. mrs. barbauld herself gives a pretty description of the sisters in their home, in that old house on windmill hill, which stands untouched, with its green windows looking out upon so much of sky and heath and sun, with the wainscoted parlours where walter scott used to come, and the low wooden staircase leading to the old rooms above. it is in one of her letters to mrs. kenrick that mrs. barbauld gives a pleasant glimpse of the poetess walter scott admired. 'i have not been abroad since i was at norwich, except a day or two at hampstead with the miss baillies. one should be, as i was, beneath their roof to know all their merit. their house is one of the best ordered i know. they have all manner of attentions for their friends, and not only miss b., but joanna, is as clever in furnishing a room or in arranging a party as in writing plays, of which, by the way, she has a volume ready for the press, but she will not give it to the public till next winter. the subject is to be the passion of fear. i do not know what sort of a hero that passion can afford!' fear was, indeed, a passion alien to her nature, and she did not know the meaning of the word. mrs. barbauld's description of hannah more and her sisters living on their special hill-top was written after mr. barbauld's death, and thirty years after miss more's verses which are quoted by mrs. ellis in her excellent memoir of mrs. barbauld:-- nor, barbauld, shall my glowing heart refuse a tribute to thy virtues or thy muse; this humble merit shall at least be mine, the poet's chaplet for thy brows to twine; my verse thy talents to the world shall teach, and praise the graces it despairs to reach. then, after philosophically questioning the power of genius to confer true happiness, she concludes:-- can all the boasted powers of wit and song of life one pang remove, one hour prolong? fallacious hope which daily truths deride-- for you, alas! have wept and garrick died. meanwhile, whatever genius might not be able to achieve, the five miss mores had been living on peacefully together in the very comfortable cottage which had been raised and thatched by the poetess's earnings. 'barley wood is equally the seat of taste and hospitality,' says mrs. barbauld to a friend. 'nothing could be more friendly than their reception,' she writes to her brother, 'and nothing more charming than their situation. an extensive view over the mendip hills is in front of their house, with a pretty view of wrington. their home--cottage, because it is thatched--stands on the declivity of a rising ground, which they have planted and made quite a little paradise. the five sisters, all good old maids, have lived together these fifty years. hannah more is a good deal broken, but possesses fully her powers of conversation, and her vivacity. we exchanged riddles like the wise men of old; i was given to understand she was writing something.' there is another allusion to mrs. hannah more in a sensible letter from mrs. barbauld, written to miss edgeworth about this time, declining to join in an alarming enterprise suggested by the vivacious mr. edgeworth, 'a _feminiad_, a literary paper to be entirely contributed to by ladies, and where all articles are to be accepted.' 'there is no bond of union,' mrs. barbauld says, 'among literary women any more than among literary men; different sentiments and connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. mrs. hannah more would not write along with you or me, and we should possibly hesitate at joining miss hays or--if she were living--mrs. godwin.' then she suggests the names of miss baillie, mrs. opie, her own niece miss lucy aikin, and mr. s. rogers, who would not, she thinks, be averse to joining the scheme. vii. how strangely unnatural it seems when fate's heavy hand falls upon quiet and common-place lives, changing the tranquil routine of every day into the solemnities and excitements of terror and tragedy! it was after their removal to stoke newington that the saddest of all blows fell upon this true-hearted woman. her husband's hypochondria deepened and changed, and the attacks became so serious that her brother and his family urged her anxiously to leave him to other care than her own. it was no longer safe for poor mr. barbauld to remain alone with his wife, and her life, says mrs. le breton, was more than once in peril. but, at first, she would not hear of leaving him; although on more than one occasion she had to fly for protection to her brother close by. there is something very touching in the patient fidelity with which mrs. barbauld tried to soothe the later sad disastrous years of her husband's life. she must have been a woman of singular nerve and courage to endure as she did the excitement and cruel aberrations of her once gentle and devoted companion. she only gave in after long resistance. 'an alienation from me has taken possession of his mind,' she says, in a letter to mrs. kenrick; 'my presence seems to irritate him, and i must resign myself to a separation from him who has been for thirty years the partner of my heart, my faithful friend, my inseparable companion.' with her habitual reticence, she dwells no more on that painful topic, but goes on to make plans for them both, asks her old friend to come and cheer her in her loneliness; and the faithful betsy, now a widow with grown-up step-children, ill herself, troubled by deafness and other infirmities, responds with a warm heart, and promises to come, bringing the comfort with her of old companionship and familiar sympathy. there is something very affecting in the loyalty of the two aged women stretching out their hands to each other across a whole lifetime. after her visit mrs. barbauld writes again:-- 'he is now at norwich, and i hear very favourable accounts of his health and spirits; he seems to enjoy himself very much amongst his old friends there, and converses among them with his usual animation. there are no symptoms of violence or of depression; so far is favourable; but this cruel alienation from me, in which my brother is included, still remains deep-rooted, and whether he will ever change in this point heaven only knows. the medical men fear he will not: if so, my dear friend, what remains for me but to resign myself to the will of heaven, and to think with pleasure that every day brings me nearer a period which naturally cannot be very far off, and at which this as well as every temporal affliction must terminate? '"anything but this!" is the cry of weak mortals when afflicted; and sometimes i own i am inclined to make it mine; but i will check myself.' but while she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred. he, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he was found lifeless in the new river. lucy aikin quotes a dirge found among her aunt's papers after her death:-- pure spirit, o where art thou now? o whisper to my soul, o let some soothening thought of thee this bitter grief control. 'tis not for thee the tears i shed, thy sufferings now are o'er. the sea is calm, the tempest past, on that eternal shore. no more the storms that wrecked thy peace shall tear that gentle breast, nor summer's rage, nor winter's cold that poor, poor frame molest. * * * * * farewell! with honour, peace, and love, be that dear memory blest, thou hast no tears for me to shed, when i too am at rest. but her time of rest was not yet come, and she lived for seventeen years after her husband. she was very brave, she did not turn from the sympathy of her friends, she endured her loneliness with courage, she worked to distract her mind. here is a touching letter addressed to mrs. taylor, of norwich, in which she says:--'a thousand thanks for your kind letter, still more for the very short visit that preceded it. though short--too short--it has left indelible impressions on my mind. my heart has truly had communion with yours; your sympathy has been balm to it; and i feel that there is _now_ no one on earth to whom i could pour out that heart more readily.... i am now sitting alone again, and feel like a person who has been sitting by a cheerful fire, not sensible at the time of the temperature of the air; but the fire removed, he finds the season is still winter. day after day passes, and i do not know what to do with my time; my mind has no energy nor power of application.' how much she felt her loneliness appears again and again from one passage and another. then she struggled against discouragement; she took to her pen again. to mrs. kenrick she writes:--'i intend to pay my letter debts; not much troubling my head whether i have anything to say or not; yet to you my heart has always something to say: it always recognises you as among the dearest of its friends; and while it feels that new impressions are made with difficulty and early effaced, retains, and ever will retain, i trust beyond this world, those of our early and long-tried affection.' she set to work again, trying to forget her heavy trials. it was during the first years of her widowhood that she published her edition of the british novelists in some fifty volumes. there is an opening chapter to this edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an admirable and most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning from the very earliest times. in she wrote her poem on the king's illness, and also the longer poem which provoked such indignant comments at the time. it describes britain's rise and luxury, warns her of the dangers of her unbounded ambition and unjustifiable wars:-- arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring; commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring. her ingenuous youth from ontario's shore who visits the ruins of london is one of the many claimants to the honour of having suggested lord macaulay's celebrated new zealander:-- pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet each splendid square and still untrodden street, or of some crumbling turret, mined by time, the broken stairs with perilous step shall climb, thence stretch their view the wide horizon round, by scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound, and, choked no more with fleets, fair thames survey through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way. it is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to the present taste. the description of britain as it now is and as it once was is very ingenious:-- where once bonduca whirled the scythèd car, and the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war, light forms beneath transparent muslin float, and tutor'd voices swell the artful note; light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane, and spreading cedars grace the woodland reign. the poem is forgotten now, though it was scouted at the time and violently attacked, southey himself falling upon the poor old lady, and devouring her, spectacles and all. she felt these attacks very much, and could not be consoled, though miss edgeworth wrote a warm-hearted letter of indignant sympathy. but mrs. barbauld had something in her too genuine to be crushed, even by sarcastic criticism. she published no more, but it was after her poem of ' ' that she wrote the beautiful ode by which she is best known and best remembered,--the ode that wordsworth used to repeat and say he envied, that tennyson has called 'sweet verses,' of which the lines ring their tender hopeful chime like sweet church bells on a summer evening. madame d'arblay, in her old age, told crabb robinson that every night she said the verses over to herself as she went to her rest. to the writer they are almost sacred. the hand that patiently pointed out to her, one by one, the syllables of mrs. barbauld's hymns for children, that tended our childhood, as it had tended our father's, marked these verses one night, when it blessed us for the last time. life, we've been long together, through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'tis hard to part when friends are dear; perhaps 'twill cost a sigh or tear, then steal away, give little warning, choose thine own time. say not good-night, but in some brighter clime, bid me 'good morning.' mrs. barbauld was over seventy when she wrote this ode. a poem, called 'octogenary reflections,' is also very touching:-- say ye, who through this round of eighty years have proved its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears; say what is life, ye veterans who have trod, step following steps, its flowery thorny road? enough of good to kindle strong desire; enough of ill to damp the rising fire; enough of love and fancy, joy and hope, to fan desire and give the passions scope; enough of disappointment, sorrow, pain, to seal the wise man's sentence--'all is vain.' there is another fragment of hers in which she likens herself to a schoolboy left of all the train, who hears no sound of wheels to bear him to his father's bosom home. 'thus i look to the hour when i shall follow those that are at rest before me.' and then at last the time came for which she longed. her brother died, her faithful mrs. kenrick died, and mrs. taylor, whom she loved most of all. she had consented to give up her solitary home to spend the remaining years of her life in the home of her adopted son charles, now married, and a father; but it was while she was on a little visit to her sister-in-law, mrs. aikin, that the summons came, very swiftly and peacefully, as she sat in her chair one day. her nephew transcribed these, the last lines she ever wrote:-- 'who are you?' 'do you not know me? have you not expected me?' 'whither do you carry me?' 'come with me and you shall know.' 'the way is dark.' 'it is well trodden.' 'yes, in the forward track.' 'come along.' 'oh! shall i there see my beloved ones? will they welcome me, and will they know me? oh, tell me, tell me; thou canst tell me.' 'yes, but thou must come first.' 'stop a little; keep thy hand off till thou hast told me.' 'i never wait.' 'oh! shall i see the warm sun again in my cold grave?' 'nothing is there that can feel the sun.' 'oh, where then?' 'come, i say.' one may acknowledge the great progress which people have made since mrs. barbauld's day in the practice of writing prose and poetry, in the art of expressing upon paper the thoughts which are in most people's minds. it is (to use a friend's simile) like playing upon the piano--everybody now learns to play upon the piano, and it is certain that the modest performances of the ladies of mrs. barbauld's time would scarcely meet with the attention now, which they then received. but all the same, the stock of true feeling, of real poetry, is not increased by the increased volubility of our pens; and so when something comes to us that is real, that is complete in pathos or in wisdom, we still acknowledge the gift, and are grateful for it. _miss edgeworth._ - . 'exceeding wise, fairspoken, and persuading.'--_hen. viii._ early days. i. few authoresses in these days can have enjoyed the ovations and attentions which seem to have been considered the due of many of the ladies distinguished at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. to read the accounts of the receptions and compliments which fell to their lot may well fill later and lesser luminaries with envy. crowds opened to admit them, banquets spread themselves out before them, lights were lighted up and flowers were scattered at their feet. dukes, editors, prime ministers, waited their convenience on their staircases; whole theatres rose up _en masse_ to greet the gifted creatures of this and that immortal tragedy. the authoresses themselves, to do them justice, seem to have been very little dazzled by all this excitement. hannah more contentedly retires with her maiden sisters to the parnassus on the mendip hills, where they sew and chat and make tea, and teach the village children. dear joanna baillie, modest and beloved, lives on to peaceful age in her pretty old house at hampstead, looking through tree-tops and sunshine and clouds towards distant london. 'out there where all the storms are,' i heard the children saying yesterday as they watched the overhanging gloom of smoke which, veils the city of metropolitan thunders and lightning. maria edgeworth's apparitions as a literary lioness in the rush of london and of paris society were but interludes in her existence, and her real life was one of constant exertion and industry spent far away in an irish home among her own kindred and occupations and interests. we may realise what these were when we read that mr. edgeworth had no less than four wives, who all left children, and that maria was the eldest daughter of the whole family. besides this, we must also remember that the father whom she idolised was himself a man of extraordinary powers, brilliant in conversation (so i have been told), full of animation, of interest, of plans for his country, his family, for education and literature, for mechanics and scientific discoveries; that he was a gentleman widely connected, hospitably inclined, with a large estate and many tenants to overlook, with correspondence and acquaintances all over the world; and besides all this, with various schemes in his brain, to be eventually realised by others of which velocipedes, tramways, and telegraphs were but a few of the items. one could imagine that under these circumstances the hurry and excitement of london life must have sometimes seemed tranquillity itself compared with the many and absorbing interests of such a family. what these interests were may be gathered from the pages of a very interesting memoir from which the writer of this essay has been allowed to quote. it is a book privately printed and written for the use of her children by the widow of richard lovell edgeworth, and is a record, among other things, of a faithful and most touching friendship between maria and her father's wife--'a friendship lasting for over fifty years, and unbroken by a single cloud of difference or mistrust.' mrs. edgeworth, who was miss beaufort before her marriage, and about the same age as miss edgeworth, unconsciously reveals her own most charming and unselfish nature as she tells her stepdaughter's story. when the writer looks back upon her own childhood, it seems to her that she lived in company with a delightful host of little playmates, bright, busy, clever children, whose cheerful presence remains more vividly in her mind than that of many of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear disconnectedly as children do in childhood, when friendship and companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up people. now and again came little cousins or friends to share our games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, ever to be relied upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly companions--simple susan, lame jervas, talbot, the dear little merchants, jem the widow's son with his arms round old lightfoot's neck, the generous ben, with his whipcord and his useful proverb of 'waste not, want not'--all of these were there in the window corner waiting our pleasure. after parents' assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever, came popular tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room of an apartment in an old house in paris, and as we opened the books, lo! creation widened to our view. england, ireland, america, turkey, the mines of golconda, the streets of bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. all mr. edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and delight our play-time, and that of a thousand other little children in different parts of the world. people justly praise miss edgeworth's admirable stories and novels, but from prejudice and early association these beloved childish histories seem unequalled still, and it is chiefly as a writer for children that we venture to consider her here. some of the stories are indeed little idylls in their way. walter scott, who best knew how to write for the young so as to charm grandfathers as well as hugh littlejohn, esq., and all the grandchildren, is said to have wiped his kind eyes as he put down 'simple susan.' a child's book, says a reviewer of those days defining in the 'quarterly review,' should be 'not merely less dry, less difficult, than a book for grown-up people; but more rich in interest, more true to nature, more exquisite in art, more abundant in every quality that replies to childhood's keener and fresher perception.' children like facts, they like short vivid sentences that tell the story: as they listen intently, so they read; every word has its value for them. it has been a real surprise to the writer to find, on re-reading some of these descriptions of scenery and adventure which she had not looked at since her childhood, that the details which she had imagined spread over much space are contained in a few sentences at the beginning of a page. these sentences, however, show the true art of the writer. it would be difficult to imagine anything better suited to the mind of a very young person than these pleasant stories, so complete in themselves, so interesting, so varied. the description of jervas's escape from the mine where the miners had plotted his destruction, almost rises to poetry in its simple diction. lame jervas has warned his master of the miners' plot, and showed him the vein of ore which they have concealed. the miners have sworn vengeance against him, and his life is in danger. his master helps him to get away, and comes into the room before daybreak, bidding him rise and put on the clothes which he has brought. 'i followed him out of the house before anybody else was awake, and he took me across the fields towards the high road. at this place we waited till we heard the tinkling of the bells of a team of horses. "here comes the waggon," said he, "in which you are to go. so fare you well, jervas. i shall hear how you go on; and i only hope you will serve your next master, whoever he may be, as faithfully as you have served me." "i shall never find so good a master," was all i could say for the soul of me; i was quite overcome by his goodness and sorrow at parting with him, as i then thought, for ever.' the description of the journey is very pretty. 'the morning clouds began to clear away; i could see my master at some distance, and i kept looking after him as the waggon went on slowly, and he walked fast away over the fields.' then the sun begins to rise. the waggoner goes on whistling, but lame jervas, to whom the rising sun was a spectacle wholly surprising, starts up, exclaiming in wonder and admiration. the waggoner bursts into a loud laugh. 'lud a marcy,' says he, 'to hear un' and look at un' a body would think the oaf had never seen the sun rise afore;' upon which jervas remembers that he is still in cornwall, and must not betray himself, and prudently hides behind some parcels, only just in time, for they meet a party of miners, and he hears his enemies' voice hailing the waggoner. all the rest of the day he sits within, and amuses himself by listening to the bells of the team, which jingle continually. 'on our second day's journey, however, i ventured out of my hiding-place. i walked with the waggoner up and down the hills, enjoying the fresh air, the singing of the birds, and the delightful smell of the honeysuckles and the dog-roses in the hedges. all the wild flowers and even the weeds on the banks by the wayside were to me matters of wonder and admiration. at almost every step i paused to observe something that was new to me, and i could not help feeling surprised at the insensibility of my fellow-traveller, who plodded along, and seldom interrupted his whistling except to cry 'gee, blackbird, aw woa,' or 'how now, smiler?' then jervas is lost in admiration before a plant 'whose stem was about two feet high, and which had a round shining purple beautiful flower,' and the waggoner with a look of scorn exclaims, 'help thee, lad, dost not thou know 'tis a common thistle?' after this he looks upon jervas as very nearly an idiot. 'in truth i believe i was a droll figure, for my hat was stuck full of weeds and of all sorts of wild flowers, and both my coat and waistcoat pockets were stuffed out with pebbles and funguses.' then comes plymouth harbour: jervas ventures to ask some questions about the vessels, to which the waggoner answers 'they be nothing in life but the boats and ships, man;' so he turned away and went on chewing a straw, and seemed not a whit more moved to admiration than he had been at the sight of the thistle. 'i conceived a high admiration of a man who had seen so much that he could admire nothing,' says jervas, with a touch of real humour. another most charming little idyll is that of simple susan, who was a real maiden living in the neighbourhood of edgeworthstown. the story seems to have been mislaid for a time in the stirring events of the first irish rebellion, and overlooked, like some little daisy by a battlefield. few among us will not have shared mr. edgeworth's partiality for the charming little tale. the children fling their garlands and tie up their violets. susan bakes her cottage loaves and gathers marigolds for broth, and tends her mother to the distant tune of philip's pipe coming across the fields. as we read the story again it seems as if we could almost scent the fragrance of the primroses and the double violets, and hear the music sounding above the children's voices, and the bleatings of the lamb, so simply and delightfully is the whole story constructed. among all miss edgeworth's characters few are more familiar to the world than that of susan's pretty pet lamb. ii. no sketch of maria edgeworth's life, however slight, would be complete without a few words about certain persons coming a generation before her (and belonging still to the age of periwigs), who were her father's associates and her own earliest friends. notwithstanding all that has been said of mr. edgeworth's bewildering versatility of nature, he seems to have been singularly faithful in his friendships. he might take up new ties, but he clung pertinaciously to those which had once existed. his daughter inherited that same steadiness of affection. in his life of erasmus darwin, his grandfather, mr. charles darwin, writing of these very people, has said, 'there is, perhaps, no safer test of a man's real character than that of his long-continued friendship with good and able men.' he then goes on to quote an instance of a long-continued affection and intimacy only broken by death between a certain set of distinguished friends, giving the names of keir, day, small, boulton, watt, wedgwood, and darwin, and adding to them the names of edgeworth himself and of the galtons. mr. edgeworth first came to lichfield to make dr. darwin's acquaintance. his second visit was to his friend mr. day, the author of 'sandford and merton,' who had taken a house in the valley of stow, and who invited him one christmas on a visit. 'about the year ,' says miss seward, 'came to lichfield, from the neighbourhood of reading, the young and gay philosopher, mr. edgeworth; a man of fortune, and recently married to a miss elers, of oxfordshire. the fame of dr. darwin's various talents allured mr. e. to the city they graced.' and the lady goes on to describe mr. edgeworth himself:--'scarcely two-and-twenty, with an exterior yet more juvenile, having mathematic science, mechanic ingenuity, and a competent portion of classical learning, with the possession of the modern languages.... he danced, he fenced, he winged his arrows with more than philosophic skill,' continues the lady, herself a person of no little celebrity in her time and place. mr. edgeworth, in his memoirs, pays a respectful tribute to miss seward's charms, to her agreeable conversation, her beauty, her flowing tresses, her sprightliness and address. such moderate expressions fail, however, to do justice to this lady's powers, to her enthusiasm, her poetry, her partisanship. the portrait prefixed to her letters is that of a dignified person with an oval face and dark eyes, the thick brown tresses are twined with pearls, her graceful figure is robed in the softest furs and draperies of the period. in her very first letter she thus poetically describes her surroundings:--'the autumnal glory of this day puts to shame the summer's sullenness. i sit writing upon this dear green terrace, feeding at intervals my little golden-breasted songsters. the embosomed vale of stow glows sunny through the claude-lorraine tint which is spread over the scene like the blue mist over a plum.' in this claude-lorraine-plum-tinted valley stood the house which mr. day had taken, and where mr. edgeworth had come on an eventful visit. miss seward herself lived with her parents in the bishop's palace at lichfield. there was also a younger sister, 'miss sally,' who died as a girl, and another very beautiful young lady their friend, by name honora sneyd, placed under mrs. seward's care. she was the heroine of major andré's unhappy romance. he too lived at lichfield with his mother, and his hopeless love gives a tragic reality to this by-gone holiday of youth and merry-making. as one reads the old letters and memoirs the echoes of laughter reach us. one can almost see the young folks all coming together out of the cathedral close, where so much of their time was passed; the beautiful honora, surrounded by friends and adorers, chaperoned by the graceful muse her senior, also much admired, and much made of. thomas day is perhaps striding after them in silence with keen critical glances; his long black locks flow unpowdered down his back. in contrast to him comes his brilliant and dressy companion, mr. edgeworth, who talks so agreeably. i can imagine little sabrina, day's adopted foundling, of whom so many stories have been told, following shyly at her guardian's side in her simple dress and childish beauty, and andré's young handsome face turned towards miss sneyd. so they pass on happy and contented in each other's company, honora in the midst, beautiful, stately, reserved: she too was one of those not destined to be old. miss seward seems to have loved this friend with a very sincere and admiring affection, and to have bitterly mourned her early death. her letters abound in apostrophes to the lost honora. but perhaps the poor muse expected almost too much from friendship, too much from life. she expected, as we all do at times, that her friends should be not themselves but her, that they should lead not their lives but her own. so much at least one may gather from the various phases of her style and correspondence, and her complaints of honora's estrangement and subsequent coldness. perhaps, also, miss seward's many vagaries and sentiments may have frozen honora's sympathies. miss seward was all asterisks and notes of exclamation. honora seems to have forced feeling down to its most scrupulous expression. she never lived to be softened by experience, to suit herself to others by degrees: with great love she also inspired awe and a sort of surprise. one can imagine her pointing the moral of the purple jar, as it was told long afterwards by her stepdaughter, then a little girl playing at her own mother's knee in her nursery by the river. people in the days of shilling postage were better correspondents than they are now when we have to be content with pennyworths of news and of affectionate intercourse. their descriptions and many details bring all the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the hearts and the pocket-books of the little society at lichfield as it then was. the town must have been an agreeable sojourn in those days for people of some pretension and small performance. the inhabitants of lichfield seem actually to have read each other's verses, and having done so to have taken the trouble to sit down and write out their raptures. they were a pleasant lively company living round about the old cathedral towers, meeting in the close or the adjacent gardens or the hospitable palace itself. here the company would sip tea, talk mild literature of their own and good criticism at second hand, quoting dr. johnson to one another with the familiarity of townsfolk. from erasmus darwin, too, they must have gained something of vigour and originality. with all her absurdities miss seward had some real critical power and appreciation; and some of her lines are very pretty.[ ] an 'ode to the sun' is only what might have been expected from this lichfield corinne. her best known productions are an 'elegy on captain cook,' a 'monody on major andré,' whom she had known from her early youth; and there is a poem, 'louisa,' of which she herself speaks very highly. but even more than her poetry did she pique herself upon her epistolary correspondence. it must have been well worth while writing letters when they were not only prized by the writer and the recipients, but commented on by their friends in after years. 'court dewes, esq.,' writes, after five years, for copies of miss seward's epistles to miss rogers and miss weston, of which the latter begins:--'soothing and welcome to me, dear sophia, is the regret you express for our separation! pleasant were the weeks we have recently passed together in this ancient and embowered mansion! i had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. how prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' then follows a sprightly attack before which johnson may have quailed indeed. 'is the fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to gallop unmolested over the fields of criticism? a few pebbles from the well-springs of truth and eloquence are all that is wanted to bring the might of his envy low.' this celebrated letter, which may stand as a specimen of the whole six volumes, concludes with the following apostrophe:--'virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred are thy delights! sophia, thy mind is capable of tasting them in all their poignance: against how many of life's incidents may that capacity be considered as a counterpoise!' footnote : in a notice of miss seward in the _annual register_, just after her death in , the writer, who seems to have known her, says:--'conscious of ability, she freely displayed herself in a manner equally remote from annoyance and affectation.... her errors arose from a glowing imagination joined to an excessive sensibility, cherished instead of repressed by early habits. it is understood that she has left the whole of her works to mr. scott, the northern poet, with a view to their publication with her life and posthumous pieces.' there were constant rubs, which are not to be wondered at, between miss seward and dr. darwin, who, though a poet, was also a singularly witty, downright man, outspoken and humorous. the lady admires his genius, bitterly resents his sarcasms; of his celebrated work, the 'botanic garden,' she says, 'it is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of the first water, but the eye will be apt to want the intersticial black velvet to give effect to their lustre.' in later days, notwithstanding her 'elegant language,' as mr. charles darwin calls it, she said several spiteful things of her old friend, but they seem more prompted by private pique than malice. if miss seward was the minerva and dr. darwin the jupiter of the lichfield society, its philosopher was thomas day, of whom miss seward's description is so good that i cannot help one more quotation:-- 'powder and fine clothes were at that time the appendages of gentlemen; mr. day wore not either. he was tall and stooped in the shoulders, full made but not corpulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a degree of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' she then compares him with his guest, mr. edgeworth. 'less graceful, less amusing, less brilliant than mr. e., but more highly imaginative, more classical, and a deeper reasoner; strict integrity, energetic friendship, open-handed generosity, and diffusive charity, greatly overbalanced on the side of virtue, the tincture of misanthropic gloom and proud contempt of common life society.' wright, of derby, painted a full-length picture of mr. day in . 'mr. day looks upward enthusiastically, meditating on the contents of a book held in his dropped right hand ... a flash of lightning plays in his hair and illuminates the contents of the volume.' 'dr. darwin,' adds miss seward, 'sat to mr. wright about the same period--_that_ was a simply contemplative portrait of the most perfect resemblance.' iii. maria must have been three years old this eventful christmas time when her father, leaving his wife in berkshire, came to stay with mr. day at lichfield, and first made the acquaintance of miss seward and her poetic circle. mr. day, who had once already been disappointed in love, and whose romantic scheme of adopting his foundlings and of educating one of them to be his wife, has often been described, had brought one of the maidens to the house he had taken at lichfield. this was sabrina, as he had called her. lucretia, having been found troublesome, had been sent off with a dowry to be apprenticed to a milliner. sabrina was a charming little girl of thirteen; everybody liked her, especially the friendly ladies at the palace, who received her with constant kindness, as they did mr. day himself and his visitor. what miss seward thought of sabrina's education i do not know. the poor child was to be taught to despise luxury, to ignore fear, to be superior to pain. she appears, however, to have been very fond of her benefactor, but to have constantly provoked him by starting and screaming whenever he fired uncharged pistols at her skirts, or dropped hot melted sealing-wax on her bare arms. she is described as lovely and artless, not fond of books, incapable of understanding scientific problems, or of keeping the imaginary and terrible secrets with which her guardian used to try her nerves. i do not know when it first occurred to him that honora sneyd was all that his dreams could have imagined. one day he left sabrina under many restrictions, and returning unexpectedly found her wearing some garment or handkerchief of which he did not approve, and discarded her on the spot and for ever. poor sabrina was evidently not meant to mate and soar with philosophical eagles. after this episode, she too was despatched, to board with an old lady, in peace for a time, let us hope, and in tranquil mediocrity. mr. edgeworth approved of this arrangement; he had never considered that sabrina was suited to his friend. but being taken in due time to call at the palace, he was charmed with miss seward, and still more by all he saw of honora; comparing her, alas! in his mind 'with all other women, and secretly acknowledging her superiority.' at first, he says, miss seward's brilliance overshadowed honora, but very soon her merits grew upon the bystanders. mr. edgeworth carefully concealed his feelings except from his host, who was beginning himself to contemplate a marriage with miss sneyd. mr. day presently proposed formally in writing for the hand of the lovely honora, and mr. edgeworth was to take the packet and to bring back the answer; and being married himself, and out of the running, he appears to have been unselfishly anxious for his friend's success. in the packet mr. day had written down the conditions to which he should expect his wife to subscribe. she would have to begin at once by giving up all luxuries, amenities, and intercourse with the world, and promise to continue to seclude herself entirely in his company. miss sneyd does not seem to have kept mr. edgeworth waiting long while she wrote her answer decidedly saying that she could not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions, nor the necessity for 'seclusion from society to preserve female virtue.' finding that honora absolutely refused to change her way of life, mr. day went into a fever, for which dr. darwin bled him. nor did he recover until another miss sneyd, elizabeth by name, made her appearance in the close. mr. edgeworth, who was of a lively and active disposition, had introduced archery among the gentlemen of the neighbourhood, and he describes a fine summer evening's entertainment passed in agreeable sports, followed by dancing and music, in the course of which honora's sister, miss elizabeth, appeared for the first time on the lichfield scene, and immediately joined in the country dance. there is a vivid description of the two sisters in mr. edgeworth's memoirs, of the beautiful and distinguished honora, loving science, serious, eager, reserved; of the more lovely but less graceful elizabeth, with less of energy, more of humour and of social gifts than her sister. elizabeth sneyd was, says edgeworth, struck by day's eloquence, by his unbounded generosity, by his scorn of wealth. his educating a young girl for his wife seemed to her romantic and extraordinary; and she seems to have thought it possible to yield to the evident admiration she had aroused in him. but, whether in fun or in seriousness, she represented to him that he could not with justice decry accomplishments and graces that he had not acquired. she wished him to go abroad for a time to study to perfect himself in all that was wanting; on her own part she promised not to go to bath, london, or any public place of amusement until his return, and to read certain books which he recommended. meanwhile mr. edgeworth had made no secret of his own feeling for honora to mr. day, 'who with all the eloquence of virtue and of friendship' urged him to fly, to accompany him abroad, and to shun dangers he could not hope to overcome. edgeworth consented to this proposal, and the two friends started for paris, visiting rousseau on their way. they spent the winter at lyons, as it was a place where excellent masters of all sorts were to be found; and here mr. day, with excess of zeal-- put himself (says his friend) to every species of torture, ordinary and extraordinary, to compel his antigallican limbs, in spite of their natural rigidity, to dance and fence, and manage the _great horse_. to perform his promise to miss e. sneyd honourably, he gave up seven or eight hours of the day to these exercises, for which he had not the slightest taste, and for which, except horsemanship, he manifested the most sovereign contempt. it was astonishing to behold the energy with which he persevered in these pursuits. i have seen him stand between two boards which reached from the ground higher than his knees: these boards were adjusted with screws so as barely to permit him to bend his knees, and to rise up and sink down. by these means mr. huise proposed to force mr. day's knees outwards; but screwing was in vain. he succeeded in torturing his patient; but original formation and inveterate habit resisted all his endeavours at personal improvement. i could not help pitying my philosophic friend, pent up in durance vile for hours together, with his feet in the stocks, a book in his hand, and contempt in his heart. mr. edgeworth meanwhile lodged himself 'in excellent and agreeable apartments,' and occupied himself with engineering. he is certainly curiously outspoken in his memoirs; and explains that the first mrs. edgeworth, maria's mother, with many merits, was of a complaining disposition, and did not make him so happy at home as a woman of a more lively temper might have succeeded in doing. he was tempted, he said, to look for happiness elsewhere than in his home. perhaps domestic affairs may have been complicated by a warm-hearted but troublesome little son, who at day's suggestion had been brought up upon the rousseau system, and was in consequence quite unmanageable, and a worry to everybody. poor mrs. edgeworth's complainings were not to last very long. she joined her husband at lyons, and after a time, having a dread of lying-in abroad, returned home to die in her confinement, leaving four little children. maria could remember being taken into her mother's room to see her for the last time. mr. edgeworth hurried back to england, and was met by his friend thomas day, who had preceded him, and whose own suit does not seem to have prospered meanwhile. but though notwithstanding all his efforts thomas day had not been fortunate in securing elizabeth sneyd's affections, he could still feel for his friend. his first words were to tell edgeworth that honora was still free, more beautiful than ever; while virtue and honour commanded it, he had done all he could to divide them; now he wished to be the first to promote their meeting. the meeting resulted in an engagement, and mr. edgeworth and miss sneyd were married within four months by the benevolent old canon in the lady chapel of lichfield cathedral. mrs. seward wept; miss seward, 'notwithstanding some imaginary dissatisfaction about a bridesmaid,' was really glad of the marriage, we are told; and the young couple immediately went over to ireland. iv. though her life was so short, honora edgeworth seems to have made the deepest impression on all those she came across. over little maria she had the greatest influence. there is a pretty description of the child standing lost in wondering admiration of her stepmother's beauty, as she watched her soon after her marriage dressing at her toilet-table. little maria's feeling for her stepmother was very deep and real, and the influence of those few years lasted for a lifetime. her own exquisite carefulness she always ascribed to it, and to this example may also be attributed her habits of order and self-government, her life of reason and deliberate judgment. the seven years of honora's married life seem to have been very peaceful and happy. she shared her husband's pursuits, and wished for nothing outside her own home. she began with him to write those little books which were afterwards published. it is just a century ago since she and mr. edgeworth planned the early histories of harry and lucy and frank; while mr. day began his 'sandford and merton,' which at first was intended to appear at the same time, though eventually the third part was not published till . as a girl of seventeen honora sneyd had once been threatened with consumption. after seven years of married life the cruel malady again declared itself; and though dr. darwin did all that human resource could do, and though every tender care surrounded her, the poor young lady rapidly sank. there is a sad, prim, most affecting letter, addressed to little maria by the dying woman shortly before the end; and then comes that one written by the father, which is to tell her that all is over. if mr. edgeworth was certainly unfortunate in losing again and again the happiness of his home, he was more fortunate than most people in being able to rally from his grief. he does not appear to have been unfaithful in feeling. years after, edgeworth, writing to console mrs. day upon her husband's death, speaks in the most touching way of all he had suffered when honora died, and of the struggle he had made to regain his hold of life. this letter is in curious contrast to that one written at the time, as he sits by poor honora's deathbed; it reads strangely cold and irrelevant in these days when people are not ashamed of feeling or of describing what they feel. 'continue, my dear daughter'--he writes to maria, who was then thirteen years old--'the desire which you feel of becoming amiable, prudent, and of use. the ornamental parts of a character, with such an understanding as yours, necessarily ensue; but true judgment and sagacity in the choice of friends, and the regulation of your behaviour, can be only had from reflection, and from being thoroughly convinced of what experience in general teaches too late, that to be happy we must be good.' 'such a letter, written at such a time,' says the kind biographer, 'made the impression it was intended to convey; and the wish to act up to the high opinion her father had formed of her character became an exciting and controlling power over the whole of maria's future life.' on her deathbed, honora urged her husband to marry again, and assured him that the woman to suit him was her sister elizabeth. her influence was so great upon them both that, although elizabeth was attached to some one else, and mr. edgeworth believed her to be little suited to himself, they were presently engaged and married, not without many difficulties. the result proved how rightly honora had judged. it was to her father that maria owed the suggestion of her first start in literature. immediately after honora's death he tells her to write a tale about the length of a 'spectator,' on the subject of generosity. 'it must be taken from history or romance, must be sent the day se'nnight after you receive this; and i beg you will take some pains about it.' a young gentleman from oxford was also set to work to try his powers on the same subject, and mr. william sneyd, at lichfield, was to be judge between the two performances. he gave his verdict for maria: 'an excellent story and very well written: but where's the generosity?' this, we are told, became a sort of proverb in the edgeworth family. the little girl meanwhile had been sent to school to a certain mrs. lataffiere, where she was taught to use her fingers, to write a lovely delicate hand, to work white satin waistcoats for her papa. she was then removed to a fashionable establishment in upper wimpole street, where, says her stepmother, 'she underwent all the usual tortures of backboards, iron collars, and dumb-bells, with the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw out the muscles and increase the growth,--a signal failure in her case.' (miss edgeworth was always a very tiny person.) there is a description given of maria at this school of hers of the little maiden absorbed in her book with all the other children at play, while she sits in her favourite place in front of a carved oak cabinet, quite unconscious of the presence of the romping girls all about her. hers was a very interesting character as it appears in the memoirs--sincere, intelligent, self-contained, and yet dependent; methodical, observant. sometimes as one reads of her in early life one is reminded of some of the personal characteristics of the writer who perhaps of all writers least resembles miss edgeworth in her art--of charlotte brontë, whose books are essentially of the modern and passionate school, but whose strangely mixed character seemed rather to belong to the orderly and neatly ruled existence of queen charlotte's reign. people's lives as they really are don't perhaps vary very much, but people's lives as they seem to be assuredly change with the fashions. miss edgeworth and miss brontë were both irishwomen, who have often, with all their outcome, the timidity which arises from quick and sensitive feeling. but the likeness does not go very deep. maria, whose diffidence and timidity were personal, but who had a firm and unalterable belief in family traditions, may have been saved from some danger of prejudice and limitation by a most fortunate though trying illness which affected her eyesight, and which caused her to be removed from her school with its monstrous elegancies to the care of mr. day, that kindest and sternest of friends. this philosopher in love had been bitterly mortified when the lively elizabeth sneyd, instead of welcoming his return, could not conceal her laughter at his uncouth elegancies, and confessed that, on the whole, she had liked him better as he was before. he forswore lichfield and marriage, and went abroad to forget. he turned his thoughts to politics; he wrote pamphlets on public subjects and letters upon slavery. his poem of the 'dying negro' had been very much admired. miss hannah more speaks of it in her memoirs. the subject of slavery was much before people's minds, and day's influence had not a little to do with the rising indignation. among day's readers and admirers was one person who was destined to have a most important influence upon his life. by a strange chance his extraordinary ideal was destined to be realised; and a young lady, good, accomplished, rich, devoted, who had read his books, and sympathised with his generous dreams, was ready not only to consent to his strange conditions, but to give him her whole heart and find her best happiness in his society and in carrying out his experiments and fancies. she was miss esther milnes, of yorkshire, an heiress; and though at first day hesitated and could not believe in the reality of her feeling, her constancy and singleness of mind were not to be resisted, and they were married at bath in . we hear of mr. and mrs. day spending the first winter of their married life at hampstead, and of mrs. day, thickly shodden, walking with him in a snowstorm on the common, and ascribing her renewed vigour to her husband's spartan advice. day and his wife eventually established themselves at anningsley, near chobham. he had insisted upon settling her fortune upon herself, but mrs. day assisted him in every way, and sympathised in his many schemes and benevolent ventures. when he neglected to make a window to the dressing-room he built for her, we hear of her uncomplainingly lighting her candles; to please him she worked as a servant in the house, and all their large means were bestowed in philanthropic and charitable schemes. mr. edgeworth quotes his friend's reproof to mrs. day, who was fond of music: 'shall we beguile the time with the strains of a lute while our fellow-creatures are starving?' 'i am out of pocket every year about _l._ by the farm i keep,' day writes his to his friend edgeworth. 'the soil i have taken in hand, i am convinced, is one of the most completely barren in england.' he then goes on to explain his reasons for what he is about. 'it enables me to employ the poor, and the result of all my speculations about humanity is that the only way of benefiting mankind is to give them employment and make them earn their money.' there is a pretty description of the worthy couple in their home dispensing help and benefits all round about, draining, planting, teaching, doctoring--nothing came amiss to them. their chief friend and neighbour was samuel cobbett, who understood their plans, and sympathised in their efforts, which, naturally enough, were viewed with doubt and mistrust by most of the people round about. it was at anningsley that mr. day finished 'sandford and merton,' begun many years before. his death was very sudden, and was brought about by one of his own benevolent theories. he used to maintain that kindness alone could tame animals; and he was killed by a fall from a favourite colt which he was breaking in. mrs. day never recovered the shock. she lived two years hidden in her home, absolutely inconsolable, and then died and was laid by her husband's side in the churchyard at wargrave by the river. it was to the care of these worthy people that little maria was sent when she was ill, and she was doctored by them both physically and morally. 'bishop berkeley's tar-water was still considered a specific for all complaints,' says mrs. edgeworth. 'mr. day thought it would be of use to maria's inflamed eyes, and he used to bring a large tumbler full of it to her every morning. she dreaded his "now, miss maria, drink this." but there was, in spite of his stern voice, something of pity and sympathy in his countenance. his excellent library was open to her, and he directed her studies. his severe reasoning and uncompromising truth of mind awakened all her powers, and the questions he put to her and the working out of the answers, the necessity of perfect accuracy in all her words, suited the natural truth of her mind; and though such strictness was not agreeable, she even then perceived its advantage, and in after life was grateful for it.' v. we have seen how miss elizabeth sneyd, who could not make up her mind to marry mr. day notwithstanding all he had gone through for her sake, had eventually consented to become mr. edgeworth's third wife. with this stepmother for many years to come maria lived in an affectionate intimacy, only to be exceeded by that most faithful companionship which existed for fifty years between her and the lady from whose memoirs i quote. it was about that maria went home to live at edgeworthtown with her father and his wife, with the many young brothers and sisters. the family was a large one, and already consisted of her own sisters, of honora the daughter of mrs. honora, and lovell her son. to these succeeded many others of the third generation; and two sisters of mrs. edgeworth's, who also made their home at edgeworthtown. maria had once before been there, "very young, but she was now old enough to be struck with the difference then so striking between ireland and england." the tones and looks, the melancholy and the gaiety of the people, were so new and extraordinary to her that the delineations she long afterwards made of irish character probably owe their life and truth to the impression made on her mind at this time as a stranger. though it was june when they landed, there was snow on the roses she ran out to gather, and she felt altogether in a new and unfamiliar country. she herself describes the feelings of the master of a family returning to an irish home:-- wherever he turned his eyes, in or out of his home, damp dilapidation, waste appeared. painting, glazing, roofing, fencing, finishing--all were wanting. the backyard and even the front lawn round the windows of the house were filled with loungers, followers, and petitioners; tenants, undertenants, drivers, sub-agent and agent were to have audience; and they all had grievances and secret informations, accusations, reciprocations, and quarrels each under each interminable. her account of her father's dealings with them is admirable:-- i was with him constantly, and i was amused and interested in seeing how he made his way through their complaints, petitions, and grievances with decision and despatch, he all the time in good humour with the people and they delighted with him, though he often rated them roundly when they stood before him perverse in litigation, helpless in procrastination, detected in cunning or convicted of falsehood. they saw into his character almost as soon as he understood theirs. mr. edgeworth had in a very remarkable degree that power of ruling and administering which is one of the rarest of gifts. he seems to have shown great firmness and good sense in his conduct in the troubled times in which he lived. he saw to his own affairs, administered justice, put down middlemen as far as possible, reorganised the letting out of the estate. unlike many of his neighbours, he was careful not to sacrifice the future to present ease of mind and of pocket. he put down rack-rents and bribes of every sort, and did his best to establish things upon a firm and lasting basis. but if it was not possible even for mr. edgeworth to make such things all they should have been outside the house, the sketch given of the family life at home is very pleasant. the father lives in perfect confidence with his children, admitting them to his confidence, interesting them in his experiments, spending his days with them, consulting them. there are no reservations; he does his business in the great sitting-room, surrounded by his family. i have heard it described as a large ground-floor room, with windows to the garden and with two columns supporting the further end, by one of which maria's writing-desk used to be placed--a desk which her father had devised for her, which used to be drawn out to the fireside when she worked. does not mr. edgeworth also mention in one of his letters a picture of thomas day hanging over a sofa against the wall? books in plenty there were, we may be sure, and perhaps models of ingenious machines and different appliances for scientific work. sir henry holland and mr. ticknor give a curious description of mr. edgeworth's many ingenious inventions. there were strange locks to the rooms and telegraphic despatches to the kitchen; clocks at the one side of the house were wound up by simply opening certain doors at the other end. it has been remarked that all miss edgeworth's heroes had a smattering of science. several of her brothers inherited her father's turn for it. we hear of them raising steeples and establishing telegraphs in partnership with him. maria shared of the family labours and used to help her father in the business connected with the estate, to assist him, also, to keep the accounts. she had a special turn for accounts, and she was pleased with her exquisitely neat columns and by the accuracy with which her figures fell into their proper places. long after her father's death this knowledge and experience enabled her to manage the estate for her eldest stepbrother, mr. lovell edgeworth. she was able, at a time of great national difficulty and anxious crisis, to meet a storm in which many a larger fortune was wrecked. but in she was a young girl only beginning life. storms were not yet, and she was putting out her wings in the sunshine. her father set her to translate 'adèle et théodore,' by madame de genlis (she had a great facility for languages, and her french was really remarkable). holcroft's version of the book, however, appeared, and the edgeworth translation was never completed. mr. day wrote a letter to congratulate mr. edgeworth on the occasion. it seemed horrible to mr. day that a woman should appear in print. it is possible that the edgeworth family was no exception to the rule by which large and clever and animated families are apt to live in a certain atmosphere of their own. but, notwithstanding this strong family bias, few people can have seen more of the world, felt its temper more justly, or appreciated more fully the interesting varieties of people to be found in it than maria edgeworth. within easy reach of edgeworthtown were different agreeable and cultivated houses. there was pakenham hall with lord longford for its master; one of its daughters was the future duchess of wellington, 'who was always kitty pakenham for her old friends.' there at castle forbes also lived, i take it, more than one of the well-bred and delightful persons, out of 'patronage,' and the 'absentee,' who may, in real life, have borne the names of lady moira and lady granard. besides, there were cousins and relations without number--foxes, ruxtons, marriages and intermarriages; and when the time came for occasional absences and expeditions from home, the circles seem to have spread incalculably in every direction. the edgeworths appear to have been a genuinely sociable clan, interested in others and certainly interesting to them. vi. the first letter given in the memoirs from maria to her favourite aunt ruxton is a very sad one, which tells of the early death of her sister honora, a beautiful girl of fifteen, the only daughter of mrs. honora edgeworth, who died of consumption, as her mother had died. this letter, written in the dry phraseology of the time, is nevertheless full of feeling, above all for her father who was, as maria says elsewhere, ever since she could think or feel, the first object and motive of her mind. mrs. edgeworth describes her sister-in-law as follows:-- mrs. ruxton resembled her brother in the wit and vivacity of her mind and strong affections; her grace and charm of manner were such that a gentleman once said of her; 'if i were to see mrs. ruxton in rags as a beggar woman sitting on the doorstep, i should say "madam" to her.' 'to write to her aunt ruxton was, as long as she lived, maria's greatest pleasure while away from her,' says mrs. edgeworth, 'and to be with her was a happiness she enjoyed with never flagging and supreme delight. blackcastle was within a few hours' drive of edgeworthtown, and to go to blackcastle was the holiday of her life.' mrs. edgeworth tells a story of maria once staying at blackcastle and tearing out the title page of 'belinda,' so that her aunt, mrs. ruxton, read the book without any suspicion of the author. she was so delighted with it that she insisted on maria listening to page after page, exclaiming 'is not that admirably written?' 'admirably read, i think,' said maria; until her aunt, quite provoked by her faint acquiescence, says, 'i am sorry to see my little maria unable to bear the praises of a rival author;' at which poor maria burst into tears, and mrs. ruxton could never bear the book mentioned afterwards. it was with mrs. ruxton that a little boy, born just after the death of the author of 'sandford and merton,' was left on the occasion of the departure of the edgeworth family for clifton, in , where mr. edgeworth spent a couple of years for the health of one of his sons. in july the poor little brother dies in ireland. 'there does not, now that little thomas is gone, exist even a person of the same name as mr. day,' says mr. edgeworth, who concludes his letter philosophically, as the father of twenty children may be allowed to do, by expressing a hope that to his nurses, mrs. ruxton and her daughter, 'the remembrance of their own goodness will soon obliterate the painful impression of his miserable end.' during their stay at clifton richard edgeworth, the eldest son, who had been brought up upon rousseau's system, and who seems to have found the old world too restricted a sphere for his energies, after going to sea and disappearing for some years, suddenly paid them a visit from south carolina, where he had settled and married. the young man was gladly welcomed by them all. he had been long separated from home, and he eventually died very young in america; but his sister always clung to him with fond affection, and when he left them to return home she seems to have felt his departure very much. 'last saturday my poor brother richard took leave of us to return to america. he has gone up to london with my father and mother, and is to sail from thence. we could not part from him without great pain and regret, for he made us all extremely fond of him.' notwithstanding these melancholy events, maria edgeworth seems to have led a happy busy life all this time among her friends, her relations, her many interests, her many fancies and facts, making much of the children, of whom she writes pleasant descriptions to her aunt. 'charlotte is very engaging and promises to be handsome. sneyd is, and promises everything. henry will, i think, through life always do more than he promises. little honora is a sprightly blue-eyed child at nurse with a woman who is the picture of health and simplicity. lovell is perfectly well. doctor darwin has paid him very handsome compliments on his lines on the barbarini vase in the first part of the "botanic garden."' mr. edgeworth, however, found the time long at clifton, though, as usual, he at once improved his opportunities, paid visits to his friends in london and elsewhere, and renewed many former intimacies and correspondences. maria also paid a visit to london, but the time had not come for her to enjoy society, and the extreme shyness of which mrs. edgeworth speaks made it pain to her to be in society in those early days. 'since i have been away from home,' she writes, 'i have missed the society of my father, mother, and sisters more than i can express, and more than beforehand i could have thought possible. i long to see them all again. even when i am most amused i feel a void, and now i understand what an aching void is perfectly.' very soon we hear of her at home again, 'scratching away at the freeman family.' mr. edgeworth is reading aloud gay's 'trivia' among other things, which she recommends to her aunt. 'i had much rather make a bargain with any one i loved to read the same books with them at the same hour than to look at the moon like rousseau's famous lovers.' there is another book, a new book for the children, mentioned about this time, 'evenings at home,' which they all admire immensely. miss edgeworth was now about twenty-six, at an age when a woman's powers have fully ripened; a change comes over her style; there is a fulness of description in her letters and a security of expression which show maturity. her habit of writing was now established, and she describes the constant interest her father took and his share in all she did. some of the slighter stories she first wrote upon a slate and read out to her brothers and sisters; others she sketched for her father's approval, and arranged and altered as he suggested. the letters for literary ladies were with the publishers by this time, and these were followed by various stories and early lessons, portions of 'parents' assistant,' and of popular tales, all of which were sent out in packets and lent from one member of the family to another before finally reaching mr. johnson, the publisher's, hands. maria edgeworth in some of her letters from clifton alludes with some indignation to the story of mrs. hannah more's ungrateful _protégée_ lactilla, the literary milkwoman, whose poems hannah more was at such pains to bring before the world, and for whom, with her kind preface and warm commendations and subscription list, she was able to obtain the large sum of _l._ the ungrateful lactilla, who had been starving when mrs. more found her out, seems to have lost her head in this sudden prosperity, and to have accused her benefactress of wishing to steal a portion of the money. maria edgeworth must have been also interested in some family marriages which took place about this time. her own sister anna became engaged to dr. beddoes, of clifton, whose name appears as prescribing for the authors of various memoirs of that day. he is 'a man of ability, of a great name in the scientific world,' says mr. edgeworth, who favoured the doctor's 'declared passion,' as a proposal was then called, and the marriage accordingly took place on their return to ireland. emmeline, another sister, was soon after married to mr. king, a surgeon, also living at bristol, and maria was now left the only remaining daughter of the first marriage, to be good aunt, sister, friend to all the younger members of the party. she was all this, but she herself expressly states that her father would never allow her to be turned into a nursery drudge; her share of the family was limited to one special little boy. meanwhile her pen-and-ink children are growing up, and starting out in the world on their own merits. 'i beg, dear sophy,' she writes to her cousin, 'that you will not call my little stories by the sublime name of my works; i shall else be ashamed when the little mouse comes forth. the stories are printed and bound the same size as 'evenings at home,' but i am afraid you will dislike the title. my father had sent the 'parents' friend,' but mr. johnson has degraded it into 'parents' assistant.' in , says miss beaufort, who was to be so soon more intimately connected with the edgeworth family, johnson wished to publish more volumes of the 'parents' assistant' on fine paper, with prints, and mrs. ruxton asked me to make some designs for them. these designs seem to have given great satisfaction to the edgeworth party, and especially to a little boy called william, mrs. edgeworth's youngest boy, who grew up to be a fine young man, but who died young of the cruel family complaint. mrs. edgeworth's health was also failing all this time--'though she makes epigrams she is far from well,' says maria; but they, none of them seem seriously alarmed. mr. edgeworth, in the intervals of politics, is absorbed in a telegraph, which, with the help of his sons, he is trying to establish. it is one which will act by night as well as by day. it was a time of change and stir for ireland, disaffection growing and put down for a time by the soldiers; armed bands going about 'defending' the country and breaking its windows. in threats of a french invasion had alarmed everybody, and now again in came rumours of every description, and mr. edgeworth was very much disappointed that his proposal for establishing a telegraph across the water to england was rejected by government. he also writes to dr. darwin that he had offered himself as a candidate for the county, and been obliged to relinquish at the last moment; but these minor disappointments were lost in the trouble which fell upon the household in the following year--the death of the mother of the family, who sank rapidly and died of consumption in . vii. when mr. edgeworth himself died (not, as we may be sure, without many active post-mortem wishes and directions) he left his entertaining memoirs half finished, and he desired his daughter maria in the most emphatic way to complete them, and to publish them without changing or altering anything that he had written. people reading them were surprised by the contents; many blamed miss edgeworth for making them public, not knowing how solemn and binding these dying commands of her father's had been, says mrs. leadbeater, writing at the time to mrs. trench. many severe and wounding reviews appeared, and this may have influenced miss edgeworth in her own objection to having her memoirs published by her family. mr. edgeworth's life was most extraordinary, comprising in fact three or four lives in the place of that one usually allowed to most people, some of us having to be moderately content with a half or three-quarters of existence. but his versatility of mind was no less remarkable than his tenacity of purpose and strength of affection, though some measure of sentiment must have certainly been wanting, and his fourth marriage must have taken most people by surprise. the writer once expressed her surprise at the extraordinary influence that mr. edgeworth seems to have had over women and over the many members of his family who continued to reside in his home after all the various changes which had taken place there. lady s---- to whom she spoke is one who has seen more of life than most of us, who has for years past carried help to the far-away and mysterious east, but whose natural place is at home in the more prosperous and unattainable west end. this lady said, 'you do not in the least understand what my uncle edgeworth was. i never knew anything like him. brilliant, full of energy and charm, he was something quite extraordinary and irresistible. if you had known him you would not have wondered at anything.' 'i had in the spring of that year ( ) paid my first visit to edgeworthtown with my mother and sister,' writes miss beaufort, afterwards mrs. edgeworth, the author of the memoirs. 'my father had long before been there, and had frequently met mr. edgeworth at mrs. ruxton's. in my father was presented to the living of collon, in the county of louth, where he resided from that time. his vicarage was within five minutes' walk of the residence of mr. foster, then speaker of the irish house of commons, the dear friend of mr. edgeworth, who came to collon in the spring of several times, and at last offered me his hand, which i accepted.' maria, who was at first very much opposed to the match, would not have been herself the most devoted and faithful of daughters if she had not eventually agreed to her father's wishes, and, as daughters do, come by degrees to feel with him and to see with his eyes. the influence of a father over a daughter where real sympathy exists is one of the very deepest and strongest that can be imagined. miss beaufort herself seems also to have had some special attraction for maria. she was about her own age. she must have been a person of singularly sweet character and gentle liberality of mind. 'you will come into a new family, but you will not come as a stranger, dear miss beaufort,' writes generous maria. 'you will not lead a new life, but only continue to lead the life you have been used to in your own happy cultivated family.' and her stepmother in a few feeling words describes all that maria was to her from the very first when she came as a bride to the home where the sisters and the children of the lately lost wife were all assembled to meet her. it gives an unpleasant thrill to read of the newly-married lady coming along to her home in a postchaise, and seeing something odd on the side of the road. 'look to the other side; don't look at it,' says mr. edgeworth; and when they had passed he tells his bride that it was the body of a man hung by the rebels between the shafts of a car. the family at edgeworthtown consisted of two ladies, sisters of the late mrs. edgeworth, who made it their home, and of maria, the last of the first family. lovell, now the eldest son, was away; but there were also four daughters and three sons at home. all agreed in making me feel at once at home and part of the family; all received me with the most unaffected cordiality; but from maria it was something more. she more than fulfilled the promise of her letter; she made me at once her most intimate friend, and in every trifle of the day treated me with the most generous confidence. those times were even more serious than they are now; we hear of mr. bond, the high sheriff, paying 'a pale visit' to edgeworthtown. 'i am going on in the old way, writing stories,' says maria edgeworth, writing in . 'i cannot be a captain of dragoons, and sitting with my hands before me would not make any one of us one degree safer.... simple susan went to foxhall a few days ago for lady anne to carry her to england.'... 'my father has made our little rooms so nice for us,' she continues; 'they are all fresh painted and papered. oh! rebels, oh! french spare them. we have never injured you, and all we wish is to see everybody as happy as ourselves.' on august we find from miss edgeworth's letter to her cousin that the french have got to castlebar. 'the lord-lieutenant is now at athlone, and it is supposed it will be their next object of attack. my father's corps of yeomanry are extremely attached to him and seem fully in earnest; but, alas! by some strange negligence, their arms have not yet arrived from dublin.... we, who are so near the scene of action, cannot by any means discover what _number_ of the french actually landed; some say , some , , some , .' the family had a narrow escape that day, for two officers, who were in charge of some ammunition, offered to take them under their protection as far as longford. mr. edgeworth most fortunately detained them. 'half an hour afterwards, as we were quietly sitting in the portico, we heard, as we thought close to us, the report of a pistol or a clap of thunder which shook the house. the officer soon after returned almost speechless; he could hardly explain what had happened. the ammunition cart, containing nearly three barrels of gunpowder, took fire, and burnt half-way on the road to longford. the man who drove the cart was blown to atoms. nothing of him could be found. two of the horses were killed; others were blown to pieces, and their limbs scattered to a distance. the head and body of a man were found a hundred and twenty yards from the spot.... if we had gone with this ammunition cart, we must have been killed. an hour or two afterwards we were obliged to fly from edgeworthtown. the pikemen, in number, were within a mile of the town; my mother and charlotte and i rode; passed the trunk of the dead man, bloody limbs of horses, and two dead horses, by the help of men who pulled on our steeds--all safely lodged now in mrs. fallon's inn.' 'before we had reached the place where the cart had been blown up,' says mrs. edgeworth, 'mr. edgeworth suddenly recollected that he had left on the table in his study a list of the yeomanry corps which he feared might endanger the poor fellows and their families if it fell into the hands of the rebels. he galloped back for it. it was at the hazard of his life; but the rebels had not yet appeared. he burned the paper, and rejoined us safely.' the memoirs give a most interesting and spirited account of the next few days. the rebels spared mr. edgeworth's house, although they broke into it. after a time the family were told that all was safe for their return, and the account of their coming home, as it is given in the second volume of mr. edgeworth's life by his daughter, is a model of style and admirable description. in mr. edgeworth came into parliament for the borough of st. johnstown. he was a unionist by conviction, but he did not think the times were yet ripe for the union, and he therefore voted against it. in some of his letters to dr. darwin written at this time, he says that he was offered , guineas for his seat for the few remaining weeks of the session, which, needless to say, he refused, not thinking it well, as he says, '_to quarrel with myself_.' he also adds that maria continues writing for children under the persuasion that she cannot be more serviceably employed; and he sends (with his usual perspicuity) affectionate messages to the doctor's 'good amiable lady and _his giant brood_.' but this long friendly correspondence was coming to an end. the doctor's letters, so quietly humorous and to the point, mr. edgeworth's answers with all their characteristic and lively variety, were nearly at an end. it was in that maria had achieved her great success, and published 'castle rackrent,' a book--not for children this time--which made everybody talk who read, and those read who had only talked before. this work was published anonymously, and so great was its reputation that some one was at the pains to copy out the whole of the story with erasures and different signs of authenticity, and assume the authorship. one very distinctive mark of maria edgeworth's mind is the honest candour and genuine critical faculty which is hers. her appreciation of her own work and that of others is unaffected and really discriminating, whether it is 'corinne' or a simple story which she is reading, or scott's new novel the 'pirate,' or one of her own manuscripts which she estimates justly and reasonably. 'i have read "corinne" with my father, and i like it better than he does. in one word, i am dazzled by the genius, provoked by the absurdities, and in admiration of the taste and critical judgment of italian literature displayed throughout the whole work: but i will not dilate upon it in a letter. i could talk for three hours to you and my aunt.' elsewhere she speaks with the warmest admiration of a 'simple story.' jane austen's books were not yet published; but another writer, for whom mr. edgeworth and his daughter had a very great regard and admiration, was mrs. barbauld, who in all the heavy trials and sorrows of her later life found no little help and comfort in the friendship and constancy of maria edgeworth. mr. and mrs. barbauld, upon mr. edgeworth's invitation, paid him a visit at clifton, where he was again staying in , and where the last mrs. edgeworth's eldest child was born. there is a little anecdote of domestic life at this time in the memoirs which gives one a glimpse, not of an authoress, but of a very sympathising and impressionable person. 'maria took her little sister to bring down to her father, but when she had descended a few steps a panic seized her, and she was afraid to go either backwards or forwards. she sat down on the stairs afraid she should drop the child, afraid that its head would come off, and afraid that her father would find her sitting there and laugh at her, till seeing the footman passing she called "samuel" in a terrified voice, and made him walk before her backwards down the stairs till she safely reached the sitting-room.' for all these younger children maria seems to have had a most tender and motherly regard, as indeed for all her young brothers and sisters of the different families. many of them were the heroines of her various stories, and few heroines are more charming than some of miss edgeworth's. rosamund is said by some to have been maria herself, impulsive, warm-hearted, timid, and yet full of spirit and animation. in his last letter to mr. edgeworth dr. darwin writes kindly of the authoress, and sends her a message. the letter is dated april , . 'i am glad to find you still amuse yourself with mechanism in spite of the troubles of ireland;' and the doctor goes on to ask his friend to come and pay a visit to the priory, and describes the pleasant house with the garden, the ponds full of fish, the deep umbrageous valley, with the talkative stream running down it, and derby tower in the distance. the letter, so kind, so playful in its tone, was never finished. dr. darwin was writing as he was seized with what seemed a fainting fit, and he died within an hour. miss edgeworth writes of the shock her father felt when the sad news reached him; a shock, she says, which must in some degree be experienced by every person who reads this letter of dr. darwin's. no wonder this generous outspoken man was esteemed in his own time. to us, in ours, it has been given still more to know the noble son of 'that giant brood,' whose name will be loved and held in honour as long as people live to honour nobleness, simplicity, and genius; those things which give life to life itself. viii. 'calais after a rough passage; brussels, flat country, tiled houses, trees and ditches, the window shutters turned out to the street; fishwives' legs, dunkirk, and the people looking like wooden toys set in motion; bruges and its mingled spires, shipping, and windmills.' these notes of travel read as if miss edgeworth had been writing down only yesterday a pleasant list of the things which are to be seen two hours off, to-day no less plainly than a century ago. she jots it all down from her corner in the postchaise, where she is propped up with a father, brother, stepmother, and sister for travelling companions, and a new book to beguile the way. she is charmed with her new book. it is the story of 'mademoiselle de clermont,' by madame de genlis, and only just out. the edgeworths (with many other english people) rejoiced in the long-looked-for millennium, which had been signed only the previous autumn, and they now came abroad to bask in the sunshine of the continent, which had been so long denied to our mist-bound islanders. we hear of the enthusiastic and somewhat premature joy with which this peace was received by all ranks of people. not only did the english rush over to france; foreigners crossed to england, and one of them, an old friend of mr. edgeworth's, had already reached edgeworthtown, and inspired its enterprising master with a desire to see those places and things once more which he heard described. mr. edgeworth was anxious also to show his young wife the treasures in the louvre, and to help her to develop her taste for art. he had had many troubles of late, lost friends and children by death and by marriage. one can imagine that the change must have been welcome to them all. besides maria and lovell, his eldest son, he took with him a lovely young daughter, charlotte edgeworth, the daughter of elizabeth sneyd. they travelled by belgium, stopping on their way at bruges, at ghent, and visiting pictures and churches along the road, as travellers still like to do. mrs. edgeworth was, as we have said, the artistic member of the party. we do not know what modern rhapsodists would say to miss edgeworth's very subdued criticisms and descriptions of feeling on this occasion. 'it is extremely agreeable to me,' she writes, 'to see paintings with those who have excellent taste and no affectation.' and this remark might perhaps be thought even more to the point now than in the pre-æsthetic age in which it was innocently made. the travellers are finally landed in paris in a magnificent hotel in a fine square, 'formerly place louis-quinze, afterwards place de la révolution, now place de la concorde.' and place de la concorde it remains, wars and revolutions notwithstanding, whether lighted by the flames of the desperate commune or by the peaceful sunsets which stream their evening glory across the blood-stained stones. the edgeworths did not come as strangers to paris; they brought letters and introductions with them, and bygone associations and friendships which had only now to be resumed. the well-known abbé morellet, their old acquaintance, 'answered for them,' says miss edgeworth, and besides all this mr edgeworth's name was well known in scientific circles. bréguet, montgolfier, and others all made him welcome. lord henry petty, as maria's friend lord lansdowne was then called, was in paris, and rogers the poet, and kosciusko, cured of his wounds. for the first time they now made the acquaintance of m. dumont, a lifelong friend and correspondent. there were many others--the delesserts, of the french protestant faction, madame suard, to whom the romantic thomas day had paid court some thirty years before, and madame campan, and madame récamier, and madame de rémusat, and madame de houdetot, now seventy-two years of age, but rousseau's julie still, and camille jordan, and the chevalier edelcrantz, from the court of the king of sweden. the names alone of the edgeworths' entertainers represent a delightful and interesting section of the history of the time. one can imagine that besides all these pleasant and talkative persons the faubourg saint-germain itself threw open its great swinging doors to the relations of the abbé edgeworth who risked his life to stand by his master upon the scaffold and to speak those noble warm-hearted words, the last that louis ever heard. one can picture the family party as it must have appeared with its pleasant british looks--the agreeable 'ruddy-faced' father, the gentle mrs. edgeworth, who is somewhere described by her stepdaughter as so orderly, so clean, so freshly dressed, the child of fifteen, only too beautiful and delicately lovely, and last of all maria herself, the nice little unassuming, jeannie-deans-looking body lord byron described, small, homely, perhaps, but with her gift of french, of charming intercourse, her fresh laurels of authorship (for 'belinda' was lately published), her bright animation, her cultivated mind and power of interesting all those in her company, to say nothing of her own kindling interest in every one and every thing round about her. her keen delights and vivid descriptions of all these new things, faces, voices, ideas, are all to be read in some long and most charming letters to ireland, which also contain the account of a most eventful crisis which this paris journey brought about. the letter is dated march , and it concludes as follows:-- here, my dear aunt, i was interrupted in a manner that will surprise you as much as it surprised me--by the coming of m. edelcrantz, a swedish gentleman whom we have mentioned to you, of superior understanding and mild manners. he came to offer me his hand and heart! my heart, you may suppose, cannot return his attachment, for i have seen but very little of him, and have not had time to have formed any judgment except that i think nothing could tempt me to leave my own dear friends and my own country to live in sweden. maria edgeworth was now about thirty years of age, at a time of life when people are apt to realise perhaps almost more deeply than in early youth the influence of feeling, its importance, and strange power over events. hitherto there are no records in her memoirs of any sentimental episodes, but it does not follow that a young lady has not had her own phase of experience because she does not write it out at length to her various aunts and correspondents. miss edgeworth was not a sentimental person. she was warmly devoted to her own family, and she seems to have had a strong idea of her own want of beauty; perhaps her admiration for her lovely young sisters may have caused this feeling to be exaggerated by her. but no romantic, lovely heroine could have inspired a deeper or more touching admiration than this one which m. edelcrantz felt for his english friend; the mild and superior swede seems to have been thoroughly in earnest. so indeed was miss edgeworth, but she was not carried away by the natural impulse of the moment. she realised the many difficulties and dangers of the unknown; she looked to the future; she turned to her own home, and with an affection all the more felt because of the trial to which it was now exposed. the many lessons of self-control and self-restraint which she had learnt returned with instinctive force. sometimes it happens that people miss what is perhaps the best for the sake of the next best, and we see convenience and old habit and expediency, and a hundred small and insignificant circumstances, gathering like some avalanche to divide hearts that might give and receive very much from each. but sentiment is not the only thing in life. other duties, ties, and realities there are; and it is difficult to judge for others in such matters. sincerity of heart and truth to themselves are pretty sure in the end to lead people in the right direction for their own and for other people's happiness. only, in the experience of many women there is the danger that fixed ideas, and other people's opinion, and the force of custom may limit lives which might have been complete in greater things, though perhaps less perfect in the lesser. people in the abstract are sincere enough in wishing fulness of experience and of happiness to those dearest and nearest to them; but we are only human beings, and when the time comes and the horrible necessity for parting approaches, our courage goes, our hearts fail, and we think we are preaching reason and good sense while it is only a most natural instinct which leads us to cling to that to which we are used and to those we love. mr. edgeworth did not attempt to influence maria. mrs. edgeworth evidently had some misgivings, and certainly much sympathy for the chevalier and for her friend and stepdaughter. she says:-- maria was mistaken as to her own feelings. she refused m. edelcrantz, but she felt much more for him than esteem and admiration; she was extremely in love with him. mr. edgeworth left her to decide for herself; but she saw too plainly what it would be to us to lose her and what she would feel at parting with us. she decided rightly for her own future happiness and for that of her family, but she suffered much at the time and long afterwards. while we were at paris i remember that in a shop, where charlotte and i were making purchases, maria sat apart absorbed in thought, and so deep in reverie that when her father came in and stood opposite to her she did not see him till he spoke to her, when she started and burst into tears.... i do not think she repented of her refusal or regretted her decision. she was well aware that she could not have made m. edelcrantz happy, that she would not have suited his position at the court of stockholm, and that her want of beauty might have diminished his attachment. it was perhaps better she should think so, for it calmed her mind; but from what i saw of m. edelcrantz i think he was a man capable of really valuing her. i believe he was much attached to her, and deeply mortified at her refusal. he continued to reside in sweden after the abdication of his master, and was always distinguished for his high character and great abilities. he never married. he was, except for his very fine eyes, remarkably plain. so ends the romance of the romancer. there are, however, many happinesses in life, as there are many troubles. mrs. edgeworth tells us that after her stepdaughter's return to edgeworthtown she occupied herself with various literary works, correcting some of her former mss. for the press, and writing 'madame de fleury,' 'emilie de coulanges,' and 'leonora.' but the high-flown and romantic style did suit her gift, and she wrote best when her genuine interest and unaffected glances shone with bright understanding sympathy upon her immediate surroundings. when we are told that 'leonora' was written in the style the chevalier edelcrantz preferred, and that the idea of what he would think of it was present to maria in every page, we begin to realise that for us at all events it was a most fortunate thing that she decided as she did. it would have been a loss indeed to the world if this kindling and delightful spirit of hers had been choked by the polite thorns, fictions, and platitudes of an artificial, courtly life and by the well-ordered narrowness of a limited standard. she never heard what the chevalier thought of the book; she never knew that he ever read it even. it is a satisfaction to hear that he married no one else, and while she sat writing and not forgetting in the pleasant library at home, one can imagine the romantic chevalier in his distant court faithful to the sudden and romantic devotion by which he is now remembered. romantic and chivalrous friendship seems to belong to his country and to his countrymen. ix. there are one or two other episodes less sentimental than this one recorded of this visit to paris, not the least interesting of these being the account given of a call upon madame de genlis. the younger author from her own standpoint having resolutely turned away from the voice of the charmer for the sake of that which she is convinced to be duty and good sense, now somewhat sternly takes the measure of her elder sister, who has failed in the struggle, who is alone and friendless, and who has made her fate. the story is too long to quote at full length. an isolated page without its setting loses very much; the previous description of the darkness and uncertainty through which maria and her father go wandering, and asking their way in vain, adds immensely to the sense of the gloom and isolation which are hiding the close of a long and brilliant career. at last, after wandering for a long time seeking for madame de genlis, the travellers compel a reluctant porter to show them the staircase in the arsenal, where she is living, and to point out the door before he goes off with the light. they wait in darkness. the account of what happens when the door is opened is so interesting that i cannot refrain from quoting it at length:-- after ringing the bell we presently heard doors open and little footsteps approaching nigh. the door was opened by a girl of about honora's size, holding an ill set-up, wavering candle in her hand, the light of which fell full upon her face and figure. her face was remarkably intelligent--dark sparkling eyes, dark hair curled in the most fashionable long corkscrew ringlets over her eyes and cheeks. she parted the ringlets to take a full view of us. the dress of her figure by no means suited the head and elegance of her attitude. what her nether weeds might be we could not distinctly see, but they seemed a coarse short petticoat like what molly bristow's children would wear. after surveying us and hearing our name was edgeworth she smiled graciously and bid us follow her, saying, 'maman est chez elle.' she led the way with the grace of a young lady who has been taught to dance across two ante-chambers, miserable-looking; but, miserable or not, no home in paris can be without them. the girl, or young lady, for we were still in doubt which to think her, led into a small room in which the candles were so well screened by a green tin screen that we could scarcely distinguish the tall form of a lady in black who rose from her chair by the fireside; as the door opened a great puff of smoke came from the huge fireplace at the same moment. she came forward, and we made our way towards her as well as we could through a confusion of tables, chairs, and work-baskets, china, writing-desks and inkstands, and birdcages, and a harp. she did not speak, and as her back was now turned to both fire and candle i could not see her face or anything but the outline of her form and her attitude. her form was the remains of a fine form, her attitude that of a woman used to a better drawing-room. i being foremost, and she silent, was compelled to speak to the figure in darkness. 'madame de genlis nous a fait l'honneur de nous mander qu'elle voulait bien nous permettre de lui rendre visite,' said i, or words to that effect, to which she replied by taking my hand and saying something in which 'charmée' was the most intelligible word. while she spoke she looked over my shoulder at my father, whose bow, i presume, told her he was a gentleman, for she spoke to him immediately as if she wished to please and seated us in _fauteuils_ near the fire. i then had a full view of her face--figure very thin and melancholy dark eyes, long sallow cheeks, compressed thin lips, two or three black ringlets on a high forehead, a cap that mrs. grier might wear--altogether in appearance of fallen fortunes, worn-out health, and excessive but guarded irritability. to me there was nothing of that engaging, captivating manner which i had been taught to expect. she seemed to me to be alive only to literary quarrels and jealousies. the muscles of her face as she spoke, or as my father spoke to her, quickly and too easily expressed hatred and anger.... she is now, you know, _dévote acharnée_.... madame de genlis seems to have been so much used to being attacked that she has defence and apologies ready prepared. she spoke of madame de staël's 'delphine' with detestation.... forgive me, my dear aunt mary; you begged me to see her with favourable eyes, and i went, after seeing her 'rosière de salency,' with the most favourable disposition, but i could not like her.... and from time to time i saw, or thought i saw, through the gloom of her countenance a gleam of coquetry. but my father judges of her much more favourably than i do. she evidently took pains to please him, and he says he is sure she is a person over whose mind he could gain great ascendency. the 'young and gay philosopher' at fifty is not unchanged since we knew him first. maria adds a postscript: i had almost forgotten to tell you that the little girl who showed us in is a girl whom she is educating. 'elle m'appelle maman, mais elle n'est pas ma fille.' the manner in which this little girl spoke to madame de genlis and looked at her appeared to me more in her favour than anything else. i went to look at what the child was writing; she was translating darwin's _zoonomia_. every description one reads by miss edgeworth of actual things and people makes one wish that she had written more of them. this one is the more interesting from the contrast of the two women, both so remarkable and coming to so different a result in their experience of life. this eventful visit to paris is brought to an eventful termination by several gendarmes, who appear early one morning in mr. edgeworth's bedroom with orders that he is to get up and to leave paris immediately. mr. edgeworth had been accused of being brother to the abbé de fermont. when the mitigated circumstances of his being only a first cousin were put forward by lord whitworth, the english ambassador, the edgeworths received permission to return from the suburb to which they had retired; but private news hurried their departure, and they were only in time to escape the general blockade and detention of english prisoners. after little more than a year of peace, once more war was declared on may , . lovell, the eldest son, who was absent at the time and travelling from switzerland, was not able to escape in time; nor for twelve years to come was the young man able to return to his own home and family. x. 'belinda,' 'castle rackrent,' the 'parents' assistant,' the 'essays on practical education,' had all made their mark. the new series of popular tales was also welcomed. there were other books on the way; miss edgeworth had several mss. in hand in various stages, stories to correct for the press. there was also a long novel, first begun by her father and taken up and carried on by her. the 'essays on practical education,' which were first published in , continued to be read. m. pictet had translated the book into french the year before; a third edition was published some ten years later, in , in the preface of which the authors say, 'it is due to the public to state that twelve years' additional experience in a numerous family, and careful attention to the results of other modes of education, have given the authors no reason to retract what they have advanced in these volumes.' in mr. edgeworth's memoirs, however, his daughter states that he modified his opinions in one or two particulars; allowing more and more liberty to the children, and at the same time conceding greater importance to the habit of early though mechanical efforts of memory. the essays seem in every way in advance of their time; many of the hints contained in them most certainly apply to the little children of to-day no less than to their small grandparents. a lady whose own name is high in the annals of education was telling me that she had been greatly struck by the resemblance between the edgeworth system and that of froebel's kindergarten method, which is now gaining more and more ground in people's estimation, the object of both being not so much to cram instruction into early youth as to draw out each child's powers of observation and attention. the first series of tales of fashionable life came out in , and contained among other stories 'ennui,' one of the most remarkable of miss edgeworth's works. the second series included the 'absentee,' that delightful story of which the lesson should be impressed upon us even more than in the year . the 'absentee' was at first only an episode in the longer novel of 'patronage;' but the public was impatient, so were the publishers, and fortunately for every one the 'absentee' was printed as a separate tale. 'patronage' had been begun by mr. edgeworth to amuse his wife, who was recovering from illness; it was originally called the 'fortunes of the freeman family,' and it is a history with a moral. morals were more in fashion then than they are now, but this one is obvious without any commentary upon it. it is tolerably certain that clever, industrious, well-conducted people will succeed, where idle, scheming, and untrustworthy persons will eventually fail to get on, even with powerful friends to back them. but the novel has yet to be written that will prove that, where merits are more equal, a little patronage is not of a great deal of use, or that people's positions in life are exactly proportioned to their merit. mrs. barbauld's pretty essay on the 'inconsistency of human expectations' contains the best possible answer to the problem of what people's deserts should be. let us hope that personal advancement is only one of the many things people try for in life, and that there are other prizes as well worth having. miss edgeworth herself somewhere speaks with warm admiration of this very essay. of the novel itself she says (writing to mrs. barbauld), 'it is so vast a subject that it flounders about in my hands and quite overpowers me.' it is in this same letter that miss edgeworth mentions another circumstance which interested her at this time, and which was one of those events occurring now and again which do equal credit to all concerned. i have written a preface and notes [she says]--for i too would be an editor--for a little book which a very worthy countrywoman of mine is going to publish: mrs. leadbeater, granddaughter to burke's first preceptor. she is poor. she has behaved most handsomely about some letters of burke's to her grandfather and herself. it would have been advantageous to her to publish them; but, as mrs. burke[ ]--heaven knows why--objected, she desisted. mrs. leadbeater was an irish quaker lady whose simple and spirited annals of ballitore delighted carlyle in his later days, and whose 'cottage dialogues' greatly struck mr. edgeworth at the time; and the kind edgeworths, finding her quite unused to public transactions, exerted themselves in every way to help her. mr. edgeworth took the mss. out of the hands of an irish publisher, and, says maria, 'our excellent friend's worthy successor in st. paul's churchyard has, on our recommendation, agreed to publish it for her.' mr. edgeworth's own letter to mrs. leadbeater gives the history of his good-natured offices and their satisfactory results. footnote : mrs. burke, hearing more of the circumstances, afterwards sent permission; but mrs. leadbeater being a quakeress, and having once _promised_ not to publish, could not take it upon herself to break her covenant. from r. l. edgeworth, july , . miss edgeworth desires me as a man of business to write to mrs. leadbeater relative to the publication of 'cottage dialogues.' miss edgeworth has written an advertisement, and will, with mrs. leadbeater's permission, write notes for an english edition. the scheme which i propose is of two parts--to sell the english copyright to the house of johnson in london, where we dispose of our own works, and to publish a very large and cheap edition for ireland for schools.... i can probably introduce the book into many places. our family takes copies, lady longford , dr. beaufort , &c.... i think johnson & co. will give _l._ for the english copyright. after the transaction mr. edgeworth wrote to the publishers as follows:-- may , : edgeworthtown. my sixty-eighth birthday. my dear gentlemen,--i have just heard your letter to mrs. leadbeater read by one who dropped tears of pleasure from a sense of your generous and handsome conduct. i take great pleasure in speaking of you to the rest of the world as you deserve, and i cannot refrain from expressing to yourselves the genuine esteem that i feel for you. i know that this direct praise is scarcely allowable, but my advanced age and my close connection with you must be my excuse.--yours sincerely, r. l. e. tears seem equivalent to something more than the estimated value of mrs. leadbeater's labours. the charming and well-known mrs. trench who was also mary leadbeater's friend, writes warmly praising the notes. 'miss edgeworth's notes on your dialogues have as much spirit and originality as if she had never before explored the mine which many thought she had exhausted.' all these are pleasant specimens of the edgeworth correspondence, which, however (following the course of most correspondence), does not seem to have been always equally agreeable. there are some letters (among others which i have been allowed to see) written by maria about this time to an unfortunate young man who seems to have annoyed her greatly by his excited importunities. i thank you [she says] for your friendly zeal in defence of my powers of pathos and sublimity; but i think it carries you much too far when it leads you to imagine that i refrain, from principle or virtue, from displaying powers that i really do not possess. i assure you that i am not in the least capable of writing a dithyrambic ode, or any other kind of ode. one is reminded by this suggestion of jane austen also declining to write 'an historical novel illustrative of the august house of coburg.' the young man himself seems to have had some wild aspirations after authorship, but to have feared criticism. the advantage of the art of printing [says his friendly minerva] is that the mistakes of individuals in reasoning and writing will be corrected in time by the public, so that the cause of truth cannot suffer; and i presume you are too much of a philosopher to mind the trifling mortification that the detection of a mistake might occasion. you know that some sensible person has observed that acknowledging a mistake is saying, only in other words, that we are wiser to-day than we were yesterday. he seems at last to have passed the bounds of reasonable correspondence, and she writes as follows:-- your last letter, dated in june, was many months before it reached me. in answer to all your reproaches at my silence i can only assure you that it was not caused by any change in my opinions or good wishes; but i do not carry on what is called a regular correspondence with anybody except with one or two of my very nearest relations; and it is best to tell the plain truth that my father particularly dislikes my writing letters, so i write as few as i possibly can. xi. while maria edgeworth was at work in her irish home, successfully producing her admirable delineations, another woman, born some eight years later, and living in the quiet hampshire village where the elm trees spread so greenly, was also at work, also writing books that were destined to influence many a generation, but which were meanwhile waiting unknown, unnoticed. do we not all know the story of the brown paper parcel lying unopened for years on the publisher's shelf and containing henry tilney and all his capes, catherine morland and all her romance, and the great john thorpe himself, uttering those valuable literary criticisms which lord macaulay, writing to his little sisters at home, used to quote to them? 'oh, lord!' says john thorpe, 'i never read novels; i have other things to do.' a friend reminds us of miss austen's own indignant outburst. 'only a novel! only "cecilia," or "camilla," or "belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.' if the great historian, who loved novels himself, had not assured us that we owe miss austen and miss edgeworth to the early influence of the author of 'evelina,' one might grudge 'belinda' to such company as that of 'cecilia' and 'camilla.' 'pride and prejudice' and 'northanger abbey' were published about the same time as 'patronage' and 'tales of fashionable life.' their two authors illustrate, curiously enough, the difference between the national characteristics of english and irish--the breadth, the versatility, the innate wit and gaiety of an irish mind; the comparative narrowness of range of an english nature; where, however, we are more likely to get humour and its never-failing charm. long afterwards jane austen sent one of her novels to miss edgeworth, who appreciated it indeed, as such a mind as hers could not fail to do, but it was with no such enthusiasm as that which she felt for other more ambitious works, with more of incident, power, knowledge of the world, in the place of that one subtle quality of humour which for some persons outweighs almost every other. something, some indefinite sentiment, tells people where they amalgamate and with whom they are intellectually akin; and by some such process of criticism the writer feels that in this little memoir of miss edgeworth she has but sketched the outer likeness of this remarkable woman's life and genius; and that she has scarcely done justice to very much in miss edgeworth, which so many of the foremost men of her day could appreciate--a power, a versatility, an interest in subjects for their own sakes, not for the sakes of those who are interested in them, which was essentially hers. it is always characteristic to watch a writer's progress in the estimation of critics and reviewers. in miss edgeworth is moderately and respectfully noticed. 'as a writer of novels and tales she has a marked peculiarity, that of venturing to dispense common sense to her readers and to bring them within the precincts of real life. without excluding love from her pages she knows how to assign to it its true limits.' in the reviewer, more used to hear the author's praises on all sides, now starts from a higher key, and, as far as truth to nature and delineation of character are concerned, does not allow a rival except 'don quixote' and 'gil blas.' the following criticism is just and more to the point:-- to this power of masterly and minute delineation of character miss edgeworth adds another which has rarely been combined with the former, that of interweaving the peculiarities of her persons with the conduct of her piece, and making them, without forgetting for a moment their personal consistency, conduce to the general lesson.... her virtue and vice, though copied exactly from nature, lead with perfect ease to a moral conclusion, and are finally punished or rewarded by means which (rare as a retribution in this world is) appear for the most part neither inconsistent nor unnatural. then follows a review of 'vivian' and of the 'absentee,' which is perhaps the most admirable of her works. we may all remember how macaulay once pronounced that the scene in the 'absentee' where lord colambre discovers himself to his tenantry was the best thing of the sort since the opening of the twenty-second book of the 'odyssey.' an article by lord dudley, which is still to be quoted, appeared in the 'quarterly review' in . what he says of her works applies no less to miss edgeworth's own life than to the principles which she inculcates. the old rule was for heroes and heroines to fall suddenly and irretrievably in love. if they fell in love with the right person so much the better; if not, it could not be helped, and the novel ended unhappily. and, above all, it was held quite irregular for the most reasonable people to make any use whatever of their reason on the most important occasion of their lives. miss edgeworth has presumed to treat this mighty power with far less reverence. she has analysed it and found it does not consist of one simple element, but that several common ingredients enter into its composition--habit, esteem, a belief of some corresponding sentiment and of suitableness in the character and circumstances of the party. she has pronounced that reason, timely and vigorously applied, is almost a specific, and, following up this bold empirical line of practice, she has actually produced cases of the entire cure of persons who had laboured under its operation. her favourite qualities are prudence, firmness, temper, and that active, vigilant good sense which, without checking the course of our kind affections, exercises its influence at every moment and surveys deliberately the motives and consequences of every action. utility is her object, reason and experience her means. xii. this review of lord dudley's must have come out after a visit from the edgeworth family to london in , which seems to have been a most brilliant and amusing campaign. 'i know the homage that was paid you,' wrote mrs. barbauld, speaking of the event, 'and i exulted in it for your sake and for my sex's sake.' miss edgeworth was at the height of her popularity, in good spirits and good health. mr. edgeworth was seventy, but he looked years younger, and was still in undiminished health and vigour. the party was welcomed, fêted, sought after everywhere. except that they miss seeing madame d'arblay and leave london before the arrival of madame de staël, they seem to have come in for everything that was brilliant, fashionable, and entertaining. they breakfast with poets, they sup with marquises, they call upon duchesses and scientific men. maria's old friend the duchess of wellington is not less her friend than she was in county longford. every one likes them and comes knocking at their lodging-house door, while maria upstairs is writing a letter, standing at a chest of drawers. 'miss edgeworth is delightful,' says tom moore, 'not from display, but from repose and unaffectedness, the least pretending person.' even lord byron writes warmly of the authoress whose company is so grateful, and who goes her simple, pleasant way cheerful and bringing kind cheer, and making friends with the children as well as with the elders. many of these children in their lives fully justified her interest, children whom we in turn have known and looked up to as distinguished greyheaded men. some one asked miss edgeworth how she came to understand children as she did, what charm she used to win them. 'i don't know,' she said kindly; 'i lie down and let them crawl over me.' she was greatly pleased on one occasion when at a crowded party a little girl suddenly started forth, looked at her hard, and said, 'i like simple susan best,' and rushed away overwhelmed at her own audacity. the same lady who was present on this occasion asked her a question which we must all be grateful to have solved for us--how it happened that the respective places of laura and rosamond came to be transposed in 'patronage,' laura having been the wiser elder sister in the 'purple jar,' and appearing suddenly as the younger in the novel. miss edgeworth laughed and said that laura had been so preternaturally wise and thoughtful as a child, she could never have kept her up to the mark, and so she thought it best to change the character altogether. during one of her visits to london miss edgeworth went to dine at the house of mr. marshall; and his daughter, lady monteagle, tells a little story which gives an impression, and a kind one, of the celebrated guest. everything had been prepared in her honour, the lights lighted, the viands were cooked. dinner was announced, and some important person was brought forward to hand miss edgeworth down, when it was discovered that she had vanished. for a moment the company and the dinner were all at a standstill. she was a small person, but diligent search was made. miss edgeworth had last been seen with the children of the house, and she was eventually found in the back kitchen, escorted by the said children, who, having confided their private affairs to her sympathetic ear, had finally invited her to come with them and see some rabbits which they were rearing down below. a lady who used to live at clifton as a little girl, and to be sometimes prescribed for by dr. king, was once brought up as a child to miss edgeworth, and she told me how very much puzzled she felt when the bright old lady, taking her by the hand, said, 'well, my dear, how do you do, and how is my excellent brother-in-law?' one can imagine what a vague sort of being an 'excellent brother-in-law' would seem to a very young child. we read in miss edgeworth's memoir of her father that mr. edgeworth recovered from his serious illness in to enjoy a few more years of life among his friends, his children, and his experiments. his good humour and good spirits were undiminished, and he used to quote an old friend's praise of 'the privileges and convenience of old age.' he was past seventy, but he seems to have continued his own education to the end of life. 'without affecting to be young, he exerted himself to prevent any of his faculties from sinking into the indolent state which portends their decay,' and his daughter says that he went on learning to the last, correcting his faults and practising his memory by various devices, so that it even improved with age. in one of his last letters to mrs. beaufort, his wife's mother, he speaks with no little paternal pleasure of his home and his children: 'such excellent principles, such just views of human life and manners, such cultivated understandings, such charming tempers make a little paradise about me;' while with regard to his daughter's works he adds concerning the book which was about to appear, 'if maria's tales fail with the public, you will hear of my hanging myself.' mr. edgeworth died in the summer of , at home, surrounded by his family, grateful, as he says, to providence for allowing his body to perish before his mind. during the melancholy months which succeeded her father's death maria hardly wrote any letters; her sight was in a most alarming state. the tears, she said, felt in her eyes like the cutting of a knife. she had overworked them all the previous winter, sitting up at night and struggling with her grief as she wrote 'ormond.' she was now unable to use them without pain.... edgeworthtown now belonged to lovell, the eldest surviving brother, but he wished it to continue the home of the family. maria set to work to complete her father's memoirs and to fulfil his last wish. it was not without great hesitation and anxiety that she determined to finish writing her father's life. there is a touching appeal in a letter to her aunt ruxton. 'i felt the happiness of my life was at stake. even if all the rest of the world had praised it and you had been dissatisfied, how miserable should i have been!' and there is another sentence written at bowood, very sad and full of remembrance: 'i feel as if i had lived a hundred years and was left alive after everybody else.' the book came out, and many things were said about it, not all praise. the 'quarterly' was so spiteful and intolerant that it seemed almost personal in its violence. it certainly would have been a great loss to the world had this curious and interesting memoir never been published, but at the time the absence of certain phrases and expressions of opinions which mr. edgeworth had never specially professed seemed greatly to offend the reviewers. the worst of these attacks miss edgeworth never read, and the task finished, the sad months over, the poor eyes recovered, she crossed to england. xiii. one is glad to hear of her away and at bowood reviving in good company, in all senses of the word. her old friend lord henry petty, now lord lansdowne, was still her friend and full of kindness. outside the house spread a green deer-park to rest her tired eyes, within were pleasant and delightful companions to cheer her soul. sir samuel romilly was there, of whom she speaks with affectionate admiration, as she does of her kind host and hostess. 'i much enjoy the sight of lady lansdowne's happiness with her husband and her children. beauty, fortune, cultivated society all united--in short, everything that the most reasonable or unreasonable could wish. she is so amiable and desirous to make others happy.' miss edgeworth's power of making other people see things as she does is very remarkable in all these letters; with a little imagination one could almost feel as if one might be able to travel back into the pleasant society in which she lived. when she goes abroad soon after with her two younger sisters (fanny, the baby whose head so nearly came off in her arms, and harriet, who have both grown up by this time to be pretty and elegant young ladies), the sisters are made welcome everywhere. in paris, as in london, troops of acquaintance came forward to receive 'madame maria et mesdemoiselles ses soeurs,' as they used to be announced. most of their old friends were there still; only the children had grown up and were now new friends to be greeted. it is a confusion of names in visionary succession, comprising english people no less than french. miss edgeworth notes it all with a sure hand and true pen; it is as one of the sketch-books of a great painter, where whole pictures are indicated in a few just lines. here is a peep at the abbaye aux bois in :-- we went to madame récamier in her convent, l'abbaye aux bois, up seventy-eight steps. all came in with asthma. elegant room; she as elegant as ever. matthieu de montmorenci, the ex-queen of sweden, madame de boigne, a charming woman, and madame la maréchale de ----, a battered beauty, smelling of garlic and screeching in vain to pass as a wit.... madame récamier has no more taken the veil than i have, and is as little likely to do it. she is quite beautiful; she dresses herself and her little room with elegant simplicity, and lives in a convent only because it is cheap and respectable. one sees it all, the convent, the company, the last refrain of former triumphs, the faithful romantic matthieu de montmorenci, and above all the poor maréchale, who will screech for ever in her garlic. let us turn the page, we find another picture from these not long past days:-- breakfast at camille jordan's; it was half-past twelve before the company assembled, and we had an hour's delightful conversation with camille jordan and his wife in her spotless white muslin and little cap, sitting at her husband's feet as he lay on the sofa; as clean, as nice, as fresh, as thoughtless of herself as my mother. at this breakfast we saw three of the most distinguished of that party who call themselves 'les doctrinaires' and say they are more attached to measures than to men. here is another portrait of a portrait and its painter:-- princess potemkin is a russian, but she has all the grace, softness, winning manner of the polish ladies. oval face, pale, with the finest, softest, most expressive chestnut dark eyes. she has a sort of politeness which pleases peculiarly, a mixture of the ease of high rank and early habit with something that is sentimental without affectation. madame le brun is painting her picture. madame le brun is sixty-six, with great vivacity as well as genius, and better worth seeing than her pictures, for though they are speaking she speaks. another visit the sisters paid, which will interest the readers of madame de la rochejaquelin's memoirs of the war in the vendée:-- in a small bedroom, well furnished, with a fire just lighted, we found madame de la rochejaquelin on the sofa; her two daughters at work, one spinning with a distaff, the other embroidering muslin. madame is a fat woman with a broad, round, fair face and a most benevolent expression, her hair cut short and perfectly grey as seen under her cap; the rest of the face much too young for such grey locks; and though her face and bundled form all squashed on to a sofa did not at first promise much of gentility, you could not hear her speak or hear her for three minutes without perceiving that she was well-born and well-bred. madame de la rochejaquelin seems to have confided in miss edgeworth. 'i am always sorry when any stranger sees me, _parce que je sais que je détruis toute illusion. je sais que je devrais avoir l'air d'une héroïne._' she is much better than a heroine; she is benevolence and truth itself. we must not forget the scientific world where madame maria was no less at home than in fashionable literary cliques. the sisters saw something of cuvier at paris; in switzerland they travelled with the aragos. they were on their way to the marcets at geneva when they stopped at coppet, where miss edgeworth was always specially happy in the society of madame auguste de staël and madame de broglie. but switzerland is not one of the places where human beings only are in the ascendant; other influences there are almost stronger than human ones. 'i did not conceive it possible that i should feel so much pleasure from the beauties of nature as i have done since i came to this country. the first moment when i saw mont blanc will remain an era in my life--a new idea, a new feeling standing alone in the mind.' miss edgeworth presently comes down from her mountain heights and, full of interest, throws herself into the talk of her friends at coppet and geneva, from which she quotes as it occurs to her. here is rocca's indignant speech to lord byron, who was abusing the stupidity of the genevese. 'eh! milord, pourquoi venir vous fourrer parmi ces honnêtes gens?' there is arago's curious anecdote of napoleon, who sent for him after the battle of waterloo, offering him a large sum of money to accompany him to america. the emperor had formed a project for founding a scientific colony in the new world. arago was so indignant with him for abandoning his troops that he would have nothing to say to the plan. a far more touching story is dr. marcet's account of josephine. 'poor josephine! do you remember dr. marcet's telling us that when he breakfasted with her she said, pointing to her flowers, "these are my subjects. i try to make them happy"?' among other expeditions they made a pilgrimage to the home of the author of a work for which miss edgeworth seems to have entertained a mysterious enthusiasm. the novel was called 'caroline de lichfield,' and was so much admired at the time that miss seward mentions a gentleman who wrote from abroad to propose for the hand of the authoress, and who, more fortunate than the poor chevalier edelcrantz, was not refused by the lady. perhaps some similarity of experience may have led maria edgeworth to wish for her acquaintance. happily the time was past for miss edgeworth to look back; her life was now shaped and moulded in its own groove; the consideration, the variety, the difficulties of unmarried life were hers, its agreeable change, its monotony of feeling and of unselfish happiness, compared with the necessary regularity, the more personal felicity, the less liberal interests of the married. her life seems to have been full to overflowing of practical occupation and consideration for others. what changing scenes and colours, what a number of voices, what a crowd of outstretched hands, what interesting processions of people pass across her path! there is something of her father's optimism and simplicity of nature in her unceasing brightness and activity, in her resolutions to improve as time goes on. her young brothers and sisters grow to be men and women; with her sisters' marriages new interests touch her warm heart. between her and the brothers of the younger generation who did not turn to her as a sort of mother there may have been too great a difference of age for that companionship to continue which often exists between a child and a grown-up person. so at least one is led to believe was the case as regards one of them, mentioned in a memoir which has recently appeared. but to her sisters she could be friend, protector, chaperon, sympathising companion, and elder sister to the end of her days. we hear of them all at bowood again on their way back to ireland, and then we find them all at home settling down to the old life, 'maria reading sévigné,' of whom she never tires. xiv. one of the prettiest and most sympathetic incidents in maria edgeworth's life was a subsequent expedition to abbotsford and the pleasure she gave to its master. they first met in edinburgh, and her short account conjures up the whole scene before us:-- ten o'clock struck as i read this note. we were tired, we were not fit to be seen, but i thought it right to accept walter scott's cordial invitation, sent for a hackney coach, and just as we were, without dressing, we went. as the coach stopped we saw the hall lighted, and the moment the door opened heard the joyous sounds of loud singing. three servants' 'the miss edgeworths!' sounded from hall to landing-place, and as i paused for a moment in the anteroom i heard the first sound of walter scott's voice--'the miss edgeworths _come_!' the room was lighted by only one globe lamp; a circle were singing loud and beating time: all stopped in an instant. is not this picture complete? scott himself she describes as 'full of genius without the slightest effort at expression, delightfully natural, more lame but not so unwieldy as she expected.' lady scott she goes on to sketch in some half-dozen words--'french, large dark eyes, civil and good-natured.' when we wakened the next morning the whole scene of the preceding night seemed like a dream [she continues]; however at twelve came the real lady scott, and we called for scott at the parliament house, who came out of the courts with joyous face, as if he had nothing on earth to do or to think of but to show us edinburgh. in her quick, discriminating way she looks round and notes them all one by one. mr. lockhart is reserved and silent, but he appears to have much sensibility under this reserve. mrs. lockhart is very pleasing--a slight, elegant figure and graceful simplicity of manner, perfectly natural. there is something most winning in her affectionate manner to her father. he dotes upon her. a serious illness intervened for poor maria before she and her devoted young nurses could reach abbotsford itself. there she began to recover, and lady scott watched over her and prescribed for her with the most tender care and kindness. 'lady scott felt the attention and respect maria showed to her, perceiving that she valued her and treated her as a friend,' says mrs. edgeworth; 'not, as too many of sir walter's guests did, with neglect.' this is miss edgeworth's description of the abbotsford family life:-- it is quite delightful to see scott and his family in the country; breakfast, dinner, supper, the same flow of kindness, fondness, and genius, far, far surpassing his works, his letters, and all my hopes and imagination. his castle of abbotsford is magnificent, but i forget it in thinking of him. the return visit, when scotland visited ireland, was no less successful. mrs. edgeworth writes:-- maria and my daughter harriet accompanied sir walter and miss scott, mr. lockhart, and captain and mrs. scott to killarney. they travelled in an open calèche of sir walter's.... sir walter was, like maria, never put out by discomforts on a journey, but always ready to make the best of everything and to find amusement in every incident. he was delighted with maria's eagerness for everybody's comfort, and diverted himself with her admiration of a green baize-covered door at the inn at killarney. 'miss edgeworth, you are so mightily pleased with that door, i think you will carry it away with you to edgeworthtown.' miss edgeworth's friendships were certainly very remarkable, and comprise almost all the interesting people of her day in france as well as in england.[ ] she was liked, trusted, surrounded, and she appears to have had the art of winning to her all the great men. we know the duke of wellington addressed verses to her; there are pleasant intimations of her acquaintance with sir james mackintosh, romilly, moore, and rogers, and that most delightful of human beings, sydney smith, whom she thoroughly appreciated and admired. describing her brother frank, she says, somewhere, 'i am much inclined to think that he has a natural genius for happiness; in other words, as sydney smith would say, _great hereditary constitutional joy_.' 'to attempt to boswell sydney smith's conversation would be to outboswell boswell,' she writes in another letter home; but in lady holland's memoir of her father there is a pleasant little account of miss edgeworth herself, 'delightful, clever, and sensible,' listening to sydney smith. she seems to have gone the round of his parish with him while he scolded, doctored, joked his poor people according to their needs. footnote : a touching illustration of her abiding influence is to be found cited in an article in the _daily news_ of september , , published as these proofs are going to press, by 'one who knew' ivan turguéneff, that great russian whom we might almost claim if love and admiration gave one a right to count citizenship with the great men of our time. an elder brother of his knew miss edgeworth, perhaps at abbotsford, for he visited walter scott there, or at coppet with madame de staël. this man, wise and cultivated in all european literature, 'came to the conclusion that maria edgeworth had struck on a vein from which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. she took the world as she found it, and selected from it the materials that she thought would be interesting to write about, in a clear and natural style. it was ivan turguéneff himself who told me this, says the writer of the article, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of miss edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. he had not the advantage of knowing english; but as a youth he used to hear his brother translate to visitors at his country house in the uralian hills passages from _irish tales and sketches_, which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. turguéneff also said to me, "it is possible, nay probable, that if maria edgeworth had not written about the poor irish of the co. longford and the squires and squirees, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in russia. my brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth."' 'during her visit she saw much of my father,' says lady holland; 'and her talents as well as her thorough knowledge and love of ireland made her conversation peculiarly agreeable to him.' on her side maria writes warmly desiring that some irish bishopric might be forced upon sydney smith, which 'his own sense of natural charity and humanity would forbid him refuse.... in the twinkling of an eye--such an eye as his--he would see all our manifold grievances up and down the country. one word, one _bon mot_ of his, would do more for us, i guess, than ----'s four hundred pages and all the like with which we have been bored.' the two knew how to make good company for one another; the quiet-jeanie-deans body could listen as well as give out. we are told that it was not so much that she said brilliant things, but that a general perfume of wit ran through her conversation, and she most certainly had the gift of appreciating the good things of others. whether in that 'scene of simplicity, truth, and nature' a london rout, or in some quiet hampstead parlour talking to an old friend, or in her own home among books and relations and interests of every sort, miss edgeworth seems to have been constantly the same, with presence of mind and presence of heart too, ready to respond to everything. i think her warmth of heart shines even brighter than her wit at times. 'i could not bear the idea that you suspected me of being so weak, so vain, so senseless,' she once wrote to mrs. barbauld, 'as to have my head turned by a little fashionable flattery.' if her head was not turned it must have been because her spirit was stout enough to withstand the world's almost irresistible influence. not only the great men but the women too are among her friends. she writes prettily of mrs. somerville, with her smiling eyes and pink colour, her soft voice, strong, well-bred scotch accent, timid, not disqualifying timid, but naturally modest. 'while her head is among the stars her feet are firm upon the earth.' she is 'delighted' with a criticism of madame de staël's upon herself, in a letter to m. dumont. 'vraiment elle était digne de l'enthousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilité.' it is difficult to understand why this should have given miss edgeworth so much pleasure; and here finally is a little vision conjured up for us of her meeting with mrs. fry among her prisoners:-- little doors, and thick doors, and doors of all sorts were unbolted and unlocked, and on we went through dreary but clean passages till we came to a room where rows of empty benches fronted us, a table on which lay a large bible. several ladies and gentlemen entered, took their seats on benches at either side of the table in silence. enter mrs. fry in a drab-coloured silk cloak and a plain, borderless quaker cap, a most benevolent countenance, calm, benign. 'i must make an inquiry. is maria edgeworth here?' and when i went forward she bade me come and sit beside her. her first smile as she looked upon me i can never forget. the prisoners came in in an orderly manner and ranged themselves upon the benches. xv. 'in this my sixtieth year, to commence in a few days,' says miss edgeworth, writing to her cousin margaret ruxton, 'i am resolved to make great progress.' 'rosamond at sixty,' says miss ruxton, touched and amused. her resolutions were not idle. 'the universal difficulties of the money market in the year were felt by us,' says mrs. edgeworth in her memoir, 'and maria, who since her father's death had given up rent-receiving, now resumed it; undertook the management of her brother lovell's affairs, which she conducted with consummate skill and perseverance, and weathered the storm that swamped so many in this financial crisis.' we also hear of an opportune windfall in the shape of some valuable diamonds, which an old lady, a distant relation, left in her will to miss edgeworth, who sold them and built a market-house for edgeworthtown with the proceeds. _april_ , .--i am quite well and in high good humour and good spirits, in consequence of having received the whole of lovell's half-year's rents in full, with pleasure to the tenants and without the least fatigue or anxiety to myself. it was about this time her novel of 'helen' was written, the last of her books, the only one that her father had not revised. there is a vivid account given by one of her brothers of the family assembled in the library to hear the manuscript read out, of their anxiety and their pleasure as they realised how good it was, how spirited, how well equal to her standard. tickner, in his account of miss edgeworth, says that the talk of lady davenant in 'helen' is very like miss edgeworth's own manner. his visit to edgeworthtown was not long after the publication of the book. his description, if only for her mention of her father, is worth quoting:-- as we drove to the door miss edgeworth came out to meet us, a small, short, spare body of about sixty-seven, with extremely frank and kind manners, but who always looks straight into your face with a pair of mild deep grey eyes whenever she speaks to you. with characteristic directness she did not take us into the library until she had told us that we should find there mrs. alison, of edinburgh, and her aunt, miss sneyd, a person very old and infirm, and that the only other persons constituting the family were mrs. edgeworth, miss honora edgeworth, and dr. alison, a physician.... miss edgeworth's conversation was always ready, as full of vivacity and variety as i can imagine.... she was disposed to defend everybody, even lady morgan, as far as she could. and in her intercourse with her family she was quite delightful, referring constantly to mrs. edgeworth, who seems to be the authority in all matters of fact, and most kindly repeating jokes to her infirm aunt, miss sneyd, who cannot hear them, and who seems to have for her the most unbounded affection and admiration.... about herself as an author she seems to have no reserve or secrets. she spoke with great kindness and pleasure of a letter i brought to her from mr. peabody, explaining some passage in his review of 'helen' which had troubled her from its allusion to her father. 'but,' she added, 'no one can know what i owe to my father. he advised and directed me in everything. i never could have done anything without him. there are things i cannot be mistaken about, though other people can. i know them.' as she said this the tears stood in her eyes, and her whole person was moved.... it was, therefore, something of a trial to talk so brilliantly and variously as she did from nine in the morning to past eleven at night. she was unfeignedly glad to see good company. here is her account of another visitor:-- _sept_. .--the day before yesterday we were amusing ourselves by telling who among literary and scientific people we should wish to come here next. francis said coleridge; i said herschell. yesterday morning, as i was returning from my morning walk at half-past eight, i saw a bonnetless maid in the walk, with a letter in her hand, in search of me. when i opened the letter i found it was from mr. herschell, and that he was waiting for an answer at mr. briggs's inn. i have seldom been so agreeably surprised, and now that he is gone and that he has spent twenty-four hours here, if the fairy were to ask me the question again i should still more eagerly say, 'mr. herschell, ma'am, if you please.' she still came over to england from time to time, visiting at her sisters' houses. honora was now lady beaufort; another sister, fanny, the object of her closest and most tender affection, was mrs. lestock wilson. age brought no change in her mode of life. time passes with tranquil steps, for her not hasting unduly. 'i am perfect,' she writes at the age of seventy-three to her stepmother of seventy-two, 'so no more about it, and thank you from my heart and every component part of my precious self for all the care, and successful care, you have taken of me, your old petted nurseling.' alas! it is sad to realise that quite late in life fresh sorrows fell upon this warm-hearted woman. troubles gather; young sisters fade away in their beauty and happiness. but in sad times and good times the old home is still unchanged, and remains for those that are left to turn to for shelter, for help, and consolation. to the very last miss edgeworth kept up her reading, her correspondence, her energy. all along we have heard of her active habits--out in the early morning in her garden, coming in to the nine o'clock breakfast with her hands full of roses, sitting by and talking and reading her letters while the others ate. her last letter to her old friend sir henry holland was after reading the first volume of lord macaulay's history. sir henry took the letter to lord macaulay, who was so much struck by its discrimination that he asked leave to keep it. she was now eighty-two years of age, and we find her laughing kindly at the anxiety of her sister and brother-in-law, who had heard of her climbing a ladder to wind up an old clock at edgeworthtown. 'i am heartily obliged and delighted by your being such a goose and richard such a gander,' she says 'as to be frightened out of your wits by my climbing a ladder to take off the top of the clock.' she had not felt that there was anything to fear as once again she set the time that was so nearly at an end for her. her share of life's hours had been well spent and well enjoyed; with a peaceful and steady hand and tranquil heart she might mark the dial for others whose hours were still to come. mrs. edgeworth's own words tell all that remains to be told. it was on the morning of may , , that she was taken suddenly ill with pain in the region of the heart, and after a few hours breathed her last in my arms. she had always wished to die quickly, at home, and that i should be with her. all her wishes were fulfilled. she was gone, and nothing like her again can we see in this world. _mrs opie._ - . 'your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.'--_as you like it_. i. it is not very long since some articles appeared in the 'cornhill magazine' which were begun under the influence of certain ancient bookshelves with so pleasant a flavour of the old world that it seemed at the time as if yesterday not to-day was the all-important hour, and one gladly submitted to the subtle charm of the past--its silent veils, its quiet incantations of dust and healing cobweb. the phase is but a passing one with most of us, and we must soon feel that to dwell at length upon each one of the pretty old fancies and folios of the writers and explorers who were born towards the end of the last century would be an impossible affectation; and yet a postscript seems wanting to the sketches which have already appeared of mrs. barbauld and miss edgeworth, and the names of their contemporaries should not be quite passed over. in a hundred charming types and prints and portraits we recognise the well-known names as they used to appear in the garb of life. grand ladies in broad loops and feathers, or graceful and charming as nymphs in muslin folds, with hanging clouds of hair; or again, in modest coiffes such as dear jane austen loved and wore even in her youth. hannah more only took to coiffes and wimples in later life; in early days she was fond of splendour, and, as we read, had herself painted in emerald earrings. how many others besides her are there to admire! who does not know the prim, sweet, amply frilled portraits of mrs. trimmer and joanna baillie? only yesterday a friend showed me a sprightly, dark-eyed miniature of felicia hemans. perhaps most beautiful among all her sister muses smiles the lovely head of amelia opie, as she was represented by her husband with luxuriant chestnut hair piled up romney fashion in careless loops, with the radiant yet dreaming eyes which are an inheritance for some members of her family. the authoresses of that day had the pre-eminence in looks, in gracious dress and bearing; but they were rather literary women than anything else, and had but little in common with the noble and brilliant writers who were to follow them in our own more natural and outspoken times; whose wise, sweet, passionate voices are already passing away into the distance; of whom so few remain to us.[ ] the secret of being real is no very profound one, and yet how rare it is, how long it was before the readers and writers of this century found it out! it is like the secret of singing in perfect tune, or of playing the violin as joachim can play upon it. in literature, as in music, there is at times a certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the mind of the writer. some metempsychosis takes place. it is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the spirit and soul of the writer. such books are events, not books to us, new conditions of existence, new selves suddenly revealed through the experience of other more vivid personalities than our own. the actual experience of other lives is not for us, but this link of simple reality of feeling is one all independent of events; it is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes repeated and multiplied--one man comes with his fishes and lo! the multitude is filled. footnote : and yet as i write i remember one indeed who is among us, whose portrait a reynolds or an opie might have been glad to paint for the generations who will love her works. but this simple discovery, that of reality, that of speaking from the heart, was one of the last to be made by women. in france madame de sévigné and madame de la fayette were not afraid to be themselves, but in england the majority of authoresses kept their readers carefully at pen's length, and seemed for the most part to be so conscious of their surprising achievements in the way of literature as never to forget for a single instant that they were in print. with the exception of jane austen and maria edgeworth, the women writers of the early part of this century were, as i have just said, rather literary women than actual creators of literature. it is still a mystery how they attained to their great successes. frances burney charms great burke and mighty johnson and wise macaulay in later times. mrs. opie draws compliments from mackintosh, and compliments from the duchess of saxe-coburg, and sydney smith, and above all tears from walter scott. perhaps many of the flattering things addressed to mrs. opie may have said not less for her own charm and sweetness of nature than for the merit of her unassuming productions; she must have been a bright, merry, and fascinating person, and compliments were certainly more in her line than the tributes of tears which she records. the authoresses of heroines are often more interesting than the heroines themselves, and amelia opie was certainly no exception to this somewhat general statement. a pleasant, sprightly authoress, beaming bright glances on her friends, confident, intelligent, full of interest in life, carried along in turn by one and by another influence, she comes before us a young and charming figure, with all the spires of norwich for a background, and the sound of its bells, and the stir of its assizes, as she issues from her peaceful home in her father's tranquil old house, where the good physician lives widowed, tending his poor and his sick, and devotedly spoiling his only child. ii. amelia opie was born in in the old city of norwich, within reach of the invigorating breezes of the great north sea. her youth must have been somewhat solitary; she was the only child of a kind and cultivated physician, doctor james alderson, whose younger brother, a barrister, also living in norwich, became the father of baron alderson. her mother died in her early youth. from her father, however, little amelia seems to have had the love and indulgence of over half a century, a tender and admiring love which she returned with all her heart's devotion. she was the pride and darling of his home, and throughout her long life her father's approbation was the one chief motive of her existence. spoiling is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much stern justice from all the rest of the world that it seems well that their parents should love and comfort them in youth for the many disgraces and difficulties yet to come. her mother is described as a delicate, high-minded woman, 'somewhat of a disciplinarian,' says mrs. opie's excellent biographer, miss brightwell, but she died too soon to carry her theories into practice. miss brightwell suggests that 'mrs. opie might have been more demure and decorous had her mother lived, but perhaps less charming.' there are some verses addressed to her mother in mrs. opie's papers in which it must be confessed that the remembrance of her admonition plays a most important part-- hark! clearer still thy voice i hear. again reproof in accents mild, seems whispering in my conscious ear, and so on. some of mrs. alderson's attempts at discipline seemed unusual and experimental; the little girl was timid, afraid of black people, of black beetles, and of human skeletons. she was given the skeleton to play with, and the beetles to hold in her hand. one feels more sympathy with the way in which she was gently reconciled to the poor negro with the frightening black face--by being told the story of his wrongs. but with the poor mother's untimely death all this maternal supervision came to an end. 'amelia, your mother is gone; may you never have reason to blush when you remember her!' her father said as he clasped his little orphan to his heart; and all her life long amelia remembered those words. there is a pretty reminiscence of her childhood from a beginning of the memoir which was never written:--'one of my earliest recollections is of gazing on the bright blue sky as i lay in my little bed before my hour of rising came, listening with delighted attention to the ringing of a peal of bells. i had heard that heaven was beyond those blue skies, and i had been taught that _there_ was the home of the good, and i fancied that those sweet bells were ringing in heaven.' the bells were ringing for the norwich assizes, which played an important part in our little heroine's life, and which must have been associated with many of her early memories. the little girl seems to have been allowed more liberty than is usually given to children. 'as soon as i was old enough to enjoy a procession,' she says, 'i was taken to see the judges come in. youthful pages in pretty dresses ran by the side of the high sheriff's carriage, in which the judges sat, while the coaches drove slowly and with a solemnity becoming the high and awful office of those whom they contained.... with reverence ever did i behold the judges' wigs, the scarlet robes they wore, and even the white wand of the sheriff.' there is a description which in after years might have made a pretty picture for her husband's pencil of the little maiden wandering into the court one day, and called by a kind old judge to sit beside him upon the bench. she goes on to recount how next day she was there again; and when some attendant of the court wanted her to leave the place, saying not unnaturally, 'go, miss, this is no place for you; be advised,' the judge again interfered, and ordered the enterprising little girl to be brought to her old place upon the cushion by his side. the story gives one a curious impression of a child's life and education. she seems to have come and gone alone, capable, intelligent, unabashed, interested in all the events and humours of the place. children have among other things a very vivid sense of citizenship and public spirit, somewhat put out in later life by the rush of personal feeling, but in childhood the personal events are so few and so irresponsible that public affairs become an actual part of life and of experience. while their elders are still discussing the news and weighing its importance, it is already a part of the children's life. little amelia alderson must have been a happy child, free, affectionate, independent; grateful, as a child should be, towards those who befriended her. one of her teachers was a french dancing-master called christian, for whom she had a warm regard. she relates that long afterwards she came with her husband and a friend to visit the dutch church at norwich. 'the two gentlemen were engaged in looking round and making their observations, and i, finding myself somewhat cold, began to hop and dance upon the spot where i stood, when my eyes chanced to fall upon the pavement below, and i started at beholding the well-known name of christian graved upon the slab; i stopped in dismay, shocked to find that i had actually been dancing upon the grave of my old master--he who first taught me to dance.' iii. after her mother's death, amelia alderson, who was barely fifteen at the time, began to take her place in society. she kept her father's house, received his friends, made his home bright with her presence. the lawyers came round in due season: sir james mackintosh came, the town was full of life, of talk, of music, and poetry, and prejudice. harriet martineau, in her memoir of mrs. opie, gives a delightful and humorous account of the norwich of that day--rivalling lichfield and its literary coterie, only with less sentimentality and some additional peculiarities of its own. one can almost see the tory gentlemen, as miss martineau describes them, setting a watch upon the cathedral, lest the dissenters should burn it as a beacon for boney; whereas good bishop bathurst, with more faith in human nature, goes on resolutely touching his hat to the leading nonconformists. 'the french taught in schools,' says miss martineau, 'was found to be unintelligible when the peace at length arrived, taught as it was by an aged powdered monsieur and an elderly flowered madame, who had taught their pupils' norfolk pronunciation. but it was beginning to be known,' she continues, 'that there was such a language as german, and in due time there was a young man who had actually been in germany, and was translating "nathan the wise." when william taylor became eminent as almost the only german scholar in england, old norwich was very proud and grew, to say the truth, excessively conceited. she was (and she might be) proud of her sayers, she boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, and finally called herself the "athens of england."' in this wholesome, cheerful athens, blown by the invigorating northern breezes, little amelia bloomed and developed into a lovely and happy girl. she was fortunate, indeed, in her friends. one near at hand must have been an invaluable adviser for a motherless, impressionable girl. mrs. john taylor was so loved that she is still remembered. mrs. barbauld prized and valued her affection beyond all others. 'i know the value of your letters,' says sir james mackintosh, writing from bombay; 'they rouse my mind on subjects which interest us in common--children, literature, and life. i ought to be made permanently better by contemplating a mind like yours.' and he still has mrs. taylor in his mind when he concludes with a little disquisition on the contrast between the barren sensibility, the indolent folly of some, the useful kindness of others, 'the industrious benevolence which requires a vigorous understanding and a decisive character.' some of mrs. opie's family have shown me a photograph of her in her quaker dress, in old age, dim, and changed, and sunken, from which it is very difficult to realise all the brightness, and life, and animation which must have belonged to the earlier part of her life. the delightful portrait of her engraved in the 'mirror' shows the animated beaming countenance, the soft expressive eyes, the abundant auburn waves of hair, of which we read. the picture is more like some charming allegorical being than a real live young lady--some belinda of the 'rape of the lock' (and one would as soon have expected belinda to turn quakeress). music, poetry, dancing, elves, graces and flirtations, cupids, seem to attend her steps. she delights in admiration, friendship, companionship, and gaiety, and yet with it all we realise a warm-hearted sincerity, and appreciation of good and high-minded things, a truth of feeling passing out of the realms of fancy altogether into one of the best realities of life. she had a thousand links with life: she was musical, artistic; she was literary; she had a certain amount of social influence; she had a voice, a harp, a charming person, mind and manner. admiring monarchs in later days applauded her performance; devoted subjects were her friends and correspondents, and her sphere in due time extended beyond the approving norwich-athenian coterie of old friends who had known her from her childhood, to london itself, where she seems to have been made welcome by many, and to have captivated more than her share of victims. in some letters of hers written to mrs. taylor and quoted by her biographer we get glimpses of some of these early experiences. the bright and happy excitable girl comes up from norwich to london to be made more happy still, and more satisfied with the delight of life as it unfolds. besides her fancy for lawyers, literary people had a great attraction for amelia, and godwin seems to have played an important part in her earlier experience. a saying of mrs. inchbald's is quoted by her on her return home as to the report of the world being that mr. holcroft was in love with mrs. inchbald, mrs. inchbald with mr. godwin, mr. godwin with miss alderson, and miss alderson with mr. holcroft! the following account of somers town, and a philosopher's costume in those days, is written to her father in :-- after a most delightful ride through some of the richest country i ever beheld, we arrived about one o'clock at the philosopher's house; we found him with his hair _bien poudré_, and in a pair of new sharp-toed red morocco slippers, not to mention his green coat and crimson under-waistcoat. from godwin's by the city they come to marlborough street, and find mrs. siddons nursing her little baby, and as handsome and charming as ever. they see charles kemble there, and they wind up their day by calling on mrs. inchbald in her pleasant lodgings, with two hundred pounds just come in from sheridan for a farce of sixty pages. godwin's attentions seem to have amused and pleased the fair, merry amelia, who is not a little proud of her arch influence over various rugged and apparently inaccessible persons. mrs. inchbald seems to have been as jealous of miss alderson at the time as she afterwards was of mary wollstonecraft. 'will you give me nothing to keep for your sake?' says godwin, parting from amelia. 'not even your slipper? i had it once in my possession.' 'this was true,' adds miss amelia; 'my shoe had come off and he picked it up and put it in his pocket.' elsewhere she tells her friend mrs. taylor that mr. holcroft would like to come forward, but that he had no chance. that some one person had a chance, and a very good one, is plain enough from the context of a letter, but there is nothing in mrs. opie's life to show why fate was contrary in this, while yielding so bountiful a share of all other good things to the happy country girl. among other people, she seems to have charmed various french refugees, one of whom was the duc d'aiguillon, come over to england with some seven thousand others, waiting here for happier times, and hiding their sorrows among our friendly mists. godwin was married when miss alderson revisited her london friends and admirers in --an eventful visit, when she met opie for the first time. the account of their first meeting is amusingly given in miss brightwell's memoirs. it was at an evening party. some of those present were eagerly expecting the arrival of miss alderson, but the evening was wearing away and still she did not appear; 'at length the door was flung open, and she entered bright and smiling, dressed in a robe of blue, her neck and arms bare, and on her head a small bonnet placed in somewhat coquettish style sideways and surmounted by a plume of three white feathers. her beautiful hair hung in waving tresses over her shoulders; her face was kindling with pleasure at the sight of her old friends, and her whole appearance was animated and glowing. at the time she came in mr. opie was sitting on a sofa beside mr. f., who had been saying from time to time, 'amelia is coming; amelia will surely come. why is she not here?' and whose eyes were turned in her direction. he was interrupted by his companion eagerly exclaiming, 'who is that--who is that?' and hastily rising opie pressed forward to be introduced to the fair object whose sudden appearance had so impressed him.' with all her love of excitement, of change, of variety, one cannot but feel, as i have said, that there was also in amelia alderson's cheerful life a vein of deep and very serious feeling, and the bracing influence of the upright and high-minded people among whom she had been brought up did not count for nothing in her nature. she could show her genuine respect for what was generous and good and true, even though she did not always find strength to carry out the dream of an excitable and warm-hearted nature. iv. there is something very interesting in the impression one receives of the 'inspired peasant,' as alan cunningham calls john opie--the man who did not paint to live so much as live to paint. he was a simple, high-minded cornishman, whose natural directness and honesty were unspoiled by favour, unembittered by failure. opie's gift, like some deep-rooted seed living buried in arid soil, ever aspired upwards towards the light. his ideal was high; his performance fell far short of his life-long dream, and he knew it. but his heart never turned from its life's aim, and he loved beauty and art with that true and unfailing devotion which makes a man great, even though his achievements do not show all he should have been. the old village carpenter, his father, who meant him to succeed to the business, was often angry, and loudly railed at the boy when good white-washed walls and clean boards were spoiled by scrawls of lamp-black and charcoal. john worked in the shop and obeyed his father, but when his day's task was over he turned again to his darling pursuits. at twelve years old he had mastered euclid, and could also rival 'mark oaks,' the village phenomenon, in painting a butterfly; by the time john was sixteen he could earn as much as _s._ _d._ for a portrait. it was in this year that there came to truro an accomplished and various man dr. wolcott--sometimes a parson, sometimes a doctor of medicine, sometimes as peter pindar, a critic and literary man. this gentleman was interested by young opie and his performances, and he asked him on one occasion how he liked painting. 'better than bread-and-butter,' says the boy. wolcott finally brought his _protégé_ to london, where the doctor's influence and opie's own undoubted merit brought him success; and to opie's own amazement he suddenly found himself the fashion. his street was crowded with carriages; long processions of ladies and gentlemen came to sit to him; he was able to furnish a house 'in orange court, by leicester fields;' he was beginning to put by money when, as suddenly as he had been taken up, he was forgotten again. the carriages drove off in some other direction, and opie found himself abandoned by the odd, fanciful world of fashions, which would not be fashions if they did not change day by day. it might have proved a heart-breaking phase of life for a man whose aim had been less single. but opie was of too generous a nature to value popularity beyond achievement. he seems to have borne this freak of fortune with great equanimity, and when he was sometimes overwhelmed, it was not by the praise or dispraise of others, but by his own consciousness of failure, of inadequate performance. troubles even more serious than loss of patronage and employment befell him later. he had married, unhappily for himself, a beautiful, unworthy woman, whose picture he has painted many times. she was a faithless as well as a weak and erring wife, and finally abandoned him. when opie was free to marry again he was thirty-six, a serious, downright man of undoubted power and influence, of sincerity and tenderness of feeling, of rugged and unusual manners. he had not many friends, nor did he wish for many, but those who knew him valued him at his worth. his second wife showed what was in her by her appreciation of his noble qualities, though one can hardly realise a greater contrast than that of these two, so unlike in character, in training, and disposition. they were married in london, at marylebone church, in that dismal year of ' , which is still remembered. opie loved his wife deeply and passionately; he did not charm her, though she charmed him, but for his qualities she had true respect and admiration. v. opie must be forgiven if he was one-idead, if he erred from too much zeal. all his wife's bright gaiety of nature, her love for her fellow-creatures, her interest in the world, her many-sidedness, this uncompromising husband would gladly have kept for himself. for him his wife and his home were the whole world; his art was his whole life. the young couple settled down in london after their marriage, where, notwithstanding fogs and smoke and dull monotony of brick and smut, so many beautiful things are created; where turner's rainbow lights were first reflected, where tennyson's 'princess' sprang from the fog. it was a modest and quiet installation, but among the pretty things which amelia brought to brighten her new home we read of blue feathers and gold gauze bonnets, tiaras, and spencers, scarlet ribbons, buff net, and cambric flounces, all of which give one a pleasant impression of her intention to amuse herself, and to enjoy the society of her fellows, and to bring her own pleasant contributions to their enjoyment. opie sat working at his easel, painting portraits to earn money for his wife's use and comfort, and encouraging her to write, for he had faith in work. he himself would never intermit his work for a single day. he would have gladly kept her always in his sight. 'if i would stay at home for ever, i believe my husband would be merry from morning to night--a lover more than a husband,' amelia writes to mrs. taylor. he seemed to have some feeling that time for him was not to be long--that life was passing quickly by, almost too quickly to give him time to realise his new home happiness, to give him strength to grasp his work. he was no rapid painter, instinctively feeling his light and colour and action, and seizing the moment's suggestion, but anxious, laborious, and involved in that sad struggle in which some people pass their lives, for ever disappointed. opie's portraits seem to have been superior to his compositions, which were well painted, 'but unimaginative and commonplace,' says a painter of our own time, whose own work quickens with that mysterious soul which some pictures (as indeed some human beings) seem to be entirely without. 'during the nine years that i was his wife,' says mrs. opie, 'i never saw him satisfied with any one of his productions. often, very often, he has entered my sitting-room, and, throwing himself down in an agony of despondence upon the sofa, exclaimed, "i shall never be a painter!"' he was a wise and feeling critic, however great his shortcomings as a painter may have been. his lectures are admirable; full of real thought and good judgment. sir james mackintosh places them beyond reynolds's in some ways. 'if there were no difficulties every one would be a painter,' says opie, and he goes on to point out what a painter's object should be--'the discovery or conception of perfect ideas of things; nature in its purest and most essential form rising from the species to the genus, the highest and ultimate exertion of human genius.' for him it was no grievance that a painter's life should be one long and serious effort. 'if you are wanting to yourselves, rule may be multiplied upon rule and precept upon precept in vain.' some of his remarks might be thought still to apply in many cases, no less than they did a hundred years ago, when he complained of those green-sick lovers of chalk, brick-dust, charcoal and old tapestry, who are so ready to decry the merits of colouring and to set it down as a kind of superfluity. it is curious to contrast opie's style in literature with that of his wife, who belongs to the entirely past generation which she reflected, whereas he wrote from his own original impressions, saying those things which struck him as forcibly then as they strike us now. 'father and daughter' was mrs. opie's first acknowledged book. it was published in , and the author writes modestly of all her apprehensions. 'mr. opie has no patience with me; he consoles me by averring that fear makes me overrate others and underrate myself.' the book was reviewed in the 'edinburgh.' we hear of one gentleman who lies awake all night after reading it; and mrs. inchbald promises a candid opinion, which, however, we do not get. besides stories and novels, mrs. opie was the author of several poems and verses which were much admired. there was an impromptu to sir james mackintosh, which brought a long letter in return, and one of her songs was quoted by sydney smith in a lecture at the royal institution. mrs. opie was present, and she used to tell in after times 'how unexpectedly the compliment came upon her, and how she shrunk down upon her seat in order to screen herself from observation.' the lines are indeed charming:-- go, youth, beloved in distant glades, new friends, new hopes, new joys to find, yet sometimes deign 'midst fairer maids to think on her thou leav'st behind. thy love, thy fate, dear youth to share must never be my happy lot; but thou may'st grant this humble prayer, forget me not, forget me not. yet should the thought of my distress too painful to thy feelings be, heed not the wish i now express, nor ever deign to think of me; but oh! if grief thy steps attend, if want, if sickness be thy lot, and thou require a soothing friend, forget me not, forget me not. vi. the little household was a modest one, but we read of a certain amount of friendly hospitality. country neighbours from norfolk appear upon the scene; we find northcote dining and praising the toasted cheese. mrs. opie's heart never for an instant ceased to warm to her old friends and companions. she writes an amusing account to mrs. taylor of her london home, her interests and visitors, 'her happy and delightful life.' she worked, she amused herself, she received her friends at home and went to look for them abroad. among other visits, mrs. opie speaks of one to an old friend who has 'grown plump,' and of a second to 'betsy fry' who, notwithstanding her comfortable home and prosperous circumstances, has grown lean. it would be difficult to recognise under this familiar cognomen and description the noble and dignified woman whose name and work are still remembered with affectionate respect and wonder by a not less hard-working, but less convinced and convincing generation. this friendship was of great moment to amelia opie in after days, at a time when her heart was low and her life very sad and solitary; but meanwhile, as i have said, there were happy times for her; youth and youthful spirits and faithful companionship were all hers, and troubles had not yet come. one day mrs. opie gives a characteristic account of a visit from mrs. taylor's two sons. '"john," said i, "will you take a letter from me to your mother?" "certainly," replied john, "for then i shall be sure of being welcome." "fy," returned i. "mr. courtier, you know you want nothing to add to the heartiness of the welcome you will receive at home." "no, indeed," said richard, "and if mrs. opie sends her letter by you it will be one way of making it less valued and attended to than it would otherwise be." to the truth of this speech i subscribed and wrote not. i have heard in later days a pretty description of the simple home in which all these handsome, cultivated, and remarkable young people grew up round their noble-minded mother.' one of mrs. john taylor's daughters became mrs. reeve, the mother of mr. henry reeve, another was mrs. austin, the mother of lady duff gordon. those lean kine we read of in the bible are not peculiar to egypt and to the days of joseph and his brethren. the unwelcome creatures are apt to make their appearance in many a country and many a household, and in default of their natural food to devour all sorts of long-cherished fancies, hopes, and schemes. some time after his marriage, opie suddenly, and for no reason, found himself without employment, and the severest trial they experienced during their married life, says his wife, was during this period of anxiety. she, however, cheered him womanfully, would not acknowledge her own dismay, and opie, gloomy and desponding though he was, continued to paint as regularly as before. presently orders began to flow in again, and did not cease until his death. vii. their affairs being once more prosperous, a long-hoped-for dream became a reality, and they started on an expedition to paris, a solemn event in those days and not lightly to be passed over by a biographer. one long war was ended, another had not yet begun. the continent was a promised land, fondly dreamt of though unknown. 'at last in paris; at last in the city which she had so longed to see!' mrs. opie's description of her arrival reads a comment upon history. as they drive into the town, everywhere chalked up upon the walls and the houses are inscriptions concerning 'l'indivisibilité de la république.' how many subsequent writings upon the wall did mrs. opie live to see! the english party find rooms at a hotel facing the place de la concorde, where the guillotine, that token of order and tranquillity, was then perpetually standing. the young wife's feelings may be imagined when within an hour of their arrival opie, who had rushed off straight to the louvre, returned with a face of consternation to say that they must leave paris at once. the louvre was shut; and, moreover, the whiteness of everything, the houses, the ground they stood on, all dazzled and blinded him. he was a lost man if he remained! by some happy interposition they succeed in getting admission to the louvre, and as the painter wonders and admires his nervous terrors leave him. the picture left by miss edgeworth of paris society in the early years of the century is more brilliant, but not more interesting than mrs. opie's reminiscences of the fleeting scene, gaining so much in brilliancy from the shadows all round about. there is the shadow of the ghastly guillotine upon the place de la concorde, the shadows of wars but lately over and yet to come, the echo in the air of arms and discord; meanwhile a brilliant, agreeable, flashing paris streams with sunlight, is piled with treasures and trophies of victory, and crowded with well-known characters. we read of kosciusko's nut-brown wig concealing his honourable scars; masséna's earrings flash in the sun; one can picture it all, and the animated inrush of tourists, and the eager life stirring round about the walls of the old louvre. it was at this time that they saw talma perform, and years after, in her little rooms in lady's field at norwich, mrs. opie, in her quaker dress, used to give an imitation of the great actor and utter a deep 'cain, cain, where art thou?' to which cain replies in sepulchral tones. we get among other things an interesting glimpse of fox standing in the louvre gallery opposite the picture of st. jerome by domenichino, a picture which, as it is said, he enthusiastically admired. opie, who happened to be introduced to him, then and there dissented from this opinion. 'you must be a better judge on such points than i am,' says fox; and mrs. opie proudly writes of the two passing on together discussing and comparing the pictures. she describes them next standing before the 'transfiguration' of raphael. the louvre in those days must have been for a painter a wonder palace indeed. the 'venus de' medici' was on her way; it was a time of miracles, as fox said. meanwhile mrs. opie hears someone saying that the first consul is on his way from the senate, and she hurries to a window to look out. 'bonaparte seems very fond of state and show for a republican,' says mrs. fox. fox himself half turns to the window, then looks back to the pictures again. as for opie, one may be sure his attention never wandered for one instant. they saw the first consul more than once. the pacificator, as he was then called, was at the height of his popularity; on one occasion they met fox with his wife on his arm crossing the carrousel to the tuìlerìes, where they are also admitted to a ground-floor room, from whence they look upon a marble staircase and see several officers ascending, 'one of whom, with a helmet which seemed entirely of gold, was eugène de beauharnais. a few minutes afterwards,' she says, 'there was a rush of officers down the stairs, and among them i saw a short pale man with his hat in his hand, who, as i thought, resembled lord erskine in profile....' this of course is bonaparte, unadorned amidst all this studied splendour, and wearing only a little tricoloured cockade. maria cosway, the painter, who was also in paris at the time, took them to call at the house of madame bonaparte _mère_, where they were received by 'a blooming, courteous ecclesiastic, powdered and with purple stockings and gold buckles, and a costly crucifix. this is cardinal fesch, the uncle of bonaparte. it is said that when fox was introduced to the first consul he was warmly welcomed by him, and was made to listen to a grand harangue upon the advantages of peace, to which he answered scarcely a word; though he was charmed to talk with madame bonaparte, and to discuss with her the flowers of which she was so fond.' the opies met fox again in england some years after, when he sat to opie for one of his finest portraits. it is now at holker, and there is a characteristic description of poor opie, made nervous by the criticism of the many friends, and fox, impatient but encouraging, and again whispering, 'don't attend to them; you must know best.' viii. 'adeline mowbray; or, mother and daughter,' was published by mrs. opie after this visit to the continent. it is a melancholy and curious story, which seems to have been partly suggested by that of poor mary wollstonecraft, whose prejudices the heroine shares and expiates by a fate hardly less pathetic than that of mary herself. the book reminds one of a very touching letter from godwin's wife to amelia alderson, written a few weeks before her death, in which she speaks of her 'contempt for the forms of a world she should have bade a long good-night to had she not been a mother.' justice has at length been done to this mistaken but noble and devoted woman, and her story has lately been written from a wider point of view than mrs. opie's, though she indeed was no ungenerous advocate. her novel seems to have given satisfaction; 'a beautiful story, the most natural in its pathos of any fictitious narrative in the language,' says the 'edinburgh,' writing with more leniency than authors now expect. another reviewer, speaking with discriminating criticism, says of mrs. opie: 'she does not reason well, but she has, like most accomplished women, the talent of perceiving truth without the process of reasoning. her language is often inaccurate, but it is always graceful and harmonious. she can do nothing well that requires to be done with formality; to make amends, however, she represents admirably everything that is amiable, generous, and gentle.' adeline mowbray dies of a broken heart, with the following somewhat discursive farewell to her child: 'there are two ways in which a mother can be of use to her daughter; the one is by instilling into her mind virtuous principles, and by setting her a virtuous example, the other is by being to her, in her own person, an awful warning!' * * * * * one or two of opie's letters to his wife are given in the memoir. they ring with truth and tender feeling. the two went to norwich together on one occasion, when opie painted dr. sayers, the scholar, who, in return for his portrait, applied an elegant greek distich to the painter. mrs. opie remained with her father, and her husband soon returned to his studio in london. when she delayed, he wrote to complain. 'my dearest life, i cannot be sorry that you do not stay longer, though, as i said, on your father's account, i would consent to it. pray, love, forgive me, and make yourself easy. i did not suspect, till my last letter was posted, that it might be too strong. i had been counting almost the hours till your arrival for some time. as to coming down again i cannot think of it, for though i could perhaps better spare the time at present from painting than i could at any part of the last month, i find i must now go hard to work to finish my lectures, as the law says they must be delivered the second year after the election.' the academy had appointed opie professor of painting in the place of fuseli, and he was now trying his hand at a new form of composition, and not without well-deserved success. but the strain was too great for this eager mind. opie painted all day; of an evening he worked at his lectures on painting. from september to february he allowed himself no rest. he was not a man who worked with ease; all he did cost him much effort and struggle. after delivering his first lecture, he complained that he could not sleep. it had been a great success; his colleagues had complimented him, and accompanied him to his house. he was able to complete the course, but immediately afterwards he sickened. no one could discover what was amiss; the languor and fever increased day by day. his wife nursed him devotedly, and a favourite sister of his came to help her. afterwards it was of consolation to the widow to remember that no hired nurse had been by his bedside, and that they had been able to do everything for him themselves. one thing troubled him as he lay dying; it was the thought of a picture which he had not been able to complete in time for the exhibition. a friend and former pupil finished it, and brought it to his bedside. he said with a smile, 'take it away, it will do now.' to the last he imagined that he was painting upon this picture, and he moved his arms as though he were at work. his illness was inflammation of the brain. he was only forty-five when he died, and he was buried in st. paul's, and laid by sir joshua, his great master. the portrait of opie, as it is engraved in alan cunningham's life, is that of a simple, noble-looking man, with a good thoughtful face and a fine head. northcote, nollekens, horne tooke, all his friends spoke warmly of him. 'a man of powerful understanding and ready apprehension,' says one. 'mr. opie crowds more wisdom into a few words than almost anybody i ever saw,' says another. 'i do not say that he was always right,' says northcote; 'but he always put your thoughts into a new track that was worth following.' some two years after his death the lectures which had cost so much were published, with a memoir by mrs. opie. sir james mackintosh has written one of his delightful criticisms upon the book:-- the cultivation of every science and the practice of every art are in fact a species of action, and require ardent zeal and unshaken courage.... originality can hardly exist without vigour of character.... the discoverer or inventor may indeed be most eminently wanting in decision in the general concerns of life, but he must possess it in those pursuits in which he is successful. opie is a remarkable instance of the natural union of these superior qualities, both of which he possesses in a high degree.... he is inferior in elegance to sir joshua, but he is superior in strength; he strikes more, though he charms less.... opie is by turns an advocate, a controvertist, a panegyrist, a critic; sir joshua more uniformly fixes his mind on general and permanent principles, and certainly approaches more nearly to the elevation and tranquillity which seem to characterise the philosophic teacher of an elegant art. ix. mrs. opie went back, soon after her husband's death, to norwich, to her early home, her father's house; nor was she a widow indeed while she still had this tender love and protection. that which strikes one most as one reads the accounts of mrs. opie is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of her nature. the deepest feeling of her life was her tender love for her father, and if she remained younger than most women do, it may have been partly from the great blessing which was hers so long, that of a father's home. time passed, and by degrees she resumed her old life, and came out and about among her friends. sorrow does not change a nature, it expresses certain qualities which have been there all along. so mrs. opie came up to london once more, and welcomed and was made welcome by many interesting people. lord erskine is her friend always; she visits madame de staël; she is constantly in company with sydney smith, the ever-welcome as she calls him. lord byron, sheridan, lord dudley, all appear upon her scene. there is a pretty story of her singing her best to lady sarah napier, old, blind, and saddened, but still happy in that she had her sons to guide and to protect her steps. among her many entertainments, mrs. opie amusingly describes a dinner at sir james mackintosh's, to which most of the guests had been asked at different hours, varying from six to half-past seven, when baron william von humboldt arrives. he writes to her next day, calling her mademoiselle opie, 'no doubt from my juvenile appearance,' she adds, writing to her father. it is indeed remarkable to read of her spirits long after middle life, her interest and capacity for amusement. she pays _l._ for a ticket to a ball given to the duke of wellington; she describes this and many other masquerades and gaieties, and the blue ball, and the pink ball, and the twenty-seven carriages at her door, and her sight of the emperor of russia in her hotel. when the rest of the ladies crowd round, eager to touch his clothes, mrs. opie, carried away by the general craze, encircles his wrist with her finger and thumb. apart from these passing fancies, she is in delightful society. baron alderson, her cousin and friend, was always kind and affectionate to her. the pretty little story is well known of his taking her home in her quaker dress in the judges' state-coach at norwich, saying, 'come, brother opie,' as he offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage. she used to stay at his house in london, and almost the last visit she ever paid was to him. one of the most interesting of her descriptions is that of her meeting with sir walter scott and with wordsworth at a breakfast in mount street, and of sir walter's delightful talk and animated stories. one can imagine him laughing and describing a cockney's terrors in the highlands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, as is their north-country fashion. 'the gifted man,' says mrs. opie, with her old-fashioned adjectives, 'condescended to speak to me of my "father and daughter." he then went on faithfully to praise his old friend joanna baillie and her tragedies, and to describe a tragedy he once thought of writing himself. he should have had no love in it. his hero should have been the uncle of his heroine, a sort of misanthrope, with only one affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary gleam of sunshine lighting the dark tower of some ruined and lonely dwelling.' 'it might perhaps be a weakness,' says the friend, long after recalling this event, 'but i must confess how greatly i was pleased at the time.' no wonder she was pleased that the great wizard should have liked her novel. it would be impossible to attempt a serious critique of mrs. opie's stories. they are artless, graceful, written with an innocent good faith which disarms criticism. that southey, sydney smith, and mackintosh should also have read them and praised them may, as i have said, prove as much for the personal charm of the writer, and her warm sunshine of pleasant companionship, as for the books themselves. they seem to have run through many editions, and to have received no little encouragement. morality and sensation alternate in her pages. monsters abound there. they hire young men to act base parts, to hold villainous conversations which the husbands are intended to overhear. they plot and scheme to ruin the fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines, but they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. one villain, on his way to an appointment with a married woman, receives so severe a blow upon the head from her brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless remorse. another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid scheme against constantia's reputation in the dark recesses of a stage-coach, is unexpectedly seized by the arm. a stranger in the corner, whom he had not noticed, was no other than the baronet whom constantia has loved all along. the dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the stranger's face: baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer leaves the coach at the very next stage, and constantia's happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage with the man she loves. 'lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely heroine, 'but you, my lord, and my smiling children, these are the rainbow that illumines it; and who would look at the gloom that see the many tinted iris? not i, indeed.' 'valentine's eve,' from which this is quoted, was published after john opie's death. so was a novel called 'temper,' and the 'tales of real life.' mrs. opie, however, gave up writing novels when she joined the society of friends. for some years past, mrs. opie had been thrown more and more in the company of a very noble and remarkable race of men and women living quietly in their beautiful homes in the neighbourhood of norwich, but of an influence daily growing--handsome people, prosperous, generous, with a sort of natural priesthood belonging to them. scorning to live for themselves alone, the gurneys were the dispensers and originators of a hundred useful and benevolent enterprises in norwich and elsewhere. they were quakers, and merchants, and bankers. how much of their strength lay in their wealth and prosperity, how much in their enthusiasm, their high spirits, voluntarily curbed, their natural instinct both to lead and to protect, it would be idle to discuss. it is always difficult for people who believe in the all-importance of the present to judge of others, whose firm creed is that the present is nothing as compared to the future. chief among this remarkable family was elizabeth gurney, the wife of josiah fry, the mother of many children, and the good angel, indeed, of the unhappy captives of those barbarous days, prisoners, to whose utter gloom and misery she brought some rays of hope. there are few figures more striking than that of the noble quaker lady starting on her generous mission, comforting the children, easing the chains of the captives. no domineering jellyby, but a motherly, deep-hearted woman; shy, and yet from her very timidity gaining an influence, which less sensitive natures often fail to win. one likes to imagine the dignified sweet face coming in--the comforting friend in the quiet garb of the quaker woman standing at the gates of those terrible places, bidding the despairing prisoners be of good hope. elizabeth fry's whole life was a mission of love and help to others; her brothers and her many relations heartily joined and assisted her in many plans and efforts. for joseph john gurney, the head of the norwich family, mrs. opie is said to have had a feeling amounting to more than friendship. be this as it may, it is no wonder that so warm-hearted and impressionable a woman should have been influenced by the calm goodness of the friends with whom she was now thrown. it is evident enough, nor does she attempt to conceal the fact, that the admiration and interest she feels for john joseph gurney are very deep motive powers. there comes a time in most lives, especially in the lives of women, when all the habits and certainties of youth have passed away, when life has to be built up again upon the foundations indeed of the past, the friendships, the memories, the habits of early life, but with new places and things to absorb and to interest, new hearts to love. and one day people wake up to find that the friends of their choice have become their home. people are stranded perhaps seeking their share in life's allowance, and suddenly they come upon something, with all the charm which belongs to deliberate choice, as well as that of natural affinity. how well one can realise the extraordinary comfort that amelia opie must have found in the kind friends and neighbours with whom she was now thrown! her father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. her own life of struggle, animation, intelligence, was over, as she imagined, for ever. no wonder if for a time she was carried away, if she forgot her own nature, her own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new revelation. here was a new existence, here was a living church ready to draw her within its saving walls. john joseph gurney must have been a man of extraordinary personal influence. for a long time past he had been writing to her seriously. at last, to the surprise of the world, though not without long deliberation and her father's full approval, she joined the society of friends, put on their dress, and adopted their peculiar phraseology. people were surprised at the time, but i think it would have been still more surprising if she had not joined them. j. j. gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently describes mrs. opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'illustrations of lying,' moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is henceforth allowed. 'i am bound in a degree not to invent a story, because when i became a friend it was required of me not to do so,' she writes to miss mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual. miss mitford's description of mrs. opie, 'quakerised all over, and calling mr. haydon 'friend benjamin,' is amusing enough; and so also is the account of the visiting card she had printed after she became a quaker, with 'amelia opie,' without any prefix, as is the quaker way; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of embossed pink roses surrounding the name. there is an account of mrs. opie published in the 'edinburgh review,' in a delightful article entitled the 'worthies of norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence. amelia opie at the end of the last century and amelia opie in the garb and with the speech of a member of the society of friends sounds like two separate personages, but no one who recollects the gay little songs which at seventy she used to sing with lively gesture, the fragments of drama to which, with the zest of an innate actress, she occasionally treated her young friends, or the elaborate faultlessness of her appearance--the shining folds and long train of her pale satin draperies, the high, transparent cap, the crisp fichu crossed over the breast, which set off to advantage the charming little plump figure with its rounded lines--could fail to recognise the same characteristics which sparkled about the wearer of the pink calico domino in which she frolicked incognito 'till she was tired' at a ball given by the duke of wellington in , or of the eight blue feathers which crowned the waving tresses of her flaxen hair as a bride. doctor alderson died in october , and mrs. opie was left alone. she was very forlorn when her father died. she had no close ties to carry her on peacefully from middle age to the end of life. the great break had come; she was miserable, and, as mourners do, she falls upon herself and beats her breast. all through these sad years her friends at northrepps and at earlham were her chief help and consolation. as time passed her deep sorrow was calmed, when peaceful memories had succeeded to the keen anguish of her good old father's loss. she must have suffered deeply; she tried hard to be brave, but her courage failed her at times: she tried hard to do her duty; and her kindness and charity were unfailing, for she was herself still, although so unhappy. her journals are pathetic in their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions. she is lonely; out of heart, out of hope. 'i am so dissatisfied with myself that i hardly dare ask or expect a blessing upon my labours,' she says; and long lists of kind and fatiguing offices, of visits to sick people and poor people, to workhouses and prisons, are interspersed with expressions of self-blame. * * * * * the writer can remember as a child speculating as she watched the straight-cut figure of a quaker lady standing in the deep window of an old mansion that overlooked the luxembourg gardens at paris, with all their perfume and blooming scent of lilac and sweet echoes of children, while the quiet figure stood looking down upon it all from--to a child--such an immeasurable distance. as one grows older one becomes more used to garbs of different fashions and cut, and one can believe in present sunlight and the scent of flowering trees and the happy sound of children's voices going straight to living hearts beneath their several disguises, and mrs. opie, notwithstanding her quaker dress, loved bright colours and gay sunlight. she was one of those who gladly made life happy for others, who naturally turned to bright and happy things herself. when at last she began to recover from the blow which had fallen so heavily upon her she went from norwich to the lakes and fells for refreshment, and then to cornwall, and among its green seas and softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most people do who go to that kind and hospitable county), and her husband's relations, who welcomed her kindly. as she recovered by degrees she began to see something of her old companions. she went to london to attend the may meetings of the society, and i heard an anecdote not long ago which must have occurred on some one of these later visits there. one day when some people were sitting at breakfast at samuel rogers's, and talking as people do who belong to the agreeable classes, the conversation happened to turn upon the affection of a father for his only child, when an elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and who was remarkable for her quaker dress, her frills and spotless folds, her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, burst into a passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing out of the room. she did not return, and the lady who remembers the incident, herself a young bride at the time, told me it made all the more impression upon her at the time because she was told that the quaker lady was mrs. opie. my friend was just beginning her life. mrs. opie must have been ending hers. it is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a quaker, trained from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so suddenly overpoweringly affected; but mrs. opie was no born daughter of the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. i have heard a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up friend into a deep arm-chair exclaiming, 'i will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.' x. at sight of thee, o tricolor, i seem to feel youth's hours return, the loved, the lost! so writes mrs. opie at the age of sixty, reviving, delighting, as she catches sight of her beloved paris once more, and breathes its clear and life-giving air, and looks out across its gardens and glittering gables and spires, and again meets her french acquaintances, and throws herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth and excitability. the little grey bonnet only gives certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted exuberance. she returns to england, but far-away echoes reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all the people for whom her regard is so warm. in august, , came the news of a new revolution--'the chamber of deputies dissolved for ever; the liberty of the press abolished; king, ministers, court, and ambassadors flying from paris to vincennes; cannon planted against the city; , people killed, and the rue de rivoli running with blood.' no wonder such rumours stirred and overwhelmed the staunch but excitable lady. 'you will readily believe how anxious, interested, and excited i feel,' she says; and then she goes on to speak of lafayette, 'miraculously preserved through two revolutions, and in chains and in a dungeon, now the leading mind in another conflict, and lifting not only an armed but a restraining hand in a third revolution.' her heart was with her french friends and intimates, and though she kept silence she was not the less determined to follow its leading, and, without announcing her intention, she started off from norwich and, after travelling without intermission, once more arrived in her beloved city. but what was become of the revolution? 'paris seemed as bright and peaceful as i had seen it thirteen months ago! the people, the busy people passing to and fro, and soldiers, omnibuses, cabriolets, citadenes, carts, horsemen hurrying along the rue de rivoli, while foot passengers were crossing the gardens, or loungers were sitting on its benches to enjoy the beauty of the may-november.' she describes two men crossing the place royale singing a national song, the result of the revolution:-- pour briser leurs masses profondes, qui conduit nos drapeaux sanglants, c'est la liberté de deux mondes, c'est lafayette en cheveux blancs. mrs. opie was full of enthusiasm for noble lafayette surveying his court of turbulent intrigue and shifting politics; for cuvier in his own realm, among more tranquil laws, less mutable decrees. she should have been born a frenchwoman, to play a real and brilliant part among all these scenes and people, instead of only looking on. something stirred in her veins too eager and bubbling for an englishwoman's scant share of life and outward events. no wonder that her friends at norwich were anxious, and urged her to return. they heard of her living in the midst of excitement, of admiration, and with persons of a different religion and way of thinking to themselves. their warning admonitions carried their weight; that little quaker bonnet which she took so much care of was a talisman, drawing the most friendly of friends away from the place of her adoption. but she came back unchanged to her home, to her quiet associations; she had lost none of her spirits, none, of her cheerful interest in her natural surroundings. as life burnt on her kind soul seemed to shine more and more brightly. every one came to see her, to be cheered and warmed by her genial spirit. she loved flowers, of which her room was full. she had a sort of passion for prisms, says her biographer; she had several set in a frame and mounted like a screen, and the colour flew about the little room. she kept up a great correspondence; she was never tired of writing, though the letters on other people's business were apt to prove a serious burden at times. but she lives on only to be of use. 'take care of indulging in little selfishnesses,' she writes in her diary; 'learn to consider others in trifles: the mind so disciplined will find it easier to fulfil the greater duties, and the character will not exhibit that trying inconsistency which one sees in great and often in pious persons.' her health fails, but not her courage. she goes up to london for the last time to her cousin's house. she is interested in all the people she meets, in their wants and necessities, in the events of the time. she returns home, contented with all; with the house which she feels so 'desirable to die in,' with her window through which she can view the woods and rising ground of thorpe. 'my prisms to-day are quite in their glory,' she writes; 'the atmosphere must be very clear, for the radiance is brighter than ever i saw it before;' and then she wonders whether the mansions in heaven will be draped in such brightness; and so to the last the gentle, bright, _rainbow_ lady remained surrounded by kind and smiling faces, by pictures, by flowers, and with the light of her favourite prismatic colours shining round about the couch on which she lay. _jane austen._ - . 'a mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.'--pascal. 'i did not know that you were a studier of character,' says bingley to elizabeth. 'it must be an amusing study.' 'yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. they have at least that advantage.' 'the country,' said darcy, 'can in general supply but few subjects for such a study. in a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.' 'but people themselves alter so much,' elizabeth answers, 'that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.' 'yes, indeed,' cried mrs. bennet, offended by darcy's manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood; 'i assure you that we have quite as much of _that_ going on in the country as in town.' 'everybody was surprised, and darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned silently away. mrs. bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.' these people belong to a whole world of familiar acquaintances, who are, notwithstanding their old-fashioned dresses and quaint expressions, more alive to us than a great many of the people among whom we live. we know so much more about them to begin with. notwithstanding a certain reticence and self-control which seems to belong to their age, and with all their quaint dresses, and ceremonies, and manners, the ladies and gentlemen in 'pride and prejudice' and its companion novels seem like living people out of our own acquaintance transported bodily into a bygone age, represented in the half-dozen books that contain jane austen's works. dear books! bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting. could we but study our own bores as miss austen must have studied hers in her country village, what a delightful world this might be!--a world of norris's economical great walkers, with dining-room tables to dispose of; of lady bertrams on sofas, with their placid 'do not act anything improper, my dears; sir thomas would not like it;' of bennets, goddards, bates's; of mr. collins's; of rushbrooks, with two-and-forty speeches apiece--a world of mrs. eltons.... inimitable woman! she must be alive at this very moment, if we but knew where to find her, her basket on her arm, her nods and all-importance, with maple grove and the sucklings in the background. she would be much excited were she aware how she is esteemed by a late chancellor of the exchequer, who is well acquainted with maple grove and selina too. it might console her for mr. knightly's shabby marriage. all these people nearly start out of the pages, so natural and unaffected are they, and yet they never lived except in the imagination of one lady with bright eyes, who sat down some seventy years ago to an old mahogany desk in a quiet country parlour, and evoked them for us. one seems to see the picture of the unknown friend who has charmed us so long--charmed away dull hours, created neighbours and companions for us in lonely places, conferring happiness and harmless mirth upon generations to come. one can picture her as she sits erect, with her long and graceful figure, her full round face, her bright eyes cast down,--jane austen, 'the woman of whom england is justly proud'--whose method generous macaulay has placed near shakespeare. she is writing in secret, putting away her work when visitors come in, unconscious, modest, hidden at home in heart, as she was in her sweet and womanly life, with the wisdom of the serpent indeed and the harmlessness of a dove. some one said just now that many people seem to be so proud of seeing a joke at all, that they impress it upon you until you are perfectly wearied by it. jane austen was not of these; her humour flows gentle and spontaneous; it is no elaborate mechanism nor artificial fountain, but a bright natural stream, rippling and trickling over every stone and sparkling in the sunshine. we should be surprised now-a-days to hear a young lady announce herself as a studier of character. from her quiet home in the country lane this one reads to us a real page from the absorbing pathetic humorous book of human nature--a book that we can most of us understand when it is translated into plain english; but of which the quaint and illegible characters are often difficult to decipher for ourselves. it is a study which, with all respect for darcy's opinion, must require something of country-like calm and concentration and freedom of mind. it is difficult, for instance, for a too impulsive student not to attribute something of his own moods to his specimens instead of dispassionately contemplating them from a critical distance. besides the natural fun and wit and life of her characters, 'all perfectly discriminated,' as macaulay says, jane austen has the gift of telling a story in a way that has never been surpassed. she rules her places, times, characters, and marshals them with unerring precision. in her special gift for organisation she seems almost unequalled. her picnics are models for all future and past picnics; her combinations of feelings, of conversation, of gentlemen and ladies, are so natural and lifelike that reading to criticise is impossible to some of us--the scene carries us away, and we forget to look for the art by which it is recorded. her machinery is simple but complete; events group themselves so vividly and naturally in her mind that, in describing imaginary scenes, we seem not only to read them, but to live them, to see the people coming and going: the gentlemen courteous and in top-boots, the ladies demure and piquant; we can almost hear them talking to one another. no retrospects; no abrupt flights; as in real life days and events follow one another. last tuesday does not suddenly start into existence all out of place; nor does appear upon the scene when we are well on in ' . countries and continents do not fly from hero to hero, nor do long and divergent adventures happen to unimportant members of the company. with jane austen days, hours, minutes succeed each other like clockwork, one central figure is always present on the scene, that figure is always prepared for company. miss edwards's curl-papers are almost the only approach to dishabille in her stories. there are postchaises in readiness to convey the characters from bath or lyme to uppercross, to fullerton, from gracechurch street to meryton, as their business takes them. mr. knightly rides from brunswick square to hartfield, by a road that miss austen herself must have travelled in the curricle with her brother, driving to london on a summer's day. it was a wet ride for mr. knightly, followed by that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon in the shrubbery, when the wind had changed into a softer quarter, the clouds were carried off, and emma, walking in the sunshine, with spirits freshened and thoughts a little relieved, and thinking of mr. knightly as sixteen miles away, meets him at the garden door; and everybody, i think, must be the happier, for the happiness and certainty that one half-hour gave to emma and her 'indifferent' lover. there is a little extract from one of miss austen's letters to a niece, which shows that all this successful organisation was not brought about by chance alone, but came from careful workmanship. 'your aunt c.,' she says, 'does not like desultory novels, and is rather fearful that yours will be too much so--that there will be too frequent a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be sometimes introduced of apparent consequence, which will lead to nothing. it will not be so great an objection to me. i allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story....' but, though the sins of a wandering story may be covered, the virtues of a well-told one make themselves felt unconsciously, and without an effort. some books and people are delightful, we can scarce tell why; they are not so clever as others that weary and fatigue us. it is a certain effort to read a story, however touching, that is disconnected and badly related. it is like an ill-drawn picture, of which the colouring is good. jane austen possessed both gifts of colour and of drawing. she could see human nature as it was; with near-sighted eyes, it is true; but having seen, she could combine her picture by her art, and colour it from life. how delightful the people are who play at cards, and pay their addresses to one another, and sup, and discuss each other's affairs! take mr. bennet's reception of his sons-in-law. take sir walter elliot compassionating the navy and admiral baldwin--'nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top--a wretched example of what a seafaring life can do, for men who are exposed to every climate and weather until they are not fit to be seen. it is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach admiral baldwin's age....' or shall we quote the scene of fanny price's return when she comes to visit her family at portsmouth; in all daughterly agitation and excitement, and the brother's and father's and sister's reception of her.... 'a stare or two at fanny was all the voluntary notice that her brother bestowed, but he made no objection to her kissing him, though still entirely engaged in detailing further particulars of the "thrush's" going out of harbour, in which he had a strong right of interest, being about to commence his career of seamanship in her at this very time. after the mother and daughter have received her, fanny's seafaring father comes in, and does not notice her at first in his excitement. "captain walsh thinks you will certainly have a cruise to the westward with the 'elephant' by ---- i wish you may. but old scholey was saying just now that he thought you would be sent first to the 'texel.' well, well, we are ready whatever happens. but by ---- you lost a fine sight by not being here in the morning to see the 'thrush' go out of harbour. i would not have been out of the way for a thousand pounds. old scholey ran in at breakfast time to say she had slipped her moorings and was coming out. i jumped up and made but two steps to the platform. if ever there was a perfect beauty afloat she is one; and there she lies at spithead, and anybody in england would take her for an eight-and-twenty. i was upon the platform for two hours this afternoon looking at her. she lies close to the 'endymion,' between her and the 'cleopatra,' just to the eastward of the sheer hulk."' '"ha!" cried william, "_that's_ just where i should have put her myself. it's the best berth in spithead. but here is my sister, sir; here is fanny, turning and leading her forward--it is so dark you do not see her."' 'with an acknowledgment that he had quite forgot her, mr. price now received his daughter, and having given her a cordial hug and observed that she was grown into a woman and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again.' how admirably it is all told! how we hear them all talking! from her own brothers jane austen learned her accurate knowledge of ships and seafaring things, from her own observation she must have gathered her delightful droll science of men and women and their ways and various destinations. who will not recognise mrs. norris in that master-touch by which she removes the curtain to save sir thomas's feelings, that curtain which had been prepared for the private theatricals he so greatly disapproved of? mrs. norris thoughtfully carries it off to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize. ii. the charm of friends of pen-and-ink is their unchangeableness. we go to them when we want them. we know where to seek them; we know what to expect from them. they are never preoccupied; they are always 'at home;' they never turn their backs nor walk away as people do in real life, nor let their houses and leave the neighbourhood, and disappear for weeks together; they are never taken up with strange people, nor suddenly absorbed into some more genteel society, or by some nearer fancy. even the most volatile among them is to be counted upon. we may have neglected them, and yet when we meet again there are the familiar old friends, and we seem to find our own old selves again in their company. for us time has, perhaps, passed away; feelings have swept by, leaving interests and recollections in their place; but at all ages there must be days that belong to our youth, hours that will recur so long as men forbear and women remember, and life itself exists. perhaps the most fashionable marriage on the _tapis_ no longer excites us very much, but the sentiment of an emma or an anne elliot comes home to some of us as vividly as ever. it is something to have such old friends who are so young. an emma, blooming, without a wrinkle or a grey hair, after twenty years' acquaintance; an elizabeth bennet, sprightly and charming ever.... in the 'roundabout papers' there is a passage about the pen-and-ink friends my father loved:-- 'they used to call the good sir walter the "wizard of the north." what if some writer should appear who can write so _enchantingly_ that he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents? what if mignon, and margaret, and goetz von berlichingen are alive now (though i don't say they are visible), and dugald dalgetty and ivanhoe were to step in at that open window by the little garden yonder? suppose uncas and our noble old leather stocking were to glide in silent? suppose athos, porthos, and aramis should enter, with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches? and dearest amelia booth, on uncle toby's arm; and tittlebat titmouse with his hair dyed green; and all the crummles company of comedians, with the gil blas troop; and sir roger de coverley; and the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the knight of la mancha, with his blessed squire? i say to you, i look rather wistfully towards the window, musing upon these people. were any of them to enter, i think i should not be very much frightened....' are not such friends as these, and others unnamed here, but who will come unannounced to join the goodly company, creations that, like some people, do actually make part of our existence, and make us the better for theirs? to express some vague feelings is to stamp them. have we any one of us a friend in a knight of la mancha, a colonel newcome, a sir roger de coverley? they live for us even though they may have never lived. they are, and do actually make part of our lives, one of the best and noblest parts. to love them is like a direct communication with the great and generous minds that conceived them. * * * * * it is difficult, reading the novels of succeeding generations, to determine how much each book reflects of the time in which it was written; how much of its character depends upon the mind and the mood of the writer. the greatest minds, the most original, have the least stamp of the age, the most of that dominant natural reality which belongs to all great minds. we know how a landscape changes as the day goes on, and how the scene brightens and gains in beauty as the shadows begin to lengthen. the clearest eyes must see by the light of their own hour. jane austen's literary hour must have been a midday hour: bright, unsuggestive, with objects standing clear, without much shadow or elaborate artistic effect. our own age is more essentially an age of strained emotion, little remains to us of starch, or powder, or courtly reserve. what we have lost in calm, in happiness, in tranquillity, we have gained in emphasis. our danger is now, not of expressing and feeling too little, but of expressing more than we feel. the living writers of to-day lead us into distant realms and worlds undreamt of in the placid and easily contented gigot age. our characters travel by rail and are no longer confined to postchaises. there is certainly a wide difference between miss austen's heroines and, let us say, a maggie tulliver. one would be curious to know whether, between the human beings who read jane austen's books to-day and those who read them fifty years ago, there is as great a contrast. one reason may be, perhaps, that characters in novels are certainly more intimate with us and on less ceremonious terms than in jane austen's days, when heroines never gave up a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart in which some modern types are a little wanting. whatever happens they could for the most part speak of quietly and without bitterness. love with them does not mean a passion so much as an interest, deep, silent, not quite incompatible with a secondary flirtation. marianne dashwood's tears are evidently meant to be dried. jane bennet smiles, sighs and makes excuses for bingley's neglect. emma passes one disagreeable morning making up her mind to the unnatural alliance between mr. knightly and harriet smith. it was the spirit of the age, and, perhaps, one not to be unenvied. it was not that jane austen herself was incapable of understanding a deeper feeling. in the last written page of her last written book, there is an expression of the deepest and truest experience. annie elliot's talk with captain benfield is the touching utterance of a good woman's feelings. they are speaking of men and of women's affections. 'you are always labouring and toiling,' she says, 'exposed to every risk and hardship. your home, country, friends, all united; neither time nor life to be called your own. it would be too hard, indeed (with a faltering voice), if a woman's feelings were to be added to all this.' further on she says, eagerly: 'i hope i do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. god forbid that i should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. i should deserve utter contempt if i dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. no! i believe you capable of everything good and great in your married lives. i believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance so long as--if i may be allowed the expression--so long as you have an object; i mean while the woman you love lives and lives for you. _all the privilege i claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not court it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone._' she could not immediately have uttered another sentence--her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed. dear anne elliot!--sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender-hearted--one can almost hear her voice, pleading the cause of all true women. in those days when, perhaps, people's nerves were stronger than they are now, sentiment may have existed in a less degree, or have been more ruled by judgment, it may have been calmer and more matter-of-fact; and yet jane austen, at the very end of her life, wrote thus. her words seem to ring in our ears after they have been spoken. anne elliot must have been jane austen herself, speaking for the last time. there is something so true, so womanly about her, that it is impossible not to love her most of all. she is the bright-eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, softened, cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth and sweetness instead of bitterness and pain. what a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to enumerate the different influences by which our lives have been affected--influences of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and circumstance,--of beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or painful ones: seasons following in their course--hills rising on our horizons--scenes of ruin and desolation--crowded thoroughfares--sounds in our ears, jarring or harmonious--the voices of friends, calling, warning, encouraging--of preachers preaching--of people in the street below, complaining, and asking our pity! what long processions of human beings are passing before us! what trains of thought go sweeping through our brains! man seems a strange and ill-kept record of many and bewildering experiences. looking at oneself--not as oneself, but as an abstract human being--one is lost in wonder at the vast complexities which have been brought to bear upon it; lost in wonder, and in disappointment perhaps, at the discordant result of so great a harmony. only we know that the whole diapason is beyond our grasp: one man cannot hear the note of the grasshoppers, another is deaf when the cannon sounds. waiting among these many echoes and mysteries of every kind, and light and darkness, and life and death, we seize a note or two of the great symphony, and try to sing; and because these notes happen to jar, we think all is discordant hopelessness. then come pressing onward in the crowd of life, voices with some of the notes that are wanting to our own part--voices tuned to the same key as our own, or to an accordant one; making harmony for us as they pass us by. perhaps this is in life the happiest of all experience, and to few of us there exists any more complete ideal. and so now and then in our lives, when we learn to love a sweet and noble character, we all feel happier and better for the goodness and charity which is not ours, and yet which seems to belong to us while we are near it. just as some people and states of mind affect us uncomfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a truthful person, generous-minded with a generous nature; life seems less disappointing and self-seeking when we think of the just and sweet and unselfish spirits, moving untroubled among dinning and distracting influences. these are our friends in the best and noblest sense. we are the happier for their existence,--it is so much gain to us. they may have lived at some distant time, we may never have met face to face, or we may have known them and been blessed by their love; but their light shines from afar, their life is for us and with us in its generous example; their song is for our ears, and we hear it and love it still, though the singer may be lying dead. iii. a little book, written by one of jane austen's nephews, tells with a touching directness and simplicity the story of this good and gifted woman, whose name has long been a household word among us, but of whose history nothing was known until this little volume appeared. it is but the story of a country lady, of quiet days following quiet days of seasons in their course of common events; and yet the history is deeply interesting to those who loved the writer of whom it is written; and as we turn from the story of jane austen's life to her books again, we feel more than ever that she, too, was one of those true friends who belong to us inalienably--simple, wise, contented, living in others, one of those whom we seem to have a right to love. such people belong to all humankind by the very right of their wide and generous sympathies, of their gentle wisdom and loveableness. jane austen's life, as it is told by mr. austen legh, is very touching, sweet, and peaceful. it is a country landscape, where the cattle are grazing, the boughs of the great elm-tree rocking in the wind: sometimes, as we read, they come falling with a crash into the sweep; birds are flying about the old house, homely in its simple rule. the rafters cross the whitewashed ceilings, the beams project into the room below. we can see it all: the parlour with the horsehair sofa, the scant, quaint furniture, the old-fashioned garden outside, with its flowers and vegetables combined, and along the south side of the garden the green terrace sloping away. there is a pretty description of the sisters' devotion to one another (when cassandra went to school little jane accompanied her, the sisters could not be parted), of the family party, of the old place, 'where there are hedgerows winding, with green shady footpaths within the copse; where the earliest primroses and hyacinths are found.' there is the wood-walk, with its rustic seats, leading to the meadows; the church-walk leading to the church, 'which is far from the hum of the village, and within sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the grey manor-house through its circling screen of sycamores. sweet violets, both purple and white, grow in abundance beneath its south wall. large elms protrude their rough branches, old hawthorns shed their blossoms over the graves, and the hollow yew-tree must be at least coëval with the church.' one may read the account of catherine morland's home with new interest, from the hint which is given of its likeness to the old house at steventon, where dwelt the unknown friend whose voice we seem to hear at last, and whose face we seem to recognise, her bright eyes and brown curly hair, her quick and graceful figure. one can picture the children who are playing at the door of the old parsonage, and calling for aunt jane. one can imagine her pretty ways with them, her sympathy for the active, their games and imaginations. there is cassandra. she is older than her sister, more critical, more beautiful, more reserved. there is the mother of the family, with her keen wit and clear mind; the handsome father--'the handsome proctor,' as he was called; the five brothers, driving up the lane. tranquil summer passes by, the winter days go by; the young lady still sits writing at the old mahogany desk, and smiling, perhaps, at her own fancies, and hiding them away with her papers at the sound of coming steps. now, the modest papers, printed and reprinted, lie in every hand, the fancies disport themselves at their will in the wisest brains and the most foolish. it must have been at steventon--jane austen's earliest home--that mr. collins first made his appearance (lady catherine not objecting, as we know, to his occasional absence on a sunday, provided another clergyman was engaged to do the duty of the day), and here, conversing with miss jane, that he must have made many of his profoundest observations upon human nature; remarking, among other things, that resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation, and propounding his celebrated theory about the usual practice of elegant females. it must have been here, too, that poor mrs. bennet declared, with some justice, that once estates are entailed, one can never tell how they will go; here, too, that mrs. allen's sprigged muslin and john thorpe's rodomontades were woven; that his gig was built, 'curricle-hung lamps, seat, trunk, sword-case, splashboard, silver moulding, all, you see, complete. the ironwork as good as new, or better. he asked fifty guineas.... i closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was mine.' 'and i am sure,' said catherine, 'i know so little of such things, that i cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear.' 'neither the one nor the other,' says john thorpe. mrs. palmer was also born at steventon--that good-humoured lady in 'sense and sensibility,' who thinks it so ridiculous that her husband never hears her when she speaks to him. we are told that marianne and ellinor have been supposed to represent cassandra and jane austen; but mr. austen legh says that he can trace no resemblance. jane austen is not twenty when this book is written, and only twenty-one when 'pride and prejudice' is first devised. cousins presently come on the scene, and amongst them the romantic figure of a young, widowed comtesse de feuillade, flying from the revolution to her uncle's home. she is described as a clever and accomplished woman, interested in her young cousins, teaching them french (both jane and cassandra knew french), helping in their various schemes, in their theatricals in the barn. she eventually marries her cousin, henry austen. the simple family annals are not without their romance; but there is a cruel one for poor cassandra, whose lover dies abroad, and his death saddens the whole family-party. jane, too, 'receives the addresses' (do such things as addresses exist nowadays?) 'of a gentleman possessed of good character and fortune, and of everything, in short, except the subtle power of touching her heart.' one cannot help wondering whether this was a henry crawford or an elton or a mr. elliot, or had jane already seen the person that even cassandra thought good enough for her sister? here, too, is another sorrowful story. the sisters' fate (there is a sad coincidence and similarity in it) was to be undivided; their life, their experience was the same. some one without a name takes leave of jane one day, promising to come back. he never comes back: long afterwards they hear of his death. the story seems even sadder than cassandra's in its silence and uncertainty, for silence and uncertainty are death in life to some people.... there is little trace of such a tragedy in jane austen's books--not one morbid word is to be found, not one vain regret. hers was not a nature to fall crushed by the overthrow of one phase of her manifold life. she seems to have had a natural genius for life, if i may so speak; too vivid and genuinely unselfish to fail her in her need. she could gather every flower, every brightness along her road. good spirit, content, all the interests of a happy and observant nature were hers. her gentle humour and wit and interest cannot have failed. it is impossible to calculate the difference of the grasp by which one or another human being realises existence and the things relating to it, nor how much more vivid life seems to some than to others. jane austen, while her existence lasted, realised it, and made the best use of the gifts that were hers. yet, when her life was ending, then it was given to her to understand the change that was at hand; as willingly as she had lived, she died. some people seem scarcely to rise up to their own work, to their own ideal. jane austen's life, as it is told by her nephew, is beyond her work, which only contained one phase of that sweet and wise nature--the creative, observant, outward phase. for her home, for her sister, for her friends, she kept the depth and tenderness of her bright and gentle sympathy. she is described as busy with her neat and clever fingers sewing for the poor, working fanciful keepsakes for her friends. there is the cup and ball that she never failed to catch; the spillikens lie in an even ring where she had thrown them; there are her letters, straightly and neatly folded, and fitting smoothly in their creases. there is something sweet, orderly, and consistent in her character and all her tastes--in her fondness for crabbe and cowper, in her little joke that she ought to be a mrs. crabbe. she sings of an evening old ballads to old-fashioned tunes with a low sweet voice. further on we have a glimpse of jane and her sister in their mobcaps, young still, but dressed soberly beyond their years. one can imagine 'aunt jane,' with her brother's children round her knee, telling her delightful stories or listening to theirs, with never-failing sympathy. one can fancy cassandra, who does not like desultory novels, more prudent and more reserved, and somewhat less of a playfellow, looking down upon the group with elder sister's eyes. here is an extract from a letter written at steventon in :-- 'i have two messages: let me get rid of them, and then my paper will be my own. mary fully intended writing by mr. charles's frank, and only happened entirely to forget it, but will write soon; and my father wishes edward to send him a memorandum of the price of hops. '_sunday evening._ 'we have had a dreadful storm of wind in the forepart of the day, which has done a great deal of mischief among our trees. i was sitting alone in the drawing-room when an odd kind of crash startled me. in a moment afterwards it was repeated. i then went to the window. i reached it just in time to see the last of our two highly valued elms descend into the sweep!!! 'the other, which had fallen, i suppose, in the first crash, and which was nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sank among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, breaking off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. this is not all: the maple bearing the weathercock was broken in two, and what i regret more than all the rest is, that all the three elms that grew in hall's meadow, and gave such ornament to it, are gone.' a certain mrs. stent comes into one of these letters 'ejaculating some wonder about the cocks and hens.' mrs. stent seems to have tried their patience, and will be known henceforward as having bored jane austen. they leave steventon when jane is about twenty-five years of age and go to bath, from whence a couple of pleasant letters are given us. jane is writing to her sister. she has visited miss a., who, like all other young ladies, is considerably genteeler than her parents. she is heartily glad that cassandra speaks so comfortably of her health and looks: could travelling fifty miles produce such an immediate change? 'you were looking poorly when you were here, and everybody seemed sensible of it.' is there any charm in a hack postchaise? but if there were, mrs. craven's carriage might have undone it all. then mrs. stent appears again. 'poor mrs. stent, it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be mrs. stents ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody.' elsewhere she writes, upon mrs. ----'s mentioning that she had sent the 'rejected addresses' to mr. h., 'i began talking to her a little about them, and expressed my hope of their having amused her. her answer was, "oh dear, yes, very much; very droll indeed; the opening of the house and the striking up of the fiddles!" what she meant, poor woman, who shall say?' but there is no malice in jane austen. hers is the charity of all clear minds, it is only the muddled who are intolerant. all who love emma and mr. knightly must remember the touching little scene in which he reproves her for her thoughtless impatience of poor miss bates's volubility. 'you, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits and in the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her.... this is not pleasant to you, emma, and it is very far from pleasant to me, but i must, i will, i will tell you truths while i am satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do me now.' 'while they talked they were advancing towards the carriage: it was ready, and before she could speak again he had handed her in. he had misinterpreted the feeling which kept her face averted and her tongue motionless.' mr. knightly's little sermon, in its old-fashioned english, is as applicable now as it was when it was spoken. we know that he was an especial favourite with jane austen. iv. mr. austen died at bath, and his family removed to southampton. in , mrs. austen, her daughters, and her niece, settled finally at chawton, a house belonging to jane's brother, mr. knight (he was adopted by an uncle, whose name he took), and from chawton all her literary work was given to the world. 'sense and sensibility,' 'pride and prejudice,' were already written; but in the next five years, from thirty-five to forty, she set to work seriously, and wrote 'mansfield park,' 'emma,' and 'persuasion.' any one who has written a book will know what an amount of labour this represents.... one can picture to oneself the little family scene which jane describes to cassandra. 'pride and prejudice' just come down in a parcel from town; the unsuspicious miss b. to dinner; and jane and her mother setting to in the evening and reading aloud half the first volume of a new novel sent down by the brother. unsuspicious miss b. is delighted. jane complains of her mother's too rapid way of getting on; 'though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. upon the whole, however,' she says, 'i am quite vain enough and well-satisfied enough.' this is her own criticism of 'pride and prejudice':--'the work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling. it wants shade. it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story--an essay on writing, a critique on walter scott or the "history of bonaparte."' and so jane austen lives quietly working at her labour of love, interested in her 'own darling children's' success; 'the light of the home,' one of the real living children says afterwards, speaking in the days when she was no longer there. she goes to london once or twice. once she lives for some months in hans place, nursing a brother through an illness. here it was that she received some little compliments and messages from the prince regent, to whom she dedicated 'emma.' he thanks her and acknowledges the handsome volumes, and she laughs and tells her publisher that at all events his share of the offering is appreciated, whatever hers may be! we are also favoured with some valuable suggestions from mr. clarke, the royal librarian, respecting a very remarkable clergyman. he is anxious that miss austen should delineate one who 'should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, something like beattie's minstrel, entirely engaged in literature, and no man's enemy but his own.' failing to impress this character upon the authoress, he makes a fresh suggestion, and proposes that she should write a romance illustrative of the august house of coburg. 'it would be interesting,' he says, 'and very properly dedicated to prince leopold.' to which the authoress replies: 'i could no more write a romance than an epic poem. i could not seriously sit down to write a romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, i am sure i should be hung before the first chapter.' there is a delightful collection of friends' suggestions which she has put together, but which is too long to be quoted here. she calls it, 'plan of a novel, as suggested by various friends.' all this time, while her fame is slowly growing, life passes in the same way as in the old cottage at chawton. aunt jane, with her young face and her mob-cap, makes play-houses for the children, helps them to dress up, invents imaginary conversations for them, supposing that they are all grown up, the day after a ball. one can imagine how delightful a game that must have seemed to the little girls. she built her nest, did this good woman, happily weaving it out of shreds, and ends, and scraps of daily duty, patiently put together; and it was from this nest that she sang the song, bright and brilliant, with quaint thrills and unexpected cadences, that reaches us even here through near a century. the lesson her life seems to teach us is this: don't let us despise our nests--life is as much made of minutes as of years; let us complete the daily duties; let us patiently gather the twigs and the little scraps of moss, of dried grass together, and see the result!--a whole, completed and coherent, beautiful even without the song. we come too soon to the story of her death. and yet did it come too soon? a sweet life is not the sweeter for being long. jane austen lived years enough to fulfil her mission. she lived long enough to write six books that were masterpieces in their way--to make a world the happier for her industry. one cannot read the story of her latter days, of her patience, her sweetness, and gratitude, without emotion. there is family trouble, we are not told of what nature. she falls ill. her nieces find her in her dressing-gown, like an invalid, in an arm-chair in her bedroom; but she gets up and greets them, and, pointing to seats which had been arranged for them by the fire, says: 'there is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, caroline.' but she is too weak to talk, and cassandra takes them away. at last they persuade her to go to winchester, to a well-known doctor there. 'it distressed me,' she says, in one of her last, dying letters, 'to see uncle henry and william knight, who kindly attended us, riding in the rain almost the whole way. we expect a visit from them to-morrow, and hope they will stay the night; and on thursday, which is a confirmation and a holiday, we hope to get charles out to breakfast. we have had but one visit from _him_, poor fellow, as he is in the sick room.... god bless you, dear e.; if ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as i have been....' but nursing does not cure her, nor can the doctor save her to them all, and she sinks from day to day. to the end she is full of concern for others. 'as for my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse has not been made ill by her exertions,' she writes. 'as to what i owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, i can only cry over it, and pray god to bless them more and more.' one can hardly read this last sentence with dry eyes. it is her parting blessing and farewell to those she had blessed all her life by her presence and her love--that love which is beyond death; and of which the benediction remains, not only spoken in words, but by the ever-present signs and the tokens of those lifetimes which do not end for us as long as we ourselves exist. they asked her when she was near her end if there was anything she wanted. 'nothing but death,' she said. those were her last words. she died on the th of july, , and was buried in winchester cathedral, where she lies not unremembered. london: printed by spottiswoode and co., new-street square and parliament street transcriber's note two instances of bryon for _byron_ have been corrected. the following additional changes have been made: a. i. r. (in dedication) a. _t._ r. her sad and dimning life her sad and _dimming_ life it was to her father hat it was to her father _that_ who invited mrs. barbauld to who invited _mr._ barbauld become their minister become their minister he was interrupted by her he was interrupted by _his_ companion companion mrs. opie's description of her mrs. opie's description of her arrival reads a comment upon arrival reads _like_ a comment history. upon history. miss thackeray's works. a new and uniform edition; each volume illustrated with a vignette title-page drawn by arthur hughes, and engraved by j. cooper. large crown vo. _s._ . old kensington. . the village on the cliff. . five old friends and a young prince. . to esther; and other sketches. . bluebeard's keys; and other stories. . the story of elizabeth; two hours; from an island. . toilers and spinsters; and other essays. . miss angel; fulham lawn. . miss williamson's divagations. new and uniform edition of mrs. gaskell's novels and tales. in seven volumes, each containing four illustrations. _price s. d. each, bound in cloth; 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late lecturer on anatomy at the government school of design, south kensington; professor of surgery in university college. illustrated by original drawings on wood by j. s. cuthbert, engraved by george nicholls & co. second edition. imp. vo. _s._ _d._ london: smith, elder, & co., waterloo place. characteristics of women moral, poetical, and historical by mrs. jameson _from the last london edition_ [illustration] boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company the riverside press, cambridge preface to the new edition. in preparing for the press a new edition of this little work, the author has endeavored to render it more worthy of the approbation and kindly feeling with which it has been received; she cannot better express her sense of both than by justifying, as far as it is in her power, the cordial and flattering tone of all the public criticisms. it is to the great name of shakspeare, that bond of sympathy among all who speak his language, and to the subject of the work, not to its own merits, that she attributes the success it has met with,--success the more delightful, because, in truth, it was from the very first, so entirely unlooked for, as to be a matter of surprise as well as of pleasure and gratitude. in this edition there are many corrections, and some additions which the author hopes may be deemed improvements. she has been induced to insert several quotations at length, which were formerly only referred to, from observing that however familiar they may be to the mind of the reader, they are always recognized with pleasure--like dear domestic faces; and if the memory fail at the moment to recall the lines or the sentiment to which the attention is directly required, few like to interrupt the course of thought, or undertake a journey from the sofa or garden-seat to the library, to hunt out the volume, the play, the passage, for themselves. when the first edition was sent to press, the author contemplated writing the life of mrs. siddons, with a reference to her art; and deferred the complete development of the character of lady macbeth, till she should be able to illustrate it by the impersonation and commentary of that grand and gifted actress; but the task having fallen into other hands, the analysis of the character has been almost entirely rewritten, as at first conceived, or rather restored to its original form. this little work, as it now stands, forms only part of a plan which the author hopes, if life be granted her, to accomplish;--at all events, life, while it is spared, shall be devoted to its fulfilment. contents. page introduction characters of intellect. portia isabella beatrice rosalind characters of passion and imagination. juliet helena perdita viola ophelia miranda characters of the affections. hermione desdemona imogen cordelia historical characters. cleopatra octavia volumnia constance of bretagne elinor of guienne blanche of castile margaret of anjou katharine of arragon lady macbeth characteristics of women. introduction. _scene--a library._ alda. you will not listen to me? medon. i do, with all the deference which befits a gentleman when a lady holds forth on the virtues of her own sex. he is a parricide of his mother's name, and with an impious hand murders her fame, that wrongs the praise of women; that dares write libels on saints, or with foul ink requite the milk they lent us. yours was the nobler birth, for you from man were made--man but of earth-- the son of dust! alda. what's this? medon. "only a rhyme i learned from one i talked withal;" 'tis a quotation from some old poet that has fixed itself in my memory--from randolph, i think. alda. 'tis very justly thought, and very politely quoted, and my best courtesy is due to him and to you:--but now will you listen to me? medon. with most profound humility. alda. nay, then! i have done, unless you will lay aside these mock airs of gallantry, and listen to me for a moment! is it fair to bring a second-hand accusation against me, and not attend to my defence? medon. well, i will be serious. alda. do so, and let us talk like reasonable beings. medon. then tell me, (as a reasonable woman you will not be affronted with the question,) do you really expect that any one will read this little book of yours? alda. i might answer, that it has been a great source of amusement and interest to me for several months, and that so far i am content: but no one writes a book without a hope of finding readers, and i shall find a few. accident first made me an authoress; and not now, nor ever, have i written to flatter any prevailing fashion of the day for the sake of profit, though this is done, i know, by many who have less excuse for thus coining their brains. this little book was undertaken without a thought of fame or money: out of the fulness of my own heart and soul have i written it. in the pleasure it has given me, in the new and various views of human nature it has opened to me, in the beautiful and soothing images it has placed before me, in the exercise and improvement of my own faculties, i have already been repaid: if praise or profit come beside, they come as a surplus. i should be gratified and grateful, but i have not sought for them, nor worked for them. do you believe this? medon. i do: in this i cannot suspect you of affectation, for the profession of disinterestedness is uncalled for, and the contrary would be too far countenanced by the custom of the day to be matter of reserve or reproach. but how could you (saving the reverence due to a lady-authoress, and speaking as one reasonable being to another) choose such a threadbare subject? alda. what do you mean? medon. i presume you have written a book to maintain the superiority of your sex over ours; for so i judge by the names at the heads of some of your chapters; women fit indeed to inlay heaven with stars, but, pardon me, very unlike those who at present walk upon this earth. alda. very unlike the fine ladies of your acquaintance, i grant you; but as to maintaining the superiority, or speculating on the rights of women--nonsense! why should you suspect me of such folly?--it is quite out of date. why should there be competition or comparison? medon. both are ill-judged and odious; but did you ever meet with a woman of the world, who did not abuse most heartily the whole race of men? alda. did you ever talk with a man of the world, who did not speak with levity or contempt of the whole human race of women? medon. perhaps i might answer like voltaire--"hélas ils pourraient bien avoir raison tous deux." but do you thence infer that both are good for nothing? alda. thence i infer that the men of the world and the women of the world are neither of them--good for much. medon. and you have written a book to make them better? alda. heaven forbid! else i were only fit for the next lunatic asylum. vanity run mad never conceived such an impossible idea. medon. then, in a few words, what is the subject, and what the object, of your book? alda. i have endeavoured to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results. my life has been spent in observing and thinking; i have had, as you well know, more opportunities for the first, more leisure for the last, than have fallen to the lot of most people. what i have seen, felt, thought, suffered, has led me to form certain opinions. it appears to me that the condition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself, and injurious to them,--that the education of women, as at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles, and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and error in both sexes; but i do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality, and treatises on education. i have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences. medon. and why have you not chosen your examples from real life? you might easily have done so. you have not been a mere spectator, or a mere actor, but a lounger behind the scenes of existence--have even assisted in preparing the puppets for the stage: you might have given us an epitome of your experience, instead of dreaming over shakspeare. alda. i might so, if i had chosen to become a female satirist, which i will never be. medon. you would, at least, stand a better chance of being read. alda. i am not sure of that. the vile taste for satire and personal gossip will not be eradicated, i suppose, while the elements of curiosity and malice remain in human nature; but as a fashion of literature, i think it is passing away;--at all events it is not my _forte_. long experience of what is called "the world," of the folly, duplicity, shallowness, selfishness, which meet us at every turn, too soon unsettles our youthful creed. if it only led to the knowledge of good and evil, it were well; if it only taught us to despise the illusions and retire from the pleasures of the world, it would be better. but it destroys our belief--it dims our perception of all abstract truth, virtue, and happiness; it turns life into a jest, and a very dull one too. it makes us indifferent to beauty, and incredulous of goodness; it teaches us to consider _self_ as the centre on which all actions turn, and to which all motives are to be referred. medon. but this being so, we must either revolve with these earthly natures, and round the same centre, or seek a sphere for ourselves, and dwell apart. alda. i trust it is not necessary to do either. while we are yet young, and the passions, powers, and feelings, in their full activity, create to us a world within, we cannot look fairly on the world without:--all things then are good. when first we throw ourselves forth, and meet burs and briars on every side, which stick in our very hearts;--and fair tempting fruits which turn to bitter ashes in the taste, then we exclaim with impatience, all things are evil. but at length comes the calm hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. thus it is with me. i can smile,--nay, i can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. but these very things, when i encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if i had the power, to hold them up to derision. medon. unless, by doing so, you might correct them. alda. correct them! show me that one human being who has been made essentially better by satire! o no, no! there is something in human nature which hardens itself against the lash--something in satire which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities. that avowal in pope-- i must be proud to see men not afraid of god, afraid of me! --has ever filled me with terror and pity-- medon. from its truth perhaps? alda. from its arrogance,--for the truth is, that a vice never corrected a vice. pope might be proud of the terror he inspired in those who feared no god in whom vanity was stronger than conscience: but that terror made no individual man better; and while he indulged his own besetting sin, he administered to the malignity of others. your professed satirists always send me to think upon the opposite sentiment in shakspeare, on "the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." i remember once hearing a poem of barry cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined away with repentance. so should those do, who having made themselves mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineaments--so should _they_ grieve and pine away, self-punished. medon. 'tis an old allegory, and a sad one--and but too much to the purpose. alda. i abhor the spirit of ridicule--i dread it and i despise it. i abhor it because it is in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of christianity; i fear it, because we find that in every state of society in which it has prevailed as a fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of that society; and i despise it, because it is the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. the spirit of satire reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me twice accursed;--evil in those who indulge it--evil to those who are the objects of it. medon. "peut-être fallait-il que la punition des imprudens et des faibles fut confiée à la malignité, car la pure vertu n'eût jamais été assez cruelle." alda. that is a woman's sentiment. medon. true--it _was_; and i have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. but to what do you attribute the number of satirical women we meet in society? alda. not to our nature; but to a state of society in which the levelling spirit of _persiflage_ has been long a fashion; to the perverse education which fosters it; to affections disappointed or unemployed, which embitter the temper; to faculties misdirected or wasted, which oppress and irritate the mind; to an utter ignorance of ourselves, and the common lot of humanity, combined with quick and refined perceptions and much superficial cultivation; to frivolous habits, which make serious thought a burden, and serious feeling a bane if suppressed, if betrayed, a ridicule. women, generally speaking, are by nature too much subjected to suffering in many forms--have too much of fancy and sensibility, and too much of that faculty which some philosophers call _veneration_, to be naturally satirical. i have known but one woman eminently gifted in mind and person, who is also distinguished for powers of satire as bold as merciless; and she is such a compound of all that nature can give of good, and all that society can teach of evil-- medon. that she reminds us of the dragon of old, which was generated between the sunbeams from heaven and the slime of earth. alda. no such thing. rather of the powerful and beautiful fairy melusina, who had every talent and every charm under heaven but once in so many hours was fated to become a serpent. no, i return to my first position. it is not by exposing folly and scorning fools, that we make other people wiser, or ourselves happier. but to soften the heart by images and examples of the kindly and generous affections--to show how the human soul is disciplined and perfected by suffering--to prove how much of possible good may exist in things evil and perverted--how much hope there is for those who despair--how much comfort for those whom a heartless world has taught to contemn both others and themselves, and so put barriers to the hard, cold, selfish, mocking, and levelling spirit of the day--o would i could do this! medon. on the same principle, i suppose, that they have changed the treatment of lunatics; and whereas they used to condemn poor distempered wretches to straw and darkness, stripes and a strait waistcoat, they now send them to sunshine and green fields, to wander in gardens among birds and flowers, and soothe them with soft music and kind flattering speech. alda. you laugh at me! perhaps i deserve it. medon. no, in truth; i am a little amused, but most honestly attentive: and perhaps wish i could think more like you. but to proceed: i allow that with this view of the case, you could not well have chosen your illustrations from real life; but why not from history? alda. as far as history could guide me, i have taken her with me in one or two recent publications, which all tend to the same object. nor have i here lost sight of her; but i have entered on a land where she alone is not to be trusted, and may make a pleasant companion but a most fallacious guide. to drop metaphor: history informs us that such things have been done or have occurred; but when we come to inquire into motives and characters, it is the most false and partial and unsatisfactory authority we can refer to. women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. those characters best fitted to my purpose are precisely those of which history never heard, or disdains to speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they _might_ be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part. medon. but instance--instance! alda. examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. do you remember that duchesse de longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?--the heroine of the fronde?--think of that woman--bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!--who made men rebels with a smile;--or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous, apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was _too_ much! and then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servants--preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that were little to a woman of her temper,) but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. now if shakspeare had drawn the character of the duchesse de longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:--for the same being, with the same faculties, and passions, and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy. medon. but these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt, or sick with belief, and are the proper subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher. alda. i cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help _me_ out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented i found solved in the pages of shakspeare. there the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. all i sought, i found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves. medon. but all will not judge alike. alda. no; and herein lies a part of their wonderful truth. we hear shakspeare's men and women discussed, praised and dispraised, liked, disliked, as real human beings; and in forming our opinions of them, we are influenced by our own characters, habits of thought, prejudices, feelings, impulses, just as we are influenced with regard to our acquaintances and associates. medon. but we are then as likely to misconceive and misjudge them. alda. yes, if we had only the same imperfect means of studying them. but we can do with them what we cannot do with real people: we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of self-love, all disguises of manner. we can take leisure to examine, to analyze, to correct our own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various passions--we can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offence to others, without pain to ourselves. medon. in this respect they may be compared to those exquisite anatomical preparations of wax, which those who could not without disgust and horror dissect a real specimen, may study, and learn the mysteries of our frame, and all the internal workings of the wondrous machine of life. alda. and it is the safer and the better way--for us at least. but look--that brilliant rain-drop trembling there in the sunshine suggests to me another illustration. passion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature, and analyze its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens,--blinding, burning, consuming where it falls. medon. your illustration is the most poetical, i allow; but not the most just. but tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large?--is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? you know the prevalent idea is, that shakspeare's women are inferior to his men. this assertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted. alda. professor richardson?-- medon. he is as dry as a stick, and his refutation not successful even as a piece of logic. then it is not sufficient for critics to assert this inferiority and want of variety: they first assume the fallacy, then argue upon it. cibber accounts for it from the circumstance that all the female parts in shakspeare's time were acted by boys--there were no women on the stage; and mackenzie, who ought to have known better, says that he was not so happy in his delineations of love and tenderness, as of the other passions; because, forsooth, the majesty of his genius could not stoop to the refinements of delicacy;--preposterous! alda. stay! before we waste epithets of indignation, let us consider. if these people mean that shakspeare's women are inferior in power to his men, i grant it at once; for in shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society--they are not equal in prominence or in power--they are subordinate throughout. richardson remarks, that "if situation influences the mind, and if uniformity of conduct be frequently occasioned by uniformity of condition, there _must_ be a greater diversity of male than of female characters,"--which is true; add to this our limited sphere of action, consequently of experience,--the habits of self-control rendering the outward distinctions of character and passion less striking and less strong--all this we see in shakspeare as in nature: for instance, juliet is the most impassioned of the female characters, but what are _her_ passions compared to those which shake the soul of othello? "even as the dew-drop on the myrtle-leaf to the vex'd sea." look at constance, frantic for the loss of her son--then look at lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and mountains tremble to their bases! medon. true; and lady macbeth, with all her soaring ambition, her vigor of intellect, her subtlety, her courage, and her cruelty--what is she, compared to richard iii.? alda. i will tell you what she is--she is a woman. place lady macbeth in comparison with richard iii., and you see at once the essential distinction between masculine and feminine ambition--though both in extreme, and overleaping all restraints of conscience or mercy. richard says of himself, that he has "neither pity, love, nor fear:" lady macbeth is susceptible of all three. you smile! but that remains to be proved. the reason that shakspeare's wicked women have such a singular hold upon our fancy, is from the consistent preservation of the feminine character, which renders them more terrible, because more credible and intelligible--not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history-- medon. in history?--this is new! alda. yes! i repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and i may add, reasonable incredulity. i have lately seen one of correggio's finest pictures, in which the three furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau--but _such_ countenances!--such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!--and the effect is beyond conception appalling. leonardo da vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his medusa-- where it is less the horror than the grace which turns the gazer's spirit into stone-- * * * * 'tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain, that humanize and harmonize the strain. and shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in lady macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in gertrude, lady anne, or cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust. medon. do you remember that some of the commentators of shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between richard and lady anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel on your sex? alda. they might have spared themselves the trouble. lady anne is just one of those women whom we see walking in crowds through the drawing-rooms of the world--the puppets of habit, the fools of fortune, without any particular inclination for vice, or any steady principle of virtue; whose actions are inspired by vanity, not affection, and regulated by opinion, not by conscience: who are good while there is no temptation to be otherwise, and ready victims of the first soliciting to evil. in the case of lady anne, we are startled by the situation: not three months a widow, and following to the sepulchre the remains of a husband and a father, she is met and wooed and won by the very man who murdered them. in such a case it required perhaps either richard or the arch-fiend himself to tempt her successfully; but in a less critical moment, a far less subtle and audacious seducer would have sufficed. cressida is another modification of vanity, weakness, and falsehood, drawn in stronger colors. the world contains many lady annes and cressidas, polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. when we read in history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and ogresses, we can safely, like the pharisee in scripture, hug ourselves in our secure virtue, and thank god that we are not as others are--but the wicked women in shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource--they frighten us into reflection--they make us believe and tremble. on the other hand, his amiable women are touched with such exquisite simplicity--they have so little external pretensions--and are so unlike the usual heroines of tragedy and romance, that they delight us more "than all the nonsense of the beau-ideal!" we are flattered by the perception of our own nature in the midst of so many charms and virtues: not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and a happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other _may_ be. they are not stuck up, like the cardinal virtues, all in a row, for us to admire and wonder at--they are not mere poetical abstractions--nor (as they have been termed) mere abstractions of the affections,-- but common clay ta'en from the common earth. moulded by god, and tempered by the tears of angels, to the perfect form of--_woman_. medon. beautiful lines!--where are they? alda. i quote from memory, and i am afraid inaccurately, from a poem of alfred tennyson's. medon. well, between argument, and sentiment, and logic, and poetry, you are making out a very plausible case. i think with you that, in the instances you have mentioned, (as lady macbeth and richard, juliet, and othello, and others,) the want of comparative power is only an additional excellence; but to go to an opposite extreme of delineation, we must allow that there is not one of shakspeare's women that, as a dramatic character, can be compared to falstaff. alda. no; because any thing like falstaff in the form of woman--any such compound of wit, sensuality, and selfishness, unchecked by the moral sentiments and the affections, and touched with the same vigorous painting, would be a gross and monstrous caricature. if it could exist in nature, we might find it in shakspeare; but a moment's reflection shows us that it would be essentially an impossible combination of faculties in a female. medon. it strikes me, however, that his humorous women are feebly drawn, in comparison with some of the female wits of other writers. alda. because his women of wit and humor are not introduced for the sole purpose of saying brilliant things, and displaying the wit of the author; they are, as i will show you, real, natural women, in whom _wit_ is only a particular and occasional modification of intellect. they are all, in the first place, affectionate, thinking beings, and moral agents; and _then_ witty, as if by accident, or as the duchesse de chaulnes said of herself, "par la grâce de dieu." as to humor, it is carried as far as possible in mrs. quickly; in the termagant catherine; in maria, in "twelfth night;" in juliet's nurse; in mrs. ford and mrs. page. what can exceed in humorous naïveté, mrs. quickly's upbraiding falstaff, and her concluding appeal--"didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?" is it not exquisite--irresistible? mrs. ford and mrs. page are both "merry wives," but how perfectly discriminated! mrs. ford has the most good nature--mrs. page is the cleverer of the two, and has more sharpness in her tongue, more mischief in her mirth. in all these instances i allow that the humor is more or less vulgar; but a humorous woman, whether in high or low life has always a tinge of vulgarity. medon. i should like to see that word _vulgar_ properly defined, and its meaning limited--at present it is the most arbitrary word in the language. alda. yes, like the word romantic, it is a convenient "exploding word," and in its general application signifies nothing more than "see how much finer i am than other people!"[ ] but in literature and character i shall adhere to the definition of madame de staël, who uses the word _vulgar_ as the reverse of _poetical_. vulgarity (as i wish to apply the word) is the _negative_ in all things. in literature, it is the total absence of elevation and depth in the ideas, and of elegance and delicacy in the expression of them. in character, it is the absence of truth, sensibility, and reflection. the vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.--if you would see how shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in romeo and juliet with mrs. quickly. on the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that shakspeare's female characters are not, in truth, in variety, in power, equal to his men, i think i shall prove the contrary. medon. i observe that you have divided your illustrations into classes; but shades of character so melt into each other, and the various faculties and powers are so blended and balanced, that all classification must be arbitrary. i am at a loss to conceive where you have drawn the line; here, at the head of your first chapter, i find "characters of intellect"--do you call portia intellectual, and hermione and constance not so? alda. i know that schlegel has said that it is impossible to arrange shakspeare's characters in classes: yet some classification was necessary for my purpose. i have therefore divided them into characters in which intellect and wit predominate; characters in which fancy and passion predominate; and characters in which the moral sentiments and affections predominate. the historical characters i have considered apart, as requiring a different mode of illustration. portia i regard as a perfect model of an intellectual woman, in whom wit is tempered by sensibility, and fancy regulated by strong reflection. it is objected to her, to beatrice, and others of shakspeare's women, that the display of intellect is tinged with a coarseness of manner belonging to the age in which he wrote. to remark that the conversation and letters of high-bred and virtuous women of that time were more bold and frank in expression than any part of the dialogue appropriated to beatrice and rosalind, may excuse it to our judgment, but does not reconcile it to our taste. much has been said, and more might be said on this subject--but i would rather not discuss it. it is a mere difference of manner which is to be regretted, but has nothing to do with the essence of the character. medon. i think you have done well in avoiding the topic altogether; but between ourselves, do you really think that the refinement of manner, the censorious, hypocritical, verbal scrupulosity, which is carried so far in this "picked age" of ours, is a true sign of superior refinement of taste, and purity of morals? is it not rather a whiting of the sepulchre? i will not even allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of french manners previous to the revolution--that "décence," which horace walpole so admired,[ ] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?--stay--i have not yet done--not to you, but _for_ you, i will add thus much;--our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things--to manners than to morals. you will hear people inveigh against the improprieties of shakspeare, with don juan, or one of those infernal french novels--i beg your pardon--lying on their toilet table. lady florence is shocked at the sallies of beatrice, and beatrice would certainly stand aghast to see lady florence dressed for almack's; so you see that in both cases the fashion makes the indecorum. let her ladyship new model her gowns! alda. well, well, leave lady florence--i would rather hear you defend shakspeare. medon. i think it is coleridge who so finely observes that shakspeare ever kept the high road of human life, whereon all travel, that he did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment; in him we have no moral highwaymen, and sentimental thieves and rat-catchers, and interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adulteresses--_à-la-mode germanorum_--no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment. he flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with with no just and generous principle. he can make us laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, yet still preserve our love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves. he has a lofty and a fearless trust in his own powers, and in the beauty and excellence of virtue; and with his eye fixed on the lode-star of truth, steers us triumphantly among shoals and quicksands, where with any other pilot we had been wrecked:--for instance, who but himself would have dared to bring into close contact two such characters as iago and desdemona? had the colors in which he has arrayed desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the overpowering blackness of _his_ character must have passed over the sun-bright purity of _hers_. for observe that iago's disbelief in the virtue of desdemona is not pretended, it is real. it arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. to the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. he rips her to pieces before us--he would have bedeviled an angel! yet such is the unrivalled, though passive delicacy of the delineation, that it can stand it unhurt, untouched! it is wonderful!--yet natural as it is wonderful! after all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of iago, judge as he does of the character and productions of others. alda. heaven bless me from such critics! yet if genius, youth, and innocence could not escape unslurred, can i hope to do so? i pity from my soul the persons you allude to--for to such minds there can exist few uncontaminated sources of pleasure either in nature or in art. medon. ay--"the perfumes of paradise were poison to the dives, and made them melancholy."[ ] you pity them, and they will sneer at you. but what have we here?--"characters of imagination--juliet--viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? are they to serve as examples or as warnings for the youth of this enlightened age? alda. as warnings, of course--what else? medon. against the dangers of romance?--but where are they? "vraiment," as b. constant says, "je ne vois pas qu'en fait d'enthousiasme, le feu soit à la maison." where are they--these disciples of poetry and romance, these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth, these unblown roses--all conscience and tenderness--whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves--where are they? alda. wandering in the elysian fields, i presume, with the romantic young gentlemen who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in their admiration of virtue, too violent in their hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth-- medon. very fair! but seriously, do you think it necessary to guard young people, in this selfish and calculating age, against an excess of sentiment and imagination? do you allow no distinction between the romance of exaggerated sentiment, and the romance of elevated thought? do _you_ bring cold water to quench the smouldering ashes of enthusiasm? methinks it is rather superfluous; and that another doctrine is needed to withstand the heartless system of expediency which is the favorite philosophy of the day. the warning you speak of may be gently hinted to the few who are in danger of being misled by an excess of the generous impulses of fancy and feeling; but need hardly, i think, be proclaimed by sound of trumpet amid the mocks of the world. no, no; there are young women in these days, but there is no such thing as youth--the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the fullblown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed. alda. blame then that _forcing_ system of education, the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world. the custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society, was bad enough; but not worse than a system of education which inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers, and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection--(in other words, of romance)--"frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore;" with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion--the same false honor which sends men out to fight duels--stands instead of the strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. hence the strange anomalies of artificial society--girls of sixteen who are models of manner miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the juliets and the imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world and put us to confusion with their doings. medon. or turn politicians to vary the excitement--how i hate political women! alda. why do you hate them? medon. because they are mischievous. alda. but why are they mischievous? medon. why!--why are they mischievous? nay, ask them, or ask the father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to further his designs in this world, than a woman run mad with politics. the number of political intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs and drawing-rooms are the _foyers_ of party-spirit, is another trait of resemblance between the state of society now, and that which existed at paris before the revolution. alda. and do you think, like some interesting young lady in miss edgeworth's tales, that "women have nothing to do with politics?" do you mean to say that women are not capable of comprehending the principles of legislation, or of feeling an interest in the government and welfare of their country, or of perceiving and sympathizing in the progress of great events?--that they cannot feel patriotism? believe me, when we do feel it, our patriotism, like our courage and our love, has a purer source than with you; for a man's patriotism has always some tinge of egotism, while a woman's patriotism is generally a sentiment, and of the noblest kind. medon. i agree in all this; and all this does not mitigate my horror of political women in general, who are, i repeat it, both mischievous and absurd. if you could but hear the reasoning in these feminine coteries!--but you never talk politics. alda. indeed i do, when i can get any one to listen to me; but i prefer listening. as for the evil you complain of, impute it to that imperfect education which at once cultivates and enslaves the intellect, and loads the memory, while it fetters the judgment. women, however well read in history, never generalize in politics; never argue on any broad or general principle; never reason from a consideration of past events, their causes and consequences. but they are always political through their affections, their prejudices, their personal _liaisons_, their hopes, their fears. medon. if it were no worse, i could stand it; for that is at least feminine. alda. but most mischievous. for hence it is that we make such blind partisans, such violent party women, and such wretched politicians. i never heard a woman _talk_ politics, as it is termed, that i could not discern at once the motive, the affection, the secret bias which swayed her opinions and inspired her arguments. if it appeared to the grecian sage so "difficult for a man not to love himself, nor the things that belong to him, but justice only?"--how much more for woman! medon. then you think that a better education, based on truer moral principles, would render women more reasonable politicians, or at least give them some right to meddle with politics? alda. it would cease in that case to be _meddling_, as you term it, for it would be legitimized. it is easy to sneer at political and mathematical ladies, and quote lord byron--but o leave those angry common-places to others!--they do not come well from you. do not force me to remind you, that women have achieved enough to silence them forever,[ ] and how often must that truism be repeated, that it is not a woman's attainments which make her amiable or unamiable, estimable or the contrary, but her qualities? a time is coming, perhaps, when the education of women will be considered, with a view to their future destination as the mothers and nurses of legislators and statesmen, and the cultivation of their powers of reflection and moral feelings supersede the exciting drudgery by which they are now crammed with knowledge and accomplishments. medon. well--till that blessed period arrives, i wish you would leave us the province of politics to ourselves. i see here you have treated of a very different class of beings, "_women in whom the affections and the moral sentiments predominate_." are there many such, think you, in the world? alda. yes, many such; the development of affection and sentiment is more quiet and unobtrusive than that of passion and intellect, and less observed; it is more common, too, therefore less remarked; but in women it generally gives the prevailing tone to the character, except where vanity has been made the ruling motive. medon. except! i admire your exception! you make in this case the rule the exception. look round the world. alda. you are not one of those with whom that common phrase "the world" signifies the circle, whatever and wherever that may be, which limits our individual experience--as a child considers the visible horizon as the bounds which shut in the mighty universe. believe me, it is a sorry, vulgar kind of wisdom, if it be wisdom--a shallow and confined philosophy, if it be philosophy--which resolves all human motives and impulses into egotism in one sex, and vanity in the other. such may be the way of _the world_, as it is called--the result of a very artificial and corrupt state of society, but such is not general nature, nor female nature. would you see the kindly, self-sacrificing affections developed under their most honest but least poetical guise--displayed without any mixture of vanity, and unchecked in the display by any fear of being thought vain?--you will see it, not among the prosperous, the high-born, the educated, "far, far removed from want, and grief, and fear," but among the poor, the miserable, the perverted--among those habitually exposed to all influences that harden and deprave. medon. i believe it--nay, i know it; but how should _you_ know it, or anything of the strange places of refuge which truth and nature have found in the two extremes of society? alda. it is no matter what i have seen or known; and for the two extremes of society, i leave them to the author of paul clifford, and that most exquisite painter of living manners, mrs. gore. st. giles's is no more _nature_ than st. james's. i wanted character in its essential truth, not mortified by particular customs, by fashion, by situation. i wished to illustrate the manner in which the affections would naturally display themselves in women--whether combined with high intellect, regulated by reflection, and elevated by imagination, or existing with perverted dispositions, or purified by the moral sentiments. i found all these in shakspeare; his delineations of women, in whom the virtuous and calm affections predominate, and triumph over shame, fear, pride, resentment, vanity, jealousy,--are particularly worthy of consideration, and perfect in their kind, because so quiet in their effect. medon. several critics have remarked in general terms on those beautiful pictures of female friendship, and of the generous affection of women for each other, which we find in shakspeare. other writers, especially dramatic writers, have found ample food for wit and satiric delineation in the littleness of feminine spite and rivalry, in the mean spirit of competition, the petty jealousy of superior charms, the mutual slander and mistrust, the transient leagues of folly or selfishness miscalled friendship--the result of an education which makes vanity the ruling principle, and of a false position in society. shakspeare, who looked upon women with the spirit of humanity, wisdom, and deep love, has done justice to their natural good tendencies and kindly sympathies. in the friendship of beatrice and hero, of rosalind and celia; in the description of the girlish attachment of helena and hermia, he has represented truth and generous affection rising superior to all the usual sources of female rivalry and jealousy; and with such force and simplicity, and obvious self-conviction, that he absolutely forces the same conviction on us. alda. add to these the generous feeling of viola for her rival olivia; of julia for her rival sylvia; of helena for diana; of the old countess for helena, in the same play; and even the affection of the wicked queen in hamlet for the gentle ophelia, which prove that shakspeare thought--(and when did he ever think other than the truth?)--that women have by nature "virtues that are merciful," and can be just, tender, and true to their sister women, whatever wits and worldlings, and satirists and fashionable poets, may say or sing of us to the contrary. there is another thing which he has most deeply felt and beautifully represented--the distinction between masculine and feminine _courage_. a man's courage is often a mere animal quality, and in its most elevated form a point of honor. but a woman's courage is always a virtue, because it is not required of us, it is not one of the means through which we seek admiration and applause; on the contrary, we are courageous through our affections and mental energies, not through our vanity or our strength. a woman's heroism is always the excess of sensibility. do you remember lady fanshawe putting on a sailor's jacket, and his "blue thrum cap," and standing at her husband's side, unknown to him during a sea-fight? there she stood, all bathed in tears, but fixed to that spot. her husband's exclamation when he turned and discovered her--"good god, that love should make such a change as this!" is applicable to all the acts of courage which we read or hear of in women. this is the courage of juliet, when, after summing up all the possible consequences of her own act, till she almost maddens herself with terror, she drinks the sleeping potion; and for that passive fortitude which is founded in piety and pure strength of affection, such as the heroism of lady russel and gertrude de wart, he has given us some of the noblest modifications of it in hermione, in cordelia, in imogen, in katherine of arragon. medon. and what do you call the courage of lady macbeth?-- my hands are of your color, but i shame to wear a heart so white. and again, a little water clears us of this deed, how easy is it then! if this is not mere masculine indifference to blood and death, mere firmness of nerve, what is it? alda. not _that_, at least, which apparently you deem it; you will find, if you have patience to read me to the end, that i have judged lady macbeth very differently. take these frightful passages with the context--take the whole situation, and you will see that it is no such thing. a friend of mine truly observed, that if macbeth had been a ruffian without any qualms of conscience, lady macbeth would have been the one to shrink and tremble; but that which quenched _him_ lent her fire. the absolute necessity for self-command, the strength of her reason, and her love for her husband, combine at this critical moment to conquer all fear but the fear of detection, leaving her the full possession of her faculties. recollect that the same woman who speaks with such horrible indifference of a little water clearing the blood-stain from her hand, sees in imagination that hand forever reeking, forever polluted: and when reason is no longer awake and paramount over the violated feelings of nature and womanhood, we behold her making unconscious efforts to wash out that "damned spot," and sighing, heart-broken, over that little hand which all the perfumes of arabia will never sweeten more. medon. i hope you have given her a place among the women in whom the tender affections and moral sentiments predominate. alda. you laugh; but, jesting apart, perhaps it would have been a more accurate classification than placing her among the historical characters. medon. apropos to the historical characters, i hope you have refuted that _insolent_ assumption, (shall i call it?) that shakspeare tampered inexcusably with the truth of history. he is the truest of all historians. his anachronisms always remind me of those in the fine old italian pictures; either they are insignificant, or, if properly considered, are really beauties; for instance, every one knows that correggio's st. jerome presenting his books to the virgin, involves half-a-dozen anachronisms,--to say nothing of that heavenly figure of the magdalen, in the same picture, kissing the feet of the infant saviour. some have ridiculed, some have excused this strange combination of inaccuracies but is it less one of the divinest pieces of sentiment and poetry that ever breathed and glowed from the canvas? you remember too the famous nativity by some neapolitan painter, who has placed mount vesuvius and the bay of naples in the background? in these and a hundred other instances, no one seems to feel that the apparent absurdity involves the highest truth, and that the sacred beings thus represented, if once allowed as objects of faith and worship, are eternal under every aspect, and independent of all time and all locality. so it is with shakspeare and his anachronisms. the learned scorn of johnson and some of his brotherhood of commentators, and the eloquent defence of schlegel, seem in this case superfluous. if he chose to make the delphic oracle and julio romano contemporary--what does it signify? he committed no anachronisms of character. he has not metamorphosed cleopatra into a turtle-dove, nor katherine of arragon into a sentimental heroine. he is true to the spirit and even to the _letter_ of history; where he deviates from the latter, the reason may be found in some higher beauty and more universal truth. alda. i have proved this, i think, by placing parallel with the dramatic character all the historic testimony i could collect relative to constance, cleopatra, katherine of arragon, &c. medon. analyzing the character of cleopatra must have been something like catching a meteor by the tail, and making it sit for its picture. alda. something like it, in truth; but those of miranda and ophelia were more embarrassing, because they seemed to defy all analysis. it was like intercepting the dew-drop or the snow-flake ere it fell to earth, and subjecting it to a chemical process. medon. some one said the other day that shakspeare had never drawn a coquette. what is cleopatra but the empress and type of all the coquettes that ever were--or are? she would put lady ---- herself to school. but now for the moral. alda. the moral!--of what? medon. of your book. it has a moral, i suppose. alda. it has indeed a very deep one, which those who seek will find. if now i have answered all your considerations and objections, and sufficiently explained my own views, may i proceed? medon. if you please--i am prepared to listen in earnest. footnotes: [ ] see foster's essay on the application of the word _romantic_--_essays_, vol. i [ ] correspondence, vol. iii. [ ] an oriental proverb [ ] in our own time, madame de staël, mrs. somerville, harriet martineau, mrs. marcet; we need not go back to the rolands and agnesi, nor even to our own lucy hutchinson. characters of intellect. portia. we hear it asserted, not seldom by way of compliment to us women, that intellect is of no sex. if this mean that the same faculties of mind are common to men and women, it is true; in any other signification it appears to me false, and the reverse of a compliment. the intellect of woman bears the same relation to that of man as her physical organization;--it is inferior in power, and different in kind. that certain women have surpassed certain men in bodily strength or intellectual energy, does not contradict the general principle founded in nature. the essential and invariable distinction appears to me this: in men the intellectual faculties exist more self-poised and self-directed--more independent of the rest of the character, than we ever find them in women, with whom talent, however predominant, is in a much greater degree modified by the sympathies and moral qualities. in thinking over all the distinguished women can at this moment call to mind, i recollect but one, who, in the exercise of a rare talent, belied her sex, but the moral qualities had been first perverted.[ ] it is from not knowing, or not allowing this general principle, that men of genius have committed some signal mistakes. they have given us exquisite and just delineations of the more peculiar characteristics of women, as modesty, grace, tenderness; and when they have attempted to portray them with the powers common to both sexes, as wit, energy, intellect, they have blundered in some respect; they could form no conception of intellect which was not masculine, and therefore have either suppressed the feminine attributes altogether and drawn coarse caricatures, or they have made them completely artificial.[ ] women distinguished for wit may sometimes appear masculine and flippant, but the cause must be sought elsewhere than in nature, who disclaims all such. hence the witty and intellectual ladies of our comedies and novels are all in the fashion of some particular time; they are like some old portraits which can still amuse and please by the beauty of the workmanship, in spite of the graceless costume or grotesque accompaniments, but from which we turn to worship with ever new delight the floras and goddesses of titian--the saints and the virgins of raffaelle and domenichino. so the millamants and belindas, the lady townleys and lady teazles are out of date, while portia and rosalind, in whom nature and the feminine character are paramount, remain bright and fresh to the fancy as when first created. portia, isabella, beatrice, and rosalind, may be classed together, as characters of intellect, because, when compared with others, they are at once distinguished by their mental superiority. in portia, it is intellect kindled into romance by a poetical imagination; in isabel, it is intellect elevated by religious principle; in beatrice, intellect animated by spirit; in rosalind, intellect softened by sensibility. the wit which is lavished on each is profound, or pointed, or sparkling, or playful--but always feminine; like spirits distilled from flowers, it always reminds us of its origin; it is a volatile essence, sweet as powerful; and to pursue the comparison a step further the wit of portia is like ottar of roses, rich and concentrated; that of rosalind, like cotton dipped in aromatic vinegar; the wit of beatrice is like sal volatile; and that of isabel, like the incense wafted to heaven. of these four exquisite characters, considered as dramatic and poetical conceptions, it is difficult to pronounce which is most perfect in its way, most admirably drawn, most highly finished. but if considered in another point of view, as women and individuals, as breathing realities, clothed in flesh and blood, i believe we must assign the first rank to portia, as uniting in herself in a more eminent degree than the others, all the noblest and most lovable qualities that ever met together in woman; and presenting a complete personification of petrarch's exquisite epitome of female perfection:-- il vago spirito ardento, e'n alto intelletto, un puro core. it is singular, that hitherto no critical justice has been done to the character of portia; it is yet more wonderful, that one of the finest writers on the eternal subject of shakspeare and his perfections, should accuse portia of pedantry and affectation, and confess she is not a great favorite of his--a confession quite worthy of him, who avers his predilection for servant-maids, and his preference of the fannys and the pamelas over the clementinas and clarissas.[ ] schlegel, who has given several pages to a rapturous eulogy on the merchant of venice, simply designates portia as a "rich, beautiful, clever heiress:"--whether the fault lie in the writer or translator, i do protest against the word clever.[ ] portia _clever!_ what an epithet to apply to this heavenly compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness! now would it not be well, if this common and comprehensive word were more accurately defined, or at least more accurately used? it signifies properly, not so much the possession of high powers, as dexterity in the adaptation of certain faculties (not necessarily of a high order) to a certain end or aim--not always the worthiest. it implies something common-place, inasmuch as it speaks the presence of the _active_ and _perceptive_, with a deficiency of the _feeling_ and _reflective_ powers; and applied to a woman, does it not almost invariably suggest the idea of something we should distrust or shrink from, if not allied to a higher nature? the profligate french women, who ruled the councils of europe in the middle of the last century, were clever women; and that _philosopheress_ madame du châtelet, who managed, at one and the same moment, the thread of an intrigue, her cards at piquet, and a calculation in algebra, was a very clever woman! if portia had been created as a mere instrument to bring about a dramatic catastrophe--if she had merely detected the flaw in antonio's bond, and used it as a means to baffle the jew, she might have been pronounced a clever woman. but what portia does, is forgotten in what she _is_. the rare and harmonious blending of energy, reflection, and feeling, in her fine character, make the epithet _clever_ sound like a discord as applied to _her_, and place her infinitely beyond the slight praise of richardson and schlegel, neither of whom appear to have fully comprehended her. these and other critics have been apparently so dazzled and engrossed by the amazing character of shylock, that portia has received less than justice at their hands; while the fact is, that shylock is not a finer or more finished character in his way, than portia is in hers. these two splendid figures are worthy of each other; worthy of being placed together within the same rich framework of enchanting poetry, and glorious and graceful forms. she hangs beside the terrible, inexorable jew, the brilliant lights of her character set off by the shadowy power of his, like a magnificent beauty-breathing titian by the side of a gorgeous rembrandt. portia is endued with her own share of those delightful qualities, which shakspeare has lavished on many of his female characters; but besides the dignity, the sweetness, and tenderness which should distinguish her sex generally, she is individualized by qualities peculiar to herself; by her high mental powers, her enthusiasm of temperament, her decision of purpose, and her buoyancy of spirit. these are innate; she has other distinguishing qualities more external, and which are the result of the circumstances in which she is placed. thus she is the heiress of a princely name and countless wealth; a train of obedient pleasures have ever waited round her; and from infancy she has breathed an atmosphere redolent of perfume and blandishment accordingly there is a commanding grace, a highbred, airy elegance, a spirit of magnificence in all that she does and says, as one to whom splendor had been familiar from her very birth. she treads as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements of jasper and porphyry--amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music. she is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed up with faith, hope and joy; and her wit has not a particle of malevolence or causticity. it is well known that the merchant of venice is founded on two different tales; and in weaving together his double plot in so masterly a manner, shakspeare has rejected altogether the character of the astutious lady of belmont with her magic potions, who figures in the italian novel. with yet more refinement, he has thrown out all the licentious part of the story, which some of his contemporary dramatists would have seized on with avidity, and made the best or worst of it possible; and he has substituted the trial of the caskets from another source.[ ] we are not told expressly where belmont is situated; but as bassanio takes ship to go thither from venice, and as we find them afterwards ordering horses from belmont to padua, we will imagine portia's hereditary palace as standing on some lovely promontory between venice and trieste, overlooking the blue adriatic, with the friuli mountains or the euganean hills for its background, such as we often see in one of claude's or poussin's elysian landscapes. in a scene, in a home like this, shakspeare, having first exorcised the original possessor, has placed his portia; and so endowed her, that all the wild, strange, and moving circumstances of the story, become natural, probable, and necessary in connexion with her. that such a woman should be chosen by the solving of an enigma, is not surprising: herself and all around her, the scene, the country, the age in which she is placed, breathe of poetry, romance, and enchantment. from the four quarters of the earth they come to kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint the hyrcanian desert, and the vasty wilds of wide arabia, are as thoroughfares now, for princes to come view fair portia; the watery kingdom, whose ambitious head spits in the face of heaven is no bar to stop the foreign spirits; but they come as o'er a brook to see fair portia. the sudden plan which she forms for the release of her husband's friend, her disguise, and her deportment as the young and learned doctor, would appear forced and improbable in any other woman but in portia are the simple and natural result of her character.[ ] the quickness with which she perceives the legal advantage which may be taken of the circumstances; the spirit of adventure with which she engages in the masquerading, and the decision, firmness, and intelligence with which she executes her generous purpose, are all in perfect keeping, and nothing appears forced--nothing as introduced merely for theatrical effect. but all the finest parts of portia's character are brought to bear in the trial scene. there she shines forth all her divine self. her intellectual powers, her elevated sense of religion, her high honorable principles, her best feelings as a woman, are all displayed. she maintains at first a calm self-command, as one sure of carrying her point in the end; yet the painful heart-thrilling uncertainty in which she keeps the whole court, until suspense verges upon agony, is not contrived for effect merely; it is necessary and inevitable. she has two objects in view; to deliver her husband's friend, and to maintain her husband's honor by the discharge of his just debt, though paid out of her own wealth ten times over. it is evident that she would rather owe the safety of antonio to any thing rather than the legal quibble with which her cousin bellario has armed her, and which she reserves as a last resource. thus all the speeches addressed to shylock in the first instance, are either direct or indirect experiments on his temper and feelings. she must be understood from the beginning to the end as examining, with intense anxiety, the effect of her own words on his mind and countenance; as watching for that relenting spirit, which she hopes to awaken either by reason or persuasion. she begins by an appeal to his mercy, in that matchless piece of eloquence, which, with an irresistible and solemn pathos, falls upon the heart like "gentle dew from heaven:"--but in vain; for that blessed dew drops not more fruitless and unfelt on the parched sand of the desert, than do these heavenly words upon the ear of shylock. she next attacks his avarice: shylock, there's _thrice_ thy money offered thee! then she appeals, in the same breath, both to his avarice and his pity: be merciful! take thrice thy money. bid me tear the bond. all that she says afterwards--her strong expressions, which are calculated to strike a shuddering horror through the nerves--the reflections she interposes--her delays and circumlocution to give time for any latent feeling of commiseration to display itself--all, all are premeditated and tend in the same manner to the object she has in view. thus-- you must prepare your bosom for his knife. therefore lay bare your bosom! these two speeches, though addressed apparently to antonio, are spoken _at_ shylock, and are evidently intended to penetrate _his_ bosom. in the same spirit she asks for the balance to weigh the pound of flesh; and entreats of shylock to have a surgeon ready-- have by some surgeon, shylock, on your charge, to stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death! shylock. is it so nominated in the bond? portia. it is not so expressed--but what of that? 'twere good you do so much, for _charity_. so unwilling is her sanguine and generous spirit to resign all hope, or to believe that humanity is absolutely extinct in the bosom of the jew, that she calls on antonio, as a last resource, to speak for himself. his gentle, yet manly resignation--the deep pathos of his farewell, and the affectionate allusion to herself in his last address to bassanio-- commend me to your honorable wife; say how i lov'd you, speak me fair in death, &c. are well calculated to swell that emotion, which through the whole scene must have been laboring suppressed within her heart. at length the crisis arrives, for patience and womanhood can endure no longer; and when shylock, carrying his savage bent "to the last hour of act," springs on his victim--"a sentence come, prepare!" then the smothered scorn, indignation, and disgust, burst forth with an impetuosity which interferes with the judicial solemnity she had at first affected;--particularly in the speech-- therefore, prepare thee to cut off the flesh. shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less, nor more, but just the pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more, or less than a just pound,--be it but so much as makes it light, or heavy, in the substance, or the division of the twentieth part of one poor scruple; nay, if the scale do turn but in the estimation of a hair,-- thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate. but she afterwards recovers her propriety, and triumphs with a cooler scorn and a more self-possessed exultation. it is clear that, to feel the full force and dramatic beauty of this marvellous scene, we must go along with portia as well as with shylock; we must understand her concealed purpose, keep in mind her noble motives, and pursue in our fancy the under current of feeling, working in her mind throughout. the terror and the power of shylock's character,--his deadly and inexorable malice,--would be too oppressive; the pain and pity too intolerable, and the horror of the possible issue too overwhelming, but for the intellectual relief afforded by this double source of interest and contemplation. i come now to that capacity for warm and generous affection, that tenderness of heart, which render portia not less lovable as a woman, than admirable for her mental endowments. the affections are to the intellect, what the forge is to the metal; it is they which temper and shape it to all good purposes, and soften, strengthen, and purify it. what an exquisite stroke of judgment in the poet, to make the mutual passion of portia and bassanio, though unacknowledged to each other, anterior to the opening of the play! bassanio's confession very properly comes first:-- bassanio. in belmont is a lady richly left, and she is fair, and fairer than that word, of wond'rous virtues: sometimes from her eyes i did receive fair speechless messages; * * * * and prepares us for portia's half betrayed, unconscious election of this most graceful and chivalrous admirer-- nerissa. do you not remember, lady, in your father's time, a venetian, a scholar, and a soldier, that came hither in company of the marquis of montferrat? portia. yes, yes, it was bassanio; as i think, so he was called. nerissa. true, madam; he of all the men that ever my foolish eyes looked upon, was the best deserving a fair lady. portia. i remember him well; and i remember him worthy of thy praise. our interest is thus awakened for the lovers from the very first; and what shall be said of the casket-scene with bassanio, where every line which portia speaks is so worthy of herself, so full of sentiment and beauty, and poetry and passion? too naturally frank for disguise, too modest to confess her depth of love while the issue of the trial remains in suspense, the conflict between love and fear, and maidenly dignity, cause the most delicious confusion that ever tinged a woman's cheek, or dropped in broken utterance from her lips. i pray you, tarry, pause a day or two, before you hazard; for in choosing wrong, i lose your company; therefore, forbear awhile; there's something tells me, (but it is not love,) i would not lose you; and you know yourself, hate counsels not in such a quality: but lest you should not understand me well, (and yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought) i would detain you here some month or two before you venture for me. i could teach you how to choose right,--but then i am forsworn;-- so will i never be: so you may miss me;-- but if you do, you'll make me wish a sin, that i had been forsworn. beshrew your eyes, they have o'erlooked me, and divided me: one half of me is yours, the other half yours,-- mine own, i would say; but if mine, then yours, and so all yours! the short dialogue between the lovers is exquisite. bassanio. let me choose, for, as i am, i live upon the rack. portia. upon the rack, bassanio? then confess what treason there is mingled with your love. bassanio. none, but that ugly treason of mistrust, which makes me fear the enjoying of my love. there may as well be amity and life 'tween snow and fire, as treason and my love. portia. ay! but i fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak any thing. bassanio. promise me life, and i'll confess the truth. portia. well then, confess, and live. bassanio. confess and love had been the very sum of my confession! o happy torment, when my torturer doth teach me answers for deliverance! a prominent feature in portia's character is that confiding, buoyant spirit, which mingles with all her thoughts and affections. and here let me observe, that i never yet met in real life, nor ever read in tale or history, of any woman, distinguished for intellect of the highest order, who was not also remarkable for this trusting spirit, this hopefulness and cheerfulness of temper, which is compatible with the most serious habits of thought, and the most profound sensibility. lady wortley montagu was one instance; and madame de staël furnishes another much more memorable. in her corinne, whom she drew from herself, this natural brightness of temper is a prominent part of the character. a disposition to doubt, to suspect, and to despond, in the young, argues, in general, some inherent weakness, moral or physical, or some miserable and radical error of education; in the old, it is one of the first symptoms of age; it speaks of the influence of sorrow and experience, and foreshows the decay of the stronger and more generous powers of the soul. portia's strength of intellect takes a natural tinge from the flush and bloom of her young and prosperous existence, and from her fervent imagination. in the casket-scene, she fears indeed the issue of the trial; on which more than her life is hazarded but while she trembles, her hope is stronger than her fear. while bassanio is contemplating the caskets, she suffers herself to dwell for one moment on the possibility of disappointment and misery. let music sound while he doth make his choice; then if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, fading in music: that the comparison may stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream and watery death-bed for him. then, immediately follows that revulsion of feeling, so beautifully characteristic of the hopeful, trusting, mounting spirit of this noble creature. but he may win! and what is music then?--then music is even as the flourish, when true subjects bow to a new-crowned monarch: such it is as are those dulcet sounds at break of day, that creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear, and summon him to marriage. now he goes with no less presence, but with much more love than young alcides, when he did redeem the virgin tribute paid by howling troy to the sea monster. i stand here for sacrifice. here, not only the feeling itself, born of the elastic and sanguine spirit which had never been touched by grief, but the images in which it comes arrayed to her fancy,--the bridegroom waked by music on his wedding-morn,--the new-crowned monarch,--the comparison of bassanio to the young alcides, and of herself to the daughter of laomedon,--are all precisely what would have suggested themselves to the fine poetical imagination of portia in such a moment. her passionate exclamations of delight, when bassanio has fixed on the right casket, are as strong as though she had despaired before. fear and doubt she could repel; the native elasticity of her mind bore up against them; yet she makes us feel, that, as the sudden joy overpowers her almost to fainting, the disappointment would as certainly have killed her. how all the other passions fleet to air, as doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair, and shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy? o love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy; in measure rain thy joy scant this excess; i feel too much thy blessing: make it less, for fear i surfeit! her subsequent surrender of herself in heart and soul, of her maiden freedom, and her vast possessions, can never be read without deep emotions; for not only all the tenderness and delicacy of a devoted woman, are here blended with all the dignity which becomes the princely heiress of belmont, but the serious, measured self-possession of her address to her lover, when all suspense is over, and all concealment superfluous, is most beautifully consistent with the character. it is, in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers, that besides talents and powers, she has also passions and affections; when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in her own keeping, but is surrendered forever and forever into the dominion of another! the possession of uncommon powers of mind are so far from affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating surprise--i had almost said terror--of such a revolution, that they render it more intense. the sources of thought multiply beyond calculation the sources of feeling; and mingled, they rush together, a torrent deep as strong. because portia is endued with that enlarged comprehension which looks before and after, she does not feel the less, but the more: because from the height of her commanding intellect she can contemplate the force, the tendency, the consequences of her own sentiments--because she is fully sensible of her own situation, and the value of all she concedes--the concession is not made with less entireness and devotion of heart, less confidence in the truth and worth of her lover, than when juliet, in a similar moment, but without any such intrusive reflections--any check but the instinctive delicacy of her sex, flings herself and her fortunes at the feet of her lover: and all my fortunes at thy foot i'll lay, and follow thee, my lord, through all the world.[ ] in portia's confession, which is not breathed from a moonlit balcony, but spoken openly in the presence of her attendants and vassals, there is nothing of the passionate self-abandonment of juliet, nor of the artless simplicity of miranda, but a consciousness and a tender seriousness, approaching to solemnity, which are not less touching. you see me, lord bassanio, where i stand, such as i am: though for myself alone, i would not be ambitious in my wish, to wish myself much better; yet, for you, i would be trebled twenty times myself; a thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich; that only to stand high in your account, i might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, exceed account; but the full sum of me is sum of something; which to term in gross, is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd, happy in this, she is not yet so old but she may learn; and happier than this, she is not bred so dull but she can learn; happiest of all is, that her gentle spirit commits itself to yours to be directed, as from her lord, her governor, her king. myself and what is mine, to you and yours is now converted. but now, i was the lord, of this fair mansion, master of my servants, queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, this house, these servants, and this same myself, are yours, my lord. we must also remark that the sweetness, the solicitude, the subdued fondness which she afterwards displays, relative to the letter, are as true to the softness of her sex, as the generous self-denial with which she urges the departure of bassanio, (having first given him a husband's right over herself and all her countless wealth,) is consistent with a reflecting mind, and a spirit at once tender, reasonable, and magnanimous. it is not only in the trial scene that portia's acuteness, eloquence, and lively intelligence are revealed to us; they are displayed in the first instance, and kept up consistently to the end. her reflections, arising from the most usual aspects of nature, and from the commonest incidents of life are in such a poetical spirit, and are at the same time so pointed, so profound, that they have passed into familiar and daily application, with all the force of proverbs. if to do, were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. i can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. the crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, when neither is attended; and, i think, the nightingale, if she should sing by day, when every goose is cackling, would be thought no better a musician than the wren. how many things by season, seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection! how far that little candle throws his beams! so shines a good deed in a naughty world. a substitute shines as brightly as a king, until a king be by; and then his state empties itself, as doth an inland brook, into the main of waters. her reflections on the friendship between her husband and antonio are as full of deep meaning as of tenderness; and her portrait of a young coxcomb, in the same scene, is touched with a truth and spirit which show with what a keen observing eye she has looked upon men and things. ----i'll hold thee any wager, when we are both accouter'd like young men. i'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, and wear my dagger with the braver grace and speak, between the change of man and boy with a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth; and tell quaint lies-- how honorable ladies sought my love, which i denying, they fell sick and died; i could not do withal: then i'll repent, and wish, for all that, that i had not killed them; and twenty of these puny lies i'll tell, that men should swear, i have discontinued school above a twelvemonth! and in the description of her various suitors, in the first scene with nerissa, what infinite power, wit, and vivacity! she half checks herself as she is about to give the reins to her sportive humor: "in truth, i know it is a sin to be a mocker."--but if it carries her away, if is so perfectly good-natured, so temperately bright, so lady-like, it is ever without offence; and so far, most unlike the satirical, poignant, unsparing wit of beatrice, "misprising what she looks on." in fact, i can scarce conceive a greater contrast than between the vivacity of portia and the vivacity of beatrice. portia, with all her airy brilliance, is supremely soft and dignified; every thing she says or does, displays her capability for profound thought and feeling, as well as her lively and romantic disposition; and as i have seen in an italian garden a fountain flinging round its wreaths of showery light, while the many-colored iris hung brooding above it, in its calm and soul-felt glory; so in portia the wit is ever kept subordinate to the poetry, and we still feel the tender, the intellectual, and the imaginative part of the character, as superior to, and presiding over its spirit and vivacity. in the last act, shylock and his machinations being dismissed from our thoughts, and the rest of the _dramatis personæ_ assembled together at belmont, all our interest and all our attention are riveted on portia, and the conclusion leaves the most delightful impression on the fancy. the playful equivoque of the rings, the sportive trick she puts on her husband, and her thorough enjoyment of the jest, which she checks just as it is proceeding beyond the bounds of propriety, show how little she was displeased by the sacrifice of her gift, and are all consistent with her bright and buoyant spirit. in conclusion; when portia invites her company to enter her palace to refresh themselves after their travels, and talk over "these events at full," the imagination, unwilling to lose sight of the brilliant group, follows them in gay procession from the lovely moonlight garden to marble halls and princely revels, to splendor and festive mirth, to love and happiness. many women have possessed many of those qualities which render portia so delightful. she is in herself a piece of reality, in whose possible existence we have no doubt: and yet a human being, in whom the moral, intellectual, and sentient faculties should be so exquisitely blended and proportioned to each other; and these again, in harmony with all outward aspects and influences probably never existed--certainly could not now exist. a woman constituted like portia, and placed in this age, and in the actual state of society, would find society armed against her; and instead of being like portia, a gracious, happy, beloved, and loving creature, would be a victim, immolated in fire to that multitudinous moloch termed opinion. with her, the world without would be at war with the world within; in the perpetual strife, either her nature would "be subdued to the element it worked in," and bending to a necessity it could neither escape nor approve, lose at last something of its original brightness; or otherwise--a perpetual spirit of resistance, cherished as a safeguard, might perhaps in the end destroy the equipoise; firmness would become pride and self-assurance; and the soft, sweet, feminine texture of the mind, settle into rigidity. is there then no sanctuary for such a mind?--where shall it find a refuge from the world?--where seek for strength against itself? where, but in heaven? camiola, in massinger's maid of honor, is said to emulate portia; and the real story of camiola (for she is an historical personage) is very beautiful. she was a lady of messina, who lived in the beginning of the fourteenth century; and was the contemporary of queen joanna, of petrarch and boccaccio. it fell out in those days, that prince orlando of arragon, the younger brother of the king of sicily, having taken the command of a naval armament against the neapolitans, was defeated, wounded, taken prisoner, and confined by robert of naples (the father of queen joanna) in one of his strongest castles. as the prince had distinguished himself by his enmity to the neapolitans, and by many exploits against them, his ransom was fixed at an exorbitant sum, and his captivity was unusually severe; while the king of sicily, who had some cause of displeasure against his brother, and imputed to him the defeat of his armament, refused either to negotiate for his release, or to pay the ransom demanded. orlando, who was celebrated for his fine person and reckless valour, was apparently doomed to languish away the rest of his life in a dungeon, when camiola turinga, a rich sicilian heiress, devoted the half of her fortune to release him. but as such an action might expose her to evil comments, she made it a condition, that orlando should marry her. the prince gladly accepted the terms, and sent her the contract of marriage, signed by his hand; but no sooner was he at liberty, than he refused to fulfil it, and even denied all knowledge of his benefactress. camiola appealed to the tribunal of state, produced the written contract, and described the obligations she had heaped on this ungrateful and ungenerous man; sentence was given against him, and he was adjudged to camiola, not only as her rightful husband, but as a property which, according to the laws of war in that age, she had purchased with her gold. the day of marriage was fixed; orlando presented himself with a splendid retinue; camiola also appeared, decorated as for her bridal; but instead of bestowing her hand on the recreant, she reproached him in the presence of all with his breach of faith, declared her utter contempt for his baseness; and then freely bestowing on him the sum paid for his ransom, as a gift worthy of his mean soul, she turned away, and dedicated herself and her heart to heaven. in this resolution she remained inflexible, though the king and all the court united in entreaties to soften her. she took the veil; and orlando, henceforth regarded as one who had stained his knighthood, and violated his faith, passed the rest of his life as a dishonored man, and died in obscurity. camiola, in "the maid of honor," is, like portia, a wealthy heiress, surrounded by suitors, and "queen o'er herself:" the character is constructed upon the same principles, as great intellectual power, magnanimity of temper, and feminine tenderness; but not only do pain and disquiet, and the change induced by unkind and inauspicious influences, enter into this sweet picture to mar and cloud its happy beauty,--but the portrait itself may be pronounced out of drawing;--for massinger apparently had not sufficient delicacy of sentiment to work out his own conception of the character with perfect consistency. in his adaptation of the story he represents the mutual love of orlando and camiola as existing previous to the captivity of the former, and on his part declared with many vows of eternal faith, yet she requires a written contract of marriage before she liberates him. it will perhaps be said that she has penetrated his weakness, and anticipates his falsehood: miserable excuse!--how could a magnanimous woman love a man, whose falsehood she believes but _possible_?--or loving him, how could she deign to secure herself by such means against the consequences? shakspeare and nature never committed such a solecism. camiola doubts before she has been wronged; the firmness and assurance in herself border on harshness. what in portia is the gentle wisdom of a noble nature, appears, in camiola, too much a spirit of calculation: it savors a little of the counting house. as portia is the heiress of belmont, and camiola a merchant's daughter, the distinction may be proper and characteristic, but it is not in favor of camiola. the contrast may be thus illustrated: camiola. you have heard of bertoldo's captivity and the king's neglect, the greatness of his ransom; _fifty thousand crowns_, adorni! _two parts of my estate!_ yet i so love the gentleman, for to you i will confess my weakness, that i purpose now, when he is forsaken by the king and his own hopes, to ransom him. _maid of honor_, _act. _. portia. what sum owes he the jew? bassanio. for me--three thousand ducats. portia. what! _no more!_ pay him six thousand and deface the bond, double six thousand, and then treble that, before a friend of this description shall lose a hair thro' my bassanio's fault. ----you shall have gold to pay the _petty debt_ twenty times o'er. _merchant of venice._ camiola, who is a sicilian, might as well have been born at amsterdam: portia could have only existed in italy. portia is profound as she is brilliant; camiola is sensible and sententious; she asserts her dignity very successfully; but we cannot for a moment imagine portia as reduced to the necessity of asserting hers. the idiot sylli, in "the maid of honor," who follows camiola like one of the deformed dwarfs of old time, is an intolerable violation of taste and propriety, and it sensibly lowers our impression of the principal character. shakspeare would never have placed sir andrew aguecheek in constant and immediate approximation with such a woman as portia. lastly, the charm of the poetical coloring is wholly wanting in camiola, so that when she is placed in contrast with the glowing eloquence, the luxuriant grace, the buoyant spirit of portia, the effect is somewhat that of coldness and formality. notwithstanding the dignity and the beauty of massinger's delineation, and the noble self-devotion of camiola, which i acknowledge and admire, the two characters will admit of no comparison as sources of contemplation and pleasure. * * * * * it is observable that something of the intellectual brilliance of portia is reflected on the other female characters of the "merchant of venice," so as to preserve in the midst of contrast a certain harmony and keeping. thus jessica, though properly kept subordinate, is certainly a most beautiful pagan--a most sweet jew. she cannot be called a sketch--or if a sketch, she is like one of those dashed off in glowing colors from the rainbow pallette of a rubens; she has a rich tinge of orientalism shed over her, worthy of her eastern origin. in any other play, and in any other companionship than that of the matchless portia, jessica would make a very beautiful heroine of herself. nothing can be more poetically, more classically fanciful and elegant, than the scenes between her and lorenzo;--the celebrated moonlight dialogue, for instance, which we all have by heart. every sentiment she utters interests us for her:--more particularly her bashful self-reproach, when flying in the disguise of a page;-- i am glad 'tis night, you do not look upon me, for i am much asham'd of my exchange; but love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit; for if they could, cupid himself would blush to see me thus transformed to a boy. and the enthusiastic and generous testimony to the superior graces and accomplishments of portia comes with a peculiar grace from her lips. why, if two gods should play some heavenly match. and on the wager lay two earthly women, and portia one, there must be something else pawned with the other; for the poor rude world hath not her fellow. we should not, however, easily pardon her for cheating her father with so much indifference, but for the perception that shylock values his daughter far beneath his wealth. i would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!--would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! nerissa is a good specimen of a common genus of characters; she is a clever confidential waiting-woman, who has caught a little of her lady's elegance and romance; she affects to be lively and sententious, falls in love, and makes her favor conditional on the fortune of the caskets, and in short mimics her mistress with good emphasis and discretion. nerissa and the gay talkative gratiano are as well matched as the incomparable portia and her magnificent and captivating lover. isabella. the character of isabella, considered as a poetical delineation, is less mixed than that of portia; and the dissimilarity between the two appears, at first view, so complete that we can scarce believe that the same elements enter into the composition of each. yet so it is; they are portrayed as equally wise, gracious, virtuous, fair, and young; we perceive in both the same exalted principle and firmness of character; the same depth of reflection and persuasive eloquence; the same self-denying generosity and capability of strong affections; and we must wonder at that marvellous power by which qualities and endowments, essentially and closely allied, are so combined and modified as to produce a result altogether different. "o nature! o shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?" isabella is distinguished from portia, and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such a man as angelo-- o cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, with saints dost bait thy hook! this impression of her character is conveyed from the very first, when lucio, the libertine jester, whose coarse audacious wit checks at every feather, thus expresses his respect for her,-- i would not--though 'tis my familiar sin with maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest tongue far from heart--play with all virgins so. i hold you as a thing enskyed, and sainted; by your renouncement an immortal spirit, and to be talked with in sincerity, as with a saint. a strong distinction between isabella and portia is produced by the circumstances in which they are respectively placed. portia is a high-born heiress, "lord of a fair mansion, master of her servants, queen o'er herself;" easy and decided, as one born to command, and used to it. isabella has also the innate dignity which renders her "queen o'er herself," but she has lived far from the world and its pomps and pleasures; she is one of a consecrated sisterhood--a novice of st. clare; the power to command obedience and to confer happiness are to her unknown. portia is a splendid creature, radiant with confidence, hope, and joy. she is like the orange-tree, hung at once with golden fruit and luxuriant flowers, which has expanded into bloom and fragrance beneath favoring skies, and has been nursed into beauty by the sunshine and the dews of heaven. isabella is like a stately and graceful cedar, towering on some alpine cliff, unbowed and unscathed amid the storm. she gives us the impression of one who has passed under the ennobling discipline of suffering and self-denial: a melancholy charm tempers the natural vigor of her mind: her spirit seems to stand upon an eminence, and look down upon the world as if already enskyed and sainted; and yet when brought in contact with that world which she inwardly despises, she shrinks back with all the timidity natural to her cloistral education. this union of natural grace and grandeur with the habits and sentiments of a recluse,--of austerity of life with gentleness of manner,--of inflexible moral principle with humility and even bashfulness of deportment, is delineated with the most beautiful and wonderful consistency. thus when her brother sends to her, to entreat her mediation, her first feeling is fear, and a distrust in her own powers: ... alas! what poor ability's in me to do him good? lucio. essay the power you have. isabella. my power, alas! i doubt. in the first scene with angelo she seems divided between her love for her brother and her sense of his fault; between her self-respect and her maidenly bashfulness. she begins with a kind of hesitation "at war 'twixt will and will not:" and when angelo quotes the law, and insists on the justice of his sentence, and the responsibility of his station, her native sense of moral rectitude and severe principles takes the lead, and she shrinks back:-- o just, but severe law! i _had_ a brother then--heaven keep your honor! [_retiring._ excited and encouraged by lucio, and supported by her own natural spirit, she returns to the charge,--she gains energy and self-possession as she proceeds, grows more earnest and passionate from the difficulty she encounters, and displays that eloquence and power of reasoning for which we had been already prepared by claudio's first allusion to her:-- ... in her youth there is a prone and speechless dialect, such as moves men; besides, she hath prosperous art, when she will play with reason and discourse, and well she can persuade. it is a curious coincidence that isabella, exhorting angelo to mercy, avails herself of precisely the same arguments, and insists on the self-same topics which portia addresses to shylock in her celebrated speech; but how beautifully and how truly is the distinction marked! how like, and yet how unlike! portia's eulogy on mercy is a piece of heavenly rhetoric; it falls on the ear with a solemn measured harmony; it is the voice of a descended angel addressing an inferior nature: if not premeditated, it is at least part of a preconcerted scheme; while isabella's pleadings are poured from the abundance of her heart in broken sentences, and with the artless vehemence of one who feels that life and death hang upon her appeal. this will be best understood by placing the corresponding passages in immediate comparison with each other. portia. the quality of mercy is not strain'd, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd; it blesseth him that gives, and him that takes: 'tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown; his sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings. but mercy is above this sceptred sway-- it is enthron'd in the hearts of kings. isabella. well, believe this, no ceremony that to great ones 'longs, not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword, the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe. become them with one half so good a grace as mercy does. portia. consider this-- that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. we do pray for mercy; and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy. isabella. ... alas! alas! why all the souls that were, were forfeit once; and he, that might the 'vantage best have took, found out the remedy. how would you be, if he, which is the top of judgment, should but judge you as you are? o, think on that, and mercy then will breathe within your lips, like man new made! the beautiful things which isabella is made to utter, have, like the sayings of portia, become proverbial; but in spirit and character they are as distinct as are the two women. in all that portia says, we confess the power of a rich poetical imagination, blended with a quick practical spirit of observation, familiar with the surfaces of things; while there is a profound yet simple morality, a depth of religious feeling, a touch of melancholy, in isabella's sentiments, and something earnest and authoritative in the manner and expression, as though they had grown up in her mind from long and deep meditation in the silence and solitude of her convent cell:-- o it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant. could great men thunder, as jove himself does, jove would ne'er be quiet: for every pelting, petty officer would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder merciful heaven! thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak than the soft myrtle. o but man, proud man! drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep. great men may jest with saints, 'tis wit in them; but in the less, foul profanation. that in the captain's but a choleric word, which in the soldier is flat blasphemy. authority, although it err like others, hath yet a kind of medicine in itself that skins the vice o' the top. go to you, bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know that's like my brother's fault: if it confess a natural guiltiness such as his is, let it not sound a thought upon your tongue against my brother's life. let me be ignorant, and in nothing good, but graciously to know i am no better. the sense of death is most in apprehension; and the poor beetle that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great as when a giant dies. 'tis not impossible but one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, may seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute as angelo; even so may angelo, in all his dressings, characts, titles, forms, be an arch villain. her fine powers of reasoning, and that natural uprightness and purity which no sophistry can warp, and no allurement betray, are farther displayed in the second scene with angelo. angelo. what would you do? isabella. as much for my poor brother as myself; that is, were i under the terms of death, the impression of keen whips i'd wear as rubies, and strip myself to death as to a bed that, longing, i have been sick for, ere i'd yield my body up to shame. angelo. then must your brother die. isabella. and 'twere the cheaper way; better it were a brother died at once, than that a sister, by redeeming him, should die forever. angelo. were you not then cruel as the sentence, that you have slander'd so! isabella. ignominy in ransom, and free pardon, are of two houses: lawful mercy is nothing akin to foul redemption. angelo. you seem'd of late to make the law a tyrant; and rather proved the sliding of your brother a merriment than a vice. isabella. o pardon me, my lord; it oft falls out, to have what we'd have, we speak not what we mean: i something do excuse the thing i hate, for his advantage that i dearly love. towards the conclusion of the play we have another instance of that rigid sense of justice, which is a prominent part of isabella's character, and almost silences her earnest intercession for her brother, when his fault is placed between her plea and her conscience. the duke condemns the villain angelo to death, and his wife mariana entreats isabella to plead for him. sweet isabel, take my part, lend me your knees, and all my life to come i'll lend you all my life to do you service. isabella remains silent, and mariana reiterates her prayer. mariana. sweet isabel, do yet but kneel by me, hold up your hands, say nothing, i'll speak all! o isabel! will you not lend a knee? isabella, thus urged, breaks silence and appeals to the duke, not with supplication, or persuasion, but with grave argument, and a kind of dignified humility and conscious power, which are finely characteristic of the individual woman. most bounteous sir, look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd, as if my brother liv'd; i partly think a due sincerity govern'd his deeds till he did look on me; since it is so let him not die. my brother had but justice, in that he did the thing for which he died. for angelo, his art did not o'ertake his bad intent, that perish'd by the way: thoughts are no subjects. intents, but merely thoughts. in this instance, as in the one before mentioned, isabella's conscientiousness is overcome by the only sentiment which ought to temper justice into mercy, the power of affection and sympathy. isabella's confession of the general frailty of her sex, has a peculiar softness, beauty, and propriety. she admits the imputation with all the sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt her own superiority to the weakness she acknowledges. angelo. nay, women are frail too. isabella. ay, as the glasses where they view themselves; which are as easy broke as they make forms. women! help heaven! men their creation mar in profiting by them. nay, call us ten times frail, for we are soft as our complexions are, and credulous to false prints. nor should we fail to remark the deeper interest which is thrown round isabella, by one part of her character, which is betrayed rather than exhibited in the progress of the action; and for which we are not at first prepared, though it is so perfectly natural. it is the strong under-current of passion and enthusiasm flowing beneath this calm and saintly self-possession; it is the capacity for high feeling and generous and strong indignation, veiled beneath the sweet austere composure of the religious recluse, which, by the very force of contrast, powerfully impress the imagination. as we see in real life that where, from some external or habitual cause, a strong control is exercised over naturally quick feelings and an impetuous temper, they display themselves with a proportionate vehemence when that restraint is removed; so the very violence with which her passions burst forth, when opposed or under the influence of strong excitement, is admirably characteristic. thus in her exclamation, when she first allows herself to perceive angelo's vile design-- isabella. ha! little honor to be much believed, and most pernicious purpose;--seeming!--seeming i will proclaim thee, angelo: look for it! sign me a present pardon for my brother, or with an outstretched throat i'll tell the world aloud, what man thou art! and again, where she finds that the "outward tainted deputy," has deceived her-- o i will to him, and pluck out his eyes! unhappy claudio! wretched isabel! injurious world! most damned angelo! she places at first a strong and high-souled confidence in her brother's fortitude and magnanimity, judging him by her own lofty spirit: i'll to my brother; though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood, yet hath he in him such a mind of honor, that had he twenty heads to tender down, on twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up before his sister should her body stoop to such abhorr'd pollution. but when her trust in his honor is deceived by his momentary weakness, her scorn has a bitterness, and her indignation a force of expression almost fearful; and both are carried to an extreme, which is perfectly in character: o faithless coward! o dishonest wretch! wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? is't not a kind of incest to take life from thine own sister's shame? what should i think? heaven shield, my mother play'd my father fair! for such a warped slip of wilderness ne'er issued from his blood. take my defiance; die! perish! might but my bending down, reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed. i'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death. no word to save thee. the whole of this scene with claudio is inexpressibly grand in the poetry and the sentiment; and the entire play abounds in those passages and phrases which must have become trite from familiar and constant use and abuse, if their wisdom and unequalled beauty did not invest them with an immortal freshness and vigor, and a perpetual charm. the story of measure for measure is a tradition of great antiquity, of which there are several versions, narrative and dramatic. a contemptible tragedy, the _promos and cassandra_ of george whetstone, is supposed, from various coincidences, to have furnished shakspeare with the groundwork of the play; but the character of isabella is, in conception and execution, all his own. the commentators have collected with infinite industry all the sources of the plot; but to the grand creation of isabella, they award either silence or worse than silence. johnson and the rest of the black-letter crew, pass over her without a word. one critic, a lady-critic too, whose name i will be so merciful as to suppress, treats isabella as a coarse vixen. hazlitt, with that strange perversion of sentiment and want of taste which sometimes mingle with his piercing and powerful intellect, dismisses isabella with a slight remark, that "we are not greatly enamoured of her rigid chastity, nor can feel much confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another's expense." what shall we answer to such criticism? upon what ground can we read the play from beginning to end, and doubt the angel-purity of isabella, or contemplate her possible lapse from virtue? such gratuitous mistrust is here a sin against the light of heaven. having waste ground enough, shall we desire to raze the sanctuary, and pitch our evils there? professor richardson is more just, and truly sums up her character as "amiable, pious, sensible, resolute, determined, and eloquent:" but his remarks are rather superficial. schlegel's observations are also brief and general, and in no way distinguish isabella from many other characters; neither did his plan allow him to be more minute. of the play altogether, he observes very beautifully, "that the title measure for measure is in reality a misnomer, the sense of the whole being properly the triumph of mercy over strict justice:" but it is also true that there is "an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it."[ ] of all the characters, isabella alone has our sympathy. but though she triumphs in the conclusion, her triumph is not produced in a pleasing manner. there are too many disguises and tricks, too many "by-paths and indirect crooked ways," to conduct us to the natural and foreseen catastrophe, which the duke's presence throughout renders inevitable. this duke seems to have a predilection for bringing about justice by a most unjustifiable succession of falsehoods and counterplots. he really deserves lucio's satirical designation, who somewhere styles him "the fantastical duke of dark corners." but isabella is ever consistent in her pure and upright simplicity, and in the midst of this simulation, expresses a characteristic disapprobation of the part she is made to play, to speak so indirectly i am loth: i would say the truth.[ ] she yields to the supposed friar with a kind of forced docility, because her situation as a religious novice, and his station, habit, and authority, as her spiritual director, demand this sacrifice. in the end we are made to feel that her transition from the convent to the throne has but placed this noble creature in her natural sphere: for though isabella, as duchess of vienna, could not more command our highest reverence than isabella, the novice of saint clare, yet a wider range of usefulness and benevolence, of trial and action, was better suited to the large capacity, the ardent affections, the energetic intellect, and firm principle of such a woman as isabella, than the walls of a cloister. the philosophical duke observes in the very first scene-- spirits are not finely touched, but to fine issues: nor nature never lends the smallest scruple of her excellence, but like a thrifty goddess she determines, herself the glory of a creditor, both thanks and use.[ ] this profound and beautiful sentiment is illustrated in the character and destiny of isabella. she says, of herself, that "she has spirit to act whatever her heart approves;" and what her heart approves we know. in the convent, (which may stand here poetically for any narrow and obscure situation in which such a woman might be placed,) isabella would not have been unhappy, but happiness would have been the result of an effort, or of the concentration of her great mental powers to some particular purpose; as st. theresa's intellect, enthusiasm, tenderness, restless activity, and burning eloquence, governed by one overpowering sentiment of devotion, rendered her the most extraordinary of saints. isabella, like st. theresa, complains that the rules of her order are not sufficiently severe, and from the same cause,--that from the consciousness of strong intellectual and imaginative power, and of overflowing sensibility, she desires a more "strict restraint," or, from the continual, involuntary struggle against the trammels imposed, feels its necessity. isabella. and have you nuns no further privileges? francisca. are not these large enough? isabella. yes, truly; i speak, not as desiring more, but rather wishing a more strict restraint upon the sisterhood! such women as desdemona and ophelia would have passed their lives in the seclusion of a nunnery, without wishing, like isabella, for stricter bonds, or planning, like st. theresa, the reformation of their order, simply, because any restraint would have been efficient, as far as _they_ were concerned. isabella, "dedicate to nothing temporal," might have found resignation through self government, or have become a religious enthusiast: while "place and greatness" would have appeared to her strong and upright mind, only a more extended field of action, a trust and a trial. the mere trappings of power and state, the gemmed coronal, the ermined robe, she would have regarded as the outward emblems of her earthly profession; and would have worn them with as much simplicity as her novice's hood and scapular; still, under whatever guise she might tread this thorny world--the same "angel of light." beatrice. shakspeare has exhibited in beatrice a spirited and faithful portrait of the fine lady of his own time. the deportment, language, manners, and allusions, are those of a particular class in a particular age; but the individual and dramatic character which forms the groundwork, is strongly discriminated; and being taken from general nature, belongs to every age. in beatrice, high intellect and high animal spirits meet, and excite each other like fire and air. in her wit (which is brilliant without being imaginative) there is a touch of insolence, not unfrequent in women when the wit predominates over reflection and imagination. in her temper, too, there is a slight infusion of the termagant; and her satirical humor plays with such an unrespective levity over all subjects alike, that it required a profound knowledge of women to bring such a character within the pale of our sympathy. but beatrice, though wilful, is not wayward; she is volatile, not unfeeling. she has not only an exuberance of wit and gayety, but of heart, and soul, and energy of spirit; and is no more like the fine ladies of modern comedy,--whose wit consists in a temporary allusion, or a play upon words, and whose petulance is displayed in a toss of the head, a flirt of the fan, or a flourish of the pocket handkerchief,--than one of our modern dandies is like sir philip sydney. in beatrice, shakspeare has contrived that the poetry of the character shall not only soften, but heighten its comic effect. we are not only inclined to forgive beatrice all her scornful airs, all her biting jests, all her assumption of superiority; but they amuse and delight us the more, when we find her, with all the headlong simplicity of a child, falling at once into the snare laid for her affections; when we see _her_, who thought a man of god's making not good enough for her, who disdained to be o'ermastered by "a piece of valiant dust," stooping like the rest of her sex, vailing her proud spirit, and taming her wild heart to the loving hand of him whom she had scorned, flouted, and misused, "past the endurance of a block." and we are yet more completely won by her generous enthusiastic attachment to her cousin. when the father of hero believes the tale of her guilt; when claudio, her lover, without remorse or a lingering doubt, consigns her to shame; when the friar remains silent, and the generous benedick himself knows not what to say, beatrice, confident in her affections, and guided only by the impulses of her own feminine heart, sees through the inconsistency, the impossibility of the charge, and exclaims, without a moment's hesitation, o, on my soul, my cousin is belied! schlegel, in his remarks on the play of "much ado about nothing," has given us an amusing instance of that sense of reality with which we are impressed by shakspeare's characters. he says of benedick and beatrice, as if he had known them personally, that the exclusive direction of their pointed raillery against each other "is a proof of a growing inclination." this is not unlikely; and the same inference would lead us to suppose that this mutual inclination had commenced before the opening of the play. the very first words uttered by beatrice are an inquiry after benedick, though expressed with her usual arch impertinence:-- i pray you, is signior montanto returned from the wars, or no? i pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? but how many hath he killed? for indeed i promised to eat all of his killing. and in the unprovoked hostility with which she falls upon him in his absence, in the pertinacity and bitterness of her satire, there is certainly great argument that he occupies much more of her thoughts than she would have been willing to confess, even to herself. in the same manner benedick betrays a lurking partiality for his fascinating enemy; he shows that he has looked upon her with no careless eye, when he says, there's her cousin, (meaning beatrice,) an' she were not possessed with a fury, excels her as much in beauty as the first of may does the last of december. infinite skill, as well as humor, is shown in making this pair of airy beings the exact counterpart of each other; but of the two portraits, that of benedick is by far the most pleasing, because the independence and gay indifference of temper, the laughing defiance of love and marriage, the satirical freedom of expression, common to both, are more becoming to the masculine than to the feminine character. any woman might love such a cavalier as benedick, and be proud of his affection; his valor, his wit, and his gayety sit so gracefully upon him! and his light scoffs against the power of love are but just sufficient to render more piquant the conquest of this "heretic in despite of beauty." but a man might well be pardoned who should shrink from encountering such a spirit as that of beatrice, unless, indeed, he had "served an apprenticeship to the taming school." the wit of beatrice is less good-humored than that of benedick; or, from the difference of sex, appears so. it is observable that the power is throughout on her side, and the sympathy and interest on his: which, by reversing the usual order of things, seems to excite us _against the grain_, if i may use such an expression. in all their encounters she constantly gets the better of him, and the gentleman's wits go off halting, if he is not himself fairly _hors de combat_. beatrice, woman-like, generally has the first word, and will have the last. thus, when they first meet, she begins by provoking the merry warfare:-- i wonder that you will still be talking, signior benedick; nobody marks you. benedick. what, my dear lady disdain! are you yet living? beatrice. is it possible disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it as signior benedick? courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence. it is clear that she cannot for a moment endure his neglect, and he can as little tolerate her scorn. nothing that benedick addresses to beatrice personally can equal the malicious force of some of her attacks upon him: he is either restrained by a feeling of natural gallantry, little as she deserves the consideration due to her sex, (for a female satirist ever places herself beyond the pale of such forbearance,) or he is subdued by her superior volubility. he revenges himself, however, in her absence: he abuses her with such a variety of comic invective, and pours forth his pent-up wrath with such a ludicrous extravagance and exaggeration, that he betrays at once how deep is his mortification, and how unreal his enmity. in the midst of all this tilting and sparring of their nimble and fiery wits, we find them infinitely anxious for the good opinion of each other, and secretly impatient of each other's scorn: but beatrice is the most truly indifferent of the two; the most assured of herself. the comic effect produced by their mutual attachment, which, however natural and expected, comes upon us with all the force of a surprise, cannot be surpassed: and how exquisitely characteristic the mutual avowal! benedick. by my sword, beatrice, thou lovest me. beatrice. do not swear by it, and eat it. benedick. i will swear by it that you love me; and i will make him eat it, that says, i love not you. beatrice. will you not eat your word? benedick. with no sauce that can be devised to it: i protest, i love thee. beatrice. why, then, god forgive me! benedick. what offence, sweet beatrice? beatrice. you stayed me in a happy hour. i was about to protest, i loved you. benedick. and do it with all thy heart. beatrice. i love you with so much of my heart, that there is none left to protest. but here again the dominion rests with beatrice, and she appears in a less amiable light than her lover. benedick surrenders his whole heart to her and to his new passion. the revulsion of feeling even causes it to overflow in an excess of fondness; but with beatrice temper has still the mastery. the affection of benedick induces him to challenge his intimate friend for her sake, but the affection of beatrice does not prevent her from risking the life of her lover. the character of hero is well contrasted with that of beatrice, and their mutual attachment is very beautiful and natural. when they are both on the scene together, hero has but little to say for herself: beatrice asserts the rule of a master spirit, eclipses her by her mental superiority, abashes her by her raillery, dictates to her, answers for her, and would fain inspire her gentle-hearted cousin with some of her own assurance. yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make a curtsey, and say, "father, as it please you;" but yet, for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsey, and, "father, as it please me." but shakspeare knew well how to make one character subordinate to another, without sacrificing the slightest portion of its effect; and hero, added to her grace and softness, and all the interest which attaches to her as the sentimental heroine of the play, possesses an intellectual beauty of her own. when she has beatrice at an advantage, she repays her with interest, in the severe, but most animated and elegant picture she draws of her cousin's imperious character and unbridled levity of tongue. the portrait is a little overcharged, because administered as a corrective, and intended to be overheard. but nature never fram'd a woman's heart of prouder stuff than that of beatrice: disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, misprising what they look on; and her wit values itself so highly, that to her all matter else seems weak; she cannot love, nor take no shape nor project of affection, she is so self-endeared. ursula. sure, sure, such carping is not commendable. hero. no: not to be so odd, and from all fashions, as beatrice is cannot be commendable: but who dare tell her so? if i should speak, she'd mock me into air: o she would laugh me out of myself, press me to death with wit. therefore let benedick, like cover'd fire, consume away in sighs, waste inwardly: it were a better death than die with mocks, which is as bad as die with tickling. beatrice never appears to greater advantage than in her soliloquy after leaving her concealment "in the pleached bower where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, forbid the sun to enter;" she exclaims, after listening to this tirade against herself,-- what fire is in mine ears? can this be true? stand i condemned for pride and scorn so much? the sense of wounded vanity is lost in bitter feelings, and she is infinitely more struck by what is said in praise of benedick, and the history of his supposed love for her than by the dispraise of herself. the immediate success of the trick is a most natural consequence of the self-assurance and magnanimity of her character; she is so accustomed to assert dominion over the spirits of others, that she cannot suspect the possibility of a plot laid against herself. a haughty, excitable, and violent temper is another of the characteristics of beatrice; but there is more of impulse than of passion in her vehemence. in the marriage scene where she has beheld her gentle-spirited cousin,--whom she loves the more for those very qualities which are most unlike her own,--slandered, deserted, and devoted to public shame, her indignation, and the eagerness with which she hungers and thirsts after revenge, are, like the rest of her character, open, ardent, impetuous, but not deep or implacable. when she bursts into that outrageous speech-- is he not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonored my kinswoman? o that i were a man! what! bear her in hand until they come to take hands; and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor--o god, that i were a man! i would eat his heart in the market-place! and when she commands her lover, as the first proof of his affection, "to kill claudio," the very consciousness of the exaggeration,--of the contrast between the real good-nature of beatrice and the fierce tenor of her language, keeps alive the comic effect, mingling the ludicrous with the serious. it is remarkable that, notwithstanding the point and vivacity of the dialogue, few of the speeches of beatrice are capable of a general application, or engrave themselves distinctly on the memory; they contain more mirth than matter; and though wit be the predominant feature in the dramatic portrait, beatrice more charms and dazzles us by what she is than by what she _says_. it is not merely her sparkling repartees and saucy jests, it is the soul of wit, and the spirit of gayety in forming the whole character,--looking out from her brilliant eyes, and laughing on her full lips that pout with scorn,--which we have before us, moving and full of life. on the whole, we dismiss benedick and beatrice to their matrimonial bonds rather with a sense of amusement than a feeling of congratulation or sympathy; rather with an acknowledgment that they are well-matched, and worthy of each other than with any well-founded expectation of their domestic tranquillity. if, as benedick asserts, they are both "too wise to woo peaceably," it may be added that both are too wise, too witty, and too wilful to live peaceably together. we have some misgivings about beatrice--some apprehensions that poor benedick will not escape the "predestinated scratched face," which he had foretold to him who should win and wear this quick-witted and pleasant-spirited lady; yet when we recollect that to the wit and imperious temper of beatrice is united a magnanimity of spirit which would naturally place her far above all selfishness, and all paltry struggles for power--when we perceive, in the midst of her sarcastic levity and volubility of tongue, so much of generous affection, and such a high sense of female virtue and honor, we are inclined to hope the best. we think it possible that though the gentleman may now and then swear, and the lady scold, the native good-humor of the one, the really fine understanding of the other, and the value they so evidently attach to each other's esteem, will ensure them a tolerable portion of domestic felicity, and in this hope we leave them. rosalind. i come now to rosalind, whom i should have ranked before beatrice, inasmuch as the greater degree of her sex's softness and sensibility, united with equal wit and intellect, give her the superiority as a woman; but that, as a dramatic character, she is inferior in force. the portrait is one of infinitely more delicacy and variety, but of less strength and depth. it is easy to seize on the prominent features in the mind of beatrice, but extremely difficult to catch and fix the more fanciful graces of rosalind. she is like a compound of essences, so volatile in their nature, and so exquisitely blended, that on any attempt to analyze them, they seem to escape us. to what else shall we compare her, all-enchanting as she is?--to the silvery summer clouds which, even while we gaze on them, shift their hues and forms dissolving into air, and light, and rainbow showers?--to the may-morning, flush with opening blossoms and roseate dews, and "charm of earliest birds?"--to some wild and beautiful melody, such as some shepherd boy might "pipe to amarillis in the shade?"--to a mountain streamlet, now smooth as a mirror in which the skies may glass themselves, and anon leaping and sparkling in the sunshine--or rather to the very sunshine itself? for so her genial spirit touches into life and beauty whatever it shines on! but this impression, though produced by the complete development of the character, and in the end possessing the whole fancy, is not immediate. the first introduction of rosalind is less striking than interesting; we see her a dependant, almost a captive, in the house of her usurping uncle; her genial spirits are subdued by her situation, and the remembrance of her banished father her playfulness is under a temporary eclipse. i pray thee, rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry! _is_ an adjuration which rosalind needed not when once at liberty, and sporting "under the greenwood tree." the sensibility and even pensiveness of her demeanor in the first instance, render her archness and gayety afterwards, more graceful and more fascinating. though rosalind is a princess, she is a princess of arcady; and notwithstanding the charming effect produced by her first scenes, we scarcely ever think of her with a reference to them, or associate her with a court, and the artificial appendages of her rank. she was not made to "lord it o'er a fair mansion," and take state upon her like the all-accomplished portia; but to breathe the free air of heaven, and frolic among green leaves. she was not made to stand the siege of daring profligacy, and oppose high action and high passion to the assaults of adverse fortune, like isabel; but to "fleet the time carelessly as they did i' the golden age." she was not made to bandy wit with lords, and tread courtly measures with plumed and warlike cavaliers, like beatrice; but to dance on the green sward, and "murmur among living brooks a music sweeter than their own." though sprightliness is the distinguishing characteristic of rosalind, as of beatrice, yet we find her much more nearly allied to portia in temper and intellect. the tone of her mind is, like portia's, genial and buoyant: she has something, too, of her softness and sentiment; there is the same confiding abandonment of self in her affections; but the characters are otherwise as distinct as the situations are dissimilar. the age, the manners, the circumstance in which shakspeare has placed his portia, are not beyond the bounds of probability; nay, have a certain reality and locality. we fancy her a contemporary of the raffaelles and the ariostos; the sea-wedded venice, its merchants and magnificos,--the rialto, and the long canals,--rise up before us when we think of her. but rosalind is surrounded with the purely ideal and imaginative; the reality is in the characters and in the sentiments, not in the circumstances or situation. portia is dignified, splendid, and romantic; rosalind is playful, pastoral, and picturesque: both are in the highest degree poetical, but the one is epic and the other lyric. every thing about rosalind breathes of "youth and youth's sweet prime." she is fresh as the morning, sweet as the dew-awakened blossoms, and light as the breeze that plays among them. she is as witty, as voluble, as sprightly as beatrice; but in a style altogether distinct. in both, the wit is equally unconscious; but in beatrice it plays about us like the lightning, dazzling but also alarming; while the wit of rosalind bubbles up and sparkles like the living fountain, refreshing all around. her volubility is like the bird's song; it is the outpouring of a heart filled to overflowing with life, love, and joy, and all sweet and affectionate impulses. she has as much tenderness as mirth, and in her most petulant raillery there is a touch of softness--"by this hand, it will not hurt a fly!" as her vivacity never lessens our impression of her sensibility, so she wears her masculine attire without the slightest impugnment of her delicacy. shakspeare did not make the modesty of his women depend on their dress, as we shall see further when we come to viola and imogen. rosalind has in truth "no doublet and hose in her disposition." how her heart seems to throb and flutter under her page's vest! what depth of love in her passion for orlando! whether disguised beneath a saucy playfulness, or breaking forth with a fond impatience, or half betrayed in that beautiful scene where she faints at the sight of his 'kerchief stained with his blood! here her recovery of her self-possession--her fears lest she should have revealed her sex--her presence of mind, and quick-witted excuse-- i pray you, tell your brother how well i counterfeited. and the characteristic playfulness which seems to return so naturally with her recovered senses,--are all as amusing as consistent. then how beautifully is the dialogue managed between herself and orlando! how well she assumes the airs of a saucy page, without throwing off her feminine sweetness! how her wit flutters free as air over every subject! with what a careless grace, yet with what exquisite propriety! for innocence hath a privilege in her to dignify arch jests and laughing eyes. and if the freedom of some of the expressions used by rosalind or beatrice be objected to, let it be remembered that this was not the fault of shakspeare or the women, but generally of the age. portia, beatrice, rosalind, and the rest lived in times when more importance was attached to things than to words; now we think more of words than of things; and happy are we in these later days of super-refinement, if we are to be saved by our verbal morality. but this is meddling with the province of the melancholy jaques, and our argument is rosalind. the impression left upon our hearts and minds by the character of rosalind--by the mixture of playfulness, sensibility, and what the french (and we for lack of a better expression) call _naïveté_--is like a delicious strain of music. there is a depth of delight, and a subtlety of words to express that delight, which is enchanting. yet when we call to mind particular speeches and passages, we find that they have a relative beauty and propriety, which renders it difficult to separate them from the context without injuring their effect she says some of the most charming things in the world, and some of the most humorous: but we apply them as phrases rather than as maxims, and remember them rather for their pointed felicity of expression and fanciful application, than for their general truth and depth of meaning. i will give a few instances:-- i was never so be-rhymed since pythagoras' time--that i was an irish rat--which i can hardly remember.[ ] good, my complexion! dost thou think, though i am caparisoned like a man, that i have a doublet and hose in my disposition? we dwell here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat. love is merely a madness; and, i tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. a traveller! by my faith you have great reason to be sad. i fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands. farewell, monsieur traveller. look you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide god for making you that countenance you are; or i will scarce think you have swam in a gondola. break an hour's promise in love! he that will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousandth part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that cupid hath clapp'd him o' the shoulder, but i warrant him heart-whole. men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them--but not for love. i could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman; but i must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat. rosalind has not the impressive eloquence of portia, nor the sweet wisdom of isabella. her longest speeches are not her best; nor is her taunting address to phebe, beautiful and celebrated as it is, equal to phebe's own description of her. the latter, indeed, is more in earnest.[ ] celia is more quiet and retired: but she rather yields to rosalind, than is eclipsed by her. she is as full of sweetness, kindness, and intelligence, quite as susceptible, and almost as witty, though she makes less display of wit. she is described as less fair and less gifted; yet the attempt to excite in her mind a jealousy of her lovelier friend, by placing them in comparison-- thou art a fool; she robs thee of thy name; and thou wilt show more bright, and seem more virtuous, when she is gone-- fails to awaken in the generous heart of celia any other feeling than an increased tenderness and sympathy for her cousin. to celia, shakspeare has given some of the most striking and animated parts of the dialogue; and in particular, that exquisite description of the friendship between her and rosalind-- if she be a traitor, why, so am i; we have still slept together, rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together, and wheresoe'er we went, like juno's swans, still we were coupled and inseparable. the feeling of interest and admiration thus excited for celia at the first, follows her through the whole play. we listen to her as to one who has made herself worthy of our love; and her silence expresses more than eloquence. phebe is quite an arcadian coquette; she is a piece of pastoral poetry. audrey is only rustic. a very amusing effect is produced by the contrast between the frank and free bearing of the two princesses in disguise, and the scornful airs of the real shepherdess. in the speeches of phebe, and in the dialogue between her and sylvius, shakspeare has anticipated all the beauties of the italian pastoral, and surpassed tasso and guarini. we find two among the most poetical passages of the play appropriated to phebe; the taunting speech to sylvius, and the description of rosalind in her page's costume;--which last is finer than the portrait of bathyllus in anacreon. footnotes: [ ] artemisia gentileschi, an italian artist of the seventeenth century, painted one or two pictures, considered admirable as works of art, of which the subjects are the most vicious and barbarous conceivable. i remember one of these in the gallery of florence, which i looked at once, but once, and wished then, as i do now, for the privilege of burning it to ashes. [ ] lucy ashton, in the bride of lammermoor, may be placed next to desdemona; diana vernon is (comparatively) a failure as every woman will allow; while the masculine lady geraldine in miss edgeworth's tale of ennui, and the intellectual corinne are consistent, essential women; the distinction is more easily felt than analyzed. [ ] hazlitt's essays, vol. ii. p. . [ ] i am informed that the original german word is _geistreiche_ literally, _rich in soul or spirit_, a just and beautiful epithet. d. _edit._ [ ] in the "mercatante di venezia" of ser. giovanni, we have the whole story of antonio and bassanio, and part of the story but not the character of portia. the incident of the caskets is from the gesta romanorum. [ ] in that age, delicate points of law were not determined by the ordinary judges of the provinces, but by doctors of law, who were called from bologna, padua, and other places celebrated for their legal colleges. [ ] romeo and juliet, act ii. scene [ ] characters of shakespeare's plays. [ ] act iv. scene . [ ] _use_, i. e. usury, interest. [ ] in shakspeare's time, there were people in ireland, (there may be so still, for aught i know,) who undertook to charm rats to death, by chanting certain verses which acted as a spell. "rhyme them to death, as they do rats in ireland," is a line in one of ben jonson's comedies; this will explain rosalind's humorous allusion. [ ] rousseau could describe such a character as rosalind, but failed to represent it consistently. "n'est-ce pas de ton coeur que viennent les graces de ton enjouement? tes railleries sont des signes d'intérêt plus touchants que les compliments d'un autre. tu caresses quand tu folâtres. tu ris, mais ton rire pénètre l'âme; tu ris, mais tu fais pleurer de tendresse et je te vois presque toujours sérieuse avec les indifférents" _héloïse._ characters of passion and imagination. juliet. o love! thou teacher'--o grief! thou tamer--and time, thou healer of human hearts!--bring hither all your deep and serious revelations!--and ye too, rich fancies of unbruised, unbowed youth--ye visions of long perished hopes--shadows of unborn joys--gay colorings of the dawn of existence! whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art; all soft and delicate images--all lovely forms--divinest voices and entrancing melodies--gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes,--italian moonlights and airs that "breathe of the sweet south,"--now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination--live once more to my heart! come, thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion, on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within the inmost sanctuary of shakspeare's genius, in juliet's moonlight bower, and miranda's enchanted isle! * * * * * it is not without emotion, that i attempt to touch on the character of juliet. such beautiful things have already been said of her--only to be exceeded in beauty by the subject that inspired them!--it is impossible to say any thing better; but it is possible to say something more. such in fact is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of juliet's character, that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. there is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is as if while hanging over a half-blown rose, and revelling in its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better to display its bloom and fragrance. yet how otherwise should we disclose the wonders of its formation, or do justice to the skill of the divine hand that hath thus fashioned it in its beauty? love, as a passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. now, admitting the axiom of rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. it is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, but it is under the influence of climate and circumstance. the love that is calm in one moment, shall show itself vehement and tumultuous at another. the love that is wild and passionate in the south, is deep and contemplative in the north; as the spanish or roman girl perhaps poisons a rival, or stabs herself for the sake of a living lover, and the german or russian girl pines into the grave for love of the false, the absent, or the dead. love is ardent or deep, bold or timid, jealous or confiding, impatient or humble, hopeful or desponding--and yet there are not many loves, but one love. all shakspeare's women, being essentially women, either love or have loved, or are capable of loving; but juliet is love itself. the passion is her state of being, and out of it she has no existence. it is the soul within her soul; the pulse within her heart; the life-blood along her veins, "blending with every atom of her frame." the love that is so chaste and dignified in portia--so airy-delicate and fearless in miranda--so sweetly confiding in perdita--so playfully fond in rosalind--so constant in imogen--so devoted in desdemona--so fervent in helen--so tender in viola,--is each and all of these in juliet. all these remind us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self; or if she does, it is of the gismunda, or the lisetta, or the fiammetta of boccaccio, to whom she is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly italian spirit, the glowing, national complexion of the portrait.[ ] there was an italian painter who said that the secret of all effect in color consisted in white upon black, and black upon white. how perfectly did shakspeare understand this secret of effect! and how beautifully he has exemplified it in juliet? so shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, as yonder lady o'er her fellows shows! thus she and her lover are in contrast with all around them. they are all love, surrounded with all hate; all harmony, surrounded with all discord: all pure nature, in the midst of polished and artificial life. juliet, like portia, is the foster child of opulence and splendor; she dwells in a fair city--she has been nurtured in a palace--she clasps her robe with jewels--she braids her hair with rainbow-tinted pearls; but in herself she has no more connection with the trappings around her, than the lovely exotic, transplanted from some eden-like climate, has with the carved and gilded conservatory which has reared and sheltered its luxuriant beauty. but in this vivid impression of contrast, there is nothing abrupt or harsh. a tissue of beautiful poetry weaves together the principal figures, and the subordinate personages. the consistent truth of the costume, and the exquisite gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated, blend all into harmony. romeo and juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic background; nor are they, like thekla and max in the wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the development of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. the poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived, is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all with the careless prodigality of genius, and the whole is lighted up into such a sunny brilliance of effect, as though shakspeare had really transported himself into italy, and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. how truly it has been said, that "although romeo and juliet are in love, they are not love-sick!" what a false idea would anything of the mere whining amoroso, give us of romeo, such as he really is in shakspeare--the noble, gallant, ardent, brave, and witty! and juliet--with even less truth could the phrase or idea apply to her! the picture in "twelfth night" of the wan girl dying of love, "who pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy," would never surely occur to us, when thinking on the enamored and impassioned juliet, in whose bosom love keeps a fiery vigil, kindling tenderness into enthusiasm, enthusiasm into passion, passion into heroism! no, the whole sentiment of the play is of a far different cast. it is flushed with the genial spirit of the south: it tastes of youth, and of the essence of youth; of life, and of the very sap of life.[ ] we have indeed the struggle of love against evil destinies, and a thorny world; the pain, the grief, the anguish, the terror, the despair; the aching adieu; the pang unutterable of parted affection; and rapture, truth, and tenderness trampled into an early grave: but still an elysian grace lingers round the whole, and the blue sky of italy bends over all! in the delineation of that sentiment which forms the groundwork of the drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but its inexpressible sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which has taken possession of juliet's whole soul, has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the torrent: but she is herself as "moving delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the current which hurries beneath them. but at the same time that the pervading sentiment is never lost sight of, and is one and the same throughout, the individual part of the character in all its variety is developed, and marked with the nicest discrimination. for instance,--the simplicity of juliet is very different from the simplicity of miranda: her innocence is not the innocence of a desert island. the energy she displays does not once remind us of the moral grandeur of isabel, or the intellectual power of portia;--it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character:--it is accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it subsiding. her romance is not the pastoral romance of perdita, nor the fanciful romance of viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical imagination. her inexperience is not ignorance: she has heard that there is such a thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. her mother and her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man's inconstancy; or she has even ----turned the tale by ariosto told, of fair olympia, loved and left, of old! hence that bashful doubt, dispelled almost as soon as felt-- ah, gentle romeo! if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. that conscious shrinking from her own confession-- fain would i dwell on form; fain, fain deny what i have spoke! the ingenuous simplicity of her avowal-- or if thou think'st i am too quickly won, i'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo--but else, not for the world! in truth, fair montague, i am too fond, and therefore thou may'st think my 'havior light, but trust me, gentleman, i'll prove more true than those who have more cunning to be strange. and the proud yet timid delicacy, with which she throws herself for forbearance and pardon upon the tenderness of him she loves, even for the love she bears him-- therefore pardon me, and not impute this yielding to light love, which the dark night hath so discovered. in the alternative, which she afterwards places before her lover with such a charming mixture of conscious delicacy and girlish simplicity, there is that jealousy of female honor which precept and education have infused into her mind, without one real doubt of his truth, or the slightest hesitation in her self-abandonment: for she does not even wait to hear his asseverations;-- but if thou mean'st not well, i do beseech thee to cease thy suit, and leave me to my grief. romeo. so thrive my soul-- juliet. a thousand times, good night! but all these flutterings between native impulses and maiden fears become gradually absorbed, swept away, lost, and swallowed up in the depth and enthusiasm of confiding love. my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more i give to you the more i have--for both are _infinite_! what a picture of the young heart, that sees no bound to its hopes, no end to its affections! for "what was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience, which she was yet without? what was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure which her heart had just tasted, but indifference, to which she was yet a stranger? what was there to check the ardor of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment, which she had never yet felt?"[ ] lord byron's haidée is a copy of juliet in the oriental costume, but the development is epic, not dramatic.[ ] i remember no dramatic character, conveying the same impression of singleness of purpose, and devotion of heart and soul, except the thekla of schiller's wallenstein; she is the german juliet; far unequal, indeed, but conceived, nevertheless, in a kindred spirit. i know not if critics have ever compared them, or whether schiller is supposed to have had the english, or rather the italian, juliet in his fancy when he portrayed thekla; but there are some striking points of coincidence, while the national distinction in the character of the passion leaves to thekla a strong cast of originality.[ ] the _princess_ thekla is, like juliet, the heiress of rank and opulence; her first introduction to us, in her full dress and diamonds, does not impair the impression of her softness and simplicity. we do not think of them, nor do we sympathize with the complaint of her lover,-- the dazzle of the jewels which played round you hid the beloved from me. we almost feel the reply of thekla before she utters it,-- then you saw me not with your heart, but with your eyes! the timidity of thekla in her first scene, her trembling silence in the commencement, and the few words she addresses to her mother, remind us of the unobtrusive simplicity of juliet's first appearance; but the impression is different; the one is the shrinking violet, the other the unexpanded rose-bud. thekla and max piccolomini are, like romeo and juliet, divided by the hatred of their fathers. the death of max, and the resolute despair of thekla, are also points of resemblance; and thekla's complete devotion, her frank yet dignified abandonment of all disguise, and her apology for her own unreserve, are quite in juliet's style,-- i ought to be less open, ought to hide my heart more from thee--so decorum dictates: but where in this place wouldst thou seek for truth if in my mouth thou didst not find it? the same confidence, innocence, and fervor of affection, distinguish both heroines; but the love of juliet is more vehement, the love of thekla is more calm, and reposes more on itself; the love of juliet gives us the idea of infinitude, and that of thekla of eternity: the love of juliet flows on with an increasing tide, like the river pouring to the ocean; and the love of thekla stands unalterable, and enduring as the rock. in the heart of thekla love shelters as in a home; but in the heart of juliet he reigns a crowned king,--"he rides on its pants triumphant!" as women, they would divide the loves and suffrages of mankind, but not as dramatic characters: the moment we come to look nearer, we acknowledge that it is indeed "rashness and ignorance to compare schiller with shakspeare."[ ] thekla is a fine conception in the german spirit, but juliet is a lovely and palpable creation. the coloring in which schiller has arrayed his thekla is pale, sombre, vague, compared with the strong individual marking, the rich glow of life and reality, which distinguish juliet. one contrast in particular has always struck me; the two beautiful speeches in the first interview between max and thekla, that in which she describes her father's astrological chamber, and that in which he replies with reflections on the influence of the stars, are said to "form in themselves a fine poem." they do so; but never would shakspeare have placed such extraneous description and reflection in the mouths of _his_ lovers. romeo and juliet speak of themselves only; they see only themselves in the universe, all things else are as an idle matter. not a word they utter, though every word is poetry--not a sentiment or description, though dressed in the most luxuriant imagery, but has a direct relation to themselves, or to the situation in which they are placed, and the feelings that engross them: and besides, it may be remarked of thekla, and generally of all tragedy heroines in love, that, however beautifully and distinctly characterized, we see the passion only under one or two aspects at most, or in conflict with some one circumstance or contending duty or feeling. in juliet alone we find it exhibited under every variety of aspect, and every gradation of feeling it could possibly assume in a delicate female heart: as we see the rose, when passed through the colors of the prism, catch and reflect every tint of the divided ray, and still it is the same sweet rose. i have already remarked the quiet manner in which juliet steals upon us in her first scene, as the serene, graceful girl, her feelings as yet unawakened, and her energies all unknown to herself, and unsuspected by others. her silence and her filial deference are charming:-- i'll look to like, if looking liking move; but no more deep will i endart mine eye, than your consent shall give it strength to fly much in the same unconscious way we are impressed with an idea of her excelling loveliness:-- beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! and which could make the dark vault of death "a feasting presence full of light." without any elaborate description, we behold juliet, as she is reflected in the heart of her lover, like a single bright star mirrored in the bosom of a deep, transparent well. the rapture with which he dwells on the "white wonder of her hand;" on her lips, that even in pure and vestal modesty still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin. and then her eyes, "two of the fairest stars in all the heavens!" in his exclamation in the sepulchre, ah, dear juliet, why art thou yet so fair! there is life and death, beauty and horror, rapture and anguish combined. the friar's description of her approach, o, so light a step will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint! and then her father's similitude, death lies on her, like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field;-- all these mingle into a beautiful picture of youthful, airy, delicate grace, feminine sweetness, and patrician elegance. and our impression of juliet's loveliness and sensibility is enhanced, when we find it overcoming in the bosom of romeo a previous love for another. his visionary passion for the cold, inaccessible rosaline, forms but the prologue, the threshold, to the true--the real sentiment which succeeds to it. this incident, which is found in the original story, has been retained by shakspeare with equal feeling and judgment; and far from being a fault in taste and sentiment, far from prejudicing us against romeo, by casting on him, at the outset of the piece, the stigma of inconstancy, it becomes, if properly considered, a beauty in the drama, and adds a fresh stroke of truth to the portrait of the lover. why, after all, should we be offended at what does not offend juliet herself? for in the original story we find that her attention is first attracted towards romeo, by seeing him "fancy sick and pale of cheer," for love of a cold beauty. we must remember that in those times every young cavalier of any distinction devoted himself, at his first entrance into the world, to the service of some fair lady, who was selected to be his fancy's queen; and the more rigorous the beauty, and the more hopeless the love, the more honorable the slavery. to go about "metamorphosed by a mistress," as speed humorously expresses it,[ ]--to maintain her supremacy in charms at the sword's point; to sigh; to walk with folded arms; to be negligent and melancholy, and to show a careless desolation, was the fashion of the day. the surreys, the sydneys, the bayards, the herberts of the time--all those who were the mirrors "in which the noble youth did dress themselves," were of this fantastic school of gallantry--the last remains of the age of chivalry; and it was especially prevalent in italy. shakspeare has ridiculed it in many places with exquisite humor; but he wished to show us that it has its serious as well as its comic aspect. romeo, then, is introduced to us with perfect truth of costume, as the thrall of a dreaming, fanciful passion for the scornful rosaline, who had forsworn to love; and on her charms and coldness, and on the power of love generally, he descants to his companions in pretty phrases, quite in the style and taste of the day.[ ] why then, o brawling love, o loving hate, o any thing, of nothing first create! o heavy lightness, serious vanity, mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lover's eyes; being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lover's tears. but when once he has beheld juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! the lambent fire that played round his heart, burns to that heart's very core. we no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that petrarch flowed in;" but all is consecrated, earnest, rapturous, in the feeling and the expression. compare, for instance, the sparkling antithetical passages just quoted, with one or two of his passionate speeches to or of juliet:-- heaven is here, where juliet lives! &c. ah juliet! if the measure of thy joy be heaped like mine, and that thy skill be more to blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath this neighbour air, and let rich music's tongue unfold the imagin'd happiness, that both receive in either by this dear encounter. come what sorrow may, it cannot countervail the exchange of joy that one short minute gives me in her sight. how different! and how finely the distinction is drawn! his first passion is indulged as a waking dream, a reverie of the fancy; it is depressing, indolent, fantastic; his second elevates him to the third heaven, or hurries him to despair. it rushes to its object through all impediments, defies all dangers, and seeks at last a triumphant grave, in the arms of her he so loved. thus romeo's previous attachment to rosaline is so contrived as to exhibit to us another variety in that passion, which is the subject of the poem, by showing us the distinction between the fancied and the real sentiment. it adds a deeper effect to the beauty of juliet; it interests us in the commencement for the tender and romantic romeo; and gives an individual reality to his character, by stamping him like an historical, as well as a dramatic portrait, with the very spirit of the age in which he lived.[ ] it may be remarked of juliet as of portia, that we not only trace the component qualities in each as they expand before us in the course of the action, but we seem to have known them previously, and mingle a consciousness of their past, with the interest of their present and their future. thus, in the dialogue between juliet and her parents, and in the scenes with the nurse, we seem to have before us the whole of her previous education and habits: we see her, on the one hand, kept in severe subjection by her austere parents; and on the other, fondled and spoiled by a foolish old nurse--a situation perfectly accordant with the manners of the time. then lady capulet comes sweeping by with her train of velvet, her black hood, her fan, and her rosary--the very _beau-idéal_ of a proud italian matron of the fifteenth century, whose offer to poison romeo in revenge for the death of tybalt, stamps her with one very characteristic trait of the age and country. yet she loves her daughter; and there is a touch of remorseful tenderness in her lamentation over her, which adds to our impression of the timid softness of juliet, and the harsh subjection in which she has been kept:-- but one, poor one!--one poor and loving child, but one thing to rejoice and solace in, and cruel death hath catched it from my sight! capulet, as the jovial, testy old man, the self willed, violent, tyrannical father,--to whom his daughter is but a property, the appanage of his house, and the object of his pride,--is equal as a portrait: but both must yield to the nurse, who is drawn with the most wonderful power and discrimination. in the prosaic homeliness of the outline, and the magical illusion of the coloring, she reminds us of some of the marvellous dutch paintings, from which, with all their coarseness, we start back as from a reality. her low humor, her shallow garrulity, mixed with the dotage and petulance of age--her subserviency, her secrecy, and her total want of elevated principle, or even common honesty--are brought before us like a living and palpable truth. among these harsh and inferior spirits is juliet placed; her haughty parents, and her plebeian nurse, not only throw into beautiful relief her own native softness and elegance, but are at once the cause and the excuse of her subsequent conduct. she trembles before her stern mother and her violent father: but, like a petted child, alternately cajoles and commands her nurse. it is her old foster-mother who is the confidante of her love. it is the woman who cherished her infancy, who aids and abets her in her clandestine marriage. do we not perceive how immediately our impression of juliet's character would have been lowered, if shakspeare had placed her in connection with any common-place dramatic waiting-woman?--even with portia's adroit nerissa, or desdemona's emilia? by giving her the nurse for her confidante, the sweetness and dignity of juliet's character are preserved inviolate to the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance and wilfulness of passion. the natural result of these extremes of subjection and independence, is exhibited in the character of juliet, as it gradually opens upon us. we behold it in the mixture of self-will and timidity, of strength and weakness, of confidence and reserve, which are developed as the action of the play proceeds. we see it in the fond eagerness of the indulged girl, for whose impatience the "nimblest of the lightning-winged loves" had been too slow a messenger; in her petulance with her nurse; in those bursts of vehement feeling, which prepare us for the climax of passion at the catastrophe; in her invectives against romeo, when she hears of the death of tybalt; in her indignation when the nurse echoes those reproaches, and the rising of her temper against unwonted contradiction:-- nurse. shame come to romeo! juliet. blistered be thy tongue, for such a wish! he was not born to shame. then comes that revulsion of strong feeling, that burst of magnificent exultation in the virtue and honor of her lover:-- upon _his_ brow shame is ashamed to sit, for 'tis a throne where honor may be crown'd sole monarch of the universal earth! and this, by one of those quick transitions of feeling which belong to the character, is immediately succeeded by a gush of tenderness and self-reproach-- ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, when i, thy three-hours' wife, have mangled it? with the same admirable truth of nature, juliet is represented as at first bewildered by the fearful destiny that closes round her; reverse is new and terrible to one nursed in the lap of luxury, and whose energies are yet untried. alack, alack, that heaven should practise stratagems upon so soft a subject as myself. while a stay remains to her amid the evils that encompass her, she clings to it. she appeals to her father--to her mother-- good father, i beseech you on my knees, hear me with patience but to speak one word! * * * * ah, sweet my mother, cast me not away! delay this marriage for a month,--a week! and, rejected by both, she throws herself upon her nurse in all the helplessness of anguish, of confiding affection, of habitual dependence-- o god! o nurse! how shall this be prevented? some comfort, nurse! the old woman, true to her vocation, and fearful lest her share in these events should be discovered, counsels her to forget romeo and marry paris; and the moment which unveils to juliet the weakness and baseness of her confidante, is the moment which reveals her to herself. she does not break into upbraidings; it is no moment for anger; it is incredulous amazement, succeeded by the extremity of scorn and abhorrence, which take possession of her mind. she assumes at once and asserts all her own superiority, and rises to majesty in the strength of her despair. juliet. speakest thou from thy heart? nurse. aye, and from my soul too;--or else beshrew them both! juliet. amen! this final severing of all the old familiar ties of her childhood-- go, counsellor! thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain! and the calm, concentrated force of her resolve, if all else fail,--myself have power to die; have a sublime pathos. it appears to me also an admirable touch of nature, considering the master-passion which, at this moment, rules in juliet's soul, that she is as much shocked by the nurse's dispraise of her lover, as by her wicked, time-serving advice. this scene is the crisis in the character; and henceforth we see juliet assume a new aspect. the fond, impatient, timid girl, puts on the wife and the woman: she has learned heroism from suffering, and subtlety from oppression. it is idle to criticize her dissembling submission to her father and mother; a higher duty has taken place of that which she owed to them; a more sacred tie has severed all others. her parents are pictured as they are, that no feeling for them may interfere in the slightest degree with our sympathy for the lovers. in the mind of juliet there is no struggle between her filial and her conjugal duties, and there ought to be none. the friar, her spiritual director, dismisses her with these instructions:-- go home,--be merry,--give consent to marry paris; and she obeys him. death and suffering in every horrid form she is ready to brave, without fear or doubt, "to live an unstained wife:" and the artifice to which she has recourse, which she is even instructed to use, in no respect impairs the beauty of the character; we regard it with pain and pity; but excuse it, as the natural and inevitable consequence of the situation in which she is placed. nor should we forget, that the dissimulation, as well as the courage of juliet, though they spring from passion, are justified by principle:-- my husband is on earth, my faith in heaven; how shall my faith return again to earth, unless that husband send it me from heaven? in her successive appeals to her father, her mother, her nurse, and the friar, she seeks those remedies which would first suggest themselves to a gentle and virtuous nature, and grasps her dagger only as the last resource against dishonor and violated faith;-- god join'd my heart with romeo's,--thou our hands. and ere this hand, by thee to romeo seal'd, shall be the label to another deed, or my true heart with treacherous revolt turn to another,--_this_ shall slay them both! thus, in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion and terror, preserving, to a certain degree, that moral and feminine dignity which harmonizes with our best feelings, and commands our unreproved sympathy. i reserve my remarks on the catastrophe, which demands separate consideration; and return to trace from the opening, another and distinguishing trait in juliet's character. in the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the action, the language, the sentiments of the drama, juliet resembles portia; but with this striking difference. in portia, the imaginative power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the other intellectual and moral faculties, that it does not give us the idea of excess. it is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns and heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. in juliet, it is rather a part of her southern temperament, controlling and modifying the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility, hurried along by her passions, animating her joys, darkening her sorrows, exaggerating her terrors, and, in the end, overpowering her reason. with juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her imagination. it is through the power of imagination that the eloquence of juliet is so vividly poetical; that every feeling, every sentiment comes to her, clothed in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from her mind to ours. the poetry is not here the mere adornment, the outward garnishing of the character; but its result, or rather blended with its essence. it is indivisible from it, and interfused through it like moonlight through the summer air. to particularize is almost impossible, since the whole of the dialogue appropriated to juliet is one rich stream of imagery: she speaks in pictures and sometimes they are crowded one upon another--thus in the balcony scene-- i have no joy of this contract to-night: it is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning which doth cease to be ere one can say it lightens. this bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. again, o for a falconer's voice to lure this tassel-gentle back again! bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud, else would i tear the cave where echo lies, and make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine with repetition of my romeo's name. here there are three images in the course of six lines. in the same scene, the speech of twenty-two lines, beginning, thou know'st the mask of night is on my face, contains but one figurative expression, _the mask of night_; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. the reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked and subdued for the time. in the soliloquy of the second act, where she is chiding at the nurse's delay:-- o she is lame! love's heralds should be thoughts, that ten times faster glide than the sun's beams, driving back shadows over low'ring hills: therefore do nimble-pinioned doves draw love, and therefore hath the wind-swift cupid wings! how beautiful! how the lines mount and float responsive to the sense! she goes on-- had she affections, and warm youthful blood, she'd be as swift in motion as a ball; my words should bandy her to my sweet love, and his to me! the famous soliloquy, "gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," teems with luxuriant imagery. the fond adjuration, "come night! come romeo! _come thou day in night_!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only juliet could or would have expressed it,--in a bold and beautiful metaphor. let it be remembered, that, in this speech, juliet is not supposed to be addressing an audience, nor even a confidante; and i confess i have been shocked at the utter want of taste and refinement in those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of prudery, yet more gross and perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful "hymn to the night," breathed out by juliet in the silence and solitude of her chamber. she is thinking aloud; it is the young heart "triumphing to itself in words." in the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the night to bring romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language, that the charm of sentiment and innocence is thrown over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may not wear them." it is at the very moment too that her whole heart and fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that the nurse enters with the news of romeo's banishment; and the immediate transition from rapture to despair has a most powerful effect. it is the same shaping spirit of imagination which, in the scene with the friar, heaps together all images of horror that ever hung upon a troubled dream. o bid me leap, rather than marry paris, from off the battlements of yonder tower, or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk where serpents are--chain me with roaring bears, or shut me nightly in a charnel-house o'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones; or bid me go into a new made grave; or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;-- things that to hear them told have made me tremble but she immediately adds,-- and i will do it without fear or doubt, to live an unstained wife to my sweet love! in the scene where she drinks the sleeping potion, although her spirit does not quail, nor her determination falter for an instant, her vivid fancy conjures up one terrible apprehension after another, till gradually, and most naturally in such a mind once thrown off its poise, the horror rises to frenzy--her imagination realizes its own hideous creations, and she _sees_ her cousin tybalt's ghost.[ ] in particular passages this luxuriance of fancy may seem to wander into excess. for instance,-- o serpent heart, hid with a flowery face! did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! dove-feather'd raven! wolfish ravening lamb, &c. yet this highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is defended by schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it appears natural, however critics may argue against its taste or propriety.[ ] the warmth and vivacity of juliet's fancy, which plays like a light over every part of her character--which animates every line she utters--which kindles every thought into a picture, and clothes her emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and unusual excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some extravagance of diction.[ ] with regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of much critical argument, it is well known that shakspeare, following the old english versions, has departed from the original story of da porta;[ ] and i am inclined to believe that da porta, in making juliet waken from her trance while romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final scene between the lovers, has himself departed from the old tradition, and, as a romance, has certainly improved it; but that which is effective in a narrative, is not always calculated for the drama, and i cannot but agree with schlegel, that shakspeare has done well and wisely in adhering to the old story. can we doubt for a moment that he who has given us the catastrophe of othello, and the tempest scene in lear, might also have adopted these additional circumstances of horror in the fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our very soul--had it been his object to do so? but apparently it was _not_. the tale is one, such as, once heard, in gentle heart destroys all pain but pity. it is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. we behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it. romeo and juliet _must_ die; their destiny is fulfilled; they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. what have they to do more upon this earth? young, innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,--not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. romeo and juliet are pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror, which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture. romeo's last speech over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed boy: in its deep pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very luxury of life and love. juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion in a fit of frenzy, wakes calm and collected-- i do remember well where i should be, and there i am--where is my romeo? the profound slumber in which her senses have been steeped for so many hours has tranquillized her nerves, and stilled the fever in her blood; she wakes "like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something promised to it by its mother," and opens her eyes to ask for it-- ... where is my romeo? she is answered at once,-- thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead. this is enough: she sees at once the whole horror of her situation--she sees it with a quiet and resolved despair--she utters no reproach against the friar--makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that affecting remonstrance-- o churl--drink all, and leave no friendly drop to help me after! all that is left to her is to die, and she dies. the poem, which opened with the enmity of the two families, closes with their reconciliation over the breathless remains of their children; and no violent, frightful, or discordant feeling is suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh. "a youthful passion," says goëthe, (alluding to one of his own early attachments,) "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls--it bursts--consuming and destroying all around, even as itself expires." * * * * * to conclude: love, considered under its poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination and accordingly, to one of these, or to both, all the qualities of juliet's mind and heart (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama proceeds) may be finally traced; the former concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections and high energies, which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power and individual interest: the latter diverging from all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth. with all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education: and the action of the drama, while it serves to develope the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "le mystère de l'existence," said madame de staël to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines." helena. in the character of juliet we have seen the passionate and the imaginative blended in an equal degree, and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with delicate female nature. in helena we have a modification of character altogether distinct; allied, indeed, to juliet as a picture of fervent, enthusiastic, self-forgetting love, but differing wholly from her in other respects; for helen is the union of strength of passion with strength of character. "to be tremblingly alive to gentle impressions, and yet be able to preserve, when the prosecution of a design requires it, an immovable heart amidst even the most imperious causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind, but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity."[ ] such a character, almost as difficult to delineate in fiction as to find in real life, has shakspeare given us in helena; touched with the most soul-subduing pathos, and developed with the most consummate skill. helena, as a woman, is more passionate than imaginative; and, as a character, she bears the same relation to juliet that isabel bears to portia. there is equal unity of purpose and effect, with much less of the glow of imagery and the external coloring of poetry in the sentiments, language, and details. it is passion developed under its most profound and serious aspect; as in isabella, we have the serious and the thoughtful, not the brilliant side of intellect. both helena and isabel are distinguished by high mental powers, tinged with a melancholy sweetness; but in isabella the serious and energetic part of the character is founded in religious principle; in helena it is founded in deep passion. there never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment--not pining in thought--not passive and "desponding over its idol"--but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith. the passion here reposes upon itself for all its interest; it derives nothing from art or ornament or circumstance; it has nothing of the picturesque charm or glowing romance of juliet; nothing of the poetical splendor of portia, or the vestal grandeur of isabel. the situation of helena is the most painful and degrading in which a woman can be placed. she is poor and lowly; she loves a man who is far her superior in rank, who repays her love with indifference, and rejects her hand with scorn. she marries him against his will; he leaves her with contumely on the day of their marriage, and makes his return to her arms depend on conditions apparently impossible.[ ] all the circumstances and details with which helena is surrounded, are shocking to our feelings and wounding to our delicacy: and yet the beauty of the character is made to triumph over all: and shakspeare, resting for all his effect on its internal resources and its genuine truth and sweetness, has not even availed himself of some extraneous advantages with which helen is represented in the original story. she is the giletta di narbonna of boccaccio. in the italian tale, giletta is the daughter of a celebrated physician attached to the court of roussillon; she is represented as a rich heiress, who rejects many suitors of worth and rank, in consequence of her secret attachment to the young bertram de roussillon. she cures the king of france of a grievous distemper, by one of her fathers prescriptions; and she asks and receives as her reward the young count of roussillon as her wedded husband. he forsakes her on their wedding day, and she retires, by his order, to his territory of roussillon. there she is received with honor, takes state upon her in her husband's absence as the "lady of the land," administers justice, and rules her lord's dominions so wisely and so well, that she is universally loved and reverenced by his subjects. in the mean time, the count, instead of rejoining her, flies to tuscany, and the rest of the story is closely followed in the drama. the beauty, wisdom, and royal demeanor of giletta are charmingly described, as well as her fervent love for bertram. but helena, in the play, derives no dignity or interest from place or circumstance, and rests for all our sympathy and respect solely upon the truth and intensity of her affections. she is indeed represented to us as one whose beauty did astonish the survey of richest eyes: whose words all ears took captive; whose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve. humbly called mistress. as her dignity is derived from mental power, without any alloy of pride, so her humility has a peculiar grace. if she feels and repines over her lowly birth, it is merely as an obstacle which separates her from the man she loves. she is more sensible to his greatness than her own littleness: she is continually looking from herself up to him, not from him down to herself. she has been bred up under the same roof with him; she has adored him from infancy. her love is not "th' infection taken in at the eyes," nor kindled by youthful romance: it appears to have taken root in her being; to have grown with her years; and to have gradually absorbed all her thoughts and faculties, until her fancy "carries no favor in it but bertram's," and "there is no living, none, if bertram be away." it may be said that bertram, arrogant, wayward, and heartless, does not justify this ardent and deep devotion. but helena does not behold him with our eyes; but as he is "sanctified in her idolatrous fancy." dr. johnson says he cannot reconcile himself to a man who marries helena like a coward, and leaves her like a profligate. this is much too severe; in the first place, there is no necessity that we _should_ reconcile ourselves to him. in this consists a part of the wonderful beauty of the character of helena--a part of its womanly truth, which johnson, who accuses bertram, and those who so plausibly defend him, did not understand. if it never happened in real life, that a woman, richly endued with heaven's best gifts, loved with all her heart, and soul, and strength, a man unequal to or unworthy of her, and to whose faults herself alone was blind--i would give up the point: but if it be in nature, why should it not be in shakspeare? we are not to look into bertram's character for the spring and source of helena's love for him, but into her own. she loves bertram,--because she loves him!--a woman's reason,--but here, and sometimes elsewhere, all-sufficient. and although helena tells herself that she loves in vain, a conviction stronger than reason tells her that she does not: her love is like a religion, pure, holy, and deep: the blessedness to which she has lifted her thoughts is forever before her; to despair would be a crime,--it would be to cast herself away and die. the faith of her affection, combining with the natural energy of her character, believing all things possible makes them so. it could say to the mountain of pride which stands between her and her hopes, "be thou removed!" and it is removed. this is the solution of her behavior in the marriage scene, where bertram, with obvious reluctance and disdain, accepts her hand, which the king, his feudal lord and guardian, forces on him. her maidenly feeling is at first shocked, and she shrinks back-- that you are well restor'd, my lord, i am glad: let the rest go. but shall she weakly relinquish the golden opportunity, and dash the cup from her lips at the moment it is presented? shall she cast away the treasure for which she has ventured both life and honor, when it is just within her grasp? shall she, after compromising her feminine delicacy by the public disclosure of her preference, be thrust back into shame, "to blush out the remainder of her life," and die a poor, lost, scorned thing? this would be very pretty and interesting and characteristic in viola or ophelia, but not at all consistent with that high determined spirit, that moral energy, with which helena is portrayed. pride is the only obstacle opposed to her. she is not despised and rejected as a woman, but as a poor physician's daughter; and this, to an understanding so clear, so strong, so just as helena's, is not felt as an unpardonable insult. the mere pride of rank and birth is a prejudice of which she cannot comprehend the force, because her mind towers so immeasurably above it; and, compared to the infinite love which swells within her own bosom, it sinks into nothing. she cannot conceive that he, to whom she has devoted her heart and truth, her soul, her life, her service, must not one day love her in return; and once her own beyond the reach of fate, that her cares, her caresses, her unwearied patient tenderness, will not at last "win her lord to look upon her"-- ... for time will bring on summer, when briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, and be as sweet as sharp. it is this fond faith which, hoping all things, enables her to endure all things:--which hallows and dignifies the surrender of her woman's pride, making it a sacrifice on which virtue and love throw a mingled incense. the scene in which the countess extorts from helen the confession of her love, must, as an illustration, be given here. it is perhaps, the finest in the whole play, and brings out all the striking points of helen's character, to which i have already alluded. we must not fail to remark, that though the acknowledgment is wrung from her with an agony which seems to convulse her whole being, yet when once she has given it solemn utterance, she recovers her presence of mind, and asserts her native dignity. in her justification of her feelings and her conduct, there is neither sophistry, nor self-deception, nor presumption, but a noble simplicity, combined with the most impassioned earnestness; while the language naturally rises in its eloquent beauty, as the tide of feeling, now first let loose from the bursting heart, comes pouring forth in words. the whole scene is wonderfully beautiful. helena. what is your pleasure, madam? countess. you know, helen, i am a mother to you. helena. mine honorable mistress. countess nay, a mother; why not a mother? when i said a mother, methought you saw a serpent: what's in mother, that you start at it? i say, i am your mother: and put you in the catalogue of those that were enwombed mine: 'tis often seen, adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds a native slip to us from foreign seeds. you ne'er oppress'd me with a mother's groan, yet i express to you a mother's care;-- god's mercy, maiden! does it curd thy blood, to say, i am thy mother? what's the matter that this distempered messenger of wet, the many-color'd iris, rounds thine eye? why?--that you are my daughter? helena. that i am not. countess. i say, i am your mother. helena. pardon, madam: the count roussillon cannot be my brother: i am from humble, he from honor'd name; no note upon my parents, his all noble: my master, my dear lord he is: and i his servant live, and will his vassal die: he must not be my brother. countess. nor i your mother? helena. you are my mother, madam; would you were (so that my lord, your son, were not my brother,) indeed my mother, or, were you both our mothers, i care no more for, than i do for heaven,[ ] so i were not his sister; can't no other, but i, your daughter, he must be my brother? countess. yes, helen, you might be my daughter-in-law; god shield, you mean it not! daughter and mother so strive upon your pulse: what, pale again? my fear hath catch'd your fondness: now i see the mystery of your loneliness, and find your salt tears' head. now to all sense 'tis gross you love my son; invention is asham'd, against the proclamation of thy passion, to say, thou dost not: therefore tell me true; but tell me, then, 'tis so:--for, look, thy cheeks confess it, one to the other. speak, is't so? if it be so, you have wound a goodly clue! if it be not, forswear't: howe'er, i charge thee, as heaven shall work in me for thy avail, to tell me truly. helena. good madam, pardon me! countess. do you love my son? helena. your pardon, noble mistress! countess. love you my son? helena. do not you love him, madam? countess. go not about; my love hath in't a bond, whereof the world takes note: come, come, disclose the state of your affection; for your passions have to the full appeach'd. helena. then i confess here on my knee, before high heaven and you, that before you, and next unto high heaven, i love your son:-- my friends were poor, but honest; so's my love be not offended; for it hurts not him, that he is loved of me; i follow him not by any token of presumptuous suit; nor would i have him till i do deserve him: yet never know how that desert should be. i know i love in vain; strive against hope; yet, in this captious and untenable sieve, i still pour in the waters of my love, and lack not to love still: thus, indian-like, religious in mine error, i adore the sun that looks upon his worshipper, but knows of him no more. my dearest madam, let not your hate encounter with my love, for loving where you do: but, if yourself, whose aged honor cites a virtuous youth, did ever in so true a flame of liking, wish chastely, and love dearly, that your dian was both herself and love; o then give pity to her, whose state is such, that cannot choose but lend and give, where she is sure to lose; that seeks not to find that her search implies, but, riddle-like, lives sweetly where she dies. this old countess of roussillon is a charming sketch. she is like one of titian's old women, who still, amid their wrinkles, remind us of that soul of beauty and sensibility, which must have animated them when young. she is a fine contrast to lady capulet--benign, cheerful, and affectionate; she has a benevolent enthusiasm, which neither age, nor sorrow, nor pride can wear away. thus, when she is brought to believe that helen nourishes a secret attachment for her son, she observes-- even so it was with me when i was young! this thorn doth to our rose of youth rightly belong, it is the show and seal of nature's truth, when love's strong passion is impress'd in youth. her fond, maternal love for helena, whom she has brought up: her pride in her good qualities overpowering all her own prejudices of rank and birth, are most natural in such a mind; and her indignation against her son, however strongly expressed, never forgets the mother. what angel shall bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive unless _her_ prayers, whom heaven delights to hear and loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath of greatest justice. which of them both is dearest to me--i have no skill in sense to make distinction. this is very skilfully, as well as delicately conceived. in rejecting those poetical and accidental advantages which giletta possesses in the original story, shakspeare has substituted the beautiful character of the countess; and he has contrived, that, as the character of helena should rest for its internal charm on the depth of her own affections, so it should depend for its _external_ interest on the affection she inspires. the enthusiastic tenderness of the old countess, the admiration and respect of the king, lafeu, and all who are brought in connection with her, make amends for the humiliating neglect of bertram; and cast round helen that collateral light, which giletta in the story owes to other circumstances, striking indeed, and well imagined, but not (i think) so finely harmonizing with the character. it is also very natural that helen, with the intuitive discernment of a pure and upright mind, and the penetration of a quick-witted woman, should be the first to detect the falsehood and cowardice of the boaster parolles, who imposes on every one else. it has been remarked, that there is less of poetical imagery in this play than in many of the others. a certain solidity in helen's character takes place of the ideal power; and with consistent truth of keeping, the same predominance of feeling over fancy, of the reflective over the imaginative faculty, is maintained through the whole dialogue. yet the finest passages in the serious scenes are those appropriated to her; they are familiar and celebrated as quotations, but fully to understand their beauty and truth, they should be considered relatively to her character and situation; thus, when in speaking of bertram, she says, "that he is one to whom she wishes well," the consciousness of the disproportion between her words and her feelings draws from her this beautiful and affecting observation, so just in itself, and so true to her situation, and to the sentiment which fills her whole heart:-- 'tis pity that wishing well had not a body in't which might be felt: that we the poorer born, whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes, might with effects of them follow our friends, and act what we must only think, which never returns us thanks. some of her general reflections have a sententious depth and a contemplative melancholy, which remind us of isabella:-- our remedies oft in themselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky gives us free scope; only doth backward pull our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. impossible be strange events to those that weigh their pains in sense; and do suppose what hath been cannot be. he that of greatest works is finisher, oft does them by the weakest minister; so holy writ in babes hath judgment shown, when judges have been babes. oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits, where hope is coldest, and despair most sits. her sentiments in the same manner are remarkable for the union of profound sense with the most passionate feeling; and when her language is figurative, which is seldom, the picture presented to us is invariably touched either with a serious, a lofty, or a melancholy beauty. for instance:-- it were all one that i should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it--he's so far above me. and when she is brought to choose a husband from among the young lords at the court, her heart having already made its election, the strangeness of that very privilege for which she had ventured all, nearly overpowers her, and she says beautifully:-- the blushes on my cheeks thus whisper me, "we blush that thou shouldst choose;--but be refused, let the white death sit on that cheek for ever we'll ne'er come there again!" in her soliloquy after she has been forsaken by bertram, the beauty lies in the intense feeling, the force and simplicity of the expressions. there is little imagery, and wherever it occurs, it is as bold as it is beautiful, and springs out of the energy of the sentiment, and the pathos of the situation. she has been reading his cruel letter. _till i have no wife i have nothing in france._ 'tis bitter! nothing in france, until he has no wife! thou shalt have none, roussillon, none in france, then hast thou all again. poor lord! is't i that chase thee from thy country, and expose those tender limbs of thine to the event of the none-sparing war? and is it i that drive thee from the sportive court, where thou wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark of smoky muskets? o you leaden messengers, that ride upon the violent speed of fire, fly with false aim! move the still-piercing air, that sings with piercing, do not touch my lord! whoever shoots at him, i set him there; whoever charges on his forward breast, i am the caitiff that do hold him to it; and though i kill him not, i am the cause his death was so effected; better 'twere i met the ravin lion when he roared with sharp constraint of hunger; better 'twere that all the miseries which nature owes, were mine at once. no, no, although the air of paradise did fan the house, and angels officed all; i will be gone. though i cannot go the length of those who have defended bertram on almost every point, still i think the censure which johnson has passed on the character is much too severe. bertram is certainly not a pattern hero of romance, but full of faults such as we meet with every day in men of his age and class. he is a bold, ardent, self-willed youth, just dismissed into the world from domestic indulgence, with an excess of aristocratic and military pride, but not without some sense of true honor and generosity. i have lately read a defence of bertram's character, written with much elegance and plausibility. "the young count," says this critic, "comes before us possessed of a good heart, and of no mean capacity, but with a haughtiness which threatens to dull the kinder passions, and to cloud the intellect. this is the inevitable consequence of an illustrious education. the glare of his birthright has dazzled his young faculties. perhaps the first words he could distinguish were from the important nurse, giving elaborate directions about his lordship's pap. as soon as he could walk, a crowd of submissive vassals doffed their caps, and hailed his first appearance on his legs. his spelling book had the arms of the family emblazoned on the cover. he had been accustomed to hear himself called the great, the mighty son of roussillon, ever since he was a helpless child. a succession of complacent tutors would by no means destroy the illusion; and it is from their hands that shakspeare receives him, while yet in his minority. an overweening pride of birth is bertram's great foible. to cure him of this, shakspeare sends him to the wars, that he may win fame for himself, and thus exchange a shadow for a reality. there the great dignity that his valor acquired for him places him on an equality with any one of his ancestors, and he is no longer beholden to them alone for the world's observance. thus in his own person he discovers there is something better than mere hereditary honors; and his heart is prepared to acknowledge that the entire devotion of a helen's love is of more worth than the court-bred smiles of a princess."[ ] it is not extraordinary that, in the first instance, his spirit should revolt at the idea of marrying his mother's "waiting gentlewoman," or that he should refuse her; yet when the king, his feudal lord, whose despotic authority was in this case legal and indisputable, threatens him with the extremity of his wrath and vengeance, that he should submit himself to a hard necessity, was too consistent with the manners of the time to be called _cowardice_. such forced marriages were not uncommon even in our own country, when the right of wardship, now vested in the lord chancellor, was exercised with uncontrolled and often cruel despotism by the sovereign. there is an old ballad, in which the king bestows a maid of low degree on a noble of his court, and the undisguised scorn and reluctance of the knight and the pertinacity of the lady, are in point. he brought her down full forty pound tyed up within a glove, "fair maid, i'll give the same to thee, go seek another love." "o i'll have none of your gold," she said, "nor i'll have none of your fee; but your fair bodye i must have, the king hath granted me." sir william ran and fetched her then, five hundred pounds in gold, saying, "fair maid, take this to thee, my fault will ne'er be told." "'tis not the gold that shall me tempt," these words then answered she; "but your own bodye i must have, the king hath granted me." "would i had drank the water clear, when i did drink the wine, rather than my shepherd's brat should be a ladye of mine!"[ ] bertram's disgust at the tyranny which has made his freedom the payment of another's debt, which has united him to a woman whose merits are not towards him--whose secret love, and long-enduring faith, are yet unknown and untried--might well make his bride distasteful to him. he flies her on the very day of their marriage, most like a wilful, haughty, angry boy, but not like a profligate. on other points he is not so easily defended; and shakspeare, we see, has not defended, but corrected him. the latter part of the play is more perplexing than pleasing. we do not, indeed, repine with dr. johnson, that bertram, after all his misdemeanors, is "dismissed to happiness;" but, not withstanding the clever defence that has been made for him, he has our pardon rather than our sympathy; and for mine own part, i could find it easier to love bertram as helena does, than to excuse him; her love for him is his best excuse. perdita. in viola and perdita the distinguishing traits are the same--sentiment and elegance; thus we associate them together, though nothing can be more distinct to the fancy than the doric grace of perdita, compared to the romantic sweetness of viola. they are created out of the same materials, and are equal to each other in the tenderness, delicacy, and poetical beauty of the conception. they are both more imaginative than passionate; but perdita is the more imaginative of the two. she is the union of the pastoral and romantic with the classical and poetical, as if a dryad of the woods had turned shepherdess. the perfections with which the poet has so lavishly endowed her, sit upon her with a certain careless and picturesque grace, "as though they had fallen upon her unawares." thus belphoebe, in the fairy queen, issues from the flowering forest with hair and garments all besprinkled with the leaves and blossoms they had entangled in their flight; and so arrayed by chance and "heedless hap," takes all hearts with "stately presence and with princely port,"--most like to perdita! the story of florizel and perdita is but an episode in the "winter's tale;" and the character of perdita is properly kept subordinate to that of her mother, hermione: yet the picture is perfectly finished in every part;--juliet herself is not more firmly and distinctly drawn. but the coloring in perdita is more silvery light and delicate; the pervading sentiment more touched with the ideal; compared with juliet, she is like a guido hung beside a georgione, or one of paesiello's airs heard after one of mozart's. the qualities which impart to perdita her distinct individuality, are the beautiful combination of the pastoral with the elegant--of simplicity with elevation--of spirit with sweetness. the exquisite delicacy of the picture is apparent. to understand and appreciate its effective truth and nature, we should place perdita beside some of the nymphs of arcadia, or the chloris' and sylvias of the italian pastorals, who, however graceful in themselves, when opposed to perdita, seem to melt away into mere poetical abstractions;--as, in spenser, the fair but fictitious florimel, which the subtle enchantress had moulded out of snow, "vermeil tinctured," and informed with an airy spirit, that knew "all wiles of woman's wits," fades and dissolves away, when placed next to the real florimel, in her warm, breathing, human loveliness. perdita does not appear till the fourth act, and the whole of the character is developed in the course of a single scene, (the third,) with a completeness of effect which leaves nothing to be required--nothing to be supplied. she is first introduced in the dialogue between herself and florizel, where she compares her own lowly state to his princely rank, and expresses her fears of the issue of their unequal attachment. with all her timidity and her sense of the distance which separates her from her lover, she breathes not a single word which could lead us to impugn either her delicacy or her dignity. florizel. these your unusual weeds to each part of you do give a life--no shepherdess, but flora peering in april's front; this your sheep-shearing is as the meeting of the petty gods, and you the queen on't. perdita. sir, my gracious lord, to chide at your extremes it not becomes me; o pardon that i name them: your high self, the gracious mark o' the land, you have obscured with a swain's bearing; and me, poor lowly maid, most goddess-like prank'd up:--but that our feasts in every mess have folly, and the feeders digest it with a custom, i should blush to see you so attired; sworn, i think to show myself a glass. the impression of her perfect beauty and airy elegance of demeanor is conveyed in two exquisite passages:-- what you do still betters what is done. when you speak, sweet, i'd have you do it ever. when you sing, i'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms, pray so, and for the ordering your affairs to sing them too. when you do dance, i wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that; move still, still so, and own no other function. i take thy hand; this hand as soft as dove's down, and as white as it; or ethiopian's tooth, or the fann'd snow, that's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er. the artless manner in which her innate nobility of soul shines forth through her pastoral disguise, is thus brought before us at once:-- this is the prettiest low-born lass that ever ran on the green sward; nothing she does or seems, but smacks of something greater than herself; too noble for this place. her natural loftiness of spirit breaks out where she is menaced and reviled by the king, as one whom his son has degraded himself by merely looking on; she bears the royal frown without quailing; but the moment he is gone, the immediate recollection of herself, and of her humble state, of her hapless love, is full of beauty, tenderness, and nature:-- even here undone! i was much afeard: for once or twice, i was about to speak; and tell him plainly the self-same sun, that shines upon his court hides not his visage from our cottage, but looks on alike. will't please, you sir, be gone? i told you what would come of this. beseech you, of your own state take care; this dream of mine-- being now awake--i'll queen it no inch further, but milk my ewes, and weep. how often have i told you 'twould be thus how often said, my dignity would last but till 'twere known! florizel. it cannot fail, but by the violation of my faith; and then let nature crush the sides o' the earth together and mar the seeds within! lift up thy looks. * * * * not for bohemia, nor the pomp that may be thereat glean'd! for all the sun sees, or the close earth wombs, or the profound seas hide in unknown fathoms, will i break my oath to thee, my fair beloved! perdita has another characteristic, which lends to the poetical delicacy of the delineation a certain strength and moral elevation, which is peculiarly striking. it is that sense of truth and rectitude, that upright simplicity of mind, which disdains all crooked and indirect means, which would not stoop for an instant to dissemblance, and is mingled with a noble confidence in her love and in her lover. in this spirit is her answer to camilla, who says, courtier like,-- besides, you know prosperity's the very bond of love; whose fresh complexion, and whose heart together affliction alters. to which she replies,-- one of these is true; i think, affliction may subdue the cheek, but not take in the mind. in that elegant scene where she receives the guests at the sheep-shearing, and distributes the flowers, there is in the full flow of the poetry, a most beautiful and striking touch of individual character: but here it is impossible to mutilate the dialogue. reverend sirs, for you there's rosemary and rue; these keep seeming and savor all the winter long; grace and remembrance be to you both, and welcome to our shearing! polixenes. shepherdess, (a fair one are you,) well you fit our ages with flowers of winter. perdita. sir, the year growing ancient, nor yet on summer's death, nor on the birth of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season are our carnations, and streaked gilliflowers, which some call nature's bastards: of that kind our rustic garden's barren; and i care not to get slips of them. polixenes. wherefore, gentle maiden, do you neglect them? perdita. for i have heard it said, there is an art, which in their piedness, shares with great creating nature. polixenes. say there be; yet nature is made better by no mean but nature makes that mean; so o'er that art which, you say, adds to nature, is an art that nature makes. you see, sweet maid, we marry a gentle scion to the wildest stock; and make conceive a bark of baser kind by bud of nobler race. this is an art which does mend nature, change it rather; but the art itself is nature. perdita. so it is. polixenes. then make your garden rich in gilliflowers, and do not call them bastards. perdita. i'll not put the dibble in earth to set one slip of them; no more than were i painted, i would wish this youth should say 'twere well. it has been well remarked of this passage, that perdita does not attempt to answer the reasoning of polixenes: she gives up the argument, but, woman-like, retains her own opinion, or rather, her sense of right, unshaken by his sophistry. she goes on in a strain of poetry, which comes over the soul like music and fragrance mingled: we seem to inhale the blended odors of a thousand flowers, till the sense faints with their sweetness; and she concludes with a touch of passionate sentiment, which melts into the very heart:-- o proserpina! for the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall from dis's wagon! daffodils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of march with beauty; violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of juno's eyes, or cytherea's breath; pale primroses, that die unmarried, ere they can behold bright phoebus in his strength, a malady most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and the crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, the flower-de-luce being one! o, these i lack, to make you garlands of; and my sweet friend to strew him o'er and o'er. florizel. what! like a corse? perdita. no, like a bank, for love to lie and play on; not like a corse: or if,--not to be buried, but quick, and in mine arms! this love of truth, this _conscientiousness_, which forms so distinct a feature in the character of perdita, and mingles with its picturesque delicacy a certain firmness and dignity, is maintained consistently to the last. when the two lovers fly together from bohemia, and take refuge in the court of leontes, the real father of perdita, florizel presents himself before the king with a feigned tale, in which he has been artfully instructed by the old counsellor camillo. during this scene, perdita does not utter a word. in the strait in which they are placed, she cannot deny the story which florizel relates--she will not confirm it. her silence, in spite of all the compliments and greetings of leontes, has a peculiar and characteristic grace and, at the conclusion of the scene, when they are betrayed, the truth bursts from her as if instinctively, and she exclaims, with emotion,-- the heavens set spies upon us--will not have our contract celebrated. after this scene, perdita says very little. the description of her grief, while listening to the relation of her mother's death,-- "one of the prettiest touches of all, was, when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came by it, how attentiveness wounded her daughter: till from one sign of dolor to another, she did, with an _alas_! i would fain say, bleed tears:"-- her deportment too as she stands gazing on the statue of hermione, fixed in wonder, admiration and sorrow, as if she too were marble-- o royal piece! there's magic in thy majesty, which has from thy admiring daughter ta'en the spirits, standing like stone beside thee! are touches of character conveyed indirectly, and which serve to give a more finished effect to this beautiful picture. viola. as the innate dignity of perdita pierces through her rustic disguise, so the exquisite refinement of viola triumphs over her masculine attire. viola is, perhaps, in a degree less elevated and ideal than perdita, but with a touch of sentiment more profound and heart-stirring; she is "deep-learned in the lore of love,"--at least theoretically,--and speaks as masterly on the subject as perdita does of flowers. duke. how dost thou like this tune? viola. it gives a very echo to the seat where love is thron'd. and again, if i did love you in my master's flame, with such a suffering, such a deadly life-- in your denial i would find no sense, i would not understand it. olivia. why, what would you do? viola. make me a willow cabin at your gate, and call upon my soul within the house; write loyal cantons[ ] of contemned love, and sing them loud even in the dead of night. holla your name to the reverberate hills, and make babbling gossip of the air cry out, olivia! o you should not rest between the elements of air and earth, but you should pity me. olivia. you might do much. the situation and the character of viola have been censured for their want of consistency and probability; it is therefore worth while to examine how far this criticism is true. as for her situation in the drama, (of which she is properly the heroine,) it is shortly this. she is shipwrecked on the coast of illyria: she is alone and without protection in a strange country. she wishes to enter into the service of the countess olivia; but she is assured that this is impossible; "for the lady having recently lost an only and beloved brother, has abjured the sight of men, has shut herself up in her palace, and will admit no kind of suit." in this perplexity viola remembers to have heard her father speak with praise and admiration of orsino, the duke of the country; and having ascertained that he is not married, and that therefore his court is not a proper asylum for her in her feminine character, she attires herself in the disguise of a page, as the best protection against uncivil comments, till she can gain some tidings of her brother. if we carry our thoughts back to a romantic and chivalrous age, there is surely sufficient probability here for all the purposes of poetry. to pursue the thread of viola's destiny;--she is engaged in the service of the duke, whom she finds "fancy-sick" for the love of olivia. we are left to infer, (for so it is hinted in the first scene,) that this duke--who with his accomplishments, and his personal attractions, his taste for music, his chivalrous tenderness, and his unrequited love, is really a very fascinating and poetical personage, though a little passionate and fantastic--had already made some impression on viola's imagination; and when she comes to play the confidante, and to be loaded with favors and kindness in her assumed character, that she should be touched by a passion made up of pity, admiration, gratitude, and tenderness, does not, i think, in any way detract from the genuine sweetness and delicacy of her character, for "_she never told her love_." now all this, as the critic wisely observes, may not present a very just picture of life; and it may also fail to impart any moral lesson for the especial profit of well-bred young ladies; but is it not in truth and in nature? did it ever fail to charm or to interest, to seize on the coldest fancy, to touch the most insensible heart? viola then is the chosen favorite of the enamoured duke, and becomes his messenger to olivia, and the interpreter of his sufferings to that inaccessible beauty. in her character of a youthful page, she attracts the favor of olivia, and excites the jealousy of her lord. the situation is critical and delicate; but how exquisitely is the character of viola fitted to her part, carrying her through the ordeal with all the inward and spiritual grace of modesty. what beautiful propriety in the distinction drawn between rosalind and viola! the wild sweetness, the frolic humor which sports free and unblamed amid the shades of ardennes, would ill become viola, whose playfulness is assumed as part of her disguise as a court-page, and is guarded by the strictest delicacy. she has not, like rosalind, a saucy enjoyment in her own incognito; her disguise does not sit so easily upon her; her heart does not beat freely under it. as in the old ballad, where "sweet william" is detected weeping in secret over her "man's array,"[ ] so in viola, a sweet consciousness of her feminine nature is for ever breaking through her masquerade:-- and on her cheek is ready with a blush modest as morning, when she coldly eyes the youthful phoebus. she plays her part well, but never forgets nor allows us to forget, that she is playing a part. olivia. are you a comedian? viola. no, my profound heart! and yet by the very fangs of malice i swear, i am not that i play! and thus she comments on it:-- disguise, i see thou art wickedness, wherein the pregnant enemy does much; how easy is it for the proper false in women's waxen hearts to set their forms! alas! our frailty is the cause, not we. the feminine cowardice of viola, which will not allow her even to affect a courage becoming her attire,--her horror at the idea of drawing a sword, is very natural and characteristic; and produces a most humorous effect, even at the very moment it charms and interests us. contrasted with the deep, silent, patient love of viola for the duke, we have the lady-like wilfulness of olivia; and her sudden passion, or rather fancy, for the disguised page, takes so beautiful a coloring of poetry and sentiment, that we do not think her forward. olivia is like a princess of romance, and has all the privileges of one; she is, like portia, high born and high bred, mistress over her servants--but not like portia, "queen o'er herself." she has never in her life been opposed; the first contradiction, therefore, rouses all the woman in her, and turns a caprice into a headlong passion; yet she apologizes for herself. i have said too much unto a heart of stone, and laid mine honor too unchary out; there's something in me that reproves my fault; but such a headstrong potent fault it is, that it but mocks reproof! and in the midst of her self-abandonment, never allows us to contemn, even while we pity her:-- what shall you ask of me that i'll deny. that honor, saved, may upon asking give? the distance of rank which separates the countess from the youthful page--the real sex of viola--the dignified elegance of olivia's deportment, except where passion gets the better of her pride--her consistent coldness towards the duke--the description of that "smooth, discreet, and stable bearing" with which she rules her household--her generous care for her steward malvolio, in the midst of her own distress,--all these circumstances raise olivia in our fancy, and render her caprice for the page a source of amusement and interest, not a subject of reproach. _twelfth night_ is a genuine comedy;--a perpetual spring of the gayest and the sweetest fancies. in artificial society men and women are divided into castes and classes, and it is rarely that extremes in character or manners can approximate. to blend into one harmonious picture the utmost grace and refinement of sentiment, and the broadest effects of humor; the most poignant wit, and the most indulgent benignity;--in short, to bring before us in the same scene, viola and olivia, with malvolio and sir toby, belonged only to nature and to shakspeare. ophelia. a woman's affections, however strong, are sentiments, when they run smooth; and become passions only when opposed. in juliet and helena, love is depicted as a passion, properly so called; that is, a natural impulse, throbbing in the heart's blood, and mingling with the very sources of life;--a sentiment more or less modified by the imagination; a strong abiding principle and motive, excited by resistance, acting upon the will, animating all the other faculties, and again influenced by them. this is the most complex aspect of love, and in these two characters, it is depicted in colors at once the most various, the most intense, and the most brilliant. in viola and perdita, love, being less complex, appears more refined; more a sentiment than a passion--a compound of impulse and fancy, while the reflective powers and moral energies are more faintly developed. the same remark applies also to julia and silvia, in the two gentlemen of verona, and, in a greater degree, to hermia and helena in the midsummer night's dream. in the two latter, though perfectly discriminated, love takes the visionary fanciful cast, which belongs to the whole piece; it is scarcely a passion or a sentiment, but a dreamy enchantment, a reverie, which a fairy spell dissolves or fixes at pleasure. but there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this shakspeare has shown to us. he has portrayed two beings, in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing; in whom love is an unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles--as modesty, grace,[ ] tenderness. _without_ these a woman is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; _with_ these, though every other faculty were passive or deficient, she might still be herself. these are the inherent qualities with which god sent us into the world: they may be perverted by a bad education--they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies--they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some passion--but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul, while it retains those faculties which render it responsible to its creator. shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial influences, suffice to constitute a perfect and happy human creature: such is miranda. when thrown alone amid harsh and adverse destinies, and amid the trammels and corruptions of society, without energy to resist, or will to act, or strength to endure, the end must needs be desolation. ophelia--poor ophelia! o far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! what shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! like a strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear--like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms--like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth--like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses--such is the character of ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. the love of ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. her sorrows ask not words but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy. beyond every character that shakspeare has drawn, (hamlet alone excepted,) that of ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation. whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. the effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few, and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought of them. it is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, as hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art. the situation of ophelia in the story,[ ] is that of a young girl who, at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a court--a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. she is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is apparently her favorite attendant. the affection of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature, is one of those beautiful redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling which we find only in shakspeare. gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there remains within her heart some sense of the virtue she has forfeited, seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of ophelia, is one of those effects of contrast in poetry, in character and in feeling, at once natural and unexpected; which fill the eye, and make the heart swell and tremble within itself--like the nightingales singing in the grove of the furies in sophocles.[ ] again, in the father of ophelia, the lord chamberlain polonius--the shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier--have we not the very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it could teach of good and evil, but keep his only daughter as far as possible from every taint of that world he knew so well? so that when she is brought to the court, she seems in her loveliness and perfect purity, like a seraph that had wandered out of bounds, and yet breathed on earth the air of paradise. when her father and her brother find it necessary to warn her simplicity, give her lessons of worldly wisdom, and instruct her "to be scanter of her maiden presence," for that hamlet's vows of love "but breathe like sanctified and pious bonds, the better to beguile," we feel at once that it comes too late; for from the moment she appears on the scene amid the dark conflict of crime and vengeance, and supernatural terrors, we know what must be her destiny. once, at murano, i saw a dove caught in a tempest; perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm; but so it was--and i watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird hither and thither, with its silver pinions shining against the black thunder-cloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell blinded, affrighted, and bewildered, into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up forever. it reminded me then of the fate of ophelia; and now when i think of her, i see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amid the storm. it is the helplessness of ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. she is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity; she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them; and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. she says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and with what is passing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of juliet. passion with juliet seems innate, a part of her being, "as dwells the gathered lightning in the cloud;" and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and titian-like complexion of the south. while in ophelia we recognize as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the passion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart far more than she is loved. when her brother warns her against hamlet's importunities-- for hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, hold it a fashion, and a toy of blood, a violet in the youth of primy nature, forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, the perfume and the suppliance of a minute-- no more! she replies with a kind of half consciousness-- no more but so? laertes. think it no more. he concludes his admonition with that most beautiful passage, in which the soundest sense, the most excellent advice, is conveyed in a strain of the most exquisite poetry. the chariest maid is prodigal enough, if she unmask her beauty to the moon: virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes. the canker galls the infants of the spring too oft before their buttons be disclos'd: and in the morn and liquid dew of youth, contagious blastments are most imminent. she answers with the same modesty, yet with a kind of involuntary avowal, that his fears are not altogether without cause:-- i shall the effect of this good lesson keep as watchman to my heart. but, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; whilst, like the puff'd and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, and recks not his own read.[ ] when her father, immediately afterwards, catechizes her on the same subject, he extorts from her, in short sentences, uttered with bashful reluctance, the confession of hamlet's love for her, but not a word of her love for him. the whole scene is managed with inexpressible delicacy: it is one of those instances, common in shakspeare, in which we are allowed to perceive what is passing in the mind of a person, without any consciousness on their part. only ophelia herself is unaware that while she is admitting the extent of hamlet's courtship, she is also betraying how deep is the impression it has made, how entire the love with which it is returned. polonius. what is between you? give me up the truth! ophelia. he hath, my lord, of late, made many tenders of his affection to me. polonius. affection! poh! you speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstances. do you believe his tenders, as you call them? ophelia. i do not know, my lord, what i should think. polonius. marry, i'll teach you: think yourself a baby; that you have taken these tenders for true pay which are not sterling. tender yourself more dearly or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, wronging it thus) you'll tender me a fool. ophelia. my lord, he hath importun'd me with love in honorable fashion. polonius. ay, fashion you may call it; go to, go to. ophelia. and hath given countenance to his speech, my lord, with almost all the holy vows of heaven. polonius. ay, springes to catch woodcocks. this is for all: would not, in plain terms, from this time forth have you so slander any moment's leisure as to give words or talk with the lord hamlet, look to't, i charge you: come your ways. ophelia. i shall obey, my lord. besides its intrinsic loveliness, the character of ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. the weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting: and yet i doubt whether any woman, who would have been capable of understanding and appreciating such a man, would have passionately loved him. let us for a moment imagine any one of shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate connection with hamlet. the gentle desdemona would never have despatched her household cares in haste, to listen to his philosophical speculations, his dark conflicts with his own spirit. such a woman as portia would have studied him; juliet would have pitied him; rosalind would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy jacques; beatrice would have laughed at him outright; isabel would have reasoned with him; miranda could but have wondered at him: but ophelia loves him. ophelia, the young, fair, inexperienced girl, facile to every impression, fond in her simplicity, and credulous in her innocence, loves hamlet; not from what he is in himself, but for that which appears to her--the gentle, accomplished prince, upon whom she has been accustomed to see all eyes fixed in hope and admiration, "the expectancy and rose of the fair state," the star of the court in which she moves, the first who has ever whispered soft vows in her ear: and what can be more natural? but it is not singular, that while no one entertains a doubt of ophelia's love for hamlet--though never once expressed by herself, or asserted by others, in the whole course of the drama--yet it is a subject of dispute whether hamlet loves ophelia, though she herself allows that he had importuned her with love, and "had given countenance to his suit with almost all the holy vows of heaven;" although in the letter which polonius intercepted, hamlet declares that he loves her "best, o most best!"--though he asserts himself, with the wildest vehemence,-- i lov'd ophelia; forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum: --still i have heard the question canvassed; i have even heard it denied that hamlet did love ophelia. the author of the finest remarks i have yet seen on the play and character of hamlet, leans to this opinion. as the observations i allude to are contained in a periodical publication, and may not be at hand for immediate reference, i shall indulge myself (and the reader no less) by quoting the opening paragraphs of this noble piece of criticism, upon the principle, and for the reason i have already stated in the introduction. "we take up a play, and ideas come rolling in upon us, like waves impelled by a strong wind. there is in the ebb and flow of shakspeare's soul all the grandeur of a mighty operation of nature; and when we think or speak of him, it should be with humility where we do not understand, and a conviction that it is rather to the narrowness of our own mind than to any failing in the art of the great magician, that we ought to attribute any sense of weakness, which may assail us during the contemplation of his created worlds. "shakspeare himself, had he even been as great a critic as a poet, could not have written a regular dissertation upon hamlet. so ideal, and yet so real an existence, could have been shadowed out only in the colors of poetry. when a character deals solely or chiefly with this world and its events when it acts and is acted upon by objects that have a palpable existence, we see it distinctly, as if it were cast in a material mould, as if it partook of the fixed and settled lineaments of the things on which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. we see in such cases the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an individual countenance. we can describe both, and can let a stranger into our knowledge. but how tell in words, so pure, so fine, so ideal an abstraction as hamlet? we can, indeed, figure to ourselves generally his princely form, that outshone all others in manly beauty, and adorn it with the consummation of all liberal accomplishment. we can behold in every look, every gesture, every motion, the future king,-- the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, th' expectancy and rose of the fair state; the glass of fashion, and the mould of form, th' observ'd of all observers. "but when we would penetrate into his spirit, meditate on those things on which he meditates, accompany him even unto the brink of eternity, fluctuate with him on the ghastly sea of despair, soar with him into the purest and serenest regions of human thought, feel with him the curse of beholding iniquity, and the troubled delight of thinking on innocence, and gentleness, and beauty; come with him from all the glorious dreams cherished by a noble spirit in the halls of wisdom and philosophy, of a sudden into the gloomy courts of sin, and incest, and murder; shudder with him over the broken and shattered fragments of all the fairest creations of his fancy,--be borne with him at once, from calm, and lofty, and delighted speculations, into the very heart of fear, and horror, and tribulations,--have the agonies and the guilt of our mortal world brought into immediate contact with the world beyond the grave, and the influence of an awful shadow hanging forever on our thoughts,--be present at a fearful combat between all the stirred-up passions of humanity in the soul of man, a combat in which one and all of these passions are alternately victorious and overcome; i say, that when we are thus placed and acted upon, how is it possible to draw a character of this sublime drama, or of the mysterious being who is its moving spirit? in him, his character and situation, there is a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity. there is scarcely a trait of frailty or of grandeur, which may have endeared to us our most beloved friends in real life, that is not to be found in hamlet. undoubtedly shakspeare loved him beyond all his other creations. soon as he appears on the stage we are satisfied: when absent we long for his return. this is the only play which exists almost altogether in the character of one single person. who ever knew a hamlet in real life? yet who, ideal as the character is, feels not its reality? this is the wonder. we love him not, we think of him, not because he is witty, because he was melancholy, because he was filial; but we love him because he existed, and was himself. this is the sum total of the impression. i believe that, of every other character either in tragic or epic poetry, the story makes part of the conception; but of hamlet, the deep and permanent interest is the conception of himself. this seems to belong, not to the character being more perfectly drawn, but to there being a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps any other human composition. here is a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search. these springs rise from an unknown depth, and in that depth there seems to be a oneness of being which we cannot distinctly behold, but which we believe to be there; and thus irreconcilable circumstances, floating on the surface of his actions, have not the effect of making us doubt the truth of the general picture."[ ] this is all most admirable, most eloquent, most true! but the critic subsequently declares, that "there is nothing in ophelia which could make her the object of an engrossing passion to so majestic a spirit as hamlet." now, though it be with reluctance, and even considerable mistrust of myself, that i differ from a critic who can thus feel and write, i do not think so:--i do think, with submission, that the love of hamlet for ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such a man as hamlet would feel for such a woman as ophelia. when the heathen would represent their jove as clothed in all his olympian terrors, they mounted him on the back of an eagle, and armed him with the lightnings; but when in holy writ the supreme being is described as coming in his glory, he is upborne on the wings of cherubim, and his emblem is the dove. even so our blessed religion, which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever were dreamt of by philosophy till she went hand-in-hand with faith, has taught us to pay that worship to the symbols of purity and innocence, which in darker times was paid to the manifestations of power: and therefore do i think that the mighty intellect, the capacious, soaring, penetrating genius of hamlet may be represented, without detracting from its grandeur, as reposing upon the tender virgin innocence of ophelia, with all that deep delight with which a superior nature contemplates the goodness which is at once perfect in itself, and of itself unconscious. that hamlet regards ophelia with this kind of tenderness,--that he loves her with a love as intense as can belong to a nature in which there is, (i think,) much more of contemplation and sensibility than action or passion--is the feeling and conviction with which i have always read the play of hamlet. as to whether the mind of hamlet be, or be not, touched with madness--this is another point at issue among critics, philosophers, ay, and physicians. to me it seems that he is not so far disordered as to cease to be a responsible human being--that were too pitiable: but rather that his mind is shaken from its equilibrium, and bewildered by the horrors of his situation--horrors which his fine and subtle intellect, his strong imagination, and his tendency to melancholy, at once exaggerate, and take from him the power either to endure, or "by opposing, end them." we do not see him as a lover, nor as ophelia first beheld him; for the days when he importuned her with love were before the opening of the drama--before his father's spirit revisited the earth; but we behold him at once in a sea of troubles, of perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. without remorse, he endures all its horrors; without guilt, he endures all its shame. a loathing of the crime he is called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature, has set him at strife with himself; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his soul to its inmost depths; all things else, all interests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its place of torment "to shake him with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul!" his love for ophelia is then ranked by himself among those trivial, fond records which he has deeply sworn to erase from his heart and brain. he has no thought to link his terrible destiny with hers: he cannot marry her: he cannot reveal to her, young, gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed the whole current of his life and purposes. in his distraction he overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the areopagus, who being occupied with graver matters, flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it. in the scene with hamlet,[ ] in which he madly outrages her and upbraids himself, ophelia says very little: there are two short sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse:-- hamlet. i did love you once. ophelia. indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. hamlet. you should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inocculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. i loved you not. ophelia. i was the more deceived. those who ever heard mrs. siddons read the play of hamlet, cannot forget the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these two simple phrases. here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she says,-- and i of ladies most deject and wretched, that sucked the honey of his music vows, are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of the play; and these, uttered almost without consciousness on her own part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. she believes hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity: she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable. of her subsequent madness, what can be said? what an affecting--what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!--past hope--past cure! there is the frenzy of excited passion--there is the madness caused by intense and continued thought--there is the delirium of fevered nerves; but ophelia's madness is distinct from these: it is not the suspension, but the utter destruction of the reasoning powers; it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know, frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. constance is frantic; lear is mad; ophelia is _insane_. her sweet mind lies in fragments before us--a pitiful spectacle! her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness--each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her infancy--are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. it belonged to shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture that we can endure to dwell upon it:-- thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, she turns to favor and to prettiness. that in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanor for the impatient restlessness that spurns at straws, and say and sing precisely what she never would or could have uttered had she been in possession of her reason, is so far from being an impropriety, that it is an additional stroke of nature. it is one of the symptoms of this species of insanity, as we are assured by physicians. i have myself known one instance in the case of a young quaker girl, whose character resembled that of ophelia, and whose malady arose from a similar cause. the whole action of this play sweeps past us like a torrent, which hurries along in its dark and resistless course all the personages of the drama towards a catastrophe that is not brought about by human will, but seems like an abyss ready dug to receive them, where the good and the wicked are whelmed together.[ ] as the character of hamlet has been compared, or rather contrasted, with the greek orestes, being like him, called on to avenge a crime by a crime, tormented by remorseful doubts, and pursued by distraction, so, to me, the character of ophelia bears a certain relation to that of the greek iphigenia,[ ] with the same strong distinction between the classical and the romantic conception of the portrait. iphigenia led forth to sacrifice, with her unresisting tenderness, her mournful sweetness, her virgin innocence, is doomed to perish by that relentless power, which has linked her destiny with crimes and contests, in which she has no part but as a sufferer; and even so, poor ophelia, "divided from herself and her fair judgment," appears here like a spotless victim offered up to the mysterious and inexorable fates. "for it is the property of crime to extend its mischiefs over innocence, as it is of virtue to extend its blessings over many that deserve them not, while frequently the author of one or the other is not, as far as we can see, either punished or rewarded."[ ] but there's a heaven above us! miranda. we might have deemed it impossible to go beyond viola, perdita, and ophelia, as pictures of feminine beauty; to exceed the one in tender delicacy, the other in ideal grace, and the last in simplicity,--if shakspeare had not done this; and he alone could have done it. had he never created a miranda, we should never have been made to feel how completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each other. the character of miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. she is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. she is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. let us imagine any other woman placed beside miranda--even one of shakspeare's own loveliest and sweetest creations--there is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contact with this pure child of nature, this "eve of an enchanted paradise." what, then, has shakspeare done?--"o wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!"--he has removed miranda far from all comparison with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. the next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being who approaches miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is ariel. beside the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that "ran upon the winds, rode the curl'd clouds, and in the colors of the rainbow lived," miranda herself appears a palpable reality; a woman, "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman, walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom. i have said that miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood, but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. she resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain or the ocean?--oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid, or naiad of the stream? we cannot think of them together. miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she _could_ not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. she has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. the impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. she has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests, and ran rippling to kiss her feet. ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. the very air, made vocal by her father's art, floated in music around her. if we can presuppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? she retains her woman's heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts--all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who never having beheld any thing resembling her, approach her as "a wonder," as something celestial:-- be sure! the goddess on whom these airs attend! and again:-- what is this maid? is she the goddess who hath severed us, and brought us thus together? and ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her, my spirits as in a dream are all bound up! my father's loss, the weakness that i feel, the wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats, to whom i am subdued, are but light to me might i but through my prison once a day behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth let liberty make use of, space enough have i in such a prison. contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified beauty, and its effect on all beholders, is miranda's own soft simplicity, her virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and language of society. it is most natural that in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, "suffering with those that she saw suffer:"-- o the cry did knock against my very heart. poor souls! they perished. had i been any god of power, i would have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er it should the good ship so have swallowed, and the freighting souls within her; and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. she has no taught scruples of honor like juliet; no coy concealments like viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defence. her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. i suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene between ferdinand and miranda. in ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of civilization, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to the being of whose destiny he disposes; while miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her life, her love, her service beneath his feet. miranda. alas, now! pray you, work not so hard: i would the lightning had burnt up those logs, that you are enjoined to pile! pray set it down and rest you: when this burns, 'twill weep for having weary'd you. my father is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself: he's safe for these three hours. ferdinand. o most dear mistress, the sun will set before i shall discharge what i must strive to do. miranda. if you'll sit down, i'll bear your logs the while. pray give me that, i'll carry it to the pile. ferdinand. no, precious creature; i had rather crack my sinews, break my back, than you should such dishonor undergo, while i sit lazy by. miranda. it would become me as well as it does you; and i should do it with much more ease; for my good will is to it, and yours against. * * * * miranda. you look wearily. ferdinand. no, noble mistress; 'tis fresh morning with me when you are by at night. i do beseech you, (chiefly that i might set it in my prayers,) what is your name? miranda. miranda. o my father i have broke your 'hest to say so! ferdinand. admir'd miranda! indeed the top of admiration; worth what's dearest to the world! full many a lady i have eyed with best regard: and many a time the harmony of their tongues hath into bondage brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues have i liked several women; never any with so full soul, but some defect in her did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed and put it to the foil. but you, o you, so perfect and so peerless, are created of every creature's best! miranda. i do not know one of my sex: no woman's face remember, save, from my glass, mine own; nor have i seen mere that i may call men, than you, good friend, and my dear father. how features are abroad i am skill-less of: but, by my modesty, (the jewel in my dower,) i would not wish any companion in the world but you; nor can imagination form a shape, besides yourself, to like of--but i prattle something too wildly, and my father's precepts therein forget. ferdinand. i am, in my condition a prince, miranda--i do think a king-- (i would, not so!) and would no more endure this wooden slavery, than i would suffer the flesh-fly blow my mouth. hear my soul speak the very instant that i saw you, did my heart fly to your service; there resides, to make me slave to it; and for your sake, am i this patient log-man. miranda. do you love me? ferdinand. o heaven! o earth! bear witness to this sound and crown what i profess with kind event, if i speak true: if hollowly, invert what best is boded me, to mischief! i, beyond all limit of what else i' the world, do love, prize, honor you. miranda. i am a fool, to weep at what i am glad of. ferdinand. wherefore weep you miranda. at mine unworthiness, that dare not offer what i desire to give; and much less take, what i shall die to want--but this is trifling: and all the more it seeks to hide itself, the bigger bulk it shows. hence, bashful cunning; and prompt me, plain and holy innocence! i am your wife, if you will marry me; if not i'll die your maid: to be your fellow you may deny me; but i'll be your servant whether you will or no! ferdinand. my mistress, dearest! and i thus humble ever. miranda. my husband, then? ferdinand. ay, with a heart as willing, as bondage e'er of freedom. here's my hand. miranda. and mine with my heart in it. and now farewell till half an hour hence. as miranda, being what she is, could only have had a ferdinand for a lover, and an ariel for her attendant, so she could have had with propriety no other father than the majestic and gifted being, who fondly claims her as "a thread of his own life--nay, that for which he lives." prospero, with his magical powers, his superhuman wisdom, his moral worth and grandeur, and his kingly dignity, is one of the most sublime visions that ever swept with ample robes, pale brow, and sceptred hand, before the eye of fancy. he controls the invisible world, and works through the agency of spirits: not by any evil and forbidden compact, but solely by superior might of intellect--by potent spells gathered from the lore of ages, and abjured when he mingles again as a man with his fellow men. he is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in shakspeare's age, as can well be imagined:[ ] and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even faust and st. leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the benevolent prospero. the bermuda isles, in which shakspeare has placed the scene of the tempest, were discovered in his time: sir george somers and his companions having been wrecked there in a terrible storm,[ ] brought back a most fearful account of those unknown islands, which they described as "a land of devils--a most prodigious and enchanted place, subject to continual tempests and supernatural visitings." such was the idea entertained of the "still-vext bermoothes" in shakspeare's age; but later travellers describe them as perfect regions of enchantment in a far different sense; as so many fairy edens, clustered like a knot of gems upon the bosom of the atlantic, decked out in all the lavish luxuriance of nature, with shades of myrtle and cedar, fringed round with groves of coral; in short, each island a tiny paradise, rich with perpetual blossoms, in which ariel might have slumbered, and ever-verdant bowers, in which ferdinand and miranda might have strayed: so that shakspeare, in blending the wild relations of the shipwrecked mariners with his own inspired fancies, has produced nothing, however lovely in nature and sublime in magical power, which does not harmonize with the beautiful and wondrous reality. there is another circumstance connected with the tempest, which is rather interesting. it was produced and acted for the first time upon the occasion of the nuptials of the princess elizabeth, the eldest daughter of james i. with frederic, the elector palatine. it is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the fate of this amiable but most unhappy woman, whose life, almost from the period of her marriage, was one long tempestuous scene of trouble and adversity. * * * * * the characters which i have here classed together, as principally distinguished by the predominance of passion and fancy, appear to me to rise, in the scale of ideality and simplicity, from juliet to miranda; the last being in comparison so refined, so elevated above all stain of earth, that we can only acknowledge her in connection with it through the emotions of sympathy she feels and inspires. i remember, when i was in italy, standing "at evening on the top of fiesole," and at my feet i beheld the city of florence and the val d'arno, with its villas, its luxuriant gardens, groves, and olive grounds, all bathed in crimson light. a transparent vapor or exhalation, which in its tint was almost as rich as the pomegranate flower, moving with soft undulation, rolled through the valley, and the very earth seemed to pant with warm life beneath its rosy veil. a dark purple shade, the forerunner of night, was already stealing over the east; in the western sky still lingered the blaze of the sunset, while the faint perfume of trees, and flowers, and now and then a strain of music wafted upwards, completed the intoxication of the senses. but i looked from the earth to the sky, and immediately above this scene hung the soft crescent moon--alone, with all the bright heaven to herself; and as that sweet moon to the glowing landscape beneath it, such is the character of miranda compared to that of juliet. footnotes: [ ] lord byron remarked of the italian women, (and he could speak _avec connaissance de fait_,) that they are the only women in the world capable of impressions, at once very sudden and very durable; which, he adds, is to be found in no other nation. mr. moore observes afterwards, how completely an italian woman, either from nature or her social position, is led to invert the usual course of frailty among ourselves, and, weak in resisting the first impulses of passion, to reserve the whole strength of her character for a display of constancy and devotedness afterwards.--both these traits of national character are exemplified in juliet--_moore's life of byron_, vol. ii. pp. , . to edit. [ ] _la sève de la vie_, is an expression used somewhere by madame de staël. [ ] characters of shakspeare's plays. [ ] i must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which i have heard likened to juliet, and often quoted as the heroine _par excellence_ of amatory fiction--i mean the julie of rousseau's nouvelle héloïse; i protest against her altogether. as a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled syrens, hamatryads and centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. as a woman, julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of isis, we should be disgusted. rousseau, having composed his julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a _woman_. he makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments--and what sentiments! but that i fear to soil my pages, i would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable _grossièreté_, and our own juliet. no! if we seek a french juliet, we must go far--far back to the real héloïse, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. she, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both. [ ] constant describes her beautifully--"sa voix si douce au travers le bruit des armes, sa forme délicate au milieu de cet hommes tous couverts de fer, la pureté de son âme opposée leurs calculs avides, son calme céleste qui contraste avec leurs agitations, remplissent le spectateur d'une émotion constante et mélancolique, telle que ne la fait ressentir nulle tragédie ordinaire." [ ] coleridge--preface to wallenstein. [ ] in the "two gentlemen of verona." [ ] there is an allusion to this court language of love in "all well that ends well," where helena says,-- there shall your master have a thousand loves-- a guide, a goddess, and a sovereign; a counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, his humble ambition, proud humility, his jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, his faith, his sweet disaster, with a world of pretty fond adoptious christendoms that blinking cupid gossips.--act i scene the courtly poets of elizabeth's time, who copied the italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits. [ ] since this was written, i have met with some remarks of a similar tendency in that most interesting book, "the life of lord e. fitzgerald." [ ] juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before herself in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by schlegel to the famous story of alexander and his physician. [ ] perhaps 'tis pretty to force together thoughts so all unlike each other; to mutter and mock a broken charm, to dally with wrong that does no harm! perhaps 'tis tender, too, and pretty, at each wild word to feel within a sweet recoil of love and pity. and what if in a world of sin (o sorrow and shame should this be true!) such giddiness of heart and brain comes seldom save from rage and pain, so talks as it's most used to do? coleridge. these lines seem to me to form the truest comment on juliet's wild exclamations against romeo. [ ] "the censure," observes schlegel, "originates in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its tame insipidity. hence an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life; but energetic passions electrify the whole mental powers and will, consequently, in highly-favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner." [ ] the "giulietta" of luigi da porta was written about . in a popular little book published in , thirty years before shakspeare wrote his tragedy, the name of juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the margin. "juliet, a noble maiden of the citie of verona, which loved romeo, eldest son of the lord monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her: she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." this note, which furnishes, in brief, the whole argument of shakspeare's play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy. in the novel of da porta the catastrophe is altogether different. after the death of romeo, the friar lorenzo endeavors to persuade juliet to leave the fatal monument. she refuses; and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and dies.--"e voltatasi al giacente corpo di romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con lei uell' arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli, disse;" che debbo senza di te in vita più fare, signor mio? e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti? "e detto questo, la sua gran sciagura nell' animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordandosi, deliberando di più non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo, e poscia con un gran grido fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde." there is nothing so improbable in the story of romeo and juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "the veronese," says lord byron, in one of his letters from verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date , and showing a tomb. it is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden--once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! the situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." he might have added, that when verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by the memory of juliet. when in italy, i met a gentleman, who being then "_dans le genre romantique_," wore a fragment of juliet's tomb set in a ring. [ ] foster's essays [ ] i have read somewhere that the play of which helena is the heroine, (all's well that ends well,) was at first entitled by shakspeare "love's labor won." why the title was altered or by whom i cannot discover. [ ] i. e. i care as much for as i do for heaven. [ ] new monthly magazine, vol. iv. [ ] percy's reliques. [ ] i. e. _canzons_, songs [ ] percy's reliques, vol. iii.--see the ballad of the "lady turning serving man." [ ] by this word, as used here, i would be understood to mean that inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent, and the false;--that which we see diffused externally over the form and movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness, as in children. [ ] _i. e._ in the story of the drama; for in the original "history of amleth the dane," from which shakspeare drew his materials, there is a woman introduced who is employed as an instrument to seduce amleth, but not even the germ of the character of ophelia. [ ] in the oedipus coloneus [ ] "and recks not his own read," _i. e._ heeds not his own lesson. [ ] blackwood's magazine, vol. . [ ] act iii. scene . [ ] goëthe. see the analysis of hamlet in wilhelm meister [ ] the iphigenia in aulis of euripides. [ ] goëthe [ ] such as cornelius agrippa, michael scott, dr. dee. the last was the contemporary of shakspeare. [ ] in , about three years before shakspeare produced the tempest, which, though placed first in all the editions of his works, was one of the last of his dramas. characters of the affections hermione. characters in which the affections and the moral qualities predominate over fancy and all that bears the name of passion, are not, when we meet with them in real life, the most striking and interesting, nor the easiest to be understood and appreciated; but they are those on which, in the long run, we repose with increasing confidence and ever-new delight. such characters are not easily exhibited in the colors of poetry, and when we meet with them there, we are reminded of the effect of raffaelle's pictures. sir joshua reynolds assures us, that it took him three weeks to discover the beauty of the frescos in the vatican; and many, if they spoke the truth, would prefer one of titian's or murillo's virgins to one of raffaelle's heavenly madonnas. the less there is of marked expression or vivid color in a countenance or character, the more difficult to delineate it in such a manner as to captivate and interest us: but when this is done, and done to perfection, it is the miracle of poetry in painting, and of painting in poetry. only raffaelle and correggio have achieved it in one case, and only shakspeare in the other. when, by the presence or the agency of some predominant and exciting power, the feelings and affections are upturned from the depths of the heart, and flung to the surface, the painter or the poet has but to watch the workings of the passions, thus in a manner made visible, and transfer them to his page or his canvas, in colors more or less vigorous: but where all is calm without and around, to dive into the profoundest abysses of character, trace the affections where they lie hidden like the ocean springs, wind into the most intricate involutions of the heart, patiently unravel its most delicate fibres, and in a few graceful touches place before us the distinct and visible result,--to do this demanded power of another and a rarer kind. there are several of shakspeare's characters which are especially distinguished by this profound feeling in the conception, and subdued harmony of tone in the delineation. to them may be particularly applied the ingenious simile which goëthe has used to illustrate generally all shakspeare's characters, when he compares them to the old-fashioned batches in glass cases, which not only showed the index pointing to the hour, but the wheels and springs within, which set that index in motion. imogen, desdemona, and hermione, are three women placed in situations nearly similar, and equally endowed with all the qualities which can render that situation striking and interesting. they are all gentle, beautiful, and innocent; all are models of conjugal submission, truth, and tenderness, and all are victims of the unfounded jealousy of their husbands. so far the parallel is close, but here the resemblance ceases; the circumstances of each situation are varied with wonderful skill, and the characters, which are as different as it is possible to imagine, conceived and discriminated with a power of truth and a delicacy of feeling yet more astonishing. critically speaking, the character of hermione is the most simple in point of dramatic effect, that of imogen is the most varied and complex. hermione is most distinguished by her magnanimity and her fortitude, desdemona by her gentleness and refined grace, while imogen combines all the best qualities of both, with others which they do not possess; consequently she is, as a character, superior to either; but considered as women, i suppose the preference would depend on individual taste. hermione is the heroine of the first three acts of the winter's tale. she is the wife of leontes, king of sicilia, and though in the prime of beauty and womanhood, is not represented in the first bloom of youth. her husband on slight grounds suspects her of infidelity with his friend polixenes, king of bohemia; the suspicion once admitted, and working on a jealous, passionate, and vindictive mind, becomes a settled and confirmed opinion. hermione is thrown into a dungeon; her new-born infant is taken from her, and by the order of her husband, frantic with jealousy, exposed to death on a desert shore; she is herself brought to a public trial for treason and incontinency, defends herself nobly, and is pronounced innocent by the oracle. but at the very moment that she is acquitted, she learns the death of the prince her son, who conceiving the dishonor of his mother, had straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, fastened and fixed the shame on't in himself, threw off his spirit, appetite, and sleep, and downright languished. she swoons away with grief, and her supposed death concludes the third act. the last two acts are occupied with the adventures of her daughter perdita; and with the restoration of perdita to the arms of her mother, and the reconciliation of hermione and leontes, the piece concludes. such, in few words, is the dramatic situation. the character of hermione exhibits what is never found in the other sex, but rarely in our own--yet sometimes;--dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness. to conceive a character in which there enters so much of the negative, required perhaps no rare and astonishing effort of genius, such as created a juliet, a miranda, or a lady macbeth; but to delineate such a character in the poetical form, to develop it through the medium of action and dialogue, without the aid of description: to preserve its tranquil, mild, and serious beauty, its unimpassioned dignity, and at the same time keep the strongest hold upon our sympathy and our imagination; and out of this exterior calm, produce the most profound pathos, the most vivid impression of life and internal power:--it is this which renders the character of hermione one of shakspeare's masterpieces. hermione is a queen, a matron, and a mother: she is good and beautiful, and royally descended. a majestic sweetness, a grand and gracious simplicity, an easy, unforced, yet dignified self-possession, are in all her deportment, and in every word she utters. she is one of those characters, of whom it has been said proverbially, that "still waters run deep." her passions are not vehement, but in her settled mind the sources of pain or pleasure, love or resentment, are like the springs that feed the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. shakspeare has conveyed (as is his custom) a part of the character of hermione in scattered touches and through the impressions which she produces on all around her. her surpassing beauty is alluded to in few but strong terms:-- this jealousy is for a precious creature; as she is rare must it be great. praise her but for this her out-door form, 'which, on my faith, deserves high speech--' if one by one you wedded all the world, or from the all that are, took something good to make a perfect woman; she you killed would be unparalleled. i might have looked upon my queen's full eyes, have taken treasure from her lips-- --and left them more rich for what they yielded. the expressions "most sacred lady," "dread mistress," "sovereign," with which she is addressed or alluded to, the boundless devotion and respect of those around her, and their confidence in her goodness and innocence, are so many additional strokes in the portrait. for her, my lord, i dare my life lay down, and will do't, sir, please you t' accept it, that the queen is spotless i' the eyes of heaven, and to you. every inch of woman in the world, ay, every dram of woman's flesh is false, if she be so. i would not be a stander-by to hear my sovereign mistress clouded so, without my present vengeance taken! the mixture of playful courtesy, queenly dignity, and lady-like sweetness, with which she prevails on polixenes to prolong his visit, is charming. hermione. you'll stay! polixenes. no, madam. hermione. nay, but you will. polixenes. i may not, verily. hermione. verily! you put me off with limber vows; but i, tho' you would seek t' unsphere the stars with oaths should still say, "sir, no going!" verily, you shall _not_ go! a lady's verily is as potent as a lord's. will you go yet? force me to keep you as a prisoner, not like a guest? and though the situation of hermione admits but of few general reflections, one little speech, inimitably beautiful and characteristic, has become almost proverbial from its truth. she says:-- one good deed, dying tongueless, slaughters a thousand, waiting upon that. our praises are our wages; you may ride us with one soft kiss a thousand furlongs, ere with spur we heat an acre. she receives the first intimation of her husband's jealous suspicions with incredulous astonishment. it is not that, like desdemona, she does not or cannot understand; but she _will_ not. when he accuses her more plainly, she replies with a calm dignity:-- should a villain say so-- the most replenished villain in the world-- he were as much more villain: you, my lord, do but mistake. this characteristic composure of temper never forsakes her; and yet it is so delineated that the impression is that of grandeur, and never borders upon pride or coldness: it is the fortitude of a gentle but a strong mind, conscious of its own innocence. nothing can be more affecting than her calm reply to leontes, who, in his jealous rage, heaps insult upon insult, and accuses her before her own attendants, as no better "than one of those to whom the vulgar give bold titles." how will this grieve you, when you shall come to clearer knowledge, that you have thus published me! gentle my lord, you scarce can right me thoroughly then, to say you _did_ mistake. her mild dignity and saint-like patience, combined as they are with the strongest sense of the cruel injustice of her husband, thrill us with admiration as well as pity; and we cannot but see and feel, that for hermione to give way to tears and feminine complaints under such a blow, would be quite incompatible with the character. thus she says of herself, as she is led to prison:-- there's some ill planet reigns: i must be patient till the heavens look with an aspect more favorable. good my lords, i am not prone to weeping, as our sex commonly are; the want of which vain dew perchance shall dry your pities; but i have that honorable grief lodged here, that burns worse than tears drown. beseech you all, my lords with thought so qualified as your charities shall best instruct you, measure me; and so the king's will be performed. when she is brought to trial for supposed crimes, called on to defend herself, "standing to prate and talk for life and honor, before who please to come and hear," the sense of her ignominious situation--all its shame and all its horror press upon her, and would apparently crush even _her_ magnanimous spirit, but for the consciousness of her own worth and innocence, and the necessity that exists for asserting and defending both. if powers divine behold our human actions, (as they do), i doubt not, then, but innocence shall make false accusation blush, and tyranny tremble at patience. * * * * for life, i prize it as i weigh grief, which i would spare. for honor-- 'tis a derivative from me to mine, and only that i stand for. her earnest, eloquent justification of herself, and her lofty sense of female honor, are rendered more affecting and impressive by that chilling despair that contempt for a life which has been made bitter to her through unkindness, which is betrayed in every word of her speech, though so calmly characteristic. when she enumerates the unmerited insults which have been heaped upon her, it is without asperity or reproach, yet in a tone which shows how completely the iron has entered her soul. thus, when leontes threatens her with death:-- sir, spare your threats; the bug which you would fright me with, i seek. to me can life be no commodity; the crown and comfort of my life, your favor, i do give lost; for i do feel it gone, but know not how it went. my second joy, the first-fruits of my body, from his presence i am barr'd, like one infectious. my third comfort-- starr'd most unluckily!--is from my breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, haled out to murder. myself on every post proclaimed a strumpet; with immodest hatred, the childbed privilege denied, which 'longs to women of all fashion. lastly, hurried here to this place, i' the open air, before i have got strength of limit. now, my liege, tell me what blessings i have here alive, that i should fear to die. therefore, proceed, but yet hear this; mistake me not. no! life, i prize it not a straw:--but for mine honor. (which i would free,) if i shall be condemned upon surmises; all proof sleeping else, but what your jealousies awake; i tell you, 'tis rigor and not law. the character of hermione is considered open to criticism on one point. i have heard it remarked that when she secludes herself from the world for sixteen years, during which time she is mourned as dead by her repentant husband, and is not won to relent from her resolve by his sorrow, his remorse, his constancy to her memory; such conduct, argues the critic, is unfeeling as it is inconceivable in a tender and virtuous woman. would imogen have done so, who is so generously ready to grant a pardon before it be asked? or desdemona, who does not forgive because she cannot even resent? no, assuredly; but this is only another proof of the wonderful delicacy and consistency with which shakspeare has discriminated the characters of all three. the incident of hermione's supposed death and concealment for sixteen years, is not indeed very probable in itself, nor very likely to occur in every-day life. but besides all the probability necessary for the purposes of poetry, it has all the likelihood it can derive from the peculiar character of hermione, who is precisely the woman who could and would have acted in this manner. in such a mind as hers, the sense of a cruel injury, inflicted by one she had loved and trusted, without awakening any violent anger or any desire of vengeance, would sink deep--almost incurably and lastingly deep. so far she is most unlike either imogen or desdemona, who are portrayed as much more flexible in temper; but then the circumstances under which she is wronged are very different, and far more unpardonable. the self-created, frantic jealousy of leontes is very distinct from that of othello, writhing under the arts of iago: or that of posthumus, whose understanding has been cheated by the most damning evidence of his wife's infidelity. the jealousy which in othello and posthumus is an error of judgment, in leontes is a vice of the blood; he suspects without cause, condemns without proof; he is without excuse--unless the mixture of pride, passion, and imagination, and the predisposition to jealousy with which shakspeare has portrayed him, be considered as an excuse. hermione has been openly insulted: he to whom she gave herself, her heart, her soul, has stooped to the weakness and baseness of suspicion; has doubted her truth, has wronged her love, has sunk in her esteem, and forfeited her confidence. she has been branded with vile names; her son, her eldest hope, is dead--dead through the false accusation which has stuck infamy on his mother's name; and her innocent babe, stained with illegitimacy, disowned and rejected, has been exposed to a cruel death. can we believe that the mere tardy acknowledgment of her innocence could make amends for wrongs and agonies such as these? or heal a heart which must have bled inwardly, consumed by that untold grief, "which burns worse than tears drown?" keeping in view the peculiar character of hermione, such as she is delineated, is she one either to forgive hastily or forget quickly? and though she might, in her solitude, mourn over her repentant husband, would his repentance suffice to restore him at once to his place in her heart: to efface from her strong and reflecting mind the recollection of his miserable weakness? or can we fancy this high-souled woman--left childless through the injury which has been inflicted on her, widowed in heart by the unworthness of him she loved, a spectacle of grief to all--to her husband a continual reproach and humiliation--walking through the parade of royalty in the court which had witnessed her anguish, her shame, her degradation, and her despair? methinks that the want of feeling, nature, delicacy, and consistency, would lie in such an exhibition as this. in a mind like hermione's, where the strength of feeling is founded in the power of thought, and where there is little of impulse or imagination,--"the depth, but not the tumult of the soul,"[ ]--there are but two influences which predominate over the will,--time and religion. and what then remained, but that, wounded in heart and spirit, she should retire from the world?--not to brood over her wrongs, but to study forgiveness, and wait the fulfilment of the oracle which had promised the termination of her sorrows. thus a premature reconciliation would not only have been painfully inconsistent with the character; it would also have deprived us of that most beautiful scene, in which hermione is discovered to her husband as the statue or image of herself. and here we have another instance of that admirable art, with which the dramatic character is fitted to the circumstances in which it is placed: that perfect command over her own feelings, that complete self-possession necessary to this extraordinary situation, is consistent with all that we imagine of hermione: in any other woman it would be so incredible as to shock all our ideas of probability. this scene, then, is not only one of the most picturesque and striking instances of stage effect to be found in the ancient or modern drama, but by the skilful manner in which it is prepared, it has, wonderful as it appears, all the merit of consistency and truth. the grief, the love, the remorse and impatience of leontes, are finely contrasted with the astonishment and admiration of perdita, who, gazing on the figure of her mother like one entranced, looks as if she were also turned to marble. there is here one little instance of tender remembrance in leontes, which adds to the charming impression of hermione's character. chide me, dear stone! that i may say indeed thou art hermione; or rather thou art she in thy not chiding, for she was as tender as infancy and grace. thus she stood, even with such life of majesty--warm life-- as now it coldly stands--when first i woo'd her! the effect produced on the different persons of the drama by this living statue--an effect which at the same moment is, and is _not_ illusion--the manner in which the feelings of the spectators become entangled between the conviction of death and the impression of life, the idea of a deception and the feeling of a reality; and the exquisite coloring of poetry and touches of natural feeling with which the whole is wrought up, till wonder, expectation, and intense pleasure, hold our pulse and breath suspended on the event,--are quite inimitable. the expressions used here by leontes,-- thus she stood, even with such life of majesty--_warm life_. the fixture of her eye has motion in't. and we are mock'd by art! and by polixines,-- the very life seems warm upon her lip, appear strangely applied to a statue, such as we usually imagine it--of the cold colorless marble; but it is evident that in this scene hermione personates one of those images or effigies, such as we may see in the old gothic cathedrals, in which the stone, or marble, was colored after nature. i remember coming suddenly upon one of these effigies, either at basle or at fribourg, which made me start: the figure was large as life; the drapery of crimson, powdered with stars of gold; the face and eyes, and hair, tinted after nature, though faded by time: it stood in a gothic niche, over a tomb, as i think, and in a kind of dim uncertain light. it would have been very easy for a living person to represent such an effigy, particularly if it had been painted by that "rare italian master, julio romano,"[ ] who, as we are informed, was the reputed author of this wonderful statue. the moment when hermione descends from her pedestal, to the sound of soft music, and throws herself without speaking into her husband's arms, is one of inexpressible interest. it appears to me that her silence during the whole of this scene (except where she invokes a blessing on her daughter's head) is in the finest taste as a poetical beauty, besides being an admirable trait of character. the misfortunes of hermione, her long religious seclusion, the wonderful and almost supernatural part she has just enacted, have invested her with such a sacred and awful charm, that any words put into her mouth, must, i think, have injured the solemn and profound pathos of the situation. there are several among shakspeare's characters which exercise a far stronger power over our feelings, our fancy, our understanding, than that of hermione; but not one,--unless perhaps cordelia,--constructed upon so high and pure a principle. it is the union of gentleness with power which constitutes the perfection of mental grace. thus among the ancients, with whom the _graces_ were also the _charities_, (to show, perhaps, that while form alone may constitute beauty, sentiment is necessary to grace,) one and the same word signified equally _strength_ and _virtue_. this feeling, carried into the fine arts, was the secret of the antique grace--the grace of repose. the same eternal nature--the same sense of immutable truth and beauty, which revealed this sublime principle of art to the ancient greeks, revealed it to the genius of shakspeare; and the character of hermione, in which we have the same largeness of conception and delicacy of execution,--the same effect of suffering without passion, and grandeur without effort, is an instance, i think, that he felt within himself, and by intuition, what we study all our lives in the remains of ancient art. the calm, regular, classical beauty of hermione's character is the more impressive from the wild and gothic accompaniments of her story, and the beautiful relief afforded by the pastoral and romantic grace which is thrown around her daughter perdita. the character of paulina, in the winter's tale, though it has obtained but little notice, and no critical remark, (that i have seen,) is yet one of the striking beauties of the play: and it has its moral too. as we see running through the whole universe that principle of contrast which may be called the life of nature, so we behold it every where illustrated in shakspeare: upon this principle he has placed emilia beside desdemona, the nurse beside juliet; the clowns and dairy-maids, and the merry peddler thief autolycus round florizel and perdita;--and made paulina the friend of hermione. paulina does not fill any ostensible office near the person of the queen, but is a lady of high rank in the court--the wife of the lord antigones. she is a character strongly drawn from real and common life--a clever, generous, strong-minded, warmhearted woman, fearless in asserting the truth, firm in her sense of right, enthusiastic in all her affections: quick in thought, resolute in word, and energetic in action; but heedless, hot-tempered, impatient, loud, bold, voluble, and turbulent of tongue; regardless of the feelings of those for whom she would sacrifice her life, and injuring from excess of zeal those whom she most wishes to serve. how many such are there in the world! but paulina, though a very termagant, is yet a poetical termagant in her way; and the manner in which all the evil and dangerous tendencies of such a temper are placed before us, even while the individual character preserves the strongest hold upon our respect and admiration, forms an impressive lesson, as well as a natural and delightful portrait. in the scene, for instance, where she brings the infant before leontes, with the hope of softening him to a sense of his injustice--"an office which," as she observes, "becomes a woman best"--her want of self-government, her bitter, inconsiderate reproaches, only add, as we might easily suppose, to his fury. paulina. i say i come from your good queen! leontes. good queen! paulina. good queen, my lord, good queen: i say good queen; and would by combat make her good, so were i a man, the worst about you. leontes. force her hence. paulina. let him that makes but trifles of his eyes, first hand me: on mine own accord i'll off; but first i'll do mine errand. the good queen (for she is good) hath brought you forth a daughter-- here 'tis; commends it to your blessing. leontes. traitors! will you not push her out! give her the bastard. paulina. forever unvenerable be thy hands, if thou tak'st up the princess by that forced baseness which he has put upon't! leontes. he dreads his wife. paulina. so, i would _you_ did; then 'twere past all doubt you'd call your children your's. leontes. a callat, of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, and now baits me!--this brat is none of mine. paulina. it is yours, and might we lay the old proverb to your charge, so like you, 'tis the worse. * * * * leontes. a gross hag! and lozel, thou art worthy to be hang'd, that wilt not stay her tongue. antigones. hang all the husbands that cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself hardly one subject. leontes. once more, take her hence. paulina. a most unworthy and unnatural lord can do no more. leontes. i'll have thee burn'd. paulina. i care not: it is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in't. here, while we honor her courage and her affection, we cannot help regretting her violence. we see, too, in paulina, what we so often see in real life, that it is not those who are most susceptible in their own temper and feelings, who are most delicate and forbearing towards the feelings of others. she does not comprehend, or will not allow for the sensitive weakness of a mind less firmly tempered than her own. there is a reply of leontes to one of her cutting speeches, which is full of feeling, and a lesson to those, who, with the best intentions in the world, force the painful truth, like a knife, into the already lacerated heart. paulina. if, one by one, you wedded all the world, or, from the all that are, took something good to make a perfect woman, she you kill'd would be unparallel'd. leontes. i think so. kill'd! she i kill'd? i did so: but thou strik'st me sorely, to say i did; it is as bitter upon thy tongue, as in my thought. now, good now, say so but seldom. cleomenes. not at all, good lady: you might have spoken a thousand things that would have done the time more benefit, and grac'd your kindness better. we can only excuse paulina by recollecting that it is a part of her purpose to keep alive in the heart of leontes the remembrance of his queen's perfections, and of his own cruel injustice. it is admirable, too, that hermione and paulina, while sufficiently approximated to afford all the pleasure of contrast, are never brought too nearly in contact on the scene or in the dialogue;[ ] for this would have been a fault in taste, and have necessarily weakened the effect of both characters:--either the serene grandeur of hermione would have subdued and overawed the fiery spirit of paulina, or the impetuous temper of the latter must have disturbed in some respect our impression of the calm, majestic, and somewhat melancholy beauty of hermione. desdemona. the character of hermione is addressed more to the imagination; that of desdemona to the feelings. all that can render sorrow majestic is gathered round hermione; all that can render misery heart-breaking is assembled round desdemona. the wronged but self-sustained virtue of hermione commands our veneration; the injured and defenceless innocence of desdemona so wrings the soul, "that all for pity we could die." desdemona, as a character, comes nearest to miranda, both in herself as a woman, and in the perfect simplicity and unity of the delineation; the figures are differently draped--the proportions are the same. there is the same modesty, tenderness, and grace; the same artless devotion in the affections, the same predisposition to wonder, to pity, to admire; the same almost ethereal refinement and delicacy; but all is pure poetic nature within miranda and around her: desdemona is more associated with the palpable realities of every-day existence, and we see the forms and habits of society tinting her language and deportment; no two beings can be more alike in character--nor more distinct as individuals. the love of desdemona for othello appears at first such a violation of all probabilities, that her father at once imputes it to magic, "to spells and mixtures powerful o'er the blood." she, in spite of nature, of years, of country, credit, every thing, to fall in love with what she feared to look on! and the devilish malignity of iago, whose coarse mind cannot conceive an affection founded purely in sentiment, derives from her love itself a strong argument against her. ay, there's the point, as to be bold with you, not to affect any proposed matches of her own clime, complexion, and degree, whereto, we see, in all things nature tends,[ ] &c. notwithstanding this disparity of age, character, country, complexion, we, who are admitted into the secret, see her love rise naturally and necessarily out of the leading propensities of her nature. at the period of the story a spirit of wild adventure had seized all europe. the discovery of both indies was yet recent; over the shores of the western hemisphere still fable and mystery hung, with all their dim enchantments, visionary terrors, and golden promises! perilous expeditions and distant voyages were every day undertaken from hope of plunder, or mere love of enterprise; and from these the adventurers returned with tales of "antres vast and desarts wild--of cannibals that did each other eat--of anthropophagi, and men whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders." with just such stories did raleigh and clifford, and their followers return from the new world: and thus by their splendid or fearful exaggerations, which the imperfect knowledge of those times could not refute, was the passion for the romantic and marvellous nourished at home, particularly among the women. a cavalier of those days had no nearer no surer way to his mistress's heart, than by entertaining her with these wondrous narratives. what was a general feature of his time, shakspeare seized and adapted to his purpose with the most exquisite felicity of effect. desdemona, leaving her household cares in haste, to hang breathless on othello's tales, was doubtless a picture from the life; and her inexperience and her quick imagination lend it an added propriety: then her compassionate disposition is interested by all the disastrous chances, hair-breadth 'scapes, and moving accidents by flood and field, of which he has to tell; and her exceeding gentleness and timidity, and her domestic turn of mind, render her more easily captivated by the military renown, the valor, and lofty bearing of the noble moor-- and to his honors and his valiant parts does she her soul and fortunes consecrate. the confession and the excuse for her love is well placed in the mouth of desdemona, while the history of the rise of that love, and of his course of wooing, is, with the most graceful propriety, as far as she is concerned, spoken by othello, and in her absence. the last two lines summing up the whole-- she loved me for the dangers i had passed, and i loved her that she did pity them-- comprise whole volumes of sentiment and metaphysics. desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection, but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character--gentleness in its excess--gentleness verging on passiveness--gentleness, which not only cannot resent,--but cannot resist. othello. then of so gentle a condition! iago. ay! too gentle. othello. nay, that's certain here the exceeding softness of desdemona's temper is turned against her by iago, so that it suddenly strikes othello in a new point of view, as the inability to resist temptation; but to us who perceive the character as a whole, this extreme gentleness of nature is yet delineated with such exceeding refinement, that the effect never approaches to feebleness. it is true that _once_ her extreme timidity leads her in a moment of confusion and terror to prevaricate about the fatal handkerchief. this handkerchief, in the original story of cinthio, is merely one of those embroidered handkerchiefs which were as fashionable in shakspeare's time as in our own; but the minute description of it as "lavorato alla morisco sottilissimamente,"[ ] suggested to the poetical fancy of shakspeare one of the most exquisite and characteristic passages in the whole play. othello makes poor desdemona believe that the handkerchief was a talisman. there's magic in the web of it. a sibyl, that had numbered in the world the sun to make two hundred compasses, in her prophetic fury sew'd the work: the worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, and it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful conserv'd of maidens' hearts. desdemona. indeed! is't true? othello. most veritable, therefore look to't well. desdemona. then would to heaven that i had never seen it! othello. ha! wherefore! desdemona. why do you speak so startingly and rash? othello. is't lost,--is't gone? speak, is it out of the way? desdemona. heavens bless us! othello. say you? desdemona. it is not lost--but what an' if it were? othello. ha! desdemona. i say it is not lost. othello. fetch it, let me see it. desdemona. why so i can, sir, but i will not now, &c. desdemona, whose soft credulity, whose turn for the marvellous, whose susceptible imagination had first directed her thoughts and affections to othello, is precisely the woman to be frightened out of her senses by such a tale as this, and betrayed by her fears into a momentary tergiversation. it is most natural in such a being, and shows us that even in the sweetest natures there can be no completeness and consistency without moral energy.[ ] with the most perfect artlessness, she has something of the instinctive, unconscious address of her sex; as when she appeals to her father-- so much duty as my mother show'd to you, preferring you before her father, so much i challenge, that i may profess due to the moor, my lord. and when she is pleading for cassio-- what! michael cassio! that came a wooing with you; and many a time. when i have spoken of you disparagingly, hath ta'en your part? in persons who unite great sensibility and lively fancy, i have often observed this particular species of address, which is always unconscious of itself, and consists in the power of placing ourselves in the position of another, and imagining, rather than perceiving, what is in their hearts. we women have this _address_ (if so it can be called) naturally, but i have seldom met with it in men. it is not inconsistent with extreme simplicity of character, and quite distinct from that kind of art which is the result of natural acuteness and habits of observation--quick to perceive the foibles of others, and as quick to turn them to its own purposes; which is always conscious of itself, and, if united with strong intellect, seldom perceptible to others. in the mention of her mother, and the appeal to othello's self-love, desdemona has no design formed on conclusions previously drawn; but her intuitive quickness of feeling, added to her imagination, lead her more safely to the same results, and the distinction is as truly as it is delicately drawn. when othello first outrages her in a manner which appears inexplicable, she seeks and finds excuses for him. she is so innocent that not only she cannot believe herself suspected, but she cannot conceive the existence of guilt in others. something, sure, of state, either from venice, or some unhatch'd practice made demonstrable here in cyprus to him, hath puddled his clear spirit. 'tis even so-- nay, we must think, men are not gods, nor of them look for such observances as fit the bridal. and when the direct accusation of crime is flung on her in the vilest terms, it does not anger but stun her, as if it transfixed her whole being; she attempts no reply, no defence; and reproach or resistance never enters her thought. good friend, go to him--for by this light of heaven i know not how i lost him: here i kneel:-- if e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love, either in discourse of thought or actual deed; or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense, delighted them in any other form; or that i do not yet, and ever did, and ever will, though he do shake me off to beggarly divorcement, love him dearly, comfort forswear me! unkindness may do much, and his unkindness may defeat my life, but never taint my love. and there is one stroke of consummate delicacy surprising, when we remember the latitude of expression prevailing in shakspeare's time, and which he allowed to his other women generally: she says, on recovering from her stupefaction-- am i that name, iago? iago. what name, sweet lady? desdemona. that which she says my lord did say i was. so completely did shakspeare enter into the angelic refinement of the character. endued with that temper which is the origin of superstition in love as in religion,--which, in fact makes love itself a religion,--she not only does not utter an upbraiding, but nothing that othello does or says, no outrage, no injustice, can tear away the charm with which her imagination had invested him, or impair her faith in his honor; "would you had never seen him!" exclaims emilia. desdemona. so would not i!--my love doth so approve him, that even his stubbornness, his checks and frowns have grace and favor in them. there is another peculiarity, which, in reading the play of othello, we rather feel than perceive: through the whole of the dialogue appropriated to desdemona, there is not one general observation. words are with her the vehicle of sentiment, and never of reflection; so that i cannot find throughout a sentence of general application. the same remark applies to miranda: and to no other female character of any importance or interest; not even to ophelia. the rest of what i wished to say of desdemona, has been anticipated by an anonymous critic, and so beautifully, so justly, so eloquently expressed, that i with pleasure erase my own page, to make room for his. "othello," observes this writer, "is no love story; all that is below tragedy in the passion of love, is taken away at once, by the awful character of othello; for such he seems to us to be designed to be. he appears never as a lover, but at once as a husband: and the relation of his love made dignified, as it is a husband's justification of his marriage, is also dignified, as it is a soldier's relation of his stern and perilous life. his love itself, as long as it is happy, is perfectly calm and serene--the protecting tenderness of a husband. it is not till it is disordered, that it appears as a passion: then is shown a power in contention with itself--a mighty being struck with death, and bringing up from all the depths of life convulsions and agonies. it is no exhibition of the power of the passion of love, but of the passion of life, vitally wounded, and self over-mastering. if desdemona had been really guilty, the greatness would have been destroyed, because his love would have been unworthy, false. but she is good, and his love is most perfect, just, and good. that a man should place his perfect love on a wretched thing, is miserably debasing, and shocking to thought; but that loving perfectly and well, he should by hellish human circumvention be brought to distrust and dread, and abjure his own perfect love, is most mournful indeed--it is the infirmity of our good nature wrestling in vain with the strong powers of evil. moreover, he would, had desdemona been false, have been the mere victim of fate; whereas he is now in a manner his own victim. his happy love was heroic tenderness; his injured love is terrible passion, and disordered power, engendered within itself to its own destruction, is the height of all tragedy. "the character of othello is perhaps the most greatly drawn, the most heroic of any of shakspeare's actors; but it is, perhaps, that one also of which his reader last acquires the intelligence. the intellectual and warlike energy of his mind--his tenderness of affection--his loftiness of spirit--his frank, generous magnanimity--impetuosity like a thunderbolt--and that dark, fierce flood of boiling passion, polluting even his imagination,--compose a character entirely original, most difficult to delineate, but perfectly delineated." emilia in this play is a perfect portrait from common life, a masterpiece in the flemish style: and though not necessary as a contrast, it cannot be but that the thorough vulgarity, the loose principles of this plebeian woman, united to a high degree of spirit, energetic feeling, strong sense and low cunning, serve to place in brighter relief the exquisite refinement, the moral grace, the unblemished truth, and the soft submission of desdemona. on the other perfections of this tragedy, considered as a production of genius--on the wonderful characters of othello and iago--on the skill with which the plot is conducted, and its simplicity which a word unravels,[ ] and on the overpowering horror of the catastrophe--eloquence and analytical criticism have been exhausted; i will only add, that the source of the pathos throughout--of that pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect--lies in the character of desdemona. no woman differently constituted could have excited the same intense and painful compassion, without losing something of that exalted charm, which invests her from beginning to end, which we are apt to impute to the interest of the situation, and to the poetical coloring, but which lies, in fact, in the very essence of the character. desdemona, with all her timid flexibility and soft acquiescence, is not weak; for the negative alone is weak; and the mere presence of goodness and affection implies in itself a species of power; power without consciousness, power without effort, power with repose--that soul of grace! i know a desdemona in real life, one in whom the absence of intellectual power is never felt as a deficiency, nor the absence of energy of will as impairing the dignity, nor the most imperturbable serenity, as a want of feeling: one in whom thoughts appear mere instincts, the sentiment of rectitude supplies the principle, and virtue itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law. no shade of sin or vanity has yet stolen over that bright innocence. no discord within has marred the loveliness without--no strife of the factitious world without has disturbed the harmony within. the comprehension of evil appears forever shut out, as if goodness had converted all things to itself; and all to the pure in heart must necessarily be pure. the impression produced is exactly that of the character of desdemona; genius is a rare thing, but abstract goodness is rarer. in desdemona, we cannot but feel that the slightest manifestation of intellectual power or active will would have injured the dramatic effect. she is a victim consecrated from the first,--"an offering without blemish," alone worthy of the grand final sacrifice; all harmony, all grace, all purity, all tenderness, all truth! but, alas! to see her fluttering like a cherub in the talons of a fiend!--to see her--o poor desdemona! imogen. we come to imogen. others of shakspeare's characters are, as dramatic and poetical conceptions, more striking, more brilliant, more powerful; but of all his women, considered as individuals rather than as heroines, imogen is the most perfect. portia and juliet are pictured to the fancy with more force of contrast, more depth of light and shade; viola and miranda, with more aerial delicacy of outline; but there is no female portrait that can be compared to imogen as a woman--none in which so great a variety of tints are mingled together into such perfect harmony. in her, we have all the fervor of youthful tenderness, all the romance of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace,--the bloom of beauty, the brightness of intellect and the dignity of rank, taking a peculiar hue from the conjugal character which is shed over all, like a consecration and a holy charm. in othello and the winter's tale, the interest excited for desdemona and hermione is divided with others: but in cymbeline, imogen is the angel of light, whose lovely presence pervades and animates the whole piece. the character altogether may be pronounced finer, more complex in its elements, and more fully developed in all its parts, than those of hermione and desdemona; but the position in which she is placed is not, i think, so fine--at least, not so effective, as a tragic situation. shakspeare has borrowed the chief circumstances of imogen's story from one of boccaccio's tales.[ ] a company of italian merchants who are assembled in a tavern at paris, are represented as conversing on the subject of their wives: all of them express themselves with levity, or skepticism, or scorn, on the virtue of women, except a young genoese merchant named bernabo, who maintains, that by the especial favor of heaven he possesses a wife no less chaste than beautiful. heated by the wine, and excited by the arguments and the coarse raillery of another young merchant, ambrogiolo, bernabo proceeds to enumerate the various perfections and accomplishments of his zinevra. he praises her loveliness, her submission, and her discretion--her skill in embroidery, her graceful service, in which the best trained page of the court could not exceed her; and he adds, as rarer accomplishments, that she could mount a horse, fly a hawk, write and read, and cast up accounts, as well as any merchant of them all. his enthusiasm only excites the laughter and mockery of his companions, particularly of ambrogiolo, who, by the most artful mixture of contradiction and argument, rouses the anger of bernabo, and he at length exclaims, that he would willingly stake his life, his head, on the virtue of his wife. this leads to the wager which forms so important an incident in the drama. ambrogiolo bets one thousand florins of gold against five thousand, that zinevra, like the rest of her sex, is accessible to temptation--that in less than three months he will undermine her virtue, and bring her husband the most undeniable proofs of her falsehood. he sets off for genoa, in order to accomplish his purpose; but on his arrival, all that he learns, and all that he beholds with his own eyes, of the discreet and noble character of the lady, make him despair of success by fair means; he therefore has recourse to the basest treachery. by bribing an old woman in the service of zinevra, he is conveyed to her sleeping apartment, concealed in a trunk, from which he issues in the dead of the night; he takes note of the furniture of the chamber, makes himself master of her purse, her morning robe, or cymar, and her girdle, and of a certain mark on her person. he repeats these observations for two nights, and, furnished with these evidences of zinevra's guilt, he returns to paris, and lays them before the wretched husband. bernabo rejects every proof of his wife's infidelity except that which finally convinces posthumus. when ambrogiolo mentions the "mole, cinque-spotted," he stands like one who has received a poniard in his heart; without further dispute he pays down the forfeit, and filled with rage and despair both at the loss of his money and the falsehood of his wife, he returns towards genoa; he retires to his country house, and sends a messenger to the city with letters to zinevra, desiring that she would come and meet him, but with secret orders to the man to despatch her by the way. the servant prepares to execute his master's command, but overcome by her entreaties for mercy, and his own remorse, he spares her life, on condition that she will fly from the country forever. he then disguises her in his own cloak and cap, and brings back to her husband the assurance that she is killed, and that her body has been devoured by the wolves. in the disguise of a mariner, zinevra then embarks on board a vessel bound to the levant, and on arriving at alexandria, she is taken into the service of the sultan of egypt, under the name of sicurano; she gains the confidence of her master, who, not suspecting her sex, sends her as captain of the guard which was appointed for the protection of the merchants at the fair of acre. here she accidentally meets ambrogiolo, and sees in his possession the purse and girdle, which she immediately recognizes as her own. in reply to her inquiries, he relates with fiendish exultation the manner in which he had obtained possession of them, and she persuades him to go back with her to alexandria. she then sends a messenger to genoa in the name of the sultan, and induces her husband to come and settle in alexandria. at a proper opportunity, she summons both to the presence of the sultan, obliges ambrogiolo to make a full confession of his treachery, and wrings from her husband the avowal of his supposed murder of herself: then falling at the feet of the sultan discovers her real name and sex, to the great amazement of all. bernabo is pardoned at the prayer of his wife, and ambrogiolo is condemned to be fastened to a stake, smeared with honey, and left to be devoured by the flies and locusts. this horrible sentence is executed; while zinevra, enriched by the presents of the sultan, and the forfeit wealth of ambrogiolo, returns with her husband to genoa, where she lives in great honor and happiness, and maintains her reputation of virtue to the end of her life. these are the materials from which shakspeare has drawn the dramatic situation of imogen. he has also endowed her with several of the qualities which are attributed to zinevra; but for the essential truth and beauty of the individual character, for the sweet coloring of pathos, and sentiment, and poetry interfused through the whole, he is indebted only to nature and himself. it would be a waste of words to refute certain critics who have accused shakspeare of a want of judgment in the adoption of the story; of having transferred the manners of a set of intoxicated merchants and a merchant's wife to heroes and princesses, and of having entirely destroyed the interest of the catastrophe.[ ] the truth is, that shakspeare has wrought out the materials before him with the most luxuriant fancy and the most wonderful skill. as for the various anachronisms, and the confusion of names, dates, and manners, over which dr. johnson exults in no measured terms, the confusion is nowhere but in his own heavy obtuseness of sentiment and perception, and his want of poetical faith. look into the old italian poets, whom we read continually with still increasing pleasure; does any one think of sitting down to disprove the existence of ariodante, king of scotland? or to prove that the mention of proteus and pluto, baptism and the virgin mary, in a breath, amounts to an anachronism? shakspeare, by throwing his story far back into a remote and uncertain age, has blended, by his "own omnipotent will," the marvellous, the heroic, the ideal, and the classical,--the extreme of refinement and the extreme of simplicity,--into one of the loveliest fictions of romantic poetry; and, to use schlegel's expression, "has made the social manners of the latest times harmonize with heroic deeds, and even with the appearances of the gods."[ ] but, admirable as is the conduct of the whole play, rich in variety of character and in picturesque incident, its chief beauty and interest is derived from imogen. when ferdinand tells miranda that she was "created of every creature's best," he speaks like a lover, or refers only to her personal charms: the same expression might be applied critically to the character of imogen; for, as the portrait of miranda is produced by resolving the female character into its original elements, so that of imogen unites the greatest number of those qualities which we imagine to constitute excellency in woman. imogen, like juliet, conveys to our mind the impression of extreme simplicity in the midst of the most wonderful complexity. to conceive her aright, we must take some peculiar tint from many characters, and so mingle them, that, like the combination of hues in a sunbeam, the effect shall be as one to the eye. we must imagine something of the romantic enthusiasm of juliet, of the truth and constancy of helen, of the dignified purity of isabel, of the tender sweetness of viola, of the self-possession and intellect of portia--combined together so equally and so harmoniously, that we can scarcely say that one quality predominates over the other. but imogen is less imaginative than juliet, less spirited and intellectual than portia, less serious than helen and isabel; her dignity is not so imposing as that of hermione, it stands more on the defensive; her submission, though unbounded, is not so passive as that of desdemona; and thus while she resembles each of these characters individually, she stands wholly distinct from all. it is true, that the conjugal tenderness of imogen is at once the chief subject of the drama, and the pervading charm of her character; but it is not true, i think, that she is merely interesting from her tenderness and constancy to her husband. we are so completely let into the essence of imogen's nature, that we feel as if we had known and loved her before she was married to posthumus, and that her conjugal virtues are a charm superadded, like the color laid upon a beautiful groundwork. neither does it appear to me, that posthumus is unworthy of imogen, or only interesting on imogen's account. his character, like those of all the other persons of the drama, is kept subordinate to hers: but this could not be otherwise, for she is the proper subject--the heroine of the poem. every thing is done to ennoble posthumus, and justify her love for him; and though we certainly approve him more for her sake than for his own, we are early prepared to view him with imogen's eyes; and not only excuse, but sympathize in her admiration of one who sat 'mongst men like a descended god. * * * * who lived in court, which it is rare to do, most praised, most loved: a sample to the youngest; to the more mature, a glass that feated them. and with what beauty and delicacy is her conjugal and matronly character discriminated! her love for her husband is as deep as juliet's for her lover, but without any of that headlong vehemence, that fluttering amid hope, fear, and transport--that giddy intoxication of heart and sense, which belongs to the novelty of passion, which we feel once, and but once, in our lives. we see her love for posthumus acting upon her mind with the force of an habitual feeling, heightened by enthusiastic passion, and hallowed by the sense of duty. she asserts and justifies her affection with energy indeed, but with a calm and wife-like dignity:-- cymbeline. thou took'st a beggar, would'st have made my throne a seat for baseness. imogen. no, i rather added a lustre to it cymbeline. o thou vile one! imogen. sir, it is your fault that i have loved posthumus; you bred him as my playfellow, and he is a man worth any woman; overbuys me, almost the sum he pays. compare also, as examples of the most delicate discrimination of character and feeling, the parting scene between imogen and posthumus, that between romeo and juliet, and that between troilus and cressida: compare the confiding matronly tenderness, the deep but resigned sorrow of imogen, with the despairing agony of juliet, and the petulant grief of cressida. when posthumus is driven into exile, he comes to take a last farewell of his wife:-- imogen. my dearest husband, i something fear my father's wrath, but nothing (always reserved my holy duty) what his rage can do on me. you must be gone, and i shall here abide the hourly shot of angry eyes: not comforted to live, but that there is this jewel in the world that i may see again. posthumus. my queen! my mistress! o, lady, weep no more! lest i give cause to be suspected of more tenderness than doth become a man. i will remain the loyal'st husband that did e'er plight troth * * * * should we be taking leave as long a term as yet we have to live, the loathness to depart would grow--adieu! imogen. nay, stay a little: were you but riding forth to air yourself, such parting were too petty. look here, love, this diamond was my mother's; take it, heart but keep it till you woo another wife, when imogen is dead! imogen, in whose tenderness there is nothing jealous or fantastic, does not seriously apprehend that her husband will woo another wife when she is dead. it is one of those fond fancies which women are apt to express in moments of feeling, merely for the pleasure of hearing a protestation to the contrary. when posthumus leaves her, she does not burst forth in eloquent lamentation; but that silent, stunning, overwhelming sorrow, which renders the mind insensible to all things else, is represented with equal force and simplicity. imogen. there cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is. cymbeline. o disloyal thing, that should'st repair my youth; thou heapeat a year's age on me! imogen. i beseech you, sir, harm not yourself with your vexation; i am senseless of your wrath; a touch more rare[ ] subdues all pangs, all fears. cymbeline. past grace? obedience? imogen. past hope and in despair--that way past grace. in the same circumstances, the impetuous excited feelings of juliet, and her vivid imagination, lend something far more wildly agitated, more intensely poetical and passionate to her grief. juliet. art thou gone so? my love, my lord, my friend! i must hear from thee every day i' the hour, for in a minute there are many days-- o by this count i shall be much in years, ere i again behold my romeo! romeo. farewell! i will omit no opportunity that may convey my greetings, love, to thee. juliet. o! think'st thou we shall ever meet again? romeo. i doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve for sweet discourses in our time to come. juliet. o god! i have an ill-divining soul: methinks i see thee, now thou art below, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb: either my eye-sight fails, or thou look'st pale. we have no sympathy with the pouting disappointment of cressida, which is just like that of a spoilt child which has lost its sugar-plum, without tenderness, passions, or poetry: and, in short, perfectly characteristic of that vain, fickle, dissolute, heartless woman,--"unstable as water." cressida. and is it true that i must go from troy? troilus. a hateful truth. cressida. what, and from troilus too? troilus. from troy and troilus. cressida. is it possible? troilus. and suddenly. cressida. i must then to the greeks? troilus. no remedy. cressida. a woeful cressid 'mongst the merry greeks! when shall we see again? troilus. hear me, my love. be thou but true of heart-- cressida. i true! how now? what wicked deem is this? troilus. nay, we must use expostulation kindly, for it is parting from us; i speak not, be thou true, as fearing thee; for i will throw my glove to death himself that there's no maculation in thy heart: but be thou true, say i, to fashion in my sequent protestation. be thou true, and i will see thee. cressida. o heavens! be true again-- o heavens! you love me not. troilus. die i a villain, then! in this i do not call your faith in question, so mainly as my merit-- --but be not tempted. cressida. do you think i will? * * * * * in the eagerness of imogen to meet her husband there is all a wife's fondness, mixed up with the breathless hurry arising from a sudden and joyful surprise; but nothing of the picturesque eloquence, the ardent, exuberant, italian imagination of juliet, who, to gratify her impatience, would have her heralds thoughts;--press into her service the nimble pinioned doves, and wind-swift cupids,--change the course of nature, and lash the steeds of phoebus to the west. imogen only thinks "one score of miles, 'twixt sun and sun," slow travelling for a lover, and wishes for a horse with wings-- o for a horse with wings! hear'st thou, pisanio? he is at milford haven. read, and tell me how far 'tis thither. if one of mean affairs may plod it in a week, why may not i glide thither in a day? then, true pisanio, (who long'st like me, to see thy lord--who long'st-- o let me bate, but not like me--yet long'st, but in a fainter kind--o not like me, for mine's beyond beyond,) say, and speak thick-- (love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing to the smothering of the sense)--how far is it to this same blessed milford? and by the way, tell me how wales was made so happy, as to inherit such a haven. but, first of all, how we may steal from hence; and for the gap that we shall make in time, from our hence going and our return, to excuse. but first, how get hence. why should excuse be born, or e'er begot? we'll talk of that hereafter. pr'ythee speak, how many score of miles may we well ride 'twixt hour and hour? pisanio. one score, 'twixt sun and sun, madam, 's enough for you; and too much too. imogen. why, one that rode to his execution, man, could never go so slow! there are two or three other passages bearing on the conjugal tenderness of imogen, which must be noticed for the extreme intensity of the feeling, and the unadorned elegance of the expression. i would thou grew'st unto the shores o' the haven and question'dst every sail: if he should write, and i not have it, 'twere a paper lost as offer'd mercy is. what was the last that he spake to thee? pisanio. 'twas, his queen! his queen! imogen. then wav'd his hankerchief? pisanio. and kiss'd it, madam. imogen. senseless linen! happier therein than i!-- and that was all? pisanio. no, madam; for so long as he could make me with this eye or ear distinguish him from others, he did keep the deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief still waving, as the fits and stirs of his mind could best express how slow his soul sail'd on, how swift his ship. imogen. thou should'st have made him as little as a crow, or less, ere left to after-eye him. pisanio. madam, so i did. imogen. i would have broke my eye-strings; cracked them, but to look upon him; till the diminution of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; nay, followed him, till he had melted from the smallness of a gnat to air; and then have turn'd mine eye, and wept. two little incidents, which are introduced with the most unobtrusive simplicity, convey the strongest impression of her tenderness for her husband, and with that perfect unconsciousness on her part, which adds to the effect. thus when she has lost her bracelet-- go, bid my woman search for a jewel, that too casually, hath left my arm. it was thy master's: 'shrew me, if i would lose it for a revenue of any king in europe. i do think i saw't this morning; confident i am, last night 'twas on mine arm--_i kiss'd it. i hope it has not gone to tell my lord that i kiss aught but he._ it has been well observed, that our consciousness that the bracelet is really gone to bear false witness against her, adds an inexpressibly touching effect to the simplicity and tenderness of the sentiment. and again, when she opens her bosom to meet the death to which her husband has doomed her, she finds his letters preserved next her heart what's here! the letters of the loyal leonatus?-- soft, we'll no defence. the scene in which posthumus stakes his ring on the virtue of his wife, and gives iachimo permission to tempt her, is taken from the story. the baseness and folly of such conduct have been justly censured; but shakspeare, feeling that posthumus needed every excuse, has managed the quarrelling scene between him and iachimo with the most admirable skill. the manner in which his high spirit is gradually worked up by the taunts of this italian fiend, is contrived with far more probability, and much less coarseness, than in the original tale. in the end he is not the challenger, but the challenged; and could hardly (except on a moral principle, much too refined for those rude times) have declined the wager without compromising his own courage and his faith in the honor of imogen. iachimo. i durst attempt it against any lady in the world. posthumus. you are a great deal abused in too bold a persuasion; and i doubt not you sustain what you're worthy of, by your attempt. iachimo. what's that? posthumus. a repulse: though your _attempt_, as you call it, deserve more--a punishment too. philario. gentlemen, enough of this. it came in too suddenly; let it die as it was born, and i pray you be better acquainted. iachimo. would i had put my estate and my neighbor's on the approbation of what i have said! posthumus. what lady would you choose to assail? iachimo. yours, whom in constancy you think stands so safe in the interview between imogen and iachimo, he does not begin his attack on her virtue by a direct accusation against posthumus; but by dark hints and half-uttered insinuations, such as iago uses to madden othello, he intimates that her husband, in his absence from her, has betrayed her love and truth, and forgotten her in the arms of another. all that imogen says in this scene is comprised in a few lines--a brief question, or a more brief remark. the proud and delicate reserve with which she veils the anguish she suffers, is inimitably beautiful. the strongest expression of reproach he can draw from her, is only, "my lord, i fear, has forgot britain." when he continues in the same strain, she exclaims in an agony, "let me hear no more." when he urges her to revenge, she asks, with all the simplicity of virtue, "how should i be revenged?" and when he explains to her how she is to be avenged, her sudden burst of indignation, and her immediate perception of his treachery, and the motive for it, are powerfully fine: it is not only the anger of a woman whose delicacy has been shocked, but the spirit of a princess insulted in her court. away! i do condemn mine ears, that have so long attended thee. if thou wert honorable, thou would'st have told this tale for virtue not for such an end thou seek'st, as base as strange thou wrong'st a gentleman, who is as far from thy report as thou from honor; and solicit'st here a lady that disdains thee and the devil alike. it has been remarked, that "her readiness to pardon iachimo's false imputation, and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes, and may show that where there is a real attachment to virtue, there is no need of an outrageous antipathy to vice."[ ] this is true; but can we fail to perceive that the instant and ready forgiveness of imogen is accounted for, and rendered more graceful and characteristic by the very means which iachimo employs to win it? he pours forth the most enthusiastic praises of her husband, professes that he merely made this trial of her out of his exceeding love for posthumus, and she is pacified at once; but, with exceeding delicacy of feeling, she is represented as maintaining her dignified reserve and her brevity of speech to the end of the scene.[ ] we must also observe how beautifully the character of imogen is distinguished from those of desdemona and hermione. when she is made acquainted with her husband's cruel suspicions, we see in her deportment neither the meek submission of the former, nor the calm resolute dignity of the latter. the first effect produced on her by her husband's letter is conveyed to the fancy by the exclamation of pisanio, who is gazing on her as she reads.-- what shall i need to draw my sword? the paper has cut her throat already! no, 'tis slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword! and in her first exclamations we trace, besides astonishment and anguish, and the acute sense of the injustice inflicted on her, a flash of indignant spirit, which we do not find in desdemona or hermione false to his bed!--what is it to be false? to lie in watch there, and to think of him? to weep 'twixt clock and clock? if sleep charge nature, to break it with a fearful dream of him, and cry myself awake?--that's false to his bed, is it? this is followed by that affecting lamentation over the falsehood and injustice of her husband, in which she betrays no atom of jealousy or wounded self-love, but observes in the extremity of her anguish, that after _his_ lapse from truth, "all good seeming would be discredited," and she then resigns herself to his will with the most entire submission. in the original story, zinevra prevails on the servant to spare her, by her exclamations and entreaties for mercy. "the lady, seeing the poniard, and hearing those words, exclaimed in terror, 'alas! have pity on me for the love of heaven! do not become the slayer of one who never offended thee, only to pleasure another. god, who knows all things, knows that i have never done that which could merit such a reward from my husband's hand.'" now let us turn to shakspeare. imogen says,-- come, fellow, be thou honest; do thou thy master's bidding: when thou seest him, a little witness my obedience. look! i draw the sword myself; take it, and hit the innocent mansion of my love, my heart. fear not; 'tis empty of all things but grief: thy master is not there, who was, indeed, the riches of it. do his bidding; strike! the devoted attachment of pisanio to his royal mistress, all through the piece, is one of those side touches by which shakspeare knew how to give additional effect to his characters. cloten is odious;[ ] but we must not overlook the peculiar fitness and propriety of his character, in connection with that of imogen. he is precisely the kind of man who would be most intolerable to such a woman. he is a fool,--so is slender, and sir andrew aguecheek: but the folly of cloten is not only ridiculous, but hateful; it arises not so much from a want of understanding as a total want of heart; it is the perversion of sentiment, rather than the deficiency of intellect; he has occasional gleams of sense, but never a touch of feeling. imogen describes herself not only as "sprighted with a fool," but as "frighted and anger'd worse." no other fool but cloten--a compound of the booby and the villain--could excite in such a mind as imogen's the same mixture of terror, contempt, and abhorrence. the stupid, obstinate malignity of cloten, and the wicked machinations of the queen-- a father cruel, and a step-dame false, a foolish suitor to a wedded lady-- justify whatever might need excuse in the conduct of imogen--as her concealed marriage and her flight from her father's court--and serve to call out several of the most beautiful and striking parts of her character: particularly that decision and vivacity of temper, which in her harmonize so beautifully with exceeding delicacy, sweetness, and submission. in the scene with her detested suitor, there is at first a careless majesty of disdain, which is admirable. i am much sorry, sir, you put me to forget a lady's manners, by being so verbal;[ ] and learn now, for all, that i, which know my heart, do here pronounce, by the very truth of it, i care not for you, and am so near the lack of charity, (t' accuse myself,) i hate you; which i had rather you felt, than make 't my boast. but when he dares to provoke her, by reviling the absent posthumus, her indignation heightens her scorn, and her scorn sets a keener edge on her indignation. cloten. for the contract you pretend with that base wretch, one bred of alms, and fostered with cold dishes, with scraps o' the court; it is no contract, none. imogen. profane fellow! wert thou the son of jupiter, and no more, but what thou art, besides, thou wert too base to be his groom; thou wert dignified enough, even to the point of envy, if 'twere made comparative for your virtues, to be styl'd the under hangman of his kingdom; and hated for being preferr'd so well. he never can meet more mischance than come to be but nam'd of thee. his meanest garment that ever hath but clipp'd his body, is dearer in my respect, than all the hairs above thee. were they all made such men. one thing more must be particularly remarked because it serves to individualize the character from the beginning to the end of the poem. we are constantly sensible that imogen, besides being a tender and devoted woman, is a princess and a beauty, at the same time that she is ever superior to her position and her external charms. there is, for instance, a certain airy majesty of deportment--a spirit of accustomed command breaking out every now and then--the dignity, without the assumption of rank and royal birth, which is apparent in the scene with cloten and elsewhere; and we have not only a general impression that imogen, like other heroines, is beautiful, but the peculiar style and character of her beauty is placed before us: we have an image of the most luxuriant loveliness, combined with exceeding delicacy, and even fragility of person: of the most refined elegance, and the most exquisite modesty, set forth in one or two passages of description; as when iachimo is contemplating her asleep:-- cytherea, how bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily. and whiter than the sheets. 'tis her breathing that perfumes the chamber thus. the flame o' the taper bows toward her; and would underpeep her lids to see the enclos'd lights, now canopied under those windows, white and azure, lac'd with blue of heaven's own tinct! the preservation of her feminine character under her masculine attire; her delicacy, her modesty, and her timidity, are managed with the same perfect consistency and unconscious grace as in viola. and we must not forget that her "neat cookery," which is so prettily eulogized by guiderius:-- he cuts out roots in characters, and sauc'd our broths, as juno had been sick, and he her dieter, formed part of the education of a princess in those remote times. few reflections of a general nature are put into the mouth of imogen; and what she says is more remarkable for sense, truth, and tender feeling, than for wit, or wisdom, or power of imagination. the following little touch of poetry reminds us of juliet:-- ere i could give him that parting kiss, which i had set between two charming words, comes in my father; and, like the tyrannous breathing of the north, shakes all our buds from growing. her exclamation on opening her husband's letter reminds us of the profound and thoughtful tenderness of helen:-- o learned indeed were that astronomer that knew the stars, as i his characters! he'd lay the future open. the following are more in the manner of isabel:-- most miserable is the desire that's glorious: bless'd be those, how mean soe'er, that have their honest wills, that seasons comfort, against self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine that cravens my weak hand. thus may poor fools believe false teachers; though those that are betray'd do feel the reason sharply, yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe, are we not brothers? so man and man should be; but clay and clay differs in dignity, whose dust is both alike. will poor folks lie that have afflictions on them, knowing 'tis a punishment or trial? yes: no wonder, when rich ones scarce tell true: to lapse in fulness is sorer than to lie for need; and falsehood is worse in kings than beggars. the sentence which follows, and which i believe has become proverbial, has much of the manner of portia, both in the thought and the expression:-- hath britain all the sun that shines? day, night, are they not but in britain? i' the world's volume our britain seems as of it, but not in it; in a great pool, a swan's nest; pr'ythee, think there's livers out of britain. * * * * * the catastrophe of this play has been much admired for the peculiar skill with which all the various threads of interest are gathered together at last, and entwined with the destiny of imogen. it may be added, that one of its chief beauties is the manner in which the character of imogen is not only preserved, but rises upon us to the conclusion with added grace: her instantaneous forgiveness of her husband before he even asks it, when she flings herself at once into his arms-- why did you throw your wedded lady from you? and her magnanimous reply to her father, when he tells her, that by the discovery of her two brothers she has lost a kingdom-- no--i have gain'd two worlds by it-- clothing a noble sentiment in a noble image, give the finishing touches of excellence to this most enchanting portrait. on the whole, imogen is a lovely compound of goodness, truth, and affection, with just so much of passion and intellect and poetry, as serve to lend to the picture that power and glowing richness of effect which it would otherwise have wanted; and of her it might be said, if we could condescend to quote from any other poet with shakespeare open before us, that "her person was a paradise, and her soul the cherub to guard it."[ ] cordelia. there is in the beauty of cordelia's character an effect too sacred for words, and almost too deep for tears; within her heart is a fathomless well of purest affection, but its waters sleep in silence and obscurity,--never failing in their depth and never overflowing in their fulness. every thing in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive. the character appears to have no surface, no salient points upon which the fancy can readily seize: there is little external development of intellect, less of passion, and still less of imagination. it is completely made out in the course of a few scenes, and we are surprised to find that in those few scenes there is matter for a life of reflection, and materials enough for twenty heroines. if lear be the grandest of shakspeare's tragedies, cordelia in herself, as a human being, governed by the purest and holiest impulses and motives, the most refined from all dross of selfishness and passion, approaches near to perfection; and in her adaptation, as a dramatic personage, to a determinate plan of action, may be pronounced altogether perfect. the character, to speak of it critically as a poetical conception, is not, however, to be comprehended at once, or easily; and in the same manner cordelia, as a woman, is one whom we must have loved before we could have known her, and known her long before we could have known her truly. most people, i believe, have heard the story of the young german artist müller, who, while employed in copying and engraving raffaelle's madonna del sisto, was so penetrated by its celestial beauty, so distrusted his own power to do justice to it, that between admiration and despair he fell into a sadness; thence through the usual gradations, into a melancholy, thence into madness; and died just as he had put the finishing stroke to his own matchless work, which had occupied him for eight years. with some slight tinge of this concentrated kind of enthusiasm i have learned to contemplate the character of cordelia; i have looked into it till the revelation of its hidden beauty, and an intense feeling of the wonderful genius which created it, have filled me at once with delight and despair. like poor müller, but with more reason, i _do_ despair of ever conveying, through a different and inferior medium, the impression made on my own mind to the mind of another. schlegel, the most eloquent of critics, concludes his remarks on king lear with these words: "of the heavenly beauty of soul of cordelia, i will not venture to speak." now if i attempt what schlegel and others have left undone, it is because i feel that this general acknowledgment of her excellence can neither satisfy those who have studied the character, nor convey a just conception of it to the mere reader. amid the awful, the overpowering interest of the story, amid the terrible convulsions of passion and suffering, and pictures of moral and physical wretchedness which harrow up the soul, the tender influence of cordelia, like that of a celestial visitant, is felt and acknowledged without being quite understood. like a soft star that shines for a moment from behind a stormy cloud and the next is swallowed up in tempest and darkness, the impression it leaves is beautiful and deep,--but vague. speak of cordelia to a critic or to a general reader, all agree in the beauty of the portrait, for all must feel it; but when we come to details, i have heard more various and opposite opinions relative to her than any other of shakspeare's characters--a proof of what i have advanced in the first instance, that from the simplicity with which the character is dramatically treated, and the small space it occupies, few are aware of its internal power, or its wonderful depth of purpose. it appears to me that the whole character rests upon the two sublimest principles of human action, the love of truth and the sense of duty; but these, when they stand alone, (as in the antigone,) are apt to strike us as severe and cold. shakspeare has, therefore, wreathed them round with the dearest attributes of our feminine nature, the power of feeling and inspiring affection. the first part of the play shows us how cordelia is loved, the second part how she can love. to her father she is the object of a secret preference, his agony at her supposed unkindness draws from him the confession, that he had loved her most, and "thought to set his rest on her kind nursery." till then she had been "his best object, the argument of his praise, balm of his age, most best, most dearest!" the faithful and worthy kent is ready to brave death and exile in her defence: and afterwards a farther impression of her benign sweetness is conveyed in a simple and beautiful manner, when we are told that "since the lady cordelia went to france, her father's poor fool had much pined away." we have her sensibility "when patience and sorrow strove which should express her goodliest:" and all her filial tenderness when she commits her poor father to the care of the physician, when she hangs over him as he is sleeping, and kisses him as she contemplates the wreck of grief and majesty. o my dear father! restoration hang its medicine on my lips: and let this kiss repair those violent harms that my two sisters have in thy reverence made! had you not been their father, these white flakes had challenged pity of them! was this a face to be exposed against the warring winds, to stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder in the most terrible and nimble stroke of quick cross lightning? to watch, (poor perdu!) with thin helm? mine enemy's dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire. her mild magnanimity shines out in her farewell to her sisters, of whose real character she is perfectly aware:-- ye jewels of our father! with washed eyes cordelia leaves you! i know ye what ye are, and like a sister, am most loath to call your faults as they are nam'd. use well our father, to your professed bosoms i commit him. but yet, alas! stood i within his grace, i would commend him to a better place; so farewell to you both. goneril. prescribe not us our duties! the modest pride with which she replies to the duke of burgundy is admirable; this whole passage is too illustrative of the peculiar character of cordelia, as well as too exquisite, to be mutilated i yet beseech your majesty, (if, for i want that glib and oily heart, to speak and purpose not, since what i well intend i'll do't before i speak,) that you make known, it is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, no unchaste action, or dishonored step that hath deprived me of your grace and favor; but even for want of that, for which i am richer; a still soliciting eye, and such a tongue i am glad i have not, tho' not to have it hath lost me in your liking. lear. better thou hadst not been born, than not to have pleased me better. france. is it but this? a tardiness of nature, that often leaves the history unspoke which it intends to do?--my lord of burgundy, what say you to the lady? love is not love when it is mingled with respects that stand aloof from the entire point. will you have her? she is herself a dowry. burgundy. royal lear, give but that portion which yourself proposed, and here i take cordelia by the hand duchess of burgundy. lear. nothing: i have sworn; i am firm. burgundy. i am sorry, then, you have lost a father that you must lose a husband. cordelia. peace be with burgundy! since that respects of fortune are his love, i shall not be his wife. france. fairest cordelia! thou art more rich, being poor, most choice, forsaken, and most lov'd, despised! thee and thy virtues here i seize upon. she takes up arms, "not for ambition, but a dear father's right." in her speech after her defeat, we have a calm fortitude and elevation of soul, arising from the consciousness of duty, and lifting her above all consideration of self. she observes,-- we are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst! she thinks and fears only for her father. for thee, oppressed king, am i cast down; myself would else out-frown false fortune's frown. to complete the picture, her very voice is characteristic, "ever soft, gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman." but it will be said, that the qualities here exemplified--as sensibility, gentleness, magnanimity, fortitude, generous affection--are qualities which belong, in their perfection, to others of shakspeare's characters--to imogen, for instance, who unites them all; and yet imogen and cordelia are wholly unlike each other. even though we should reverse their situations, and give to imogen the filial devotion of cordelia, and to cordelia the conjugal virtues of imogen, still they would remain perfectly distinct as women. what is it, then, which lends to cordelia that peculiar and individual truth of character, which distinguishes her from every other human being? it is a natural reserve, a tardiness of disposition, "which often leaves the history unspoke which it intends to do;" a subdued quietness of deportment and expression, a veiled shyness thrown over all her emotions, her language and her manner; making the outward demonstration invariably fall short of what we know to be the feeling within. not only is the portrait singularly beautiful and interesting in itself, but the conduct of cordelia, and the part which she bears in the beginning of the story, is rendered consistent and natural by the wonderful truth and delicacy with which this peculiar disposition is sustained throughout the play. in early youth, and more particularly if we are gifted with a lively imagination, such a character as that of cordelia is calculated above every other to impress and captivate us. any thing like mystery, any thing withheld or withdrawn from our notice, seizes on our fancy by awakening our curiosity. then we are won more by what we half perceive and half create, than by what is openly expressed and freely bestowed. but this feeling is a part of our young life: when time and years have chilled us, when we can no longer afford to send our souls abroad, nor from our own superfluity of life and sensibility spare the materials out of which we build a shrine for our idol--then do we seek, we ask, we thirst for that warmth of frank, confiding tenderness, which revives in us the withered affections and feelings, buried but not dead. then the excess of love is welcomed, not repelled: it is gracious to us as the sun and dew to the seared and riven trunk, with its few green leaves. lear is old--"fourscore and upward"--but we see what he has been in former days: the ardent passions of youth have turned to rashness and wilfulness: he is long passed that age when we are more blessed in what we bestow than in what we receive. when he says to his daughters, "i gave ye all!" we feel that he requires all in return, with a jealous, restless, exacting affection which defeats its own wishes. how many such are there in the world! how many to sympathize with the fiery, fond old man, when he shrinks as if petrified from cordelia's quiet calm reply! lear. now our joy, although the last not least-- what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters'? speak! cordelia. nothing, my lord. lear. nothing! cordelia. nothing. lear. nothing can come of nothing: speak again! cordelia. unhappy that i am! i cannot heave my heart into my mouth: i love your majesty according to my bond; nor more, nor less. now this is perfectly natural. cordelia has penetrated the vile characters of her sisters. is it not obvious, that, in proportion as her own mind is pure and guileless, she must be disgusted with their gross hypocrisy and exaggeration, their empty protestations, their "plaited cunning;" and would retire from all competition with what she so disdains and abhors,--even into the opposite extreme? in such a case, as she says herself-- what should cordelia do?--love and be silent? for the very expressions of lear-- what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters'? are enough to strike dumb forever a generous, delicate, but shy disposition, such as cordelia's, by holding out a bribe for professions. if cordelia were not thus portrayed, this deliberate coolness would strike us as verging on harshness or obstinacy; but it is beautifully represented as a certain modification of character, the necessary result of feelings habitually, if not naturally, repressed: and through the whole play we trace the same peculiar and individual disposition--the same absence of all display--the same sobriety of speech veiling the most profound affections--the same quiet steadiness of purpose--the same shrinking from all exhibition of emotion. "tous les sentimens naturels ont leur pudeur," was a _vivâ voce_ observation of madame de staël, when disgusted by the sentimental affectation of her imitators. this "pudeur," carried to an excess, appears to me the peculiar characteristic of cordelia. thus, in the description of her deportment when she receives the letter of the earl of kent, informing her of the cruelty of her sisters and the wretched condition of lear, we seem to have her before us:-- kent. did your letters pierce the queen to any demonstration of grief? gentleman. ay, sir, she took them, and read them in my presence and now and then an ample tear stole down her delicate cheek. it seemed she was a queen over her passion; who, most rebel-like sought to be king over her. kent. o then it moved her! gentleman. not to a rage. faith, once or twice she heaved the name of father pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart, cried, _sisters! sisters! shame of ladies! sisters! what, i' the storm? i' the night? let pity not be believed._ then she shook the holy water from her heavenly eyes; * * * * then away she started, to deal with grief alone. here the last line--the image brought before us of cordelia starting away from observation, "to deal with grief alone," is as exquisitely beautiful as it is characteristic. but all the passages hitherto quoted must yield in beauty and power to that scene, in which her poor father recognizes her, and in the intervals of distraction asks forgiveness of his wronged child. the subdued pathos and simplicity of cordelia's character, her quiet but intense feeling, the misery and humiliation of the bewildered old man, are brought before us in so few words, and at the same time sustained with such a deep intuitive knowledge of the innermost workings of the human heart, that as there is nothing surpassing this scene in shakspeare himself, so there is nothing that can be compared to it in any other writer. cordelia. how does my royal lord? how fares your majesty? lear. you do me wrong to take me out of the grave. thou art a soul in bliss; but i am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead. cordelia. sir, do you know me? lear. you are a spirit, i know: when did you die? cordelia. still, still far wide! physician. he's scarce awake: let him alone awhile. lear. where have i been? where am i? fair daylight! i am mightily abused. i should even die with pity to see another thus. i know not what to say. i will not swear these are my hands: let's see. i feel this pin prick. would i were assured of my condition. cordelia. o look upon me, sir, and hold your hands in benediction o'er me-- no, sir, you must not kneel. lear. pray, do not mock me: i am a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upwards; and to deal plainly with you, i fear i am not in my perfect mind. methinks i should know you, and know this man, yet i am doubtful: for i am mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill i have remembers not these garments; nor i know not where i did lodge last night. do not laugh at me; for as i am a man, i think this lady to be my child cordelia. cordelia. and so i am, i am. lear. be your tears wet? yes, faith. i pray you weep not if you have poison for me i will drink it. i know you do not love me; for your sisters have, as i do remember, done me wrong: you have some cause, they have not. cordelia. no cause, no cause! as we do not estimate cordelia's affection for her father by the coldness of her language, so neither should we measure her indignation against her sisters by the mildness of her expressions. what, in fact, can be more eloquently significant, and at the same time more characteristic of cordelia, than the single line when she and her father are conveyed to their prison:-- shall we not see these _daughters_ and these _sisters_? the irony here is so bitter and intense, and at the same time so quiet, so feminine, so dignified in the expression, that who but cordelia would have uttered it in the same manner, or would have condensed such ample meaning into so few and simple words? we lose sight of cordelia during the whole of the second and third, and great part of the fourth act; but towards the conclusion she reappears. just as our sense of human misery and wickedness being carried to its extreme height, becomes nearly intolerable, "like an engine wrenching our frame of nature from its fixed place," then, like a redeeming angel, she descends to mingle in the scene, "loosening the springs of pity in our eyes," and relieving the impressions of pain and terror by those of admiration and a tender pleasure. for the catastrophe, it is indeed terrible! wondrous terrible! when lear enters with cordelia dead in his arms, compassion and awe so seize on all our faculties, that we are left only to silence and to tears. but if i might judge from my own sensations, the catastrophe of lear is not so overwhelming as the catastrophe of othello. we do not turn away with the same feeling of absolute unmitigated despair. cordelia is a saint ready prepared for heaven--our earth is not good enough for her: and lear!--o who, after sufferings and tortures such as his, would wish to see his life prolonged? what replace a sceptre in that shaking hand?--a crown upon that old gray head, on which the tempest had poured in its wrath?--on which the deep dread bolted thunders and the winged lightnings had spent their fury? o never, never! let him pass! he hates him that would upon the rack of this rough world stretch him out longer. in the story of king lear and his three daughters, as it is related in the "delectable and mellifluous" romance of perceforest, and in the chronicle of geoffrey of monmouth, the conclusion is fortunate. cordelia defeats her sisters, and replaces her father on his throne. spenser, in his version of the story, has followed these authorities. shakspeare has preferred the catastrophe of the old ballad, founded apparently on some lost tradition. i suppose it is by way of amending his errors, and bringing back this daring innovator to sober history, that it has been thought fit to alter the play of lear for the stage, as they have altered romeo and juliet: they have converted the seraph-like cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off victorious at the end of the play--exit with drums and colors flying--to be married to edgar. now any thing more absurd, more discordant with all our previous impressions, and with the characters as unfolded to us, can hardly be imagined. "i cannot conceive," says schlegel, "what ideas of art and dramatic connection those persons have, who suppose we can at pleasure tack a double conclusion to a tragedy--a melancholy one for hard-hearted spectators, and a merry one for those of softer mould." the fierce manners depicted in this play, the extremes of virtue and vice in the persons, belong to the remote period of the story.[ ] there is no attempt at character in the old narratives; regan and goneril are monsters of ingratitude, and cordelia merely distinguished by her filial piety; whereas, in shakspeare, this filial piety is an affection quite distinct from the qualities which serve to individualize the human being; we have a perception of innate character apart from all accidental circumstance: we see that if cordelia had never known her father, had never been rejected from his love, had never been a born princess or a crowned queen, she would not have been less cordelia; less distinctly _herself_; that is, a woman of a steady mind, of calm but deep affections, of inflexible truth, of few words, and of reserved deportment. as to regan and goneril--"tigers, not daughters"--we might wish to regard them as mere hateful chimeras, impossible as they are detestable; but fortunately there was once a tullia. i know not where to look for the prototype of cordelia: there was a julia alpinula, the young priestess of aventicum,[ ] who, unable to save her father's life by the sacrifice of her own, died with him--"_infelix patris, infelix proles_"--but this is all we know of her. there was the roman daughter, too. i remember seeing at genoa, guido's "pieta romana," in which the expression of the female bending over the aged parent, who feeds from her bosom, is perfect,--but it is not a cordelia: only raffaelle could have painted cordelia. but the character which at once suggests itself in comparison with cordelia, as the heroine of filial tenderness and piety, is certainly the antigone of sophocles. as poetical conceptions, they rest on the same basis: they are both pure abstractions of truth, piety, and natural affection; and in both, love, as a passion, is kept entirely out of sight: for though the womanly character is sustained, by making them the objects of devoted attachment, yet to have portrayed them as influenced by passion, would have destroyed that unity of purpose and feeling which is one source of power; and, besides, have disturbed that serene purity and grandeur of soul, which equally distinguishes both heroines. the spirit, however, in which the two characters are conceived, is as different as possible; and we must not fail to remark, that antigone, who plays a principal part in two fine tragedies, and is distinctly and completely made out, is considered as a masterpiece, the very triumph of the ancient classical drama; whereas, there are many among shakspeare's characters which are equal to cordelia as dramatic conceptions, and superior to her in finishing of outline, as well as in the richness of the poetical coloring. when oedipus, pursued by the vengeance of the gods, deprived of sight by his own mad act, and driven from thebes by his subjects and his sons, wanders forth, abject and forlorn, he is supported by his daughter antigone; who leads him from city to city, begs for him, and pleads for him against the harsh, rude men, who, struck more by his guilt than his misery, would drive him from his last asylum. in the opening of the "oedipus coloneus," where the wretched old man appears leaning on his child, and seats himself in the consecrated grove of the furies, the picture presented to us is wonderfully solemn and beautiful. the patient, duteous tenderness of antigone; the scene in which she pleads for her brother polynices, and supplicates her father to receive his offending son; her remonstrance to polynices, when she entreats him not to carry the threatened war into his native country, are finely and powerfully delineated; and in her lamentation over oedipus, when he perishes in the mysterious grove, there is a pathetic beauty, apparent even through the stiffness of the translation. alas! i only wished i might have died with my poor father; wherefore should i ask for longer life? o i was fond of misery with him; e'en what was most unlovely grew beloved when he was with me. o my dearest father, beneath the earth now in deep darkness hid, worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still wert dear, and shalt be ever. --even as he wished he died, in a strange land--for such was his desire-- a shady turf covered his lifeless limbs, nor unlamented fell! for o these eyes, my father, still shall weep for thee, nor time e'er blot thee from my memory. the filial piety of antigone is the most affecting part of the tragedy of "oedipus coloneus:" her sisterly affection, and her heroic self-devotion to a religious duty, form the plot of the tragedy called by her name. when her two brothers, eteocles and polynices, had slain each other before the walls of thebes, creon issued an edict forbidding the rites of sepulture to polynices, (as the invader of his country,) and awarding instant death to those who should dare to bury him. we know the importance which the ancients attached to the funeral obsequies, as alone securing their admission into the elysian fields. antigone, upon hearing the law of creon, which thus carried vengeance beyond the grave, enters in the first scene, announcing her fixed resolution to brave the threatened punishment: her sister ismene shrinks from sharing the peril of such an undertaking, and endeavors to dissuade her from it, on which antigone replies:-- wert thou to proffer what i do not ask-- thy poor assistance--i would scorn it now; act as thou wilt, i'll bury him myself: let me perform but that, and death is welcome. i'll do the pious deed, and lay me down by my dear brother; loving and beloved, we'll rest together. she proceeds to execute her generous purpose; she covers with earth the mangled corse of polynices, pours over it the accustomed libations, is detected in her pious office, and after nobly defending her conduct, is led to death by command of the tyrant: her sister ismene, struck with shame and remorse, now comes forward to accuse herself as a partaker in the offence, and share her sister's punishment; but antigone sternly and scornfully rejects her; and after pouring forth a beautiful lamentation on the misery of perishing "without the nuptial song--a virgin and a slave," she dies _à l'antique_--she strangles herself to avoid a lingering death. hemon, the son of creon, unable to save her life, kills himself upon her grave: but throughout the whole tragedy we are left in doubt whether antigone does or does not return the affection of this devoted lover. thus it will be seen that in the antigone there is a great deal of what may be called the effect of situation, as well as a great deal of poetry and character: she says the most beautiful things in the world, performs the most heroic actions, and all her words and actions are so placed before us as to _command_ our admiration. according to the classical ideas of virtue and heroism, the character is sublime, and in the delineation there is a severe simplicity mingled with its grecian grace, a unity, a grandeur, an elegance, which appeal to our taste and our understanding, while they fill and exalt the imagination: but in cordelia it is not the external coloring or form, it is not what she says or does, but what she is in herself, what she feels, thinks, and suffers, which continually awaken our sympathy and interest. the heroism of cordelia is more passive and tender--it melts into our heart; and in the veiled loveliness and unostentatious delicacy of her character, there is an effect more profound and artless, if it be less striking and less elaborate than in the grecian heroine. to antigone we give our admiration, to cordelia our tears. antigone stands before us in her austere and statue-like beauty, like one of the marbles of the parthenon. if cordelia reminds us of any thing on earth, it is of one of the madonnas in the old italian pictures, "with downcast eyes beneath th' almighty dove?" and as that heavenly form is connected with our human sympathies only by the expression of maternal tenderness or maternal sorrow, even so cordelia would be almost too angelic, were she not linked to our earthly feelings, bound to our very hearts, by her filial love, her wrongs, her sufferings, and her tears. footnotes: [ ] ----the gods approve the depth, and not the tumult of the soul. wordsworth. "il pouvait y avoir des vagues majestueuses et non de l'orage sans son coeur," was finely observed of madame de staël in her maturer years; it would have been true of hermione at any period of her life. [ ] winter's tale, act v scene [ ] only in the last scene, when, with solemnity befitting the occasion, paulina invokes the majestic figure to "descend, and be stone no more," and where she presents her daughter to her. "turn, good lady! our perdita is found." [ ] act iii, scene . [ ] which being interpreted into modern english, means, i believe, nothing more than that the pattern was what we now call _arabesque_. [ ] there is an incident in the original tale, "il moro di venezia," which could not well be transferred to the drama, but which is very effective, and adds, i think, to the circumstantial horrors of the story. desdemona does not accidentally drop the handkerchief; it is stolen from her by iago's little child, an infant of three years old, whom he trains and bribes to the theft. the love of desdemona for this child, her little playfellow--the pretty description of her taking it in her arms and caressing it, while it profits by its situation to steal the handkerchief from her bosom, are well imagined, and beautifully told; and the circumstance of iago employing his own innocent child as the instrument of his infernal villany, adds a deeper, and, in truth an unnecessary touch of the fiend, to his fiendish character. [ ] consequences are so linked together, that the exclamation of emilia, o thou dull moor!--that handkerchief thou speakest of i found by fortune, and did give my husband!-- is sufficient to reveal to othello the whole history of his ruin. [ ] decamerone. novella, mo. giornata, do. [ ] _vide_ dr. johnson, and dunlop's history of fiction. [ ] see hazlitt and schlegel on the catastrophe of cymbeline. [ ] more rare--_i. e._ more exquisitely poignant. [ ] characters of shakspeare's plays. [ ] _vide_ act . scene . [ ] the character of cloten has been pronounced by some unnatural, by others inconsistent, and by others obsolete. the following passage occurs in one of miss seward's letters, vol. iii p. : "it is curious that shakspeare should, in so singular a character as cloten, have given the exact prototype of a being whom i once knew. the unmeaning frown of countenance, the shuffling gait, the burst of voice, the bustling insignificance, the fever and ague fits of valor, the froward tetchiness, the unprincipled malice, and, what is more curious, those occasional gleams of good sense amidst the floating clouds of folly which generally darkened and confused the man's brain, and which, in the character of cloten, we are apt to impute to a violation of unity in character; but in the some-time captain c----, i saw that the portrait of cloten was not out of nature." [ ] i. e. _full of words_. [ ] dryden. [ ] king lear may be supposed to have lived about one thousand years before the christian era, being the forth or fifth in descent from king brut, the great-grandson of Æneas, and the fabulous founder of the kingdom of britain. [ ] she is commemorated by lord byron. _vide_ childe harold canto iii. historical characters. cleopatra. i cannot agree with one of the most philosophical of shakspeare's critics, who has asserted "that the actual truth of particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasure as well as the dignity of tragedy." if this observation applies at all, it is equally just with regard to characters: and in either case can we admit it? the reverence and the simpleness of heart with which shakspeare has treated the received and admitted truths of history--i mean according to the imperfect knowledge of his time--is admirable; his inaccuracies are few: his general accuracy, allowing for the distinction between the narrative and the dramatic form, is acknowledged to be wonderful. he did not steal the precious material from the treasury of history, to debase its purity,--new-stamp it arbitrarily with effigies and legends of his own devising and then attempt to pass it current, like dryden, racine, and the rest of those poetical coiners: he only rubbed off the rust, purified and brightened it, so that history herself has been known to receive it back as sterling. truth, wherever manifested, should be sacred: so shakspeare deemed, and laid no profane hand upon her altars. but tragedy--majestic tragedy, is worthy to stand before the sanctuary of truth, and to be the priestess of her oracles. "whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thought from within;"[ ]--whatever is pitiful in the weakness, sublime in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of human intellect, these are the domain of tragedy. sibyl and muse at once, she holds aloft the book of human fate, and is the interpreter of its mysteries. it is not, then, making a mock of the serious sorrows of real life, nor of those human beings who lived, suffered and acted upon this earth, to array them in her rich and stately robes, and present them before us as powers evoked from dust and darkness, to awaken the generous sympathies, the terror or the pity of mankind. it does not add to the pain, as far as tragedy is a source of emotion, that the wrongs and sufferings represented, the guilt of lady macbeth, the despair of constance, the arts of cleopatra, and the distresses of katherine, had a real existence; but it adds infinitely to the moral effect, as a subject of contemplation and a lesson of conduct.[ ] i shall be able to illustrate these observations more fully in the course of this section, in which we will consider those characters which are drawn from history; and first, cleopatra. of all shakspeare's female characters, miranda and cleopatra appear to me the most wonderful. the first, unequalled as a poetic conception; the latter, miraculous as a work of art. if we could make a regular classification of his characters, these would form the two extremes of simplicity and complexity; and all his other characters would be found to fill up some shade or gradation between these two. great crimes, springing from high passions, grafted on high qualities, are the legitimate source of tragic poetry. but to make the extreme of littleness produce an effect like grandeur--to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like power--to heap up together all that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthlessness be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness,--to do this, belonged only to shakspeare that worker of miracles. cleopatra is a brilliant antithesis, a compound of contradictions, of all that we most hate, with what we most admire. the whole character is the triumph of the external over the innate; and yet like one of her country's hieroglyphics, though she present at first view a splendid and perplexing anomaly, there is deep meaning and wondrous skill in the apparent enigma, when we come to analyze and decipher it. but how are we to arrive at the solution of this glorious riddle, whose dazzling complexity continually mocks and eludes us? what is most astonishing in the character of cleopatra is its antithetical construction--its _consistent inconsistency_, if i may use such an expression--which renders it quite impossible to reduce it to any elementary principles. it will, perhaps, be found on the whole, that vanity and the love of power predominate; but i dare not say it _is_ so, for these qualities and a hundred others mingle into each other, and shift and change, and glance away, like the colors in a peacock's train. in some others of shakspeare's female characters, also remarkable for their complexity, (portia and juliet, for instance,) we are struck with the delightful sense of harmony in the midst of contrast, so that the idea of unity and simplicity of effect is produced in the midst of variety; but in cleopatra it is the absence of unity and simplicity which strikes us; the impression is that of perpetual and irreconcilable contrast. the continual approximation of whatever is most opposite in character, in situation, in sentiment, would be fatiguing, were it not so perfectly natural: the woman herself would be distracting, if she were not so enchanting. i have not the slightest doubt that shakspeare's cleopatra is the real historical cleopatra--the "rare egyptian"--individualized and placed before us. her mental accomplishments, her unequalled grace, her woman's wit and woman's wiles, her irresistible allurements, her starts of irregular grandeur, her bursts of ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, oriental voluptuousness, and gipsy sorcery. what better proof can we have of the individual truth of the character than the admission that shakspeare's cleopatra produces exactly the same effect on us that is recorded of the real cleopatra? she dazzles our faculties, perplexes our judgment, bewilders and bewitches our fancy; from the beginning to the end of the drama, we are conscious of a kind of fascination against which our moral sense rebels, but from which there is no escape. the epithets applied to her perpetually by antony and others confirm this impression: "enchanting queen!"--"witch"--"spell"--"great fairy"--"cockatrice"--"serpent of old nile"--"thou grave charm!"[ ] are only a few of them; and who does not know by heart the famous quotations in which this egyptian circe is described with all her infinite seductions? fie! wrangling queen! whom every thing becomes--to chide, to laugh, to weep; whose every passion fully strives to make itself, in thee, fair and admired. age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety:-- for vilest things become themselves in her. and the pungent irony of enobarbus has well exposed her feminine arts, when he says, on the occasion of antony's intended departure,-- cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly: i have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. antony. she is cunning past man's thought. enobarbus. alack, sir, no! her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. we cannot call her winds and waters, sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report; this cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as jove. the whole secret of her absolute dominion over the facile antony may be found in one little speech:-- see where he is--who's with him--what he does-- (i did not send you.) if you find him sad, say i am dancing; if in mirth, report that i am sudden sick! quick! and return. charmian. madam, methinks if you did love him dearly, you do not hold the method to enforce the like from him. cleopatra. what should i do, i do not? charmian. in each thing give him way; cross him in nothing. cleopatra. thou teachest like a fool: the way to lose him. charmian. tempt him not too far. but cleopatra is a mistress of her art, and knows better: and what a picture of her triumphant petulance, her imperious and imperial coquetry, is given in her own words! that time--o times! i laugh'd him out of patience; and that night i laughed him into patience: and next morn, ere the ninth hour, i drunk him to his bed; then put my tires and mantles on, whilst i wore his sword, philippan. when antony enters full of some serious purpose which he is about to impart, the woman's perverseness, and the tyrannical waywardness with which she taunts him and plays upon his temper, are admirably depicted. i know, by that same eye, there's some good news. what says the married woman?[ ] you may go; would she had never given you leave to come! let her not say, 'tis i that keep you here; i have no power upon you; hers you are. antony. the gods best know-- cleopatra. o, never was there queen so mightily betray'd! yet at the first, i saw the treasons planted. antony. cleopatra! cleopatra. why should i think you can be mine, and true, though you in swearing shake the throned gods, who have been false to fulvia? riotous madness to be entangled with those mouth-made vows, which break themselves in swearing! antony. most sweet queen! cleopatra. nay, pray you, seek no color for your going, but bid farewell, and go. she recovers her dignity for a moment at the news of fulvia's death, as if roused by a blow:-- though age from folly could not give me freedom, it does from childishness. can fulvia die? and then follows the artful mockery with which she tempts and provokes him, in order to discover whether he regrets his wife. o most false love! where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill with sorrowful water? now i see, i see in fulvia's death, how mine receiv'd shall be. antony. quarrel no more; but be prepared to know the purposes i bear: which are, or cease, as you shall give th' advice. now, by the fire that quickens nilus' shrine, i go from hence thy soldier, servant, making peace or war, as thou affectest. cleopatra. cut my lace, charmian, come--but let it be. i am quickly ill, and well. so antony loves. antony. my precious queen, forbear: and give true evidence to his love which stands an honorable trial. cleopatra. so fulvia told me. i pr'ythee turn aside, and weep for her: then bid adieu to me, and say, the tears belong to egypt. good now, play one scene of excellent dissembling; and let it look like perfect honor. antony. you'll heat my blood--no more. cleopatra. you can do better yet; but this is meetly. antony. now, by my sword-- cleopatra. and target--still he mends: but this is not the best. look, pr'ythee, charmian, how this herculean roman does become the carriage of his chafe! this is, indeed, most "excellent dissembling;" but when she has fooled and chafed the herculean roman to the verge of danger, then comes that return of tenderness which secures the power she has tried to the utmost, and we have all the elegant, the poetical cleopatra in her beautiful farewell. forgive me! since my becomings kill me when they do not eye well to you. your honor calls you hence, therefore be deaf to my unpitied folly, and all the gods go with you! upon your sword sit laurell'd victory; and smooth success be strew'd before your feet! finer still are the workings of her variable mind and lively imagination, after antony's departure; her fond repining at his absence, her violent spirit, her right royal wilfulness and impatience, as if it were a wrong to her majesty, an insult to her sceptre, that there should exist in her despite such things as space and time; and high treason to her sovereign power, to dare to remember what she chooses to forget give me to drink mandragora, that i might sleep out this great gap of time my antony is away. o charmian! where think'st thou he is now? stands he, or sits he, or does he walk? or is he on his horse? o happy horse, to bear the weight of antony! do bravely, horse! for wot'st thou whom thou mov'st? the demi-atlas of this earth--the arm and burgonet of men. he's speaking now, or murmuring, where's my serpent of old nile? for so he calls me. met'st thou my posts? alexas. ay, madam, twenty several messengers: why do you send so thick? cleopatra. who's born that day when i forget to send to antony, shall die a beggar. ink and paper, charmian. welcome, my good alexas. did i, charmian, ever love cæsar so? charmian. o that brave cæsar! cleopatra. be chok'd with such another emphasis! say, the brave antony. charmian. the valiant cæsar! cleopatra. by isis, i will give thee bloody teeth, if thou with cæsar paragon again my man of men! charmian. by your most gracious pardon, i sing but after you. cleopatra. my salad days, when i was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as i said then. but, come away-- get me some ink and paper: he shall have every day a several greeting, or i'll unpeople egypt. we learn from plutarch, that it was a favorite amusement with antony and cleopatra to ramble through the streets at night, and bandy ribald jests with the populace of alexandria. from the same authority, we know that they were accustomed to live on the most familiar terms with their attendants and the companions of their revels. to these traits we must add, that with all her violence, perverseness, egotism, and caprice, cleopatra mingled a capability for warm affections and kindly feeling, or rather what we should call in these days, a constitutional _good-nature_; and was lavishly generous to her favorites and dependents. these characteristics we find scattered through the play; they are not only faithfully rendered by shakspeare, but he has made the finest use of them in his delineation of manners. hence the occasional freedom of her women and her attendants, in the midst of their fears and flatteries, becomes most natural and consistent: hence, too, their devoted attachment and fidelity, proved even in death. but as illustrative of cleopatra's disposition, perhaps the finest and most characteristic scene in the whole play, is that in which the messenger arrives from rome with the tidings of antony's marriage with octavia. she perceives at once with quickness that all is not well, and she hastens to anticipate the worst, that she may have the pleasure of being disappointed. her impatience to know what she fears to learn, the vivacity with which she gradually works herself up into a state of excitement, and at length into fury, is wrought out with a force of truth which makes us recoil. cleopatra. antony's dead! if thou say so, villain, thou kill'st thy mistress. but well and free, if thou so yield him, there is gold, and here my bluest veins to kiss; a hand that kings have lipp'd, and trembled kissing. messenger. first, madam, he is well. cleopatra. why, there's more gold. but, sirrah, mark! we use to say, the dead are well: bring it to that, the gold i give thee will i melt, and pour down thy ill-uttering throat. messenger. good madam, hear me. cleopatra. well, go to, i will. but there's no goodness in thy face. if antony be free and healthful, why so tart a favor to trumpet such good tidings? if not well, thou should'st come like a fury crown'd with snakes. messenger. wil't please you hear me? cleopatra. i have a mind to strike thee ere thou speak'st; yet if thou say antony lives, is well, or friends with cæsar, or not captive to him, i'll set thee in a shower of gold, and hail rich pearls upon thee. messenger. madam, he's well. cleopatra. well said. messenger. and friends with cæsar. cleopatra. thou art an honest man. messenger. cæsar and he are greater friends than ever. cleopatra. make thee a fortune from me. messenger. but yet, madam-- cleopatra. i do not like _but yet_--it does allay the good precedence. fie upon _but yet_: _but yet_ is as a gaoler to bring forth some monstrous malefactor. pr'ythee, friend, pour out thy pack of matter to mine ear, the good and bad together. he's friends with cæsar in state of health, thou say'st; and thou say'st free. messenger. free, madam! no: i made no such report, he's bound unto octavia. cleopatra. for what good turn? messenger. madam he's married to octavia. cleopatra. the most infectious pestilence upon thee! [_strikes him down._ messenger. good madam, patience. cleopatra. what say you? [_strikes him again._ hence horrible villain! or i'll spurn thine eyes like balls before me--i'll unhair thine head-- thou shalt be whipp'd with wire, and stewed in brine smarting in ling'ring pickle. messenger. gracious madam! i, that do bring the news, made not the match. cleopatra. say 'tis not so, a province i will give thee, and make thy fortunes proud: the blow thou hadst shall make thy peace for moving me to rage; and i will boot thee with what gift beside thy modesty can beg. messenger. he's married, madam. cleopatra. rogue, thou hast lived too long. [_draws a dagger._ messenger. nay then i'll run. what mean you, madam? i have made no fault. [_exit._ charmian. good madam, keep yourself within yourself; the man is innocent. cleopatra. some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt. melt egypt into nile! and kindly creatures turn all to serpents! call the slave again; though i am mad, i will not bite him--call! charmian. he is afraid to come. cleopatra. i will not hurt him. these hands do lack nobility, that they strike a meaner than myself. * * * * cleopatra. in praising antony i have dispraised cæsar. charmian. many times, madam. cleopatra. i am paid for't now-- lead me from hence. i faint. o iras, charmian--'tis no matter go to the fellow, good alexas; bid him report the features of octavia, her years, her inclination--let him not leave out the color of her hair. bring me word quickly. [_exit alex._ let him forever go--let him not--charmian, though he be painted one way like a gorgon, t'other way he's a mars. bid you alexas [_to mardian._ bring me word how tall she is. pity me, charmian. but do not speak to me. lead me to my chamber. i have given this scene entire because i know nothing comparable to it the pride and arrogance of the egyptian queen, the blandishment of the woman, the unexpected but natural transitions of temper and feeling, the contest of various passions, and at length--when the wild hurricane has spent its fury--the melting into tears, faintness, and languishment, are portrayed with the most astonishing power, and truth, and skill in feminine nature. more wonderful still is the splendor and force of coloring which is shed over this extraordinary scene. the mere idea of an angry woman beating her menial, presents something ridiculous or disgusting to the mind; in a queen or a tragedy heroine it is still more indecorous;[ ] yet this scene is as far as possible from the vulgar or the comic. cleopatra seems privileged to "touch the brink of all we hate" with impunity. this imperial termagant, this "wrangling queen, whom every thing becomes," becomes even her fury. we know not by what strange power it is, that in the midst of all these unruly passions and childish caprices, the poetry of the character, and the fanciful and sparkling grace of the delineation are sustained and still rule in the imagination; but we feel that it is so. i need hardly observe, that we have historical authority for the excessive violence of cleopatra's temper. witness the story of her boxing the ears of her treasurer, in presence of octavius, as related by plutarch. shakspeare has made a fine use of this anecdote also towards the conclusion of the drama, but it is not equal in power to this scene with the messenger. the man is afterwards brought back, almost by force, to satisfy cleopatra's jealous anxiety, by a description of octavia:--but this time, made wise by experience, he takes care to adapt his information to the humors of his imperious mistress, and gives her a satirical picture of her rival. the scene which follows, in which cleopatra--artful, acute, and penetrating as she is--becomes the dupe of her feminine spite and jealousy, nay, assists in duping herself; and after having cuffed the messenger for telling her truths which are offensive, rewards him for the falsehood which flatters her weakness--is not only an admirable exhibition of character, but a fine moral lesson. she concludes, after dismissing the messenger with gold and thanks, i repent me much that i so harry'd him. why, methinks by him this creature's no such thing? charmian. o nothing, madam. cleopatra. the man hath seen some majesty, and should know! do we not fancy cleopatra drawing herself up with all the vain consciousness of rank and beauty as she pronounces this last line? and is not this the very woman who celebrated her own apotheosis,--who arrayed herself in the robe and diadem of the goddess isis, and could find no titles magnificent enough for her children but those of _the sun_ and _the moon_? the despotism and insolence of her temper are touched in some other places most admirably. thus, when she is told that the romans libel and abuse her, she exclaims,-- sink rome, and their tongues rot that speak against us! and when one of her attendants observes, that "herod of jewry dared not look upon her but when she were well pleased," she immediately replies, "that herod's head i'll have."[ ] when proculeius surprises her in her monument, and snatches her poniard from her, terror, and fury, pride, passion, and disdain, swell in her haughty soul, and seem to shake her very being. cleopatra. where art thou, death? come hither, come! come, come and take a queen worth many babes and beggars! proculeius. o temperance, lady? cleopatra. sir, i will eat no meat; i'll not drink, sir: if idle talk will once be necessary. i'll not sleep neither; this mortal house i'll ruin, do cæsar what he can! know, sir, that i will not wait pinion'd at your master's court, nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye of dull octavia. shall they hoist me up, and show me to the shouting varletry of censuring rome? rather a ditch in egypt be gentle grave to me! rather on nilus' mud lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies blow me into abhorring! rather make my country's high pyramids my gibbet, and hang me up in chains! in the same spirit of royal bravado, but finer still, and worked up with a truly oriental exuberance of fancy and imagery, is her famous description of antony, addressed to dolabella:-- most noble empress you have heard of me? cleopatra. i cannot tell. dolabella. assuredly, you know me. cleopatra. no matter, sir, what i have heard or known. you laugh when boys, or women, tell their dreams is't not your trick? dolabella. i understand not, madam. cleopatra. i dream'd there was an emperor antony; o such another sleep, that i might see but such another man! dolabella. if it might please you-- cleopatra. his face was as the heavens; and therein stuck a sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted the little o, the earth. dolabella. most sovereign creature-- cleopatra. his legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm crested the world; his voice was propertied as all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; but when he meant to quail or shake the orb he was as rattling thunder. for his bounty, there was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas, that grew the more by reaping. his delights were dolphin like; they show'd his back above the element they liv'd in. in his livery[ ] walk'd crowns and coronets; realms and islands were as plates[ ] dropp'd from his pocket. dolabella. cleopatra! cleopatra. think you there was, or might be, such a man as this i dream'd of? dolabella. gentle madam, no. cleopatra. you lie,--up to the hearing of the gods! there was no room left in this amazing picture for the display of that passionate maternal tenderness, which was a strong and redeeming feature in cleopatra's historical character; but it is not left untouched, for when she is imprecating mischiefs on herself, she wishes, as the last and worst of possible evils, that "thunder may smite cæsarion!" in representing the mutual passion of antony and cleopatra as real and fervent, shakspeare has adhered to the truth of history as well as to general nature. on antony's side it is a species of infatuation, a single and engrossing feeling: it is, in short, the love of a man declined in years for a woman very much younger than himself, and who has subjected him to every species of female enchantment. in cleopatra the passion is of a mixed nature, made up of real attachment, combined with the love of pleasure, the love of power, and the love of self. not only is the character most complicated, but no one sentiment could have existed pure and unvarying in such a mind as hers; her passion in itself is true, fixed to one centre; but like the pennon streaming from the mast, it flutters and veers with every breath of her variable temper: yet in the midst of all her caprices, follies, and even vices, womanly feeling is still predominant in cleopatra: and the change which takes place in her deportment towards antony, when their evil fortune darkens round them, is as beautiful and interesting in itself as it is striking and natural. instead of the airy caprice and provoking petulance she displays in the first scenes, we have a mixture of tenderness, and artifice, and fear, and submissive blandishment. her behavior, for instance, after the battle of actium, when she quails before the noble and tender rebuke of her lover, is partly female subtlety and partly natural feeling. cleopatra. o my lord, my lord, forgive my fearful sails! i little thought you would have follow'd. antony. egypt, thou know'st too well my heart was to the rudder tied by the strings, and thou should'st tow me after. o'er my spirit thy full supremacy thou know'st; and that thy beck might from the bidding of the gods command me. cleopatra. o, my pardon? antony. now i must to the young man send humble treaties, dodge and palter in the shifts of lowness; who with half the bulk o' the world play'd as i pleas'd, making and marring fortunes. you did know how much you were my conqueror; and that my sword, made weak by my affection, would obey it on all cause. cleopatra. o pardon, pardon! antony. fall not a tear, i say; one of them rates all that is won and lost. give me a kiss; even this repays me. it is perfectly in keeping with the individual character, that cleopatra, alike destitute of moral strength and physical courage, should cower terrified and subdued before the masculine spirit of her lover, when once she has fairly roused it. thus tasso's armida, half siren, half sorceress, in the moment of strong feeling, forgets her incantations, and has recourse to persuasion, to prayers, and to tears. lascia gl' incanti, e vuol provar se vaga e supplice belta sia miglior maga. though the poet afterwards gives us to understand that even in this relinquishment of art there was a more refined artifice. nella doglia amara già tutte non oblia l' arti e le frodi. and something like this inspires the conduct of cleopatra towards antony in his fallen fortunes. the reader should refer to that fine scene, where antony surprises thyreus kissing her hand, "that kingly seal and plighter of high hearts," and rages like a thousand hurricanes. the character of mark antony, as delineated by shakspeare, reminds me of the farnese hercules. there is an ostentatious display of power, an exaggerated grandeur, a colossal effect in the whole conception, sustained throughout in the pomp of the language, which seems, as it flows along, to resound with the clang of arms and the music of the revel. the coarseness and violence of the historic portrait are a little kept down; but every word which antony utters is characteristic of the arrogant but magnanimous roman, who "with half the bulk o' the world played as he pleased," and was himself the sport of a host of mad (and bad) passions, and the slave of a woman. history is followed closely in all the details of the catastrophe, and there is something wonderfully grand in the hurried march of events towards the conclusion. as disasters hem her round, cleopatra gathers up her faculties to meet them, not with the calm fortitude of a great soul, but the haughty, tameless spirit of a wilful woman, unused to reverse or contradiction. her speech, after antony has expired in her arms, i have always regarded as one of the most wonderful in shakspeare. cleopatra is not a woman to grieve silently. the contrast between the violence of her passions and the weakness of her sex, between her regal grandeur and her excess of misery, her impetuous, unavailing struggles with the fearful destiny which has compassed her, and the mixture of wild impatience and pathos in her agony, are really magnificent. she faints on the body of antony, and is recalled to life by the cries of her women:-- iras. royal egypt--empress! cleopatra. no more, but e'en a woman![ ] and commanded by such poor passion as the maid that milks, and does the meanest chares.--it were for me to throw my sceptre at the injurious gods: to tell them that our world did equal theirs till they had stolen our jewel. all's but naught, patience is sottish, and impatience does become a dog that's mad. then is it sin to rush into the secret house of death ere death dare come to us? how do you, women? what, what? good cheer! why how now, charmian? my noble girls!--ah, women, women! look our lamp is spent, is out. we'll bury him, and then what's brave, what's noble, let's do it after the high roman fashion, and make death proud to take us. but although cleopatra talks of dying "after the high roman fashion" she fears what she most desires, and cannot perform with simplicity what costs her such an effort. that extreme physical cowardice, which was so strong a trait in her historical character, which led to the defeat of actium, which made her delay the execution of a fatal resolve, till she had "tried conclusions infinite of _easy_ ways to die," shakspeare has rendered with the finest possible effect, and in a manner which heightens instead of diminishing our respect and interest. timid by nature, she is courageous by the mere force of will, and she lashes herself up with high-sounding words into a kind of false daring. her lively imagination suggests every incentive which can spur her on to the deed she has resolved, yet trembles to contemplate. she pictures to herself all the degradations which must attend her captivity, and let it be observed, that those which she anticipates are precisely such as a vain, luxurious, and haughty woman would especially dread, and which only true virtue and magnanimity could despise. cleopatra could have endured the loss of freedom; but to be led in triumph through the streets of rome is insufferable. she could stoop to cæsar with dissembling courtesy, and meet duplicity with superior art; but "to be chastised" by the scornful or upbraiding glance of the injured octavia--"rather a ditch in egypt!" if knife, drugs, serpents, have edge, sting, or operation, i am safe. your wife, octavia, with her modest eyes, and still conclusion,[ ] shall acquire no honor demurring upon me. now iras, what think'st thou? thou, an egyptian puppet, shall be shown in rome as well as i. mechanic slaves, with greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall uplift us to the view. in their thick breaths, rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded, and forc'd to drink their vapor. iras. the gods forbid! cleopatra. nay, 'tis most certain, iras. saucy lictors will catch at us like strumpets; and scald rhymers ballad us out o' tune. the quick comedians extemporally will stage us, and present our alexandrian revels. antony shall be brought drunken forth; and i shall see some squeaking cleopatra boy my greatness. she then calls for her diadem, her robes of state, and attires herself as if "again for cydnus, to meet mark antony." coquette to the last, she must make death proud to take her, and die, "phoenix like," as she had lived, with all the pomp of preparation--luxurious in her despair. the death of lucretia, of portia, of arria, and others who died "after the high roman fashion," is sublime according to the pagan ideas of virtue, and yet none of them so powerfully affect the imagination as the catastrophe of cleopatra. the idea of this frail, timid, wayward woman, dying with heroism from the mere force of passion and will, takes us by surprise. the attic elegance of her mind, her poetical imagination, the pride of beauty and royalty predominating to the last, and the sumptuous and picturesque accompaniments with which she surrounds herself in death, carry to its extreme height that effect of contrast which prevails through her life and character. no arts, no invention could add to the real circumstances of cleopatra's closing scene. shakspeare has shown profound judgment and feeling in adhering closely to the classical authorities; and to say that the language and sentiments worthily fill up the outline, is the most magnificent praise that can be given. the magical play of fancy and the overpowering fascination of the character are kept up to the last, and when cleopatra, on applying the asp, silences the lamentations of her women:-- peace! peace! dost thou not see my baby at my breast, that sucks the nurse to sleep?-- these few words--the contrast between the tender beauty of the image and the horror of the situation--produce an effect more intensely mournful than all the ranting in the world. the generous devotion of her women adds the moral charm which alone was wanting: and when octavius hurries in too late to save his victim, and exclaims, when gazing on her-- she looks like sleep-- as she would catch another antony in her strong toil of grace, the image of her beauty and her irresistible arts, triumphant even in death, is at once brought before us, and one masterly and comprehensive stroke consummates this most wonderful, most dazzling delineation. i am not here the apologist of cleopatra's historical character, nor of such women as resemble her: i am considering her merely as a dramatic portrait of astonishing beauty, spirit, and originality. she has furnished the subject of two latin, sixteen french, six english, and at least four italian tragedies;[ ] yet shakspeare alone has availed himself of all the interest of the story, without falsifying the character. he alone has dared to exhibit the egyptian queen with all her greatness and all her littleness--all her frailties of temper--all her paltry arts and dissolute passions--yet preserved the dramatic propriety and poetical coloring of the character, and awakened our pity for fallen grandeur, without once beguiling us into sympathy with guilt and error. corneille has represented cleopatra as a model of chaste propriety, magnanimity, constancy, and every female virtue; and the effect is almost ludicrous. in our own language, we have two very fine tragedies on the story of cleopatra: in that of dryden, which is in truth a noble poem, and which he himself considered his masterpiece, cleopatra is a mere common-place "all-for-love" heroine, full of constancy and fine sentiments. for instance:-- my love's so true, that i can neither hide it where it is, nor show it where it is not. nature meant me a wife--a silly, harmless, household dove, fond without art, and kind without deceit. but fortune, that has made a mistress of me, has thrust me out to the wild world, unfurnished of falsehood to be happy. is this antony's cleopatra--the circe of the nile--the venus of the cydnus? _she_ never uttered any thing half so mawkish in her life. in fletcher's "false one," cleopatra is represented at an earlier period of her history: and to give an idea of the aspect under which the character is exhibited, (and it does not vary throughout the play,) i shall give one scene; if it be considered out of place, its extreme beauty will form its best apology. ptolemy and his council having exhibited to cæsar all the royal treasures in egypt, he is so astonished and dazzled at the view of the accumulated wealth, that he forgets the presence of cleopatra, and treats her with negligence. the following scene between her and her sister arsinoe occurs immediately afterwards. arsinoe. you're so impatient! cleopatra. have i not cause? women of common beauties and low births, when they are slighted, are allowed their angers-- why should not i, a princess, make him know the baseness of his usage? arsinoe. yes, 'tis fit: but then again you know what man-- cleopatra. he's no man! the shadow of a greatness hangs upon him, and not the virtue; he is no conqueror, has suffered under the base dross of nature; poorly deliver'd up his power to wealth. the god of bed-rid men taught his eyes treason. against the truth of love he has rais'd rebellion defied his holy flames. eros. he will fall back again and satisfy your grace. cleopatra. had i been old, or blasted in my bud, he might have show'd some shadow of dislike: but to prefer the lustre of a little trash, arsinoe, and the poor glow-worm light of some faint jewels before the light of love, and soul of beauty-- o how it vexes me! he is no soldier: all honorable soldiers are love's servants. he is a merchant, a mere wandering merchant, servile to gain; he trades for poor commodities, and makes his conquests thefts! some fortunate captains that quarter with him, and are truly valiant. have flung the name of "happy cæsar" on him; himself ne'er won it. he's so base and covetous, he'll sell his sword for gold. arsinoe. this is too bitter. cleopatra. o, i could curse myself, that was so foolish. so fondly childish, to believe his tongue-- his promising tongue--ere i could catch his temper. i'd trash enough to have cloyed his eyes withal, (his covetous eyes,) such as i scorn to tread on, richer than e'er he saw yet, and more tempting; had i known he'd stoop'd at that, i'd saved mine honor-- i had been happy still! but let him take it. and let him brag how poorly i'm rewarded; let him go conquer still weak wretched ladies; love has his angry quiver too, his deadly, and when he finds scorn, armed at the strongest-- i am a fool to fret thus for a fool,-- an old blind fool too! i lose my health; i will not, i will not cry; i will not honor him with tears diviner than the gods he worships; i will not take the pains to curse a poor thing. eros. do not; you shall not need. cleopatra. would i were prisoner to one i hate, that i might anger him! i will love any man to break the heart of him! any that has the heart and will to kill him! arsinoe. take some fair truce. cleopatra. i will go study mischief, and put a look on, arm'd with all my cunnings. shall meet him like a basilisk, and strike him. love! put destroying flame into mine eyes, into my smiles deceits, that i may torture him-- that i may make him love to death, and laugh at him _enter_ apollodorus. apollodorus. cæsar commends his service to your grace cleopatra. his service? what's his service? eros. pray you be patient the noble cæsar loves still. cleopatra. what's his will? apollodorus. he craves access unto your highness. cleopatra no;-- say no; i will have none to trouble me. arsinoe. good sister!-- cleopatra. none, i say. i will be private. would thou hadst flung me into nilus, keeper, when first thou gav'st consent to bring my body to this unthankful cæsar! apollodorus. 'twas your will, madam. nay more, your charge upon me, as i honor'd you. you know what danger i endur'd. cleopatra. take this, [_giving a jewel_, and carry it to that lordly cæsar sent thee; there's a new love, a handsome one, a rich one,-- one that will hug his mind: bid him make love to it: tell the ambitious broker this will suffer-- _enter_ cÆsar. apollodorus. he enters. cleopatra. how! cÆsar. i do not use to wait, lady where i am, all the doors are free and open. cleopatra. i guess so by your rudeness. cÆsar. you're not angry? things of your tender mould should be most gentle. why should you frown? good gods, what a set anger have you forc'd into your face! come, i must temper you. what a coy smile was there, and a disdainful! how like an ominous flash it broke out from you! defend me, love! sweet, who has anger'd you? cleopatra. show him a glass! that false face has betray'd me-- that base heart wrong'd me! cÆsar. be more sweetly angry. i wrong'd you, fair? cleopatra. away with your foul flatteries; they are too gross! but that i dare be angry, and with as great a god as cæsar is, to show how poorly i respect his memory i would not speak to you. cÆsar. pray you, undo this riddle, and tell me how i've vexed you. cleopatra. let me think first, whether i may put on patience that will with honor suffer me. know i hate you! let that begin the story. now i'll tell you. cÆsar. but do it mildly: in a noble lady, softness of spirit, and a sober nature, that moves like summer winds, cool, and blows sweetness, shows blessed, like herself. cleopatra. and that great blessedness. you first reap'd of me; till you taught my nature, like a rude storm, to talk aloud and thunder, sleep was not gentler than my soul, and stiller. you had the spring of my affections, and my fair fruits i gave you leave to taste of; you must expect the winter of mine anger. you flung me off--before the court disgraced me-- when in the pride i appear'd of all my beauty-- appear'd your mistress; took unto your eyes the common strumpet, love of hated lucre,-- courted with covetous heart the slave of nature,-- gave all your thoughts to gold, that men of glory, and minds adorned with noble love, would kick at! soldiers of royal mark scorn such base purchase; beauty and honor are the marks they shoot at. i spake to you then, i courted you, and woo'd you, called you dear cæsar, hung about you tenderly, was proud to appear your friend-- cÆsar. you have mistaken me. cleopatra. but neither eye, nor favor, not a smile was i blessed back withal, but shook off rudely, and as you had been sold to sordid infamy, you fell before the images of treasure, and in your soul you worship'd. i stood slighted; forgotten, and contemned; my soft embraces, and those sweet kisses which you called elysium as letters writ in sand, no more remember'd; the name and glory of your cleopatra laugh'd at, and made a story to your captains! shall i endure? cÆsar. you are deceived in all this; upon my life you are; 'tis your much tenderness. cleopatra. no, no; i love not that way; you are cozen'd; i love with as much ambition as a conqueror, and where i love will triumph! cÆsar. so you shall: my heart shall be the chariot that shall bear you: all i have won shall wait upon you. by the gods, the bravery of this woman's mind has fir'd me! dear mistress, shall i but this once---- cleopatra. how! cæsar! have i let slip a second vanity that gives thee hope? cÆsar. you shall be absolute, and reign alone as queen; you shall be any thing. cleopatra. * * * * farewell, unthankful! cÆsar. stay! cleopatra. i will not. cÆsar. i command. cleopatra. command, and go without, sir, i do command _thee_ be my slave forever, and vex, while i laugh at thee! cÆsar. thus low, beauty---- [_he kneels_ cleopatra. it is too late; when i have found thee absolute, the man that fame reports thee, and to me, may be i shall think better. farewell, conqueror! (_exit._) now this is magnificent poetry, but this is not cleopatra, this is not "the gipsey queen." the sentiment here is too profound, the majesty too real, and too lofty. cleopatra could be great by fits and starts, but never sustained her dignity upon so high a tone for ten minutes together. the cleopatra of fletcher reminds us of the antique colossal statue of her in the vatican, all grandeur and grace. cleopatra in dryden's tragedy is like guido's dying cleopatra in the pitti palace, tenderly beautiful. shakspeare's cleopatra is like one of those graceful and fantastic pieces of antique arabesque, in which all anomalous shapes and impossible and wild combinations of form are woven together in regular confusion and most harmonious discord: and such, we have reason to believe, was the living woman herself, when she existed upon this earth. octavia. i do not understand the observation of a late critic, that in this play "octavia is only a dull foil to cleopatra." cleopatra requires no foil, and octavia is not dull, though in a moment of jealous spleen, her accomplished rival gives her that epithet.[ ] it is possible that her beautiful character, if brought more forward and colored up to the historic portrait, would still be eclipsed by the dazzling splendor of cleopatra's; for so i have seen a flight of fireworks blot out for a while the silver moon and ever-burning stars. but here the subject of the drama being the love of antony and cleopatra, octavia is very properly kept in the background, and far from any competition with her rival: the interest would otherwise have been unpleasantly divided, or rather cleopatra herself must have served but as a foil to the tender, virtuous, dignified, and generous octavia, the very _beau ideal_ of a noble roman lady:-- admired octavia, whose beauty claims no worse a husband than the best of men; whose virtues and whose general graces speak that which none else can utter. dryden has committed a great mistake in bringing octavia and her children on the scene, and in immediate contact with cleopatra. to have thus violated the truth of history[ ] might have been excusable, but to sacrifice the truth of nature and dramatic propriety, to produce a mere stage effect, was unpardonable. in order to preserve the unity of interest, he has falsified the character of octavia as well as that of cleopatra:[ ] he has presented us with a regular scolding-match between the rivals, in which they come sweeping up to each other from opposite sides of the stage, with their respective trains, like two pea-hens in a passion. shakspeare would no more have brought his captivating, brilliant, but meretricious cleopatra into immediate comparison with the noble and chaste simplicity of octavia, than a connoisseur in art would have placed canova's dansatrice, beautiful as it is, beside the athenian melpomene, or the vestal of the capitol. the character of octavia is merely indicated in a few touches, but every stroke tells. we see her with "downcast eyes sedate and sweet, and looks demure,"--with her modest tenderness and dignified submission--the very antipodes of her rival! nor should we forget that she has furnished one of the most graceful similes in the whole compass of poetry, where her soft equanimity in the midst of grief is compared to the swan's down feather that stands upon the swell at flood of tide, and neither way inclines. the fear which, seems to haunt the mind of cleopatra, lest she should be "chastised by the sober eye" of octavia, is exceedingly characteristic of the two women: it betrays the jealous pride of her, who was conscious that she had forfeited all real claim to respect; and it places octavia before us in all the majesty of that virtue which could strike a kind of envying and remorseful awe even into the bosom of cleopatra. what would she have thought and felt, had some soothsayer foretold to her the fate of her own children, whom she so tenderly loved? captives, and exposed to the rage of the roman populace, they owed their existence to the generous, admirable octavia, in whose mind there entered no particle of littleness. she received into her house the children of antony and cleopatra, educated them with her own, treated them with truly maternal tenderness, and married them nobly. lastly, to complete the contrast, the death of octavia should be put in comparison with that of cleopatra. after spending several years in dignified retirement, respected as the sister of augustus, but more for her own virtues, octavia lost her eldest son marcellus, who was expressively called the "hope of rome." her fortitude gave way under this blow, and she fell into a deep melancholy, which gradually wasted her health. while she was thus declining into death, occurred that beautiful scene, which has never yet, i believe, been made the subject of a picture, but should certainly be added to my gallery, (if i had one,) and i would hang it opposite to the dying cleopatra. virgil was commanded by augustus to read aloud to his sister that book of the eneid in which he had commemorated the virtues and early death of the young marcellus. when he came to the lines-- this youth, the blissful vision of a day, shall just be shown on earth, then snatch'd away, &c. the mother covered her face, and burst into tears. but when virgil mentioned her son by name, ("tu marcellus eris,") which he had artfully deferred till the concluding lines, octavia, unable to control her agitation, fainted away. she afterwards, with a magnificent spirit, ordered the poet a gratuity of ten thousand sesterces for each line of the panegyric.[ ] it is probable that the agitation she suffered on this occasion hastened the effects of her disorder; for she died soon after, (of grief, says the historian,) having survived antony about twenty years. volumnia. octavia, however, is only a beautiful sketch, while in volumnia, shakspeare has given us the portrait of a roman matron, conceived in the true antique spirit, and finished in every part. although coriolanus is the hero of the play, yet much of the interest of the action and the final catastrophe turn upon the character of his mother, volumnia, and the power she exercised over his mind, by which, according to the story, "she saved rome and lost her son." her lofty patriotism, her patrician haughtiness, her maternal pride, her eloquence, and her towering spirit, are exhibited with the utmost power of effect; yet the truth of female nature is beautifully preserved, and the portrait, with all its vigor, is without harshness. i shall begin by illustrating the relative position and feelings of the mother and son; as these are of the greatest importance in the action of the drama, and consequently most prominent in the characters. though volumnia is a roman matron, and though her country owes its salvation to her, it is clear that her maternal pride and affection are stronger even than her patriotism. thus when her son is exiled, she burst into an imprecation against rome and its citizens:-- now the red pestilence strikes all trades in rome, and occupations perish! here we have the impulses of individual and feminine nature, overpowering all national and habitual influences. volumnia would never have exclaimed like the spartan mother, of her dead son, "sparta has many others as brave as he;" but in a far different spirit she says to the romans,-- ere you go, hear this: as far as doth the capitol exceed the meanest house in rome, so far my son, whom you have banished, does exceed you all. in the very first scene, and before the introduction of the principal personages, one citizen observes to another that the military exploits of marcius were performed, not so much for his country's sake "as to please his mother." by this admirable stroke of art, introduced with such simplicity of effect, our attention is aroused, and we are prepared in the very outset of the piece for the important part assigned to volumnia, and for her share in producing the catastrophe. in the first act we have a very graceful scene, in which the two roman ladies, the wife and mother of coriolanus, are discovered at their needle-work, conversing on his absence and danger, and are visited by valeria:-- the noble sisters of publicola, the moon of rome; chaste as the icicle, that's curded by the frost from purest snow, and hangs on dian's temple! over this little scene shakspeare, without any display of learning, has breathed the very spirit of classical antiquity. the haughty temper of volumnia, her admiration of the valor and high bearing of her son, and her proud but unselfish love for him, are finely contrasted with the modest sweetness, he conjugal tenderness, and the fond solicitude of his wife virgilia. volumnia. when yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness pluck'd all gaze his way; when, for a day of king's entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding--considering how honor would become such a person; that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir,--was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. to a cruel war i sent him, from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. i tell thee, daughter--i sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man. virgilia. but had he died in the business, madam? how then? volumnia. then his good report should have been my son; i therein would have found issue. hear me profess sincerely: had i a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good marcius, i had rather eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action. _enter a_ gentlewoman. madam, the lady valeria is come to visit you. virgilia. beseech you, give me leave to retire myself. volumnia. indeed you shall not. methinks i hear hither your husband's drum: see him pluck aufidius down by the hair: as children from a bear, the volces shunning him: methinks i see him stamp thus, and call thus-- "come on, you cowards! you were got in fear, though you were born in rome." his bloody brow with his mail'd hand then wiping, forth he goes; like to a harvest-man, that's task'd to mow or all, or lose his hire. virgilia. his bloody brow! o jupiter, no blood! volumnia. away, you fool! it more becomes a man than gilt his trophy. the breast of hecuba, when she did suckle hector, look'd not lovelier than hector's forehead, when it spit forth blood at grecian swords contending. tell valeria we are fit to bid her welcome. [_exit gent._ virgilia. heavens bless my lord from fell aufidius! volumnia. he'll beat aufidius's head below his knee. and tread upon his neck. this distinction between the two females is as interesting and beautiful as it is well sustained. thus when the victory of coriolanus is proclaimed, menenius asks, "is he wounded?" virgilia. o no, no, no! volumnia. yes, he is wounded--i thank the gods for it! and when he returns victorious from the wars, his high-spirited mother receives him with blessings and applause--his gentle wife with "gracious silence" and with tears. the resemblance of temper in the mother and the son, modified as it is by the difference of sex, and by her greater age and experience, is exhibited with admirable truth. volumnia, with all her pride and spirit, has some prudence and self-command; in her language and deportment all is matured and matronly. the dignified tone of authority she assumes towards her son, when checking his headlong impetuosity, her respect and admiration for his noble qualities, and her strong sympathy even with the feelings she combats, are all displayed in the scene in which she prevails on him to soothe the incensed plebeians. volumnia. pray be counsell'd: i have a heart as little apt as yours, but yet a brain that leads my use of anger to better vantage. menenius. well said, noble woman: before he should thus stoop to the herd, but that the violent fit o' the time craves it as physic for the whole state, i would put mine armour on, which i can scarcely bear. coriolanus. what must i do? menenius. return to the tribunes. coriolanus. well. what then? what then? menenius. repent what you have spoke. coriolanus. for them? i cannot do it to the gods; must i then do't to them? volumnia. you are too absolute, though therein you can never be too noble, but when extremities speak. i pr'ythee now, my son, go to them with this bonnet in thy hand; and thus far having stretch'd it, (here be with them) thy knee bussing the stones, (for in such business action is eloquent, and the eyes of the ignorant more learned than the ears,) waving thy head, which often, thus, correcting thy stout heart now humble, as the ripest mulberry, that will not hold the handling. or, say to them, thou art their soldier, and being bred in broils hast not the soft way which, thou dost confess, were fit for thee to use, as they to claim, in asking their good loves; but thou wilt frame thyself, forsooth, hereafter theirs, so far as thou hast power and person. menenius. this but done, even as she speaks, why all their hearts were yours for they have pardons, being asked, as free as words to little purpose. volumnia. pr'ythee now, go, and be rul'd: although i know thou hadst rather follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf than flatter him in a bower. menenius. only fair speech. cominius. i think 'twill serve, if he can thereto frame his spirit. volumnia. he must, and will: pr'ythee, now say you will, and go about it. coriolanus. must i go show them my unbarb'd sconce? must i with my base tongue give to my noble heart a lie, that it must bear? well, i will do't; yet were there but this single plot to lose, this mould of marcius, they to dust should grind it, and throw it against the wind. to the market-place you have put me now to such a part, which never i shall discharge to the life. volumnia. i pr'ythee now, sweet son, as thou hast said, my praises made thee first a soldier, so to have my praise for this, perform a part thou hast not done before. coriolanus. well, i must do't: away, my disposition, and possess me some harlot's spirit! * * * * i will not do't: lest i surcease to honor mine own truth, and by my body's action, teach my mind a most inherent baseness. volumnia. at thy choice, then: to beg of thee, it is my more dishonor, than thou of them. come all to ruin: let thy mother rather feel thy pride, than fear thy dangerous stoutness: for i mock at death with as big heart as thou. do as thou list-- thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me but owe thy pride thyself. coriolanus. pray be content; mother, i am going to the market place-- chide me no more. when the spirit of the mother and the son are brought into immediate collision, he yields before her; the warrior who stemmed alone the whole city of corioli, who was ready to face "the steep tarpeian death, or at wild horses' heels,--vagabond exile--flaying," rather than abate one jot of his proud will--shrinks at her rebuke. the haughty, fiery, overbearing temperament of coriolanus, is drawn in such forcible and striking colors, that nothing can more impress us with the real grandeur and power of volumnia's character, than his boundless submission to her will--his more than filial tenderness and respect. you gods! i prate, and the most noble mother of the world leave unsaluted. sink my knee i' the earth-- of thy deep duty more impression show than that of common sons! when his mother appears before him as a suppliant, he exclaims,-- my mother bows; as if olympus to a molehill should in supplication nod. here the expression of reverence, and the magnificent image in which it is clothed, are equally characteristic both of the mother and the son. her aristocratic haughtiness is a strong trait in volumnia's manner and character, and her supreme contempt for the plebeians, whether they are to be defied or cajoled, is very like what i have heard expressed by some high-born and high-bred women of our own day. i muse my mother does not approve me further, who was wont to call them woollen vassals; things created to buy and sell with groats; to show bare heads in congregations; to yawn, be still, and wonder when one but of my ordinance stood up to speak of peace or war. and volumnia reproaching the tribunes,-- 'twas you incensed the rabble-- cats, that can judge as fitly of his worth, as i can of those mysteries which heaven will not have earth to know. there is all the roman spirit in her exultation when the trumpets sound the return of coriolanus. hark! the trumpets! these are the ushers of marcius: before him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears. and in her speech to the gentle virgilia, who is weeping her husband's banishment-- leave this faint puling! and lament as i do in anger--juno-like! but the triumph of volumnia's character, the full display of all her grandeur of soul, her patriotism, her strong affections, and her sublime eloquence, are reserved for her last scene, in which she pleads for the safety of rome, and wins from her angry son that peace which all the swords of italy and her confederate arms could not have purchased. the strict and even literal adherence to the truth of history is an additional beauty. her famous speech, beginning "should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. i shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. one exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond the rhetorician and historian, and belongs only to the poet. speak to me, son; thou hast affected the fine strains of honor, to imitate the graces of the gods; to tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, and yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt that should but rive an oak. why dost not speak? think'st thou it honorable for a nobleman still to remember wrongs? daughter, speak you: he cares not for your weeping. speak thou, boy; perhaps thy childishness may move him more than can our reasons. there is no man in the world more bound to his mother; yet here he lets me prate like one i' the stocks. thou hast never in thy life show'd thy dear mother any courtesy; _when she, (poor hen!) fond of no second brood, has cluck'd thee to the wars, and safely home, laden with honor._ say my request's unjust, and spurn me back: but, if it be not so, thou art not honest, and the gods will plague thee that thou restrain'st from me the duty which to a mother's part belongs. he turns away: down, ladies: let us shame him with our knees. to his surname coriolanus 'longs more pride, than pity to our prayers; down, and end; this is the last; so will we home to rome, and die among our neighbors. nay, behold us; this boy, that cannot tell what he would have, but kneels, and holds up hands, for fellowship, does reason our petition with more strength than thou hast to deny't.[ ] it is an instance of shakspeare's fine judgment, that after this magnificent and touching piece of eloquence, which saved rome, volumnia should speak no more, for she could say nothing that would not deteriorate from the effect thus left on the imagination. she is at last dismissed from our admiring gaze amid the thunder of grateful acclamations-- behold, our patroness,--the life of rome. constance. we have seen that in the mother of coriolanus, the principal qualities are exceeding pride, self-will, strong maternal affection, great power of imagination, and energy of temper. precisely the same qualities enter into the mind of constance of bretagne: but in her these qualities are so differently modified by circumstances and education, that not even in fancy do we think of instituting a comparison between the gothic grandeur of constance, and the more severe and classical dignity of the roman matron. the scenes and circumstances with which shakspeare has surrounded constance, are strictly faithful to the old chronicles, and are as vividly as they are accurately represented. on the other hand, the hints on which the character has been constructed, are few and vague; but the portrait harmonizes so wonderfully with its historic background, and with all that later researches have discovered relative to the personal adventures of constance, that i have not the slightest doubt of its individual truth. the result of a life of strange vicissitude; the picture of a tameless will, and high passions, forever struggling in vain against a superior power: and the real situation of women in those chivalrous times, are placed before us in a few noble scenes. the manner in which shakspeare has applied the scattered hints of history to the formation of the character, reminds us of that magician who collected the mangled limbs which had been dispersed up and down, reunited them into the human form, and reanimated them with the breathing and conscious spirit of life. constance of bretagne was the only daughter and heiress of conan iv., duke of bretagne; her mother was margaret of scotland, the eldest daughter of malcolm iv.: but little mention is made of this princess in the old histories; but she appears to have inherited some portion of the talent and spirit of her father, and to have transmitted them to her daughter. the misfortunes of constance may be said to have commenced before her birth, and took their rise in the misconduct of one of her female ancestors. her great-grandmother matilda, the wife of conan iii., was distinguished by her beauty and imperious temper, and not less by her gallantries. her husband, not thinking proper to repudiate her during his lifetime, contented himself with disinheriting her son hoel, whom he declared illegitimate; and bequeathed his dukedom to his daughter bertha, and her husband allan the black, earl of richmond, who were proclaimed and acknowledged duke and duchess of bretagne. prince hoel, so far from acquiescing in his father's will, immediately levied an army to maintain his rights, and a civil war ensued between the brother and sister, which lasted for twelve or fourteen years. bertha, whose reputation was not much fairer than that of her mother matilda, was succeeded by her son conan iv.; he was young, and of a feeble, vacillating temper, and after struggling for a few years against the increasing power of his uncle hoel, and his own rebellious barons, he called in the aid of that politic and ambitious monarch, henry ii. of england. this fatal step decided the fate of his crown and his posterity; from the moment the english set foot in bretagne, that miserable country became a scene of horrors and crimes--oppression and perfidy on the one hand, unavailing struggles on the other. ten years of civil discord ensued, during which the greatest part of bretagne was desolated, and nearly a third of the population carried off by famine and pestilence. in the end, conan was secured in the possession of his throne by the assistance of the english king, who, equally subtle and ambitious, contrived in the course of this warfare to strip conan of most of his provinces by successive treaties; alienate the breton nobles from their lawful sovereign, and at length render the duke himself the mere vassal of his power. in the midst of these scenes of turbulence and bloodshed was constance born, in the year . the english king consummated his perfidious scheme of policy, by seizing on the person of the infant princess, before she was three years old, as a hostage for her father. afterwards, by contracting her in marriage to his third son, geoffrey plantagenet, he ensured, as he thought, the possession of the duchy of bretagne to his own posterity. from this time we hear no more of the weak, unhappy conan, who, retiring from a fruitless contest, hid himself in some obscure retreat: even the date of his death is unknown. meanwhile henry openly claimed the duchy in behalf of his son geoffrey and the lady constance; and their claims not being immediately acknowledged, he invaded bretagne with a large army, laid waste the country, bribed or forced some of the barons into submission, murdered or imprisoned others, and, by the most treacherous and barbarous policy, contrived to keep possession of the country he had thus seized. however, in order to satisfy the bretons, who were attached to the race of their ancient sovereigns, and to give some color to his usurpation, he caused geoffrey and constance to be solemnly crowned at rennes, as duke and duchess of bretagne. this was in the year when constance was five, and prince geoffrey about eight, years old. his father, henry, continued to rule, or rather to ravage and oppress, the country in their name for about fourteen years, during which period we do not hear of constance. she appears to have been kept in a species of constraint as a hostage rather than a sovereign; while her husband geoffrey, as he grew up to manhood, was too much engaged in keeping the bretons in order, and disputing his rights with his father, to think about the completion of his union with constance, although his sole title to the dukedom was properly and legally in right of his wife. at length, in , the nuptials were formally celebrated, constance being then in her nineteenth year. at the same time, she was recognized as duchess of bretagne _de son chef_, (that is, in her own right,) by two acts of legislation, which are still preserved among the records of bretagne, and bear her own seal and signature. those domestic feuds which embittered the whole life of henry ii., and at length broke his heart, are well known. of all his sons, who were in continual rebellion against him, geoffrey was the most undutiful, and the most formidable: he had all the pride of the plantagenets,--all the warlike accomplishments of his two elder brothers, henry and richard; and was the only one who could compete with his father in talent, eloquence, and dissimulation. no sooner was he the husband of constance, and in possession of the throne of bretagne, than he openly opposed his father; in other words, he maintained the honor and interests of his wife and her unhappy country against the cruelties and oppression of the english plunderers.[ ] about three years after his marriage, he was invited to paris for the purpose of concluding a league, offensive and defensive, with the french king: in this journey he was accompanied by the duchess constance, and they were received and entertained with royal magnificence. geoffrey, who excelled in all chivalrous accomplishments, distinguished himself in the tournaments which were celebrated on the occasion; but unfortunately, after an encounter with a french knight, celebrated for his prowess, he was accidentally flung from his horse, and trampled to death in the lists before he could be extricated. constance, being now left a widow, returned to bretagne, where her barons rallied round her, and acknowledged her as their sovereign. the salique law did not prevail in bretagne, and it appears that in those times the power of a female to possess and transmit the rights of sovereignty had been recognized in several instances; but constance is the first woman who exercised those rights in her own person. she had one daughter, elinor, born in the second year of her marriage, and a few months after her husband's death she gave birth to a son. the states of bretagne were filled with exultation; they required that the infant prince should not bear the name of his father,--a name which constance, in fond remembrance of her husband, would have bestowed on him--still less that of his grandfather henry; but that of arthur, the redoubted hero of their country, whose memory was worshipped by the populace. though the arthur of romantic and fairy legends--the arthur of the round table, had been dead for six centuries, they still looked for his second appearance among them, according to the prophecy of merlin; and now, with fond and short-sighted enthusiasm, fixed their hopes on the young arthur as one destined to redeem the glory and independence of their oppressed and miserable country. but in the very midst of the rejoicings which succeeded the birth of the prince, his grandfather, henry ii., demanded to have the possession and guardianship of his person; and on the spirited refusal of constance to yield her son into his power, he invaded bretagne with a large army, plundering, burning, devastating the country as he advanced. he seized rennes, the capital, and having by the basest treachery obtained possession of the persons both of the young duchess and her children, he married constance forcibly to one of his own favorite adherents, randal de blondeville, earl of chester, and conferred on him the duchy of bretagne, to be held as a fief of the english crown. the earl of chester, though a brave knight and one of the greatest barons of england, had no pretensions to so high an alliance; nor did he possess any qualities or personal accomplishments which might have reconciled constance to him as a husband. he was a man of diminutive stature and mean appearance, but of haughty and ferocious manners, and unbounded ambition.[ ] in a conference between this earl of chester and the earl of perche, in lincoln cathedral, the latter taunted randal with his insignificant person, and called him contemptuously "_dwarf_." "sayst thou so!" replied randal; "i vow to god and our lady, whose church this is, that ere long i will seem to thee high as that steeple!" he was as good as his word, when, on ascending the throne of brittany, the earl of perche became his vassal. we cannot know what measures were used to force this degradation on the reluctant and high-spirited constance; it is only certain that she never considered her marriage in the light of a sacred obligation, and that she took the first opportunity of legally breaking from a chain which could scarcely be considered as legally binding. for about a year she was obliged to allow this detested husband the title of duke of bretagne, and he administered the government without the slightest reference to her will, even in form, till , when henry ii. died, execrating himself and his undutiful children. whatever great and good qualities this monarch may have possessed, his conduct in bretagne was uniformly detestable. even the unfilial behavior of his sons may be extenuated; for while he spent his life, and sacrificed his peace, and violated every principle of honor and humanity to compass their political aggrandizement, he was guilty of atrocious injustice towards them, and set them a bad example in his own person. the tidings of henry's death had no sooner reached bretagne than the barons of that country rose with one accord against his government, banished or massacred his officers, and, sanctioned by the duchess constance, drove randal de blondeville and his followers from bretagne; he retired to his earldom of chester, there to brood over his injuries, and meditate vengeance. in the mean time, richard i. ascended the english throne. soon afterwards he embarked on his celebrated expedition to the holy land, having previously declared prince arthur, the only son of constance, heir to all his dominions.[ ] his absence, and that of many of her own turbulent barons and encroaching neighbors, left to constance and her harassed dominions a short interval of profound peace. the historians of that period, occupied by the warlike exploits of the french and english kings in palestine, make but little mention of the domestic events of europe during their absence; but it is no slight encomium on the character of constance, that bretagne flourished under her government, and began to recover from the effects of twenty years of desolating war. the seven years during which she ruled as an independent sovereign, were not marked by any events of importance; but in the year she caused her son arthur, then nine years of age, to be acknowledged duke of bretagne by the states, and associated him with herself in all the acts of government. there was more of maternal fondness than policy in this measure, and it cost her dear. richard, that royal firebrand, had now returned to england: by the intrigues and representations of earl randal, his attention was turned to bretagne. he expressed extreme indignation that constance should have proclaimed her son duke of bretagne, and her partner in power, without his consent, he being the feudal lord and natural guardian of the young prince. after some excuses and representations on the part of constance, he affected to be pacified, and a friendly interview was appointed at pontorson, on the frontiers of normandy. we can hardly reconcile the cruel and perfidious scenes which follow with those romantic and chivalrous associations which illustrate the memory of coeur-de-lion--the friend of blondel, and the antagonist of saladin. constance, perfectly unsuspicious of the meditated treason, accepted the invitation of her brother-in-law, and set out from rennes with a small but magnificent retinue to join him at pontorson. on the road, and within sight of the town, the earl of chester was posted with a troop of richard's soldiery, and while the duchess prepared to enter the gates, where she expected to be received with honor and welcome, he suddenly rushed from his ambuscade, fell upon her and her suite, put the latter to flight, and carried off constance to the strong castle of st. jaques de beuvron, where he detained her a prisoner for eighteen months. the chronicle does not tell us how randal treated his unfortunate wife during this long imprisonment. she was absolutely in his power; none of her own people were suffered to approach her, and whatever might have been his behavior towards her, one thing alone is certain, that so far from softening her feelings towards _him_, it seems to have added tenfold bitterness to her abhorrence and her scorn. the barons of bretagne sent the bishop of rennes to complain of this violation of faith and justice, and to demand the restitution of the duchess. richard meanly evaded and temporized: he engaged to restore constance to liberty on certain conditions; but this was merely to gain time. when the stipulated terms were complied with, and the hostages delivered, the bretons sent a herald to the english king, to require him to fulfil his part of the treaty, and restore their beloved constance. richard replied with insolent defiance, refused to deliver up either the hostages or constance, and marched his army into the heart of the country. all that bretagne had suffered previously was as nothing compared to this terrible invasion; and all that the humane and peaceful government of constance had effected during seven years was at once annihilated. the english barons and their savage and mercenary followers spread themselves through the country, which they wasted with fire and sword. the castles of those who ventured to defend themselves were razed to the ground; the towns and villages plundered and burnt, and the wretched inhabitants fled to the caves and forests; but not even there could they find an asylum; by the orders, and in the presence of richard, the woods were set on fire, and hundreds either perished in the flames, or were suffocated in the smoke. constance, meanwhile, could only weep in her captivity over the miseries of her country, and tremble with all a mother's fears for the safety of her son. she had placed arthur under the care of william desroches, the seneschal of her palace, a man of mature age, of approved valor, and devotedly attached to her family. this faithful servant threw himself, with his young charge, into the fortress of brest, where he for some time defied the power of the english king. but notwithstanding the brave resistance of the nobles and people of bretagne, they were obliged to submit to the conditions imposed by richard. by a treaty concluded in , of which the terms are not exactly known, constance was delivered from her captivity, though not from her husband; but in the following year, when the death of richard had restored her to some degree of independence, the first use she made of it was to _divorce herself_ from randal. she took this step with her usual precipitancy, not waiting for the sanction of the pope, as was the custom in those days; and soon afterwards she gave her hand to guy, count de thouars, a man of courage and integrity, who for some time maintained the cause of his wife and her son against the power of england. arthur was now fourteen, and the legitimate heir of all the dominions of his uncle richard. constance placed him under the guardianship of the king of france, who knighted the young prince with his own hand, and solemnly swore to defend his rights against his usurping uncle john. it is at this moment that the play of king john opens; and history is followed as closely as the dramatic form would allow, to the death of john. the real fate of poor arthur, after he had been abandoned by the french, and had fallen into the hands of his uncle, is now ascertained; but according to the chronicle from which shakspeare drew his materials, he was killed in attempting to escape from the castle of falaise. constance did not live to witness this consummation of her calamities; within a few months after arthur was taken prisoner, in , she died suddenly, before she had attained her thirty-ninth year; but the cause of her death is not specified. her eldest daughter elinor, the legitimate heiress of england, normandy, and bretagne, died in captivity; having been kept a prisoner in bristol castle from the age of fifteen. she was at that time so beautiful, that she was called proverbially, "la belle bretonne," and by the english the "fair maid of brittany." she, like her brother arthur, was sacrificed to the ambition of her uncles. of the two daughters of constance by guy de thouars, the eldest, alice, became duchess of bretagne, and married the count de dreux, of the royal blood of france. the sovereignty of bretagne was transmitted through her descendants in an uninterrupted line, till, by the marriage of the celebrated anne de bretagne with charles viii. of france, her dominions were forever united with the french monarchy. in considering the real history of constance, three things must strike us as chiefly remarkable. first, that she is not accused of any vice, or any act of injustice or violence; and this praise, though poor and negative, should have its due weight, considering the scanty records that remain of her troubled life, and the period at which she lived--a period in which crimes of the darkest dye were familiar occurrences. her father, conan, was considered as a gentle and amiable prince--"gentle even to feebleness;" yet we are told that on one occasion he acted over again the tragedy of ugolino and ruggiero, when he shut up the count de dol, with his two sons and his nephew, in a dungeon, and deliberately starved them to death; an event recorded without any particular comment by the old chroniclers of bretagne. it also appears that, during those intervals when constance administered the government of her states with some degree of independence, the country prospered under her sway, and that she possessed at all times the love of her people and the respect of her nobles. secondly, no imputation whatever has been cast on the honor of constance as a wife and as a woman. the old historians, who have treated in a very unceremonious style the levities of her great-grandmother matilda, her grandmother bertha, her godmother constance, and her mother-in-law elinor, treat the name and memory of our lady constance with uniform respect. her third marriage, with guy de thouars, has been censured as impolitic, but has also been defended; it can hardly, considering her age, and the circumstances in which she was placed, be a just subject of reproach. during her hated union with randal de blondeville, and the years passed in a species of widowhood, she conducted herself with propriety: at least i can find no reason to judge otherwise. lastly, we are struck by the fearless, determined spirit, amounting at times to rashness, which constance displayed on several occasions, when left to the free exercise of her own power and will; yet we see how frequently, with all this resolution and pride of temper, she became a mere instrument in the hands of others, and a victim to the superior craft or power of her enemies. the inference is unavoidable; there must have existed in the mind of constance, with all her noble and amiable qualities, a deficiency somewhere, a want of firmness, a want of judgment or wariness, and a total want of self-control. * * * * * in the play of king john, the three principal characters are the king, falconbridge, and lady constance. the first is drawn forcibly and accurately from history: it reminds us of titian's portrait of cæsar borgia, in which the hatefulness of the subject is redeemed by the masterly skill of the artist,--the truth, and power, and wonderful beauty of the execution. falconbridge is the spirited creation of the poet.[ ] constance is certainly an historical personage; but the form which, when we meet it on the record of history, appears like a pale indistinct shadow, half melted into its obscure background, starts before us into a strange relief and palpable breathing reality upon the page of shakspeare. whenever we think of constance, it is in her maternal character. all the interest which she excites in the drama turns upon her situation as the mother of arthur. every circumstance in which she is placed, every sentiment she utters, has a reference to him, and she is represented through the whole of the scenes in which she is engaged, as alternately pleading for the rights, and trembling for the existence of her son. the same may be said of the merope. in the four tragedies of which her story forms the subject,[ ] we see her but in one point of view, namely, as a mere impersonation of the maternal feeling. the poetry of the situation is every thing, the character nothing. interesting as she is, take merope out of the circumstances in which she is placed,--take away her son, for whom she trembles from the first scene to the last, and merope in herself is nothing; she melts away into a name, to which we can fix no other characteristic by which to distinguish her. we recognize her no longer. her position is that of an agonized mother; and we can no more fancy her under a different aspect, than we can imagine the statue of niobe in a different attitude. but while we contemplate the character of constance, she assumes before us an individuality perfectly distinct from the circumstances around her. the action calls forth her maternal feelings, and places them in the most prominent point of view: but with constance, as with a real human being, the maternal affections are a powerful instinct, modified by other faculties, sentiments, and impulses, making up the individual character. we think of her as a mother, because, as a mother distracted for the loss of her son, she is immediately presented before us, and calls forth our sympathy and our tears; but we infer the rest of her character from what we see, as certainly and as completely as if we had known her whole course of life. that which strikes us as the principal attribute of constance is _power_--power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride: the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical coloring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate. hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. the weakness of the woman, who by the very consciousness of that weakness is worked up to desperation and defiance, the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. the energy of constance not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment while neither from her towering pride, nor her strength of intellect, can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure. it is, therefore, with perfect truth of nature, that constance is first introduced as pleading for peace. stay for an answer to your embassy, lest unadvised you stain your swords with blood: my lord chatillon may from england bring that right in peace, which here we urge in war; and then we shall repent each drop of blood, that hot, rash haste so indirectly shed. and that the same woman, when all her passions are roused by the sense of injury, should afterwards exclaim, war, war! no peace! peace is to me a war! that she should be ambitious for her son, proud of his high birth and royal rights, and violent in defending them, is most natural; but i cannot agree with those who think that in the mind of constance, _ambition_--that is, the love of dominion for its own sake--is either a strong motive or a strong feeling: it could hardly be so where the natural impulses and the ideal power predominate in so high a degree. the vehemence with which she asserts the just and legal rights of her son is that of a fond mother and a proud-spirited woman, stung with the sense of injury, and herself a reigning sovereign,--by birth and right, if not in fact: yet when bereaved of her son, grief not only "fills the room up of her absent child," but seems to absorb every other faculty and feeling--even pride and anger. it is true that she exults over him as one whom nature and fortune had destined to be _great_, but in her distraction for his loss, she thinks of him only as her "pretty arthur." o lord! my boy, my arthur, my fair son! my life, my joy, my food, my all the world! my widow-comfort, and my sorrow's cure! no other feeling can be traced through the whole of her frantic scene: it is grief only, a mother's heart-rending, soul-absorbing grief, and nothing else. not even indignation, or the desire of revenge, interfere with its soleness and intensity. an ambitious woman would hardly have thus addressed the cold, wily cardinal:-- and, father cardinal, i have heard you say, that we shall see and know our friends in heaven: if that be true, i shall see my boy again: for since the birth of cain, the first male child, to him that did but yesterday suspire, there was not such a gracious creature born. but now will canker eat my bud, and chase the native beauty from his cheek, and he will look as hollow as a ghost; as dim and merge as an ague's fit; and so he'll die; and rising so again, when i shall meet him in the court of heaven i shall not know him: therefore never, never. must i behold my pretty arthur more! the bewildered pathos and poetry of this address could be natural in no woman, who did not unite, like constance, the most passionate sensibility with the most vivid imagination. it is true that queen elinor calls her on one occasion, "ambitious constance;" but the epithet is rather the natural expression of elinor's own fear and hatred than really applicable.[ ] elinor, in whom age had subdued all passions but ambition, dreaded the mother of arthur as her rival in power, and for that reason only opposed the claims of the son: but i conceive, that in a woman yet in the prime of life, and endued with the peculiar disposition of constance, the mere love of power would be too much modified by fancy and feeling to be called a _passion_. in fact, it is not pride, nor temper, nor ambition, nor even maternal affection, which in constance gives the prevailing tone to the whole character; it is the predominance of imagination. i do not mean in the conception of the dramatic portrait, but in the temperament of the woman herself. in the poetical, fanciful, excitable cast of her mind, in the _excess_ of the ideal power, tinging all her affections, exalting all her sentiments and thoughts, and animating the expression of both, constance can only be compared to juliet. in the first place, it is through the power of imagination that when under the influence of excited temper, constance is not a mere incensed woman; nor does she, in the style of volumnia, "lament in anger, juno-like," but rather like a sibyl in a fury. her sarcasms come down like thunderbolts. in her famous address to austria-- o lymoges! o austria! thou dost shame that bloody spoil! thou slave! thou wretch! thou coward! &c. it is as if she had concentrated the burning spirit of scorn, and dashed it in his face: every word seems to blister where it falls. in the scolding scene between her and queen elinor, the laconic insolence of the latter is completely overborne by the torrent of bitter contumely which bursts from the lips of constance, clothed in the most energetic, and often in the most figurative expressions. elinor. who is it thou dost call usurper, france? constance. let me make answer; thy usurping son. elinor. out insolent! thy bastard shall be king, that thou may'st be a queen, and check the world! constance. my bed was ever to thy son as true, as thine was to thy husband; and this boy liker in feature to his father geffrey, than thou and john in manners: being as like as rain to water, or devil to his dam. my boy a bastard! by my soul, i think his father never was so true begot; it cannot be, an if thou wert his mother. elinor. there's a good mother, boy, that blots thy father. constance. there's a good grandam, boy, that would blot thee. * * * * elinor. come to thy grandam, child. constance. do child; go to its grandam, child: give grandam kingdom, and its grandam will give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig: there's a good grandam. arthur. good my mother, peace! i would that i were low laid in my grave; i am not worth this coil that's made for me. elinor. his mother shames him so, poor boy, he weeps. constance. now shame upon you, whe'r she does or no! his grandam's wrongs, and not his mother's shame, draw those heaven-moving pearls from his poor eyes which heaven shall take in nature of a fee: ay, with these crystal beads heav'n shall be bribed to do him justice, and revenge on you. elinor. thou monstrous slanderer of heaven and earth! constance. thou monstrous injurer of heaven and earth! call me not slanderer; thou and thine usurp the dominations, royalties, and rights of this oppressed boy. this is thy eldest son's son infortunate in nothing but in thee. * * * * elinor. thou unadvised scold, i can produce a will that bars the title of thy son. constance. ay, who doubts that? a will! a wicked will-- a woman's will--a canker'd grandam's will! king philip. peace, lady: pause, or be more moderate. and in a very opposite mood, when struggling with the consciousness of her own helpless situation, the same susceptible and excitable fancy still predominates:-- thou shalt be punish'd for thus frighting me; for i am sick, and capable of fears; oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears a widow, husbandless, subject to fears; a woman, naturally born to fears; and though thou now confess thou didst but jest with my vexed spirits, i cannot take a truce, but they will quake and tremble all this day. what dost thou mean by shaking of thy head? why dost thou look so sadly on my son? what means that hand upon that breast of thine? why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum, like a proud river peering o'er his bounds? be these sad signs confirmers of thy words? * * * * fellow, begone! i cannot brook thy sight-- this news hath made thee a most ugly man! it is the power of imagination which gives so peculiar a tinge to the maternal tenderness of constance; she not only loves her son with the fond instinct of a mother's affection, but she loves him with her poetical imagination, exults in his beauty and his royal birth, hangs over him with idolatry, and sees his infant brow already encircled with the diadem. her proud spirit, her ardent enthusiastic fancy, and her energetic self-will, all combine with her maternal love to give it that tone and character which belongs to her only: hence that most beautiful address to her son, which coming from the lips of constance, is as full of nature and truth as of pathos and poetry, and which we could hardly sympathize with in any other:-- arthur. i do beseech you, madam, be content. constance. if thou, that bid'st me be content, wert grim, ugly, and slanderous to thy mother's womb, full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains, lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious. patched with foul moles and eye-offending marks, i would not care--i then would be content; for then i should not love thee; no, nor thou become thy great birth, nor deserve a crown. but thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy! nature and fortune join'd to make thee great: of nature's gifts thou mayest with lilies boast, and with the half-blown rose: but fortune, o! she is corrupted, chang'd, and won from thee; she adulterates hourly with thine uncle john; and with her golden hand hath pluck'd on france to tread down fair respect of sovereignty. it is this exceeding vivacity of imagination which in the end turns sorrow to frenzy. constance is not only a bereaved and doating mother, but a generous woman, betrayed by her own rash confidence; in whose mind the sense of injury mingling with the sense of grief, and her impetuous temper conflicting with her pride, combine to overset her reason; yet she is not mad: and how admirably, how forcibly she herself draws the distinction between the frantic violence of uncontrolled feeling and actual madness!-- thou art not holy to belie me so; i am not mad: this hair i tear is mine; my name is constance; i was geffrey's wife; young arthur is my son, and he is lost: i am not mad; i would to heaven i were! for then, 'tis like i should forget myself: o, if i could, what grief should i forget! not only has constance words at will, and fast as the passionate feelings rise in her mind they are poured forth with vivid, overpowering eloquence; but, like juliet, she may be said to speak in pictures. for instance:-- why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum? like a proud river peering o'er its bounds. and throughout the whole dialogue there is the same overflow of eloquence, the same splendor of diction, the same luxuriance of imagery; yet with an added grandeur, arising from habits of command, from the age, the rank, and the matronly character of constance. thus juliet pours forth her love like a muse in a rapture: constance raves in her sorrow like a pythoness possessed with the spirit of pain. the love of juliet is deep and infinite as the boundless sea: and the grief of constance is so great, that nothing but the round world itself is able to sustain it. i will instruct my sorrows to be proud; for grief is proud and makes his owner stout. to me, and to the state of my great grief let kings assemble, for my grief's so great, that no supporter but the huge firm earth can hold it up. here i and sorrow sit; here is my throne,--bid kings come bow to it! an image more majestic, more wonderfully sublime, was never presented to the fancy; yet almost equal as a flight of poetry is her apostrophe to the heavens;-- arm, arm, ye heavens, against these perjured kings a widow calls!--be husband to me, heavens! and again-- o that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth, then with a passion would i shake the world! not only do her thoughts start into images, but her feelings become persons: grief haunts her as a living presence: grief fills the room up of my absent child; lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; then have i reason to be fond of grief. and death is welcomed as a bridegroom; she sees the visionary monster as juliet _saw_ "the bloody tybalt festering in his shroud," and heaps one ghastly image upon another with all the wild luxuriance of a distempered fancy:-- o amiable, lovely death! thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! arise forth from the couch of lasting night, thou hate and terror to prosperity, and i will kiss thy detestable bones; and put my eye-balls in thy vaulty brows; and right these fingers with thy household worms; and stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust; and be a carrion monster like thyself; come, grin on me, and i will think thou smil'st, and buss thee as thy wife! misery's love, o come to me! constance, who is a majestic being, is majestic in her very frenzy. majesty is also the characteristic of hermione: but what a difference between _her_ silent, lofty, uncomplaining despair, and the eloquent grief of constance, whose wild lamentations, which come bursting forth clothed in the grandest, the most poetical imagery, not only melt, but absolutely electrify us! on the whole, it may be said that pride and maternal affection form the basis of the character of constance, as it is exhibited to us; but that these passions, in an equal degree common to many human beings, assume their peculiar and individual tinge from an extraordinary development of intellect and fancy. it is the energy of passion which lends the character its concentrated power, as it is the prevalence of imagination throughout which dilates it into magnificence. some of the most splendid poetry to be met with in shakspeare, may be found in the parts of juliet and constance; the most splendid, perhaps, excepting only the parts of lear and othello; and for the same reason,--that lear and othello as men, and juliet and constance as women, are distinguished by the predominance of the same faculties,--passion and imagination. the sole deviation from history which may be considered as essentially interfering with the truth of the situation, is the entire omission of the character of guy de thouars, so that constance is incorrectly represented as in a state of widowhood, at a period when, in point of fact, she was married. it may be observed, that her marriage took place just at the period of the opening of the drama; that guy de thouars played no conspicuous part in the affairs of bretagne till after the death of constance, and that the mere presence of this personage, altogether superfluous in the action, would have completely destroyed the dramatic interest of the situation;--and what a situation! one more magnificent was never placed before the mind's eye than that of constance, when, deserted and betrayed, she stands alone in her despair, amid her false friends and her ruthless enemies![ ] the image of the mother-eagle, wounded and bleeding to death, yet stretched over her young in an attitude of defiance, while all the baser birds of prey are clamoring around her eyry, gives but a faint idea of the moral sublimity of this scene. considered merely as a poetical or dramatic picture, the grouping is wonderfully fine; on one side, the vulture ambition of that mean-souled tyrant, john; on the other, the selfish, calculating policy of philip: between them, balancing their passions in his hand, the cold, subtle, heartless legate: the fiery, reckless falconbridge; the princely louis; the still unconquered spirit of that wrangling queen, old elinor; the bridal loveliness and modesty of blanche; the boyish grace and innocence of young arthur; and constance in the midst of them, in all the state of her great grief, a grand impersonation of pride and passion, helpless at once and desperate,--form an assemblage of figures, each perfect in its kind, and, taken all together, not surpassed for the variety, force, and splendor of the dramatic and picturesque effect. queen elinor. elinor of guienne, and blanche of castile, who form part of the group around constance, are sketches merely, but they are strictly historical portraits, and full of truth and spirit. at the period when shakspeare has brought these three women on the scene together, elinor of guienne (the daughter of the last duke of guienne and aquitaine, and like constance, the heiress of a sovereign duchy) was near the close of her long, various, and unquiet life--she was nearly seventy: and, as in early youth, her violent passions had overborne both principle and policy, so in her old age we see the same character, only modified by time; her strong intellect and love of power, unbridled by conscience or principle, surviving when other passions were extinguished, and rendered more dangerous by a degree of subtlety and self-command to which her youth had been a stranger. her personal and avowed hatred for constance, together with its motives, are mentioned by the old historians. holinshed expressly says, that queen elinor was mightily set against her grandson arthur, rather moved thereto by envy conceived against his mother, than by any fault of the young prince, for that she knew and dreaded the high spirit of the lady constance. shakspeare has rendered this with equal spirit and fidelity. queen elinor. what now, my son! have i not ever said, how that ambitious constance would not cease, till she had kindled france and all the world upon the right and party of her son? this might have been prevented and made whole with very easy arguments of love; which now the manage of two kingdoms must with fearful bloody issue arbitrate. king john. our strong possession and our right for us! queen elinor. your strong possession much more than your right; or else it must go wrong with you and me. so much my conscience whispers in your ear-- which none but heaven, and you, and i shall hear. queen elinor preserved to the end of her life her influence over her children, and appears to have merited their respect. while intrusted with the government, during the absence of richard i., she ruled with a steady hand, and made herself exceedingly popular; and as long as she lived to direct the counsels of her son john, his affairs prospered. for that intemperate jealousy which converted her into a domestic firebrand, there was at least much cause, though little excuse. elinor had hated and wronged the husband of her youth,[ ] and she had afterwards to endure the negligence and innumerable infidelities of the husband whom she passionately loved:[ ]--"and so the whirligig of time brought in his revenges." elinor died in , a few months after constance, and before the murder of arthur--a crime which, had she lived, would probably never have been consummated; for the nature of elinor, though violent, had no tincture of the baseness and cruelty of her son. blanche. blanche of castile was the daughter of alphonso ix. of castile, and the grand-daughter of elinor. at the time that she is introduced into the drama, she was about fifteen, and her marriage with louis viii., then dauphin, took place in the abrupt manner here represented. it is not often that political marriages have the same happy result. we are told by the historians of that time, that from the moment louis and blanche met, they were inspired by a mutual passion, and that during a union of more than twenty-six years they were never known to differ, nor even spent more than a single day asunder.[ ] in her exceeding beauty and blameless reputation; her love for her husband, and strong domestic affections; her pride of birth and rank; her feminine gentleness of deportment; her firmness of temper; her religious bigotry; her love of absolute power, and her upright and conscientious administration of it, blanche greatly resembled maria theresa of austria. she was, however, of a more cold and calculating nature; and in proportion as she was less amiable as a woman, did she rule more happily for herself and others. there cannot be a greater contrast than between the acute understanding, the steady temper, and the cool intriguing policy of blanche, by which she succeeded in disuniting and defeating the powers arrayed against her and her infant son, and the rash confiding temper and susceptible imagination of constance, which rendered herself and her son easy victims to the fraud or ambition of others. blanche, during forty years, held in her hands the destinies of the greater part of europe, and is one of the most celebrated names recorded in history--but in what does she survive to us except in a name? nor history, nor fame, though "trumpet-tongued," could do for _her_ what shakspeare and poetry have done for constance. the earthly reign of blanche is over, her sceptre broken, and her power departed. when will the reign of constance cease? when will _her_ power depart? not while this world is a world, and there exists in it human souls to kindle at the touch of genius, and human hearts to throb with human sympathies! * * * * * there is no female character of any interest in the play of richard ii. the queen (isabelle of france) enacts the same passive part in the drama that she does in history. the same remark applies to henry iv. in this admirable play there is no female character of any importance; but lady percy, the wife of hotspur, is a very lively and beautiful sketch: she is sprightly, feminine, and fond; but without any thing energetic or profound, in mind or in feeling. her gayety and spirit in the first scenes, are the result of youth and happiness, and nothing can be more natural than the utter dejection and brokenness of heart which follow her husband's death: she is no heroine for war or tragedy; she has no thought of revenging her loss; and even her grief has something soft and quiet in its pathos. her speech to her father-in-law, northumberland, in which she entreats him "not to go to the wars," and at the same time pronounces the most beautiful eulogium on her heroic husband, is a perfect piece of feminine eloquence, both in the feeling and in the expression. almost every one knows by heart lady percy's celebrated address to her husband, beginning, o, my good lord, why are you thus alone? and that of portia to brutus, in julius cæsar, ... you've ungently, brutus, stol'n from my bed. the situation is exactly similar, the topics of remonstrance are nearly the same; the sentiments and the style as opposite as are the characters of the two women. lady percy is evidently accustomed to win more from her fiery lord by caresses than by reason: he loves her in his rough way "as harry percy's wife," but she has no real influence over him: he has no confidence in her. lady percy. ... in faith, i'll know your business, harry, that i will. i fear my brother mortimer doth stir about this title, and hath sent for you to line his enterprise, but if you go-- hotspur. so far afoot, i shall be weary, love! the whole scene is admirable, but unnecessary here, because it illustrates no point of character in her. lady percy has no _character_, properly so called; whereas, that of portia is very distinctly and faithfully drawn from the outline furnished by plutarch. lady percy's fond upbraidings, and her half playful, half pouting entreaties, scarcely gain her husband's attention. portia, with true matronly dignity and tenderness, pleads her right to share her husband's thoughts, and proves it too i grant i am a woman, but withal, a woman that lord brutus took to wife, i grant i am a woman, but withal, a woman well reputed--cato's daughter. think you, i am no stronger than my sex being so father'd and so husbanded? * * * * brutus. you are my true and honorable wife: as dear to me, as are the ruddy drops that visit my sad heart! portia, as shakspeare has truly felt and represented the character, is but a softened reflection of that of her husband brutus: in him we see an excess of natural sensibility, an almost womanish tenderness of heart, repressed by the tenets of his austere philosophy: a stoic by profession, and in reality the reverse--acting deeds against his nature by the strong force of principle and will. in portia there is the same profound and passionate feeling, and all her sex's softness and timidity, held in check by that self-discipline, that stately dignity, which she thought became a woman "so fathered and so husbanded." the fact of her inflicting on herself a voluntary wound to try her own fortitude, is perhaps the strongest proof of this disposition. plutarch relates, that on the day on which cæsar was assassinated, portia appeared overcome with terror, and even swooned away, but did not in her emotion utter a word which could affect the conspirators. shakspeare has rendered this circumstance literally. portia. i pr'ythee, boy, run to the senate house, stay not to answer me, but get thee gone. why dost thou stay? lucius. to know my errand, madam. portia. i would have had thee there and here again, ere i can tell thee what thou should'st do there. o constancy! be strong upon my side: set a huge mountain 'tween my heart and tongue! i have a man's mind, but a woman's might. ... ah me! how weak a thing the heart of woman is! o i grow faint, &c. there is another beautiful incident related by plutarch, which could not well be dramatized. when brutus and portia parted for the last time in the island of nisida, she restrained all expression of grief that she might not shake _his_ fortitude; but afterwards, in passing through a chamber in which there hung a picture of hector and andromache, she stopped, gazed upon it for a time with a settled sorrow, and at length burst into a passion of tears.[ ] if portia had been a christian, and lived in later times, she might have been another lady russel; but she made a poor stoic. no factitious or external control was sufficient to restrain such an exuberance of sensibility and fancy: and those who praise the _philosophy_ of portia and the _heroism_ of her death, certainly mistook the character altogether. it is evident, from the manner of her death, that it was not deliberate self-destruction, "after the high roman fashion," but took place in a paroxysm of madness, caused by overwrought and suppressed feeling, grief, terror, and suspense. shakspeare has thus represented it:-- brutus. o cassius! i am sick of many griefs! cassius. of your philosophy you make no use, if you give place to accidental evils. brutus. no man bears sorrow better; portia's dead. cassius. ha!--portia? brutus. she is dead. cassius. how 'scap'd i killing when i cross'd you so? o insupportable and touching loss-- upon what sickness? brutus. impatient of my absence, and grief that young octavius with mark antony had made themselves so strong--(for with her death these tidings came)--_with this she fell distract_, and, her attendants absent, swallowed fire. so much for woman's philosophy! margaret of anjou. malone has written an essay, to prove from external and internal evidence, that the three parts of king henry vi. were not originally written by shakspeare, but altered by him from two old plays,[ ] with considerable improvements and additions of his own. burke, porson, dr. warburton, and dr. farmer, pronounced this piece of criticism convincing and unanswerable; but dr. johnson and steevens would not be convinced, and, moreover, have contrived to answer the _unanswerable_. "who shall decide when doctors disagree?" the only arbiter in such a case is one's own individual taste and judgment. to me it appears that the three parts of henry vi. have less of poetry and passion, and more of unnecessary verbosity and inflated language, than the rest of shakspeare's works; that the continual exhibition of treachery, bloodshed, and violence, is revolting, and the want of unity of action, and of a pervading interest, oppressive and fatiguing; but also that there are splendid passages in the second and third parts, such as shakspeare alone could have written: and this is not denied by the most skeptical.[ ] among the arguments against the authenticity of these plays, the character of margaret of anjou has not been adduced, and yet to those who have studied shakspeare in his own spirit, it will appear the most conclusive of all. when we compare her with his other female characters, we are struck at once by the want of family likeness; shakspeare was not always equal, but he had not two _manners_, as they say of painters. i discern his hand in particular parts, but i cannot recognize his spirit in the conception of the whole: he may have laid on some of the colors, but the original design has a certain hardness and heaviness, very unlike his usual style. margaret of anjou, as exhibited in these tragedies, is a dramatic portrait of considerable truth, and vigor, and consistency--but she is not one of shakspeare's women. he who knew so well in what true greatness of spirit consisted--who could excite our respect and sympathy even for a lady macbeth, would never have given us a heroine without a touch of heroism; he would not have portrayed a high-hearted woman, struggling unsubdued against the strangest vicissitudes of fortune, meeting reverses and disasters, such as would have broken the most masculine spirit, with unshaken constancy, yet left her without a single personal quality which would excite our interest in her bravely-endured misfortunes; and this too in the very face of history. he would not have given us, in lieu of the magnanimous queen, the subtle and accomplished french woman, a mere "amazonian trull," with every coarser feature of depravity and ferocity; he would have redeemed her from unmingled detestation; he would have breathed into her some of his own sweet spirit--he would have given the woman a soul. the old chronicler hall informs us, that queen margaret "excelled all other as well in beauty and favor, as in wit and policy, and was in stomach and courage more like to a man than to a woman." he adds, that after the espousals of henry and margaret, "the king's friends fell from him; the lords of the realm fell in division among themselves; the commons rebelled against their natural prince; fields were foughten; many thousands slain; and, finally, the king was deposed, and his son slain, and his queen sent home again with as much misery and sorrow as she was received with pomp and triumph." this passage seems to have furnished the groundwork of the character as it is developed in these plays with no great depth or skill. margaret is portrayed with all the exterior graces of her sex; as bold and artful, with spirit to dare, resolution to act, and fortitude to endure; but treacherous, haughty, dissembling, vindictive, and fierce. the bloody struggle for power in which she was engaged, and the companionship of the ruthless iron men around her, seem to have left her nothing of womanhood but the heart of a mother--that last stronghold of our feminine nature! so far the character is consistently drawn: it has something of the power, but none of the flowing ease of shakspeare's manner. there are fine materials not well applied; there is poetry in some of the scenes and speeches; the situations are often exceedingly poetical; but in the character of margaret herself, there is not an atom of poetry. in her artificial dignity, her plausible wit, and her endless volubility, she would remind us of some of the most admired heroines of french tragedy, but for that unlucky box on the ear which she gives the duchess of gloster,--a violation of tragic decorum, which of course destroys all parallel. having said thus much, i shall point out some of the finest and most characteristic scenes in which margaret appears. the speech in which she expresses her scorn of her meek husband, and her impatience of the power exercised by those fierce overbearing barons, york, salisbury, warwick, buckingham, is very fine, and conveys as faithful an idea of those feudal times as of the woman who speaks. the burst of female spite with which she concludes, is admirable-- not all these lords do vex me half so much as that proud dame, the lord protector's wife. she sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies, more like an empress than duke humphrey's wife. strangers in court do take her for the queen: she bears a duke's revenues on her back, and in her heart she scorns our poverty. shall i not live to be avenged on her? contemptuous base-born callet as she is! she vaunted 'mongst her minions t'other day, the very train of her worst wearing gown was better worth than all my father's lands, till suffolk gave two dukedoms for his daughter. her intriguing spirit, the facility with which she enters into the murderous confederacy against the good duke humphrey, the artful plausibility with which she endeavours to turn suspicion from herself--confounding her gentle consort by mere dint of words--are exceedingly characteristic, but not the less revolting. her criminal love for suffolk (which is a dramatic incident, not an historic fact) gives rise to the beautiful parting scene in the third act; a scene which it is impossible to read without a thrill of emotion, hurried away by that power and pathos which forces us to sympathize with the eloquence of grief, yet excites not a momentary interest either for margaret or her lover. the ungoverned fury of margaret in the first instance, the manner in which she calls on suffolk to curse his enemies, and then shrinks back overcome by the violence of the spirit she had herself evoked, and terrified by the vehemence of his imprecations; the transition in her mind from the extremity of rage to tears and melting fondness, have been pronounced, and justly, to be in shakspeare's own manner. go, speak not to me--even now begone. o go not yet! even thus two friends condemn'd embrace, and kiss, and take ten thousand leaves, loather a hundred times to part than die: yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee! which is followed by that beautiful and intense burst of passion from suffolk-- 'tis not the hand i care for, wert thou hence; a wilderness is populous enough, so suffolk had thy heavenly company: for where thou art, there is the world itself, with every several pleasure in the world; and where thou art not, desolation! in the third part of henry the sixth, margaret, engaged in the terrible struggle for her husband's throne, appears to rather more advantage. the indignation against henry, who had pitifully yielded his son's birthright for the privilege of reigning unmolested during his own life, is worthy of her, and gives rise to a beautiful speech. we are here inclined to sympathize with her; but soon after follows the murder of the duke of york; and the base revengeful spirit and atrocious cruelty with which she insults over him, unarmed and a prisoner,--the bitterness of her mockery, and the unwomanly malignity with which she presents him with the napkin stained with the blood of his youngest son, and "bids the father wipe his eyes withal," turn all our sympathy into aversion and horror. york replies in the celebrated speech, beginning-- she-wolf of france, and worse than wolves of france, whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth-- and taunts her with the poverty of her father, the most irritating topic he could have chosen. hath that poor monarch taught thee to insult? it needs not, nor it boots thee not, proud queen, unless the adage must be verified, that beggars, mounted, ride their horse to death. 'tis beauty, that doth oft make women proud; but, god he knows, thy share thereof is small. 'tis virtue that doth make them most admired; the contrary doth make thee wondered at. 'tis government that makes them seem divine, the want thereof makes thee abominable. * * * * o tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide! how could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child to bid the father wipe his face withal, and yet be seen to bear a woman's face? women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless! by such a woman as margaret is here depicted such a speech could be answered only in one way--with her dagger's point--and thus she answers it. it is some comfort to reflect that this trait of ferocity is not historical: the body of the duke of york was found, after the battle, among the heaps of slain, and his head struck off: but even this was not done by the command of margaret. in another passage, the truth and consistency of the character of margaret are sacrificed to the march of the dramatic action, with a very ill effect. when her fortunes were at the very lowest ebb, and she had sought refuge in the court of the french king, warwick, her most formidable enemy, upon some disgust he had taken against edward the fourth, offered to espouse her cause; and proposed a match between the prince her son and his daughter anne of warwick--the "gentle lady anne," who figures in richard the third. in the play, margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:[ ] we are disgusted by her versatile policy, and a meanness of spirit in no way allied to the magnanimous forgiveness of her terrible adversary. the margaret of history sternly resisted this degrading expedient. she could not, she said, pardon from her heart the man who had been the primary cause of all her misfortunes. she mistrusted warwick, despised him for the motives of his revolt from edward, and considered that to match her son into the family of her enemy from mere policy was a species of degradation. it took louis the eleventh, with all his art and eloquence, fifteen days to wring a reluctant consent, accompanied with tears, from this high-hearted woman. the speech of margaret to her council of generals before the battle of tewksbury, (act v. scene ,) is as remarkable a specimen of false rhetoric, as her address to the soldiers, on the eve of the fight, is of true and passionate eloquence. she witnesses the final defeat of her army, the massacre of her adherents, and the murder of her son; and though the savage richard would willingly have put an end to her misery, and exclaims very pertinently-- why should she live to fill the world with words? she is dragged forth unharmed, a woful spectacle of extremest wretchedness, to which death would have been an undeserved relief. if we compare the clamorous and loud exclaims of margaret after the slaughter of her son, to the ravings of constance, we shall perceive where shakspeare's genius did _not_ preside, and where it _did_. margaret, in bold defiance of history, but with fine dramatic effect, is introduced again in the gorgeous and polluted court of edward the fourth. there she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptered, desolate, powerless--or like a vampire thirsting for blood--or like a grim prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of her enemies, which she lived to see realized. the scene following the murder of the princes in the tower, in which queen elizabeth and the duchess of york sit down on the ground bewailing their desolation, and margaret suddenly appears from behind them, like the very personification of woe, and seats herself beside them revelling in their despair, is, in the general conception and effect grand and appalling. the duchess. o, harry's wife, triumph not in my woes; god witness with me, i have wept for thine! queen margaret. bear with me, i am hungry for revenge, and now i cloy me with beholding it. thy edward he is dead, that kill'd my edward; thy other edward dead, to quit my edward: young york he is but boot, because both they match not the high perfection of my loss. thy clarence he is dead, that stabb'd my edward; and the beholders of this tragic play, the adulterate hastings, rivers, vaughan, grey, untimely smother'd in their dusky graves. richard yet lives, hell's black intelligencer, only reserv'd their factor, to buy souls and send them thither. but at hand, at hand, ensues his piteous and unpitied end; earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar for him: saints pray to have him suddenly convey'd from hence. cancel his bond of life, dear god, i pray, that i may live to say, the dog is dead.[ ] she should have stopped here; but the effect thus powerfully excited is marred and weakened by so much superfluous rhetoric, that we are tempted to exclaim with the old duchess of york-- why should calamity be full of words? queen katherine of arragon. to have a just idea of the accuracy and beauty of this historical portrait, we ought to bring immediately before us those circumstances of katherine's life and times, and those parts of her character, which belong to a period previous to the opening of the play. we shall then be better able to appreciate the skill with which shakspeare has applied the materials before him. katherine of arragon, the fourth and youngest daughter of ferdinand, king of arragon, and isabella of castile, was born at alcala, whither her mother had retired to winter after one of the most terrible campaigns of the moorish war--that of . katherine had derived from nature no dazzling qualities of mind, and no striking advantages of person. she inherited a tincture of queen isabella's haughtiness and obstinacy of temper, but neither her beauty nor her splendid talents. her education under the direction of that extraordinary mother, had implanted in her mind the most austere principles of virtue, the highest ideas of female decorum, the most narrow and bigoted attachment to the forms of religion, and that excessive pride of birth and rank, which distinguished so particularly her family and her nation. in other respects, her understanding was strong, and her judgment clear. the natural turn of her mind was simple, serious, and domestic, and all the impulses of her heart kindly and benevolent. such was katherine; such, at least, she appears on a reference to the chronicles of her times, and particularly from her own letters, and the papers written or dictated by herself which relate to her divorce; all of which are distinguished by the same artless simplicity of style, the same quiet good sense, the same resolute, yet gentle spirit and fervent piety. when five years old, katherine was solemnly affianced to arthur, prince of wales, the eldest son of henry vii.; and in the year , she landed in england, after narrowly escaping shipwreck on the southern coast, from which every adverse wind conspired to drive her. she was received in london with great honor, and immediately on her arrival united to the young prince. he was then fifteen and katherine in her seventeenth year. arthur, as it is well known, survived his marriage only five months; and the reluctance of henry vii. to refund the splendid dowry of the infanta, and forego the advantages of an alliance with the most powerful prince of europe, suggested the idea of uniting katherine to his second son henry; after some hesitation, a dispensation was procured from the pope, and she was betrothed to henry in her eighteenth year. the prince, who was then only twelve years old, resisted as far as he was able to do so, and appears to have really felt a degree of horror at the idea of marrying his brother's widow. nor was the mind of king henry at rest; as his health declined, his conscience reproached him with the equivocal nature of the union into which he had forced his son; and the vile motives of avarice and expediency which had governed him on this occasion. a short time previous to his death, he dissolved the engagement, and even caused henry to sign a paper in which he solemnly renounced all idea of a future union with the infanta. it is observable, that henry signed this paper with reluctance, and that katherine, instead of being sent back to her own country, still remained in england. it appears that henry, who was now about seventeen, had become interested for katherine, who was gentle and amiable. the difference of years was rather a circumstance in her favor; for henry was just at that age, when a youth is most likely to be captivated by a woman older than himself: and no sooner was he required to renounce her, than the interest she had gradually gained in his affections, became, by opposition, a strong passion. immediately after his father's death, he declared his resolution to take for his wife the lady katherine of spain, and none other; and when the matter was discussed in council, it was urged that, besides the many advantages of the match in a political point of view, she had given so "much proof of virtue, and sweetness of condition, as they knew not where to parallel her." about six weeks after his accession, june , , the marriage was celebrated with truly royal splendor, henry being then eighteen, and katherine in her twenty-fourth year. it has been said with truth, that if henry had died while katherine was yet his wife, and wolsey his minister, he would have left behind him the character of a magnificent, popular, and accomplished prince, instead of that of the most hateful ruffian and tyrant who ever swayed these realms. notwithstanding his occasional infidelities, and his impatience at her midnight vigils, her long prayers, and her religious austerities, katherine and henry lived in harmony together. he was fond of openly displaying his respect and love for her; and she exercised a strong and salutary influence over his turbulent and despotic spirit. when henry set out on his expedition to france, in , he left katherine regent of the kingdom during his absence, with full powers to carry on the war against the scots; and the earl of surrey at the head of the army, as her lieutenant-general. it is curious to find katherine--the pacific, domestic, and unpretending katherine--describing herself as having "her heart set to war," and "horrible busy" with making "standards, banners, badges, scarfs, and the like."[ ] nor was this mere silken preparation--mere dalliance with the pomp and circumstance of war; for within a few weeks afterwards, her general defeated the scots in the famous battle of floddenfield, where james iv. and most of his nobility were slain.[ ] katherine's letter to henry, announcing this event, so strikingly displays the piety and tenderness, the quiet simplicity, and real magnanimity of her character, that there cannot be a more apt and beautiful illustration of the exquisite truth and keeping of shakspeare's portrait. sir, my lord howard hath sent me a letter, open to your grace, within one of mine, by the which ye shall see at length the great victory that our lord hath sent your subjects in your absence: and for this cause, it is no need herein to trouble your grace with long writing; but to my thinking this battle hath been to your grace, and all your realm, the greatest honor that could be, and more than ye should win all the crown of france, thanked be god for it! and i am sure your grace forgetteth not to do this, which shall be cause to send you many more such great victories, as i trust he shall do. my husband, for haste, with rougecross, i could not send your grace the piece of the king of scots' coat, which john glyn now bringeth. in this your grace shall see how i can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a king's coat. i thought to send himself unto you, but our englishmen's hearts would not suffer it. it should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward, but all that god sendeth is for the best. my lord of surrey, my henry, would fain know your pleasure in the burying of the king of scots' body, for he hath written to me so. with the next messenger, your grace's pleasure may be herein known. and with this i make an end, praying god to send you home shortly; for without this, no joy here can be accomplished--and for the same i pray. and now go to our lady at walsyngham, that i promised so long ago to see. at woburn, the th day of september, ( .) i send your grace herein a bill, found in a scottishman's purse, of such things as the french king sent to the said king of scots, to make war against you, beseeching you to send mathew hither as soon as this messenger cometh with tidings of your grace. your humble wife and true servant, katherine.[ ] the legality of the king's marriage with katherine remained undisputed till . in the course of that year, anna bullen first appeared at court, and was appointed maid of honor to the queen; and then, and not till then, did henry's union with his brother's wife "creep too near his conscience." in the following year, he sent special messengers to rome, with secret instructions: they were required to discover (among other "hard questions") whether, if the queen entered a religious life, the king might have the pope's dispensation to marry again; and whether if the king (for the better inducing the queen thereto) would enter himself into a religious life, the pope would dispense with the king's vow, and leave her there? poor katherine! we are not surprised to read that when she understood what was intended against her, "she labored with all those passions which jealousy of the king's affection, sense of her own honor, and the legitimation of her daughter, could produce, laying in conclusion the whole fault on the cardinal." it is elsewhere said, that wolsey bore the queen ill-will, in consequence of her reflecting with some severity on his haughty temper, and very unclerical life. the proceedings were pending for nearly six years, and one of the causes of this long delay, in spite of henry's impatient and despotic character, is worth noting. the old chronicle tells us, that though the men generally, and more particularly the priests and the nobles sided with henry in this matter, yet all the ladies of england were against it. they justly felt that the honor and welfare of no woman was secure if, after twenty years of union, she might be thus deprived of all her rights as a wife; the clamor became so loud and general, that the king was obliged to yield to it for a time, to stop the proceedings, and to banish anna bullen from the court. cardinal campeggio, called by shakspeare campeius, arrived in england in october, . he at first endeavored to persuade katherine to avoid the disgrace and danger of contesting her marriage, by entering a religious house; but she rejected his advice with strong expressions of disdain. "i am," said she, "the king's true wife, and to him married; and if all doctors were dead, or law or learning far out of men's minds at the time of our marriage, yet i cannot think that the court of rome, and the whole church of england, would have consented to a thing unlawful and detestable as you call it. still i say i am his wife, and for him will i pray." about two years afterwards, wolsey died, (in november, ;)--the king and queen met for the last time on the th of july, . until that period, some outward show of respect and kindness had been maintained between them; but the king then ordered her to repair to a private residence, and no longer to consider herself as his lawful wife. "to which the virtuous and mourning queen replied no more than this, that to whatever place she removed, nothing could remove her from being the king's wife. and so they bid each other farewell; and from this time the king never saw her more."[ ] he married anna bullen in , while the decision relating to his former marriage was still pending. the sentence of divorce to which katherine never would submit, was finally pronounced by cranmer in ; and the unhappy queen, whose health had been gradually declining through these troubles of heart, died january , , in the fiftieth year of her age. thus the action of the play of henry viii. includes events which occurred from the impeachment of the duke of buckingham in , to the death of katherine in . in making the death of katherine precede the birth of queen elizabeth, shakspeare has committed an anachronism, not only pardonable, but necessary. we must remember that the construction of the play required a happy termination; and that the birth of elizabeth, before or after the death of katherine, involved the question of her legitimacy. by this slight deviation from the real course of events, shakspeare has not perverted historic facts, but merely sacrificed them to a higher principle; and in doing so has not only preserved dramatic propriety, and heightened the poetical interest, but has given a strong proof both of his delicacy and his judgment. if we also call to mind that in this play katherine is properly the heroine, and exhibited from first to last as the very "queen of earthly queens;" that the whole interest is thrown round her and wolsey--the one the injured rival, the other the enemy of anna bullen--and that it was written in the reign and for the court of elizabeth, we shall yet farther appreciate the moral greatness of the poet's mind, which disdained to sacrifice justice and the truth of nature to any time-serving expediency. schlegel observes somewhere, that in the literal accuracy and apparent artlessness with which shakspeare has adapted some of the events and characters of history to his dramatic purposes, he has shown equally his genius and his wisdom. this, like most of schlegel's remarks, is profound and true; and in this respect katherine of arragon may rank as the triumph of shakspeare's genius and his wisdom. there is nothing in the whole range of poetical fiction in any respect resembling or approaching her; there is nothing comparable, i suppose, but katherine's own portrait by holbein, which, equally true to the life, is yet as far inferior as katherine's person was inferior to her mind. not only has shakspeare given us here a delineation as faithful as it is beautiful, of a peculiar modification of character; but he has bequeathed us a precious moral lesson in this proof that virtue alone,--(by which i mean here the union of truth or conscience with benevolent affection--the one the highest law, the other the purest impulse of the soul,)--that such virtue is a sufficient source of the deepest pathos and power with out any mixture of foreign or external ornament: for who but shakspeare would have brought before us a queen and a heroine of tragedy, stripped her of all pomp of place and circumstance, dispensed with all the usual sources of poetical interest, as youth, beauty, grace, fancy, commanding intellect; and without any appeal to our imagination, without any violation of historical truth, or any sacrifices of the other dramatic personages for the sake of effect, could depend on the moral principle alone, to touch the very springs of feeling in our bosoms, and melt and elevate our hearts through the purest and holiest impulses of our nature! the character, when analyzed, is, in the first place, distinguished by _truth_. i do not only mean its truth to nature, or its relative truth arising from its historic fidelity and dramatic consistency, but _truth_ as a quality of the soul; this is the basis of the character. we often hear it remarked that those who are themselves perfectly true and artless, are in this world the more easily and frequently deceived--a common-place fallacy: for we shall ever find that truth is as undeceived as it is undeceiving, and that those who are true to themselves and others, may now and then be mistaken, or in particular instances duped by the intervention of some other affection or quality of the mind; but they are generally free from illusion, and they are seldom imposed upon in the long run by the shows of things and superfices of characters. it is by this integrity of heart and clearness of understanding, this light of truth within her own soul, and not through any acuteness of intellect, that katherine detects and exposes the real character of wolsey, though unable either to unravel his designs, or defeat them. ... my lord, my lord, i am a simple woman, much too weak t' oppose your cunning. she rather intuitively feels than knows his duplicity, and in the dignity of her simplicity she towers above his arrogance as much as she scorns his crooked policy. with this essential truth are combined many other qualities, natural or acquired, all made out with the same uncompromising breadth of execution and fidelity of pencil, united with the utmost delicacy of feeling. for instance, the apparent contradiction arising from the contrast between katherine's natural disposition and the situation in which she is placed; her lofty castilian pride and her extreme simplicity of language and deportment; the inflexible resolution with which she asserts her right, and her soft resignation to unkindness and wrong; her warmth of temper breaking through the meekness of a spirit subdued by a deep sense of religion; and a degree of austerity tinging her real benevolence;--all these qualities, opposed yet harmonizing, has shakspeare placed before us in a few admirable scenes. katherine is at first introduced as pleading before the king in behalf of the commonalty, who had been driven by the extortions of wolsey into some illegal excesses. in this scene, which is true to history, we have her upright reasoning mind, her steadiness of purpose, her piety and benevolence, placed in a strong light. the unshrinking dignity with which she opposes without descending to brave the cardinal, the stern rebuke addressed to the duke of buckingham's surveyor, are finely characteristic; and by thus exhibiting katherine as invested with all her conjugal rights and influence, and royal state, the subsequent situations are rendered more impressive. she is placed in the first instance on such a height in our esteem and reverence, that in the midst of her abandonment and degradation, and the profound pity she afterwards inspires, the first effect remains unimpaired, and she never falls beneath it. in the beginning of the second act we are prepared for the proceedings of the divorce, and our respect for katherine heightened by the general sympathy for "the good queen," as she is expressively entitled, and by the following beautiful eulogium on her character uttered by the duke of norfolk:-- he (wolsey) counsels a divorce--a loss of her that like a jewel hath hung twenty years about his neck, yet never lost her lustre. of her that loves him with that excellence that angels love good men with; even of her, that, when the greatest stroke of fortune falls, will bless the king! the scene in which anna bullen is introduced as expressing her grief and sympathy for her royal mistress, is exquisitely graceful. here's the pang that pinches; his highness having liv'd so long with her, and she so good a lady, that no tongue could ever pronounce dishonor of her,--by my life she never knew harm-doing. o now, after so many courses of the sun enthron'd, still growing in a majesty and pomp,--the which to leave is a thousand-fold more bitter, than 'tis sweet at first to acquire,--after this process, to give her the avaunt! it is a pity would move a monster. old lady. hearts of most hard temper melt and lament for her. anne. o, god's will! much better she ne'er had known pomp: though it be temporal, yet if that quarrel, fortune, do divorce it from the bearer, 'tis a sufferance, panging as soul and body's severing. old lady. alas, poor lady! she's a stranger now again. anne. so much the more must pity drop upon her. verily, i swear 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow. how completely, in the few passages appropriated to anna bullen, is her character portrayed! with what a delicate and yet luxuriant grace is she sketched off, with her gayety and her beauty, her levity, her extreme mobility, her sweetness of disposition, her tenderness of heart, and, in short, all her _femalities_! how nobly has shakspeare done justice to the two women, and heightened our interest in both, by placing the praises of katherine in the mouth of anna bullen! and how characteristic of the latter, that she should first express unbounded pity for her mistress, insisting chiefly on her fall from her regal state and worldly pomp, thus betraying her own disposition:-- for she that had all the fair parts of woman, had, too, a woman's heart, which ever yet affected eminence, wealth, and sovereignty. that she should call the loss of temporal pomp, once enjoyed, "a sufferance equal to soul and body's severing;" that she should immediately protest that she would not herself be a queen--"no, good troth! not for all the riches under heaven!"--and not long afterwards ascend without reluctance that throne and bed from which her royal mistress had been so cruelly divorced!--how natural! the portrait is not less true and masterly than that of katherine; but the character is overborne by the superior moral firmness and intrinsic excellence of the latter. that we may be more fully sensible of this contrast, the beautiful scene just alluded to immediately precedes katherine's trial at blackfriars, and the description of anna bullen's triumphant beauty at her coronation, is placed immediately before the dying scene of katherine; yet with equal good taste and good feeling shakspeare has constantly avoided all personal collision between the two characters; nor does anna bullen ever appear as queen except in the pageant of the procession, which in reading the play is scarcely noticed. to return to katherine. the whole of the trial scene is given nearly verbatim from the old chronicles and records; but the dryness and harshness of the law proceedings is tempered at once and elevated by the genius and the wisdom of the poet. it appears, on referring to the historical authorities, that when the affair was first agitated in council, katherine replied to the long expositions and theological sophistries of her opponents with resolute simplicity and composure: "i am a woman, and lack wit and learning to answer these opinions; but i am sure that neither the king's father nor my father would have condescended to our marriage, if it had been judged unlawful. as to your saying that i should put the cause to eight persons of this realm, for quietness of the king's conscience, i pray heaven to send his grace a quiet conscience and this shall be your answer, that i say i am his lawful wife, and to him lawfully married, though not worthy of it; and in this point i will abide, till the court of rome, which was privy to the beginning, have made a final ending of it."[ ] katherine's appearance in the court at blackfriars, attended by a noble troop of ladies and prelates of her counsel, and her refusal to answer the citation, are historical.[ ] her speech to the king-- sir, i beseech you do me right and justice, and to bestow your pity on me, &c. &c. is taken word for word (as nearly as the change from prose to blank verse would allow) from the old record in hall. it would have been easy for shakspeare to have exalted his own skill, by throwing a coloring of poetry and eloquence into this speech, without altering the sense or sentiment; but by adhering to the calm argumentative simplicity of manner and diction natural to the woman, he has preserved the truth of character without lessening the pathos of the situation. her challenging wolsey as a "foe to truth," and her very expressions, "i utterly refuse,--yea, from my soul _abhor_ you for my judge," are taken from fact. the sudden burst of indignant passion towards the close of this scene, in one who ever yet had stood to charity, and displayed the effects of disposition gentle, and of wisdom o'ertopping woman's power; is taken from nature, though it occurred on a different occasion.[ ] lastly, the circumstance of her being called back after she had appealed from the court, and angrily refusing to return, is from the life. master griffith, on whose arm she leaned, observed that she was called: "on, on," quoth she; "it maketh no matter, for it is no indifferent court for me, therefore i will not tarry. go on your ways."[ ] king henry's own assertion, "i dare to say, my lords, that for her womanhood, wisdom, nobility, and gentleness, never prince had such another wife, and therefore if i would willingly change her i were not wise," is thus beautifully paraphrased by shakspeare:-- that man i' the world, who shall report he has a better wife, let him in nought be trusted, for speaking false in that! thou art, alone, if thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness, (thy meekness saint-like, wife-like government, obeying in commanding; and thy parts, sovereign and pious else, could speak thee out,) the queen of earthly queens. she is noble born, and, like her true nobility, she has carried herself towards me. the annotators on shakspeare have all observed the close resemblance between this fine passage-- sir, i am about to weep; but, thinking that we are a queen, or long have dreamed so, certain the daughter of a king--my drops of tears i'll turn to sparks of fire. and the speech of hermione-- i am not prone to weeping as our sex commonly are, the want of which vain dew perchance shall dry your pities: but i have that honorable grief lodged here, which burns worse than tears drown. but these verbal gentlemen do not seem to have felt that the resemblance is merely on the surface, and that the two passages could not possibly change places, without a manifest violation of the truth of character. in hermione it is pride of sex merely: in katherine it is pride of place and pride of birth. hermione, though so superbly majestic, is perfectly independent of her regal state: katherine, though so meekly pious, will neither forget hers, nor allow it to be forgotten by others for a moment. hermione, when deprived of that "crown and comfort of her life," her husband's love, regards all things else with despair and indifference except her feminine honor: katherine, divorced and abandoned, still with true spanish pride stands upon respect, and will not bate one atom of her accustomed state though unqueened, yet like a queen and daughter to a king, inter me! the passage-- a fellow of the royal bed, that owns a moiety of the throne--a great king's daughter, ... here standing to prate and talk for life and honor 'fore who please to come to hear,[ ] would apply nearly to both queens, yet a single sentiment--nay, a single sentence--could not possibly be transferred from one character to the other. the magnanimity, the noble simplicity, the purity of heart, the resignation in each--how perfectly equal in degree! how diametrically opposite in kind![ ] once more to return to katherine. we are told by cavendish, that when wolsey and campeggio visited the queen by the king's order she was found at work among her women, and came forth to meet the cardinals with a skein of white thread hanging about her neck; that when wolsey addressed her in latin, she interrupted him, saying, "nay, good my lord, speak to me in english, i beseech you; although i understand latin." "forsooth then," quoth my lord, "madam, if it please your grace, we come both to know your mind, how ye be disposed to do in this matter between the king and you, and also to declare secretly our opinions and our counsel unto you, which we have intended of very zeal and obedience that we bear to your grace." "my lords, i thank you then," quoth she, "of your good wills; but to make answer to your request i cannot so suddenly, for i was set among my maidens at work, thinking full little of any such matter; wherein there needeth a longer deliberation, and a better head than mine to make answer to so noble wise men as ye be. i had need of good counsel in this case, which toucheth me so near; and for any counsel or friendship that i can find in england, they are nothing to my purpose or profit. think you, i pray you, my lords, will any englishmen counsel, or be friendly unto me, against the king's pleasure, they being his subjects? nay, forsooth, my lords! and for my counsel, in whom i do intend to put my trust, they be not here; they be in spain, in my native country.[ ] alas! my lords, i am a poor woman lacking both wit and understanding sufficiently to answer such approved wise men as ye be both, in so weighty a matter. i pray you to extend your good and indifferent minds in your authority unto me, for i am a simple woman, destitute and barren of friendship and counsel, here in a foreign region; and as for your counsel, i will not refuse, but be glad to hear." it appears, also, that when the archbishop of york and bishop tunstall waited on her at her house near huntingdon, with the sentence of the divorce, signed by henry, and confirmed by act of parliament, she refused to admit its validity, she being henry's wife, and not his subject. the bishop describes her conduct in his letter: "she being therewith in great choler and agony, and always interrupting our words, declared that she would never leave the name of queen, but would persist in accounting herself the king's wife till death." when the official letter containing minutes of their conference was shown to her, she seized a pen, and dashed it angrily across every sentence in which she was styled _princess-dowager_. if now we turn to that inimitable scene between katherine and the two cardinals, (act iii. scene ,) we shall observe how finely shakspeare has condensed these incidents, and unfolded to us all the workings of katherine's proud yet feminine nature. she is discovered at work with some of her women--she calls for music "to soothe her soul grown sad with troubles"--then follows the little song, of which the sentiment is so well adapted to the occasion, while its quaint yet classic elegance breathes the very spirit of those times, when surrey loved and sung. song. orpheus with his lute-made trees, and the mountain-tops that freeze, bow themselves when he did sing to his music, plants and flowers ever sprung, as sun and showers there had made a lasting spring. every thing that heard him play, even the billows of the sea, hung their heads and then lay by in sweet music is such art, killing care, and grief of heart, fall asleep, on hearing, die. they are interrupted by the arrival of the two cardinals. katherine's perception of their subtlety--her suspicion of their purpose--her sense of her own weakness and inability to contend with them, and her mild subdued dignity, are beautifully represented; as also the guarded self-command with which she eludes giving a definitive answer; but when they counsel her to that which she, who knows henry, feels must end in her ruin, then the native temper is roused at once, or, to use tunstall's expression, "the choler and the agony," burst forth in words. is this your christian counsel? out upon ye! heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge that no king can corrupt. wolsey. your rage mistakes us. queen katherine. the more shame for ye! holy men i thought ye, upon my soul, two reverend cardinal virtues; but cardinal sins, and hollow hearts, i fear ye: mend them, for shame, my lords: is this your comfort the cordial that ye bring a wretched lady? with the same force of language, and impetuous yet dignified feeling, she asserts her own conjugal truth and merit, and insists upon her rights. have i liv'd thus long, (let me speak myself, since virtue finds no friends,) a wife, a true one a woman, (i dare say, without vain-glory,) never yet branded with suspicion? have i, with all my full affections, still met the king--lov'd him next heaven, obey'd him been out of fondness superstitious to him-- almost forgot my prayers to content him, and am i thus rewarded? 'tis not well, lords, &c. my lord, i dare not make myself so guilty, to give up willingly that noble title your master wed me to: nothing but death shall e'er divorce my dignities. and this burst of unwonted passion is immediately followed by the natural reaction; it subsides into tears, dejection, and a mournful self-compassion. would i had never trod this english ground, or felt the flatteries that grow upon it. what will become of me now, wretched lady? i am the most unhappy woman living. alas! poor wenches! where are now your fortunes? [_to her women_ shipwrecked upon a kingdom, where no pity, no friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me! almost no grave allowed me! like the lily that once was mistress of the field, and flourish'd, i'll hang my head and perish. dr. johnson observes on this scene, that all katherine's distresses could not save her from a quibble on the word _cardinal_. holy men i thought ye, upon my soul, two reverend cardinal virtues; but cardinal sins, and hollow hearts, i fear ye! when we read this passage in connection with the situation and sentiment, the scornful play upon the words is not only appropriate and natural, it seems inevitable. katherine, assuredly, is neither an imaginative nor a witty personage; but we all acknowledge the truism, that anger inspires wit, and whenever there is passion there is poetry. in the instance just alluded to, the sarcasm springs naturally out from the bitter indignation of the moment. in her grand rebuke of wolsey, in the trial scene, how just and beautiful is the gradual elevation of her language, till it rises into that magnificent image-- you have by fortune and his highness' favors, gone slightly o'er low steps, and now are mounted, where powers are your retainers, &c. in the depth of her affliction, the pathos as naturally clothes itself in poetry. like the lily, that was mistress of the field, and flourish'd, i'll hang my head and perish. but these, i believe, are the only instances of imagery throughout; for, in general, her language is plain and energetic. it has the strength and simplicity of her character, with very little metaphor and less wit. in approaching the last scene of katherine's life, i feel as if about to tread within a sanctuary, where nothing befits us but silence and tears; veneration so strives with compassion, tenderness with awe.[ ] we must suppose a long interval to have elapsed since katherine's interview with the two cardinals. wolsey was disgraced, and poor anna bullen at the height of her short-lived prosperity. it was wolsey's fate to be detested by both queens. in the pursuance of his own selfish and ambitious designs, he had treated both with perfidy; and one was the remote, the other the immediate, cause of his ruin.[ ] the ruffian king, of whom one hates to think, was bent on forcing katherine to concede her rights, and illegitimize her daughter, in favor of the offspring of anna bullen: she steadily refused, was declared contumacious, and the sentence of divorce pronounced in . such of her attendants as persisted in paying her the honors due to a queen were driven from her household; those who consented to serve her as princess-dowager, she refused to admit into her presence; so that she remained unattended, except by a few women, and her gentleman usher, griffith. during the last eighteen months of her life, she resided at kimbolton. her nephew, charles v., had offered her an asylum and princely treatment; but katherine, broken in heart, and declining in health, was unwilling to drag the spectacle of her misery and degradation into a strange country: she pined in her loneliness, deprived of her daughter, receiving no consolation from the pope, and no redress from the emperor. wounded pride, wronged affection, and a cankering jealousy of the woman preferred to her, (which though it never broke out into unseemly words, is enumerated as one of the causes of her death,) at length wore out a feeble frame. "thus," says the chronicle, "queen katherine fell into her last sickness; and though the king sent to comfort her through chapuys, the emperor's ambassador, she grew worse and worse; and finding death now coming, she caused a maid attending on her to write to the king to this effect:-- "my most dear lord, king, and husband; "the hour of my death now approaching, i cannot choose but, out of the love i bear you, advise you of your soul's health, which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever; for which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles: but i forgive you all, and pray god to do so likewise; for the rest, i commend unto you mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her, as i have heretofore desired. i must intreat you also to respect my maids, and give them in marriage, which is not much, they being but three, and all my other servants a year's pay besides their due, lest otherwise they be unprovided for: lastly, i make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.--farewell!"[ ] she also wrote another letter to the ambassador, desiring that he would remind the king of her dying request, and urge him to do her this last right. what the historian relates, shakspeare realizes. on the wonderful beauty of katherine's closing scene we need not dwell; for that requires no illustration. in transferring the sentiments of her letter to her lips, shakspeare has given them added grace, and pathos, and tenderness, without injuring their truth and simplicity: the feelings, and almost the manner of expression, are katherine's own. the severe justice with which she draws the character of wolsey is extremely characteristic! the benign candor with which she listens to the praise of him "whom living she most hated," is not less so. how beautiful her religious enthusiasm!--the slumber which visits her pillow, as she listens to that sad music she called her knell; her awakening from the vision of celestial joy to find herself still on earth-- spirits of peace! where are ye? are ye gone, and leave me here in wretchedness behind ye? how unspeakably beautiful! and to consummate all in one final touch of truth and nature, we see that consciousness of her own worth and integrity which had sustained her through all her trials of heart, and that pride of station for which she had contended through long years,--which had become more dear by opposition, and by the perseverance with which she had asserted it,--remaining the last strong feeling upon her mind, to the very last hour of existence. when i am dead, good wench, let me be used with honor: strew me over with maiden flowers, that all the world may know i was a chaste wife to my grave; embalm me, then lay me forth: although unqueen'd, yet like a queen, and daughter to a king, inter me i can no more.-- in the epilogue to this play,[ ] it is recommended-- to the merciful construction of good women, for _such a one_ we show'd them: alluding to the character of queen katherine. shakspeare has, in fact, placed before us a queen and a heroine, who in the first place, and above all, is a _good_ woman; and i repeat, that in doing so, and in trusting for all his effect to truth and virtue, he has given a sublime proof of his genius and his wisdom;--for which, among many other obligations, we women remain his debtors. lady macbeth. i doubt whether the epithet _historical_ can properly apply to the character of lady macbeth; for though the subject of the play be taken from history, we never think of her with any reference to historical associations, as we do with regard to constance, volumnia, katherine of arragon, and others. i remember reading some critique, in which lady macbeth was styled the "_scottish queen_;" and methought the title, as applied to _her_ sounded like a vulgarism. it appears that the real wife of macbeth,--she who lives only in the obscure record of an obscure age, bore the very unmusical appellation of graoch, and was instigated to the murder of duncan, not only by ambition, but by motives of vengeance. she was the grand-daughter of kenneth the fourth, killed in , fighting against malcolm the second, the father of duncan. macbeth reigned over scotland from the year to --but what is all this to the purpose? the sternly magnificent creation of the poet stands before us independent of all these aids of fancy: she is lady macbeth; as such she lives, she reigns, and is immortal in the world to imagination. what earthly title could add to her grandeur? what human record or attestation strengthen our impression of her reality? characters in history move before us like a procession of figures in _basso relievo_: we see one side only, that which the artist chose to exhibit to us; the rest is sunk in the block: the same characters in shakspeare are like the statues _cut out_ of the block, fashioned, finished, tangible in every part: we may consider them under every aspect, we may examine them on every side. as the classical times, when the garb did not make the man, were peculiarly favorable to the development and delineation of the human form, and have handed down to us the purest models of strength and grace--so the times in which shakspeare lived were favorable to the vigorous delineation of natural character. society was not then one vast conventional masquerade of manners. in his revelations, the accidental circumstances are to the individual character, what the drapery of the antique statue is to the statue itself; it is evident, that, though adapted to each other, and studied relatively, they were also studied separately. we trace through the folds the fine and true proportions of the figure beneath: they seem and are independent of each other to the practised eye, though carved together from the same enduring substance; at once perfectly distinct and eternally inseparable. in history we can but study character in relation to events, to situation and circumstances, which disguise and encumber it: we are left to imagine, to infer, what certain people must have been, from the manner in which they have acted or suffered. shakspeare and nature bring us back to the true order of things; and showing us what the human being _is_, enable us to judge of the possible as well as the positive result in acting and suffering. here, instead of judging the individual by his actions, we are enabled to judge of actions by a reference to the individual. when we can carry this power into the experience of real life, we shall perhaps be more just to one another, and not consider ourselves aggrieved, because we cannot gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns. in the play or poem of macbeth, the interest of the story is so engrossing, the events so rapid and so appalling, the accessories so sublimely conceived and so skilfully combined, that it is difficult to detach lady macbeth from the dramatic situation, or consider her apart from the terrible associations of our first and earliest impressions. as the vulgar idea of a juliet--that all-beautiful and heaven-gifted child of the south--is merely a love-sick girl in white satin, so the common-place idea of lady macbeth, though endowed with the rarest powers, the loftiest energies, and the profoundest affections, is nothing but a fierce, cruel woman, brandishing a couple of daggers, and inciting her husband to butcher a poor old king. even those who reflect more deeply are apt to consider rather the mode in which a certain character is manifested, than the combination of abstract qualities making up that individual human being; so what should be last, is first; effects are mistaken for causes, qualities are confounded with their results, and the perversion of what is essentially good, with the operation of positive evil. hence it is, that those who can feel and estimate the magnificent conception and poetical development of the character, have overlooked the grand moral lesson it conveys; they forget that the crime of lady macbeth terrifies us in proportion as we sympathize with her; and that this sympathy is in proportion to the degree of pride, passion, and intellect, we may ourselves possess. it is good to behold and to tremble at the possible result of the noblest faculties uncontrolled or perverted. true it is, that the ambitious women of these civilized times do not murder sleeping kings: but are there, therefore, no lady macbeths in the world? no women who, under the influence of a diseased or excited appetite for power or distinction, would sacrifice the happiness of a daughter, the fortunes of a husband, the principles of a son, and peril their own souls? * * * * * the character of macbeth is considered as one of the most complex in the whole range of shakspeare's dramatic creations. he is represented in the course of the action under such a variety of aspects; the good and evil qualities of his mind are so poised and blended, and instead of being gradually and successively developed, evolve themselves so like shifting lights and shadows playing over the "unstable waters," that his character has afforded a continual and interesting subject of analysis and contemplation. none of shakspeare's personages have been treated of more at large; none have been more minutely criticized and profoundly examined. a single feature in his character--the question, for instance, as to whether his courage be personal or constitutional, or excited by mere desperation--has been canvassed, asserted, and refuted, in two masterly essays. on the other hand, the character of lady macbeth resolves itself into few and simple elements. the grand features of her character are so distinctly and prominently marked, that, though acknowledged to be one of the poet's most sublime creations, she has been passed over with comparatively few words: generally speaking, the commentators seem to have considered lady macbeth rather with reference to her husband, and as influencing the action of the drama, than as an individual conception of amazing power, poetry, and beauty: or if they do individualize her, it is ever with those associations of scenic representation which mrs. siddons has identified with the character. those who have been accustomed to see it arrayed in the form and lineaments of that magnificent woman, and developed with her wonder-working powers, seem satisfied to leave it there, as if nothing more could be said or added.[ ] but the generation which beheld mrs. siddons in her glory is passing away, and we are again left to our own unassisted feelings, or to all the satisfaction to be derived from the sagacity of critics and the reflections of commentators. let us turn to them for a moment. dr. johnson, who seems to have regarded her as nothing better than a kind of ogress, tells us, in so many words, that "lady macbeth is merely detested." schlegel dismisses her in haste, as a species of female fury. in the two essays on macbeth already mentioned, she is passed over with one or two slight allusions. the only justice that has yet been done to her is by hazlitt, in the "characters of shakspeare's plays." nothing can be finer than his remarks as far as they go, but his plan did not allow him sufficient space to work out his own conception of the character, with the minuteness it requires. all that he says is just in sentiment, and most eloquent in the expression; but in leaving some of the finest points altogether untouched, he has also left us in doubt whether he even felt or perceived them; and this masterly criticism stops short of the _whole_ truth--it is a little superficial, and a little too harsh. in the mind of lady macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense over-mastering passion, which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling. in the pursuit of her object, she is cruel, treacherous, and daring. she is doubly, trebly dyed in guilt and blood; for the murder she instigates is rendered more frightful by disloyalty and ingratitude, and by the violation of all the most sacred claims of kindred and hospitality. when her husband's more kindly nature shrinks from the perpetration of the deed of horror, she, like an evil genius, whispers him on to his damnation. the full measure of her wickedness is never disguised, the magnitude and atrocity of her crime is never extenuated, forgotten, or forgiven, in the whole course of the play. our judgment is not bewildered, nor our moral feeling insulted, by the sentimental jumble of great crimes and dazzling virtues, after the fashion of the german school and of some admirable writers of our own time. lady macbeth's amazing power of intellect, her inexorable determination of purpose, her superhuman strength of nerve, render her as fearful in herself as her deeds are hateful; yet she is not a mere monster of depravity, with whom we have nothing in common, nor a meteor whose destroying path we watch in ignorant affright and amaze. she is a terrible impersonation of evil passions and mighty powers, never so far removed from our own nature as to be cast beyond the pale of our sympathies; for the woman herself remains a woman to the last--still linked with her sex and with humanity. this impression is produced partly by the essential truth in the conception of the character, and partly by the manner in which it is evolved; by a combination of minute and delicate touches, in some instances by speech, in others by silence: at one time by what is revealed, at another by what we are left to infer. as in real life, we perceive distinctions in character we cannot always explain, and receive impressions for which we cannot always account, without going back to the beginning of an acquaintance, and recalling many and trifling circumstances--looks, and tones, and words: thus, to explain that hold which lady macbeth, in the midst of all her atrocities, still keeps upon our feelings, it is necessary to trace minutely the action of the play, as far as she is concerned in it, from its very commencement to its close. we must bear in mind, that the first idea of murdering duncan is not suggested by lady macbeth to her husband: it springs within _his_ mind, and is revealed to us, before his first interview with his wife,--before she is introduced or even alluded to. macbeth. this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill; cannot be good. if ill, why hath it given me earnest of success, commencing in a truth? i am thane of cawdor-- if good, why do i yield to that suggestion, whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, and make my seated heart knock at my ribs, against the use of nature? it will be said, that the same "horrid suggestion" presents itself spontaneously to her, on the reception of his letter; or rather, that the letter itself acts upon her mind as the prophecy of the weird sisters on the mind of her husband, kindling the latent passion for empire into a quenchless flame. we are prepared to see the train of evil, first lighted by hellish agency, extend itself to _her_ through the medium of her husband; but we are spared the more revolting idea that it originated with her. the guilt is thus more equally divided than we should suppose, when we hear people pitying "the noble nature of macbeth," bewildered and goaded on to crime, solely or chiefly by the instigation of his wife. it is true that she afterwards appears the more active agent of the two; but it is less through her preëminence in wickedness than through her superiority of intellect. the eloquence--the fierce, fervid eloquence with which she bears down the relenting and reluctant spirit of her husband, the dexterous sophistry with which she wards off his objections, her artful and affected doubts of his courage--the sarcastic manner in which she lets fall the word coward--a word which no man can endure from another, still less from a woman, and least of all from a woman he loves--and the bold address with which she removes all obstacles, silences all arguments, overpowers all scruples, and marshals the way before him, absolutely make us shrink before the commanding intellect of the woman, with a terror in which interest and admiration are strangely mingled. lady macbeth. he has almost supp'd: why have you left the chamber? macbeth. hath he ask'd for me? lady macbeth. know you not, he has? macbeth. we will proceed no farther in this business; he hath honored me of late, and i have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon. lady macbeth. was the hope drunk, wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since, and wakes it now, to look so green and pale at what it did so freely? from this time, such i account thy love. art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valor, as thou art in desire? would'st thou have that which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, and live a coward in thine own esteem; letting i dare not wait upon i would, like the poor cat i' the adage? macbeth. pr'ythee, peace i dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more, is none. lady macbeth. what beast was it then, that made you break this enterprise to me? when you durst do it, then you were a man; and, to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man. nor time, nor place, did then adhere, and yet you would make both; they have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you. i have given suck, and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: i would, while it were smiling in my face, have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, and dash'd the brains out, had i so sworn, as you have done to this. macbeth. if we should fail.-- lady macbeth. we fail.[ ] but screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail. again, in the murdering scene, the obdurate inflexibility of purpose with which she drives on macbeth to the execution of their project, and her masculine indifference to blood and death, would inspire unmitigated disgust and horror, but for the involuntary consciousness that it is produced rather by the exertion of a strong power over herself, than by absolute depravity of disposition and ferocity of temper. this impression of her character is brought home at once to our very hearts with the most profound knowledge of the springs of nature within us, the most subtle mastery over their various operations, and a feeling of dramatic effect not less wonderful. the very passages in which lady macbeth displays the most savage and relentless determination, are so worded as to fill the mind with the idea of sex, and place the _woman_ before us in all her dearest attributes, at once softening and refining the horror, and rendering it more intense. thus, when she reproaches her husband for his weakness-- from this time, such i account thy love! again, come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, ye murdering ministers, that no compunctions visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, &c. i have given suck, and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me, &c. and lastly, in the moment of extremest horror comes that unexpected touch of feeling, so startling, yet so wonderfully true to nature-- had he not resembled my father as he slept, i had done it! thus in one of weber's or beethoven's grand symphonies, some unexpected soft minor chord or passage will steal on the ear, heard amid the magnificent crash of harmony, making the blood pause, and filling the eye with unbidden tears. it is particularly observable, that in lady macbeth's concentrated, strong-nerved ambition, the ruling passion of her mind, there is yet a touch of womanhood: she is ambitious less for herself than for her husband. it is fair to think this, because we have no reason to draw any other inference either from her words or actions. in her famous soliloquy, after reading her husband's letter, she does not once refer to herself. it is of him she thinks: she wishes to see her husband on the throne, and to place the sceptre within _his_ grasp. the strength of her affections adds strength to her ambition. although in the old story of boethius we are told that the wife of macbeth "burned with unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen," yet in the aspect under which shakspeare has represented the character to us, the selfish part of this ambition is kept out of sight. we must remark also, that in lady macbeth's reflections on her husband's character, and on that milkiness of nature, which she fears "may impede him from the golden round," there is no indication of female scorn: there is exceeding pride, but no egotism in the sentiment or the expression;--no want of wifely and womanly respect and love for _him_, but on the contrary, a sort of unconsciousness of her own mental superiority, which she betrays rather than asserts, as interesting in itself as it is most admirably conceived and delineated. glamis thou art, and cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised:--yet do i fear thy nature; it is too full o' the milk of human kindness, to catch the nearest way. thou would'st be great, art not without ambition; but without the illness should attend it. what thou would'st highly that would'st thou holily; would'st not play false. and yet would'st wrongly win: thou'dst have, great glamis, that which cries, _thus thou must do, if thou have it; and that which rather thou dost fear to do, than wishest should be undone_. hie thee hither, that i may pour my spirits in thine ear; and chastise with the valor of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round, which fate and metaphysical[ ] aid doth seem to have thee crowned withal nor is there any thing vulgar in her ambition: as the strength of her affections lends to it something profound and concentrated, so her splendid imagination invests the object of her desire with its own radiance. we cannot trace in her grand and capacious mind that it is the mere baubles and trappings of royalty which dazzle and allure her: hers is the sin of the "star-bright apostate," and she plunges with her husband into the abyss of guilt, to procure for "all their days and nights sole sovereign sway and masterdom." she revels, she luxuriates in her dream of power. she reaches at the golden diadem, which is to sear her brain; she perils life and soul for its attainment, with an enthusiasm as perfect, a faith as settled, as that of the martyr, who sees at the stake, heaven and its crowns of glory opening upon him. great glamis! worthy cawdor! greater than both, by the all-hail _hereafter_! thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present, and i feel now the future in the instant! this is surely the very rapture of ambition! and those who have heard mrs. siddons pronounce the word _hereafter_, cannot forget the look, the tone, which seemed to give her auditors a glimpse of that awful _future_, which she, in her prophetic fury, beholds upon the instant. but to return to the text before us: lady macbeth having proposed the object to herself, and arrayed it with an ideal glory, fixes her eye steadily upon it, soars far above all womanish feelings and scruples to attain it, and stoops upon her victim with the strength and velocity of a vulture; but having committed unflinchingly the crime necessary for the attainment of her purpose, she stops there. after the murder of duncan, we see lady macbeth, during the rest of the play, occupied in supporting the nervous weakness and sustaining the fortitude of her husband; for instance, macbeth is at one time on the verge of frenzy, between fear and horror, and it is clear that if she loses her self-command, both must perish:-- macbeth. one cried, _god bless us!_ and, _amen!_ the other, as they had seen me, with these hangman's hands. listening their fear, i could not say, _amen!_ when they did say, _god bless us!_ lady macbeth. consider it not so deeply! macbeth. but wherefore could not i pronounce, amen? i had most need of blessing, and amen stuck in my throat. lady macbeth. these deeds must not be thought after these ways: so, it will make us mad. macbeth. methought i heard a voice cry, "sleep no more," &c. &c. lady macbeth. what do you mean? who was it that thus cried? why, worthy thane, you do unbend your noble strength, to think so brainsickly of things.--go, get some water, &c. &c. afterwards, in act iii., she is represented as muttering to herself, nought's had, all's spent, when our desire is got without content; yet immediately addresses her moody and conscience-stricken husband-- how now, my lord? why do you keep alone, of sorriest fancies your companions making? using those thoughts, which should indeed have died with them they think on? things without remedy, should be without regard; what's done, is done. but she is nowhere represented as urging him on to new crimes, so far from it, that when macbeth darkly hints his purposed assassination of banquo, and she inquires his meaning, he replies, be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou approve the deed. the same may be said of the destruction of macduff's family. every one must perceive how our detestation of the woman had been increased, if she had been placed before us as suggesting and abetting those additional cruelties into which macbeth is hurried by his mental cowardice. if my feeling of lady macbeth's character be just to the conception of the poet, then she is one who could steel herself to the commission of a crime from necessity and expediency, and be daringly wicked for a great end, but not likely to perpetrate gratuitous murders from any vague or selfish fears. i do not mean to say that the perfect confidence existing between herself and macbeth could possibly leave her in ignorance of his actions or designs: that heart-broken and shuddering allusion to the murder of lady macduff (in the sleeping scene) proves the contrary:-- the thane of fife had a wife; where is she now? but she is nowhere brought before us in immediate connection with these horrors, and we are spared any flagrant proof of her participation in them. this may not strike us at first, but most undoubtedly has an effect on the general bearing of the character, considered as a whole. another more obvious and pervading source of interest arises from that bond of entire affection and confidence which, through the whole of this dreadful tissue of crime and its consequences, unites macbeth and his wife; claiming from us an involuntary respect and sympathy, and shedding a softening influence over the whole tragedy. macbeth leans upon her strength, trusts in her fidelity, and throws himself on her tenderness. o full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! she sustains him, calms him, soothes him-- come on; gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night. the endearing epithets, the terms of fondness in which he addresses her, and the tone of respect she invariably maintains towards him, even when most exasperated by his vacillation of mind and his brain-sick terrors, have, by the very force of contrast, a powerful effect on the fancy. by these tender redeeming touches we are impressed with a feeling that lady macbeth's influence over the affections of her husband, as a wife and a woman, is at least equal to her power over him as a superior mind. another thing has always struck me. during the supper scene, in which macbeth is haunted by the spectre of the murdered banquo, and his reason appears unsettled by the extremity of his horror and dismay, her indignant rebuke, her low whispered remonstrance, the sarcastic emphasis with which she combats his sick fancies, and endeavors to recall him to himself, have an intenseness, a severity, a bitterness, which makes the blood creep. lady macbeth. are you a man? macbeth. ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that which might appall the devil. lady macbeth. o proper stuff! this is the very painting of your fear: this is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said, led you to duncan. o, these flaws and starts (impostors to true fear) would well become a woman's story, at a winter's fire, authoriz'd by her grandam! shame itself! why do you make such faces? when all's done you look but on a stool. what! quite unmann'd in folly? yet when the guests are dismissed, and they are left alone, she says no more, and not a syllable of reproach or scorn escapes her: a few words in submissive reply to his questions, and an entreaty to seek repose, are all she permits herself to utter. there is a touch of pathos and of tenderness in this silence which has always affected me beyond expression: it is one of the most masterly and most beautiful traits of character in the whole play. lastly, it is clear that in a mind constituted like that of lady macbeth, and not utterly depraved and hardened by the habit of crime, conscience must wake some time or other, and bring with it remorse closed by despair, and despair by death. this great moral retribution was to be displayed to us--but how? lady macbeth is not a woman to start at shadows; she mocks at air-drawn daggers; she sees no imagined spectres rise from the tomb to appall or accuse her.[ ] the towering bravery of _her_ mind disdains the visionary terrors which haunt her weaker husband. we know, or rather we feel, that she who could give a voice to the most direful intent, and call on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to "unsex her," and "stop up all access and passage of remorse"--to that remorse would have given nor tongue nor sound; and that rather than have uttered a complaint, she would have held her breath and died. to have given her a confidant, though in the partner of her guilt, would have been a degrading resource, and have disappointed and enfeebled all our previous impressions of her character; yet justice is to be done, and we are to be made acquainted with that which the woman herself would have suffered a thousand deaths of torture rather than have betrayed. in the sleeping scene we have a glimpse into the depths of that inward hell: the seared brain and broken heart are laid bare before us in the helplessness of slumber. by a judgment the most sublime ever imagined, yet the most unforced, natural, and inevitable, the sleep of her who murdered sleep is no longer repose, but a condensation of resistless horrors which the prostrate intellect and powerless will can neither baffle nor repel. we shudder and are satisfied; yet our human sympathies are again touched: we rather sigh over the ruin than exult in it; and after watching her through this wonderful scene with a sort of fascination, we dismiss the unconscious, helpless, despair-stricken murderess, with a feeling which lady macbeth, in her waking strength, with all her awe-commanding powers about her, could never have excited. it is here especially we perceive that sweetness of nature which in shakspeare went hand in hand with his astonishing powers. he never confounds that line of demarcation which eternally separates good from evil, yet he never places evil before us without exciting in some way a consciousness of the opposite good which shall balance and relieve it. i do deny that he has represented in lady macbeth a woman "_naturally cruel_,"[ ] "_invariably savage_,"[ ] or endued with "_pure demoniac firmness_."[ ] if ever there could have existed a woman to whom such phrases could apply--a woman without touch of modesty, pity or fear,--shakspeare knew that a thing so monstrous was unfit for all the purposes of poetry. if lady macbeth had been _naturally_ cruel, she needed not so solemnly to have abjured all pity, and called on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to _unsex_ her; nor would she have been loved to excess by a man of macbeth's character; for it is the sense of intellectual energy and strength of will overpowering her feminine nature, which draws from him that burst of intense admiration-- bring forth men children only, for thy undaunted metal should compose nothing but males. if she had been _invariably_ savage, her love would not have comforted and sustained her husband in his despair, nor would her uplifted dagger have been arrested by a dear and venerable image rising between her soul and its fell purpose. if endued with _pure demoniac firmness_, her woman's nature would not, by the reaction, have been so horribly avenged, she would not have died of remorse and despair. * * * * * we cannot but observe that through the whole of the dialogue appropriated to lady macbeth, there is something very peculiar and characteristic in the turn of expression: her compliments, when she is playing the hostess or the queen, are elaborately elegant and verbose: but, when in earnest, she speaks in short energetic sentences--sometimes abrupt, but always full of meaning; her thoughts are rapid and clear, her expressions forcible, and the imagery like sudden flashes of lightning: all the foregoing extracts exhibit this, but i will venture one more, as an immediate illustration. macbeth. my dearest love, duncan comes here to-night. lady macbeth. and when goes hence? macbeth. to-morrow,--as he purposes. lady macbeth. o never shall sun that morrow see! thy face, my thane, is as a book, where men may read strange matters;--to beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in your eye your tongue, your hand; look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it. what would not the firmness, the self-command, the enthusiasm, the intellect, the ardent affections of this woman have performed, if properly directed? but the object being unworthy of the effort, the end is disappointment, despair, and death. the power of religion could alone have controlled such a mind; but it is the misery of a very proud, strong, and gifted spirit, without sense of religion, that instead of looking upward to find a superior, looks round and sees all things as subject to itself. lady macbeth is placed in a dark, ignorant, iron age; her powerful intellect is slightly tinged with its credulity and superstition, but she has no religious feeling to restrain the force of will. she is a stern fatalist in principle and action--"what is done, is done," and would be done over again under the same circumstances; her remorse is without repentance, or any reference to an offended deity; it arises from the pang of a wounded conscience, the recoil of the violated feelings of nature: it is the horror of the past, not the terror of the future; the torture of self-condemnation, not the fear of judgment; it is strong as her soul, deep as her guilt, fatal as her resolve, and terrible as her crime. if it should be objected to this view of lady macbeth's character, that it engages our sympathies in behalf of a perverted being--and that to leave her so strong a power upon our feelings in the midst of such supreme wickedness, involves a moral wrong, i can only reply in the words of dr. channing, that "in this and the like cases our interest fastens on what is _not_ evil in the character--that there is something kindling and ennobling in the consciousness, however awakened, of the energy which resides in mind; and many a virtuous man has borrowed new strength from the force, constancy, and dauntless courage of evil agents."[ ] this is true; and might he not have added, that many a powerful and gifted spirit has learnt humility and self-government, from beholding how far the energy which resides in mind may be degraded and perverted? * * * * * in general, when a woman is introduced into a tragedy to be the presiding genius of evil in herself, or the cause of evil to others, she is either too feebly or too darkly portrayed; either crime is heaped on crime, and horror on horror, till our sympathy is lost in incredulity, or the stimulus is sought in unnatural or impossible situations, or in situations that ought to be impossible, (as in the myrrha or the cenci,) or the character is enfeebled by a mixture of degrading propensities and sexual weakness, as in vittoria corombona. but lady macbeth, though so supremely wicked, and so consistently feminine, is still kept aloof from all base alloy. when shakspeare created a female character purely detestable, he made her an accessory, never a principal. thus regan and goneril are two powerful sketches of selfishness, cruelty, and ingratitude; we abhor them whenever we see or think of them, but we think very little about them, except as necessary to the action of the drama. they are to cause the madness of lear, and to call forth the filial devotion of cordelia, and their depravity is forgotten in its effects. a comparison has been made between lady macbeth and the greek clytemnestra in the agamemnon of eschylus. the clytemnestra of sophocles is something more in shakspeare's spirit, for she is something less impudently atrocious; but, considered as a woman and an individual, would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel murderess, and unnatural mother, with lady macbeth? lady macbeth herself would certainly shrink from the approximation.[ ] the electra of sophocles comes nearer to lady macbeth as a poetical conception, with this strong distinction, that she commands more respect and esteem, and less sympathy. the murder in which she participates is ordained by the oracle--is an act of justice, and therefore less a murder than a sacrifice. electra is drawn with magnificent simplicity and intensity of feeling and purpose, but there is a want of light, and shade, and relief. thus the scene in which orestes stabs his mother within her chamber, and she is heard pleading for mercy, while electra stands forward listening exultingly to her mother's cries, and urging her brother to strike again, "another blow! another!" &c. is terribly fine, but the horror is too shocking, too _physical_--if i may use such an expression: it will not surely bear a comparison with the murdering scene in macbeth, where the exhibition of various passions--the irresolution of macbeth, the bold determination of his wife, the deep suspense, the rage of the elements without, the horrid stillness within, and the secret feeling of that infernal agency which is ever present to the fancy, even when not visible on the scene--throw a rich coloring of poetry over the whole, which does not take from "the present horror of the time," and yet relieves it. shakspeare's blackest shadows are like those of rembrandt; so intense, that the gloom which brooded over egypt in her day of wrath was pale in comparison--yet so transparent that we seem to see the light of heaven through their depth. in the whole compass of dramatic poetry, there is but one female character which can be placed near that of lady macbeth; the medea. not the vulgar, voluble fury of the latin tragedy,[ ] nor the medea in a hoop petticoat of corneille, but the genuine greek medea,--the medea of euripides.[ ] there is something in the _medea_ which seizes irresistibly on the imagination. her passionate devotion to jason, for whom she had left her parents and country--to whom she had given all, and would have drawn the spirit from her breast had he but asked it, sighing forth her soul into his bosom;[ ] the wrongs and insults which drive her to desperation--the horrid refinement of cruelty with which she plans and executes her revenge upon her faithless husband--the gush of fondness with which she weeps over her children, whom in the next moment she devotes to destruction in a paroxysm of insane fury, carry the terror and pathos of tragic situation to their extreme height. but if we may be allowed to judge through the medium of a translation, there is a certain hardness in the manner of treating the character, which in some degree defeats the effect. medea talks too much: her human feelings and superhuman power are not sufficiently blended. taking into consideration the different impulses which actuate medea and lady macbeth, as love, jealousy, and revenge on the one side, and ambition on the other, we expect to find more of female nature in the first than in the last: and yet the contrary is the fact: at least, my own impression as far as a woman may judge of a woman, is, that although the passions of medea are more feminine, the character is less so; we seem to require more feeling in her fierceness, more passion in her frenzy; something less of poetical abstraction,--less art, fewer words: her delirious vengeance we might forgive, but her calmness and subtlety are rather revolting. these two admirable characters, placed in contrast to each other, afford a fine illustration of schlegel's distinction between the ancient or greek drama, which he compares to sculpture, and the modern or romantic drama, which he compares to painting. the gothic grandeur, the rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colors of lady macbeth, stand thus opposed to the classical elegance and mythological splendor, the delicate yet inflexible outline of the medea. if i might be permitted to carry this illustration still further, i would add, that there exists the same distinction between the lady macbeth and the medea, as between the medusa of leonardo da vinci and the medusa of the greek gems and bas reliefs. in the painting, the horror of the subject is at once exalted and softened by the most vivid coloring, and the most magical contrast of light and shade. we gaze--until, from the murky depths of the background, the serpent hair seems to stir and glitter as if instinct with life, and the head itself, in all its ghastliness and brightness, appears to rise from the canvass with the glare of reality. in the medusa of sculpture, how different is the effect on the imagination! we have here the snakes convolving round the winged and graceful head: the brows contracted with horror and pain; but every feature is chiselled into the most regular and faultless perfection; and amid the gorgon terrors, there rests a marbly, fixed, supernatural grace, which, without reminding us for a moment of common life or nature, stands before us a presence, a power, and an enchantment! footnotes: [ ] milton. [ ] "that the treachery of king john, the death of arthur, and the grief of constance, had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination. something whispers us that we have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn the truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies."--see characters of shakspeare's plays.--to consider _thus_ is not to consider _too_ deeply, but not deeply _enough_. [ ] _grave_, in the sense of mighty or potent. [ ] fulvia, the first wife of antony. [ ] the well-known violence and coarseness of queen elizabeth's manners, in which she was imitated by the women about her, may in shakspeare's time have rendered the image of a royal virago less offensive and less extraordinary. [ ] she was as good as her word. see the life of antony in plutarch. [ ] _i. e._ retinue. [ ] _i. e._ silver coins, from the spanish _plata_. [ ] cleopatra replies to the first word she hears on recovering her sense, "no more _an empress_, but a mere woman!" [ ] _i. e._ sedate determination.--johnson [ ] the cleopatra of jodelle was the first regular french tragedy: the last french tragedy on the same subject was the cléopatre of marmontel. for the representation of this tragedy vaucanson, the celebrated french mechanist, invented an automaton asp, which crawled and hissed to the life,--to the great delight of the parisians. but it appears that neither vaucanson's asp, nor clairon, could save cléopatre from a deserved fate. of the english tragedies, one was written by the countess of pembroke, the sister of sir philip sydney; and is, i believe, the first instance in our language, of original dramatic writing, by female. [ ] "the sober eye of dull octavia."--act v. scene . [ ] octavia was never in egypt. [ ] "the octavia of dryden is a much more important personage than in the antony and cleopatra of shakspeare. she is, however, more cold and unamiable, for in the very short scenes in which the octavia of shakspeare is introduced, she is placed in rather an interesting point of view. but dryden has himself informed us that he was apprehensive that the justice of a wife's claim would draw the audience to her side, and lessen their interest in the lover and the mistress. he seems accordingly to have studiously lowered the character of the injured octavia who, in her conduct to her husband, shows much duty and little love." sir w. scott (in the same fine piece of criticism prefixed to dryden's all for love) gives the preference to shakspeare's cleopatra. [ ] in all, about two thousand pounds. [ ] the corresponding passage in the old english plutarch runs thus: "my son, why dost thou not answer me? dost thou think it good altogether to give place unto thy choler and revenge, and thinkest thou it not honesty for thee to grant thy mother's request in so weighty a cause? dost thou take it honorable for a nobleman to remember the wrongs and injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an honest nobleman's part to be thankful for the goodness that parents do show to their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they ought to bear unto them? no man living is more bound to show himself thankful in all parts and respects than thyself, who so universally showest all ingratitude. moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them in revenge of the injuries offered thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy. and, therefore, it is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion i should obtain my so just and reasonable request of thee. but since by reason i cannot persuade ye to it, to what purpose do i defer my last hope?" and with these words, herself, his wife, and children, fell down upon their knees before him. [ ] _vide_ daru, histoire de bretagne. [ ] _vide_ sir peter leycester's antiquities of chester. [ ] by the treaty of messina, [ ] malone says, that "in expanding the character of the bastard, shakspeare seems to have proceeded on the following slight hint in an old play on the story of king john:-- next them a bastard of the king's deceased-- a hardy wild-head, rough and venturous." it is easy to _say_ this; yet who but shakspeare could have expanded the last line into a falconbridge? [ ] the greek merope, which was esteemed one of the finest of the tragedies of euripides, is unhappily lost; those of maffei, alfieri, and voltaire, are well known. there is another merope in italian, which i have not seen: the english merope is merely a bad translation from voltaire. [ ] "queen elinor saw that if he were king, how his mother constance would look to bear the most rule in the realm of england, till her son should come of a lawful age to govern of himself."--holinshed. [ ] king john, act iii, scene . [ ] louis vii. of france, whom she was accustomed to call, in contempt, _the monk_. elinor's adventures in syria, whither she accompanied louis on the second crusade, would form a romance. [ ] henry ii. of england. it is scarcely necessary to observe that the story of fair rosamond, as far as elinor is concerned, is a mere invention of some ballad-maker of later times. [ ] _vide_ mezerai. [ ] when at naples, i have often stood upon the rock at the extreme point of posilippo, and looked down upon the little island of nisida, and thought of this scene till i forgot the lazaretta which now deforms it: deforms it, however, to the fancy only, for the building itself, as it rises from amid the vines, the cypresses and fig-trees which embosom it, looks beautiful at a distance. [ ] "the contention of the two houses of york and lancaster," in two parts, supposed by malone to have been written about . [ ] i abstain from making any remarks on the character of joan of arc, as delineated in the first part of henry vi.; first, because i do not in my conscience attribute it to shakspeare, and secondly, because in representing her according to the vulgar english traditions, as half sorceress, half enthusiast, and in the end, corrupted by pleasure and ambition, the truth of history, and the truth of nature, justice, and common sense, are equally violated. schiller has treated the character nobly: but in making joan the slave of passion, and the victim of love, instead of the victim of patriotism, has committed, i think, a serious error in judgment and feeling; and i cannot sympathize with madame de staël's defence of him on this particular point. there was no occasion for this deviation from the truth of things, and from the dignity and spotless purity of the character. this young enthusiast, with her religious reveries, her simplicity, her heroism, her melancholy, her sensibility, her fortitude, her perfectly feminine bearing in all her exploits, (for though she so often led the van of battle unshrinking, while death was all around her, she never struck a blow, nor stained her consecrated sword with blood,--another point in which schiller has wronged her,) this heroine and martyr, over whose last moments we shed burning tears of pity and indignation, remains yet to be treated as a dramatic character, and i know but one person capable of doing this. [ ] see henry vi. part iii. act. iii. sc. -- queen margaret. warwick, these words have turned my hate to love,-- and i forgive and quite forget old faults, and joy that thou becom'st king henry's friend. [ ] horace walpole observes, that "it is evident from the conduct of shakspeare, that the house of tudor retained all their lancasterian prejudices even in the reign of queen elizabeth. in his play of richard the third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of york from the curses which queen margaret had vented against them; and he could not give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to utter them." [ ] see her letters in ellis's collection. [ ] under similar circumstances, one of katherine's predecessors, philippe of hainault, had gained in her husband's absence the battle of neville cross, in which david bruce was taken prisoner. [ ] ellis's collection. we must keep in mind that katherine was a foreigner, and till after she was seventeen, never spoke or wrote a word of english. [ ] hall's chronicle [ ] hall's chronicle, p. . [ ] the court at blackfriars sat on the th of may, . "the queen being called, accompanied by the four bishops and others of her counsel, and a great company of ladies and gentlewomen following her; and after her obeisance, sadly and with great gravity, she appealed from them to the court of rome."--_see hall and cavendish's life of wolsey._ the account which hume gives of this scene is very elegant; but after the affecting _naïveté_ of the old chroniclers, it is very cold and unsatisfactory. [ ] "the queen answered the duke of suffolk very highly and obstinately, with many high words: and suddenly, in a fury she departed from him into her privy chamber."--_vide hall's chronicle_. [ ] _vide_ cavendish's life of wolsey. [ ] winter's tale, act iii. scene . [ ] i have constantly abstained from considering any of these characters with a reference to the theatre; yet i cannot help remarking, that if mrs. siddons, who excelled equally in hermione and katherine, and threw such majesty of demeanor, such power, such picturesque effect, into both, could likewise feel and convey the infinite contrast between the ideal grace, the classical repose and imaginative charm thrown round hermione, and the matter-of-fact, artless, prosaic nature of katherine; between the poetical grandeur of the former, and the moral dignity of the latter,--then she certainly exceeded all that i could have imagined possible, even to _her_ wonderful powers. [ ] this affecting passage is thus rendered by shakspeare:-- nay, forsooth, my friends, they that must weigh out my afflictions-- they that my trust must grow to, live not here-- they are, as all my other comforts, far hence, in mine own country, lords. _henry viii._ _act_ iii. _sc._ [ ] dr. johnson is of opinion, that this scene "is above any other part of shakspeare's tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetic; without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices; without the help of romantic circumstances; without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery." i have already observed, that in judging of shakspeare's characters as of persons we meet in real life, we are swayed unconsciously by our own habits and feelings, and our preference governed, more or less, by our individual prejudices or sympathies. thus, dr. johnson, who has not a word to bestow on imogen, and who has treated poor juliet as if she had been in truth "the very beadle to an amorous sigh," does full justice to the character of katherine, because the logical turn of his mind, his vigorous intellect, and his austere integrity, enabled him to appreciate its peculiar beauties: and, accordingly, we find that he gives it, not only unqualified, but almost exclusive admiration: he goes so far as to assert, that in this play the genius of shakspeare comes in and goes out with katherine. [ ] it will be remembered, that in early youth anna bullen was betrothed to lord henry percy, who was passionately in love with her. wolsey, to serve the king's purposes, broke off this match, and forced percy into an unwilling marriage with lady mary talbot. "the stout earl of northumberland," who arrested wolsey at york, was this very percy; he was chosen for his mission by the interference of anna bullen--a piece of vengeance truly feminine in its mixture of sentiment and spitefulness; and every way characteristic of the individual woman. [ ] the king is said to have wept on reading this letter, and her body being interred at peterbro', in the monastery, for honor of her memory it was preserved at the dissolution, and erected into a bishop's see.--_herbert's life of henry viii._ [ ] written, (as the commentators suppose,) not by shakspeare, but by ben jonson. [ ] mrs. siddons left among her papers an analysis of the character of lady macbeth, which i have never seen: but i have heard her say, that after playing the part for thirty years, she never read it without discovering in it something new. she had an idea that lady macbeth must from her celtic origin have been a small, fair, blue-eyed woman. bonduca, fredegonde, brunehault, and other amazons of the gothic ages were of this complexion; yet i cannot help fancying lady macbeth dark, like black agnes of douglas--a sort of lady macbeth in her way. [ ] in her impersonation of the part of lady macbeth, mrs. siddons adopted successively three different intonations in giving the words _we fail_. at first a quick contemptuous interrogation--"_we fail?_" afterwards with the note of admiration--_we fail!_ and an accent of indignant astonishment, laying the principal emphasis on the word _we_--_we_ fail! lastly, she fixed on what i am convinced is the true reading--we fail. with the simple period, modulating her voice to a deep, low, resolute tone, which settled the issue at once--as though she had said, "if we fail, why then we fail, and all is over." this is consistent with the dark fatalism of the character and the sense of the line following, and the effect was sublime, almost awful. [ ] _metaphysical_ is here used in the sense of spiritual or preternatural. [ ] mrs. siddons, i believe, had an idea that lady macbeth beheld the spectre of banquo in the supper scene, and that her self-control and presence of mind enabled her to surmount her consciousness of the ghastly presence. this would be superhuman, and i do not see that either the character or the text bear out this supposition. [ ] cumberland. [ ] professor richardson. [ ] foster's essays. [ ] see dr. channing's remarks on satan, in his essay "on the character and writings of milton."--_works_, p . [ ] the vision of clytemnestra the night before she is murdered, in which she dreams that she has given birth to a dragon, and that, in laying it to her bosom, it draws blood instead of milk, has been greatly admired; but i suppose that those who most admire it would not place it in comparison with lady macbeth's sleeping scene. lady ashton, in the bride of lammermoor, is a domestic lady macbeth; but the development being in the narrative, not the dramatic form, it follows hence that we have a masterly portrait, not a complete individual: and the relief of poetry and sympathy being wanting, the detestation she inspires is so unmixed as to be almost intolerable: consequently the character, considered in relation to the other personages of the story, is perfect; but abstractedly, it is imperfect; a basso relievo--not a statue. [ ] attributed to seneca. [ ] a comparison has already been made in an article in the "reflector." it will be seen on a reference to that very masterly essay, that i differ from the author in his conception of lady macbeth's character. [ ] appollonius rhodius.--_vide_ elton's specimens of the classic poets. the end. books by mrs. anna jameson the characteristics of women: moral, poetical, and historical. the diary of an ennuyÉe. memoirs of the loves of the poets. biographical sketches of women celebrated in ancient and modern poetry. studies, stories, and memoirs. sketches of art, literature, and character. with a steel engraving of raphael's madonna del san sisto. memoirs of the early italian painters (cimabue to bassano). legends of the madonna as represented in the fine arts. sacred and legendary art. in two volumes. legends of the monastic orders as represented in the fine arts. forming the second series of sacred and legendary art. each volume, mo, $ . ; the ten volumes, in box, $ . ; half calf, $ . ; tree calf, $ . . * * * * * houghton, mifflin & co., _publishers_, boston and new york.